LECTURE 17
The Teachings of the Buddha ...........................................................58
LECTURE 18
ĝƗntideva—MahƗyƗna Buddhism ....................................................62
LECTURE 19
ĝƗntideva—Transforming the Mind ..................................................66
LECTURE 20
Zen—The Moon in a Dewdrop and Impermanence .........................70
LECTURE 21
Zen—Being-Time and Primordial Awakening ...................................73
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The Teachings of the Buddha
Lecture 17
You can try this at home. Remove all of your thoughts. Remove your body. Remove your memories. Remove your personality. Remove your perceptions. And ask, what’s left? The Buddhist insight was nothing is left. Persons are fundamentally selÀ ess, just constantly changing continua, and that’s because of their impermanence.
T
he word “Buddha” comes from the Sanskrit bodh and means simply “awakened one.” The Buddha was a prince named Siddhartha
Gautama who lived in about the 5th century B.C. At around the age of 30, Siddhartha left his home as a Ğramana, a wandering mendicant, seeking to answer the problem of why there is suffering in the world. In the course of his travels, he came to a small town called Bodh Gaya, sat down under a tree—now called the Bodhi Tree (the “tree of awakening”)— and vowed not to arise until he had attained full awakening. He meditated all night and, at dawn, realized the fundamental nature of reality, becoming awakened. For the last 45 years of his life, he wandered across northern India, communicating his insight to hundreds of students.
Three fundamental ideas animate all of Buddhist philosophy: impermanence, selÀ essness, and interdependence. First of all, the Buddha recognized that all phenomena are impermanent, and he divided impermanence into two levels: gross impermanence, the slow change in things over time, and subtle impermanence, the idea that everything is constantly changing, moment by moment. Ourselves and everything around us are continua of causal processes, sequences of momentary events, not single solid things that persist through time.
The second major idea is that of selÀ essness; there is no core, no basic entity to things. The Buddha distinguished between two kinds of selÀ essness: the selÀ essness of the person and of phenomena. Because things are constantly changing, there is no component or identity that they retain over time. The same is true of ourselves. We, too, are constantly changing continua.
Closely connected to selÀ essness is the idea that everything in the universe, including ourselves and every state of ourselves, is interdependent. The Buddha distinguished three kinds of interdependence. The ¿ rst of these is causal, meaning that everything that occurs depends on causes and conditions. The second is mereological; that is, the whole is dependent on its parts and vice versa. Finally, the Buddha argued that everything depends for its identity on conceptual imputation, meaning that the identity we ¿ nd for anything in the world arises from our own conceptual categories.
The Four Noble Truths, set forth by the Buddha, should really be understood as four truths for those who would be noble. The First Truth is that all is suffering. Each
thing we encounter is either itself a source of suffering or something that is Once he realized the fundamental nature of reality, the meaning of life, Siddhartha Gautama (c. 500 B.C.E.–c. 420 B.C.E.) was awakened as the Buddha.
suffering. The most obvious kind of suffering is what the Buddha called the suffering of suffering, that is, ordinary pain and unpleasantness. The second kind of suffering is the suffering of change, which involves both change itself, such as growing old, and anything that lasts too long, even something pleasant, as sources of suffering. The third kind of suffering is that of pervasive conditioning. This suffering is brought on by the fact that we live in a world of uncertainty, one in which everything depends on a vast network of causes and conditions that are out of our control. The background anxiety caused by those conditions is pervasive suffering, which gives rise to the suffering of change and the suffering of suffering.
The Second Truth is that there is a cause of suffering: attraction and aversion. Those two causes, in turn, are caused by primal ignorance, our inability to recognize that things are impermanent, selÀ ess, and interdependent. We treat things as though they have natures that make them the things they are, independent of our imputation and desires, independent of their parts, independent of their causes and conditions. The result is that we accord much more importance to things that are attractive or aversive than they really have. We treat them as being desirable or undesirable in themselves, and we treat change as something to be resisted or dreaded, rather than a natural part of our lives.
The Third Truth is that there is a release from suffering, which is to eliminate primal ignorance. The Buddha urges us to reduce attraction and aversion by coming to understand the fundamental nature of reality. We can’t eliminate pain or change, but we can eliminate the suffering that they bring by eliminating our primal confusion about those things and about ourselves.
