Buddhism Archive

Indicting The Self

By
matthewbain
 – December 19, 2009Posted in: Buddhism, Sufism
Indicting The Self

The story of the Indian Buddhist master Atisha and his insulting cook sheds light on the practice of indicting the self. When Venerable Atisha took Buddhism from India to Tibet he also took a rude cook with him, who was in the habit of insulting him. The Tibetans, who held Atisha in high esteem were astonished at the cook’s behaviour and offered to replace him, but Atisha told them that he needed this man. Everyone else was so nice and respectful to Atisha that this rude, contemptuous cook was a precious resource for him.

Atisha was a practitioner of training the mind, a special branch of Buddhist practice that subsequently became known in Tibet as lojong. Practitioners of training the mind are very skillful at transforming adverse conditions into the spiritual path, at making positives out of negatives. The heart of this practice is indicting the self. This is what Geshe Chekhawa means when he says “gather all blame into one” in Seven Verses of Mind Training. Atisha and his followers, known as the Kadampa Geshes, recognised that all of our problems, suffering and unhappiness are caused by our false sense of self-importance. Therefore it is appropriate to indict or blame this false sense of self.

Atisha’s cook was such a valuable resource because he reminded Atisha of the negative aspect of himself while everybody else was busy venerating and respecting him. Because Atisha was a humble spiritual practitioner he would not have lightly dismissed the cook’s insults, thinking “I will accept these insults patiently, but I know they are false.” Atisha would have considered the insults carefully, examining his own self for faults. If the cook accused Atisha of arrogance, heartlessness, or fakery then Atisha would have scrutinised himself, suspecting that the cook may be right. This is why the cook was such a precious resource. Atisha advised us not to think about our own good qualities, but instead to think about the good qualities of others, and not to think of the faults of others, but instead consider our own faults and purge them as if they are bad blood.

If we do not indict our false sense of self-importance it will inflict misery on ourselves and others. The Koran calls the self (Arabic: nafs) in its raw state “the self that commands to evil” (Sura 12:53). The next state is the “self-accusing self” (Sura 75:2). This corresponds to the Kadampa practice of gathering all blame into one. The self-accusing self is our conscience, which is able to objectively see our own faults. Objectivity is key, because it is important not to turn the practice of indicting our self into a process of beating ourselves up, causing low self-esteem. We should identify and analyse our own faults, skillfully turning negative situations into opportunities for personal growth, but we shouldn’t invent faults that aren’t there. Atisha would have taken his cook’s insults seriously, and checked to see whether he really had the faults he was being accused of. However if he concluded that the fault wasn’t present, then he wouldn’t have engaged in the fault of caustically over-analysing or berating himself.

By gathering all blame into one through indicting the false sense of self, we reach the stage the Koran calls the self “at peace” (Sura 89:27). We achieve a happy and peaceful mind and are no longer subject to misery and fear, because we have eliminated its root cause, our false sense of self importance.

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Self Power and Divine Power

By
matthewbain
 – October 31, 2009Posted in: Buddhism, Religion
Self Power and Divine Power

November 2008

On the spiritual path both self power and Divine power are required to achieve liberation / salvation / illumination. Self power means relying on our own power, control, effort etc. Divine power means letting go, and relying on the blessings, grace and transformational properties of the Divine.

Tibetan (Vajrayana) Buddhist teachers tend to be exponents of Divine-power, emphasizing the role of the Divine (conceived as Buddha / Buddhas) in the development of virtue. A typical statement is “without the blessings of the Buddhas, it is impossible for a virtuous mind to arise.” (Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, Understanding The Mind).

Like the other great religious traditions, Buddhism is interesting because within it we can find a wide variety of practices and interpretations. There are exponents of Buddhism who strongly emphasize self power, and there are others such as Japanese Pure Land practitioners who rely completely on Divine power. The  main practice of the Pure Land school is nien-fo (Jap. nembutsu), repeatly reciting the name of Buddha Amitābha (Jap. Amida) in order to recollect and call on him for protection. There is a striking similarity here with the Sufi practice of dhikr.

One of the founders of the Pure Land school was Shinran who, according to Paul Williams in Mahayana Buddhism, “felt incapable of attaining enlightenment by his own efforts, so his last resort was faith in Amida” . Shinran developed an extreme Divine power view, believing that “salvation comes from gratefully accepting Amida’s saving grace, not by any good works.” After a single recitation of the nembutsu with faith all other recitations are superfluous, and according to Shinran even faith comes from grace. Shinran closely analysed the nature of self power and Divine power, and came to believe that relying on Divine power is the truly difficult path, because it is too easy to slip into believing that we have the power to rescue ourselves and that our own actions might be sufficient for salvation.

Although it has many good qualities, Pure Land is an extreme interpretation of Buddhism, similar to Calvinism in Christianity. It certainly seems a long way from the Buddhism described in the early scriptures (Pali Canon), although the practice of ‘letting go’ is found there. I think the following paragraph from Lama Yeshe reveals the fine balance between self power and ‘letting go’ in healthy Buddhist meditation:

“Now, you might think that Buddhism emphasizes control too much and feel that the lamas are saying, “Your deluded mind is so full of negativities that you must restrict it tightly.” But this is not what we mean . . . In Tibet we say that directing the mind is “like bridling a fine horse to make him rideable.” A horse is a tremendously powerful animal and if you do not have the means to control him properly he may gallop off wildly, possibly destroying himself and others as well. If you can harness all that energy, however, the horse’s great strength can be used for accomplishing many difficult tasks. The same applies to yourself . . . So the control we are talking about is similar to that of a pilot who does not restrict but rather directs the power [my italics] of his aeroplane.” Wisdom Energy, p125-6

In this analogy, the conscious mind that is capable of control is self power, and the horse is the unconscious power of the mind and the inner energy winds (Skt. prana). Correct practice means finding the balance between self power and letting go, so that the horse is under control, but is still able to express its unbounded energy. Another analogy is sailing, where the wind is outside of our control, and the elements of the boat such as the sail are self power. By correctly orienting those elements which are under control to the wind, the sailor is able to use (or be used) by the other power to good effect.

