Firstly, a note about my absence from this blog for some months. This is due to spending time on long-form writing, specifically two books on the Heart Sutra, one aimed at scholars and the other aimed at general readers. I have several other essays in development for this blog.
The Ṛgveda contains stories about a Promethean figure called Yama, who discovered the way to die and be reborn amongst his ancestors in the pitṛloka or the world of the fathers. I take this to reflect Brahmins assimilating a doctrine of rebirth from their indigenous companions in India. The impression of taking up a previously unknown supernatural commitment is bolstered by the fact that rebirth is not mentioned in the older portions of the Ṛgveda.
The simplest form of rebirth eschatology is a simple cycle of this world and that world, with birth and death connecting them. We see "this world"/"other world" terminology associated with this in Pāli (ayaṃ loko vs paro loko). You always die here and are born there. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka introduced a new goal. Rather than returning to the ancestors, one can merge with Brahman. However, not everyone gets to merge with Brahman; you have to be a man, a Brahmin, and you have to have observed the special rituals all your life. If you are not a Brahmin man, you have some other less desirable fate.
With the addition of alternative destinations based on how one has lived, the stage is set for a revolution: good people—however we define "good"—go to a good place in the afterlife; and bad people go to a bad place. For the Jains, the right way to live is without killing anything. For Buddhists, the right way is to act with good intention. And so on.
At the same time, however, rebirth stops being a good thing. The cycle of rebirth began to be seen as a nightmare from which we all needed to wake up. This view is shared by Brahmins, Jains, and Buddhists.
Indian religions began to aim at what is often called "the deathless" (amṛta). The highest accolade the Buddha ever gave any of his followers after they died was "He has not been reborn". This was the aim of Buddhist practice. The Buddha died, and he was not reborn. The flame or, better, the burning that leapt from incarnation to incarnation, from moment to moment, was extinguished once and for all. As such, the culmination of the Buddha's career is not his attaining nirvāṇa under the bodhi tree, but rather his final extinction (parinirvāṇa) in Kushnagar. With his last death, the Buddha vanishes from our world, never to be seen again. And this is a good thing. At first. When Buddhist art first appears in India, around the time of Asoka, Buddhists are still celebrating the Buddha's ultimate extinction by representing him as absent from the scene.
We can see the Buddha as an anti-Promethean figure, who didn't steal immortality from the gods, but who flung the eternal round of rebirth back in their faces.
The absence of the Buddha is something to celebrate. He succeeded! Everything he said was true! He made it out! And so on. The Buddhist stories about the final death of the Buddha depict the arahants as stoic in the face of his death, with only Ānanda showing any human emotion, weeping for "He who was so kind" (an interesting characteristic to highlight at this point). And yet, this is only the beginning of the story.
Problematising the Buddha's Absence
Fast forward a few centuries. All the people who might have met the Buddha, and all their grandchildren, are dead. The recitation of stories about him has fallen into formalism. Doctrinal and practical disputes have fractured the Buddhist community again and again. There is now a whole zoo of sects competing for followers and patronage. At least some Buddhists are beginning to suspect that the absence of the Buddha is fatal for Buddhism.
In a sense, the impermanence of any particular dispensation is necessary in the myth of the Buddha. The stories of past buddhas emphasise the timelessness of Buddhism. But the idea that the Buddha has no teacher means that only one buddha can appear in the world (in any world) at a time. And the previous buddhas' teaching has to completely die away before a new person can become a buddha. Each buddha as to start from scratch. Buddhists even guessed at the duration of the Buddha's teaching; firstly, it was going to last 500 years, and later 1000 years, and so on until some Buddhists posited that Maitreya would be waiting billions of years for the teaching of Śākyamuni to die out.
However it happened, it's apparent that some Buddhists began to find the absence of a living Buddha problematic. Notably, certain sects came to the conclusion that in the absence of a Buddha, awakening is not possible.
Nowhere was the Buddha's absence more keenly felt than in China, where the idea that the Buddhadharma cyclically appears, persists for a time, and then disappears evolved into the idea that the disappearance is imminent, and we are witnessing the final decline of Buddhism. I've told the story of Jìngwǎn 靜琬, who responded to the end times by carving all the Buddhist sutras in stone at Fangshan.
