Buddhism
Buddhism is a religion, certainly, and a philosophy, indeed. However, religion and philosophy are what Buddhism evolved into during its diffusion—self-propelled by the intrinsic excellence of the Buddha’s teaching—whereas Buddhism in itself is a spiritual doctrine, concrete and operative, directed toward the transmutation of the mind.
Siddhartha Gautama, prince of the Śākya clan—called the Buddha, “the Awakened One”—was born in the fifth century B.C.E. in northern India, near present-day Nepal, under celestial and divine auspices that foretold him to be either a universal monarch or a guide of humankind. His father wished him to inherit the throne and thus kept him confined within palaces of pleasure, carefully sealed off from the real miseries of life. Yet one day the young prince caught sight of an old and sick man who had escaped the vigilant censorship of the court. Venturing out in secret, he then saw the sufferings of the world—and death. He resolved to renounce the kingdom and flee, becoming an ascetic and joining a group of renunciant yogins. After several years without attaining spiritual realization, he abandoned that method and decided to meditate alone until illumination. That illumination came to him at Bodh Gaya, beneath the fig tree (pippal): the mālā made of this tree’s seeds, known as bodhicitta seeds, are indeed the ones most used by Buddhists. For forty days thereafter, the Tathāgata—“the Thus-Come One,” who had thus come to unveil reality to men—pondered how he might communicate his revelations.
The fundamental teaching of the Buddha is the Four Noble Truths. Life is suffering. Suffering is caused by ignorance. Ignorance can be dissolved. The way to dissolve ignorance is the Eightfold Path. All the other teachings of the Buddha—impermanence, non-self, emptiness, samatha and vipasyanā, and even nirvāṇa—are specific and detailed elucidations of the Four Noble Truths.
Among the Four Noble Truths, the essential point is to realize that we live in ignorance—thereby awakening from the long, drowsy dream in which humanity has always remained immersed. But what, then, is this ignorance? The Buddha spoke of it with absolute clarity, and after him it has been illustrated by countless lamas and yogins—while beyond Buddhism it is echoed and restated in every esoteric doctrine. Ignorance is the ego—the “I”. The error, the veil of Māyā, is the belief that we are this “I.” To believe oneself to be the “I” is precisely the root of saṃsāra. Saṃsāra is the state of endless suffering born of attachment: the condition of being bound to events, even when we seem to master them. Its opposite, nirvāṇa, is the complete cessation of suffering. This is not a simplistic or moralistic reproach of selfishness. Even one who lived by the highest ethical standards, devoted entirely to the good of others, would still remain a captive of the ego.
A Westerner finds it difficult even to grasp what the Buddha means, for Western thought—and this holds true for every modern human being—has always revolved around the idea of the ego, taken implicitly or explicitly as its foundation. This, in fact, is the human condition itself: every man lives under the delusion of being the “I”. Even those of the East live within the ego; yet the difference is that in the East the wise know the ego to be an illusion, whereas Westerners take it to be the one and only reality. Looking at it in contemporary scientific and philosophical terms, the “I” is representation. For philosophy, psychology, the sciences, and the neurosciences, man lives by representations of reality. That is the ego: mere and commonplace self-referentiality. Yet beneath the ego lies a state of authentic awareness, which the Tibetans call rigpa and the Vedānta calls ātman. Nietzsche and Heidegger were the only Western thinkers whose thought was founded purely and directly upon the necessity of escaping representation.
If a man lives identified with his “I”, he cannot even conceive what it might mean to find himself beyond it; a circle enclosed within a greater circle cannot comprehend the larger one that contains it. Buddhism is a body of doctrines and methods that enable one, if inwardly disposed, to find oneself beyond the “I”, in nirvāṇa. The Buddha’s teachings are not a sequence of concepts to be understood or memorised, for the only part that “understands” is the intellectual mind—namely, the ego. Nor are they a creed: one is not asked to swoon in devotion or be carried off by some phantasmagoria. The Buddha states how things are; then each person, if he wishes, may try to put it into practice—to realise reality. The Buddha showed the way to awaken from the deception in which mankind has always lived. He came, as he said, “to turn the Wheel of Dharma”—not to overturn the beliefs of his age, still less to found a new religion. He honoured and respected the Vedas, the foundation of true knowledge, but criticised the Brahmins, the priests who no longer understood them. Whoever wished to follow him was free to do so; he imposed no conversions. He often told his monks not to “believe” what he said, but rather to inquire and discern—to examine their own mind—in order to experience, that is, to live, higher states of consciousness. The Saṅgha—the monastic order founded by the Buddha himself—was not meant for the worship of deities, but as a community of mutual support whose sole purpose is the attainment of enlightenment. The deities of Buddhism are by no means gods in the Western sense: they are not the anthropomorphic gods of Homer, nor are they an abstract, personal God.
