Real Life with Ryuei

Buddhism's Two tracks - the clinical and the heart approach

Hi everyone,

As Byrd noted, my response to Glenn was rather on the eggheady side of things.

But after thinking it over - my response really came down to some core convictions of mine that I don't think are all that complicated.

1. I think that the Buddha took advantage of all the spiritual methods of his day that dealt with calming and being at peace but he took it in a revolutionary direction. He used that calm peaceful mind to just see how things actually are and by awakening to that freeing oneself of the mental and emotional poisons that ruin our life. This awakening allows us to express the love, joy, compassion, and true peace that is our actual birthright.

2. This method the Buddha uses boils down to samatha (stopping) and vipassana (looking). We say, "stop and smell the roses." It's the same idea but taken to a rutheless clinical extreme of dropping all our self-interest, preoccupations, attachments, aversions, and assumptions and just nonjudgementally being presently aware of what is. This is easier said than done of course. It takes courage, maturity, and self-discipline.

3. The Buddha realized that there does need to be a way to facilitate the maturity, stability, self-discipline needed to just stop and look. That is why he prescribed a program consisting of a holistic healthy lifestyle called the eightfold path or the Middle Way. This can be explained in a simpler way as the threefold training of morality, meditation, and wisdom, or broken down into a system of 37 aids to enlightenment. But these all come back to the Middle Way of the eightfold path. The Buddha unequivocally stated that the only way to liberation is through following this path. I believe that. But I don't think it necessarily needs to be followed self-consciously, and in some cases it would be detrimental to do so.

4. Now there are some elements that the Buddha taught which do not fit into the eightfold path. One of these is faith, or sraddha, which means "trust" or "confidence." Faith is one (actually two in different modes) of the 37 aids to enlightenment. The Buddha realized that in order to take up the Middle Way and follow through with it, one must be motivated and must have deep trust and confidence in this Way and one's ability to accomplish it. The Buddha also realized that some people have a more simplistic and devotional orientation and if that could be utilized in the direction of faith in the Middle Way then such people could awaken as well, just as their more detached and intellectual counterparts - maybe even more easily because they wouldn't have to contend with so much conceputalizing and intellectualizing and second-guessing. I believe those who strongly emphasize just silent sitting or mindfulness to the exclusion of the role of faith are overlooking an imporant element of the Way - perhaps the key element as without faith one cannot even begin the Way let alone conclude it in the face of difficulties both internal and external.

5. The Buddha also taught the six recollections as a way of fostering faith, confidence, and to enhance one's motivation to practice. These are recollection of the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha, and of the merits of generosity, morality, and aspiration to the heavenly realms. Perhaps the six recollections cannot in and of themselves lead to right view and the rest - mindfulness and insight. But they strengthen, direct, and inspire the faith that does lead to the emulation of the Buddha, the practice of the Dharma, and so on. I believe the recollection of the Buddha eventually evolved into Nembutsu, whereas the recollection of the Dharma can be seen as the prototype of Odaimoku. In fact, I think the recollection of the Dharma can be said to be the Buddha's own practice in a very fundamental sense - but that is another article.

6. The Buddha also taught the cultivation of the Brahmaviharas - boundless loving-kindness, boundless compassion, boundless sympathetic joy, and boundless equanimity. He taught these to those who wanted to be reborn in the heavenly realms in union with Brahma (the creator God). He taught them to those who needed to overcome hatred and ill-will. He taught them to the Kalamas so they could directly experience wholesome states of mind. In short, the Buddha realized that some people need to work on their emotional life and bring it into a more wholesome balance before embarking on the more detached and clinical method of stopping and looking. There are some hints in some discourses that the Buddha believed these could lead to awakening itself if taken to their ultimate conclusion. Others, the Mahayanists, came to believe that an awakened person would not have transcended these states, as though leaving them behind or outgrowing them; but rather the Buddha had consummated these states and naturally expressed them in his interractions with others without any trace of self-consciousness, self-serving purposes, or even any duality between self and other. I think these Brahmaviharas should not be underestimated or neglected, even though they are not part of the 37 aids to enlightenment or explicitly part of the 8-fold path.

So in short I see the Mahayana as a blossoming of the importance of the Brahmaviharas, an further awakening into the no-self nature and the non-duality of the conditioned and the unconditioned, and in many of its forms as a realization that if Buddhism is to be a Way of awakening for more than an elite few, the element of faith can be the Dharmagate that unselfconsciously allows for the development of the rest. Can faith and the cultivation of devotional methods be misused or misdirected to further exacerbate greed, hatred, and delusion? Sure. But that is when these skillful methods are no longer skillful and no longer an effective method. But that does not mean that Buddhism should not try to be skillful and should not try to use those methods that speak to the heart of the common person as well as the mind of the skeptical detached observer.

Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei

Posted by Ryuei at May 5, 2008 11:53 AM