Introduction to Buddhism

I. Why is Buddhism, more than any other non-Western tradition today, attracting the attention of thousands of people in North America.

• • Is it a fad?

  • A symptom of rebellion?

  • A consequence of the failure of Christians to manifest the transformed living they proclaim?

  • Is interest in Buddhism motivated by a quest to satisfy the need for mental, physical, and moral discipline in daily life?

  • Is it a quest for transformed experience?

  • Is Buddhism popular because of its resonance with ecology in its commitment to non-violence and sensitivity to the suffering of all living beings?

  • Is Buddhism popular because it offers a religion without God?

Undoubtedly some of the above factors are part of the story.

II. The remark about religion without God raises a question: What do we mean by religion?

• • If we define "religion" functionally in psychological and social terms, Buddhism must surely be classified as a religion.

  • If we define religion in terms of a Western paradigm as including devotion to God, what is to be made of Buddhism?

  • One possibility is that Buddhism in some versions is simply an atheistic, psychological practice with no truly spiritual fruit.

  • Perhaps Buddhism shows that humans can truly flourish without a belief in God.

  • In some versions of Mahayana Buddhism, the figure of Buddha has become equivalent to a concept of God. In some cases, devotion to the Buddha is interpreted as devoted to an exterior image of your own true self.

  • Perhaps coming into harmony with "the Buddha-nature within" (the indwelling spirit, or--on an alternative interpretation of "the spiritual"--facilitating the growth of the inner source of inspiration, creativity, peace, and love) is not a particularly conscious process, and so it can succeed in persons who may lack a belief in God but who nonetheless manifest a certain faith in ideals.

Who was the Buddha?

The founder of Buddhism, Siddhartha Gautama

(560-480 BCE), was born in northeast India, the son of royalty, according to legend, whose parents, fearing that he would become a monk, gave him a sheltered upbringing and showered him with every pleasure and comfort.

In his late teens, with a beautiful wife and a lovely son, he wandered away from the castle and, according to legend, in four days saw four sights that changed his life.

• • One day and saw a sick person for the first time in his life. Stunned, he meditated profoundly.

  • The next day he went forth and saw an old person, and it struck him deeply.

  • The next day he encountered a corpse and was thoroughly shaken.

  • The next day he saw a monk who had renounced the world--and he determined to do the same.

This began a quest for liberation through the ascetic practice of yoga. After six years of this fruitless quest of extreme self-denial, he left the group and went forth to find liberation on his own. Sensing that the goal was near, he sat down under the Bo tree, vowing not to rise until he had broken through every barrier. His enlightenment experience has had greater repercussions on planetary religious history than any other such experience except that of the apostle Paul on the road to Damascus. Then, utterly fulfilled, with no desire to have a following, he walked forth from the forest and seeing some of his former associates who invited him to share, began his career of teaching. His "sermon" in the Deer Park contains the heart of his doctrine--the four noble truths and the eightfold path.

The four noble truths

(cf., Dhammapada, pp. 66-67):

1. The truth of suffering (dukkha: life before enlightenment has suffering since we resist its impermanence, change, insubstantiality; it is as though we are riding in an ox cart getting a bumpy ride; there are so many kinds of suffering to which we mortals are liable, from acute pain of body to torment of soul to the nagging sense that things are somehow out of joint)

2. The cause of suffering (tanha--on one interpretation: desire--so that the goal of self-cultivation is to eliminate all desire; on another interpretation, there can be healthy desires, since Siddartha Gautama's real critique was against anxious craving.)

3. The removal of the cause of suffering (eliminate tanha)

4. The way to remove tanha: the Eightfold Path

The Eightfold Path (cf. Dhammapada, p. 67, XX.1, 88):

Right (or accurate, appropriate, precise) views (i.e., the four noble truths)

right purpose

right speech

right conduct (do not kill, steal, lie, drink intoxicants, or be unchaste)

right livelihood (don't earn a living by working in a factory that manufactures weapons, a liquor store, a slaughterhouse . . . )

right effort

right mindfulness (self-awareness, e.g., of the habits of mind through which our thoughts originate)

right concentration (the ultimate goal of meditation, however that may be conceived, experienced, or expressed)

Siddhartha Gautama was called "the Buddha," one who has waked up. He founded an order of monks and proclaimed a teaching without miracle, mystery, or appeal to authority: the student was to validate the truth of the teachings in his own experience. He made no claim to divinity. His dying message was "Work out your own salvation."

Siddhartha Gautama's earliest followers formed the tradition known as Theravada ("the way of the elders"). It persists in southeast Asia as a monastic tradition, with an emphasis on wisdom. The Dhammapada comes from this tradition.

Buddhism developed another branch as it moved north and east--Mahayana ("the large raft"--i.e., to ferry the people, including householders, not only monks and nuns, to the other shore--from suffering to enlightenment). It took hold in China (where Pure Land Buddhism teaches hope for a heavenly afterlife, interpreted sometimes as an inner state), Korea, and Japan (where Shin Buddhism teaches calling on the name of Amida Buddha--a message of salvation by faith--to save us from our sinfulness). The emphasis is on wisdom and compassion (karuna an active disposition). The vow of the bodhivattva is to save all beings before entering into the ultimate nirvana--final "extinction" of all individuality.

