One Vehicle Zen

Personally, the one most important point about the history of Chan/Zen that I think is most under recognized, understated, and undervalued is that Bodhidharma was said to teach the Lankavatara Sutra "depending on the One Vehicle Lineage of Southern India" (依南天竺一乘宗).  This comes from Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks, Scroll 25, in the section on the Lankavatara teacher Fachang    I learned of this reference in two places, first in D.T. Suzuki's Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra, pages 54-55, in a discussion of how Huike, and those who learned from him, taught the Lankavatara Sutra differently from the teachers who taught the sutra in a Yogacara style, and second in Philip Yampolsky's book The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, on page 29 in footnote 87, and it opened my eyes to what had been the missing dimension of the historical unity of Chan/Zen that explained so many things, such as why Guifeng Zongmi said that the One Vehicle of Manifesting the Nature was the most profound level of Buddha Dharma, why Mazu said “Mind is Buddha,”  why Chan/Zen was known as the Buddha Mind School or Lineage, etc.   

D.T. Suzuki wrote, “The line of Hui-k’e belonged to the Ekayana school (一乘教) of Southern India which was also the one resorted to by Dharma himself when he wanted to discourse on the philosopphy of Zen Buddhism.  To this Ekayana school belong the Avatamsaka and the Sraddhotpanna as well as the Lankavatara properly interpreted.”  According to Suzuki, and I agree, if taught according to the Yogacara style the Lankavatara is improperly interpreted, because such teaching does not stand on the One Vehicle lineage/school of interpretation brought from Southern India by Bodhidharma.  Once we realize that Bodhidharma was a teacher of the One Vehicle Lineage of Southern India, then the Mind-only, One Mind, Buddha Mind, and One Buddha Vehicle emphasis of Chan/Zen makes perfect sense.

The Fifth Ancestor Zen Master Hongren, Huike’s “great-grandson” in the Dharma, wrote the Discourse on the Most Supreme Vehicle in which he said that we know that keeping the original (root) true mind is the lineage of the twelve divisions of the scriptures because in teaching the multitude of beings, “the Tathagata accords with the gate of the true mind to lead them to enter the One Vehicle.”  And he also says, “This discourse shows the One Vehicle to be the lineage, so that they who live in confusion arrive at the meaning of the Way.”

In the Platform Sutra of The Sixth Ancestor, Great Master Huineng, who was Hongren’s Dharma son, taught a reciter of the Lotus Sutra about the correct One Vehicle from the Chan/Zen perspective in Chapter 7:  

"The Buddha articulated the root for ordinary men, he did not articulate it for Buddhas.   If there were those who were not willing to have faith in this principle, then they withdrew from the sitting mats to follow another.  The difference is from not knowing that, while already sitting in the cart of the white ox, still you are involved in seeking the three carts outside the gate. Compare the clear language of the Sutra that says to you, ‘There is only One Buddha Vehicle, without having extra vehicles that seem to be two or seem to be three.’

"From beginning to end, the numberless expedient means by every kind of causes and conditions, illustrations and metaphors, words and phrases, were because in all cases the Dharma is for the One Buddha Vehicle.  Why you do not understand is because the three carts were provisional for former times, and because the One Vehicle is true for the present time."

Also, at the beginning of Section 9 of the Platform Sutra, the Emperor and his Queen say to the two resident masters residing in the Imperial Palace that they wish to inquire into the One Vehicle, The two masters defer from the task and say the Imperial majesties should ask Chan Master Neng.  Thus, whether or not the account is historical, it shows that Zen master Huineng was considered by the authors of the Platform Sutra to be the preeminent teacher of the One Vehicle (Ekayana). 

As Yampolsky muses in his footnote, the reference to Bodhidharma teaching the One Vehicle Sect/School/Lineage of Southern India may be the real source for Shenhui's calling the lineage-school (宗 zong) of Huineng "the Southern School or Lineage" (南宗 Nanzong), and that name may not be just a reference to the geography of China.

So while it has been said by some that the One Vehicle school died out in India, the truth is that Ekayana (One Vehicle) Buddhism came to China with Bodhidharma, and the Chan/Zen lineage is the quintessence of One Vehicle (Ekayana) Buddhism and the continuation of the One Vehicle Lineage of Southern India brought to China by Bodhidharma..

