The Buddha From Babylon

by Harvey Kraft

  Since I sat under the Bodhi Tree, with the insight of a Buddha I understood that my Teachings must be suited to the capacities of my audience. [So as not to confuse them or cause them to reject my ultimate intention] I could not prematurely proclaim the fullness of the Truth, which now after more than forty years has yet to be revealed . . . Although the Buddha's sermons at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end are equal in their intention to liberate, one is different from the other in meaning, scope and power.209

  When Sakamuni started his teaching course his guiding purpose had been to bequeath Perfect Enlightenment to all living beings. Finally at the age of seventy-two, after a lengthy period revealing the Three Cosmologies and the practices of the Three Vehicles, the time had come to complete his original intention:

  I [have] set up such tactful ways [as the Three Vehicles] to

  Enable my disciples to advance into Buddha-wisdom.

  [But] I have never said: 'You all shall accomplish the Buddha Way.'

  The reason why I have never [so] said

  is that the time for saying it had not yet arrived.

  [But] now is the very time . . .

  Of yore I made a vow, wishing to cause all creatures a rank

  equal to and without difference from mine.

  According to the vow I made of old,

  Now [all circumstances] have been perfectly fulfilled

  For transforming all living beings

  Leading them to enter the Buddha Way.210

  Using a progressive method of teaching (Skt. Upaya) he sought to expand the receptivity of his followers. In rendering the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha set his sights on future generations. He was conscious not only of those physically present, but of his legacy.

  Now the time had come for Sakamuni to take humanity on the final leg of the journey. To that end he would reveal the One Vehicle of Perfect Enlightenment—the direct use of Buddhahood as the means for human transformation and fulfillment.

  During the Flower Garland Sutra Sakamuni did not speak directly. He deferred to the Celestial Bodhisattvas for their descriptions of the Infinite Wisdom Cosmology. In the Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom as he elucidated the Cosmos of Relativity, he spoke only in the beginning leaving the bulk of it for his foremost disciples to teach. In the Lotus Sutra, however, he took the leading role in communicating his ultimate Cosmology, because only a Buddha could actually teach it. The revelation of the Lotus Cosmology would come directly from his own lips, without compromise, without adapting the content to the capacity of followers.

  Feeling strong and in perfect voice despite his senior age, Sakamuni declared that all Buddhas agreed, without a single dissenting voice, that Perfect Enlightenment could only be realized through the Threefold Buddha-body:

  All the Buddhas, in singular agreement, with one voice declare the unvarnished Truth. Though they have one [Cosmic-body], they display it in countless ways as innumerable [Wisdom-bodies]. In each of these contexts, they address various conditions of Existence, and manifest in countless shapes [Mortal-bodies] . . . This Reality is the incomprehensible and profound world of Buddhas.211

  The Celestial Bodhisattvas, hearing that all Buddhas shared in the inconceivable scope of the Threefold Buddha-body212 requested of Sakamuni to explain the One Vehicle—its origin, triggering mechanism, place of actualization, and how it could be used to quickly gain a Threefold Buddha-body?

  He urged them to listen attentively:

  This vehicle is profound beyond conception, because it has the power of unexcelled awakening. It instantly penetrates and takes hold of one's Karma, brings immeasurable benefit, and removes obstacles to one's advance . . . It originally comes from the abode of all the Buddhas; it goes wherever living beings aspire to awaken; and, it returns to the place where all Bodhisattvas fulfill their mission.

  This vehicle comes like this, goes like this, and returns like this. This vehicle, having such infinite blessings and inconceivable power can direct [those who enter it] to quickly accomplish supreme Buddhahood.213

  The "abode of all the Buddhas" reminded the listeners of the Formless Field where the Lotus Treasury Mind-World214 incubated all potentials. The "aspiration of all the living" referred to the Field of Desire, the engine that converted the Formless into Form. The "place where all Bodhisattvas fulfill their mission" reflected the Field of Form where the relative worlds of living beings appeared. The One Buddha-Vehicle possessed the "inconceivable, transcendent power" to permeate the Threefold Field of Existence, and, therein, it had the power to illuminate the worlds of Form, Formlessness, and Desire with Perfect Enlightenment. Given its all-encompassing scope, this passage hinted that the Dharma of the One Vehicle illuminated Buddhahood, even if it was hidden in the present bodies of mortals.

