Category Archives: Blog

Blog

A Little AI Magic

Not all AI are equal.

Google’s Gemini AI, even the Advanced option, leaves a lot to be desired when compared to Microsoft’s Copilot.

Here’s the prompt I tried on both:

generate image in style of emoji that represents Nichiren Buddhism

Gemini’s first try generated these images:

Gemini’s second try generated this error message:

I’m a language model and don’t have the capacity to help with that.

Gemini’s third try generated these images:

I then fired up Microsoft’s Copilot, which utilizes DALL-E 3 to generate images.

The first time I entered the prompt “generate image in style of emoji that represents Nichiren Buddhism” in Copilot I got these images:

The second time I entered the prompt “generate image in style of emoji that represents Nichiren Buddhism” in Copilot I got these images:

The Designer app inside Copilot even lets you tweak the image with different styles:

This:
copilot dalle3

Becomes these:

That’s enough of this. I was originally going to discuss how Gemini and Copilot allow you to narrow the sources used to answer prompts. For example you take “what is the meaning of the Daimoku in Nichiren Buddhism” and modify it by adding “Using website 500yojanas.org as principal source, what is the meaning of the Daimoku in Nichiren Buddhism.” Again Gemini and Copilot offer vastly different answers. Maybe I’ll get around to writing about that eventually.

Dogen, words, Blog, Books

The Karma of Words

In “Visions of Awakening Space and Time,” Taigen Dan Leighton quotes from William R. LaFleur’s “The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval Japan.” For example:

In The Karma of Words, William LaFleur discusses the sophisticated nature of the Lotus Sutra as literature and its impact on medieval Japanese poetics: “The surprising feature of [the parables] in the Lotus is that they are simultaneously the vehicle and the tenor of that vehicle. In a very important sense, the parables of the Lotus are about the role and status of parabolic speech itself. They are what I would call self-reflexive allegory; that is, their trajectory of discourse behaves like a boomerang. Much like the Dharma described in a crucial section of the hōben chapter, they are characterized by ‘the absolute identity [or equality] of their beginning and end.’ ”

Dōgen and the Lotus Sutra, p27

And, as is my want, after reading this I sent away for a copy of LaFleur’s book, which was published by University of California Press in 1986.

This book is not about the Lotus Sutra but, instead, about Medieval Japan, the period in which Nichiren lived.

LaFleur explains in his Preface to the book:

karma-of-words-bookcover

The origin of this study lies in the simultaneous frustration and fascination I felt nearly two decades ago when for the first time I saw a performance of nō drama in Japan. I was greatly moved by what I saw, but I was also greatly perplexed by the presence in this form of drama of energies, assumptions, and aesthetic values that seemed very different from those present in the classical theaters of ancient Greece and Renaissance Europe. Here was a form of drama that had evidently been shaped by a set of religious and philosophical assumptions—but these were neither those of Aristotle nor those of European Christianity. My curiosity about this led me to search for relevant books and to question people who I thought might provide information.

I soon discovered a certain consensus; it was that, although the components in nō are many and complex, it is probably Japanese Buddhism which did most to shape the world of nō. Beyond this, however, my frustration continued, since the available materials in Western languages provided information about Buddhist elements in this form of drama but stopped short of a real reconstruction of the way the Japanese in the medieval period of their history saw their world and envisioned their destinies in and through Buddhist terms and concepts. Footnotes gave definitions of things like arhats, asuras, and Amida, but these things collectively never added up to a satisfying account of the intellectual and religious assumptions of the Buddhist poets, dramatists, and writers of prose in medieval Japan.

This book is first an attempt to provide what I could not find then and was subsequently forced to pursue in the original texts and in modern scholarly studies in Japanese.

Of course, I’m less interested in nō, which I’ve never seen performed, than I am in understanding how Buddhism shaped Japan’s world view.

As a self-styled “modern Buddhist,” I was particularly taken by this observation by LaFleur:

Buddhism gained ascendency in medieval Japan largely because it successfully put forward a coherent explanation of the world and of human experience; it was the single most satisfying and comprehensive explanation available to the Japanese people at the time. This is to deny neither that Buddhism was espoused by persons who had great social and political power nor that it provided justifications for their power and prestige. Moreover, this is not to disembody it or overlook the impressive technological and artistic side of the Buddhism that came to Japan from China and Korea—its magnificent architecture, paintings, icons, vestments, illuminated scrolls, and choreographed ritual. It is merely to call attention to the cognitive dimension and to observe that Buddhism provided not only salvation but also explanation. That is, as a religion in a medieval context, it was considerably more comprehensive, than religion in modern settings. In many ways, Buddhism performed in medieval Japan much of the role now customarily assigned to science. It did so by giving to the epoch a basic map of reality, one that provided cognitive satisfaction not only to learned monks in monasteries but also to unlettered peasants in the countryside.

The Karma of Words, p26-27

Perhaps it is time for Buddhists to take back the role taken by modern science and reassert Buddhism’s “basic map of reality” – the law of cause and effect and all of its ramifications.

Over the next four days I’ll publish quotes from “The Karma of Words.”

Stone Last Age, Dogen, Blog

About Time

Back in January 2024 I discussed Dōgen, referencing Jacqueline Stone’s article, “Seeking Enlightenment in the Last Age.” In fact, her explanation of Dōgen’s interpretation of time was one reason I sought out Leighton’s book on Dōgen.

Stone writes:

Because this “now” is absolute, and because “there is no time that has not arrived,” Buddhahood is not a potential that will unfold in the future, but can be realized only in the present moment. In other words, attaining Buddhahood is not, in Dōgen’s view, a gradual evolving from potential to realization associated with a linear view of time.

Leighton’s book offers this explanation of the source of Dōgen’s view of time:

Returning to consideration of other Mahāyāna approaches to temporality, the Avataṃsaka Sūtra, or Flower Ornament Sutra, in the chapter on “Detachment from the World” speaks of ten times through which great bodhisattvas explain past, present, and future. These ten times are the past, present, and future of the past; the past, present, and future of the future; the past, present, and future of this present; and finally, the interfusion of those previous nine times as the tenth, “being the one instant of the present.”

