Buddhism A Journey Through History [1 ed.] 9780300234268, 9780300281491

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Buddhism

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Buddh i s m A J ourney t h rough History

Donald S. Lopez Jr.

New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Calvin Chapin of the Class of 1788, Yale College. Copyright © 2024 by Donald S. Lopez Jr. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Scala type by Integrated Publishing Solutions. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2024930199 isbn 978-0-300-23426-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Toward a Global History of Buddhism 1 1. History

85

2. Apocalypse

99

3. Art

112

4. Canon

124

5. Council

138

6. Disappearance

153

7. Encounter

166

8. Food

177

9. Identity

188

10. Immortality

200

11. Incarnation

211

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12. Innovation

225

13. Law

240

14. Narrative

254

15. Nation

266

16. Ordination

278

17. Orthodoxy

292

18. Persecution

303

19. Philosophy

314

20. Pilgrimage

325

21. Rule

336

22. Schism

347

23. Science

359

24. Self

370

25. Sex

382

26. Society

393

27. War

404

28. Women

415

29. Wrath

427

30. Writing

438 Notes 453 Index 503

Preface

In a footnote to the sixth and final volume of his monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, first published in 1789, Edward Gibbon describes the religion of the Mongol rulers of Yuan Dynasty China: “The attachment of the khans, and the hatred of the mandarins, to the bonzes and lamas seems to represent them as the priests of the same god, of the Indian Fo, whose worship prevails among the sects of Hindostan, Siam, Thibet, China, and Japan. But this mysterious subject is still lost in a cloud, which the researchers of our Asiatic Society may gradually dispel.”1 “Fo” is Chinese for “Buddha.” This was the view of the greatest British historian of the eighteenth century. Over the past two centuries, the researchers of the Asiatic Society, and many others, have dispelled many clouds. Still, challenges remain. Some of the challenges are simply a matter of scale. The History of Indian Buddhism (Histoire du Bouddhisme indien) by the great Belgian scholar, and Roman Catholic priest, Étienne Lamotte, published in French in 1958, is 896 small-print pages long in its English translation (not counting maps and plates) and stops in 75 CE. Some of the challenges are conceptual, especially in the case of India. In his preface, Lamotte writes, “Buddhist sources tend, in general, to move on an abstract level of ideas and, if they explain the doctrine of Śākyamuni and the great scholars in detail, if they give a detailed description of the order of bhiksus ˙ [monks] and bhiksunīs [nuns], they are almost completely devoid of historical ˙ ˙ or chronological indications. The philosophia perennis willingly disregards time and space.”2 In an essay in Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism on what the term “history” might mean in Buddhism, the British Sinologist Timothy Barrett consulted the 1,450-page Buddhist Chinese-Sanskrit Dictionary, published by Akira Hirakawa in Japan in 1997, and could not find a Sanskrit term that

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corresponded to shi, the standard Chinese character for “history.”3 In the Indian Buddhist canons, we find far more stories about the Buddha’s past lives, often as an animal, than we do about his final “historical” life in which he achieved nirvāna. Even in devout Buddhist societies, those past lives have been ˙ regarded by some as folklore rather than history. How might the history of Buddhism be written? Any presentation of the Buddhist tradition that seeks to be somehow comprehensive is faced with two existential challenges: the problem of time and the problem of space. The problem of time is not simply one of the duration of the tradition over many centuries, some of them historical. There are many more millennia extending from the distant mythological past to the apocalyptic future. Buddhist writers at many moments of history and in many Asian lands have been obsessed with the question of when the Buddha’s teachings will disappear from the world. Even for the historical period of twenty-five hundred years, it is impossible to construct a coherent narrative by following a single chronology. Seeking to travel through space, one might imagine that one could create a map with two arrows, originating in India, one pointing north, one pointing south. The arrows pointing north would trace the route of Buddhism from India to China to Vietnam to Korea and to Japan. The arrows pointing south would trace the route of Buddhism from India to Sri Lanka to Burma to Thailand to Cambodia and to Laos. However, this would be misleading and, in many ways, inaccurate. Highly significant developments occurred in India after Buddhism had been flourishing in China for centuries. Buddhism was well established in Japan long before it ever spread to Tibet, despite Tibet’s proximity to India. Mahāyāna and tantric elements were present in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, before what is known today as Theravāda Buddhism became the state orthodoxy in various kingdoms of the region and Islam was established in Indonesia. Our arrows would require all manner of branches, twists, spirals, and vanishing points. It is perhaps best to think of the history of Buddhism, then, not as a chronology moving from the past toward the present or as a movement across a map, with multicolored arrows emanating from the Bodhi Tree, but as a dense network of interconnections, with lines linking dots. Those lines, however, would be hollow, allowing movement in both directions, allowing travel through space and through time. This movement can be illustrated in the case of all Buddhist lands. And it can be illustrated in the case of Buddhist texts and Buddhist images. A book of this length could easily be written about any of the twenty-five

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centuries in the history of Buddhism. A volume on the ninth century CE, for example, would require the discussion of many regions: India, China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, and what is today Indonesia, and a wide range of languages. A book of this length could also easily be written about the history of Buddhism in each of these regions (and many more). However, to organize the volume strictly geographically would prevent the reader from perceiving the rich and important interactions that have occurred among these regions over time. And yet, the Buddhist traditions of Asia are highly regional, tending to tell their stories as local histories placed within a cosmic frame. The substance of this book is thirty essays, most between five thousand and six thousand words in length, short enough to be read in a single sitting, long enough to provide sustenance for thought, long enough to serve as the topic for a classroom session in a course on Buddhism. The first chapter is entitled “History,” placed first because it raises some of the questions and the challenges we face when we seek to understand, and to represent, the history of Buddhism. After that, the chapters are organized alphabetically by title. Each is meant to be self-contained. In order to treat each of the topics in a way that is both interesting and accurate, similar background information is sometimes provided among the chapters, with certain key ideas, texts, and historical figures appearing more than once. This is intentional. Buddhism, like all religions, is always invoking the past in order to authorize the present. The titles of the chapters are not the names of historical figures, texts, dynasties, or geographical regions. Instead, they are abstract nouns like “art,” “encounter,” “food,” “nation,” “philosophy,” “science,” “sex,” and “war,” where the title of the chapter is explored in different times and places in the Buddhist world, with a kind of case study providing the rubric. In order to begin in a time that might be more familiar to the reader, many of the chapters begin—at least in the context of Buddhist history—in the modern period, understood here as any time in the past two and a half centuries. The event described there provides the occasion to explore instantiations of the title of the chapter in several times and places, tracing it back to its origins, when that is possible. The chapters often close by returning to their opening scene. A number of those events that open the chapters take place in Europe or America. These were chosen for several reasons: first, to provide a familiar starting point for those unfamiliar with Buddhism; second, to demonstrate that

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Buddhism is indeed a global religion and has been longer than many would imagine; and finally, to suggest how important the history of the study and representation of Buddhism is to the received history of Buddhism. In Georges Pérec’s 1978 novel La vie mode d’emploi, translated into English as Life: A User’s Manual, Percival Bartlebooth (who, it is important to note, is in­dependently wealthy) spends his last years putting together wooden puzzles of his own design. After spending years learning how to paint in watercolor, he had embarked on a world tour, eventually producing five hundred watercolors of the seaports that he had visited. Upon his return to his Paris apartment, he had each painting pasted onto blocks of wood, and then had a master carpenter use his jigsaw to cut the blocks of wood into five hundred jigsaw puzzles, each with seven hundred and fifty pieces. He then began to work on the puzzles. After he completed each puzzle, he had the pieces glued back together and the painting removed from the wooden block. On the twentieth anniversary of his completion of the original painting, Bartlebooth had his servant take the painting back to the port it depicted, where it was dipped into water, washing away the watercolors, leaving a blank page, which the servant returned to him. Bartlebooth died while he was working on the four hundred and thirty-ninth puzzle. There was one piece missing. It was shaped like an x, but the only piece that was left was shaped like a w. There is much that could be said about how Pérec’s puzzle might be like the study of Buddhism, with all the study required to learn to write about Buddhism, with all the places one must, or at least should, visit, some in person, some in the imagination, some in dreams—all this in order to produce a coherent narrative of a doctrine, a work of art, a person, a place, a practice. About how the more one learns the less one seems to know, about how the pieces of a puzzle of the picture one has painted fail to fit together. And in the rare moments when they do, about the strange sense of satisfaction that comes from allowing it all to melt into the void. But enough philosophizing. This book is a puzzle of thirty pieces. The reader is invited to assemble, disassemble, and reassemble them as they seek, as I do, to understand what we call Buddhism.

Acknowledgments

One of the many challenges to writing a book of this size and scope is the amount of scholarship to draw from. After graduating from Tokyo Imperial University (today Tokyo University) in 1921, the Pure Land priest Shinshō Hanayama (1898–1995) read “Quotations in Proof of His Sketch of Buddhism” by Brian Houghton Hodgson (1801–1894), published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland in 1835. Hodgson at the time was serving as the East India Company’s resident at the court of Nepal. Reading the essay caused Hanayama to wonder about how many works had been written about Buddhism by “Occidental scholars.” He began compiling a list, significantly augmented during two years in Europe, where he visited libraries in London, Paris, Berlin, and Heidelberg. He collected titles on index cards over the course of his career as a professor at Tokyo University until his retirement in 1959. To honor him, the cards were assembled and published in 1961 as Bibliography of Buddhism, a list of books and articles in English, French, and German, alphabetized by author. It contains 15,073 entries. The index shows that there are 185 entries on the Indian emperor Aśoka, the subject of the first chapter here; seventy-eight entries on Borobudur, the massive Buddhist monument in Indonesia; seventy-nine entries on Turkestan, whence Buddhism entered China; and, strangely, 326 entries on Christianity, where we find essays like “On a Few of the Chief Contrasts between the Essential Doctrines of Buddhism and of Christianity,” published in 1889 by Sir Monier Monier-Williams, the author of a famous Sanskrit-English dictionary. Scholarship on Buddhism seems to have multiplied almost exponentially in the six decades since the publication of Hanayama’s book, with hundreds of Buddhist texts edited, translated, and commented upon, biographies of famous

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figures—from the Buddha himself to the Fourteenth Dalai Lama—composed, and monographs written on all manner of people, places, and things, both real and imagined. To consult all of this scholarship would require many lifetimes, lifetimes during which yet more scholarship would be produced. The present volume has therefore had to be selective in its sources. Among the towering figures of previous generations, it has relied especially on Étienne Lamotte for India and Erik Zürcher for China. Among scholars of my own generation, I have turned often to the work of—in no particular order—Gregory Schopen, Richard Salomon, John Strong, Patrick Olivelle, Jonathan Silk, and Oskar von Hinüber for India; Peter Skilling for Southeast Asia; Ann Heirman, Daniel Stevenson, John Kieschnick, and Stefano Zacchetti for China; Jan Nattier for Central Asia; Robert Buswell for Korea; and Jacqueline Stone, William Bodiford, Paul Groner, and Richard Jaffe for Japan. All of this has been enriched by the work of dozens of other scholars, including many from the younger generation who are reshaping the field; their names fill the endnotes. Among my colleagues in the Buddhist Studies program at the University of Michigan, I am particularly grateful to Micah Auerback. Finally, I would like to especially thank the two anonymous reviewers for Yale University Press, clearly outstanding scholars, who slogged through the entire manuscript, offering a host of corrections and suggestions along the way and displaying the perfections of giving, effort, patience, concentration, and wisdom. Support for this project was generously provided by the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan.

Buddhism

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Introduction Toward a Global History of Buddhism

What we refer to as Buddhism is more than twenty-five hundred years old. Its founder, a figure called the Buddha, is cloaked in mystery. Over the course of centuries, Buddhism spread from its place of origin in northeast India, throughout what is today the nation of India, and to what are today Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran; into China, Korea, and Japan; to Sri Lanka and to Southeast Asia (including Indonesia); to Tibet and to Mongolia, and to ethnically Mongol regions of the Russian republics. It has four canonical languages—Sanskrit, Pāli, Chinese, and Tibetan—with a “canon” that encompasses over three hundred large volumes in Tibetan alone; the Chinese canon, with many different texts, is preserved on 81,258 carved wooden printing blocks. In addition to the canons, there are thousands of important works in the vernaculars of Asia. Buddhism has long been a primary source of artistic and architectural forms throughout Asia, with images of the Buddha becoming ubiquitous around the world. By the nineteenth century, Buddhism had become an object of fascination in Europe and America, and today, across the globe. According to Buddhism, we live in a place called samsāra, a cycle of birth, ˙ death, and rebirth that has no beginning. At rare moments in time, a remarkable individual appears to teach its denizens how to escape from the cycle, freed forever from suffering to enter a realm called nirvāna. That individual is ˙ called a buddha, a Sanskrit term that means “awakened one.” After that buddha passes away, never to be reborn again, his teachings remain for a while before, like their teacher, disappearing, leaving the world bereft. It is only after billions of years pass that the next buddha appears in the world to teach the path to nirvāna once again. According to Buddhism, this sequence of a buddha ˙

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coming into the world, teaching, passing away, and then another buddha coming has happened again and again from time immemorial. Thus, to tell the history of Buddhism would be to tell the history of the universe. It would be a history of a past that has no beginning, moving toward a future that has no end. Yet, apart from Buddhist accounts, we have no evidence of previous buddhas. We only know about the most recent buddha, our buddha, not the jolly, corpulent figure of Chinese figurines but the austere and imposing figure, seated cross-legged, his hands resting in his lap, the figure that we call the Buddha, or the historical Buddha. The tradition that he founded—whether we call it a religion, a philosophy, or a way of life—is called Buddhism. When the term “world religion” was first coined in the nineteenth century, there were only two: Christianity and Buddhism. In the twenty-first century, Buddhism seems to be everywhere in the world, with millions carrying a mindfulness app on their phones, with “Zen” an adjective, with a Buddhist monk, the Dalai Lama, the second-most famous religious figure in the world after the pope. During the long period of his teaching (traditionally said to have lasted forty-­ five years), the Buddha walked through many of the regions of what is today northeast India and southern Nepal, pausing to spend the monsoon months in various cities (and, in one case, in a heaven on the summit of a mountain). After his first sixty monks had attained enlightenment, he famously instructed them to “go forth for the good of the many, for the happiness of the many, out of compassion for the world, for the welfare, the good, and the happiness of gods and humans. Let no two go in the same direction.” They seem to have obeyed him, setting out on foot, and later on horseback, camelback, the decks of ships, and today in the cabins of commercial jets. After issuing that instruction to his monks, the Buddha set off alone to successfully convert, en masse, a thousand dreadlocked members of a fire-worship cult. At the same time, all manner of supernatural travel occurred. It is said that at night, while his monks were sleeping, the Buddha would use his “mind-made body” to travel to distant regions of India to teach the dharma. Eventually, stories would be told of the Buddha making magical journeys to faraway lands, often leaving his footprints in stone to mark his past presence. Of such footprints, the Buddha is reported to have said, “In the future, intelligent beings will see the scriptures and understand. Those of less intelligence will wonder whether the Buddha appeared in the world. In order to remove their doubts, I have set my footprints in stone.”1 He must have understood that most of us are of less intelligence, for his footprints abound across the Buddhist world, far beyond the confines of northern India, and stories are told of how he placed

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them here and there, and the blessings that accrue to those who see them, a reminder that he has gone, and thus a reason for sadness, but also a reminder that he came, and thus a reason for joy. The domain of the Buddha’s dharma was expanded yet further, in this case across time, with the composition of the jātaka stories, the accounts of the Buddha’s former lives, which occurred in regions and worlds far beyond the roads that the Buddha and his first disciples traveled. One should therefore not speak of “the spread of Buddhism.”2 An abstract noun like “Buddhism” is incapable of travel. What travels are people and things; in the case of Buddhism, it has most often been monks and merchants, and what they carry in their minds and on their backs: texts, relics, and images. The names of many of the travelers are known, exalted as saints and heroes in the lands where they carried the dharma, their journeys transforming the landscape of Asia, establishing monasteries, many of which included a stūpa, the most ubiquitous of Asian architectural forms (called pagodas in East Asia), said to contain a relic of the Buddha. Still, when one seeks to write about Buddhism, one is faced with absence. The historian sees the absent founder; the chronicler sees the absent date; the philosopher sees the absent self; the art historian sees the absent Buddha beneath the Bodhi Tree. Yet all pronouncements about the timeless occur in time. By understanding those times, we can better understand those pronouncements and those who made them. Buddhism is not beginningless, it did not arise out of nowhere. What, then, are our sources to understand those times when we have no histories? Buddhism was born in India and flourished, or at least survived, there for almost two thousand years. And yet we have no history of Buddhism that was composed by Buddhists in India, the land where the Buddha was born and died. We have histories written in Sri Lanka, in China, and in Tibet, among other Buddhist lands—histories that are heavily mythologized. These histories do not present themselves as local histories but as histories of Buddhism, often beginning with the life of the Buddha, with his previous lives, or even with the formation of the world. They continue through the events that led to the arrival of the dharma in the new land, an arrival sometimes foreshadowed by the Buddha, either by his own ancient visit (proved by the footprints that he left in stone) or by his prophecy. Thus, these histories are not a history of Sri Lankan Buddhism or of Chinese Buddhism or of Tibetan Buddhism, but of the transmission of the true dharma to a distant destination. The history of Buddhism in India must therefore be deduced from other sources: from sacred scriptures, from excavations, from inscriptions, and from the accounts of foreign pilgrims.

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The largest of these resources is the Buddhist canon. However, most Buddhist texts do not intentionally describe their own present, that is, the time when the text was written. They are not eyewitness accounts. It is not insignificant that the sūtras, the discourses attributed to the Buddha himself, begin with the phrase “Thus did I hear,” representing someone’s (traditionally taken to be the Buddha’s personal attendant Ānanda’s) recollection of what the Buddha, now gone, had said in the past. In many cases, Buddhist texts are describing, or in some cases inventing, the past to justify the present or the future. The most important example of this would be the monastic codes of the various Buddhist schools, where stories of the past are told in which the Buddha makes hundreds of rules, many of which deal with the minutiae of monastery life. Yet there is no archaeological evidence of monasteries until long after the death of the Buddha. Because he was the source of authority, when rules were added and subtracted, the account must be projected back to the time of the Buddha. Nonetheless, although presented as descriptions of the past, the contents of a sūtra can tell us something about the present of its authors. Ironically, another source of Buddhist descriptions of the time of a text’s composition are prophecies, allowing us to discern something about the present of the authors from the future they predict. Thus, the first challenge of writing a global history of Buddhism is knowing where to begin. Buddhism goes to great lengths to explain why it did not arise at a particular historical moment, although of course it did. If we assume, at least for the moment, that Buddhism is a religion, then the usual approach would be to begin with the founder, setting the stage with various geographical, historical, linguistic, and cultural props, providing the backdrop for the founder’s entrance onto the world stage. Yet here we are immediately frustrated. It is not clear where we should place these props around the stage, because we do not know the plot and we cannot find the protagonist. It is difficult to navigate without the North Star. It is difficult to play chess without the queen. It is difficult to write a history of Buddhism without the Buddha.

The Historical Buddha If we compare the Buddha to Jesus, as so many have done, we note that by the end of the first century CE, we have the history of Josephus, all of Paul’s letters, and the three Synoptic Gospels. Triangulating these with Roman records, scholars are able to confirm the existence of a rabbi named Jesus of Nazareth who was probably born between 6 and 4 BCE and who was executed during

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the rule of Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judaea from 26 to 36 CE. A great many questions remain about the life and teachings of Jesus, especially about the so-called lost years between his conversation with the elders in the temple at age twelve and his baptism by John at age thirty; as we shall see, some would claim that he was in India studying Buddhism during those years. Despite these questions, there is sufficient textual and archaeological evidence to conclude that Jesus was a historical figure who lived during the first decades of the period that would come to be named after him, “AD” for “Anno Domini.” The case of the Buddha is much more difficult. The first reference that we have to the Buddha appears in the rock edicts of the Indian emperor Aśoka, who ruled from 268 to 232 BCE, in an edict produced in the eleventh year of his reign. The number of years between the life of the Buddha and the first surviving reference to him is therefore much longer than in the case of Jesus, a matter not of decades but of centuries. The question is: How many? To attempt to answer this, we must turn to Buddhist sources composed long after the reign of Aśoka. Buddhist texts tend to measure time from the date of the Buddha’s death rather than his birth. The convening of a council of monks or the birth of a famous figure is typically dated from the time of the Buddha’s passage into nirvāna; in modern Buddhist sources, we sometimes see the designation “AN” ˙ for “After Nirvāna.” There is some consensus, based on a single, admittedly very ˙ important, text that the Buddha lived for eighty years. Yet when those years occurred fluctuates wildly. Among many calculations of the dates of the Buddha in Chinese works, one of the most widely accepted for his death is 949 BCE. Based on how one reads the Kālacakra Tantra, a hugely influential work composed in the eleventh century, the passing of the Buddha took place in 878 BCE. The Theravāda tradition of modern Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia places the nirvāna in 544 BCE. Various Tibetan sources give dates as early as 2420 ˙ BCE. A Japanese work published in 1896 gave the date of the Buddha’s birth as 1027 BCE. Contemporary scholars continue to argue for death dates ranging from 544 BCE to 368 BCE, with some consensus that the Buddha likely died in the period between 420 and 350 BCE.3 Thus, if we assume that Jesus was born in 5 BCE, was baptized at the age of thirty, and executed at the age of thirty-three in 28 CE, and that Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians was written in 50 CE, then twenty-two years elapsed between the death and the first surviving written mention of the founder of Christianity. If Aśoka’s Minor Rock Edict 1, in which Aśoka describes himself as a Buddhist layman, was composed in the eleventh year of his reign, then the period between the death

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of the founder of Buddhism and the first written mention of him falls somewhere between 111 and 2,163 years. This immediately raises the question of whether the Buddha lived at all. Is the Buddha a historical figure? Early European accounts of the Buddha describe an idol known by many names. It was only in the eighteenth century that there was a general consensus that the Buddha had been a historical figure, although his place of origin was a matter of speculation and debate, with both Egypt and Scandinavia being suggested by British scholars. In 1844, the first detailed study of the Buddha and Buddhism was published by the eminent French scholar Eugène Burnouf (1801–1852). His book, Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism (Introduction à l’histoire du Buddhisme indien), would paint a portrait of the Buddha that remains largely unretouched to this day. Yet just ten years later, Horace Hayman Wilson (1786–1860), the leading British expert on ancient India, would deliver a lecture to the Royal Asiatic Society in which he would argue, “It seems not impossible, after all, that Sákya Muni is an unreal being, and that all that is related of him is as much a fiction as is that of his preceding migrations, and the miracles that attended his birth, his life, and his departure.”4 Over the past century and a half, and continuing to the present day, the question of whether the Buddha was a historical figure has continued to be raised. There is much to ponder here. Still, it is a question that is difficult, perhaps impossible, to answer. Much depends on what we mean by “historical.” However, perhaps the more pertinent question for the purposes of a history of Buddhism is: Should we care? For, we must acknowledge that for twenty-five hundred years (depending, of course, on when the Buddha is said to have died), millions of Buddhists across Asia have believed that he was a historical figure. In deference to that belief, we will assume the existence of the Buddha. However, in each case, the reader is requested to bear in mind what an ephemeral, even phantasmagoric, figure he sometimes seems to be. His existence was assumed—indeed, it was well established—by the time that Aśoka ascended to the throne of the Mauryan Empire circa 268 BCE. The Buddha is mentioned in Aśoka’s famous rock edicts and pillar inscriptions. Aśoka refers to specific Buddhist sūtras by name, although none of those sūtras has survived under those same names. He erected pillars at the four most sacred sites in the Buddhist world: the sites of the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, first sermon, and death. He provided tax relief to the village near the site of the Buddha’s birth. He warned against dissension in the community of monks and nuns. Of particular interest is an inscription declaring that he had enlarged

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and personally visited the stūpa of Konāgamana (Kanakamuni, in Sanskrit), ˙ one of the buddhas of the prehistoric past. Among the many things this means is that, whether the historical Buddha existed or not, by the time of Aśoka, the cult of a prehistorical buddha had been established and was important enough for his stūpa to be visited by the emperor. Religions, regardless of when they come into existence, tend to trace their origins to the ancient past, to represent themselves not as invention but as revelation. Thus, Jesus is the messiah prophesied in the Hebrew Bible. Adam is the first of the prophets of Islam; Muhammad is the twenty-fifth, the seal of prophets. In India, the Vedas are described as apauruseya, literally, “non-human,” ˙ in the sense that they are not of human origin, existing eternally as sound— sound that is heard by the sages, who transmit it to the world. Buddhism is no different. Indeed, throughout its long history, Buddhism has always been a latecomer, needing to prove its legitimacy. This was true even in India, where the Vedic tradition, with its fire sacrifice and hereditary caste of priests, had been in place for centuries. Thus, it is an essential element of Buddhist doctrine that the truth that the Buddha realized under the Bodhi Tree at the age of thirty-five was not his creation or even his discovery, but rather the rediscovery of a truth that had been realized by buddhas of the past, buddhas whose teachings had been forgotten, buddhas whose names were known only to him. In a famous allegory, a man follows a path through the wilderness that leads to an ancient city that has fallen into ruins. He informs the king, urging him to restore it to its former glory. Each buddha is that man, uncovering the path to nirvāna in age after age in an act of revelation. ˙ The buddha of the present age, our buddha, seems to have appeared during a vibrant period of Indian history. Its society was organized according to the famous caste system, divided into four hereditary groups: priests, warriors, landowners and merchants, and servants. The term translated as “priest” here is “brāhmana” (brahmin), and refers to those who performed fire sacrifices to a ˙ pantheon of gods in return for various boons. Their sacred texts (although preserved orally) were the Vedas, the earliest dating to 1500 BCE, and consisting largely of hymns to the gods, instructions on chanting the hymns, and instructions on how to perform sacrifices to those gods. Toward the end of the Vedic period, usually placed from 1500 to 500 BCE, we see the appearance of the Upanisads, where ideas of rebirth are articulated and the primacy of the eter˙ nal self (ātman) is celebrated, with knowledge of that self said to lead to liberation from rebirth. Buddhism would adopt much of the system of karma and rebirth set forth

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in these texts, while famously declaring that the eternal self does not exist. It is important to note that, despite the fame of the Upanisads in the West, the prac˙ tice of fire sacrifice was not displaced by their celebration of the metaphysical. In early Buddhist texts, the sacrifice-performing brahmins are often portrayed as the Buddha’s chief opponents, antagonists, and competitors for patronage, as well as a primary pool for converts. Despite his reputation in the West as an opponent of the caste system, the Buddha declares that the traditional hierarchy that ranks the brahmin above the others is mistaken; in fact, his own caste, the warrior caste, is preeminent. In the rock edicts of Aśoka and elsewhere, we find the term “śramana˙ brāhmana,” suggesting another group of religious professionals, although their ˙ relationship to the brahmins is not clear; in some texts it appears to be antagonistic. The term “śramana” is often translated as “ascetic” or “recluse” and is ˙ generally assumed to include the Buddhists and other ascetic groups. Buddhist texts refer to a wide range of schools or “views,” most of which have been lost to history, known primarily through Buddhist sources. The opening text in the Pāli collection, called the Sūtra on the Supreme Net (Brahmajāla Sutta), mentions “sixty-two views,” which becomes a stock phrase repeated in other works to refer to non-Buddhist schools en masse. The late Vedic period, some five centuries before the Common Era, saw the rise of an increasingly urban economy in northeast India, and with it, cities and states ruled by powerful kings, the rise of trade, and a growing merchant class. The leisure provided by such wealth seems to have inspired some to renounce their assigned social status and the duties it required. With the city now the center of wealth and culture, they sought to leave it behind to dwell in the forest. If the city was the place of kingship, statecraft, commerce, and family life, with elaborate fire sacrifices performed by professional priests, the forest was the place of the natural and the supernatural, a place of mystery and danger, the abode of illicit love and of spiritual pursuits. During this period, we find people, mostly men but some women, renouncing the world. The phrase that occurs is “Go forth into the homeless life.” The term translated as “home” here carries all the connotations of domesticity, including property, profession, and family, and the responsibilities that they entail. Those who did so were called, among other terms, śramana, leaving the city, and all that it signified, ˙ for the forest in search of liberation, however defined. We can trace what would become the six schools of Hindu philosophy to this period, including the Yoga school, where “yoga” does not refer to a set of

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āsanas, instead famously defined as “the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.” Among the various Hindu schools, we know much about the doctrines of those six schools. Yet only one of those schools—Vedānta—could be said to have followers to the present day. There were also schools that did not follow the Vedas. We have the names of dozens of these, but only two have survived to the present, each founded by a teacher not from the caste of priests but from the caste of warriors. The followers of a teacher called the Jina are the jaina, what in English we call Jains. The followers of a teacher called the Buddha are the bauddha, what in English we call Buddhists. What we call Buddhism thus seems to have been one of a number, apparently a large number, of ascetic movements that arose in northern India during this period. Only one is what was called a world religion when that term was coined in the nineteenth century. These various groups held a wide range of philosophical views. In addition to the list of sixty-two, a later work says that there were 363 schools at the time of the Buddha. Only some of these are listed, and even fewer are known from other sources, making their precise meaning and reference difficult to decipher. It seems clear, however, that many of these are not names of philosophical schools but rather a catalogue of the practices, often bizarre practices, of various cults—those who live in a hole in the ground, those who behave like dogs, those who behave like deer—as well as various forms of extreme asceticism worthy of the Desert Fathers. Almost all of these schools or sects fell into obscurity, so much so that their names do not survive in the original Sanskrit, with scholars struggling to reconstruct what the Sanskrit might have been. When their names, and even more rarely, their teachings, survive, they are generally found in the works of their critics. Why did Buddhism survive when so many traditions died? What was the appeal of a religion whose most famous dictum is “All is suffering”? One reason is that it offered a path, indeed several paths, to escape that suffering. Yet other religions make similar claims. We will have occasion to ponder what it was about Buddhism that allowed it to survive so long and to travel so far. It seems clear that the persistence of Buddhism cannot be found simply in its philosophy. Perhaps more important was its ability to be translated, in all senses of that term, signifying movement from one land to another, from one medium to another, from one language to another, as we shall see in the pages that follow. Unlike Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism, Buddhism does not have a sacred language. According to a famous story, this is not an accident but a considered decision by the Buddha himself.

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The Community of Monks and Nuns Buddhist texts describe the Buddha’s original community of monks as those who had left home, wanderers moving from village to village and city to city all year round. According to the traditional account, the Buddha’s lay supporters complained that by traveling during the monsoon season, his monks were damaging their fields and killing insects as they walked along the muddy roads. Responding, as he is often portrayed as doing, to the mores of the laity, the Buddha made a rule requiring monks to remain in one place during the monsoon, in what is called the rains retreat. Detailed rules about proper comportment during this time are found in the monastic code, rules that needed to be amended when the community of nuns was later founded. Remaining sedentary for a period of this length, especially during the months of the rainy season, required some form of shelter. The laity thus provided what was called a rains abode (varsavāsa). It is speculated that these temporary shel˙ ters evolved into more permanent dwellings, where monks and nuns would live year-round, referred to in English as the monastery and the nunnery. According to Buddhist scriptures, this seems to have occurred during the Buddha’s lifetime, with various grand monasteries described, each with a “perfumed chamber,” the residence reserved for the Buddha. Here again, however, we find a conflict between the traditional accounts and the archaeological record. In his references to Buddhism in his rock edicts, Aśoka mentions a stūpa, but he does not mention monasteries. Indeed, the earliest archaeological evidence of Buddhist monasteries dates to the beginning of the Common Era, long after the reign of Aśoka. The Buddhist monastic code, together with the works of one of the Buddhists’ chief rivals, the Jains, suggests that prior to the establishment of the monastery, it was not the case that Buddhist monks lived entirely outdoors. There seem to have been public rest houses (āvasatha) where members of a variety of ascetic groups stayed together, often receiving public alms, rather than begging from door to door. In the monastic code, the Buddha makes a rule that monks may not eat their meals on two consecutive days at such a rest house, suggesting that they were allowed to eat there for one day. The commingling of ascetic groups seemed to extend even to ordination, with men moving into and out of the Buddhist monkhood. In order to ensure their commitment to the monastic community, for ascetics from other groups, the Buddha prescribes a probationary period of four months before ordination.5 With a relatively thin archaeological record, especially for the first centuries

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of the tradition, we are left largely with texts when we seek to construct a history of Buddhism in India. Buddhist texts, however, are not fired bricks; they are crumbling palm-leaf manuscripts and tightly wrapped scrolls of birchbark when they survive at all. The earliest surviving manuscripts of the Pāli canon, long believed (falsely) to be the earliest surviving record of the Buddha’s teaching, date from the ninth century CE. In fact, the earliest surviving Buddhist texts were discovered not in India or Sri Lanka, but in what is today Pakistan and Afghanistan. Scholars date them to the late first century BCE. If we place the death of the Buddha around 400 BCE, this is some four centuries after his death. In the traditional accounts, we learn that within a few months of the Buddha’s passing, the monks became concerned that his teachings would be lost and so convened what is known to history (although it is likely a myth) as the First Council. At the time of his passing, the Buddha did not appoint a successor, saying instead that in his absence, the dharma (the teachings) and the vinaya (the “discipline” or monastic code) would be the monks’ master. Five hundred enlightened monks (arhats) are said to have assembled in a cave near Vulture Peak, the site of so many of the Buddha’s sermons. There, a monk named Upāli recited each of the rules of the monastic code and described the circumstances of the Buddha making them. This was the vinaya, the discipline. Then Ānanda, the Buddha’s cousin and personal attendant, was called upon to recite everything that he had heard the Buddha teach. He did so, each time beginning with the phrase “Thus did I hear.” This was the dharma, the sūtras, the discourses, with the term “sūtra” (which means “aphorism” in Sanskrit) used in Buddhism to refer to the teachings of the Buddha or those given by others with his sanction. The assembled arhats then memorized and recited what they heard, a process said to have taken seven months. Seeking parallels with events like the Council of Nicaea, scholars speak of the various Buddhist “councils.” However, in Sanskrit, the term is “san˙gīti,” literally, “sing together.” Before the Buddha had passed away, he had told Ānanda that after he was gone, the monks could ignore the minor rules. At the conclusion of the recitation of the monastic code, Ānanda mentioned this to the assembled monks. When he was asked what those rules were, he confessed that he had neglected to ask. As a result, the assembled monks decided they needed to follow all the rules. Ānanda’s oversight was one of the charges made against him at the First Council. The story suggests that many of the elements of the highly complicated code, composed of hundreds of transgressions and punishments, have been regretted by Buddhist monks and nuns for centuries. There are a number of reasons to conclude that the account of the First

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Council is more myth than history, intended to promote the belief that the Buddhist canon (regardless of the various ways in which it was understood) could be traced back to the Buddha himself, preserved by his immediate disciples, all arhats and thus enlightened masters, shortly after his death, with nothing added afterward. The description of the First Council by the renowned monk Buddhaghosa, writing in Sri Lanka in the fifth century CE, explains that Ānanda recited the sūtras in precisely the order that we have them today in Pāli, organized into their current five sections (nikāya). Yet the earliest titles of Buddhist sūtras that survive appear in one of the rock edicts of Emperor Aśoka, where seven works are listed. As noted above, none of those titles corresponds exactly to works that have survived to the present day. The purpose of the First Council does not seem to have been to produce a catalogue. Its purpose, rather, was to demonstrate, or at least to suggest, that new works were not composed after the death of the Buddha and then attributed to him. We will see many efforts over the course of the history of Buddhism to perpetuate that myth. There would be more councils, some mythological, some historical, convened by various Buddhist kings, extending into the twentieth century. In descriptions of the Buddhist canon, we encounter the term “tripitaka,” ˙ usually translated as the “three baskets” or categories of the teachings of the Buddha: sūtra, vinaya, and abhidharma. The abhidharma (a term difficult to translate) is mentioned in some accounts of the First Council but not in others, suggesting that it came into existence after the death of the Buddha. The Buddha often describes his teachings as twofold: the dharma (that is, the sūtras) and the vinaya; he does not mention the abhidharma. Yet there is an elaborate story that attributes the abhidharma to the Buddha himself, not as something that he taught to his assembled monks on earth but rather to his deceased mother, reborn as a god, in heaven. Nonetheless, the abhidharma is of great importance because the texts in this category mark the beginning of Buddhist philosophy. The term “abhidharma” is traditionally read in two ways: “higher” or “supreme” dharma (in the sense of doctrine) and “pertaining to” or “supplemental” to the dharma. Together, these give the sense of texts that serve as an addendum to the Buddha’s teaching, presenting his true intention in a systematic and often technical form, removing the more conversational and anecdotal elements of the sūtras, where the Buddha is said to have always adapted his teaching to the various needs and capacities of the members of a particular audience. The abhidharma is intended to set forth what he really meant. The genre is said to derive from the many lists that occur in the sūtras—aides-

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mémoire for what was an oral tradition for centuries—often in cases where the Buddha is breaking things down into their various constituents. The authors of the abhidharma developed these lists into comprehensive categories meant to account for all material and mental elements of the universe, a theory of everything, encompassing what in the West would be called metaphysics, ontology, cosmology, epistemology, and psychology. Here we find detailed descriptions of the famous “five aggregates” (skandha) that constitute the person; of the functions of causation, especially as they pertain to karma and rebirth; of the process of purification from ignorance to enlightenment; and, especially, of the nature of the mind, broken down (as all things are broken down in the abhidharma) into six main minds and as many as fifty-two “mental factors” (caitta), according to an influential version. It is with disputes about the vinaya and the appearance of the abhidharma that we see the development of the various monastic schools of Buddhism. According to traditional accounts, the first “schools” of Buddhism occurred as a result of the Second Council, where disagreements occurred over what seem to us to be the most minor matters of comportment, precisely the kind of “minor rules” that the Buddha told Ānanda could be ignored after his death. A group of monks were doing ten things that others judged improper. These included carrying salt in an animal horn, drinking whey after twelve noon (the monastic code prohibited eating after that hour), and using mats with fringe. When the monks who were doing these things were judged to be in violation of the vinaya, they rejected the judgment, calling themselves the Mahāsāmghika (the ˙ Great Assembly, or Majority). Those who judged this group are known to history as the Sthavira (the Elders). From these two main groups, a number of different schools and sub-schools would eventually split off. Traditional sources tend to count eighteen of these schools (called nikāya, or “group”), although thirty-four different names appear in various texts and in inscriptions that describe donations made to particular schools. Sometimes these names are geographical (Pūrvaśaila, “Eastern Hill”), sometimes they are doctrinal (Lokottaravāda, “Transcendentalist”), and sometimes they seem self-promotional (Bahuśrutīya, “Learned”). Regardless of how many schools there were, they did not all exist at the same time in Indian history or in the same geographical location. These schools were not philosophical schools. They were monastic orders that often had what we would regard as minor differences in their implementation of the monastic code, similar to those that led to the Mahāsāmghika– ˙ Sthavira split. Their canons were similar but not identical, and they sometimes disagreed on points of doctrine. To give one example, the Buddhist schools

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differed on the length of the period between death and rebirth. What is today the Theravāda school of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia asserts that rebirth occurs immediately after death. However, many other schools asserted that there is an “intermediate state” between the moment of death and the moment of rebirth (conception in the case of a human or animal) that could last up to forty-nine days. This period is the famous bardo of what is known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

The Teachings of Buddhism This is a book about Buddhist history, or perhaps more accurately, about the history of Buddhism. By “Buddhist history” one might mean history as understood by Buddhists, while the “history of Buddhism” might mean a history of the tradition untouched, or at least only lightly touched, by Buddhist doctrine. Often the difference is stark; sometimes the borderline is blurred. In the chapter dealing with the Indian emperor Aśoka, we will have occasion to consider this difference, and its consequences, more fully. Yet even for a history of Buddhism, one needs to know something about Buddhist doctrine, the conceptual universe in which Buddhists have lived their lives. To this point, we have outlined some of the topics that must serve as the foundation of a history of Buddhism. We have repeatedly mentioned the dharma but thus far have not specified what that dharma is, “what the Buddha taught,” regardless of whether he actually taught it. It would therefore be useful to discuss what we might call the basics of Buddhist doctrine, the things that, despite the developments in the dharma, have generally been accepted, or at least acknowledged, by all Buddhist schools. This section will provide a brief survey, without claiming that the various doctrines described here are equally important to all Buddhists in all Buddhist lands across all the centuries of the tradition. In some ways, Buddhist cosmology is more important in this regard than Buddhist philosophy. It is difficult to understand Buddhist history without understanding the world in which it is played out. It is a flat world, one created billions of years ago, not by God, or a god, but by the past deeds, the karma, of the beings who inhabit it. From the Buddhist perspective, the environment, the world, the universe is entirely the product of our own actions. The world is a vast disc with a rim of iron mountains that contains a vast ocean. In the center of that ocean is a great mountain, flat on its four slopes and flat on its summit, called Mount Meru (or Sumeru). That mountain is surrounded in the

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four cardinal directions by four islands, shaped like a circle, a square, a semicircle, and a triangle, each flanked by two smaller islands of the same shape. Humans, at least as we know them, inhabit the triangle-shaped island, located to the south of the great mountain, an island-continent called Jambudvīpa (Rose Apple Island). The other islands, and their inhabitants, are rarely discussed in Buddhist literature. Those inhabitants are taller than we are, they live much longer, and—most often mentioned—their life span is uniform; they know exactly how long they will live. For the humans of the southern continent, as it is often said, “Death is certain; the time of death is uncertain.” Karma is also central to Buddhist historiography. It is because of the karma of the person who becomes the Buddha that he reveals the path to enlightenment at a specific time and place in history. It is because of the karma of the beings of the universe that they are able to benefit from his presence in the world or remain oblivious to it. In Buddhism, time is dated from his passage from our world into nirvāna, and the decline of civilization is measured by our ˙ distance from his death. The site of Buddhist history is the southern continent; its triangular shape, flat in the north and pointed at the south, looks remarkably like India. Humans and animals inhabit this world. Yet they are only two of six types of beings: gods, demigods, humans, animals, ghosts, and the inhabitants of hell (in fact, a system of hells). Together, they populate what Buddhist texts call the Realm of Desire, so called because its denizens desire the pleasures of the senses. The gods live in six heavens, two on Mount Meru and four in heavens located in the sky above. The demigods, less powerful than the gods and jealous of their powers, live on the slopes of Mount Meru. They are the least important of the six, sometimes omitted entirely from the list. Humans and animals require little comment. Although they are usually invisible to humans, ghosts inhabit wastelands without vegetation, doomed to wander in search of food and water. For this reason, they are commonly known in English as hungry ghosts, following the Chinese term. The original Sanskrit term is “preta,” which means “departed,” for the ghosts are the unfed spirits of the dead. They suffer horribly from a range of afflictions, scorched by moonlight and frozen by sunlight, with knots in their throats and limbs so thin that when their knees knock they set off sparks. Because they inhabit our world, they appear often in Buddhist literature. There are many rituals in which monks and nuns offer them food. Buddhism has an elaborate system of subterranean hells, divided into the categories of hot hells, cold hells, neighboring hells, and trifling hells, one’s

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postmortem destination determined by the gravity of the misdeeds one has committed in the past. The hot hells include familiar infernos as well as all manner of sadistic torture, carried out by demons who are also said to be the creation of one’s sins. The cold hells are desolate lands of snow and ice, worlds without a sun or a moon, hells with names like “Chattering Teeth” and “Bursting Blisters.” Much of this cosmology is inherited from Hinduism, with some important modifications. The first is that although individual worlds come into and go out of existence, the universe has no creator and no beginning. This universe is called samsāra in Sanskrit, literally, “the wandering,” often rendered in En˙ glish as “cyclic existence.” The important point here is that the inhabitants of the universe have been wandering in these six realms forever, “blown by the winds of karma” as the Buddhist texts say, from one realm to another in lifetime after lifetime, from time immemorial. As monks say in response to a question by the Buddha, “The mother’s milk that we have drunk as we roamed and wandered on through this long course—this alone is more than the water in the four great oceans.”6 Another of the modifications that the Buddhists made to Hindu cosmology is that the gods are not immortal. They live long lives enjoying the most sublime of the pleasures of the senses, with powers far exceeding those of humans. Yet, like humans, they are mortal, eventually dying as gods to be reborn as something far less exalted. The fire that fuels the migrations of the six types of beings is karma, a Sanskrit word that simply means “action.” According to Buddhist doctrine, intentional actions plant seeds that, at some point in an unspecified future, bear fruit as experiences of pleasure and pain. Some of these actions have the power to serve as the cause of an entire lifetime, with each of the five realms (the demigods are usually excluded here) serving as the destination of particular deeds. Thus, one is born as a god through deeds of generosity; one is born as a human through ethical deeds, in particular, the keeping of vows to refrain from unvirtue; one is reborn as an animal through deeds motivated by stupidity; one is reborn as a ghost through deeds motivated by greed; one is born in hell through deeds motivated by hatred. In each case, a deed may be physical, verbal, or mental. Because the cycle of rebirth has no beginning, the store of past deeds is measureless, meaning that the cycle of rebirth is endless. That is, unless someone knows how to end it. That someone is the Buddha or, more accurately, a buddha; according to Buddhist doctrine, a buddha has appeared in the world

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many times in the past, discovering the path to liberation from rebirth and teaching that path, before departing from the cycle himself. He and his teachings are eventually forgotten, casting the world back into inexorable suffering until the next buddha appears to once again reveal the path. What is that path that leads to a state free from suffering? One cannot ask the gods because they do not know. When properly propitiated they can provide a good harvest, good weather, and good health. They cannot protect us from all the sufferings of samsāra. Only a buddha knows; only a buddha can provide ˙ that protection. One of the standard elements of Buddhist narrative is gods appearing in the audience of the Buddha’s teachings, a god imploring the Buddha, a man, to teach. Some have seen this as a Buddhist turn away from the divine to the human. It also has a more mundane motivation, to demonstrate that the Buddhist Buddha is superior to the Hindu gods, gods who come to him for protection. This idea of protection, of shelter from the storm of suffering, is central to the identity of the Buddhist, for a Buddhist is defined as someone who seeks shelter, usually rendered in English as “refuge,” by turning to the “three jewels,” so called because they are difficult to find, and when found are of great value: the Buddha, his dharma, or teaching, and his san˙gha, or community of monks and nuns. A Buddhist is someone who says three times: “I go for refuge to the Buddha. I go for refuge to the dharma. I go for refuge to the san˙gha.” As the foundations of Buddhist identity, each of these terms is subject to extensive commentary; we will only provide the basics here. The Buddha is, of course, the Buddha. Although one of his many epithets is devātideva, “god above the gods,” he is a human, a human who did not simply discover the path to liberation from rebirth by meditating under a tree one night. Instead, he is said to have taken a vow to become a buddha billions of years ago, and in the presence of a previous buddha, going on to perfect himself over eons so that he would eventually be able to discover the path to nirvāna when the teachings of the previous buddha, and the knowledge of that ˙ path, had fallen into oblivion. He perfected himself by performing deeds called perfections (pāramitā), numbered as six or ten, the six being: giving, ethics, patience, effort, concentration, and wisdom. From the time that he made the vow until the night of his enlightenment billions of years later, he was called a bodhisattva, a word difficult to translate but meaning someone who, motivated by compassion, vows to achieve buddhahood. When he eventually achieved enlightenment during his final lifetime in samsāra, he gained the ability to ˙ remember all of his past lives, and he would often recount them. These are the famous jātaka (literally, “birth,” here in the sense of “past rebirth”) stories, per-

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haps the most popular genre of Buddhist literature, with the future buddha, sometimes an animal, sometimes a human, making all manner of remarkable (and often grisly) sacrifices to save the lives of others. However, for the purposes of the refuge formula, the Buddha is a source of refuge because he found that place of refuge and compassionately taught others how to find it. The actual refuge is the dharma, a word of multivalent meaning in Sanskrit and even in Buddhism. Here, it means the teachings of the Buddha; in this context the term is often translated as “doctrine.” That doctrine is vast; he is said to have given eighty-four thousand teachings. Here, we might begin with the first teaching he gave after his enlightenment, the famous (and mistranslated) “four noble truths,” four potent nouns: suffering, origin, cessation, path. Buddhist texts describe the beings of the six realms of rebirth, all beset with their own form of suffering: the horrible tortures suffered by the denizens of hell, the incessant hunger and thirst of the ghosts, animals constantly seeking something to eat while fearing being eaten. Eight sufferings of humans are enumerated: birth, aging, sickness, death, losing friends, making enemies, not finding what one seeks, finding what one does not seek. Even the gods suffer, having a vision of their future fate in a lower realm, a fate that they foresee but cannot escape. Were these various forms of suffering not bad enough, the beings of samsāra have no control over their occurrence. Each of those suffer˙ ings, physical or mental, is the result of a past deed, of past karma. And so the second of the four truths is origin, the cause of suffering. That cause is most immediately karma. The theory, or at least, a theory of karma existed in ancient India prior to the time of the Buddha. Here, however, “karma” referred often to a ritual act, an element in the often elaborate Vedic fire sacrifice, with a misdeed being a ritual deed misdone. During this early period, the doctrine of rebirth that we associate with Indian religions had not developed; it begins to appear in the Upanisads and seems to have been widely accepted ˙ by the time of the Buddha. It is also in the Upanisads that karma takes on an ˙ ethical element and is linked to rebirth. The Buddha is credited with emphasizing the element of intention in actions of body and speech, with Buddhist thinkers developing an elaborate system that explains how deeds, not only physical actions but also words and even thoughts, produce effects in the future in the form of experiences of physical and mental pleasure and pain. This theory would provide the foundation for much Buddhist thought and practice over the centuries, for monastics and laity alike. Among many other purposes, it provides an explanation that has been sought across the globe and across the centuries: how to explain the

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suffering of the innocent and the happiness of the wicked. And, in the case of Buddhism, how to do so without the existence of an eternal and omnipotent God. In its theory of karma, Buddhism provides a simultaneity of the past, present, and future, as the present is the product of the past, a present that in turn creates the future. In Buddhism, therefore, the misdeeds that cause suffering are not only physical, like killing; they are verbal, like lying, and even mental, like wishing others harm. These are the causes of suffering. However, one cannot stop acting, speaking, and thinking. And even if one could, each being carries a vast store of physical, verbal, and mental misdeeds done in countless lifetimes in the past, each with the potential to fructify as feelings of physical and mental pain. The second truth of origin thus identifies not only actions, but the causes of those actions, the negative mental states that motivate them, called afflictions (kleśa). These are variously enumerated, but the most important are three: desire, hatred, and ignorance, referred to together as the three poisons. Desire and hatred do not call for particular comment. Ignorance, however, has a specific meaning in Buddhism. It is an active misconception of the nature of the person. Put most simply, it is the belief in self, that within each being there is an eternal soul, an enduring entity that is the referent of words like “I” and “mine,” an immortal identity that perdures from day to day and from lifetime to lifetime. The central claim of Buddhist philosophy is that such a self does not exist, and that belief in such a self is the root cause of all forms of suffering. Searching ever for the cause, the Buddhists see suffering caused by past actions, actions motivated by desire or hatred, and desire and hatred motivated by ignorance, the belief in self. Thus, if the belief in self can be destroyed, desire and hatred, and then the deeds they induce, become impossible. It is possible, therefore, to make suffering cease. And so the third truth is cessation, a state not only of the cessation of action and of the emotions that provoke it, not only a cessation of ignorance, but a cessation of rebirth. It is said that when the absence of self is seen, that vision is so powerful that it not only prevents future deeds motivated by desire and hatred; it also destroys all of the past deeds that could cause suffering in the future. Thus, another word for cessation is “nirvāna,” a state in which the causes ˙ for future rebirth have been destroyed such that when one dies, one is never reborn again, because, in a certain sense, one never really existed in the first place. When a Buddhist declares, “I go for refuge to the dharma,” nirvāna is ˙ said to be the true refuge. That such a refuge exists is a source of solace. Still, one needs to know how to get there.

