THE STORY OF
BUDDHISM
A CONCISE GUIDE TO ITS
HISTORY AND
TEACHINGS
DONALD S. LOPEZ JR.
C O N T E N T S
Pronunciation Guide
INTRODUCTION
I THE UNIVERSE
2 THE BUDDHA
3
4
5
6
THE DHARMA
MONASTIC LIFE
LAY PRACTICE
ENLIGHTENMENT
CONCLUSION
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
IX
XI
I
I9
37
I03
I 3 0
I67
206
2 5 4
PRONUNCIATION GUIDE
S AN S KR I T AND P ALl
The standard system for transliterating Sanskrit and Pali terms has
been used here. Vowels occur in both long and short forms, with
long vowels marked with a bar (macron ) over the vowel. They are
pronounced as follows:
i like the a in Ia
i like the ee in keep
ii like the u in super
a like the u in butter
e like the ay in bay
i like the i in it
o like the o in so
u like the ou in could
Some consonants without diacritical marks are not pronounced
as one would expect in English:
c like ch in churn
th like t in too, but with more emphasis or aspiration
ph like p in port, but with more emphasis or aspiration; there is
no f sound
XII T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
Consonants with diacritical marks are pronou nced as follows:
n like ny in Bunyan
r like ri in rip
s and are pronounced like sh in ship
. c.f, are retroflex forms of t, d, and n and may be pronounced
by curling the tongue against the roof of the mouth . Those who find
this difficult may pronounce them as t, d, and n without penalty.
. !, and n are pronounced roughly as they would be in English.
C H I N E S E
The pinyin system for transliterating Chinese is used here. It is generally
pronounced as might be expected, with the following conventions:
q is like ch in change
x is like sh in ship
JA P A N E S E
A bar (macron ) over a vowel does not change the sound of the
vowel but lengthens it.
T I B E T A N
There i s n o generally accepted system for phonetically rendering
Ti betan in English. Here a phonetic equivalent is provided, followed
by a transliteration in the Wylie system. For example:
Tisong Detsen ( Khri srong Ide btsa n )
IN T R O D U C T I O N
In northern India, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama rises at 4 A . M . and,
having offered obeisance to the Buddha, sits down on his meditation
cushion to contemplate his death. Knowing that death is certain, but
the time of death uncertain, he prepares for death daily. He imagines
an intricate process in which consciousness gradually retreats from
the five senses to gather at his hea rt. Step by step, the four elements
of earth, water, fire, and wind-the basic constituents of the material
world and human body-lose the ca pacity to serve as a foundation
for consciousness. First, the earth constituent dissolves, and the
dying person loses the capacity to perceive forms clearly. Instead, a
mirage appears, like that of water in a desert. Second, the water
constituent dissolves, and the dying person is no longer able to hear
sounds, seeing only what appea rs to be thick billowing smoke. With
the third dissolution, that of the fire constituent, the dying person
loses the ability to smell and perceives red sparks of light, like fireflies
flickering in darkness. The last of the four elements, the wind
constituent, dissolves next. The Dalai Lama imagines that his
tongue will then lose the ability to taste, and his body will no longer
be able to experience physical sensation or even to move. At this
point, he will stop breathing, but he will not be dead. His mind will
perceive a sputtering flame, like a burning Tibetan butter lamp.
According to Buddhist physiology, during the process of death,
the winds-subtle energies that serve as the vehicles for consciousness-
withdraw from a network of seventy-two thousand channels
that course throughout the body. Among all these channels, the
most important is the central channel, which runs from the genitals
upward to the crown of the head, then curving down to end in the
space between the eyes. Parallel to the central channel are the right
2. T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
and left channels, which wrap around it at seven points, creating
constrictions that prevent winds from moving through the central
channel. At these points of constriction there are also networks of
smaller channels that radiate throughout the body. These points are
called the seven wheels. The most important wheel is located at the
heart.
At this point in the process of death, the sense consciousnesses
have ceased to operate entirely. Next, all ordinary conceptions dissolve.
The winds from the channels that course through the upper
part of the body have now withdrawn from the right and left channels
and have gathered at the crown of the head at the top of the
central channel. When these winds descend through the central
channel to the heart wheel, the dying person sees nothing but radiant
white, like a clear autumn night sky before dawn, pervaded by
moonlight. Shortly thereafter, the winds from the lower part of the
body enter the central channel at the base of the spine and ascend
toward the heart. This produces a vision of a bright red color, like a
clear autumn sky pervaded by sunlight. Now the winds that have
gathered a bove and below enter into the heart wheel, and the dying
person seems to swoon, seeing everywhere a radiant blackness, like
a clear autumn sky in the evening after the sun has set and before
the moon has risen. Finally, in the last stage, the mind of clear light
dawns, with the color of the sky at dawn, free from sunlight, moonlight,
and darkness. This is death.
The Dalai Lama understands that if one is not a ble to recognize
each of these stages as they occur, the mind of clear light will slip
away and depart from the body, seeking a new place for rebirth .
However, if he can remain mindful throughout the process, he will
be able to bring death onto the path to enlightenment. When he
encounters the mind of clear light, the most profound state of consciousness,
he will dwell within it, passing through the radiant night
to rise as a buddha in the clear light of dawn.
In Thailand, an a udience gathers to watch a film. I n it, a handsome
prince n amed Vessantara is beloved by his kingdom because of his
great generosity. He is married to a beautiful princess, named
Maddi, who bears him two children, a boy and girl. One day a
Introduction 3
delegation arrives from a nearby kingdom that is suffering from
drought. The king of that land has undertaken a fast in an effort to
bring rain, but to no avai l. They ask, therefore, that Vessantara give
them one of the prized possessions of his land, a white elephant that
brings rain wherever it goes. Vessantara agrees to their request.
After the departure of the elephant, the people of Vessantara 's
kingdom complain that the source of their prosperity has been
taken from them. They demand that Vessantara be punished. Vessantara's
father refuses to imprison his son but eventually accepts
the suggestion that he be banished. and Vessantara is sent into exile
for the crime of giving a gift, but not before making a lavish gift to
the people, providing clothing, food, and drink to all who need
them. Maddi refuses to let him go alone, and she and the children
accompany him to the forest.
En route to their forest hermitage, Vessantara gives away their
carriage and horses. I n the forest, they find the hut of an ascetic on
Crooked Mountain, where they live contentedly for seven months
amid flowers, songbirds, and friendly animals. But one night Maddi
has a terrible dream that a strange man bursts into her hut and cuts
out her heart. Calmed by Vessantara, she goes back to sleep. The next
day, she sets out into the forest to collect food, leaving Vessantara to
tend the children. While she is away, a brahmin arrives, the first
human they have seen in seven months. But he makes an inhuman
request, asking Vessantara to offer him not food and drink, but his
son and his daughter. Vessantara immediately agrees. The children
run away and h ide, but their father finds them, and as they cling to
his legs, their tears fa ll on his feet. But he does not change his
mind, explaining to his children how giving gifts makes him
happy. The brahmin leads the children away to be his servants,
beating them as they go. The children escape and run back to their
father, asking at least to be a ble to remain to bid farewell to their
mother. But Vessantara does not relent, and his son asks him if his
heart is made of stone . The children are once aga i n led away into
servitude, asking their father to give their toys to their mother to
soothe her when she grieves. Vessantara is overcome with sorrow,
thinking first to save the children but deciding in the end that a gift
once given cannot be reclaimed. Watching i n the distance as his
4 THE STORY OF BUDDHISM
children escape again from the brahmin, only to be run down and
caught, he sheds hot tears of blood.
Maddi is overcome with despair when she returns home to find the
children gone and searches for them throughout the night before
fainting at Vessantara's feet. When she regains consciousness, she asks
where the children have gone. He replies that he gave them to a brahmin
as slaves but assures her that she is young enough to have more
children. Eventually, another brahmin arrives, asking that Vessantara
give him Maddi. Aga in, Vessantara agrees, and Maddi is led away
without complaint, saying that Vessantara has the right to do with
her as he pleases. The brahmin immediately reveals that he is, in
fact, Indra, the king of the gods, come to test the limits of the
prince's generosity. He returns Maddi to the prince and grants him
eight wishes. Vessantara asks, among other th ings, that his father be
glad to see him upon his return to the kingdom, that he ascend the
throne to be a compassionate king, that he have a son, and that he
never regret a gift.
He does not ask for the return of his children, who remain the
slaves of the evil brahmin, made to serve him all day and sleep on the
ground at night. The brahmin eventually takes them to the kingdom
of Vessantara 's father, who recognizes his grandchildren and purchases
them from him. Learning from the children the whereabouts of
their parents, the king expresses regret at having banished Vessantara
and leads a procession to invite him to return. Vessantara and Maddi
are overcome with joy to be reunited with their children. Vessantara
agrees to return home and assume the throne, insisting that his gift of
the elephant long ago had been proper. His first act as king is to free
all captives, human and animal. Indra causes a rain of jewels that
soon becomes waist deep. Vessantara distributes some of the jewels
and saves the rest so that he might make more gifts in the future.
The Thai audience weeps as Vessantara gives away his children
and then his wife and delights in the happy ending, although they
already know the plot by heart. They also know that, upon his
death, Vessantara will be reborn as the Buddha .
I n japan, the monk Tanno Kakuoo rises each morning at 2. A.M. and
dons a white robe and straw sandals, the traditional dress of the
Introduction 5
dead. He begins a solitary walk of twenty-two miles around Mount
Hiei above Kyoto, stopping to pray at 270 shrines along the way.
Tanno is a Buddhist monk of the Tendai sect, and he has made a
vow to walk this route one thousand times, a feat accomplished by
only eleven monks since 19 4 5. According to tradition, if he cannot
fulfill his vow to complete the " thousand-day walk, " he must commit
suicide.
During the first three years, he completed one hundred of these
marathons, gaining such strength and stamina that he was able to
complete the route, including the grueling fourteen-hundred-foot
ascent at the end, in five and a half hours of steady walking, returning
to his monastery by 7:3 0 A . M .. He would remove his straw sandals
after each walk and hang them outside the temple door, requiring a
new pair for each marathon. I ncreasing his pace, he completed four
hundred circuits in the next two years. As the fame of his ordeal
grew, people from a nearby village would kneel along the route,
waiting for Tanno to touch them on their head and shoulders with
his rosary as he passed . Only once along the route was he permitted
to sit, pausing on a stone bench with a lotus blossom carved in its
surface to visualize himself as a buddha and pray for the health and
prosperity of the em peror and nation of japan.
After completing seven hundred of the thousand circuits, Tanno
faced his greatest ordeal, called the Great Fast. After attending his
own funeral feast, he was locked inside the temple of the wrathful
god Fudo, where he would recite one hundred thousand mantras
over nine days. During that time, he was not allowed to eat, drink,
or sleep. Such privation for seven days ordinarily results in death .
Every night he was released from the temple in order to draw water
from a nearby well, water that he had to use in various offerings but
could not drink himself. On the first night, he required twelve minu
tes to return with two buckets of water suspended from a pole
ov er his shoulder. On the ninth night, having now lost one-fourth
of his body weight, he req uired one hundred minutes. Surviving this
ordeal, he sat with the assembled monks and was declared now fit
to pray for the welfare of the emperor and the nation. He was then
offered a bowl of tea.
After only three weeks in which to recover from his fast, he
6 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
undertook a more grueling pace, completing one hundred consecutive
circuits of a longer route, thirty-five miles in length. This was followed
by a yet more demanding route of fifty-two miles, each circuit requiring
eighteen hours, allowing him only two hours of sleep. By the time
he had completed 999 circuits, he had become national news, and television
crews from around Japan came to record his final ascent on the
final day. According to the tenets of his sect, upon the completion of
the thousand-day walk, Tanno Kakudo became a living buddha.
These three cases appear to have very little in common. Although
occurring simultaneously in a modern world of mass communication,
they took place in different parts of the globe and in different
languages. The Tibetan lama who sat on a cushion in meditation,
the Thai audience who sat in chairs to watch a film, and the japanese
monk who pa used in his morning marathon for a moment
and sat on a stone bench em bossed with a lotus blossom were
unaware of one another and unfamiliar with one another's practices.
Yet, each of the three accounts shares a single word, buddha, a
term from the Sanskrit language of ancient India that means " awakened
. " An epithet rather than a given name, it was employed some
twenty-five hundred years ago to describe one of the many itinerant
teachers who wandered among the towns and villages along the
river Ganges. This man, known simply as the Buddha, became one
of the most famous figures in human history. We know very little
about him; scholars even disagree on the date of his death by as
much as a century. Yet some twenty-five hundred years later, a
Tibetan lama living in exile in northern India, employees of businesses
in Bangkok, a Japanese monk living on a mountain near
Kyoto, and an American woman practicing Zen meditation in
Michigan look back to him and call themselves Buddhists, tracing a
direct link from the present back to an obscure Indian ascetic who
died more than two millennia ago.
This link is traced back most often through the transmission of
teachings. A teacher received instruction from his teacher, who
received it from his teacher, moving back slowly over centuries and
across oceans, deserts, and mountains to ancient India and into the
Introduction 7
presence of the Buddha hi mself. This retrospective route is more
easily imagined in reverse. When we try to measure the movement
of the Buddha's words from his time to ours, we are immediately
confronted with problems. We do not know with certainty what
language he spoke. We know that he left no writings, that what he
taught was preserved in the memories of generations of his followers,
not to be written down until some four centuries after his death .
T hus, it is impossible to know precisely what the Buddha taught.
Yet the authority of this man who authored no book was so great
that works attributed to him have been composed in many languages
and in many lands over many centuries. When Buddhists
trace their lineage back to the Buddha, it is often through these
texts, texts that often confound our desire for historical specificity.
The Buddha is reported to have exhorted his monks to " go and
wander for the welfare of the multitudes, for the happiness of the
multitudes, out of sympathy for the world, for the benefit, welfare,
and happiness of gods and humans . " And, indeed, the teachings of
the Buddha were carried around the world, not as a disembodied
truth descending on another culture from a bove, but rather as a
more material movement-of monks, texts, relics, and icons-along
trade routes and across deserts, mountains, and seas. Over the
course of many centuries after the death of the Buddha, his words
and his image made their way from India to the nations now named
Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Myanmar,
Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, China,
Taiwan, Tibet, Mongolia, Korea, and Japan. Over the past two centuries,
Buddh ism has become established in Europe, Australia, and
the Americas. The languages in which the teachings were written
included not only the classical Buddhist languages of Pali, Sanskrit,
Chinese, and Tibetan, but also forgotten languages such as
Khotanese, Sogdian, Tangut, and Tocharian B. Vast numbers of
works were thus attributed to the Buddha. These in turn were commented
upon, at great length. The words of the Buddha and his
Indian commentators then had to be translated into new languages
(with the translators remembered as heroes), where they in turn
received further commentary. Remarkable numbers of texts were
8 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
thus produced, which somehow had to be organized . These col lections
are referred to by the language in which they appear: the Pali
canon, the Chinese canon, the Ti betan canon . And these so-called
canons do not include many more local texts in various vernaculars
that, because of time or ci rcumstance, did not warra nt inclusion .
Buddhism has thus prod uced a vast literature, far beyond the capacity
of a single person . One edition of the Ti betan canon, for example,
contains 1 , 1 08 works that are traditionally regarded as spoken
by the Buddha, or spoken with his sanction, and an additional
3 ,4 6 1 treatises by Indian Buddhist masters. Were the entire collection
to be translated into English, it would fill some two hundred
thousand pages. Not even the most erudite scholar is expected to
know the names of all the works included, much less their contents.
This overwhelming ocean of texts, many long unread in languages
long forgotten, inevita bly changed through time and translation,
presenting doctrines and practices at wild variance with one
another, all claiming to originate from a man whose words can
never be recovered . What holds it all together? The texts and practices
that have been identified, by themselves or by others, as Buddhist,
have varied widely across Asia and across history. These
variations have been significant enough that what might be cal led
Buddhist in Japan not to be recognized as Buddhist in Sri Lanka.
Indeed, the mutual recogn ition of Buddhists from different regions
of Asia has occurred with any frequency only over the past century
with the identification of Buddhism as a "world religion," and even
then Buddhists in one region have tended to claim that their Buddhism
is more original or more pure or more efficacious than the
Buddhism encountered elsewhere. Acknowledging the transformations
that occur across time, across history, across culture, across
language, would it not be more accurate, then, to speak not of the
Buddhist tradition, but instead of many Buddhist traditions?
Such an approach has certa in advantages if we wish to consider
Buddhism as it has occurred across historical periods and across
geographical regions. This Buddhism is not a coherent unity. But if
one adopts a different perspective, a perspective that offers a different
view of time, of history, and of people, then something that we
might call Buddhism, in the singular, begins to appear. The Buddha
Introduction 9
taught, or so it is reported, that all beings in the universe are subject
to rebirth without beginning, such that all beings in the universe
were present, somewhere in the universe, when he taught the path
to freedom in India twenty-five hundred years ago. Some who had
the good fortune to hear his teachings and put them i nto practice
were able to follow the path and free themselves from rebirth. Others,
less fortunate, have contin ued to be reborn, again and again.
They missed the opportunity to sit in the circle of the Buddha's disciples.
But the Buddha claimed, or so it is reported, not to have
invented a new path, or to have discovered a path that was previously
unknown, but simply to have uncovered a path that had been
long forgo tten. The path had been taught by other buddhas in the
distant past and would be taught by other buddhas in the distant
future. He was but one of many buddhas. These compassionate
beings would appear in the world again. And i n the meantime, the
teachings of the buddha who lived in India twenty-five hundred
years ago, our Buddha, would rema in in the world. No matter that,
when reading Buddhist texts, we find many different paths and
many different descriptions of the state of freedom from rebirth.
No matter that there are even di fferent pred ictions of how long the
Buddha's teaching will remain in the world before it is forgotten. In
this sense, the particulars of time and place and language seem less
important. If everyone has been reborn countless times in the past,
everyone has already been reborn in countless places and has spoken
countless languages. And if the Buddha is regarded as a skillful
teacher who, recognizing the different interest and capacities of his
listeners, teaches different things to different people accord ing to
their needs, then the contra dictions in the tea ching are perhaps simply
a pparent. The Buddha, however he is understood and whatever
he is recorded to have said, provides the reference point fo r what is
called Buddhism.
A book with the title The Story of Buddhism might be written in
any number of ways. One might take a historical approach, consulting
the ancient archaeological remains of Buddhism in India before
turning to the chronicles of the kingdoms that came to embrace the
teachings of the Buddha. Here, one would note that, in the histories
of many Buddhist lands, few events are considered more important
10 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
than the installation of the first image of the Buddha or the founding
of the first monastery. One might take a political approach, examining
the role of Buddhist monks as advisers of kings and emperors.
Here, one would note that Buddhism tended to arrive first at court,
delivered by emissaries ( sometimes Buddhist monks) who offered
texts and images to the throne, along with claims of their extraordinary
powers. One might take an economic approach, examining
how what began as a brotherhood of beggars became a wealthy and
powerful institution, providing all manner of financial services.
Here, one would examine the economy of karma, whereby material
gifts to monks and nuns meant to provide for their physical sustenance
would be exchanged for spiritual merit to provide for the
well-being of laypeople in this lifetime and the next. One might take
a sociological approach, considering the ways in which Buddhist
monasteries provided for some a haven for those unable to succeed
in the world, for others a conduit to influence and fame that would
have been unavailable through other means. Here, one would examine
the role of women in Buddhism; the Buddha is reported to have
taken the revolutionary step of accepting women into his order, yet
he is said to have done so with great reluctance, predicting that by
his deed the duration of his teaching had been curtailed. One might
adopt a literary approach, examining the fascinating network of
images, narratives, and tropes that connect Buddhist texts across the
centuries. Here, one wou ld note the development of the biography
of the Buddha and the ways in which this increasingly stylized biography
came to serve as a model for the lives of su bsequent saints.
One might adopt a philosophical approach, comparing the diverging
tenets of all manner of scholastic traditions, each of which was
at great pains to demonstrate how its doctrines derived from the
Buddha himself. Here, it would be important to note that the scholars
who wrote sophisticated discourses on the immaterial nature of
the Buddha also offered prayers and incense to his image. One
might take an art historical approach, tracing the roles of art and
architecture across Asia. Here, one would note that in their studies
of Buddhist art in India, scholars have long been intrigued by a
number of early stone carvings in which the Buddha is not present
but absent. The carvings depict scenes in which obeisance is being
Introduction I I
paid to the footprints of the Buddha or to a tree. In one scene, considered
to depict the Buddha's departure from the palace, a riderless
horse is shown . Such works have led to the theory that early Buddhism
was aniconic, that is, that there was a prohibition against
depicting the Buddha in bodily form; he could only be represented
with certain symbols. The argument is based in part on another
absence, with the lack of any prescriptions for depicting the Buddha
in early texts taken as evidence that such depictions were proscribed.
This view has been challenged by those who offer a different
interpretation of many of the scenes regarded as evidence of
aniconism. Perhaps the carvings do not depict events from the life of
the Buddha but rather show pilgrimages to and worship of important
sites from the life of the Buddha, such as the Bodhi tree.
It is important to note that writing a single volume work entitled
The Story of Buddhism is a distinctively modern and, until rather
recently, non-Buddhist thing to do. Even the term Buddhism is of
recent vintage. In seventeenth-century Europe, only four religions
were identified in the world: Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedism,
and Paganism ( also known as Idolatry ) . The history of the academic
study of religion is in one sense a process of replacing Paganism
with a larger list of isms: Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism,
Sikhism, and, of course, Buddhism. Hinduism is a term derived
from hind, a Persian word for the Indus River Valley, an area now
located in Pakistan and populated by Muslims. Hinduism has no
correlate in Sanskrit, its sacred language. Buddhism is a somewhat
more complicated case. We really cannot say with certainty what
the Buddha himself cal led what it was he said. As noted a bove, none
of what are regarded by the fa ithful as his words were written down
until some four centuries after he passed into nirvii1}a. However,
when they were written down, we find him referring to what he
taught as the dharma vinaya. Dharma is famously untranslatable;
nineteenth-century translators used to render dharma as " law. "
More recently i t i s often translated a s teachings o r doctrine. Vinaya
refers to the rules of monastic discipline. Thus, the Buddha divided
what he taught into, perhaps, a set of doctrines and a set of rules.
The corpus of his teachings came to be referred to in Sanskrit as
buddhadharma, the teaching or doctrine of the Buddha, and his
I:Z. T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
followers as bauddha, Buddhist. Thus, an adjective, bauddha, that
may be accurately rendered as " Buddhist, " existed in Sanskrit, even
if there was little consensus over precisely what it encompassed.
But the term Buddhism has only recently been adopted by Buddhists.
In Sri Lanka, what we might call Buddhism is simply referred
to as the sasana, the teaching. In Tibet, it is most commonly referred
to as nang pa 'i chos, the religion of the insiders. In China, it is fo
jiao, the teaching of the Buddha (fo used to be pronounced as budh
in Chinese) . In Japan, it is butsudo, the way of the Buddha. Over the
history of these traditions, apart from a general recognition of India
as the birthplace of the Buddha, there is little sense of the referents of
these various names being a single entity that we might call Buddhism.
They were, instead, like a variety of dialects, not always mutually
comprehensible.
If there was little cognizance among the Buddhists of belonging
to a single pan-Asian tradition, there was confusion among the
European travelers who encountered them. Only in 1 8 o 1 does the
Oxford English Dictionary record the use of the term Boudhism,
changed to Buddhism in 1 8 1 6 in the phrase of a contri butor to the
Asiatic Journal: "The name and peculiarities of Buddhism have a
good dea l fixed my attention. " In 1829 Edward Upham published
The History and Doctrine of Budhism, the first work in English
with the word, albeit lacking one d, in its title. But even at the end of
the nineteenth century, the referent was not always clear, and the
spelling of the term was, in one famous case, intentionally altered.
Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, remembered
as a key figure in the Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka, distinguished
between the corrupt practices of Asian Buddhists, which she
called Buddhism, and a more esoteric science of enl ightenment,
called Budh-ism, a synonym of Theosophy.
It is only with the invention of the category of religion, with its
obligatory constituents of a founder, sacred scriptures, and fixed
body of doctrine, that Buddhism comes to be counted as a world
religion. Even then, it was judged by many Europeans as a rival to
Christianity. During the nineteenth century, monks from a variety of
traditions came to speak of a single pan-Asian Buddhism in an
attempt to counter the attacks of Christian missionaries and coloIntroduction
IJ
nial officials. One of the early attempts to unite Buddhism under a
single creed (and a single flag) was made not by an Asian Buddhist
but by a Theosophist, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott. In 1 891 he formulated
a set of fourteen rather bland principles ( " 1 . Buddh ists are
taught to show the same tolerance, forbearance, and brotherly love
to all men, without distinction; and an unswerving kindness toward
members of the animal kingdom " ), principles that, with some
effort, he persuaded a variety of Sri Lankan, Burmese, and japanese
Buddhist leaders to endorse.
Also during the ni neteenth centu ry, Buddhism became a su bject
of academic inqu iry in Europe and America, focused primarily on
the study of texts. Since that time, scholarly knowledge of Buddhism
has expanded and cha nged and contin ues to change . The date of the
Buddha's birth remains a topic of active scholarly debate; the circumstances
that led to the rise of the movement (or movements )
known as the Mahayana, the " G reat Vehicle," continue to be
explored, as does the degree of its importance in India; cases of
direct plagiarism of Hindu tantric texts by Buddhists ( simply substituting
the word Siva with the word Buddha ) are being discovered;
birch bark scrolls inscribed with the Buddhist texts continue to be
unearthed ( such as those acquired by the British Libra ry in 19 9 4 ) ;
previously unknown works (at least in Europe a n d America ) are
being translated into English; meditation is being reconsidered, both
in terms of the extent of its practice historica lly as well as its function
as a form of private and motionless ritual; the events of the first
centuries after the death of the Buddha and prior to the writing
down of his teachings remain a source of active speculation and
study, considering, for example, what prompted the act of writing.
And scholars conti nue to speculate about the reasons why, apart
from the obvious factors such as Muslim invasions, Buddhism
seemed to disappear from India, the land of its birth, around the
twelfth century. If it did not entirely disappear, what rema ined,
and why?
Thus, knowledge of Buddhism is always changing, and, in important
ways, Buddhism changes in the process. This book attempts to
reflect the current state of that knowledge and to avoid the errors
and prejudices of the past. At the same time, this book, like all
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
books, is a product of its time. In the history of Buddhist scholarship,
this is a period in which there is less interest in Buddhist philosophy
and more emphasis on Buddhist practice, less interest in
Buddhism as a global entity and more interest in its local manifestations,
less interest in the practices of elites, especially monastics, and
more interest in the practices of ordinary monks, nuns, and laypeople.
There is less interest in scholastic debates and more interest in
social history. There is less interest in doctrine and more interest in
ritual. These prej udices are inevitably present here, but with at least
the hope of some recognition of their presence and an attempt at
some semblance of balance, given the impossible task of encompassing
Buddhism in one hundred thousand words.
My primary aim is to focus on Buddhist practice, in the broad
sense of the term. Rather than portray Buddhism as a philosophy or
a way of life, as it is so often characterized in the West, I prefer to
view Buddhism as a religion to which ordinary people have turned
over the centuries for the means to confront, control, or even escape
the exigencies of life. The Buddha named what he spoke as the
dharma, a word that used to be rendered as " law, " now more commonly
as " teaching" or " doctrine . " But dharma has many meanings;
traditional commentators provide ten. It is derived from the
Sanskrit root meaning " to hold, " and Buddhist monks are fond of
saying that the dharma is what holds one back from falling into suffering.
Precisely what it is that constitutes the dharma is a question
that has absorbed Buddhist thinkers for centuries, but this functional
sense of the dharma as a means of protection from suffering
and for the promotion of well-being, both now and in the future,
remains a constant across the Buddhist world and across Buddhist
history.
W hat is encompassed by this dharma is indeed vast. It can
include chanting the Buddha's name, circumambulating his relics,
prostrating before his image, copying, reading, or reciting his
words, painting his image, taking and maintaining vows, offering
food and robes to monks and nuns, writing arcane commentaries,
sitting in meditation, exorcising demons, visualizing oneself as the
Buddha, placing flowers before a book, burning oneself alive.
Introduction
My task here is to present these various activities within a context
of doctrine and practice. I have not, for the most part, traced their
historical origins or their evolution over time and between cultures.
I have tried to avoid engaging in my own extended analysis, seeking
instead to descri be some of the manifestations of Buddhism in such
a way that their own logic will be clear. In an effort to achieve this,
I do not begin, as most books do, with a retelling of the life of the
Buddha. I follow, instead, a more traditional approach. Buddhist
histories generally start at the beginning, with the creation of the
universe. The appearance of the Buddha in the world is regarded by
Buddhists as the most auspicious event in history. In order to understand
how this might be so, it is necessary to understand the nature
of the world that the Buddha entered, in terms not only of its physical
topography, but also of its location in time. The Buddha's first
words as an infant were that this was his final birth. The momentous
nature of this claim, even when not made by a newborn child,
can be appreciated only if one has some understanding of the Buddhist
theory of reincarnation. The Buddha claimed that, whether
buddhas come or go, the nature of the universe remains the same.
Hence, I describe the nature of the universe prior to his appearance.
The secon d and longest chapter of the book is devoted to the
Buddha. Here I tell the story of the life of the Buddha as it is most
commonly told, beginning with his birth as a prince and ending
with his entry into nirviia as the enl ightened one eighty years later.
Along the way, I discuss what is traditionally considered to be his
first sermon on the four noble truths: the apparently simple formula
according to which life is qualified by suffe ring, that suffe ring has a
c ause, that there is a state beyond suffe ring, and that there is a path
to that state. Indeed, in this chapter, and throughout the book, I try
to provide a mixture of history, legend, and doctrine, an approach
that is often fo und in Buddhist literature. In the case of the Buddha,
h is teaching is often meant to serve as a substitute fo r his presence.
T he basic narrative of the life of the Buddha is remarkably simi
l ar across the Buddhist world, but there is a vast ra nge of opinion
concerning the precise meaning of the events of that life, and
especially about what the Buddha taught from the n ight of his
1 6 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
enlightenment to his passage into nirvaa forty-five years later.
Some would claim that the Buddha never ceased teaching the
dharma during that time; others would claim that he uttered not a
single word. Even after he was gone, the Buddha remained alive in
the world in the form of relics that were entom bed and worshiped
and, later, in the form of images. From the life of the Buddha, I turn,
then, to the various persons he has been understood to be and to
have been. For a central element i n the life of the Buddha is his previous
lives, not simply his immediately preceding life as Prince Vessantara,
whose del ight in giving caused him to give away even his
children and his wife, but his many previous lives, sometimes as an
animal, when he was a bodh isattva, one who has promised to
become a buddha and has set out on the path to buddhahood, a
path that encompasses many millions of lifetimes . Some forms of
Buddhism declare that there are at this moment many bodhisattvas
ready to offer their aid to any and all who call upon them. Some
forms of Buddhism declare that all beings will one day set out on the
bodhisattva path and hence that all beings will become buddhas.
This is possible, they declare, because all beings are endowed with
something called the buddha nature.
A Buddhist is generally defined as someone who seeks refuge in
the three jewels: the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha . Chapter
3 is devoted to the dharma. Rather than seeking to survey the vast
range of Buddhist doctrine, I consider here some of the strategies
that Buddhist thinkers have employed to control the vast repository
of doctrine they inherited. In order for the dharma to be controlled,
it had to be classified, a process that involved facing the contradictions
that occurred when so many texts claimed to be the word of
the Buddha . From these rather philosophical concerns, I turn to
some of the more practical uses of the word of the Buddha and the
various forms of protection it has provided to those who follow its
admonitions.
Sangha means "commun ity, " and the sangha, the third of the
three j ewels, is variously interpreted . Sometimes it means the community
of those who have followed the path of the Buddha and
achieved nirvaa . Sometimes it means the community of monks and
nuns. Most broadly, it refers to the community of followers of the
Introduction 1 7
Buddha . Here, I consider the sailgha in two chapters. Chapter 4
examines the world of monks and nuns. The first followers of the
Buddha renounced fa mily life in order to seek the path to nirvar:ta.
They lived on the donations of others, goi ng from door to door each
morning on their begging rounds. The group eventually became
large enough to req uire a code of cond uct, with individual rules formulated,
according to tradition, by the Buddha himself on the occasion
of a pa rticular transgression. Some deeds, such as murder or
breaking the vow of chastity, required permanent expulsion . Lesser
offenses needed only to be confessed in order to be expiated . The
community of monks, which is said to have slept outdoors in the
early years, soon came to require more perma nent shelters, and
these structures, donated by lay supporters, became the first monasteries.
Both in the case of begging for food and in the case of the donation
of shelter, one observes the strong relia nce of monks on the
laity. But the laity received something in return, namely the merit
accrued from giving gifts to a virtuous person . Indeed, monks do
not thank laypeople for the food they receive; laypeople thank
monks for providing them with the opportunity for giving. The
order of nuns was said to have been esta bli shed by the Buddha himself,
creating an order for women whose husbands had abandoned
them to become monks. The fact that the Buddha conceded that
women have the capacity to achieve enlighten ment and created the
opportunity for them to do so has been cal led a revolutionary act,
given the condition of women in India at the time. Yet nuns were
burdened by rules and regulations far more stringent than those for
monks, and the order of nuns eventually died out in many parts of
the Buddhist world.
Chapter 5 is devoted to the group that has always constituted the
majority of Buddhists and whose support is essential for the survival
of monks and nuns: laypeople. Buddhist laypeople have genera lly
considered themselves incapable of doing the things that monks and
nuns do and thus have devoted themselves instead to their support,
in the hope of accruing the merit that will allow them to become
monks and nuns, idea lly as disciples of the next buddha, in a future
lifetime. In the meantime, laypeople generally seek a pleasant
1 8 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
rebirth in heaven for themselves and for their family members and,
to that end, engage in all manner of charita ble activities, often
directed toward monks and nuns, but also directed toward others : a
common form of Buddhist merit making is the freeing of animals
bound for slaughter. Much lay practice is associated with death rituals
where, again, monks are called on to serve as intermediaries
between the real m of the living and the rea lm of the dead.
The ultimate aim of Buddhism, however, is to escape death
entirely through achieving enlightenment, and the final chapter considers
several of the ways in which this state has been sought. Meditation
serves as only one of several techniques employed in pursuit
of enlightenment. Some would claim that enlightenment requires
the accumulation of merit over many lifetimes. Others would claim
that enlightenment is possible in this very lifetime. Some would
claim that enlightenment is a gradual process of purifying the mind
of defilements. Others would claim that we are already enlightened
and simply need to recognize it. Some would claim that enlightenment
requires monumental effort. Others would claim that enlightenment
is benevolently bestowed by the Buddha.
No single volume can do j u stice to Buddhism. I can only hope to
give some sense of the contours of the world of Buddhism here. In
order to trace these contours, I have relied above all on Buddhist
stories. Most Buddhists throughout history have not engaged in
meditation. Many monks have not known the four noble truths. But
everyone, monk and nun, layman and laywoman, knows stories
about the Buddha, about the bodhisattvas, about famous monks
and nuns. These stories, sometimes miraculous, sometimes humorous,
sometimes both, have provided the most enduring means for
the transmission of the dharma, more enduring even than grand
images carved in stone. Each retelling of a story is slightly different
from the one before, with embellishments and omissions, yet always
able to be told again, its plot providing a coherence to the myriad
constituents of experience, from which we may derive both instruction
and delight. And so I begin my story of Buddhism.
I
T H E U NIV E R S E
The universe has no begin n i ng. It is the prod uct of karma, the law
of the cause and effect of actions, accord ing to which virtuous
actions create pleasure in the future and nonvirtuous actions create
pain. It is a natural law, accounting for all the happiness and
suffering in the world. The bei ngs of the universe have been
reborn without begi nning in six rea lms, as gods, demigods,
humans, animals, ghosts, and hell beings. Their actions create not
only their individual experiences of pleasure and pain, but also
the domains in which they dwe l l . The physical universe is thus the
product of the individual and col lective actions of the inha bitants
of the universe . Buddhist practice is di rected largely at performing
deeds that will bring happiness in the future, avoiding deeds that
will bring pain, and cou nteracting the future effects of mi sdeeds
done in the past. And there are some who seek the u ltimate goa l
of freedom from the bonds of karma and the universe it has
forged.
The workings of ka rma are understood over the course of lifetimes
without beginning, and thus Buddhists speak not only of days
and months and years, but also of aeons. The cosmological systems
of Indian Buddhism describe a universe that passes through four
periods: creation, a biding, destruction, and nothingness. The physical
universe is created during the first period, which begins when the
faint wind of the past karma of beings starts to blow in the vacuity
of space at the end of the previous period of nothingness. Beings
come to inhabit the world during the period of abiding. During the
period of destruction, the physical universe is incinerated by the
heat of seven suns. This is followed by a period of nothingness, after
which the fourfold cycle begins again.
20 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
According to a widely known creation myth, the first humans in
the present period of abiding had a life span of eighty thousand
years. Free from the marks of gender, they were able to fly and were
illuminated by their own light; there was no need for a sun or moon .
They also did not require food . At that time, the surface of the earth
was covered by a white frothy substance. One day one of the beings
descended to earth and dipped the tip of its finger into the substance
and then touched the finger to its tongue. The taste was sweet. Soon
everyone was eating the white substance, which would naturally
replenish itself. But the introduction of this food into their bodies
soon caused them to lose their natural luster, and the sun and moon
appeared to i llumine the sky. The added weight of their bodies soon
made it impossible for them to fly. The white substance evolved into
a naturally growing huskless rice that would be ready to harvest
again the day after it was picked . But as the beings ate more and
more of the rice, it became necessary for them to somehow eliminate
the waste that was accumulating in their bodies, and the anus and
genitals developed . One couple soon discovered an additional use for
the genitals and engaged in sexual intercourse for the first time. The
others were scandalized, pelting them with mud. Soon, to hide thei r
shameful activities, people began to build houses. Growing too lazy
to pick the rice each day, they began to take more than they needed
and hoard it in their homes. As a result, the rice developed husks and
required more and more time to grow. Soon people began to steal
from one another, requiring the election of a king who would enforce
a system of laws. And this is how human society began .
In this myth w e see the story of a fall, from a state of luminous
freedom to slavery to the land. From the single fateful act of tasting
the white, sticky substance came first the sun and the moon, then
the need to eat food, then gender, then sexuality, then settlements,
then society. According to Buddhist cosmology, things have continued
to decline, with the human life span decreasing to one hundred
years, at which point the Buddha appeared in h istory. There are
n umerous predictions as to how long his teaching will remain in the
world, ranging from five hundred to five thousand (or even twelve
thousand) years. The life span of humans will continue to drop over
many millennia, until it reaches only ten years, a time of pestilence,
The Universe 2.1
famine, and war, with armies of children fighting bloody battles. At
this point, the life span will begin to increase, growing slowly back
again to eighty thousand . The world will be like a heaven, with
wish-granting trees bearing their fruit and society free from the need
for any form of government. It is when the human life span is at its
apex of eighty thousand years ( some five billion years from now)
that the next buddha, Maitreya, will appear. After twenty cycles in
which the human life span ranges from eighty thousand to ten, this
universe will be destroyed.
In the meantime, humans inhabit a flat world that has at its center
the square Mount Meru, its four faces made of gold, silver, lapis
lazuli, and crystal. The mountain is surrounded by seven concentric
ranges, beyond which there is a great ocean, with island continents
located in the four cardinal directions. Humans inhabit the southern
continent, called jambudvipa ( Rose Apple Island ) , facing the lapis
side of Mount Meru, which makes the sky and ocean blue.
Six realms are located in this world, populated by beings who are
born there as a result of their karma. Together, these six constitute
the Desire Real m, so called because the beings who populate it are
driven by desire. The first and h ighest is the realm of gods. These are
abodes of pleasure, ranging from pleasure gardens filled with the
sound of celestial music, the scent of jasmine, the taste of ambrosia,
and the touch of beautiful women, to sublime immaterial states of
deep concentration distinguished by various levels of mental bliss.
The lowest of the heavens is that of the kings of the four directions,
who reign over their respective slopes of Mount Meru. Each month
they go forth into the world of humans to observe their conduct,
which they report back to the gods of the next heaven, located on
the flat summit of the mountain. It is called the Heaven of the
Thirty-Three and is populated by the gods of ancient India, ruled by
Indra. This is an instance, to be repeated throughout the Buddhist
world, of subsuming and subordinating local deities into the Buddhist
pantheon. Other heavens float above Mount Meru in the sky.
Above the heavens of the Desire Realm are the Form Realm and the
Formless Realm, places of sublime rebirth that result from achieving
deep states of meditation in the previous life. In the Form Realm,
the beings remain attached to beautiful forms but are free from
2 2 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
manifest desire. The highest heavens, if they can be called that, are
in the Formless Realm, whose gods exist without form as deep
states of concentrated consciousness, absorbed in infinite space, infinite
consciousness, nothingness, and neither existence nor nonexistence.
But even here, beings are bound in the cycle of rebirth.
Gods live very long lives, but they are not immortal . The death of
gods in the heavenly realms is attended by six signs: their natural luster
fades, their grand throne becomes uncomfortable, their bodies
begin to perspire, the garlands of flowers around their necks begin to
wilt, their servants are reluctant to approach them, their palace
becomes dusty. At that moment, it is said that the god has a vision of
his or her next lifetime, and because a god will almost inevitably be
reborn in a lower realm ( because gods squander their time in heaven
intoxicated by pleasure) , this is the most intense suffering in the cycle
of rebirth. This cycle is called sat?tsiira, literally meaning "wandering
" in Sanskrit. The second category (omitted in some presentations
) is the class of demigods, deities less powerful than gods but
more powerful than humans. They are jealous of the gods and
engage in warfare with them . The third place of rebirth is as a
human, already familiar to us. The realms of gods, demigods, and
humans are regarded as fortunate places of rebirth within the cycle.
The other three realms, of animals, ghosts, and hell beings, are
considered unfortunate, containing, as they do, increasingly intense
and varied forms of suffering. Animals are said to suffer the particular
fate of having to spend their lives in the pursuit of food, while
also seeking to avoid becoming food . Unlike humans, for animals it
is the taste of their flesh, the texture of their skin, or the scent of
their musk that may serve as the cause of their death. The next
realm is that of ghosts, some of whom inhabit the human world,
invisi ble to all but the spiritually advanced . Ghosts suffer from
hunger and thirst (thus, the term hungry ghosts ) . They are constantly
seeking food and drink, and when they find them, they
encounter obstacles. A river, upon thei r approach, may turn into
burning sand or into a current of pus and blood. Ghosts are
depicted as having h uge abdomens and tiny limbs. Their throats are
sometimes the size of the eye of a needle, sometimes tied in a knot.
When they are a ble to i ngest food, it turns into spears and balls of
The Universe 2 3
molten lead. The origin of the category of ghost is unclear, but their
depiction in Buddhist iconography suggests a human suffering from
acute starvation, with a bloated abdomen supported precariously by
a skeletal frame. The Sanskrit term rendered here as "ghost, " preta,
means " departed, " suggesting that these ghosts are the wandering
spirits of departed ancestors whose families have fa iled to make the
proper offeri ngs for their sustenance in the next life. Buddhist
monks and nuns, who (at least theoretica lly ) have renounced the
responsibilities of family life, have traditionally taken it as their task
to feed the hungry ghosts.
Buddhist texts describe a n extensive and harrowing complex of
hells. There are eight hot hells, eight cold hells, four neigh boring
hells, and a number of trifling hells. The eight hot hells are lands
made of burning iron, located one below another deep beneath the
surface of the earth, where the denizens undergo a variety of tortures
over a protracted lifetime. The first, and least severe, is called
the Reviving Hell, where one is born with weapons in hand,
engaged in mortal combat. Upon being k illed, a voice from the sky
shouts, " Revive, " and the whole process begins again. According to
a more detailed description, the hell has a number of di fferent
regions, reserved for those who have committed specific misdeeds.
Those who have killed birds without remorse find themselves in a
pit filled with a mixture of excrement and molten copper. Having no
form of sustenance, they are forced to eat it. But the excrement is
filled with maggots that, once inside the body, consume it from the
inside until nothing remains. The lifetime in this hell is described as
follows: "If fifty human years were a day, and th irty of these were a
month, and twelve of those were a year, then five hundred of those
years would be one day in this hell, and one would live five hundred
years of such days. " This, the shortest of the infernal life spans,
might be calculated as r . 6 2 x r o • • years. The other hot hells entail
various forms of burning, sometimes being cast into cauldrons of
molten metal, sometimes being impaled on spears by demons. In the
hell reserved for adulterers, males see a beautiful woman at the top
of a tree beckoning them to climb up. As they climb, the leaves of
the tree are transformed into razors and knives that lacerate their
bodies. Arriving at the treetop, they find that the woman is gone.
T H F. S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
Looking down, they see her at the foot of the tree, calling to them .
Climbing down , they suffer the same injuries, only to find the
woman at the top of the tree. They continue to climb up and down
the tree in pursuit of the obj ect of thei r desire for ten trillion years.
In the most tortuous of the hells, reserved for those who have committed
particularly heinous crimes, such as pa rricide, one's body is
indistinguishable from fire. The cold hells are ba rren wastelands of
snow and ice, cast in eternal darkness. The names of the cold hells,
Bursting Blisters, Moan ing, Chattering, Split like a Lotus, give some
sense of the suffering experienced there. Upon release from the hot
or cold hells, one passes through the neighboring hells, whose
names are also evocative: Burning Ashes, Mud of Corpses, Road of
Razors, Burning River.
R E A L I T Y
Buddhist texts make repeated reference to the di fference between
the way things appear and the way things are, to how believing
what one perceives with the senses leads only to su fferi ng, while
understanding the way things really are leads to freedom from suffering.
Hence, the Buddhist universe is not simply the topography of
heavens and hells, but the rea lity that lies behind them. This rea lity
is not rega rded as an innovation of the Buddha, but rather as a fact
that the Buddha discovered, just as previous buddhas had discovered
it in the past and future buddhas will discover it in the future.
The Buddha decla red that, whether or not buddhas appear in the
world, the nature of thi ngs remains the same.
The hallmark of Buddhist thought is the doctri ne of no-self. Some
of the philosophical schools of ancient India spoke of the existence
of an eternal self that passed from lifetime to lifetime, taking on and
leaving behind a body, much as we don and doff our clothes each
day. Beings are enslaved in the cycle of rebirth beca use they fail to
recognize this silent self as their true nature, identifying instead with
constituents of the fleeting world . To see the self is to become who
one has always truly been.
The Buddhist doctrine of no-self seems to stand in direct contraThe
Unh,erse
diction, declaring that a permanent, indivisi ble, autonomous self is
an illusion and that the belief in such a self is the cause of all suffering.
The Buddha provided a detai led analysis of the con stituents
of mind and body, most commonly dividing them into five groups,
called the aggregates. The first is fo rm, which incl udes not only
visible forms seen by the eyes but also impercepti ble su btle matter,
as well as sounds, odors, tastes, and tangible objects. The other
four aggregates a re menta l . Feeling is the factor that accompa nies
every moment of consciousness and is of th ree types: pleasurable,
painful, and neutra l, with pleasure defined as that which one
wishes to encounter again when it ceases, pa in as that which one
wishes to be sepa rated from when it arises, and neutrality, to which
one is indi fferent. All feelings of pleasure and pain, all happiness and
suffering, are the effects of past actions, the fruition of karmic seeds
planted in the past by virtuous and nonvirtuous deeds of body,
speech, and mind. The third factor is discrimination, the innate mental
ability to distinguish between objects. Like feeling, it accompanies
all moments of consciousness, al lowing them to differentiate one
object from another and to recognize an object seen in the past. Setting
aside the fourth aggregate for a moment, the fifth of the five
aggregates is consciousness. In Buddhism, there are six forms of consciousness.
The eye consciousness perceives colors and shapes, the
ear consciousness perceives sounds, the nose consciousness perceives
smells, the body consciousness perceives tangible objects, and the
mental consciousness perceives " phenomena," that is, anything that
exists. The fourth aggregate, cal led conditioning factors, is something
of a " none of the above" category, encompassing a disparate
set of factors that do not fit into the other five categories, including
what we would call emotions, both positive ( such as nonattachment,
effort, and conscientiousness ) and negative (such as anger, pride,
resentment, and jealousy) . There are also factors here that can be
either virtuous or nonvirtuous, depending on one's intention: sleep,
contrition, investigation, and analysis. In the category of conditioning
factors we find concepts that are neither material nor mental
(such as time, impermanence, number, and similarity).
The Buddhist claim is that these five aggregates are the inventory
of what we call the person and that it is a complete inventory; no
26 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
parts are missing. Of particular significance is the fact that each of
the aggregates and all of their subcategories are impermanent, none
lasting more than an instant. Nothing, therefore, is worth clinging
to. One can search exhaustively through all the aggregates, and one
will not be a ble to find anything that does not disintegrate the
moment after it comes into existence . The most important conclusion
to be drawn is that there is no self among the aggregates .
I ndeed, mind and body function perfectly without a doer of deeds
and a thinker of thoughts. What we call the person is simply a
process, a chain of causes and effects, driven by the engine of
karma. To perceive a self amid this process, to posit an owner whose
possessions extend to the mind and the body and then out into the
world, driven by desire and protected by hatred, is simply to forge
more links in the chain of rebirth . To put an end to suffering, it is
necessary to perceive an a bsence, to see that the self that seems so
real was never there in the first place.
It is often asked how rebirth is possible if there is no self. Long
ago a Buddhist monk a nswered the question with a nother question
: " Ca n a flame move from one candle to a nother ? " His point
was that although it is possible to l ight one candle with another,
the same flame does not move between them. The flame is, scientifica
lly speaking, a process of oxidation, cha nging every instant,
yet it appears to move from one candle to another. The person is
simply a process of mental and physical constituents, among
which is the process called consciousness. Consciousness,
although changing every moment, persists as a contin u u m over
time. Death is simply the movement of consciousness, ever changing,
from one physical foundation . Rebirth is the movement of
consciousness, ever changing, to a d i fferent physical foundation
(which is itsel f impermanent ) , like lighting one candle with
another.
With the development of various schools in the centuries after the
Buddha's death, the doctrine of no-self came to be widely interpreted.
Perhaps in testimony to the tenacity of the belief in self, one
group, called the Vatslputrlyas, posited the existence of something
they termed the " inexpressible self, " which travels from one lifetime
to the next. A Chinese pilgrim in India in the seventh century
The Universe 27
reported that a Vatsiputriya sect was the largest of the Buddhist
schools. Although we can not credit their philosophy of self as the
reason for their popularity, it is useful to note two points: first, that
the doctrine of no-self was widely i nterpreted throughout the history
of Buddhist thought, and second, that such interpretations
were the purview of a tiny group of scholars whose views on the
subject remained unknown to the vast maj ority of Buddh ists. That
the Vatsiputriyas could hold what seems to us such a heretical view
and yet remain widely popular suggests that, despite the claims of
the philosophers, the doctrine of no-self is less central to the l ives of
Buddhists than we are often led to imagine. Furthermore, the doctrine
of no-self in much of its phi losoph ical elaboration seemed to
apply only to the person; the five aggregates, although impermanent,
were presented as having some kind of reality, whether as the
objects of raw sense perception, as one school argued, or as partless
particles of matter that combined to form gross objects.
Some four hundred years after the Buddha's death and the rise of
a movement referred to as the Mahayana, the " Great Vehicle, " discourses
of the Buddha began to appear that called themselves "perfection
of wisdom " sutras. These sutras came to be known by their
length, hence the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Stanzas,
the Perfection of Wisdom in Twenty-Five Thousand Stanzas, the
Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Stanzas, the Perfection
of Wisdom in One Letter. Like many other Mahayana
siitras, the perfection of wisdom texts were not systematic treatises
that set forth philosophical points and doctrinal categories in a
straightforward manner. Instead, they strike the modern reader as
having something of the nature of revelations, bold pronouncements
proclaimed with certainty rather than specu lative arguments
developed in a linear fashion . The perfection of wisdom that the
sutras repeatedly praised, rather than presented, was the knowledge
of emptiness (sunyata ). To see that all phenomena are empty is to
see the truth. This emptiness was often presented in a series of
negations, negations that made reference to Buddhist categories
that heretofore were said to have some reality. Thus, referring to
the five aggregates, the Heart Sutra says, "In emptiness, there is no
form, no feeling, no discrimination, no conditioning factors, no
2. 8 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
consciousness . " In order to become a buddha it was necessary to see
everything in the universe, from the form aggregate to the omniscient
mind of the Buddha, to be empty; as the siitras repeatedly
declared, not to see anything is to see everything.
The systematization of this a bsence, called emptiness, was not to
be found in the anonymous perfection of wisdom siitras but was
accomplished by a later generation of authors whose names are
known to us. The most famous of all is Nagarj una. We know very
little a bout his life. Traditional biographies state that he was born
four hundred years after the Buddha and lived for six hundred
years. Modern scholarship places him in the first or second century
of the common era . His role in the early development of the
Mahayana is suggested by the fact that traditional biographies
credit him with retrieving the Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred
Thousand Stanzas from a jeweled casket at the bottom of the
sea, where it had been held in safekeeping by the king of the dragons
since the time of the Buddha.
Nagarj una's most famous work, both i n India ( based on the number
of commentaries that survive) and in the West, is his Treatise on
the Middle Way ( Madhyamakadstra ) . It is a verse work in twentysix
chapters that begins with the famous obeisance to the Buddha,
" Homage to the perfect Buddha, most excellent of teachers, who
taught that what arises dependently has no cessation, no production,
no annihi lation, no permanence, no coming, no going, no difference,
no sa meness, is free of ela borations, and peaceful. " Among
the topics that he subjects to analysis are motion, vision, karma, suffering,
liberation, the four truths, and buddhahood, demonstrating
that each is empty.
The Treatise on the Middle Way is an often cryptic work, written
in a turgid poetic style. Unlike many works in its genre, it lacks a
prose commentary by the author in which the dense phrases are
expanded. The fact that it has inspired so many commentaries over
the centuries suggests that it is often ambiguous, such that the precise
meaning of emptiness remains elusive. Nonetheless, a number
of key points can be identified .
In his first sermon, the Buddha had prescribed a middle way
between the extremes of self-indulgence and extreme asceticism.
The Universe
Apparently drawing on his experience as a prince and later as a
renunciate, he counseled against a life devoted to the gratification of
the senses as well as a life in which the body is subjected to privation.
Instead, a course between these two, controlling the senses but
sustaining the body, provides the best approach to enlightenment.
Nagarj una also prescribes a middle way, but of a philosophical variety,
a middle way between the extremes of existence and nonexistence.
Precisely what neither existence nor nonexistence might mean
was the subject of debate by later commentators, but Nagarjuna
provides a due when he equates the terms emptiness, dependent
origination, and the middle way.
Dependent origination has two mean ings in Buddhist thought.
The first refers to a twelvefold sequence of causation: ignorance,
action, consciousness, name and form, sources, contact, feeling,
attachment, grasping, existence, birth, aging and death. In some
accounts this sequence is said to have constituted the Buddha's
enlightenment. Nonetheless, it remains one of the more vexing categories
of Buddhist thought, one whose origins and precise meaning
continue to elude scholars. Several traditional commentaries explain
it as a description of the process of rebirth, with some organizing
the twelve links over the course of a single lifetime and others dividing
the twelve over three lifetimes. The second mean i ng of dependent
origination is a more general one, the notion that everything
comes into existence in dependence on someth ing else. It is this
second meaning that Nagarj una equates with emptiness and the
middle way.
The manner in which dependent origination can serve as a synonym
for emptiness is clarified by one of Nagarjuna 's interpreters,
who defines self as that which does not depend on somethi ng else. In
this sense, the notion of self is extended beyond persons to encompass
all phenomena. Anything that exists autonomously, independently,
or objectively can be said to have " self. " Nagarj una's claim,
as one might suspect, is that such a self is also an illusion, to believe
in such a self is ignorance, and to understand that such a self does
not exist is wisdom, i ndeed, the perfection of wisdom. Emptiness,
therefore, is not the negation of existence but rather is the absence
of a particular kind of existence, an existence that is independent of
3 0 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
any other factors. If nothing exists i ndependently, then everythi ng
exists dependently and lacks, or in other words is empty of, independent
existence. It is in this sense that dependent origination and
emptiness are synonyms. Together, they represent a middle way
between the extremes of existence and nonexistence, which are
glossed by some commentators as the extremes of independent existence
and utter nonexistence.
The Treatise on the Middle Way is largely devoted to demonstrating
that the basic categories of experience-motion, the sense faculties,
fire, and fuel-as well as the basic categories of Buddhism-the
four truths, nirvaa, and the Buddha himself-are empty because
they are somehow dependent, depending for their existence either
on their causes or on their parts or on the human mind that names
them. For example, Nagarj una demonstrates that motion does not
occur because it cannot be located either on the path already traversed,
the path being traversed, or the path not yet traversed :
motion cannot be present where it is already past; it would be
redundant for motion to be present on the path currently being traversed;
and motion cannot be present on the portion of the path
that lies ahead. Writing always in verse, Nagarj una rarely qualifies
his negations; he does not specify that he is refuting only the independent
existence of the object under scrutiny and not its very existence.
But he is sensitive to the charge of nihilism, having a
hypothetical opponent charge that the doctrine of emptiness
denies all existence, making everythi ng and anything impossible.
Nagarj una replies that, on the contrary, it is emptiness that allows
for possibility. He states, " For whom emptiness is possible, everything
is possible. " What he seems to mean is that if things were
indeed as autonomous, independent, objective, and rea l as we ignorantly
conceive them to be, existence would be static and unchanging,
concretized to the point of paralysis. It is emptiness that allows
for change and transformation, most importantly the transformation
of the mind from ignorance to wisdom, from saJTlsara to buddhahood.
If the afflictions were endemic to the mind, such transformation
would be impossible. As he says in another work traditionally
attributed to him, the Hymn to the Sphere of Reality ( Dharmadhatustava),
"When a fireproof garment, stained by various stains, is
The Universe
placed in fire, the stains are burned but the garment is not. In the
same way, the mind of clear light is stained by desire. The stains are
burned by the fire of wisdom; the clear light is not. "
Yet Nagarj una must account for the world; he must impart some
status to the universe and its constituents. To do so, he introduces
the doctrine of the two truths: ultimate truths and conventional
truths. Ultimate truths are so called because they are the objects of
the ultimate consciousness, the mind perceiving reality directly. The
ultimate truth is emptiness. Some readi ngs of Nagarj una and his
commentators suggest that these truths are plural in the sense that
each phenomenon in the u niverse is qualified by emptiness, its own
absence of independent existence, and thus has its own emptiness.
This does not entail a qualitative difference among these many
emptinesses but rather that emptiness, the ultimate truth, is to be
found as the true nature of each of the objects of our experience.
But what is the status of these objects, if they are ultimately
empty? Nagarj una calls them conventional truths. They include
everything other than emptiness that exists in the universe, from a
form to the omniscient mind of the Buddha. The term conventional
truth is in a sense a misleading translation of the Sanskrit term,
which has a more pej orative sense, meaning according to one etymology,
"truth for those obscured by ignorance. " If a truth is something
that exists as it appears, then conventional truths are not true;
a chair, for example, appears in our unanalyzed experience to exist
objectively and autonomously, encompassing its parts. But the chair
is in fact empty of such independent existence. Therefore, the chair
appears in one way but actually exists in another and so is not true.
Only the ignorant would believe that thi ngs exist in the way that
they appear. Yet this false appearance of conventional truths does
not render them utterly nonexistent. As Nagarj u na says, without
conventional truths, the ultimate cannot be known . Indeed, the category
of the conventional encompasses all of the salubrious components
of the Buddhist path, including the Buddha. The relation
between the two truths would then seem to be one between an
object ( the conventional truth) and its true nature ( the ultimate
truth) . The Heart Satra famously declares, " Form is empty. Emptiness
is form. " Commentators have taken this as an expression of the
3 2 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
relation between the two truths. Form, the first of the five aggregates
and a conventional truth, is empty. Emptiness, the ultimate
reality, is not to be found apart from the objects of ordinary experience;
it is the very nature of form.
It should be noted, however, that the exposition of emptiness set
forth by Nagarj una and his commentators (who were not always in
agreement) was just one of the many Buddhist views of the nature of
reality that developed in India. It was by no means the most popular;
as mentioned above, a Chinese pilgrim reported that the Vatsiputriyas,
who spoke of an " inexpressible self, " claimed many
adherents. In the Theravada tradition, the two truths were interpreted
to mean something akin to ordinary and technical languages.
When the Buddha said "this is a man " or " this is a woman , " he was
speaking in the conventional sense; when he said " this is impermanent"
or " this is an aggregate, " he was speaking in the ultimate
sense. Nagarj una was certainly widely read and commented upon in
Tibet, less so in East Asia . His influence has been somewhat exaggerated
by the fact that his Treatise on the Middle Way, and one of
its commentaries, is preserved in Sanskrit and has been much studied
by modern scholars.
A competing view of reality to that of the middle way, or Madhyamaka,
of Nagarjuna was the Yogacara view, associated with the
fourth-century Indian scholar Asariga . Sometimes referred to as
" mind only, " it denies the existence of external objects. One of the
arguments for the subjective nature of experience is the discrepancy
in the way that two people may perceive the same object. In the
Buddhist case, the experiences of beings from different rea lms in
sa11sara are compared. What might appear as a glass of water to a
human appears as ambrosia to a god, as a home to a fish, as burning
sand to a ghost, and as molten lead to a hell being. Who is to say
what it really is? For the Yogacara, there is no public, objective
experience of a single world. Instead, each person perceives his or
her own world, created by karma . They speak of a form of consciousness
called the su bstratum (alayavijizana ) , where all the seeds
of one's past deeds are deposited . One by one, these seeds come to
fruition, simultaneously creating a consciousness and its object; the
object does not exist prior to its perception by consciousness. As
The Universe 3 3
that experience ceases, another seed will fructify, creating a nother
experience of su bj ect and object. Each being in the universe, therefore,
inha bits a private world . It is as if the universe were populated
by countless cinemas, each occupied by a single person, each
eternally viewing a different film projected by consciousness, each
eternally suspending disbelief. For the Yogacara, ignorance and suffering
result from believing the movie to be real, from mistaking the
projections to be an external world, from thinking that what appear
to be external objects are independent of consciousness, and then running
after them, desiring some and hating others. For the Yogacara,
wisdom is the insight that everyth ing is of the nature of consciousness
and the product of one's own projections. With this insight,
desire and hatred, attachment and aversion, naturally cease, for
their objects are seen to be ill usions. With the achievement of
enlightenment, the substratum consciousness is transformed into
the mirrorlike wisdom of a budd ha.
The Madhyamaka and Yogacara are but two of a wide range of
descriptions of real ity that developed across the Buddhist world . In
China, one finds not only the familiar notion of the presence of rea lity
in the constituents of ordinary experience, referred to as " the
interpenetration of principle and phenomena," but also the more
far-reaching claim that each phenomenon contains within itself
every other phenomenon in the universe, described in the meta phor
of a vast net bearing a jewel at every knot, each jewel containing
within itself the reflection of all the other jewels. In Zen, there is the
saying "mountains are mountains," referring to the dictum that
before one begins the practice of Zen, mountains are mountains;
during the practice of Zen, mountains are not mountains; after the
practice of Zen, mountains are mountains.
T H E E N D
Unlike so many other traditions, the Buddhist scriptures contain no
classic account of an end time, an apocalypse, a n eschaton. Certainly
we can locate predictions of wars between the forces of good
and evil and descriptions of the cosmic cycles, of how the physical
3 4 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
universe comes into existence, of how, through karma, the world
comes to be populated, how that world persists through cycles of
fortune and misfortune, calculated by the wax and wane of the
human life span, and how, finally, the physical universe is destroyed
and the cosmos passes into a period of involution, with the inhabitants
of the world retreating into the heavens. But according to
Indian Buddhist cosmology, that period of cosmic involution is only
temporary, and a new cycle of creation, abiding, and disintegration
will begin . But this is not what we usually mean when we talk about
an apocalypse, i n which the world is destroyed once and for all, or
an eschaton, in which the final purpose of human existence and of
creation is fulfilled.
Indeed, we find in Buddhist literature a rather pronounced reluctance
to deal with beginnings or ends. In the accounts of the Buddha's
enlightenment experience under the tree, it is said that he had a
vision of all of his past lives going back over billions of aeons, but
never does it say that he beheld the beginning, that he experienced
that primal moment of creation that is a seemingly ubiquitous element
of myth and ritual, not only in the so-called primitive religions,
but in Vedic traditions of India as well. The Buddha warned
that to refuse to follow the religious path until one knows whether
or not the world is eternal is to be like the man who refused to have
a poison arrow extracted from his body until he knew whether the
person who shot the arrow was ta ll, short, or of medium height.
The Buddha described all such questions as "a jungle, a wilderness, a
puppet-show, a writhing and a fetter, and coupled with misery, ruin,
despair, and agony. "
Indeed, the Buddha refused to answer the question of whether the
universe has an end. But how does one interpret silence ? The fourthcentury
Indian commentator Vasubandhu explained that the Buddha
would not answer in the affirmative or the negative because he
would be misunderstood: to say that saqtsara is endless would suggest
that there is no liberation, and to say that saqtsara ends would
suggest that individual effort is unimportant. The fourteenth-century
Ti betan commentator Tsang kha pa suggested that the Buddha
knew that saq1sara would never end, as i f he refrained from deliverThe
Universe 3 5
ing that particular piece of bad news so as to spare the world needless
despa ir.