As well as balanced teachings like these, within Tibetan Buddhism it is easy to find teachings which tend strongly to Divine power. The Dakini can be considered an archetypal manifestation of Divine power. She appears to Naropa as a hag in order to shock him into a new, more honest phase of spiritual practice:

“All that he had neglected and failed to develop was symbolically revealed to him as the vision of an old and ugly woman . . . she is a deity because all that is not incorporated in the conscious mental make-up of the individual and appears other-than and more-than himself is, traditionally, spoken of as the divine.” Herbert Guenther, The Life and Teachings of Naropa.

Also, Judith Simmer-Brown writes:

“the Dakini is the ‘other’. As an outside awakened reality that interrupts the workings of conventional mind, she is often perceived as dangerous because she threatens the ego structure and its conventions and serves as a constant reminder from the lineages of realized teachers. She acts outside the conventional, conceptual mind, and has therefore the haunting quality of a marginal, liminal figure.” (from Dakini’s Warm Breath).

As well as the Dakini, the major source of other-power in Vajrayana Buddhism is the Lama (spiritual guide). In The Single Decisive Path, Gampopa says: “mahamudra [great enlightenment] has no cause; faith and devotion are the cause of mahamudra. Mahamudra has no condition; The holy Lama is the condition for mahamudra.”

Although the great monotheist religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam emphasize the centrality of faith in God, most denominations assert the importance of self power too: “God helps the man who helps himself” neatly sums up this attitude, or “first tie your camel, then trust God”.

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What Is The Self?

By
matthewbain
 – October 10, 2009Posted in: Buddhism, Sufism
What Is The Self?

June 2008

A Swiss couple on vacation in India found a beautiful picture in a store. They bought it, and in order to protect the picture the store-keeper rolled it up and slotted it into a long cardboard tube.

The couple continued to travel around India and so for the rest of their journey they had to carry the tube everywhere they went. It was long and awkward, and they were forever trying to protect it, to stop it getting bent or dented as they climbed into buses, or clambered out of rickshaws.

Eventually they took the tube home to Switzerland where they opened it, only to discover that the store-keeper had deceived them — he had never put the picture inside. All the time they had been carrying around an awkward tube, trying to protect it, when really it was empty!

At first they were angry, but then they laughed.

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Evolution and Perfection

By
matthewbain
 – September 7, 2008Posted in: Buddhism, Philosophy
Evolution and Perfection

The atheist Richard Dawkins uses the theory of evolution as a weapon with which to attack religion. He argues that when Charles Darwin proved evolution he disproved religion. There are many moderate scientists who believe that evolution can co-exist with religious faith, but not Dawkins. He believes that once we grasp evolution we must necessarily dispense with religious beliefs such as God, soul, mind (that is not produced from the body), and reincarnation.

When used as a weapon against religion (and I would suggest this is not its best use) the theory of evolution can be quite effective in challenging a number of theological notions. In his recent TV program Richard Dawkins asked the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams whether God had set up the mechanism of evolution. The Archbishop was happy to say yes, and agreed with Dawkins that once evolution was up-and-running there is no need for divine intervention. Dawkins turned this against the Archbishop, arguing that if there is no need for divine intervention in evolution or history, surely there is no basis for miracles?

This argument is quite effective because it attacks a particular theological notion of perfection. If God is perfect, and uses mechanisms such as evolution as instruments of creation, why should he ever need to intervene in history? Of course, many creationists argue that evolution doesn’t exist because God created everything perfectly right from the start, but some of them take extremely naive, science-denying positions in order to maintain their belief. What Dawkins wants us to admit is that creatures including humans are flawed, therefore God could not have created them, because God, and by implication his creations, must necessarily be perfect.

Mainstream Buddhism is less vulnerable to Dawkins’ attack than the monotheistic religions because it does not posit a creator God, instead arguing that the natural world and the forms we take are created by our minds, and that whilst our minds are contaminated by ignorance, craving and negative karma, we should expect to be reborn in imperfect forms and environments with the nature of suffering. Dawkins would nevertheless still be hostile to all the metaphysical and devotional (‘unscientific’) elements of Buddhism.

The Buddha took suffering as the starting point for his philosophy, and clearly there is a lot of suffering in the world. Suffering challenges naive conceptions of God’s perfection. Why would God create tiny wasps that bore into grubs, lay their eggs in them, and paralyze them so that they can’t move but can still suffer as the eggs hatch and they are eaten from the inside?

In addressing this question it is worth noting that any concept of perfection must have a functional (teleological) element. Things are perfect for particular functions, not in abstract. The plumage of the bird of paradise is perfect for attracting mates, a duck’s beak is perfect for scooping food from a pond, and a chameleon’s eyes are perfect for all-round vision. The world is full of things that do not seem to be perfect because they do not seem to have any particular function (e.g. the human appendix) or because they do not perform their function very well (e.g. the British Parliament). It could be that we simply do not yet understand their true function. Are male nipples really antennae to pick up cosmic rays? Is Starbucks really the first wave of an alien invasion?

The Mahayana Buddhist sage Shantideva wrote that

“Even suffering has good qualities. Because of suffering pride is dispelled. Compassion arises for beings trapped in samsara. Evil is shunned, and joy is found in virtue.” (from ‘Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life’).

If we were to consider the world as God’s training and testing ground for humans then we could argue that suffering is a necessary part of the design, and in some sense ‘perfect’. However, we might lament the enormity of the suffering with which God sees fit to test us, and pray that his mercy might take precedence over his wrath.

