Tibetan Buddhism

views updated

Tibetan Buddhism

To understand Tibetan Buddhism and its significance to the contemporary United States, we must first understand Buddhism, then Tibet, then the combination. What is Buddhism? It is usually considered a religion. But the operative definitions of religion today fit only a third of the phenomena that make up the many forms of Buddhism—those in the categories of beliefs, rituals, and pattern maintenance in general. Most of Buddhism is, rather, concerned with pattern transcendence, through education, ethical discipline, literature, art, science, and philosophy. The Buddha's enlightenment was not a religious discovery, not a mystical meeting with "God," nor a mission to spread divine "Truth." It was, rather, presented as one human being's exact and comprehensive experiential understanding of the nature and structure of reality, the attainment of the final goal of all philosophical exploration and scientific investigation. "Buddha" is a title, meaning "awakened," "enlightened," and "evolved." A buddha's mind is just what most theists have thought the mind of God should be like, fully knowing everything in an infinite universe, totally Aware—thus by definition inconceivable, incomprehensible to finite, ignorant, egocentric consciousness.

Though it seems preposterous to those acculturated as we are in the United States, we must acknowledge the Buddha's claim of omniscience. Though definitional for every form of Buddhism, it is rarely emphasized, since this claim is sacrilege for theists and an impossibility for materialists. However, to be a Buddhist, one must believe that a buddha has evolved from an ignorant human to a state of knowing everything, and is thus able to give all beings a realistic refuge from suffering. Thus the purpose of a Buddhist's life, seen as a part of an infinite evolution, is to awaken such omniscience within oneself, to transcend the egocentric human condition, and to become a buddha. When one awakens as a buddha, suffering ends and happiness is complete. The infinite number of beings who have already become buddhas are naturally moved to share their happiness with all other beings, which they do all the time.

But even buddhas cannot force ignorant beings to become wise, and thus free and happy. Since beings are liberated from suffering only by their own free understanding, buddhas are forced to become teachers. Thus, Buddhism was always more an educational movement than a religious mission. The Buddha emphatically disclaimed any power as a creator. He critiqued the plausibility of any being having total power over all beings and things. He did not reject the existence of gods—he was not an "atheist." He is reported to have met gods, angels, and even devils, finding them just as real as any other beings and just as caught in ultimate ignorance. He found that gods also need the teachings of enlightened buddhas. Among a buddha's most important names are "God beyond gods" (Devatideva) and "Teacher of Gods and Humans" (Devamanushyashasta). Buddhism developed in India from the Buddha's time in the sixth and fifth centuries b.c.e., in what can be described as three main phases: the monastic (Shravakay?na), the messianic (Mah?y?na), and the apocalyptic (Vajray?na), each dominant for around five hundred years, with the earlier phases flourishing in parallel.

The monastic phase emphasized monasticism, as necessary for individual liberation. It was socially revolutionary, stressing ethical dualism and creating a new institution consisting of schools for human freedom, beyond the control of religious or secular authorities. The ideal of this phase was the enlightened monk or nun, the saint or arhat. The lay community was pushed to live according to a tenfold path of good and bad evolutionary action, not killing, stealing, or committing sexual misconduct; not lying, slandering, abusing, or speaking frivolously; and not harboring malice, greed, or unreasonable convictions. The critical education and warrior-like training of the monastics produced tamed persons, free of the wildness of egocentric drives. The social result of this phase was the pacification of a previously warlike society, and the spread of values supporting urbanization and the merchant classes. During this phase, Buddhism as a monastic educational movement spread outside of India, to Sri Lanka, Central Asia, Iran, and west Asia.

The messianic phase, dominant from 0 to 500 c.e., stemmed from core monasticism to reach out into lay society to transform the social ethic through the nondualistic ethic of love and compassion. It was socially evolutionary, as the monasteries developed into universities. The ideal of this phase was the bodhisattva, the hero or heroine who vows to free all beings from suffering and transform all universes into the buddhaverse, embarking on a process of conscious evolution through millions of future individual lives to complete buddhahood. This phase elaborated the doctrine of the three bodies of a buddha, the bodies of truth, beatitude, and beneficial emanation.

Metaphysically, the notion of nirv??a as a safe place beyond the world is critiqued, and the ultimate nonduality of nirv??a and sa?s?ra undergirds the nonduality of wisdom and compassion, of the monastic and lay communities, and of the Buddhist and non-Buddhist societies. The social result of this phase was to move Indian society, by now more civilized, toward a universalistic orientation, freeing the popular imagination of the colorful cosmos of the infinite buddhaverse. This phase spread wherever the monastic phase had spread, also moving beyond into China and further west in Asia.

