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What is Buddhism |
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Buddhism has been, for many centuries, the dominant
spiritual tradition in most parts of Asia, including the countries
of
Indochina,
as well as
Sri Lanka,
Nepal, Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan. As with Hinduism in
India,
it has had a strong influence on the intellectual, cultural and
artistic life of these countries. Unlike Hinduism, however, Buddhism
goes back to a single founder, Siddhartha Gauthama, the so-called
‘historic’ Buddha. He lived in India in the middle of the sixth
century B.C.,during the extra ordinary period that saw the birth of
so many spiritual and philosophical geniuses: Confucius and Lao-Tzu
in China, Zarathustra in Persia, Pythagoras and Heraclites in
Greece.
If the flavor of
Hinduism is mythological and ritualistic, that of Buddhism is
definitely psychological. The Buddha was interested in satisfying
human curiosity about the origin of the world, the nature of the
Divine, or similar questions. He was concerned exclusively with the
human beings. His doctrine, therefore, was not one of metaphysics,
but one of psychotherapy. He pointed out the origin of human
frustrations and the way to overcome them, taking up for this
purpose the traditional Indian concepts of maya, karma, nirvana, ect.,
and giving them a fresh, dynamic and directly relevant psychological
interpretation.
After the Buddha’s
death, Buddhism developed into two main schools, the Hinayana and
Mahayana. The Hinayana, or small Vehicle, is an orthodox school
which sticks to the letter of the Buddha’s teaching, whereas the
Mahayana or Great Vehicle, shows a more flexible attitude, believing
that the spirit of the doctrine is more important than its original
formulation. The Hinayana school established itself, in
Ceylon, Burma and Thailand, whereas the Mahayana spread to Nepal,
Tibet, China, and Japan and became, eventually, the more important
of the two schools. In India itself. Buddhism was absorbed, after
many centuries, by the flexible and assimilative Hinduism, and the
Buddha was finally adopted as an incarnation of the many faced god
Vishnu.
As Mahayana Buddhism
spread across
Asia
, it came into contact
with people of many different cultures and mentalities who
interpreted the Buddha’s doctrine from their own point of view,
elaborating many of its subtle points in great detail and adding
their own original ideas. In this way they kept Buddhism alive over
he centuries and developed highly sophisticated philosophies with
profound psychological insights.
In spite of the high
intellectual level of these philosophies, however, Mahayana Buddhism
never loses itself in abstract speculative thought. As always in
Eastern mysticism, the intellect is seen merely as a means to clear
the way for the direct mystical experience, which Buddhists call the
‘awakening’. The essence of this experience is to pass beyond the
world of intellectual directions and opposites to reach the world of
acintya, the unthinkable, where reality appears as undivided and
undifferentiated ‘suchness’.
This was the experience
Siddhartha Gauthama had one night, after seven years of strenuous
discipline in the forests. Sitting in deep meditation under the
celebrated Bodhi Tree, the Tree of Enlightenment, he suddenly
obtained the final and definite clarification of al his searches and
doubts in the act of ‘unexcelled, complete awakening’ which made him
the Buddha, that is, ‘the Awakened’. For the Eastern world, the
Buddha’s image in the state of meditation is as significant as the
image of the crucified Christ for the west, and has inspired
countless artists all over
Asia who have created magnificent sculptures of meditating Buddha’s.
According to Buddhist
tradition, the Buddha went to the Deer Park of Benares immediately
after his awakening to preach his doctrine to his formers fellow
hermits. He expressed it in the celebrated form of the Four Noble
Truths, a compact presentation of the essential doctrine which is
not unlike the statement of a physician, who first identifies the
cause of humanity’s sickness, then affirms that the sickness can be
cured, and finally prescribes the remedy.
The first Noble Truth
states the outstanding characteristics of the human situation, dukka,
which is suffering or frustration. This frustration comes from our
difficulty in facing the basic fact of life, that everything around
us is impermanent and transitory.’ All things arise and pass away’
said the Buddha, and the notion that flow and change are basic
features of nature lies at the root of Buddhism. Suffering arises,
in the Buddhist view, whenever we resist the flow of life and try to
cling to fixed forms which are all maya, whether they are things,
events, people or ideas. This doctrine of impermanence includes also
the notion that there is no ego, no self which is the persistent
subject of our varying experiences. Buddhism holds that the idea of
a separate individual self is an illusion, just another form of maya,
an intellectual concept which has no reality. To cling to this
concept leads to the same frustration as adherence to any other
fixed category of thought.
