Serene Compassion: A Christian Appreciation of Buddhist Holiness

SERENE COMPASSION

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SERENE COMPASSION A CHRISTIAN A P P R E C I A T I O N OF BUDDHIST HOLINESS

Denise Lardner Carmody John Tully Carmody

New York

Oxford

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

1996

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1996 by Denise Lardner Carmody Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carmody, Denise Lardner, 1935Serene compassion : a Christian appreciation of Buddhist holiness Denise Lardner Carmody, John Tully Carmody. p. cm. ISBN 0-19-509969-9 1. Buddhism—Doctrines—Introductions. 2. Buddhism—Relations— Christianity. 3. Christianity and other religions—Buddhism. I. Carmody, John, 1939-1995. II. Title. BQ4132.C37 1996 261.2'43—dc20 95-42758

135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

PREFACE This book builds on two prior volumes that we have published on Christian appreciation of the spirituality of other religious traditions; Christian Uniqueness and Catholic Spirituality (1990) and Catholic Spirituality and the History of Religions (1991), as well as on our recent In the Path of the Masters (1994). Here, we take up an appreciation of Buddhist holiness from a Christian point of view, in effect setting Christ in dialogue with the Buddha. Specifically, we expose for a Western audience interested in the riches of Buddhist spirituality six topics at the heart of the Buddhist enterprise: the Buddha himself, his teaching, the community that he founded, meditation, morality, and Buddhist wisdom. In each case, we stress the insight and beauty that Buddhists have generated before suggesting what Westerners may find problematic. By the end of the study, readers should be able to estimate how what Christians call "grace" has been at work abundantly in the tradition and community flowing from the Awakened One. Although we are going our own way in this work, we acknowledge gladly the help we have found in the writings of such pioneers of interreligious dialogue as Ramon Panikkar, Leonard Swidler, Hans king, and Paul Knitter. We also acknowledge, with affection as well as gratitude, our debts to the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at Collegeville, Minnesota, and to the Jewish-Christian-Muslim Dialogue sponsored by the National Conference and the Journal of Ecumenical Studies. Santa Clara, Calif. May 1995

D. L. C. J. T. C.

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CONTENTS 1. Introduction

3

2. The Buddha

12

3. The Dharma

30

4. The Sangha

48

5. Meditation

67

6. Morality

86

7. Wisdom

105

8. Conclusion

Index

133

124

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SERENE COMPASSION

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1 Introduction

Buddhist Holiness Early in his engaging reworking of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Sogyal Rinpoche describes his master. lamyang Khyentse, to whom he was given when only six months old, functioned as his living link to Tibetan Buddhist tradition. What Sogyal recalls when bringing his master before us illustrates the Buddhist holiness with which we engage in this work: He was the incarnation of a master who had transformed the practice of Buddhism in our country. In Tibet it was never enough simply to have the name of an incarnation, you always had to earn respect, through your learning and through your spiritual practice. My master spend years in retreat, and many miraculous stories are told about him. He had profound knowledge and spiritual realization, and I came to discover that he was like an encyclopedia of wisdom, and knew the answer to any question you might ask him. There were many spiritual traditions in Tibet, but lamyang Khyentse was acclaimed as the authority on them all. He was, for everyone who knew or heard about him, the embodiment of Tibetan Buddhism, a living proof of how someone who had realized the teachings and completed their practice would be.' Holiness is a kind of realization. Inasmuch as we think of God or ultimate reality (perhaps nirvana is the best Buddhist equivalent) as

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holy, we imply that holiness is perfection—reality without flaw, mote, or sin. If illusion and error mark what is not holy, not ultimate in being or perfection, not divine, it follows that most of what we experience, being less than ultimate, is not fully real. Only God or nirvana is fully real. Other beings are real in the measure that they approach God or nirvana. The saints and most eminent teachers are "realized" in the sense that they achieve a measure of humanity that the rest of us usually do not. In them we can see the ideal, what the teachings that we and they share as our guidelines are like when they take over a mind and heart. Saints incarnate the ideal of the tradition in which they develop. They give their tradition flesh, warmth, weight, and character. No teaching is fully real until it moves from the pages of the holy books into the minds and hearts of its saintly exemplars. All sages who reflect on the living ways of saintly teachings stress that the letters always lag behind the spirit. To catch the spirit, one needs to encounter a teaching in its full vitality, as a master and a community strive to embody it. Even though no master or community will embody a teaching perfectly, greater masters such as Jesus and the Buddha have bequeathed their disciples a substantial peace. In their example, disciples can see the teaching exemplified sufficiently clearly and profoundly to leave no serious doubts. Thus devout Buddhists have never doubted the adequacy of the Buddha's enlightenment, while devout Christians have never doubted the saving power of Jesus' love. The Buddhist holiness that engages us in this volume presents itself as a compassionate wisdom. As we shall see when studying the meditation and morality that it enjoins, Buddhist wisdom is not merely an academic philosophy. The guidance that the Buddha offered was practical, holistic, a medicine as much as a knowledge. Because of the good effects they could attribute to following the Buddha's pathway, his followers have walked it confidently and joyously. For the most impressive among them, it has been a light that is warm as well as bright, an understanding that is also love. Indeed, in the aftermath of the Buddha's experience of enlightenment, it seems unthinkable that he should not have postponed his full entry into nirvana so as to teach others what he had realized. Awakening of the depth that he gained was bound to be compassionate. Appreciation of the suffering intrinsic to unenlightened existence was bound to move him to alleviate others' pains. Holiness, therefore, presses toward altruism. In the history of saintliness, we find few, if any, misanthropic hearts. Certainly, we find many solitaries, who have felt it necessary to withdraw from the madding crowd, but the regular refrain in their teaching and prayer is that their withdrawal has made them tender toward the sufferings of their sisters and brothers. As their own ignorance has become clearer

Introduction I 5

to them, they have seen that Saint Paul spoke for a great multitude. Heard compassionately, most of us lament that we do not do the good that we want to do and that we do much evil that we do not want to do (Rom. 7). As their own laziness, pride, hardness of heart, and other failings have become plain, the great solitaries have realized that virtually all people shuffle in chains, shackled to ignorance and sin. The holier such solitaries, many of them monks and nuns living in the desert, the kinder their judgments about their fellow human beings and the more constant their prayers of intercession. It is wrong to think that holiness takes people apart from ordinary humanity. The greatest saints have lived at the center of history, haggling like Abraham for the wretches of Sodom and Gomorrah. Nonetheless, holiness does make an impact on the saint's personality, rendering him or her purer than the rest of us. "Purity" is not an exact term or quality, but the average person associates it with holiness. The physical analogy is to cleanliness. What a tidy room, a neat person, a well-washed body conveys physically, holiness conveys spiritually. Saints have few cobwebs in the corners of their souls. The light of God or nirvana has penetrated their recesses, scattering deep thoughts of envy and lust. The saint may have a mind more energetic than tidy, but his or her spirit does not abide great disorder. S0ren Kierkegaard wrote that purity of heart is to will one thing. The lover of God commits no adulteries with idols. The Buddhist saint wholly committed to nirvana does not dally with samsara, the reality opposed to nirvana. The order in the soul of the holy person projects a characteristic simplicity. Strike that soul and a pure sound comes forth. The holy person is not muffled or discordant. When it comes to ritualistic expressions of holiness, the history of religious practice suggests that purity has often captured the imaginations of those pursuing improvement and wanting to draw near to the divine or sacred, the ultimate in being and goodness. Thus in an article on the idea of the holy (which owes a great deal to Rudolf Otto but encompasses more than his famous book), Willard Oxtoby has written: Indeed, much of the principal ritual expression of holiness is bound up with the notion of purity. For persons most familiar with the religious traditions of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, this may not be immediately evident, since many interpreters in recent centuries have concentrated on an ethical conception of holiness, crediting the Hebrew prophets or Jesus with a repudiation of ritual. The intimate relationship between holiness and purity can also be overlooked because a separate vocabulary for purity exists in both Hebrew and Greek. But the notion that the holy itself, as well as human beings who seek to draw near to it, should be kept from the profane, finds symbolic as well as practical ex-

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pression in the avoidance of various sorts of contaminating or polluting substances and actions. Jewish avoidance of pork, Muslim traditions regarding fasting, Christian practice of celibacy, Zoroastrian precautions to safeguard the holy fire, traditional Hindu dietary and social taboos, Shinto ablutions at shrines—all these and many more are instances of the maintenance of some sense of purity worthy of holiness in the "great religions."2

Traditional Buddhists in pursuit of holiness have embraced celibacy and encouraged vegetarianism. These are physical ways of pursuing a purity consonant with their sense of what enlightenment and nirvana entail. Awakening put a premium on the spirit. Certainly, the Buddha advocated a "middle way" that did not denigrate the body. Equally certainly, however, his own example and the traditional practice of his monastic community made the spirit superior to the body. Indeed, disciplines other than celibacy—moderation in diet and sleep, for example—reinforced the conviction that the body did best when it stayed in fighting trim to serve the spirit; and while the practice of vegetarianism expressed Buddhist convictions about nonviolence (doing as little injury to other living things as possible), it also served Buddhist ascetic ends, reinforcing detachment and spareness. Thus our first approaches to Buddhist holiness suggest that, for all the warmth and humanity that ideal masters manifest, it will involve us with purity, detachment, discipline, and freedom. In the measure that Buddhists penetrate reality, make progress toward what is substantial, and distance themselves from what is illusory, they find their lives simplifying. Whether or not they subscribe to a monastic regime, they give their bodily appetites limited rights. Food, clothing, sleep, and possessions pertain largely to the order of means. They are as good or bad, as helpful or harmful, as the degree to which they expedite or hinder spiritual practice. If people become preoccupied with food or clothing, they divert themselves from what Buddhists consider more important matters: for example, progress in mediation or greater proficiency in compassion. If sleep or possessions become matters of great moment, mindfulness and virtue are likely to languish. The profile of the Buddhist holy person, therefore, makes little provision for food, clothing, sleep, or possessions. The ideal in their regard is a simplicity that deals with them expeditiously. People familiar with Christian traditions about holiness will find little strange in this Buddhist cast of mind. The Christian saints have also paid little regard to food, clothing, sleep, and possessions. They, too, have thought of the needs of the body as commonplace. A healthy body was a great boon, and one had a strong obligation to treat the body well; but bodily disciplines also were important, to ensure the primacy of the spirit. The spirit would live with God eternally. Christian faith said that the body would be resurrected, but

Introduction

I 7

precisely how was not clear. So most of the saints considered the spirit the part to stress when speaking of how to draw close to God. By lifting one's mind and heart to God in prayer one was most likely to deal with the holy God intimately and transformingly. From the beginning, then, we may expect that Buddhist and Christian instincts about holiness have held much in common. The sameness of ultimate reality and of human nature, working in both traditions, has ensured that saints of both traditions would move through time with a similarly light step.

Catholic Spirituality In two earlier volumes, we have dealt with general matters concerning Catholic spirituality in a global age.3 Here, the most useful introductory consideration may be to continue reflecting on holiness and purity but to shift from a primarily Buddhist orientation to a Catholic Christian one. By doing this, we can anticipate the regular movement of the volume, which is from Buddhist insights to Catholic appreciations. With all orthodox Christians, Catholics believe that creation comes from God as a wonderful blessing. They can accept the Buddhist teaching that all of life is suffering, because it rests on both empirical evidence and cogent metaphysical analyses, but they cannot let this teaching or any other lead them to call creation, either natural or human, evil. Relatedly, they cannot endorse the (Gnostic) position that something went awry in the process of creation, in effect causing God to make a mistake. Neither matter nor death nor sin vitiates the Christian view that creation is thoroughly good. No abuse of nature, sex, food, wealth, or spiritual endowments such as intelligence, imagination, and strong will justifies the proposition that God was foolish to bring these creatures into being or that God laments their having come to be. It follows that a Christian sense of holiness is incarnational and that it finds congenial the Tibetan Buddhist instinct that masters such as lamyang Khyentse incarnate the wisdom of the ages. When early Christian devotees went out to the desert and apprenticed themselves to fathers and mothers revered for holiness, they acted from a profoundly incarnational instinct. It was valid, legitimate, and very human to use elders as models for, or guides to, spiritual progress. Relatedly, it was valid to revere saints one had never seen, holy people present only in the lore developed by prior generations. Finally, it was valid to bow before icons, to use material, artistic representations of the Mother of God, the Apostles, and the giants of foregoing ages because the human senses had the right to an education in what the life of God, the

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imitation of Christ, and the good news trumpeted by the evangelists entailed. Consequently, when Christians come upon a tradition such as Tibetan Buddhism, in which the lineage of masters is important, they have many grounds for respecting it. Certainly, significant questions can arise, for example, concerning the relation between a given master and Gautama, the historical Buddha. How does this relation compare with that between a Christian master, such as Antony, the paradigmatic desert father, and Jesus, the center of Christian faith? Different Buddhists might answer this question in different ways. In general, though. Buddhism admits more flexibility than Christianity. No orthodox Christian can make a master, such as Antony, Benedict, or Francis of Assisi, or a mistress, such as Hildegarde of Bingen or Teresa of Avila, the equal of Jesus. All such masters or mistresses have to depend on Jesus for their salvation just as fully as less accomplished Christians do. The Zen admonition to "slay" the Buddha suggests a different possibility in Buddhist holiness, though not one that denigrates Gautama. For Zen Buddhists, and perhaps for devotees of other schools as well, personal practice is more important than faith in Gautama (though faith in Gautama can remain strong). The Buddha is more an exemplification of what can happen to any human being through enlightenment than a unique incarnation of divine being or truth. Naturally, it is not wise to push contrasts such as this too hard, especially at the outset of a comparative inquiry. Christian theologians such as Karl Rahner have ruminated profitably about the paradigmatic aspects of the Incarnation—the ways that Jesus the Christ represents a uniquely full realization of a potency ("obediential") that all human beings carry, by virtue of their spirituality, to become expressions of God—while devotional Buddhists have often spoken of Gautama in terms that can be likened only to the language of worship: homage accorded divinity or ultimate reality as such. Nonetheless, we may assume from the outset of our inquiry, as a working hypothesis, that Christians have a greater investment in the uniqueness of their founder, their human locus of salvation, than Buddhists do. Whereas there is only one Christ, the oneness of the Buddha is less pronounced. The many bodhisattvas and buddhas of various realms can make Buddhism seem pluralistic. The one Christ can carry cosmic overtones that distance him somewhat from Jesus of Nazareth, the historical figure whom Christian faith confesses to be like the rest of us ordinary human beings in all things save sin, but those overtones can never sunder the personal identification between Jesus and the Logos (the eternal divine Word) without running afoul of conciliar Christian faith. Once again, there is a parallel on the Buddhist side inasmuch as the Dharmakaya, the Law Body, of the Buddha bears relations to Gautama. Still, these relations

Introduction I 9

are probably not so intrinsic or unqualified as those between the humanity and divinity of Jesus the Christ. At any rate, while doctrinal differences, at least of emphasis, are bound to occur between Buddhists and Christians, in our opinion adherents of these traditions can agree to the practical incarnational proposition that holiness occurs in space and time, works through ordinary bodies and social groups, and both takes much of its shape from a given culture and in turn works on that culture to bring out some of its best possibilities. Neither Buddhism nor Christianity is acosmic or antimaterial, opposed to the body or the arts or the sciences. Individual Buddhists and Christians, as well as groups from different ethnic backgrounds and historical periods, may vary considerably in how they live out their commitment to incarnating holiness, but in principle they tend to agree that their faith, their spiritual commitment and genius, rightly extends into every nook and cranny of both personal and social life.4 The Buddha would not be the Buddha, the fully enlightened one, were this not so for Buddhists, and Jesus would not be the Incarnate Word, the Son of God, were this not so for Christians. In calling Gautama the Buddha, his followers have committed themselves to the proposition that light shone in him so fully that by following his way one can get to the core of what it means to be human. All that "humanity" implies is available in the Buddhist program. Certainly, other masters, other traditions, other cultures possess great riches and are worth consulting and listening to with docility; but in the Buddhist program, nothing essential to full human flowering is lacking. Without such a conviction, Buddhism would never have developed its monastic life, its great cluster of saints, or its dazzling cultures. All these depend on a complete commitment to the dharma (teaching) that embraces it with full enthusiasm. Similarly, Christianity would never have called forth the complete generosity that its saints have manifested or the full permeation of cultures that its best artists and scientists have achieved without the parallel conviction that in following Christ one could find, or be given, everything essential to human fulfillment (indeed, a life—of divinity itself—far exceeding what human nature could postulate). In our opinion, an individual cannot manifest the wholeheartedness that either Buddhist or Christian holiness exhibits while doubting the adequacy of the Master or his program. Psychologically, that does not compute. Indeed, one of the major challenges for a global spirituality is to rethink this psychology of wholeheartedness in the context of persistent, ongoing interreligious dialogue. Nowadays, Christians can know a great deal about Buddha and the Buddhist programs for eminent holiness, as Buddhists can know a great deal about Jesus and the Christian pro-

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grams for eminent holiness. (Naturally, adherents of both religions can also know a great deal about Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and still other paths to eminent holiness.) For many Buddhists and Christians alike, the cultural isolation that one associates with traditional Tibet (even after allowing for regular traffic with India and China) or medieval Europe (which had analogous traffic with classical and Muslim cultures) no longer is possible. More significantly, for at least a few Buddhists and Christians, it is no longer desirable. The goodness and stimulus that these truly contemporary Buddhists and Christians (and, of course, parallel adherents of other religious traditions) find in one another's legacies forbid them to walk away from a generous encounter and an eager commitment to mutual instruction and challenge. Whatever difficulties such an openness may bring regarding how to think about one's own religious tradition, the Tightness of following truth or goodness or holiness whenever one encounters it makes turning one's back on a truth-bearing dialogue partner unthinkable. Still, those we call fundamentalists clearly can find such a turning of their backs not only thinkable but imperative. Their response to a pluralistic world, the close contact of traditions with mutually competing as well as supporting claims, is to reaffirm almost mindlessly the adequacy of their received faiths. In the fundamentalist Christian case, the Buddha cannot be comparable to Jesus in any serious regard because that would diminish Jesus and so be blasphemous. Buddhists will have to say for themselves whether Jesus represents a parallel threat. Perhaps a different traditional understanding of orthodoxy and dogma in most Buddhist schools makes that less likely. (The parallel in Islam seems quite exact, though, and so Muslim fundamentalism is at least as virulent as Christian.) We have gone to considerable length in prior works to expose a nuanced position that we think, or at least hope, maintains a privileged place for Jesus and traditional, orthodox Christology while also maintaining a full openness to interreligious dialogue and so to the wisdom of a rich tradition such as Buddhism. Suffice it to say here that we think, in good Catholic fashion, that the proper stance in such interreligious inquiry is not either/or but both/and. We intend to be both fully orthodox Catholic Christians and profound admirers of the Buddha and Buddhist holiness. NOTES 1. Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), xi-xii. 2. Willard G. Oxtoby, "Holy, Idea of the," in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 6:436. Rudolf Otto's famous work Das Heilege appeared in 1917.

Introduction

I 11

3. John Tully Carmody and Denise Lardner Carmody, Christian Uniqueness and Catholic Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), and Catholic Spirituality and the History of Religious (New York: Paulist Press, 1991). 4. For the Catholic Christian instance of the cultural incarnations of faith, see Lawrence S. Cunningham, The Catholic Heritage (New York: Crossroad, 1983), and The Catholic Experience (New York: Crossroad, 1985). On Buddhist understandings on Buddhahood, see Paul J. Griffins, On Being Buddha (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), and Paul Williams, Mahayana Buddhism (London: Routledge, 1989).

2

The Buddha

Gautama The historical Buddha (563-483 [in some reckonings, a century later in others]) is an anchor for the holiness that his followers have sought. Tradition has it that he was born a prince and raised in luxury and became serious about life only when, around age thirty, he realized that old age, disease, and death are omnipresent. Quitting his palace, his beautiful wife, and his son, Gautama set out to solve the problem of suffering. His first teachers, Hindu holy men, did not give him what he sought. Although he learned to meditate and progressed spiritually through asceticism, no enlightenment flooded his being. He still felt trapped in the clutches of karma (the system of cause and effect rooted in desire). Until he could break free of desire and karma, he would know no true joy. In retrospect, this institution marks the distinctiveness and the genius of the Buddha. We deal with Gautama's experience of enlightenment in the next section. Here, the task is to fill out the profile of the prime exemplar of Buddhist holiness. As a wealth of statuary the world over suggests, Gautama reached his eminence through meditation. The statues of the emaciated Buddha remind us that he strove mightily to bend his body toward enlightenment, but the greater impression that Buddhist art makes is of serenity, a peace won through meditation. With his mind

The Buddha I 13

and spirit brought into serenity, Gautama suffered no upset. Suffering no upset, he could preach to the world, teaching a growing number of disciples patiently, gladly, and joyfully. The decision to teach came at the behest of the gods. Wanting the benefit of human beings who were suffering, they prevailed on the Buddha to share the light that had flooded him. Indeed, the Awakened One instructed the gods themselves, helping them move from a bliss merely momentary toward the full liberation of nirvana. (In traditional Indian cosmology, the realms of the gods are not ultimate. The gods remain trapped in samsara, the world of birth and death marked by desire and suffering. Inasmuch as only human beings can merit nirvana, it is better to be a human being than a god.) as the Buddha considered the matter, compassion moved to the fore. Seeing the sufferings of all living creatures, he postponed his entry into the full bliss of nirvana to labor to enlighten others. The main posture in which the Buddha comes to us, therefore, is that of a compassionate teacher. He is a sage, one who can instruct suffering, benighted human beings in the most important wisdoms, those that can liberate them from the pains inevitable as long as they cling to the illusion that either they or the things they encounter are fully real or worth desiring. We shall analyze this sagacity in Chapter 3, when we study the dharma. Here, the main point is that when we think of the historical Buddha, it is not his princely, medicinal, or thaumaturgic qualities that should predominate. He is less a ruler from the warrior class, a physician of the soul, or a wonder-worker than a teacher. The great benefit he offers is the truth that can set people free, the wisdom that can remove the bedrock of suffering. Much as the followers of Jesus have developed a host of epithets to glorify their master, so the followers of the Buddha have delighted in a wealth of praiseful descriptions. As Frank E. Reynolds and Charles Hallisey have put it: Countless epithets have been applied to the Buddha over the centuries, but buddha itself has been a particular favorite for explanation. Even hearing the word buddha can cause people to rejoice because, as the Theravada commentary on the Samyutta Nikaya says, "It is very rare indeed to hear the word buddha in this world." . . . The Patisambhida, a late addition to the Theravada canon, explored the significance of the word buddha by saying that "it is a name derived from the final liberation of the Enlightened Ones, the Blessed Ones, together with the omniscient knowledge at the root of the Enlightenment Tree; this name 'buddha' is a designation based on realization." . . . Particular epithets accentuate specific qualities of the Buddha that might otherwise remain unemphasized or ambiguous. Thus the epithet "teacher of gods and men" ... is used in the Mahanidessa, another late canonical text in the Theravada tradition, to display the Bud-

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dha as one who helps others escape from suffering. . . . Various epithets define the Buddha as having attained perfection in all domains. His wisdom is perfect, as are his physical form and manner. In some cases the epithets indicate that the Buddha is without equal, that he has attained "the summit of the world." . . . Perfect in all points, superior through distance from all beings, unique, the Beatific had evidently taken, in the thought of his followers, the place which the devotees of the great religions attributed to the great God whom they adored.1

The implication is that wisdom of the kind and the degree that Gautama gained was divine. He could not possess the eminence his followers found in him without being more than human. He had to have penetrated to reality itself, holiness that was essential. His being had to express the sacred, the ultimate in light and goodness. Further, this assumes that human beings can contact or penetrate the ultimate in light and goodness. If Gautama attained perfect realization, or full enlightenment, why not others? Eventually, some Buddhist thinkers pictured the Buddha as an eternal principle of reality, the equivalent of the Christian Logos at the heart of creative divinity, but this a priori view did not displace either the humanity of the Buddha or the inference that his humanity grounded the real possibility that other members of his species, men and women like him, could also gain enlightenment and so freedom from their sufferings. This suggests that the "divinity" of the Buddha, whether one uses the term strictly or loosely, works through his humanity. He incarnates enlightenment. Gautama is how enlightenment appears in the flesh. Interestingly, this also argues that divinity or ultimate reality or the holiness for which human beings long is serene, cool, yet compassionate. There is no indication that the Buddha, or Buddhist divinity, agonizes about the situation of human beings. He does not die young or suffer physical or political assaults or become broken by life's trials. The stylized, adoring narratives keep him in complete control, giving up his spirit and entering nirvana when he judges the time to be ripe. How completely he has escaped from the demands or limits of the body is not clear. He is still recognizably human, forced to eat and sleep; but the substance of his life, the meaning on which the narratives focus, has become his teaching mission. He remains in the world until he has answered all the needs that his disciples bring forward. Certainly, later generations will produce further needs and additional questions, but at his death the Buddha had the satisfaction of knowing that he had met all the claims made on him. He died and entered nirvana in peace, with all his business finished. This sense of completeness distinguishes the Buddha from Jesus. Jesus died young, well before the ripeness that his own Jewish tradition, as well as the world religions in general, associate with the sage. He did not enjoy the full round of experiences that East Asia, for example,

The Buddha

I 15

correlates with the Buddha, Confucius, and Lao-tzu, its premier sages. Jesus certainly seized the imagination of the New Testament writers as the embodiment of divine wisdom, but he fits more exactly the type of the prophet. His teachings, healings, and miracles serve a mission from God to announce a time of crisis, judgment, and change. The "word of God" that seized the classical Hebrew prophets works in the life of Jesus, impelling him. He must announce the dawning of his father's kingdom. He moves in an acceptable hour, a time of grace, keenly aware that it throws established political and religious ways into question. The Buddha eventually transformed the culture, and so the politics, of much of Asia. For example, King Ashoka (r. 273-232 B.C.E.) tried to move India to a Buddhist social outlook and program, but the Buddha's own focus was not political. He addressed individuals rather than institutions. The changes he sought came from interior transformation rather than external rearrangements. Inasmuch as the crux of his teaching was the renunciation of desire, he placed great limits on worldly projects. The entire world was "burning," as one of his famous early sermons put it. The way to liberation was to extinguish desire and thus stop the burning of both the senses and the mind. This was not an acosmic or anticosmic teaching, but neither was it worldly. The lever to grasp was the human spirit. Until one grasped, or ungrasped, the human spirit—freeing oneself from craving, desire, bondage to burning wants and needs—one had no leverage against karma or samsara and no good prospects for nirvana. The Buddha was a holy man fascinated by the prospect of nirvana. Nirvana was not simply the removal of painful suffering, mere escape from karma, rebirth, samsara. It was also an (inevitably opaque, blank, dark) image for perfection. Free of conditions, the person come to enlightenment could expect to enjoy a complete fulfillment. What "person" signifies in this context remains unclear but will be discussed later. A key Buddhist tenet has it that the "self" is the most central illusion, the ignorance most people find hardest to overcome. For the moment, though, we can speak commonsensically and say that the Buddha and his best followers intuited that the dharma would bring them complete fulfillment, the equivalent of what Hindu Indian culture spoke of as sat, at, ananda—being, awareness, and bliss. With the flame of desire blown out, the human spirit or remainder or whatever we should call what passes from samsara into nirvana would enter upon full freedom. It would gain what human beings have been made to gain inasmuch as they have been composed or have evolved so that they feel oriented or equal to perfection. Such a reality is what we mean by the sacred, the holy, the divine. It is being and consciousness at their best, apart from any defects. The fact that we can to some extent imagine and desire such a reality gives

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it a significant, in fact crucial, existence. The idea of God or the holy is enough to make God or the holy real. Such reality may differ from the reality of palm trees and coconuts. It may not rumble like a Mazerrati sports car or purr like a Hollywood sex kitten, but the fact that it means something to us—indeed, that it structures our minds and hearts (as the foundation of our spirituality)—endows it with being and invites the wise to ponder it steadily and lovingly. As he taught for about forty years following his enlightenment, the Buddha drew from his love of nirvana, his sense of the unconditioned that gave him his definition, the peace and joy depicted in so many of the statues of him.

Awakening The etymological roots of the word "Buddha" link it with "knowledge." The Buddha is the one who knows, who has come awake. Without the experience of awakening, Gautama would not have become or been regarded as the Buddha. With the experience of enlightenment, any of the followers of the Buddha can become a Buddha. Indeed, with the experience of awakening, anyone can see that all realities are intrinsically full of knowledge. Thus awakening is the signature act of Buddhism. When a Buddhist master signs his or her name, the letters are valid inasmuch as they express an inner being flooded with awareness. The Buddhacarita, a devotional work attributed to Ashvaghosa, a second-century C.B. poet living in the court of a northwest Indian monarch, puts into stylized form the most influential legends about the awakening of Shakyamuni (the family name of Gautama). Here is Ashvaghosa's account of the pivotal moment, at the border of the third and fourth watches of the blessed night of Buddhahood, when the World Conquerer entered upon his victory: Then, as the third watch of that night drew on, the supreme master of trance turned his meditation to the real and essential nature of this world: "Alas, living beings wear themselves out in vain! Over and over again they are born, they age, die, pass on to a new life, and are reborn! What is more, greed and dark delusion obscure their sight, and they are blind from out of this great mass of ill." He then surveyed the twelve links of conditioned co-production [the cosmic-mental order of cause-and-effect], and saw that, beginning with ignorance, they lead to old age and death, and, beginning with the cessation of ignorance, they lead to the cessation of birth, old age, death, and all kinds of ill. When the great seer had comprehended that where there is no ignorance whatever, there also the karma-formations are stopped—then he had achieved a correct knowledge of all there is to be known, and he stood out in the world as a Buddha. He passed through the eight stages of Transic

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insight, and quickly reached their highest point. From the summit of the world downwards he could detect no self anywhere. Like the fire, when its fuel is burnt up, he became tranquil. He had reached perfection, and he thought to himself: "This is the authentic Way on which in the past so many great seers, who also knew all higher and lower things, have travelled on to ultimate and real truth. And now I have obtained it!" At the moment, in the fourth watch of the night, when dawn broke and all the ghosts that move and those that move not went to rest, the great seer took up the position which knows no more alteration, and the leader of all reached the state of all-knowledge. When, through his Buddhahood, he had cognized this fact, the earth swayed like a woman drunken with wine, the sky shone bright with the Siddhas who appeared in crowds in all directions, and the mighty drums of thunder resounded through the air. Pleasant breezes blew softly, rain fell from a cloudless sky, flowers and fruits dropped from the trees out of season—in an effort, as it were, to show reverence for him.2

Working backward from the end, we note first that the awakening of Gautama was a cosmic event. All of nature entered into the joy and praise of his accomplishment. Flowers and fruits bore homage because he had become their master, worthy of full honor. The skies and the heavenly beings that filled them were equally effusive. Truly, a magnificent, world-shaking event had occurred. The author quoted in the last section who said that it is rare to hear the word "Buddha" had this world-shaking significance in mind. To penetrate the very essence of reality, to see directly and without illusion the way that all things are, occurs not even once in a typical generation. The earth sways like a woman drunk on wine because enlightenment is the acme of celebration, a kind of nuptials of wisdom. Second, still working backward, we seize on the end of alteration. When Gautama entered upon Buddhahood, he gained the fullness of knowledge ("all-knowledge"). There was nothing more for him to desire. He had taken to himself all that he wished, which was precisely what fulfilled him. So he could rest content. He could be by himself, in himself, with complete satisfaction. Here we find at work the IndoEuropean intuition and conviction that divinity, full being, does not change. Change comes from lack, mere potency, and so afflicts all beings that are not divine. Change does not afflict a being that is divine in the full sense, where ultimate reality and holiness are implied. The true God needs nothing outside himself or herself. Divinity, in its full measure, is being-awareness-bliss from its own source. If it produces nondivine beings, lesser gods or mortals, this cannot be from need or a desire to supplement a less than perfect endowment. It has to be from beneficence, largess. (Some myths portray the gods as making human beings to be their slaves or even as objects on which to vent their sadism, but in fact most such myths, whether in India or the ancient

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Middle East [where probably we should not speak of Indo-European structures of language and thought], are not describing divinity as such—the full instance of being or holiness that alone merits complete worship.) Thus when the Buddhacarita says that Shakyamuni came to know no more alteration, it accords him full divinity. The earth sways in harmony with his knowledge of his own Buddhahood because it has ventured into the presence of its Lord. What ought we to read in the symbolism that awakening was consummated at the beginning of the fourth watch, when dawn broke and the ghosts went to rest? Certainly, the purest, most original light of nature coincides with the awareness that flooded the spirit of Shakyamuni. The knowledge that Buddhists celebrate as the crux of a Buddha is the principle by which reality itself, in its full sweep through natural and spiritual beings, holds together. To be is to be ordered to mind, intelligible—that is another hallmark of the Indo-European complex of languages and thought. The ghosts move away, stop acting, and come to rest because they belong to the realms of irrational darkness— fear, nonbeing, mere emotion, what threatens to overrun the best in the world and the best in spiritual beings such as humans. The awakening of Gautama hastens their departure to clear the stage for the work of liberation that the All-Conquerer will carry out. In fact, Buddhism has always held ghosts, as it has held the lesser gods, in some disdain. One might admit them to the iconography that the common people needed, agreeing that they represented powerful psychic forces, but under firm analysis their significance melted away. They were nothing to fear and nothing to cultivate. One made much greater progress by ignoring them, to concentrate on the core Buddhist program of wisdom, morality, and meditation, than by paying them superstitious, let alone formally cultic, heed. Third, the moment when Shakyamuni looked around, saw no self anywhere, felt completely tranquil, with no burning of desire, and knew that he stood on the authentic Way, where the great seers of the past had stood, is probably the inmost moment in the drama of Buddhahood. It reminds us that by the time of Ashvaghosa's account, Shakyamuni had been fitted into a large pantheon of Buddhist heroes, who had also gained enlightenment. All were Buddhas because all had won the crucial victory over ignorance and desire, coming to see the light of being for themselves. Many had specific names and roles as major or minor actors in the cosmic drama of salvation. Any one could swell to strictly divine proportions because any one possessed the crux of divinity as such, but popular Buddhist imagination liked to play with a multiplicity of savior figures, as though the more soldiers or dolls in the playbox, the more engaging the game. (One sees the same instinct at work in much Christian hagiography.) The bodhisattvas (often the word is translated as "saints," but in fact it is closer to "Buddhas to be,"

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drawing on the same root image of knowledge as "Buddha" and in simple terms designating those who have gained enlightenment but continue to labor for the liberation of all suffering, living beings) meet the same need. The general result, then, is to fill the lay imagination with reams of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, as though in the course of the endless eons of cosmic history (the Indian world is usually depicted as always having been and always going to be) the lighting flash of Buddhahood happens again and again. Fourth and last, at the summit of awareness, where he perceived that there is no self, the Buddha looked down on the other stages of his journey upward. Those other stages included realizations about the sufferings that all living things go through because of their indenture to samsara, which in turn is due to their ignorance and desire. Although awakening as an experience is holistic and finally ineffable, when expressed with the skill of a Buddha it conveys enough conceptual content to show ordinary mortals that the premise of their lives is wrong. All of life is suffering because of desire. Human beings and other living things stay trapped in samsara because they want things, seek things, and race forward in ambition. The peace of the Buddha is not accidental. He is the Buddha because he stands apart from desire and knows the delusion of wanting, seeking, ambitioning. Thus the elements of the experience of enlightenment fit together nicely, like the joints of a skillful carpenter. What Shakyamuni leaves is ignorance and pain. What he joins is knowledge and bliss. The border is where the light comes and the desire leaves definitively. The dawn, when the ghosts depart, is the shining of the flame of nirvana that does not burn, the removal of the night of samsara, during which all is smoky with the burning of ignorant wanting.

