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Four Illusions: Candrakirti's Advice to Travelers on the Bodhisattva Path

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Four Illusions: Candrakirti's Advice to Travelers on the Bodhisattva Path 1. Travelers on the Buddhaʹs Path Stories of Gautama Buddhaʹs life say that he left behind his home and family in search of an answer to the question of why people suffer. Neither his experience of sensual pleasures as a rich manʹs son nor his experience of harsh austerities as a homeless wanderer brought relief. After he found the answer to his question, he chose the active life of teaching over a quiet life of meditative silence. When asked to teach, he responded with compassionate concern for the well‐being of others.1 He sought out his former companions and told them about a middle path that avoided both self‐ indulgence and self‐torture. In this first discourse (S V 421), the Buddha identified the demands of desire as the basic cause of human suffering: “And this, O monks, is the truth of the arising of suffering. It is this desire, which leads to repeated existence, which is associated with pleasure and passion, and which finds pleasure everywhere.” He prescribed a course of treatment to alleviate the pain and restore sufferers to health. The recommended treatment is concerned with alleviating not just physical pain. Equally important is treatment of the mental pain that comes from wanting what is unattainable (immortality) or transient (happiness, beauty, power). The Buddha prescribed a path of action based on ethical conduct, on meditation, and on insight into erroneous beliefs. Erroneous beliefs about gods and heavens perpetuate the illusion of immortality. Erroneous beliefs about acquiring endless quantities of food, drink, sex, and wealth perpetuate the illusion that happiness or beauty or temporal power can endure. The Buddha took his therapeutic message on the road and found converts in the cities and rural areas he traveled through. The new community (sangha) he formed was linked not by blood ties but by a vision of this world as a disturbing and dangerous place. The Mahayana Movement The Buddhaʹs teachings became the vehicle that assured people safe passage through the dangers of this world and the next. The preservation and proper interpretation of the Buddhaʹs words were of paramount importance for the first generation of his followers. As the Buddha lay dying, he advised his grieving disciples that they must look to his words for inspiration and guidance after he had gone. Traditional accounts of early Buddhist history record that five hundred of these disciples who had attained the status of saints (arhat) met to recite and collect what they had remembered of the Buddhaʹs teachings.2 These disciples and their students carried his word into new areas and formed new communities. Within a hundred years of the Buddhaʹs death, these diverse monastic communities, led by teachers with their own opinions on the interpretation of his teachings, had developed sectarian identities (Bareau 1955; Dutt 1977). Around the first century c.e. , debate over the interpretation of the Buddhaʹs teachings contributed to the writing and rewriting of discourses (sutra) and scholastic texts (abhidhaRama) with new analyses of the Buddhaʹs teachings. The authors of AbhidhaRama works shared certain fundamental assumptions about the world and the practice of the Buddhaʹs path. They believed that things (dhaRama) have an inherent existence or nature of their own (svabhva) and that arhats experience Nirvana through their insight into the nature of these things. The movement now known as Mahayana (Great Vehicle) criticized the arhatsʹ path as focusing too intently on their self‐centered pursuit of Nirvana. Bodhisattvas begin their path with their intention of working for the enlightenment (bodhi) of all beings (sattva). Mahayana supporters claimed that the vehicle of the Bodhisattva is greater because that path balances the individual pursuit of insight with great compassion for others. The authors of Mahayana texts rejected the AbhidhaRama assumption that mental health is associated with the skillful pigeonholing of things into categories, such as healthy and unhealthy (kusala, akusala). They believed that insight into the empty nature of all things frees the Bodhisattvasʹ mind from discouragement or depression and enables them to remain actively working in the world. Although the origins of the Mahayana movement remain obscure, most scholars agree that it developed in monastic circles. It was not a sectarian movement, since Chinese pilgrims reported that the monks who supported its vision lived in the same monastic institutions as other monks whom they criticized for supporting an inferior path (Williams 2000, 96–111). Chinese and Tibetan pilgrims followed the trade routes to India, the holy land of Buddhism, visited its