We can also move towards more subtle notions of perfection. In the Fukanzazengi the Zen Buddhist master Dogen writes:

“Fundamentally speaking, the basis of the Way is perfectly pervasive, how could it be contingent on practice and verification? The vehicle of the ancestors is necessarily unrestricted; why should we expend sustained effort? Surely the whole being is far beyond defilement; who could believe in a method to polish it? Never is it apart from this very place; what is the use of a pilgrimage to practice it? And yet, if a hair’s breadth of distinction exists, the gap is like that between heaven and earth; once the slightest like or dislike arises, all is confused and the mind is lost.” (from ‘On Zen Practice’ by Taizan Maezumi and Bernie Glassman, Wisdom Publications 2002, p13)

Here master Dogen is arguing for the natural perfection underlying reality and the mind. Natural perfection does not need to be refined, but must be recognized. While we fail to recognize perfection it appears as imperfection. The irony of Zen practice is that while natural perfection surrounds and permeates everything, so that recognizing it should be the easiest thing of all, letting go of our false conceptions requires effort and training. It is the path that is ‘neither easy nor difficult’.

How can the imperfect be perfect? In Buddhism anger is considered to be imperfect and faulty. Shantideva writes:

“There is no evil greater than anger,
And no virtue greater than patience.
Therefore, I should strive in various ways
To become familiar with the practice of patience.

If I harbour painful thoughts of anger,
I shall not experience mental peace,
I shall find no joy or happiness,
And I shall be unsettled and unable to sleep.

Overcome by a fit of anger,
I might even kill a benefactor
Upon whose kindness I depend
For my wealth or reputation.

Anger causes friends and relatives to grow weary of me
And, even if I try to attract them with generosity, they will not trust me.
In short, there is no one
Who can live happily with anger.

Although the enemy of anger
Creates sufferings such as these,
Whoever works hard to overcome it
Will find only happiness in this and future lives.”
(‘Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life’, Tharpa Publications, Ch.6 vs 2 -7)

Although anger should be abandoned, it is a manifestation of the underlying purity of the mind and of emptiness (shunyata). Relating to anger in this way is a skillful method to come to terms with and eventually abandon it. John Welwood writes:

“A further step on the path of awakening involves learning to be with our experience in an even more direct and penetrating way, which I call unconditional presence. Here the focus is not so much on what we are experiencing as on how we are with it. Being fully present with our experience facilitates a vertical shift from personality to being. Being with anger, for instance, involves opening to its energy directly, which often effects a spontaneous transmutation. The anger reveals deeper qualities of being hidden within it, such as strength, confidence or radiant clarity, and this brings us into deeper connection with being itself. From this greater sense of inner connectedness, the original situation that gave rise to anger often looks quite different. Beyond transmutation there lies the still subtler potential to self-liberate experience through naked awareness. Instead of going into this anger, this would simply mean resting in presence as the anger arises and moves, while recognizing it as a transparent, energetic display of being-awareness-emptiness”
(from ‘Toward a Pschology of Awakening’, Shambala Publications 2000, pp126-7)

Drawing out the full implications of these passages is beyond me, suffice it to say that there is a close relationship between perfection and imperfection. Those who fail to see the relationship between evolution and perfection, and cling to one side or the other, drive us further from reality.

Comparing Buddhist and Muslim Attitudes to Scripture

By
admin
 – September 2, 2008Posted in: Buddhism, Religion, Sufism
Comparing Buddhist and Muslim Attitudes to Scripture

Please note the limited scope of this article, as it does not compare attitudes towards ‘secondary’ literature such as hadith in Islam and Abhidharma and Mahayana Sutras in Buddhism.

It can be useful to compare the roles that scripture plays in different religions, for example Buddhism and Islam.

Muslims are united in their belief in the Qur’an as their definitive scripture. The Qur’an is the revelation that Mohammed received from God via the angel Gabriel. The Qur’an is definitive, but there are four classical schools of Qur’anic interpretation, and Muslims disagree over the scope for ongoing interpretation. ‘Moderate’ scholars such as Tariq Ramadan argue for a relatively wide scope for interpretation compared to ‘fundamentalists’.

In Buddhism there is some debate over which scriptures are authentic. The Theravada tradition denies the authenticity of Mahayana scriptures such as the Perfection of Wisdom and Lotus Sutras which are central to Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism. (For a Sutra, authenticity means that it was spoken or authorized by the Buddha himself.)

The earliest Sutras (or Suttas) were written in the Pali language, and preserved by the Theravada school in the Pali canon. The Buddha did not write down the teachings himself, nor is it likely that they were transcribed by any of his immediate disciples. Instead they were transmitted orally for a number of generations until the Buddhist Sangha decided it was important to preserve them in writing.

“According to a generally accepted ancient tradition, the first attempt to agree the form of the Buddhist textual tradition, what was remembered as the authoritative ‘word of the Buddha’, took place some three months after the Buddha’s death at the town of Rajagriha in northern India when 500 arhats took part in a ‘communal recitation’ (samgiti). This event is commonly referred to in modern writings as ‘the first Buddhist council’.” (from ‘The Foundations of Buddhism’ by Rupert Gethin, Oxford University Press 1998, p40)

Gethin goes on to say:

“the notion of a fixed canon of Buddhist scriptures is somewhat problematic. And we must be careful not to impose inappropriate notions of ‘canon’ and authenticity – derived say from Christianity [or Islam] – on the Buddhist tradition. Even in the accounts of the first Buddhist council we are told of a monk who, on hearing the recitation of the Buddha’s teaching by the 500 arhats, declared that he preferred to remember the teaching as he himself had heard it from the Buddha.” (ibid, p46)

This latter comment is interesting because, although the two are held to be mutually supportive, Buddhism prioritizes direct personal experience over scriptural understanding. It is one thing for scriptures to be authentic, it is another to have an authentic realization of Dharma. Correct scriptural understanding is excellent, but deep personal experience is truly liberating. The Theravada monk Ven. Analayo writes:

