hell were quenched. Even the cries of the beasts were hushed as peace
encircled the earth. Only Mara, the Evil One, did not rejoice.
III. Buddhism
The Man Who Woke Up
Buddhism begins with a man. In his later years, when India was afire
with his message and kings themselves were bowing before him,
people came to him even as they were to come to Jesus asking what he
was. 1 How many people have provoked this question—not “Who are
you?” with respect to name, origin, or ancestry, but “What are you?
What order of being do you belong to? What species do you
represent?” Not Caesar, certainly. Not Napoleon, or even Socrates.
Only two: Jesus and Buddha. When the people carried their
puzzlement to the Buddha himself, the answer he gave provided an
identity for his entire message.
“Are you a god?” they asked. “No.” “An angel?” “No.” “A saint?”
“No.” “Then what are you?”
Buddha answered, “I am awake.”
His answer became his title, for this is what Buddha means. The
Sanskrit root budh denotes both to wake up and to know. Buddha,
then, means the “Enlightened One,” or the “Awakened One.” While
the rest of the world was wrapped in the womb of sleep, dreaming a
dream known as the waking state of human life, one of their number
roused himself. Buddhism begins with a man who shook off the daze,
the doze, the dream-like vagaries of ordinary awareness. It begins with
a man who woke up.
His life has become encased in loving legend. We are told that the
worlds were flooded with light at his birth. The blind so longed to see
his glory that they received their sight; the deaf and mute conversed in
ecstasy of the things that were to come. Crooked became straight; the
lame walked. Prisoners were freed from their chains and the fires of
The historical facts of his life are roughly these: He was born around
563 B.C. in what is now Nepal, near the Indian border. His full name
was Siddhartha Gautama of the Sakyas. Siddhartha was his given
name, Gautama his surname, and Sakya the name of the clan to which
his family belonged. His father was a king, but as there were then
many kingdoms in the subcontinent of India, it would be more
accurate to think of him as a feudal lord. By the standards of the day
his upbringing was luxurious. “I wore garments of silk and my
attendants held a white umbrella over me. My unguents were always
from Banaras.” He appears to have been exceptionally handsome, for
there are numerous references to “the perfection of his visible body.”
At sixteen he married a neighboring princess, Yasodhara, who bore a
son whom they called Rahula.
He was, in short, a man who seemed to have everything: family, “the
venerable Gautama is well born on both sides, of pure descent”;
appearance, “handsome, inspiring trust, gifted with great beauty of
complexion, fair in color, fine in presence, stately to behold”; wealth,
“he had elephants and silver ornaments for his elephants.” He had a
model wife, “majestic as a queen of heaven, constant ever, cheerful
night and day, full of dignity and exceeding grace,” who bore him a
beautiful son. In addition, as heir to his father’s throne, he was
destined for fame and power.
Despite all this there settled over him in his twenties a discontent,
which was to lead to a complete break with his worldly estate.
The source of his discontent is impounded in the legend of The Four
Passing Sights, one of the most celebrated calls to adventure in all
world literature. When Siddhartha was born, so this story runs, his
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 1 of 45
father summoned fortunetellers to find out what the future held for his
heir. All agreed that this was no usual child. His career, however, was
crossed with one basic ambiguity. If he remained with the world, he
would unify India and become her greatest conqueror, a Chakravartin
or Universal King. If, on the other hand, he forsook the world, he
would become not a world conqueror but a world redeemer. Faced
with this option, his father determined to steer his son toward the
former destiny. No effort was spared to keep the prince attached to the
world. Three palaces and 40,000 dancing girls were placed at his
disposal; strict orders were given that no ugliness intrude upon the
courtly pleasures. Specifically, the prince was to be shielded from
contact with sickness, decrepitude, and death; even when he went
riding, runners were to clear the roads of these sights. One day,
however, an old man was overlooked, or (as some versions have it)
miraculously incarnated by the gods to effect the needed lesson: a man
decrepit, broken-toothed, gray-haired, crooked and bent of body,
leaning on a staff, and trembling. That day Siddhartha learned the fact
of old age. Though the king extended his guard, on a second ride
Siddhartha encountered a body racked with disease, lying by the
roadside; and on a third journey, a corpse. Finally, on a fourth occasion
he saw a monk with shaven head, ochre robe, and bowl, and on that
day he learned of the life of withdrawal from the world. It is a legend,
this story, but like all legends it embodies an important truth. For the
teachings of the Buddha show unmistakably that it was the body’s
inescapable involvement with disease, decrepitude, and death that
made him despair of finding fulfillment on the physical plane. “Life is
subject to age and death. Where is the realm of life in which there is
neither age nor death?”
Once he had perceived the inevitability of bodily pain and passage,
fleshly pleasures lost their charm. The singsong of the dancing girls,
the lilt of lutes and cymbals, the sumptuous feasts and processions, the
elaborate celebration of festivals only mocked his brooding mind.
Flowers nodding in the sunshine and snows melting on the Himalayas
cried louder of the evanescence of worldly things. He determined to
quit the snare of distractions his palace had become and follow the call
of a truth-seeker. One night in his twenty-ninth year he made the
break, his Great Going Forth. Making his way in the post-midnight
hours to where his wife and son were locked in sleep, he bade them
both a silent goodbye, and then ordered the gatekeeper to bridle his
great white horse. The two mounted and rode off toward the forest.
Reaching its edge by daybreak, Gautama changed clothes with the
attendant who returned with the horse to break the news, while
Gautama shaved his head and, “clothed in ragged raiment,” plunged
into the forest in search of enlightenment.
Six years followed, during which his full energies were concentrated
toward this end. “How hard to live the life of the lonely forestdweller…to rejoice in solitude. Verily, the silent groves bear heavily
upon the monk who has not yet won to fixity of mind!” The words
bear poignant witness that his search was not easy. It appears to have
moved through three phases, without record as to how long each lasted
or how sharply the three were divided. His first act was to seek out
two of the foremost Hindu masters of the day and pick their minds for
the wisdom in their vast tradition. He learned a great deal—about raja
yoga especially, but about Hindu philosophy as well; so much in fact
that Hindus came to claim him as their own, holding that his criticisms
of the religion of his day were in the order of reforms and were less
important than his agreements. In time, however, he concluded that he
had learned all that these yogis could teach him.
His next step was to join a band of ascetics and give their way an
honest try. Was it his body that was holding him back? He would
break its power and crush its interference. A man of enormous will
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 2 of 45
power, the Buddha-to-be outdid his associates in every austerity they
proposed. He ate so little—six grains of rice a day during one of his
fasts—that “when I thought I would touch the skin of my stomach I
actually took hold of my spine.” He would clench his teeth and press
his tongue to his palate until “sweat flowed from my armpits.” He
would hold his breath until it felt “as if a strap were being twisted
around my head.” 2 In the end he grew so weak that he fell into a
faint; and if the maiden Sujata had not been around to feed him some
warm rice gruel, he could easily have died.
This experience taught him the futility of asceticism. He had given this
experiment all anyone could, and it had not succeeded—it had not
brought enlightenment. But negative experiments carry their own
lessons, and in this case asceticism’s failure provided Gautama with
the first constructive plank for his program: the principle of the
Middle Way between the extremes of asceticism, on the one hand, and
indulgence on the other. It is the concept of the rationed life, in which
the body is given what it needs to function optimally, but no more.
Having turned his back on mortification, Gautama devoted the final
phase of his quest to a combination of rigorous thought and mystic
concentration along the lines of b. One evening near Gaya in northeast
India, south of the present city of Patna, he sat down under a peepul
tree that has come to be known as the Bo Tree (short for bodhi or
enlightenment). The place was later named the Immovable Spot, for
tradition reports that the Buddha, sensing that a breakthrough was
near, seated himself that epoch-making evening vowing not to arise
until enlightenment was his.
The records offer as the first event of the night a temptation scene
reminiscent of Jesus’ on the eve of his ministry. The Evil One,
realizing that his antagonist’s success was imminent, rushed to the
spot to disrupt his concentrations. He attacked first in the form of
Kama, the God of Desire, parading three voluptuous women with their
tempting retinues. When the Buddha-to-be remained unmoved, the
Tempter switched his guise to that of Mara, the Lord of Death. His
powerful hosts assailed the aspirant with hurricanes, torrential rains,
and showers of flaming rocks, but Gautama had so emptied himself of
his finite self that the weapons found no target to strike and turned into
flower petals as they entered his field of concentration. When, in final
desperation, Mara challenged his right to do what he was doing,
Gautama touched the earth with his right fingertip, whereupon the
earth responded, thundering, “I bear you witness” with a hundred, a
thousand, and a hundred thousand roars. Mara’s army fled in rout, and
the gods of heaven descended in rapture to tend the victor with
garlands and perfumes.
Thereafter, while the Bo Tree rained red blossoms that full-mooned
May night, Gautama’s meditation deepened through watch after watch
until, as the morning star glittered in the transparent sky of the east,
his mind pierced at last the bubble of the universe and shattered it to
naught, only, wonder of wonders, to find it miraculously restored with
the effulgence of true being. The Great Awakening had arrived.
Gautama’s being was transformed, and he emerged the Buddha. The
event was of cosmic import. All created things filled the morning air
with their rejoicings and the earth quaked six ways with wonder. Ten
thousand galaxies shuddered in awe as lotuses bloomed on every tree,
turning the entire universe into “a bouquet of flowers set whirling
through the air.” 3 The bliss of this vast experience kept the Buddha
rooted to the spot for seven entire days. On the eighth he tried to rise,
but another wave of bliss broke over him. For a total of forty-nine
days he was lost in rapture, after which his “glorious glance” opened
onto the world.
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 3 of 45
Mara was waiting for him with one last temptation. He appealed this
time to what had always been Gautama’s strong point, his reason.
