One way to make sense of the bewildering proliferation of Buddhist schools, doctrines, and practices over the last 2,500 years is to see them as a single, creative, ongoing effort to deal with the central problem of samsaric existence, which is the erroneous belief in an enduring, permanent self. Whether it is Zen, Pure Land, Theravada, or Tibetan Buddhist practice, all Buddhist paths teach practices that will effectively destroy the belief in this self. Dogen’s Zen, with its stress on faith, is no different; that is, the mechanism of faith is effective in dealing with the problem of the self. The necessity of shinjin datsuraku, the “dropping off of body and mind,” is the necessity of understanding that one is, like all other beings, empty of this self that is only a convenient fiction.

How does one drop off body and mind? How does one achieve emptiness? It seems that there have been primarily two different ways of achieving this result in the history of Buddhism. The way of pre-Mahayana Buddhism and the Theravada Buddhism of present-day Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka has been the way of frontal assault. This is the method of shamatha and vipassana meditations, which first put obstructive emotions and impulses to sleep in shamatha exercises, then subject the self to the corrosive analysis of vipassana insight practices. The final achievement is the destruction of the illusory self.

The other method, which is generally Mahayana and takes various forms, is an indirect method. It is indirect because instead of attacking the idea of a self directly, the illusion is destroyed in the process of directing one’s will and attention away from the self. The Mahayana emphasis on compassion and the bodhisattva’s career of selfless service on behalf of others gradually diminishes self-serving, self-interested action. The saying “to help others is to help oneself” means that in the process of devoting oneself unconditionally to helping all living beings, one becomes more and more capable of acting in a non-self-serving manner. I would like to suggest that faith accomplishes the same goal in Dogen’s Zen. And, of course, because this Zen is Mahayana Buddhism, there is the same bodhisattva vow, so that the individual involved in this Zen practice is working toward the goal in the traditional Mahayana fashion. The approach must be indirect, in a way, because the direct pursuit of enlightenment is a confession of dualistic thinking and merely one more attempt to seek ego gratification.

This is why Dogen Zenji so often warns against any kind of seeking or wanting, even if the object of the desire is a “holy” object or enlightenment itself. “If you wish to practice the Way of the Buddhas and ancestors, you should follow without thought of profit the Way of the former sages and the conduct of the ancestors, expecting nothing, seeking nothing, and gaining nothing. Cut off the mind that seeks and do not cherish a desire to gain the fruits of buddhahood,” he says in the Zuimonki. But how does one practice if one should not think of practicing for something?

There are several ways of doing this in Mahayana Buddhism. One method is that of making a vow to emancipate all living beings even though one is not completely emancipated oneself; this is the traditional bodhisattva vow. By practicing in this manner, even though one has an objective (to emancipate all living beings), it is not a self-gratifying objective. The other method is to commit oneself utterly to practicing the Way, but in the understanding that it is not merely oneself who is carrying out the practice: Thus, when one sits in zazen, it is not the individual self who sits, but the Buddha who sits, and thus all beings. The gradual clarification of one’s experience as a result of zazen is not the result of the individual clarifying and spiritualizing his own mind, but the result of the Buddha being a Buddha; that is, it is the Buddha who is realizing buddhahood, as Dogen says. And this begins to happen when we completely abandon our own efforts and trust completely in our true nature, which is the Buddha. Again, this is Buddhist faith.

Faith is important in Dogen’s Zen because practice must be undertaken in trust in another—the Buddha. This is the necessary basis of practice. Seen in this way, Dogen’s Zen is not really the Buddhism of self-power (jiriki), it is the Buddhism of other-power (tariki). One may indeed practice the Buddhism of self-power, and many do, but it will not be Dogen’s way. Dogen’s approach to practice and realization is the culmination of Buddhism’s historical attempt to deal with the problem of the self and its actions, and is thus a most sophisticated and profound solution to the problem.

In Shinran’s Pure Land Buddhism, it is taught that liberation and final nirvana are gifts given by Amida and not states attained by our own efforts. Moreover, in order for Amida’s wonderful gifts to become a reality for us, we must not try to gain them by our own efforts. In a time countless cosmic eons in the past, when Amida was still a practicing bodhisattva named Dharmakara, he made a number of vows, the essence of which was that he, Dharmakara, would never enter into the state of final, complete buddhahood until and unless every other living being also achieved the same buddhahood. Through countless, inconceivable practices he accumulated a vast store of merit and finally did become the Buddha Amida. What this means is that in some sense, all living beings are guaranteed buddhahood, and therefore also, in some sense, are already Buddhas, because the condition of the vows was that Dharmakara would not become a Buddha unless every other living being did also. The fact of his present buddhahood implies the present buddhahood of all beings. In other words, the conditions of the vow are fulfilled. Once an individual becomes aware of what Amida has done for him, that is, once faith in the vows has arisen in his heart, he is then reborn in Amida’s paradise when he dies, where he will speedily achieve enlightenment. The key to rebirth in the Western Paradise of Amida is unshakable faith in the vows.

To have faith in the Buddha is the same as forgetting the self.

When we look deeper into this matter of faith and try to determine what is actually happening in the life of the believer, it becomes evident that faith exactly coincides with the complete abandonment of self-effort and a turning to Amida, for as was pointed out above, self-effort is itself an admission of doubt in the power of Amida’s vows. As D. T. Suzuki and others have noted, if we strip away the mythological trappings of the situation, we find that what is spoken of as a kind of knowledge that one has really been saved by Amida is a form of satori, and this satori occurs when, and only when, the individual ceases to rely on his own power and ability. Is this not the forgetting of the self that Dogen speaks of in Genjo koan? Can there be a more powerful form of this self-forgetting than abandoning oneself completely to the Other?

Thus, the reason why faith is necessary, and is so powerful, is that in turning completely to the Other, we begin to forget the self and its incessant demands. It might be said that the human tendency to seek self-gratification through self-reliance begins to diminish in inverse ratio to our faith and trust in our inherent Buddha nature and its ability to actualize itself. Thus, Dogen tells us to throw ourselves into the house of the Buddha. A young Soto Zen monk once remarked, “We can find complete freedom and tranquility in ourselves when we have left ourselves completely to the Buddha’s boundlessly wide mind.” Dogen knew this from his own experience, and therefore his life was spent teaching a Buddhism of faith in the power of the Other, who is the Buddha.

It is difficult to overstate the matter: To have faith in the Buddha is the same as forgetting the self. How can it be otherwise when the prime requirement for “learning the Way” is to forget the self, shinjin datsuraku? The dropping off of one’s own body and mind and the minds and bodies of others is the almost incredible and inconceivable act of becoming totally empty, whereby we are no longer attached to anything (even nirvana), in which there is nothing to desire, nothing to expect, nothing to be. The vexing dualisms of life are transcended and all discriminations cease to operate. But how does one achieve this life if practice itself is a greater attachment, and if one’s practice is based on dualisms even more absolute than the ordinary ones? It is like trying to fight fire with fire—an even greater entanglement in contradictions and confusion.

In the final analysis, there is really no difference between this faith and zazen itself. The definition of zazen is that sitting means not activating thoughts toward external events, and Zen means seeing one’s true nature and not being confused. True zazen, then, is any activity carried out without self-concern, not forming self-serving attitudes toward events, and living one’s ordinary life without attachment or loathing. This is the same as forgetting the self. To forget this self is to have faith in the ability of the Buddha to illuminate our lives with Buddha insight. Nothing more is required. Thus, Dogen says:

When I see an ignorant old monk sitting wordlessly, I think of the story of the woman with faith who became enlightened by giving a feast. It does not depend on knowledge, books, words, or long explanations. It just requires the aid of true faith.

♦  

From How to Raise an Ox: Zen Practice as Taught in Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo by Francis Dojun Cook © 2002. Reprinted in arrangement with Wisdom Publications. 

The post Nothing to Be appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Once a month, Tricycle features an article from the Inquiring Mind archive. Inquiring Mind, a Buddhist journal that was in print from 1984–2015, has a growing number of articles from its back issues available at www.inquiringmind.com. This month’s selection is from the Fall 2011 “Bodhisattva” issue.

***

When I began my Buddhist training at the age of 21, I had no interest in liberation or compassion. The great Buddhist ideals of the arhat [one who has attained enlightenment], bodhisattva and buddha held no attraction for me. Rather, having discovered how satisfying meditation felt when I became settled in the present moment, I took up Buddhist practice as a way to have a more calm presence in my life. As a new practitioner of Buddhism, I began to find a peacefulness that was more meaningful than any of the other ways I experienced myself.

Eventually I learned that Buddhist practice involves more than simple presence and peacefulness. I came to find great meaning in the Buddhist goals of liberation and compassion. I also came to appreciate the different idealized portrayals of people connected to these goals—arhats, bodhisattvas and buddhas. An arhat is someone who is liberated by following the teachings of a buddha; a bodhisattva is someone training to become a buddha; a buddha is someone who discovers the path to liberation. Now, after years of practice, my approach to these ideals has become somewhat idiosyncratic. Rather than focusing on their literal meaning, I view the arhat as representing our capacity for liberation, the bodhisattva our ability for compassion, and the buddha how liberation and compassion work together in partnership. To the degree that I distinguish the arhat and the bodhisattva, I prefer to see them as walking hand-in-hand.

My approach is in stark contrast to that of people who emphasize one practice ideal at the expense of the other. It is also in contrast to the historical tendency to use the bodhisattva/arhat distinction to separate from and condemn other Buddhists. I experienced this when I practiced in Asia. After practicing Zen in Japan on the bodhisattva path, I practiced vipassana in Thailand, where the focus is on the arhat path. In Thailand, I was told that the Japanese bodhisattva path was heretical. When I returned to Japan, my Zen teacher told me that in Thailand I had been practicing with Mara, the Buddhist devil.

