Temple University World Religions Discussion

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Please answer these two questions with two page long response. Thank you!

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  • How would you compare the origin and development of Buddhism with that of Hinduism? Additionally, what concept from Buddhism do you think is essential to understanding the tradition? Explain why. Reference both the readings and the video in your response.
  • Compare what you saw in the video with what you read in Prothero and the Novak selection. In what ways does one of the materials (Prothero, Novak, or video) build on or enhance one of the other materials Prothero, Novak, or video)? Explain with reference to the readings in your response.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZY-TH4KHlg&feature=emb_title

https://iad.cdn.nv.instructuremedia.com/originals/o-6E61sXtNtQT7SceKo3ab6Lz788pp25G/transcodings/t-7PFEH5k2Yj91S13GRft7WzJpZoZ1uH8.mp4?&Expires=1581037707&Signature=LLCQ4TvcYQjU-~ixgn5x~Od1JDGpdZRPjpbFripNCFh7jXEY7GUSievsT0SSrvdNdMGAZqYwFiDLPaEeSP3UmuGLYVtxy~NEONvrm3twtYfjwgOJeQgT58l3t35~wH~lfikWkSHfuk7qkM7Di8vsF2fRzriUAeNTJRGaEwjLekhJWv7mtAUqI59tNJ5mU0Fg0fTxP9HruMztjTo5-Nzqe92Sbcb-w1h5f~kAJL1dRhZsx4FusEcFDmnxD~gVgFZg~F11-eRFwFXE43CTNcQjpELOHxXYf2PmmPRdlDDELNk8-JKnQMg5pJhjCEPTJT784HaJmbE6pB41LLuUa9Db~w__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLP4NHW7VFATZNDQ

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Chapter Five Buddhism The Way of Awakening Buddhism begins with a fairy tale. Unlike Cinderella or Rocky, however, this is no underdog fantasy of someone who has nothing and gains the whole world. In fact it is just the opposite—a story of someone who has everything and decides to give it all away. It begins with a prince in a palace and a dim and distant sense that something has gone awry. The prince’s name is Siddhartha Gautama, also known as Shakyamuni (“Sage of the Shakya Clan”). The time is the sixth century B.C.E.—the Axial Age of Confucius in China, Cyrus the Great in Persia, and Pythagoras in Greece. The place is Lumbini, the Bethlehem of Buddhism in the foothills of the Himalayas in what is now southern Nepal. This prince’s mother had died as he was taking his first breaths, so in his bones he knows suffering, but his father sees to it that life in the palace is whisked clean of dissatisfaction. Shortly after Siddhartha was born, a soothsayer had prophesied that he would be great in either politics or religion. His father was religious, but he was a practical man too. Determined to raise a Napoleon rather than a Mother Teresa, he went to great lengths to shield his son from anything that might upset his soul and set him to wandering. Now a young man, this coddled prince enjoys what by all appearances is a life of champagne and caviar. Like Muhammad and Confucius, he lost a parent as a boy, but he has a beautiful house, a beautiful wife, and a beautiful son. All this beauty, however, cannot stop questions from bubbling up. He starts to ask himself, “How did I get here?” And then he looks at the roads radiating out from his palace and for the first time allows himself to imagine where they might lead. This future Light of Asia informs his father that he wants to see the real world. His father reluctantly agrees to send him on a tour outside the cozy confines of his sheltered life but orchestrates things as carefully as advanced planners for a prime minister’s visit to Paris. The Champs144 Élysées has been swept of homeless people, foreign minstrels, and other unpleasantness. But on this tour the Buddha-to-be sees a sick person. “What is that?” he asks his charioteer (because throughout his life he has been shielded from sickness). His charioteer tells him, “A sick person. Each of us falls ill. You and I alike. No one is exempt from sickness.” On his second tour, orchestrated in even greater detail by his father, Siddhartha sees an old man. “What is that?” he asks his charioteer (because throughout his sheltered life he has been shielded from old age). His charioteer tells him, “An old person. Each of us gets old. You and I alike. No one is exempt from old age.” On his third tour, Siddhartha sees a corpse. “What is that?” he asks his charioteer (because throughout his sheltered life he has been shielded from death). His charioteer tells him, “A dead person. Each of us dies. You and I alike. No one is exempt from death.” On his fourth and final tour, Siddhartha sees a wandering holy man. “What is that?” he asks his charioteer (because throughout his sheltered life, which has included encounters with all sorts of beautiful and wealthy and powerful people, he has never seen such a man). His charioteer tells him, “A sannyasin, a wandering ascetic who has left behind spouse and family and job and home in search of spiritual liberation.” These four sights bring on the most momentous midlife crisis in world history. Looking at his life though the prism of the suffering of sickness, old age, and death, Siddhartha decides that there must be more to human existence than profit, power, pleasure, and prestige. So at the age of twenty-nine he vows to “go forth from home to homelessness.”1 The next day, in an event now celebrated as the “Great Departure” (and reenacted in ordination ceremonies the world over), Siddhartha allows his spiritual desires to override the duties of filial piety. He says good-bye to his father and wife and son, walks out of his palace one last time, rides to the border of what would have been his vast inheritance, shaves his head, takes off his fine clothes, and puts on the life of a wandering holy man. In the Western religions, wandering typically arrives as punishment. It is the spanking you get after you eat the apple or kill your brother. But for Siddhartha wandering arrived as opportunity. For years he meandered around North India, studying with various yogis, experimenting with various body austerities, and otherwise searching for a solution to the problem of human suffering. As he whittled his body down to skin and bones—the opposite of the big fat plastic “Buddhas” of Chinatown fame— his renown as an ascetic grew, but his ability to focus on his spiritual goal diminished. The more he disciplined his body, the more often and more 145 desperately it cried out for food and sleep. So he left his teachers and fellow students and decided to strike out on his own. Forging a “Middle Path” between hedonism and asceticism, he vowed to eat and sleep just enough to solve the problem of suffering. At the age of thirty-five, after six years as a renunciant, he sat crosslegged under a tree in Bodhgaya in North India and vowed not to get up until he had stolen the secret of our everlasting wandering from rebirth to rebirth. Sensing trouble, Mara, the demon of sense pleasures, sent a Bangkok of distractions his way, but the Buddha-to-be would not be stirred by such trivialities. After forty-nine days, awakening came upon him. In one of the great moments in world history, he saw that all things are impermanent and ever changing. He saw how we suffer because we wish the world were otherwise. And through these insights he saw his suffering itself wander away. From that point forward he was the Buddha, which, like the term Christ, is a title rather than a proper name. In this case the title means not messiah but “Awakened One.” After his Great Awakening, the Buddha had a crisis of conscience. He knew that what he had achieved he had achieved alone, by his own effort, on his own merit, and through his own experience. He knew that words fail. So how could he possibly teach what he had learned to others? Wouldn’t any instruction he might offer be misunderstood? How could he speak without disturbing the silence out of which his awakening had come? So this newly minted Buddha considered withdrawing entirely from the world of speech and society. He returned to his itinerant life, wandering in silence for days. He finally decided, however, to try to help others see what he had seen, experience what he had experienced, so that they, too, might escape from “this sorrow-piled mountain-wall of old age, birth, disease, and death.”2 In a deer park in Sarnath, outside of Varanasi in North India, he found five fellow travelers who had turned their backs on him after he had decided to embark on the Middle Path. “Turning the wheel of dharma,” he delivered to them his first sermon: Buddhism 101. At the heart of this sermon were the Four Noble Truths, which compress the problem, solution, and techniques of Buddhism into this quick-and-easy formula: life is marked by suffering; but suffering has an origin; so it can be eliminated; and the path to the elimination of suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path. Whether these five holy men were converted by his person or by his words is not known. But after the Buddha gave this pathbreaking sermon, each of them decided to join his sangha, or community, and the 146 Buddhist mission was on. For the next forty-five years, the Buddha wandered around the Indian subcontinent, turning the wheel of dharma and gathering monks and nuns into a motley crew of wandering beggars. Together they bore witness to what has been described as “history’s most dangerous idea”—that human beings can solve the human problem on our own, without recourse to God or divine revelation.3 In this way, Buddhism, the most psychological of the great religions, joined Platonism, Jainism, Confucianism, and Daoism as one of the great innovations of the Axial Age. One of the distinguishing marks of the Buddhist tradition is its emphasis on experience over belief. Buddhism never had a creed or a catechism until the American convert Henry Steel Olcott decided in the late nineteenth century that any self-respecting religion needed both. This relative indifference toward religion’s doctrinal dimension is rooted in the Buddha’s celebrated refusal to speculate. Like his contemporary Confucius, who also inspired a new religion without relying on God or the supernatural, the Buddha was a practical man. He likened his teaching to a raft—“it is for crossing over,” he said—and was forever passing his carefully chosen words through a colander of the useful.4 One of the most famous stories of the Buddha’s life concerns a man who keeps peppering him with all manner of metaphysical puzzlers. Is the world eternal? Are body and soul one and the same? The Buddha responds to these questions with questions of his own. If you were shot with a poisoned arrow, would you waste time and breath by asking who shot the arrow, how tall he was, and of what complexion? Wouldn’t you just pull the arrow out? Buddhism, he says, is about removing the arrow of suffering. Speculation only plugs more pain and poison into skin. At the age of eighty this prince who had awakened ate a bad piece of meat placed in his begging bowl. He died of food poisoning in Kushinagar, India, not far from his boyhood home on the Nepalese border. Just before passing into what Buddhists refer to as parinirvana (“final nirvana”), he asked his followers not to grieve for him. Everything is characterized by transiency (anicca), he said. Everything that is born must decay and die. His reputed last words were, “Be lamps unto yourselves; work out your own liberation with diligence.” His followers then cremated his body and distributed the remains as relics. Since that time Buddhist pilgrims have been making the circuit of the four sacred places of the Buddha’s life: Lumbini, where he was born; Bodhgaya, where he was enlightened; Sarnath, where he gave his first 147 sermon; and Kushinagar, where he died. Along the way they pray to the Buddha not only for nirvana but also for help with the struggles of ordinary life, and they regale one another with miraculous legends of his past lives. These pilgrims used to go on foot, sleeping under the stars or on monastery floors (or both), but now it is possible to go on first-class trains and air-conditioned buses, enjoying the amenities of luxury hotels. When I was young, I did a budget version of this circuit myself and was particularly taken with Sarnath. One of the glories of India is that it is a land of hyperstimulation. If, as the Hebrew Bible puts it, “Wisdom crieth aloud in the streets” (Proverbs 1:20), you wouldn’t know it in Mumbai or Calcutta, since a clamorous combination of cars, motorbikes, motorized rickshaws, buses, and bicycle bells push decibels in many Indian cities to jet runway levels. But the stimulation does not hyperactivate only the ear. India’s images of the divine are riots of color. And its city streets are crowded almost to the point of impassibility. When I visited, Sarnath was a welcome respite from this blooming, buzzing confusion. While many of the world’s sacred spaces have been overtaken by the jealous god of consumerism, Sarnath had yet to go over to the tourist side. The architecture of the stupas there was blessedly spare, reminiscent of the Native American funeral mounds scattered around the American South and Midwest. And the place was eerily, blessedly quiet, a fitting tribute to this way of awakening. From Asia to America Upon the death of the Buddha, who is often said to have lived between 563 and 483 B.C.E. but may have lived as much as a century later, much of Buddhism was literally a movement—a meandering collection of monks and nuns who imitated the Buddha’s “no abiding place” lifestyle, supported only by the benevolence of lay followers willing to give them food in hopes of acquiring good karma and a better rebirth. But eventually more and more of these renunciants settled down into a vast network of wealthy and powerful patrons. In this way Buddhism became the first of the great religions to develop the institution of monasticism. As the fairy tale of the Buddha yielded to the exigencies of history, Buddhism spread across much of the Indian subcontinent, thanks in part to its revolutionary rejection of the caste system and its indifference to the scriptures, ceremonies, and status of high-caste Brahmins. It moved north 148 and east into Central Asia, along the Silk Road into China, and from there into Korea and Japan. It sailed south to Sri Lanka and Myanmar, and from there into the Southeast Asian archipelagos. It even hiked its way over the mountains to the sky-high plateau of Tibet. Buddhism spread not because it had a new holy book, like Islam, or a new god, like Christianity. In fact, early Buddhists refused to see the Buddha as divine and did not view his words as revelation. Buddhism spread because it had a story, a powerful new story about someone who, by waking up, had solved the problem of human suffering and found peace amidst the swirl. Back in its homeland of India, Buddhism had its Constantine moment when the great emperor Ashoka (304–232 B.C.E.), shaken by a horrific battle that gave him a great victory in exchange for thousands upon thousands of deaths, converted to Buddhism and began to construct all over the subcontinent monuments to compassion, nonviolence, and religious tolerance. But India was a god-besotted place and not one to forsake divinity. So by the thirteenth century, Buddhism had all but died out in the land of its birth, a victim of the popularity of bhakti-style Hinduism and the powerful arrival of Islam. Buddhism went West in the nineteenth century via books, artifacts, and people—through translations of Buddhist scriptures into European languages; through art collected by Buddhist sympathizers and deposited in places such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; through converts, such as the Russian founder of the Theosophical Society, Helena Blavatsky; and through immigrants, particularly from China and Japan, to Europe and North America. Today roughly 445 million people, or 7 percent of the world’s population, are Buddhists, making Buddhism the world’s fourth largest religion after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. The world’s Buddhists are concentrated in South and East Asia and are only minimally represented in Africa and Latin America. There are, at a minimum, 175 million Buddhists in China, and Buddhists form majorities in Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Japan, and Laos. When it comes to monasticism, numbers are hard to come by. There may have been as many as one million renouncers in Tibet when China invaded in 1950, but monks are probably most numerous today in Thailand and Taiwan. Buddhism’s trend line, however, is down. At its peak, this tradition might have accounted for close to one-third of the world’s population, but the twentieth century hit Buddhism hard. The rise of communism in China and North Korea, and of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity in South 149 Korea, were particularly devastating. Still, Buddhism is growing rapidly in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, thanks to ongoing immigration from Asian countries, the enticement of a spirituality that doesn’t hinge on the God proposition, and Buddhism’s apparent compatibility with science, especially modern psychology and quantum mechanics. Buddhism has also benefited from the belovability of the Tibetan Buddhist leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner, the Dalai Lama, and from a series of 1990s films on Tibetan themes, including Seven Years in Tibet starring Brad Pitt, and Little Buddha starring Keanu Reeves.5 Of all the Asian religions, Buddhism has had the largest influence on European and American popular culture. Its beliefs and practices have made their way onto the television show The Simpsons, the movie The Matrix, a bestselling book by NBA coach Phil Jackson called Sacred Hoops (1996), and lyrics by the hip-hop group the Beastie Boys (“Bodhisattva Vow”). Buddhism has also long attracted the attention of Western intellectuals. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called Buddhism “a hundred times more realistic than Christianity,” and the American Beat Generation hero Jack Kerouac devoted his novel Dharma Bums (1958) to Buddhist themes and in the process helped to set off the “rucksack revolution” of the 1960s.6 The largest of the three main Buddhist branches is the Mahayana (“Great Vehicle”), which predominates in Vietnam and in East Asian countries such as China, Japan, and Korea. The oldest is the Theravada (“Way of the Elders”), which is popular in South and Southeast Asia—in Thailand, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia. Tibet is home to the highaltitude Vajrayana “Diamond Vehicle,” which also has a presence in Mongolia, Bhutan, Nepal, Russia, parts of China and Japan, and India, where the Dalai Lama has resided in exile since fleeing his homeland in 1959. Although Buddhism is widely associated in the West with meditation, most Buddhists do not meditate. Their piety consists largely of bhakti-style devotion to various Buddhas and other supramundane figures. They worship these Buddhas in temples, pray to them at home, and go on pilgrimage to sacred sites associated with their exploits. Buddhism also plays the leading role in funerary rites in almost every society where it has a major presence. Because this tradition is associated with rebirth, families look to Buddhist monks when it comes to dying, funerals, and memorials. Among the great religions, Buddhism runs in the middle of the pack in terms of contemporary influence, just behind Hinduism, which boasts 150 more adherents, and just ahead of Judaism, which claims only about one practitioner for every thirty Buddhists worldwide. From Suffering to Nirvana Like Hindus, Buddhists trace the human problem to the karma-fueled cycle of life, death, and rebirth known as samsara. But Buddhists are more explicit about precisely why it is undesirable to wander from rebirth to rebirth. Rebirth is undesirable, they say, because life is marked by suffering. So the problem Buddhism seeks to overcome is suffering, which Buddhists refer to as dukkha. Its goal is nirvana, which literally means “blowing out” (as in the candles on a birthday cake) but in this case refers to extinguishing suffering.7 Buddhists use a variety of techniques to achieve this goal. Some chant. Some just sit. Some visualize their way into mandalas, or sacred maps of the cosmos. Some puzzle over mind benders called koans in an effort to frustrate the either/or mind and shock what remains into nondual awakening. But Buddhists are best known for the practice of meditation, even though it is not a common activity among laypeople. A Burmese friend who has been meditating for decades once described his practice as nothing more than “a chance to be idle.” In our purpose-driven culture, however, doing nothing can be hard work. Of all the styles of Buddhist meditation, the simplest is following your breath. I do this with my students in my introduction to religion courses, and it’s something anyone can try at home. You find a comfortable place to sit and then just follow your breath—its going out, its coming in, and the subtle rests between its ebbing and flowing. In the process you might realize that this breath is forever changing, the end of the out giving rise to the start of the in, and the end of the in giving rise to the start of the out. You might also feel how the body breaths on its own—that you are not in control.8 Another popular Buddhist practice is vipassana, which is variously translated as “insight” and “mindfulness” meditation. Here, instead of your breath, you follow your feelings or thoughts or sensations. If you are bored, observe that you are bored. If your back aches, observe that your back aches. The aim of vipassana meditation is simply to be mindful of things as they are, to watch how all conditions arise and pass away, and so to observe, as German poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it, that “no feeling is 151 final,” and no thought or sensation either.9 Metta is another form of Buddhist meditation. Metta is often translated as “loving kindness,” but it also means unconditional love—love without attachment or expectation of return. In this technique you begin by feeling metta for yourself. You move on to cultivating unconditional love for a friend. Then you feel metta for someone you neither like nor dislike, and then for someone you dislike or even hate. In the next stage you feel unconditional love for yourself, your friend, the person to whom you are indifferent, and your enemy, treating them all as equally needful and deserving of loving kindness. Finally, you extend this feeling of metta to all beings everywhere in the world and beyond: “May all creatures be of a blissful heart.”10 Though their techniques differ, Buddhists share certain core convictions. Whereas some Buddhists are deeply engaged in questions of rebirth and the afterlife, most follow their Confucian and Jewish counterparts in focusing on the here and now. They see suffering as the problem and nirvana as the solution. They trace suffering to “ignorant craving”—our tendency to mistake things that are changing as unchanging and then to cling desperately to their supposedly unchanging forms.11 Or, as one Zen teacher puts it, “Suffering arises from wanting something other than what is.”12 This is a shocking departure from the teachings of Plato and the Upanishads, which promise happiness to those who discover and hold fast to what is unchanging and eternal. But the most astonishing thing about Buddhism, and perhaps its greatest contribution to the conversation among the great religions, is its teaching that the thing we are most certain of—the self—is actually a figment of the imagination. Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” Buddhists say if you think carefully enough you will see that you are not. According to Buddhists, the self (Cartesian or otherwise) does not actually exist. You can take these words as a philosophical proposition to be proved (or disproved), but that wouldn’t be very Buddhist of you, since Buddhists have insisted since the time of their founder that their teachings are true only insofar as they are useful. In other words, the point of Buddhist teachings is to reduce and eliminate suffering. So these teachings are aptly likened to vehicles—ferryboats or rafts intended to take you from this island of suffering to the far shore of nirvana. If they can’t do that, then we should throw them away, however “true” they may or may not be in 152 theory. Because it tends to analyze the human problem in terms of the individual, and to aim to solve that problem through withdrawal from society, Buddhism has long been viewed by sociologists as pessimistic, apolitical, socially apathetic, and ethically inert—perhaps the most powerful evidence of Karl Marx’s claim that religion is “the opiate of the masses.” And there is some merit to this charge. Buddhists have traditionally focused on the individual more than society. I suffer because of how I view the world, not because of political or economic structures that oppress or impoverish me. At least until the twentieth century, Buddhists have been revolutionaries only in the realm of the individual mind. Over the last generation, however, Buddhists have responded to such criticisms with “Engaged Buddhism,” a term coined by the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (b. 1926) to refer to efforts to apply the Buddhist principle of compassion to social and economic problems such as poverty, war, injustice, discrimination, and environmental degradation. Engaged Buddhists in France and the United States, Vietnam and India are working to address the social roots of suffering through collective action. After 9/11, one of the most outspoken groups denouncing racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims were engaged JapaneseAmerican Buddhists who, recalling the internment of almost all American Buddhists in internment camps during World War II, wanted to be sure that nothing like that happened to American Muslims. The Buddhist tradition, these Engaged Buddhists argue, is by no means just about personal spiritual growth. Buddha, Dharma, Sangha Like Christianity and