Mara did not argue the burden of reentering the world with its
banalities and obsessions. He posed a deeper challenge. Who could be
expected to understand truth as profound as that which the Buddha had
laid hold of? How could speech-defying revelation be translated into
words, or visions that shatter definitions be caged in language? In
short, how show what can only be found, teach what can only be
learned? Why bother to play the idiot before an uncomprehending
audience? Why not wash one’s hands of the whole hot world—be
done with the body and slip at once into nirvana? The argument was
so persuasive that it almost carried the day. At length, however, the
Buddha answered, “There will be some who will understand,” and
Mara was banished from his life forever.
Nearly half a century followed, during which the Buddha trudged the
dusty paths of India until his hair was white, step infirm, and body
nothing but a burst drum, preaching his ego-shattering, life-redeeming
message. He founded an order of monks and nuns, challenged the
deadness of brahmin society, and accepted in return the resentment,
queries, and bewilderment his stance provoked. His daily routine was
staggering. In addition to training monks and overseeing the affairs of
his order, he maintained an interminable schedule of public preaching
and private counseling, advising the perplexed, encouraging the
faithful, and comforting the distressed. “To him people come right
across the country from distant lands to ask questions, and he bids all
welcome.” Underlying his response to these pressures and enabling
him to stand up under them was the pattern of withdrawal and return
that is basic to all creativity. The Buddha withdrew for six years, then
returned for forty-five. But each year was likewise divided: nine
months in the world, followed by a three-month retreat with his monks
during the rainy season. His daily cycle, too, was patterned to this
mold. His public hours were long, but three times a day he withdrew,
to return his attention (through meditation) to its sacred source.
After an arduous ministry of forty-five years, at the age of eighty and
around the year 483 B.C., the Buddha died from dysentery after eating
a meal of dried boar’s flesh in the home of Cunda the smith. Even on
his deathbed his mind moved toward others. In the midst of his pain, it
occurred to him that Cunda might feel responsible for his death. His
last request, therefore, was that Cunda be informed that of all the
meals he had eaten during his long life, only two stood out as having
blessed him exceptionally. One was the meal whose strength had
enabled him to reach enlightenment under the Bo Tree, and the other
the one that was opening to him the final gates to nirvana. This is but
one of the deathbed scenes that The Book of the Great Decease has
preserved. Together they present a picture of a man who passed into
the state in which “ideas and consciousness cease to be” without the
slightest resistance. Two sentences from his valedictory have echoed
through the ages. “All compounded things decay. Work out your own
salvation with diligence.”
The Silent Sage
To understand Buddhism it is of utmost importance to gain some sense
of the impact of Buddha’s life on those who came within its orbit.
It is impossible to read the accounts of that life without emerging with
the impression that one has been in touch with one of the greatest
personalities of all time. The obvious veneration felt by almost all who
knew him is contagious, and the reader is soon caught up with his
disciples in the sense of being in the presence of something close to
wisdom incarnate.
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 4 of 45
Perhaps the most striking thing about him was his combination of a
cool head and a warm heart, a blend that shielded him from
sentimentality on the one hand and indifference on the other. He was
undoubtedly one of the greatest rationalists of all times, resembling in
this respect no one as much as Socrates. Every problem that came his
way was automatically subjected to cool, dispassionate analysis. First,
it would be dissected into its component parts, after which these would
be reassembled in logical, architectonic order with their meaning and
import laid bare. He was a master of dialogue and dialectic, and
calmly confident. “That in disputation with anyone whomsoever I
could be thrown into confusion or embarrassment—there is no
possibility of such a thing.”
The remarkable fact, however, was the way this objective, critical
component of his character was balanced by a Franciscan tenderness
so strong as to have caused his message to be subtitled “a religion of
infinite compassion.” Whether he actually risked his life to free a goat
that was snagged on a precipitous mountainside may be historically
uncertain, but the act would certainly have been in character, for his
life was one continuous gift to the famished crowds. Indeed, his selfgiving so impressed his biographers that they could explain it only in
terms of a momentum that had acquired its trajectory in the animal
stages of his incarnations. The Jataka Tales have him sacrificing
himself for his herd when he was a stag, and hurling himself as a hare
into a fire to feed a starving brahmin. Dismiss these post facto
accounts as legends if we must; there is no question but that in his life
as the Buddha the springs of tenderness gushed abundant. Wanting to
draw the arrows of sorrow from everyone he met, he gave to each his
sympathy, his enlightenment, and the strange power of soul, which,
even when he did not speak a word, gripped the hearts of his visitors
and left them transformed.
Socially, the Buddha’s royal lineage and upbringing were of great
advantage. “Fine in presence,” he moved among kings and potentates
with ease, for he had been one of them. Yet his poise and
sophistication seem not to have distanced him from simple villagers.
Surface distinctions of class and caste meant so little to him that he
often appears not even to have noticed them. Regardless of how far
individuals had fallen or been rejected by society, they received from
the Buddha a respect that stemmed from the simple fact that they were
fellow human beings. Thus many an outcaste and derelict,
encountering for the first time the experience of being understood and
accepted, found self-respect emerging and gained status in the
community. “The venerable Gautama bids everyone welcome, is
congenial, conciliatory, not supercilious, accessible to all.” 4
There was indeed an amazing simplicity about this man before whom
kings bowed. Even when his reputation was at its highest he would be
seen, begging-bowl in hand, walking through streets and alleys with
the patience of one who knows the illusion of time. Like vine and
olive, two of the most symbolic plants that grow from the meagerest
of soils, his physical needs were minimal. Once at Alavi during the
frosts of winter he was found resting in meditation on a few leaves
gathered on a cattle path. “Rough is the ground trodden by the hoofs
of cattle; thin is the couch; light the monk’s yellow robe; sharp the
cutting wind of winter,” he admitted. “Yet I live happily with sublime
uniformity.”
It is perhaps inaccurate to speak of Buddha as a modest man. John
Hay, who was President Lincoln’s secretary, said it was absurd to call
Lincoln modest, adding that “no great human being is
modest.”Certainly, the Buddha felt that he had risen to a plane of
understanding that was far above that of anyone else in his time. In
this respect he simply accepted his superiority and lived in the self-
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 5 of 45
confidence this acceptance bequeathed. But this is different from
vanity or humorless conceit. At the final assembly of one of his
sangha’s (order’s) annual retreats, the Exalted One looked round over
the silent company and said, “Well, ye disciples, I summon you to say
whether you have any fault to find with me, whether in word or in
deed.” And when a favorite pupil exclaimed, “Such faith have I, Lord,
that methinks there never was nor will be nor is now any other greater
or wiser than the Blessed One,” the Buddha admonished:
“Of course, Sariputta, you have known all the Buddhas of the past.”
“No, Lord.”
“Well then, you know those of the future?”
“No, Lord.”
“Then at least you know me and have penetrated my mind
thoroughly?”
“Not even that, Lord.”
“Then why, Sariputta, are your words so grand and bold?”
Notwithstanding his own objectivity toward himself, there was
constant pressure during his lifetime to turn him into a god. He
rebuffed all these categorically, insisting that he was human in every
respect. He made no attempt to conceal his temptations and
weaknesses—how difficult it had been to attain enlightenment, how
narrow the margin by which he had won through, how fallible he still
remained. He confessed that if there had been another drive as
powerful as sex he would never have made the grade. He admitted that
the months when he was first alone in the forest had brought him to
the brink of mortal terror. “As I tarried there, a deer came by, a bird
caused a twig to fall, and the wind set all the leaves whispering; and I
thought: ‘Now it is coming—that fear and terror.’” As Paul Dahlke
remarks in his Buddhist Essays, “One who thus speaks need not allure
with hopes of heavenly joy. One who speaks like this of himself
attracts by that power with which the Truth attracts all who enter her
domain.”
Buddha’s leadership was evidenced not only by the size to which his
order grew, but equally by the perfection of its discipline. A king
visiting one of their assemblies, which was prolonged into a full-moon
night, burst out at last, “You are playing me no tricks? How can it be
that there should be no sound at all, not a sneeze, nor a cough, in so
large an Assembly, among 1,250 of the Brethren?” Watching the
Assembly, seated as silent as a clear lake, he added, “Would that my
son might have such calm.”
Like other spiritual geniuses—one thinks of Jesus spotting Zacchaeus
in a tree—the Buddha was gifted with preternatural insight into
character. Able to size up, almost at sight, the people who approached
him, he seemed never to be taken in by fraud and front but would
move at once to what was authentic and genuine. One of the most
beautiful instances of this was his encounter with Sunita the flowerscavenger, a man so low in the social scale that the only employment
he could find was picking over discarded bouquets to find an
occasional blossom that might be bartered to still his hunger. When the
Buddha arrived one day at the place where he was sorting through
refuse, Sunita's heart was filled with awe and joy. Finding no place to
hide—for he was an outcaste—he stood as if stuck to the wall,
saluting with clasped hands. The Buddha “marked the conditions of
Arahatship [sainthood] in the heart of Sunita, shining like a lamp
within a jar,” and drew near, saying, “Sunita, what to you is this
wretched mode of living? Can you endure to leave the world?” Sunita,
“experiencing the rapture of one who has been sprinkled with
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 6 of 45
ambrosia, said, ‘If such as I may become a monk of yours, may the
Exalted One suffer me to come forth!’” He became a renowned
member of the order. 5
thoroughly knows and sees, face to face, this universe.” “Deep is the
Tathagata, unmeasurable, difficult to understand, even like the
ocean.”
