Indra in the Writings of Kukai

In this article I want to look at some associations with the Vedic god Indra which have found their way into Buddhism. Indra, under the name Sakka, is a frequent character in the Pali texts, and plays an active and positive role in the Jatakas. Although Buddhists acknowledge no creator god, no supreme being on the model of Jehovah, gods do play an important role in the Buddhist religion.

My starting point will be two mentions of Indra by the 9th century Japanese master Kukai, who I've written about on several previous occasions. In Kukai's writing there are several references to Indra. He uses the image of Indra's Net frequently. It comes from the Avatamsaka Sutra where it conveys the idea of the interpenetration of all things by all things, that is central to Kukai's understanding of the Dharma. I want to pass over this image, however, and look at two other references which are quite different in nature and relate to Indra's role as a god of speech.

The two references are found in Hakeda's translations of Kukai's major works. In the Shoji jisso gi, or Meaning of Sound, Word, and Reality Kukai quotes a verse from the Mahavairocana Sutra:

The perfectly Enlightened One's mantras Are made up of syllables, names, or clauses; Like the statements of Indra, They are meaningful and effective.[1]

Then in the Ungi gi Kukai is discusssing the meanings of the phonemes which make up the seed syllable hum (ie hūṃ) and says:

Next, if interpreting from the point of view of their common features, it can be stated that each letter embraces the universe principle, all the teachings, religious practices, and attainments, just as [each word in the grammatical] statements made by Indra contains many meanings...[2]

In the first instance Kukai explains away the presence of Indra as an authority on truth by equating the name with a secular Sanskrit grammarian known as Shakradeva. This is plausible, but I think there is a better explanation. In the Shatapatha-Brahmana there is a sory about Indra defeating the demon Vritra. Indra is cheated out of part of his reward by the messenger god Vayu, and as a result decides to make only one fourth of speech, that is the vocal sounds of humans only, intelligible. The speech of birds, animals, and insects are therefore unintelligible.[3] Beck points out that this is a reworking of a Rigvedic myth which reinforces Indra's role as grammarian, or as the god responsible for making Vac comprehensible. Later, although still prebuddhist, in Chandogya Upanishad it says "all vowels are embodiments of Indra" (CU ii.24.3). It seems as though Indra maintained this function in the Mahavairocana Sutra, although this does not sit well with Kukai.

The second idea, that things said by Indra can have many meanings, also harks back to Vedic literature. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 5.2 shows another Vedic god, Prajapati, conversing with gods, humans, and demons. In answer to questions from each he merely says "da". By this the gods understand daamayata (self-control); humans datta (giving); and demons dayadhvam (compassion). The short section ends with the words

This is what the divine voice that is thunder repeats: 'DA DA DA', 'Be self-controlled! Give! Be compassionate![4]

Now although it is said to be Prajapati speaking it is very clear in Vedic myth that thunder is associated with Indra. Indeed one could say that for the Vedic speaking people Indra was thunder. So this would seem to be one of those cases, common in Indian texts, where one god has assumed the attributes of another. Further more we see the idea that a single syllable can have very different meanings - a phenomena modern scholars call polysemy (from the Greek = multiple meaning). This is precisely what Kukai is exploring in the Ungi gi. Kukai allows for infinite meanings, not only for hum itself, but for each of it's constituent parts.

Later on Indra's role as Vagishvara - or lord of Speech - was taken over by the bodhisattva Manjusri who, in early Chinese imagery, is sometimes depicted as riding a white elephant, just as Indra does. Manjusri has yet to take up this role in 9th century Japan. It is possible that had not occured even in China, which is the likely home of the cult of Manjusri. As the original wielder of the thunderbolt or vajra, Indra is also a model for Vajrapani.

Portrayals of Indra in Buddhist and Vedic literature do seem to vary quite a bit. So much so that Rhys Davids was moved to write in his Dictionary:

Europeans have found a strange difficulty in understanding the real relation of Sakka to Indra... Sakka belongs only to Buddhist mythology then being built up. He is not only quite different from Indra, but is the direct contrary of that blustering, drunken, was god.[5]

As I have said, Indra, often plays a positive role in the Jatakas, and is often shown payin homage to the Buddha. He appears to be a representative of the old Vedic gods, and is often paired with Brahma representing the later Vedantic gods.

Even in this brief treatment I think you can see that the Vedic Indra did indeed find his way into Buddhism and that these two roles - the one who makes things meaningful, and the one who allows for polysemy - are present in the writing of Kukai in 9th century Japan. These things are impossible to prove of course, and there may be some 'black swan' piece of evidence waiting out there to show the theory to be wrong, but the precedents existed and Buddhists have a long history of borrowing from their surrounding culture, so the circumstantial case is quite good.


Notes

[1] Hakeda. Kukai : Major Works. p. 238
[2] Hakeda. p. 259
[3] quoted in Beck, Guy. Sonic Theology. p.26.
[4] Roebuck, Valerie J. The Upanisads. p82 (BU 5.2.3)
[5] Rhys-Davids, Pali-English Dictionary. sv Inda, p.121.

image: Indra (with vajra) and consort on elephant. Keshava Temple, Somnathpur. www.art-and-archaeology.com

The Seed Syllable of Perfect Wisdom

dhīḥ
Siddham Script

The seed syllable dhīḥ (धीः) shown left in the Siddham script, turns up in a number of mantras such as those of Mañjughoṣa and Prajñāpāramitā. There doesn't seem to be much written about dhīḥ so I thought I'd summarise what I know here. It is frequently said that mantras, especially seed syllables (bīja) are untranslatable, and this is often true. In the case of dhīḥ however we find that it is a regular word. Monier-Williams gives several definitions for dhī:

1. to perceive , think , reflect
2. f. thought , (esp.) religious thought , reflection , meditation , devotion , prayer (pl. Holy Thoughts personified); understanding , intelligence , wisdom (personified as the wife of Rudra-manyu ) , knowledge , science , art; mind , disposition , intention , design; notion , opinion , the taking for (comp.)

Dhīḥ is singular of either the nominative or the vocative form of the noun - ie it is either a name or attribute; or form of address as in Oh (she) who perceives. The word occurs rarely in the Ṛgveda where it's usually translated as intelligence or prayer, though clearly the connotations are much broader. Antonio T. De Nicolas translates it as vision in his essay Religious Experience and Religious Languages. Monier-Williams definition 2. is clearly interesting territory for Buddhists and covers much the same religious territory as the wisdom dieties mentioned below.

So dhīḥ, not surprisingly became the seed syllable - the sonic quintessence - of the goddess of wisdom in Buddhism, Prajñāpāramitā, who names means "perfection of wisdom". It occurs, unusually in the middle of her mantra: oṃ āḥ dhīḥ hūṃ svāhā.

And with the connection between her and Mañjuśrī which becomes apparent in tantric literature it should be no surprise that it is also his seed syllable. In the case of his mantra is it tacked onto the end of the Alphabet of Wisdom, om arapacana dhīḥ

Geshe Rabten describes the formal debating procedure of Tibetan monks at the beginning of which they yell dhīḥ - invoking Mañjuśrī. They pose some problem for an opponent, and yell dhīḥ as they clap their hands together leaving the opponent to answer as best they can. He says:

dhīḥ
Tibetan Uchen Script

"Then you draw the right hand back, and at the same time put the left hand forward. This motion of the left hand symbolizes closing the doors of the three lower states of rebirth; drawing back the right hand symbolizes one’s wish to bring all sentient beings to liberation. But to fulfil this wish is not easy. You must have great knowledge and wisdom; and for this you recite ‘dhīḥ’, asking Mañjuśrī to pour down a torrent of wisdom upon you."

But the word also has an effect on Mañjuśrī he "blesses us with wisdom and understanding". These two aspects of the use of mantra go back to Vedic times when the sacrifice provided 'food' for the gods, who responded with 'food' for the worshippers - the food in both cases being metaphorical rather than literal.

Edie Farwell and Anne Hubbell Maiden, in The Wisdom Of Tibetan Childbirth tell us that Tibetans paint dhīḥ on the tongue of newborns using saffron so that they will be articulate and wise.