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Thus, the fourth truth is the path. In what is known in European-language sources as his first sermon, the Buddha enumerated an eightfold path: correct view, correct intention, correct speech, correct action, correct livelihood, correct effort, correct mindfulness, correct concentration. These can be subsumed under a somewhat more straightforward category of the three trainings: in ethics, in concentration, and in wisdom. “Ethics” in Buddhism refers to the restraint of body and speech, restraint that is often achieved through vows. Indeed, it is said that the primary cause of rebirth as a human is the taking and keeping of various vows. There are vows for laypeople, which can be taken for one day or for life; there are vows for novice monks, vows for novice nuns, vows for fully ordained monks, and vows for fully ordained nuns, the numbers increasing with each level. In one of the several monastic orders that originated in India, a fully ordained monk holds 253 vows, and a fully ordained nun holds 364 vows. The purpose of the vows, at least at the most basic level, is to provide restraint from engaging in negative deeds of body and speech that would produce negative karma. However, in a remarkable element of Buddhist ethical theory, the vow is not simply a deterrent, it is a constant engine generating good karma. Once the vow has been taken, positive karma is created during every moment that the vow is not broken, even when one is sleeping. Indeed, one of the schools of Indian Buddhism argues that when one takes a vow, it creates in one’s body something called invisible matter (avijñaptirūpa), which creates positive karma as long as one keeps the vow or as long as one lives, whichever comes first. However, ethical actions result only in good rebirths as a human or a god and moments of physical and mental pleasure during those lifetimes. Virtue alone cannot cause liberation from rebirth. For that, meditation is necessary. Hence, the second of the three trainings: concentration. The term translated as “concentration” here is “samādhi” in Sanskrit, a term that refers to a deep state of meditation in which the mind can be focused on a single object, without interruption or distraction, for an extended period of time. What is important here is the power of concentration rather than the object on which the mind is focused. The Buddha is said to have prescribed forty objects for the cultivation of this concentration, ranging from the breath, to compassion, to the foulness of the human body, to the recollection of the Buddha’s qualities. There are four levels of concentration—simply called first, second, third, and fourth—that are also abodes in the Buddhist cosmos, heavens reserved for those who attain that particular level of concentration in meditation during their previous life as a human.

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However, rebirth in a heaven is not the goal of the Buddhist path. The doctrinal point here is that the ordinary level of concentration of beings who inhabit the Realm of Desire is weak, too weak to dispel the belief in self at anything more than a discursive level, too weak to destroy that ignorance and the karmic seeds it has created over the course of innumerable past lifetimes. A greater level of mental stability and power is required. The training in concentration is intended to build that power, a power gained through developing advanced stages of meditation. Among the four concentrations, the Buddha particularly praised the fourth, in part because the feeling that accompanies it is equanimity. On his deathbed, the Buddha placed his mind in the fourth concentration and from there passed into nirvāna. ˙ In order to achieve nirvāna, the concentration that has been developed re˙ quires a specific content to bring about liberation from suffering. That content is wisdom. “Wisdom” in this context does not refer to a generic understanding of the ways of the world derived from a lifetime of experience. It refers to a specific insight into the nature of reality. That reality is variously described in Buddhist texts, but in the early tradition, wisdom is the specific understanding of what are called the three marks: impermanence, suffering, and no self, with particular focus on the last of these. In the context of the three trainings, wisdom is not merely a philosophical understanding of no self, as important as that is. It is that understanding taken as the focus of the highly concentrated mind developed during the second training. It is this wisdom that has the power to destroy the causes of future rebirth and to deliver the meditator into nirvāna. When a Buddhist says, “I go for refuge to the dharma,” among ˙ all the teachings of the Buddha, the four truths are often said to be its referent. And among those four truths, the true refuge is the third truth, cessation, because it is the state beyond all suffering. Suffering, origin, cessation, path; these are the four truths. As noted above, the well-known “four noble truths” is a mistranslation. The Sanskrit term “ārya,” meaning “noble” or “superior,” refers not to the truths but to those who understand them, distinguishing them from everyone else, referred to in Buddhist literature as ordinary beings (pr thag jana) for whom suffering, origin, ces˙ sation, and path are not true because they have not yet been understood. The refuge formula concludes with the statement, “I go for refuge to the san˙gha.” Although “san˙gha” is the standard term in Buddhism for the community of monks and nuns, in the refuge formula, it refers to the āryasan˙gha, the “noble community”—that is, those who have attained a level of deep insight into the four truths and are thus able to lead others to it. It is for them that suffering,

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origin, cessation, and path are true. The term “four noble truths” thus should be rendered “four truths for the [spiritually] noble.” It is said that the first san˙gha was composed of the Buddha’s first followers, ordained simply by him saying to them, “Ehi bhiksu” (Come, monk), monks who would go on to understand ˙ the four truths. The influx of the less spiritually noble led the Buddha to institute an elaborate ordination procedure for monks, and later, apparently against his will, for nuns. The “four noble truths” and the “eightfold path” are often presented as the essence of Buddhism, especially in modern presentations of the tradition. It is important to note, however, that the kind of description presented here would have been something found almost exclusively in the domain of monks, and among those, scholar monks, trained in Buddhist doctrine. Over the course of the past two and half millennia, the vast majority of Buddhists have not been monks and nuns, but have been laypeople who know nothing of no self, who seek, as so many have over the millennia, health and wealth for themselves and their families in this lifetime and the treasures of heaven in the next. With some rare exceptions across Buddhist history, laypeople have not studied Buddhist philosophy; many monks and nuns never did so. And contrary to the stereotype of Buddhism so present and persistent in the modern world, the vast majority of Buddhist laypeople never practiced meditation. They were not interested in the state of cessation called nirvāna. It was only when the seeds ˙ of the modern mindfulness movement were planted in Burma in the first decades of the twentieth century that this began to change. It is only because of the power of a modern Western fantasy that has been projected onto the history of Buddhism that we tend to think otherwise. As we find in so many religions, Buddhist laypeople have been concerned above all with seeking happiness in this life and heaven in the next life. From the point of view of the four truths, they have been concerned with suffering and the cause of suffering. They have been concerned above all with karma, what is presented in Buddhist texts as the inexorable law of the cause and effect of actions. Yet much of Buddhist practice is devoted to somehow avoiding the negative consequences said to be the unavoidable effects of deeds done in the past, while doing whatever one can to accumulate good karma. Here, Buddhism offered the laity the means to achieve happiness in this life and heaven in the next through a particular form of exchange. Laypeople gave monks and nuns material support, initially largely in the form of food, with various forms of wealth also provided by those with the means to offer it. Monks and nuns received those gifts and, by doing so, al-

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lowed the laity to create good karma, said to fructify in the form of wealth in this life and heaven in the next. The power of this karma was said to depend in part on the purity of the recipient. This is why Buddhist laypeople have been concerned that the monastics they support maintain their vow of celibacy. In the context of karma, this is more important than a monk or nun’s philosophical sophistication or meditative attainments. These are the monks and nuns that the Buddhist laity seek to support. These are the monks and nuns that the Buddhist laity want to perform rituals on their behalf. At a large Buddhist temple in Japan, there is a sign posted outside the gate with a series of two-digit numbers in red and black: 25, 42, 61, 19, 33, and 37 in red, with the numbers preceding and following each of those numbers in black. Any Japanese would recognize these as yakudoshi, “ages of calamity,” ages twenty-five, forty-two, and sixty-one for men; ages nineteen, thirty-three, and thirty-seven for women. In order to escape calamity, rituals are to be performed and offerings are to be made, not only in the baleful year itself (in red) but in the year before and the year after (in black). At the top of the steps of the main temple, one finds a table with flat wooden sticks that look like tongue depressors. There is also a container of pencils and markers as well as a list of phrases in characters, including “progress in studies,” “traffic safety,” “finding marriage partner,” and “business success.” People write one of these phrases on a stick and set it in a tray. Several times a day, a priest will ceremoniously burn the sticks in a fire altar, sonorously chanting while another priest beats a drum. Outside another temple is a wooden statue of a monk. Although statues of Buddhist saints are not usually touched in Japan, people line up before the statue, clean their hands at a hand sanitizer dispenser, and then rub various parts of his body—his heart, his head, his back, his knees—and then touch the corresponding part of their own body in order to heal that body part. Nowhere do we hear mention of the four truths, no self, or even Śākyamuni Buddha. This is Buddhism for most Japanese. And this, despite the fact that in the canon, the Buddha condemns fire sacrifice in works like the Sacrifice Sūtra (Yaññasutta). In the monastic code, he prohibits monks from practicing divination, dismissing it as “animal knowledge” (tiracchāna-vijjā). This is not to say that the Buddhist canon is absent from lay life. In Japanese temples, it often has its own temple. At some temples, for a small fee one is allowed to turn a tall wooden structure, called a rinzou, with drawers filled with texts on each of its eight sides, and with spokes protruding near the bottom that look something like the capstan of an ancient warship. Pushing on the spoke

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causes the wheel to rotate in a clockwise direction. Turning the wheel once is said to produce the merit equal to reading the entire Chinese Buddhist canon. The woodblock print of the Ming Dynasty edition contains 6,771 volumes. These examples from modern Japan demonstrate a difference, some would argue a divergence, from the familiar Buddhism of the four noble truths, from one’s sense of “true Buddhism.” However, we should resist the temptation to posit an original Buddhism from which all other elements of the tradition are a development or a deviation. Such an original is hard to find. All Buddhists, around the world and across the centuries, have felt that they are practicing authentic Buddhism. As we shall see, distance in time from the Buddha is a common cause for lament in Buddhist texts, especially in the context of the disappearance of the dharma. However, distance in time and space from the place of origin rarely figure in assessments of authenticity in Buddhist communities. Hence, Tibet was a latecomer to the Buddhist world, despite its long border with India. Yet Tibetans will often claim that their Buddhism is the most complete because they received and preserved the complete compendium of the Buddha’s teachings, from the four noble truths to the highest yoga tantras, the latter texts considered essential for the achievement of buddhahood. Japan was geographically the farthest from the Indian birthplace of Buddhism. Yet, beginning in the ninth century and continuing until the twentieth century, Japanese clerics would claim that their Buddhism was the most authentic, sometimes describing a process of evolution and refinement as the dharma made its way from India to China, reaching its culmination in Japan. But what of the homeland itself? It must be the site of the authentic dharma. It is traditionally said that in order for Buddhism to be deemed authentically present in a particular region, there must be a community of fully ordained monks who participate in three rituals: the annual rains retreat, the annual ceremony to end the rains retreat, and the fortnightly recitation of the monastic vows and confession of infractions. By this measure, Buddhism was absent from India for centuries. The question, then, is not about authenticity, a term best consigned to the realm of polemics. Still, there are questions to be asked. For example, what is the appeal of Buddhism? Why did it arise and thrive before essentially fading away in India, the land of its birth? This is a question that scholars continue to study. To ponder it, we must differentiate two audiences of the Buddha’s teachings: the monks and nuns who left their homes and families for the celibate life, and the families, royal and commoner, who supported them. For the laity, Buddhism provided a mechanism for the making of merit that

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did not require the performance of a sacrifice by a Vedic priest, something that was not possible for so many in ancient India because of barriers of caste and condition. In Buddhism, the mechanism of merit was instead the simple monk or nun who appeared at one’s door each morning, satisfied by simply putting some leftover food in their bowl. Giving (dāna) was extolled as the highest of all virtues, bearing fruit in the future as wealth, either as a human, or better, as a god in one of the many heavens of the Buddhist cosmos. Giving to a Buddhist monk or nun was a virtue in which all could partake, regardless of caste or gender. Indeed, in both Buddhist scriptures and Buddhist inscriptions, we find the names of women, not only queens and princesses but courtesans and daughters of wealthy merchants. The greater the gift, the greater the merit. In the monastic code, we find the statement, “Giving dwellings to the san˙gha is praised as the best by the Buddha.”

The Spread of Buddhism According to a famous Sri Lankan chronicle, Buddhism was established there during the reign of a king who ruled from 247 to 207 BCE, brought to the island by Aśoka’s monk son; he was later followed by Aśoka’s nun daughter, who brought with her a cutting of the Bodhi Tree, the tree under which the Buddha achieved enlightenment. This work, called the Great Chronicle (Mahāvamsa), ˙ was likely composed in Sri Lanka in Pāli around 500 CE. A much earlier work about Aśoka called the Legend of Aśoka (Aśokāvadāna), composed in India in Sanskrit some three centuries earlier, makes no mention of this visit or even of these children. We see throughout the history of Buddhism the need that Buddhist cultures felt to bring themselves into physical and temporal proximity to the Buddha, to have the dharma arrive in their land as early as possible, even to declare that the Buddha himself had visited their land. The Sri Lankan chronicles describe three aerial visits to the island by the Buddha. After Aśoka, who died in 232 BCE, the next great patron of Buddhism, at least according to Buddhist sources, was Kaniska of the Kushan Dynasty, who ˙ reigned from circa 127 to 150 CE. The Kushans were a nomadic people originally from what is today Xinjiang Province in China. In the second century BCE, they migrated west into Bactria, a region that includes modern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Bactria had been ruled by Darius the Great as part of the Achaemenid Dynasty. The region was conquered by Alexander the Great in a campaign that culminated in the Battle of Jaxartes, near modern Tashkent. After Alexander’s death in 323 BCE, Bactria was ruled by one of his generals,

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Seleucus (c. 358–281 BCE), who founded his own dynasty and empire, the Seleucid. It was succeeded by what is known as the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, which in turn fell to the Kushans, who arrived in the region around 135 BCE. Their empire reached its greatest extent during the reign of Kaniska in the sec˙ ond century of the Common Era, encompassing much of modern Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northern India, and was ruled from his capital of Purusapura, ˙ modern Peshawar in Pakistan. Among the several deities whose images were stamped on the reverse of his coins (with images of the emperor himself on the observe) are buddhas, identified by their names written in the Bactrian language: Shakamano Boddo and Metrago Boddo, that is, Śākyamuni Buddha and Maitreya Buddha (the future buddha). This should not be seen, however, as a sign of particular devotion to Buddhism. Like Aśoka, and other famous emperors across the Buddhist world, Kaniska supported a number of religions, an ecumenical approach meant to ˙ maintain social harmony among his subjects in the worldly realm, while receiving the protection of a maximum number of deities in the realms above and the times beyond. Among the more than thirty deities represented, more numerous than the Buddha and Maitreya on Kushan coins are Persian deities such as Mazda and Mithra. The Hindu deity Śiva also appears on Kushan coins. The portrayal of Kaniska in Buddhist sources as a devout Buddhist is likely ˙ hyperbolic. Kaniska is also famous for what is called the Kaniska Stūpa, described as ˙ ˙ one of the great wonders of the Buddhist world and said to have been some four hundred feet tall and inlaid with precious stones. Archaeological evidence suggests that a smaller stūpa was built around 150, shortly after the emperor’s death, and then rebuilt during the fourth century. This stūpa is mentioned by several of the famous Chinese pilgrims, with Xuanzang describing it in detail some five centuries after the emperor’s death. A casket containing relics was excavated in 1909. The inscription states that it was a gift of Kaniska to monks ˙ of the Sarvāstivāda school, one of the famous “eighteen schools” of Indian Buddhism. Like Aśoka, Kaniska is said to have convened a council, counted as the Fourth ˙ Council, where the most important of all abhidharma texts, the massive Great Exegesis of the Abhidharma (Abhidharmamahāvibhāsa, also known simply as ˙ the Great Exegesis, Mahāvibhāsa), was compiled by a group of five hundred ar˙ hats. Like the Third Council, said to have been convened by Aśoka, the Fourth Council of Kaniska is likely legendary. Still, his reign seems to have been a time ˙ of important developments in the arts, with the great centers of Buddhist

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sculpture, Gandhāra and Mathurā, located within his domain; the famous poet Aśvaghosa, author of the first complete biography of the Buddha, is said to have ˙ resided at his court. Based on archaeological and epigraphical evidence, by end of the second century of the Common Era, Buddhism seems to have been established throughout what is today India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, with major stūpa complexes at such famous sites as Sanchi, Bhārhut, and Amarāvatī in India; Peshawar and Taxila in Pakistan; and Anurādhapura in Sri Lanka. Although Buddhists likely traveled into the Mediterranean world—India had active trade with Rome— there is little archaeological or textual evidence to suggest a significant presence there.7 Especially important for its eventual spread to China was Buddhism’s strong presence in the northwest, in regions that today include Kashmir, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. It was from these regions that Buddhism would make its way to China. That scholars trace the spread of Buddhism through the expanding regions in which the archaeological remains of stūpas (and the inscriptions they bear) have been discovered points to elements essential to the geographical growth of Buddhism: relics and writing, the major material forms of the dharma. Without an immortal god in heaven, Buddhism was bereft when the Buddha died and passed into nirvāna, a state that, at least in its early interpreta˙ tion, is one of extinction, the cessation of mind and body. With his passing, the Buddha achieved what is called the nirvāna without remainder. According ˙ to the famous account of his last days, he instructed his monks to cremate his body and entomb his relics in a mound at a crossroads. However, a dispute arose among his lay followers as to who had a right to the relics, leading to a compromise in which eight (or in some accounts, ten) portions were allotted. The Buddha’s followers then returned to their home regions, where they enshrined their share of the relics in a stūpa. There are obviously many more than eight stūpas in India, not to mention the dagobas of Sri Lanka, the pagodas of China, Korea, and Japan, the chedi of Thailand, and the chöten of Tibet, all stūpas. The proliferation of the relics required for these stūpas is credited to the emperor Aśoka, who is said to have broken open seven of the eight original stūpas, taken the relics, and built eighty-four thousand stūpas. Despite this hyperbole, the presence of a stūpa would be an important marker of the presence of Buddhism in a particular region; the ruins of a stūpa mark its decline. The stūpa would represent the remaining physical presence of the Buddha in samsāra and hence would be˙ come the primary site of Buddhist devotion, for monks and laity alike. Numer-

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ous texts describe the benefits, in this lifetime and the next, that accrue to those who pay homage to a stūpa. When the Mahāyāna sūtras began to appear, they would often proclaim their own importance by comparing it to that of a stūpa. Relics, small and portable, became the means of implanting the dharma in new lands. So did texts. The preeminent scripture of ancient India were the Vedas, texts (the oldest, the R g Veda, dating to the second millennium BCE) that extol ˙ a pantheon of gods and prescribe sacrifices to them. It is misleading, however, to describe them as “scriptures” or “texts” because they have been maintained orally to the present day by Hindu priests, using a sophisticated system of mnemonics. Although there are injunctions in Hindu texts against writing down the Vedas, it appears that this was done beginning around 1000 CE; the first published version was produced not by a brahmin priest but by the famous German Indologist Max Müller in 1849. Regardless, according to Hindu doctrine, the Vedas are eternal, having existed always as sound. They have no author, human or divine; as mentioned above, they are apauruseya, not made ˙ by a person. This was the tradition into which the Buddha was born, with many of his monks coming from his own warrior caste as well as the caste of brahmin priests, the keepers of the Vedas. Thus, although writing likely existed at the time, it was used for the mundane mercantile, not for the transcendent truth. His teachings are therefore called buddhavacana (the speech of the Buddha), with the Sanskrit “vac” being a cognate for “voice.” His pronouncements are often called the lion’s roar, silencing the lesser animals of the forest, that is, the teachers of other sects. Later, we find his teaching described as having sixty qualities of vocalization. Scholars have found evidence of orality in the Pāli sūtras, with the kind of repetitions and refrains found in orally preserved works like the Homeric epics. Monks who taught particular texts, or groups of texts, were called bhānaka (reciters). Indeed, the monastic code refers to two ˙ monastic vocations: reciter and meditator. As noted above, the word translated as “council” literally means “sing together” or “recitation.” We also should not assume that an oral phase was eventually replaced by a written phase. The term for “learned” in Buddhism literally means “one who has heard much” (bahuśruta). During his visit to India in the seventh century, the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang reports that monks in Kashgar knew most of the texts by heart, with some being able to recite the entire tripitaka and the massive Great Exegesis of the Abhidharma, although he ˙ concedes that “they don’t delve in the doctrines.”8 At the Sixth Council, held in

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Yangon in Burma in 1956, a monk named Mingon Sayadaw recited the entire Pāli canon from memory. But what language did the Buddha speak? Despite claims to the contrary, the Buddha did not teach in the language called Pāli, the language of the Theravāda canon, a language that developed after the death of the Buddha, likely in response to a particular need. When the Buddha preached the dharma, given the length of his ministry (traditionally said to be forty-five years), the extent of his travels, and the number of dialects in northern India at the time, it is likely that he spoke several languages. In a famous passage, two monks approach the Buddha. They are described as belonging to the brahmin caste and having good voices and good pronunciation. Their caste and their diction suggest that they were well-versed in the Vedas, the sacred scriptures of the Hindus. The memorization and recitation of the Vedas was the central task of brahmin priests, with the efficacy of Vedic sacrifice depending on their proper and precise pronunciation, the sound being more important than the meaning. The two brahmin monks complain to the Buddha that monks from different castes are corrupting the words of the Buddha by repeating them in their own dialects. They offer to remedy this by putting the words of the Buddha into proper verses, in effect offering to give the Buddha’s teachings the same form as the teachings of his sometime rivals, the brahmin priests. One might imagine that the Buddha would accept this offer. However, not only does he refuse, he declares that anyone who versifies his teachings in that way will be guilty of violating the monastic code. He goes on to say, “I command that the word of the Buddha be learned by each one in his own mode of expression.”9 In a version of the story preserved in Chinese, he explains why: “In my religion, there is no concern for fine language. As long as the meaning and reasoning are not lacking, that is all I wish. You must teach according to the sounds which enable people to understand. That is why I said one should act according to the country.”10 With this declaration, the Buddha seems to give his blessing to the translation of his teachings, perhaps the most important factor in making Buddhism what nineteenth-century European scholars would call a world religion. In a sense, translation, at least oral translation, is described as being present from the time of the Buddha. In addition to instructing his monks to preach in the local vernacular, he himself is described as speaking many regional languages, an early example of what would become one of the hallmarks of the Mahāyāna: that the Buddha used “skillful means” to teach what was most appropriate for each of his listeners. Some of the Nikāya schools and the Mahāyāna

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would adopt the view that when the Buddha preached, he in fact only uttered a single syllable (in some accounts, the letter a, the first letter of the Sanskrit alphabet), and members of the audience would hear a discourse in their own dialect and adapted specifically to their needs and capacities.11 With the teachings of the Buddha not committed to writing, recitation was the primary means of their expression, recitation in what was likely a vernacular of the region of their origin. However, as Buddhism spread across the Indian subcontinent, a subcontinent with many vernaculars, monks joined the san˙gha who did not understand the northeastern dialect of the sūtras and the monastic code. When monks gathered together to recite the canon, as it existed at the time, they needed to be able to do so in the same language. It seems, then, that sometime after the reign of Aśoka, a language called Pāli (a term that means “canon” or “canonical passage”) was invented as a kind of Church Latin, an artificial language that was the native tongue of no one, in which the teachings of the Buddha could be recited and preserved. This is the language of the so-called Pāli canon as it survives today, although that canon reflects Pāli as it existed in the twelfth century.12 It was in the first century before the Common Era that the teachings of the Buddha began to be committed to writing, and not always in Pāli. An ancient Sri Lankan chronicle reports that during the time of a king who reigned from 29 to 17 BCE, monks who had memorized the tripitaka—the ˙ “three baskets” of the Buddhist canon—wrote it down. However, no manuscripts survive. The oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts are from the north, discovered in the ruins of a monastery in eastern Afghanistan, a region that was once a part of Gandhāra. Here, the word for “book” is “pustaka” (leather), because books were inscribed on leather in the north; in the south they were inscribed on palm leaves. The texts are in a language called Gāndhārī (related to Sanskrit) and written in a script called Kharost hī. They date from the first century BCE to the third ˙˙ century CE. These texts have survived, while others have not, in part because the region of Gandhāra does not receive the annual drenching monsoon that causes organic materials to rot. They have also survived because, for reasons that are not clear, the texts were placed in clay jars and buried in the vicinity of a stūpa. In ancient India there had long been the practice of a text, often a very short text, serving as the sacred relic enshrined in a stūpa. In the later tradition, we find, in several regions of the Buddhist world, the practice of burying texts to be unearthed at some point in the future. As we shall see, the practice of preserving the dharma for future generations, especially at times when Buddhism is in danger of extinction, would continue to the twentieth century.

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It was from the Gandhāra region that Buddhism would make its way to China, where it would establish its second hub, leading to the translation of thousands of texts into Chinese, the composition of thousands of texts in Chinese, and the development of new forms of Buddhist art and architecture, all of which would have a profound effect on the history, cultures, and people of East Asia, including those of China itself. The transmission of Buddhism to China will be described below. Here, we will continue with the history of Buddhism in India. Although most of the works discovered among the Gāndhārī manuscripts are associated with the early schools, there have also been discoveries of texts with Mahāyāna themes, some associated with the Dharmaguptaka school. Thus, it is around the beginning of the Common Era that we see what is sometimes referred to as the rise of the Mahāyāna. This is the subject of an entire chapter below, but a brief excursus into the problem of nomenclature is necessary here. The first task is to distinguish the terms “Mahāyāna,” “Hīnayāna,” and “Theravāda.” The first, “Mahāyāna,” means “Great Vehicle.” It began as a term of selfreference and is used in modern works to identify persons, doctrines, philosophical schools, and geographical regions that accept texts referred to as the Mahāyāna sūtras as the word of the Buddha. These texts, which themselves sometimes use the term “Mahāyāna” and sometimes do not, began to appear shortly before the beginning of the Common Era; many of the most influential of these texts seem to have been composed during the first three centuries of the Common Era. Typically beginning with the standard phrase “Thus did I hear,” they represent themselves as the teaching of Śākyamuni Buddha but are not. Those who believe that they are his teachings are regarded as followers of the Mahāyāna. This raises the question of what distinguishes a text as a Mahāyāna sūtra, when it is difficult to identify with certainty any Buddhist sūtra as the teaching of the historical Buddha. The distinction is therefore between those texts that most Buddhists have regarded as the word of the Buddha and those additional texts that only some Buddhists have regarded as the word of the Buddha. Most Buddhists today would tend to accept the texts included in the modern Pāli canon as the word of the Buddha. This, however, is immediately complicated by the existence of a number of such canons in other Indic languages that correspond to the Pāli canon, sometimes overlapping with it, sometimes not. The Pāli canon, at least as it exists today, is not older than some of the Mahāyāna sūtras. Therefore, it is historically inaccurate to divide Buddhist texts into those of the Mahāyāna and those of the Theravāda, for two reasons. First, many texts,

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or at least versions of many texts, that are accepted by adherents of the Mahāyāna as the word of the Buddha are also accepted by the Theravāda. Second, and more importantly, “Theravāda” refers to a school of Buddhism that today exists predominantly in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. It only became the orthodoxy long after the introduction of Buddhism to those regions. Furthermore, the use of the name “Theravāda,” meaning “Way of the Elders,” to name a Buddhist school is of recent vintage, coined not by an ancient Buddhist master but by a modern British convert in 1907. It purports to be the Pāli for the Sanskrit term “Sthaviravāda.” However, despite the presence of a Sthavira school among the traditional eighteen schools of early Indian Buddhism, the term “Sthaviravāda” seems not to be attested. Thus, it is inaccurate when discussing the premodern period to refer to the non-Mahāyāna schools, that is, those who do not accept the Mahāyāna sūtras as the word of the Buddha, as Theravāda. What, then, should they be called? In some but certainly not all of the Mahāyāna sūtras, we find the word “Hīnayāna.” Often euphemistically translated into English as “Lesser Vehicle,” “Individual Vehicle,” or, as in a famous French work, “Petit Véhicule,” it is in fact a term of abuse, meaning “Base Vehicle” or “Vile Vehicle,” used to refer to those who reject a particular Mahāyāna sūtra. Knowing that it is not accurate to use “Theravāda” for all eighteen (and more) of the early Indian schools, an earlier generation of scholars adopted the term “Hīnayāna” as a mass noun to refer to them. Although, over the long history of religions, pejorative terms have become standard forms of reference (one thinks of “Shaker” and “Quaker”), it is no longer considered acceptable to use the term “Hīnayāna.” This leaves us with the dilemma as to what to call these schools. One cannot call them pre-Mahāyāna because this gives the false impression, held by many, that they were displaced by the Mahāyāna. In fact, they continued. In order to counter the image of a great vehicle bulldozing the minor schools, some scholars have adopted the term “mainstream schools,” thus correcting that impression and signaling what scholars have determined was a more tenuous presence of the Mahāyāna in India than its own texts so often claim. This term, however, may be an overcorrection, making the Mahāyāna seem somehow deviant, when it is clear that Mahāyāna and, for want of a better term, non-Mahāyāna monks kept the same monastic vows, lived in the same monasteries, and performed many of the same rituals. Solving the dilemma of translation by reverting to the Sanskrit (something often done in the field of Buddhist Studies), others have suggested the term “Nikāya schools” to refer to the traditional eighteen schools or groups (nikāya). Hence, pre-Mahāyāna Bud-

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dhism can be called Nikāya Buddhism, with the understanding that it did not end with rise of the Mahāyāna. Among these variously inadequate options, the term “Nikāya Buddhism” will be used in this book for the Indian schools that existed in India prior to the appearance of what are called the Mahāyāna sūtras and then coexisted with the Mahāyāna schools that developed there. The term “Theravāda” will be used to refer only to the form of Buddhism, a hardly autonomous form of Buddhism, practiced in Sri Lanka and several countries of Southeast Asia, its precursors arriving in Sri Lanka by the third century BCE and spreading to mainland Southeast Asia later.

The Monastery In this book, monasteries will be mentioned often, far more than they would, for example, in a history of Christianity. This is because the monastery was the primary site of Buddhist practice, and not only the practice of meditation. The monastery was the place where the transaction so central to the spread and survival of Buddhism took place: where the laity offered monks and nuns material wealth in exchange for spiritual wealth. Thus, despite its reputation in the West as a religion detached from the mundane world, in fact, Buddhism has always been deeply embedded within it, with the fortunes (often in the literal sense) of the monastic community rising and falling based on the extent of patronage by the local community, and especially the local merchant and sometimes the local king. Over the course of its history, Buddhism has typically made its first appearance in a new land at court, not in the countryside, with the monk often offering the monarch the means not to liberation but to longevity. Thus, the center of Buddhist life throughout the Buddhist world—whether it be chanting, study, meditation, ritual, or the edification of the laity—was the monastery (using a term borrowed from the Christian tradition). When Buddhist lands have recounted the history of the dharma, it often begins with the founding of the first monastery and the ordination of the first native males as Buddhist monks. Traditional histories of Buddhism are therefore largely histories of monks and monasteries. In Buddhist texts themselves, composed for the most part by Buddhist monks, the monastery and monasticism are placed in the center. As noted above, Buddhism is only said to be established in a given region when there is a community of ordained monks who perform three rituals: the annual rains retreat, the annual conclusion of the rains retreat, and the fortnightly confession of infractions of the monastic code. In prophecies of the disappearance of the dharma, the decline is measured in the declining

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discipline of the monks, until eventually their saffron robes turn white, the color of the robes of a layman. Modern histories of Buddhism have followed this focus on monasticism, for a number of good reasons, including the fact that textual remnants of the tradition are typically the writings of monks, and archaeological artifacts are often the remains of monasteries; Buddhist laypeople often leave no traces, and when they do, they are often donor inscriptions at a stūpa or monastery. In many ways, one can track the geographical and chronological spread of Buddhism by the location of monasteries. As it moved east, we find monasteries near the oasis towns of the Silk Road. However, throughout its history, Buddhism has made large leaps across the map and jump-started in new lands, almost always through the patronage of the monarch, as we see in Sri Lanka, Japan, and Tibet, for example. The monasteries founded by kings tend to be grand, both in scale and in style, sites of Buddhist learning, learning that took the form of the production of texts by the scholar monks who became their most famous inmates, and, in foreign lands, learning that took the form of translation.13 As with so many elements of the tradition, the origin of the monastery is traced back to the life of the Buddha, despite the fact that no archaeological evidence of monasteries has been discovered that dates even to the time of Aśoka, much less to the Buddha. This suggests that the community of monks and nuns began, like other ascetic groups of ancient India, as groups of wandering mendicants who did not have a permanent dwelling place. As discussed above, according to the traditional story, the Buddha and his monks wandered year-round until the laity complained to him that by wandering during the rainy season, the monks were trampling their crops and stepping on insects. The Buddha declared that henceforth the monks would remain in one place during the threemonth period of the rainy season. This came to be known as the rains retreat (varsā), a practice eventually adopted by monastics across the Buddhist world, ˙ even in regions without a monsoon season. Elaborate rules appear in the monastic code for what can and cannot be done during this period. The end of the rains retreat is a traditional time for laypeople to make offerings to the monastic community, often in the form of cloth for new robes (kathina). ˙ At some point, however, permanent dwellings for monks and nuns would begin to be built, and these would become the center of monastic life; even monks who chose to live in the forest would be expected to go to the nearest monastery every fortnight for the required recitation of the monastic code. Buddhist texts would therefore extol the great merit accrued by those who donated lands and materials for the construction of monasteries and for the renovation

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of those that had fallen into disrepair. The Buddha praises the offering of a monastic residence as the greatest gift that one can give to the monastic community. It was understood that once donated, the monastic lands and their buildings became the property of the san˙gha in perpetuity, with many rules about their proper use and disposition. For example, they were to be built close enough to a town to allow monks to go on the morning begging round, but not so close as to allow the bustle of urban life to interfere with study and meditation. The archaeological record suggests that in the last centuries before the Common Era, groups of monks were small enough to be supported by local communities of the pious. The archaeological record also reveals the remains of monasteries in the modern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, dating from the early centuries of the Common Era, with monasteries continuing to be built in India for a millennium, ranging in size from rock-cut retreats for a few monks in the mountains of Maharashtra to great monastic universities like Nālandā in Bihar, said to house thousands of monks. The most common design of smaller monasteries was a number of individual cells organized around a central courtyard, in the center of which was a stūpa or a tree, said to be a cutting from the Bodhi Tree. The words that are translated into English as “monk” and “nun” are “bhiksu” ˙ and “bhiksunī” in Sanskrit, which are the masculine and feminine forms of the ˙ ˙ word “beggar.” Monks and nuns were required to beg for their food each morning and to eat everything that was placed in their begging bowl by twelve noon. Small towns and villages could not provide the daily sustenance of scores of monks on their morning alms round; there are many stories of the Buddha and his monks avoiding regions struck by famine. As monasteries evolved from small settlements of monks to more elaborate institutions, they came to require a wealthy patron, whether merchant or king, who often provided support in the form of lands, which the monasteries then owned and farmed or, more accurately, had farmed; the monastic code prohibits monks and nuns from tilling the soil. Gifts of land to monasteries therefore often also included the laborers to farm it, meaning that these monasteries in effect owned these laborers, with scholars debating whether they should be described as serfs or slaves.14 In addition to being prohibited from tilling the soil and cutting plants, monks and nuns are also prohibited from encouraging others to do so. Landowning monasteries therefore required lay workers to oversee the farming of the land and the preparation of food for the monks, who no longer needed to go on a daily begging round. Thus, although monastic vocations were traditionally counted as only two—chanting and meditation—an elaborate system

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of monastic offices developed in India, and beyond, to manage the many material needs of the monastery.15 The evolution of the Buddhist monastery in India—in size, in function, and in location—is often linked to the rise of urbanization and trade. One obvious reason for this is that wealthy cities can support large Buddhist monasteries in a way that rural villages cannot; despite the Buddha’s famous renunciation of the world, his community could not survive without it. Thus, monks needed the world, but why did the world need monks? We have already noted the form of economic exchange that has sustained Buddhism for centuries: in exchange for their material wealth, the laity receive spiritual wealth from the san˙gha. That spiritual wealth comes in the form of merit—good karma—that will fructify in the future as rebirth as a prosperous human or a god in one of the Buddhist heavens; these, not nirvāna, have been the motivation for most Buddhist practice over ˙ the millennia. One of the reasons that the Buddha resisted calls for a vegetarian diet was that it prevented the laity from placing meat into the alms bowl of the monk, depriving the laity of an opportunity to make merit. Thus, the Buddhist monastery would become part of the economy, and the society, of the city. As noted above, when the Buddha had a sufficient group of enlightened monks (sixty), he famously told them to “Go forth for the good of the many, for the happiness of the many, out of compassion for the world, for the welfare, the good, and the happiness of gods and humans. Let no two go in the same direction.” It is noteworthy that this occurred very early in his ministry, not long after his first teaching of the four truths. In other words, Buddhist monks were supposed to travel. This distinguished Buddhist monks from their Hindu counterparts, brahmin priests, who were generally sedentary, many living as married village priests. There were also caste restrictions on travel, especially across the sea, which was considered not only a place of great danger but a place of pollution. In the most famous of the Hindu law codes (dharmaśāstra), the Laws of Manu (3.158), there is a list of disreputable people to be shunned, including a dancer, a one-eyed man, the son of an adulteress, a drunk, a gambler, an epileptic, a leper, and a lunatic. Reading through this long list, we find “a navigator of the ocean.” Indeed, it was widely believed that a Hindu lost his caste status if he crossed the “black waters” of the ocean.16 The Buddha was a member of the warrior caste (ksatriya), and much of the ˙ support for him and his community of monks seems to have come from merchants, members of the merchant caste (vaiśya), who had strong economic reasons to travel and thus less compunction about sailing the seas. There are many stories of Buddhist monks traveling on merchant ships, often rescuing

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the merchants from all manner of natural and supernatural disasters. Again, there was an exchange, with merchants providing the monks with material support and safe transit across the seas, and monks providing merchants with spiritual support, usually more in the form of prayers and blessings than in expositions of doctrine. If monks traveled by sea, they also traveled by land, again, often in the company of traders. Throughout the Buddhist world, monasteries are found along trade routes and in the cities where those trade routes crossed; the ruins of monasteries are found along abandoned trade routes and in the ruins of those cities. One of the reasons sometimes cited for the demise of Buddhism in India was that by the mid-eighth century, the merchants who traveled in caravans and who sailed the seas were often Muslims. Archaeological and epigraphic evidence suggests that as Buddhist monasteries in India grew larger, their patron base grew smaller. Beginning in the fourth century CE, royal patronage became increasingly necessary for the sustenance of monasteries. By the seventh century, this would often become the case. This was the heyday of Nālandā, a monastery that became in many ways a university, teaching the doctrines of both Buddhist and non-Buddhist schools, as well as various arts and sciences, attracting students from across the subcontinent and across Asia. We know from the accounts of Chinese pilgrims like Xuanzang that huge resources were required for the maintenance of the monastery, provided in the form of royal grants of lands and laborers. Who were these monks? As powerful as the Buddhist critique of self might be, that alone was likely not the motivator of the mendicant. The Buddhist scriptures are filled with the names of monks who were inspired by the Buddha’s teaching, left their homes to become monks, and eventually attained the rank of arhat. How many of these were historical figures is difficult to say. Various rules in the monastic code suggest that there were many others who joined for the free lunch, the life of relative leisure lived without the constraints of family and caste. With wealth in ancient India often passed to the first son, other sons might become monks. In some regions of Tibet, there was a “monk tax,” requiring families to provide a son to the monastery. In many Buddhist communities to the present day, having a son as a monk is a point of pride and is regarded as a significant source of merit for parents and grandparents as they move from this lifetime to the next. Those who became nuns certainly included those inspired by the Buddha’s teachings. Again, we have the names of many who became arhats, their enlightenment experiences recorded in a work called the Therīgāthā, the Songs of the Female Elders. Again, how many of these nuns were historical figures is

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difficult to determine. In addition to offering the teachings of the Buddha, the nunnery provided a vocation and a life of relative safety for the widow, the unmarried daughter, the woman escaping a bad marriage, and the wife of the man who had left her, including those who left to become a monk. Although there were heavy restrictions placed on nuns, there is ample evidence in inscriptions and texts (especially in the stories from the monastic code) to suggest that nuns played prominent roles in India. Like monks, they could own and inherit property, sponsor businesses, and support their families (both in this lifetime and the next).17 This would have been the case until the order of nuns (in the sense of bhiksunī, fully ordained nuns) died out in India. We do not know when that ˙ ˙ occurred. An order of such nuns was never established in Tibet, despite the considerable Buddhist traffic between India and Tibet that began in the tenth century, a time when the order of nuns was already long established in China. In the modern imagination, many myths about Buddhism persist, myths that are easily dispelled by reading the monastic code (vinaya). There we learn, for example, that not all monks meditate. In India, as previously noted, there were two monastic vocations, recitation and meditation, with the first charged with the all-important task of maintaining the canon by memorizing and reciting texts. Even after the introduction of writing, several centuries after the death of the Buddha, and the explosion of the canon with the composition of the Mahāyāna sūtras, Buddhism has remained in many ways an oral tradition. Meditation, therefore, was not an obligation but a vocation. In the Pāli tradition, we see this reflected in the terms “ganthadhura,” literally, the “burden of the books,” and “vipassanādhura,” the “burden of insight.” The question was raised in Sri Lanka during the first century BCE as to which was more important. The answer was the burden of the books because without the books, there is nothing to meditate on.18 As a result, young and intelligent monks in Sri Lanka were traditionally given the task of memorizing and reciting, while men who ordained later in life were made to meditate. We can note in passing here that in both Buddhist and secular literature across Asia, the old monk, especially the widower who ordained late in life, is often portrayed as a comic figure.19 That there was prejudice against the meditator is evident in a rule to prevent it: in the bodhisattva vows, it is an infraction to take offerings intended for meditators and give them to reciters. This is not to say that these occupations were somehow exclusive. There are many cases of famous meditators who had committed vast amounts of text to memory and thus were able to recite it. Yet another divide in the Buddhist monastic community, seen both in India

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and widely across the Buddhist world, are the monks who lived in monasteries located in or near cities and the monks who lived in the forest. It appears that sections of urban monasteries were reserved for meditators. Yet monks who lived in the forest seem to have largely been meditators. Although individual “forest monks” (whether they live in the jungles of Thailand or the caves of Tibet) have been revered as great saints, monastic power—and, hence, monastic discourse—has largely been controlled by the city monks. Indeed, the great villain in Buddhist literature, the Buddha’s cousin Devadatta, is condemned not only for his multiple assassination attempts on the Enlightened One, but for his advocacy that monks live in the forest and refuse to dine in the homes of the laity. Forest monks, ascetics, and meditators who did not attempt to kill the Buddha are often the objects of mockery in the stories found in the monastic code. The monks and nuns who held positions of power typically lived at urban monasteries, where their patrons were merchants, princes, and kings, as well as their wives and daughters. Their power derived largely from the wealth they received, the wealth they controlled, and the wealth they increased. Substantial sections of the monastic code, put in the mouth of the Buddha himself, are devoted to these matters. Here we find monks and nuns making loans at high rates of interest, administering monastery lands, inheriting property, investing in businesses, and supervising the slaves (dāsa) who had been provided by a donor to work monastery lands, with nuns sometimes serving as legal agents in such enterprises.20 A further misconception about monks and nuns is that when they “went forth” from the home to the homeless life, they cut all ties with their families. This is dispelled not only by the large number of inscriptions made in the names of monks and nuns who dedicate merit to the welfare of their parents but by the monastic code itself, where the Buddha declares that it is an infraction for a monk or nun not to provide for their parents, even if it means sharing the alms from their begging bowl.21 All this suggests that, although many monks traveled far, the majority seem to have remained close to home. A final misconception about the Buddhist san˙gha must be dispelled, or at least qualified: the representation of the Buddhist monastic order as welcoming all who sought ordination. It is the case that once a monk or nun was ordained, their caste status seems often to have been disregarded, with seniority established by date of ordination. The Buddha changed this rule in the case of nuns, with his imposition of the “heavy rule” that a nun must always defer to a monk, regardless of her seniority. Despite this equality among the ordained, we see evidence in the Buddhist monastic code of discrimination against some

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who sought ordination. Thus, although Buddhist monks are often associated with medicine, the ordination ritual contains a long list of forty-three diseases that disqualify the postulant, including psoriasis, hemorrhoids, and asthma. The Buddhist monastic code has a surprisingly capacious category of sexual deviance, excluding all manner of people classed as pandaka (perhaps best translated as ˙˙ “queer”) from ordination. Finally, despite the Buddha’s representation in Western sources as “anti-caste,” in addition to criminals, slaves, and war captives, those who performed low-caste occupations, such as carpenters, leatherworkers, washermen, bamboo harvesters, and cartwrights, as well as candāla, the term ˙˙ that was long translated as “outcaste,” were all forbidden from ordaining.22 The necessity of patronage by the rich and the royal as well as the scholastic focus of the large monastic university served to weaken the connection between the san˙gha and the lay community, always more tenuous than that between the community and the Hindu priest. Apart from some funeral rites, there were traditionally no prescribed life-cycle rituals in Buddhism, nor were monks supposed to practice astrology. Buddhist monks deal with the dead. Thus, when the dynasty fell, the king was a Hindu, or the economy suffered, the dharma was placed in danger. This is one of the theories of the demise of Buddhism in India. Especially in the north, the annual incursions of Muslim armies from what is today Afghanistan only hastened a process that was already in progress. The sixth through the twelfth century, a period of great literary and philosophical flowering in Indian Buddhism, was institutionally a period of decline.23 Yet disappearance is something difficult to measure. This has led scholars to rely on the accounts of Chinese pilgrims. Thus, Faxian (337–422), traveling in India in the first decade of the fifth century, recorded the presence of monasteries. Xuanzang (602–664), traveling in India two centuries later, recorded the presence of monasteries and the ruins of monasteries. At Tamralipti, a seaport on the Bay of Bengal and a common port of entry for monks arriving from China and Southeast Asia by sea, Faxian counted twenty-two monasteries; Xuanzang counted ten. There is substantial evidence, some textual, some archaeological, to suggest a steep decline in the fortunes of Buddhism in north India by the eleventh century, leading some to “go forth and teach” for reasons other than “for the good of the many, for the happiness of the many, out of compassion for the world.” We know of many Indian monks, some of whom were distinguished scholars, who left their cultured homeland to make the difficult journey north to what was considered the uncivilized land of Tibet. A famous example is the Bengali monk Atiśa (982–1054), who is known to have sailed to what was likely Suma-

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tra to study for twelve years, making it clear that it was not simply Sumatran monks who were traveling to India; the scholastic exchange also went in the other direction. Later, when he was invited to Tibet, he was forbidden by the abbot of Vikramaśīla Monastery (which would be attacked by Muslim armies in 1199 and 1203) to travel to what he described as “that yak pen.” Atiśa went anyway and would play a major role in the Buddhist renaissance after the fall of the Tibetan Empire, precipitated by the assassination of the Tibetan king by a Buddhist monk in 842. One of the last of the Indian monks remembered by history to leave India traveled much farther than Tibet. This was Dhyānabhadra (Zhikong Chanxian, in Chinese), known to history because of a detailed biography written (in Chinese) on his tomb in Korea in 1378. Here, we learn that he was a monk of Nālandā, who, on the instructions of his teacher, traveled to Sri Lanka, where he studied not what is today called Theravāda but what is today called Zen. After returning, he left India and set off for China via Tibet, traveling eventually to Korea, where he founded a monastery. The inscription reports that he died in 1363 at the age of 127.24 A famous monk from Eastern Bengal named Vanaratna (1384–1468) traveled to Sri Lanka to study the monastic code because it was dying out in India. He would later travel to Tibet. All of this brings us to the vexed question of the origins of what is known as Buddhist tantra. For many readers, the immediate association of the word “tantra” is sex, famously represented in the yab yum (father-mother) Tibetan images of deities in sexual union. Sex is certainly part of the story but, for better or worse, the story is much more complicated. The word “tantra” in Sanskrit refers to a manual, a genre different from the sūtra, which means “aphorism.” Thus, there is a connotation of instrumentality in the term “tantra,” something that is seen reflected in the Buddhist works that carry that title. There are traditionally four purposes of the rites prescribed in the texts called tantras: pacification, increase, control, and wrath. Each of these terms seems all too worldly for what we imagine Buddhism to be, something confirmed by the texts themselves, where there are rites for pacifying negative forces (including illness), increasing wealth and life span, subjugating the unwilling, and killing those who resist. This is accomplished primarily through the propitiation of various deities, summoned through ritual offerings and the recitation of their particular mantra, a kind of spell. Regardless of where one draws the line between religion and magic, the practices set forth in the tantras (both Hindu and Buddhist) tend to fall very much in the magic category. One can easily see how these powers would be coveted by a ruler; they seem less appropriate for the practice of a Buddhist monk. Yet, to the horror of Victorian scholars of Bud-

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dhism, those powers were sought by monks, with tantras describing all manner of unspeakable practices placed in the mouth of the Buddha and beginning, like sūtras, with the words “Thus did I hear.” Despite the presence of some shockingly antinomian elements, it is not the case that tantra marked a radical fracture of the Buddhist tradition. Scholars have noted that many of the elements associated with Buddhist tantra are in many ways the amalgamation and ritualization of elements with a long history in Buddhism, including in the apparently more pacific Pāli tradition. Thus, in the Pāli canon there are works called paritta (protection), typically a short passage from a sūtra that the Buddha prescribes for protection from snakes, scorpions, evil spirits, and various illnesses. The person who recites these brief texts is said to gain protection from these dangers. The famous Sūtra on Loving Kindness (Mettā Sutta) was prescribed by the Buddha to pacify some tree spirits that were frightening some meditating monks. In many Mahāyāna sūtras, including such famous works as the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapundarīka), there ˙˙ is a chapter of dhāranī, a series of often incomprehensible syllables whose rec˙ itation is said to bring various rewards. Thus, what might be otherwise described as magic spells have a long history in Buddhism. What might be called magical powers have an even longer history. Four deeds entail expulsion from the monastic order: killing a human, stealing, having sexual intercourse (specifically defined), and lying. Lying, however, is specified to mean lying about possessing supernatural powers that one does not possess. It is a lesser offense to tell laypeople about supernatural powers that one does possess. This implies that such powers exist, as the Buddha himself famously demonstrated with his miracle display at Śrāvastī. In the tantric texts, those who recite mantras, perform the necessary rituals, and propitiate the appropriate deities are said to attain powers called siddhi. Here, again, we are struck by their mundane nature. Among several such lists we find the ability to fly, to dive into the earth, to make oneself invisible, to see things at great distances, and to live for eons. The worldly nature of these powers was acknowledged as they became incorporated into Buddhist discourse. They were called laukikasiddhi, “worldly” or “mundane” powers. To these lists a single lokottarasiddhi, literally, “otherworldly power,” would be added: buddhahood. Given these various variables, the definition of the term “Buddhist tantra” is sufficiently contentious that it was decided not to devote a separate chapter to it in this volume, but rather to distribute it (if we knew what “it” was) throughout in an effort to illustrate its continuities with that which is, for one reason or another, deemed “not tantric.”

