Zen/Chan and Vajrayana/Tantra

I’m leaving the details of these ideas out of my series because they didn’t strictly have originating ideas in the first millennium of Indian Buddhist thought and practice. They are of course developments that have influenced Japanese/Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism especially.

In brief, though, if it helps, Zen and Chan Buddhism both consider the nature of the mind to be both something and nothing. They also both consider and attempt the realisation of our Buddha-natures.

As far as Vajrayana/Tantra is concerned it is informed by the Yogacara view of the three kayas. Asanga’s ‘turning around’, they also believe, is a beginning-point for the radical realisation of our Buddha-natures.

In the remaining posts I’m returning to discussion of some of the things that unite especially but no only Mahayana Buddhists (just as I considered in earlier posts what united Buddhists before the advent of Mahayana (and still unites Theravada Buddhists and Mahayana Buddhists to some extent today)).

Yogacara and Experience and Mind-Only

So as I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, Yogacara was more than a doctrinal position. It was about experience and meditation. The doctrine is clear however, there are three natures and that’s what Yogacarins are hoping to experience. The explanations of doctrinal matters are also methods for getting to this final result. Within the practice, practitioners gain an understanding that the appearance (abhasa) of things is clouded in their initial unenlightened condition by vijñana (literally “divided knowing”) and then clarified for the enlightened (that have correctly followed the practice) by buddhajñana. A Buddhist saying illustrating the course of this practice goes something like this: “at first, before I became a monk, I saw rivers and mountains. Then I became a monk and saw that there were no rivers and mountains. Then I became enlightened and I realised that there were rivers and mountains”. So, one goes progressively through two divided visions to one real realisation. Another saying goes something like “If you see a Buddha on the road, kill him!” The idea here is that we must realise the Buddha that is inside us rather than seek one outside us. In one of the Maitreya-Asanga treatises the author explains that sunyata is about the non-existence of the subject-object duality [it’s therefore in accord with Madhyamika teachings in this] but then adds that sunyata also means that this very non-existence has an existence.

It may be argued given its focus on how the enlightened mind can make non-existence existent that Yogacara is a Mind-Only teaching but is it and indeed what does this mean? It sounds solipsist or something of that kind. In fact that has been an argument against Yogacara – that its Mind-Only aspect is mere solipsism also tended to the eternalism that is also a Buddhist issue with Hinduism. Yogacarins argue that their teaching is rather a therapy than an actual view as such and so can’t be solipsist. The aim is merely to reveal to us that we are living in a world that we can’t understand and that realising both that we can’t understand and that we are living a life is to understand the world as it really is. So it’s a therapy all about the mind and our experience of the mind but that doesn’t mean there is nothing but mind. Mind is also just the same as everything around it: sunyata. One of the Sutras (I think possibly the Lankavatara) says that the world is only in our mind but that there is something outside that but that that something is outside our experience. What’s more, cittamatra (Mind-Only) is therefore naturally regarded as being about the experience of more than merely mind – so mind is clearly not the ultimate and only real thing for the Mind-Only view that is one feature of the Yogacara view.

Nevertheless, there is no distinction to be made between mind and object of mind (from the earliest Asanga writings this was made clear as an object of the teaching). Yogacara isn’t dualist.

It may be fair to say that some Chinese versions of Yogacara verge rather strangely even more closely to idealism of some kind (subject to their own caveats). It might also be fair to say that Descartes’ solipsist cogito ergo sum starting point is idealist but it was only a starting point for him however illogical his argument out of it may have been. Cittimatrata is the truth of cittimatra (which is a multitude of things depending on what stage of understanding you are at within the school).

The Yogacara Reaction (a Third Turning Exemplar)

Was it a reaction to problems with Madhyamika? Certainly, the problems it claims to address are that of negativity and the potential for nihilism of the Madhyamika way (how Middle Way can negation really be, it essentially argued?) This school also (as with Madhyamika) arose out of the practice of meditation more than as a purely scholastic divergence. Its name means “practice (cara) of (a) discipline (yoga)” and it rose to prominence in the 4^th and 5th Centuries CE – so it was the latest starter I’ve so far considered (though I’ve briefly mentioned later-developed schools such as Zen and the Tibetan Vajrayana schools and also modern day divisions).