So dhīḥ is the syllabic, even sonic, representation of perfect wisdom - the wisdom that sees everything just as it is, without adding or subtracting anything, and is applied in ways which both evoke and invoke the qualities of perfect wisdom as embodied by Mañjuśrī and Prajñāpāramitā.

~~oOo~~

What's in a name?

If a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet, what would Shakespeare have made of roses with no smell at all? If the smell is the thing, then why not just call Turkish Delight "Rose". Does "rosey cheeks" refer to the way someone smells? The relationship of words to things is one of the most fascinating philosophical problems. Most people take up one of two extreme positions on this subject: firstly that names are natural to their object, and secondly that names are entirely conventional, the latter being the most common way of thinking about it at present. Plato explored both sides of the debate in his Cratylus dialogue but typically did not commit to either view. What follows is an attempt at a Buddhist perspective on the problem, heavily informed by the writing of George Lakoff.*

There is a fundamental error which has persisted almost throughout the history of thinking about this problem. The assumption has always been that there is a one to one relationship between a word and the thing it names, and that the 'things' are unitary. So dog is one 'thing' and rose is another 'thing', and the ideal language, a dream of scholars both biblical and secular, would have only one word for each thing. The things are assumed to be unitary for the purposes of naming, even though we know them to be a collection of attributes. All of this multiplicity of reference and meaning seems untidy somehow.

If, the argument goes, there was a natural relationship between words and things, then everyone would use the same word for a thing. Therefore because different languages use different names for things, there is no natural relationship - words are arbitrary. This is the current paradigm for thinking about the relationship between words and things. The hypothesis is made only slightly more sophisticated by an acknowledgement that our choice of words is not entirely free, but constrained by 'socially agreed rules' such as the phonetic pallet of a language. However this holds only if we first make the assumption that the thing being named is unitary and that it is viewed identically by everyone everywhere. Simple observation should be enough to tell us that things are not unitary they are complex, nor are people always agreed on what they perceive. And yet on this assumption rests most of contemporary linguistics!

Within any category of object there is a great deal of variation. A great-dane is a dog, as is a poodle or a corgi. But these creatures are really quite different in some ways as well. George Lakoff tells us that they fit the category dog because of their shared features, but that some will seem more typically like a dog to us, and some less. He refers to these typical category members as protoypes. This is crucial. When I say 'dog' I may have a different beast in mind than when you say 'dog', especially if we come from different cultures. Often we are quite atuned to such subtle differences. We have quite a few words in English: dog, canine, mutt, cur, hound, mongrel, spaniel, tyke, bitch, pup, pooch, 'man's best friend', plus as many as 200 breeds. And we probably know when each word fits. Sometimes I might even, if only ironically, dispute that the animal in question is a member of the category: "call that a dog?". Think about how we use dog in metaphors as refering to a subordinate position, or loyalty, or persistence, or a keen sense of smell. As well there are many ways to see a dog: as a working dog, a hunting dog, a lap dog, a guard dog, a circus dog, a food item, etc. We may change the word we use for the dog depending on whether the dog has shit on our carpet or not! "Dog" is not a simple unitary concept- it is, as we Buddhists say, compounded and has a subjective component. But because we have a tendency to focus unconsciously on prototypes, we come to believe that a dog is a dog is a dog.

If we have different images of the archetypal dog, and if perhaps we interact differently with dogs, and we actually do have a number of words to suit the occasion, then it makes perfect sense that someone from a another culture uses a different word to the one I use. This needn't lead to the conclusion that words are arbitrary, only to the conclusion that the relationship between words and things is complex, because we and things are complex.

What I'm arguing for is a more nuanced view of words, things, and the relationships between them - for a middle way. A Buddhist theory of naming, on the grounds of observation, must refuse to see things as either determined or random, these are extremes. Equally it would not see the complex as simple. It would refute the notion of "dogness" - an essence possessed by all dogs upon which the name hangs. Such an essence cannot be found. I've mainly address the question from the point of view of debunking the 'arbitrary' argument. Sometime I'd like to look at the other side of the equation - the 'naturalness argument.

Would it really have mattered if Juliet was a Montague? Well probably not, but it might have mattered if she had been a dog! Is this stuff important? Well I believe that the way we use words tells us a lot about the working of the mind, and to a Buddhist there is no more important subject!


* My thoughts on this are influenced in particular by:
George Lakoff (1987). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Uni of Chicago Press
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Uni of Chicago Press

The Yellow Rite

Yellow is the colour of the sun, of gold, and of fields of grain in the autumn just prior to harvest. Hence it is associated with richness, abundance, and fecundity. The sun is probably the most important thing in India and features in the mythologies of all the various sub-cultures. It is also a potent symbol. For the last five years I've lived in Cambridge England. When you are 52 degrees north of the equator the sun is never directly overhead. But in India the sun is high in the sky even in winter. The sun is the key to everything. Just enough and the plants grow and ripen, but too much and plants, animals and people start to die. The sun has many names in India - Sūrya, Vairocana, Prabhakara, Āditya, Mitra, Savitri, etc. Gold is a precious substance where ever it is found. Gold does not tarnish. It is both ductile and malleable and can be made into any shape, or beaten so thin that light passes through it, picking up a greenish tinge on the way. The Aryan people were golden skinned, and Buddhists insisted that the Buddha was the colour of gold.

So it should come as no surprise that the Yellow, or Golden Rite is the Rite of Abundance and Increase. This rite can be used to gain wealth, to be materially rich, but spiritually speaking the greatest wealth is not material, it is knowledge and vision of how things really are. However there is often a middle ground in the use of this rite. In the Tara Tantra it says by this rite, one will be endowed with necessary goods, long life, beautiful appearance, and strength. In the form of the Tara mantra addressed to White Tara one requests that Tara grant you long life, merit and wisdom. But why these qualities? It is said that these things - long life, beauty, strength, merit, wisdom etc. - all help the Bodhisattva to spread the message of the Buddha and to sustain them in their repeated sojourns in saṃsara. One requests the material things that will best support one's spiritual progress in other words!

I'll talk about two applications of the Yellow Rite: gratitude and generosity. With my usual disclaimer about my rather idiosyncratic approach to this kind of magic.

Gratitude is a very positive mental state. By cultivating a sense of gratitude for what we already have we do begin to experience a sense of abundance. Often our dissatisfaction with what we have, whether it be a sexual partner, a car, or whatever, is because we have ceased to pay attention to the fact that we have it. Because the grass is always greener on the other side, we stop looking at the grass on this side. Gratitude brings us back into relationship with our immediate surroundings, our personal possessions and helps up to appreciate how lucky we are. In other words gratitude helps us reconnect with the fundamental interconnectedness of the cosmos. This is the essence of tantric magic according to Ariel Glucklich who studied modern day tantric magi in Varanasi.*

Even if things could always be better, anyone well-off enough to read these words on the internet probably has plenty to be grateful for. Gratitude is a way of creating awareness of abundance, the abundance that we already have, and which can help to counteract the feeling that we don't have enough, or even that we aren't good enough. From a state of abundance, we are always ready to give, which leads us onto generosity.

Generosity is giving from a sense of abundance, and it creates abundance for others. I've written quite a bit about generosity in my take on the six perfections for instance, or in the story of my generous friend Kapil. I see one of the primary aspects of generosity as making us aware of other people. But the Yellow Rite it is also a way to create a sense of abundance in everyone around us. If we all gave until we "swooned with joy" then what abundance there would be! Generosity is also about letting go of attachments, and this again creates a sense of abundance in us.

You can see that I am not advocating the Yellow Rite as a way of getting what you want, although this aspect of the rite is present in the texts. The Buddha was quite clear that amassing a fortune, acquiring lovers and families, storing up food, or gold, or favours, etc would not provide any lasting satisfaction. At the very least we are all going to die. A mountain of gold will not change this fact. A dozen beautiful lovers will not prevent us getting old. And most of us will get sick at some point despite having a hundred DVD's in our collection. Actually it is possible to be happy and have very few possessions. Remember back in the 1980's when Ronald Reagan was pursuing the arms race with Soviet Russia and it was announced that there were enough nuclear weapons on both sides to destroy all life on the planet 100 times over? I remember thinking how insane that situation was. I remember thinking what's the point? Sometimes having more of something is completely pointless.

