PRESENTED AT THE BUDDHA CENTER ON JUNE 22 AND 25, 2013 AND AGAIN TO THE NEW BUDDHA CENTRE ON SATURDAY, JULY 20, 2024 (REVISED). 

Impermanence and suffering indicate the reality of permanence and happiness. Therefore, non-enlightenment posits enlightenment. Because rebirth is illusory, enlightenment must be real. A coin cannot have one side. Rebirth is merely its deluded reflection. The root of the Mahayana doctrine of the Buddha-potential appears in the Pali Canon as the “pure bright mind.” Since the world is unsatisfactory, eventually one will see this. It is only a small step from realizing the essential unsatisfactoriness of the world to formulating the intention to escape, since all beings desire happiness. Thus, the world generates the aspiration to attain enlightenment and, finally, enlightenment itself.

The Lineage of Bodhisattvas

That some achieve enlightenment is the universal tradition of humanity. In the Buddhist lineage, it refers to twenty-seven buddhas. These buddhas preceded the historical Buddha. The Buddha lineage begins with a Buddha called Tanhankara. The fourth Buddha, Dipankara, predicted the future enlightenment of Sumedha, a rich Brahman turned hermit, who many ages later was reborn as Gotama. Our blessed age will have known five buddhas: Kakusandha, Konagamana, Kassapa, Gotama, and Metteyya. Metteyya will appear in the far future. These are not the only buddhas who existed in the past. According to the Pali Canon, innumerable buddhas have flourished in past cosmic ages of vast cycles of time. In the Buddhist tradition, the duration of an age ranges from thousands to trillions of years, or it is incalculable. The Pali Canon also refers to a twenty-ninth Buddha, Metteyya. Metteyya will be born long after people have forgotten the historical Buddha. and his teaching, at the zenith of a veritable golden age of progress, some thousands of years hence.

Whether one accepts these traditions as literally true is beside the point. What is important is the underlying idea. Expressions of ideas in historical, metaphorical, mythological, or symbolic terms do not affect the underlying meaning. In this way, one can extract meaning from non-historic texts without “confusing the planes.”

The word bodhisattva comes from Pali bodhi-, awakened + satta, living. The bodhisattva has “woken up”; he has formulated right view and acquired perfect insight. Like the Buddha, a bodhisattva vows to achieve enlightenment to become a perfected being, to free all sentient beings from the delusion of worldliness. In the Eightfold Path, this refers to a being who has “heard the word.” Thus, formulating right view because of this realization, he undertakes the second step of initiation, viz., Right Intention. The bodhisattva is worthy. The vow of an arhant is not “other” than the vow of a bodhisattva, but its essence. In the same way, Mahayana is not other than Hinayana and Hinayana is not other than Mahayana. The realization of the unity of Hinayana and Mahayana culminates in the doctrine of the “single” or “universal” vehicle.

The Bodhisattva inhabits the plane of happiness. This is a higher vibration or dimension of reality in the Buddhist system of vertical and horizontal extension that constitutes the thirty-one planes of existence. It is above the human realm; only ghosts, animals, and hell-beings rank lower than humans. Humans are special, however, in that they can hypostasize the Buddha-potential. Those below us suffer too much. Those above us are too comfortable.

In the universe, human birth is rare. It presents an opportunity for realization that one should value by seeking to live by a code of ethics that will create the merit needed to be reborn as a human. That is the first task of everyone. The Buddhist code of ethics is not unique. The Buddha did not consider ethics to be especially important. He refers to ethical practices as “inferior matters of mere morality” in the first discourse of the Sutta Pitaka. This contrasts with the emphasis on formal credentials, established curricula, courses of training, and rules that dominates ecclesiastical sectarianism, as though one can put the teaching in a box.

