The Seed of Perfection

Come said the muse,
Sing me a song no poet has yet chanted,
Sing me the universal.

In this broad earth of ours,
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
Nestles the seed of perfection.

By every life a share or more or less,
None born but it is born, conceal'd or unconceal'd the seed is.

-Walt Whitman in the "Song of Universal Praise".

Musings on Two Old Favorites

One unique thing about Buddhism is that there is no single scripture that encapsulates all the teachings and that everyone follows. Coming from a cultural background informed by the Abrahamic faiths, I find this very interesting and a bit challenging. It's quite easy for Christians to bust out a Bible or Muslims to whip out the Quran but what's a Buddhist to do? Carrying around the entire Canon of Buddhist scriptures is a tad impractical (although not impossible now with the right files loaded into a PDA or iPhone).

Despite the massive amount of teachings, there are quite a few "all time favorites" that are easily picked out. For me, two such texts are 'The Dhammapada' and 'The Heart Sutra'.

Some might yawn at these choices since they have (thankfully!) became VERY popular and well known in modern times. It's not a stretch to say that the Dhammapada and the Heart Sutra are the two most popular Buddhist scriptures period.

My connection with the Dhammapada is a special one: it was the first actual Buddhist scripture I ever read. I've encountered many, many translations of this text, some good, some not so good, but my favorite one is the Gil Fronsdal version. Fronsdal's rendering perfectly balances elegant poetic expressions with precise, penetrating insight.

The full translation by of Fronsdal's Dhammapada is available from Audio Dharma.

The Heart Sutra is particularly popular not only for the depth of it's meaning but also for it's brevity. This makes it a staple of nearly every Mahayana ceremony/event/practice. The sutra is popular in many languages such as the original Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Tibetan. Translating these translations into English leaves us with nearly as many English versions as there grains of sand in the Ganges river.

My favorite examination of the sutra is Bill Porter's (Red Pine) "The Heart Sutra: The Womb of Buddhas". His commentary is short yet profound, just like the sutra itself.

As far as actual translations go, I really like the one from the Buddhist Text Translation Society but it's not my favorite. My favorite Heart Sutra translation is from the Order of Interbeing, a branch of the Vietnamese Zen tradition founded by Thich Nhat Hanh. The Plum Village Foundation Hong Kong has a link to their version (rendered as The Heart of Perfect Understanding) as well as the audio of it being chanted in English. And I must say, it sounds absolutely amazing!

Heart Sutra -ReMixed!

I came across this 'Heart Sutra Dance Mix' and found it quite...catchy! It's the 'long version' of the sutra. It was posted on YouTube by a person who goes by the name of 'mofreedom'. Enjoy!

Samantabhadra's Repentance Verse

For all the harm that I've done,
With my body, speech, and mind.
From beginningless greed, anger and stupidity.
Through lifetimes without number till this very day,
I now repent and I vow,
To change entirely.

***

Ven. Heng Sure of the Berkeley Monastery has a wonderful musical version of this:

The Bodhisattva Path as Taught by Bill Withers

Moon Reflecting on Water

...Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water.
Enlightenment does not divide you, just as the moon does not break the water. You cannot hinder enlightenment, just as a drop of water does not hinder the moon in the sky. The depth of the drop is the height of the moon. Each reflection, however long or short its duration, manifests the vastness of the dewdrop, and realizes the limitlessness of the moonlight in the sky....

-from Dogen's Genjokoan, translated by Robert Aitken Roshi and Kazuaki Tanahashi

Being and Mindfulness

Author and NY Times columnist Judith Warner posted a provocative entry on her blog entitled 'Being and Mindfulness'. Here's a snippet:

The other night at a dinner party, a friend described how she tried to practice mindfulness meditation to keep herself from losing it during an utterly wretched seven-hour layover in an airport while she was exhausted, ill and desperate to get home to her children.

“I kept trying to be all ‘Be Here Now,’” she said, “but I just wanted to be anywhere but here.”

We all laughed.

Then she described how, on another day, she’d managed not to bite off the head of a woman who’d been gratuitously mean to her 8-year-old daughter, but instead had stayed in the moment and had connected and been able to join with the woman in an experience of their common, sadly limited, humanity.