Dōgen and the Lotus Sutra, p107

This all fits very nicely within the concept of 3,000 Worlds in a Single Thought Moment

While I’m on the topic of time, I want to set aside these definitions of a kalpa:

Basic Indian cosmology offers a very wide view of time that was adopted by Buddhism. There is a recurring cycle in every universe of four kalpas: the formation or becoming, continuity or the abiding, the decaying, and the “nonmanifest” or empty. A kalpa is an incalculably long period of time, with one colorful traditional description of its duration as “the image of a bird that flies once every hundred years over the peak of Mount Everest with a piece of silk in her talons; the length of time it would take the silk to wear down the mountain completely is said to be one kalpa.” Another calculation is that a short kalpa “is the time required to empty a hundred square mile city enclosure filled with poppy seeds if one seed were to be removed every three years.”

Dōgen and the Lotus Sutra, p110-111
Stone Last Age, Dogen, Blog

Bodhisattvic Workings

Back in January 2024 I discussed Dōgen, referencing Jacqueline Stone’s article, “Seeking Enlightenment in the Last Age.” The topic was Dogen’s Practice.

Taigen Dan Leighton in “Dōgen and the Lotus Sutra” offers this:

Both the Vajrayāna and the Zen emphasis is on fully expressed performance of reality, not its cognitive knowledge or interpretation, which reflects the valuing of actual bodhisattvic workings over theoretical dictums. …

In his writing “Talk on Wholehearted Engagement of the Way” (“Bendöwa”), Dōgen directly emphasizes the hermeneutical priority of the actualization of practice over doctrinal theory: “Buddhist practitioners should know not to argue about the superiority or inferiority of teachings and not to discriminate between superficial or profound dharma, but should only know whether the practice is genuine or false.”

Dōgen and the Lotus Sutra, p19
Dogen, Blog

Perspectives on the Self-Referential Lotus

The fact that the Lotus Sutra references the Lotus Sutra taught in the past on several occasions is a matter of some controversy for those who are not devotees of the Lotus Sutra. I’ve written before about this here.) In “Visions of Awakening Space and Time: Dōgen and the Lotus Sutra, Taigen Dan Leighton has an interesting discussion on the topic:

The Lotus Sutra itself frequently emphasizes the importance of and rewards for the proclamation of the Lotus Sutra, through reading, copying, and reciting it. To be sure, other Mahāyāna sutras talk about the merit to be derived by recalling or copying the sutra being read. However, the Lotus Sutra at times seems to hold this self-referential quality at its center, such that it promotes an extreme mode of self-referential discourse that is unique to it. The sutra often speaks of the wondrous nature of the Lotus Sutra, right in the text commonly referred to as the Lotus Sutra. This rhetorical device can be startling and mind-twisting, like Escher’s painting of two hands drawing each other. Various important figures in the sutra appear within the text of the Lotus Sutra because they have heard that the Lotus Sutra is currently being preached by Śākyamuni Buddha on Vulture Peak. For example, in chapter 11, the stūpa of the ancient Buddha Prabhūtaratna emerges from the earth and floats in midair because he has vowed always to appear whenever the Lotus Sutra is preached. In the same chapter, myriad bodhisattvas [Śākyamuni’s replicas] arrive from world systems in all directions to praise the Buddha for preaching this sutra in which they themselves are appearing.

This quality of the sutra talking about the sutra, and especially its many references to the Lotus Sutra as something expounded many ages ago, as about to be expounded, or even as hopefully to be expounded in the distant future, has led some commentators to observe that the whole text of this sutra, more than any others, is a preface to a missing scripture. As George and Willa Tanabe say, “The preaching of the Lotus sermon promised in the first chapter never takes place. The text, so full of merit, is about a discourse which is never delivered; it is a lengthy preface without a book. The Lotus Sutra is thus unique among texts. It is not merely subject to various interpretations, as all texts are, but is open or empty at its very center.” This is a plausible perspective or interpretation. The text does refer, in third person, to a designated text that one might keep vainly waiting for, as if for Godot.

However, this perspective misses the manner in which the Lotus sermon certainly does exist. Fundamental messages of the Lotus, such as the One Vehicle and the primacy of the Buddha vehicle, are difficult to miss, even if they might be interpreted in various ways, Furthermore, between the lines the Lotus Sutra functions within itself both as a sacred text or scripture and as a commentary and guidebook to its own use, beyond the literal confines of its own written text. The Lotus Sutra is itself a sacred manifestation of spiritual awakening that proclaims its own sacrality. Right within the text’s proclamation of the wonders of a text with the same name as itself, the text celebrates its own ephemeral quality with the visionary splendors of its assembly of buddhas, bodhisattvas, and spirits, and with the engaging qualities of its parables.

The synthesis of the immanent spirit spoken about in the text and the text’s own intended functioning as an instrument or skillful catalyst to spark awakening has been carried on among its followers. This is exemplified in the varieties of Nichiren Buddhism in that they are rooted and focused in devotion to the Lotus Sutra itself as a sacred manifestation, and devotional object, which they are committed to proclaiming and promulgating. But for Dōgen, the self-proclamation of the Dharma in the Lotus Sutra becomes an aspect of his rhetorical style rather than an externalized objectification.

Dōgen and the Lotus Sutra, p23-24

Later he offers:

The extraordinary self-referential quality of the Lotus Sutra also had an important effect on both Dōgen and Nichiren in their responses to the enduring Śākyamuni and the sutra itself. Whereas the impact of the self-referential is most clearly expressed by Dōgen in his style of Dharma proclamation, for Nichiren the manner in which the sutra proclaims its own value and soteriological role becomes the basis for his religious praxis. Nichiren takes the sutra literally in this respect. Perhaps more than any other major Buddhist thinker, he elevates one scripture as sacred essence and object. The sutra itself extensively extols the virtues of copying, reading, and reciting the sutra. Nichiren simplified and consolidated these practices into chanting its name and venerating the written name of the sutra as an icon.

Dōgen and the Lotus Sutra, p59
Dogen, Blog, Books

Dōgen and the Lotus Sutra

dogen-and-the-lotus-sutra-bookcover
From the flyleaf of the book:

As a religion concerned with universal liberation, Zen grew out of a Buddhist worldview very different from the currently prevalent scientific materialism. Indeed, says Taigen Dan Leighton, Zen cannot be fully understood outside of a worldview that sees reality itself as a vital, dynamic agent of awareness and healing. In this book, Leighton explicates that worldview through the writings of the Zen master Eihei Dōgen (1200-1253), considered the founder of the Japanese Sōtō Zen tradition, which currently enjoys increasing popularity in the West.