In my blog post about the yellow Buddha Ratnasambhava I pointed out that he represents both our highest ideals - the jewel of Awakening - and our most fundamental value - generosity. The Yellow Rite is concerned with activating the latter in pursuit of the former.


* Ariel Glucklich (1997) The End of Magic. Oxford University Press Inc, USA.

Lucifer... still up there!

One of the joys of being on my ordination retreat was that we were a long way from the light pollution of 'civilisation'. So for the first time I got to see the northern stars! Each night as we emerged from our evening puja at about 10pm I would pause to look up and marvel at the stars - viewing was good about 95% of the time.

When the retreat started in early April, Leo was almost directly overhead at that time of night. Orion was still above the western horizon, and many other constellations which I had never seen before were also visible - notably Ursa Minor and the Pole Star, a real novelty for this southern hemisphere dweller. As the weeks went by Orion strayed closer to the horizon each night until he was no longer visible at 10pm, and Leo was chasing after him, leaving Virgo and then Libra to the top spot.

But what really captivated me was Venus, Lucifer, the Evening Star. The name Lucifer means simply "Light Bringer" and probably refers to his being the brightest star in the heavens. By lining up a couple of pointer stars I was able to observe Lucifer moving against the backdrop of the stars, and even, after a few weeks for him to go retrograde and retrace his steps. This is one of those things that I have seemingly always known about, taken for granted even, but can now confirm, having seen it with my own eyes.

The linking of Lucifer, the Morning Star, with Satan or the Devil in the Christian tradition is usually put down to a misreading of Isaiah (14:12) "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!". Isaiah it seems was referring symbollically to a king of Babylon, probably Nebuchadnezzar (though this is disputed). Origen (The 3rd Century Christian Father) seems to have been the first to make the misidentification, although it was Augustine who cemented it (in The City of God, XI,15), and Dante who popularised it. The whole story of the Christian Devil seems to be a comedy of errors - recounted in many places although my favourite is an art book by Luther Link - The Devil : the Archfiend in art from the 6th to the 16th century.

However as my observations have made clear, and this is my point, far from having fallen, Lucifer is still the brightest star and still traverses the heavens! Although the misidentification is patent, and deflates the idea of the morning star being related to evil incarnate, this observation still seems significant to me. For one thing it shows how a simple misunderstanding can propagate through a civilisation and become significant - a meme with a life of it's own. For another it reminds me that the understanding of Heaven and Hell in the west owes more to Dante and Milton than to the Bible. I recently rewatched the film Dogma which despite it's ironically didactic, even evengelical, tone (seeking to convert us not to Christianity, but to a very liberal humanism), relies on Dante and Milton for it's imagery and story without seemingly being at all aware that it is doing so.

Perhaps the unfallen Lucifer reminds us that unacknowledged aspects of our psyche - what Jung called the Shadow - can still be manifest, even if we ignore, or demonise them. He also reminds us that what is unacknowledged need not in fact be 'bad' or 'evil', but can be, like Lucifer, a bringer of light. Interestingly when reading Milton the modern reader generally seems to find Lucifer the more symapthetic character. Jehovah comes across as domineering and bombastic, whereas Lucifer clearly has good cause - it seems from the story - to be unhappy with the abitrary and summary way in which he is displaced in the eyes of the creator by the rather wet figure of Jesus. 'Self-awareness - an important aspect of Buddhist practice - means taking in every aspect of our psyche including the bits we would rather not. Indeed spiritual progress is hardly thinkable without acknowledging that currently we are sunk in a mire of greed and hatred and delusion. For Shinran this was so much the case that he could not conceive of us ever escaping without the grace of the Buddha to extract us.

However Lucifer is also a bright star and this reminds us that there is hope, there is light in the world. Light is a frequent symbol in Buddhist texts - the Buddha is a lamp who lights the way in the darkness of our ignorance. We Western Buddhists have responded strongly to the image which is seen in our adoption of "Enlightenment" as a translation for Bodhi despite the two concepts being etymologically unrelated. Ignorance is darkness, and Awareness is light. In the Mahayana texts Buddhas are often seen illuminating the universe with rays of light, and Bodhisattvas themselves are said to be made of light. For Buddhists the Buddha is the light at the end of the tunnel, and the central image of the Bardo Thodol is of the light of the Dharmadhatu.

The goal of Buddhists is not simply to bask in the light of a saviour, even in Pure Land Buddhism! It is to become Buddhas, to becomes a lamp ourselves. If we make the effort towards awareness then we become light bringers too!

- Image: Lucifer (before the fall), William Blake.

The Mystical ARAPACANA Alphabet

Manjughosa and his twin Manjusri are well known Mayahana figures. Both are youths of 16, the colour of a tiger's eye, brandishing a flaming sword, and holding a book - the Pefection of Wisdom in 8000 lines. Their mantra is pretty common in the FWBO as it's one of the nine chanted at the end of seven-fold pujas: oṃ a ra pa ca na dhiḥ. Om is a sacred Indian sound symbol which is at once very simple, but very difficult to write about without becoming trite. Dhih is a seed syllable which is associated with perfect wisdom. Again I find it difficult to write much about dhih. It seems to me that the om and dhih simply indicate that arapacana found a home in the generalised Mahayana cult of the dharani (about which more another time). However I recently turned up something interesting about arapacana that I would like to share.

arapacana is made up of the first five syllables of an alphabet which occurs in the Perfection of Wisdom in 25,000 lines - translated by Edward Conze as The Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom. I need to clarify 'alphabet' a bit. Actually Sanskrit is a syllabic language, which means that a consonant is almost always associated with a vowel. The most basic, unmarked, form assumes the short 'a' vowel sound which you hear in the English word but. That's why the 'alphabet' is not written in roman characters as arpcn! So this alphabet is spelt out in the Sutra, and each syllable is associated with some aspect of perfect wisdom. A, for instance, stands for anutpada - unarisen - and refers to the idea that no actual 'things' ultimately exist, that there are just conglomerations of conditions which are constantly changing. One of the most important conditions being our perception and the associated mental processes.

The alert amongst you will already have clocked that the Sanskrit alphabet does not begin a ra pa ca na - it begins with the vowels a, i, u, e, o, etc, in their short and long forms. Even the consonants start with ka, kha, ga, gha, nga, etc. So this is not the Sanskrit alphabet. Some scholars have postulated a Gandhari origin, or that it relates to the Karoshthi alphabet.* The earlier Lalitavistara Sutra also has an alphabet of Wisdom - this one is Sanskrit.

But why? What is special about the alphabet? The answer lies, I suggest, not in Buddhism at all but in one branch of Vedic exegesis known as Mimamsa (miimaa.msaa) which has origins almost as old as the Vedas themselves, although the first systematic account was Jaimini's Mimamsa Sutra probably written about 200 BCE - about a century before the Lalitavistara Sutra.

The central concern of the Mimamsa School was the status of the Vedas as divine revelation - and as such they parallel the Christian philosophers who sought to "prove" the divine status of the Christian Bible. The Indian problem was that the words used in the Vedas were (more or less ) the same words that ordinary people use in their banal conversations. What is so holy about them? A contemporary school, the Sphotavada, worked along the lines that the words were special because of the order that they were in - that it was the sentences of the Vedas that made them holy. The Mimamsa went in the other direction. The meaning of a sentence depends on the sum of the parts that make it up. The smallest units are what are true or real (both translations of satya) and in the case of Sanskrit this is the syllable. To quote Shabara, a mid-1st century BCE Mimamsa scholar:

"The word gauh (cow) is nothing more that the three phonemes which are found in it, namely g, au, and h... It is also these very phonemes which cause the understanding of the meaning of the word".

Contemporary scholar Guy Beck adds:

"The human process of comprehension is therein said to result from the mysterious accumulation of individual letter potencies (shakti), each of which leaves an impression or trace (samskara), which carries over onto the next letter or syllable".**

The early Upanishads contain several little treatises on the associations of syllables with esoteric meaning - Chandogya 1.3.6 for instance. But Shabara has taken this to it's logical conclusion and given significance to all of the syllables. This doesn't entirely solve the problem of logically establishing the revealed nature of the Vedas, but that need not distract us at present since that is not our project.