A practice outlined in the early literature of Buddhism is buddhānusmṛti; recollection of the Buddha, or, to be more precise, recollection of the good qualities of the Buddha. People in the ancient world had exactly the same imaginative capacity as we do. And this means that people could have very vivid imaginative experiences of the Buddha.
Hallucinations and visions are a commonly experienced side-effect of sensory deprivation and are enhanced by ascetic practices such as starvation and sleep deprivation. Withdrawing attention from sensory experience in meditation is a form of sensory deprivation (see Attwood 2021). So, in a community of hardcore meditators, people will have visions. Anyone steeped in Buddhism is quite likely to have visions involving Buddhist imagery, or they will interpret what they see in Buddhist terms.
Recollection of the Buddha was further developed in the Pratyutpanna-buddhasammukhāvasthita-samādhi Sūtra "The Discourse on the Meditation on Meeting the Buddhas of the Present Face to Face". The Pratyutpanna-samādhi Sūtra is contemporary with early Prajñāpāramitā. This text teaches a meditative state in which we can have a vision of the buddhas of the present—not just Śākyamuni, but also Akṣobhya and Amitābha—enabling us to receive teachings from them, and ensuring that we are reborn in their buddha-field.
Indian Buddhists didn't give up on the idea that Śākyamuni was gone from our world and never returning. This fact is as important to Buddhists as Jesus rising from the dead is to Christians. However, recollection and the occasional visions were clearly not enough to sustain Buddhists. An integral aspect of Mahāyāna is the creation of various loopholes to the one Buddha rule. If we cannot have the Buddha, we may still have a buddha.
Note that in this essay I refer to "the early literature of Buddhism", by which I mean the oldest datable literature, which is largely from Gandhāra and China. This should not be confused with the rather dubious and historically problematic idea of "the literature of early Buddhism". As I have noted previously, so-called "early Buddhism" is an orientalist construct. Moreover, the use of Pāli is not attested before the fifth century CE. See also my as-yet-unpublished essay: On Historical Methods in Buddhist Studies and the Disputed Historicity of the Buddha (Version 2).
Loopholes for Making the Buddha Present Again
The Other Universes Loophole
Two of the oldest and most striking Mahāyāna texts are both called Sukhāvativyūha Sūtra. In English, we distinguish a longer and shorter version, which in China are better known as the Wúliàngshòu jīng «無量壽經» (*Amitāyus Sūtra) and the Āmítuó Jīng «阿彌陀經» (*Amitābha Sūtra). The two texts are somewhat different, but they share certain themes.
In particular, these two texts get around the one buddha rule by imagining other worlds in which a buddha still lives. These worlds were called "buddhafields" (buddhakṣetra). In this view, we live in the buddhafield established by Śākyamuni. In some Chinese translations, Sukhāvatī is called a “purified land" (jìngtǔ 净土). From this, the term "pure land" caught on and, thus, we think of the Buddhism focused on Amitābha and Sukhāvatī as Pure Land Buddhism.
However, there is a limitation. Because of the one buddha rule, Amitābha cannot operate in our world. All he can offer is that when we die, he will ensure that we are reborn in Sukhāvatī, where we will meet with ideal conditions for ending rebirth, and live only one more life.
Note that although Sukhāvati is better known, the first pure land attested in Buddhist literature was actually Akṣobhya's buddhafield called Abhirati (on which see Nattier 2000 and Strauch 2010). Another "pure land" buddha is Bhaiṣajyaguruvaiḍūryaprabharāja (aka Bhaiṣajyaguru orBhaiṣajyarāja), who we know in English as "the Medicine Buddha". As noted, both Akṣobhya and Amitābha also feature in the Pratyutpannasamādhi Sūtra.
Pure Land Buddhism became very popular indeed in East Asia and remains amongst the most popular approaches to Buddhism in the modern world.
The Bodhisatva Loophole
The term bodhisatva initially seems to be a way of referring to Śākyamuni prior to his awakening. Although, of course, bodhisatva also refers to all the other Buddhas prior to their awakening. By the time of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā (circa the year 1 CE ± about 200 years), bodhisatva became a term for anyone who was working towards awakening.
By the way, the standard folk etymology, that bodhisatva is a noun that means "a being" (satva) who aspires to awakening (bodhi), is doctrinally fine, but grammatically incorrect. Sanskrit compounds in the form X-satva are almost always adjectival and mean something like "one whose essence is X" or "one having the nature of X". So bodhisatva is not a noun; it's an adjective that means "one whose nature is awakening". We can take this to mean one who is completely dedicated to awakening, but yet to attain it.
