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;
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
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 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 a
nnounces 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 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 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. 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, 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 eating and vegetarianism, between you and me, or even between nirvana and samsara.
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