The Mahayana view, generally, had begun to dominate India and Buddhist thought was experiencing one of its heydays. One of its greatest thinkers and the great Sarvastivadan scholastic abhidharma commentator Vasubandhu lived at this time and eventually converted to the less scholastic Yogacara Mahayana view himself after producing his great Sarvastivadan commentary (in which he noted with concern the Sarvastivadan school’s decline), though he remained a thinker and commentator, just with the reduced scholastic pressure inherent in this meditative school. He was apparently converted by his half-brother Asanga and clearly went on to become a key philosopher of the new school.

Asanga had been Sarvastivadan but become a devotee of the not-yet-Buddha, Maitreya, and was also the originator (with alleged assistance of Maitreya during meditation) of much of the Yogacara School’s ideology. According to a popular fable, Asanga’s complete conversion to Maitreya devotion had come about after much searching and prayer to Maitreya for guidance. Finally, when he had reached a point close to despair if not of actual despair, he saw a dog ridden with worms. Further, he realised in his then state that the only way to rid the extremely weakened dog of the worms without killing it was to lick the worms out of its body one by one and proceeded to do so (whereupon the dog revealed itself to be Maitreya and explained that his compassion and wisdom had finally allowed him to see the Maitreya, who had always been with him, in the dog). Besides the Sandinirmocana that I refer to below, Asanga was given five other Sutras by Maitreya (hence their author is usually cited as Maitreya-Asanga). There is a story of one of these Sutras being recited to Asanga by the alleged voice of Maitreya in front of an assembly that was unable to see Maitreya (could Asanga (or Maitreya) have been a great ventriloquist?)

The view’s major special claim to fame is its explicit emphasis on the idea that we all have a Buddha nature (remembering from an earlier post that there was a class of Sutras that had this emphasis – it is, generally, a Yogacara-specific class of Sutra). One of its pre-eminent ones is called the Sandinirmocana, which explicitly mentions that its teachings are a third turning of the wheel of dharma and discusses the limitations of the other turnings (without supplementation by the affirmation and negation of Yogacara that is the true Middle way).

The most completely Yogacara-only class of Mahayana scriptures is the Mind Only class (in terms of what different Mahayana Siddhantas view as useful Mahayana texts). As a rule, it has a more positive-sounding spin on things than Madhyamika. There is for this new view something in the sunyata of an excellent or even an ordinary mind that luminesces, radiates and possesses clarity (prabhasvara).

The difference between these schools is perhaps reminiscent of the difference between Plato and Aristotle later further developed in Western philosophy on the nature of mind and in fact this school may have been inspired by debate within the Hellenistic world that came to the attention of Buddhists.

The Avatamsaka Sutra uses an analogy that suggests all Buddhas are like jewels in an infinite cosmological net all reflecting off each other for us to experience in all their splendid co-reflected awesomeness. This became an especially important Sutra in China where it was seen by many as the highest explanation of what Siddhartha’s actual way of experiencing the universe was (once he became a Buddha). Many of the apparent paradoxes and confusions generally found in Zen and Chan commentaries and thought can be partly traced back to this particular idea of Siddhartha’s (and, by extension, enlightened ones') experiences. For instance, when asked what the ultimate principle of Buddhism is, a Zen master might answer “the oak tree in the garden” because the enlightened Zen monk is expected to see the luminescence, radiance and 'thusness' or 'suchness' (tathata) in all things where the ordinary person isn’t looking.

Being all about meditation, it was natural for its focus to be on the mind, perception and experience. It attempted to deal with so-called false appearances to the mind (pravrtti) by a turning about of this false reality (paravrtti) to get around the false appearances. The focus is on the teaching that it is realisable that there are no objects or subjects, which it calls graspable things (grahyas) and graspers (grahakas), in this state. The unique emphasis here (by the unique use of these specific terms and rejection of the more usual Mahayana terms subject and object and thereby their existence) is thus on undermining whatever it is that ‘causes’ grasping by denying any possible graspability of any actual object by any actual subject.