Buddhism in Tibet
Tibetan
culture was transformed by Buddhism, which arrived from India,
Afghanistan and China shortly after 600 CE. Mahayana Buddhism became
not only Tibet’s official religion but its social structure, art and
architecture as well. The Tibetan written characters were created to
translate Buddhist texts into the Tibetan language. Many Mahayana
texts, including Nagarjuna’s, survived in Tibet as Islam took over
India. Tibetans claim that Buddhism arrived centuries earlier, when the
Buddha himself and other Buddhas came to Tibet to teach. One amusing
story has Buddha asking about Tibet before journeying there, and he is
told that the Tibetans are the nicest people ever. Buddha worries that
if the Tibetans are so extraordinarily nice, he will lose his finely
honed ability to deal with jerks, so he takes along a terrible tea
servant who constantly mocks the Buddha and plays tricks on him.
Buddhism
developed into many competing schools of thought in Tibet as it had in
India and did in China, Japan and throughout Asia. Tibetan Buddhism is
known for its elaborate rituals, tantric practices, meditation
exercises, and systems of symbols, deities and demons. Tibetans believe
that many demons were converted to Buddhism by great teachers, and so
much artwork features demons who are protectors of Buddhism, its
teachings and the community. Gazing at these demons, and similarly at
skull bowls of blood, decapitated heads and other horrifying images is
thought to purify the self of obstructions and identify with the lowest
and most horrifying levels of the self and mind.
Soon
after Tibetan Buddhism was established, there was an influx of Chinese
Chan (Zen, in the Japanese, which we will briefly cover today and move
to koans exclusively in two weeks). Controversy arose between those who
supported the elaborate Buddhist practices and those, including many
nobles, who supported the simplicity of Zen, which taught that
enlightenment could be achieved suddenly and without elaborate
ceremonies and practices. Zen Buddhists do traditionally believe in
deities and practice ceremonies, but meditation and enlightenment became
the primary and simple focus. Interestingly, here in the Bay Area and
in America the Beatniks loved Zen and its stark black and white imagery,
while Hippies, many who did embrace Zen, were drawn to the colorful and
elaborately beautiful art and practices of Tibetan Buddhism and Indian
Hinduism. Legend has it that after a debate judged by the Tibetan King
in 979 CE between both sides, the Chinese and their school was expelled
and the King officially pronounced the Indian Nagarjuna to be affixed as
patriarch of Tibetan Buddhism in opposition to Bodhidharma, the
patriarch of Chan/Zen.
Between
1200 and 1500, many schools of Tibetan Buddhism arose in debate with
each other over the vast store of Indian texts which survived only in
Tibet. Education in Tibetan Buddhism largely consists of the
memorization of texts and debate with others about various
understandings of the texts and their teachings. Good debaters would
achieve fame and following, much like athletes and celebrities today.
Many debates revolved around the controversial concepts of emptiness
and buddha-nature. As untranslated texts were being translated, schools
based on the new texts (Gsar-ma) entered into debate with older schools
based on the earlier translated and established texts (Rnin-ma).
According
to modern scholarship, some of both the old and the new texts were
never original Indian texts at all, but were written in Tibet and
“discovered” by various figures at various times. Similar “discoveries”
occurred in China and Japan with the development of Buddhism there.
New schools would arise, and a member would “discover” a text hidden in
a log or a cave that just happened to support their doctrines and argue
against the doctrines of competing schools. Tibetans view Buddhism as
evolving in India into the final form of Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka school,
and then each Tibetan school views this tradition as evolving in Tibet
into their own position. This is very similar to Chan/Zen, each school
viewing itself as the final evolution. As mentioned, this ‘final form’
takes drastically different forms in various places.
The
Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol) has attracted a following in
Europe and America, first among scholars such as the Theosophists and
the psychoanalyst Karl Jung, who noted the similarities with the
Egyptian Book of the Dead in his search for the primordial archetypes of
the common human psyche, and later with Timothy Leary and hippies who
viewed psychedelic experiences as a death and rebirth. The text is to
be read to the dying and then to the corpse in the days after death to
help it be released from rebirth and achieve nirvana. Again and again,
the text implores the dead to embrace the clear light from above which
appears bright and frightening to the ignorant, who prefer the dull
light from below. Embracing the clear light, which they are now ‘set
face to face’ with, results in liberation, while running into the softer
dim light means being reborn in the world of suffering and desire.