At which point, full of congratulations (and suppressing my own story of having lost my temper with a woman in an airport bathroom who, I felt, had addressed my daughter Julia with an unforgivable tone of officiousness and disdain), I was beginning to wonder what body snatcher had taken my cranky friend away and left this kindly, calm, pod person in her place.

Where was the woman I always seek out at school events to laugh with? Where was the black humor, the sense of absurdity?

I felt strangely abandoned.

Warner goes on to touch on some very important points regarding mindfulness practice. Her experiences also point to some of the perils when certain practices are taken too far out of context. The whole point of mindfulness practice, from the Buddhist perspective, is precisely NOT to boost up the sense of the self.

On one hand, it's great when teachers like Pema Chödrön get the 'Oprah seal of approval' but at the same time, what good is any of this if people aren't really practicing properly?

Yo Sootraaz R Punk! (Part II)

Continued from Part I

...To understand where all Buddhist texts ultimately emerge from, we have to start at the beginning: the Buddha himself. During the Buddha's time, literary culture was still not widespread but the tradition of an oral culture was already thousands of years old, established and maintained (to this very day) by Hindu brahmins. Because the recitation and memorization of teachings was the norm, it made perfect sense for the Buddha and his followers to preserve the teachings orally. Something that deserves mention and will have far reaching implications, is the fact that the Buddha encountered and taught many different kinds of people. This meant that he had to communicate with them in ways they could understand. With Brahmins and kings, he most likely debated in poetic Sanskrit while with others, he used whatever local dialect may have been necessary. So right from the get-go, we've got a heterogeneous linguistic mixture. In fact, the Buddha specifically advised his followers to teach in languages that people could understand. This rule is even part of the earliest surviving Vinaya (monastic code):

"The speech of the Awakened One is not to be raised into meter (a Veda). Whoever should do so: an offense of wrong doing. I allow that the speech of the Awakened One be learned in one's own dialect." - Cullavagga V.33.1

The story behind this rule is that some monks (previously Brahmins) had set the Buddha's teachings into Sanskrit meter because they looked down on the "low class" dialects spoken by many of the other monks. The Buddha, however, admonished the monks and proclaimed this precept. The reasons are obvious - those who teach the Dharma should not adhere to an exalted form of speech only meant for an educated elite. The Dharma should be made available to all.

For hundreds of years, the teachings were passed down orally before they were finally written down around 100 BCE in Sri Lanka. The language of preservation at this time was Pali, a language that became the basis of the Theravada tradition. Interestingly, we don't really know what the Buddha's native language was. His mother tongue is referred to as Magadhi, (an ancient North Indian language related to Sanskrit and Pali) but there's not much else we know. Many have argued, as a way of playing up the Pali canon's significance/authenticity, that the Buddha actually spoke Pali. Modern scholarship however, casts serious doubt on this claim. The word 'Pali' itself means 'text' and refers to the (oral) language that the earliest teachings (texts) were eventually presevered and passed down in.

The flip side, of course, is that we shouldn't be so ready to deposit the Pali Canon into the nearest trash recepticle merely because "the Buddha didn't speak it verbatim". The compendium of scriptures, stories, verses, and training rules that make up the Canon have survived for 2100+ years in their original language. In fact, the Pali canon is the only such collection of early Buddhist teachings to survives in its entirety and was, as alluded to earlier, the first to be written down. With credentials like that, fudging the socio-linguistic history of ancient, northeast India seems even more unnecessary. Furthermore, all of the arguments over what language the Buddha "really spoke" seem to lose most of their significance when we recall that the Buddha, like many Indians past and present, was conversant in multiple languages/dialects.

Curiously, the very earliest texts from would become known as the Mahayana tradition, date from around the time that the Pali suttas were being written down. Here too, the language of preservation was one that was almost certainly not the Buddha's native language: Sanskrit. And even then, the early Mahayana sutras were not written down in the classical Sanskrit of linguists and poets like Pāṇini, Kālidāsa, and Aśvaghoṣa but in a dialect modern scholars call 'Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit'. Once again we run into the linguistic mish-mash but once again, we should ask ourselves, how much does this matter against having the teachings preserved in languages we can understand?

