Buddhist Scriptures Read online

  That there is something called ‘the wisdom arisen from hearing’ implies that there is something to listen to, and those are the teachings. But there are hundreds upon hundreds of teachings ascribed to the Buddha himself, and many thousands more in the commentaries. It is impossible that all of these could be heard, much less mastered, by a single person, thus raising the question of which of these teachings are most important. This is the question that consumes the various schools of Buddhist thought that developed across Asia. But even when a conclusion is reached on this difficult question, the problem remains of what role, if any, the understanding of doctrine should play on the path to enlightenment. This question is considered in Chapter 40.

  The study of doctrine requires thought. Yet there is a substantial literature in Buddhism that decries thought as the musings of the distracted mind, leading away from, rather than towards, insight into reality. Such derogation of thought leads to the question of what role, if any, cogitation should play on the path. Is ‘the wisdom arisen from thinking’ a contradiction in terms? This kind of discourse against the discursive finds its most powerful expression in the Chan and Zen doctrine of ‘no thought’ and in debates over gradual versus sudden enlightenment. A discussion of these two categories by a famous Korean master is found in Chapter 41.

  An important technique for developing concentration in the early Indian tradition, and in the Theravāda of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, is called ‘mindfulness of the Buddha’ (buddhānusmṛti), in which one called to mind in a designated sequence the good qualities of the Buddha. In Indian Mahāyāna texts, recollection of the Buddha evolved into a visualization practice of the Buddha’s magnificent form, a practice that was still used to develop concentration but also served more visionary purposes, designed to bring one face to face with the Buddha himself. One of the buddhas to be encountered in this way was Amitābha, discussed above. In China, the chanting of Amitābha’s name was central to a number of ceremonies and practices for gaining ‘mindfulness of the Buddha’.

  During the Kamakura period in Japan (1185–1333), the Tendai monk Hōnen concluded that during the age of the degeneration of the dharma (which, according to the calculations of the day, had begun in 1052), faith in chanting the name of Amitābha (‘namu amida butsu’) was the only path to salvation; all other routes ended in failure. Hōnen’s views gained popularity; he also gained the enmity of the established sects of Japanese Buddhism, and was sent into exile. Excerpts from the work that caused this controversy appear in Chapter 42.

  The next four chapters present rituals that are perhaps more ceremonial than solitary meditation, and that focus more directly on the relationship between the Buddhist and the other inhabitants of the universe: social relations on a cosmic scale. Buddhist practice is traditionally subsumed under three trainings: in ethics, in meditation, and in wisdom. Ethics is often defined in Buddhism as the restraint of body and of speech, specifically refraining from the non-virtuous deeds of killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, divisive speech, harsh speech and senseless speech. Monastic vows, as made clear in Chapter 26, are promises not to do a wide variety of things. One should not conclude, however, that Buddhist ethics are entirely passive. The most famous exception to such a characterization is the bodhisattva’s vow to free all beings in the universe from suffering and lead them to enlightenment.

  In the early tradition, there was a single bodhisattva for each age; ‘our’ buddha took the vow aeons ago in the presence of the previous buddha Dīpaṁkara (see Chapter 15); the next buddha, Maitreya, is still waiting to appear in the world, which will only occur when the teachings of our buddha have been forgotten. However, with the rise of the Mahāyāna, the bodhisattva ideal became universalized, and ceremonies were designed in which individuals took the vow to achieve buddhahood in order to liberate others from suffering. One such ceremony is described in Chapter 43. Over the course of the long path to buddhahood, bodhisattvas were to perform limitless virtuous deeds, often summarized in the six ‘perfections’ of giving, ethics, patience, effort, concentration, and wisdom. A bodhisattva was expected not only to refrain from harming others, but also to protect beings from harm. In a number of Buddhist cultures, especially those of East Asia, there is the practice of ‘releasing life’, rescuing animals (usually fish and birds, but often sheep and cattle) from slaughter by purchasing them from fishmongers and butchers and then releasing them into the wild or keeping them in protected areas, often at a temple or monastery. Before the animals were freed, they would be taught the dharma. A widely practised ceremony for releasing animals is described in Chapter 44. Such practices often came into conflict with pre-Buddhist cultural practices. In China, for example, a large number of social and ceremonial occasions required that an animal be sacrificed; not to do so was regarded as most inauspicious. Buddhist teachers, therefore, sought to counter these traditions by explaining why animal sacrifice should be avoided. Several such arguments appear in Chapter 45. Buddhist social relations extended beyond the human and animal realms. Buddhist monks have long had a special responsibility towards ghosts, considered in some cultures to be the unattended spirits of ancestors, roaming the world in search of food and drink. A ceremony for feeding the hungry ghosts is found in Chapter 46.

