Buddhist spectrum

The marvel of miracle

Sachitra Mahendra

The Brahmin flew over the river to the other side. He had achieved that spiritual position, thought his acolyte. In the line was the Buddha with his closest associate Monk Ananda. Monk Ananda who was wondering if the Buddha wanted to outsmart the Brahmin. The Buddha stepped into the raft softly, and gave out a few coins to him upon the end of the river cruise.

“See Ananda,” the Buddha piped up, “that Brahmin’s so called skill is only a few coins worth. Miracles do not tell your mental achievement.”

Although the Buddha did not accept performing the miracles, his life is bedecked with miracles, one would notice. He uttered a few words of wisdom immediately after his birth. He was worshipped by two elders: his teacher and father. He entered deep meditation as little Prince Siddhartha.

There were times the Buddha had to perform physical miracles before his relatives, untamable humans and beasts, and sages of other disciplines. All the same he sternly rejected all but one form of miracle, the skill of convincing. The Buddha had the flair for convincing almost anyone about his teachings; other cults took this out as a negative feature and labelled the skill as avartani mayava, the spell of talking someone around.

When he was on the verge of enlightenment, the Mara approached with his darling daughters hot on the heel. They tried all sorts of charm to seduce this man who tried to tread beyond the traditional lines. The seduction was enough, the scriptures go on to say, to cause dark vomit, if it was a normal human being. But the Buddha stood astonishingly upright and calm.

In the third week of the Buddha’s enlightenment, the deities were not quite sure about his achievement as yet.

The Buddha sensed this and showed his mettle by creating a golden bridge in the air. His twin miracle, simultaneous creation of both water and fire, was larger than life for his relatives.

Why did the Buddha perform miracles while asking his followers not to take up that path? The Buddha is extraordinary compared with others and he lives in a world full of do-gooders who have doubts about his enlightenment. Only a miracle can make a run-of-the-mill happy and impressed.

In fact this does not sound in sync with the core of Buddhism, but by all odds, this technique should be employed at times, because it helps them get the essence of the Dhamma at least to some extent.

As the chief teacher, the Buddha had to change tack often, especially when his disciples refrained from performing miracles. The Buddha had to tackle tough humans and beasts such as Alawaka, Angulimala and Nalagiri too.

Many events of this calibre are recorded in the Buddha’s life story. The Buddha made a visit to the Brahma world, because they had likened the Nibbana to the Brahma existence, under an illusion.

The Buddha had to show his strength to convince the Brahma chief, hence they had a hide-and-seek game to test the mind-strength of each other. Wherever the Brahma chose to hide, it was well lit far and wide, whereas no one could ever locate the Buddha from his hideaway.

The Buddha was in old age, when he was on a long journey with his companion Monk Ananda. He became thirsty and wanted Ananda to fetch some water. Monk Ananda could not find water anywhere. Only place Ananda came across had muddy water. But it became crystal clean by the Buddha’s power.

Buddhism stands aloof from all other religion, because it discourages the marvel of physical miracle. Physical miracles are required only when the philosophy does not have a firm foundation.

The Buddha’s spiritual strength

As laid down in Mahasihanada Sutta:

“Sariputta, the Tathagata has these ten Tathagata’s powers, possessing which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahma. What are the ten?

1. “Here, the Tathagata understands as it actually is the possible as possible and the impossible as impossible.And that is a Tathagata’s power that the Tathagata has, by virtue of which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahma.

2. “Again, the Tathagata understands as it actually is the results of actions undertaken, past, future and present, with possibilities and with causes. That too is a Tathagata’s power.

3. “Again, the Tathagata understands as it actually is the ways leading to all destinations. That too is a Tathagata’s power.

4. “Again, the Tathagata understands as it actually is the world with its many and different elements. That too is a Tathagata’s power.

5. “Again, the Tathagata understands as it actually is how beings have different inclinations. That too is a Tathagata’s power.

6. “Again, the Tathagata understands as it actually is the disposition of the faculties of other beings, other persons. That too is a Tathagata’s power.

7. “Again, the Tathagata understands as it actually is the defilement, the cleansing and the emergence in regard to the jhanas, liberations, concentrations and attainments. That too is a Tathagata’s power.

8. “Again, the Tathagata recollects his manifold past lives, that is, one birth, two births, three births, four births, five births, ten births, twenty births, thirty births, forty births, fifty births, a hundred births, a thousand births, a hundred thousand births, many aeons of world-contraction, many aeons of world-expansion, many aeons of world-contraction and expansion: ‘There I was so named, of such a clan, with such an appearance, such was my nutriment, such my experience of pleasure and pain, such my life-term; and passing away from there, I reappeared elsewhere; and there too I was so named, of such a clan, with such an appearance, such was my nutriment, such my experience of pleasure and pain, such my life-term; and passing away from there, I reappeared here.’ Thus with their aspects and particulars he recollects his manifold past lives. That too is a Tathagata’s power.