The historical Buddha was born as a bodhisattva. Bodhisattvas have many degrees of realization. All but the highest are subject to the afflictions of an erroneous mind. However, this was Gotama’s final birth before he would attain complete realization. For twenty-nine years, Gotama lived the life of Riley, including sensual pleasures. He partied and achieved prowess in military sports, but he was also a pampered child. He married young, happily, but had a son he named Rahula. Rahula means “fetter” or, in some interpretations, “eclipse.” Gotama was completely human and even subject to despair and doubt. Sometimes one forgets that the Buddha was a fully human being. At the age of 29, Gotama experienced a call. His original bodhisattva vow re-asserted itself. Then he began the final six-year adventure that led him to complete emancipation and the attainment of Buddhahood.

The Tathagata

“Tathagata” is the word the Buddha used all through the Pali Canon to refer to himself. Of uncertain derivation, there are at least eight traditional interpretations, none of which is certain. It refers to an Arhant; people understood it, though no one has found earlier references to it in non-Buddhist literature. It means something like “thus gone,” with the emphasis on “thus,” from Pali tatha-, ‘thus, in this way’ + gatha, ‘gone, gone away.’ “The Thus Come One.” The Buddha’s realization is so abstract, so post-linguistic, and so transcendent that no one can express it any other way. The word itself is numinous, like the Hebrew “unpronounceable name of God,” Yahweh.

Although bodhisattvas are “thrown up” by the churning of the world, they are rarer than humans are; humans are, of course, already a rare rebirth. Bodhisattvas constitute a human elect. As such, they may be born in favourable circumstances. It is a widespread tradition that bodhisattvas also have close communication with the spiritual realms. Divine beings, sentient beings whose bodies are pure mind and form, extremely intelligent, long-lived, beautiful, mostly happy, and powerful, inhabit the spiritual realms. Like all beings, they are also limited and subject to delusion and death. Divine beings are not “gods,” but they include all the deities and angels (so-called) of antiquity.

The Buddha asserted that part of the sacred knowledge he had realized came from the spiritual worlds. Divine beings inhabit parallel dimensions of experience that intersect our own. Physical constraints did not limit the Buddha’s mind. He was able to experience (access) that totality. This is the technical meaning of “omniscience.” Psychedelic research clearly shows these experiences are neither symbolic nor subjective. Rather, they are experiential aspects of yogic practice.

The bodhisattva is “in between.” He is in the world, but no longer of it. He is awake to the truth of his own nature. He aspires to a Buddhahood he both is and is not. The Buddha potential is both real and potential. One can have intimations of Buddha-nature and still be subject to delusion. Even advanced realizers can still suffer from delusion. The full realization of Buddha-nature is synonymous with “extinction.” “Extinction” is negative only from the perspective of the world. From the perspective of the absolute, it is positive. The Buddha called emancipation “the unaging, unailing, deathless, sorrowless, and undefiled supreme sanctuary from bondage, Nibbana.”

The most authentic version of the renunciation of the Buddha says that when Gotama left home, his parents wished otherwise and they wept. This account differs from the story that the Bodhisattva stole out of the palace when everyone was sleeping and Rahula was an infant. The later description reads like a reaction to the statement the Buddha’s parents opposed his leaving home.

Gotama fell in with a gnostic yogi who claimed to have experienced “nothingness.” Gotama emulated his example and after a period of practice experienced “nothingness.” The name of the Buddha’s first teacher was Alara Kalama. Gotama was not satisfied with this attainment, so he went to another teacher, who taught him to experience “neither-perception-nor-non-perception.” The name of the Buddha’s second teacher was Uddaka Ramaputta, “son of Rama.”

The planes of “nothingness” and “neither perception nor non-perception” are the top two dimensions of the formless realm of the thirty-one planes of existence. These dimensions are the highest planes of the world. These planes are simultaneously ontological and mental states. Mind itself is the primary ontology.