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Finally, before leaving India, we should consider briefly the question of “local gods.” One of the ways that Buddhism established itself in a region where it was not previously present—including India—was to incorporate local deities into its pantheon, acknowledging their existence, and their powers, but always making them subservient to the Buddha. In India, this includes local spirits, like the massive snake who wrapped himself around the Buddha to protect him from a storm not long after his enlightenment, and the god Brahmā, the creator god of Hinduism, who begged the Buddha to teach the path out of samsāra because neither he, nor any of the other gods, knew what the path ˙ was. In many ways, the history of Buddhism is a history of cultural appropriation. Important Hindu gods like Indra and Brahmā appear often in Buddhist texts as devotees of the Buddha. Indra presides over the Heaven of the Thirty-­ Three atop Mount Meru, where the Buddha goes to preach the dharma to his mother. When the teaching is complete, the two gods accompany the Buddha when he descends to earth in the city of Samkāsya, in a scene called devāvatāra, ˙ the “descent of the deities.” Buddhist texts make it clear, however, that the Buddha is superior to the gods—he is, as previously noted, called devātideva, “god above the gods”—because he is liberated from rebirth and they are not. The incorporation of other Indian gods, including wrathful deities, would continue throughout the history of Buddhism in India. Part of the appeal of Buddhism during its early centuries in China was the apparent similarity between the Daoist immortal and the Buddhist arhat, with much borrowing between the two religions. In Japan, the local kami were incorporated into the Buddhist pantheon and worshipped at Buddhist temples as worldly emanations of bodhisattvas. Indeed, the name for what is often referred to as the indigenous religion of Japan, Shintō, was coined to distinguish the previously unnamed tradition from Buddhism. In Japanese, Buddhism is “butsudō,” the “way of the Buddha.” Shintō is the “way of the kami.” In Tibet, when the local gods were preventing the construction of the first monastery in the late eighth century, the tantric master Padmasambhava was called in to defeat them in a magical battle, converting them to Buddhism and enlisting them in the protection of the dharma. In Burma, the local gods are called nat. Traditionally counted as thirty-six, the Buddhists added a thirty-seventh, the Indian god Indra, to serve as their king. This phenomenon is not merely the observation of scholars. In 1868, the nativist government of the newly enthroned Meiji emperor issued the Shinbutsu Hanzenrei, the “Kami and Buddha Separation Decree,” ordering that local Japanese gods, kami, not be included in the Buddhist pantheon, where they had

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long been worshipped as local incarnations (gongen) of Indian buddhas and bodhisattvas. At Suwa, a large Buddhist and Shintō complex, this differentiation resulted in the destruction of nineteen Buddhist temples and sub-temples and the loss of the scriptures and the images they contained.25 Turnabout is fair play, so we also see Buddhism’s rival religions making the Buddha their own. Thus, in India, we find the Buddha listed as the ninth of the ten incarnations of the god Visnu, and for reasons rather objectionable to ˙˙ Buddhists. According to the story, demons were performing Vedic rituals (which involved animal sacrifice), thus gaining powers that came to rival those of the gods. The gods appealed to Visnu, who took the form of the Buddha, ˙˙ teaching the demons to ignore caste distinctions and abstain from killing animals. The demons followed his teachings, thus losing their powers and being reborn in hell. In China, the Daoist sage Laozi decided to leave China when he was eighty years old, traveling west on an ox. When he reached the western gate, he presented the sentry with his famous text, the Daode Jing, and continued westward to India, where he became the Buddha, teaching a simple form of Daoism to civilize the barbarians.

Buddhism beyond India The terms that appear today in course catalogues and art galleries do not appear in the Buddhist world prior to the colonial period—terms like “Chinese Buddhism,” “Korean Buddhism,” “Thai Buddhism,” “Tibetan Buddhism,” and even “Theravāda Buddhism.” The more ancient terms are “fojiao” in Chinese, “bukkyō” in Japanese, “nang pa sangs rgyas pa’i chos” in Tibetan, “buddhadharma” in Sanskrit, and “sāsana” in Pāli. We note that none of these terms has any geographical designation. In each case, they can be translated, at least roughly, with a single English word: “Buddhism,” a word that first appeared in English in 1801, when it was spelled “Boudhism.” Still, it is important that any global history of Buddhism proceeds around the globe, discussing its successes and its failures. For when Buddhism moved beyond India (where it would eventually die out as an institutional presence), it had to confront religious traditions that were well established. China already had a long history, a substantial literary and philosophical corpus, and its own religions. There was what would come to be called Shintō in Japan, the various “spirit cults” of Southeast Asia, and the mountain deities of Tibet, a country that did not have a written language prior to the introduction of Buddhism. Still, all Buddhist traditions trace their origins back to the Buddha and to

I n t r o d u c t i o n    45

India, whether those origins are historically grounded or not. We have therefore begun with this brief survey of the history of Buddhism in India. We will now move far too quickly through the other Buddhist traditions of Asia and, briefly, of the West. The following description of Buddhism in each of the countries will vary in length. This variation should not be taken as a reflection of the relative importance of these national traditions. Instead, it reflects the fact that there is a much fuller historical record of Buddhism, and more modern scholarship on that record, in some regions of Asia than in others. Scholars use the term “South Asia” to refer to the modern states of India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. As discussed above, during its early centuries, Buddhism became well established in what is today Pakistan as well as in parts of Afghanistan, and in Sri Lanka. Thus, as we trace the movement of Buddhism, should the line on the map go next to China (via Central Asia) or to Sri Lanka? Going to China would take us to the second major hub of the Buddhist world, the site of a hugely influential Buddhist tradition from which the Buddhist traditions of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam would arise. Having discussed these lands as well as Tibet (a latecomer to Buddhism despite its long border with India), one could then travel back east and south to Sri Lanka, where the Pāli tradition of Buddhism was preserved after the demise of Buddhism in India, and which remains the oldest of the Pāli traditions to survive to the present day, with close ties to the Buddhist schools of Southeast Asia. As sensible as such a solution might seem, it tends to foster stereotypes, most importantly, the one that divides the modern Buddhist world into the Mahāyāna (China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Tibet, Mongolia) and Theravāda (Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos)—what European Orientalists called Northern Buddhism and Southern Buddhism—and projects that divide back in time. Yet we know that the Mahāyāna and tantra were an important presence in Sri Lanka for centuries and that the āgamas, Sanskrit correlates of the Pāli nikāyas, were translated into Chinese at an early date, with the assistance of monks who were not devotees of the Mahāyāna. Thus, it seems best to proceed chronologically, turning to Nepal and Sri Lanka before China. Nepal Lumbinī, said to be the place where the Buddha was born, emerging from under his mother’s right arm, is located in Nepal and has been a site of Buddhist pilgrimage from at least the time of Aśoka, who visited Lumbinī in 248 BCE. Despite the decline and eventual disappearance of Buddhism as an in-

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stitutional presence from what is today India, it is inaccurate to say that Buddhism disappeared from the Indian subcontinent. Buddhism, and tantric Buddhism, has remained an important presence in Nepal, a region of the Indian frontier that only became an independent state in 1769. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang describes a thriving Buddhist monastic community there, living in harmony with Hindu institutions. Although Nepal today is a majority Hindu country, the Kathmandu Valley has long been home to a Buddhist community called the Newar. Reflecting the strong importance of the Mahāyāna and Buddhist tantra in neighboring Bihar and Bengal, their sacred texts are the nava­ dharma, or “nine books,” including such famous works as the Lotus Sūtra, the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Stanzas (Astasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā), ˙˙ and the Extensive Play (Lalitavistara), an important biography of the Buddha. Although the tradition of celibate monks continued in Nepal into the seventeenth century, it was replaced by an institution familiar from Hinduism but rarely seen in Buddhism: an endogamous caste of married priests who perform life cycle rituals for their communities. In Nepal there are two groups, with their names indicating their origins. The first is “vajrācarya,” or “vajra master,” a standard term for a tantric adept, whether monk or layperson, in Indian Buddhism. The second is “śākyabhiksu,” or “Śākya monk,” a term that can simply mean ˙ “Buddhist monk,” but which some scholars have argued refers especially to Mahāyāna monks. It is speculated that both groups, and especially the latter group, are the descendants of Buddhist monks who married. Males of both groups have married and have traditionally lived in a vihāra (a term most commonly translated as “monastery,” but obviously inaccurate in this case), performing priestly functions for the Newar Buddhist community. As is the case in some Theravāda countries, it is traditional for boys of the śākyabhiksu caste ˙ to be ordained as monks briefly before returning to lay life. As families grew, the sons entered other professions, such that the two terms came to be used as family names rather than as titles. It was only in the twentieth century that Theravāda Buddhism began to find followers in Nepal. Members of the vajrācarya caste continue to perform rituals connected with several of the most important Indian Buddhist tantras. One of the traditional trade and travel routes between Tibet and India passes through Nepal. As Buddhism became established at the Tibetan court in the eighth century CE, the Kathmandu Valley became an important stop for Indian monks traveling to Tibet, and Tibetan monks and lamas traveling to India; it was common for Tibetans traveling south to stop in Kathmandu to acclimate to the lower altitude and to study Sanskrit before continuing to the plains of

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India. After the demise of Buddhism in India, Nepal itself became an important destination for Tibetan Buddhists, with the famous stūpas of Bou­dhanāth and Svayambhū considered sacred sites for pilgrimage and practice. Because of the long border with Tibet, and over the centuries, especially since the Tibetan diaspora that began in 1959, Nepal has been the home of ethnic Tibetan groups who are practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism. The word “Sherpa,” used to designate the local guides who lead mountaineers to the summit of Everest, derives from the Tibetan “shar pa,” meaning “easterner.” Sri L ank a Separated from India by a narrow strait, the island of Sri Lanka has played an important role in the myth and history of India. In myth, when it is identified with the island of Lan˙kā, it is the home of demons, such as Rāvana, who abducts Sītā, the wife of King Rāma, in the Hindu epic the Rāmāyana. In the ˙ Mahāyāna sūtra called Descent into Lan˙kā (Lan˙kāvatāra), the Buddha travels to the island to teach the dharma to the demon king. In later Buddhist texts, it would be identified as the site of important tantric teachings. In history, over the centuries, Sri Lanka was often at war with the kingdoms of southern India, particularly during the Chola Dynasty. Thus, in both myth and in history, Buddhism has been central to Sri Lankan identity for more than two millennia. According to Sri Lankan accounts, the Buddha made three visits to India, traveling by air. Early Sri Lankan chronicles, composed in Pāli—the Chronicle of the Island (Dīpavamsa) from the fourth ˙ century CE, and the Great Chronicle (Mahāvamsa) from the fifth century CE— ˙ describe a close relationship between the Sri Lankan king and the emperor Aśoka, with Aśoka sending his monk son (Mahinda) to the island (also traveling by air) to convert the king and establish the order of monks, and his nun daughter (San˙ghamittā) to the island (traveling by sea) to establish the order of nuns. According to her story, she brought with her a cutting from the Bodhi Tree before it was chopped down in India, thus transferring the most sacred flora in the Buddhist universe from India to Sri Lanka, where it would be protected from harm. The tree, along with a tooth relic of the Buddha enshrined in Kandy, remain the most sacred relics on the island. The “Great Stūpa” at Anurādhapura is the subject of its own chronicle, the Chronicle of the Stūpa (Thūpavamsa), and is said to contain relics that the Buddha specifically reserved ˙ for the island prior to his passage into nirvāna. ˙ Although the close ties between Aśoka and his family and the royal line in

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Sri Lanka are generally regarded as a myth, inscriptional evidence suggests the presence of Buddhism on the island from the third century BCE—that is, the time of Aśoka. Like its Southeast Asian neighbors, although Sri Lanka is regarded today as a stronghold of Theravāda orthodoxy, as noted above, there is strong evidence of both Mahāyāna and tantric traditions there. It is in Sri Lanka, for example, that the tantric master Vajrabodhi (671–741) received tantric teachings and from Sri Lanka that he sailed to Tang China. His disciple Amoghavajra later returned to the island to retrieve tantric texts. A fourteenth-­ century work entitled the Compendium of Schools (Nikāyā San˙grahaya), composed in Sinhala, lists tantric texts by name. Throughout its history, however, the Pāli tradition has been at the center of Sri Lankan Buddhism. The Great Chronicle reports that the canon was committed to writing in the late first century BCE. The Chinese pilgrim Faxian, who visited Sri Lanka in 410, describes a large and thriving monastic community and lavish support from the court and laity; he reports that there were five thousand monks living in the famous monastery of Abhayagiri. It was in Sri Lanka that Buddhaghosa, an émigré from India, composed his most important works, including the Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga). The fortunes of the san˙gha would fall in the eleventh century. As a result of the Chola Wars, the order of fully ordained monks died out in Sri Lanka and had to be revived by a delegation of monks from Burma. The order of monks would die out two more times, again revived by foreign monks, again from Burma and then from Thailand. The order of nuns, which had played such an important role in the establishment of the order of nuns in China in 429 CE, would die out and not be revived. From this point on, what came to be called Theravāda (divided into several sects, or nikāya) would begin to dominate Buddhist life in Sri Lanka. However, because of a series of invasions by Hindu kings from India, Hindu temples were constructed, and Hindu deities became incorporated into the pantheon, as they were in Thailand. Beginning in the sixteenth century, Sri Lanka, in part or whole, would come under Portuguese, then Dutch, and finally British rule, becoming the British colony of Ceylon in 1796, and not gaining its independence until 1948. Events of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries include the 1873 Pānadurē Debate between a Buddhist monk and a Protestant clergyman about the shape of the world (flat or round), and the efforts of the renowned Sri Lankan activist Anagārika Dharmapāla (1864–1933). Today, Sri Lanka is about 70 percent Buddhist, with a significant Hindu population who speak a different language, Tamil, and are located mostly on the north of the island. There has been more than a

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quarter century of ethnic and religious violence between Buddhists and Hindus, with the support, encouragement, and sometimes participation of Buddhist monks. Before we leave South Asia for China, it is important to recall that the regions that these terms, “India” and “China,” designate shift repeatedly over the history of Buddhism. In mapping the Buddhist world, it is often more useful to speak not of kingdoms or nations or sects or schools but to speak instead of languages. As Buddhist texts made their way from what we refer to as India to what we refer to as China as those lands existed at the beginning of the Common Era—the most consequential movement of Buddhist texts (and the monks who carried them) in the history of the tradition—it is important to pause to note how different those two cultures were. The classical language of India was Sanskrit, with a complex and sophisticated grammar. The classical language of China was Chinese, also highly sophisticated but with almost no grammar in the sense of such elements as number and case. In India, we have almost no histories; scholars must rely on epigraphy and archaeology when they attempt to reconstruct that history. There is also little of what might be called social history in Indian literature. In the case of Buddhism, scholars have relied above all on the monastic code, where the story told to describe the misdeed that led to the formulation of a vow to prevent that misdeed can often be used to form inferences about social life, based on the idea that rules are not made to prohibit things that are not done. This is especially the case with vows dealing with property, but less so with sexuality, where fantasy often seems to reign. China is a land where detailed histories, and his­ tories of Buddhism, have been written for centuries, and where writing was in extensive use long before it would be in India.26 China is also a culture that has prized the preservation of all manner of records, allowing the great French Sinologist Jacques Gernet, for example, to write a detailed economic history of Buddhism in China. Another source of the social history of Buddhism, in both India and especially in China, is popular literature, especially plays, where Buddhist monks are rarely portrayed as paragons of virtue. China It is sometimes said that Buddhism has two places of origin: India and China. It certainly has two hubs. After Buddhism spread from India to China, China became a major center of Buddhist thought and practice, spreading from there to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. In each of these lands, the canonical language

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was Chinese. Some scholars have even spoken of “the Chinese transformation of Buddhism.” This is not a characterization that Chinese Buddhists would themselves accept because it calls into question their fealty to the Indian origins of Buddhism. However, with the remarkable translation projects that turned Sanskrit palm-leaf manuscripts into Chinese scrolls, a huge canon was created, one that was augmented by a host of indigenous Chinese works. In the history of Buddhism, the establishment of the dharma in a new region is typically marked by the establishment of the first monastery and the first ordination of local males as monks. It is this that establishes Buddhism not as a religion merely practiced by foreigners, but as one physically established on local soil in the form of a monastery, populated by local men who have taken the vows of monks, and supported by the local community, in many cases by the monarch himself. According to Chinese Buddhist accounts, the emperor Ming of the Eastern Han, who reigned from 58 to 75 CE, had a dream of a golden being flying around his palace, rays of light shining from its head. When he reported the dream to his ministers, one of them explained that he had heard of a being in the West called the Buddha, who had attained the way (dao). The emperor sent out an expedition, who returned with a statue of the Buddha and a text called the Sūtra in Forty-Two Sections (Sishi’er zhang jing). There is no such text in the various Indic canons; the fact that it does not begin with the standard sūtra opening, “Thus did I hear,” and extols Confucian virtues suggests that it is a Chinese apocryphon composed largely of short passages translated from Buddhist sūtras. What is important for our story is where the expedition acquired the sūtra: a place called Yuezhi, in Chinese. Yuezhi, however, is not a toponym; it is an ethnonym for the Kushans, a nomadic people of what is today Gansu Province in China, who migrated to the southwest to conquer Bactria, eventually establishing the vast Kushan Empire ruled by the emperor Kaniska, discussed above. ˙ The first reliable reference to a Buddhist monastery in China dates from 193 CE. The first Buddhist text to be cited in China is the Sūtra in Forty-Two Sections, a passage from which appears in a memorial from 166.27 Thus, in the case of China, the arrival of Buddhism might be better dated not from the founding of the first monastery (whenever that might have been) but by the translation of the first Buddhist texts into Chinese, texts in which the trans­ lator or scribe in most cases dutifully provides the date. The translation of Buddhist texts from Indic languages into Chinese would prove to be one of the most consequential events in the history of Asia. As has already been noted, when we speak of Buddhism spreading to China,

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it is important to note that “Buddhism” is an abstract noun that travels only through the regions of the mind. In order for it to do so, there first must be a more material movement, a movement across physical spaces, with Buddhist monks carrying texts (sometimes on their backs, sometimes in their memory) and images, across mountains and deserts, rivers and seas. When we speak of Buddhism spreading to China, it is also important to identify, or attempt to identify, what we mean by “China.” The current consensus is that the first Buddhist teachings arrived in China in the last decades before the Common Era, during the Han Dynasty (202 BCE— 220 CE). The domain of this dynasty was much smaller than modern China, lacking the western provinces of the People’s Republic of China. However, it administered what was called the Protectorate of the Western Regions, a large and largely inhospitable domain of deserts, bounded by the Tian Shan mountains to the north and the Kunlun mountains to the south. Today, most of this region is part of Xinjiang Province, with Tibet to the south and Kazakhstan to the north. Buddhist monks brought Buddhist texts from Gandhāra (which included regions of modern Pakistan and Afghanistan), Parthia (today eastern Iran), and Sogdiana (today parts of modern Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan) on what was often a dangerous and difficult journey to China. At least some of these monks were multilingual; we note that the names of a number of the early translators of Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into Chinese have the character yue in their name, indicating that they were Yuezhi, that is, Kushans. One of the most famous of the early translators was An Shigao, who arrived in the Chinese capital of Luoyang in 148 CE. The character an is the Chinese transcription for “Arsacid kingdom” in the region Roman geographers called Parthia. There are a number of conclusions to be drawn from this. Perhaps the first of these, noted above, is that it is more useful to think of Buddhism moving not from one ill-defined nation to another (and here, we must note that what we mean by “India” is just as fluid as what we mean by “China”), but from one language to another, with all that is at stake in the process we call translation. It is therefore also important to note that the most famous and important monks of this period were foreigners, their success in spreading the dharma enhanced during the early centuries of Buddhism in China by the fact that this was an age of disunity, with dynasties rising and falling, dynasties often established by polities that were not Han Chinese. Still, the participation of Chinese monks was obviously crucial. One need think only of the process of translation, a process that, throughout the history of Buddhism, was not, apart from

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some famous exceptions, carried out by a single bilingual individual but by a multilingual committee. If the foreign monk spoke some Chinese, he would first provide an oral translation of the Indian text, a text that he either had in his possession or that he had in his mind. The most famous case of memorization is the Kashmiri monk Buddhayaśas who, in the fifth century, recited the entire vinaya of the Dharmaguptaka sect, known in China as the Four-Part Vinaya. It would become the standard monastic code in East Asia. If the foreign monk did not speak Chinese, a bilingual monk or layman would provide the oral translation. That draft translation would then be recorded in Chinese. Next, it would be revised into proper Chinese by a scribe, producing a translation that the foreign monk in many cases could not read. Yet the Buddhist text had now been rendered into a language that could be read across a huge and expanding geographical range, not only two millennia of dynasties in China, but also in Vietnam, Korea, and Japan, where Buddhist monks to the present day read Buddhist texts in Chinese. By the Tang Dynasty, there were official translation bureaus, sponsored by the emperor, where multiple teams produced translations of multiple texts. Few of the foreign monks seem to have learned to compose works in Chinese, and it seems that some also had difficulty learning to speak Chinese well enough to perform the traditionally essential task of delivering lectures and oral commentaries on a given text. One of the great foreign translators was the Indian monk Gunabhadra (394–468), who arrived in China by a sea route ˙ around 435. He would go on to translate a number of important Nikāya and Mahāyāna texts, including the Descent into Lan˙kā Sūtra. However, he struggled to teach the dharma in Chinese. According to a famous story, one night he dreamed that a kindly sword-wielding god cut off his head and replaced it with an exact replica. The next day, he could speak Chinese fluently.28 The translation of Indic texts into Chinese often required the creation of neologisms to render Buddhist terms. Sometimes those terms were translations, as in the case of “se,” the Chinese word for “color” used to render the Sanskrit term “rūpa” (form), as in the famous declaration of the Heart Sūtra (Prajñāpāramitāhrdaya), “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Sometimes ˙ they were phonetic renderings. Hence “buddha” in Chinese is “fotuo” (often shortened to “fo”), pronounced “but-da” at the time; “nirvāna” was “niepan”; ˙ “san˙gha” was “sengqie”; “bodhisattva” was “pusa.” Sometimes new terms were invented for Sanskrit terms that remain difficult to translate: “mantra” was “zhenyan,” literally, “true word.” This process is obviously prone to error, providing one of the reasons why we find major works being retranslated over the

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course of Chinese history. Still the early translations, regardless of their later lack of use, provide an essential tool for scholars to date the composition of Indian texts, especially the Mahāyāna sūtras, something that is very difficult to do from Indian sources with much accuracy: if a text had been translated into Chinese on a certain date, which the Chinese colophon often provides, it must have existed in India by that date, a date that scholars call the terminus ad quem. Because so many Mahāyāna sūtras are dated in this way, and because of the subsequent centrality of a number of those sūtras, it is sometimes assumed that works and doctrines of the Nikāya schools played little role in the development of Buddhism in China. This is inaccurate. An early Chinese apocryphon called the Scripture on the Fifty Contemplations (Wushi jiaoji jing), dating from as early as the late third century CE, has the Buddha criticizing those who seek to follow the long bodhisattva path, instead advocating a buddhahood that seems very much like the nirvāna of the arhat.29 Because of the great fame and ˙ long survival of the Pāli canon, it is easy to forget that a number of the Nikāya schools of India had their own canons, in Sanskrit and Prakrit, that overlap with and diverge from the Pāli canon in important ways. They are often organized under the same headings, with the term “āgama” (scripture) used instead of the term “nikāya” (section) in the Pāli; hence the Dīrghāgama, or “Long Scriptures,” of the Dharmaguptaka school corresponds to the Dīgha Nikāya, or “Long Section,” in Pāli. Despite the similar organization, there are substantial differences in content between the Pāli and Sanskrit (or Prakrit) versions. Apart from some fragments, none of the works of these other canons are thought to survive in an Indic language, making the Chinese versions especially valuable. Four categories of scripture (as opposed to five in the Pāli canon) from the Sanskrit collections were translated into and preserved in Chinese, suggesting their importance to the development of the larger Chinese canon. These translations represent the canons of the Dharmaguptaka, Sarvāstivāda, Kāśyapīya, and Mahāsāmghika schools. ˙ Nonetheless, the transmission of Buddhist texts to China was relatively random, with texts arriving not in the order in which they had arisen in India but arriving because they happened to be carried by land or sea by this or that monk. That these texts were composed in different periods, and sometimes in different regions of South Asia, was not something that was obvious in China. In some cases, it was frustration over this state of affairs, especially in the case of the vinaya, that would send Chinese pilgrims like Faxian, Xuanzang, and Yijing on the long journey to India to retrieve texts. Nor was it clear that the Mahāyāna sūtras had developed in many cases in response to the doctrines of

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the Nikāya schools. That so many of the Mahāyāna sūtras present themselves as single-volume solutions, promising buddhahood and other boons to their devotees without recourse to other texts, was one reason that these sūtras became so influential in China, serving in some cases as the centerpiece for an entire school over many centuries, as well as the centerpiece around which the rest of the canon could be categorized according to period and profundity. One thinks immediately of the Lotus Sūtra for the Tiantai school, the Flower Garland Sūtra (Avatamsaka) for the Huayan school, and the three Pure Land sūtras ˙ for the Pure Land traditions. Although the Chan school extolled the Descent into Lan˙kā Sūtra, it is more famous for being a “special transmission outside the teachings.” The earliest Chinese Buddhist text by a named Chinese author is Mouzi’s Treatise on the Resolution of Doubts (Mouzi lihuo lun) by an otherwise unknown Buddhist layman named Mouzi, a work traditionally dated to the second century CE, but which may be as many as two centuries later. Regardless, the work is important because it makes clear that by the time of its composition (whenever that was), Buddhism was sufficiently well established in China to attract criticism from Daoist and Confucian quarters, criticisms that could be countered in the text with some sophistication; the work is presented in the form of a series of dialogues between Mouzi and various Daoist and Confucian critics. A persistent criticism of Buddhism throughout its history in China was that becoming a monk or nun was an unfilial act, as it meant mutilating the body provided by one’s parents by shaving the head and, more consequentially, taking a vow of celibacy and thus failing to provide for one’s parents in this lifetime and the next. Mouzi would argue that Buddhist monks are filial because they rescue their parents from rebirth in the lower realms. Meanwhile, the process of translation continued in China, spurred by the expertise and efforts of the monk Kumārajīva (344–413). Although he was brought to China against his will (kidnapped by Chinese forces), he came to thrive there, with his fluent translations from the Sanskrit admired for their literary qualities. By this time, Chinese monks (as opposed to foreign monks) had become leading figures in the monastic community, attracting disciples and composing works that would have wide influence. By the seventh century, we see the emergence of the first indigenous Chinese Buddhist school to gain long-lasting fame, indigenous in the sense that its textual foundation cannot be traced back to India. This is the famous Chan school, its name derived from the Chinese attempt to duplicate the sound of the standard Sanskrit term for “concentration,” “dhyāna.” The Chinese charac-

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ter chan is pronounced in Japanese as “zen.” According to its creation myth, its famous “mind to mind transmission” began when the Buddha, seated before an audience on Vulture Peak, held up a flower without speaking. The meaning of this was understood only by the eminent monk Mahākāśyapa, who passed it on to the Buddha’s cousin Ānanda, who then passed it on to his disciple Śānavāsa, through a lineage of twenty-four Indian monks, including such fa˙ mous figures as the philosopher Nāgārjuna, continuing to Bodhidharma, who traveled to China from “the West” (that is, India) by sea, relaying the transmission to a series of Chinese disciples, referred to as patriarchs. Sadly, although there may have been an émigré monk in China named Bodhidharma, his transmission of an unbroken Chan lineage that could be traced back to the Buddha himself was a Chinese concoction. Buddhism continued to grow in China during the period of disunity that preceded the founding of the Sui Dynasty in 581 CE, with monasteries being founded and monks and nuns being ordained. Chinese monasteries ranged in size and importance. Some were grand establishments supported by the state or by noble families, where scholar monks translated and studied texts and performed elaborate rituals, sometimes with hundreds of monks in residence. There were also all manner of small temples and chapels, sometimes supported by a single wealthy family, other times serving a single village. By the end of the Sui Dynasty in 617, there were over two hundred thousand monks and nuns and almost four thousand monasteries counted by the state, excluding the many itinerant and village monks. These figures would increase during the Tang, with the number of monks and nuns constituting 1 percent of the population.30 The Tang Dynasty (618–907) is often described as the “golden age” of Buddhism in China. This is the period of the remarkable pilgrim and translator Xuanzang and the devout and resourceful empress Wu Zetian. It also saw the flourishing not only of Chan but of other major schools of Chinese Buddhism, including Tiantai (which extolled the Lotus Sūtra) and Huayan (which extolled the Flower Garland Sūtra). However, Buddhism did not emerge from this golden age untarnished. There have been four major persecutions of Buddhism in Chinese history (prior to the devastation of the Cultural Revolution): in 446, 574 to 577, 842 to 845, and 955. The third of these occurred during the Tang, carried out by the emperor Wuzong, who, like previous critics, regarded Buddhism as a foreign (and thus barbarian) religion whose monks and nuns were parasites, contributing neither labor, military service, nor taxes to the state. According to the report prepared for the emperor, forty-six hundred monas-

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teries and forty thousand temples and hermitages were destroyed, with imperial officials confiscating the monasteries’ often extensive lands and substantial treasuries and freeing 150,000 serfs. In the process, some 260,000 monks and nuns were defrocked and returned to lay life. The last persecution was by Emperor Shizong in 955, who ordered the closing of 30,366 monasteries, leaving only 2,694 open. This persecution seemed less directed against Buddhism as an ideology and more for its wealth; Buddhist images, bells, and other ritual implements were melted down to provide copper for minting coins. As was the case in India and elsewhere in the Buddhist world, monasteries were often wealthy institutions, owning lands (and serfs to cultivate them), lending money at interest, and receiving donations from the laity to perform rituals for the living and the dead. It was also during the Tang that what are referred to as “esoteric teachings” (mijiao) were introduced to the Tang court. These were various texts and rituals that were said to bring about worldly results, dealing with such topics as astrology, divination, the prevention of natural disasters, the subjugation of demons, the longevity of the monarch, and the protection of the state from enemy invasion. Such texts and rituals are often described as “tantric,” but, as noted above, these kinds of quotidian concerns are addressed in all manner of Buddhist texts. In the case of China, these were introduced by three Indian ritual masters (who would also make important translations) who arrived in the Tang capital in short succession: first Śubhakarasimha (637–735) in 716, followed ˙ by Vajrabodhi (671–741) and Amoghavajra (705–774) in 721. They did not represent their Buddhism as a new school, lineage, or vehicle, and their Chinese hosts do not seem to have seen them that way; mantra, dhāranī, and apotropaic ˙ rituals had long been part of the Chinese Buddhist world. Among the three, Amoghavajra stayed the longest and achieved the most fame, gaining the confidence of three successive Tang emperors. He initiated the emperor Suzong as a cakravartin, a universal monarch, and summoned wrathful deities to defeat the An Lushan rebels as well as Uyghur and Tibetan invaders. During his service to the throne, he received two imperial honors: the purple robe, the highest honor for a Buddhist monk, and the position of state preceptor. It was a disciple of Amoghavajra, the Chinese monk Huiguo (746–805), who would convey esoteric teachings to the visiting Japanese monk Kūkai (774–835), who would make them the basis of his Shingon school upon his return to Japan. “Shingon” is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese term “zhenyan” (literally, “true word”), the Chinese rendering of the Sanskrit word “mantra.” The Tang Dynasty was followed by a period of disunity called the Five Dy-

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nasties and the Ten Kingdoms. The Chan school began to move into prominence during this period, not because of particular innovations in doctrine, practice, or rhetorical style, but because it was able to gain the support and patronage of a number of local rulers in far-flung regions of the collapsing Tang Empire. That patronage catapulted Chan monks into the mainstream, paving the way for their dominance during the Song Dynasty.31 The Song was followed by almost a century of Mongol rule, described below. This was the time of Kublai Khan, during whose reign Tibetan Buddhism would come to play an important part at the Chinese court. The Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) would see similar patterns of patronage and polemics that occurred throughout Buddhism’s history in China, with Buddhism being regarded, at least by some, as one of the “three teachings” (sanjiao) of China (along with Confucianism and Daoism). Buddhism was now sufficiently engrained in the popular psyche that a new genre of literature became popular, one that combined Buddhist doctrine with the Chinese penchant for bookkeeping. These were the karma ledgers, in which the profits and losses of particular deeds could be recorded and tallied. A Buddhist work from 1604 assigns fifty points for saving an infant from being drowned and raising it as one’s own child. Asking fishermen, hunters, and butchers to seek a different profession earns three points, increased to fifty if one is successful. Talking back to one’s parents results in ten negative points; sentencing a person to death brings one hundred negative points. Each character misread or omitted while chanting a sūtra is one negative point. Reciting a sūtra after eating garlic or onions results in one negative point. Illicit sexual intercourse with a person of good family results in ten negative points; sex with a prostitute is two.32 The Ming would be succeeded by the Qing (1644–1911), when a series of Manchu emperors expanded the realm to its largest domain. With their influence extending to Mongolia and Tibet, they were strong patrons of Buddhism, with the most famous of the Qing emperors, Qianlong (1711–1799), inviting the Panchen Lama to his summer residence at Chengde. It was during the reign of Qianlong that the Buddhist canon was translated into Manchu, with the sūtras translated from Chinese, and the vinaya from Tibetan. The fortunes of Buddhism declined during the Republican period that begin in 1912. The emperor now deposed, Buddhism, with its pantheon of gods and demons and its rituals for the dead, was dismissed by many Chinese thinkers as a form of superstition to be abandoned. This led a number of Chinese Buddhist thinkers to revisit Buddhist philosophy, particularly that of the Yogācāra school, in an effort to demonstrate that Buddhism is compatible with modern

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science. After the Communist Revolution and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Buddhism suffered, especially during the Cultural Revolution when Buddhism, both in China and Tibet, was classified as one of the “four olds” (old ideas, old culture, old habits, old customs), causing many of the leading monks to escape to Taiwan. Since the 1980s, there has been something of a Buddhist revival, but under strict party control. As has been the case throughout the history of China, and of other Buddhist lands as well, Buddhist monks have sought to serve the state. Korea What are today North Korea and South Korea did not become a unified kingdom until 668. The Korean Peninsula contained three kingdoms: one very large, Koguryŏ (from which the name “Korea” eventually evolved), and two small kingdoms in the south: Paekche in the southwest and Silla in the southeast. As in so many Buddhist countries, the advent of Buddhism is traditionally dated to the arrival of Buddhism at court. In 372, the Koguryŏ king Sosurim received Buddhist images and scriptures from the king of the Northern Qin Dynasty in China. Paekche and Silla would develop their own connections to Buddhism via China in the decades that followed. As was the case in so many lands, the introduction of Buddhism was not simply the importation of the dharma; it brought all manner of innovations in architecture, writing, astronomy, calendrics, and medicine. The Silla king Chinhŭng was the first Korean monarch to allow the ordination of Buddhist monks, becoming a monk himself (as other kings across the Buddhist world have done) in his old age. Again, as was also the case in so many Buddhist countries, the success of Buddhism relied heavily on its connections to the court. In Korea, the tradition of “state protection Buddhism” was inherited from China. Here, monarchs would build and support monasteries and temples, where monks would perform rituals and chant sūtras intended to both secure the well-being of the royal family, in this life and the next, and protect the kingdom from danger, especially foreign invasion. In the case of Korea, the connection to the court is particularly evident in the five precepts formulated by the Silla monk Wŏn’gwang (541–630) upon his return from eleven years of study in China. Formulated in India, the “five vows” or “five precepts” (pañcaśīla, literally, “fivefold ethics”) are the vows taken by laypeople: not to kill, not to steal, not to lie, not to engage in sexual misconduct, and not to use intoxicants. Wŏn’gwang’s five precepts were: to serve the king with loyalty, to serve one’s parents with filial piety, to treat

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friends with sincerity, never to retreat in battle, and not to kill sentient beings indiscriminately. In Korea, those battles were often among the three kingdoms. The grandest of the Silla monasteries was Hwangnyongsa, built between 553 and 569 on the order of King Chinhŭng (r. 540–576). It included a sixteenfoot statue of the Buddha and a nine-story wooden pagoda, built after a monk told the queen that it would ensure Silla’s conquest of its enemies. In the wars for the unification of the Korean Peninsula, resulting in Silla victory and the establishment of what is called Unified Silla in 668, Silla kings often promoted their cause in Buddhist terms, declaring, for example, that members of the royal family were, like the Buddha, members of the warrior (ksatriya) caste of ancient ˙ India. Knowing of the four types of cakravartin, or “wheel-turning king,” and that Aśoka was considered an iron-wheel cakravartin, King Chinhŭng, seeing himself as Aśoka’s successor, named his sons Copper Wheel and Gold Wheel. A subsequent king, Chinp’yong (r. 579–632), referred to his queen and himself with the Korean translations of “Māyā” and “Śuddhodana,” the mother and father of the Buddha. The Silla monk Chajang went on pilgrimage to Wutaishan, the sacred mountain in China said to be the abode of Mañjuśrī, the bodhisattva of wisdom. He returned with relics of the Buddha’s skull and finger bone to be enshrined in pagodas, reporting that he had been informed by an emanation of Mañjuśrī that Hwangnyongsa had been built on the place where the ancient buddha Kāśyapa had taught the dharma, thus transforming Silla into a sacred Buddhist land. Despite this, in 1238, Hwangnyongsa, including the Buddha statue and the pagoda, was completely destroyed by Mongol troops. Only the foundation stones remain today. Not all Korean monks who went to China returned to their homeland. By the seventh century, it was common for Korean monks to go to China to study, many remaining there for the rest of their lives, taking Chinese names that sometimes obscured their Korean ethnicity. For example, the famous scholarmonk Wŏnch’ŭk (613–695), a disciple of Xuanzang, wrote a commentary on a Mahāyāna sūtra that was considered so important that it was translated into Tibetan, where it is simply known as “the Chinese commentary.” As in China, the Korean san˙gha remained under the control of the state; offerings to monasteries could only be made with the approval of the throne; men could only become monks on “ordination platforms” approved by the throne; and an examination system was established that placed monks in the state bureaucracy. As in other Buddhist lands, monks were not those who had renounced the world but were vassals of the king, with monks sometimes dis-

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patched to China by royal decree. With strong royal patronage, Buddhism continued to thrive through the Koryŏ period (935–1392), with monasteries being granted their own lands and serfs, accumulating great wealth in the process. All of this would change with the fall of the Buddhist Koryŏ and the establishment of the Confucian Chosŏn (1392–1910). Monastic properties were confiscated, monasteries were closed, and Buddhist monks and nuns were prohibited from entering cities, a policy that did not change until 1895, when a petition, not from a Korean monk but from a Japanese priest, was approved. Ten years later, Korea would become a Japanese protectorate. In 1910, Korea would become a Japanese colony, remaining under Japanese rule until the end of the Second World War. The fate and fortunes of the Korean monastic community under Japanese colonial rule are discussed in the chapters that follow. During this period, a debate arose over the question of whether monks should marry, as most Japanese monks had done, or remain celibate, following the ancient tradition of India and China. The repercussions of this debate continue to be felt in the Korean Buddhist community today. In the aftermath of the Korean War, Buddhism was suppressed in North Korea and became a minority religion (with fewer adherents than Christianity) in South Korea. Japan Just as Buddhism was introduced into what is today Korea when a Chinese king sent scriptures and statues to a Korean king, Buddhism is said to have been introduced into Japan when a Korean king sent scriptures and statues to a Japanese king. According to Japanese sources, this occurred in 538 or 552 CE. However, as is the case with so many Buddhist stories of the introduction of Buddhism from one royal court to another, “Buddhism,” often in the form of a foreign monk or merchant, was likely present in Japan prior to this official transmission. Asukadera, traditionally considered the first Buddhist temple, was constructed in Nara in 588. The great defender of Buddhism during this period, according to traditional sources, was Prince Shōtoku (574–622), who defeated the Mononobe clan, which opposed Buddhism. According to a famous account, before going into battle, the fourteen-year-old prince felled a tree, carved small statues of the Buddhist divine kings of the four directions, and placed the statues in his topknot, promising to build a temple in their honor if he emerged victorious. He is also depicted as a great scholar, said to have composed commentaries on three famous

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Mahāyāna sūtras. According to the Japanese chronicles, at the time of his death, in Japan there were forty-six Buddhist temples, 816 monks, and 569 nuns. By the eighth century, “state protection Buddhism” had been established in Japan, as it had been in China and Korea. In the wake of a devastating smallpox epidemic that killed a third of the population, in 738, Emperor Shōmu (701–756) commissioned the building of the famous temple Tōdaiji in Nara and later the great buddha image that it houses. He also ordered the establishment of regional monasteries and nunneries, where monks and nuns would recite such works as the Lotus Sūtra and the Sūtra of the Golden Light (Suvarnaprabhāsa). In the seventh chapter of the latter text, the divine kings of ˙ the four directions, whose statues Prince Shōtoku had placed in his topknot, promise to come to the aid of countries in times of invasion, famine, and disease if the monks of that land recite the sūtra. The early history of Buddhism in Japan is periodized according to the location of the capital. Thus, the period from 710 to 794 is known as the Nara period. It is famous especially for its six schools, with the schools and the monks who belonged to them under the administration of the state. These schools, each imported from China, were focused on a particular text or philosophical school, hence: Ritsu, on vinaya; Jōjitsu, based on the Indian abhidharma text called the Proof of Reality (Tattvasiddhi) by the third-century Indian monk Harivarman; Kusha, based on the Treasury of Abhidharma (Abhidharmakośa) by the fifth-century Indian monk Vasubandhu; Sanron, based on three Madhyamaka texts; Hossō, based on Chinese Yogācāra; and Kegon, from the Chinese Huayan school. When the emperor built a new capital called Heiankyō (today called Kyoto), the Heian period (794–1185) began. This period is particularly famous for the work of two monks, each of whom traveled to China, and each of whom brought back texts and teachings that would become the foundations of important schools. Saichō (767–822) established the Japanese version of the Chinese Tiantai school (Tendai, in Japanese) with its focus on the Lotus Sūtra. His efforts to have a bodhisattva ordination platform established on Mount Hiei outside Kyoto, independent of the established ordination platforms of the Nara schools, bore fruit only after his death. Mount Hiei would become the most influential and powerful Buddhist institution in Japan, with its own army of warrior monks who fought against other Buddhist sects for centuries before being defeated by the powerful warlord Oda Nobunaga in 1571. The other new school of the Heian period was Shingon. In 804, Kūkai

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(774–835) went to China in the delegation that included Saichō. There, he met the monk Huiguo (746–805), a disciple of the Indian monk Amoghavajra, who had, with his own teacher, Vajrabodhi, brought esoteric rituals to the Tang court, as discussed above. Kūkai would found the Shingon or “True Word” (the Chinese translation of “mantra”) school of Japanese Buddhism, with its headquarters on Mount Kōya. A civil war that began in 1180 led to a military leader, or shogun, becoming ruler of Japan. This was Yoritomo of the Minamoto clan, the brother of legendary warrior Yoshitsune. He and his loyal companion, the warrior monk Benkei, are two of the most beloved figures in Japanese history. Yoritomo made the city of Kamakura his capital, thus starting the Kamakura period (1185–1333) of Japanese Buddhism. What are considered the major schools of Japanese Buddhism today all derive from this period, all founded by monks of the Tendai school. Thus, the monks Eisai (1141–1215) and Dōgen (1200–1253) each made trips to China, returning with teachings that would provide the bases for the Rinzai and Sōtō schools of Zen. The notion of “state protection Buddhism” remained strong during this time. When his efforts to establish the Rinzai school were opposed by the Tendai sect in which he had been trained, Eisai submitted a petition to the shogun entitled The Promotion of Zen to Protect the Nation (Kōzen Gokokuron). In Japanese history, however, he is more famous for another work, Drinking Tea for Health (Kissa Yōjōki), in which he described the many benefits of drinking green tea, which he is credited with introducing to Japan from China. What are today the Pure Land schools (Jōdo Shū and Jōdo Shinshū) were begun by Hōnen (1133–1212) and his disciple Shinran (1173–1263). The remarkable Nichiren (1222–1282) vigorously advocated devotion to the Lotus Sūtra, founding the school that bears his name, prophesying calamities that would befall Japan if the sūtra was not declared supreme above all others. The fame of these schools today, however, should not be taken to mean that they dominated this long period of Japanese Buddhism; the Shingon, Tendai, and Nara schools remained strong and continued to evolve. Questions about the nature of enlightenment and of what it meant to be ordained as a Buddhist monk were much debated. It was also during this period that the kami, the indigenous deities of Japan, became fully integrated into the Buddhist pantheon. The next period, called the Muromachi (1336–1573), ended in a period of civil war in which Buddhists took up arms, both against each other and against a powerful warlord. Some Nichiren communities in Kyoto joined forces with local warlords and attacked the warrior monks of Yamashina Honganji, the

