Whose Dharma?

The Buddha lived and died approximately 2500 years ago. The mostly agrarian and pastoral culture in which taught is as far removed from the USA of the 21^st-century as can be imagined. The Awakened One spoke a language that is imperfectly understood today, and his words have been imperfectly translated into a number of “canonical” languages, none of which are extant. The various cultural spheres through which Buddhism moved in its journey from Southeast Asia to North America and Europe—as different from each other as ours is from them—shaped the teachings to their own needs. In short, there are many good reasons to doubt that what the Buddha taught, or even what his contemporaries understood his dharma to be, are exactly what you and I believe them to be. If I am right about that, then Buddhism is a kind of mirror-cum-trampoline for both individual and social development, intellectual, moral and spiritual. I can live with that. Having studied and practiced Buddha-dharma in several traditions and with varying degrees of rigor for—can it be?—45 years plus, I am less certain than ever of what Buddhist awakening is, and who, if anyone, has attained it. Should I stumble upon nirvana myself one day, no one will be more surprised than I.

Nevertheless, I make bold to declare that, if the account of the Buddha’s Dharma set forth in the Nikayas is not a gross misrepresentation of his thought, the Buddha was not in the business of making blanket judgments about the nature of Reality. He certainly suggested that things are not always what they appear to be, and that we are mistaken in our views of various sorts of things. Yet, stripped down to its bare bones, his project is metaphysically noncommittal: He was always talking about this or that, and never (or rarely) about whatever might underlie phenomena. When he spoke of the goal, it was in the most frustratingly vague of terms. He successfully avoided the kind of ontological ultimates and metaphysical skyscrapers in which the Advaita Vedantins, among others, entombed themselves. Even so, his immediate successors, and their successors, were unable to resist the temptation to elaborate on his intentionally incomplete worldview. And so we have the Abhidhamma, the schools, and a vast corpus of apocrypha.

The inventors of Chan had their favorite sources, of course, among them (besides the ever-popular and foundational Prajñāpāramitā literature) the Lankāvatara, Vimalakīrti, and Samdhinirmocana Sutras. Dōgen’s apparent favorite was that hardest of all scriptures to fathom, the Lotus of the Marvelous Dharma. As we progress through the assigned reading, we will discover not only alternate versions of Buddha-Dharma, but multiple Buddhas as well.