This article is the last in a four-part series on stories of great Buddhist nuns. Here we meet Venerable Utpalavarna, a nun who demonstrates extraordinary spiritual power even as her life is threatened by members of her own community.

What follows is a retelling of a story recorded in the Kshudrakavastu, a scripture from the canon of monastic discipline belonging to the Mulasarvastivada school of the Sanskrit-Tibetan tradition.

Venerable Utpalavarna sat in a state of peaceful equanimity, meditating beneath the canopy of a tree. A movement crossed her awareness, and briefly she glanced to the side. She saw a monk prostrating with great devotion to a nearby shrine, surrounded by a group of his students bowing along with him. Because of the great reverence they showed the stupa, Utpalavarna deduced that the monks thought they were bowing to a shrine dedicated to the Buddha himself. This was definitely not the case. Somewhat against her better judgment (monks in positions of authority did not often care to be reprimanded in front of their students by a nun), she decided to speak up.

“Venerable,” she said, “make sure you know whose shrine you’re bowing to.”

Taken aback, the monk abruptly straightened into a standing position. Why would this nun say such a thing? After a moment’s reflection, he realized that this shrine must not be one dedicated to the Buddha, but rather some other spiritual teacher. He felt embarrassed to be seen making a mistake, particularly in front of his students. Worse, there was a rule against nuns disparaging monks, and although Venerable Utpalavarna had not meant to insult him, he took it that way.

The scripture tells us that this monk had a karmic tendency toward hatred. Seething, he marched over to Venerable Utpalavarna, and began to scold her aggressively. Venerable Utpalavarna, however, refrained from responding in kind. She merely sat in silence.

Social embarrassment is very hard for most people to stomach. Embarrassment, especially when it rises to the level of shame, makes us want to disappear. Anger, on the other hand, can have a vitalizing quality, and so, like the vexed monk, we reflexively summon up anger to push embarrassment away.

The monk turned to his students and commanded them, “Venerables, those of you who love and cherish the Buddha should rip out every single brick from around that heap of bones! Tear it down!”

With lightning obedience, his retinue tore out the bricks, hastily tossing them into a pile. It took but a moment for the sacred monument to be reduced to a heap of masonry.

Standing nearby were two nuns, the now-former caretakers of the ruined shrine, who helplessly watched its destruction. Grieving, they wept on their long walk back to the nuns’ residence, where they told their sisters what had taken place.

Among them, a few nuns were still spiritually immature, and prone to outburst. As they stood together in a circle, weeping, Venerable Sthulananda said to them, “Elder sisters, which one of you told the monk he was wrong about the shrine?”

“Utpalavarna was sitting right there!” they cried. “She must have been the one to tell him.”

Sthulananda leaned in. “Sisters,” she said, her tone conspiratorial, “Utpalavarna is from a low-class family. It shows in everything she does. I know exactly what she said. She did this. Let’s go.”

When a conflict arises that impacts everyone in a group, social lines can start to form quickly. A kind of collective frenzy often takes over, designating those who follow along as “in,” and those who resist or object as “out.” To be on the inside may feel secure, especially when a strong leader emerges to take up the charge of one side.

Sthulananda was clearly stoking the fire of conflict. She didn’t stop with a simple accusation against Venerable Utpalavarna, but went on to twist the words of the Buddha around. She quoted a statement from the Buddha out of context about the dangers that unruly members posed to the sangha. She used the distorted quotation to justify an attack on Utpalavarna, and even her murder.

Lost to delusion, the group flew into a fury. Intent on murder, they grabbed anything that could be used as a weapon, and set out to find the target of their rage.

Venerable Utpalavarna saw them coming over a distant ridge. “They’re headed right here,” she thought. “What do they want?” She remembered the shrine’s destruction, and the grief of its  former keepers. Then recognizing the silhouettes of Venerable Sthulananda and the weapons the women were carrying, she understood. They were coming to kill her.

Venerable Utpalavarna recited a blessing over her cloak, wrapped it tightly around herself, and entered into a state of fathomless meditation.

The enraged nuns, arriving in a clamor, encircled her, stabbing her again and again with their weapons. Through the strength of her meditation, her breath became as still as that of a dead person. Believing that Venerable Utpalavarna had died, the group congratulated itself on a job well done.

“Sisters,” they said, “we have avenged this wrong. Come, let’s go!” and they departed.

In the ensuing silence, Venerable Utpalavarna rose out of her meditation. Returning to her ordinary state of consciousness, she looked down and took in how grievously wounded she was.

She lifted her gaze to the temple, and, with the last reserves of her physical strength, limped toward help.

When she arrived at the temple, many of the monks reacted with concern. But there were less sensible monks among them who could not allow themselves to believe her story. They considered Venerable Utpalavarna a liar, and grew angry at her presence in the temple. They could not imagine that a group of nuns would have acted in such a way, and so they denied that it was even possible. “Venerable brothers,” they said, “while a nun who is very angry might refrain from prostrating to an elder with whom she was frustrated, the notion that these women would go so far as to try and kill Venerable Utpalavarna is ridiculous. Enough of this disruption! We have to decide what we should do about this woman’s presence among the monks.”

“We don’t have to do anything,” others said. “The only thing to do is inform the Buddha what has taken place.”

“Why should we bring the Buddha into any of this? We should make a rule ourselves that no nun may enter the temple, ever.” 

The monks gathered without the Buddha present and made a rule that no nun was allowed to enter the temple.

And so, for a time, none did.

Now, Mahaprajapati Gautami, the Buddha’s aunt and adoptive mother, was the leader of the community of nuns. It had been her custom to come to the temple and pay daily, devoted homage to the Buddha. So it was a surprise to her when one day the monks said, “Gautami, the sangha of monks has made a rule that nuns may no longer enter the temple. You may not enter. Stay away.”

“Noble ones,” she said, “your rule is very broad. Must all the sangha of nuns be punished for the mistakes of a few?”

“The sangha of monks has accepted this rule,” the monks replied. “What can we do?”

Mahaprajapati Gautami was conspicuous in her silence. She returned to her residence.

The Buddha noticed her absence that morning, and knowing well what had taken place, asked his attendant, “Ananda, has Mahaprajapati Gautami fallen ill?”

“No, Lord, she has not.”

“Why has she not come?”

Venerable Ananda explained the situation as he understood it in detail. 

“Ananda,” the Buddha said, “it is important that the sangha of monks be able to make rules as they see fit. Still, the sangha of nuns is largely reliant on them  . . .” 

When the nuns’ sangha was formed, the acceptance of it by the larger community had depended in part on the nuns formally assenting to what are widely known as the eight garudhammas. These special rules created protocols for the nuns’ conduct in regard to ordination ceremonies, retreat practice, teachings, and the like, and made them dependent on the monks for certain teachings and rites.

“ . . . If the nuns are not allowed to enter the temple,” the Buddha continued, “it will pose problems.” 

Then the Buddha proclaimed an addendum to the rule the monks had made. Nuns were allowed back into the temple, but first they had to verify to the gatekeeper that they were not carrying any sharp weapons, as Venerable Utpalavarna’s assailants had.

It is interesting to note that while the Buddha let stand the rules the monks had made, he did not share their skepticism about Venerable Utpalavarna’s story. In fact, the Buddha did what he could to safeguard the entire community from such attacks in the future.

In reading, as in daily life, there is an unconscious process of identification and disidentification that takes place. We identify with or against people, events, or experiences. As readers, our reflex is to assume that we are incapable of the heinous actions done by some of the characters in this story. But we are not fundamentally different from them. 

Should the right set of circumstances arise, any one of us could become rageful and bent on revenge, as the grieving nuns did, or deny another person’s reality when met with their suffering in a way we can’t take in, as some of the monks did. Fortunately, we are also not fundamentally different from the very best qualities we see depicted in the story. With study, contemplation, and meditation, we can become like Venerable Utpalavarna. We can respond to others’ rage and accusations with equanimity, and even reach the point of being able to harness the power of our minds in meditation to protect ourselves from danger. When a wrong has taken place, we can act as the Buddha did, and set safeguards to protect our communities into the future. When the knives are out, we can become all these things, and more.

The post When the Knives Are Out appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

This well-known story is from one of the first widely read works on Zen published in English, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, compiled and published by Paul Reps in 1957. It incorporates stories from several sources, including a book published in 1919 called 101 Zen Stories, which in turn drew mostly from a 13th-century Japanese collection, the Shasekishū, and a koan collection, The Gateless Gate (Jpn: Mumonkan).

Ask anyone today the meaning of the story and they will likely give the same answer: carpe diem; Seize the day! Enjoy life while it lasts; live life to the fullest; savor the simple pleasures of life while you can; or, in the words of the title of a book by Maezumi Roshi, Appreciate Your Life. Many philosophers and religious thinkers have emphasized that profound awareness of one’s mortality changes the way one lives and feels life. Anyone who has had a serious illness or accident knows something about this. So this story presents an illustration of being able to appreciate the sweetness of whatever the moment brings in the face of the situation we are all inevitably in—hanging on for life while the white and black mice of passing days and nights nibble away at our remaining time. The Zen attitude, the story suggests, is to fully appreciate and savor each moment in unblinking awareness of our precarious circumstances. Meditation, we might further infer, fosters this appreciation.

There exist, however, other iterations of the story that imply an altogether different message, including versions in ancient Buddhist and Hindu texts. The Buddhist one is in the Lalitavistara, a fourth-century account of the life of the Buddha. In this text, the man is chased by an elephant instead of a tiger, he falls into a well instead of off a cliff, and rats, rather than mice, nibble the vine. Below him is a great serpent, and four snakes come from the sides of the well attempting to bite him. Instead of the strawberry, there is a beehive from which drops of honey fall into his mouth while bees swarm and sting him. And brush fires burn the tree branch to which he clings. The Buddha, who is relating this story, details what the various elements represent (the elephant is impermanence, the fire is old age, the serpent below, death). The five drops of honey represent desires for food and drink, sleep, sex, wealth, and fame. He leaves no ambiguity about the moral of the story: “That is why, great king, you should know that birth, old age, illness, and death are quite terrible. You should always remember them, and not become a slave to your desires.” In a version found in the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, the story is put into the mouth of a Jain monk, who explains that the drops of honey are trivial pleasures that people become attached to and consume insatiably, distracting them from the spiritual life. He mocks the doomed man for craving the superficial pleasure of the honey in the face of his precarious situation.