The Lotus Sutra, arguably the most important Buddhist scripture in East Asia, contains a famous story about bodhisattvas (enlightening beings) who emerge from under the earth to preserve and expound the Lotus teaching in the distant future. The story reveals that the Buddha only appears to pass away, but actually has been practicing, and will continue to do so, over an inconceivably long life span.

Leighton traces commentaries on the Lotus Sutra from a range of key East Asian Buddhist thinkers, including Daosheng, Zhiyi, Zhanran, Saigyo, Myōe, Nichiren, Hakuin, and Ryōkan. But his main focus is Eihei Dōgen, the 13th century Japanese Sōtō Zen founder who imported Zen from China, and whose profuse, provocative, and poetic writings are important to the modern expansion of Buddhism to the West.

Dōgen’s use of this sutra expresses the critical role of Mahayana vision and imagination as the context of Zen teaching, and his interpretations of this story furthermore reveal his dynamic worldview of the earth, space, and time themselves as vital agents of spiritual awakening.

Leighton argues that Dōgen uses the images and metaphors in this story to express his own religious worldview, in which earth, space, and time are lively agents in the bodhisattva project. Broader awareness of Dōgen’s worldview and its implications, says Leighton, can illuminate the possibilities for contemporary approaches to primary Mahayana concepts and practices.

As Taigen Dan Leighton explains:

Dōgen quotes the Lotus Sutra more by far than any other sutra, and with unsurpassed veneration. In the Shōbōgenzō (True Dharma Eye Treasury) essay “Taking Refuge in the Three Treasures” (“Kie Buppōsō-hō”), he quotes a passage from the closing verse of chapter 16 about how beings who are beset by their evil karma do not ever hear the name of the three treasures (buddha, Dharma, and sangha), whereas those who are virtuous, gentle, and upright see the Buddha’s enduring presence on Vulture Peak. Immediately after quoting from chapter 16 about the Buddha’s enduring life span, Dōgen says that this Lotus Sutra is itself the single great cause for the appearance of buddha tathāgatas, substituting the sutra itself for the intention to awaken all beings cited as the single great cause for buddhas in chapter 2 of the sutra. Then he declares that the Lotus Sutra “may be said to be the great king and the great master of all the various sutras that the Buddha Śākyamuni taught. Compared with this sutra, all the other sutras are merely its servants, its relatives, for it alone expounds the Truth.”

Dōgen and the Lotus Sutra, p67

As a Nichiren follower, I find Dōgen’s view of the Lotus Sutra very “Zen”:

In the essay in Shōbōgenzō that most directly and fully focuses on the Lotus Sutra, called “The Dharma Flower Turns the Dharma Flower” (“Hokke-Ten-Hokke”) from 1241, Dōgen celebrates the value of sutras while explicitly responding to the Zen axiom about sutra study that privileges direct mind-to-mind teaching above study of words and letters. The essay centers on a dialogue from the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Ancestor, Dajian Huineng (638-713; Daikan Enō in Japanese), who tells a monk who has memorized the Lotus Sutra that he does not understand the sutra. Huineng tells the monk, “When the mind is in delusion, the Flower of Dharma turns. When the mind is in realization [enlightenment], we turn the Flower of Dharma.” Dōgen clarifies how this story implies the necessity for an awakened hermeneutical approach to the active, practical applications of sutra study, rather than being caught by reified scriptural formulations.

Much of the essay involves intricate wordplay and discussion concerning the polarity of turning the Dharma flower, or else being turned by it, which Dōgen eventually resolves in characteristically nondualistic fashion. In the conclusion he says that now that we have heard about this turning or being turned and “experienced the meeting of the ancient buddha with ancient buddhas, how could this not be a land of ancient buddhas? We should rejoice that the Dharma flower is turning from age to age, and the Dharma flower is turning from day to night, as the Dharma flower turns the ages and turns the days and nights.” For Dōgen, the reality of the Dharma flower and of the Buddha’s enduring life span transforms the very earth and time itself. He ends the lengthy essay by proclaiming, “The reality that exists as it is … is profound, great, and everlasting [referencing the Buddha’s life span], is mind in delusion, the Flower of Dharma turning, and is mind in realization, turning the Flower of Dharma, which is really just the Flower of Dharma turning the Flower of Dharma. … If perfect realization can be like this, the Flower of Dharma turns the Flower of Dharma. When we serve offerings to it, venerate, honor, and praise it like this, the Flower of Dharma is the Flower of Dharma.”

In Dōgen’s reality, ultimately the Lotus turning the practitioner, as well as the practitioner turning the Lotus, are both simply instances of the Lotus Dharma turning the Lotus Dharma. The Dharma of the Lotus Sutra is simply nondual and wondrous.

Dōgen and the Lotus Sutra, p68-69

Consider the dreams of Dōgen:

In another of the numerous examples in Shōbōgenzo of Dōgen using wordplay to invert conventional thinking, in “Within a Dream Expressing the Dream” (“Muchū Setsumu”), written in 1242, he extensively elaborates on his statement “All buddhas express the dream within a dream.” He thereby denies the supposedly lesser reality of the “dreams” of the transient phenomenal world and negates a Platonic exaltation of the absolute, which LaFleur describes as the antithesis of Lotus Sutra teaching. Instead, Dōgen proclaims the dream world of phenomena as exactly the realm of buddhas’ activity: “Every dewdrop manifested in every realm is a dream. This dream is the glowing clarity of the hundred grasses. … Do not mistake them as merely dreamy.” The liberative awakening of buddhas is itself described as a dream: “Without expressing dreams, there are no buddhas. Without being within a dream, buddhas do not emerge and turn the wondrous dharma wheel. This dharma wheel is no other than a buddha together with a buddha, and a dream expressed within a dream. Simply expressing the dream within a dream is itself the buddhas and ancestors, the assembly of unsurpassable enlightenment.”

Dōgen is not frivolously indulging in mere paradox here, but follows the logic of the dream as necessarily the locus of awakening. As he says in his celebrated 1233 Shōbōgenzō essay, “Actualizing the Fundamental Point” (“Genjōkōan”), “Those who have great realization of delusion are buddhas.”

