God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (29 page)

What intrigues me about the quest of Zen practitioners for
satori
(their term for moments of awakening that bring qualities of spontaneity and openness to everyday life) is how often these moments come in a flash of intuition. There is now strong evidence that breakthroughs of many sorts—Eureka! moments for scientists and novelists alike—often arrive only after the rational brain has run into a brick wall. When you are out for a walk or a drive or just waking up or just going to sleep, the solution does an end run around your ordinary mind and pops into your head, fully formed. Apparently you need to wear out the left side of the brain so the right side can do its work. Or, to use language more native to the Buddhist tradition, you can’t get to nonduality with the dualistic mind. You can’t think your way to nirvana; it comes when you are out of your mind.

Emptiness

Another crucial development in Mahayana Buddhism was the teaching of
shunyata
, or emptiness. Whereas Theravada Buddhists had argued that the self was actually a composite (of the five skandhas) and therefore both fantasy and phantasm, Mahayana Buddhists took this argument one step further, contending that everything, including the five skandhas, is equally empty.

I can attest on the basis of two decades as a Religious Studies professor that this teaching is almost as hard to convey as no-self. Just as most of us prefer to live in the physical universe of Isaac Newton, untroubled by the unsettling truths of Einsteinian relativity, most of us are perfectly happy to accept existence as it appears without worrying about how it might actually be. But even those of us who want to see the reality rather than the shadow have a hard time wrapping our heads around the mind-bender of emptiness. And as if that isn’t enough, there is the warning of the great second- and third-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna that garbling this doctrine can be hazardous to your health. “
Shunyata
misunderstood,” he writes, “is like a snake grasped by the head.”
²⁴
So fair warning and beware.

The teaching of shunyata goes something like this: Since everything comes and goes in a great chain of cause and effect, nothing is independent; nothing exists on its own. There is no fire without fuel, and fuels such as wood and natural gas cannot even be conceived of as “fuel” without the concept of “fire.” The cottage where I live on Cape Cod may seem to be a very real and substantial “thing,” but it was brought into being by (among other empty things) carpenters and roofers and shingles and nails (each of which is itself empty), and one day the effects of wind and rain (among other things) will rot it away. The same can be said of our opinions and beliefs, which also arise and fall in a great chain of cause and effect. Yes, things appear to have permanent, unchanging essences. But as much as we hate to admit it, nothing is really permanent, and everything is constantly changing. Yes, things appear to be unto themselves—this cup, that plate, this fork. But everything is made of something else and is always in the process of becoming something other than what it now appears to be. Before the fork was a fork, it was a sheet of stainless steel; before it was a sheet of stainless steel, it was iron, chromium, and other metals buried in rocks underground (though not, of course, conceived as such by the rocks nearby). And even this fork in my hand is only a “fork” among English speakers. In a culture of chopsticks unacquainted with Western place settings, it is simply an oddly shaped curio. “Form is emptiness,” says the Heart Sutra, “and emptiness is form.”
²⁵

For generations shunyata was seen in the West as pessimistic and nihilistic, perhaps because this term was routinely mistranslated as nothingness. But “emptiness is openness,” as the American teacher of Tibetan Buddhism Pema Chodron puts it.
²⁶
Shunyata should be understood first and foremost as a teaching of freedom rooted in experience:

Until we experience it,

Emptiness sounds so

Empty.

Once experienced,

All is empty by comparison.
²⁷

To make this difficult teaching a bit more plain, Mahayana Buddhists speak of two truths: conventional truth with a small
t
and Absolute Truth with a capital
T.
From the perspective of Absolute Truth, everything is empty. Ultimately, there is no distinction between you and your best friend: each is radically interdependent; each is ever changing; each is impermanent. Ultimately, there is no unchanging essence to you or to me, just as there is no unchanging essence of chariot, car, house, or fork. Yet conventionally we speak of ourselves and these objects as if they were objects, as if we and they were independent, unchanging, and permanent, just as we speak of objects moving through space and time as if Newton’s laws live even though we know that Einstein has superseded him and that many so-called objects are actually better described as waves. We do this because it is useful under most circumstances to speak in conventional terms. There is no chariot, says Nagarjuna, but that does not mean you cannot climb aboard and take it for a spin.

