I think there is very often, in spite of the attempts at reconciliation, real differences in the Buddhist tradition. Curiously enough, you not only find that in the Theravada countries where Satipatthana has had a revival of interest in just the past twenty years, you also find if you talk to people who are jayis, who are living in the backcountry meditating, repeated denigrations of the people who are doing Satipatthana. They say that if you don't do the trances you don't get anywhere. I think what you have in Buddhism is this, and I think one of the things that creates a dynamic in Buddhism is this tension. I think between different contemplative complexes is one of the things that gives an impetus to creativity in contemplation in Buddhism. I think two things are happening. There are

[01:06]

at one level attempts to integrate the two, to create paths. At another level there seems to be a constant exploration of the limits of each type to see how far you can go on a particular way. I think that in addition to there being standard path structures, you also find in Buddhism the two types continuing with traditions of their own. For example, you can find not only what we can call jhana meditations continuing in Buddhism, but you can find what we can call sati, smrti meditations continuing in Buddhism. One of the things that's curious about Buddhist literature is that texts are not written by people who are in trances, that almost all the texts seem to come from this side of the tradition. But if you look at Hindu material, interestingly enough, if you look at the Bhagavad Gita, for

[02:14]

example, at the places where it employs Buddhist terminology, where it uses terms like nirvana, like dukkha, where it uses Buddhist terminology, if you look at the sections in the Shanti Parvan where they're talking about trance state, they use Buddhist terminology to describe trance state. In the Hindu literature that is in the Mahabharata, in the Bhagavad Gita, in the Hindu literature from around the turn of the millennium to, say, 300 AD, 400 AD, you find that the Hindus looked at the Buddhists as archetypically enstatic. Whenever the Hindus wanted to talk about an enstatic tradition, they used Buddhist terminology, which I think is evidence that this was moving right along. There were jhanic traditions in Buddhism at the same time, but they didn't write books the way people in the mindfulness tradition wrote books. But curiously enough, people from outside the Buddhist tradition saw this side as being typically Buddhist. And mediating between this opposition, you had all the various

[03:21]

path structures. And in addition to creating path structures, it seems that what is Buddhist is this whole triadic structure. That's Buddhism. And what Buddhism is doing is trying to explore all the parameters of contemplative techniques. And you not only have these independent traditions, but you have constant attempts to make paths. In China, you've got tiantai, you've got zhuguang meditation, as a very important Chinese attempt to create a path structure. And I think in China, too, you find both these traditions going and continuing. In some sense, what happened in China was an accident of history, that the great Buddhist persecutions, in a sense, lopped off the top of the pyramid in China, because path structures for some reason tend to be associated with monastic institutions. The other structures tend to be portable.

[04:24]

And what you find in China, sort of as an accident of history more than anything else, is that the great monastic institutions were lopped off by the great persecutions, and you were left with the portable cults, which means Pure Land, which means Zen, things like that. This, again, is very speculative, and I wouldn't bet real money on it, but it seems to me that, again, you can see the development of tantric paths in India as, again, a new response to putting together a path out of what were then developed forms of these two traditions, that you can see, for example, the mahasiddhas in India, the crazy wanderers, people like Saraha and Kanha, as developing a sati tradition, and the tantric path that developed in the Indian Buddhist universities as being an attempt, again, to make a path out of what were then the developed types of these two traditions. So I think that this

[05:30]

is a continuing dynamic in Buddhism. It's probably going on even now. And I think this is one of the things that gives the Buddhist tradition an impetus to grow and change and develop and gives it a flexibility to adapt to new cultures. But the whole triad is Buddhism, no matter what people may say about each other. Yeah, please, don't let my loquacity intimidate you. It seems like, actually, like you were hinting at all the time, that there are two different cultural traditions. There's a shamanic thing, probably out of Central Asia, where there's the thing of a vertical universe, and the thing of ascending from one plane to another to reach final luminance. And also to get there in your own person. In your present body, you get to have it, literally. You talk to the gods, and then you come back. Versus

[06:32]

the other business, where there's cleaning, doing what we call mirror polishing, which seems to be another piece of polemic. That seems, this mirror polishing, seems to be a very Indian kind of thing. I would guess that too. I would be utterly reluctant to attempt to make any cultural connections between the Indus Valley and anything else. But it seems to me that, curiously enough, you find ecstatic traditions, for example, in Greece. They were influential through Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysus in the Christian tradition. You find them in India. You don't find the enstatic complex as strongly anyplace else