In India, both positions were presented; there were those who
held that saqtsara is endless and those who held that saqtsara will
end. Those who held that saqtsara is endless compa red it to the limitless
sky, which, although impinged on the horizon by mountains
that seem to rise up to violate its domain, can never be obscured by
them. Even though buddhas have appeared throughout history to
liberate innumerable sentient beings, the buddhas are like the great
mountains that rise and fall; they can never block out the sky. In this
model, saqtsara appears as a constant, almost as nature. It is portrayed
as neither positive nor negative and cannot ultimately be
opposed. It functions rather as the unlimited stage for the drama of
suffering and the drama of enlightenment.
The second Indian model is presented in the more familiar Buddhist
voca bulary of cause and effect, of contagion and antidote.
Saqtsara is ultimately the product of ignorance, the belief in self,
and the antidote to that ignorance is the understanding that there is
no self. Thus, saqtsara will end when wisdom has utterly displaced
ignorance. The metaphor here is not of mountains and the sky but
of stains on gold; the stains can be removed, leaving the gold
untainted. Gold can be stained but it cannot rust. Whereas other
metals lose their luster to rust and are permanently corroded in the
process, the stains on gold are only superficial; beneath them is pure
gold, and that purity can be uncovered . It is not surprising, then,
that many of the arguments that saqtsara will someday end seem
to pivot on a n oft-cited declaration, " The nature of the mind is
clear light; the stains are adventitious . " That is, the defilements
that give rise to the cycle of birth, aging, sickness, and death a re
superficial, accidenta l , incidental, added on, implying what might
seem to be a surprisingly substantial ist position for a Buddhist
thinker, that the nature of consciousness persists after the defilements
have been expunged because the mind is somehow more
real than the defilements.
If the defilements, the negative mental states of craving, hatred,
pride, jealousy, ignorance, are not innate but are, in a sense, accidental,
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
then they can be removed. But there must be a mechanism for their
removal, and this mechanism, of course, is the Buddhist path. But
that path, and the nature of the universe through which it leads,
remains unknown until a being appears in the world who, over the
course of many l ifetimes, has perfected himself to the point that he
gains an insight that has been long forgotten. Having gained that
insight, he proclaims it to the world. Such a being is called a buddha.
Some twenty-five hundred years ago, it is said, a being destined
soon to be a buddha was residing in a heaven above Mount Meru.
Having determined that the time was right for him to complete the
task he had set for himself aeons ago when he promised to find a
way to escape from suffering and then to show that way to the
world, he surveyed the continent of Jambudvlpa, seeking the appropriate
city, the appropriate clan, the appropriate parents for his final
birth . He then made his descent.
Suggested Reading
Hopkins, Jeffrey. Meditation on Emptiness. London: Wisdom Publications,
1 983 .
Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Taye. Myriad Worlds: Buddhist Cosmology
in A bhidharma, Kalacak ra, and Dzog-chen. Ithaca : Snow
Lion Publications, 1 9 9 5 .
Lopez, Donald S., Jr. The Heart Sutra Explained: Indian and
Tibetan Commentaries. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1 98 8 .
Matsunaga, Daigan, and Alicia Matsunaga . The Buddhist Concept
of Hell. New York: Philosophical Library, 1 9 7 2 .
Nattier, Jan. Once upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist
Prophecy of Decline. Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1 9 9 1 .
Sadakata, Akira . Buddhist Cosmology: Philosophy and Origins.
Tokyo: Kosei Publishing, 1 9 9 7 .
2
T H E B U D D H A
The Buddha was born the son of a king, in what is today southern
Nepal. The date of his birth is unknown. Many scholars have set the
date at 5 6 3 B.C.E. , although other sources suggest that he was born
as much as a century later. According to traditional biographies, his
mother dreamed that a white elephant had entered her womb. Ten
lunar months later, as she strolled in a garden, the child emerged,
not by the usual route, but from under her right arm. Unlike other
infants, he was a ble to walk and talk immediately. A lotus flower
blossomed under his foot at each step, and he announced that this
would be his last lifetime. The child was named Siddhartha, " he
who achieves his aim " ; his clan name was Gautama. Convinced that
his son was unusual, the king summoned the court astrologers to
predict the boy's future. Seven agreed that he would become either a
great king or a great renunciate; one astrologer said that there was
no doubt, the child would become a great renunciate. His father set
out to prevent this possibility. Apparently assuming that depression
is what leads to the religious life, he endeavored to shield his son
from any and all things that might make him unhappy. He gave him
three palaces: one for winter, one for summer, one for the rainy season.
He provided him with the best of everything, surrounded him
with beautiful women, and ensured that he not be exposed to old
age, sickness, or death. His son excelled at everything he tried,
becoming skilled in all the sciences and arts, including the arts of
love. At the age of sixteen he married a beautiful princess.
The prince was so content in his sheltered domain that he seemed
not to have become curious about the outside world for twenty-nine
years. Only then did he ask his father to allow him to take a chariot
ride through the city. His father initially refused but eventually
T H F. S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
relented, but not without first sending out his troops to remove all
the sick, old, and ugly people from the royal route and stationing
musicians in the trees to serenade the prince as he rode. Somehow
(whether it was the work of the gods or of fate ), one old person
escaped the soldiers' scruti ny, standing bent and wizened as the
prince passed by. Not knowing what this was that stood before him,
the prince asked his charioteer to explain. He was told that this was
an old man. The prince asked whether this was the old man, the
only one in the world, or if there were others like him. When he was
told that everyone-the prince, his father, his wife, and his kinsmen-
would all one day become old and bent, the prince reacted,
the texts report, like a bull when l ightning strikes in the meadow. He
commanded his driver to take him back to the palace at once.
The prince eventually summoned the courage for three more trips
beyond the palace walls. On the first he saw a sick person, on the
second he saw a corpse being carried to the cremation ground, on
the third he saw a renunciate beneath a tree, a bsorbed in serene
meditation. Having been exposed, in turn, to the existence of old
age, sickness, death, and the fact that there are those who seek a
state beyond them, he went to his father and asked permission to
leave the city and retire to the forest. His father refused and offered
his son anything if he would stay. The prince asked that his father
promise that he would never die, become ill, grow old, or lose his
fortune. His father answered that these things were beyond his powers.
The prince retired to his harem, where he was entertained by
beautiful women. But he was unmoved, and as the night wore on
the women fell asleep in all manner of inelegant postures, disheveled
and drooling. The prince was disgusted by the scene, declaring that
women are by nature impure, and resolved to go forth in search of a
state beyond birth and death .
Upon being informed that his wife had given birth to a son, he
was not overjoyed, saying instead, " An impediment has been born .
A fetter has arisen . " The child was, accordingly, named Rahula,
" fetter. " But before the pri nce left the palace, he crept into his wife's
chamber to look upon his infant son . He resisted the urge to hold
him, knowing that to do so would awaken his wife and prevent his
departure from the world. It is this last look, looking at but not
The Buddha 3 9
touching what he was to leave behind, that forms one of the most
poignant moments in the narrative. ( In another version of the story,
Rahula had not yet been born on that fateful night. Instead, the
prince's final act as a householder was to conceive his son, whose
gestation period extended over the six years of his father's searching.
Rahula was born on the night that his father achieved enlightenment.
)
The prince set out for the unknown, leaving the world he knew
behind, exchanging his royal robes for the clothes of his servant,
giving up the royal cuisine for whatever passers-by would place in
his begging bowl . Wandering for six years, he became the disciple of
master meditators who taught him how to achieve deep states of
blissful concentration. He quickly equa led the attainments of his
teachers and recognized that the goa ls they had achieved remained
within sarpsara . Next, he j oined a band of five ascetics dedicated
to the most extreme forms of self-mortification. The prince also
became adept at this, surviving on one gra in of rice and one drop of
water a day. But one day, while bathing in a river, he fainted from
weakness and came to the conclusion that mortification of the flesh
was not the path to freedom. So he accepted a dish of rice and
yogurt from a young woman who mistook his gaunt visage for a
ghost to whom the local village made offerings. He ate the meal and
then cast the dish into the river, saying, "If I am to become a buddha
today, may the dish float upstream. " The plate floated upstream for
some distance before disappearing into a whirlpool, descending
down to the palace of a serpent king, where it landed on top of the
dishes used by the previous buddhas, making a clicking sound.
Seeing that he had abandoned their regimen, his five companions,
still convinced of the efficacy of asceticism, abandoned him in scorn.
Now left alone, the prince determined that he would sit down under
a tree and not rise until he had found what he had sought for so
long. That night, on the full moon of May, six years after he had left
his palace, he meditated all night. He was attacked by Mara, the
god of desire, who recognized that the prince was seeking to put
an end to craving and thereby free himself from Mara's control.
Mara attacked him with a conflagration of nine storms-storms of
wind, rain, rocks, weapons, live coals, burning ashes, sand, mud, and
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
darkness-but the prince remained serene and meditated on love,
turning the hail of fury into a shower of blossoms. Next Mara sent
his three beautiful daughters, Lust, Thirst, and Discontent, to tempt
the prince, but he remained unmoved. Seeking to determine what
kind of woman he would be attracted to, they appeared first as virgins,
then as women in the prime of their youth, then as middleaged
women, and finally as old women . When the prince remained
unmoved, they tried to return to their youthful forms but were
una ble to because the prince had so resolved. In desperation, Mara
challenged the prince's right to occupy the spot of earth upon which
he sat, claiming that it belonged to him i nstead . The prince, seated
in the meditative postu re, stretched out his right hand and touched
the earth, asking the goddess of the earth to confirm that a great gift
that he had made as Prince Vessantara i n his previous life had won
him the right to sit beneath the tree. She assented with a tremor, and
Mara withdrew.
Now the prince meditated through the night. During the first
watch of the night, he had a vision of all of his past lives, recalling
where he had been reborn, what he had been named, which caste he
had belonged to, what food he had eaten. He saw the persistence of
the person, both in its plenitude and paucity, multiplied through its
continuity across aeons of evolution and dissolution, rising on the
rope of memory to the karmic present. It was these constituents of
social identity-place, name, family, caste, food, pleasure, pa in, and
death-that he had abandoned as he went forth from the house and
the responsibilities of the householder, giving up a permanent dwelling
place, renouncing his former abode. His vision of his past lives
amounted to an insight into his personal identity as it is found in
sarr.sara, the cycle of birth and death .
During the second watch of the night, he saw the workings of the
law of karma, how beings rise and fall, succeed and fail, as a consequence
of their deeds. In the third watch of the night, the hours
before dawn, he was transformed. Accounts differ as to precisely
what it was that he understood, and, indeed, Buddhist schools
throughout history have looked back to this night to claim their
particular view of reality to have been discovered by the prince. Yet
all agree that he became a buddha, an awakened one, one who has
The Buddha 4 1
roused himself from the slumber of ignorance. The implication, of
course, is that the rest of the world remains asleep.
His first vision of his entire past enhances the potency of the
vision of the third watch, in which he saw (at least according to
many accounts ) , in the instantaneous present, that this person is a
mere projection, that before and behind the chain of causation there
is no agent, no person, no self, that the li berating identity beyond
saqtsara is no self. The personal continuity recollected in the vision
of his past abodes is proved a fiction by the vision of the third
watch, where there is no self to be seen . The prince saw the past and
present order of the world in the first two watches of the night. When
he saw that that ordered world has no essence, he was awakened.
This tension, in the paradigmatic event of the tradition, between personal
identity and identitylessness, between saqtsara and nirviit:ta,
between continuity and cessation, between the historical and ahistorical,
is played out throughout Buddhist philosophy.
The experience of that n ight was sufficiently profound for the
prince, now the Buddha, to remain in the vicinity of the tree for
seven weeks, savoring his enlightenment. One of those weeks was
rainy, and the serpent king came and spread his hood above the
Buddha to protect him from the storm. Later, two merchants
approached him and offered him food. In return, the Buddha
plucked some hairs from his head and gave them to the merchants.
It is noteworthy that the Buddha's first gift to the world was not the
gift of the dharma, but the gift of a relic.
He was unsure as to what to do next, since he felt that what he
had understood was so profound that it would be difficult for others
to comprehend. The god Brahma descended from his heaven to
entreat him to teach. He showed him a lotus pond and pointed out
that some of the lotuses were under water, some were at the level of
the water, and some had risen above the water and blossomed,
untouched by the water. In the same way, there are humans at different
levels of development, some of whom would benefit from his
teaching. That a god would make this request of the Buddha suggests
that the gods remained subject to the cycle of rebirth from
which the Buddha was now free; they depended on him to show
them the path to liberation. The incident also shows the way in
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
which Buddhism subordinated the Indian gods to the authority of
tbe Buddha. A similar process would be repeated throughout Asia,
as all manner of local deities and spirits were incorporated into Buddhist
pantheons.
The Buddha decided to teach and concluded that the most suitable
students were his first teachers of meditation, but he was
informed by a deity that they had died. He thought next of his five
old comrades in the practice of asceticism. His achievement of
enlightenment carried with it supernormal powers, and the Buddha
determined that they were residing in a deer park in Sarnath, outside
Banaras. He set out on foot, meeting along the way a wandering
ascetic with whom he exchanged greetings, explaining to the
man that he was the sole enlightened one, unsurpassed even by the
gods. The man responded with indifference.
Nearing the deer park, the five ascetics noted his approach and,
still stung by his apparent indulgence, conspired to ignore him. But
as he approached his charisma compelled them to rise and greet
him. They asked the Buddha what he had understood since they left
him, and he taught what has come to be known as the " four noble
truths. " In fact, this is a misleading translation. The term translated
as " noble " is aryan, a Sanskrit word, ruined by Hitler, meaning
" superior. " The Indo-European peoples who appeared in northern
India around 1 500 B.C.E. called themselves Aryans. The Buddha is
said to have redefined the word to mean superiority of character
and insight ( specifically someone who has seen nirvaQ.a ) rather than
superiority of blood and birth. Thus, his first teaching concerns four
things that are truths for those who have seen nirvaQ.a but that are
not known to be true by the unenlightened; a more accurate rendering
would thus be " four truths for the [spiritually] noble. "
T H E F O U R T R U T H S
The first truth is the truth of suffering. According to the Buddhist
psychological systems, suffering is a feeling that may a fflict the
body or the mind. The Buddha identified the obvious sufferings that
humans undergo: birth, aging, sickness, death, losing friends, gainThe
Buddha 4 3
ing enemies, not finding what one wishes for, encountering what one
does not wish for. But he is also said to have identified a more subtle
form of pain: pleasure. He observed that pain and pleasure are qualitatively
different, that a painful experience will remain painful
unless one acts to cou nteract the pain, but a pleasura ble experience
will natura lly become painful eventually. Indeed, there is no pleasurable
worldly activity-listening to music, eating food, drinking
wine, making love-that will remain pleasurable indefin itely. Each
source of pleasure will eventua lly become a source of pain. Conventional
wisdom to practice moderation, to know "when to stop,"
acknowledges this fact. Pleasure is therefore compared to the relief
felt when a heavy burden is shifted from one shoulder to another.
After a while, the other shoulder will begin to hurt, at which point
the burden will be shifted back. The Buddha referred to feelings of
pleasure as sufferi ngs of change because they will naturally turn
into pain unless one consciously desists. There is a third, even more
subtle, form of suffering. This is called the suffering of conditi oning,
referring to the fact that all beings are so conditioned by their past
deeds as to be susceptible to suffering in the next moment. Once it is
acknowledged that the person is a process of physica l and mental
constituents, and once it is acknowledged that those constituents are
impermanent and thus subject to change at any moment, there is no
way to ensure that su ffering will not occur in the next moment. This
form of suffering is so subtle that it goes unnoticed by the ignorant,
like a wisp of cotton in the palm of the hand, but is considered the
most immediate form of suffering by the enlightened, like a wisp of
cotton in the eye.
The second truth is the truth of origin, in which a series of causes
are traced back to their root. The immediate cause of suffering is
karma, the seeds of virtuous and nonvirtuous deeds done in the
past. In Buddhism, karma is something like a natural law, according
to which virtuous deeds cause pleasure and nonvirtuous deeds cause
pain. Indeed, every feeling of pleasure or pain we experience is said
to be the result of some deed done in the past. That deed could have
OCcurred in the present lifetime or thousands of lifetimes ago. It is
this doctrine that has resulted in Buddhism sometimes being labeled
as fatalistic. Buddhist thinkers hold that all forms of suffering, from
4 4 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
the annoyance of a hangnail to the suffering of war, are the direct
products of past deeds. They would say, however, that although
experience is, in that sense, given, our response to experience is free.
Indeed, it is our free response to the events of our lives ( those events
caused by karma ) that creates future karma, which in turn determines
the future.
Buddhist practice, whether for laypeople or monks and nuns, is
largely centered around performing virtuous deeds and avoiding
nonvirtue. These categories are not vaguely construed but are closely
specified, as is so often the case in Buddhist thought, in a list. The
standard formulation is of ten nonvirtuous deeds. Three are physical:
killing, stealing, sexual misconduct. Four are verbal : lying, divisive
speech, harsh speech, and senseless speech. Three are menta l :
covetousness, harmful intent, wrong view. It is noteworthy that negative
karma may be accumulated as a result not only of words and
deeds, but also of thoughts. Most of the ten are straightforward,
some are not. Sexual misconduct, for example, involves having sexual
relations against the other person's will or with someone who
has a vow of celi bacy. It extends to include such things as having
sexual relations during the daytime or in the presence of an image of
the Buddha . Senseless speech seems to include all forms of speech
motivated by desire, hatred, or ignorance that are not classed as
lying, divisive speech, or harsh speech. These include gossip, bragging,
loquaciousness, lamentation, singing, and reading bad commentaries,
that is, much of human discourse. Wrong view comprises
a range of non-Buddhist philosophical positions but in this context
refers most importantly to the belief that actions do not have effects;
this rejection of the law of karma is said to be particularly grave
since it leads to the indiscriminate performance of the other nine
non virtues.
Each deed has a different weight, depending both on the object of
the deed and the strength of the motivation. Killing a human is
therefore more consequential than kil ling an animal, killing an elephant
more consequential than killing an ant. Intention is of prime
importance in Buddhist theories, so that rubbing the back of one's
neck to find one has inadvertently killed a gnat does not constitute a
deed of killing. Yet a soldier in a n army bears the karma of murder
The Buddha 4 5
even if he himself kills no one in the battle because he is part of the
group responsible for the death . Of all possible sins, five are identified
as the most heinous, resulting in rebirth in the most tortuous
hell. They are ( 1 ) patricide, ( 2 ) matricide, ( 3 ) killing an arhat, ( 4 )
maliciously wounding the Buddha, and ( 5 ) causing schism in the
community of monks and nuns. These five deeds are not hypothetical.
The last three were committed by the Buddha's evil cousin, Devadatta .
His negative karma was so great that he did not even live out his life
before being reborn in hell but was swallowed by the earth .
What is particularly pernicious about the law of karma is that it
is not the weight of one's deeds in the present life that determines
one's future fate, despite the fact that it is quite common in Buddhist
depictions of hell to find the condemned standing before the Lord of
Death, who holds a loft a pair of scales. Instead, any "complete
action " (an action that fulfills certain criteria of intention and execution)
from any of one's innumerable past lives can serve as the
cause for an entire future lifetime. Thus, each being in the universe
bears the seeds for countless future births in saf!1siira. The deeds of
the present life are nonetheless crucial, for it is one's state of mind at
the moment of death that " selects " from the vast repository the particular
seed that serves as the cause of the next lifetime. Thus, Buddhists
are fond of saying that if you wish to know what you were
like in the past, look at your present body. That is, one's status as a
human is the sign of having performed an ethical act in the past, and
the specific conditions of one's body-one's beauty, health, and station-
are all the result of past deeds. If you want to know what you
will be in the future, look at your present mind. That is, your predominant
state of mind, whether it is inclined toward virtue or nonvirtue,
will be manifest at the moment of death, when the seed for
your next life will bear its fruit.
The vast store of karmic seeds carried by each being in the universe
creates the apparently infinite possibility for future rebirth.
Simply stopping action is therefore not a viable solution to the
dilemma of birth and death. The Buddha postulated that it was necessary
instead to put an end to the cause of action. These causes he
identified as the klesa, a term perhaps best rendered as "afflictions. "
These are negative states of mind such as pride, doubt, jealousy,
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
spite, miserliness, distraction, and resentment. Primary among these
are the " three poisons, " desire, hatred, and ignorance. These are the
states of mind that motivate the performance of the nonvirtuous
deeds that in turn produce suffering. Buddhist texts describe at
length which of the afflictions motivates which of the nonvirtues.
Stea ling can be motivated by desire or hatred, for example, sexual
misconduct by desire, hatred, or ignorance.
Of the three poisons, the most funda menta l, and hence the root
cause of all suffering, is ignorance. Ignorance in Buddhism does not
refer to a lack of knowledge but to an active misconception a bout
the nature of things. The various misconceptions under which
humans operate are sometimes summarized as the four perverse
views: seeing the impermanent as permanent, the ugly as beautiful,
the painful as pleasurable, and no-self as self. To counteract these
views, Buddhist texts are replete with descriptions designed to generate
a sense of revulsion toward the world, it being noted, for
example, that hair, teeth, and fingernails that seem so pleasing when
attached to the body become immediately repulsive when they
become detached from the body. One also finds detailed descriptions
of the process of digestion, sufficiently graphic to turn the
most dedicated gourmand away from the ta ble. The stomach is
descri bed as a cesspool and the body as a source of four secretions
( bile, phlegm, pus, and blood; the Buddha is said to lack the first
three ) . By developing a sense of revulsion toward food, one comes
to see that what one once thought was bea utiful is in fact ugly.
But such measures are forms of suppression. To uproot desire
entirely, one must overcome the final and most fundamenta l of the
four perverse views. The most powerfu l form of ignorance is to see
self where there is no self. The doctrine of no-self is certainly the
most famous and the most widely elaborated in Buddhist thought. It
seems that the Buddha rejected the doctrines current among other
renunciate philosophers of his day who saw the key to liberation
from suffering in the recognition of an eternal self or soul. For the
Buddha, it was the belief in self, the belief that a mong the various
constituents of mind and body there is something that lasts longer
than an instant, that is the cause of all suffering. The belief in self
engenders the desire that soothes the self and the hatred that proThe
Buddha 4 7
tects it. Desire and hatred then inspire the performance of nonvirtuous
deeds, which in turn produce the negative karma that create suffering.
Ignorance is thus the root cause of suffering. Consequently, if
ignorance could be eliminated, suffering would end.
The third truth descri bes not the path to the elimination of suffering
but the goal itself, described as cessation. This cessation, the
state of the utter absence of suffering, is better known as nirvaa.
Generally etymologized as " blowing out, " nirvaa is not technica lly
a place but instead an absence, the absence of suffering in the present
and the absence of any possibility of suffering in the future. All
suffering has been destroyed because the causes of suffering, the
afflictions, have been destroyed . Indeed, enlightenment is sometimes
said to consist of the twofold knowledge of the destruction of the
afflictions and the impossi bility of the afflictions arising again in the
future. The Buddha passed into nirvaa upon his death. When we
examine this momentous event from the vantage point of Buddhist
doctrine, it seems that at that moment the Buddha ceased to exist.
His enlightenment at the age of thirty-five had destroyed the seeds
for all future rebirth. Because he was from that moment utterly free
of ignorance, it was impossible for him to experience desire or
hatred and so could not perform deeds motivated by them. He
therefore produced no fu rther karma for the remainder of his life.
When the karma that served as the cause for his lifetime ran its
course, there were no more causes, either from a past life or from his
present life, for future rebirth.
Two types of nirvaa are thus described. The first is cal led the
"nirvaa with remainder. " This is the nirvaa that the Buddha
achieved under the Bodhi tree, when he destroyed all the seeds for
future rebirth. But the karma that had created his present life was
still functioning and would do so until his death, like a watch that
has been wound but will eventually stop. Thus, his mind and body
during the rest of his life are what was left over, the remainder, after
he realized nirvaa. The second type is called the " n irvaa without
remainder," or final nirvaa. This is the nirvaa that the Buddha
passed into upon his death. But where did he go ?
A Theravada text tells of a monk named Yamaka who announced
that the Buddha taught that a monk who has destroyed desire,
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
hatred, and ignorance no longer exists after his death . His position
was reported to Sariputra, who went to see the monk, explaining
that it is wrong to say that the monk ceases to exist when he enters
nirvaa because the monk does not exist prior to entering nirvaa .
To speak of the monk as someone who exists in one moment and
does not exist i n the next, to speak of the cessation of the monk, is
to assume that there is a monk, that there is a self, that the monk,
and hence the person, is something more than a collection of momentary
constituents, an aggregation of physical and mental components,
a series of causes and effects, coming into and going out of existence
in each instant. Nirvaa is not, therefore, the destruction of anything
or a place where someone goes but is, instead, the a bsence that
is created when all the causes of what might, for the sake of convenience,
be called the person, have been destroyed, when the last
effect has been produced and there are no causes left. This tension
between the notion of the person as an agent, capable of winning
salvation, and the notion of the person as a fiction, indeed a dangerous
fiction that is the source of all woe, would persist in one form or
another throughout the developments of Buddhist thought in Asia .
It would be stated perhaps most powerfully in the Diamond Sutra,
where the buddha-to-be, cal led a bodhisattva, is said to vow to lead
all beings into the final nirvaa, knowing that there are no beings to
be led to the final nirvaa .
The fourth truth is the path to nirvaa, the means of putting an
end to suffering. The path is described in many different ways, with
recourse, as always, to various lists. One of the most common delineations
of the path is in terms of the three trainings: in ethics, med itation,
and wisdom, each of which is considered essential to the
attainment of nirvaa.
Ethics (51/a) in this context refers to desisting from nonvirtuous
deeds of body and speech. The various vows that Buddhists take
will be discussed in deta il in the chapters on monastic life and lay
practice. In the context of the path, it is commonly stated that it is
impossible to control one's mind-the essential task of meditationuntil
one is able to control the coarser operations of body and speech.
One must therefore vigi lantly refrain from nonvirtuous deeds such
as killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, divisive speech, harsh
The Buddha 4 9
speech, and senseless speech. Such restraint, especially when it occurs
through keeping a vow, also serves to produce positive karma, necessary
for progress along the path.
Meditation (samadhi) in th is context refers to a state of concentration
in which the mind remains focused on a chosen object for an
extended period of time. Such mental sta bility occurs only as the
result of extensive training, for the mind in its ordinary state is out
of control, descri bed variously in Buddhist texts as a wild elephant
and a drunken monkey. The random and unintentional movement
of thought from one subject to another must be brought under control
through the practice of meditation. Here meditation, contra ry
to popular conceptions, is not a state of blissful trance but is instead
a laborious process of choosing an object of concentration, focusing
the mind on the object, and vigi lantly bringing the mind back to the
object whenever it wanders off. Buddhist texts wryly observe that in
the early stages of practice, distraction is interrupted by occasional
moments of meditation . Forty objects of concentration are traditionally
set forth, to be prescri bed depending on which of the afflictions
predominates. Those who are hateful should meditate on love,
those attached to the body should meditate on impermanence, those
who are prideful should meditate on causation, those who are distracted
should meditate on the breath. The ever-deepen ing states of
concentration that result from sustained focus on the chosen object
are delineated in great detail in Buddhist texts, resulting in a state of
concentration sometimes identified as serenity ( samatha ) . At this
point, the meditator is able to place the mind on the object and keep
it there indefinitely, with only the sl ightest effort. It is only at this
point that the mind has been turned into a suitable instrument with
which to investigate the nature of rea lity.
That reality is the absence of self, and it is the understanding that
there is no self that constitutes salvific wisdom (pra;na ) , the third of
the three trainings. This understanding is not easily ga ined. The
belief in self has been so deeply ingrained over countless lifetimes in
the past that the claim that there is no self seems at first to be counterintuitive.
In order to overcome the belief in self, therefore, it is
necessary to gain more than an intellectual understanding of its
nonexistence. One must gain a direct and nonconceptual realization .
s o T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
Stated more technically, it is impossible to destroy the seeds for
future suffering and rebirth until one understands the lack of self at
a deep level of concentration, specifically the level of serenity. This is
not to suggest that a conceptual understanding of no-self is without
benefit. In many traditions of Buddhist practice, such an understanding
is an essential prerequisite to any deeper realization. Texts
speak in fact of three types of wisdom. The wisdom arising from
hearing refers to the level of understanding that one can gain
through study; hearing in this context refers specifically to listening
to teachings but also extends to include reading. The second type is
the wisdom arising from thinking. Here, thinking refers to what one
would normally call meditation : the understanding that results from
a careful and systematic investigation carried out while seated in the
formal meditative posture. The third and highest form of wisdom is
the wisdom arising from meditation, where meditation refers specifically
to understanding conjoined with the deep level of concentration
known as serenity. Using this concentrated mind to understand
the absence of self produces a state called insight ( vipasyana ) . It is
only at this level that the seeds of suffering are destroyed, but it is
impossible (at least according to the gradualist approach ) to arrive
at this level of wisdom without passing through the other two.
The precise content of meditation on no-self varies among Buddhist
traditions but generally entails a systematic search among the
components of the body and the mind, seeking to find that autonomous
and substantial entity that we imagine the self to be. This
practice is described in chapter 6 . The assumption, of course, is that
a thorough investigation of the body and the mind will conclude ultimately
that there is no such self to be found, that the person is a collection
of impermanent moments of mind and body, constantly
breaking up like a hard rain on a stone courtyard . Th is very absence
of self is the true nature of the person, and a deep understanding of
the absence of self leads to the state of the absence of suffering called
mrvaJ:ta.
In the early traditions ( and in present-day Theravada ) , one is said
to pass through four stages in the path to nirvaJ:ta . The first is called
the stream-enterer, marked by the initial realization of the a bsence
of self at the level of deep concentration. This initial vision of nirvar:ta
The Buddha 5 1
destroys all seeds for future rebirth as an animal, ghost, or hell
being. One has entered the stream leading to nirvaa and will be
reborn a maximum of seven more times. The second stage is that of
the once-returner, who, as the name suggests, will be reborn in the
Desire Realm at most one more time before either entering nirvaa
or being reborn in a heaven of the Form Rea lm, whence he or she
will enter nirvaa. The third stage is cal led the never-returner, who
has destroyed all the seeds that would cause returning, that is, being
reborn, in the Desire Realm. The final stage is that of the arhat, a
term that means one who is worthy of worship. The arhat will enter
nirv:it:ta upon death . If one thinks of nirvaa as cessation, then an
arhat is one who achieves the cessation of the afflictions of desire
and hatred and then achieves the cessation of the aggregates at
death. These four stages may encompass severa l lifetimes, or they
may be completed in one, as the Buddha did when he passed
through the four stages in a single evening as he sat under the Bodhi
tree, rising the next morning as an arhat. It was considered possible
for laypeople to pass th rough the four stages, although in the Theravada
tradition it was stated that 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
incapable of supporting such a state of enl ightenment.
Another articulation of the fou rth truth, the truth of the path, is
the eightfold path, although this l ist is less importa nt than many
world rel igions textbooks would lead one to believe. The eight elements
are correct action, correct speech , correct livelihood, correct
view, correct mindful ness, correct meditation, correct intention,
and correct effort. These eight fit neatly under the th ree tra inings,
with correct action, correct speech, and correct livelihood fa lling
under the training in ethics; correct effort, correct mindful ness,
and correct meditation fa lling under the training in meditation;
and correct view and correct intention fa lling under the training in
wisdom.
The order of the four truths is the subject of much commentary.
The four occur in two pairs, and in each the effect is preceded by the
cause. Suffering is the effect of origin, and cessation is the effect of
the path. The first pai r is to be abandoned, the second pair is to
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
be adopted. The fact that the truths appear out of chronological
sequence, with the effect coming before its cause, is explained
through recourse to a medical model, in which the Buddha, in setting
forth the truths, is following the procedure of a physician. The
physician's first task is to recognize that illness is indeed present and
to identify it. This is precisely what the Buddha does in observing
that existence is qualified by suffering. The second step is to make a
diagnosis, to determine the source of the malady. In the second truth,
the truth of origin, the Buddha explains the sequence of causes, both
i mmediate and mediate, that give rise to suffering. The physician's
next task is to determine whether the disease is fatal or whether a
subsequent state of health is possible; that is, the physician makes a
prognosis. The third truth is the postulation of a state free from suffering,
called cessation or nirvaa. Once the prognosis is made, the
physician must prescribe the cure, the course of action that will lead
from sickness to health. The fourth and final truth of the path is said
to be the Buddha's prescription.
The doctrine of the four truths ill ustrates the central ity of the
notion of causation in Buddhist thought. Indeed, if it is possible to
identify a particular contribution of the Buddha to the phi losophies
of his day, it would be the thoroughgoing emphasis on causation as
an i nexorable force whose devastating effects can be escaped by
understanding its operation. That is, everything is an effect of a
cause. I f the cause can be identified and destroyed, the effect is also
destroyed . This is the meaning of the first two truths and why they
seem at first to be placed out of sequence. The first truth, suffering,
is the effect. Suffering must be recognized as such and its pernicious
quality acknowledged. It is then that the cause of suffering can be
identified, and this is the second truth, the truth of origin . And
within the second truth itself a sequence of suffering is set forth : the
immediate cause of suffering is negative karma, which in turn is
caused by desire and hatred, which in turn are caused by ignorance.
I f the root cause, ignorance, can be destroyed, the massive tree of
suffering is uprooted, never to grow again.
This insight seems to have been regarded as revolutionary, as the
story of Sariputra's conversion illustrates. Sariputra was a disciple
of another renunciate teaching the path to liberation when he encounThe
Buddha 5 3
tered one o f the Buddha's original disciples, Asvajit, on the road. He
noticed Asvajit's serene countena nce and stopped to ask him who
his teacher might be. Asvajit replied that his teacher was the Buddha
. When Sariputra went on to ask what it was that the Buddha
taught, Asvajit demurred, explaining that he had only recently
renounced the life of a householder and was incapable of presenting
the teaching in fu ll; he could only give a summary. Sariputra would
not be put off, however, and asked Asvajit to provide him with the
spirit of the Buddha 's teaching. Asvajit said, " For those things that
have causes, he has set forth the causes. And he has also set forth
their cessation. The great renunciate has so spoken . " According to
the story, by simply hearing these words, which to our ears may
hardly seem inspiring, Sariputra gained the first stage of insight into
nirvar:ta and became a stream-enterer. He went on to become the
wisest of the Buddha's disciples. And Asvaj it's summation became
perhaps the most famous statement in all of Buddhist literature.
Indeed, what may have begun, accord ing to the story, as something
simply to satisfy a persistent questioner so that Asvajit could continue
on his way, became a slogan and eventually a mantra, its very recitation
said to have healing powers. These words were often enshrined
in a stiipa, serving as a substitute for a relic of the Buddha .
Sariputra repeated this statement to his companion, Maudgalyayana,
who also became a stream-enterer upon hearing it. Together,
they became disciples, indeed, the two chief disciples of the Buddha,
with Sariputra renowned for his wisdom and Maudgalyayana for
his magical powers. Ma udgalyayana could perform intercelestial
travel as easily as a person bends his arm, and the tradition is replete
with the tales of his travels, flying to the Himalayas to find a medicinal
plant to cure the ailing Sariputra and bringing a sprig from the
Bodhi tree to be planted at the Jetavana monastery, even taking the
form of an eagle to defeat a great serpent whose vast hood had cast
the entire world i nto darkness. Yet Maudgalyayana's supernormal
powers, unsurpassed i n the world, were insufficient to overcome the
law of cause and effect and the power of his own karma, as the
famous tale of his death displays.
A group of naked ascetics resented the fact that the people of the
kingdom of Magadha had shifted their allegiance and patronage
5 4 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
from them to the Buddha and his followers, and they bla med
Ma udgalyayana, who had reported that in his celestial and infernal
travels he had observed deceased followers of the Buddha in heaven
and the followers of other teachers in hell. They hired a group of
bandits to assassinate the monk. When he discerned their approach,
the eighty-four-year-old monk made his body very tiny and escaped
through the keyhole. He eluded them in di fferent ways for six days,
hoping to spare them from committing the deed of immediate retribution
of killing an arhat. On the seventh day, Maudgalyayana temporarily
lost his supernormal powers, the residual karmic effect of
having brought a bout the death of his pa rents in a distant previous
lifetime. The bandits beat him merci lessly until his bones had been
smashed to the size of grains of rice and left him for dead. He then
soared into the air and into the presence of the Buddha, where he
paid his final respects and passed into nirvaa at the Buddha's feet.
T H E L A S T D A Y S O F T H E B U D D H A
The Buddha spent the forty-five years after his enl ightenment traveling
with a group of disciples from city to city, from village to village,
across northeastern India, teaching the dharma to those who would
listen, occasionally debating with ( and according to the Buddhist
sources always defeating) masters from other sects and gaining followers
from all social classes. Those who decided to go forth from
the household and become his disci ples joined what came to be
known as the sangha, the community of monks and nuns. Their
practice is descri bed in chapter 4. The majority of the Buddha's followers
did not renounce the world, however, and remained in lay
life. The Buddha also provided teachings for them, described in
cha pter 5. He taught the dharma both to the rich and to the poor, to
the powerful and the destitute, to gods and humans, and even to
nonhumans. The demoness Hariti kidna pped and devoured several
children every day in the city of Rajagha. The Buddha therefore
kidnapped her favorite among her five hundred children and hid
him in his begging bowl . When Hariti finally found him and
demanded his return, the Buddha asked her to consider how the
The Buddha 5 5
mothers of the city felt upon the loss of their only children, when
Hariti was so upset at losing only one of her five hundred. Hariti
agreed to desist yet needed another source of sustenance. The Buddha
instructed the monks to make daily offerings to Hariti and her
sons. Chinese travelers to ancient India report seeing a statue of
Hariti, holding an infant, in the dining halls of monasteries.
But not all were converted . Some launched intrigues aga inst the
Buddha and persecuted his followers. And some were unable to
benefit from his presence. Ananda, the Buddha's cousin and personal
attendant, once asked the Buddha to approach an old woman
and teach her the dharma . When the Buddha stood before her, she
turned her back; when he stood behind her, she turned forwa rd; when
he stood above her, she lowered her head. Finally she covered her face
with her hands. The Buddha explained that there are some people
whose past karma prevents them from even seeing the Buddha, much
less benefiting from his teaching. Yet three times each day and night
the Buddha surveyed the world with his omniscient eye to locate
those that he might benefit, often traveling to them, using his supernormal
powers to do so.
Others came to the Buddha. A young mother, distraught with
grief, brought her dead infant to the Buddha . Knowing of his great
powers, she begged him to bring her child back to life. He promised
to do so, saying that he only required a single mustard seed from a
household that had known no suffering. The woman set out from
door to door, asking for a mustard seed and hearing from each family
a different tale of sorrow. She slowly understood the universa lity
of suffering, laid her child to rest, and became a nun, eventually
a chieving nirvaJ: a.
Shortly before his own death, the Buddha remarked to A nanda,
apparently in passing, that a buddha can, if requested, extend his
life span for thousands of years. The Buddha reiterated this point a
second and then a third time, but Ananda, distracted by Mara,
failed to request that he do so. Mara then appeared and reminded
the Buddha of his promise to him, made shortly after his enl ightenment,
to pass into nirvar:ta when he had completed his instructions
in the dharma. The Buddha agreed to pass away three months
hence, at which point the earth quaked. Ananda was roused from
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
his meditation and asked the Budd ha the reason for the tremor. He
was told that there are eight reasons for an earthquake, one of
which was when a buddha rel inquishes the will to live. Ananda
immediately implored him not to do so, but the Buddha explained
that the time for such req uests had passed and criticized him for
missing the earlier suggestion; had he asked then, the Buddha would
have consented . The Buddha ever: reminded him that he had mentioned
this power of a buddha fifteen times in the past, and each
time Ananda had said noth ing.
At the age of eighty the Buddha accepted a meal from a blacksmith,
instructing the smith to serve only him and to bury the rest
of the meal without offering it to others. The Buddha contracted
dysentery shortly thereafter and lay down on his right side between
two trees, which immediately blossomed out of season . He instructed
the monk who was fanning him to step to one side, explaining that
he was blocking the view of the deities who had assembled to witness
his passing. He asked the five hundred disciples who had
assembled whether they had any last question or doubt. When they
remained silent, he asked a second time, and then a third. He then
decla red that none of them had any doubt or confusion, that they all
had achieved at least the level of stream-enterer and thus were destined
to ach ieve nirvaJ:ta. The Buddha then entered into meditative
absorption, passing from the lowest level to the highest, then from
the highest to the lowest, before entering the fourth level of concentration,
whence he passed into nirvaJ:ta.
The scene of the Buddha's passage into nirvaJ:ta is one of the most
widely depicted in Buddhist art, with the Buddha lying peacefully on
his right side, surrounded by all manner of humans, deities, and animals.
Those who have become arhats are distinguished by the serene
expressions on their faces; they know that all cond itioned thi ngs are
transitory. The others, the gods, the not yet enl ightened monks, the
laity, and the animals-even the mighty tiger-weep open ly. The
reason for thei r sorrow is often said to be their sense of loss at not
being able to hear, and thus benefit from, the Buddha's teachings
again. But one finds evidence of a more personal reverence of the
Buddha. Even in the apparently stoic tradition of the Theravada,
the most heartfelt devotion is expressed by the most serene of
The Buddha 5 7
monks. When Sariputra i s about to take his final leave o f the Buddha,
going home to teach his stubborn mother before he must die, he
embraces the Buddha's legs and says, "I have practiced the ten perfections
for one innumerable aeon and one hundred thousand
aeons so that I might worship these feet. "
The Buddha i s said to have instructed his followers to cremate his
body and distribute the relics that remained among various groups
of his followers, who were to enshrine them in hemispherical reliquaries
called stiipas. His body lay in a coffin for seven days before
being placed on a funera l pyre. No one, however, was able to set the
pyre a blaze. The Buddha's chief disciple, Mahakasyapa, had been
away at the time of his death . Upon his arrival, only he was able to
light the pyre. The relics were initially entrusted to one group, until
armed men from seven other regions arrived and demanded the
relics. In order to avert bloodshed, a monk intervened and divided
the relics into eight portions. Ten sets of relics were said to have
been enshrined, eight from portions of his remains, one from the
ashes left from the pyre, and one from the bucket that was used to
distribute the remains into eight parts. The king Asoka ( discussed in
chapter 5 ) is said to have gathered up the relics more than a century
later and enshrined them in eighty-four thousand stiipas.
The stiipa would become a reference point denoting the Buddha 's
presence in the landscape. Early texts and the archaeologica l records
link stiipa worship with the Buddha's life and especially the key
sites in his career. A standard list of eight shrines is recommended
for pilgrimage and veneration, located at the places of his birth,
his enlightenment, his first turning of the wheel of dharma, and his
death, as well as four cities where he performed miracles. For example,
a stiipa was located in Sarp.kasya, where the Buddha descended
to the world after teaching the dharma to his mother ( who died
seven days after his birth ) in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three. However,
stiipas are also found at places that were sacred for other reasons,
often associated with a local deity. Stiipas were constructed for
past buddhas and for prominent disciples of the Buddha. Indeed,
stiipas dedicated to disciples of the Buddha may have been especially
popular because the monastic rules stipulate that donations to such
stiipas became the property of the monastery, whereas donations to
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
stiipas of the Buddha remained the property of the Buddha, who
continued to function as a legal resident of most monasteries in
what was called " the perfumed chamber. " Like the Buddha, the
stiipa was regarded as a legitimate recipient of gifts, and rules prohi
bited these gifts from being converted to money and used for
other purposes.
Throughout the history of Buddhism and across the Buddhist
world, relics have been considered potent objects and have generated
strong reactions in their devotees and their dispa ragers. In 8 7 3
c.E., the Chinese emperor ordered that a portion o f a finger bone o f
the Buddha b e transported t o the capita l . According t o a contemporary
report, its arrival caused an outpouring of the most dramatic
devotions. A soldier amputated his left arm and held it before the
relic, while others cut off their hair and bit off thei r fingers. Stiipas,
then, were not considered to contain bits of ash and bone but were
said to contain the Buddha himself; the relics, deemed indestructible,
were described as infused with the virtues of a buddha . It is,
therefore, somewhat misleading to describe the stiipa as a substitute
for the Buddha; it was said that to see the stiipa is to see the Buddha.
The vicinity of a stiipa (or of a sacred site associated with the life of
the Buddha, such as Bodhgaya, the site of his enlightenment) was
considered an auspicious site for the entombment of the ashes of
both monks and laity; hundreds of minor stiipas have been discovered
around such sites. The stiipa, through the power of the Buddha
it contained, was believed to have the power to deliver into heaven
the dead whose names were inscribed there.
The potency of relics was even acknowledged by enemies of the
dharma. In I 5 6 I , the Portuguese conquered the kingdom of Sri
Lanka and captured its Buddhist king. The Portuguese viceroy
sailed back to his headquarters in Goa, on the western coast of
India, with his prisoner in velvet-covered chains. He also carried a
greater prize, indeed, the kingdom's most precious treasure, a tooth
of the Buddha, mounted in gold. The king of Pegu in Burma heard
of this great theft and sought its return. He sent a delegation to Goa,
offering a vast sum of gold to the Portuguese in return for the tooth.
The Portuguese, their treasury depleted, were inclined to accept the
offer until the archbishop intervened, protesting that returning the
The Buddha 5 9
tooth would further encou rage idolatry among the heathen, allowing
them to offer homage to a tooth, homage that is rightfully due
only unto God . An assembly of the officers of the military and the
church was convened, deciding in the end that the needs of the state
to replenish its treasury were outweighed by the need to prevent the
worship of false gods. The archbishop placed the tooth in a mortar
and smashed it to powder. After burning the powder in a brazier, the
ashes were cast into the river. Yet the tooth reappea red in Sri Lanka
and was captured by the British in I 8 I 5. The tooth relic of the Buddha
can be seen in Kandy today.
Stiipas and the relics they preserved were also pivotal in the social
history of Buddhism: these monuments became magnets attracting
monastery building and votive construction as well as local ritual
traditions and regional pilgrimages that produced rewards both spiritual
and material. Buddhist devotionalism at these centers generated
income for local monks, artisans, and merchants, an alliance
basic to Buddhism throughout its history. At these geogra phical
centers arrayed around the monument, diverse devotional exertions,
textual studies, and devotees' merca ntile pursuits could all prosper.
And new teachings were proclaimed in the shadow of the stupa.
T H E B O D I E S O F T H E B U D D H A
Although what might be deemed a biogra phy of the Buddha did not
appear until some six centuries after his death, the story recounted
above of the Buddha's life and death is genera lly accepted, albeit
with both major and minor additions and elisions, throughout the
Buddhist world. Where the various schools of Buddhism part company
is not so much on the events of the Buddha's life as on what he
taught, a question that has profound implications for their understanding
of the identity of the Buddha. Some four centuries after the
Buddha's death, we see the first textual references to something
called the Mahayana, the " Great Vehicle. " It may be an overstatement
to refer to the Mahayana as a self-conscious movement, at
least in its early centuries. It may be more accurate to speak of the
appearance of new texts that called themselves Mahayana siitras.
60 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
Regardless of its humble origi ns and, as we shal l see, its ambiguous
status in India, the Mahayana would go on to become of central
importance for the Buddhisms of China, Tibet, Mongolia, Korea ,
and japan.
The Mahayana seems to have begun with the production of texts,
texts that purported to be the authentic word of the Buddha, despite
the fact that they appeared centuries after his death . Their belatedness
is variously explained: some of the Mahayana siitras state that
the Buddha knew that what he taught in these siitras was so profound
that it would be misconstrued if it was widely disseminated to
the audience of his day. The siitras, once spoken by the Buddha and
recorded, therefore had to be spirited away, sometimes to a heaven,
sometimes to a cave, sometimes to a bejeweled casket at the bottom
of the sea guarded by dragons, to be held in safekeeping until the
time was ripe for their revelation. Other texts were divinely inspired,
miraculously heard, and committed to writing by a person endowed
with the power of clairaudience. It is difficult to say what it was that
spurred the explosion of writing that resulted in the Mahayana
siitras. Although the contents of the siitras are too diverse to be
regarded as in any way systematic, a number of apparently new
conceptions are to be found among their pages.
Perhaps the most important is a new conception of the Buddha.
No longer was the Buddha seen, if he had ever been after the first
generation of followers, as a human being who, having achieved
enlightenment, taught for forty-five years and passed into nirvar:ta
upon his death . One of the most important Mahayana siitras for
the new conception of the Buddha, the Lotus Satra (SaddharmaputJ.darlka
), explains that the Buddha only feigned his death. Knowing
that if he remained forever accessible to the world, his followers
would feel no sense of urgency a bout the need to escape from
rebirth themselves, the Buddha only pretended to pass into nirvar:ta.
His life span is, in fact, immeasurable. Furthermore, in the Lotus
Satra the Buddha explains that his six years of austerities, culminating
in his achievement of enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, were
merely a pretense. He had in fact become a buddha aeons before,
only pretending to become disillusioned with his princely life, only
pretending to give it all up, only pretending to strive diligently in the
The Buddha 6 1
quest for enlightenment. This was all a performance designed to
inspire the world.
It is not so much that the events of the Buddha's life are amended
in the Mahayana siitras but rather that they are reinterpreted . The
accounts of the Buddha include a host of human concerns; monks
fan the Buddha in the heat, wash his feet, rub his back, and bring
him medicine when he is sick. Ananda bri ngs the Buddha water to
wash his face and a stick to clean his teeth . Ananda ca rries messages
for the Buddha, assembles the monks at his request, and makes sure
that monks who come to visit the Buddha do not accidentally leave
any belongings behind. The Buddha begs for alms in a village and
departs having received nothing. What we might regard as human
moments are explained away in the Mahayana siitras as instances of
the Buddha's skillful means. The Buddha has no need for food beca use
he does not have an ordinary body. Yet he pretends to go emptyhanded
on his alms round so that when a monk in the future is also
unsuccessful, he might console himself with the thought that even
the Buddha sometimes had to go hungry.
Indeed, the trad ition seemed to have struggled with the identity
of the Buddha, with the Buddha's true nature, from early on. Early
scholastics speak of the Buddha having a physica l body and what
was called a " mind-made body " or an "emanation body, " a second
body that he used to perform miraculous feats such as visiting his
mother in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three on top of Mount Meru
after her death. The question was also raised as to whom precisely
the Buddhist should pay homage when honoring the Buddha. Was it
the physical body, which seems to have died of dysentery and then
was cremated, or the ashes being distributed among the followers
and entombed in stiipas? Or was it something less corruptible ? A
term was coined to descri be a more metaphorical body, a body or
collection of all of the Buddha's good qualities or dharmas: his wisdom,
his compassion, his fortitude, his patience. This corpus of
qualities was called the dharmakaya and was identified as the body
of the Buddha to which one turned for refuge.
All of this would be recast i n the Mahayana siitras. The emanation
body was no longer the body that the Buddha employed on special
occasions to perform supernatural feats. The emanation body
6 2. T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
was the only body that appeared in the world, the only body that
was visible to humans. It was the emanation body that was born as
a prince, it was the emanation body that went forth from the city in
the chariot. It was the emanation body that renounced the princely
life, it was the emanation body that achieved enlightenment and
taught the dharma to the world . That is, the Buddha that we know
is a magical display. Furthermore, the Buddha was not restricted in
his emanations to the resplendent form so familiar to us from Buddhist
iconography. He could appear as inanimate objects such as an
inspiring sentence or word, a cooling breeze, or a bridge across an
impassable river. The Buddha could appear in human form, especially
as a musician or an artist. The true buddha, the source of the
emanations, was the dharmakaya, a term that still referred to the
Buddha's transcendent qualities but, playing on the multivalence of
the term dharma, came to mean something perhaps more cosmic, an
eternal principle of enlightenment and ultimate truth, descri bed in
later Mahayana treatises as the Buddha's omniscient mind and its
profound nature of emptiness.
The doctrine of the bodies of the Buddha was not simply a theological
innovation; it was to be put to a wide range of other uses
beyond Buddhist India, perhaps most famously in Ti bet. With the
decline of the Tibetan monarchy in the ninth century, both politica l
and religious authority ( although the strict distinction between the
two should not be immediately assumed in many Buddhist societies )
shifted gradually to Buddhist teachers. Since many of these teachers
were Buddhist monks who had taken vows of celi bacy, the problem
of succession arose. In some cases, authority was passed from a
monk to his nephew. However, by the fourteenth century ( and perhaps
even earlier), a form of succession developed in Ti bet that,
although supported by standard Buddh ist doctrine, seems unique in
the Buddhist world. It was asserted that great teachers could determine
their next rebirth and that the new incarnations of past teachers
could be identified as young children.
Tibetans chose the term for a body of a buddha to name this
notion of incarnation . That is, the next incarnation of a former
great teacher is called a tulku, (sprul sku ) , the Ti betan translation of
nirma,akaya, " emanation body. " The implication is that there is a
The Buddha
profound difference in the processes whereby ordinary beings and
incarnate lamas take birth in the world. For the former, rebirth is a
harrowing process, a frightful journey into the unknown, a process
over which one has no control. One is blown by the winds of karma
into a new lifetime. The rebi rth of an incarnate lama is a very di fferent
matter. As "emanation bodies, " incarnate lamas are technically
buddhas, free from the bonds of karma. Their rebirth is thus entirely
voluntary. They need not be reborn at all, yet they decide to return to
the world out of their compassion for others. Furthermore, they
exercise ful l control over their rebirth. For ordinary beings, rebirth
must take place within forty-nine days from the time of death .
Incarnate lamas are under no such constraints. For ordinary beings,
the circumstances of the rebirth-the place, the parents, the form of
the body, and the ca pacity of the mind-are all determined by
karma. For the incarnate lama, all of these are matters of choice and
are said to have been decided in advance so that a dying incarnation
will often leave instructions for his disciples as to where to find his
next rebirth.
Since the fourteenth centu ry, all sects of Ti betan Buddhism have
adopted the practice of identifying the successive rebirths of a
great teacher, the most famous instance being, of course, the Dalai
Lamas. But there are some three thousand other lines of incarnation
i n Tibet (only a few of whom are female ) . The institution of
the incarnate lama has proved to be a central component of
Tibetan society, providing the means by which authority and
charisma, i n all of their symbolic and material forms, are passed
from one generation to another. Indeed, the spread of Ti betan
Buddhism can usefully be traced by the increasingly la rge geographical
areas in which inca rnate lamas are discovered, extending
today to Europe and North America . It is important to note, however,
that this system did not solve all of the more material problems
of succession . Many of the more bloody events i n the history
of Tibetan Buddhism occurred in intrasectarian rivalry over the
disposition of the power and property of a powerfu l lama, the
point of contention often being whether that power and property
should be passed to a family member or a chief disciple, or to the
lama's next incarnation .
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
Along with additional bodies of the Buddha, the Mahayana si"Itras
also revealed the presence of multiple universes, each with its own
buddha . These universes, sometimes called buddha fields, sometimes
called pure lands, were described as abodes of extravagant splendor,
luxuriant gardens where the trees bore a fruit of jewels, the birds sang
verses of the dharma, and the inhabitants devoted themselves to its
practice. These buddha fields, described in detail in certain sutras,
became preferred places for future rebirth, and the buddhas who
presided there became objects of devotion, especially the buddha of
infinite light, Amitabha, and his Land of Bliss called Sukhavati . Some
pure lands were accessible only to those far advanced on the path,
and there the buddhas appeared in yet a third form ( i n addition to the
emanation body and the dharma body). This was the enjoyment body
(sambhogakaya ) , the form of a youthful prince adorned with the
thirty-two major marks and eighty minor marks of a superman .
H I NAY A NA A N D M A H AYA N A
W h y is it that the Buddha merely seemed t o achieve enlightenment
under the Bodhi tree, that he merely seemed to enter nirvaa, that
he merely seemed to teach that nirvaa was the cessation of the
mind and the body ? The Mahayana sutras were clearly seeking to
recast the person of the Buddha and the structure of his path. But
such a revision had also to take into account the earlier tradition,
what the Buddha had already taught, the path of the arhat that culminated
in nirvaa. In the Lotus Satra, the Buddha tells of a group
of travelers who set out for a distant city, led by an experienced
guide. At the end of a long journey they reach their destination, only
to be told the next morning that they must go farther, that they have
not yet reached their goal . The guide reveals, in fact, that the city in
which they had spent the night was an illusion, a city he had conj
ured as a way station on their long path; i f he had revealed to them
from the outset that the road was so long and the goal so distant,
the travelers never would have set out in the first place. The travelers
are those who seek enlightenment, their guide is the Buddha. Knowing
that the goal of h ighest enlightenment, buddhahood, is far away,
The Buddha
too distant for some to seek, he fa bricates an easier goa l, called
nirvat:J.a, on which some can set their sights. But this nirvar:ta is an
illusion, it does not exist, it is not the final goal.
By the time that sutras like the Lotus were composed, three different
paths seem to have been delineated and accepted by various
schools of Indian Buddhism. The first and most common was the
path of the sriivaka, litera lly, " the listener, " the disciples of the
Buddha who li stened to his teachings and put them i nto practice.
The sravaka path passed through the stages of stream-enterer, oncereturner,
and never-returner, culminating in the stage of the arhat,
who passed into nirvar:ta at death . The second path was that of the
pratyekabuddha, the " solitary enlightened one. " This term appears
to apply to a distinct group among the early followers who preferred
not to live communally with other monks but who practiced
in solitude, often in silence. They achieved the same nirvar:ta and
passed through the same stages as the sravaka but did not rely on
the teachings of the Buddha (at least, according to some renditions,
during their last lifetime ) . They were said to achieve enlightenment
during the time when the teachings of a buddha were not present in
the world. And having achieved enl ightenment, they did not speak
of the path to others.
The third of the three paths was the path of the bodhisattva.
The term, variously interpreted, seems to mean one who aspires to
enlightenment. The Buddha often uses the term to refer to himself in
the period prior to his enlightenment, "when I was a bodhisattva . "
In the story o f the Buddha's past lives, the bodhisattva i s a person
who encounters the teachings of a buddha and is fully capable of
becoming an arhat i n that very lifetime. But rather than becoming
an arhat, the bodhisattva decides to delay his liberation in favor of a
greater good. Recognizing that there will come a time when the
teachings of Buddhism will have disappeared from the world, when
the world will be bereft of a path to liberation, the bodhisattva vows
to follow the long path to buddhahood so that he may u ncover the
path to nirvar:ta and show it to the world, after it has been long forgotten.
In the Theravada tradition, this vision of the bodhisattva is found
in the story of Sumedha. Four countless aeons and one hundred
6 6 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
thousand aeons ago, there lived a brahmin named Sumedha who,
real izing that beings are subject to birth, aging, sickness, and death,
set out to find a state beyond death . He retired into the mountains,
where he lived the life of a renunciate and gained yogic powers.
Flying through the air one day, he looked down and saw a great
crowd gathered around a teacher. Sumedha descended and asked
who this teacher might be and was informed that he was the buddha
Dlpaq1kara . When he heard the word buddha he was overcome
with j oy. As Dlpaq1kara approached, Sumedha loosened his long
matted locks and lay down in the mud to make a bridge across the
mud for the Buddha . As he lay there awaiting the arrival of the
Buddha, Sumedha reflected that he had the capacity in that very lifetime
to practice the teachings of Dlpaq1kara and become an arhat,
thereby freeing himself from birth and death . But he concluded that
rather than crossing the ocean of suffering alone, he would postpone
his li beration by following the longer, nobler path to buddhahood;
as a buddha he could lead many across the ocean to the
further shore. Dlpaq1kara stopped before Sumedha's prone form
and announced that many aeons hence this austere yogin with matted
locks would become a buddha . Dlpaq1kara went on to prophesy
the details of the lifetime in which Sumedha would become a buddha:
who his parents would be and who his disciples. He foretold of
the tree under which he would sit on the eveni ng he achieved
enlightenment. In his last lifetime, the Buddha predicted, his name
would be Gautama.
The commentary to this story enumerates the qualifications
Sumedha fulfilled to become a bodhisattva, qualifications that, by
implication, anyone who wishes to become a bodhisattva must meet
according to the Theravada. In the lifetime in which the vow to
become a buddha is first made, ( r ) he must be a human, ( 2 ) he must
be a male, ( 3 ) he must be able to achieve liberation in that lifetime,
( 4 ) he must make the vow in the presence of a living buddha, ( 5 ) he
must be a renunciate, ( 6 ) he must possess yogic powers, ( 7 ) he must
be capable of sacrificing his life, and ( 8 ) he must have great zeal.
This extraordinary person, having made the vow to achieve buddhahood
for the sake of others and whose destiny has been confirmed
by the prophecy of a buddha, sets out on a long and arduous
The Buddha
path of thousands of lifetimes to become a buddha in a time when
the teachings of the previous buddha have been long forgotten .
What distinguishes the bodhisattva from the sravaka in the early
tradition and in the Theravada of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia,
then, is not so much the goal of nirvar:ta but the path by which they
find it. The sravaka relies on the teachings of the Buddha, but the
bodhisattva must rely only on himself, for there is no buddha to
teach him. The bodhisattva has, therefore, a much more difficult
task, and his path is consequently much longer. In order to empower
himself to find the city of nirvar:ta when the path to it has become
overgrown, the bodhisattva perfects himself over millions of lifetimes
through the practice of virtue, motivated always by compassion.
Because he had a full memory of the past, the Buddha would
recount stories of his past lives. These jataka, or " birth stories, " are
among the most popular in all of Buddhist literature. In many of his
past lives, the Buddha was an animal; as a rabbit, he throws himself
into a fire to provide a meal for a starving sage. As an elephant, he
encounters seven hundred men lost and starving in the desert. The
elephant directs the men to a mountain in the distance, at the foot of
which they will find the carcass of an elephant that they can eat. He
then runs ahead to the mountain and j umps from its summit. As a
prince, he commits suicide by throwing himself off a cliff so that a
hungry tigress can feed her cubs. As a merchant, he and five companions
are shipwrecked and doomed to drown, when he reca lls
that the ocean will not bear a dead body but will cast it upon the
shore. Instructing his five companions to hold on to him, he slits his
own throat. Finally, in his last life, Prince Siddhartha completed the
path, passing through the four stages during the night of his enlightenment,
to become an arhat himself and to enter nirvar:ta at death .
The bodhisattva and the sravaka di ffer, then, not in the goal that
they reach but in the difficulty and length of their paths, the bodhisattva
being the extraordinary person, unique in each age, to find
the path to nirvar:ta through his own efforts and teach it to the
world. So long as the teachings of this new buddha remain in the
world, there is no need for another buddha, for the path to nirvar:ta
is known. This appears to have been the view of the bodhisattva
prior to the rise of the Mahayana. It remained the view of the
6 8 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
dozens of non-Mahayana schools of Indian Buddhism, schools that
some scholars refer to collectively as " mainstream Buddhism . " And
it remains the view of the bodhisattva in the Theravada school of Sri
Lanka and Southeast Asia .
And this is the story that many of the Mahayana siitras seek to
retell. In the Lotus Satra, the Buddha tells of a great mansion in a
state of decay. Its walls are crumbling, its pillars are rotten, and it
has become inhabited by all manner of vermin. Inside the house,
th ree children are playing. Suddenly the house catches fire. The children's
father calls to them to come out, but they are so absorbed in
their games that they ignore him. Finally, in desperation, knowing
what they most want, he tells them that he has three carts waiting
outside, a goat-drawn cart for one, a deer-drawn cart for another,
an ox-drawn cart for the third. Delighted, the children run from the
house to safety, where they find not three carts but one, a magnificent
chariot drawn by a great white ox, festooned with ga rlands of
flowers. The burning house is, of course, sa11sara . The children represent
all beings, their father the Buddha. Absorbed in the transient
pleasures of the world, beings are oblivious to the impending doom
that surrounds them. The Buddha knows, however, that sentient
beings have different interests and dispositions. He therefore tells
them that there are three vehicles, the vehicle of the sravaka, the
vehicle of the pratyekabuddha, and the vehicle of the bodhisattva . It
is only when they have turned away from sa11sara that he tells them
there are not three vehicles, that there is, in fact, only one, the great
vehicle, the vehicle of the Buddha. In the Lotus Satra, which according
to historians was composed centuries after the Buddha's death,
the Buddha declares that his earlier teaching of the nirvaa of the
arhat and the path to it had been a pretense, an expedient measure
taken to attract the attention of those initially incapable of aspiring
to the only goal there is, the goal of buddhahood . Thus, the Lotus
declares (although not all Mahayana siitras would agree, as discussed
in chapter 3) that there is only one final vehicle that everyone,
even those who have already followed the other path to
become arhats, will eventually mount, the great vehicle, which will
take them along the bodhisattva path to buddhahood. After telling
the parable of the burning house, the Buddha makes a prophecy
The Buddha
that the wisest of the snivakas, Sariputra , will become a buddha,
and soon all the arhats in the audience are clamoring for prophecies
of their own future enlightenment.
The Buddha's skillful methods are such that he does not always
teach what is ultimately true but what is most useful at the moment.
Indeed, in other texts it is said that when an audience gathers to
hear a discourse of the Buddha, each person hears what is most
appropriate for him or her, spoken in their own language, and each
person in the vast audience thinks that they are receiving private
instruction from the Buddha.
But the Buddha's skillful means serve not only as a means of
inclusion. It is also a means of accounting for and incorporating
what had come before. The earlier tradition-at least those elements
within it at odds with a particular Mahayana sutra and those who
may not accept a particular Mahayana sutra as authentic-is thus
dismissed and sometimes referred to ( although not in the Lotus
Satra) as the Hlnayana, a word often daintily rendered in English as
the " Lesser Vehicle . " But hlna is a pejorative term in Sanskrit, meaning
base, discarded, mean, and low. And Hlnayiina came to be used
as a term of derision; it did not refer to any historically identifiable
school or sect, even by another name. It is therefore most definitely
not some kind of equivalent for the modern Theravada school of Sri
Lanka and Southeast Asia, nor does it function adequately as a general
term for as many as thirty-four defunct Indian Buddhist schools.