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main Jōdo Shinshū temple, burning it to the ground. The Nichiren forces were in turn defeated by warrior monks from Mount Hiei, again allied with warlords. Much of Kyoto burned to the ground in the process. It was these Mount Hiei monks who would later be slaughtered by the troops of the warlord Oda Nobunaga. Next came the Edo period (1600–1868), named after the new capital Edo (modern Tokyo), ruled by the Tokugawa shoguns; the period is therefore also called the Tokugawa. This was also the period of the persecution of Japanese Christians (converted by European missionaries). The Edo period ended with what is called the Meiji Restoration, which began in 1868. For almost seven hundred years, the emperor had been a figurehead, cloistered in the ancient city of Kyoto, while the country was ruled by a series of shoguns, essentially military dictators. In 1868, the emperor again became head of state. One of the many changes instituted during the Meiji was the elevation of Shintō as the state religion and the persecution of Buddhism. Buddhism would survive the devastating campaigns against it by the Meiji government, emerging much changed. During the twentieth century, many Japanese Buddhist institutions supported Japanese colonialism, including the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, the annexation and colonization of Korea that began in 1910, the invasion and annexa­ tion of Manchuria in 1931, and the Second World War, which began for Japan with its invasion of China in 1937, with Buddhist priests serving as military chaplains in times of war. The U.S. State Department’s “2020 Report on International Religious Freedom: Japan” shows that 48.6 percent of Japanese are Shintō, 46.3 percent are Buddhist, 1 percent are Christian, and 4 percent are “other.” It also shows that 80 percent of Japanese report that they do not have religious beliefs. Mongolia Prior to the thirteenth century, the dominant form of religious practice on the Asian steppes that would eventually become what are today Mongolia and the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia was a form of shamanism with a pantheon of sky deities. Over the course of their conquests, Genghis Khan (d. 1227) and his armies encountered and defeated a number of Buddhist polities. The fall of the Tibetan royal house in the ninth century meant the demise of the Tibetan Empire and the decline of Tibet as a military power in the region. This left Tibet at the mercy of neighboring powers. In 1240, Godan Khan (1206–1251), a grandson of Genghis, sent thirty thousand troops into Tibet on

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a reconnaissance expedition, seeking to identify who had the authority to surrender Tibet to Mongol rule, only to discover that Tibet had no king but instead seemed to be ruled by various monks and lamas. One of these was the distinguished monk and scholar Sakya Pandita (1182–1251), who traveled to the Mon˙˙ gol court at Liangzhou. In 1247, he met with Godan Khan, teaching him about Buddhism and curing him of a chronic skin disease (possibly leprosy). Gaining his confidence, he negotiated an arrangement under which the Mongols would hold suzerainty over Tibet, with some estates granted to Mongol nobles, but without military incursion or direct Mongol rule. Sakya Pandita was accom˙˙ panied by his young nephew Phakpa (1235–1280), who remained with Godan Khan after Sakya Pandita’s death, whether as a guest or as a hostage, or some ˙˙ combination of the two, remains unclear. In 1253, the eighteen-year-old was invited to the court of Godan’s brother, Kublai Khan, where he would remain for most of his life, returning to Tibet in his final years. In 1260, Kublai Khan became the Mongol sovereign, ruling an empire that would come to include modern-day China (including Tibet), Mongolia, and Korea; he would proclaim himself emperor of the Yuan Dynasty in 1271. Phakpa was named state preceptor (guoshi) and later imperial preceptor (dishi), making him the chief official of the vast monastic communities of the empire and confidante of the emperor. More importantly for Tibet, his duties included the administration of his homeland, with local authority in both civil and military matters granted to the abbot of his home monastery of Sakya in western Tibet. Mongol troops were sent to subdue those members of the Kagyü sect who objected to this arrangement. At Kublai Khan’s court, Phakpa brought Buddhism, and especially Tibetan Buddhism, to a place of particular prominence, defeating Daoist priests in debate and adding Buddhist rituals to the well-established Confucian rites of the Chinese court. Tibetan sources note that when he bestowed tantric initiation on the emperor and his wife, the pious Chabi, Phakpa occupied a higher seat, something that would have been considered anathema at the Chinese court. Phakpa would become one of the most prominent political figures in Tibetan history, providing the model for what is called the priest-patron partnership, which, at least in theory, was meant to define the relationship between Tibet and a series of Mongol, Manchu, and Chinese rulers. Here, responsibility for the spiritual realm is granted to the priest, who provides religious instruction and performs rituals for the benefit of the state, and responsibility for the material realm is granted to the patron, who provides financial support and military protection, with the understanding that the local political administration

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of Tibet would remain in the hands of Tibetans. During his lifetime, Kublai Khan had been identified as a cakravartin. After his death, he would be called an incarnation of Mañjuśrī, the bodhisattva of wisdom. At the meeting of Altan Khan (1507–1582) of the Tümed Mongols and the Geluk incarnate lama Sönam Gyatso in 1578, the khan would dub the Tibetan monk Dalai Lama. Sönam Gyatso would declare that he himself was the incarnation of Phakpa, and that Altan Khan was the incarnation of Kublai Khan. The Dalai Lama (retrospectively counted as the third) would discourage the Mongols from the practice of blood sacrifice and burned images of their deities in a fire ritual dedicated to the wrathful Buddhist deity Mahākāla. The institution of incarnation would be used again to strengthen the relationship between the Mongols and the Geluk when, upon the death of Sönam Gyatso, the Fourth Dalai Lama was identified as Altan Khan’s great-grandson, the only non-Tibetan to ever be selected as Dalai Lama. After his early death, his successor, the Fifth Dalai Lama, built upon the strong relationship with Mongol leaders, enlisting the aid of Gushri Khan (1582–1655) of the Khoshut Mongols in defeating his enemy, the king of the Tibetan region of Tsang. In 1642, Gushri Khan declared himself king of Tibet, restoring the patron-priest relation, with the Fifth Dalai Lama as priest. Upon the khan’s death in 1655, the Dalai Lama would assume the role of head of state. This began a period of close relations between the Mongols and the Geluk sect, with Mongols coming to Tibet for study, some remaining in Tibet to become prominent scholars, others returning to Mongolia to establish monasteries and translate Tibetan texts into Mongolian. The Fifth Dalai Lama consolidated his power in Tibet by suppressing those sects that he regarded as his enemies. This included the Jonang, which had been led by the remarkable monk and scholar Tāranātha, who had died in 1634. The Fifth Dalai Lama converted the main Jonang monastery to Geluk, banned the printing of its texts, and declared that Tāranātha had been reborn as the son of an important Mongol khan. This line of incarnations, which came to be called the Jetsun Dampa Hutuktu, would serve a similar religious and political role in Mongolia that the Dalai Lama played in Tibet. The first was Zanabazar (1635–1723) of the Khalkha Mongols, who played an influential role as both a scholar and leader, building close ties with the Qing throne. During the Qing, the Qing emperor, the Dalai Lama, and the Jetsun Dampa were identified as human incarnations of the bodhisattvas Mañjuśrī (the bodhisattva of wisdom), Avalokiteśvara (the bodhisattva of compassion), and Vajrapāni (the ˙ bodhisattva of power), respectively. In the wake of the death of the Fifth Dalai Lama, Tibet was ruled by Lhazang Khan of the Khoshut Mongols. After depos-

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ing the Sixth Dalai Lama and naming his own son as the seventh, he was deposed and killed by an army of Dzungar Mongols, who in turn would be defeated by Qing forces. Regardless, throughout the lengthy Qing Dynasty, Buddhist teachers and Buddhist monasteries would become central to almost all elements of Mongolian life, with Mongolia having one of the highest percentages of its population as monastics in the Buddhist world. Mongolian Buddhism suffered harsh persecution in the wake of the Russian Revolution, both in Mongolia and what would become the Soviet republics of Kalmykia and Buryatia, with monastery lands seized, monasteries destroyed, books burned, prominent lamas executed or imprisoned, and monks defrocked. A recovery from almost a century of persecution began in 1990. Tibet Tibet has long been perceived as something of an anomaly in the Buddhist world, condemned in European sources for its faux pope and its monstrous deities, so deviant from what Orientalists considered to be the original teachings of the Buddha that it did not deserve the name “Buddhism.” They called it instead Lamaism, a term derived from the Chinese “lama jiao,” the “teaching of the lamas,” suggesting that the Chinese also regarded it as somehow separate from “fo jiao,” the “teaching of the Buddha.” Tibetans, like all Buddhists, simply call their religion Buddhism. Although the term “Lamaism” is no longer used in polite society, there is in fact something anomalous about Tibetan Buddhism: Buddhism arrived there very late. When looking at a map of Asia in, say, the sixth century CE, we see Buddhism thriving in India, or at least certain regions of India. We also see Buddhism established in what are today Nepal, Bangladesh, Burma, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and China. Each of these countries shares a border, in many cases a long border, with the Tibetan kingdom of the period. Buddhism was thriving in Japan, thousands of miles to the east of the Bodhi Tree, and in Sumatra, thousands of nautical miles to the south of the Bodhi Tree, and yet it was absent in Tibet, despite the fact that the Buddha had been born in neighboring Nepal. To enter Tibet, there were formidable mountains to climb or deserts to cross, but mountains and deserts (and oceans) had not barred the movement of Buddhism to other lands. Tibet was a blank spot on the Buddhist map, an uninhabited island in a Buddhist sea. According to traditional Tibetan histories, Buddhism arrived not from India to the south or China to the east, but from the sky. During the reign of a king

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named Lha Thothori Nyantsen, whom Chinese sources place in the fifth century CE, a casket fell from the sky onto the roof of his palace. When it was opened, it contained a sūtra about the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara (who centuries later would incarnate as the dalai lamas), a seal stamped with his mantra, “om māni padme hūm,” and a golden stūpa. However, no one could read the ˙ ˙ ˙ text or knew what a stūpa was; the casket and its contents were dubbed the “sacred secret.” Although there are a number of ways to read this story, it seems to suggest, as one would expect, that Buddhist artifacts must have made their way into Tibet over the centuries, but also that Buddhism had not been introduced through the usual route of the arrival of monks and the founding of monasteries. That would not happen until much later. According to Tibetan accounts, Buddhism entered the Land of Snows by a terrestrial route during the seventh century. By this time, Tibet was a major military power, and as a result of his conquests, the Tibetan king, Songtsen Gampo, received a Nepalese princess and a Chinese princess as wives; the Chinese princess, Wencheng, was the niece of the Taizong emperor (598–649). Both princesses were Buddhists, and each brought with her a statue of Śākyamuni Buddha, converting the king. The story of the journey of the Chinese statue (said to be of Indian origin and carved during the Buddha’s lifetime) from the Tang capital to the Tibetan capital is a harrowing one, suggesting the obstacles that the new religion faced. The landscape of Tibet is described as a huge supine demoness, who flinched and flailed when the cart transporting the statue crossed into Tibetan territory, causing all manner of problems and delays. In order to allow the safe passage of the statue, the king built a number of temples across his realm, strategically located at various parts of the de­ moness’s body, effectively impaling her. The most famous Buddhist temple in Tibet, the Jokhang, is located over her heart. Having been converted to the true dharma by his wives (identified in Tibetan sources as incarnations of the female bodhisattva Tārā), the king concluded that his kingdom needed a written language in order to be able to translate the Buddha’s teachings into Tibetan. He dispatched a delegation of young men to India to learn Sanskrit. Only one member survived the journey, returning home to invent an alphabet and a grammar for the Tibetan language. The two princesses play an important role in Tibetan accounts of the establishment of Buddhism, and Princess Wencheng remains famous in China, credited with bringing Chinese civilization to a savage people. However, historians have doubted the historicity of the Nepalese princess and determined that the twelve-year-old Princess Wencheng was offered in marriage not to

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Songtsen Gampo but to his son, who died before she arrived in Tibet. The king, by then an old man, took her as one of his several queens, dying a few years later. The story of the invention of the Tibetan language is considered a myth. Thus, the extent to which Songtsen Gampo, the first of Tibet’s three great dharma kings, was a devotee of the dharma, remains in question. Traveling along the western border of Tibet in the first half of the eighth century, the Korean monk Hyecho reported in his travel journal, “Neither the royalty nor commoners know anything of the Buddha’s teachings and there are no monasteries.”33 We must wait until the end of the eighth century for Buddhism to be introduced in a more traditional way: the founding of the first Tibetan monastery. The king at this time was Trisong Detsen, who reigned from 755 to around 799. Tibet remained a significant military power in the region; in 763, his army invaded China and briefly occupied the Tang capital at Chang’an (modern Xi’an). Trisong Detsen was also a patron of Buddhism and, near the end of his reign, invited a prominent Indian monk, living in Nepal at the time, to aid him in the construction of the first monastery and to serve as the first abbot. This was Śāntaraksita (725–788), one of the major philosophers of late Indian Bud˙ dhism, remembered especially for his massive compendium and critique of all of the Indian philosophical schools of the day, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist, entitled the Compendium of Principles (Tattvasamgraha). That a figure of his ˙ prominence would make the long and difficult journey to what by Indian standards would be an uncivilized place may provide further evidence of the decline that Buddhism had suffered in the land of its birth. The site for the monastery was a place called Samye. According to traditional accounts, the project encountered resistance from local deities who impeded the construction. Śāntaraksita is said to have told the king that the subjugation ˙ of these deities was beyond his own capabilities, advising the king to invite a tantric master from India named Padmasambhava for the task; he would come to be regarded as “the second Buddha” by one of the major sects of Tibetan Buddhism. Like the Buddha, Padmasambhava is a figure of great historical importance and great historical uncertainty. According to the story, Padmasambhava accepted the king’s invitation and defeated the Tibetan demons, sparing their lives in return for a vow that they would become protectors of the dharma. With this obstacle removed, the monastery at Samye was built in the form of the Buddhist cosmos, with the central temple as Mount Meru and the four surrounding temples representing the four continents. Scholars place the founding of the monastery and ordination of seven Tibetan men as the first monks around 779. Tibet would eventually have the largest number of Buddhist monks

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(as measured by percentage of population) in the world. Remembered by Tibetans as the “bodhisattva abbot,” Śāntaraksita died a few years later. ˙ All manner of further deeds would be ascribed to Padmasambhava. He is said to have taken the queen of Tibet as his consort and bestowed tantric teachings to the members of the court. Knowing that Tibet was not yet prepared to receive the full transmission of tantric teachings, he dictated thousands of texts, with the queen as his scribe, and then buried them all over the Tibetan landscape, underground, underwater, and sometimes in the hearts of disciples yet unborn. These are the famous “treasure texts” (gter ma) of Tibetan Buddhism, the most famous of which in the West is the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead. He then departed for his palace called Lotus Light on the Copper-Colored Mountain, said to be located on an island off the coast of India, where he abides to this day. This account derives from sources composed centuries after the supposed events. The earliest accounts that mention Padmasambhava—found in a text called the Testament of Ba (Sba bzhed), which may date from the ninth or tenth centuries—describe him as a water diviner invited to Tibet to provide advice on irrigation, a science that at the time would have required the propitiation of water spirits. During the reign of Trisong Detsen, Tibet’s relations with China were not entirely military. After the death of Śāntaraksita, Chinese monks of the Chan ˙ school gained a presence at court, apparently winning the favor of the queen. According to traditional accounts, the king became alarmed at what he regarded as the antinomian nature of their teachings, fearing that, should they become widespread, they would undermine the morality of his realm. The late lamented Śāntaraksita had left a will in which he warned of this danger, advis˙ ing the king to invite his disciple Kamalaśīla (also an important author of late Indian Buddhism) to come to Tibet and defend the right view. According to Tibetan accounts, the king called for a debate between Kamalaśīla and a Chinese monk of the Northern Chan school named Heshang Moheyan (Monk Mahāyāna). This famous event, which likely occurred in the last decade of the eighth century (797 is often given as the date), is known to history as the Samye Debate and the Council of Lhasa. The fact that these names mention two different sites suggests some uncertainty about what took place, whether it was a face-to-face debate or an exchange of documents. However, documents do exist, making it clear that the point of controversy was the nature of enlightenment, and whether its attainment was gradual or sudden. Kamalaśīla held the “gradual” position, arguing that enlightenment was attained through a combination of ethics, concentration, and wis-

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dom, with a foundation of virtuous deeds necessary to build sufficient mental strength to reveal the nature of reality. Moheyan, as a member of the Chan school, held the “sudden” position, arguing that virtuous deeds are irrelevant for the achievement of enlightenment, that the mind is naturally enlightened, and this simply needs to be recognized through entering a state of inactivity, free from all thought. The Samye Debate is just one of several instances in the history of Buddhism in which such questions about the nature of enlightenment, and how to reach it, are raised. According to Tibetan accounts (which are contradicted by Chinese accounts), the king himself, serving as the judge in the debate, declared Kamalaśīla the winner, banishing Heshang Moheyan and his party from Tibet. Tibetan accounts report that Heshang Moheyan left one shoe behind, an omen that a remnant of his teaching would live on in Tibet. He is also said to have hired Chinese butchers to assassinate Kamalaśīla. The story of the debate, which seems to have occurred in one form or another, and the doctrinal issues at stake are of less importance to the history of Buddhism than the outcome. An aging king of Tibet, whose troops had captured the Chinese capital some three decades earlier, essentially declared that henceforth his kingdom would receive its Buddhism not from China, with which it shared a long border, but from India, despite the towering peaks that must be passed to reach it. Over the centuries that followed, many Tibetan pilgrims would make that journey and many Indian masters would make their way to the Land of Snows. The last of the great Buddhist kings of Tibet was Ralpacan (c. 802–838), the grandson of Trisong Detsen. So great was his devotion to the dharma that he was said to allow monks to sit on his long locks (which is what his name means in Tibetan). In yet another reminder that Buddhism is not to be associated with pacifism, during his short reign, the Tibetan Empire reached its greatest geographical extent, defeating Chinese armies in a number of campaigns. He is remembered especially for his sponsorship of the translation of a huge number of Indian Buddhist texts from Sanskrit into Tibetan, a project begun by his father. In order to ensure consistency of translation, in 814 a group of scholars completed a lexicon of almost ten thousand Sanskrit words with their Tibetan equivalents. The Catalogue from Pang Tang (Dkar chag ’Phang thang ma) from 818 lists 961 titles of works translated or to be translated. However, his patronage of Buddhism was regarded as excessive by members of his court, leading to his assassination and the enthronement of his brother Lang Darma. Buddhist histories of Tibet portray him as a tyrant and an enemy of the dharma, withdrawing support from the san˙gha and defrocking monks. His reign was

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short. According to a famous story, a Buddhist monk, bowing to pay homage to the king, took out a bow and arrow that he had hidden in his robes and murdered the king in 842. The assassination of Lang Darma brought an end to the Tibetan Dynasty. Tibet would never again be ruled by a lineally descended king; a different kind of descended ruler would ascend to the throne in the person of the Fifth Dalai Lama, installed in 1655, eight centuries after Lang Darma’s demise. The immediate aftermath was the end of what some later Tibetan historians would call the earlier dissemination of the dharma and the beginning of what they call the time of fragmentation, a time of political upheaval and civil war in which the transmission of Buddhism from India is portrayed as having ceased, for the improbably lengthy period of a century and a half. In the last years of the tenth century, a revival of Buddhism began in western Tibet when a number of young Tibetans made their way to nearby Kashmir, returning to Tibet with new texts to translate, in new monasteries founded by a series of pious local kings. These events mark what Tibetans—or at least the Tibetan schools that came to prominence during this period—call the later dissemination of the dharma, a period of active religious commerce between India and Tibet, with Tibetans making the dangerous journey from the rarefied air of their high-elevation homeland to the humid Indian plains, where they studied at the great monasteries, studied with tantric masters, and returned home with new texts to translate and new initiations to bestow.34 This was also a time when a number of prominent Indian masters traveled to Tibet, inspired not so much by the piety of the Tibetans but by the perilous state of Buddhism in northern India; already in decline there, several major monasteries would be sacked by Muslim armies in the late twelfth century. The most famous of these arrivals, and the most beloved by Tibetan Buddhists, was the Bengali master Atiśa, who arrived in 1042, remaining until his death in 1054. The temples and monasteries that the returning monks and laymen founded came to be centers of political and economic influence, patronized by local aristocrats and the pious laity, who offered their sons for ordination. Based largely on a particular text or cycle of Indian texts, and the Tibetan master who had been empowered by his guru to transmit them, the so-called sects (the Tibetan term “chos lugs” literally means “dharma system”) of Tibetan Buddhism began to take shape. The huge project of translating the canon of Indian works into Tibetan resumed during this period, with the rendering of tantric works referred to as new translations, to distinguish them from those translated under the Tibetan kings. The resulting translations would become the famous Kangyur

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(literally, “Translation of the Word [of the Buddha]”), preserved in 108 volumes in one edition, containing almost twelve hundred titles; and the Tengyur (literally, “Translation of the Treatises,” that is, commentaries and freestanding works composed by Indian Buddhist masters), preserved in some 225 volumes, containing some four thousand titles. One of the early centers of both religious and political authority was Sakya Monastery in western Tibet, home of the sect with that same name. As discussed above, when the Mongols sent troops into Tibet in 1247, they met with the preeminent Sakya scholar of the day, Sakya Pandita (1182–1251). His nephew ˙˙ Phakpa (1235–1280) remained with the Mongols. He would become the teacher and imperial preceptor of Kublai Khan, and the Sakya sect would be granted political dominion over Tibet. This was also the period of the rise of the institution of the incarnate lama, the most famous of whom were the dalai lamas, described above and in the chapters that follow. The current Dalai Lama, born in 1935, is the fourteenth. The People’s Liberation Army invaded Tibet in 1950. In 1959, in the wake of a popular uprising against the Chinese, the Dalai Lama went into exile in India, where he has lived since, being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. C ambodia Although today we sometimes think of Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos as adherents of an undifferentiated Theravāda Buddhism, what nineteenthcentury European scholars referred to as Southern Buddhism, each country obviously has its own history, as well as complicated, and sometimes fraught, relations with its neighbors and with the European colonial powers: Sri Lanka and Burma were British colonies; Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam were part of French Indochina. Only Thailand was able to successfully retain its independence. It is equally important to recognize that the Theravāda orthodoxy in Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos is a relatively late development in the long histories of those lands. Other branches of Buddhism flourished there, as did Hinduism. Indeed, it is useful to think of Buddhism as just one element (at times a relatively minor element) of Indic culture that made its way into the region beginning in the first centuries of the Common Era, with other elements including calendrics, astronomy, medicine, kingship, language, literature, art, and architecture, as well as religion. This is nowhere more true than in the case of Cambodia.

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Although there is some evidence of the presence of Buddhism in what is today Cambodia as early as the second century CE, scholars of Cambodian or Khmer history tend to divide its Buddhist traditions into three periods centered around the construction of the massive Angkor Wat temple complex during the twelfth century. During the pre-Angkor period, the Buddhist presence, primarily in the form of deities, was for the most part limited to the court. During the eighth century, images of Avalokiteśvara (also known as Lokeśvara), the Mahāyāna bodhisattva of compassion, as well as Pāli inscriptions appear, suggesting the presence of both Mahāyāna and what would come to be called Theravāda Buddhism; an inscription that mentions Lokeśvara dates to 791. In the centuries leading up to the construction of Angkor Wat, Khmer kings identified themselves with Hindu deities, especially Śiva and Visnu; Angkor Wat it˙˙ self is dedicated to Visnu. Again, however, there may not have been a strict line ˙˙ between what would come to be known as Hinduism and Buddhism. The king Yaśovarman (r. 889–900) built hermitages dedicated to Śiva, Visnu, and the ˙˙ Buddha. Jayavarma VII (r. 1181–1218) built temples dedicated to two Mahāyāna deities, Lokeśvara and Prajñapāramitā, the goddess regarded as the embodiment of the perfection of wisdom and the mother of all buddhas. It was during this period and in subsequent centuries that the presence of the Pāli tradition became more pronounced, primarily through contact with the Pagan kingdom in what is today Burma and the Sukhothai kingdom in what is today northern Thailand. A prince is said to have traveled to Sri Lanka at the end of the twelfth century, where he was ordained as a monk. Pāli would replace Sanskrit in inscriptions; works on Buddhist doctrine and on the life of the Buddha would be composed in both Pāli and Khmer. A lengthy period of warfare with its neighbors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to the increased influence of Thai Buddhism, with both the Thammayut (which had been established by the Thai king Mongkut) and Mahānikāi monastic lineages being established in Cambodia. Cambodia became a French protectorate in 1863, remaining under French control for almost a century, displaced by the Japanese during the Second World War. The French were generally supportive of Buddhist institutions, seeing them as a site for the introduction of modern education. This did not assuage resentment of the French presence, with various millenarian movements predicting the advent of the future buddha Maitreya, prophesied to restore Buddhism in the world. A very different millenary period began in 1970, when the Khmer Rouge deposed the head of state, Prince Sihanouk. By the end of the decade, some two million had died in what is known to history as the Cambo-

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dian genocide. Repeating well-worn critiques of Buddhist monks as parasites who do not contribute to the state, the murderous regime of Pol Pot set out to obliterate Buddhism, killing some 60 percent of the monks and forcing those who survived to disrobe. Temples were turned into warehouses and Buddha images were desecrated. With the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, monks had to be invited from Vietnam to reordain the monks who had survived. In the subsequent decades, Buddhist institutions have slowly begun to be rebuilt. Indonesia One tends not to associate Indonesia with Buddhism, perhaps because today Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world. However, prior to the coming of Islam in the thirteenth century, Indonesia, and especially the islands of Sumatra and Java, played a major role in what is called Maritime Buddhism, serving as a stopping place for Buddhist monks traveling in trading vessels on voyages between India and China. Famous Indian monks traveled by sea to China, and famous Chinese monks traveled by sea to India, making the pilgrimage to acquire teachings and texts. However, Indonesia was not simply a way station for monks traveling between the two hubs of the Buddhist world. In addition to being a thriving center of trade, the Indonesian kingdom of Śrīvijaya was an important center of Buddhist art, architecture, and practice in its own right for several centuries, beginning in the seventh century and ending in the fourteenth century. The most important account of Buddhist practice there comes from the Chinese monk Yijing (635–713), who traveled to India to retrieve texts on monastic discipline. On his outward voyage in 671, he spent some six months there studying Sanskrit in a monastery with a thousand monks. He was sufficiently impressed by the level of monastic practice that he spent a decade there on his return voyage from 685 to 695, famously returning briefly to China, apparently to get more ink. He would advise future Chinese pilgrims on their way to India to spend one or two years in Sumatra to study Sanskrit and to learn proper monastic decorum. His account of his time there provides a valuable ethnography of Buddhist monastic life during this period. The region was also a major center of tantric practice. Vajrabodhi, the great tantric master who would play a central role at the Tang court, met his disciple Amoghavajra in Java before they sailed for China.35 The art historical and archaeological record is also rich. The earliest Buddhist icons from the region, dating from the seventh century, share stylistic

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elements with those from southern India and Sri Lanka in what became an international style in Buddhist Southeast Asia. Statues from the eighth and ninth centuries suggest that there was a strong Mahāyāna presence in what is today Indonesia, with images of the major bodhisattvas. These would be followed by images of tantric deities, including those associated with the Kālacakra Tantra. In the realm of Buddhist architecture, the island of Java is the site of Borobudur, perhaps the grandest monument in the Buddhist world. Construction began around 790 and continued over a period of some sixty years. Over a thousand bas-reliefs depict scenes from a wide range of Buddhist texts, including the past lives of the Buddha and scenes from his final lifetime. On the terrace at the top, there are seventy-two stūpas, each with a buddha visible inside. With the decline of Buddhism in Java, the monument became surrounded by jungle and covered in volcanic ash. A major restoration project funded by UNESCO began in 1975. Today, Borobudur is the most visited tourist site in Indonesia. Burma Like almost all of the countries in the Buddhist world, the nation-state known today as Burma, as well as its current borders, were rather recently established. Among the several polities to inhabit the region over the centuries, the most important for the history of Buddhism are the homelands of the Mon peoples to the south and the Pyu peoples to the north, regions often described in Englishlanguage sources as Lower Burma and Upper Burma. Their proximity to India and Sri Lanka facilitated a long and rich history with those Buddhist cultures. Like so many Buddhist countries, Burma traces its contact with Buddhist India to long before there is scholarly evidence, describing visits by the Buddha himself and embassies from the emperor Aśoka that restored, rather than introduced, Buddhism to their land. Indeed, Burma tells the story of two Mon merchants named Bhallika and Trapusa (Tapussa in Pāli), the first people to meet the Buddha after his enlight˙ enment, indeed, offering him his first meal, some honey cakes. In return, the Buddha did not teach them the path to nirvāna; he offered them what would ˙ become relics: some of his hair. When the merchants returned to their homeland, these relics were enshrined in the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, the holiest shrine in the nation. Like other Southeast Asian traditions, Burma was the site of a wide range of Buddhist doctrine and practice before adopting the Theravāda orthodoxy with which it is so strongly identified today. For example, in the Sanskrit tradition,

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there is the story that the Buddha gave the arhat Mahākāśyapa his robe, instructing him to present it to the next buddha, Maitreya. Thus, rather than entering nirvāna himself, Mahākāśyapa went into suspended animation inside a ˙ mountain to await Maitreya. For the Burmese, that mountain is located in their land. The first historical evidence of Buddhism in Burma is from the fourth century CE, with both Pāli and Sanskrit inscriptions and images of Buddhist and Hindu deities. Chinese travelers to what is today Burma describe the presence of four of the traditional eighteen schools of Indian Buddhism. In subsequent centuries, Buddhist tantra came to be an important influence, likely coming from Bengal. The term “weikza,” often translated as “wizard,” is the Burmese rendering of the Sanskrit “vidyādhara,” literally, “knowledge bearer,” a term for a tantric master. This tradition continues to the present day, with practitioners eschewing traditional meditation practice in order to avoid disappearing into nirvāna, ˙ seeking instead to extend their life spans until the coming of Maitreya, said to occur after the teachings of Śākyamuni Buddha have disappeared, a process that takes five thousand years in the Pāli tradition, with Maitreya appearing long after that. Millenarianism around the advent of Maitreya has a long history in Burma. It was only in the twelfth century that what would come to be known as the Theravāda tradition became dominant in Burma, through ties with Sri Lanka. The relationship was not unidirectional. As a result of the turmoil caused by Sri Lanka’s war with the Chola Empire of southern India, the order of Buddhist monks died out—in the sense that there was not the minimum number of five fully ordained monks to confer ordination—during the reign of King Vijayabāhu I (r. 1055–1110). He appealed to the king of Pagan, Anawrahta (r. 1044–77), who sent a delegation of twenty monks to reestablish the order. By the late twelfth century, the Sri Lankan san˙gha, now strong, would send monks of the Mahāvihāra sect to Burma, where they would become the Sīhala san˙gha. The already existing san˙gha, called the Myanma san˙gha, continued practices drawn from the Mahāyāna and tantric traditions of India. This would continue into the fifteenth century, a time when translations, adaptations, and commentaries on Pāli works began to be produced in Burmese. In 1476, the Mon king Dhammazedi (r. 1471–92) required that all monks be reordained into the Sīhala san˙gha. This practice has remained until the present day, not without periods of factionalism within the san˙gha. This included a dispute in the eighteenth century over whether monastic robes should cover one shoulder or both shoulders.36

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Thibaw, the Buddhist monarch of Burma, would be deposed by the British in 1885, despite the efforts of his father, King Mindon, to forestall his kingdom’s fate by convening a council of monks and carving the canon in stone. Fearing that Buddhism would be destroyed by the British, a Buddhist monk developed a simple form of meditation to be taught to the laity, that group of Buddhists who had traditionally not practiced meditation, and that simple form of meditation would become what today is called mindfulness.37 Burma would become a major battleground in the Second World War. In the eastern province of what is today Rakhine State, Muslims allied with the British fought Buddhists allied with the Japanese, an animosity that would rise again in 2012 with the persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority by the Buddhist majority, with the support of many Buddhist monks and the complicity of the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Buddhist Aung San Suu Kyi. Vietnam Unlike the other Buddhist cultures of Southeast Asia, Vietnam’s Buddhism is more closely connected to China than to India and Sri Lanka. Northern Vietnam was part of the Jiaozhou Province of China until 679 CE, after which it became Annan, an abbreviation of “Annan Duhufu,” or “Protectorate General to Pacify the South,” with its seat in Songping (modern Hanoi). The region remained under Chinese control until a mutiny of Annan troops in 880, with the first Vietnamese dynasty, the Đinh, being founded in 968. Buddhism seems to have been present in the region from the second century CE, with monks from Jiaozhou active in China during the Tang Dynasty as well as Indian and Central Asian monks arriving in the region by sea. Buddhist monks held positions at court during the first two Vietnamese dynasties, with Chan (Thien, in Vietnamese) gaining particular importance during the Lý Dynasty (1010–1225); monks of the two main Chinese Chan schools—Linji and Caodong—arrived from China. After leading Vietnamese troops in victory over the invading Mongols in `n Dynasty, Trâ `n Nhân Tông (1258–1308), 1285 and 1288, the third king of the Trâ abdicated and became a Buddhist monk, going on to found the first Vietnamese Chan school, called Trúc Lâm (Bamboo Grove). Although he is said to have composed a number of works, only some poems survive. The first collection of Buddhist prose works to be composed in Vietnam date from this period, including biographies of eminent monks. As it was in China and Korea, Confucianism would be a rival and opponent

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of Buddhism in Vietnam. Dynasties beginning in 1428 and continuing to 1802 were patrons of Confucianism, establishing a civil service system based on the Chinese model. Although Buddhist monks lost their influence at court, the Bamboo Grove school was revived, and Chan monks came from China to teach, establishing new Chan schools. Throughout this period, Buddhism continued to be practiced among the Vietnamese people in ways common to much of the Buddhist world, including donations to monks and nuns, the building and restoration of temples, the sponsoring of the printing of Buddhist scriptures, the taking of Buddhist precepts, the making of merit (including by freeing animals bound for the butcher), the performance of rituals of repentance, the chanting of sūtras, and the recitation of prayers for rebirth in the pure land of Amitābha. As in China, Japan, and Korea, the Vietnamese celebrate the socalled Ghost Festival in the summer, in which offerings are made to the san˙gha on behalf of seven generations of deceased ancestors. What is today Vietnam became part of the colony of French Indochina in 1887, with the French remaining in control of regions of the country until 1954. Roman Catholic missionaries had been active in Vietnam since the arrival of the Jesuits in the seventeenth century, with significant success in conversion of the laity and the ordination of Vietnamese priests continuing into the nineteenth century. The growing influence of Roman Catholicism and the French colonial presence was resisted by many Vietnamese monks in the first decades of the twentieth century, an activism that continued during the period of the Vietnam War. The presence of Buddhism in Vietnam was seared into the memory of the world on June 11, 1963, when the monk Thích Quả ng Đức set himself on fire to protest the persecution of Buddhists by the Roman Catholic Diem regime. From the Vietnam peace movement would emerge Thích Nhâ´t Hanh (1926–2022), a leading figure in what he called Engaged Buddhism, ˙ in which Buddhist principles and practices are used to address modern problems. With the end of the war and the reunification of Vietnam, Buddhism came under the control of the Communist government. Thail and Like other Buddhist polities, the region known today as Thailand claims early connections to Indian Buddhism, describing visits by monks sent by Aśoka in the third century BCE. Historical evidence of Buddhism dates to the fourth century CE, with Buddhist texts and images making their way to what is today Thailand along rivers and seas. Despite the later Theravāda orthodoxy, Nikāya

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schools, Mahāyāna, and tantra were all present for centuries, with tantric elements remaining in some forms of Thai meditation. Propitiation of Hindu deities and the role of brahmin priests remain an important part of Thai Buddhist life to the present day, with the Hindu epic the Rāmāyana holding a central ˙ position in Thai art and culture. The king of Sri Lanka sent monks of the Mahāvihāra sect to the region in the late twelfth century, with Thais traveling to Sri Lanka and Burma for ordination during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In 1753, at the invitation of the king of Sri Lanka, a delegation of Thai monks came to the island to reestablish the order of monks there. There has been a close relation between the ruler and the san˙gha for centuries, with the king playing an active role in the life of the monastic community, both in its support and its administration, granting lands, appointing officials, and adjudicating disputes. There is a long tradition, continuing to the present day, of the monarch, either as crown prince or king, ordaining as a monk for a short period of time. In the case of Rāma IV (1804–1868), the period as a monk lasted for twenty-seven years. His experience as a monk and his sophisticated knowledge of the Pāli canon led him to establish what would become a new sect of Thai Buddhism called the Thammayut (Adherents of the Dharma), where he sought to correct what he regarded as the lax monastic discipline in the Mahānikāi that had been brought from Sri Lanka centuries before. Both sects continue to the present day, with the Thammayut in the minority. In the late nineteenth century, monks of the Thammayut, feeling constrained by strict government control and the duties of urban monastic life, founded what is known as the forest monk tradition, seeking to reestablish the ascetic life of meditation associated with the time of the Buddha. During the nineteenth century, Rāma IV (Mongkut) and his son and successor, the equally revered Rāma V (Chulalongkorn), maintained generally cordial relations with the European powers (a Thai king had sent a delegation to Paris during the reign of Louis XIV) and America, successfully maintaining Thai independence and discouraging Christian missionizing. Thailand was the only nation in Southeast Asia that did not become the colony or protectorate of a Western power. Thailand would escape the devastation suffered by much of Asia by creating an alliance with Japan during the Second World War, with Thai monks largely resisting the calls of Japanese Buddhists to support the war. Today, the Thai san˙gha (which has resisted the ordination of women) remains one of the most prosperous monastic communities in the Buddhist world, with a number of Buddhist universities where monks achieve a high level of

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training in the Pāli canon. The ordination of males for a brief period time (traditionally for the three months of the rains retreat) remains a common practice in Thailand as well as in other Southeast Asian countries. Laos The history of Buddhism in the region today called Laos is among the least understood in the Buddhist world, with the earliest surviving sources dating from the fourteenth century. The works that survive tend not to be versions of the Buddhist canon, but various extracanonical works including folktales, ritual manuals, commentaries, histories of important monasteries, images, relics, and apocryphal jātaka stories. Royal chronicles describe the introduction of Buddhism during the reign of King Fā Ngum (r. 1353–74). According to these accounts, as a young prince, he was sent into exile to Angkor, returning some years later with an Angkor princess as his wife. At the request of the princess, the Angkor king sent a delegation of Khmer and Sri Lankan monks, two images of the Buddha, and a copy of the Buddhist canon to the Lao capital. It would not be until the subsequent century that the kingdom was ruled by a monarch with a Buddhist name: Chakkaphat Phaen Phaeo (r. 1442–79; “chakkaphat” means “cakravartin”); it seems to be during his reign that Buddhism became the dominant religion at the Lao court. King Phōthisālarāt (r. 1520–47) and his son Xētthāthirāt (r. 1548–71), also a strong patron of Buddhism, sought, as many monarchs have done, to “purify the san˙gha,” in their case, by trying to prohibit the worship of nature deities and other practices deemed to be magic rather than dharma. By the sixteenth century, there was significant interchange with the Buddhist polities of what would become Thailand and Burma, with the Mahānikāi sect of the Theravāda, imported to the mainland from Sri Lanka, becoming the dominant monastic form. Despite their shared monastic tradition, Laos and Thailand were often at war, with two of the most sacred buddha images of Southeast Asia taken hostage. Thus, Lao forces captured the Emerald Buddha— the most sacred of all buddha images in Thailand—and took it to the Lao capital in 1564. It remained there until 1784, when Thai forces took it back to Thailand. The most sacred buddha image for the Lao is the Phra Bang, said to have been brought from Angkor during the reign of Fā Ngum. It was captured by Thai troops in 1778 and not returned until 1867.38 In 1893, what is today Laos became part of French Indochina. Ironically, it was during the period of French rule that study of the Pāli canon flourished,

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under the auspices of the French-founded École de Pali. Among the motivations was apparently to reduce the influence of monks from independent Thailand, with its long border with French Laos. In the post-colonial period, Laos, like other regions of Europe and Asia, saw the rise of Communist parties. In Laos, it was the Pathet Lao, which came into existence shortly after the departure of the French in 1953. Buddhism, and especially Buddhist monks, have historically been repressed, and often brutally repressed, by Communist regimes, as in China, Tibet, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The Pathet Lao took a different tack, seeking to find points of commonality between Buddhism and Communism. Thus, the Buddha was hailed for his rejection of his royal status, his supposed rejection of the Indian caste system, and his commitment to the liberation of the masses from suffering. In a new model of the long association of “san˙gha and state,” the administration of the monastic community was controlled by lay members of the party, with periods of repression during the late 1970s. With the fall of the Pathet Lao, the Lao san˙gha returned to more traditional roles. Europe and Americ a A global history of Buddhism must extend to the Western Hemisphere, where Buddhism has a more recent but important history. The first reference to the Buddha from European sources is found in Clement of Alexandria, who writes, “Some, too, of the Indians obey the precepts of Boutta; whom, on account of his extraordinary sanctity, they have raised to divine honours.”39 In 1956, while excavating a Viking house on Helgö Island in Sweden, archaeologists unearthed an Indian statue of the Buddha dating from the sixth century. It is not clear how it got there. One of the most detailed early European accounts of the life of the Buddha is found in Marco Polo’s Book of the Marvels of the World (Livre des merveilles du monde), published around 1300. In his description of his visit to Sri Lanka (which he called Seilan), he concludes, “And there he [the Buddha] did abide, leading a life of great hardship and sanctity, and keeping great abstinence, just as if he had been a Christian. Indeed, and he had but been so, he would have been a great saint of Our Lord Jesus Christ, so good and pure was the life he led.”40 Although a delegation from Siam visited the court of Louis XIV in 1684, most of the early information about Buddhism came to Europe in the reports of European travelers to Asia. The story of Buddhism in “the West,” regardless of how that term is understood, is inextricable from the story of colonialism, of how tales and then texts

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of Buddhist Asia made their way across land and sea to Europe and then across the Atlantic to America. The earliest of these came from Roman Catholic missionaries to India, Sri Lanka, Siam, Burma, Vietnam, China, Japan, and Tibet. The Jesuit College of St. Paul was founded in Goa on the western coast of India by St. Francis Xavier in 1542; he would travel to Japan in 1549. Many of the reports of the Jesuits and other travelers were gathered in Religious Ceremonies and Customs of All the Peoples of the World (Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde), published in Amsterdam between 1723 and 1743 in nine volumes by Jean Frédéric Bernard and Bernard Picart. Up until the nineteenth century, Europeans tended to divide the people of the world into four nations: Christians, Jews, Muslims, and “Idolaters.” Buddhists were placed in the last category. Jesuit missionaries to many Buddhist lands wrote extensively about Buddhism without using the term, describing it as a form of idolatry. The links between Christian missionizing and European colonialism are obviously strong. In 1596, the pilot of the San Felipe, a Spanish vessel that had shipwrecked in Japan, showed a Japanese official a map of the Spanish Empire, explaining to him that the Spanish first sent missionaries to convert the population of the region, after which they sent soldiers to conquer it. Some European colonizers skipped the missionary step and just sent soldiers. The most important of these for the history of Buddhist Studies were the British, whose East India Company would gain control of most of India in the wake of the defeat of the Nawab of Bengal by troops under the command of Robert Clive at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. By 1815, they had taken control of Sri Lanka. Officers of the company undertook extensive studies of Buddhist art, architecture, and epigraphy. A key event was the dispatch by an official of the East India Company, Brian Houghton Hodgson (1801–1894), who sent 423 Sanskrit manuscripts and Tibetan block prints from Nepal—which the British had defeated in the Gurkha War that ended in 1816—to libraries and scholars in India and Europe. The most consequential destination for his dispatch was Paris, where academic chairs in Chinese and Sanskrit had been established in 1814. The holder of the chair in Sanskrit, Eugène Burnouf (1801–1852), made the Sanskrit manuscripts sent by Hodgson the foundation of the first history of Buddhism composed by a European, Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism, published in French in 1844. Beginning with Burnouf and continuing to the present day, the study of Buddhism in the West has largely been the study of texts, with Buddhism making its way into European and American culture through books. Also in 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s The Dial published a chapter of the

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Lotus Sūtra (translated from Burnouf’s French by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody). In 1879, the British journalist Edwin Arnold published a romantic life of the Buddha in verse called The Light of Asia. He was knighted for his efforts. Thomas W. Rhys Davids, a former British colonial official in Sri Lanka, founded the Pali Text Society in 1881, publishing many translations of Pāli works. The looting of the “Library Cave” at the cave temple complex in Dunhuang, first by Aurel Stein (1862–1943) for Britain, then by Paul Pelliot (1878–1945) for France, revealed texts (today held in collections in Britain, France, Japan, and China) whose study has transformed the understanding of the history of Buddhism.41 However, the story of Buddhism in Europe, and especially in America, is not simply a story of texts traveling westward on ships across the Atlantic. It is also a story of Buddhists traveling eastward on ships across the Pacific. The first Buddhists to arrive in America were likely Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins, who were brought to Boston in 1829. They would later be followed by Chinese seeking their fortunes in Jinshan, “Gold Mountain,” working in mining towns in California and on the transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869. The Chinese would be followed by Japanese immigrants. The Chinese were subject to great persecution, with the Chinese Exclusion Act signed by President Chester A. Arthur in 1882. The Japanese would be sent to internment camps during the Second World War. Meanwhile, the Buddhism that had been brought across the Atlantic moved beyond the academy. Buddhism was central to the Theosophical Society, founded in New York in 1875 by the Russian medium Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) and the American Civil War veteran Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907). Madame Blavatsky claimed to have spent seven years in Tibet. It would inspire many to turn to the Mystic East in the decades after the Civil War. It was a Theosophist, Walter EvansWentz, who published what he called The Tibetan Book of the Dead in 1927. The World’s Parliament of Religions was held in Chicago in 1893 as part of the Columbian Exposition, meant to celebrate, one year late, the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s “discovery of America.” Buddhism was represented by delegates from Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Japan. Of these, Anagārika Dharmapāla of Sri Lanka (then the British colony of Ceylon), with his fluent English and allusions to Christianity, was a particular sensation— rivaling Swami Vivekananda of India, who represented Hinduism—despite the fact that Dharmapāla proclaimed the superiority of Buddhism to Christianity. The following year, the German immigrant Paul Carus (1852–1919) would publish The Gospel of Buddha, an anthology of passages from Buddhist texts with comparative passages from the Bible.

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In the aftermath of the Second World War, D. T. Suzuki would represent (not always accurately) many elements of Japanese traditional culture (including flower-arranging, calligraphy, archery, rock gardens, and haiku) as somehow “Zen.” Inspired largely by his work, Zen Buddhism would emerge in the postwar period as the most popular form of Buddhism in the West, extolled by a number of writers and artists, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and their fellow dharma bums.42 In the wake of the Vietnam War, it became common for American colleges and universities to have a course called “Introduction to Buddhism” in their curricula. With the immigration of Tibetan lamas to Europe and America after the flight of the Dalai Lama in 1959, Tibetan Buddhism would eventually come to displace Zen in many ways, with the Zen works of authors like Suzuki and Alan Watts remaining popular. It was also in the late twentieth century that there were movements in a number of Buddhist communities to restore the order of fully ordained Buddhist nuns, in some cases for the first time in centuries. Many Western women remain involved in this effort. In the early twenty-­ first century, mindfulness came to the fore, presented as a technique for stress reduction, becoming an important element in the self-help movement, despite the famous Buddhist doctrine that there is no self. Often drowned out in discussions of Buddhism in the West, and especially Buddhism in America, are the voices of Asians: the American citizens of Japanese ancestry who sought to preserve their Buddhist practice in internment camps during the Second World War, the American citizens of Chinese ancestry whose families have been in the United States for more than a century, the Buddhist refugees from Southeast Asia forced to leave their homelands in the wake of war and genocide. Also often drowned out are the voices of those whose families were brought across the sea in centuries past: members of the Black community who have been empowered by a Japanese chant. These are the lay Buddhists of America, seeking salvation in this lifetime and the next as Buddhists have always done, not always by practicing meditation or studying philosophy, but by making offerings to monks and nuns, by performing rituals, by chanting the name of the buddha Amitābha, by chanting the title of the Lotus Sūtra.