The story of how this tale migrates from the world-weary ethos of ancient ascetic communities in India to the back pockets of world-affirming, strawberry-eating seekers in the 1960s is long, complicated, and fascinating. The story of the Buddha’s life told in the Lalitavistara, containing within it our story of the unfortunate falling man, was picked up by the Manicheans and transformed into the tale of Barlaam and Josaphat (the latter’s name is likely derived from the term “bodhisattva”). An Arabic version circulated in eighth-century Persia, and from there it was adapted to Christianity and attributed to St. John Chrysorrhoas of Damascus (675–749). In this version the man is transfixed with tasting the honey and, failing to notice a ladder his friend extends to him, falls and is devoured by the dragon below, now representing Satan.  

The story of Barlaam and Josaphat circulated throughout Europe and the Middle East for centuries and was translated into many languages. In the nineteenth century, Leo Tolstoy used the story of the man in the well as the centerpiece of his autobiographical work, A Confession, where he saw it as an expression of the futility of his life up to the point of his radical personal transformation and embracing of a liberal, pacifist understanding of the teachings of Jesus. Tolstoy’s autobiography, in turn, had a profound influence on a young Indian lawyer in the nineteenth century—Mohandas Gandhi—who would incorporate it into his own revolutionary teachings. So the story made its way back to India after becoming a part of most of the major religious traditions of the world and attaining new meanings and significance in each one. Meanwhile, around the same time Gandhi encountered it, a Zen monk named Nyogen Senzaki (1876–1958), one of the first Zen monks to teach in the United States, compiled and helped translate a version of the story of the man in the well—which had all the while been circulating in Asia, both independently and as a part of the Lalitavistara and other texts—into the version we have now in English in the book 101 Zen Stories, which became a part of Reps’ slim, pocket-sized volume, which is still in print and part of essential Zen reading in America.  

The journey of this story illustrates how texts, works of art, poems, rituals are never fixed in their meaning. They yield up new interpretations in new contexts, as novel meanings are coaxed out of them by new cultural contexts, and people tweak them to resonate with prevailing ideals and assumptions. All of this is a rather roundabout way of illustrating that the ethic of renunciation so pervasive in early Buddhist literature often fades into invisibility in modernized Buddhisms and is largely displaced by what I would call the ethic of appreciation. This ethic entails an affirmation of the implicit value of the physical world, the senses, and the ordinary experience of ordinary people. The ethic of appreciation contrasts strikingly with the ethic of world-renunciation that dominates the early Buddhist literature. It is part of a broader Indian ascetic literature that attempts to train the mind to see things in particular ways, develop particular virtues, sensibilities, aesthetic responses, and affective habits. According to the suttas and the Vinaya, monastics must train themselves in detachment from the world. They are to cultivate indifference, for example, to the eight worldly concerns: hope for gain and fear of loss; hope for fame and fear of disgrace; hope for praise and fear of blame; hope for pleasure and fear of pain (AN 8.5). They are to see the world as something that cannot possibly bring about satisfaction, as something fleeting and unreliable, deceptive and beguiling. They should become disenchanted with it and withdraw emotional investment in seeking satisfaction from it. They are to imagine the interior of bodies to counter attraction to physical beauty, cultivate revulsion at physiological processes like digestion and sex, and take opportunities to view corpses to ameliorate illusions of permanence and vivify the inevitability of death. They are to shun attachment to family and avoid seeking solace in the inevitably fragile and unstable human relationships. The world is often called a “mass of suffering.”  

There is another side to this, however. These attitudes exist in counterpoint to advice in the suttas on good family relations and the need to cultivate particular social emotions like love, compassion, and taking joy in others’ happiness. In some literature, readers are advised to cultivate the kind of love toward all living beings that a mother has for her only son. The Buddha gives advice to kings on worldly affairs and is clearly invested in the wellbeing of people, animals, and society. So throughout the Buddhist traditions a tension exists between an ethic of detachment and renunciation and a more this-worldly ethic of compassion and engagement. Also, we should remember the wide array of this-worldly practices Buddhists have developed that were oriented toward physical health, worldly prosperity, and a fortunate rebirth this side of nirvana. We have to be careful, therefore, not to overstate the anti-worldliness of early Buddhism or suggest that it has an unrelentingly negative view on embodied life. Rather, a great deal of Buddhist literature attempts to navigate this tension between ascetic detachment and compassionate engagement.  

The message of the early version of the story of the man in the well—as well as the meditations on corpses and contemplations of the repugnance of the body—is not that one should appreciate one’s life, with its delicious honey drops, beautiful scenery, exquisite scents and tastes, and other physical delights. It is, rather, that such sensual engagement merely entraps one further in the cycle of samsara. Granted, Buddhist traditions are not univocal in this. Tantric literature sometimes starkly reverses the devaluation of the physical, valorizing the body and physiological processes, seeing them as essential to liberation. A passage from the Candamaharosana Tantra, for example, declares:

One should not torment oneself with austerities,

Abandoning the five sense-objects.

One should notice beauty as it comes along,

And listen to the sound.

One should smell the odor

And savor the supreme taste.

One should experience the sensation of touch,

Pursuing the five types of sense-objects.

One will quickly become awakened….

East Asian Buddhist literature, drawing from the broader strains of the Daoist reverence of mountains, rivers, and trees, expresses a similar admiration of the physical and natural world, some seeing even rocks and grasses as infused with buddha-nature.  

The ethic of appreciation that has more recently become intertwined with Buddhist and Buddhist-derived meditative practices, however, may be something new. It is part of the modern valorization of worldly life, what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls the “affirmation of ordinary life.” The idea is that the value and dignity of human life does not reside beyond it but in the manner of living it. The ordinary person, rather than the noble warrior or king, becomes the center of artistic attention in modern art and literature, where ordinary experience is valorized and, in some cases, even sacralized. Much of the world of global, cosmopolitan late-modernity flows from the European Enlightenment, and one of its distinctive characteristics was this broad sense of world-affirmation. Most inheritors of this tradition have a general sense that the world and worldly activity are good in and of themselves. Marriage, reproduction, and work attain an esteem absent in medieval times, when the world was often considered a place of brief, temporary residence prior to occupying one’s true home in the afterlife. Pleasure was positively reevaluated, as was material well being. A positive view of the prospects of worldly satisfaction is not, of course, exclusive to the modern West, but it has been a prominent and enduring feature of the modern and late-modern eras.

Contemporary meditation and mindfulness practices have embedded themselves in this world-affirming ethos, absorbing it so thoroughly as to transform the significance of the practice itself. Consider a standard exercise in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction courses. One of the first things students do is eat a raisin. They first look at the raisin, notice its folds and contours, then eat it excruciatingly slowly, with complete focus on the flavors, sensations, textures—all the nuances of the experience of this simple, everyday activity. The exercise is designed to bring increased attention to something familiar in order to uncover hidden dimensions of ordinary experience. The clear implication is that all experiences are like this. They all contain hidden aspects, secret delights, normally occluded subtleties to which we, in our mindless routines, have become blind. To increase attention to the fine-grained qualities of our ordinary experiences is to truly live our life rather than miss it in a haze of daydreams, distractions, and mental chatter. The underlying message is: the raisin is good; your sense-experience is good; your life as an embodied being who eats and digests and has sex and enjoys the sights, sounds, tastes, sensations, and smells of the natural world is good.    

The purpose of close attention to the ordinary phenomena of embodied experience in the early Buddhist meditation texts is quite different. These practices are designed to bring about disenchantment (nibbida—sometimes translated “revulsion”) with all phenomena and to develop dispassion (viraga) and detachment from them. There is still a hint of detachment in contemporary versions: one detaches from one’s ordinary habitual attitudes and mindless sleepwalking through life in order to discover the hidden treasures just below the surface. And it is not just treasures: sometimes one finds ugly emotions, hidden internal conflicts, repressed desires. But underlying it all is the idea that in order to deal with such difficulties, as well as appreciate the wonders of life, one must be mindful and increase one’s scope of awareness—and that, ultimately, even in the face of old age, sickness, and death, embodied human life is good in and of itself, whether or not there is an afterlife or nirvana.  

The point here is not to disparage recent reconfigurations of meditation as not sufficiently “traditional,” nor to laud them as having shaken off the shackles of tradition. Buddhist traditions have been adapted and transformed in different cultures long before coming to the West. In each case, the ideas and practices incorporated elements of the new culture and, in turn, contributed to changes in those cultures. In each case at least part of the value that meditative practices have offered derived not from the fact that they are being practiced exactly as a preceding historical version of the tradition practiced it but in how they became relevant in a novel cultural context.

If the ethic of appreciation is baked into contemporary culture, and meditation and mindfulness in our era are inevitably tilted toward the “this-worldly” side of the equation, the question then becomes: to what this-worldly uses are these practices best put today? Is meditation a tool for creating more productive workers to feed the system of global capital? Or does it focus the critical faculties of the mind for resistance against systems of routinization, commodification, and oppression? For critical inquiry into the social hierarchies and oppressive structures? Does it create an inner citadel that insulates one from being adversely affected by external events? Or does it create greater attunement, intimacy, and sensitivity to the world and others in the world? Is it for creating mental and physical health as understood today? Or for fostering an awareness of a transcendent dimension of experience? These are questions that, whether they are formulated explicitly or not, are being worked out among practitioners and their communities every day. They are not so much about the abstract question how does meditation work? but, rather, what work does meditation do in a novel cultural ecosystem?

♦

This piece is adapted from the forthcoming book Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds, Oxford University Press.

The post Strawberries and the Ethic of Appreciation appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It is unlikely that Crosby, Stills and Nash were thinking about the Buddha’s smile when they composed their classic lyric, “If you smile at me, I will understand, ’cause that is something everybody everywhere does in the same language.” Yet if we were to think anything like they did, we might believe that its meaning is perfectly transparent. The image of a smiling Buddha is so common, we can probably all picture it in our mind’s eye, and probably all of us have an immediate response to the question of why the Buddha smiles.

I am confident that Crosby, Stills and Nash were also not thinking about the difference between what scientists of facial expressions call “the voluntary (or social) smile” and “the genuine (or enjoyment) smile,” or “Duchenne smile,” named after the French scientist who first posited its existence in the 19th century. The basic insight here is that some smiles, “genuine smiles,” are involuntary and spontaneous, while other smiles, “social smiles,” are voluntary, the result of an intention or thought. Furthermore, while genuine smiles have been closely linked with the feeling of happiness, social smiles do not have any such connection to a specific emotional state. Indeed, social smiles can even be used to mask emotions or thoughts that one does not wish others to perceive. 