Compassion The burning of ignorant wanting continued to work in the Buddha, even after he himself was removed from the flames. Compassion suggests a solidarity with lesser creatures, those who have yet to gain enlightenment. Seeing what ignorance did to them, the Buddha was moved with pity and suffered at their side. Perhaps he recalled the torments of soul that he himself went through prior to gaining release from desire. Or perhaps anyone need only see clearly and hear with unmuffled ears to be moved by the sufferings of those still trapped in samsara. If such beings lack food or clothing and have not resigned themselves to the material poverty to which all animate beings are always vulnerable, they are bound to twist and turn in frustration. If their bodies are sickly or their minds burn with regrets, any benign observer is sure to feel sorry for them.

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The Buddha had this ability to feel sorry. He is signal for the virtue that Confucians calljen—humaneness, fellow-feeling, natural love. Indeed, we do well to view his ministry of teaching as an overflow of his compassion. Being moved by the sufferings of his fellow living beings, Shakyamuni (or any other Buddha or bodhisattva) labored to lighten their burdens, to apply balm to their sores, by teaching them the way to release from suffering. One of the Mahayanist texts that puts the convictions of a bodhisattva into canonical form runs as follows: A Bodhisattva resolves: I take upon myself the burden of all suffering. I am resolved to do so. I will endure it. I do not turn to run away, do not tremble, am not terrified, nor afraid, do not turn back or despond. And why? At all costs, I must bear the burdens of all beings. In that I do not follow my own inclinations. I have made the vow to save all beings. All beings I must set free. The whole world of living beings I must rescue, from the terrors of birth, of old age, of sickness, of death and rebirth, of all kinds of moral offence, of all states of woe, of the whole cycle of birthand-death, of the jungle of false views, of the loss of wholesome dharmas, of the concomitants of ignorance—from all these terrors I must rescue all beings.3

A bodhisattva, as we have noted, is a buddha to be. He or she (bodhisattvas can come in feminine personas) has gained the essence of Buddhahood. All that is lacking is entrance upon nirvana, the full flowering of enlightenment. No desire keeps the bodhisattva enmeshed in samsara. The world of death and rebirth holds no attractions. However, the bodhisattva is not greedy for nirvana. Enlightenment has penetrated her or his being so deeply that all questions of gain are moot. The substance of nirvana comes with the light of definitive understanding. When and how it blossoms fully is secondary and nearly irrelevant. The bodhisattva knows that in, what a Westerner might call, the fullness of time nirvana will arrive. The work of helping less fortunate beings, those still suffering in samsara, will reach its term. Just as the historical Buddha came to the point where his disciples had no more questions, so the bodhisattva will come to the point where there is no more for him or her to do. Mahayana is the branch of Buddhism that thinks of itself as most lay-oriented and compassionate. The root image behind its family name is a huge raft (maha-yana] capable of carrying myriad believers across the stream of suffering, the river of samsara. Working from the far side of the stream (enlightenment, mrvana-in-principle), the bodhisattvas and Buddhas labor to ferry pilgrims across the river of karmic woe. They work serenely because they have full confidence that when all propriety and karmic necessity have been served the Buddhist victory will manifest itself.

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There is no doubt about the victory. The experience of Gautama and all the other Buddhas and bodhisattvas assures us that suffering will end when ignorance and desire meet their match and are bested. Still, the pains of those who have yet to participate deeply in this victory are real, and so the Buddhas and bodhisattvas axe moved to offer aid, steadily and compassionately. The vow of the bodhisattva quoted earlier formalizes this compassion. A devout Mahayana Buddhist feels his or her heart expand to include all living things. The religious program that Mahayana Buddhists pursue intentionally moves away from anything private or solipsistic. Neither laypeople nor monks can rightly look on themselves as isolated islands not concerned with the oceans or continents of common suffering. Mahayanists have criticized other Buddhists, both tacitly and explicitly, who have concentrated excessively on personal or private liberation. One can debate how social the focus of the Buddha's own preaching was, but no valid outcome of such a debate can overturn the historical fact that some Buddhists came to feel that striving for enlightenment, trying to appropriate such staple teachings as the Four Noble Truths, either had become too narrow or, in light of further experience, needed to expand from an original narrowness to a more catholic, ecological breadth. "Ecological" is a good word in this context, for we should underscore that for well over two millennia Buddhists have thought about the universe in cosmocentric terms. Anthropocentric terms have made them uneasy. Instinctively, as a reflex from the core of their religious system, the Buddha's central insight into suffering, they have felt that all living things suffer in samsara. In part this feeling was an overflow of ancient Indian convictions about reincarnation. At death, the life-force did not go out of existence. Rather, it passed into a new form. Human beings, plants, animals, and spiritual beings (ghosts, good and bad) did not exist in isolation from one another. Their lives, fates, karmic careers touched on one another, flowing into one another's sectors of space and time and out from one another's destinies. Inasmuch as a fortunate destiny, or a good karmic career, implied progress up the scale of evolution, advancing closer to the border of nirvana and full freedom, Buddhists have configured karmic histories as moving from lowly stations, such as those of ants or vegetables, to loftier stations, such as those of priests or warriors. (Traditional Indian social judgments persisted in the Buddhist scriptures long after Buddhist teaching about enlightenment had provided a basis for overthrowing the system of varnas and jatis: caste.) A bad patch of karmic history, punctuated by evil-doing, could send a given packet of life-forces spiraling down the evolutionary roadway so that subsequent existences would present the formerly eminent per-

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son not as a twice-born human being but as a lower-caste person, perhaps even as an outcast or a beast of burden. The bodhisattva accepts this samsaric view of ecological existence but defeats it by vowing to apply his or her salvific knowledge and status to the sufferings of those on the lower rungs, languishing away from the portals of enlightenment and nirvana. Precisely how the saintly beings will save the lesser beings from their pains is not clear from this text. In part, the text implies that the bodhisattvas will hoist the burdens of the ignorant by (as we know more clearly from other sources) teaching the wisdom of the dharma. Inasmuch as the bodhisattva vows to bear the sufferings of lesser creatures, a Buddhist soteriology (doctrine of salvation) comes into view. The saintly beings substitute themselves for those who are suffering. They become willing victims, vehicles of atonement. In some historical periods, Buddhists have developed extensive systems of merit. On occasion, they have become cosmic accountants, tallying up pluses and minuses, even implying a generic treasury of credits, accumulated through the good deeds of the saints in past eons. More usually, the devotional texts simply assure the readers or chanters that the bodhisattvas and Buddhas never cease to labor on their behalf. Skillful in means to save errant, ignorant beings, those who have gained enlightenment constitute a vast corps of helpers. Indeed, their bulk and power offer good reasons for confidence and courage: eventually, all beings are bound to gain nirvana because all beings have powerful saviors dedicated to their release. Most of the pains from which the bodhisattva vows compassionately to liberate woeful beings are clear, but "the loss of wholesome dharmas" may not be. Dharmas are individual constituents of reality, as well as teachings. Wholesome dharmas are, therefore, constituents of a being's reality and situation that set him or her up well for enlightenment. Always in classical Buddhism the criterion of what is good or bad, wholesome or impure, is awakening, release, nirvana. If something advances a given being's chances for awakening, that something is positive, good, or wholesome. If something holds a given being's chances back or depresses them, it is negative. The inference in our text is that a being who has come to Buddhahood can help free lesser beings from unwholesome dharmas. Once again, the text does not say precisely how the Buddha or bodhisattva in question goes about such work. There is no doubt, however, that any believer, striving in good faith to make progress toward awakening, can trust that higher beings are laboring diligently on his or her behalf. Perhaps the higher beings are rearranging the dharmas, rewriting past history so that what seemed crooked turns out to be straight. Perhaps they are rearranging the atoms or molecules or genes so that a storm that was due to arise will not or a cancer that was in store fails to

The Buddha I 23

materialize. Nature, to say nothing of the human personality, is mutable enough to provide believers with plenty of occasions for thinking that beneficent forces have come to their aid and bent their assigned destinies for the better. Again and again, the devout think that they have felt the compassion of the bodhisattvas.

Freedom The compassion of the Buddha does not compromise his freedom. Enlightenment brings Gautama out of the world of samsara and into the world of nirvana. No compassion for suffering beings still trapped in samsara drags him back into the cycle of births and deaths. He is able to work for the liberation of others without tarnishing his spiritual splendor or tying himself again to the wheel of karma. Like the lotus that arises above the mud, the Buddha can labor in the midst of karmic dirt while himself remaining immaculate, completely above the fray. Mahayana dialecticians, putting their keen minds to the relations between samsara and nirvana, finally raised this capacity of the Buddha to the status of a metaphysical principle. Nirvana itself exists within samsara. Indeed, believers can say that nirvana and samsara are one. Most substantially, samsara would be mere nothingness were it not for nirvana. More subtly, for human minds, nirvana comes into focus only as the negation of samsaric properties. Nirvana is what appears when we negate the presence and effects of desire and reject the ignorance that makes us perceive and think and choose wrongly. Thus nirvana depends on samsara, from a human point of view. From the viewpoint of a bodhisattva, nirvana needs nothing; Buddhahood simply is. However, it can help limited, groping human beings to say that nirvana depends on, and is inextricable from, samsara, that nirvana and samsara are one. However we ought to speak about this finally ineffable relationship, whatever the final dialectics ought to be, the art of all Buddhist lands tells us that the compassion of the Buddha does not take away his freedom. Consistently, the statues of India, China, Japan, and Thailand portray a man at full peace, undisturbed by any passions or pains. The smile of the Buddha is light, cool, and carefree. He is beyond the fray. The beholder has reason to think that the Blessed One cares for lesser beings and is certainly compassionate and merciful, but the stronger message from Buddhist art is that this personage has conquered samsara and exhibits the bliss of nirvana at its fullest strength. Usually, the freedom of the Buddha dovetails with his commitment to teaching. In sovereign liberty, under no compulsion, he elected to preach the dharma. Perhaps gentleness is the bridge between his compassion and his freedom: the bruised reed he would not break. Even

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the most lowly peasant, the most wretched sinner, could approach him, confident of receiving a sympathetic hearing. Because the Buddha is so free, it is inconceivable that anything could anger him or come across to him as threatening. He has become stable in goodness. His posture of helpfulness, bending forward to be of aid, seems entirely of his own doing. No will but his own makes him compassionate, a universal teacher, but his own will cannot be doubted. Nothing is more certain than his commitment to liberate all suffering beings from their torments. The lore that developed about the historical Buddha conveys an impression similar to that conveyed by Buddhist art. The many stories that describe him teaching his first disciples emphasize the fullness of his control. Buddhist hagiography has few tales in which a blessed one mixes it up as the equal of ordinary men and women. On occasion one finds that enlightenment can appear in the form of an extraordinary ordinariness. That is the point to the Zen saying that after enlightenment rivers are still rivers and trees are still trees. (During enlightenment everything can turn over.) Similarly, the Zen teaching pictures known as herding an ox make the point that after full enlightenment the ox-herder (the person pursuing full realization) appears completely content in the world, even seems comfortably dusty with the leavings of the marketplace. Nonetheless, the zest and humility conveyed through the Zen stress on ordinariness never make the Buddha one of the boys. As fully enlightened, he cannot not be different from ordinary, unenlightened men and women. His grace and freedom have to appear as one of a kind. Perhaps this is the point at which to note that, in estimable spiritual analyses, freedom is never license to do what one's undeveloped, libidinous desires prompt. Always, freedom seen under the aspect of enlightenment or ripe holiness is the active capacity to do what one ought, to be what one's nature dictates or holds out as one's best potential. This means that the Buddha is a sort of everyman, or everyperson, as Jesus is. What happened to Shakyamuni can happen to any other member of his species, should hard work, favorable karma, and other incalculable factors that a Westerner might collect under the heading "grace" conspire sufficiently. Every being is intrinsically enlightened. Many Buddhist philosophers push this conclusion. To be is to be sprung from and oriented to mind. For idealistic Buddhist schools, such as the Yogacara, there is only mind; but even less radical proponents of mindfulness turn out, by Western standards, to be quite idealistic because virtually all Buddhist philosophy takes its stand, by necessity, on the primacy of enlightenment. If light flooded Shakyamuni and the other Buddhas and bodhisattvas so that it, or knowledge, came to stand out as their essence, then this has to be at the heart of, coincident or coeval with, being. To exist and to

The Buddha I 25 be lightsome, intelligent, and intelligible are two sides of the same coin, the one currency that makes possible the whole economy we label "reality." Reality is all that stands out from nothingness, either physically or mentally. It is all that has any sort of being, material or spiritual, in nature or in culture. For our purposes, the interesting point is the freedom that realizing this about the cosmos brings. It is precisely what the Buddha manifests so serenely. His confidence in the Tightness of his message flows from his confidence in the Tightness of his being, of who and what he is, and his confidence in the Tightness of his being flows from his enlightenment. Because he sees, knows, and understands, he is the Buddha and what he says is "buddhist": full of knowledge and truth, the middle path. So the Buddha is not free because he gained wealth (in fact, he ran away from material wealth) or because he gained power (in fact, he gave up political and military power) or because he acquired vast learning (in fact, he does not present himself as a scholar). The Buddha is free, according to the Buddhist legends and artworks, because he knows—he is a knowing being. The truth makes him free. What is the truth? The truth is that all of life, as people spontaneously experience and conceive it, is suffering; that the cause of this suffering is desire; that giving up desire can lead to freedom from suffering; and that there is a noble, eightfold method or path by which one can give up desire and break out of ignorant wanting. Gautama illustrates what is in any of us, waiting to break out when we free ourselves of desire. Any of us might become flooded with awareness and so free of illusion, bad wanting, and bondage to the moral law of cause and effect. If we want nothing, nothing can hold us in the cycle of death and rebirth. If we realize there is nothing worth wanting, no profit or fittingness in desire or ignorance, we can advance into nirvana. Everything that helps us toward such a view of ourselves and the crux of the human vocation is our Buddhist friend. Everything that contests such a view is our Buddhist enemy. That is the Buddhist version of Deuteronomy's figure of two ways, death and life. The ordinariness of Jesus differs somewhat from that of Gautama. Jesus is an everyman to the degree that we accept traditional Christian views of his having been born of a flesh and blood mother, grown up in a representative, if undistinguished, village, and worked and suffered and died more like than unlike any of his fellows. Certainly, there are legends, such as that of his having been conceived and born virginally, and convictions, such as that he was completely sinless, that set him apart from his sisters and brothers, both contemporary and subsequent. Moreover, there are Christian dogmas, such as that he was, literally, the Son of God, eternal and infinite, that make him no everyman. However, while these qualify his likeness to other men and women,

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they do not destroy it. What happened in him can happen analogously in any of us because we too can be filled with the divinity whom he called "Father" and so come to an extraordinary measure of humanity, an unexpectable demonstration of what human nature may achieve when it gains union with the God for whom it has been constructed. The freedom that Jesus displays, as he goes his round of teaching and healing, is reminiscent of the freedom of the Buddha. Jesus, too, suffers little from external necessities or compulsions. His compassion may seem to cause him more pain than what the passion of the Buddha stirs in the depths of his enlightenment, but the compassion of Jesus goes hand in hand with a compensating surrender to the will of God, a soothing freedom from any fear that things will not turn out as they ought or must, that God will be shown not to have been in charge. The Crucifixion of Jesus, which distinguishes his human experience markedly from that of the Buddha, suggests interesting qualifications to this freedom; but in the final analysis, the Crucifixion does not take the freedom of Jesus away. Jesus agrees to his fate, making it truly his own. Pointedly, he chooses the steps that eventuate at Golgotha. As his destiny matures, he is neither mindless nor impotent. He does not rush to his fate unaware, nor does he surrender his self-possession. As the Gospels portray him (which, of course, derives from their theological commitments or their definite investments of faith), Jesus passes from agony to freedom through trust in his Father. When he commends his spirit into his Father's keeping, nothing worldly any longer determines his death. His death obeys all the biological laws consequent on his having a normal body, but as well it manifests the lordship, the control, of his God. If the accounts of the passion alone do not make this plain, the accounts of the Resurrection drive it home unmistakably.

Christian Evaluation The term "Christian evaluation" implies no haughtiness. We are not setting ourselves up as judges of the Buddha, as though we had superior status. On the contrary, we consider ourselves suffering beings manifestly trapped in samsara and in need of all the compassion and enlightenment we can get. Our evaluations, then, are simply another form of our admiration and attempts to be honest. Inasmuch as we are trying to advance toward the center of interreligious dialogue, where heart must speak to heart fully honestly, we feel the need to reflect on the overall impression that Gautama makes when we bring him into the orbit of Jesus, our own existential master. First, the freedom of the Buddha loses none of its appeal. Jesus appears in the New Testament as the personification of wisdom, and this same attribute makes the Buddha fully admirable. The Christian is not

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limited to a prophetic God. The biblical God is the source and fullness of wisdom as well. Indeed, Jesus strikes the Christian as the incarnation of the reason, the Logos, by which creation holds together. This doctrine goes back to the first chapter of Colossians and the prologue of the Gospel of John. Updated, it correlates the intelligibility of both the natural and human worlds and cultural progress with the selfexpression of God that Jesus enfleshed. Thus the sovereign freedom with which the historical Buddha moved through the world is thoroughly congenial. If he and Jesus differ in the degree to which they seem engaged with human pain, that difference does not remove his relevance. Another way of approaching this point may be to lay down the thesis that there is a Christian removal of desire comparable to the Buddhist one. The long-standing Christian teaching that urges apatheia, freedom from unruly urges or compulsions, comes close to what the Buddha suggests in his second Noble Truth. Lately, traditional Christian masters, such as the desert fathers who exposed apatheia in classical terms, have come in for serious criticism. Modern psychology, feminism, process thought, and biblical thought (inasmuch as it has been considered opposed to classical Greek thought), to name only a few sources, have sponsored attacks on apatheia as inhuman, opposed to the full incarnation of the Logos, which would have to include Jesus' emotions. Rightly, many modern and contemporary Christians have wanted Jesus to be passionate. Because of this desire, as well as the apparent teaching in the evangelical accounts of how he lived, they have found Jesus capable of both intense sorrow and lilting joy. He had close friends, bitter enemies, and the emotions that go along with both. He went to his death in pain and regret, though also in deep trust in his God. Wherever one looks, in other words, Jesus seems to display a ready heart, as well as a ready wit. He notes the blind person, the person born deaf or lame, and his heart goes out. He weeps over Lazarus, as well as the city of Jerusalem, which rejects him. The hardness of heart that he encounters in the Pharisees, along with the plain corruption, makes his blood boil with anger. He is a vibrant man, a passionate man, a great lover of the lilies of the field and how they grow. Nonetheless, he is not dominated by his emotions. His fullness of humanity radiates from a selfless center. Not his own will but that of his Father drives him. At the end of the day, when he tallies accounts by the moon, no burning ambition keeps him awake. When he chides his disciples, it is for their lack of faith. They must little see, little appreciate, most sadly of all little love the God who makes his heart sing because if they knew this God and felt his parental touch, they would entrust their lives like little children. If asked for bread, the God of Jesus could never give a stone. If returned to with a repentant heart, his Father could only run out on the road, fall on the penitent's neck, and

28 / SERENE COMPASSION order up the fatted calf with feasting and dancing. There is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine of the just, who were always recorded in the book of life, because the God of Jesus loves every bit of creation, every hair of every child's head. Defining himself completely by his relation with this God, Jesus is "apathetic" in precisely the way that the desert fathers desired. He moves in full freedom, with great compassion, as a personification of divine wisdom that renders it dazzlingly human. His smile beckons the little children, and his death mask, in the tomb, moves the angels to take him to paradise. Death could not hold him because, like the Buddha passing through the parinirvana, from samsara into complete freedom, Jesus gave death nothing to which to cling. He was intent only on pleasing his Father. Therefore, no Christian equivalent of karma retained power in his being or held any sway in his soul. For Christians, the sufferings of Jesus, chosen freely for their sake and that of salvation, render him more fully human than he would have been if not bruised. Jesus suffers what to a Buddhist are the ugly onslaughts of bad karma, the full furies of samsara, not because he cares about anything worldly but to drink to the dregs the cup that his Father has given him. If it pleased, we could say that he punctuated divine compassion so explicitly, engaged in solidarity with ordinary mortals so fully, because he wanted to leave no doubt that God identifies the divine concern completely with miserable, vulnerable human beings, making their pain fully his own. Can pain be fully divinity's own on Buddhist grounds? Several problems of definition block our way to a crisp answer. First, "divinity" is a weighted term. For our purposes, Gautama is divinity in human garb, the ultimate light of being blazing in human history. Certainly, there are other ways of understanding divinity, on Buddhist grounds, including the denial that it is relevant. (If one does not equate "divinity" with holiness or ultimacy and does not agree that it can be both personal and impersonal, Buddhism can present itself as atheistic.) Nonetheless, we think that the treatment of Gautama in Buddhist history justifies considering him as a valid, powerful locus of divine values and powers. Second, does the divinity manifested in Shakyamuni, or in other Buddhas, appear to be suffering? In our opinion, the proper answer is no. One can say that compassion includes suffering, and one can refer to texts, such as the bodhisattva vow that we quoted earlier, that have a Buddhist saint or figure of divinity assuming the sufferings of creatures trapped in samsara. However, compared with the historical pathos of Jesus, these forms of suffering appear detached, spiritual in an unhistorical sense, and generic. They do not call to mind blood and brokenness like that which Jesus of Nazareth bore. Third, the sufferings of the Buddha do not call to mind a resurrection

The Buddha I 29

from death, a complete conquest of pain and frustration, like that which Christians celebrate on Easter. Certainly, the Buddha is a conquerer over ignorance, death, and rebirth. His enlightenment, as we have seen in Ashvaghosa's account, entailed cosmic celebration. Once again, however, the historicity of Gautama's conquest does not run parallel to what we find in the Gospels about Jesus. The Buddha does not die young, in agony, on a cross. He does not return from the grave with the marks of his suffering transfigured. He does not bear these marks into heaven, where they become aspects of divinity's own eternal being. Indeed, the historical career of Gautama threatens to evanesce, as the ahistorical, timeless cycle of appearances by Buddhas develops, especially in Mahayanist circles. Like Hindu avatars, Mahayana Buddhas come and go cyclically, whenever cosmic karma requires. Thus the soteriological career of Gautama has no truly eschatological, once-andfor-all quality. What he was and did had happened countless times before, in prior kalpas (cosmic eons), and it would happen countless times again, in future kalpas. This qualifies the suffering of Gautama considerably and so the character of the "salvation" that suffering human beings can find in the person of the Buddha. Salvation remains a meaningful predicate. The Buddha saves all those who find restoration to physical, moral, or spiritual health through his story, message, or iconography. He continues to point the way to the depths of human experience, where the light of release shines in the darkness of karmic ignorance. All of life is suffering, as his wisdom teaches. The extinction of desire can remove suffering, as his example shows. Many Buddhists have gone to their deaths peacefully and unafraid because the dharma has penetrated their substance. They have floated free of the pernicious aspects of selfhood because they have taken to heart Shakyamuni's insights into selflessness. To deny any of this would be like trying to blink away manifest facts. How such facts best arrange themselves, when one imposes a Christian framework, is a further question but not one that removes the many soteriological benefits that Gautama has offered the world. NOTES 1. Frank E. Reynolds and Charles Hallisey, "Buddha," in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 2:322-323. See also Heinz Bechert, ed. The Dating of the Historical Buddha (Go ttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1992). 2. Edward Conze, trans., Buddhist Scriptures (Hammondsworth, Penguin, 1972), 50-51. 3. Edward Conze et al., eds. and trans., Buddhist Texts Through the Ages (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), 131.

33

The Dharma

The Four Noble Truths The dharma is Buddhist teaching, the equivalent of the Christian creed. With the Buddha and the sangha (community), it comprises The "Three Jewels," or three key aspects, of Buddhist religion. When formally becoming a Buddhist, a person "takes refuge" in the dharma, as well as in the Buddha and the sangha. In other words, one vows to make Buddhist teaching the doctrinal form of one's life. Henceforth, this interpretation of reality, this understanding of how things structure themselves, will be one's own hermeneutic (way of deciphering experience). If there is salvation in Buddhism, it does not occur apart from the dharma, any more than it occurs apart from the Buddha and the sangha. The dharma is as intimately tied to the Buddha and the sangha as they are tied to each other. The dharma is what Gautama and the other Buddhas and bodhisattvas have taught. It is what the community lives by and what it expresses socially. An early, relatively simple formulation of the dharma, as we have it in the accounts of the awakening of Gautama, is the Four Noble Truths. Streaming with awareness, the Buddha conceptualized what he had experienced in these four basic, interconnected statements. Although one can find slight variations in how they have been formulated throughout Buddhist history, as one can find variations in the Christian

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creeds, the following formulation reflects the mainstream of Buddhist interpretation: 1. 2. 3. 4.

All of life is suffering. The cause of suffering is desire. Removing desire removes suffering. The way to remove desire is to follow the Noble Eightfold Path of right views, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration.

We have already dealt with suffering and desire. We could not avoid a preliminary discussion of them if we were to describe what made Gautama the Buddha. All of life is suffering because no life avoids pain, disappointment, frustration, or negativity in some form. All living creatures come into being through birth and pass out of being through death. This basic situation, known as samsara, determines that all creatures must endure suffering. No creature is complete, perfect, deathless, invulnerable. We never come across a man, woman, child, or animal that does not change—is not subject to physical wounds or emotional losses or, in the case of human beings, intellectual frustrations. Thus, we may look upon all living beings as bonded by suffering. As a bottom line, a condition shared with full catholicity, people on every continent, in every historical era, know suffering and strive to lessen pain. The first Noble Truth is largely a matter of empirical observation. One needs only to know how to register pain to realize that suffering is universal. The second Noble Truth is more analytical. In our opinion, it is the doctrinal linchpin of Buddhism: the cause of suffering is desire. Several comments are in order. First, this teaching predated the Buddha, though he may well have expressed it with novel clarity. From the apparent dawn of Indian reflection on the human condition, seers (rishis) mused that attachment, wanting, ambition, and the like were the holds by which suffering lays hands on human beings. In a word, it is our desire that makes us vulnerable, or open to disappointment. Because we want food, we experience hunger as frustrating, frightening, an experience of suffering. The same, though more clearly spiritual, is true of our cravings for success, money, sexual pleasure, understanding, and inner peace. We suffer because we expose ourselves in desire. The third Noble Truth simply drives the second home: if we eliminate desire, we eliminate suffering. Naturally, the Buddha does not mean that we want food only because we have let ourselves imagine a banana or a bowl of rice. He is not saying that our bodies and our physical metabolisms play no role. He is saying that we can detach ourselves from much, eventually all, of the suffering that hunger causes. We can stop thinking that food is our due or a necessity. At the limit, we can give up the notion that we have to live. Our continuing in existence, and so the imperative that we eat, can cease to matter.

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The Buddha is not saying that we should seek suicide or in any way turn our backs on our lives or bodies. In most cases, that would involve us in another form of desire, one both rarer than hunger and more suspect, less natural or healthy. He is saying that our living, our continuing to thrive in this body, should not dominate our minds and hearts. We can attain considerable detachment from our living and our bodies. There is nothing absolute about us. When we think of our ceasing to exist, our dying, even our never having been, we can do so peacefully. The fourth Noble Truth sketches the Noble Eightfold Path, a program for removing desire and so uprooting the cause of suffering and gaining freedom from the pain that most people consider inseparable from life in a body. If we develop right views so that we think correctly about nature, human affairs, ourselves, the gods, we can remove the harmful desires that wrong views generate. Until we have gotten our heads straight, we will keep bumbling forward, spinning in the muck of desire. Therefore, right views are imperative to fully appropriate Buddhist philosophy. Right intention is the moral equivalent of right views. Parallel to the straightening of our intellects that right views implies is a straightening of our wills. We have to want correctly and order our passions. Buddhism knows that we cannot do without passions. It does not have as its ideal a wooden soldier or a toy woman or man, but it insists that we intend, bore forward in our work and planning, correctly. It claims, on the basis of much experience and analysis, that only those who want correctly do not "desire" in a noxious, pejorative way. Therefore, Buddhist asceticism includes exercises for the will, patterns for straightening the intention. The third aspect of the Noble Eightfold Path is speech. Those who run on at the mouth and do not discipline their tongues will never remove untoward, enslaving desire. They will always be in pain, subject to karmic suffering, because their tongues and minds will be conspiring to keep them in illusion. Speech is not an indifferent production of sounds or a merely mechanical control of air. Human beings speak to convey meaning. They listen to receive meaning. The flow of conveyance and reception contributes directly to the reality in which human beings live. How we imagine the world and other people to be made and to operate is a social construct. With our neighbors, we conspire every day to build and maintain the world. If we discipline our speech, which usually requires becoming familiar with silence and so with the chaos or unarticulated order on which speech, language, and culture alike depend, we gain considerable control over how we think and intend and what shapes our minds and wills. Fourth, right action is necessary because desire gains shape through our deeds. If our acts are disordered—if we pursue indecent pleasures—

The Dharma / 53 so will our lives be. We have to learn what ways of comporting ourselves, when alone and when accompanying others, are congruous with freedom from desire. Equally, we have to learn what actions are harmful, wrong, samsaric. Action is the great lever of karma. If we act rightly, without desire, karma finds nothing to grasp and our spirits are smooth. In contrast, if lust or greed or any other disorder impels us, we ensnare ourselves more deeply in the painful cycle of deaths and rebirths. No theft, lie, or improper blow fails to exact its karmic price. No adultery or gluttony or other offense against justice fails to feed the flame. Fifth, a right livelihood is imperative because how we earn our living clearly shapes how we act, speak, will, and think. If we work as butchers, slaughtering fellow living beings, we are bound to come away bloodied in spirit as well as body, tainted heavily with karmic gore. If we work as prostitutes or thieves or soldiers or garbage collectors, we place ourselves in peril inasmuch as traditional Indian evaluations of action have found these occupations soiling. One can debate that finding, but the necessity of gaming one's living in a pure, proper way will remain. Depending on the criteria, a physical, intellectual, artistic, or religious work will seem helpful or harmful to one's hopes for liberation. Whatever tends to incite desire, either carnally or spiritually, will be problematic. Whatever encourages detachment, the quenching of desire, a long view of what conduces to peace will appear as a good vocation, a livelihood one can call right. Sixth, right effort is that which is steady, constant, and guided by religious (ultimate, enlightened, Buddhist) principles. We have to act in the world, put forth effort, gain a living. How we apply our wills, focus our imaginations, use our minds, and consort with our neighbors comes under the heading "effort." The awakened neither strive nor fail to strive. They do not champ at the bit, nor are they indolent or quietistic. Any effort that engages us with personal projects, political causes, even religious campaigns that threaten our balance and cloud our peace, is suspect. So, too, is any effort that falls short of a proper intensity, energy, or vigor. Buddhism is hard on laziness, at least as hard as on frenzy. It wants the golden mean, the balanced middle. So, the person of right effort gets things done but without falling into a tizzy. He or she is happy to take up a task in the morning but also happy to lay it down at night. Seventh, right mindfulness carries overtones of meditation. A good Buddhist pays attention to the matter at hand. He or she is not distracted, daydreaming, or out of control. Sufficient for any day or moment is the "evil," the necessity, present and begging treatment. The mindful do not lose themselves in the future, and they are not trapped in the past. Neither ambition nor nostalgia taints their awareness. When planning is necessary, they gladly scan the future. When it seems

34 / SERENE COMPASSION prudent to review past experience, they move serenely into the archives of memory. Mindfulness is an index of spiritual vitality. Those whom meditation has made focused, able to hold themselves together and apply their powers to present obligations or opportunities, have been "sitting profitably." Eighth and last, right concentration extends the mental, meditational aspect of the Buddhist religious program and suggests its roots. One cannot concentrate deeply without becoming, in some significant way, yogic. Yoga is discipline, especially that which purifies consciousness, empties and directs human awareness. Until our awareness is rightly ordered, we are unlikely to get to the roots of the desires that entrap us. Samsara seldom yields until one has penetrated its illusions and come to see for oneself through lengthy, arduous meditation how birth and death are structured and what keeps most people suffering and unable to remove their karmic debts. Right concentration is the epitome of this yogic cast to Buddhist existence. It says that at the core of the Middle Way a disciplined consciousness locks onto Buddhahood.

The Three Marks The dharma often assumes a metaphysical slant. Regularly, it discourses on how reality itself, what the West calls being, is composed. Particularly acute is the Buddhist analysis of the Three Marks that all realities carry. Any being of our experience is sure to be (1) painful, (2) fleeting, and (3) selfless. The painfulness of any being is guaranteed by the first Noble Truth, but the first of the Three Marks explores and reinforces what the first Noble Truth teaches. Whatever we encounter is painful in itself, as a metaphysical or ontological constituent of its reality. Indeed, "all of life is suffering" takes its foundation from the ontological painfulness that wise, authentically Buddhist analysis finds in each entity. This painfulness is not separate from the fleetingness and selflessness of each entity, but Buddhists have found it useful to meditate on each of the Three Marks to drive home to themselves the undesirability of everything in their environment. Looking to ourselves, we know directly that pain is our bounden, inalienable lot. We cannot not change—fail, be vulnerable, feel frustration, and finally die. We cannot not be limited, ignorant, prone to disease, easy prey for thieves and bullies and assassins. To be human is to be exposed, unprotected, at the mercy of both the natural elements and the bad elements in society, as well as the fates or furies or whatever we should call the weird, heavenly, divine powers operating in the world. The fear and anxiety that this exposure can cause already draws us into pain, even when nothing has yet beaten us down. For

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example, simply observing sickness, old age, and death shook the young Prince Gautama to his roots, causing him to slip out of the castle at night and pursue a solution to the core problems of the human condition. The second mark of all entities is that they are fleeting. Change is the universal condition. We cannot step into the same stream twice. We are not exactly the same people today that we were yesterday, to say nothing of ten years ago. Our bodies are fleeting, in the sense that we age and die with an alarming rapidity and that our cells are constantly at work—on the move, changing metabolic elements, dealing with electrical charges, processing hormones. Nothing anywhere is completely stable. The heavens move. The seasons change. The air, the water, the earth itself is in flux, suffering erosion or flood or storm. Just as the painfulness of all beings tells the wise person that there is nothing to which we should cling, so does the fleetingness of all beings. Thus meditation masters such as Buddhaghosa liked to have their disciples picture the decay of a beautiful sexual partner. She (most of the disciples were male and were presumed to be heterosexual) might be lissome today, ripe and beckoning, but wise disciples would consider how she would look after only a few weeks in the grave. They would, in imagination, watch the worms at work at her breast and see the rot glistening at her throat. In reality, they might realize, she had always been only a bag of bones. In death, she would become only what she had always been and with remarkable speed. Decay is a seal set on all our foreheads, a brand burned into all our backs. Consider how food passes through this damsel's system. Watch her take her rice in, chew it to a pulp, lubricate it with saliva, belch as it hits her stomach, shift as her intestinal gases break it down, grunt to eliminate it, and finally leave it a smelly, repulsive excresence. A master such as Buddhaghosa was trying to get his disciples to meditate their way to chastity by distancing themselves from objects of sexual desire, but in the process he both drew on the mark of fleetingness and reinforced it. Everything changes, rots, breaks down, turns to dust, leaves only skeletal bones. Nothing offers stable, secure, unfailing pleasure or meaning. Nothing in the realm of samsara is holy, fully real, capable of saving us or holding us in full health. Therefore, we are fools to cling to anything in samsara. Our clear goal should be to move through the samsaric realm without becoming attached to anything. Ideally, life would teach us to be as fluid or fleeting emotionally and psychologically as all the things that we meet are ontologically. The final mark, selflessness, is the most distinctively Buddhist. Whereas Hindus have allowed for an atman, a soul or self, and many Hindu philosophers have argued that the atman is the spark in us of the divine (the Brahman grounding the cosmos), Buddhists have applied their dialectical razors to all beings and found all to be selfless,

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anatman. Indeed, with pleasure and without rue, Buddhist philosophers have told all people who would listen that nothing in them had or was a stable, secure, valuable identity. Even their own names pointed to nothing to which they ought to cling. People changed physically, intellectually, emotionally. They grew, thrived, sickened, and died; and at each stage someone significantly different from his or her predecessors inhabited the corporeal housing, was the given "self" to which the name pointed. What people instinctively called a "person," a human identity, was not a complete illusion. Harry or Sam or Evelyn responded when called by that name. Forty years later, he or she could still recall the trauma of the first day of school, when a childish bladder had proved unreliable. Nonetheless, under hard analysis this referential selfhood did not furnish a solid basis for attributing to anyone a permanent, substantial atman. Harry, Sam, and Evelyn would pass out of existence. Each was more phenomenal, or accidental, than substantial. None had an identity on which others could get a solid, unwavering fix. Each was shadowy at the edges, something of a mystery, an enigma, a vagueness even to him- or herself. Not having a self on which to rely, and finding everything in experience to be painful and fleeting, the astute, well-educated Buddhist was well armed to fight samsara. Samsara lost much of its power and charm when one took the Three Marks to heart. On every side, samsara showed itself to be a cheat, a fraud, a whore. It danced and dazzled, but at the end of the day, it failed to deliver. Death ruled at its core. Dissolution ate into its every cell and fiber. Human beings wanted a fullness of being, goodness, beauty, truth, reality. They longed for the holy, the ultimate, nirvana. Nothing that they experienced gave them that. Everything that came to them through the senses or offered itself up to their intellects or submitted to their volition was painful, fleeting, selfless—much less than nirvana. Everything burned up in the flame of desire. Nothing survived the holocaust. Therefore, the Buddhist masters counseled people to look elsewhere. Instead of pursuing what was painful, fleeting, and selfless, let people withdraw their minds and hearts from everything samsaric and stop their wholesale desiring by following the Noble Eightfold Path. More positively, let them take refuge in the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha, with faith and trust that eventually the holy, the really real, the nirvanic would make itself known. In the clearing created by a purification of desire, the unconditioned (that which escaped the corrosive acids of samsara because it preceded samsara, existed at a more primordial level, beyond all the ignorance and illusion of samsara) would reveal itself, and it would be beautiful. Awakening is the experience of this beauty. In breaking free of ignorance, Buddhas and bodhisattvas escape from the Three Marks, gain-

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ing a reality that is unmarked, seamless, perfect. Nirvana lies beyond all dichotomies, dualities, and partialities of the samsaric realm. It is not one, and it is not many. It is not here in our midst, and it is not beyond. Yet it is here, and it is beyond. It is both and neither. It simply is. Yet it also is not; it is no-thing. To appreciate it, we have to stop grasping, leave off trying to gain or dominate. We have to be with what is ultimate, as that appears in the provisional, the partial, the penultimate. Nirvana is as relevant to the living as to the dying and as free of the one as the other. It is the basis and substance of the material as well as the spiritual, but neither the one nor the other defines it. It is not painful, fleeting, or selfless; but we have to use caution when saying that it is joyous, stable, and an own-being. Such positive attributes, drawn from ordinary experience, push us toward slippery slopes and almost inevitably into error and illusion. The wise contemplate nirvana, venturing beyond the land of the Three Marks, but they do this simply, holistically, without privileging the categories in their heads, the words on their tongues, or the desires in their hearts. The wise let the unconditioned, the unmarked, be. Much that Christian masters and mistresses have said about God applies to nirvana, that which is unmarked, noncontingent. God and nirvana have the priority; samsaric beings are always secondary. What is unmarked leads the orchestra, pulls the strings of the puppet-band. The marked dances and jerks as the unmarked sees fit. The unmarked is the potter, molding the pots as the clay invites. A major point in the journey to wisdom is the moment when the pilgrim realizes that the ultimate is the real while the proximate, the human, is the questionable.