In the Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtras, Amitābha is accompanied by his two chief disciples Avalokiteśvara and Mahāsthāmaprāpta, mirroring the triad of Śākyamuni, Śāriputra, and Maudgalyāyana. In the Chinese versions of these texts, Avalokiteśvara is named as Amitābha's heir, making him parallel to Maitreya. Hence, Avalokiteśvara is a bodhisatva.
In another early Mahāyāna text, the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka Sūtra (White Lotus Sutra), a chapter is added (towards the end of the long process of composition) in which Avalokiteśavara is said to respond directly to calls for help and is able to take any appropriate form to help people (including female forms). This chapter circulated independently in China as the Guānyīn jīng «觀音經» (Guanyin Sutra).
The Guanyin Sutra sets the pattern for a whole genre of miraculous stories in Chinese Buddhism in which people experiencing misfortunes call out the name of Avalokiteśvara and are rescued.
It is sometimes said that bodhisatvas of this type somehow "hold back" from nirvāṇa. There is a sense in which this is true, since they are said to be still active in the world. Since they are not absent from the world, they cannot have attained parinirvāṇa. However, it would be better to distinguish between nirvāṇa (which only happens to living beings) and parinirvāṇa (which only happens to awakened beings who die). The idea seems to be that a bodhisatva like Avalokitēsvara has attained nirvāṇa, but not parinirvāṇa. In any case, along the way they have attained almost unlimited magical powers, not least of which is the ability to travel from their own universe to ours (which is never explained as such), and includes a supernaturally long life. Later, in the Tibetan context, the bodhisatva is said to develop the ability to choose to incarnate after death. For example, the Dalai Lama is considered to be an incarnation or avatara of Avalokiteśavara.
In any case, bodhisatvas are not constrained by the one-buddha rule because they are not buddhas; they are the disciples of buddhas in other universes. Once this creative idea was seeded in the Buddhist imagination, it thrived and produced a vast number of bodhisatvas, each with their own cult.
These bodhisatvas from other buddhafields are sometimes erroneously called "celestial bodhisatvas" as though they parallel Christian angels (themselves based on Babylonian figures absorbed into Jewish mythology).
The Eternal Buddha Loophole
While the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka Sūtra speaks to the origins of bodhisatva cults, the main event in the text is the (re)appearance of a Buddha from the distant past.
While Śākyamuni is preaching the Lotus Sutra, a huge stūpa made of the seven precious things rises from the earth accompanied by celestial music and offerings. Inside is the preserved body of Prabhūtaratna Buddha, who lived in the distant past. Long ago, he made a vow that, after entering parinirvāṇa, his entire body would remain inside a stūpa and that he would appear whenever the Lotus Sutra was preached.
Thus, at face value, the Lotus Sutra gets around the one living buddha rule because, in fact, Prabhūtaratna is dead. However, the Lotus Sutra goes a lot further. The claim is made that all buddhas are merely manifestations (nirmāṇa) of Śākyamuni. And in point of fact, the buddhas who appear in different worlds, under different names, teaching different beings—including buddhas who appear to enter parinirvāṇa—are merely skilful manifestations of this singular primordial, eternal buddha.
In this view, there is really only one buddha who attained awakening in the distant past, and now transcends time and space. This buddha is constantly teaching the Dharma through manifest intermediaries, such as Gautama.
A similar claim is made in the somewhat later Survarṇabhāsottama sūtra (Golden Light Sutra).
The idea of emanations of an eternal buddha is further developed by Yogācāra Buddhists in their trikāya "three body" doctrine. Physical manifestations in our universe, like Śākyamuni, are nirmānakāya; Buddhas in the Pure Lands are saṃbhogakāya; and the ādibuddha is dharmakāya. The latter is often reified as "the Dharmakāya".
The idea of a primordial buddha (ādibuddha) becomes embedded in Tantric Buddhism, centred at first on Mahāvairocana and later on different figures. In Kūkai's accounts of esoteric Buddhism, all forms are the secret body of Mahāvairocana, all sounds are his secret voice, and all thoughts are his secret mind. Thus Mahāvairocana is the universe and the universe is Mahāvairocana.
