Buddhism and the Real World
Dr. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. on what the dharma might offer in the domain of social action
Manjushri [Bodhisattva of Wisdom] (2001) by Salvadoran-born muralist Marta Ayala, Balmy Alley, Mission District, San Francisco, CA, 2011. Ayala’s mural merges 17th-century Tibetan Art with Latin American motifs. Manjushri, whose name means “Gentle Glory,” is said to be the embodiment of all the wisdom of all the Buddhas. Photo: SF Mural Arts
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In October 2020, I was asked to participate in a symposium at Nalanda West, a Buddhist group in Seattle led by the Tibetan lama Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche. Coming in the wake of the traumatic events of the previous summer, the symposium was called “Buddhist Responses to Modern Problems.” All of the other speakers, including Ponlop Rinpoche himself, were Buddhist teachers. I therefore took it as my task to provide what, for want of a better word, might be called a “scholarly approach.”
The title of my comments at the symposium was “Buddhism in the Real World,” a title admittedly open to multiple interpretations. I focused on one of those interpretations, asking the question: What resources does Buddhism provide to bring about social change? I tried to answer this question by turning to two sources: Buddhist doctrine and Buddhist history. I looked mostly at the distant past and did not focus on what has been called Modern Buddhism, a relatively recent sect of Buddhism, one with its own pantheon of saints and its own canon of sacred texts.
An edited version of this essay was published in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review in its Summer 2021 issue. The full essay is provided here, with images curated by HTI Open Plaza.
—Donald S. Lopez, Jr., University of Michigan
Like all religions, Buddhism has changed over time.
One of the most important changes in recent decades has been the evolution of Engaged Buddhism, a movement whose participants apply dharma teachings and devote meditation practice to social justice, environmental activism, and other causes. This raises a question: as calls for social action resound throughout the land, what resources are provided by the teachings of the Buddha, the dharma?
I would like to offer two responses to this question. The first is that a survey of Buddhist doctrine and history suggests that, for a variety of reasons, Buddhism has relatively little to offer in the domain of social action, at least as that term is understood today. The second response is that that’s okay.
Let me begin with an anecdote. Over forty years ago, I set out for India for my dissertation research at a Tibetan refugee monastery. A few days after arriving, I was taken to meet the abbot. In my few days there, I had become concerned that many of the young monks—boys who seemed to be between eight and sixteen—had large scabs on their shaved heads, something that I assumed was a treatable skin condition. I was on a Fulbright fellowship, which in those days provided a very generous stipend by Indian standards. In the course of our conversation, I told the abbot that I would be happy to provide some funds to bring a doctor from a nearby town to treat the young monks. The abbot told me that that would not be necessary. He asked whether I might instead like to contribute to a fund for a new statue of Maitreya. According to Buddhist cosmology, Maitreya will achieve buddhahood in approximately 5.67 billion years. One of the several lessons we might draw from this story is that it is debatable whether New Age claims that Buddhism teaches us to “live in the moment” are accurate. It may be, in fact, that Buddhism is in many ways more concerned about the future than the present, more about the next world than this one. There are strong doctrinal reasons for this.
According to standard Buddhist cosmology, our world, a world that is the product of our collective karma, passes through various cosmic stages. The current stage, called the Stage of Abiding, also passes through cycles, cycles in which both the lifespan and the qualities of humans rise and fall. At present, we are on a downward slope, with the human lifespan decreasing, eventually dropping to ten years, after which it will rise again until it reaches 80,000 years. It is then that Maitreya will come. During this period of decline, not only will the conditions of the world deteriorate, but the dharma will disappear.
Buddha Shakyamuni. Karnali Basin, Khasa Malla Kingdom, Northwestern Nepal; 13th-14th century. Gilt copper alloy with inlay. Courtesy Rubin Museum of Art, C2006.24.1 (HAR 65687)
“the teaching of Śākyamuni will suffer the fate of all impermanent things, fading away over time”
A central element of Buddhist claims to legitimation in ancient India was the assertion that Śākyamuni, the buddha who appeared in our world 2500 years ago, was not unique, that there had been many buddhas in the past, whose names he knew and whom he had encountered in his previous lives on the bodhisattva path. Their teachings had been entirely forgotten, however, making it necessary for a new buddha—in our age, Śākyamuni Buddha—to restore the salvific dharma to the world. However, like that of all buddhas, the teaching of Śākyamuni will suffer the fate of all impermanent things, fading away over time until it is entirely lost and forgotten. How long this will take and how it will happen have been of great interest to Buddhist thinkers in the centuries after his passing, and a variety of chronologies have been set forth. One of the earliest predictions of the demise of the dharma appears in the traditional account of the Buddha’s grudging decision to establish an order of nuns. He says that had he not done so, his teaching would last for a thousand years but because he has ordained women, it will only last for five hundred years.
