Buddha noodling

Tuesday, 19 August 2008 by CVM.

On a recent trip to China I was struck by the many variations of Buddhism that I encountered. I was particularly struck by the various forms of Buddhism that were deeply superstitious. In particular, there was much reference to praying to Buddha and how Buddha bestows his blessing etc. A brief perusal of the internet shows there is similar diversity of opinion on this subject. I wonder if BBB would give us a tutorial on the denominations of Buddhism and their doctrinal distinctions. Which is right and which is wrong? A rather non-Buddhist question of course!

RESPONSE by bbbeard:

Well, a broad question. And there is a collection of terminology that is a form of busy-work for people not satisfied with mere enlightenment.

The two main trunks of Buddhism are called Mahayana and Hinayana, commonly translated as “Greater Vehicle” and “Lesser Vehicle”. “Vehicle”, apart from being the really cool 1970 hit from  “The Ides of March”, is the translation of the Sanskrit “Yana” and means “way of enlightenment”. There is a third vehicle, Vajrayana, which is really an offshoot of Mahayana. Vajrayana is also called Tantric Buddhism.

Of course, the way such things go, some folks disagree with this taxonomy; in particular the term “Hinayana” has been called “pejorative”. Such folks tend to group non-Mahayana sects into a trunk called Theravada. You are encouraged to find other taxonomies if that suits you.

Geographically, Hinayana is mostly associated with India and Southeast Asia. The stereotypical lesser vehicle fellow dresses in a saffron robe and doesn’t masturbate. Mahayana is mostly associated with China and Japan, also pulling in Mongolia, Taiwan, and Tibet. The stereotypical greater vehicle fellow dresses in a black robe and sits a lot. Zen is a Mahayana sect.

Again, the way such things go, despite the geographical correlates you can pretty much find any kind of Buddhist anywhere. So your mileage may vary.

One of the more colorful Mahayana offshoots is Tibetan Buddhism, which is kind of like the outrageous eccentric uncle whom you love to have at parties but wouldn’t necessarily bring to church. The isolation and relative poverty of Tibet has bred a number of practices and doctrines that are peculiar to that region. Or, if you look at it benevolently, Tibetan Buddhism is kind of “technicolor Buddhism” – all the features of greater vehicle doctrine are taken past the point of saturation, producing a gorgeous mosaic that is larger than life (not to mention more photogenic than garden-variety Buddhism).

I recommend “The Monk and the Philosopher” by Jean-François Revel for a glimpse into the life of a Tibetan monk. This is quite a fascinating book. Revel, of course, was a noted French philosopher. His son Mathieu Ricard is a scientist, with a doctorate in molecular genetics from Institut Pasteur. Shortly after he earned his doctorate, Mathieu left for Tibet, where he became a monk. The book is a dialogue between father and son about matters religious, secular, and scientific.

There is also an old but fascinating classic text by Alexandra David-Neel called “The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects“, which I have to say I found profoundly influential when I read it as a young man. It was the first time, I recall, that I read a really coherent account of the difference between exoteric and esoteric religious doctrine – a difference which, I am given to understand, also applies to Christianity to some extent.

Maybe that should be the jumping-off point for any account of the diversity within Buddhism. Broadly speaking, exoteric doctrine is “doctrine for the public”, while esoteric doctrine is “doctrine for the enlightened”. The idea is that the great mass of humanity has neither the capacity nor the inclination to study the esoteric doctrine. In Christianity, or so I have been led to understand, esoteric doctrine is “secret doctrine”, but I don’t think that is quite the case in Buddhism (unless, of course, there is a layer of secrecy underneath the “public” “esoteric” doctrine… but that way madness lies….) Exoteric doctrine is the set of beliefs that are promulgated for public understanding and practice. They are complementary, not antagonistic, kind of yin-yang and all that jazz.

A typical case is doctrine regarding the divinity of Buddha. If I dare speak for esoteric doctrine, Buddha was an enlightened person who showed that there is a middle way to enlightenment, neither hedonistic nor ascetic, neither atheistic nor animistic, neither excessively public nor intensely private. He also showed how there are enhanced states of understanding which can be reached through meditation. One of the aspects of that understanding is the realization of the interconnectedness of everything, which I suppose a wag might interpret as a restatement of the horizon problem in cosmology. An aspect of that interconnectedness is that when a person dies, i.e. when their body stops working, the manifestations of that person’s existence continue to ripple down through time. When Buddha died, or so the story goes, his nature (”Buddha-nature”) merged with all of existence. So in esoteric doctrine, there is no Buddha sitting in Heaven, processing prayer requests. He’s gone, he’s everywhere, and he’s not coming back because he never left.

But that’s all kind of high-falutin’ for your typical farmer/engineer/soldier/courtesan, so the esoteric doctrine explains that it’s okay to have an exoteric doctrine for the regular folks. In the exoteric doctrine, people collect little Buddha figurines and pray to them. I can’t really say whether this prayer is different from Christian prayer or not, since I’ve not done either. But it’s fair to say that it’s common in the exoteric doctrine to visualize a personal Buddha, as it were, who hears the prayers and acts on them. Of course, one of the major Buddhist doctrines is the doctrine of karma, which is variously translated as “what goes around comes around”, “you get what you deserve”, “a circle has no end”, etc., so I suppose that in the esoteric view, worthy prayers do get answered.

I haven’t really addressed the doctrinal differences between Mahayana and Hinayana trunks. Some people have tried to make an analogy with the Catholic/Protestant divide, but I find this somewhat baffling. (I’m not aware of a conflict where Hinayanists and Mahayanists have resorted to bloodshed over doctrine.) Mostly, Hinayana (Theravada) Buddhists are “originalist” in that they claim their doctrine stems directly from the teachings of the Buddha, while the Mahayanists have a markedly more evolved theology and philosophy of the soul, much of it contributed by numerous other enlightened folks over the course of several millennia. (So which of them is more “Catholic”?) Hinayana is closely associated with the Pali Canon, which is essentially the meeting minutes of the “Third Council” held in Pataliputta in 308 BC. Mahayana, as remarked, has a diverse lineage, starting with Nagarjuna (c. 200 AD) who wrote extensively about nothingness (hence foreshadowing the inscrutable modern doctrine of the close connection between vacuum expectation values and particle propagators).

As far as “which is right and which is wrong?” goes, well, yeah, that’s a different paradigm. I tend to incline to the Mahayanist and esoteric view. But I also tend to the “translational” view of religious beliefs, that is, I understand when some person talks about God or angels or prayer they can mean something similar to what another person might call totality or spirit or hope. Languages are the coordinate systems we use to navigate through our lives, but, well, the map is not the ground. (”People ask me where I live and I say ‘E-4’”).

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