  Such a supreme, ultimate Vehicle, has an extremely great transcendent power and is unsurpassed in its worth. It makes all ordinary people accomplish the sacred merit [of faith], which makes them forever free from [the sorrows of] life and death . . . It makes all living beings sprout innumerable meaningful [lives], makes the ways of Bodhisattva-Mahasattva manifest in the bodies of ordinary persons, and makes the Sacred Tree grow dense, thick, and tall to illuminate their karmic merits. Therefore this [one vehicle] sutra is recognized as having inconceivable meritorious power.215

  Sakamuni herewith reiterated that the teaching he would propose in this sutra could transform Bodhisattva-Mahasattva into Buddhas. Then, in acknowledging the Enlightening Beings for the work they do, he suggested that to enter the Lotus Cosmology, one needed to emulate the Bodhisattva-Mahasattvas:

  You are persons who abolish sufferings and remove calamities thoroughly with great mercy and great compassion. You cultivate the good field of blessings for all living beings. You have been great and good leaders [giving of yourself] extensively for all. You are the great support for all living beings. You are the great benefactors of all living beings!216

  This passage sent a strong message to his disciples, calling upon them to set their priorities straight by deepening their compassion and commitment to benefit living beings. It also hinted that by extension, the Lotus Cosmology had the power to turn ordinary people into Buddhas— that is, if ordinary people first became Bodhisattva-Mahasattvas.

  ONCE UPON A TIME

  Sakamuni Buddha entered into cosmic contemplation remaining perfectly still. Flowers rained from the sky and the ground shook in six ways. Everyone joined their minds and gazed at the Buddha with palms pressed together in eager anticipation. Suddenly, a spotlight emitted from between his eyebrows.

  The Buddha's cosmic ray of light shined on 18,000 world-systems217 in the eastern sky. The all-encompassing light illuminated a myriad of lives, in each world revealing the full range of conditions, plights, and paths beings experienced across the spectrum of Existence.

  The multiplex of live scenes displayed all at once in a giant cosmic shadowbox across the sky. This vision dramatized countless conditional variances: showing beings in the Six Worlds of Samsara experiencing states ranging from pain to ecstasy; various aspirants seeking liberation from compelling temptations; Enlightening Beings traveling everywhere to offer comfort and aid; and, Buddhas were seen teaching the Dharma and transforming worlds.

  The Celestial Bodhisattva Loving Kindness (Skt. Maitreya) wondered as to the meaning of such a rare and marvelous exposition. He had observed that throughout the 18,000 inhabited world-systems the Buddhas initially taught various Dharma according to the capacity and skills of their followers, but eventually the time had come for them to "roar like noble lions" and fully illuminate Existence.

  In their final Teachings, they all would unveil the Perfectly Endowed Dharma, "the most subtle of all sutras." That being their routine, Maitreya wondered, "Was Sakamuni Buddha now intending to do the same?" He then turned to his colleague the Celestial Bodhisattva Manjusri, the keeper of eons of memories, for an answer.

  Then Manjusri said to Maitreya Bodhisattva and the other disciple leaders: "Reflectin
g upon the actions of past Buddhas, I can confirm that Sakamuni, the World-honored One, now prepares to teach and explain the supreme Dharma, which will rain down equally upon all, be heard far and wide like the trumpeting of a great conch, and herald the coming of a new Age like the sound of a great big drum. Whenever in the past I have witnessed former Buddhas cause such a cosmic exposition in the living worlds, they would emit a ray of light, and then always proceed to unveil the most excellent Cosmology. To be sure this is the case again.218

  While Sakamuni remained transfixed on displaying the spectacular panorama in the sky, Manjusri divulged that since time immemorial countless other Buddhas had produced a similar beam to reveal the great expanse of experiences throughout Existence. Each time this happened a Buddha announced that he was ready to reveal the Lotus Cosmology, the Universal Truth that all Buddhas regarded as the culminating Teaching. According to Manjusri, what the Buddhas did in other places and times was about to happen again here and now.

  "I have seen this beam before," he said.