In
a series of talks in 2010, the Dalai Lama spoke to an audience on the
need for compassion and discipline across religious and secular lines,
and then taught from Nagarjuna’s central texts. We have already
discussed Nagarjuna, and his importance for Tibetan Buddhism as well as
Mahayana Buddhism across North East Asia. He says that the golden age
of ancient Indian should be a model of how many religions and
philosophies can coexist together. He says that he believes that only
Buddhism truly believes in anatman, the absence of a permanent self, but
he will ask Jain leaders about this at a Jain ceremony and series of
dialogues he is going to attend in a month. He also mentions that some
Jains attend these conferences completely naked, and giggles for awhile
about it. He also mentions that religions such as Christianity and
Islam which believe in heaven do believe in a permanent self, but
neither he nor they know what this is for sure.
Teaching
from the Nagarjuna texts, he says that the true self has no self
particular to itself at all, and that through study, critical
reflection, and meditation, as we saw last time, one can come to a
greater and greater realization of this deepest level of reality. He
follows Nagarjuna who criticizes the Yogachara or Mind Only school for
maintaining a duality between mental conceptions and mind, saying that
form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. Rather than ridding the mind
of mental conceptions, we become not only the mental conceptions but the
conceptions they oppose to realize mind. Realizing interdependence
means maintaining distinctions while simultaneously overcoming them.
This is the true cleansing of realization. Just as Buddha criticized
Jains for trying to get rid of the self as a conception, Nagarjuna is
criticizing the Yogachara for trying to get rid of conception, including
the self. Negation of concepts is not their annihilation, but
accepting the things that they negate. Overcoming the self is not
annihilation of the self, but acceptance of the other as the self
through compassion.
On
a final political note, Tibet is currently occupied and claimed by
China. While the Tibetan nobility did not treat the common people very
well, a major factor that allowed the Communists to invade and take
over, the Tibetans begged the Americans to help them and arm them
against China, but American CIA agents evaluated the situation and did
not see much value in protecting the vast Tibetan desert lands, allowing
Tibet to fall to China. Two years later, the world’s largest deposit
of uranium was discovered in the Tibetan and Khazakstani mountains,
putting this in Soviet Russian and Communist Chinese control. If those
deposits had been discovered two years earlier, it is likely that
America would have protected the Tibetans and Tibet would be free today.
Buddhism in China & Japan
We
will cover the Period of the Hundred Schools (600-200 BCE) and the Han
unification of China (220 BCE - 200 CE) at the beginning of the second
half of the class before we cover Confucianism, Moism, and Daoism. The
short story, to introduce Buddhism in China, is that many schools of
thought flourished in the warring period before the Han unification of
China, and that with the arrival of the Han dynasty came royal patronage
and support for Confucianism and Daoism. In the latter half of the Han
dynasty, between 65 and 200 CE, the third most prominent school of
Chinese thought, Buddhism, began to spread and settle in China, arriving
from India and central Asia.
The
Han was a prosperous time, when there was much new money and much
interest in philosophy and study and patronizing the arts and temples.
The old moneyed families, the new money families coming up, and the
scholars were now competing and collaborating voices. By the later half
of the Han, there were 30,000 students at the government funded state
university, where primarily Confucianism and other classic texts were
studied.
Unfortunately,
Confucianism had become a new orthodoxy, and skeptical calls for
revisions as well as the weakening of Han power had many scholars
looking to Daoism, particularly the two main texts of the Dao De Jing
and the Zhuang Zi we will study, as well as other systems such as the
paradoxical Logicians and authoritarian Legalists for new solutions and
understandings to old problems just as Buddhism was coming over the
border. The peasants, who were increasingly desperate, turned to Daoist
religious communities of worship in large numbers and rebellions were
common. The largest were the Yellow Turban rebellions of 184 and 189 CE
which sought land and food distribution for the people. The Han
triumphed and put down the rebellions, but infighting soon pulled the
Han apart again once it was no longer unified against the Yellow
Turbans. This power vacuum allowed Buddhism to take hold and thrive.
Daoism
offered the strongest alternative for both the elite scholars and the
common devotional communities. They centered on the ideals of a return
to nature and the natural, the freedom of the community and individual
from abuse of authority, and the absolute as mystical One. Buddhism
increasingly offered an alternative also in line with these ideals.
Some early Daoist tales sound much like later Buddhist koan stories.
Liu Ling, a Daoist master, was often drunk and sometimes lay around
completely naked, and when several men entered his house and saw him in
this state, he replied, “Heaven and earth are my dwelling, and my house
is my pants...What are you all doing in my pants?”. As uplifting as
these stories were, the Daoists offered little structure for reordering
society, some retreating into nature, others ignoring local tyrants or
turning to religious devotion and ecstasy.
