The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti

This translation of "A Mahayana Scripture" by Uma Thurman's more famous dad fits into the recent penchant I've had for exploring related spiritual traditions via things sitting on the shelf at the cat bookstore.  I believe it caught my eye because at one point I started the Michael Taft & M.C. Owens lecture series (before finding M.C. Owens intial overview a bit long-winded).  It's the first Mahayana scripture I've read other than the Heart Sutra.  And I guess it confirms me as 'Theravadan', at least for the moment, because I didn't find it particularly approachable or revelatory.

In fact, it leads me to reiterate the same question I asked in the case of Tantra Illuminated -- if the philosophy is so simple, why is its exposition so ... gaudy.  The basic idea is so profound and straightforward that it is almost totally summed up in the five short pages of Chapter 9, "The Dharma-Door of Nonduality".  ALL PHENOMENA ARE EMPTY.  Thank you for you attention to this matter.  And yet this scripture has an elaborate literary structure that spans multiple universes and involves uncountably large contingents of boddhisattvas doing various magic tricks.  On top of that, it rather condescendingly uses all the Buddha's 'Hinayana' disciples as whipping boys to illustrate the superiority of the Mahayana path.  I get that all this is supposed to expand our mind in trans-rational ways, and there is doubtless a profound teaching in that.  But I simply don't have the background to find this stuff helpful.  I think I better stick with the Early Buddhism I'm familiar with and that makes sense to me.

Tantra Illuminated

A couple of years ago I read Christoph Wallis' translation of and commentary on the Recognition Sutras.  It was an interesting glimpse to Kashmiri Shaivism, a nondual branch of what we now call hinduism.  So when I saw his earlier introduction to the broader scope of tantric teachings, of which Shaivism is a particular lineage, floating about my used bookstore, I figured I should expand my mind a little.  I found this book less well written and less interesting than the Recognition Sutras, but it was still worth getting a little fuller picture of this tradition.

The book's subtitle, "The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition" also turns out to be its organizational principle.  The first part contains a long discussion of nondual philosophy, including a set of lists to rival even the Buddhist list obsession -- 36 tattvas, 5 acts of God, 4 levels of the world, 5 states of Awareness, etc ...  This was all interesting enough, but ultimately feels to me like just another arbitrary metaphysical construct. Certainly, part of this response is simply because, right now, I find myself more interested in the marked contrast between this philosophical apparatus and the Buddha's refusal to even engage these metaphysical speculations.  But there's also a coherent intellectual objection here that I first formulated in the context of people talking about Dzogchen (a system which Wallis suggests is extremely similar to Kashmiri Shaivism).  If everything, including ourselves, is really just an emanation of a single divine energy, why are there so many different gods and practices and lists involved?  Compared to Theravadan practices and philosophy, the Tantric world is incredibly complex.  I understand that it's more of a lay tradition, not aimed mainly at monastics.  And I understand that this naturally means it is a less renunciate path, more open to the beauty and complexity of everyday life.  But one would naively think that the practices which fit with what Wallis calls a "nondual monism" would be more like shikantaza, and less like multi-part meditations with elaborate visualization of deities and channels.  To be clear, I think this objection is simply the beginning of conversation, not some sort of invalidation of these traditions.  I still find the contrast between core belief and philosophical articulation notable.

The second, more interesting, part of the book explains the history of Tantra.  Wallis is not merely a spiritual practitioner, but also an academic, so he does a great job of situating this tradition with the context of medieval India, distinguishing it's various flavors, and tracing some of its later influences.  For example, it's remarkable to learn that we can trace the origins of hatha-yoga back to a much corrupted version of tantric practices.  It was also kinda interesting to get such a succinct overview of the way various branches of the tradition can be organized into a left-right spectrum defined by how seriously they take the concept of nonduality.  I personally might have wished for more detail concerning the way that Buddhism clearly influenced these branches of Vedanta, as well as more insight into how their influence in turn percolated back into Vajrayana, and especially Tibetan, Buddhism.  But this was probably beyond what could be put into one volume. 

The final part contains a quick overview of tantric practices.  There's not really enough detail to start doing these practices on one's own, though this is clearly by design.  Wallis feels like anyone interested enough in this way of seeing the world should pursue a relationship with a qualified teacher.  So we really just get a flavor for some of the pranayama and visualization practices that were central to almost all the tantric lineages.  There's even a section regarding what you might call "insight" meditation -- looking at the world in ways that loosen our self-centered concepts and thus bring us into contact with some larger field, interpreted here as divine.  