The Buddha’s entire life was saturated with the conviction that he had
a cosmic mission to perform. Immediately after his enlightenment he
saw in his mind’s eye “souls whose eyes were scarcely dimmed by
dust and souls whose eyes were sorely dimmed by dust” 6—the whole
world of humanity, milling, lost, desperately in need of help and
guidance. He had no alternative but to agree with his followers that he
had been “born into the world for the good of the many, for the
happiness of the many, for the advantage, the good, the happiness of
gods and men, out of compassion for the world.” 7 His acceptance of
this mission without regard for personal cost won India’s heart as well
as her mind. “The monk Gautama has gone forth into the religious life,
giving up the great clan of his relatives, giving up much money and
gold, treasure both buried and above ground. Truly while he was still a
young man without gray hair on his head, in the beauty of his early
manhood he went forth from the household life into the homeless
state.” 8
The Rebel Saint
Encomiums to the Buddha crowd the texts, one reason undoubtedly
being that no description ever satisfied his disciples completely. After
words had done their best, there remained in their master the essence
of mystery—unplumbed depths their language could not express
because thought could not fathom them. What they could understand
they revered and loved, but there was more than they could hope to
exhaust. To the end he remained half light, half shadow, defying
complete intelligibility. So they called him Sakyamuni, “silent sage
(muni) of the Sakya clan,” symbol of something beyond what could be
said and thought. And they called him Tathagata, the “Thus-come,” the
“Truth-winner,” the “Perfectly Enlightened One,” for “he alone
In moving from Buddha the man to Buddhism the religion, it is
imperative that the latter be seen against the background of the
Hinduism out of which it grew. Unlike Hinduism, which emerged by
slow, largely imperceptible spiritual accretion, the religion of the
Buddha appeared overnight, fully formed. In large measure it was a
religion of reaction against Hindu perversions—an Indian
protestantism not only in the original meaning of that word, which
emphasized witnessing for (testis pro) something, but equally in its
latter-day connotations, which emphasize protesting against
something. Buddhism drew its lifeblood from Hinduism, but against
its prevailing corruptions Buddhism recoiled like a whiplash and hit
back—hard.
To understand the teachings of the Buddha, then, we shall need a
minimal picture of the existing Hinduism that partly provoked it. And
to lead into this, several observations about religion are in order.
Six aspects of religion surface so regularly as to suggest that their
seeds are in the human makeup. One of these is authority. Leaving
divine authority aside and approaching the matter in human terms
only, the point begins with specialization. Religion is not less
complicated than government or medicine. It stands to reason,
therefore, that talent and sustained attention will lift some people
above the average in matters of spirit; their advice will be sought and
their counsels generally followed. In addition, religion’s institutional,
organized side calls for administrative bodies and individuals who
occupy positions of authority, whose decisions carry weight.
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 7 of 45
A second normal feature of religion is ritual, which was actually
religion’s cradle, for anthropologists tell us that people danced out
their religion before they thought it out. Religion arose out of
celebration and its opposite, bereavement, both of which cry out for
collective expression. When we are crushed by loss or when we are
exuberant, we want not only to be with people; we want to interact
with them in ways that make the interactions more than the sum of
their parts—this relieves our isolation. The move is not limited to the
human species. In northern Thailand, as the rising sun first touches the
treetops, families of gibbons sing half-tone descending scales in
unison as, hand over hand, they swoop across the topmost branches.
Religion may begin in ritual, but explanations are soon called for, so
speculation enters as a third religious feature. Whence do we come,
whither do we go, why are we here?—people want answers to these
questions.
A fourth constant in religion is tradition. In human beings it is
tradition rather than instinct that conserves what past generations have
learned and bequeath to the present as templates for action.
A fifth typical feature of religion is grace, the belief—often difficult to
sustain in the face of facts—that Reality is ultimately on our side. In
last resort the universe is friendly; we can feel at home in it. “Religion
says that the best things are the more eternal things, the things in the
universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final
word.” 10
Finally, religion traffics in mystery. Being finite, the human mind
cannot begin to fathom the Infinite it is drawn to.
Each of these six things—authority, ritual, speculation, tradition,
grace, and mystery—contributes importantly to religion, but equally
each can clog its works. In the Hinduism of the Buddha's day they had
done so, all six of them. Authority, warranted at the start, had become
hereditary and exploitative as brahmins took to hoarding their
religious secrets and charging exorbitantly for ministrations. Rituals
became mechanichal means for obtaining miraculous results.
Speculation had lost its experiential base and devolved into
meaningless hair-splitting. Tradition had turned into a dead weight, in
one specific by insisting that Sanskrit—no longer understood by the
masses—remain the language of religious discourse. God’s grace was
being misread in ways that undercut human responsibility, if indeed
responsibility any longer had meaning where karma, likewise misread,
was confused with fatalism. Finally, mystery was confused with
mystery-mongering and mystification—perverse obsession with
miracles, the occult, and the fantastic.
Onto this religious scene—corrupt, degenerate, and irrelevant, matted
with superstition and burdened with worn-out rituals—came the
Buddha, determined to clear the ground that truth might find new life.
The consequence was surprising. For what emerged was (at the start) a
religion almost entirely devoid of each of the above-mentioned
ingredients without which we would suppose that religion could not
take root. This fact is so striking that it warrants being documented.
1. Buddha preached a religion devoid of authority. His attack on
authority had two prongs. On the one hand he wanted to break the
monopolistic grip of the brahmins on religious teachings, and a good
part of his reform consisted of no more than making generally
accessible what had hitherto been the possession of a few. Contrasting
his own openness with the guild secrecy of the brahmins, he pointed
out that “there is no such thing as closed-fistedness in the Buddha.” So
important did he regard this difference that he returned to it on his
deathbed to assure those about him: “I have not kept anything
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 8 of 45
back.” 11 But if his first attack on authority was aimed at an institution
—the brahmin caste—his second was directed toward individuals. In a
time when the multitudes were passively relying on brahmins to tell
them what to do, Buddha challenged each individual to do his own
religious seeking. “Do not accept what you hear by report, do not
accept tradition, do not accept a statement because it is found in our
books, nor because it is in accord with your belief, nor because it is the
saying of your teacher. Be lamps unto yourselves. Those who, either
now or after I am dead, shall rely upon themselves only and not look
for assistance to anyone besides themselves, it is they who shall reach
the topmost height.” 12
2. Buddha preached a religion devoid of ritual. Repeatedly, he
ridiculed the rigmarole of Brahmanic rites as superstitious petitions to
ineffectual gods. They were trappings—irrelevant to the hard,
demanding job of ego-reduction. Indeed, they were worse than
irrelevant; he argued that “belief in the efficacy of rites and
ceremonies” is one of the Ten Fetters that bind the human spirit. Here,
as apparently everywhere, the Buddha was consistent. Discounting
Hinduism’s forms, he resisted every temptation to institute new ones
of his own, a fact that has led some writers to characterize his
teachings (unfairly) as a rational moralism rather than a religion.
3. Buddha preached a religion that skirted speculation. There is ample
evidence that he could have been one of the world’s great
metaphysicians if he had put his mind to the task. Instead, he skirted
“the thicket of theorizing.” His silence on that front did not pass
unnoticed. “Whether the world is eternal or not eternal, whether the
world is finite or not, whether the soul is the same as the body or
whether the soul is one thing and the body another, whether a Buddha
exists after death or does not exist after death—these things,” one of
his disciples observed, “the Lord does not explain to me. And that he
does not explain them to me does not please me, it does not suit
me.” 13 There were many it did not suit. Yet despite incessant
needling, he maintained his “noble silence.” His reason was simple.
On questions of this sort, “greed for views…tends not to
edification.” 14 His practical program was exacting, and he was not
going to let his disciples be diverted from the hard road of practice
into fields of fruitless speculation.
His famous parable of the arrow smeared thickly with poison puts the
point with precision.
It is as if a man had been wounded by an arrow thickly smeared with
poison, and his friends and kinsmen were to get a surgeon to heal him,
and he were to say, I will not have this arrow pulled out until I know
by what man I was wounded, whether he is of the warrior caste, or a
brahmin, or of the agricultural or the lowest caste. Or if he were to
say, I will not have this arrow pulled out until I know of what name of
family the man is;—or whether he is tall, or short, or of middle height;
or whether he is black, or dark, or yellowish; or whether he comes
from such and such a village, or town, or city; or until I know whether
the bow with which I was wounded was a chapa or a kodanda, or until
I know whether the bow-string was of swallow-wort, or bamboo fiber,
or sinew, or hemp, or of milk-sap tree, or until I know whether the
shaft was from a wild or cultivated plant; or whether it was feathered
from a vulture’s wing or a heron’s or a hawk’s, or a peacock’s; or
whether it was wrapped round with the sinew of an ox, or of a buffalo,
or of a ruru-deer, or of a monkey; or until I know whether it was an
ordinary arrow, or a razor-arrow, or an iron arrow, or of a calf-tooth
arrow. Before knowing all this, that man would die.
Similarly, it is not on the view that the world is eternal, that it is finite,
that body and soul are distinct, or that the Buddha exists after death,
that a religious life depends. Whether these views or their opposites
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 9 of 45
are held, there is still rebirth, there is old age, there is death, and
grief, lamentation, suffering, sorrow, and despair…. I have not spoken
to these views because they do not conduce to absence of passion, or
to tranquillity and Nirvana.
And what have I explained? Suffering have I explained, the cause of
suffering, the destruction of suffering, and the path that leads to the
destruction of suffering have I explained. For this is useful.
4. Buddha preached a religion devoid of tradition. He stood on top of
the past and its peaks extended his vision enormously, but he saw his
contemporaries as largely buried beneath those peaks. He encouraged
his followers, therefore, to slip free from the past’s burden. “Do not go
by what is handed down, nor on the authority of your traditional
teachings. When you know of yourselves: ‘These teachings are not
good: these teachings when followed out and put in practice conduce
to loss and suffering’—then reject them.” His most important personal
break with archaism lay in his decision—comparable to Martin
Luther’s decision to translate the Bible from Latin into German—to
quit Sanskrit and teach in the vernacular of the people.
5. Buddha preached a religion of intense self-effort. We have noted the
discouragement and defeat that had settled over the India of Buddha’s
day. Many had come to accept the round of birth and rebirth as
unending, which was like resigning oneself to a nightmarish sentence
to hard labor for eternity. Those who still clung to the hope of eventual
release had resigned themselves to the brahmin-sponsored notion that
the process would take thousands of lifetimes, during which they
would gradually work their way into the brahmin caste as the only one
from which release was possible.
