Buddhism and Its Branches

When someone tells you they are a Christian, they can mean a whole gamut of ideological and lifestyle choices.  Someone might be a celibate Roman Catholic nun.  Another Christian may be an Amish farmer. One might be a liberal Quaker academic while another is a deeply conservative, snake-handling Appalachian evangelical.  There are many flavors of Christianity.

The same goes with every religion including Buddhism.

I have trouble answering the question of what kind of Buddhist I am.  I have experienced a bit of various types.  Many years ago a guy I was dating at the time was a practicing member of Soka Gakkai USA, and we would chat together sometimes.  This is the same variety of Buddhism practiced by Tina Turner.

More recently another guy I dated in Colorado regularly goes on Vipassana retreats where attendees go for days without speaking, reading anything, or even making eye contact.  The meditant is deeply submerged in meditation and him/herself.

There are of course two main branches of Buddhism:  Theravada and Mahayana.  Tibetan/Vajrayana Buddhism is a third major branch that some classify as a type of Mahayana.

Frankly, I am not educated enough to know the clear differences between them.  The different branches share much in common and Buddhist retreat centers may have monks and lay practitioners of various types working together.  Here though is my emerging knowledge of this subject.  If any readers can share more light on the branches, I would be very grateful!

• Theravada (School of the Elders) is the oldest continuous Buddhist tradition.  It grew out of the earliest Indian Buddhist traditions and preserved many early Buddhist writings in the language of Pali.  Theravada flourished originally on the island of Sri Lanka before spreading to Thailand and Southeast Asia.  All Buddhists look to the Pali writings as authentic.  The Dalai Lama, a Tibetan Buddhist, has said that Buddhists should first look to understand Theravada Buddhism even if they belong to other branches.  Theravada Buddhists focus on reaching nirvana and thus becoming an Arhat but believe in this time period most beings cannot achieve Buddhahood.  I think of Theravada as Buddhism's Roman Catholicism/Eastern Orthodoxy.
• Mahayana (Greater Vehicle) is the Buddhism more common in East Asia (China, Korea, and Japan).  Zen Buddhism comes from this tradition.  Mahayana has a definite mystical quality to it.  There is an emphasis in Mahayana teachings on emptiness and the belief that all beings can reach Buddhahood.  In ways I think of Mahayana as Buddhism's Protestantism because there are elements in this tradition of breaking free of the need for priesthoods and a focus on individuals achieving Buddhahood directly.
• Vajrayana (Diamond Vehicle) or Tibetan Buddhism is a branch of Mahayana Buddhism that flourishes among Tibetans and Mongolians.  The Dalai Lama is one of this branch's key priests.  There are others too such as the Panchen Lama.  This school appears to emphasize various tantric practices (not sex!) to speed up achieving Buddhahood.  Thus, a person seeking Buddhahood as a way to better help others may identify -according to Wikipedia- with the path as much as the results.  So, perhaps you aren't a Buddha today but you can practice Buddha actions in speech, thought, and action today.  It is my understanding that Tibetan Buddhism also incorporates elements of the pre-Buddhism Bon religion originally practiced among Tibetans.

Since I currently do not belong to any sangha or congregation, I do not have a clear line of teachings from a single school that I follow.  Theravada's stripped down Buddhist basics appeals to me as does Mahayana's mystical practices and Tibetan's practical guides to daily living.  I guess I'll see where the road takes me.

The Buddha and Budai

This statue with the lit candle represents Gautama Siddhartha, the historic Buddha.
















This cheery wooden fellow on the right represents Budai, a figure in Chinese and other Asian folklore. Budai and the Buddha are often confused.  Budai is even known as the Laughing Buddha to make things more confusing, and he is associated with Maitreya, a legendary future Buddha who will return to the Earth when most of current Buddhism has been forgotten.  Maitreya is an accepted prophecy among some Buddhists.