The way to tell the difference between these two types of smile, according to scientists, is to look at the eyes. While both types of smile involve raising the corners of the mouth, only genuine smiles always involve the contraction of the muscle in the face that pulls up the cheeks and makes the corners of the eyes bunch together, the zygomaticus muscle, which many people have difficulty contracting intentionally. Indeed, a recent New York Times article details the work of a Japanese “smile coach” who helps clients train these facial muscles to improve their smiles.

This distinction is relevant to our question of why the Buddha smiles, because the notion of the involuntary smile offers at least the possibility of universality, the possibility that everyone everywhere, including the Buddha, actually does smile in the same language, a language we can all understand. Yet the distinction between genuine smiles and social smiles raises the issue of cultural specificity and difference. Different cultures and historical periods have different customs and norms around the act of smiling, which means that it is often not immediately obvious why someone smiles.

So if we want to evaluate our immediate response to the question of why the Buddha smiles, whatever it might be, then we would need to know more about the Buddha’s smile. Is it voluntary? Is it spontaneous? What are its features and circumstances? The rich heritage of Buddhist literature can help us answer some of these questions, and it can also help us to place the smile in some of its cultural and historical contexts. 

In preparing this article, I searched for the word “smile” in 84000’s online reading room, a catalog of translated texts in the Kangyur and Tengyur, the canonical scriptures of Tibetan Buddhism, and found over fifty different works. Some of them feature multiple episodes of smiling, and more than twenty of these works include episodes of the Buddha smiling. For instance, the Buddha smiles on more than half a dozen occasions in the 18,000 Line Perfection of Wisdom Sutra alone, while in the collection of stories called The Hundred Tales of Karma (Karmaśataka), there are another seven instances of the Buddha smiling. Another rich resource is the Lalitavistara, one of the best-known versions of the story of the Buddha’s final life, from his conception up to the teaching of the first sermon. In the Lalitavistara, the future buddha smiles on several occasions, as do other characters, such as his mother, his future wife, his schoolmaster, and his father. 

As one reads through these various episodes, one can find certain patterns and themes, which one can then situate within a broader Indian cultural context. (It is worth bearing in mind that the Tibetan canonical collections contain translations mostly of Indian Buddhist works from Sanskrit.) As a broad generalization, even though it is true that buddhas and kings may smile on occasion, smiling is an act that is often associated in Indian literature with females and children, and Buddhist literature is not an exception. 

The Lalitavistara provides a good example. Early in this work, the Buddha’s mother is described as “having a smile on her face and not furrowing her brow” while she is carrying the future buddha in her womb, a trope that also appears among other published translations on 84000. Also, when the future buddha’s future wife, named Gopa in this sutra, first hears about him, she smiles, and she is also described as having a laughing or smiling expression on her face when she first meets him. Additionally, in the chapter on the defeat of Mara, the daughters of Mara are described as having smiles on their faces, and indeed, the act of showing the teeth by making a sort of half-smile is listed therein as one of the thirty-two “wiles of women” (strīmāyā).

Also in the Lalitavistara, when the newborn future Buddha takes his seven steps, he smiles and says, “This is my last birth.” When his aunt takes him to the temple to see the gods, he smiles and, with a laughing expression on his face, informs her that he is “the supreme god among the gods” and all the gods came and paid homage to him at his birth.

The literary portrayal of the iconic smile of the Buddha also contains some set narrative patterns in Buddhist literature. First, one may note that his smiles are public displays; the Buddha does not smile to himself. His smile is prompted by some state of affairs, and then directly afterwards someone present—often it is Ananda—asks him to explain why he smiled. Sometimes the narrator of the episode even tells us that the Buddha smiles with the intent of being asked, so that he can explain the reason. The fact that the Buddha has a reason for smiling is significant in itself: the Buddha’s smile is almost always described as an intentional act, an act of volition. Buddhist literature doesn’t necessarily make a clear distinction between voluntary and involuntary smiles, but as Ananda, or someone else, typically says, buddhas do not smile without a reason. While the specific reason or circumstances may vary to some degree, the Buddha’s smile is almost always followed by either an explanation of something in the distant past that only the Buddha knows, or a prediction about the future, often the future awakening of someone as a buddha, which only a buddha can give.

So the Buddha typically smiles because he wants to make something known. Does the Buddha also smile because he feels happy or at peace? This is a difficult question to answer. Consider, for example, an episode in the Chapter on Becoming a Monk (Pravrajyāvastu) in the Mūlasarvāstivāda-vinaya, one of the classical Indian canonical collections that explains the rules of the monastic code and the one translated into Tibetan to govern the Tibetan Buddhist monastic tradition. The story goes as follows: 

As the Buddha is walking through Varanasi, he comes to a certain location and smiles. Then, we see another common pattern that is found in many instances of the Buddha’s smile, one that appears to grow more pronounced as Buddhist literature develops: Multicolored rays of light issue from the Buddha’s mouth and traverse the cosmos, including the hells and the heavens, before disappearing, in this instance beneath the Buddha’s feet. After Ananda has seen this happen, he asks the Buddha why he has smiled, and the Buddha tells him it is because many wicked men have raped a great many nuns in that place. When they die, the Buddha informs Ananda, these wicked men will be reborn in the hell realms.

At this point, a monk comes forward and confesses that he, too, has raped a nun in the past, and the Buddha responds that a person who has raped a nun should be banished from the monastic community, and that, in future, such persons should not be allowed to become monks, because the dharma and the discipline will not take root in them. 

So we might want to ask, does the Buddha smile in this instance because he is happy or at peace about the situation he has just disclosed to the audience? The text does not tell us, one way or another. It does not give any indication of the Buddha’s inner state, at all, but it would seem to be too much to say that the Buddha smiles here because he is happy or content. Rather, he smiles because he perceives a teaching opportunity. As the bodhisattva Puṇyaraśmi says in a different sutra, the Questions of Rāṣṭrapāla, the Buddha “trains the world when he smiles.” 

In the classical trope of the Buddha’s luminous smile, as it is found in Buddhist narrative collections in Sanskrit as well as in Mahayana Buddhist literature, the light rays that emerge from the Buddha’s mouth are also said to indicate the general reason for the Buddha’s smile. So, after the rays of light ease the suffering of beings in bad circumstances, such as the hell realms, and remind those in good circumstances about the basic truth of impermanence, when they return to the Buddha, the place on his body where they disappear is also said to indicate the kind of prediction or information that the smile is intended to convey. In the above example, the fact that rays of light disappear into the Buddha’s feet shows that he means to point out a rebirth in the hell realms. However, if the light dissolves into the bump on the top of the Buddha’s head, then his smile indicates someone’s future awakening as a perfect buddha. These various correlations are explained in the classical trope as it is found repeatedly in classical Buddhist story literature like The Hundred Buddhist Tales (Avadānaśataka).

With the exception of the theme of the smile’s luminosity, many of the basic patterns described above are also found in the Pali Buddhist canon. If one were to look therein, one would find only a handful of instances in which the Buddha smiles, four episodes to be precise. Moggallana (Maudgalyāyana in Sanskrit), the Buddha’s great disciple famous for his superhuman powers, also smiles on one occasion therein, and he also does so, interestingly enough, at seeing an image of great suffering. 

When one compares the instances in the Pali canon with some of those found in other Buddhist collections, as well as those in Mahayana Buddhist literature, and if one takes into account the broader Indian cultural context, one may be surprised to discover that the Buddha’s smile demonstrates his majesty and his extraordinary knowledge and power. The Buddha simply knows and sees more than we do, and his smile becomes an opportunity for us to bear witness to this fact. 

In a sense, the Buddha’s smile is a wondrous occasion, an occasion for witnesses to wonder and to express wonderment. The point here is not that the indelible image of the Buddha’s smile, the one depicted on the faces of so many Buddha images, can or should be reduced to a single meaning or significance, but rather it is to say the opposite. Because of its enigmatic nature, the Buddha’s smile was a source of great meaning for Buddhists in the past, and when we attend to the vast literary and cultural heritage of Buddhism, it can continue to provide meaning for us today and in the future.

⧫

Learn more about the Buddha’s smile in Dr. Fiordalis’ article “Buddhas and Body Language: The Literary Trope of the Buddha’s Smile.”

The post Why Does the Buddha Smile? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Arising as they do from an earlier oral tradition, Buddhist scriptures are brimming with stories. This is true not only of the sutras—that is, the foundational Buddhist scriptures such as the Heart Sutra, with which many will be familiar—but also of the Vinaya, which is the collective name for those scriptures that lay out in formal terms the practice of monastic discipline.

The rules that the Buddha sets forth in the Vinaya scriptures are typically illustrated with stories featuring certain nuns or monks who come to embody errant monastic behavior. Where the monks are concerned, a great number of rules were made based on the misbehavior of six (or twelve) monks in particular who became known as the Band of Six (or the Band of Twelve). On the nun’s side, there is one nun whose actions gave rise to a majority of the additional rules for nuns: Venerable Sthulananda.

Venerable Sthulananda’s actions range from the hilarious to the bewildering to the alarming, or even shocking. She was a rebel and a provocateur, even as she demonstrated strong devotion to the teachings and the order of nuns. In a sense, Venerable Sthulananda’s actions, while often problematic, constitute a tremendous contribution to the monastic discipline itself. For without her mistakes, many of the vows that form the basis of monastic practice would not exist.

What follows in this third installment in the series on women in the Vinaya is one of the most provocative stories about Venerable Sthulananda. On the one hand, it can be read as the scripture seems to suggest: an example of what Buddhist nuns ought not to do. But as we read, we can also notice our own responses, and even judgments, and consider how we relate to others.

During the time of Buddha Shakyamuni, there lived a woman married to a wealthy merchant who spared no expense satisfying her intense desire for fine things. When the merchant began traveling to other countries on business, she found there were other men who were just as generous and happy to lavish her with gifts. Her husband had been away for some time when she discovered she was pregnant. The timing of his trip meant that the child could not be his.

Her reaction was unequivocal. “I must get rid of this fetus in my womb,” she thought, “or else when my husband returns, he will destroy me.” Working to suppress her rising panic, she immediately took steps to end the pregnancy.