1 • History

A history, as this book aspires to be, typically begins at the beginning. But where does Buddhism begin? As we shall see in the pages that follow, the Buddha famously declined to answer questions about origins and end-times. According to standard Buddhist doctrine, samsāra—the cycle of birth, death, and ˙ rebirth—has no beginning. And so, from the Buddhist perspective, history also does not. Such a doctrine has profound consequences for notions of time, of experience, of identity, and of history itself. For if birth has no beginning, the personal history of each creature in the universe extends back to infinity. Indeed, “creature” is the wrong word, for there was no one to create them. The events in the lives of these beings, both individually (biography) and collectively (history), are therefore so much repetition of the same, lacking uniqueness and, therefore, lacking what might be regarded as historical significance. How does one write history with such a historiography? This is not to say that Buddhists have not composed histories, although they are notably absent in India, the land where, to common sight, Buddhism began and lived for more than a millennium. This is not to say that Buddhists have not composed biographies, although with the important exception of the Buddha himself, we do not find the genre in India. When Buddhists recount the past, it is most often the past life of a particular person, most often the Buddha, who is said to have full recollection of the events of the past lives of himself and all sentient beings. Yet, this remarkable capacity, this total recall, this ability to recount what was said verbatim, these capacities that the historian craves, do not result in what we might call history. Without a creator God to damn the wicked and redeem the good, Buddhists require a theory to explain, in the language of the literature, why beings rise

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and fall through the realms of rebirth. How they do seems less important than that they do. Adverting so often to the law of karma, Buddhist accounts of the past above all explain the present. Like all religions, Buddhists recount, often in great detail, events that, at least from the evidence gathered by modern historians, did not occur. One thinks of the Exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt; the Isra’, the journey of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem in a single night; the resurrection of Jesus; and the great battle on the field of Kuruksetra where, as two huge ˙ armies stood arrayed ready for battle, Krishna drove his chariot between them and delivered the Bhagavad Gītā. In the case of Buddhism, there is the First Council, for example, when five hundred enlightened monks gathered in a cave for seven months to recite and then memorize everything that the Buddha had taught. And, there is, as some have suggested, the historicity of the Buddha himself. Yet each of these occurrences, even if they did not occur as they are recounted, are central to the identity of the traditions that they represent and to their histories as they tell them. One of the challenges for the historian of Buddhism, or any religion, is to grant these events the importance they deserve, while understanding the significance of their construction. As Michel de Certeau asks, “But what historical research does not set out from a legend?”1 The case of the emperor Aśoka provides a particularly important case study of this dilemma and so is considered in the first chapter here. The British East India Company, chartered by Elizabeth I in 1600, played an important role in the production of European knowledge of the religions of India. Much scholarship was produced by the company’s officers, rarely in projects related to their official duties. In modern parlance, we would call them amateur scholars. Sir William Jones (1746–1794), who announced the connections between Sanskrit and Greek, was a judge. Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765–1837), author of Essays on the Religion and Philosophy of the Hindus, started in India as a clerk, “a writer” in the parlance of the company, eventually becoming a revenue collector and later a judge. Charles Wilkins (1749–1836), translator of the Bhagavad Gītā, was a typographer. Horace Hayman Wilson (1786–1860), author of the first Sanskrit-English dictionary, was a surgeon, whose interests in metallurgy led him to be appointed as assay master. Empires require coins—coins that are not counterfeit. The assay master sets the standards and measures the purity. James Prinsep (1799–1840) was one of the ten children of John Prinsep, who had made his fortune as an indigo planter in India before returning to England. He arranged for his son to apprentice at the Royal Mint in London

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before sending him to India in 1819. James Prinsep would also work as an assay master at mints in Benares and Calcutta until his return to England. He was a skilled metallurgist, developing new techniques for testing the composition of metals. Like his fellow officers of the company, he developed a number of side pursuits including, as one might suspect, numismatics. An interest in ancient coins led to an interest in the words that were inscribed on them. Prinsep’s skills at deciphering ancient scripts would make him an unlikely contributor to the history of Buddhism, an officer of a modern “Western” empire who made a discovery about an ancient “Eastern” empire. On March 7, 1838, he addressed the Asiatic Society of Bengal. He began: As long as the study of Indian antiquities confines itself to the illustration of Indian history it must be confessed that it possesses little attraction for the general student, who is apt to regard the labour expended on the disentanglement of perplexing and contradictory mazes of fiction, as leading only to the substitution of vague and dry probabilities for poetical, albeit extravagant, fable. But the moment any name or event turns up in the course of such speculations offering a plausible point of connection between the legends of India and the rational histories of Greece or Rome—a collision between the fortunes of an eastern and western hero—forthwith a speedy and spreading interest is excited which cannot be satisfied until the subject is thoroughly sifted by the examination of all the ancient works, western and eastern, that can throw concurrent light on the matter at issue.2 We will have occasion to return to this passage later in this chapter. Before doing so, we must say something about the “eastern hero” to whom Prinsep alludes. In the almost two centuries since Prinsep’s lecture, tomes have been devoted to him. Here, we will devote a chapter to him, asking what he is able to tell us about the history of Buddhism. His name is Aśoka. In addition to War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man, H. G. Wells wrote the two-volume Outline of History. There, with some hyperbole, he writes, “Amidst the tens of thousands of names of monarchs that crowd the columns of history, their majesties and graciousnesses and serenities and royal highnesses and the like, the name of Asoka shines, and shines almost alone, a star.”3 Accounts of the life of Aśoka are preserved in both Sanskrit and Pāli. According to the Sanskrit account, Aśoka was a cruel king. He ordered his ministers to cut down all the flowering trees and fruit trees in the royal gardens, leaving only the thorn trees. His five hundred ministers refused, saying that it

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was the thorn trees that should be cut down. He drew his sword and beheaded them all. Aśoka’s body was rough to the touch; the women of the inner chamber found him repulsive and took no pleasure in caressing him. One day, when he was sleeping, they broke off the flowers and branches of his favorite tree. When Aśoka awoke and learned what had happened, he had the women burned alive. The chief minister went to the king and told him that these deeds of mass murder were damaging his reputation among his subjects, who had begun calling him Aśoka the Cruel. The minister did not seek to dissuade the king from killing those who displeased him; he instead counseled the king to appoint a royal executioner to do the deed. A young sadist was recruited for the position and built a structure with a beautiful exterior and a single entrance, calling it Pleasant Prison. Aśoka granted the executioner’s request that no one who entered would ever leave alive. The executioner then went to a Buddhist monastery, where he heard a monk describing the many horrors of hell, where demons make the damned swallow balls of burning iron. The executioner made careful note of these tortures and decided to inflict them on those who entered his prison. One day, a monk named Samudra was begging for alms in the capital. When he entered Pleasant Prison, he realized immediately that he had entered the wrong house. When he turned to leave, he was seized by the executioner and told that he would die there. The monk began to weep, saying that his opportunity to practice the teachings of the Buddha had been lost. He asked the executioner to delay his demise for one month; the executioner agreed to one week. On the seventh day, Aśoka observed a woman of the inner chamber conversing with a young man. Enraged with jealousy, he sent them to the Pleasant Prison, where the executioner crushed them with a giant mortar and pestle as the monk looked on. When nothing was left of them, the monk exclaimed that the Buddha was correct when he declared that the body is as ephemeral as a ball of foam, that only the insane would delight in its beauty. He understood that his imprisonment had in fact been fortuitous, for it gave him the opportunity to “cross the ocean of existence,” to achieve enlightenment. With the seven-day stay of execution over, the executioner threw the monk into a huge iron cauldron that he filled with water, blood, grease, urine, and excrement. He then lit a fire under the cauldron to boil the monk alive. Yet he heard no screams of pain. When he climbed to the top of the cauldron, he looked down to see the monk seated in meditation atop a large lotus blossom. The executioner summoned the king, who asked the monk who he was. The monk

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replied that he was a son of the Buddha, saying, “Tamed by the hero among men who has tamed himself, calmed by this sage who has himself reached the height of quietude, I have been freed from the bonds of existence by one who is delivered from the great terrors of the world.” The monk went on to inform the king that the Buddha himself had predicted that one hundred years after his passage into nirvāna, there would be a king named Aśoka who would dis˙ tribute his relics across the world. The monk recommended, however, that prior to taking on this august task, the king destroy the chamber of horrors where so many had died. The king apologized to the monk and, joining his palms in reverence to the Buddha, promised to perform his prophesied task. As the king began to leave, he was stopped by the executioner, who reminded him of his promise that no one who entered Pleasant Prison would ever leave. Incredulous, Aśoka asked the executioner if he was asking for permission to kill the king. When the executioner said that he was, Aśoka replied, “And which one of us entered here first?”4 As Aśoka departed, the executioner’s henchmen seized him and threw him into a pit of fire. Aśoka ordered that the prison be destroyed. At the time of his death, the Buddha’s body had been cremated and his relics distributed among eight groups of his followers, each of whom enshrined the relics in a stūpa. Leading his army, Aśoka went to the site of each of the first seven stūpas and extracted the relics. The custodians of the eighth stūpa, the serpent deities called nāgas, refused to provide their relics. Aśoka then divided the relics from the seven stūpas into eighty-four thousand shares, which he placed in eighty-four thousand boxes of gold, silver, crystal, and beryl and sealed each inside an urn. He then entrusted those urns to spirits called yaksas ˙ and instructed them to distribute the urns to all the cities on earth, to be enshrined in eighty-four thousand stūpas. He also sent an edict to each location. All of this was miraculously accomplished in one day. Aśoka next sought to make a pilgrimage to the sites of the major events in the life of the Buddha. He invited an esteemed monk named Upagupta to be his guide. When Upagupta arrived, Aśoka commented on his soft limbs, so different from his own rough skin. Upagupta explained that in a previous life, Aśoka, as a small boy, had placed a handful of earth in the begging bowl of the Buddha. The Buddha predicted that one hundred years after his passing, the child would be the great king Aśoka, who would rule the four quarters of the earth. Yet because he offered the Buddha dirt, his skin would be rough. Aśoka then asked Upagupta to take him on a tour of the important places in the Buddha’s life. They started at Lumbinī, the place of the Buddha’s birth, and ended at Kuśinagara, the place of the Buddha’s passage into nirvāna, where ˙

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Aśoka fainted, so overwhelmed was he with devotion. At several of the places, Upagupta summoned a long-lived demigod who had been witness to the Buddha’s deeds to describe the Buddha to Aśoka. Along the way, the king offered large sums of gold and erected shrines at the place of the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, first sermon, and passage into nirvāna. Next, he had Upagupta ˙ take him to the stūpas of the Buddha’s chief disciples, which he also honored with offerings of gold. Aśoka was particularly devoted to the Bodhi Tree, where the Buddha sat on the night of his enlightenment. He loved it so much that his queen became jealous and enlisted a witch to kill the tree. Aśoka discovered the plot in time to save it, digging a trench around the tree and filling it with a hundred thousand vases of milk. He later convened a great assembly of monks but was puzzled when the seat of the most senior monk was vacant. He was informed that this was the seat of the monk Pindola, the only monk still alive who saw the Buddha in the flesh. ˙˙ The Buddha had ordered him not to pass into nirvāna as long as his teaching ˙ remained in the world. When the aged monk arrived, his eyebrows so long that he had to raise them with his hands to see the king, he recounted a number of episodes from the life of the Buddha that he witnessed, including a small boy placing a handful of earth into the Buddha’s begging bowl. Aśoka would make extravagant gifts to the assembly of monks for the remainder of his reign, on one occasion presenting them with four hundred thousand robes at the end of the annual rains retreat. He would give his lands, his wives, his son, and his ministers to the assembly and then ransom them back with gold from his treasury. As he grew old, his grandson, the heir apparent, became alarmed at Aśoka’s depletion of the royal coffers. He rescinded the king’s orders to make donations to the monks. In the end, Aśoka was left with only half of a myrobalan fruit, which he sent as an offering to the monastery near his capital. This is the (greatly abbreviated) account of the life of Aśoka that appears in the Sanskrit text whose title is often translated as the Legend of Aśoka (Aśokā­ vadāna). It is a story well known across the world of Sanskrit Buddhism (India, Nepal, Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan) and known in Europe since it was recounted by Eugène Burnouf in French in 1844. Despite the English rendering of its title as “legend,” it is presented as a historical account. It is not. And yet Aśoka was a historical figure. We find a different account of the life of Aśoka in Pāli, the canonical language of the Buddhist traditions of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. There, in

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the Mahāvamsa, the Great Chronicle of the island of Sri Lanka, Buddhism is ˙ brought to the island by Aśoka’s children, the monk Mahinda and the nun San˙ghamittā. The story of Aśoka himself is briefer and only somewhat less violent. One of a hundred sons of Bindusāra, he ascends to the throne after murdering his ninety-nine brothers. The text mentions that his coronation occurred 218 years after the Buddha passed into nirvāna. One day, he sees a seven˙ year-old Buddhist monk, already an arhat, walking through the city. Unbeknownst to the king, the monk, whose name is Nigrodha, is his nephew, the son of one of the brothers he had had killed. Impressed by his demeanor, Aśoka invites the monk to the palace, where he converts him to Buddhism. Aśoka, who had been providing alms for sixty thousand brahmin priests, shifts his charity to sixty thousand Buddhist monks. Learning that there are eighty-four thousand sections to the Buddha’s dharma, he vows to build eighty-four thousand monasteries (vihāras) around the world, dispersing the funds to the kings of eighty-four thousand towns, a task that was completed in three years. He himself builds a monastery called Aśokārama, the “garden of Aśoka.” There, at a great festival attended by many millions of monks and nuns, those who had achieved enlightenment performed a miracle, granting the king a vision called unveiling the world (lokavivarana), which allowed him to survey the en˙ tire continent of Jambudvīpa.5 There is a third account of Aśoka, one that is unknown in Buddhist texts. Here, we must return to James Prinsep. The British had discovered a number of inscriptions in various regions of India, some carved onto pillars, some onto the faces of rocks. Prinsep was able to decipher the script, called Brahmī, finding that the inscriptions seemed to be written in the name of a king called Devānampiye Piyadasi, which might be translated as “Beloved of the Gods, Who ˙ Looks with Kindness.” Other inscriptions mentioned a king named Piyadasi. Prinsep assumed that Piyadasi was a Sri Lankan king. So convinced was Prinsep of the importance of the inscriptions that he described Sri Lanka in 1837 as “the very first meridian when the true longitude of all ancient Indian history seems destined to be calculated.” However, George Turnour, another officer of the East India Company serving in Sri Lanka (at that time, the British colony of Ceylon), while translating the Mahāvamsa, discovered that “Beloved of the ˙ Gods” was an epithet of an Indian king named Aśoka, who was credited with bringing Buddhism to the island.6 The name “Aśoka” would later be discovered in one of the Indian inscriptions. The Sri Lankan chronicle also reported that Aśoka was the grandson of Candragupta (who would be identified as the founder of the Mauryan Dynasty), and that Aśoka had ascended to the throne

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218 years after the Buddha passed into nirvāna. Here, it seemed, was some ˙ history. The passage from Prinsep that opens this chapter mildly mocks the uninterest of Europeans in Indian history until the name of a Greek or Roman king is mentioned in an Indian source. The discovery that he announces in his speech is the mention of the Greek king Antiochus II—who ruled the Seleucid Empire from 286 to 246 BCE—in one of the Aśokan inscriptions. Aśoka’s grandfather Candragupta is identified in Greek sources as Sandracottus. Without the classical connection, Prinsep notes, the laborious work of deciphering the Indian sources, what he calls “the disentanglement of perplexing and contradictory mazes of fiction,” results in nothing more than “the substitution of vague and dry probabilities for poetical, albeit extravagant, fable.” In the two versions of the life of Aśoka, one from India, one from Sri Lanka, we certainly find elements of fable. Yet his rock edicts continue to provide all manner of important information for the student of ancient India. Only two of those can be considered here, yet two whose importance is difficult to overstate. The first is that the edicts of the emperor Aśoka—thirty-four of which have been discovered carved on rocks, pillars, and the walls of caves—are (setting aside the still undeciphered symbols on the Harappan seals) the earliest surviving written records from ancient India. And it is among these inscriptions that we find the earliest mention of the Buddha and of Buddhism. Although these edicts are of great importance to the history of Buddhism, we note that they are classed as “minor edicts.” The primary purpose of the Aśokan inscriptions was to serve as writs of royal policy. In these “major edicts” in which he speaks as head of state, Buddhism is not mentioned. The second thing that the inscriptions provide is something essential for a history of Buddhism. It is in the minor edicts, where he refers to himself by his personal name, that the emperor provides elements of a biography. It is a biography very different from those preserved in Buddhist sources, with elements that seem to have remained unknown to Buddhists for centuries, indeed, unknown until they were deciphered by an officer of the East India Company and a subject of the newly crowned Queen Victoria. In 1844, Eugène Burnouf, holder of the chair in Sanskrit at the Collège de France, would publish the first European attempt to tell the history of Buddhism in India. It was Burnouf’s belief that it was with the Buddha that India emerged from the realm of myth and into the realm of history. As he wrote, “The history of India begins to become clear only in the epoch of Śākyamuni. Starting with this sage, central India is covered with truly historical monuments and inscriptions; one sees

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precious synchronisms being established between this country and the history of Occidental peoples.”7 His proof was the Aśokan inscriptions that he knew from Prinsep and the stories of Aśoka that he himself translated. It was Aśoka, he believed, who would allow the world to do what was essential to place the Buddha in history: to set his dates. For Burnouf, this was the most pressing need, not just for the study of Buddhism but for the study of South Asian history. Referring to the Buddhist councils and the appearance of the Mahāyāna sūtras, he wrote, “We lack, in short, the fundamental point from which we must proceed to place them in the annals of India and of the world. . . . It is the death of Śākyamuni, the last buddha; here is the major fact that sets the foundation for the entire historical development of Buddhism.”8 As noted above, two dates appear in the Buddhist sources for Aśoka’s birth, both using what would become the standard Buddhist means of measuring time: the number of years not from the birth of the Buddha but from his death. In the Sanskrit source, the Buddha predicts that a boy who put dirt in his begging bowl will become a king named Aśoka one hundred years after he passes into nirvāna.9 The Pāli source says that Aśoka will be crowned king 218 years ˙ after the Buddha’s passage. Scholars place the coronation date around 268 BCE. Thus, given that Buddhist sources say that the Buddha lived for eighty years, his dates would be 448 to 368 BCE (based on the Sanskrit source) or 566 to 486 BCE (based on the Pāli source). As discussed in the introduction to this volume, those dates for the Buddha have been called into question, with many scholars estimating that the Buddha died around 400 BCE. Despite Burnouf’s fixation on the date, more important is what we learn about the state of Buddhism during Aśoka’s reign. We learn that the Buddha was esteemed by the emperor, who declared in one inscription, “All that the bhagavan Buddha has spoken, O monks, is well spoken.” We learn that the cult of the Buddha was sufficiently revered that the sites of his birth, first sermon, enlightenment, and passage into nirvāna were well-established pilgrimage ˙ places, with Aśoka erecting pillars at all four and personally visiting two. We learn that there was something of a canon, with Aśoka recommending to monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen seven Buddhist “discourses of the dharma” by name; no sūtras by those names are found in the surviving canon, although scholars have speculated as to their relation to existing works.10 Perhaps as important as the titles of the texts is Aśoka’s implication that he is listing them so that the Buddha’s teachings will last long. In order to establish the antiquity of their religion, especially in competition with the adherents of the eternal Veda, the Buddhists needed to declare the

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existence of previous buddhas, each of whom had taught the same dharma, with the teaching of that buddha disappearing completely from the world, after which a new buddha would appear to restore it. There are various lists of previous buddhas, among whom is Konāgamana (Kanakamuni in Sanskrit), listed ˙ as the second of the five buddhas of the present eon. Our buddha, Gautama Buddha, is the fourth, with Maitreya, the future buddha, the fifth. It is fascinating to note that among the inscriptions of Aśoka is a pillar at Nigali Sagar, discovered in 1895, which states that he doubled the size of the stūpa of Konāgamana in the ˙ fourteenth year of his reign and visited it in the twentieth year; this is the only reference to a stūpa in his inscriptions. Thus, the cult of the previous buddhas was already sufficiently established that there was a stūpa for Konāgamana; this ˙ stūpa was sufficiently famous that an emperor would visit it, and sufficiently old that it needed to be enlarged. The fragments of the pillar seem to have been moved from another site seven miles away, where there is indeed a brick stūpa. When excavated, it was found to contain animal bones.11 From all this one would assume that Buddhism was well-established in India at the time of Aśoka and that the emperor himself was a Buddhist. Here, again, there is much to say. Nowhere in the major and minor rock edicts and pillar inscriptions do we find the story of the cruel king being converted by a monk, whether it be a monk sitting on a lotus in a torture chamber, as in the Sanskrit version, or a seven-year-old arhat whom he passed on the street, as in the Pāli version. Still, there is a famous story of a conversion experience. It appears that Aśoka’s empire was vast, encompassing all of modern India (except for the southern tip) and Pakistan as well as much of modern Afghanistan. One region remained unconquered: Kalinga on the eastern coast of India, in what is today Odisha. In Major Rock Edict 13, Aśoka states that in the eighth year of his reign, he conquered Kalinga, leading to the deaths of one hundred thousand people, with one hundred fifty thousand taken prisoner and deported, and many more dying of other causes. He regrets the suffering that is caused by warfare, not only to the brāhmana-śramana—a term generally thought ˙ ˙ to encompass the religious professionals of his day, including both brahmin priests and various ascetic (śramana) groups, which would include both Bud˙ dhists and Jains—but also to their families and adherents. In the edict, he says that his remorse caused him to renounce military conquest and devote himself to a different form of conquest, what he calls dharmavijaya, conquest by the dharma. What he means by “dharma” here has long been a topic of debate. There is good reason to believe that this multivalent term was not used by the emperor, regardless of his own respect for the Buddha, to mean the teachings

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of the Buddha; it seems instead to mean something closer to “morality.” In those edicts that were translated into Greek and Aramaic, “dharma” is translated as “piety” (to parents or gods) and as “truth,” respectively. This is not to say that Aśoka did not explicitly express his allegiance to the Buddha, his teachings, and the monastic community. In Minor Rock Edict 1, Aśoka describes himself as an upāsaka, a lay Buddhist, saying that he had become one, presumably through a refuge ceremony, two and a half years earlier, but that he had strived more vigorously and visited the san˙gha in the past year. This edict is found in eighteen sites across his large kingdom. In Rock Edict 8, from the same year, he reports that he visited Bodh Gayā. In the socalled Schism Edict, he says that division in the san˙gha should not be allowed and that a monk or nun who causes a division will be returned to lay life.12 All of this would indicate that Buddhism was well-established in much of India by the time of Aśoka’s reign. Yet there is no archaeological evidence of Buddhist monasteries dating from his time, suggesting that the Buddha was famous enough for the sites of his birth, enlightenment, first teaching, and death to be places of pilgrimage, but that his community of monks and nuns was still largely a community of wandering mendicants. This despite canonical accounts of monasteries being established during the Buddha’s lifetime. The Aśoka of the edicts has been the subject of extensive scholarship for almost two centuries. Yet, he remains something of an enigma. Was he a great emperor, as the Buddhist sources tell us, or a minor king who brought about the end of the dynasty founded by his grandfather? His grandfather is mentioned in Greek sources. Aśoka is not. Was he an equal-opportunity supporter of the religions of his realm, a particular partisan of the Buddhists, or something of both? He praises the Buddha and admonishes the san˙gha, but he does not use the term “dharma,” the second of the Buddhist three jewels, in the context of Buddhism. He donates caves to the Ājīvikas, a rival sect that his father had supported, but he does not seem to have offered caves to the Buddhists. Buddhist sources, of course, portray him as an ardent Buddhist. In the Sanskrit account of his life, he has eighteen thousand Jains executed because one of them drew a picture of the Buddha bowing to the Jain founder. In the Pāli account, Aśoka sends out nine monks to “convert the regions.” If he was a Buddhist, what was his Buddhism? In the edicts, there is mention of heaven and hell, but no mention of rebirth or nirvāna, concepts so central to Buddhist iden˙ tity. Between 256 to 241, Buddhism is not mentioned in any of his inscriptions. Yet he would have six pillars erected between his capital Pataliputra (modern Patna) and Lumbinī, the site of the Buddha’s birth, which he visited in 248.

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These are questions that scholars continue to ponder; they cannot, sadly, be resolved here.13 What is important to ponder for the pages that follow is how one would go about writing the history of Aśoka, given the three versions we have discussed here. The two Buddhist versions, one in Sanskrit, one in Pāli, tell very different stories. As we have seen, they differ in how he became a Buddhist, in the names of his children, the names of the monks he revered, whether he established eighty-four thousand stūpas or eighty-four thousand vihāras, and many other details. Perhaps more importantly, neither the Sanskrit version nor the Pāli version shows any knowledge of the inscriptions; the story of the emperor’s remorse after the Kalinga War is unknown to them. The various stories and personages found in the Buddhist stories are not mentioned in the edicts. This suggests that the authors of the stories, or at least some of those authors, visited the famous sites where the Aśokan pillars stood but could not read them. The most famous of the Chinese pilgrims to India, Faxian (337–422) and Xuanzang (602–664), mention the pillars; they know that they bear the words of Aśoka, but are wrong about what the inscriptions say. By the time of Faxian, not only was the story of Aśoka known in China, but it was believed that some of his eighty-four thousand stūpas were to be found there.14 Was it that the Brahmī script of the inscriptions was indecipherable at the time that the Sanskrit and Pāli biographies of Aśoka were composed, or that the content of the pillars did not serve their purpose? The Sanskrit version is concerned above all with the relics of the Buddha— how Aśoka collected relics from seven of the stūpas built after the Buddha’s passage into nirvāna and made eighty-four thousand stūpas, now found across ˙ Asia. The Pāli version is concerned above all with creating a link between Sri Lanka and Aśoka: that it was Aśoka’s son who established the order of monks there; that it was Aśoka’s daughter who established the order of nuns; and that this daughter brought with her a cutting of the Bodhi Tree before it was destroyed in India. In both accounts, Aśoka is a cakravartin, a wheel-turning emperor, a term that does not appear in the edicts, where Aśoka shows no hesitation to praise himself. Which of these three—the Sanskrit story, the Pāli story, or the story from the inscriptions—would be considered the more accurate history? Since we know that Aśoka was a historical figure and that his edicts contain the oldest reference to the Buddha and to Buddhism, this is a crucial question. The Sanskrit and the Pāli stories, so filled with miracle and wonder, might be dismissed as mere legend, lacking the weight of the words carved in stone. The history

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told by deciphering those words, words that were carved in stone centuries before the Buddhist tales were told, is also a history that is motivated. It is a history told by colonial officers and the Orientalists who read them, who believed they had discovered a new classical civilization that would lead to a new Renaissance. That Burnouf wrote the first history of Indian Buddhism in the wake of the French Revolution and with an unconcealed contempt for the Roman Catholic Church cannot be ignored. As he told his student Max Müller, “I am a brahmin, a Buddhist. I hate the Jesuits.”15 Burnouf would go on to paint the portrait of the Buddha that we know and love today, the Buddha who was born in history, not in myth. He was born as a human—not a demon or a god—a man who had challenged the authority of the Hindu church of his day. This man sought freedom from suffering, through his own efforts, without the need for God. And having found it, he taught not a religion but a philosophy, a philosophy that led to freedom. He established a brotherhood of monks and a sisterhood of nuns, offering his teachings to members of all castes and classes, to men and to women. Liberty, fraternity, equality. There are reasons to question each of the elements of this portrait. However, for the purposes of writing a history of Buddhism, we must first acknowledge the irony here. For centuries, Buddhists, both in India and elsewhere in Asia, worshipped stūpas that they believed had been established by Aśoka, represented throughout Asia as the greatest of the Buddhist kings, serving as a model for many. In India, Tibet, and East Asia, they knew his story primarily from the Sanskrit version described here. In Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, they knew his story primarily from the Pāli version also described here. As we have noted, those versions tell very different stories. Over the centuries, Buddhists made pilgrimages to Lumbinī, where the Buddha was born; to Bodh Gayā, where the Buddha was enlightened; to Sarnath, where the Buddha gave his first sermon; to Kuśinagara, where the Buddha passed into nirvāna. There, ˙ they walked past pillars, some inscribed with the words of Aśoka himself, words carved during Aśoka’s lifetime, and thus the oldest, and, some might therefore argue, the most authentic of all Buddhist writing; the pillar at Lumbinī states that he visited the site twenty years after his coronation, typically dated to 268 BCE. And yet they could not read them, as the script in which they were written had passed into oblivion. They needed to wait for a colonial officer from a foreign invader to decipher them, not for Buddhists, but for his fellow Orientalists, who would exalt ancient Buddhists in order to debase the Buddhists of their own time. There is a long history of European writers claiming that India has no history,

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lamenting the lack of historical sources, often identifying a twelfth-century text by Kalhana called the River of Kings (Rājataran˙ginī)—a verse chronicle of ˙ ˙ the kings of Kashmir beginning from the third millennium BCE—as the only historical work composed in Sanskrit. This complaint about the absence of historical writing, however, is not limited to European Orientalists. The eleventh-century Persian Al-Bīrūnī was one of the most remarkable scholars in history, making important contributions to astronomy (a crater of the moon and an asteroid are named after him) and mathematics, as well as linguistics. He was also a prominent and prolific historian. In 1017, while serving as his court astronomer, Al-Bīrūnī accompanied Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) in his raids into India. Al-Bīrūnī learned Sanskrit and wrote the famous History of India (Tārīkh al-Hind). There he writes, “Unfortunately the Hindus do not pay much attention to the historical order of things, they are careless in relating the chronological succession of their kings, and when they are pressed for information and are at a loss, not knowing what to say, they invariably take to story-telling.”16 As discussed in the introduction to this volume, although we find chronicles in the literature of many Buddhist lands, there are very few Buddhist works from ancient India that we would classify as “historical documents.” What we have, most often, are legends. This does not mean, however, that we cannot use legends to write history. In 1952, Jorge Luis Borges published a short essay about the Buddha, which he called “Forms of a Legend.” There he wrote, “Reality may be too complex for oral transmission; legends re-create it in a way that is only accidentally false and which permits it to travel through the world from mouth to mouth.”17

2 • Apocalypse

When Henry A. Wallace (1888–1965) is remembered positively today, he is remembered for his work as secretary of agriculture from 1933 to 1940, during the first and second terms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency. These years were the depth of the Depression and the devastation of American farming communities. As secretary, Wallace supported the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act in 1937, which provided loans to sharecroppers in the South. He had a strong interest in botany throughout his life, crediting his fascination to walks he would take as a child with George Washington Carver, who boarded in the Wallace home while Carver was a student at Iowa Agricultural College (now Iowa State University). In 1940, when FDR ran for an unprecedented third term as president, Wallace was his running mate, serving during the critical years of America’s entry into the Second World War and playing a leading role in the mobilization of the U.S. military. FDR ran for a fourth term in 1944. With the war still raging and Roosevelt’s health rapidly declining, the selection of his running mate was particularly important. There was opposition to Wallace within the Democratic Party, among some for his condemnation of segregation, among others for his religious views. At the Democratic National Convention, although Wallace received the majority of votes on the first ballot, it was not enough to win the nomination. On the second ballot, support shifted to Harry Truman, who would become president when FDR died on April 12, 1945. Truman asked Wallace to remain in his cabinet as secretary of commerce, but later demanded his resignation because of Wallace’s criticism of Truman’s confrontation with the Soviet Union. In 1948, Wallace ran for president as the candidate of the newly formed

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Progressive Party, with the support of such notable figures as Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, Lillian Hellman, W. E. B. DuBois, Aaron Copland, and Norman Mailer, as well as a number of actors and writers who had been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Wallace won 2.4 percent of the vote. His slim chances for victory were damaged by the publication of excerpts from more than 150 letters that Wallace had written years before, known to history as the Guru Letters because some of them began, “Dear Guru.” One letter, dated April 17, 1934, ended, “In humility and daring, with insight and continual striving may I join in the service to Shamballa.”1 When Henry A. Wallace is remembered derisively today, it is because of these letters. On September 7, 1875, at 46 Irving Place in New York, a group of friends who called themselves the Miracle Club decided to found what would become the Theosophical Society. The meeting was hosted in the apartment of a Russian émigré and spirit medium, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891). The goals of the society included the formation of a universal brotherhood without distinctions of race, creed, sex, caste, or color; the encouragement of studies in comparative religion, philosophy, and science; and the investigation of “the unexplained laws of Nature and the powers latent in man.” From its humble beginnings, the Theosophical Society would come to inspire many of the great artists, writers, and musicians of the fin de siècle period, extending far into the twentieth century. Madame Blavatsky would later claim to be in communication with a group of enlightened masters whom she called by the Sanskrit name “mahatma” (great soul). From their abode in Tibet, they conveyed to her, often in letters that magically materialized, the teachings of Theosophy (Greek for “knowledge of God”), the ancient truths that lay at the foundation of the mystical traditions of all religions. Two of the masters were frequent correspondents: Master Koot Hoomi and Master Morya. The founding of the Theosophical Society was a sign, and perhaps a symptom, of the idea of the deep unity of all religions, religions that draw from a single source of truth. For Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophists, there had once been a single religion from which all religions had evolved, or rather devolved, a religion that was still visible, for those with eyes to see, in the mystical teachings of the mahatmas, some of whom were counted as founders and saints of various religions, including the Buddha, Jesus, the Hindu master Śan˙kara, and the Tibetan monk Tsongkhapa. She was not alone in her unifying and universalizing vision, nor was it lim-

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ited to the West. In India, the Bengali saint Ramakrishna Paramhansa (1836– 1886) would declare that all religions are one, a message delivered to him not by a mahatma but discovered through his own experience: practicing Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and various strands of Hinduism; practicing as male and as female; and finding the same experience at their core, the same life-giving water known by different names. After his death, his teachings were published in English in 1907 as The Gospel of Ramakrishna by his disciple Swami Abhedananda (1866–1939).2 Ramakrishna’s disciples took his message around the world as missionaries, the most famous being the formidable Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902). Despite their inclusion in these visions, Buddhists tended to resist the ecumenical embrace. In 1906, Anagārika Dharmapāla (1864–1933)—at the time, the most famous Buddhist in the West and a former member of the Theosophical Society, having been initiated by Madame Blavatsky herself—published an essay entitled “Can a Buddhist Be a Member of the Theosophical Society?” The short answer was “no.” Buddhism bore no historical relation to any other religion, and thus a “conscientious Buddhist who is well versed in Buddhist lore can no more sympathise with the principles of Theosophy than with the teachings of Christ, Muhammad, Krishna and Moses.”3 Ramakrishna’s universalist vision was also met with a certain disdain. The Tibetan scholar Gendun Chopel (1903–1951) wrote of Ramakrishna, “Because he did not offend any of the religions, today is a period in which his teachings are flourishing like the lambs of a rich man. In general, when there are many scholars upholding different religious traditions, they regard each other as enemies, even on subtle philosophical points. Once these scholars are no more, and after their subtle and refined reasoning has disappeared, all boundaries will become mixed into a single flavor, giving rise to something that is easy for anyone to follow. This seems to be the supreme achievement of fools.”4 Despite this resistance, Buddhism, and especially Tibetan Buddhism, would come to play a key role in these universalist claims. In 1894, a Crimean journalist named Nicolas Notovitch published a book called The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ (La vie inconnue de Jésus-Christ). There, he explained that while recuperating from an equestrian accident at Hemis Monastery in Ladakh in 1887, he learned that Jesus had spent the so-called lost years—the eighteen years between his disputation with the elders at age twelve and his baptism by John at age thirty—in India, where he studied Buddhism. An account of his time there was preserved in Tibetan in a work called The Life

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of Saint Issa: The Best of the Sons of Men. According to Notovitch, the abbot of Hemis told him: Issa is a great prophet, one of the first after the twenty-two Buddhas; he is greater than any of the Dalaï-Lamas, for he constitutes part of the spirituality of the Lord. It is he who has instructed you, who has brought back frivolous souls to God, who has rendered you worthy of the blessings of the Creator, who has endowed each creature with the knowledge of good and evil. His name and his deeds have been recorded in our sacred writings, and, whilst reading of his great existence spent in the midst of an erring people, we weep over the horrible sin of the pagans, who assassinated him after putting him to the most cruel tortures. . . . The principal rolls—written in India and Nepal at different epochs, according to the course of events—are at Lassa [Lhasa, the capital of Tibet] and number many thousands. In some of the larger convents, there are copies made by the Lamas at different periods during their stay at Lassa, and later presented to their convents as souvenirs of their visits to the great master, our the Dalaï-Lama.5 A number of elements of this passage should give us pause, beginning with the fact that the diction and vocabulary are not that of a Tibetan monk. In addition, according to the Chronicle of the Buddhas (Buddhavamsa), a Pāli text that ˙ Tibetans do not know, there have been twenty-five, not twenty-two buddhas. Tibetan texts are preserved on xylographs, not scrolls. And Hemis Monastery is a domain of the Drukpa Kagyü sect, which has no particular love for the dalai lamas. Yet Notovitch’s book, quickly translated into English, German, Spanish, and Italian, created a sufficient sensation that Max Müller, the most famous Orientalist of the day, felt compelled to publish a detailed refutation.6 Still, the story lives on, on websites and in books and documentaries, into the twenty-­ first century. That Notovitch perpetrated a hoax is not particularly interesting. The more important question is why it was so quickly believed. We recall that the late nineteenth century was a time of race theory and academic anti-Semitism, with scholars of the stature of Ernest Renan seeking to explain away the Jewishness of Jesus.7 That Jesus escaped from the rabbis to spend his formative years with Aryan Buddhist monks in India was one solution to the problem, although likely not intended by Notovitch himself, who was a Russian Jew. The more interesting possibility for the popularity of The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ is that it sought to provide documentary evidence of the universalism espoused by

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everyone from Madame Blavatsky to Swami Vivekananda. We therefore should not be surprised to learn that another of Ramakrishna’s leading disciples, his biographer Swami Abhedananda, traveled to Tibet in 1922, where he claimed to see the Tibetan text of The Life of Saint Issa, describing it in his travelogue written in Bengali, Kashmir and Tibet (Kaśmīra o Tibbate). Which brings us to another Nicholas. Nicholas Roerich was born in 1874 and died in 1947. Prior to the Russian Revolution, he was a well-known painter, designing the sets and costumes for Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, which premiered in Paris in 1913, drawing jeers from the audience on opening night. His wife, Elena Shaposhnikova (1879–1955), translated Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine into Russian and claimed to be in constant communication with Master Morya (first through séances and automatic writing, and later in visions—brought on by what she called “fiery headaches”—while staring at his portrait). After the Russian Revolution, the family traveled widely, with extended stays in London and New York, where Nicholas Roerich was feted as a painter and Elena promoted what she called Agni Yoga (also called Living Ethics), a philosophy that she said had been transmitted to her by Master Morya. In Jazz Age New York, they were spiritual celebrities, gathering a circle of wealthy patrons and devoted disciples, attracted by what seemed to be an irresistible merging of mysticism and art. They soon established the Master Institute of United Arts in a studio above a Greek Orthodox church on West Fifty-Fourth Street as well as the Nicholas Roerich Museum; in 1923, it was the only museum in the United States devoted to a single artist. But something more grand was needed. One of their disciples, the wealthy financier Louis Horch, acquired property on Riverside Drive and arranged the financing for a twenty-seven-story art deco building, designed by Harvey Wiley Corbett, a noted architect of the day. Corbett refused the Roerichs’ demand, transmitted to Elena by Master Morya, that the building be crowned with a golden stūpa. The skyscraper was to house art studios, offices, galleries, and an auditorium on the first three floors, and apartments for artists above. It was called the Master Building, named after Master Morya, and remains the tallest building on Riverside Drive. It opened to great fanfare in June 1929, with a grand reception attended by Jimmy Walker, the flamboyant mayor of New York. Three days later, Nicholas Roerich went to Washington to meet with President Herbert Hoover, explaining to him the importance of Central Asia and the racial and cultural affinity of Mongolians and Native Americans. The stock market would crash a few months later.

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To understand Roerich’s fascination with Central Asia, we must now leave New York and go to India, where the Roerichs, again with the financial support of their American disciples, had built an estate for themselves in the Kulu Valley, which they dubbed the Urusvati Himalayan Research Institute. (“Urusvati” was Elena’s esoteric name, said to mean “morning star” in Sanskrit. In fact, the term is not attested in Sanskrit.) Their son Yuri (or George) had completed his studies in Oriental languages, first at the University of London, then at Harvard, and finally at Paris with Sylvain Lévi and Paul Pelliot, receiving an MA in Indian Philology in 1923. The Roerichs would establish the Journal of the Urusvati Himalayan Research Institute of the Roerich Museum, where George published an article entitled “Studies in the Kālacakra” in 1931. In 1833, the Transylvanian scholar Alexander Csoma de Kőrös (1784–1842) had written, “The peculiar religious system entitled the Kála-Chakra is stated, generally, to have been derived from Shambhala, as it is called in Sanscrit (in Tibetan ‘bdé-hbyung,’ vulgó ‘dè-jung,’ signifying ‘origin or source of happiness’) a fabulous country in the north, the capital of which was Cálapa, a very splendid city, the residence of many illustrious kings of Shambhala, situated between 45° and 50° north latitude, beyond the Sita or Jaxartes, where the increase of the days from the vernal equinox till the summer solstice amounted to 12 Indian hours, or 4 hours, 48 minutes, European reckoning.”8 In his catalogue of the Tibetan canon, Csoma would describe the Kālacakra Tantra as “the first original work of a Tantrika system that originated in the north, in the fabulous Shambhala.”9 The Kālacakra Tantra is the most famous text of the final centuries of Buddhism’s institutional presence in India. It seems to have been composed between 1025 and 1040 CE, that is, almost a millennium and a half after the passing of the Buddha. And yet, its authors represent it as the teaching of the historical Buddha. It would come to be regarded as such by many, especially in Tibet, where it held a particular importance. The Kālacakra Tantra is renowned for many things, including its calendrics, astrology, physiology, and yogic practice of “empty images.” Here, however, we will focus on the tantra’s creation myth and on the apocalyptic battle between good and evil that it foretells. In the tantra, Sucandra, the ruler of the kingdom of Śambhala, located somewhere beyond the Himalayas, travels to Vulture Peak in India, where he asks the Buddha to teach him how to practice the dharma as a monarch, without having to renounce his throne (as the Buddha himself had done as Prince Siddhārtha). Instead of teaching him there, the Buddha, although remaining on Vulture Peak in his monastic guise, also emanates himself in the form of the

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deity Kālacakra, blue in color, with four faces, twenty-four arms, and two legs, in union with his consort Viśvamātā (Mother of All). He appears in this form far to the southeast at Dhānyakat aka (near modern-day Amarāvatī). Here, he ˙ teaches Sucandra (and a large audience) the Kālacakra Tantra. The king memorizes it, returns to Śambhala, and transcribes it in twelve thousand verses, also writing a commentary in sixty thousand verses. Sucandra builds a mandala ˙˙ of the buddha Kālacakra in the middle of the capital and propagates the teaching throughout its 960 million villages, creating something of a Buddhist pure land on earth. The kingdom of Śambhala is shaped like a giant lotus and filled with sandalwood forests and lotus lakes, all encircled by a great range of snowy peaks. In the center of the kingdom is the capital, Kalapa, where the luster of the palaces, made from gold, silver, and jewels, outshines the moon; the walls of the palaces are plated with mirrors that reflect a light so bright that night is like day. The inhabitants are ruled by a beneficent ruler, called the Kalkin. The laypeople are all beautiful and wealthy, free of sickness and poverty; the monks maintain their vows without the slightest infraction. They are naturally intelligent and virtuous, devoted to the practice of the Vajrayāna, although all authentic forms of Indian Buddhism are preserved. Like the pure land of the buddha Amitābha, the majority of those reborn there attain buddhahood during their lifetime in Śambhala. The eighth king of Śambhala composed a condensed version of the Kālacakra Tantra. Over time, Sucandra’s transcription of the original tantra and his commentary were lost, leaving the condensed version as the only surviving record. This is the text known today as the Kālacakra Tantra. This text eventually made its way from Śambhala to India. This is said to account for the late appearance of this teaching of Śākyamuni Buddha. Just as the perfection of wisdom (prajñāpāramitā) sūtras were said to have been safeguarded for centuries by the nāgas beneath the sea, the tantra was preserved by the kings of Śambhala beyond the snowy range. As in many sūtras and tantras, the Buddha makes a prophecy in the Kālacakra Tantra. Here, he predicts that in fourteen hundred years, the “religion of the barbarians” will appear in the world. The term is “mlecchadharma”; “mleccha” is a common Sanskrit term for a foreigner, more specifically, someone from beyond the boundaries of Sanskritic caste and culture. The Buddha offers a wealth of detail about this barbarian religion. It will be introduced by one Madhumatī in the city of Vāgadā in the land of Makha—in other words, by Muhammad in the city of Baghdad in the land of Mecca (the Buddha’s om-

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niscience in this case does not appear to extend to geography). This Madhumatī is the incarnation, the avatāra, of the god Rahman. The Buddha goes on ˙ to describe the religion and practices of Islam in some detail and with relative accuracy, providing what appears to be a Shi’a list of prophets, beginning with Adam (arda) and ending with the Mahdī (mathanī ). The Muslims are described as honest, clean, and brave in battle, but their practices are described as bizarre. They believe in heaven and hell but reject the doctrine of rebirth; they pray five times a day after bathing; they practice animal sacrifice; they destroy the images of Hindus and Buddhists; they reject the caste system; they eat camels, horses, and cattle; a man marries his paternal uncle’s daughter; and they “cut the skin from the tips of their penises as a cause for happiness in heaven.”10 The Buddha’s condemnation of Islam extends to the rendering of names. The authors of the Kālacakra Tantra do not seem to have known Arabic, and thus they transliterate rather than translate the names of God and his prophets, doing their best to render the sounds into Sanskrit. However, even this becomes an occasion for condemnation. Muhammad becomes Madhumatī. The word “madhu” means “honey,” but it can also mean “fermented honey”; it is a cognate of the English “mead.” The word “mati” means “mind.” Thus, in medieval England, “madhumatī” would have meant one with a “mind of mead” or, in contemporary parlance, “wino.” Theirs is a religion of violence that worships the God of Death (māradevatā). The Arabic “Bismillāh” (in the name of God) becomes “visavimlā” (withered by poison); “Mahdī” is “mathanī” (de˙ stroyer); “Abraham” is “varāhī” (swineherd); “Moses” is “mūsa” (mouse). ˙ The Buddha goes on to predict that the descendants of Muhammad will destroy sixty-eight sacred sites and places of pilgrimage, a rather precise number for a prediction made more than a millennium and a half in the past. This barbarian religion is clearly a threat to the true dharma. And so, the Buddha not only prophesies the coming of Muhammad but the Muslim incursions into India, stating that “the corruption of the philosophies (siddhānta) on the entire surface of the earth will occur in the yoga of time.”11 A contemporary commentary places those incursions at 403 years after 622, the year of the Hijra, or 1025. This year is significant for a number of reasons. It allows us to date with remarkable precision an Indian text attributed to the Buddha, something that is exceedingly rare in the vast canon of sūtras and tantras. It also indicates how late in the history of Indian Buddhism tantras were being composed, tantras that would go on to have a significant influence on the tradition. Most importantly for Nicholas Roerich, the tantra predicts that in 2425, the bodhisattva warrior and the twenty-fifth Kalkin, Raudracakrin, will lead his

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Buddhist army across the Himalayas, and to Baghdad, where it will defeat the barbarian army of the Mahdī, killing him in an apocalyptic battle. The victory will usher in a golden age in which human life span will increase, crops will grow without being cultivated, and the population of the earth will devote itself to the practice of Buddhism. Nicholas Roerich had learned about Śambhala (spelled in European language sources as “Shambhala”) in St. Petersburg before the Russian Revolution from the Buryat monk Agvan Dorzhiev (1853–1938), an advisor to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama (1876–1933). Dorzhiev had apparently told the Thirteenth Dalai Lama that Russia was Shambhala and Tsar Nicholas was its king. With Elena Roerich serving as the medium for the messages of Master Morya, Roerich developed his own eschatology, combining two unrelated Buddhist visions of the future. The other vision of the future was more ancient, well-established long before the composition of the Kālacakra Tantra in the eleventh century. This was the prophecy, accepted throughout the Buddhist world, of the coming of Maitreya, the buddha of the future. According to the standard Buddhist view of time, there have been many buddhas in the past, and there will be many buddhas in the future, each appearing in their own world in sequence, but only after the teachings of their predecessor have been forgotten and his relics have disappeared. The next buddha in our world will be Maitreya, said to be currently residing in the Tusita Heaven, ˙ where all buddhas await their final rebirth. That arrival is far in the future; some calculations place his advent 5.67 billion years after the passing of the Buddha. Millenarian and messianic movements across the Buddhist world, sometimes taking the form of violent insurrection, would often announce the advent of Maitreya. The Roerichs believed that both of these events—the apocalyptic Kālacakra war and the coming of Maitreya—would occur much sooner, through their efforts. In fact, these events were imminent, ushering in what Roerich referred to as the New Era. Master Morya had informed Elena Roerich that her husband was the king of Shambhala. The master had already informed her that in his past lives, Roerich had been the Old Testament prophet Amos, an ancient Chinese emperor with the unlikely name of Fuyama Tsung-Tao, the Buddhist poet Aśvaghosa, and the ˙ Fifth Dalai Lama. Elena herself had been an Aztec queen, the wife of Solomon, an Egyptian queen, the sister of Morya, the daughter of the Buddha (unmentioned in Buddhist sources), and the wife of the Mughal emperor Akbar. Morya had also moved up the date of the apocalyptic battle between good and evil by a millennium. It would now occur between 1928 and 1931.