Nothing struck the Buddha as more pernicious than this prevailing
fatalism. He denies only one assertion, that of the “fools” who say
there is no action, no deed, no power. “Here is a path to the end of
suffering. Tread it!” Moreover, every individual must tread this path
himself or herself, through self-arousal and initiative. “Those who,
relying upon themselves only, shall not look for assistance to any one
besides themselves, it is they who, shall reach the topmost height.” No
god or gods could be counted on, not even the Buddha himself. When
I am gone, he told his followers in effect, do not bother to pray to me;
for when I am gone I will be really gone. “Buddhas only point the
way. Work out your salvation with diligence.” The notion that only
brahmins could attain enlightenment the Buddha considered
ridiculous. Whatever your caste, he told his followers, you can make it
in this very lifetime. “Let persons of intelligence come to me, honest,
candid, straightforward; I will instruct them, and if they practice as
they are taught, they will come to know for themselves and to realize
that supreme religion and goal.”
6. Buddha preached a religion devoid of the supernatural. He
condemned all forms of divination, soothsaying, and forecasting as
low arts, and, though he concluded from his own experience that the
human mind was capable of powers now referred to as paranormal, he
refused to allow his monks to play around with those powers. “By this
you shall know that a man is not my disciple—that he tries to work a
miracle.” For all appeal to the supernatural and reliance on it
amounted, he felt, to looking for shortcuts, easy answers, and simple
solutions that could only divert attention from the hard, practical task
of self-advance. “It is because I perceive danger in the practice of
mystic wonders that I strongly discourage it.”
Whether the Buddha’s religion—without authority, ritual, theology,
tradition, grace, and the supernatural—was also a religion without
God will be reserved for later consideration. After his death all the
accoutrements that the Buddha labored to protect his religion from
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 10 of 45
came tumbling into it, but as long as he lived he kept them at bay. As a
consequence original Buddhism presents us with a version of religion
that is unique and therefore historically invaluable, for every insight
into the forms that religion can take increases our understanding of
what in essence religion really is. Original Buddhism can be
characterized in the following terms:
1. It was empirical. Never has a religion presented its case with such
unequivocal appeal to direct validation. On every question personal
experience was the final test of truth. “Do not go by reasoning, nor by
inferring, nor by argument.” A true disciple must “know for himself.”
2. It was scientific. It made the quality of lived experience its final
test, and directed its attention to discovering cause-and-effect
relationships that affected that experience. “That being present, this
becomes; that not being present, this does not become.” There is no
effect without its cause.
3. It was pragmatic—a transcendental pragmatism if one wishes, to
distinguish it from the kind that focuses on practical problems in
everyday life, but pragmatic all the same in being concerned with
problem solving. Refusing to be sidetracked by speculative questions,
Buddha kept his attention riveted on predicaments that demanded
solution. Unless his teachings were useful tools, they had no value
whatsoever. He likened them to rafts; they help people cross streams,
but are of no further value once the further shore is reached.
4. It was therapeutic. Pasteur’s words, “I do not ask you either your
opinions or your religion; but what is your suffering?” could equally
have been his. “One thing I teach,” said the Buddha: “suffering and
the end of suffering. It is just Ill and the ceasing of Ill that I
proclaim.”
5. It was psychological. The word is used here in contrast to
metaphysical. Instead of beginning with the universe and moving to
the place of human beings within it, the Buddha invariably began with
the human lot, its problems, and the dynamics of coping with them.
6. It was egalitarian. With a breadth of view unparalleled in his age
and infrequent in any, he insisted that women were as capable of
enlightenment as men. And he rejected the caste system’s assumption
that aptitudes were hereditary. Born a kshatriya (warrior, ruler) yet
finding himself temperamentally a brahmin, he broke caste, opening
his order to all regardless of social status.
7. It was directed to individuals. Buddha was not blind to the social
side of human nature; he not only founded a religious order (sangha)
—he insisted on its importance in reinforcing individual resolves. Yet
in the end his appeal was to the individual, that each should proceed
toward enlightenment through confronting his or her individual
situation and predicaments.
Therefore, O Ananda, be lamps unto yourselves. Betake yourselves
to no external refuge. Hold fast as a refuge to the Truth. Work out
your own salvation with diligence.
The Four Noble Truths
When the Buddha finally managed to break through the spell of
rapture that rooted him to the Immovable Spot for the forty-nine days
of his enlightenment, he arose and began a walk of over one hundred
miles toward India’s holy city of Banaras. Six miles short of that city,
in a deer park at Sarnath, he stopped to preach his first sermon. The
congregation was small—only five ascetics who had shared his severe
austerities but had broken with him in anger when he renounced that
approach, only to have now become his first disciples. His subject was
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 11 of 45
the Four Noble Truths. His first formal discourse after his awakening,
it was a declaration of the key discoveries that had come to him as the
climax of his six-year quest.
Asked to list in propositional form their four most considered
convictions about life, most people would probably stammer. The Four
Noble Truths constitute Buddha’s answer to that request. Together they
stand as the axioms of his system, the postulates from which the rest
of his teachings logically derive.
The First Noble Truth is that life is dukkha, usually translated
“suffering.” Though far from its total meaning, suffering is an
important part of that meaning and should be brought to focus before
proceeding to other connotations.
Contrary to the view of early Western interpreters, the Buddha’s
philosophy was not pessimistic. A report of the human scene can be as
grim as one pleases; the question of pessimism does not arise until we
are told whether it can be improved. Because the Buddha was certain
that it could be, his outlook falls within Heinrich Zimmer’s
observation that “everything in Indian thought supports the basic
insight that, fundamentally, all is well. A supreme optimism prevails
everywhere.” But the Buddha saw clearly that life as typically lived is
unfulfilling and filled with insecurity.
He did not doubt that it is possible to have a good time and that having
a good time is enjoyable, but two questions obtruded. First, how much
of life is thus enjoyable. And second, at what level of our being does
such enjoyment proceed. Buddha thought the level was superficial,
sufficient perhaps for animals but leaving deep regions of the human
psyche empty and wanting. By this understanding even pleasure is
gilded pain. “Earth’s sweetest joy is but disguised pain,” William
Drummond wrote, while Shelley speaks of “that unrest which men
miscall delight.” Beneath the neon dazzle is darkness; at the core—not
of reality but of unregenerated human life—is the “quiet desperation”
Thoreau saw in most peoples’ lives. That is why we seek distractions,
for distractions divert us from what lies beneath the surface. Some
may be able to distract themselves for long periods, but the darkness is
unrelieved.
Lo! as the wind is, so is mortal life:
A moan, a sigh, a sob, a storm, a strife.
That such an estimate of life’s usual condition is prompted more by
realism than by morbidity is suggested by the extent to which thinkers
of every stripe have shared it. Existentialists describe life as a “useless
passion,” “absurd,” “too much (de trop).” Bertrand Russell, a
scientific humanist, found it difficult to see why people should take
unhappily to news that the universe is running down, inasmuch as “I
do not see how an unpleasant process can be made less so [by being]
indefinitely repeated.” Poetry, always a sensitive barometer, speaks of
“the pitiful confusion of life” and “time’s slow contraction on the most
hopeful heart.” The Buddha never went further than Robert Penn
Warren:
Oh, it is real. It is the only real thing.
Pain. So let us name the truth, like men.
We are born to joy that joy may become pain.
We are born to hope that hope may become pain.
We are born to love that love may become pain.
We are born to pain that pain may become more
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 12 of 45
Pain, and from that inexhaustible superflux
endangered, ever after to be reproduced again in us as the dread of
‘anxiety’ conditions.”
We may give others pain as our prime definition. 24
Even Albert Schweitzer, who considered India pessimistic, echoed the
Buddha’s appraisal almost to idiom when he wrote, “Only at quite rare
moments have I felt really glad to be alive. I could not but feel with a
sympathy full of regret all the pain that I saw around me, not only that
of men, but of the whole creation.”
Dukkha, then, names the pain that to some degree colors all finite
existence. The word’s constructive implications come to light when
we discover that it was used in Pali to refer to wheels whose axles
were off-center, or bones that had slipped from their sockets. (A
modern metaphor might be a shopping cart we try to steer from the
wrong end.) The exact meaning of the First Noble Truth is this: Life
(in the condition it has got itself into) is dislocated. Something has
gone wrong. It is out of joint. As its pivot is not true, friction
(interpersonal conflict) is excessive, movement (creativity) is blocked,
and it hurts.
Having an analytical mind, the Buddha was not content to leave this
First Truth in this generalized form. He went on to pinpoint six
moments when life’s dislocation becomes glaringly apparent. Rich or
poor, average or gifted, all human beings experience:
1. The trauma of birth. Psychoanalysts have in our time made a great
deal of this point. Though Freud came to deny that the birth trauma
was the source of all later anxiety, to the end he considered it anxiety’s
prototype. The birth experience “involves just such a concatenation of
painful feelings, of discharges and excitation, and of bodily sensations,
as have become a prototype for all occasions on which life is
2. The pathology of sickness.
3. The morbidity of decrepitude. In the early years sheer physical
vitality joins with life’s novelty to render life almost automatically
good. In later years the fears arrive: fear of financial dependence; fear
of being unloved and unwanted; fear of protracted illness and pain;
fear of being physically repulsive and dependent on others; fear of
seeing one’s life as a failure in some important respect.
4. The phobia of death. On the basis of years of clinical practice, Carl
Jung reported that he found death to be the deepest terror in every
patient he had analyzed who had passed the age of forty.
Existentialists join him in calling attention to the extent to which the
fear of death mars healthy living.
5. To be tied to what one dislikes. Sometimes it is possible to break
away, but not always. An incurable disease, a stubborn character
defect—for better or for worse there are martyrdoms to which people
are chained for life.
6. To be separated from what one loves.
No one denies that the shoe of life pinches in these six places. The
First Noble Truth pulls them together by concluding that the five
skandas (life components) are painful. As these skandas are body,
sensations, thoughts, feelings, and consciousness—in short, the sum of
what we generally consider life to be—the statement amounts to the
assertion that the whole of human life (again, as usually lived) is
suffering. Somehow life has become estranged from reality, and this
estrangement precludes real happiness until it is overcome.
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 13 of 45
For the rift to be healed we need to know its cause, and the Second
Noble Truth identifies it. The cause of life’s dislocation is tanha.
