The Way to Enlightenment:  Buddhism

 

The Buddha's dates are 563 to 483 B.C. This is a long time back. I want to stress the date 500 B.C., which is, as we'll see a little later on, of great importance. In the first centuries of Buddhist art, the Buddha himself was never represented, because he had already escaped from his body. Here he appears as a tree. His body was there, but his presence was like the sun that has set. He had left the body behind like a sunset. It wasn't there. However, five hundred years later we begin to have images of the Buddha, which means another kind of Buddhism has come into expression. 

 

                  The first order of Buddhism was very strongly monastic. As I've said with respect to Jainism, the community hopes in later incarnations to be able to renounce the world, to quit the world and to go on the quest for nirvanic release. Early Buddhism carried this message also. It was very strongly monastic. But then, in the first century A.D., in northwest India, the idea changed. There's another Buddhism. The first century A.D. was the first century of Christianity as well - only a short distance to the west. 

 

                  The first Buddhism is called Theravada. Vaada means "the word," and thera means "of the saints" - the doctrine of the old saints. Another name for this Buddhism is Hinayana. Yana means "ferryboat," and hina means "little." So we have little ferryboat Buddhism. Only a very few people can ride in a little ferryboat - those who have said "No" to life. They are going to nirvana. But the whole sense of nirvanic realization is that you have transcended pairs of opposites: desire and fear, you and me. We've gone to unity. So the distinction between samsara, suffering in the world, and nirvana, or rapture in transcendence, is that there's no distinction. So now we can begin to see that the world itself is a manifestation of Buddha consciousness. 

 

                  The images of the Buddha, which begin to appear five or six hundred years after the Buddha's death, have nothing to do with that beautiful character of 500 B.C. One of the earliest images of the Buddha we have is in Ceylon. He's seated on the ground, which means this is a man who through meditation has identified his

consciousness with Buddha consciousness, the transcendent consciousness, which lives in all beings. 

 

                  There's a wonderful story in a paper by Daisetz Suzuki.

The young student said to his master, "Am I in possession of Buddha consciousness?"

The master said, "No."

The student said, "Well, I've been told that all things are in the possession of Buddha consciousness. The rocks, the trees, the butterflies, the birds, the animals, all beings."

The master said, "You are correct. All things are in possession of Buddha consciousness. The rocks, the trees, the butterflies, the bees, the birds, the animals, all beings - but not you."

"Not me? Why not?"

"Because you are asking this question." 

 

                  If you've put your identification of yourself with this rational problem, you are not getting the message. The Buddha is one who wiped that out, got the message, and now is living out of the message. 

 

                  Here we have the Buddha on a lotus. This is the Buddha as manifestation. This wonderful posture is known as earth-touching. The lotus, like the water of the Ganges, is a manifestation of the grace of the eternal life pouring into the world. That's what the rose represents in medieval symbolism in the Christian tradition. The image of the Trinity appears on the celestial rose. The image of the Buddha appears on the celestial lotus. When you have a figure seated on the lotus, or on the rose, it is a personification of the energy already represented in that flower. So the Buddha didn't have to work at all to realize his identity. 

 

                  There are two ways of thinking about Jesus: he is true man; he is true god. If he was true man he suffered. If he was true god he didn't. There are two ways of thinking about the Buddha: he is the one who sat down and meditated and found his Buddha consciousness; he is the incarnation of Buddha consciousness and he didn't have to meditate at all - he knew it. 

 

                  The Buddha was born from his mother's side. That means, insofar as his historical message is concerned and his historical character, he was not talking about nature. He was talking about the virgin birth, the nature of the spiritual life. He had experienced the virgin birth himself, you might say, from his mother's side at the level of the heart, not at the level of the pelvic natural birth. No sooner was he born than the deities came down and received him on a golden cloth. Nobody thinks this happened. The dynamic feats of saviors are symbolic of the meaning of the saviors' teaching. It's not like Carl Sandburg's life of Lincoln, where you get documentation of the actual details of the life. It has nothing to do with what happened in life. It has to do with the implications of the life. So the Buddha is born, the gods receive him on a golden cloth, they put him on the ground, and this little child takes seven steps, and his right hand lifts and his left hand points down and he says: "Worlds above, worlds below, there's no one in the world like me!" 