“The philosophical setting of ancient India was influenced by three main approaches to the acquisition of knowledge. The Brahmins relied mainly on ancient sayings, handed down by oral transmission, as authoritative sources of knowledge; while in the Upanishads one finds philosophical reasoning used as a central tool for developing knowledge. In addition to these two, a substantial number of the wandering ascetics and contemplatives of that time considered extrasensory perception and intuitive knowledge, gained through meditative experiences, as important means for the acquisition of knowledge. These three approaches can be summarized as: oral tradition, logical reasoning, and direct intuition. When questioned on his own epistemological position, the Buddha placed himself in the third category, i.e. among those who emphasized the development of direct, personal knowledge.” (from ‘Satipatthana – the direct path to realization’ by Analayo, Windhorse 2003, p44)

Whilst emphasizing the priority of direct, personal knowledge:

“the Buddha once illustrated the dangers of relying entirely on one’s own direct experience with the help of a parable. In this parable, a king had several blind men each touch a different part of an elephant. When questioned on the nature of the elephant, each blind man gave an entirely different account . . . Although what was experienced by each of the blind men was empirically true, yet their personal direct experience had revealed only part of the picture. The mistake each made was to wrongly conclude that his direct knowledge gained through personal experience was the only truth, so that anyone disagreeing must be mistaken. This parable goes to show that even direct personal experience might reveal only a part of the picture and therefore should not be grasped dogmatically as an absolute ground for knowledge. That is, emphasis on direct experience need not entail a complete rejection of oral tradition and reasoning as auxiliary sources of knowledge.” (ibid pp.45-46)

In comparison to the Buddhist scriptures, the interval between the Qur’an being spoken by the Prophet and written down by his followers was much shorter:

“An inner circle of his followers wrote down verses of the Qur’an as they learned them from the Prophet and there are records of there being a total of twenty-nine scribes for this. By the end of the Prophet’s life (632 CE) the entire Qur’an was written down in the form of uncollated pieces . . . The standard Muslim account is that, during the second year after the Prophet’s death (633 CE) and following the Battle of Yamama, in which a number of those who knew the Qur’an by heart died, it was feared that with the gradual passing away of such men there was a danger of some Qur’anic material being lost. Therefore the first caliph and successor the the Prophet, Abu Bakr, ordered that a written copy of the whole body of Qur’anic material as arranged by the Prophet and memorized by the Muslims should be made and safely stored with him.” (from ‘The Qur’an’, trans. M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, Oxford University Press 2004, pp.xv-xvi)

The Qur’an is the source of authoritative knowledge in Islam, but understanding the Qur’an also implies a commitment to understanding the world and one’s own soul. William C. Chittick says that the Qur’an:

“tells us repeatedly that God creates the world by speaking. Just as the Qur’an and other scriptures are collections of God’s “signs” or “verses” (ayat), so also the whole universe is a vast collection of God’s signs and verses. In effect, God creates the universe by revealing three books – the universe, the human self, and scripture. In each book he displays his signs and writes out his words. Once we understand that reality is configured by speech, we see that the human task is to read and understand what has been written and to follow the instructions. The interpretation of the Qur’an is the foundation and fruit of all Islamic sciences, and it has always entailed the simultaneous interpretation of the universe and the soul. Every Muslim, by accepting the Qur’an as God’s Speech, has accepted the responsibility of understanding what God is saying . . . Every soul will answer for its own reading, not only of scripture but of the other two books. And, given that the soul’s understanding is written out in itself, the soul’s own book is the all-important determinant of its destiny . . . The crux of knowledge, then, is to understand one’s own soul.” (from ‘Ibn Arabi – Heir to the Prophets’ by William C. Chittick, OneWorld Publications 2005, pp57-58)

What Remains Is God

By
matthewbain
 – August 23, 2008Posted in: Buddhism, Sufism
What Remains Is God

“The things we normally see do not exist” is one of the phrases for which Geshe Kelsang Gyatso would most like to be remembered. it is a wake-up call to us all, heartfelt advice that we should integrate into our daily lives and our way of perceiving the world.

The reason why “the things we normally see do not exist” is because the things we normally see appear to exist inherently, independent of their parts and the minds which perceive them. During his Universal Compassion teachings in Summer 2008, Geshe Kelsang explained how we can overcome our ignorant grasping at inherent existence. He described how we should analyze with wisdom the way things normally appear to our minds. The following paragraphs are my edited notes from his teaching:

“What does it mean to search for things with wisdom? Through wisdom we develop the sincere wish to understand the way things really are, which is called ultimate truth. With this wish, if we search for things, then we are doing so with wisdom. This is called an ultimate search.

“When we search for things that we have lost such as our car we are searching for things with ignorance. This is called a conventional search. If we lose our car we believe that the car we normally see is lost, but this car does not exist! This is ignorance. Then we believe we have found the car that we normally see. This is also ignorance! We should know that although we see things, our way of seeing things is mistaken.

“When we see a car we see a car within its parts. In reality a car does not exist within its parts because neither the individual parts nor the collection of parts is the car. If we search with our wisdom eye we will not find the car. We will realize that it does not exist in the way we think. We will realize the emptiness [Sanskrit: shunyata] of the car. We meditate on this single-pointedly for as long as possible until we develop deep familiarity.

“In the same way we see our body. Whenever we see our body we see it within its parts. In reality our body does not exist within its parts, because they are the parts of the body not the body itself, however there is no body other than its parts. Through understanding this we will perceive the emptiness of our body.

“In the same way when we see our self we see our self within our body and mind. In reality our self does not exist within our body and mind because they are our possessions and our self is the possessor. However there is no self other than our body or mind.

“We can apply this to all phenomena. Then we will realize the emptiness of all phenomena. We should meditate on this and hold it without forgetting.”

(For more detailed teachings on emptiness, please refer to Heart of Wisdom by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, available from www.tharpa.com)

In a separate teaching Geshe Kelsang Gyatso has said that the mind which is completely mixed with the emptiness of all phenomena can validly be called God (see my article God and Buddhism). So, when the veils of illusion are removed, what remains is God.

In a poem called The Theophany of Perfection by Ibn Arabi, God addresses the disciple, revealing the veiled truth behind “the things that we normally see”.

