In the dazzling diversity of Asian afterlives, traces appear of an undifferentiated underworld like that of Sumer or Greece (India, China, Japan), as well as diligent efforts to improve its living conditions (China). The dead depart, but some spirits do not go far enough away, troubling the neighborhood; others, the ancestors, must be fed and maintained to secure their help (India, China), and come and go for festivals (China, Japan). Heaven contends with spirits and gods for hegemony, and hell develops late, unnecessary when spirits watch or supplemental when elaborate codes order social relationships (Hindu dharma, Confucian rites and way of heaven). Rebirth is regarded as essential for morality, or discounted as mythology.1 Hells police the isolated, piercing egotism, creating anxiety about death and salvation. Eastward lie many sumptuous heavens, interactive tombs,2 and horrific hells, as well as nirvana and nothing at all.
To speak of “the afterlife,” however, is often to commit a category error. Neither heavens nor hells are eternal, when they exist. Nor is death a terminus. Ancestors remain nearby. After death, one may wander on (samsara). Rebirth creates a before and after for the self—or no-self (Buddhism). Birth continues, death repeats. Moralized as karma, rebirth makes individuals as responsible for the past as for their immediate future, and the futures that follow their deaths. In perhaps the ultimate cautionary tale—or tribute to human dissatisfaction—rebirth once invented, had then to be prevented.
These afterlives, their texts, and their relationships can only be sketched here, but they enlarge our repertoire of afterlife imaginings as well as the cosmos, within and without. Tracing such afterlife-shaping concepts as ancestors, rebirth, karma from their Vedic origins in India through Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism, the chapter picks up Confucianism, Daoism, and new varieties of Buddhism in China, stares awestruck at Tibet, and on to Japan, ending with two encounters between Buddhism and the Christian west, a seventeenth-century dispute and a twentieth-century fiction.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims have, ostensibly, one God and the overlapping books that make them, in the Qur’anic phrase, “peoples of the Book.” Hindus alone have the Rig and three other Vedas, the Brahmanas, the Upanishads, the Puranas, the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata, the last fifteen times longer than the Christian Bible, written over a six-hundred year period with no single, authorized version.3 The Ramayana, which to western eyes seems a romance with the poetic authority of Homer, lays claim as it concludes to the religious authority of the Vedas (c. 1700–300 BCE).4 We expect different philosophical schools to come and go, but the gods also keep changing, emerging from nowhere like Shiva or declining into irrelevance like Brahma and Indra.5 “Hindu” is a foreign neologism for “those across the Indus,” whatever they may happen to believe, whenever.6 (Religions coextensive with their region lack names, until a missionary religion—Buddhism, Christianity, Islam—arrives, providing followers with an identity that transcends such conventional forms of identity as region, family, tribe, language. The new name enables a transition from one social order, polity, or people to another.) At least the Hindu canon is confined to one language, Sanskrit, and there is some agreement as to what it contains.
Buddhism proceeds otherwise. Not the story of a god or gods, but of a teaching (dharma) and its practices, Buddhist canons flourish in at least four additional languages, Pali, Burmese, Chinese, and Tibetan, as well as Sanskrit.7 The new Fo Guang Shan library in Yangzhou, China, has a 100,000-volume collection of Buddhist scriptures.8 The Chinese canon includes the world’s oldest printed book, 868 CE, the “Diamond-Cutter” Perfection of Wisdom Sutra.9 The Tibetan Book of the Dead (the Bardo Todrol or Liberation by Hearing), in the West perhaps the single most famous Buddhist text, but only one item in a vast Tibetan canon, appeared as late as the fourteenth century. Texts are revered, chanted, preserved, copied, and multiplied, and every new school has produced new writings and privileged some texts over others. Originating in northeast India (near Patna) in the fifth or sixth century BCE and flourishing in India until the thirteenth century CE, Buddhism traveled west, north, and east through Afghanistan (the Buddhas of Bamiyan) to China, Mongolia, and Tibet, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan, as well as south and east to Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Indonesia. Traveling, it accommodated the systems of thought it encountered, integrating gods and spirits, reshaping its own philosophical positions.
In China, before Buddhism arrived in the first century CE, there flourished alongside popular religion’s restless spirits and “unruly gods,”10 multiple philosophical schools that, preferring cosmology to theology and present rites to afterlives, had no afterlife rewards and punishments to enforce morality or console survivors. The descendants kept the watchful eyes of their ancestors open, to reward or punish the living, not the dead. Heaven looked down from above and validated the order of which it formed part, without being a person, a creator, or a place to take up residence. It rewarded the living with life, and took life away, like Confucius’s favorite disciple, but paid no attention to the dead.11 The world teemed with spirits consulted in divinations or creating havoc requiring divination, and those matters required specialists in divination. Heaven, earth, and man in between: death participated in the natural order controlled by rites and custom, for Confucius and Mencius.
Laozi and Zhuangzi, texts or authors later venerated by Daoists, with their canon of 1500 works,12 probed death’s natural terrors, but imagined no alternative, apart from staying alive as “immortals.” Immortality became for the first time a serious scientific pursuit, a search for methods of not dying at all. An anecdote from The Analects of the Warring States catches that openness to multiple possibilities, a strong preference for life, and acceptance of others’ deaths, but not one’s own. The widow of the Duke of Qin wanted her lover from Wei buried alive with her when she died. He attempted to dissuade her: she did not believe in an afterlife, so his being with her would do her no good. If there were an afterlife, however, her husband the Duke would not be pleased to see her arrive with her lover.13 At the turn of the eras, Daoism and Buddhism promoted other worlds, while Confucian thought periodically reestablished its hegemony and wrinkled its nose at popular superstition.
Because a continuous literary tradition extends from the earliest Veda (the Rig Veda, a collection of hymns c. 1700–1000 BCE) to the Mahabharata and Puranas and because Hinduism dominates the subcontinent where all three first appeared, “Hinduism” is often misunderstood as the elder tradition, from which Buddhism emerges. That privilege belongs, however, not to Hinduism, but to Vedic religion and its descendant Brahmanism, so called for its administration by priests, Brahmins, and their ritual texts, the Brahmanas (800–500 BCE). That evolving religious practice generated its own internal questioning in the early Upanishads (600–400 BCE, others 200 BCE–100 CE).14 Buddhism and Hinduism emerge dialectically relative to that tradition and each other, gripping the fundamental doctrines (dharma) that displaced the Vedic world of the fathers: self (or not, in Buddhism), rebirth, karma, and release (moksha).
Nor do Buddhism and Hinduism exhaust Indian religious traditions. Of at least six groups with which the Buddha and his followers competed for ideological dominance, one survives as the Jains. Another periodically revives, the afterlife-denying materialism of Ajita Kesakambalin.15 Jains, too, seek liberation from karma. Their last (twenty-fourth) teacher the Mahavira was contemporaneous with the Buddha (sixth or fifth century BCE), their penultimate Parsva several hundred years earlier, and their teachings are suspected of links with the Indus Valley civilization (c. 2300–1750 BCE), antedating the Vedas (c. 1700–300 BCE). Regional indigenous traditions, animist and shamanist, include those subsequently developed in Tibetan Bon and Japanese Shinto.16 Buddhism reached Tibet in the seventh century CE and Japan, through Korea, in the sixth.17 Hindu-Buddhist syncretism marks southeast Asia, where Hindu Angkor Watt abuts Buddhist Angkor Thom.18
Islam and Christianity enter India within their first centuries of existence, by way of trade and missionaries, joined by Parsis (Zoroastrians, traditionally settling in western India in 937 CE) and Jews. A Christian missionary reaches China from Persia about 658 CE.19 In southeast Asia, Muslim traders spread Islam, ultimately displacing Buddhism and Hinduism in Indonesia and Java, except for Bali. In India, Muslim conquests have been blamed for the disappearance of Buddhism in the thirteenth century, their monasteries and libraries denied elite patronage and destroyed as pagan, not of the Book. (Islamic painting absorbs Buddhist influence in the seventeenth century, and Buddhism returns to India in the late nineteenth century, compounded by the twentieth-century Tibetan diaspora.20) Guru Nanak founded Sikhism in the sixteenth century, a way to the one God that combines karma and samsara with grace: “There is no Hindu or Muslim, so whose path shall I follow? I shall follow the path of God.” All this makes for a heady afterlife mix.
If Judaism, Christianity, and Islam once supposed a single resurrection and a singular God ruling one eternity in one closed universe, so multiple rebirths and divinities, innumerable eons and uncountable world systems populate eastern traditions. To Christianity’s one Incarnation, Vishnu has ten avatars, embodiments, or incarnations, sometimes including the Buddha.21 If there was once one Gotama gathering disciples in Magahdi, there are now thousands upon thousands of Buddhas in innumerable Buddha-fields throughout universes that expand and contract but are neither created nor extinguished.22 If the east multiplies, it also subtracts: the self (Sanskrit ātman) may be everything or nothing, emptiness or Buddha nature or Ᾱtman, the absolute. Western deities punish violations of their own laws, here or hereafter. In the east, cause and effect is still more inexorable. Past actions play themselves out, and their consequences punish and reward the perpetrators in this life and lives to come. “We are not punished for our actions, but by our actions,” a modern adherent explains. Suffering or prosperity in this life is the ripening of karma from past lives, and so is love, those miraculous inexplicable attachments that suddenly appear.
As in the Christian Bible, any assertion can be contradicted. Enlightenment is possible only now, in this life, yet funeral rites guide the dead to Buddhahood and enlightenment. Nor is release always sought: rebirth is sometimes desired, and not every tradition supposes rebirth. Confucians “pay their respects to the spirits of their ancestors” and reverence the order of things in the heavens and earth. They “never discuss whether there is life after death,” or so it seemed to a Japanese Zen-Buddhist Christian convert in the early seventeenth century.23
BIRTHING KARMIC REBIRTH AND ĀTMAN
If a historical question vexes the eastern afterlife, it is the birth of rebirth: Who did it? Where did it come from? As obscure and sought after as resurrection’s origins in Christianity and Judaism, ethicized rebirth appears in the earliest Upanishads time enough to be taken as a fundamental description of life’s process by Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and to be disputed by others, but no one knows yet quite how it got there. Gananath Obeyesekere proposes that rebirth was an element in Indian tribal religions “ethicized” as karma.24 Wendy Doniger objects that “tribal sources” merely name an unknown. Equally mysterious is how Upanishadic rebirth turned into the Buddhist canon’s five realms of existence: hells, hungry ghosts, animals (ashuras, or angry demons, later make a sixth), humans, and gods.
The earliest texts, the hymns of the Rig Veda (1700–1000), send the souls of those rewarded to the world of the fathers, with shade, lovely women, Soma, honey, and butter. There Yama presides, the first man to die, now a god (RV 10.135.1; 10.14; 10.154.1). Traces appear of a dreaded house of clay, like Enkidu’s nightmare in Gilgamesh (RV 7.89), and a pit, darkness, for demons, but not for human sinners (RV 7.104).25 Some Indologists suggest that the original afterlife was the house of clay, the undifferentiated underground analogous to Ereshkigal’s domain, the place of bodies, the pit.26 The pit is said to be sacred to the ancestors, but it is also a place where the hymnist wishes demons, sorcerers, and his enemies crushed, burned, and thrust down into darkness (RV 7.104). As the fathers moved into the light, the pit darkened for those who gave Brahmins lame cows.27
Intimations of automatic, continuous rebirth within the clan appear.28 An injunction to the dead to take root in the plants with your limbs (RV 10.16.3) suggests a later Upanishadic description of how rebirth happens. Falling from the world of the fathers (its merit/karma consumed), the soul returns in rain to plants; the plants eaten become semen, and the semen emitted, the soul is reborn (Chāndogya Upanishad [CU] 5.10.1–10).29 Several hymns urge taking bodies and reaching descendants, but in the other world, not this one. The fire (Agni) releases the body to the fathers and descendants: “Set him free again to go to the fathers, Agni, when he has been offered as an oblation in you and wanders with the sacrificial drink. Let him reach his own descendants, dressing himself in a life-span. O knower of creatures, let him join with a body” (RV 10.16.5, Doniger pp. 49–50). RV 10.14.8 urges “Leaving behind all imperfections, go back home again; merge with a glorious body.” Since the deceased is off to the fathers, the body should be with them, not on earth, but a new body has been imagined, and later rituals will make new bodies to secure rebirth.30
If these rebirth intimations are not Borgesian traces, antecedents created by what followed them, they are very faint, and they are not moralized. In tribal societies from south India to the Inuit, dead ancestors return to their kin group in new births. Often the ancestor reborn can be identified, and grandfathers have a penchant for reappearing in grandsons.31 Such rebirths have no moral component. Nor does attaining the Vedic world of the fathers. That destination depends not on morality, but its close cousin, correct ritual actions (karma) conducted by Brahmins and performed by male heirs that secure a place with the ancestors, linking the generations.32 The community strengthened, the body is dispersed: the eye to the sun, breath to the wind, limbs to the plants, all else to sky, earth, or water (RV 10.16.3).33 Often equated with drinking soma or enjoying a long, vigorous life of 100 years, immortality is achieved “through offspring” (RV 2.33.1; 4.4.10; 6.7.3).34
In the Vedas, Sanskrit karma means “action” and refers to the rites or sacrifices performed to secure life’s—and death’s—good things. Properly performed, Vedic rituals (karma) produce the desired results without the intervention of any god. When karma extends beyond ritual to other actions, Patrick Olivelle argues, the autonomy it possessed as rites transfers to the autonomy of one’s (other) actions’ consequences.35 Karma, good and bad, accrues as merit or demerit, first as sacrifices, then as deeds. It becomes the consequences that actions produce through time, or “the residual effect of past actions.”36 Originally material accretions to a self that burn up in another life, karma remains a fruitful concept. Past actions, disconnected from a self, accumulate, like plastic detritus in the ocean or white privilege. Whatever the origins and however transmitted, the Upanishads treat their knowledge of rebirth as new, the hidden answer to a question posed in Vedic terms. They also discover death.
Death rises to startling prominence in the earliest Upanishad, the Bŗhadāraṇyaka [BU, c. 600–500 BCE37]. Its first song identifies the Vedic sacrificial horse with the cosmos, but in the second, death rules, creates, becomes the horse and the fire: “In the beginning there was nothing here at all. Death alone covered this completely, as did hunger, for what is hunger but death?”(BU 1.2.1). Death creates a body, copulates with speech, gives birth to the world, eats all, and dies, his corpse bloating, his mind thinking, desiring to become an offering. The horse and the fire are death. This knowledge “averts repeated death” (BU 1.2.4–7).38 As Doniger and others emphasize, repeated death, intrinsically undesirable, precedes the theorization of rebirth.39 What the text overcomes, however, is skepticism about rebirth, not re-death.
A miracle of editorial suturing in three parts, separated by lineages of Brahmins (2.6, 4.6, 6.5, pp. 75, 131, 163–65), the BU presents death, breath, and the cosmos (part 1); centers on rebirth, karma, and the absolute (part 2); and ends in practice: the routes the dead self follows and practical instructions about birth and sex (part 3), including what to eat to have a “learned and famous son” or, surprisingly, “a learned daughter who will live out her full life span” (6.4.17–18, p. 159). Moving from death to birth, from cosmos to intimacy, the text ends eagerly collaborating with the desire for offspring that it has already advised giving up to avoid re-death and rebirth. This is not a fault. Although it is logically inconsistent, it is comprehensive.
In the pivotal passage in the second part, the new doctrine of karma (action) is introduced as a secret, partially disclosed. Equally remarkable, the secret answers a question couched precisely in the terms of Rig Veda 10.16.3. What happens to “the person” after the body’s cosmic dispersal at death? Ārtabhāga asks Yājñavalkya, the Brahmin, “tell me—when a man has died, and his speech disappears into fire, his breath into the wind, his sight into the sun, his mind into the moon, his hearing into the quarters, his physical body into the earth, his self (ātman) into space, the hair of his body into plants, the hair of his head into trees, and his blood and semen into water—what then happens to that person?” Yājñavalkya recognizes the canonical terms, and he has the answer, but the answer cannot be openly disclosed: “ ‘My friend, we cannot talk about this in public. Take my hand,…let’s go and discuss this in private.’ So they left and talked about it.” Fortunately, someone overheard, so the narrator discloses the secret. They talked only about “action,” they praised only “action,” and Yājñavalkya said, “A man turns into something good by good action and into something bad by bad action” (3.2.13, p. 81). This secret will be unfolded, but first skepticism must be overcome. Rebirth, they say, is not possible.
A song likens a dead man to an uprooted tree. Cut down, a tree may grow again from the root (as Job knew), or a man from a seed before he dies (when he begets a son), but an uprooted tree will not grow again: “Once he’s born, he can’t be born again./ Who, I ask will beget him again?” (BU 3.9.28 p. 103). One later answer is himself, for his wife becomes his mother when she bears him a son.40 That possibility has already been dismissed: it happens before he dies. No guaranteed automatic re-begetting seems to be on offer. Yet “Perception, bliss, brahman” belong to those who know how to answer this unanswerable question, how to be born again.