Nirvana Let us linger with this moment. Usually it is more than simply intellectual. Intellectually, one who accepts traditional Buddhist or Christian metaphysics agrees that all beings are characterized by the Three Marks (the Christian equivalent is contingency, non-necessity). "Yes, that seems to follow," the intelligent or simply pious person tends to say. However, neither Buddhist nor Christian masters have been satisfied with a plain acknowledgment, a mere nod of the mental head. Both have wanted a change of mind, a conversion that reset the person's entire mental horizon. Admittedly, such a conversion amounts to an experience of enlightenment. The clearest cases, East and West, appeared in the reports of the mystics, those whom light or love had dazzled so that they changed definitively. Nonetheless, what the mystics and the great saints reported in vivid terms expressed what the masters (most of whom

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were themselves mystics) hoped would be obtained in the lives of all of their disciples, though perhaps in more sober, workaday garb. The really real, nirvana, the divine, is unconditioned, unmarked. That is how we have been speaking about it. In the main, we have to characterize nirvana negatively as "not this, not that." If ordinary, sensible, samsaric reality is painful, fleeting, and selfless, nirvana is not painful, not fleeting, not selfless. Whether it is joyous, permanent, and selfsufficient is a further question, one that Buddhist dialecticians have been more reluctant to answer affirmatively than Christians. Nonetheless, anything insightful in such an affirmation would apply to nirvana, as Buddhist philosophers saw it. The only caution was not to reify such an affirmation, not to imply that "permanent" or "self-sufficient" captured the reality of nirvana without qualification or remainder. Interestingly, the best Christian theologians entered parallel cautions. Regularly, they insisted that when speaking of God we miss the mark more often than we hit it. No matter what we say about God, God remains more unlike than like our predication. Why? Because God is infinite and we are finite, God is simple and we have to speak complexly, step by step. Our minds are not adequate to the task of describing God precisely. We never capture divinity as it is in itself. The best we can manage are fertile, useful analogies, metaphors, or inferences. They are precious indeed, because without them we would stumble in total darkness. Still, even with them, enjoying the light they shed, we grope in a twilight, a half-light, a constant penumbra. The longer we abide in this penumbra, this "cloud of unknowing," the better we navigate. Those who persevere in meditation and similar exercises (the most demanding that the human spirit generates) find the darkness, the simplicity, the primordiality of nirvana congenial. Slowly, they come to sense that they are dealing with what alone is fully important and wholly real. Even though, with amusement, they have to confess that they can say virtually nothing about this ultimate blankness, this always present "they know not what," it lures their hearts, their inmost spirits, like a seductive lover, the most beautiful other they have ever met. So their times of prayer or work with this mysterious, foundational other become like trysts. They go off to their meetings with a romantic air, at first perhaps a bit guiltily, slipping away on the sly, then boldly, out in the open, with a song in their hearts and a skip in their steps. Nirvana is the one reality that never fails. Unlike everything in the realm of birth and death, it does not change, decay, or disappoint us. Paradoxically, we cannot capture it or ever gain it by grasping. If we would be good lovers, we have to give up our striving, hand over our ambitions, become content to let it appear, work our conversion for us, as it finds best. Certainly, most masters report that an intensification of spirit helps, a vigorous meditational regime is a great benefit, but they

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also chant, as a steady chorus, that enlightenment comes on wings of grace, the captive of nothing human. No one can predict or program when dualism will fall away and holistic light will crash through. All the haiku that fix the blessed moment to the fall of a cherry blossom or the flight of an osprey testify that our enlightenment will seem unplanned. The dance of the dharmas moves to a music that human spirits neither compose nor conduct. The best we can do is learn to hear dimly, as through a glass held against a wall. Like technicians working the sonar machines of a submarine, we can go only from ping to ping. Poignantly, it takes the best of us years and years to learn even how to listen. Nirvana is hidden in the midst of samsara. Nothing could be without its presence, its influence, its reality, yet nothing reveals it unmistakably. That there is something, that be-ing occurs, justifies our suspicions that there must be an is-ness, a Being, that is free of the forms or containers in which we always meet reality. In other words, we have grounds for thinking it valid to ruminate about an is-ness, a being, that is not limited to being something, that could be no-thing, could simply be, without qualification or specification. These are just stuttering efforts to push and pull at language so that it hands over some of its implicit ontology. Inasmuch as language intends realities, it cannot fail to make oblique, semiconscious statements about the construction of the reality with which it engages our minds. Nirvana plays, dances, and skips through such statements. Buddhists insist that we err by imagining nirvana as a realm apart or static or noumenal (a thing in itself or a collection of things in themselves or a super Thing unto Itself). Nirvana is not not painful or not fleeting or the place for the non-self, just as much as it is not painful, not fleeting, a place for the non-self. One has to deny denials as constantly as one denies affirmations. Nirvana is unique, foundational, whole, transcendent to what we sense, imagine, think, feel, judge, choose, but also immanent to it. Probably the best tactic for dealing with it is to make our human spirits as whole, broad, and comprehensive as we can, to hold ourselves in the fullest self-possession we can. Then, letting the natural orientation of such a self-possession toward ultimacy, nirvana, or God emerge, we can intuit that the whole of us is relational or dialogical. Under the (dialogical) figure of our being spoken into being by a mastermind or cosmic poet, we can muse that what we say, through our bare being, occurs in the midst of an ongoing conversation. We are not the first speeches that nirvana ever made, nor are we colloquies complete unto ourselves. What is being said or sung in the heavens and throughout the earth, in other households and minds and hearts, is relevant to what we say by our being. Still, the depth and center of what we say by our being and our action and the chatter of our minds

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rivets us to the silence, or full unique speech, of nirvana, God, the ultimate. Who and what we are does not and could not occur without this silent primal speech of nirvana. In other words, the dharma that is cosmic, the Logos that expresses the mind of God, is the alphabet or grammar or breathing on which our ontological saying, the little song we sing by being here for x number of nights and days, depends. We make no say without it, apart from its foundational, constitutive contribution. Another way of putting this is to posit that we are related to nirvana through and through. Without such a relation, we would not be. Certainly, Buddhists stress that we are in a moving stream of dharmas, a never-ending dance of all the constituents of samsaric, karmic reality. With good reason, they resist reifying descriptions that would tie our atmans to the cosmic Brahman, making the ontological tie that holds us in being a rigid, unmoving tether. This does not mean, however, that the great Buddhist dialecticians, such as Nagarjuna and the others who worked in the Madhyamika school that won highest honors in Mahayanist circles, did not appreciate and expose the relational character of all existence. With proper cautions, they would even say that nirvana itself is relational, inasmuch as it cannot be real for us without appearing in our minds, and that when it does this it functions relationally as our ground, cause, horizon, goal, and delight. Immediately, such dialectical masters would add that nirvana is also not functional, relational, our ground, cause, horizon, goal, or delight. We do not capture it, hold it hostage, determine its significance, dictate its reality. Yet, we do define it. When it comes into language, we do place it under relational constraints. That is the nature of language and everything else in our non-nirvanic beings. Even nirvana becomes somewhat non-nirvanic (samsaric, marked) when we become aware of it, discuss it, try to deal with it and sense how it molds our lives. Reflection like this is a Buddhist version of the paradoxical, poetic, maddening, delightful process that all mystics, poets, metaphysicians, artists, and others trying to get their minds and spirits in tune with the holy go through. The most salient feature of our human consciousness is that to make us aware of anything definite it has to carry an at least peripheral awareness of what is indefinite. Nirvana or God functions as the horizon against which we discern everything specific. We would neither sense nor conceive of rocks, trees, other people, goodness, or nirvana itself if human consciousness did not move in tandem with something or someone of a different order, a global "we don't know what," an Other that is not human. To be human, we have to be defined, located, given our sense of both limits and possibilities by others or an Other. Think of this Other as either static or moving, as you prefer. Better, think of it as static, moving, not-static, not-moving—as always both/and, neither/nor. Think of

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it as the source of the light by which we find such categories taking shape or as a darkness, or a light too bright for us, more primordial, original, creative than what we generate ourselves in understanding. Then, you may understand why and how we never control nirvana, even though we can think both about it and that we feel it.

Peace To be absorbed with nirvana is not a disturbing fate. If one lives with what is not samsaric for even a little while, it begins to take over the play and announce the tunes. Its action, in one's mind, heart, soul, and strength, is peaceful. It soothes the fevered brow, places cool cloths on the will burning with desire. "Want not," it says. "Let go. Laissezpasser, laissez tomber." Buddhist peace brings to mind, to heart, and to grateful memory the Christian teachings about abandonment to divine providence. De Caussade, Brother Lawrence, the Little Flower, and the other Christian masters who wanted to let God be God spoke with a similar accent. Neither they nor their Buddhist equivalents were quietists, people counseling doing nothing. Yet both sets of masters, Western and Eastern, were Augustinian in key elements of their appreciation of grace. We are not saved, enlightened, made whole to whatever degree we can be in this samsaric realm by our own merits, works, or cleverness. God and nirvana either assume the priority in our lives or do not dwell with us in their proper reality but exist for us only as simulacra of their actual "selves." Consequently, the more closely we approach either God or nirvana, the more realistic our thinking and willing become and the more peaceful our beings. Letting what simply is so be so for us, we start to find the world beautiful, just right, exactly what greater powers than we have determined it should be. The danger in this peacefulness, this agreement with the world as it is, is of course the quenching of our prophetic fire, the demise of our anger at evil and our outrage that innocent children should suffer. Outsiders, and perhaps some insiders as well, have charged Buddhism with having succumbed to this danger. However, Buddhists, like Christians, have sponsored innumerable good works, so many that Asian history, like European history, would be vastly different, virtually void of charitable institutions in some eras, without the active presence of their faith. Buddhists have run hostels, hospitals, chapels, schools, orphanages, and many other useful, compassionate institutions. Monks have placed in the social body a living reminder that life is more than food, clothing, and pleasure. So, one has to go case by case, when assessing the quietistic dangers of a possible Buddhist overconcern with nirvana. One person's judgment of excess may merely balance another person's

42 / SERENE COMPASSION sober assessment that society can use all the help it can get with detachment, a longer and wiser view. The dharma promises peace. The Buddha incarnated peace, the sangha institutionalizes peace, and the teaching discloses how peace is founded, what thoughts bring it nigh. When we extinguish the flames of desire, we invite peace to replace upset, overconcern, agitation. Desire is the sure formula for war, whether against our own best interests or against outsiders. Strife, conflict, and battle arise, more often than not, because one party wants something zealously and another party opposes this want more or less equally zealously. As we write, the component peoples of the former Yugoslavia have completed several years in which they have given the world an object lesson in the follies, the brutalities, and the horrors of unbridled desire. They have not been able to reconcile their lusts for vengeance and land, and so they have raped, pillaged, machine-gunned, lied, smirked, and generally swined their way to disrepute, contempt, and hatred in the community of civilized people. In the process, the people have soiled the Orthodox Christian, Catholic, and Islamic religious traditions central to their history as Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims. None of their religious traditions has proved able to control tribal hatred and gross spiritual disorder. Each has seemed a sham, a mere tool of base ethnic identity and hateful passion to be in the world defiantly, singing anthems of bloodlust. Buddhists, looking from afar, do well to summon all their mahakaruna, the greatest of their compassions. Christians, counting the Serbs and Croats as brothers and sisters, have done best by hanging their heads in shame and worst by not excoriating their siblings' blatant contradiction of Jesus' demand that we love our enemies and do good to those who persecute us. Unlike the Christians of the former Yugoslavia, we should hear this demand because, despite all our sins, we still want to be like our Father in heaven, who makes his sun to shine and his rain to fall on just and unjust alike and because we still cling to a smidgin of Christian authenticity. Regardless of how a patient, merciful Christian God looks upon a disaster such as the former Yugoslavia, the peace inculcated by the Buddhist dharma, like that inculcated by the Christian Gospel, retains its full vigor, shines yet in the mind's eye of all peoples serious about enlightenment. Call to mind your favorite statue of the Buddha or your favorite icon of Christ and you will sense exactly what we mean. These saviors, masters, incarnations of the wisdom that has gone beyond are deeply peaceful even in their sufferings. The Buddha raising his hand in the mudras of teaching sets on the airwaves a propulsion of peace. The Christ, handing over his spirit on the cross, triumphs over all the violence, disorder, and fear-driven hatred of his enemies through the outflow of his deep-seated peace. The message with which

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the Buddha and the Christ convince the wise is that one cannot deal with holy ultimacy, nirvana, or the righteous Father without being drawn, nearly forced, into the tranquility of order, an Augustinian peace. The worldly saying has it that people can be known by the company they keep. A religious improvement of this saying might have it that saints can be known by the glow of peace that their heavenly lovers give them. Certainly, those who embrace the dharma and derive liberation from it can continue to live in the world and lament its evils; but inevitably, they enjoy a release from the terrors that afflict the worldly, those still dominated by samsara. To meet God or to taste nirvana is to know something more powerful than death and rebirth, something free of karmic bondage. Such knowledge or experience is both direct and indubitable. For that moment, the Buddhist holy person or Christian saint stands outside samsara, karma, sin, death, the realm of Satan. A touch of the wisdom that has gone beyond, a hint of the Holy Spirit, assures the blessed recipient that all manner of things will be well. Being itself is perfect. God has no flaws, no pains, no regrets. Enlightenment, salvation, liberation—all the key religious words the saints use—occur by God's taking us into the divine perfection. We who are mortal come to partake in the divine deathlessness. We who are sinful, dark with ignorance, mired in karma come to partake in what is completely holy, wholly lightsome, and free of all conditions and marks. Even the intuition that this could be our destiny expands our lungs in peace. Immediately, we have prospects that samsaric beings do not calculate, so we stand free of the terrors that haunt their nights and cramp their days. Immediately, we sense that if we seize the uncramped day and respond to such grace, we can abandon ourselves, let the ultimate be fully ultimate, actually reign, and so drop most of our fears, worries, and self-concerns. In anything like an enlightened perspective, human beings are not very large or important. The galaxies swirl, dwarfing our little dances. The stars explode, the mites multiply, the nuclear particles spin. History is long and bloody. We are short and cowardly. Billions of other men and women have laughed, suffered, been wise or foolish, been good examples to their children or bad. Little distinguishes us from these billions. As the recording angels write things down, no golden letters are likely to gild our stories, but simply plain black ink. We have never been the center of even a fraction of cosmic history, despite our inclination to dramatize our skits. We have always been mugs and stooges, runny-nosed brats only a divinely compassionate mother could love. Buddhist masters invite us to enter into the capacious peace that loss of self, the relinquishment of egocentricity, offers. In the measure that we agree with what simply is and praise the proportions of the cosmic dharma, we can feel worry and guilt and regret fall away and peace and

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contentment nod in our direction. As we let what is be in our lives, rule in our minds and hearts, we incarnate the dharma, being in modest measure as the Buddha and the other Enlightened Ones were fully. This is the peace to which the dharma calls us. This is the end, the telos, of the teaching. Happy to be in the place that wisdom points out and that a discerning assessment of our lives indicates, we can know why Shakyamuni overflows with peace, never loses his composure, always has a smile that blends compassion and irony, knowing and notblaming, loving and forgiving.

Christian Evaluation The dharma is parallel to the Christian creed or Gospel. Just as the dharma is primarily the teaching that the Buddha offered, so the Gospel is primarily the teaching that Jesus (and then his disciples, in writing the New Testament) offered. Just as the Buddha became identified with the dharma in its nirvanic and cosmic aspects (the Dharmakaya), so Jesus also became identified with the Gospel in its eternal and cosmic aspects (the Logos). Here, the human, worldly wisdoms of the dharma preoccupy us, so our Christian evaluation approaches it as the equivalent of the good news that one finds in the New Testament. The Four Noble Truths are a simpler version of wisdom than what we find in the New Testament, unless we accept the twofold commandment of Jesus (love of God and love of neighbor) as a sufficient digest of his teaching. The Four Noble Truths are also more ascetic, analytic, and monkish than what Jesus preached. Jesus probably would not say that all of life is suffering, though certainly he would understand what the Buddha meant. He could say that all of life is sinful, if allowed to enter the qualifications that all of life is also good and that where sin abounds grace abounds the more. The proposition that the cause of suffering is desire would require some reflection because Jesus operated with a different conceptual system. Inasmuch as "desire" meant a distortion of love, a wrongful wanting, a setting one's heart on false treasures, the proposition would ring harmoniously with Jesus' gospel. Inasmuch as it implied a yogic view of human nature and healthy religion or a dark view of spontaneous experience the second Noble Truth would probably give Jesus qualms. The third and fourth Noble Truths would stir related qualms. Jesus gives no sign of expecting that suffering will cease until the consummation of history, the full dawning of his Father's reign. Nothing in his Gospel opens the door to his agreeing that the Noble Eightfold Path can bring about the cessation of desire, though the adjective "right" placed in front of those eight points admits of considerable flexibility. For Jesus, the way to joy and triumph over sin and suffering is faith. People

The Dharma / 45 who wholeheartedly embrace the Gospel, the love of God, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit begin to live free of the present eon of sin and suffering, the Christian equivalent of the samsaric realm. Jesus has no doctrine of karma or reincarnation. For him, existence is not cyclic, on either the personal or the cosmic levels. At death, we gain a definitive status, either with God or alienated from God. Those who cling to the words and example of Jesus, in the power of his spirit, can hope to gain eternal life with God. Those who reject the love poured out in the life of Jesus choose hell. Thus a Christian evaluation of the most popular digest of the dharma, the Four Noble Truths, when developed from a resume of the Gospel of Jesus, raises questions about the Buddhist judgment that ordinary existence is ignorant, samsaric, a continuum of death and rebirth. There is more goodness, more to love, and less to fear in the world of Jesus than in the world of Gautama, though after enlightenment any Buddha finds the world to be perfect. Still, this enlightened judgment depends on an analysis of ordinary, samsaric existence as unreal, without sapiential status, that sounds foreign to most Christian ears. Jesus distinguishes less sharply between what ordinary people experience and what those led by the Spirit learn. The Spirit moves in all people's lives, soliciting faith. The good news summons all people to repent and believe in the dawning of the Kingdom, the advent of the eschatological time of grace. However, nirvana is in the midst of samsara, so Buddhists, too, can respect ordinary existence and experience. Certainly, the dharma is rooted in the historical culture of India that Gautama inherited and brought forward. Nonetheless, it seems more universal, more easily translated into other cultures, than the Gospel, whose roots are peculiarly Jewish. The early Christians began to translate the preaching of Jesus and the story of his death and Resurrection into Hellenistic categories from the earliest days after his Ascension. This translation is visible in the New Testament itself and so became canonical. However, the Buddha made no distinction between insiders and outsiders parallel to that which Judaism made between Jews and Gentiles. Apparently, he was harder on women, less open to their full participation in the sangha than Jesus was to the participation of women in the Christian community, but women had only to experience enlightenment to rebut this prejudice. In Buddhism, if one knows, then one has authority, regardless of extrinsic qualities. The prejudices that women faced in the Christian church after the first generations were harder to rebut because they were more amorphous, a generalized misogyny fed by both Hellenistic and Jewish biases. If we consider the Three Marks a good metaphysical digest of the dharma, we note that nothing so cogent lives at the center of the Christian Gospel. With proper metaphysical preparation, Christians might

46 / SERENE COMPASSION agree that all things are painful and fleeting. The third mark, selflessness, would be harder to sell, in part because the classical conciliar discussions of the being of Jesus worked over the full ground of personhood, concluding that while there was in Jesus only one full person, and that divine (the Logos), Jesus possessed a fully human intellect, will, and set of emotions, to say nothing of a fully human body and the qualities consequent to it. Inferentially, we may say that Jesus, therefore, possessed a fully human personality. No orthodox Christian analysis of his being, however sapiential—rigorously performed from the Christian equivalent of the Buddhist "wisdom that has gone beyond"—can conclude that Jesus, or any other fully human being, does not possess a definite center of consciousness, a valid, stable reference point for his name. The linchpin of the Christian metaphysical orientation is Jesus himself, inasmuch as his incarnation of the Word of God construes creation and salvation as symbolic through and through. "Symbolic" does not mean unreal or not physical or not ontological but that reality, as Christians are bound to see it, is analogical (also dialectical, but the more central we make the Incarnation, the more analogy prevails over dialectics). The flesh of Jesus is the great revelation of ultimate reality, the fullest expression of God that finite reality can convey. "Symbolic," therefore, means "sacramental." The sign of Jesus, the statement or icon or artwork created in his person and life's work, is holy in both its substance and its effects. Jesus is a performative utterance, a speech of the Father that works profound changes in those who take it to heart. As well, he is a historical form of the Logos that structures the natural cosmos. Creation occurs in the one divine Logos. God speaks forth the galaxies in the one Word that is his Son and took flesh of the Virgin Mary. This makes Christian salvation as cosmic and ontological as Buddhist, but more historical. The story of Jesus and his disciples is for Christian faith the hermeneutic of the universe. Nothing ontologically higher than the Incarnation can occur anywhere in the universe that Christians can conceive because Christians can conceive of nothing higher than the perfect union of divinity with created being. In the Incarnation of the Logos, finite reality existing apart from, though still completely dependent on, divinity receives a full divinization. The Resurrection of Jesus manifests this full divinization dramatically, but after the Resurrection Christian faith discerned such divinization to have always been the core of Jesus' identity. From conception, he was the enfleshment of the self-expression of the Father, the historical locus of the first of the two processions that constitute the eternal life of the triune God. The Christian is likely to miss in the Buddhist dharma the rich life of this triune God in itself, as well as the entrance of its ultimately communal life into history through the Incarnation. Certainly, a sympa-

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thetic Christian hearing of the dharma will find in the awakening of Gautama some equivalents to the Incarnation, as it will find in the omnipresence of nirvana in samsara many equivalents to the creative presence of the triune God in both nature and history. However, the Christian divinity will probably still seem more personal, more exactly knowing and loving, than the Buddhist nirvana. Relatedly, Christian accounts of peak experiences in which believers receive the communication of God will seem warmer and more loving than Buddhist accounts of reception of nirvanic reality through awakening. (However, we should not exaggerate this difference, since many accounts of Buddhist awakening throb with gratitude and joy.) The metaphysical problems (many of which cluster around responsibility for evil) that God sets Christian theologians have never persuaded Christians to abandon their personal imagery for the deity. Even when Christians have isolated their God from history by denying that he (generally, the Christian God has been a patriarch, though nothing in Christian theology proper requires this) could have a real relation with the world (one suggesting that God needed the world or could be changed by it), Christians have prayed as though God listened, cared, and might act to make a difference. Similarly, they have loved a Bible that portrayed God as passionate, able to rage but willing to change his mind, irrational at times in his love for Israel. Such personalism and passion are foreign to the ultimacy taught in the Buddhist dharma. No doubt, devotional Buddhism offers qualifications to this characterization, but the sober Buddhist mainstream tends to support it. Buddhism is not a warm religion emotionally, let alone a hot one. It chants, but it seldom rocks or dances with pentecostal fervor. It chastises governments and social classes when they do wrong or create unjust political orders, but it does not sponsor the corps of politically oriented prophets that the Christian Gospel does. Where Jesus wades into the fray, overturning the tables of the moneychangers and limiting what people can render to Caesar, the Buddha prescinds, believing that only people who get their personal spiritual houses in order will be orderly citizens, good neighbors, and sources of social peace.

4

The Sangha

Chastity Sangha denotes both the whole Buddhist community, all who take refuge in the Three Jewels, and the monastic part of that community. Together, with special symbolic power deriving from the monastic community, lay Buddhists, monks, and nuns have contributed to social peace by embodying values counter to samsaric culture—ways of discipline and nonviolence opposing karmic ways of selfishness and grasping. The Buddhist teachings about chastity (one of the five precepts of core Buddhist ethics, which we consider in Chapter 6) are a good example of how the sangha has made its social mark. As well, they have been central to the life of the monastic community and an important influence in lay life. In this chapter we deal with the monastic ideals, admitting that, as in Christian history, monks and nuns have not always practiced them punctiliously. Chastity is a primary issue in all social codes. Unless a community controls its sexual mores, it risks the breakdown of family life and the rise of dissoluteness, promiscuity, and disease in personal life. Because the dharma has laid such a heavy stress on eliminating desire, Buddhists have ideally expected a crisp discipline in sexual matters. Buddhist history and culture do not give the impression of puritanism. Rather than suppression, the ideal usually has been detachment, taking all the appetites lightly. In matters of food, the monastic dictum was, "No stom-

The Sangha / 49 ach more than two-thirds full." In sexual conduct, the monastic way was abstinence and the laity were to avoid obsession. The example of Gautama was instructive in this area, as in many others. He grew up living luxuriously, a prince in a palace. He had limitless pleasures available (in part, according to legend, because his father, having received predictions that he would leave home and become a Buddha, tried to keep Gautama distracted and satisfied in the palace). He married a beautiful woman and begot a healthy son, but when he underwent an existential crisis occasioned by observing disease, old age, and death, he gave up family life and set out to roam as an ascetic. In his zeal for enlightenment, he sent sexual pleasure packing, along with material possessions. After awakening, the Buddha lived a celibate life, moving from place to place and begging his food. The inner circle of the community of followers that he gathered lived similarly, adding obedience to his leadership. Thus the monastic portion of the sangha has followed the model that Gautama himself developed and exemplified. At the core of that model has been celibacy. The monastic rules (vinaya) make it clear that sexual offenses were on the minds of the legislators, though many other things were as well. Both heterosexual and homosexual lapses were prohibited. Monks, meditating daily, became acutely aware of sexual fantasies, temptations, and energies. As their ideals rose and they aimed at a complete purity of consciousness, they were supposed to seek a chastity of spirit as well as of body. It was not enough to abstain from physical sexual relations. It was further desirable so to integrate sexual drives with the pursuit of enlightenment that they caused no distractions. (Indeed, in tantric Buddhism masters developed exercises to tap libidinal energies for their assault on enlightenment.) Laity tended to receive any intense spiritual instruction from monks, and monks usually adapted the monastic disciplines that they knew best. Thus laity received counsel to abstain from sexual relations on occasion, as they received counsel to fast now and then. In both cases, the point was to increase their merit and their discipline. Procreation was supposed to bulk larger than emotional satisfaction and romance, while the karmic dangers in eroticism (its potential for tying people to the world of death and rebirth) meant that a positive Buddhist view of sexual love and desire was hard to find. Traditional Indian culture, as represented by mainstream Hindu mores, held that pleasure was one of the four legitimate goals of life. It was the lowest (followed by wealth, duty, and salvation), but it was legitimate. Pleasure (kama) held little appeal for the yogin, but laity could pursue and enjoy it, in moderation. (In fact, it could become a good training ground for realizing the pernicious ways of karma.) Buddhism, like Hinduism, ideally did not disparage family life. Most Indians recognized the importance of the extended family as the main-

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stay of the economic and political orders. East Asian Buddhists tended to honor a Confucian social structure, in which filial piety was perhaps the most important virtue. Procreation was a heavy duty, so much so that Buddhist monasticism often faced strong social opposition (for example, women might have to fight hard to become nuns). Eldest sons had the strongest duty to continue the family line (in part to ensure sacrifices for the peace of their elders and ancestors in the afterlife), but all children were expected to produce heirs. Infertility was grounds for returning a wife to her natal family. Until a woman produced children, especially sons, she had little status in her husband's household, which she joined at marriage. Indeed, her only strong leverage against her mother-in-law was a phalanx of healthy sons. Inasmuch as the Buddhist view of the necessity of quenching desire to gain enlightenment and nirvana qualified the rights of eros and procreation, Buddhism set a countercultural bomb ticking in Confucian cultures. Monastic life offered an alternative to traditional social patterns, one that both Chinese and other East Asians often attacked. Imperial patronage deflected such attacks in times of prosperity; but in times of persecution, when Taoism or Confucianism or, in Japan, Shintoism gained the upper hand and determined to reduce Buddhist influence, Buddhist monks and nuns could find themselves turned out of the monasteries and returned to lay life. Indian high culture generally thinks of spiritual progress as entailing a physical purification and a cleansing of consciousness. On the whole, Buddhism has shared in this Indian tendency. (East Asian thought is usually more concrete, embodied, holistic than Indian, and more layoriented or worldly than yogic. In fact, East Asian monastic schools, such as Zen, adapted the native sense of lineage and reverence of ancestors, constructing chains of notable masters and picturing the dharma as handed down in an unbroken catena. At many periods, it was important for a teacher to have received an imprimatur—an authentication of his experience of enlightenment—from a recognized ancestor-guru.) This has meant that analyses of meditational experience, such as those found in the abhidharmic literature, have sought to diminish physical concerns, such as interest in food or sex, as a way to make spiritual progress. It is not so much that thinking of food or sex is immoral ("impure thoughts") as that any concern with bodily matters has been considered more karmic than intellectual, metaphysical, or spiritual. The less traffic with matter, the better. The body and its consequents were there, and common sense required both keeping the body healthy and dealing with its regular needs. Still, the more one could discipline the body and keep it from intruding, the better. The key concerns of monastic Buddhism have been meditation and wisdom. Monastic morality has sought to support these concerns and to

The Sangha / 51 enable them to flourish by eliminating distractions, disorders, and material preoccupations. This has meant a monastic ideal of detachment and spareness—begging one's food (and so not caring greatly about food); living apart from the opposite sex (and so minimizing sexual temptations); dressing simply; following the orders of one's master exactly; having few possessions; being content to remain within the often circumscribed confines of one's monastery; not seeking promotion, preferment, or honors; and so forth. Sexual discipline in lay life, with special emphasis on the conduct of the unmarried, expressed how Buddhists sought to translate into the secular world the abridgement of the erotic that monastic celibacy institutionalized. The Buddhist living in the world failed if his or her dealings with sex, money, power, and other key matters were not restrained, disciplined, and compatible with the central teaching that the root of suffering is desire. Buddhist art in particular and culture in general show that such restraint and discipline have been no enemies of beauty. East Asian temple art, in particular, has drawn great inspiration from Buddhist themes. However, the dance, song, and theater of Buddhist countries (Thailand and Japan come to mind) strike Westerners as formal, stylized, and controlled. While such countries might tolerate a low culture—various demimondes, gambling, and prostitution—their higher cultures have placed the erotic in the service of awakening, sometimes graphically. The tea ceremony, floral arrangement, calligraphy, archery, and martial arts that Zen has inspired in Japan are good examples of the restraint characteristic of Buddhist aesthetics. This is not to deny that Japan and other Buddhist countries have housed hotbeds of pornography and other forms of sexual vice. (Thailand is now notorious for teenage prostitution and AIDS.) It is simply to note that Buddhist chastity, centered in the monastic sangha, has been a significant influence on the high cultures of many Buddhist countries. As noted, tantric Buddhism, which flourished most famously in Tibet, often sought to tap libidinal energies for the sake of enlightenment. Thus some famous eccentric Tibetan masters counseled their (mature) disciples to break traditional prohibitions to make available the energies invested in taboos. For example, the disciples might eat forbidden foods (such as meat), drink alcoholic beverages (a staple prohibition, mentioned explicitly in the sila, the five fundamental ethical precepts), and engage in sexual intercourse (forbidden to monks and nuns). Relating this last iconoclastic practice to the Tibetan interest in heavenly spirits and deities, a male-female couple of disciples might practice sexual intercourse (imaginary or real), in which they impersonated the gods at the deeds of sacred marriage. Using mandalas (sacred signs, in this case precincts fenced off to represent sacred parts of the cosmos where the gods dwelt) and mantras (sacred sounds), the ritual inter-

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course (maithuna) of the couple could become a holistic effort first to break with ordinary, samsaric perceptions and then to break through the realms of inhibition intermediate between samsara and nirvana. The point ideally was not self-indulgence but movement to a higher discipline, one that attacked the complacency, if not the hypocrisy, threatening those whose moral or physical purity had become dogmatic. Chastity was not an end but a means. It had little value in its own right, at least when compared with the final experience and value, enlightenment. If sex became an obsession, even in the negative mode of constant effort to maintain one's chastity, chastity could be doing more harm than good. If the exercise of sex might do more good as far as moving toward liberation than restraint was doing, then reasonableness suggested having at it.