What is worthy of study is not delusions or fantasies about enlightenment, but the reality of the causes and conditions of the realms of delusion and suffering. A similar logic is expressed in the Lotus Sutra dictum that buddhas manifest only due to the presence of suffering beings.

Dōgen and the Lotus Sutra, p32-33

Or this example:

In his Enlightenment Day jōdō, number 88, in 1241, Dōgen says:

“Two thousand years later, we are the descendants [of Śākyamuni]. Two thousand years ago, he was our ancestral father. He is muddy and wet from following and chasing after the waves. It can be described like this, but also there is the principle of the Way [that we must] make one mistake after another. What is this like? Whether Buddha is present or not present, I trust he is right under our feet. Face after face is Buddha’s face; fulfillment after fulfillment is Buddha’s fulfillment.

“Last night, this mountain monk [Dōgen] unintentionally stepped on a dried turd and it jumped up and covered heaven and earth. This mountain monk unintentionally stepped on it again, and it introduced itself, saying, “My name is Śākyamuni.” Then, this mountain monk unintentionally stepped on his chest, and immediately he went and sat on the vajra seat, saw the morning star, bit through the traps and snares of conditioned birth, and cast away his old nest from the past. Without waiting for anyone to peck at his shell from outside, he received the thirty-two characteristics common to all buddhas, and together with this mountain monk, composed the following four-line verse:

Stumbling I stepped on his chest and his backbone snapped,
Mountains and rivers swirling around, the dawn wind blew.
Penetrating seven and accomplishing eight, bone piercing the heavens,
His face attained a sheet of golden skin.

In this jōdō Dōgen describes a dreamlike fantasy in which he accidentally steps on a piece of shit, and in accord with Yunmen’s description of Buddha often cited by Dōgen, it jumps up and declares itself to be Śākyamuni. This vision increases the apparent disrespect for Buddha in Yunmen’s utterance, as Dōgen again steps on his chest (albeit again accidentally), even after the dried shit identifies himself as Śākyamuni Buddha. But Dōgen uses this scatological vision not to degrade, but to further celebrate Buddha, by declaring that upon being stepped on, “He went and sat on the vajra seat, saw the morning star, bit through the traps and snares of conditioned birth, and cast away his old nest from the past.”

Here Dōgen skillfully proclaims and celebrates, nonexplicitly, the major revelation of the Lotus Sutra of the Buddha’s life span enduring over inconceivable ages, and that his archetypal story of his home-leaving and awakening is demonstrated simply as a skillful mode. The effect of this dream parable of Dōgen is to reinforce the story in chapter 16 by describing Buddha and his awakening process as still omnipresent, “last night” right at Eiheiji, and even in excrement.

Dōgen’s dream story also echoes the Lotus Sutra, chapter 4, parable of the prodigal son, who can realize his fundamental endowment only after years of shoveling manure in his father’s field. As Dōgen says in the introduction to his parable, even Śākyamuni “is muddy and wet from following and chasing after the waves.” Dōgen’s further introductory statement, “Whether Buddha is present or not present, I trust he is right under our feet,” echoes the Lotus Sutra parable about the ragged beggar unknowingly having the Dharma jewel sewn within his robe. It further suggests the image in chapter 15 of myriad bodhisattvas suddenly springing forth from beneath the ground “under our feet,” which, as we will see, represents for Dōgen the omnipresence of the bodhisattva potential in the ground of concrete particulars.

Dōgen and the Lotus Sutra, p37-38

Other parts are less “Zen” and clearer for me. Here are some quotes I’ve set aside from the book:

Liberation and the Lotus Sutra

The purpose of Buddhism is liberation from the karmic cycle of suffering via awakening, and the goal of the Mahāyāna is the awakening of all beings. In chapter 2 the Lotus Sutra states, in the line probably most often cited by Dōgen, that the sole cause for a buddha’s appearing in the world is to help the diverse suffering beings enter into, open up, disclose, and fully realize this awakening. The one great cause for Buddha’s manifesting is also the one great cause for the expounding of Buddhist teachings. So it is a primary hermeneutical principle and criterion of all interpretations of Buddhist texts that they be evaluated based on their effectiveness as liberative instruments.

Dōgen and the Lotus Sutra, p15

The Need to Practice

For Dōgen, the ultimate emptiness or impermanence of all things and events does not diminish the need to fully engage in practice the present particulars of the conditioned world. And there is no place or time other than this current, impermanent Dharma position in which to enact this practice. Dōgen often emphasizes ordinary, everyday reality, such as the activities of daily monastic practice, as the locus of awakening and of the sacred and the importance of not seeking liberation outside of the grounding of immediate everyday circumstances.

Dōgen and the Lotus Sutra, p70-71

Seeing that the Buddha Is Alive

Dōgen further turns the meaning of the Buddha’s life span in the 1244 Shōbōgenzō essay “Awakening to the Bodhi-Mind” (“Hotsu Bōdaishin”), in which he discusses bodhicitta, the first arousal of the thought of universal awakening, which he considers of utmost importance, mysterious, and in some sense equivalent to the whole of a buddha’s enlightenment. After quoting the Buddha’s statement at the very end of chapter 16, “I have always given thought to how I could cause all creatures to enter the highest supreme Way and quickly become Buddhas,” Dōgen comments, “This [statement] is the Tathāgata’s lifetime itself. Buddhas’ establishment of the mind, training, and experience of the effect are all like this.” For Dōgen the inconceivable life span is exactly this intention to help all beings awaken, which mysteriously creates the ongoing life of the Buddha. As long as this vow and direction to universal awakening persists in the world and has the potential to spring forth in current practitioners, Dōgen sees that the Buddha is alive.

Dōgen and the Lotus Sutra, p90

In addition to discussing Dōgen’s view of the Lotus Sutra, Taigen Dan Leighton offers some interesting background on the sutra and the context of Japan’s Kamakura period. For the next eight days I’ll publish quotes concerning Nichiren, Zhiyi and Zhanran.