A more detailed description, one that was important especially in East Asia, posited three periods: the true dharma (saddharma), the semblance of the true dharma (saddharmapratirūpaka), and the demise of the true dharma (saddharmavipralopa). The first is the period following the passage of the Buddha into nirvāṇa, when his teachings are properly maintained and it is possible to follow the path to liberation. During the second, the teachings remain extant but progress on the path is more difficult. In the final period, the practice of the path eventually becomes impossible. This decline is generally attributed to what are called the “five degradations” (kaṣāya): (1) the degradation of the life span, because the human life span decreases; (2) the degradation of views, because wrong views become rampant; (3) the degradation of afflictions, because negative emotions become stronger; (4) the degradation of sentient beings, because both the physical and mental powers of the beings of the world weaken; and (5) the degradation of the eon, because the physical environment deteriorates. We might pause to consider whether all five are present in our world today.
It was of course essential to be able to calculate exactly when each of the periods began and ended. Importantly, when did the final period begin and, most importantly, are we already in it? As one might expect, all manner of calculations were made. In Japan, it was concluded that the final period began in 1052.
If that is the case, chances for redemption, whether for ourselves or for our world, are futile, leading to practices that will allow us to wait for better times or that will take us elsewhere. Thus, in Myanmar, we have the practice of the weizza, often translated as “wizard.” They engage in longevity practices to extend their lifespan until the coming of Maitreya. In China and Japan, the doctrine of decline led to the rise of the Pure Land schools, where, through the grace of Amitābha, we are reborn in his buddha field of Sukhāvatī, the Land of Bliss, and from there achieve buddhahood. And in late Indian Buddhism, we find millenarianism in the Kālacakra Tantra, composed sometime between 1025 and 1040, in the wake of Muslim raids into north India, predicting an apocalyptic war in which the army of the good will sweep out of the kingdom of Śambhala, deep in the Himalayas, to defeat the barbarians and restore the dharma, a war that will not occur until the year 2425.
Maitreya. Tibet; 14th century. Brass with copper alloy, silver and copper inlay. Courtesy Rubin Museum of Art, C2005.16.33 (HAR 65456)
“…Maitreya will come…not only will the conditions of the world deteriorate, but the dharma will disappear.”
In Buddhism, therefore, we live in a world of saṃsāra, a world that is by its very nature marked with suffering, impermanence, and no self, a world that is in irreversible decline, a world that is irredeemable. We recall that Tibetans chose to translate the Sanskrit term loka, “world,” as ’jig rten, “disintegrating foundation.” And so, in Tibetan Buddhism, we find the “four things to turn the mind away from the world.” These are four contemplations: of the rarity of human birth, of the inevitability of death, of the inexorability of karma, and of the faults of the six realms of saṃsāra. We are to develop renunciation; we should think of life as like a prison from which we are trying to escape, with all the urgency of a person whose hair is on fire. These texts say little about trying to repair the disintegrating foundation.
But what about the four “divine abodes” (brahmavihāra) ? When people speak of the social commitment of Buddhism, they often mention these four: love, compassion, joy, and equanimity. But what is less often mentioned is that they appear most prominently as four of the forty topics set forth by the Buddha as objects of concentration, to develop a sufficient level of mental strength to escape the world. Other topics for developing concentration include recollection of the Buddha, dharma, and saṃgha, meditation on the breath, and meditation on the repulsiveness of food. Ten of those forty concern the foulness of the human body, a foulness understood through the contemplation of ten stages of decomposition of a decaying corpse, a corpse of the same sex in order to discourage necrophilia.