Buddhism
was at first regarded as a strange foreign form of Daoism. The two
fought and supported each other alternatively for centuries afterward.
In spite of their profound similarities, centrally skepticism of human
understandings and transcendence of attachment in the unification of
all, Indian and Chinese language and culture had profound differences as
well. Chinese language uses short terms, while Indian language strings
incredibly long and complicated terms together. Similarly, Chinese
philosophy values brevity and expresses itself in simple, concrete
metaphors, while Indian philosophy values comprehensiveness and
expresses itself in complex and abstract analysis.
A
comparison of Daoist and Buddhist texts shows this immediately.
Compare the metaphor of the well frog in the Zhuangzi with the middle
length discourses of the Buddha on the categories of existence and how
each is inherently empty. Consider that Buddhists would refer to
‘perfection’, while Daoists would refer to being ‘round’, Buddhists
would refer to ‘one’s true nature’, while Daoists would refer to ‘one’s
original face’, and Buddhists would refer to ‘essence’, while Daoists
would refer to ‘the pupil of the eye’. This was the same situation when
Buddhism arrived in Japan around 550 CE, Daoism and Confucianism having
arrived long before. The Japanese understood Buddhism in a Daoist
natural world context.
Socially
Chinese and Indian cultures were also at odds. Chinese society was
familial, seeking value in the worldly prosperity of the family. Indian
Buddhism valued the otherworldly, and advocated leaving the home in
pursuit of enlightenment in the monastery. While Daoism did have its
wandering and wilderness dwelling sages, this would be a sticking point
for Buddhism for many centuries. Many competing Confucians and Daoists
would routinely call for an expelling of the foreign culture that asked
the young to abandon their families for the monastery. To overcome
this, Buddhists, like Daoists, offered local communities support in
education, medicine, and relief in times of crisis. Gradually, Daoism
and Buddhism were interrelated, with the Buddhist Dharma (teaching)
equated with the Dao (way), and Buddhist nirvana (liberation) equated
with the Daoist wu-wei (non-action). These were crude equations, which
were enriched over centuries of translation and scholarship.
Buddhist
sutras continued to arrive from India, carried by both Indian and
Chinese Buddhist monks on pilgrimages to spread the dharma. In
architecture, the Indian stupa became the Chinese pagoda, one of the
most common and recognizable forms of Chinese architecture. Chinese
artists began portraying the Buddha and boddhisattvas in Chinese form.
The Mahayana Completion of Wisdom sutras (Prajnaparamita sutras) were
introduced, becoming the central texts of the most popular forms of
Buddhism today, Chinese and Japanese Pure Land Buddhism, which focus on
devotional chanting to bodhsattvas for good fortune and protection.
While
Pure Land traditions were popular among common people and traditional
noble families, the Chan (Chinese) or Zen (Japanese) tradition became
popular among scholars and nobles who pursued philosophy, literature and
the arts. The Pure Land tradition feeds off the faith practices of the
Tiantai school, and the Chan/Zen feeds off the wisdom tradition of the
Huayan school. Both teach the oneness of all things, but the Tiantai
would say there are demons in the heavens and buddhas in the hells,
while the Huayan say that One is All and All is One. Next week, we will
exclusively study the Chan/Zen literature and the koan stories, some of
my favorite philosophy texts. The history of Buddhism in Korea and
Japan is also dominated by the duality of the Pure Land devotional
traditions and the Chan/Zen meditation and koan practice.
In
Japan, Amida (from the Indian Amitabha) worship reached a radical and
popular form that bears interesting resemblances to Protestant
Christianity. Shinran (1173-1262) founded one of the most popular forms
of Japanese Buddhism, Jodoshinshu, which taught that other than the
most dedicated sages human beings are too sinful to gain enlightenment,
so the best way for all people to gain entrance to higher existence, in
accord with the Mahayana tradition, was to rely entirely on the grace
and power of Amida who could bring both the good and the bad to heavenly
realms or pure lands. It is only in turning away from self
accomplishment and entirely towards the salvation of all by grace that
the most people could be saved from hell worlds. Shinran decided that
no vow of celibacy would make much difference, and so he married and
taught his priests to marry, for which he was persecuted for the rest of
his life.