Recently it has become fashionable to decorate with statues and images of Buddhas.  I have no less than 3 Buddhas and 1 Budai in my home.  Yet, there are no surviving images of Gautama Siddhartha from the first 600 years or so of Buddhism.  Many of our present statues of Buddha have elements from statues of Gautama Siddhartha carved in Gandhara in the 1st or 2nd century of the Common Era.  Gandhara was a kingdom in what is now northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan.  Interestingly, the area became Hellenized through the invasion of Alexander the Great and his troops around 330 BCE.  Greek artistic influences created the first statues of the Buddha.

What did the historic Gautama Siddhartha look like?  We don't actually know.  Early Buddhist writings say he was a handsome man who had trained as a warrior when younger.  These writings praise his complexion. His early biographies say Gautama Siddhartha was born in what is today modern Nepal in Limbini.  He taught, lived, and died in northern India.  Ethnically, he belonged to the Sakya people.  When he was younger he lived a hedonistic life as a pampered prince.  Then he was an ascetic who nearly starved himself to death.  He probably had black hair like most South Asian people today.  In his days as a pampered prince perhaps he was a jolly, stocky man, but in his ascetic days he was almost certainly an emaciated stick figure of a man.  Traditional biographies state he lived until the age of 80, a very old age for his day.  Like all human beings, he changed over time.  

On Hope

I wrestle with the concept of hope as a Buddhist. I tend to consider myself an optimist, and hope is an arrow in my quiver of sunshine. After reading some of the works of Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, however, I've come to a place where I contemplate and wrestle with the complexities of hope.

One of Buddhism's central Four Noble Truths firmly identifies expectations as the root cause of suffering. The whole of Buddhist practice aims at awakening people to a new perspective to overcome the pain of unmet expectations.

So, hope can equate to an expectation; a false hope. A person can hope an external force -God, your boss, that cute guy who makes deliveries to your office- will fulfill a hopeful desire. We regularly tell someone who is sick that I hope you feel better. Then there is the advice to someone facing a possibly terminal illness: Hope for the best and plan for the worst. 

 Alexander Pope perhaps best sums up the realities of hope in his An Essay on Man:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never is, but always to be blessed:
The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

(If you are like me, I had to look up expatiates. It means to write at length about something...or as Southerners might say, to go on and on about something.)

Hope is a fantasy about tomorrow that seeks to comfort or numb today's feeling of incompleteness or fear. To again quote Pope, hope never is, but always to be. This seemingly helpful and positive approach to living can become an escape from experiencing the Now -raw and uncensored so to speak- to instead cling to a possible tomorrow, a divine plan that will work things out, a fate or karma or destiny or something Out There that is going to make everything ok.

Such a viewpoint, however, runs against much of what Buddhism's core beliefs argue. Pema Chödrön's writing conveys some of this viewpoint. In surrendering a reliance on hope for a better tomorrow, we can come to realistically find our strength in experiencing the Now stripped of expectations of how that experience will play out. Chödrön gently writes about our grasping for something solid in an ever-changing reality. Hope robs us of the Now. It is imagining how the flight attendant will bring you peanuts and a Coke in a little plastic cup before you gently land -when in reality you are in free fall towards humanity's shared experience of mortality.

Frankly, who wouldn't want to grasp for the peanuts and Coke instead of plummeting for an hour...or 50 years... towards Death? And if no hope, what do you say to someone who is sick? ...Sorry to hear you're ill...Sure, you could say this, but you aren't really offering any solace that things will work out. And isn't that what we all want people to assure us: that things will work out?