Begging Just as monastic celibacy put the sharpest point on Buddhist restraint concerning sex and bodily pleasures, so monastic begging put the sharpest point on Buddhist restraint concerning material possessions. If those pursuing enlightenment full-time found that living without security regarding even their food helped them advance, all Buddhists—indeed, all observers of good will—might take a salutary lesson. To pry away the sticky fingers of desire, one did well to restrain oneself concerning food, clothing, shelter, and other material factors. Certainly, monks needed food to survive, but often they needed less food than anxious or gluttonous folk imagined, as well as less clothing, comfort in housing, or recreational dealings with friends. If one agreed that gaining enlightenment was the pressing necessity, then whatever lessened one's desires was helpful. Because ordinary folk tended to desire material pleasures and possessions excessively, monks' lessening their dependence on food, even their assurance of food, could offer a good example. The relation between monks and laity that has prevailed throughout Buddhist history is dialectical. In both ideal and practice, monks have offered the example of what zealous Buddhist faith and practice looks like. As well, they have offered teaching, spiritual direction, and the conduct of religious ceremonies. In some countries, such as Thailand, throughout many historical periods young men of the mainstream would go to a monastery for at least six months as part of their general education. During this training, they would learn to meditate, to ponder the main Buddhist teachings, and to experience what an intense practice of Buddhist ideals meant. Somewhat like traditional Indians apprenticed to a guru during the first of the four classical Hindu ashramas, they would try to appropriate their millennial cultural tradi-

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tion—learn the classics, devote themselves full-time to the sanctioned interpretation of life. The hope behind this tradition was that later, when such men were earning a living and raising a family, Buddhist ideals would shape their days. Then, as they matured toward retirement from worldly activities, they would have a sense of tradition on which to rely, a lead to the classical wisdom they might want to renew, as they prepared themselves for old age and death. In such a horizon, the time they had spent going the round of the village with their begging bowl and asking pious layfolk for their food might return as golden moments, when the freedom of living sparely, the mutual dependence of monks and laity, and the spiritual significance of food might stand out as object lessons. Begging, which was often more occasional than regular or daily, is a two-edged sword, as well as a two-way street. To take the latter image first, the traffic between laity and monks would be such that monks depended on laity for their material sustenance—alms, food, clothing, protection from enemies. Laity, in turn, would depend on monks for their spiritual sustenance—instruction in the dharma, models of religious zeal, help with their personal problems in meditation, ethical matters, family disputes. Laity would share with monks the benefits of living in the world—dealing with money, sex, and power, meeting samsara head on. Monks would share with laity the benefits of living detached from the world—silence, study, and immersing oneself in the tradition so as, ideally, to understand it experimentally, from within, as an intense practitioner. The ideal of begging puts this two-way traffic into succinct, concrete, and practical form. In pious imagination, the monk holds out his bowl, the poor little wooden symbol of his need. The layperson fills it with rice, as an offering meant to honor the holiness of the life that such food sustains. The layperson earns merit for supporting the monk's holy life. The monk earns merit for acting humbly by making himself depend on another for his very food. The monk also earns merit for providing the layperson a chance to earn merit. When they bow to each other, monk and layperson acknowledge this mutual benefit they are creating, as well as the dignity of one another's way of life. Even when monasteries developed other means of support, begging remained an instructive symbol. Begging is also a two-edged sword because unless faith remained high on both sides of the equation, the interaction would degenerate into a source of mutual resentment. Laity might resent the arrival of the monk with his begging bowl, finding it an importunity. "Here he is again, the lazy beggar. Why doesn't he move his backside, do some work, earn his rice?" Pious laity would, no doubt, seldom articulate such sentiments, but they might still lodge at the edge of consciousness, pinching the layperson's appreciation of monastic life. If the monks did

54 / SERENE COMPASSION not live austerely, manifestly restraining themselves to a simple level of material existence to concentrate on meditation, scholarship, and in some cases social services, such as running hostels for travelers or hospitals for the sick, then laity could resent supporting monasteries, even begrudge filling monks' begging bowls. For their part, monks could resent having to go out in all kinds of weather to obtain their food, keeping silence, depending on the charity of others, never knowing what quality or quantity of food they might receive. If their lives in the monastery were indeed spartan, begging could become a significant further penance or austerity, perhaps the one that proved the last straw. Would it not be better, and provide a little relief, to get laypeople to give enough cash to allow the monastery to buy its own food and arrange for preparing it? Would that not save time, energy, and occasional humiliation, as well as improve the fare at table? Certainly, humiliation could be good for the spirit, but moderation was desirable in all things. Sometimes laity were so churlish that begging generated more irritation in the monks than virtue. It was well to offer laity a chance to gain merit and to have that chance oneself, but other activities—such as meditation, teaching, and offering spiritual counsel—provided at least equal opportunities for merit. Even physical work around the monastery could seem more attractive, less distracting, less exposed to the world, less conductive to feelings of oddness and awkwardness, less misunderstood. Like Christianity, Buddhism has striven to be in the world but not of it, and has not always succeeded. Nonetheless, the dharma has made it plain that the world is a vale of tears, a plenum of suffering. The more insight and wisdom people have, the less they want to have to deal with the world and the more they want to withdraw and trim their desires. Yet, as awakening comes, Buddhists see that everything is intrinsically pure. Omnia tnunda mundis, Western monasticism taught: to the pure, all things are pure. To the enlightened Buddhist, everything shines with light and is in the core of its being perfect, mind only. Further, as the example of the Buddha proved, to the enlightened those suffering in the world are a great cause for compassion. They tug at the enlightened one's heart, prompting the bodhisattva vow to postpone entry into nirvana so as to take their sufferings on himself or herself and move them to share in enlightenment. Even before full enlightenment, then, as soon as the dispositions of the enlightened have begun to shape their ideals, monks have tended to want to share their love of the dharma, their increasing appreciation of its depth and beauty, through preaching, teaching, and religious counsel. They have hoped that their monastic way of life would offer a rich, round example of what is most important in a well-ordered life

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and that laity would retreat to their monasteries regularly for spiritual renewal. In all these ways, Buddhism has sought to escape the world, tame it, and show it life's best possibilities. Of course, monks inevitably became involved in worldly concerns— financing their monasteries, advertising their spiritual offerings, making their monasteries centers of culture (tea ceremonies, traditional art works, gardens, musical concerts, religious sculptures). Less inevitably but equally significantly, laity became aware of monasteries and monks as soon as they gained religious interests and aspirations. Whenever they learned about meditation or came to find Buddhist philosophy intriguing, they were sure to find that monks were the major authorities. Whenever they felt the need of spiritual counsel, monks were sure to appear as major resources. Laity could worry that monks would not really understand their problems, shaped as such problems were by life in the world. What could monks know about sexual frictions in marriage, problems with children, the tensions and worries of running a business, the pressures of politics? On occasion, monks might venture into political matters, joining peace marches or going out to vote, but laypeople could fear that in such matters monks would be naive, easily duped by idealistic slogans. However, regular interaction often allowed laity to explain their problems sufficiently clearly for monks to discern the spiritual crux and help them considerably. Monks, in turn, could worry that laypeople were so worldly that they were nearly bound to misunderstand religious doctrines and ceremonies. For example, how likely was the average layperson to put in the time and muster the discipline necessary to launch a significant practice of meditation? How likely was the average layperson to put in the study necessary to master the ideas underlying meditational practice, bolstering the traditional morality, explaining the religious ceremonies? The basis of Buddhist life could be rendered as simply as the Four Noble Truths, and there was merit in keeping it simple; but it could also beckon one into truly profound matters of being, knowing, psychology, and metaphysics. Was broaching such matters with average laypeople not casting pearls before swine? All that we have said about monks applies to nuns, mutatis mutandis. Under the supervision of monks, nuns traditionally could offer spiritual direction to laywomen, make their monasteries sources of Buddhist culture, and develop the mutual relationships with laypeople that characterized monks' dealings with people living in the world (known as "householders"). Nuns might beg their food directly (though their wandering to beg could raise worries and practical questions, at least in the minds of those who feared for their safety, purity, reputation, and the like) or they might solicit alms from layfolk. They might do gainful work at their monasteries and offer retreats. In a dozen ways,

56 / SERENE COMPASSION they could provide laity occasions to gain merit, and through their dealings with laity they could gain merit themselves. Begging, therefore, can stand as an epitome of the rich skein of ideal interactions that monks and laity have conspired to weave throughout Buddhist history. At high times of the Buddhist calendar, when ceremonies to celebrate important events such as the birthday of the Buddha were in order, laypeople would flock to the local monastery, where the monks or nuns would try to show themselves as proper hosts. Together, the two ranks would create the wholeness of the sangha, the mutual coordination and support of those who lived in the world and kept it going and those who had forsaken the world to give it good example and wise counsel. Both vocations were necessary if the sangha was to embrace the whole of human potential and keep vigorous the full span of the wisdom necessary to bring a full complement of believers across the stream of suffering to enlightenment and nirvana. Thus the bowl held out and the rice poured in became in Buddhist history a powerful symbol of the sociology of the Middle Way.

Obedience When his first disciples gained permission to live with the Buddha, follow him in his wanderings to preach, take regular counsel from him, and then collaborate in his work, they inevitably put themselves under obedience to his direction. From this beginning, as well as traditional Indian views of the proper relationship between guru and pupil, the monastic sangha developed the practice of having monks live under obedience to the abbot of their monastery. In part, this was simply a matter of governance: it could work well for a person of sound judgment and wide experience to set the tone and coordinate the whole monastic enterprise. Further, it was a matter of respect for the intrinsic authority of those one knew had gained enlightenment. In the general culture of East Asia, the profound reverence of youth for elders played a large role in the development of obedience to one's guru. Usually, the head of the monastery was the object of great devotion. For many monks, he was the living embodiment of Buddhist tradition. From his mouth the dharma spoke. In religious groups, however, obedience tends to become more than simply a political tool, more even than a cog in the wheel of tradition. Looking at the asceticism necessary to remove desire or sin, many monks and nuns have realized that stripping away personal willfulness can be extremely important. Just as chastity focused the entire question of ruling the body well and begging focused the entire question of how to use material things, so obedience could focus the entire question of how to reduce self-centeredness, pride, ambition, and self-assertion. If

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a person was willing to set aside what he or she thought, wanted, or hoped to serve the will of another, that person was well on the way to spiritual maturity. The superior might be giving a particular directive for the common good ("Please take up the post of guestmaster") or for the specific good of the individual in question ("Read this book," "Try this koan"). Either way, the directive could become the symbol of providence or good karma, as well as the occasion for setting aside selfishness and gaining considerable merit. For a tradition that makes selflessness the most crucial of the three marks that it finds characterizing all entities, obedience could seem especially apt. Who was there, in the monk's or nun's psychosomatic unity, to resist a lawful order, to put out contrary willfulness? What solid personality actually existed to raise a fuss? Thinking about questions such as these, the monk or nun working at the matter of obedience could find a good occasion to penetrate the truth of anatman. Obedience, therefore, offered the chance to move more gracefully to the dance of the dharmas. The less that the illusion of having a self tied a person down, the more graceful that person was likely to be. Spiritually, self-concern is usually a drag. Metaphysically, Buddhists find it the result of a pernicious illusion. All beings in fact are empty (sunya). Seen from the heavenly perspective of a bodhisattva, none has an ownbeing, or an atman. The better one appreciates this truth, the more likely one is to live freely. What chastity and begging can accomplish for light movement through the worlds of sex and material possessions, obedience can accomplish for light movement through the world of selfconcern and spiritual preoccupation. In Buddhist discussions of creativity, mindlessness often comes up for praise and positive analysis. East Asian aesthetics, especially, makes much of acting spontaneously, from the center of the psychosomatic complex, with no inhibiting controls by the calculating mind. Naturally, the mature artist has gone through a full training. The spontaneity or naivete under discussion is tutored, secondary rather than primary. Like the unconsciousness of the trained pianist, it is a long way from the mindlessness with which a child first pillories a Steinway. Much discipline has created a form that has freed the artist's spirit to concentrate on meanings. He or she does not have to bother much with mechanics. Indeed, a poet still awkward in grammar can seldom write a good lyric (though many accomplished poets find that their work makes them return regularly to grammar and etymology). At any rate, obedience can serve the flourishing of Buddhist art if one understands and practices it correctly. A correct understanding and practice does not beat the individual down. It is not punitive, abusive, or ascetic in ways that raise welts on the psyche as a rough hairshirt or chain can raise welts on the back. The wise and kind master treats each disciple as an individual, learning what he or she needs to prosper. For

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some it is gentleness. For others it is sternness. However, for all artists help at integrating mind and spirit, thus freeing all of one's energy and talent for imaginative inspiration, is a great blessing. S0ren Kierkegaard viewed the mind of the creative worker running like the box high above an old-fashioned flush toilet. The unconscious is flowing freely with images, intuitions, powerful affects. For the moment, the artist has available an unwonted, perhaps almost excessive, proportion of his or her capability. For the moment, past experience and the present emotional or spiritual state (need, hunger, desire, pain, or joy) conspire with maximal profit. The parallel ideal for the Buddhist artist or warrior is to be able to paint a scroll or shoot an arrow with complete concentration, integration, and employment of potential. Posture, breathing, muscle skills, and the other physical components of the worker stand at the full service of understanding, craft, and attention. So the calligraphic poem, a blend of painting and poetry, appears magically on the scroll, produced by a kind of automatic writing or ghostly agency. So the arrow flies to its mark as though sent off by an unseen spirit, a guardian helper standing invisibly at one's shoulder. The person arranging the best floral display or most gracefully executing the tea ceremony or laying out the most perfect Zen garden or moving most effectively in the martial arts often enjoys such an automatic, mindless state. Western athletes sometimes describe it as "entering the zone." Psychologists of peak experience sometimes speak of "flow." Religious people are bound to refer to uncontrollable, wonderful moments or seasons as times of grace. The place of obedience in moving toward times of grace—indeed, toward an increasingly habitual ability to work and live with a proper integration and mindlessness—is nothing that one can prescribe or execute mechanically. Like all important aspects of the spiritual life, it depends on experience, discretion, and the ability to apply general principles to ever-changing particular circumstances—to say nothing of its dependence on the divine spirit, which breathes as it will. Yet it also seems clear that those who have lived generously under obedience can enjoy some advantages when it comes to the central spiritual matter of divesting oneself of self-centeredness. The sort of self-concern that marks the spiritually immature can yield to a proper practice of obedience, freeing the individual to concentrate on the objective world and grow markedly in realism. According to some current feminist schools, the psychology of many Western women may suggest placing some nuances on this analysis, inasmuch as pride (excessive self-confidence or self-assertion) is not the typical problem that women face but is more characteristic of men. If the typical problem that women face is lack of a proper pride, autonomy, sense of worth, confidence, and the like, then obedience ought

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to target an increase of self-reliance, not a decrease. A wise spiritual master or mistress would then give orders and arrange experiments that encouraged the disciple to develop her own inner resources. Looking to herself rather than outside authorities, she might even have to lay aside the director's edicts from time to time to move toward a properly critical understanding and acceptance of them. That, in turn, could help her move toward a properly critical and balanced view of tradition as a whole, all that the dharma or church authorities impose. In maturity, the religious person is truly free, a most attractive blend of docility and responsibility, able to hear and obey but also to command, adapt, show personal initiative, and take proper responsibility. When obedience is a truly spiritual discipline, targeting this kind of maturity in both sexes, it serves the entire religious community. Then, one has both monastics and laypeople who fulfill the Freudian criterion of psychological health through their ability both to love and to work. Then, one has the glory of God being manifested through the signal humanity of people who are fully alive.1

Lay Life The essentials of the dharma apply to human life simplidter (before any distinction into monastic and lay). The Four Noble Truths, the Three Marks, the five precepts of sila refer to women as much as men, children as much as adults, people in the world as much as people who have withdrawn into monastic communities. Still, Buddhism has tended to rank people in precisely these orders: women below men, children below adults, laypeople below monks and nuns. As was the case in most periods of Christian history (after the apostolic era), spirituality— sketches of the ideal religious life—focused more on those considered professionally religious (monastics) than on laypeople. Moreover, lay spirituality, such as it was, tended to be an adaptation of monastic spirituality—a tailoring worked by monks for their lay disciples, or diriges, often without full awareness of the real circumstances in which the laity were living. Predictably, however, pious Buddhists, monks and nuns as well as laypeople, like pious people in other religious traditions, have worked out their own adaptations or appropriations of the canonical traditions. As has been true in most other traditions, they have favored stories (myths) rather than abstract (philosophical or theological) doctrines. They have loved ceremonies, sought the help of saints (bodhisattvas, gurus, legendary holy people, wonderworkers) who seemed to bring ultimate holiness near, and, generally, they have tried to make their faith serve their daily needs, especially their need for good fortune (in

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the face of a capricious nature and often venal neighbors) and healing (in the face of manifold physical and spiritual vulnerabilities). Religious experts might decry popular religion, whether inside or outside the monastery, as riddled with ignorance and superstition. They might fear magic and religion's absorption into ethnicity, where it could become simply part of the way "we" thought of ourselves, imagined "our" mores to work, losing its critical powers, its astringent call to combat samsaric desire and press forward toward fully authentic being and nirvana. Nonetheless, in most historical periods and geographical locales, ordinary Buddhists have resisted a full direction by experts, insisting on creating their own folk or "little" traditions. Buddhism has been less the exception to this rule than a typical instance of how consistently it has operated. Certainly, in East Asia Buddhism often adopted a more pragmatic, worldly cast than it had worn in more speculative, metaphysical India. Certainly, Mahayanist schools prided themselves on accommodating tradition to the needs of laypeople so as to open more space on the raft taking benighted humanity across the stream of samsara. The Vimalakirti Sutra, which made a layman rather than a monastic figure the exemplary bodhisattva, enjoyed great popularity in East Asia; but these changes, though they reached toward the center of the dharma and were in fact quite substantial, had less effect overall than less official changes worked by unsophisticated Buddhists, themselves at the grass roots. Primary among such grass-roots changes was a shift from concern with gaining nirvana to gaining merit (to improve one's karma and, in a future existence, to both enjoy more pleasure and be positioned better to gain enlightenment). Theravada Buddhists seem to have embraced this preoccupation with merit more fully than Mahayana Buddhists, but one finds it exerting a strong influence in many periods of (Mahayana) Chinese history, as well as, for example, (Theravada) Burmese history. Writing as an anthropologist interested in Burmese religion, Melford E. Spiro has described in considerable detail the shift from what he calls nibbanic Buddhism, a religion of radical salvation, to kammatic Buddhism, a religion of proximate salvation. Both adjectives come from Pali (rather than Sanskrit) and reflect a cultural movement from an official, scholarly context to a vernacular, popular one. Nibbana (nirvana] is the state of full unconditionedness that we have considered when analyzing the Buddha's goal. Kamma (karma] is the law of cause and effect, or, more popularly, the results of the operation of that law (the burdens and shapings of consciousness) that tended to preoccupy laypeople when they weighed either their ethical potency or their chances for salvation. After noting that the great religious traditions have regularly had to adapt their highest ideals so that ordinary people living in the world

The Sangha / 61 could find them both attractive and practicable, Spiro describes the adaptation that Theravada Buddhism made for laypeople in countries such as Burma: Typically, instead of renouncing desire (and the world), Buddhists rather aspire to a future worldly existence in which their desires may find satisfaction. Contrary to nibbanic Buddhism, which teaches that frustration is an inevitable characteristic of samsaric existence, they view their suffering as a temporary state, the result of their present position in samsara. But there are, and they aspire to achieve, other forms of samsaric existence which yield great pleasure. These range from the earthly existence of a wealthy human being to the heavenly existence of a blissful deva. Frustrated in their striving for greater pleasure in their present lives, the Burmese—to particularize this generalized discussion—hope to find it in a future life. Their aim is not to transcend the samsaric world, but to alter their fate (in a future life) within it. Contrary, then, to the ideology of nibbanic Buddhism, Buddhism for most Buddhists is a means not so much for the extinction of desire as for its satisfaction; not so much for the cessation of rebirth as for a better rebirth; not so much for some kind of absolute Deliverance—whether this be conceived as the extinction of being or, less extremely, of an individualized ego—as for the persistence of the individuated ego in a state of sensate happiness.2 In keeping with this new view of their goal, kammatic Buddhists have tended to become preoccupied with merit rather than knowledge. If elitists have sought saving knowledge through meditation and study that press toward enlightenment, most Burmese Buddhists have sought merit through practices thought to decrease bad karma and increase good karma. To let Spiro complete the comparison he has built: Since, in nibbanic Buddhism, the soteriological goal consists in the cessation of rebirth, and since karma is the cause of rebirth, the aim of soteriological action is the extinction of karma. With the shift in soteriological goal to the persistence and enhancement of rebirth rather than to its cessation, the aim of soteriological action is the improvement rather than the extinction of one's karma. Hence, in nibbanic Buddhism salvation is achieved not by works (and certainly not by faith), but only by knowledge (panna); and since meditation alone [some Buddhists might add intuitive philosophical study] produces the knowledge requisite for salvation, meditation is the soteriological act of nibbanic Buddhism. Any other kind of action, even moral action, is subversive of salvation, for morality produces karma, which in turn causes rebirth. Among contemporary Theravada Buddhists, on the other hand, not knowledge but merit is the goal of religious action, for merit alone improves one's karma, and good karma is the prerequisite for their soteriological aim, viz., a happy rebirth. Hence, since giving (dana) and morality (sila) are the primary means for acquiring merit, they (and not meditation) are viewed as the soteriological acts by the latter Buddhists. In short, there has been an im-

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portant shift in Theravada Buddhism from salvation through knowledge to salvation through works.3

With due qualifications, we can suspect that ordinary people in virtually all Buddhist traditions and cultures (Mahayana and Vajrayana [tantric], as well as Theravada) have tended toward this shift from knowledge to ethical action. As well, we can suspect that a devotional, ceremonial life, in which almsgiving and prayers, of both homage and petition, predominated, became the regular focus of mainstream Buddhist religion. Some monks and nuns might hold out for a more austere, meditational religion geared toward nirvana, but even they could be influenced by the convictions of the crowd, as well as by what the laity asked of them (what they needed for ceremonies or understood as useful spiritual direction). Naturally, this shift in the preoccupations of the majority of Buddhists, who have always been laypeople, has shaped both the overall profile of the sangha and, through the inevitable interaction between the sangha and the dharma, the dharma. Social life and doctrine always interact, shaping each other mutually. The impact of kammatic Buddhism on the profile of Gautama has tended to be more subtle, so the first Jewel, the Buddha, can appear to have gleamed more steadily than the dharma and the sangha. Nonetheless, in the schools and periods when lay Buddhism has been strongest, one finds the Buddha stressing a compassionate adaptation of his originally austere teachings, in effect accommodating to the evils of the wicked age the difficulties of living the dharma in anything like a pristine form. Relatedly, Buddhas and bodhisattvas notable for their kindness, their susceptibility to being approached through faith rather than austere meditational practice, tend to come to the fore. Thus Kuan-yin, the motherly form of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, has become the most popular deity in East Asia, assuring her petitioners that she understands their difficulties and will help with their desires for children, wealth, good health, and good fortune and generally sanctioning a stress on almsgiving and good deeds, rather than meditation and knowledge. The preaching of the Japanese saint Shinran (1173-1263), who deliberately gave up celibacy, married, and lived in the world to incarnate his convictions about the religion best suited to the difficult current eon, stressed the sufficiency of faith in the goodness of the Buddha. Finally, we note that the focus of Nichiren Buddhism, another influential Japanese tradition, has fallen on recitations (of the Lotus Sutra) and deeds designed to build up good karma and merit, often explicitly to improve wealth and fortune immediately in this present life. Overall, then, the pressures of lay life have worked major changes in Buddhist practice, both ceremonial and ethical, as well as influential changes in Buddhist doctrine and theology (sense of the divine).4

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Christian Evaluation Christianity has sponsored a powerful monastic life for both men and women, as well as numerous adaptations of its doctrine for laity, so there are good grounds for thinking that Buddhism and Christianity are quite alike sociologically. However, when we look closely at the origins of the two religions, at the religious lives that their founders appear to have led personally, and at the centrality of worldliness to their doctrinal complexes, we find significant differences. The result of an overall comparison, then, is analogy rather than close morphological similarity. The differences at the origins of the two religions—as these differences take root in the personal religious styles of the two founding figures, the Buddha and Jesus, and as they find clear expression in what seem to be the founders' own teachings—force us to begin our comparison on a note of difference. From the moment that he became the Buddha, Gautama was in effect a monk. Although he was born a member of the second caste, a warrior rather than a priestly Brahmin, his enlightenment took him outside the going social structure, assimilating him to the sannyasin, the wandering holy man to whom caste meant little. He embraced celibacy and begging. He undertook the direction of disciples and endorsed obedience. Little in his own historical teaching, in contrast to the teachings attributed to him or to other Buddhas or bodhisattvas later, under pressure to develop a kammatic soteriology for the laity, aimed at anything but the extinction of desire and the achievement of nirvana. As a result, the present, secular world interested him very little. Almost always, his pronouncements about it were negative: it was the realm of samsara, the hell-pit of burning desire, the radical enemy. Jesus, in contrast, did not appear on the scene as a monastic figure, though from the moment that he was baptized by John the Baptist and driven into the desert by the Holy Spirit, monkish features developed in his religious style. Jesus was born into an artisan family, grew up basically as a peasant, and evidenced many countercultural attitudes.5 His sympathies remained lay, even proletarian, rather than priestly or clerical, and he did not require celibacy or poverty of his disciples. In addition, he welcomed women into his community (as, Buddhist traditions suggest, the Buddha initially did not). However, Jesus did embrace celibacy himself, did live poorly, did if not beg his food at least accept it as alms from others, and did provide direction, both practical and spiritual, for his band of disciples. He took time out for prayer, seemed determined to retain some of the minimalism he learned in the desert, and struck a balance (a middle way) between asceticism and the enjoyment of worldly pleasures, probably coming down on the side of simplicity, if not austerity. Worldly matters

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did not interest Jesus much personally. Personally, he was so absorbed in his relationship with God that money, possessions, sex, creative work, and the personal aspects of politics received little attention. For the religious life of the individual, these things pertain to the realm of means, as things we should use gratefully but lightly, referring everything good in them to the bounty of God and maneuvering around everything problematic, or potentially derailing, because worship of God and promotion of social justice are matters of much greater moment. Promotion of social justice, in fact, is a major difference between the original slant of Christianity and that of Buddhism. While the Buddha's teaching certainly carries significant social implications, many of which Buddhism has developed throughout its history, nothing like Jesus' preoccupation with the reign of God, need to redo the social contract on behalf of marginal groups, and criticism of the hypocrisy of an official religion that stigmatized many marginal peoples as "sinners" or classes properly unenfranchised (women, children, and, with many qualifications, gentiles) appears in the work of the Buddha. The Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7), often considered the epitome of the preaching of Jesus, and the Beatitudes that one finds in that sermon (Matt. 5) set Jesus apart from the Buddha, making him a much more active champion of the downtrodden social classes. Certainly, the justice that Jesus promises the downtrodden will appear fully only when the reign of God takes complete hold of history; but it seems clear that Jesus wanted, indeed expected, that faith in him and his God would produce justice proleptically, making a powerful beginning. Especially, it seems, he expected this to happen in his own group, the protochurch which he imagined developing from his disciples. From these beginnings, Christianity and Buddhism developed significant differences in their doctrinal and theological emphases. As they reflected on the character of Jesus, the early Christians soon credited him with properly divine powers and status, so much so that in the New Testament itself (written within two generations of his death) the doctrine of the Incarnation was probably well established. This, in turn, radicalized the Jewish realism, even materialism, that Jesus had inherited and assumed in his preaching. For such materialism, this world of natural creation and human history is thoroughly real. It may be flawed, limited, mottled by sin, but it is not illusory, a bin of ignorance, or something we should characterize as horribly burning. For Christian theology, the flesh of Jesus became the main sacrament of the divine presence. If asked what God is most like, most orthodox Christians point to Jesus of Nazareth, revealed through the Resurrection, especially, to be the Christ, the special anointed emissary of God. For Christians, it is not the pure spirit of the human being but the incarnational composite that is the prime natural locus of divine revelation. The

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richest zone of grace is not the storms and grandeurs of nature but the dialogue between God and the human heart, the love among human beings. This has meant that even when Christianity fled to the desert and took many Greek, spiritualistic views to heart, it could never cast aside sacramentality, the Incarnation, matter, politics, art, education, and the rest of worldly, historical existence. Certainly, it could and did stress heaven, eternity, and the spirit, often making them more important than earth, time, and the body. Sometimes this stress hit the mark directly, later generations would say, and sometimes it missed the bull's-eye. However, as long as any Christians, monks or laypeople, wanted to remain faithful to the religious practice or theology laid out in the New Testament, they had to accept, indeed promote, a significant materialism, secularism, or worldliness. They had to present God and the primary religious obligations as occurring in the midst of ordinary social experience and in the call on all ordinary people to be just and loving. When Christianity gained a privileged status in the Roman Empire, early in the fourth century, such worldliness settled in for a long cultural career. Intriguingly, the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, building on several prior reform movements, both castigated the worldliness that the church had developed, its living hand-in-glove with the princes and wealthy classes of the day, and criticized its clerical power structure and its neglect of laypeople. The sixteenth-century Reformers rejected the celibacy that had become mandatory, by and large, for the Western clergy and brought strong criticisms to bear on monasticism, which they thought had grown so strong as to warp the general sociological fabric of Christian faith. For preaching these convictions, their strongest ally was the Bible, specifically the New Testament portraits of how the generations of Jesus and the Apostles had lived the Gospel. As the Reformers read the Bible, Jesus was not a monk or an ascetic but a prophet, a man commissioned by God to effect a powerful revolution that would transform all of social life, converting it to the holiness of God. Certainly, these attitudes, this interpretation of original Christianity, is itself open to criticism, especially for the ways in which it led to puritanical excesses and doctrines of human depravity that allowed enormous violence. (Buddhism has a great deal to teach Christianity about ahimsa, or noninjury.) However, Protestant worldliness puts in clear, strong form the materialism or historicity that stands out so much more obviously in Christianity than in Buddhism, especially regarding politics. As much as Christianity, Buddhism has sought to incarnate its doctrines about both the build of reality and the way human beings ought to act. It has been at least as influential as Christianity in art, for ex-

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ample; but on the whole (apart from such examples as King Asoka, whom we discuss in Chapter 6), it has not embraced political responsibility and worldly power as directly as Christianity in good measure because it has not considered this world as real and its central figure has not been so unique an incarnation of a sole, fully personal God. The advantages this gives to Christian sociology, when one compares it with Buddhist sociology, no doubt lie largely in the eye of the beholder. NOTES 1. For general scriptural background on the monastic sangha, see Henry Clarke Warren, Buddhism in Translations (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 392486. 2. Melford E. Spiro, Buddhism and Society, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 67. 3. Ibid., 92-93. 4. See also Roger Corless, The Vision of Buddhism (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 72-114. 5. See John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus (San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1991), and John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew (New York: Doubleday, 1991).

5 Meditation

Attention Gautama became a monk, or the prototype for Buddhist monks and nuns, by trying to solve a spiritual problem. Certainly, both the way that he configured the problem and the way that he moved to solve it depended on his local, contemporary culture. He did not create the concepts of karma, samsara, or desire. Long before his day, Indian saints and sages had practiced meditation. It seems fair to say, however, that Gautama brought a certain ruthlessness to bear on both the analysis of the problem of human suffering and the practice of the solution that his analysis suggested. He may not have realized that he was being so ruthless while he went through the process that made him the Buddha, but after the fact both his teaching and his organization of the sangha stand out from surrounding Indian culture as leaner, simpler, and often deeper. The Buddhist version of Indian spirituality was a radical reformation. In this chapter, we deal with the first of three practical concerns that have articulated the Buddhist program, both its reforms and its constructive developments. Like the Three Jewels, what some commentators call the Three Pillars of Buddhism summarize the essentials of the whole. As we have seen, the Three Jewels delineate how Buddhists understand their faith and where they have invested their hearts. The Buddha has been their historical anchor, the personal face from which

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the impersonal, timeless truth of nirvana has shone most persuasively. The dharma has been the intellectual formulation of what Gautama experienced, how the timeless truth of liberation might best enter human minds and hearts. The sangha, in its two aspects of monastic and lay ways of life, has been the social body in which the culture implied in embracing the Buddha has developed. Together, the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha have given Buddhism its main dimensions. When it came to religious practice and what Buddhists ought to do, three other focuses developed: meditation, morality, and wisdom. Each has ties to each of the Three Jewels (so, for those who like maps or taxonomies, nine relations might be drawn), but the more important ties are those that these focuses have to one another. Certainly, the Buddha meditated, thought hard about the structures of reality, and lived out the implications of his enlightenment. Equally certainly, the dharma bears on meditation, wisdom, and morality; and these three focuses have always preoccupied the sangha. Still, when commentators describe meditation, wisdom, and morality as three "pillars," they imply something structural, three things supporting Buddhism at its foundations by bearing together the existential load that this tradition carries. That load is both the ambitions (desires, needs) that human beings bring to Buddhism, as to any religion, and the historical developments that such ambitions generated—that is, what Buddhism became over time in the major religious concerns of the faithful. To say that meditation, wisdom, and morality have been the most important focuses of Buddhist religious life is to imply that these concerns summarize what Buddhists have felt most strongly they had to do if they were to become what their ambitions held out to them or to realize what beckoned at the beginning of their religious lives as their consummation or fulfillment. Implying this does not mean that Buddhists have had no interest in ritual. It does not mean that organization, politics, and power have not played important roles. It simply means that when we go through the ordinary literature that Buddhist master analysts have produced, we find that meditation, wisdom, and morality recur as the tripod on which the centrists tend to settle. Ask what the practice of Buddhist faith entails, and you are most likely to hear from Buddhist analysts a description of meditation, wisdom, and morality. Only a few Buddhists took on the disciplines of meditation and philosophical study whole heartedly. Even so, these disciplines controlled the Buddhist ideal. Meditation, implied in the last two of the eight concerns enunciated in the fourth Noble Truth (mindfulness, concentration), begins with attention. The first connotation of yoga, the ancient Indian word that we are bound to associate with Buddhist as well as Hindu meditation, is "discipline." There are various yogas because there are various places where one can focus one's discipline: the mind, the body, the affections,

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work. Moreover, the largely mental exercises that we consider in this chapter obviously do not take place apart from such related disciplines as bodily posture, breathing, diet, and study. Buddhists have generated various schools of meditation, numerous traditions of how best to develop mental discipline and make it bear on gaining insight, peace, awakening. Indeed, the different Buddhist schools of philosophy and monastic lineages have developed at least small differences in their traditions of meditation. Nonetheless, what we consider here applies to most Buddhists meditating in most times and places. Here, we are dealing with the mainstream, the central convictions that have supported and directed the vast majority of those serious enough to develop a personal religious practice (that is, those whose Buddhism has been more than simply part of their general cultural inheritance and milieu). With these preliminaries out of the way and some ground cleared, let us begin our analysis of Buddhist meditation by reflecting on attention. "Attention" is our translation, of sorts, of "mindfulness," the Eastern watchword. For Westerners, the goal of mindfulness perhaps best comes into focus when one says, "Pay attention!" Parents are always saying this to children. Teachers grow weary of having to repeat it to students. Collaborations tend to slump because one or more parties stops paying attention and lets business slide. Lovers, spouses, and friends drift apart when one or more becomes distracted. Attention relates to interest. If we are interested, we attend. The healthy heterosexual male watches the backside, the frontside, and indeed all sides of the pretty woman, missing no swing, recording each ripple and bounce. The lover of classical music hears each note of the Mozart concerto, marveling anew at how a piano can sing. The scientist absorbed in a problem, the mathematician lost in an inference, and the poet gone into a sequence of images illustrate attention to the point of rapture. Because they are doing what they love, they are uncommonly collected and focused. They tend or flow, toward what they love. They do not fly off in three different directions or think or feel on four different levels, and from their powerful tending, the collectedness of their flow, the one-pointedness of their awareness, they derive a greater sense of identity and energy than usual. They are more themselves, and their powers seem deeper, more efficient, more effective. In the main, they achieve their best results and gain their deepest appreciations and finest emotions when they are most interested, attentive, present. We become present through attention. If inattentive, we are elsewhere. Our body may be in the classroom, but our mind has run ahead to the cafeteria because we are hungry, or back to last week because we are lusty. One of our many peculiarities as human beings is that we can be both present and absent. We can live collectedly or distractedly, and obviously most of us live in several different modes, sometimes

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collected and many times distracted. Most of us practice a wide range of attentiveness, sometimes with a close correlation to our interests and other times disjointedly because of bodily fatigue or what's occurring around us or a rush of new feelings. The beginning of progress in meditation, Buddhist masters agree, is setting out to improve our mindfulness, to increase our ability to pay attention, to multiply the number of times we actually do pay attention. However, Buddhist masters are also concerned about what holds our attention. They are not interested in getting us more absorbed into the samsaric world. Generally, they think that we shall profit most toward enlightenment and liberation by attending to our own minds and learning how we think, imagine, and feel. The masters' point is not simply for us to make an inventory of consciousness, but to learn from what passes down our mental stream that all of life is suffering, that desire constantly causes suffering, and that as we stop desire we decrease suffering. Alternatively, their point is for us to learn that everything we have experienced and can observe passing down the mental stream is painful, fleeting, and selfless. Regularly, a Buddhist analysis is going to verify the Three Marks. By paying attention and becoming familiar with what we think and what can be thought, we can mature into practical Buddhist philosophers. Meditation, as much as study, develops the wisdom that Buddhists treasure. In that way, meditation is a pillar related to wisdom. The two support each other, as they support morality. Because the person who has meditated regularly and matured in his or her practice has experiential grounds for believing in the Four Noble Truths and thinking the Three Marks an accurate description of all samsaric realities, that person tends to love the dharma as light from on high. Similarly, he or she tends to love the precepts of Buddhist morality; to avoid ethical offenses; and to keep the ideals of not killing, not lying, not stealing, not being unchaste, and not taking intoxicants. By personal observation of the mental stream, he or she knows how acts of lying or unchastity relate to thoughts, images, and desires of lying or unchastity. Similarly, he or she can learn how selflessness, anatman, reveals the folly and the emptiness of such ethical offenses. Thus paying attention can be the start of, and an important regular feature in, a comprehensive personal religious program. In fact, meditation tends to be the crucial activity that most distinguishes zealous, fully serious Buddhists from those who are only nominal or lukewarm. (An interesting comparative question is whether regular prayer makes the same distinction among Christians.) Without the minimal investment implied in learning to pay attention and focus, one is not likely to make much progress that Buddhists would consider salutary. The first step toward enlightenment is a humble toddle after attention.

