It has always struck me since my Catholic high school days that early Christians (really the Greeks in general) had different words for different kinds of love - a word for erotic love, a word for love of family, a word for love between friends, and then agape - unconditional love. There was no one ambiguous word for "love" that was employed to mean anything from greedy desire for a hamburger, to naked lust, to feelings of cameraderie, to simply liking a person, to sublime self-sacrificing atlruism. Our English word "love" has become next to useless because of how it has been overlain with all kinds of irrational and even degrading meanings.
I think that is why many Buddhists have really started to carefully investigating and cultivating the Buddhist words - metta (loving-kindness), karuna (compasion), sympathetic joy (mudita), and equanimity (upeksha) because the meaning of these includes warmth and feeling but is not narrow or irrational or materialistic. And instead of just being an emotion we may or may not feel, these four brahmaviharas (divine abidings) are states that we can actually cultivate.
It is also noteworthy to me that all four of them are about loving-kindness and that loving-kindness is a general wish for the well-being, happiness, security and ultimately enlightenment of others. Compassion is when loving-kindness encounters those who are suffering. Sympathetic joy is when it encounters those who have reaped the rewards of good causes or, even better, have attained a degree of liberation and insight. Equanimity is the ability to have an stance of loving-kindness towards all in all circumstances. And just as Jesus said, "love others as you love yourself" the cultivation of these four boundless states of mind begins with directing the well-wishing, compassion, joy in honestly gained success, and equanimity towards oneself - and after that radiates that feeling or well-wishing in all directions. Furthermore these states lead to and/or are generated from an insight into the interdependently transformative nature of all beings and all that is.
Another great thing about the teachings relating to loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity is that they identify the near and far enemies of each. The far enemies are the opposites - so hatred, cruelty, envy, and bias would be far enemies of each of the above qualities. But the near enemies are the counterfeits, and so the teachings warn us not to get confused. Don't mistake sentimental attachment for loving-kindness, or over-identifying with the pain or successes of others to the point where you are just living your life through others or losing your perspective, or mistaking indfifference for equanimity. And again, to idenfity the difference requires wisdom and so wisdom leads to the four divine abodes and also is generated by our working on them.
But here we come back to Nichiren Buddhism. Nichiren said that for ordinary beings in the latter age it is extraordinarily difficult for us to cultivate all the virtues and merits that Buddhists cultivated in the past. Rather, we should concentrate on wisdom, and since we have no wisdom we should replace wisdom with faith in the Wonderful Dharma. Faith, means trust and confidence. The Wonderful Dharma is the true nature of ourselves and of all reality. It is the Wonderful Dharma taught in the Lotus Sutra that points out our universal buddha-nature and the compassionate presence of buddhahood in our lives. Our faith gives us access to this. It means that in chanting Odaimoku we can look forward to our minds coming to dwell in the four divine abodes as one aspect of the many virtues and qualities of buddhahood which our faith and practice of Odaimoku can help bring about.
But there is also this - we can chant till we are blue in the face to get a job or to meet the perfect person, or to get a raise or find the perfect home. But once we have made that ultimate root cause, we must go out and send in resumes, or attend social gatherings, or improve our work, or go check out the houses on the market. There must be follow-through with faith in the power of the Odaimoku. In the same way, we must chant to bring forth such beautiful states of mind as the four divine abodes. And then when we are out in the world we should be more self-aware and look for opportunities to approach ourselves, our family and friends, strangers, and even enemies in a new way. We must be self-aware and make the effort. Otherwise, we are merely praising the Lotus Sutra with our lips but then slandering it in our hearts and in our actions by dualistically thinking that the Odaimoku will do the work so that we don't have to. The power to bring forth the beautiful states of mind described in the four divine abodes comes from the Odaimoku - the seed of buddhahood that they are aspects of. But in turn, we must do our best to glorify the Odaimoku and all life be being loving, compassionate, joyful, and ful of a peace that picks no sides and has no boundaries.