Shabara wrote in the time immediately preceding, or even slightly over-lapping, the rise of the Mahayana. We know that Buddhists, in accordance with the general Indian approach, were apt to incorporate any practice or idea which could be adapted to their use. It seems to me that in this case the Vedic linguistic speculations were adopted, and developed. The apotheosis of this occurs in the Mahavairocana Abhisambodhi Tantra where visualisation of the Sanskrit alphabet is recommended as a meditation practice.

It is interesting to note that this ancient India interest in the significance of words or syllables prefigures much of modern linguistics. Ferdinand de Saussure himself had held a professorship in Sanskrit before giving his lectures on general linguistics in 1910-11 that have set the agenda of linguistics ever since. Another interest contemporary parallel is in the research of Margaret Magnus. Magnus's doctoral thesis explored the way that phonemes (the smallest unit of articulate vocal sounds) bear meaning. Standard linguistic theory tells us that phonemes have an arbitrary relationship to meaning - that the sounds we use to indicate things or concepts are arbitrary and conventional. I don't have space in this post to go into the details of Magnus's findings, but I have repeated many of her experiments and I believe that phonemes are not entirely arbitrary.

The arapacana mantra, then, stands as an embodiment of a principle, put forward by the Mimamsa school on the basis of Upanishadic speculation, but taken up by Buddhists around the time of the rise of the Mahayana: that each and every articulate vocal sound has significance.

* see for instance: Richard Salomon. New Evidence for a Gandhari Origin of the Arapacana Syllabary. Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 110, No. 2 (Apr - Jun, 1990), pp. 255-273
** Guy L. Beck. Sonic Theology. (Delhi : Motilal Banarsidass, 1995, 1993), pp.61.


Sound files from my evening on the Arapacana Alphabet at the Cambridge Buddhist Centre, 1 Nov 2007.

• talk on the Arapacana Alphabet
• A led meditation on the first five letters of the Arapacana Alphabet.

15/3/08. I've just added a page to visblemantra.org which pulls out the bits of the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Sūtra related to the Wisdom Alphabet meditation, with a few added comments.

The Buddha and the Lost Metaphor

At the end of 2006 I attended a series of lectures by Richard Gombrich and I promised to try to use my blog to pass on some of what he said. In this entry I want to look at a metaphor used by the Buddha, but which had already become obscure by the time the Pali Canon was written down. The metaphor is "dwelling (or staying) with Brahma" - brahmaa vihaara in Pali. Obviously this is an important metaphor for Buddhists and well known to practitioners in the FWBO through the Mettabhavana meditation practice, which is said to be one of the four "Brahma Viharas" - along with the karuna, mudita and upekkha-viharas. So where did this metaphor come from?

Even a passing familiarity with the Upanishads will show you that 'dwelling with Brahma' is a paraphrase of the goal of spiritual practice in those texts. There is it usually presented as union with Brahma, but this is not significantly different from the Buddhist usage. So what is going on here? Is the Buddha suggesting that we literally seek union with Brahma? We need not take the phrase literally, and in fact there is much to suggest that the Buddha did not mean it so.

Gombrich has analysed the occurrences of this way of speaking, and has come to see the Tevijja Sutta in the Digha Nikaya as the first usage. In most texts the metaphor is used awkwardly, or interpreted literally, but in the Tevijja Sutta, although the actual words Brahma vihara are not used, the idea is present and fits the context. In the Tevijja Sutta the Buddha is using the idea of the way to Brahma (where one would subsequently dwell) as a metaphor for the goal of the spiritual life, and the audience are Brahmins who would have been well versed in this kind of talk. The Tevijja Sutta is part parody because it criticises those Brahmins who purport to teach the way to Brahma when most of them have never even laid eyes on Brahma. The Buddha tells them that he has seen Brahma face to face - this is the subject of another parody in the Digha Nikaya - and that he can teach them the way to Brahma which is to practice a meditation on loving kindness. This is clearly an early example of the Buddha's "skill in means", a quality that came to the fore in the White Lotus Sutra.

Now by the time the Canon was written down the sense of this metaphor had been lost. Gombrich argues, and I think we must agree, that the Buddha was cognizant of the early Upanishads. We know this because he names, quotes from, and satirises them! But the scribes of three or four centuries later who wrote the Canon down in Sri Lanka were not familiar with the Upanishads, and so they struggled to know what to make of the Buddha teaching the "way to Brahma". One of the consequences of taking the Buddha literally was that a new set of "realms" had to be added to Buddhist cosmology - the Brahmalokas. Also to "dwell with Brahma" meant being reborn in a loka or realm, which meant that one was not freed from rebirth, and therefore not Awakened! So the scribes had to do quite a lot of work to fit all this in.

Independently I have found a striking confirmation of this conjecture in the Karaniya Metta Sutta. This is one of the most familiar suttas in the Pali Canon. It asks the question: what should one do who seeks the path of peace? And then it gives a well structured account of practice: one should be ethical it says, morally and ethically good. And then one should practice a meditation, which we would now recognise as a species of Mettabhavana, in which one cultivates boundless loving kindness to all creatures - just as, the sutta says, a mother loves and protects her only child, so should we regard all that lives, leaving none out. To do this, to keep this reflection in mind at all times, is, the text says, to dwell with Brahma. But then comes a little coda, the tenth verse, which goes back to the beginning and in a completely different style admonishers us to be ethical and avoid falling into wrong views, and if we practice well we will "never again lie in a womb".

I'd like to suggest that the last verse was added later. It is clearly different in tone than the preceding nine verses, and it does not fit the structure. I suggest that the line (below with my rough translation) at the end of the ninth verse is the original ending of the sutta:

etaṃ satiṃ adhiṭṭeyya brahmaṃ etaṃ vihāraṃ idha-m-ahu
This mindfulness should be undertaken, this is dwelling with Brahma here and now they say.

The tenth verse was probably added by an assiduous monk who, in ignorance of the metaphor, thought that "dwelling with Brahma" could not be the end of the sutta since at best it meant taking rebirth in a Brahmaloka, and at worst was non-Buddhist! Perhaps he thought that a verse had been lost which revealed the true intent of the sutta and so added one that fit his worldview. This fits with Gombrich's hypothesis, and helps to make sense of an awkwardness in the text. I've run this past a number of fans of the sutta and they agree that it is at least plausible. Of course we can never prove such a thing, and the ten verse Karaniya Metta Sutta is still the canonical version. But it does show that we need to be alert when dealing with texts, even canonical texts. It is all to easy for metaphors to become lost over time, or in different cultures.

- image : Chola bronze of Brahma

29-03-08 fixed typos, added diacritics.

26-8-12 The website Chant Pāli has some references which confirm my supposition about the 10th verse. The metre of the verse is inconsistent with the other nine, either a different metre or a "very irregular".

Warder (1970), p. 228, n. 1, suggests that this last verse is "a later addition." Warder, A.K. (1970, 2004). Indian Buddhism. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. ISBN: 81-208-1741-9.

 Ānandajoti (2007), n. 11, writes: "Metre: it may be we should take the first half of the pādayuga as a Siloka line showing the savipula. If it is Old Gīti it is very irregular."

The inconsistent metre further reinforces the perception that the verse was written by another person than the original composer. My conjecture that the editor was concerned about ending on the note about dwelling with Brahma seems more likely in this light. It might be simple prejudice but it seems to me that a lesser intellect and lesser poet, a blockhead fundamentalist, has tampered with the poem.

When Awareness is too much to bear

There's an image from near the beginning of the Tibetan Book of the Dead as translated by Chögyam Trungpa that has stayed with me. In the bardo we are confronted with Reality in it's pure form, but it is too intense and we flinch away, and then we are presented with Reality in a slightly less straightforward, but still pure, form, but it also is too intense and we flinch. We keep chunking down until we find a level of Reality we can deal with. In every moment Reality is staring us in the face but often it's too intense and we have to look away. And so we are bound to Samsara. It seems that all of us can only bear a little Reality at a time.