The apocalyptic phase, dominant ca. 500–1000 c.e., was socially culminatory, with the monastic universities reaching out beyond the literate state into culturally marginal areas. It elaborated the furthest implications of the messianic phase by aiming at immediate transformation of the universe to buddhaverse. Its ideal figure is the female or male great adept (mahasiddha), an already actual perfect buddha maintaining an ordinary human form in history, exemplifying the kingship of each individual, contemplatively, ritually, and artistically. Messianic nondualism is here extended to everything, including sexuality and death; buddhahood is reconceived as bliss-void-indivisible orgasmic reality. There is an apocalyptic insistence on accelerating history and evolution, a realization of individual buddhahood and universal buddhaverse here and now, in this lifetime preferably, through magical, high-tech means. The social result was the elevation of women, the expansion of culture to marginal low castes, tribal members, and foreigners, and the permeation of high culture with aesthetic values. This phase spread everywhere that the previous phases had spread, reaching further to Indonesia, Korea, Japan, and Tibet. It was preserved in its original integration with the two previous phases only in the Shingon school in Japan and in Tibet.

Until recently, Tibet was a huge country of over one million square miles, unmistakably recognizable on a relief map of Asia as the highest plateau in the world, with an average altitude of 14,000 feet. It was as large as all of Europe. Its diverse regions were unified by intertribal wars from 500 b.c.e. to 500 c.e., with a royal dynasty emerging in the Yarlung valley near the Tsangpo River. This dynasty conquered an empire beyond the huge plateau that lasted from around 600 to 850 c.e. Its emperors began to import Buddhism as a cultural treasure from their Indian, Nepalese, Central Asian, and Chinese neighbors, whom they often conquered and pillaged. Inspired by the great adept from India, Padma Sambhava, these emperors created a written language, commissioned huge numbers of translations, built temples and monasteries, ordained monks, and spread the Buddhist ethic, in spite of the fact that their conquest empire depended on violence and martial discipline rather than Buddhist gentleness and spiritual discipline. Around 850 c.e., internal dissension shattered the dynasty, and Buddhism was suppressed as the state cult, though it gradually took hold as a grassroots movement.

By 1042, the Bengali master Atisha came to a regionalized Tibet gripped by a popular fervor for the Buddhist lifestyle and began to teach the full panoply of concepts developed in India during the three phases sketched above. From his time through the seventeenth century, a medieval Tibet became more and more monasticized and less and less militaristic, experiencing a brief period of state unification as part of the Mongol empire during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century.

Around 1400, a spiritual renaissance was ushered in by the lifework of the gifted lama Jey Tsong Khapa, who shared with Padma Sambhava and Atisha a special recognition by Tibetans. He attained full enlightenment in 1398, after an arduous six-year retreat. For the last twenty-one years of his life, his popular impact increased exponentially and set the tone for the next five hundred years. It was based on a new level of national dedication to Buddhism, making it the main aim of Tibetan life. Tsong Khapa founded the Great Prayer Festival in Lhasa in 1409, bringing the whole nation together for two weeks of prayer every lunar new year to celebrate an apocalyptic fortnight of miracles in Shakyamuni Buddha's biography. This became a core event for all of Tibet from 1409 until 1960, with the Chinese occupation of Tibet.

The centuries following the era of Tsong Khapa saw the rippling outward of this spiritual synthesis in a gradual process of transformation of the social, political, and physical landscape of Tibet. Monasteries were built on an unprecedented scale, with the Lhasa area alone constructing three major monasteries that came to house over twenty thousand monks (Lhasa's own lay population was no more than thirty-five thousand). The social climate became more peaceful, as fewer individuals were available for the armies of the aristocratic warlords.

