Bodhisattva Cults, Cosmology and Iconography

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, given how difficult the levels were to achieve (see the last post), those who attained the higher levels came to be viewed as great teachers and almost as gods. Level ten must have been virtual Buddha status and thus must have not been seen much. Much of this adoration ran in parallel with a similar trend in the Hindu Bhakti movement. Krsna was the prime Hindu example of a god on earth that came to be worshipped in a similar way.

A number of beliefs arose concerning the lives of various of the greatest Bodhisattvas and their current whereabouts and degree of contactibility. They were venerated and indeed contacted (allegedly). The realm of earth into which Siddhartha came is called Saha for these purposes. By its nature it only permitted Siddhartha to teach for about 50 years as he was a man on earth.

As I mentioned in a recent post, however, Mahayana Buddhists learn there are other better purer realms in which Buddhas and Bodhisattvas now live and sometimes they rule that entire realm and are able to teach for hundreds of years. Amitabha is the best known and apparently the greatest (as I mentioned in an earlier post). His name in Japanese is Amida (for those who were wondering - since in an earlier post I mentioned the alleged supernatural power of repeating his name in Japanese). He rules the Western pure Buddha-realm also called the ‘full of bliss’ realm (Sukhavati). The Pure Land scriptures that I’ve mentioned contain the most details of all of this.

The order of the development of cults is interesting. The first object of worship was the coming Buddha, Maitreya, but his cult has been overtaken by others. Next came the great Amitabha. His cult is still going strong. Avalokitesvara is a Buddha (or a Bodhisattva, depending on who you ask) and the 14^th Dalai Lama is believed by his followers to be a re-birth of Avalokitesvara (as are the 1^st to the 13^th). Avalokitesvara seems to be believed to have manifested himself in many forms (and again, depending on whom you ask, he may himself be a manifestation of Amitabha or Amitabha may be a manifestation of him).

There are thought to be five ‘families’ of Buddhas and Siddhartha is regarded as being of the "Lotus" family.

Also icons of various Bodhisattvas came to be standardised so you could tell (if you knew the iconography) who was being depicted and why. For example the fat Buddha we know isn’t Siddhartha (i.e. the historical Buddha). He hasn’t yet become a Buddha and will be known as Maitreya in about 8,000 years once he is born on earth. In earlier posts I’ve given images of the Buddas Manjusri and Amitabha. Manjusri is usually depicted with the sword as in the image I provided. Avalokitesvara is often depicted with many heads and many arms with eyes on them. In some cases, one of the heads is thought to be the head of Amitabha. Here is one e.g:

Avalokitesvara with many heads and arms (from Vietnam and Wikipedia)

Tara is a female Buddha (or, again, possibly a Bodhisattva). She, too, is said to have manifested herself many times incarnately as indeed we all have (around 21 or 22 known times at least in Tara's case). You will usually see her depicted with green skin as in the following image from Wikipedia. She is also usually depicted (as here) moving her foot down so she can get up from her lotus position and help people. She’s another Tibetan favourite:

If you see a red Buddha it’s likely to be Amida (the Japanese version of Amitabha) (see below) but the Tibetans also have a love affair with him as one can imagine given his relationship with Avalokitesvara:

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).

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.

The Madhyamika Mahayana School (Emptiness, the Second Turning and the Prajnaparamita Sutra)

This school in fact regarded itself as the most middle way.

Nagarjuna, who probably lived in the 1^st Century CE, is known as the founder and pre-eminent philosopher of Madhyamika. His idea was that Buddhism required ‘unpacking’ and especially favoured the Prajnaparamita Sutras as useful tools for this. He added his own thoughts in writing where he deemed clarification necessary, of course.