The key is brahman. Death dismembers a man, and a dismembered man created the cosmos (RV 10.90). Dismembered in death, all parts dispersed, what remains is the ungraspable, essential self (ātman). Self is perception, self is—or can be—brahman. It is like this: at death, the self (ātman) knocks down the body and stretches out, like a caterpillar from the tip of one leaf to another. A desiring self follows its character into a new life. A self without desire is brahman and is not reborn. In brahman there is no perception, no diversity, no difference of good or bad, no desire for sons or wealth, no outside, no inside, just self, brahman.41 Those who reach brahman are not reborn, and it is a state also attainable in this life, before death. The absolute puts an end to rebirth—and re-death.
To establish these points, questions and answers resume—but now the king challenges the Brahmin and drives him to the heart of the mystery. The “other world” intersects with this world in the world of dreams (4.3.9, p. 113). Stacked one upon another are the world of the ancestors, the world of the Gandharvas, the worlds of gods-by-rites and gods-by-birth, the world of Prajāpati, the creator, and finally of brahman, each hundreds of times more blissful than the one before (4.3.20–32, pp. 115–19). The Brahmin claims to have reached the end, but then the king forces him to address the process of dying, and the Brahmin, hunted home, tells all, tells of karma and those who return and those who do not return (4.3.34–4.4.24; p. 119–27).
The secret sentence is repeated, “A man turns into something good by good action and into something bad by bad action” (4.4.5, p. 121). A new distinction is added: the man who desires “returns/ back to this world,/ back to action” while the man who is unattached, without desires, is brahman, “and to brahman he goes” (4.4.6, p. 121). Brahman is attainable in this world, when desires are banished: “Then a mortal becomes immortal, /and attains brahman in this world” (4.4.7, p. 121).42
In the third part, the fundamental practical question—where does the person go after death?—is answered. Two new paths, one of knowledge, the other of sacrifice, lead from the Vedic funeral fires, and a dismal third way leads where one would not wish to go (6.2.2, 6.2.15–16, pp. 145–49). The person who knows, enters the flame passes to the day, the waxing moon, the sun, the world of the gods, the lightning, and on to brahman—and never comes back. Others who have made sacrifices, given gifts, and even practiced austerities enter the smoke. They pass to the waning moon, the world of the fathers, the moon where the gods feed on them, and thence into wind, rain, and back to earth, into the fires of a man and a woman, to circle around again and again. Those ignorant of the paths, who neither know nor give, become “worms, insects, and snakes” (6.2.16).43 The secret was not entirely secret: a verse quoted from the Rig Veda tells of two paths: “Two paths mortals have, I’ve heard:/ the paths to fathers and to gods” (6.2.2).44 What the verse did not tell was the way beyond the gods to brahman or back to the fathers. Nor did it threaten anyone with being reborn as a worm or snake.
The equally ancient Chāndogya Upanishad names what foods people become for rebirth: “rice and barley, plants and trees, sesame and beans, from which it is extremely difficult to get out” (5.10.6, p. 237). Eaten, they become semen, and deposited come into being again, without reference to BU’s more poetic fires of man and woman. Shifting the path to the gods from the middle to the end of the narrative, the last stop before brahman (CU 4.15.5, p. 227, versus BU 6.2.15), it ranks austerity (associated with the fourth life stage, renunciation) with knowledge as leading to the path of gods and brahman (CU 5.10.1, p. 237). In BU, austerity was classed with sacrifice and gift-giving that led to rebirth (BU 6.2.16, p. 149). CU also threatens. Good behavior leads to a good womb—Brahmin, Kshatriya, or Vaishya—bad to “a foul womb, like that of a dog, a pig, or an outcaste woman” (CU 5.10.7, p. 237).
The Kaushītaki Upanishad simplifies the process and sends everyone at once to the moon. Those who can answer the moon’s question pass on and through; the rest come back from the moon in rain, as “a worm, an insect, a fish, a bird, a lion, a boar, a rhinoceros, a tiger, a man or some other creature—each in accordance with his actions and knowledge” (1.2, p. 327). Beyond the moon, a man passes worlds of many gods, shakes off his good and bad deeds onto relatives (those he likes get the good, those he dislikes the bad), and passes onto Brahman, the real, where he is greeted by nymphs and flowers and food and sweet scents, and engages another metaphysical disquisition that enables him to remain. There are no hells. To be reborn in a stinking womb, as a pig, a dog, an outcast, or as a mite, born and dying (CU), or as a worm or snake (BU) suffices for discipline. Nor does everyone want to go beyond the moon. Chandogya Upanishad holds out the hope of being reborn in a better womb than one experienced this time round (CU 5.10.7, p. 237).
Those who mocked rebirth in BU reappear in the Katha Upanishad, along with “joyless worlds,” otherwise undescribed. A boy worries that the dry, barren cattle his father is sacrificing are worse than useless: “ ‘Joyless’ are the worlds called, /to which a man goes/ who gives them as gifts” (KathaU 1.3, p. 375). Visiting Death, however, the boy does not ask about the relationship between cattle and worlds, but whether anything at all awaits after death. Some say after death there is nothing, and some say there is something. Those who say, “This is the world; there is no other,” fall into death’s power again and again, or so Death claims (KaU 2.6, p. 383).45 Such materialists or annihilationists, in Hinduism the Charvaka school, appear also in Buddhist texts in the person of Ajita Kesakambalin, who insists: “There is no such thing as this world or the next…. A human being is built up of the four elements. When he dies, the earthy in him returns…. to the earth, the fluid to the water, the heat to the fire, the windy to the air, and his faculties pass into space.”46
The Katha Upanishad also demonstrates, more elegantly than the BU’s delightful third part, the way the tradition synthesizes contradictory elements, in this case sacrifice and the self as equally sources of immortality. Ritual comes first: the fire sacrifice. The “foundation” of all, hidden in the “cave of the heart,” it leads “to an endless world” (1.14, p. 377). Performing this sacrifice three times—and it will now be named for the boy Naciketas—overcomes “birth and death” (1.17, p. 377) and the performer “rejoices in heaven” (1.18, p. 379). At this point, all should be over, but then philosophy begins. Having reached heaven and immortality through the fire sacrifice, Naciketas asks, bizarrely, what happens to a man when he is dead: “ ‘He exists,’ say some, others, ‘He exists not’ ” (1.20, p. 379). Even more bizarrely, Death pleads that “even the gods of old” had doubts about this question—though he has just promised that through the sacrifice Naciketas has thrust the “fetters of death” aside and arrived in heaven (1.18). Pressed, he explains the self and the knowledge that leads to the “unborn and eternal, primeval and everlasting” “grandeur of the self” (2.18, 20, pp. 385–87). The self escapes from samsara, which now first means “round of rebirth” (3.7, p. 389; p. 607n).
Two or three things happen here. On the one hand, the fire sacrifice evidently no longer suffices. Heaven is no longer enough; the sacrifice no longer answers every question. On the other, the fire sacrifice is given pride of place within the newer philosophical orientation: it comes first. The boy rejects the temptations of pleasures and wealth and sons and ever-so-long life, all transient, in favor of the new, secret knowledge of self (1.26–2.11; 3–4, pp. 379–403). The sacrificial and the philosophical systems interweave, strengthening each other, much as the way to brahman includes the world of the fathers and earlier heavens as it passes by.
What is this self? Unfamiliar as the absolute brahman or ātman within, we know it from the structure of consciousness and the relationship between consciousness and speech, Upanishadic obsessions. It is caught in the body, but like bodiless wind, rain-cloud and lightning, it rises up without a body (CU 8.12.2, p. 285). It is what sees with the sight, smells with the sense of smell, “The one who is aware: ‘Let me say this’—that is the self; the faculty of speech enables him to speak” (8.12.4, p. 285), and it thinks with the mind. “[T]hat is brahman; that is the immortal; that is the self (ātman)” (CU 8.14, p. 287). It is also the ultimate origin: “In the beginning this world was the self (ātman), one alone, and there was no other being at all that blinked an eye. He thought to himself: ‘Let me create the worlds’ ” (Aitareya Upanishad 1.1, p. 317). Ungraspable and indescribable, it nevertheless is; it is that. Afterlife enquiries lead into the self, beyond which there is nothing. Meanwhile, heavens exist, and a strange propensity for unintentional entries.
HEAVENS, HELLS, HINDUISM, AND ESCAPE HATCHES
Encouraging charity, sacrifice, and knowledge, threatening vile rebirths, the early Upanishads imagine no hells, many heavens, and release through renunciation. Hells emerge belatedly linked with dharma in the Ramayana and Mahabharata, epics separate from the Vedic tradition but claiming authority with it in Hinduism. The Ramayana, 200 BCE–200 CE, knows nothing of samsara and moksha (liberation), but attends to modeling dharma in its hero and its heaven, with reward more prominent than punishment. 47 Dharma, in Buddhism the term for doctrine or teaching, in Hinduism is duty, the duty specific to one’s caste (varna), gender, occupation, circumstances, life stage (ashrama: youth who studies, householder who gains wealth and children, forest dweller who downsizes, and renouncer [samnyasa] who dies alive, giving up everything to seek liberation). As the web of rules and expectations that govern social life, dharma is relational, situating the person relative to others. “Everyone has a svadharma, a proper dharma, a pattern of life incumbent upon him or her that will ensure his or her welfare after death. But…one’s svadharma is not individual or personal.”48 One’s dharma is the right thing to do in any given situation, the right way to act and to be depending on one’s identity, age, gender, occupation, varnashramadharma.
The Ramayana’s Yama judges in his kingdom (judging others’ performance of dharma is his dharma), and everyone eats the fruit of his own actions (karma). Malefactors are ripped and boiled and burned and shredded, but however dire their situation, their misdeeds are not reported. By contrast, what constitutes good, and elicits reward, is clearly modeled. Beneficent actions—giving cattle, sharing rice, bestowing dwellings—are reciprocated.49 A wily skeptic contests the usefulness of feeding the ancestors, implicitly challenges rebirth, and explicitly derides a world to come: “at death [everyone’s] lot is annihilation just the same.” Jabáli the Brahman’s adharma is “at variance with righteousness.”50
Compensating for the Ramayana’s omission, the Mahabharata explains heavens, hells, karma, and rebirth, much as Odysseus’s mother explains the flight of the soul. Yudhishthira’s descent to hell is anticipated discursively in the dying Bhishma’s answering Yudhishthira’s questions (Book Twelve. Peace. Volume Three. The Book of Liberation, literally Mokṣadharma). Both Odysseus and Yudhishthira are shocked by what they find: a relative unexpectedly dead and relatives unexpectedly in hell. The outcome is better for Yudhishthira’s relatives than Odysseus’s. Embodying dharma, Yudhishthira refuses to leave hell without his relations—a determination that releases them all from this dismal illusion. Like Homer’s tortures, the hells are already conventional set pieces: rivers of boiling water, forests of sword leaves, ground sprouting razors, trees with thorns for impaling, and corpses with their entrails scattered. (A Jain variant has a river with waves like razors.51)
Once Yudhishthira refuses to go to heaven and leave his people behind, the system is explained to him. Good kings on their deaths visit hell to burn away their bad karma and then ascend to heaven. Bad kings go first to heaven, burn up their good karma, and then fall away into hell. Neither heaven nor hell is permanent, and eventually both are reborn according to their karma on arrival. Yudhishthira and his went to heaven and beyond, to the world “beyond which there is nothing.”52 They did not come back: moksha unsought. Like the routes of the dead in the BU, the Mahabharata’s account of rebirth, heavens, and hells is a minor episode relative to the cosmic metaphysics at its didactic and spiritual center, the Bhagavad Gita (Song of God) where, linking dharma and bhakti (devotion to a god), death and the self split and fuse.
The great war that will destroy two related clans about to begin, Arjuna the archer realizes he cannot bear to kill his relatives and turns to his charioteer, the god Krishna disguised, to withdraw. Arjuna would rather die than kill. Ahimsa, doing no harm, protecting others’ dharma: surely these are absolute moral values. When men die in battle, their families, their familial law (dharma), and their dead, the ancestors, die again: “When the ritual offerings of rice and water fail, their Fathers fall degraded” (1.42).53 Hell waits for violated dharma. Krishna persuades Arjuna that his duty as a warrior, a Kshatriya, is to kill. That is his varnadharma, caste duty, his righteousness, honor, virtue.
Krishna’s complex and beautiful arguments begin from the self, eternal and undying, and end in vision: the god Krishna’s self as the destroyer of worlds, all-consuming time. As the self occupies a changing body from childhood through adulthood to old age, so it finds a new body after death. Men lying dead on the battlefield do not die; only the impermanent, unreal body dies. The eternal self drops the body like old clothes and takes up another. Equally sure is the death of those born, and the birth of those dead: one should not grieve for what cannot be prevented (2.11–30). Far from hell, heaven opens to welcome the warrior who finds a battle unsought: “It is heaven’s gate thrown wide” (2.32).
The battle suspended, Krishna takes Arjuna along many paths to self-realization and transcendence. The final vision is not self, but other. From Krishna, the worlds unroll, the origin of gods and sages, without beginning, the source of everything that is (10: “The divine splendor”). Beginning in beauty, vision ends in terror, as the infinite cosmic body of the god draws the world into its fiery jaws, consuming all beings. Arjuna cries out, “Who are you?” as he sees the men he knows on the battlefield disappear into the burning mouth. The answer, as it flashed into Robert Oppenheimer’s mind, witnessing the first atomic bomb: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” (11.32). The men waiting to join battle are dead already, Krishna tells Arjuna; even without your participation, they will all die. After many turns, the creating death of the BU reappears, more startling than ever. Death, like the self, is everything and nothing.
Once they were discovered—and Arjuna knows them—Hinduism did not give up its hells. They multiply, complicate, and systematize, perhaps in competition with Buddhism, but they also take an odd, perhaps unique turn, after a predictable, rationalizing development. The Puranas (300–1500 CE) explain, as the Ramayana does not, what misdeeds are to be punished.54
The Markandeya Purana (c. 300 CE) condemns not giving food or umbrellas, killing a cow or a father, destroying a pond. It sends perpetrators to hells named Terrible, Great Terrible, Darkness, Cutting-off, Unsupported, Sword-leaf-forest, and Hot-pot.55 Bowker counts 6 to 28 hells with 144 sections beneath the seventh or lowest world, where punishments fit crimes. In that Sword-leaf-forest, leaves are swords that slice those who needlessly cut down trees or kill camels.56 Other Sword-leaf-forests entice lovers to slice themselves climbing up and down a tree to a wheedling beloved.57
Especially in pluralistic societies, ritual rules require more reinforcement than moral rules (so the Ten Commandments start from four anomalous ritual commands: no other gods but me, no idols, no naming, keeping the Sabbath, while the remaining six appear wherever prohibitions are found). The gravest acts offend against ritual: the killer of a cow precedes in atrocity the killer of a Brahmin, who precedes killers of women, children and the old (Agni Purana, 1200–1500 CE). Crows rip out through the anus the intestines of men who have urinated in front of a cow, Brahmin, the sun, or fire (Vamana Purana, 300–1000 CE). A Muslim or Buddhist neighbor might not regard such acts as wrong. “Snatching” is a word translators of the Puranas often use to describe disapproved activities relative to others’ wives, wealth, or mustard.58 Cycling between heavens and hells gains a malevolent twist. Those in heavens see those in hells and know that they will fall when their merit has burned up. Those in hells see those in heavens, envy their happiness, and rejoice to see them fall.59 Yama acquires a fanged assistant, his scribe Citragupta, determined that malefactors get what they deserve.
Yet the Puranas also emphasize escape, extending compassion beyond the family to strangers and insisting on the efficacy of new rituals over old. Yudhishthira’s story is twice retold, of kings Vipashchit (Markandeya Purana, 300 CE) and Mahīratha (Padma Purana, 1000–1400 CE). Each time, the king bestows his merit on strangers, releasing them as he ascends to the highest heaven, beyond even meditating saints. In the Padma Purana, performing only Vedic rituals dooms a son’s otherwise virtuous father to ten rebirths as an animal before he rises to hungry ghost, familiar Buddhist realms of rebirth. Fortunately, the son can help by observing Puranic rituals, especially the “full-moon day of Vaiśākha,” of which the benefits last a thousand years. That month’s “full-moon day” preserved king Mahīratha from punishment for sensual enjoyments and enabled him to release sufferers from hell. Merely watching other devotees perform such worship for a month saves a particularly vile sinner, the lapsed Brahmin Dhaneśvara, from the hell Citragupta insists he deserves. When Dhaneśvara is cast into a fiery hell, it suddenly cools. So puzzled are the wardens of hell by this undeserved escape that before being transported to another world, he is treated to what seems a Buddhist-influenced spectacle: seven named hells, of six sections each, forty-two in total but multiplied to eighty-four by the distinction between deliberate and non-deliberate actions.60
Devotion to a god also comes to promise release or a heaven, like that awaiting Yudhishthira in the Mahabharata. Devotional Hinduism, implicit in Rama’s divinity and explicit in the Gita, develops from about the third century CE. Ascent to the highest heaven, not to return, once limited to those who know the Vedas and those who practice austerities, now figures as an alternative for the devout, with heavens peculiar to Shiva (called Kailāsa), or Vishnu (Vaikun. țha), appropriated for their devotees.61 Daneśvara escaped from hell by idly watching other devotees worship. So, too, Shiva’s heaven has been achieved even by hunters and dog-cookers who accidentally perform a Shiva-worshiping ritual.62 A Buddhist frog has the same kind of luck—smacked on the head while hearing a chant, he awakes in a marvelous heaven, wondering how he got there.63
Success hinges on a well-spent last moment, albeit accidental. While the Ramayana and Mahabharata lay out death practices, the Bhagavata Purana addresses a very specific question: “what…should be done by a person about to die?”64 Death is to be prepared for, and the meaningful ending is intentional. Concentration delivers a renouncer to ātman, beyond rebirth, beyond perception, merged with the absolute. A good death, farewells made, food and drink given up, attention focused on the god or rebirth to come, takes others dying where they wish to go. Within a year, the soul will have found another body.