Again imprecisions of translations—all are to some degree dishonest
—make it wise to stay close to the original word. Tanha is usually
translated as “desire.” There is some truth in this—the kind we
encounter in Heartbreak House when George Bernard Shaw has Ellie
exclaim, “I feel now as if there was nothing I could not do, because I
want nothing,” which assertion moves Captain Shotover to his one
enthusiasm in the play: “That’s the only real strength. That’s genius.
That’s better than rum.” But if we try to make desire tanha’s
equivalent, we run into difficulties. To begin with, the equivalence
would make this Second Truth unhelpful, for to shut down desires, all
desires, in our present state would be to die, and to die is not to solve
life’s problem. But beyond being unhelpful, the claim of equivalence
would be flatly wrong, for there are some desires the Buddha
explicitly advocated—the desire for liberation, for example, or for the
happiness of others.
Tanha is a specific kind of desire, the desire for private fulfillment.
When we are selfless we are free, but that is precisely the difficulty—
to maintain that state. Tanha is the force that ruptures it, pulling us
back from the freedom of the all to seek fulfillment in our egos, which
ooze like secret sores. Tanha consists of all “those inclinations which
tend to continue or increase separateness, the separate existence of the
subject of desire; in fact, all forms of selfishness, the essence of which
is desire for self at the expense, if necessary, of all other forms of life.
Life being one, all that tends to separate one aspect from another must
cause suffering to the unit which even unconsciously works against
the Law. Our duty to our fellows is to understand them as extensions,
other aspects, of ourselves—fellow facets of the same Reality.”
This is some distance from the way people normally understand their
neighbors. The customary human outlook lies a good halfway toward
Ibsen’s description of a lunatic asylum in which “each shuts himself in
a cask of self, the cask stopped with a bung of self and seasoned in a
well of self.” Given a group photograph, whose face does one scan for
first? It is a small but telling symptom of the devouring cancer that
causes sorrow. Where is the man who is as concerned that no one go
hungry as that his own children be fed? Where is the woman who is as
concerned that the standard of living for the entire world rise, as that
her own salary be raised? Here, said the Buddha, is where the trouble
lies; this is why we suffer. Instead of linking our faith and love and
destiny to the whole, we persist in strapping these to the puny burros
of our separate selves, which are certain to stumble and give out
eventually. Coddling our individual identities, we lock ourselves
inside “our skin-encapsulated egos” (Alan Watts), and seek fulfillment
through their intensification and expanse. Fools to suppose that
imprisonment can bring release! Can we not see that “tis the self by
which we suffer”? Far from being the door to abundant life, the ego is
a strangulated hernia. The more it swells, the tighter it shuts off the
free-flowing circulation on which health depends, and the more pain
increases.
The Third Noble Truth follows logically from the Second. If the cause
of life’s dislocation is selfish craving, its cure lies in the overcoming
of such craving. If we could be released from the narrow limits of selfinterest into the vast expanse of universal life, we would be relieved of
our torment. The Fourth Noble Truth prescribes how the cure can be
accomplished. The overcoming of tanha, the way out of our captivity,
is through the Eightfold Path.
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 14 of 45
The Eightfold Path
The Buddha’s approach to the problem of life in the Four Noble Truths
was essentially that of a physician. He began by examining carefully
the symptoms that provoke concern. If everything were going
smoothly, so smoothly that we noticed ourselves as little as we
normally notice our digestion, there would be nothing to worry about
and we would have to attend no further to our way of life. But this is
not the case. There is less creativity, more conflict, and more pain than
we feel there should be. These symptoms the Buddha summarized in
the First Noble Truth, with the declaration that life is dukkha, or out of
joint. The next step was diagnosis. Throwing rites and faith to the
winds, he asked, practically, what is causing these abnormal
symptoms? Where is the seat of the infection? What is always present
when suffering is present, and absent when suffering is absent? The
answer was given in the Second Noble Truth: the cause of life’s
dislocation is tanha, or the drive for private fulfillment. What, then, of
the prognosis? The Third Noble Truth is hopeful: the disease can be
cured by overcoming the egoistic drive for separate existence. This
brings us to prescription; how is this overcoming to be accomplished?
The Fourth Noble Truth provides the answer. The way to the
overcoming of self-seeking is through the Eightfold Path.
The Eightfold Path, then, is a course of treatment. But it is not an
external treatment, to be accepted passively by the patient as coming
from without. It is not treatment by pills, or rituals, or grace. Instead, it
is treatment by training. People routinely train for sports and their
professions, but with notable exceptions like Benjamin Franklin, they
are inclined to assume that one cannot train for life itself. The Buddha
disagreed. He distinguished two ways of living. One—a random,
unreflective way, in which the subject is pushed and pulled by impulse
and circumstance like a twig in a storm drain—he called “wandering
about.” The second, the way of intentional living, he called the Path.
What he proposed was a series of changes designed to release the
individual from ignorance, unwitting impulse, and tanha. It maps a
complete course; steep grades and dangerous curves are posted, and
rest spots indicated. By long and patient discipline, the Eightfold Path
intends nothing less than to pick one up where one is and set one down
as a different human being, one who has been cured of crippling
disabilities. “Happiness he who seeks may win,” the Buddha said, “if
he practice.”
What is this practice the Buddha is talking about? He breaks it down
into eight steps. They are preceded, however, by a preliminary he does
not include in his list, but refers to so often elsewhere that we may
assume that he was presupposing it here. This preliminary step is right
association. No one has recognized more clearly than the Buddha the
extent to which we are social animals, influenced at every turn by the
“companioned example” of our associates, whose attitudes and values
affect us profoundly. Asked how one attains illumination, the Buddha
began: “An arouser of faith appears in the world. One associates
oneself with such a person.” Other injunctions follow, but right
association is so basic that it warrants another paragraph.
When a wild elephant is to be tamed and trained, the best way to begin
is by yoking it to one that has already been through the process. By
contact, the wild one comes to see that the condition it is being led
toward is not wholly incompatible with being an elephant—that what
is expected of it does not contradict its nature categorically and
heralds a condition that, though startlingly different, is viable. The
constant, immediate, and contagious example of its yoke-fellow can
teach it as nothing else can. Training for the life of the spirit is not
different. The transformation facing the untrained is neither smaller
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 15 of 45
than the elephant’s nor less demanding. Without visible evidence that
success is possible, without a continuous transfusion of courage,
discouragement is bound to set in. If (as scientific studies have now
shown) anxieties are absorbed from one’s associates, may not
persistence be assimilated equally? Robert Ingersoll once remarked
that had he been God he would have made health contagious instead
of disease; to which an Indian contemporary responded: “When shall
we come to recognize that health is as contagious as disease, virtue as
contagious as vice, cheerfulness as contagious as moroseness?” One of
the three things for which we should give thanks every day, according
to Shankara, is the company of the holy; for as bees cannot make
honey unless together, human beings cannot make progress on the
Way unless they are supported by a field of confidence and concern
that Truthwinners generate. The Buddha agrees. We should associate
with Truthwinners, converse with them, serve them, observe their
ways, and imbibe by osmosis their spirit of love and compassion.
With this preliminary step in place we may proceed to the Path’s eight
steps proper.
1. Right Views. A way of life always involves more than beliefs, but it
can never bypass them completely, for in addition to being social
animals, as was just noted, human beings are also rational animals.
Not entirely, to be sure—the Buddha would have been quick to
acknowledge this. But life needs some blueprint, some map the mind
can trust if we are to direct our energies purposively. To return to the
elephant for illustration, however great the danger in which it finds
itself, it will make no move to escape until it has first assured itself
that the track it must tread will bear its weight. Without this conviction
it will remain trumpeting in agony in a burning wagon rather than risk
a fall. Reason’s most vociferous detractors must admit that it plays at
least this much of a role in human life. Whether or not it has the power
to lure, it clearly holds power of veto. Until reason is satisfied, an
individual cannot proceed in any direction wholeheartedly.
Some intellectual orientation, therefore, is needed if one is to set out
other than haphazardly. The Four Noble Truths provide this
orientation. Suffering abounds, it is occasioned by the drive for private
fulfillment, that drive can be tempered, and the way to temper it is by
traveling the Eightfold Path.
2. Right Intent. Whereas the first step summoned us to make up our
minds as to what life’s problem basically is, the second advises us to
make up our hearts as to what we really want. Is it really
enlightenment, or do our affections swing this way and that, dipping
like kites with every current of distraction? If we are to make
appreciable headway, persistence is indispensable. People who achieve
greatness are almost invariably passionately invested in some one
thing. They do a thousand things each day, but behind these stands the
one thing they count supreme. When people seek liberation with
single-mindedness of this order, they may expect their steps to turn
from sliding sandbank scrambles into ground-gripping strides.
3. Right Speech. In the next three steps we take hold of the switches
that control our lives, beginning with attention to language. Our first
task is to become aware of our speech and what it reveals about our
character. Instead of starting with a resolve to speak nothing but the
truth—one that is likely to prove ineffective at the outset because it is
too advanced—we will do well to start further back, with a resolve to
notice how many times during the day we deviate from the truth, and
to follow this up by asking why we did so. Similarly with uncharitable
speech. Begin not by resolving never to speak an unkind word, but by
watching one’s speech to become aware of the motives that prompt
unkindness.
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 16 of 45
After this first step has been reasonably mastered, we will be ready to
try some changes. The ground will have been prepared, for once we
become aware of how we do talk, the need for changes will become
evident. In what directions should the changes proceed? First, toward
veracity. The Buddha approached truth more ontologically than
morally; he considered deceit more foolish than evil. It is foolish
because it reduces one’s being. For why do we deceive? Behind the
rationalizations, the motive is almost always fear of revealing to others
or to ourselves what we really are. Each time we give in to this
“protective tariff,” the walls of our egos thicken to further imprison us.
To expect that we can dispense with our defenses at a stroke would be
unrealistic, but it is possible to become progressively aware of them
and recognize the ways in which they hem us in.