  Therefore, the Cosmology to be revealed in the Lotus Sutra was not a teaching of a specific Buddha. It was the final revelation of all Buddhas, a Last Will and Testament, as it were, to be articulated after they had finished answering all questions and provided various gates of liberation. The Buddhas always held back from teaching it prematurely, careful to do so, as its transformative power was too unbelievable for mortals to imagine, accept, or heed.

  Now that the time had approached for Sakamuni Buddha to reveal it in the Saha world, it was the role of Manjusri to prepare the audience. Through a story of Buddhas from the remote past, he illustrated that the Lotus Sutra would: (a) be preceded by certain omens; (b) honor earlier contributors to the pursuit of wisdom; (c) harmonize the cosmic activities of Buddhas everywhere; (d) expand the scope of Transmigration; and (e) free one's thoughts from the relative confines of space-time-scale and dimension.

  Long ago in an unimaginably distant past on a far-away world a Buddha named Bright Sun Moonlight similarly emitted such an illuminating ray. He was the first of 20,000 subsequent Buddhas, all of the same name, who after each such display proceeded to teach the Lotus Dharma. The last Bright Sun Moonlight Buddha had been a king who abdicated his throne. He had eight princely sons who followed his example and devoted themselves to the Eight Noble Paths. As all his namesake predecessors had done before him, the last Bright Sun Moonlight Buddha responded to a question from the Celestial Bodhisattvas. Then he went into a trance as flowers rained from the sky, and the earth trembled six ways. As his audience rejoiced and pressed their palms, he illuminated 18,000 world-systems in the east, exactly as Sakamuni did now.

  Although Bright Sun Moonlight Buddha's sermon on the Lotus Cosmology took six hundred thousand years to preach, his audience experienced the passing of time equal only to that of taking a single meal. The compression of time, along with the malleability of scale and space, was a feature of the Perfectly Endowed Reality, which Buddhas showcased in the final cosmology.

  Before the assembly of the Lotus Sutra in Sakamuni's time, the Bodhisattva Vimalakirti had signaled that the Buddha was preparing to reveal the Lotus Cosmology. On his sick bed he invoked the Perfectly Endowed Reality by explaining that in this Reality the entire "Great Three-Thousand-fold-Universe" can be placed inside a mustard seed.

  In the past, when Bright Sun Moonlight Buddha espoused the Lotus Cosmology, his entire assembly sat inside the Perfectly Endowed Reality wherein numerous millennia turned into an hour. Thus Manjusri illustrated that "inside the Perfectly Endowed Reality" the Laws of Relativity no longer applied. As Sakamuni Buddha was getting ready to similarly distinguish between relative and formless time, Manjusri reasserted that the Perfectly Endowed Reality made superfluous the relative distinctions of large vs. small spaces, or short vs. long measures of time.219

  The 20,000 Bright Sun Moonlight Buddhas all shared the Vedic name Bharadvaja, a highly honored family name belonging to a lineage of authentic Rishi composers responsible for the oldest core of the Rig Veda. The Vedic book of the Bharadvaja Family220 heralded the Arya arrival in the ancient Saraswati River of the Indus Valley region and praised the gods of the sun and the moon (Mitra and Varuna).

  This story about the family lineage of Bright Sun Moonlight Buddhas honored the original Vedic traditions embraced by Arya-Scythian communities, including Siddhartha Gautama's Saka heritage. Sakamuni charged that later volumes and additions to the Rig Veda veered from or tampered with the original. While honoring the authentic Vedic heritage, Manjusri's tale in the Lotus Sutra also served as a cautionary message warning of the possibility that posthumously alterations may be made to the authentic Teachings of the Buddha.

  Also acknowledged in the Bright Sun Moonlight flashback were the Brahma meditation disciplines. Yoga was the basis for the Buddhist meditation practices of contemplations and concentrations (Skt. Samadhi), the technique which allowed seekers to "strip Mahabrahma's Realm of Form of delusional sensations and distractions" until a single cognitive thought remained: the pure bliss of spiritual being, Nirvana.