9. “Again, with the divine eye, which is purified and surpasses the human, the Tathagata sees beings passing away and reappearing, inferior and superior, fair and ugly, fortunate and unfortunate, and he understands how beings pass on according to their actions thus: ‘These worthy beings who were ill-conducted in body, speech and mind, revilers of noble ones, wrong in their views, giving effect to wrong view in their actions, on the dissolution of the body, after death, have reappeared in a state of deprivation, in a bad destination, in perdition, even in hell; but these worthy beings who were well-conducted in body, speech and mind, not revilers of noble ones, right in their views, giving effect to right view in their actions, on the dissolution of the body, after death, have reappeared in a good destination, even in the heavenly world.’ Thus with the divine eye, which is purified and surpasses the human, he sees beings passing away and reappearing, inferior and superior, fair and ugly, fortunate and unfortunate, and he understands how beings pass on according to their actions. That too is a Tathagata’s power.

10. “Again, by realizing it for himself with direct knowledge, the Tathagata here and now enters upon and abides in the deliverance of mind and deliverance by wisdom that are taintless with the destruction of the taints. That too is a Tathagata’s power that a Tathagata has, by virtue of which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahma.

Translated by Bhikkhus Bodhi and Nanamoli

Buddhism in South India

Anne E. Monius

The soaring towers of the great temples dedicated to the Hindu gods Siva and Visnu have taken charge of the religious landscape in the Tamil-speaking corner of Southeast India. Impressive shrines built by a succession of powerful medieval dynasties cover the region, from Kancipuram in the North to Sriralkam, Citamparam, Tancavur, and Maturai.

The temples of Siva’s son, Murukan, mark the boundaries of the Tamil country. The most prominent Tamil political party (Tiravita Munnerrak Kalakam, or DMK) declared Murukan to be its official patron deity in 1971.

Minority populations

Tamil-speaking Hindus enjoy the reputation throughout India of being the most traditional and the most orthodox, with their practices and institutions representing a seemingly unbroken chain of religious development that stretches back nearly two millenniums. Although minority populations of Muslims, Christians, and Jains do exist, the overwhelming majority of the Tamil-speaking population in modern India practice some form of devotion to Siva, Vishnu, or the goddess.

Yet the literary and historical record of religions in this region of southernmost India tells a far more complex story.

Although the monarchs of the medieval Pallava, Paotiya, and co. constructed large edifices in honor of the Hindu pantheon, they patronized other sectarian communities as well, including Jains, Ajivikas and Buddhists.

Early records

Indeed, non-Hindu communities played such an important role in South Indian literary and religious culture and in the administration of the state between the fourth and seventh centuries that later Saiva tradition labeled this period the Kalabhra Interregnum, the interruption of the ‘wicked ones’ (kalappalar).

The earliest written records in Tamil, the Brahmi inscriptions, are Jain. Between the composition of the classical, or Calkam literature (roughly, the second through fourth centuries), and the emergence of the Hindu devotional (bhakti) poet-saints in the 7th through 9th Centuries, the majority of the poetic works produced in Tamil were written by either Buddhists or Jains.

Despite the presence of Buddhists, Jains, and Ajivikas in the Tamil inscription-wise, archaeological, and literary record, the significance of non-Hindu contributions to the history of religions in Tamil-speaking South India has only recently become the topic of serious academic study.

In what Richard Davis calls the ‘standard historical narrative concerning South Indian Jainism and Saivism’ for example, scholarship has long tended to pit Hindu against non-Hindu, telling ‘a story of heterodox challenge and Hindu revival and triumph.’

In this historical narrative, which has dominated the study of religion in South India for more than a century, Buddhists and Jains appear only intermittently as the ‘other’, as foreigners to be spurned, ridiculed, and ultimately dismissed as ‘anti Tamil,’ unable to corrupt or suppress with their emphasis on ascetic practice the natural joie de vivre of the Tamils.

Woman in religion

Several recent and important studies have begun to reverse this scholarly trend, however, particularly in regard to the long presence of Tamil-speaking Jains in South India.

Leslie C. Orr’s work, for example, examines the lives of both Hindu and Jain ‘religious women’ in the inscription record of the 8th through 13th Centuries, noting that Jain women were both significant temple donors and religious teachers. James Ryan’s study of the 9th Century poetic narrative, the Civakacintamaoi, demonstrates the power of literary parody in this sophisticated work by a Jain monk that overturns the classical conventions of literary love to prove “the poisonousness of lust in epic fashion’.

Productive encounter

Paula Richman’s study of the 6th Century Buddhist narrative, the Manimekalai, loosely follows a similar approach, demonstrating the ways in which the author inverts classical literary ideals with great rhetorical finesse to inculcate Buddhist values in his audience.

Examining the anti-Jain invective in the earliest devotional poetry to Siva, Indira Peterson asserts that “we cannot assume that the Jains suddenly stopped participating in Tamil culture even as the Saiva Bhakti cult began to assert itself.

It is much more likely that the Nayanars (the Saiva saints, literally ‘leaders’) found it advantageous to exclude their most powerful rivals from their reformulation of Tamil culture.