The second direction in which our speech should move is toward
charity. False witness, idle chatter, gossip, slander, and abuse are to be
avoided, not only in their obvious forms but also in their covert ones.
The covert forms—subtle belittling, “accidental” tactlessness, barbed
wit—are often more vicious because their animus is veiled.
4. Right Conduct. Here, too, the admonition (as the Buddha detailed
it in his later discourses) involves a call to understand one’s behavior
more objectively before trying to improve it. The trainee is to reflect
on actions with an eye to the motives that prompted them. How much
generosity was involved, and how much self-seeking? As for the
direction in which change should proceed, the counsel is again toward
selflessness and charity. These general directives are detailed in the
Five Precepts, the Buddhist version of the second or ethical half of the
Ten Commandments:
Do not kill. Strict Buddhists extend this proscription to animals and
are vegetarians.
Do not steal.
Do not lie.
Do not be unchaste. For monks and the unmarried, this means
continence. For the married it means restraint in proportion to one’s
interests in, and distance along, the Path.
Do not drink intoxicants. It is reported that an early Russian Czar,
faced with the decision as to whether to choose Christianity, Islam, or
Buddhism for his people, rejected the latter two because both included
this fifth proscription.
5. Right Livelihood. The word “occupation” is well devised, for our
work does indeed occupy most of our waking attention. Buddha
considered spiritual progress to be impossible if the bulk of one’s
doings pull against it: “The hand of the dyer is subdued by the dye in
which it works.” Christianity has agreed. While explicitly including
the hangman as a role society regrettably requires, Martin Luther
disallowed usurers and speculators.
For those who are intent enough on liberation to give their entire lives
to the project, right livelihood requires joining the monastic order and
subscribing to its discipline. For the layperson it calls for engaging in
occupations that promote life instead of destroying it. Again the
Buddha was not content with generalizing. He named names—the
professions of his day he considered incompatible with spiritual
seriousness. Some of these are obvious: poison peddler, slave trader,
prostitute. Others if adopted worldwide would be revolutionary:
butcher, brewer, arms maker, tax collector (profiteering was then
routine). One of the number continues to be puzzling. Why did the
Buddha condemn the occupation of caravan trader?
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 17 of 45
While the Buddha’s explicit teachings about work were aimed at
helping his contemporaries decide between occupations that were
conducive to spiritual progress and ones that impeded it, there are
Buddhists who suggest that if he were teaching today he would be less
concerned with specifics than with the danger that people forget that
earning a living is life’s means, not life’s end.
6. Right Effort. The Buddha laid tremendous stress on the will.
Reaching the goal requires immense exertion; there are virtues to be
developed, passions to be curbed, and destructive mind states to be
expunged so compassion and detachment can have a chance. “‘He
robbed me, he beat me, he abused me’—in the minds of those who
think like this, hatred will never cease.” But the only way such
crippling sentiments can be dispelled, indeed the only way to shake off
fetters of any sort, is by what William James called “the slow dull
heave of the will.” “Those who follow the Way,” said Buddha, “might
well follow the example of an ox that marches through the deep mire
carrying a heavy load. He is tired, but his steady gaze, looking
forward, will never relax until he comes out of the mire, and it is only
then he takes a respite. O monks, remember that passion and sin are
more than the filthy mire, and that you can escape misery only by
earnestly and steadily thinking of the Way.” 27 Velleity—a low level
of volition, a mere wish not accompanied by effort or action to obtain
it—won’t do.
In discussing right effort, the Buddha later added some after-thoughts
about timing. Inexperienced climbers, out to conquer their first major
peak, are often impatient with the seemingly absurd saunter at which
their veteran guide sets out, but before the day is over his staying pace
is vindicated. The Buddha had more confidence in the steady pull than
in the quick spurt. Stretched too taut, a string will snap; a plane that
ascends too sharply will crash. In China the author of the Tao Te Ching
made the point with a different image: “He who takes the longest
strides does not walk farthest.”
Because the West has found the last two steps in the Eightfold Path of
special importance for the understanding of the human mind and its
workings—there are several meditation centers in the United States,
catering disproportionately to mental health professionals, that are
dedicated exclusively to their practice—these will be discussed at
greater length.
7. Right Mindfulness. No teacher has credited the mind with more
influence over life than did the Buddha. The best loved of all Buddhist
texts, the Dhammapada, opens with the words, “All we are is the
result of what we have thought.” And respecting the future, it assures
us that “all things can be mastered by mindfulness.” 28
Among Western philosophers, Spinoza stands closest to the Buddha on
the mind’s potential. Spinoza’s dictum—“to understand something is
to be delivered of it”—comes close to summarizing his entire ethic.
The Buddha would have agreed. If we could really understand life, if
we could really understand ourselves, we would find neither a
problem. Humanistic psychology proceeds on the same assumption.
When “awareness of experience is fully operating,” Carl Rogers
writes, “human behavior is to be trusted, for in these moments the
human organism becomes aware of its delicacy and tenderness
towards others.” The Buddha saw ignorance, not sin, as the offender.
More precisely, insofar as sin is our fault, it is prompted by a more
fundamental ignorance—most specifically, the ignorance of our true
nature.
To gradually overcome this ignorance, the Buddha counsels such
continuous self-examination as to make us wilt (almost) at the
prospect, but he thought it necessary because he believed that freedom
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 18 of 45
—liberation from unconscious, robot-like existence—is achieved by
self-awareness. To this end he insisted that we seek to understand
ourselves in depth, seeing everything minutely, “as it really is.” If we
maintain a steady attention to our thoughts and feelings, we perceive
that they swim in and out of our awareness, and are in no way
permanent parts of us. We should witness all things non-reactively,
especially our moods and emotions, neither condemning some nor
holding on to others. A miscellany of other practices are
recommended, some of which are these: The aspirant is to keep the
mind in control of the senses and impulses, rather than being driven by
them. Fearful and disgusting sights are to be meditated on until one no
longer experiences aversion toward them. The entire world should be
pervaded with thoughts of loving-kindness.
Out of the semi-alertness that comprises the consciousness of the
average human being, this seventh step summons the seeker to steady
awareness of every action that is taken, and every content that turns up
in one’s stream of consciousness. The adept becomes aware of the
moment when sleep takes over, and whether breath was coming in or
going out at that moment. Obviously, this takes practice. In addition to
working at it continuously to some extent, special times should be
allotted for undistracted introspection. Periods of complete withdrawal
for the purpose must also be built into one’s schedule.
Here is a Western observer’s description of monks in Thailand
practicing this seventh step:
One of them spends hours each day slowly walking about the
grounds of the wat in absolute concentration upon the minutest
fraction of every action connected with each step. The procedure
is carried into every single physical act of daily life until,
theoretically, the conscious mind can follow every step that goes
into the generation of a feeling, perception or thought. A fifty-
year-old monk meditates in a small graveyard adjoining his wat,
because he’s undisturbed there. He seats himself, cross-legged
and immobile but with his eyes open, for hours on end—through
the driving rain at midnight or the blistering heat of noonday. His
usual length of stay is two or three hours.
Through this practice one arrives at a number of insights: (1) Every
emotion, thought, or image is accompanied by a body sensation, and
vice versa. (2) One discerns obsessive patterns in what arises in one’s
mind and how these patterns constitute our misery (dukkha). For some
it is a nursing of old grievances; others find themselves preoccupied
with longings and self-pity, and still others simply feel at sea. With
continuing practice the obsessive grip of these patterns loosens. (3)
Every mental and physical state is in flux; none is solid and enduring.
Even physical pain is a series of discrete sensations that can suddenly
change. (4) The meditator realizes how little control we have over our
minds and our physical sensations, and how little awareness we
normally have of our reactions. (5) Most important, one begins to
realize that there is nobody behind the mental/physical events,
orchestrating them. When the capacity for microscopic attention is
refined, it becomes apparent that consciousness itself is not
continuous. Like the light from a light bulb, the on/off is so rapid that
consciousness seems to be steady, whereas in fact it is not. With these
insights, the belief in a separate self-existent self begins to dissolve.
8. Right Concentration. This involves substantially the techniques
we have already encountered in Hinduism’s raja yoga and leads to
substantially the same goal.
In his later years the Buddha told his disciples that his first intimations
of deliverance came to him before he left home when, still a boy and
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 19 of 45
sitting one day in the cool shade of an apple tree in deep thought, he
found himself caught up into what he later identified as the first level
of the absorptions. It was his first faint foretaste of deliverance, and he
said to himself, “This is the way to enlightenment.” It was nostalgia
for the return and deepening of this experience, as much as his
disillusionment with the usual rewards of worldly life, that led him to
his decision to devote his life completely to spiritual adventure. The
result, as we have seen, was not simply a new philosophy of life. It
was regeneration: change into a different kind of creature, who
experienced the world in a new way. Unless we see this, we shall be
unequipped to fathom the power of Buddhism in human history.
Something happened to the Buddha under that Bo Tree, and something
has happened to every Buddhist since who has persevered to the final
step of the Eightfold Path. Like a camera, the mind had been poorly
focused, but the adjustment has now been made. With the “extirpation
of delusion, craving, and hostility,” the three poisons, we see that
things were not as we had supposed. Indeed, suppositions of
whatsoever sort have vanished, to be replaced by direct perception.
The mind reposes in its true condition.
Basic Buddhist Concepts
The Buddha’s total outlook on life is as difficult to be certain of as that
of any personage in history. Part of the problem stems from the fact
that, like most ancient teachers, he wrote nothing. There is a gap of
almost a century and a half between his spoken words and the first
written records, and though memory in those times appears to have
been incredibly faithful, a gap of that length is certain to raise
questions. A second problem arises from the wealth of material in the
texts themselves. Buddha taught for forty-five years, and a staggering
corpus has come down to us in one form or another. While the net
result is doubtless a blessing, the sheer quantity of materials is
bewildering; for though his teachings remained remarkably consistent
over the years, it was impossible to say things for many minds and in
many ways without creating problems of interpretation. These
interpretations constitute the third barrier. By the time texts began to
appear, partisan schools had sprung up, some intent on minimizing the
Buddha’s break with Brahmanic Hinduism, others intent on
sharpening it. This makes scholars wonder how much in what they are
reading is the Buddha’s actual thought and how much is partisan
interpolation.