  Having used the Yoga discipline to achieve the transcendent station of Heavenly Nirvana, some 200 Arhats in the audience appeared buoyed with this acknowledgement. On behalf of Sakamuni, Manjusri completed the honoring of past contributions by former spiritual teachers, but then added a surprising twist. When he taught the Lotus Sutra, Bright Sun Moonlight had prophesized the promotion of one of his followers to become a Buddha in a future lifetime. Taken aback, the Arhats wondered, was Manjusri preparing the audience for the possibility that Sakamuni Buddha would also be making such a prediction?

  TRAP

  During the lifetime of Sakamuni Buddha, Babylon influenced the exploration of Philosophic Naturalism using reason and intuition to uncover a natural design to the cosmos. After studying in Mesopotamia leading pre-Socratic Aegean philosophers from Anatolia and Greek city-states embarked on philosophic investigations about the nature of existence.

  Among the Magi purged in the Darius-Zoroaster takeover, a number found refuge west of Babylon, among Aegean Sea cultures where the "Love of Wisdom" (Grk. Philosophia) was prized. Others headed east of Babylon, where various Arya seers had built their framework for cosmology around an overarching Vedic eternalism. East and west, cosmic theories abounded in search of a single, unified cosmology in harmony with elemental and celestial knowledge. Through the fusion of reasoning and envisioning they produced an array of cosmological orchestrations.

  The earliest Aegean philosophers attempted to uncover the "primordial element" from which life arose. Thales (624–546 BCE) reasoned that life emerged out of the waters, which he deemed to be the base element of existence. Anaximander (610–546 BCE) assumed that the Universe was composed of an undifferentiated mass out of which opposing differences arose. Contemporaries of Siddhartha Gautama, Pythagoras of Samos (570–495 BCE) related the alignment of sacred numbers and geometry to an inherent harmonic scale embedded in the Cosmos, and Heraclitus of Ephesus (535–475 BCE), expressed a concept similar to the Cosmos of Relativity. He saw all phenomena as ever changing and interactive, and surmised that when they engaged in nature, relatively co-dependent phenomena created natural patterns. He concluded that everything in nature emerged out of a transcendent constant, an underlying reality, a boundless field containing all information and reasons, which he named Logos. In regard to the base elements, Heraclitus posited that life was fundamentally formed out of the element of fire, to be understood as energy. Another of the Buddha's contemporaries, the philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon (570–470 BCE) advanced the idea of an eternal Unity, positing the oneness of Existence and that a single God permeated the Universe and governed it with his thoughts.

  Common to all of the early cosmologist-philosophers was the pursuit of one integrated Truth, a single, whole cosmology that unified Nature and Eternity. Among them, only Sakamuni Buddha demanded proof of concept through an individual's engagement with the cosmology. Due to his focu
s on successful application, he expressed concerns similar to those of ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian seers regarding the pitfalls inherent in navigating the boundless expanse using cosmic vision.

  Egypt's cosmic guides had warned that the soul might break apart or get lost in its attempt to cross the vast space between Earth and the heavenly stargates. Babylonian seers similarly warned of the dangers to one's sanity and the lure of insidious forces that one could encounter in navigating the mind during a trance state. The Vedic Yogi also insisted on disciplined trance travel to prevent one from becoming lost in cosmic space.

  Sakamuni repeatedly cautioned his disciples regarding the dangers of an inflated ego, which could derail their attempts to reach the highest levels of clear vision. He warned against the insidiousness of elitism and arrogance that might arise as they climbed to higher realms of spiritual progress. The more successful they were in transcending the self, he advised, the more alert they had to be. He exhorted those who attained a superior level of wisdom, believing they achieved invincibility from distorted views, to be aware that in actuality they had become more vulnerable to the powerful, corrupting force of fundamental darkness.

  Ready to cross into Enlightenment, the most skilled seekers would come to the edge of the "Chasm of Cosmic Darkness," also known as the Sixth Heaven in the Universe of Desire, the realm ruled by Mara, the powerful Demon King murderer of wisdom. Righteous in the belief that they had overcome the causes of sorrow, convinced that their state of mind was incorruptible, a group of Arhats assumed that they were free of Mara's grip.

  Sakamuni recalled his earlier days among forest-dwelling sages seeking to frustrate the Dark One's corrupting influences by detaching from desire. Having actually defeated Mara, he knew that detachment was the very instrument Mara used to set a trap for those who had freed themselves from attachments.