In a thought-provoking essay that ponders the origins of the seeming similarities between Jain thought and the medieval Saiva philosophy in Tamil known as Saiva Siddhanta, Richard Davis suggests a model of ‘productive encounter’ among sectarian communities, a flow of ideas back and forth despite the Saiva rhetoric of challenge and defeat.

Indeed, each of the essays in the edited volume, suggestively titled Open Boundaries: ‘Jain Communities and Cultures in Indian History’, in which Orr, Ryan, Peterson, and Davis articles cited previously appear, fruitfully attempts to understand the Jain tradition, from models of kingship to Jain contributions to Sanskrit literary theory, in the broader context of South Asian history and religiosity, taking into account the ‘challenging, borrowing, contradicting, polemicizing, appropriating, and modifying that goes on across religious boundaries’.

Among the many religious communities that once wielded influence in various realms of cultural life in the Tamil-speaking South, relatively little study has been made of the Buddhists.

With the Buddhist strongholds of Amaravati and Nagarjunakooda immediately to the north and the great monastic establishments of Sri Lanka to the east, it is certainly not surprising to find traces of a Buddhist presence in the kingdoms of the Pallavas, the Paotiyas, and the Co;as in the fourth through twelfth centuries.

Medieval South

Yet while the scattered artifacts of Buddhism in the region have been examined individually over the past century or so, the significance of any one is often far from clear; the character of the Tamil-speaking Buddhist community or communities has remained largely obscure.

Who were the Tamil-speaking Buddhists of South India? What did being ‘Buddhist’ mean in the complex religious world of the medieval South, a diverse landscape of competing sectarian communities in which Buddhists were perhaps always a minority? What can the disparate remnants of Buddhism in this region reveal to the historian of religions?

Burning your books!

Lotus Heart

Once there was a well known philosopher and scholar who devoted himself to the study of Zen for many years. On the day he finally attained enlightenment, he took all his books out into the yard, and burned them all.

This reminds me the simile of raft. The Buddha once compared his teachings to the raft. Just because it helped you cross the river, you don’t need the raft on your shoulder after crossing the river. “Likewise my teachings”, said the Buddha, “should be given up too when you achieved the goal.”

However believe you me, the Buddha never asked to burn the raft! Not to destroy his teachings either. Why the philosopher burned all his books may remain a frozen mystery. Perhaps he felt that others would not grasp the philosophy, and might be harmful to the ignorant beings. Following complex philosophies is just like eating sweets by a well sharpened knife. Did he burn the books because he realized their uselessness? Or did he burn them because he thought there was no more knowledge left to gain? I get the feeling that maybe he wasn’t very enlightened. Or maybe the scholar felt he was done with his studies, and didn’t need his books anymore.

Anyway you can’t learn everything from books. Even though you are well versed in thousand lines of Dhamma, you may not be practically following them. In the Buddha’s time, the monks were mainly in two camps: meditating and teaching monks. The second groups knew the Dhamma backwards and forwards to teach the community. The meditating monks did not have a thorough knowledge of the Dhamma, because they were aiming for the mental development. This first group achieves the goal of Buddhism, whereas the second group lives up to hundreds of years merely preaching the Dhamma to others.

I remember Dr. E W Adikaram, who gave up reading towards the last phase of his life. He claimed himself the happiest on the earth. Why can’t we claim ourselves the happiest on the earth? Buddhism has given more than enough for us to be happy. It’s not the outside environment that make us gloomy, it’s completely mind made. We may read hundreds of books or listen to countless sermons, but we never follow them. If we realise that and follow, then we are all happy beings on earth – just like everyone can become a Buddha in the Mahayana vehicle.

So remember this: books won’t help you out always. You have to learn life’s lessons yourself, not from what other people say. Listen and read what others have to say, and try to think them over. It’s your own thoughts that are important. Everything else is indoctrination from others.

The philosopher on the other hand reminds us this: Once you have gained a true understanding of something, the knowledge will be with you for the rest of your life. You’ll never have to study it again. Dr Adikaram did that, because whatever he came across, he read it fully mindful. We can do that too. It’s far better reading and try to understand one single stanza rather than trying to mug off many suttas.

The reason that he burned the books was because he felt that he had learned all that he could possibly and that it was time to move on and learn from life itself. Once you attain a goal, you no longer need the methods that helped you get there. All systems of knowledge and conceptual beliefs, including this one, a limited perception.

My friend says this story is bullshit. Forget about enlightenment, what if the Zen master forgets something later on and wants to look it up? We all learn from cradle to grave. Even the Buddha did not want to destroy his teachings – he wanted others to be benefitted. This also sounds like he wanted to rid himself of his former life. I don’t see anything wrong with this, the books must have been pretty cool under fire.

Every young generation says the olden day knowledge is useless, and the new knowledge should be given way. The scholar must have wanted to get rid of hacked useless books, and freshen his mind for new knowledge.

Whatever it is, I find it hard to agree completely with the story. Why burn the knowledge attained? Knowledge must be saved for the future. A mind can only store away so much information.

Maybe he realized with his enlightened mind that he was cold. I could never bring myself to burn a book! It’s almost like burning the person, probably our teacher, who wrote it. We should not have grudges against teachers!