That is, love, compassion, joy, and equanimity occur on the meditation cushion and not in the marketplace. And in their original articulation, equanimity is the highest of the four. When we read what the great fifth-century monk Buddhaghosa says about equanimity in his Path of Purification, we see that it is essentially the concession that each of us is subject to our own karma and there is no particular benefit in being troubled by the fate of others. As the Path of Purification says, “Beings are owners of their deeds. Whose [if not theirs] is the choice by which they will become happy, or will get free from suffering, or will not fall away from the success they have reached?” In other words, we’re on our own. All of this is to say that we do not find substantial resources in the Buddhist canon for what we think of as social action.
At this point, you might be thinking: What about compassion, what about the bodhisattva, what about giving (dāna), the highest Buddhist virtue, the first of the six perfections?
Let’s consider giving. The most famous stories of giving in the Buddhist canon occur in the jātaka stories, the accounts of the Buddha’s past lives as a bodhisattva. We notice here that cases of giving are often of a spectacular, and sometimes gruesome nature. A prince commits suicide by jumping off a cliff to feed a starving tigress and her cubs, a rabbit jumps into a fire to feed a starving sage, a king methodically carves off body parts to save a dove from a hawk. In one of the rare cases in which the bodhisattva is reborn as a woman, she cuts off her breasts to feed a starving woman so that the woman can nurse her starving child. Or consider the most famous story of giving, of the bodhisattva in the last human lifetime before he becomes Prince Siddhārtha, the story of Prince Vessantara. Here, in perhaps the most heartbreaking scene in Buddhist literature, he gives his darling children to an evil brahman to be his slaves, just because the brahman asked him to. We have the story of the philosopher Āryadeva plucking out one of his eyes and giving it away and then regretting having done so. We learn that one should not pluck out one’s own eye and give it to someone unless one has attained the first stage of the bodhisattva path, which we know from other sources is reached 10⁵⁹ years after developing the aspiration to enlightenment. Thankfully, none of these cases of giving are real world examples.
And perhaps they are not supposed to be. The eighth-century Indian monk Śāntideva, the most eloquent expositor of the bodhisattva’s practice, explains that the perfection of giving actually has nothing to do with the alleviation of poverty. As he writes: “If the perfection of giving meant the dispelling of the world’s poverty, then how did the previous buddhas perfect it, since beggars still abound?” In other words, the Buddha perfected giving and yet there is still poverty in the world. The perfection of giving therefore cannot mean the alleviation of poverty. As he explains in the next stanza, the perfection of giving is instead the thought, the intention, the willingness to give everything to everyone. Therefore, the perfection of giving is an attitude. In Sanskrit, it is cittam eva, “just a thought.” We see this same idea in some Tibetan Buddhist practices, in which one does not actually give anyone anything, but instead imagines offering the universe and all its wonders to the buddhas and bodhisattvas, and does so 100,000 times. Recalling the life of Milarepa, the national hero of Tibet, we might ask the question, “Is spending one’s life meditating in a cave a compassionate act?”
But what about the bodhisattva vow? This is a term that usually occurs in the singular in English-language discussions, referring to the vow to attain buddhahood in order to liberate all beings from suffering. Sometimes we hear of a plural form in Zen:
Beings are numberless, I vow to save them.
Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to break them.
Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them.
The Buddha’s way is unsurpassable, I vow to become it.
In the Tibetan tradition, however, there are many more than four. Here we find eighteen root vows and forty-six secondary vows. In keeping with model of the monastic code, these are presented in the form of infractions, thus eighteen root infractions and forty-six secondary infractions. If social action is to be found in the Mahāyāna, it likely will be found here. And it is, often in fascinating forms. In keeping with our sense that calls to social action are rare in Buddhist literature, we find a reference to charity in only one, in fact, only half of one of the eighteen root infractions: “not giving the dharma or wealth,” that is, it is an infraction of the bodhisattva vow not to provide the teaching of the dharma or one’s material possessions to those who request it. We might note in passing that later in the list we find an infraction that seems puzzling but perhaps is sadly relevant to our times: it is an infraction of the bodhisattva vows to destroy cities.