When the Bodhisattva left home at the age of 29, five ascetics followed him. Their leader was Kondannya. Kondannya was a Brahman scholar in the Kapilavatthu court of Suddhodana, the Buddha’s father. He alone predicted that Gotama would become a World Teacher at the infant’s naming ceremony. Kondannya based his prediction on divination by physiognomy. Physiognomy is the art of determining character or personal characteristics from the form or features of the body and face. It is not clear whether the group of five followed Gotama when he was associated with Alara Kallama and Uttar Ramaputta. Together with Bhaddiya, Vappa, Mahanama, and Assaji, Gotama engaged in all the traditional practices of proto-Shaivite self-mortification until he was on the verge of dying.

Shaivism originated in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE from the same renunciant counterculture as the Buddha himself. Buddhism and Shaivism share significant cultural characteristics. These include the cross-legged posture; yoga practice; tolerance towards women; renunciation of household life, sex, and childbearing; a northern Indian provenance; anti-Brahmanism; the rejection of caste and consequent association with untouchables; and a cemetery cult, including the ritual use of human bones.

Gotama experimented with yoga. He experimented with mind meditation, breath meditation, and breathless meditation. Because of these exercises, he experienced a kind of illumination, accompanied by severe physical pain and burning sensations. Gotama bore down even harder on himself. He continued the breathless meditation and starved himself. Gotama took this to the point of nearly dying. Then he abandoned it, realizing these practices are self-defeating. 

Finally, he recalled a childhood experience he had while sitting under a rose-apple tree. He had entered a simple meditative state. He resolved to enter this state consciously. However, he could not do so in his extremely sick state. At this point, he took a little rice milk porridge from a passing village girl called Sujata. Sujata offered it to him, mistaking him for the spirit of the tree under which he sat. Gotama had broken his vow of abstinence. This caused his companions to abandon him. They believed he had reverted to the luxurious life of his youth. Gotama went into seclusion in a pleasant clearing by a river where he could seek alms at the local village each morning.

Alone, Gotama became absorbed in a series of progressive mental meditations. The Bodhisattva’s meditation consisted of progressively refined states of concentration, detachment, and bliss. They culminated in the memory of past lives and he realized his essential identity with the totality of the world and all beings.

According to Buddhist tradition, this occurred during the first of three watches of the night. In the following two watches, he realized the truth of the law of moral causality and the Four Truths. Thus, he attained emancipation and finally cut the bond of attachment to time.

The Chain of Cause and Effect

The Buddha realized the significance of the law of interconnectedness even before his enlightenment. Paticcasamuppada is quite the word to unravel. The PED has “arising on the grounds of a preceding cause.” The law of causality was already a well-established concept in Indian tradition. The Buddha realized that the law of causality leads inevitably to the realization that everything is infinitely interconnected. Therefore, everything is mutually dependent. Ananda told the Buddha he understood this concept. The Buddha rebuked Ananda. He likened the doctrine to a hairball and proclaimed its complexity. Emancipation arises out of the realization of the doctrine of universal interconnectedness as the cessation of delusion and the key to enlightenment. In the language of quantum physics, the Buddha has discovered the “waveform” nature of reality.

The Buddha realized that the essence of the law of causality is not action, but intention. This realization distinguishes the Buddha’s realization from the Indian tradition culminating in Jainism. The mind generates causality. Thus, one prepares oneself for the realization of enlightenment, not found or bound by rules or actions. The primary causal factor lies in volition itself. Volition is intimately involved with ignorance. Volition is necessarily innocent of both ignorance and enlightenment. Thus, the Buddha decisively separated himself from the notion of salvation by action or non-action, including ethics, rules, rituals, and beliefs.

The foregoing is the general meaning of interconnectedness. The Buddha applied the general principle to the conditioned arising of suffering. He also applied it to a less well-known analysis of the conditioned arising of property. The latter relates to the Buddha’s views on politics and government. Here we will simply summarize the Buddha’s view of the conditioned arising of suffering. This is the twelvefold chain.