How Buddhism Began, Blog, Books

How Buddhism Began

how-buddhism-began-bookcoverProfessor Richard F. Gombrich gave a series of lectures in 1994. These in turn were turned into a slim volume entitled, “How Buddhism Began; The Conditioned Genesis of the Early Teachings,” which was published in 1996 by the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Here’s the publisher’s introduction:

This book takes a fresh look at the earliest Buddhist texts and offers various suggestions how the teachings in them had developed. Two themes predominate, firstly, it argues that we cannot understand the Buddha unless we understand that he was debating with other religious teachers, notably brahmins. For example, he denied the existence of a “soul”; but what exactly was he denying? Another chapter suggests that the canonical story of the Buddha’s encounter with a brigand who wore a garland of his victims’ fingers probably reflects an encounter with a form of ecstatic religion.

The other main theme concerns metaphor, allegory and literalism. By taking the words of the texts literally—despite the Buddha’s warning not to—successive generations of his disciples created distinctions and developed doctrines far beyond his original intention. One chapter shows how this led to a scholastic categorization of meditation. Failure to understand a basic metaphor also gave rise to the later argument between the Mahayana and the older tradition. Perhaps most important of all, a combination of literalism with ignorance of the Buddha’s allusions to Brahminism led Buddhists to forget that the Buddha had preached that love, like Christian charity, could itself be directly salvific.

Richard F. Gombrich was the Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University. He has written numerous books and articles on Buddhism, in which include The World of Buddhism: Buddhist Monks and Nuns in Society and Culture (1991) and Buddhist Percept and Practise (1991 ). He was the President of the Pali Text Society and was honoured with Sri Lanka Ranjana award in 1994 and the SC Chakrabarty medal from the Asiatic Society, Kolkata.

The 164 pages offer little that I feel I need to copy here, but I found a couple of his concepts worth noting.

For example, he argues, in effect, that Buddhism is Empty – there is no fixed, unchanging essence that is Buddhism.

Buddhists readily accept … that Buddhism as we can now witness it is in decline; they might even accept such labels as ‘corrupt’ and ‘syncretistic.’ They should have no trouble in accepting the proposition on which these lectures are based: that Buddhism as a human phenomenon has no unchanging essence but must have begun to change from the moment of its inception.

This seems, however, to worry some modem scholars. Not long ago I attended a meeting of the British historians of Indian religions at which there was a discussion not, I am glad to say, about the definition of religion, but about the definition of Buddhism. I do not think that most of the participants approached the question in an essentialist spirit: they were ready to accept that Buddhism could be adequately defined, in a nominalist manner, as the religion of those who claim to be Buddhists. But they asked whether the various forms of Buddhism which gave those people their religious identity had any common features. They failed to find any, and reached the rather despairing conclusion that Buddhism was therefore not a useful concept at all.

I think this is to go too far. True, it is not prima facie obvious that there are features common to the religions of a traditional Theravādin rice-farmer, a Japanese Pure Land Buddhist, and a member of the UK branch of the Soka Gakkai International. This may not bother the Buddhists themselves, secure within their own traditions, and I am not aware that they have seriously discussed the problem. But I suggest that the Buddha’s teaching again offers a solution through the doctrine of causation, conditioned genesis. For the Buddha and his followers, things they focused mainly on – living beings – exist not as adamantine essences but as dynamic processes. These processes are not random (adhiccasamuppanna) but causally determined. Any empirical phenomenon is seen as a causal sequence, and that applies to the sāsana too. ‘One thing leads to another,’ as the English idiom has it. Whether or not we can see features common to the religion of Richard Causton, the late leader of the UK branch of Soka Gakkai International, and that of Nāgārjuna, or of the Buddha himself, there is a train of human events which causally connects them. Buddhism is not an inert object: it is a chain of events.

How Buddhism Began, p6-7

I also appreciated Gombrich warning about literalism, having myself admitted to a preference for the literal words of the Lotus Sutra.

The Buddha seems to have had a lively awareness of the dangers of literalism. A short text, AN Il, 135, classifies people who hear his teachings into four types; the terms are explained at Puggala-paññatti IV, 5 (= p. 41). As commonly, the list is hierarchic, the best type being listed first. The first type (ugghatita-ññu) understands the teaching as soon as it is uttered; the second (vipacita-ññu) understands on mature reflection; the third (neyya) is ‘leadable’: he understands it when he has worked at it, thought about it and cultivated wise friends. The fourth is called pada-parama, ‘putting the words first’; he is defined as one who though he hears much, preaches much, remembers much and recites much does not come within this life to understand the teaching. One could hardly ask for a clearer condemnation of literalism. As throughout this lecture, I am merely pointing out that Buddhism provides the best tools for its own exegesis.

In fact there is an extremely famous text in the Pali Canon in which the Buddha criticizes literalism. But I see a great irony here, for the words of the text have been too literally interpreted, so that its point has been missed. I am referring to the simile of the raft in Alagaddūpama Sutta (MN sutta 22), the sermon with the simile of the water snake.

How Buddhism Began, p22

More problematic for me is Gombrich’s discussion of Merit Transfer. As a Nichiren Buddhist, I am quite comfortable with the idea that I can transfer, through my prayers, merit I’ve earned through my practice.

To begin with, it is very difficult to keep reading when Gombrich starts by saying he is discussing “The transfer of kama – in particular of good karma, merit… ” and then describes this “a process” being transferred. I must assume Gombrich is speaking in shorthand. It is too far-fetched to imagine that he actually confuses the actions – good and bad – with the results &ndash merit. Here’s the pertinent quote:

The transfer of kama – in particular of good karma, merit – is a vast topic; much has been written about it and there is no room here for a long digression. However, I cannot resist the opportunity to make three points. First: Buddhologists have tended to ignore the importance of such transfers in Brahminical texts, where they are documented from a very early period. As Professor Hara has pointed out (Hara, 1994), the Mahābhārata, for example, envisages transfer not only of good and bad karma but of such things as long life and dishonor. So the idea that many properties we are accustomed to thinking of as nontransferable can in fact be transferred was probably part of a widespread popular belief, and in partly accepting it Buddhism was moving towards the general norm.