The oddest implication of emptiness is that we are all already Buddhas. It is the dualistic mind that sees Buddhahood as something different from us. Move into nondualistic awareness and you will realize that you have been a Buddha since birth. Here we may seem to be treading toward something like self-deification, or what the Hindus call God-realization. But if the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Sogyal Rinpoche is right, the point of shunyata may not be to transcend our humanity, but to inhabit it more fully. “You don’t actually ‘become’ a Buddha,” he writes, “you simply cease, slowly, to be deluded. And being a Buddha is not being some omnipotent spiritual superman, but becoming at last a true human being.”
²⁸

One of the wonders of the ancient world (and Indonesia’s top tourist attraction) is the ninth-century Mahayana temple at Borobudur in Java. When viewed from above, this temple looks like a mandala—a map of the cosmos that doubles as a map of the human mind. Every day devotees circumambulate and ascend it, moving symbolically through the world of craving, the world of forms, and finally entering the world of formlessness. All the while, tourists snap photos incessantly and Indonesian schoolchildren practice their broken English with foreigners.

Even with the distractions, however, this remarkable temple is almost enough to turn you into a Buddha all by itself. As you ascend the six rectangular stories and three circular stories of this massive lava-rock monument, thousands of bas-reliefs carved in stone tell the story of the Buddha’s life and illustrate the karmic law of cause and effect. At the top are seventy-two stupas. Stupas are structures that typically house some sacred relic, and, if you look carefully, you will see a stone statue of a seated Buddha inside each one. But in the center and at the highest point of this monument is an empty stupa—a wonderful gesture that recalls the empty chair for God so ubiquitous in Bali and, of course, the Mahayana teaching of emptiness itself.

Thunderbolt and Diamond

Vajrayana Buddhism, numerically the smallest of Buddhism’s three paths, is often also called Tibetan Buddhism because, although it flourished elsewhere, it survived most visibly in Tibet. Vajrayana developed out of Mahayana in India in the sixth century and moved into Tibet in two great waves, first in the eighth century and again in the eleventh. There it made a great civilization that creatively combined Theravada-style monasticism, the study and contemplation of Mahayana texts, the magical and ritualistic traditions of Tantra, and the shamanistic beliefs and practices of the indigenous Bon religion. Vajrayana thrived in Tibet for centuries, until the Chinese invaded in 1950, eventually forcing the fourteenth Dalai Lama and his “Buddhocratic” government into exile in India.
²⁹

Vajrayana Buddhism enjoys a visibility in the West far out of proportion to its numbers, thanks to books and films trumpeting Tibet as an impossibly faraway Shangri-La, the inescapability of the Dalai Lama’s trademark smile, and widespread sympathy for Tibetan underdogs in the face of Chinese rule. Tibetan Buddhist monks are famous in Europe and North America for crafting out of colored sand intricate multicolored mandalas, which in this case include Buddhas in all nine directions (north, northeast, east, southeast, south, southwest, west, northwest, and center). These sand mandalas often take days to build but, in a grand demonstration of the Buddhist truth of impermanence, they are scattered to the wind (or into a river) shortly after they are completed.

Like Mahayana Buddhists, Vajrayana Buddhists are not immune from bragging about their beloved tradition. Robert Thurman, the first Westerner ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk and now a Buddhist Studies professor at Columbia University, claims that this tradition creatively combines the best of Theravada monasticism and Mahayana messianism.
³⁰
But there is also a boast in the name itself.
Vajra
means both “thunderbolt” and “diamond,” so Vajrayana is the thunderbolt or diamond vehicle. Because it has the concentrated force of a thunderbolt, it presents the possibility of achieving Buddhahood extraordinarily quickly—in one lifetime. Because it can cut like a diamond, it is able to break through the Gordian knot of the dualistic mind to the nondualistic awareness of emptiness.