[07:37]

in the world that I can think of as India. Which makes me think that it's a growth native to the Indian soil. But again, this is very speculative. But then it moves west later, I should think, into the Western monastic tradition, where you withdraw from the world and where you do all kinds of meditative trips about, like But it seems, for example, if you look at the intertestamental Jewish monastic communities, there seems to be some considerable questions as to how monastic they were. It seems people moved in with their whole families. I don't know. It's a curious, the origins of Christian monasticism and the possible influence of Buddhist monasticism on Christian monasticism is fascinating. That whole trade between the West and the East through Central Asia is a fascinating thing. You know that Ashoka had a monument in northwest India that was

[08:45]

bilingual in Greek and Aramaic. There was obviously a cultural interchange going on, but what its form was or how it was working, we just don't know. But it's fascinating, it really is. So monasticism may have been a Buddhist invention that was exported to Christian Europe, yeah. And then the Christian thing took over the whole business of ascending through graves of likeness and all that. But you find that in monastic tradition also. Yeah. So I would tend to associate what I call the ecstatic contemplative complex with Indo-European, probably tracing it back to Indo-European. I hesitate to use the word shamanic, but that's probably as good, shamanic in the broadest sense rather than the restricted cultural sense, to Indo-European shamanic traditions and to see the ecstatic as being native to

[09:47]

India. But you're right, I think that you have different cultural roots for these. But I think this was something that was being worked out through many of the Indian traditions. I think that much of, say, what the Bhagavad Gita is arguing about is some way to overcome the difference between what the Gita calls yoga and Sankhya. Note again this term that is like the parthi sankhana that we find in the Anguttara Nikaya for the visionary ecstatic tradition as opposed to yoga, which is end-static withdrawal. And what the Gita recommends is a very un-Buddhist solution that the Buddhists never took over is that the way to mediate this opposition is through bhakti. And this was their solution, which in a sense became the Hindu solution to the problem. You don't think that leads out into Pure Land? I think in a sense, yes. But I think that what happens with Pure Land meditations and the

[10:51]

kinds of visualizations that make up Pure Land meditation, I think that what bhakti is in the Gita is very similar to buddhanusmriti that was exported to China as visionary meditation on the Buddha and the Pure Lands. I think these two are very similar. What happened, though, is that I think in Hinduism, to speak in purely structural terms, that bhakti, this kind of iconographic visualization that is called bhakti, became the mediator between the opposition and was a successful mediator. I think that because Buddhism, because of the internal dynamic of Buddhism in many ways, this kind of meditation was subsumed under the end-static tradition of Buddhism. And that in a sense, I think structurally Pure Land meditation fits into the Jhana tradition in Buddhism as in a sense the visionary creation

[11:52]

of an alternative world and as such seems to have as transcendent a soteriology as the earlier Jhana traditions. I think this seems to be the drift within Buddhism and how it was subsumed under the general structural rubric. Let me just make clear, I want to keep as separate as possible the textual analysis, which I think is okay, from the tremendous house of cards of speculation which we are in the process of building on it. But as I said, I recommend this to your consideration. I think it works structurally, but there's a lot of work to be done. Well, just as I was saying before, like they were able to pick out all the funny systems, let me just name a guy at Harvard who analyzed the Homeric poems and how there were all these

[12:54]

detachable parts you could move around through the whole thing. Parry and then Lord. Yeah, this guy. He's got that sorted out. It's certainly persuasive that you can use it in a Buddhist way because, like Kanta says, apparently a lot of the earliest material is poetic. It's metrical. Right. The pieces of which, as you suggest, can be blocked, which are added and subtracted. That seems to me the process by which these were put together. It's an ancient compositional activity. It raises problems, I will be quick to point out, for the Buddhist tradition itself. And it raises the same kinds of problems for the Buddhist tradition that I think Protestant Christianity has been fighting through over the past 40 years, which are issues that if in fact this is the case, it seems that the major creative activity in the development