We need to dig deeper, moving to the secondary infractions to find more. Here, we find the initially shocking statement that it is an infraction of the bodhisattva vows not to commit one of the seven physical and verbal non-virtues in order to benefit others. That is, it is a violation of the bodhisattva vows not to kill, not to steal, not to engage in sexual misconduct, not to lie, not to speak divisively, not to speak harshly, and not to speak senselessly in order to benefit others. We can probably all imagine cases where each of these might be justified, except for sexual misconduct. When we read the examples that are given, we find more of the heterosexual male sexual fantasies that abound in Buddhist literature. For example, a bodhisattva is permitted to have sex with a woman who tells him that she will commit suicide if he does not do so. This secondary vow, particularly the requirement that the bodhisattva kill, steal, and lie for the benefit of others, raises a host of ethical questions pertinent to our discussion.
As we move through the forty-six secondary infractions, we find that it is an infraction for a bodhisattva not to accept offerings. But we find that it is also an infraction not to help those in need, not to help the sick, not to alleviate suffering, not to console the bereaved, not to help the poor, not to stop those engaged in harmful deeds, and, if you have magical powers, not to use them for the benefit of others. Several of these are elaborated by the fourth-century monk Asaṅga in this moving passage:*
Furthermore, the bodhisattva attends the suffering. He nurses sentient beings beset by sickness. He leads the blind and shows them the way. He causes the deaf to understand using sign language by teaching them the symbols for words. Those without arms or legs he carries himself or transports them by a conveyance…
Furthermore, the bodhisattva protects sentient beings from fear. He protects sentient beings from fear of being harmed by beasts of prey. He protects them from fear of whirlpools and sea monsters, from fear of kings, from fear of robbers and thieves, from fear of foreign enemies, from fear of masters and lords, from fear of being without livelihood, from fear of insult, from fear of being timid in public, from fear of non-humans, and from fear of vampires…
Furthermore, the bodhisattva takes away the grief of sentient beings who have suffered misfortune, beginning with misfortunes involving relatives and friends. That is, he takes away the grief at the death of parents. He takes away the grief at the death of a child or spouse, a male or female servant, an assistant or employee. [He takes away the grief upon] the death of a friend, a confidant, a kinsman, or a relative. [He takes away the grief at] the death of such people as masters, abbots, and teachers…
Furthermore, the bodhisattva provides necessities for those who want necessities. He gives food to those who want food. He gives drink to those who want drink, transportation to those who want transportation, clothing to those who want clothing, ornaments to those who want ornaments, vessels to those who want vessels, perfumes, flower garlands, and creams to those who want perfumes, flower garlands, and creams, a place to stay for those who need a place to stay, and light for those who need light.
*Passage drawn from Indian scholar Asaṅga’s Bodhisattvabhumi and appears in my chapter “Sanctification on the Bodhisattva Path,” published in Sainthood: Its Manifestations in World Religions (University of California Press, 1990), edited by Richard Kieckhefer and George D. Bond.
This passage, as moving as it is, portrays the bodhisattva as a cosmic social worker (with a sideline in cosmetics). It does not portray the bodhisattva as a political organizer. And, again, as moving as the passage is, we do not find significant evidence in the premodern period of acts of charity performed by Buddhist monastics. Where real giving, in the real world, becomes important in Buddhism, it is not giving to our local community; it is giving to the monastic community. And with that, let’s turn from doctrine to history.
Sanathavihari Bhante Bhikku, a Mexican-American Theravada monk, at the American Military University Alumni Rally, 2018. Source: AMU EDGE. Born in Los Angeles, CA as Ricardo Ortega, he was raised Catholic and served in the U.S. Army. Sanathavihari created the YouTube channel Monje en la Modernidad [Monk in Modernity] and founded Casa de Bhavana, a Theravada organization devoted to spreading the Dharma in the Spanish-speaking community.
It is difficult to say much with certainty about the period of the Buddha’s lifetime, whenever that occurred. It seems clear, however, that what we call Buddhism began as one of a number of ascetic movements that arose in northern India some five centuries before the Common Era. The phrase that occurs again and again in the sūtras is “go forth into the homeless life.” The term translated as “home” here carries all the connotations of domesticity, including property, profession, and family, and the responsibilities that they entail. Buddhist monks and nuns were required to leave that behind, with the monastic code preventing them from owning property, engaging in a profession, tilling the soil, and even touching money. We recall that the words bhikṣu and bhikṣunī, which we regularly translate as “monk” and “nun,” in fact mean “beggar.” And, as we know, beggars can’t be choosers. The order therefore depended upon the laity for their sustenance and was subject to the laws of the king.