Let's fast forward a few hundred years after the Pali Canon was written down to the 4th century CE. By this time, numerous sects of Buddhism were already established and many 'new' Mahayana sutras had appeared and were appearing. One of the few "internal" criteria for determining the authenticity of a text was something called 'buddhavacana' (बुद्धवचन) or 'Word of the Buddha'. For all Buddhist schools past and present, this doesn't mean the literal words the Buddha spoke but rather an adherence to the teaching of the Buddha (i.e. the Dharma). The question many people asked themselves was 'I never heard of such a teaching before but is it something that the Buddha or one of his enlightened disciples would have taught'? The answer, at least in the Mahayana tradition, is yes. Traditionally, the explanations of the origin of Mahayana sutras include everything from secret lineages of transmission to brave sages recovering texts from other realms of existence. Historically, it's impossible to say who specifically composed these texts but this newly emerged Sutra Problem was already the subject of debate and inquiry even in ancient times.

The master Vasubhandu, along with his scholar and brother Asanga, are regarded as the classic masters and codifiers of the Yogacara teachings. They both lived in the 4th century CE and were also trying to find ways of dealing with The Sutra Problem. Vasubhandu was known for using the Four Reliances as a guideline for evaluating 'new' sutras:

1. Rely on the message of the teacher, not on his personality;
2. Rely on the meaning, not just on the words
3. Rely on the real meaning, not on the provisional one;
4. Rely on your wisdom mind, not on your ordinary, judgemental mind.

It's interesting how the Four Reliances are very reminiscent of the teachings found in an 'authentic' text like the Kalama Sutta.

As a friend of mine pointed out, Bill Porter (Red Pine) in his translation/commentary of the Heart Sutra mentions the Four Reliances and their traditional and modern implications:

The question of authorship was an important one for early Buddhists concerned with authenticity. But over the centuries it has become less so. Nowadays Buddhist resolve this issue by considering the teaching contained in the text on its own merits. Accordingly, the principle of the Four Reliances (Catu pratiśaraṇa - चतु प्रतिशरण)...Thus, if a teaching accords with the Dharma, then the teacher must have been a buddha or someone empowered by a Buddha to speak on his or her behalf. For our part, all we can safely claim is that the author of this sutra was someone with an understanding of the major Buddhist traditions two thousands years ago , the ability to summarize their salient points in the briefest fashion possible, and the knowledge of where Buddhas come from.

Many people who do not/did not accept these new teachings viewed them as degenerate works that teach things the Buddha never taught. It's true that there may be many things that the historical Buddha probably never 'actually taught' but, again, does this mean that we should automatically junk all of these teachings? The fact that these sutras emerged in the first place, became so popular, and profoundly influenced the study and practice of Buddhism definitely counts for something and warrants a closer look regardless of whether or not we agree and/or follow the Mahayana teachings.

In his "Way of the Bodhisattva", Shantideva engages in an exchange with non-Mahayana monks who attempt to discredit him as well as the Mahayana sutras he refers to during his legendary discource on the Bodhisattva Path. Let's jump into the middle of the debate:

40. [Hinayanist]:Liberation comes from understanding the Four Truths so what is the point of perceiving emptiness?
[Madhyamika/Shantideva]:Because a scripture states that there is no Awakening without this path.

41. [Hinayanist]: The Mahayana is certainly not authenticated.
[Madhyamika]:How is your scripture authenticated?
[Hinayanist]: Because it is authenticated by both of us.
[Madhyamika]: Then it is not authenticated by you from the beginning.

42. Apply the same faith and respect to the Mahayana as you do to it. If something is true because it is accepted by two different parties, then the Vedas and the like would also be true.

43. If you object that the Mahayana is controversial, then reject your own scripture because it is contested by heterodox groups and because parts of your scriptures are contested by your own people and others...

...49. If you acknowledge the utterances that correspond to the sutras as the words of the Buddha, why do you not respect the Mahayana, which is for the most part similar to your sutras?