The traditional understanding is that one can follow either the path of the arhat or the path of the bodhisattva. But one cannot follow both. A practitioner on the arhat path learns and follows the Buddha’s teachings to liberate him or herself, ideally in this lifetime. A practitioner on the bodhisattva path aims to become, in some future lifetime, a buddha, or someone who in one’s final rebirth discovers the path of liberation for oneself and makes it available to the world. According to this divided schema, one can either be motivated to attain liberation for oneself or one can be motivated by compassion to help others become liberated.

Related: What School of Buddhism is Right for You?

As I was not initially motivated by either liberation or compassion, I was surprised when I discovered these were becoming important to me the more I practiced. The value of compassion came first, seemingly through a side door. Having tasted a degree of peace early on, which came from the simple practice of present-moment awareness, I took up intensive Zen training. But I soon found that this peace was elusive, as I encountered deep guilt, insecurity, and suffering. I was shocked at how self-centered I was and how painful that self-centeredness could be. Because the only practice I knew was to be mindfully present, I spent a lot of time, both in formal practice and in my daily life, trying to have a settled presence with my suffering. Years later, I realized that in doing this I was slowly being “compassioned.” My resistances and defenses gradually relaxed, and in their place grew tenderness and kindness. It was a process that seemed to soften a crust around my heart.

An important rite of passage into experiencing this compassion was the monthly Bodhisattva Full Moon Ceremony at the Zen center where I practiced. I remember well the first time I participated in the ritual, in the dim light of the Buddha hall, with 50 others practicing the deep, slow, resonating chanting and synchronized bowing. I was moved by something that seemed to well up from the depths of the earth. That ceremony helped me recognize the tenderizing of my heart that was beginning in the depths within me.

The central ritual of the Bodhisattva Full Moon Ceremony is the recitation of the four bodhisattva vows. The first vow expresses the intention to live for the benefit of others: “Beings are numberless, I vow to liberate them all.” Perhaps because this is so impossibly ambitious, it bypassed my logical mind and resonated with something that felt truer than my self-identity or desires. This something came with a feeling of warmth, ease, and openness in my chest. With time, I came to identify this with a compassion that did not seem personal or mine.

For me, this vow and the bodhisattva ideal came to represent the compassion emerging from the practice. It was a compassion intimately linked to the inner freedom that came as the practice loosened up my fears, insecurities, and attachments. Over time, the bodhisattva ideal became increasingly important to me, not as something to believe in or adopt from outside myself, but as a meaningful way of expressing the way my open heart was responding to suffering in the world. Caring for the suffering of others became as important as caring for my own suffering.

Some of my Zen teachers taught that the bodhisattva’s impossible dedication to save all beings is a metaphor for relating to others with a liberated mind. As this mind frees one from attachment to personal identity, a bodhisattva helps others without attachment to being a helper. With a liberated mind, bodhisattvas have no need to even consider themselves bodhisattvas. In fact, to be preoccupied with seeing oneself as a bodhisattva actually limits freedom and compassion.

As I understood the bodhisattva ideal through Zen teachings, a bodhisattva’s practice is to liberate oneself and at the same time to care for others. To liberate yourself without any empathy for others would mean your heart has not opened fully. It would be like trying to open your fist while some fingers remain tight in your palm. Trying to liberate others without having experienced some spiritual freedom yourself would mean you didn’t have firsthand experience of what you most wanted for others. It would be like trying to teach others a language you hadn’t even learned.

After ten years of following the bodhisattva path through Zen practice, I continued meditation practice in Thailand and Burma, countries where the arhat path is emphasized. Practicing there, I had the opportunity to go on long vipassana retreats, on which I could continue to develop the basic practice of mindful attention to the present moment that I had started at the age of 21. Nonetheless, studying vipassana meant I crossed the great historical Buddhist divide between the Mahayana and the Theravada traditions, the former based on the bodhisattva ideal and the latter mostly focused on the arhat ideal. In crossing this divide, I was aware of some of the Mahayana critiques of those on the arhat path: that they are selfish and they lack compassion, and that the liberation arhats attain is inferior and perhaps even misguided.

My encounter with Theravada Buddhists in Thailand and Burma showed these criticisms to be unjustified. I did not encounter selfish Buddhists. Rather, I met many practitioners on the arhat path engaged in helping others. Theravada temples are often involved in supporting their surrounding communities. In addition to being places that offer spiritual guidance and teachings, Theravada temples can function as community and medical centers, schools, orphanages, and homes to the homeless. In fact, Theravada temples are often more involved in serving their local communities than were the Zen temples where I lived in Japan.

My longest silent Theravada retreat was eight months long, with most of the time spent alone in a small room. I can well imagine someone thinking that this was a selfish thing to do. After all, it entailed months of focusing only on myself, with little connection to helping others. But vipassana meditation is a practice of liberation that can carry one beyond selfishness. One cannot progress along any path of liberation if one is selfish; to be selfish is to be enslaved in attachment. As mindfulness develops, one will become acutely aware of the suffering and limitation of self-centeredness—a natural motivation to overcome it grows. Liberation is the end of selfishness.

It was true that during the long vipassana retreats, we were not supposed to focus on compassion. My Burmese teacher was quite explicit about this. He didn’t want us to add anything extra to the direct mindfulness practice we were cultivating. However, the consequence of doing intensive vipassana practice was the rise of a powerful sense of compassion. This is partly because one learns how deep and subtle human suffering can be. One discovers an underlying layer of suffering that is not personal and does not arise from the stories and events of our particular life. To thereby realize the pervasiveness of how people suffer, while at the same time having an open and relaxed heart, evokes empathy and compassion for others. The ability to see suffering grows as a person is liberated from self-centeredness and attachments, much as one may only see how hazy the air has been when there is a day without haze.

So with practicing vipassana on the Theravada arhat path, my capacity for compassion continued to increase. As I practiced vipassana, I found that my heart was freed from some of the greed, hatred, and delusion that obscured my capacity to be sensitive and empathetic. This growth of compassion was also supported by the Theravada practice of cultivating lovingkindness, something I had not been taught in my years of Zen practice.

Having engaged in practices associated with the arhat path, and with practices associated with the bodhisattva path, I look upon both with great gratitude. For me, both have been paths of liberation and compassion. The rhetoric of the arhat ideal may emphasize liberation while the rhetoric of the bodhisattva ideal may emphasize compassion, but in the heart, liberation and compassion cannot be separated. The cultivation of liberation and compassion go together like the front and back of an open hand. Clinging, attachment and mental bondage are like clenching the hand into a fist. When the fist is opened, liberation and compassion are both there. Now that I have been practicing Buddhism for over 35 years, I am less and less inclined to use the categories of arhat, bodhisattva, or even buddha. I don’t see much need for them. My Buddhist practice is now guided by my heart’s capacity for liberation and compassion. Increasingly, I look at the world through eyes informed by these two qualities.

Everything I have learned about Buddhism teaches me to loosen my attachment to all things. This includes concepts such as bodhisattva and arhat, the Mahayana and the Theravada. I have found these concepts useful when they help free me from clinging or help me help others. I find them harmful when they are what I cling to. And when I am not attached, I find I am happy to let these concepts go. I have no need to see myself, or others, through these categories. Instead, with this non-attachment comes my wish that all beings may be free of suffering.

♦

Inquiring Mind Articles Related to “The Bodhisattva & The Arhat”:

Where the Path Divides: Early Buddhism and the Bodhisattva Ideal, by Bhikkhu Bodhi

Interview with Geshe Thupten Jinpa: Compassion Curriculum

Beautiful Loser: Shantideva & The Way of the Bodhisavttva, by Jenny Bondurant

I Am, It Is, We Are, by Trudy Goodman

The post Why I Walk Two Paths appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

There’s an old story about a frog. He’s lived all his life in a well, and one day another frog appears at its rim. They get to talking, and the strange frog tells the older one that he’s come from somewhere called the ocean.

“I never heard of that. I guess it’s about a quarter the size of my well?”

“No. More than that,” answers the other.

“OK—a half?”

“Much bigger,” the strange frog laughs.

“The same size, then?”

“No, even bigger,” says the foreign frog.

“Alright. This, I got to see,” says the oldster as he clambers out the well and sets out for the ocean.

It’s a hard road, but at last he arrives.

Unfortunately, when he sees the ocean, the shock is so great that it blows his mind and his head explodes.

Lately it has occurred to me that this beloved story told by the 19th-century master Patrul Rinpoche could apply to many of us in our encounter with Buddhism. Just like that frog, we have a bad case of the disease of conceit. We are so confident in the opinions that we bring with us to our encounter with the dharma that we neglect how it radically differs from our preconceptions. We are the frog before it leaves the well.

Sadly, many of us believe that we are already in possession of all there is worth knowing about Buddhism. Such a conceit has a number of causes, but chief among them is the conviction that Buddhism and our own pre-existing assumptions are identical. This belief is particularly pernicious because it blocks any genuine encounter with the dharma. We can represent this belief in the form of a syllogism: My opinions are compassionate. Buddhism is compassionate. Therefore Buddhism must be identical with my opinions.

Related: 10 Misconceptions about Buddhism 

We exhibit a similar lack of self-awareness when we assert that our version of Buddhism is free of dogma. What do we really mean when we say this? It might be rephrased: Buddhism should be free of dogma (that I don’t like). However, Buddhism must conform to contemporary opinions and the received wisdom of Enlightenment thought and scientificity (because they are not dogmas, and I like them).

A common example of unconcern with examining our prior assumptions is evident when we declare that “Buddhism is just common sense,” when that’s precisely what it’s not. Dharma is nothing if not counterintuitive. After all, our perception and “intuition” indicate that we possess a permanent, singular, and autonomous identity, ensuring our entanglement in the cycle of birth and death.