But when faced with the aborted fetus, she did not know what to do. She was brooding over how to dispose of it when a monastic approached the house for alms. It was Venerable Sthulananda, seeking alms on behalf of Buddha Shakyamuni’s order of nuns.

“There’s no one here to give you alms,” the woman said from behind the door. “Please go away.”

“Good woman, what is wrong?” said the nun. “Did someone die? Is no one home?”

“It’s not that someone has died, exactly,” the woman hedged, “so much as my child came out of me.” She explained her situation and said, “I don’t know how or where to get rid of it.”

“You are a woman of good reputation,” Venerable Sthulananda noted, before asking, “if I dispose of it for you, will you give me alms?”

“Yes, noble one, I will.”

Venerable Sthulananda smiled. “Will you also give alms to the next nun who comes?”

“Yes I will.”

“. . . annnnnnnnd to the keeper of the monastery storehouse?”

“Yes! I will, I will.”

“Very good, then,” said Venerable Sthulananda, briskly officious. “I’ll handle it.”

Already we can see in this story what a complex figure Venerable Sthulananda is. She demonstrates a commitment to helping provide for her community, and she shows concern for a woman who feels herself in danger from her husband. These are virtues. But as the story goes on, a question is raised about whether her subsequent actions constitute wrongdoing for a nun.

Venerable Sthulananda took the fetus, placed it inside her massive begging bowl and carried it over to an empty house. As she went to leave it there, the former residents entered the house, and when they saw what she was doing, they said to one another, “What is this bald-headed ascetic up to?”

Venerable Sthulananda responded with a sharp rebuke. “I’ll have you know that this belonged to a woman of high birth! I am just getting rid of it.” With that, she left the fetus there and departed.

Those who witnessed Venerable Sthulananda disposing of the fetus considered the action unbecoming of a nun and grew critical of the nuns of Buddha Shakyamuni’s order. The next time they saw a group of Buddhist nuns, they scolded them, shouting, “You nuns are an unruly bunch!” before reporting to the nuns what Sthulananda had done. The nuns told a group of monks what had taken place, and the monks in turn informed the Buddha.

Many of us may be surprised, even shocked, to hear about an early Buddhist nun helping to dispose of an aborted fetus. Some readers may take issue with a Buddhist nun having anything to do with an abortion; others will celebrate her practical, nonjudgmental assistance of a woman in crisis. Whatever our personal political orientation, it will likely color, or even define, our first reaction to the story. 

Is a higher view possible? How did the Buddha himself react?

Many of the monastic rules arose in response to public outcry. Since the sangha depends for its subsistence, after all, on the layfolk of the surrounding community, amicable community relations are a must. But interestingly, while the Buddha took swift action to safeguard the monastic community from disgrace, condemning her actions, he stopped short of condemning Venerable Sthulananda herself. Instead, he created a rule removing the condition that made her action possible in the first place: he forbade the nuns to use extra-large begging bowls.

“What took place was only possible because a nun was making use of an extra-large begging bowl,” the Buddha said. “That being the case, nuns should not make use of overly large begging bowls.” Turning to the monks, he said, “Monks, Sthulananda has done what a nun should not. Nuns should not take such actions, nor should they make use of large begging bowls.”

***

The first two women we met in this series were ripe for idealization. There was Mahaprajapati Gautami, first head of the nun’s order and paragon of virtue; and Krsha Gautami, whose tale of redemption brought her from unfathomable trauma to high realization in the course of a single lifetime. Venerable Sthulananda is different.

In our own lives, we are likely to encounter sentient beings who harbor shocking secrets or behave in ways others may not approve of; who take action, but do so narcissistically; or who do a wrong thing for a very good reason. Put another way, we are more likely to encounter the “Venerable Sthulanandas” of the world than the “Mahaprajapati Gautamis.” 

Works of literature, such as those we encounter in the scriptural canon, provide a special opportunity to learn to appreciate and love a person like Venerable Sthulananda for their boldness, independence, and enormous practicality, even if or as we label their behavior problematic for the communities to which they belong.

The Buddha’s response shows us that boundary-setting doesn’t require the categorical rejection of a person or their permanent expulsion from the community.

Who doesn’t have a “Venerable Sthulananda” in their life—a person with whom we must set boundaries around certain behaviors? The Buddha offers an approach that is less concerned with censure and more focused on removing the conditions that allow for the arising of conflict. The Buddha’s response shows us that boundary-setting doesn’t require the categorical rejection of a person or their permanent expulsion from the community. Simply put, from where the Buddha sits, just because a behavior may be problematic, does not necessarily mean that the person is.

This advice, it turns out, is not easy to take to heart. The temptation is to act as others did in the story, in which they saw Venerable Sthulananda amid an “unseemly” act and swiftly condemned her. Not only that, but they leveraged her actions into grounds for condemnation of the entire community to which she belonged. Had it been available to them, one imagines the disapproving householders calling Venerable Sthulananda out on Twitter, doxxing or threatening her life, proposing a ban on the nun’s order—the modern-day list goes on and on.

The present political moment—not only in the United States but also in many places around the world—seems to encourage us to see things in terms of stark contrasts, to imagine that those who hold views contrary to our own must be quite unlike us. It’s true that we may need to create boundaries, take action to stop wrongdoing, or detach from a problematic relationship. Still, a personal sense of reconciliation may be possible even as conflict persists. Here, the reconciliation is an inner one. It is an awareness of both parties’ buddhanature. As Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh reminded us, “Understanding,” or even the hope of it, “is the essence of love.”

The post The Rebel Nun and Her Extra-Large Begging Bowl appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

This is the story of Yasodhara, the woman who was married to the one who became the Buddha. Yasodhara is not the focus of most early Buddhist texts. The literature preserves fragments of her life, but the focus is (unsurprisingly) usually on her husband. The literature is genuinely scant where she is concerned—particularly regarding her youth. She is a key player during a few moments in the Buddha’s life, but otherwise, we know little about her. We know she produced their one and only son, that she was left behind when he made his Great Departure, and that when he returned to the palace seven (or eight) years later, he took his son back to the forest with him. The Jatakas (past-life stories) refer to her regularly, suggesting that Yasodhara and the Buddha had been connected for lifetimes, but we do not know much more than that. Indeed, Yasodhara is so marginalized in some cases that she does not even receive a name. She is known simply as Rahulamata—Rahula’s mother.

Siddhartha and Yasodhara are described as having been born at the same moment and in the same neighborhood, just a few doors away from each other. The heartbreak she experiences after his departure (which is described dramatically in a number of sources) was grounded in the fact that the Buddha departed alone, without inviting her to join him. After countless lifetimes of shared experiences, he abandoned her without even saying goodbye. 

According to one account, his Great Departure took place on the very day she gave birth! After his son was born, Siddhartha is described as walking over to her bedroom to see them. He stood at the threshold and considered entering, longing to touch his newborn son, but he realized that if he did, she would wake up, and then he would no longer be able to leave. He therefore departed without touching his son or saying goodbye to his wife. His abandonment was dramatic, and the outcome was devastating. Yasodhara woke up the next morning to the news of his departure, told to her by someone else.

I have spent most of my academic career exploring the various versions of Yasodhara’s narratives, enjoying the rich tapestry of her and Siddhartha’s shared multi-life story, and I have yet to scratch the surface. The Buddha’s story, where Yasodhara plays an ongoing part, has been told more times than anyone can track, and each telling is different. The skeleton of the story remains, but the details vary, the emphasis redirects. Every time the Buddha and Yasodhara’s timeless story is told, it shifts, so that one can spend a lifetime studying these narratives and never quite reach the end.

The question that begs reflection (at least for me) is this: what would the story be today? What would I say if I was to try writing it myself? What would I see in the story if I did?

I began my own telling and discovered that the story broke my heart. I found Yasodhara facing suffering, living suffering, while her husband roamed the forest in a quest to solve it. She was living what he was trying to understand. Yasodhara was stripped of everything—her home, her husband, her status as a married woman, and eventually even her child. I saw him receiving all the glory while she was left with shattered remains. 

For a time, I was angry with him. What kind of a hero causes so much pain? What kind of paradox had I landed in, that he was idealized for solving the problem of suffering while he created so much of it at the same time? Could he not have done things differently? My protective impulse wrapped itself around Yasodhara and pushed the Buddha away.

But then I learned something else: I was not the first to feel the burning pain of Yasodhara’s story. Although Buddhist hagiography focuses on the Buddha, and although these texts (unsurprisingly) idealize him, the early writers did not close their eyes to the suffering he leaves in his wake. Yasodhara’s laments are part of the tradition too. When she discovers he has gone, she challenges the chariot driver for taking her beloved away. She demands explanation, she charges in fury, she collapses with pain. Her abandonment was not lost on many of the early hagiographers. 

Buddhism has a long relationship with misogyny, but what I found as I wrote this version of Yasodhara’s story was something else: male authors taking on a woman’s voice, crying her tears of pain, and expressing the loss that his departure represented for her. They knew what the Buddha’s departure cost Yasodhara, and they took the time to express it. These male authors gave a voice to the pain that renunciation creates for the women left behind. They were sensitive in ways I had not appreciated until then. Although I may have been upset with the Buddha for hurting Yasodhara, I grew to love the writers for their sensitivity to her plight. Indeed, I would never have experienced frustration with the Buddha if they did not provide his story so compellingly. They provided me with a map that I had not appreciated until I tried to chart the course myself.

Some of my telling of Yasodhara’s story is based on early Buddhist literature. Some of it is based on what we know as early Hindu literature. Some of it may be historical, but most of it is not. And some of it has come out of the playfulness of my mind. I could say a lot more about this project, but I believe it is time to let the story speak for itself.

***

The following is the prologue to Sasson’s novel.

I was shivering despite the heat. I gripped the wall for support as I reached for my shawl. The inlaid jewels felt so cold and hard against the palm of my hand. No matter how many pillows I had filled my room with over the years, I had never been able to soften the edges. The towering structure of palace life was built with too much stone. I folded myself into the white cotton cloth, trying desperately to quiet the trembling.

I could not go downstairs in this state. I didn’t want to fall apart in front of everyone, but I knew they were waiting, and my body was not complying. I could not make myself still.

I took a deep breath and readied myself to let go, but as soon as I did, I buckled and fell. “Great Goddess!” I cried out as I hit the marble floor. 