One of Tsong Khapa's disciples, Gendun Drubpa (1391–1474), attained great awakenings and performed great deeds, founding the huge Tashi Lhunpo Monastic University in southern Tibet and teaching hosts of disciples. After his death, he turned up reincarnated as the son of a yogin couple. Eventually reunited with his disciples at Tashi Lhunpo, he was named Gendun Gyatso (1475–1542). He spent long years in retreat, gave great teachings, built important monasteries, and made daring inner voyages as an adept. His next reincarnation was Sonam Gyatso (1543–1588), who continued the universal spiritual education program, the building of monasteries, the taming of individuals, and his inner voyages as an adept. Invited to the court of the Mongol king Altan Khan, he tamed this formidable warlord and taught him that it was better not to sacrifice war captives to the ancestors and war gods, but rather to take refuge in the Three Jewels of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, and to practice renunciation, compassion, and wisdom, even becoming a buddha. Altan Khan was so impressed by his encounter with a person he obviously perceived to be a superior being that he gave him the name "Dalai Lama," "dalai" being the Mongol word for "ocean." Counting his two retrospectively renamed predecessors, Sonam Gyatso became known as His Holiness the Third Dalai Lama.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the secular rulers of Tibet felt overwhelmed by the popular dedication to enlightenment education, monastic vocations, and monastery building. As in both shogunate Japan and Protestant Europe, a period of violent persecution of monasteries ensued, with the fate of the country in the balance. The secular forces of the militaristic, aristocratic warlords tried to eclipse the rise of the monastery-centered, spiritual lifestyle, but the monastic leaders resisted. The Dalai Lama, by now the beloved spiritual leader of a huge population, called for help from the Mongolian ruler Gushri Khan, who had become his disciple. The Khan swept into Tibet and crushed the coalition of Tibetan warlords, disarmed them, and brokered a peace that elevated the main monastic leader to head the nation.

In 1642, almost exactly a thousand years after the first Buddhist temple was built in Lhasa, His Holiness the Fifth Dalai Lama (1617–1682) was crowned king of Tibet. He founded the Ganden Palace Victory Government, which Tibetans still consider their legitimate government, a unique form of government eminently suited to Tibet's Buddhist society. It was almost completely demilitarized, acknowledging the centrality of the monastic institutions in the national life and the priority given to nonviolence. He built the Potala Palace on the Red Mountain at Lhasa. His palace was three buildings in one: a monastery for the abbot, a fortress for the king, and a buddha realm or mandala for the adept.

The nobility was virtually expropriated, retaining the use of and income from parts of its hereditary estates only as salary for service to the Ganden government. Nobles were deprived of their private armies, losing their feudal power of life and death over their peasants. With thanks to the Mongolian supporter, the Great Fifth asked him and his army to go back to Mongolia, and Tibet became the first modern nation to be unilaterally disarmed. As the Protestant princes of northern Europe and the shoguns of Japan had seen, a nation could not afford a universal military and a universal monastery at the same time; this caused them to terminate their monasteries. In Tibet alone at this time, the monastery terminated the military instead and created a bureaucratic government to maintain a principled peace. International security was maintained by diplomacy and moral force, not by military prowess. During the 317 years of the Dalai Lamas' rule over Tibet, a remarkable society developed, the earliest postmodern society in the world. Completely demilitarized, it was utterly "educationalized," in that the monastic vocation thrived at the highest rate ever achieved in any society. It was not Shangri-la; Tibetans believe that Shambhala (their own mythic paradise on earth) exists in the northern polar region. They were highly aware of the all-too-human faults of their "Land of Snows." But they still felt specially blessed by the presidency of Lokeshvara, their archangelic messiah figure incarnate in the Dalai Lamas. It was the land of his sacred mantra, OM MANI PADME HUM, "Come! Jewel and Lotus Holder! Be with me!" It was a land of maximum opportunity for the individual intent on enlightenment. There was maximum low-cost, lifelong educational opportunity. There were minimum taxes, almost no military service, no mortgages, and no factories for material products. There was no lack of teachers.

Tibetan Buddhist practice can be summarized briefly as consisting of: (1) living in a multilife continuum of evolutionary lives, under the refuge of the Buddha, the dharma reality and teaching, and the community of enlightenment-oriented people; (2) finding that refuge represented by living, enlightened, incarnate teachers (lamas) who could administer the teachings to individuals in an optimal manner; (3) recognizing within the special preciousness of the human life-form and so making the most of this life opportunity; (4) acknowledging impermanence and the immediacy of death, making each moment precious; (5) accepting the evolutionary impact of every thought, word, or deed, hence taking responsibility for one's own fate; (6) recognizing the universality of suffering attendant upon the unenlightened, egocentric mind-set, hence resolving to develop wisdom free of delusion; (7) recognizing the common condition of all beings as suffering and interrelated, and hence developing love and compassion as the key to all evolutionary progress and ultimate happiness; (8) aspiring to attain perfect understanding of the nature of reality as the only way to find freedom from suffering; (9) cultivating a positive imagination and vision of the universe and the empirical self as the method of achieving relative happiness; and (10) rehearsing and perfecting control over the processes of death, between-state (the after-death, dreamlike transformation experience) travel, and the evolutionary life with a view to ensuring complete enlightenment for the sake of oneself and others. Though there is an infinite variety of theories and practices suited to a great variety of individuals, these ten developmental processes are common to all forms of Tibetan Buddhism.