This third Buddhist vehicle also answers to a host of additional names: Mantrayana because of its use of mantras, or sacred chants; Lamaism because of its reverence for the lama (which means guru, or teacher); Esoteric Buddhism because many of its practices are passed down in secret from lama to student; and Tantric Buddhism, because some of its practices are derived from Tantra. One such practice is partaking of the “Five Forbidden Things”—meat, fish, alcohol, sex, and mystical gestures called
mudras
—an activity that seeks to break through the either/or mind to the nondualism of emptiness. Just as Chakrasambhara, the bodhisattva of compassion, and his consort, Vajrabarahi, merge into each other sexually, there is no ultimate distinction, Vajrayana Buddhists say, between meat eating and vegetarianism, between you and me, or even between nirvana and samsara.

The most widely read Vajrayana Buddhist text in the West is the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which has been celebrated as a scientific, spiritual, psychological, and humanistic text.
³¹
This funerary manual, whose technical name (or one of them) is
Liberation through Hearing in the Intermediate State
, guides the consciousness of the deceased through the intermediate state (
bardo
) between death and rebirth—a period Vajrayana Buddhists believe lasts for up to forty-nine days. Its words are chanted, ideally by a lama, over the corpse of the dying and the dead.

The afterlife journey described in this text begins with a terrifying white light known as the Great Luminosity. Stay calm, you are told. Don’t be afraid. See the Great Luminosity (which some have likened to the light reported by people who have had near-death experiences) as nothing more than a projection of your own mind. If you are able to do this, to see yourself and this light as one rather than two different things, then you are liberated and will not be reborn. But this is very rare. So most of us go on to the next stage: a parade of ugly and wrathful Buddhas, followed by beautiful and benevolent Buddhas. This time, we are told not to be too repelled by or too attracted to any of these images. Don’t fear them or love them or run to or from them. Just understand each as a projection of your own mind. If you are able to do this, to realize the emptiness of the distinction between yourself and these Buddhas, then you are liberated and will not be reborn. But this, too, is rare. So the overwhelming majority of us go on to the final stage, which determines when and where we will be reborn. In this stage we see various scenes of animals and humans having sex, and on the basis of the good and bad karma we have accrued in past lives, we insinuate ourselves into one of those scenes and are reborn into it.
³²

Beyond Buddhism

Quick-and-easy formulas are problematic in every great religion. Have you really gotten to the heart of Islam if you perform the Five Pillars? Or to the heart of Christianity if you say “Amen” to the Nicene Creed? With Buddhism, quick-and-easy formulas are particularly suspect. To be sure, Buddhists have long been on the lookout for formulas that could get them to nirvana. And ritual has always played a major role in the tradition. But more than belief, Buddhism is about experience. And for the tradition’s mystics, this experience lies on the far side not only of rites and creeds but also of language itself.

The teaching of emptiness was misunderstood in the West for generations as pessimistic and nihilistic. But in truth it is a teaching of freedom. There are reasons why the Buddha was often described as joyful and why the Dalai Lama seems inseparable from his trademark smile. One is that shunyata offers liberation from suffering. Another is that emptiness liberates us from enslavement to people, judgments, objects, and ideas, including the person of the Buddha and the institutions of Buddhism itself.

One beloved koan reads, “If you see the Buddha, kill the Buddha.” Another Zen saying goes: “There is Buddha for those who don’t know what he is, really. There is no Buddha for those who know what he is, really.”
³³
Each of these sayings warns in its own way against clinging to the Buddha. Why should clinging to the Buddha cause us any less suffering than clinging to God or self or boyfriend or political party or ideology or nation? But these sayings also make the broader point that anything that comes to you secondhand is worse than worthless; trust only what you yourself have seen to be true in your own experience.