It was an insult available to be hurled at any number of apparent
opponents, a term particularly vitriolic perhaps beca use it arose
within rather than between communities.
What conditions could account for such rancor? The historical
record is scant, but one might imagine that i n the centuries after the
Buddha's death, the legacy of the Buddha, both doctrinal and social,
came under the control of powerful monasteries and their patrons.
What came to be called the Mahayana might have begun as a number
of local reactions against the monastic establishment, reactions
in which certai n monks and nuns joined with the laity to produce
new texts that offered a different vision, a different ideal, a different
aspiration. The Mahayana, if it was a movement at all, was certainly
not anticlerical. There is some evidence to suggest that some
70 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
of its texts were associated with stii pas. As discussed above, these
monuments that held the sanctified remnants of the teacher became
important pilgrimage sites as well as sites for the burial and enshrinement
of the pious. One might imagine that the stiipas would provide
a place where new teachers could teach, where new texts could be
recited . Telling tales of the compassionate deeds of the bodhisattva,
the new teachers might predict that mem bers of the audience would
also, if they only accepted this or that new siitra as the word of the
Buddha, become bodhisattvas and even buddhas themselves. One
might imagine that such prophecies had a special potency, transforming,
as they would, an ordinary life into the past life of a future
buddha. In order for these new siitras to ga in authority-and it is
often appropriate to think of each new siitra as its own Mahayana
with its own community of people who had vowed to undertake the
more arduous bodhisattva path-they would have to defend themselves
against charges of fraud and fa brication brought aga inst them
by the monastic esta bl ishment.
These charges must have been widespread, for they even make
their way into the Mahayana siitras themselves. A siitra will often
begin with someone rising from the assembly to reverently ask a
question, sometimes a question as simple as why the Buddha is smiling.
The Buddha will often give a short answer and then will be
asked to elaborate, with his answer forming the body of the siitra .
In certain Mahayana siitras, there is a strange interlude in which a
group of monks rises and leaves before the Buddha begins his discourse.
The most famous case occurs in the Lotus Satra, when a
group of five thousand monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen exit as
the Buddha is about to deliver the true dharma. This literary device
is genera lly interpreted to represent those members of the contemporary
community who rejected the teachings of the Lotus. In
another siitra, various members of the audience attain various levels
of progress on the path after the Buddha's teaching, but five hundred
monks, accomplished in meditation, rise and leave because
they have not comprehended what the Buddha had taught. The
Buddha explains to Ananda that in a past life they had been fol lowers
of a non-Buddhist teacher and had listened to a discourse of a
previous buddha with contempt.
The Buddha 7 1
Indeed, we find Ma hayana texts for the next millennium defending
the Mahayana as the authentic word of the Buddha. A si xth-century
text, the Blaze of Reasoning ( Tarkajvala ) by Bhavaviveka, listed
the charges brought by the sravakas, including that the Mahayana
siitras were not to be found in the compilations of the word of the
Buddha; that the Mahayana contradicts the teaching that all conditioned
phenomena are impermanent by claiming that the Buddha is
permanent; that beca use the Mahayana teaches that the Buddha did
not pass into nirvar:ta, it implies that nirvar:ta is not the final state of
peace; that the Mahayana belittles the arhats; that it pra ises bodhisattvas
above the Budd ha; that the Mahayana perverts the entire
teaching by claiming the Buddha was an emanation .
The defenses of the authenticity of the Mahayana as the word of
the Buddha are many. They center often on the function of the
siitras, claiming, for example, that the Mahayana is an effective antidote
to the afflictions of desire, hatred, and ignorance and therefore
must have been taught by the Buddha. It is also claimed that the
Mahayana siitras most effectively set forth the path to buddhahood
for all beings, a goa l, it should be noted, set forth only in the
Mahayana siitras. That this defense, or perhaps better, defensiveness,
of the Mahayana, persists into some of the last treatises preserved
from Indian Buddhism suggests that when we step back from the
rhetoric of the Mahayana and turn instead to its practice in India,
two things seem clear. First, the Mahayana was never a self-conscious
" school" of Indian Buddhism, in the sense of an institution of
individuals committed to a set of doctrinal principles. Rather than a
wholesale substitution for forms of earlier Buddhist practices, the
Mahayana appears to be a rather vague supplement to them. For
example, there was no sepa rate monastic code for Mahayana monks.
This makes the term Mahayana very difficult to define with any precision.
One can perhaps do no better than the rather tautological
description of the Chinese pilgrim Yij ing, who wrote in his 6 9 1
Record of Buddhist Practices, "Those who worship the bodhisattvas
and read the Mahayana siitras are called the Mahayana, while those
who do not perform these are called the Hinayana. "
The second point to be suggested is that the Mahayana may have
remained a minority movement throughout its history in India. As
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
we know from h istories of various Christian sects, the mere bulk
of literary output is not a relia ble measure of popula rity; it may
i ndeed suggest the opposite. Chinese pilgrims report that the populations
of the great monasteries were mixed, with the devotees of
the Mahayana i n the mi nority. We know, of course, of the su bsequent
ascendancy of the Mahayana outside India, i n China, japan,
Korea, and Tibet. But the Mahayana may have been better esta blished
abroad even in the last centuries of Indian Buddhism. The
great Bengal i master Atisa undertook a perilous sea voyage to
Sumatra in order to receive Mahayana teachings unavaila ble in
India. Atisa would eventually leave India permanently i n order to
teach the dharma i n Ti bet, arriving there in 1 04 2 . Yet one wonders
why the monk regarded as the greatest Buddhist scholar i n India
(at least as described by the Ti betans, who had a certa in self-interest
i n such a description ) would have left a prominent post at the
monastery of Vikramasila in order to go and teach in what his
abbot descri bed as " the yak pen " of Ti bet. As one scholar has
descri bed it, the situation would be somewhat akin to Einstein
leaving his post at Princeton to accept a professorship at the University
of the Andaman Islands. It is not to demean in the least
Atisa's storied compassion to say his decision makes greater sense
if one considers the possibility that the condition of Mahayana
Buddhism i n India in the eleventh centu ry was not strong enough
to induce him to stay.
T H E B O D H I S A T T V A
In order to become a bodhisattva, one must develop bodhicitta, literally,
" the aspiration to enlightenment. " It is glossed to mean the
commitment to achieve buddhahood in order to liberate all sentient
beings from suffering, a commitment made i n the form of a vow.
The most famous version of the bodhisattva vow in East Asia was
articulated by the Chinese monk Zhiyi: " Sentient beings are numberless.
I vow to ferry them across [the ocean of saqtsara ] . Delusion
is inexhaustible. I vow to uproot it completely. The gates of the
dharma are endless. I vow to enter them all. The way of the Buddha
The Buddha 7 3
i s unsurpassed . I vow t o actualize it. " In such a form ulation, the
goal is the liberation of all beings from suffering; buddhahood is
simply seen as the best means for its ach ievement. As Nagarj una
wrote, "Thus far, other than the aspiration to enlightenment, the
buddhas have perceived no other way in the world to achieve one's
own and others' welfare . " Three routes are described. The vow of
the bodhisattva is construed according to the simile of the king, who
assumes the powers of a buddha and then leads all beings to enlightenment;
or the simile of the ferryman, who arrives simu ltaneously
with his passengers at the further shore of buddhahood; or the simile
of the shepherd , who follows his flock into the shelter of the pen
and closes the gate behind him. The bodhisattva leads all beings to
buddhahood before becoming a buddha himself.
Bodhicitta is not, then, simply a feeling of pity or compassion,
although these are its prerequisites; it is the active wish to free all
beings from suffering. Buddhist texts do not seem to regard this
wish as somehow natural or spontaneous. It is represented instead
as something that must be cultivated, and various techniques are set
forth to this end.
One technique derives from the doctrine of rebirth. Based on the
belief that the cycle of rebi rth is beginningless and that the number
of beings in the universe is vast yet finite, it is possible to conclude
that, over the long course of saq�sara, one has been in every possible
relationship with every other being in the universe. Each human,
animal, insect, hell being, god, and ghost has been one's friend and
foe, ally and adversa ry, protector and assailant, savior and murderer.
The story is often told of the monk Sariputra encountering a
wo man with a baby on her lap, eating a piece of pork. When a dog
approaches, she kicks it away. Sariputra weeps at the sight, explaining
that through his knowledge of the past he sees that the woman is
eati ng the flesh of a pig that had been her fa ther in its past life. The
d og had been her mother. Her parents had been murdered by an
ene my who had died and been reborn as the woman's child, now
coddled on her lap.
In the technique for developing bodhicitta, one relationship
among all others is singled out: that of mother and child. Every
being in the universe has been one's human mother in a past life.
7 4 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
This relationship is presumably chosen because it is universaL
Although everyone in the universe has also been one's child, not
everyone has been a parent in this lifetime. But everyone has been a
child, and everyone has had a mother. One is i nstructed to see every
being that one encounters as having been one's mother in a past life,
to the point that this is the first thought that one has when meeting
someone. All of the sacrifices that the mother makes for the child
are descri bed i n poignant detail, noting that, after all of the pain and
discomfort the child causes for the mother during the months of
pregnancy, it is surprising that the mother does not simply discard
the child when it ultimately emerges from the womb. I nstead, she
treats the child with great love, sacrificing her own health for its
welfare, patiently teaching it to walk and to talk, such that every
step one takes and every word one speaks for the rest of one's life is
the direct result of the mother's kindness.
The meditator is then instructed to imagine his or her own mother,
grown old and blind, gone mad, carrying a great burden on her
back, and staggering toward an abyss. What kind of child, they ask,
would not run to rescue its mother? Perhaps a mother's ability to
create guilt i n her child is as universal as the experience of childhood.
The mother is old because she has been reborn endlessly over
the long course of saf!1sara, the cycle of birth and death . She is
blinded by ignorance and crazed by desire and hatred . She ca rries
on her back the burden of all of her past actions and staggers
toward rebirth as an animal, ghost, or hell being. It is assumed that
any child would rush to its mother's aid in such a situation, seeking
to relieve her of her present suffering and preventing her from
undergoing further suffering in the future. Accordi ng to the prescription,
it is at this point that the meditator develops not only the
wish that all beings will be freed from suffering but also the conviction
to effect that li beration oneself. Having surveyed all of the possible
means to benefit others, one should conclude that buddhahood
affords the ultimate opportunity for benefit to others, both because
of a buddha's extraordinary powers and because of a buddha's
u n ique pedagogica l skills. As a siitra stares, " Buddhas neither
wash sins away with water, nor remove the sufferings of beings
with their hands. They do not transfer their realizations to others.
The Buddha 7 5
Beings a re freed through the teaching of the truth . " When this
wish to become a buddha i n order to free all beings from suffering
becomes spontaneous, such that it is equally strong whether one is
standing, sitting, wa lking, or lying down , one has become a bodhisattVa.
Another argument for compassion is offered b y the eighth-century
Indian poet Santideva, who begins by declaring that all the suffering
in the universe is caused by what he calls the self-cherishing attitude,
that all pa in, from the most trivial to the most tortuous, from the
most private to the most global, can be traced back ultimately to the
wish to promote one's own welfare over that of others. This selfcherishing
derives from the false belief in self, the ignorance that
motivates desire and hatred, which in turn motivate the nonvirtuous
deeds that bring about suffering, both now and in the future. All
happiness, on the other hand, is the result of cherishing others,
putting the welfa re of others before one's own . Therefore, paradoxically,
it is in one's own best interests to abandon concern for one's
own welfare. Santideva thus counsels what he calls the exchange of
self and other, in which the neglectful attitude with which one has so
long regarded others is now di rected to the self, and the sense of
care and protection with which one has regarded oneself is now
transferred to others. He argues that " self" is simply an arbitrary
designation and that the sense of identification with a body that has
arisen from the physical constituents of others-one's parents-is
simply a matter of habit. If one can regard this impersonal body as
"I," why can 't one come to rega rd the bodies of others as " I " and
protect them as one now protects this body?
He compares the situation of the beings in saf!1sara to that of the
Buddha. The former have been maniacally seeking their own happiness
over countless lifetimes, yet they still encounter only suffering.
The Buddha, on the other hand, at some point in the past decided to
abandon his own welfare and seek the happiness of others. " Look
at the difference between them, " says Santideva. By abandoning his
own welfare, the Buddha has found perfect freedom and happiness.
By seeking their own welfare, others have found only pain. This
would suggest that the great emphasis on compassion that one finds
in Buddhist texts does not imply the existence of a purely altruistic
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
act in which the actor derives no benefit; Santideva 's argument
seems to rest at times on the conclusion that unless he is compassionate,
he will burn in hell . Instead, dedication to the welfare of
others is promoted as the most effective means of gaining true happiness
for oneself. The current Dalai Lama sometimes calls this
"wise selfishness . "
Santideva distinguishes between two forms o f bodhicitta, the aspirational
and the practical, which he likens to the decision to make a
journey and actually embarking on the path. This second type, practical
bodhicitta, is generally set forth in terms of what are known as
the six perfections, the bodhisattva deeds. Both in the mainstream
schools and in the Mahayana, the bodhisattva was regarded as a person
of extraordinary dedication, someone who could fol low the
much shorter path of the arhat and escape from sasara but who
eschewed this lesser goal in order to seek the far more difficult and
lofty goal of buddhahood out of compassion for the world. In the
ancient mainstream schools and the modern Theravada, this
involved vowing to become a buddha when there was no buddha in
the world to teach the dharma; the bodhisattva would thus have to
find the path to nirva�:ta on his own.
In the Mahayana delineations of the path, it was said that there
were two obstacles to overcome on the path to enlightenment. The
first were called the obstructions to l i beration. These were the afflictions
of desire, hatred, and ignorance, and anyone who sought liberation
from rebirth by either the Hinayana or Mahayana path
must destroy them with wisdom. More subtle and difficult to overcome
were the obstructions to omniscience, subtle and deeply
ingrained forms of ignorance that caused objects to appear falsely
and that prevented the simultaneous knowledge of all phenomena in
the universe. Bodhisattvas sought to destroy not only obstructions
to l iberation, as the arhat did, but the obstructions to omniscience
as wel l . To ach ieve this more difficult task, the bodhisattva would
require great stores of virtue as sustenance over the billions of lifetimes
of practice that compose the path to buddhahood. These
virtues were called the perfections. Ten ( and sometimes thirty) are
listed in some Theravada texts, but the classic formulation is of six:
giving, ethics, patience, effort, concentration, and wisdom.
The Buddha 7 7
Giving is the abil ity to give sentient beings whatever they require,
and there are numerous tales of bodhisattvas giving away their bodies
to those who request them. For example, a wise and virtuous
king was approached by five brahmins who asked him for a meal.
When the king agreed to provide it, the brahmins assumed their true
form as cannibal-vampires, informing the king that they only ate
human flesh and blood . The king kept his promise to feed them,
over the protests of his ministers. The king was the Buddha in a previous
life. The five vampires were his first five disciples, receiving
here the gift of his flesh, receiving later the gift of the dharma.
Ethics in Buddhism generally refers to the keeping of vows.
Although those who aspired to the bodhisattva path were often
monks, ordination as a monk or a nun was not deemed a requirement.
The most important of all vows for the bodhisattva is the
commitment to achieve buddhahood for the sake of all beings in the
universe. But beyond this central vow, a sepa rate set of vows was
formulated for bodhisattvas ( descri bed in cha pter 4 ) .
Patience i s the ability both t o withstand the difficulties encountered
on the path and to forbear mistreatment by others. Numerous
tales are told of the bodhisattva 's extraordinary patience. A drunken
king awoke to find his female attendants seated at the feet of a sage.
The king demanded to know what doctrine he preached, and the
sage replied that he preached patience. The king asked him to define
patience, and the sage replied that patience is not becoming angry
when struck or a bused . Determined to test the sage's commitment to
his teaching, the king had him lashed with thorns and then, in turn,
had his executioner cut off the sage's hands, then his feet, then his
nose, and then his ears. Each time he asked the sage what he
preached, and the sage replied that he taught patience, and patience
was not to be found in his amputated extremities. Before he died,
the sage wished the king a long life. The Buddha had been that sage
in a previous life. Indeed, it is said that if the Buddha were flanked
by two people, one of whom was massaging his right arm with fragrant
oils and another who was stabbing his left arm with a knife,
he would regard the two equally.
Santideva offers an interesting argument for patience and against
anger. When someone strikes us with a stick, do we become angry at
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
the stick or the person wielding the stick ? Both are necessa ry for
pain to be inflicted, but we feel anger only for the agent of our pa in,
not the instrument. But the person who moves the stick is himself
moved by anger; he serves as its instrument. If we are directing our
anger against the root cause of the pain, we should therefore direct
our anger against anger. He also notes that, according to the law of
karma, everything unpleasant that happens to us is the result of our
own past deeds. Therefore, the person who harms us is in fact only
the unwitting conduit of our own past nonvirtue, returning in the
form of feel ings of pain. And as a result of harming us, the other
person will himself or herself incur negative karma for which he or
she will have to suffer in the future. If we respond with anger, we are
both planting the seeds for our own future suffering and causing
further pain for the person who already will have to suffer for the
harm they have done us. Anger is thus self-destructive; a moment of
anger can destroy stores of virtue accumulated over many lifetimes.
Santideva describes a world covered with sharp stones. In order to
walk without cutting one's feet, there a re two solutions. One can
either cover the entire surface of the earth with leather, or one can
cover the soles of one's feet with leather. The world is fil led with
enemies, those who find fault with us in varying degrees. In order to
avoid the harm caused, to oneself and others, by responding in
anger, there are two solutions. One can destroy all the enemies, or
one can practice patience.
The fourth perfection, effort, is the ability to take delight in virtue
in all situations and never to be daunted by obstacles along the path
to buddhahood. The perfection of concentration entails mastering a
vast nu mber of states of deep concentration, called samadhi, many
of which provide the bodhisattva with magica l powers. The minimal
requirement, however, is the state called serenity, which provides
the mental strength needed to penetrate beyond deceptive
appearances and discern rea lity. The perfection of wisdom is the
knowledge of emptiness, understanding the absence of self, or any
intrinsic nature, in all persons and things.
The Mahayana siitras repeatedly declare that the practice of the
bodhisattva is to amass the two collections, the collection of merit
The Buddha 7 9
and the collection of wisdom. Merit (or method ) and wisdom are
called the two wings of the bird flying to enlightenment. The six perfections
are divided into the categories of merit and wisdom in various
ways. For example, giving, ethics, and patience a re classed as
merit, wisdom as wisdom, with effort and concentration necessary
for both . Bodhisattvas are enjoined, indeed, to practice each of the
thirty-six combinations of the six perfections: the giving of giving,
the giving of ethics, the effort of patience, the concentration of wisdom.
Indeed, according to some, these six vi rtues are perfected only
when they are informed by the knowledge of emptiness. To give a
gift with the bodhisattva's motivation is the virtue of giving. To give
a gift knowing that the giver, the gift, and the act of giving are empty
of any intrinsic nature is the perfection of giving. This is the interpretation
given to the statement from the Diamond Sutra, mentioned
earlier, where the bodhisattva is said to vow to lead all beings
into the final nirvaa, knowing that there are no beings to be led to
the final nirvaa.
The bodhisattva thus embarks on a path that is said to require
three periods of countless aeons, calculated by one scholar at 3 84 x
I0'8 years. With the bodhisattva 's initial yogic vision of emptiness,
he embarks on what are cal led the ten stages ( bhumi), with names
like Joyous, Radiant, Difficult to Overcome, Gone Afar, Immovable,
and Cloud of Doctrine. Over their course he acquires greater and
greater power, moving from the position of an ordinary being who
turns to the buddhas and bodhisattvas for aid to the position of an
advanced bodhisattva to whom ordinary beings now turn . In order
to gain the ability, possessed only by a buddha, to be in a state of
direct realization of emptiness while at the same time being fully
cognizant of all the phenomena of the world, the bodhisattva practices
entering into and rising from the vision of emptiness over and
over again, more and more rapidly, alternating between the two
states many times in an instant. Over the course of the ten levels, a
bodhisattva ach ieves extraordinary powers, powers that only multiply
on the slow ascent toward buddhahood. On the first level, for
example, a bodhisattva can see one hundred buddhas in an instant,
can live for one hundred aeons, can see for one hundred aeons into
So T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
the past and the future, can go to one hundred buddha lands, can
illumi nate one hundred worlds, and can bring one hundred beings
to spiritual maturity in an instant.
With these great powers, advanced bodhisattvas are not only models
to emulate but saviors to beseech. In the Mahayana Buddhist cultures
of East Asia and Tibet, such bodhisattvas have become objects
of particular devotion, called upon to intervene in all manner of
crises, deemed more approachable than the distant Buddha . The most
famous of these bodhisattvas is Avalokitesvara, the " lord who looks
down. " Indeed, much of the Lotus Sutra 's fame in East Asia derives
from one brief chapter, the twenty-fifth chapter devoted to the bodhisattva
Avalokitesvara or, as he was known in China, Guanyin, "he
who discerns the sounds of the world. " In the chapter, the Buddha
explains that if suffering beings single-mindedly call his name, this
bodhisattva will rescue them from all forms of harm, including fire,
flood, shipwreck, murderers, demons, prison, bandits, and wild animals.
This chapter was so popular that it often circulated as an independent
text, and it was considered a great act of piety to copy the
sutra; some even wrote it in their own blood. In the centuries after the
sutra was translated into Chinese, miracle stories began to circulate
about the bodhisattva's wondrous powers, how those who called
upon him in times of dire need would find that the shackles had fallen
from their ankles and the prison door stood open, that their names
had been erased from execution lists, that they could walk through
hordes of bandits unnoticed, that their houses remained undamaged
in the midst of a great fire, that they had been cured of leprosy.
Guanyin, precisely as the sutra promised, was known to be especially
adept at rescuing the drowning. In the midst of a river battle, a
fat man meditated on the bodhisattva and abandoned ship. The water
was deep and the river was raging, yet the water came up only to his
waist, as if he were standing in shallow water. Eventually, a boat came
to rescue him, but the man's weight was so great that he could not be
lifted aboard. The man looked down and saw four men pushing him
up. Once he was on the ship he looked back, but no one was there.
A Japanese story tells of a monk who was making the perilous
voyage from Japan to China when a great storm forced him and a
h undred fellow travelers to abandon ship into a smaller boat. The
The Buddha 8 r
boat drifted for ten days, the passengers having no food to eat or
fresh water to drink . A monk on board suggested that they should
all recite the Guanyin chapter of the Lotus Sutra thirty-three times
(the chapter enumerates thirty-three forms that Guanyin assumes in
order to rescue suffering beings ) . The monk himself wrapped a wick
around the little finger of his left hand, soaked it in oil, and set it on
fire, and he began to recite the chapter. At the end of the thi rty-third
recitation, a wave of foam could be seen approaching from the
south . When it reached the boat, one of the passengers dipped a
ladle into the foam and tasted it. It was fresh water. The passengers
all drank the water, which sustained them until a ship appea red and
rescued them.
The siitra also promised that Guanyin would provide sons to the
childless. This power was particularly associated with the WhiteRobed
Guanyin, who begins to be represented in Chinese art and
literature in the tenth centu ry. Although the Indian bodhisattva
Avalokite5vara and his early Chinese counterparts were male, the
White-Robed Guanyin, dressed in long flowing hooded robe and
often carrying a child, is female. Her special power is to grant sons
and to protect women during pregnancy and child birth. A wh ite
placenta is the sign of her intercession .
Avalokite5vara also took human form. In Ti bet, it was the Dalai
Lama . In China, it was the princess Miaoshan ( "Wondrous Goodness
" ) , whose story is told in a twelfth-century text called the Precious
Scroll of Fragrant Mountain ( Xiangshan baojuan ) . Princess
Miaoshan was the third daughter of the king. From the time of her
childhood she refused to eat meat. When it came time for her to
marry, she refused the husband her father had selected for her. The
king punished her first by restricting her to the royal gardens, but
when she did not relent he became increasingly en raged and his
punishments became increasingly severe. He sent her next to work
as a laborer in a nearby nunnery. When she still refused to marry,
he burned down the nunnery, killing five hundred nuns. Princess
Miaoshan survived the blaze, and the king ordered her to be executed
by strangulation. Her body was carried by a deity to the Forest
of Corpses. The bodhisattva Kitigarbha ( known as Dizang in
Chinese, jizo in Japanese) gave her spirit a tour of the regions of
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
hell. Along the way, the princess preached the dharma to the hell
beings, as a result of which they were reborn in Amita bha's pure
land. The Lord of Death heard of her work, and, fearing that his
realm would soon be depopulated, he asked the princess to return to
the world of the living. Restored to life, she went to Fragrant Mountai
n and practiced the dharma for nine years. Meanwhile, the king
began to suffer the effects of murdering five hundred nuns, contracting
an incurable disease. Hea ring of her father's illness, Princess
Miaoshan disguised herself as a monk and returned to the court,
declaring that the king could be cured with a medicine made from
the eyes and hands of a person without hate. She said that such a
person lived on Fragrant Mountain. The king sent his servants to
the mountain, where they found the princess, who cut off her hands
and gouged out her eyes and presented them to the servants. As she
had predicted, the king was cured, and he went to Fragrant Mountain
to offer thanks to the great sage who had made such a sacrifice .
When he arrived, he recogn ized the eyeless and handless person as
his own daughter. He repented his misdeeds and took refuge in
the three jewels ( the Buddha, the dharma, and the sailgha ), praying
that his daughter's eyes and hands be restored. The princess then
explained that she was, in fact, the bodhisattva Guanyin and appeared
with one thousand golden arms and eyes of diamonds. Fragrant
Mountain in Henan province has remained a popular center of pilgrimage,
especially for women, until the present day.
The most famous female bodhisattva i n Tibetan Buddhism is
Tara, born from a lotus blossom that sprang from a tear shed by
Avalokitesvara as he surveyed the suffering universe. She is thus said
to be the physical manifestation of the compassion of Avalokitesvara,
himself said to be the quintessence of all the compassion of all the buddhas.
Because buddhas are produced from wisdom and compassion,
Tara, like the goddess Prajnaparamita ( " Perfection of Wisdom " ), is
hailed as "the mother of all buddhas " despite the fact that she is most
commonly represented as a beautiful sixteen-year-old maiden.
But like Avalokitesvara, Tara is best known for her salvific powers,
appearing in the i nstant her devotee recites her mantra, orrz tare
tuttare ture svaha. She is especially renowned for her ability to
deliver those who call upon her from eight fears-lions, elephants,
The Buddha
fire, snakes, bandits, prison, water, and demons-a nd many tales
are told recounting her miraculous interventions. She can appear in
peaceful or wrathful forms, depending on the circumstances, her
powers extending beyond the subj ugation of these worldly frights
into the heavens and into the hells.
She is often depicted as one of two female bodhisattvas flanking
Avalokitesvara : Tara, the personification of his compassion, and
Bhkuti, the personification of his wisdom. But Tara is the subject
of much devotion in her own right, serving as the su bject of many
stories, prayers, and tantric rituals. Like Ava lok itesvara, she has
played a cruci al role in Ti bet's history, in both divine and human
forms. In the seventh century she took human form as the Chinese
princess who married King Songtsen Gampo (Srong btsan sgam po ),
the first Buddhist king of Tibet, bringing with her the buddha image
that would become the most revered in Tibet. In the next century,
she appea red as Yeshe Tsogyal ( Ye shes mtsho rgya l ) , the wife of
King Tisong Detsen ( Khri srong Ide btsan ) and the consort of the
Indian tantric master, Padmasambhava . In addition to becoming a
great tantric master herself, she served as scribe as Padmasambhava
dictated the texts that he would hide throughout Ti bet, ready to be
discovered centuries later. Tara was also the protective deity of the
Indian scholar Atisa, appearing to him at crucial points in his life,
advising him to make his fateful journey to Tibet, despite the fact
that his life span would be shortened as a result. Later Tara is said to
have appeared as the great female practitioner of the cho (gcod) tradition,
Machig Lapdon ( Ma gcig lab sgron, I 0 5 s-I I 5 2 ? ) , descri bed
in chapter 6. Indeed, aeons ago, when she fi rst vowed to achieve
buddhahood and free all beings from suffering, Tara also vowed to
always appear in the female form.
O T H E R B U D D H A S , O T H E R W O R L D S
In order that the dharma be preserved i n the long period between
buddhas, Sakyamuni ( the " sage of the Sakya clan, " as our buddha is
commonly called ) requested a number of arhats to prolong their
l ives and remain in the world, not passing into nirval).a, until the
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
advent of Maitreya, the next buddha, asking them to preserve the
dharma and to serve as worthy objects of the charity of the laity.
There are various traditions as to the number of these arhats, some
l isting four, some eight, some sixteen or eighteen . It is this latter
number that became esta blished in China, where the arhats ( lohans
in Chinese ) were objects of particular devotion and lore, depicted
widely in painting and sculpture as often austere Indian figures of
wizened body and serious mien. One of these arhats was the Buddha's
own son, Rahula. Various locations throughout the Buddhist world
have been identified as the abode of one or another of these arhats,
who are known to appear as mendicants from time to time, unrecognized
by all but a few.
Maitreya, presently a bodhisattva, will appear in the world when
the human life span is once again eighty thousand yea rs. He will
replicate the deeds of Gautama, with certain variations. For example,
he will live the life of a householder for eight thousand years,
but, having seen the four sights and renounced the world, he will
practice asceticism for only one week before achieving buddhahood .
As the Buddha, he will visit the mountain where the great arhat
Mahakasyapa has been entombed, in a state of deep samadhi,
awaiting the advent of Maitreya. Mahakasyapa keeps the robe of
Sakyamuni, which the previous buddha had entrusted to him to
pass on to his successor. When Maitreya accepts the robe, it will
cover only two fingers of his hands, causing people to comment at
how diminutive the past buddha must have been.
But for those who know how to contact him, Maitreya is present
even today. The fourth-century Indian monk Asaitga was known as
the greatest scholar of his time, so great, in fact, that there was no
one to whom he could turn with his questions. He determined,
therefore, to put his questions to the future buddha, Maitreya . It
would be millennia before Maitreya took human rebi rth to become
the next buddha, but Asailga knew that Maitreya was residing in
Tuita, the Joyous Pure Land. Asailga concl uded that, by cultivating
a state of deep concentration, he would be able to communicate
with the coming buddha. He retired to a cave and meditated for
three years, without result. When he emerged, he noticed that water
dripping from the roof of the cave had created a slight depression i n
The Buddha
the rock floor. Inspired by the fact that the steady effort of weak
water had eroded hard stone, Asailga determined to return to his
meditation. He emerged from the cave three years later, aga in without
having been able to commun icate with Maitreya. As he prepared
to leave, he noticed that the spindly wings of the bats that
flew out of the cave at dusk and into the cave at dawn had smoothed
the rough stone surface of the cei ling of the cave. Again inspired,
Asailga returned to his meditation for another three years, emerging
yet again, after a total of nine years. As he gathered his few possessions
and prepa red to leave, he noticed a man walking down the
road, rubbing a large metal spike with a cotton doth. Puzzled,
Asailga asked the man what he was doing and the man explained
that he was a tailor and that he was making a needle. He showed
Asailga a small box containing several other needles he had made
using the same technique. Impressed by the tailor's industry, Asailga
returned to his cave.
Three years later he emerged, now having devoted twelve years
to the futile attempt to communicate with Maitreya . A dog lay outside
the mouth of the cave. It had been inj ured somehow and carried
a deep gash on its thigh . The wound had become infested with
maggots. Moved by pity for the dog, Asailga wanted to clean and
dress the wound. But to do so would be to deprive the maggots of
their sustenance, and as a Buddhist monk he had vowed not to kill
any living being. He needed to provide the maggots with another
meal . Not knowing what else to do, he stopped a passer-by and
traded his begging bowl for a knife, with which he cut a piece of
flesh from his own thigh . He placed the flesh next to the dog and
determined to transfer the maggots, one by one, from the dog to
the piece of flesh. He thought first that he would use a stick, but
that would inj ure the maggots. He would use his fingers, but the
maggots were so del icate that some would certa inly be injured in
the process. He concluded that he had no other recourse but to
transfer the maggots with his tongue. At this thought, even Asailga
felt a wave of revulsion and so closed his eyes, extended his tongue,
and lowered his head toward the dog's wound in order to transfer
the first maggot. But to his surprise his tongue touched the cold
stone of the cave floor.
8 6 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
He opened his eyes to see the bodhisattva Maitreya standing before
him, resplendent in silk robes. Asanga recognized him immediately
and could not resist asking where Maitreya had been for the past
twelve years. Maitreya responded that he had been with Asanga all the
time; he had been so close to Asanga in fact that the front of
Maitreya's robe was soiled by the crumbs from Asanga's noon meal. It
was just that the obstacles in Asanga's mind blinded him to Maitreya's
presence, obstacles that could not be removed by twelve years of diligent
meditation but that evaporated in the face of Asanga's moment of
compassion for the dog. Asanga was skeptical at this explanation and
so lifted the bodhisattva onto his shoulder and carried him into town .
No one saw Maitreya; most people saw only Asanga walking alone.
An old woman saw Asanga carrying a dog on his shoulder. Maitreya
then magically transported Asanga to the Joyous Pure Land, where he
answered all of his questions. Asanga returned to transcribe these
teachings into what are known as the Five Books of Maitreya . But
Asanga was unusual in his abilities to communicate with the coming
Buddha. Many Buddhists, especially in Southeast Asia, do not consider
it possible to achieve nirvaa during the current times of degeneration.
They therefore direct their merit making toward a rebirth in
the far future when they can meet Maitreya when he is the next buddha
and thereby benefit from his dharma .
The origins of the notion of the " pure land" ( a Chinese term that
does not appear in Indian literature ) rema in somewhat unclea r. In
Buddhist cosmology there are bill ions of universes like our own,
with a similar structure including a central mountain surrounded by
four island continents, with heavenly rea lms above the pea k of the
mountain and infernal realms located below the surface. The worlds
( and regions within the world) differ largely in terms of the degree
of happiness and suffering to be found there. This is, in turn, dependent
on two factors: the karma of the inha bitants and whether or
not the world is considered " fortunate, " that is, whether or not a
buddha is present in the world during a given aeon. In such a fortunate
time and fortunate place, the world becomes a " buddha field, "
a site for the deeds of a buddha . The purpose of the buddha is to
purify the world, both by teaching the dharma and through miraculous
deeds. Worlds exist in various degrees of purification, with the
The Buddha
most pure having no rea lms of hell beings, ghosts, or animals, or
even a central mountain; in an agricultural society such as ancient
India, the absence of topographical variation was considered a sign
of fortune and purity.
How pure is our own world, and what is the capacity of our
buddha, Sakyamuni, to purify it? This question is raised in the
opening scene of the Vimalaklrti Sutra. After the Buddha reveals
the marvels of the buddha fields to his aud ience, someone asks why
it is that the fields of other buddhas are so splendid, filled with jeweled
lotuses, while the field of Sakyamuni Buddha, that is to say,
our own world, is so ordina ry, even impoverished, fil led with dust
and squalor and ( appa rently worst of a l l ) an uneven topography. In
response, the Buddha simply touches the earth with his big toe, and
the world is miraculously transformed into a bejeweled paradise.
The Buddha then expla ins that what he has revealed is the true
nature of his land, that he uses his miraculous powers to make it
appear squalid in order that his disciples will develop a sense of
renunciation and practice the path . This is an extraordinary statement,
that the impermanence and suffering so centra l to the basic
doctrines of Buddhism, which are set forth as the reasons why sasara
must be a bandoned, are presented here simply as instantiations
of the Buddha's powers, of his skillful methods to bring others
to enlightenment.
Numerous buddha fields are described, sometimes in passing,
sometimes in detail, in the Mahayana siitras. But no pure land is
more famous than the Land of Bliss. The Sutra of the Land of Bliss
begins with A nanda noticing that the Buddha is looking especially
serene one day, and he asks him the reason . The Buddha responds
that he was thinking back many millions of aeons in the past to the
time of the buddha Lokesvararaja. The Buddha tells a story, in the
form of a flashback .
In the audience of this buddha was a monk na med Dharmakara
who approached Lokesvararaja and proclaimed his aspiration to
become a buddha. Dharmakara then requested the Buddha to
describe all of the qualities of a pure land. Lokesvararaja compassionately
complied, providing a discourse that lasted one million
years, in which he described each of the qualities of the lands of
8 8 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
eight hundred thousand million trillion buddhas. Having listened
attentively, Dharmakara then retired to meditate for five aeons. In his
meditation, he tried to concentrate all the marvelous qualities of the
millions of pu re lands that had been descri bed to him into a single
pure land, a pure land, that is, that would be the quintessence of all
pure lands. When he completed his meditation, he returned to
describe this imagined land to Lokesvararaja. But he did not simply
describe the land, he promised to make rea l the pure land he had so
precisely visualized, creating a place of birth for fortunate beings,
vowing that he himself would follow the long bodhisattva path and
become the buddha of this new buddha field . He described the land
he would create in a curious way, in a series of promises, stating that
if this or that marvel was not present in his pure land, may he not
become a buddha . For example, he said, "If in my pure land there
are animals, ghosts, or hell beings, may I not become a buddha . " He
made forty-eight such promises. These incl uded that all of the
beings in the pure land will be the color of gold; that bei ngs in the
pure land will have no conception of private property; that no bodhisattva
will have to wash, dry, or sew his own robes; that bodhisattvas
in his pure land will be able to hear the dha rma in
whatever form they wish to hear it and whenever they wish to hear
it; that any woman who hears his name, creates the aspiration to
enl ightenment in her mind, and feels disgust at the female form will
not be reborn as a woman again. Two vows have been the focus of
particular attention . In the eighteenth vow ( seventeenth in the East
Asian version ), Dharmakara promised that when he is a buddha, he
will appear at the moment of death to anyone who creates the aspiration
to enl ightenment, hears his name, and remembers him with
fa ith . In the nineteenth vow (eighteenth i n the East Asian version ) ,
h e promises that anyone who hears h i s name, wishes t o b e reborn in
his pure land, and dedicates their merit to that end will be reborn
there, even if they make such a resolution as few as ten times during
the course of their life. Only those who have committed one of the
five deeds of immediate retri bution ( killing one's father, killing one's
mother, kill ing a n arhat, wounding a buddha, causing dissension in
the sangha) are exc luded .
The scene then returns to the present. Ananda asks the Buddha
The Buddha
whether Dharmakara was successful, whether he did indeed traverse
the long path of the bodhisattva to become a buddha. The Buddha
replies that he did in fact succeed and that he became the buddha
Amita bha, the buddha of Infinite Light. The pure land that he created
is cal led Sukhavati, the Land of Bliss. Beca use Dharmakara
became a buddha, all of the thi ngs that he promised to create in his
pure land are now manifest, and the Buddha proceeds to describe
Sukhavati in great detail. It is ca rpeted with lotuses made of seven
precious substances, some of which reach ten leagues in diameter.
Each lotus emits millions of rays of l ight, and from each ray of light
there emerge millions of buddhas who travel to world systems in all
directions to teach the dharma. The pure land is level, like the pa lm
of a hand, without mountains or oceans. It has great rivers, the
waters of which will rise as high or sink as low as one pleases, from
the shoulders to the ankles, and will vary in temperature as one
pleases. The sound of the river will take the form of whatever auspicious
words one wishes to hear, such as buddha, emptiness, cessation,
and great compassion. The words hindrance, misfortune, and
pain are never heard, nor a re the words day and night used, except
as metaphors. The beings in the pure land do not need to consume
food. When they are hungry, they simply visualize whatever food
they wish, and their hunger is satisfied without need ing to eat. They
dwell in bejeweled palaces of their own design. Yet there is a hierarchy
even in the pure land. Some of the inha bitants sit cross-legged
on lotus blossoms while others are enclosed within the calyx of a
lotus. The latter do not feel imprisoned, because the calyx of the
lotus is quite large, containing within it a palace similar to that
inhabited by the gods. Those who ded icate their merit toward
rebirth in the pure land yet who harbor dou bts a re reborn inside
lotuses where they must remain for five hundred years, enjoying
visions of the pure land but deprived of the opportu nity to hear the
dharma. Those who are free from doubt are reborn immediately on
open lotuses, with unlimited access to the dharma .
The structure of the siitra provides its narrative potency. What
begins as a story a bout a bodhisa ttva long ago and in a u n iverse
far away ends with the description of a pure land that is present
here and now to all who would seek it. Further, the fact that
90 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
Dharmakara describes his pure land in a series of vows, saying, "If
this not be the case in my pure land, may I not achieve buddhahood,"
means that all of the things he promised to create there are
now a reality beca use he did achieve buddhahood. The dedication of
roots of virtue and the cultivation of the aspi ration to enlightenment
are classic practices of the Mahayana. But in the siitra it is revea led
that these can now be di rected toward a goal far more immediate
than distant buddhahood, that one can be reborn in a pure land in
the very next lifetime through the power of Dharmakara's vow. Such
rebirth would become a common goal of Buddhist practice, for
monks and laity alike, throughout East Asia ( see chapter 6 ) .
There are yet other buddhas who are neither predicted t o appear
in this world nor who preside over a famous pure land. One such
buddha, important in tantric Buddhism (discussed in chapter 6 ) , is
Vaj rasattva, the " diamond hero. " Although it is said that buddhas
do not wash away sins with water, Vaj rasattva seems to do precisely
that. The visual ization of Vaj rasattva is an important form of purification,
deemed a prereq uisite for more advanced tantric meditation
in Tibet. One begins the Vaj rasattva meditation by sitting in the
meditative posture and visualizing above one's head a lotus flower
with one hundred thousand petals. The sta lk of the flower actua lly
extends inside one's head to a depth of the breadth of four fingers.
Lying at the top of the lotus blossom are the discs of the sun and the
moon, upon which sits the buddha Vaj rasattva . He is bri lliant white
in color and appears as a youthful prince, wea ring a crown . He is
adorned with jewelry, a necklace, armlets, and earrings and is
dressed in robes of the finest silk. He holds a vaj ra in his right hand
and a bell in his left. He sits in sexual union with his consort, the
beautiful Vajratopa, dressed in similar finery. They face each other
in sexual embrace, his arms, holding vajra and bell, wrapped behind
her back. In the space between their hearts there floats a moon disc,
around the edge of which are written the letters of Vaj rasattva's
hundred-syllable mantra . Unlike many mantras that seem to have
no semantic meaning, Vaj rasattva's mantra can be translated. It
means, " Oqt Vaj rasattva, keep your pledge. Vaj rasattva, reside in
me. Make me firm. Make me satisfied. Fulfill me. Make me compassionate.
Grant me all powers. Make my mind virtuous in all deeds.
The Buddha 9 1
Hii11 ha ha ha ha hoh. All the blessed tathagatas, do not abandon
me, make me indivisible. Great pledge being. Ah hiiJ1 . "
While visualizing Vaj rasattva and his consort, the meditator
begins to recite the mantra silently, imagining that as each syllable is
recited, the letters begin to slowly melt, prod ucing camphor. The
liquid drips down from the moon disc, passing over the place
where the deities are joined, and down through the stem of the
lotus blossom into the crown of the meditator's head. The liquid
begins to fill the body from above. At the same time, all of the karmic
impurities accumulated over countless lifetimes begin to be expelled
from the anus and the soles of the feet. At this point, all the while
reciting the mantra and imagining the pure camphor entering from
above, the meditator imagines that the earth opens up below to a
depth of ten stories. At the bottom of this great pit stand all the
beings to whom one owes some karmic debt: the person one cheated
in a past lifetime, one's parents whose kindness was never repaid, as
well as all of the animals whose flesh one has consumed-the cattle,
chickens, pigs, and sheep--over one's many lifetimes as a carnivore.
The motley host stands below, staring up with open mouths, waiting
to be fed. As the torrent of liquid and solid filth emerging from
one's nether parts descends toward them, it is magically transformed
into whatever they desire-gold for some, food for othersand
each is satisfied, its debt repaid.
Now the meditator's body has entirely fil led with camphor, all
impurities dispelled. At this point, Vajrasattva, his consort, and the
one-hundred-thousand-petaled lotus disappea r, and the meditator is
transformed into Vaj rasattva himself. In the center of his chest is a
flat moon disc, around the edge of which stand the letters of the
mantra, 0112 vajrasattva ha112. As one recites the mantra silently, rays
of light begin to emanate from Vaj rasattva's body in all directions,
eventually extending to the limits of the space and stri king the body
of every being in the universe. As each being is touched by the ray
of light, each is transformed i nto Vaj rasattva and begins reciting the
mantra, until all beings in the universe are the buddha Vaj rasattva
and all sounds are the sound of his mantra .
Now the entire universe begins to melt into light, beginning at
the outer reaches and moving slowly toward the center until the
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
meditator as Vaj rasattva is left alone. His body then begins to dissolve
into light until all that remains is the moon disc and the letters
of the mantra . Then the moon disc fades and om dissolves into
va;ra, va;ra dissolves into sattva, and sattva dissolves into ham. The
letter ham then begins to melt from below until all that is left is a
flaming dot, which itself dissolves i nto light, leaving only emptiness.
As we have seen, in the early tradition the Buddha was perceived
as that most rare hero, occurring once in each age, who was willing
to traverse the aeons-long bodhisattva path in order to find the truth
and teach it to the world at a time in history when that truth had
been forgotten . In the Mahayana, buddhahood became a universal
goal; according to some formulations, all beings will follow the long
bodhisattva path to buddhahood. Here, in the Vaj rasattva meditation,
considered a preliminary practice, the goal becomes the path .
That is, i n order to begin the path to buddha hood, one imagines
oneself to be a buddha now, who emanates rays of light from a
mantra in his heart, magically transforming all beings in the universe
into buddhas.
B U D D H A I M A G E S
It is difficult to overstate the importance of images i n Buddhism. I n
the first centuries o f its introduction into China, Buddhism was
known as "the religion of images . " In societies where only a tiny
portion of the population was literate, other modes of communication
played a far larger role than the texts that have so often provided
the primary focus for our understanding of Buddhism. The
preaching that the Buddha sent his monks out to do " for the benefit
of gods and humans, " and that must have played such an important
role in the propagation of the dharma, took the form of words that
disappeared into the air as they were spoken . The incense lit in a
ceremony went up i n smoke, and the flowers presented in an offering
wilted . The stories that captivated the minds and imaginations
of so many became memories. The rituals performed for purposes
both personal and universal, mundane and exalted, were completed
before they could be preserved on film, the intonation of the chant,
The Buddha 9 3
the subtlety of the gesture often impossible to reproduce from a
manual . What remains are those things that bear a sufficient material
weight to allow them to persist through time, the weight of ink
on paper, the weight of lacquer on wood.
There is no historical evidence that images of the Buddha were
made until centuries after his death. Yet there are a number of
images whose sanctity derives from the belief that the Buddha posed
for them. The most famous of these is the image made for King
Udayana, the ruler of the kingdom of Vatsa and a patron of the
Buddha. The Buddha's mother, Queen Maya, had died shortly after
his birth and was therefore unable to receive the benefit of her son's
enlightenment. He therefore magica lly traveled to the place where
his mother had been reborn, the Heaven of the Thirty-Three on the
summit of Mount Meru, and spent the summer rain retreat teaching
the dharma to his mother and the assembled gods. The Buddha
taught her and the assembled gods the Abhidharma, over the course
of three months. The Buddha returned to earth briefly each day to
collect a lms, pausing to give Sariputra a summary of what he had
been teaching the gods, which Sariputra would then pass on to the
sangha. Sariputra is thus renowned as the master of the Abhidharma.
King Udayana was devastated when he learned that he
would be unable to behold the Buddha for so long and approached
Maudgalyayana, the arhat who surpassed all others in his supernormal
powers. He asked him to magically transport a piece of sandalwood
and thirty-two artists to the Heaven of the Thirty-Th ree,
where together they would carve a statue of the Buddha, with each
artist responsible for depicting one of the thirty-two marks of a
superman that adorned the Buddha's body. When they had completed
their work, the sandalwood statue was brought back to
earth. At the end of the rain retreat, the Buddha descended from
heaven. When he approached, the statue rose to meet him ( and it is
thus a standing image of the Buddha ) . The Buddha blessed the
image and predicted that it would play an important role in the
propagation of the dharma .
As one might imagine, a number of statues of the Buddha were
subsequently identified as the Udayana image. According to one
account, the image was brought to China in the first century. But the
9 4 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
famous Chinese scholar and pi lgrim Xuanzang ( 5 9 6-664 ) reported
seeing the image during his visit to India six centuries later. In the
tenth century, the Japanese pi lgrim Chonen ( 9 3 8- 1 0 1 6 ) traveled to
China and had a copy of the Udayana image made to take with him
back to Japan. According to one story, the original image magica lly
traded places with the copy en route so that the image Chonen
brought to japan was the image made for King Udayana. It has
since been worsh iped at the Seiryoji temple in Kyoto. A panel on the
back of the image was opened in 1 9 54 to reveal a miniature set of
organs made from silk, along with coins, crystals, scriptures, and
historical documents related to the history of the statue.
A Buddhist image, whether painted or scul pted, is not considered
finished until it has been ani mated in a consecration ceremony. In
the case of a Tibetan sculpture, the interior must be filled with rolls
of mantras wrapped around a wooden dowel, called the " life stick, "
that runs from the crown of the head to the base of the image. Often
i ncense or the soil from a sacred place is added as well, before the
bottom of the image is sealed shut and marked with the sign of a
crossed vajra. Paintings are ma rked with mantras, often the letters
07ft ah hu1ft on the reverse of the scroll, al igned with the head,
throat, and heart of the figure on the front. A consecration ceremony,
sometimes brief, sometimes qu ite ela borate, is then performed,
the purpose of which is to cause the deity represented in the
image ( most commonly, a buddha ) to enter into and thus ani mate
the image. According to the Mahayana, a buddha is said to be in
what is called the unlocated nirvar:ta, because he abides in neither
the maelstrom of sa11sara nor the solitude of the arhats' nirvar:ta .
The consecration rite thus causes the buddha to move from the
unlocated nirvar:ta to become located in the physical image. The
image has to be transformed into a buddha in order for it to become
localized as a site of merit making. In the ceremony, the unconsecrated
image is (in the visual ization of the person performing the
consecration ) made to dissolve into emptiness (which is its true
nature ) and then reappear as the deity itself, often through the use
of a mirror, which reflects the ultimate nature of the deity into the
conventional form of the image.
A standard component of the ceremony is the recitation of the
The Buddha 9 5
verse, "As all the buddhas from [their] abodes i n Tusita heaven,
entered the womb of Queen Maya, likewise may you enter this
reflected image. " In consecration ceremonies in northern Thailand,
monks recite the biography of the Buddha to the image of the Buddha
being consecrated, focusing on his path to enlightenment, his
achievement of enl ightenment, and the extraordinary states of
knowledge he attained. The consecrated image of the Buddha is thus
not a symbol of the Buddha but, effectively, is the Buddha, and there
are numerous stories of images speaking to their devotees. The emanation
body of the Buddha includes not only the form of the Buddha
that appears on earth, once in each age, in the guise of a monk,
adorned with the thirty-two major marks and eighty minor marks
of a superman; the Buddha can also appear in the guise of ordinary
beings, as well as (appa rently) inanimate objects. Indeed, epigraphic
evidence indicates that Indian monasteries had as a standard component
of their design, beginning at least in the fou rth or fifth century,
a room called the " perfumed chamber" that housed an image
of the Buddha. The chamber was regarded as the Buddha's active
residence, with its own contingent of monks assigned to it.
The substance from which an image is made is often of great
power. A Vietnamese story tells of a devout girl work ing as a cook
at a monastery who was impregnated by a monk while she was
sleeping. She left in shame and gave birth to a daughter, whom she
entrusted to the monk's care. The monk went out during the night
and placed the baby in the hole of a hi biscus tree, promising that
both the tree and the child would attain buddhahood. Fifty years
later the tree, now grown tall, fell into the river and drifted to the
monastery. Three hundred men were unable to bring it ashore, but
the child's mother pulled it from the river single-handedly. Four
buddha images were made from the tree and insta lled in the monastery.
Called Dharma Cloud, Dharma Rain, Dharma Thunder, and
Dharma Lightning, they were renowned for responding to the
prayers of the faithful.
There are countless stories about the origins and power of particular
images of buddhas and bodhisattvas. The most famous buddha
image in Burma is known as the Mahamuni, the great sage. According
to its creation myth, the Buddha and five hundred arhats flew
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
from India to Selagiri Hill in Burma in response to the wish of the
king to pay homage to the Buddha. The Buddha was invited to the
capital, where he taught the dharma for seven days. Upon his departure,
the king requested that the Buddha leave behind his likeness. A
divine sculptor spent seven days casting an image that was a precise
duplicate of the Buddha's form. The Buddha breathed upon the
image to animate it, at which point the two were indistinguishable
to those who beheld them. The Buddha predicted that although he
would pass into nirvar:ta in his eightieth year, the statue would
remai n for five thousand years. The twelve-foot bronze statue has
remained an object of veneration, surviving fire and seizure by rival
kings. Its face is bathed by a monk in an elaborate ceremony each
morn ing at dawn. To merely observe the ceremony is said to be a
source of great merit.
But images were not limited to distant figures, like the Buddha. In
China, it was commonly reported that eminent monks would
remain seated in the meditation posture after their deaths and that
their bodies would not decay, emitting i nstead a divine fragrance.
The bodies of some of these monks were eventua lly mummified
and became objects of veneration, installed in places of honor in
the temple. In some cases, these mummies were further preserved
through a lacquering process that effectively transformed them into
living statues. Often the statues would be painted gold, the earlobes
would be lengthened, and a dot would be placed between the eyebrows;
golden skin, long earlobes, and a circle of hair between the
eyebrows are three of the thi rty-two marks of a buddha. One
scholar has speculated that the art of lacquered statuary in China
derives from this process of preserving mummies. Even when a master's
body was not preserved and was cremated, it was common to
make a statue of him in which the relics resulting from his cremation
were deposited .
Numerous Buddhist texts extol the virtues of producing images
of the Buddha. One of the earliest texts translated i nto Chinese, the
Scripture on the Production of Buddha Images (Zuo fo xingxiang
iing), promises, " One who produces an image of the Buddha will
most certainly be born to a wealthy family, with money and precious
jewels beyond reckoning. He will always be loved by his parThe
Buddha 9 7
ents, siblings, and relatives. Such is the fortune obtained by one who
prod uces an image of the Buddha . " The text goes on to say that
anyone who sees an image of the Buddha and piously takes refuge in
the Buddha's stupa or his relics will not be reborn as a hell being,
ghost, or animal for one hundred aeons.
But images sometimes offer more immediate aid. An old couple
in Japan was so poor that they did not have reeds to thatch their
roof. The wife gave her husband a piece of cloth she had woven and
told him to take it to the market and sell it. But no one would buy it,
and he turned for home as snow began to fal l . It was New Year's
Eve. He met a weaver of straw hats who had also been unable to sell
anything. The old man traded the piece of cloth for five straw hats.
On his way home, he passed six statues of the bodhisattva Jizo, covered
with snow. He brushed off the snow and placed a straw hat on
the first five statues. Since he had only five hats, he took off his own
hat and put it on the sixth statue. He returned home and, with nothing
to eat, fell asleep with his wife. They were awakened during the
night by the sound of men pushing something up the mountain path
toward their house. When they opened the door they found a bundle
of food and money, enough to sustain them for many days. In the
distance, they could make out the form of six small figures wa lking
single file down the mountain.
B U D D H A N A T U R E
The word tathagatagarbha has been widely translated . Tathagata is
an epithet of the Buddha, meaning either " one who has thus come "
or "one who has thus gone. " Garbha has a wide range of meanings
in Sanskrit, including " element, " " inner chamber" ( and by extension
" treasure room " ), " husk," and the "calyx of a flower. " It was
translated into Chinese as zang, meaning " storehouse. " It refers to
the potential for buddhahood that ( according to only some Mahayana
thinkers) resides naturally and eternally i n all beings.
This buddha nature is proclaimed in a number of Mahayana
sutras, employing similes of something of great value hidden from
view and therefore remaining unrecognized until its presence is
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
revealed by a person with the eyes to see it. Thus, the tathagatagarbha
is like pure honey in a cave, entirely covered by bees, which
prevent one from seeing it. In the same way, this pure buddha nature
is covered by the afflictions of desire, hatred, and ignorance but can
be seen by the Buddha, who expounds the dharma and discloses the
presence of the tathagatagarbha in order that beings may destroy
the afflictions and make manifest their buddha nature. The tathagatagarbha
is like a kernel of wheat that is covered by a husk so
coarse that an unknowing person might discard it, yet when cleaned
it is food fit for a king. The tathagataga rbha is like a piece of gold
that has lain at the bottom of a cesspool for many years. Yet the
gold does not decay and when retrieved and cleaned is of great
value. The tathagatagarbha is like a treasure hidden beneath the
house of a poor family. The treasure is silent and so cannot announce
its presence, yet when it is discovered poverty is dispelled. In the
same way, the buddha nature abides silently within the bodies of
all beings, untainted by their afflictions, as they take rebirth in saqtsara
again and again. Buddhas appear in the world i n order to
announce to all beings the intimate presence of this great treasure
in their bodies. The tathagatagarbha is like the seed of a mango fruit.
It does not decay and can be planted in the ground and grow into a
great tree.
In one allegory about the tathagatagarbha, a man had a gold
statue of great value that he needed to tra nsport on a long journey.
Fearing that he would be robbed en route, he wrapped the statue in
old rags so that it would not be noticed . The man died along the
way, and the statue lay in an open field, where it was kicked and
trodden upon by other travelers until it was filthy. A person with
supernormal sight saw through the rags, uncovered the statue, and
worshiped it. In another, a master craftsman cast a golden statue in
an earthen mold and then buried the mold and the statue upside
down within it so that the statue would cool. When it was
unearthed, it looked like a scorched and di rty piece of pottery. Then
the mold was removed to reveal a statue of pure gold. In the same
way, the Buddha i nstructs beings to use wisdom to break the mold
of the afflictions to reveal their buddha nature.
With the development of the Mahayana philosophical schools,
The Buddha 9 9
the doctrine of the tathagatagarbha, a pure buddha nature eternally
present in all sentient beings, became subject to exegesis and controversy.
For example, some Yogacara scholars argued that the tathagatagarbha
was not a universal quality. They held that all seeds for
future experience reside in something called the foundation consciousness.
Present there was a seed that would determ ine one's ultimate
destiny, an enl ighten ment gene, so to speak. There were four
kinds of such seeds. Some beings had the sravaka seed and would
eventually enter the Hinayana, follow the sravaka path, and
become an arhat entering the nirvaa without remainder. Others
had the pratyekabuddha seed and would enter the Hinayana, follow
the pratyekabuddha path, and become an arhat, entering the
nirvaa without remainder. Still others were endowed with the bodhisattva
seed and would enter the Mahayana and follow the bodhisattva
path to buddhahood. Final ly, there were those who had an
indeterminate seed and, depending upon the teachings they encountered
over the course of their births, would enter either the
Hinayana or the Mahayana. Most controversially, these same
exegetes also held that there were certa in beings who had no
enlightenment seed. They were called icchantikas, beings of great
desire, and were considered constitutionally doomed to wander forever
in saJTlsara. In fifth-century China, the question of whether
such benighted beings also had the buddha nature became a subject
of great controversy until a new edition of the Mahanirva11a Sutra
made its way to China . This sutra, said to be the record of the
Buddha's last words, proclaimed that even the icchantikas have
the buddha nature.
Yet another controversy derives from the fact that the tathagatagarbha
is often descri bed in such a way that it sounds like the self,
something that Buddhism is supposed to deny. This is explicitly the
case in the Lion 's Roar of Queen Srlmala Sutra, where the list of the
four inverted views is reiterated . Ignorant beings see conditioned
phenomena as being endowed with permanence, pleasure, sel f, and
purity, when in fact they are impermanent, miserable, selfless, and
impure. The siitra goes on from this traditional point to claim
that, when referring to the tathagatagarbha, these four correct
views of impermanence, misery, no-self, and impurity are themselves
1 00 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
inverted and wrong. They must be inverted once again to become
the four perfect qualities of the tathagatagarbha : permanence, pleasure,
self, and purity. In a commentary on one of the texts Asanga is
said to have received from Maitreya, he explains that the four perfect
qualities describe the dharmakaya of the Buddha . It is pure
because the Buddha has turned away from the impurity of sa11sara.
It is blissful because the Buddha has attained all states of bliss and
has no fear of the sufferings of sa11sara . It is permanent because the
Buddha compassionately works for the benefit of all beings as long
as the world exists. It is self because the Buddha turns away from
the self that the non-Buddhists mistakenly bel ieve to exist in the five
aggregates. It is the real ity of no-self, which the Buddha has understood,
that is held to be the true self.
Such explanations were unsatisfying to Madhyamaka exegetes,
who explained the tathagatagarbha as a provisional teaching, that
is, something that the Buddha taught for a given audience and for a
given purpose but that was not a statement of his final position . For
these authors, it is unthinkable that a fully enlightened buddha
could remain hidden in the heart of each sentient being. The magnificence
of buddhahood could not be obscured by the afflictions,
no matter how thick . Instead, the tathagatagarbha, the buddha
nature, was in fact the emptiness of the mind, with which all beings
were indeed endowed. It was this emptiness that allowed for all
transformation and that would eventually become the omniscient
mind, the dharmakaya of a buddha. Knowing that if he had spoken
of emptiness directly, many in his audience would have been frightened,
mistaking it for nihilism, the Buddha compassionately chose
to speak, in more positive and substantialist terms, of the tathagatagarbha
instead.
Despite, or perhaps beca use of, the many phi losophical problems
that attended it, the doctrine of the tathagatagarbha remained an
animating source of both controversy and inspiration . In tenth-century
Tibet, it was declared that the tathagatagarbha, when properly
cultivated, flowed out through the eyes to transform all that was
seen into a buddha field . In seventh-century China, the members of
the Three Levels school believed that in the degenerate age it was
The Buddha 1 0 1
inappropriate t o take refuge in a particular buddha because humans
were no longer capable of accurately discriminating between the
enlightened and the unenlightened, much less between buddhas. For
them, the Buddha encompassed all living beings because all beings
were equally endowed with the buddha nature. They were renowned
in Tang China for bowing down to stray dogs (regarded in China
with particular disgust) as complete embodiments of the enlightenment
of the Buddha . The Buddha, it seemed, was everywhere.
Suggested Reading
Cowell, E. B. The ]ataka or Stories of the Buddha 's Former Births.
London: Pa li Text Society, I 9 5 7 ·
Gomez, Luis 0. Land of Bliss: The Paradise of the Buddha of Measureless
Light: Sanskrit and Chinese Versions of the SukhiJvatlvyuha
Sutras. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, I 9 9 6 .
Hurvitz, Leon. Scripture o f the Lotus Blossom o f the Fine Dharma
(The Lotus Sutra). New York: Colum bia University Press, I 9 7 6 .
Jayawickrama, N. A., trans. The Story o f Gotama Buddha: The
Niddna-katha of the ]atakatthakatha. Oxford: Pali Text Society,
1 9 90.
Lamotte, Etienne, trans. The Teaching of Vimalakirti (Vimalaklrtinirde
a). London: Pali Text Society, I 9 7 6 .
Lopez, Donald S., Jr., e d . Buddhism i n Practice. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, I 99 5 .
--. Religions of China in Practice. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, I 9 9 6 .
--. Religions of Tibet i n Practice. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, I 9 9 7 ·
Narada Maha Thera . The Buddha and His Teachings. Colombo, Sri
Lanka: Lever Brothers Cultural Conservation Trust, I 9 8 7 .
Ngyuen, Cuong Tu. Zen i n Medieval Vietnam. Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, I 9 9 7 .
1 0 2. T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
Nyanaponika Thera and Hellmuth Hecker. Great Disciples of the
Buddha: Their Lives, Their Works, Their Legacy. Boston : Wisdom
Publications, 1 9 9 7 .
Patrul Rinpoche. The Words of M y Perfect Teacher. S a n Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1 9 9 4 ·
Santideva. The Bodhicaryavatara. Translated by Kate Crosby and
Andrew Stilton . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 9 9 8 .
Schober, Juliane, ed. Sacred Biography and Buddhist Traditions of
South and Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1 9 9 7 ·
Voice o f the Buddha, The Beauty o f Compassion: The Lalitavistara
Satra. Berkeley: Dharma Publishing, 1 9 8 3 .
Wa rren, Henry Clarke. Buddhism in Translations. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1 9 5 3 .
3
T H E D H A R M A
The first of the three jewels is the Buddha, who shows the world
where to find a place of refuge from the sufferings of birth, aging,
sickness, and death. Variously translated as " teaching, " " doctrine, "
or " law, " the dharma is said to be that refuge. The dharma is traditionally
said to be of two types, the verbal doctrine and the realized
doctrine, that is, the words of the Buddha's teachings and the realization
of those teachings through the practice of the path. In this
chapter, we will be concerned primarily with the verba l doctrine but
will turn to the rea lized doctrine in chapter 6.
One might assume that the verbal doctrine is more accessible
than the realized doctrine beca use it is more public; it exists in physical
form in all manner of texts, in many languages. Yet because
these texts were written down so long after the death of the Buddha,
the question of authorship and hence authority remains a vexed
one, not only in the case of the more fantastic Mahayana siitras, but
even in the case of the Pali suttas, regarded by contemporary Theravada
Buddhists as the most accurate record of what the Buddha
actually taught. The term Buddhist apocrypha has sometimes been
used to describe those texts composed outside of India ( in China or
Tibet, for example) that represent themselves as being of Indian origin.
