Gandhi

The essence of all of the policies of all of the men I mentioned in the last post is aiming for non-violent solutions for political and social problems but Gandhi seems to have inspired all of the others so I’ll start with him (even if he was Hindu).

He was born and raised in the Indian region of Gujarat in the late 19^th Century where at the time the very non-violent religion Jainism that I mentioned in one of my earliest Buddhism posts was quite common. Jainism most likely influenced the young Gandhi. Incidentally, the founder of Jainism and Siddhartha may have been actual contemporaries and known of each other’s work. Gandhi thought at length about the concept noted as the main special focus of Jainism of doing no harm (expressed in Sanskrit as ahimsa). There is much written about Gandhi (and all of these men) but ahimsa is the central feature of his ideas (along with engagement with problems) that they all took on.

Another feature of his early ideas is that he recognised and regretted (as did others of my list of wise men) that, between Globalisation and the modern era population explosion, the environment was no longer conducive to the retreat into the wilderness of the wise person, which was so often the inspiration for religious regeneration in earlier eras. The wilderness had gone. Buddhism, too, could be mined (and was) in order to find the inspiration for the environmental movement that arose in the last century or so in the West. On a deeper level, he saw the environmental challenge as a destruction of habitat that would inevitably lead to conflict. Retreat was no longer possible. The question for our three thinkers was ‘how to be’ with the conflict.

The conflict Gandhi faced was between ‘Indian’ British Indians and their colonisers, the British Indians among the British Indians and Britain. His way to be was ‘peaceful’ yet ‘struggling’. A Muslim woman in a documentary recently compared this approach to her interpretation of jihad and indeed there was always significant Muslim support for Gandhi’s approach (and even for Gandhi himself). Thich Nhat Hanh’s problem was the colonialist Vietnam War (he led a Buddhist delegation to the Paris Peace Talks). The Dalai Lama’s problem was an alleged invasion and suppression of Tibet and its culture and politics by the Chinese pouvoirs-en-place-ont-été. MLK’s bug-bear was the colonisation of the poor of the US by the US ruling class (and globally) and of US ex-slaves. These men (and Aung San Suu Kyi – a Theravada Buddhist) have also contributed their non-violent ahimsa ideals directly to environmentalism.

Gandhi studied law in England and was then fortuitously invited to practise in South Africa in a practice that helped many Indians there. In England he had been especially influenced by learning of Jesus’s “Sermon on the Mount” and Christianity more generally and the social ideas of people like Tolstoy.

In South Africa he became committed to the welfare of Indians and he tells of having been asked to leave a first class carriage despite holding a valid ticket. He cites what then happened as his first approach to non-violent protest. He at first refused and upon being manhandled out of the carriage attempted to resume it whereupon he was further ‘roughed up’ and later arrested.

In Hindu terms, he was a karma yogi, meaning an active practitioner, and is known to have said something to the effect of “whoever thinks religion has nothing to do with politics knows nothing about religion and nothing about politics”. He repeated the name of the god, Ram, as a general spiritual practice and was reportedly repeating it as he died at the hands of an assassin.

Returning to an India during the First World War that knew him well as a defender of the Indians of South Africa, he set up a “Tolstoy” ashram (commune). He apparently also had some correspondence with Tolstoy. He was immediately asked to join the independence movement and, with the Indian National Congress Party, set to work on organising non-violent civil disobedience. His belief was that a few hundred Brits could hardly resist the civil disobedience of (at that time) a population of 600 million British Indians for very long and that violence could thus easily be avoided. He also tried to establish ecumenism among Indian British Indians (the ‘Indians’ of ‘British India’ - now Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis but probably not so focused on the Burmese or the natives of the Aden Settlement which were also considered British Indians until 1937) especially working on the fraught relationship between Hindus and Muslims. He also worked to end discrimination against the ‘lower’ castes in Hinduism.