The Fourth Noble Truth is the prescription for removing this confusion, which is the Eightfold Path. The Eightfold Path identi¿ es domains of concern for Buddhists and suggests that if we live appropriately in those domains, we can eliminate primal ignorance and, hence, suffering. The three principal domains here are action, which includes right action, right livelihood, right propriety, and right speech; thought, which includes the right view, right meditation, and right effort; and mindfulness. Ŷ
Name to Know
Siddhartha Gautama (c. 500 B.C.E.–c. 420 B.C.E.): Siddhartha Gautama, more commonly known as ĝakyamuni Buddha or just the Buddha, was born in Lumbini to the royal family in the small state of Kapilavastu, in presentday Nepal.
Important Term
Ğramana: A wandering ascetic of ancient India.
Suggested Reading
Chödron, Taming the Monkey Mind.
Rahula, What the Buddha Taught.
Williams, Buddhist Thought.
Study Questions
1. What does it mean to say that the world is pervaded by suffering? Is this true even for those who enjoy life?
2. What is the relation among primal ignorance, attachment, aversion, and suffering? Why is primal ignorance so dif¿ cult to extirpate?
ĝƗntideva—MahƗyƗna Buddhism
Lecture 18
When we put together the idea of emptiness and the bodhisattva ideal, you have a sense of how, about 500 years later, Buddhism develops a kind of deeper metaphysics but also a more committed social face.
T
he term MahƗyƗna means “great vehicle,” and it describes an evolution of Buddhist thought that arose in India between the 1st century B.C.E. and the 1st century C.E. The MahƗyƗna revolution brought the idea of lay practice of Buddhism to prominence and saw the gradual evolution of the ideal of self-development into an ideal of altruistic practice and social virtues.
The MahƗyƗna began with the propagation of a set of controversial sutras. In Buddhism, a sutra is a text taught by or in the presence of the Buddha, but these sutras, the Prajnaparamita sutras, or “Perfection of Wisdom” sutras, became known after Buddha’s death. According to the MahƗyƗna tradition, the Buddha taught these during his lifetime but only to a select group of people, because he recognized that they were complex and might be misunderstood if they fell into the wrong hands. Many scholars believe that they were developed by Buddhist monks who needed to legitimate the new ideas evolving in the MahƗyƗna.
The revolutionary content of the MahƗyƗna is embodied in two signi¿ cant ideas. The ¿ rst of these is that our primal ignorance is an innate tendency to think that both ourselves and phenomena around us have inherent existence—that we are substantial, independent things. But the fact is that the fundamental nature of things is to be empty of essence, empty of substantiality. To understand things as they are is to understand them as empty in this sense—not nonexistent but conventionally designated, interdependent, and not substantially existent. There are held to be two truths about things: the ultimate truth, their emptiness of essence, and the conventional truth, their ordinary functioning as interdependent things. Although conventional truth is more super¿ cial, the two are, in a deep sense, identical. To understand that things are empty is to understand that they are just conventional. To understand the conventional reality of things is to see that they are empty.
The second revolutionary idea in the MahƗyƗna is the bodhisattva path.
In pre-MahƗyƗna Buddhism, the moral ideal was that of the arhat, the person who understands the Four Noble
Truths, practices the Eightfold Path, and
The fact is that the fundamental nature of things is to be empty of essence, empty of substantiality. achieves the cessation of suffering. The ideal of the bodhisattva is of a person who commits himself or herself to attaining full awakening in order to bene¿ t other sentient beings.
Among the principal ¿ gures of the
MahƗyƗna movement was the 8th-century
philosopher ĝƗntideva, who taught at the great Buddhist university Nalanda. The text for which he is most famous is the BodhicƗryƗvatƗra, which can be translated as “How to Lead an Awakened Life.” It’s a kind of how-to manual setting out the bodhisattva path and remains one of the most popular texts in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.
The bodhisattva path begins and ends with the cultivation of a state of mind called bodhicitta, meaning a commitment to attaining an awakening. This is animated by another mental state, karunƗ, usually translated as “compassion.” The bodhisattva revolution can be thought of as the replacement of the ideal of self-awakening with the ideal of compassionate engagement. Note that the karunƗ is not about feeling and it’s not an emotion; it is a commitment, not “sloppy sympathy.”