I love the phrase consensual reality! Most of the time it just means 'the level of reality which most of the community, or the collective, can handle over a sustained period of time'. What is meant, I'm sure, is not the mob, not the unthinking riot that can spontaneously break about amongst groups, but the more everyday conspiracy that we generally do tacitly consent to. This can be interesting for Buddhists because we are interested in consensus and we are interested in Reality. Buddhist practices aim to raise our level of awareness and to get us to consent to a higher level of reality. So we often don't consent to consensual reality, and that can be a interesting position to be in as anti-war protesters in Sri Lanka found last year when they were attacked by a mob of hardline pro-war bhikkhus! (which must be the acme of Buddhist oxymorons)

It's hard when one is depressed, to put on a good show as a Buddhist. If we hang around with other Buddhists a lot, and I do, then we can get these subtle hints, and sometimes not so subtle, that it is not OK that we are suffering quite so much and quite so publicly. Almost like we're letting the side down somehow. Everyone suffers of course, but some people suffering much more acutely, and witnessing this can make us very uncomfortable. Buddhists are meant to be happy, yeah?

Sometimes when ordinary reality is too much to bear things can escalate way off the scale and you end up in a realm of intense mental suffering, the Hell Realms. This is not an unfamiliar experience for me, and I know a number of people who when confronted with reality have, for instance, tried to take their own lives, or to harm themselves in any number of ways. Remember that everyone is flinching from reality all the time. If we flinch away from an experience that is incredibly painful then we are not behaving in a way that is different to our fellow humans.

The difference is merely one of the strength of the reaction. The more painful the experience the more we flinch, and that can take us into the Hell Realms. It's also important to remember that this is not a punishment. Not facing Reality is in itself painful. But for some reality is so painful that they will attempt suicide, or cut themselves, or numb themselves with strong drugs, or whatever. Sometimes the pain spills over into unskilful behaviour - anger, shouting, attacking - frequently the sufferer blames and punishes themselves which just makes things worse.

Now some people will immediately be able to relate to this - they will have their own experience of harming themselves in some drastic way in order to avoid experiencing reality. But the majority will not get what I am saying. You feel confused by extreme responses to suffering, you feel uncomfortable, you feel threatened, you feel afraid. Try this (with caution): imagine that you are a small, defenceless child, and that someone larger, or a group of people, is physically attacking you. How long does the attack last? Are you badly hurt, or just terrified? Was it a stranger, or someone you know and love? Were there witnesses and how did they respond: with kindness, with mockery, did they join in? Now imagine it all over again. And again. Do this at several times a day for several years. Imagine that you have almost perfect recall of the violent events so that the memories of being attacked and abused are, after decades even, capable of propelling your body into a fight or flight response - your heart races, your muscles tense, your breathing is shallow! Would you be willing to try this thought experiment? How far would you take it and what effect would it have on your mind? Would you chose to do it? Would you be able to? For some people, some times there isn't really a choice - those are our memories, that is our experience.

Sangharakshita points out that in the Tibetan Wheel of Life the Buddha who appears in the Hell Realms offers the beings there Amrita which has a double connotation. Amrita means "deathless" so it stands for the goal. Sometimes when you at rock bottom there is nothing to do but go for refuge. Amrita is also like ambrosia though, like a soothing balm. And this is something that beings in Hell need: they need to be soothed and cooled, they need a little relief. This may seem like a contradiction but sometimes what people who are suffering need is a little distraction. When you suffer intensely it is all too easy to be caught up in that, to feel like all there is is suffering. A little soothing distraction can create enough space around the hurt, enough perspective to allow a more creative response. It is said that the human realm is so special because it is only from there that Awakening is possible. Sometimes a little relief allows a being in Hell to approach a more human state from where anything is possible.

I don't think there's any way around the fact that we need to cultivate awareness, that we need to pay attention to what is going on. But compassion dictates that we allow for human weakness in ourselves and others, that we allow for flinching away from pain. Each person is the best judge of how much pain they can stand, and we need to let them make that decision for themselves. And maybe stand by with amrita.

image - detail from Michelangelo's Last Judgement.

Buddhism and Interfaith Dialogue

Since the beginning Buddhism been in a constant dialogue with other religious traditions, which has been tolerant to some extent, but also critical and polemical. Buddhists have used parody, satire, re-contextulisation, as well as outright condemnation when the need arose. There is some really very biting parody of Brahmins in the Pali Canon, some very funny jokes at their expense! Sangharakshita is sometimes criticised, in a kind of weird reversal, for being critical of other Buddhists and expecially of Christians. It's as though we Buddhists have forgotten our own history and are buying into a modern myth which is telling us that all religion is ok, and not to rock the boat. However our own scriptures give the lie to that naive notion. Buddhism is and always has been quite a militant critic of unbelievers, and even of lax believers.

However Buddhism also has the interesting tactic of syncretising with indigenous beliefs. In China it bred with Taoism especially. Confucianists remained quite hostile because Buddhism appeared to deny filial piety - no family values for us! In Japan Buddhism formed an interesting syncretism with Shinto resulting in the identification of the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, with the Great Sun Buddha, Vairocana. In Tibet there was Bon and the synthesis of Buddhism and Bon has been a very dynamic hybrid indeed. However in India there were a number of major faiths with which Buddhism interacted and syncretised. Firstly there was the Vedic religion which gave us such concepts as Brahma Vihara, and Going for Refuge. More crucially there was the later interaction with Puranic Hinduism - and especially with the worship of Siva. Siva had gone through a long process of being absorbed into mainstream Indian faith through being identified with the Vedic Rudra. This was a bit of a stretch to be honest, but the Brahmins were very good at this sort of thing, offering to make the preists of competing cults into honorary Brahmins for instance. In the Mahayana Karandavyuha Sutra we see Siva being gently converted into a Buddhist, just as Brahma and Indra were in the Pali Texts. But in the Sarvatathagata-tattvasamgraha Tantra the action has been stepped up a notch. This time Siva refuses to submit, and Vajrapani kills him and tramples on his body (which is what we see in the depictions of Vajrapani). He brings him back to life however and converts him to Buddhism - both the killing and ressurection are accomplished with mantras.

But here's something interesting: I was searching around for a pic of Vajrapani doing a two-step on old Siva and his wife, and it took some time. In a lot of images they are left out and Vajrapani is just dancing around on his own - which doesn't make a lot of sense and ignores the context for him being wrathful and stomping in the first place. An important function of Vajrapani was (right back in the Pali texts) and is (in the Tantras) the thumping of people who fail to pay homage to the Buddha. Has Vajrapani been sanitised for public consumption I wonder?

We will probably never see a depiction Jesus being trampled by Vajrapani the way that Siva is because, at the time and place the Vajrayana was emerging, Siva worship was the prevailing religion, and it was a vigorous living force and a threat to Buddhism. Christianity has been in a slow decline for centuries now, and although western culture is nominally Christian, the evidence is that it is dying. The Pope (take your pick) will occasionally say something along the lines that although Buddhism has some good points it really is a failure because it is humanist, but it's like being savaged by rabbit. And the Dalai Lama is also titled His Holiness these days. In any case Christianity is fighting on many fronts. With militant Islam constantly in the news, basic Christian values being undermined, not to mention in-fighting and schism over the status of women and homosexuals; the Christian clergy really don't see Buddhism as a problem - we smile a lot and so they think we're harmless. Tee hee.

I don't see much on offer from theology generally which which to syncretise in the West. Philosophy does seem to have some promise, but I'm not well versed enough to know how things might mix and match. I think the '-ology' which provides the richest pickings for a syncretism in the west is not theology, but psychology - especially depth psychology which had its beginnings with Carl Jung, and which sees psychology as a manifestation of archetypes of a deeper layer of reality. It is said that Jung was strongly influenced by Eastern religion, and by Tibetan Buddhism in particular. So perhaps the syncretism has already begun. Perhaps we will see Freud and Jung being trampled by Vajrapani sometime soon in a Tantra near you. Now that might be interesting.

Ratnasambhava quest que cest?

Lately I have been pondering the mandala of the five Jinas. Something was puzzling me. Amitabha and Akshobhya represent a set: compassion and wisdom. Vairocana clearly is a development of the Buddha. Early tantras have a trinity of Amitabha, Shakyamuni, and Akshobhya. Wisdom and compassion are clearly the two most salient features of a Buddha and it makes sense to represent them as individual Buddhas. However the tantras introduced a set of five Buddhas, which by about the 7th or 8th century CE had settled down into Akshobhya, Ratnasambhava, Amitabha, Amoghasiddhi, and Vairocana in the centre. Clockwise from the east which is at the bottom in the image.

