Tricycle | Awake in the World

IN EARLY BUDDHISM, the Buddha was understood to be a remarkable person who discovered and overcame, through his own subjective experimentation, the root of human suffering, and devised a method for sharing his experience so that others could duplicate it. He spent about forty-five years refining his discussion of that method, and creating a social structure for an organized community that promoted it.

In the Lotus Sutra—a Mahayana text, so important in Far Eastern Buddhism—you get quite a different sense of who the Buddha was and what he accomplished. In this sutra the Buddha reveals that he is not a person at all; he is the eternal principle of the essential ineffable nature of reality. He says that earlier he had pretended to be a person, had faked his birth, aging, and his passing away, because that is what was expected and needed by people at that time. He says that the various painstaking early methods he devised to promote awakening were actually expedient devices, useful for disciples with a limited understanding but not really salient or necessary in reality, and that now, in the Lotus Sutra, he is revealing the deeper truth that nirvana isn't a state to be attained at some future time through long effort. In fact, nirvana is the real nature of all things, and so no method and no cultivation is or ever was necessary; simply to have faith in the Lotus Sutra's true teaching suffices. So just holding up a flower would be enough to evoke all teachings, all truths. No more is needed.

While the Lotus Sutra is sprawling and poetic, rather than philosophical in an organized way as other sutras often are, it suggests and supports two crucial Mahayana concepts that are germane to this discussion. One is tathata, or "suchness"—the world as it is, seen in its true aspect, free of our conceptual projections, our ordinary lunacy. The early Buddhist idea of the world as a vale of tears to be overcome by purification and effort is set aside in the Lotus Sutra in favor of a spiritualized world, an eternal world, which is the only real world. The concept of suchness suggests that this true world, beyond our limited views of it, is already a perfect Buddha-land, if only we can open our eye of faith and see it as it is.

A second Mahayana concept supported by the Lotus Sutra teaching is upaya, skillful means. According to the doctrine of upaya, there are no particular fixed means of awakening. One need not be limited by Buddhist practices taught previously, which were, after all, only provisional and limited in scope. In reality, everything is potentially a means to awakening. It is simply a matter of seeing this and knowing how to apply each thing in each particular case. Buddhist practice is not limited to austere meditation, monastic precepts, cultivation of wholesome states, and so on, activities best suited to home-leavers and ascetics. Bodhisattvas practice skillful means to help all beings without exception to awaken. If beings need food, tofu is skillful means; if they need warmth, a blanket is skillful means. There's nothing that can't be part of a program for awakening. Everything is practice.

If the Buddha is not a human being born from his past karma into this world for one last lifetime's practice, as previous sutras taught, if the Buddha is instead the eternal principle of suchness and awakening as the Lotus Sutra implies he is, then how and why does he appear in this world? The Lotus teaches that he appears not from karma, as do all other beings, but due to the "One Great Causal Condition," which is the interdependent nature of existence/nonexistence, a field whose true shape and purpose is love. This is a deep and astounding teaching: that far from being a world of trouble and tears as it appears to be, this world of existence/nonexistence, seen in the light of suchness and lived according to upaya, is in reality a world of bliss and awakening. But beings don't know this. They are awash in a sea of suffering. Reality's true trajectory is toward relieving this suffering through love.

It seems to me that somehow we all know that love is our real nature and our real goal; we all long to realize this goal, however confused and misguided our longing may be. Being human has embedded right in the middle of it some sense of longing and reaching out for something very, very large, not outside our lives, but as our lives. We are all in search of the One Great Causal Condition, whether we know it or not. The teaching of the Lotus Sutra affirms that this is so, and gives us a way to understand and envision it.

An important saying of the Lotus Sutra, one that is crucial for understanding our story, is that suchness is revealed "by a buddha and a buddha." A buddha alone cannot realize it; only a buddha and a buddha can. Although we must all rely on our own experience and intelligence, we cannot realize suchness by dint of our own efforts. An appreciation of true suchness can be awakened within us only in radical encounter. "Only a buddha and a buddha" means there are no separate buddhas. There are only points of meeting, moment after moment, world after world, of meeting. All things merge, mix, create, and liberate each other. Nothing is separate and alone. This is how things are. This is compassion, not merely an extra something one of us feels for another, but existence itself. Being is by its nature sharing and loving. And we realize this not as a concept or a method we can work at and finally grasp, but as a truth that we perceive through our mutual recognition, our mutual shared awakening.