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei
P.S. I want to thank Brian, and Byrd and others for comments posted on a discussion list prompted all this to come out. I have been thinking about these things for several years now since taking a year long seminar on them with Dharmajim and also in preparation for the four day retreat I held in Denmark last August that had these as the theme.
The following are some of my thoughts about who gets to be (or regarded to be) a Buddha. It is the result of many years of ruminations and I continue to reflect on this issue, but I share these now because of some "dialogues" I have been having lately and also in response to Brian's thoughtful essay about it over at Dr. Science. So here goes:
1. I consider an enlightened person to be someone who is completely awake and lives insightfully and compassionately in accord with reality. You can call this person an arhat, a bodhisattva, a buddha, a saint, or a mensch but the point is this is the kind of person we should all hope to be.
2. I think the teachings and example of Shakyamuni Buddha as set forth in the sutras set a very high bar on what kind of insight and conduct we can expect from such a person. And I agree that this person Shakyamuni Buddha is more or less mythical (or at least legendary) though there was (I believe) a solid historical basis for this person.
3. I see no value in setting up any sectarian founder as a replacement for Shakyamuni Buddha, and the consequences always seem to be that a lesser standard of conduct and insight overshadows that set by Shakyamuni Buddha and also fact that the sectarian founders' own work depended on the inspiration of the sutra is overlooked or obscured and the sutras themselves set aside. I see no value and a lot of harm in that. It ends up betraying the founders' own vision because the founders themselves depended upon the sutras and the example set by the Buddha.
4. The whole point of taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha in the first place is to be enlghtened ourselves. There are no schools of Buddhism that would disagree with this or who would say that the Buddha gets to be enlightened and we don't. That would defeat the whole purpose of Buddhism itself. So can the followers of different schools of Buddhism hope to become buddhas, and should they regard their founders as having attained the goal of Buddhism which is "buddhahood" (in the wider sense of the word that indicates a fully awake compassionate person)? I would say so. I would hope so.
5. Finally, related to points 2 and 3, I take refuge in (which is to say I take my primary inspiration from) the person who supposedly taught the following:
"In this world
hostilities are never
appeased by hostility.
But by the absence of hostility
are they appeased.
This is an interminable truth."
(Dhammapada verse 5 translated by Glenn Wallis)
My primary inspiration for how to act like a buddha does not come from the person who said (even if in jest) this:
"Unless all the temples of the Pure Land and Zen Schools such as Kenchoji, Jufukuji, Gokurakuji, Great Buddha, and Chorakuji are burned down and their priests all beheaded at Yuigahama Beach, Japan will be bound to be destroyed."
(p. 243 Senji-sho, Writings of Nichiren Shonin: Doctrine 1).
Which standard would most people regard as the conduct of a Buddha I wonder?
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei
Here is an amusing article I happened across today:
Punk Rockers Hit the Road for Kerry
I had been wondering when the punks and others would come out and direct their musical vision and energy into a prophetic stance against what is happening in this country. And I noticed that some country-western artists want to come out and support Bush. Wow, liberal punks on one side and country neocons on the other. I'd like to group the Budhists with the liberal punks, but it seems that some of them have run off and joined the libertarians!
Plus I keep running into Buddhist Republicans online. And I thought "form is emptiness, emptiness is form" was a hard to crack Buddhist paradox.
Anyway, I do appreciate what Alice Cooper had to say: "If you're listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for," Cooper told the Edmonton Sun in August, "you're a bigger moron than they are."
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei
My own reading of the Buddhist canon leads me to believe that the
term Buddha or Awakened One was not quite as exalted in the begining
and that in some ways it was equivalent to the term Arhat or Worthy
One in the very beginning. If memory serves, there was even a little
used term Shravaka-Buddha which meant someone who became a Buddha by
listening to the first Buddha's teaching.