My maidservant flew into the room and was beside me in seconds. “Your Highness!”

“I can’t do this!”

I was trying to breathe but was failing miserably. “I don’t want to lose my baby!”

Neelima was holding my hand, squeezing it with all her strength. “Breathe, Your Highness. You must breathe.”

I tried, but there was no air. “Who asks such a thing from a mother? It isn’t right!”

“I know,” she mumbled as she tried to hold back her own tears. “It never is.”

I was clutching a leg of the rosewood bedframe as though it might carry me to shore, but it did little to anchor me. The swirling was coming from within, and no ship would have been strong enough to navigate against my pain. Looking up, I was met with high ceilings pulsating over my head, geometric carvings moving in all directions.

“What if he needs me out there?” I pleaded. “What if something happens?”

“He won’t be alone. They will take care of him,” she tried to assure me.

“But they can’t take care of him the way I do! He needs his mother, and they are taking him away from me!”

There was no response to that. We could both see the truth of my words. I looked around the room, looking for something to save me from the situation. Some argument that had been left behind that might convince them to change their minds.

“And they will be in the forest!” I added, suddenly remembering this piece of fear. “It’s so dangerous out there! There are snakes and tigers and who knows what else!”

She held onto my hand as my worries spilled onto the floor.

“What if I never see him again, Neelima? What if he never comes back?”

“I don’t know . . .”

“What kind of a man makes such a request?” I burst with anger. “First he leaves me, and then he comes back only to take away my only son! How can he do this to me?” If I had had anything in my hands at that moment, I would have thrown it across the room.

“How does he keep finding new ways to splinter me apart?” I sobbed into the darkness of my palms.

For some reason, this last question affected her differently. Perhaps it was because she had just met with him. She straightened her hunched frame, tucked a few wisps of gray hair that had escaped her headscarf, and looked me right in the eyes.

“Your Highness, I know that this is horrible. But I also know that you are brave,” she replied. “You can face this.”

“But I don’t want to face this . . .” I said almost to myself.

“Of course not. But it is what you are being called to do. Master Rahula needs you to do this. He needs you to be brave so that he can be. It is time for him to receive his education.”

“But why does his education have to take him so far away?”

“I don’t know . . . but it is the way of things for him.”

I took a deep breath as her words landed on my crowded heart. She was telling me what so many others had told me before. She was telling me what I did not want to hear but what everyone else seemed to recognize. I looked into her weathered face, following the lines of history that were etched across her forehead. Her spotted hands resting on mine.

She was right. My own confusion was probably nothing compared with what he must be experiencing in his little seven-year-old self. I had to pull myself together for his sake.

Sensing my determination, she offered me one of her gnarled hands. “Let me help you up.”

I took it gratefully. Her calluses were so thick they had turned into cushions. 

“Are you all right?” she asked as I leaned against the bed. The silk sheets were bunched up in a corner. I had not let anyone into my room for days. Not even her.

“I . . . think so.”

“Can I bring you a cup of something warm? Milk with a sprinkle of dried turmeric perhaps?”

I shook my head and turned towards the window. The sun was breaking through the sky, flooding my room with orange light.

“Tell them that I will be downstairs in a moment.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” she obeyed with a bow.

It was time. I ironed out my simple white clothing and adjusted my braid. I would not break again.

***

I walked carefully down the rounded marble staircase that led to the Great Hall. The trembling had subsided, but I was still a bit uncertain of myself. I held the golden handrail with one hand and lifted my robes with the other so as not to slip. When I reached the bottom, I exhaled with relief.

I could see bodies milling about in the courtyard ahead. Men dressed in orange rags moving silently. Ochre-colored shadows. I adjusted my braid one more time, smoothed out my white wrap and tightened my sash, and then crossed the Great Hall to the courtyard with one objective in mind: to find my son.

He was sitting by himself by the edge of the lotus pool. “How are you, darling?” I asked as I sat down beside him.

He did not look up. His fingers were trailing through the water in between the flowers. A flock of black birds tore through the darkening sky, chasing the moon like lost souls. He did not notice them either. The servants would start lighting the oil lamps soon, and then everything would be different.

“Sweetheart?”

Still no response.

“Rahula,” I whispered as I placed my hand on the softness of his little neck. “Please look at me.”

He trailed his fingers a little while longer, making pathways through the water. A frog watched him from the safety of a lotus leaf. Eventually, he looked up. His beautiful eyes were filled with the emotions he could not speak aloud. I wanted to fall into them. My mind fled into the past without permission as images of him from over the years paraded before my eyes. When had he grown so tall?

I placed a lock of hair behind his ear, as I had done so many times before. I loved caressing his hair. But a moment later, I recoiled at the realization that soon his hair would be shaved away. He would be so different. He would not really be my son anymore.

“How are you feeling, sweetheart?” I asked, as I attempted to put those thoughts aside.

He shrugged. “I’m all right.”

“Are you ready?”

“I guess so.” He turned towards the water again.

“Sweetheart, it’s all right to feel a bit scared right now. You don’t have to be so brave.” He looked up at me. “You know,” I added, “I’m scared too.”

At these words, all of his restraint melted, and he threw himself into my arms. “Oh Mother! I am scared! I don’t want to go!” He sobbed against my neck. He was trembling, just as I had been a moment earlier. Every fiber in my being wanted to scoop him up and run away. Run from the men in orange robes who were forcing us into this separation. Run from the world that dictated such realities and called them wisdom. My baby was crying, and I wanted to make his tears go away.

I inhaled the sweet smell of him. I would have renounced the entire world to be able to hold onto him longer, but I would not renounce his future to satisfy my desires. Slowly, ever so carefully, I pulled us apart.

“My most beautiful sweetheart,” I whispered. “I am so sad. I cannot imagine living without you.” I wiped away the tears that were dripping down my own cheeks. “But I won’t hold you back. It is time for you to find your life.”

“But I want to be with you !” he exclaimed.

“I know. I want that too, but you will be with your father. He will take good care of you.”

He looked past me to where the men were, his father sitting straight and elegant at the center.

“I don’t even know him,” he objected.

“You will learn to know him.”

“But . . . what if he doesn’t like me?”

“That, my darling, is one thing I know you don’t have to worry about,” I said with a confident smile. “You are impossible not to love, my beautiful Rahula. And your father is a good man. You will see.”

He wiped his tears, which I knew was a good sign. “But what if I never see you again, Mother?” he asked, as he voiced an all too familiar fear.

“I believe we will see each other again, darling. But if anything happens . . .” I stumbled against the words but caught myself, “then I will see you in the next life. We will never be lost to each other, Rahula. Don’t ever forget that.”

Men in orange robes approached. “Are you ready, young master?” asked one of them.

Rahula searched my face, looking for permission.

“He is ready,” I answered for him.

The post The Woman Who Married the Buddha appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The second installment in the series of women in the Vinaya (the division of the Buddhist canon that lays out the structure of monastic life), what follows is a retelling of a story recorded in the Kshudrakavastu, a scripture from the Vinaya of the Mulasarvastivada school of the Sanskrit tradition. 

It’s the story of the nun Krsha Gautami, who survived a series of staggering personal losses, as well as horrific violence, in her life. Even after all of this, however, she went on to achieve states of great realization. (Note: There is no relation to Gautama Buddha, but Venerable Krsha will be familiar to readers of the Pali canon, where she’s referred to as Kisa Gautami.)

As it is told in Pali scripture, after losing her young son, Krsha Gautami begged the Buddha to restore him to life. By way of response, the Buddha gave her the famous instruction involving a mustard seed. As told in Sanskrit, her story is longer and her losses are greater. The story’s first half is this: 

Before she was a nun, Krsha was a young woman married to the son of a close family friend. She had already borne one child, and as the time drew near for her to give birth to their second, they set out for her mother’s house. When Krsha went into labor early, her husband drew their chariot to the side of the road. Not knowing how to help her, he fell asleep beneath a tree, and Krsha gave birth alone in the chariot, their toddler son nearby.

Somehow pulling herself together soon after giving birth, she stepped out of the chariot and carried their newborn to where her husband lay—only to find that he had been bitten by a venomous snake in his sleep, and died. As Krsha stood weeping over his body with her infant and toddler in her arms, a thief made off with the horse that drew their chariot, stranding them. 

At that moment, the sky filled with dark clouds and it started to rain. Water overtook the road with shocking swiftness. There was no choice but to wade through it.

“If I try to cross with the children,” she realized, with growing alarm, “all three of us will drown.”

Indeed the water was treacherous, and the two children together unwieldy. She left the toddler on the near bank, and waded across carrying the baby, who she set down on the far bank, then began doubling back for the other.

She was mid-river when a fox appeared. The water was high enough to prevent her from moving quickly. In the time it took her to turn around, the fox had snatched up the baby and carried it into the woods. Krsha froze, then began to leap up and down, waving her hands and crying out after the fox. The toddler, thinking she was calling him, stepped toward her, off the bank and into the water. He disappeared into the river. To her horror, Krsha was unable to save either one of them.

Husband and children torn from her, she was devastated. She stood on the riverbank in the middle of the wilderness, with nothing but a cloth wrapped around her lower body, and heard only the sound of the rushing water and the crying birds. She sobbed for her husband, for her toddler, and for the newborn. All but choking with tears of pity and compassion, with her hands she drew together a mound of earth.

Amid great hardship Krsha fights her way back to her family. Finally she arrives and finds that in the interim, her parents too had passed away. She was overcome by a second wave of traumatic grief. Her reflections appear in verse, in the manner of the sutras.

Why did I remain at home?
What profit did it bring me?
Husband, friends and family ripped away—
I shall go, for it makes no sense to linger.
Better to stay in the forest, alone,
Than to live in an empty house.
The household life is sin—of what use is it, then?
It multiplies our sorrows and suffering.

She goes off into the forest, intending to remain alone for the rest of her life. There she met a kindly older woman who invited her home. When Krsha had recovered enough, they began spinning thread together, eking out a living through shared labor. 

Despite Krsha’s stated wish to remain alone, her elder friend pressed her to remarry—specifically, to marry a handsome young man who returned often to their house to buy thread.

“Daughter,” the elder woman said, “the young weaver asked after you. He has no wife. You should assent, and be happy.”

“Enough—never speak of this again,” the younger woman said. “I’m disenchanted with household life. Come what may, I’ll never live that way again.”