ĝƗntideva distinguishes two levels of bodhicitta, the ¿ rst of which is aspirational bodhicitta. That is the genuine aspiration to attain awakening in order to bene¿ t others, and it motivates the arduous task of cultivating the bodhisattva path. But because aspirational bodhicitta emerges at the beginning of the bodhisattva path and isn’t animated by full awakening—by a true understanding of interdependence, selÀ essness, and impermanence— it’s not fully engaged. By the end of the bodhicitta path, when we’ve realized the full wisdom that makes it possible to see reality as the Buddha thought reality should be seen, then we reach fully engaged bodhicitta with spontaneous awakened action, spontaneous karunƗ for the bene¿ t of all sentient beings.
The bodhisattva path is characterized by the cultivation of the six perfections: generosity, propriety, patience, effort, meditation, and wisdom. All of this is reÀ ected metaphorically in the Buddhist wheel of life. At the hub, we have a snake, a rooster, and a pig, representing aversion, attraction, and ignorance. Outside of the hub, we have the six realms of cyclic existence, a kind of iconographic representation of our emotional lives. If we broaden our vision, we see that the whole wheel of life is within the jaws of death. The iconography of the wheel of life demonstrates that all of our constant cycling between different emotional states has as its background this anxiety or terror about death. In the next lecture, we’ll see ĝƗntideva’s understanding of how we can deal with that fear to transform ourselves from beings who are constantly shuttling between these states of suffering into beings who can actually do something about it. Ŷ
Name to Know
ĝƗntideva (8th century C.E.): We know almost nothing of the life of ĝƗntideva. All biographical sources agree that he was born a Brahmin, converted to Buddhism, and studied at Nalanda University in present-day Bihar state in India.
Important Terms
bodhisattva: In Buddhism, one who has formed the altruistic aspiration to attain awakening for the bene¿ t of all sentient beings.
karunƗ: Compassion, the commitment to act to relieve the suffering of others.
Suggested Reading
Goodman, Consequences of Compassion.
Williams, MahƗyƗna Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations.
Study Questions
1. How do we understand the Buddhist wheel of life as a metaphor for ordinary life?
2. What is the signi¿ cance of taking phenomenology as an approach to morality?
ĝƗntideva—Transforming the Mind
Lecture 19
After all, when we look at other lives and we ask which one is the most meaningful, we don’t pick the one that’s most sordid, the one that’s most sel¿ sh. We pick the one that is most bene¿ cial to others.
A
t the end of the last lecture, we saw that there is a fundamental psychological block to meaningfulness—the fear of death—and to solve the problem of suffering, we need to remove that block. That subject is addressed in ĝƗntideva’s How to Lead an Awakened Life.
In chapters 1 and 2, ĝƗntideva explores the motivation for cultivating virtue in order to make our lives meaningful. He begins by saying that he hopes to bene¿ t others with his text and, in doing so, to become a better person himself. He points out that in our ordinary lives, we are overcome by motivations—greed, fear, sel¿ shness—that make our lives sordid and meaningless, but we know that the cultivation of virtue and concern for others would make our lives more meaningful. If for a moment we have the motivation to cultivate moral development, we should seize it.
ĝƗntideva argues that the vicious life—the life replete with vice—is permeated by fear; the fear of death conditions our lives by animating confusion, attachment, and aversion, but despite its pervasiveness, this fear is invisible to us. In our inattention, we get caught up in motivations that we would never reÀ ectively endorse. Vice is grounded in fear and it generates fear. Given that the two are so deeply interrelated, the only release we could possibly imagine from fear is the cultivation of virtue, which makes our lives peaceful, meaningful, and bene¿ cial to others.
Recall, from our last lecture, that the ¿ rst step on the bodhisattva path is the cultivation of aspirational bodhicitta, that is, the commitment to achieve awakening. Engaged bodhicitta is a goal that can be achieved only by cultivating all the perfections on the bodhisattva path, especially the perfection of wisdom. This perfection allows us to engage with reality as it is, not as it appears to us through the haze of ignorance. Engaged bodhicitta is the
According to the wheel of life, the biggest motivation for virtue is the fear of death. Virtue is something we cultivate in order to make our lives peaceful, in order to make our lives meaningful, and in order to make our lives bene¿ cial to others.
spontaneous capacity, arising out of deep insight, to see things that have to be done and to do them. This idea coincides with those of Aristotle and the Daoists: The cultivation of deep insight generates the possibility of spontaneity.