Sometimes, the Mahayana siitras composed in India have been
called apocryphal. Yet strictly speaking all Buddhist siitras, even
those composed in Indian languages, are apocryphal because none
can be identified with complete certainty as a record of the teaching
of the historical Buddha. And even when Buddhists of a particular
school or historical period or region accept a given set of texts as the
authentic word of the Buddha, they are inevitably faced with the
1 04 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
problem of interpretation, a problem that appears to have been present
from the time of the Buddha's death.
T H E W O R D O F T H E B U D D H A
As the Buddha was about to pass into nirvar:ta, he told Ananda, " It
may be, Ananda, that some of you will think, 'The word of the
teacher is a thing of the past; we now have no teacher. ' But that,
Ananda, is not the correct view. The dharma and the vinaya,
Ananda, that I have taught and made known to you is to be your
teacher when I am gone. " The Buddha appointed no successor. Furthermore,
he had taught the dharma over an extended geographical
area to a wide range of audiences over the course of forty-five years.
And nothing that he had taught had been written down during his
lifetime. It was, therefore, inevitable that when groups of disciples
assembled to discuss what the teacher had taught, which teaching,
indeed, would be the teacher in his absence, disagreements arose
about authenticity. How was one to determine what was the
authentic word of the Buddha ?
The first attempt to collect the teachi ngs of the Buddha is said to
have occurred shortly after the Buddha's death. Mahakasyapa was
alarmed to hear that one monk had rejoiced at the death of the
Buddha because it meant that he would no longer be bound by the
rules of monastic discipline and could do whatever he pleased . Fearing
that this view might become widespread and that the teachings
of the master would pass away with him, Mahakasyapa proposed
that a council of arhats convene to gather the words of the Buddha.
However, upon the death of the Buddha many arhats had decided
also to pass into nirviir:ta, and Mahakasyapa had difficulty persuading
five hundred arhats to remain in the world long enough to aid in
the compilation of the Buddha's word. As the personal attendant of
the Buddha who had heard more than any other, Ananda was
invited, even though he was not an arhat; he was given the ultimatum
to become one before the meeting began. He was able to do so
the night before, j ust as his head was about to touch his pillow, thus
The Dharma
becoming enl ightened in none of the four traditional positions: sitting,
standing, walking, or lying down.
The code of monastic discipline was recited by its leading expert,
Upali, and Ananda recited the teachings that would become the five
collections of siitras. Because of his extraordinary powers of mindfulness,
Ananda was said to be a ble to repeat sixty thousand words
of the Buddha without omitting a syllable and could recite fifteen
thousand stanzas of the Buddha . Ananda also mentioned that,
shortly before he passed into nirvar:ta, the Buddha had said that the
monks could a bolish the minor rules of monastic discipline after his
death . But because Ananda had failed to ask the Buddha which
rules he was referring to, the assembly decided not to revise the
monastic code.
The question also arose as to what should be counted as the
word of the Buddha. Even the ea rliest form ulations do not suggest
that the dharma is limited to what was spoken by the Buddha himself.
Some schools included both what the Buddha himself said as
well as discourses delivered by a disciple of the Buddha and certified
by him as being true. Another school held that the dharma is
what is proclai med by the Buddha, by his disciples, by sages, and
by gods such as Indra . A second set of criteria considered not the
spea ker but what was said. A monk m ight report that he had
heard the teaching of the Buddha from the Buddha himself, from a
community of elder monks, from a group of monks who were specialists
in a particular teaching, or from a single monk who was
such a special ist. However, what the monk had heard was not to
be accepted as the word of the Buddha, even if he claimed to have
heard it from the Buddha himself, unless the monastic community
determined that the teaching conformed with accepted discourses
of the Buddha and conformed with the code of monastic discipline.
Such criteria effectively sanctioned only those doctrines and
practices that were already accepted. It appears to be the product
of a community simultaneously lamenting the loss of teachings
already forgotten and hence seeking to discover and preserve
whatever stil l remained while at the same time wary of the introduction
of innovation.
1 06 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
The Buddha is said to have described his teaching as the dharma
vinaya, the doctrine and the discipline, and the early organization of
the Buddha's teaching reflected this twofold structure, thereby trying
to provide a common body of doctrine and a common code of
conduct for the community. The discourses of the Buddha, called
siitras, comprised one category and were organized not according to
subject matter but according to length: there was the collection of
long siitras, the collection of medium-length siitras, the col lection of
grouped siitras, and the collection of enumerated siitras (that is,
siitras that spoke of things that occur in pairs, in sets of th ree, sets of
four, and so forth up to eleven ) . The second major category was of
the vinaya, the rules of monastic discipline. It contained not only a
listing of the rules but an account of the circumstances that led to
their institution . A third category of texts was later added, cal led the
abhidharma, concerned with scholastic elaboration and analysis of
the many lists of physical and mental constituents mentioned in the
siitras. These three categories of texts would be known as the tripitaka,
the three baskets. But this was only one of a number of structures
under which the teachings of the Buddha would be collected .
The first reference to the tripitaka and its commentary being committed
to writing occurs in a Sinhalese chronicle in which it is stated
that during the reign of Varragamani Abhaya ( 29- 1 7 B.C. E. ) the
monks who remembered the canon wrote it down, apparently fearing
that otherwise it might be lost as a result of war, famine, or infighting
among monasteries. Scholars speculate that prior to this time the Buddha's
words had been crafted into oral texts designed with the aim of
mnemonic preservation, employing techniques such as redundancy,
versification, and the arrangement of works according to length, all
methods that had been used in India for centuries for the oral preservation
of the Vedas. It seems that no single monk was expected to have
the legendary memory of Ananda, able to recall all that the Buddha
taught. The sangha was therefore organized toward the task of preservation;
there is reference, for example, to the " reciters of the long discourses"
and to the " reciters of the medium-length discourses. "
This process o f identifying and regulating the word o f the
departed Buddha entailed many decisions, and according to traditional
accounts, those decisions were made by the arhats, those disThe
Dharma 1 07
ciples of the Buddha who were bel ieved to have destroyed all the
afflictions, who themselves wou ld pass into nirvar:ta at death . But if
we follow the traditional accounts of the early community, the
authority of these li berated beings was soon called into question at
the second ( or third ) council with the proclamation of the five theses
of a monk cal led Mahadeva, the first and most important of which
was the shocking claim that arhats were subject to noctu rnal seminal
emissions, seduced by goddesses in their drea ms. In the rules
of monastic discipline, the Buddha had forbidden masturbation
but had declared that nocturnal emission was not a n offense since
it was unintentiona l . But an arhat was bel ieved to have attained
two knowledges: the knowledge that all of the passions had been
destroyed and the knowledge that the passions would never occur
again. Thus, Mahadeva 's claim ra ises the question of whether the
enlightenment of the arhat, specifically, his transcendence of passion,
extends to acts that are uni ntentional, what might be referred
to today as unconscious acts.
This claim has been widely interpreted by both ancient and modern
exegetes. Some saw it simply as Mahadeva's attempt to maintain
his own status as an arhat, despite the fact that he hi mself on occasion
presumably succumbed to dream-state temptation . By this time,
the followers of the Buddha had become divided into schools, or
factions, and some scholars have seen Mahadeva's claim as an indication
of the la xity of the group with whom he is associated (called
the Mahasa11ghika ), making the highest attainment more accessible
to themselves. But it is also possible to see his claim as a challenge to
an authority beyond sectarian rival ry, as an attempt to humanize
and thereby problematize the enlightenment of the arhat. The
Mahasarpghikas and their subsects are reported to have held a view
of the Buddha that came to be accepted by the Mahayana-that the
Buddha was transcendent and undefiled from birth, never experiencing
a moment of desire, hatred, or ignorance, even prior to his
enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. By claiming both the corporeality
of the arhat and the transcendence of the Buddha, the Mahasarp.ghikas
effectively wrest enlightenment, and hence authority,
away from the surviving arhats and restore it solely to the Buddha.
This was j ust one of the controversies of the early community, left to
1 08 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
preserve and protect the word of the Buddha after his passage into
nirvaa.
The rise of the Mahayana some four centuries after the Buddha's
death was marked by a proliferation of new siitras ( although the
original meaning of sutra, "aphorism," was lost as the new siitras
came to encompass hundreds of pages ) , each claiming to be the
word of the Buddha, each beginning with the phrase, "Thus did
I hear. " Often the "I" was said to refer, as it had in earlier works,
to A nanda. But often the " I " referred to a bodhisattva, such as
Maiij usri or Vaj rapai. And sometimes the person who heard the
siitra was not identified . To say that the hearer (and hence reporter)
of the words of the Buddha was Maiijusri or Vajrapai was to imply
that the Mahayana siitras were secret teachings not intended for the
Hinayana disciples of the Buddha and thus purposefully delivered in
their absence; Ananda could not report these words of the Buddha
because he was not there to hear the siitra . To say that it was
Ananda who heard the words was to attempt incorporation, that
just as the " early" siitras were heard and reported by the Buddha's
attendant, so also were the Mahayana siitras. To say that the hearer
was Ananda, but that he was empowered by the Buddha to perform
the task and that, even then, he merely heard but did not understand
what he would later report, was to attempt both to preserve the
Mahayana as the most profound of teachings, beyond the ken of
Hinayana disciples, but still to count it among the discourses heard
in the physical presence of the Buddha himself. Finally, to leave the
hearer unnamed was to allow siitras to be heard by anyone with the
qualifications of faith, and several Mahayana siitras set forth techniques
for coming into the presence of buddhas in other buddha
fields and receiving their teachings.
The question of who heard the Mahayana siitras immediately
raises the question of their authenticity and hence their authority.
And, as discussed in chapter 2, their authenticity and authority were
questioned by their opponents and defended by their proponents. In
pursuing the question of the authenticity of the Mahayana further,
we may move away from the texts for the moment, to consider
recent theories of the origins of the Mahayana, by postulating two
admittedly rather amorphous periods of the Mahayana in India, the
The Dharma 1 09
period of the siitras and the period of the treatises (sastra ) . The first
would have begun around the beginn ing of the common era, with
the rise of a disparate collection of cults centered around newly
composed texts and their charismatic expositors. Some of these
texts, like the Lotus, in addition to proclaiming their own unique
potency as the means to salvation, would also praise the veneration
of stiipas. Others, like much of the early perfection of wisdom corpus,
would proclaim their superiority to stiipas, declaring themselves
to be su bstitutes for the body and speech of the Buddha,
equally worthy of veneration and equally efficacious as objects of
devotion. These early siitras seem to have functioned in mutual
independence, with each siitra deemed by its devotees to be complete
unto itself, representing its own world. It was here that the
problem of interpretation had to be most explicitly confronted.
T H E I N T E R P R E T A T I O N O F T H E W O R D
The latter phase of Indian Mahayana, the period of the treatises, is
the period in which there seems to have been, rather than a relatively
disconnected collection of cults of the book, a self-conscious,
although not internally consistent, scholastic entity that thought of
itself as the Mahayana. The scholars who described themselves as
proponents of the Mahayana devoted a good deal of energy to surveying
what was by then a very large corpus of siitras and then
attempting, through a variety of interpretative strategies, to craft the
myriad doctrines contained there into a coherent system of phi losophy
and practice. In order to accomplish this, the self-contained
worlds presented in individual siitras were fragmented into repositories
from which commentators could extract citations in support
of their systems; indeed, treatises were composed that were essentially
anthologies of statements from siitras, thematically arranged .
In short, it is in this latter period that the siitras, which seem at first
to have been recited and worshiped, became, in addition, objects of
scholastic reflection and analysis.
All Buddhist exegetes, regardless of scholastic or vehicular affiliation,
were also faced with the problem of the interpretation of the
I I O T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
siitras. It is a common tenet of all schools of Buddhism that, j ust as
a physician does not prescribe the same medicine to cure all maladies,
so the Buddha did not teach the same thing to everyone.
Therefore, two teachings could be the authentic word of the Buddha
yet be at odds with each other. The Buddha is said to have taught
different things to different people based on his extraordinary
knowledge of their interests, capacities, dispositions, intelligence,
and past lives. Yet as an enl ightened bei ng, the Buddha, and hence
his teachings, must be free of all error and contradiction. How was
one to harmonize the Buddha's statements in one context that " the
self is one's protector" with his numerous declarations that "there is
no self" ? The Buddha may also appear to say something quite contrary
to the tenor of the doctrine, unconstruable as even provisionally
true. A commonly cited example of such a statement is the
declaration in the Dhammapada that one becomes pure through
killing one's parents, which the commentators must bring into doctrinal
consistency by explaining that parents are to be understood
here to mean negative mental states such as desire.
Such problems were only exacerbated by the Mahayana, where
the Buddha's admonition in his first sermon that suffering is to be
identified, its origin abandoned, its cessation attained, and the path
to that cessation followed, had to somehow be made compatible
with the statement that " there is no suffering, no origin, no cessation,
no path . " What did it mean to read in one siitra that from the
night of his enlightenment to the night that he passed into nirvaa
the Buddha never stopped teaching the dharma and to read in
another that from the night of his enlightenment to the night that he
passed into nirvaa the Buddha did not utter a single word ?
To answer such questions, one had to be able to claim knowledge
of the Buddha's own intention, to know what the Buddha's final
position on a given point of doctrine might have been, to know
what the Buddha really meant. The major schools of Buddhist
thought in Asia set forth their own position on the Buddha's final
view. But they faced the larger problem of accounting for those statements
that seemed to contradict what they understood the Buddha's
final position to be on some point of doctrine.
One strategy adopted in the Theravada was to classify the teachThe
Dharma I I I
i ngs of the Buddha in terms of the aud ience to whom he spoke and
then rearrange them into a single progression to nirvaa, beginning
with the most preliminary teachings and ending with the most
advanced. Works such as the Instructions on the Pitaka ( Petakopadesa
) explain that the teachi ngs of the Buddha have been broken
up according to meaning and phrasing, and they provide guidelines
by which the interpreter can restore their original coherence. In
order to ach ieve this, elaborate sets of interlocking categories are
introduced, such as the th ree k inds of disciple to whom teachings
are directed ( the ordinary person, the learner, and the arhat ); the
three personality types ( desirous, hateful, and deluded ); the four
basic topics dealt with in the sutras ( the afflictions, mora lity, insight,
and the arhat) . For example, sutras on the afflictions set forth the
effects of deeds motivated by desire, hatred, and del usion. Sutras on
mora lity set forth the benefits of deeds such as givi ng; a man who
gave a garland of flowers to the Buddha was reborn in heaven for
eighty-four thousand aeons. The teachings on the afflictions and on
morality are directed to ordinary people. Sutras on insight are
intended for monks and set forth the path to nirvaa. Sutras on
arhats descri be those who have destroyed desire, hatred, and ignorance
and have no need to accumulate merit for rebirth in heaven,
for they will enter nirvaa upon their death . Thus, the four kinds of
sutras are presented in a progression with the sutras on morality
superseding the sutras on the afflictions, the sutras on insight superseding
the sutras on morality, and the sutras on the arhat su perseding
the sutras on insight.
Another set of criteria, found i n many texts, both " mai nstream "
(that i s , non-Mahayana schools) a n d the Mahayana schools, is the
so-called four reliances: ( 1 ) Rely on the dharma, not on the person.
( 2 ) Rely on the meaning, not on the letter. ( 3 ) Rely on the definitive
mean i ng, not on the provisional meaning. ( 4 ) Rely on knowledge,
not on ( ordinary ) consciousness. In themselves, these do not provide
a great deal of clarity on the issue. They do, however, introduce two
key terms that would themselves be subjected to wide interpretation:
provisional and definitive.
In their most straightforward sense, provisional and definitive
refer to individual statements and by extension to the sutras i n
I I 2. T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
which those statements are conta ined. Those that cannot be taken
literally are regarded as provisional or subject to interpretation.
Those that can be taken literally are regarded as definitive. An
example of a definitive statement is that giving gifts in the present
results in wealth in the future, a simple articulation of the law of
karma. The Buddha may also make a provisional statement, that is,
something not to be taken literally, for any number of reasons. He
may, for example, assure lazy persons who are incapable of any virtuous
practice whatsoever that they will be reborn in Sukhavati, the
paradise of Amitabha, if they will simply pray. He does this in order
to cause them to accumulate a modest amount of merit, although he
knows that they will not be reborn in the pure land immediately or
even in their next lifetime but at some point in the distant future. In
another case, when the Buddha encountered those who did not
believe in rebirth and saw no existence beyond death, he taught the
immortality of the soul and rebirth in different universes, although
he knew in fact that there is no immortal soul.
Adapting his teachings to the needs of his audiences, the Buddha
taught specific antidotes to various faults. Thus, as an antidote to
hatred, he taught the cultivation of love; as an antidote to desire, he
taught meditation on the foul, such as a decomposing corpse; as an
antidote to pride, he taught meditation on dependent origination; as
an antidote to a wandering mind, he taught meditation on the
breath . He indicated that these faults can be completely destroyed
by these antidotes, calling each of them a supreme vehicle. In fact,
he knew that these faults can be completely destroyed only with full
insight into the absence of self. Thus, the Buddha had overstated
their potency. Elsewhere, he would criticize a virtue in an adva nced
disciple and praise it in a beginner, again seeking to inspire both to
progress further on the path .
But the categories of the provisional and definitive do not solve
the problem of the conflict of interpretation; they simply bring it
into relief, as two famous siitras demonstrate, siitras in which the
Buddha himself acknowledges the difficulty and provides criteria for
adj udicating conflicts. Indeed, the Buddha does so in a number of
texts, resulting in interpretative guidelines that themselves come
into conflict yet must be regarded as the word of the Buddha.
The Dharma 1 1 3
The Buddha's first teaching of the four truths to the five ascetics
in the deer park at Sarnath is known as the turning of the wheel of
dha rma . In a famous Mahayana text, the Perfection of Wisdom in
Eight Thousand Stanzas ( A$tasahasrikaprajiiaparamita ), the gods
declare that when the Buddha taught the perfection of wisdom, he
turned the wheel of the dharma a second time, superseding the first
turning of the wheel. Yet another important Mahayana surra,
called, interestingly, the Sutra Untying the Intention (Samdhinirmocana
), goes one step further, setting forth yet a th ird wheel. A bodhisattva
explains that the first turning of the wheel had occurred in the
deer park at Sarnath, where the Buddha had taught the four noble
truths to those of the sravaka vehicle. Yet, he says, "This wheel of
dharma turned by the Buddha is surpassa ble, an occasion [ for refutation
] , provisional, and subject to dispute . " Referring presumably
to the perfection of wisdom sutras, the bodhisattva goes on to
explain that the Buddha then turned the wheel of dharma a second
time for those who had entered the Mahayana, teaching them the
doctrine of emptiness, that phenomena are "unproduced, unceased,
originally qu iescent, and naturally beyond sorrow. " But this wheel
also is provisiona l . The Buddha turned the wheel of doctrine a th ird
time for those of all vehicles, clearly differentiating how things exist.
"This wheel of doctrine turned by the Bhagavan is unsurpassed, not
an occasion [ for refutation] , of defin itive meaning; it is indisputable.
" The surra thus takes something of a historical perspective
on the Budd ha's teaching, declaring that both his first sermon on the
four truths to sravakas and his teaching of the perfection of wisdom
to bodhisattvas were not his final and most clearly delineated view.
That view is found in the thi rd turning of the wheel of dharma, a
wheel that incl udes, minimally, the Sutra Untying the Intention
itself.
The Satra Untying the Intention is closely associated with the
Yogacara, one of the two major Mahayana schools in India, who
accepted its chronology in order to support their superiority over
the Madhyamaka ( the other major schoo l ) , whom they associated
with the second wheel. As one might predict, the Madhyamakas,
who regarded the teachings of the perfection of wisdom siitras to
be the Buddha's highest and final teaching, did not accept such a
1 1 4 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
typology, declaring the Satra Untying the Intention itself to be provisional,
intended for those lesser bodhisattvas who could not yet
understand the profound emptiness. The opinion of the many nonMahayana
schools, whose teachings were consigned to the first
wheel, are not known. They would presumably have dismissed the
entire story as a concoction of the Mahayana, denying that it is the
word of the Buddha.
At the same time, the Madhyamakas looked to a different siitra
for their understanding of what was provisional and what was
definitive, an understanding that did not depend on the claim of
insight into the Buddha's intention . The Satra Taught to Ak$ayamati
(Ak$ayamatinirdesa ) declares, "Siitras that teach the establishment
of the conventional are called siitras of provisional meaning. Those
siitras that teach the esta blishment of the ultimate are called siitras
of definitive meaning. Siitras that teach with various words and
letters are called siitras of provisional meaning. Those siitras that
teach the profound-difficult to see and difficult to understand-are
called siitras of definitive meaning. " That is, beca use emptiness is
the definitive, final nature of rea lity, siitras that set forth this final
nature are definitive; all others require interpretation. This method
of categorizing scripture focuses interpretation on the ontological
question of the true nature of things, excluding from consideration
questions of the Buddha's intention, the ci rcumstances of his teaching,
his audience, his skillful methods, and the literal accepta bility of
his words. It makes matters rather simple. Siitras that speak about
emptiness are definitive. Siitras that discuss other topics are provisional
. Thus, although it is certainly the case that the practice of giving
brings about the karmic effect of wea lth in the future, this is a
provisional teaching because it does not set forth the true nature of
giving; that is, it does not set forth the emptiness of giving. Such a
scheme does not solve the question of what is literally acceptable,
but it turns the question of interpretation away from intention. But
the question of what was definitive and what was provisional was
not solved by this siitra or by any other and continued to pose problems
for generations of thinkers throughout the Buddhist world.
In China, the problem of authenticity and interpretation was
complicated by the fact that Buddhist texts arrived in a haphazard
The Dharma I 1 5
fashion over several centuries, and the Chinese were rightfully
bewildered by the conflicting claims to authority made by various
texts and teachers. They responded by devising a number of classification
systems that attempted to order the various siitras according
to when they were taught during the Buddha's life and according to
the audience to whom he taught them . As was the case in India,
there was a divergence of opinion over chronology and over what
constituted the Buddha's highest teaching: Was it the first thing he
taught a fter his enl ightenment or the last thing he taught before he
passed i nto nirviia ? The Tientai school placed the Lotus Sutra at
the top of its hierarchy, for example, while the Huayan school
reserved this position for the Flower Garland Sutra (Avatarrzsaka ) ,
which they claim was taught by the Buddha in the second week after
his enlightenment, while he still sat beneath the Sodhi tree. It therefore
represents his most immediate and direct expression of the content
of his enlightenment, prior to the time that he rose from his seat
to set out to teach a dha rma modified in order that it be comprehended
by a diverse audience of the unenl ightened. Seeking to surpass
the claim of a particular text as representing the Buddha's
highest teaching (and thus proclaim its own legitimacy ), Chan
descri bed itself as " a special transmission outside the teachings . "
In Japan, one o f the most comprehensive attempts t o categorize
the teachings of the Buddha (and esta blish the supremacy of his own
school ) was made by Kiikai ( 7 74-8 J 5 ) , who outlined ten stages of
spiritual development, begi nning with a person of the most base
concerns, whom he called the "goatlike, " and moving grad ually
upward to those best served by Confucian teachings and then
Daoist teachings. Moving then upward to Buddhism, he identified
those best served by the teachings for sriivakas, then pratyekabuddhas.
Ascending to the Mahayana, he set forth the characteri stics of
those who would benefit from the Yogacara, the Madhyamaka, the
Lotus Sutra, and the Flower Garland Sutra. The most advanced disciples
of all were worthy of the teachings of his own new school, the
Shingon (True Word ) . It is noteworthy that i n this scheme, all of the
contemporary schools competing for royal favor in Japan are identified
( although we have no evidence for a Goat School, its adherents
were surely numerous) and are ranked, all below Kiikai's school.
1 1 6 T H E S T O R Y O F B U U D H I S M
Problems of interpretation were not limited to the Mahayana,
with its seemingly endless array of siitras to draw from. Nor were
such problems confined to questions of authority, where one text
was judged definitive while another was dismissed as provisiona l.
Even among the mainstream schools of Indian Buddhism, schools
whose canons of siitras varied little, one finds a host of controversies
over a host of options, some seemingly pedantic, others dea ling
with the question of how to interpret the most fundamenta l poi nts
of Buddhist doctrine.
Buddhism is famous for its doctrine of impermanence, which
describes how all conditioned things are produced, abide for an
instant, age, and then disintegrate . But precisely how does this
process work ? Is there an instant of production, an instant of abiding,
an instant of aging, and an instant of disintegration ? If so,
it would seem that things do not last for an instant, as the siitras
declare, but for four instants, unless production, abiding, aging, and
disintegration somehow occur simultaneously. And what precisely
are production, abiding, aging, and disintegration ? Are they inherent
in all things, or are they separate and discrete entities, external forces
that act upon things to cause them to be produced, abide, age, and
disintegrate?
These were the kinds of problems that concerned the Abhidharma
scholar-monks of schools like the Sarvastivada ( " Proponents
of Everything that Exists " ) and the Sautrantika ( " Followers of
Siitras" ) in India . The former held that production, abiding, aging,
and disintegration ( known as the " four characteristics " ) are conditions
that all impermanent thi ngs possess and that perform the
function of causing those things to be produced, abide, age, and disintegrate.
( Permanent entities, such as space and nirvaa, are not
susceptible to the four characteristics and are thus referred to as
"unconditioned. " ) For example, production draws an entity out of
the future and causes it to enter into the present. Yet even within the
Sarvastivada, there was debate over whether there are four characteristics
or three: to include " a biding " seems to some to run counter
to the doctrine of impermanence. The Sarvastivada position was
opposed by the Sautrantika scholar Vasubandhu, who argued that
the four characteristics are not separate entities but are instead
The Dharma 1 1 7
descri ptions or designations for processes that occur naturally to
impermanent things without anything else acting upon them . Thus,
when the necessary causes and conditions come together, something
is produced. And once produced, nothing further is required for it
to abide, age, and disintegrate. It is the nature of conditioned things
to arise and pass away. He supported his argument by asserting that
no statement by the Buddha can be found to support the separate
existence of the four characteristics. The Samistivada opponent
responded by providing such scriptural support. And so the debate
continued. Such scholastic controversies were not limited to India
but traveled with Buddhism across Asia.
H O W M A N Y V E H I C L E S TO E N L I G H T E N M E N T ?
As discussed in chapter 2, the Mahayana siitras proclaimed a bodhisattva
path that was not reserved for a single individual in each age
but was open to a l l who would develop the aspiration to buddhahood
. This proclamation carried with it a reevaluation of the path
that had previously been regarded as the ideal, the path of the arhat,
culminating in a nirvat:ta that was the cessation of all suffering, and
hence of mind and body. The nirvat:ta of the arhat was presented as
a lesser attainment. But what precisely did this mea n ? What was the
ultimate fate of the arhat? This question brings us again to the
question of scriptural interpretation, for the Mahayana siitras present
two conflicting answers. The question is traditionally posed in
terms of vehicles. Some siitras said that there are three: the vehicle
of the sravaka, the vehicle of the pratyekabuddha, and the vehicle of
the bodhisattva . Some siitras said that there is but one, the vehicle of
the bodhisattva.
For those who championed one final vehicle, there was the
prophecy in the Lotus Satra that the wisest of the sravakas, Sariputra,
would enter the bodhisattva path to eventually become the buddha
named Padmaprabha. It must be possi ble, therefore, for the arhats
not to pass into the nirvat:ta without remainder but to follow the
long path to buddhahood. Those who argued for one vehicle,
called the Mahayana, the " Great Vehicle, " the buddhaytlna, the
I I 8 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
" Buddha Vehicle, " or the ekayana, "the Single Vehicle, " proclai med
that the compassionate Buddha would not lead sentient beings to a
lesser li beration than he himself had attained. For this reason, all
beings i n the universe will eventua lly become buddhas, rega rdless of
which path they initially follow. Thus, the nirvar:ta of the sravaka is
like an illusory city conjured by a skillful guide, a way station for
wea ry travelers to keep them from turning back on their long journey
to a distant goa l. Such statements suggest that the nirvar:ta of the
Hinayana is a penulti mate achievement. Those who upheld this
position argued that the presence of the buddha nature in all bei ngs
provides further proof of one final vehicle, that all bei ngs are
endowed with the buddha nature and, consequently, all are of the
buddha lineage.
Yet the proponents of one vehicle were also confronted with a
historical dilemma: the fate of great arhats of the past who achieved
liberation and passed into nirvar:ta without recou rse to the Mahayana.
If all beings are destined to enter the Mahayana and become
buddhas, what is to be done a bout the arhats who have already
entered the nirvar:ta without remainder ? The proponents of one
vehicle, if they wished to uphold their position, have to redefine
nirvar:ta, not as a state of the utter cessation of mind and body, but
as a state in which mind and body persist in a purified form. That is,
in order to bring the arhats of the past on to the Great Vehicle, it
was necessary to deny the existence of a nirvar:ta without remainder,
the state that, according to the earlier tradition (and competing traditions
) the arhat entered, never to emerge. The proponents of one
vehicle therefore accepted that arhats sever the continuum of a birth
and death that are the products of the afflictions and the actions
they induce, but they held that this does not entail the final annihilation
of mind and body. Indeed, they argued that it is simply
unseemly to think that the buddhas, knowing the supremacy of the
Mahayana, would, in the final analysis, teach anything else. And so
they claimed that there is but one vehicle because it is unthinkable
that there be three. But even if the nirvar:ta of the arhats is merely
a contrivance of the compassionate Buddha, the Mahayana must
provide some explanation of their attainment and give some account
of their whereabouts. Thus, arhats abandon the afflictions of the
The D harma 1 1 9
rea lms of rebirth and, consequently, are not born there. Instead,
they take birth in a pure land in a meditation body seated inside a
closed lotus blossom, and they a bide in this uncontaminated realm
for many aeons until the time when they are roused from their deep
meditation by buddhas, who exhort them to enter the Mahayana.
They then return to saf!1sara by their own wish and undertake the
long path of the bodhisattva .
The opposing view was held by the proponents of three vehicles.
They turned for scriptural support to the Satra Untying the Intention,
which explained that sravakas are incapable of entering the
Mahayana and achieving buddhahood, " because their compassion
is meager and they are horrified by suffering and because they are
naturally of a n inferior lineage . " The possibil ity of transferring to
the Great Vehicle was held out for some, but they must do so before
entering the nirvaJ:ta without remainder; those arhats who have
entered the nirvaJ:ta in which the mind and body no longer remain
cannot return to saf!1sara to undertake the bodhisattva path. But
arhats who have ach ieved the nirvaJ:ta with remainder, that is, those
who have destroyed the afflictions but continue to experience the
effects of the karma that caused thei r present lifetime, are able to
lengthen that lifetime magically to enable themselves to begin the
bodhisattva path. Thus, the proponents of three vehicles were in a
sense more traditional, retaining the category of the nirvaJ:ta without
remainder as it was understood by the non-Mahayana schools but
reserving it only for those who fa il to undertake the bodhisattva
path .
Those who argued for three vehicles pointed out that sentient
beings differ in their personal ities. Some delight in the sufferings of
others, some are pained by them. These various dispositions are
neither the result of social conditioni ng nor the products of past
karma. Instead they are, in effect, genetically determined by a seed,
a potency, possessed by each sentient being, present from the beginningless
beginning of saf!1sara . The proponents of three vehicles
postulate a kind of spiritual determinism in the form of three lineages:
the sravaka lineage, the pratyekabuddha lineage, and the
bodhisattva l ineage. From the presence of these three lineages, a corresponding
set of ultimate destinations is inferred. Those with the
1 2.0 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
sravaka seed attain the nirva�:ta of the sravaka, those with the
pratyeka buddha seed atta in the nirvaJ:ta of a pratyekabuddha, those
with the bodhisattva seed attain the unsurpassed enl ightenment of
the buddha. Because arhats who have entered the remainderless
nirvaJ:ta of the sravaka and pratyekabuddha have aba ndoned all the
causes for rebirth in saJ1sara, it is impossible for them ever to
ach ieve buddhahood, which req uires many more lifetimes of practice.
This is their fate, determined by their seed . Thus, for the proponents
of three vehicles, not all beings have the buddha nature.
Some have the sravaka seed and they will become arhats, some have
the pratyeka buddha seed and they will also become arhats, some
have the bodhisattva seed and they will become budd has. Unwi ll ing
to deny the possibility that some srii.vakas become bodhisattvas, the
proponents of three vehicles also said that some possess an undetermined
seed, which means that they may begin one path and then
move to another.
As with the case of other clashes of scriptural interpretation, the
problem is not so much finding support for one's own position as
accounting for the fact that the Buddha seems also to support the
opposing position. As one might expect by now, both parties
ascri bed the opponent's position to the Buddha's skillful methods in
compassionately teaching what is not ultimately the truth to those
who are not prepared for it. Thus, the proponents of one vehicle
would claim that the Buddha taught that there are th ree vehicles to
those who are una ble to comprehend the grandeur of the single
vehicle. The proponents of three vehicles are somewhat more specific.
A text called the Ornament for the Mahayana Satras ( MahayiJnasatralamkara
) explains, " In order to lead some, in order to hold
others, the perfect buddhas teach one vehicle to the uncertain . "
Those t o b e led are snivakas and pratyeka buddhas o f indefin ite lineage,
that is, those who have entered the Hinayii.na path but are not
predestined to complete it. They are told by the Buddha that there is
but one vehicle, which begins with the practices of sravakas and
then proceeds to the practices of bodhisattvas. The others, those to
be held, are bodhisattvas of indefinite lineage, who are in danger of
forsaking the Mahayana beca use they have become discouraged
The Dharma 1 2. 1
about sarpsara when they see that sentient beings irrationally do one
another harm. To keep them from despondently turning to the
sravaka vehicle and seeking liberation for themselves a lone, the
Buddha tells them that there is but one vehicle, the Mahayana, that
there is no other alternative.
The apparent inclusivism of one vehicle and the exclusivism of
three vehicles should not obscure the fact that each of these
Mahayana doctrines also performs a certain polemical role in its
treatment of the prior tradition, which they name the Hinayana . By
claiming that there are three vehicles, the presence of the prior path
and its goa l of the nirvaa without rema inder is conceded but
deposed to a lesser rank. By claiming that there is but one vehicle,
the prior tradition is subsumed entirely as an expedient teaching,
offered to those of lesser capacity until they are prepared to receive
the true dharma .
T H E P O W E R O F T H E W O R D
The interpretation of an individual siitra and the attempt to make
sense of conflicting claims of multiple siitras remained constant concerns
of scholar-monks across the Buddhist world. But these siitras
were not simply the purview of the scholastics, and they were not
simply read as repositories of arcane doctrine. As the word of
the Buddha-whether provisional or definitive mattered little-the
same siitras that were mined for doctrinal positions held other treasures
for those who could read them, recite them, or simply pronounce
their names.
Buddhism shared with other Indian traditions an abiding belief in
the power of sound. The dharma is called the word of the Buddha,
and siitras begin with the testimony, "Thus did I hear. " Even with
the great proliferation of writing that resulted in a massive corpus of
siitras, and the continued composition of texts throughout the Buddhist
world, there is almost always some attempt to preserve the
pretense of speech. In the case of the Mahayana siitras, the anonymous
author served merely as a scribe, writing down what has been
1 2 2 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
hea rd from a buddha, a bodhisattva, or a deity in a vision or in a
dream or recording what has been passed down from long ago. The
trope of dictation pertained in rea lms both human and divine. Certa
in tantric texts were said to have been spoken by the bodhisattva
Vaj rapar:ti on a mountain in a mythic Sri Lanka (considered a place
of mystery and danger in much Indian literature ) to five sages, one
of whom, a kind of demon known as a rdk$asa, inscribed them in
malachite ink on pages of gold. The texts were then placed into a
treasure chest, which was hidden in the sky and watched over by
goddesses.
The words of siitras and tantras, whether inscribed on pages of
gold, etched on to palm leaves, written on scrolls of paper, or carved
into wooden blocks, retained a power that was released when the
words were read aloud, and recitation has been regarded as an efficacious
practice throughout the Buddhist world . In Sri Lanka, siitras
or portions of siitras called pirit ( " protection " ) are chanted by Buddhist
monks as a means of averting danger. In the ceremony a long
thread is twisted around the neck of a clay pot fil led with water. One
end of the thread is held by the chanting monks, the other end by
those assembled to receive the blessings. The power of the recitation
is thus channeled through the thread from the monks to the audience.
After the ceremony, the water in the pot is sprinkled on the
audience and the thread is broken into pieces and distributed, to be
worn around the wrist or neck as a kind of ta lisman.
In a Japanese tale, a monk had memorized the entire Lotus Satra
and chanted it regularly but was consistently unable to remember
two words in the second chapter, pure heart. He went to the
Hasedera temple and prayed to the famous statue of the bodhisattva
of compassion . After seven days, a man appeared to him in a dream
and explained that in his past life he had been reading the Lotus
Satra near a fire, when an ember j umped from the flame and landed
on the scroll, burning those two characters. He did not repair the
text before he died. As a result, he would not be able to remember
those words in his next life unless he made amends. The man
repented his misdeed, whereupon he was able to recite the siitra
without difficulty. He traveled to the town where the man i n the
dream had told him he had lived in his last life. He found his former
The Dharma 1 2 3
parents, who showed him the damaged copy of the siitra, which he
repaired. He served his parents of this life and his last life and practiced
the teachings of the Lotus Satra.
But the siitras seem also to have taken cognizance of their own
prolixity and often offered, again within the siitra itself, alternatives
to the memorization and mastery of the contents of an entire text.
Among these were dharatJlS, essentially long mantras, that were said
to contain, in a highly condensed form, the essence of the siitra .
Hence, the recitation of the dharar:ti functioned as the retention of
the siitra. Some scholars of Buddhism have regarded the proliferation
of mantras and dharar:tis in Buddhist texts as late accretions,
signs of the degeneration of the original rationalistic creed of the
Buddha into popu lar superstition. However, even in the Pali suttas,
once considered by some to be the closest approximation of what
the Buddha taught, one finds short recitations that are prescribed to
protect against certa in malad ies and dangers, such as snakebites.
Nor should the presence of such spells be regarded as a concession
to the unlettered; stories abound of great scholar-monks also being
adept at the recitation of mantra . Instead, these mantras, which
have been transliterated into the vernacu lars of the Buddh ist world
in order to preserve their sound, offer testimony to the enduring
power of speech.
And the power of ma ntra is great. The wrathful bod hisattva
Vaj rapar:ti was able to subdue all the deities in the universe simply
by intoning the mantra ham, causing them, on threat of death, to
take refuge in the Buddha, dharma, and sailgha. Only the chief of
gods, Siva, rema ined unwilling to submit, even after Vaj rapar:ti
revived him from death. Vaj rapar:ti had Siva and his consort
dragged upside down into his presence, as all the world la ughed at
them. He then placed his left foot on the prone Siva and his right
foot on his consort and intoned a mantra that caused Siva to strike
his one thousand heads with his one thousand arms, inflicting great
pain upon himself. Vajrapar:ti then recited the mantra of love, om
buddha maitri vajra rak$a ham, whereby the soles of his feet tra nsmitted
not misery but deliverance, and Siva experienced the bliss of
the liberation of all the buddhas and was instantly born as a buddha
in a distant universe.
I 2.4 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
Mantras thus have power even over gods. They seem also to have
power over something more powerful than the gods, the inexorable
law of karma . A criminal sentenced to death wore a bracelet inscribed
with the mantra of a goddess known as one of the five protectors.
He chanted the mantra as the executioners raised their
swords to behead him, and the swords were smashed to pieces.
Next he was thrown into a cave of monsters, but his body blazed
with flame and the monsters were afraid to eat him. Next he was
bound and thrown into a river, but the river dried up. The king
commuted his sentence. ( Should the reader be interested, the mantra
is O'ft namo bhagavatyai aryamaharatisarayai. )
This mantra is so powerful that it could even counteract the
karma of other beings. A particularly greedy monk who stole offerings
left at the foot of a stiipa was afflicted with a terrible disease as
the result of his misdeeds. A kind man placed an amulet with the
mantra around the monk's neck . The monk regained consciousness
long enough to regret his misdeeds but died that same night and was
reborn in the most torturous hell. Immediately the fires of hell
became extinguished and could not be rekindled and the sufferings
of the denizens of hell were relieved. The demons of the Lord of
Death were unable to slice the bodies of the damned, denizens cast
into the Grove of Swords emerged unscathed, their beds of needles
felt like velvet, the cauldrons of molten lead had become mysteriously
cool. When they complained to the Lord of Death, he
explained to them that a bodhisattva had died in the city of Pukaravati
and that his body, bearing an amulet with the dharar:ti, was
being protected and honored by gods. The demons went to the city
and saw that this was true; when they retu rned to hell, the spirit of
the monk had already departed, to be reborn in the Heaven of the
Thirty-Three.
The perfection of wisdom siitras are renowned for their declaration
of the emptiness of all things, identifying the insight into emptiness as
the perfect wisdom that bestows buddhahood. I f the perfection of
wisdom has the power to destroy the most pernicious ignorance, it
is reasonable to assume that it should also be a potent weapon
against less formidable foes . This is confirmed by the siitras themselves.
In the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Stanzas,
The Dharma
the deity Mara assembles an army of demons to attack the Buddha.
Discerning their approach, the king of gods, Indra, calls to mind
and then recites the perfection of wisdom, and the demons are
repulsed. The perfection of wisdom siitras have reta ined this talismanic
power throughout the Mahayana world. Among the many
perfection of wisdom siitras, none is considered more efficacious
than the Heart Satra, praised as their essence. The Heart Satra need
not be recited; its very inscription offers protection. and today in
Japan one can purchase fans, neckties, credit cards, and tea mugs
decorated with the characters of the Heart Sutra. A japanese story
illustrates its magical powers.
A blind boy named Hoichi had the rare ability to recite the epic
Tale of Heike in a beautiful voice, accompanying hi mself on a
stringed instrument called a biwa. He lived in the temple of Amidaj1,
near the town of Shimonoseki on the coast of southern Honshu,
near the site of the decisive battle in which the ships of the Heike
clan met their doom. Late one summer evening, Hoichi was sitting
outside playing the biwa when he heard someone call his name.
From the sound of the footsteps, he knew that the mysterious vi sitor
was a samurai warrior in full armor. He told Hoichi that his lord
was passing through the area and wished to have the epic performed,
especially the part that told of the final sea battle. Hoichi
was led to what must have been an opulent villa where the women
spoke in the refined language of the court. He was given a kneeling
cushion and began to sing the mournful song of the battle. His performance
was so poignant that the whispered expressions of admiration
of his voice soon changed to sobs and wails. The lord himself
was so moved that he invited Hoichi to return for six more nights.
The soldier then led the blind boy back to the temple before daybreak.
The next n ight the soldier arrived at the appointed hour and
brought Hoichi back to the villa. This time, however, some servants
of the monastery followed. They lost Hoichi in the evening fog but
eventually heard his song in the distance and followed it to the
cemetery of Amidaj i, where Hoichi sat alone. They led him back to
the monastery, where one of the monks determined what had happened.
Hoichi was in grave danger, for he had not been taken to a
T 2 6 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
villa each night but to a cemetery, where he performed not for a
noble family and its retainers, but for the ghosts of the Heike clan,
who listened rapt to the story of their own demise. On the night that
he completed his song, he would surely be killed.
That n ight, the abbot devised a plan to save his life. The monks
took calligraphy brushes and ink and wrote the words of the Heart
Satra over every inch of Hoichi's body. This would render him invisible
to the ghosts. If Hoichi sat silent and did not betray his presence
with his voice when the soldier came to fetch him that night, the
ghost would not find him. The next morn ing the monks discovered
Hoichi sitting in the monastery's garden, alive. But blood was flowing
from holes on either side of his head, holes where his ears had
been . The monks had forgotten to write the siitra on his ears, which
alone had remained visible to the puzzled ghost, who tore them off
and took them with him to present to his lord. From then on, the
famous singer of the Tale of Heike was known as Miminashi
Hoichi, " Hoichi the Earless . "
A s this story illustrates, written records o f the words o f the Buddha
were themselves potent objects of devotion. It is typical for a
Mahayana siitra to conta in a detai led description of the benefits that
accrue from its copying. The Lotus states that anyone who copies
the Lotus Satra will, without even reading or reciting it, be reborn
in their next life as a god in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three. And
texts were indeed copied; scrolls have been preserved in Chinese of
n umerous texts, often the Guanyin chapter of the Lotus, written in
the scri be's blood. Colophons identify all manner of motivations,
seeking that the merit resulting from the act of copying go to assist
a deceased family member in finding a good rebirth, that the merit
be retained for future use to provide a happy rebirth for the scribe,
or that it relieve the sickness of a loved one.
I n a Theravada text, the Chronicle of Discourses on the Scriptures
( Sangltlyavamsa ) , the Buddha explains the eighty-four thousand
u nits of the dharma . Those eighty-four thousand units are like
eighty-four thousand buddhas who will teach after he is gone. Thus
anyone who preserves the dharma by copying the tripiaka will
accrue the merit of preserving eighty-four thousand buddhas; each
letter is an image of the Buddha . The same text explains that anyone
The Dharma 1 2 7
who builds a library for the dharma will be reborn as the lord of
four continents, surrounded by two thousand islands, with eightyfour
thousand palaces made of various precious stones. Those who
give cloth for the wrapping of books will receive eighty-four thousand
treasuries; those who give string for tying books will receive
inexhaustible wealth; those who give wicker cabinets for books will
receive eighty-four thousand palaces made of gems.
The Lotus recommends five practices for preachers of the
dharma: receiving and maintaining the sima, reading it, reciting it,
copying it, and explaining it to others. It is noteworthy that reading
and reciting are listed separately, suggesting that these were
regarded as di fferent acts. Reciting, especially from memory, was
considered to be particularly potent. But each of these five practices
was performed in China, and miraculous tales are told a bout them .
During the reign of the Emperor Wu-cheng of the Northern Qi, a
man was once digging on the slope of a mountain when he
unearthed what appeared to be a pair of human lips, with a tongue
protruding from between them. He reported his discovery to the
emperor, who asked various scholars what the significance might be.
A learned monk explained that the sense faculties of anyone who
recites the Lotus Sutra more than one thousand times are not subject
to decay, even after death. The emperor dispatched some monks
to the site, where they placed the lips and tongue on an altar, circumambulated
it, and offered incense. In response to their request
that it manifest its marvelous powers, the tongue and lips began to
move, as if chanting.
Certainly the most extreme form of devotion to the Lotus derived
from the twenty-third chapter in which a bodhisattva named
Bhaiajyaraj a ( "Medicine King" ) in a previous life decided to
express his dedication to a buddha by transforming himself i nto a
flame. In order to do th is, he i ngested all manner of oils and fragrances
for twelve hundred years. He then coated his body with oil,
donned a jeweled cloak soaked in oil, and set himself a blaze, creating
a light that illumined the u niverse for twelve hundred years.
Reborn in the presence of the buddha he had so honored, he was
entrusted with the task of cremating the buddha upon his death,
collecting his relics, and erecting stiipas. Having completed this
1 2 8 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
task, he immolated his forearm in offering. His deed was praised by
the Buddha, who remarked that burning even a finger or a toe as an
offering to a stiipa accrues greater merit than offering all that is precious
in the universe. Although there is little evidence to suggest that
such a practice was emulated in India, it was in China, where cases
of self-immolation have been documented into the twentieth century.
Stories are told of monks and nuns who wrap themselves in
waxed cloth and then set themselves alight, chanting the twentythird
chapter of the Lotus Satra until their voices fall silent. A less
extreme and fa r more common practice was the burning of fingers
or the j oints of fingers. The finger ( or joint) would be anaesthetized
by tying a string very tightly below the portion to be burned, in
order to cut off the circu lation. The finger would next be wrapped
in pine resin and sanda lwood and then set ablaze, as the monk (and
those who attended him) chanted . Here, the Lotus Satra, which
elsewhere explains that the Buddha does not always mean what he
says, seems to have been ta ken quite literally.
Suggested Reading
Buswell, Robert E., Jr. , and Robert Gimello, eds. Paths to Liberation:
The Marga and Its Transformations in Buddhist Thought.
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1 9 9 2 .
Cox, Collett. Disputed Dharmas: Early Buddhist Theories of Existence.
Tokyo: International Institute for Buddhist Studies, I 99 5 .
Hakeda, Yoshito S . Kakai: Ma;or Works. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1 9 7 2 .
Lamotte, Etienne. History of Indian Buddhism. Louvain, Belgium:
Peeters Press, I 9 8 8 .
Lopez, Donald S., Jr. Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart
Satra. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 9 9 6 .
--., e d . Buddhism i n Practice. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1 9 9 5 .
The D harma 1 29
Buddhist Hermeneutics. Honolulu: University of Hawa ii
Press, 1 9 8 8 .
Mizuno, Kogen. Buddhist Sturas: Origin, Development, Transmission.
Tokyo: Kosei Publishing Company, 1 9 8 2 .
Wisdom of the Buddha: The Samdhinirmocana Mahayana Sutra.
Translated by John Powers. Berkeley: Wisdom Publications,
1 9 9 5 ·
4
M O NA S T I C LI F E
It is difficult to overstate the centrality of the sangha for the practice
of Buddhism. Buddhist nations tend to tell their histories around the
founding of monasteries. After the death of the Buddha the decline
of the dharma is measured in degrees of deviation of monks from
their vows. Buddhist history and Buddhist texts agree that without
monks there can be no Buddhism, a view supported by Buddhist
views of the end time. In the final stages of disappearance of the
dharma, it is said that when all Buddhist texts disappear, the last to
go will be the codes of monastic discipline, at which point the saffron
robes of the monks will turn white, the color of the robes of the
laymen.
The Buddha and his followers proba bly began as a group of
wandering ascetics, who required only four things: a tree to sleep
beneath, alms food to eat, rag robes to wear, and fermented cow's
urine for medicine. The traditional possessions of a monk (greatly
expanded in practice in many places throughout the Buddhist
world) were a set of three robes, a begging bowl, a belt, a razor for
shaving the head, a needle for sewing the robes, a water strainer to
prevent the unintentional consumption of insects, a walking staff,
and a toothpick. Sandals for feet, a sitting pad for the ground, an
umbrella for the sun, and a fan for heat were also permitted .
Although in the early years the Buddha and his monks are said to
have wandered during all seasons, they soon adopted the practice
of other ascetic groups of remaining in one place during the months
of the rainy season that occurs in northern India from the middle of
July to the middle of October. Wealthy patrons had shelters built for
their use, with the end of the rainy season marking a special occasion
for making offerings of food and provisions (especially cloth
Monastic Life I J I
for robes ) to monks. These shelters eventually evolved into monasteries
that were inha bited throughout the year. It seems that early on
in the tradition, the sailgha became largely sedenta ry, although the
tradition of the wandering monk continued. Whether they wandered
without a fixed abode or l ived in monasteries, monks and
nuns who lived in a designated region were expected to gather twice
a month, at the full moon and new moon, to confess and affirm
their vows communally. This practice was strictly followed in some
parts of the Buddhist world, virtually ignored in others.
One indication that the domestication of the sailgha must have
occurred early in the tradition is the fact that a range of activities
classically associated with the Buddhist monk came to be regarded
as ascetic practices followed only by the most devoted of renunciates.
Thirteen such practices are enumerated : wearing robes made
from discarded cloth rather than from cloth donated by laypeople
(there were apparently laypeople who had thei r servants guard piles
of old rags so that they could be taken only by Buddhist monks);
wea ring only three robes; eating only food acquired through begging
rather than mea ls presented to the sailgha; begging for food
from house to house rather than begging only at those houses
known to provide good food; eating only what can be eaten in one
sitting; eating only what can be placed in one bowl ; refusing more
food once one has indicated that one has eaten enough; dwelling in
the forest; dwelling at the foot of a tree; dwelling in the open air,
using only a tent made from one's robes as shelter; dwelling in a
charnel ground; sleeping in any bed that is offered, without concern
for its quality; and never lying down . Indeed, one of the schisms that
occurred in the sailgha during the Buddha 's life involved a dispute
over the degree of asceticism required of monks. The Buddha's
cousin, Devadatta, led a faction that favored a more extreme discipline
than that counseled by the Buddha, requiring, for example, that
monks live only in the forest and never eat meat. When Devadatta
failed in winning control of the order, he tried to assassinate the
Buddha by sending a wild elephant to trample him and later by
rolling a boulder down upon him. But the elephant stopped in his
charge and bowed at the Buddha's feet, and a piece of the rock only
grazed the Buddha's toe. Nonetheless, Chinese pilgrims to India
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
many centuries later encountered monks that followed the discipline
of Devadatta. Another schism arose between monks of a monastery
over a minor infraction of lavatory etiquette. Unable to settle the
dispute, the Buddha retired to the forest to live among the elephants
for an entire rainy season.
The sangha was by no means a homogeneous community. The
vinaya texts describe monks from a wide variety of social backgrounds.
Mention is made of monks from all four of India's social
castes. There was also a wide variety of monastic specialties. The
texts describe monks who are ski lled in speech, those who memorize
and recite the siitras, those who memorize and recite the vinaya, and
those who memorize and recite lists of technical terms. There were
also monks who specialized in meditation, monks who served as
advisers to kings, and monks responsible for the administration of
the monastery and its property. This last responsibility req uired all
manner of specific skills, including the keeping of keys, the regu lation
of bathrooms, the acquisition of land, the administration of
sharecropping, and the supervision of la bor ( including that of lay
servants who had been donated to the monastery, who may or may
not be regarded as " slaves " ) . One of the tasks of the monastery
administration was to ensure that the wandering monks were not
given mundane work, that meditating monks not be disturbed by
noise, and that monks who begged for alms received good food. The
famous sixth-century Chinese text, the Lives of Eminent Monks
( Gaoseng zhuan ) , categorizes its subjects under ten categories:
translators, exegetes, theurgists, meditators, disciplinarians, selfimmolators,
cantors, promoters of good works, hymnodists, and
sermonizers, and these categories only comprise the eminent.
As the defining sign of a monk or nun, robes are discussed at
great length in Buddhist literature. Although the robes differ greatly
in color and design across the Buddhist world, each tradition
regards its style of robes to have been sanctioned by the Buddha and
to be replete with Buddhist symbol ism. Ti betan monks wear a vest
under their upper robe that is said to signify the gaping mouth of the
Lord of Death, thereby serving as a constant reminder of impermanence.
Although sandals were sometimes disdained as a luxury during
the time of the Buddha (and remain so in parts of Southeast
Monastic Life 1 3 3
Asia ), Tibetan monks wear high boots with features resembling a
rooster, a snake, and a pig, the standard symbols of desire, hatred,
and ignorance, which the monk tramples with every step.
As the symbol of monkhood, the robes are to be regarded by the
laity as they would a stiipa, regardless of the purity of the one who
wears them; the beauty of the jasmine flower is not diminished by
the fact that some of the blossoms are eaten by insects. At the same
time, there are vivid cautions against shaming the robes. In one
siitra the Buddha says that it would be preferable for someone to
wrap his body in burning sheets of iron than for a monk who has
broken the precepts to accept a gift of robes from a faithful layman;
the man who wears the iron sheets must suffer only until his quick
death, but the monk who accepts the robes will burn in hell for
aeons. Indeed, the improper comportment of monks, from the way
they wear their robes to their disposition of offerings to their relations
with women, is often decried in Buddhist texts, sometimes in
the form of prophecies, in which the Buddha predicts the sad state
of affairs that will pertain in the future. These descriptions are
thought to derive from contemporary sources, placed in the mouth
of the Buddha as a social commentary on the state of the sangha and
what must be done to correct it. A nineteenth-century Cambodian
text describes a time of warfare and chaos in which the seasons are
reversed and monks break the monastic code. The period ends in a
seven-year battle in which blood flows as high as the belly of an elephant
and only four monks are left alive. This text has been used in
recent years to explain the reign of the Khmer Rouge, during which
almost a quarter of the Cambodian people lost their lives and Buddhism
was nearly destroyed.
The practice of begging for alms, going silently with lowered eyes
from door to door, seems to have become less common as Buddhist
monks became more sedentary, and it was irregularly practiced in
the Buddhist world. The practice has largely disappeared in Sri
Lanka yet is important in Thailand, especially after reforms in the
late nineteenth century. Monks did not beg in Tibet; the monastic
population was too large and the distances too great. Monks seem
also not to have gone on begging rounds in China, although some
large monasteries would have an annual procession, complete with
1 3 4 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
chanting, drums, and gongs, in which the local populace would turn
out to make offerings of money, rice, incense, and medicine. Begging
for alms may have been ra re even in India, resorted to only under
unusual circumstances of need . Indeed, monks and nuns in India
seem to have maintained their private property upon entering the
sailgha, sometimes building their own monasteries, and to have
inherited property on the death of their parents; the names of monks
and nuns figure prominently in the lists of donors of stiipas and statues,
with inscriptions dedicating the merit of the gift to the welfare of
their parents and of all beings or to the health of a family member or
friend.
The sailgha was also a community where disputes arose and had
to be settled. Here we find not a romantic scene of monks living
apart from the world, devoting every waking moment to the practice
of meditation, but a perhaps more human world where monks
and nuns, far from being dead to the world, are much a part of it.
They are j ust as concerned, for example, with the funeral rites of
their parents as any layperson might be . And they are concerned
that their own funera ls be properly performed . A vinaya text tells of
a deceased monk who haunts the monastery because his possessions
have been divided among the community without a proper funera l
ceremony being performed for him. Indeed, there seem to have been
rather strict property lines in the Indian monastery, with some
goods belonging to the stiipa, some goods belonging to the sailgha
in a general sense, and some belonging to individual monks. It was
important that these divisions be respected and that goods belonging
to the stiipa, for example, not be used for the sailgha, unless the
goods were borrowed and a proper accounting was made, incl uding
a notation of when the goods would be returned .
Upon the death of an ordinary monk in a Chinese Buddhist monastery
(as opposed to an abbot, who received a more elaborate
funera l ) , the local authorities were notified and permission to perform
the funeral requested . The corpse was then washed and the
head shaved. Dressed in clean robes, the corpse was placed in a
round coffin, seated in the meditation posture. The coffin remained
in the monastery's infirmary, adorned with flowers and banners
inscribed with Buddhist teachings. Monks assembled before the cofMonastic
Life 1 3 5
fin to chant the name of Amitabha and to recite the monastic vows.
The next day, incense was offered at the coffin and the name of
Amitabha chanted, and the coffin was carried by monastery workers
to the cremation site, followed by a procession of monks. Upon
arrival, the monks burned incense and recited scriptures on beha lf
of the deceased monk. The abbot of the monastery then delivered
a brief sermon before he lit the funeral pyre. After more chanting
of siitras and of Amitabha's name, the monks returned to the monastery.
The next day, a monk returned to the cremation site to
gather the ashes, either to be cast i nto a river or installed i n a stone
pagoda.
It is a common misconception that Buddhist monks and nuns do
not eat meat. In the early tradition, monks and nuns were enjoined
to eat whatever was placed in their begging bowls, and the Buddha
himself is said to have died from eating bad pork . In later Indian
Buddhism, inj unctions against meat eating occur in some Mahayana
siitras, including the Mahanirvar,a Satra, regarded as the Buddha's
final instructions. These statements came to be regarded as definitive
in China, where monks and nuns a bstained from meat as well as
from what were known as the five strong flavors: leeks, garlic,
onions, ginger, and sca llions. The prohi bition against eating meat in
China led to something that the Buddha perhaps had not intended :
the development of a tradition of opulent vegetarian cuisine, complete
with tofu creations that looked and tasted exactly like chicken
and pork. Such dishes can still be found on the menus of Chinese
restaurants with such names as " Arhat's Delight. " This sumptuous
tradition continued in japan, where the monastery and nunnery
became fashionable sites for noblemen and women to retire from
the world after a shift in the winds of power.
Throughout the Buddhist world, monks and laypeople have
lived in a symbiotic relationship: the laity provide material support
for monks while monks provide a locus for the layperson's accumulation
of the merit that results from supporting monks who
maintain their vows. This merit was often very specifically directed,
with donors providing donations in exchange for which the monks
performed recitations of siitras, the resulting merit being assigned
to the donor or the donor's deceased relative. Monks were often
I J 6 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
constrained not only to accept gifts from the laity but to use them,
whether or not they had any need for them, in order that the donor's
merit could be obtained. Even for a monk to accept a gift from a
layperson and then offer it elsewhere was frowned upon. The merit
of the gift resulted from the gift being used, and gifts of a more permanent
nature, such as a monk 's cel l, would continue to accrue
merit for the donor after the donor's death . Thus, although there are
certainly exceptions, one does not often find in the Buddhist world
monasteries sponsoring charitable activities or founding orphanages
and hospita ls, especially in the premodern period. There are many
stories of the compassionate deeds of Buddhist monks, and many
monks have effectively encouraged the la ity in such activities, but
for the most part Buddhist monasteries have been understood as
factories for the making of merit; more tangible forms of value have
therefore generally flowed into the monastery rather than out of it.
The distinction between monk and layperson is thus generally
sharply drawn, even in Japan, where, since the Meiji era, monks
have married. The distinction is not so much about celi bacy, although
outside Japan the pretense of celibacy and its attendant
misogyny have remained important. The distinction is, instead, one
of a division of labor. The role of the monk is to maintain a certain
purity, largely through keeping an ela borate set of vows. Such purity
renders the monk as a suitable " field of merit" to whom laypeople
can make offerings, thereby accumulating the favora ble karma that
will result in a ha ppy rebirth in the next life. This view persists in
modern Japan. The so-called training monasteries of the Soto Zen
sect are special centers where young monks train for two or three
years to receive instruction in meditation (often the only susta ined
period of meditation practice of a Zen priest) and engage in various
rituals of austerity. Because of the potency and purity of these
monks, the training monasteries are considered particularly auspicious
sites for the offering of prayers for the concerns of everyday
life, called " this-worldly benefits " (genze riyaku) in Japanese.
By adopting a certain lifestyle, in which the transient pleasures of
married life are renounced, monks provide the opportunity for the
layperson to amass a certain ka rmic capital. In return, monks
receive the fruits of labor of the laity-labor that they themselves
Monastic l.ife ' 3 7
have eschewed-in the form o f their physical support. More specifically,
monks do what laypeople cannot do beca use they genera lly do
not know how: recite texts, rema in celibate, perform rituals, and
sometimes meditate. Laypeople do those things that monks are forbidden
to do: till the soil, engage in business, ra ise families. ( In
Southeast Asia, monks should not touch money. In China and Tibet,
where lay and state support for monks was often less generous than
in some Theravada countries, monks commonly engaged in commerce,
either individually or on behal f of the monastery. ) The rules
and regu lations in the vinaya texts were meant to govern the lives of
Buddhist monks and to structure their relations with the laity.
Monks in the vinaya literature are caught in a web of social and ritual
obligations; they partici pate in a wide range of domestic rituals,
from those at a child's birth to those at a patron's death . In Buddh ist
traditions across Asia, ritual maintenance of these monastic codes
has served as the mark of orthodoxy, much more than adherence to
a particular belief or doctrine. Indeed, it is said that the teaching of
the Buddha will endure only as long as the vinaya endures.
Buddhist monks have traditionally been consu lted by laypeople
on all manner of personal affairs, such as the best date for starting
the construction of a house or having a wedding. Some monks have
been valued for their knowledge of astrology and hence their ability
to predict the future. Other monks have gained reputations as healers
with the power to cure ill nesses and make amulets. In many Buddhist
countries, the largest communal interactions between monks
and laypeople occur at festivals. One such festival is the annual celebration
of the Buddha's birthday in Korean monasteries. Much of
the monastery remains off limits to laypeople during the year, but
this rule is relaxed for the festival to celebrate the Buddha's birth .
On the morning before the main ceremony, many monasteries hold
a ceremony of bathing the Buddha. In a small building draped with
flowers is placed a statue of the baby Buddha at the moment of his
birth, standing upright, with his right arm raised, proclaiming that
he is foremost among gods and humans. Laypeople line u p to
make offerings to the Buddha and receive from the monks a sma l l
c u p of water, which they pour over the head o f the statue, bathing
the Buddha. They then receive a cup of medicinal water to drink.
q 8 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
This simple ceremony is a source of great income for the monastery.
On the Buddha's birthday itself, the monks string hundreds of paper
lanterns on cords that connect every building in the monastery compound.
The most ela borate lanterns are shaped like lotus flowers.
Laypeople line up at the main gate of the monastery and make offeri
ngs to the monastery, in return for which the monks write the
names of the family, including the deceased members, on a merit
certificate. Each of these certificates is next attached to a lantern. If
any lanterns are left without certificates, the monks will write the
names of their own relatives on a certificate and paste it to a lamp.
In the evening, the laypeople go out in search of the lamp with their
certificate, place a candle inside, and light it. The monks light the
unlit lamps. The monks and laypeople stroll around the monastery
to enjoy the sight of the lamps in the spring evening, sometimes
climbing a hill for a more panoramic view. Throughout the evening,
the monks take turns going to the main hall to join in the chant of
" Sokkamuni-pul," Sakyamuni Buddha .
Many motives, in addition to the desire for liberation from
rebirth, have moved men to become monks. Buddhist texts themselves
concede that monkhood provides a livelihood that is free
from tyrannical rulers, safe from thieves, and protected from creditors.