On The Way To The Far Shore

I've found all of Leigh Brasington's books so straightforward and useful that at this point I'd probably read anything he wrote.  But I was actually particularly keen to go thorough his new commentary on the Pārāyanavagga because it is the other collection of suttas (alongside the Aṭṭhakavagga) that people think are the earliest writings in the Pali Cannon.  Since I just recently read Gil Fronsdal's commentary on the latter, along with a few Upanishads to set the context, it seemed like a good moment to continue in the same vein.

Like the "Book of Eights", the "Way to the Far Shore" also pears down the Buddha's teaching to its core message.  Be mindful and investigate the way that craving causes suffering, and the way that letting go of craving leads to the end of suffering.  Here, these observations are not ariticulated as a list of "Noble Truths", but the teaching is the same.  This core message is very simple. and repeated many times in these verses.  We have to investigate for ourselves how holding on prevents us from living peacefully.  Brasington of course has more expansive commentary, and some very interesting reflections on the translation of certain terms, but his short book is mostly aimed at helping us to see how simple and direct the pre-Theravadan path can be.   

Cosmos

Deleuze recommended Witold Gombrowicz's strange avant-garde novel in several places, so I decided to finally give it a shot.  It was actually fairly entertaining ... for an avant-garde novel.  But it is definitely not going to be everyone's cup of tea.  To wit, I think I remember seeing one Amazon review that classified it as "unreadable".  I didn't find it to be that exactly, though you will be sorely disappointed if you're looking for a page-turning story.  While the novel does have an identifiable plot of sorts, and isn't merely a series of language games or meta-references like some experimental novels, it can at times be a repetitive and frustrating experience.  So a lot like life in general, and in particular like being fully present inside our own everyday insanity.  Ultimately, that's what the novel is about -- the way we construct a 'meaningful' cosmos out of a thousand tiny and unrelated details by welding together correspondences that serve our desires.  In the end, it seems clear that Gombrowicz feels the cosmos lacks any innate meaning and is simply a chaos of constellations we squint into form.  Though, given that we are also part of the cosmos, perhaps this squinting already is an innate meaning.

Upanisads

Both Leigh Brasington and Gil Fronsdal have suggested that we can better understand some of the early Buddhist suttas in the Pali Cannon by knowing something about the religious and philosophical background of ancient India at the time the Buddha was teaching.  The main source for the ideas then current are the Upanishads, the philosophical end of the Vedic texts that form the foundational scripture of what we now call Hinduism.  So, increasingly intrigued by these early suttas, I decided to plunge into reading what the translator identified as the principal early Upanishads.  

Unfortunately, this shit is just totally obscure.  It's not that there aren't some interesting creation myths, some pointed moral stories, and even some philosophical insights here.  The problem is really that, like most oral traditions, these documents are not meant to stand alone.  To really understand them it's clear you need a very detailed grasp of the extremely complex Vedic rituals whose metaphysical inner significance they are meant to illuminate.  In fact, the very word "upanishad" means something like "hidden connection".  The idea is to explain the cosmological reasons why one must let the horse run free for a year and must stand to the North when it is sacrificed, and etc ... Since I don't know anything about the details of these rituals, I was mostly only able to glean a few high-level takeaways from the text.  

First, what we find, overwhelmingly and repetitively, is a list of correspondences. The parts of the hose correspond to the parts of the cosmos.  The parts of the human being correspond to the elements of the universe.  Even the syllabic parts of the ritual chants correspond to the parts of the human as well as the cosmos.  The whole text is dominated by lists of point-by-point correspondences, hidden analogies or upanishads.  

Second, these analogies are ultimately arranged in the way implicit in the very concept of analogy -- concentric circles.  Essentially, everything is a scaled version of everything else.  The small figure corresponds point-by-point to a larger figure, which in turn corresponds to an even larger figure.  This naturally culminates in the famous philosophical and mystical conclusion: Atman = Brahman, Self = Whole.  The entirety of the universe is analogous to this grain of sand.  The upanishads demonstrate this concentric structure again and again by listing out how Z depends on Y depends on X, depends on ... until we get back to A, which is always the Breath or Self.  The whole infinite universe depends on and is identified with an innermost metaphysical core or foundation, a correspondence between that which is larger than the largest, and smaller than the smallest, as it were.  

It's obvious that reducing 3,000 years of beautiful tradition to a couple of bullet points reflects a pretty superficial reading of these texts.  Nevertheless, even just seeing these aspects firsthand does help me appreciate what Brasington and Fronsdal are getting at.   