Indeed, the relation between monastic order and state seems to have been very important from the beginning, with three kings—Bimbisāra, Prasenajit, and Ajātaśatru—figuring prominently in the sūtras as friends and patrons of the Buddha. And we note that Buddhist monks often served as advisors to kings, even composing texts on the topic. We think immediately of Nāgārjuna’s Precious Garland of Advice for a King and Letter to a Friend, both likely written for a king of the Śatavahana Dynasty. We think of Matṛceta’s Letter to Kaniṣka. In Tibet, we think of the monk Phagpa at the court of Kublai Khan and Jangkya Rolpai Dorjé at the court of the Qianlong Emperor. We think of Ju Mi pham’s Treatise for a Just King. All of these works have been translated into English and provide much to ponder when we think about the question of Buddhism in the real world. We can note here, however, that part of the advice offered by these advisors (all of whom were Buddhist monks) was the importance of supporting the monastic order.
This is because as the order grew in size and became sedentary, it was increasingly difficult for local communities to provide food for the monks and nuns, making royal patronage all the more necessary. The order therefore came to protect the interests of the state, and it did so in a number of ways. Thus, in the interview that must precede the ordination of a monk, the candidate is asked whether he is a soldier, a criminal, or in debt, insuring that the monastic order did not become a refuge for those seeking to escape from the rule of civil law. We should note in passing that ordination also included a physical examination for a lengthy list of physical and mental maladies that would prevent ordination. Thus, despite the association we often make between monasticism and medicine, the monastery was not regarded as a place for the treatment of the sick.
In order for the monastery to survive, conforming to the laws of the state was not enough. The order had to contribute to it. It did so through the economy of karma. We know from a variety of sources that in the early tradition, laypeople were not instructed in meditation. This remained the case for centuries. Indeed, the origins of the mindfulness mania that is sweeping the world can be traced not back to the Buddha but to early twentieth-century Myanmar. Instead, the laity was taught the virtue of dāna, of giving, with karma theory specifying that the recipient of the gift figured in the calculation: the purer the recipient, the greater the good karma, with purity measured by maintenance of the vow of celibacy. The Buddha also taught that the karmic effect of generosity is wealth in the future, especially the marvelous wealth of the six Buddhist heavens of our world, called the Realm of Desire.
Wheel of Life. Tibet; 18th century. Pigments on cloth. Courtesy Rubin Museum of Art, Gift of Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, F1997.40.10 (HAR 591)
“…the karmic effect of generosity is wealth in the future, especially the marvelous wealth of the six Buddhist heavens of our world…the Realm of Desire.”
The most important service that Buddhist monks could provide to the laity, therefore, was not teaching them to meditate, but to enter into a transaction in which material gifts in this life were converted into heavenly riches in the next. And this power to convert currency seems to reside only with the order. So exclusive is their power that even Maudgalyāyana, the monk renowned for his magical powers, was unable to feed his own mother after she was reborn as ghost. The Buddha informed him that the only way to feed the dead is to feed the monks. We can see, then, that the order entered into a business relationship with the laity, advising the laity, almost in the words of the Gospel of Matthew, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.” It is doctrines like these that made the Roman Catholic Church and the Buddhist order, originally a community of beggars, among the wealthiest institutions in world history. We know, for example, that the economy of Tibet collapsed in the 1960s not because the dharma was not being dispensed but because Buddhist monasteries were the banking system of the nation.
Buddhist texts explain that kings who supported the monastic order would reap a further benefit than that offered to the common people: protection from natural disaster and from foreign invasion. In Chinese, we even find the term huguo fojiao, “state protection Buddhism,” referring to Indian texts like the Lotus Sūtra and the Sūtra of the Golden Light, and to apocryphal sūtras like the Renwang Jing, the Sūtra for Humane Kings, which promise protections to kings who promote their teachings. When the monk Eisai sought permission to introduce Zen Buddhism into Japan, the petition that he penned to the shogun was not about Bodhidharma coming from the west or the sound of one hand clapping; it was entitled Kōzen Gokokuron “Treatise on the Promotion of Zen for Defense of the State.” We know that in both the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and in the Second World, many Japanese monks fully supported the Japanese war effort. This included the Rinzai master Shaku Sōen, one of the most famous monks of the Meiji Period, remembered today as the teacher of D. T. Suzuki. During the Russo-Japanese War, Count Leo Tolstoy wrote to him, asking Shaku Sōen to join him in condemning the war between their two countries. Shaku Sōen declined.