[14:01]

of Buddhism took place in the earliest Buddhist community. And there are real questions, I think, that the Buddhist community now is going to have to address itself to constructively in the ways in which we can claim to have access to the words of the Buddha and what kinds of canonical warrant are now available for basic Buddhist doctrine, whether in fact this makes any difference to the authority which is going to be attached to these sutras. I doubt if it does make a difference. But I think that especially the parts of the Buddhist tradition that cling very closely to textual authenticity rather than to say a line of transmission as validating a set of teachings. I think especially the Single-E's Buddhists, who often are, as my teacher Robinson put

[15:03]

it, poly-canon-thumping fundamentalists, are facing an issue. But I think in many ways the Zen tradition isn't, because Zen teachings are validated by a transmission rather than by reference to particular canonical warrants. And I think that different parts of the Buddhist community are going to have to come to terms with various problems in this. Yeah? I guess I have two questions. One relating directly to what you were saying. I noticed in the Sunimaga, they have a list of dates of all the major events in the development of the poly-canon, I guess. I'm not exactly sure what it was, but the history of Salon and Buddhist Salon. And one event was that at a certain point they decided to, it says right there, they

[16:04]

decided to preserve the text rather than practice their contents, which was very interesting to me. And I thought you might have some comments on that. I know, I actually know very little about the history of Buddhism in Salon. It's not really my field, and there's an awful lot of good stuff written on it. I know there were difficulties in Salon in preserving the canon, especially after they were invaded by the Tamils. And that, again, one of the reasons why Buddhaghosa was invited to Salon was to take the scriptures that were in Sinhalese and to translate them into Pali, which was then a canonical language. Not a spoken language anymore. If Buddhaghosa had a native language, it was probably Telugu or Tamil. Although he knew Pali, he probably spoke Pali fluently, his mother tongue was probably Druvidian language, curiously enough.

[17:05]

And he was called to Salon to translate the Sinhalese traditions into Pali, sort of make them a little more orthodox. You know the story of when Buddhaghosa went to Salon, the scholar's nightmare he went through? I have great sympathy for Buddhaghosa for this, because he was brought to Salon, and they gave him a test to see if he was really the man to do the job. And they gave him this verse to write a commentary on. And the verse was, you know, a tangle, a tangle, it's all a tangle, who will untangle the tangle? Which is a bad start already, to write a commentary on a verse like that. So he sat down, he wrote the Visuddhimagga. After he wrote the Visuddhimagga, here's where the scholar's nightmare comes in. The gods stole the manuscript. And he didn't have a carbon, and he didn't have a xerox, and the manuscript was gone, so there was nothing but to sit down and write the whole thing again, which he did, and the gods stole it again. So he wrote the whole thing a third time, and he finally brought it to the community

[18:10]

of Sinhalese monks. And at that time, the gods produced the two other versions that he had written, and they were identical in every syllable. But I have great, I once shipped a box, when I came out here from Madison, I shipped a crate of my notes by parcel post from Madison to California, and I told the office of California, call me as soon as they arrive. Four days went by and they didn't arrive, and five days went by, and I had tremendous sympathy for Buddhaghosa and his lost manuscript at that point. Finally they arrived. The gods restoring the Visuddhimagga. Yeah, all right. The second thing was that you talked about the two traditions of Jhana and Sati, call it, for want of a better word. But there's, I'm not sure, but I think there's a third kind of practice, which is the practice of the supernatural powers. And you see those as the powers of the Tathagata or something like that, but they're not associated

[19:16]

with insight, and they don't seem to be associated with trance. Maybe they are. Curiously enough, they're associated with trance. This is, I must confess, a loose thread in my argument, which I will tie up sometime, that the idis, the magic powers, seem to be associated with trance states, and yet later on, they become incorporated in the Abhijnaas. Now, Abhijnaa, remember, is a very late term in the Pali canon. But later on, these idis that are associated with the trance states become part of these six Abhijnaas, of which the last three are the three Vidyas that constitute Buddha's enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. The vision of his past lives, the knowledge of everybody, everybody rising and passing away according to his destiny, and knowledge of the cessation of kleshas, of asava, of the flowing. And then you have three added to this, the first of which are these idis.