In the remainder of the text, ĝƗntideva works through the structure of the perfections, beginning with generosity. This is the ¿ rst of the virtues to be cultivated because giving enables us to reduce our attachment to things and to the self. The innate view that places us at the center of the universe is a distortion that generates pointless cycling through suffering instead of pointed altruistic aspiration.
The second perfection is that of mindfulness. From the Buddhist perspective, mindfulness is deeply moral because it keeps us focused on the virtues we intend to cultivate and on the degree to which our own activity reÀ ects those virtues. ĝƗntideva gives us the image of unmindfulness as a mad elephant, stampeding and causing destruction wherever it goes. He further argues that our suffering is caused primarily by our own mental attitudes. For that reason, we can lead better lives, not by transforming the world around us, but by transforming our minds. This idea recalls the exhortion from Stoicism to focus only on what we can control.
ĝƗntideva then turns to the perfection of patience, an important virtue because it is the answer to anger and because it’s a state of mind that can block attraction and aversion. It’s also a necessary virtue for anyone who is seriously committed to moral cultivation, because self-transformation is an arduous path. The chapter on patience gives us numerous echoes of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius on the topic of anger. Anger destroys our ability to think rationally and to bene¿ t others; a single moment of anger can devastate lifelong relationships or commitments. As Marcus Aurelius did, ĝƗntideva urges us not to become angry at people, who are driven by conditions, any more than we would become angry at a stomachache. ĝƗntideva also emphasizes the fact that anger isn’t harmful to just others but to ourselves. Again, echoing both Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, ĝƗntideva tells us to respond to those who make us angry with pity and compassion. If we are going to bene¿ t others, we must help them overcome irrationality, not pile our own irrational anger on top of theirs. The instrument for overcoming our own anger is thinking about it analytically and, in doing so, cultivating patience, which requires mindfulness, meditation, and wisdom.
In the cultivation of wisdom, we make the transition from aspirational bodhicitta to fully engaged bodhicitta. Wisdom is the dinstinction between just knowing analytically that anger is bad and patience is good and completely eliminating the superimposition of essences and independence. This leads to an engagement with things as interdependent, selÀ ess, and impermanent, a spontaneous engagement that allows the virtuoso manifestation of compassionate action. Ŷ
Suggested Reading
Dalai Lama XIV, A Flash of Lightning in a Dark Night.
ĝƗntideva, A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life (three good translations: Crosby and Skilton, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; Wallace and Wallace, Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1997; and Padmakara Translation Group, Boulder, CO: Shambhala Classics, 2006).
Study Questions
1. What is bodhicitta? What is the difference between aspirational and engaged bodhicitta, and why is this difference so important?
2. What are the six perfections? Why is each of them central to the cultivation of bodhicitta? How do they connect to the causes of suffering?
Zen—The Moon in a Dewdrop and Impermanence
Lecture 20
When Buddhism entered [China,] it was always interpreted through the lenses of Daoism and Confucianism. When Buddhism was translated into Chinese, it was translated into a language that was already rich with philosophical resonance.
T
he Zen (Chinese: Chan) tradition sees its own beginning in a special moment of wordless communication between the Buddha and one monk, Maha Kasyapa. Since that moment, the Buddha’s realization about the nature of reality, gained from contemplation of a single À ower, has been passed from one Zen master to another in an unbroken line of transmission.
Zen came to China in the late 5th or early 6th century C.E. with the monk Bodhidharma, regarded as the ¿ rst Chinese patriarch in a succession of six. The story of the sixth patriarch, Hui Neng, brings to life some of what is pregnant in Zen. Hui Neng, an illiterate woodcutter, was living at the temple when the ¿ fth patriarch held a poetry contest to choose his successor. The patriarch’s principal disciple, Senxiu, came up with this verse: “The body is the Bodhi tree; the mind is a clear mirror. Always strive to polish it. Let no dust alight.” The physical practice of Buddhism is like the tree under which the Buddha gained awakening; it’s the physical prop that makes awakening possible. The mind, like a mirror, is naturally luminous and reÀ ects the nature of reality. We see echoes of Confucianism in the emphasis on polishing and cultivating that mirror. Finally, “Let no dust alight” tells us to keep our minds clear of emotions and delusions.