So where did Ratnasambhava and Amoghasiddhi come from? This is something of a mystery. The standard texts such as Snellgrove's Indo-Tibetan Buddhism note the appearance of the pair, describe them and then move on. There is nothing about the process, nor about why they make a pair. Do they make a pair? Ratnasambhava is in the south, is golden yellow, is lotus throne is supported by horses, his mudra is the varada or giving mudra, and his emblem is the jewel - his name means Jewel Born. He is associated with the sun at midday. Ratnasmabhava's wisdom is the wisdom of equality which sees the that everything has the same nature, which is the nature of Shunyata.

Amoghasiddhi is in the north, is dark green, and his lotus throne is supported by shang-shang birds (these are garuda birds with human torsos and heads who play cymbals.) His mudra is the mudra of fearlessness and his emblem is the crossed vajra. In Sanskrit it is vishva-vajra, where vishva means something like "on all sides". Amoghasiddhi's wisdom is the wisdom of fearlessness. The Buddha kula that he presides over is known as the action family and his name means Unobstructed Success.

The breakthrough in understanding this pair came while attending a communication course with Locana. Over simplifying a bit, the model of communication and connection that Locana was describing begins with observation. Feelings arise from these observations. These feelings connect us with, and flag up, our values or needs. And out of this we move into action, or we make a request. The details are not important, but what struck me was that three of the steps in the model - observation, feelings, and actions - could relate to three of the Buddhas in the mandala. Obervation is intellect, but also brings to mind the mirrorlike wisdom which sees things just as they are. Feelings are obviously connected with red Amitabha's compassion. Action as I just mentioned were the concern of Amoghasiddhi. What was left out was values. The values, or sometimes needs, that are referred to are universal human values that we can all understand and connect with. They are the key to understanding conflict and connection. And it struck me that values is what Ratnasambhava corresponds to.

The jewel that Ratnasambhava holds is the cintamani, a symbol for the Bodhicitta. This is surely the highest value of Buddhists. We value Awakening as the most value thing. Generosity is the most fundamental virtue in Buddhism, which is to say that we value it highly. Generosity is sometimes seen as the best practice for lay people, whereas Awakening is the goal of serious practitioners. Generosity builds us merit which will a lay person to be born in fortunate circumstances, i.e. in circumstances where they can practice seriously and Awaken. In a mundane sense Ratnasambhava represents wealth. One of the main Bodhisattvas of his kula is Jambhala who holds a mongoose which spews forth jewels when squeezed. So yes, this does seem to fit. Sangharakshita has associated Ratnasmabhava with beauty and art. I think this is covered by the idea of value. Beauty is the object of aesthetic appreciation, and paying attention to beauty, according to Sangharakshita, helps to refine our senses. Refining our senses can help us to make progress towards experiencing more refined states of mind. Finally great art can help to transform our lives by inducing in us a reflection of the inspired state of the artist.

I suspect that Amoghasiddhi came first however. In the early tantra there were three Buddha kulas. At around the same time a group of three Bodhisattvas appeared in Buddhist art. Avalokiteshvara, Manjusri and Vajrapani represented compassion, wisdom and energy. The word translated as energy is virya. Virya is energy in pursuit of the good, ethical energy. It is energy directed towards Awakening. Amoghasiddhi is the Buddha of action, and this action is motivated by, and directed towards, the good. And the good is represented by the jewel held by Ratnasmabhava. So yes Ratnasambhava and Amoghasiddhi do represent a pair.

Another observation has occurred to me in the last few days. Ratnasmabhava is a solar deity, he is associated with horses, is associated with giving, and is associated with art, beauty, and inspiration. Now there is another Indian deity who shares these characteristics and that is Agni. Agni is one of the old Vedic gods whose worship is outlined in the Rigveda. The word agni is cognate with ignite, and he was associated with the sacrificial fire, but also anything which burned including digestion, and the sun! So Agni is synonymous with the sun. The largest and most elaborate sacrifice in the Vedic calendar was the horse sacrifice - which is described in the first book in the Rigveda. Finally it was through possession by Agni that the Vedic sages were able to give voice to the ecstatic inspired hymns which make up the Rigveda. He is the source, the spark, of imagination and poetry - the highest art of the Vedic period.

This kind of absorption, if I am right, should come as no surprise. This is what the history of Indian religion is like. Buddhism adopted and absorbed deities from the earliest times, so that Indra is a frequent character in the Pali Canon for instance. The five Buddha mandala is a feature of esoteric Buddhism, which is itself a grand synthesis of seventh century Indian religion.

image by Aloka from the Padmaloka website.

Buddhism and Hinduism

I'm just back from a foray down to London where I picked up a copy of Alexander Studholme's book The origins of Om Manipadme Hum : a Study of the Karandavyuha Sutra. I read enough on the train coming back from Cambridge to have a major realisation.

Some time ago in pursuing my interest in mantra I began to delve into Vedanta and Veda. Buddhists seem not to write that much about mantra. Leaf through any book on Tibetan Buddhism and it will contain at most a couple of paragraphs about mantra - usually they trot out the folk etymology from the Guhyasamaja Tantra, and something about mantras being symbols of Awakening. Given that this is not really what mantras are used for, either popularly or in the Tantras themselves it has always puzzled me. Kukai, the Japanese Vajrayana master, by contrast is preoccupied with what mantra is, and how it works and is a lot more informative. In any case Vedic scholars of mantra, while not exactly abounding, outnumber the Buddhists by at least 10 to 1. I became especially interested in those linguists from the pragmatist school, and in the cognitive linguistic approach of George Lakoff.

It emerges, when one takes the time to study them, that Buddhism is rather heavily indebted to the Vedic religion. This had already begun to dawn on me when I discovered Richard Gombrich. His How Buddhism Began is misnamed but goes a lot further into this area than I had managed (it helps if you can read Sanskrit!). While attending his lecture series last year I became even more deeply acquainted with Gombrich's ideas, and with those of Joanna Jurewicz who has explored some of the same territory from the Vedic point of view. It became obvious that the Buddha knew the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, and probably the Chandogya as well. He quotes and parodies these texts, and what's more makes use of metaphors that only make sense if you know the Upanishads. It's clear that the people who wrote down the Pali Canon had already lost the sense of some important metaphors - Brahma Vihara is a stand out - by the time the Canon was finalised in about the first century BCE. Jurewicz, also a fan of Lakoff, has shown that the well know sequence known as the Nidana Chain, can be viewed as a Buddhist polemic of Vedic cosmogony. To me this is a revelation. What it says is that despite Buddhist chauvinism against Hinduism, some central features of our discourse - going for refuge for another instance - are directly traceable to the Vedic discourse current in the 5th century BCE when the Buddha was active.

In tracing the arc of mantra as it traverses the Rigvedic period and into the Vedantas there is a reasonably logical progression which relates to the abstraction of the meaning of rituals. The basic shift was from external rituals to imaginative internal rituals. To put it a little simplistically here was a movement away from the fire rituals and the development of meditation as a substitute. The connection with early Buddhism is detectable in the Paritta texts, and in certain magical rites especially the so-called Saccakiriya or Act of Truth.

However from there the trail is quite faint. Dharanis, which are not quite mantras as they appear in the Vajrayana, and yet very different from any use of words/language in early Buddhism. They begin to appear in texts such as the White Lotus, the Golden Light, the Lankavatara etc, in about the 4th or 5th century CE. You will often hear that a Dharani is a sort of aide de memoir for Dharma teachings, but I'm here to tell you that none of the Dharanis that appear in the above named sutras look like that. It is true that as early as the Lalitavistara there were "alphabets of wisdom" where the syllables of Sanskrit (more or less) were associated with aspects of Dharma teachings about the nature of phenomena. But the link between this idea, which is followed up in the Perfection of Wisdom texts and the Mahavairocana Sutra, and the actual dharanis in sutras is not credible. It has always seemed to me that the presence of those dharanis, in the absence of any exegetical tradition, must remain a mystery. I'm not so sure now.