Secular works throughout Asia often take a somewhat more
cynical view, seeing the Buddhist monk as someone unfit, either by
disposition or choice, for respectable society. Indeed, the caricature
( and perhaps fantasy) of many popular portrayals of the Buddhist
monk is that of a scoundrel who escapes from his responsibility to
the family and to the state in order to live a life devoted to the pursuit
of food, drink, and equally immoral nuns. Buddhist monks thus
often appear as comic characters in novels, dramas, and stories
throughout Asia. In Drunken Games ( Mattavilasa ) , a South Indian
play composed around 600 C.E., a Buddhist monk explains that the
Buddha instructed monks to l ive in mansions, to sleep on good
beds, to eat good food in the morning, to drink delicious beverages
in the afternoon, to chew perfumed leaves, and to wear comfortable
clothes. He is puzzled that he has found no instructions from the
Buddha requiring that monks marry and drink liquor. He suspects
that the Buddha did indeed instruct monks to do so but that old
Monastic Life 1 3 9
monks, jealous of young monks, had removed these rules from the
monastic code. The monk goes out in search of the complete and
unedited text. The sixteenth-century Chinese epic novel journey to
the West ( better known in Engl ish in Arth ur Waley's abridged translation
Monkey ) , tells the story of the heroic pi lgrimage of the monk
Tripiaka, who sets out on foot for India in search of Buddhist scriptures.
Tripiaka is portrayed as a pious and learned young man but
utterly inept in all worldly situations, dissolving in tears at the slightest
difficulty. Fortunately, the bodhisattva Avalokite5vara sends along
a monkey with magical powers, who rescues the monk from all manner
of natural and supernatural enemies.
A story from the Theravada tradition plays on the notion of the
" act of truth , " a kind of oath that is said to have efficacious power.
For example, when Prince Siddhartha cut off his royal locks as a
sign of his ren unciation of the world, he threw his hair into the sky
and said, " I f I am to become a buddha, let them stay in the sky. If
not, let them fa ll to the ground . " (The hair did not descend . ) In this
story, a young boy is bitten by a poisonous snake. The distraught
parents stop a passing monk and ask him to use his medica l knowledge
to save the child. The monk repl ies that the situation is so
grave that the only possi ble cure is an act of truth . The father says,
" If I have never seen a monk that I did not think was a scoundrel,
may the boy live . " The poison leaves the boy's leg. The mother says,
"If I have never loved my husband, may the boy live. " The poison
retreats to the boy's waist. The monk says, "If I have never believed
a word of the dharma but found it utter nonsense, may the boy
live . " The boy rises, completely cured.
Men and women entered the order with a wide range of motivations.
Some certainly saw sarp.sara as a prison and sought to escape
from rebirth with the zea l, as the texts say, with which a man whose
hair is on fire puts out the blaze. Some became monks as orphans,
and some were promised to the monkhood as a result of recovery
from illness ( whether that of a family member or their own ) . There
was a saying in China that when a son became a monk his ancestors
for nine generations went to heaven. In certain regions of Tibet
there was a policy according to which farmers employed by monastic
estates were required to have one of their three sons become a
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
monk of the monastery. Some men sought refuge from conscription
into the army or wanted to escape from financial troubles. It would
be inappropriate to assume that one's initial motivation provided
any indication of one's future success, however that might be measured
. One of the most prominent Tibetan monks of the modern
period explained that he decided to enter the order because he liked
the look of the monks' robes.
T H E R U L E S O F D I S C I P L I N E
According to the traditional account, during the early years of the
Buddha's teaching there were no rules for monks. When Siiriputra
requested that the Buddha announce regulations, the Buddha
replied that he would do so at the appropriate time; at the time of
Siiriputra's request there was no need for rules because all the members
of the sangha were destined for nirviia and their behavior was
therefore naturally correct: all stream-enterers have given up any
belief in mistaken rules and rituals. As the true dharma began to
vanish, there would be more rules and fewer arhats. The rules of
monastic discipline were not offered by the Buddha in toto but
evolved over time, being formulated one by one in response to given
situations. A rule prescribed in the vinaya therefore carries with it a
story describing the circumstances of its formulation, and these stories,
whether they are considered as originating from the Buddha
himself or from the later community ( although according to the tradition,
all rules were formulated by the Buddha himself), offer fascinating
insights into the concerns of monastic life. The rule against
allowing criminals to enter the order was formu lated when people
complained that the Buddha had admitted Angulimiila, a murderer
who wore a neck lace made of the little fingers of the right hands of
999 people; the Buddha was to be the thousandth, but he converted
Angulimiila instead. In each case, the monk whose actions occasioned
the formulation of the rule was not punished because the rule
to be broken had not existed at the time. Angulimiila remained a
monk and became an arhat.
The rule forbidding sexual intercourse was established not after a
Monastic Life
monk surrendered to lust but when a monk who had left his pa rents
and his wife to join the sangha honored his mother's request to produce
an heir to inherit the family's wealth. The monk's brief but successful
return to the ways of a householder was condemned by the
Buddha, who told him it would have been better for him to have
inserted his penis into the mouth of a poisonous snake than to have
placed it in the vagina of a woman. Buddhist ethical treatises discuss
sexual relations in the context of karma; " sexual misconduct " is the
third of ten deeds that produce negative karma, which in turn creates
suffering in the future. The great fourth-century compendium
of Buddhist doctrine, Vasubandhu's Treasury of Knowledge (A bhidharmako
a ), explains that sexual misconduct is censured in the
world beca use "it is the corruption of another man's wife and
beca use it leads to retri bution in a painful rebirth . " He goes on to
describe four kinds of sexual misconduct. The first is sexual intercourse
with an improper partner, such as another man's wife, one's
mother, one's daughter, a nun, or a female relative up to seven times
removed . In keeping with the misogyny so prevalent in Buddhism, it
is noteworthy that sexual misconduct is defined from the male perspective,
prohibiting intercourse with women who are somehow off
limits, protected by a husband, a family, the sangha, or the incest
taboo.
The other types of sexual misconduct involve a man's intercourse
with his own wife but in ways that are somehow improper. Thus, to
use " a path other than the vagina " is to commit sexual misconduct.
The sex act also becomes a misdeed if it is performed in an unsuitable
location, such as a public place, near a stiipa, in a forest retreat,
or in the presence of images of the three jewels. Finally, there are
unsuita ble times for sex, such as when one's wife is pregnant, nursing,
ill, or menstruating, or during the daytime.
For monks, the penetration of any orifice-f a male, female, animal,
or spirit-with the penis even to the depth of a mustard seed,
whether one is the active or passive party, entails expulsion from the
order. A monk may also not penetrate any of his own orifices. This
rule was made to discourage two remarkable monks, one of whom
was capable of auto-fellatio and another who performed autosodomy.
The monastic texts dwell, as one might expect, on the various
T H E S T O R Y 0 1:' B U D D H I S M
permutations of the sexual act at some length, proscribing all manner
of bestiality and necrophilia and dwelling especially on the question
of intention. A monk who fel l asleep with an erection was
taken advantage of by a group of passing women, without the monk
being disturbed from his slum ber. The Buddha ruled that no offense
had been committed but henceforth allowed monks to close their
doors while napping. Masturbation, in a wide variety of forms, was
deemed a lesser offense, resulting in probation. The story associated
with its formulation tells of a monk who was thin and jaundiced
from the practice of austerities. On the advice of another, he began
to eat and sleep more regularly and to masturbate. Contrary to Western
stereotypes of the ill effects of masturbation, the monk soon
became robust and healthy, causing his fellows to ask what medicine
he had been taking. When he expla ined his miracle cure, the monks
were disgusted that he used the same hand with which he ate his
alms for other purposes as wel l and reported him to the Buddha,
who made a rule forbidding the practice.
Upon ordination, novice monks and nuns took five vows ( not to
kill any living being, not to stea l, not to engage in sexual activity,
not to l ie about spiritual attainments, and not to use intoxicants ) ,
p l u s vows not t o eat after the noon meal (a rule widely transgressed
in some Buddhist cultures through recourse to the even ing " medicinal
mea l " ), not to handle gold or silver, not to adorn thei r bodies,
not to sleep in high beds, and not to attend musical performances.
With ful l ordination, monks took an additional set of vows, for a
tota l of 227 in the Theravada tradition followed in Sri Lanka and
Southeast Asia, 25 3 in the Miilasarvastivadin tradition followed in
Tibet, and 250 in the Dha rmaguptaka code followed in China. The
vows covered the entire range of personal and public decorum and
regu lated physical movements, social intercourse, and property. It is
these vows that have defined a Buddhist monk across the centuries,
much more than adherence to a particular doctrinal position.
Indeed, all Buddhist monks, even those who profess the Mahayana,
fol low one of these codes, all of which derive from the so-called
Hinayana schools of India. The dozens of schools ( nikayas ) of
Indian Buddhism seem in fact to have been differentiated not by the
goal to which they aspired or the doctrine they professed but by the
Monastic Life 1 4 3
ordination lineage and the pa rticular version of the monastic code
followed in their region of India. The second council, said to have
occurred a century after the Buddha's death, was called to resolve
disputes concerning monastic discipline.
The vows were organized accord ing to the weight of their infractions.
Four infractions-murder, sexual intercourse, stealing, and
lying about spiritual attainments-warranted expulsion from the
order. Consumption of alcohol was categorized as an offense to be
confessed rather than one entailing expulsion . The Buddha was said
to have formulated the rule after a monk renowned for his supernormal
powers accepted a gift of liquor from some laymen and was subsequently
discovered insensible at the city gate as the Buddha passed
by. The monks carried him to the monastery and laid him down to
sleep, with his head pointed respectfully toward the Buddha. The
drunken monk immediately got up and lay down again, with his
feet pointing toward the Buddha, a sign of disrespect. The Buddha
noted that this once proper and deferential monk was now behaving
improperly as a result of drinking alcohol. He therefore prohibited
monks from drinking. Commentaries later defined the amount of
alcohol that needed to be consumed to constitute an infraction as
the amount on the tip of a blade of grass. Texts on Buddhist ethics
note that the use of intoxicants di ffers from the other misdeeds
because it does not in itself harm others . However, its dangers are
illustrated by a story. A monk encountered a distu rbed woman who
was carrying a bottle of wine and leading a goat. The woman told
the monk that if he did not either ( a ) kill the goat, ( b ) make love to
her, or ( c ) drink the wine, she would kill herself. This presented the
monk with an ethical dilemma : each of these deeds was prohibited
by his vows, yet if he did not break one of them, he would be
responsible for the death of a human being, a far graver misdeed .
Knowing that killing and sexual intercourse entailed expulsion from
the order but drinking did not, he drank the bottle of wine and
ended up choosing the other two options as well .
Lesser infractions were atoned for through a temporary expulsion,
the temporary loss of certain rights, some kind of penance,
penalty, or probation, or simply by confession in the fortnightly
communal recitation of the rules or by acknowledgment to another
' 44 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
member of the sailgha. During the period of probation, the monk had
to announce his offense daily, had to use the worst bed and the lowest
seat, and had to go to the end of the line when food was distributed.
A monk on probation was also not allowed to leave the
monastery unaccompanied. Infractions that entailed confession
incl uded digging in the earth (and hence tilling the soil), staying
more than two or th ree nights with an army, and informing a
layperson of spiritual attainments that one does indeed possess; to
fa lsely claim attainments resulted in expulsion from the order. An
entire section of the code prescribed rules of simple decorum, the
violation of which was not deemed an infraction. These incl uded the
rules for eating and using the toilet. It also prevented monks from
teaching the dharma to persons who showed disrespect by not
removing their shoes, doffing their turbans, or setting down their
parasols. Many rules in this category reflected the mores of an
Indian society that sometimes proved baffling when the monastic
code was translated into other languages in other lands.
Like all codes of conduct, the Buddhist monastic codes evidence a
certain gap between theory and practice. And as in all codes, the individual
prohibitions, said to have been pronounced by the Buddha
himself after a particular infraction had been committed, provide
some insight into the kinds of things that monks were doing. Rules
are made to prohibit rea l or anticipated conduct. That these rules
seem to have been tra nsgressed, not only in India but throughout
Buddhist Asia, should come as no surprise. It is therefore perhaps
more accurate to regard the monastic rules as an ideal to aspire to
rather than as a code of conduct. In 1 2 3 5 , the japanese monk
Shiisho vowed that during the weeks of his stay at a certa in temple
he would refrain from drinking liquor, engaging in sexual relations
(apparently with males ) , and playing games of chance . From one
perspective, such a statement appears shocking, that a monk would
promise for a short period to refrain from doing things that should
result in his permanent expulsion from the order. At the same time,
Shiisho acknowledges by his promise a certain commitment to the
practice of restraint and an aspiration to a lofty ideal.
Monastic l.ife 1 4 5
O R D I N A T I O N
The formal ordination ceremony for a monk, still followed in many
parts of the Buddhist world, seems to have developed after the death
of the Buddha . During his lifetime, one became a monk simply by
accepting the Buddha's call, " Come, monk . " It later evolved into a
two-step process, "going forth, " or becoming a novice, and full
ordination as a monk. In order to become a novice, a boy had to be
old enough to scare away a crow, genera lly interpreted to be eight
years of age. He was given a preceptor with whom he would reside
and a teacher from whom he would learn the dharma . His head
would be shaved, and he would don the robes of a monk. He would
then prostrate himself before the preceptor and declare three times
that he sought refuge in the Buddha, the dharma, and the sailgha .
He would then be instructed in the ten vows of a novice.
Ordination as a monk was a more formal ceremony, requiring
the presence of ten monks (or five in remote areas ) . The novice had
to be at least twenty years of age and free from various physical
defects. He would thus be asked whether he was free ( a nd not a
slave ) , human (and not a demon ), and male (and not a hermaphrodite),
free from debt, exempt from the military, free from various
diseases such as leprosy and asthma, had his parents' permission,
and was at least twenty years of age. The novice would formally
request ordination three times, after which the presiding monk
would ask him a series of questions to determ ine his eligibility. The
presiding monk would then ask the assembly three times to accept
the novice into the order. The assembled monks would assent with
their silence. Upon approval, the precise time of the ordination
would be duly noted, for this would forever determine the new
monk's seniority; seniority in the sailgha is measured not by chronological
age but by length of membership in the sailgha, measured
from the moment of ordination. The new monk would then be told
that he would be expel led from the order if he killed a human, stole,
engaged in sexual misconduct, or lied about his spiritual attainments.
Ordination as a monk or nun was considered a lifelong commitment,
and in some Buddhist societies a certain stigma attached to
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
those who returned to lay life. Yet in a Mahayana siitra the Buddha
explained that the gifts of the la ity are to be received only by monks
who practice purity; those who do not maintain the precepts rigorously
amass great negative karma by accepting alms. Upon hearing
this, five hundred monks rose and returned to lay life, feeling they
were inadequate to the demands of monkhood. The Buddha praised
them for their realistic assessment of themselves and predicted that
they would be among the first disciples of Maitreya. In some Buddhist
societies, it is indeed customary to return to lay life; ordination
as a novice functions as a traditional rite of passage. In Thailand,
for example, it is common for unmarried young men to be ordained
and spend the three months of the rains retreat as a monk; in addition
to serving as a rite of passage into manhood, the time spent as
a monk is said to accrue great merit for the young man's parents. In
China, the status of the monk was considered so potent that sickly
children were sometimes ordained as novices at a very young age
(which required nothing more than the shaving of the head ) . When
the child reached adolescence in good health, a ceremony would be
held in which the child was symbolically expelled from the order for
some apparent offense, at which point he would again allow his hair
to grow long. The status of monkhood was considered sufficiently
auspicious for there to develop in japan a tradition of posthumous
ordination. As in the standard ordination ceremony, each precept
was recited and the person was asked three times whether he or she
intended to keep it. The fact that the deceased remained silent was
interpreted in the Zen sect (which administered most funera ls) as a
sign of Zen insight. After the precepts had been administered, the
deceased was presented with the possessions of a Buddhist monk or
nun: a robe and a bowl. In addition, a kechimyaku ( lineage certificate
) was prepared, listing the deceased at the end of a long line of
disciples, traced back over the generations to the Buddha himself.
The name of the deceased, however, was a new Buddhist name. The
degree of esteem of the monastic name so bestowed-an esteem
measured by the number of characters and the number of strokes
required to write each character-was (and continues to be ) often
related to the amount of money offered by the family. In modern
funerals, more than half of the funeral fee paid to the temple can be
Monastic Life 1 4 7
for the Buddhist name. With the deceased now a monk or nun, a
monastic funeral would be performed, with the deceased dressed in
robes with head shaved. The kech imyaku would be placed inside the
coffin with the body.
In China, it was common for men to enroll first at a loca l temple,
where they would have their heads shaved and begin to observe the
ten vows of a novice, although such vows had not been formally
administered. The novice might remain at the local temple for one
or two years of training before receiving ordination, which often
took place at a large public monastery. Over much of the course of
Chinese history, ordination was controlled by the government, with
specific monasteries receiving permission to ordain a certain number
of monks at given interva ls. Monks would be exempted from military
conscription and taxation, and th us the size of the sangha was
a state concern; when the economy suffered, the government would
sell ordination certificates to raise capital. The law code of the Ming
Dynasty prohibited the building or rebuilding of any monastery
without official authorization . Anyone who violated this law would
receive one hundred blows with the long stick, and the monks of
such a monastery would be retu rned to lay life and banished to the
far frontiers of the empire.
In the large Chinese public monasteries, the ordination period
traditionally lasted for fifty-three days. During the first two weeks,
the monks were instructed in the daily sched ule and rules of comportment
and memorized the various verses that accompanied their
every activity. They were instructed by senior monks, often stern
disciplinarians who wielded a club to beat those who transgressed .
In answer to any statement by this monk, the novices could only
reply, "A mitabha . " At the end of two weeks, the novices would
kneel in assembly to recite the refuge formula and receive the ten
vows of a novice. At the concl usion of the ceremony, they would
receive the robes and begging bowl of a monk . The next portion of
the ordination period was devoted to learning the 250 vows of a
fully ordained monk, which would be again administered to the
group. The final portion of the period was devoted to receiving the
fifty-eight bodhisattva vows from the Brahmd 's Net Stura ( Fan
wang jing) . At least for the past century, it has been common for
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
Chinese monks and nuns to have a set of small round scars ( from
three to eighteen ) on the top of their shaved heads, resulting from
being burned with a stick of i ncense at the time of their ordination .
B O D H I S A T T V A V O W S
Monks who followed the Mahayana also took another set of vows,
the bodhisattva vows. Although those who aspired to the bodhisattva
path were often monks, ordination as a monk or a nun was
not deemed a requirement for the bodhisattva ordination. In India,
China, and Tibet, the bodhisattva vows were generally seen as a
supplement to the monk's vows. In Japan, they became a substitute.
The most important of all vows for the bodh isattva is the commitment
to achieve buddhahood for the sake of all beings i n the
universe. But beyond this central vow, separate sets of vows were
formulated for bodh isattvas. In an Indian version, a bodhisattva
promised eighteen things: ( 1 ) not to praise oneself and slander others
out of attachment to profit or fame; ( 2 ) not to fai l to give one's
wealth or the doctrine, out of miserliness, to those who suffer without
protection; ( 3 ) not to become enraged and condemn another,
without listening to his or her apology; ( 4 ) not to abandon the
Mahayana and teach a facsimile of the excellent doctrine; ( 5 ) not to
steal the wealth of the three jewels; ( 6 ) not to abandon the excellent
doctrine; ( 7 ) not to steal the saffron robes and beat, imprison, or
expel a monk from the life of renunciation, even if he has broken
the ethical code; ( 8 ) not to commit the five deeds of immediate
retri bution (killing one's father, killing one's mother, killing an arhat,
wounding the Buddha, causing a schism in the sangha); ( 9 ) not to
hold wrong views; ( 1 0 ) not to destroy cities; ( I I ) not to discuss
emptiness with those whose minds have not been trained; ( 1 2 ) not
to turn someone away from buddhahood and complete enl ightenment;
( 1 3 ) not to cause someone to abandon completely the monastic
vow i n order to practice the Mahayana; ( 1 4 ) not to believe that
desire cannot be abandoned by the vehicle of sravakas or to cause
others to believe it; ( 1 5 ) not to claim falsely, "I have accepted the
profound emptiness " ; ( 1 6 ) not to impose fines on renunciates or
Monastic Life 1 4 9
take donors and gifts away from the three jewels; ( 1 7 ) not to cause
meditators to give up ( the practice of) serenity (samatha ) or take
the resources of those in retreat and give them to reciters of texts;
( 1 8 ) not to abandon the aspirational and practical commitment to
achieve buddhahood. This l ist collects a wide range of concerns,
some of which ( like the vow not to commit any of the deeds of
immediate retribution ) are encompassed by the vows of monks and
nuns; some of which ( like the vow not to give up the commitment to
achieve buddhahood ) are central to the conception of the Mahayana;
some of which ( like the promise not to turn someone away from
their monastic vows ) demonstrate the compatibility of monastic and
bodhisattva practice; and some of which (like the promise not to
destroy cities ) simply strike the modern reader as odd.
The tension between the demands of the monk and the demands
of the bodhisattva are illustrated in some of the secondary infractions
of the bodhisattva vows. For example, it is an infraction for a
bodhisattva not to be willing to commit one of the nonvirtuous
deeds of body and speech ( kill ing, stealing, sexual misconduct,
lying, divisive speech, harsh speech, senseless speech) out of compassion
for others . Stories are told to illustrate the bodhisattva's
compassion in this regard. An ascetic who had maintained celi bacy
for four billion years was approached by a woman. When he
refused her advances she threatened to commit suicide. Moved by
compassion, the ascetic consented and lived with her for twelve
years before returning to the forest. As a result of his deed, the
ascetic did not accrue the negative karma of sexual misconduct but
instead shortened his path to enlightenment by one million aeons. A
more extreme case is that of five hundred traders who embarked on
a sea voyage in search of treasure. They were successful, but during
the voyage home a thief aboard the ship concocted a plan to murder
the five hundred and take their treasure. The leader of the five hundred
learned of the plan in a dream and decided that the only way to
save the l ives of the five hundred was to murder the thief. He
thereby not only saved their lives but prevented the thief from
accruing the negative karma of five hundred murders. Indeed, the
thief was reborn in heaven . And the m urderer, rather than amassing
the negative karma of murder himself, was a ble to reduce his own
J 5 0 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
path to enl ightenment by one hundred thousand aeons by means of
his compassionate act. The murderer was none other than the future
Buddha .
The bodhisattva vows used in China derived from the Brahma 's
Net Sutra, a Chinese apocryphon compiled in the fifth centu ry. They
consisted of ten major and forty-eight minor precepts. The ten
major precepts incl uded vowing not to cause the loss of life, not to
steal, not to engage in sexual m isconduct, not to lie, not to sell
liquor, not to report the misdeeds of others, not to engage in praise
of oneself or the criticism of others, not to be miserly, not to be
resentful, and not to sla nder the dharma . These bodhisattva precepts
could be received by either monks or laypeople who had not
committed one of the heinous crimes ( the standard list of five, augmented
with killing a senior monk and kill ing a master of a Buddhist
community ) . For monks in China ( a s was the case in India and
Tibet) , the bodhisattva vows were considered a supplement to the
2 5 0 monastic vows of the vinaya.
The bodhisattva vows took on a di fferent role in japan. As in
China, they were derived from the Brahma 's Net Sutra. However,
the Tendai and Zen sects regarded these vows as a su bstitute for,
rather than a supplement to, the monastic vows set forth in the
vinaya . This interpretation developed, in part, for poli tica l reasons.
During the Nara period, monks received both the vinaya and
bodhisattva precepts . Indeed, an entire sect, the Ritsu, was dedicated
to the practice and interpretation of the vinaya. The ordination
of monks was control led by the Nara sects, and it was req uired
that they be administered in the city of Nara . The monk Saicho
( 7 67-8 2 2 ) traveled to China, where he studied the works of the
Tienta i sect and returned to japan intent on spreading its teachings
in japa n . Basing himself at Mount Hiei near Kyoto, he wished to
esta blish a sect independent of the administration of the Nara sects,
but in order to do so he had to be a ble to ordain monks, something
prohibited outside of Nara. Saicho thus declared the standard
monastic vows to be a Hinayana practice and esta bl ished a form of
monastic ordination derived solely from the bodhisattva precepts of
the Brahmd 's Net Sutra. As m ight be expected, this innovation was
not accepted by the Nara sects, who declared the monks of Mount
Monastic Life 1 5 1
Hiei to be simply laymen in monks' robes. But Saicho's Tendai sect
became, after his death, the most powerfu l Buddhist sect in japan,
and his innovation in ordination became the norm, with Mount
Hiei becoming the training ground for leading figures of the Pure
Land and Zen sects, who would develop their own interpretation of
the role of precepts in the path to enlightenment.
For Shinran of the True Pure Land sect (Jodo Shinsh ii ) , the precepts
derived from an earlier age, when the followers of the Buddha
were able to atta in enlightenment through their own efforts. In the
present degenerate age, to attempt to maintain precepts, even bodhisattva
precepts, is a futile exercise; it is even an act of h u bris, suggesting
that one has the power to effect one's own enlightenment.
Thus Shinran abandoned all precepts and ordinations. For him the
only vow that mattered was the eighteenth vow of Amitiibha, who
had promised in the Sukhavatlvyuha to deliver into the Pure Land
all those who called his name.
Dogen, the founder of the Soto Zen sect, asserted that the three
train ings of Buddhism-ethics, meditation, and wisdom-were
already fu lly present in the act of Zen meditation; he even accepted
the view that to observe the Hinayiina vows was to break the bodhisattva
vows . This is not to suggest that Dogen rejected all rules; he
made the routines of the Zen monastery, instituted by the great
patriarchs of China, the foundation of Soto monastic life. He followed
the Tendai in basing monastic ordination on the Brahma 's
Net Satra but made his own list of sixteen precepts.
M O N A S T I C L I F E
The primary a bode of the monk was the monastery. Despite the
presence of large monasteries throughout the Buddhist world, evidence
suggests that most were quite sma l l . In 1 9 3 0 in China, for
example, there were some five hundred thousand monks living in
one hundred thousand monasteries and temples, with only a bout 5
percent living in larger monasteries that ranged in size from fifty to
one hundred fifty monks. In the Indian monastic code there is discussion
of monasteries being owned by laymen (suggesting that
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
donors reta ined rights over lands they donated to the sangha ) and of
there being so few monks that they were constrained to occupy more
than one monastery each day so that the owner could accrue the
requ isite merit. In such cases, it seems al most as if the monastery
was a kind of ten ant farm, leased to monks, which they cultivated in
order to harvest merit rather than mil let, merit duly provided to the
landlord.
Monastic life was highly regulated. Monasteries had their own
administration with officers of various ranks. In a large Chinese
monastery, these included the guest prefect, the bath prefect, the
water chief, the charcoal manager, the manager of the infirma ry, the
chief of the bell tower, and the ab bot's quarters acolytes . The day,
the month, and the year were ma rked by ceremonies that must be
performed properly, and individual mon ks lived according to an
elaborate etiquette, much of which was based on seniority, determined
not by age but by the number of yea rs one had been a mon k .
A twelfth-century Chinese vinaya text contains instructions o n such
things as the proper contents of the pack of a wandering monk, the
procedures for staying overnight at a monastery, entering the
abbot's quarters, enterta ining distinguished visitors, inaugurating
and ending the summer retreat, serving a meal provided by a donor,
and performing the funeral for an abbot. There were also detailed
instructions on how to serve tea in various ceremonies and services.
Much of the activity in a large Chinese tra ining monastery took
place in the sangha hall, a large rectangular structure, one end of
which held an altar with an image of the bodhisattva of wisdom
Manj usri. Much of the hall was fil led with low platforms, each
large enough to accommodate the assigned space for severa l
monks. The monks sat in meditation, took their morn ing and noon
meals, and slept in these spaces. Rules prescri bed how one was to
rise in the morning (in some monasteries at 3 A . M . ) . Stepping down
from the platform after waking up in the morning, and proceeding
to the washstand, the monk was to mentally say, " From the hours of
dawn straight through to dusk, I will make way for all living beings.
If any of them should lose their bodily form under my feet [that is,
be killed] , I pray that they may immediately be born in the pure
land . " There were rules for washing one's face and brushing one's
Monastic Life
teeth, for folding one's blanket and putting on one's robes. There
were rules for offering rice ( not less than seven grains) to the hungry
ghosts before each meal, eating the meal in silence, receiving a second
helping, washing one's bowls, spoon, and chopsticks afterward.
One was to sleep on the right side; lying on one's back or stomach
was said to induce bad dreams. And there were detailed rules for
using the toilet, an ela borate undertaking even though a simplified
robe was worn for the purpose. All of these rules were to be followed
in addition to the 2 5 0 vows of a monk.
In genera l, monks were to comport themselves i n a discreet and
dignified manner at all times, respecting the ranks of seniority in all
situations and following precise rules of decorum, their activities
punctuated by the mental recitation of verses that reminded them of
the larger purpose of their routine. When a monk raised his bowl to
receive food from the server, he was to recite si lently, " Upon receiving
this food, I pray that living beings shall have as food the bliss of
meditation and be filled to satiation with joy in the dharma . "
The degree t o which Buddhist monks meditated differs, again,
over time and across regions. The fact that monastic regulations
refer to a special category of meditators suggests that this activity
was considered a specialty of which not all monks partook. In the
large and el ite Chan training monasteries in the early decades of the
twentieth century, monks would enroll in a five-month session duri
ng which there would be seven periods each day ( with monks rising
at 3 A.M. and going to bed at r o P.M . ) of combined seated and walking
meditation, punctuated by four meals, three teas, and two naps.
Even at such monasteries, those engaged in the full meditation regimen
represented a minority of the monks of the monastery, who
were engaged in all manner of other activities . At smaller monasteries,
there may have been no formal schedule for meditation or
chanting.
Monasteries supported themselves by different means i n different
countries. Some received support from the state. In Tibet and China,
large monasteries often owned substantial lands ( sometimes at a
great distance from the monastery itself) that would be leased out to
tenant farmers; monks were prohibited by the vinaya from tilling
the soil because they might inadvertently kill insects. The Indian
1 5 4 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
monastic codes contain i nstructions on how funds from permanent
endowments to the monastery may be loaned at interest, a service
that monasteries elsewhere in the Buddhist world a lso provided.
Other monasteries supported themselves through performing services
for the dead, while others, located on a sacred mountain or
possessing a famous image, would benefit from the donations of
pilgrims and tourists .
In addition to serving as sites of merit making, many Buddhist
monasteries also served as centers of learning. Especially in largely
illiterate societies, monasteries were important educational institutions.
Some of the largest such centers in the Buddhist world were
the great monasteries of Lhasa i n Tibet. Just as the great monasteries
of India had drawn students from many lands, so these Ti betan
monasteries drew monks from China in the east, Kalmykia in the
west, Mongolia in the north, and Nepal in the south . One of these
monasteries was Drepung, the largest monastery in the world, with
over ten thousand monks. A small percentage of these monks were
engaged in a formidable scholastic curriculum that often took
twenty years to complete. It was centered on the study of five Indian
treatises, k nown simply as the " five texts . " The first was the Ornament
of Realization (A bhisamayala11kiira), one of the works that
Maitreya gave to Asailga . Studied for four to six years, this work
is said to present the " hidden teaching" of the perfection of wisdom
siitras, that is, the intricate structure of the Hlnayana and Mahayana
paths to enlightenment. It is for the most part a list of terms,
known as the " seventy topics, " each of which has multiple subcategories.
There are, for example, twenty varieties of the aspiration to
buddhahood ( bodhicitta ) . The second text was the Introduction to
the Middle Way ( Madhyamakavatara ) by Candraklrti, a work organized
around the ten perfections of the bodh isattva path but the
bulk of which is devoted to the sixth, the perfection of wisdom. This
chapter served as the locus classicus for the Middle Way philosophy
of Nagarj una. It was studied for two to four years . The third work
was the Commentary on Valid Knowledge ( Pramiir}avarttika ) of
Dharmaklrti. Monks of the three great monasteries of Lhasa would
convene annually to debate a bout Dharmaklrti's text. This text contains
arguments for the existence of rebirth, for l i beration from
Monastic Life 1 5 5
rebirth, and for the omniscience of a buddha, discussions of the
two valid sources of knowledge ( direct perception and inference ) ,
classi fications of logical proofs, a n d an analysis of the operations
of thought. Written in a cryptic poetic style, this is considered
one of the most difficult Indian treatises and thus is a particular
favorite of the most scholarly monks. The fourth text was the
Treasury of Knowledge (Abhidharmakosa) of Vasubandhu, a compendium
of Hlnayana doctrine, providing the basis for Buddhist cosmology
and karma theory, among other topics. It was studied for
four years. The final work, also studied for four years, was the
Discourse on Vinaya ( Vinayasutra ) of Gul).apra bha, setting forth
the rules of monastic discipline accord ing to the system practiced
in Tibet.
The successful completion of the entire curriculum took some
twenty years of study. D uring this time, the educational techniques
were two : memorization and debate. It was customary for a monk
over the course of his study to memorize the five Indian works, his
college's textbooks on the Indian works, and some of the phi losophical
writings of the founder of the sect; consequently, it was not
uncommon for an accomplished scholar to have over a thousand
pages of Ti betan text committed to memory. This repository of doctrine
was mined in the second educational technique of the monastic
university, debate. Debate took place in a highly structured format
in which one monk defended a position (often a memorized definition
of a term or an interpretation of a passage of scripture ) that
was systematically attacked by his opponent. In answering the challenger's
attacks, the defender was limited to four answers: "I agree, "
"Why ? , " "The reason is not proven," and "That does not follow. "
The defender of the position would be seated . His opponent would
stand over him, his rosary draped over his left wrist. The challenger
would clap his hands in the defender's face and then draw the rosary
up his left arm . In the winter, the weather was often so cold that the
monks' hands would crack and bleed as they slapped their palms
together to punctuate a point, splashing blood i n the opponent's
face. Even this aggressive act was infused with Buddhist symbolism:
the left hand was said to symbolize wisdom, the right, compassion.
Bringing the hands together in a clap signified the union of method
1 5 6 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
and wisdom required for the atta inment of buddhahood. Drawing
the rosary up the left arm symbol ized pulling all beings out of saf!1-
sara and into nirvar:ta. Skill in debate was essential to progress to the
highest rank of academic scholarship and was greatly admired. Particular
fame was attached to those monks who were able to hold the
position of one of the lower schools in the doxographical hierarchy
against the higher. These debates were often quite spirited, and certa
in debates between highly skil led opponents are remem bered with
an affection not unlike that which some attach to important sporting
events in the West. It was commonly the case that a monk, adept
at the skills of memorization and debate, would achieve prominence
as a scholar without ever writing a single word.
It would be misleading to conclude that all monks live in monasteries.
There has long been the tradition of the wandering monk, a
tradition that enj oyed a renaissance in twentieth-century Tha iland.
In 1 90 2, the king of Thailand passed the Sangha Act in an effort to
unite the various regional monastic traditions, with their local customs
and dialects, under a single national system promulgated in
the Thai language. The act proh ibited local a bbots from ordaining
monks; the power to ordain was granted only to those monks
who had been appointed by the Bangkok government. Local a bbots
who ignored the act and contin ued to ordain monks were arrested .
The act required that monks remain in a monastery throughout the
year; it prevented them from pa rticipating in local festivals; and it
imposed a curriculum of study written in a language that many of
the monks could not understand. Resistance to the reforms was
widespread among both monks and laity.
Some monks sought to escape the scrutiny of the state sangha by
adopting the ancient lifestyle of the wandering monk who lived in
the forest and begged for alms in vil lages. They were cal led thudong
monks because they adopted the thi rteen practices of an ascetic
( mentioned at the beginning of this chapter ) . These monks lived in
the wild, each carrying on his shoulder a large umbrella with a mosquito
net that served both for meditation and as a tent during the
night. Their life stories are fil led with encounters with tigers, wild
elephants, pythons, and ghosts; one of their practices was to sleep
in cremation grounds, something encouraged by laypeople who
Monastic Life 1 5 7
bel ieved that the sanctity of the monks provided protection from
vengeful spirits. Part of their power derived from their strong powers
of concentration, often developed by focusing on the mantra
buddho. These monks believed that ascetic practice was more efficacious
than study and followed what they believed had been the
practice of the Buddha h imself.
As a result of a variety of factors, including deforestation, the
concerns of the military, and the orders of the monastic hierarchy,
the tradition of the wandering forest monk has largely died out. In
1 9 8 7, the state Sangha Council issued an order that all forest monks
leave the forest, except for those who reside in officially sanctioned
forest monasteries. Since then, the Thai forest monks, once derided
as uncivilized by educated urbanites, are now adm ired. Just as the
tradition was dying out, popular monthly magazines began to be
published that recounted the lives and teachings of the forest
monks. The biographies of these monks are often reprinted and distributed
at the funerals of laypeople.
N U N S
Shortly before the Buddha passed into nirvanr:ta, Ananda asked him
how a monk should relate to women . " Do not look at them , " the
Buddha replied . But if we see one ? " Do not speak to them , " the
Buddha replied. But if a woman speaks to u s ? " Maintain mindfulness
and self-control, " the Buddha repl ied .
The role of women in Buddhism may be traced back to the story
of the Buddha's conception and bi rth . The bodhisattva, residing in
the Joyous heaven, surveyed the world and chose King Suddhodana
and Queen Maya as suitable parents for the next buddha. The
queen dreamed that a white elephant had entered her womb and
soon found that she was pregnant. Later texts, apparently concerned
that the future Buddha could not a bide in a foul-smelling
womb, explained that Maya's womb was transformed into a jeweled
pavilion, resting on four pillars, containing a throne of lapis
lazuli. Even then, after ten lunar months, the bodhisattva did not
emerge via the usual route but instead from under his mother's right
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
arm. And unlike other infants, he emerged immaculately clean and
a ble to walk, taking seven steps ( a lotus blooming at each ) and
announcing that this was his last birth. Queen Maya died seven days
later. The texts explain that a womb that has held the bodhisattva
may not ever be poll uted by sexual relations. The only alternative,
aptJarently, was that the future buddha's mother must die.
Perhaps the most important text regard ing women is the story of
the foundation of the order of nuns. In the accou nt, the Buddha's
aunt and stepmother, Mahaprajapati, approached the Buddha and
requested that women be allowed to go forth from the worldly life
and enter the order. When the Buddha refused, Mahaprajapati and
a number of other women shaved their heads, put on monks' robes,
and followed the Buddha and his monks on their travels, their bare
feet bloodied on the path. The Buddha had ruled that monks must
receive the permission of their parents to go forth from the household
life ( this rule was requested by the Buddha 's father, whose own
son did not receive such permission ) but not the permission of their
wives. The women who followed the widow Mahaprajapati were
the wives of men who had become mon ks. Feeling pity for them,
A nanda approached the Buddha and req uested that the women be
al lowed to enter the order. The Buddha refused . Ananda then asked
whether women are capable of following the path to enl ightenment,
and the Buddha conceded that they are. A nanda persisted, however,
and after his third request, the Buddha relented, but only after prescri
bing a set of eight rules for nuns that esta blish their inferiority to
monks. First, although seniority within the order of monks was
based on length of ordination, a nun who had been ordained for one
hundred years must rise and pay respects to all monks, even those
who had been orda ined for one day. Second, a nun must not spend
the rains retreat in a place where there are no monks. Third, nuns
must ask the order of monks for instruction in the dharma and for
the a ppropriate time to hold the fortnightly confession assembly.
Fourth, after the ra ins retreat, a nun should confess any infractions
to both the order of monks and the order of nuns. Fifth, a nun who
has committed an important infraction must submit to discipline
from both the order of monks and the order of nuns. Sixth, a female
novice must train for a probationary period of two years before
Monastic Life 1 5 9
seeking ordination from both the order o f monks and the order of
nuns. Seventh, a nun may never revile a monk in any way. Eighth,
although a monk may criticize a nun, a nun may not criticize a monk.
The account closes with the Buddha pred icting, with a certain
resentment, that his admission of women to the order will drastically
curtail the length of time that his teaching will remain in the
world before it disappears completely. Had he not been compelled
to admit them, his teaching would have lasted for one thousand
years. Now it would remain for only five hundred . A Chinese Buddhist
monk who made a pilgri mage to India in the fifth century
observed that nuns paid particular obeisance to the stiipa of A nanda
because of his role in establishing the order, something that Ananda
was chastised for ( a long with al lowing the body of the Buddha to be
touched by women's tears ) at the first council of monks convened
shortly after the Buddha's death.
The story of the ordination of women has been widely interpreted
. Read as a historical account, it presents clear difficulties for
those who wish to present the Buddha as a protofeminist. In order
to preserve such a picture, severa l scholars have pointed out that
this account was written by monks after the Buddha's death and
thus may not represent the events as they actually occurred. Such a
view reflects a strong a nticlerical attitude, in which a nything that
the Buddha says or does that does not conform with a particular
image of h i m is ascri bed to the work of monks. It is, i n fact, a very
Buddhist position to take, rega rding the Buddha as the precursor
who anticipates all that i s good and true, postulating a li neage,
and then equating that l ineage with a uthority. The weight of the
argument is d i m i nished when it is recalled that everythi ng that the
Buddha is reported to have said or done was recorded by monks
after the Buddha 's death . What the Buddha actually said or did is
inaccessible.
The Buddha's views on the dangers of women probably reflected
those of the Indian society of his day. At the same time, unlike
leaders of some other contemporary groups, he granted women
admission to his order and confirmed their a bility to follow the path
to nirvar:-a. In traditional Indian society, a woman was said to be
protected by her father in her youth, protected by her husband in
1 60 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
midlife, and protected by her son in old age. It is noteworthy that
the women seeking to become nuns are led by Mahaprajapatl, the
Buddha's stepmother. Now a widow, she turns to her son for protection.
Indeed, it appears that the early members of the order of
nuns were those widowed by the dharma. For although men did not
require the consent of their wives in order to receive ordination,
women did require the consent of their husbands. It is therefore not
surprising that among the stories of ill ustrious female disciples of
the Buddha, one finds a preponderance of widows, courtesans, and
unwed daughters of kings as well as the wives of monks; the five
hundred women who follow Mahaprajapatl are all abandoned
wives of monks. Aging courtesans used their lost looks as instructions
in impermanence, describing in sta rk detail how their own full
breasts had become like empty water bags, how their once-beautiful
teeth were now broken and yellow. A bea utiful young woman
devoted to the Buddha would often convert her parents, servants,
and fiance to the dharma. For those who were too taken with their
own bea uty, the Buddha would conjure a woman even more beautiful,
whom he would magically cause to age before her eyes, falling
at her feet as a rotting corpse.
There are also stories of women who came to the order of nuns
out of desperation, having undergone su fferings risi ble in their
extremity. One well-known story tells of a wea lthy young woman
who refused to marry the man chosen for her by her parents.
Instead, she escaped with a servant by whom she became pregnant.
Some years later, she was returning with her husband to her parents'
home in order to give birth to her second child, when a great storm
arose. Her husband went into the woods to seek shelter for them
and was stung by an adder and died. She gave birth to a son that
night and continued on her journey, carrying one son and leading
the other. Reaching a river, she left the older child on the riverbank
and carried the baby across. Returning for the first child, she
watched helplessly as he plunged into the river by h imself and was
swept away by the current. Turning back to the infant, she saw him
being carried away by a hawk. Continuing on her journey, she
encountered a neighbor who informed her that her parents perished
when their house collapsed in the storm the previous night. Later,
Monastic Life 1 6 1
she remarried and had another child. One night, her husband
returned home in a drunken rage, murdered the child, threw it into
the fire, and made the woman eat the flesh. She left her husband and
later met a young man whose wife had recently died. Sha ring stories
of their past misfortunes, they married, but the young man soon
became sick and died. She lea rned that it was the custom of his
country for the widow to be buried alive with her husband. She
escaped death herself when thieves broke into the grave. At this
point, she began to wonder what the source of her sorrows might
be. She wandered naked, reviled as a crazy woman . One day, she
happened to come upon the Buddha. His disciples tried to forbid
her from approaching, but he saw that she had made a prayer to a
buddha in a previous life to become a nun. In order to fulfill her
prayer, the Buddha told her to return to her senses and taught her
the dharma . After hearing his teaching, she asked to be admitted to
the order of nuns and eventually became an arhat.
The Buddha's female lay disciples are often women of great
wea lth who generously provide the Buddha and his monks with requisites
such as food, clothing, shelter, bedding, and medicine. He
explains to them that a laywoman will be reborn as a god if she is an
agreeable companion to her husband, honors his parents, is industrious
in her housework, treats her servants properly, guards her
husband's property and does not squander his wealth, takes refuge
in the three jewels, observes the five precepts, and finds delight in
generosity and ren unciation . However, he is ultimattly skeptical
a bout the possibil ity of happiness in fa mily life, saying that a person
with a hundred loved ones has a hundred sorrows, but a person
with no loved ones has none.
Regardless of what the attitude of the Buddha himself may have
been, Buddhist texts are replete with negative portrayals of women,
perhaps not surprisingly when one considers that these portrayals
are the products of a commun ity of celibate men. Women are presented
as sites of danger and pollution, and the filth of the female
body is cataloged in great deta i l . A text called the Menstruation
Satra offered women salvation from a special hell in which they
were chained in a lake of blood. They were doomed to this fate
because their blood shed d uring childbirth had polluted the earth.
1 6 1 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
Further, when they had washed blood from their garments in a river,
water downstream (and hence polluted by their menstrual blood ) had
been used to make tea that had been served to monks. The Buddha
provides instructions on how to avoid being reborn in this hell. The
Sutra in Forty-Two Sections, renowned as the first Buddhist text to
be translated into Chinese, says, " A deity presented a woman of
pleasure to the Buddha, wanting to test the Buddha's will and examine
the Buddha's way. The Buddha said, 'Why have you come here
bearing this leather sack of filth ? . . . Be gone ! I have no use for
her. ' " In order to cure a monk of his infatuation with a bea utiful
courtesan named Sirima, the Buddha ordered that she not be cremated
when the young woman unexpectedly died but instead had
the king have her body placed in the charnel grounds. When the
body had reached a suitable level of putrefaction, the king ordered
all in his kingdom to file past it. The Buddha and his monks also
went, and the Buddha addressed the assembled populace, explaining
that many would have paid a thousand gold coins j ust a few days
ago to spend one night with Sirima, but now no one would have her.
The infatuated monk became an arhat upon hearing these words.
A text called the Therlgatha, " Songs of the ( Female ) Elders , "
recounts the life stories of some of t h e Buddha's female disciples.
The pregnant wife of a merchant was cast out of her home by her
mother-in-law. She gave birth to a son while wandering; when she
was bathing in a river the son was stolen. She was later kidnapped
by a bandit chief to whom she bore a daughter but was able to
escape, leaving the child behind. She became a courtesan and married
a young man who, some years later, took a second, younger
wife. The elder wife eventually determined that the younger wife
was her own daughter and that they were ma rried to her son .
Repelled by their lot, the son became a monk and the mother
became a nun. Apart from the gender of the protagonists, these
works do not vary stylistically from another collection, the Theragatha,
" Songs of the ( Male) Elders . " It is difficult to discern a female
voice in the Therlgatha, and the work may have been written, once
again, by monks, the products of a later monastic literary tradition
rather than the autobiographical testimonials of nuns. The works preMonastic
Life 1 6 3
sent an uncompromising vision of the female form as foul. The question
is whether this is the view of monks or whether it is the view of
nuns, made to see themselves as monks are taught to see them.
Some changes in the attitude to women are evident in certa in of
the Mahayana si"Itras, where the doctrine of emptiness calls into
question the status of all categories, including male and female. In
the Vimalaklrti Satra, a goddess turns Sari putra into a woman
momentarily, to his great chagrin . In another sutra, an important
exposition of the buddha nature is provided by the queen Srimala.
In the Lotus Sutra, a serpent princess magica lly transforms herself
into a human male and achieves perfect buddhahood in an instant.
Despite the desta bilization of the categories of male and female in
these Mahayana sutras, tra nsformations tend to move in the male
direction. Two of the great authors of the Mahayana, Nagarj una in
his Garland of jewels ( Ratnavall ) and Santideva in his Entering the
Path of Enlightenment ( Bodhicaryavatara ) include stereotypical
descriptions of the unclea nliness of the female body, and Santideva
includes in the prayer that concludes his work the wish that women
may be reborn as men. There is even the story in a Mahayana sutra
of a bodhisattva so handsome that upon seeing him women are
overwhelmed by lust and drop dead, to be reborn in the more auspicious
form of a male. The Buddha predicts that-billions of women
will suffer this happy fate.
The fact that the critique of the categories of male and female
offered by the doctrine of emptiness did not appear to eliminate
misogyny from Buddhist texts suggests that the influence of the doctrine
of emptiness may not have been as pervasive as some have
imagined. Whatever importance the critique may have had on the
ultimate level, the socially constructed conventional world remained
largely untouched by it, even by the most eloquent exponents of
emptiness. Those who seek a refuge from misogyny in Buddhism
must always choose their texts carefully and ignore the fact that,
regardless of the textual resources that may be availa ble, the presence
of Buddhism in a given society has not materially improved the
status of women, although nunneries have often provided a welcome
refuge for women.
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
The order of nuns died out in Sri Lanka around the end of the
tenth century. As a result of a protracted war with a South Indian
king, Buddhist institutions were devastated to the point where there
were not the requisite number of monks for the ordination of new
monks. The king brought monks from Burma to revive the sailgha
of monks, but he did not make similar efforts for the sailgha of
nuns. D uring the Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka at the end of the
n ineteenth century, laywomen took the ten vows of a novice and
wore robes of saffron ( the color of monastic robes ) and white ( the
color of lay dress ) , thereby indicating their ambivalent status.
Once the sailgha of nuns declined in any Buddhist society, it was
in severe j eopardy because the rules of discipline required that ten
fully ordained nuns be present to confer ordination on a new nun,
after which she was required to have a second ordination ceremony
at which ten monks were present. It survives in China, Korea, and
Vietna m . The ordination of nuns did not take place in Ti bet.
The question of the status of women in Buddhism, a question
to which the Buddha himself is seen as regarding with a certain
ambivalence, remains an ongoing problem to which Buddhist women
are responding in a variety of ways. The monastic community in the
Theravada traditions of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia have generally
responded negatively to proposals for the restoration of the
order of fully ordained nuns. The order of nuns rema ins strong in
Chinese Buddhism, and women from other Buddhist traditions, following
the rule that ten fully ordained nuns must be present to
ordain a female novice as a nun, have traveled to Hong Kong, Taiwan,
and Korea to receive ordination . Such ordinations have met
with a variety of responses. Because the lineage of ordination
accepted in China is not accepted by the Theravada tradition, it is
not considered valid by Theravada monks. The Dalai Lama, however,
representing a society in which the ful l ordination of women
never occurred, has encouraged women of the Tibetan Buddhist
tradition to seek ordination from Chinese nuns.
Indeed, today the order of nuns is strongest in Taiwan, where
over 6o percent of the some ten thousand ordained between r 9 5 2
and 1 9 8 7 were women. The nun Cheng-yen founded i n 1 9 66 the
Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu-Chi Foundation, which collected
Monastic Life
pennies to provide medical fees for the poor. Today it is the largest
civic organization in Taiwan with over four million members, the
maj ority of whom are women . The organization has built a large
hospital and medical college in Taiwan and has supported disaster
relief around the world. Its founder made a vow at the age of twelve
to the bodhisattva Guanyin that she would become a lay Buddhist if
her mother recovered from an illness, which she did. After the death
of her father she became a nun. She was moved to found her organization
both out of pity for the plight of the poor who were una ble
to afford medical treatment and in response to the criticism of
Catholic missionary nuns in Taiwan, who claimed that Buddhism
cared only for individual salvation and ignored the plights of society.
Suggested Reading
Bodiford, Wi lliam M. Soto Zen in Medieval Japan. Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, 1 99 3 .
Buswell, Robert E., Jr. The Zen Monastic Experit;.nce: Buddhist
Practice in Contemporary Korea. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1 9 9 2 .
Dutt, Sukumar. Buddhist Monks and Monasteries o f India: Their
History and Their Contribution to Indian Culture. London :
George Allen & Unwin, 1 9 6 2 .
Horner, Isabel B. Women Under Primitive Buddhism: Lay Women
and Alms Women. New York : E. P. D utton, 1 9 3 0.
Schopen, Gregory. Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected
Papers on the A rchaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic
Buddhism in India. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1 99 7 .
Tiya vanich, Kamala. Forest Recollections: Wandering Monks in
Twentieth- Century Thailand. Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 1 997.
Warren, Henry Clarke. Buddhism in Translations. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, I 9 5 3 .
1 6 6 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
Welch, Holmes. The Practice of Chinese Buddhism: I 9 0 0- I 9 J O .
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, r 9 67 .
Wilson, Liz. Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine
in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Uterature. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1 99 6 .
5
L A Y P R A C T I C E
A Buddhist is someone who says th ree times, " I go for refuge to
the Buddha. I go for refuge to the dharma. I go for refuge to the
saitgha . " This formula is repeated often, sometimes privately,
sometimes publicly, in ela borate ceremonies and solitary moments.
With in the general category of the Buddhist, of those who go for
refuge to the three jewels, the fundamenta l division is between the
monks and nuns on the one hand and the la ity on the other. Laypeople
may ta ke up to five vows, promising for the rest of their lives
( 1 ) not to kill humans, ( 2 ) not to steal, ( 3 ) not to engage in sexual
misconduct, ( 4 ) not to use intoxicants, ( 5 ) not to lie a bout spiritual
attainments. It is possible to take one or any combination of these
vows. These vows are sometimes administered individually and
sometimes administered in large public ceremonies; as many as five
thousand people attended such events in China during the Second
World War.
From a doctrinal point of view, the purpose of a vow is to restrain
nonvirtuous deeds of body and speech, thereby accumulating merit.
According to Buddhist theory, once a vow is taken it assumes a subtle
physical form inside the body and remains present until death or
until the vow is broken . As long as the vow is present in the body,
the person accumulates merit for maintaining the vow. For this reason,
it is considered more virtuous ( and hence more karmically efficacious
) to take a vow not to steal, for example, and then not to
steal, than simply not to steal without having taken a vow not to do
so. At the same time, it is more damaging to commit a misdeed that
one has vowed not to than it is to commit the deed without having
taken a vow. Taking vows for short periods of time is also considered
efficacious. Thus, in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, laypeople,
1 6 8 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
especially laywomen, often maintain the five precepts ( with restraint
from sexual misconduct understood to mean celibacy) plus three
others ( not to eat after midday, not to attend musical performances
or adorn their bodies, not to sleep in high beds ) twice each month
on the full moon and the new moon.
In medieva l Japan, a tradition of the mass ordination of laypeople
developed in the Zen sect. These ceremonies could last two or
three days, often designed to coincide with a Buddhist holiday, such
as the Buddha 's bi rthday. Perhaps a hund red people from a wide
range of social classes would gather at a temple, where they received
teachings from a Zen master and followed some version of the
monastic regimen . Special emphasis was placed on vows, which
were said to be a ble to subdue evil in this life and confer enl ightenment
in the next. The physical embodiment of this power was a certificate
called a kechimyaku. This was a li neage chart that began
with the Buddha himself and listed in turn each generation of
teacher and disciple, from India, to China, to Japan, and to the
monk administering the vows to each layperson at the ceremony.
The first name on the list was the Buddha, and the last name on the
list was of the layperson, identified by a new Buddhist name
received upon ordination. The layperson was thus linked by a di rect
line back to the Buddha. The kechimyaku was thus highly val ued
and was bel ieved by many to possess extraordinary powers.
Such lay ordination indicates the power that is genera lly associated
with monkhood, a power in which the laity sought to parta ke.
Lay ordination is one of a number of conduits. More commonly,
monks served as mediators of merit, merit that would bring happiness
in this life and the next. The Buddha instructed laymen in the
means of acquiring long life, beauty, happiness, fame, and rebirth in
heaven, and he encouraged the accumulation of wealth acq uired
through honest effort. According to ka rmic theory, wealth is the
direct result, and hence the sign, of past giving. The practice of generosity,
particularly when it is directed toward a meritorious object
such a s the sangha, creates further wealth, which the Buddha praises
for its capacity to al low the householder to give happiness to his
family, to provide for his friends, to escape fire, thieves, and enemies,
to honor guests and monarchs, and to make offerings to the
Lay Practice
sangha . The primary deed of the Buddhist layperson is therefore
charity, but charity directed to a pure object, the sangha, which has
the power to transmute the material wealth of the present into happiness
in the future. This future certa inly incl udes the present life
but pertains particularly to the more mysterious world beyond
death, a world in which the dharma has especial power.
The centrality of giving to lay practice is illustrated powerfully by
perhaps the best-known story in all of Thai Buddhism. It tells of the
arhat monk Phra Malai who one day encountered a poor grass cutter
who presented him with eight lotuses, asking that the merit from
_his gift result in his never being reborn as a poor man again. In order
to fu lfill his req uest, Phra Malai took the eight lotuses and, using his
supernormal powers, flew to the Heaven of the Thirty-Three on top
of Mount Meru . When Prince Siddhartha had gone forth from the
world, he had cut off his topknot with his sword and thrown it into
the air, saying that if he was to achieve his goa l, the hair would not
descend back to ea rth . The topknot was caught by Indra, the king of
the gods, who enshrined it in a stiipa in the Heaven of the ThirtyThree,
providing an object of worship, and thus merit making, for
the gods, who otherwise would fa ll into a lower realm upon their
death in heaven . Phra Malai offered the lotuses to the stiipa .
While at the stiipa, Phra Malai saw a deity a pproach with one
hundred divine attendants. He was told that the deity had been
reborn as a god as a result of feeding a starving crow. More gods
arrived, one after another, each with a larger retinue than the last,
and in each case Phra Malai was told of the act of charity that
resulted in their divine station. A deity with twenty thousand attendants
had given food to a monk. A deity with forty thousand attendants
had given robes, food, shelter, and medicine to the sangha . A
deity with eighty thousand attendants was a poor man who had
caused his master to notice a monk on his alms-round. Eventually,
Maitreya, the coming buddha, descended from the Joyous pure land
to the Heaven of the Thirty-Three, where he also worshiped the
stiipa. Maitreya asked Phra Malai how the people of Jambudvipa
made merit, and Phra Malai descri bed their various practices, saying
that the people of the world did so in order that they may be disciples
of Maitreya when he becomes the next buddha. Maitreya
1 7 0 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
explained that those who wished to do so should listen, in the course
of a day and a night, to the story of the bodhisattva Vessantara, who
gave away everything. They should also bring gifts, each numbering
a thousand, to the temple where the story is recited . After
descri bing how the conditions in the world would deteriorate and
then improve before he came as the next buddha, Maitreya
returned to his pure land, and Phra Malai returned to the world,
where he reported Maitreya 's teaching. The grass cutter who
offered the eight lotuses eventually died and was reborn as a god in
the Heaven of the Thirty-Three; a lotus bloomed under his feet
with every step he took.
Much lay practice, not only in Thailand but throughout the Buddhist
world, assumes that it is not possible for laypeople to complete
the path to enlightenment during the present age, because they did
not have the good fortune to benefit from the teachings of the Buddha
during his lifetime. Much lay practice, therefore, has as its ultimate
goa l rebirth as a human at the time of Maitreya, with the good fortune
of becom ing a monk in his assembly and completing the path
to nirviir:ta under his tutelage. One also hopes to accumulate sufficient
merit to spend the intervening aeon as a god in one of the
heavens.
As in other religions, death and death rituals are central concerns
of Buddhist thought and practice, for monks and laity alike. Part of
this importance derives from the doctrine of rebirth, accord ing to
which all beings in the universe have been born and died countless
times in the past. Death then marks both an end and a begi nning,
but a beginning that is genera lly rega rded with trepidation. According
to the doctrine of impermanence, nothing lasts longer than
an instant, and change, and hence death, is possible in the next
moment. Until all the causes for rebirth have been destroyed
through the practice of the path, death and rebirth will continue
relentlessly. Human life, especially rebirth as a human with access to
the Buddha's teachings, is regarded as a rare and precious opportunity.
Gods are generally addicted to the pleasures of heaven and fai l
t o seek l i beration from rebirth. Animals, ghosts, a n d hell beings are
overwhelmed by their particular sufferings and cannot turn to the
path. Humans born in remote regions where Buddhism is unknown
Lay Practice 1 7 1
o r who are born i n a n age when Buddhism has disa ppeared from the
world have no chance to hear the dharma . Those with wrong views
( such as the belief in the efficacy of animal sacrifice ) or who have
committed grave sins are also at a disadvantage. To be reborn as a
human who has access to the Buddhist teaching is thus incredibly
rare, an opportunity not to be lost in the pursuit of the ephemeral
pleasures of the world. In a famous analogy, a single blind tortoise is
said to swim in a vast ocea n, surfacing for air only once every century.
On the surface of the ocean floats a single golden yoke. It is
rarer, said the Buddha, to be reborn as a human with the opportunity
to practice the dharma than it is for the tortoise to surface for
its centennial breath with its head th rough the hole i n the golden
yoke. It is also said that the number of beings in the realms of animals,
ghosts, and the hells is equal to the number of stars seen on a
clear night. The number of beings born as humans and gods is equal
to the number of stars seen on a clear day. Thus, the death that Buddhist
texts genera lly descri be is the end of a life lived in easy access
to dharma, a life but rarely lived and, once over, l\llikely to be
encountered in the near future beca use of the great store of negative
karma accumulated over the beginningless course of saq�sara .
Buddhist texts repeatedly wa rn that no matter who o n e might be
or where one might hide, death cannot be escaped, not by strength
or wealth or magic. If even the Buddha himself died, what hope is
there for others ? The human life span is rarely more than one hundred
years, and this period wanes steadily with the passage of years,
months, days, nights, morni ngs, and evenings. Much of life is
already gone, and what rema ins cannot be extended . There is not an
instant of life that does not move towa rd death . Hence, as one text
warns, it is wrong to take pleasure in the misconception that we
shall remain in this world, j ust as it would be inappropriate for a
person who has fa llen from a cliff to enjoy his descent to ea rth .
The uncertainty of the length of life is said to be a feature of the
continent of jam budvipa, where humans reside, and is only exacerbated
by the fact that in this world the causes of death are many, the
causes of remaining a live few. Causes of death include enemies,
demons, animals, and imbalances among the four elements (earth,
water, fire, and wind) that constitute the physical body. The tenuous
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
hold on life is further i mperiled beca use those things upon which we
depend for l i fe are unreliable and can easily become causes of death .
Food can poison, friends can deceive, roofs can collapse. Indeed,
there are no causes of l i fe that cannot become a ca use of death. For
these reasons it is said that, at the time of death, friends are of no
benefit because they cannot prevent us from leaving this life and
they cannot accompany us to the next. Wealth is of no benefit
beca use it must be left behind. Not even the body can be taken along
to the next life. At the time of death, nothing is said to be of benefit
except the dharma, and a wide range of practices developed around
the Buddhist world to that end, most prominently in funeral rites.
One of the chief functions of Buddhist monks is to perform rites
for the dead. In contemporary Thailand, Buddhist monks often read
summaries of the seven books of the Abhidharma at funerals. The
Abhidharma is considered to be the most technical and difficult of
all the teachings of the Buddha. Yet here the most scholastic of
works is seen to have particular powers of salvation. One of the
summaries declares, "Whoever is born or dies on Sunday and hears
the Dhammasanga1}i [one of the seven books] will be released from
all demerit accrued through the eye. At death this person will not be
reborn in hell but will enter heaven . " The other six books of the
Abhidharma provide for those who are born or die on the other
days of the week.
The funerary function of Buddhist monks in China is suggested by
the fact that during the Ming dynasty the government tried to incorporate
the Buddhist clergy under the supervision of the Ministry of
Rites. The most famous of the rites of the dead is the Ghost Festival,
held during the seventh lunar month. The rite's textual source
( whether of Indian or Chinese origin is unknown ) is the Ullambana
Satra, in which Maudgalyayana, the disciple of the Buddha renowned
for his supernormal powers, traveled through the realms of rebirth
in search of his deceased mother. He was alarmed to find her as a
hungry ghost and brought her a bowl of rice to satiate her starvation.
However, it was his mother's fate that whatever food she
tried to place i n her mouth turned into fl a m i ng coal s . He asked the
Buddha what could be done. The Buddha explained that it was
impossible to offer her food directly. He instructed Maudgalyayana to
Lay Practice 1 7 3
prepare a great feast of food, water, incense, lamps, a n d bedding on
the fifteenth day of the seventh month and offer it to the monks of
the ten directions. At that time, all of the great bodhisattvas and
arhats would appear in the form of ordinary monks. If the food was
offered to them as they assembled at the end of their rains retreat, his
parents, seven generations of ancestors, and various relatives would
escape rebirth as an animal, ghost, or hell being for their next seven
lives. If the parents were living at the time of the offering, they would
live happily for one h undred years. The Buddha proclaimed that this
offer-ing would be efficacious not simply for Maudgalyayana, but for
anyone, of high station or low, who performed it. He advised,
indeed, that it be performed annually.
The reciproca l nature of the relationship between the la ity and
the clergy is emphasized yet again here. The Buddha explains to
Maudgalyayana that his magical powers, although they surpass
those of all other monks, are insufficient to the task of freeing his
mother from her infernal fate. Only one means is effective:: the laity
must make offerings to the monastic commun ity on behalf of their
dead relatives. Only then can the dear departed be spared the tortures
of the lower rea lms. It is a standard element of Buddhist doctrine,
in fact, that laypeople are incapable of making offerings
directly to the deceased relatives. Instead, they must make offerings
to the sailgha, who will, in turn, transfer the merit of their gift to the
deceased. This mediation by monks has been one of the primary
functions of the sailgha, and the gifts given as raw materials by the
laity have been a primary sou rce of their sustenance. The practice
carries a particular potency in China, where monks and nuns have
traditionally been criticized for being unfilial; they have renounced
the world and hence the family and have fai led to continue the family
line with their progeny. The Ullambana Satra makes clear that
the traditional Chinese practice of making offerings to the ancestors
is not efficacious. Instead, Buddhist monks are essential agents in
the rituals, and hence the life, of the family.