Hui Neng’s response was this poem: “Bodhi originally has no tree. The mirror has no stand. Buddha nature is primordially clean and pure. Where could dust even alight?” Here, awakening doesn’t depend on physical being; it depends on the primordial nature of the mind—the mirror—which has no stand. In other words, don’t worry about the ordinary physical world; pay attention to experience. Further, our ability to attain awakening “is primordially clean and pure.” The attractions and aversions highlighted by Senxiu’s poem aren’t even part of our primordial nature.
The second verse reads: “The mind is the Bodhi tree. The body is a mirror stand. The mirror is primordially clean and pure. How could it ever be dusty?” Here, the mind is the support for awakening, while the body merely holds up the mind. And given that the mind is “primordially clean,” what we need to eliminate is the idea of cultivation. In doing so, we’ll ¿ nd that we are already fully awakened, already, effectively, a Buddha.
Zen Buddhism is suspicious of language and conceptuality and emphasizes direct experience and meditation as opposed to study. Zen Buddhism is suspicious of language and conceptuality and emphasizes direct experience and meditation as opposed to study. If you understand your own nature,
you attain Buddhahood. Much of
Zen training hinges on puzzles
called coagons: What is the sound of one hand clapping? These puzzles are meant to make us realize that rational and discursive thought doesn’t work; solutions come with sudden insight. Understanding this inner process leads us to understand our own minds.
In the Zen tradition, each of us has a primordial capacity to understand ourselves and the world completely, to live in a fully awakened, spontaneous way. Practice is a matter of recovering or uncovering that Buddha nature. Zen also emphasizes the idea that beauty is the world, and seeing beauty is part of what it is to understand the world.
The notion of impermanence plays a much more central role in Zen than it does in other Buddhist traditions. While Indian Buddhism makes a distinction between gross and subtle impermanence, Zen also distinguishes metaphysical impermanence, an impermanence in the nature of things. The idea here is this: Zen focuses on our own mind and experience, and the mind is subtly impermanent; our thoughts change from moment to moment. Because of this, we are constantly experiencing subtle impermanence. Our own mental states provide us with the foundation for a constant experience of constant change. But because of our fear of death, we reinterpret the experience of impermanence as an experience of constancy, thus creating a layer between ourselves and reality and between ourselves and genuine experience. As a result, we live in a meaningless dream world even though we have the constant reality of a beautiful, impermanent world before our perception all the time.
We close with a poem from Dǀgen: “Being in the world: To what might it be compared? Dwelling in a dewdrop fallen from a waterfowl’s beak, the image of the moon.” Dǀgen compares “being in the world”—our experience—to a dewdrop from a bird’s beak—something delicate, impermanent, and unbelievably beautiful. Further, the moon is contained in this tiny dewdrop, just as being in the world entails containing the vastness of reality within us—but only momentarily. The deepest kind of beauty is that which reveals impermanence because in doing so, it reveals the nature of our minds and reality. We can experience reality only if we grasp and celebrate impermanence. Ŷ
Suggested Reading
Kasulis, Zen Action, Zen Person.
Suzuki, Zen Buddhism.
Study Questions
1. How is Zen a continuation of Indian Buddhist ideas? What does it draw from Daoism?
2. Why is impermanence such an important part of the Zen understanding of the nature of reality?
Zen—Being-Time and Primordial Awakening
Lecture 21
If you really apprehend emptiness—this notion of voidness of essence— then all you apprehend is the ordinary nature of ordinary things.
T
he Indian philosopher Nagarjuna distinguished between two truths that are distinct in one sense but constitute a fundamental unity.
Conventional or everyday truth posits entity, while ultimate truth sees phenomena as empty of essence, empty of independence, and empty of permanence. The unity between these two truths arises as follows: One way to characterize the ultimate truth of emptiness is to say that conventional phenomena are no more than conventional; their identities are posited by us, but they do not inherently have identities. The two truths are distinct in our awareness but are ontologically uni¿ ed, that is, uni¿ ed in being.
