Here and there we find oases in this desert of words—passages of the same profound beauty which graces the Upanishads and of a somewhat similar meaning. These will be found principally in a collection of sayings known as the Dhammapada (of which I recommend the translation by Mrs. C. A. F. Rhys Davids).8 They are found, too, in some of the Dialogues and in other isolated sections of the Canon, and they stand out in such contrast to the rest that they are immediately recognizable as the words of a truly great mind. Therefore to arrive at some idea of the Buddha’s teaching we have to take such passages and consider them in their historical context, in relation to what came before them and to what developed out of them. We must remember that the Buddha was active at a time when Hinduism was in a decline, when spiritual experience had been forgotten in its symbols. Except in some few instances his own teaching was swept away in this decline and became so devitalized that it ultimately died out in the land of its birth. But for some hundreds of years a truly vital tradition lived on in India, drawing to it some of the best minds then existing among the Brahmins. This tradition finally came north to China, Tibet, and Japan, and in China Buddhism achieved its full glory in the blending of Indian profundity with the Chinese senses of reality, beauty, and humor.
The Buddhism of Gautama
The Buddha’s teaching is unique in its utter lack of theology; it concentrates wholly on the necessity of arriving at a personal, immediate experience and dispenses with the doctrinal symbol of that experience. In this respect it is the only truly psychological religion. It is a mistake to say that the Buddha denied the existence of any kind of God or soul; these were subjects he simply refused to discuss on the grounds that mere talking and mere belief were not conducive to enlightenment. “One thing do I teach,” he said. “Dukkha and deliverance from dukkha.” It is usually translated “suffering and deliverance from suffering,” but for us the word “suffering” is rather too sweeping. I prefer the translation “discord” or even “unhappiness.” According to him the cause of discord or unhappiness was tanha or selfish craving, which is perhaps best understood as refusal to accept the “three signs of being.” These are:
1.Anicca—Change or Impermanence.
2.Anatta—Literally, “No-self.” The unreality of the ego as a permanent, self-contained, and self-directing unit.
3.Dukkha—In this context, suffering in its widest sense.
Many people have thought that in making anatta one of the three signs of being the Buddha denied absolutely the existence of any eternal principle in man whatsoever. Actually he denied nothing more than the self-existence of the ego (see above, ch. 1, p. 25), and although as a general rule he refused to discuss the existence of a “Higher Self” (which would be identical with Brahman) there is no doubt that he had it in mind, for he refers directly to it in several places.9
When these three signs of being are fully accepted, man attains the experience of Nirvana, whose literal meaning is the dying out of the fire of tanha. In order that no one should confuse doctrine with experience he only described Nirvana negatively and would say nothing positive about it at all. Nirvana, resulting from the acceptance of the three signs of being, is deliverance from sangsara, the “Wheel of Birth and Death”—a general symbol of limited experience, of the bondage of the spirit in the wheel of opposites where all that we like is conditioned by what we dislike. Figuratively (and perhaps actually; we do not know) Nirvana is understood as deliverance from the necessity of being reborn again and again in this world of sangsara. For sangsara is just like what we have called the vicious circle—a circle which turns on and on as long as we try to grapple with the opposites in their own terms, as long as we set pleasure against pain, life against death, permanence against change, and acceptance against escape. The “Wheel of Birth and Death” is indeed the squirrel cage of man’s unhappiness, pursuing himself in order to escape from himself. It is like a bar revolving on its center; the more you push against one end of it, the more it revolves.
Total acceptance of the three signs of being culminates and fulfills itself in the experience of enlightenment or awakening (bodhi), which is the abrupt transition from the dual to the nondual view of life, for Nirvana is sometimes described by the same negative method as employed by the Vedantins in regard to Brahman (cf. the passage quoted on pp. 153–54 from the Mandukya Upanishad). Thus in the Pali Canon alone there is an abundance of evidence to show that Nirvana indicates the same experience of nonduality; a somewhat neglected passage from the Canon puts this beyond all doubt, for Gautama says:10
Thus the Tathagata [Buddha] knows the straight path that leads to a union with Brahma. He knows it as one who has entered the world of Brahma and has been born in it. There can be no doubt in him.
This is one of a few hints that the Buddha’s view of life went far deeper than many of his disciples admit. For, after his death, his followers began to separate into two great divisions known subsequently as the Mahayana (Great Vehicle) and Hinayana (Lesser Vehicle). It was as if the seed planted by the Buddha had sprouted into two stems, of which one continued to grow while the other withered. For the Hinayana (now confined to Ceylon [Sri Lanka], Burma [Myanmar], and Siam [Thailand]) stuck to the letter of the Pali Canon, “working upon it,” to borrow an appropriate sentence from Bacon, “as the spider worketh its web, bringing forth cobwebs of learning, admirable for its fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit.” In their hands the Buddha’s teaching decomposed just as their psychology decomposed man and the universe, proving the nonexistence of all things.
Mahayana Buddhism
But the Mahayana began where the Buddha left off—if indeed there is no truth in the claim that Mahayana is the Buddha’s esoteric teaching. It explored further into the psychology of enlightenment, the nature of Nirvana and sangsara, and the spiritual ideals of Buddhism. One tradition claims that the secret of enlightenment was passed, by a direct mystical communication, down the Mahayana line from patriarch to patriarch of the order.11 Yet although Mahayana by no means escaped the scholasticism of the Hindu mind, and although, contrary to the Buddha’s own practice, it indulged in some of the most subtle metaphysical speculations that man has produced, it established a number of principles which have formed the basis for the greatest spiritual achievements of Buddhism.
The Hinayanists looked upon Nirvana as an escape from the pains of life and death—a conception which to the Mahayanists with their Brahmanic background appeared as the old error of dualism. Thus the ideal man of the Hinayana was the Arhat—one who simply attained Nirvana and ceased from rebirth, entering into the formless rest, bliss, and impersonality of the eternal. But the Mahayanists gave their philosophy of nonduality practical expression in the ideal of the Bodhisattva, who attains liberation but remains in the world of birth and death to assist all other beings to enlightenment. In other words, they refused to make any absolute distinction between Nirvana and sangsara; the two states are the same, seen, as it were, from different points of view. Therefore the great Lankavatara Sutra says:12