“Daughter,” said the elder, “a woman’s life is tenuous. We dwell in states of suffering. Such opportunities are rare. Reflect on our condition, give him your assent, and stay with him. If you don’t, it will be a mistake.”

Eventually Krsha relented, and on a suitable day, date, and time the young weaver took her into his house. But he was cruel…

In light of the extremely graphic violence that unfolds over the course of their marriage, we will refrain from narrating it. It is enough to say that when finally Krsha escaped her monstrous husband, her body, spirit, and mind were battered to the point of utter brokenness. Her mind turned again and again to all the ways she had been hurt.

Exposed to the elements, and starving, she went mad and tossed away her lower garment. Her hands and feet were cracked, her coarse hair long and grey, her appearance grotesque. She wandered aimlessly until she came to Śrāvastī.

Now, the Buddha has stated that the ripening of sentient beings’ karma is inconceivable. And the fruits of Krsha’s past actions flowered such that she had the experience of coming to Jetavana…

The Buddha sat in Jetavana Grove, teaching the dharma to a vast assembly of monks. To Krsha he appeared to shine, like a bright lamp placed in a golden vessel, if that vessel were hung high in a tree, and that tree were covered with gems. Just the sight of him was enough to return her to her senses. Realizing that she was unclothed amid the monastic assembly, she ran and huddled in a corner.

One can imagine the shock of the assembly of male monastics at her presence. As for the Buddha, his response was an expression of his infinite compassion. He turned to his assistant. “Ananda, give a cloak to the caravan leader’s wife Krsha Gautamī,” he said, referencing her happy first marriage, “and I shall give her a discourse on the dharma.”

Venerable Ananda brought her a cloak. Krsha Gautami wrapped it around herself, and went to where the Blessed One was seated, bowing before she took a seat at one side.

It would be hard for most of us to find the right words to say to Krsha Gautami at such a moment of extreme distress, but the Buddha understood her exactly. Although the story does not share the teaching he offered, it must have been perfectly suited to her heart. She immediately attained the realization of a stream enterer, buoyed up by a newfound understanding that would carry her inevitably, all the way to awakening.

Eyes wide, Krsha stood and requested ordination into the order of nuns. “Lord,” she said, “I wish to go forth from home life, to become a novice and achieve the state of full ordination in the monastic discipline and dharma which you have spoken so beautifully. Will the Blessed One permit me to practice the religious life in his presence?”

The Buddha assented, and handed her over to Mahaprajapati, the woman who had raised him and was now the head of the nun’s order. Mahaprajapati ordained her as a novice, then conferred upon her full ordination, trained her in the discipline, and gave her personal instruction. It was not long before Venerable Krsha attained arhatship, the state beyond all emotional distress. In time, the Buddha would commend her as foremost among the fully ordained nuns in upholding the monastic discipline.

***

Later, a group of younger nuns were questioning their decision to become ordained and curious about the pleasures of household life—whether it held something for them that they could not find as nuns. When they asked Venerable Krsha for advice, she offered them the story of all that had happened to her—the grief and pain that made up her former life.

As she recounted one by one the losses of her first husband, children, mother, and father, they grew disenchanted with their imaginings. As she turned to the violence of her second marriage, goosebumps covered their bodies, and they trembled as they listened.

It was then that Venerable Krsha, knowing what was in their hearts, gave them a discourse on the dharma such that they realized for themselves the four noble truths.

As her story is told in Pali, Kisa Gautami finds healing and renunciation as she goes door to door. Hearing the stories of others’ grief, she realizes the universality of suffering—no one suffers alone. This understanding begins to lift her despair.

As told in Sanskrit, the learning comes the other way round. As Venerable Krsha tells her story to the younger nuns, renunciation dawns within them. The two versions of the story agree: shared grief becomes the way to freedom.

♦

See here for the story of Mahaprajapati, the Buddha’s stepmother and the first nun.

The post Through Grief to Freedom: The Story of Krsha Gautami appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

According to scholar Bernard Faure, the life story of the Buddha is one of the great myths of modern times. Yet many Western scholars tend to neglect the rich mythological and ritual elements of the Buddha’s biography, opting instead to present a simplified, linear narrative. Faure, a professor of Japanese religion at Columbia University, believes that focusing exclusively on historical accounts of the Buddha’s life “strips the story of all its juice.” In his new book, The Thousand and One Lives of the Buddha, Faure presents some of his favorite myths about the Buddha’s life, including the fantastical stories surrounding his birth and his legendary face-off with the demon king Mara. In the process, Faure traces how the Buddha’s biography has been constructed and retold across cultures, from early Buddhist texts to contemporary art forms of manga, Japanese graphic novels, and science fiction.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Faure spoke with Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, about what these myths and stories can teach us about the creativity of the Buddhist tradition. Read an excerpt from their conversation below, and then listen to the full episode.

***

James Shaheen: Where does the emphasis on the actual or historical existence of the Buddha and piecing together his story come from? 

Bernard Faure: Well, of course, any religion needs a founder. But as [French anthropologist Claude] Lévi-Strauss once said, often, this founder is a virtual focus. For example, when you see an image reflected in the water, you seem to believe that the source of this image comes from the place that you see inside the water, but it actually comes from a different place. In that sense, the Buddha is a virtual focus, a virtual source. Nevertheless, it is real in that sense. Saying it’s virtual doesn’t mean that there’s nothing there. First, on the origin side, people need a founder. They need to somehow believe that there was someone there at the beginning of things. That doesn’t necessarily have to be a historical figure, but often that’s the case. Then, as Western discourse developed in the 17th, 18th, and 19th century, this tendency to historicism and the historical method became really the dominant form of study in the field of humanities, philology, and history. So it became the dominant paradigm, the idea that through the study of text, you could get back to the author behind the text and therefore to the historical figure who founded this movement. That was a kind of natural development in a sense. There was a reaction in the 19th century, of course, and scholar Donald S. Lopez, Jr. and others have written about this. This was a reaction against Christianity and religion perceived as really an obscurantist movement. Now we had a religion that supposedly had a founder who looked very reasonable, was not walking on water, was not doing all the crazy things that we’re used to, so a religion with a philosopher as a founder, that was very attractive to 19th-century scholars for understandable reasons. But in doing so, they threw out the baby with the bathwater, if I might say.

We seem to value literal truth or scientific truth over mythical truths. Obviously, we need both. But in this case, your emphasis has been on the myth of the Buddha because, like you say, that’s where the juice is. Is that fair to say? It’s a reaction against what I see as the pendulum that has really swung to the other extreme. Historical study is really important. I’m not denying that. I’m a historian myself. But history is not historicism. Historicism is a tendency to really deny anything that is not purely material or physical, anything that cannot be proved or solved by documents, and the idea that somehow the more authentic documents should be the simplest ones because if something is very simple, it means it didn’t have time to get elaborated and developed and so on, so we might be closest to the origin. And this is to forget that actually, very often, stories are going to be embellished with legends and other things through time. But sometimes just the opposite happens. This is exactly what’s happening now with historicism and also with modern Buddhism. We want to simplify the story to make it fit our agenda or our desire. So stories can go both ways. They can become more complex or more simple. To think that because you have simple texts and this simple text will be, let’s say, the Pali, and that will be therefore much closer to the original Buddha, that’s a very strong presupposition.

How would you describe your approach to the life of the Buddha? My approach is that I like stories. I study religion—Japanese religion, Chinese religion, Buddhism in East Asia—and religion is mostly stories. Sometimes these stories are not so great; sometimes they are really fascinating. There is a sheer pleasure in reading these stories. Reading the life of Buddha is a great experience, and I don’t want to somehow deprive readers of that pleasure. If scholars are doing that, then I think that’s a problem.

“The first way to do that is to get nonjudgmental and take these stories at face value.”

In the book, you explore how depictions of the Buddha have evolved and expanded into new art forms like manga and science fiction. Can you say more about these art forms? It may be a little iconoclastic from some people’s point of view, but once you admit that the life of the Buddha is a kind of story, there is no reason to privilege some stories over others. This is my main point in my critique of historicism: the idea that if we’re trying to get back to the real Buddha, then we have to get to the earliest texts, the simplest texts, and therefore we have to look in India. But if we admit that the Buddha’s life is essentially a story, then other stories in other places and cultures might be just as interesting, and the stories of the Buddha in Southeast Asia, China, Japan, or Korea might tell us just as much.

If we continue that line of thought, why limit ourselves to Buddhist texts? Buddhists were always inventing stories. But imagination is not the privilege of Buddhists. Everyone can imagine stories, and if there are values conveyed by such stories, then the stories are good. For example, even manga, like Japanese manga writer Tezuka Osamu’s Buddha series, can give you a sense of compassion and the real values of Buddhism. To me, that is much more interesting than a very dry scholarly account of the life of the Buddha as historical reality because the literary genres of manga and science fiction can convey ideas, values, and principles that are at the heart of Buddhism. There’s no reason to shun them because they are not the orthodox, authentified stories of the Buddhist tradition itself.

Throughout the book, you resist easy interpretations or reductions to simple morals, and you ask if it is possible to avoid reductionism and instead preserve the strangeness of the Buddha’s life story. Can you say more about how you came to savor these stories? First, I don’t think it’s possible to avoid all reductionism. I don’t claim to be an objective scholar who finally comes up with the truth about the life of the Buddha. But I do like to read a good story. Buddhism has a lot of good stories to tell. Many of the stories that scholars typically put forward I don’t find as interesting. They have a moralistic tone, and the Buddha often ends up being so boringly didactic. But sometimes you find there’s something else going on in these stories, and you don’t know why they attract you.

The Lotus Sutra is a good example. At face value, the stories can seem ridiculous: a stupa comes out of the earth like a rocket, and the door opens and there’s a buddha waiting in it. Another buddha gets in it, and then the two buddhas take off together for outer space. Is this some kind of science fiction story? But for some reason, these stories work, and they have worked for centuries. That’s enough for me. As a historian, I want to understand what made people find this interesting. Now, because we have become so rational and Westernized, we have a hard time understanding that. The first step toward some kind of awakening would be to try to understand what people in the past have already seen in these stories. The first way to do that is to get nonjudgmental and take these stories at face value.

The post Uncovering the Mythical Buddha appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A group of Buddhist scholars with interests in epigraphy—the study and interpretation of ancient inscriptions—are meeting weekly for an informal series of talks titled “Buddhist Epigraphy and Women’s History.” The sessions began in September and are held over Zoom nearly every Friday from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m Eastern, with the final session scheduled for February of 2023. Each week, one of 15 scholars shares an aspect of their epigraphical research as it relates to women’s history.