It’s such assumptions—whether religious, political, or cultural—that have to be temporarily suspended if we’re to uncover the nature of reality.

The pride behind holding beliefs unquestioningly is one of the six stains to be avoided when receiving the teachings. As Patrul Rinpoche himself pointed out, it is very difficult to recognize the stains for what they are. Yet, unless we can dissolve them, our receipt of spiritual teachings will at best be profitless, and at worst, poisonous.

Related: Six Lessons from Patrul Rinpoche 

What’s required is a sense of humility, which will render us open to the teaching. The traditional analogy that illustrates this positive approach to the dharma is that of a vessel placed right side up so that it can be filled with water. This receptivity is not to be confused with credulity, nor a hurried reach for certainty when the teachings get difficult. It is rather a readiness to attend to the words and meaning of the teaching, and to persist in critical reflection until it is digested and becomes a part of our thinking.

Regrettably, there are many examples of our casual habit of assuming, without evidence, that two-and-a-half millennia of Buddhist teachings are identical with modern opinions. You see its effect in the dismay expressed by some when they discover, for instance, traditional Asian Buddhist views on ethical issues regarding matters of life and death. What often results is a determined effort to excise the offending teaching, sometimes in the name of a “higher compassion,” or to rejig it to complement notions that are currently fashionable.

One could well guess that our disregard for the actual teaching is one reason why many Asian Buddhists have come to regard Western Buddhists as ultimately unserious. In fact, this might sometimes lead the more cynical Asian teachers to steer clear of anything that might challenge their putative disciples or provoke their displeasure. Some might even be tempted to alter the teachings themselves.

Naturally, such evasiveness accomplishes little for the survival of the dharma. What is the use of a dharma, after all, that doesn’t challenge our assumptions?

We might yet espouse a view of the dharma that is capable of undermining our pride. Patrul Rinpoche offers the Four Metaphors given in sutra:

Noble one, think of yourself as someone who is sick,
Of the dharma as the remedy,
Of your spiritual teacher as a skillful doctor,
And of diligent practice as the way to recovery. 

As for the teacher, there are enough genuine ones. And if we go and find one, things could start to get interesting for us frogs right about now.

[This story was first published in 2015]

The post Against “Common Sense” Buddhism appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Every mystical tradition has one or more ways to transform emotional energy into attention. The most common method is devotion, which plays a central role in traditions as diverse as Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Pure Land Buddhism, and Vajrayana Buddhism. In many of the Theravada traditions of Southeast Asia, lovingkindness is used to generate the emotional energy needed to power attention. Likewise, in many of the Mahayana traditions, compassion is the emotion of choice.

In Mahayana practice, compassion is both a practice and a result. Compassion is used to transform emotional reactivity into attention, and that attention in turn is used to awaken to the nature of mind—emptiness. But then that same emptiness becomes the basis for a different kind of compassion. This interweaving of emptiness and compassion is expressed in the Sanskrit word bodhicitta, for which an accepted and widely used English translation is “awakening mind.”

The role of compassion in Mahayana practice has led to more than a few misunderstandings in today’s world. In many traditions compassion is the stepping-stone into bodhicitta (awakening mind), the central theme of Mahayana. Many people regard bodhicitta as simply a form of altruism. (It is that, but also much more.) Others are of the opinion that the practice of compassion is primarily about doing good in the world, and that the ethics of bodhicitta require engagement with social or environmental issues and the advancement of specific social and cultural agendas, including identity politics, diversity, and related matters.

This social and political orientation is very much at odds with my own training in the Tibetan tradition. None of my teachers ever presented bodhicitta as a method or basis for social action, let alone political advocacy. Quite the contrary; they presented it as a way to make use of whatever we encounter in life to deepen or enhance our experience of awakening. The awakening they taught led to an essentially mystical relationship with life—a way of experiencing life directly, unmediated by the conceptual mind, a way of life based on the union of compassion and emptiness. What one actually did with one’s life was left open.

If compassion is the wish that others not suffer, one approach, certainly, is to address material and emotional needs—struggles with poverty, hunger, illness, and fear in all of their innumerable combinations, as well as the many ways in which people are treated as less than human. This form of compassion seeks to alleviate suffering and pain as much as possible and takes expression in society as kindness, care, and justice.

To bring an actual end to suffering is another matter entirely. Suffering comes to an end only when a person is so in touch with life that he or she is completely at peace, regardless of physical or emotional circumstances. The wish to help others find that kind of peace is a very different form of compassion.

Bodhicitta evolves out of this second kind of compassion. Bodhicitta, as awakening mind, is the intention to awaken to life in order to help others awaken to life. It is not simply a feeling or an emotion or a sentiment. It has a vertical dimension that runs at right angles to our social conditioning and embraces a knowing, a seeing, into the nature of experience itself. It may grow out of the compassion that seeks to alleviate suffering, but it is qualitatively different.

Bodhicitta permeates every aspect of Mahayana teaching and practice. Broadly speaking, it is a quality (many might say it is the quality) that moves us in the direction of awakening. But what is it?

For some teachers bodhicitta is an intention. The 4th-century Indian master Asanga regarded it as the intention to wake up in order to free all beings from samsara. Here, samsara means the way that we experience life when we are confused by emotional reactions and blinded by a lack of experiential understanding of what we are. For other teachers, such as the 8th-century scholar-monk Shantideva, it is primarily a commitment to engage in the practice of awakening, which is actively motivated by the wish to help others be free. For yet others, it is the experience of awakening itself—those moments when we experience a unity of compassion and emptiness that goes beyond any conceptual understanding. In such moments, emotional reactivity and ignorance relinquish their hold on us, and our relationship with life fundamentally and irrevocably changes. And for still others, notably the 14th-century Tibetan master Longchenpa, it is freedom from the confusion of blindness and reactivity—a freedom in which all choice disappears and we simply respond to the struggles and needs of others according to the circumstances of our lives.

Bodhicitta has been the subject of many large and weighty tomes. The Four Great Vows in the Zen tradition provide a wonderfully succinct, pragmatic, and profound articulation of bodhicitta:

Beings are numberless: may I free them all.
Reactions are endless: may I release them all.
Doors to experience are infinite: may I enter them all.
Ways of awakening are limitless: may I know them all.

The first of the four vows says Beings are numberless: may I free them all. It speaks to a heartfelt wish that others not suffer. In the practice of bodhicitta, we actively cultivate a wish that others be free of pain and struggle. As an example of such a wish, consider the 19th-century Tibetan master Jamgon Kongtrul the Great. Kongtrul himself was an extraordinarily humble person who devoted his life to practice and teaching. Nevertheless, he was so highly regarded that in the reincarnation tradition of Tibetan Buddhism he was regarded as a bodhisattva who would become the thousandth buddha of this age (Buddha Shakyamuni is said to be the fourth). Legend has it that the intention of the thousandth buddha is to do for sentient beings as much as all the previous 999 buddhas have done. Now that is a big wish! Its time frame alone boggles the imagination.

You might pause here and take a few moments to formulate a comparable wish. Make it big—really big. Make it as big as you can possibly imagine, and then push it a bit further. Do not worry about whether it is practical or even possible. When you have it, hold it in your heart for a few minutes. If you experience a shift, just rest there for a few minutes and consider what it would be like to live your life from that shift. From the perspective of bodhicitta practice, that shift is everything.

We soon find out that helping others to find peace in themselves is far from easy. We quickly discover that far from being able to help others, we are locked up in our own worlds of emotional reaction—the fiery hells and icy wastes of anger and hate, the barren deserts of greed where nothing is ever enough, the never-ending rat race of envy and competition, and so on. Our whole life consists of flitting from one such world to another. No matter where we land, we do not see things clearly and we are unable to provide any meaningful help to others. Thus the second of the great vows is Reactions are endless: may I release them all.

In today’s world, where we have been brought up in the myth that we can actually control our lives and control what we experience, it is important to remember that we cannot and do not actually release emotional reactions. All we can do is create the conditions in which emotional reactions let go on their own. Those conditions are a generosity of spirit; as much honesty with ourselves as we can muster; patience to endure our own confusion; steady and consistent effort; an ability to rest in attention without distraction; and a knowing that enables us to see through our own confusion. These qualities are known in Mahayana teachings as the six perfections—generosity, ethics, patience, diligence, meditative stability and wisdom. They create the conditions that make it possible for us to experience emotional reactions in open attention without succumbing to, suppressing, or controlling them. Then, as the texts say, emotional reactions arise and subside on their own, like clouds in the sky.

If a bodhisattva should practice generosity while still depending on form, he or she is like someone walking in the dark. He or she will not see anything. But when a bodhisattva practices generosity without depending on form, he or she is like someone with good eyesight walking in the bright sunshine—he or she can see all shapes and colors.

—The Diamond Sutra

Here bodhicitta changes from a wish to a commitment: we are going to use whatever life throws at us to wake up. We may engage in political or social action if we feel called to do so, but our intention is subtly different. We use those settings or whatever our situation is in life to see our own emotional reactivity and work through it as best we can. The main point is that with the commitment of bodhicitta we no longer have the luxury of indulging our own confusion and reactivity.

You may notice that this way of approaching life does not necessarily make life better. In fact, often it makes things more difficult, precisely because we cannot indulge our reactivity. We cannot ignore or avoid the pain and struggles of others, whether the other is a surly store clerk or a difficult boss or a homeless person on the street. You may also begin to appreciate that bodhicitta is not a sort of super-altruism or compassion. Rather, it is a practice that changes how we experience life itself. Conventional notions of happiness, gain, fame, and respect begin to lose their hold, and we come to value peace, equanimity, and compassion as qualities worth striving for in their own right.