Undoubtedly, the most serious obstacle to the recovery of the
Buddha’s rounded philosophy, however, is his own silence at crucial
points. We have seen that his burning concerns were practical and
therapeutic, not speculative and theoretical. Instead of debating
cosmologies, he wanted to introduce people to a different kind of life.
It would be wrong to say that theory did not interest him. His
dialogues show that he analyzed certain abstract problems
meticulously; that he possessed, indeed, a brilliant metaphysical mind.
It was on principle that he resisted philosophy, as someone with a
sense of mission might shun hobbies as a waste of time.
His decision makes so much sense that it may seem a betrayal to insert
a section like this one, which tries forthrightly to identify—and to
some extent define—certain key notions in the Buddha’s outlook. In
the end, however, the task is unavoidable for the simple reason that
metaphysics is unavoidable. Everyone harbors some notions about
ultimate questions, and these notions affect interpretations of
subsidiary issues. The Buddha was no exception. He refused to initiate
philosophical discussions, and only occasionally did he let himself be
pried from his “noble silence” to engage in them, but certainly he had
views. No one who wishes to understand him can escape the
hazardous task of trying to discover what they were.
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 20 of 45
We may begin with nirvana, the word the Buddha used to name life’s
goal as he saw it. Etymologically it means “to blow out,” or “to
extinguish,” not transitively, but as a fire ceases to draw. Deprived of
fuel, the fire goes out, and this is nirvana. From such imagery it has
been widely supposed that the extinction to which Buddhism points is
complete, total annihilation. If this were so there would be grounds for
the accusation that Buddhism is life-denying and pessimistic. As it is,
scholars of the last half-century have exploded this view. Nirvana is
the highest destiny of the human spirit and its literal meaning is
extinction, but we must be precise as to what is to be extinguished. It
is the boundaries of the finite self. It does not follow that what is left
will be nothing. Negatively, nirvana is the state in which the faggots
of private desire have been completely consumed and everything that
restricts the boundless life has died. Affirmatively, it is that boundless
life itself. Buddha parried every request for a positive description of
the unconditioned, insisting that it was “incomprehensible,
indescribable, inconceivable, unutterable”; for after we eliminate
every aspect of the only consciousness we have known, how can we
speak of what is left? 30 One of Buddha’s heirs, Nagasena, preserves
this point in the following dialogue. Asked what nirvana is like,
Nagasena countered with a question of his own:
“Is there such a thing as wind?”
“Yes, revered sir.”
“Please, sir, show the wind by its color or configuration or as thin or
thick or long or short.”
“But it is not possible, revered Nagasena, for the wind to be shown;
for the wind cannot be grasped in the hand or touched; yet wind
exists.”
“If, sir, it is not possible for the wind to be shown, well then, there is
no wind.”
“I, revered Nagasena, know that there is wind; I am convinced of it,
but I am not able to show the wind.”
“Even so, sir, nirvana exists; but it is not possible to show
nirvana.” 31
Our final ignorance is to imagine that our final destiny is conceivable.
All we can know is that it is a condition that is beyond—beyond the
limitations of mind, thoughts, feelings, and will, all these (not to
mention bodily things) being confinements. The Buddha would
venture only one affirmative characterization. “Bliss, yes bliss, my
friends, is nirvana.”
Is nirvana God? When answered in the negative, this question has led
to opposite conclusions. Some conclude that since Buddhism professes
no God, it cannot be a religion; others, that since Buddhism obviously
is a religion, religion doesn’t require God. The dispute requires that we
take a quick look at what the word “God” means.
Its meaning is not single, much less simple. Two meanings must be
distinguished for its place in Buddhism to be understood.
One meaning of God is that of a personal being who created the
universe by deliberate design. Defined in this sense, nirvana is not
God. The Buddha did not consider it personal because personality
requires definition, which nirvana excludes. And while he did not
expressly deny creation, he clearly exempted nirvana from
responsibility for it. If absence of a personal Creator-God is atheism,
Buddhism is atheistic.
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 21 of 45
There is a second meaning of God, however, which (to distinguish it
from the first) has been called the Godhead. The idea of personality is
not part of this concept, which appears in mystical traditions
throughout the world. When the Buddha declared, “There is, O monks,
an Unborn, neither become nor created nor formed…. Were there not,
there would be no deliverance from the formed, the made, the
compounded,” he seemed to be speaking in this tradition. Impressed
by similarities between nirvana and the Godhead, Edward Conze has
compiled from Buddhist texts a series of attributes that apply to both.
We are told that
Nirvana is permanent, stable, imperishable, immovable, ageless,
deathless, unborn, and unbecome, that it is power, bliss and
happiness, the secure refuge, the shelter, and the place of
unassailable safety; that it is the real Truth and the supreme
Reality; that it is the Good, the supreme goal and the one and
only consummation of our life, the eternal, hidden and
incomprehensible Peace.
We may conclude with Conze that nirvana is not God defined as
personal creator, but that it stands sufficiently close to the concept of
God as Godhead to warrant the name in that sense.
The most startling thing the Buddha said about the human self is that it
has no soul. This anatta (no soul) doctrine has again caused Buddhism
to seem religiously peculiar. But again the word must be examined.
What was the atta (Pali for the Sanskrit Atman or soul) that the
Buddha denied? At the time it had come to signify (a) a spiritual
substance that, in keeping with the dualistic position in Hinduism, (b)
retains its separate identity forever.
Buddha denied both these features. His denial of spiritual substance—
the soul as homunculus, a ghostly wraith within the body that animates
the body and outlasts it—appears to have been the chief point that
distinguished his concept of transmigration from prevailing Hindu
interpretations. Authentic child of India, the Buddha did not doubt that
reincarnation was in some sense a fact, but he was openly critical of
the way his Brahmanic contemporaries interpreted the concept. The
crux of his criticism may be gathered from the clearest description he
gave of his own view on the subject. He used the image of a flame
being passed from candle to candle. As it is difficult to think of the
flame on the final candle as being the original flame, the connection
would seem to be a causal one, in which influence was transmitted by
chain reaction but without a perduring substance.
When to this image of the flame we add the Buddha’s acceptance of
karma, we have the gist of what he said about transmigration. A
summary of his position would run something like this: (1) There is a
chain of causation threading each life to those that have led up to it,
and to those that will follow. Each life is in its present condition
because of the way the lives that led up to it were lived. (2)
Throughout this causal sequence the will remains free. The lawfulness
of things makes the present state the product of prior acts, but within
the present the will is influenced but not controlled. People remain at
liberty to shape their destinies. (3) The two preceding points affirm the
causal connectedness of life, but they do not entail that a substance of
some sort be transmitted. Ideas, impressions, feelings, streams of
consciousness, present moments—these are all that we find, no
spiritual substrate. Hume and James were right: If there is an enduring
self, subject always, never object, it never shows itself.
An analogy can suggest the Buddha’s views of karma and
reincarnation in a supporting way. (1) The desires and dislikes that
influence the contents of my mind—what I pay attention to and what I
ignore—have not appeared by accident; they have definite lineages. In
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 22 of 45
addition to attitudes that I have taken over from my culture, I have
formed mental habits. These include cravings of various sorts,
tendencies to compare myself with others in pride or envy, and
dispositions toward contentment and its opposite, aversion. (2)
Although habitual reactions tend to become fixed, I am not bound by
my personal history; I can have new ideas and changes of heart. (3)
Neither the continuity nor the freedom these two points affirm requires
that thoughts or feelings be considered entities—things, or mental
substances that are transported from mind to mind, or from moment to
moment. Acquiring a concern for justice from my parents did not
mean that a substance, however ethereal and ghostlike, leapt from
their heads into mine.
This denial of spiritual substance was only an aspect of Buddha’s
wider denial of substance of every sort. Substance carries both a
general and a specific connotation. Generally, it refers to something
relatively permanent that underlies surface changes in the thing in
question; specifically, this more basic something is thought to be
matter. The psychologist in Buddha rebelled against the latter notion,
for to him mind was more basic than matter. The empiricist in him, for
its part, challenged the implications of a generalized notion of
substance. It is impossible to read much Buddhist literature without
catching its sense of the transitoriness (anicca) of everything finite, its
recognition of the perpetual perishing of every natural object. It is this
that gives Buddhist descriptions of the natural world their poignancy.
“The waves follow one after another in an eternal pursuit.” Or,
Life is a journey.
Death is a return to the earth.
The universe is like an inn.
The passing years are like dust.
The Buddha listed impermanence (anicca) as the first of his Three
Marks of Existence—characteristics that apply to everything in the
natural order—the other two being suffering (dukkha) and the absence
of permanent identity or a soul (anatta). Nothing in nature is identical
with what it was the moment before; in this the Buddha was close to
modern science, which has discovered that the relatively stable objects
of the macro-world derive from particles that barely exist. To
underscore life’s fleetingness the Buddha called the components of the
human self skandas—skeins that hang together as loosely as yarn—
and the body a “heap,” its elements no more solidly assembled than
grains in a sandpile. But why did the Buddha belabor a point that may
seem obvious? Because, he believed, we are freed from the pain of
clutching for permanence only if the acceptance of continual change is
driven into our very marrow. Followers of the Buddha know well his
advice:
Regard this phantom world
As a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp—a phantom—and a dream.
Given this sense of the radical impermanence of all things finite, we
might expect the Buddha’s answer to the question “Do human beings
survive bodily death?” to be a flat no, but actually his answer was
equivocal. Ordinary people when they die leave strands of finite desire
that can only be realized in other incarnations; in this sense at least
these persons live on. But what about the Arhat, the holy one who has
extinguished all such desires; does such a one continue to exist? When
a wandering ascetic put this question, the Buddha said:
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 23 of 45
“The word reborn does not apply to him.”
“Then he is not reborn?”
“The term not-reborn does not apply to him.”