Accidental salvation stretches the boundaries when people—or frogs—are saved without trying. But there is an even odder twist, and it may be unique to Hinduism: the salvation by an unintended accident of the deliberately vicious in the act of committing a crime.
Jesus and the Buddha cherished the vicious, but salvation hinged on belief for Jesus and attention for the Buddha. That frog was listening to the dharma (doctrine). Reform is usually expected as a quid pro quo of salvation. But Shiva’s heaven is particularly partial to “unreformed sinners.” A bibulous, fornicating, dicing thief climbs on a Shiva lingam to steal a temple bell, the bell rings, and at once he is carried triumphantly to heaven.65 Well might he wonder how he got there. Someone will explain that he had worshiped Shiva by ringing the bell and embracing the lingam. The story attests Shiva’s power and accessibility, as well as the doctrine that all souls of all sentient beings will ultimately be saved, whatever their beliefs. But surely this story takes that view too far, much too far?
An implication of dharma, attributed to Gandhi, is that “Everything you do is insignificant, but you have to do it.”66 Contrariwise, if you have done it, it signifies. It counts in the accumulation of karma.
JAINS, BRIEFLY
Like Hindus, Jains are called “eternalists” in Buddhist scriptures. The jiva, self or soul, is as eternal and uncreated as the world itself. Rid of karma, understood as material particles created by clogging actions and emotions, the soul rises liberated above the five heavens to the top of the universe with the great ford-makers, or tirthankara, and other enlightened souls, omniscient, blissful, potentially infinite in number. Its materiality suggesting an early origin, Jain karma is adhesive: it clings to the jiva or soul like dust to a damp cloth.67 There is no creator god who intervenes in human affairs, though many gods are equally part of the uncreated, eternal cosmos that turns like a wheel through endless eons. In those turnings, the truth of Jain practice dies out and must be brought back by a ford-maker, who teaches once again how to ford the ocean of rebirth. Mahavira (“great hero,” a title like Buddha “awakened” or Christ “anointed”) was the twenty-fourth. Until liberation, the soul migrates through heavens of the gods, animals, at least seven hells, plants, water, earth, air and fire, laypeople, and, in one variant, women. The sky-clad Dvigimbara Jains argue that since female ascetics cannot go naked (“sky clad”) as ascetics must to achieve liberation, women can achieve liberation only after they are reborn as male. The white [cloth]-clad Shvetembara suppose male and female ascetics equally capable of liberation, but not laypeople, who accumulate merit and prevent as much influx of karma as possible. The eighteenth Shvetembara ford-maker was a woman, Malli, reborn in that form as punishment for performing more asceticism than had been agreed upon. Her Dvigimbara equivalent is male.68
Rebirth is immediate: the soul leaps “like a monkey” from one body to the next.69 Although the soul moves fast, dying may take an idiosyncratic elongation—or once did. Some devout Jains have practiced death by fasting (sallekhana). Simultaneously they cleanse the body of karma and concentrate the mind while awaiting death to achieve liberation or a desired rebirth. Buddhist scriptures record strenuous disapproval of the practice. Today this deliberate and intentional death is uncommon as a Jain practice, but it has become a secular choice for those otherwise unable to end their lives. An after-death ritual practiced by the Shvemtabara, the Antaraya Karma Puja, reduces the hindrance karma of the dead so as to promote a better rebirth.70 Inconsistent with immediate rebirth, the practice lets survivors participate in the death to help, for one last time. Beyond rebirth, the liberated soul rises unobstructed. Liberation is possible only from a human body; many gods in the heavens await rebirth in human form to achieve liberation. Hell-beings have longer to wait, since they must work their way up through animals.
And there are the plants: Jains retain the Vedic and Upanishadic integration of plants into the totality of life processes and rebirth. To plants they attribute consciousness, in their timely germination and their potential rebirth as sacred trees before a human birth.71 Like the other religions originating in India, Jainism condemns harm to other living things. Doing no harm, ahimsa, the Jains take further than any other sect, extending the principle to gnats, ants, and worms, and even to root vegetables, since eating the root destroys the plant. Jain monastics often wear face masks to prevent accidentally destroying a tiny life form. From a Jain friend Gandhi learned nonviolence.
Like Death in the Katha Upanishad, Jains faced challenges from materialists who disputed the soul’s existence. The legendary King Prasenajit scoffed that no soul emerged from the cauldron containing a criminal sealed in to die and that no soul could be found when another criminal was chopped to pieces in search of it. The monk Keshin explained: the soul was like the sound of a drum, which can be heard outside a sealed house, and chopping up the body to find soul was like chopping wood to find fire.72 Unlike Hindus, Jains are not simple eternalists: the soul both is and is not eternal. Asked if the soul was eternal, the Mahavira said, “Yes, Jamali, the soul does not cease to exist.” Asked if the soul was not eternal, the Mahavira said, “Yes, Jamali, from a hellish creature it becomes an animal, from an animal man, from man a god.”73 To such questions about existence, the Buddha answered not at all.
BUDDHISM, ONE AND MANY
Though sometimes he answered too much: did the Tathāgata still exist after he died and entered nirvana? He would not be reborn, but was he still? Somewhere, something? When one is talking “afterlives,” that is a pretty basic question to which one might reasonably expect a clear response. “It is inept to say of him—of the Uttermost Person, the Supernal Person, the Attainer of the Supernal—that after dying the Tathāgata is, or is not, or both is and is not, or neither is nor is not…”74 The problem is the question’s phrasing; it is “inept,” but we are not told how to ask it right. When we insist on an answer, we demonstrate precisely the clinging, craving desire that the Buddha existed—or exists—or both or neither or—to move us beyond. Buddhism both erases and generates afterlives. When it contracts to its own dharma (doctrine or teaching), the afterlife empties out, vanished. When it contemplates the sufferings of sentient beings caught in samsara, its starting point, it finds way upon way to rescue them. The means range from immediate enlightenment to innumerable worlds of Buddhas and bodhisattvas—and Buddhist schools.
Buddhism defines dharma as doctrine or teaching, devaluing the bio-cultural social order in favor of insight into the “universal law of becoming and passing away.”75 It denies the existence of that essential self, Ātman, that joined the eternal (Hindu) or rose to solitary bliss among other solitudes (Jain). Buddhism erased the self for “no-self.” No essential, unchanging, independently subsisting entity inside us constitutes us. This sleight of mind privileges the flickering impressions and memories that were all Hume found when he looked inward, searching for self, consciousness, identity (and should cheer Daniel Dennett, unless he objects to being scooped).76 Nor, argues the second century CE Mahāyāna philosopher Nāgārjuna, is there a ground elsewhere, outside us, in something else: every existent depends on other non-self-subsisting entities. (The obvious analogy is language: words have no absolute meaning in themselves but only relative to other words, and what relationship has language to reality?) Nothing exists of itself; everything is empty of self-existence.77 With no self, there is equally no other, neither outside nor inside, only interdependence, relatedness, and awareness.78
This emptiness complicates afterlives and their status. In nirvana (Sanskrit “extinction” or “extinguished,” like a candle flame), one passes beyond rebirth, beyond the five realms of existence, beyond death, into a state the Buddhist canon takes pains to differentiate from annihilation or extinction. “[T]here is an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned [that enables] escape from the born, become, made, and conditioned.”79
In the origin story, the young man who would become the enlightened one, the Buddha, dismayed by birth, sickness, old age, and death, sought to achieve release by traditional Indian ascetic practices, as did his contemporary “Nigaṇțha Nātaputta,” as Mahavira the Jain is called in the Pali canon. For the Buddha-to-be, painful practices did not succeed. One day, under the Bodhi tree, enlightenment came, and the young man entered nirvana, an indescribable state in which desire and craving and clinging cease. He understood that life is suffering. The first human sound is a wailing cry, the last a rattle. Suffering arises from craving, craving can be ended, and there is a path that leads to the end of craving. These four noble truths enclose the Eightfold Path in the fourth. For the next twenty years, he taught the way to liberation he had found to others, and then he died, entering parinirvana, beyond the cycle of rebirth. He left behind the dhamma (in Pali, dharma in Sanskrit) to bind and guide his followers, his funeral to be conducted by the laity, and they also to erect stupas for his ashes so that those who worshipped there could achieve liberation.
As an afterlife, this is not much. Nirvana sweeps away some of the most gorgeous afterlife webs ever spun. Wandering through lifetimes, the path ends where the atheist-materialist begins, nowhere much at all. As Ajita Kesakambalin put it, the body returned to its four elements, “while his faculties went into space.”80 Nirvana or space, the names differ, but the situation seems much the same. Why bother? One answer, though not the attainment, is simple: the objective is enlightenment in this life. Once enlightened, one clings neither to self/non-self nor to desire/dread of rebirth. How one occupies one’s world is transformed.81 Another answer is that all beings exist in dependence on others, born, made, conditioned. That web of causation extends indefinitely, through “all the heavenly and human beings and the asuras of the entire world,…the thousand-millionfold lands.”82 The world one occupies is transformed. Buddhism is, as it happens, its own expanding and contracting cosmos, and much of the action is in the afterlives.
Siddhartha Gautama (his personal name in Sanskrit), the Buddha or “the enlightened,” “the awakened,” spoke Magadhi, an Indo-Aryan language related to Sanskrit. His teachings were transmitted orally, with quarrels over what constituted the canon and the true teachings emerging within seventy years of his death.83 His traditional dates are sixth century, the Buddha, 563–483, and the Mahavira, 599–527; recent scholarship moves their lives into the fifth century, 463–383 BCE and 499–427 BCE, a century closer to Buddhist scriptures (Jain scriptures date from c. 496 CE.).84 In the first century BCE, the teachings that reach back to the historical Siddatha Gotama (his personal name in Pali) were committed to writing in Pali in Ceylon. Called the Tripitaka (Three Pitakas or Baskets), the Pali canon of the Theravada tradition was fixed by the fifth century CE in some fifty-six volumes. The baskets are the Vinaya Pitaka or disciplinary rules of the monastic order, the Sutta Pitaka or discourses and sayings of the Buddha in five collections (Long Discourses, Mid-Length Discourses, Additional, Miscellaneous and Small), and the Abhidhamma Pitaka or philosophical discourses, concerning the doctrines of the schools.85
Theravada Buddhists, who accept only the Pali canon, flourish from Sri Lanka to Laos and Cambodia. Sometimes designated Southern Buddhism, their practice is directed towards attaining enlightenment as a monk or nun, becoming an arhat, like the Buddha himself in his lifetime. Nirvana achieved, the arhat passes out of reach, again like the Buddha himself, but not as a Buddha, or with him. The Buddha was an arhat, but there is only one Buddha, at any one time. When the doctrine declines and enlightenment becomes difficult or impossible, then Maitreya, the Buddha-to-come, will restore it. There is a great gulf fixed between the Buddha and arhats, as between the master and disciples, but they end in the same situation.
Mahāyāna, or Northern, Buddhism has larger canons (sutras composed between the first and sixteenth centuries CE in India, Central Asia, China, Tibet) and different objectives. Every sentient being is ultimately capable of the goal, becoming a Buddha. Some take the bodhisattva vow to help others attain Buddhahood, a process taking lifetimes.86 The bodhisattva becomes both an object of worship and a path for laity as well as monks to follow. Initially, Mahāyāna sutras were probably midrashic—filling gaps, answering questions left by the canonical texts.87 By the seventh century CE, those who venerated bodhisattvas and aimed at Buddhahood called their orientation “Mahāyāna” (“greater [mahā] vehicle [yāna]”) and denigrated those who rejected their innovations as “Hīnayāna” (“defective” or “lesser [hīna]” “vehicle [yāna]”). Monks who sought only their own enlightenment were selfish; better to attempt the bodhisattva path to help others, so the claim went once the schools separated. Mahāyāna schools extend from China, Tibet, and Vietnam to Korea and Japan, sometimes subdivided into Northern Buddhism—Tibet, Mongolia, Bali—and Eastern—China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan.88
Both persuasions once flourished in the same monasteries in India, as a visiting Chinese Mahāyānist reported at the end of the seventh century CE. Monks followed the same discipline and rules, but “Those who worship the Bodhisattvas and read the Mahāyāna Sūtras are called the ‘Mahāyānists,’ while those who do not perform these are called the Hīnayānists.”89 The orientation once termed “defective” by their opponents is now designated “Theravada,” from another early school. Mahāyānists have not been the only ones to call names. C. F. Rhys Davids calls the bodhisattava a “Bîrana weed,” choking out the path of self-training with “a gorgeous hierarchy of mythological wonder-workers.”90
Buddhist dharma jolted the afterlife. The goal was to end rebirth, but the Buddha’s disciples wanted to know what had become of their dead. Naming names, the Buddha tells: one has attained arahantship; sister Nandâ has “become an inheritor of the highest heavens, there to pass entirely away, thence never to return”; another has become a Sakadâgâmin who on his first return to this world will make an end of sorrow. Fifty have reached sister Nanda’s level, ninety Sakadâgâmins, and five hundred arahants.91 One female follower is outraged that she has been reborn in a higher heaven than three male disciples, two of whom vow to imitate her and try harder. These impressive success rates the Buddha and his followers occasionally contrasted with those of other teachers.
Buddhist rebirth tilts towards better things, from the beginning. The Buddha advises aspiration. In the order of discourse, bad rebirth precedes good: those who do not do well will be “reborn into some unhappy state of suffering or woe.” Those who do well are “reborn into some happy state in heaven.”92 That order seems to emphasize bad outcomes, except that they are rapidly left behind for better and better worlds. Attention continues moving upwards as the heavens multiply, ascending deva realms, regions of lights and gods Radiant, Luminous, Cool, All-seeing. Heavens ascend from the pleasant, familiar heavens of desire, through many heavens of form, to heavens of formlessness that correspond to states of meditation. Except for the very highest of heavens from which one passes to nirvana without return, no heaven is permanent. The limit for the returning highest heavens is eighty-four thousand eons, a mere nine million years for the lowest.93 There are heavens beyond heavens to try for, and something beyond even that.
A serene death is one of the five rewards of a good life.94 Rich, respected, confident, anxiety-free, the person dying concentrates in the last moments on where to go next. As in the Upanishads, one may aim for strictly socio-economic improvement. The Buddha sympathetically counsels how to achieve a better material rebirth, but he also suggests one might look a little higher. The virtuous dying householder, concentrating his attention with serenity in dying, may aspire to be reborn as a wealthy Brahmin or noble or householder. Holding the thought “fixed, firmly established, and expand[ing] it…conduces to rebirth within that range.” Or he may look higher, where devas in the realm of “the four kings of the firmament are long-lived, splendid in appearance and lead a blissful existence.” Or he may spiral upwards to “the Three-and-Thirty gods, the Yama, the Tusita, the Nimmanarati, the Paranimmita-vasavatti gods, or [among] the gods of the Brahma world.”95 Beyond the Brahma world are other heavens of formlessness, from which nirvana can be achieved without rebirth.
Looking down, Buddhism also looks in. Hells’ external tortures are internal torments. They threaten from outside and goad from within, but they are not eternal. In the Long Discourses, frequent terms for bad rebirths are “the waste, the woeful way, the downfall, the constant round [of transmigration.]” 96 In the Middle Length Discourses the familiar “five destinations” appear: hell, animal, hungry ghost, human, gods.97 The bad would seem to outnumber the good, if we did not already know how many realms of gods there are.
With proper guidance, even the most undeserving can escape punishment and win the heaven most desired. That is one moral of the Dhānañjāni Sutta: Sutta 97. Another moral is that the most undeserving have potential beyond what they desire. The Buddha’s disciple Sāriputta deftly leads the misbehaving brahmin Dhānañjāni from hell’s pains to the Brahma world, an amazing accomplishment for which the Buddha gently chides his disciple.
