More on Mahayana

It is, in fact, a common thing to openly follow more than one religion (including Mahayana) in East Asia. Theravadans may also follow Buddhism and other religions, though it tends to be more clandestine (so other rites are less likely to be openly practiced in the Buddhist temple). Early Jesuit missionaries in China found the idea of professing a combination of faiths especially difficult to get their heads around.

So we have in some Mahayana communities three yanas (vehicles (or ways)): the monk or nun way, the hermit way (pratyekabuddhayana) and the layperson way to be a good Buddhist. Walpola Rahula discusses these roles in this and Theravada contexts in his Zen and the Taming of the Bull. Many of Siddhartha’s immediate disciples chose the Arhat path open to them (I’ve mentioned in an earlier post how much easier it would be expected to be for them given his proximity to their lives – Christian and Muslim traditionists tend to have a similar view of people whose lives were directly touched in incarnate human terms by their respective main religious paragons). Rahula acknowledges (in agreement with what I wrote in an earlier post) that Theravadans honour the Bodhisattva way without according it the precedence over the other two that Mahayana Buddhism does.

In Mahayana theology, Arhathood tends not to be regarded as the end, in any event, as it is often seen as merely permitting a rest stage perhaps leading to a better re-birth but a re-birth all the same. This is clearly not the Theravada view. Their belief is that an Arhat is a “never-returner” by definition having attained nirvana.

The Lotus Sutra has another analogy that again attempts to explain the difference. Suppose we are together in the middle of a vast desert with Siddhartha (this desert is meant to be an analogy for the much-hated samsara of both Theravadan and Mahayana tradition). Then, out of compassion, Siddhartha causes a mirage so that we believe the end to the desert is near. In his compassion, then, he created this mirage (Arhathood) in order that we might be encouraged and strive to reach the end. Once we reach the mirage we will (perhaps unhappily) realise that it is a mirage but by then we will actually be much closer to the end of the desert and have more strength to get out of it than if there had been no mirage produced. So Buddha is not beyond telling at least one ‘white’ lie it seems, if the means can be justified by this most ultimate end: ultimate liberation. The sutra directly teaches that there is only one way out of the desert and that is Buddhahood (so Siddhartha, by ‘providing’ that sutra, at least makes good on his promise to unmask the mirage in the end).

The American Theravadan Jack Kornfield once joked “whether there are one or three, all vehicles will be towed away”.