We make good on our commitment to awakening not by doing good but by using whatever arises in our lives to wake up. To do so, we have to let go of our emotional reactions, again and again and again. Every reaction that does let go opens a door to a different way of experiencing life, and that brings us to the third vow: Doors to experience are infinite: may I enter them all.

This line in Japanese contains a double entendre that is difficult to replicate in English. The phrase “doors to experience” also means “doors to the dharma,” as the word dharma means both what arises in experience and spiritual teaching.

An example of one such door is found at the beginning of The Diamond Sutra. The Buddha returns from his daily rounds begging for food in the town of Shravasti. He sits down and takes his meal. He then puts away his bowl and folds his robes. Subhuti is so awed by the naturalness of these simple actions that he is moved to ask the Buddha, “How does a bodhisattva sit? How does a bodhisattva act? How does a bodhisattva take hold of mind?”

The Buddha begins his response with the last question. In the third chapter of The Diamond Sutra he says, essentially, “To take hold of mind, a bodhisattva sets the intention to lead every being into nirvana—wherever they may be, however they have come into this world, however mundane or transcendent their experience. And in doing so, the bodhisattva knows that no being is freed.”

The first time I read this passage, everything just stopped. Thoughts vanished. My mind was completely clear, and at the same time there was nothing there. “Oh,” I said to myself, “that is how you take hold of mind!” Many of the sutras are to be read this way, not as philosophical teachings but as elicitations of specific experiences.

How is it that no being is freed? As the Buddha goes on to say in the sutra, no being is freed because in the moment of taking hold of mind, there is no perception of an other, no perception of a being, a soul, a life, or a person.

When something like this happens, we drop to our knees in awe that such an experience is humanly possible. We had no idea that we were capable of feeling such far-reaching care and compassion while experiencing such depth of peace and presence. Shantideva’s magnificent work The Way of the Bodhisattva arose out of the wonder and awe he felt when he discovered this possibility. This is bodhicitta, or awakening mind. Small wonder, then, that we feel we have discovered something profoundly, ultimately, and absolutely true.

Right there is where the notion of ultimate or absolute truth is born. The term “absolute truth” does not refer to a truth in the sense of philosophical, mathematical, or scientific truth. It is truth more in the sense of a poem that rings true or a sword that cuts true. It is experientially true in a way that goes right to the core of our being and beyond. By contrast, everything else seems superficial, misleading, and mundane, and is seen as “relative truth.” In short, the two truths of Mahayana Buddhism are not truths as such, but descriptions of how we experience life when the conceptual mind lets go.

This contrast is well described by a poem in the anonymously published collection Full On Arrival:

Until we experience it,
Emptiness sounds so
Empty.
Once experienced,
All is empty by comparison.

This is one example of a door to experience, or a door to the dharma. The irony is that every emotional reaction is also a door to this way of experiencing life. We can use our commitment to bodhicitta to meet any emotional reaction, open to it, see what it is, and let it release on its own. When we do these steps, we usually experience a shift. That shift is a glimpse of a different way of experiencing life, a way that does not depend on the conceptual mind, a way in which words, thoughts, and emotional reactions have no hold. Bodhicitta here is not a wish. Nor is it an ongoing commitment. It is an experience of awakening. In any such glimpse of bodhicitta, you immediately recognize the two themes of Mahayana Buddhism, emptiness and compassion. On the one hand, when the mind stops, there is nothing there, just the peace of empty clarity. On the other, in that peace you are intensely and deeply aware of the pain of the world, and compassion naturally arises.

Now we move into the realm of the fourth vow: Ways of awakening are limitless: may I know them all. As we go through these doors again and again, our efforts build momentum. The inexpressible peace and freedom we experience when emotional reactions let go begins to pervade our life. Probably the most eloquent description of bodhicitta at this level is found in Longchenpa’s important work The Basic Space of Phenomena [Tib., chos dbyings mdzod]. In this truly epic work, Longchenpa sees awakening mind as the basis of life:

Awakening mind is the basis of all experience.
It is unrestricted, arising as anything whatsoever.
Its natural clarity shines in the vastness of pure experience:
Nothing whatsoever to identify, it is just the way unfettered awareness carries itself.

Longchenpa presents awakening mind as the constant unfolding of awareness or experience in an inconceivable vastness that can only be described as unrestricted empty clarity. This is a deeply mystical knowing, and at this point there is virtually nothing left of us. We are free. But what form does this freedom take?

We have all the freedom of the sun: we radiate light and warmth to the world without any thought of who deserves to be nurtured and who does not. We have all the freedom of the rain: we provide the moisture of understanding and everyone partakes of it, regardless of how they live their lives. We have all the freedom of the wind, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, touching every form of life with the breath of life. We have all the freedom of the earth: we provide support and nourishment for all who live and breathe in the world without any say as to what they do with their lives. Such thoughts never arise. Instead, we are completely and utterly at peace, and at the same time we respond naturally and spontaneously to the pains of the world and the needs of others.

Three Kinds of Bodhicitta

Compassion, the wish that others not suffer, arises in different ways. One is the simple, straightforward feeling that comes quite naturally when we see others struggling. We just want them to be at peace. A second is when we have come to terms with an aspect of life that everyone finds difficult—aging and mortality, for instance. In coming to terms with our own mortality, we see that we are all in the same boat, so to speak, and, again, we naturally feel compassion for others struggling with the same issue. Compassion arises in yet a third way when we come to know experientially that the sense of “I” we hold so dear is simply a movement of mind—there really is nothing there. Then we see that others are not different from us and their struggles are no different from ours.

In classical Indian Buddhism, the first way, the straightforward wish, leads to king- or queen-like bodhicitta. It is a wish to help others, a wish we realize through the power of our own virtue and understanding. The understanding and acceptance of mortality gives rise to boatman-like bodhicitta, helping others to accept this experience we call life just as it is and to be free and at peace with it. The third kind of compassion, the direct knowing of non-self, gives rise to shepherd-like bodhicitta. Here there is no comparison, not even the conceit of equality—just the intention to guide others as best we can to the peace and understanding of freedom, with little, if any, concern for ourselves.

Understand there are three kinds of persons
Because of their small, middling, and supreme capacities.
I shall write clearly distinguishing
Their individual characteristics.
Know that those who by whatever means
Seek for themselves no more
Than the pleasures of cyclic existence
Are persons of the least capacity.
Those who seek peace for themselves alone,
Turning away from worldly pleasures
And avoiding destructive actions
Are said to be of middling capacity.
Those who, through their personal suffering,
Truly want to end completely
All the suffering of others
Are persons of supreme capacity.

♦

From Atisha’s Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, by Atisha Dipamkara with commentary by Geshe Sonam Rinchen, translated by Ruth Sonam © 1997. Reprinted with permission of Shambhala Publications (shambhala.com). Atisha Dipamkara (982–1054 CE) was a Bengali Buddhist master and major figure in the spread of Mahayana Buddhism in Asia.

The post Bodhicitta Explained appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

This three-year-long exhibition, part of a rehanging of the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler galleries’ permanent collection, shows what magic can be worked with a clear objective and access to some of the world’s most beautiful Buddhist art. Comprising some 250 objects, all drawn from the Freer/Sackler’s holdings, the show grew out of a 2013 meeting among scholars, curators, designers, and representatives of the lead sponsor of the exhibition, the Robert H. N. Ho foundation, a Hong Kong–based organization dedicated to promoting a deeper public understanding of Buddhism and Chinese culture.

As cocurated by Debra Diamond, the Freer/Sackler’s curator of South and Southeast Asian art; Robert DeCaroli, an art historian specializing in the early history of Buddhism; and Freer Fellow Rebecca Bloom, the exhibition presents an overview of Buddhist thought that spans two millennia and the three major schools of Buddhism—Nikaya, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. When a museum holding a premier collection of Asian art turns its attention to a show about Buddhism, the results are bound to be engaging; but what truly sets this exhibition apart is its emphasis on the original purposes and meanings of the objects on view. Rather than organize the artworks by style, region, or period, as is usual in museum displays, Diamond and her collaborators have created thematic groupings of objects, accompanied by lively wall texts and labels, that lay out Buddhism’s core principles; interactive kiosks for the curious that provide more specific information about individual pieces; and several immersive environments that bring the rituals behind the objects to vivid life.

This is an exhibition with a difference, presenting through art the myriad ways Buddhism may be practiced, from solitary meditation to communal celebrations, and the myriad forms its iconography can take, from immense stupas to tiny clay images carried by pilgrims. “We wanted to create contexts by which people could understand the objects as something more than artworks,” Diamond told me last spring. “Why were they made? How did Buddhists engage with them? And what does it mean for them to now be in a museum? So we created this exhibition about art and practice.” 

The show opens with images of the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, who more than 2,500 years ago renounced a princely life to seek an answer to the pain of existence. After his death, his teachings spread across Asia and are common to all forms of Buddhism. 

Four stylistically different Buddha heads greet visitors at the door—including a delicate 2nd- or 3rd-century Indian portrait in red sandstone from the northern Indian city of Mathura, as minimal as a Matisse drawing, and a more folkish 18th-century bronze from Thailand; nevertheless, each one incorporates many of the signs and marks that traditionally identify the historical Buddha, such as long earlobes, a cranial bump, and a dot between the eyes. A touchscreen kiosk allows visitors to pose more questions about the display, including asking the sculpture how it got there—the answer to which touches on looting and the often illegal ways whereby such objects end up mutilated and in museums. 

From here, the show moves on to the idea of multiple buddhas, which all schools believe in, though the Nikaya schools believe that only one Buddha is living at any particular time. In contrast, Mahayana Buddhism, a later outgrowth, believes that multiple buddhas can exist in the world simultaneously. A small bronze altarpiece, commissioned in 609 by a daughter for her father and mother, vividly articulates this new idea, depicting a scene from the Lotus Sutra in which the Buddha of the Past comes to hear the historical Buddha at the moment he begins to teach. 