Some of his philosophising can be easily seen to compare to Mahayana Buddhism. He argued for non-violence based on the truth (satya) and compassion. The truth is known as a result of turning away from the exterior world in order to gain wisdom but compassion turns the wise person back to resolve the problems of the exterior world. He differs from it to the extent that he saw non-violence as a means inextricably causally linked to truth as an end whereas a Buddhist would tend to not make such a clear causal link between the two.

He saw non-violence not as a mere non-action but as a positive force. He encouraged ‘holding on to truth (Satyagraha)’ meaning in the case of struggles with others actually believing in the truth of the best nature of your ‘opponent’. As a theist, he saw this best nature as deriving in some way from the Ultimate Truth. So his model wasn’t adversarial; it wasn’t about “us” and “them”. Being ‘friends’ with the better nature of an adversary meant that one couldn’t contemplate violence against her or him and also that only these peaceful means could lead to peaceful ends. Here are three rough paraphrases of quotes that illustrate his philosophy:

There are no roads to peace; peace is the only road.

An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

Befriending one who believes you to be an enemy is the quintessence of religion.

After a life of preaching non-violence as a Hindu (though he never regarded Jainist ahimsa as an absolute requirement in conflict) he was emphatically rejected by a member of his own faith when he was assassinated by a Hindu militant in 1947 who apparently thought he was too soft on Muslims.

The Mahayana Bodhisattva Path

This typically begins with a vow to enter on the path upon becoming a novice monk or nun and some special spiritual exercises (in addition to the usual ones) aimed at producing a compassionate and enlightened heart and mind (bodhicitta) are entered into.

The idea is to go beyond the outer behaviour required by the vinaya and focus on developing more perfect inner behaviours which derive from more enlightened inner attitudes. This path began to be encouraged with the second turning and was, of course, strengthened with the humanism/everythingism of the third turning.

Meditation on the equality of everything was one method employed in this cultivation of compassion. This was, of course, aided by the idea that everything had a Buddha Nature and at the same time that ‘everything’ was ‘no thing’.

Meditating upon selfishness (perhaps the opposite of the intense compassion sought) and its results was (and is) also used or (perhaps ironically) on the teachings of the self-happiness that altruism brings (now borne out by Western science).

Equanimity can also be meditated upon (labels like ‘the other’, ‘friend’ and ‘stranger’ might be turned over in the mind, their usefulness questioned and the labels mentally discarded). ‘Self’ interest might thus be questioned and discarded as a useful attitude in the very real problematic nature of ‘self’ itself thus established. It may be noted in the meditation that at some time in a past life every single being may have been both the mother and the child (and perhaps also both friend and enemy) of every other single being (in extreme cases both sentient and non-sentient beings are included in this in some mystical sense). This was all expected to break down excessively self-cherishing attitudes as compared with attitudes to others.

You can guess that a lot of this was also done by pre-Mahayana monks and nuns seeking to be Arhats but this was clearly now more of a necessity as even more extreme unselfishness had to be cultivated in order to now go beyond mere (inherently relatively selfish) Arhat-thinking.

Only after this programme had proved successful would the ten bhumis I mentioned in an earlier post actually be entered into. Even to be considered to have attained the first of these is considered a great achievement within Buddhism. The formal attainment of each level gives a rank within the religious community and teaching rights with regard to ranks attained. The attainment of rank six is indicated by the honorific Aryabodhisattva (advanced Bodhisattva).

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).

More on what seemed to make Yogacara such an Improvement

So what was really so positive about this change? A few doctrinal notes follow:

Tathagatagharba:

This is the idea of the Buddha Nature (or Essence or Matrix or Seed) in all of us. In this sense we are all Buddhas. Our Buddha-seed needs to be grown, though, and that means we must nurture it in an analogous way to the way we would nurture plant seeds if we wanted to grow a garden. We need to give it the sun it needs, the right amount of water (neither too much nor too little – Buddhism is all about the Middle path, after all), etc. We are sleeping Buddhas because our minds are just like Buddha minds ready to become awakened.