Healthy and happy, Dhānañjāni plundered Brahmin households and the king; Sāriputta warned him uselessly about hell. Dying, Dhānañjāni asks the master to visit him “out of compassion.” Arrived, Sāriputta asks if Dhānañjāni has the symptoms of a good death—decreasing pains—but he does not. His increasingly painful feelings resemble hell tortures: a strong man splitting my head with a sharp sword, a tough leather strap being tightened around my head, violent winds carving up my belly like a butcher an ox, violent burning as if I were being roasted over hot coals. From that hell Dhānañjāni already feels, Sāriputta leads him out, asking which is better, hell or the animal realm? Animal or ghost? Ghost or human? Human or…? In four questions with obvious answers Dhānañjāni is out of his own hell and into the realms of the gods, where after seven questions about which god realm is better (Yama or Tusita? etc.), Sāriputta decides to leave Dhānañjāni in the Brahma-world, since “these brahmins are devoted to the Brahma-world.” Sāriputta establishes Dhānañjāni in “the inferior Brahma-world” and goes his way “while there was still more to be done.” For that the Buddha chides. Dhānañjāni had the potential to move beyond the Brahma world toward enlightenment, but now he “has died and has reappeared in the Brahma-world.”98
Comical and endearing, the sutta takes the student through the levels, reveals the importance of the moment of dying, in which Dhānañjāni is able to reverse a lifetime of misdeeds, sneers at brahmins’ contentment with the “inferior” Brahma-world (the highest heaven in non-Buddhist contexts), and marks the familiar pains of sickness as one source of hell’s tortures. Penal codes are another source of hell tortures. Sadistic hellish tortures imagined for the dead derive, after all, from sadistic tortures inflicted on living bodies.
The peculiar horrors of the Bālapaṇḍita Sutta (Fools and Wise Men) 129, in the Middle Length Discourses, derive from the penal system feared by the guilty. The living fool sees what is done by kings to robbers, and realizes he too deserves such punishments. They are grisly indeed: “flogged with whips, beaten with canes, beaten with clubs, having his hands cut off, his feet cut off, his hands and feet cut off; his ears cut off, his nose cut off, his ears and nose cut off; having him subjected to the ‘porridge pot,’ to the ‘polished-shell shave,’ to the ‘Rāhu’s mouth,’ to the ‘fiery wreath,’ to the ‘flaming hand,’ to the ‘blades of grass,’ to the ‘bark dress,’ to the ‘antelope,’ to the ‘meat hooks,’ to the ‘coins,’ to the ‘lye pickling,’ to the ‘pivoting pin,’ to the ‘rolled up palliasse,’ and then splashed with boiling oil, thrown to be devoured by dogs, impaled alive on stakes, and his head cut off with a sword.”99 The fool knows he deserves such treatment now, and fears it after he dies, tormenting himself while he lives, as Lucretius assures us fools do. Ultimately, the poor fool is reborn into a poor human condition, outcast, scavenger, destitute, deformed, ugly, with none of life’s good things. Doing amiss, he dies and goes to hell once again, “the complete perfection of the fool’s grade.”
For the wise man, the outcome is pleasant: the seven treasures and four successes of “a Wheel-turning Monarch.” The seven treasures are the wheel-treasure, which rolls triumphing over the whole earth; the elephant-treasure, a flying white elephant for the king to ride; the horse-treasure, a flying white horse with a raven-black head; the jewel-treasure, a glowing beryl; the woman-treasure, a perfect human beauty, eager to serve, sweet in speech, with warm limbs in cool weather and cool limbs in warm weather, chaste, breathing lotus and exuding sandalwood; the steward-treasure, who produces gold whenever it is wanted; and the counsellor-treasure, who governs on the king’s behalf. Indeed, the wheel-turning monarch has nothing to do except preside over the world, fly his horse or his elephant and be adored. Beautiful, long-lived, with a good digestion, he is loved by Brahmins and householders, so he orders his charioteer to drive more slowly so that they may look at him longer, as they have requested. The wise man who enjoys this heaven will be reborn in a noble or rich household, where he will enjoy his beauty and other good things, “clothes, vehicles, garlands, scents, and unguents.” He will act well and be reborn in another heaven when he dies.100
The wise man evidently has other things than enlightenment in view. Repurposing and expanding Sutta 129’s account of hell, the Devadūta Sutta (The Divine Messengers): Sutta 130 trades in the wheel-turning monarch’s pleasures for the Buddha’s own enlightenment narrative and insists on personal responsibility. When the “wardens of hell” bring the worst of the dead before him, King Yama, fallen far from the Vedic realm of the fathers, catechizes them one by one about the “divine messengers.” Have they seen an infant fouled in its excrement (birth), a hideous old man or woman (age), an adult fouled in excrement (sickness), a prisoner tortured (with details verbatim from Sutta 129), and a corpse one to three days old, “dead, bloated, livid, and oozing with matter” (death)? Repeated after every question is a reminder. “[T]his evil action of yours was not done by your mother or your father, or by your brother or your sister, or by your friends and companions, or by your kinsmen and relatives, or by recluses and brahmins, or by gods: this evil action was done by you yourself, and you yourself will experience its result.”101 The English cadence could be mistaken for Deuteronomy. From 130.10–16, the text is identical with Sutta 129.10–16, but at 130.17, instead of tracking off to the animal realm, hells keep flaming, externally and internally.
In the Great Hell, flames surge from wall to wall; the sufferer attempts escape through an opening door that closes as he reaches it. The eastern door finally lets him out into a new series of named hells: Excrement, Hot Embers, Simbali Trees, Wood of Sword-leaf Trees, then into a caustic river. Dragged out, he is force-fed hot metal balls (a common feature in hungry ghost scrolls) and molten copper for drink, and then thrown back into the Great Hell. At the end of each torture, “he feels painful, racking, piercing feelings.” Proceeding torture by torture through the sutra, not by horrific excerpts, that repetition, “painful, racking, piercing feelings,” creates inwardness. The physical descriptions transform themselves into accounts of inner states, like a very long and unpleasant anxiety attack. Or a very bad dream: more than anyone else King Yama wants out and to learn the Dhamma. (Awakening is possible, the very last lines assure us.)
Later texts systematize and moralize the hells—and are given more privileged positions in the canon. The Mahāvastu introduces the Vinaya-pitaka, the first basket containing the rules for monastics and tells its hells three times.102 A venerable old man visits hell and then all the “other worlds,” from animals to eight levels of heavenly devas. The hells are laid out systematically: 8 great hells have 16 secondary hells, making 136. The first telling names the hells, describes the tortures, and explains that the sufferers “do not die, because they are upheld by karma.” The second description shrinks to a schematic, and the final repetition expands, moralizing the hells, fitting specific acts to appropriate tortures.
The acts condemned are principally violence against other sentient beings, both human and animal, though hostile thoughts and anger are condemned to the same hatchet-cutting hell as warring kings, thieves, and soldiers. Swords and daggers grow on the hands of those who urged war against villages, and now they slice each other up. (Frequently pictured, such images inspired Saigyō’s twelfth-century poetic sequence.103) Among the darker paradoxes is being shredded from neck to hip for preparing instruments of torture. Mountains crush those who crushed lice with their fingernails or smashed worms or bludgeoned living creatures to death. Monkeys, rats, serpents, bees, scorpions, centipedes, wild animals, sheep: all are avenged in named hells. These crimes reach out to catch ordinary people—who would not crush the head of a scorpion?
In the other realms, the hungry ghosts have their thin necks and huge bellies, their bald and repulsive heads. They feed on excrement and phlegm and pus, longing for rice and water, never obtaining them. The beast level is rarely represented visually, its problems ignorance, asociality, and violence better laid out in words: “They knew neither mother nor father, neither brother nor sister, neither teacher nor teacher’s pupil, neither friend nor kinsman. They devoured one another and drank one another’s blood. They slew and strangled one another. From darkness they passed into darkness….” The ashuras, or angry demons, as a sixth level mark the text as late. They are appropriately huge, angry, and hideous. Skipping the human level, the text passes to the devas, the heavens, and runs through the levels, each more beautiful than the last. But none is permanent—except those remote heavens in which an arhat can achieve full Buddhahood.
That gesture indicates Mahāyāna inflection, and with Mahāyāna, even the highest aspiration ascends. The goal is no longer to be an arhat, liberated, but to be a buddha. Once there was only one; in Mahāyāna there are many. As the Lotus Sutra has it, the Buddha preaches various doctrines that fit the needs of diverse living beings, but concludes, “At all times I think to myself: / How can I cause living beings/ to gain entry into the unsurpassed way/ and quickly acquire the body of a Buddha?”104
The Lotus Sutra is among the most influential Mahāyāna texts, the basis of several Chinese and Japanese schools, Tiantai (China, Vietnam), Tendai (Japan), Cheontae (Korea), and Nichiren (Japan). It may have originated in Central Asia or India in a regional dialect, but first appears in Chinese translation, 255 CE.105 It rebalances Mahāyāna emptiness, skill in means, and the bodhisattva way.
Of emptiness the principal philosopher is Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 CE, south India). The corollary of non-self, emptiness registers the nonexistence of essences or substance, of anything pertaining to “I” or ego, of any ultimate ground. As Westerhoff points out, Hume was perfectly comfortable with a non-self that acted as if it thought it were a self, but for Nāgārjuna that illusion interferes with the apprehension of reality, of Buddha nature, and one mind.106 He wants to correct cognition: that is hard. There is no difference between samsara and nirvana, Nāgārjuna declared. The world, “a web of fluxing, interdependent, baseless phenomena,” is “empty of inherent nature,” but relational. “Unconditioned” nirvana contrasts with “conditioned” samsara as the same field traversed by insight and by ignorance.107 Samsara becomes as ungraspable as nirvana has always been. Later, Pure Land advocates claimed Nāgārjuna as an authority.108 One of them, challenged as to why anyone should follow the path if samsara and nirvana were the same, replied that if the questioner found samsara satisfying, he should stay there; if he did not, he could return to pursue the path.
“Emptiness” the Lotus Sutra carries concealed within it. “Skill in means,” skillful means or expedient means, it obtrudes: the Buddha adapts his teaching to the level of his hearers. It follows that there are two categories of truth: ultimate and conventional (or provisional). A teaching may be not “true” but only “provisional,” suitable to a student at a certain level and abandoned as the student increases in proficiency. Ultimate truth dissolves conventional teaching. Which truth is ultimate and which conventional will, in turn, divide schools.109
Merely reciting or copying the Lotus Sutra leads to salvation, the Lotus Sutra assures its auditors and readers. It discloses vast Buddha lands, Buddhas, bodhisattvas, Brahma gods, dragon kings, gandharva and garuda kings, arhats, nuns. Inclusive and generous, it knows nothing of hell, except for those who slander the sutra itself. They are reborn in the lowest hell or as a scabby dog with oozing sores. No horrific details are offered about hell, though if a sutra-slanderer should be reborn human, he will be ugly and have bad breath and odor. People he gives medicines to will die. The sutra skips supernatural hungry ghost and ashura realms for animal sufferings in those who cut off their “buddha-seeds.”110 Promising “peace in this life, good rebirth in the afterlife,” it assures its listeners that whatever their spiritual capacity, the Buddha fits each: “It is like the rain falling from that great cloud upon all the plants and trees, thickets and groves, and medicinal herbs. Each, depending upon its species and nature, receives its full share of moistening and is enabled to sprout and grow.”111 Yet amidst all this burgeoning, the ultimate is emptiness, separation from desire, extinction of grasping:
The Thus Come One knows that this is the Law of one form, one flavor, namely, the form of emancipation, the form of separation, the form of extinction, the form of ultimate nirvana, of constant tranquility and extinction, which in the end finds its destination in emptiness. The Buddha understands all this. But because he can see the desires that are in the minds of living beings, he guides and protects them, and for this reason does not immediately preach to them the wisdom that embraces all species.112
Emancipation, separation, extinction, nirvana, tranquility, extinction: Divide six into two sets of three: emancipation, separation, extinction. Nirvana, tranquility, extinction. Nirvana is emancipation; separation is tranquility. Divide six into three sets of two: emancipation, separation. Extinction, nirvana. Tranquitility, extinction. The end is emptiness. Emptiness is entering the body of a Buddha. What happened to flying elephants? Or copying the sutra?
With its gorgeous evocation of worlds, the Lotus Sutra supplies the phrase and the narrative that erases its own structure, but accommodates every reading: the story of the burning house and the doctrine of expedient means. A father sees his children at play in a house on fire; he offers them a goat-cart, deer-cart, ox-cart, anything they want to get them out of the house. They run eagerly out, but there are no little carts: instead he gives each a huge jewel-laden carriage.113 Was he lying? Was he deceiving them? Or was he using “skillful means” to save them? The father is the Buddha or the dharma; the burning house is this world, the little carts other Buddhist vehicles (the arhat, voice hearer or disciple, who heard the words of a Buddha and attained nirvana; the pratyeka-buddha or solitary buddha who awakened by his own efforts, often practicing in the forest; the bodhisattva who sets out to become a perfect buddha and to awaken others114). The single jewel-laden vehicle is Buddhahood, and what then is the truth of Buddhism? Is it a jeweled carriage or extinction or emptiness beyond jeweled carriages? All or none? Or some?
The question is inept. With no ending and no beginning, there can be no middle, as Nāgārjuna says.115
CHINA BEFORE BUDDHISM
Entering China about 60 CE, Buddhism encountered ancestors, spirits, popular gods, proto-Daoist Way[s], the Confucian Tian or Heaven, and as destination for the dead, the Yellow Springs. Established, entrenched, competitive, vital, each was intertwined with ritual and divinatory practices and staked out alternative approaches to death while blurring boundaries with borrowings. There was no trace of a moralized afterlife with rewards and punishments to be enjoyed after death or any certain method to live again—though ancestors could die again. Buddhism offered something quite new: karmic rebirth, a moralized opportunity to possess another life. As philosophically fertile as India in the Buddha’s time, the fifth to third centuries BCE had been in China the period of “100 Schools,” of Confucius, Mencius, Mozi (Mo Di), Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), Laozi (Lao Tze, “Old Master”), succeeded in the first century CE by the rationalist Wang Chong. The Yellow Springs will be familiar: an ancient, subterranean underworld without reward, without punishment, to which all the dead depart and where they are reunited, and so carry insignia of rank for recognition.
Exiling his mother in 721 BCE for her attempt to seize power, a ruler vowed they would meet again only in the Yellow Springs. A loving couple commit suicide, going together to the Yellow Springs. Even the skeptical Wang Chong (27–97 CE) accepted the Yellow Springs as a destination. A tomb was a disagreeable “hole dug underground beside the Yellow Springs.”116 Of the dead, a Han poet wrote that they lie “asleep below the Yellow Springs, never to awake in a thousand years.”117 A “Land of Darkness,” presided over by a grim queen of the earth, the Yellow Springs persisted,118 but Han and later tombs show there came to be considerable activity underground—dancing, music, visits. Above ground there were earnest efforts not to die at all, to live very long, to be immortal.
Ancestor worship did not, however, abet any of those goals, except protecting longevity. Ancestors, while in some sense alive, have no lives of their own. Characteristic of ancestor worship is vagueness about where precisely the ancestors are or who they were (as they recede in time) and what they are doing. They have a place in the calendar and the rituals that honor them, but they also have new names, not those of the persons they were when alive, that fix them in the ritual system of invocation and sacrifice. They are also vulnerable, as in the Gita. They depend on their descendants not only for existence—no descendant, no ancestor—but also for sustenance. If they are not fed, they die again. Abandoned, hungry, they may trouble other families.119
The Shang dynasty (c. 1200–1045 BCE), its oracle bones’ inscriptions the earliest writing in east Asia, had no netherworld gods, but ancestors for twenty-one generations (from us to Chaucer) confirmed their claim on political power. The ancestors were consulted over the ruler’s own health, safety, and ritual correctness. The ancestresses—and to qualify one had to be both the wife of a king who was the son of a king and the mother of a king—were asked only for progeny and received less auspicious name days. Other gods, of rain, lightning, sun, and moon, received prayers over such crucial public matters as rain, insects, and harvests.120 Shang ancestor worship began with grandparents. Dying parents grieved or relieved their offspring, but did not become ancestors until after their son’s death, and only if he had a male child.
As a system for binding generations, and ensuring that there be generations and male privilege, a better could scarcely be devised. Ancestors protect and empower, but they also depend. The descendants whom they produce and for whom they provide continue to be responsible for them and their well-being. When the Zhou overthrew the Shang, inadvertently demonstrating (Keightley observes) the Shang ancestors’ failure to protect their clan, the Zhou did not do away with ancestor worship, but reformed it, as if they understood its appeal and utility. Royals would have seven generations of ancestors to revere and commoners two—parents and grandparents.
The watchful eye of the ancestors also policed. In a text probably from the Western Zhou (1027–771 BCE), a Shang ruler threatens that his people’s own ancestors will punish them for their refusal to cooperate with him: “Our former rulers [his ancestors] will restrain your ancestors and fathers (so that) your ancestors and fathers will reject you, and not save you from death…. Your ancestors and fathers urgently report to my High Rulers, saying, ‘Execute great punishments on our descendants.’”121 Such ancestors were very much living presences, however remote and depersonalized they might be as the ladder of generations rose out of sight. A lament from the Shih Ching (Book of Songs, c. 600 BCE) puts the ancestors’ failure to protect where an Egyptian, Babylonian, or Israelite deplores the inscrutability of his god: “The fourth month was summer weather;/ The sixth month, blistering heat./ Have our ancestors no compassion/ That they can bear to see us suffer?”122
Many more poems celebrate the blessings bestowed by the ancestors, pleased with the food and drink offered them at banquets, when someone played the ancestor receiving the offerings. Whatever external controls the ancestors exercised, they were less powerful than the internal controls created by the awareness of their presence. The Han practiced visualization techniques during sacrifices. Imagining the home, the voice, the aimless conversation of the dead made them present.123 Such techniques suggested that the ancestors were summoned up by the mind and revered in the name tablet. They did not reside in the tablet or cluster in some void waiting to be called, as Zhu Xi put it (twelfth century CE).124 But the ancestors had nothing to say about what it was like being dead.