It began to seem as though the appearance of what were called mantras in the Tantric texts came out of nowhere as far as Buddhism is concerned - and yet the obvious presence of magic speech in the Pali texts made it seem a rather unsatisfactory conclusion. Did the practices and ideas completely die out and have to be re-imported several centuries later? Or was there a link I was missing? But one more back-track. Many years ago now Sangharakshita noted, almost in passing, that the presence of the goddesses Sri (aka Laksmi) and Sarasvati in the Golden Light Sutra represented some lumps of only partly digested Hinduism. Of course we know that the Vajrayana contains a fair number of the lumps at various stages of assimilation. Studholme, in his study of the Karandavyuha Sutra seems to have caught a snap shot of the historical processes at work, and to explain how those lumps might have got their.

Early Buddhism existed in a milieu which was largely twofold, with the old Vedic religion on the one hand, and the more experimental and disparate Samanas on the other. The Pali texts are full of polemic and critique of Brahmins, Jains, Ajivakas and non-Buddhists of every sort. Brahmins and their theology get the bulk however. Five of six centuries later however a change in the religious landscape had taken place. Probably in response to the success of Buddhism in the centuries following Asoka, the Brahminical tradition began to reorient itself away from the Vedas, and towards almost equally ancient texts known as Puranas. These texts emphasise a different set of gods, so that Indra, Agni, and Brahma, give way to Vishnu. At the same time the assimilation of the tribal religion which worshipped Siva was more of less complete. Sacrifices gave way to devotional practices known as puja. This is more of less Hinduism as distinct from Vedism. Not that the Vedic tradition disappeared completely - India doesn't seem to ever completely abandon any religious idea.

So the Mahayana grew up in an entirely different milieu to early Buddhism. And what Studholme has shown is that Mahayana Buddhism was in as close a dialogue with devotional Puranic Hinduism as early Buddhism was with Vedism and Vedantism. This accounts for the apparent discontinuities which I have observed in the use of magical words. One of Studholme's main theses is that the Om Manipadme Hum mantra was part of a response to Puranic Shaivism, and bears a close relationship to the Saivite mantra Om Namah Shivaya. I haven't read far enough to know what to think of that yet, but from what I've seen it promises to be fascinating!

The White Rite

The colour white has a very interesting range of associations. In Herman Melville's book Moby Dick the white whale became the focus for all the rage and hatred of Captain Ahab. Melville devoted a chapter of Moby Dick to exploring the negative symbolism of white: the white of pus and maggots and putrefaction for example. However we more often associate white with purity and cleanness in a ritual sense. Virgin brides are married in white. Fresh snow is also sometimes referred to as virginal. The Pope wears white. Being the opposite of black, it symbolises good, light, positivity, and space. From India we have the wonderful image of the while lotus rising unstained up from the mud. White light may be split into the colours of the rainbow by a prism, or a rain drop; but the same process in reverse combines the colours of the rainbow back into pure white light: an important observation for our understanding of the White Rite. The White Rite is the rite of purification - or more traditionally the rite of pacification. This rite is used to pacify impulses arising from greed, hatred and delusion, hence the association with purity. In the more mundane sense the white rite is also to pacify demonic forces in the world around us.

In terms of the mandala the white figure sits at the centre. There are a number of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas who appear in white forms, the most important being Vairocana, Avalokiteshvara and White Tara. The white figure at the centre of the mandala possesses and integrates all of the qualities of the other figures - Love, Fearlessness, Wisdom, Abundance; and yet adds some new subtle quality that is difficult to quantify. Vairocana - the Illuminator - is an ancient Indian figure who predates Buddhism by many centuries. He is the sun, of course, in its most benign aspect. Spiritually he illuminates the darkness of ignorance. Holds the dharmacakra, which identifies him with the Dharma - it is not that he possesses or teaches the Dharma: no, he is the Dharma.

The wisdom of Vairocana is known as the Wisdom of the Dharmadhatu (dharmadhātujñāna). Dharmadhatu is synonymous with śūnyatā, tathatā, and the dharmakāya: i.e. it stands for the Reality Principle. These Buddhist technical terms are rather abstract and abstruse, and do not really convey much. Indeed it is sometimes said that one cannot say anything definite about the dharmakāya. Which leaves us with a puzzle: if this wisdom is so abstract as to be inconceivable, then of what practical value is it to us. In terms of the Tantric Rites, how might we bring this quality into our practice? I have explored a number of ways to do this. As I mentioned in my essay on the Red Rite, I do not follow the tradition closely because it is not easy to see how the old magical rites would work in a modern context.

Purity in Buddhism is equated with purity of intention, since it is intention which underlies actions (karma), and it is the results of actions that prevents us being truly free. So one aspect of the Wisdom of the Dharmadhatu is moral purity - in Buddhist terms keeping the precepts. In terms of the ten precepts followed by members of the Western Buddhist Order (and in Shingon) this means: kindness, generosity, contentment, truthful kindly harmonious helpful speech, and tranquillity (non-greed), love, and wisdom. Each time we exercise our moral judgement, each time we decline the act that we know will lead to suffering, we are exercising the White Rite. Of course if we do find ourselves acting unskilfully we can confess it to some appropriate person. This too is an example of the White Rite - the experience, and acknowledgement of remorse can be a powerfully transformative practice. This of course has nothing to do with guilt or atonement. Remorse is simply turning the moral spotlight on our own actions. Neither has it to do with sitting in judgement on others.

Something that Kūkai writes about in connection with the dharmakāya gives us another clue to the White Rite. He says that all forms are the body of the Dharmakāya Buddha, all sounds are his voice preaching the Dharma, and all mental activity is his Awakened mind. This sounds a little theistic at first, but Kūkai was not suggesting that Vairocana is a creator god, but pointing towards something more subtle. All things are marked by impermanence, insubstantiality and unsatisfactoriness. So everything can be said to be of the same nature. If we anthropomorphise the metaphor then we may say that everything is a manifestation of Vairocana, who is reality itself, who is the very impermanence of all things. Putting this into practice we can try to see the Buddha everywhere, hear the Dharma everywhere, and cultivate a sense of identification with every living being. To give a more concrete and contemporary example: we know that human impact in the environment is causing problems. So each time we consciously, for example, minimise our own impact by recycling, or reusing, or using low energy light bulbs - then we are acknowledging the truth of interconnectedness and exercising the White Right. This is interesting because it suggests that the colour of the Buddhist environmental movement might be white rather than green which has quite different traditional associations.

We know that Tantra adopted the old Vedic magical principle of bandhus or associations between levels of reality. So in each quarter of the mandala there is a Buddha who has a colour, and various other associations. At the other end of the scale there is a kleśa - a defilement - associated with each Buddha. In the case of Vairocana the defilement is ignorance. This kind of ignorance is sometimes known as viparyasa or topsy-turvy views. We see the impermanent as permanent for instance or the painful as pleasant. The White Rite is concerned with dispelling this kind of ignorance. We can only doing this by paying attention. After my first brush with the Dharma I wrote this in my journal, although I no longer recall the source, that an aspect of suffering is "a desperate will to live unrelated to serious or systematic attempt to understand what life actually involves". Practising Buddhism is precisely the opposite - it is an attempt to live on the basis of a serious and systematic attempt to understand what life involves. And this again is the function of the White Rite.

As with the Red Rite I'm suggesting here that the magical tantric rites can operate in an everyday way. In this case every time we acknowledge and act in accordance with the way things are - when we choose to act skilfully, when we see ourselves as interconnected, or when we try to see more directly how things really are - that is the White Rite in action. This is Buddhism as the path of purification.

Jai Bhim!

Think of an Indian politician - chances are if you are a Westerner you either thought of Gandhi or one of his scions. I usually don't like to write about politics or politicians since it only seems to encourage them. In this case however there is a definite tie in with Buddhism in India, so I'll break my own rule just this once.

Now if I asked an Indian Buddhist the same question they would most likely not think of a Gandhi, they would be more likely to think of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. In fact if you asked them about Gandhi they might be quit dismissive of him - which can come as a bit of a shock to those who think of him as a kind of saint who did so much for the oppressed people of Indian. So why would an Indian Buddhist think like this?