When the Buddha was a Bodhisattva, he was already reflecting on the causes of suffering. He proceeded to analyze each cause systematically, beginning with what one knows – ageing, death, and the whole mass of suffering. The immediate cause of all this is birth or rebirth. However, the law of causality states that every phenomenon must have a cause. Therefore, the Buddha resolves birth into a more fundamental concept. This is becoming, i.e., impermanence or change. Becoming is a synonym for the world. It refers to things changing through time.

Becoming resolves into five fundamental aspects of what one conventionally calls mind or perhaps “the psyche,” including desirous attachment; feeling; contact; and the six senses, i.e., seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, and thinking. If one reverses the order one can see how the six senses lead to the unity of object, subject, and sensation called contact; leading to feeling, especially the feelings of pleasure and pain; leading to desire; and finally hardening into attachment. This is the method of reversal.

More fundamental even than the six senses are name and form. The PED glosses namarupa as individuality, the individual being (paradoxically, because name and form are opposites). Name refers specifically to the immaterial, cognitive aspect of the person, especially the linguistic faculty of speech. Form refers to body-form-appearance. More fundamental than name and form is consciousness. The Buddha says name and form causes consciousness, and consciousness causes name and form. Bodhi describes this relationship as a “vortex,” a word also used by Padmasambhava, the great 8th century Tantric adept who is credited with converting the Tibetan people to Vajrayana Buddhism.

The cause of consciousness is the karmic complex or involved system of causes and effects that together constitute the innate tendencies that work themselves out continuously through consciousness, name and form, etc. Finally, the Buddha identifies the root cause of this whole chain of causes and effects as “not knowing” or ignorance.

The chain of cause and effect has a few interesting aspects. First, the Buddha identified it, at least in essence, prior to his enlightenment. It became an essential element of his post-enlightenment teachings, along with the childhood memory of meditating under the rose-apple tree. This fact gives us a fascinating glimpse into the mind of the Bodhisattva prior to his enlightenment. It causes us to realize that the enlightenment was not, or not just, a qualitative transformation of state in which, one moment he is ignorant, and the next moment he is enlightened. Rather, it shows the teaching as a progressive process in which the Buddha engaged even prior to his enlightenment.

Second, it shows that the Buddha’s philosophical method does not begin with ontological absolutes. This was the custom of Indian philosophy before him. Rather, it shows how the Buddha began with the immediacies of human experience. From these he extrapolated to larger generalizations about the nature of reality. The Buddha anticipated the development of what Westerners would like to think of as “modern” philosophy, especially phenomenology, process philosophy, and existentialism, not merely by centuries, but millennia.

Third, it shows the Buddha applying the principle of causality to everything.

Fourth, it shows that the Buddha did not make a hard distinction between psychology and ontology or subjective and objective realities. Rather, in common with the universal wisdom tradition, this includes all mystical understandings of the world; macrocosm and microcosm, the universal and the individual are  opposite sides of the same coin and essentially identical. This also appears in the thirty-one planes of existence. The thirty-one planes of existence are simultaneously thirty-one levels of consciousness or yogic/psychological states.

Fifth, it leads to the paradoxical conclusion that the absolute, reality itself, is fundamentally ignorant. The ‘no-information’ state of the absolute is a fundamental point of the great Korean sutra, the Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment. Otherwise, the appearance of the world would be inexplicable. This in turn leads to the realization that the absolute is trans-dual.

This reminds one of C.G. Jung’s comparison of the universe to the unconscious, the “not conscious.” The unconscious universe posits phenomenality as the “skilful means” by which the unconscious progressively becomes self-conscious: in Jung’s language, individuation through a process of differentiation. This is why, when we translate the term tathagatagarbha, commonly translated as “Buddha nature,” I prefer the term “Buddha-potential.” Otherwise, one posits an insoluble contradiction, i.e., a perfectly enlightened being that is nevertheless somehow also ignorant. Christian theology suffers from a similar problem when it posits God. God is perfectly good, yet it is the ultimate source of evil. Here one directly contemplates the mystery of the one becoming two, which as we learned in the previous talk is the source of suffering, the subject-object dichotomy that yoga seeks to overcome by a synchronized brain state induced by mental concentration or “entrainment.”