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Imagination In the course of more than 2,000 years of intense involvement with meditation, Buddhists have inevitably accumulated an immense amount of experience. When it comes to organizing their experience with mindfulness, four objects stand out. A classical text from the Pali Canon (the scriptures of the Theravadins) suggests both what these four objects are and the dense way that scriptural writers tend to deal with traditional matters such as meditation: Once the Exalted One dwelt among the Kosala people, in Sala, a village of the Brahmins. There he addressed the monks as follows: "Those who are new monks, not long gone forth, who have come but recently to this teaching and discipline, they should be encouraged, introduced to and established in the cultivation of the four Foundations of Mindfulness. Which four? "Come, o brethren, practise body-contemplation on the body, ardent and clearly comprehending, single-minded, with a serene heart and a collected and concentrated mind, for knowing the body as it truly is. "Practise feeling-contemplation on feelings ... for knowing feelings as they truly are; practise mind-contemplation on the mind ... for knowing the mind as it truly is; practice mind-object contemplation on mindobjects, ardent and clearly comprehending, single-minded, with a serene heart and a collected and concentrated mind, for knowing mind-objects as they truly are." 2

So, four principal concerns of traditional Buddhist exercises in mindfulness are the body, the feelings, the mind, and what is in the mind. By becoming aware of these four, we may at least begin a serious practice of meditation and launch a Buddhist journey into self-knowledge and self-control. The body is always with us, sometimes more vividly, sometimes less. If we are in pain, wincing from a toothache or a stubbed toe, the body is with us vividly. Even if we are in comfort, however, sitting contentedly with our mystery novel and glass of wine, we have some awareness of the pressure of the cane chair on our rump or the moisture of the wine glass on our thumb. To become more mindful, we need only direct our attention, sharpen our concentration. Why is the pressure more marked on the left side than the right? Is the cane weaker on the right side? Are we fatter on the left? Why does the moisture coalesce more on our thumb than our forefinger? Has the paper napkin slipped off our thumb? Have we lost feeling in the forefinger? It is easy to raise questions such as these to focus awareness. We need only exert ourselves a bit to stir up a little attention. However, raising questions, which suggests that we are interested in answering something serious, can be misleading. On the whole, what

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Buddhist masters mean by becoming mindful of the body is not a matter of mapping one's present sensations. It is useful to know what one's sensations are—how sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell function. We receive the world through these senses, and their functioning is an important part of our animality; but our real goal lies deeper. If we become serious students, the senses can reveal a fascinating subtlety and open realms of internal sensation that most people barely realize exist. For example, practiced yogins sometimes can observe and direct otherwise involuntary, automatic sensory mechanisms concerned with respiration, pulse, body temperature, and perhaps even the release of hormones. Still, the typical Buddhist meditator is not interested in contemplating commonsensically our ordinary human physiology. Instead, he or she is after a simple registering of what the ordinary mental stream reports about the body as a way to appreciate that much knowing, or much of the awareness that shapes our daily sense of reality, tells us not only that we are embodied but that our embodiment is changing constantly. Eventually, by consulting the dharma and traditional wisdom that interpret such reports, we may appropriate better the second of the Three Marks: fleetingness. We may also appropriate the first, painfulness, inasmuch as we register a constant imperfection and a frequent suffering in our experience of the body. The exercise of mindfulness itself, however, is mainly a recording, a paying attention without special comment or interpretation. Ideally, we are first just cameras and audio machines, letting the data make their impact, holding ourselves in readiness, attending with an active passivity. The same is true of the first, simply operational aspect of becoming mindful of feelings, of the mind, and of the objects of the mind. If we need to raise questions about any of these so as to direct our attention accurately and get them in proper focus, fine; but our meditation is not a discursive operation. We are not probing with our minds, developing inferences, reasoning either inductively or deductively. Rather, we are calming the mind—the imagination, the will, the feelings—so as to become recorders and make ourselves aware. We are learning what simply, regularly, nearly automatically happens inside us, the traffic going back and forth along our mental stream. In this process, we are gaining a nonmanipulative measure of control over this stream and its traffic. At the least, we are withdrawing ourselves from an ignorant, unaware subjection to it. As long as we have not paid attention to it, it can work on us, make any number of different impressions, push us this way or that, without our being aware. Unwittingly, we can entertain images, feelings, even hypotheses, judgments, and decisions that markedly color our consciousness. These may be insignificant or significant, but either way we will have no say about them because we have no awareness of them. Not registering them,

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being unfocused and opaque, we shall be operated on, even victimized, as though we were sleeping or anesthetized. At this point, we may realize that any inventory of what mindfulness involves, even as simple a one as this classical Theravadist indication of four principal objects to which we ought to attend, raises serious questions about terminology and about the theories of consciousness to which the terms by which we describe consciousness are related inevitably. In other words, there are different schools, traditions, conventions about what to call images, concepts, sensory impressions, ideas, feelings, and the like. The quartet used in this classical Buddhist text is not exhaustive, and one would have to know exactly what psychological school it came from to be fully confident of knowing what "body," "feelings," "mind," and "mind-objects" denote and connote. Not being expert in this matter, we have worked commonsensically, avoiding much nuance. Still, it strikes us now that "imagination" is not one of the four principal objects and that perhaps by asking why this is so we can advance another step into the mental and emotional world of mainstream Buddhist meditation. For Western psychologists, imagination is crucial. Aristotelian analyses of consciousness, for example, inherit the view that insight comes from a grasp of form in fantasy. We get the point by presenting to ourselves internally, through imagination, the constellation of sensory impressions that sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch have gathered for memory and then pressing it to yield up some possible meaning. For example, we bring to mind the images we witnessed yesterday: the dirty coat, the raspy voice, the wretched smell, the scaly feel. Juggling these data, these givens, from past experience as we can summon them from memory, we find that they leap into the likely significance "bum" or "street person" or "alcoholic." The nuances in these three terms seem slight, compared with the gross, general yield: the figure lurking at the edge of our mind, because he came up last night in a somewhat troubling dream, was a person down-and-out, an unpleasant reminder of the dysfunctions of our social system, to say nothing of the perils of ordinary life, the way that any man or woman can go under, granted a little bad fortune in either genes or personal history. Other Western schools of psychology, or of introspection attending to the mental stream, might take "imagination" in a different direction, but even the somewhat prosaic inclination of Aristotelians suggests how central imagination is to our mental lives, our sense of reality, how we interact with the natural world, the world of culture, and how we retrieve and create and shape our awareness. One of the fascinating aspects of imagination is that it functions both actively and passively. We can push ourselves to develop new images, new constellations of the data available in memory. We can manipulate language, symbols, metaphors, as well as more simple physical images to pursue a problem,

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make an argument, or move ourselves and perhaps also an audience to new ground. Even as we do such work, however, images occur spontaneously, apparently as much apart from our control as under our direction. Indeed, even to think about an image we need an image, and what that image will be at a given moment, in a given context, we cannot say ahead of time. It will come from the whole of us, the entire current existential combination. That combination depends on our body (digestion, previous night's sleep), our history (the lullabies our mother sang, the books we've read), our senses (we're blue-green colorblind), and our temper (irritated or mellowed out by that wine by the pool). In fact, the process and the self that it reveals are far too rich, uncontrolled, and mysterious for us to dream of mastering. In fact, our dreams, as well as the cold projects for mastery that we develop in daylight, enter into the equation, driving home how much of it comes from the unconscious. Therefore, the meditator who attends to any significant portion or level or focus or content of consciousness does well to summon patience, humility, and a sense of humor. If we are not to despair, we have to come to meditation as petitioners, disciples, people wanting to learn rather than dominate. We have to sense that reality is much greater than ourselves and ask it not to overwhelm us. If we wish, we can ask this as though praying: infinite God, limitless nirvana, do not sweep me away. The characteristically Buddhist style in these matters, at least as Theravadist masters tend to present it, is serene, detached, and objective. Probably, imagination does not figure at the center because it is too rich and tends too easily to invite an overly active engagement. First, we need simply to observe. In the beginning, we have to bracket judgments, evaluations, further musings, creative flights. The Buddhist meditator is not an artist or a philosopher. The Buddhist meditator is first a recorder, a humble register of what is there. What is there is very important in Buddhism. "Suchness" is a crucial term for reality, ultimately for both nirvana and Buddha nature. Desire thrives when we lose focus on suchness and shunt off into creative imagination, alternative realities, worlds or scenarios that might be more pleasing, flattering, or apparently energizing. Naturally, there are other things to be said, countervalues that we must oppose to this ascetic, minimalist instinct, if we are to let Suchness be as rich as its simple reality suggests. Still, frequently an almost perfervid Western personalism or subjectivity needs little more than such Buddhist asceticism or minimalism. In most contemporary Western minds, exercises for simply quieting things down and registering what is happening could be immensely beneficial.

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Nonduality Although they agreed with the Theravadist desire to quiet things down, many Mahayanist masters did not like the Theravadist attention to the details of the mental stream. At best, registering such details seemed a preliminary exercise. For the Mahayanist meditational schools that depended on the philosophical equation of nirvana and samsara or that pushed the doctrine of the Three Marks to a synthetic stress on emptiness, the more profitable way to employ mindfulness applied it to nonduality. Although one might have to suffer the constant stream of one's mental flotsam and jetsam, staying on the surface of these endless phenomena would never drive one into enlightenment. The better tack was to bore into the emptiness, which could also appear to be the simple Suchness, that all phenomena, and indeed the stream itself, presented. The better tack was to concentrate on what might seem to be spirit as such, awareness as unmarked, pure, or pristine in its naked occurrence, as one could find. This is the instinct of Zen, which developed East Asian predilections for concreteness and practicality into a powerful meditational method. Whether through boring into a koan (a paradoxical saying) or repeating a core mantra thought to epitomize the Nondualistic heart of reality (for example, mu: "is," "yes," "thus," "so") or just sitting with a relaxed awareness that ideally would be an awareness of nothing but awareness, the Zen meditator could seek a mindless, unreasoning penetration of Suchness, reality without illusions, the way things are. In such seeking, the "belly," the center of the personality, has been more important than the mind. Whereas subtle Mahayanist dialecticians such as Nagarjuna might set out to use the mind to defeat the mind, Zen masters tended to fear that the mind would distract their disciples by dividing them into mind-body or intellectual-emotional schizophrenics. Just as the world was one, consistently no-thing, whole in a way that defeated the ratiocinating, distinguishing human mind, so the human being itself was one, felt and acted and thrived best when everything flowed together and no part or dimension worked against another. We saw some of this instinct when we discussed East Asian Buddhist aesthetics. It is no accident that in Japan, Zen had a great influence on the martial arts, the tea ceremony, archery, floral arrangement, and other much prized cultural treasures. Certainly, the historical relations between Zen and Taoism, Shintoism, and Neo-Confucianism are rich and complex. In many cases, we perhaps do better to speak of "Japanese" or "Chinese" aesthetics, rather than "Buddhist." Nonetheless, Buddhism furnished the lion's share of both the philosophical conception in which this aesthetic was articulated and the meditational prac-

76 / SERENE COMPASSION tice that facilitated it. Zen monasteries sponsored a disproportionate share of the bamboo groves, the serene statuary, the reflecting pools, even the houses for the tea ceremony that gave body to the dazzling Japanese instinct that ultimate reality, the Suchness and beauty that make us most whole, is nondual, flows along as an indivisible stream. Thus when entering upon meditation, the knowledgeable disciple gladly accepts the traditional nondualistic posture, which keeps the spinal column straight (the lotus position). In the beginning, it can be extremely painful to get one's legs beneath one so as to sit correctly. With time, however, the posture becomes habitual, and the integration that it bestows on the mind-body complex constitutes an ongoing lesson, a recurrent preaching by the self to the self, that one is not dual, any more than the rest of reality is dual. Then, granted a peaceful commitment to the prescribed period for meditation, one simply tries to execute what one's master has prescribed. In Soto Zen schools, this tends to be a simple sitting, without any agenda for the mind. Relaxed yet attentive, aware, staying just on the right side of tautness, the disciple sits mindfully, with deep faith that such sitting expresses the intrinsically enlightened nature of his or her or any being. Awakening (satori) comes as the ripening of this faith, its bursting into vivid awareness and experiential clarity. Awakening is like a birth, the coming to term of a life that has been gestating peacefully for its prescribed period. There is no need to become dramatic, let alone panicky, about the process of advancing toward Buddhahood. If it does not happen in this life, one can be sure that one is making progress that will improve the chances that it will occur in a future life. Setting aside egocentricity, ambition, greedy desire for enlightenment, the Soto Zen disciple can sit in great peace, agreeing that what consciousness shows is just what it is, empty of anything but Suchness. Death, life, beauty, ugliness, joy, pain—all can be noted, experienced, and agreed to. There is no need for judgment, evaluation, or discrimination. For the period of meditation (other periods, for example of political decision, might be different), the goal is simply to unite oneself with what one finds— the Buddha nature, the intrinsic lightsomeness of all things, along with their whispers of nirvana, of a pure, undivided ultimacy that in neither many nor one, that just is.3 Somewhat in contrast, Rinzai Zen masters have often given their disciples koans into which they were supposed to bore with determination, great energy, and intensity. The koan serves as a focus, a kind of meditational icon, with which the Rinzai disciple can do battle. (The samurai—Japanese warriors—both drew considerable inspiration from Rinzai Zen and, in turn, contributed to its sometimes martial tone.) For example, if given "the sound of one hand clapping," the disciple can learn quickly that he or she will gain little by reasoning. On the surface, taken as a proposition presumably logical, the koan is nonsense.

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Clapping requires two hands. The image of one hand clapping is actually a silent, or at most muted, flapping. The fingers bend over and caress the palm. It is impossible to produce anything sharp, sure to draw attention or convey applause. So, the koan must intend something else. Both psychologically and metaphysically, it must seek to push the disciple in a direction other than ordinary logic. Suppose the disciple lets the koan slide below the mind, lodge in the gullet or belly or heart—some more median zone or symbolic organ, where it can cause disturbance because it can keep reminding the disciple that it is undigested, a source of bile. The disciple then has to live with the koan, come to terms with it, agree to the initially disagreeable possibility that reality is untidy or paradoxical or irrational, at least to the degree that so illogical a saying as this does in fact make a strange sense and that it does become intriguing, hinting of much more sense, perhaps even of enlightenment and wisdom. What does it mean that something meaningless can in fact also mean? How ought we to embrace the fact, the Suchness, that one hand can make a sound in the imagination, an impact on the subimaginative spirit, even though it cannot make a sound in the physical order, where two palms have to collide to cause a clap? The Zen suggestion is that we ought to embrace such a Suchness by moving below even these dialectical, ratiocinative attacks on the koan and boring into it with our central spirits, engaging with it from the hara, our self-summarizing "belly." We ought to become as fully one with it as possible, welding our spirits to its lovable, damnable, quirky Suchness. In doing so, we can experience how capital in our constitution as human beings is our ability first to desire and then to effect such a union. From meditating in this Rinzai Zen way, we can gain the experiential realization that to be human is to tend, attend, intend—to be a psychosomatic tension in search of a suitable intended. Buddhism is not strong on nuptial imagery, but at this point Christian usage brings such imagery to mind. Meditation, or more gently contemplation, can be romantic, even erotic, in the sense that it can be the place where most nakedly and passionately the human spirit pursues its beloved, the beautiful other who seems to promise its complete fulfillment, the consummation both orgasmic and utterly plain that alone would do full justice to how it has been made. Nondualism, whether it comes through orgasmic ecstasis from the limiting self or plain, peaceful registering of perfect Suchness, overturns the world of samsara. There is in nondualism no one to suffer and no thing to cause suffering. The space or ontological distance, has vanished. Like a clever boxer who gets so close to his opponent that the opponent has no room in which to swing at him and can only clinch or push him against the ropes, the Zen meditator, standing for all the meditators operating under the strong influence of a psychology of

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nondualism wins by defeating the notions of winning, of battling, of being separate enough to fight. He or she does not claim that the commonsensical self vanishes or is absorbed into a monistic Other, an Eastern Hegelian night in which all cows are black. Rather, as we find in the next section, the more closely that enlightenment approaches, the more completely the questions that come from partiality, dualism, lack of integration—in a word, ignorance or immaturity—fall away. When the final blow falls, the last detonation comes to banish ignorance and tip the world over, never to be dual again, there is only light, at least at the core, for the final characterization. There is no shadow; no fragmentation; no moon apart from the sky; no waves apart from the ocean; no human being apart from the moon, the sky, the waves, the ocean, the great wide earth, or the full mass of pitiable human beings.4

Awakening Awakening is the goal of meditation. When he sat himself under the bodhi tree, vowing not to rise until he had conquered samsara, Gautama knew that he would settle for only full understanding, light, and the power that would release him from suffering completely. The "knownunknown" that he sought, the heuristic goal, was an exhaustive yet simple knowing. The exhaustive character of this knowing relates it to nirvana, that which is unconditioned. The simplicity relates it to nondualism. It comes together, and it covers everything. It floods every bit of the awakened one's being. No part of a Buddha or bodhisattva remains in the dark, at war with intelligence or intelligibility. From an awareness that has trained both the senses and the mind to a proper appreciation of the imagination, to a simplification that brings nonduality front and center, the march toward Buddhahood can seem, in retrospect, both inexorable and inevitable. Of course, that is not true, but awakening does reveal the fittingness of making meditation stress mindfulness and nondualism. Transformed by awakening, the successful meditator, the conquering Buddhist yogin, brims with energy and freedom, as well as with light. This can make him or her seem crazy, an eccentric set loose on an unsuspecting world, perhaps even dangerous. Tibetan tradition, for example, has supported a certain craziness in some of its greatest saints. Milarepa, Naropa, Tilopa, and others have wandered in the mountain snows, written and sung wild songs, celebrated an ecstasy, a transport into wondrous new realms, at which outsiders could only shake their heads. When they assumed the care of disciples, Tibetan gurus such as these famous saints did not trim their craziness. Not only might they counsel the breaking of taboos that we have mentioned (eating forbidden foods,

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drinking liquor, engaging in sexual intercourse) but, if the disciple seemed sufficiently mature, they might also exercise him or her in extremely demanding forms of obedience to assault the ordinary, dualistic, workaday mind or spirit as fiercely as possible and so break down all resistances to enlightenment. The following description of the critical period in the life of Milarepa (Mi-la-ras-pa) exemplifies both the crazy, perhaps even cruel, demands that a guru might make of a disciple and the extremely personal ties that Tibetan gurus often developed with their disciples (something we saw in the Introduction between Sogyal Rinpoche and his master lamyang Khyentse): In all branches of Buddhism, but especially in the Tibetan Vajrayana tradition, in order to follow the spiritual path one needs a personal teacher who has himself attained a measure of realization. As one text puts it, without a teacher the Buddhas have no voice. Knowing this, Mi-la-raspa set out in search of a master who would accept him and train him. He first applied to a Rnin-ma ("old school") master, who soon told Mi-la-raspa that he could not help him. However, this master mentioned the name of another nearby teacher, one Mar-pa, and it is said that at the sound of his name, Mi-la-ras-pa felt a shock of happiness and found himself irresistibly drawn to this person. Mi-la-ras-pa later saw in this reaction an indication of a strong karmic connection to Mar-pa, a connection that is held in Vajrayana Buddhism to be a necessary binding factor in the master-disciple relationship. In order to search for Mar-pa, Mi-la-ras-pa continued his travels. At the same time, both Mar-pa and his wife Bdagmed-ma dreamed that Mar-pa's chief student, in need of only a little purification, was about to arrive. Mi-la-ras-pa met Mar-pa on the road by one of the latter's fields, where Mar-pa immediately set Mi-la-ras-pa to plowing. Told that he must work for his bread, Mi-la-ras-pa spent his daylight hours performing various tasks at heavy labor for Mar-pa, whose demeanor was austere, majestic, and demanding. In spite of Mi-la-ras-pa's entreaties and pleadings, Marpa would not permit Mi-la-ras-pa to join the other students, commenting that Mi-la-ras-pa could work for bread or for teachings, but not for both. Sinking into black despondency, Mi-la-ras-pa tried to run away to another teacher but quickly realized that his real relationship was with Mar-pa, and so returned. According to Mi-la-ras-pa's biography, although Mar-pa pretended to be angry with Mi-la-ras-pa, he repeatedly conveyed his concern and love for him to Bdag-med-ma. Only much later, when Mar-pa finally initiated him and accepted him as his main spiritual son, did the genius of Mar-pa's training begin to become clear to Mi-la-ras-pa.5 The philosophical foundation for Mar-pa's idiosyncrasy lay in the Mahayanist doctrine that nirvana and samsara are one. To the enlightened, very little matters, and virtually anything can become the means by which realization can occur. The guru has mainly to read the psychological needs of the student at hand. Mar-pa evidently thought that

8o / SERENE COMPASSION Milarepa most needed a period of trial at heavy labor, during which he might realize the inevitability of his karmic bonds with Mar-pa and finally become apt to receive his love, the bestowal of his power through a spiritual begetting. In the oneness of nirvana and samsara, there is no duality. Ignorance thrives on duality. Mar-pa wanted to overcome what was keeping Milarepa from sensing his oneness with his fated guru, as well as his oneness with his better self, that which could work obediently, without complaint, at whatever was necessary. For the awakened, neither study nor meditation is strictly necessary, either to gain realization or to lead others to it. Milarepa could learn more in the field, working like a yak or a dray horse, than others could learn from books, lectures, and hours of sitting. Zen has taught the same lesson by bestowing special honors on the sixth Patriarch, the hero of the influential Platform Sutra, who though illiterate came to awakening from a single hearing of the dharma while working as a kitchen boy. Certainly, studying and sitting help the majority of disciples, but one should not canonize them. Similarly, one should not canonize celibacy or vegetarianism or teetotalism. Thus we find that Mar-pa has a wife and that many other Tibetan masters would take strong drink, profiting from the ecstasy it could generate. The psychological foundation for a religious pedagogy such as Marpa's is the difficulty of getting beyond assumptions, orthodoxies, and inhibitions. Zen has the saying "One must slay Buddha." This is not meant to disparage Gautama. It is meant rather to underscore the subtlety of illusion, our constant search for securities. What Christians sometimes call the "clerical" mind and the New Testament has canonized in the figure of the Pharisee brings this sort of danger home. Everywhere, religion declines when the wrong kind of orthodoxy, dogmatism, or obedience thrives. Again and again, genuine masters grow sad because their disciples seek a stiff imitation rather than a fluid recreation. Thus the great Protestant theologian Karl Earth is reported to have asked God to deliver him from becoming a Barthian. Thus in every generation, the "righteous" drive many of the best and the brightest away. Awakening tends to favor the strong over the weak and to emphasize the harm that trying to bridle the strong will, tether the creative and hungry spirit, can do. However, the enlightened know full well the weakness of the majority and so usually appreciate the force in arguments, like the Confucian, that the majority always need the doctrinal equivalent of crowd control. In highly authoritarian groups, such as Confucians and Roman Catholics, this doctrinal crowd control tends to become excessive. In highly fluid groups, the awakened can find themselves yearning for a firmer hand with less self-indulgence and stewing. The advantage of a tradition such as the Tibetan, in which the most important relationship is the one-to-one tie between the individual

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guru and the individual disciple, lies in the fact that, presumably, the relationship can be tailored to suit just what this given person, living in this given time, place, and group, needs to flourish. Naturally, "to flourish" should not be taken in a viciously individualistic way. It can include the needs of the entire community, such that the maturation of the individual disciple includes his or her becoming a useful, ministerial figure who benefits the whole group. However, a sharp indicator of the vitality of a given religious tradition is the degree to which it appreciates the simple spiritual fact that genuine religious authenticity cannot be dogmatic or inflexible but must honor the spirit more than the letter. When a given religious authority prefers to deal with its subjects heteronomously, trying to constrain them from without by imposing laws, it gives the usually bad signal that it does not really know its business or that it has lost its faith in its own superior authority, the living God or dharma. The end of meditation, it follows, is the production of people dangerous to religious mediocrity. The enlightened do not think or behave as the unenlightened or the semienlightened expect religious people to do. The enlightened are free spirits, which does not mean that they are bound to be disobedient. It does mean, however, that they are bound, by their enlightenment itself, to realize keenly the relativity of all samsaric, merely human forms, whether of thought or behavior or political authority. They are bound to love the freedom of bowing only to the living God, the actual, proven truth, even if, for such good reasons as humility or love or prudence or the apparent common good of the moment, they do not feel bound to attack or contest given phlegmatic and uninspired authorities who carry a respectable claim to legitimacy.

Christian Evaluation How ought a Christian analyst to regard a meditational tradition that aims at producing free spirits? Most positively, we believe. Where the Spirit of God lists, there is religious liberty. When Jesus is led by the Spirit into the desert, he learns to defend himself against the subtleties of Satan and comes back the slave of nothing less than God. All religious traditions that have taught that idolatry is the great sin have recognized the need for people to free themselves of everything less than God. Certainly, this includes their own egos. As well, however, it includes the inclination to rate religious institutions much too high and to fight much too weakly the regular effort of religious institutions to substitute themselves for God. In the Christian case, the process to this freedom of spirit tends to come not through meditation precisely, but through either energetic prophetic prayer or receptive contemplation. The prophet, like Jesus,

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is called by God into a close communion with the uniquely divine, fully unidolatrous source of everything ultimately holy. The sage, like Jesus, contemplates a personal, heavenly Father whose goodness he cannot exaggerate. From either intercourse with his God, Jesus leaps free of everything less than God. He is enlightened, dominated completely by the ultimate in power and holiness, but in the modes of will and love, as much as that of knowledge. He is enlightened, more exactly, in the mode of connatural knowledge, where love and knowledge are inseparable. This means that the mainstream, orthodox Christian commentator on Buddhist meditation is bound to find it too cool, too impersonal, too lacking in imagination and metaphor. We hasten to add that the mainstream, orthodox Buddhist commentator on Christian contemplation is likely to find it too warm, too personal, too fraught with imagination and metaphor (except, perhaps, for the radically apophatic masters, such as John of the Cross and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing). The differences in the two religions' meditational styles relate intimately to the differences in their conceptions of ultimate reality. Where Buddhists pursue an impersonal nirvana, Christians pursue union with the Father of Jesus Christ. As meditational styles and conceptions of ultimate reality cooperate in a given tradition through the centuries, they generate a distinctive range of religious experiences. Thus after nearly 2,000 years of contemporaneous development in their traditions of meditation and reflection on ultimate reality, Buddhists and Christians probably have markedly different ranges of religious experience. This is not to say that they hold nothing in common. A priori, one can expect that a certain sameness in human nature (enough to allow them to learn one another's languages and not misunderstand one another's cultures completely), along with a certain sameness in their ultimate realities (there is only one nirvana, Buddhists say, as Christians say there is only one God), brings it about that their most important religious experiences overlap considerably. The Buddhist coming into awakening, like the Christian mystic being drawn into union with God, may sense a similar light and warmth, suffer a similarly wonderful inability to articulate what is happening, and emerge similarly purified, in love with all that is. Still, our stress on the differences between Buddhist and Christian religious experiences probably does say that Christian prayer is not identical with Buddhist meditation. It is difficult to defend the differences in technique that the two traditions have developed and not sound a cautionary note against those who would turn Christian meditators into disciples of Zen, Vipassana, tantric, or any other Buddhist traditions or masters. We want to sound that cautionary note not to inhibit interreligious dialogue, but to honor the complexity of the issues

Meditation I 83 involved. (For the same reason, we would expect Buddhist advisers to be cautious when dealing with disciples interested in Christian prayer.) Certainly, serious seekers after God or Buddhahood are right to admire apparent progress, insight, or holiness wherever they find it. We ourselves hold to a theology of grace, much indebted to Karl Rahner, that finds the spirit of God, indeed precisely the spirit of Christ, at work in all contemplation or action that is holy. So it is not from fear, the suspicion that Buddhism is a work of evil forces, that we think wise commentators resist any easy syncretism of either meditational practices or theoretical interpretations. It is from a strong sense that meditation or prayer is the existential crossroads of one's whole tradition, the place where the entire cultural history and exfoliated system of symbols comes to clearest focus. One cannot start pulling at tendrils of this system, let alone principal branches, without risking a loss of both focus and vitality, which would be a considerable threat to the living organism. As Christians, we take our orientation in prayer—meditation, contemplation, petitionary prayer, public (liturgical) prayer, oral prayer, whatever—from the person and teachings of Jesus. We should also, of course, learn all we can about what the great Christian masters of prayer, the saints who have been the best teachers, have said about the process of searching for God. If we stay close to the example of Jesus, set ourselves to the "imitation of Christ" that has been a mainspring of Christian spirituality since the time of the Epistles of Paul, we shall approach God personally, as a parent whose love we should never doubt. Similarly, if we learn much from the great Christian masters of prayer, we shall equip ourselves to persevere in the darkness of faith, even while we find our love of icons, scriptural passages, liturgical images, and smells and sounds growing. Whether in darkness or light, solitude or liturgical celebration, we shall be seeking the Creator of the universe, the trinitarian community of Father-Son-Spirit that Jesus bids us to believe is light in which there is no darkness at all. In other words, our prayer will always be compatible with, and guided by,-the scriptural and traditional norms that tie it to the prayer of the very religious man Jesus lost in the love of his glorious Father, even when our prayer may seem so negative, so free of images, so aware of the otherness of God that it is at least the cousin, perhaps even the sister or brother, of the purest Buddhist appreciation of Suchness. Naturally, as Christians at least hoping to move toward enlightenment, we remain free to think that Buddhists, faithful to their own historical traditions, which come from the one God's providential love in their regard, can find richly saving grace in their Zen, Vipassana, tantric, and other meditational traditions. We remain completely free,

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that is, to think that whatever increases authenticity (honesty, wisdom, goodness, and love) comes from the one true God and takes people to him. Buddhists are not saved and do not make religious progress apart from their histories and present cultural complexes. Grace comes to them, as to all other peoples, through the actual family lives, educational institutions, political fortunes, paintings, songs, dances, and religious ceremonies that engage them, shape them, and flow from an ultimately incalculable blend of outside constraints and inner liberties. If learning about Christian prayer helps Buddhists progress toward greater personal or cultural authenticity, we should promote such learning vigorously. Equally, if learning about Buddhist meditation helps Christians progress toward greater personal or cultural authenticity, we should promote that kind of learning vigorously. However, in neither case should we be naive about either the complexity of the issues and forces involved or the greater role that God, represented by both past providence and current mystery, plays in any final adjudications of authenticity. Explicitly, we are not saying that Christians have no reason for wanting Buddhists to learn about Christ, that there is no advantage to becoming a Christian, no need for Christian evangelization or mission, no dependence of Buddhists on Christ for their salvation. On Christian theological grounds, we would want or say all these good things. Our point is rather that any Christian analysis of Buddhist meditation makes it clear that Buddhists have their own complete treasury of wisdom about what happens when people deal with the holy seriously. Christians do best when they trust that God knows what she or he is doing and position themselves patiently to hear Buddhists out, listen before speaking, learn before they would teach, all the while feeling no need to apologize for their own traditions about prayer because through intense practice they find those traditions more than adequate. Finally, to remind ourselves of the devotional side of Buddhism, where many people approach the Buddha as a personal savior and so seem quite like many Christians at their prayers on a typical Sunday, we quote the following verses from a Mahayanist devotional scripture: All the faults can never in any way be in him; All the virtues are in every way in him established. To go to him for refuge, to praise and honour him, To abide in his religion, that is fit for those with sense. The only Protector, he is without faults or their residues; The All-knowing, he has all the virtues, and that without fail. For even the spiteful cannot find with any justice Any fault in the Lord—in his thought, words, or deeds. Homage to the Self-Existent! Wonderful his many works, Virtues potent and abundant, which refuse to be defined.

Meditation I 85 There is no end to their number, for their nature words must fail. But to speak of them brings merit, and so we have much to say.6

NOTES 1. See, for example, Philip Kapleau, The Three Pillars of Zen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). 2. Nyanaponika Thera, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (London: Rider, 1962), 143. See also Winston L. King, Theravada Meditation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980). 3. See Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (New York: John Weatherhill, 1970). 4. For good discussions of both koans and the experience of safari, see Kapleau, Three Pillars of Zen. 5. Reginald Ray, "Mi-la-ras-pa," in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 9:520; also W. Y. Evans-Wentz, ed., Tibet's Great YogiMilarepa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). 6. Matriceta, Satapancasatkastotra, I, 1-4, 8-9, in Buddhist Texts Through the Ages, trans, and ed. Edward Conze et al. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), 190. See also R. E. Buswell, The Zen Monastic Experience (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992).