In time, however, the term Buddha became reserved for Shakyamuni
and tied itself in with Indian cosmological ideas (which may have
been pre-Buddhist) that there can only be one Buddha per world
system per dispensation. The term came to be used in the more
restricted sense of someone who discovered the Dharma without a
teacher (something shared with Pratyeka Buddhas) and then set the
Wheel of Dharma in motion. The only difference between a Buddha and
an Arhat then was that the Buddha was not only enlightened but had
also developed the compassionate means of teaching the Dharma over
ages of bodhisattva practice. For that matter, Shariputra and
Maudgalyayana at least were said to have developed merits and
methods of teaching through ages of fulfilling compassionate vows,
but not to the degree that the Buddha did. In my article at
Ryuei.net called "The Nature of the Buddha" I talk about the 18
virtues of the Buddha above and beyond his enlightenment that made
him a Buddha whereas others were only Arhats who were equally
enlightened but not equally able to teach.
Then comes the Mahayana with the idea that the Buddhas and
bodhisattvas compassionate aspirations made them more selfless than
the more "short sighted" Arhats. And that is when the Buddha really
began to be exalted and the ideal of the Arhat correspondingly fell
in estimation. The two were no longer equivalent but now clearly two
seperate goals, one greater and one lesser. The early Mahayana sutra
called the Lotus Sutra even taught that the Arhat was just a
provisional goal on the way to full Buddhahood.
Other Mahayana sutras went even futher and advanced the idea that
the Arhat wasn't even enlightened to the same degree as a Buddha.
The idea was that while the Arhat awakened to the selfless nature of
people, the Buddha had gone even further and realized the selfless
or empty nature of all dharmas (i.e. phenomena). And that their
boundless compassion went hand in hand with this deeper and more
thoroughgoing insight.
In East Asian Buddhism, however, there was a need for a more
immediate realization of enlightenment and even buddhahood itself.
Unlike the Indians, the Chinese were not content with the idea that
the full enlightenment of buddhahood lay in some far distant future
or Pure Land. So in Ch'an especially, if not in the other schools
but Ch'an came to predominate, you have the idea that anyone who
becomes enlightened has become a buddha or realized buddhahood. This
rhetoric came to pervade East Asian Buddhism and completely
overlooked the more technical and systematic definitions of what
buddhahood entails found in the Indian tradition.
Funcitionally, I believe, the Chinese and other East Asians had
completely bypassed the conceptual gap between Arhats and Buddhas
that had become the rhetorical divide between Hinayana and Mahayana
Buddhism in India. Now anyone who had become selfless and
compassionate was considered a Buddha and this goal could be
achieved in a single lifetime. In many ways, I believe, the
functional description of attaining buddhahood in East Asian
Buddhism is not far off at all from the functional descriptions of
Arhats in pre-Mahayana. No one in East Asian claims that
these "buddhas" (consisting of monks, nuns, and laypeople) had all
the 18 virtues which buddhas supposedly have according to the Pali
Canon and Mahayana sutras. No one in popular East Asian rhetoric
gets into the technical definitions of which obstuctions to
enlightenment are transcended which would supposedly differentiate
between an Arhat and a Buddha. They are simply liberated and
compassionate people. And in fact, this is how Arhats are described
in pre-Mahayana works.
But because East Asians were committed to being Mahayana Buddhists
(even if they were not the logical systematic hair-splitters of
Indian Mahayana) they could not ever admit to an equivalence between
their home grown Buddhas and the original meaning of Arhat because
the Mahayana sutras had exalted the former term and derided the
latter. So now the title Buddha meant someone who knew at heart that
they were fully awakened in a non-dual selfless and compassionate
interaction with all life while acting as a bodhisattva in worldly
affairs, whereas the Arhat came to mean someone who selflishly
removed themselves from the world to pursue their own spiritual
gratification. These East Asian approaches to the titles Buddha and
Arhat are not exactly what the Indians may have intended, but I
think that there is as much wisdom in this outlook as there is in
the Indian scholastic tradition.