The Buddha Nature Loophole
Another creative response to the absence of the Buddha was the idea of tathāgatagarbha, or buddhadhātu "Buddha nature". This suggests that we all have the germ of a buddha inherent within us, and practice is a matter of revealing our underlying nature.
This idea is first expounded in theMahāparinirvāṇa-mahāsūtra (also erroneously referred to as the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra) and elaborated in theTathāgatagarbha-sūtra.
Michael Radich (2015) suggests that the tathāgatagarbha "womb of the tathāgatas" contrasts with the fleshy womb from which humans are born. Brahmins always saw bodily fluids as ritually polluted, and in the Brahmanised Buddha myth, the Buddha does not emerge from his mother's vagina, where he would be polluted by vaginal secretions, amniotic fluid, and blood, but immaculately through her side. Some versions of the myth also suggest that Māyā was not impregnated in the usual way either, since semen is also a polluting body fluid.
Radich invokes the Christian theological term docetic. A docetic view holds that Jesus was not really human but wholly divine. The contrary of this is the heretical idea of a wholly human Jesus, who was not divine, a view known as psilanthropic (Greek for "merely human").
Over time, Buddhists represent the Buddha as increasingly supernatural and magical. So "docetic" is a nice word, but it also might obscure the fact that what actually happened was that the Buddha became more and more like a god. The idea of a psilanthropic Buddha, as presented by humanists like Thomas and Carolyn Rhys Davids or Richard Gombrich, is popular in Europe but inconsistent with the general trend within Buddhism.
Given all the different loopholes, the idea of docetic buddhas is apt.
What stands out in all of this is how creative Indian Buddhists were in creating loopholes to deal with the problematic absence of the Buddha, and how many different solutions they came up with.
Prajñāpāramitā Doesn't Have a Loophole
Now, I said in the introduction to this essay that "some" Buddhists were bothered by the absence of the Buddha. And I've shown some of the main loopholes that Buddhists imagined in order to bring another buddha into our world to fill the void left by Śākyamuni's parinirvāṇa. There is one example of a piece of literature that seems almost reconciled to the absence of the Buddha.
Following the stock introduction, the opening lines of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā are a discussion about who has authority to preach the Dharma. The Buddha asks Subhūti to instruct the bodhisatvas, and Śāriputra wonders to himself whether Subhūti will teach from the Buddha's authority or his own. Knowing Śāriputra's mind, Subhūti answers that disciples of the Buddha speak with the anubhāva of the awakened (buddhānubhāvena).
In general, Sanskrit anubhāva means "direct perception, apprehension, experience, knowledge from experience, understanding". In translations of Buddhist texts, the word has taken on a magical connotation, and PED suggests translations such as "power, majesty, greatness, splendour, etc", leading to translations such as "by the power of the Buddha". This is certainly redolent of docetism.
I haven't thoroughly checked yet, but it seems to me that the buddha in buddhānubhavena, at least in the context of Aṣṭasāhasrikā, is not a reference to "the Buddha", but is just a past participle being used adjectivally (as they all can be). The Aṣṭasāhasrikā does not seem to refer to Śākyamuni as "the Buddha". He is addressed as Bhagavan and referred to as "a tathāgata". Winding back the docetism a little, I think that buddhānubhāvena means "with the experience of the awakened". Subhūti can speak with the experience of the awakened, precisely because he is awakened (buddha).
Subhūti goes on to explain (Vaidya 1960: 2-3):
yo hi tathāgatena dharmo deśitaḥ, tatra dharma-deśanāyāṃ śikṣamāṇās te tāṃ dharmatāṃ sākṣātkurvanti dhārayanti, tāṃ dharmatāṃ sākṣātkṛtya dhārayitvā yad yad eva bhāṣante, yad yad eva deśayanti, yad yad eva upadiśanti, yad yad evodīrayanti, yad yad eva [3] prakāśayanti, yad yad eva saṃprakāśayanti, sarvaṃ tad dharmatayā aviruddham |
For those who were taught that Dharma by the Tathāgata, training in that instruction of Dharma, they realise the nature [of experience] and retain/maintain [that realisation]. Having realised that nature, whatever they say, whatever they instruct, whatever they teach, whatever they draw out, whatever they reveal, and whatever they make manifest, all that is consistent with the nature [of experience] (dharmatā).