Finally, sixth, one sees in the chain references to the two fundamentals of the Buddhist path, viz., desire and ignorance. Most of the links in this chain are not things one can easily change. Birth, becoming, mind, cause and effect – these are not things one can simply “turn off.” They are ontological and thus outside our conscious control. However, one knows from the Four Truths that desire is the cause of suffering. As a karmically generated phenomenon, desire is transitory. Thus, it can cease and, by its cessation, one can achieve emancipation. The Four Truths are the basis of the Hinayana path of renunciation. However, even in the Pali Canon, desire is not primary. Desire itself has a cause, and that cause is ignorance. In the Prajnaparamitas one reads,

Having given but a little gift, having guarded but a little morality, having developed but a little patience, having exerted but a little vigour, having entered trance but a little, having developed wisdom but a little, a Bodhisattva, a great being, who wants by skilful conversion to make this small amount for all beings on account of the knowledge of all modes into an immeasurable and incalculable one, should train in perfect wisdom.

Perfect Wisdom

Perfect Wisdom (or Right View) is the first step of the Eightfold Path. Peter Masefield in his extraordinary analysis of the Pali Canon, Divine Revelation in the Pali Canon, recognized the significance of this. The Buddha refers to “the breakthrough by wisdom.” The cultivation of wisdom is the basis of the Mahayana path, clearly stated in the first Mahayana sutra.

Wisdom is especially important in the Dharma Transmission to the West. Many Westerners misconstrue wisdom, either as the distant goal of the path or as an irrelevant affectation, conflating wisdom with empty intellectualism. This intellectual antipathy is widespread.

The Buddha is clear that wisdom is not attainable by mere reasoning. There are examples in the Pali Canon of disciples who achieve awakening quickly, with little or no meditative practice, simply by hearing the teaching of the Buddha. Sometimes the Buddha calls this “dharma in brief.” Thus, the chain works in both directions, not merely as the cause of suffering but also, by the method of reversal, the “cause” of enlightenment as well. Enlightenment is a non-causal dharma. Enlightenment transcends causation. The Buddha rediscovered this way. He did not invent the path. Rather, it is the primordial path known to the ancients too. The Buddha calls this the Eightfold Path. He likens it to an old path found in the forest, leading to an abandoned and forgotten city.

The Mission of the Buddha

At first, the Buddha hesitated to teach. He considered following the path of a hermit. Sahampati, the chief of the Brahma world, persuaded him to teach. The Buddha wanted to teach his first two teachers, Alara Kallama and Uddaka Ramaputta. When he discovered they had recently died, the Buddha resolved to visit Kondannya’s group to beat the drum of the Deathless. On the road, the first person to whom the Buddha offered his realization doubted not only the Buddha’s realization. He doubted the Buddha himself. This was Uppaka. Uppaka rejected the Buddha because he was self-realized, i.e., without a teacher. Scratching his head, he left the Buddha on the road.

After his enlightenment, after deciding to teach, the Buddha taught the group of five in the Deer Park, Sarnath, northeast of present-day Benares. The ascetics had already rejected the Buddha due to the accusation of luxurious living, recollecting the indulgences of his youth. They were hard to convince, but he taught them, beginning with the Middle Way, resulting in the realization of emancipation.

Kondannya experienced the truth of the teachings for himself, thereby becoming a stream-enterer and, five days later, an Arhant. He died alone after twelve years living at Mandakini Lake, Chaddanta Forest, in the Himalayas, some time prior to the Buddha’s death. He left his retreat once only, on the day before his death, to bid the Buddha farewell, kissing and caressing his feet with his hands.

