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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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;
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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