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It was, therefore, essential that Roerich meet with the Dalai Lama, that is, the Tibetan Dalai Lama; Morya had already declared Roerich to be the “Western Dalai Lama,” and Roerich had portraits of himself painted, appropriately enrobed. Roerich thus sought permission to visit Lhasa, identifying himself as the Head of the World Union of Western Buddhists and as an American, calling himself Reta Rigden; “rigs ldan” is Tibetan for “Kalkin.” Financed by his American disciples and organized by his son Yuri, Nicholas led an expedition to Central Asia from 1925 to 1928, hoping to meet the Dalai Lama and enlist him in the cause. His route would take him through Ladakh. Before departing, Roerich offered to retrieve the Tibetan manuscript of The Life of Saint Issa and sell it to the New York Times, in exchange for $100,000. As the “Western Dalai Lama,” he wished to meet the “Eastern Dalai Lama,” in part to instruct him in how to bring what Roerich deemed “purified” Buddhism to Tibet. Like many of his day, including the Theosophists, Roerich believed that Tibetan Buddhism was “Lamaism,” defiled by all manner of magic and demon worship. However, his request to visit Lhasa was refused by the Tibetan government, causing Roerich to excoriate the Dalai Lama as the “Yellow Pope” of “shamanistic Lamaism.”12 He placed his hope instead in the Panchen Lama. While the Dalai Lama is considered the incarnation of a bodhisattva, Avalo­ kiteśvara, the Panchen Lama, is considered the incarnation of a buddha, Amitābha. The institution of the Panchen Lama began in the seventeenth century, when the Fifth Dalai Lama created the position for his own teacher, with the idea that they would alternate as teacher and student from lifetime to lifetime, a plan that soon foundered when so many subsequent dalai lamas died young. The Panchen Lama would become the second-most important incarnate lama in Tibet, ruling over a large region of western Tibet from the great monastery of Tashilhunpo. In addition, the lineage of Panchen Lamas had a long connection to the land of Shambhala (with the Third Panchen Lama writing a famous guidebook); it was believed that the Panchen Lama would one day be reborn as the twenty-fifth king of Shambhala, the king who would lead the army of the dharma to victory. In September 1931, Japanese troops invaded China, taking control of Manchuria and establishing the Japanese colony of Manchukuo in 1932. That same year, at the invitation of high-ranking Chinese Buddhists, the Sixth Panchen Lama (1883–1937; the ninth by Chinese numbering) bestowed the Kālacakra initiation in the Forbidden City in Beijing in the hope of restoring peace and national sovereignty. When this failed, and as the political situation with Japan

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continued to deteriorate, he was invited to give the initiation again in 1934, this time in Hangzhou. According to some reports, seventy thousand people attended, including such prominent figures as Taixu and General Huang Musong. That the initiation was intended to protect China from foreign invaders is confirmed by the fact that at the ceremony, the Panchen Lama recited the famous Chinese Buddhist apocryphon, the Scripture for Humane Kings (Renwang jing), a central text of what is known in Chinese as “state-protection Buddhism” (huguo fojiao).13 Back in America, Elena Roerich was writing letters to President Roosevelt, saying: At the austere hour when the entire world stands at the threshold of reconstruction and the fate of many countries is being weighed on the Cosmic Scales, I am writing to you from the Himalayan Heights, to offer the Highest Help. . . . The Counsel is ready for America and it is useful for her to accept it, or else, many are the examples of grave consequences of rejection. . . . Hence from the same One Source the Mighty Hand is outstretching to Your Help and the Fiery Messages can once again reach the White House. The map of the World is already outlined and it is offered to you to occupy the worthiest place in the forming of the New Epoch. And upon You depends to accept or reject it. The destiny of the Country is in your hands.14 Concerned about the loss of artistic treasures in times of war, Nicholas Roe­ rich promoted the Treaty on the Protection of Artistic and Scientific Institutions and Historic Monuments. It is known to history as the Roerich Pact. It was signed by the United States and other members of the Pan-American Union in a ceremony in the Oval Office on April 15, 1935. The purpose of the treaty was to protect important cultural and artistic works in wartime. To protect buildings that housed such works, as well as libraries, universities, and concert halls, each would fly the “Banner of Peace,” designed by Roerich, its three red circles, inspired by the three jewels of Buddhism, symbolizing not the Buddha, dharma, and san˙gha, but art, science, and religion. Signing on behalf of the United States was Henry A. Wallace. Wallace had been interested in religious experience since his youth, reading William James as well as works on Asian and Native American traditions, which eventually attracted him to Theosophy. An offshoot of the Theosophical Society was the Liberal Catholic Church, founded by Theosophist Charles Leadbeater in 1917. By 1925, it had a branch in Des Moines, Iowa. Wallace became

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its secretary. He met Nicholas Roerich in 1929 and became his devotee, given the name “Galahad,” after the virtuous Knight of the Round Table. Roerich later gave him a ring of what he called the Maitreya Sangha and prophesied that Wallace would become president of the United States. In 1934, Wallace arranged for Roerich to lead a research team that would travel to the Gobi Desert to find drought-resistant grasses that might succeed on American farms of the Dust Bowl. Roerich’s true destination was a more verdant land. The Gobi Desert was of particular interest to Roerich because in The Secret Doctrine, published in 1888, Madame Blavatsky had said that Shambhala was located there, writing, “The ‘Island,’ according to belief, exists to the present hour; now, as an oasis surrounded by the dreadful wilderness of the great Desert, the Gobi.”15 Elsewhere, she wrote, “One and all believe in Scham-bha-la, and speak of it as a fertile fairy-like land, once an island, now an oasis of incomparable beauty, the place of meeting of the inheritors of the esoteric wisdom of the god-like inhabitants of the legendary island.”16 Roerich also knew Albert Grünwedel’s 1915 The Way to Shambhala (Der Weg nach Śambhala), which included a translation of the guidebook to Shambhala written by the Third Panchen Lama (1738–1780). Roerich and his party had no expertise in agriculture and largely ignored the two American botanists assigned to the team by the Department of Agriculture, using the expedition instead as an attempt to recruit Japan (and its puppet state of Manchukuo) and Mongolia to the great cause. More importantly, Roerich hoped to meet the Panchen Lama, who had fled to China after a dispute with the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama had died in 1933, leaving the Panchen Lama the most important figure in the Tibetan Buddhist world. Roerich’s wife, Elena, received this telepathic message from Master Morya, revising the dates of the apocalypse: The Dates are drawing near, the prophecies and behests of Shambhala are being fulfilled. As was said, the Northern Man [Roerich] together with the PR [Panchen Rinpoche] will build the stronghold. . . . Only the Shambhala Teaching will save the world. You know the meaning of the great year of [19]36. Now you know about a meeting of the PR with the Northern Man in the 34th year. You know that the warriors of the Rising Sun will fulfill the Orders of Shambhala. . . . Let him [i.e., the Panchen Lama] wait and assemble the Shambhala warriors. Let him remember that they will come from all quarters of the Earth.17

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But Roerich did not meet the Panchen Lama, and the expedition did not find drought-resistant grasses. For the United States, the expedition was a diplomatic and scientific disaster, and a great embarrassment for Henry Wallace.18 In 2012, reports appeared in such venerable publications as the New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel about a statue that had recently appeared on the art market in Germany after having been looted from Tibet by the Nazis in the 1930s. Scientific research showed that it had been carved from a meteorite; scholars speculated that it was a thousand years old, depicting the Buddhist deity Vaiśravana, who guards the north from his palace on the slopes of Mount Meru. In fact, apart from possibly being made from a meteorite, none of these things were true. The German scholar Isrun Engelhardt proved that the statue—which is about ten inches tall and weighs twenty-two pounds— was not looted by the German expedition to Tibet in 1938 led by Ernst Schäfer; it was not made in Tibet; it is not a thousand years old; and it does not depict Vaiśravana. In fact, it was made in Mongolia, probably in Ulan Bator, likely in 1926 or 1927. And it depicts Nicholas Roerich as the king of Shambhala.19

3 • Art

In February 1954, the abbot of a temple in Japan removed a panel from the back of a five-foot, three-inch wooden statue of the Buddha. Named after the temple in Kyoto on whose altar it still stands (usually behind a screen), it is known as the Seiryōji Shaka, or the Seiryōji Śākyamuni. Opening a buddha image is a consequential act, not to be undertaken lightly. Most abbots would not allow such a thing, seeing it as sacrilege. However, the abbot of Seiryōji since 1942, Tsukamoto Zenryū (1898–1980), was a distinguished scholar of Chinese Buddhism who knew the statue’s history. With him stood a team of scholars as well as representatives from the Ministry of Education. The panel, located between the Buddha’s shoulders and above his waist, was five and a half inches wide and eleven inches long, revealing a compartment that was three inches deep. The compartment was completely filled with what appeared to be all manner of disparate materials, over five hundred individual pieces. There were precious stones, a brass bell, a child’s silver bracelet, rosary beads, and a one-foot wooden pole wrapped in gold foil. They found scrolls of three sūtras—a block print of the Diamond Sūtra (Vajracchedikā) and manuscripts of the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapundarīka) and the Sūtra of the Golden ˙˙ Light (Suvarnaprabhāsa)—as well as woodblock images of Śākyamuni preach˙ ing the Lotus Sūtra, and of the bodhisattvas Mañjuśrī, Samantabhadra, and Maitreya. There was a description of the pilgrimage of the Japanese monk Chōnen (938–1026) to China composed by one of his disciples, as well as Chōnen’s birth certificate, tied with his umbilical cord. And there was an oath from Chōnen himself—marked with his handprints from his own blood—to build a new monastery when he returned to Japan, an oath that went unfulfilled. There were 132 Chinese coins, some pasted to the inner surface of the panel.

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Perhaps most surprisingly, the compartment contained miniature viscera, internal organs—heart, lungs, liver, stomach, and fifty inches of intestines—each hand sewn in silk, each containing a tiny treasure inside: a bit of incense, a small gem, a piece of paper with a mantra written on it. They found a catalogue of the contents of the compartment, complete with the donors’ names and prayers for auspicious rebirth; the organs had been offered by three Chinese nuns, the silver bracelet by a one-year-old child. However, not all of the items listed were present, and there were items in the cavity that were not on the list. For example, the list said there were four mirrors, when there was only one. The list also said that a tooth of the Buddha had been implanted in the statue’s forehead, causing blood to appear at the top of the statue’s head. Finally, there were some four hundred fragments of a variety of textiles, cut into small squares. And importantly, the catalogue gave a date. The statue had been sealed on the eighteenth day of the eighth month in the year 985, its contents remaining untouched for almost a millennium.1 Buddhist art is a massive field, encompassing many cultures, historical periods, media, and styles. Like most of the topics of this book, it can—and in the case of Buddhist art, it has—filled many volumes in many languages. In this chapter, we will try to introduce something of its form, something of its purpose. Rather than attempt a survey, we will explore those themes through a single image, the Seiryōji Buddha. As is the case so often in this book, in order to understand the history, we must begin with the legend. The Buddha’s mother, Mahāmāyā, died seven days after his birth. Apart from the early accounts, where no mention of this is made, the famous biographies of the Buddha, composed centuries after his passing, all report this, differing only on the cause of her death. According to some, she died from happiness, overjoyed at having given birth to a future buddha. According to others, she died then because she would have died of a broken heart when her son renounced the world and left the palace twenty-nine years later. According to yet others, she died because no other child can inhabit the womb where a future buddha once dwelled. She was reborn as a god in the Joyous Heaven (Tusita), the same ˙ heaven whence her son had descended into her womb. Because of her early demise, she was not able to benefit from her son’s teachings. And so, seven years after his enlightenment, the Buddha decided to teach her the dharma. Buddhist monks and nuns are prohibited from traveling during the monsoon season, observing what is known as the rains retreat, during which they must remain in one location. The Buddha decided to spend the three months of that rains retreat on the summit of Mount Meru, the flat-topped mountain

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at the center of the Buddhist universe and the site of another, and lower, Buddhist heaven, the Heaven of the Thirty-Three. His mother was invited to meet him there, where he gave daily teachings to her and the assembled gods. He taught them something that he had not taught before, that class of teachings called the abhidharma, the “higher dharma,” which encompasses what are often considered the more philosophical elements of Buddhist doctrine. Sometimes described as metaphysics, it deals with technical questions about the material and immaterial constituents of existence, focusing especially on epistemology and ontology. Yet, the Buddha could not restrict his highest teaching to the heavens; he needed to also dispense it on earth. And although he was the Buddha, he was also a monk who had to beg for his alms. Thus, each day during the three months of the rains retreat, he would fly down to earth before noon, collect his alms, and eat his meal. His disciple Śāriputra, renowned as the wisest of the monks, would meet him, and the Buddha would repeat the teachings he had given to the gods before returning to Mount Meru. At the end of the rains retreat, the Buddha made a dramatic return to earth. The two most famous of the gods—Śakra (Indra), lord of the Heaven of the Thirty-Three, and Brahmā, lord of the Brahmā realms in the sky above Mount Meru—created a magnificent stairway from heaven. It consisted of three sets of stairs: the one on the right was made of silver; the one in the center was made of seven jewels; and the one on the left was made of gold. Brahmā descended the stairs of silver; Śakra descended the stairs of gold; and the Buddha came down the jeweled staircase. Called devāvatāra in Sanskrit, meaning “descent of the gods,” it is among the most commonly depicted scenes in Buddhist iconography. This divine staircase touched the earth at the city of Sāmkāśya. It ˙ then sank into the ground, leaving only seven steps above the surface. This legend—told and retold, presented and represented across the Buddhist world—serves three important purposes. First, it rights a wrong. The most important of women, the mother of the Buddha, is able to receive the benefit of her son’s buddhahood. We often associate the notion of “filial piety” with Chinese religion. Yet, the devotion of the child to the parent is evident throughout the Buddhist world, from the earliest votary inscriptions of Buddhist monks and nuns to the Tawadeintha (Thirty-Three) festival in modern Burma, where the Buddha’s descent is acted out. Here, the monk playing the Buddha declares that the teachings he gives to his mother are worth less than the milk he received from just one of her breasts.2 Second, the story adds the Buddha’s imprimatur, indeed, his authorship, to the abhidharma, the third and last of the “three baskets” (tripitaka) that consti˙

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tute the Buddhist canon. Early texts refer to the Buddha’s teaching as having only two parts, the dharma and the vinaya, the doctrine and the discipline, causing scholars to speculate that the abhidharma developed long after the Buddha’s death; the traditional attribution to Śāriputra is the way that the tradition tacitly acknowledged this (despite the fact that, according to the tradition, he died before the Buddha). The story of the Buddha’s heavenly sojourn explains that the Buddha did, in fact, teach the abhidharma; he just did not teach it publicly, conveying it in private lunchtime lectures to Śāriputra over the course of three months. Third, and finally, the story creates a new place of pilgrimage, with the city of Samkāśya becoming one of the “eight great sites” associated with the Bud˙ dha. Samkāśya is, in fact, far to the west of the region where the Buddha likely ˙ lived and died. As his teachings spread westward after his death, this legend brought him there. The story of the Buddha’s sojourn atop Mount Meru would come to serve a fourth purpose, one in many ways more consequential than the other three. To understand its importance, however, we must leave the legend for a moment and turn to art history. Buddhism, which entered China beginning in the first century of the Common Era, is sometimes referred to as xiang jiao, the religion of the icons.3 Among the earliest Buddhist texts to be translated into Chinese is a work called the Scripture on the Production of Buddha Images (Zuo fo xingxiang jing) in which the Buddha explains the many benefits that accrue to those who make images of the Buddha. For example, “One who produces an image of the Buddha will, in a later life, attain such wealth that there never will come a time when it will be exhausted; nor can such wealth be calculated. It is, perhaps, possible to measure the water in all the rivers and oceans of the four quarters by measuring it out by the gallon. But the wealth attained by one who produces an image of the Buddha exceeds the amount of water in the rivers and oceans of the four quarters by a factor of ten.”4 The Buddha provides this scripture to a figure we will meet below, the Indian king Udāyana. Yet, in the first centuries of Buddhism’s history in India, it appears that there were no statues of the Buddha, an absence that has vexed art historians from the nineteenth century to the present day. The earliest images of the Buddha that have been discovered seem to date from the late first century and early second century CE, some five centuries after his death, if we place his passage into nirvāna around 400 BCE. Some scholars argue that the earliest-known ˙ image of the Buddha is that found on the Bimaran Casket. Now part of the collection of the British Museum, the small gold reliquary was discovered at

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a stūpa site in eastern Afghanistan in 1841. The museum dates it to 50 to 60 of the Common Era.5 There are many earlier Buddhist monuments in India, monuments where the presence of the Buddha is represented. However, his presence is represented by his absence. We do not find the Buddha seated with his right hand touching the earth or standing with his right hand in the gesture of dispelling fear. Instead, we find stone carvings of footprints or of an empty throne. Elsewhere, specific objects seem to symbolize specific moments in his life: a lotus for his birth, a riderless horse for his departure from the palace, a tree for his enlightenment, a wheel for his first sermon, a stūpa for his passage into nirvāna. It is ˙ important to note that these carvings contain many figural images of gods, humans, and animals. It is the Buddha himself who is missing. A number of theories have been put forward to explain his absence. Some have assumed that the Buddha, or the early generations of his monastic community, had forbidden the making or worship of his image. However, among the voluminous monastic codes, no explicit prohibition has been discovered. The most pertinent passage is preserved in a Chinese translation of the monastic code of one of the many early sects, in which the Buddha’s patron, the wealthy merchant Anāthapindada (whose name means “Feeder of the Defense˙˙ less”), says, “Since it is not permitted to make a likeness of the Buddha’s body, I pray that the Buddha will grant permission to make an image of [the Buddha when he was] a bodhisattva.”6 The Buddha agrees. It is important to acknowledge that the theory put forward by art historians of a century ago—that the Buddha had prohibited his followers from worshipping his form—is quite consistent with the persistent portrayal of the Buddha as a teacher of ethics, an enemy of superstition, and the founder of a philosophy, not a religion, so different from the idol-worshipping Hindus of the British Raj. The numerous statues of the Buddha discovered in India could, according to this theory, therefore only have been made centuries after his passage into nirvāna, and likely due to foreign influence. ˙ In 327 BCE, Alexander the Great led his army eastward, conquering the regions of Bactria, Gandhāra, and Swat. The following year, he continued into the Punjab, defeating the army of King Porus at the Battle of Hydaspes. Also in 326, he conquered Taxila, the capital of Gandhāra. Known as Taksaśīla in ˙ Sanskrit, it is mentioned in many Buddhist texts. In 330, Alexander founded the city of Alexandria in Arachosia. Its modern name of “Khandahar” likely derives from Alexandria. (We recall that in John Huston’s 1975 film The Man Who Would Be King, the people of Kafiristan believe that Daniel Dravot—played by

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Sean Connery—is Sikander, that is, Alexander.) Over the next four centuries, a time of the geographic expansion of Buddhism throughout the Indian subcontinent and beyond, a number of Indo-Greek city-states formed in the region, many with Greek artisans among the inhabitants. In the second century of the Common Era, the region was ruled by the Kushan king Kaniska I (r. c. ˙ 127–150 CE) from his capital, Purusapura (modern Peshawar). He is remem˙ bered by Buddhists as second only to the Mauryan emperor Aśoka as a pious royal patron of Buddhism in ancient India, a characterization questioned by scholars. This was a time of active trade along well-established land and sea routes, including trade with the Roman Empire. It was also a time of growth for Buddhist communities throughout Kaniska’s realm. Indeed, art historians ˙ have speculated that images of the Buddha began to appear during the Kushan period, which ended in the third century CE. One of the theories for the origin of the Buddha image, a theory that many continue to support, is that figural representations of the Buddha began in the north, under Hellenistic influence. For some of the statues, it is difficult to tell whether it is the Buddha or Apollo. Against this argument that the Buddha image derives from Greek influence (a theory in keeping with nineteenth-century theories of the supposed kinship of Indo-Aryan peoples), other art historians have noted a separate tradition of statues of the Buddha, originating in the same period, around the beginning of the second century CE, but in the region of Mathura, about eighty miles south of modern Delhi and far from Greek influence. Although Mathura was also under Kushan control at the time of Kaniska, these images have much more ˙ in common with Hindu and Jain sculpture from the region. The buddhas of Mathura do not look like Apollo. Regardless of the place of origin, the transition—from the Buddha being represented by an empty space or symbol in the scene, to the Buddha being represented in the familiar form that we know today—did not go unnoticed by the several Buddhist communities of India, with various texts expressing various forms of anxiety about the figural representation of the Buddha, and some texts suggesting that the Buddha cannot be represented because he is now absent, passed forever into the extinction of nirvāna. Yet other texts suggest that ˙ the Buddha cannot be represented because he transcends all representation.7 In an early Mahāyāna sūtra, called the Lion’s Roar of Maitreya (Maitreyasimhanāda), ˙ the Buddha endorses the making of images of himself by those who seek merit, but he condemns those monks in the future who, rather than studying or meditating, paint images of the Buddha on “cotton cloth, walls, and enclosures” in order to make a living from it, presumably from offerings by the laity.8

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Thus, if images of the Buddha were to be accepted, as they obviously came to be, it was important that their origin be accounted for, and that that origin be authentic. As we see throughout the history of the tradition, authenticity in Buddhism ultimately derives from the Buddha himself. Which brings us back to the summit of Mount Meru and the fourth problem that his sojourn there seeks to solve. In a well-known story (with a number of variants), while the Buddha was teaching the dharma to his mother and the assembled gods on Mount Meru, one of his patrons, Udāyana (or Rudrāyana), the king of Vatsa, became distraught when he learned that he would not be able to behold the Buddha for three months. He summoned to his palace in the city of Kauśāmbī the monk Maudgalyāyana, who was famous for his supernatural powers, including the ability to visit the heavens and hells. The king asked him to carry a five-foot piece of the finest ox-head sandalwood to the Heaven of the Thirty-Three, along with thirty-two artists to carve it into a statue of the Buddha, with each artist responsible for rendering one of the thirty-two marks of a superman (mahāpurusa) that adorn the Buddha’s body. They created a perfect likeness ˙ of the Buddha, which was then flown down to earth and delivered to King Udāyana, who was overjoyed to be in its presence. When it was learned that the Buddha was going to descend from Mount Meru, King Udāyana went to meet him, taking the seated sandalwood statue of the Buddha with him in a cart. When the Buddha set foot on earth, the statue stood up and approached the Buddha, bowing at his feet. The Buddha then bowed to the statue and said, “In later ages, you will greatly carry on the work of the Buddha. After my nirvāna, I entrust all my disciples to you.” The Bud˙ dha suggested that they walk together to the Buddha’s residence at Jetavana Monastery. The image asked that the Buddha lead the way, but the Buddha insisted that the statue go first, saying, “Before long, I will enter nirvāna, so my ˙ salvific benefit will not last much longer. You will remain in the world and save my future disciples. As you will be of eternal benefit in the salvation of sentient beings, you should go first.” When the two buddhas arrived at Jetavana, they sat side by side on lion thrones, worshipped by the assembled monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen.9 There is a great deal that could be said about this story, but for our purposes, we see that it dispels any doubts about the propriety of making images of the Buddha, since the first Buddha image had been made in the presence of the Buddha, and with his permission. But there is much more here. One might imagine that, with the original Buddha now back on earth, there was no fur-

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ther need for the copy. Yet, this is not the case. Furthermore, the statue is not inert but animate, standing, walking, and talking with the Buddha. Nor is the statue the Buddha’s double; it has its own agency and sanctity, receiving the obeisance of the Buddha himself. And, most importantly, the statue is charged with carrying on the Buddha’s work after his imminent passage into nirvāna. ˙ Carved to serve as a temporary substitute of the Buddha during his brief absence from earth, he is charged to serve as the surrogate of the Buddha during his permanent absence from samsāra. ˙ Instructed by the Buddha to remain in the world, the statue seems to have done so. Xuanzang reports seeing the statue, or what was claimed to be the statue, twice, in two very different locales. The first, in 636, was in King ­Udāyana’s capital of Kauśāmbī; it is a standing sandalwood statue that emits a divine light from time to time. Numerous foreign kings had tried to take it, but it could not be moved, even by many men. Later, in the city of Bhīmā, far to the north near Khotan, he saw a twenty-foot sandalwood image of the standing Buddha and was told by the locals that this was the image made for King Udāyana, and that the image had subsequently flown to their city.10 Xuanzang was sufficiently impressed by one or the other of these images that he had a one-foot, five-inch copy made, which he brought back to China in his cache of manuscripts, images, and relics. After his return from India in 645, Xuanzang wrote a letter to the emperor. “I consider myself unfortunate to live during a time when the Buddha can no longer be encountered,” he began. “Still, I have had the small benefit of learning the teachings through images. Living in the Final Age of the Dharma, where else could I take refuge?”11 However, by the time he returned to the Tang capital with a copy of the Udāyana image, the original statue, according to another account, was already in China.12 The most famous translator in the history of Buddhism is the Central Asian monk Kumārajīva (344–413). He was born in Kucha, an important oasis city in the Tarim Basin along the northern Silk Road. The present city is located in the Uyghur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang Province in China. For centuries, it was a major center of Buddhism. Stopping there on his way to India in 630, Xuanzang reported that there were over one hundred monasteries and five thousand monks. Kumārajīva’s father was an Indian monk named Kumārāyana. According to legend, by the fourth century, the Udāyana Buddha was in Kashmir. When the Hindu king Pusyamitra founded the Śun˙ga Dynasty, he carried ˙ out a campaign of violent persecution of Buddhism. Kumārāyana, fearing that the Udāyana Buddha might be destroyed, decided to carry it to safety. (We should

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pause in our story to note that Pusyamitra—widely portrayed as a persecutor ˙ of Buddhism, a murderer of monks, and destroyer of monasteries—reigned from 185 to 149 BCE, some five centuries before Kumārāyana.) Placing the lifesize sandalwood statue on his back, he set off across the mountains to Kucha. He reached his destination after a long journey, the monk carrying the statue on his back by day, the statue (whom, we recall, could walk) carrying the monk on his back by night, as poignantly portrayed in a scroll painting by Kanō Motonobu in the sixteenth-century Illustrated Origin of the Śākyamuni Hall (Shaka-dō engi emaki).13 When Kumārāyana reached Kucha, the king was so impressed by his erudition that he ordered the monk to marry his sister, the princess Jīvakā, herself a devout Buddhist. Their son was Kumārajīva, who went on to gain a reputation as an eminent scholar, traveling to Kashmir to study Sarvāstivāda doctrine and to Kashgar to study the Mahāyāna. He became sufficiently famous that when the Chinese general Lü Guang conquered Kucha in 383, he kidnapped Kumārajīva, who is said to have taken the Udāyana Buddha with him. Kumārajīva, and the statue, were eventually brought to the capital, Chang’an, in 402. Over the next five centuries, the statue was moved from one monastery to another, arriving in the city of Kaifeng, the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty, in 965.14 The Japanese monk Chōnen is said to have seen the statue there in 985. So moved was he by its sanctity that he traded a monk’s most prized possessions— his robe and his begging bowl—for some Chinese cherry wood, and hired two Chinese sculptors to make a full-scale copy. One month later, the statue was completed. The compartment that the sculptors had carved in the back was filled with various items—duly catalogued—by a variety of donors, the back panel was sealed, and the statue was taken to Japan. Indeed, some of the contents of the compartment can be connected to its destination. Both the Lotus Sūtra and the Sūtra of the Golden Light were central to what is called state-protection Buddhism, the notion that obeisance to a given sūtra can save the kingdom from calamity. The bodhisattvas on the block prints that were enclosed—Maitreya, Mañjuśrī, and Samantabhadra—each play an important role in the Lotus Sūtra. And the importance of the statue itself was not to be denied. The Buddha had allowed a sandalwood statue of himself to be made and had charged that statue to serve as his surrogate in the centuries after his passage into nirvāna. ˙ Chōnen had brought a copy of that very statue to Japan. In the centuries that followed, even this did not seem enough, as two legends developed, one called the replacement story, the other called the switching story. In the first, Chōnen, in an act of patriotic robbery, places his copy on the altar of its Chinese temple

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and takes the original with him to Japan. In the second, absolving Chōnen of any crime, the image appears to Chōnen in a dream and informs him that the image itself has made the switch. Both stories explain the statue’s famous Japanese epithet “Sangoku denrai” (Passed through three kingdoms)—a single statue, posed for by the Buddha himself, that made its way from India, to China, to Japan. It would become the most copied buddha image in Japan. Buddhist doctrine speaks of two types of nirvāna, with and without remain˙ der. The Buddha achieved the nirvāna with remainder under the Bodhi Tree, ˙ putting an end to future rebirth, with his remaining mind and body left to play out their karmic course. He achieved the nirvāna without remainder when he ˙ died, his mind and body ceasing to exist, his cycle of birth and death forever ended. All that remained were the relics. The relics would become the primary focus of Buddhist devotion, all that was left of the Buddha, enshrined in increasingly large and elaborate stūpas. The earliest surviving stone Buddhist images sometimes have a small aperture, often at the top of the crown protrusion. Art historians speculate that it was meant to hold a relic, suggesting that a Buddha image needed a piece of the Buddha in order to be sanctified. That monastic communities differentiated between those statues that contained relics and those that did not is confirmed by the long list of infractions and their penalties that comprise the Buddhist vinaya. There, we read that stealing an image of the Buddha with a relic is a more heinous crime than destroying an image of the Buddha without one; the former requires the performance of a public penance, the latter only repentance.15 We recall that the catalogue of the contents of the Seiryōji Shaka states that a tooth of the Buddha had been embedded in the image. In the “replacement” version of the story, therefore, Chōnen committed the graver infraction when he took the image to Japan. It is assumed that the relic was installed in the image as part of a consecration ritual. These rituals would become ubiquitous across the Buddhist world: an image of the Buddha, whether painted or sculpted, is not considered finished until it has been animated in a consecration ceremony. It is a particularly potent ceremony, because it turns the dead material of the statue—whether it be wood, bronze, or stone—into a living Buddha. The filling of the cavity of the Seiryōji Shaka was certainly part of such a ceremony, as the silk viscera make clear. In Thai ceremonies, monks recite the events of the Buddha’s life in order to animate his form, like reading a diary to a person who has emerged from a coma.16 A Tibetan ceremony includes this prayer: “Just as all the buddhas from

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their abode in Tusita, entered the womb of Queen Māyā, may you, the protec˙ tor, always reside here with the image. . . . As long as these abodes of body, speech, and mind are not destroyed by damage from earth, water, fire, and wind, I pray that you act immeasurably for the welfare of sentient beings and remain steadfast [in the image].”17 Common to many of the ceremonies is the “opening the eyes of the Buddha,” in which the eyes of the image are painted. In Sri Lanka, when the artist paints the eyes, he does not look directly at the image, but instead looks into a mirror.18 The importance of consecrating an image of the Buddha was evident even to Robert Knox (1641–1720), an English sailor shipwrecked in Sri Lanka and held captive there for nineteen years. In his An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon in the East-Indies (1681), he writes of the idol Buddou: Some being devoutly disposed, will make the Image of this God at their own charge. For the making whereof they must bountifully reward the Founder. Before the Eyes are made, it is not accounted a God, but a lump of ordinary Metal, and thrown about the Shop with no more regard than anything else. But when the Eyes are to be made, the Artificer is to have a good gratification, besides the first agreed upon reward. The Eyes being formed, it is thenceforeward a God. And then, being brought with honour from the Workman’s Shop, it is dedicated by Solemnities and Sacrifices, and carried with great state into its shrine or little house, which is before built and prepared for it.19 As Gustave Flaubert wrote in The Temptation of Saint Anthony, “For matter to have so much power, it must contain a spirit. The souls of the gods are attached to their images.”20 Because a statue of the Buddha is considered to be the Buddha, in some traditions, it is common that he, like all monks, be offered robes. In a famous scene, the Buddha looked out over the rice fields of Magadha and, finding the pattern pleasing, told Ānanda that the robes of a monk should be patched. This has become the practice across the Buddhist world, where even newly made cloth is cut up and then sewn back together. We might imagine, then, the final moments before the panel on the back of the Seiryōji Shaka was sealed. Hundreds of Chinese monks, present for the consecration ceremony, form a line. As each reaches the Buddha, he cuts off a small piece of his own robe and places it inside the statue, a small and simple offering of a patch, patches that together would be enough to make the vestments of the Buddha.21 As they did so, many would have had in mind this passage from the Lotus Sūtra:

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Those who, even with distracted minds Have offered a single flower to a painted image Will in time see innumerable buddhas. Or those who have done obeisance to images, Or merely pressed their palms together, Or raised a single hand, or nodded their heads, Will in due time see immeasurable buddhas.22

4 • Canon

On July 10, 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act (often referred to as Public Law 480 or PL 480), under which American food surpluses would be provided as foreign aid to developing nations. The law served important humanitarian purposes but was also meant as a foreign policy tool of the Cold War, intended to gain influence with nations that might otherwise “go Communist.” Under PL 480, over the next fifteen years, India would receive fifty million tons of American grain as famine relief. The grain, mostly wheat and rice, was provided as trade, meaning that India had to provide something in return. It was decided that India would repay the debt in rupees, but that those rupees would be spent by the American government in India. In yet another Cold War tactic, it was decided that hundreds of books that promoted American culture and values would be published and sold at reduced prices in India. Officials of the U.S. Agency for International Development in India also used the funds to acquire copies of books in some fifty South Asian languages, buying multiple copies of each to be distributed to as many as forty-six research libraries (plus the Library of Congress) in the United States. With PL 480 programs in Israel, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Indonesia, and Brazil, these collections would provide the bibliographic foundation for “area studies” programs—dealing not only with South Asia but with Southeast Asia and the Middle East as well—at a host of American universities. On March 30, 1959, the Dalai Lama went into exile in India. He was soon followed by tens of thousands of Tibetans, many of whom were monks and lamas. Traveling mostly on foot over difficult terrain, they could only carry their most precious possessions. Many carried books. That same year, the Rockefeller

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Foundation arranged for several prominent lamas and their families to come to the West. One group came to Seattle, where they began to teach courses on Tibetan language, culture, and religion at the University of Washington. In 1968, E. Gene Smith (1936–2010), a descendent of the Mormon leader Joseph Smith, was hired by the Library of Congress field office in New Delhi. Smith had studied Tibetan Buddhism at the University of Washington. He proposed that because the texts carried by the Tibetans were now in India, PL 480 funds should be used to purchase newly published versions of those texts, which would then be sent to American libraries. Thousands of titles would eventually be published, many bound in a large codex form rather than the traditional Tibetan xylographs. Smith kept a copy of each title for himself, amassing the largest personal library of Tibetan Buddhist texts in history. After his retirement, he had those texts digitized, making them freely available online at what he called the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center.1 Various presentations and periodizations of the decline of the dharma appear in Buddhist texts. In these, the dharma that the Buddha taught, and which continued to exist at least until he has passed into nirvāna, is called the true ˙ dharma (saddharma). In some descriptions, what exists after his passing is called the reflection or the semblance of the true dharma (saddharmapratirūpaka), which continues to exist until the reflection begins to fade and the world enters the time of the disappearance of the true dharma (saddharmavipralopa). Especially in East Asia, much effort was expended in calculating when the second period ended and the third began. The Sanskrit term that is translated here as “reflection” or “semblance” can also mean something falsified or counterfeit. The term is used in this sense in an interesting passage from the Pāli canon. We recall that the Buddha only began making rules for the monastic community when it became necessary to do so; the early community was composed of arhats who had destroyed desire and hatred, and so were naturally ethical. When a monk who was not an arhat asked the Buddha why there used to be few rules and many enlightened monks, but now there are many rules and few enlightened monks, the Buddha replied, “The Teacher does not make known the training rule for disciples until certain things that are the basis for taints become manifest here in the Sangha; but when certain things that are the basis for taints become manifest here in the Sangha, then the Teacher makes known the training rule for disciples in order to ward off those things that are the basis for taints.”2 He goes on to say that this occurs when the san˙gha gains great worldly renown.

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Yet when Mahākāśyapa (Mahākassapa, in Pāli), who was an arhat, asked the same question, the Buddha offered a different answer: “When beings are deteriorating and the true dharma is disappearing there are more training rules but fewer bhikkhus are established in the final knowledge. Kassapa, the true dharma does not disappear as long as the counterfeit of the true dharma has not arisen in the world. But when a counterfeit of the true dharma arises in the world, then the true dharma disappears.”3 He goes on to say that counterfeit gold does not appear in the world as long as there is true gold, but once there is counterfeit gold, true gold begins to disappear. This is not a natural process caused by the four elements of earth, water, fire, and wind; the true dharma disappears when senseless people appear. He explains that the true dharma disappears when monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen do not have proper respect for the Buddha, the dharma, the san˙gha, the training, and concentration. There is much to say about this passage. However, what is most interesting here is that the Buddha is acknowledging the decline of the dharma during his own lifetime. We tend to imagine something quite different: that the dharma continued to grow and flourish throughout the decades of the Buddha’s long teaching career; as long as he was present in the world, the dharma flourished. It is only with his demise that the dharma suffers the loss that all religions face upon the death of their founder. Here, however, the Buddha seems to lament that his teaching is already being polluted, that a “counterfeit dharma,” something that one associates with the time after his passing, is already rampant. Furthermore, the imagery here is not one of decline and decay but of replacement. He does not say that true gold becomes more valuable or that it becomes difficult to distinguish true gold from counterfeit gold, but that true gold begins to disappear. Given that the original question was not about the quality of the dharma but about the proportional relationship between monastic rules and enlightened monks—the more rules, the fewer enlightened monks—the imagery might be related to popularity and patronage. The more debased the dharma becomes, the more senseless people begin to follow and support it, making those who devote themselves to the more demanding true dharma a smaller and smaller minority, until they disappear. In Buddhism predictions of the decline of the dharma are typically placed in the longue durée of millennia. The author of this sūtra, however, locates the decline in the Buddha’s own lifetime, not lamenting the inevitable loss as we move further from the time of the founder, but lamenting what were likely sectarian divisions within the san˙gha, divisions over whose dharma was pure and

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whose dharma was counterfeit. Put another way, the sūtra seems to ask: Which texts should be certified as authentic, worthy of preservation in the canon? The question of what constitutes the Buddhist canon is a complicated one, answered in different ways in different periods of Buddhist history and different regions of the Buddhist world.4 The problem begins with what we mean by “canon” in the Buddhist context. In Christianity, the “canon” often refers to the texts that the councils of the Church fathers decided would constitute the two testaments, classifying other texts as apocrypha. These terms—“canon,” “council,” and “apocrypha”—have all been imported into the study of Buddhism, not without difficulty. Here, the term “apocrypha” is generally used to refer to texts that purport to be the teachings of the Buddha (or a famous Indian master) but are not. Borrowing again from Biblical Studies, the term “pseudepigrapha” offers a somewhat closer analogue, but is rarely used in Buddhist Studies. Within the various Buddhist traditions, the Theravāda would consider the entire Mahāyāna and tantric corpuses to be apocryphal because, in their view, they were not taught by the Buddha or with his sanction. In China, where so many Indic texts arrived after having been carried— sometimes orally, sometimes physically—by Buddhist monks over the course of several centuries, those texts that were composed in China but purported to be Indian were judged apocryphal. As early as 374, the monk Dao’an (312–385) produced a catalogue of works, which he organized under three categories: authentic, suspicious, and false.5 Similar classifications would appear in dozens of different catalogues compiled over the centuries.6 Beginning around the eleventh century, Tibetan lamas of the Nyingma sect began discovering texts that they claimed had been composed by the eighth-century Indian master Padmasambhava and then buried by him, to be unearthed at the appropriate time in the future. These texts were written in a secret script that only their discoverers could decipher. The authenticity of these texts, which have continued to be discovered into the twenty-first century, has been called into question by members of other sects. And yet, these various apocrypha from India, China, and Tibet include some of the most influential and famous works in the history of Buddhism. All of the Mahāyāna sūtras—the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapundarīka), the Heart Sūtra ˙˙ (Prajñāpāramitāhrdaya), the Vimalakīrti Sūtra (Vimalakīrtinirdeśa)—would fall ˙ into this category. One of the most influential and commented-upon Chinese Buddhist texts, the Awakening of Faith (Dasheng qixin lun), would be an apocryphon. In Tibet, the Nyingma sect created its own canon for its treasure texts,

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a canon that includes what is known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The various Buddhist apocrypha are particularly important to scholars of Buddhism because, when they can be roughly dated, they provide insights into the religious and social concerns of their day; the prophecies of the future that are so prevalent in these texts tell us much about their present. It is clear, then, that various Buddhist traditions have various definitions of what makes a text apocryphal. What each shares, however, is the importance of lineage, that is, the need to trace all teachings back to the Buddha himself. In the fourth century, Dao’an criticized the lax standards of Chinese monks compared to those of India: “When monks in foreign countries are trained in the teachings [of Buddhism], they kneel down and receive it orally. The teacher confers on his disciples the teachings exactly as he received them from his own teacher by repeating it ten or twenty times. If even one word deviates [from the accepted transmission], it is revised after mutual conference and [the wrong word] is immediately deleted. There is no laxity as far as the monks and teachings are concerned.”7 Thus, to borrow a term from another domain, for a text or teaching to be considered authentic and not apocryphal, it is essential to be able to establish a chain of custody that extends back to the Buddha. We see this in a great many cases across the Buddhist world. In India, we are told that the reason for the gap of several centuries between the death of the Buddha and the appearance of the perfection of wisdom sūtras is that he entrusted them to the nāgas for safekeeping in their undersea palaces, where they were later retrieved by Nāgārjuna. We see it in China and the Chan school, a school for which there is no textual evidence in India. And so, we are told that it is not a textual transmission but a “mind to mind transmission,” begun when the Buddha, seated on Vulture Peak, did not set forth a sūtra but instead held up a flower, transmitting that silent teaching to Mahākāśyapa, tracing the transmission across the centuries to Bodhidharma, who took it to China. We see it in Tibet, where the most damning condemnation that one can make of a Buddhist teaching is that it has no Indian source. We see it in Japan, when in the Zen sect, after death and prior to cremation, the deceased is ordained as a monk or nun, given a Buddhist name, and given a chart called a bloodline transmission (kechimyaku), which provides a line of transmission from the deceased, back through the Japanese, Chinese, and Indian patriarchs, to the Buddha himself.8 For the historian of Buddhism, questions of authenticity and apocrypha are far more complicated. As has been discussed, nothing that the Buddha taught was committed to writing until some four centuries after his death. Thus, al-

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though there are various scholarly tools for determining that a particular text is earlier than another text, this only establishes chronology, not origin. As a result, many scholars believe that the original teachings of the Buddha are difficult, if not impossible, to recover. If there is no original from which to trace authenticity, does this make all Buddhist texts somehow apocryphal? This is a large question that cannot be answered here. It therefore seems best, as is the practice throughout this volume, to focus on what the various Buddhist traditions themselves say. Which brings us back to writing. The monastic code that would serve as the foundation for Buddhist practice in China and Korea is that of the Dharmaguptaka school. Better known in East Asia as the Four-Part Vinaya, it made its way to China not on the pages of a text but in the memory of a monk, Buddhayaśas, who arrived in the Chinese capital from his native Kashmir in 408. There, he recited the text, working with a Chinese monk to translate it into Chinese, a process that took four years and filled sixty scrolls. This translation must be assumed to be authentic because a Sanskrit manuscript of the FourPart Vinaya has never been discovered, perhaps due in part to the fact that monks memorized their monastic codes. Yet, how are we to know that Buddhayaśas was faithfully reciting a text rather than his own concoction? Writing seems to provide a way to answer that question, an exemplar against which to compare the copy, a version of the text that takes the physical form of ink on paper rather than the ephemera of sound, a form that is light enough to be carried on the back of a being, human or animal, that need not understand it. And yet, the text lacks the immediacy of the human voice and the authority of the memory of the sage. The relationship of apocrypha to canon comes together in the particularly interesting case of the empress Wu and her suppression of the Three Levels school. As part of her apotheosis, the monks of her court interpolated passages into Indian texts that identified her with sainted figures of the past and that foretold her future glory. There are many prophecies about how Buddhism will disappear from our world. One of those, held by the Haimavata—“Those Who Live in the Himalayas,” an early Nikāya school—predicted that the dharma would disappear five hundred years after the passing of the Buddha, and it would do so in five stages, each lasting a century. At the end of the first century, the ability to achieve liberation would disappear, followed in the next four centuries by the ability to achieve deep meditative states, the ability to maintain the monastic vows, the ability to learn, and the ability to practice giving.9

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If we consider these in reverse order, we see the Buddhist path. The most basic practice of Buddhism, and of the Buddhist laity, is giving (dāna), the deed that supports the san˙gha. This is followed by learning. The Sanskrit term here is literally “hearing much” (bahusŕuta), which in this case, would refer to hearing the dharma, either by a monk or a layperson. If it were a layperson, the next step would be to become ordained, with the presence of fully ordained monks (and sometimes nuns) seen as the marker for the presence of Buddhism; without a sufficient number of fully ordained monks and nuns, the order of monks and nuns will die out, as it has in several regions of the Buddhist world over the centuries. It is monks and nuns who meditate, and so the next practice is to develop samādhi, a term that refers to a range of meditative states. Such states are necessary in order to achieve liberation from rebirth, the last stage on the path and the first constituent of the tradition to disappear in the Haimavata theory of decline. Although this particular theory of decline was likely unknown in Tang Dynasty China, the practice of giving took on deep philosophical meaning in what is known as the Three Levels school (Sanjie jiao). Here, the three levels refer to levels of decreasing spiritual capacity, with the first two levels referring to the time of the Buddha and some period thereafter (various time periods are given for each). The more salient point is that the followers of the school, founded by the Chan monk Xinxing (540–594), believed that for fifteen hundred years after the passing of the Buddha (which in East Asia was often placed in 949 BCE), humans with the correct view would continue to appear in the world. Sixteen hundred years after his passing, humans with false views would begin to appear in the world. Indeed, human capacity would be so diminished that it would be impossible to know the right view.10 Evocations of the end-time in the history of Buddhism, although tinged with a nostalgia for the time of the Buddha, have been occasions for doctrinal innovation. This was the case with the Three Levels school, which found an inspiring implication in the inability of humans to make valid judgments. For them, “right view,” one of the elements of the eightfold path, was impossible. This meant that they could not make distinctions. In a Buddhist version of Pascal’s Wager, they therefore judged it prudent to acknowledge the presence of the buddha nature in all beings, including animals, demons, and the gods of other religions. All should be revered. It was therefore wrong to honor the Buddha, dharma, and the san˙gha to the exclusion of others. The most important distinction that the Three Levels refused to make was the distinction most central to the institution of Buddhism: the distinction between monk and lay-

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person. Although there were monks in the school, they claimed no special status and granted none to their fellow monks. Their founder, Xinxing, had given up his monk’s vows. What, then, was meant by Buddhist practice, apart from bowing down to dogs, as the members of the sect were said to do? Noting that the first of six perfections was giving, and that giving equally to all without distinction was something that the benighted could do, Xinxing advocated charity for those most in need. Gifts were no longer to be given to the monks by the laity; monastic and lay alike should give to the poor. The school would eventually establish what they called the Inexhaustible Treasury at their monastery in the Tang capital, where donations were received from both monks and laity. These treasuries were soon established at Three Levels monasteries throughout China, where the funds were used to support the poor, especially during times of famine, but also for sponsoring more traditional merit-making rituals and for restoring monasteries. They would also become important lending institutions.11 To claim that all sentient beings of the third level are benighted and incapable of making judgments meant that the ruler was such a sentient being. This obviously did not sit well with the state, especially when the ruler claimed to be a cakravartin, a universal monarch, as the famously pious and famously ruthless Empress Wu did, a ruler who had come to the throne in 690, 1,639 years after the passing of the Buddha, according to Chinese reckoning. And she surrounded herself with monks who were willing to forge texts to glorify her, monks for whom the Three Levels school’s rejection of the exaltation of the monk over the layperson did not sit well. In 695, Empress Wu sponsored the compilation and publication of a massive new catalogue of Buddhist scriptures. The work of a team of seventy monks, it contained 3,616 titles. Among these, 231 titles were classified as spurious. Among these were twenty-two titles associated with the Three Levels school, identified as indigenous and not of Indian origin. An annotation described the texts as transgressing the intention of the Buddha and described the school as heretical, stating that an edict had banned its monks from all activities other than begging for alms, going on retreat, abstaining from grain, maintaining their vows, and meditating.12 In time, the Inexhaustible Treasuries would be shut down. The classification of the texts as spurious meant that when the canon would later come to be compiled and printed, the works of the Three Levels school would not be included. Yet, apocrypha sometimes find a way to survive; we know of their existence largely from manuscripts discovered in a cave.13 In the history of Buddhism, we see that one of the most effective ways to