Brasington, for example, suggests in his Dependent Origination and Emptiness that the Bahiya sutta is addressed to a follower of the Brhad-aranyaka Upanishad because its titular character is identified as "Bahiya of the bark-cloth".  A little more research shows that this is a plausible though maybe not a slam-dunk reference.  Brasington's footnote (pg. 152, 160) indicates that John Peacock told him that the Brhad-aranyaka Upanishad -- one of the two Upanishads people agree is "early", and whose title literally translates as "Great Forest" or "Great Wilderness" because it was recited in the wilderness outside the village (Olivelle xxxii) -- "makes a big deal about trees".  I think this overstates the case a bit.  Olivelle's index only includes four entries under "tree" in the BU.  I don't think it's fair to call it a central theme of the whole text or something it makes a big deal about.  However, it is clearly the main metaphor of the poem quoted at 3.9.28 

Man is like a mighty tree—
that's the truth.
His body hairs are its leaves,
His skin is its outer bark.
Blood flows from his skin,
As sap from the bark of a tree.
Blood flows when the skin is pricked,
As sap, when the bark is slit.
His flesh is the sapwood;
His sinews are the fibers—
that's certain.
His bones are the heartwood;
And his marrow resembles the pith.
A tree when it's cut down,
Grows anew from its root;
From what root does a mortal man grow,
When he is cut down by death?
Do not say, "From the seed";
For it's produced from him
while he is still alive;
And like a tree
sprouting from a seed,
It takes birth at once,
even before he dies.

A tree, when it's uprooted,
Will not sprout out again;
From what root does a mortal man grow,
When he is cut down by death?
Once he's born,
he can't be born again.
Who, I ask,
will beget him again?
Perception, bliss, brahman,
The gift of those who give,
The highest good—
awaits those who know this
and stand firm.

This poem constitutes a pretty direct correspondence between the 'covering' of a man and the bark of a tree.  Since it's tough to actually change one's skin into bark, it seems plausible that this analogy might be the source of the ascetic tradition referenced in the Mahabharata of going off into the wilderness clad only in twigs.  Since I don't know how widespread this practice was at the time of the Buddha, it's hard to be certain that identifying Bahiya as "of the bark cloth" would also immediately identify his religious beliefs for the hearer, but it seems like a reasonable guess.  But the guess is strengthened dramatically by the further correspondence between the teaching the Buddha gives to Bahiya and some of the other parts of chapter 3 of the BU.  Brasington illustrates this with a couple of quotes, and there's one more that's nearly identical.

"You can't see the seer who does the seeing; you can't hear the hearer who
does the hearing; you can't think of the thinker who does the thinking; and you
can't perceive the perceiver who does the perceiving. The self within all is this self
of yours. All else besides this is grief!" BU 3.4.2

"He sees, but he can't be seen; he hears, but he can't be heard; he thinks, but he
can't be thought of; he perceives, but he can't be perceived. Besides him, there is no
one who sees, no one who hears, no one who thinks, and no one who perceives. It is
this self of yours who is the inner controller, the immortal. All besides this is grief." BU 3.7.23

"This is the imperishable, Gargi, which sees but can't be seen; which hears
but can't be heard; which thinks but can't be thought of; which perceives but can't
be perceived. Besides this imperishable, there is no one that sees, no one that hears,
no one that thinks, and no one that perceives. BU 3.8.11

Given that it's repeated so often in this chapter and throughout the BU as a whole, I think it's pretty fair to conclude that uncovering the ineffable internal self or soul is the basic goal of this Upanishad.  It would be too long to include the full context leading up to these quotes, but as I mentioned in the bullet points, it's structured around a long list of nested dependencies that culminate in the central position of this secret self.  The text promises that if you know this self, you will be able to "eat the world" and "move freely in all the worlds" and be "imperishable" and avoid "grief".  Seeing this unseen self at the center of everything is the highest goal, and it allows one to possess the world by analogy.  The whole structure couldn't contrast more with what the Buddha says to Bahiya:

"Then, Bāhiya, you should train yourself thus: In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen. In reference to the heard, only the heard. In reference to the sensed, only the sensed. In reference to the cognized, only the cognized. That is how you should train yourself. When for you there will be only the seen in reference to the seen, only the heard in reference to the heard, only the sensed in reference to the sensed, only the cognized in reference to the cognized, then, Bāhiya, there is no you in connection with that. When there is no you in connection with that, there is no you there. When there is no you there, you are neither here nor yonder nor between the two. This, just this, is the end of stress."