“Oh, my beloved! How many times I have called you without your hearing Me!
How many times I have shown myself without your looking at Me!
How many times I have become perfume without your inhaling Me!
How many times I have become food without your tasting Me!
How is it that you do not smell Me in what you breathe?
How do you not see Me, not hear Me?
I am more delicious than anything delicious,
More desirable than anything desirable,
More perfect than anything perfect.
I am Beauty and Grace!
Love Me and love nothing else
Desire Me
Let Me be your sole concern to the exclusion of all concerns!”

(quoted in An Ocean With Shore by Michel Chodkiewicz, State University of New York, 1993)

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God and Buddhism

By
matthewbain
 – August 15, 2008Posted in: Buddhism, Religion
God and Buddhism

What is the place of God within Buddhism? Many people believe that Buddhism is atheistic, but the true picture is more complex. In his early teachings (the Pali Canon) the Buddha refuses to be drawn on metaphysical questions such as the origin of the cosmos, the relationship between body and soul, what happens to a Buddha after death and, implicitly, the existence of God. The reason for this is pragmatic considerations concerning the effort involved in exploring such questions. The Buddha is of the firm opinion that our effort would be better spent realizing the Four Noble Truths. He offers the parable of the poisoned arrow:

“It’s just as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends & companions, kinsmen & relatives would provide him with a surgeon, and the man would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a priest, a merchant, or a worker.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know the given name & clan name of the man who wounded me… until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short… until I know whether he was dark, ruddy-brown, or golden-colored… until I know his home village, town, or city… until I know whether the bow with which I was wounded was a long bow or a crossbow… until I know whether the bowstring with which I was wounded was fiber, bamboo threads, sinew, hemp, or bark… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was wild or cultivated… until I know whether the feathers of the shaft with which I was wounded were those of a vulture, a stork, a hawk, a peacock, or another bird… until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was bound with the sinew of an ox, a water buffalo, a langur, or a monkey.’ He would say, ‘I won’t have this arrow removed until I know whether the shaft with which I was wounded was that of a common arrow, a curved arrow, a barbed, a calf-toothed, or an oleander arrow.’ The man would die and those things would still remain unknown to him. In the same way, if anyone were to say, ‘I won’t live the holy life under the Blessed One as long as he does not declare to me that ‘The cosmos is eternal,’… or that ‘After death a Tathagata neither exists nor does not exist,’ the man would die and those things would still remain undeclared by the Tathagata.” http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.063.than.html

The important point is that, in refusing to be drawn on such questions, the Buddha is not taking any particular position on them. He is not denying, therefore, that God exists. What he does explicitly deny, however, is a God who determines all of our actions, and who abrogates free will. In other words the Buddha strongly argues against a fatalistic notion of God. In the Tittha Sutta (AN 3.61) the Buddha recounts:

“Having approached the priests & contemplatives who hold that…’Whatever a person experiences… is all caused by a supreme being’s act of creation,’ I said to them: ‘Is it true that you hold that… “Whatever a person experiences… is all caused by a supreme being’s act of creation?”‘ Thus asked by me, they admitted, ‘Yes.’ Then I said to them, ‘Then in that case, a person is a killer of living beings because of a supreme being’s act of creation. A person is a thief… unchaste… a liar… a divisive speaker… a harsh speaker… an idle chatterer… greedy… malicious… a holder of wrong views because of a supreme being’s act of creation.’ When one falls back on creation by a supreme being as being essential, monks, there is no desire, no effort [at the thought], ‘This should be done. This shouldn’t be done.’ When one can’t pin down as a truth or reality what should & shouldn’t be done, one dwells bewildered & unprotected. One cannot righteously refer to oneself as a contemplative. This was my second righteous refutation of those priests & contemplative who hold to such teachings, such views.”

Instead the Buddha places the emphasis on our own minds and mental actions as the key determinants of our existence. In the Dhammapada (1.1-3) he famously says:

“We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.”

It is when we deeply consider the nature of mind that metaphysical questions come to the fore, such as how does the mind create the world, and what is its relationship to God? These questions arise in relation to the later Buddhist traditions of the Mahayana and Vajrayana, which introduce a multi-tiered concept of mind, with the world said to be produced from the deepest ‘root’ mind known as the Consciousness-Basis-of-All or the Continually Residing Mind.

For ordinary beings trapped in samsara our root minds carry impure karmic seeds which produce an impure world, but through practicing the Buddhist path we can purify our root mind until it becomes the Dharmakaya, the mind of a Buddha. When we achieve the Dharmakaya we will inhabit a Buddha’s Pure Land. Maitreya said that when our mind becomes pure our world becomes pure. Geshe Kelsang Gyatso has said it is valid to use the name God to refer to the Dharmakaya. Other Buddhist teachers have said similar things. For example, the Zen master, Sokei-An, says:

“… Dharmakaya [is] the equivalent of God … The Buddha also speaks of no time and no space, where if I make a sound there is in that single moment a million years. It is spaceless like radio waves, like electric space – intrinsic. The Buddha said that there is a mirror that reflects consciousness. In this electric space a million miles and a pinpoint – a million years and a moment – are exactly the same. It is pure essence … We call it ‘original consciousness’ – ‘original akasha’ – perhaps God in the Christian sense. I am afraid of speaking about anything that is not familiar to me. No one can know what IT is …” (Zen Pivots, Weatherhill, NY, 1998, pp. 142, 146)

Elsewhere Sokei-An comments:

“The creative power of the universe is not a human being; it is Buddha. The one who sees, and the one who hears, is not this eye or ear, but the one who is this consciousness. This One is Buddha. This One appears in every mind. This One is common to all sentient beings, and is God.” (The Zen Eye, Weatherhill, New York, 1994, p. 41)

Also the Rinzai Zen Buddhist teacher, Soyen Shaku (of whom D.T. Suzuki was a pupil) said:

“At the outset, let me state that Buddhism is not atheistic as the term is ordinarily understood. It has certainly a God, the highest reality and truth, through which and in which this universe exists. However, the followers of Buddhism usually avoid the term God, for it savors so much of Christianity, whose spirit is not always exactly in accord with the Buddhist interpretation of religious experience … To define more exactly the Buddhist notion of the highest being, it may be convenient to borrow the term very happily coined by a modern German scholar, ‘panentheism’, according to which God is … all and one and more than the totality of existence …. As I mentioned before, Buddhists do not make use of the term God, which characteristically belongs to Christian terminology. An equivalent most commonly used is Dharmakaya … When the Dharmakaya is most concretely conceived it becomes the Buddha, or Tathagata ..”
(Sermons of a Buddhist Abbot, by Soyen Shaku, Samuel Weiser Inc, New York, 1971, pp.25-26, 32)

The passages above show how Buddhists can use the word God to describe ultimate truth. Indeed, it may be necessary to do so when talking to certain audiences. The Croatian academic Snjezana Akpinar says:

“I had learned from my experience in Indonesia, which is an Islamic country, that there was no way that you say to an Islamic audience, “Buddhism doesn’t believe in God.” That would lead to the instant closing of the door. In Indonesia, there is a policy that five [sic] religions are accepted due to their belief in God: Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, and Buddhism. The Indonesian Buddhists had suggested Buddhism’s belief in God by speaking in terms of Adibuddha. This was from the Kalachakra (Cycle of Time) teachings, which had been spread to Indonesia a little more than a thousand years ago. Adibuddha means, literally, the first or primordial Buddha. The Indonesian Buddhists themselves didn’t have a full understanding of Adibuddha. But without explaining it, they said, “Here we have the equivalent of God.” Naturally, when I came to Indonesia, the Indonesian Buddhists asked me what Adibuddha actually meant. I explained to them that you could speak about it in terms of the clear light mind. In each person, this is the creator of our appearances, what we perceive; so in this sense it’s like a creator. Using this general interpretation of Adibuddha, I was able to enter into dialogue with Islamic scholars in other countries. Islamic scholars have tended to be very open to this because in Islam, Allah is not personified. Likewise, this creative power within each mind -– which might be seen as something like a creator god found in each person –- also is not personified. As presented in the Nyingma, Kagyu, and Sakya schools of Tibetan Buddhism, Adibuddha is beyond words, beyond concepts, unimaginable. Islamic scholars could relate to this very well.” http://www.berzinarchives.com/web/en/archives/study/islam/general/common_features_islam_buddhism.html

The translation of Adibuddha as ‘primordial Buddha’ provides the sense of being outside time which is essential to certain conceptions of God. The term Adibuddha is also associated with many positive qualities by some Tibetan Buddhist schools.

“Adibuddha is believed to be a primordial, self-existent, self-created Buddha who is the personification of Shunyata or emptiness (freedom from confining substance or conceptual graspability) enshrining the infinitely Knowing Mind of Great Compassion; all phenomena lack true separate existence yet still appear, and their basis is the undifferentiated and inconceivable Mind of Buddha (empty of all defects and ignorance)” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism

For this reason the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism prefers the term Dharmakaya to Adibuddha, because the Gelug school emphasizes the path of negation (via negativa) as taught by Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti where ultimate truth is discerned by deconstructing reality. Christianity, Judaism, islam, Hinduism and Taoism also have their own paths of negation. The via negativa in Islam is described by Snjezana Akpinar:

“I would say that Allah is nothingness, and when you say the basic mantra of Islam “La Ilaha ‘Ila Al-lah” . . . it’s actually inviting you to keep repeating “There is no God except Allah” over and over as you decrease one syllable, or one “lah” at a time . “Lah” means ‘no’, so it’s a negation. And so, Allah is the Great No. Allah is something that you cannot imagine, because it’s beyond everything, and so it is the big “ah” at the end of the word lah that designates the nothingness. When you repeat, “La Ilaha Illa Al-lah”, you are peeling off layers of everything that’s imaginable. You keep repeating it and knocking off syllables until you’re left with that “ah” and that’s the hua or pure breath of God.”

http://www.berzinarchives.com/web/en/archives/study/islam/general/common_features_islam_buddhism.html

Can We Attain Liberation In This World?

By
matthewbain
 – August 13, 2008Posted in: Buddhism, Sufism
Can We Attain Liberation In This World?

In his Lojong teachings Geshe Kelsang Gyatso says that we can see this world as a Pure Land of Buddha, because for a Lojong practitioner every situation provides a perfect training opportunity. However in his Mahamudra teachings Geshe Kelsang emphasizes the impurity of this world.

During his Mahamudra teachings in the summer of 2007 Geshe Kelsang taught about sleep. He said that sleep is a subtle mind which causes sense awareness to cease. While awake we use our five sense awarenesses but

“these sense awarenesses, normally, for ordinary beings, always perceive inherently existent forms, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile objects”.

These are the five objects of desire.

“We are like flies, always wanting, seeking these objects.”

Our mind is always grasping at these objects, therefore we have no opportunity to experience inner peace during waking, instead we experience unpleasant feelings such as worry, attachment, anger and dissatisfaction.

“We are like a negative person during waking.”

When we sleep our gross minds such as our sense awarenesses cease. All the problems we experience during waking cease. Deep sleep activates our very subtle mind, which functions to perceive emptiness (shunyata), but we cannot recognize it because we have insufficient mindfulness. Therefore we need to train in Mahamudra meditation to activate our very subtle mind during waking. This involves trying to replicate the sleep process by causing our sense awarenesses and other gross minds to cease. (Please see Geshe Kelsang Gyatso’s books Mahamudra Tantra or Clear Light of Bliss for a detailed explanation.)

Geshe Kelsang says that the path to liberation taught in Mahamudra Tantra is different from that taught in Sutra, because in his Sutra teachings the Buddha never mentions subtle or very subtle minds. In fact, in the Sutras the Buddha teaches that liberation (nirvana) can be attained by working with our normal (i.e. gross) perceptions. For example, in the Rohitassa Sutta (Samyutta-Nikaya (I, ii, 3.6)) Rohitassa, the some of a god (deva) asks the Buddha if there is some place

“where, lord, does one not get born, nor grow old, nor die, nor leave one’s sphere for another, nor get reborn? Now is one able, lord, by walking to come to know the end of the world, or to see it, or to get there?”. The Buddha replies that there is no such place, but that “it is in this fathom-long carcass [i.e. the human body], friend, with its impressions and its ideas that, I declare, lies the world, and the cause of the world, and the cessation of the world, and the course of action that leads to the cessation of the world.”