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ensure the survival of a particular text is for that text to instruct its devotees to copy it. Just as the cake in Alice in Wonderland says, “Eat me,” many Buddhist texts, especially Mahāyāna sūtras say, “Copy me.” To cite but one of many examples, we read in the Lotus Sūtra, “If there is anyone who hears this Lotus Sūtra, copies it, or moves others to copy it, their merit will be limitless even if it is measured through the Buddha’s wisdom.”14 And like Alice’s cake, those words made those sūtras grow. What became of all those copies? In the deserts of western China, there is an oasis town called Dunhuang, one of the stops on the Silk Road. It became such an important point of transit and commerce that, over time, a complex of caves was carved into its sandstone cliffs. With paintings of buddhas and bodhisattvas on their walls and ceilings, these caves, lit only from without by the sun from their entrance and within by torches held by the faithful, are today considered one of the most important repositories of Buddhist art in the world. By 1900, however, these caves, known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, were largely abandoned, looked after by a caretaker, a Daoist priest named Wang Yuanlu. On June 25, 1900, while removing sand that had accumulated in what is today called Cave 16, he discovered a sealed vestibule on the right side of the passageway into the cave. When he opened it, he found that it was stuffed from floor to ceiling with bundles of scrolls, texts, paintings, and banners, later estimated at some fifty thousand pieces, untouched for almost a millennium. On the instructions of the provincial governor, a door was built into the opening Wang had discovered; the door was locked, and Wang was entrusted with the keys. The last half of the nineteenth century was something of a golden age of Indian archaeology, or at least amateur archaeology, conducted by engineers of the British army, often called in when railway workers found the remains of a temple or stūpa while laying tracks. Notable among these was Alexander Cunningham (1814–1893) of the Royal Engineers, a friend and student of James Prinsep of the East India Company. In 1861, upon his retirement from the army, Cunningham was appointed by the viceroy to head what would become the Archaeological Survey of India. He would eventually identify, and in some cases excavate, many of the most famous sites in Buddhist India, including Bodh Gayā, Sarnath, Nālandā, and Sanchi. Many of the archaeological treasures large enough to be moved were shipped back to Britain; some of the most important works of Buddhist sculpture in the British Museum were provided by Cunningham. In his excavations, Cunningham’s bible was Xuanzang’s account of his travels, The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions (Da Tang xiyu ji). In

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addition to the texts he retrieved and the translations he made, Xuanzang is revered for the information that he presents about Buddhist life in India during his sixteen-year sojourn there, providing a kind of demography of monastic life, explaining which monasteries were where, how many monks lived there, and what their doctrinal affiliation was. His travel account had been translated into French by Stanislas Julien in 1857 and 1858, and then into English by Samuel Beal, “Chaplain in Her Majesty’s Fleet,” in 1884 as Si-Yu-Ki: Buddhist Rec­ ords of the Western World. Inspired by Cunningham’s discoveries, a British-trained Hungarian scholar named Aurel Stein, who had served in administrative posts in Lahore and Calcutta, decided to trace Xuanzang’s route outside of India and into Central Asia. He arrived in Dunhuang in 1907, having heard about the caves from a fellow Hungarian who had visited the site in 1879. There were also rumors of the manuscripts. Learning that Wang Yuanlu was a fan of the novel Journey to the West (Xiyouji), based on Xuanzang’s travels, Stein presented himself as a latter-­day Xuanzang; just as the Chinese pilgrim had carried sacred scriptures from India to China, this European pilgrim had come to carry sacred scriptures from China to Europe. He even paid to have a crude clay statue of Xuanzang sculpted for one of the caves. Stein eventually convinced the reluctant Wang to give him several thousand texts and hundreds of paintings in return for a contribution of the equivalent of £130 for the restoration of Cave 16. In 1912, Stein was honored by George V, made Knight Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire. The looting of Dunhuang would continue. Aurel Stein made two more trips. In 1908, the year after Stein’s first trip, the French scholar Paul Pelliot (1878– 1945) arrived. Unlike Stein, he knew Chinese, which offered him two advantages: he could converse directly with Wang, and he could read the works in the Library Cave. He went through thousands of texts, many just fragments, identifying those that he considered most important and taking them to Paris. In 1911, Count Ōtani Kōzui (1876–1948) led an expedition from Japan, returning to Kyoto with over four hundred manuscripts. Arriving in 1914, Sergei Oldenburg (1863–1934) took 365 scrolls and some eighteen thousand fragments of texts back to St. Petersburg. The American archaeologist Langdon Warner (1881–1955) removed twenty-six paintings from the walls of four caves and took them to the Fogg Museum in Boston. How this small room came to be stuffed with texts, paintings, and banners and then sealed (sometime in the early eleventh century) remains something of a mystery, with a number of theories put forth. The space seems to have orig-

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inally been a small meditation chapel, later becoming a memorial chapel to a monk who served as abbot at Dunhuang in the ninth century; a number of the manuscripts may have belonged to him. Buddhist texts, considered to be physical embodiments of the Buddha’s speech, are considered sacred. They are not to be stepped on, discarded, or burned. In many ways, Buddhist texts are regarded as relics and are honored as such; many of the recently discovered Gandhāran manuscripts were found buried in the vicinity of a stūpa. The Library Cave may have been used as a repository, even a tomb, for the many texts and fragments of texts accumulated over the years. This may be a reason that once it was filled, the room was not enclosed by a door but sealed, with a mural painted over the new wall.15 The contents of the Library Cave, as it came to be called, were quite remarkable, filling a space of some five hundred cubic feet. It included texts in Chinese, Tibetan, and Sanskrit, as well as a number of Central Asian languages such as Khotanese and Sogdian—some forty thousand manuscripts and fragments. The texts themselves were predominantly Buddhist in content, but also included Daoist, Confucian, Nestorian Christian, Jewish, and Manichean texts. In addition, there were all manner of more secular works, including administrative and legal documents. The Buddhist works encompassed a wide range of genres, including many of the famous Indian sūtras and śāstras, but also meditation manuals, prayers, ritual instructions, divination texts, and lecture notes. The books took many forms. Some were scrolls that were rolled; some were folded concertina style; some were bound as books; some were bags of fragments. A common format was called the pothi—loose, oblong pages modeled on the Indian palm-leaf manuscript. In some cases, holes were drilled through pages, so that a string could be inserted to hold the pages together in their proper order. Many of the texts were manuscripts; others were block prints. When Aurel Stein, who could not read Chinese, examined the texts he had received from Wang Yuanlu, he was dismayed to find hundreds of copies of the same texts, especially the Lotus Sūtra and the Diamond Sūtra (Vajracchedikā); one copy of the Diamond Sūtra, dating from 868, is regarded as the oldest dated printed book. Many copies of the Sūtra on the Land of Bliss (Sukhāvatīvyūha), the central text for Pure Land practice, were also found. The colophons that had been added at the end of the texts indicate that they were copied for the benefit of the patron and their family, both the living and the dead. For a text to survive, it must be copied, and copied in a way that will allow it to survive. Carving in stone is perhaps the most effective medium, but that is

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a long, laborious, and expensive process. Those impediments did not stop Buddhists from doing so. Writing by hand is faster, but the survival of the text depends on the medium onto which the text is copied. In Buddhist India, that was often a palm leaf or a piece of birchbark, cut into oblong shapes and inscribed with a stylus.16 But palm leaves and birchbark are brittle, susceptible to destruction and decay by fire and water. This is one reason why so many Indian Buddhist texts are lost in their original Sanskrit or Prakrit, while those that survive were discovered in the cooler and drier north. Many that were lost in their original Indic forms are preserved in Chinese or Tibetan translation, the manuscripts surviving long enough to be carried abroad and translated. The transition from copying Buddhist scriptures by hand, a practice extolled in so many Mahāyāna sūtras, to the mass production of copies through the technology of the woodblock print, developed in China, would have important implications for questions of canon. This was a massive undertaking, requiring all manner of scholarly, technical, and administrative resources. First, a list of texts worthy of inclusion had to be compiled by a committee of learned monks, with texts considered apocryphal or otherwise spurious excluded. Next, a corrected version of each text had to be established, requiring the comparison of available translations and decisions on the proper terminology. Again, this was the work of Buddhist monks. As this scholarly work was going on, a huge amount of wood had to be acquired, selected for its absence of knots, as well as for its durability and resistance to warping and cracking; pear wood was considered especially good for the purpose. The trees had to be cut down, the wood seasoned and then cut into tens of thousands of rectangular blocks of identical size; the carving of the Kaibao canon, a project that began in 971, required over 130,000 blocks. Those blocks then needed to be hand carved by hundreds of highly skilled craftsmen, able to correctly carve hundreds of Chinese characters onto each block, in relief and backwards. A huge warehouse had to be constructed to store the thousands of blocks, organized in such a way that blocks for a particular text could be located for printing. All this had to occur before the tedious process of printing could begin, with copies of the entire canon presented to monasteries throughout the realm, gaining great merit for the donor for the pious deed of preserving and disseminating the dharma. The entire process required decades. Yet, beginning in the Song Dynasty, records indicate that some dozen editions of the canon were carved over the next millennium. Designed to endure, very few survive. In 1127, the Jurchen (later called the Manchu) invaded Song China, captured the rulers, and took many

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of the blocks back north. In the early eighteenth century, the blocks of a canon completed in 1440 were burned to make charcoal that was then used to make glazed tiles for the Forbidden City.17 It was an act of piety to sponsor the carving of the canon. Sometimes it was financed by the ruler alone, often for the merit it would produce in this lifetime and the next. Sometimes it was a community effort, with individuals and families sponsoring the carving of a particular text or groups of texts. One of the motivations for the carving of what is called the first Koryŏ canon in Korea was to protect the kingdom from invasion. Completed in 1087, it was the most comprehensive canon of its day, with 5,924 fascicles in 570 cases. One of the motivations behind the carving of the canon was the belief that its presence would ward off invading armies. During the Mongol invasion of 1232, the Koryŏ canon was burned.18 Knowing of the Mongol fear of traveling by ship, King K’ojong (1213–1259) had a palace built on Ganghwa Island at the mouth of the Han River, west of Seoul. The king had another set of blocks carved there, a project that required sixteen years. Those blocks survive to the present day at Haein Monastery. Ganghwa Island would continue to play an important role in Korean history. Buddhism had existed in Korea for centuries before it came to Tibet. Indeed, according to traditional histories, Tibet did not have a written language prior to the introduction of Buddhism. By decree of the king, a written language, based on Sanskrit, was invented for the translation of Buddhist texts. The Tibetan Buddhist canon is organized differently than the Pāli canon and the Chinese canon. Intended as a collection of works from India, it is divided into two apparently simple categories: works by the Buddha and works by other Indian masters. The two parts are thus called the “Translation of the Word [of the Buddha],” or “Kangyur” in Tibetan, and the “Translation of the Treatises,” or “Tengyur” in Tibetan, with “treatise” (śāstra, in Sanskrit) here referring to works authored by Indian masters. Each of these was divided into sections. In the case of the “Translation of the Word,” that is, the sūtras and tantras attributed to the Buddha, works were divided by genre, such as “vinaya” and “perfection of wisdom.” In one edition there are 1,109 titles in 102 volumes. In the case of the “Translation of the Treatises,” works were generally divided by philosophical school, such as “Madhyamaka” and “Cittāmatra,” or genre, such as “medicine” or “jātaka.” That same edition’s Tengyur contains 3,358 titles in 212 volumes. Together, the two collections fill more than 97,500 block-printed folios and thus more than 195,000 printed sides.19 In 2003, Gene Smith’s Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center published the “Translation of the

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Word” in ten compact discs. Later that same year, he published the “Translation of the Treatises” in eleven compact discs. By 2021, digital technology had advanced to the point that the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, now renamed the Buddhist Digital Resource Center, could place the entire Tibetan Buddhist canon on a flash drive, designed so that it could be worn around the neck as an amulet.

5 • Council

Britain went to war with the Buddhist kingdom of Burma three times in the nineteenth century, conquering more and more of the country each time. The First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824 to 1826 was essentially a dispute over territories along the eastern border of British India and the western border of Burma. Burma lost those territories. In the Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1852, Britain attacked by sea, with heavy fighting in Yangon (once known in English as Rangoon), including around the Shwedagon Pagoda, the most sacred site in the land, said to hold the hairs that the Buddha had given to the two merchants who offered him the first meal after his enlightenment. What was called Lower Burma, the coastal regions, including the capital of Yangon, fell to the British. King Mindon (1808–1878) fled north, where he established a new capital on the banks of the Irrawaddy River, the walled and moated citadel city of Mandalay. In Buddhism, all events, including wars won and lost, are the result of the collective karma of those who experience them. The foremost responsibility of a king is to protect his kingdom. Over history, Buddhist kings have sought to do this through the protection and promotion of the dharma as understood in a cosmic context, thereby making merit that would shield their realms from invasion. As the people of a Theravāda kingdom, the Buddhists of Burma accepted the prophecy that the dharma will disappear over the course of five millennia after the Buddha’s passage. The great fifth-century exegete Buddhaghosa provides what would become the standard sequence. By the end of the first millennium, no one would be capable of achieving even the state of a stream-enterer, much less an arhat; in Burma, it was believed that no one had become an arhat since 1337. By the end of the second millennium, monks would not be able to maintain the monastic vows. By the end of the third millennium, all Buddhist

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books would have disappeared. By the end of the fourth millennium, all monks would return to lay life. At the end of the fifth and final millennium, the last remnants of the dharma, the relics of the Buddha, would burst into flames. King Mindon knew that he was living in the third millennium. Indeed, he believed that the founding of his new capital had been prophesied to take place on the 2,400th anniversary of the nirvāna of the Buddha. The decline in mo˙ nastic discipline predicted for the second millennium was already in evidence, and so the king set out to purify the san˙gha by imposing a system of state oversight, one that was resented by monastic elders. The particular danger of the third millennium was the disappearance of the teaching. In an effort to forestall that, and to make merit to protect his new capital from the British, he called a “council” (a term discussed below). In 1871, some twenty-four hundred monks gathered in Mandalay, where they spent five months confirming and then reciting the Pāli tripitaka, what is often called the Buddhist canon. King Mindon ˙ counted the congregation in Mandalay as the fifth Buddhist council. (The most recent council by Burmese reckoning is the sixth, from 1954 to 1956, with 1956 marking the 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha’s passage into nirvāna.) ˙ But a council of mortal monks might not be enough to preserve the dharma beyond its destined disappearance. He, therefore, had a great temple built, a temple called the Kuthodaw Pagoda, the Pagoda of Royal Merit, where he literally had the Buddhist canon carved in stone. It required 729 marble tablets, five feet tall and three feet wide, with the texts inscribed on both sides, with eighty to one hundred lines per side, in Burmese script. After the words had been chiseled into the stone, they were painted with gold. Each of the tablets was then housed in a small, temple-like structure called a kyauksa gu, or “inscription cave,” adorned with bells and an umbrella-shaped ornament on top. The work began in 1860 and was completed in 1868—that is, three years before the council that was supposed to purify the canon of error. King Mindon was not the first pious Buddhist to do this. Seeking to preserve the dharma for the Degenerate Age, beginning in the seventh century and continuing to the twelfth century, the Chinese Buddhist canon was carved on stone slabs and sealed in caves near Fangshan. Over fourteen thousand of those slabs remain extant.1 In the history of Christianity, the various councils—the Council of Nicaea, the Council of Ephesus, the Council of Chalcedon—are regarded as key moments in the formation of the religion, where what appear today to be arcane points of theology somehow became matters of life and death. Councils are also regarded, at least retrospectively, as crucial moments in the history of Buddhism, often occasioned by a crisis. As in Christianity, in many cases, those crises seem

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precipitated by disputes over the most minor matters. Unlike Christianity, at least some of the Buddhist councils seem to be matters of myth rather than history. This is the case with the First Council. Yet, despite the fact that it likely never occurred, at least as it is recounted in the scriptures, the issues raised in its account would remain central to the tradition.2 According to the story, not long after the Buddha’s passage into nirvāna, ˙ Mahākāśyapa, the Buddha’s chief disciple and de facto leader of the community after his passing, overheard a monk named Subhadra telling some other monks that the death of the Buddha was an occasion for joy rather than sorrow because the Buddha would no longer be around to tell the monks what they could and could not do. On his deathbed, the Buddha had been asked who would lead the community in his absence. He did not name a successor, saying instead that the dharma and the vinaya—his teachings and the monastic code—should be their master. Hearing Subhadra’s delight at the death of the Buddha, Mahākāśyapa worried that the dharma and vinaya might already be in danger. He therefore decided to convene a council in order to collect and codify them, saying, “Come, let us, your reverences, chant dhamma and discipline before what is not dhamma shines out and dhamma is withheld, before what is not discipline shines out and discipline is withheld, before those who speak what is not-dhamma become strong, and those who speak dhamma become feeble.”3 With the support of the king, the reformed patricide Ajātaśātru, Mahākāśyapa called a meeting of monks, to be held in Saptaparna Cave near ˙ Vulture Peak, the site of so many of the Buddha’s sermons. (Recall that above the enclosures for the sacred tablets were called caves in Burmese.) We should note that Subhadra’s relief at the death of the Buddha was not because of what the Buddha made the monks believe; it was because of what he made the monks do. That it is this statement that occasions the First Council and the codification, or at least the story of the codification, of the Buddhist canon, suggests, as does other evidence, that it is not doctrine but discipline, not orthodoxy but orthopraxy, that provided the impetus for the First Council. It was to be a meeting of five hundred monks. However, Mahākāśyapa specified that those monks also be arhats, those who had advanced to the highest level of the Buddhist path, those who, having destroyed all causes for future rebirth, would enter nirvāna upon their death. The council was to consist of five ˙ hundred arhats. In order to maintain that number, Mahākāśyapa made a rule that no one was allowed to pass into nirvāna until the council had taken place. ˙ However, at least in the opinion of one monk, it was already too late; the degeneration of the dharma had already begun. This was the monk Gavāmpati, ˙

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one of the Buddha’s earliest disciples. When he was asked to serve as one of the five hundred arhats, he declined, preferring to pass into nirvāna. In a story ˙ that does not appear in the Pāli version, he told the monk who had come to invite him, “Have not the Doctrine and Discipline of the Lord, as well as the sentences and words corresponding to the Doctrine, and the philosophical teachings likewise,—have they not been rendered impure? Those who were of virtuous behaviour, have they not got their minds diverted from reading, reciting, and taking to heart (the word of the Scripture)? Are they not assembling now for telling obscene tales? With minds possessed of doubt and uncertainty, do they not consider that which is not the Doctrine to be such, and do they not speak of the real Doctrine as not being it?”4 For Gavāmpati, the disappearance ˙ of the dharma had begun. For good or for ill, many elements of the Buddhist vocabulary that are translated into European languages draw from Christianity; “monk” and “nun” are only the most obvious examples. “Council” is another such term. The Sanskrit term is “san˙gīti,” literally, “sing together.” In the Buddhist context, it is perhaps best translated as “recitation” or “chanting.” This is important to understand, because the First Council, or the most important part of the First Council, consisted not in debates over points of doctrine but in chanting everything that the Buddha had taught—that is, chanting, and therefore compiling, the dharma and vinaya. There was an immediate problem, however. Twenty years after he achieved enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree (and thus at age fifty-five, according to most Indian accounts), the Buddha asked his cousin Ānanda to serve as his personal attendant. Ānanda—who had become a monk (again, according to most accounts) when the Buddha returned to his home city of Kapilavastu a year after his enlightenment—agreed, but only after stating a number of conditions, one of which was that the Buddha would repeat to him anything that he might have taught when Ānanda was not present. It was thus assumed to be the case that Ānanda had heard everything that the Buddha taught, either being present at the time or having the Buddha repeat it to him when he was not. Ānanda, therefore, was essential to the compilation of the dharma, the Buddha’s discourses. This was the problem: Ānanda was not an arhat and therefore was ineligible to attend the council. Instructed by Mahākāśyapa to become an arhat before the rapidly approaching date, Ānanda tried mightily, without success. It is said that one may achieve enlightenment in any one of four postures: sitting, standing, walking, and lying down. None of these worked for Ānanda. Meditating all night before the meeting was to begin, at dawn he collapsed on his bed in

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despair. In what seems a rare moment of Buddhist humor in a grave situation, it is said that Ānanda became an arhat as his head fell toward his pillow and his feet rose from the floor, the only arhat said to have achieved liberation from rebirth in this posture. With his entrance to the assembly now permitted and the five hundredth arhat now counted, the council could begin. Ānanda would recite the dharma, that is, the sūtras, of the Buddha, and the monk Upāli, renowned for his strict adherence to the monastic code, would recite the vinaya, each prompted by questions from Mahākāśyapa. He asked Upāli to begin, in each case describing the event that led the Buddha to formulate the rule. When he had concluded, Ānanda was asked to recite the sūtras. In order to attest to the accuracy of what he was about to recite, he would begin each discourse with “Evam mayā śrutam” (Thus did I hear). He would then ˙ explain where the Buddha was when the discourse was given, who was in the audience, and who asked the question that occasioned the discourse. This phrase, “Thus did I hear,” would become among the most famous in Buddhist literature, with the “I” taken to refer to Ānanda. It is crucial to note the importance of orality or, better, aurality, here. In keeping with the ancient Indian tradition that the truth is conveyed through speech, the authenticity of a discourse of the Buddha is determined here by the statement that it was heard directly from the mouth of the Buddha. In the centuries following this account of the First Council, this criterion would come under revision. It is noteworthy that in the traditional account, there seems to be no concern about Ānanda being able to properly remember everything he had heard the Buddha speak over the course of the decades. We recall that according to the Gospels, the mission of Jesus lasted only three years. The Buddha had been enlightened at age thirty-five and died at age eighty. As noted above, according to traditional accounts, Ānanda was present as a member of the Buddha’s community of monks for all but one of those years and was his attendant for the last quarter century. Thus, there was much to hear. Ānanda is renowned for his prodigious memory; it is said that he could recite sixty thousand words of the Buddha without omitting a syllable. The First Council, therefore, took some time. After Upāli and Ānanda recited the vinaya and the dharma, the other assembled arhats needed to recite them as well, a process that required seven months. According to the Theravāda traditions, the texts were recited in the order in which they are preserved today in the Pāli canon.5 There is much to ponder in this story. Whenever the story of the First Council was composed, it is clear that it was crucial to its authors that it present the event as having taken place shortly after the death of the Buddha, while the

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memory of his teachings remained fresh among his immediate followers. Furthermore, these were not ordinary followers, but the Buddha’s most famous direct disciples, all of them arhats, and they thus possessed all manner of supernormal powers, including powers of memory, led by the memory master himself, Ānanda, who had been by the Buddha’s side for so long. The claim, then, is that two of the three elements of what is often presented as the Buddhist “canon,” the famous tripitaka or “three baskets”—the sūtrapitaka (basket ˙ ˙ of discourses) and vinayapitaka (basket of discipline)—were codified immedi˙ ately after the Buddha’s death. It is also a concession that the third basket, the abhidharmapitaka (basket of the higher dharma), was compiled later and was ˙ not spoken directly by the Buddha. The question of what comprises the Buddhist canon would haunt the tradition for its entire history. The story of the First Council is likely among the first, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempts to resolve that question. Ānanda is one of the most beloved figures in the Buddhist tradition. Less austere and severe than monks like Mahākāśyapa, Ānanda is remembered for his devotion to the Buddha and for his kindness to those who sought the Buddha’s teachings and advice. There is a guileless quality, even a naiveté, about him that has endeared him to the tradition for centuries. While one would expect him to be presented as the hero of the First Council, he is not. As the story is told, it is almost as if his honesty led to his downfall. The figure beloved by the laity would become the target of the resentment of the monks. This is because, in the course of his lengthy recitation of everything that the Buddha had said, Ānanda described things that only he had heard—as always in the sūtras, speaking of himself in the third person—things that the Buddha had said when the two of them were alone, and that, at least as the story is told, were revealed to the assembly of arhats for the first time at the First Council. There are three incidents to consider here, the first two of which occur in the Great Discourse on the Final Nirvāna, the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta, the lengthy ˙ account of the Buddha’s last days. Here, the Buddha is an old man, suffering from various maladies. In an effort to restore his strength, he and Ānanda spend some time alone at a forest shrine practicing meditation. In the course of their conversation, he tells Ānanda, almost in passing, that, if asked to do so, a buddha is able to live “for an eon or until the end of an eon.” The term translated as “eon” here is “kalpa,” a term used to measure vast periods of time in ancient India. There are various types of these eons, and their lengths are variously calculated, but the shortest of the eons lasts many millions of years. Strangely, upon hearing this remarkable news, made all the more timely because the

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Buddha’s time is nigh, Ānanda responds with the equivalent of a shrug, despite the Buddha repeating this fact two more times. After a conversation with Māra—the deity of death who had attacked the Buddha on the night of his enlightenment—the Buddha decides that he should pass into nirvāna soon, and, in order to do so, he “relinquishes his life force,” ˙ causing the earth to quake. The tremor seems to get Ānanda’s attention, and he asks the Buddha why the earth has quaked. The Buddha then enumerates the several causes of earthquakes. Included in the list is: when a buddha relinquishes his life force. Ānanda finally understands what has happened and remembers what the Buddha has told him, three times. He begs the Buddha to live for an eon or until the end of the eon. But the Buddha rather coldly replies that it is too late, that he had his chance, even reminding Ānanda of fifteen previous occasions when he had told him of this remarkable power that all buddhas possess. Each time, Ānanda did not take the hint, failing to make the crucial request. This private conversation, revealed by Ānanda at the First Council, becomes the basis of one of the charges leveled against him in what is known as the trial of Ānanda. If we imagine the First Council as a historical event, taking place three months after the death of the Buddha, we can easily understand the charge against Ānanda as a reflection of the grief of the community of enlightened monks; though they understand the doctrine of impermanence that the Buddha preached throughout his life, there is nonetheless the guilt of those left behind when the beloved has passed beyond, made all the more acute when the beloved is the teacher. The story also serves as a response to what we can imagine the rivals of the Buddhists might have said: If this person who called himself the Buddha was indeed the Enlightened One, greater than the gods, endowed with all manner of magical powers, why did he die after a bout of dysentery at the age of eighty? Because Ānanda forgot to ask him not to. When we imagine the story as a later account, composed long after the Buddha’s death, we can see the story as an expression of the anxiety of the community at the absence of the master, the “founder.” We must recall that the founder of Buddhism did not ascend to heaven, where he hears our prayers, waiting to descend on Judgment Day. At least in what scholars consider the early tradition, when the Buddha passed into nirvāna, he was gone forever, leaving only ˙ his words and the relics from his cremation behind. As the community faced all manner of crises, from both within and without, how nice it would have been if Ānanda had only asked the question. He is to blame, made to shoulder the collective regret of the centuries.

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Another incident that Ānanda reports seems less profound, more petty. It occurred when the Buddha was on his deathbed, lying on his right side between two trees. The Buddha gives Ānanda final instructions on a seemingly random list of matters, including permission for the community of monks, should they so wish, to abolish the minor rules of the monastic code after his death. Buddhist monks keep many vows, 227 in the Theravāda tradition of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, 253 for the Mūlasarvāstivāda tradition of Tibet. Most of them are minor. Thus, the Buddha’s instruction is major. In the account of the First Council, the assembled monks ask Ānanda the crucial question: What did the Buddha mean by “minor rules”? Ānanda confesses that he failed to ask. One can imagine the jeers resounding through the cave where the five hundred enlightened masters have assembled. After some discussion, it is concluded that because the monks do not know which vows the Buddha felt were dispensable, they have no choice but to keep them all. Again, in the context of the story, one can imagine the importance of this question, occurring in the same assembly where Upāli has just recited all the rules. But the story also bears the weight of the centuries leading up to its composition, and beyond, where generations of monks have Ānanda to blame for the dozens of little rules that they follow, largely details of decorum that must have sometimes struck the ancient monk, as they do the modern reader, as simply petty. The third conversation that the Buddha reports is about a matter that is not petty. According to the traditional account, a year after his enlightenment, the Buddha returned to his home city of Kapilavastu, where he saw his father, his wife, and his son for the first time since, as Prince Siddhārtha, he had left the palace under the cover of darkness seven years earlier. After a number of moments of tension with members of his family, the Buddha’s return becomes a triumph, with many members of his Śākya clan deciding to become monks. Hearing that his father is dying, the Buddha makes a return visit four years later. The Buddha preaches the dharma to his father, who becomes an arhat and passes away. The Buddha and monks then depart for the city of Vaiśālī. When they reach the city, Ānanda notices a group of five hundred women, their hair shorn, their feet bare, dressed in yellow robes. They are led by the Buddha’s stepmother, and Ānanda’s aunt, Mahāprajāpatī, widow of the recently deceased king. Other women included those who had been abandoned by their fathers, husbands, and sons, now monks who had gone forth from the life of the householder. Ānanda asks Mahāprajāpatī why they were there. She replies that they wish to become nuns. Ānanda conveys their request to the Buddha, who refuses.

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Earning the eternal gratitude of Buddhist nuns over the centuries, Ānanda persists, asking the Buddha whether women are capable of achieving enlightenment. The Buddha concedes that they are. Eventually, the Buddha agrees to allow women to be ordained, establishing an order of nuns. He is represented as having done so grudgingly, imposing a special set of eight “weighty rules” (gurudharma) that nuns must follow, including a rule that a nun may never criticize a monk. The Buddha also makes the ominous prediction that his teaching, which would have lasted for a thousand years, will now only last for five hundred years because he has agreed to ordain women. It is often useful when reading the many prophecies in Buddhist texts to regard them not as predictions of the future but as descriptions of the present. Thus, we might imagine this “prophecy” being included in an account of women’s ordination composed five hundred years after the Buddha’s passing, with the author using the ordination of women to explain what he perceives as the sad state of the dharma. As we might expect, Ānanda again is made to take the blame. He did not ask the Buddha to (essentially) live forever; he did not ask the Buddha which rules could be ignored; and he talked the Buddha into doing something that he otherwise would not have done: ordain women. This charge is made despite its implication that the Buddha, the Enlightened One, could be talked into doing something that he really did not want to do. If this were not bad enough, several other charges are made against Ānanda at the First Council. The versions vary, but they include the charge that he once stepped on the robe of the Buddha while he was sewing it, and that he allowed women to see the Buddha’s naked body when it was being prepared for cremation. Faced with these various charges, the ever honest Ānanda confessed to them all, saying only that he saw no fault in having done them.6 We see in the story of the First Council, story (and not history) though it may be, so many of the themes that would dominate the Buddhist tradition, not only in its natal India, but across Asia, and today, the world: obsession with the purity of the monastic community, as measured by monks maintaining their vows, which served as the impetus for the First Council; spiritual attainment as a measure of authority, as with the need for Ānanda, despite more important qualifications, to become an arhat in order to participate in a council where his presence was required; concern with the canon, with what is, and is not, the word of the Buddha, as measured by what was heard by whom; the need to delimit and control the contents of the canon in order to prevent the inclusion of the inauthentic; the centrality of orality, that the words of the Buddha,

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once heard, must be memorized and recited; the eternal anxiety over the absence of the Buddha, his eternal presence assured had Ānanda only asked him to stay; the simultaneous pride in and resentment of the monastic code, which could have been so much more manageable had Ānanda only asked what a minor rule was; and the question of the status of women, acknowledged as fully capable of advancing on the path and attaining liberation from rebirth (something so rare in the religions of ancient India), yet burdened with heavy rules as the price of being allowed to do so. Finally, we see the envy of those with proximity to the sacred: the council begins with Ānanda being celebrated and ends with him being scorned. The Buddha’s refusal to name a successor—declaring instead that after his passing, the dharma and the vinaya would be the master of the monks—would have its own consequences. As Buddhism spread across the Indian subcontinent, differences of opinion would arise about exactly what constituted the monastic code. With no arbiter appointed to adjudicate, who would decide? Indeed, as the various schools and subschools began to proliferate, they tended to differ (with some important exceptions) on questions of discipline more than on questions of doctrine. And, as one might expect, the first point of contention was the status of the “minor rules.” The Second Council was said to have taken place one hundred years after the Buddha passed into nirvāna. This suspiciously round number and the ab˙ sence of any mention in the edicts of Aśoka of the schools said to have resulted from the council has raised questions about its historicity, or at least its date. However, the issues that gave rise to the schism seem, by virtue of their pettiness, to reflect conflicts that were afoot in the monastic community in the early history of Buddhism in India. The event said to have precipitated the council was when a monk named Yaśas traveled to the city of Vaiśālī, the site of many of the Buddha’s activities, and observed the monks there receiving gold and silver, rather than food, from the laity into their begging bowls. This was a clear violation of the minor rule against touching gold and silver. Yaśas went on to learn from the monks of Vaiśālī that they had identified nine additional minor rules that they had decided to ignore. These included things that, indeed, seem quite minor: carrying salt in an animal horn, drinking milk whey after noon, and using sitting mats that had fringe. One of the things deemed permissible, however, was quite consequential: violating a monastic rule because one’s teacher had done so, that is, allowing precedence to outweigh law. When Yaśas informed the monks that they were in violation of the monastic code, they expelled him from the order. He sought support from a senior monk

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named Revata, who came to Vaiśālī, where he conferred with the leader of the local monks, a monk named Sarvagāmin, who, ironically, was said to have been a direct disciple of Ānanda. When questioned by Revata, Sarvagāmin ruled that the ten deeds reported by Yaśas were indeed violations of the monastic code. Many of the monks, however, disagreed, ignoring his ruling. This led to what is sometimes referred to, perhaps hyperbolically, as “the great schism” between the monks of Vaiśālī, who called themselves the Mahāsāmghika (literally, Those ˙ of the Great Assembly, less literally, The Majority), and those who called themselves the Sthaviranikāya (the Group of Elders). Not surprisingly, this account of the Second Council, in which the minority elders are portrayed as the strict upholders of the vinaya, appears in the canon of the Theravāda, which traces its origins, with some difficulty, back to the Sthaviranikāya.7 Nonetheless, it is important to note that a comparison of the surviving vinaya codes finds substantial similarity in the monastic rules among those schools considered offshoots of the Sthavira. That is, the Sarvāstivāda, Mūlasarvāstivāda, Theravāda, Dharmaguptaka, and Mahīśāsaka vinayas are similar to each other, and each differs from the Mahāsām ghika vinaya.8 ˙ Depending upon who is counting, there have been six, and as many as nine, councils; we do not need to go through them all. The Third Council, however, deserves mention. It is said to have been called by Aśoka himself. In both the Pāli and Sanskrit legends, Aśoka is renowned for his almost maniacal generosity toward the monastic community, showering them with various riches. According to the account of the Third Council (which appears only in Pāli sources), this led, not unexpectedly, to all manner of followers of other tīrthika (that is, non-Buddhist) teachers seeking ordination for the (literally) free lunch it provided each day. When the authentic monks recognized this, they stopped ordaining them. However, this simply led to all manner of freeloaders shaving their heads, putting on yellow robes, and moving into the monastery. The central ritual of the Buddhist monastery is the uposadha ceremony, the ˙ fortnightly assembly of all the monks and nuns in a given region to recite the monastic code and confess any infractions, after which the community declares itself to be pure. The authentic monks of Aśoka’s capital of Pataliputra knew that they could not in good conscience perform the ceremony because the monastic community of the city was not pure. They therefore suspended it. Hearing this, but apparently not knowing the reason why, Aśoka became enraged, sending a minister to compel the monks to do so. When they declined, he began beheading them, stopping just before he cut off the head of the king’s own brother, who was a monk at the monastery. Aśoka then convened a council of

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a thousand monks, who recited the dharma and the vinaya for nine months, apparently serving as the means of driving out those false monks who could not do so. We see again that the purity of the Buddhist san˙gha is measured not by belief but by the code of conduct, and the ability to recite it.9 This is not to suggest that doctrine and belief, the domain of the other pitaka, the sūtrapitaka, was not also a domain of anxiety. The question of what ˙ ˙ the Buddha taught—in the words of the tradition, what was buddhavacana, the word of the Buddha—would continue to be debated for centuries. It remains the red line that divides the Theravāda traditions from the Mahāyāna traditions until the present day. Some of the early schools counted as the word of the Buddha both what the Buddha himself had said as well as those discourses delivered by a disciple that the Buddha had certified as being true. We see this even in Mahāyāna sūtras, most famously in the Heart Sūtra (Prajñāpāramitāhrdaya), which ends with the ˙ Buddha praising what Avalokiteśvara has taught. Eventually, tests were devised to determine whether a statement should be counted as the word of the Buddha. The most famous of these are the four “great authorities” (mahāpadeśa) found in a number of texts, including the account of the Buddha’s final days, where he explains them to the monks. A monk may report that he heard a teaching of the Buddha from one of four authorities: (1) the Buddha himself, (2) a community of elder monks, (3) a smaller group of learned elder monks, and (4) a single learned elder monk. The san˙gha will then judge whether it is the word of the Buddha based on whether it conforms with the accepted sūtras and is in agreement with the vinaya. If it does, it is to be accepted; if it does not, it is to be rejected. As a strategy for determining textual authenticity, these criteria are clearly conservative, authenticating only those doctrines and practices that have already been accepted. They appear to come from a community lamenting the loss of teachings already forgotten and so seeking to find and preserve whatever might still remain, yet wary of the introduction of innovation.10 In Aśoka’s rock edict at Bhairāt, we find the rather innocuous encomium, “All that the bhagavan Buddha has spoken, O monks, is well spoken.” In a Mahāyāna sūtra, it receives what appears to be a dangerous twist: “All which is well-spoken, Maitreya, is spoken by the Buddha.”11 This would seem to remove all restrictions from admission into word of the Buddha. Yet even the Mahāyāna is conservative, for the sūtra qualifies the meaning of “well-spoken” (subhāsita). ˙ A statement is the word of the Buddha if it is meaningful and not meaningless, if it is principled and not unprincipled, if it brings about the extinction and

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not the increase of the afflictions, and if it sets forth the qualities and benefits of nirvāna and not the qualities and benefits of samsāra.12 ˙ ˙ With these qualifications, the statement seems entirely uncontroversial. Still, we see an important shift of emphasis from the four great authorities. Thus, there is no longer any concern that the words be heard directly from the Buddha or from one or more learned monks. Perhaps of greater significance, a statement is not judged to be the word of the Buddha based on its conformity to already known and accepted discourses. It is to be judged based on its function: to destroy the afflictions and lead to nirvāna. Admittedly, this is the most tra˙ ditional of Buddhist aims, but in the absence of the omniscient arbiter, the Buddha, who is to make this judgment? If there is no Buddha, is everything permitted? Despite the efforts of King Mindon to preserve the dharma for at least the rest of the third millennium, it seemed that it might not survive the nineteenth century. In the Third Anglo-Burmese War, lasting only three weeks in November 1885, the rest of Burma fell, and the entire country became an extension of the British colony of India, ruled by the Raj. The king, Mindon’s son Thibaw, was deposed and sent into exile. All Burmese were expelled from Mindon’s citadel palace, which contained the Pagoda of Royal Merit; it was renamed Fort Dufferin (after the Earl of Dufferin, viceroy of India) and made a headquarters for British troops. A Burmese civil servant wrote to Queen Victoria, reminding her of the British policy of respecting all religions and complaining that the Burmese Buddhists were being prohibited from visiting this site of their sacred texts. In 1890, the British troops received her order to withdraw from all Burmese religious sites. The delight over this welcome news from the empress of India was replaced by horror when the Burmese found that the Pagoda of Royal Merit, with its 729 temples for the 729 sacred slabs, had been looted. Thousands of bells had been stolen. The gold had been scraped from the words of the Buddha. The demise of the dharma seemed to be at hand. One of the most important monks of this period was Ledi Sayadaw (1846– 1923); as a young monk, he had recited a long and difficult text at King Min­ don’s council. He viewed the fall of his homeland to the British, and the profound threat that it posed to the survival of Buddhism, from the perspective of Buddhist cosmology: the coming of the British was an omen of the apocalypse, the disappearance of the dharma. Without a pious monarch, its protection had to be found elsewhere. Over the long history of Buddhism and across the Buddhist world, the study of the scriptures and the practice of meditation had been the exclusive purview of the monastic community. The role of the laity, always

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the vast majority of Buddhists in a given country, was to support the monastic community with their offerings. In a symbiotic relationship that stood at the heart of Buddhism across Asia, the role of monks and nuns was to maintain their vows (especially the vow of celibacy) and thus remain suitable recipients of the offerings of the laity. In this exchange, monks and nuns received material support, and laypeople received merit, that is, good karma, which would lead to a happy rebirth in the next lifetime. With these two roles long established, study and meditation did not have a natural place in lay Buddhist life. But with the dharma lacking royal protection and under threat of extinction, Ledi Sayadaw sought to preserve it by dispersing it as widely as possible, extending it even to the laity, and in both of its forms, the study of scripture and the practice of meditation. Without the support of the king, he looked to the commoners, attempting to democratize the dharma in order to save it. Making use of the newly introduced printing press, he began writing pamphlets that set forth the complicated categories of Buddhist philosophy, called the abhidharma. He also revived a simple form of meditation practice called vipassanā, or “insight” meditation, the form of meditation that leads to achievement of the four levels of enlightenment: stream-enterer, once-returner, never-­ returner, and arhat.13 As noted above, according to Burmese sources, the last person to become an arhat did so in 1337. This, in part, reflected the Pāli chronology of the dis­ appearance of the dharma, according to which one thousand years after the Buddha’s passage into nirvāna it becomes impossible to achieve any of the four ˙ stages of enlightenment. There were political reasons as well, however. Many of the kings of Southeast Asian polities, including those of Burma, considered themselves to be bodhisattvas. A bodhisattva is restricted from achieving any of the four stages of enlightenment until the night that he achieves buddhahood. Until that night, he is what is called a common being (puthujjana). Were a monk to achieve any of the four stages of enlightenment, he would no longer be a common being but instead a noble person (ariya) and thus someone to whom all common beings, even kings, need to show deference. By the time that Ledi Sayadaw and other monks began to offer instruction in insight meditation, there was no king of Burma. Through his efforts and those of other monks, centers were established where laypeople could study and meditate. It is this movement at the beginning of the twentieth century— motivated by fear of the British—that led to vipassanā retreats, where monks and even laypeople became stream-enterers, in spite of Buddhaghosa’s chronology. They did so by practicing a form of meditation that came to be known as

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“the Burmese method.” From a strange meeting of this form of Buddhist meditation and American therapy culture came “mindfulness,” which swept through the self-help community in Europe and America at the beginning of the twenty-­ first century. As we consider the question of what constitutes the canon, however, we recall that councils were often called to correct the canon, down to matters of spelling and grammar. Yet “correct” is not the right word. There are no errors in the speech of the Buddha. The council’s role is to purify the errors, the human errors, that had crept in over time. It was then that the canon would, once again, be preserved. Yet King Mindon preserved the words of the Buddha first, carving them in stone. It was only then that he convened the council. Perhaps he did so because he knew the British invasion was imminent. Or perhaps it was because the canon must always come first. In the beginning was the word.