However, too easy acceptance of such transferability would have shaken the foundations of Buddhism as a doctrine of moral responsibility. So far from reifying merit, Buddhist orthodoxy even resisted the reification of the individual, the moral agent. How could a process transfer an aspect of itself to another process? The Sarvāstivāda, showing a tendency to multiply entities, argued that the process which we conventionally talk of as a person was connected to its properties (including karma) by something called prāpti ‘possession’ (in a verbal sense). The Theravāda came to accept the transfer of merit, but apparently tried to evade the problematic notion of transferring a process, karma, by taking over this piece of Sarvāstivādin terminology. This is my second point; I am not aware that it has been noticed before. In Pali, therefore, what is said to be given is not merit but ‘possession’ (of merit) – patti-dāna. Though all Theravādins use the term patti (= Sanskrit prāpti), I suspect that hardly any of them know just what it means (as distinct from what it refers to), since it was borrowed from another school.

It has always been my understanding that my prayers transfer my “possession” of merit to my ancestors.

Even more problematic is Gombrich’s conclusion to his discussion of merit transference:

In early Buddhism, the Buddha was a savior only in the sense that he taught the way to salvation. In the Mahāyāna, both Buddhas and bodhisattvas saved more directly, by transferring merit. My third point is that this transfer of a reified karma seems to me to be what is crucial in turning Buddhism into a religion in which one could be saved by others. It is thus the transfer of merit which takes the place in Buddhism which divine grace occupies in Christianity.

How Buddhism Began, p56-57

I strongly object to – this transfer of a reified karma seems to me to be what is crucial in turning Buddhism into a religion in which one could be saved by others.

In the Lotus Sutra’s Parable of the Burning House, the Buddha explains: “Śāriputra! The rich man did not save his children by his muscular power although he was strong enough. He saved them from the burning house with a skillful expedient and later gave them each a large cart of treasures.”

The Buddha and the Bodhisattvas remain saviors only in the sense that they teach the way to salvation. The merit transfer that I offer to my ancestors, to my family and to all beings should never be confused with salvation. That’s not what I’m offering.

essentials, Blog

Takakusu’s Wheel of Life

Buddhism before the Lotus Sutra was divided into three vehicles – the Śrāvaka vehicle, the Pratyekabuddha vehicle and the Bodhisattva vehicle. These are introduced in Chapter One of the Lotus Sutra when Mañjuśrī explains the teaching of a long-ago Buddha called Sun-Moon-Light.

To those who were seeking Śrāvakahood, he expounded the teaching of the four truths, a teaching suitable for them, saved them from birth, old age, disease, and death, and caused them to attain Nirvāṇa. To those who were seeking Pratyekabuddhahood, he expounded the teaching of the twelve causes, a teaching suitable for them. To Bodhisattvas, he expounded the teaching of the six paramitas, a teaching suitable for them, and caused them to attain Anuttara-samyak-saṃbodhi, that is, to obtain the knowledge of the equality and differences of all things

Walpola Sri Rahula’s What the Buddha Taught offers an excellent discussion of the Four Noble Truths. Dale S. Wright’s The Six Perfections: Buddhism & the Cultivation of Character outlines the Bodhisattva practice. However, the teaching of the twelve causes is more problematic.

Those Twelve Causes are detailed in Chapter 7 of the Lotus Sutra:

[Great-Universal-Wisdom-Excellence Tathāgata expounded] the teaching of the twelve causes, saying, ‘Ignorance causes predisposition. Predisposition causes consciousness. Consciousness causes name-and-form. Name­-and-form causes the six sense organs. The six sense organs cause impression. Impression causes feeling. Feeling causes craving. Craving causes grasping. Grasping causes existence. Existence causes birth. Birth causes aging-and-death, grief, sorrow, suffering and lamentation. When ignorance is eliminated, predisposition is eliminated. When predisposition is eliminated, consciousness is eliminated. When consciousness is eliminated, name-and-form is eliminated. When name-and-form is eliminated, the six sense organs are eliminated. When the six sense organs are eliminated, impression is eliminated. When impression is eliminated, feeling is eliminated. When feeling is eliminated, craving is eliminated. When craving is eliminated, grasping is eliminated. When grasping is eliminated, existence is eliminated. When existence is eliminated, birth is eliminated. When birth is eliminated, aging-and-death, grief, sorrow, suffering and lamentation are eliminated.’

In the Sutra of Innumerable Meanings this is called the “Twelve-linked Chain of Dependent Origination.”

In the past I’ve relied on Ryuei McCormick’s Understanding the 12-Linked Chain of Causation. Having now read The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy, I feel Junjiro Takakusu offers a very accessible explanation of this teaching. This is long, but well worth the read.

The Wheel of Life is a circle with no beginning, but it is customary to begin its exposition at Blindness (unconscious state). Blindness is only a continuation of death. At death the body is abandoned, but Blindness remains as the crystallization of the effects of the actions performed during life. This Blindness is often termed Ignorance; but this Ignorance should not be thought of as the antonym of knowing; it must include in its meaning both knowing and not knowing—Blindness or blind mind, unconsciousness.

Blindness leads to blind activity. The ‘energy’ or the effect of this blind activity is the next Stage, Motive, or Will to Live. This Will to Live is not the kind of will which is used in the term ‘free will’; it is rather a blind motive toward life or the blind desire to live.

Blindness and Will to Live are called the Two Causes of the Past. They are causes when regarded subjectively from the present; but objectively regarded, the life in the past is a whole life just as much as is the life of the present.

In the life of the present the First Stage is Subconscious Mind. This is the first stage of an individual existence which corresponds, in actual life, to the first moment of the conception of a child. There is no consciousness yet; there is only the Subconscious Mind or the Blind Will toward life. When this Subconscious Mind advances one step and takes a form, it is the Second Stage of the present, Name-Form. The Name is the mind, because mind is something we know by name but cannot grasp. Name-Form is the stage of prenatal growth when the mind and body first come into combination.

In the Third Stage a more complex form is assumed and the six sense organs are recognized. They are the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body (organ of touch) and mind.

The Fourth Stage corresponds to the first one or two years after the birth of the child. The six sense organs reach the state of activity, but the sense of touch predominates. The living being begins to come into contact with the outside world.

Now that the living being is able to manifest its consciousness, it begins to take in the phenomena of the outside world consciously. This is the Fifth Stage called Perception, representing the growth scale of a child three to five years old. Here the individuality of the living being is definitely recognized; in other words, the status of the present life has been formed.