  But Buddhist practice is not concerned solely with solitary meditation or public ceremony, with the path to enlightenment for oneself, or for others. Buddhists, like all humans, are concerned with finding happiness in this life and the next. And because the next life is uncertain, this life should be as long as possible. Practices designed to extend one’s lifespan appear in Buddhist literature from across Asia. Chapter 47 includes a sūtra that prescribes devotion to a buddha named Aparimitāyur, ‘Unlimited Lifespan’. But regardless of the length of one’s life, death will eventually come and one will be blown by the winds of one’s past karma to rebirth in one of the six realms of the gods, demigods, humans, animals, ghosts, or hell beings. Obviously, birth as a god or a human (especially a prosperous human) is preferred, and birth in the three lower realms is to be avoided; ceremonies at the time of death and after death are designed to achieve this. But death is also seen as an opportunity; in some tantric traditions, it is the moment in which the most profound state of consciousness, called the ‘mind of clear light’, is revealed. Thus, for those with the proper training, death can be transformed into buddhahood. Chapter 48 sets forth a sophisticated technique intended to bring about this vital transformation.

  Enlightenment

  Enlightenment is the ultimate goal of Buddhist practice, but its meaning has been broadly defined across history. Commentators explained that when the Buddha sat under the tree and achieved enlightenment, he destroyed at that moment the causes for future rebirth. The karma that had set his last lifetime in motion would run its course, but when it had, he was not reborn again but passed into nirvāṇa – the eternal cessation of his mind and body. Four stages in the process of enlightenment were enumerated: first the ‘stream-enterer’, whose initial vision into the nature of reality destroyed all seeds for future birth as an animal, ghost, or hell being, and who would enter nirvāṇa in a maximum of seven lifetimes; secondly the ‘once-returner’, who would be reborn once more in this world; thirdly the ‘never-returner’, who would never be reborn again in our world but would enter nirvāṇa after rebirth in a heaven; and finally the arhat, ’the worthy one’, who destroyed all seeds for future rebirth in this life, as the Buddha had done, and entered nirvāṇa upon death.

  Mahāyāna authors distinguished between the enlightenment of an arhat and the enlightenment of a buddha. An arhat was for ever free from future rebirth and entered the quiescence of nirvāṇa. A buddha was likewise free from future rebirth, but also gained omniscience. A buddha never really died, but entered a more dynamic state than that of the arhat. It was called the ‘unlocated nirvāṇa’ because he inhabited neither the realm of saṁsāra nor the nirvāṇa of the arhat.

  This is just the briefest suggesti
on of the many meanings of enlightenment, as the chapters in this section show. Chapter 49 raises the interesting question of whether laymen can achieve enlightenment. The story of the Buddha’s disciple Citta the Householder clearly implies that they can. It would later be explained (and Citta’s description of his attainment would be interpreted to mean) that laymen could achieve the first three of the four stages listed above – up to the stage of the never-returner – and still remain laymen. A layperson who became an arhat had to be ordained as a monk or nun within seven days or die; the body of a layperson, unpurified by monastic vows, was considered physically unable to sustain the final stage of enlightenment.

  Chapter 50 recounts the enlightenment of nuns. When the Buddha’s disciple Ānanda was trying to convince the Buddha to allow women to enter the order, he asked whether women were capable of achieving enlightenment. The Buddha answered that they were. This chapter contains accounts of three nuns, all of whom became arhats. The stories told here, the verse portions of which are probably quite ancient, tell of their encounters with the god of desire, Māra. As he did when the future buddha sat under the tree, Māra here mocks the nuns in an effort to deter them from their goal. In each case, he is unsuccessful.

  It was sometimes said that the state of enlightenment is beyond thought and therefore beyond description. This, however, did not deter attempts to describe it, and these descriptions sometimes resorted to paradox. One of the most famous attempts is found in what is known in English as the Diamond Sūtra, an excerpt from which appears in Chapter 51. It is noteworthy here that the Buddha’s interlocutor is the monk, and arhat, Subhūti. Subhūti was a famous disciple of the Buddha, the younger brother of a wealthy patron of the Buddha, an exemplary monk said to be foremost in living without conflict and in being worthy of offerings. The authors of the Mahāyāna sūtras sought to demonstrate the superiority, and authenticity, of their doctrines by taking famous figures of the earlier tradition, especially monks who were considered to have been already enlightened, like Śāriputra and Subhūti, and making them characters in the new sūtras, asking the Buddha to explain a reality which they themselves, although arhats, had not yet understood. In the Diamond Sūtra, that reality is explained largely through a language of negation.

  Enlightenment was also explained in positive terms, perhaps most famously in the doctrine of the ‘buddha nature’ or tathāgatagarbha. The Buddha had defined ignorance as the mistaken belief that those things that are in fact miserable, ugly, impermanent and without self are instead pleasurable, beautiful, permanent and possessing self. Yet certain Mahāyāna sūtras explained that the buddha nature was different – it was, in fact, blissful, beautiful and permanent, and endowed with self. This kind of positive and even substantialist description of what some sūtras claimed to reside naturally within all beings seems clearly at odds with the doctrines of no-self and of emptiness, and Buddhist scholastics debated this problem. But other texts seemed unconcerned with such issues, and offered poetic praise to the buddha nature, as in Chapter 52. Certain strands of the tantric tradition developed this idea of the intrinsic nature of enlightenment further, claiming that enlightenment resides naturally in this mind and in this body; it need only be recognized, as the tantric master Saraha explains in his songs (Chapter 53).