Islam, Buddhism is a missionary religion. And converting is easy. All you have to do is recite the Three Refuges (or Three Jewels): I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha. The term sangha means community. In early Buddhism this 153 community was restricted to celibate monks and nuns. Laypeople did their thing at the margins, chiefly by giving food and clothing to monastics and receiving good karma in return. But they were not part of the sangha. Instead of reaching for the ultimate aim of nirvana, they hoped only for the proximate aim of a better rebirth. More recently, however, the notion of sangha has expanded to include nonmonastics. Today, if a Buddhist friend tells you she is going to her sangha, she means she is going to a meeting with her Buddhist friends. The Cape Sangha, near my Cape Cod home, is made up entirely of lay Buddhists. The Buddha is just a human being in the earliest forms of Buddhism. Because of his vast storehouse of merit, he may be able to work wonders of clairvoyance and clairaudience, and even to fly, but he does not claim to be a god or savior. He is simply a pathfinder—someone who has experienced what Kerouac called “the Great Awakening from the dream of existence” and lived (for a while) to tell the tale.13 So all he can show us is how to be human. While other religious communities work hard to build up the authority of their founders, early Buddhists undercut the Buddha’s authority. Their Buddha taught his listeners not to be seduced by the authority of any text, tradition, or teacher (even himself), but to discover for themselves how to live an authentically human life. Their Buddha also refused to designate a successor. After he died, he said, the teachings would be in charge. So there never would be a Buddhist pope. The second of the Three Jewels, dharma, requires more explanation. In Hinduism, dharma means duty. Here it refers primarily to teaching (as in a “Dharma talk”). But dharma has also been translated as “the way it is,” since Buddhist teachings aim at nothing grander than “to know things as they are.”14 Buddhist teachings vary of course, but they often begin with the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path. Though widely considered to be the simplest doctrinal distillation of Buddhist teaching, the Four Noble Truths are anything but simple. In fact, I never feel more challenged as a professor than I am when I am trying to explain these teachings. The First Noble Truth observes that human existence is characterized by dukkha, or suffering. According to the European Values Survey, reincarnation belief is rising rapidly in the West: 29 percent of adults in the United Kingdom believe in reincarnation, as do 19 percent in western Germany, 21 percent in France, and 32 percent in Russia.15 Many 154 Westerners today welcome reincarnation as an opportunity to experience in the next life things they were unable to experience in this one. But for Buddhists reincarnation is literally a drag—a wheel full of friction and frustration. Yes, we can be happy. We can even be ecstatic. And there is joy along the way. Yet each of us, no matter how rich or poor or powerful or weak, is going to get sick, grow old, and die. Because nothing is permanent, nothing can permanently satisfy us. Because things change and pass away, everything and everyone we love will someday be no more. The happiness we experience is fleeting, and buried inside much of it is the sort of deep sadness that the Portuguese refer to as saudade. The Second Noble Truth is more hopeful: suffering has an origin. Everything in this world is interdependent, linked in a great chain of cause and effect, so suffering must come from somewhere. Buddhists identify twelve links in this chain of “dependent origination” (pratitya-samutpada) but the key links are ignorance, thirst, and grasping. We suffer because we close our eyes to the way the world really is. We pretend we are independent when we are really interdependent. We pretend that changing things are unchanging. And we desperately desire the world and the people who populate it to be as we imagine it (and them) to be. And so we suffer when our spouses take up new interests, or when our favorite (and perfect just as it was) old-fashioned ice cream store puts up a ridiculous Web site with a stupid new logo, or when the brand new T-bird we are proudly driving home from the Ford dealership is hit by a rock thrown by a sixyear-old kid who would go on to write this book (true story). We suffer because we desperately grasp after people, places, and things, as if they can redeem us from our suffering. We suffer because we cling to beliefs and judgments, not least beliefs in gods, and judgments that this friend or that enemy is morally bankrupt. Today “you have changed” is an explanation one lover gives to another as she is walking out the door. In Buddhism, “you have changed” is a description of what is happening every moment of every day. The Third Noble Truth observes that, since suffering has a cause, it can be eliminated. If we wake up to the way the world really is, in all its flux and flow, and stop clinging to things that are by their nature running through our fingers, then we can achieve nirvana. But what is this “blowing out”? Nirvana is often described in negative terms as the extinguishing of thirst, grasping, suffering, greed, hate, delusion, and rebirth. More positively it is said to be bliss, though a bliss that is beyond description, and peace, though a peace that is beyond our ken. But nirvana is not some static place you go to after death. It can be achieved in this 155 lifetime. The Fourth Noble Truth observes that there is a path to the goal of nirvana. Like Confucianism’s Doctrine of the Mean, this Middle Path steers clear of the extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification. Also known as the Eightfold Path, it comprises “right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.”16 Because this path has ethical, experiential, and doctrinal dimensions, it is traditionally divided into three disciplines: ethical conduct (right speech, right action, and right livelihood); mental discipline (right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration); and wisdom (right understanding and right thought). In short, be kind, be wise, be mindful. Although all of the Four Noble Truths are described as teachings, it is more faithful to the tradition to refer to them as observations, because none of this is dogma. Buddhism is a come-and-see tradition. More than believers, its adherents are practitioners. Its dharma is not divine revelation. And we are not supposed to accept it just on faith. We are challenged to experiment with its teachings, to see for ourselves whether what the Buddha said accurately describes the world and (more to the point) whether its practices reduce our suffering. No Soul, No Self Of all the observations made by the Buddha, one is particularly vexing: we have no soul. Mormons say our souls existed before we were born, and almost all religions promise to preserve our souls after death. According to Buddhists, Hindus are wrong to locate the essence of the human person in the Atman, because the Atman does not exist. This core Buddhist teaching is called anatta (in the Buddhist language of Pali) or anatman (in Sanskrit), which in either case means “no soul.” But that is only half of it (and the easy half), because according to Buddhists we have no self either. What we habitually refer to as “I” or “you,” as if it were some unchanging essence, is actually nothing more than a conventional name attached to an ever-changing combination of separate parts called the five skandhas. When mixed together, these five “aggregates”—matter, sensations, perceptions, thoughts, and consciousness—create the illusion of “I” and “me.” But this illusion is all there is to “myself.” One core text for this difficult teaching is a dialogue between the 156 Buddhist sage Nagasena and a king named Menander. Like the rest of us, the king sees no reason to question anything as obvious as his own existence, but Nagasena is not so easily seduced by appearances. His argument for anatta hangs on an analysis of the king’s chariot, whose existence the king sees no reason to question either. So Nagasena asks him, “Is the axle the chariot?” “No.” “Are the wheels?” “No.” “The frame?” “No.” The chariot, Nagasena observes, is a composite made up of various things, just as a car today is composed of its frame and wheels and axles. The terms chariot and car are conventional designations, agreedupon names for the coming together of various objects. So, too, is I a conventional designation for the coming together of this jangle of