History of Mahayana Buddhism: Innovation and Perfection

so today we're going to look at the history of Mahayana Buddhism its earliest origins and then some of its later developments coming right up so I'm Doug Smith I'm study director at the secular Buddhist Association that secular Buddhism org if you're new to the channel and interested in living a wiser and a kinder and a less stress filled life consider subscribing so many of us will be familiar with Mahayana Buddhism it's probably the most popular form of Buddhism or school of Buddhism or group of schools of Buddhism there is in the world it's generally what we find in China and in Japan and in Tibet and it's also in the West and many many different places so you will probably known about it maybe you'll think that that's all Buddhism is if you think that that's all Buddhism is then I suggest checking out my prior video about the history of tera vaada Buddhism because that's a different kind of Buddhism and also early Buddhism which is more related to Tara vada is also part of that but so today we're going to talk about Mahayana which is one of the as I say a very very popular way of of study and practice and and learning now Mahayana Buddhism is a somewhat later development so the Buddha lived some time he died sometime around the fifth century BCE so sometime around 400 BCE and there were several centuries of development after that time and Mahayana really didn't arise until sometime around the 1st century BCE and although there weren't specifically Mahayana monasteries that is to say monasteries that were devoted to Mahayana until something like the 6th or 7th century of the Common Era so a long long time after the Buddha's life I think and in in the West we tend to think of the distinction between schools in comparison to Christianity where we think of schisms of perhaps even warfare between different schools of of Christianity so that they they disagreed about some facts or some some claims or some beliefs and as a result they split off in a different group with a lot of animosity Buddhism has a quite different early history it seems as though Mahayana Buddhism arose within a month a monastic context and there wasn't a kind of clear schism like we have in Western Christianity instead what probably happened over centuries is that you had people with different kinds of viewpoints about practice and certain beliefs as well practicing within the same monastery and so long as they could keep the same monastic vows so long as they could keep the same monastic rules I didn't matter because that was was only the rules that kept monks together in the monastery as long as they could all agree to the same sort of ground rules it didn't really matter your particular form of practice or your particular beliefs and it seems though there were a few causes and conditions that led to the arising of the Mahayana belief and practice system the first was almost certainly the death of the of the historical Buddha and after his time what we find is a lot of we what we might call hagiographic kind of stories coming up about him making him more than just a simple mere human out trying to find out the truth about things and more into a kind of a deified figure with that came stories about his prior life times known as a Jataka tales at least in some some of these are known as Jataka tales they're also in other parts of the early canon later stories were written about him there also other stories about other potential Buddha's that were written and other stories written in his name and along with that almost certainly came a number of we might call meditative innovations that is to say people who were meditators would come up with ideas while they were meditating they might have we might I mean in a Christian context they would be called revelations they're not revelations in a Buddhist context but they function in a kind of a similar way or they might have it's not entirely clear that is to say people might have had experiences or visions or ideas while they were doing medet that they felt came from the Buddha himself or some other kinds of supernatural beings who were that has to say on the Buddhist side and so as these innovations occurred and as the Buddha as a historical figure biggie became have changed and as his achievements became greater and greater and greater over time sort of expanded and expanded his achievements became farther and farther away from those of the simple arahant now if we've seen the earlier lectures about early Buddhism or the tera vaada we know the ARA hunt was the is the is the goal of early Buddhism as to become an awakened being as to pista is to basically overcome greed hatred and ignorance and through that the sort of cycle of samsara okay so that was the early goal and that was the goal that the Buddha himself believed he had achieved the historical Buddha at least insofar as we know from the early texts but as the idea of the Buddha became grander and grander his achievements so far outstripped those of the mere ARA hunt that it seemed as though he had he had an entirely different goal in mind that what it was to be a Buddha was something quite different from what it was to be a Nara hunt it was almost to be a kind of a deified being and along with that arose the idea that perhaps the Buddha had not died that that perhaps the Buddha talked about the ways in which the world our experience of the world was was incorrect or was full of misunderstanding and the world was to us something of a mirage and so it might be that the Buddha's own death was a mirage the Buddha's own death was a kind of a misunderstanding and that the Buddha was still around and still could be could be asked to do things for us or can be at least an ongoing figure within our lives and over time there was the production of a number a very larger number of what we might call from our Western academic context apocryphal kinds of stories that is stories written in the buddha's name that were supposedly composed by the buddha the historical buddha but we're not actually so i mean they were written centuries after his death and we might wonder how this came about during a period where people clearly knew that the Buddha wasn't