[20:19]

I have a feeling that what's involved here is that at the outset, these magical powers, like the ability to levitate, to pass through solid walls, to walk on water, were associated with the enstatic contemplative complex, but they were so desirable that everybody started claiming them after a while. But as I say, it's a curious thing. But in the text, as far as I can see, they seem to be diagnostic of the tradition of enstasis. I can give you some references, if you'd like. Would you like some references? All right. There's a story, you may have noticed I like stories, about a guy named Susima, who is a non-Buddhist wanderer. And he, along with other non-Buddhist wanderers, is wondering why the Buddhists get all the

[21:22]

alms they get while these other non-Buddhists aren't getting any good stuff from the lay people. So they send Susima to join the Buddhist community to find out why the Buddhists are getting all the good stuff. So he goes into the Buddhist community as a spy, brought in by poor old Ananda, of course, who is always a sucker for these things. Ananda, of course, was the one who let women into the order, you see. And Susima wanders around, and he hears all these Buddhist monks saying, making the announcement of their realization. They go around saying, I'm sure you've all heard this. And he's very puzzled, and he goes up to them and asks them what they mean. As they thus know, and they thus see, he asks if they possess idis. And they say no, they don't possess idis. He asks if they possess the divine ear, the second abhijna, that hears at a distance. No, they don't. He asks if they possess knowledge of the thoughts of others.

[22:25]

Third abhijna. No, they don't possess that. He asks if they have memory of their former lives, or the divine eye that sees beings arise and cease according to their destiny. Or, if they touch with their bodies the non-material, the arupa vimoka states, wherein matter is transcended. And they don't. In other words, they have none of the things that, according to Susima, are diagnostic of the end-static tradition. And Susima says, well then how can you be liberated? Susima, obviously being an end-static, he says, well, how can you be liberated? You don't have any of the idis, and you don't have any of the non-material vimokas, non-material turning away meditative trance states. And they say, friend Susima, whether you understand it or not, we have been liberated by knowledge. All right? We're panyavimukta. We're liberated by prajna. In other words, they are ecstatic.

[23:27]

And of course, what happens is he goes to the Buddha, and he asks the Buddha to explain it, and what the Buddha does is to take Susima step-by-step through the twelve-fold chain of dependent origination, whereupon Susima becomes an arhat, and yet has not touched with his body any of the non-material states of vimoka, where matter is transcended. This seems to be a piece of ecstatic polemic against end-stasis. There are end-static polemics against end-stasis. For example, the story of... I'll tell you one more story, then I will not tell you any more stories. The monk Narada is sitting with two monks named Musila and Savita. And Musila and Savita are talking about dependent origination, and Savita asks Musila whether, and here he says, apart from belief in faith, apart from hearsay, apart from approval of a received opinion, he asks him whether he has himself personal knowledge of the twelve-fold chain of dependent origination.

[24:29]

And Musila says, yes. So Savita takes him step-by-step at each step of the twelve-fold chain of dependent origination. He says, yes, I know that, and I see it. So Savita says, well, Musila, then you must be an arhat, with no asuras, with no flowings anymore. And Musila stays quiet. That is, he says, yeah, I'm an arhat. Whereupon Narada says to Savita, wait a minute, why don't you ask me those questions? So Savita asks him the same questions, and at each point Narada says, yes, I know that, and I see that. And Savita says, well, then, Narada, you must be an arhat. And Narada says, no, I'm not. He says, I am not liberated, nor has my flowing ceased. It's as if there were a well in the desert, but with no rope nor means of drawing the water. A man comes by, overcome with heat, weary, trembling, thirsty, and looks down into the well. Truly, he would know that here was water, yet he could not touch it with his body.

[25:33]

I have seen as it is with true knowledge that the ceasing of becoming is nirvana, yet I am not liberated, nor has my flowing ceased, which is a piece of instatic polemic. It doesn't do you any good to know it, you have to touch it with your body. So those are my last two stories. Whatever else you ask me, I will not tell you another story. Yeah? Dr. Kansa, the only thing you know about archaic Buddhism, I think, is the numerical, these things are numbers, in which you can write the three jewels and the four jewels. I find myself reluctantly in disagreement with Dr. Kansa. It's not a happy position to be in. But there it is. I think in some ways, given the state of scholarship

[26:38]

at the time he was writing, he was probably right. But I think it is possible to get back behind the text. I think that you have to sort of begin with a different set of assumptions. It seems that there has been for a long time, for whatever reasons, for whatever sectarian reasons, for whatever polemical purposes, an assumption that somehow you have to find the original Buddhism. This seems to me to be a product of the fact that the early British scholars in Buddhism were products of 19th century liberal Protestantism. And that in fact, they were looking for the historical Buddha very much like late 19th century liberal Protestantism was looking for the historical Jesus. That if you can find the historical Buddha with his pure, unsullied doctrine, that is before religious or magical elements got into it, if you can find the pure ethical idealism of Buddha,