hair, head, hands, ideas, and emotions. Outside of such conventions, however, no essence of “me” is to be found. The self is a charlatan; all memoir is fiction. This may sound overly philosophical, and perhaps absurd, as if we have stumbled upon a metaphysics seminar for hypercaffeinated graduate students. Why should we care about this mumbo jumbo? Isn’t the dharma supposed to be useful? Is there any practical payoff for denying something as undeniable as myself? Yes, Buddhists say. The false belief that “I” am some permanent, unchanging, independent essence unleashes all sorts of untold suffering. It gives rise to the ego, and then it gives the ego the reins, so we are dragged through each day by thoughts of “I” and “mine,” obsessing over satiating the ego’s insatiable cravings. A few years ago an academic journal devoted an entire issue to one of my books. I was flattered, but when the issue arrived I had no desire to read it. I emailed a friend about my disinterest, which surprised me. “Of course!” she responded. “The only thing your ego does is say ‘you’re great’ and ‘you stink,’ over and over again, in internally referential and self-perpetuating loops. . . . Any form of criticism is a version of ‘you stink,’ and any form of praise is another version of the same message, since ‘you’re great’ implies you would stink if you weren’t great in that way.” The ego does more than tell baseball players they can’t hit and professors they can’t think, however. It endlessly trumpets its own existence—an activity toward which something that actually existed might not devote so much energy. Confucianism says no to “I, me, mine” by denying the self’s independence. We are not isolated atoms, Confucians say; we are interdependent webs of social relations. Buddhism goes a step further by denying any real self of any sort. Put an end to ignorance and grasping and 157 suffering by putting the lie to the false self, it says. Or, as a poet put it: Do Not Act From Ego. It is a sticky little Mouse trap that Begins With A Wheel Running us in Circles. Get off.17 Theravada and Mahayana There is some question about whether Buddhism is a religion, but as with Confucianism this question reveals more about our own assumptions about religion than it does about Buddhism itself. Some who find Confucianism lacking on the God front try to reduce it from religion to ethics. With Buddhism the temptation is to reduce it to psychology, or therapy. The earliest forms of Buddhism did not speak of God or stress the supernatural. They saw the Buddha as a human being. So if religion is about “belief in Spiritual Beings,” as the classic definition by British anthropologist E. B. Tylor puts it, Buddhism was not in the religion family.18 It wouldn’t be very Buddhist of Buddhism to remain forever the same, however. And it did not. As a child of India, Buddhism inherited Hinduism’s absorptive strategy. In India, it picked up most of the typical trappings of its religious kin, not least an elaborate pantheon of Buddhas and other spiritual beings with all the supernatural powers of Kali and Shiva. In Tibet it picked up some of the magic of the indigenous shamanism of Bon. And in China it adopted some of the naturalness, spontaneity, and simplicity of Daoism. There was an early effort to fossilize the tradition, to set it in stone. At its First Council, held hard by the Buddha’s death in the fifth century B.C.E. 158 or so, his followers agreed on a canon of the Buddha’s teachings known as the Tripitaka, or “Three Baskets.” At the Second Council, held about a century later, Buddhists split over a variety of matters, including how strictly monastic rules should be interpreted and enforced. This was Buddhism’s Reformation, in the sense that it opened the door to the mad diversity that characterizes Buddhism (and Protestantism) today. This diversity is likely endemic to any tradition that subordinates “Is it true?” to “Does it work?” When new teachings or scriptures come along—and this tradition has produced both at a dizzying pace—Buddhists, rather than rejecting them as bastard children, adopt them as long-lost kin (assuming they can pass the pragmatic test of eliminating suffering). The beginning of the Common Era was a period of extraordinary religious activity that saw the birth of Christianity, rabbinic Judaism, and bhakti-style Hinduism. This period also gave the world bhakti-style Buddhism, known today as Mahayana. Maha means “great” and yana means “vehicle” so Mahayana means “greater vehicle,” and today it is the most popular Buddhist school. But in the beginning this name was a boast rather than a demographic observation. “I am the greatest,” bragged heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali. Mahayana Buddhists said the same thing. Much as Ali taunted Joe Frazier, they referred to their opponents as Hinayana, or “lesser vehicle.” These opponents, however, disagreed, and one group that survives today is Theravada (“Way of the Elders”). Mahayana Buddhists claimed they were greater than Theravada Buddhists and their kin for many reasons, but one of their biggest claims to fame was their egalitarian bent. Theravada Buddhism was a monastic tradition. For Theravadins, the only way to achieve nirvana was to withdraw from the worlds of family, work, sex, and money into the celibate life of a monk or nun. For this reason, some refer to the Theravada path as “Monastic Buddhism.”19 The Mahayana branch also had its monastics, but here renunciation was optional. Ordinary husbands and wives, employees and bosses expressed their devotion to new Buddhas by visiting new stupas and reading new scriptures. And though many of these laypeople contented themselves with the proximate goal of a better rebirth, some now began to hope for the ultimate goal of nirvana, without giving up on either love or worldly success. Mahayanists attacked Theravadins on many grounds, but the blow that hit hardest was the accusation that their predecessors were selfish. Theravada Buddhism was all about individual enlightenment, Mahayanists 159 argued. The Theravada exemplar was the arhat, who distinguished himself from the rest of humanity by wisdom (prajna) alone. So Mahayanists disparaged the arhat as smug, self-seeking, and self-centered. How could he cling to his own spiritual advancement when there was so much suffering among those he was leaving behind? In a series of new scriptures, which they attributed to the Buddha but their opponents attacked as fakes and forgeries, the Mahayanists championed a new exemplar called the bodhisattva. This term literally means “awakening being,” but the key virtue of this Mahayana hero is compassion (karuna). Instead of focusing selfishly on his own private nirvana, the bodhisattva uses his huge storehouse of merit to assist others. “All the suffering in the world comes from the desire for happiness for oneself,” writes the eighth-century Indian poet-philosopher Shantideva in his Guide to the Bodhisattva Path. “All happiness in the world comes from the desire for happiness for others.”20 Like Hinduism’s jnana yogis, Theravada Buddhism’s arhats stood in the self-help tradition. They, too, believed that the only way to get the religious goal was through one’s own merit. So achieving nirvana was extraordinarily difficult. In India, the easier path of bhakti yoga developed inside Hinduism right around the same time the Mahayana path was first charted. As of the beginning of the Common Era, it was possible for Hindus to get moksha through other power rather than self-effort: if you are devoted to a god of your choosing, your god will do the heavy lifting. Mahayana Buddhism worked in much the same way. With the rise of bodhisattvas, who walked and talked like Hindu gods, it became possible to get nirvana through outside assistance rather than self-reliance—through devotion to a bodhisattva, who would use his merit to take away your suffering. In this way it became much easier to achieve nirvana, and laypeople became fuller participants in the Buddhist community. The bodhisattva is typically described as someone who has a crisis of conscience while standing on the threshold of nirvana. “How can I enter into nirvana when so many other beings are suffering?” he asks. And the compassionate answer is, “I cannot.” So rather than renouncing the world, the bodhisattva returns to it, promising to postpone his own final nirvana out of compassion for others. This promise takes the form of the Bodhisattva Vow. Though this vow is different in different scriptures, it always includes a healthy dose of megalomania: However innumerable sentient beings are, I vow to save them; 160 However inexhaustible the passions are, I vow to extinguish them; However immeasurable