Nor did Confucianism address that question directly, though proto-Daoism considered it. Both fitted death into the natural or social order, though proto-Daoists often tweaked the nose of Confucian social order. These antithetical traditions, subversive and orderly, mystical and harmonious, play back and forth against each other, sometimes bitterly opposed, often mutually appreciative and understood as comprehending different registers of action and meaning. By 86 BCE Confucius and Laozi were thought to be contemporaries, with Laozi about twenty years older than Confucius (traditional dates 551–479 BCE). Confucius’s “Conversations,” the Chinese title of the Analects, assumed their present form about a hundred years after his death.125 Confucius’s reality seems certain, but the archives official who vanished after giving a 5000 character book, the Dao de Jing, to the Keeper of the Pass has largely been abandoned as an identity.126 Given, however, that the name “Laozi” means “old [lao] master [zi],” we can safely say it could have been written by no other, whoever he was. The other principal proto-Daoist text is the Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) by Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), that is, Master Zhuang, a century later, between 370 and 301 BCE, the time of Confucius’s disciple Mencius in the Warring States period.
Confucius declined inquiries about that world of spirits in favor of the way (dao) of this world under heaven (tian). In the Christian West, heaven is the abode of an anthropomorphic God and his saints, while the godless and amoral “way of the world,” from Bunyan’s Mr. Worldly Wiseman to Congreve’s Way of the World, is its antithesis. Heaven for Confucius is neither anthropocentric nor an abode. It is the order of nature, comprehending the progress of the seasons, the movements of celestial bodies, the proper functioning of states, kingdoms, families, the life spans of living beings. Heaven and earth, with man in between, proceed by rule. Obeying the rules and rituals established in the past secures the prosperity of the present. “Tend carefully to death rites, and pay reverence to those long departed, and the people will in the end be rich in virtue.” As to the spirits of the dead and death itself, those Confucius deftly sidestepped: “When you don’t yet understand life, how can you understand death?”127
Insisting on reverence for the long dead and fidelity to the rituals, Confucian tradition relegated to folklore traditional animist, oracular afterlife practices and beliefs, scoffing at superstition, yet without the hostility with which Deuteronomists quashed the dead in ancient Israel or Wang Chong expostulated in the first century CE against ghosts, revenants, and communication with the dead.128 Insofar as Confucius addressed spirits, they were a force for good: “Bounteous indeed is the moral force of the ghosts and spirits.”129 There remained intense empathy with bodies of the dead and graves of the ancestors: a soul remained in the body after death. Confucius hearing a report of burned bones responded with horror to the pain the dead must have suffered, and he wept when he learned his father’s tomb had been damaged in a flood.130 Such stories about Confucius, like those about the Buddha, come from long after Confucius himself and evidence the attitudes his admirers attributed to him and presumably shared.
At death for Confucius the two souls that make up the living person separate and change their names. The po, renamed gui, remains with the body, and the hun or spirit, renamed shen, departs to “a condition of glorious brightness.”131 To the hun the ritual of calling back the dead is addressed: if the hun does not return, the person dies.132 In the Book of Rites (Li chi), Confucius explains that “ ‘ghost’ means the po that remains underground after death, but the spirit, or hun, flies on high to become a divine being. ‘Once this opposition is established,’ the Master continued, ‘two kinds of rituals are framed in accordance and (different) sacrifices are regulated.’ ”133 Burning fat and scented wood for the shen brings to mind the ancestors. Grain, liver, delicacies, and liquor for the gui, or animal spirit, remind people to love one another and cultivate good feelings for those around them. The rituals stabilize the present and join present to past. Beyond the rituals, the rules for mourning, and his feeling for the po’s vulnerability, Confucius does not go. A powerful ideational structure imbricated with ritual actions requires no afterlife to enforce morality, and rituals console survivors. Confucian forms coordinated the family, the state, the heavens, and the individual for the sake of this world, which includes all others.
The early proto-Daoist texts, the Dao de Jing and Zhuangzi, punctured Confucian social order in favor of a natural order equally accepting of death but contemptuous of ritual, convention, and common sense. Dao means “way,” a favorite term of Confucius for the proper functioning of society under Heaven (Tian). The Daoist Way is, by contrast, paradoxical, inexplicable, elusive. Slippery and stimulating, it presses against and slips past meaning. The Dao de Jing begins by defining its terms:
The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth,
The Named is the mother of all things. 134
Parsing such sentences can occupy—and has—many lifetimes. The Dao de Jing speaks often of death, of the spirits made harmless by the Dao’s hegemony (#60), of the dead as stiff and strong, the new born pliant, weak, and superior (#76), of the people, who do not fear death and lightly lose their lives (#74, 75). Long life is desirable (#55, 59), death inevitable, caused by desire for life. One section (#50) anticipates the invulnerability of Daoist immortals and has also been read from a Buddhist perspective as passing beyond life and death into non-being:
Man comes in to life and goes out to death.
Three out of ten are companions of life.
Three out of ten are companions of death.
And three out of ten in their lives lead from activity to death.
And for what reason?
Because of man’s intensive striving after life.
I have heard that one who is a good preserver of his life will not meet tigers or wild buffaloes,
And in fighting will not try to escape from weapons of war.
The wild buffalo cannot butt its horns against him,
The tiger cannot fasten its claws in him,
And weapons of war cannot thrust their blades into him.
And for what reason?
Because in him there is no room for death.135
Striving after life leads to death, but a good preserver of life is invulnerable to death. How is one to leave no room for death without striving intensely after life? That is the secret of the immortals, who make their first literary appearance in Zhuangzi. Their lives are collected in Liexian Zhuan (Collected Biographies of Immortals, ed. Lu Xiang, c. 79–8 BCE), and their mysterious diet informs the macrobiotic instructions found in manuscripts in tombs.136
For the Confucian whose Way is something to be followed, a path, the Daoist tangles the mind. More teasing and less portentous than Laozi, Zhuangzi challenges the transparency of language, the medium we live in: “Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?”137 Irreverent, yet profound, Zhuangzi also challenges the rites and even the nature of death.
Correct mourning rituals, the central concern of the Confucian Book of Rites, the Zhuangzi violates shockingly in multiple anecdotes. Zhuangzi’s wife dies, and he is found beside her corpse singing and drumming a tub. He explains to his horrified friend that his wife’s progress from nothing to nothing is merely “the order of things pass[ing] on”: “I looked back to her beginning and the time before she was born…. In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born. Now there’s been another change and she’s dead. It’s just like the progression of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter.”138 Death belongs. “[I]f I think well of my life, for the same reason I must think well of my death.”139 Rather than devaluing or de-terrorizing death by making it nothing, in the Lucretian mode, Zhuangzi gives death a positive, if momentary, value. Going further, he considers the condition of being dead as potentially superior to being alive.
Playing with that paradoxical possibility, Zhuangzi turns over many metaphors. Death might be a way back to the home of one’s youth, a captivity better than the freedom one has lost (Lady Li), a situation one would not trade for a kingdom, or so a skull tells him. Traveling, Zhuangzi sees a clean skull beside the road and asks it what it did wrong to lie unburied and exposed, supposing three types of evil deeds, or perhaps just cold and hunger, or perhaps just time. He uses the skull for a pillow that night, and the skull appears in a dream full of contempt for Zhuangzi’s foolish living ideas. “Among the dead there are no rulers above, no subjects below, and no chores of the four seasons. With nothing to do, our springs and autumns are as endless as heaven and earth. A king facing south on his throne could have no more happiness than this.” Zhuangzi does not buy it: if the Clerk of Destinies re-fleshed him, surely the skull would want to return to parents, family, home? The skull wrinkles his fleshless brow and seems to say no, “Why would I throw away more happiness than that of a king on a throne and take on the troubles of a human being again?”140 The skull’s account of death is very dead: there is no secret or hidden life in it. To the skull’s question, a medical text has a quick answer in another question and answer: “What is the most valuable thing under Heaven? Life.”141
The opportunity to be re-fleshed by the Clerk of Destinies was not entirely theoretical. In 297 BCE, three years after his death, a man was returned to life after an appeal to “the Director of the Life-mandate” initiated by his patron, the general Xi Wu.142 The resurrection account turned up in a tomb dating before 206 BCE, too late for the historical Zhuangzi (370–301 BCE), but not for additions to the original text. Under such circumstances, the skull’s rejection becomes more considered, emphatic, and paradoxical. There is no violation of common sense. That belongs to the earliest literary portrayal of an immortal old flying man, perhaps a popular belief, perhaps a poet’s invention elaborating Laozi’s “one…. good preserver of his life.” Zhuangzi unleashes the fantastic immortals of later religion, art, and story and deadly practical research.
Ying-shih Yü cites Zhuangzi’s first chapter as the earliest description of ascetic, reclusive, “otherworldly” immortals: “Far away on the mountain of Gu Ye there lived a spiritual man. His flesh and skin were like ice and snow. His manner was elegant and graceful as that of a maiden. He did not eat any of the five grains, but inhaled the wind and drank the dew. He rode on clouds, drove along the flying dragons, and thus rambled beyond the four seas.”143 The person reporting this phenomenon finds it “insane and refuse[s] to believe it.”
His companion scolds him for his misunderstanding: “This man, with this virtue of his, is about to embrace the ten thousand things and roll them into one…. There is nothing that can harm this man. Though flood waters pile up to the sky, he will not drown. Though a great drought melts metal and stone and scorches the earth and hills, he will not be burned…. Why should he consent to bother about mere things?”144
The response slides smoothly from the challenge to such a person’s existence (repeated by Wang Chong in the first century CE, “The Spuriousness of the Tao”145) to a defense of his abandoning his Confucian social responsibilities. Similarly, the three friends, of whom two sang to the third’s corpse, had prized joining with others without joining with others, leaving earth below: “Who can climb up to heaven and wander in the mists, roam the infinite, and forget life forever and forever?”146 While Confucians, Legalists, and Mohists left it alone, other proto-Daoists scrambled after real immortality. Immortality sometimes meant merely “longevity,” but it also slid beyond longevity to not dying at all.
The boundary is difficult to police: a quest for “immortality” becomes mere “longevity” when someone dies. Not dying was sought through diet, breathing, herbs, elixirs, yogic practices, alchemical researches, and magical practices to bypass death. More than one Han emperor lost his life taking poisonous elixirs, including cinnabar, that promised to lengthen what they ended. In the Six Dynasties period (220–589), Daoist texts propose three to twenty-one ways to make cinnabar edible.147 Living long, becoming a spirit, freeing oneself from form (as his friends sing Sanghu has done in Zhuangzi), traveling magically through the cosmos appear in the medical literature of the age: “Long life is generated through storing and accumulating. As for the increasing of this life, above one observes in the Heavens, and below one distributes to the Earth. He who is capable will invariably become a spirit. He will therefore be able to be liberated from his form. He who clarifies the great way travels and traverses the clouds.”148
This world adjoined another, rich in paradises, immortals, elixirs of immortality. It enjoyed isles of the blessed and Mt. Penglai, where peaches ripen once in three thousand years. With a bureaucratic netherworld and thirty-two heavens, there were occasional ascents to heaven by daylight, and, more rarely, a resurrection. The Yellow Emperor departed for heaven on a dragon’s back, accompanied by a harem of seventy. A prince who died in 122 BCE took his household including dogs and cocks. In 7 BCE a humble official named Tang Gongfang took his wife, family, animals, and house (daubed with immortality ointment) in his translation into another existence. The Canon of Immortality (Xian Jing) explained that persons of high rank could escape death, but lower ranking persons had to die, shedding their bodies like cicadas.149 The empty tomb—clothing folded up, no body—was a popular motif.150
The desire for an existence elsewhere just like this one had long been expressed in tombs. Underground, a bureaucracy saw to the etiquette and administration of death, while activities, entertainments, visits, and paradises flourished, for those who could afford them. Among the entertainments was reading. In jade headrests, on bamboo slips, people carried with them their favorite texts, ranging from copies of Laozi in a concubine’s tomb (c. 233–202 BCE) to medical texts instructing in proper diet and care of the yin (penis), and hopeful tales of other people’s resurrections.151 These dead now share their reading, adding texts unknown before the excavation of the tombs. (Had the Greeks done the same, we might have Sappho.) Writing tools—ink stones, ink, and brushes—also appear, as if official duties, Jessica Rawson suggests, or poetry were to continue in the tomb.152
From Neolithic times (c. 4000 BCE) the Chinese had buried their dead with utensils and food. Dragons, tigers, and constellations later represented the cosmos.153 They invented coffins, and the I Ching comments on the change. From the Shang through the early Han (third century BCE), they took others with them. Human sacrifices numbering 166 at the highest to 5 at the lowest, accompanied important deceased persons. Some persons sacrificed had their own coffins near the center; others lay at the periphery without coffins. Some had their own burial goods; others were mutilated. Attendance, but also protection: tombs of fallen Qin rulers were promptly vandalized.154
The persistence of human sacrifice down to the third century BCE, diminishing from the fourth century,155 suggests an unwillingness to send powerful dead below alone or, given the advance planning such tombs required, the unwillingness of the living to descend without such company as they were accustomed to. In the fifth century BCE, the first tomb found with apertures for the po to circulate surrounded its marquis with eight women in coffins in his chamber, and thirteen in another chamber. He would not be lonely, or bored, with such companionship. Perhaps they shared the gold vessels for food under his coffin.156 There would always be someone there, someone he already knew.
In the Eastern Zhou (771–256 BCE), terrestrial deities appear who might be underworld deities: Lord of the Earth, Master of the Place, God of Posthumous Journey, God of Life-Mandate, and deities to manage dangerous ghosts who died unnaturally.157 Tombs acquired beds, tables and lamps, often of better quality than the traditional ritual offerings.158 From about the fifth century BCE, what Wu Hung calls “the happy home,” and Jessica Rawson “a new view of the universe,” begins to appear. Tombs represent a cosmic environment, the immortal paradise (from early Han), and comfortable living spaces—as if “the tomb builders provided all the answers they knew to questions about the afterlife.”159 Enjoying musical instruments, elaborate foodstuffs, and doors and windows, the po soul moves about.
Inscriptions from Han tombs record nearly twenty kinds of subterranean officials who govern the netherworld in general and tombs specifically.160 In 168 BCE, the Household Assistant from the family of the Marquis of Dai wrote to the langzhong in charge of the dead with a “list of mortuary objects” to be forwarded to “the Lord of the Grave (Zhusang Jun).” Three tiers communicate: the Household Assistant in this world, “the Assistant in charge of funeral goods” in the next who receives the complete list of goods to transmit to his superior, “the Lord Administrator of funeral goods.” 161 Functionaries addressed those of their own rank, so a town’s Assistant Magistrate addressed the “Underworld Assistant.” Sometimes the deceased reported his death himself to the underworld Lord (Dixia Zhu).162 The officials were often historical figures, transplanted to another life. As in other bureaucracies, there is error: and this bureaucracy corrects it. When Xi Wu declared that Dan had been summoned too early, “he was not yet fated to die,” the mistake was rectified, after three years.163
Coordinating this world and the next, as he consolidated China, the Emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BCE) cobbled together spirit worlds.164 Confucius had been dead about three hundred years when the emperor declared Confucianism the official doctrine of the state.165 He modeled his palace and gardens on a Daoist paradise.166 When a fang shih, or diviner, told him that T’ai i was the supreme celestial deity, he established the worship of T’ai i (Grand One) at his capital in 113 BCE.167 He sought elixirs of immortality, sending ships in quest of the blessed isles. Disappointed by a Daoist practitioner who died before he delivered the promised elixir, he executed the next two practitioners before they failed him.
As the emperor intervened to shape heaven, Heaven became more interventionist.168 In the Huai-nan tzu, ante 139 BCE, fusing Confucian, legalist, and Daoist materials, Heaven, acting in this world (the only one, multileveled), punishes the unjust, as earthly sovereigns do, while it rewards the virtuous by saving them from death.169 That responsibility had been the ancestors’, not heaven’s, the family’s, not the state’s. Wang Chong criticizes the concept, in the first century CE.170 Others criticized Heaven’s justice when the wise and good suffered untimely deaths and misfortunes.171 A monotheistic problem that dualism solves and polytheism avoids, dubious events became Heaven’s will, rather than the outcome of a contest between ancestors and families or the meddling of spirits of the heavens, winds, stars, mountains, water, death, and the grave. Meanwhile some thirty-six thousand demons were required by ordinance to keep away from tombs, their names listed and persons described for 320.172
Gorgeous as were the tombs, hopeful the medical texts, orderly the rituals, with misty blessed isles circled by immortals, not everyone was reconciled to loss, or imagined a destination for the vanished spirit even so certain as the Yellow Springs. So Cai Yong (132–192 CE) lamented Lady Ma:
She is gone, never to return,
Sinking into the great darkness.