To paraphrase the movie Mommie Dearest, this isn't Pema Chödrön's first time at the rodeo. She's been divorced. She has faced her share of life's hurdles. And she has come out of these experiences and her learning with something of a no nonsense, gritty Buddhism; the kind of pick-yourself-up-'cuz-no-one-else-will pragmaticism that offers the advice you give at last ditch interventions. Chödrön isn't cruel. She preaches a loving message of maitri or how to develop a loving relationship with yourself as your best friend. She does, however, urge people to lean into the sharp points -as her teacher would say to her- of our fears. Give up hope for a fantasy future and instead live in the uncomfortable, shifting Now. Chödrön teaches us that if we lean into those sharp points -neither running from our fears or impaling ourselves on our terrors- we will release all those energies we use to avoid pain. We will become stronger and find the energy to deal with our issues in the Now. And we will be dealing with our own issues personally rather than hoping for some external help. It's not a Buddhism you'd likely find marketed at a Disney store, but it is a path towards a perspective that alleviates suffering.

So, does this mean Buddhists should abandon all hope, all ye spiritual seekers who enter? Not necessarily. Even the current Dalai Lama uses the word hope from a Tibetan teaching:

There is a saying in Tibetan, 'Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength.'
No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful experience is, if we lose our hope, that's our real disaster. -13th Dalai Lama

Here is my personal interpretation. To alleviate our own suffering, we must be awake to the Now. If there is a God, gods, Fate, or some destiny in store for us, we cannot really know. So, we have to work with what we do personally experience. When hopes are fantasies that imagine some better future that takes us out of the Now into a dreamy future, then we have to learn to wake up from these hope-dreams. Likewise, when our fears play out movies of some dark futures, we have to wake from these fear-dreams. Developing a perspective that helps us stay rooted in our own abilities and the Now is key. Meditation involving focusing on the Now through mindfulness techniques is a practical skill to develop this perspective.

So, chuck the hope-dreams. What remains, however, is hope as empowerment. Change is constant. Today's enslaved people are tomorrow's liberated nation. History tells us things change. History also teaches us that the actions we take now determine the future.

This leads us to another key concept in the Buddha's teachings: our thoughts create the Universe. Now, this statement skips some steps so let's dig a bit deeper. First, we think of something. Then we choose to act or not act. Our actions or inactions create some or all of the conditions which come together to define the Universe. And here in this formula there is a place for hope-plans. In the Now we can envision a better future that we want to build. Our hope becomes a blueprint and plan. It remains rooted in the Now and within us to create. There is a clear understanding that this future may or may not come into existence. It will depend on what we think in the Now and do in the Now that will determine the changes in the Now of tomorrow.

So, my perspective is that Buddhist concepts of hope involve a subtle perspective that differentiates dreamy escapist fantasies where some external force will create a bright, cheery future from plans for a different future grounded in consciously acting in the present with our own personal skills to bring about this future. It's the difference from sitting on the couch and hoping to lose 20 pounds this year from going for a 2 mile walk and hoping that if you keep going for walks you will lose 20 pounds this year. One kind of hope releases us from responsibility and action but keeps us in whatever situation pains us. The other empowers us to know our present is our future.

Or, so I have come to understand from my own readings and ponderings.

Meeting John Lennon on the Way to Nirvana

Imagine there's no heaven

It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace

You, you may say
I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one   -John Lennon, Imagine 

I am terrible at song lyrics and pop culture.  I honestly thought this song had a lyric that went something like Imagine there's no God, but it looks like the lines are actually about heaven, hell, and religion.  So, I'll take what I can get and use this song as a jumping point to discuss Buddhism as a non-theist spiritual path.

One of the first uncomfortable ideas I encountered when moving into Buddhism was the concept of a 'godless religion'.  In exploring this idea I found in my experience that American Buddhists have a whole constellation of related answers about whether Gautama Siddhartha taught there is or is not a God -or gods. For an exercise in confusion, sometime do an internet search for "Buddha does God exist".

So, let me take you down my own path regarding this question:

My views on Buddhism and the existence of God began with a story I read in various forms from the internet over the years.  In the original form that I first encountered, the story goes something like this:

The Buddha was teaching near a village.  A villager came to the Buddha and asked him, "Lord Buddha, you are very wise.  Do the gods truly exist?"  The Buddha responded, "How can we really know?  Instead, focus on something you can do now." 