the Dharmas are, I vow to study them; However incomparable the Buddha-truth is, I vow to attain it.21 When I try to explain the psychology of the bodhisattva to my students, I describe the bodhisattva as someone standing on the front porch of nirvana, holding open the door while waving others into the party ahead of him, refusing to enter until everyone else has entered first. By introducing time and space into a situation that is said to be beyond both, this image may conjure up an unhelpful picture of a massive logjam at Buddhism’s analog to the Pearly Gates. But it underscores the extent of the bodhisattva’s compassion, patience, and resolve. In addition to the bodhisattva, Mahayana Buddhists gave the world a radically new interpretation of the Buddha. While Theravadins saw the Buddha as a pathfinder and a human being, Mahayanists came to see him as eternal and omniscient—a supernatural being who could answer prayers and reward devotion. Moreover, Mahayanists spoke not just of one Buddha, but of many—a vast pantheon of wonder-working Buddhas on call 24/7 to lavish grace and favor on ardent devotees. Eventually Mahayanists came to believe that trying to become an arhat was simply aiming too low. Why hope for anything less than Buddhahood itself? The ready availability of meritorious Buddhas and bodhisattvas changed the playing field for laypeople seeking either the proximate goal of a better rebirth or the ultimate goal of nirvana. In the Theravada model, laypeople received merit from monks in exchange for food and clothing. And while that merit might help you to a better rebirth, it could never get you nirvana. In the Mahayana model, laypeople received merit from Buddhas and bodhisattvas in exchange for their devotion, and while that merit would likely only propel you to a better rebirth, it could also transport you to nirvana. It is of course impossible to distill the many distinctions between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism down to one thing, but the crux of it is that Theravada Buddhists think we awaken on our own, while Mahayana Buddhists think we awaken in relationship with others. Or, as Buddhist psychoanalyst Mark Epstein puts it, “we need partners in order to realize who we are.”22 Zen and Other Ways to Blow Your Mind 161 With the emergence of the Mahayana school, Buddhism moved undeniably into the family of religions, since its vast (and growing) pantheon of bodhisattvas and Buddhas offered devotees all the grace and magic of other religions’ gods. Just as bhakti Hindus could win moksha through the grace of Shiva or Krishna, Mahayana Buddhists could win nirvana through the grace of a Buddha or bodhisattva of their choosing. Many of these supramundane beings now have followings rivaling those of St. Jude or the Virgin Mary. The most popular bodhisattva, Avalokiteshvara, embodies compassion and, like Krishna, is said to come to earth repeatedly to save people in peril. Known in Tibet as Chenrezig, he switches genders in East Asia, into the all-merciful Guanyin (in China) and Kannon (in Japan). The most popular post-Gautama Buddha is the Buddha of Infinite Light—Amitabha in Sanskrit and Amida in Japanese—who is able to create out of his immeasurable storehouse of good karma a celestial abode of bliss—the Pure Land—that makes the Christians’ heaven and the Muslims’ Paradise look like Disneyland at closing time. This Buddha was popularized in Japan by Honen (1133–1212), the founder of the Jodo Shu (Pure Land) school, who promised that if you just chanted the name of the Amida Buddha—“Namu Amida Butsu”—he would issue you a one-way ticket to the “Western Paradise” or “Pure Land” from which nirvana is ensured. Nothing else was required. No meditation. No austerities. No study. All you had to do was demonstrate your devotion by chanting those three words, and the Amida Buddha would do the rest. The epitome of this bhakti path of faith, grace, and devotion came a few decades later with Shinran (1173–1263) and his Jodo Shinshu (True Pure Land) school. This Japanese reformer said it wasn’t necessary to chant the name of the Amida Buddha incessantly, as many of Honen’s followers were doing. All that was needed was one sincere invocation. Today this other-power tradition is the most popular Buddhist school in Japan and has taken up residence in the United States as the Buddhist Churches of America. Another Mahayana reformer from medieval Japan, Nichiren (1222– 81/2), distinguished himself by the scripture he read rather than the Buddha he worshipped. Like Honen and Shinran, he was a chanter rather than a meditator. But his chant was to the Lotus Sutra: Namu myoho renge kyo (“Hail to the Marvelous Teaching of the Great Lotus”). Various Lotus Sutra schools emerged out of Nichiren’s reforms, but the best known is Soka Gakkai International (SGI), a power-of-positive-thinking 162 organization that has spread from Japan to Brazil, Singapore, and the United States, where it is the most racially and ethnically diverse of all American Buddhist organizations. While many Mahayana schools echoed the Nichiren schools in organizing themselves around a scripture, one school did an end run around scriptures altogether. Popularized by Jack Kerouac and other Beat writers during the 1950s (though Kerouac himself was actually partial to the “Mind-Only” Yogacara school), Zen Buddhism takes its name from dhyana in Sanskrit, which became Chan in Chinese and then Zen in Japanese. Each of these words means “meditation,” so Zen is a meditation school. Zen is best known, however, for two distinctive practices. The first, developed by the Soto Zen school, is shikantaza. In this deceptively difficult practice, you just sit. You don’t try to follow your breath or to see into the nature of reality. You just sit idle for a time without thinking. (“Are you not thinking what I’m not thinking?” reads a New Yorker cartoon of two Zen monks in the lotus position.23) A second Zen practice, developed by the Rinzai Zen school, is the koan. A Zen master will pose a puzzle to a student: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Or “What was your face before your mother and father were born?” Or (my personal favorite), “What would the Buddha have said if there was no one to hear and no opportunity to teach?” The student will then try to offer a response that is genuine, spontaneous, and unrehearsed. Zen grew out of the interaction of Buddhism with Confucianism and Daoism during the Tang dynasty in eighth-century China. Practitioners, however, trace their tradition back to the Buddha himself. Their oft-told tale speaks of an assembly of monks eagerly awaiting a discourse from the Buddha. When he arrives, however, he says nothing. He turns a flower in his fingers, he smiles, but he does not speak. Everyone is confused. Everyone, that is, except for one monk who smiles back, whereupon the Buddha announces that this monk had received his transmission—a teaching that is direct and ordinary, transmitted outside of words. What intrigues me about the quest of Zen practitioners for satori (their term for moments of awakening that bring qualities of spontaneity and openness to everyday life) is how often these moments come in a flash of intuition. There is now strong evidence that breakthroughs of many sorts— Eureka! moments for scientists and novelists alike—often arrive only after the rational brain has run into a brick wall. When you are out for a walk or a drive or just waking up or just going to sleep, the solution does an end 163 run around your ordinary mind and pops into your head, fully formed. Apparently you need to wear out the left side of the brain so the right side can do its work. Or, to use language more native to the Buddhist tradition, you can’t get to nonduality with the dualistic mind. You can’t think your way to nirvana; it comes when you are out of your mind. Emptiness Another crucial development in Mahayana Buddhism was the teaching of shunyata, or emptiness. Whereas Theravada Buddhists had argued that the self was actually a composite (of the five skandhas) and therefore both fantasy and phantasm, Mahayana Buddhists took this argument one step further, contending that everything, including the five skandhas, is equally empty. I can attest on the basis of two decades as a Religious Studies professor that this teaching is almost as hard to convey as no-self. Just as most of us prefer to live in the physical universe of Isaac Newton, untroubled by the unsettling truths of Einsteinian relativity, most of us are perfectly happy to accept existence as it appears without worrying about how it might actually be. But even those of us who want to see the reality rather than the shadow have a hard time wrapping our heads