50. If the whole is faulty because one part is not acceptable, why not consider the whole as taught by the Jina[Buddha] because one part is similar to the sutras?

-Chapter 9, verses 40-50, translation by Wallace & Wallace

Shantideva, of course, makes a great point: the same line of reasoning used to cast doubt on the Mahayana can also be applied to the non-Mahayana texts. Going further, the vast scriptural commentaries from all traditions would need to be thrown out because they were obviously not from the Buddha's mouth. And yet, let us again ask ourselves if a "book burning" of so-called "false texts" is the proper course of action.

People have been arguing and debating the The Sutra Problem for thousands of years and probably won't stop anytime soon. However, The Sutra Problem wouldn't be such a problem at all if people had a more open and accommodating attitude instead of the unskillfully rigid "this is true and that is false" perspective. Aside from the traditional Four Reliances, another related guideline to use is what we can call the "Pudding Proof" method. The proof is in the pudding, as the old saying goes and it turns out there are instances of accomplished masters using this principle. One very notable case has to do with the famous Ming Dynasty master, Hanshan Deqing and the Shurangama Sutra.

The curious case of the Shurangama Sutra goes back many years and has many far out and just plain weird stories associated with it. Professor Ron Epstein relates a few in his fascinating articled called "Shurangama Sutra: A Reappraisal of its Authenticity". Professor Epstein concludes his talk with what he calls a provocative point:

As already mentioned, the Shurangama is connected with enlightenment of the well-known Ming Dynasty Ch'an Master Han-shan Te-ch'ing. According to his autobiography, he used the work to verity his enlightenment. He explains in his autobiography that he had never heard lectures on the Sutra and did not understand its meaning at all. Then, according to his own account, he studied the Sutra using the power of yoga pratyaksa, or direct veridical perception, claiming that it is impossible to grasp the meaning of the work if one gives rise to a even a little bit of discriminating consciousness. After eight months of constant study, he tells us that he came to a total understanding of the work that was devoid of doubt.

In other words, I think we can say that, for Ch’an Master Han-shan, the Sutra was seen as an imprint of a mind in which discriminating consciousness had been totally eliminated. Of course, Han-shan did not ascribe to prevalent modern Western scholarly ideas about the historical development of Buddhist texts and believed the Sutra had come directly from Sakyamuni Buddha himself, but that is not the point. What is important here is that Han-shan's experiential verification that the text is written on the level of non-discriminative awareness reinforced his belief in the genuineness of the text. Such a criterion lies beyond the narrow band of historical and philological issues that have so far dominated modern scholarly studies of textual authenticity. It seems to me that further study of traditional criteria such as this their own terms must be a prerequisite for evaluation of their relevancy, or lack of it, in terms of the methodology and goals of modern Buddhological research.

All that and then some.

***
We've looked at a lot of stuff and covered a lot of ground. The whole purpose of doing this has been to try and develop a more constructive attitude in dealing with the various texts that all the different Buddhist traditions have accrued over the millennia. A recurring theme of this blog is what a unique time it is practice the Dharma. We're at time when all of the different Buddhist traditions, particularly in the West, are having more and more contact with each other. This can be a very good thing. If the interactions are focused on what we have in common, we can further strengthen the common bond we share as Sons and Daughters from good families. Constructively and respectfully examing the differenes between traditions can also be an extremely useful thing. Both endeavors can go a long way towards enriching the practice of Buddhism in the modern age.

What won't work, as Rita Gross mentions, is the perpetuation of narrow-minded sectarianism. To say we live in the Information Age is now a ridiculous understandment (I looked up ~80% of the material for this post online). Pali gathas, Ch'an Awakening poetry, and mystical tantras, once separated by many mountains and rivers, are a mere few keystrokes and clicks from our fingertips. In some ways, we'd be a bit crazy to NOT take a look at the texts of other traditions and see what's out there. This doesn't mean that we need to agree with everything we encounter or that we have to somehow force it all to fit. What we should do, however, is take things as they come to us and remember that the goal of all sutras, regardless of origin, is as Thich Nhat Hanh would say, to transform suffering into peace, joy, and liberation.

Happy Reading.