The series was organized by Stephanie Balkwill, assistant professor of Chinese Buddhism at UCLA, who sought to combine her two loves of community-building and women’s history. “Reading epigraphy is difficult, so it’s best done in community. We all bring different skills to the table,” Balkwill said. “I wanted to form a group that could foreground community in Buddhist studies while also making these difficult sources more accessible.” 

The 15 Buddhist scholars range from professors at research universities to graduate students, whose areas of expertise include East, Central, South, and Southeast Asia. Each “epigraphy in progress” session is designed to be short and fun, and participants are encouraged to bring material that has mystified, fascinated, or even stumped them.

During the introductory session on September 9, Wendi Adamek, religious studies professor and Numata Chair in Buddhist Studies at the University of Calgary, discussed her process of interpreting epigraphy and the role of imagination in historical scholarship. On October 28, Kate Lingley, associate professor of art history at the University of Hawaii, will share her research on the networks and relationships of non-elite women in medieval China. Other scholars include Alice Collett, Amy Langenberg, and Trent Walker.

According to Balkwill, sources like epigraphy and art history can enrich the historical record by filling in the gaps left by Buddhist texts, which have been edited, redacted, and handed down by a tradition of elite monastic men. “A lot of what’s left out of texts deals with the religious practice of women, cultural outsiders, or people who did not hold power in any given place where these texts were transmitted,” Balkwill said. 

Balkwill first dove into epigraphy as part of her research on women living in 4th- and 6th-century northern China and how they interacted with Buddhism. Since texts on women’s lives during that time are scarce, Balkwill’s project supervisor advised her to look into the period’s rich epigraphical record. By studying various inscriptions written on or placed inside stupas and tombs, Balkwill was able to glean rare insights into the lives of women in the period. “I’ve been really invested in trying to surface voices and practices that have been lost,” she said. “We can’t recover those things from Buddhist texts. But we can if we look at sources like art history and epigraphy, which are just as valid and offer an inclusive vision for the practice of Buddhism today.” 

The “Buddhist Epigraphy and Women’s History” series is open to anyone who wants to join, regardless of their expertise. Interested participants can contact Balkwill for the Zoom information at balkwill@humnet.ucla.edu. 

♦

The post A New Weekly Series on Epigraphy Explores the Lives of Ancient Buddhist Women appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“All things, O priests, are on fire.”

Monks sitting zazen. Hushed recesses of a temple. Summer morning in 1945. Birds chittering. Drone of an airplane.

“The eye, O priests, is on fire; forms are on fire; eye-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the eye are on fire….”

Last breath of silence. Precarious equilibrium. In the temple: teetering universe of silence, poised on tip of silence before the sudden—  

***

Buddhist temples stood at ground zero in Hiroshima. Cloistered for centuries behind white stucco walls in the boisterous Nakajima district, among banks, street front markets, sake bars and shops, the temples offered oases of quiet and contemplation. Gardens of combed sand. Ponds of irises and goldfish. Monks in the Pure Land temples, the Tendai, and Zen temples would have roused before dawn. By 8:15 on the morning of August six, those in the Zen temples would have completed formal oryoki breakfast; some may have been raking leaves in courtyards, or performing kitchen chores; maybe they had resumed sitting on their zafus, in the breathing stillness of zazen. Beyond the walled temple compounds, unsuspecting people of Hiroshima jammed trolley cars, or settled by open windows at their office desks, or queued at vendors’ stalls, or walked along the sunlit thoroughfares beside the Motoyasugawa River. Soldiers flagged trucks through checkpoints. Hundreds of school kids, mobilized to help demolish wooden buildings and widen streets through the city, huddled in work crews as the airplane poised on its tip of silence before the—  

***

Monks in Buddhist temples vaporized instantly. Vanished in a sky wrenched open, a white noise of deafening light.

From the “Fire Sermon” of the Buddha: “The ear is on fire; sounds are on fire…the nose is on fire; odors are on fire…the tongue is on fire; tastes are on fire…the body is on fire; things tangible are on fire —”

A light flash not of satori; a light flash of atoms cleaving apart. Enlightenment: hurling shockwave. Bone-melting furnace of exploding light.

“The mind is on fire; ideas are on fire…mind-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the mind are on fire —”

***

It’s the fall of 1997 and I’m in Hiroshima. I sit on a bench under maple trees, at the epicenter of the blast, and I look straight up into heaven. That sky is where the God of my childhood Sunday school lessons does not live. That sky is where the sun burst in cataclysmic bloom, unfolding its million lotus petals of thermonuclear fire.

Conspicuously American, I’m sitting in the Peace Park. I’ve traveled from Kanegasaki, seven hours north of here by bullet train, where I’m currently living and working and where I often sit zazen at Taiyo-ji Zen Temple.

Now in Hiroshima I’m watching a few wives and husbands wheel baby strollers. Here where the city lay charred flat, some high school girls consult and giggle then disperse; a jogger passes; pigeons wagtail huffily and peck the sidewalk. The smell of stale mud emanates from the river. Traffic and city noises mingle with the distant tong of the struck Peace Bell. Women workers sweep ginkgo leaves. A vagrant grabbles around a trash pail for cigarette butts. Heaped at the wrought iron fence lie tribute wreaths and garlands of folded paper cranes.

I had not originally planned to visit Hiroshima. Then I understood I needed to make this pilgrimage. In 1982, when I joined nearly a million people in a historic march through the streets of Manhattan in support of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze, an elderly Japanese woman from a busload of Hiroshima survivors handed me a banner. It pictured the bomb-demolished shell of the city’s Industrial Promotion Hall. Now, seated on this bench, I watch ravens flocking it. They’re black as the black rain that sizzled over Hiroshima after the fireball dissipated. The birds roost at vacant windows of the rubbled brick edifice. They perch on the tortured steel armature of the dome. This structure, well-known from postwar photographs, has been declared by the United Nations a World Cultural Heritage Site, enshrined forever as a memorial and emphatic warning to future generations. 

Every person working inside this shell of a building on that August morning of 1945 disintegrated in the heat glare of the Doomsday Bomb. Hundreds of dazed survivors from surrounding neighborhoods, blinded, their skin barbecued, shrieking, ran or fell into the river just a few yards from where I’m sitting, and they drowned. I have not fortified myself emotionally. Seeing this building has slammed me in the chest. It requires twenty minutes, perhaps longer, to recompose myself once the tears begin.

The unimaginable scope of human suffering.

It’s astonishing to imagine everything within the range of my vision—buildings, bridges, trees—obliterated in a mere quarter-second. People like these people ambling past me today, smiling, talking…

Nearby, close to the Atomic Bomb Museum, I discover a hummock of origami paper cranes, thousands of them heaped in bright pastels. They festoon the base of the “Children’s Peace Monument.” This shrine commemorates the thousands of infants, toddlers, and school kids who died when “Little Boy”—a fiendish nickname the American military conceived for the uranium bomb—dazzled the sky above them in that fatal instant before their world collapsed. The shrine also commemorates a little girl, Sadako Sasaki, who perished from leukemia caused by atomic radiation in the brute aftermath of Little Boy. Sasaki endeavored to fold a thousand paper cranes for peace before she died. According to Japanese custom, a person who creates a thousand origami cranes receives one wish. She wished for a world free of nuclear weapons. I glance at tags affixed to long strands of gaily particolored, festive origami cranes—prayers for peace from children throughout the world. I find none from the United States.

I venture inside the Atomic Bomb Museum, braving its exhibits. Torn, blood-smeared jackets of children. A cement wall bristling with glass shards hurricaned by the blast. A boy’s fingernails that slid off his maimed hands before he died, preserved by his mother. Photos of the flattened city of ash. Photos of comatose men and women, of victims gasping in hospitals, their bodies torched to carbon. A white wall drabbled by streaks of the radioactive black rain. It looks like an execution wall stained by blood of liquid tar, the blood of humanity’s festering heart… Broken wrist watches stopped at precisely 8:15 a.m., the moment when Hiroshima erupted as hell unto the earth… A bicycle like the mangled skeleton of a prehistoric beast… A section of a bank’s front wall, seared permanently with a human shadow flash-printed by the bomb explosion when it turned the person’s flesh to superheated mist… A shattered bell from a Buddhist temple.

Outside the museum, shaken, I page through a thick guest book signed by visitors from all over the world. France. Germany. Canada. Belgium. Brazil. India. Nigeria. Egypt. China. Poland. Again I see no names from the United States. It occurs to me that I’ve never met a person in America who’s visited Hiroshima.

***

During World War II, my dad, Gene Ruhl—a nineteen-year-old rural kid far from the cloistered hills of our native Appalachia—endured two years as a gunner’s mate on the USS LST 743, witnessing death and dive-bombers in the South Pacific. He manned the boat’s front machine guns when troops landed on the exploding beaches of New Guinea, the Admiralty Islands, the Philippines, and the jungle shores of Borneo, air slit with shrapnel and flares. After two years of fighting to wrest sweltering, mosquito-ridden islands from the Japanese, the next stop was Japan itself. American troops dreaded the invasion, expecting unparalleled slaughter. My father shared that dread. “We thought it would be a bloodbath. Our fleet was off the coast of Japan, getting ready to go in.”   

On the evening of August 6, 1945, rumors spread through the LST. Then news came over Armed Forces radio. A few days later newspapers arrived in the ship’s small library. Gene took one to his bunk, where he learned the United States had detonated a futuristic science-fiction bomb. Its target, the Japanese industrial city of Hiroshima, had simply vanished. A few days later, another of the new bombs dropped on Nagasaki. Abruptly, the war in the Pacific ended.

Soon after, as the American occupation began, my father and his buddies got shore leave and walked through the Japanese port city of Sasebo. “All we’d been hearing for years was how terrible the Japanese were,” my dad told me. “But we went into Sasebo and my God – the kids were so cute and the people so friendly, and you’d think, ‘This is the enemy?’” He always chuckles when he relates this, wagging his head in disbelief. “It made you realize, people are just people, all over the world.” He strolled the streets with his buddies, giving away Hershey bars, taking photos of beaming children and Shinto shrines. Then my father and a friend hopped into an Army jeep and hitched a ride to Nagasaki. 