The school’s main theme is that what had been thought to be effable was, in fact, ineffable, and this is thus a critique of earlier Buddhism. Attempting to 'eff' what wasn’t effable (reality) was clearly an effing waste of energy. Zen/Chan Buddhists also favour the Prajnaparamita scriptures (among others) and meditation over scholastic effing efforts. Their well-known koens (for example, “what is the sound of one hand clapping” and “if a tree falls in the forest, and there is nobody around to hear it, does it make a sound”) attempt to illustrate this recognition of the ineffability of reality when the iconic Zen master answers “neti, neti (no, no)” to any and all efforts to answer such a koen (in terms of final truth). Incidentally, the Upanishad scriptures had the same idea of ineffability. Two truths are thus again delineated (if both are not effed): paramartha (final) and samvrti (relative).

Again, this may be compared to the philosophical concerns of Western philosophers. Kant especially, possibly the greatest philosopher of the past 500 years, had a go at ineffability in his Critique of Pure Reason. The basic idea that he used against all arguments for God’s existence of the time was that one can’t apply human reason or language in fully explaining God, for example as a uniquely uncaused cause. God for him must surely be beyond cause, not uncaused (could we even prove that we were truly in a caused reality, after all?) While he was a Christian, his philosophy contributed to a new Western agnostic movement. The difference in the use of ineffability in Buddhist philosophy is that Madhyamika Buddhists still believe that while the infinite may not be explained it may certainly be understood or it may be better to say realised (eventually) by a properly trained human mind.

This concern to notice an ineffability reminds us in effect of Siddhartha’s concern to not answer his famous 14 questions of the two earliest canons (by not answering, was he in effect answering them “neti, neti”? On the Madhyamika view, the answer to that is yes - he knew the answer but didn’t answer because there were no words for the answer – that is, it’s ineffable. He allowed his non-answer to be noted, though, for the same reason the Zen school broadcasts koens – so that we may see that there may well be an answer but one that isn’t effable). The subtlety of all this is seen (especially by this school) to be part of the reason Siddhartha was at first so reluctant to teach. Nagarjuna philosophised that Madhyamika Buddhism was engaged in a dialectic debate that was certainly necessary but definitely not sufficient for a complete understanding of ultimate truths. The reality loomed beyond and over the debate that brought it near to view, clarified sensitivity to it and partly illuminated it.

So the specific characteristics (svalaksana) of the dharmas and other things listed in the abhidharma gave merely a version of relative truth that Siddhartha left to Madhyamika to complete when monks were ready to reject nihilism (and, in the way monks of the first turning still believe they are true, at least, they aren’t really true). Even the duality of samsara and nirvana is now seen to be illusory. Importantly, there can be no right concept. Some are certainly regarded as more right (or at least more complete) than others but dualities are thus not replaced by nihilistic nullities and eternalities but by mere relativities (and the purest idea of non-self); dependent arising is as real as it’s ever been and then some. Even dharmas had no self, Nagarjuna needed to make plain. The abhidharma critiques come from both Nagarjuna and the Prajnaparamita discourses themselves.

So the Arahants have unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, who can say) missed out (so far). This went some way to democratising Buddhism, though, because it went some way towards cutting down the tallest of tall poppies in the world of Buddhism.

The concise Heart Sutra is perhaps the best known and most important Buddhist scripture today and for all time and is a Prajnaparamita Sutra. A 9^th Century copy of it in Chinese is also in the oldest known extant printed book. Its focus, too, is on the emptiness emphasised by this school. It is also favoured by Thich Nhat Hanh, who I’ll discuss in a later post. The emptiness emphasised in the Heart Sutra is the emptiness of independence from other things. Nhat Hanh treats this subject in an article in which he wonders aloud how a piece of paper is different from the sun that shone on the tree that was the source of the paper to grow it or the labour of the logger that chopped the tree down to begin the paper production process or the logger her/himself or the food the logger eats and so on.

So the emptiness that follows from this is not solipsist but rather emptiness of self-existence (svabhava). This, then, is the paramartha truth: both and neither nothingness and the eternal – the true and ultimate Middle Way. This idea of emptiness is needed to reduce attachment to the ultimate extent (even to the teachings of the school itself – anything that may be expressed in words may be likened to Siddhartha’s famous ‘raft’ of the raft parable – one day they may all be discarded). What’s more, the awe of truly realising the ultimate cannot but produce the purest compassion.