6 Morality

Sih The five basic precepts in which Buddhism has couched the morality it has found the dharma to impose are known as sila (custom, conduct). Traditionally, Buddhists describe them negatively: not to kill, not to lie, not to steal, not to be unchaste, and not to take intoxicants. Before describing how these precepts orient Buddhist holiness for action, let us reflect briefly on morality itself. We have considered meditation, the effort to develop mindfulness, control imagination, penetrate beyond nonduality to Suchness, and gain awakening. In analyzing this first pillar on which the Buddhist religious edifice rests, we came across the conviction that meditation is the key spiritual activity, inasmuch as it is for Buddhists with any religious ambition the place most likely to yield understanding, the key source of authority. Unless a person meditates, he or she is likely to be considered, and in fact to be, a nominal or lukewarm or simply "lay" believer (in the sense of someone uneducated, forced to live on the surface, without any specialized, critically tested, and assimilated understanding of Buddhist tradition). If we study the place of morality in most religious cultural complexes, we have to place some nuance on this potentially elitist set of judgments that emanate from stressing meditation. Action, behavior, and ethics tend to incarnate more of what people believe, understand, and

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in fact are than does what goes on in their minds and hearts but remains unexpressed, or unexposed to the challenges of social life. The various schools of what in the United States has come to be known as the philosophy of pragmatism illustrate this observation or conviction. So do most varieties of liberation theology, Christian and non-Christian. Praxis, action, political-social-economic involvement—one cannot make fair, accurate evaluations of a faith without estimating its impact in these zones, how it takes shape ethically, in terms of influencing values, helping or hindering the poor, lowering or raising the incidence of suffering. This is the conviction that makes many observers of religion, both scholarly and lay, pay more attention to ethics and what people actually do than to meditation or philosophy. The proof is in the pudding. The dharma or Gospel is as powerful as the degree to which it shapes action and social life. Many Christians who take this position refer it to the prophetic posture of Jesus, who followed the Hebrew prophets in considering social justice as important as pure cult and in linking love of God to love of neighbor. It follows, then, that we can take Buddhist morality, which interested the laity more than meditation or wisdom, as a valid epitome of Buddhist religious life and a reliable index of Buddhist holiness. If believers are keeping the five precepts of sila earnestly, their lives will be quite pure and the essentials of what the Blessed One wanted to achieve in their regard will probably be happening. Desire may have relatively little hold on them, karma may be decreasing, and their progress from illusion to enlightenment may be impressive. It also follows, or can be made to follow, that meditation ought to show its fruits by sponsoring a pure ethical life and that wisdom ought to explain the foundations of practice as well as meditation. Consider, for example, the precept not to kill. On the surface, it is powerful yet, for civilized peoples, relatively easy to accept. If human beings do not respect one another's lives, they will live in constant bloodshed and know little peace or joy. The strong will ride roughshod over the weak, might will make right, and the majority will despair of the human condition, wishing that they had never been born. Not to kill, therefore, seems a minimal step out of the jungle and into any respectable humanity. Still, the history of the planet, in which wars bulk large, on a simple reading of any daily newspaper from a representative present-day American city, reminds us that killing is widespread. Criminals, gangs, people bent on domestic violence, terrorists—the different species of murderer are hard to count on one hand. Making the commitment not to kill places the Buddhist against all of them. On the authority of Gautama, they are all in the wrong and any of us who wants to be in the right has to oppose them. Naturally, killing can imply more than murder, and in the next sec-

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tion, when we deal with Buddhist ahimsa (nonviolence), we consider this further. Here, we need only note that all ethical traditions have to make many distinctions if they are to serve their people the sophistication necessary to make mature religious living possible anywhere, especially in the lay world. For example, does regular threat from foreigners justify raising an army to defend "our" realm. If we do raise an army, is it legitimate and moral for our defenders to injure people who are attacking us, even to kill them; and if so, under what conditions, with what limits, in what ways? "Not to kill" is not a simple precept or commitment, especially when we involve ourselves with public policies. Even the apparently most simple, unobjectionable aspect of sila shows us that taking refuge in the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha makes claims on our entire lives. Less dramatically and violently, but perhaps no less subtly, taking the other precepts of sila seriously helps us appreciate more fully the entirety of the claim that Buddhist faith makes. "Lying" is elementally a matter of failing to speak the truth, failing to match our words with what is so and, thereby, expressing falsehood. Relatedly, lying is misleading others, eventually perhaps even misleading ourselves, and so threatening the surrounding community with a slant, an error, likely to warp it. If an individual does not tell the truth, he or she clouds over the purity of heart that comes only from simplicity, nondualism, willing only what is right, God's will. If a group allows its communications to become clouded, slanted, prejudicial, untrustworthy, it taints its bloodstream, its entire politics. Ideology, in the sense of a knowledgeable slanting of information and interpretation, supposedly for the sake of achieving desirable social ends, has become one of the worst charges raised against the regimes generally considered the most corrupt of the modern era, the Nazi regime of Hitler and the Soviet regime of Stalin. Unfortunately, however, numerous other regimes, both Western and Eastern, present the Nazis and the Soviets significant competition, in any comparative battle for the title "worst liars." In China, Africa, Cambodia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, India—wherever people congregate sufficiently to produce wealth and power worth wanting—telling the truth, in any straightforward way, seems to go by the board regularly, as a matter of course. Certainly, one ought to provide for cultural differences in understanding what the "truth" implies socially. One ought, for example, to be aware of social milieus in which saving face, dealing through appearances, is the time-honored tradition. Nonetheless, both at home and abroad, any person of experience and religious idealism hears the word "truth" as a strong temptation to cynicism. Both Buddhists and Christians know that the light they seek will often seem an endangered species.

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The same seems to hold for the word "theft." It, too, quickly passes beyond our initial image of taking something, probably a piece of property not one's own. Although simple enough when the image is of something like a bicycle left unchained in an alley or a doll forgotten on a school bus, with only a little reflection the idea of theft takes us into graft, racketeering, insider trading, and espionage. Before long, we realize that all human beings suffer many temptations to take things that do not belong to us, including ideas and credit for good works. Indeed, we realize that people who would never misappropriate money or political credit to their own account can grab with both hands when it comes to their families, their religious groups, and their ethnic traditions. Everywhere, desire makes us wanters; needers; people ambitious to build bigger barns, bigger reputations, arid bigger bank accounts. Everywhere, therefore, we are liable to temptations to steal. Nowhere, then, do any of us still smoldering with desire not have to practice renunciation or restraint. We have looked at chastity, the object of the fourth precept, in the context of Buddhist monasticism. Here, in the context of mainstream Buddhist morality, the major offenses and problems seem grosser. At the least, Buddhists, like all other human beings, ought not to commit adultery, fornicate, rape (relevant insofar as it is violence linked to unchastity), or in any way abuse other people or themselves. The question of precisely what abuse is involved in many sexual matters furnishes ethicists as much business as parallel questions about theft, lying, or murder. Precisely how Buddhists ought to think about homosexuality, masturbation, divorce, abortion, prostitution, and other activities linked to sex, if not unchastity, cannot be determined simply. The monastic experience of the sangha, as well as religious refinement in general, suggests that the key to a good sexual morality, a proper execution of the precept of not being unchaste, lies in gaining a balanced self-control, a middle line between indulgence and repression. Lust, in the negative sense of selfish desire for sexual pleasure, is the bugaboo. Love, in the positive sense of seeking the good of both oneself and the other through honest, considerate, usually gentle dealings, is the savior. Few people are born with full grace, ease, or command in matters of sex. Most people find such matters so intimate as to be both fascinating and troubling, solid stimuli to ethical and religious maturation. Finally, perhaps somewhat peculiarly, and certainly from ties to meditation, Buddhists have urged freedom from intoxicants—not taking alcohol, drugs, or other agents that taint or distort consciousness. The end of Buddhist practice is freedom from illusion, the gaining of enlightenment. Anything that increases darkness and impedes the coming of light is therefore a powerful enemy. Certainly, lying, poor education,

po / SERENE COMPASSION propaganda, and similar forms of "darkness" are relevant to this judgment, but in its fifth general moral precept Buddhism has something more physical in mind. What we eat and drink has a strong influence on what we experience flowing down the stream of consciousness, what we have to negotiate through if we are to cross samsara and come to the far side, nirvana. For this reason, many Buddhists have favored vegetarianism, finding that eating meat tends to coarsen consciousness, as well as injure other creatures. Relatedly, they have generally frowned on taking beer, wine, hashish, or other drugs. As we have seen, tantric masters, for one instance, have sometimes found it necessary to oppose any dogmatizing of this canonical ethical outlook. They have not wanted to absolutize something that could be only relative or to allow any orthodoxy to become itself a subtle form of intoxication. Apart from caveats such as this, however, Buddhists have generally agreed that their ethicospiritual ideals commit them to purify consciousness as much as possible and that this implies not taking intoxicants. In the measure that they have wanted to deal with Suchness straightforwardly, they have fled whatever might warp or deflect them.

Nonviolence Nonviolence, or ahimsa, has been a staple Indian moral ideal for millennia, although it first came to the attention of many Westerners through the example and writings of Mahatma Gandhi, who used it to liberate India from British rule after World War II. The following description from a general article provides a useful context for our discussion: The first major vow taken by Brahmanic ascetics and the Buddhist and Jain religious mendicants alike is that life should not be destroyed, whether in mind, in words, or in deeds. The Jains especially emphasize the unique importance of this pledge (which their lay believers also take), and emphasize that all forms of violence, including the passions, destroy the soul's ability to attain ultimate perfection; in addition, that violence turns against the very man who does not refrain from it. The observance of ahimsa naturally implies many restrictions as far as the mendicant's diet is concerned. The only acceptable food is that which can be prepared without taking another life; meat-eating is thus shunned. In a more extreme view, plants that are cultivated and then cut and destroyed to become food are also forbidden. The ideal diet, then, consists of fruits, which fall naturally from the trees. Because various penances and ascetic practices have always been based on fasting or on living only on fruits or seeds, ahimsa came to be closely associated with vegetarianism, of which the Jains soon became and remain uncompromising advocates.1

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The Brahtnans were the priests who dominated the ritualistic religion against which Gautama reacted negatively. The Jains derive from the Jaina (conquerer) or Mahavira (great man), a religious reformer who flourished in the generation before Gautama. Thus Buddhist interest in ahimsa, vegetarianism, and the political implications of nonviolence has roots 2,500 years old. As soon as people became convinced that asceticism could move their pursuit of holiness forward, they developed bodily disciplines. Along with curtailing their sleep and paining their limbs, they experimented with fasting. In this process, they came to distinguish among the bodily effects that different diets created, as well as the interior, spiritual effects. Among Indians, the consensus grew that the purest diet consisted of only fruits and seeds. Both the good personal effects of such a diet— the dieter's sense that he or she felt lighter, purer, more spiritual—and the good social or ecological effects—doing no harm to animals and most vegetables—commended it. Ahimsa, therefore, often carried a close personal connotation. It could express the ideal shaping the way that the pursuer of holiness tried to direct her or his body. It was a significant factor in the person's elementary maintenance of life. The extinction of desire, a radical attack on suffering, in Buddhism has both personal and social goals. The individual wants to escape from samsara, but individuals with any sophistication come to realize that this project cannot be solipsistic. Long before one attains the progress expressed in the bodhisattva vow to labor for the salvation of all living things, it is bound to come home that samsara is a field, a system, an ecological web. My desire is a source of pain not only to me but also to the pig that I slay and eat, the wheat that I cut down and grind, and the slave I command to serve me. Conversely, the desire of others is a source of pain to me. The tiger wanting my blood is a dramatic example, but the shopowner wanting my money or the master wanting my labor is not. Thus any serious reflection on samsara, or any programmatic effort to escape it, is likely to spotlight the omnipresence of desire and suffering. In the process, Indians found it likely to spotlight the omnirelevance of nonviolence. When we do harm (himsa), we slay, more or less literally. We cause injury, which is at least the first step toward killing. What we move toward killing may be another organism, whose physical life we want to extinguish or appropriate, or a reputation we think undeserving. It may even be simply a mood, a moment, a flow of pheromones on the air. Although the object, and the objective significance, or our will to injure, certainly is important, religious analysts tend to note the subjective sameness that can run through different kinds and levels of himsa. The physical murderer is much worse than the person who kills only a social persona, a reputation, but the two are kin. In each lodges

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a negative energy, a desire to destroy. This desire can be good, when it expresses hatred of evil or the need to defeat a truly wicked enemy threatening life or virtue. However, in those who are habitually violent, it tends to be bad, both corrupting them and poisoning the ecological niche in which they live. Therefore, to make progress toward goodness and to combat self-destruction, the monk or layperson serious about enlightenment has to grapple with his or her murderous tendencies. The ideal of removing all passion, which the quotation just cited attributes to the Jains, does not appear so strongly among Buddhists. Certainly, Buddhist monks seek serenity, the equivalent of the Christian apatheia. Certainly, all serious Buddhists seek the peace that comes from a good conscience, the balance that comes from keeping reason in control of emotion. To stay on top of desire, ideally along the way to eliminating it (the craving responsible for karmic entrapment), one has to escape any enslavement to the passions, any victimization or cooption by anger and violence. Nonetheless, without a strong will to gain awakening and a passionate hatred of the evils consequent on samsara, the Buddhist is not likely to make significant progress. In maturity, the experienced meditator may have to lay aside the ambition of reaching enlightenment because that ambition may become an obstacle. In the beginning and for the majority of their lives, a strong passion for enlightenment tends to be a great ally. When Gandhi sought a way to get the British out of India and return his people's sovereignty, he knew that it could not be done by political arms. Both practically and ideally, that seemed to him impossible. From experiences in South Africa, where he had stumbled into a championship of the "colored," he had learned that a creative combination of legal and political expertise, along with certain attitudes, often made him a powerful advocate and a highly effective leader. He had to know the system (a combination of British and local laws and mores) within which he was dealing. He also had to practice immense self-restraint and gain the upper hand morally. Finally, he had to be uncommonly stubborn, having discerned the real nub of the dispute in question and committed himself to it wholeheartedly. Back in India, Gandhi increasingly assumed the persona, and in fact the spiritual substance, of a traditional Indian holy man. He simplified his clothing; his diet became more radically vegetarian; and his interior life, his battle to clarify his ideals and gain mastery of himself, took him to vows of celibacy and nonviolence. In maturity, he believed that he could effect no lasting, proper good unless he worked with both pure motives and pure means. He would never persuade mill owners to treat their workers justly until he changed their hearts and minds. He would never see the British leave India until he had made home rule, eman-

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cipation, a truly holy cause—a consummation devoutly desired by the entire international community that subscribed to morality in politics. Gandhi's major tactic was the strike, the personal equivalent of which was the fast. Binding his followers to satyagraha, the force of truth, he would lead them in marches, rally their spirits to stay out on strike, and organize the support that they needed, all the while negotiating with their opponents as a most respectful, obliging, and learned barrister. He might sit in a loincloth, but he knew the law. He might live a simple life in an ashram, but he was dynamite on the stump and could stride along vigorously at the head of a march day after day, eating up the miles. If the British threw him in jail, he did not care. It was a good chance to read, reflect, and purify his spirit. He cared more if his followers were brutalized by British clubs, but the only result that gave him truly sore distress was his followers' losing control and breaking with nonviolence. The irony and tragedy of Gandhi's political career is that he won the victory for Indian emancipation, defeating the British with satyagraha and ahimsa, only to see India tear itself apart with Hindu-Muslim violence. He was murdered by a Hindu fanatic, an object lesson in the dangers of religious violence. Since his death, India has been as convulsed by violence as most other nonaligned nations. Indeed, lately a constant rage seems to smolder at its center, as Hindus and Muslims bloody one another again and again. Ahimsa, it turns out, is a hard sell. No religious tradition can claim to have taken it wholly to heart and made it completely effective. The peoples of the former Yugoslavia mock it constantly, as we have noted. The ranks of terrorists—Muslim, Jewish, African, Asian, Peruvian— large or small, extended or local, incarnate the problem. Thus any radical approach to the first precept of Buddhist sila is bound to engage one with the hardest issues in both anthropology and political science. Nonviolence is a marvelous, though disturbing and often depressing, lens through which to meditate about the human prospects for holiness. Thus Buddhist leaders urge people to strive for ahimsa, but recognize that military service and other violent occupations might be necessary, and so legitimate, at times.

Social Ethics Fortified by the example of the dispassionate, compassionate Buddha and by a dharma that stresses the extinction of desire, Buddhist moralists have sought to bring nonviolence and the other attitudes inculcated by sila to bear on economics, politics, and the rest of culture. Certainly, the Buddha does not appear on the scene as a prophet, a

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social reformer, or a sage with a political agenda. Inevitably, however, those who take his message to heart ask what a Buddhist culture ought to look like. What, for instance, ought Buddhist values to mean for family life? How ought they to impinge on work, art, buying and selling? Is there a proper Buddhist approach to farming? Can Buddhists be magistrates, policemen, or soldiers? Indeed, what would a truly Buddhist prince hope to achieve for his people, and how would he go about trying to realize his hopes? In potentially innumerable questions such as these, we see that Buddhism was bound to grapple with social ethics. Indeed, during the reign of King Ashoka (273-232 B.C.E.), Buddhists experimented with running a state by enforcing sila and nonviolence. Walpola Rahula, whose slim volume What the Buddha Taught is a marvel of concise helpfulness, suggests how the Buddha viewed social issues: The Cakkavattisihanada-sutta of the Digha-nikaya (No. 26) clearly states that poverty (daliddiya) is the cause of immorality and crimes such as theft, falsehood, violence, hatred, cruelty, etc. Kings in ancient times, like governments today, tried to suppress crime through punishment. The Kutadanta-sutta of the same Nikaya explains how futile this is. It says that this method can never be successful. Instead the Buddha suggests that, in order to eradicate crime, the economic condition of people should be improved: grain and other facilities for agriculture should be provided for farmers and cultivators; capital should be provided for traders and those engaged in business; adequate wages should be paid to those who are employed. When people are thus provided for with opportunities for earning a sufficient income, they will be contented, will have no fear or anxiety, and consequently the country will be peaceful and free from crime.2

The conclusion may be more optimistic than either empirical experience or Buddhist analyses of desire justify, but the drift of the analysis is plain. At the least, the Buddha expected the people with the power to shape economic arrangements so as to give the masses a chance to earn a living. He expected rulers not to take the easy, cruel path of branding all criminality the result of a bad will fit only for jail or beating. Any normal decency and compassion would make people with power strive to alleviate the sufferings of the poor, not simply by offering them alms but, more substantially, by offering them the chance to work gainfully and so not need alms. Anyone who made this offer to alleviate the sufferings of the poor would aid not only their bodies but their spirits. He or she would put not only food in their bellies, but hope and the chance for virtue in their spirits. The poor would have less inclination to despair and so less inclination to rage violently. They would be less chained to the vicious wheel of samsara, less likely to bite and gouge like mindless animals. For all its stress on the spirit and liberation from constraints on the body, Buddhism has had many reasons for targeting a healthy realism

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about the body, family life, work, economics, and politics. Although these are not the items that dominate Gautama's sermons, they are always implied. The point to extinguishing desire cannot be to move outside the body or the family or the state. That is impossible, unless one heads toward suicide. The point to extinguishing desire is rather to free oneself from untoward, disordered relationships within the psychosomatic complex—the family, the state, and all the other contexts where people find themselves. Regarding crime, punishment, and the provision of adequate economic incentives, realism would suggest a straightforward acknowledgment of complexity. All people need food and material security. Social life is dysfunctional if large numbers of citizens cannot meet this need. A dysfunctional social organization cries out to be reformed. Human beings have to assume that in their rationality they have the capacity to make such a reform. They may do this through village councils or edicts of kings. They may give either men or women the lead. The pressing point is that they get the job done. The lesser issue is how they do it, as long as their means are decent and do not corrupt them more than they help. We see the discipline of Buddhist meditation helping to ground such a realism. Able to register all the relevant factors in a complicated equation, the mature Buddhist ought to be able to grasp well the actual dimensions of the problem. Having no axe to grind, no desire that one set of factors prevails at the expense of another, such a person could provide good counsel and direct a process of economic reform. Usually, the great problem in generating economic or social reform is the bad will, the bias, and the vested interests that reformers face. Usually, hard study can provide many solid suggestions for improvement, but significant numbers of the people involved, especially those who will have to change their customary ways, fight such suggestions tooth and nail. So the Buddhist conviction that spiritual reform, conversion through education in the deep truths of the dharma, is relevant directly to social prosperity rings true. We can never dispense with relevant information and analysis, but at least equally germane is the mentality of the people involved, their degree of honesty and decency. Still, to most Western observers, including ourselves, Buddhists have consistently undervalued the place of empirical analysis and the effort to change external social arrangements, as well as the place of democratic institutions in the state, relying too heavily on interior transformation to effect social justice. Certainly, every group has the right to determine for itself the proper balance between thought and action, the personal and the social, outer constraints and free inner choices; but the poverty that history shows has been endemic in India, China, and the vast Asian areas between these dominant cultural basins mounts a strong case that the Buddhist determinations have erred on

96 / SERENE COMPASSION the side of the private and interior, not giving the masses all the help they might have received to move out of grinding suffering. Agreeing that the social ethics of Theravada Buddhism are hard to find but much impressed with the general spiritual and ethical depth of this tradition, Winston L. King has written: Now it may well be that though there has been a mimimum of avert social philosophy in Buddhism it has not been completely without a socially formative dynamism and sense of direction. Such sense of social direction as Buddhism has had grows directly out of one of its basic notions . . . televolition, or the radiation of good will. It may be put this way: The "method" of social change proper to Buddhism is that of the individualized radiation of virtue and health out into society by holy persons." Virtue here of course refers not to specific character traits so much as moral worth and power; and health is used in the figurative sense of mental-moral integrity or good character. For just as social improvement is held to be the sum of the individual self-improvement of the members of a society, so the Buddhist view is that society must, or may, improve by individuals in a strictly individual way—by the radiation of their personal virtue or holiness. This general point, of course, is common to many moral and religious philosophies: The power of the example of a good man is great and may do more to change the character of a society than all manner of political schemes and policy statements. (Witness Gandhi's influence on Indian politics and society in the three decades before Indian independence.) There is a kind of contagion of good will. And also the same principle is often reversed: How can good policies be carried out by morally evil men? For the character of a man affects all that he does. There are no impersonal deeds.3

True enough, but adequate? If Buddhism offers such outer-oriented Western social outlooks as Marxism and capitalism a much needed critique, reminding them that there are no impersonal or purely institutional deeds, they in turn offer Buddhism much to ponder regarding the impact of outer circumstances on the production of inner virtue. Rahula's references to the Buddha's views on how to curb crime suggest some awareness of such a countercritique, some openness to the proposition that people act in part in response to the social situation in which they find themselves. The sizable amount of advice given to rulers through the ages constitutes a small library on at least inchoate social morality.4 Nonetheless, if we use the demanding, pragmatic, but fair criterion of the actual circumstances in which the masses have to live, it follows that Buddhist thought has not been fully successful in Asia. In many historical eras and geographical locales, there has not been enough personal virtue radiating to produce even simple material sufficiency, let alone bounty. Even after one has made the often legitimate argument that the problem is not with the program but the unwillingness of people to embrace

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the program wholeheartedly, solid grounds for criticism remain. When people do not embrace a program wholeheartedly enough to make it effective, the program itself has to be considered ineffective—in need of review and probably also of reform or supplement. In the case of Buddhist ethics, this implies that the wonderful inner core that holds individuals to very high standards needs the supplement of hardheaded economic and political policies that pave the way for effective change—the creation of new social patterns better geared to feeding, healing, and educating the next generation of children.

Personal Responsibility Children who laugh with delight because they find life good justify any religious regime. No matter how dark a religion finds the human condition to be, how grim its analysis of samsara or sin, if it cannot justify and promote the laughter of our children, we should toss it out the window. Perhaps the greatest moral strength of Buddhism is the profound sources of joy that it discloses. The victory of Gautama shouts that victory is possible. The conviction of the dharma that all beings are intrinsically perfect, the nirvana is the inmost significance of samsara, bathes the whole world in light. Freedom is only the realization of truths such as these. Joy is only the full, liberating participation of the human spirit in them. Children raised in an atmosphere where the intrinsic perfection of all beings shapes the cultural horizon have a solid, preferential chance to grow up laughing. With any normal measure of fortune favoring them, they can find even a demanding, materially poor life much blessed. If you asked a representative Buddhist for a text that summarized Buddhist morality, probably the Dhammapada would top the list of suggestions. Although located in the Pali Canon and favored especially by the Theravadins, it has served virtually all Buddhists as the moral ideal and a fine description of how the positively pious follower of Gautama ought to think and act. The Dhammapada is a slight treatise, only 423 verses, no doubt so popular, in good measure, because so brief. The first verses, which set its tone, are the most famous (as are the first verses of the Taoist classic, the Tao Te Ching): All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that drags the wagon. All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with

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a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.5 Impossible to miss, first, is the idealism of the text. Not only does it set a high standard, but it gives thought the determining say in reality. If we are what we have thought, then feeling, sensation, action, the body physical, the body social, even the influence of the gods, samsara, or nirvana are secondary. Primary, capital, determinative is what we think, how we reason about our experience and the world it brings us, the meaning that we create or receive. According to the Dhammapada, we have an enormous discretion. We can make the world as we wish. The final characterization of everything that happens to us depends on how we choose to regard it, the spin that we decide to place on it. The person who speaks or acts with an evil thought is responsible for an evil world. The clear assumption of the entire scripture is that he or she has a choice and need not speak or act with an evil thought. Suppose, for example, that I am at a ball game. I order popcorn, and as it is handed down the aisle to me it gets dropped and spilled. I can call this an accident. I can call it a deliberate injury, worked on me by a malevolent neighbor, known or unknown. I can even call it a chance to exercise virtue—patience, forgiveness, renunciation, in light of a samsaric, always imperfect world. According to the Dhammapada, the choice lies in my hands. Little is determined objectively. Few spills of popcorn are unambiguous—either accidents or expressions of ill will. How I view what happens to me, my overriding view of fate or providence, will have a great say in my happiness or sorrow. The temper of my days, the quality of my life, is a function of my attitude more than anything else. Speaking and acting with evil thoughts so that we interpret our experiences negatively or suspiciously or so that we lash out at others habitually, from a will to injure them, are bound to bring us pain. In Buddhist perspectives of this moralistic sort, pain, the all-too-familiar impress of samsara, flows from a bad attitude, which in other contexts might be explicated in terms of a pernicious desire. Here, the striking point is the inevitability that the text postulates. Pain is inescapable, as long as we think wrongly. Suffering will dog us constantly, until we give up ignorance, wrong views. We shall know no peace and enjoy no freedom as long as we kick against the goad, champ at the bit, and refuse to surrender our bad attitudes and false consciousness. The image of the wheel following the ox is deliberate. We shall be only beasts of burden, dragging ourselves round and round to little effect but the slavish service of others, until we rise above an instinctual, animal posture toward the world and seize our properly human freedom: distance from instinct, control through thought and choice. The wheel is a central symbol in Buddhism. It calls to mind the

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dharma, which rolls along generation after generation, offering the world the means to travel out of its sufferings. It also calls to mind conditioned coproduction, the chain links of the system of karma by which samsara runs. Also known as dependent coaming, this system is a wheel turning in twelve phases: (1) Aging and dying depend on rebirth; (2) rebirth depends on becoming; (3) becoming depends on the appropriation of certain necessary materials; (4) appropriation depends on desire for such materials; (5) desire depends on feeling; (6) feeling depends on contact with material reality; (7) contact depends on the senses; (8) the senses depend on "name" (the mind) and "form" (the body); (9) name and form depend on consciousness (the spark of sentient life); (10) consciousness shapes itself by samsara; (11) the samsara causing rebirth depends on ignorance of the Four Noble Truths; and (12) therefore, the basic cause of samsara is ignorance.6

We may say, then, that the wise disciple attends to the wheel of the dharma, delighting in letting it roll up victory or dominance in his or her consciousness, while the unwise disciple is ground under constantly by the wheel of conditioned coproduction. The second verse, deliberately run parallel to the first to etch a sharp contrast and help disciples (whose education was principally oral) hold this teaching in memory, assumes the same priority of attitude, the same idealistic philosophy, as the first verse. Everything that we are comes from what we have thought. Our thoughts form the foundation of our lives. As we think, so shall we speak or act. As we determine the meaning of things to be, so shall the sum of our days tally. Here, however, the accent is positive, the possibility sunny. If we cultivate pure thoughts, speak or act from right motivation, we shall gain happiness. As surely as we all have a shadow, as every bit of sun makes an impact on our days, right thoughts conduce to happiness and happiness follows in their train. The wagon rolling behind the ox, following it step by step, is no more certain than the consequence of happiness upon right thinking. Right thinking inevitably makes us what we ought to be, want to be, and can only rejoice by becoming. When we think rightly, construe the world realistically, flee wrongful desire and violence for compassion and love, we exercise and create our humanity— the nature we are meant to have but must labor to actuate. For the Dhammapada, our human, moral situation is as simple as this black-and-white, dichotomous crossroads. Like Deuteronomy, it sets before us two ways: death and life. We can choose bad or evil thoughts, the pollution of our spirits through sin: envy, desire, bitterness. We can reject the wisdom of sila by entertaining, developing, even executing thoughts of killing, lying, stealing, unchastity, and intoxication; or we can welcome the wisdom of sila by rejecting the pollution of our spirits

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through sin, cultivating good thoughts, good habits, and the detached, selfless appreciation of Suchness. The choice is ours. No gods or fates or irrational agencies pass the final judgment. The core rationality, the radical self-reliance, of primitive, proto-Theravada Buddhism could hardly be plainer. Later commentators might feel required to add numerous nuances and further historical observations, but at the moment the reason for the popularity of the Dhammapada could not be more obvious. This classic puts the entire moral enterprise squarely on our own shoulders. Are we ready for such responsibility? Will we accept it, or will we blanche and run to idols, orthodoxies, psychological pseudosophistications? Christians are bound to be among those charged by radical Buddhists of the Dhammapada's ilk with such flight and pseudo-sophistication because Christians are bound to make provision for the grace of God— the primacy of God's agency in what any of us as individuals, or the whole of us as a coordinated creation, becomes. We deal with this Christian necessity in the next section. Here, however, it may be well to indicate how much of the radical moral thrust of the Dhammapada rings true on Christian grounds. Jesus preached a good news, calling people to open themselves to the reign of God. It would have been folly for him to do this were people not able to understand what he was talking about and free to accept or reject his message. While the Gospels suggest that Jesus was sensitive to the mystery of how human freedom interacts with the grace of God, every time that he spoke of judgment or passed out blame or praise he ratified the proposition that we human beings have it within our power to make a difference, to walk on the way of life instead of death, regarding both our small personal lives and the ripples that we send into the wider world of history and evolution. How we think, what we choose to make our criteria for judgment and decision, the interpretational framework—a hermeneutic of hope or suspicion—that we endorse is capital. Will we have faith, surrendering ourselves to Jesus, trusting that he has told us the truth and did not die in vain? Or will we hold back, doubt, retain our suspicions, let a moldy cynicism rot our spirits? The question, in evangelical terms, is as central and sharp as what we find in the Dhammapada. The answer, on both Buddhist and Christian grounds, places morality right in our own hearts and minds. No one can make us a saint or a sinner despite ourselves. No one can do our living, dying, loving, or hating for us. We are the men and women addressed, the ever-present audience for the prophets such as Nathan, Jesus, and the authors of challenging moral texts such as the Dhammapada, who have tried to save the world from moral chaos by driving home to us our personal responsibility.

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Christian Evaluation The five precepts of sila, the Buddhist stress on nonviolence, insights into the sources of prosperity, and the stress on personal responsibility compose an estimable moral package. Anyone receiving this package in the mail and not thinking it a great gift ought to turn in his or her credit card. When people are not killing, lying, stealing, being unchaste, and taking intoxicants, they are living a high moral life. If they are avoiding violence, trying to provide the opportunities for material sufficiency, and stressing personal responsibility for what their lives become, they are offering a challenging teaching. The first impression of the fair-minded Christian ought to be that Buddhist spirituality or interiority is a gift to the wide moral world. The Christian missionaries to China, both Catholic and Protestant, who disparaged Buddhism (and Taoism) as atheistic doctrines leave little doubt why they were so ineffective.7 What might a better Christian attitude be, and on what grounds could one justify it? A better Christian attitude, in our view, would be to proceed empirically, staying close to the data of actual moral performance, and distribute one's praise or blame case by case. If a given person seems honest, fair, loving, kind, and helpful, we should assume that that person is in fact these things. Conversely, if a given person shows the signs of being a bounder, leaving a wake of bad effects, we should assume that the less we have to do with him or her (bracketing questions of offering help, direct or indirect, toward moral conversion), the better. Analogously, we should judge social situations, and the systems or programs generating them, by their fruits. This is the plain evangelical criterion for moral evaluation, and nothing better has come along to replace it. Morality is a tissue of concrete, specific deeds, words, and relationships. We can estimate it well only from up close, where we can see its actual effects, smell whether its breath is in fact sweet or sour. Indeed, it may be that we can estimate it well, in the final analysis, only if it lays hands on our own flesh, touches our own oxen, either gently and helpfully or so as to gore. The first move in ethical analysis and dialogue is to come to grips with the actual behavior in question. A priori moves, judgments from the top down (for example, by virtue of what the dharma or the Gospel supposedly implies), are always dangerous. Certainly, what people have in their heads, the teachings they follow, shapes what they do; but what they do is a better index of what they actually believe, in the crunch, than what they say they believe. Therefore, we have criticized Buddhist morality more strictly on social than on individual matters because the poverty of many Buddhist lands, along with the consequent great suffering, indicates actual, operative dysfunctions, while the high spirituality of many individual Buddhists, laity as well as monks, indicates that little is wrong with the

102 / SERENE COMPASSION individual side of Buddhist ethics. Certainly, one cannot separate rigidly the social from the individual, as though all individuals were not social and social forces did not shape all individual consciences. Still, one can emphasize one or the other. In the case of the Buddhist moral profile, the combination of more data indicating less social than personal effectiveness and few canonical teachings offering adequate analyses of such matters as economic responsibility and political rule seems to us to justify the tentative judgments that we have proffered. It may be, of course, that limitations in our knowledge of Buddhist history and literature blind us to a social performance meriting more praise. It may also be that Western biases in evaluating social "effectiveness" or "prosperity" do the same. On Buddhist grounds, samsara is nothing to promote; freedom from worldly concerns can be a hallmark of religious progress. Still, we have noted the balancing reasons for calling Buddhism (indeed, any realistic religion) incarnational, as well as Buddhist successes in shaping whole cultures. Shaping our view here is the position that Buddhism cannot avoid responsibility for what Buddhists become, any more than Christianity can avoid responsibility for what Christians become. If Buddhists have generally comported themselves as less murderous than Christians, better examplars of nonviolence, then Buddhism leads in the race to teach humanity how to live in peace. If Christians have generally comported themselves as better eradicators of deep poverty, malnutrition, sickness, ignorance, sexual prejudice, and other social scourges, then Christianity leads in the race to teach humanity how to gain a social life worthy of images of God. (Naturally, "race" is only a figure of speech and we are not proposing a silly competition; also, the poverty of Latin America should slow any Christian chauvinism.) Both of these propositions are hypothetical. On our own analytical grounds, we could determine something probative, sharp and compelling in its regard, only by immersing ourselves in hard data and proceeding case by case. Also, there are important connections between peace and a social life worthy of the images of God that any adequate, even interesting, comparative ethical inquiry would have to pursue. However, for our purposes, what we have said to this point should make the approach that we are advocating sufficiently clear. Christians who want to estimate the moral aspects of Buddhist holiness accurately and fairly so as to appreciate rightly the gifts of God poured out through the Middle Way will draw close to how Buddhists have actually lived, what their behavior has actually been and achieved, observing what goes on among and within Buddhists as openly and sympathetically as possible. On what grounds are Christians wisest to try to justify this empirical attitude? Several candidates come to mind. First, the attitude may seem plain common sense, as the beneficial results of more than two cen-

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turies' development of the tolerance encoded in the Enlightenment, as well as of more than two generations' development of ecumenism (in the wide sense of benevolent interreligious dialogue), dictate "common sense" should be understood. Second, the attitude may seem sufficiently the reverse or corrective of historical blunders that Christians have made to commend it as a new tactic. Christian missioners, church authorities, and laity all inherit a history that makes them liable to charges of having both possessed and expressed an arrogance, a self-centeredness, and a religious superficiality that has impeded grievously their relations with non-Christians. Indeed, they carry a history that makes them liable to charges of having contributed to bloody wars and other terrible sufferings. To come with a new attitude, deliberately positive, sympathetic, patient, humble, nonimperial, and resolutely empirical, is merely to acknowledge past follies and to try not to prolong them. Third, however, is a deeper, ultimately better ground for the attitude that we are proposing. Scripturally, one of the best proponents of it is the apostle Peter: "I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him" (Acts 10:34). To our minds, this text, not as a simpleminded "proof" but as an indication of a deeply hopeful and humanistic theology of grace, allows us, counsels us, maybe even compels us to deal with all people as equally apt for and loved by God with a full, providential provision of all that God must supply if they are to live healthy individual and social lives. Equally, this text and this attitude warn us against any vicious use of "chosenness" or particularity— any conceit that we (Christians, Jews, Muslims, whatever) are the "people of God" in a way that draws the circle of salvation along the borders of our populations. Certainly, few peoples have been more arrogant culturally than the traditional Chinese, who considered themselves the center of the earth and regarded all foreigners as barbarians. Buddhism did not create this attitude, but neither did it extirpate it from Chinese culture. The principle of God's nonpartiality, in other words, cuts in every fair direction, as a good principle ought. Nirvana is not limited to Buddhist minds, hearts, or experiences. It shows no partiality, but in every nation favors those who want it and do what is necessary to become enlightened by it. Admittedly, this view of grace is neither the only one advanced in scripture nor one that scripture develops sufficiently to guide interreligious dialogue for the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, it provides the crucial first step, which has to be thoroughly positive. If we cannot connect with the grace and presence of God, we wander in the dark, neither realistic nor able to offer outsiders the surpassingly good news of Christ. The humanity of actual people—how they are doing person-

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ally and culturally, the degree of health or illness that they show by the ordinary criterion of what children need to laugh confidently—has to be our guide in ethical evaluations, not ideologies or cults. The news of Christ has to be good, hopeful, an invitation and service to nonChristians, rather than a threat or club, if Christians are to be welcome. Of course, the Gospel makes high demands, as the Dhammapada does. Of course, the doctrine of the cross of Christ is an enemy of selfishness and remains the scandal that Paul saw affronting the Jews of his day and striking the gentiles as folly; but the doctrine, the continuing reality, of the cross of Christ is also profoundly consonant with actual human suffering, and we cannot separate it from the Resurrection, in which the conquest of suffering, the radical liberation of human potential, bursts forth eschatologically. So, if Catholic Christians take the Gospel to heart, believing that it is incomparably good news, they have nearly unlimited reasons for thinking that they have a gift too precious to mar through impatience or superficiality. In fact, they have solid reasons for thinking that the substance of this Gospel, the undying love of divinity itself, has always been working at the center of cultures such as the Buddhist, shaping everything good in them, all that is winsomely human. Accepting these reasons, we can hear Paul's lovely exhortation with sharper ears, applying it fully to interreligious appreciation and to holiness wherever we come across it: "Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things" (Phil. 4:8). NOTES 1. Colette Caillot, "Ahimsa," in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 1:153. 2. Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught (New York: Grove Press, 1974), 81-82. 3. Winston L. King, In the Hope ofNibbana (La Salle, 111.: Open Court, 1964), 193. 4. See Ken Jones, The Social Face of Buddhism (Boston: Wisdom, 1989). 5. Irving Babbitt, trans., The Dhammapada (New York: New Directions, 1964), 3. 6. Denise Lardner Carmody and John Tully Carmody, Ways to the Center, 4 ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1993), 128. 7. See Ralph R. Covell, Confucius, the Buddha, and Christ (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1986).