O! Alas!
Her table and mat are set out in vain;
Her curtains and screens are put up to no purpose.
Such things are still here,
But we don’t see their owner.
The qi173 of her hun soul whirls and drifts.
Where can we settle her spirit?
Upon what can her sons (now) depend?
And to what can her daughters draw near?174
NEW DIRECTIONS IN CHINA: PURE LAND AND CH’AN
When Buddhism reached China after 60 CE, its missionaries proceeding north through Gandhara and Afghanistan and then east, the Buddha was taken for a western barbarian flying immortal, able to bring good fortune. Its key concepts were translated at first in Daoist terms.175 It seemed clear that when Laozi disappeared, he had gone south and become known as “Buddha.” Daoist metaphysics led Wang Fu (90?–165?), the Confucian political thinker, to complain that “Scholars nowadays like to talk about matters concerning vacuity and nonbeing.”176 The Buddhist variants emptiness and non-self proved equally stimulating.
In the first millennium CE, Buddhism and Daoism, John Lagerwey suggests, “run each other ragged and wear each other smooth in a complex process involving debate, plagiarism, appropriation, revelation, and synthesis” until “a relatively harmonious cohabitation” of Buddhism, Daoism, popular religion, and Confucianism emerges in the Tang (618–907).177 Daniel Overmyer places the emergence of Daoism proper between the second and fifth centuries CE.178 The timing suggests provocation by Buddhist competition, and the Taoist Canon charts the absorption of Buddhist ideas and images, though Buddhists never conquered the tombs. Among the dead in a sixth-century CE sarcophagus, Daoist deities fly, wings sprouting from their shoulders, dragons drawing chariots through the sky, female deities drawn by tigers, hares running through hillsides, jeweled flowers, musical processions. Scenes of nature, deities, immortals, dragons, clouds, and flying: Daoist paradises liberated the dead.179 Choice was not always necessary. In the garden scenery of one spacious Tang tomb appear both a Buddhist monastery and Daoist temple.180 Buddhism’s progress was slow, but it slid into and filled out existing conceptual lacunae as it competed with established systems of thought, simultaneously recognizable and revolutionary.
The stunning possibility of rebirth, of living again in this world after death, struck a chord among seekers of premortem immortality, although to others it seemed simply incredible, like the immortal in Zhuangzi: “The Buddhists say that after a man dies he will be reborn. I do not believe in the truth of these words…. ”181 Among third-to-fourth-century CE Daoists, one earthly immortal, a Mr. Puoshi, preferred to remain among worldly pleasures rather than ascend to heaven.182 With rebirth, one died, but one could get this world back, and better, with diligent last-moment concentration.
Explaining rebirth, Buddhism gained an immortal soul. Hui-yüan (fourth century CE) described that immortal spirit as “an extremely subtle, immaterial and everlasting principle in man” that leaps from one body to another like flame on firewood, the emotions keeping it in existence, indestructible.183 To a context already accustomed to precise and careful administrative calibrations in the netherworld bureaucracy, Buddhism brought a thoroughly systematized other-worldly cosmology for heavens above and hells below.
Hells were an innovation. Five Daoist underworld gods became Ten Yama Kings, with scribes, wardens, in ten courts for eighteen hells or eighty-four thousand.184 Chinese dynasties had struggled, risen, and fallen without a punitive underworld to secure the moral order. A cosmology defined by Heaven, Earth, and Water had no obvious place for “hell.” The word devised was “Earth Prison”: a tomb with no visiting privileges. The threats of the Daoist T’ai-p’ing ching (Scripture of Great Peace, second century CE) use penal and judicial terminology, but are nothing to the sword-leaf forests of the Pali canon or Genshin’s later Ōjōyōshū. Death itself is the initial punishment, incurred by the acts themselves, not by Heaven’s intervention, and responsibility is one’s own:
If a man commits evils unceasingly, his name will then be entered into the Register of Death. He will be summoned to the Underworld Government…where his body is to be kept. Alas! When can he ever get out? His soul will be imprisoned and his doings in life will be questioned. If his words are found to be inconsistent, he will be subject to further imprisonment and torture. His soul is surely going to suffer a great deal. But who is to blame?185
Daoist hells flourish after about 400 CE, keeping up with Buddhism. Texts that treat the Nine Realms of Darkness always explain how to escape the Department of the Long Night.186 Ultimately, the netherworld was inserted among the deities of the lower body parts.187
In China, the dominance of Mahāyāna seems in retrospect inevitable. Daoism had already come under attack from Confucians for its preference of the recluse over the socially committed actor. As early as the Zhuangzi the immortals’ withdrawal requires defense. The Daoist Scripture of Great Peace ranks those who sought to “transcend this world with…family” above those who seek only “personal salvation.”188 So Mahāyānists charged those they called “Hīnayāna” with selfishness. Of the two principal Buddhist orientations originating in China, Ch’an (Zen in Japan) and Amitābha’s Pure Land, the latter overflows with compassion for living beings, the former aims at awakening—the Buddha nature, the one mind, the original enlightenment within all sentient beings.
Every Buddha, and many a bodhisattva, has a Buddha field, realms of influence, or, more narrowly, a Pure Land. The bodhisattva Maitreya, the Buddha-to-come, resides in Tusita Heaven (Tosotsuten, highly valued in Tibet and in Japan by the Shingon sect). The bodhisattva Kannon has Fudaraku, across the sea. Śākyamuni himself preaches the Lotus Sutra eternally in Sacred Eagle, or Vultures’, Peak.189 Sukhāvatī (blissful land), lying billions of worlds away in the western quarter of the universe, is the Pure Land of Amitāyus (infinite or eternal life) or Amitābha (infinite or immeasurable light) Buddha, in Japan Amida, in China Amituo.190
Developing in the same period as Hindu bhakti, devotion to a Buddha reshapes Buddhist cosmology from vertical heavens to lateral Pure Lands, extending in the ten directions, as the heavens collapse into the six realms, displaced as destination. Creating non-returners, Pure Lands shift the devotee’s focus at death from liberation or heaven to rebirth in a Pure Land, where enlightenment will be attained in the future. Those who choose Maitreya will return with him to find their enlightenment then. Most Pure Land sutras originated in India, but the three regarded as fundamental to Amitābha’s Pure Land were combined, and one was written, in China.191
Amitābha’s Pure Land desires the salvation of all sentient beings (usually no animals reside in a Pure Land, but there are exceptions192). Created by the fulfillment of the bodhisattva Dharmakāra’s vows (forty-eight altogether), Sukhāvatī forever prevents the devotee’s falling into the lower realms (vow 2). To be reborn there, mindfulness suffices, if the dying call on Amitābha’s name ten times (vow 18). (Excepted are those who commit one of the five great crimes: murder of father, mother, or arhat, injury to a buddha, schism in the order [sangha].) The Buddha and his retinue welcome the dying devotee (vow 19), and sincere desire to be reborn in Amitābha’s Pure Land will be fulfilled (vow 20).193 The eighteenth vow underlies the recitation of the nenbutsu (nembutsu) to achieve salvation, literally “thought” + “Buddha,” or “mindfulness of the Buddha.” Elaborate deathbed practices enabled the dying to recite serenely “Nāmo ‘mitābhāya Buddhāya,’ ‘Honor to Amitābha Buddha’” ten times while thinking of Amitābha, hopeful for that hierarchy-inverting vision.194 It sounds very simple. Nāgārjuna described devotion as the “easy practice” to become a non-returner, but reaching the Pure Land demanded strenuous meditation and visualization techniques.195 A moment’s distraction could lose everything. So in medieval Japan Shinran’s daughter feared that his death showed he had not reached the Pure Land, but others reassured her.196
If compassion for others and their eventual enlightenment sustains Pure Land, present enlightenment animates the Ch’an meditation school. China’s agile, impudent ninth-century CE Platform Sutra mocks Pure Land devotees and misguided interpreters of other sutras who anticipate enlightenment (bodhi) in a Pure Land: “To search for Bodhi somewhere beyond this world/ Is like looking for a rabbit with antlers.”197 Enlightenment is possible only now, in this world, from a human body, and it is this moment only that instantiates transcendence. Insight may be gained by strenuous sitting meditation (zazen, Japan) or walking meditation, or at a blow in a sudden cognitive shift (the koans). Buddha-nature is common to all. The project is to realize that nature, to become a Buddha now: “Without depending on words and letters/ Pointing directly to the human mind;/ Seeing the innate nature, one becomes a Buddha.”198 The realization cannot be taught; it can only be performed. The afterlife evaporates: mist, dew, sparkle. Buddhahood achieved, there is no rebirth to fear or to desire.
Pure Land looks to Amitābha Buddha “without,” Ch’an to Buddha-nature “within.”199 China treated the antithetical emphases as complementary. Suggesting the vicissitudes of schools, in Japan’s Soto Zen, the Zen practitioner in the funeral service performs the Buddhahood of the dead. A torch draws in the air a circle, symbol of enlightenment and emptiness; the monk says, “The cages of life and death are but phantom relations. When these phantom relations perish, [one] returns to the source. One morning: wind and moon. One morning: perishing…. The late [person’s name] took refuge in the Great Ascetic [the Buddha], converged on the place beyond knowledge [enlightenment], and marched through the gateway to perfect nirvana…. Where the red fire burns through the body, there sprouts a lotus, blossoming within the flames.”200
Not everyone went to a Pure Land or achieved Buddhahood now, or attempted to do so. In stories China’s other-worlds preserved an incorrigible this-worldliness. Probably ninth century or later, the assessor of “T’ai Tsung in Hell” exploits his lowly position in the court of the dead, and his wits, to improve his status above ground, in this life, where happiness is found, or not at all. His next-world job serves as stepping stone to greater prosperity in this, and he keeps both jobs.201 The worlds of the dead and the living are simultaneous, parts of a whole where actions in one produce effects in the other.
Arrived at the court of the dead, worried but still arrogant, the fratricidal emperor T’ai Tsung humiliates Lord Yama as “only sector-leader of a parcel of demons.”202 Yama slinks off, leaving the case to a low-level underworld functionary, the assessor Ts’ui Tzu-yü. In a mortifying failure of etiquette, the emperor is left waiting. Anxious, Ts’ui Tzu-yü nevertheless outwits his master (who expects something for nothing, as the oblivious powerful always do). To escape death by justifying his actions, the emperor need only explain that a sage ruler will murder his brothers and imprison his father (as this emperor had done) to save a kingdom. The consequence: the emperor gives the functionary a much finer post above ground, returns to life himself for ten years (he’d asked only for five days), and promotes the copying of the Great Cloud Sutra. A wily bureaucrat triumphs over a scary emperor and secures a harmonious outcome for every one, including the cosmos, where the sutras multiply.
TIBET: A VERY BRIEF GUIDE TO READING THE BOOK OF THE DEAD
The relatives and friends surrounding us in this life
Are like a gathering of shoppers at a market….
When the market closes, the shoppers will disperse.
—Tibetan Book of the Dead203
Buddhism reached Tibet in the seventh century from China and developed a vast canon under Indian influence. Saluted in George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (2016), the Book of the Dead or Bardo Thos-grol Chen-mo (Great Liberation by Hearing in the Intermediate States) first appears in the fourteenth century, revealed as a long-hidden eighth-century text.204 The Tibetan tradition possesses a rare self-consciousness that the rites of the dead serve the living, that the book of the dead guides life.205 That consciousness is explicit in the title: Liberation by Hearing. It is also explicit in the text: the living are enjoined to read the book three times a day, to read it aloud, and to read it in public places.206 The dead have up to forty-nine days before rebirth to achieve the liberation the living also seek. When the book is read to the dead, who hears it? It is not only the dead who listen.
Entering the text as a general reader is not easy. There is no substitute for an informed guide through a complex philosophical and meditative tradition so different from our own. A barista in Chicago, eying the orange cover of the complete translation, with the Dalai Lama’s own introduction and generous apparatus, lamented having tried and given up. This remarkable edition, for such readers, is best grasped, as Swift would say, by the tail: starting from the end and working back, from the popular play “A Masked Drama of Rebirth,” a Tibetan Everyman (chap. 13), through the “Aspirational Prayers” (chap. 12) to “The Great Liberation by Hearing” (chap. 11). The terms once familiar, the reader can start again from the dazzling beginning.
The opening, it must be confessed, is seductive. Mortality salience surfaces at once. In the daily verses of the preliminary practice (chap. 1,“Natural Liberation of the Nature of Mind…”), consciousness of death excites the practitioner to persevere, to “start…with the reflection on death” as the way to completion. Ten similes represent the world of phenomena we live in, some beautiful, some requiring explication: selfless, empty, free from conceptual elaboration, illusion, mirage, dream, reflected image, celestial city, echo, reflection of the moon in water, bubble, optical illusion, intangible emanation. There is a truth to be realized, but we are caught in cyclic existence, overwhelmed by our past actions, and need to be saved from the “six-dimensional city,” the familiar six realms of rebirth.
The truth to be realized is the non-dual Buddha nature of mind. “Just to recognize this is enough! If you recognize this brilliant essence of your own conscious awareness to be the Buddha [nature], then to gaze into intrinsic awareness is to abide in the enlightened intention of all the buddhas” (231).
Looking for Buddha-nature elsewhere than in the mind is futile. People who look “to something else, above and beyond [mind],/Resemble someone who has already found an elephant, but is out looking for its tracks [elsewhere]” (51). For those of us taken with that elephant, “A Masked Drama of Rebirth” is a “skillful means” leading to the “Aspirational Prayers” and “The Great Liberation by Hearing.”
The “Aspirational Prayers” draw the reader into the solitude and terror of death. Sent into a great wilderness, alone, driven by past actions, buffeted by cause and effect, with no firm ground, “I roam in cyclic existence” (310–12). Existential anxiety is soothed by the helps that surround and enclose the dying, buddhas, bodhisattvas, and reassuring knowledge provided in the recitation itself.
“The Great Liberation by Hearing” is the “skillful means which liberates yogins of average ability during the intermediate states” (225) of dying, reality, and rebirth. Superior practitioners, recognizing the inner radiance, are liberated in the first state, at the moment of death. Most dead are confused, uncertain, terrified by the lights and sounds arising, panicked, and enter the second intermediate state, reality. Still identifying as bodies, they realize they are dead when they try to speak to the living, who cannot perceive them. From within the consciousness and past actions of the dead, phantasmagoric apparitions arise, lights, sounds, the peaceful deities emerging, but the dead may turn away, “[a]lthough it is impossible not to be liberated by [the successful recognition of] this [introduction]” (243). At any moment, liberation is possible, the text exhorts and counsels.
The wrathful deities arise from the power of evil past actions and “habitual tendencies.” Yama Dharmarāja will appear, vast and terrifying, but his forms “have no material substance. Emptiness cannot be harmed by emptiness.” “Your body is a mental body, formed of habitual tendencies. Therefore, even if you are slain and cut into pieces, you will not die. You are [in reality] a natural form of emptiness, so there is no need to be afraid” (268). To achieve liberation, the dead must recognize their own emptiness and radiance. Finally, the unliberated dead enter the third intermediate state of rebirth, longing for a new body and finding their way home into cyclic existence.
“The Great Liberation by Hearing” begins with the greatest of all “Aspirational Prayers.” Death manifests its power to unify survivors, strengthening the community that comes together in the shadow of the word, extending concern to all beings, in a series of wishes unlikely to be fulfilled, but worth wishing, though they may be achievable only by the dead, as Zhuangzi suspected:
May all sentient beings be endowed with happiness!
May they all be separated from suffering and its causes!
May they be endowed with joy, free from suffering!
May they abide in equanimity, free from attraction and aversion! (220).
Wishing does not make it so, but it makes us feel for a moment as though it might be so. And for the instant of recitation, it is so; words displace reality.
As to the future state, in the play Masked Drama of Rebirth wrongdoer Lakṣanāraka is chagrined to discover that, unlike the phenomenal world, the hells are real. He had been certain that once his body decayed and his mind vanished, there would be nothing left to go to any hells, and he laughed at those who feared them. Fierce Yama Dharmarāja cannot save him from the consequences of his past actions. Yet no one wants sufferings to last forever. The play ends with a well-doing householder rewarded and a final prayer: “May the hells be exhausted and emptied!” (333).
