Buddhism

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 Gautama, the so-called ‘historic’ Buddha. He lived in India in the middle of the sixth century BC, during the extraordinary period that saw the birth of so many spiritual and philosophical geniuses: Confucius and Lao Tzu in China, Zarathustra in Persia, Pythagoras and Heraclitus in Greece.

If the flavour of Hinduism is mythological and ritualistic, that of Buddhism is definitely psychological. The Buddha was not 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 situation, with the suffering and frustrations of 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, etc., and giving them a fresh, dynamic and directly relevant psychological interpretation.

After the Buddha’s death, Buddhism developed into 2 main schools, the Hinayana and the 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 peoples 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 the centuries and developed highly sophisticated philosophies with profound psychological in- sights. 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 distinctions and opposites to reach the world of acintya, the unthinkable, where reality appears as undivided and undifferentiated ‘suchness’. This was the experience Siddhartha Cautama 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 all his searches and doubts in the act of ‘un- excelled, 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 Buddhas. According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha went to the Deer Park of Benares immediately after his awakening to preach his doctrine to his former fellow hermits. He expressed it in the celebrated form of the Four Noble Truths, a compact presenta-

tion 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 characteristic of the human situation, duhkha, 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, trishna, which is clinging, or grasping. It is the futile grasping of life based on a wrong point of view which is called aviciya, or ignorance, in Buddhist philosophy. Out of this ignorance, we divide 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 frustra- tion. Trying to cling to things which we see as firm and per- sistent, 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 questions. 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 the 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 Buddhahood. The Fourth Noble Truth is the Buddha’s prescription to end all suffering, the Eightfold Path of self-development which leads to the state of Buddhahood. 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 sectionsdealwithrightaction.TheygivetherulesfortheBuddhist way of life, which is a 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 a 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 Buddhahood, 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 characteristic of his world view and of his attitude as a teacher. ‘Decay is inherent in all compounded things,’ he said before 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 the orthodox Hinayana school. The Mahayana school, on the other hand, is based on a number of so-called s&as, 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 Mahayana school calls itself 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 Bhagavad 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 meta- physical 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 ‘such- ness’; 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. Complementary to it is the Buddhist’s religious consciousness which involves faith, love and com- passion. 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 corn- passion. 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’s religious consciousness. The Dharmakaya is similar to the Brahman 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 on 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 en- lightenment for himself alone, but has vowed to help all other beings achieve Buddhahood 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 ideal is also consistent with the Buddhist doctrine of non-ego, because if there is 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 school of Mahayana Buddhism. The basis of this school is the Buddhist doctrine that the original nature of all human beings 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, accord- ing to many authors, in the so-called Avatamsaka school which is based on the sutra of the same name. This 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.3 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 philo- sophers began to translate and interpret the Avatamsaka, one of the greatest scriptures produced by the Indian religious genius, the two poles combined to form a new dynamic unity and the outcome were the ha-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’.4 The central theme of the Avatamsaka is the unity and inter- relation 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.