In a certain sense, then, Buddhist monks and nuns, across the Buddhist world, have been civil servants, providing a service to the state in return for their protection and sustenance. However, dynasties rise and fall, and not all kings have been patrons of Buddhism. When we look at the history of Buddhism in India, China, and Korea, we see the devastating effect that the withdrawal of royal patronage has had on the monastic community. Long before the Muslim invasions, Chinese pilgrims to India encountered many monasteries deserted and in ruins because the local king was now a Hindu or the trade route had shifted. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Buddhist monks and nuns were not allowed within the city walls of Seoul. It was in countries that had a relatively stable reign of Buddhist kings, places like Tibet and Thailand, that the monastic order thrived. When we look at Tibetan history, we note that there is no more evil figure than the ninth-century king Lang Darma, who was literally demonized for his attempts to prevent extravagant support of the monastic order from bankrupting the country. According to a famous story, he was assassinated by a Buddhist monk, who is remembered as a hero.
Indeed, when we look at the history of Buddhism, we see that Buddhist monks and nuns most often take what we term social action against those whom they perceive to be enemies of the dharma. One of the protests against British rule in Burma occurred because the British wore their shoes when visiting the Shwedagon Pagoda, the most sacred stupa in the nation, said to hold the hairs that the Buddha had given to the two merchants who offered him the first meal after his enlightenment. The prominent monk Ledi Sayadaw published a pamphlet entitled, “The Impropriety of Wearing Shoes on Pagoda Platforms.” He went on to do something even more revolutionary in his efforts to defend the dharma against the British: he taught lay people how to meditate, inventing the practice that we call mindfulness. We note that perhaps the most famous act of political protest by a Buddhist in modern history, the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc in Saigon in 1963, was against the government of the Diem family, who were Roman Catholics, and perceived as persecutors of Buddhism. In Tibet, we know that many monks took up arms against the British during the Younghusband Invasion of 1904 and against the Chinese during the Battle of Lhasa in 1959, all in defense of the dharma. Indeed, we can consider the recent self-immolations in Tibetan regions of the PRC as acts of political protest in defense of the dharma.
A rebel Cuban soldier before a golden statue of Buddha discovered inside the recently nationalized hacienda of magnate and senator José Cortina, Pinar del Río, Cuba, ca. 1959. Known as La Güira, the estate featured pagodas and “oriental” structures, with names like Casa de Buda, built by architects and laborers from Asia. The photo was taken during Fidel Castro’s tour of the region ahead of plans for agro-touristic reforms and seen as a representation of the deposed oligarchy’s private extravagances.
Original photo by Raúl Corrales for “El rostro del latifundio” by Antonio Nuñez Jiménez in INRA Vol. 1, No. 10 (January 1960), journal of the Instituto Nacional de la Reforma Agraria. Reproduced in La revolución congelada: Dialécticas del castrismo by Duanel Díaz Infante (Editorial Verbum, 2014).
Thus, among the questions we might ponder is: When we think of social problems, does Buddhism have more to offer in diagnosis than it does in cure?
And, if that is the case, why is it the case? It probably has something to do with karma, what is presented as a natural law of cause and effect, a law that explains everything that happens to us, good or bad, a law that despite being apparently inexorable, the great majority of Buddhist practice over time has sought to circumvent. We recall that if we do 100,000 prostrations, it destroys the negative karma of physical misdeeds done over millions of lifetimes.
What, then, does it mean to intervene in the playing out of the karmic events that create our world, and is that intervention itself karmically ordained? Is it the case, in fact, that perennial questions of the choice between justice and mercy that haunt the theologies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are also present in Buddhism? Do we say, with Portia in the Merchant of Venice, “Though justice be thy plea, consider this: / That in the course of justice none of us / Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy, / And that same prayer doth teach us all to render / The deeds of mercy.” Yet even if we contemplate karma and compassion in those terms, are we forced to conclude that what makes Buddhism so strong at the personal level is what makes it weak at the political level?