  Tantra is especially famous in the West for its sexual imagery. Although there is much more to tantric theory and practice than images of deities in sexual embrace, sexual yoga and sexual symbolism are crucial elements of the tradition, especially in India and Tibet. In Chapter 54, a buddha and his consort, seated in sexual union, together put into words the nature of enlightenment. In Japan, the tantric master Kūkai argued that the tantric teachings – what he called ‘esoteric teachings’ – were qualitatively different from the Buddha’s exoteric teachings. The highest teachings were taught not by Śākyamuni Buddha, but by the buddha Mahāvairocana, whom Kūkai identified as the dharmakāya or ‘dharma body’. In Chapter 55, he explains that esoteric practice is intended to unite the disciple with the dharmakāya, through the transformation of body (through mudrā or gesture), speech (through mantra) and mind (through samādhi or concentration).

  But for others, such transformation was not really necessary; enlightenment was already present. This view is most commonly associated perhaps with Chan and Zen schools of China and Japan. In Chapter 56, the famous Chan orator Shenhui explains that one should not be attached to enlightenment and that it is a mistake to force the mind to abide on a chosen object in the practice of meditation, because, in fact, the mind abides nowhere.

  During the Kamakura period in Japan, there were competing claims about the nature of enlightenment and which practice, in fact, led to it. The monk Nichiren argued that, because the three thousand realms of the universe are encompassed in a single moment of thought, ordinary beings can be buddhas and the realm of the buddha can be present in this world. The key, he claimed, was devotion to the Lotus Sūtra, as he explains in Chapter 57.

  Shinran was a disciple of Hōnen (see Chapter 42), but, unlike his teacher, he argued that in the degenerate age there was nothing that one could do to be reborn in the pure land of Amitābha (described in Chapter 8). The power of Amitābha’s vow was such that not only would he deliver all those who called his name to be reborn in his pure land, he would also plant that name in their hearts. Thus, not only was it impossible to achieve enlightenment through one’s own efforts in the degenerate age, even to attempt to do so was harmful. One need only hear the name of Amitābha emanating from one’s own heart.

  On the question of the nature of enlightenment, the Zen schools looked back to the famous four phrases of Bodhidharma, the last of which is ‘seeing into one’s own nature and becoming a buddha’. Chapter 59 includes a series of answers to questions put to the Zen master Bassui by his lay disciples. When asked about the location of the pure land, Bassui explains that when one is single-minded, without distraction, the buddha Amitàbha appears, and the mind, free from thought, becomes the pure land.

  This section, and this volume, concludes not with a description of enlightenment, but with a prayer for enlightenment by the famous Indian monk and poet Śāntideva.

  I have not attempted to provide a summary of Buddhist thought and practice here. Such an undertaking is fraught with difficulties in a book-length study, and is impossible in a brief introduction. Even were it possible, to attempt to do so would be at odds with the larger aim of this project. It is not my purpose to provide a normative description of Buddhism and then demonstrate how the various chapters of this book illustrate particular elements of that description. Instead, it is my hope that the reader will form some sense of the scope of the Buddhist tradition by reading the chapters here, asking all the while what it is, apart from the spine of this book, that holds them all together.

  Further Reading

  Abé, Ryūichi, The Weaving of Mantra: Kūkai and the Construction of Esoteric Buddhist Discourse (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999)

  Abhayadatta, Buddha’s Lions: The Lives of the Eighty-four Siddhas, trans. James B. Robinson (Berkeley, CA: Dharma Publishing, 1979)

  Bentor, Yael, Consecration of Images and Stūpas in Indo-Tibetan Tantric Buddhism (Leiden: Brill, 1996)

  Bielefeldt, Carl, Dōgen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988)

  Bodhi, Bhikkhu, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Saṃyutta Nikāya (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2000)

  Bodiford, William M., Sōtō Zen in Medieval Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993)

  Brereton, Bonnie, Thai Tellings of Phra Malai: Texts and Rituals Concerning a Popular Buddhist Saint (Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University, Program for Southeast Asian Studies, 1995)

  Buddhaghosa, The Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga), trans. Bhikkhu Ñyaṇamoli (sic), 2nd edn. (Colombo, Ceylon: A. Semage, 1964)

  Burlingame, Eugene Watson, Buddhist Legends (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1921)

  Buswell, Jr., Robert E. (ed.), Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990)

  Buswell, Jr., Robert E., Tracing Back the Radiance: Chinul’s Korean Way of Zen (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1991)

  Buswell, Jr., Robert E., The Zen Monastic Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.)

  Buswell, Jr., Robert E. and Robert Gimello (eds), Paths to Liberation: The Mārga and its Transformations in Buddhist Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1992)

  Chang, Garma C. C. (ed.), A Treasury of Mahāyāna Sūtras: Selections from the Mahāratnakūṭa Sūtra (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1983)

  Collins, Steven, Nirvāṇa and Other Buddhist Felicities: Utopias of the Pali Imaginaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)

  Cowell, E. B., The Jātaka or Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births (London: Pali Text Society, 1957)

  Cox, Collett, Disputed Dharmas: Early Buddhist Theories of Existence (Tokyo: The International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 1995)