Earth Day Requires Repudiation of Capitalism

EARTH DAY RANT: I'll be blunt. If you support Earth Day but don't see the relevance of an economic analysis that demonstrates the fundamental cause of climate change is capitalism, then you are either ignorant of the facts or complicit in that very same climate change.
We simply cannot honestly embrace Earth Day and Support Science in public demonstrations if we do not include an analysis of society based on socialized economics, depth psychology, and spiritual ethics.
Science is good, but scientists who sold out to capitalism, selling us the "benefits" of pesticides, nuclear fission, fossil fuel energy, pharmaceuticals, etc., all as if science had rigorously established that there was no down side, have perverted science, every bit as much as the Catholic Church perverted the teachings of Jesus by their Crusades, Inquisitions and Witch-hunts. Thus the scientists who have sold their services for the almighty immoral "Dollar" and thereby have destroyed the objectivity and integrity of scientific studies in our universities are themselves the responsible parties for today's anti-science backlash.
By following these three moral precepts of Buddhism scientists could easily redeem science:
1. Do not kill, support life;
2. Do not steal, be giving;
3. Do not lie, be truthful.

But this requires that scientists must call out the death-supporting, stealing, and lying conduct of their fellow scientists.  Today, the vast majority of scientists protect each other from external criticism nearly as strenuously as the Blue Line of law enforcement does. To redeem science, scientists must point out when a colleague or university department has blurred the lines of the scientific method in order to get that grant or endowment or that paper published. 

Above all else, science must be an ethical calling, not an industry in service of capitalism, because capitalism is inherently anti-democratic, routinely unethical, and necessarily places a higher virtue on making profits than on protecting the environment and honestly practicing the scientific method.   

Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications

This is a new feature for the TWW Blog with the hope of adding a little more coherence to the line up.  Under the title of “Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications” I will be outlining my pet peeves about Buddhism’s “coming to the West.”  Being aware of the processes of accommodation, acclimation, and acculturation that occur in transplanting Buddha Dharma into another culture is my primary concern.  The Buddha Dharma is the teaching of how mind awakens.  This awakening is not bound to any particular culture and is universally available to and inherent within each and every single person and living being. 

One of the most important factors in Buddhism’s arrival in the West is the necessity of disentangling the cultural aspects of Buddha Dharma from those aspects that are the common denominator of the human mind, i.e., the Buddha aspects. This happens whenever Buddhism enters a new cultural context.  It happened whenever and wherever Buddhism spread beyond the region where the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama Shakyamuni, actually walked as a living, breathing, spiritual mendicant, e.g., into the areas now known as Southern India, Northwestern India, Southeast Asia, Ancient Gandhara, Centeral Asia. China, Mongolia, Tibet, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.

The core problem is that we mostly do not know what is cultural and what is mind. As Buddhism spread throughout the regions of Asia, there was a general cultural communication that facilitated the transplanting of Buddha Dharma without a head on collision of cultural themes.  For example, Buddhism moves relatively easily into a culture that has either an animistic-shamanistic or pluralistic-pantheistic approach, because it can either become one more view among others in a panoply of perspective, or can integrate the perspective of the mind’s awakening within the preexisting metaphors of awakening in a shamanistic cultural matrix. 

But Buddhism has more difficulty in cultures that worship and idolize an anthropomorphic monotheistic hegemonic God, such as the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  It is therefore historically significant that Buddhism is now able to come to the West, only after the West has had its own form of “Enlightenment” wherein the Dharma of Science has been able to free its own culture from the dogmatic rule of an anthropomorphic God.    

This current historical condition now presents problems of its own for Buddha Dharma coming to the West, as now practitioners of Buddha Dharma must take advantage of the cultural space created between the old precincts dominated by the God-religion and the new fields of the scientific worldview, while at the same time addressing the concerns of each.  Buddhism’s finding its place in the West between the polarization of an other-worldly God religion and a worldly science is analogous to Buddhism’s finding its place in China between the preexisting forms of Taoism and Confucianism. 