around the mind-bender of emptiness. And as if that isn’t enough, there is the warning of the great second- and third-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna that garbling this doctrine can be hazardous to your health. “Shunyata misunderstood,” he writes, “is like a snake grasped by the head.”24 So fair warning and beware. The teaching of shunyata goes something like this: Since everything comes and goes in a great chain of cause and effect, nothing is independent; nothing exists on its own. There is no fire without fuel, and fuels such as wood and natural gas cannot even be conceived of as “fuel” without the concept of “fire.” The cottage where I live on Cape Cod may seem to be a very real and substantial “thing,” but it was brought into being by (among other empty things) carpenters and roofers and shingles and nails (each of which is itself empty), and one day the effects of wind and rain (among other things) will rot it away. The same can be said of our opinions and beliefs, which also arise and fall in a great chain of cause and effect. Yes, things appear to have permanent, unchanging essences. But as much as we hate to admit it, nothing is really permanent, and everything is 164 constantly changing. Yes, things appear to be unto themselves—this cup, that plate, this fork. But everything is made of something else and is always in the process of becoming something other than what it now appears to be. Before the fork was a fork, it was a sheet of stainless steel; before it was a sheet of stainless steel, it was iron, chromium, and other metals buried in rocks underground (though not, of course, conceived as such by the rocks nearby). And even this fork in my hand is only a “fork” among English speakers. In a culture of chopsticks unacquainted with Western place settings, it is simply an oddly shaped curio. “Form is emptiness,” says the Heart Sutra, “and emptiness is form.”25 For generations shunyata was seen in the West as pessimistic and nihilistic, perhaps because this term was routinely mistranslated as nothingness. But “emptiness is openness,” as the American teacher of Tibetan Buddhism Pema Chodron puts it.26 Shunyata should be understood first and foremost as a teaching of freedom rooted in experience: Until we experience it, Emptiness sounds so Empty. Once experienced, All is empty by comparison.27 To make this difficult teaching a bit more plain, Mahayana Buddhists speak of two truths: conventional truth with a small t and Absolute Truth with a capital T. From the perspective of Absolute Truth, everything is empty. Ultimately, there is no distinction between you and your best friend: each is radically interdependent; each is ever changing; each is impermanent. Ultimately, there is no unchanging essence to you or to me, just as there is no unchanging essence of chariot, car, house, or fork. Yet conventionally we speak of ourselves and these objects as if they were objects, as if we and they were independent, unchanging, and permanent, just as we speak of objects moving through space and time as if Newton’s laws live even though we know that Einstein has superseded him and that many so-called objects are actually better described as waves. We do this because it is useful under most circumstances to speak in conventional terms. There is no chariot, says Nagarjuna, but that does not mean you cannot climb aboard and take it for a spin. The oddest implication of emptiness is that we are all already Buddhas. 165 It is the dualistic mind that sees Buddhahood as something different from us. Move into nondualistic awareness and you will realize that you have been a Buddha since birth. Here we may seem to be treading toward something like self-deification, or what the Hindus call God-realization. But if the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Sogyal Rinpoche is right, the point of shunyata may not be to transcend our humanity, but to inhabit it more fully. “You don’t actually ‘become’ a Buddha,” he writes, “you simply cease, slowly, to be deluded. And being a Buddha is not being some omnipotent spiritual superman, but becoming at last a true human being.”28 One of the wonders of the ancient world (and Indonesia’s top tourist attraction) is the ninth-century Mahayana temple at Borobudur in Java. When viewed from above, this temple looks like a mandala—a map of the cosmos that doubles as a map of the human mind. Every day devotees circumambulate and ascend it, moving symbolically through the world of craving, the world of forms, and finally entering the world of formlessness. All the while, tourists snap photos incessantly and Indonesian schoolchildren practice their broken English with foreigners. Even with the distractions, however, this remarkable temple is almost enough to turn you into a Buddha all by itself. As you ascend the six rectangular stories and three circular stories of this massive lava-rock monument, thousands of bas-reliefs carved in stone tell the story of the Buddha’s life and illustrate the karmic law of cause and effect. At the top are seventy-two stupas. Stupas are structures that typically house some sacred relic, and, if you look carefully, you will see a stone statue of a seated Buddha inside each one. But in the center and at the highest point of this monument is an empty stupa—a wonderful gesture that recalls the empty chair for God so ubiquitous in Bali and, of course, the Mahayana teaching of emptiness itself. Thunderbolt and Diamond Vajrayana Buddhism, numerically the smallest of Buddhism’s three paths, is often also called Tibetan Buddhism because, although it flourished elsewhere, it survived most visibly in Tibet. Vajrayana developed out of Mahayana in India in the sixth century and moved into Tibet in two great waves, first in the eighth century and again in the eleventh. There it made a great civilization that creatively combined Theravada-style monasticism, 166 the study and contemplation of Mahayana texts, the magical and ritualistic traditions of Tantra, and the shamanistic beliefs and practices of the indigenous Bon religion. Vajrayana thrived in Tibet for centuries, until the Chinese invaded in 1950, eventually forcing the fourteenth Dalai Lama and his “Buddhocratic” government into exile in India.29 Vajrayana Buddhism enjoys a visibility in the West far out of proportion to its numbers, thanks to books and films trumpeting Tibet as an impossibly faraway Shangri-La, the inescapability of the Dalai Lama’s trademark smile, and widespread sympathy for Tibetan underdogs in the face of Chinese rule. Tibetan Buddhist monks are famous in Europe and North America for crafting out of colored sand intricate multicolored mandalas, which in this case include Buddhas in all nine directions (north, northeast, east, southeast, south, southwest, west, northwest, and center). These sand mandalas often take days to build but, in a grand demonstration of the Buddhist truth of impermanence, they are scattered to the wind (or into a river) shortly after they are completed. Like Mahayana Buddhists, Vajrayana Buddhists are not immune from bragging about their beloved tradition. Robert Thurman, the first Westerner ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk and now a Buddhist Studies professor at Columbia University, claims that this tradition creatively combines the best of Theravada monasticism and Mahayana messianism.30 But there is also a boast in the name itself. Vajra means both “thunderbolt” and “diamond,” so Vajrayana is the thunderbolt or diamond vehicle. Because it has the concentrated force of a thunderbolt, it presents the possibility of achieving Buddhahood extraordinarily quickly —in one lifetime. Because it can cut like a diamond, it is able to break through the Gordian knot of the dualistic mind to the nondualistic awareness of emptiness. This third Buddhist vehicle also answers to a host of additional names: Mantrayana because of its use of mantras, or sacred chants; Lamaism because of its reverence for the lama (which means guru, or teacher); Esoteric Buddhism because many of its practices are passed down in secret from lama to student; and Tantric Buddhism, because some of its practices are derived from Tantra. One such practice is partaking of the “Five Forbidden Things”—meat, fish, alcohol, sex, and mystical gestures called mudras—an activity that seeks to break through the either/or mind to the nondualism of emptiness. Just as Chakrasambhara, the bodhisattva of compassion, and his consort, Vajrabarahi, merge into each other sexually, there is no ultimate distinction, Vajrayana Buddhists say, between meat 167 eating and vegetarianism, between you and me, or even between nirvana and samsara. The most widely read Vajrayana Buddhist