sacred sites, and collected texts, which they brought back to their native lands. The fragmentary nature of the few Mahayana texts that survive in medieval Sanskrit manuscripts and the piecemeal translation of others into Chinese and Tibetan compound the difficulty of determining the circumstances under which the Mahayana movement arose. No historical records attest to the emergence of a charismatic leader. No early Mahayana scriptures (sutra) bear an authorʹs name, since the Buddha, seen in visions or revelations, inspired their composition. The unsystematic and diverse teachings in these texts suggests that they were composed in monastic communities separated by geography, language, and philosophy. Monks who traveled from one monastery or pilgrimage place to another carried copies of these scriptures, which became part of an institutionʹs library. The duplication of these scriptures was itself a meritorious act. Learned monks in these institutions around the first century c.e. began to compose Mahayana treatises (sutra), which explained the teachings of these scriptures and incorporated them into a systematic philosophy. Nagarjunaʹs Middle Way Nagarjuna (ca. second to third centuries c.e. ), the best known of these early Mahayana philosophers, lived in a monastic community in southern India. In addition to his philosophical works, Nagarjuna wrote letters to one of the Satavahana Dynasty kings encouraging him to adopt the vision of the Mahayana.3 In his most important work, the Mulamadhyamakakarikah (Root Verses on the Middle Way), he uses reason to defend the position that things are empty of any inherent existence of their own and cannot create themselves or sustain themselves without depending on other causes and conditions. The Madhyamaka (Middle Way) school of Buddhist philosophy takes its name from his belief that emptiness (sunyata) is the middle way between the extreme positions of nihilism and eternalism. Nihilists reject belief in a transmigrating self that experiences the results of actions (kaRama); eternalists believe in the eternal existence of such a self. Nagarjuna concedes that the eternalist view, which motivates people to do good in hope of a heavenly reward, is better than the nihilist view, but better still is the liberating insight that repudiates both views (R I.43–45). This liberating insight is the proper understanding of emptiness, as explained in Mahayana scriptures. In the Mulamadhyamakakarikah, Nagarjuna refers to an early Mahayana scripture, the Kyapaparivarta in which the Buddha speaks of the therapeutic value of emptiness. In this text, the Buddha asks Kasyapa to determine if a patient would be cured under these circumstances: a doctor gives medicine to a patient, but after it cures his symptoms it remains in his bowels without being expelled (KP §95–97). If it remains, Kasyapa replies, the patientʹs problems would become worse. The Buddha encourages him to regard emptiness in the same way. Nagarjuna similarly regards emptiness as a therapeutic antidote to the ill effects of attachment to views: The Buddhas have said that Emptiness is a purgative for all views. But they have said that those who hold Emptiness as a view are incurable. (MMK XIII.8) Emptiness functions like a laxative to free blockages of the mind. After it has accomplished its purpose, there is no reason to continue using it. Nagarjuna caustically suggests that people who hold on to emptiness will be no better off than the unfortunate patient with chronic constipation. He further condemns the destructive psychological effects of attachment to views in his Yuktiak (Sixty Verses on Logic). He warns (vv. 47–51) that engaging in divisive debates makes people vulnerable to attack by the “snakes of the afflictions (klea).” The snake of desire poisons debaters who want their own views to succeed and the snake of anger attacks them when their opponentsʹ views prevail. Many of the Buddhaʹs discourses collected in the Ahakavagga condemn the negative consequences of attachment to views. These discourses indicate that by eradicating egotism and remaining constantly mindful, the serious practitioner can calm the mindʹs development and expansion of concepts and views. The encyclopedic work of Madhyamaka philosophy attributed to Nagarjuna, the Ta‐chih‐tu Lun (*Mahprajñpramitopadea), quotes the Ahakavagga.4 The Ahakavagga and the works of Nagarjuna support restraint of the senses as a means of calming the disruptive effects of the mindʹs unrestrained activity: “Peace is the calming of all that is perceived, the calming of conceptual development (prapañca)” (MMK XXV.24ab). This verse advocates yogic practices that withdraw the mind from all sensory stimuli as a means for calming the mind and controlling its tendency to develop concepts. Insight into the emptiness of things also brings conceptual development to a halt (MMK XVIII.5).
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