[27:40]

then you have Buddhism at its purest. Which of course you found in Ceylon, which is a very nice place. But it seems to me that this kind of quest was a product of current Protestant notions that somehow the earlier you get in Buddhism, the more pure it is. Just as if you can only recover the teachings of the historical Jesus, then you will find this elevated ethical, not magical, not religious teaching that Jesus was supposed to represent in late 19th century liberal Protestant theology. So the search was on for a long time for the Buddhism. And I think that what Dr. Kansa was very rightly reacting against at that point was this search for the original pure Buddhism. And that somehow if you can recover the teachings of the Buddha,

[28:42]

you will find this kind of ethical, simple idealism that the Buddha taught, which is the faith for modern British civil servants. The thing that drew all the civil servants and all the religious professors and everything was that the further back they got, the more complicated and primitive and un-British. Right. The more it looked like what the bog Irish believed, which is the definition of a low-class religion. These civil servants in Ceylon were perfectly capable of thinking about Ceylon as preserving pure, untouched Buddhism, totally ignoring the people who were swinging from hooks embedded in their flesh during the annual festivals in Ceylon. So yeah, this is it. This was a real problem. I think this is what Kansa was reacting against. Not so much that you can't do it,

[29:44]

but I think he might have been saying you can't do it that way. And I tend to agree. I think that by scholarly methods, whatever methods of access there may or may not be, I think by scholarly methods you can't come back to an original Buddhism. I think you can come back to a whole series of teachings that were being passed around orally in the early Buddhist tradition, in the early Buddhist community, all of which claimed the warrant of coming from the mouth of the Buddha. And I think that you had, in fact, contradictory teachings circulating, even as you find contradictory teachings in the sutras themselves, which I think is a strength, not a weakness. Yeah? I was curious about, you know, you pointed out on your triangle there that most of the literature came from the satsang side. And I was wondering, I don't know, but I was wondering if, you know, there's been some literature produced from, you know, some jhanic states or various samadhis,

[30:45]

or from that particular actual state, according to the text. I think, for example, you can find reflections of the jhanic side in some of the Theragata and Therigata. I think that some of these very folk songs, very nice songs, I think you could probably go through and find some representing each tradition, although the line would probably be hard to draw. But I think it's possible. A person who is in trance is not writing. We certainly can find pericopes, archaic material that seems to come from the jhana tradition. But I must confess that within the Buddhist tradition itself there seems to be a paucity of material from that side. It's curious to me that many of the non-Hindu literatures come from the jhanic side. I would be delighted because this would bolster my argument. I am in a kind of running disagreement, another uncomfortable position to be in, with Professor Jaini, who is also another man

[31:46]

that I am reluctant to disagree with, who maintains that in fact the sati side was the dominant side in Buddhism throughout its history. And just as you were reporting the kind of polemic that you find here, saying that jhana was just something you did on the side, it's something they incorporated from non-Buddhist traditions. And it's something that, you know, you sort of did at the beginning, but this was the real stuff. And in a sense, if you simply do a head count of the literature, it appears right. But I think that if you look at the way this keeps cropping up in odd places in Buddhism, and again this very curious way in which the Hindu tradition looks at the Buddhists as being primarily enstatic, I think you just have these people continuing to do this but being very quiet about it. And not producing a lot of literature and basically staying in their caves. I'm not sure. Right. But the transfer of the name in China

[32:55]

from jhana to chan, from sort of a shift of the name over the side, it's very interesting. And I think it comes through from the use of this term jhana to refer to buddhanusmriti meditations in the early Chinese Buddhist community. Meditations on Amitabha and on Maitreya were then called jhana. And then the whole process of meditating was just given this term. So it eventually sort of shifted over this way until it became chan, which is very clearly in the ecstatic tradition and is one of the places where this is carried to as far as it can go. It's one of the full developments of this tradition. These people have to get up. Oh, all right. Okay, well thank you very much

[33:56]

for listening. And next week I'll bring, from the heavy to the light, next week what I'll do is I'll bring in some slides and I'll talk about daily life in a Tibetan monastery. And that'll be fun. All right.

[34:09]

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