The Second Noble Truth
deals with the cause of all suffering, trushna, which is clinging,
or grasping. It is the futile grasping of life based on a wrong
point of view which is called avidya, or ignorance, in Buddhist
philosophy. Out of this ignorance, we divided the perceived world
into individual and separate things and thus attempt to confine the
fluid forms of reality in fixed categories created by the mind. As
long as this view prevails, we are bound to experience frustration
after frustration. A trying to cling things which we see as firm and
persistent, but which in fact are transient and ever changing, we
are trapped in a vicious circle where every action generates further
action and the answer to each question poses new question. This
vicious circle is known in Buddhism as samsara, the round of birth
and death, and it is driven by karma, the never ending chain of
cause and effect.
The third Noble Truth
states that suffering and frustration can be ended. It is possible
to transcend the vicious circle of samsara, to free oneself from the
bondage of karma, and to reach a state of total liberation called
nirvana. In this state, the false notions of a separate self have
for ever disappeared and the oneness of all life has become a
constant sensation. Nirvana is the equivalent of moksha in Hindu
philosophy and, being a state of consciousness beyond all
intellectual concepts, it defies further description. To reach
nirvana is to attain awakening, or Buddha hood.
The fourth Noble Truth
is the Buddha’s prescription to end all sufferings, the Eightfold
Path of self-development which leads to the state of Buddha hood.
The first two sections of this path, as already mentioned, are
concerned with right seeing and right knowing, that is with the
clear insight into the human situation that is the necessary
starting point. The next four sections deal with right action. They
give the rules for the Buddhist way of life, which is
Middle Way between opposite
extremes. The last two sections are concerned with right awareness
and right meditation and describe the direct mystical experience of
reality that is the final goal.
The Buddha did not
develop his doctrine into consistent philosophical system, but
regarded it as a means to achieve enlightenment. His statements
about the world were confined to emphasizing the impermanence of all
‘things’. He insisted on freedom from spiritual authority, including
his own,saying that he could only show the way to Buddha hood, and
that it was up to every individual to tread this way to the end
through his or
her own efforts. The Buddha’s last words on his deathbed are
characteristics of his word view and of his attitude as a teacher.
‘Decay inherent in all compounded things/ he said passing away;
“Strive on with diligence.
In the first few
centuries after the Buddha’s death, several Great Councils were held
by the leading monks of the Buddhist order at which the entire
teaching was recited aloud and differences in interpretation were
settled. At the fourth of these councils, which took place on the
island of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in the first century
A.D., the memorized doctrine, which had been passed on orally for
more than five hundred years, was for the first time recorded in
writing. This record, written in the Pali language, is known as the
Pali Canon and forms the basis of orthodox Hinayana school. The
Mahayana school, on the other hand, is based on a number of so
called sutras, scriptures of huge dimensions, which were written in
Sanskrit one or two hundred years later and present the Buddha’s
teaching in a much more elaborate and subtle way than the Pali
Canon.
The Mahaana school calls
it self the Great Vehicle of Buddhism because it offers its
adherents a great variety of methods, or ‘skilful means’ to attain
Buddhahood. These range from doctrines emphasizing religious faith
in the teachings of the Buddha, to elaborate philosophies involving
concepts which come very close to modern scientific thought.
The first expounder of
the Mahayana doctrine, and one of the deepest thinkers among the
Buddhist patriarchs, was Ashvaghosha, who lived in the first century
A.D. He spelled out the fundamental thoughts of Mahayana
Buddhism-in particular those relating to the Buddhist concept
of ‘suchness’ in a small book called The Awakening of Faith. This
lucid and extremely beautiful text, which reminds one of the
Bhagawath Gita in many ways, constitutes the first representative
treatise on the Mahayana doctrine and has become a principal
authority for all schools of Mahayana Buddhism.
Ashvaghosha probably had
a strong influence on Nagarjuna, the most intellectual Mahayana
philosopher, who used a highly sophisticated dialectic to show the
limitations of all concepts of reality. With brilliant arguments he
demolished the metaphysical propositions of his time and thus
demonstrated that reality, ultimately, cannot be grasped with
concepts and ideas. Hence, he gave it the name sunyata, ‘the void’,
or ‘emptiness’ a term which is equivalent to Ashvaghosha’s ‘tathata’,
or ‘suchness’; when the futility of all conceptual thinking is
recognized, reality is experienced as pure suchness.