The Buddha is not only replacing a doctrine of essential Self with one of not-self, but it seems he's implicitly critiquing the entire structure of Vedic reasoning.  Instead of an essential core of an analogy, we have an in-essential emptiness at the center of everything.  Instead of concentric circles, we have the links and loops of dependent origination.  This latter is less obvious, but I think even more important.  Dependent origination is not a set of linear dependencies, but a system of feedback loops.  It doesn't work by analogy and point-by-point correspondence, unless we think that all things are 'analogous' because they exists only as "streams of dependently arising processes interacting", as Brasington puts it.  The whole point is that there is not a core inner Self -- of a person or of anything else -- that is analogous to a total outer Whole.  Stuff depends on other stuff ad infinitum, to the point where the term 'stuff' becomes misleading.

The contrast between the logic of the Upanishads and the logic of dependent origination brings me to Fronsdal's suggestion in The Buddha before Buddhism that a familiarity with the BU can help us understand the Book of Eights generally, and in particular its important "Discourse on Quarrels and Disputes" (chapter 11, pgs 87-98).  This might be the oldest version of dependent origination (Brasington compares various translations here).  Fronsdal is certainly right to observe that this sutta starts by paralleling the concentric circle structure we find throughout the BU (section 3.9, which ends with the tree poem above, is a perfect example of this).  Quarrels and disputes depend on what is cherished, which depends on desire, which depends on the pleasant/unpleasant, which depends on sense contact, which depends on name and form.  If this were the BU, the list would inevitably end with " ... depends on Atman (Self)".  In the Upanishads, this inner kernel, in a strange twist, is always equal to the outer Whole (Brahman).  When we realize that we are everything, that Atman is Brahman, we enter into a non-dual realm that no longer supports any sort of concept of differentiation.  BU 4.5.12-15 provides a very clear articulation of the result of reaching the end of the chain, which culminates in the famous "neti, neti".

"It is like this. As the ocean is the point of convergence of all the waters, so the skin is the point of convergence of all sensations of touch; the nostrils, of all odors; the tongue, of all tastes; sight, of all visible appearances; hearing, of all sounds; the mind, of all thoughts; the heart, of all sciences; the hands, of all activities; the sexual organ, of all pleasures; the anus, of all excretions; the feet, of all travels; and speech, of all the Vedas.

"It is like this. As a mass of salt has no distinctive core and surface; the whole thing is a single mass of flavor—so indeed, my dear, this self has no distinctive core and surface; the whole thing is a single mass of cognition. It arises out of and together with these beings and disappears after them—so I say, after death there is no awareness."
After Yajnavalkya said this, Maitreyi exclaimed: "Now, sir, you have utterly confused me! I cannot perceive this at all." He replied: "Look—I haven't said anything confusing. This self, you see, is imperishable; it has an indestructible nature.  For when there is a duality of some kind, then the one can see the other, the one can smell the other, the one can taste the other, the one can greet the other, the one can hear the other, the one can think of the other, the one can touch the other, and the one can perceive the other. When, however, the Whole has become one's very self (atman), then who is there for one to see and by what means? Who is there for one to smell and by what means? Who is there for one to taste and by what means? Who is there for one to greet and by what means? Who is there for one to hear and by what means? Who is there for one to think of and by what means? Who is there for one to touch and by what means? Who is there for one to perceive and by what means?

"By what means can one perceive him by means of whom one perceives this
whole world?
"About this self (atman), one can only say 'not—, not—.' He is ungraspable, for he cannot be grasped. He is undecaying, for he is not subject to decay. He has nothing sticking to him, for he does not stick to anything. He is not bound; yet he neither trembles in fear nor suffers injury.
"Look—by what means can one perceive the perceiver? There, I have given you the instruction, Maitreyi. That's all there is to immortality."

While the Buddha doesn't end his list by saying that name and form depend on the Self, he seems to describe something pretty similar when he's asked where form disappears:

Appearances disappear when
Not conceiving concepts,
Not conceiving false concepts,
Not nonconceiving,
And not conceiving disappearance.
This is because conceiving is the basis of conceptual differentiation. (BbB, pg 97)

Both these descriptions, then, seem to point to a state of non-dual awareness.  In the Upanishads, this is clearly the highest state, and reflects our identity with everything.  So is the Buddha endorsing this union with Brahman as the end of the path as well, even if he doesn't explicitly call this the Self?  Fortunately, we don't have to speculate; the very next question posed to the Buddha is whether, "learned ones here say highest purity of the spirit goes only this far? Or do they say it is something more than this?"  