In the Sutras the Buddha therefore recommends, as a path to liberation, meditative practices which work with our normal sense perceptions and mental awarenesses, such as the four ‘close-placements of mindfulness’. (For more information on these close-placements please read the book Satipatthana – The Direct Path to Realization by Ven. Analayo.)

The idea that this body is a suitable basis for achieving liberation is in accordance with the Abrahamic religions. At the core of all of these religions is God’s creation of Adam and Eve in His own image or form. According to Muslim tradition God fashioned man from clay and then breathed life into him. Muslims believe that man has a privileged place in creation because God taught man “all the names” (Qur’an:2:31).

“To say that God created man in his own form implies that man’s meaning is designated by God’s all-comprehensive name, which denotes both the Essence and all the divine attributes. When the Qur’an says God taught Adam “all the names,” this means that he taught him all the names of God and creation. These names designate God as the One/Many, the single Essence that comprehends all reality, what Ibn ‘Arabi commonly calls “the Divine Presence”.” (from Ibn ‘Arabi – Heir to the Prophets by William C. Chittick, OneWorld 2005, p74).

It is because God taught man “all the names” that man has the potential to achieve perfection (i.e. liberation).

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Fantastic and Crap

By
matthewbain
 – August 7, 2008Posted in: Buddhism, Sufism
Fantastic and Crap

A Buddhist monk once asked me to comment on a particular retreat center in Spain. I said that in my opinion it was “fantastic and crap”, which made him laugh. It was fantastic because there was a palpable, magical spirituality about it. it was crap because it had many of the tedious problems associated with human communities such as poor communication, wasted effort and resources, project delays etc. Little did I know at the time that I was later going to build my joke into a whole philosophy — but here goes!

The first Noble Truth of Buddhism is the truth of suffering, the unsatisfactory nature of life. The entire realm of existence is said to be pervaded by unsatisfactoriness. Even our moments of pleasure and happiness have an unsatisfactory quality about them. The third Noble Truth is the truth of cessation. It is possible to achieve a True Cessation of suffering. This True Cessation is Nirvana, and only Nirvana is peace. This fundamental teaching of Buddhism describes a yawning chasm between our current state of suffering – samsara – and the holy state of Nirvana. The fourth Noble Truth is the path to get from samsara to Nirvana.

In his deconstruction of all conceptual categories, including the four Noble Truths themselves, the 2nd century CE Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna showed how neither samsara nor Nirvana exist inherently, from their own side. They are both empty of inherent existence, which means that they are dependent-related phenomena. They both depend upon mental imputation.

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso’s teachings on the Tibetan Lojong tradition imply a way in which we can see this world as both faulty and perfect. At the heart of the Lojong tradition is the teaching on Exchanging Self with Others, which is described in detail in the article A Place Where We Cannot Be Harmed. If we fully exchange self with others then, although there continues to be suffering, we are no longer be harmed by it. From this point of view we have achieved Nirvana while remaining in the world.

In his oral teachings in 2008 Geshe Kelsang Gyatso explicitly stated that even for the trainee Lojong practitioner this world is like a Buddha’s Pure Land, because it enables us to experience the perfect conditions we need in order to advance on the path (to generate renunciation, bodhichitta and wisdom realizing emptiness). From the point of view of the Lojong practitioner the world is both perfect and faulty at the same time. It is faulty because there is suffering in it, but it is perfect because if we exchange self with others then we are able to transform suffering into the path to enlightenment. For Lojong practitioners whatever conditions we encounter are perfect for our practice. As Geshe Chekhawa says:

“Do not rely upon other conditions. Apply the principal practice at this time.” (quoted in ‘Universal Compassion’ by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso).

In theistic religion there is a similar gulf between the perfect state of the Creator and the faulty, suffering state of the creatures. Because of this gulf many mainstream Muslim scholars insist on God’s transcendence rather than immanence with regard to the created world. They say that to argue that God is immanent in the created world is to deny both God’s unity and perfection.

On the other hand, the great Sufi Muslim scholar Ibn ‘Arabi argued that we need to investigate reality with two eyes: reason and imagination. With reason we will, as the other scholars say, discover God’s incomparability (Arabic: tanzih) with his creation and therefore we will understand the truth of transcendence. But if we explore with imagination we will discover God’s similarity (Arabic: tasbih) to his creation, and so we will understand the truth of immanence.

“Ibn ‘Arabi’s contribution was to stress the need to maintain a proper balance between the two ways of understanding God.” (Ibn ‘Arabi – Heir to the Prophets by William C. Chittick, OneWorld Publications, 2005, p19).

By viewing the world with the eye of reason we see that it is crap! By viewing the world with the eye of imagination we see that it is fantastic! But we don’t want to suffer from double vision. We want to develop a unified vision which is able to handle conventional and ultimate reality at the same time.

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Conceptions of the Ultimate

By
matthewbain
 – July 31, 2008Posted in: Buddhism, Philosophy, Religion
Conceptions of the Ultimate

At the heart of the Samkhya school of Hinduism are the concepts of purusha and prakriti. Purusha is a passive, inert, witnessing consciousness. Prakriti is the active principle, the essence of subtle matter. According to the Samkhya school, the world we normally see -– called samsara or maya -– develops because purusha becomes fascinated with prakriti, which begins to divide and multiply. Soon purusha loses itself in the infinite variety of prakriti, which has now become the five elements of space, air, fire, water and earth in all their manifestations.