JAPAN’S DIALECTICS AND THREE INTONATIONS OF PURE LAND
In Japan, Buddhism officially arrives with a gift of sutras from a Korean principate in the mid-sixth century, shortly before Japanese literature begins with two collections of historic, mythological tales, the Kojiki, (Record of Ancient Matters, 711–12), commissioned by the Empress Genmei, and the Nihon shoki or Nihongi (Chronicles of Japan, 720), dedicated to her daughter Empress Gensho (both ruling empresses). The Nihongi recounts the contested arrival of Buddhism to a land that already possessed “180 Gods [kami] of Heaven and Earth,” “yin and yang” and four other worlds, several of Chinese origin.207
A seventh-century widow wishes for her dead spouse a “heavenly land of long life,” the Daoist-inflected tenjukoku.208 The Nihongi and Kojiki allude to an “eternal land” across the seas of Toko-yo no kuni (the land of the ancestors or gods). Its waves lap the shores of Ise, and fragrant fruits flourish out of season as on Mt. Penglai. Below the ground is Ne no kuni, the root country, a netherworld to which the rude storm god Susanoo is expelled and where he belatedly takes up residence after his marriage. Although being sent down is a punishment, there is nothing disagreeable about his new terrain. Roots in the earth suggest life and growth, whether vegetation or ancestors. More aversive is the familiar land of darkness, the land of Yomi, written with the Chinese characters for “Yellow Springs.”209
That quiet Chinese place has become a scene of horror and a powerful pollution taboo. A thwarted Orpheus, the deity-kami Izanagi meant to rescue his dead sister-spouse Izanami from death, but she had eaten among the dead. Lighting a torch, he saw her—rotting, maggot-ridden, eaten. Horrified, he flees, she pursues, and he seals her in her dark cave, Yomi, with a rock, like a hillside burial. Izanami screams that she will destroy one thousand human grasses a day; Izanagi replies that he will have fifteen hundred born. Cleansing himself from this pollution, Izanagi bathes; from his right eye comes the sun goddess Amaterasu, his left the moon, and his nose that ill-behaved storm god.210 Some commentators identify Susanoo’s Ne no kuni with Yomi, and Susanoo wails because he wants to follow his mother Izanami to “the Nether Land.”211 But he never meets her, and the connotations of the spaces differ. Susanoo never rots, nor is he associated with others rotting. Izanami becomes Yömö-tu-opokāmi, Great deity of Yomi, but no one visits her, even when they draw near the “yellow springs.”212
When the Nihongi laments a king’s death in battle, two undifferentiated entities follow antithetical trajectories. Both are “he,” but one disappears into air, space; the other sinks downward to darkness, like Lady Ma. The dead king “passed upwards and was lost in the infinite. Like flowing water, he returns not again, but remains at rest in the dark dwelling.”213 “Lost in the infinite” is less positive than the shen’s movement upward to divinity, brightness. Up, down, and fluidity in between: that was all even a king could expect.
Japan had flourished with no ethicized afterlife, no retribution beyond the grave, no underworld gods threatening the dead. Izanami sealed in her cave threatens the living, not the dead. From his Ne no kuni, Susanoo threatens no one. Underground, he disappears from the Nihongi. In the Kojiki, his daughter’s lover, who has already been killed twice, outwits him, making off with his bow, sword of life, and daughter. He shouts good advice after them, and all is well. Kami, or spirits, inhabited places, objects, and persons: earth, rivers, mountains, wind, sun, moon, trees, rocks, gods, fire, and certain people, living or dead. They could be helpful, vengeful, or indifferent, and they required placating and solicitation. Digging into the earth was particularly disturbing to them and demanded propitiation. Court and local officials oversaw the appropriate rites, and the Nihongi recounts opposition by such officials to a new kami (Buddha) arrived from Korea.
The spirits compete and collaborate with Buddhism into the present, with the Kojiki and the Nihongi laying out alternate perspectives. The Kojiki ignores Buddhism to tell of creation, history, and the kami. The Nihongi integrates systems, but also describes their conflict. Chinese yin and yang appear unseparated before creation, and the word Shinto when an emperor succeeds who “believed in the Law of Buddha and reverenced the Way of the Gods, [Shinto],” the first instance of the term.214 The new kami’s opponents represented their opposition as loyalty to the indigenous gods against a powerful foreign import.
That conflict has periodically re-entered Japanese politics in the form of revivals of “authentic” Shinto and hostility to Buddhism, extending to destruction of temples and artifacts as late as the nineteenth century. The political implications have made scholars cautious. No separate, unbroken lineage of pre-Buddhist indigenous practices exists, as the word “Shinto” seems to imply and as the State Shinto of the Meiji era insisted. “Shinto” has a clear referent, the way of the kami, but that way has a history intertwined with Buddhism, power, and politics, sometimes collaborating, sometimes coopting or coopted, and sometimes hostile.
The Buddha arrived as a gold and copper statue, with three sutras in 552 CE, according to the Nihongi.215 The Golden Splendor Sutra (Sanskrit Svuarṇa prabhāsa sutra, Japanese Konkōmyō saishōō kyō) was early among the most popular at court, frequently read and lectured on, with one hundred copies sent to the provinces.216 In 577 CE, more books and six Buddhists disembarked as gifts from Korea (Pèkché)—an ascetic, a meditator, a nun, a mantra-reciter, a maker of images, and an architect.217 By 606 CE, Buddhist rites had been incorporated in imperial funerals.218 By 640 CE, the Larger Pureland Sutra had been explicated at court, and Buddhism remained a court monopoly, forbidden to be taught to common folk.219 According to the Nihongi, the “wonderful” new doctrine had been recommended as “most excellent [but] hard to explain and hard to comprehend.” It led “to a full appreciation of the highest wisdom,…every prayer…fulfilled.” Others, defending the interests of the gods already on the premises, attributed an epidemic to wrath at the new kami.220 Sutras were read when emperors were ill, but they worked less well than praying to the four directions, Chinese style, when rain was wanted.221
Folded into existing practices and beliefs, competing with kami and claiming them as adherents or predecessors, Buddhism brought a detailed, moralized account of what happened—or could happen—after death. Three moments are especially instructive about that afterlife’s trajectory into the living, dying present: Genshin’s tenth-century Ōjōyōshū, Fukansai Habian’s seventeenth-century Myōtei Mondō, and Natsume Sōseki’s twentieth-century I Am a Cat. Written by a Tendai monk, the Ōjōyōshū (985) is a Buddhist treatise that makes startlingly vivid to its readers or auditors the reality of the lives to come after death and shows them how to secure rebirth in Amida’s Pure Land. Enormously influential, it inspired paintings, poems, and, a century after the author’s death, two Buddhist schools that still command numerous adherents, Hōnen’s Jōdo-shū (Pure Land School) and Shinran’s Jōdo Shin-shū (True Pure Land School).
The second, Myōtei Mondō (1605), had no influence whatever. Written by a Zen-Buddhist Christian convert, it was not available in complete form until the late-twentieth century (1972). A dialogue between two Japanese nuns, Myōshū a Buddhist and Yūtei turned Christian, it attacked the afterlife accounts and belief systems of twelve Buddhist schools, Confucianism, and Shinto to promote the Christian afterlife. If Myōtei Mondō produced any Christian converts, they vanished in the Shogunate’s efforts to stamp out Christianity, after 1614. Habian himself abandoned Christianity in 1608. What Habian shows is the desire for a ground denied by Buddhist philosophical speculation, and he turns that speculation against the beliefs Genshin had made so immediate and so vivid. As to Natsume Sōseki, enthusiast of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, I Am a Cat (1905–1911) is just a novel narrated by a cat up to the cat’s last-moment thought. After Habian’s dissolving all possible belief, Sōseki’s cat illustrates the persistence of belief that does not need belief, when “afterlife” as an empirical phenomenon is irrelevant, or just not the point.
Written in six months following the funeral of his widowed mother (983 CE), revisiting a town he had not seen for thirty years, Genshin’s Ōjōyōshū (985 CE) takes the shape of a sutra as it moves away from “the unclean world” to the Pure Land “in the West ten thousand hundred millions lands away.”222 As a monk of the Tendai order, established at Mt. Hiei near Kyoto in 805 CE, Genshin (942–1071) privileged the Lotus Sutra and rigorous meditation and contemplation techniques to realize the one Buddha mind and nature, 223 but he was also sympathetic to Amida’s Pure Land. The Pure Land enabled those who could not achieve enlightenment through meditation in this world to do so in another. The Ōjōyōshū intends to help simple people escape the Lotus Sutra’s “burning house” through “the one gate of Nembutsu.”224
Unlike Hōnen (1133–1212, Jōdo-shū) and Shinran (1173–1263, Jōdo Shin-shū or Shin), whom his work inspired, Genshin regarded as intrinsic to the nembutsu recognition through deep meditation of one’s innate enlightenment, “self-insight,” but not everyone was capable of that.225 His allegiance to contemplative meditation is clear in the structure of his work, with seven of ten parts given to how to practice nembutsu. Like the Lotus Sutra, he adapts the dharma to all capacities, from country people at a funeral to an elite brotherhood formed to practice the nembutsu together and to assist each other in dying.226
Genshin begins with a campaign of terror: a blistering attack on sensory attachment to this world. Japan even more than China, with its reclusive immortals, seems to have lacked an indigenous renunciant tradition like India’s. Localities were required, the Nihongi reports, to contribute ten religious a year to monastic purposes. Nuns signed on before monks—whether coerced or seizing an escape from life’s usual offers. Giving up this world was a Buddhist innovation, at odds with ordinary mortal pleasures and intimacy with the kami that peopled the world unseen. The Ōjōyōshū works hard to generate revulsion at this world and longing for another. Disrupting a sutra’s correct order from bad to better and better, hells take more pages than the other five realms combined (hungry ghosts, beasts, ashuras, humans, heavens), and nothing improves within the six realms. The Pure Land itself is only half again as long as the hells.
Collected from Buddhist sutras, the eight hells from Repetition to No Interval inflict relentless physical suffering. The human realm, traditionally a privileged position for hearing the dharma en route to the heavens or enlightenment, disgusts (with impurity), suffers (age, death, sickness), and vanishes (impermanent). Genshin counts our bones—360—and sets the viscera rotting. Eighty-thousand worms crawl through cavities and orifices; the corpse bloats, pus oozes, birds and dogs feed on the remains. The body is a stinking mass of corruption that suffers innumerable agonies from birth to death—and withal so brief, impermanent and fleeting.
The heavens are agonizing to leave, the psychological suffering worse than hell pains, to lose bliss. Even the Daoist flying immortal, the hermit “who rides on the wind, sits on the clouds and flies about feely enjoying himself,” and sees “seven times the birth of a new world,” must ultimately face death—and traverse the six realms if he did “not desire the way of the Hotoke [Buddha].”227
With Amida’s Pure Land, Genshin proposes what seems a real other place to desire. Welcomed by the bodhisattvas Kwannon and Daiseishi descending, beholding Amida, arriving from a grass hut to a lotus seat, held safely in Kwannon’s arms, freed from fear of falling into the three evil realms: the devotee arrives where Nāgārjuna himself wished to go: “I, therefore, do nothing but offer my life to Mida and desire to enter the Pure Land.”228 In the Pure Land, one sees the Buddha and recites the scriptures, converses and meditates among jewels, beautiful clothes (that do not require mending, sewing, or cleaning), fragrances, flowers, and food with “sweet and sour” taste as the heart desires it.229 From millennium-later perspectives, there are notable absences: friends, family, intellectual activity alternate to the Buddhistic, famous people (as in Dante). In this exquisite space, their absence is not felt.
Apart from its emphasis on food, fragrance, wild ducks, and lotus ponds, Amida’s Pure Land differs from Christian paradises principally in that it includes the idea of progress beyond the Pure Land to enlightenment. The final pleasure of Pure Land is “Pleasures of Making Progress in the Way of the Buddha.”230 That progress may take kalpas, but it is part of the understanding of the place. (As a unit of measurement, a kalpa is the time it takes a granite mountain to disappear when a butterfly’s wing brushes it once every three years.) Christians have nowhere else to go and nothing more to achieve once they reach their blissful abode. Those who reach Amida’s Pure Land are “non-returners,” but another goal awaits. The impermanence of the goal underlies what has seemed a contradiction in Genshin.
Genshin prefers (Tendai) contemplative nembutsu to (Pure Land) invocation nembutsu, and he subordinates nembutsu to “immediate realization of Buddhahood” in Kanjin ryaku yōshū (Essentials of Self-insight).231 Nembutsu achieves the Pure Land, but only contemplative practices lead beyond to Buddhahood. As an epigraph to the Ōjōyōshū has it, “I was seeking the way of Buddha all through the night but it was really to find my own heart.”232 Nembutsu seeks and finds the Buddha. “My own heart” remains to be found.
That seeking engages visualization meditations of stunning complexity, laid out with careful instructions. Contemplating the Buddha-marks, the practitioner is told that they cannot be seen and then what he will see and accomplish when he does see what cannot be seen: “The fleshy topknot: There is no one who can actually see this. It appears high and round like a heavenly parasol. Those who wish to contemplate it in detail should contemplate like this: Above this topknot is a great aureola of a thousand colors. Each color produces eighty-four thousand apparition-Buddhas. Above the topknot of each apparition-Buddha there is also an aureola. The various rays follow one upon another reaching to the countless worlds of the ten regions. Moreover, in the ten regions there are apparition-Bodhisattvas who descend like clouds and surround the apparition-Buddhas…. Those who rejoice in this mark will annul one hundred billion kalpas of extremely heavy bad karma and will not fall into the three evil paths.”233
Genshin also codified deathbed practices that endure to the present. Mindfulness at death was the key opening the door to the desired Buddha land. The dying person was advised to “hold a five-colored cord fastened to a Buddha image, visualize Amida’s coming, and chant the nenbutsu,…so as to generate the all-important ‘last thought’ that would ensure birth in his Pure Land.”234 Holding the cord communicated following the Buddha, the chant filled the mouth and ears with Buddha, the color and image the eyes, the cord the touch. Sick and dying persons were reminded of their good deeds to assist them in concentrating on the Buddha, and the last thought at the moment of death enabled a joyous transit to the Pure Land, with Amida descending to lead the dying there.
After 1680, the first two parts of the Ōjōyōshū were frequently printed alone in illustrated editions, without the practical instructions.235 Those parts address only two doctrinal points. Evidently the view is common, and Genshin holds it dangerous, that the world continues to exist, but people don’t. Genshin is earnest against a heresy that holds the four great elements (earth, wind, fire, water) to be permanent and the body impermanent, for it dies and dissolves into the four great elements. (Ajita’s) illiterate, illusory position misunderstands “the real nature of things” and the complex activity within the four elements.236 Buddhism aims for the annihilation of annihilation, not annihilation, and that can be confusing. As Genshin quotes the Daikyō, “All work is impermanent. This is the law of life and annihilation. To end the annihilation of life and annihilation, such calm annihilation is true happiness.”237
Nāgārjuna is quoted every few pages, a poem, an aperçu. Whether authentic or midrashic, the citations mark what Nāgārjuna meant to Genshin. Where Nāgārjuna is, the Void cannot be far behind. Genshin supposes someone asking, “It is easy to understand the teachings about Impurity, Suffering and Impermanency and that every phenomenon which appears to us has a noumenon back of it, but what is meant by the Void?”
The answer is to think it “like a dream and a vision.” There follows a long story of a man trying to keep silent while asleep but finally his dream becomes too real and he cries out. Most people live the dream of vain thoughts and look upon things in the Void as though they were real—and never wake up.238 Understanding the Void is essential to Buddhahood, as Amida himself explains: “Knowing that all phenomena are like a flash of lightning, let them decide upon the way of the Bodhisattva, achieve the various virtues, obtain a fixed mind and attain Buddhahood! If they understand that the nature of all phenomena is voidness and that there is no ego, and if they seek eagerly after the pure Buddha land, they shall certainly obtain a land like this.”239 Or as Nāgārjuna is quoted immediately after: “The law of all existence is Impermanency and of a Non-ego Principle. It is like the moonlight upon the water, like the sparkle of a dew drop, or a flash of lighting. There is no law which can be called a Law.”240
The fame of Genshin’s text was compounded by its inspiring first artists and then Hōnen (1133–1212) and his disciple Shinran (1173–1263). In their reforms, Genshin’s subtleties and complications drop away, along with his methods of veneration and visualization. Hōnen took his epigraph from Genshin: “Among causes of rebirth, nembutsu is fundamental” and privileged recitation over meditative nembutsu. Recitation was the only needful action.241 Shinran emphasized the Buddha’s compassion and the devotee’s dependence on “other power” rather than “self power,” implicitly denigrating Genshin’s demanding meditative and contemplative practices. In turn, nembutsu practice inspired Nicheren (1222–1282), founder of the Nichiren school, who insisted on the primacy of the Lotus Sutra and an easy “self-power” practice to Buddhahood. He recommended chanting the formula Namu myō-hō ren-ge-kyō, “Honor to the Lotus Sutra of the True Dharma” and contemplating a wooden plaque inscribed with the formula.242 Valuing visuals, and auguring his work’s influence on artists, Genshin began the tradition of illustrating his work. He portrayed not a hell or even a hungry ghost, but Amida and the bodhisattvas welcoming the dying.243
Pure Land has been credited or charged with smoothing the way for Christianity in both Japan and Korea.244 Sir Charles Eliot, an eminent Victorian, refused to call it Buddhism, and western scholars have traditionally been more interested in other Buddhist schools. While the Bibliothèque nationale de France has a few studies of Pure Land, almost all written in English, it has many more studies of Zen, written in French. Fujita Kōtatsu has compassion for “an understandable lack of interest in a tradition superficially resembling Western monotheism.”245
It is surprising, then, to be told by a seventeenth-century ex–Zen Buddhist monk that there is no afterlife in Pure Land. The monks know better—something else—and are just not telling. A fictional widow, comforted for the death of her husband by a promised Pure Land reunion on a lotus flower, realizes she has been deceived. The promise is, in every sense, empty: “[T]he heart of Buddhist teaching is that neither the gods nor buddhas, nor Hell nor the Land of Ultimate Bliss, actually exist outside our minds. Now I realize why the monks used to say to me somewhat dismissively: ‘Now listen Myōshū. Hell and the Land of Ultimate Bliss, and the gods and buddhas are not what you think they are. But since enlightenment is difficult to attain just you go on sitting there chanting the nenbutsu.’ ”246 Myōshū feels betrayed by “skillful means.”