And this is where the magic happens -- the Buddha doesn't answer the question one way or another.  He doesn't refute the Self of the Upanishads, nor does he endorse it.  Instead -- if Fronsdal is correct in linking the word "upanissitāti", here translated as "conditional", to "upanishad" in its etymological meaning of "hidden connection" -- the Buddha basically cracks a joke.

Knowing, '[both] these [claims] are conditional [upanissitāti],'  

A sage investigates conditionality. 

Knowing, the liberated one doesn't get into disputes. 

This wise one doesn't associate with 

Becoming or not-becoming (BbB, pg 98)

We don't get this joke till we see that the "upanishad" of the Upanishads is ultimately always the Self.  The Self is precisely the "hidden connection" that unifies everything into a Whole, the inner concentric circle and last stop on every chain of dependency.  The Self is literally God, and this is the esoteric doctrine the text is aimed at uncovering.  

About this self (atman), one can only say 'not—, not—.'

He is ungraspable, for he cannot be grasped. He is undecaying, for he is not subject to decay. He has nothing sticking to him, for he does not stick to anything. He is not bound; yet he neither trembles in fear nor suffers injury. Now, those are the eight abodes, the eight worlds, the eight gods, and the eight persons. I ask you about that person providing the hidden connection (upanisad)—the one who carries off these other persons, brings them back, and rises above them? If you will not tell me that, your head will shatter apart."

Sakalya did not know him, and his head did, indeed, shatter apart. Robbers, moreover, stole his bones, mistaking them for something else. (BU, 3.9.26)

The funny thing is that the Buddha is agreeing with the Upanishads in a sense.  Our self is a sort of hidden connection between things.  This isn't because it is the center of or equal to the universe, but because everything is equally a hidden connection between all the other things.  They all arise dependent on one another, not from some essential core.  And our Self too is conditional -- dependent on, and hence connected to, other stuff.  Rather than a hidden center, we should think of it as a node, just another node in a vast network of nothing but nodes, nothing like the point of convergence we find in the ocean.  Or perhaps it would be better to say, anticipating the Mahayana, that the Buddha is pointing to a void where the Upanishads located the center of the circle.  

Now that I understand the reference better, I appreciate the power of the way the sutta ends.  The Buddha has led us through the highest state that meditation has to offer, a non-dual experience of a world where we no longer cherish our concepts.  But his pun takes away the possibility of interpreting this state metaphysically, as proof that we are one with the universe.  This is just another state, just another connection the world is capable of forming.  And we are urged to investigate it as such, to examine how it works, not cling to its significance and opine on what it means about us.  Thus do we leave behind quarrels and disputes with the Upanishads.

The Awakening of the West

Since I've enjoyed some of Stephen Batchelor's other writings I figured I'd take a chance on the cat bookstore's copy of his history of "The Encounter of Buddhism and Western Culture".  It's a fairly quick read that delivers on its subtitle by recounting a series of vignettes linking current (as of 1994) Buddhists teaching in the West back to the Eastern teachers that founded these traditions.  The result is something more engaging than a dry chronological history of everything that happened between Menander meeting Nagasena and the Dalia Lama showing up at the Berlin Wall.  Instead, we get a much better sense of the larger than life personalities involved in each of these living traditions that have enabled them to expand and grow and transcend their cultural roots over the past 2500 years.  However, this feature is balanced by a bug (if you can call it that).  The book contains so much history in each of its dense, often partly overlapping, stories that there are a bewildering number of names associated with an ever ramifying number of traditions that we have to try and keep distinct.  While it's a not a scholarly work and is trying to appeal to a broad audience, it's attempt to touch on everyone who is anyone in the long history of Buddhism sometimes makes it feel a bit exhausting and over-written.  So it may not be a good first stop for people who don't at least have some of this history already mapped out.  

Tree of Smoke

While Dennis Johnson's novel about Vietnam is my least favorite of his works that I've read so far (though that's just Jesus' Son and Already Dead) it was still compellingly written and kinda interesting.  Halfway through I realized that while I've seen many films about Vietnam, I can't recall reading another novel set there.  The benefits of dealing with the subject in a novel are obvious -- there are lots more unrelated characters here, spread out over a much longer time span, and hence encompassing more dimensions of the sprawling mess that gave birth to the Boomers.  As one might expect though, the message ends up being rather similar to everything else we've heard about Vietnam.  That war destroyed the American soul in a unique way.  Every trip to Vietnam was a trip into the heart of darkness.