The lesson I walk away from all this is not to get too caught up in
terminology but to look past the lables and see what functions are
being pointed to. And what I see, whether in the Pali Canon, the
Mahayana sutras, or the East Asian commentators, is that it is
possible in this life to attain selfless wisdom and boundless
compassion and that this goal has been and is being achieved both by
those who become known as teachers and by quiet ordinary people.
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei
Hi Dharma friends,
Some people wonder if Buddhism really does help people overcome pain and suffering, and may wonder why their lives are not easy and free of conflict since they have been practicing Buddhism. On the other hand, some may have been told that Buddism is about continually seeking out and overcoming challenges and obstacles. I think both of these approaches miss the point, and so I would like to address that here.
Traditional Buddhism teaches the nature of suffering, the causes of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the way leading to the cessation of suffering. Nichiren Buddhism is no exception to this.
In regard to suffering - there is a difference between pain and suffering. Painful feelings and events continued to arise both in the lives of Shakyamuni Buddha and Nichiren Shonin. Shakyamuni Buddha did in fact get old, had many bodily pains that he spoke of towards the end of his life. In fact, there were times when he had to lie down due to the pain, and he told Ananda that his body had become like a cart that is breaking down and barely being held together. Then there were the premature deaths of his disciples Shariputra and Maudgalyayana (who was murdered by jealous brahmins) which prompted him to make the comment that after their deaths the Sangha seemed very empty to him. Towards the end of his life, the Shakya clan was massacred by a rival clan led by King Virudhaka. There were many other such painful occurences in the life of the Buddha. In the end, he died of what was most likely liver damage from eating poison mushrooms which had mistakenly been served to him.
Looking at Nichiren's life - he was continually persecuted, exiled, ambushed, and even came close to being executed. His followers were persecuted (even by family members), arrested, jailed, exiled, and even killed (the three Atsuhara martyrs come to mind). Nichiren faced starvation, exposure to the elements, and many harsh living conditions even at Mt. Minobu which can get quite cold and was a very rugged environment in those days. In the end, Nichiren died of what may have been colon cancer at the relatively early age of 60 and within only a few years his most trusted disciples had turned upon one another.
If we want to judge by worldly health, and success, and worldly standards of ease and happiness, then neither Shakyamuni Buddha nor Nichiren Shonin have much to show for their supposed enlightenment. But here is where the difference comes into play. They faced painful situations - but did they suffer? Did they react with distress, fear, despair, and anguish? Or did they react with a cool confidence derived from their infinite perspective on life and death and the conditionality of all things? I believe they faced painful situations with confidence, compassion, and a universal insight that looks through the painful surface to the underlying reality that is Unborn and Deathless. And from that perspective of wisdom and compassion they were able to deal with these challenges in the most productive and peaceful way possible in each moment. In other words, their wisdom enabled them to rise above the pain, and their skillful means based on compassion enabled them to relate positively to life and do what needed to be done or at least to refrain from doing anything to make things worse. And underneath it all the serene joy of knowing that all things are working to ultimately express universal buddhahood - the universal energy of love, compassion, joy and peace.
As Buddhists, then, do we need to go out and find trouble? Do we need to go out and look for painful situations or further obstacles to overcome - as if Buddhahood were some kind of Olympic event where one must continually find a way to push past previous records and limits? I do not think so. Neither Shakyamuni Buddha nor Nichiren Shonin ever deliberately tried to look for trouble. Rather, they made themselves available to teach the Dharma, and did not shrink from trouble or challenges in the course of fulfilling that mission. And that mission to teach the Dharma was based on compassionate vows to help others overcome suffering (the usual reaction and response to life's inevitably painful realities) rather than mere ambition or a search to vaingloriously overcome hurdles and obstacles. Compassionate vows to work for others are at the heart of Shakyamuni Buddha and Nichiren Shonin's interactions with the world and it is this that caused them not to seek trouble but to face it courageously and grace and wisdom when it did come their way. They did not seek obstacles, but they did overcame them in the course of showing the way to peace and liberation from suffering for all beings.
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei