3
The Blossom of Mahayana
What makes the limit of Nirvana
Is also then the limit of Samsara
Between the two we cannot find
The slightest shade of difference.
BUDDHISM EVOLVES
At first, conservative and liberal interpretations were not fully opposed. The monks from both perspectives lived and taught side by side for close to four hundred years. Gradually, though, Buddhist doctrine began to change; by around 100 C.E., a new literature and a new rationale for the dissenting doctrine emerged.
This new literature revealed a doctrine that creatively reinterpreted the historical words of Buddha. Over time, these interpretations became more clearly defined, and sentiment grew among the liberal monks to make a formal separation from the conservative Elders.
The liberal groups proposed an explanation for how their ideas were authentic Buddhist doctrine. They said that while the Hinayana sutras were being codified at the First Council, another assembly of monks hid a number of new, more progressive sutras for safekeeping. Five centuries later, these hidden sutras were re-discovered and brought forth as the Mahayana scriptures.
Much like King Asoka, who championed the older form of Buddhism, King Kanishka (78-103 C.E.), a conqueror from northern India, helped to spread the new Buddhism with passionate zeal. He called a council of five hundred monks and collected their new texts into a group. They called their new form Mahayana, the Great Vehicle, formally separating from the traditional Buddhism of the Elders, naming the older group of Buddhists Hinayana, the Lesser Vehicle. Now Mahayana Buddhists distinguished themselves as their own separate form of Buddhism.
In northwestern and southern India, Buddhism was exposed to Hellenistic influences as well as Iranian and Mediterranean cultures. The more liberal and inclusive Mahayana was open to other cultures, helping it to spread to China, Japan, Tibet, Nepal, Mongolia, and Korea.
DOCTRINAL CHANGES FROM HINAYANA TO MAHAYANA
Mahayana Buddhists developed what they considered to be an expanded, superior, and higher doctrine than that of Hinayana. The new doctrine replaced Buddha as the center and originator of Buddhism with a wider conception of Buddha. In Mahayana, Buddha, temporarily incarnated in the earthly person of Siddhartha Gautama, became Dharmakaya, the embodiment of the dharma within a succession of Buddhas over the millennia, to be followed by other Buddhas in the future. Buddha became all Being, the meaning within all phenomena, now supernatural, timeless, and spaceless. Buddha could not be found in spoken words, doctrines, or learning. The dharma body, or Dharmakaya, was transcendent, and thus Buddha’s exact words and rules as memorized by Ananda and the early disciples were only a temporary embodiment, not the permanent one.
The bodhisattva replaced the arhat as the ideal role model. Bodhisattvas live with compassion, kindness, and patience. According to the Mahayana, wisdom is virtue, and thus being compassionate, kindly, and patient was the correct interpretation of the Buddha’s teaching, not that of becoming a wise, dispassionate arhat. Bodhisattvas did not withdraw from society to find nirvana. Their altruistic ethics encouraged good works in the interest of the whole world.
Mahayana added many long discourses on metaphysical subjects, replacing Buddha’s silence in the earlier sutras. Our experience of an apparently real world, Mahayana taught, is illusion. The true nature of reality is emptiness, which is explained in the next two sections on the Madhyamika and Yogacarin Sects of Mahayana Buddhism.
The highest value was placed on what the Mahayana called upaya, skill in means, which meant that there were many ways to reach salvation. This allowed for a much broader repertoire of theories, techniques, and methods that could be included in Mahayana Buddhism than had been allowed in Hinayana. For example, people were permitted to worship images of Buddha with rituals, thereby finding enlightenment with faith and not simply by wisdom as in Hinayana.
Mahayana tended to be more charitable and warmer than Hinayana. Practitioners could be more emotional, personal, and interactive with other people. They produced ornate art, literature, and ritual. Hinayana continued to be more monastic, secluded, conservative, and less emotional, viewing all passions as delusions.
Mahayana now could appeal to a larger variety of situations and people. They were less strict, more inclusive with regard to women and monks of lesser attainment, as well as opening the potential for enlightenment to householders.
TWO SCHOOLS OF MAHAYANA
Two major schools of Mahayana developed with their own doctrines, called Yogacara and Madhyamika. The Yogacarin philosophy, or mind-only school, believed that our minds create reality as we experience it. The other main root, Madhyamika or middle way school, held that we cannot ever know whether reality really exists. People should remain in the middle and take neither side. Mahayana doctrine became formalized as systems through these two schools. They would become the taproots for all later Mahayana forms of Buddhism that would be carried around the world.
NAGARJUNA AND THE MADHYAMIKA SCHOOL
Nagaljuna was a third-century Indian philosopher who founded the Madhyamika school of Buddhism. Nagarjuna’s school taught philosophy as an alternative to meditation, for breaking the chains of becoming. Correct philosophical understanding is the approach to freedom from attachment, to find the Middle Way. Nagaljuna’s writings led away from idealist separation from the world, and away from classical disputes in philosophy. Nagaljuna offered an alternative to the two mainstream beliefs of his time, which were the oneness of the universe and the denial of the universe.
THE FOURFOLD NEGATION LEADS TO EMPTINESS
Nagarjuna proposed a dialectic method of questioning called the Fourfold Negation. It consisted of four possible positions: (1) no position is tenable; (2) absolute versus relative existence accounts for the phenomena of existence; (3) the foundation for phenomena is emptiness; (4) codependent origination of phenomena accounts for the existence of phenomena. The Fourfold Negation can be restated as a logical paradigm, best shown in this chart:
| Is | Is Not | |
| Is | is, is | is, is not |
| Is Not | is not, is | is not, is not |
Nagarjuna believed that concepts were inadequate to convey the essence of enlightenment, yet concepts were still essential—that is, concepts were both inadequate and essential. Paradoxically, all four combinations of is and is not are equally possible and impossible at the same time. Recognizing that all phenomena are interconnected, no philosophical position can be taken without being refutable. Nagarjuna showed how no philosophical position can be supported without question, without bias. No ultimate certainty exists. This leaves us with only one option: emptiness, which we cannot even call emptiness without error! Emptiness is the unifying basis for all philosophies, an ultimate ground that all philosophies share.