 

                  He didn't have to go to work to find that out. He knew it when he was born. Daisetz Suzuki, during his first lecture in the United States on Buddhism, mentioned this. He said, "You know, that's very funny thing, baby

just born, to say a thing like that! You think he would have waited, waited until he had his illumination under the

bo tree and his spiritual birth. But we in the Orient all mixed up. We don't make great distinction between

spiritual and material life. Material manifests spiritual." So then he went on in a long talk, pretending to lose all his notes. In Japanese and Chinese paintings, there is a lot of vacant space and you can read something into that. So he left us vacant space by pretending to lose his notes so we could help him find them and feel participation in the lecture. To do too well is not nice. 

 

                  Finally Suzuki came to this point. "They tell me when baby is born, baby cries. What does baby say, when baby cries? Baby says: 'Worlds above, worlds below, no one in the world like me!' All babies Buddha babies."

 

                  The little baby is a Buddha baby. It's a manifestation in innocence of these wonderful energies. So what's the difference between any little mouse and Queen Maya's? Hers knew he was a Buddha baby. The whole thing of Buddha consciousness means getting to know you are it. That takes a lot of work, principally because society keeps telling you you are not it. 

 

                  When this quester, this seeker, this one who is about to become the Buddha, came to the tree in the middle of the universe, the axis mundi, which is called the immovable spot, he sat there. That's a psychological condition. You don't have to go to Bodh-Gaya to find the immovable spot. You've got it right here, if you have it.

And what is it? It is the spot that is not moved by desire and fear. 

 

                  So to test him, there came the lord of the world, and his name was desire and fear. As desire he was called Kama, which means lust, desire, delight, pleasure. He tried to move the Buddha by displaying to him his three beautiful daughters. Their names were Desire, Fulfillment, and Regret. Future, present, past. The Buddha had disengaged himself from the biology of this body, and so he wasn't moved. Kama was unhappy about that, and he turned himself into Mara, the Lord of Death, to inspire fear. He threw against the Buddha all the weaponry of an army of ogres. There was nobody there. This is why we don't see him in the early works; he was not present as a body. He had disengaged himself. And so the weapons were turned into lotuses as they entered his field of nonentity, and he was, as it were, worshiped. 

 

                  Now comes the hard one for good Christians to appreciate. Kama/Mara was desperate and he turned himself now into Dharma, the Lord of Social Duty. That's supposed to be Christianity. How in heaven's name are you going to find your own track if you are always doing what society tells you your duty is? So it's at this point that Mara, now as Dharma, Duty, says to him, "Young Prince, you are supposed to be on your throne governing a country, don't you read the morning paper? Don't you know what's going on? Things are falling apart. There are picket lines all over the place." What do you do when that call comes? He just dropped his hand and touched the earth. This is: "Don't try to move me with this journalistic appeal. I'm interested in eternity." And he calls the goddess, Mother Universe, to witness to his right to be there. She, in her majesty, with a voice that resounds like thunder on the horizon, says, "This is my beloved son, who through innumerable lifetimes has so given of himself that there is nobody here." And with that, the elephant on which Dharma was riding bowed in worship, the army was dispersed, and the Buddha achieved illumination. 

 

                  So that symbolizes Akshobhya, not to be moved. This is the first position. You have found it. You are sitting there. You are in the immovable spot and no appeal of the journalistic field of time is going to move you. That's the first step. The second step is, having found the still point, to come back into the field of time. 

 

                  So we have two Buddhisms: the earlier small-vehicle Buddhism that's going away from the field of time and then, later, the Buddhism that says we are manifestations and we can move in this field of time, but without being moved. This is known as "joyful participation in the sorrows of the world." And you can do that, be what is known as a bodhisattva, one whose "being"  (sattva)  is  "illumination" (bodhi). With that still point having been found, you can move into the field of movement and not move. That's the important thing. 

 

                  Heinrich Zimmer, a gifted interpreter of symbolic forms, was lecturing in New York on Buddhism, and he wanted to describe the difference between the little-vehicle Buddhism, Hinayana, and the big-vehicle

Buddhism, Mahayana. He used a wonderful image. When the Buddha achieved illumination that night he was so stunned that he sat for seven days in one place without moving. This is being utterly removed from the field of time. Then he got up and walked seven paces back and stood for seven days looking at the place where he had been sitting. This is relating the temporal to the immovable realization. Then for seven days he walked back and forth between the two places, relating and integrating. He then sat down under another tree, and his first thought was, "This cannot be taught." That's the first fact about Buddhism, and what I'm talking about here. This cannot be taught. You know the saying: "You can lead a girl to Vassar, but you can't make her think." 

 

                  No sooner had he had that thought than the gods Indra and Brahma came down. Just as in Christianity the deity of the older tradition is still present, so in Buddhism the deities of the older tradition are present. 

 

                  Indra and Brahma said, "Please teach, for the salvation of mankind and the gods and all the world." And the Buddha said, "I will teach. But what I teach is not Buddhism; it is the way to Buddhism." What's called Buddhism is a vehicle to carry you to Buddhist realization, and the word for vehicle is yana, and the vehicle specifically that is referred to is a ferryboat. So Buddhism is called the ferryboat, and it's taking us to a yonder shore, and the yonder shore is the shore beyond pain and pleasure, gain and loss, fear and desire, you and me. It's the transcendence of duality in the realization of the cosmic unity, or transcosmic unity. 

 

                  Zimmer then said, "Well now, if we want to understand Buddhism and the two Buddhisms - Hinayana and Mahayana, little ferryboat and big ferryboat - let's think about a ferryboat." We are in Manhattan. There's the Hudson River, and beyond the river is New Jersey, the Garden State. We've never been to Jersey, but we've heard about it and we're fed up with Manhattan. We go down to the riverbank and we stand there looking across at Jersey. Jersey for us is simply a mirage before the eyes. We don't know what's over there, but we're longing to be there. We're thinking about it because Manhattan's gotten to be just too much. Well, one fine day, what do you know! From the yonder shore a ferryboat comes across, right to our feet. In the ferryboat is a man, and the man says, "Anyone for Jersey, the Garden State?" You say, "I'm for Jersev." Then he says, "Now, listen. There's a point here, namely, you can't come back. This is a one-way trip. You're giving up your family, your ideals, your money, your future, everything. Are you ready to quit?" You say, "I am fed up." He says, "Get aboard." 

 

                  This is the little ferryboat, Hinayana; only those who are ready and willing to quit the whole show can go across. And we read in the texts, "Unless you are as eager for nirvanic release as a man with his hair on fire would be for a pond into which to dive, don't start, it's too difficult." So here we have the idea of great ascetic difficulty and renunciation. This is why it's a little ferryboat. So you get aboard. 

 

                  The boat starts out and you think, "Mother!" But it's too late, you're in the boat. You learn to love the splash of the water. You learn to speak in a new language - port and starboard instead of left and right; fore and aft instead of front and back. You don't know any more about Jersey than you did before you left, but you've come to think of the people in Manhattan as fools. So there you are. There's very little to do, really - lift sails, pull them down again, paddle a little bit, pray. You are a monk or a nun, putting flowers on altars, counting beads, now on this hand, now on that, and so forth and so on. Life's been reduced to something sweet and simple. The last thing you want is to arrive at the other shore and find out there's something else to do. However, after a couple of incarnations (you thought it was going to be a short trip, nothing of the kind, this is a long job), the boat scrapes ashore in Jersey. Ah! This is the exciting moment. We're there. This is what is known as rapture. You step ashore. It's a different world. Finally you think, I wonder what Manhattan looks like from here? 

 

                  With respect to the passage, the Buddha says: "Suppose a man wishing to get to the yonder shore should build himself a raft, and now having arrived at the yonder shore, with respect for the raft, should pick the raft up and carry it on his shoulders. Would that be an intelligent man?" "Oh no, master," said the monks. So it is with the laws of the order, they have nothing to do with Nirvana. Nirvana transcends all this. The laws of

the order are the vehicle that gets you there. 

 

                  This is the Hinayana, up to now. We're leaving Manhattan and going to Jersey. We're leaving samsara, the vortex of pain, and going to a nirvanic release. You're in New Jersey, you turn around to see Manhattan: you're in the realm of nonduality. You're in the world of transcendence of all pairs of opposites. There's no Manhattan over there. There's no Hudson River between. There's no ferryboat. There's no man in the boat. This is it. That's all it is. You have gone past duality and the realization is: I was there all the time. It's just a transformation of the eyes. Like that saying in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, "The kingdom of the father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it." See it! The radiance is all around us here, right now! This is it, and the multiplicity is unity in a wonderful sort of display. So that's the Mahayana. We're there, and yet we're on the ferryboat, and the ferryboat is there. And who's on the ferryboat? There's nobody on the ferryboat. This is the wonderful paradox of Buddhism. The key word is anatman. All things are without a self. We're all manifestations of that transcendence. The notion of self is exactly what is separating us from other people. Dissolve that. Don't be afraid, yield. Become the food of others. When that happens, you're in the whole thing. And this is known then as the great delight, mahasukha. 

 

                  And what then is finally the best austerity, what is the best discipline? The best discipline is: Enjoy your

friends, Enjoy your meals. Realize what your play is. Participate in the play, in the play of life. This is known

as mahasukha, the great delight. So there comes this final saying, Bhoga is yoga. Delight and enjoyment (bhoga) a form of yoga. That is the whole theme of T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party. You've got to give a party? That's your ritual, to realize the presence. It's a wonderfull thing. That's the great Buddhism.

 

                  An interesting thing is that this development of Mahayana Buddhism took place in northwest India, mostly, in the first two centuries A.D., which were precisely the centuries of the development of Christianity. The idea of the bodhisattva is the one who, out of his realization of transcendence, participates in the world. That's the idea of the Christ, in his love for the world, coming to be crucified - participating in the crucifixion, intentionally, with joy. What's the invitation of Christ? The invitation of Christ is joyful participation in the sorrows of the world, if you read it this way. So there is a wonderful dialogue here when you think of the Christ in the way of the Buddha. These are two folk manifestations of the same elementary idea. The lesson the Buddha tells you is, "You are it." All right. What's the invitation of Christ? Joyful participation, come into this crucifixion with joy, not fear, not desire, and it's a rapture. That's the story there. 

 

                  Now, many rituals associated with war, in the old days, had to do with getting the warriors into what is known as a "berserk attitude," where you go into the pain of the war with rapture. You are wild participating in this thing. That is a religious approach to war. And so we have the two Buddhisms: the Buddhism of the ascetic effort and the Buddhism of the joyful participation; the little ferryboat, the big ferryboat. "We're there" is big ferryboat stuff. The other one - "You're working hard" - is more little ferry-boat. Now some people like to work hard, so the worst thing you can do is say, "Gee, you're having a ball." "No, I'm having a terrible time, and that's the whole sense of my life." Another person might require a different doctrine. 

 

                  This is the Bodh-Gaya, the actual tree under which the Buddha sat. So we can concretize the whole thing, we can go to Bodh-Gaya. There's a big temple there that depicts the stages of the heavens. The idea is that reincarnation is the counterpart in the Orient of purgatory in the West. When you die, and are so bounded by your ego and its intentions and desires and fears that you can't open to the transcendent revelation of the beatific vision which would annihilate egoism, then you have to be purged (purgatory) of your ego. And this is a kind of postgraduate course that is given to you in a good Christian tradition. In the Oriental tradition, you would be reborn to have another chance. So you keep getting reborn until you are cleansed of ego. But in between incarnations you will go either to a heaven or to a hell, depending on how you behaved. If you responded as well as you could to the disciplines of your life, you will go to a heaven for which you are ready. If you resisted, you will be sent to a hell where real tough deities will smash you up and make you sorry for yourself. 

 

                  Now the heaven that you go to will be appropriate to your condition. Nobody is judging you and saying that you've got to go to this heaven or to that hell. Your own psyche has a kind of specific gravity that carries you just to the right heaven. If you are ready for rock and roll, it won't assign you to a chamber music concert. The heaven that you will enjoy will be appropriate to your readiness. The heavens grade up. The lower heavens are those of erotic delights of one kind or another. Next up are those of philosophical contemplation and so forth. Up above it's the transcendence, the meditation on the transcendent, and finally you dissolve. That's the world mountain. Beneath it are the abyssal hells, also graded. Dante's Divine Comedy gives us exactly that. The difference between Dante's hell and the hell of Thomas Aquinas is this: Aquinas's hell is just sheer punishment while Dante's hell is appropriate to the way you lived your life. Dante's heaven is also. So the future transcendent is simply a reflection of your present earthly character and being. 

 

                  The Buddha and Confucius share an important date, 500 B.C. But the Buddha sought Nirvana, the stillpoint, while Confucius emphasized social participation. Through social participation, the Tao, the way, the life

order, is recognized and participated in and brought into manifestation. Confucius's dates are something like 551 to 478 B.C. It's right on the line of the Buddha's dates, 563 to 483 B.C. Confucius is the key man for the Far East. Behind Confucius is another figure, known as Lao-tzu. Here they are

talking to each other. These aren't actually portraits of the men; nobody knows what they looked like. But Lao-tzu means "the old boy," the old sage who identifies himself with a kind of puer eternus, with the Tao. 

 

                  They tell me that in China the two great attitudes are the Confucian and the Taoist. Where society is in form, the Confucian mood prevails, which is participation in the way of the society through the rites of the society. They have nothing to do with sacrifice and ritual in the old sense. They have to do with participation in the social order. When the society goes berserk, then people move toward the Taoist position, which is unification with the universe-the Tao of the universe. The Taoist sage, a typical one you might say, is on the mountaintop. He's let the briars grow in the gate to his hut, he unites with the universe. (Or you can unite with society.) In any case, in China, and one feels this very strongly, there is a much stronger accent on positive participation in the flow than in India. Even in the "Bhoga is yoga" of the Mahayana in India, you still feel, "Well, we wish we were out of it." But in China there is this marvelous grounding participation. 

 

                  Lao-tzu represents the Tao in nature; Confucius adapts it to the Tao in society. Remember 500 B.C., the Buddha in India, Confucius in China. 

 

                  Now we come to the Near East and Darius I, 523-486 B.C. He was the master. What is the idea here? The idea is of the emperor as incarnation, or representative of the king of kings - God as king of kings, and human beings as God's subjects. Here is the idea of man as the servant of God, man as the subject of God, man as the slave of God. This has come down to us. 

 

                  When I was in school, we recited the catechism

"Why did God make you?"

"God made me to love him, to serve him, and to honor him in this world and to be happy with him forever in heaven."

It has to do with the relationship to God. God did not make me to realize my godhood. That's a totally different thing. We are on the other side of the line. This is the Near Eastern system out of which our biblical heritage comes. Now that is outstanding and different. 

 

                  In Greece, at the same time, Pythagoras flourished. You'd think you were in India again. One of the most accessible statements of the Pythagorean position is by Ovid in the Metamorphoses. He tells of the sage of Samos, who was far from the gods but in his mind at home with them. And what did this sage teach?

"All things change, but they are one. The one wax takes many molds." It's the same old doctrine. 

 

                  So here we have it: in between the Indo-European classical Greek and Indo-European Indian - and beyond that, the Chinese - we haave this authoritarian king-of-kings tradition, which has come to us through the

Bible. I don't know how it got there, but it's there. 

 

                  In fifth-century Greece, with Aristotle, something else comes in: rational philosophy and the humanistic tradition - man as man, which is not in the Orient at all - the idea of man as himself the center without bondage to deities. The deities are there as echoes, but they themselves represent powers of man. 

 

                  If we are to think of the old perennial philosophy as a manifestation to our mental mind of the wisdom of the body, we may think of the Aristotelian approach as addressed to and from the mental. When you are reading Aristotle - whether it's his Aesthetics or The Soul or whatever - you realize that what he's doing is rendering through rational terminology references to, and something of the implications of, the older tradition. He's talking about the soul and about transcendence of rationality by means of rational language. What has happened since is that the rational has taken over, and the reference to the transcendence drops out. That's one of the characteristics of our tradition. So in the West we have these two heritages: Aristotle and the Bible.

Aristotle's rationality was rational in its reference to something transcendent of rationality, but it has become increasingly strictly rational. In the Bible the stress is on the ethnic rather than the elementary aspect of the message. And these two have given us a commitment to time and space in and for itself, against which the transcendence of the perennial philosophy comes as a threat. A lot of people get the feeling of being threatened by this other thing because it threatens their rational, ethnic, stance. 

 

                  Now comes the great moment. Aristotle's student is Alexander the Great. In 332 B.C., at the Battle of Arbela, he defeats Darius III. A young, brilliant soldier, whose father was a great military man, Alexander invents military methods that go way beyond what anyone has thought of before. And within fifteen years, he has conquered all of the older systems in the Near East. Persia falls and he rushes through to India. He enters the Punjab around 327 B.C., and it is there that the first encounter of the Western mind and the Oriental guru takes place. 

 

                  Alexander had a lot of young officers who were students of Aristotle and other philosophers. They had heard that there was a school of Indian philosophers out in the forest, and so, with about ninety-eight interpreters, they go out to talk to this school. What they find is a group of naked old codgers sitting on a burning hot rock. When they propose to talk philosophy, the old yogis say, "Who can talk philosophy with young men wearing military boots and capes? Take your clothes off, sit on a rock for about ninety years, then we can begin to talk." 

 

                  But one of them was interested. He gut up to the jeers of all the others and went off with these chaps and became quite a favorite at Alexander's banquet table. Alexander may have been a little bit tired of Aristotle by that time. The old yogi became really a great favorite and was given presents and gifts. But when the army turned back into Persia, he asked them to build him a great pyre. He climbed up, sat in yoga posture on top of the pyre, and with the elephants of Alexander's army trumpeting and doing sunwise turns around the pyre, he went up in flames. This was Europe's first encounter with the philiosophy of the East, and it hasn't recovered since. 

 

                  In India, because of Alexander, there was a ripple effect and the fall of one dynasty after another. We find as late as the first century B.C., in Orissa, at the other end of India, Greek soldiers - Greek mercenaries - guarding temples. And favorites in the harems of north India at that time were the Greek women. So a very strong Greek influence takes hold. And the most important figure to derive from this in India was Ashoka. His dates are the middle of the third century B.C., around 250 B.C. Ashoka was the first emperor to become a Buddhist. It is thought he may have been a Jain before that. He had conquered the north of India and a good deal of the east, but then he became overwhelmed with the realization of the sorrow that he had brought about through his conquests. The Buddhist realization, "All life is sorrowful," overwhelmed him, and he became a Buddhist. 

 

                  He was the first Buddhist monarch, and he sent missionaries - now this is important - to Ceylon. He sent his own son and daughter to Ceylon to found the mission there. He sent missionaries also - and these are recorded in statements that are engraved in rock and marble - to Macedonia, to Cyprus, and to Egypt. So about 250 B.C. we begin to have Buddhist missionaries in the Near East, and it is at that time that neo-Platonic philosophy begins to arrive. There have been important studies - one by a German named Garba, for example-of parallels between neo-Platonic and Sankhya philosophies. And there's no doubt about it. The influence began coming over, so we begin then to have a synthesis of Eastern and Western thinking. 

 

                  Now we come to the beginning of Buddhist, and really Hindu, architecture. This is from Ashoka's time at

Sanchi. It is called a stupa, and what it represents is a reliquary, a burial mound within which relics are kept.

But it is symbolic of the world. It's the

cosmic egg. In the stupa, old pre-Buddhist deities are shown paying respect to the Buddha. That's the wonderful thing about Buddhism. Whenever it goes anyplace, it doesn't say, "Cut out your gods." There is a very easy synthesis of religions where Buddhism goes. The characteristic of the Muslim and Christian traditions is to annihilate the gods of the country that they enter. The characteristic of the more gentle Buddhist tradition is that these gods are the local powers of life, which are themselves manifestations of Buddha consciousness. So there they stand in reverence to the revelation of their own Buddhahood.