around anymore and it's clear that there were actually a number of arguments between monks about this between monastics this is differences of opinion where people would have a text and try to justify its existence even though other people might not have heard of it basically some of that justification was based on what we might call these kinds of meditative revelations but also there were early tax there in fact there are certain canonical texts a handful of them that seemed to be really late canonical perhaps after the Buddha's lifetime but in any event are part of the Canon at least the Pali Canon for in particular such as one called the Uttara V potty suta where there's a discussion by a person a man who claims to be talking on the Buddha's behalf and he's basically a God talks with this man and asks you know how can you say such a thing and this this man basically says that whatever is well spoken is spoken by the Buddha in other words the Buddha everything the Buddha said was well spoken and so if I'm speaking well I'm speaking the Buddha's words and their other texts like this where things where I believe it said something to the effect of that whatever is well spoken it can be thought of as Dharma or Dhamma and whatever is Dhamma of course is the word of the buddha so I mean at least in spirit it's the word of the buddha even if he didn't actually say it so all of this kind of all these kinds of we might say reinterpret of kind of moves work together so that when new texts arose they might be taken at least by certain of the monastics within within the monastery as potentially credible so we have basically what is the creation of a new path instead of the path of the arahant which is a more or less solitary path I mean with Manasa in a monastic context usually but a more or less solitary path working on your own to to reach awakening which is again the the destruction of greed hatred and ignorance we turn from that path to what you might say is a grander path it's a path of saving all sentient beings of awake and of helping to awaken all sentient beings of becoming a complete Buddha as opposed to becoming an arahant we just thought of as a lesser as a lesser path and you might imagine that there was probably some significant strain within the monastery here because on the one hand you'll have people who are more conservative who say well look that none of this is actually in the old texts and so you're not really practicing the word of the Buddha and in contradiction to that the the early Mahayana practitioners proto Mahayana really didn't exist as Mahayana yet on the on their for their part were basically identity and in many attacks they do denigrate the what we might call more conservative parts of Buddhism as being a lesser as being not as not as courageous as being not as compassionate as they were and eventually this is where we come up with it or where the name mahayana comes up because Mahayana means the greater vehicle it's the greater vehicle towards the goal which in this case has again changed from mere becoming an arahant to becoming a Buddha and and they would distinguish that from in some texts what's called the Hinayana or the lesser vehicle which they saw as all the other stuff all the stuff that was sort of more allied to the to the the original texts that the Buddha might have actually might have actually composed of course they didn't see them that way they thought of them as the Buddha's first thought of the virtus sort of first teaching and they saw themselves as sort of propounding the Buddha's second teaching as it were that is to say his sort of wisest teaching the teaching that was that was hidden for a long time and then had come to come to light and Richard Gombrich the great early as scholar of early Buddhism has written and I and other people have said similar things that it's probably the case that this that Mahayana Mahayana belief system couldn't have arisen without writing without the existence of writing it seems as though these texts in general began to be written down sometime around the 1st century BCE um you know 1st 2nd century something like that and this is perhaps not coincidentally when we begin to get these Mahayana texts and Richard Gombrich is argument is quite interesting what he says is look in the context where texts or teachings were preserved by memorization what you have is memorization by a large group of people and what the tax that they memorized while they've been memorized for as long as you know people could remember it was the same tax release it was supposed to be they were trying to preserve those texts so there really wasn't an easy way for a new text to then enter that Canon of course there would be modifications around the edges and so on and people would make mistakes but the idea of an entirely new text that had never been memorized before it's hard to see how that could have happened at least not in most contexts whereas if we had writing then of course a new text could be written down and kept in a book and become and and be disseminated to other people who are interested and in a certain sense immediately have the same sort of textual validity as other texts that had been memorized before and had now been written down as well both of them now we have the early texts and the more new texts that are on the same level now because they've both been written down and both can be preserved because they've been written down so we get the Bodhisattva path the ideal of perfect Buddhahood replaces the ARA hunt ideal in Mahayana Buddhism but of course perfect Buddhahood is something way way bigger than us it's something that where we almost become deified and so to get there what we have is what's called the Bodhisattva path so the Bodhisattva path is basically where we dedicate ourselves we take vows to remain within this world until all beings are able to become unlike along with us at which point become we become a Buddha until that time what we are doing is remaining within the world helping with compassion and wisdom helping others and that is the the path of the Bodhisattva in other words were sort of modeling ourselves on the Buddha before he became a Buddha right so he he went through its it's set