When they arrived my father gaped incredulously at a wide lowland of scathed and flattened rubble. The city and its people had been swept away, clear to the cinder-gray horizon, as if by a mop. 

Years later my dad told me, “Every politician, every one of these damn loudmouth congressmen, and every president who rattles on about winning a nuclear war should be made to go out and look at what one of those bombs can actually do. The destruction—it’s practically incomprehensible. And hell, the one they dropped on Nagasaki was just a little pop-gun compared to what they have now. It’s just unbelievable.”

***

“And with what are these on fire?” asked the Buddha. “With the fire of hatred, with the fire of…death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair are they on fire.”

⧫

Excerpted by permission of the author from Appalachian Zen: Journeys in Search of True Home, from the American Heartland to the Buddha Dharma (Nov 2022) by Steve Kanji Ruhl, Monkfish Book Publishing Company, Rhinebeck NY

The post Hiroshima: Fire Sermon appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

One of the most fundamental teachings of Buddhism is that everything changes—and that even applies to the teachings themselves. In places where the dharma once flourished, it can disappear, and in places far from its origins it can take root. Time and place, history and geography, are always on the move. Such is the case with the ancient Buddhist kingdom of Khotan, a land said to have been formed by the draining of a mountain-rimmed lake. 

Now a prefecture (Hotan) in China’s troubled Xinjiang region, Khotan was one of the wealthy Central Asian oasis states along the Silk Roads, the overland trading routes that connected India, China, and the rest of Eurasia. It lies on the southwest edge of the vast desert that fills the Tarim Basin. To its south towers the Kunlun mountain range, which divides Khotan from present-day Ladakh to the southwest and Western Tibet to the southeast. 

For several centuries BCE and during the first millennium CE, Khotan was a small but important kingdom, subject to waves of migration, invasion, and domination by much more powerful states to its west and east, but surviving thanks to its own resources (silk production and jade) and above all to its position as an oasis on such a major trade route. This small and not very powerful country became an outpost of Indian culture during or soon after the reign of Ashoka. It had flourishing, perhaps pre-Mahayana, Buddhist institutions by the first century BCE; was connected to the ancient kingdom of Gandhara and Kashmir in India’s northwest; and sustained Mahayana communities as early as the third century CE. The kingdom also played an outsized role in the spread of Buddhism from India to China. In the third and fifth centuries respectively, the two Buddhist texts that arguably have had the greatest influence on Chinese Buddhism, The Perfection of Wisdom in Twenty-five Thousand Lines, and the Buddhavatamsaka (or “Flower Ornament”) Sutra, were first translated into Chinese from texts found in Khotan. 

The kingdom’s founding myths center around the draining of a lake on the orders of the Buddha Shakyamuni and describe a land planned, visited, and blessed by the buddhas of the past. The myths are—uniquely—enshrined as canonical scriptures in Tibetan in the form of two sutras preserved in the Kangyur, the words of the Buddha translated into Tibetan, and two prophetic histories in the Tengyur, Tibetan translations of Indian commentaries on the scriptures. They are among some twenty texts listed by the thirteenth century Tibetan scholar Chomden Rikpai Raltri as having been translated into Tibetan from Khotanese. 

A translation of one of the two sutras was published by 84000 last year. It is The Prophecy on Mount Goshringa (Toh 357, Gosrngavyakarana), and describes the Buddha flying to Khotan with a large entourage, and blessing the creatures that live in the great lake that has hitherto filled the landscape. He consecrates the country’s other features, its sacred mountain, stupas and sites; gives teachings there; and makes prophecies about its future importance as a land for the practice and preservation of the dharma. At the end of the sutra, the Buddha asks disciple Shariputra and divine king Vaishravana to deploy their supernatural powers and drain the great lake into a river course. They cut a mountain into two great pieces and move it out of the way so that the lake can drain into a nearby river called the Gyisho, thought to be perhaps the river now known today as the Karakax. It is not very clear, however, where the mythical lake might have been. Was it in the mountains behind the present city, or could it even have been the whole Tarim Basin?

The other sutra (now being translated but not yet ready to publish) is The Questions of Vimalaprabha (Toh 168, Vimalaprabhaparipcccha). In it, the Buddha predicts the rise of Khotan as a dharma country in the century following his parinirvana, commands the gods and bodhisattvas to protect its inhabitants, and for their use pronounces dharanis, (phrases similar to mantras), protective for the land. In particular, one of King Prasenajit’s daughters, Vimalaprabha—a bodhisattva goddess who has deliberately taken this rebirth as the princess in order to receive these instructions—is appointed by the Buddha to take a leading role in guiding and protecting Khotan during several of her future lifetimes as a series of powerful women. The final passage of the sutra describes the Buddha disappearing from Vulture Peak and reappearing in a meditative absorption in Khotan, accompanied by bodhisattvas seated on lotuses floating in the huge lake, each above particular underwater locations where the stūpas and monasteries of the future land will later appear when the lake is drained. 

Two further Khotanese texts, The Prophecy of the Arhat Sanghavardhana and The Prophecy Concerning Khotan (Toh 4201 and 4202), are preserved in Tibetan in the Tengyur (placed mysteriously in the Epistles section). Both include summaries of the same lake story.

***

The founding myths of Khotan find a shared theme with that of another mountainous site, the Kathmandu Valley, also said to have been formed by the draining of a lake. The legend of Kathmandu, in which the sacred hill of Svayambhu plays a pivotal role, is recounted in the various versions of a Newar Buddhist text called the Svayambhu-purana, an anonymous work first composed in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries but probably based on earlier oral traditions, and developing over time into different versions of increasing length. The myth sets up the landscape as a place intentionally shaped and blessed by no less than seven successive buddhas and is thus deeply meaningful to the Newars of Kathmandu, and of course to the many other Buddhist inhabitants, pilgrims, and visitors who throng the valley and its holy places. The valley is not just a place whose multitude of sites, temples, caves, stupas, ponds, and other memorials are connected haphazardly to details of its history. It is an intentionally created buddhafield, a hidden land revealed as propitious for study, practice, and accomplishment.

The two founding myths don’t just share the overall theme of what is an archetypal land-from-water creation legend found in Asia and cultures throughout the world. A few more specific similarities between them have led scholars both in Tibet and in the West to point out that the two stories are more closely linked.

Both places are sites associated with the seven successive buddhas. A mixture of people from both China and India are said to have been the original human settlers of both newly created valleys, and the Indian settlers in both places are associated with Indian kings. In the Khotan stories, the Emperor Ashoka’s exiled son Kunala is adopted by the king of China, too, before becoming the founding ruler of Khotan, and is referred to by the name “Suckler of the Earth-Breast” (perhaps Gostana in the original, lost Khotanese version); a parallel story is told in the Vamshavali, another Newar text on the founding myth of Kathmandu. The Prophecy Concerning Khotan and the Vamshavali each mention sites called Namobudong and Namobuddha, respectively, where bodhisattvas performed acts of “great giving.” The list of parallels goes on, and perhaps the most convincing is that Goshringa, the name of the hill in Khotan from which the Buddha surveyed and blessed the country, is also said in the Svayambhu-purana to be one of the successive names of the sacred hill of Svayambhu, used in the age before the present one.

The Khotanese texts are many centuries older than the Nepalese, and their details may somehow have ended up being incorporated in the Kathmandu legends. For instance, the very name Khotan seems to have been derived from the names of Kunala or Gostana, the Indian prince; and the mixing of Indian and Chinese populations as the original settlers seems much more descriptive of Khotan than of Nepal. The borrowing of details need not, of course, negate the authenticity of either story. One hypothesis is that the Svayambhu-purana started out simply as a general anthology of Buddhist narratives from elsewhere, but that as more and more details of local founding myths were gradually added, later versions of the text were taken as primarily about those local myths, until the local theme came to be reflected in the text’s very title.

***

Despite the overlap between these stories, the destinies of the two lands could not be more different. The dharma has survived and flourished in the Kathmandu Valley, despite Nepal’s many problems. But in Khotan it has not. In fact, history has largely forgotten how important this jewel of a country once was. By the twelfth century, little was left of Khotan’s Buddhist past. The power of China had waxed and waned several times. Tibet’s imperial reach had long ago collapsed. The Silk Roads had dwindled in importance. Waves of Turkic and Iranian influence, eventually bringing Islam, had surged through the region. Mongol power was increasing. Many scholars and historians in Tibet seemed already to have become ignorant of Khotan’s contribution to their culture a few centuries earlier. Some were so ill-informed that they were not even sure what country was designated by the Tibetan name for Khotan, Liyül, let alone where it was. Others, familiar perhaps with the legends of Svayambhu, identified the Khotan sutras confidently with Nepal, as evidenced by specific refutations of that notion by early figures like the Kadampa master Drolungpa Lodro Jungne and the great Sakya scholars Sakya Pandita and Rendawa Zhonnu Lodro. In the thirteenth century, Chomden Rikpai Raltri saw the need to specify Liyül as being “on the other side of the Chakpo snow-mountains” and, in another work, to write a couplet on the subject:

sa nus bzung ba’i li yul de/
rgya bod mtshams kyi bal po min 

This Liyül of “Sustained by the Earth Breast”
Is not the Nepal on the border of India and Tibet.

Even in the twentieth century, the renowned Tibetan traveler and scholar Gendun Chopel (1903–1951) found it necessary to point out to his countrymen that to identify Liyül with Nepal was wrong, and that the features of the country, as mentioned in the Kangyur texts, are those of Khotan. 

For people in different places at different times, the availability of the Buddha’s teachings has always depended on geography and history. Geographical barriers to the accessibility of the teachings are more easily overcome in the modern world than they were in earlier times, but historical ones, in the form of cultural and political circumstances, still impose restrictions. 

Khotan’s founding myth relates how the buddhas create new opportunities in both time and space for the dharma to be spread, taught, and practiced, but it is also part of a Buddhist literary genre that contemplates the dharma’s inevitable decline. Knowing how the destiny of one’s land is related to the Buddha’s prophetic warnings brings resilience when dangers threaten. Knowing that one’s land is linked to the Buddha’s concern to identify and establish safe havens, where the practice of the dharma will endure, brings comfort and inspiration—as it still does to Buddhists in the Kathmandu valley, and once did to the people of Khotan. Let us honor the memory of Khotan and the magical draining of its lake.

The post The Lost Buddhist Kingdom of Khotan appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.