As
texts arrived and were translated, the Chinese noticed that the
Theravada and Mahayana had two different ideas of how one achieves
enlightenment already mentioned. The Theravada teach that progress is
gradual, much like the Confucians do, and that it is only study within
the institution that brings slow and steady progress. The Mahayana
teach that buddha-nature is already within, and that sudden
breakthroughs and transcendent states are achievable by anyone, much
like the Daoists do, and that this can occur either inside or outside of
the institution. This dual understanding became complimentary but also
developed into a conflict, the central conflict of the two schools of
Chan/Zen and later a conflict within Neo-Daoism and Neo-Confucianism
which had both subsumed much of Buddhism in later centuries.
All
of this resulted in a vast expansion of Buddhism, among common
devotional worshipers who sought refuge in new divinities, practices and
communities, among scholars who found new philosophical concepts and
texts to study and re-read, and among the wealthy who gave immense
amounts for new temples, monasteries and monuments with new designs and
appeal to secure their own fortune not only with the deities but with
the populace. Daoist priests and Buddhist priests alike served
communities and noble families, providing relief for the suffering of
both the poor through charity and the rich through consolation.
Buddhist organizations funded hospitals, low cost hostels for
travelers, bridges, and trees planted beside popular roads.
Unfortunately,
this allowed many Buddhist monasteries to become extraordinarily
wealthy, which attracted unwanted attention from competing systems and
rulers who were wary of rivals. It was not lost on the ruling powers
that Buddhism, like Daoism, served as a popular center of power that
could, and sometimes did, result in rebellion. Mahayana Buddhism in
particular had teachings that could be interpreted as supporting
rebellion, especially by those in the suffering countryside. In the
last age, when the buddha Maitreya was expected foretold by signs, no
government was legitimate and the world was soon to be reformed and
reborn. Many rebellions used the color white, the color associated with
Maitreya, as a symbol for their movements.
In
some periods, Buddhism or Daoism was persecuted depending on patronage,
while in other periods each received vast contributions and thrived.
This is entirely similar to Catholic monasteries in Europe, who not
only fought amongst themselves (Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits)
after becoming wealthy civic centers of education, medicine and
technology, but had to survive persecution of rulers who wanted their
wealth as well. In later dynasties, after Confucianism, Daoism and
Buddhism were the three established schools of Chinese thought and were
interwoven in official rituals and popular culture, rulers worked hard
to work with Buddhist leadership, who had considerable sway over much of
the population, while also making sure that they did not acquire too
much unchecked power.
Around
1100 CE, Neo-Confucianism attempted to revive Confucianism to return it
to its central place in society. While Zhu Xi, the greatest teacher of
Neo-Confucianism, saw Buddhism as the enemy, he could not help but
reincorporate Buddhist teachings such as the metaphors of the sun behind
the clouds and the pearl at the bottom of the muddy pond, each implying
that through study, as well as meditation, the inner truth and nature
can be realized. While originally the term ‘li’ meant human order and
tradition, in Neo-Confucianism Li became cosmic order, more like the
Dharma of Buddhism and Dao of Daoism after being intertwined with
Buddhism over centuries. While Confucius taught that one should benefit
one’s own family as well as humankind, Neo-Confucians taught that one
should benefit all conscious beings like Mahayana boddhisattvas. Wang
Yang Ming (1472-1529 CE), one of the greatest Neo-Confucians who we will
study, was called a Buddhist in disguise by his opponents for teaching
Buddhist metaphors that were part of popular culture and sudden
achievement of new understanding. Neo-Confucianism supported state
funded hospitals, orphanages, homes for the elderly, and public
cemeteries.
In
the last two centuries, as China encountered Europeans, there were new
favorable and unfavorable interpretations of Buddhism used to understand
China’s relationship with the new foreigners. Some attempted to show
that there was nothing new in European thought that could not be found
in Buddhism, such as rationalism, humanism, democracy, dialectic,
evolution, and later communism and existentialism. Others argued that
Indian Buddhism and its transcendent visions had held China back such
that it had not modernized as fast as Europe. Later, Chinese communists
such as Mao would both condemn Buddhism as superstition of a past age
as well as celebrate it as a common bond with Asia that transcended
nationalism and demonstrated that Asia and the world could one day share
a common culture.
One
final modern figure to mention is Nishida Kitaro (1870-1966), a
Japanese philosopher and Zen practitioner who founded an entire school
of philosophy in Japan by comparing Zen and the Buddhist tradition to
German philosophy, particularly the existentialism of Nietzsche and
Heidegger. In his book The Self Overcoming of Nihilism, he argues that
German and French existentialists have a preoccupation with the
emptiness of existence as a negative, meaningless and frightening thing,
and that Buddhism and Zen have gone beyond this to affirm the positive
abundance and richness of the emptiness and void.