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The Sage We have described The Buddha as a monk, or a protomonk, stressing his removal of himself from the world, his dedication to celibacy, and his sponsorship of begging and obedience. We might describe him equally well as a sage, an exemplar of wisdom. Gautama became the Buddha, as we have underlined, by gaining awareness. His authority rested on the fact that he knew and could teach from personal experience, simply by sharing the light that flooded his own being. This is the enviable position of the sage, Eastern and Western. He or she is the person in whom the teaching, the divine or perennial wisdom, has gained a clear voice for a present generation. He or she is the person so gifted, so graced, that how reality configures itself is as obvious as a landscape, as indubitable as a proof from Euclid. The wisdom of the Buddha produced the dharma, if we speak in human, historical terms. It provided the authority necessary to found the sangha, which we might describe as a wisdom community, parallel to describing the Church as a community of salvation. Meditation pursues wisdom in the sense that the experiential source of wisdom is enlightenment. Morality depends on and incarnates wisdom in the relation of practice to theory, action to ideal. Everywhere, then, wisdom is as central to Buddhism, as capable of epitomizing the whole, as any of the other nuclear matters we have studied. Nowhere can we legiti-

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mately separate the sage from the monk, the saint, the guru, or the bodhisattva. Buddhism does not strike the comparativist as a prophetic religion. The program that the Buddha preached certainly implied personal and social changes, and sometimes, it seems, he announced it with much passion; but on the whole, it emerges as a serene call to the light, a peaceful, benevolent effort to share something so realistic in his view that whether others accepted it or not was not crucial. The Buddha taught the dharma because it was there, a good deed to be done. However, it was there whether he taught it or not, and if he taught it unsuccessfully, because of the invincibility of the ignorance of his hearers, nothing essential changed. We do not find in the preaching of the Buddha the Pauline "Woe betide me if I do not preach the gospel" (1 Cor. 9:16). No charity of Christ urges him forward to the point of exhaustion. The master or mistress he serves is an untroubled nirvana. The great impression that he makes is of impregnable peace. What are the assets of the sage, and how do they appear in Buddhism? For our interest in Buddhist holiness, this question serves well. The assets of the sage, as we have already indicated, include an existential appropriation of the canonical, holy wisdom on which his or her tradition takes its stand. All religions, Eastern and Western, present themselves as wisdoms. Whether they understand "wisdom" to mean the plan of God or the historical traditions of their community or simply what a prudent, sagacious person knows and does, they all stress that if you come to them and embrace their program, you will enjoy greater realism, a more effective and profitable view of the way things actually are. You will leave behind foolishness, ignorance, and the views of those who keep missing the mark. You will join the ranks of the sober, the judicious, and the successful. Confucius is a prototypical sage, illustrating both the sobriety of the sagacious religious type and its temptations to stuffiness and sententiousness. Lao-tzu is quirkier, more poetic, and Chuang-tzu is livelier still. Jesus is also a sage, the personification of (Christian) wisdom, especially to his contemplative followers, the disciplines tending to love the evangelical theologies of John and Paul. So are Moses, Muhammad, and Zoroaster sages, to say nothing of the classical Hindu holy man. None of these figures escapes competition from the Buddha, and most of them, when compared, seem less purely sagacious than he, less defined by enlightenment. So while "wisdom" plays an important role at the foundations of virtually all estimable, well-developed, religious traditions, it is especially powerful in Buddhism. What does the Buddha know, and why does this make him wise? He knows about suffering. First, he knows that all of life is suffering. Second, he knows the cause of suffering. Third, he knows how to remove the cause of suffering. Expatiated slightly, so that it makes Four

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Noble Truths, this core of the Buddha's wisdom gives us the crucial evidence. The Buddha knows why people hurt and how to stop their hurting. Therefore, he is as wise as the depth or significance of human pain. His knowledge is as valuable or estimable as the relevance and benefaction in the healing it offers. Buddhist wisdom is not academic, antiseptic, or merely a game or a work of art. Buddhist wisdom is soteriological, therapeutic, redemptive. It claims it can heal the sorest lesions and give balm to the deepest hurts, which are spiritual. People suffer. All around, our neighbors are in pain. Sometimes this is obvious. Often we try to forget or avoid it. Some Western philosophers (Leibnitz, Heidegger) have said that the primary question is: Why is there something rather than nothing? Most religious philosophers have rather said or assumed that the primary question is: Why must people suffer? Jesus was one of these religious philosophers, to the degree that he made salvation, healing of sickness and restoration to wholeness, his life's work. Although he seems not to have speculated much about suffering, he worked night and day to alleviate it. The power of God went out from him to heal those broken in body or spirit. He gave sight to the blind and raised the dead because the suffering of the body scourged him. He forgave sins and called for faith because he knew how the spirit writhed. So Jesus would have heard the Buddha's first Noble Truth sympathetically. Looking over the crowds of Jerusalem, he would have wept again because they did not know what was necessary for peace. We might attempt similar imaginative surveys with Muhmmad, Confucius, or other religious founders.1 In each case, we would find a deep compassion for the sufferings of human beings, an angry realization that ignorance slashes the majority deeply. Confucius was more than a prickly teacher, sensitive to his dignity and inclined to stand on formality. Muhammad was more than a zealous, poetic "reciter" of the Word of God, bound to speak of Judgment because the Lord of the Worlds compelled him. Both were mature men, full of compassion for the pains of their fellow human beings and able themselves to do what they wished because their will and the will of the way they followed coincided, but they were well aware of how difficult many others found such virtue. The sage can suffer because he or she lives in a body, works with a mind, and possesses a limited, flawed spirit that is bound to quake at death. Yet the sufferings of the sage are themselves limited because the sage is formed by the unlimited, the all-holy God, the unmarked nirvana, the deathless ultimate. For the Buddha, this formation produced a dialectic of compassion and detachment. Remembering all that he had suffered in the palace, the Buddha bent kindly toward the myriad women and men still trapped in ignorance. He knew why and how the

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sight of disease, old age, and death might terrify them and why they sought instead distraction. However, there were limits to what he could do for them, until they were willing to limit their distraction. Until they became mindful, or hurt badly enough to give him a full hearing, he could not become their sage. So he had to remain detached, fortifying his convictions about Buddhahood, deepening his perception that following the cessation of desire came the cessation of pain, like the shadow following the sun. He had to remove himself from the samsaric turmoil and care nothing about "results" in any worldly sense. Wisdom has this nisus toward detachment. Finding the whole world to be burning, it tends to move outside the world. While this move raises the danger of hardheartedness, there is little that the sage can do about it. He or she cannot plunge into the bazaar of samsara as though the things that most people desire were more than baubles. He or she cannot make out to be valuable anything samsaric, contingent, a minion of the world or the flesh or the devil. He or she has to accept the fact that the peace of God surpasses most people's understanding. There is no avoiding the related fact that what people do not understand they tend to devalue, if not indeed to mock. Thus the Buddha had to secure himself outside all human evaluations. What others made of his wisdom could not be his concern. In fact, a great many people found it dazzling, original words of unequaled acuity and help; but he still gave his words, taught his dharma, peacefully, as detached from its apparent success or failure as any karma-yogin. The sage represents mind, detachment, reason, and objectivity, taken to their fulfillment but not divorced from heart, compassion, emotion, and personalism. The sage incarnates what humanity looks like when no passions throw it off balance and sweet reason calls the key tunes. Thus in a typical statue, Gautama sits in serene peacefulness, apart from the samsaric wars. The aura that he projects is his best advertisement because the great majority of those who see it feel themselves to be troubled. Peace is what they want, what they wish would visit their nights; but disquiet is what they have, their too-intimate bedfellow. The sage is attractive inasmuch as he or she would be a better bedfellow, more reliable and satisfying. In the right order that the sage projects, the average, suffering person finds great hope for a better love. It is enough that someone somewhere can state plausibly that there is a cure for suffering. It is enough that some people seem convinced, on empirical grounds, that life is not absurd, which is, in fact, the case. Some people have met God or cracked the problem of suffering. Some people have found a love to justify their lives, a great passion or work or vision. Most human beings accept the fact that they themselves are not going to be such singular people. They do not expect their own lives to turn over, push them into enlightenment, or draw them out into sagehood.

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Useful and precious indeed, therefore, are the lives of the great sages and saints, which did turn over, did push a few people into enlightenment, and can stand as very specific, concrete proofs that wisdom is possible and that people can learn to make their way, feeling confident of their passage, knowing peace in themselves and others, on the basis of indubitable experience.

Scripture Buddhist scripture usually takes the form of reputed discourses of the Buddha, but sometimes takes the form of reputed discourses of another Buddha or a bodhisattva. The source is important, inasmuch as the scripture purports to be wisdom from the far side, the realm of enlightenment and nirvana. The literary form of the discourse is interesting because it points up the sapiential character of Buddhist holiness. Unlike the biblical scripture attributed to prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, Buddhist scripture does not wax passionate. Characteristically, it offers a lecture or preaches a calm sermon, addressing itself to the mind more than the emotions, making its appeal to judicious reason. The further characteristic of most of the discourses of the Pali Canon is that they are moralistic. While the Buddha occasionally wanders into the outer precincts of metaphysics and more frequently into introspective psychology (germane to the mindfulness involved in meditation), more normally he offers medicinal advice about behavior, describing certain behaviors that might lower the fever behind immorality and restore the spirit essential to moral health. Consider, for example, the following passage from the Mahaparinibbanasutta, the discourse of the great decease (the moment of the Buddha's passing into nirvana}: Then the Blessed One addressed the Pataligama disciples, and said: "Fivefold, O householders, is the loss of the wrong-doer through his want of rectitude. In the first place the wrong-doer, devoid of rectitude, falls into great poverty through sloth; in the next place his evil repute gets noised abroad; thirdly, whatever society he enters—whether of Brahmans, nobles, heads of houses, or Samanas—he enters shyly and confused; fourthly, he is full of anxiety when he dies; and lastly, on the dissolution of the body, after death, he is reborn into some unhappy state of suffering or woe. This, O householders, is the fivefold loss of the evil-doer! "Fivefold, O householders, is the gain of the well-doer through his practice of rectitude. In the first place the well-doer, strong in rectitude, acquires great wealth through his industry; in the next place, good reports of him are spread abroad; thirdly, whatever society he enters—whether of nobles, Brahmans, heads of houses, or members of the order—he enters

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confident and self-possessed; fourthly, he dies without anxiety; and lastly, on the dissolution of the body, after death, he is reborn into some happy state in heaven. This, O householders, is the fivefold gain of the welldoer."2 The parallelism suggests a context of oral teaching and memorization, as it did for the first two verses of the Dhammapada. The audience is not made up of specialists, monks, or nuns but laypeople, "householders." The cultural milieu is Indian, sensitive to different ranks in a caste society: nobles, priests, householders (farmers, herders, merchants), and monks. The presuppositions include karma and rebirth, which operate according to a stern moral causality. The worldly effects of doing evil and doing good are important enough to enter as inducements: poverty or wealth, evil reputation or good, unease in social situations or ease. Worth special mention is the moment of death, when what one has become is revealed and one knows whether one has to lament for a life ill-spent or can rejoice at a life used well. Consequent on this revelation is one's fate in the next life: decline in one's karmic situation or improvement. We find here no abstruse analyses of conditioned coproduction. Even the Four Noble Truths remain tacit. To the fore is only what might seize the attention of the solid layperson. Sufficient for this preaching is laying out the two ways of vice and virtue. If the Buddha can get his auditors, who, the text tells us, are already disciples in some measure, to see clearly the basic options lying before them, he shall have done a good hour's work. If he can bolster their aversion to vice and strengthen their love of virtue, he shall have left them better than he found them. That is why they have come to hear him if they are more than curious. They want to leave better than they were when they came. They want reasons, encouragements, to do the good that glistens before them and to avoid the evil that sometimes glistens more brightly. The Buddha is wise enough to take them as he finds them. He is skillful enough in the ways of salvation to speak their language, illumine their actual lives, and make the dharma appealing. So here we have the sage in the mode of the practical teacher or preacher, the Buddhist equivalent of the biblical spinner of proverbs. The text flows along, apparently following well-worn conventions, down a stream of traditional convictions and figures. It is less poetic than the equivalent teaching of Jesus, less given to fresh parables, but it is similarly accessible, popular, down-to-earth. One does not need learning to grasp it. One needs only common sense. It places a premium on experience, rewarding those with eyes to see and ears to hear. It also stimulates reflection, though one more commonsensical than scholarly or scientific. "Look at this," the Buddha seems to say. "Pay attention and grasp

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the lesson." Consider what happens to those who do not exert themselves morally and keep stumping along in vice. See the ill effects of their sloth and selfishness, their spiritual torpor. In contrast, note the good effects of diligence and self-denial. Unhappiness and happiness are as near, and as inevitable, as the distinction between doing wrong and doing right, between being lazy and being vigorous morally. Not all Buddhist scriptures come from the mouth of the Buddha, and not all bear prosaically on vice and virtue. The following excerpt from a dialogue between King Milinda and the monk Nagasena takes up the nature of nirvana: King Milinda said: "I will grant you, Nagasena, that Nirvana is absolute Ease, and that nevertheless one cannot point to its form or shape, its duration or size, either by simile or explanation, by reason or by argument. But is there perhaps some quality of Nirvana which it shares with other things, and which lends itself to a metaphorical explanation?" "Its form, O king, cannot be elucidated by similes, but its qualities can." "How good to hear that, Nagasena! Speak, then, quickly, so that I may have an explanation of even one of the aspects of Nirvana! Appease the fever of my heart! Allay it with the cool sweet breezes of your words!" "Nirvana shares one quality with the lotus, two with water, three with medicine, ten with space. . . . As the lotus is maintained by water, so is Nirvana unstained by all the defilements. . . . As cool water allays feverish heat, so also Nirvana is cool and allays the fever of all the passions. . . . As medicine protects from the torments of poison, so Nirvana from the torments of the poisonous passions. . . . And these are the ten qualities which Nirvana shares with space. Neither is born, grows old, dies, passes away, or is reborn; both are unconquerable, cannot be stolen, are unsupported, are roads respectively for birds and Arhats [saints] to journey on, are unsupported and infinite."3

While this text keeps us in a genre (dialogue) that reaches out to the lay imagination, we have moved to more speculative issues. Generally, the Buddha himself did not discourse on nirvana, thinking it a topic likely to distract people from the practical, medicinal business that usually was pressing. If the point was to get the poisonous arrow of desire out, it was irrelevant to know exactly what the state of arrowlessness would be. Here, however, we meet a disciple, a regal one at that, whose thirst to know about nirvana seems genuine. Sensing that, Nagasena, a good guru, adapts the normal pedagogy and tries to slake the king's thirst. He cannot explain nirvana because nirvana lies beyond explanation, but he can offer some similes that may improve Milinda's mind and sharpen his understanding. Wisdom is adaptable. The sage, knowing personally, can easily summon images that are apt. Moreover, scriptural wisdom, in Buddhism as elsewhere, is varied. The Bible contains an amazing range of literary

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materials. As a whole, it offers a chorus of voices far from simply harmonious. The same is true of the (enormously larger) canon of Buddhist scriptures.4 Although most of the discourses are moralistic and abstract, we find interesting exceptions, such as this highly effective, supposedly off-the-cuff response of Nagasena. In the scriptures taken as a whole, the major preoccupations of Buddhist holiness—meditation, morality, and wisdom—receive exhaustive treatment, leaving the genuine seeker thrilled by an embarrassment of riches. The tone is usually serene and confident, soliciting trust that solid fare is being handed over, or "traditioned." Again and again, the Buddhist worldview emerges clearly, foursquare and manageable: "Think this way, act that way, and all will be well." The canonical Buddhist worldview is the opposite of magic, especially at its historical beginnings, before tantric factors made much impression on the canon. If anything, it runs the risk of rationalism. So Buddhist scriptural wisdom is more prosaic than poetic, which for the long run (of work on wisdom or pursuit of enlightenment) may be all to the good. We have noted that most Buddhist discourses on meditation avoid heavy concentration on imagination. The parallel in the relatively unimaginative temper of the scriptural strategy overall cannot be accidental. For those wanting to damper desire, sobriety is usually a help. For people wanting to live by dispassionate spirit, calm reason rather than vivid impulse or symbol, simple prescriptive lists—three fruits and four starches—may be just the menu to offer. Scriptures get their practical authority from usage. Because they are writings that have been put to the test and found helpful, they pass on to the next generation as primary resources. Certainly, a hermeneutical circle develops so that the next generation is primed to find them especially helpful. Certainly, their association with founding figures, leading saints, even the aboriginal mind of God gives their message an awesome backing; but the actual workings of the human mind guarantee that unless people find given scriptures workable, they will not continue to live by them. Some writings may stay on the canonical books, beloved of clerics, but they will not be the de facto authorities forming the hearts of the majority. The majority will not do without words to live by. The sages who gain the most influence are those who produce the words the majority experience to be most nourishing.

The Prajnaparamita In Mahayanist circles, some of the sapiential words experienced to be most nourishing by the elite are associated with the Prajnaparamita, the "wisdom that has gone beyond." The first three verses of the concise

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and popular Heart Sutra illustrate well the tone and content of the literature associated with this concept of wisdom: Homage to the Perfection of Wisdom, the Lovely, the Holy! Avalokita, the Holy Lord and Bodhisattva, was moving in the deep course of the Wisdom which has gone beyond. He looked down from on high, He beheld but five heaps, and he saw that in their own-being they were empty. "Here, O Sariputra, form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form, the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses and consciousness."5

The sutra begins with an invocation. It is a sacred text, geared as much to worship, or at least veneration, as to study. Indeed, in some of the most influential circles of Buddhist philosophy, one would be hard put to separate communal worship, private meditation, and study (which tended to be both communal and private). The invocation goes out to not just Wisdom, but the "Perfection of Wisdom," the ne plus ultra, and the invocation is an act of homage. The invoker (both the one who composed the text and the one using it) bows before the perfection of wisdom, the Prajnaparamita. The perfection of wisdom is holy. One does well to treat it like a deity and invest in it all one's religious hope and awe. Moreover, the Prajnaparamita is feminine. The invoker is calling upon a goddess. She is lovely, the radiance of the beauty of the noble, the holy, that which is fully real. The implication may also be that she is gracious, both fluid and kind. The overtone may be that the fullest insight, the richest enlightenment, is subtle, round, whole, inasmuch as cross-culturally these are stereotypes for feminine beauty. A lovely lady ought to be loved. The invocation carries a romantic, even erotic, potential. Most of the philosophically minded meditators using this sutra would have been monks, men yearning for liberating, fulfilling wisdom. While the general discipline of their regimes would have restrained eroticism, there is no restraining the fullness of love that flames forth when ultimate, divine beauty makes itself known. The invoker could have been a lover. The lady could have been his Lady Fair. Finally, the lady holds the promise of being fertile. Love of her beauty bids fair to bring creativity, increase, progeny. No matter how chaste the imagination of the philosophical meditator, the invoker of sapiential scriptural texts, fruitfulness could remain important. Buddhist hopes for fruitfulness run the gamut that we find in other traditions. Individuals hope to become wiser, calmer, happier, more useful. The community as a whole hopes to grow in numbers and good influence. Whatever expresses or symbolizes health, vigor, development, progress comes under the generic heading "fruitfulness." The image of birth,

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and so of procreation and sexual interaction, is inevitable. One would hardly be tempted to call the Buddhist philosophical literature sexy, but from time to time it surprises itself. Avalokita is a bodhisattva associated with the Prajnaparamita. His name relates him to beyondness, for it describes him as looking down. He is moving, not at all static. He has to keep pace with the wisdom that has gone beyond dichotomies such as stasis and mobility. If the dharmas dance, he must be a dancer. If the dharmas celebrate their own perfection, which frees them from any need to work, he must be sabbatical, a bodhisattva not needing to work. He finds himself in the deep course of wisdom. He follows the track, the way, of the light by which everything stands. Naturally, the depth of this light means that it is for lesser beings also darkness. Naturally, he is below lesser beings, deeper than they, as well as above. We may locate him, imaginatively, in the heavens, but we could also locate him at the bottom of the sea. The wisdom he loves, serves, observes, describes has gone beyond all thises and thats, heres and theres, ups and downs. It is primary and everything else is secondary. It expresses nirvana and so can never be rendered adequately in the terms of samsara. What did Avalokita see when he looked down from on high? What is the viewpoint, the main insight, that comes from beyond? If there is a gist, an epitome of the Prajnaparamita, we are about to hear it. Here, it comes to us in two propositions. First, the only thing that the bodhisattva of wisdom sees when he gazes on samsara is five heaps. Second, none of these heaps is full or solid. Each is, in its own being, empty. The gist of the Prajnaparamita has delighted and directed some of the most profound Buddhist philosophy. It has expressed and stimulated some of the sharpest dialectics, the most dazzling sapiential logic, that the world has known. In Tibet, it sanctioned the craziness of the most lauded gurus. In Mahayanist lands, it made emptiness a cultural center. The beginnings were thoroughly Indian, as the Sanskrit nature of the language and thought shows; but the translations were polyglot, suggesting how deep the conception had gone. Edward Conze, the translator of the text that we are using, explains the five heaps: Although Avalokita is aware of the sufferings of beings, and suffers with them [as a good bodhisattva must], making his pains their own, nevertheless, when he casts his glance at this swarming multitude of men, animals, ghosts and angels, all more or less ill at ease, he did not see any persons or beings at all. Where ignorance imagines a personality or a living being, wisdom beholds but^zve heaps. The Sanskrit for "heaps" is skandhas. The skandhas are the five constituents of our personality as it appears. On analysis, all the data of our experience—of ourselves and of objects in relation to us—can be stated in terms of these skandhas, without introducing the nebulous word "I."6

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So we are dealing with a radicalization of the third mark. The view of samsaric beings that Avalokita offers is an extension, an intensification, of the notion of anatman. The first sentences of Conze's gloss suggest the soteriological impact that this view portends. Although all samsaric beings suffer, in the end there is no one to suffer, and so, in a significant sense, there is no substantial suffering. (This view cries out for comparison with Christian theodicies, such as that developed by Augustine, which analyzed evil as finally unsubstantial, unreal, nonbeing.) The five skandhas constitute another of the omnipresent lists that Buddhist masters composed for their disciples, harkening back to the example of the Buddha himself. Sariputra was a major disciple of the Buddha, remembered for his skill in abhidharmic analysis—penetration of consciousness. Inasmuch as the arrangement here makes Sariputra the pupil of the bodhisattva representing prajnaparamitic wisdom, the effect is to subordinate the abhidharma to the Prajnaparamita. Form concerns the physical aspects of the world. Feeling covers all emotions, both pleasant and unpleasant. Perception is the yield of the five senses and the mind. Impulse is a broad term, covering volitions, tendencies, and strivings. Consciousness, finally, is awareness, and it assumes the commonsensical separation of subject and object. The significant point, however, is not the enumeration of the skandhas but their emptiness. None is a self, a substance. All are at best penultimate, do not command crucial standing in the sight of the wisdom that is final. Each is convertible with emptiness and emptiness with it. When we say "form," we could say "emptiness," just as well. Usually, when we say "emptiness," we would not say "form," but with metaphysical propriety we could. There is no aspect of form, nothing that it intends to name, nothing that it ought to denote in the world of what truly is, that does not yield to emptiness. For a noumenal, ultimate view of the world of phenomenal language, describing samsara, "emptiness" can be rendered by "form," as well as by "feelings," "perceptions," "impulses," and "consciousness." The text does not mean that these terms point to no differences and coagulate into an amorphous mess. It means that from an ultimate perspective, no term, no naming from samsara, deals successfully with what is actually so. What is actually so escapes the partiality of all samsaric language. As soon as we begin to discriminate this from that, we have lost the primal wholeness that ultimate wisdom loves. So ultimate wisdom empties everything samsaric of pressing significance. Two points remain, and we make them briefly. First, this prajnaparamitic stress on emptiness could sponsor a truly profound appreciation of the mystery of existence, as well as a great folly, both intellectual and moral. The profound drew from it strong motives for thinking

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harder and loving less selfishly. The foolish drew from it putative sanctions for dialectical babble and moral antinomianism (self-serving license). Second, a Christian theological sensibility is likely to love emptiness as akin to the via negativa that protects the mystery of God— to the temper to keep chanting that, no matter what we say about God, God is more unlike than like our saying. However, a Christian theological sensibility, tied to the Incarnation and the thorough realism, indeed materialism, of creation, is also likely to balk at asserting a completely mutual convertibility between the skandhas and emptiness, as it is likely to balk at anything less than a highly nuanced equation of samsara and nirvana in general.

Tantra The last species of Buddhist wisdom that we consider is Tantra (system), which has given more weight to psychological drives and symbolism than other schools. It has thrived most fully in Tibet, but it began in India, probably outside Buddhist circles. Edward J. Thomas, writing a general history of Buddhist thought, treats it passingly near the end of his work and, perhaps unwittingly, displays a representative Western discomfort at its concern with sex: Tantrism is a form of religion of unknown origin, and may possibly have arisen among some indigenous and non-Aryan people. It consists in giving religious significance to the facts of sex. Such a development, at least in a certain stage of society, is not necessarily immoral. Its discussion, however, belongs to medical psychology. The unpleasantness of the subject has sometimes led writers to speak of it as mere debauchery, but a proper examination of the facts would probably show that it belongs to an exceptional but not abnormal social development. When introduced into a quite different state of society it must appear both abnormal and immoral. In any case a proper discussion of the subject could only be made by including and treating of the facts as they have existed in all the various forms of Hinduism and as they exist now. One peculiar feature of Buddhist Tantrism is that it adopted religious technical terms and applied them in new senses, so that what appear as ordinary expressions may bear a surprisingly different meaning, and a tantric sense may be lurking where least expected. It is usually found combined with two other factors, the use of magic formulas, and yoga-practice. All three have this in common that they represent attempts to get beyond the hard world of [material] facts and achieve the marvelous results imagined by the mystic. The use of magic formulas and practices, as we have seen, is very old in Buddhism. It was discouraged, and it was forbidden to the monk, but it was never doubted that such practices might be effective. In Mahayana they were not only held to be effective, but were regularly taught in the sutras. Yoga is also very old, and among yoga-practices were many which

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might be performed for worldly purposes. These practices, too, increased and were elaborated by Mahayana, and there is little doubt that they opened the way to Tantrism. It was among the Yogacharas [philosophers based in yoga] that Tantrism developed. The yogi practices his methods, and expects a wonderful result. But all his striving, if he is not of the mystic temperament, may leave him disappointed. Tantrism makes readier promises.7

Wisdom wants to be effective. If a given point of view, proposed as ultimate, or nirvanic, seems to yield no benefits, why should anyone cling to it? However, this does not condemn wisdom to becoming confused with magic. Normally, scholars of the history of religions understand magic as the effort to bend reality, the gods, or the sacred powers to the human will. This smacks of irreverence, pride, perhaps even demonism, so they contrast it negatively with religion, which they view as submitting the human will to the divine. Magic is manipulative; religion, submissive. The good shaman, interested in white magic, wants to move the sacred forces, by his or her will, to effect cures or to gain benefits for the tribe—in short, to do good. The evil shaman, interested in black magic, wants to move the sacred, or at least the weird, forces, by his or her will, to work curses or to wreak havoc on the tribe's enemies—to do evil. Still, in practice magic escapes such tidy disjunctions, and we find that the spells, mantras, mandalas, and esoteric sexual practices that Tantra sometimes developed have parallels in mainstream Mahayanist circles, such as those responsible for the Heart Sutra. For example, the conclusion of the Heart Sutra is plainly a spell, capable of being employed magically, as an exertion imposed on the Prajnaparamita to help the one chanting it gain favor, presumably to do good, but not necessarily so: Therefore one should know the prajnaparamita as the great spell, the spell of great knowledge, the utmost spell, the unequalled spell, allayer of all suffering, in truth—for what could go wrong? By the prajnaparamita has this spell been delivered. It runs like this: Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, O what an awakening, all-hail! This completes the Heart of perfect wisdom.8

The Buddhist aware of the mainstream language that shaped the pursuit of wisdom would have heard in "Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond" a mantra—a spell to chant, a psychic amulet to hold out, for both blessing and protection. In Sanksrit, the alliterations and sonic values are even stronger: "Gate gate paragate parasamgate." If an adept stayed at the chanting of this mantra for any length of time (say, half an hour), the sounds would move, echo, push one another ahead, fall back on one another. In the dance of awareness that this movement stimulates, the emptiness of all dharmas, all items

(18 / SERENE COMPASSION of consciousness, might become clear. Certainly, the second mark (fleetingness) would. The chanter, who often would also be a sober student of Mahayanist dialectics, would be meeting more holistically the reality that his or her mind had worked over rationally. The affective, emotional, perhaps even libidinal quality of the dharmas, their emptiness, their goneness could emerge. The chanter could know directly and with considerable visceral effect that everything is gone, empty, not to be feared. This could seem the fulfillment of the precious promise that wisdom will make us free. It could trigger a profound enlightenment, as effectively as the proper fracturing of a koan. The following paragraphs by the Dalai Lama from a work on Tantra in Tibet suggest how far the best conceptions of mantras have been from anything magical in the low sense: In Mantra, conjunction of method with wisdom and vice versa means not that method and wisdom are individual entities which are merely compatible with each other but that they are complete within the entity of one mind. Based on cultivating the union of method and wisdom, at Buddhahood the Truth Body of non-dual wisdom itself appears as the features of a deity. Therefore, prior to meditating on a divine body it is necessary to establish through reasoning the non-inherent existence of oneself. Then, within the context of meditating on this emptiness, just that mind which has one's own emptiness as its object serves as the basis of appearance of the deity. Induced by ascertaining the emptiness of one's own inherent existence, this consciousness itself appears in the form of the face, arms, and so forth of a deity. The wisdom consciousness vividly appears as a divine body and at the same time ascertains its own non-inherent existence. These two— the wisdom cognising non-inherent existence and the mind of deity yoga—are one entity, but posited to be different from the viewpoint of their imprints. Thus, from a conventional point of view method and wisdom are different within the context of being one entity. They are said to be different in that method is the exclusion of non-method and wisdom is the exclusion of non-wisdom.9

This is a dense exposition, and we do not have the space to explicate it fully, even if we had the skill. For our purposes, the points to stress certainly include the following: (1) How the conjunction of method with wisdom recalls the conjunction of the skandhas with emptiness, as well as the conjunction of samsara with nirvana. Here, Tibetan Tantra is employing such a conjunction, along with the rejection of dualism that "conjunction" necessarily implies, to defend its conviction that one meets, even becomes, the wisdom one is pursuing because the mantric method makes the chanter one with the chanted. (2) At Buddhahood (awakening), what can appear through the mantric method is nirvana in the appearance of a god. For this to happen and be understood properly, the meditator ought to have grasped his or her own emptiness

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(third mark, anatman, in radical measure). Otherwise, there will not be the proper "space" (that is, nonspace) for union with the god to occur. Indeed, the Dalai Lama says that the mind focused on its own emptiness is the basis for the appearance of the god that one becomes. (3) While ordinary, samsaric reasoning is bound to think of the god and wisdom as different, in reality, as Buddhahood sees things, "These two—the wisdom cognising non-inherent existence [in the mind of the mantric meditator] and the mind of deity yoga [an obscure phrase, on grammatical grounds; here, probably the consciousness dominating the method—yoga—of orienting meditation toward the appearance of a deity]—are one entity." Whatever the full metaphysical and psychological resonances, these texts suggest the seriousness of the pursuit of holiness that the tantric wisdom schools could sponsor. The adoption of mantric, auditory and visual, foci for meditations on emptiness and the orientation of such foci toward the appearance of deities perhaps sought what, in Christian terms, has been called "divinization" (theosis). In the next section, we comment briefly on the implications of such a search. Here, we need only make the point that even if mantric, imaginative, symbolic meditations took up sexual energies, focusing on the intercourse between the deity that could appear and the (empty) consciousness of the meditator, they need not have been licentious; indeed, atmospherically, they usually would not have been. It could have been a highly sophisticated form of nuptialism, often amounting to a celebration of the intimacy between the mind of the meditator and what that mind knows, especially the holiest aspects.10

Christian Evaluation Let us focus this evaluation of Buddhist wisdom in terms of idealism and monism. What ought, or at least can, a sympathetic, appreciative Christian make of the sapiential component of Buddhist holiness inasmuch as (1) it claims that reality is empty and so immaterial (ideal) and (2) it understands this emptiness and idealism as allowing, perhaps even requiring, a union (monism) or identification (which always remains a non-identification) between such operators (of the commerce between the samsaric and nirvanic realms) as method and wisdom, mind and deity? Concerning idealism, Christians well grounded in their own scriptures, traditions, metaphysics, and mysticism are likely to be cautious but not hostile. They should not be hostile because, although God is the creator of the natural world, the Christian divinity itself is not material. God is spiritual, immaterial, if not precisely ideal, and a great mystery hangs over the process by which a spiritual Creator produced