One of the tenets of Mahayana Buddhism is that all sentient beings have the potential to become buddhas. As the number of buddhas grew under Mahayana’s influence, so did the number of specific practices devoted to them. The Buddha Amitabha, for instance, depicted here as a wasp-waisted, muscular youth in a patched robe, took a vow to create a Pure Land, into which those who call on him can be reborn and there become buddhas themselves. An exuberant Chinese stone stele, carved with a pattern of 1,000 buddhas, commemorates the Buddha Maitreya, the Future Buddha, who waits, pensive, for the next age to arrive.

Two immersive environments bring the practice of Buddhism into the immediate present. A vitrine of small objects shaped like stupas—structures built to contain Buddhist relics—is a lead-in to a hypnotic three-channel video showing a single day, from dawn to dusk, at the Ruwanwelisaya stupa in Sri Lanka. Shot this year, the footage shows groups of Sinhalese Buddhists making communal offerings of bolts of cloth—which are wrapped around the structure before being donated to the monks for new robes—as well as gifts of flowers, light, incense, and prayers. The movie ends with an extraordinary shot of the stupa glittering with thousands of butter lamps in the encroaching darkness. 

A second immersive environment is an approximation of the kind of traditional Buddhist shrine that would have belonged to an aristocratic Tibetan family [see p. 89]. Created from a gift of 243 pieces of Tibetan sacred art by the collector Alice S. Kandell, the shrine—with help from Tibetan lamas and Western scholars—has been arranged as it would have appeared in an important lama’s home, with sculptures arranged hierarchically on stands and flanked by thangkas [scroll paintings]. 

Pride of place just outside the shrine goes to an 18th-century copper sculpture of Padmasambhava, the semilegendary master venerated for bringing Vajrayana teachings from India to Tibet in the 700s, as well as for converting demons (i.e., gods of other religions) into protectors of Buddhism. Some of the most engaging exhibits in the show are vitrines containing images of these enlisted guardians, including one containing a sculptural depiction of a saucy, plump-rumped, and beribboned Jambhala (originally the Hindu god Kubera), who grants riches and wishes, accompanied by his gem-spitting mongoose. 

Bodhisattvas—future buddhas who have chosen to stay in the world to help other beings—are also given their day, with extra attention paid to their polymorphous guises. And although buddhas were generally depicted in monk’s robes while bodhisattvas were shown in luxurious clothing and jewels, one modest 7th-century tin figure of a bodhisattva, part of a hoard of such figures discovered in Thailand, has the matted hair and simple loincloth of an ascetic—perhaps the form in which he could do the most good.

Near the end of the show, a map depicts the scope of the Buddhist world, from Afghanistan to Japan and from Mongolia to Indonesia, while yet another kiosk traces the journeys of Hyecho, a young 8th-century Korean monk who set out to see the birthplace of Buddhism in India and eventually traveled as far as Iran. The Silk Road brought pilgrims like Hyecho, along with monks, migrants, and merchants, to such remote sites as Kizil, an oasis town in northwestern China. Fragments of brightly pigmented 6th-century Buddhist paintings from the walls of the caves at Kizil testify to the cosmopolitan makeup of its visitors by showing personages, of different colors and wearing a variety of costumes, all listening to the words of the Buddha.

The final room in the exhibition is modest in the extreme, containing little more than an 8th- or 9th-century Indianstyle Javanese Medicine Buddha and a 13th-century Cambodian statue of Prajnaparamita, who embodies the perfection of wisdom. The little Buddha’s back is inscribed with a mantra, or sacred passage; a film nearby translates its meaning for visitors. At a time when the world desperately needs both healing and wisdom, these small, clear-cut figures make a fitting conclusion to the show. 

But they also might make an intriguing beginning—visitors are free to take in this exhibition following their own path and at their own pace. Its quiet exhibits, organized concentrically, can be navigated in any order while still making sense, and will change over time in response to feedback from visitors. (My own wish would be for a slightly less moody design—while soothing, the dark maroon walls also reminded me of Robert Wright’s caution in the New York Times of November 6 not to make Buddhism too exotic.) If you are at all interested in Buddhism, try to make it to Washington to see this show. You’ve got three years.

The post The Buddhas Go to Washington appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When I first visited Japan as a college student many years ago, I came for the explicit purpose of studying Buddhism. Like many of my fellow travelers, I was introduced to Japanese Buddhism through the writing of mid-century American poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac. I chose a study abroad program that allowed foreign students to study at Buddhist temples, because I wanted to experience the spiritual adventures described in English-language literature on Buddhism. I expected to find austere mountain retreats filled with meditating monks who only paused from their pursuits toward enlightenment to craft elegant flower arrangements or compose enigmatic haiku. What I found was anything but the romanticized tales of American literature.

At a temple near the foothills of Mount Hiei, just to the northeast of Kyoto, we awoke at sunrise to join a dozen or so monks dressed in multicolored robes and reciting a series of chants that turned out to be scriptures. We then moved on to stay at another temple on Mount Koya to the south, where we participated in elaborate rituals featuring wrathful deities, fire, and rhythmic incantations. What were we chanting? I was curious to know what this all meant.

As I later discovered, both mountains are home to schools of esoteric Buddhism. These mountaintop monasteries were established in the early 9th century CE as training centers where clergy throughout Japan could study newly imported texts and their ritual applications. It is unclear what exactly this training consisted of during the early centuries, but learning the proper recitation of incantations called dharanis and mantras was certainly its primary objective. However, what exactly made these practices “esoteric” and how they were thought to differ from traditional Mahayana Buddhism are difficult questions to answer.

Like tantra and vajrayana in the Buddhist traditions of Central Asia, esoteric Buddhism in Japan is sometimes called the completion or fulfillment of the Buddha’s teachings. A millennium of wrangling among Buddhist scholastics and modern scholars has concluded that the esoteric teachings were not preached by the historical Shakyamuni Buddha during his 80 years of life in this world. Among their adherents, however, they are seen to be the timeless and ultimate truth of the dharma that caused Shakyamuni’s awakening to buddhahood in the first place. Therefore, those who cultivate these esoteric teachings have direct access to the very source of the Buddha’s enlightenment. If we put aside the particulars of such sectarian polemics, however, and explore how esoteric Buddhism has been discussed over the centuries, we discover a much more multivalent meaning to this arcane, although influential, tradition within Japanese Buddhism.

The English word esoteric originates from Greek, meaning “internal” or “inner.” The Sino-Japanese ideograph commonly translated as “esoteric Buddhism,” literally means “secret teachings.” We can generally define this form of Buddhism as a teaching of the Buddha that is either a secret to be discovered in the mind of the practitioner or knowledge limited to an elite group of practitioners. The basic etymological definition of the word, however, sheds very little light on the actual content and details of these so-called secret teachings, especially if we take into consideration the fact that the term “esoteric Buddhism” has come to denote several overlapping traditions, practices, and doctrines in Japanese Buddhism.

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Similar to classification systems of tantra in the Indo-Tibetan tradition, esoteric Buddhism in Japan denotes a class of scripture. Although the term tantra rarely appears in East Asian sources, many of the texts utilized in Japan are Chinese translations of early tantras. For instance, the Sarva-tathagata-tattva-samgraha, the primary source for the ritual system in Japanese esoteric Buddhism, was a seminal yoga tantra that still plays an important role in Nepali Buddhism. But this is where the similarities between Central and East Asian Buddhism end, and one must take caution not to assume a historical continuity between these traditions. While the early tantras gave way to the more systematic and detailed rites of the Guhyasamaja Tantra and Hevajra Tantra in India and Tibet, these textual and ritual traditions made no impact on East Asian Buddhism. Rather than devising a system of tantra distinct from the Mahayana sutras, esoteric Buddhist scholastics were mostly concerned with how newly translated texts such as the Sarva-tathagata-tattva-samgraha, Mahavairocana Sutra, Susiddhikara Sutra, and their respective ritual manuals compared with the teachings of older sutras, particularly the Lotus and the Mahaparinirvana.

Esoteric Buddhism can also be identified by a specific set of rituals that evolved out of these scriptures. The fourfold initiation rite (shido kegyo), for instance, is a series of incantation practices and rites involving mandalas, culminating in a fire ritual (goma, from Sanskrit homa); there are also other rites to produce worldly benefits such as rainmaking or healing. (By the late 12th century, such rites had become pervasive among clergy in Japan, whose livelihoods often relied on their perform-ance of these rituals.) Another kind of rite—the consecration rites called abhisheka—is also a staple of esoteric Buddhism. The imperial court even took part in special consecration rites that employed esoteric imagery, such as mandalas, and the recitation of mantras, and monastic centers and their clergy competed for imperial favor by providing such ritual services.

The ritual lineage was an important component of medieval esoteric Buddhism, perhaps more important than the rituals themselves. Ritual training systems varied according to lineage, and the affiliation of a monk with a particular temple and master was essential to the preservation of a given style of rite. The transmission of ritual protocols for mantras, the hand gestures known as mudras, and the procedures of a rite were transmitted secretly from master to disciple, which kept the correct performance of a rite secret as well. However, lineage and secrecy have long been important issues in East Asian Buddhism. The rites in esoteric Buddhism may have added new components based on recently translated sources, but the emphasis on orthodox lineage was nothing new or particularly esoteric.

Rhetoric should also be considered a part of any definition of esoteric Buddhism. Calling one’s own tradition “esoteric” and its central teachings “secret” is, of course, a polemical assertion. The term “secret teachings” implies a superior and elite knowledge. This knowledge is contrasted with a lesser “exoteric” form of the teaching, which is simpler and adapted for less advanced practitioners. The phrase “exo-esoteric Buddhism” is a case in point. By the 11th century, some esoteric schools began distinguishing themselves from others by declaring that only they had received transmission into the truly secret teachings of the Buddha. The other schools, it was claimed, also expounded the secret teachings, but still relied on an exoteric interpretation to explain them. The use of the pejorative “exo-esoteric Buddhism” was intended to elevate one’s own school over the other forms of esoteric Buddhism. In other words, to claim that one’s own tradition is esoteric is to assert authority over a superior lineage and knowledge of the teachings that is not necessarily accessible to the average practitioner.

Despite its polemical overtones, there is still a doctrinal basis to the notion of a secret teaching. The defining element of esoteric Buddhism in Japan is the claim that an initiate into the tradition can achieve liberation as a Buddha in this world and in his or her current physical body by realizing the secret teachings of the Buddha. The method for accomplishing this feat is called the cultivation of the three secret activities (sanmitsu gyo).

It is a common misconception that this doctrine originated with the esoteric sutras and was primarily a Japanese innovation. Actually, it can be found in Chinese Buddhism as early as the 3rd century, and by the time these texts were translated in the late 7th and 8th centuries, the doctrine of the three secret activities was already a topic frequently discussed among Chinese Buddhist intellectuals.

The concept of the three secret activities was based on a correlation between the three sources of karmic production in sentient beings—namely body, speech, and mind—and those same functions in the Buddha. Regulating these karmic actions has always been central to codes of conduct for monastics and lay practitioners alike. For example, the purpose of the ten lay precepts in Mahayana Buddhism is to instruct members of the Buddhist community in proper conduct regarding the karmic effects of their bodily, verbal, and mental actions. Prohibitions against killing, stealing, and engaging in sexual misconduct govern bodily actions that inevitably have negative karmic consequences. Restrictions on lying, slander, divisive language, and flattery allow the practitioner to cultivate wholesome speech. Ethical guidelines for eradicating greed, anger, and false views purify one’s mental state and eventually lead to liberation from such negative karmic results. Once the Mahayana practitioner ceases to commit these negative actions and instead cultivates wholesome bodily, linguistic, and mental activities, he or she will achieve a favorable rebirth and advance on the path toward buddhahood.

From early on in East Asian Buddhism, it was assumed that the Buddha must also possess these three activities. After all, if the Buddha spoke the sermons recorded in the sutras, he must have had the ability to speak. He also had a physical form, which is represented in numerous statues, drawings, and literary accounts detailing the distinctive marks of a buddha, so he clearly had bodily actions. And according to scriptures such as the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha teaches in response to the needs of sentient beings, so he must have some kind of mental activity in order to perceive these needs. However, a buddha, by definition, has extinguished all negative karmic output and therefore has purified the three activities. Because these pure activities are inconceivable to non-buddhas, they are called “secret.”

The claim that the Buddha possesses three karmic activities in a similar fashion to sentient beings was pervasive throughout Chinese and Japanese Buddhism. But the esoteric tradition differs from the mainstream Mahayana interpretation in its procedure for realizing these activities. To the question “How exactly can unenlightened sentient beings comprehend the rarified actions of the Buddha?” the obvious answer is that only someone who has experienced awakening knows what it is like to become a buddha. In the Mahayana schools, this process is explained in abstract terms such as “realizing the characteristics of thusness,” the “perfect interfusion of all existence,” or simply as “inconceivable.” The expedited path to liberation in esoteric Buddhism, however, is premised on the possibility of cultivating the three secret activities through a ritualized union with the Buddha, achieved by mimicking the body, speech, and mind of the Buddha.

By assuming the posture of a buddha and emulating its mudras, the esoteric practitioner embodies the characteristics of the Buddha. The correct recitation of a buddha’s mantra identifies the reciter with the speech of the Buddha. Mantras are the language of enlightened beings, and mastering this secret language opens a channel of communication with the Buddha. Finally, to see things as they truly are is to know the mind of the Buddha. In esoteric Buddhism, this abstraction is represented by the iconography of the mandala. Mandalas are the cosmos seen from the perspective of a fully awakened being. By generating the buddhas, bodhisattvas, deities, and alternative realms depicted in the mandala in one’s own mind, the adept unites his or her mental actions with the secret activity of the Buddha.

In essence, the practice of cultivating the three secret activities is a theory of ritual. Whether singing hymns, undertaking austerities, or focusing on calming the mind, the practitioner must follow an established set of protocols in order to achieve the desired spiritual aims. By mimicking the three activities of the Buddha, the esoteric Buddhist acolyte sets forth on a path toward purifying the body, speech, and mind, ultimately leading to the attainment of buddhahood. The methods for achieving such a lofty goal are accessible to the modern practitioner only because the necessary ritual protocols have been tested, refined, and transmitted by past masters.

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The soteriological process of the three secret activities is contingent on the inherent capacity for all beings to become a buddha, not only in the distant future after numerous rebirths but in one’s current body. If the esoteric practitioner correctly emulates the activities of a buddha, then he or she can see the body of the buddha, hear its voice, and comprehend its thoughts. Thus, the three secret activities of the Buddha coexist with the three activities of sentient beings. By unifying one’s three activities with the activities of a buddha, the practitioner will see his or her own body as the Buddha, hear his own voice as the voice of the Buddha, and realize that his own thoughts are the mind of the Buddha. As a style of deity yoga, this practice aims to guide the initiate toward the ultimate realization that the secret activities of the Buddha and the actions of the practitioner are essentially nondual and indistinguishable. In other words, if you look like a buddha, talk like a buddha, and think like a buddha, then you must be a buddha.

The cultivation of the three secret activities is fundamental to both the Mount Hiei (Tendai) and Mount Koya (Shingon) traditions of esoteric Buddhism. Although the notion that the Buddha possesses such actions was commonplace in East Asia well before the translation of esoteric texts, the proposition that it is possible for sentient beings to realize such secrets is definitive of esoteric Buddhism. Therefore, in addition to the historical and liturgical features of the esoteric schools of Japanese Buddhism, the doctrine of the three secret activities distinguishes them from other Mahayana traditions.

Finally, we might say that the secret teachings of the Buddha are internal to our own bodily, verbal, and mental actions and accessible to us thanks to the transmission of practices that have been passed down by elite groups of ritual masters. However, reflecting on this doctrine of mimetic buddhahood, I can’t help but wonder if it was intended to be taken literally—or are the three secrets of the Buddha a metaphor for the path to becoming a buddha? If the secret activities of the Buddha mirror the actions of sentient beings, and it is possible for sentient beings to realize these secrets, then isn’t the cultivation of these perfected activities just a metaphor for our own liberation from negative karmic output?

Since I was first introduced to Japanese esoteric Buddhism many years ago, I have often pondered this question and have come to think that yes, this doctrine is a metaphor. But that does not diminish its salvific value. Navigating the fuzzy line between metaphor and reality is an essential component of religious thought and practice. Crossing the sea of samsara, for example, is a metaphor for passing from our world, with all its familiar experiences of suffering, into an uncertain existence (or nonexistence, as the case may be) in which all such suffering has been extinguished. Metaphors allow us to express the ineffable and explain the incomprehensible. Esoteric Buddhism seizes on such metaphors not merely as abstract concepts but as methods for crossing from the known to the unknown and, ultimately, for becoming a buddha.

The post Becoming a Buddha appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Luis Gómez, a Buddhist scholar, translator, and psychologist who founded the PhD program in Buddhist Studies at the University of Michigan, which has produced some of the best-known scholars in the field today, died on September 3 in Mexico City. He was 74.

Gómez retired from the University of Michigan in 2008 after 35 years of teaching but continued to teach in both the San Francisco Bay Area and Mexico. In recent years, Gómez published a translation of Shantideva’s Bodhicaryavatara [A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life], a foundational text in Tibetan Buddhism and “a work that he regarded as a guide for his life,” according to his obituary.

Born in Puerto Rico in 1943, Gómez received his bachelor’s degree from the Universidad de Puerto Rico in 1963 and completed his PhD in Buddhist Studies, Indic Philology, and Japanese Language and Literature from Yale University four years later.

In a 2012 post on Trike Daily, religious studies professor Charles Prebish wrote that Gómez “has argued that Buddhism isn’t just an object that we study, but a religious tradition that may make serious demands upon us.”

Reflecting on his death, Tricycle features editor Andrew Cooper wrote about a talk that Gómez once gave at the Zen Center of Los Angeles about the misconceptions Buddhists have about Buddhism.

“At the time, I edited the Zen center’s journal, and I edited and published” his talk, Cooper wrote. “I think it was one of the earliest essays by a Buddhist scholar to address the concerns of non-specialists. To some extent, we now take for granted that this kind of thing is valuable, but at the time, it was something new. Up to then, for the most part, scholars spoke only to scholars and practitioners spoke only to practitioners. I think Luis did much to pave the way for others scholars to do the same, and for Buddhist publications to see value in it.”

Gómez’s scholarship spanned a number of topics within the Buddhist umbrella, including Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, and pan-Asian Buddhism, with a focus in particular on the Mahayana.

You can read the full obituary here.

The post Remembering Prominent Buddhist Scholar Luis Gómez appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

How many times have you heard someone complain about the weather? Have you ever noticed yourself getting cranky with the same guy at work over and over? Have you known an addict who keeps returning to a drug that tears their life apart? Or perhaps you have known someone who has transformed their life positively and grown beyond their old habits. The Buddhist concept of “storehouse consciousness” (alaya vijnana) arose about 2,000 years ago to help explain why people return so often to the same emotional states and viewpoints. Two specific practices for working with it—awareness of the awesome power of the storehouse and mindfulness of emotion—can change our emotional and cognitive habits into more compassionate, joyful, and free responses, transforming our lives in the process.