Tibetan Buddhism

developed vajrayana (also called tantra, the diamond path, the sudden path) from the entrance of Buddhist monks into remote and isolated Tibet in the 8th century CE. The earlier, shamanistic religion of the people, Bon, has filtered into the Buddhism there. Monks are just people who are trying a little harder. There are many reasons to become a monk or nun. It's hard to earn a living, and it's advantageous for a family to have one less mouth to feed. You get regular meals in the monastery. Monks do no self-supporting work. In a society where the oldest son gets the inheritance, the youngest may join a monastery for economic reasons. Rival monasteries used to have battles. Vajrayana Buddhism is an intellectual, intense, accelerated approach to the goal, using extreme practices to transform the self into a bodisattva (enlightened being compassionately devoted to the salvation of all beings). The practices include visualization (of an ideal being, human or divine, embodying the qualities of character that you aim to acquire) and concentration (e.g., on a mandala or visual symbol of a teaching--the only "book" for those who are illiterate). Along the path, one is said to achieve magical powers to control natural phenomena (e.g., weather) and to foreknow the future, but the discipline is such as to purify the mind of all temptation to misuse the power. There are four main schools, each tracing its lineage by oral transmission from an early teacher. Each school has its own monasteries, universities, meditation techniques, and public, communal rituals. The goals are the same for each school. One begins with preliminary practices: performing 100,000 full-body prostrations, 100,000 recitations of the refuge mantra ("I take refuge in the teacher; I take refuge in the Buddha; I take refuge in the teaching; I take refuge in the community"); as well as other exercises including visualization. Retreats may last as long as a few years and may be solitary or with a small group of people. Self-analysis is prominent. There is an unstated but underlying orientation toward the goddess Tara, as compassion is a feminine attribute. Prayers may be conveyed by being hung on flags which blow in the wind; the colors of the prayer flags represent the five elements; and the very repetition of the sounds of mantras recited with the beads on a rosary is supposed to improve character. The abbot of a monastery posed a series of questions to a seeker: "Are you your body?" "Yes," was the eventual answer after meditation. "Are you your mind?" "Yes," was the eventual answer after meditation. "Who controls your mind?"

In the late 1950s China invaded Tibet and destroyed the monasteries (now somewhat rebuilt), and the 14th Dalai Lama led his people into exile in India (there is now a center in Ithaca, New York, for the continuation of these teachings; there are other centers in San Francisco and Boulder). When U.S. President Nixon went to China, he agreed with Mao Tse Tung to cease support for guerilla operations against that invasion. The Dalai Lama is the public figure who interfaces between Tibetan Buddhism and the rest of the world. He was chosen to be their God and also at the same time comfortably regarded as not a God. He is a spiritual and political leader of his people today.

Selected themes from the Dhammapada (a Theravadan sutra, or scripture, with quotes here taken from the translation by Thomas Cleary)

Truth

"Someone who is intelligent will realize the truth right away by associating with someone wise for even a while, just as the tongue discerns the taste of the soup" (V.6, p. 26). "Giving truth surpasses all giving; the flavor of truth surpasses all flavors; the enjoyment of truth surpasses all enjoyments . . . " (XXIV.21, pp.113-14). "A mendicant whose pleasure is truth, who delights in truth, who contemplates truth, and who follows truth, does not fall away from truth" (XXV.5, p. 118).

Doctrines are not to be absolutized. They are useful means. The relativity of truth means that there are deeper ways of expressing truth for more advanced minds.

Meditation

"Meditate, O Mendicant, and do not be negligent; do not let your mind be on desire. . . . There is no meditation for one lacking insight, no insight in one who does not meditate. One in whom are both meditation and insight is near indeed to nirvana. To a mendicant with a calm mind who has entered an empty house, there occurs an unearthly pleasure from accurate discernment of truth. Whatever one comprehends the arising and passing away of the clusters [form, sensation, perception, combination, and consciousness], one attains a joyous happiness that is the immortality of knowers. Do not swallow an iron pill through negligence . . . (XXV.12-15, p.120f).

"Meditative, dispassionate, settled, accomplished, free from compulsion, having reached the supreme end; that is the one I say is priestly. By day the sun shines, the moon illumines the night; the warrior shines in armor, the priestly one shines in meditation. But the Buddha shines with radiant energy day and night." (XXVI.4-5, p. 126; tantric technique, p. 79)

"One for whom there is nothing at all before, after, or in the meanwhile, who has nothing and clings to nothing, is one that I call priestly" (XXVI.39, p. 134). "Whoever looks upon this world as a bubble, as a mirage, is not seen by the King of Death" (XIII.4, p. 59).

Actions

have consequences! (IX.1-3, pp.42-43; X.5, p. 47)

Compassion

(See comment, p. 53)

"The mendicant who lives in kindness, with clearminded faith in the teaching of the Enlightened, will go to the state of peace, the bliss where conditioning has ceased" (XXV.9 p. 118).

Give to true monks (XXIV.23-26, pp. 114-15).

Restrain yourself from violence to any sentient being (X.1-4, p.46f.; cf. XIX.15).

Family

"I do not call someone priestly because of his origin, or his mother . . . " (XXVI.14, p.128).

"Pleasant is motherliness in the world, and fatherliness is pleasant." (XXIII.15, p. 106).

"The wise do not say a fetter is strong if it is iron, wood, or jute, but infatuation with pearl earrings, and desire for sons and wives" (XXIV.12, p. 110).

"A man whose mind is obsessed with children and chattels is carried away by death like a sleeping village by a flood. Children are no protection, nor father, nor yet kin; there is no refuge in relatives, for one overtaken by death" (XX.15-16, p. 93).

"Killing mother and father, and two warrior kings, killing a kingdom with all its subjects, the priestly one goes untroubled" (XXI.5, p. 96; note the comment: "Mother and father stand for greed and conceit").

Community

in Mahayana teaching (for Thomas Cleary) is universal love and objective reality (p. 67). Note what some people refer to as the Buddhist trinity, since in Mahayana teaching these are three aspects of a unity: take refuge in the enlightened one (the Buddha), in the teaching (the dharma), in the community (sangha) (XXI.7-9, p. 97).