The emptiness of phenomena is itself empty. For my hand to be empty is for it to have the property of emptiness, but the emptiness of my hand depends on my hand. If I don’t have a hand, I don’t have any emptiness of my hand. The notion of emptiness here is not a deeper reality behind ordinary things but the actual reality of ordinary things—itself empty of essence, empty of independence, and empty of permanence. We don’t say that ordinary things are empty; there is just emptiness. Even emptiness is empty.
The Heart sutra helps us understand this idea of the emptiness of emptiness and the nonduality of ultimate and conventional truth. In this sutra, the question is asked: How does one become truly wise? The answer is that anyone who wants to understand the nature of reality should contemplate its components and see that each of them is empty of essence. The sutra then gives us the fourfold profundity: Form is empty, but emptiness is form. Form isn’t different from emptiness; emptiness isn’t different from form. The point here is that form—physical reality—is empty. But to be empty is just to be the emptiness of ordinary things; there is no deeper reality behind that idea. The fact that emptiness and form are different from each other means that if you truly understand both conventional phenomena and emptiness, you understand the ordinary world around us, which is nothing but empty phenomena. Thus, these two truths, even though they involve two different apprehensions of the world, are actually nondually related—they’re the same thing.
In this sense, for Zen, phenomenology—the nature of our experience—joins with metaphysics. Metaphysically, we understand that there’s no difference between ordinary reality and its ultimate nature. But phenomenologically, we understand that to experience ordinary reality is to see things as they are, not to see beyond them. This ties to the distinction between perception and conception, two modes of awareness with different objects: the particular
and the universal. Universals are permanent, independent, and unreal. Perception can reveal reality to us, but conception, because it always involves engagement with abstract concepts, is deceptive. If we superimpose Perception can reveal reality to us, but conception, because it always involves engagement with abstract concepts, is deceptive.
conception over perception, we fail to see actual momentary phenomena and, thus, fail to see the ultimate nature of reality. But if we can strip away that superimposition, we realize the absence of duality between the conventional and the ultimate.
This stripping away also allows us to see the absence of duality between subject and object. In ordinary experience, we distinguish ourselves as the subjects and everything else around us, including people, as objects; thus, we’re the center of the world. But once we drop the notion that we exist as substantial phenomena and see that we are interdependent, constantly changing processes, then that pole of subject and object disappears. This is what enables spontaneity and allows us to enter into the experience that Dǀgen called being-time, real presence in the world.
Dǀgen emphasizes that existence itself is temporal. Time is the nature of our world, not an abstract container in which the world occurs. Time is change; thus, it’s constituted by things that are changing. Things don’t happen in time; time exists because things happen. Time has two aspects: It is experienced as À owing, and it is arrayed simultaneously, like Dǀgen’s mountain range.
We may experience only the present right now, but the present exists and is signi¿ cant only in its relationship to the past and the future. To ignore the moment that we live in is to lose reality, because all that is real is that moment, but to ignore the past and the future is to lose the meaning of reality.
The goal of Zen practice is full awakening, which is not to suddenly see beyond reality but to see reality as it is. Dǀgen tells us that we are constantly perceiving things as impermanent, interdependent, and essenceless, but we then superimpose conception on them. That primordial perception, however, is the ground of our Buddha nature, what makes it possible for us to be awakened. We are always, in every moment, primordially awakened, and our task is to recover that state through mindfulness and meditation. Ŷ
Important Terms
being-time: The intimate union of existence and temporality; the fact that to exist is to be impermanent yet to have a past and a future to which one is essentially connected and the fact that human existence is always experienced in relation to past, present, and future. metaphysics: The study of the fundamental nature of reality.
phenomenology: Inner experience, or the theory of inner experience.
Suggested Reading
Kasulis, Zen Action, Zen Person.
Stambaugh, Impermanence Is Buddha Nature.
Study Questions
1. In what sense are the two truths different? In what sense are they identical? Why is a nondual understanding of their relation so central to Zen?
2. What does it mean to say that we are primordially awakened? Why is practice necessary at all if this is true?