The term “storehouse consciousness” refers to the unconscious level of experience where our habits are maintained and where they transform. In the Yogacara school of Buddhism, an Indian Mahayana tradition, practice is understood as the means by which we participate in this transformation, so that instead of being mere repeaters of our habits and conditioning we can be intentional participants in the way our habits are formed. Yogacara, or “yoga practice,” integrates Theravada and Mahayana practice and thought, using innovative concepts like the storehouse. Although Yogacara is almost extinct as a distinct school of Buddhism, it was and remains profoundly influential, particularly on the Tibetan and Zen Buddhist traditions.

Buddhist teachings put a lot of emphasis on moment-to-moment awareness of what is experienced through the six senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and mind. Western thought would usually keep the mind in a separate category from the other five senses, but if we investigate our experience right now we can see that all six of these are just stuff that is happening, or “phenomena.” Right now you see black marks on white, and you experience those marks as having meaning. Perhaps you hear sounds: a purring cat, the wind in the pines, or passing traffic. There are sensations in the body—feet in contact with the floor and breath moving through the abdomen. Emotion is also present, perhaps as a calm that arises when you read Buddhist writing or as anxiety over life’s challenges. Maybe there are thoughts as you wonder how aware you are or as you drift from the meaning of these words to a pressing work-related concern. A deep intimacy with all of these is central to Buddhist practice and to transforming the storehouse. But the concept of the storehouse was created because deep awareness of the moment does not explain why we tend to keep having similar feelings and thoughts.

Conventionally we believe that we see true reality through the senses and then the mind figures out how to get what it wants out of it. Yogacara thought, however, says that human beings perceive a world that is determined by the habits of emotion, perception, and thought held in the storehouse, which would explain how the same piece of news brings up opposite responses in people of different political persuasions or how one person can joyfully jump in a puddle while another glumly trudges along in the rain. Think about how profoundly different our experience is of getting to work when we are in a calm, present, mindful state from those times when we are really angry or anxious about something. In one we notice the unique face of each passing stranger, the blue or gray of the sky, how our body moves, thoughts coming and going. But when intense emotion takes over we may not even notice that we are driving a car or walking down the street; we may arrive without any awareness of how we got where we are, as though sleepwalking. Our habits in the storehouse allowed us to travel and led us to be completely absorbed in thoughts about our problems, perhaps without any awareness of the powerful emotions that give rise to our obsessive thinking and our alienation from our own lives.

The conditioning that creates our habits is staggeringly vast. Think of all that had to happen for you to be able to interpret the letters in this word as having meaning. Seeing black marks and imputing meaning to them is a habit of mind that happens unconsciously. Millions of years of evolution, both physical and cultural, come into play so that you can understand each word. Our emotional habits, too, stem from untraceable conditions. The impulse to fight or run that we share with our animal relatives arose a very long time ago from infinitely distant conditions. Even Western psychology uses the technique of recalling childhood emotional states that still trigger our current emotional habits. Teachings on the storehouse consciousness emphasize remembering its vastness and unknowability. Rather than figuring out our past conditioning—focusing on abuse and harmful family patterns or looking at cultural biases and evolutionary tendencies—Yogacara focuses on deep mindfulness of what emotion is arising right now. (This is not to impugn other Western psychological practices, however, which are excellent and powerful as well.)

The storehouse, to quote many Yogacara texts, is like a flowing river. And as the early Greek philosopher Heraclitus noted, you can never step in the same river twice. The storehouse helps us understand how we have a sense of a continuous self: one of the most pervasive habits of consciousness is to divide the elements of experience into self and other, and construct the sense that this self continues, separate from what it believes is other, over time. However, the storehouse and the conditioning it holds is always utterly unique in every moment. It is not a continuous self. It is a central tenet of Buddhist thought that the idea of a lasting, separate self is an illusion, and many Yogacara teachings emphasize that we can become confused and think the storehouse is our self. Rather, the storehouse is like the river that runs through my hometown. I go and walk along the woody bottoms and I take it for granted as I walk that it’s the Mississippi, the very same river that Huck Finn plied, but sometimes as I sit in meditation on the sandy bank, it’s clearly just water as it is right now, with no name, no past, no future. The Mississippi’s flow forms its banks, its shape, and it is ever changing as it picks up sand here and dumps it there, and as rain fills it and it empties out in the Gulf. Our habits are similar: they have formed over geological time, but right now they are unique, and right now we have an amazing opportunity to consciously participate in how they flow.

We can practice to transform the storehouse so that our lives flow more joyfully, kindly, and peacefully, so that our energy is free to benefit everyone and everything around and within us. Being aware of the awesome power of the storehouse and being mindful of emotions are two powerful ways to engage in this transformation. The classic metaphor for how this transformation occurs is one of seeds, fruit, and cultivation. Any intentional, emotional, or cognitive impulse in us plants a seed in the storehouse that will cause a similar intention, emotion, or thought to arise in the future in the form of fruit. In each moment our experience is determined to a great extent by seeds from the past that are bearing fruit right now. In each moment, too, we can plant a seed intentionally that will create fruit in the future. We can plant seeds of mindfulness, of kindness, of humility, of energy, of trust, of letting go—an array of beneficial possibilities. If we are not attentive to planting these kinds of seeds, however, we will unconsciously plant more seeds like the ones that have borne fruit from our past. When we are angry, worried, or greedy, if we are not consciously involved in what kind of seeds we plant, we will probably just unconsciously plant more angry, worried, greedy seeds.

“We can practice to transform the storehouse so that our lives flow more joyfully, kindly, and peacefully, so that our energy is free to benefit everyone and everything around and within us.”

This article, my writing and your reading, has been one way of engaging in awareness of the awesome power of the storehouse, and in a moment I’ll give a specific practice to cultivate this awareness in your daily life. Although Buddhist practice often invites us to dive below verbal thought, it has always included focusing the mind on thoughts that are conducive to non-suffering. It is profoundly empowering to shift our focus from believing the story our mind creates about an external world to remembering that our storehouse consciousness itself is driving our view of the world and our feelings about it. We don’t have to view ourselves as victims of an external world or as victims of our conditioning. We receive the fruit of seeds of the past as our experience right now, and we can choose to do what is helpful right now: to plant beneficial seeds.

Nothing makes me more personally aware of the awesome power of the storehouse than my own experience of how different the world seems when I am calm and grounded in the feelings in my body versus when I’m swimming in thoughts driven by anger, shame, or despair. Yet there’s also a lot of science about how our perception is colored by our unconscious habits. A stereotyping and prejudice research laboratory at the University of Chicago, for example, conducted one well-known study in which college students and other residents of the community were briefly shown images of young men who were either armed or unarmed. Their task was to very quickly identify which people were holding guns and which were holding playing cards. They were much more likely to be wrong and think a person was holding a gun if the person in the photograph was black. Awareness of the awesome power of the storehouse can help us to be humble, compassionate, and motivated. We all arrive in this moment seeing and feeling the world in a way produced by infinite numbers of seeds. Each of us, right now, can participate in the process of our conditioning.

Cultivating Awareness of the Storehouse

Here is an easy practice you can use to cultivate awareness of the immense power of the storehouse. It takes a minute or two. Stop and take three mindful breaths and notice how you feel in your heart and your body. Then list ten things from the past that planted seeds in the storehouse and that were involved in creating your perception of this moment. Since everything is connected, anything that ever happened counts, but it’s good to focus on emotional states. Here’s an example: after lunch I stop and take three mindful breaths. Then I use my fingers to count to ten and say or think, “My perception of this moment depends on: loving my mom, the rainy road last night, the terror of war, white privilege, meditating this morning, my grumpy grandpa, watching baby birds, never feeling good enough when I was young, being afraid of the dark, worrying about work.” Then I move on. There’s no need to analyze; just let the seeds of remembering how much the past forms the present sink into the unconscious, the storehouse. Reminders that infinite seeds form our moments help us shed the habit of believing everything we think; they help us be patient with the slow road to liberation; and they help us focus on the ground of our deepest empowerment: the ability to transform our consciousness.

Mindfulness of Emotion

Mindfulness of emotions is powerful. This is the practice of focusing compassionate awareness on how we feel below the level of thought. Feelings profoundly influence how we see the world and how we act. In each moment we receive the fruit of our past emotional seeds in the form of experience. If we are aware of that fruit, its power will be exhausted in the light of mindfulness, and if we are aware in a compassionate, focused way, we plant seeds of compassionate focused awareness that lets things go and lets things be. Joyful feelings are free to arise without creating clinging, and painful states can arise without expressing themselves in harmful ways. We cultivate the ability to be here in our lives in a way that is available to whatever arises. We dissolve the emotional habits that drive the world’s suffering. Buddhism is, at its root, medicine for suffering, suffering that arises from patterns of mind. Mindfulness of emotion goes straight to the root of that suffering.

To practice mindfulness of emotion, it’s good to start with the awareness centered in the breath in the body. The body can help us tether awareness to the present moment. To be mindful of emotion, we dive below words, thoughts, and stories, even those about how we feel. You may find emotions located in the body: anxiety roiling in the stomach, shame burning across the chest, joy bubbling up along the spine. Emotion also dwells nowhere, just outside of reach—but not outside of perception. Feel it. Move toward it, draw loving awareness toward it, and seeds of the past will bear fruit and lose their power simply by being seen. This is not a practice about controlling or naming emotions; it’s about simply and compassionately feeling what’s here. It’s like sitting in meditation with the sound of a bird outside the window, just hearing it, not naming or judging it. We attend to our heart and let it be.