Everything about post–seventeenth century Tibetan life was rationalized to facilitate the production of enlightenment; their unique psychological and social form of life is a kind of inner modernity. Most recently, this mentality has adapted quite well to the rest of the world's industrial modernity, in the United States and throughout the world, except when the encounter was violently forced, as it decidedly was when the Chinese Communists attempted to impose Marxist materialism, communistic egalitarianism, and an industrial focus on Tibetans, via an all-out assault on Tibetan Buddhism. They destroyed monastic institutions, monks and nuns, scriptures, outdoor monuments, mani stones, prayer flags, personal rosaries and prayer wheels, icons, paintings, photographs of the Dalai Lama, even knowledge of the Tibetan language. They instituted intensive communist thought reform and struggle sessions for decades. They killed members of the upper classes, forced redistribution of all forms of wealth, and imposed Chinese-language education and Maoist indoctrination. They enlisted all able-bodied persons in labor brigades, work gangs, and other production units.

These brutal measures caused the death of approximately 1.2 million people, destroyed all the architectural and artistic treasures of the Tibetan nation, and eradicated the intelligentsia entirely, except for a few people who survived the prison camps or who escaped into exile in the United States and elsewhere. Nonetheless, the attempts to eradicate Tibetan culture were a dismal failure. The minute the Chinese administration was distracted by the post-Mao disturbances in the early 1980s, the Tibetans rose up and began to rebuild their monasteries, to become monks and nuns, and to restore their previous social order based on occupation and talent. They traveled to India for pilgrimage and to receive initiations and teachings from the Dalai Lama and other teachers. The Chinese were astounded that such "primitive" thinking could have survived their thirty-year onslaught; but they uneasily acquiesced in the Tibetan choices, hoping to make Tibet, with its colorful monasteries, quaint monks, and ceremonies, an attractive tourist destination. But by the late 1980s, monks and especially nuns began to make peaceful protests against the Chinese occupation, and the government again suppressed the monasteries with a heavy hand.

In exile in India, Nepal, and Bhutan, as well as in North America, Europe, and Australia, the Dalai Lama and about 150,000 Tibetan refugees have succeeded in keeping their unique civilization alive. They have their own school system, so young Tibetans can learn the Tibetan language, history, and some basic religious teachings. They have maintained a high rate of monasticism, with over 25,000 monks and nuns, making up about one sixth of the Tibetan population in exile. The curricula of the monasteries and nunneries continue to emphasize spiritual studies and practices, though a modicum of modern, secular learning is added to orient the religious in the contemporary world. Tibetan spiritual teachers have attracted large followings in Europe, the Americas, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia, and some have written best-sellers. The Dalai Lama has received the Nobel Peace Prize, and has met and is respected by most of the world's religious and secular leaders. The Communist Chinese regime still refuses to recognize him or his people's right of self-determination, and still succeeds in making other governments ignore the reality of Tibet as the price of trade relations.

Tibetans in the United States and elsewhere are a success story as refugee communities go, with little history of violence, crime, or persisting poverty, and they easily take to the professions of the modern economy. The last chapter of the amazing social experiment of Tibetan Buddhist civilization cannot yet be written, as it involves the coming experience of the political freedom Tibet will inevitably gain, as the restructuring of the big-power, twentieth-century colonialism that Russia only recently relinquished becomes global. Then we will see if a society touched by living buddhas, with a different popular sense of the purpose and value of human life, with a determined spiritual orientation, will adopt some elements of materialistic modernity. Which elements will it adopt, and which will it reject? Will Tibetans use computers to aid them in their quest for evolutionary perfection in Buddhahood? Will they militarize, never again to taste the bitterness of conquest and occupation by an outside power? Will they exploit and ruin their own environment? Will they industrialize in an external manner? The world will get a chance to see if a culture oriented to the possibility of becoming a perfect buddha can persist in a materially modern setting.

See alsoBuddha; Buddhism; Dalai Lama; Dharma; Enlightenment.