The simple answer is this: caste. Caste is the system of social stratification which goes back a 100 generations in India. It attained the status of immutable law early in this era, and is still central to Indian society. Most Indian Buddhists were born into social circumstances, i.e. into a caste, which not only oppressed them, but tried to cut off any escape routes. Caste is strongly linked to the Hindu idea of karma - which has similarities and differences from the Buddhist idea. The main thing here is that one's station in life is determined by the caste one is born into, and that is determined by actions in a past life. If one is born into poverty, oppression, poor health, and few opportunities, then one must deserve it, and one must accept it as one's lot. Clearly this ideology could only have been thought up by a privileged elite. Some castes were thought to be so low down the evolutionary scale, to have committed such heinous crimes in their past life and so brought penury upon themselves, that the mere touch of them polluted a higher caste Hindu - they were the untouchables.

Dr Ambedkar was born into the Mahar caste and at that time the Mahars were untouchable. This typically meant that they were forced to do the dirtiest, lowest paid, most dangerous jobs, denied education, and oppressed in various other ways. Ambedkar managed to escape his fate. Ambedkar found a liberal and philanthropic mentor and sponsor who paid for his education. Mind you he still suffered severe prejudice - and famously had to sit outside the classroom of his primary school listening to lessons through the window. Ambedkar persevered and eventually gained a doctor of law degree from Harvard University. He went on to become the first law minister of India in the Gandhi lead government. Ambedkar was the architect of the constitution of India, and importantly for his people succeeded in the abolition of untouchability.

Clearly Ambedkar was a great man who inspired his people to raise themselves out of the dirt. But why the antipathy towards Gandhi? Gandhiji opposed Ambedkar's desire to free all Indians from caste. Ambedkar proposed abolishing caste altogether, but Gandhi resisted him. He even went on one of his famous hunger strikes to force Ambedkar to back down and water down his anti-caste legislation. Gandhi believed that caste was what held Indian society together. He wanted to maintain caste duty for Hindus which meant dirty hard labour for the untouchables, but to show that it wasn't personal he suggested changing their designation from untouchables to harijans or "children of god". Gandhi spoke out against oppression, against religious intolerance, but he also supported the status quo of the caste system. Gandhi was a Brahmin. The cynical would simply say that was protecting the interests of his caste, or perhaps that he knew that high caste power brokers in India would not accept the ex-untouchables as equals.

1949 came and India became independent and the people formerly known as untouchables did begin to be able to make a few changes. But caste prejudice persisted and the uplift of the oppressed people was resisted. Ambedkar decided that Hindu prejudice against them was too strong. After lengthy consideration he became a convert to Buddhism, and led millions of his people to abandon Hinduism and embrace the Buddhadharma. This did not end the prejudice however nor the persecution, but it helped to give these oppressed people a vision of freedom for themselves and their children.

People who are born into those communities which were formally designated as untouchable, now refer to themselves as Dalit - oppressed. The Dalits revere Ambedkar as a bodhisattva, as a saviour who showed them how they could be free. They don't revere Gandhi because Gandhi was unwilling to treat them as equals. Attacks on Dalits continue to be common place in part so India. On 26 September 2006 Ambedkar's home state of Maharastra was rocked by the brutal rape and murder of the family of a Dalit man. The attack was allegedly committed by high caste Hindus in revenge for his opposition to the building of a road through his fields, and sparked a series of protests and strikes in the State.

October the 14th 2006 marked 50 years since the conversion of Dr Ambedkar to Buddhism. His followers greet each other with Jai Bhim! which means Victory to Bhimrao (Ambedkar)!

I recommend the BBC radio program Escaping Caste

Women and Buddhist Ordination

In the last couple of months I attended a series of lectures by Professor Richard Gombrich. These were very stimulating lectures and gave rise to many interesting discussions subsequently with the friends who also attended them. I have several raves to write as a result.

What I want to write about today is women. Specifically I want to take a bit of a look at the Buddhist ordination of women. I practice in a tradition, if it can be called that, in which men and women receive ordination on an equal basis - no extra rules or precepts for women, no extra conditions. It is an explicit acknowledgement that men and women are equally capable of going for refuge to the three jewels. Now in our spiritual community it is sometimes said that despite the equivalence of the ordinations, women have not always been treated as equals. Indeed one of our senior order members wrote a book which dwelt on the traditional Buddhist view that women are spiritually inferior, and sought to justify that view - which is not a line of argument I wish to pursue!

Professor Gombrich was exploring the origins and greatness of the Buddha's ideas and mentioned the case I'm about to explore in passing in an early lecture. Women, so the story goes, were admitted into the Buddhist Order reluctantly and then only with special pleading from Ananda on behalf of the Buddha's aunt Mahāpajapati. The admission of women, it says in the 10th chapter of the Cullavagga book of the vinaya, would be contingent on a number of conditions: they must accept a number of extra rules; have a status lower than the lowest male bhikkhu; and show all bhikkhus respect. Even so the admission of women to the Sangha is said to have shortened the lifespan of the Dharma!*

This is, or should be, fairly familiar ground to students of Buddhism. It does not sit well with us westerners though, especially in this post-modern, post-feminist era. We accept in theory, if not always in practice, that men and women are equal. I think this has been a serious sticking point for many women and not a few men approaching the Dharma! So I was intrigued when Professor Gombrich drew my attention to the verses of Bhaddā Kundalakesa in the Therigatha (107-111). These verses, he says, show that the idea that the Buddha was reluctant to admit women to the order was a later falsification. I will mostly use the translations of K. R. Norman because although C.A.F. Rhys Davids includes portions of the commentaries in hers, Norman's is more clear - fortunately both are printed together in my copy**.

Bhadda was a Jain ascetic, who was drawn to the Buddha after losing a debate with Sariputta. The verses begin:

With hair cut off, wearing dust, formerly I wandered, having only one robe... (107)

This much is enough to identify her as a Jain - dust is a primary Jain metaphor for karma, and clearly she is a wandering ascetic very similar in description to other samaṇas in the the Canon. One of the arguments offered for the Buddha's reluctance to ordain women was that it might have created a dangerous precedent at a time when only men were ascetics. Not so according to this text - there were women Jain ascetics. The commentary suggests that her hair was not so much cut, as pulled out by the roots.

Verse 110 begins:

Having bent the knee, having paid homage to him, I stood with cupped hands face to face with him (110a)

The key second half of the verse runs in Pali:

ehi bhadde'ti maṃ avaca, sā me āsūpasampadā (110b)

Which I translate as

Come Bhadda, he said to me; that was my ordination.

Now this is very interesting indeed. Bhadda goes to see the Buddha, and on the spot he confers on her the higher ordination!

I want to point out a few salient features of this passage. Firstly the formula "ehi bhikkhu" (= "come bhikkhu") is usually considered to place a text very early, before the whole rigmarole of lower and higher ordinations, or even formal vinaya rules came into being. In the beginning the Buddha would just say to you "come", and that was it, you were a bhikkhu or bhikkhuni. I've taken the trouble to include the Pali because the word for ordination in the text is a variant of upasampadā which stands to the higher or full ordination - this by the way, is what it means when someone refers to themselves as a "fully ordained Buddhist monk or nun".

By the time that the story of Mahāpajapati things were a lot more complex. Ascetics from other traditions had a two year stand down period before they could take the lower ordination. They then had to make satisfactory progress as a samanera, or novice monk, before being granted the higher ordination. And as I have already pointed out women had a series of additional rules imposed upon them.

So the instant higher ordination of Bhadda is remarkable in several ways: it is clearly early, there is no hesitation, and there are no extra rules or conditions, and the Dharma is not cut short by 500 years! This story is apparently a one off, but often a one off can be very telling, especially in this case since the Canon has been edited to conform to orthodox Theravada belief at the time it was written down. Bhadda it seems slipped through the net! Having looked at the text, and knowing a bit about the background I find myself agreeing with Professor Gombrich that the whole set up for women with it's low status and extra rules is a late addition, and probably reflects the prejudice of a time after the Buddha.

Notes

* Ute Husken. 2000. The Legend of the Establishment of the Buddhist Order of Nuns in the Theravada Vinaya-Pitaka. Journal of the Pali Text Society. (Vol XXVI, pp.43-69).
** C.A.F Rhys Davids and K.R. Norman. 1997. Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns : Theriigaathaa. (Oxford : Pali Text Society).

see also Bhadda Kundalakesa at Access to Insight

image: dhammarati