Beginning in the eighth century, a related text appeared in China
that would gain wide popularity. It was entitled Satra for the Spell
That Brought Deliverance to the Flaming Mouth Hungry Ghost
( Fo shuo qiuba yankou egui tuoluoni jing ) . In the text, Ananda was
1 7 4 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
sitting in contemplation when he was approached by a hungry ghost
of horrifying visage named Flaming Mouth, who announced to
A nanda's great alarm that A nanda would die three days hence and
be reborn as a hungry ghost. When A nanda asked whether there
was anything he could do to avoid such a fate, the ghost informed
him that the next day he must distribute one bushel of food and
drink to hundreds of thousands of hungry ghosts and to hundreds
of thousands of brahmins. By doing so, not only would A nanda 's
life span be increased, but Flaming Mouth would be released from
the realm of hungry ghosts and be reborn as a god . This remedy
offered little solace to Ananda; he had no wealth and so could not
provide such extensive gifts. In despair, he went to the Buddha and
was told that there was another method. He taught Ananda a
dhara1}l, a kind of spell that, when recited, would magica lly provide
forty-nine bushels of rice each to hungry ghosts and brahmins
numerous as the sands of the Ganges. The spell would, in addition,
cause hungry ghosts to be reborn as gods and would increase the life
span of whoever recited it. (The spell, by the way, is namo sarva
tathagata avalokita samvara samvara hum. ) The Buddha recommended
the practice to any and all who seek long life, merit, and
prosperity. They need simply put a small amount of water and rice
into a bowl, recite the spell seven times, recite the name mantras of
four buddhas, snap their fingers seven times, and pour the water
and rice on the ground. All the hungry ghosts in the four directions
will thereby receive forty-nine bushels of rice, and those who make
the offering will be protected from demons and attain lim itless merit
and a long life. By reciting the same spell fourteen times and casting
the water and rice into flowing water, myriad brahmins will be fed.
Anyone who even witnesses the ritual will be reborn as the great
god Brahma. Monks and nuns who wish to make similar offerings
to the three jewels need only recite the spell twenty-one times. The
Sutra for the Spell That Brought Deliverance to the Flaming Mouth
Hungry Ghost was put to wide use to feed hungry ghosts. The ceremony
often took five hours to complete and was held in the evening,
when hungry ghosts were said to be wandering. It could be performed
for the benefit of a particular person and was performed
often during the summer Festival of Hungry Ghosts.
Lay Practice 1 7 5
The efficacy of the Scura for the Spell That Brought Deliverance
to the Flaming Mouth Hungry Ghost made this text quite popular
in China, especially as a mortuary text, and numerous rituals developed
around it. One of the many forms that such rituals took was
the " rite of water and land " (shuilu fahui), a grand ceremony usually
lasting seven days and sometimes requiring the services of fifteen
hundred monks. Although designed to relieve the sufferings of
all beings who inhabit the water and land, this ritual, perhaps deriving
froin the Chi nese tradition of making offerings to departed
ancestors, generally took the form of an ela borate service for the
dead, both ancestors who had been properly buried as wel l as the
unidentified dead who had not-the victims of natural disaster,
famine, and war who had none to mourn them or sustain them in
the next world, wandering dangerously until they were sated . The
purpose of the ritual was nothing less than freeing all beings from
the torments of the six realms of rebirth . Such a rite entailed great
expense, with food, incense, gems, and brocades offered to the living
and the dead over the cou rse of an entire week; its extravagance
in both form and meaning drew throngs of spectators.
The basic structure of the ritual was that of a feast. First, the
guest would be invited to the host's abode; second, the guest would
be offered food; third, the guest would be sent on his way. In this
case, there were two sets of guests and thus two main a ltars, an
inner altar and an outer altar. The outer altar was the site of a wide
range of efficacious activities. Indeed, there were several outer
altars, with sites arranged for the recitation of particularly potent
siitras. Shorter siitras could be recited in a single day. Hence, on the
fourth day the Lotus Sutra would be recited, on the seventh day,
the Diamond Sutra. At other altars, two monks would recite the
Avata'l'lsaka Sutra over the seven days of the ritual; at another eight
monks would recite the name of Amitabha for seven days.
The inner a ltar was where the rite of water and land proper took
place. It was in turn divided into a n upper hall and a lower hall, providing
seats for two sets of guests. The former was the more exalted,
serving as the seat for buddhas, bodhisattvas, arhats, and various
gods, immortals, monastic patriarchs, and past masters. A scrol l
would b e hung on the walls for each of the categories o f superior
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
beings, along with a verse of praise. For each scroll a sma ll altar was
set up where incense and offerings were placed . This altar would
serve as the guest's seat ( complete with name card ) at the banq uet
that would ensue. Outside the inner altar was a miniature bathing
pavilion, with basin and towel, all connected to the inner altar by a
long cloth, to serve as a passageway for the exalted guests.
The lower hall was reserved for those sti ll sunk in sa11sara, genera
lly organized into the categories of mem bers of the i mperial government,
gods, demigods, humans, ghosts, animals, hell beings, and
those in the intermediate state between death and rebirth . Other
lists added local gods, protector spirits, as well as departed monks
and friends of the sponsoring monastery and depa rted relatives of
the sponsoring patron . Scrolls and seats were similarly arranged for
each of these groups.
Once all was in place, on the third day the officiating monks dispatched
effigy emissa ries to the heavens, atmosphere, earth, and
underworld to invite the exalted guests from their respective abodes.
They arrived the next day and were duly escorted to the bathing
pavilion and then across the bolt of cloth to the inner altar, where
they were requested to occupy their designated seats. Offerings were
then presented to them. On the fifth day, emissaries were dispatched
to the administrators of the celestial and terrestrial rea lms ( including
the hell s ) , to whom they presented pardons granting permission
to all the beings of sa11sara to leave their homes, whether palaces or
prisons, to attend the great feast. Upon their arrival they were
offered a bath and a new set of clothes and given refuge in the three
jewels. Thus purified, they were escorted into the presence of the
buddhas and bodhisattvas in the inner alta r and were escorted to
their seats in the lower chamber. On the sixth day, the guests of the
lower chamber were offered both material and spiritual sustenance,
in the form of food and the recitation of siitras and the buddha's
name, converting them all to the dharma . The seventh day was
taken u p with rituals of completion, including the issuing of a document
of verification, after which all the guests were invited to return
to their homes. The guests of the lower cha m ber departed with the
new k nowledge that their final destination was the pure land.
Scholars have suggested that the popularity and persistence of
Lay Practice 1 7 7
Buddhist services for the dead derives in part from their intersection,
in motivation if not ideology, with traditional offeri ngs to a ncestors.
In Sri Lanka, it is customa ry to invite monks to one's home to be fed
and to receive offerings after the death of a parent. Such offerings
are made typica lly seven days a fter the death, again three months
after the death, and annually on the anniversary of the death thereafter.
In order for this to be a gift to the sangha, at least five monks
must be present. According to pre-Buddhist Chi nese practice, family
mem bers must be properly bu ried and then sustained with regular
offerings. The spirit of an ancestor so supported will send blessings
to the family below. But a spirit neglected will become a demon or
ghost and haunt the fa mily. The introduction of the Buddhist doctrine
of rebirth, in which the rea lm of ghosts was j ust one of three
negative postmortem states, caused a certain confusion and conflation,
and Buddhist clerics were constantly reminding the laity that
not all ritually neglected ancestors had become hungry ghosts. Such
conflations were strengthened by the fact that both pre-Buddhist
and Buddhist rites entailed the offering of food to the departed .
Aga in, Buddhist clerics had to remind their fold that such food
should be rega rded as an offering to all beings, an act of giving,
rather than dispatched to a si ngle departed relative. Whatever good
fortu ne accrued from such good deeds should be regarded not as a
blessing from a bove but as a result of the law of karma .
Mortuary rites in China often involved the use of so-ca lled " spirit
money, " bank notes in different denominations, as well as silver and
gold ingots ( made of paper) that would be bu rned during the ceremony
and thus transported to those awaiting the j udgment of where
they would be reborn next, who could then use it to make gifts to
the various infernal bureaucrats. After the death of a family member,
his or her name was inscribed on a stone tablet and instal led on
the family altar, where it would receive offerings of food. Those
who could a fford to do so would have a nother such ta blet installed
in a monastery, where monks would recite siitras before it on the
first and fifteenth day of each month, during the Festival of Hungry
Ghosts, and on the winter solstice. More expensive arrangements
could be made in which siitras would be recited daily. Regardless, the
recitation of the siitra provided two services to the dead: it provided
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
instruction in the dharma, and it provided merit, for the monks
would transfer the merit they accrued through the recitation to the
deceased. Many monasteries had a " hall of rebirth " where these
tablets were installed. Others had a " hall of longevity " where
tablets for the living were kept, the recitation of si"Itras designed in
this case to prolong life.
One of the chief functions of Buddhism in japan has been to deal
with death; the word hotoke in japanese means both " buddha " and
" dead person . " In japan, the deceased were generally placed into
two categories: the near dead and the distant dead. The former
included family members who had been dead for less than thirtythree
years and who retained a specific identity within recent memory.
The latter were family members who passed into the more
generic category of ancestors. The dead who had no family to perform
rituals on their behalf, regardless of how long they had been
dead, fel l into a third category, cal led "the dead lacking relations, "
and were regarded with both pity and fear. According to the funeral
rites performed by the Shingon sect ( and followed in somewhat different
forms in other sects ) , rites for deceased relatives would be
performed on the forty-ninth day after the death ( with more ela borate
versions calling for rites in each of the preceding weeks ) , and
then on the first, third, seventh, thirteenth, and thirty-third anniversary
o f the death . Until the thirty-th ird yea r, these rites were
performed on the behalf of the deceased individual. After the thirtythird
anniversary, the deceased would become a member of the
ancestral collective and would receive offerings in the annual Obon
festival in late summer, where the ritual for feeding the Flaming
Mouth hungry ghost would be performed. As in China, then, Buddhist
funerals and memorial rituals were accepted in japan as the
most efficacious way of dealing with the dead, effectively transforming
deceased relatives into beneficent ancestors who protected the
l iving, and effectively placating the ghosts of " the dead lacking
relation s " who otherwise might afflict the living. In the always
inexact accommodation of practice to doctrine, many of the ideas
considered most classically Buddhist, such as no-self and the mechanisms
of karma that lead to rebirth in one of the realms of saqtLay
Practice 1 79
sara, have been largely forgotten in Japan in favor of the cult of the
ancestors.
In the decades since the Second World War, rituals have been developed
for the welfare of aborted and miscarried fetuses. Although
unborn children were not given funeral rites in premodern Japan,
with the lega lization of abortion in 1 948 and its prevalence as a
form of birth conrrol, Buddhist temples began to invent memorial
services for the unborn, modeled on the funeral ceremony, in which
the unborn child was given a name, texts were recited in order to
produce merit for the dead child and to prevent it from haunting the
living, and a place was establ ished as a site for offering and commemoration
. The most visible of such sites are stone images of the
bodhisattva Jizo, revered as a protector of children. Rows of identical
statues of Jizo are found at Buddhist temples throughout Japan,
distinguished by the bibs, knit caps, and sweaters in which they
have been dressed and by the small toys placed at their feet.
S A NG H A A N D S T A T E
The appea l o f Buddhism has not been limited to solitary yogins
meditating on emptiness or simple peasants seeking a happy rebi rth
for their loved ones. Despite its characterization of the world as an
ephemeral rea lm of relentless suffering, Buddhism has had strong
relations with the state throughout its history. The Buddha counted
a mong his patrons a number of k i ngs, such as Bim bisara, who first
encountered the prince shortly after his ren unciation, inviting him
to return to his kingdom after his enlightenment. Bimbisara donated
a bamboo grove to the Buddha and his monks, where the Buddha
spent severa l ra in retreats. Eventually eighteen monasteries were
provided to the sangha in his city of Raj agrha and its environs.
The most famous of all Buddhist kings ( a l though the extent to
which he was Buddhist rema ins the subject of scholarly debate ) ,
regarded as the ideal Buddhist ruler throughout Asia, w a s Asoka,
who ascended to the throne of the Mauryan dynasty of northern
India in 2 70 B.C.E. Soon after his a scension, Asoka undertook a
I SO T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
military conquest that brought almost the entire Indian subcontinent
under his domain. As a result of a particularly bloody war in
South India, he is said to have renounced violence in favor of the
dharma, inaugurating a forty-year reign of peace and prosperity.
The most enduring record of Asoka's rule is the rock inscriptions he
had carved on stone pillars, in which he sets forth a policy of rule
according to the dharma. The question is whether dharma should be
taken to mean the teachings of the Buddha or whether it should be
understood in the more general sense of law or righteousnes!>. Support
for the former view derives from occasional references to the
three j ewels, his visit to the Buddha's birthplace, and the names of
Buddhist texts in the edicts. According to Buddhist legend, however,
there is no doubt a bout the king's al legiance.
In the most famous of these legends, in his previous life Asoka
had-as a young boy playing i n the dirt-encountered the Buddha
on his begging rounds. The boy had piously placed a handful of dirt
into the Buddha's begging bowl, with the prayer that the merit of his
deed would cause him to become a great king who would rule the
earth and honor the Buddha. The Buddha smiled at the boy, and, as
often occurred, rays of light in various colors emerged from his
mouth, traveling in all directions, warming the cold hells and cooling
the hot hells below, teaching impermanence to the gods above.
When these rays of l ight were reabsorbed, the place in the Buddha's
body to which they returned was significant. If the person he smiled
upon was to be reborn as an animal, they vanished into the sole of
his foot. If the person was to become a buddha, they disappeared
into his crown protrusion. On this occasion, the rays of light vanished
i nto his left hand, signifying that the boy would become an
"armed cakravartin. "
The notion of the cakravartin, or wheel-turning king, predates the
rise of Buddhism in India but was incorporated into Buddhist theories
of kingship. According to one myth, during an ideal age before
the present time of degeneration, the world was ruled by a king. His
body bore the thirty-two marks of a superman; he was endowed
with seven treasures (a wheel, a jewel, a queen, a minister, a general,
an elephant, and a horse) , the most important of which was a great
Lay Practice
wheel that conquered without conflict any region where it rolled.
After bringing the four continents under the domain of the king, the
wheel returned to his capital, where it hovered in the air a bove his
palace. At the end of the king's reign, the wheel sunk to the ground.
Later Buddhist texts distinguished four types of cakravartins, making
it clear that their appearance in the world was not restricted to
the past. A cak ravartin with a golden wheel rules all four continents
of the world. A cakravartin with a silver wheel rules three continents,
and a cakravartin with a copper wheel rules two. The least of
the kings is a cakravartin with an iron wheel, who rules only one
continent, Jambudvlpa. Each of the four kings requires more disputation
in order to secu re dominion over this rea lm, with the
cakravartin with an iron wheel resorting to the sword . This last category
seems to correspond to the armed cakravartin mentioned in
the legend of Asoka; by filling the Buddha's begging bowl with earth
( with good intention ) , he wins dominion over the ea rth . Throughout
the history of Buddhism in Asia, all manner of ki ngs and potentates
would identify themselves, or be praised by others, as
cakravartins. Some Japanese Buddhist apologists for the invasion of
China in 1 9 3 7 descri bed Emperor Hirohito as a cakravartin with a
golden wheel.
Asoka began his next lifetime inauspiciously, being ugly in form
(said to be a negative effect of offering dirt to the Buddha ) and malicious
in nature, delighting in torturing prisoners, building a prison
modeled on the Buddhist hells-beautiful on the outside but horrible
on the inside-condemning all who passed through its gates to
death . One such unfortunate person was a Buddhist monk who
became an arhat while imprisoned. When the time for his execution
came, the jailer found it impossible to light the fire beneath the cauldron
in which the monk was to be boiled. The king was summoned,
at which point the monk displayed all manner of supernormal feats,
converting the king to the dharma . Asoka had the prison destroyed
and began a construction project of another kind, gathering the relics
of the Buddha to build eighty-four thousand stiipas. Asoka devoted
the rest of his life to the support of Buddhism, visiting the great pilgrimage
sites, entertaining the sailgha i n a great festival, and finally,
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
on his death bed, giving away all of his wealth to Buddhist monks,
until he was left with only half a fruit, which he had made into a
soup and served to the sangha.
Such largesse was not merely legendary. There was a tradition of
extravagant royal festivals in which all manner of gifts were given to
the sangha. In some cases, the king would go so fa r as to offer his
own ornaments and robes, donning the dress of a Buddhist monk to
preach the dharma . But such transformations were only temporary,
and his attendants would soon buy back the symbols of kingship
and the king would return to his royal robes .
In the histories of many lands, the introduction of Buddhism is
associated with a pious prince. In Japan, Prince Shotoku ( 5 4 7-6 2 2 )
is regarded a s both the founder o f the Japanese state and the first
patron of Buddhism. The dharma had been recommended to him by
the Korean king of Paekche, who described it in a way in which it
was perhaps regarded throughout Asi a : as difficult to comprehend
but capable of producing measureless merit such that every wish is
fulfilled. The appeal of Buddhism, then, was not so much that it
provided liberation from suffering as that, in the words of the Lotus
Sutra, it provided " peace and safety in the present life and good circumstances
in future lives. " This promise of happiness in this life and
the next has contri buted powerfully to the persistence of the dharma .
Prince Shotoku is credited with building temples and writing
commentaries on siitras, putting the dharma into practice in support
of his own rule and, by extension, of the nation. As in the case of
many countries, images of Buddhist deities played an important role
i n the establishment of the dharma . In a battle with a rival ( and antiBuddhist)
faction, the fourteen-yea r-old prince is said to have felled
a tree, carved small statues of the kings of the four directions, and
placed the statues in his topknot, vowing to build a temple i n their
honor when he emerged victorious. Another statue, still to be seen
in Nara, was less effective. When Prince Shotoku and his wife became
ill, members of the court, in an effort to save him, vowed to
have a statue of Siikyamuni Buddha made that resembled the prince.
The prince died the next day, but the statue was completed and is
enshrined i n the Golden Hall of Horyii j i .
Another royal defender of the dharma is the S r i Lankan prince
Lay Practice
DunhagamaiJ.i, who defeated the other mmor kingdoms of the
island and briefly united them i nto a Buddh ist k ingdom in the second
century B . C . E . His rather mythologized tale is told in the fifthcentury
chronicle of th island, the Mahavarrzsa. Dunhagamar:ti had
been a monk i n his previous life; the monk had vowed to be reborn
as a cakravartin . As king, he went to war against the enemies of the
dharma, carrying a spear that bore a relic of the Buddha. The battle
ended when he killed the enemy king, the pious but non-Buddhist
E!ara. After his victory, he planted his spear in the earth. When he
attempted to extract it, he failed and so decided to have a stiipa built
around it, making the i nstrument of his victory a site for the making
of merit. He is remembered for building important stiipas and for
granting sovereignty over the island of Sri Lanka, not to any king,
but to the relics of the Buddha, agai n suggesting the vitality and
agency such rel ics were seen to possess. Like Asoka, Dunhagamar:tl
was trou bled by the carnage he had caused with the deaths of sixty
thousand. But he was assured by a delegation of arhats that,
because among his victims there was only one Buddhist and one
recent convert, he had only accrued the karma of killing one and
one half persons. As a result of meritorious deeds, Dunhagamar:ti is
said to have been reborn in the Joyous heaven, awaiting rebirth as a
disciple of Maitreya. The story of Dunhagamar:ti continues to be
told and has been deployed i n recent years to defend the violence of
Sinhalese Buddhists aga inst non-Buddhist Tamils in Sri Lanka.
Sometimes the resistance to the introduction of Buddhism came
not merely from rival factions but from the land itself. When a
famous image of the Buddha was being transported from China to
Tibet, where the dharma had recently been adopted by the king, all
manner of obstacles prevented its successful transport to the royal
capital. It was soon determined that the very land of Tibet, in the
form of a great demoness, was objecting to the i ntroduction of the
new religion and was thus, through the movements of her body
( which was also the surface of the state) attempting to impede its
progress. The k i ng then ordered that Buddhist temples be constructed
around his land, each a bove a vital point in the demoness's
body, effectively impaling her i n a supine position and making his
real m ready for the establishment of the dharma.
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D I I I S M
Images and relics of the Buddha thus play an important role in
the histories of dynasties, serving as signs of righteousness and legitimation.
The fifteenth-century Legend of Queen Cama ( Camadevlva'ft
sa ) tells how the Buddha vi sits northern Thailand and predicts
that after he enters nirvar:ta one of his relics will appear there. An
ascetic builds a great city in prepa ration for the discovery of the relic
and invites a pregnant princess ( whose husband has become a Buddhist
monk) to be its ruler, Queen Ca ma. She gives birth to twin sons,
who in turn become forebears of a roya l lineage. A pious Buddhist,
her dying words are " suffering, impermanence, no-self. " Twentyeight
kings and some four hundred years later, the relic is finally discovered
bu ried beneath the king's latrine, its presence revea led by a
white crow that preaches the dharma . It is only then that the true
purpose of the dynasty, the protection of the relic and hence of the
th ree jewels, is revealed.
Throughout much of Asia, Buddhist mon ks were su pported by
the state because of their abi lities to pred ict the future, to bring
timely rains, and to legitimate rule by identi fying the king's past
associations with the Buddha in previous lives. In China, in an apocryphal
text cal led The Perfection of Wisdom Satra for Humane
Kings Who Wish to Protect Their States ( Renwang hu guo banrou
boluomiduo jing), the Buddha expla ined that, during the time of the
final dharma, rulers a re entrusted with the preservation of Buddhism.
And by performing the proper rituals ( which entailed elaborate
feasts for monks ) , their rea lms will be protected from drought,
plague, floods, and invading armies. Across East Asia there thus
developed the view of a sym biotic relationship between imperial
rule and the sangha, between state law and Buddhist law. The ruler
was responsible for protecting and maintaining the sangha. The
sangha was responsible for maintaining moral rectitude, thus creating
the merit that would sustain the state, and for instructing the
populace in the virtuous behavior that would promote social order.
Monks must maintain their vows, and the state must maintain
monks in order for harmony to prevail . This twofold promotion of
the dharma was meant to ensure the welfare of the state and its subjects
in this life and the next.
In japan, one of the ways in wh ich Buddhist monks sought to
Lay Practice
gain state support for their pa rticular sect was to claim its efficacy in
securing the welfare of the nation. For example, the Zen monk Eisai
( 1 1 4 1-1 2 1 5 ) returned from China to compose a Treatise on Promoting
Zen for the Protection of the Country (KDzen gokokuron ),
which he submitted to the new mil itary dictatorship based in Kamakura.
It was believed that the security and prosperity of japan
depended on a variety of deities, who had the power both to avert
natural disasters and to protect the island from foreign invasion. In
order to maintain the favor and su pport of these deities, the appropriate
offerings and prayers had to be performed. The efficacy of
such rituals depended, according to traditional Buddhist theory, on
the purity of those who performed them. Eisai argued that the ethical
discipline of Zen monks made them the most potent practitioners
of the rituals for the protection of the state descri bed in such
works as the Perfection of Wisdom Sutra for Humane Kings Who
Wish to Protect Their States. In this sense Buddhism is not so much
identified with a particular state as it is regarded as a power, of
equal or perhaps greater importance, that can serve the state when
properly propitiated. Such arguments for the reciproca l relation of
sangha and state continued to be made in japan during the twentieth
century, used by many Buddhist sects to j ustify their strong support
for the Japanese conq uest of much of Asia.
Eisai was successful in gaining the patronage of the Kama kura
shogunate. One of his near contemporaries, Nichiren ( 1 2 2 2- 1 2 8 2 ),
was not. He was the founder of one of the new movements of
Kamakura Buddhism, which claimed that a single practice held the
key to enlightenment. For Dogen, it was " j ust sitting" in Zen meditation.
Seated meditation, he claimed, is not j ust one of a va riety of
Buddhist practices or j ust the practice of the Zen sect, it is rather
the essentia l practice of Buddhism. Zazen is not a method that
results in buddhahood but rather is the most perfect expression of
the buddhahood that pervades the un iverse. From this perspective,
to sit in meditation is to be a buddha; it is a manifestation of one's
true nature, present from the very beginning. For Honen, the single
practice was chanting namu amida butsu, " homage to Amitabha
Buddha, " calling on him to deliver the faithful to his pure land
upon their death. For Nichiren, it was chanting the great title of the
1 8 6 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
Lotus Sutra, in Japanese namu myaha renge kyo. Other sects in
Japan, nota bly the Tendai, had championed the Lotus as the Buddha's
true and final teaching, regarding other siitras as examples of
the Buddha's skillful methods. Nichiren went much further, declaring
all other Buddhist texts to be utterly ineffectual during the
degenerate age. He reinterpreted the Buddhist sin of " deprecating
the dharma . " Traditionally it had been taken to mean denying the
efficacy of the Buddha's teaching, claiming a spurious text to be the
word of the Buddha, or claiming an authentic text to be spurious
( these latter two forms being commonly invoked in debates over the
status of the Mahayana siitra s ) . Nichiren rather radically reinterpreted
what it meant to deprecate the dharma; for him, it was a sin
to promote any text other than the Lotus, with the sinner doomed
to hell. He preached this view quite pu blicly, attracting the opprobrium
of the other Buddhist sects of Japan. Nichiren declared, however,
that such harsh rhetoric was required to turn the benighted
toward the true teaching, and whatever persecution he suffered as a
result served both as a further sign of the degenerate age when the
devotees of the Lotus are persecuted ( as the siitra itself predicted )
and as a n opportunity for him to experience the effects of his own
past karma. Like Eisai, Nichiren also wrote a treatise to the mil itary
dictator in Kamak ura, predicting that Japan would suffer both natural
disaster and foreign invasion if patronage of the other Buddhist
sects was not suspended in favor of the Lotus Sutra. Nichiren was
arrested and sent into exile. His example of criticizing the government
was emulated by many of his followers. While under arrest,
Nisshin ( 1 407- 1 4 8 8 ) was handed the bamboo saw with which he
was to be beheaded ( the sentence was apparently su bsequently commuted
) . Nisshin struck the saw against the floor of his cell, explaining
that he was dulling the blade so that he might suffer more for the
sake of the Lotus Sutra.
Relations between the sangha and the state have taken a wide
variety of forms throughout the Buddhist world, often with questions
over domains of authority. The Chinese monk Hui-yuan
( 3 3 4-4 1 7 ) refused to bow to the emperor, arguing that beca use Buddhist
monks had renounced the world, they were not obliged to
abide by its customs. The sangha has been regarded as essential to
Lay Practice
the good fortune of the state y some rulers, as a drain on the state
treasury and a refuge of scoundrels by others. The most sweeping
monastic reform of recent times occurred in I 8 7 2 in japan, when
the Meij i government removed any special status from monkhood.
Henceforth , monks had to register in the household registry system
and were subject to secular education, taxation , and military conscription.
Most controversially, the government declared, "From
now on Buddhist clerics will be free to eat meat, marry, grow their
hair, and so on . " Nuns were also a llowed to eat meat, marry, and
grow their hair, but they were not permitted to wear lay dress .
Unlike most monks, japanese nuns have chosen to remain celibate,
despite the Meij i declaration . Since the seventeenth centu ry, there
had been laws, sporadically enforced, making meat eating and marriage
criminal offenses for monks; during the Tokugawa period
( 1 60 3 - 1 8 6 8 ) the government enacted regulations requiring all
monks to be celibate and making relations with a woman punisha
ble by death . The fact that these activities had been criminalized by
the government suggests that such acts were widespread, and this
appears to have been the case. It was common, for example, for
monks, despite vows of celi bacy, to have wives and chi ldren. Indeed,
the fate of the widows and orphans of monks appears to have been
an embarrassment to the state.
The new regulations were met with alarm by the Buddhist sects
of japan, especially the regu lation permitting marriage. It was
feared that rescinding the law against clerical marriage would
destroy the distinction between monk and layperson, bringing
chaos to the state. In response to protests from Buddh ist leaders,
the government su bsequently issued an addendum to the law, stating
that although meat eating and marriage were no longer crimin
a l offenses, the individual sects were free to regulate these
activities as they saw fit. Most sects subsequently issued regulations
either condemning or prohibiting marriage for their monks.
Nonetheless, during the last century it became increasingly common
for monks to marry, with less than 1 percent keeping the code
of monastic discipline.
In other Buddhist lands the line between monk and state was
blurred i n other ways. Mongkut ( Rama IV, I 8o6-I 8 6 8 ) of Thailand
1 8 8 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
was ordained at the age of twenty and spent twenty-seven years as a
monk, becoming a distinguished scholar, before returning to lay life
and ascending the throne. One of the pu rposes served by his long
period of monkhood was the protection it a fforded from attempts
on h i s l i fe that might be made by his elder brother, the king. As
a monk, he founded a new sect called the Thammayut ( " adhering
to the dharma " ) that placed special emphasis on strict observance
of the code of monastic discipline. He instituted a wide range of
changes in monastic life, including the way that robes were worn.
As with all reform movements, such cha nges were said to be a
return to the practices of the original sangha. In his sect, the study of
the siitras was emphasized over meditation practice.
Sometimes the head of state was identified with a particular bodhisattva.
In Ti bet, the fi fth Dalai Lama, a Buddhist monk, was installed
on the throne of Tibet by his Mongol patrons in 1 64 2. The Dalai
Lama also consolidated his power mythologically, declaring himself
to be the present incarnation of the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, the
embodiment of compassion, who according to myth was the progenitor
of the Ti betan people: Avalokitesvara had taken the form of a
monkey in order to mate with an ogress, their offspring being the
first Tibetans. By identifying himself with Avalokitesvara, the Dalai
Lama beca me the human manifestation of the cosmic bodhisattva of
compassion. He was at once a Buddhist monk, the human incarnation
of a bodhisattva, and a divine king, com bining sangha and state
simultaneously in a single person.
T H E R O L E O F T H E B O O K
It is important to bear in mind that the vast majority of Buddhists
across Asia have been illiterate. Thus, it is misleading to think of the
Buddhist book solely as something to be read. Siitras were placed on
altars and worshiped with offerings of flowers and incense, as the
siitra itself often prescribed . Laypeople sought to accrue merit and
avert misfortune by paying monks to come into their homes and
chant siitras. Regardless of whether the audience ( or the reader)
could understand the content, the word of the Buddha was being
Lay Practice
heard, and this carried the power of a magic spell. Those with sufficient
resources would commission the copying of a siitra, as the
siitra itself often prescribed, thereby not simply making a duplicate
that someone else could read, but multiplying a sacred object that
would serve as the focus of further meritorious devotions. In China,
some monasteries had halls devoted excl usively to the recitation of
siitras. Laypeople could purchase certificates representing a given
number of recitations of a siitra . Those certificates could then be
offered ( through burning) in services for deceased relatives. Other
monasteries had rooms for perusing scriptures, where monks would
read, or simply glance at, the pages of scriptures. Whether or not the
text was comprehended, this was considered a meritorious act.
I ndeed, in Ti bet at the time of the new year or i n the case of natural
disasters such as droughts, it was common for the monks of a
monastery to read the entire portion of the canon considered to be
the word of the Buddha, traditionally contained in 1 0 8 volumes. In
this massive undertaking, the volumes of the collection were divided
among as many monks as possible, who simultaneously read each
page aloud, creating a cacophony of the dharma . As an additional
blessing, the volumes were then carried in a procession around the
village. In East Asia, communal readings of the canon sometimes
did not even entail the texts being read aloud; each text simply had
to be unfolded. In addition to whatever merit this practice accrued,
it also aired out texts to prevent damage from mold and insects.
The Heart Satra is perhaps the most famous of all Buddhist texts,
chanted daily in Buddhist temples and monasteries throughout East
Asia and Tibet, renowned for its terse expression of the perfection of
wisdom, the knowledge whereby buddhahood is achieved . In part
because of its brevity ( it is only about one page long in translation ) ,
i n part because of its potency ( a s the quintessence of the Buddha's
wisdom ) , the Heart Satra has been pur to a wide variety of ritual
uses. The most common use to which the Heart Satra is put in Tiber
is in a rite for turning away demons. This is a rite that laypeople will
ask a monk or lama to perform in an effort to remove a present
problem or avert a future danger.
The lama performing the rite (who may or may not be a mon k )
first places either a painting o r statue o f the Buddha in the center o f
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
a white cloth and arranges offerings in front of it. To the east ( that
is, in front of the Buddha image ) , he places seven images of dough
stamped with the impression of the divine demon Mara, in the form
of a white human on a white horse, with flowers in his right hand
( the flowers of desire that Mara shoots at his victims) and a noose in
his left. To the south he places seven images of the Demon of the
Afflictions, a yellow human on a yellow horse. In his right hand is a
sword, in his left a noose. To the west, he places seven images of the
Demon of the Aggregates in the form of a red human on a red horse
with a spear in his right hand and a noose in his left. To the north,
the lama places seven images of the demon who is the Lord of Death
in the form of a black human on a black horse. In his right hand he
holds a club, in his left a noose.
It is then necessary to prepare an effigy of the person who has
commissioned the performance of the rite, the patron, the person
whom the rite is meant to benefit. The lama makes a dough statue of
the patron, having first had the patron breathe on and spit on the
dough . The effigy is then dressed in a garment made from clothing
belonging to the patron and is placed in front of the Buddha image
with its face turned toward the Buddha and its back toward the
lama. In this position, the effigy stands as both a su bstitute and a
protector for the patron, acting as his surrogate before the demons.
The lama then visualizes himself as the Buddha, seated in the
midst of the four demons. The lama, as the Budd ha, plays the role
first of host to the demons, then of the agent who enters into a contract
with the demons, and finally of their conqueror. He is surrounded
by a retinue, with Avalokitesvara on the right and eight
bodhisattvas and eight monks on the left. The lama next visualizes
the goddess Prajtiaparamita ( " Perfection of Wisdom " ) at his heart,
seated on a moon disc, surrounded by buddhas and bodhisattvas.
Moving to an even smaller sca le, the meditator imagines that there
is a moon disc in the center of her heart, upon which stands the letter
ah. At an even more min ute level, the lama is instructed to visual
ize the letters of the Heart Satra standing upright a round the edge
of the moon disc at the goddess's heart. The letters of the siitra
radiate both light and their own sound, serving as offerings to the
buddhas and bodhisattvas, who in turn alleviate the sufferings and
Lay Practice 1 9 1
purify all those gathered for the performance o f the rite ( and all sentient
beings ) as the lama contemplates the meaning of emptiness.
The lama is then instructed to recite the Heart Satra as many times
as possible and then make the standard offerings of ablution, flowers,
incense, lamps, perfume, food, and music, with the appropriate
mantras followed by verses praising Sakyamuni and Praj naparamita .
He then moistens the images and offerings with water and invites
the four actual demons to come from their a bodes, the four Formless
Realms, and dissolve into their molded images. The four
demons are presumably said to reside in the Formless Realms
beca use they are invisible. The four demons are believed to be invisi
ble, perniciously invading the human domain undetected but for
the harm they inflict. In order that the demons be placated and
turned back, they must be made visi ble and brought into physical
presence. Hence, dough images are made for them, which they are
then invited to enter and animate.
The Heart Satra is then repeated nine times. After each set of nine
repetitions, the lama claps and turns one of the seven demons
al igned to the east so that it faces outward . The siitra is then recited
nine more times and another image is turned, until the seven
demons in the east have all been tu rned around, requiring sixtythree
recitations of the siitra . The same procedure is repeated for the
demons in the other three directions, such that the siitra must be
repeated 252 times to complete the process. The four demons and
their retinues have been turned away from the Buddha by the power
of the Heart Satra so that they now face outward toward the effigy
of the patron.
The lama is instructed to say di fferent things, depending on
whether the rite is being performed for a sick person, to destroy an
enemy, or for some other purpose. If the rite is being performed in
order to destroy an enemy, the lama is instructed to say, " By the
power of the words of truth of the noble three jewels, may our
enemy so-and-so today be summoned, liberated [that is, killed ] , and
his flesh and blood eaten by the gods and demons of the world. May
his consciousness be led into the sphere of reality. "
Offerings are then made to the demons, with requests that they
refrain from further harm. The demons, now residing physically i n
1 9 2 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
their dough images and facing toward the lama, are further brought
under control by bringing them into a social relation, the position of
the guest, to be offered hospitality, in the form of food and gifts, by
the lama acting as host. For example, to the divine demon Mara the
lama is instructed to say, "I offer this biscuit, endowed with a hundred
flavors and a thousand potencies, to the assembled armies of
the child of gods. May it turn into enj oyments, their exhaustion
unknown, that agree with their individual thoughts. Having
delighted and satisfied them all, I pray that all of the harm unleashed
by the four demons will be cast aside . "
The gift t o b e offered t o the demons i s the effigy of the patron .
First, the person whom the effigy represents cleans the effigy with
water that has been in his or her mouth. The lama then blesses the
effigy. The effigy is repeatedly praised; it is described as being superior
to the patron of whom it is a replica. In return for releasing the
patron from their power, the demons will be given something of
greater value, the effigy. Once the offering of the effigy has been
made to the demons, the next step is the dispatching of the demons.
The demons, as guests, have been fed and offered a gift. It is now
time for them to depart. Here the demons are both cajoled and
threatened, invited to return with the gifts they have received to
their palaces in the Formless Realm. The offering of the effigy is thus
a gift given in order to receive; in effect, the demons and the patron
( with the lama acting as his agent) enter into a contract, agreeing to
release the patron from their power in return for their taking possession
of the effigy. The demons are to understand that any breach
of this contract carries with it a pena lty; should they not keep their
part of the bargain and return to harm the patron, then the lama,
through his surrogate, the Buddha, will visit them with punishment.
The next step is to take all of the images and offerings ( with the
exception of the Buddha image ) to a sa fe distance and then place
them facing away from the place where the rite was performed. The
location, however, depends on the purpose of the rite that the lama
has been asked to perform. For example, i f the rite is for the welfare
of a sick person, they are to be put in a cemetery. I f a horoscope pred
icts that danger is approaching as a result of the " fourth year exeLay
Practice 1 9 3
cutioner, " the ina uspicious year that occurs four years after one's
birth year in the twelve-year cycle, or as a result of the "conj unction
of the seven, " the ill fortune that results from a relationship with
someone seven years apart in age, they are to be placed in the direction
the harm is predicted to come from. If it is for bringing happiness,
they are placed either above or below a crossroads. If a curse is
being deflected, they are placed in the direction of the curse. If one is
making a curse, they are placed in the direction of the enemy. If one
has been harmed by the spirit king, they are placed at the base of a
temple or a stupa . If one has been harmed by a female devil, it is
placed outside the town. If one has been harmed by a water deity,
they are to be placed at a lake or a spring.
The rite then concludes with a blessing, ca ll ing upon the five buddhas
and a sixth deity, the goddess of the earth . The usual offerings,
prayers, and dedications are then made, with the lama reminded to
keep in mind throughout that both he and the patron are by nature
empty. The text concludes with a final testimony to the rite's
potency: " By coming under the power of the four [demons] in this
existence, one is bereft of happiness and tormented by mil lions
of sufferings. Until one atta ins the vajra-like samadhi [the final
moment of meditation before the achievement of buddhahood] , this
rite is an amazing method of exorcism . "
Such rituals, i n which the Buddha and his dharma are called upon
to dispel the damage done by evil spirits, are repeated in myriad
forms throughout the Buddhist world. The presence of these rites in
Buddhist cultures was once regarded as evidence of " the little tradition,
" a concession made to the la ity by monks who knew better
than to believe in such things . In fact, Buddhism has always derived
much of its support, from the most powerful kings to the local villagers,
from its magical power to dispel evil and promote goodness .
Monks, with their ability to read and recite the sutras and mantras
that possess such power, have often been the agents of this protection.
From the time of the Buddha, this appears to have been a central
means for their sustenance and a central element of their
practice, forming an essential link to the laity.
1 94 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
K A R M A
Whether they were seeking to dispel demons in this l i fe or to find a
fortunate rebirth in the next, Buddhists, both monks and laity, have
remained preoccupied with karma, generally seeking a magical
means of su bverting the negative karma of the past and an efficient
technique for a massing positive karma in the present. The law of
karma as classically expounded, in which the misdeeds of the past
must fructify as present and future suffering, unless one attains
insight into no-self, was either unknown to or ignored by most Buddhists
over the centuries and across Asia. This did not mean, however,
that ela borate interventions into the workings of karma did
not occur. Indeed, such interventions have constituted the practice
of Buddhism.
The powers of the Lotus Sutra, for example, are considered so
great that its very title has miraculous power. A story from twelfthcentury
China tells of a depraved and evil man who once mocked a
pious monk by making a face at him and sarcastically saying,
" Lotus Sutra. " When the man died and was appropriately consigned
to hell in accordance with his evil deeds in life, the Lord of
Death declared that a mistake had been made, that despite his evil
appearance the man had performed a deed of such goodness that he
should return to the world . Indeed, no one who had ever chanted
the name of the Lotus Sutra even once had ever been reborn in hel l.
In a Tang dynasty tale, a woman fishmonger was reborn in hell
for having engaged in wrong livelihood. The Lord of Death determined
that she had once listened to a lecture on the Lotus Sutra and
so al lowed her to return to earth, but not before giving her a tou r of
the sufferings she avoided. In seeing the plight of denizens of the
various hells, she spontaneously said, " Homage to the Lotus Sutra "
(akin to someone remarking in disbelief, "Jesus Christ " ) , at which
point all the hell beings who heard her were miraculously reborn in
heaven.
In each of these cases, there is a mechanism at work referred to in
China as " stimulation-response. " Rather than a simple case of divine
intercession or compassionate salvation by a bodhisattva, the
pious person creates a kind of resonance through the recitation that
Lay Practice 1 9 5
first attracts the attention of the deity and then compels him or her
to respond. It would be misleading, therefore, to regard these stories
as somehow supernatura l, in which the divine momenta rily suspends
the laws of nature to intervene in the human world. Instead,
the salvations that occur are wholly natural, in the sense that when
the appropriate cause is present, the effect must occur.
This rather mechanistic view found a somewhat different expression
in the calculation of karma . The classical exposition of karmic
theory saw all intentional deeds of the ignorant person, whether virtuous
or evi l, as producing karma and thus further binding the person
in saf!1sara . Rebirth was not seen to be the result of weighing the
deeds of the past life in a balance and moving up or down in the six
rea lms, depending on the way the scales tipped. Rather, each complete
deed from any past life was a potential cause of an entire lifetime,
and a variety of factors, including one's state of mind at the
time of death, determined which particular deed would fructify as
the next lifetime. But such fine points seem to have been of little
interest in most Buddhist societies, where one finds an enduring
interest in the calculation of karma . This is nowhere more true than
in China, where hell was transformed into an infernal bureaucracy,
where the minions of the Lord of Death consulted ledgers of the
deeds of the damned. In a Chinese text called the Sutra of the Ten
Kings (Shiwang jing), the fate of the dead in the world between
death and rebirth is descri bed . Ten times a fter death (at the end of
each of the first seven weeks, one hundred days, one year, and three
yea rs ) the deceased is escorted like a prisoner into the presence of a
king who has before him a precise record of all the person's deeds of
the past life. The dead are herded like sheep from court to court,
pushed along by ox-headed guards wielding pitchforks. In the
fourth court a scale weighs their good deeds aga inst their sins. In
the fifth court they are dragged by the hair and made to look into
the mirror of karma, where they see their past misdeeds reflected. In
the tenth court, reached a fter three years of suffering, the place of
rebirth is decided. Among misdeeds, specific mention is made of the
gravity of using money that rightfully belongs to the three jewels.
In the siitra, the Buddha explains that if the family left behind on
earth sends the appropriate offerings at the appropriate time, the
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
deceased may be excused from the cou rts at various poi nts along
the j ourney and be granted a favora ble rebirth . Those families who
sponsor vegetarian feasts for monks and commission the making of
images may create sufficient merit to have their loved one avoid the
j udicial system entirely and be reborn in heaven . Of particular efficacy
is oneself copying or sponsoring the copying of the Satra of the
Ten Kings and making pictures of the ten kings. Doing so for one's
own benefit will be duly noted in the registry of one's deeds, and one
will be spared the ordeal of j udgment when one dies. Doing so on
behalf of deceased loved ones will cause them to emerge from the
ordeal and secure a happy rebirth . In testimony to the popularity of
this practice, many copies of the scriptures, many with illustrations
of the ten courts, have been discovered in manuscript collections.
Among the living, there was also a fascination with determining
the merits and demerits of one's deeds, and works were composed
prescribing some deeds and proscribing others. The prototype of
such texts is the Tract of the Most Exalted on A ction and Response
( Taishang ganying pian ), first published in u 64 . An entire genre of
ledgers of merit and demerit was spawned, works that drew eclectically
from Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist sources, with one
tradition usually weighted against the others, depending on the allegiance
of the author. These works list hundreds of meritorious and
demeritorious deeds, assigning a certa in number of positive and
negative points to each. Readers were encouraged to pause before
sleep each night to take account of the past day's activities, recording
good deeds (and their respective merit) in one column and bad
deeds ( and their respective demerit) in another. Scholars have linked
the popularity of these works with changes in the social and economic
structures during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties.
A Buddhist work from 1 604 assigns two merit points per day for
serving one's stepmother with respect and one point per day for
obeying the laws of the dynasty. Fifty points are earned for saving
an infant from being drowned and raising it as one's own child. Trying
to convince fishermen, h unters, and butchers to seek a more virtuous
source for their livelihood earns th ree points, increased to fifty
if one is successfu l . Giving a burial plot to a family that has none
is worth thirty points. Among more specifically Buddhist activities,
Lay Practice 1 9 7
composing a commentary on a Mahayana text earns fifty points per
work, to a maximum of fifteen hundred for prolific authors. A commentary
on a Hinayana text is worth only one point, the same
amount of merit earned by chanting the name of the Buddha one
thousand times. Among negative deeds, talking back to one's parents
results in ten negative points, making poison results in five negative
points, and sentencing a person to death counts one hundred
points. Killing animals during a period of the year in which killing
animals is prohibited results in twice the negative points that would
be incurred at other times. Among Buddhist practices, to slander the
Buddha results in five negative points. Each cha racter misread or
omitted while chanting a siitra counts one negative point. Rising to
receive a guest while chanting a siitra results in two negative points,
unless the guest is a government official, in which case there is no
penalty. Reciting a siitra after eating garlic or onions results in one
negative point. Illicit sexual intercourse with a person of good family
results in ten negative points; two negative points are incurred
for having sexual relations with a prostitute.
The concern with making merit and the idea l of the bodhisattva's
compassion intersected in the practice of releasing animals. Refraining
from killing and maintaining a vegetarian diet were themselves
sources of merit, but they were, in a certain sense, passive deeds. An
apocryphal Chinese siitra, cal led Brahma 's Net ( Fan wang jing),
lists, in a long enumeration of things that a bodhisattva vows to
avoid, " the non practice of releasing and saving. " In Tibet, as a
result of a bad omen or ina uspicious horoscope, one might be
advised to free some animals. This would involve purchasing a goat
or a sheep that was destined to slaughter and protecting it from
death . In China, the release of animals more commonly involved
turtles and fish ( although game birds and animals were a lso sometimes
included ) and was carried out on a grander, often imperial,
scale. In 6 1 9, an imperial decree prohibited fishing, hunting, and the
slaughter of animals during the first, fifth, and ninth months of the
year. A decree of 7 5 9 esta blished eighty-one ponds for the release
and protection of fish. Sometimes public ceremonies for the release
of creatures were held annually to commemorate the Buddha's birth.
( Reports suggest that in medieval Japan the imperial government
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
would order the capture of three times the number of fish needed to
be released at a ceremony in order that the requisite number-often
from one thousand to th ree thousa nd-be alive by the time the ceremony
took place. In such cases, the practice of releasing animals
resulted in the unfortunate death of many before they could be liberated
. ) At the local level, lay societies for releasing living beings
were founded, often inspired by the preaching of a famous monk. In
some, each member would bring an animal for release to the
monthly meeting, in others members collected donations in order to
purchase fish, birds, and domesticated animals doomed to the dinner
ta ble.
The locus classicus for the practice is a story in the Sutra of
Golden Light (Suvar11abhasottama ) . In a previous life, the Buddha
was a merchant's son named jalavahana, who one day encountered
a dried-up pond in the forest, filled with ten thousand dying fish.
Summoning twenty elephants, he carried bags of water from a river
into the forest and replenished the pond, saving the fish. He then
sent for food with which to feed them. Finally, recalling that anyone
who hears the name of the buddha Ratnasikhin will be reborn in
heaven, he waded into the pond and pronounced the buddha's
name, fol lowed by an exposition of dependent origination . When
the fish died, they were reborn in the Heaven of the Thi rty-Three.
Recalling the reason for their happy fate, they visited the world of
humans, where each offered a pearl necklace to Jalavahana 's head,
foot, right side, and left side.
Among the benefits said to accrue from the practice of releasing
animals were honor, longevity, prosperity, progeny, a successful
career, recovery from mental il lness, protection from natural disasters
( such as drought), and rebirth in one of the heavenly rea lms. A
tenth-century japanese work tells of a devout woman who had
chanted the name of Amitabha all her life. At the time of her death,
she felt that some small karmic obstacle was preventing her rebirth
in the pure land. She recalled that some time ago someone had given
her some carp. Rather than eat them, she released them into a wel l .
S h e n o w wondered whether the carp, so confined, longed t o swim i n
a river. S h e h a d someone transport the carp t o a river. Soon after, the
Lay Practice 1 99
fragrance of lotuses filled her room and she died painlessly facing
the west, the direction of Amita bha's land. But there were benefits in
this life as well . A winemaker who compassionately prevented flies
from drowning in his casks was arrested and convicted for a crime
he did not commit. As the j udge was about to write his sentence, a
swarm of flies covered his pen. The winemaker was released .
The physical release of fish and animals was not considered fully
efficacious unless some attempt was made to ensure their spiritual
release as well . Ceremonies to accompany the liberation of the animals
were composed by eminent Buddhist monks. As i n the rite of
water and land, the model was one of salvation through hearing the
dharma; a famous story tells of a frog who was accidentally stepped
on while the Buddha was preaching the dharma and was reborn in
the Heaven of the Thirty-Three. In some cases, the rite would be as
simple as the chanting of a siitra or the chanting of Amita bha's
name. In more elaborate ceremonies, the fish would hear a sermon
on the su fferings of sarpsara . After that, the officiating priest would
sprinkle them with water that would purify them of the mental
defilements that prevented them from understanding what was
being said. The priest would then bestow refuge in the three jewels,
followed by a prayer for the animals to be reborn in their next life in
the Heaven of the Thirty-Three and eventually achieve enlightenment.
This would be followed by a lecture on the twelvefold chain
of dependent origination, one of the most difficult of Buddhist doctrines
even for bipeds, then a confession of the animals' sins, and
finally a prayer for rebirth in the pure land. Eventually, almost every
large monastery in China had a pool for releasing fish and pens for
the care of livestock that had been rescued from the butcher.
Because these animals had been given Buddhist precepts, they were
encouraged to observe them, with males and females segregated
and carnivorous fish kept separately. Birds, turtles, and fish were
more popular for release than domesticated animals because they
required no further assistance. The pious who delivered cows and
pigs to the monastery, however, were required to contribute toward
their sustenance.
200 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
P I L G R I M A G E
In his final instructions before his death, the Buddha prescribed the
practice of pilgrimage to sites where his relics would be enshrined.
He declared that those who offer flowers, incense, or paint to one of
his stiipas will derive merit from their good deed, and those who feel
delight at the sight of a stiipa or who die while on pi lgrimage will be
reborn in heaven . Pi lgrimage has been a major form of practice
throughout the history of Buddhism and across the Buddhist world,
with pilgrims journeying from around Asia to India in order to visit
the sites important in the life of the Buddha, especially Bodhgaya,
the place of his enlightenment. Accounts from the thirteenth century
indicate that Bodhgaya was maintained by a delegation of Sri Lankan
monks, who would retreat into the forest when Muslim troops passed
through the area. In subsequent centuries, control of Bodhgaya was
lost by Buddhists; it was only restored after Indian independence in
the last century. Since that time, pilgrimage to Bodhgaya from across
the Buddhist world has increased greatly.
Each region of the Buddhist world also has its own pilgrimage
sites, whether they be temples, statues, monasteries, sacred mountains,
or caves once occupied by saints. Pilgrimage provides a powerfu
l technique for the " buddhification " of the landscape, with
locales (often mountains) a l ready important in local practice transformed
into Buddhist sites by the identification of the mountain as
the location of a relic of the Buddha or as the residence of a bodhisattva.
At the summit of Adam's Pea k in Sri Lanka there are footprints
of the Buddha. In China, Mount Wutai was regarded as the
a bode of the bodhisattva of wisdom, Manj usri, and was identified
with a mountain mentioned in the Flower Garland Sutra ( Avata'ftsaka
) . It became a major pilgrimage site, drawing pilgrims from as
far away as Mongolia and Tibet. In some cases, mountains far
beyond India were identified as mountains mentioned in Indian
Buddhist siitras as the place where the Buddha had delivered an
important discourse or performed a famous miracle. In Tibet and
Japan, certain sacred mountains were said to have originally been
Indian peaks that had detached themselves from the earth and flown
through the air and descended in another land, carrying their deities
Lay Practice 2.0 1
with them . These mountains contai ned hidden treasuries and secret
caves, which were discovered by charismatic figures like the eighthcentury
japanese figure En the Ascetic. Pilgrimage has served as an
important conduit for various forms of exchange, both religious and
commercial.
In Ti bet, pilgrimage is often made to the a bodes of deities known
as protectors. Protectors play a central role in Ti betan Buddhism,
for monks, nuns, and laypeople alike. Buddhas and bodhisattvas are
distant and exalted enl ightened beings of Indian origin . Their aid is
not genera lly sought for the more mundane matters of life. Often of
Tibeta n origin, some dating from pre-Buddhist times, protectors a re
the formerly malignant spi rits who ani mated and terrorized the
Ti betan landscape. In order for Buddhism to take hold in Ti bet,
these spirits had to be defeated in magical battle by Indian masters
such as Padmasambhava in the eighth century. Rather than be
killed, the Ti betan spirits agreed to su bmit to the new faith and
defend Buddhism. Unlike the foreign buddhas and bodhisattvas,
protectors thus have strong loca l associations; they are ancestral
guardians of a clan, a valley, a mountain, a monastery. A p rotector
is thus a much more personal deity, like a big brother or a guardian
angel or a godfather (in both senses of the term ) , someone who can
help with financial or personal problems, who will protect you from
danger and punish your enemies. It is common for Ti betans to credit
their protector with everyth ing from success in business to surviving
an accident. Ti betans thus feel a great sense of al legiance and personal
intimacy toward their protector.
A protector, although a loca l god, was often regarded, as often
occurred throughout the Buddhist world, as a member of the retinue
of a great buddha and bodhisattva . The a bode of the local god was
thereby incorporated into the Buddhist domain. Scholars have
noted in the case of Ti bet that many of the most important pilgrimage
mountains a re located in border regions that define the boundaries
of a kingdom as a Buddhist realm. Pilgrimage to the a bodes of
these enlightened beings conferred a range of blessings, including
fortunate rebirth and fortune and good health in this life. The
mountain abodes of these deities were considered sacred spaces,
often discovered or "opened " by a great lama in the past, who used
2 0 2 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
his magical powers to wrest control of the place from ma lignant
spirits, recognizing that, in reality, the mountain is a ma<:fala, with
its peak serving as the seat of the central deity. As such, even to set
foot on the mountain was considered efficacious. Circumambulation
was thus a common practice in Ti betan Buddhism, made all the
more potent if one could trace the circuit of the mountain not simply
with one's footsteps but with one's entire body. Hence, the wellknown
image of Tibetan pilgrims performing " full prostrations," in
which they bow down and stretch their bodies on the ground at full
length, rise, walk forward a few steps, and then bow down again.
Tibetan pilgrims commonly traverse pilgrimage routes of hundreds
of miles in this fashion.
In northern Thailand, the practice of pi lgrimage is associated
with the life cycle of the individual . There, as in many parts of Asia,
years are named after animals in a twelve-year cycle; one is said to
have been born in the Year of the Dog, the Year of the Hare, the
Year of the Monkey, and so forth . It is considered auspicious to
make a pilgrimage to one of twelve sacred sites lin ked to one's birth
year in order to worship the relic of the Buddha ensh rined there. In
most cases the relics are said to have been brought to Thailand by
emissaries of Asoka. Some of these shrines are of easier access than
others; three of them are not located in Thailand. One of these is the
Shwe Dagon in Rangoon; another is Bodhgaya in India. The third of
the twelve sites is not in Thailand, nor is it on ea rth . After the time
of the Buddha 's cremation, Droa, the brahmin who distributed the
relics, kept a tooth of the Buddha for himself and hid it in his hair.
The tooth was taken by the god Indra and enshrined in the Heaven
of the Thirty-Three. Those born in the Year of the Dog would be
required to visit this most inaccessible of stiipas. However, they may
instead visit the city of Chiang Mai and the shrine of War Ket,
named a fter this tooth relic of the Buddha.
One of the most famous pilgrimage routes in Japan is the eightyeight-
stage pilgrimage route around the smallest of the main islands,
Shikok u . Once accomplished on foot, this circuit today is most
often traveled by bus, with most pilgrims stopping at each temple
on the route to have the name of the site stamped on to a scrol l or
into a book. The pilgrimage is associated with the great Shingon
Lay Practice 20J
master Kukai ( 774-8 3 5 , reverentially also known as Kobo Daishi,
" Great Teacher Who Spread the Dharma " ) . Kukai is believed sti ll to
be present in the world. For according to his legend, Kukai did not
die on Mount Koya i n 8 3 5 but merely entered a state of eternal
samadhi, awaiting, like Mahakasyapa, the coming of Ma itreya.
Although memorial services were performed each week for seven
weeks after his death, no funeral was performed . Kukai appeared
al ive, and his hair and beard continued to grow. He was sealed
inside a mausoleum, where priests continued to change his clothes.
The vicinity of his tomb on Mount Koya is fil led with the ashes of
the dead, who await with Kukai the advent of Maitreya .
Kukai was born on Shikoku, a lthough the pilgrimage route as it
is cu rrently known did not take shape until the seventeenth century.
He is said to accompany each pilgrim along the route around the
island of Shikoku and often assumes the guise of a pilgrim himself,
benefiting those who show him generosity and punishing those who
do not. Performing the pilgrimage is said to offer many rewards,
recou nted in severa l collections of ta les. A man who could not speak
undertook the pilgrimage and bega n to speak fluently by the third
day. A woman carrying water to her sick da ughter encountered a
pilgrim who asked for the water. She gave it to him freely. In gratitude,
the pilgrim, who was in fact Kukai, performed a tantric rite,
and a river of pure water magica lly appeared . A leper performed the
pi lgrimage and was cu red by the time he returned home. The most
famous story, one of punishment and salvation, i s a bout a greedy
man named Emon Saburo, who refused to give alms to a pilgrim
who came to his door. Instead, he struck him with a stick and broke
his begging bowl into eight pieces. Emon had eight sons, and over
the next eight days each son died. Emon rea lized that the pilgrim
had been Kukai and set out to ask his forgiveness. I n an effort to
find him, he traversed the Shikoku pilgrimage route i n the reverse
direction, making the circuit twenty-one times without meeting the
master. As Emon lay dying at one of the temples, Kukai appeared to
him and a bsolved him of his misdeeds. Emon asked to be reborn
into a good family so that he could perform good deeds. Kukai
wrote " Emon Saburo reborn " on a stone and placed it i n his hand
as he died. After the appointed time, a child was born clenching the
204 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
same stone in his hand and grew up to restore a temple on the pilgrimage
route where the stone is today enshrined.
Suggested Reading
Brereton, Bonnie. Thai Tellings of Phra Malai: Texts and Rituals
Co11cerning a Popular Buddhist Saint. Tempe: Arizona State University
Program for Southeast Asian Studies, 1 9 9 5 .
Gombrich, Richard F. Precept and Practice: Traditional Buddhism
in the Rural Highlands of Ceylon. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
I 9 7 I .
Groot, Jan J . M . de. Sectarianism and Religious Persecution in
China. Taipei: Literature House, I 9 6 3 .
Lopez, Donald S . , Jr. Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart
Satra. Princeton: Princeton University Press, I 9 9 6 .
--., ed . Buddhism i n Practice. Princeton : Princeton University
Press, I 99 5 .
--. Religions of China in Practice. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1 9 9 6 .
Reader, Ian, a n d George J. Tanabe Jr. Practically Religious: Worldly
Benefits and the Common Religion of japan. Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, I 99 8 .
Strong, john S . The Legend of King Asoka: A Study and Translation
of the AsokavadiJna. Princeton: Princeton University Press, I 9 8 3 .
Swearer, Donald K . , and Sommai Premchit. The Legend of Queen
Cama: Bodhirarrzsi 's CiJmadevlvarrzsa, A Translation and Commentary.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1 99 8 .
Tanabe, George J . , Jr. , ed. Religions of Japan in Practice. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, I 9 9 9 ·
Teiser, Stephen F. The Ghost Festival in Medieval China. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, I 9 8 8 .
-- . The Scripture of the Te n Kings and th e Making of Purgatory
in Medieval Chinese Buddhism. Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 199 4 .
Lay Practice 2.0 5
Welch, Holmes. The Practice of Chinese Buddhism: I 9 0 0-I 9JO.
Cambridge: Harva rd University Press, 1 9 6 7 .
Y ii , Chiin-fang. The Renewal of Buddhism i n China: Chu-hung and
the Late Ming Synthesis. New York : Columbia University Press,
1 9 8 1 .
6
E N L I G H T E N M E N T
The nature of enlightenment and the most efficient means to achieve
it have been much discussed in Buddhist texts across Asia and
across the centuries, often at some remove from those most devoted
to its pursuit. Some claim that enl ightenment can occur suddenly,
brought about by someth ing as simple as the ringing of a bel l. Others
set forth a detailed process of gradual perfection of the mind,
proceeding over ten stages and ensuing over mill ions of lifetimes .
Some claim that no one has become enlightened since the time of the
Buddha . Others declare that all beings are already enl ightened, they
j ust need to recognize it. Buddhist sutras regularly report the number
of beings who achieved various states of enl ightenment by simply
listening to a discourse of the Buddha . The Buddha's first five
disciples became arhats after hearing his second sermon, and all
sixty of the Buddha's early disciples also became arhats. Siiriputra,
the wisest of the Buddha's disciples, became an arhat while he stood
behind the Buddha, fanning him, as the Buddha delivered a discourse
to another monk. Ananda, the Buddha's attendant, became
an arhat after the Buddha's death as he lay down to go to sleep, j ust
before his head touched the pillow.
The techniques for achieving enlightenment are equally varied .
Some declare that intellectual analysis of the constituents of mind
and body is essential. For others, there is no greater obstacle to
enlightenment than the discursive activities of the mind. For some,
the suppression of desire is required before progress can be made on
the path. For others, desire, especially sexual desire, offers access to
deep states of consciousness essential to the path . Whatever the
technique, the measure of enlightenment is difficult to make. The
Enlightenment 207
state is rarely described as self-va lidating-even Sariputra and
Maudgalyayana, the chief disciples of the Buddha, did not know
that they had become arhats until the Buddha told them so-and, in
the absence of the Buddha, who else is qualified to determine who
has reached enlightenment? Two centuries after the Buddha's death,
a controversy arose over whether arhats were subject to nocturnal
emissions; a lthough free from desire during the day, could they be
seduced in their dreams ? The ability to perform mi racles is, as we
shall see below, a side effect of relatively lesser states and hence cannot
be taken as an indication of enl ightenment. In the mainstream
traditions, the final proof of enlightenment is to never be reborn
again, something difficult to determine by those left behind. Yet
many modern Theravada teachers say that so much time has passed
since the death of the Buddha that it is now impossible for anyone
to become a n arhat; we must await the coming of Maitreya . The
Mahayana traditions either declare the immanence of enlightenment
or predict it in the unimaginably distant future. What remai n
a r e t h e texts, texts that describe enlightenment and texts that tell
how to get there.
In many Indian Buddhist texts, it is stated that a certai n level of
concentration is necessary in order for the knowledge of n i rvar:ta to
be salvific, that is, for the vision of nirvar:ta to be powerful enough to
destroy all the seeds of future rebirth. In this sense, concentration
serves as a prerequisite for insight i nto rea lity. But such concentration,
called samadhi, a lso brings other benefits prior to the ultimate
passage into nirval)a . These i nclude not only rebirth in the heaven of
Brahma, but a wealth of supernormal abilities. Thus, because of his
attainment of concentration, Sariputra, while meditating one day,
survived a blow on the head from a demon, a blow that would have
felled an elephant or split a mounta i n . When a monk who observed
the incident asked how he was feel i ng, Sariputra responded that he
was quite well but had a slight headache. Another monk survived
immolation un burned, another was protected from robbers, a laywoman
was unhurt by boiling oil, a queen repelled a poison arrow.
Even more impressively, it is said that one who has attained a state
of deep concentration is able to create multiple versions of himself
2.0 8 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
or hersel f, to walk through walls and mountains, to dive in and out
of the earth, to walk on water, and to fly th rough the sky in the lotus
posture, touching the sun and the moon.