In other words, this story implies Gautama Siddhartha felt belief or disbelief in gods -remember he was raised in polytheistic Hinduism- ultimately was a distraction from improving one's life now through Buddhist practices.  Moreover, he felt the question was unanswerable and thus the futility of worrying over this idea again distracted a person from practical methods of improving one's life in the here and now.

Read the responses to a question regarding whether Buddha believed in God/gods for a mind-blowing exercise in confusion.  Mind you, how different is this thread from any discussion of Christians of different denominations discussing some aspect of Christianity...or Muslims discussing Islam, etc.?  No religion maintains a single orthodoxy.

Since then I've come to believe this story is more a folk belief rather than a direct quote.  It, however, embodies the general message regarding this question in early Buddhist writings.  The ambiguity, however, allows for a variety of Buddhist views:

Atheism:

There are some passages, and I cite them in the book, where the Buddha does address the question of Theism and Atheism. And he takes a stance of what I call an "ironic Atheist." Buddha treats belief in God with a certain kind of ironic amusement. He doesn't take it seriously at all. And the passages in which he addresses it, are really a sort of like a short diversional entertainment. Once he's dealt with those ideas, he puts them aside, and no longer dwells on that topic. -Stephen Batchelor, Confessions of an Atheist Buddhist

This useful webpage goes into more detail by contextualizing Gautama Siddhartha's life in the context of living in a Hindu society at that time.  It also explores the threads of argument against the existence of a Supreme Being.

Agnosticism:  Like the original story I described at the start of this post, the Buddha basically says "how can we know?" and urges focus on the knowable and do-able by focusing on Buddhist practices to reach enlightenment.  A number of Buddhists take this tack:  there may or may not be a Creator and/or Supreme Being.  In our current states of being we cannot know.

Devas:  In Hinduism devas are a race of beings with god-like powers.  They are in fact gods in Hinduism though there are different levels and types of deities.  Gautama Siddhartha grew up with this belief system.  Later Indian Buddhists appear to have continued to believe in devas but argued they too were ultimately impermanent -and immersed in their lives of sensual pleasures- could be less wise than an enlightened human being.  In other words, like the playful and spiteful Greek, Roman, and Norse gods more familiar to Westerners through classical mythology, the devas were often just like humans with some superpowers thrown in.  So some Buddhists view Buddhism as believing in devas but that they are no more than beings on a more elevated plane of existence similar to humans having certain greater abilities than other animals.

Theism:  While I have not come across much written about this viewpoint, I have encountered a number of spiritual people who practice a form of syncretism where they mix Buddhism and other beliefs.  Some of these people call themselves Buddhists.  Others do not.  They find Buddhist practices a rich skill set for dealing with life.  They take the seeming agnostic Buddhist viewpoint and run with it:  Buddhism gives them skills for dealing with NOW!  Larger questions of the creation of the universe and the afterlife punt to other spiritual perspectives.  So, I've met Buddhist Christians and Buddhist Wiccans.

This is not so unusual.  In Japan people often mix Shinto and Buddhism depending on the life event being acknowledged (births, deaths, etc.).  A great story I learned when I taught in China tells a fable where Gautama Siddhartha, Kongzi (Confucius) and Laozi -the founders of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism respectively- gathered to share a bottle of wine.  Alas, the wine had turned to vinegar.  Confucius first takes a sip, and he frowns because the wine is not what it is supposed to be.  It is disorderly.  Gautama takes a sip and maintains the serene smile on his lips.  Having no expectations, he experiences the vinegar as it is.  At last Laozi takes a sip, and he smiles.  Why?  Because Daoism seeks to understand Nature as it is.  The wine is now vinegar so it is the nature of its true self.

The moral to this story is basically these three belief systems offer a person various skill sets for how to deal with life.  Why choose when you can have all three?

