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).

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).

Meditation and the Getting of Wisdom (Bhavana)

The getting of wisdom by meditation has various terms including Samadhi (concentration), samatha (peacefulness of mind) and jhana (absorption) and meditators seek Ekagrata (one-pointedness). Meditation and the arrival at wisdom thereby are the second and third parts of the marga following on from the sila of my last post and are all about the clarifying of the mind begun by learning to follow the rules or vinaya.

Siddhartha himself, as I’ve noted, began by following the methods of at least two of the great Sramana teachers of his day in his region but then he added his own steps. He realised that the two teachers only taught the clarifying of the mind for its own sake so his additional step was a thought process designed directly to get wisdom from an apparently already clarified mind. This next stage of wisdom development is called prajña, vipasyana (insight) and smrti (awareness).

The realisation that different traditions may validly differ on how to bring wisdom about relies on the teaching of the Buddhist concept of skilful means (upaya). The idea here is that Siddhartha recognised there were several paths to enlightenment suited to different people depending upon their current states and interests. As always, pragmatism and experimentation were orders of the day. Incidentally some Mahayana teachings include that Siddhartha was actually a Buddha from birth who underwent his own trials and errors merely as an example to us to be prepared to engage in a trial and error approach as we seek knowledge. There are sometimes said to be 84,000 (or 84,000,000) doors or more appropriately, perhaps, doorways (a less literal translation from the Indian would be heaps of doorways) to the house of wisdom. Siddhartha did apparently give the punters options as they sought their own truths. A way of understanding the entrances is said to be via the metaphor that when a finger is pointed at the moon, one is meant to see the moon rather than examine the finger. Here then are a few of the approaches that have arisen:

One approach is that while in an enhanced state the meditator should analyse the theory of non-self taught to her or him as s/he recites it in her or his imagination. This is held to lead to real experience of its truth.

One Theravada tradition called vipassana in Pali (vipasyana in Sanskrit) takes leaps of stages directly from basic breath training to promotion of awareness that is held to spark the insight required for the wisdom required to be attained. There are held to be four ways to get there this quickly (to the required state of mindfulness). It’s about first noting the rising and passing of emotions, being fully aware of the emotions, not reacting to the emotion in the habitual way and finally being aware of the result and effect of not reacting in that way. This produces the requisite realisation of the error of the past thoughts and short-circuits the 12 links of dependent arising that I mentioned earlier. All of impermanence, non-self and dukkha can thus be realised by this experience of relative and relatively unobstructed and undistorted clarity of mental ‘vision’. So it’s an intellectual pursuit and it’s about breaking unskilful habits. The Platform Sutta of the Sixth Patriarch discusses this method.

Another method is the well known one of focusing on conundrums (called koens in Zen Buddhism) such as what is the sound of one hand clapping?

Meditating on the five aggregates and the twelve links of dependent arising directly may reveal the truth. The links that I’ve discussed earlier are sometimes divided for this purpose into three aspects of samsara: klesa (defilements – links 1, 8 and 9), karma (actions – links 2 and 10) and dukkha (results – links 3 to 7, and links 11 and 12). The wheels created by especially Tibetan Buddhist artists could be used in the meditation on the 12 links and contained all the information apparently needed for even illiterate monks.

One may choose to use, as a practical form of Bhavana, Metta or Maitra Bhavana (cultivation of loving kindness or friendliness). There is also a Metta Sutra that bears meditation upon. One wishes for the happiness of all beings beginning with one’s friends and eventually getting to strangers and even enemies who hate and want to hurt us. There are a group of related Bhavanas related to this one that are collectively called the divine abodes (brahmavihara) and they include cultivation of things such as compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity (often done first when they are all done together). The name of the next Buddha, Maitreya, evidently points to the belief that s/he is expected to be all about this loving kindness/friendliness lark.

Visualising attributes of Siddhartha and/or of Buddhas generally is another form of Bhavana used (called buddhanusmrti or Buddha remembrance).

In the next posts, I'll discuss the ideas of nirvana, non-self and truth some more before discussing some more history of Buddhist thinking in the lead-up to discussing the major split between what are now called the Mahayana and Theravada traditions of Buddhism.

The First Noble Truth (Dukkha – suffering or unsatisfactoriness)

The idea is that the cosmos we know of (as unenlightened beings) is in conditioned existence (samsara) (i.e. things follow from other things) and that this is unsatisfactory (dukkha is our very state of existence, then).

There are three categories. The first is dukkha dukkha and this means the clearly unsatisfactory things such as direct suffering, pain, trauma, loads, psychological distress and loss/bereavement. The second form is the unsatisfactoriness of the reality that we know the happinesses we may be feeling now will surely end in old age or death (viparinama (change) dukkha). Siddhartha is asking for people to consider how their lives are unsatisfactory in the here and now (are we in pain now or do we fear the pain of loss of our happiness in the future?) The third form of unsatisfactoriness is the very fact that those states we feel - good or bad - are not our independent states, they are conditioned because we are living in a conditioned world (samkhara (conditioned existence) dukkha (samskara duhkka in Pali)). Siddhartha wants followers to examine whether this conditioned state is real or must be real for all time. He also asks them to ask if any of these three states is satisfactory. It’s fairly clear that if they are our reality that our reality is not ideal.

Is knowing this, then, the beginning of the way to reach for the ideal reality that is possible? The idea is that pondering this in itself in depth is useful to us if we seek enlightenment. This is really a pondering of whether we have agency to make our own reality or not. The answer of course is too subtle for us to simply know without in-depth pondering (and pondering over many lifetimes may be required before we can know the answer). The Buddhist argues both that 'we' are dependent by nature and that imagining otherwise is an illusion that we need to try to know as the illusion it is but that knowing this is part of finding a way out of this major chain of dukkha states we call our lives.

There are within this dukkha (samsara) reality held to be five or six realms plus some meditation level realms and we’ve now entered into the metaphysics/ontology of abhidharma. Tibetan Buddhists especially have created wheels of existence that depict the realms for the benefit of the unlettered. One actually shows 31 realms because there are various sub-realms all of which humans might potentially experience in some sense in their lifetimes so human mind experiences in some sense reflect Buddhist cosmology.

The five realms that we can say Buddhists accept as at least real in some sense according to the abhidharma are the Hell realm (niraya), the Animal realm (tiracchanaroni – especially difficult to get out of), the Ghostly realm (pettivisaya – the ghosts may or may not be hungry and/or thirsty ghosts), the Human realm (mantissa) and the realm of the Gods. Some wheels depict a further realm of Titans (a demi-god (Asura) realm). Within the actual God (deva and Brahma) realms some hold that there are six lower God sub-realms and sixteen higher God sub-realms.

I’ve mentioned that only humans, egotistical though they are said to be, are able to escape to nirvana because only they are able to see both what is and what can be but is not now and four of the possible realms are realms regarded as higher than the higher God realms that can only be reached by human meditation (called formless dhyana/Samadhi/Zen) - levels five to eight of meditation - the highest of them is on the edge of nirvana but still a realm of existence and the four lower so-called pure form levels of meditation one to four permit communion with various higher gods). Humans can also arguably be reborn in these highest four realms (five to eight) as a result of having reached them in an earlier life by meditation.