To achieve such powers, the mind must first be concentrated
upon an object, and forty suitable objects of concentration are traditionally
set forth in Theravada literature. The first of the forty
objects is cal led the earth device. The meditator is to stretch a piece
of leather or cloth across a wooden frame and then smear a disc of
dawn-colored clay, the size of a sa ucer, onto the surface, using a
trowel to make it smooth. After sweeping the surrounding area and
taking a bath, the meditator then sits down two and a half cubits
from this earth device and stares at the disc, menta lly repeating
"earth , " open ing and shutting his eyes until the disc appears j ust as
clearly with eyes shut as it does with eyes open. At this point, the
meditator is to return to his dwell ing and concentrate on the mental
image, only going back to look at the clay disc should the image
fade. After focusing on the menta l image for some time, it will be
replaced by a bright light, like the moon emerging from beh ind a
cloud. This is the mark of the attainment of a state cal led " access
concentration," the precursor to actual concentration .
For the water device, the meditator stares at a bowl of clean
water and thinks " water, water. " For the fire device, the meditator
makes a four-finger-breadth hole in a woven mat or a cloth or a
piece of leather, hangs it between himself and a fire, and stares at the
center of the flame through the hole, thinking, " fi re, fire . " For the
air device, the meditator should notice the tops of trees moving in
the wind or feel the breeze on his skin and think, "air, air. " For the
blue device, the meditator should stare at a tray fil led with morning
glories or at a blue cloth and think, " blue, blue . " ( There are a lso yellow,
red, and white devices. ) For the light device, the meditator
should focus on a circle of sunlight or moonlight on the ground or a
circle of l ight cast on the wa ll by a lamp and think, " light, light. "
For the space device, the meditator is to look through a hole in the
wall and think, " space, space. " In each case, therefore, a visual ( or
in the case of wind, a tactile) image provides the basis from which a
mental i mage is formed and then visualized, a ugmented by the mental
repetition of its name.
Enlightmment 209
Among the forty traditional objects for developing samadhi is the
practice known as buddhanusmr:ti, variously translated as " remembrance,"
" recol lection , " "commemoration, " or " mindfulness " of
the Buddha. In the Theravada text The Path of Purification ( Visuddhimagga
), the meditator is instructed to call to mind the virtues of
the Buddha through a formula of ten epithets: " Indeed this Bhagavan
is the arhat, perfectly and fully enl ightened, perfect in knowledge
and deed, the Sugata, the knower of the world, the unsu rpassed, the
tamer of persons suitable to be tamed, the teacher of gods and
humans, the Buddha, the Bhagavan. " Sustained attention to these
qualities of the Buddha leads to happiness, which leads to bliss,
which, in turn, leads to samadhi. However, as was the case with the
development of concentration through the devices, it has other
effects. Those who recollect the Buddha are full of faith, understanding,
mindfulness, and merit. They are happy and free from fear, feeling
as if they are living in the presence of the Buddha. Indeed, the
body of a person who is concentrating on the qualities of the Buddha
becomes worthy of veneration . This sense of identification with the
Buddha will be encountered again in tantric meditations.
Mindfulness of death is another of these forty topics. Among six
types of person ( the desirous, the hateful, the ignorant, the fa ithful,
the intelligent, and the speculative ) , mindfulness of death is said to
be a suitable object for persons of intell igent temperament. Elsewhere,
however, it is said that only two among the forty a re generally
usefu l : the cultivation of love for the community of monks and
the mindfulness of death .
In his specific exposition of how to cu ltivate mindfulness of
death, the fifth-century Indian monk Buddhaghosa says that the
meditator who wishes to take death as his object of concentration
should go to a remote place and should simply repeatedly think,
" Death will take place, " or, " death, death . " Should that not result
in the development of concentra tion, Buddhaghosa provides eight
ways of contemplating death .
The first of the eight is contemplation of death as a murderer,
where one imagines that death will appear to deprive one of life.
Death is certain from the moment of birth; beings move progressively
toward their demise, never turning back, j ust as the sun never
1 1 0 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
reverses its course through the sky. The second contemplation is to
think of death as the ruin of a l l the accomplishments and fortune
acquired in life. The third contemplation is to compare oneself to
others who have suffered death yet who are greater than oneself in
fame, merit, strength, supernormal power, or wisdom. Death will
come to oneself j ust as it has come to these beings. The fourth contemplation
is that the body is shared with many other creatures.
Here one contemplates that the body is inhabited by the eighty families
of worms, who may easily cause one's death, as may a variety
of accidents. The fifth contemplation is of the tenuous nature of life,
that life requires both inhalation and exhalation of breath, requires
a balanced alternation of the four postures of standing, sitting,
walking, and lying down . It requires moderation of hot and cold, a
balance of the four physical constituents ( earth, water, fire, and air),
and nourishment at the proper time. The sixth contemplation is that
there is no certainty a bout death; that is, there is no certainty as to
the length of one's life, the type of illness of which one will die,
when one will die, or where, and there is no certa inty as to where
one will be reborn. The seventh contemplation is that l i fe is limited
in length. In general, human l i fe is short. Beyond that, there is no
certainty that one will l ive as long as it takes " to chew and swa llow
four or five mouthfuls . " The final contemplation is of the shortness
of the moment, that is, that life is in fact j ust a series of moments of
consciousness.
It is clear from this presentation, as from many others from
across the Buddhist world, that meditation does not refer simply to
a trance state free of all cognitive content. What Buddhaghosa
describes is a series of reflections, a series of thoughts to be pondered,
but while sitting in the formal posture. What is particularly
noteworthy here is that such reflections are designed to induce not
simply a mindfulness of death but a deep state of concentration that
can be employed to understand the nature of rea lity. As already
mentioned, Buddhist texts described three types of wisdom: the wisdom
arising from hearing would include understanding derived
from listening to teachings and reading texts; the wisdom arising
from thinking refers to understanding developed in a process of sustained
and systematic reflection in meditation, precisely the kind of
Enlightenment 2 1 1
understanding of death descri bed above; the wisdom arising from
med itation refers to the specific state of understanding that is conjoined
with samadhi, that is, insight strengthened by a deep level of
concentration .
But such concentration is just one of the benefits of cultivating
mindful ness of death . A monk devoted to the mindfulness of death
is dil igent and disenchanted with the things of the world. He is neither
acquisitive nor avaricious and is increasingly aware of imperma
nence, the first of three marks of mundane existence. From this
develops an awareness of the other two marks, suffering and selflessness.
He dies without confusion or fear. If he does not attain the
death less state of nirvar:ta in this lifetime, he will at least be reborn in
an auspicious rea lm.
Such doctri nal points were also enunciated in tales that tell of a
dispassion that chal lenges the cred ulity even of the gods . In a former
l i fe the Buddha was a simple fa rmer skilled in the mindfulness
of death . Wh ile work ing in the fields, his son was bitten by a poisonous
snake and died. Unmoved, the fa rmer carried his son's
body to the foot of a tree and went back to his plowing until it was
time for his noon mea l . He sent word back to his wife to send only
one meal instead of two. His wife understood immediately what
had happened but was q uite un perturbed and took perfume and
flowers to her son's body, which was prepared for cremation. The
family stood around the flaming pyre, without any display of emotion,
causing Indra, the chief of the gods, who happened to be
passing by, to ask whether they were roasting a n a n i m a l . When he
was told that it was a human body in the fire, Indra asked i f he had
been a n enemy. Told that it was not a n enemy but the fa rmer's son,
Indra commented that the boy must not have been loved by his
father. The fa rmer assured him that the boy had been very dear to
h i m . When Indra asked why, then, he did not weep, the fa rmer
repl ied that the boy had suffered his fate and that lamenting could
not restore him. When asked why she did not weep, the mother
said, "As children cry i n vain to grasp the moon a bove, so morta ls
idly mourn the loss of those they love. No friends' lament can
touch the ashes of the dead. Why should I grieve ? He fares the way
he had to tread. "
2. 1 2. T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
One of the more lurid of Buddhist meditations is the famous
" meditation on the foul , " in which one is instructed to visualize a
corpse in various stages of decay. Indeed, ten types of corpses are
enumerated: the bloated, the livid, the cut up, the gnawed, the scattered,
the hacked and scattered, the bleeding, the worm infested, and
the skeleton. As with the earth device practice, the meditator is to
contemplate the physical corpse until a clear mental image can be
visualized. This practice was apparently widely prescribed by the
Buddha until he left the community to go on retreat for several days
and returned to find the ranks of his monks rather diminished . When
he inquired of Ananda the reason for the attrition, Ananda explained
that during his absence as many as thirty monks had committed suicide
in a single day, so overcome were they by loathing of their own
bodies as a result of meditating on the foul. The Buddha then substituted
meditation on the breath as the standard practice. Indeed, the
practice of suicide is discouraged by the Buddha because it can rarely
be done without being motivated by either desire or hatred and thus
would simply result in a negative rebirth. He permitted a monk who
was suffering from a terrible disease to take his own life because the
monk was already an arhat and would enter nirvarya upon death .
A somewhat more pristine version of the meditation on the foul,
descri bed by Vasubandhu, instructs the meditator to imagine a
small circle of exposed bone between the eyes. This area of bone is
then slowly extended until the entire cranium is imagined to be
bone. The meditator eventually comes to visualize himself or herself
as a skeleton. One's environs are then tra nsformed into bone, beginning
with one's own dwell ing and extending eventually to the shore
of the ocean, with the entire landscape and all of the dwel lings and
beings in it made only of bone. Having expanded th is vision to its
furthest extent, the meditator then moves back in the opposite direction,
until j ust one skeleton remains. Concentration is contracted
once more to the exposed cranium, and finally to the thumb-sized
circle between the eyes .
It is again noteworthy that these meditations on the foul are codi
fied within the context of developing concentration, with specific
topics designed for a variety of human predilections and fai lings.
The contemplation of the foul is offered as an antidote to desire,
Enlightenment 2 1 3
and there are numerous stories of monks who overcome the desire
they feel for women they encounter by imagining them to be skeletons.
In one case, the elder Mahatissa passed by a beautifully adorned
woman but noticed only her teeth. Real izing the impurity of the body,
he became an arhat at that moment. Meditation on the breath, practiced
so widely in the Zen tradition, is here j ust one of forty topics
suitable as the focus for the development of concentration; breath
meditation is prescribed especially for those who suffer from an
excess of thoughts.
T A N T R A
Some five centuries after the rise of the Mahayana, another major
movement occurred in Indian Buddhism, which was retrospectively
designated as the Vaj rayana ( "Thunderbolt" or " Diamond Vehicle
" ) . It is referred to in Western scholarship as Buddhist tantra,
named after the texts in which the teachings occur. The term tantra
most commonly connotes a ritual manual or set of instructions and
in the Buddhist context is used in contrast to the term sutra, a discourse
of the Budd ha. The tantras are traditionally regarded as the
teachings of the Buddha as well, distinguished from the siitras
beca use the Buddha is said to have delivered these teachings secretly
to a select group of disciples.
The origins of the Vaj rayana a re even less clearly understood
than those of the Mahaya na. Like Hln ayana and Mahayana, Vaj rayana
is a retrospective designation, in this case coined to describe a
rather disparate set of practices by which the long path to buddhahood
could be traversed more quickly than was possible via the
Mahayana, a path on which various supernormal powers were
gained in the process . Given the great attention paid to these supernormal
powers i n many tantric texts, it is unclear whether they
were not often seen as the goal of the practice, with the lofty goal
of buddhahood becoming tangentia l . Some of these practices, such
as engaging in behaviors that transgressed caste prohi bitions concerning
diet and m iscegenation, appear to have been borrowed
from ascetic movements c urrent in India at the time, in which
2 1 4 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
abominations became obl igations and prohibitions prescribed. Others
were developments of themes long present in Buddhist texts,
such as the possibility of coming into the presence of the Buddha
through visualization practices . Despite the efforts of generations of
Buddhist thinkers, it rema ins exceed ingly difficult to identify precisely
what it is that sets the Vaj rayana apart.
In the tenth century, Naropa was renowned as one of the greatest
Buddhist scholars in India. Having defeated many non-Buddhists in
philosophical debate, he became abbot of the great monastery of
Nalanda. One day, while walking outside the monastery, he encountered
an old hag who laughed at him mockingly, claiming that his
knowledge of the dharma was merely intellectual, that he had no
true understanding of the path . Naropa asked the woman who had
authentic knowledge. She said that he should seek her brother,
Tilopa. Naropa resigned his position at the monastery and set out in
search of Ti lopa. After many adventures, he arrived in a village and
asked a passer-by if he knew the wherea bouts of the great scholar
Tilopa . The man replied that there was no great scholar named
Tilopa, but a begga r named Ti lopa lived in a hut on the edge of the
village . Approaching the hut, Naropa observed a black-skinned
man squatting by a fire with a kettle of fish. He would gra b a live
fish, snap his fingers, pl unge it into the fire for a moment, and then
eat the fish. Naropa, a monk who had taken a vow not to kill any
living being, was horrified . Yet he respectfully spoke to the beggar,
asking Tilopa to accept him as his disciple.
So began what are known as the twelve trials of Naropa . Tilopa
and Naropa came to a pond. Ti lopa said, "If I had a loyal disciple,
he would build a bridge across that pond . " Na ropa tried to do so,
but his body was soon covered with leeches and he fainted from loss
of blood. Another time, they saw a wedding party pass, with a
roya l minister and his bride riding on an elephant. Tilopa said, " If
I had a loyal disciple, he would drag them off the elephant and beat
them . " Naropa did as his teacher said and was himself beaten
within an inch of his life by the wedding party. These were two of
the twelve trials. In each case, Tilopa would heal his disciple's
wounds and then give him instructions i n what came to be known
as the six yogas of Naropa, among the most famous of the tantric
Enlightenment 2 1 5
teachings. Together, they give a sense of the world envisioned by the
Vaj rayiina .
There are a number of configurations of the six yogas, in most
cases involving some combination of eight practices : ( 1 ) inner heat,
( 2 ) clear l ight, ( 3 ) sexual union with a consort, ( 4 ) dream yoga, ( 5 )
illusory body, ( 6 ) consciousness transference, ( 7 ) the intermediate
state, and ( 8 ) forceful entry. These various practices seem not to
have originated with Niiropa or Tilopa but rather to represent a collection
of tantric teachings current in Bengal in the eleventh century.
They are all considered highly advanced teachings intended to result
in the attai nment of buddhahood.
The foundational practice for the six teachings is the first, the
yoga of inner heat, which, like the other yogas, is based on a physiology
in which winds or su btle energies serve as the vehicles for consciousness.
These winds course through the body via a network of
channels, making possible everything from the movement of the
limbs to the movement of the mind. Among these, the most important
is the central channel, which runs from the genitals upward to
the crown of the head. Parallel to the central channel are the right
and left channels, which wrap around it at several points, creating
constrictions that prevent wind from moving through the central
channel . At these points of constriction, there are also networks of
smaller channels that radiate throughout the body. These points are
called " wheels, " or "cakras. " Those located at the crown of the
head, throat, heart, and slightly below the navel are emphasized in
inner-heat yoga . The practice entails the visualization of radiant letters
on top of lotuses in the cakras, combined with breath exercises
that loosen the constrictions in the channels and cause the winds to
enter into the central channel. Through the generation of heat at the
navel cakra, essences called drops at the head, throat, and heart
cakras are caused to melt, generating bliss.
The abil ity to cause the winds to enter the central channel provides
the meditator with access to various profound states of consciousness
essentia l to the attai nment of buddhahood, most
importantly, the mind of clear l ight, located in the heart cakra. It is
this most profound state of consciousness that, upon the realization
of emptiness, is transformed into the omniscience of a buddha. A
2 1 6 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
related technique for causing the winds to enter the centra l channel
and the mind of clear light to become manifest is provided by sexual
union with a consort. The mind of clea r light is said to become manifest
briefly at the moment of orgasm.
When the mind of clear light can be identified during the waking
state, it is possible then also to gain access to the clear light of sleep.
The third of the six teachings, dream yoga, is dedicated specifica lly
to finding and using the mind of clea r light during sleep. In order to
reach that point, there is a series of in structions designed to provide
control over dreams. At the conclusion of the practices, the yogin
creates an ill usory body, an immorta l body made of the most su btle
wind and mind that, upon enlightenment, becomes the physical
body of a buddha. Prior to that point, there is a series of practices
involving the contemplation both of one's own form and then of the
form of a buddha in a mirror, designed to induce insight into the
illusory nature of the body. The first five of the teachings are
intended to bestow buddhahood in this lifetime. If this is not possible,
the last three provide means for doing so after death or in
another body. The practice of consciousness transference is a technique
for forcibly causing one's consciousness to travel up through
the central channel, exit from an apertu re in the crown of the head,
and travel to a pure land, an ideal rea lm for the achievement of
enlightenment.
If this is not possible, there is the practice of the intermediate
state, in which the mind of clear light is identified and buddhahood
attained in the period between death and rebirth . If this is not possible,
there are instructions on how to find an auspicious rebirth . In
Tibet, a gen re of texts known as Liberation in the Intermediate State
Through Hearing ( Bar do thos grol)-a portion of one of wh ich was
translated as the famous Tibetan Book of the Dead-describes the
process of death and rebirth in terms of three intermediate states, or
" bardos " ( bar do, a Tibetan term that literally means " between
two" ) . The first, and briefest, is the bardo of the moment of death
when, at the end of a process of sensory dissolution that presages
physical death, a profound state of consciousness, called the clear
light, dawns. I f one is able to recognize the clear light as reality, one
immediately achieves liberation from saqtsara, the cycle of rebirth.
Enlightenment 2 1 7
I f the clear light is not recognized at that time, the consciousness of
the deceased person moves into the second bardo ( which appears to
be a Ti betan innovation ) , cal led the bardo of rea lity. The disintegration
of the personality brought on by death again reveals reality, but
in this case not as the clear light but in the multicolored forms of a
mar:tala of forty-two peaceful deities and a mar:tala of fifty-eight
wrathful deities. These deities appear in sequence to the consciousness
of the deceased in the days immediately following death . If
rea lity is not recognized in this second bardo, then the third bardo,
the bardo of mundane existence, dawns, during which one must
again take rebi rth in one of the six realms of gods, demigods,
humans, animals, ghosts, or in hell; consciousness is blown to the
appropriate place of rebirth by the winds of past ka rma .
The last of the yogas of Na ropa is known as forceful entry, a
practice discussed more rarely than the others, preserved, it seems,
for emergency situations. The most famous case of forceful entry in
Ti betan literature is found in the biography of Ma rpa ( 1 0 1 2-1 09 6 ) ,
the teacher o f Ti bet's great yogin, Milarepa ( M i I a ras pa ) . Marpa's
son, after fracturing his skull in an equestrian accident, transferred
his consciousness into the body of a recently deceased pigeon, since
no human corpse could be found at short notice. The bird was then
given directions by Marpa for flying across the Himalayas to India,
where it discovered the fresh corpse of a thirteen-yea r-old brahmin
boy, into which the bird transferred its consciousness and then
expired. The boy rose from the funeral pyre prior to his immolation
and grew up to become a great yogin .
Tilopa a n d Naropa were two of the famous eighty-four mahasiddhas,
or great adepts. As the arhat is the ideal of mainstream Buddhism
and the bodhisattva is the ideal of the Mahayana, so the
mahasiddha is the ideal of Buddhist tantra in India. Although many
of the hagiographies of the mahasiddhas present the stories of
princes who, like the Buddha, turned away from the world, others
tell of enlightened masters who are neither virtuous monks nor gentle
bodhisattvas but instead are drawn from the most base levels of
Indian society: butchers, hunters, fishermen, blacksmiths, leathersmiths,
pimps, involved in professions that are sources of pollution.
If this were not enough, they also engage in activities that break
1 1 8 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
taboos: they eat meat, they meditate sitting on top of corpses, they
copulate with low-caste girls. If the power of the monk derives from
the purity he acquires through abstaining from the things that laymen
do, the power of the tantric yogin derives from his transgression
of purity, engaging in acts that violate monastic vows as well as
the prescriptions regarding purity and pollution of the caste system.
The mahasiddhas also perform prodigious magical feats, flying
through the air, turning base metals into gold, diving into the earth,
restoring amputated limbs. They are rega rded as enl ightened beings,
using what is proh ibited in the path, transform ing activities that
would send others to hell into the deeds of a buddha. It is unclear
how many of the mahasiddhas were historical figures, and the
accounts of their deeds are obviously rich in mythological detail.
What is perhaps more important than their historicity is what their
stories might tell us about Buddhist tantra . Their stories are replete
with what we might regard as miracles, the performance of which
the Buddha was said to have discouraged . On the philosophical
level, such miracles demonstrate that those who have insight i nto
the nature of real ity are not bound by rules, their transgression of
the conventions of society signifying their transcendence of the laws
of nature. Those who understand the true nature of the world can
manipulate it, unbound by the laws of gravity or the laws of karma .
When Tilopa snapped his fingers before plunging the fish into the
fire, he was transporting their consciousness into a pure land.
The stories of the mahasiddhas also demonstrate the persistence
of the worldly in the history of Buddhism, that the appeal of Buddhism
has always been, at least in part, that it had potent magic.
Tantric practice is said to produce two types of powers, called siddhis.
There are mundane siddhis, such as the ability to turn base
metals i nto gold, to find buried treasure, to gain the love of a
woman, to curse an enemy, to paralyze an invading army, to stop
the sun from moving across the sky. And there is the supramundane
siddhi of buddhahood . Much of the tantric literature that survives is
designed to provide mundane siddhis, genera lly divided into four
categories of deeds: pacifying, increasing, controlling, and wrathfu l .
At some point, these disparate practices became sufficiently
respectable to be identified as a separate "vehicle. " And j ust as the
Enlightenment 2. 1 9
Mahayana had to esta blish its identity against the earlier tradition
by declaring both its priority and superiority, so the scholastic devotees
of tantra argue at length for the priority of the Vaj rayana. Here
the Vaj rayana (or, as it was also called, the Mantrayana ) was not a
sepa rate vehicle but was an alternative form of the Mahayana,
superior to the path set forth in the Mahayana siitras, a path that
the tantric exegetes referred to as the " Perfection Vehicle. " In late
Indian Buddhist literature we find the term tantra being defined relationally,
specifically in contradistinction to the term stUra. Authors
distinguish tantra by enumerating the various ways in which it is
superior to siitra practices. But no two authors can seem to agree on
the set of characteristics that di sti nguishes tantra . Furthermore,
these characteristics appear invariably vague.
One of the most influential declarations of the superiority of
tantra was that of Tripiakamala in his Lamp for the Three Modes
( Nayatrayapradlpa ) : " Even if the aim is the same, the Ma ntra
Vehicle is superior due to nonobscuration, many skillful methods,
nondifficulty, and being designed for those of sharp faculties. "
Tri piakamala explains that followers o f the Perfection Vehicle are
not entirely deluded with regard to method because they practice the
six perfections but are nonetheless somewhat del uded because, in
attempting to perfect the practice of giving, they do such extreme
things as give away pa rts of their bodies, nota bly their heads. This,
he argues, is not the way that the perfection of giving is fu lfilled.
Followers of the Ma ntrayana look down upon such practices and
fulfill all six perfections in a samadhi that unites method and wisdom.
Tripiakamala argues furthermore that the Mantrayana has
more methods than the exclusively peaceful practices of asceticism
and vow-keeping found in the Perfection Vehicle; practitioners of
mantra have techniques for transmuting the five poisons ( desire,
hatred, envy, pride, and del usion ) into the five buddha lineages. The
Mantrayana is also easier than the Perfection Vehicle because in the
Mantrayana one uses the bliss of desire to achieve the bliss of
enlightenment. He sets forth a hierarchy of tantric practitioners,
the lowest of whom achieve enlightenment through the bliss
achieved in union with a n actua l consort. The practitioners of a n
intermediate level consort with a n imagined woman, and t h e best,
2 20 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
already free from desire, have no consort and know the mahamudra,
the wisdom of nonduality. Final ly, Tripiakamala argues
that followers of the Mantrayana have greater intelligence than
others . Followers of the Hinayana are confused a bout the nature
of reality. Followers of the exoteric Mahayana understand emptiness
but are confu sed about the method for achieving buddhahood,
whereas the fol lowers of the Mantrayana are not confused
a bout anything and can perform deeds that would cause others to
fa ll into an unfortu nate rea l m of rebirth.
But this was j ust one view. The Ti betan schola r Tsang kha pa
( 1 3 5 7-1 4 1 9 ) argued, armed with copious citations from Indian
texts, that there is only one factor that distinguishes tantra from
siitra . Th is is the practice of deity yoga, in which one visual izes oneself
as being a buddha. He notes that buddhahood has two aspects,
the truth body, which is a buddha's omn iscient mind, and a form
body, which is a buddha's magnificent form that appears on earth
and in pure lands. Although the two bodies cannot be achieved separately,
it is said that the truth body is the product of wisdom and
the form body is the product of method. In the Perfection Vehicle,
the wisdom is acquired through meditation on emptiness, while
method entails the practice of limitless forms of the six perfections.
Tsang kha pa argues that there is no reality higher than the emptiness
taught in the Perfection of Wisdom siitras and delineated by
Nagarj una. Furthermore, to meditate on emptiness is to emulate
the truth body of a buddha, the omniscient mind eternally cognizant
of emptiness. Therefore, the superiority of tantra is not to
be found in the rea l m of wisdom. The Perfection Vehicle's technique
for the acq uisition of a form body, however, is deficient,
because the cause-the practice of the six perfections-does not
simulate the effect: the magn ificent body of a buddha endowed with
thirty-two major marks and eighty minor marks of a superman.
Bodhisattvas of the Mantra Vehicle also practice the six perfections,
but they have an additional method that bodhisattvas of the Perfection
Vehicle lack: they visualize themselves as having the body,
speech, mind, and activities of a buddha now. As one Indian tantra,
the Vajrapaiijara, states, "The method is to bear the Teacher's form. "
Tsong kha pa explains that in the practice of deity yoga, the meditaEnlightenment
l. l. I
tor first meditates on emptiness and then ( in visualization) causes
the consciousness that contemplates emptiness to appear in the form
of a compassionate buddha. In this way, the bodhisattva simultaneously
accumulates method and wisdom and unites method and wisdom
in a single consciousness, indivisibly, like a diamond ( vajra ) .
Tsong kha pa's elegant argument does not describe the maj ority
of tantric practices, yet it demonstrates the degree of scholastic
sophistication that eventually was brought to bear on practices that
may have had much more humble origins. It also demonstrates the
degree to which tantra became incorporated into the scholastic discourse
concerning the various vehicles to liberation.
Indian tantric exegetes (and their Ti betan and East Asian descendants
) employed a number of strategies to legitimate the tantras as
authentic and authoritative teachings, strategies in many cases
already familiar from the Mahayana siitras. Hence, as with certain
Mahayana siitras, the late appearance of the tantras is explained by
the fact that they were hidden at the time of the Buddha, to be discovered
and revealed at a more appropriate time. As mentioned earlier,
some tantras were said to have been spoken by the bodhisattva
Vaj rapai on a mountain in Sri Lanka (considered a place of mystery
in much Indian literature ) to five sages, one of whom, a kind of
demon known as a rakasa, inscri bed them in malachite ink on
pages of gold. Or, as with the claim of the Lotus that all arhats will
eventually enter the bodhisattva path and become buddhas, so in
certain exegetical systems of what is called Highest Yoga Tantra, we
find the claim that only through its path has buddhahood ever been
attained. In this scheme, the tantric path is seen as the necessary
extension of the bodhisattva 's path as set forth in the Mahayana
siitras, j ust as the Lotus portrayed the bodhisattva's path as the necessary
extension of the arhat's path set forth in the earlier tradition.
The tantric path is thus represented as the supplement to the
siitra path, providing what is essential for the goal of the siitra path,
buddhahood, to be fulfilled. Those who remain on the siitra path
only prolong their time in sasara, which, for the most extraordinary
bodhisattvas, can be reduced from three periods of countless
aeons to three years and three months by the practice of Highest
Yoga Tantra. Indeed, the claim is made that Sakyamuni himself
2. 2. 2. T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
entered the tantric path and ach ieved enlightenment in the highest
pure land. It was this practice of the tantric path that provided
Sakyamuni with the method to become a buddha and then to set
forth the siitra path for those unsuited for tantra .
It is important, however, to consider not simply what tantric master.;
have said about tantra, but what they do. In order to be permitted
to engage in tantric practice, some kind of in itiation is genera lly
required. These ceremonies may be very simple or very ela borate,
involving a small group of disciples or hundreds of thousands, as
when the Dalai Lama gives the Kalacakra initiation. Prior to the initiation,
the tantric guru will prepare the in itiation site, dispelling
demons and creating a magical circle of protection to keep evil forces
away. He will then create a mar:t4ala, sometimes using a painted
image, a drawing, or an ela borate sand diagram. The mar:t4ala, representing
the perfect world the initiates are to enter, will be kept hidden
from them until the appropriate moment. Prior to the actual
initiation, the in itiates are given the bodhisattva vows ( described in
chapter 4 ), since their tantric practice is considered an advanced
form of the Mahayana path.
The guru plays the role of the Buddha in the in itiation. Indeed, in
Buddhist tantras in general, one is instructed to rega rd the guru as
the Buddha himself, and an ela borate etiquette is set forth to this
end. There is a traditional l ist of thirty infractions regarding the
guru that tantric in itiates vow to avoid. These include neglecting to
make obeisance and offerings to the guru six times each day; scorning
and slandering the guru; disturbing the mind of the guru; imagining
the guru and the buddha Vaj radhara to be different; stepping
on the guru's shadow, shoes, or seat; sitting on the bed or seat where
he is present; wa lking in front of him without receiving permission
to do so; leaning against pillars and cracking one's knuck les in the
presence of the guru; not stopping others from bowing to oneself in
the presence of one's guru; and so forth . There are also various sets
of tantric vows associated with different tantric texts and deities.
Some of the infractions, such as maintaining the ten virtues ( that is,
not committing one of the ten nonvirtuous deeds ), are shared with
the ethics both of monks and laypeople. Some of the infractions,
such as a bandoning the aspiration to enl ightenment, are shared with
Enlightenment
the bodhisattva vows. Other infractions, such as despising one's
own body, reflect the view of the body as the locus of enl ightenment
in this very lifetime. Yet other infractions, such as sexual union with
an unqualified consort, neglecti ng to meditate on emptiness when in
sexual union, and em itting semen during the act, derive from the
sexual practices of Highest Yoga Tantra .
The actual initiation may be a simple or elaborate process,
referred to as entering the mar:tala. Here, the mar:tala is regarded
as the sanctified space of enlightenment, presided over by the
teacher, rega rded as a buddha . The initiation is meant to help ensure
the achievement of buddhahood, but it is not certain which buddha
one will become. In order to predict this, the initiate will sometimes
throw a flower onto a smaller mar:tala where five buddhas are represented.
The buddha upon whom the flower lands identifies the
buddha whom the initiate will become. In severa l of the initiations
of Highest Yoga Tantra, the initiate, sitting outside the mar:tala,
imagines that rays of light emerge from the heart of the teacher
( visual ized as a buddha, seated in sexual union with his consort ) ,
drawing the initiate into his mouth, through his body, a n d out
through his penis into the womb of the consort, where the initiate
melts into a drop of l ight and then into emptiness. This emptiness
turns into the letter and sounds of a mantra, then into a lotus, then
into a buddha. Rays of light from the heart of the teacher make
offerings to all the male and female buddhas and bodhisattvas, who
enter into sexual union, melting into an ambrosia (cal led bodhicitta,
the mind of enlightenment) that enters into the mouth of the teacher
and passes into the womb of the consort, where it con fers in itiation
upon the initiate, who now appears in the form of a buddha. This
buddha emerges from the womb of the consort and is set on the initiation
seat. After this " internal initiation , " there are ela borate rites
to cleanse and purify the body, speech, and mind of the initiate.
Much of the practice described in tantric initiation and practice
involves the embodiment and enactment of a world, the fantastic
jewel-encrusted world of the Mahayana siitras (or the horrific world
of the charnel ground ) . In the siitras, these worlds appear before the
audience of the siitra at the command of the Buddha. In the tantras,
it is the practitioner who manifests that world through visualization,
2 2 4 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
through a process of invitation, descent, and identification. In tantric
practice, it is the practitioner who manifests the world that the siitras
declare to be immanent yet only describe. Tantric practice is, in this
sense, the making of the world of the Mahayana siitras.
Despite the ubiquity of the doctrine of emptiness and the declaratioa
of the ultimate unreality of all worlds, there is nonetheless a
sense in much tantric practice (as there is in many Mahayana siitra s )
that some worlds a r e more real t h a n others. A n important segment
of tantric practice, therefore, often classed as the " stage of generation
, " is taken up with techniques for replacing one world with
another, an ordinary world with an extraordinary world, called the
mar:u;lala. Tantric practice provides access to a rea lity that is more
real than the real world, a world that is accessible to the enlightened.
Nagarjuna's emptiness provides much of the conceptua l foundation
for this view; it is freedom from the limitations of I and mine
that bestows access to a higher reality as well as control over ordinary
reality; hence the "supernatura l " powers of the tantric yogin.
In this vision of rea lity, the world is a mal).qala, a palace, with a buddha
seated at its center. To the extent that the world appears to a
buddha, it appears as a bejeweled mal).Qala. In this sense, it can be
said that within the conventional, which includes even the body of
the buddha, some appearances are more true than others. Indeed
what, according to some, sets tantric practice apart from " lower"
forms is that the perfected world of the mal).Qala, which is the goal,
also becomes the path. By visualizing oneself as already possessing
the body, speech, mind, and resources of a buddha now, one will
more quickly actually come to possess them in the future. The goal
becomes the path . When this mal).Qala no longer needs to be simulated,
when the visualization becomes obj ectified, then buddhahood
is achieved. Ironica lly, at that point the meditator, now a buddha,
no longer has any need to appear in the mal).qala that has now been
made real but continues to do so out of compassion, displaying to
others the perfected world that awaits at the end of the path. The
subj ective visualization of the meditator becomes the obj ective proj
ection of the buddha.
Daily tantra practices, called sadhanas ( " methods of achievement
" ) , tend to follow a fairly set sequence, whether they are simple
Enlightenment 2 2 5
a n d brief o r more detailed a n d prolix. More ela borate sadhanas
may include the recitation of a lineage of gurus; the creation of a
protection wheel guarded by wrath ful deities to subj ugate enemies;
the creation of a body mar:t<.fala, in which a pantheon of deities takes
residence at various parts of the meditator's body; and so forth .
In many sadhanas, the meditator is instructed to imagine light
radiating from the body, inviting buddhas and bodhisattvas from
throughout the universe. Visualizing them arrayed in the space
before him or her, the meditator then performs a series of standard
preliminary practices called the sevenfold service, a standard component
of sadhanas and prayers that developed from an Indian
Mahayana rite called the three-part liturgy. Prior to the actua l sevenfold
service, the assembled deities are offered ( again, in visualization
) a bath and new clothing, treated j ust as an honored guest
would be in India. The sevenfold service would then be performed.
The first of the seven elements is obeisance, an expression of
homage to the assembled deities. Next comes offering, usually the
longest section of the seven parts. Here fantastic gifts are imagined
to be arrayed before the buddhas and bodhisattvas, offerings to
please each of their five senses : beautiful forms for the eye, music for
the ears, fragrances for the nose, del icacies for the tongue, sensuous
silks for the body. The offering often concludes with a gift of the
entire physical universe with all its marvels. The third step is confession
of misdeeds. Despite the apparent inexora bility of the law of
karma, it is nonetheless believed that by sincerely confessing a sin to
the buddhas and bodhisattvas, promising not to commit it again in
the future, and performing some kind of purificatory penance ( usually
the recitation of a mantra ) as an antidote to the sin, the eventual
negative karmic effect of the negative deed can be avoided. The
fourth step, admiration, is also related to the law of karma . It is
believed that acknowledging, praising, and otherwise taking pleasure
in the virtuous deeds of others causes the taker of such pleasure
to accumulate the same merit as that accrued by the person who
actually performed the good deed.
The fifth step is an entreaty to the buddhas not to pass into
nirvar:ta. As d iscussed i n chapter 2, a buddha is said to have the ability
to l ive for aeons but will do so only i f he is asked; otherwise, he
12.6 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
will disappear from the world, pretending to die and pass into
nirvaa. The sixth of the seven branches follows naturally from the
entreaty to rema in in the world; it is a supplication of the buddhas
and bodhisattvas to teach the dharma. The final step is the dedication
of the merit of performing the preceding toward the enl ightenment
of all beings. It is noteworthy that each of these steps is a
Buddhist practice found, either in full form or in resonance, in
mainstream Buddhist practice; there is nothing aberrant in the
tantric form.
The meditator then goes for refuge to the three j ewels, creates the
aspiration to enl ightenment, the promise to achieve buddhahood in
order to l iberate all beings in the universe from suffering, and then
dedicates the merit from the foregoing and s bsequent practices
toward that end. The meditator next cultivates the four attitudes of
love, compassion, joy, and equanimity, before meditating on emptiness
and reciting the purificatory mantra, ott� svabhavauddhah
sarvadharmah svabhavauddho 'hatt�, " OJ1, naturally pure are all
phenomena, naturally pure am I , " understanding that emptiness is
the primordial nature of everything, the unmoving world and the
beings who move upon it. Out of this emptiness, the meditator next
creates the ma<;lala.
The meditator here creates an imaginary universe out of emptiness.
The foundation is provided by the four elements, wind, fire,
water, and earth ( represented by Sanskrit syllables ) . On top of these,
the meditator visualizes the ma<;lala. The Sanskrit term ma,4ala
simply means circle, but in this context, within a tantric sadhana,
a ma<;lala is the residence of a buddha, an extraordinary palace
inhabited by buddhas and their consorts, by bodhisattvas and protectors.
A ma<;lala may be quite spare, an undescribed palace with
only five deities, one deity in the center and one in each of the cardinal
directions. But usually ma<;lalas are much more elaborate. The
ma<;lala of the buddha Guhyasamaja, for example, is articulated
in great detail, with five layers of walls of white, yellow, red, green,
and blue. It has a jeweled molding, archways, a quadruple colonnade;
it is festooned with jewels and pendants; and it is populated
by thirty-one deities, each on its own throne, arrayed on two levels.
The ma<;lala is the perfected world that the meditator seeks to manEnlightenment
2 2 7
ifest and then inha bit, either by identifying with the central deity
or by mak ing offerings to him or her. It was said to be essential for
the meditator to imagine the fantastic palace of the buddha, the
maryc.lala that he or she inha bits, noting the particular bodhisattvas,
protectors, gods, and goddesses located throughout the multistoried
dwel ling, with each item of silk clothing and gold ornament appearing
clearly. Part of this visualization was accomplished through the
description of the details in the tantric text itself. However, meditators
were typically advised to study a visual image of the particular
buddha and maryc.lala, and this was one of the uses to which paintings
and statues were put by those involved in meditation practice.
The next step in the siidhana is for the meditator to ani mate the
residents of the maryc.lala by causing the actual buddhas and bodhisattvas,
referred to as " wisdom beings," to descend and merge with
their imagined doubles, the " pledge beings . " Light radiates from
the meditator's heart, drawing the wisdom beings to the maryc.lala,
where, through offerings and the recitation of the mantra jah hum
bam hoh, they are caused to enter the residents of the maryc.lala. The
residents are then often blessed with the th ree sylla bles: a white om
at the crown of the head, a red ah at the throat, and a blue hum at
the heart.
With the preliminary visualization now complete, the stage is set
for the central meditation of the siidhana, and this varies depending
upon the purpose of the siidhana. Generally, offeri ngs and prayers
are made to a sequence of deities, and boons are requested from
them, each time accompanied with the recitation of an appropriate
mantra . At the end of the session, the meditator makes mental offerings
to the assembly before inviting them to leave, at which point
the entire visualization, the palace and its residents, dissolves into
emptiness. The siidhana ends with a dedication of the merit accrued
from the performance of the siidhana to the welfare of all beings.
Tantra has often been described as " the yoga of sex , " causing
despair for scholars of the nineteenth century and delight for seekers
in the twentieth. There are the famous yah yum ( father and mother)
images of Tibetan Buddhism, depicting buddhas in sexual union with
beautiful female consorts; the Guhyasamilja Tantra begins, "Thus
did I hear. At one time the Bhagavan was abiding i n the vaginas of
2 2 8 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
the vaj ra-maidens, the essence of the body, speech, and mind of all
the buddhas . " There are numerous tantric texts describing the symbolic
meaning of such statements. The male, for example, is said to
represent method, the female, wisdom-the two factors that must
be u nited in order to achieve buddhahood . However, there is much
to suggest that such statements were often taken literally, with a
variety of motivations. A Tibetan king of the eleventh century complained
that if tantric practice resulted in buddhahood, as its adherents
claimed, then butchers, hunters, and prostitutes would have
been enlightened long ago.
With the ela boration of the tantric systems, profound meanings
were found in passion. The Smrzputa Tantra states, " Looki ng,
laughing, holding hands, the two embraci ng, the four tantras abide
in the manner of insects . " In the systemization of tantra in India,
different groups of tantras were set forth, starting with Action
Tantra at the bottom and ascending to Performance Tantra, Yoga
Tantra, and Highest Yoga Tantra . Such a hiera rchy was obviously
devised by the proponents of Highest Yoga Ta ntra, but the presence
of such a system suggests that enough tantric literature and competing
schools existed in India for such a ranking, artificial as it might
have been, to be advanced . According to the quotation from the
Samputa Tantra, the four classes of tantras are divided according to
the ascending ability of their initiates to use desire in the path . Followers
of Action Tantra were able to handle the desire that arises
from looking at a lover; those of Performa nce Tantra could also
employ the desire of sharing a smile with the beloved. The physical
contact of holding hands was permitted to those of Yoga Tantra .
Only the most advanced of tantric practitioners, those of Highest
Yoga Tantra, could use the most intense form of desire, that of sexual
embrace. In ancient India, it was believed that the insects that
one found when a log was split open had been born from the wood
that they in turn consumed . To say that " the four tantras abide in
the manner of insects " means that the desire born from sexual passion
can be used to destroy the desire that binds beings in sarrtsara,
like using a thorn to remove a thorn. Sexual intercourse and the
powerful feelings it engenders becomes, for those who are capable
of using it, a potent method for attaining enlightenment. This is
Enlightenment
called " bringing desire to the path . " In the final initiations of Highest
Yoga Tantra, the guru engages in ritual union with a consort and
then places a drop of the fluid resulting from their union, called here
bodhicitta, on the initiate's tongue. The initiate then sits in ritual
embrace with a consort in order to achieve the state of i nnate bliss.
The tantric vows specify that one must not forget the ultimate reality
at this time. Indeed, this mind of profound bliss is to be used to
understand emptiness, the ultimate reality.
But much tantric practice made no mention of the union of male
and female or made any mention of desire, relying instead on imagery
of a more horrific nature. A well-known example is the practice
cal led cho (gcod) in Ti betan Buddhism. The cho practitioner is
expected to frequent cemeteries and other sites fra ught with danger,
where he or she will pitch a tent, perform a dance, beat a drum, and
blow on a trumpet made from a human thigh bone.
The full name of the practice is " the demon to be severed . " There
is a long tradition in Buddhism of regarding demons as the projections
of the desire, hatred , and ignorance that are the root cause of
su ffering and that must be eliminated on the path to buddhahood .
Indeed, according to an Indian enumeration by Asanga, one's own
mind and body are rega rded as " the demon of the aggregates, " and
one of the demons to be eliminated in cho practice is attachment to
one's own body. In the cho literature, four demons are enumerated :
tangi ble demons, the harmful forces that exist in the external world;
intangible demons, the negative mental states resulting from desire,
hatred, and ignorance; the demon of delight, which takes false pride
in the superiority of one's teacher or premature pleasure in the
results of one's meditation practice; and the demon of conceit, the
belief in self. In keeping with classical Buddhist doctrine, if this last
demon can be destroyed through the u nderstanding that there is no
self, that the person and indeed all phenomena are devoid of any
intrinsic nature, then the other three types of demons will also be
eliminated. I ndeed, the perfection of wisdom literature, with its
exposition of the doctrine of emptiness, is highly revered in the cho
tradition as the ultimate means of c utting through the webs of
ignorance.
In the cho practice, the meditator imagines his or her consciousness
l. J O T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
in the form of the goddess Vajrayogini, abiding in the central channel.
She exits from the aperture at the crown of the head, at which
point the meditator's body is imagined to collapse. Vaj rayogini cuts
off the crown of the skull of the prostrate body and transforms it
into a huge cauldron, into which the body is thrown. The boiling of
the body produces an elixir that is offered to all the buddhas and
bodhisattvas and to all sentient beings and spirits, both benevolent
and ma levolent. These offerings are referred to as the four feasts :
the white, variegated, red, and black. The Mahayana dyad of wisdom
and compassion are represented here. By severing the skull
from the body, one cuts attachment to the body, resulting in wisdom.
Among the deeds of the bod hisattva is the perfection of giving.
Because the body is the object of such great attachment, the gift of
the body is often praised as the highest form of the perfection of giving.
This compassionate deed produces a great store of merit for the
meditator. Indeed, because the practitioner of cho is often a wandering
mendicant who has nothing other than his or her own body to
offer in order to accumulate the necessary store of merit to progress
on the path, cho is someti mes cal led "a beggar's collection of
merit. " Thus, even here, in a practice that an earlier generation of
scholars regarded as a remnant of Ti betan shamanism, clear continuities
with more "classica l " forms of Buddhist practice may be
discerned . From the mainstrea m traditions of India there is the
emphasis on the accumulation of merit, the central practice of lay
Buddhists. From the Mahayana of India, there is the practice of the
perfection of giving, with the motivation of leading all beings to
buddhahood. And from the exa mple of the Buddha himself, there is
the practice of cutting off attachment to the body, embodied in the
life of the beggar, the litera l meaning of bhik$u, the Sanskrit term for
the Buddhist monk.
T H E P U R E L A N D
It is common Buddhist doctrine that buddhas come and buddhas go,
with a new buddha appearing in the world only when the teachings
of the previous buddha have disa ppeared from the world. Thus,
Enlightenment l. J I
Sakyamuni only appeared when the teachings of the previous buddha,
Kasyapa, had disappeared, and Maitreya will only appear
when Sakyamuni's teachings are gone. There are various formulas
for calculating when this will occur, but the consensus seems to be
that Maitreya will not arrive soon . This has led to various millennial
movements in Buddhist history awaiting Maitreya. Some of those
who see nirvcir:ta as the utter extinction of the aggregates have
sought to postpone their entry into nirvcir:ta so that they may be
reborn at the time of Maitreya . Others have developed alchemical
practices designed vastly to prolong their lives so that they may live
long enough to greet the advent of Maitreya .
But for much of the Buddhist world, the question of the disappearance
of the dharma has been a cause for anxiety and hence doctrinal
innovation. For who can say precisely when the dharma will
disappear? The final signs will be clear enough . In the last stages of
disappearance of the dharma, it is said, all Buddhist texts will disappear
( the last to go will be those on monastic discipline), the sa ffron
robes of the monks will turn white ( the color of the robes of the laymen
) , and, in the end ( when the human life span is seventy thousand
years ) , all of the relics of the cremated Buddha-the teeth, the
bones, the fingernails, the hair-will break free from their reliquaries,
the stiipas and pagodas, and magica lly travel to Bodhgaya,
where the si xteen arhats who have protected the dharma since the
Buddha's passage will gather the relics into a stiipa beneath the tree
where the Buddha achieved enlightenment. There they will be worshiped
one last time by the arhats and gods before they fly into the
air, burst into flames, and vanish. The arhats will do the same.
This obviously has not occurred yet, but what is the efficacy of
Buddhist practice as the world declines, moving further and further
from the time of the Buddha and closer and closer to the u tter disappearance
of his teaching? The prophecies concerning how long the
dharma will remain after the death of the Buddha vary; some say
only five hundred years, some say two thousand. But all describe a
gradual process of decline, not in the quality of the teaching but in the
quality of the disciples; the monks will be lax in their maintenance of
their vows, the laypeople will be complacent, and the general fortitude
and intelligence of practitioners will decline. In India, the
2 3 2 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
disa ppearance of the dharma was used to promote the efficacy of
tantric practice, specifically designed for beings of the degenerate age.
In China, Buddhists often despa ired of their abil ity to make sense
of the mass of disparate texts, doctrines, and practices that reached
them from India, and from the fifth century onward the decl ine of
the dharma became a consistent concern of Buddhist thought and
practice. Rather than ascribing the problem to competing schools
and variant translations, Buddhist monks in China often blamed
themselves, concluding that they were living in the last stage of the
decline of the dharma and thus were constitutionally ncapa ble of
making progress on the path that the Buddha had set forth . Th is led
in turn to the composition of a large number of apocryphal texts
that set forth specific remedies to the problem; in China some texts
called for charity directed not to monks, but to the poor, the old,
and the sick. This led in one case to the establishment of the Inexhaustible
Treasury at a temple in Changan, which gathered donations
that were then distri buted to the needy.
Some of the texts that set forth the decline of the dharma described
what must have been contemporary events-inadeq uate support of
the saitgha, state regulation of Buddhist institutions, the taxation
of monastic property-in the form of prophecies of the Buddha,
suggesting that the decline that the Buddha had prophesied was
already at hand and that disaster was imminent un less the remedy,
set forth in the siitra, was taken immediately. The prophesied evils,
however, were not limited to the state. Also commonly mentioned
are corrupt and greedy monks who violate their vows and laypeople
who a llow tem ples to fa ll into disrepair and sell images of
the Buddha.
But perhaps the most important response to the disa ppearance
of the dha rma in East Asia was Pu re Land practice. While devotion
to Amitabha and the prayer to be reborn in his pure land began
( and to a certain extent rema ined ) a common component of the
practices of many Chinese Buddhist schools, beginning in the sixth
century it began to be argued that, in the time of the decline of the
dharma, it is impossible to follow the path traversed by the great
arhats and bodhisattvas of the past. Humans of this age were simply
lacking in the requisite intelligence and effort. For this reason, the
Enlightenment
only recourse available was to rely on the powers of Amitabha, who
in his eighteenth vow had promised to deliver all who called his
name into the Land of Bliss upon their death . Pure Land practice
never became institutionalized as an independent school in China,
as it would in Japan, but the infl uence of the Pure Land was pervasive,
extending from eminent scholars such as Hui-yuan ( 3 3 4-4 1 6 ) ,
who formed a group that made a col lective vow t o b e reborn i n the
pure land, to popular preachers such as Shandao ( 6 1 3 -6 8 1 ) , who
organized mass recitations of Amita bha's name in the capital; from
members of the monastic and lay elite to the unlettered; from
exegetical treatises to devotional tracts; from the pu blic officials of
the court to the women of the inner household. Hardly the simple
practice suited to the unsophisticated ( a lthough often so promoted ),
the Pure Land has proved a compelling aspiration for Chinese from
all strata of society for many centuries.
Pure Land practice is more variegated than the simple recitation
of the name. It is accurate to say, however, that its central practice is
nianfo, a term that means " buddha contemplation , " " buddha intonation
, " and " buddha invocation . " It is a translation of the Sanskrit
term buddhanusmrti, litera lly " mindfulness of the Buddha . " In the
early Indian tradition and in the Theravada of Sri Lanka and Southeast
Asia, this seems to have been a form of meditation in which one
called to mind in a designated sequence the good qualities of the
Buddha. Mindfulness of the Buddha was, however, simply one of
the traditional list of forty suitable topics for inducing a state of
deep concentration . In Indian Mahayana texts, recol lection of the
Buddha evolved into a visual ization practice of the Buddha's magnificent
form-adorned with thirty-two major marks and eighty
minor marks-a practice that was sti ll 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 Amitabha.
In China as in India, visions of Amitabha and his pure land
remained central goals of the practice, certifying that one would be
born in the Land of Bliss after death. A particularly efficacious technique
for inducing such visions was the intonation of his name; in
Chinese Amitabha was A-mi-tuo-fuo. Such practices clearly have
2. 3 4 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
Indian antecedents but received special emphasis in China. The Satra
on the Meditation of the Buddha of Infinite Life ( Guan wu liang shou
;ing) presents itself as being an Indian siitra but is in fact of Chinese or
Central Asian origin. It prescri bes " ten moments of single-minded
and sustained recitation of the Buddha's name . " This phrase would
receive particular emphasis in China, with one manual explaining
that every morning after having bathed and dressed, one should stand
facing the west, with palms joined in reverence, and recite the name of
Amitiibha ten times, neither too loud nor too soft, too fast nor too
slow, with each recitation taking a single exhalation of the breath.
It is important to recall, however, that such recitation most often
occurred within a designated ritual structure, where it was accompanied
by prostrations, the burning of incense, confession of sins,
the chanting of scriptures, and visualization practice. Even in large
popular movements such as that of Shandao, where less emphasis
was placed on the efforts of the devotee and more emphasis was
placed on Amitiibha 's salvific power, meditative visions were both
sought and praised as reliable signs ( more reliable than dreams, for
example ) of one's imminent birth in the reti nue of the Buddha of
Infinite Light. It is not the case, therefore, that we find in China an
inexorable movement from an elite and scholarly Pure Land practice,
in which private meditation is the key, to a popular practice of
communal chanting by the un lettered .
Pure Land practice in China is typica lly performed in a purified
space before an altar where an image of the Buddha has been
installed. The ceremony begins with the offering of incense and the
prayer that the smoke of the incense will spread through the ten
directions and the limitless buddha lands, being transformed into
offerings to the three jewels and perfuming all beings in the universe,
inspiring them to seek rebirth in the pure land. The three jewels are
then invited to enter the sanctuary in the form of buddhas, siitras,
and the inhabitants of the pure land, especia lly Amitiibha and his two
attending bodhisattvas, Avalokitesvara and Mahiisthiimapriipta .
Each of the invited buddhas and bodhisattvas is then worshiped
individually with prostrations and praise. The members of the congregation
then visualize themselves as standing before Amitiibha
and all the other buddhas and recite a prayer of repentance, which
f'.n/ightenment 2 3 5
reads in part, " May he cause the grave sins committed by me and
other beings to be completely puri fied-regardless of whether they
were done in the beginni ngless past, in the present life, or a re yet to
be done in the future; whether they were committed by me or urged
on others, passively witnessed or lactively] celebrated, remem bered
or forgotten, committed knowingly or not, dou btfu l or certa in, hidden
or revea led . " Next, the merit accumulated through the performance
of the rite is dedicated to the wel fare of all beings, and all
pledge to be reborn in the pure land in order to complete the bodhisattva
path q uickly and li berate all beings from suffering. The refuge
formula is then recited, a fter which each person should recite from
memory one of the pure land sutras or single-mindedly intone the
name of Amitabha.
A popular form of this rite for both monks and laity was extended
over seven days. During this period, the practitioners ate only one
meal of plain food each day. Throughout the period, they were not
allowed to lie down or sleep, with every moment dedicated to the
constant contemplation of Amitabha 's qualities and the constant
recitation of his name, while visual izing Amitabha standing before
them, his golden body radiant with light. Speaking was prohibited,
except to announce their intentions for rebirth in the pure land, to
confess their sins, to recite the Sutra of the Land of Bliss, or to recite
Amitabha 's name. There were various techniques for intoning
Amitabha's name, such as the famous " five-tempo recitation " of the
ninth-century monk Fazhao, where the five tempos were said to ha rmonize
with the heavenly music that resounded naturally through the
pure land. A more elaborate form of Pure Land practice, generally
limited to monastics because of its length, involved a ninety-day
retreat in a specially constructed buddha-mindfulness sanctuary. During
this time the practitioner would constantly circumambulate an
altar with an image of Amitabha while reciting his name and visualizing
his form. The goal was eventually to achieve a state of samadhi in
which Amitabha and his pure land would appear in a vision .
Given the goal of rebirth in the pure land, it is not surprising to
find that particular attention is given to the moment of death. It is
standard Buddhist doctrine that death, which may come at any
moment, is a time of both great opportunity and great danger. Each
2 3 6 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
being carries the store of all of his or her past deeds, any one of
which can serve as the cause of the next lifetime. Which one of these
seeds will fructify as the next life is determined by one's state of
mind at the time of death . A virtuous state of mind will bring a seed
for a happy rebirth to the fore, a nonvirtuous state of mind, such as
fear of death, greed for one's possessions, or attachment to family
members, will bring forward the cause of a miserable rebirth. Great
pains are therefore taken in trying to promote a virtuous state of
mind at the time of death by such traditional means as having siitras
chanted and placing an image of a buddha in the room. But a virtuous
state of mind is not so easily ensured. It is said that the time of
death is so tra umatic that the dying person is unable to turn his or
her mind to something unfamiliar; at death the mind reverts to what
it knows. Hence the necessity that Pure Land practitioners a lways
have the name of Amitabha on their lips. Even then, the situation is
always volatile. A Chinese text warns agai nst al lowing into the presence
of a dying person anyone who consumes meat, wine, or the five
pungent herbs. Otherwise, the person will become confused by
demons and will be reborn as an animal, ghost, or hell being.
In the Pure Land tradition, what is deemed essential is some sign
that the dying person has successfully forged "the connection to the
pure land , " certifying that rebirth is assured in the Land of Bliss.
Some of the signs are derived from the Pure Land siitras themselves:
paintings commonly depict the scene from the Satra on the Meditation
on the Buddha of Infinite Life of Amitabha and his retinue
appea ring before the deathbed bea ring the lotus pedestal where the
devotee will soon be enthroned in the pure land. Other signs include
a peaceful death while seated upright in the meditative posture.
Those in attendance may hear otherworldly music, detect rare fra grances,
or perceive supernal lights . If the corpse is cremated, it may
yield crystal beads; if it is to be buried, it may be natura lly preserved
from decay. A somewhat more mundane sign had to do with the
temperature of the body. Every corpse was said to have a warm spot
that indicated the point at which the soul had exited. If the feet were
warm, it meant that one would be reborn in hell. Warm knees meant
that one would be reborn as an anima l . A warm chest meant rebirth
as a human. A warm spot on the crown of the head was proof that
Enlightenment 2. 3 7
the deceased had gone o n to the pure land. After death, the deceased
may visit friends and family members in dreams and conduct them
on a tour of the pure land. In one account, the Lady of Yueguo is led
to the pure land by her recently departed maidservant, who shows
her a lotus pond. Yet some of the lotuses are in full and glorious
bloom while others are wilting. The maid explains that whenever
someone on earth vows to be reborn in the pure land, a lotus takes
root. It will grow and blossom as long as the person's practice
remains strong; if their diligence fa lters, it will wither. Those who
remain dedicated in their devotions will upon death be reborn in the
pure land in the center of their lotus blossom. When the lady asks
where she herself will be reborn, she is led to a resplendent altar
encircled by rainbows. Such stories serve as testimonies to the efficacy
of Amitabha's vow.
But the efficacy of the vow also raised questions. If one simply
had to call upon Amitabha once, even at the last moment of life,
why not live a profl igate life and then appeal to the Buddha at the
moment of death, knowing that he is bound by his vow to appea r
and deliver one to the pure land ? Why participate in seven-week
retreats of intensive contemplation or devote one's waking moments
to the recitation of the name ? The answer provided by severa l Chinese
clerics was that, although rebirth in the pure land was assured
to all who called on Amitabha without distinction, once in the pure
land there were distinctions of time and place that were directly
related to one's deeds in life. A hierarchy of the saved, with nine
grades of devotees, was ela borated, from the most pious to the most
depraved, ranging from devout practitioners of the Mahayana, who
mai ntained the Buddhist precepts throughout their lives, to moral
persons who called upon Amitabha at the time of death to parricides
saved by a deathbed conversion. As with the law of karma,
which Amitabha's vows seemed somehow to subvert, one's deeds in
the past life determined one's status in the next. In the pure land,
lifelong practitioners were reborn in lotuses located close to
Amitabha's seat, and their lotuses blossomed quickly. The less pious
would find themselves i n lotuses that bloomed more slowly-the
greatest s inners waiting twelve aeons-and were located at some
remove from Amitabha.
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
In the first centuries of Buddhism in Japan, the recitation of the
homage to Amitabha, in Japa nese namu amida butsu, was used primarily
as a means of protecting the living by sending the spirits of
the dead to the pure land and thus was rega rded as inauspicious. It
was employed as one of a number of practices in the Tendai and
Shingon schools. The itinerant monk Kiiya ( 9 0 3 -9 7 2 ) is credited
with spreading the practice of chanting the nembutsu as a means for
the living to ga in birth in the pure land at death . He would chant the
nembutsu in the marketplace of Kyoto, beating a gong and dancing.
In the temple called Rokuharamitsuji in Kyoto there is today a
famous statue depicting Kiiya dressed in rags, with a gong suspended
around his neck, carrying a hammer in one hand and a staff
topped with antlers in the other. His mouth is open, and from it protrudes
a wire to which are attached what appea r to be six cylinders.
On closer inspection, they are seen to be six identical standing buddhas,
one for each of the syllables: na-mu-a-mi-da-butsu ( Homage
to Amitabha Buddha ) .
Perhaps the most famous o f the death bed instructions i s a work
by the Japanese Tendai monk Genshin ( 9 4 2- 1 0 1 7 ) entitled Essentials
for Rebirth in the Pure Land ( OiDyDshu ) . Accord ing to the
Sutra of the Land of Bliss, Amita bha wou ld appear at the deathbed
of any and all who called upon him and would escort them to the
pure land. Genshin designed a ritual to ensure that this would happen
. It entailed providing a proper setting for death as well as a
series of ten reflections for the dying person . The person should be
placed in a separate room, if possi ble, away from his or her possessions,
the sight of which may induce nostalgia for and attachment to
the things of this world. A golden image should be installed, facing
the west, the direction of Amita bha 's pure land. The left hand of the
image should hold a five-colored pennant, the end of which should
be grasped by the dying person, who should be placed behind the
Buddha image, ready to be led to the pure land. The dying person
should chant the nembutsu and imagine the arrival of Amitabha and
his hosts, bea ring a lotus throne to transport the person to the pure
land. Family members who have recently partaken of meat, alcohol,
garlic, or onions should not be al lowed to visit. Only fellow devotees
should be present to offer encouragement to the dying person to
Enlightenment 2 J 9
perform the ten moments of reflection stipulated in the eighteenth
vow of Dharmakara as the means of gaining entry into the pure
land. To that end, the dying person should be exhorted to see only
the Buddha, hear only the dharma, speak only the teachings of the
Buddha, and think of nothing except birth in the pure land.
Recognizing that ten uninterrupted moments of the aspiration to
be reborn in the pure land are difficult for unenlightened beings
whose minds are like an untamed horse, Genshin provides a sequence
of ten different reflections, each of which is to be accompanied by
chanting namu amida butsu. He begi ns with a rather sophisticated
point of Mahayana doctrine. First, one should reflect on the ultimate
nonduality of nirvaa and saJ!lsara, such that ignorance arises
ultimately from the mind of all the buddhas. Thus, chanting namu
amida butsu, one should reflect on the qualities of the three jewels,
regarding the Buddha as the doctor, the dharma as the medicine,
and the sangha as the nurse. Second, the dying person should feel a
sense of weariness with the world and the cycle of birth, aging, sickness,
and death, seeing in Amitabha the power to destroy the karma
that would otherwise bind one in saiTJsara for eight billion aeons.
One should therefore long for Amitabha to appear and should chant
namu amida butsu. Third, realizing that if one is not born in the
pure land now, one will be reborn as an animal, ghost, or hell being
and thus lose the opportunity to hear the dharma and be reborn in
the pure land, one should therefore aspire to be reborn in the pure
land and chant namu amida butsu. Fourth, one should reflect on all
the good deeds that one has performed in the past and dedicate all
of the resulting merit to a single aim: rebirth in the pure land. With
that dedication, one should cham namu amida butsu. Fifth, the purpose
of being reborn in the pure land is to eventually become a buddha
in order to be a ble to benefit all sentient beings. Affirming the
vow of the bodhisattva , one should chant namu amida butsu.
Sixth, the virtues of Amitabha a re beyond description . All of the
buddhas of the ten directions, as numerous as the gra ins of sand of
the Ganges, constantly extol the virtues of Amitabha. Therefore,
one should take refuge single-mindedly in Amita bha, rather than
another buddha, and chant namu amida butsu. Seventh, one
should visualize Amitabha in all his splendor, focusing specifically
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
on the small curl between his eyebrows (called the un:za ) , which
radiates seven billion fifty-six million rays of light throughout the
universe. To reflect on the iirr:ta for j ust an instant destroys the evil
karma accumulated over billions of aeons in saf!1sara . Focusing on
the iirr:ta, one should chant namu amida butsu. Eighth, one shou ld
reflect that the minds of all those who are touched by the light radiating
from the iirr:ta overcome attachment to objects, to self, and to
rebirth, and focus on the nembutsu meditation, thereby atta ining
birth in the pure land. With this in mind, one should chant namu
amida butsu. Ninth, one must know that, even though it may not be
visible to the dying person, Amitabha is emitting light from his iirr:ta
and is at that very moment on his way to the deathbed, accompanied
by his two chief bodhisattvas . Wishing for his arriva l, one
should chant namu amida butsu. Genshin considered the seventh,
eighth, and ninth reflections to be the most important. Final ly, the
dying person should be reminded that he or she is about to have his
or her last thought, the most importa nt thought of the lifetime,
more weighty than all the deeds of the past century. I f one can th ink
now of Amitabha, one will be born in the pure land. If not, one will
plunge again into the ocean of saf!1sara . With fa ith in the power of
Amitabha's vow and the wish that he guide one to the pure land,
chant namu amida butsu.
During the Kamakura period in Japan, the Tendai monk Honen
read the entire Buddhist canon three times before concluding that
during the degenerate age ( which according to the calculations of
the day had begun in 1 0 5 2 ) , faith in chanting the name of Amitabha
was the only path to salvation; all other routes ended in failure. He
reported that his own teacher, not realizing this, had concluded that
the only means of salvation was to await the coming of Maitreya
and to that end had vowed to be reborn in a lake as a particularly
long-lived serpent. Honen's views gained popula rity, even attracting
the attention of the emperor. But he also gai ned the enmity of the
esta blished sects of Japanese Buddhism. When two of his monks,
known for their beautiful chanting, were invited to court and ended
up spending the night in the ladies' quarters, the monks were executed
and Honen was sent into exile.