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(and continues to produce) a material creation. However, because of the Incarnation, Christian theology, which ought to shape intimately Christian spirituality, will tend to suspect characterizations of reality that are antimaterial or that threaten to denigrate the natural world and the human body as lesser realities, perhaps even unrealities, when compared with thought, mind, consciousness (though, of course, in human beings none of these three is immaterial, spiritual, as we judge they must be in God or ultimacy). If the biblical doctrine of creation did not force the Christian to this sort of suspicion of idealism, the Incarnation certainly should. The central tenet of Christian faith holds that the Word of God (the expression of the divine mind, the articulation of the divine idealism) took flesh. In the flesh that Jesus of Nazareth derived from his mother Mary, God made the statement, the revelation, the saving act that orthodox Christians judge to be the center of reality, the midmost hermeneutic. There, in the flesh of Christ, human beings find the primary sacrament of the divine meaning: love, the intent to save broken creation. There abide, actively, fuller wisdoms than what would abide had there been no Incarnation, had only mind or idealism come forth. Christian materialism is not simply an accommodation to the flesh and blood of all Christians. It is not simply a sacred anthropocentrism, a charismatic anointing of our own species. It is, for a refined, educated Christian faith, a mysterious compacting of the whole wonder that anything is, based on the prosaic starting point, the humble indubitable fact, that some things closest to human beings are materially, or exist enfleshed. This means that some disjunctions between the ideal and material realms are not illusory. It means that one cannot collapse the two realms without some remainder simply because of the balancing truth that they cannot be completely disjoint but must in some significant ways be collapsed together, insofar as we can think about them conjointly, discovering that they are one in being and that their oneness in being comes from, or at least for us depends on, the spirituality of consciousness. Buddhism does not deny most of what Christian materialism affirms. It does not deny the skandhas, the body, or the samsaric realm, let alone the suffering in them. It does not deny the dichotomies between the samsaric and nirvanic realms. It bids people eat, drink, work, sleep, care for one another, and reproduce the species. If it cautions that these activities will be enslaving, unless one does them without desire, it makes this caution peacefully, thinking that the universe is endless and that nirvana cannot be hurried. However, Buddhism does deny that any material entities are not empty. Nonetheless, Buddhism has worked with a good heart to fashion beautiful cultures, full of grace and peace. It has urged its most generous followers to contemplate the vow of the bodhisattva, which expresses

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the compassion that the sufferings of samsaric culture ought to stir in the ardent believer's heart. The portraits of Gautama that it has loved best show him at peace in the world, giving himself wholeheartedly for the benefit of others. In these ways, Buddhism has been incarnational, humanistic, realistic, even, we might say, material. The problem of the moment, then, is not so much the actual, historical, political operation of Buddhist cultures as it is the predilections of higher Buddhist philosophy (though, naturally, one cannot separate these two facets of Buddhism thoroughly, and if our social critique has been valid, Buddhism has not been as effective "materially" at combating poverty as a Christian is bound to wish it had been). As we gauge the lay of the land, these predilections do not allow incarnationalism to the metaphysical, oritological degree that the enfleshment of the Logos in Jesus the Christ requires. They would take offense at the notion that the ultimate has made matter its richest self-expression. It is not our inclination to depreciate Buddhist holiness because we do not see how central Buddhist tenets do not square with central Christian ones. It is not our inclination to say that the Christian way deserves a metaphysical privilege such that we can feel superior to other people's ways, especially when those people can seem manifestly holier or wiser than we. It is simply our inclination to be honest about the caveats that our study and reflection have created. Here, the caveat is that the potential Christian buyer must beware of the idealism that moves throughout all Buddhist spirituality but that conies to its clearest expression in the Buddhist philosophy of emptiness. Lovely as this philosophy is when it comes to the appreciation of how the ultimate, including the Christian God, is not a thing, it tends to run aground on the shoals of the Incarnation. (At this juncture, the Crucifixion and Resurrection can remain merely entailments of the Incarnation. For so preliminary a probe as this, they add nothing crucial [no pun intended] to the probable incompatibility of Buddhist wisdom and Christian wisdom—even Pauline Christian wisdom, which takes its stand on the cross.) In other words, we feel able to distinguish between the holiness that many Buddhists have drawn from the doctrine of emptiness, as that doctrine has become vital in a meditative appropriation of sutras like the Heart, and the adequacy of such (doctrinal) wisdom itself. Why, granted our constant observation that practice and theory, holiness and doctrine, go together, not deterministically but influentially, do we feel this way? Because people are more, and know more, than they can articulate. Much of their most crucial knowledge is tacit, as well as connatural. People can be better, and know more effectively, on the connatural or tacit level than they can account for theoretically in the terms furnished by their traditions of wisdom. This religious situation is reminiscent of

122 / SERENE COMPASSION Einstein's view of natural science. When giving advice about how to understand science, he counseled taking more seriously what scientists do than what they say they do (their phenomenology), let alone how they explain what they do (their philosophy of science). On the matter of monism, we may be briefer. There is for Christians only one God. This God is the sole ultimate reality. If we press ahead for the Christian equivalent of Buddhist nirvana, it is God. For Christians speaking the language they prefer, the one God is the Trinity, the community of Father-Son-Spirit, from which the Son (Logos) "came forth" into matter, at the moment, the historicization of divine life, that Christians call the Incarnation. The oneness (monotheism) of the Christian God remains, throughout all incarnationalism, materialism, and historicization. Precisely how it remains no one can say, but the Christian God could not be God without such oneness. This monotheism grounds the legitimate Christian equivalents of the Buddhist insistence, in both ontology and language, on the otherness or ineffability or nonduality of nirvana, Buddhahood, and the other ciphers for ultimacy. For example, as noted, the Christian has necessary canonical, conciliar reasons for saying that whatever we say about God, God is more unlike than like our saying. Summarily put, the crux of these reasons is that God is infinite and all that we say is finite, and the Incarnation does not remove this crux. The implications of this Christian intellectual position for spirituality, prayer and practice both, are enormous, though of course we must also say that spiritual experience has shaped this intellectual position, greatly and mutually, as any careful examination of the lives of the "fathers" who founded Christian intellectualism and spirituality alike quickly shows. Turning to later times, the highly esteemed explications of prayer that Christians find in the writings of the sixteenth-century master John of the Cross both depend on a monotheistic apophaticism akin to Buddhist nonduality and explain such apophaticism profoundly. The dark night and the spiritual marriage that John expounds make sense only if the nonduality of God is also an inexplicable, at times even insensible, mystery both far and near—near in its distance and far in its intimacy (how Buddhist!). Analogy, paradox, and dialectic are merely three different species of apophatic, mystical, properly ontological language—three relatively slight variations on the Thomist confession that, although we can know that God is, we cannot know what God is. NOTES 1. See John Tully Carmody and Denise Lardner Carmody, In the Path of the Masters (New York: Paragon House, 1994).

Wisdom I 125 2. Mahaparinibbanasutta, I, 23-24, in Buddhist Suttas, trans. T. W. Rhys Davids (New York: Dover, 1969), 16-17. 3. "The Questions of King Milinda" (4b), in Buddhist Scriptures, trans. Edward Conze (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 156-157. 4. See Edward J. Thomas, The History of Buddhist Thought (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 261-287. 5. Edward Conze, Buddhist Wisdom Books (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), 77-81. 6. Ibid., 79. 7. Thomas, History of Buddhist Thought, 245-246. 8. Conze, Buddhist Wisdom Books, 101-102. 9. Dalai Lama, "Essence of Tantra," in Tantra in Tibet, ed. Tsong-kha-pa (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977), 1:63. 10. Relevant would be Stephan Beyer, The Cult ofTara (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

8

Conclusion

Interreligious Dialogue Our evaluation in chapter 7 was both doctrinal and speculative. This seemed appropriate in the context of a Christian appreciation of Buddhist wisdom. Buddhist wisdom has borne intimately on Buddhist holiness. Buddhist wisdom has been heavily doctrinal and speculative, as well as closely tied to meditation and morality. As we reflected on the pluses and minuses of meditation and morality, so did we reflect on Buddhist wisdom, moving into its mentality. Still, although we love to speculate in Christian terms because it stimulates both imagination and reason and so can seem to energize faith, we do not believe that speculation is the best coin for interreligious dialogue to trade in. We do not find the exchange of theoretical ideas, let alone theoretical arguments, anywhere near so likely to bring people of different religious traditions to esteem one another rightly and cooperate politically as exchanges focused on meditation and morality. Just as we urged Christians to attend to the empirical aspects of Buddhist morality so that their estimates could be properly concrete, so might we urge partners in interreligious dialogue generally to begin with practice, both social and personal, and to move to theory slowly, patiently, as the dialogue itself requires. Let us expand on this possibility. The best position for empirical beginnings does not deny our oft-

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repeated view that theory informs and flows from practice, that theory and practice interact constantly. There is no empty head atop an acting human body, whether that body belongs to a saint or a criminal. Nonetheless, if, instead of immediately beginning to swap ideas and present papers on the Christian view of x or the Buddhist view of y, we watch what people do, attend to what they actually say, and ask them to let us observe other relevant aspects of their behavior and then tell us what they think they are doing (with a premium on commonsensical, simply operational explanation and the lightest possible load of academic thought), we may avoid most of the cul de sacs in which too many interreligious dialogues notoriously end up. Once, we heard an experienced Christian ecumenist say that common worship was divisive and that theological dialogue was the great imperative. That did not ring true, and the slowness of the estranged Christian churches to overcome their divisions seemed to make its falsity manifest. We ourselves think that any people calling themselves "Christian" in good faith, with a solid, though perhaps only minimalist or centrist, purchase on the traditional Christian Creed, not only can but should worship together whenever situations seem to warrant, regardless of the historical fissures running along their denominational lines.1 However, regardless of the acceptability of this position, on Christian grounds, concerning so central a matter as eucharistic worship, the diluted form of it that we are advancing here for interreligious dialogue generally—that the action of the other, undergone during meditation and moral projects, ought to be the first focus of an appreciative interaction—may be unobjectionable. The diluted form simply proposes that people are less likely to be alienated and more likely to be charmed and opened by a request to come into their midst, physically or mentally, and see how they live, appreciate their (religious) culture, than by a dialectical analysis of their ideas. It proposes that most people feel good enough about who they are religiously—how they live, what their tradition has become—to be willing, even happy, to show you around their cultural neighborhood and explain how things are done locally. The proposition is curious in that one might think that a dialectical analysis of ideas would be tamer than an observation of full culture or actual behavior. In fact, most people know instinctively that ideas and doctrines are very partial expositors of the rich, mysterious experiences and challenges that the interaction of faith and suffering or faith and joy generates in their communities. Therefore, they fear letting mere ideas represent them. Perhaps an analogy from tourism applies. The native hates the stereotype of "Italian" or "Turk" or "American" that seems to have gone out over the airwaves, but if the visitor shows any inclination toward a fullbodied, properly nuanced appreciation—any desire to applaud what

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the natives have developed in their version of the common project to be human—the native tends to warm up, feel proud, and give the visitor all the help toward understanding that he or she desires. Go to a foreign restaurant, showing yourself interested in the food and primed to find it good, and the waiter will usually bend over backward. Of course, the restaurant is a business, the waiter is earning a living, and your applause conjures up dollar signs; but that is not the whole story. The "dialogue," or the advance in mutual appreciation, that dining out can occasion is much more than economic. If we eat well, for beauty and meaning as well as sustenance, we advance our sense of community, take another step forward in brother- and sisterhood. On Christian, incarnational grounds, this venture is wonderfully sacramental, and our bodies reveal our minds and hearts. The empirical aspects of our lives are the surest points of departure for understanding the whole. Meditation and morality are things that we do more than think. If we are serious religiously, we pray or meditate. Certainly, we do this because we believe in God or nirvana, but over the years we also do it because we have done it. It has become habitual, a familiar mode of being. We would not be ourselves without it. The more religious we are (the thicker the bump on our forehead from bowing), the more our praying defines who we are and the less we would be ourselves without it. Sometimes, in fact, our prayer is our passion, our love, our addiction (usually positive, occasionally negative). Sometimes it is all that we have, our only shelter amidst the great cold. If you really want to know who I am, and much of who I am develops through my praying, then you must want to know about my prayer. If I really want to tell you who I am, both because confession is good for the soul and because I want eventually to know who you are so that we might share this so painful and so beautiful human condition more fully, eventually perhaps even in love, and if who I am develops through my praying, then I have to want to tell you about my prayer, not sensationally or to feed any religious prurience, but modestly, gratefully, and usually with many confessions of failure. You cannot understand my Christianity, my faith, my being (if I am a wholehearted Christian) without understanding my prayer. If I want to understand your wholehearted Buddhism, I have to enter into the world of your meditation and you've got to welcome and guide me; otherwise, we will never understand one another, let alone know the love we might. The realization that dialogue, interaction, ecumenism has now become a global imperative has to teach all of us involved in interreligious dialogue that we must get to where we all actually live—to the actions and passions that really shape our meaning, to the faith that makes not just a sound traditional statement but a pressing present difference. Normally, this faith will repose less in the ideas that we can push for-

Conclusion I 127 ward from the doctrinal treatises of our traditions than the humble, phenomenological reports we can make about what happens when we brave the silence of God, the emptiness of all dharmas. Normally, probing our prayer or meditation will promise a much richer yield. The same, we believe, is true concerning morality—our actual, existential, ethical lives, private and communal, Christian and Buddhist. They, too, brim with concrete, empirical, temptingly revelatory reports from the wars of what it means to live as a Buddhist or a Christian. All that we have said about the potential latent in a dialogue beginning with prayer or meditation, therefore, could be developed and applied, mutatis mutandis, to ethics or morality. If this modest proposal holds weight, the question for interreligious dialogues that remain trapped in the ozone of academic papers is whether the participants really do want to understand one another. (The analogous question for infra-Christian ecumenical dialogues among people stuck in an apparently quite bearable separation is whether in fact, they believe what they say about the sinfulness of such a separation, as implied in John 17). In the measure that we avoid discussing, sharing, and studying focused on where our people actually live their religious lives, we suggest that we are not fully serious, that our dialogues are still adolescent or cosmetic or merely curious. We do not mean these observations to be as harsh as they may seem. Revelation is difficult. People can point to many apparently valid grounds for wanting to protect themselves. Outsiders can be boorish. History serves up many reminders that we could, perhaps should, harbor hate; but both God and nirvana devastate these defenses. Both God and nirvana tell us that we shall go forward in peace and joy only if we agree to share what is going on in us and among us here and now, the things that both make us believers and prevent our being so. If we can love God or nirvana, we know that we have hearts that will remain painfully restless until they rest, with our brothers and sisters, in a common passionate response to these ineffably beautiful realities. Relatedly, I shall never profit from Buddhism as I want and ought to unless, in addition to reading some good books, I find some Buddhists who can help me sense what it means to feel drawn toward Buddhahood and why the Middle Way is the most beautiful of paths. The same, analogously, is true of any profit I might draw from Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, as well as, presumably, any profit that I, as a Christian, might offer a person from one of those traditions who is truly interested in the Christian pathway. Finally, we have to note, of course, that many people seem uninterested in how the faith of others helps and hinders those others' struggles to become more arid more human. Indeed, many people seem uninterested in "humanization," in ambling beyond pretzels and beer. This sad fact is another phenomenon that it would be immensely re-

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warding, and demanding, to explore, but we authors know from the outset what our tentative conclusion would be—that anyone uninterested in his or her own humanity is more specious than actual. This would imply that the gains likely to accrue from assuming, with Aristotle, that all human beings by nature desire to know, or from assuming, with Jesus, that all people by nature are apt for the call of the Kingdom, far outweigh the gains likely to accrue from taking torpor, boorishness, retardation, whether general or religious, as an accurate picture of how people regard their own humanity. In a word, we think the grounds—Christian, Buddhist, simply human—for riveting interreligious dialogue onto the most passionate, aching, joyous aspects of people's traditional lives are so compelling that it is irrational not to try to fix ourselves there.

The Christian Middle Way If, in conclusion, we look in the mirror and ask what face we think Christians ought to present when they set out to appreciate Buddhist holiness, the one that gazes back is serene, balanced, and patient—a Christian equivalent of the Buddha one meets everywhere in the East, a Christ figure from orthodox iconography. For the passionate interreligious dialogues that we hope will develop in the future, the best starting visages of the interlocutors, paradoxically enough, will probably be those most peaceful. Alternatively, the best Christian self-positioning will probably be the most centrist, in mirror-appreciation of the exquisite balance of the best Buddhist self-positioning. In other words, we may well be able to evaluate a Christian exploration of the holiness of non-Christians by the degree to which it brings out a Christian Middle Way. (This Middle Way, it probably need not be said, derives on its own grounds directly from the Incarnation, the exquisite balance of divinity enfleshed.) For an exquisitely balanced, incarnational, Christian Middle Way in both life and interreligious dialogue, the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha are far more to be praised than blamed. Where sin has abounded there, grace has abounded the more. Where one has to mark failures, one can mark successes much more frequently. We think that the facts warrant similar judgments concerning the roles of meditation, morality, and wisdom—the contributions that all three have made to Buddhist holiness, in contrast to what they have contributed to Buddhist sinfulness. Taking our final stand on the peace of the eschatologically sacramental Christ, let us reflect gratefully on these possibilities. The Buddha is not so much a competitor with Christ as a fellowtraveler. Regardless of how much the religious experiences of these two

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great founding figures differ and of how difficult they might have found it to communicate in their own day, when there was no pluralistic, global religious culture on which they could both draw, from the perspectives available to their followers today—perspectives that may well dominate the third Christian millennium—both the Buddha and the Christ are saviors, sages, and irreplaceable benefactors of humankind. Jesus would look on the Buddha with love and appreciation because the Buddha labored so generously for the benefit of the people for whom Jesus died. Jesus would applaud the desire of the Buddha to lessen people's sufferings, and he could go part of the way with the Buddha's view that the way to lessen people's sufferings is to lessen their desire. Thus the first of the Buddhist Three Jewels, the Buddha, is no necessary stumbling block for Christians. They need not take offense at the proposition that God has used the Buddha to save millions of Asians. "Save" in this context means heal, make whole, support in their efforts to affirm the goodness of existence and their gratitude for having been born. "Save" can also mean direct toward a prayer and behavior inclined to make people more human, calculated (though not guaranteed) to make their lives deeper, fairer, more beautiful, better. The Buddha certainly did these things. Certainly, these good effects emanated from his life's work. On Christian grounds, therefore, the Buddha is an effective mediator of what the One God wants to, and actually does, do in all people's lives. The dharma has generated similarly good, saving effects. What the Buddha taught and the sangha developed has straightened many minds, warmed many hearts, arid fortified many backbones. At the simplest level, the dharma has been a bulwark for bedrock morality: doing good and avoiding evil. In the intermediate zones, where cultures nourish themselves, it has provided guidance about matter and spirit, money and education, masculinity and femininity, art and politics. Sometimes this guidance has been remote: all of life is suffering, all dharmas are empty. Sometimes it has been near and specific: do not murder, eat no flesh, refuse to work as a butcher or a soldier. Speculatively, it has developed a light view of reality, according to which the dharmas dance in light and joy. Organizationally, it has opted for the rule of monks over laypeople, of men over women. By telling people that their lives are transmigratory, it has developed a distinctive cosmology, an ecological view of the huge eons of universal time. Whatever the overall adequacy of this cosmology, in developing it the dharma has filled one of the major needs of any culture: to account for the ways of the natural world. By supporting the view that mind is more significant than body or social circumstance, the dharma has oriented Buddhist morality, meta-

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physics, economics, and politics distinctively. The idealistic orientation that one finds in Buddhist cultures derives directly from the mainstream of Buddhist philosophy. The mainstream of Buddhist philosophy is already apparent in the preaching of the Buddha, at least in germ, so when Christians judge that Jesus would have largely approved the work of the Buddha, they open the positive possibility that Jesus would have approved at least some of the idealism that the Buddha taught. This intermediate influence on culture justifies our praising the dharma and thinking, on Christian grounds, that it has served well the saving purposes of the One God. The highest influence of the dharma, its fashioning an elite for truly impressive holiness, passes out of realms that human judgment can assess into the mysteries of the interaction between human freedom and divine sacredness. Suffice it to say, on this occasion, that fair-minded Christians ought to show great reverence whenever they come across saintliness—love so pure that it makes God sing. Concerning idealistic aspects of the dharma, which we have had occasion to deal with cautiously, a Christian Middle Way, as we have noted, can correlate the positive aspects of Buddhist idealism with the nonmateriality of God. Inasmuch as God is not limited to a body, God is free of matter, just as Buddhism describes nirvana. The dharma, it follows, is not wholly unacceptable to a median Christianity because of its idealism. There is room for discussion. All the more so will this be the case when the discussants find much to admire in one another's meditational and moral performances. All the more will the dharma become an object of Christian admiration when generous Buddhists show Christians why and how it has helped them become so alert, energetic, and creative, as it often has—for example, in times of high Zen culture. The sangha has never organized itself so rigidly as the Christian Church has wanted to organize itself. Always the sangha has floated among several foci and models of organization. Although most basically one could always distinguish the ranks of the laity from the ranks of the monks, seldom was the relationship between these ranks defined with anything like the precision that Western ecclesiology sought. In addition, within the monastic stratum of the sangha one finds many different schools. Apparently, they have felt no need to arrange themselves in serried ranks that all Buddhists would approve. Apparently, Buddhist monks usually managed to live without certitude about their place in the overall pecking order. Certainly, the history of Buddhism shows conflicts between different monastic traditions. More often than not, however, the lack of a single, overarching institutional authority (a "papacy," one might say) meant that monks and laypeople interested in monks' fortunes had to live

Conclusion I 131 with considerable ambiguity. The likeliest upshot of such a historical pattern is that most members of the sangha embraced this jewel without worrying overmuch about its external criteria for authority. Generally, the authority that Buddhists have sought is internal, existential: manifest holiness, wisdom that any fair observer would call impressive. A Christian Middle Way has to admire this Buddhist achievement. In the measure that Christians applaud balance and beauty, they have to clap their hands when noting the nearly 2,500 years of survival achieved by taking refuge in the Three Jewels. The first imperative is survival. For perhaps seventy-five generations Buddhists have fulfilled this imperative by attracting people to adhere to images of the Buddha, memories and developments of what he taught, and the community that he founded. Meditation, morality, and wisdom are also bound to appear lovely to a Christian Middle Way. Any imitation of Christ properly balanced has to love the effort to pray deeply, walk exactly, and understand the build of reality that Buddhists have laid out century by century. Christian balance says that the ideal is neither too much or too little—nothing in excess, but also nothing in niggardly, ungenerous measure. People ought to meditate, on both Buddhist and Christian grounds, and their meditation ought, over the years, to make them lighter, freer, and less and less held down by desire. People also ought to act generously, righteously, doing what is just, and comporting themselves morally. Christians can only take heart when they realize how frequently Buddhists have followed sila, practiced ahimsa, and honored the bodhisattva vow. They can only thank God for the good example displayed by Buddhists who have traveled lightly and avoided greed and desire. The Buddhist Middle Way has been a fine lesson to all Christians with eyes to see. In the best achievements of Buddhist morality, Christians can find much to stimulate their own imitation of Christ. Finally, the achievements of Buddhist wisdom strike the Christian who loves the Buddhist Middle Way as a permanent gift to all human beings. Now that Buddhist wisdom has escaped from being the exclusive property of Buddhists, entering upon the wider career of offering insight to any human beings interested in gaining freedom from bondage to desire, Christians, ought to take to heart the enlightenment that the Buddha achieved eschatologically, which brought into the world, once and for all, what humanity can become when a great yogin gains victory over illusion and enters nirvana. Christians ought to gaze joyfully at statues of the Enlightened One. The Buddhist version of the Middle Way dovetails with the Christian version of the Middle Way inasmuch as both traditions have become potent enough to direct numerous disciples to genuine spiritual liberation, actual escape from samsara and sin. Thus the Buddhist and Chris-

132 / SERENE

COMPASSION

tian traditions can applaud each other and claim that their middleness, their catholicity, is itself a fine index of wisdom. NOTE 1. See Heinrich Fries and Karl Rahner, Unity of the Churches: An Actual Possibility (New York: Paulist, 1985).

INDEX Ahimsa. See Nonviolence Anatman, 57, 70 Antony, Saint, 8 Apatheia, 27, 28, 92 Apostles, 7, 65 Aristotle, 73, 128 Art, Buddhist, 51, 57-58, 65 Ashoka (King of India), 15, 66, 94 Ashvaghosa, 16, 18, 29 Asia, 14, 56, 57, 95 Buddhism in, 15, 50, 60, 62, 96 Atman, 35, 40, 57 Augustine, Saint, 115 Avalokita, 113, 114, 115 Avalokiteshvara, 62 Awakening, 76, 78-81, 86 Earth, Karl, 80 Begging, 51, 52-56, 57, 63 Benedict, Saint, 8 Bible, 47, 65, 111-12. See also Gospels; New Testament Bodhisattvas, 8, 24, 30, 59 and alleviation of suffering 18-19,20-

21, 22-23, 28, 54 and the Three Marks, 36-37 Body, 6-7 Bosnians, 42 Brahman, 35, 40, 90, 91 Britain, 90, 92, 93 Buddha, 6, 28, 44, 49, 56, 62 awakening of, 16-19, 47, 78, 131 Christian evaluation of, 26-29 enlightenment of, 4, 12, 14 epithets applied to, 13—14 as everyman, 24, 25 and freedom, 23-27 as sage, 105-108, 110-111 and social issues, 64, 93, 94 as teacher, 13-14, 15, 16, 20, 23-24, 115 and the Three Marks, 36-37

Buddhacarita, 16-17, 18 Buddhaghosa, 35 Buddhism, 7, 8, 82 Christian evaluation of, 128-132 and interreligious dialogue, 9-10 and laity, 48, 49, 51, 52-56, 59, 60-62 monastic tradition of, 48, 130-131 and personal responsibility, 97-100,101 ranking in, 45, 59 as reformation of Indian spirituality, 67-68 and secular world, 54-55, 63, 65-66 and social issues, 64, 66, 93-97, 102 Burma, 60, 61 Cakkavattisihanada-sutta, 94 Caste system, 21 Catholicism, 7, 42, 80, 101, 104 Celibacy, 49, 80, 92 and Christianity, 6, 63, 65 Chastity, 48-52, 56, 57, 89 China, 10, 88, 95, 101, 103 Buddhism in, 23, 50, 60, 75 Christianity, 42, 45, 80, 82 and interreligious dialogue, 9-10, 124128 and Middle Way, 128-132 and monastic ideals, 48, 59, 63, 65 and personal responsibility, 100 and secular world, 54, 64-65 and social issues, 64, 66, 102 Chuang-tzu, 106 Cloud of Unknowing, The, 82 Colossians, 27 Compassion, 6, 42 of the Buddha, 13, 19-23, 24, 26, 27, 62 of Jesus, 26, 27, 28 Conditioned coproduction, 99, 110 Confucianism, 20, 50, 80 Confucius, 15, 106, 107 Contingency, 37 Conze, Edward, 114, 115

134 / Index Creation, 7, 120 Croats, 42 Crucifixion, 26, 121 Dalai Lama, 118-119 Dhammapada, 97-98, 99-100, 104, 110 Dharma, 9, 29, 36, 54, 62 and bodhisattvas, 22-23 and Christian creed, 44 Christian evaluation of, 44—47, 129130 defined, 22, 30 and peace, 15, 42, 44 Dharmakaya, 8, 44 Divinity, 17-18, 28 East Asia. See Asia Einstein, Albert, 122 Enlightenment, 24-25, 29, 103 Europe, 10, 88 Evil, 47, 115 Ezekiel, 109 Family life, 49-50 Feminism, 27, 58-59 Four Noble Truths, 21, 30-34, 36, 106107, 110 Christian evaluation of, 27, 44-45 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 8 Freedom, 6, 23-27 Freud, Sigmund, 59 Fundamentalists, 10 Gandhi, Mahatma, 90, 92-93, 96 Gautama. See Buddha Ghosts, 18, 19 Gnosticism, 7 God, 3-4, 5, 37, 47 Gospels, 27, 29, 100, 101, 104. See also Bible; New Testament and dharma, 44, 45 Grace, 24, 58, 83, 84, 103 Hallisey, Charles, 13-14 Heart Sutra, 113, 117 Hegel, G. W. F., 78 Heidegger, Martin, 107 Hildegarde of Bingen, 8 Hinduism, 6, 29, 52, 93, 127 atman in, 35 meditation in, 68 and pleasure, 49 and Tantra, 116

Hitler, Adolf, 88 Holiness, 3, 4, 5, 6-7, 9 Idealism, 119-120, 121, 130 Imagination, 73-74, 86 Incarnation, 7-8, 46-47, 64, 65, 128 and Buddhist wisdom, 116, 120, 121, 122 India, 10, 17, 88, 95 Britain in, 90, 92, 93 Buddhism in, 15, 23, 45, 60, 116 Isaiah, 109 Islam, Muslims, 6, 10, 42, 93, 103, 127 Jaina, 91 Jains, 90, 91, 92 Japan, 23, 51, 62, 75-76 Jeremiah, 109 Jesus, 5, 8, 47, 81-82, 106 and the Buddha, 128-129, 130 compassion of, 107 death of, 14-15,29 and dharma, 44-47 as everyman, 24, 25-26 and freedom, 26, 27-28 and the Logos, 8-9, 27, 46, 120 and personal responsibility, 100 as prophet, 15, 16 and secular world, 63-64 and social justice, 64, 87 Jews. See Judaism John of the Cross, Saint, 82, 106, 122 John the Baptist, Saint, 63 Judaism, 6, 10, 45, 64, 103, 104, 127 Kammatic Buddhism, 60-61, 62, 63 Karma, 12, 15, 23,24, 33 and Christianity, 28, 45 and merit, 60, 61, 62 Khyentse, lamyang, 3, 7, 79 Kierkegaard, S0ren, 5, 58 King, Winston L., 96 Koans, 75, 76-77 Kuan-yin, 62 Laity, 48,49, 51, 87 Christian, 63 and merit, 60-62 relationship of, with nuns, 55-56, 59, 62 Lao-tzu, 15, 106 Latin America, 88, 102 Law Body, 8 Lazarus, 27

Index Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 107 Liberation theology, 87 Logos, 8-9, 27, 44, 46, 120, 121 Madhyamika school, 40 Mahaparinibbanasutta, 109-110 Mahavira, 91 Mahayana, 117 Mahayan Buddhism, 29, 40, 62, 84-85, 112, 114 and laity, 20-21, 60 and nirvana and samsara, 20, 23, 75, 79 andTantra, 116, 118 Mandalas, 51, 117 Mantras, 51, 75, 117-118, 119 Mar-pa, 79-80 Marxism, 96 Materialism, 121 Christian, 64, 65, 116, 120, 122 Mayanidessa, 13 Mediation, 6, 67, 68 Meditation, 12, 55, 61, 92, 128 and attention, 68-70 and awakening, 76, 78-81, 86 and Christianity, 70, 77, 81-84, 126, 131 four concerns of, 71-74 and imagination, 73-74, 86, 112 and monastic Buddhism, 50-51 and morality, 70, 86, 87, 89 and the Noble Eightfold Path, 33, 34, 68 and nondualism, 75-78 and social issues, 95 andTantra, 118-119 and wisdom, 4, 70, 87, 105, 124 Merit, 60, 61, 62 Milarepa, 78, 79-80 Milinda (Menander, king of India), 111 Monks, Buddhist, 56 ideals and morals of, 48, 49, 50-51, 52 and laity, 52-56, 59, 62 Morality, Buddhist, 4, 68, 86, 87-100, 124, 128, 129-130 and Christianity, 101-104 and interreligious dialogue, 127, 131 and meditation, 70, 86, 87, 89 Muhammad, 106, 107 Muslims. See Islam Nagarjuna, 40, 75 Nagasena, 111, 112 Naropa, 78 Neo-Confucianism, 75

I 135 New Testament, 15, 44, 64, 65, 80. See also Bible; Gospels Nibbanic Buddhism, 60, 61 Nichiren Buddhism, 62 Nirvana, 19, 20, 21, 22, 111 attributes of, 3-4, 5, 6, 15, 37, 38-41, 42 and the Buddha, 13, 14, 15 and Christianity, 37-38 and samsara, 15, 23, 45, 47 Noble Eightfold Path, 31-34, 36, 44 Nonviolence, 88, 90-93, 94, 101, 102 Nuns, Buddhist, 48, 50, 55-56, 62 Obedience, 51, 56-59, 65 Otto, Rudolf, 5 Oxtoby, Willard, 5-6 Pali, 60 Pali Canon, 71, 97, 109 Parinirvana, 28 Patisambhida, 13 Paul, Saint, 5, 104, 106 Peace, 41-44 Peter, Saint, 103 Platform Sutra, 80 Pragmatism, 87 Prajnaparamita, 112-116, 117-118 Prayer, 82, 83, 84, 122 Process thought, 27 Protestantism, 65, 101 Protestant Reformation, 65 Psychology, 27, 73-74 Purity, 5-6 Rahner, Karl, 8, 83 Rahula, Walpola, 94, 96 Realism, 64 Reincarnation, 21-22, 45 Resurrection, 26, 28-29, 45, 46, 64, 121 Reynolds, Frank E., 13-14 Rinpoche, Sogyal, 3, 79 Rinzai Zen, 76-77 Ritual, 5, 68 Roman Empire, 65 Sage, 105-109 Saints, 4-5, 6-7, 18-19, 22, 59 Salvation, 46 in Buddhism, 22, 29, 30, 46, 60, 61-62 Samsara, 20, 21, 22, 31, 34 and Christianity, 26, 28, 45 gods trapped in, 13

156 / Index Samsara, (continued) and nirvana, 5, 15, 19, 23, 47 and the Three Marks, 35, 36 Samyutta Nikaya, 13 Sfl«0/ld, 36,42,48,62, 130 Sanskrit, 60, 114, 117 Sariputra, 115 Sat, 15 Scripture Buddhist, 109-112 Christian. See Bible; Gospels; New Testament Selflessness, 35-36, 46, 57-58, 70 Serbs, 42 Shakyamuni. See Buddha Shinran, 62 Shintoism, 6, 50, 75 Siddhas, 17 Sila, 86-90, 93, 94, 101 Soteriology. See Salvation Soto Zen, 76 Spiro, Melford E., 60-61 Stalin, Joseph, 88 Suchness, 74, 76, 77, 86, 90, 100 Tantric Buddhism, 62, 82, 90, 112 Christian evaluation of, 83, 116 method and wisdom in, 116-119 and sexual drives, 49, 51, 116, 117, 119 Taoism, 50, 75, 101 Tao Te Ching, 97 Teresa of Avila, Saint, 8 Thailand, 23, 51, 52 Theravada Buddhism, 13 and meditation, 71, 73, 74, 75 and merit, 60, 61-62 social ethics of, 96, 97, 100 Thomas, Edward J., 116

Three Jewels, 30, 48, 67, 68, 129, 131 Three Marks, 34-37, 59, 70, 72, 75 Christian evaluation of, 45-46 Three Pillars, 67 Tibet, 10, 114 Tantrain, 51, 116, 118-119 Tibetan Book of the Dead (Rinpoche), 3 Tibetan Buddhism. See also Buddhism guru-disciple relationship in, 78-81 Tilopa, 78 Vajrayana Buddhism, 62, 79 Vegetarianism, 6, 80, 90, 91 Vimalakirti Sutra, 60 Vipassana, 82, 83 What the Buddha Taught (Rahula), 94 Wheel, 98-99 Wisdom, Buddhist, 4, 50-51, 68, 70, 105106, 124 Christian evaluation of, 115, 116, 119122, 123, 128, 131 Women in Buddhism, 45, 50, 63 and Christianity, 45, 63 and obedience, 58-59 Yoga, 34, 68-69, 116-117, 118, 119 Yogacara, 24 Yugoslavia, 42, 93 Zen .Buddhism, 51, 80, 82, 83, 130 and the Buddha, 8 lineage in, 50 and meditation, 75-76 Zoroaster, 106 Zoroastrianism, 6