What the Buddha did was to set forth the very core of the esoteric teaching of the Vedas in terms accessible to his contemporaries, who were drowning in the ignorance of the Kali Yuga—the age of darkness. After the Buddha there were a few, rare beings who truly realised his teaching; and there were the many who, though able to grasp intellectually the beauty and coherence of his doctrine, could not attain realisation. From them arose what later became the philosophies and the religion of Buddhism. The study of Buddhism should never be an end in itself. Within the Western mode of cognition, to understand something means to reduce it to concepts; yet Buddhism begins from the insight that concepts are mere artefacts fashioned by the egoic mind—they are not reality itself, but only a distorted and arbitrary reflection of it. Buddhism, as said, is a body of doctrines and methods that lead to liberation from the delusion that is identification with the “I”. The yogas of Buddhism are known as “skillful means”, instruments directed toward an end. Yet they lead to that end in a way quite different from what Western thought would assume: the end of liberation is not brought about by the means according to the ordinary notion of cause and effect. Yet the very understanding of cause and effect lies at the heart of the Buddha’s teaching—later examined with diamond-like clarity, especially by the Tibetan masters. It is not, however, the causal link as conceived by those who live within the ego; indeed, Nietzsche perhaps says the same when, more than once, he ridicules the very idea of causality. Buddhism, like all other yoga, teaches that one cannot will to escape the ego—for the simple reason that the very one who “wills” to escape it would be the ego itself. One must rather find oneself on this side of the ego, as happened to the Buddha himself, who precisely teaches how this event can be brought about.
As Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, still says today, Buddhism is the control of the mind: it is neither knowing nor believing. For both he who knows—or thinks he knows—and he who merely believes are equally far from actual reality. Buddhism is such a pure science of the mind that one enslaved to the ego cannot even understand what he reads. As the Buddha often says in the Dhammapada, whoever has gone beyond the ego abides beyond good and evil, living above the three times—neither burdened by the past, nor anxious for the future, nor captive to the present. Yet Buddhism is not a mere psychology; this basic way of relating to phenomena is only a first step. To live outside the three times is neither relativism nor ataraxia, but rather the cognitive condition of the mind’s nature prior to the veil of representation. And when asked what ultimate reality was like, the Buddha replied that it made no sense to describe it: those who are not within it cannot understand, while those who reach it have no need of explanation.
“Emptiness is form, and form is emptiness.” This is one of the Buddha’s most difficult sayings. Since for the Buddha form roughly corresponds to what Aristotle calls the synolon—the phenomenon as the union of form and matter—this saying may be understood thus: things do not exist in themselves, yet neither are they non-existent; and this not-being-while-being is their very nature. But stated in this way, it remains nothing more than a theoretical assertion, a conceived thought. What the Buddha is saying, rather, is precisely that it is not a matter of thinking that reality bears certain names, but of experiencing reality prior to the need to name it—that is, prior to the “I”. For the Buddha, and for every Buddhist, the notions of being and non-being are themselves nothing but concepts—skeletal constructs wrought by calculative reason, devised to allay the anxiety of not understanding. Reality is not concepts; it is reality itself. In many Buddhist texts—if not most—one reads that one must keep equally distant from both nihilism and eternalism. In Western terms, these two expressions correspond simply to idealism and realism, together with their various sub-forms; for such merely philosophical modes of thought had taken root even in the East. For Buddhism, things neither “exist” nor “do not exist”; yet this is not a mere concept, nor a blind belief, but the state of the mind’s undefiled nature—the ground of every human mind, which each person, if fortunate, may come to realise.
Buddhism spread throughout the East—to China, Tibet, Japan, and Southeast Asia—while in India it was for the most part supplanted by other forms of teaching. Over the centuries, three Vehicles of Buddhism developed: Theravāda, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna. Theravāda, “the School of the Elders”, rests solely upon the Pāli Canon, the Tripiṭaka or “Three Baskets” of the Buddha’s discourses. This Vehicle aims at individual awakening through the Way of the Sūtras—the very discourses spoken by the Buddha—chiefly by means of the meditative disciplines of samatha and vipasyanā, understood directly from the reading of the Sūtras themselves. The Mahāyāna, or “Great Vehicle”, the most widespread of all, expands the canon by adding further Sūtras, based on the insight that the “official” Sūtras of the Pāli Canon represent only the exoteric portion of the Buddha’s teaching, intended for all. The Mahāyāna aims at the liberation of all sentient beings; therefore, the bodhisattva renounces his own realisation, moved by compassion, in order to lead others to awakening. The Vajrayāna, which took form in Tibet and Nepal, is the esoteric and tantric expression of Buddhism—the corpus of the Buddha’s teachings kept secret, for they can be realised only by those endowed with particular gifts. It discloses the arduous and perilous path that makes liberation possible within a single lifetime. Its preliminary paths are based on visualisations, maṇḍala, and mantra; the higher stages are the Mahāmudrā and the Dzogchen, wholly analogous, though more analytic in method, to the esoteric yogas of India.
A word of counsel to those who wish to enter these domains of knowledge: first, read the Eastern texts directly and without mediation, not through the filters of Western scholarship. And above all, read them as if everything you encounter were possible—without that almost instinctive reservation, now ingrained in the modern mind, that whatever does not submit to the goddess Reason must be the work of naïve credulity.
(Lukhang Temple, Lhasa — particular)