The above five Stages are called the Five Effects of the Past appearing in the Present. In these Stages the individual is formed, but the individual is not entirely responsible for its own formation because the causes of the past have effectuated the development of these Stages. From here on, the individual begins to create causes on his own responsibility, or in other words, enters the proper sphere of self-creation.

The first of the Three Causes in the Present is Desire. Through Perception the individual experiences sorrow, pleasure, suffering, enjoyment, or neutral feeling. When the experience is sorrow, suffering, or neutral feeling nothing much will happen. But when it is pleasure or enjoyment, the individual will endeavor to make it his own. This effort is Desire; it produces attachment. The first step of this attachment is the next Stage, Cleaving, the effort to retain the object of Desire. The last state of this attachment is Formation of Being. The term Existence is often used for this Stage, but as it is a link between the present and future, and the preliminary step for Birth, I believe that ‘Formation of Being’ is a more fitting term.

Desire, Cleaving and Formation of Being represent the three stages of the activities of an adult, and together constitute the Three Causes in the Present. While an individual is enjoying the effects of the past, he is forming the causes for the future. While the plum fruit is ripening on the tree, the core in the fruit is being formed. By the time the fruit is ripe and falls to the ground, the core too is ready to bring forth a new tree of its own to bear more fruits in the future.

As to the Future there are two Stages—Birth and Old age-Death, or in short, Birth and Death. When viewed from the Three Causes in the Present, Birth and Death may be termed the effects. But when viewed in the light of the continuous Wheel of Life, we may regard the future as the time when the Causes in the Present open out and close. Also, the Effects of the Future contain in themselves causes for the life still further in the future.

The present is one whole life, and so is the future. Past, Present and Future are each a whole life. In this Wheel of Life, the present is explained particularly minutely with eight stages, but in truth Blindness and Will to Live of the past and Birth and Death of the future have the same constituent stages as those of the present.

Because we human beings are accustomed to make the present the starting point of consideration, naturally the future is regarded as effects of the present. Therefore the life in the future is given descriptively as Birth and Death. And because the past is regarded as the cause of the present, it is given as causal principles, Blindness and Will to Live.

It is quite possible to reconstruct the Wheel of Life in the following manner in which Birth and Death are to be regarded as merely an abbreviated description of a whole life and Blindness and Will to Live are to be regarded as an ideological description of a round of life. Past, Present and Future are relative terms.

It is clear that the Causation Theory of Buddhism is not like the theory of causality of classical physical science which is a fixed theory. In Buddhism every Stage is a cause when viewed from its effect; when viewed from the antecedent cause, it is an effect. It may be also said that there is a cause in the effect, and an effect in the cause. There is nothing fixed in this theory.

The Blindness, which remains after the death of a living thing, is the crystallization of the actions (karma) which the living being performed during its life, or in other words, the ‘energy’ or influence of the actions that remain. One’s action (karma) is the dynamic manifestation of mental and physical energy. This latent energy may be called action-influence or potential energy. Action-influence remains after the action ceases, and this is what makes the Wheel of Life move. As long as there is energy, it has to work, and the Cycles of Causations and Becomings will inevitably—subconsciously or blindly—go on forever.

In other words, a living being determines its own nature and existence by its own actions. Therefore we may say the living being is self-created. The act of self-creation has continued in the past for thousands and millions of lives, and the living being has gone around the circle of Twelve Divisioned Cycle of Causations and Becomings over and over again.

The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy, p30-34

For the next month and a half I will be publishing daily excerpts from The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy.

essentials, Blog

Takakusu’s Claim of Violent Nichirenism

In discussing Nichiren’s teaching in The Essestials of Buddhist Philosophy, Juniro Takakusu has a distinct view:

Nichiren’s attacks against these schools became more violent than ever when he was mobbed, attacked and banished to Izu in 1261. Even after his return to Kamakura and to his native place to see his ailing mother, he did not refrain from his violent protest against the government as well as the religion, and went so far as to say that Tokiyori, the Hōjō Regent who believed in Zen and wore a Buddhist robe, was already in hell and that the succeeding Regent Tokumune was on the way to hell. Upon the arrival of the Mongolian envoys demanding tribute, he again remonstrated the Regime to suppress the heresies and adopt the Lotus doctrine as the only way out of national calamities. In 1271 he was arrested, tried and sentenced to death. In a miraculous way he escaped the execution and was banished to the remote island of Sado at the end of the same year.

The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy, p180

I find it fascinating that Takakusu would describe Nichiren’s attacks on the other schools as violent. Violence was what Nichiren experienced at Seichoji Temple on April 28, 1253, when he declared the supremacy of the Lotus Sutra. His non-violent efforts to persuade the rulers of Japan to adopt the Lotus as the teaching of the nation and to shun other sects was answered with exile to Izu.

Takakusu declares that Nichiren was “tried and sentenced to death.” This is not supported by Nichiren’s writings. I’ve also never read another source who suggested that Nichiren was given a trial where he could dispute the charges or that this trial resulted in a death sentence.

I admit to quibbling now, but as a retired editor I can’t abide Takakusu’s suggestion that somehow Nichiren was responsible for the “miraculous way he escaped the execution.”

Takakusu takes this “violent” view of Nichiren and applies it to his later followers:

The school, always colored by a fighting attitude, had many disputes with other religious institutions. In 1532, for example, it had a conflict with Tendai, the mother school, called the war of Tembun. One of the Nichiren sects called Fujufuse Sect (‘no give or take’) refused to comply with the parish rule conventionally set forth by the government and was prohibited in 1614 along with Christianity by the Tokugawa Shogunate.

The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy, p181

Again, we have violence against Nichiren followers described as their fault. Rev. Ryuei Michael McCormick offers this description of the dispute in 1532:

Despite the power struggles and doctrinal conflicts, the Kyoto temple militias gained in strength as the Ashikaga Shogunate’s power waned and Japan descended into anarchy. When the Nembutsu based peasant rebellions threatened the city of Kyoto in the summer of 1532, the militias came out in force to defend the city, and for the next four years they ruled the city of Kyoto. This brief rule of the Nichiren Buddhist townspeople is known as the Lotus Uprising (Hokke Ikki) in contrast to the Pure Land Buddhist peasant rebellions known as the Single-minded [Faith in Nembutsu] Uprisings (Ikko Ikki).