The Middle Way is the place between extremes. One may interpret it within yogic, ethical, and epistemological frameworks. Yogically, the middle way is the state of perfect physical and mental equilibrium. Ethically, it is the balance of loving-kindness and reason. Epistemologically, the middle way connotes direct experience, neither physical nor metaphysical. It also refers to the transcendence of duality, positing the reality of the trans-dual. The trans-dual is another necessary implication of “middleness.” “Middleness” is also implicit in the Tibetan doctrine of the bardo, which the Pali Canon implies in the doctrine of the “intermediate state.” 

The Buddha identifies the Middle Way with the Eightfold Path. It is important to remember that a wheel turns. The “coming forth” of the teaching is dynamic. It is never a copy, but an ever-present, self-propagating energy-information-reality pattern or system. In this way, the Buddha, by the power of truth, set the teaching in motion in Sarnath. It continues to “turn” to this day. The recluses, plus the Buddha himself, formed the nucleus of the first Buddhist community, consisting of six members. Kondannya became the first monk and the first arhant.

Later, the Buddha asks Ananda in the presence of the order to tell him what he is like: “Ananda, explain more fully the Tathagata’s wonderful and marvellous qualities.” Ananda compares the Buddha to a whole litany of wonderful things, starting with a miraculous birth. The Buddha replies, “Remember this too as a wonderful and marvellous quality of the Tathagata. Feelings, perceptions, thoughts – these are known as they arise, as they are present, as they disappear.” That is to say, the art of meditation is greater even than a miracle. A method of meditation is implied.

What the Buddha realized about the yogic path is that torturing the body is not required or even beneficial. Instead, the yogi can simply withdraw his attention from attachment to physicality through concentrated attention and awareness. In the three similes “never heard before,” the Buddha describes two wet sappy pieces of wood lying in water and dry land and a dry sapless piece of wood lying on dry land. The dry sapless piece of wood is the arhant. The deeper meaning refers to the symbolism of fire and ignition in relation to enlightenment and solar symbolism. Fire is the “psychic heat,” the tummo or kundalini – the fire of enlightenment itself. Thus, the power of detachment generates or activates an energetic state or potential that can in turn “ignite” the state of illumination or enlightenment. The Buddha is the kinsman of the Sun, himself a descendent of the solar race. The Sun is the door to the deathless. The path of transcendence is the solar path. The Buddha realized that asceticism is still attachment to physicality. He formulated the intention of achieving a state of perfect happiness not bound to physicality. This state is neither self-indulgent nor ascetic. It is rooted in the detachment, intention, and awareness that lead to awakening.

Notes

[1] The fourth Buddha, Dipankara, is said to have predicted the future enlightenment of Sumedha, a rich Brahman turned hermit, who numerous kappas later was born as Gotama. Our age is blessed that it will have known five Buddhas: Kakusandha, Konagamana, Kassapa, Gotama, and Metteyya. Metteyya will appear in the distant future.

[2] There is some evidence in the Pali Canon for a Northern Buddhist tradition Gotama renounced the world at the age of 19, and attained enlightenment at 30, but the mainstream tradition says 29 and 35. In fact, he was probably 28 and 34 respectively in Western reckoning, since Asian chronology considers an infant to be one year old at birth.

[3] In the Anguttara Nikaya, the Buddha compares the practices of self-mortification with the physical, verbal, and mental impurities of the Brahmans, and declares neither will attain enlightenment because of their exclusive emphasis on the physical.

[4] Pali-English Dictionary (see bibliography).

[5] Thus, Vinnyana is similar to the Cabalistic concept of the nephesch.

[6] Uppaka was an Ajiwaka, one of the five major samana philosophies. The Ajiwakas believed in cosmic determinism. The other schools were the hedonistic Lokayata (or Charwaka), the ascetic Jain (or Nirgrantha), the agnostic Ajnana, and Buddhism itself.

[7] The Gnostic Society Library, The Gospel of Thomas Collection,  Logion 13, http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl_thomas.htm.