“To each and all of my questions, Gotama, you have replied in the
negative. I am at a loss and bewildered.”
“You ought to be at a loss and bewildered, Vaccha. For this doctrine is
profound, recondite, hard to comprehend, rare, excellent, beyond
dialectic, subtle, only to be understood by the wise. Let me therefore
question you. If there were a fire blazing in front of you, would you
know it?”
“Yes, Gotama.”
“If the fire went out, would you know it had gone out?”
“Yes.”
“If now you were asked in what direction the fire had gone, whether to
east, west, north, or south, could you give an answer?”
“The question is not rightly put, Gotama.” Whereupon Buddha
brought the discussion to a close by pointing out that “in just the same
way” the ascetic had not rightly put his question. “Feelings,
perceptions, forces, consciousness—everything by which the Arhat
might be denoted has passed away for him. Profound, measureless,
unfathomable, is the Arhat even as the mighty ocean; reborn does not
apply to him nor not-reborn, nor any combination of such terms.”
It contributes to the understanding of this conversation to know that
the Indians of that day thought that expiring flames do not really go
out but return to the pure, invisible condition of fire they shared before
they visibly appeared. But the real force of the dialogue lies
elsewhere. In asking where the fire, conceded to have gone out, had
gone, the Buddha was calling attention to the fact that some problems
are posed so clumsily by our language as to preclude solution by their
very formulation. The question of the illumined soul’s existence after
death is such a case. If the Buddha had said, “Yes, it does live on,” his
listeners would have assumed the persistence of our present mode of
experiencing, which the Buddha did not intend. On the other hand, if
he had said, “The enlightened soul ceases to exist,” his hearers would
have assumed that he was consigning it to total extinction, which too
he did not intend. On the basis of this rejection of extremes we cannot
say much with certainty, but we can venture something. The ultimate
destiny of the human spirit is a condition in which all identification
with the historical experience of the finite self will disappear, while
experience as such not only remains but is heightened beyond
recognition. As an inconsequential dream vanishes completely on
awakening, as the stars go out in deference to the morning sun, so
individual awareness will be eclipsed in the blazing light of total
awareness. Some say, “The dewdrop slips into the shining sea.” Others
prefer to think of the dewdrop as opening to receive the sea itself.
If we try to form a more detailed picture of the state of nirvana, we
shall have to proceed without the Buddha’s help, not only because he
realized almost to despair how far the condition transcends the power
of words, but also because he refused to wheedle his hearers with
previews of coming attractions. Even so, it is possible to form some
notion of the logical goal toward which his Path points. We have seen
that the Buddha regarded the world as one of lawful order in which
events are governed by the pervading law of cause and effect. The life
of the Arhat, however, is one of increasing independence from the
causal order of nature. It does not violate that order, but the Arhat’s
spirit grows in autonomy as the world’s hold decreases. In this sense
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 24 of 45
the Arhat is increasingly free not only from the passions and worries
of the world but also from its happenings in general. With every
growth of inwardness, peace and freedom replace the turbulent
bondage of those whose lives are prey to circumstance. As long as
spirit remains tied to body, its freedom from the particular, the
temporal, and the changing cannot be complete. But sever this
connection with the Arhat’s final death, and freedom from the finite
will be complete. We cannot imagine what the state would be like, but
the trajectory toward it is discernible.
Spiritual freedom brings largeness of life. The Buddha’s disciples
sensed that he embodied immeasurably more of reality—and in that
sense was more real—than anyone else they knew; and they testified
from their own experience that advance along his path enlarged their
lives as well. Their worlds seemed to expand, and with each step they
felt themselves more alive than they had been before. As long as they
were limited by their bodies, there were limits beyond which they
could not go; but if all ties were loosed, might not they be completely
free? Once more, we cannot concretely imagine such a state, but the
logic of the progression seems clear. If increased freedom brings
increased being, total freedom should be being itself.
A thousand questions remain, but the Buddha is silent.
Others abide our questions. Thou are free.
We ask and ask; thou smilest and art still.
Big Raft and Little
Thus far we have been looking at Buddhism as it appears from its
earliest records. We turn now to Buddhist history and the record it
provides of the variations that can enter a tradition as it seeks to
minister to the needs of masses of people and multiple personality
types.
When we approach Buddhist history with this interest, what strikes us
immediately is that it splits. Religions invariably split. In the West the
twelve Hebrew tribes split into Israel and Judah. Christendom split
into the Eastern and Western churches, the Western church split into
Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, and Protestantism splinters.
The same happens in Buddhism. The Buddha dies, and before the
century is out the seeds of schism have been sown. One approach to
the question of why Buddhism split would be through analyzing the
events, personalities, and environments the religion became implicated
with in its early centuries. We can cut through all that, however, by
saying, simply, that Buddhism divided over the questions that have
always divided people.
How many such questions are there? How many questions will divide
almost every assemblage of people whether in India, New York, or
Madrid? Three come to mind.
First, there is the question of whether people are independent or
interdependent. Some people are most aware of their individuality; for
them, their freedom and initiative is more important than their
bondings. The obvious corollary is that they see people as making
their own ways through life; what each achieves will be largely of his
or her own doing. “I was born in the slums, my father was an
alcoholic, all of my siblings went to the dogs—don’t talk to me about
heredity or environment. I got to where I am by myself!” This is one
attitude. On the other side of the fence are those for whom life’s interconnectedness prevails. To them the separateness of people seems
tenuous; they see themselves as supported and vectored by social
fields that are as strong as those of physics. Human bodies are of
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 25 of 45
course separate, but on a deeper level we are joined like icebergs in a
common floe. “Send not to ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for
thee.”
A second question concerns the relation in which human beings stand,
not this time to their fellows, but to the universe. Is the universe
friendly—helpful on the whole toward creatures? Or is it indifferent, if
not hostile? Opinions differ. On bookstore shelves we find volumes
with titles like Man Stands Alone, and next to them Man Does not
Stand Alone and Man Is Not Alone. Some people see history as a
thoroughly human project in which humanity raises itself by its own
bootstraps or progress doesn’t happen. For others it is powered by “a
higher power that makes for good.”
A third dividing question is: What is the best part of the human self, its
head or its heart? A popular parlor game used to revolve around the
question, “If you had to choose, would you rather be loved or
respected?” It is the same point with a different twist. Classicists rank
thoughts above feelings; romantics do the opposite. The first seek
wisdom; the second, if they had to choose, prefer compassion. The
distinction probably also relates to William James’s contrast between
the tough-minded and the tender-minded.
Here are three questions that have probably divided people as long as
they have been human and continue to divide them today. They
divided the early Buddhists. One group took as its motto the Buddha’s
valedictory, “Be lamps unto yourselves; work out your salvation with
diligence.” Whatever progress those in this group make will be the
fruit of wisdom—insight into the cause of suffering as gained through
meditation. The other group held that compassion is the more
important feature of enlightenment, arguing that to seek enlightenment
by oneself and for oneself is a contradiction in terms. For them, human
beings are more social than individual, and love is the greatest thing in
the world.
Other differences gathered around these fundamental ones. The first
group insisted that Buddhism was a full-time job; those who made
nirvana their central object would have to give up the world and
become monks. The second group, perhaps because it did not rest all
its hopes on self-effort, was less demanding. It held that its outlook
was as relevant for the layperson as for the professional; that in its
own way it was as applicable in the world as in the monastery. This
difference left its imprint on the names of the two outlooks. Both
called themselves yanas, rafts or ferries, for both claimed to carry
people across life’s sea to the shores of enlightenment. The second
group, however, pointing to its doctrine of cosmic help (grace) and its
ampler regard for laypeople, claimed to be “Buddhism for the people”
and thereby the larger of the two vehicles. Accordingly it preempted
the name Mahayana, the Big Raft, maha meaning “great,” as in
Mahatma (the Great Souled) Gandhi. As this name caught on, the
other group came to be known, by default, as Hinayana, or the Little
Raft.
Not exactly pleased with this invidious designation, the Hinayanists
have preferred to call their Buddhism Theravada, the Way of the
Elders. In doing so they regained the initiative by claiming to
represent original Buddhism, the Buddhism taught by Gautama
himself. The claim is justified if we confine ourselves to the explicit
teachings of the Buddha as they are recorded in the earliest texts, the
Pali Canon, for on the whole those texts do support the Theravada
position. But this fact has not discouraged the Mahayanists from their
counterclaim that it is they who represent the true line of succession.
For, they argue, the Buddha taught more eloquently and profoundly by
his life and example than by the words the Pali Canon records. The
Huston Smith: “Buddhism” – page 26 of 45
decisive fact about his life is that he did not remain in nirvana after his
enlightenment but returned to devote his life to others. Because he did
not belabor this fact, Theravadins (attending too narrowly to his initial
spoken words, the Mahayanists contend) overlook the importance of
his “great renunciation,” and this causes them to read his mission too
narrowly.
No one saves us but ourselves,
We can leave to the two schools their dispute over apostolic
succession; our concern is not to judge but to understand the positions
they embody. The differences that have come out thus far may be
summarized by the following pairs of contrasts, if we keep in mind
that they are not absolute but denote differences in emphasis.
For Mahayana, in contrast, grace is a fact. We can be at peace because
a boundless power draws—or if you prefer, propels—everything to its
appointed goal. In the words of a famous Mahayana text, “There is a
Buddha in every grain of sand.”
1. For Theravada Buddhism progress is up to the individual; it
depends on his or her understanding and resolute application of the
will. For Mahayanists the fate of the individual is linked to that of all
life, and they are ultimately undivided. Two lines from John Whittier’s
“The Meeting” summarize the latter outlook:
He findeth not who seeks his own
The soul is lost that’s saved alone.
2. Theravada holds that humanity is on its own in the universe. No
gods exist to help us over the humps, so self-reliance is our only
recourse.
By ourselves is evil done,
By ourselves we pain endure,
By ourselves we cease from wrong,
No one can and no one may;
We ourselves must tread the Path:
Buddhas only show the way.
...
Purchase answer to see full
attachment