Ultimately, however, we make decisions about the world based on our understanding of the truth. Or, to put it another way, if my topic is Buddhism in the real world, how real is that world? Let me close, then, by considering this most challenging and consequential of topics. The famous category of the two truths—ultimate truth and conventional truth—is not something we can discuss here, in part because it is understood so differently in the different Buddhist schools. But we know that the seventh-century philosopher Candrakīrti etymologizes the term saṃvṛtisatya—generally translated as “conventional truth” and which encompasses all of the objects of our everyday experience—as “truth for an obscured mind.” For him, the ultimate truth is the absence of what we hold to be true. We recall the Buddha’s famous declaration in the Diamond Sūtra, “A shooting star, cataracts, a butter lamp, an illusion, a drop of dew, a bubble, a dream, a lightning flash, a thunder cloud—This is the way one should see conditioned things.” There is much to say here, but we note that throughout the Buddhist tradition there is an extreme sense skepticism, the warning that the information that we receive through our senses is deceptive, with one school, the Yogācāra, denying the existence of an external world. Their other name is cittamātra, “mind only.”
What, then, does it mean to act in the real world when the world is unreal?
The philosophical category that is more germane to our topic, then, is not the two truths; it is pramāṇa, valid knowledge. This is a central question in Indian philosophy: How many sources of valid knowledge, of knowledge about the world, are available to us? Some of the Hindu schools listed as many as six, including śabda, “speech,” which includes the Vedas and the testimony of the truthful. But the Buddhists, in a turn toward empiricism, radically limited the forms of valid knowledge to just two: direct perception and inference. As the seventh-century philosopher Dharmakīrti famously says, “Because there are two types of objects of knowledge, there are two forms of valid knowledge.” The two types of objects of knowledge are the manifest, that is, things we can know through our senses, and the hidden, things whose existence we can only infer. The two forms of valid knowledge are, therefore, direct perception and inference. But even these two forms of valid knowledge have problems, with much written about what it means to be valid and how mistaken a form of consciousness can be and still be valid. Inference, of course, encompasses the vast topic of Buddhist logic, where we note that Buddhists claim to have arguments that convincingly prove not only that there is fire on a mountain pass because there is smoke, but that rebirth exists and that enlightenment exists.
The fact that even valid direct perception is in some sense invalid has been disquieting to Tibetan thinkers for centuries, extending to the twentieth century. In his controversial work Adornment for Nāgārjuna’s Thought, Gendun Chopel (1903-1951) wrote a poem that includes this refrain, tha snyad tshad grub ’jog la blo ma bde. This beautiful line of verse in Tibetan can be clunkily rendered into English as “I am not comfortable about positing conventional valid knowledge.” He presents a sophisticated critique, but stated simply, he concludes that what we call conventional valid knowledge is essentially the opinion of the majority. To illustrate this, he cites a story from Candrakīrti. It’s a story about a king whose astrologer warns him that a terrible rain storm is approaching: anyone who drinks the rainwater will go mad. The king has all the wells in the palace covered, but there is no time to warn the people, who drink the water and go insane. Soon, the people storm the palace, denouncing the king as a madman. As Gendun Chopel writes, “In the end, not knowing what else to do, the king drank the water, and came to agree with everyone else.” This is a chilling story in ancient India, all the more chilling in twenty-first century America, where so many of us have been tempted to taste the waters of madness.
And so, from the Buddhist perspective, the near future is grim. But in the distant future there will occur what is called the nirvana of the relics. At the same precise moment all around the world, all of the stupas and pagodas will explode, releasing their relics. The relics will fly to Bodh Gaya, where they will reassemble under the Bodhi Tree to be worshipped by the gods one last time. The relics will then burst into flame and disappear. This is the sign that the advent of Maitreya is nigh. Perhaps we should build that statue.
And if we build that statue in America, we should inscribe these words on its base, the word of the American poet and bodhisattva, Gary Snyder:
“The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both.”
MORE
Listen to an in-depth discussion of this article on Domyo Burk’s The Zen Studies Podcast, Episode 169: “Looking to Buddhism to Support Values and Beliefs We Already Hold.”