Fukansai Habian (1565–1621, a.k.a. Fabian Fucan) spent twenty years as a Christian convert and lay brother, assisting the Jesuit mission in Japan with an adapted, romanized Heike monogatari, aggressive Christian proselytizing in public debates, and the Myōtei Mondō (Myōtei Dialogues [1605]). The title blends the names of Myōshū, a Buddhist, and Yūtei, a Christian, who search for an afterlife through eight Buddhist schools (Kusha, Jōjitsu, Risshū, Hossō, Sanron, Kegon, Tendai, Shingon), plus Zen and Pure Land for ten, and Ikkō and Nicheren for twelve. Kusha, Jōjitsu, and Risshū belong to the “superficial” and “shallow” Hīnayāna, the others to the “profound” Mahāyāna (68). Shinto and Confucianism (with Daoism) follow. Finally, Yūtei shows Christianity’s superior afterlife and logic.
Habian left the Jesuits around 1608, before Christianity was outlawed in 1614. He complained of their arrogance and failure to ordain Japanese; they alleged in private correspondence that he had gone off with a lay sister. Jesuits ordained only one Japanese, not Habian, and most diocesan clergy were ordained after he left the order.247 In 1620 he published Deus Destroyed (Ha Daiusu), attacking Christianity from a Buddhist perspective, and he probably died the next year. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927) called him “a genius” and wrote a new section for Ha Daiusu in the story “Lucifer” (1918).248 Others have called him an “auto-didact,” as if he learned about Buddhism and other systems while reading on his own for the Jesuits. James Baskind has shown his intimate knowledge of a Rinzai Zen koan manual from Daitokuji monastery,249 so that derogatory term misleads. What is clear, and perhaps creates the “auto-didact” impression, is that Habian kicked over what he had been taught (up to the age of eighteen, when he converted) and set up his own unguided reason against the subtle teachings of the schools.
What Habian found—and then gave up—in Christianity was a ground for truth. He wanted truth that existed outside the mind, real, solid, empirical. In the Dialogues, he delights in scientific accounts of earth’s circumference, eclipses, the moon’s changes and light, or geographical accounts of the Khyber Pass. When he attacks a Buddhist school, tale, or doctrine, he often begins by contrasting a Buddhist myth with some discovery brought “by Christianity.” The same authority he attributed to western science, he gave, for a time, to Christian theological doctrines, especially its afterlife. The rational soul, anima rationalis, not faith, grounded Christian immortality,250 and he treated Confucian silence about the afterlife with unusual—for him—respect. Rejecting Christianity, he rejected not its concept of the afterlife, but the truth of its concept. Resurrection and ascent to heaven sound “quite splendid,” but in a faith perverse from its roots, all must be “devilish illusion, magical trickery.”251
In that translation from Deus Destroyed, Habian sounds angry, like someone who has been cheated of something he wanted and realizes he has been played. To end the Dialogues he had expressed a pious hope: “But this I have done as a prayer that I may be accepted into Heaven in the next life” (194). When he jeers at the nonexistence of the Christian afterlife in Deus Destroyed, he does not reassert any Buddhist afterlife against it. The next life remains an illusion. The arguments of the Dialogues stand.
Habian could motivate a study in liminality—discourses suddenly intersect and a paradigm lurches. Comic, biting, a satirist, he insists on the dualisms others are intent on overcoming. He learned to write from the Heike monogatari of the “evanescence of this fleeting world…the clarity of the autumn moon rising in the clear night sky…hidden by dawn in scattered clouds.” Myōshū quotes “the Buddha’s words, ‘All conditioned phenomena are like a dream, a phantom, a bubble, a shadow’ [which] if it were not for the question of the next life, said it all.” She recounts the advice of that deceptive priest, whose advice does not after all seem so bad, when he advises the young widow not to kill herself: “It would be very unfortunate for he [sic] who has gone before you. They say…that ‘the seed of buddhahood arises from a connection.’ If you make this the seed of your awakening, change your appearance and chant the nenbutsu to bring constant consolation to his spirit, in the end you will be born on the same lotus flower as him [in the Pure Land] and your conjugal vows will be fulfilled both in this world and the next” (56). Habian has a gift for scenes, the Gojō area of Kyoto: “[A]mong the mansions with their high, crested gates I found a hut with a rough door made from a single piece of wood, and next to it was the kind of brushwood fence you find in mountain villages. It was a truly desolate, rustic scene. Since it was late autumn, the lonely atmosphere was more pronounced than elsewhere, with withered creeper leaves and morning glories in the garden, and on a worn grassy path of which only a part remained stood a lone child facing in the opposite direction.”
For Habian, the inwardness of Buddhism is its fatal flaw. To become enlightened is to realize one is inherently a buddha and that hells and lands of ultimate bliss are nowhere other than “in our minds”(105). If existence comes from and returns to and is the void, and enlightenment is (the apprehension of) that knowledge-process, then apprehension itself, but not apprehension of anything, is the there there. Habian takes the key Buddhist terms for approximating ultimate reality and takes them where annihilationist heretics do: to nothing at all.
“Thusness,” “void,” “emptiness,” “one mind,” “nothingness,” “buddha-nature,” “buddha-hood,” “no self,” “extinction,” “original state”: Yūtei finds not the phenomenology of enlightenment, but nonexistence. What the Buddha “was enlightened about [is] ‘ultimate emptiness,’ which in the final analysis means that neither the exalted person of the ‘Buddha’ himself nor inferior ‘sentient beings’ such as us actually exist. Enlightenment is realizing where Heaven and Hell really are. Anyone who becomes enlightened in this fashion is called a buddha. That’s the essence of the Dharma: nothing more” (66). Karma and the four noble truths disappear: “we ourselves, this self that we believe exists, does not in truth exist. It teaches that the real does not exist” (80). “[O]nce you have understood essential nothingness…. it’s all just doctrine in the end” (120).
Jan Westerhoff, though he does not have Habian in mind, considers denying the reality of the real “misleading.”252 It is not that “the real” does not exist; it is that what we perceive is not the real, and the real is not what we perceive. Modern physics supplies an analogy that would please the de-converted Habian: we and the chairs we sit on dissolve into atoms that are mostly void, atoms keep disintegrating into other bits and pieces, but still we sit on chairs.
Habian has no time for hell terrors, or the other realms. Buddhism always distinguishes the “provisional and the true. The provisional asserts that temporarily on the surface the Buddha, Hell, and Heaven all exist; the true…states that Hell and Heaven have no real existence” (67–68). Such states arise merely in the mind: “The mind of man sometimes suffers and hell arises; sometimes there is sorrow and [the hell of] hungry ghosts arises; but with no-thought and no-mind the fruits of the Buddha are manifest” (93). The intimacy of the dharma does not seduce him: “Generally speaking, in Buddhism nothing is said to be divorced from our body. This is what Kukai meant when he said: ‘The Buddhist Dharma is nowhere remote. It is in our mind; it is close to us. Thusness is nowhere external. If not within our body, where can it be found?’ ” (89)
Nirvana is nowhere. Enlightenment “means to understand that since empty buddha-nature does not exist, fundamentally no one is born and no one dies…The underlying meaning is that when we die, sentient beings return to this Void; they become nothing” (26–27). Wanted is self that survives death: “without self…when each one of us dies…he is just absorbed into the void of thusness” (73). Myōshū thought there were buddhas residing in pure lands of ultimate bliss, but disappointingly it seems it just all leads “to enlightenment” (86). Yūtei rebukes those who want to speak of “Buddhisms”: Hīnayāna, Mahāyāna, Zen, Pure Land, eight schools or twelve, “in the final analysis, it’s ‘all the same Buddhism…’” (70).
Habian ends the Buddhist discussion with Pure Land, from a Christian perspective the most challenging of Buddhist schools for its similar promises. The structure he imposes signifies: he first denies Pure Land rebirth—it is emptiness again. He then revives his earlier technique of setting an empirical fact against a Buddhist mythos, but this time to conclude rather than introduce. Scorning Pure Land cosmology, he mocks its adherents. Having distinguished “immediate” and “imminent” rebirth, Yūtei quotes Pure Land theorists who identify Pure Land rebirth with awakening or enlightenment. If one remembers Genshin and his careful, intentional planning of our dying, Habian’s account of the last moment is quietly devastating. “[A]t the moment of death the nenbutsu practitioner experiences the same nothingness to which those in other schools have already become awakened” (122).
From this erasure, Habian returns to science: he wants something that really exists. Amida and his land to the west “ten trillion Buddha lands away” do not. The universe is not flat and has no east and west. The story is all just Lord Śākaymuni “at his tricks again” (123–24). Worse and worse, the chanters drive everyone else out of their minds: ‘So Pure Land adherents ring their bells, shake their heads, and chant ‘namu Amidabutsu, namu Amidabutsu’ without a thought for anyone else in the neighborhood, and when they really get going to an outsider it sounds just like the ‘heave-ho’ you hear as men pull up their boats from the sea. It would seem that to make people chant the nenbutsu like that is designed to bring them to a state of no-mind” (126).
Habian is respectful of Confucianism, less so of Daoism, and Shinto he deconstructs as an allegory of yin and yang, sexually, historically, ethnographically, and politically—a tour de force. What draws Habian to Christianity is a rational soul that exists eternally and will not fall from heaven: “[T]ransmigration does not exist, even if you might wish it did,” Yūtei says, referring to but not mentioning hell (181). The Christian paradise receives less detail than Pure Land paradises usually do, and Myōshū is shocked only by the exclusion of animals, since Buddhism teaches the “fifty-two species” have “the same nature as man” (173). Rejecting Christianity, Habian derides eternal damnation for a persimmon: “the all-merciful, all compassionate Deus! Him only shall you call all-merciful and all-compassionate who sweeps away suffering and grants joy!”253 The one who does that, however, is never named.
Relative to the afterlife, once Habian leaves Christianity, there is no indication that he holds any position other than Myōshū’s before Yūtei’s exposition of Christianity. Myōshū, asked to explain what she thinks about the afterlife, does not know what survives and suspects it must be nothing at all: “All we know is that by reciting the nenbutsu one achieves salvation, but I have no idea what survives or what shape it takes. But from what they tell me, they proclaim the existence of Hell and Paradise in the afterlife but only as an expedient truth, so what kind of thing really survives to experience either suffering or pleasure? Since human bodies are composed of the five elements, earth, water, fire, wind, and air, they combine while we live, but after death if cremated they become ashes and if buried they turn into earth. Water returns to water and fire to fire and all is dispersed, so if I am pressed to say what it is that survives to experience suffering or pleasure, I would have to say nothing” (173). Genshin deplored that position, six hundred years earlier.
Six hundred years earlier still, Wang Chong (27–97 CE) would not have disagreed: “When a fire is extinguished, its light does not shine any more, and when a man dies, his intellect does not perceive any more. The nature of both is the same…. What is the difference between a sick man about to die and a light about to go out?”254 Nirvana means “extinguished” or “quenched,” like a flame,255 and no concept has ever been more difficult to explain. To it the Trinity doesn’t hold a candle—blown out. It is in fact more difficult to comprehend something’s simply being gone than it is to understand it as having gone elsewhere. Subtracting agency does not come easily to our species. From the Rig Veda to Myōshū, the parts dispersed go somewhere else. David Hume reduced causation to correlation and expected his own extinction, but even he offered the compliment that if there is such a thing as soul that survives the death of the body, “The Metempsychosis is…the only system of this kind that philosophy can hearken to.”256
Rebirth engages the double perspective that life stops (forever) and that it goes on (eternally), that the individual is one body and many minds, that life is eternally desirable and that eternal dying is detestable. Eternalists, like Hindus, Muslims, Plato, and Christians, split the life/death binary with the Annihilationists, like Wang Chong, Ajita Kesakambalin, Samuel’s woman of Tekoa, and Lucretius (who admitted metempsychosis as a possibility, but only as not self). Buddhists hold out a middle way. But how can there be a middle way between life and death, surely the ultimate either/or dualism, that turns a self into an object?
The middle way abjures that dualism of which we ever experience only half—mind in body—for a network of interdependent processes and relationships. If there is no there there—no substantial existence—, there is also no not there not there—no nonexistence. When a character dies at the end of a book, is there finality, or is there a pattern of relationships established within, through, and beyond the book, between characters and readers, characters and writer, writer and readers?
To illustrate, the last word and a long quotation belong to Natsume Sōseki, revisiting a poem by Hume’s contemporary Thomas Gray, “On the Death of a Favorite Cat Drowned in a Bowl of Goldfishes.” The cat was Horace Walpole’s tabby, Selima; the bowl was a Chinese vase, and Sōseki introduced eighteenth-century English literature to Japan. Sōseki’s reworking of Gray’s satiro-comical poem profits from Sterne’s precise physical detail in Tristram Shandy. Sōseki’s novel I Am a Cat is narrated by the cat, who has no name. The cat falls into a deep clay jar holding water and cannot get out; it struggles, suffers, relaxes, and gives way. Similar situations afflict sentient beings with two legs.
Sōseki’s passage reproduces almost as physical experience the Buddha’s ancient perception that life is suffering, that attachment and desire are the cause of suffering, that it is possible to end suffering, that letting go is the way to enlightenment, and that enlightenment is concentrated letting go. Passing from dualism to non-differentiation, the last-moment thought to secure a good rebirth—and none after that—is the nembutsu, the meditation on Amida. The translation is Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, until Elizabeth Porcu steps in at the last six sentences. It is an unconscionably long quotation. It repays slow, very slow reading.
When I came again to myself I found I was floating in water. Because I was also in pain I clawed at what seemed its cause, but scratching water had no effect except to result in my immediate submersion. I struck out desperately for the surface by kicking with my hind-legs and scrabbling with my fore-paws. This action eventually produced a sort of scraping sound and, as I managed to thrust my head just clear of the water, I saw that I’d fallen in a big clay jar against whose side my claws had scraped. All through the summer this jar had contained a thick growth of water-hollyhocks, but in the early autumn the crows had descended first to eat the plants and then to bathe in the water. In the end their splashing about and the heat of the sun had so lowered the water level that the crows found it difficult either to bathe or to drink, and they had stopped coming….
From the water’s surface to the lip of the jar, it measures some five inches. However much I stretch my paws I cannot reach the lip. And the water gives no purchase for a jump. If I do nothing, I just sink. If I flounder around, my claws scrabble on the clay sides but the only result is that scraping sound. It’s true that when I claw at the jar I do seem to rise a little in the water but, as soon as my claws scrape down the clay, I slide back deep below the surface. This is so painful that I immediately start scrabbling again until I break surface and can breathe. But it’s a very tiring business, and my strength is going. I become impatient with my ill success, but my legs are growing sluggish. In the end I can hardly tell whether I am scratching the jar in order to sink or am sinking to induce more scratching.
While this was going on and despite the constant pain, I found myself reasoning that I’m only in agony because I want to escape from the jar. Now, much as I’d like to get out, it’s obvious that I can’t: my extended front leg is scarcely three inches long and even if I could hoist my body with its outstretched fore-paws up above the surface, I still could never hook my claws over the rim. Accordingly, since it’s blindingly clear that I can’t get out, it’s equally clear that it’s senseless to persist in my efforts to do so. Only my own senseless persistence is causing my ghastly suffering. How very stupid. How very, very stupid deliberately to prolong the agonies of this torture.
“I’d better stop. I just don’t care what happens next. I’ve had quite enough, thank you, of this clutching, clawing, scratching, scraping, scrabbling endless struggle against nature.” The decision made, I give up and relax: first my fore-paws, then my hind-legs, then my head and tail.
Gradually I begin to feel at ease. I can no longer tell whether I’m suffering or feeling grateful. It isn’t even clear whether I’m drowning in water or lolling in some comfy room. And it really doesn’t matter. It does not matter where I am or what I’m doing. I simply feel increasingly at ease. No, I can’t actually say that I feel at ease, either. I feel that I’ve cut away the sun and moon, they pull at me no longer; I’ve pulverized both Heaven and Earth, and I’m drifting off and away into some unknown endlessness of peace. [shift of translations] I die. I die and gain peace. Peace cannot be gained without dying. Namu Amida Butsu, Namu Amida Butsu. Thank you! Thank you!257
Are we or are we not all drowning cats?
Ito and Wilson translate the very last words more accurately, “thankfully, thankfully,” but doing so loses the English cliché even as it represents the process of the sense more “fully.”
Will this cat be reborn in Amida’s Pure Land? Surely that question is inept.
The last-moment thought is less about where you are going, than where you already are.