Nagarjuna’s statement
that the essential nature of reality is emptiness is thus far from
being the nihilist statement for which it is often taken. It merely
means that all concepts about reality formed by the human mind are
ultimately void. Reality, or emptiness, itself is not a state of
mere nothingness, but is the very source of all life and the essence
of all forms.
The views of Mahayana
Buddhism presented so far reflect its intellectual, speculative
side. This, however, is only one side of Buddhism. Complimentary to
it is the Buddhist’s religious consciousness which involves faith,
love and compassion. True enlightened wisdom (bodhi) is seen in the
Mahayana as being composed of two elements which D.T, Suzuki has
called the ‘two pillars supporting the great edifice of Buddhism’,
They are Prajna, which is transcendental wisdom, or intuitive
intelligence, and Karuna, which is love or compassion.
Accordingly, the
essential nature of all things is described in Mahayana Buddhism not
only by the abstract metaphysical terms Suchness and Void, but also
by the term Dharmakaya, the ‘body of being’, which describes reality
as it appears to the Buddhist religious consciousness. The
Dharmakaya is similar to the Brhaman in Hinduism. It pervades all
material things in the universe and is also reflected in the human
mind as bodhi, the enlightened wisdom. It is thus spiritual and
material at the same time.
The emphasis in love and
compassion as essential parts of wisdom has found its strongest
expression in the ideal of the Bodhisattva, one of the
characteristic developments of Mahayana Buddhism. A Bodhisattva is a
highly evolved human being on the way to becoming a Buddha, who is
not seeking enlightenment for himself alone, but has vowed to help
all other beings achieve Buddha hood before he enters into nirvana.
The origin of this idea lies in the decision of the Buddha-presented
in Buddhist tradition as a conscious and not at all easy decision-
not simply to enter nirvana, but to return to the world in order to
show the path to salvation to his fellow human beings. The
Bodhisattva ideas is also consistent with the Buddhist doctrine of
non-ego, because if there’s no separate individual self, the idea of
one individual entering nirvana alone obviously does not make much
sense.
The element of faith,
finally, is emphasized in the so-called Pure Land of Mahayana
Buddhism. The basis of this school is the Buddhist doctrine that the
original nature of all human being is that of a Buddha, and it holds
that in order to enter nirvana, or the ‘Pure
Land’, all one has to do is to have faith in one’s original Buddha
nature.
The culmination of
Buddhist thought has been reached, according to many authors; in the
o-called Avatamsaka school which is based on the sutra is regarded
as the core of Mahayana Buddhism and is praised by Suzuki in the
most enthusiastic words:
As to the Avatamsaka-sutra,
it is really the consummation of Buddhist thought, Buddhist
sentiment, and Buddhist experience. To my mind, no religious
literature in the world can ever approach the grandeur of
conception, the depth of feeling, and the gigantic scale of
composition as attained in this sutra. It is the eternal fountain of
life from which no religious mind will turn back athirst or only
partially satisfied.
It was this sutra which
stimulated Chinese and Japanese minds more than anything else, when
Mahayana Buddhism spread across Asia. The contrast
between the Chinese and Japanese on the one hand, and the Indians,
on the other, is so great that they have been said to represent two
poles of the human mind. Whereas the former are practical, pragmatic
and socially, minded, the latter are imaginative, metaphysical and
transcendental. When the Chinese and Japanese philosophers began to
translate and interpret the Avatamsaka, one of the greatest
scriptures produced by the Indian religious genius, the two poles
combine to form a new dynamic unity and the outcome were the Hua-yen
philosophy in China and the Kegon philosophy in Japan which
constitute, according to Suzuki, ‘the climax of Buddhist thought
which has been developing in the Far East for the last two thousand
years’.
The central theme of the
Avatamsaka is the unity and interrelation of all things and events;
a conception which is not only the very essence of the Eastern world
view, but also one of the basic elements of the world view emerging
from modern physics. It will therefore be seen that the Avatamsaka
sutra, this ancient religious text, offers the most striking
parallels to the models and theories of modern physics.
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