Nagarjuna’s critique of theories was neither conceptual nor cognitive because words and thoughts inevitably deceive us. Nagarjuna’s approach leads to giving up thought, letting go of conceptual boundaries and definitions, indeed, of existence or nonexistence itself. By the use of thought and logic, he leads the mind of his student to recognize the futility of thought and logic. If no basis for taking a philosophical position can be conclusively demonstrated, then why take one? Madhyamika is critical of all positions, including Hinayana. This opened the way for later developments in Mahayana.
VASUBANDU, ASANGA, AND THE YOGACARIN SCHOOL
The founders of the Yogacarin movement were two brothers, Vasubandu and Asanga. They lived around 400 C.E. in northwestern India. Asanga believed in Mahayana from the start. But his brother Vasubandu began as a Hinayanan. It was while translating some Hinayana texts that Vasubandu began to find fault. He then found new inspiration in Mahayana and became a spokesman with his brother for Yogacarin.
Both brothers believed that mind is the basis for enlightenment. The Yogacarin view of the world of phenomena is that it is all in our minds. Our thoughts make the world seem real. Yogacarins used meditation to reach a state of no-thought to escape the illusion.
Vasubandu also worked out an interesting new logic. He defined an existent thing by a specific example of what it is, what it does, and then he gave an illustration of what it is like and what it is not like. He always used specifics, never general or abstract categories. For example: (1) This fireplace has a fire in it (what it is); (2) because there is smoke, there is fire (what it does); (3) so it is a wood-burning furnace (what it is like) and not a pond (what it is unlike).
This example reflects a Buddhist perspective of understanding each thing as it is in its particularity, not as a member of a class or category, as is done in Aristotelian logic. Lists of attributes are only temporary and relative. In Buddhism, abstraction is an illusion. Thus when we read Buddhist descriptions, it is puzzling from the Western perspective, where the class of something can help clarify a single individual case. From the Buddhist point of view, the class is empty, and the individual case is an example, an expression of the universal Buddha nature, which is empty of distinction. A form of logic known as Buddhist logic evolved the implications of Yogacarin further into a system.
PARAMARTHA: FINDING TRUE MIND
Paramartha (499-569) is one of the more renowned later Yogacarins who came from eastern India. He brought the school to China (546) and translated seventy-five sutras and works of Yogacarins into Chinese. He was very outgoing and traveled around the country lecturing and teaching. As a result, he gathered many devoted students who carried forth the tradition.
One hundred years later, Hiuen-tsiang (650), who was taught by one of Paramartha’s students, taught Chi-k’uei (632-685), who brought Yogacara to Japan and called it the Hosso sect.
The essence of the doctrine is that defining things as real, separate objects in and of themselves is a phenomenon of consciousness. The world is an illusion, subjective—an extension of our inner conceptions. Perception can be tricked or distorted, as when we see a mirage or a conjuring illusion.
Paramartha believed that how we perceive, interpreted through language, sets up barriers to our understanding the world and the things that we are concerned about. In order to change behavior, we must change the meanings we give to things, including our dependence on language. Meaning is true essence, not the words we use. We must still the mind and withdraw from our sensory perception of the world in order to find the true Mind.
“Mind-only” is the “suchness” of an object, undifferentiated, in its true state. There are three ways to view an object. First is the imagined as real—simply itself, distinct from others. Second is the dependent aspect—how one thing is conditioned by other things. The third is that suchness or mind is the true essence of all things. In truth, there are no separate objects, and ultimately, even consciousness is illusion. Only mind exists. You can understand the truly real, or suchness, through meditation.
STOREHOUSE CONSCIOUSNESS
But the apparent constancy of phenomena and the world must be explained, and in fact was explained by the Yogacarins as alaya, the storehouse consciousness. Sense perceptions accumulate in a deeper core region of consciousness known as the storehouse, where they gather related perceptions, which, like a rolling snowball, produce other perceptions and conceptions that are drawn in and gather even more.
Storehouse consciousness permeates everything we experience in an all-pervasive way. For example, when you visit a clothing store, the clothes often have a perfumed smell characteristic of that store. While you are there, it affects your sense of smell. You bring an item home, and it maintains the odor for a while. The storehouse consciousness is similar, a heavy perfume that permeates everything we do and think all the time.
As a result of the storehouse consciousness, our actions, for good and bad, are affected. These actions, in turn, influence the world, which inevitably affects us, and more snowballing of perceptions and conceptions takes place. There is a feedback loop of mutual influencing, based on the storehouse consciousness. This gives constancy to our world, and makes it hard to change.
The storehouse consciousness can be dissolved by meditation. We learn to recognize the relativity of the world. Al is mind and mind is empty, without substance.
Illusion seems real, reality is illusion. Thus meditation shows the practitioner that though illusions seem real, nothing is real.
CONCLUSION
Yogacarins led their students deeply into illusion and then out of it to free them with meditation. Madhyamikans led their students with reason and philosophy and then freed them by showing them that reason and philosophy were futile. They were left with the middle way. Both schools were persuasive and effective in offering the Mahayana perspective. Each presented a part of the Mahayana whole. Subsequent development in Buddhism used their concepts as a springboard into emptiness, the foundation of Mahayana.