At the very least, this says that the first generation of disciples were every bit as capable of teaching the Dharma because they had realised it for themselves (sākṣātkurvanti) and still bore it in mind (dhārayanti). Which is to say, they were awakened (buddha). However, if this is true, then those disciples were capable of imparting the knowledge to their own followers, who themselves could attain nirvāṇa and become teachers. They are effectively saying that the Buddha's absence is not an issue as long as his awakened disciples (and their disciples) continue to practice Prajñāpāramitā. Only a buddha awakens without a teacher.
Lineages of awakened teachers keep the Dharma alive in the absence of the Buddha, down to the present. This persistence over 2000 years contradicts the myth of the Buddha's dispensation gradually dying out. However, perhaps the number of non-awakened people operating as teachers of awakening argues for the opposite conclusion. You cannot teach what you do not know. In any case, Buddhism is clearly struggling under liberalism and capitalism, but it continues in some fashion.
Conclusion
The desire of Buddhists to be in the presence of the Buddha, or at least a buddha, is understandable. All the more so when we consider how ideas, attitudes, and practices have accreted around the central idea of making experience cease in order to be released from rebirth. By the time Buddhism enters the historical record, we already have a lay wing mainly dedicated to material support of both eremitic and coenobitic monks, veneration of relics (aka stupa worship), and evidence of multiple schisms. As far as I can see, outside of Buddhist mythology, Buddhism as a cultural phenomenon was always pluralistic, and the "underlying unity" that some Theravādins profess to see in the Pāli suttas is a psychological projection. The earliest historical evidence of Buddhism (which does not include the Pāli Suttapiṭaka or the Dīpavaṃsa) is all highly pluralistic.
The Buddha dies and is not reborn. This is celebrated as the greatest success of any person in history. At first. Centuries later, the absence of the Buddha became problematic and drove a series of creative innovations which would enable one to come into the presence of a living Buddha. In addition to the older practice of recollecting the Buddha (buddhānusmṛti), I have outlined three such innovations:
(1) The invention of other universes, known as buddhafields, with living buddhas who could not be active in our world because of the one buddha rule. However, this development also gave us bodhisatvas from other universes who could be active in our world precisely because they are not buddhas. Buddhas and bodhisatvas proliferated.
(2) The idea of a transcendent, eternal, ādibuddha appeared first in the Lotus Sutra and later, for example, in the Golden Light Sutra. The idea is developed into the Yogācāra trikāya doctrine with its dharmakāya buddha, and this is assimilated into tantric/esoteric Buddhism. In these views, the absence of the Buddha is an illusion, since he is omnipresent.
(3) The tathāgatagarbha or buddha-nature doctrine argues that Buddhahood is something (pure and perfect) that already resides within all sentient beings. All Buddhist practice does is reveal the underlying reality (NB this attitude is highly reminiscent of Sāṃkhya as depicted in the Sāṃkhyakārikā).
By the beginning of the Common Era, buddhas are routinely god-like: eternal, omnipresent, and highly magical. Moreover, by this time Buddhists explicitly believe that buddhas and bodhisatvas respond to prayers and intercede in the world to save the pious.
Finally, I pointed out that Aṣṭasāhasrikā addresses the problem by referring to the experience of the awakened (buddhānubhāva) which rests on a personal realisation (sākṣātkurvati) that is retained (dhārayati) by the bodhisatva. However, over time Prajñāpāramitā per se is subsumed into the Mahāyāna synthesis where it is seen merely as proto-Madhyamaka, and becomes detached from the practice of anupalambhayoga.
~~oOo~~
Bibliography
Attwood, Jayarava. 2021. "Sensory Deprivation and the Threefold Way." Unpublished essay. https://www.academia.edu/83896358/Sensory_Deprivation_and_the_Threefold_Way
Nattier, Jan. 2000. "The Realm of Akṣobhya: A Missing Piece in the History of Pure Land Buddhism." Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 23: 71–102.
Radich, Michael. 2015. The Mahāparinirvāṇa-mahāsūtra and the Emergence of Tathāgatagarbha Doctrine. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press,
Strauch, Ingo. 2010. "More Missing Pieces of Early Pure Land Buddhism: New Evidence for Akṣobhya and Abhirati in an Early Mahayana Sutra from Gandhāra." The Eastern Buddhist (New Series) 41(1): 23-66.
Vaidya, P.L. 1960. Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra. Darbhanga: The Mithila Institute.