Honen had continued to emphasize ethical behavior, declaring
F.nlightenment
that if the wicked person could be reborn in the pure land, how
much greater were the chances of the good person . He u rged his followers
to repeat the name of Amitabha as much as possible. He
hi mself repeated it seventy thousand times each day. His disciple
Shinran followed him into exile and came to hold more radical
views. Like Honen, he bel ieved that any attempt to rely on one's
own powers to achieve freedom from saJTlsara was futi le. The only
possible course of action was to rely on the power of Amitabha. But
for Shinran, this power was pervasive. To even make the effort to
say silently, namu amida butsu, " Homage to Amitabha Buddha , "
w a s a futile act of hu bris. The very presence of the sounds of
Amitabha's name in one's heart was due to Amita bha's compassionate
power. It was therefore redundant to repeat the name more than
once in one's life; all s u bseq uent recitation should be regarded as a
form of thanksgiving. Shinran therefore reversed Honen's dictum to
say that if the good person can be reborn in the pure land, how
much greater were the cha nces of the wicked person, who had no
delusions a bout his ability to effect his own welfare, to ach ieve his
own salvation. The enl ightened activity of Amita bha is present
everywhere, and it is only ignorant striving after self-gratification
that obstructs the fu lfillment of Amitabha's vow. Once one abandons
the conceit that one can achieve happiness, either in this life or
the next, through one's own willfu l deeds, and instead entrusts oneself
to the power of Amita bha, one is instantaneously freed from the
bonds of saJTlsara ( a lthough still subject to its afflictions) in this life
and will be born in the pure land at death . Salvation in this sense
occurs not at death but at the initial moment of fa ith in Amitabha.
Th is moment of fa ith, again, occurs not through an act of will. It is,
in fact, a manifestation of the mind of Amitabha. With this immediate
and irreversi ble confirmation, there is no reason to be concerned
with ela borate deathbed rituals and contemplations, such as that
designed by Genshin. In fact, Shinran argued that performing such
practices in the hope of being delivered into the pure land was simply
another manifestation of futile self-power; he thus rejected all
prayers and rituals designed to provide happiness in this life or the
next. Yet the moment of faith does not imply permission to engage
in unethical behavior, secure in the belief that, whatever one might
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
do, one will be born in the pure land at death. Shinran emphasized
that even to make such an assumption was to again succumb to the
ignorance of self-power.
The salvation of the most depraved sinner from hell and his deliverance
into the pure land was not a dictum unique to Honen and his
disciples. The question was rather the means of deliverance. Myoe,
one of Honen's harshest critics, advocated a technique called the
mantra of light, in which pure sand infused with the power of a
mantra was sprink led on the grave. Even if the person had committed
the five deeds of immediate retribution and was abiding in the
most torturous hell, the light from the sand would reach them,
instantly purifying their misdeeds and causing them to be reborn in
the Land of Bliss.
In a certain sense, the reliance on Amitabha's grace that became
the hallmark of Pure Land practice in Japan changed the status of
Siikyamuni Buddha. No longer a model to be emulated or a teacher
to be followed, he became instead a messenger, proclaiming to the
world the presence of Amitiibha's pure land and the potency of his
vows. We should not conclude, however, that such a view of the
Buddha carried the day. There were those who sought to duplicate
the experience of the master, seated beneath the tree.
Z E N
There is no historical evidence for a Zen school in India. Yet Zen,
like all Buddhist traditions, traces its origins back to the Buddha. It is
said that the Buddha was seated before a large audience on Vulture
Peak . He drew a flower from one of the bouquets placed in offering
before him and held it up. No one understood except the monk
Mahiikiisyapa, who said nothing; he simply smiled. The Buddha said
to him, "I possess the treasure of the true eye of the dharma, the
wondrous mind of nirviia, the subtle entry to the dharma, born
from the formlessness of true form, not relying on words and letters,
a special transmission outside the teachings. I bequeath it to
Mahiikasyapa . " This teaching beyond words, this mind-to-mind
transmission, was passed down from master to disciple in a lineage
Enlightenment 2.4 3
that incl uded such illustrious figures as Nagarjuna, until it reached
one Bod hidharma, who in the late fifth century left India and traveled
to China. According to a famous story first recorded in 7 5 8 , the
Emperor Wu of Liang was delighted to learn of the presence of the
Indian master in his rea lm and sum moned him to court. The
emperor was known as a devoted patron of the dharma, having
sponsored the construction of monasteries and the printing of
sutras. He was therefore eager to ask the Indian monk how much
merit he accumulated through these good deeds. Bodhidharma
answered, " None whatsoever. " The emperor then asked exactly who
Bodhidharma was. He answered that he did not know. Bodhidharma
is said to have retreated into the mountains, where he spent nine
years in meditation, gazing at the wa ll of a cave. When he was
unable to keep his eyes open, he cut off his eyelids and threw them
aside, where they grew into the fi rst tea pla nts in China. Accord ing
to a story that first appears some four centuries after the event it
describes, he was eventually approached by a Chinese man who
stood silently waiting for his presence to be acknowledged by
Bodhidharma. The Indian monk continued to ignore him, even as
snow fell and drifted against his feet. Finally, the man drew a sword,
cut off his left arm, and presented it to Bodhidharma, asking the
master to calm his mind. Bodhidharma told him that he would calm
his mind if the man would first show it to him. The man said that he
had looked for his mind for many years but had been una ble to
grasp it. Bodhidha rma replied, "There, it is ca lmed . " The Chinese
scholar thus became the fi rst Chinese patriarch of the Chan tradition
in China, a tradition that became fa mous for its four phrases :
a special transmission outside the teachings
not relying upon words and letters
pointing directly at the human mind
seeing one's own nature and becoming a buddha
The most famous of the patriarchs was the sixth, Huineng.
According to the story, he was a poor boy who sold firewood to
support his mother. One day he heard a monk reciting the Diamond
Satra in the market and experienced a moment of insight. He asked
24 4 T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
the monk who his maste was. The monk replied that he was a disciple
of the patriarch H ungren. Huineng left home to become his
disciple. When he a rrived at the monastery, Hungren asked how
Huineng, being a barbarian from the south, could ever become a
buddha . Huineng answered that there was no north or south in the
buddha nature. Impressed by his answer, the master put the boy to
work pounding rice in the kitchen .
One day he heard that the master had decided it was time to
choose his successor, the student who would become the next patriarch
and receive the signs of office, Bodh idharma's robe and bowl.
H ungren told each student to write a poem expressing his understanding.
The a uthor of the best poem would be chosen as the sixth
patriarch . All of the monks assumed that Hungren's leading disciple,
a monk named Shenxiu, would succeed the master and so did
not bother to compose poems. Shenxiu's poem was:
The body is the Bodhi tree;
The mind a bright mirror's stand.
We must always try to polish it.
Do not let dust collect.
Huineng overheard one of the monks reciting the poem and composed
his own . But since he was illiterate, he could not write it
down himself. Instead, he asked one of his friends to write his poem
on one of the walls of the monastery at night, when no one would
see. His poem responded to that of Shenxiu. It read:
Bodhi originally has no tree.
The mirror also has no stand.
Buddha nature is ever clear and pure.
Where is there room for dust?
The poem was noticed the next day, and the master himself came
to read it. He announced publicly that although worthy, it did not
display full understanding. But that night he secretly summoned
Huineng to his room and presented him with Bodhidharma's robe
and bowl, conferring on him the signs of the sixth patriarch. He told
Enlightenment
him that many would be upset by his selection, so he should leave
the monastery immediately.
This is the story told by Huineng's followers, and recent scholarship
has suggested that it is not a historical account but rather
a story told for polemical purposes. Nonetheless, it points to an
important paradigm of two models of enlightenment. The first might
be referred to as the purification model, in which the afflictions of
desire, hatred, and ignorance, and the karma that they produce, are
viewed as pollutants. Precisely what it is that is polluted is often difficult
to identify, sometimes simply referred to as the mind. The
image here is of something pure that is obscured by dirt. In the first
poem, the mind is compared to a mirror that, when clean, reflects
things exactly as they are, without distortion or obscuration. Yet
dust settles on the surface of the mirror, diminishing its clarity. The
path to enl ightenment therefore entails a process of purification in
which the mind is cleansed of its impurities. That process takes
place in the here and now, in this very body, which is likened to the
tree under which the Buddha achieved enlightenment.
The second poem might be taken as an example of the second
model, which might be referred to as the recognition model. The
claim here is that if something is naturally pure, it cannot be polluted
. There is thus no need to clean the mirror. Furthermore, this
pure nature is not li mited to any particular physical locus, present
here, absent there, but is universal . Enlightenment, then, entails the
recognition of what has always been the case. The mind is naturally
enl ightened; all beings are already buddhas.
This apparently simple dichotomy, more commonly known as
the gradual and sudden paths, received extensive commentary and
elaboration in China, often in the service of polemics. The master
Zongmi ( 7 8o-84 1 ) examined the categories in their various combinations.
Gradual cultivation followed by sudden enlightenment was
like gradually chopping down a tree until it suddenly falls; sudden
cultivation fol lowed by gradual cultivation was like immediately
discerning the target and then gradually learning how to hit it with
an arrow; gradual cultivation and gradual enlightenment was like
ascending a nine-story tower, one's vista expanding with each
upward step; sudden enlightenment and sudden c ultivation was the
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
most rare of cases and depended on having practiced gradual cultivation
in a previous life; sudden enl ightenment followed by gradual
cultivation was like the birth of an infant that has a l l its limbs but
must slowly learn how to use them. This final model was preferred
by Zongmi.
Zongmi's considered examination of the categories was unknown
in Ti bet, where a debate over sudden and gradual took place in the
late eighth century. Here, the rivals were not two Chinese monks
but a Chinese monk and an Indian monk. And this time the gradual
position was said to carry the day. A conflict seems to have developed
between the Indian and Chinese partisans ( and their a llies in
the Tibetan court) over the question of the nature of enlightenment,
with the Indians holding that enlightenment takes place as the culmination
of a gradual process of purification, the res ult of combining
virtuous action, meditational serenity, and philosophical insight.
The Chinese spoke against this view, holding that enl ightenment
was the intrinsic nature of the mind rather than the goal of a protracted
path, such that one need simply recognize the presence of
this innate nature of enlightenment by entering what they deemed a
nonconceptual state beyond distinctions; all other practices were
superfluous. According to both Ch inese and Ti betan records, a
debate was held between the Indian scholar Kamalasila and the
Chan monk Heshang Moheyan at Samye ( Bsam yas ) circa 797, with
King Tisong Detsen ( Khri srong Ide btsan ) himself serving as j udge.
Kamalasila was declared the winner, and Moheyan and his party
were banished from Ti bet, with the king proclaiming that thereafter
the Madhyamaka position of Nagarj u na would be fol lowed in
Ti bet. It is unlikely that a face-to-face debate took place or that the
outcome of the controversy was so unequivoca l. Nonetheless, from
this point Ti bet turned for its Buddhism toward India and away
from China; no school of Chinese Buddhism had any further influence
in Tibet. Indeed, the identification of one's opponent with the
Chinese monk Moheyan was to become a stock device in polemical
literature in Tibet. Chan would rema in one of the most enduring
forms of Buddhism in China, spreading a lso to Korea, where it is
known as Son, and japan, where it is known as Zen. Contrary to
the way Zen has been characterized in the West, in China, Korea,
Enlightenment 24 7
and Japan it is known for its strong and strict monastic training, its
commitment to the study of Buddhist literature, and its disciplined
lifestyle.
Since it claimed to be a special transmission outside the conventional
Buddhist teachings, Zen developed its own scriptures through
a l iterary tradition of collecting and commenting upon the statements
of enlightened teachers, drawn from biographies and other
records. These works of literature gathered what were purported to
be reports of conversations between enlightened masters and their
disciples, gnomic exchanges that often mocked traditional monastic
practices such as memorizing and reciting siitras and engaging in
scriptural exegesis. These " recorded sayings " and "encounter dialogues
" contained brief exchanges that seemed nonsensical: ( Q:
What is the Buddha ? A: Three pounds of flax. ) or outrageous (Q:
What is the Buddha ? A: A dried piece o f shit. ) These exchanges came
to be known as " public cases " ( kung-an ) , a term borrowed from
Chinese j urisprudence that literally means " j udge's bench" and
referred to a legal precedent, a standard of j udgment. These public
cases have become famous in the West by the Japanese form of kungan,
koan. Generally represented in modern times as logical puzzles
designed to break through the barriers of thought, they in fact constitute
Zen scriptures and are memorized, recited, analyzed, and
expounded upon like any other Buddhist text, having their own traditional
forms of commentary and exegesis and providing standards
for the regulation of practice. A monk's ability to comment on these
koans became a means of testing his insight. Koans, which seem to
have begun as objects of study and commentary, eventually also
became the focus of formal meditation practice.
To consider one of the most famous koans to come from China,
the monk Zhaozhou was asked whether or not a dog had the buddha
nature. It is important to note that dogs are generally not kept
as pets i n China but are considered unclean creatures that eat
garbage and ordure. We must a lso recall that it is a standard doctrine
in Mahayana Buddhism, and especially in China, that a l l
sentient beings possess the buddha nature. The question, then, is
whether even one of the most disgusting forms of sentient life is
endowed with the buddha nature. Zhaozhou answered, " Not" ( wu
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
in Chinese, mu in Japanese ) . Zhaozhou's unexpected answer may be
understood within the la rger context of the perennial debate in the
Mahayana over whether all things have the buddha nature. Thus,
the koan provided for the Chan tradition, which claimed to have
renounced reliance on words and letters, a literary form in which
the fundamental truths of Buddhism could be both expressed and
debated . The unusual form of the koan, with its use of direct and
sometimes even rude speech, al lowed Chan at the same time to
remain true to its rhetoric of immediacy.
Koans were eventually transformed into a device for cultivating
concentration, as a means of stopping thought and focusing the
mind, much like the earth device. Indeed, the Chinese term Chan
( Zen in japanese) derives from an attempt to render in Chinese the
sound of the Sanskrit term dhyana, mea ning concentration. One is
often instructed to focus the mind on the word mu. The stoppage of
thought-brought a bout by such questions as, "Two hands clapping
make a sound. What is the sound of one hand ? " and, "Why did
Bodhidharma come from the west ? "-is meant to freeze the mind in
a ball of dou bt, fol lowed by a flood of understanding, so often
descri bed in Zen literature. Precisely what the nature of that understanding
is, however, is more difficult to describe. It was customary
for Japanese monks who visited China to submit an official report
on what teachings they had acquired. Upon his retu rn, the Zen
monk Dogen ( uoo-1 2 5 3 ) reported that he had learned that eyes
are horizontal and noses are vertica l.
M E D I T A T I O N O N E M P T I N E S S
In the Chan and Zen traditions, the process of meditating on a koan
often fol lows a sequence of two steps: one first concentrates on the
koan in an effort to stop all thought, following which the " meaning"
of the koan is revealed in a flash of insight. Some scholars have
noted a parallel between this process and the traditional Indian Buddhist
practice of developing a deep state of concentration called
serenity (amatha) in which discursive thought is brought firmly
under control, and then using that concentrated mind to develop
Enlighte1rment 24 9
insight ( vipayana ) into the nature of rea lity, described often as noself
or as emptiness. But whereas the Zen insight is described in
terms of spontaneity and immediacy, severa l of the Indian and
Tibetan schools set forth a process that relies on reasoned analysis.
It is a common Buddhist tenet that di rect perception of rea lity is
necessary for the achievement of l i beration from rebirth, whether it
be the liberation of an a rhat or of a budd ha. For the Madhyamaka
school in India and Ti bet, this reality is referred to as emptiness or
the selflessness of phenomena. It is emptiness that must be directly
perceived by the mind in order to destroy desire, hatred, and ignorance
and the karma of the deeds they have motivated over countless
lifetimes. Emptiness is not immediately accessible to direct
perception; its presence must first be understood conceptually, must
be inferred, by using reasoned analysis. Numerous reasonings are
set forth in Madhyamaka texts, two of which we might examine
here. According to the Madhyamaka claim, we ordinarily conceive
of things as if they existed in and of themselves, thinking that when
we point to what we ca ll a chariot, in the classical example, or a
chair, there is a chariot or a chair there. It would seem to follow,
then, that when we examined the chair more carefully, we would
find the chair. If we were to take a set of tools and disassemble the
chair, we would find four legs, a seat, and a back. None of these
individua lly is the chair. This is not particularly surprisi ng, since we
consider the chair to be these parts assembled in a specific way. We
might say, therefore, that the collection of the parts arranged
accordingly is the chair. But where is the collection ? It also cannot
be found among its parts. The parts, even when properly assembled,
are not the objectively existent chair that we pointed to. That chair
is absent. This a bsence is the emptiness of the chair.
Another argument states that if something exists in and of itself,
that is, if it exists intrinsica lly, it must be either intrinsica lly one or
intrinsically many. Any gross object that is chosen cannot be intrinsically
one because it will have parts, either physical parts or temporal
parts ( moments of duration ) . Even the smallest particle must
logically have physica l extension if it is to serve as a component of
a larger object. If they had no size, then all such particles would
occupy the same space and there would be no extension. Therefore,
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
one can conclude that there is nothing that is intrinsically one. And
because whatever is many must be composed of a number of ones,
intrinsic manyness is also refuted. Even nirviir:ta, the state of the
absence of the afflictions, is not immune from the critique. Nirviir:ta
is permanent and does not change. Yet, because it is only known by
consciousness over a series of moments, it can be shown to have
parts and therefore is not intrinsically one.
The Madhyamaka claim is that nothing is ultimately findable
under analysis. Everything is empty, even emptiness. This is not to
deny that one can sit on a chair. The emptiness critique is not
directed at functional efficacy. It targets instead the fa lse nature of
independence, the self, that we ignorantly project onto ourselves
and the objects of our experience.
A twenty-dollar bill or a ten-pound note is a piece of paper of a
particular shape with words and pictures printed on it in a particular
arrangement. By common consent, the citizens of a particular
region decide to project value onto the piece of paper, a value far
beyond that of the paper and the ink. Although the paper and ink
are of little worth, a piece of paper currency can provoke greed and
jealousy, sometimes resulting in theft in which one person may be
physically injured and another person might be imprisoned . If the
note is torn in half, it ceases to have value. What an instant before
was sufficient to purchase a meal is now two worthless pieces of
paper. One half of a ten-pound note cannot be used to purchase a
five-pound movie ticket. Yet if one were to carefully join the two
halves together with transparent tape, the value of the bill would be
magically restored . It is clear that the ten-pound note is nowhere to
be found in the paper and the ink; its very existence as a ten-pound
note arises entirely in dependence on the projection of value by the
human minds of the members of a local society. The Madhyamaka
claim is that nothing in the universe possesses intrinsic value, that
all characteristics, both those deemed most essential and those
deemed most trivial, are subjective projections and do not inhere in
the object. The reasoned scrutiny that searches for the object among
its pans is designed to demonstrate this fact and thereby overcome
attachment and aversion, desire and hatred, for these illusory objects,
illusory in the sense that they do not exist as they appear.
Enlightenment
To meditate on emptiness is to perform this kind of analysis. To
seek the self, one must first have a clea r idea of what one is looking
for. Thus, some meditation manuals advise actively cultivating the
sense of self, despite the fact that this sense is the target of the analysis.
Our sense of identity is often vaguely felt. Sometimes, for example,
we identify with the body, saying, "I am sick . " At other times,
one is the owner of the body, " My stomach hurts . " It is said that by
imagining a moment of great pride or imagining a fa lse accusation,
a strong and palpable sense of the " I " appears in the center of the
chest: "I did it, " or, "I did not do that. " This sense of self is to be
carefully cultivated, until one is convinced of its rea lity. One then
sets out to find this self, reasoning that, if it exists, it must be
located somewhere in the mind or the body. A standard Buddhist
list employed in this case gives the six constituents: earth, water, fire,
wind, space, and consciousness . Earth incl udes all of the obstructive
parts of the body: bones, teeth, fingernails, hair, internal organs,
m uscle, sinew. One is instructed to go through each of these individually
and ask, " Is the hair on the head the I ? , " " Is the cranium the
I ? , " " Is the right upper incisor the I ? , " "Is the left ring finger the 1 ? , "
presumably answering n o in each case. One then moves to water, all
of the liquid parts of the body, the blood, the bile, the phlegm, the
urine, lymph, the semen, the menstrual fluid, asking in each case
whether any of these is the I. Fire refers to the wa rmth of the body,
descri bed in the Indian medical systems as residing in the belly. Is
this heat the I? Space includes all of the empty cavities in the body,
in the lungs, the stomach, the mouth. Are any of these the I ?
The last of the six constituents, consciousness, i s of six types. One
asks whether the consciousness of the eye that sees forms, of the ear
that hears sounds, of the nose that smells fragrances, of the tongue
that tastes flavors, or of the body that feels sensations is the I. Perhaps
the most likely candidate for the I is the mental consciousness,
the process of thought and memory. But an observation of the mind
reveals its inconstancy, moving without apparent reason from one
object to another. It lacks the permanence and autonomy that the I
seems to possess. At the conclusion of the process of detailed investigation,
it is expected that the I will not be found. And because one
reasoned in the first place that, if the I exists, it must be locatable
z. p . T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
somewhere in the mind or the body, one is left only with a sense of
the absence of the I, of the lack of self, of emptiness. This is an intellectual
understanding of emptiness, too weak to destroy the afflictions
or past karma. This process must be repeated again and
aga i n until one's idea of emptiness becomes clearer and clea rer.
This conceptual understanding of emptiness, when combined with
the strength of concentration similar to that gained by using the
earth device described a bove, can be deepened further until what
began as an idea becomes a direct perception in which the mind and
emptiness seem to be mixed, like pure water poured into pure water.
Concepts and logic can thus be employed to move to a nonconceptual
state. As the Kayapa Chapter Satra ( Kayapaparivarta ) says,
" Kasyapa, it is thus. For example, fire arises when the wind rubs
two branches together. Once the fire has started, the two branches
are burned. Just so, Kasyapa, if you have the correct ana lytica l intellect,
noble wisdom is created. Through its creation, the ana lytical
intellect is consumed. "
Suggested Reading
Abhayadatta . Buddha 's Lions: The Lives of the Eighty-Four Siddhas.
Translated by James B. Robinson. Berkeley: Dharma Publishing,
1 97 9 .
Buddhaghosa . The Path o f Purification ( Visuddhimagga ) . Translated
by Bhikkhu Nyaamoli [sic] . 2nd edition. Colombo, Sri
Lanka: A . Semage, I 9 6 4 .
Dalai Lama a n d Jeffrey Hopkins. Kalachakra Tantra: Rite of Initiation.
2nd revised edition. London: Wisdom Publications, I 9 8 9 .
Faure, Bernard. The Rhetoric o f Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of
Chan/Zen Buddhism. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1 9 9 1 .
Gregory, Peter. Tsung-mi and the Sinification of Buddhism. Princeton:
Princeton Universi ty Press, 1 99 I .
Enlightenment
Guenther, Herbert V. The Life and Teachings of Naropa. Oxford :
Oxford University Press, 1 9 6 3 .
Heine, Steven, and Dale S. Wright, eds. The Koan: Texts and Contexts
in Zen Buddhism. New York: Oxford University Press,
2000.
Hopkins, Jeffrey. Meditation on Emptiness. London : Wisdom Publications,
I 9 8 3 .
Lopez, Donald S., Jr. Elaborations o n Emptiness: Uses of the Heart
Satra. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 9 9 6 .
--, e d . Buddhism i n Practice. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1 9 9 5 .
--. Religions of China in Practice. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, I 9 9 6.
McRae, John R. The Northern School and the Formation of Early
Ch 'an Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawa i i Press, I 9 8 6 .
Snellgrove, David. Indo- Tibetan Buddhism: Indian Buddhists and
Their Tibetan Successors. Boston: Shambhala, I 9 8 7 .
Tanabe, George J . , Jr., ed. Religions o f Japan in Practice. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, I 9 9 9 ·
Tsong-ka-pa. Tantra i n Tibet: The Great Exposition o f Secret
Mantra. London: George Allen & Unwin, I 977.
White, David Gordon, e d . Tantra in Practice. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000.
CONC L U S ION
Let us conclude with stories of statues. The first occurs not in an
ancient Sanskrit text but in a modern English tale, told not by a
Buddhist monk but by Oscar Wilde. In "The Happy Prince," Wilde
tells of a prince who lived his life in the Pa lace of Sans-Souci, playing
with his companions during the day and dancing in the Great
Hall at night. " Round the garden ran a very lofty wall, but I never
cared to ask what lay beyond it, everything a bout me was so bea utifu
l . " The prince lived and died without ever leaving the city. After
his death, the people erected a gi lded statue of the prince on a ta ll
column that stood high a bove the city. Only then, as a statue, did
the prince see the miseries of the world . And though his heart was
made of lead, he could not help but weep.
With the help of a swallow, the pri nce does what he can to relieve
the sufferings he surveys. He has the swal low remove the ruby from
the hilt of his sword and bring it to a poor woman caring for her son,
sick with fever. Next, the prince has the swallow pluck out one of
his sapphire eyes and ca rry it to a young writer, so hungry and cold
that he cannot finish his play. The other eye is delivered to a little
match girl so that her father will not beat her. Finally, the pri nce has
the swallow peck off the gold that covers his statue, leaf by leaf, and
give it to the poor. Eventually, the swal low dies of the cold and the
shabby statue of the prince is removed from the column and melted
down. All that is left is a broken heart of lead, which will not melt in
the furnace.
One does not know whether Wilde was providing an ironic twist
on the story of Prince Siddhartha here. The life of the Buddha was
well known in England through such works as Sir Edwin Arnold's
The Light of Asia. The story does cause one to wonder what might
Conclusion
have happened had the Indian prince not succumbed to his curiosity
about the world outside the walls, had not taken his chariot rides
outside the city and beheld the four sights: of an old man, a sick
man, a corpse, and a meditating mendicant. It was this stark confrontation
with aging, sickness, death, and the possibility of a state
beyond that sent the prince out in search of that state, a state that he
claimed to have found six years hence. This, according to the story,
is how Buddhism began, at least the Buddhism taught by the Buddha
of our age.
Wilde's story provides a further parallel, one that he perhaps did
not consider. The happy prince was able to alleviate suffering only
after his death when he surveyed the world as a statue. The Buddha
continued to live after his death, not as one image but as countless
images. What remained of his body after it was burned, his relics,
are enshrined throughout Asia and, like the jeweled eyes of the
prince, are said to be able to dispel all manner of sorrow and bestow
all manner of blessing. His statues, now multiplied around the
world, are regarded as his living presence, approached daily to grant
all manner of prayers.
The second statue can be seen today in Japan. In Kyoto stands the
temple of Sanj iisangendo, built in 1 z.66. It is a long and largely
undistinguished structure. Inside, arrayed in five rows of almost four
hundred feet each, are one thousand golden statues of the bodhisattva
of compassion, Kannon, each five feet five inches in height. Each
statue has eleven faces and one thousand arms (although only fortytwo
arms are visible to ordinary sight). Each of the statues appears
to the untutored eye to be identical to all of the others. But we are
told that each is slightly different. They all look the same, but they
are different.
The bodhisattvas of Sanj iisangendo challenge the viewer to perceive
difference. The student of Buddhism faces a different challenge.
For Buddhism is renowned as a religion of adaptation and
assimilation, shaping and reshaping itself to accommodate new
cultures and circumstances. But such a characterization assumes
that there is some self, some Buddhism, to change and to adapt in
the first place. Where is the borderline between a local practice-be
it Indian, Tibetan, Korean, Laotian, or Thai-and Buddhism ? What
T H E S T O R Y O F B U D D H I S M
makes someth ing-a text, an image, a practice-Buddhist? These are
admittedly questions that have only occasionally vexed Buddhists in
the premodern period of the history of Asia . But they become pertinent
when we come to regard Buddhism as a "world rel igion. " The
challenge, then, is not to see the minute di fferences in the dazzling
array of statues in Kyoto but to survey all the people and texts and
practices that appear so different and to identi fy among them something,
no matter how elusive, that is the same and that might be
called Buddhism, to detect an essence in a tradition that famously
proclaims that there is no essence, that there is no self.
But there is also another challenge, the challenge provided by the
dharma, which makes the remarkable claim that it is possible to l ive a
life untainted by what are called the eight worldly concerns: gain and
loss, fame and disgrace, praise and blame, happiness and sorrow.
GL O S S A R Y
Abhidharma ( Sanskrit) : literally, the "higher teaching, " a category
of scriptures that provide systematic analyses of the constituents
of the person, the process of perception, the nature of enlightenment,
and other issues of a scholastic nature.
Amitabha ( Sanskrit) : litera lly, " Infinite Light, " the buddha who presides
over the western pure land of Sukhavati, the Land of Bliss.
Amita bha's vow to deliver the faithful to his pure land serves as
the foundation of much Mahayana practice, especially in East
Asia .
arhat ( Sanskrit) : literally, " one who is worthy, " one who has followed
the path and destroyed all causes for future rebirth and
will enter nirvar:ta upon death . Regarded as the ideal in the mainstream
traditions, where the Buddha is a lso descri bed as an arhat,
in the Mahayana the attainment of an arhat is negatively compared
to that of a buddha . Certa in arhats were selected by the
Buddha to remain in the world until the coming of Maitreya .
These arhats ( called lohans in Chinese) were objects of particular
devotion in East Asian Buddhism.
Avalokitdvara ( Sanskrit ) : litera lly, " the lord who looks down," the
bodhisattva of compassion, often called upon for salvation in times
of danger. A male bodhi sattva in India and Tibet, Avalok itesvara
( known as Guanyin in Chinese, Kannon in Japanese) assumed a
female form in East Asia. The Dalai Lamas of Tibet are considered
human embodiments of Avalokitdvara .
bodhicitta ( Sanskrit) : literally, " mind of enlightenment, " it is the
compassionate aspiration to achieve buddhahood in order to liberate
all beings i n the universe from suffering. The development
of bodhicitta makes one a bodhisattva.
Glossary
bodhisattva ( Sanskrit) : often glossed as "one who has the intention
to achieve enlightenment, " a bodhisattva is a person who has
compassionately vowed to achieve buddhahood but has not yet
done so. A l l forms of Buddhism set forth the path of the
bodhisattva , who works for the welfare of others. In the
Mahayana, the bodhisattva is presented as the ideal.
cakravartin ( Sanskrit) : literally, " wheel turner, " an ideal monarch
who rules according to the teachings of the Buddha . The Indian
emperor Asoka is often described as a cakravartin.
Chan ( Chinese ) : the " meditation " school of Chinese Buddhism,
which traces its l ineage back to the Indian master Bodhidharma
(who is said to have come to China in the late fifth century ) and
back to the Buddha himself. The school 's name is pronounced
" Zen " in Japanese.
Desire Realm ( Sanskrit: kamadhatu ) : the lowest of the three realms
in Buddhist cosmology, populated ( in ascending order) by hell
beings, ghosts, animals, humans, demigods, and gods .
dharma ( Sanskrit ) : although difficult t o translate, the term h a s two
general meanings in Buddhism. The first is the teaching or doctrine
of the Buddha, both as expounded and as manifested in
practice. The second, perhaps to be rendered as " phenomena,"
refers to the basic constituents of mind and matter.
dharmakaya ( Sanskrit) : literally, " dharma body, " the term used
to refer to the transcendent qualities of the Buddha. In the
Mahayana doctrine of the three bodies of the Buddha, the dharmakaya
is sometimes presented as the ultimate reality from
which the other forms of the Buddha derive.
emptiness ( Sanskrit: unyata ) : the absence of substantial nature or
intrinsic existence in any phenomenon in the universe. In the
Madhyamaka philosophy of Nagarj una, emptiness is the final
nature of reality, and the understanding of emptiness is essential
for the achievement of enlightenment.
Form Realm ( Sanskrit: rupadhatu ) : in Buddhist cosmology, a realm
of heavens a bove the Desire Rea lm reserved for those who attain
certain states of deep concentration in their previous life .
Formless Realm ( Sanskrit: arupyadhatu ) : in Buddhist cosmology,
the highest realm within the cycle of rebirth where beings exist as
Glossary 2. 5 9
deep states of concentration . Like the Form Realm, i t i s reserved
for those who achieve those states in thei r previous life.
Gautama ( Sanskrit) : the clan name of the historical Buddha. His
given name was Siddhartha, " he who achieves his goal . "
jambudvipa ( Sanskrit) : litera lly, " Rose Apple Island , " the southern
continent in traditional Buddhist cosmology. It is rega rded as the
world that we inhabit.
Hinayana ( Sanskrit) : literally, " low vehicle, " a pejorative term used
by proponents of the Mahayana to describe those who do not
accept the Mahayana siitras as authentic words of the Buddha. In
Mahayana texts, those who follow the Hinayana seek to become
arhats by following the path of the sravaka or pratyekabuddha
rather than by following the superior path of the bodhisattva to
buddhahood. In modern scholarship, Hinayana is also sometimes
used in a nonpej orative sense to refer to the many nonMahayana
schools of Indian Buddhism.
jataka ( Sanskrit ) : litera l ly, " birth, " a story of one of the Buddha's
previous lives as a bod hisattva . Among the most popu lar of
Buddhist stories, the tales relate the virtuous deeds of the
bodhisattva, often when he was an animal.
karma ( Sanskrit): literally, " action , " the law of the cause and effect
of actions according to which virtuous deeds result in happiness
in the future and nonvirtuous deeds result in suffering. Karma is
accumulated over many lifetimes and fructifies to create present
experience.
koan ( Japanese ) : often rendered as " public case, " the japanese pronunciation
of the Chinese lega l term kung-an, referring to a standard
of j udgment. A koan is commonly a short statement or
exchange drawn from accounts of Chinese Chan masters. These
statements served both as the basis for commentaries by Chan
and Zen teachers and as obj ects of contemplation.
lama (Tibetan: bla ma ) : a religious teacher. The term is often used to
denote an " i ncarnate lama , " that is, a teacher who has been identified
as the present incarnation of a great teacher of the past.
lohan ( Chinese): see arhat.
Madhyamaka ( Sanskrit) : literally, " middle way, " a philosophical
school a ssociated with Nagarjuna that set forth a middle way
260 Glossary
between the extremes of existence and nonexistence. According
to the Madhyamaka, the ultimate reality is emptiness .
Mahakasyapa ( Sanskrit ) : one of the disciples of the Buddha,
Mahiikiisyapa is said to have called the sangha together after the
Buddha's death in order to compile his teachings. He is said to
;:emain i n samiidhi inside a mountain, awaiting the coming of
Maitreya .
Mahayana ( Sanskrit ) : literally, " Great Vehicle , " a term used by
proponents of siitras that began to appear some four centuries
after the death of the Buddha and that were regarded by them as
the word of the Buddha . The term has come to mean by extension
those forms of Buddhism ( today located for the most part in
Ti bet, China, Korea, and Japa n ) that base their practice on these
siitras .
Maitreya ( Sanskrit ) : literally, " Kindness, " the next buddha to
appear in the world after Siikyamuni. Maitreya is currently a
bodhisattva residing in a heaven, awaiting the appropriate time
to appear.
maQ"ala ( Sanskrit) : literally, "circle, " in tantric Buddhism a representation
( in both two- and three-dimensional forms ) of the
palace of a buddha . Such representations are particularly important
in initiation rites, in which the initiate is said to " enter the
mar:t"ala . "
Maiijusri ( Sanskrit) : literally, " Gentle Glory, " the bodhisattva of
wisdom, often depicted holding aloft a sword, with which he cuts
through the webs of ignorance.
mappo ( Japanese ) : literally, " decay of the dharma , " the third and
final period of the Buddha's teaching before it disappears entirely
from the world. A belief that humanity had entered this degenerate
age provided the motivation for much Buddhist practice in
East Asia, particularly directed at rebirth in the pure land.
Meru ( Sanskrit) : in Buddhist cosmology, the mountain in the center
of the universe. Gods inhabit its surface and summit.
method ( Sanskrit: upaya ) : ( I) the expedient means by which the
Buddha leads beings to enlightenment by teaching them what is
not ultimately true until they are prepared for the definitive teachGlossary
ing; ( 2 ) practices ( such as giving, ethics, and patience ) whereby the
bodhisattva accumulates the requisite store of merit required to
achieve buddhahood.
Nagarjuna ( Sanskrit) : Indian monk of the second century regarded
as the chief proponent of the doctrine of emptiness and as the
founder of the Madhyamaka school. In traditional biographies,
he is credited with retrieving the perfection of wisdom sutras
from the ocean realm of the serpent king.
nembutsu ( Japanese ) : literally, " buddha recitation, " the practice of
reciting the phrase, " Homage to Amitabha Buddha . " A general
Mahayana practice in China ( and possibly in India ) , it became
the central practice of the Pure Land ( Shinshu ) schools of Japan.
nirmaakaya ( Sanskrit) : l iterally, "emanation body, " the third of
the three bodies of the Buddha. It is this body that appears in the
real m of humans and teaches the dharma. According to this
Mahayana view, the Buddha who appeared on earth was the
magical display of a buddha enlightened long before.
nirvaa ( Sanskrit) : litera lly, " blowing out, " the cessation of suffering
and hence the goal of Buddhist practice. The nature of
nirvaJ?.a is widely interpreted in Buddhist literature, with distinctions
made between the vision of nirvaJ?.a, which destroys the
seeds of future rebirth, and the final nirvaJ?.a entered upon death.
Mahayana texts a lso distinguished between the nirvaJ?.a of an
arhat and the enlightenment of a buddha.
perfection ( Sanskrit: pararrzita ) : the deeds performed by a bodhisattva
on the path to buddhahood, commonly enumerated as si x :
giving, eth ics, patience, effort, concentration, a n d wisdom .
perfection of wisdom: see prajii.aparamita.
prajii.aparamita ( Sanskrit) : literally, " perfection of wisdom , " the
understanding of reality required to achieve buddhahood,
according to many Mahayana sutras. The term also describes a
genre of Mahayana sutras devoted to the exposition of emptiness
and the bodhisattva path.
pratyekabuddha ( Sanskrit ) : l iterally, " i ndividually enlightened
one, " a disciple of the Buddha devoted to solitary practice who
achieves the state of a n arhat without relying on the teach ings of
Glossary
a buddha in his last lifetime. According to Mahayana exegetes,
the path of the pratyekahuddha along with the path of the sravaka
constitute the Hinayana.
pure land: also referred to as a buddha field, the domain that a buddha
creates as an ideal setting for the practice of the dharma.
Functioning in the Mahayana as a form of paradise, rebirth in a
pure land, especially the pure land of Amitahha, was the focus of
various practices, especially in East Asia.
Sakyamuni ( Sanskrit ) : litera l ly, " Sage of the Sakya Clan , " an epithet
of the historical Buddha.
samadhi ( Sanskrit) : a state of deep concentration developed through
meditation practice. One of the three trainings ( along with ethics
and wisdom ) , samadhi, especially a specific level known as serenity
(samatha ) , is regarded as a prerequisite for li berating wisdom.
sarp.bhogakaya (Sanskrit) : literally, "enj oyment body, " one of the
three bodies of the Buddha. The sa11hhogakaya appears to hodhisattvas
in pure lands.
sarp.sara ( Sanskrit ) : literally, "wandering, " the hegi nningless cycle
of birth, death, and rebirth, composed of the rea lms of gods,
demigods, humans, animals, ghosts, and hell beings. The ultimate
goal of Buddhism is li beration from sa11sara.
sailgha ( Sanskrit ) : literally "community, " a term most commonly
used to refer to the order of Buddh ist monks and nuns, it can he
used more genera lly for any commun ity of Buddhists, including
fully ordained monks, fully ordained nuns, male novices, female
novices, laymen, and laywomen .
siddhi ( Sanskrit ) : literally " achievement, " a siddhi is a power gained
through yogic practice. The term is especially important in Buddhist
tantras, where there are two types of siddhis: ( r ) the mundane
or worldly, such as the power to fly, walk through walls,
and transmute base metals into gold; and ( 2 ) the supramundane
or transcendent siddhi of buddhahood . One who possesses siddhi
is called a siddha, hence the mahasiddhas, or great adepts, of
Indian tantric literature.
skandhas ( Sanskrit ) : literally, "aggregates, " one of the terms used to
describe the physical and mental constituents of the person,
Glossary
among which there is no self. The five constituents are form, feel ing,
discrimination, conditioning factors, a n d consciousness.
§ravaka ( Sanskrit ) : literally, " listener, " a general term for a disciple
of the Buddha, interpreted i n the Mahayana to designate those
who follow the path in order to become an arhat. According to
Mahayana exegetes, the path of the pratyekabuddha along with
the path of the sravaka constitute the Hinayana.
stiipa ( Sanskrit) : a reliquary containing the remains or possessions
of the Buddha or a Buddhist saint. Initially taking the form of a
hemisphere i n India, stiipas developed into a variety of architectural
forms across Asia, including the pagoda in East Asia. Stiipas
have served as important places of pilgrimage throughout the history
of Buddhism.
Sukhavatl ( Sanskrit ) : l iterally, " the Land of Bliss, " the pure land
presided over by the buddha Amitabha. It is also known as the
Western Paradise.
siitra ( Sanskri t ) : literally, " aphorism , " a discourse traditionally
regarded as having been spoken by the Buddha or spoken with
his sanction.
tantra ( Sanskrit) : literally, "continuum . " Tantra in its most general
sense means a manual or hand book . In Buddhism it refers to a
text that contains esoteric teachings, often ascribed to the Buddha .
These texts provide techniques for gaining siddhis, both mundane
and supramundane.
tathagata ( Sanskrit) : literally, " one who has thus come " or " one
who has thus gone," a n epithet of a buddha.
tathagatagarbha ( Sanskrit) : literally, "embryo " or " essence " " of the
tathagata, " it is the buddha nature, which, according to some
schools of Mahayana Buddhism, exists in all sentient beings.
Theravada ( Pali ) : literally, " School of the Elders," a branch of the
Indian Sthaviravada that was established in Sri Lanka in the third
century B . C . E . In the eleventh century c . E . the Theravada became
the dominant form of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia.
As the last remaining school of the many Indian non-Mahayana
schools, "Theravada " is often mistakenly regarded as a synonym
of "Hinayana. "
Glossary
three jewels ( Sanskrit: triratna ) : the Buddha, the dharma, and the
sailgha, to whom a Buddhist goes for refuge from the sufferings
of sarp.sara .
tripiaka ( Sanskrit) : literally, " three baskets , " one of the traditional
schemes for organizing Buddhist discourses into three: siitra,
vinaya, and abhidharma.
Vajrayana ( Sanskrit ) : literally, " Diamond Vehicle " or "Thunderbolt
Vehicle, " a term used to designate esoteric or tantric Buddhism,
traditionally regarded as a form of the Mahayana capable of
leading to buddhahood more quickly than the conventional
bodhisattva path.
vinaya ( Sanskrit ) : l iterally, " taming, " the code of monastic conduct.
Yogacara ( Sanskrit) : literally, " practitioners of yoga, " a philosophical
school originating in India and associated with the fourthcentury
monk Asailga . Among its many tenets, it is best k nown
for the doctrine of " mind-only, " which describes the world as a
projection of consciousness.
Zen ( Japanese ) : see Chan .
B I B L I O G R A P H Y
O F
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INDE X
Abhidharma, 3 6, 9 3 , 1 06, u 6, 1 72.
Abhidharmakrua. Se Treasury of Knowledge
Abhisamayalarrkara. Se Ornament
of Realization
afflictions, 4 5, 46, 47, so, 7 1 , 76, 9S, 1 oo,
107, I 11, 1 19, :Z.4 I, :Z.4S• :Z.SO, :Z.S:Z.
aggregates, fi ve, :z.s, :z.6, 2.7, :z.S, 31, 4 3, 47
Ak$ayamatinirdda. See Satra Taught
to Ak$ayamati
alayaviifi4na, 3 :z.
Amidaji, us
Amitabha, 64, S:z., S9, n :z., 1 3 5 , 1 47, I S I ,
1 7 5 . I S s , 1 9S, I 99, :z. 3 3 , 2.34, :z. 3 5 , :z. 3 6,
:Z.3 7, :Z. 3 S , :Z.39, :Z.40, :Z.4 I , :Z.4:Z.
Ananda, s s . s 6 , 6 J , 70, S?, s s , 1 04, lOS,
1 0 6, I O S , I S ? . I S S . 1 5 9 . 1 7 3 . 1 7 4 ·
:z.o6, :z. I :z.
Angulimala, I 40
arhat, S J , H• 67, 6S, 76, S 3 , S4, 99, 1 04,
I 06, I 07, 1 I I , I 1 7, I I I I 9, I 3 S > I 40,
I 6 I , 1 7 3 , I S I , :Z.06, :z.07, :Z.3 1 , :Z.49
Asanga, 3 :z., S4, S s , S6, 1 00, 1 54, :z.:z.9
A$tasahasrikapraifi4paramita. Se
Perfection of Wisdom in Eight
Thousand Stanzas
Atisa, 72., S 3
Avalokitesvara, S o , S 1 , S:z., S 3 , I 3 9, I S S,
I 90, 2. 3 4
Avatatr�saka Satra. Se Flower Garland Satra
Asoka, King, 57, 1 79, 1 So, I 8 I , I S 3 , :z.o:z.
ASvaj it, 5 3
Bar do thos grol. Se Liberation in the
Intermediate State Through Hearing
Bhaijyaraja, 1 2.7
Bhavaviveka, ? I
Bltrkuti, S 3
bhami. See bodhisattva, ten stages
Bimbisara, 1 79
Blavatsky, Madame, I :z.
Blaze of Reasoning, ? I
Bodhgaya, s S
Bodhi tree, 1 1 , 47, S J , S 3 , 60, 64, I I 5, 2.44
Bodhicaryavatara. See Entering the Path
of Enlightenment
bodhicitta, 72., 73, 7 6, I H• :z.:z.3, 2.2.9
Bodhidharma, 2.43, :z.44, 2.4S
bodhisattva, 1 6, I S, 4S, 6s, 66, 67, 6S,
70, 7 S , ?6, 77, 7S, 79, SO, S I , S 2., 8 3 ,
8 4 , 8S, 89, 92., 9 5 , 9 9 , I I 3 , 1 1 4, 1 1 7,
II9, 12.0, 1:Z.2., I2.3, I2.4, 149. IS4· IS?.
1 63 , I 6 S , I 70, I 88, I 94, 2.00, :Z.O I , 2. I 7,
:Z.:Z.0, 2.2.1,2.2.2., 2.2.3, 2.2.6, 2.2.7, 2. 3 4. 2.39.
2.40, 2. 5 5 ;
qualifications for becoming, 66;
ten stages, 79;
vows of, 66, 72., 7 3 , 77, I 4 8-p, I 97
Brahma, 4 1 , 1 74, :z.o7
Brahma 's Net Satra, I 47, I SO, I S I , I 97
buddhadharma, I I
buddha nature, I 6, 97- I O I , 1 1 8, uo,
1 63 , 2.09, 2.3 3 , 2.47
buddhanusmrti, 2.09, 2.3 3
buddhaytJna, I I ?, l i S
butsudo, n
cakravartin, I So, I S I , I S 3
Cama, Queen, I S4
OJmadevrva,sa. Se Legend of Que C4ma
Candrakini, I S4
cause and effect, law of, I9, 3 5 , S3
Chan, I I S , I S 3
Cheng-yen, I 64
Chonen, 94
Chronicle of Discourses on the
Scriptures, 1 2.6
Commentary on Valid Knowledge, I S4
cosmology, Buddhist, 2.0, 34, 86, I S S
Index
Dalai Lama, 1 , 2., 6 3 , 76, 8 1 , 1 64, 1 8 8, 2.2.2.
deity yoga, 2.2.0
dependent origination, 2.9, 30, 1 1 2., I 98
Desire Realm, 2. I , 5 1
Devadatta, 4 5, I J I , I 3 2.
Dhammapada, I I O
dhiJrarJl, 1 2. 3 , 1 2.4, I 74
dharma, I r , I 4 , I 6, I 8, 5 4 , 5 5 , 5 7, 5 8 , 64,
70, 72., 76, 8 2. , 84, 8 6 , 89, 9 2., I 0 3 , 1 04,
I 0 5 , I T O, I I I , I I 3 , 1 1 5 , 1 2. I , 1 2.3 ,
I 3 0, 1 3 9. 1 4 5 · I S O, I S 8, 1 60, I 6 I , I 67 ,
I 69 , I 7 1 , I 7 2. , 1 7 8, I 8o, I 8 I , 1 8 2.,
I 8 3 , I 84, I 8 8, I 8 9, I 9 3 , I 99, 2. I 4 , 2.2.6,
2. 3 I, 2. 3 2., 2.39, 2.4 2., 2.4 3 , 2. 5 6,
dharma vinaya, 1 1 , I 0 6
DharmadhiJtustava. See Hymn t o the
Sphere of Reality
Dharmaguptaka, I 4 2.
Dharmakara, 8 7 , 8 8 , 8 9 , 90, 2. 3 9
dharmakiJya, 6 I , 6 2. , 1 00, 2. 3 9
Dharmakitti, 1 5 4, I 5 5
Diamond Satra, 4 8 , 79, 1 7 5 , 2. 4 3
Dipaq�kara, 66
Discourse on Vinaya, I 5 5
Dizang, see Kitigarbha
Dogen, r s r , r 8 s , 2.4 8
Drepung Monastery, I 5 4
eightfold path, 5 I
Eisai, I 8 5
ekayiJna, I I 8
emanation body, 6 I , 62., 6 3 , 64, 9 5
emptiness, 2.7, 2. 8 , 2.9, 3 0, 3 1 , 3 2., 62., 7 9 ,
8 9 , 94, 1 00, 1 1 4, I 2.4, 1 4 8, I 6 3 , 1 79 ,
I 9 1 , 2. 1 5 , 2. 2.0, 2. 2. I , 2. 2. 3 , 2.2.4, 2.2.6, 2. 2.7,
2. 2.9, 2.4 8-49, 2. 50, 2. 5 I , 2. 5 2.
meditation on, 2.48-5 2.
enjoyment body, 64
Entering the Path of Enlightenment, 1 63
Essentials for Rebirth in the Pure Land, 2. 3 8
ethics, 4 8 , 76, I 4 3 , I 5 I
Fan wang jing, see BrahmiJ 's Net Satra
Flower Garland Satra, 1 1 5 , 2.00
fo jiao, 1 2.
Fo shuo qiuba yankou egui tuoluoni jing.
Se Satra for the Spell That Brought
Deliverance to the Flaming Mouth
Hungry Ghost
Form Realm, 2. I -2.2., 5 I
Formless Realm, 2. 1 , 2.2.
four noble truths. 1 5 , I 8, 2.8, 30, 4 2. 54, I 1 3 ;
truth of cessation, 4 7, 5 2.;
truth of origin, 4 3, 52.;
truth of suffering, 4 2.-4 3 , 5 2.;
truth of the path, 4 8 , 5 2.;
sequence of, 5 1 - 5 2.
four reliances, 1 1 I
Fudo, s
Ganges, River, 6, I 74• 2. 3 9
Gaoseng zhuan. Se Lives of Eminent Monks
Garland of jewels, I 6 3
Gautama, 3 7 , 66, 84
Genshin, 2.38, 2. 3 9 , 2.40, 2.4 1
Great Vehicle. See Mahayana
Guan wu liang shou jing. See Satra on the
Meditation of the Buddha of Infinite Life
Guanyin, 8o, 8 I , 1 2.6, 1 6 5
Guhyasamaja, 2. 3 4
GuhyasamiJja Tantra, 2.2.7-2.8
Gui:taprabha, I 5 5
Hariti, 5 4-5 s
Heart Satra, 2.7-2.8, } I , n s , 1 2.6 I 8 9,
1 90, 1 9 I
Heshang Moheyan, 2. 4 6
Hinayana, 64, 69, 76, 9 9 , I o8, 1 1 8, 1 4 2.,
I S O, 1 5 1 , I 54· ' 5 5 · 1 9 7. 2. I 3 , 2.2.0
Hoichi, u s , 1 2.6
Honen, 1 8 5 , 2.4o-4 I
Huayan, I I S
Huineng, 2.4 3-4 4 , 2.4 5
Hui-yuan, I 8 6, 2. 3 3
Hungren, 2.44
Hymn to the Sphere of Reality, 3 o-3 1
icchantika, 99
insight, so, 2.07, 2. 1 1 , 2.43-44, 2.4 6, 2.47,
2.4 8-49
Instructions on the Pitaka, I I 1
Introduction to the Middle Way, I 5 4
jambudvipa, 2. I , 3 6
}iJtaka, 67
jetavana, 5 3
jizo, I 79· See also K,itigarbha
Index 2.73
jodo Shinshii, 1 5 1
Journey to the West, 1 3 9
Kalacakra, 112.
Kamalasila, 146
karma, 10, 19, u, 16, 18, 31, 34, 43, 44,
4 7, 5 1, 55,78, 86, 111 , 119, 136, I 4I,
1 49, 1 5 5, I 7 I , I 7 7, I 8 3 , 1 8 6, 1 94--99,
1I7,1I8, 115 ,137,139,14 5• 149 , 1 5 1
Kasyapa, 13 1
kechimyaku, 1 4 6
klda. See afflictions
Kobo Daishi. See Kiikai
Kozen gokokuron. Se Treatise on
Promoting Zen for the Protection of
the Country
Kitigarbha, 8 I-82.
Kiikai, • I s . 103
Lamp for the Three Modes, 1 1 9
Legend of Queen Cdma, I 8 4
Liberation in the Intermediate State
Through Hearing, 2. 1 6
Lion 's Roar of Queen Smn41a Satra, 99
Lives of Eminent Monks, I 3 1
Lokesvararaja, 87, 88
Lotus Satra, 6o, 64, 68, 69, 70, So, 8 I ,
1 1 5 , 1 1 7, 1 11, I 13 , I 16, I 17, I 18, 1 7 5 ,
1 8 1, J 86, 1 94· 1 1 I
Machig Lapdon, 8 3
Maddi, 1-3 , 4
Madhyamaka, 31, 33, IOO, II3-14, u 5 ,
146, 149. 1 50
Madhyamak/Uastra. Se Treatise on the
Middle Way
Madhyamakavatara. See Introduction to
the Middle Way
Mahadeva, 1 07
Mahakasyapa, 5 7, 84, I 04, 103, 141
mahamudra, 1 10
Mahamuni, image, 9 5
Mahanirvd'IQ Satra, 99, I 3 5
Mahaprajapati, I 5 8, I 6o
Mahisal"!lghika, 107
mahasiddha, 2. 1 7, 2. 1 8
Mahisthimaprapta, 134
Mahavarr, I 8 3
Mahayana, 1 3 , 17, 18, 59, 6o, 6 I , 61, 64,
6?,68, 69, ?0, 7I, 71, 76, 78, 8o,87,
90, 91, 94, 97--9 8, 99, 103, I07, I08,
109, 110, I I I, Il3, II4, I I 5o I I6, I 1 7 ,
n 8, II9, 110, I1I-11, I15, 116, IJS,
I41, 1 4 6, 1 4 8, IS4 . • 63, I86, I97. 107 ,
1I3, 117, 119, 110, 11I, 111, 113, 114,
11S, 130, 13J ,1J 7, 139, 147-48
Mahayanasatralamkara. Se Ornament
for the Mahayana Satra
Maitreya, u, 84, Ss, 86, IOO, I46, IS4·
169-70, I83, 103, 107, 140;
Five Books of, 86, 1 54
ma4ala, 1o1, 1 I 7, 111, 11J, 114, 11S ,
116, 117
Maiijusri, I o8, I 5 1, 100
mantra, s . 5 3, 81, 9Q-9 I, 91, 94, 113,
1 14, t S 7, I 74, I 9 I , t 9 3 • 1 I 9, 11S , 116,
117, 141
Mantra Vehicle, 1 1 9
Mantrayana, 1 1 9, 110
Mara, J 9-4o, s s. I 1 S, I 90, 1 9 1
Marpa, 1 1 7
Maudgalyayana, S J, 54, 93, 1 7 1-7 3, 107
Maya, Queen, 9 3 , 9 S · I S 7. I S 8
meditation. See sarn4dhi
Miaoshan, Princess, 8 1 , 81
middle way, 18- 19, 30, 31, 154. See
also Madhyamaka
Milarepa, 1 1 7
mind only, 3 1 . See also Yogiicara
Mount Hiei, s, ISo-SI
Mount Meru, 11, 36, 61, 93, 169
Nagarj una, 18, 19, 30, 31, 31, 73, IS4•
16J, 110, 114, 143, 146
Nalanda, 1 I 4
Naropa, 114, 115, 117
Nayatrayaprathpa. See Lamp fo r the
Three Modes
Nichiren, I 8 s-86
nikayas, 1 41-4 3
nirmi2'1Qkaya. See emanation body
nirvaa, II, I5, J O, 4I, 41, 4 7, 48, s o- p ,
S1, S4. ss. 56, 6o,6s, 67, 68, 7 I, 76,
79, 83, 86, 94, 96, I04, IOS, 107, I08,
III, IIS, 117, II8, 119, 110, 111, 140,
IS6, IS?. 159 · 170, 184, 107, 111, 111,
11S, 1J I , 1J9, 1.f1, 1SO
2.74 Index
nirvi.,a with remainder, 47, I I 9
nirva.,a without remainder, 4 7, 99, I I 7,
I I 9, I 1 I
o;oyosha. Se Essentials for Rebirth in
the Pure Land
Olcott, Colonel Henry Steel, 1 3
Ornament for the Mahayana Satras, 1 10
Ornament of Realization, I S4
Padmaprabha, I I 7
Padmasambhava, 10I
Path of Purification, 109
Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand
Snzas, 17, 1 I 3 , I 14-1 5
Perfection of Wisdom i n One Hundred
Thousand Stanzas, 17, 18
Perfection of Wisdom in One Letter, 17
Perfection of Wisdom in Twenty-five
Thousand Snzas, 17
Perfection of Wisdom Satra for Humane
Kings Who Wish to Protect Their
Stes, I 84, 1 8 s
Perfection Vehicle, 2. 1 9, 110
Petakopadesa. Se Instructions on the Pitaka
pra;na, 49
Prajiiipiramiti, goddess, 8 1, 1 90
Pramd11a11arttika. Se Commenry on
Valid Knowledge
pratyekabuddha, 6 5 , 68, 99, 1 1 s . 1 1 7,
1 1 9-10
Precious Scroll of Fragrant Mounin, 8 I
pre. 13
Pure Land, 88, 89-90, 13o-41
origin of term, 86
Rihula, 3 8-3 9, 84
Rijaha, 54
Ratnavalr. See Garland o f jewels
Record of Buddhist Practices, 7 I
Renwang hu guo banrou boluomiduo
iing. Se Perfection of Wisdom Satra for
Humane Kings Who Wish to Protect
Their Stes
Ritsu, 1 50
Saddhamrapurulartka. Se Lotus Satra
sadhana, 114-15, 116, 117
Saicho, I SO
Sikyamuni, 83-84, 87, 1 3 8, I 8 1, 1 9 1 ,
111, 1} 1 , 141
samadhi, 78, 84, 1 9 3 , 103, 107, 1 u ,
2. 1 9, 13 5
lamatha, 49, 1 49, 148-49. See also serenity
sambhogakaya. See enjoyment body
Samdhinirmocana. See Satra Untying
the Intention
Sirpkisya, 57
Sampu Tantra, 2.18
sarpsira, 11, 30, 34, 3 5 , 39, 4 1, 4 5, 68,
71, 73 . 74. 7 5 . 76, 94. 98, 99. 1 00, 1 1 9,
1}9, 1S6, I7I,I76, 178-79, 19S, I99 ,
1 1 6, 1 1 1 , 118, 1}9, 140, 14 1
sangha, 1 6, 54· 88, 93 . 1 06, 1 1} , 1 } 0,
I } I , 1 } 1, 1 3 4· 1 40, 1 4 1 , 1 4 5 · 1 4 7. I S 1,
I 64, 1 67, 1 68, 1 69, 1 7 3 . 1 77. 1 79-8 8,
1 } 1, 139
Sangltlyavamsa. Se Chronicle of
Discourses on the Scriptures
Sintideva, 7 5 , 76, 77, 78, I 6 3
Siriputra, 48, 5 1-5 3 , 5 7 , 6 9 , 73, 9 3 , 1 1 7,
1 40, I 6} , 106, 107
Sarnath, I 1 3
Sarvistivida, 1 1 6
sasana, 1 1
Sa utrintika, I 1 6
Scripture on the Production of Buddha
Images, 96
Seiryoji temple, 94
sereniry, 49, so, 78, 1 49, 148
Shandao, 1 3 3 , 134
Shenxiu, 144
Shingon, 1 1 s. 1 78, 101-3 , 138
Shinran, 1 s I , 14 1
Shiwang iing. See Satra of the Ten Kings
Shotoku, Prince, 1 8 1
Shiisho, 1 44
Siddhinha, 37, 67, I 3 9. 1 69, 1 5 4
Jlla. See ethics
Siva, 1 3 , 1 13
Songtsen Gampo, King, 8 3
Soto, 1 3 6, 1 5 I
Jravaka, 6 s , 67, 6 8 , 6 9 , u 3 , u s, 1 1 7,
I I 9, I 10, 1 1 I
Srimili, Queen, 1 6 3
Suddhodana, King, 1 57
Index 2. 7 5
Sukhavati, 6 4 , 8 9 , I I Z.
SukhavatJvyaha, 1 S ' · See also Satra of
the Land of Bliss
Sumedha, 6 s-66
sanyata. See emptiness
Satra for the Spell That Brought
Deliverance to the Flaming Mouth
Hungry Ghost, I 7J , 1 74
Satra in Forty-two Sections, I 6z.
Satra o f Golden Light, I 9 8
Satra of the Land of Bliss, 87, z.J 5 , 2. 3 8
Satra of the Ten Kings, I 9 S . I 9 6
Satra o n the Meditation of the Buddha of
Infinite Life, 2.34, 2. 3 6
Satra Taught t o Ak$ayamati, 1 I 4
Satra Untying the Intention, I I J-1 1 4, 1 1 9
Suvar�J,abhasottama. See Satra of
Golden Light
Tanno Kakudo, 4-s
tantra, z. 1 3-30;
Action Tantra, z.z.8;
Highest Yoga Tantra, z.z.r , z.z.J , z.z.8, 2.2.9;
Performance Tantra, z.z.8
Yoga Tantra, z.z.8
Tara, s z., 8 3
Tarka;vala. See Blaze o f Reasoning
tathagatagarbha. See buddha nature
Tendai, s, r so, I S I , 1 86, 2. 3 8 , 2.40
Theosophical Society, 1 2.
Theragatha, 1 6z.
Theravada, J Z., 47, SO, S I , S 6, 6 S , 66, 67,
68, 76, I OJ , J J o- J I I , I Z.6, I J 7, I J 9,
I 4 Z., I 64, Z.070 Z.08, z.J J
Therrgatha, I 6 z.
three poisons, 4 6
three trainings, 4 8 , s I , I s 1
Tibetan Book of the Dead. Se Liberation in
the Intermediate State Through Hearing
Tientai, u s , I SO
Tilopa, Z. I 4, Z. I S, Z. I 7, l. I 8
Tisong Detsen, King, 8 3 , 2.46
Treasury of Knowledge, I 4 I, I H
Treatise on Promoting Zen for the
Protection of the Country, 1 8 s
Treatise on the Middle Way, z.8, 3 0, 3 2.
tripitaka, I o6, u6
Tripitaka, monk, 1 3 9
Tripiakamala, 2. 1 9, z.z.o
Tsong kha pa, 34-3 5 , z.z.o, z.z. r
tulku, 6 z.
Tuita, 8 4 , 9 S
Udayana, King, 9 3 , 94
Ullambana Satra, I 7 Z., 1 73
Upali, 1 o s
Upham, Edward, n
va;ra, 90, 94, I 9 3 , z. z. 1
Vajrapar:Ji, 1 08, u z. , u3, z. z. 1
Vairapaniara, l.l.O
Vajrasattva, 90, 9 1 , 92.;
meditation on, 9<>-92.;
one-hundred-syllable mantra, 9<>-9 1
Vajrayana, Z. I J , 2. 1 4, 2. 1 9
Vajrayogini, 2.30
Vasubandhu, 3 4• I I 6-I 7, 1 4 1 , I S S
Vatsiputriya, z.6-z.7, 3 2.
Vessantara, z. , 3 , 4 , 40, 1 70
Vikramasila, 72.
Vimalakrrti Satra, 87, 1 63
vinaya, I I , 1 04, I 06, 1 3 2., 1 3 7, I SO
Vinayasatra. See Discourse on Vinaya
vipasyana, so. See also insight
Visuddhimagga. Se Path of Purification
Wu-cheng, Emperor, I l.7
Wutai, Mount, z.oo
Xiangshan bao;uan. Se Precious Scroll of
Fragrant Mountain
Xuanzang, 94
Yamaka, 47-48
Yeshe Tsogyal, 8 3
Yijing, 7 1
Yogacara, 3 2., 99, u 3 , I S
Zen, 6, n . I 3 6, I 46, I so, I S J , 1 68, 1 8 s ,
Z. I 3 , 2.42.-48, 2.49
Zhaozhou, z.47
Zhiyi, 7z.
Zongmi, z.4 s
Zuo fo xingxiang iing. Se Scripture on
the Production of Buddha Images
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