text in the West is the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which has been celebrated as a scientific, spiritual, psychological, and humanistic text.31 This funerary manual, whose technical name (or one of them) is Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State, guides the consciousness of the deceased through the intermediate state (bardo) between death and rebirth—a period Vajrayana Buddhists believe lasts for up to forty-nine days. Its words are chanted, ideally by a lama, over the corpse of the dying and the dead. The afterlife journey described in this text begins with a terrifying white light known as the Great Luminosity. Stay calm, you are told. Don’t be afraid. See the Great Luminosity (which some have likened to the light reported by people who have had near-death experiences) as nothing more than a projection of your own mind. If you are able to do this, to see yourself and this light as one rather than two different things, then you are liberated and will not be reborn. But this is very rare. So most of us go on to the next stage: a parade of ugly and wrathful Buddhas, followed by beautiful and benevolent Buddhas. This time, we are told not to be too repelled by or too attracted to any of these images. Don’t fear them or love them or run to or from them. Just understand each as a projection of your own mind. If you are able to do this, to realize the emptiness of the distinction between yourself and these Buddhas, then you are liberated and will not be reborn. But this, too, is rare. So the overwhelming majority of us go on to the final stage, which determines when and where we will be reborn. In this stage we see various scenes of animals and humans having sex, and on the basis of the good and bad karma we have accrued in past lives, we insinuate ourselves into one of those scenes and are reborn into it.32 Beyond Buddhism Quick-and-easy formulas are problematic in every great religion. Have you really gotten to the heart of Islam if you perform the Five Pillars? Or to the heart of Christianity if you say “Amen” to the Nicene Creed? With Buddhism, quick-and-easy formulas are particularly suspect. To be sure, Buddhists have long been on the lookout for formulas that could get them to nirvana. And ritual has always played a major role in the tradition. But 168 more than belief, Buddhism is about experience. And for the tradition’s mystics, this experience lies on the far side not only of rites and creeds but also of language itself. The teaching of emptiness was misunderstood in the West for generations as pessimistic and nihilistic. But in truth it is a teaching of freedom. There are reasons why the Buddha was often described as joyful and why the Dalai Lama seems inseparable from his trademark smile. One is that shunyata offers liberation from suffering. Another is that emptiness liberates us from enslavement to people, judgments, objects, and ideas, including the person of the Buddha and the institutions of Buddhism itself. One beloved koan reads, “If you see the Buddha, kill the Buddha.” Another Zen saying goes: “There is Buddha for those who don’t know what he is, really. There is no Buddha for those who know what he is, really.”33 Each of these sayings warns in its own way against clinging to the Buddha. Why should clinging to the Buddha cause us any less suffering than clinging to God or self or boyfriend or political party or ideology or nation? But these sayings also make the broader point that anything that comes to you secondhand is worse than worthless; trust only what you yourself have seen to be true in your own experience. Like “drunken” Sufis who laugh off the Five Pillars as baby steps on the road to Islamic adulthood, Buddhists who experience the mystery of emptiness recognize that ultimately all dualisms are figments of the ordinary mind, which is as binary as any computer. We should “hush the dualism of subject and object” and “forget both” because there is no essential distinction between lay and monastic, male and female, the bodhisattva who does the liberating and the person who is liberated.34 But emptiness does not just short-circuit the dualistic mind. It disables our penchant for judging others. When the habitual mind sees someone do something other than what it would do, it judges. When it sees someone thinking something other than what it thinks, it judges. And when it sees someone worshipping some god other than its god, it judges again. According to shunyata, every creature in this jangle of judgments arises from a false dualism of right and wrong, true and false, good and bad. Even the most basic Buddhist dualism—between the problem of samsara and the solution of nirvana—is, according to this tradition, ultimately unreal. The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path are empty, too, as is Buddhahood itself. According to the Heart Sutra, “There is no ignorance, no extinction of ignorance.”35 And as Mahayana’s master 169 of paradox Nagarjuna wrote, “The Buddha never taught any doctrine to anyone.”36 So we should abandon attachments to every teaching and every practice. Oh, and don’t forget that, according to the teaching of shunyata shunyata (“the emptiness of emptiness”), emptiness is empty too. This may now sound not only pessimistic and nihilistic but also absurd. If there is no problem and no solution, what is the point? Is Buddhism just one big fat joke? To say that there is no distinction between samsara and nirvana, however, is not to say that nirvana is impossible. It is to say that nirvana is inevitable. In fact, it is already here. To experience its bliss, all we need to do is to step out of the closed, either/or mind to the open heart of emptiness. Samsara is nirvana if you just accept things as they are. To say that there is no distinction between a Buddha and a dog is not to say that all you will get out of a Buddha is a sniff and a wag. It is to say that, if you see the world as it is, even a dog’s scamper from his leash can lead you to bliss beyond bliss. What the experience of emptiness teaches, in short, is that there is nowhere to go, nothing to wait for. This is it. To borrow from the American writer John Updike, Buddhism serves “to give the mundane its beautiful due.”37 In other words, everything written in this chapter resides in the realm of conventional truth rather than Absolute Truth. Stories about the Great Departure and the Great Awakening of the Buddha are useful, but ultimately Buddhism is more about experience than narrative. Exegesis of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path is useful. Descriptions of the problem of suffering and the solution of samsara, and of exemplars such as arhats, bodhisattvas, and lamas, may be useful, too, but they will not themselves take you over to the far shore. Ultimately Buddhism is more about experience than doctrine. Here ultimate things lie beyond words, in the smile of the Buddha, and in his silence. 170
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Running head: THE ORIGIN OF BUDDHISM

The Origin of Buddhism
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THE ORIGIN OF BUDDHISM

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The Origin of Buddhism

"The root of suffering is attachment." Siddhartha Gautama, founder of Buddhism.
Gautama, who was later referred to as Buddha, was the founder of the Buddhist religion formed
around six hundred years ago (Prothero). People living around the time were experiencing a lot
of dissatisfaction in the social dimension, as most of them were moving into cities away from
their rural lives (video). People were wondering how to escape suffering revolving around
sickness, poverty, pain, and sorrow. Different movements arose to help solve the question of
human suffering, and different routes provided various methods of escape (video). Gautama
attempted to solve the puzzle by moving away from his life as a prince into asceticism, which
involves denying the body of all worldly pleasures (Prothero). The run-away prince almost
starved himself to death in a period of fasting and meditation (Prothero), and that is when he
formed the middle way between self- indulgence and self- denial.
Hinduism was present at the time of Gautama, and scholars attribute Buddhism to have
developed from historical Hinduism (video). The two religions find their roots in the North of
India, and they both aim to find a solution to human suffering (Prothero). Moreover, both
religions contend that the way out of human suffering is through Nirvana for Buddhists and
Moksha for Hindus. Both are ways of achieving enlightenmen...


Anonymous
Really great stuff, couldn't ask for more.

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