Sometimes it feels wonderful to offer this kind of intimacy to yourself, to see and be seen at this primal level. Sometimes your feelings may be very mild or almost imperceptible. That is fine: just see how you are. Sometimes it’s painful or even overwhelming. However you feel is okay. (If there is pain that’s too great to bear, however, it’s probably time to talk to your teacher or shift your practice to something less intense.) To simply sit with your own raw heart when you feel consumed by desire, anger, despair, fear, or shame takes courage, commitment, and support. Focusing mindfulness on emotions can plant many wonderful seeds: compassion, attention, concentration, and perhaps most important, courage—to face things we want to run from, to trust that we can be here with whatever happens, and to let go as we allow calm and joy to arise and pass away. We have an incredible opportunity in each moment to participate in the awesome power of the storehouse consciousness. We can offer something transformative to the world right now: compassionate awareness.

The post Cleaning Out the Storehouse appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I collect ancient coins. Years ago, at a currency show, I saw a coin showing a man with a full beard wearing bulky boots, a peaked cap, and a long cape over a triangular caftan. On the reverse, a four-armed figure stood next to a four-branched candlestick. Inscriptions in an exotic script circled both figures. I’d never seen a coin like it.

I learned that it was a coin of the Kushan Empire, one of the four great powers of its day (along with Rome, Parthia, and China’s Han Dynasty) that ruled much of Central Asia in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. The few ancient references to the Kushans are so obscure that the empire was lost to Western historians for more than a thousand years, its importance only rediscovered in the early 19th century through the study of its coins.

We have never heard of the Kushans because Western education is so often focused on European history. But the Kushans were integral to the shaping and spreading of early Mahayana Buddhism. They were the first culture to depict the Buddha in human form, and these images have become the iconic representations that we see today. When I added a Kushan coin showing the Buddha to my collection, I felt like I owned a piece of world-changing history.

The Kushan Empire started on the eastern Mongolian steppes north of China during the 2nd century BCE, where warring nomadic tribes drove one tribal confederation called the Yuezhi far west into present-day northern Afghanistan. There they encountered Hellenistic culture brought by Alexander the Great some 200 years earlier. The Yuezhi abandoned their nomadic way of life to become the Kushans—Guishang being a Chinese word for one of the Yuezhi tribes—and began to profit from increasing trade between the Roman Empire and Han China during the 1st century CE. The Kushan Empire grew to include present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and northwest India, and brought hundreds of years of relative stability, an era known as the Pax Kushana.

The cloaked figure I saw on the Kushan coin was King Kanishka, perhaps the most important Kushan ruler, who reigned from 127 to 151 CE. The candlestick was his tamgha, a personal symbol recalling his nomadic ancestors that appeared on all his coins. The four-armed figure was the Indian god Shiva. The Kushans are known for their multiculturalism and religious tolerance, and their coins depict more than 30 deities from Greco-Roman, Iranian, and Indian traditions. But it appears that King Kanishka may have been most generous in his patronage of Buddhism during the development of Mahayana Buddhism. He is credited with calling the Fourth Buddhist Council in Kashmir, where 500 monks gathered to compile the canon of the Sarvastivada sect, solidifying its Abhidharma teachings. At about this time Nagarjuna wrote his famous Treatise on the Middle Way. We also find the first evidence of Prajnaparamita and the Perfection of Wisdom sutras along with other foundational sutras that would eventually shape Buddhism in China.

From the earliest days of Buddhism until the Kushans, the Buddha had been shown symbolically—as the Bodhi tree, a stupa, an empty throne, a wheel, a riderless horse, or a footprint. The Kushans absorbed the Hellenistic tradition of representing deities as human beings. Kushan art—called Gandharan—blended Indian and Greek styles to create some of the earliest depictions of the historical Buddha, the future Buddha (Maitreya), and bodhisattvas, whose likenesses survive to this day. (A different style of Buddha image appeared at Mathura in India around the same time.) Some of the first Gandharan Buddha images appeared on King Kanishka’s coins, which may have been minted to commemorate the building of a towering 700-foot stupa holding relics of the Buddha, a wonder of its day that stood for centuries on the outskirts of present-day Peshawar in Pakistan. 

The famous Chinese pilgrim and translator Xuanxang traveled through Central Asia on his way to India in the 7th century. By then the Kushans were long gone, but evidence of their presence remained in a vast profusion of richly ornamented stupas, temples, and monasteries full of Buddhas and bodhisattvas carved in human form. Today, remains of this Buddhist past dot the landscape of Pakistan’s Swat Valley. While decades of war and the expense of archaeology have made the excavation of Kushan sites difficult or impossible, there have been important recent contributions to our understanding of the Kushans. The Rabatak Inscription, found in Afghanistan in 1993, clarified Kanishka’s geneology—a topic that was hotly debated for decades. In 1994 the British Museum acquired ancient Gandharan birch bark scrolls containing perhaps the oldest surviving Buddhist texts.  At Mes Aynak near Kabul, a Buddhist city was discovered built on top of a huge copper deposit—the most important archaeological discovery in a generation according to writer and historian William Dalrymple. Sadly, a 30-year mining lease with China was signed in 2007 threatening to destroy it. An international team of archaeologists is trying to save what they can as negotiations to extend the excavation continue. The show Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul, brought Kushan-era pieces to museum audiences in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Germany in 2009. The American Numismatic Society published a catalog of their Kushan coin collection last year, and one on the British Museum’s comprehensive Kushan coin collection is coming soon, reminding me of my first encounter with King Kanishka. We won’t be wondering who the Kushans were much longer.

The post Lost and Found on the Silk Road appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Adult coloring books are in. Way, way in. Marketed as an anti-stress activity, the demand for adult coloring books has created an entirely new category of book publishing, with titles like The Mindfulness Coloring Book: Anti-stress Art Therapy for Busy People and Color Me Thin—Mindful Weight Loss. (There’s even an official coloring book for the TV show Game of Thrones.)

Robert Beer is the author and illustrator of The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs, the first comprehensive reference book to the symbols found in Tibetan line drawings, paintings, and ritual objects, and the first in English to examine the symbolism and iconography of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism. Beer recently published two Buddhist coloring books using never-before-seen images drawn over the course of 30 years. The first book presents symbols and motifs from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition while the second focuses on traditional Buddhas, deities, and enlightened masters. He spoke with Tricycle recently about the drawings’ religious symbolism and the physical toll that decades of brushwork have taken on his hands.

–Marie Scarles, Editorial Assistant

How did this project arise? I had no knowledge of the coloring book phenomena until last June. My partner, Gill Farrer-Halls, got the Saturday Guardian newspaper and pointed out that from the top ten non-fiction bestsellers, six were coloring books. I looked online and realized there was this craze of mindfulness connected with coloring for adults! People find that they can turn their mobile phone off, turn their laptop off, turn their TV off, and sit down and spend an hour or two coloring in an image.

What does it mean to have Westerners, particularly if they are unfamiliar with Buddhist religious symbolism, interacting with these sacred images? I think that it will depend on the individual. In the West, there’s an interest in spirituality across the whole spectrum. Some people would pick up the book and identify with the spiritual elements of Tibetan Buddhism; then they could learn something. At the back of both books, there are thumbnail images and 150-word texts that describe the symbols and their history. There are brief histories of the lineage holders in the back of the second book as well.

When you spend time patiently working on something—when you spend hundreds and hundreds of hours coloring in or making drawings like I’ve done—it certainly has an effect on the mind. In that sense, I think the act of coloring has great authenticity as being connected with some spiritual, meditative state. The images themselves convey certain qualities; the deities themselves represent certain energy qualities. I think people are attracted to this kind of sacred imagery.

You write in the introduction of your second book that the collection includes some of the finest drawings you’ve ever done. You list Green Tara [the Buddha of enlightened activity], White Tara [known for compassion, healing, and serenity], and Padmasambhava [also known as Guru Rinpoche, an 8th-century Indian Buddhist master credited with bringing Buddhism to Tibet] in particular. It’s clear from looking at them that they’re very complex. What else makes them special? It’s not only those three. Milarepa [one of Tibet’s most famous yogis] too, and a few others I drew, I spent a long time on. I remember I drew Green Tara and Red Tara in Scotland back in the late nineties. I might have spent six weeks on the two of them. Every day I would work on those two. They took a long time to draw, mainly because you have to compose the drawing, which is lightly drawn in pencil, before the brushwork goes on. And then afterward, I erased the pencil and went over the drawing again with a brush because some of the ink gets erased when you’re taking the pencil marks off. When these drawings are finished, it’s like they have a life beyond their mechanical reproduction. In a sense they cover a stillness that, to me, is something that I’m not the author of. The author is stillness itself.

Have you colored in your own images yet? I got myself a box of Sharpie pens and they’re sitting unopened. I haven’t actually done any coloring myself.

Why not? Although this question sounds like a small one, it’s actually quite a big answer. I’ve lost most of the feeling in my right hand through handwriting thousands of letters to people who contacted me with questions before the advent of email. Then there was all the drawing and painting, every day at the drawing board for around 30 years, and in between I was always creating things with my hands. To be quite honest I can no longer draw or write with a pen. My right hand is extremely damaged. Even signing my signature is very difficult. My partner writes all the Christmas cards and the addresses—I just sign them. I have to type with one finger as well. So I haven’t drawn for many, many years—probably about 15—mainly because of repetitive strain injury, and the Sharpie pens I bought are still in their box!

If I were to color one of my drawings in, it would look like the Padmasambhva image above, which was actually painted by an Indian painter in Jaipur based on my instructions.

Buddhist Art Coloring Book 1 and 2 are available from Shambhala Publications.

Color your own Yeshe Tsogyal and Padmasambhava from Beer’s Buddhist Art Coloring Book 2

The post Coloring with the Buddha appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.