The Lotus Uprising ended disastrously in 1536 when a Nichiren Buddhist lay follower challenged and then defeated a Tendai monk in a public debate. Incensed, the warrior-monks of Mt. Hiei descended upon the city in force and burned down all 21 of the Nichiren Buddhist head temples in Kyoto as well as the whole southern half of the city and a good portion of the northern half. This event is known as the Tenmon Persecution.

History of Nichiren Buddhism

As for the Fujufuse Sect, it was not violent in its refusal to support institutions that failed to accept the Lotus Sutra as the supreme teaching of the Buddha. But the response of the regime to their defiance was certainly violent.

Perhaps Takakusu was again influenced by the times. As I explained yesterday, the lectures Takakusu gave in 1937-39 may have reflected the pre-World War II context. The Nichirenism of Chigaku Tanaka in those pre-war years certainly displayed “a fighting attitude.”

Tomorrow: Takakusu’s Wheel of Life

essentials, Blog, Books

The Essestials of Buddhist Philosophy

essentials-bookcover-webYesterday I completed reprinting quotes from Walpola Sri Rahula’s What The Buddha Taught. A trained Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka, the Rev. Dr. Rahula focused entirely on what is taught in his country. Today, I jump to the other extreme, with The Essestials of Buddhist Philosophy by Juniro Takakusu, a book completely devoted to the Buddhism of 20th century Japan.

Takakusu, 1886-1945, explains the rationale for this Japanese perspective in his Introduction:

A discourse on Buddhist Philosophy is usually begun with the philosophy of Indian Buddhism, and in this respect it is important to trace the development of Buddhist thought in India where it thrived for 1500 years. It should be remembered, however, that before Buddhism declined in India in the eleventh century, its various developments had already spread far into other countries. Hinayana Buddhism, or the Small Vehicle, which emphasizes individual salvation, continued in Ceylon, Burma, Siam and Cambodia. Mystic or esoteric Buddhism developed as Lamaism in Tibet. Mahayana Buddhism, or the Great Vehicle, which emphasizes universal salvation, grew in China where great strides in Buddhist studies were made and the different thoughts in Mahayana schools were systematized.

In Japan, however, the whole of Buddhism has been preserved — every doctrine of both the Hinayana and Mahayana schools. Although Hinayana Buddhism does not now exist in Japan as an active faith, its doctrines are still being studied there by Buddhist scholars. Mikkyō, which we may designate as the Esoteric Doctrine or Mysticism, is fully represented in Japan by Tendai mysticism and Tōji mysticism. The point which Japanese mysticism may be proud of is that it does not contain any vulgar elements, as does its counterpart in other countries, but stands on a firm philosophical basis.

The schools which were best developed in China are Hua-yen (Kegon, the ‘Wreath’ School) and T’ien-t’ai (Tendai, the ‘Lotus’ School). When the Ch’an (Zen) School is added to these two, the trio represents the highest peak of Buddhism’s development. These three flourished in China for a while and then passed away, but in Japan all three are still alive in the people’s faiths as well as in academic studies.

A rather novel form of Buddhism is the Amita-pietism. It is found to some extent in China, Tibet, Nepal, Mongolia, Manchuria and Annam; but it flourishes most in Japan, where it is followed by more than half of the population.

I believe, therefore, that the only way to exhibit the entire Buddhist philosophy in all its different schools is to give a resume of Buddhism in Japan. It is in Japan that the entire Buddhist literature, the Tripitaka, is preserved and studied. …

In the present study of Buddhist philosophy the subject will not be presented in its historical sequence but in an ideological sequence. This ideological sequence does not mean a sequence in the development of ideas; it is rather the systematization of the different schools of thought for the purpose of easier approach.

The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy, p9-10

As a result of this Japanese focus, Takakusu’s explanation of Buddhism focuses on six general principles common especially to all schools of Mahayana:

  1. The Principle of Causation
  2. The Principle of Indeterminism of the Differentiated
  3. The Principle of Reciprocal Identification
  4. The Principle of True Reality
  5. The Principle of Totality
  6. The Principle of Perfect Freedom

In discussing Reciprocal Identification, Takakusu offers his explanation of the major difference between the Hinayana and Mahayana.

Hinayana Buddhism is generally satisfied with analysis and is rarely inclined to synthesis. The Mahayana, on the other hand, is generally much inclined to the reciprocal identification of two conflicting ideas. If one party adheres to his own idea while the other party insists on his own, a separation will be the natural result. This is what happens in the Hinayana. The Mahayana teaches that one should put one’s own idea aside for a moment and identify one’s own position with that of the other party, thus mutually synthesizing the opposed positions. Then both parties will find themselves perfectly united. This is really a process of self-denial which is minutely taught in the dialectic method of the School of Negativism (Sunyata, Void).

The word for ‘reciprocal identification’ is more literally ‘mutual’ and ‘regarding,’ that is, ‘mutually viewing from each other’s point, ‘mutual identification,’ which is as much as to say an ‘exchange of views.’ It is indispensable to bring about a reconciliation of conflicting opinions or to effect a syncretism among opposing speculative systems. This trend of thought, in fact, served greatly to restore the original idea of tolerance which was revealed in the Buddha’s teaching but was almost entirely lost in the various schools of Hinayana which resulted from differences of opinion.

The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy, p43-44

The material for the book was originally delivered in a series of lectures during 1938-39 at the University of Hawaii, where Takakusu was a visiting professor.

The pre-World War II context is clear in Takakusu’s discussion of the Aryan race in India:

Against the asserted superiority of the Aryan race and the appellation of anarya (non-Aryan) given to the aborigines or some earlier immigrants [in India], the Buddha often argued that the word ‘Arya’ meant ‘noble’ and we ought not call a race noble or ignoble for there will be some ignoble persons among the so-called arya and at the same time there will be some noble persons among the so-called anarya. When we say noble or ignoble we should be speaking of an individual and not of a race as a whole. It is a question of knowledge or wisdom but not of birth or caste. Thus the object of the Buddha was to create a noble personage (arya-pudgala)—in the sense of a noble life.

The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy, p25

Before returning to Japan, Takakusu gave the university permission to publish this book. The first edition was published in 1947. The third edition, which is the one I read, was published in 1956.

Tomorrow: Takakusu’s Claim of Violent Nichirenism

Book Quotes

Book List