Obscurations (avarana) are hiding these facts from us, in this doctrine, as clouds hide the vastness of the sky beyond on a very dark (and wild and woolly) day. This concern at avarana (and its imagery) especially appealed to Mahayana Buddhists in China but affected all of Mahayana Buddhist thinking. There are two types of avarana, klesa avarana (caused by passions and the idea of self) and jñeya avarana (caused by cognition), and Arhats are supposed to have only dealt with the first type.

The Three Kayas of Buddhas

These are three dimensions or bodies of Buddhas. Works popular in the second turning literature had mentioned two bodies: rupakaya (Siddhartha himself as a man was a rupakaya) and dharmakaya (some kind of ultimate Buddha dimension). Yogacara tradition calls the formed rupakaya dimension nirmanakaya (a ‘measured-out’ dimension), uses the same word for the same second dimension and adds sambhogakaya. This translates as the enjoyment dimension. The distinction between all three is believed to be such a subtle one that only a Bodhisattva at a somewhat advanced level can perceive it.

Ordinary beings can somewhat experience all the kayas, however, by experiencing a statue of a Buddha. The final kaya is held to link the first two somehow. Thus the studied iconography I will mention in a future post is regarded as important as its proper execution is the avenue that best allows this luminous kaya linkage to be experienced by the ordinary mortal. This is part of the reason for the jewellery and elaborate clothing often depicted – that’s the best material way to indicate (if unfortunately imperfectly) the greatness of the luminosity.

Meditating on the Buddhas (as many Mahayana Buddhists do) can even somewhat reveal this three-kaya complex for normal mortals, too. It’s meant to ‘tap into’ our own Buddha-like dimensions.

This all may be a rationale for lay devotionalism but it is stressed that only the advanced Bodhisattva may experience the radiance to the full extent. Again Chinese and Zen Buddhists have some confusing sayings (in this case along with some from the Tantric/Vajrayana form of Tibetan Buddhism) that arise from this idea of the three kayas. In Zen, for example, it has been said that “the trees, stones and mountains all preach sunyata” and that “the teaching of vulture peak [where Siddhartha preached about sunyata] is still going on”. This is meant to mean that there is Buddha-radiance around today for those who will see it and learn from the sambhogakaya.

The devotional “Pure Land” Schools such as Amitabha devotees connected especially with the idea of sambhogakaya.

The Eight Consciousnesses

Regular Buddhism notes six consciousnesses (the five Western senses and the sense of mind). Yogacara adds what it calls store-consciousness and defilement of mind bringing the total to eight.

Store-consciousness contains our karmic seeds (vasana or samskara) that affect us by making us see ourselves as subjects. Other Buddhists have claimed that this doctrine sneaks the idea of self back into a Buddhism where it doesn’t belong. The Yogacarins counteract this criticism by reaffirming the impermanence and dependence of all of the consciousnesses and asserting that the difficulty of this doctrine for the human mind is part of the reason it is part of the third turning. They ask for trust that this doctrine is in no way eternalist.

The defilement of mind (klistamanas) is the consciousness that perceives the store-consciousness to be an ego and formulates the idea of subject and object.

The clear aim of Buddhism in this connection, then, is to purify our minds of these last two consciousnesses.

The Three Natures (Svabhavas)

These three new philosophical concepts are needed, according to the Yogacara view, to give an adequate account of reality (in this philosophical role, they replace the two truths in a way). There are two things regarded as being wrong to do: attribution (samoropa) and negation or “cutting off (vccheda)”, linked to the first two turnings. Our experience, then, goes on and produces appearances and there are three progressive aspects of this:

1) Parikalpita – constructed and mistaken knowing (an issue for epistemology);

2) Paratantra – dependent existence (an ontological question); and

3) Parinispanna – perfected existence (a soteriological matter).

Realisation that normal knowledge (parikalpita) is mistaken leads to an end of externalising and ideas of subject and object and of paratantra which also leads to parinispanna, the true realisation of paratantra. Rationalisation of paratantra is not sufficient, realisation is required, and paratantra is not negation as that would be productive of a nihilist parinispanna. Parinispanna is regarded as a cleansing of parikalpita from paratantra (as a nugget of gold is refined out of its usual ore).