The Italian scholar Giuseppe Tucci writes:

“Having assumed all the characteristics of the prakriti . . . maya spreads out over all that exists, while God, the Absolute Soul, one or multiple – when imprisoned in the illusory individuality of maya – remains inert, taking colour, like a crystal, from the reflections projected on to him by the passions with which maya is stained.” (from ‘The Theory and Practice of the Mandala’, p55).

According to some Hindu yogis, the path to liberation can be described in terms of achieving a ‘oneness’ or unity with everything. Some yogis see maya as the active force of the Creator God, so that the phenomenal world, in all its variety, has a divine quality. Through identifying this divine quality both within himself and in the world, a divine ‘oneness’ is revealed within diversity, and the yogi becomes ‘one with everything’.

The Madhyamaka school of Buddhism puts ‘emptiness’ (shunyata) in a similar position to the Creator, because samsara is seen as an illusory manifestation of emptiness. For this reason emptiness is sometimes described as a ‘mother’. In ‘Song of Emptiness’ the Tibetan scholar Changkya Rölpai Dorje says:

“These various apprehended [objects] and apprehenders [minds] are the manifestation of the mother. This birth, death, and these changing [things] are the falsities of the mother.” (quoted, ‘Heart of Wisdom’, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso).

However, although all phenomena are said to be of ‘one taste’ in emptiness, the Madhaymaka school does not go so far as to say that emptiness is a ‘oneness’ pervading everything, because emptiness is not an entity in its own right and in emptiness there is no ‘number’, such as one or many. In the ‘Heart Sutra’, the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara says:

“Shariputra, like this all phenomena are merely empty, having no characteristics [such as number] . . . They have no decrease and no increase.” (quoted, Heart of Wisdom, Geshe Kelsang Gyatso)

To say that all phenomena are empty does not mean that all phenomena are one entity, because emptiness is not separate from the diversity of phenomena. Emptiness does not possess positive attributes of its own such as oneness or manyness, it is a mere negation of the mistaken inherent existence of phenomena. Emptiness is, strictly speaking, a negative conception of the Ultimate.

In Hinduism there are both negative and positive conceptions of God, most prominently in the Advaita-Vedanta school (which owes a historical debt to the Madhyamaka). In Advaita-Vedanta God can be understood either as nirguna (without attributes) or saguna (with attributes). The negative way of understanding God is considered more profound. Negative ways of understanding God (viae negativae) can also be found in Christianity in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas and in Judaism in the work of Maimonides in his ‘Guide for the Perplexed’.

Within Buddhism the strongest assertion of the positive attributes of the Ultimate is found in the doctrine of Tathagathagarbha or (Buddha nature). The teachings on Buddha nature are sometimes considered to be part of the Third Turning of the Wheel of Dharma along with the teachings on Mind-only (Chittamatra). The First Turning is preserved in the scriptures of the Theravada Buddhist school and includes the teaching on the Four Noble Truths. The Second Turning is the Perfection of Wisdom teachings, which are the core teachings of the Madhyamaka school.

Depending on whether a weak or strong interpretation of the Buddha nature teachings is employed, all sentient beings are either said to have the seed of Buddhahood within them (weak), or to be in some sense already enlightened (strong). In his book ‘Mahayana Buddhism’ Paul Williams says that the

“tension between innate, inherent enlightenment and becoming enlightened is a tension at the root of the Tathagathagarbha tradition” (p97).

Buddha nature is present in all living beings. While it is accompanied by defilements we remain ordinary, but when the defilements are removed the Buddha nature becomes the Dharmakaya (Buddha’s enlightened mind). A good example of positive qualities being attributed to the Dharmakaya and the Buddha nature can be found in the ‘Srimala Sutra’, where the Dharmakaya is described as:

“beginningless, uncreate, unborn, undying, free from death; permanent, steadfast, calm, eternal; intrinsically pure, free from all the defilement store; and accompanied by Buddha natures more numerous than the sands of the Ganges, which are nondiscrete, knowing as liberated, and inconceivable.”

Paul Williams also says that “the Tathagathagarbha is said to be a substratum which is permanent, steadfast, and eternal.” (ibid p101). This is a strongly positive view of the ultimate, so it is clear that there is considerable scope for disagreement between those who believe that the emptiness teachings are definitive versus those who believe in the Buddha nature teachings.

As we might expect, positive and negative conceptions of the ultimate have been a major point of debate within the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. It is possible to reconcile these views using a quote by the great Tibetan yogi Milarepa, who said:

“Everything is the nature of the mind. Mind is the nature of emptiness.”

When practicing the first part we can concentrate on positive qualities such as the radiant, brightly shining nature of the mind, when practicing the second we can emphasise the negative, empty qualities of the mind.

In the ‘Anguttara Nikâya’ I.8-ll the Buddha says:

“This mind, monks, is brightly shining, but it is defiled by defilements which arrive. But this is not understood as it really is by those who are spiritually uneducated, so they do not develop the citta [mind]. This mind, monks, is brightly shining, but it is freed from defilements which arrive. This is understood as it really is by those noble disciples who are spiritually educated, so they do develop the citta“.

Peter Harvey comments:

“A key idea is that whatever defilements or stains there may or may not be on the ‘surface’ of the mind, even if they have deep roots, these do not penetrate to the inner depths of the mind. The mind has a ‘radiance’ whether or not it is ‘corrupt’ and ‘defiled’ or ‘clarified’ and ‘freed from defilements’. Even the corrupt person destined for hell thus has a ‘brightly shining’ citta ‘covered’, so to speak, by the defilements which obscure it. The defilements ‘arrive’, like people arriving at a guest house . . . “Beneath the surface level of mind, which has such things as anger, pride, jealousy, worry etc., there is something ‘brightly shining’ – intrinsically stainless, a basic goodness, perhaps an ‘original sinlessness’. However terrible a person’s actions, which may lead to weighty karmic consequences over a long period, the seed of perfection is never destroyed, only more deeply covered over. Whatever heritage of previously developed character faults a child brings into this world, the seed of perfection is there to be developed. This expresses a very positive view of human nature and, indeed, of the nature of all beings.”

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