I continue my own exploration of whether I believe in the existence of God, but that is a post for another day.  For now I leave you with this post and a Beatles tune to run through your head.

Meditation on the No Self

This blog is a way for me to understand my growing knowledge and understanding of Buddhism.  So, that's my fine print way of saying "I don't know a lot about Buddhist philosophy."  I'm still learning, and this blog is a way for me to explore and share.

One sometimes challenging concept of Buddhism for me is the idea of no self.  Buddhism argues that our perception of having an individual self is illusionary.  As an illusion, we act in ways sometimes that bring us pain because we cling to this idea of an individual self.  Lord knows I cling to my individual self!

I've come to think of this no self illusion in terms of a single street's relationship with an entire grid pattern.
Streets and roads are part of a larger, interconnected network.  These networks only end at the edge of a continent where oceans separate one network from another.  My house sits on a street that I perceive to be an individual.  It has its own name.  It runs in a particular direction which has a linear cohesiveness to it similar to how my own life has a linear history running through time.  My street is even mine:  it has relationships where certain people live on it.  Certain people commute on it.  Certain repair people maintain the electric lines and sewers above and below it.

But my street is part of a network of all the streets in my city.  My city's network in turn is connected by highways, back roads, and interstates to most of the roads in North America -maybe even South America too.  Change a sign and redirect traffic and my road will become the new twist in the larger, main spoke road to which it connects two blocks up.  There are real things that make my street individual, but in the larger scope of things this individual link in the great network is no more an individual than a single stretch of a line in a painting made with a continuous brush stroke.

I think of myself as like my street:  seemingly individual but part of a larger single spiritual body.  Especially if I do not meditate, my moods are constantly in flux; the reactions to outside stimuli rather than some internal state usually.  Something 'bad' happens and I am in a 'bad' mood.  Something 'good' happens, and I'm in a 'good' mood.  It makes me ask:  just what do I really feel?  Is my emotional state just a series of reactions?

Meditation tells me there is a calm, peaceful state of observation inside.  This place...this me...watches with an interested but detached serenity.  Or, if not always serene, this part of me is able to discern factors behind my emotions such as illness, fear, excitement, etc.

I've read that as one grows deeper in experience with meditation over the years, this place of observation gains depth until the observer notices there is no one to observe:  the people we think we are becomes a series of reactions and relationships we observe.  It is almost as if meditation flies us over our street so that we begin to observe the bigger street grid.  The individual dissolves as a component of the whole.

I think compassion by necessity flows out of this observation.  When the speeding driver irritated by your left turn is as much you as the driver turning left, one feels empathy towards both.

I'll end with two other factoids:

1. There is a Buddhist story or fable about a demon who comes to a Buddhist nun to tempt her with all sorts of worldly delights.  She calmly looks at the demon and tells him there is no one there to tempt.  Neat story! For me the implications are that cultivating this sense of no self is not about nihilism but offers a way to overcome fear, overeating, substance abuse, etc. by moving the locus of control to a higher spiritual sense of unity when our illusionary sense of individual self may feel weak.  Maybe.  I'll have to give this some more thought but it is at least a fable to ponder.

2. One current theory in physics argues that each decision gives birth multiple universes.  In each new universe, we made a different choice.  So, in Universe A I chose chocolate ice cream.  In B I chose vanilla.  In C I chose strawberry.  In D I decided not to have any ice cream at all.  Like the idea of the no self, such a model of the universe is both fascinating and frightening to me because again it unseats the idea of a single, unitary self.  If one could, however, reach a state of being where one was aware of all your selves in the multiverses, each experience would become a rich source of knowledge.  There would be no clinging to hopes for a particular outcome in one universe because both the chosen and feared outcomes would both come to pass in one universe or another.  While physics offers no way currently to perceive between multiverses, it is a concept where Buddhism and physics may overlap in some sense.