in the Jataka tales and other places you know an uncountable number of left lifetimes until he got to that point so we're trying to do is model ourselves on that and along with this half the perfect Buddhahood there came up a whole bunch of new ideas about the ways to practice and the aims of practice at least on a day-to-day level so before if we've watched other videos in this channel we'll know about things that constitute what's called the 37 factors of awakening and those are things such as the foundations of mindfulness the jhanas that the four efforts if we look under right effort and many many others but instead and those are that sort of the if you like the complete scope of practice within the earlier system in the end the Mahayana system those are replaced or more or less replaced by what's called other perfections of the parameters and the paramita are a group of different kinds of virtues if you like that we are supposed to perfect in order to become perfect Buddha's so the idea was that the Buddha himself well the the our Hans may have worked on these thirty seven factors of awakening the Buddha himself would have worked on these perfections and in the earlier text there six and the later texts there are something like ten there are different numbers of these but what we'll talk about the early ones and they go in in a sort of a progression generosity virtue patience effort concentration and wisdom and we can see that we can understand that this is sort of a progression we begin with generosity in the same way that the layperson begins by being generous and then we we take virtues on we we behave ethically we make effort right we're patient and eventually we get to concentration and wisdom and the final at least of this early stage is wisdom which is known as progeny and these are again the parameters or the or the perfections so the last of these are these perfections is progeny and so if we think of the perfection of wisdom that's progeny aparajita which is a group is actually a name of a group of suit does that were written sutras that were written early on in the development of Mahayana that really I would say helped to really form the Mahayana into what it is these sutures on the perfection of wisdom or partion of parameter sutras that really did sort of outline what it was that we were supposed to be understanding what the wisdom is that we were supposed to be gaining as we became Buddhas and the idea is that these that the perfection of wisdom being the last of the perfections encompassed all the other perfections and so if we could only understand this perfection of wisdom we would be able to understand all the perfections and gain them all at the same time that is to say we would gain the the wisdom of the Buddha and probably these are these present parameter sutras were composed again by people who had undergone very very deep states of meditation and they had taken the results of those states of meditation as instructive to writing these texts in these deep states of meditation they would get to places that were without sensation without ideation without thought very quiet and this led to this notion that reality in its in its at its fundamental core was without sensation without perception without without any real ID ID ation that all of our normal ways of approaching the world were sort of radically misleading so you know we would seem to see a world that was a certain way but in fact we saw nothing of the real world we saw nothing that was real we seem to have concepts that that that take us certain places but in fact all of our concepts sort of fall away when we get to these deep states of meditation so perhaps in reality all the concepts really do fall away and aren't instructive of what really is going on so all our thoughts concepts and perceptions are radically mislead and reality is in fact what they come what they were we might say is empty and some of these ideas do come from the early text where he taught where the Buddha talks about meditation on emptiness and this is this is then taken and sort of run with in the pressure of parameter sutras just to see that reality is this kind of emptiness and it's further taken that that that if this is the case there are certain paradoxes that arise and and these are discussed as well so if reality is really empty if reality in a certain sense doesn't exist the way we think it does then the wooda doesn't exist either and the Bodhisattvas don't exist and the path doesn't exist so we're left in a kind of a paradoxical state of not really knowing where we are what we're doing and in the early text the pali texts or the early canon early canonical texts emptiness was was associated always with anata or non-self however as johannes Bronckhorst the great scholar of the early tradition talks about there seems to have been something of a shift in how anata was treated a shift between the way was treated in the early texts and the way it began to be treated because in the early tax anata was treated as sort of not self or non-self so it for example we would say in meditation we learned that the pain that we experience is not self it's not who I am my possessions my my clothing my bank account my car car are not things that are me I'm not them I shouldn't identify with them because by identifying with them I'm implicitly saying they're part of me but they aren't me they're non-self in the early tradition it was a kind of a psychological practice that was supposed to be universalized so we looked at all parts of the world as non-self however in the later tradition as we got forward into the present parameter sutras and farther this notion of emptiness shifted from being non-self to being without self so it wasn't just that they weren't who I was but that they didn't have selves at all in a since they didn't really exist at all and this of course doesn't only go for things in the world but also goes for all of our concepts all of our dualistic concepts and so you get this notion arising of non duality that all of our dualistic concepts are sort of based on an idea that concepts have a certain reality a certain fundamental truth to them when in fact they're empty they're empty of self which means they they don't really have a self they don't really exist in some sense so all of our concepts as well sort of fall apart and all of our sort of dualistic thinking about the world also falls apart and this kind of view in a very very rough sketch is then run with by perhaps one of the greatest Buddhist philosophers Nagarjuna probably the greatest philosopher after the would himself at least the most well-known who is the founder of what's called the my camicus school that was a very very important school in all of the development or most of much of the development of Mahayana Buddhism however that the take that he gave and that in the Gardena gave was also controversial and there were there were something of what we might call a backlash from within the Mahayana tradition this feeling that maybe some people at least in the mechanical we're taking that too far towards nihilism and so their view was that in fact while the world itself may have been without without self well what we find by by doing meditative introspection is that in fact all the world is mind that in other words it's all mind created in a sense it's all a product of our mind of our thinking of our ideation all that we know are just thoughts and appearances and so the aim then of practice is to as it were purify this this great expanse of appearances and thoughts to a stage that is like a Buddha and there is certainly some some parts of the early text that to talk about luminous mind usually in the context of Jonica meditation but those were taken by this group of Mahayana practitioners and teachers to mean the stage of awakening so that the the Buddhist stage the stage of becoming a perfect Buddha was the stage of reaching this kind of luminous spotless mind a mind that they would say was uncreated it was it was sort of identical with with awakening itself with with Nirvana itself and Nirvana being the stage the state that was that was non produced that was supposedly outside of causes and conditions then if they thought of this mind the same way and that became one of the origins of the yoga Chara school the mind only school although not all of the yoga chair believers believed that all there were were minds at least what they would say is that all we have access to or mental kinds of states and then the idea of this limitless spotless uncreated mind was seen later as the sort of Buddha latent within us and the Buddha with latent within all things were we understand all things as as all things that we have experience of and that that kind of way of taking this became what's called Buddha nature or that to talk at the garbha schools or ways of thinking about Mahayana practice and belief so that the Buddha the Buddha became went from being an actual person with a certain history to being a kind of a spotless nature of mind latent within all things and latent within ourselves and this kind of this in a strange way I mean this is of course something this became a controversy I mean there were controversies all the time between these various ways of interpreting the Dharma but one of the ways of seeing this is is that it became a kind of a reification of the self the self sort of comes back up again and in the the form of Buddha nature what may be said is that this Buddha nature is is of the nature of emptiness it doesn't really exist in that sense but that wasn't always the way it was taken and not the way it was necessarily taken because many people didn't see it or might see it as a kind of a shift over to an earlier form of thought in particular the upanishadic form of thought that the Buddha himself was in opposition to if we if we know about the early openness odds that were written around the time or a little bit for the time of the Buddha one of the things in the earlier punished odds was this notion it's in Sanskrit says tattvam I see you are that and the idea was that you yourself your Atman your soul was identical with Brahma with with the universe with all things and so the the aim of this kind of brahman ik religious goal that their aim was to understand this way that you in yourself was that were identical to the Brahma the universal soul and in a way this this this aspect of the tatata Garbus schools sort of reified that they sort of they sort of brought that up again in but in in different terms in terms of emptiness where your understanding that your own emptiness is the equivalent of this kind of put in nature that pervades all of reality and that sort of sustains all of reality that's all of what reality is at its basis and in fact in one of these Mahayana sutras of lanka Vitara sutra they talk about just this this question of to what extent this really is just a sort of a brahman ik teaching all over again so we know these things were controversial so we see in general in the history of the Mahayana as a number of innovations it began again not as a schism with any other school but simply as I think people who wanted to press the boundaries of it people who were perhaps a little bit less conservative in their opinions who may have had certain kinds of meditative experiences who may have had a certain sort of a longing for an understanding of the way the Buddha really was people who were not satisfied with the old practices people who were not satisfied with a solitary a relatively solitary kind of practice but who wanted something that was more overtly compassionate and all of these these different ideas have came together into making the Mahayana that we know today if you have any questions about this I'd really love to hear them down below I'm sure many of you have experienced practicing in a Mahayana context I do in a Zen context and as well have had experience in Tibetan contexts and know this stuff somewhat from the inside too and you'll see bits and pieces of all the things I've discussed in either of those certainly in a Zen context you'll hear some of them so and this maybe give you an idea of where they may have come from thanks so much for watching and I hope to catch you on the next one of these videos and meanwhile be well

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Id: wi_hqpIu-vk

Length: 26min 54sec (1614 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 06 2018