Part of the difficulty will be for Buddha Dharma to simultaneously shed the Indian, Chinese Tibetan, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese cultural encrustations, yet remember and retain Buddha Dharma itself.  As we wash off the cultural accretions, this of course presents us with the paradigmatic conundrum of not throwing the baby out with the bath water.   As just one example, we can see in the West that some adherents to a materialistic scientific worldview misperceive karma and rebirth as merely cultural aspects of Buddha Dharma that can be jettisoned.  But as I see it, we have in the scientific field of psychology the common denominator of the study of the psyche with which Buddha Dharma can ally itself to show us that in the scientific study of mind, every single human culture that has existed has some form of teaching about karma and rebirth, e.g., the Christian teaching of “you reap what you sow.”  

For instance, in 1939 Carl G. Jung wrote an essay titled "Concerning Rebirth" recognizing that the concept of rebirth has various aspects and outlining five categories of rebirth as psychological forms that the archetype of rebirth manifests itself.  Jung points out that rebirth is not a materialistically measurable phenomenon, it can't be weighed or photographed, but it is a "purely psychic reality." Jung said,

Rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind. These primordial affirmations are based on what I call archetypes. In view of the fact that all affirmations relating to the sphere of the suprasensual are, in the last analysis, invariably determined by archetypes, it is not surprising that a concurrence of affirmations concerning rebirth can be found among the most widely differing peoples. There must be psychic events underlying these affirmations which it is the business of psychology to discuss--without entering into all the metaphysical and philosophical assumptions regarding their significance. [The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9.1, Par. 207.]

 

Therefore by recognizing the role of psychology we can scientifically determine that karma and rebirth are not merely cultural notions to be discarded but are archetypes of the universal collective unconscious that is the foundation of all cultures, and both karma and rebirth can be scientifically and personally studied today, with the 2500 year history of such Buddhist study providing insights for us today .    

For this series, the heading “Caveats” will warn about and point out the problems in sentences and ideas that I come across in English speaking texts, usually describing the Buddha Dharma erroneously, giving false impressions, causing confusion, or generally mistaking or misstating something about the Buddha Dharma.

The heading “Corrections” will attempt the brief restatement from my perspective to correct what was written.

The heading “Clarifications” will articulate the reasons for announcing the caveat and making the correction.

It should go without saying that I’m not writing from a position of a particular orthodoxy, but from a particular perspective.  The point is not that these corrections are intended to establish objective dogmatic views that everyone must adhere to, but that they reveal the “truth of perspective” itself, which is a central aspect of the core teachings of the Buddha Dharma, i.e., having an “Aligned View” is the first of the folds of the Eightfold Path that is basic to Buddhism.     

Here, the Buddha Dharma view we are centrally aligning with is the One Vehicle. This mind-only perspective “stands on zero” as the nondual teaching of emptiness (sunyata) and manifests Buddha Nature as the coming and going of thusness (Tathagata) for the great matter of bringing people to hear of, learn about, and enter into the Buddha’s seeing and knowing in order to alleviate the imbalance and off-centeredness (dukkha) that inevitably arises with self-consciousness and causes the general distress and dissatisfaction inherent in our lives that leads to our greed, hatred, delusions and the whole plethora of vexations, and ultimately to our killing, harming, stealing, lying, and generally bad behaviors towards each other.   

My initial anticipation is that many of first blogs of the series will circle around the areas of confusion between the One Vehicle and the Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha themes of Buddha Dharma as understood by scholastics in the West. 

This page will act as the introduction and table of contents for the blogs posted in this series, as well as a preview of blogs I hope to include.  The posted blogs can also be found by clicking on the “CCC” link in the list of Labels on the side of the pages.

If you have any suggestions or pet peeves of your own about how Buddha Dharma is being accommodated and acculturated in the West, please let me know in the comments.

_/|\_

Gregory

Posts in this series:

Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications: The meaning of ‘ Mind-only’

Anticipated Topics for Caveats, Corrections, and Clarifications:

~ Manas, the 7^th Consciousness
~ Alayavijnana, the 8th Consciousness
~ Mind Only (citta-matra), Consciousness Only (vijnana-matra), and Notification Only (vijnapti-matra)
~ Lankavatara Sutra, The Sutra of Going Down to Lanka
~ Zen and Zen Samadhi
~ Samatha Vipassyana and Samadhi Prajna
~ Tendai Shikan and Zen Shikantaza
~ Five Types of Zen