6 • Disappearance

In 1761, the planet Venus crossed the face of the sun. Several European scientific societies, led by the French Académie des sciences, organized a project to measure the sun’s distance from the Earth, dispatching over one hundred observers to sixty locations around the world. The French scholar Guillaume Le Gentil (1725–1792) was sent to the French colony of Pondicherry on the east coast of India, only to find upon his arrival that it had been captured by the British. On June 6, 1761, the date that the observations had to be made, he was at sea; the rolling of the ship made it impossible to make accurate observations. Undeterred, he decided to remain in Asia until Venus returned eight years later. Fortunately, by this time, the French had retaken Pondicherry, and he was able to build a proper observatory as he awaited the appointed day, June 3, 1769. It was cloudy. Almost driven to madness, he eventually returned to Paris, where he found himself declared dead and his wife remarried. In 1780, he published an account of his travels in two volumes, entitled Voyage in the Seas of India, Made by Order of the King, on the Occasion of the Passage of Venus across the Disk of the Sun on June 6, 1761, and on the 3rd of the Same Month 1769 (Voyage dans les mers de l’Inde, fait par ordre du roi, à l’occasion du passage de Vénus sur le disque du soleil le 6 Juin 1761, et le 3 du même mois 1769). It seems that as he waited for Venus to cross the orb of the sun above, he was able to observe what had sunk into the earth below. There is something most noteworthy, which none of the travelers who discuss the Coromandel Coast and Pondichéry have noticed, found a short league south of the town, on the plane of Virapatnam, and rather near the river, a granite statue very hard and very beautiful: this statue,

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around three feet to three and a half feet in height, is sunk in the sand up to the waist, and doubtless weighs many thousand; it is as if it was abandoned in the middle of this vast plain. I cannot give a better idea of it than to say that it exactly conforms to and resembles the Siamese Sommonacodum [Samana Gotama, an epithet of the Buddha]; its head is the ˙ same shape, it has the same facial features, its arms are in the same attitude, and the ears are absolutely similar. The form of this divinity, which has certainly been made in this country, and which does not resemble in any way the present-day divinities of the Gentiles [Hindus], struck me when I passed this plain. I found various information about this singular figure; the Tamoults [Tamils] all assured me that it was Baouth [Buddha], who was no longer looked to and whose worship and festivals ceased after the Brames [brahmins] made themselves masters of the people’s belief.1 Thus, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the time when the British and the French were fighting for control of the subcontinent, not just the image of the Buddha but Buddhism itself was sinking beneath the surface, moving from a living institution to an archaeological artifact. Among the many mysteries that continue to vex scholars of the tradition, perhaps none are more important than the date of the Buddha’s death and the reason why his religion died in India. When it disappeared, how it disappeared, why it disappeared, and even if it disappeared continue to be debated. Again, these are questions whose answers, even tentative answers, could fill several volumes.2 In 1234, a Tibetan pilgrim named Dharmasvāmin made the arduous journey to India, the Buddhist holy land. When he arrived at Bodh Gayā, the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment, the holy of holies of the Buddhist world, he found it completely deserted. Soon, four monks appeared, one of whom explained, “It is not good. Frightened by the Turks, everyone has fled.”3 “The Turks” here (turuska, in Sanskrit) refers to the Muslims. Dharmasvāmin reports that ˙ Muslim soldiers had already stolen the emerald eyes from the image of the Buddha inside the Mahābodhi Temple. Fearing further desecration, the monks had walled up the entrance to the temple and painted an image of Śiva on the door to make it appear to be a Hindu shrine. Indeed, one of the constants in narratives of the demise of Buddhism in India—by modern scholars and by Buddhists both ancient and modern—is the role played by Islam, whether to strike the death blow or to hasten the decease of

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a dying tradition. We will find that this element of the story is overstated, oversimplified, and in some senses, simply wrong. However, let us begin with Islam. Until the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001 and the persecution of the Rohingya population of Burma in recent years, one rarely spoke of Buddhism and Islam in the same sentence. They seem so different, especially in their European caricatures: one a religion of peace, the other a religion of war; one a religion of nonviolence, the other a religion of violence. This caricature of the two traditions extends back to at least the nineteenth century. When the term “world religions” was first coined (in German) by the Dutch theologian Cornelis Tiele (1830–1902), he counted only two, Christianity and Buddhism, explaining that the spread of a world religion “cannot be due to some fortuitous or external circumstances only, but must have its principal cause in the very nature of each sort of religion.”4 Islam was, therefore, excluded because it had been spread by conquest, not by the power of its message. We understand the prejudice that underlies such a claim, while recognizing that that prejudice still exists, and that it still exists in Buddhist communities. As is always the case with caricature, the realities are far more complicated. And in the case of Buddhism and Islam, the story is a long one, only facets of which can be considered here. Relations between Buddhism and Islam extend back over many centuries. After the death of Muhammad in 632, troops under the command of the third caliph, Uthman, toppled the Sasanian Empire, bringing Persia under Muslim control by 651. It was in the eastern regions of this Persian Empire that Muslims likely first came in contact with Buddhists; perhaps the earliest reference to Islam in a Buddhist text is in a Madhyamaka commentary from around 700 CE, where the mu sul man are listed among those who permit the eating of meat.5 In 711, Aror (modern Rohri), the capital of Sindh Province of modern Pakistan, fell to Muslim troops under the command of Muhammad ibn Qasim of the Umayyad Caliphate. Buddhism had been an important presence in Sindh from the time of Aśoka, a presence that continued under a series of rulers, both Buddhist and Hindu, up to the time of the Muslim conquest. What is perhaps the first Buddhist description of the Muslim presence there comes from an unlikely source. Sometime around 721, an eighteen-year-old Korean monk named Hyecho went to China, the traditional center of study for Korean monks during this period. However, he did not remain there, setting out by sea for the Buddhist holy land of India, stopping in Sumatra along the way. He arrived in India in 724, making a remarkable journey that took him, by his account, to Persia and Arabia, before traveling east along the Silk Road, crossing over into Chinese

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territory in 727. His travel journal, which survives only in fragments, was discovered by the French Orientalist Paul Pelliot (1878–1945) in the Library Cave at Dunhuang in 1908. In that journal, describing what he simply calls “West India,” but what is likely the Sindh region, Hyecho writes, “Currently, half the country is destroyed, crushed by the invasions of Arabia.”6 Later, in his description of “Sindh-Gujarat,” he writes, “Half the nation has suffered much damage due to the invasion of the Arabs.”7 However, it is noteworthy that in each case, he says that the local kings and their subjects revere the three jewels and that there are many monasteries and monks in the region. Hyecho does not use the word “Islam” or “Muslim,” simply writing of “Arabs.” And his description of them is more concerned with their culinary habits than with their beliefs, saying only, “They serve Heaven and know nothing of the Buddha dharma. According to the law of the land, there is no custom of doing prostrations.”8 Indeed, Hyecho often finds Buddhism flourishing under Muslim rule. For example, describing the Wakhan Valley in modern Afghanistan, he writes, “The troops of the king of Wakhān are weak and not able to defend their land. Therefore, they have accepted the rule of the Arabs, offering a yearly tribute of 3,000 rolls of silk. . . . There are temples and monks here, and they practice the Hīnayāna. The king, chiefs, and common people are all devoted to the Buddha and do not follow heterodox teachings. Thus, there are no other religions in this country.”9 Hyecho’s description would seem to suggest that military control (either by conquest or by treaty), and the economic benefits that resulted from it, were the primary motivations of the Muslims during this period. At least in the first centuries of Islam, they seemed content to leave local rulers, and their religions, in place. That Buddhists were not subject to conversion is also evident from the etymology of a famous, and to some infamous, Arabic term. Arriving in Kāpiśī, today a province of northeast Afghanistan, Hyecho describes a pious Buddhist king and a thriving Buddhist community, with temples and monasteries, one of which houses relics of the Buddha. Under Muslim rule, this region came to be known as Kafiristan, the Land of the Kafirs, the Idolaters— both because of the presence of buddha images and because “kafir” sounds like “Kāpiśī.” Eventually, vast regions where Buddhism had once flourished became Muslim, with the Buddhists either converting or leaving. But this happened slowly. Buddhism remained active in Bamiyan, the site of the famous Buddha statues in Afghanistan, until the eleventh century. It was then that Muslim armies made their way across the borders of pre-partition India, first into the Indus

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Valley of modern Pakistan, and then eastward into the Gangetic plain. Here again, their motivations seem to have been largely mercenary. Buddhist monks and Hindu priests were killed, monasteries and temples sacked, not because they were infidels worshipping idols but because those idols were made of gold. However, before Muslim troops brought Islam to Buddhist India, Muslim authors brought Buddhism to Christian Europe. In his Book of the Marvels of the World (Livre des merveilles du monde), also known as The Description of the World (Il Milione), Marco Polo describes the island of Sri Lanka, where his ship made port on his return voyage to Venice, perhaps in 1291. In his chapter on the island (which he calls Seilan), he provides the most detailed, and positive, account of the life of the Buddha to appear in a European language up to that point, concluding that had the Buddha been a Christian, “he would have been a great saint of Our Lord Jesus Christ, so good and pure was the life he led.” In 1446, an unnamed editor of Marco Polo’s book inserted this sentence into Polo’s description: “This is like the life of Saint Iosafat who was son of the king Avenir of those parts of Indie, and was converted to the Christian faith by the means of Barlam, according as is read in the life and legend of the holy fathers.”10 Who is this Iosafat? Marco Polo’s commentator was referring to the well-known story of two Christian saints, Barlaam and Josaphat. In 1571, the doge of Venice would present a bone from Josaphat’s spine to King Sebastian of Portugal; the relic is enshrined today in the church of St. Salvator in Antwerp. It would not be until 1859 that the French savant Édouard Laboulaye (1811–1883) confirmed that the story of the Buddha was similar to the story of St. Josaphat. Eventually, scholars learned that there was a good reason for this: the story of Barlaam and Josaphat was based on the life of the Buddha. Not only that, the source of the connection was Islam. The evidence of influence is found in three famous elements of the life of the Buddha as it is traditionally told in Asia. After the birth of Prince Siddhārtha, his father the king summons the court astrologers to foretell his son’s destiny. All but one predict that he will become either a cakravartin or a buddha; one predicts with certainty that he will become a buddha. Alarmed that his son will not succeed him, the king builds a palace where his son will be shielded from all that is unattractive in the hope that he will not renounce the world. In the story of Barlaam and Josaphat, the king is a devotee of idols and a persecutor of Christians. When he hears one of his astrologers predict that his son will renounce the world and become a great teacher, he fears that his son will one day become a Christian, building a palace to prevent such a fate.

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Second, in the life of the Buddha, after living in the palace for twenty-nine years, Prince Siddhārtha grows curious about the world beyond the walls and takes four chariot rides through the city, encountering—each for the first time in his life—an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and, finally, a meditating monk, thus learning that there is aging, sickness, and death, as well as those who seek to escape their grip. In the story of Barlaam and Josaphat, Prince Josaphat also rides outside the palace, encountering a blind man, a leper, and an old man. Shortly thereafter, a Christian monk named Barlaam arrives from the island of Serendip (Sri Lanka), offering instruction in the Gospel to the son of the pagan king. The third scene takes place in the palace. After returning from his fourth chariot ride, Prince Siddhārtha, married and with a newborn son, asks his father for permission to leave his family and the throne he will one day inherit to go in search of a state beyond birth and death. His father refuses and attempts to distract the prince by having a group of courtesans beguile him with their beauty. But the prince is unmoved. In the story of Barlaam and Josaphat, King Avenir instructs a group of beautiful women to seduce his virgin son. A slave princess almost succeeds, but the chastity of the prince is preserved when he has a vision of the hell that awaits him should he succumb to carnal passion. How did these elements from the life of the Buddha become central to the plot of the story of two Christian saints? With some impressive detective work, scholars have concluded that it comes from an Arabic text called the Book of Bilawhar and Būdhāsaf (Kitāb Bilawhar wa Būdhāsaf ), which derives from a Persian source, now lost. That Persian source likely derives from a biography of the Buddha in an Indic language, yet to be identified. The earliest version of the Arabic text dates from sometime between 750 and 900. It contains many of the parables that would appear in the story of Barlaam and Josaphat, as well as a number of Buddhist elements that are absent from the Christian tale. Prince Būdhāsaf is the son of a pagan king, who leaves the palace to pursue an ascetic path simply called “the religion” (which does not seem to be Islam) after receiving the teachings of Bilawhar. Despite their disagreements, both father and son declare themselves to be followers of a prophet called al-Budd. A clear parallel to the life of the Buddha is found in the account of the death of Būdhāsaf. After giving his last teachings to his disciple, Abābīd, and the people of Kashmir, he says: “I have taught, protected, and raised up the Church, I have put there the lamps of those who came before me, I have reassembled the dispersed flock of Islam to which I was sent. Now the moment comes when I will be raised out of this world and my spirit will be freed from its body. Ob-

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serve your commandments, do not stray from the truth, adopt the ascetic life. Let Abābīd be your leader.”11 His words echo the final instructions of the Buddha, who, in some readings of the passage, told his monks to be a lamp unto themselves and to strive for their salvation. The Buddha, however, did not appoint a successor, telling his monks that his teachings would be their teacher after he was gone. Scholars speculate that in the tenth century, Georgian monks living in Jerusalem turned the Arabic story into a story of an idolatrous king, a persecutor of Christians, and of his virtuous son who is converted to Christianity by a pious monk named Barlaam. The Georgian story was then translated into Greek, perhaps by Euthymius the Georgian (d. 1028), abbot of a monastery on Mount Athos. From Greek it went into Latin (the oldest surviving version is from 1048), and from Latin into many of the vernaculars of Europe, where it would become one of the most popular saints’ tales of the Middle Ages. The path from language to language, from Latin back to Sanskrit, is clear. “Josaphat” in Latin is “Ioasaph” in Greek, “Iodasaph” in Georgian, “Būdhāsaf” in Arabic, and “Bodhisattva” in Sanskrit. “Bodhisattva,” “one who aspires to enlightenment,” is the primary epithet of Prince Siddhārtha prior to the time that he achieves enlightenment and becomes the Buddha. The reports of Hyecho and the story of Barlaam and Josaphat make clear that the relations between Islam and Buddhism were far more complicated than the myth of relentless persecution of Buddhists by Muslims that persists in parts of the Buddhist world to the present day. However, in perhaps the most famous text of the final centuries of Buddhism’s presence in India, we find a strong condemnation of Islam and a violent revenge fantasy that remains shocking to those who regard Buddhism as a religion of nonviolence. I refer to the Kālacakra Tantra, also discussed in Chapter Two. Some four centuries after the passing of the Buddha, texts that are referred to collectively as the Mahāyāna sūtras began to be composed in India, purporting to be the words of the historical Buddha, accepted as such by some, but hardly by all. Some thousand years after the passing of the Buddha, texts that are collectively referred to as the Buddhist tantras began to appear, again purporting to be the word of the historical Buddha, again accepted as such by some, but hardly by all. Internal evidence provides a rare opportunity to date a Buddhist text with some precision: the Kālacakra Tantra seems to have been composed in what is today Pakistan between 1025 and 1040 CE, that is, almost a millennium and a half after the passing of the Buddha. And yet, its authors represent it as the teaching of the historical Buddha, and it was regarded as

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such by many, especially in Tibet, where it came to hold a particular importance. The Kālacakra Tantra is renowned for many things, including its calendrics, its astrology, and its physiology. Here, however, as we ponder the disappearance of Buddhism from India, at least as a flourishing institution, we note that the Buddha predicts an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. The army of the Buddhist king of Śambhala will sweep out of his Himalayan kingdom to defeat the army of the barbarians, killing their leader, the Mahdī, and restoring the dharma to the world. However, according to the Buddha’s prophecy, that battle will not take place until 2425. In 1001, the Muslim sultan Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) began a series of incursions into the Indian subcontinent from his capital at Ghazni in modern Afghanistan. In that year, he defeated the Hindu king Jayapāla at the Battle of Peshawar. In ancient times, Peshawar was called Purusapura (City of the ˙ Supreme Person). Conquered by Alexander the Great in 326 BCE, it would become a major center of Buddhist art and learning, the capital of the emperor Kaniska, whose famous stūpa was built there, and the birthplace of the half˙ brothers Asan˙ga and Vasubandhu. Until his death in 1027, Mahmud led armies from Afghanistan into India extending farther and farther to the south and east, attacking the city of Mathura (considered by some the birthplace of the buddha image) in 1021 and sacking the famous Hindu temple of Somnath in Gujarat in 1025. It is unlikely that Mahmud and his troops distinguished between Hindus and Buddhists, considering them simply to be idol worshippers. In 1011, he had declared, “The religion of the faithful inculcates the following tenet: ‘That in proportion as the tenets of the prophet are diffused, and his followers exert themselves in the subversion of idolatry, so shall be their reward in heaven’; that, therefore, it behooved him, with the assistance of God, to root out the worship of idols from the face of all India.”12 Buddhists were regarded as idolaters. The Persian word “bot,” a common term for “idol,” is likely derived from “buddha.” It was in the immediate aftermath of Mahmud’s raids that the Kālacakra Tantra was composed. We note that its authors move the site of its composition away from Vulture Peak in northeast India, the site of so many of the Buddha’s past teachings and of so many future Muslim raids, far to the south to the city of Amarāvatī and out of harm’s way. And they move the stronghold of the dharma out of India entirely and far to the north, to the land of Śambhala. Muslim incursions into northern India, moving ever eastward, would continue, extending into Bihar and Bengal, with the great monasteries of Nālandā and Vikramaśīla sacked by the end of the twelfth century. In a Muslim account

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of what was likely the monastery of Odāntapuri, near Nālandā, we read that “Muhammad Bakhtiyar [d. 1206] with great vigour and audacity rushed at the gate of the fort and gained possession of the place. Great plunder fell into the hands of the victors. Most of the inhabitants of the place were Brahmans with shaven heads. They were put to death. Large numbers of books were found there, and when the Muhammadans saw them, they called for some persons to explain their contents, but all the men had been killed. It was discovered that the whole fort and city was a place of study (madrasa).13 The shaven-headed “Brahmans” were clearly Buddhist monks. But as Buddhist monasteries were being ravaged in the north, Buddhism seemed to be flourishing in the south, if we can measure the presence of Buddhism from the presence of images of the Buddha. In the modern state of Tamil Nadu, some sixty large, granite images of the Buddha have been discovered, many buried in the ground. The large, seated stone sculpture of the Buddha in the Art Institute of Chicago is one of these. The statue sinking into the ground that Guillaume Le Gentil saw near Pondicherry was likely another. These statues seem to date from the twelfth century, the period of the Muslims’ invasions in the north. In addition, some four hundred bronze Buddhist images have been discovered, some made for export to Sri Lanka and perhaps even to China from the port at Nagapattinam.14 Thus, if Buddhism was under threat in the north at the time of the composition of the Kālacakra Tantra, it seems to have been safe in the south. It is therefore inaccurate to say that Islam destroyed Buddhism in India. Marauding armies do not destroy a religion. What, then, caused its demise? When we examine the accounts of the many Chinese pilgrims to India, centuries before the arrival of the Muslims, we find that Buddhism was dead or dying in many regions of the subcontinent. The most detailed of these accounts comes from Xuanzang, who left China in 629 and returned in 645. He found Buddhism thriving in some places but moribund in others. Describing Gandhāra, a great center of Buddhist art, architecture, and learning, he writes, “There were more than a thousand monasteries but they are now dilapidated and deserted, in desolate condition. Most of the stupas are also in ruins. There are about a hundred deva [Hindu] temples inhabited by various heretics.”15 He finds Vaiśālī (the site of the Second Council), Aśoka’s capital of Pataliputra, the famous monastery of Kukkut ārāma, and Kapilavastu (the city of Prince Siddhārtha’s youth) ˙ all in ruins. Buddhist societies tend to measure the vitality of the dharma by the presence of monks, recounting their histories around the ordination of their first monks.

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Buddhist accounts of the end-time describe the saffron robes of the monks turning white, the color of the robes of laymen. Monks require monasteries, and monasteries require support. As a small community of wandering mendicants, as the tradition likely began, such a san˙gha could likely be supported by the alms of local communities. But as the community of monks grew, they were no longer wandering; they were living in monasteries. In order to conform with the practices of other mendicant groups, the Buddha is said to have instituted the rains retreat, the three-month period during the annual monsoon when he required monks to remain in one place. Although there are stories in the canon of kings and merchants offering parks to the Buddha, where elaborate assembly halls and dwellings were built, scholars speculate that what we think of as the Buddhist monastery evolved from simple rains retreat shelters after the death of the Buddha. The earliest monastery substantial enough to have left archaeological remains dates from the stūpa complex at Sanchi in the second century BCE. As the size of these monasteries grew, more substantial support was required, sometimes from the state, which would grant lands and the laborers who tilled it to a monastery. In this case, the Buddha himself, although long passed into nirvāna, was the property holder.16 ˙ The Buddha was himself from the royal caste, and his royal patrons, especially the kings Bimbisāra and Prasenajit, figure prominently in Buddhist stories. We know that Aśoka’s devotion to the dharma was likely less fervent than it is represented to be in Buddhist texts. Like many other Indian rulers, he was an equal-opportunity patron of many of the religions of his realm, but with a personal preference for Buddhism. Some Indian rulers, like those of the Pāla Dynasty in northern India, were generous patrons of Buddhism; its fall in 1174 coincided with the Muslim invasions. But other Indian rulers were not. Several Hindu kings cut down and uprooted the Bodhi Tree, including Śaśān˙ka of Bengal during the seventh century, the time of Xuanzang’s visit. The larger monasteries became, the more resources they required. Chinese descriptions of Nālandā, where Xuanzang studied, report between three thousand and ten thousand monks, supported by as many as two hundred villages. This makes Buddhism, as a monastic institution, highly vulnerable to political and economic upheaval. It is also likely that relations between monks and local communities became more distant; rather than begging at doorways or dining in the homes of the laity, monks would eat the food harvested by tenant farmers and prepared by lay cooks in monastery kitchens. Unlike Hindu priests, Buddhist monks did not live in the community and perform life-cycle rituals, apart from occa-

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sional funerals. Indeed, Hindus, whether Vedic priests, scholastic logicians, devotees of Krishna, or devotees of Śiva, contributed greatly to the vicissitudes of Buddhism during its long history in India, long before the arrival of Muslim armies, and with far greater success. In the National Museum in New Delhi, we find a stele dating from the eleventh or twelfth century that depicts the wrathful Hindu goddess Cāmundā seated on the corpse of the Buddha.17 ˙˙ And so, Buddhism began to fade away, a decline that began in central India within several centuries of the death of the Buddha. There are reports and archaeological evidence of the persecution of Buddhist monks and the vandalism and destruction of Buddhist sites as early as the second century BCE. Most of the great stūpa complexes of India date from the first two centuries before the Common Era; the cave temples of Ajant ā, dating from the fifth century CE, are ˙˙ an exception. Famous stūpa complexes like Sanchi and Bhārhut were renovated over the centuries, but the archaeological evidence shows many sites being abandoned during the early centuries of the Common Era.18 The reasons are not entirely clear. Monastic Buddhism—that is, the institution of Buddhism centered around the large monastery sustained by royal or merchant patronage—likely ended around the thirteenth century. That does not mean that there were no Buddhists. Buddhist communities seem to have continued far to the northeast in Chittagong, near the border with Burma, as well as in the Newar community in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal. The Tibetan author Tāranātha (1575–1634) reports that when he was fourteen, the Indian tantric master Buddhaguptanātha (1514–1610) came to Tibet. Already in his mid-seventies, he told Tāranātha that he did not exclusively practice Buddhism and that he had not encountered what he considered to be authentic Buddhist teachings until he received the Hevajra initiation on the island of Dramiladvīpa (whose location has not been iden­ tified). His name suggests that he was part of the nāth tradition, a form of Śaivism that contained certain Buddhist elements.19 All of this raises the question: When we speak about the disappearance of Buddhism in India, what do we mean by “disappearance,” and what do we mean by “Buddhism”? The demise of Buddhist institutions in India would be a crucial factor shaping the modern representation of the Buddha and of Buddhism. By the time that European scholars (notably, the officers of the British East India Company) began a sustained study of the history of India, Buddhism was an artifact. As far as they knew, there were no Buddhists in India, although there were Buddhists almost everywhere else in Asia, including in their nearby colony of Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Instead there were monuments (often in ruins), statues (often

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broken), and texts (often in fragments). It was as if they had discovered ancient Greece. From these fragments, they assembled what they and others would call original Buddhism, a Buddhism whose birthright the Buddhist cultures of Asia (with the exception of that in their colony of Ceylon) had forfeited, a Buddhism against which the Buddhist cultures of Asia would be judged, and judged to be lacking. But that is another story. After the British were gone, Buddhism returned. On October 14, 1956, the prominent independence leader, framer of the Indian constitution, and minister of law and justice Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) converted to Buddhism. He was a Dalit (once called “untouchable”) and had long railed against the caste prejudice of India. Vowing that he would not die a Hindu, he considered Christianity, Islam, and, most seriously, Sikhism. After visits to Sri Lanka and Burma, he decided on Buddhism, arguing that the persecution of the Dalits derived from the fact that they had long ago been Buddhists, scorned by Hindus. Ambedkar’s Buddhism was his own, what he called Navayāna (the New Vehicle). It was a Buddhism compatible with science, a Buddhism without the four truths, a Buddhism without rebirth. Ambedkar’s Buddhism was a Buddhism of social action (he wrote an essay called “Buddha or Karl Marx?”), adding seventeen vows to the original five taken by the Buddhist laity. Some four hundred thousand Dalits converted with him on that day in 1956. Millions more would follow. Today, there are over eight million Buddhists in India, 0.7 percent of the population. And so perhaps Buddhism never really disappeared from India. According to a Buddhist sūtra called Introduction to the Domain of the Inconceivable Qualities and Wisdom of the Tathāgatas (Tathāgatagunajñānācintyavisayāvatāranirdeśa), ˙ ˙ it depends on whom you ask: Some know the essence of the teaching of the Blessed One, while others know the Blessed One’s teaching in a state of decline. Some know that ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty years have elapsed since the Blessed One taught the dharma. Some know that ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty years have elapsed since the Blessed One passed into nirvāna. Some know that ˙ a hundred or a thousand years have elapsed since the Blessed One attained perfect awakening. Others know that a hundred or a thousand years have elapsed since the Blessed One passed into nirvāna. Some know that ˙ ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty thousand years have elapsed since the Blessed One attained perfect awakening. Others know that ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty thousand years have elapsed since the Blessed One

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passed into nirvāna. Some know that ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty hun˙ dred thousand million eons have elapsed since the Blessed One attained perfect awakening, while others know that ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty hundred thousand million eons have elapsed since the Blessed One passed into nirvāna. . . . The complete and perfect Buddha, in order to ˙ break the pride, conceit, and arrogance of sentient beings who have previously accumulated roots of virtue, in order to ripen their previously accumulated roots of virtue, and in order to guide them to the teaching of the Tathāgata—displays the decline and disappearance of the authentic dharma of the Tathāgata.20

7 • Encounter

In 1995, Pope John Paul II visited Sri Lanka. Buddhist monks boycotted a meeting with him because of comments he had made about Buddhism in his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, published the year before. There, the pontiff describes Buddhism as “atheistic,” going on to say that in Buddhism, “We do not free ourselves from evil through the good that comes from God; we liberate ourselves only through detachment from the world, which is bad. The fullness of such detachment is not union with God, but what is called nirvana, a state of perfect indifference with regard to the world.”1 In contrast, he explains that “in the realm of the Gospel, there is no space for any nirvana, apathy, or resignation. Instead, there is a great challenge to perfect creation—be it oneself, be it the world.”2 Such claims about Buddhism by Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, have a long history, one too long to consider here. We can note that the pontiff’s description of Buddhism, objectionable as it may be to some, is quite tame compared to those of his priestly predecessors. We need only recall the description of the Buddha by the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), renowned as “the last man who knew everything,” and one of the greatest scholars in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Describing the Buddha, he writes, “Then he betook himself to the mountain recesses and there he instituted this abominable idolatry with Satan’s help. Afterwards he infected the whole Orient with his pestilent dogmas.” He goes on to describe the Buddha’s teachings, saying, “These are not tenets, but crimes. They are not doctrines, but abominations. They are not histories, but fables.”3 As has been noted elsewhere in these pages, the story of the European encounter with Buddhism could be the subject of an entire volume. Indeed, it already has been.4 And because many of those volumes are fairly recent, per-

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haps we should not devote a full chapter to the topic. However, most of those volumes consider what Christians have said about Buddhism over the centuries. We will give a few examples of that here, before turning to a related topic: what Buddhists have said about Christianity. According to a rather well-worn stereotype, Buddhism is a religion where all positions are tolerated, where philosophical speculation is discouraged; we should, instead, live in the moment. However, Buddhism arose in a cultural climate of competition for the alms of laypeople and the patronage of princes. In many accounts in the canon, the Buddha demonstrates the superiority of his own teachings and the inferiority of those of other teachers, sometimes through philosophical argumentation, but often through the performance of miracles, as he did at Śrāvastī, where he rose into the sky, shooting fire and water from his body. Over the next millennium in India, Buddhist scholars of various schools defended themselves against a variety of opponents, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist. As Buddhism spread across Asia, it would continue to encounter hostile ideologies and creeds. Thus, what has held a central place in Buddhist literature over the entire history of the tradition is not interfaith dialogue, but interreligious polemic. According to the tradition, the spread of Buddhism began early. After the Buddha had gathered sixty disciples and taught them to follow the path to liberation and to attain the state of the arhat, he famously said, “Go forth for the good of the many, for the happiness of the many, out of compassion for the world, for the welfare, the good, and the happiness of gods and humans. Let no two go in the same direction.” It is unclear how far that first generation of monks traveled. In 326, Alexander the Great and his army crossed the Indus River in what is today Pakistan, defeating Indian troops at the Battle of Hydaspes. Plu­ tarch, writing four centuries later, reports Alexander’s encounter with ten gymnos­ ophists (“naked philosophers”), who, if the encounter occurred, would likely have been Jain monks or Hindu sadhus. In 305, Alexander’s general Seleucus led his troops against Candragupta Maurya, the grandfather of Aśoka. Following a peace treaty, there would be a significant Greek, or “Indo-Greek,” presence in the Gandhāra region, in what is today Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the region under Greek rule for about two centuries, beginning with the invasion of Demetrius I of Bactria in 185. Buddhism was well established in the region by then; the Greek king Menander I (d. 130 BCE) is presented in Buddhist sources (where he is known as Milinda) as a devout Buddhist. His (likely apocryphal) dialogue with the monk Nāgasena, known as the Questions of Milinda (Milinda Pañha), is among the most beloved texts of the Theravāda tradition.

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According to the Mahāvamsa, the Great Chronicle of Sri Lanka, after the ˙ third Buddhist council, Aśoka sent Buddhist monks as missionaries to nine regions. Six of these are on the Indian subcontinent. The other three are Sri Lanka, Suvannabhūmi (the region of modern Burma and Thailand), and the land of the Yonas, that is, the Greeks. This text, however, may have assumed that the officials whom Aśoka sent to administer the regions of his realm, called dharmamahāmātra (prime ministers of the dharma), were Buddhist missionaries, when in fact they seem to have been senior officials charged with conducting ethics inspections of the several regions of his realm, administering various social programs and granted some enforcement powers; Aśoka’s “Schism Edict” gives them the authority to expel monks and nuns who create dissension in the san˙gha.5 The term “dharma” for Aśoka most often means “morality” more generally, rather than Buddhism more specifically. When we speak of Buddhism encountering this or that culture or region, of course, we mean Buddhists, and especially Buddhist monks. Regardless of where and when such encounters began, it is clear that by the beginning of the Common Era, some four centuries after the passing of the Buddha, Buddhist monks were traveling along the trade routes of Asia, both by land and sea, where they encountered the adherents of other religions, including Christians. In the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, a work dating from the early third century CE, a lottery is conducted by the Apostles after the Pentecost; St. Thomas (of “Doubting Thomas” fame) is assigned India as his mission field. The first mention of the Buddha in a Christian source is considered to be the statement of Clement of Alexandria, also writing in the third century: “Some of the Indians obey the precepts of Boutta; whom, on account of his extraordinary sanctity, they have raised to high honors.” Elsewhere in his account, presumably describing a stūpa, he says that the holy men of India “honor a kind of pyramid under which they believe the bones of some god are resting.”6 Buddhists in China likely encountered Nestorian Christians, the followers of Nestor, archbishop of Constantinople, who was excommunicated at the Council of Ephesus in 431 and exiled to Egypt for arguing that the Virgin Mary should be referred to as the “bearer of Christ” (christotokos) rather than the “bearer of God” (theotokos). His followers would make their way as far as China, where there was a thriving community by the Tang Dynasty. However, in 845, Emperor Wuzong undertook a persecution of foreign religions that he said were sapping the resources of the state. Buddhism, which he described as a “pestilence,” was the main target, with over four thousand monasteries destroyed and over

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250,000 monks and nuns returned to lay life. Much smaller communities, including Christians and Zoroastrians, did not escape the suppression. Consequential Buddhist contact with Christians in China would occur with the arrival of the Jesuits. When Matteo Ricci and his fellow Christian fathers arrived in China in 1582, they were advised to pose as Buddhist monks, putting up a plaque on their residence in the city of Zhaoqing that read “Pure Land of the West” (xilai jingtu), a term that would evoke for the Chinese both India and the “Western Pure Land” (xifang jingtu) of the buddha Amitābha. They were referred to by the Chinese as heshang and seng, two terms for Buddhist monks. When the Jesuits introduced themselves as “Buddhist monks from the Pure Land of the West,” it may have been unclear to the Chinese whether this referred to Amitābha’s heaven or their street address in Zhaoqing. Finding little success in spreading the Gospel, in 1595, at the urging of their Chinese scholar friends, Ricci and the Jesuits donned a different disguise, abandoning the dress of Buddhist monks for the long beard and silk robes of the Chinese scholar.7 From that point on, Ricci’s slogan would become “Qin ru pai fo” (Draw close to Confucianism and repudiate Buddhism). Still, Matteo Ricci was intrigued by apparent parallels between his own faith and the faith that he would come to condemn. When he and other Jesuits made the long and perilous journey to Asia, they found shave-pate monks in robes, chanting hymns, burning incense, and saying their prayers with rosaries. As he writes: The doctrine of this second sect [Buddhism] mentions a certain trinity in which three different gods are fused into one deity, and it teaches reward for the good in heaven and punishment for the wicked in hell. They make so much of celibacy that they seem to reject marriage entirely and it is a common custom with them to abandon their homes and families and to go on pilgrimage to beg alms. In some respects their profane rites resemble our own ecclesiastical ceremonies, as for instance their recitation in chant which hardly differs from our Gregorian. There are statues in their temples and the vestments worn by those offering a sacrifice are not unlike our copes.8 In early Christianity, we find the theory of “demonic plagiarism,” set forth by such Church fathers as Justin Martyr, according to which any similarity between ritual elements of the Church and those of rival cults is attributed to

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the work of the Devil.9 A number of Jesuit thinkers turned to this patristic doctrine to explain the similarities between Christianity and Buddhism, seeing these superficial similarities not as signs of kinship, or even as deceitful borrowing, but as the work of the Devil. Thus, Athanasius Kircher, describing the adulation afforded the Dalai Lama in his China Illustrata, published in Latin in 1677, would write, “Before him the visitors fall prostrate and place their heads on the ground. They kiss his feet with incredible veneration, as if he were the Pope. Thus, even by this the deceitfulness of the evil spirit is marvelously shown, for veneration due only to the vicar of Christ on earth, the Pope of Rome, is transferred to the heathen worship of savage nations, like all the other mysteries of Christianity. The Devil does this with his natural malevolence.”10 In 1603, Ricci would condemn Buddhism in his catechism, written in Chinese, The True Doctrine of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu shiyi). There, he accused not Satan, but the Buddha of plagiarism. Not knowing that the Buddha had preceded Jesus by several centuries and that for the Chinese, “the West” often meant India, he wrote: Things may be similar in one or two respects yet quite different in reality. The Religion of the Lord of Heaven [that is, God] is a very ancient religion, and Śākyamuni lived in the West. He must secretly have heard of this teaching. Anyone wishing to promote his own school of thought must insert two or three elements of orthodoxy into it otherwise no one will believe him. Śākyamuni borrowed the doctrines concerning the Lord of Heaven, Heaven and Hell [from us] in order to promote his private views and heterodox teachings; we transmit the correct Way.11 Ricci’s knowledge of Buddhist doctrine was rather superficial, although he made the occasional good point. In arguing against the Buddhist prohibition of killing animals because they were once our human parents in a past life, he wonders why those same animals are beaten as beasts of burden. And in arguing against the prohibition of meat-eating, he asks: If God did not want us to kill animals for food, why did he make their flesh taste so good?12 Even those who understood Buddhist doctrine well saw Satan. The Italian Jesuit Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733) gained a more sophisticated understanding of Buddhist philosophy than any European prior to the nineteenth century. A missionary to Tibet, he followed the curriculum of the Tibetan monks of the day, beginning with elementary textbooks on logic and proceeding to more sophisticated works. Based on his studies at Sera Monastery, he came to the

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conclusion that the entire edifice of Tibetan Buddhism rested on two doctrines: the doctrine of rebirth and the doctrine of emptiness. He found both of these to be inimical. Because Buddhists argue that the cycle of rebirth has no beginning, they deny the existence of a first cause, contrary to Aristotle, and thus are at odds with Aquinas’s second proof for the existence of God. The doctrine of emptiness denied the existence of anything that is not somehow contingent, anything that possesses svabhāva (literally, “own being” or “intrinsic existence”). Again, such a claim is at odds with the first proof for the existence of God, the argument for the existence of an unmoved mover. For Desideri, the Buddhist doctrines were not merely philosophical errors; they were ultimately Satanic. As he writes: The fundamental error of the Tibetans’ sect and the source of all other false dogmas they believe is their positive, direct, and express denial of the existence of any being in itself, uncreated and independent, and of any primary and universal cause of things. The malice of the infernal enemy was able to perpetrate such a shrewd and subtle trick that he has not only concealed the extreme monstrosity and irrationality of this error with pretty tinsel, but on top of that has succeeded in giving it such a veneer and façade as to make it appear to those people as a subtlety of the most elevated and purest understanding, the culmination of a sanctity and perfection that cannot be achieved in any other way, and the only door immediately leading to true happiness and eternal bliss, although it is an error that more than any other is totally opposed to these goals.13 And this was despite the fact that Tibetan Buddhist authors wrote about Christianity rather approvingly. A Tibetan Buddhist who was a contemporary of Desideri wrote, “The teacher Ye Su (Jesus), or Protector of the World, is known to have had a miraculous birth. He composed a treatise that taught a ten-limbed vow of not taking life, and so forth, that the experience of happiness arises as a result of virtuous actions, that one falls into hell through the ripening of evil acts and suffers agonies there forever, and that deliberately committed misdeeds are not purified by confession.”14 Other Buddhist lands would be less positive. We will consider Sri Lanka below. Here, however, we can briefly consider examples from China, Japan, and Thailand. Since we began with Matteo Ricci, we should begin with his most prominent critic, the Ming Dynasty monk Ouyi Zhixu (1599–1655). In 1643, he published a lengthy critique of Christianity in a work called Collected Essays Refuting

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Heterodoxy (Pixie ji). Unlike Ricci, he knew that the Buddha preceded Jesus. And thus, for him, it was Jesus who plagiarized the Buddha. You also say that at the last moment before death, if one listens to the teachings of the Lord of Heaven and also reforms and regrets, then one is transformed; thus it superficially resembles the ten moments of recollection of [Amitābha] Buddha. If you speak the truth, then the Buddhists also speak the truth. You speak of the importance of relying on the Ten Commandments; the Buddhists also speak of the importance of relying on the Ten Precepts. You speak of truthfully performing [confession] with one’s mind and body; the Buddhists also speak of truthfully performing [repentance] with one’s mind and body. You speak of the importance of true mind, true intention, pained regret, and powerful elimination [of sins], such that afterwards one dare not again commit them; the Buddha also speaks of the importance of a true mind, true intention, pained regret, and powerful elimination [of sins], such that afterwards one dare not to commit them. All this is stolen from the Buddha’s teachings, and yet you deny it.15 It is not, therefore, that Christianity is wrong, at least on these points, but that the Buddhists teach versions of the same things. The Christian missionaries, therefore, are in no position to criticize Buddhists, especially when they stole these doctrines from them. Francis Xavier arrived in Japan in 1549. A number of the local feudal lords (daimyo), especially on the island of Kyushu, would convert to Christianity, together with their subjects, with as many as two hundred thousand converts by 1582. Fearing that friars armed with the Gospels would eventually be followed by soldiers armed with muskets, in 1591, the shogun Hideyoshi issued his Letter to the Viceroy of the Indies, which concluded: “A few years ago the so-called Fathers came to my country seeking to bewitch our men and women, both of the laity and the clergy. At that time, punishment was administered to them, and it will be repeated if they should return to our domain to propagate their faith. It will not matter what sect or denomination they represent—they shall be destroyed.”16 Christianity was officially banned in 1614. During this period, many Japanese converts were executed, in some cases by crucifixion.17 In 1648, a Zen monk named Sessō Sōsai composed an attack on Christianity entitled Refutation of Malignant Teachings (Taiji jashū-ron). It contains a vicious condemnation of Jesus. Unlike Ouyi Zhixu in China, writing five years

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earlier, he does not simply list parallels between Buddhism and Christianity, but explains that Jesus was an evil disciple of the Buddha who not only stole his teachings but then willfully distorted them. The list is long. Here is an excerpt, one that displays an impressive knowledge of Roman Catholic vocabulary (in Portuguese). In character, Jesus was bold and coarse, his fictions wily. He may have taken refuge in the Śākya clan, but he learned only its superficial designations and forms, without penetrating to its depths. Under false pretenses, he stole the forms of the dharma of the Śākya clan, and made of them a heretical, wrong view. He either changed the designation but kept the substance, or he kept the phenomenon but altered the principle. Thus, he changed King Brahmā and called him Deus; he changed the deities of the brahmaloka and called them anjos [angels]; he changed Heaven and called it Paraíso [Paradise]; he changed the human realm and called it Purgatório; he changed the hells and called them inferno; he changed the abhiseka consecration and called it bautismo; he changed ˙ the ksama repentance and called it confissão; he changed the Ten Good ˙ Precepts and called them Mandamentos; he changed the [institution of ] bhiksunīs and called them virgens . . . he took the bones of dead criminals ˙ ˙ and called them relíquias, likening them to the śarīra of the Buddha.18 To this point, we have seen Christians and Buddhists making strikingly similar complaints about each other, essentially charging their opponent with cosmic property theft. The Buddha was a Christian who took elements of Christianity to form his own odious cult. Jesus was a Buddhist who decided to take fundamental elements of Buddhist thought and practice and distort them to serve his own purposes. To this, the Christians add the charge of demonic plagiarism, that it was Satan himself who made bad copies of Christian sacraments in order to mock the missionaries, priests who had made the perilous voyage from Europe to Asia only to discover a pathetic parody of themselves already in residence. We note that in Jesuit writings of this period, Satan is sometimes called “the ape.” The case of Thailand is somewhat different. Thailand (then called Siam) and France had extensive diplomatic relations during the 1680s. In 1684, the king of Siam, seeking French protection from the Dutch and Portuguese, sent an ambassador to France, meeting the French king at Versailles. Louis XIV would send a series of embassies to Siam beginning the following year. These embassies produced many reports, the most fa-

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mous of which was Simon de la Loubère’s Du royaume de Siam, published in Paris and Amsterdam in 1691, and in English two years later as A New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam. There, we find a good deal of information about Buddhism, including a biography of the Buddha. It also includes a chapter called “The Life of Thevetat, Translated from the Balie,” that is, the life of the Buddha’s evil cousin Devadatta, translated from the Pāli. Oddly, however, Devadatta’s biography is three times longer than that of the Buddha. The reason for the French interest in Devadatta is not immediately clear. It may have been that, as opponents of the Buddha themselves, they felt a sense of alliance with his ancient nemesis. They may also have been struck by his infernal fate. When Devadatta sought to return to sit at the Buddha’s feet, either to repent his acts of rebellion or to try once again to assassinate him, he sunk into the earth, descending down to the lowest and most horrific of the Buddhist hells, where he was impaled, with one iron spit from his head to his feet, another through his shoulders, and a third penetrating his chest and back, a torture akin to crucifixion. The French interest in Devadatta, however, would become the ultimate impediment to their efforts. Each of the French embassies included Jesuit priests as part of the mission. The French Jesuits were, of course, interested in bringing Christianity to Thailand and, to that end, undertook a serious study of Buddhism, producing some of the most extensive European descriptions of Buddhism of the seventeenth century. The most important of these Jesuits was Guy Tachard (1651–1712). In 1688, he accompanied a Thai ambassador back to France, where he met the king, and then took him on to Rome, where he met Pope Innocent XI. In his A Relation of the Voyage to Siam, published in London that same year, he wrote rather poignantly of the French failure. Tho there be many things that keep the Siamese at a distance from the Christian Law, yet one may say, nothing makes them more averse from it than this thought. The similitude that is to be found in some points betwixt their Religion and ours, making them believe that Jesus Christ, is the very same with that Thevathat mentioned in their Scriptures, they are perswaded that seeing we are the Disciples of the one, we are also the followers of the other, and the fear they have of falling into Hell with Thevathat, if they follow his Doctrine, suffers them not to hearken to the propositions that are made to them of embracing Christianity. That which most confirms them in their prejudice, is that we adore the image of our Crucified Saviour, which plainly represents the punishment of Thevathat.

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So when we would explain to them the Articles of our Faith; they take us always up short, saying that they do not need our Instructions, and that they know already better than we do, what we have a mind to tell them.19 For the Thai Buddhists, then, Jesus was not a previously unknown disciple of the Buddha, as the Chinese and Japanese claim. He was instead one of the most famous, and certainly the most infamous, figures in Buddhist literature, the Buddha’s cousin and nemesis, Devadatta. For the Thais, this is all they needed to know about Christianity. Unlike his Roman Catholic predecessors cited above, Pope John Paul II wrote in a time when Buddhism had made substantial inroads in the West, with many Europeans and Americans identifying themselves as Buddhist and practicing Buddhist meditation. He, therefore, had to deal not only with doctrine but with practice. To that end, he compares Buddhist meditation with Roman Catholic meditation, explaining that the problem with the Buddhist system is that it does not lead to union with God. Therefore, the pope concludes, “it is not inappropriate to caution those Christians who enthusiastically welcome certain ideas originating in the religious traditions of the Far East.”20 His argument, then, is that Buddhist meditation can only take one so far; the ultimate goal can only be reached via the Christian path: extra ecclesiam nulla salus. Buddhism makes the same claim. One of Prince Siddhārtha’s meditation teachers was Udrāka Rāmaputra. However, the Buddha leaves him because his meditation leads only to a state of trance sometimes called the peak of existence. He cannot achieve nirvāna because the Buddha has yet to achieve it himself ˙ and teach the path to others. A similar argument was made against other Buddhists. With the rise of the Mahāyāna some four centuries after the Buddha’s death, it became necessary to account for the previous traditions. Using the apparently innocuous notion that the Buddha taught different things to different people in accordance with their capacity, in works like the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapundarīka), the Buddha explains that he had taught the path to nir˙˙ vāna to those who felt incapable of traversing the longer bodhisattva path to ˙ buddhahood. In fact, nirvāna is only an illusion, a city conjured by a skilled ˙ guide for travelers temporarily too weary to sojourn on to their true goal. The old vehicle can only travel so far. After that, one must transfer to the Mahāyāna to reach true enlightenment. This is precisely the argument that the pope makes about Roman Catholic contemplation, and specifically the Carmelite mysticism of St. John of the Cross. In China, competing Buddhist schools were ranked in elaborate classifica-

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tory schema called panjiao, with the schools that designed the hierarchy inevitably occupying the highest position, and with other schools, and their favored texts, serving merely as teachings that prepared the way for the final view. In Tibet, the four major schools of Indian Buddhist philosophy were ranked, with the lower schools described as rungs on a ladder to the higher. The Geluk sect of the dalai lamas placed Madhyamaka—more precisely, a school of Madhyamaka called Prāsan˙gika—at the top, claiming that liberation from rebirth was only possible through the doctrine of emptiness as it was taught there. In Japan, the great Zen master Dōgen (1200–1253) wrote in his magnum opus that the sūtras of the Buddha are not simply texts, but that “there are nothing but sūtras everywhere in time and space,” that mountains and rivers are also sūtras. Yet, he found the issue of truth being present outside Buddhism to be an entirely different question, writing, “Ignorant people state that Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism are ultimately one, only the entrances are different. Or they say those teachings are like a tripod. This kind of view is often heard among the monks of the Great Sung China. . . . These misguided foolish people have a superficial view of the Buddhist Way because they lack sufficient understanding of the Dharma and its origin.”21 It would seem, then, that neither Christians nor Buddhists subscribe to the romantic view that all roads lead to the same mountaintop; they may all lead to Everest Base Camp, but there is only one path to the summit.

8 • Food

In 2006, a prominent Buddhist monk visited a pastoral village in eastern Tibet, a community of herders of yaks. Because of its altitude and lack of arable land, herders of yaks and sheep have always constituted a significant part of the population of Tibet. The monk gave teachings on the three jewels and offered instructions on how to transfer one’s consciousness into the pure land of Amitābha at the time of death. In addition, he asked the members of the community to take a vow not to sell their yaks to Chinese slaughterhouses for three years because of the negative karma that the killing would cause and the pain that the animals would suffer. Most members of the community took the vow, despite the fact that the sale of their yaks represented a substantial source of their income. Buddhism is renowned for its sense skepticism, its condemnation of sense experience as dangerous. A monk is to walk with downcast eyes to prevent being distracted and attracted by sights of the world. It is a violation of the monastic code to attend a musical performance or to wear fragrant garlands. In many ways, the monastic lifestyle, and the monastic code that enforces it, can be seen as means to delimit and limit sense experience, the vow of celibacy being only its most famous element. Buddhist meditation practice requires the withdrawal of the senses; there are many stories of monks in deep meditation being oblivious to the sights and sounds around them. In one famous story, while meditating, Śāriputra was struck on the head by a hammer-wielding demon with a blow that would have felled an elephant. When he rose from meditation, he complained to another monk who had witnessed the attack that he had a mild headache. But not all sense experience can be avoided, and not all senses can be with-

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drawn. Although the sense experiences deriving from the taste buds cannot be prohibited in the way that sense experience deriving from the sex organs can, this does not prevent the consumption of food from being disparaged in Buddhist literature as anything more than the means of sustaining the body. It is not a source of pleasure. According to the early tradition, our ordinary powers of concentration lack sufficient strength to destroy the impediments that prevent us from achieving liberation. It is therefore necessary to develop a level of concentration (dhyāna) beyond that of the Realm of Desire, where we dwell, and achieve at least what the commentaries call access concentration. In the Theravāda tradition, the Buddha famously offers forty different topics for developing this concentration, including such famous topics as mindfulness of the breath, as well as the four “divine abidings” (brahmavihāra) of love, compassion, joy, and equanimity. The Buddha is said to have designed these as remedies for particular psychological maladies; those with too many thoughts should meditate on the breath; those who are hateful should meditate on love. Less well-known is the thirty-ninth of the forty topics: the repulsiveness of food. That is, one should sit down on one’s meditation cushion and focus one’s mind on how disgusting food really is. The locus classicus for detailed instructions on the forty topics is the Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga), composed in Sri Lanka in the fifth century CE by the great Indian scholar Buddhaghosa. In its English translation, his discussion of the forty topics takes up almost three hundred pages, with the section on the repulsiveness of food going on for seven stomach-churning pages. Here is an excerpt, chosen not to overly repulse the reader: And when he enters a house, some give and some do not. And when they give, some give yesterday’s cooked rice and stale cakes and rancid jelly, sauce and so on. Some, not giving, say, “Please pass on, venerable sir,” others keep silent as if they did not see him. Some avert their faces. Others treat him with harsh words such as: “Go away, you bald-head.” When he has wandered for alms in the village in this way like a beggar, he has to depart from it. . . . When he has dipped his hand in and is squeezing it up, the sweat trickling down his five fingers wets any dry crisp food there may be and makes it sodden. And when its good appearance has been spoilt by his squeezing it up, and it has been made into a ball and put into his mouth, then the lower

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teeth function as a mortar, the upper teeth as a pestle, and the tongue as a hand. It gets pounded there with the pestle of the teeth like a dog’s dinner in a dog’s trough, while he turns it over and over with his tongue; then the thin spittle at the tip of the tongue smears it, and the thick spittle behind the middle of the tongue smears it, and the filth from the teeth in the parts where a tooth-stick cannot reach smears it. When thus mashed up and besmeared, this peculiar compound now destitute of the [original] colour and smell is reduced to a condition as utterly nauseating as a dog’s vomit in a dog’s trough. Yet, notwithstanding that it is like this, it can still be swallowed because it is no longer in range of the eye’s focus.1 Despite this, we must eat. Food is thus a particularly fraught topic in Buddhism. Both Buddhist commentators and modern scholars, for example, have labored long over the contents of the Buddha’s last meal, the meal that caused him to suffer a violent attack of dysentery. Was it pork, or was it mushrooms? Why did the Buddha tell his host to bury the leftovers and not serve it to the other monks? Why, before his death, did the Buddha ask Ānanda to tell his host that he bore no blame? In yet another story, the Buddha and five hundred monks are forced to subsist on horse barley. Because this is something quite demeaning, it must somehow be explained. According to one explanation, this was the karmic result from a former life of the Buddha when he cursed the monks of a previous buddha, saying they should eat horse barley.2 Food figures in other ways in stories of the Buddha’s previous lives as a bodhisattva, where he often commits suicide, sometimes as a human, sometimes as an animal, so that his flesh may feed others. Indeed, there is an entire genre of stories about the “gift of the body” (dehadāna).3 The place of food in Buddhism is thus a rich and interesting topic in itself. It also tells us much about how a tradition responds to social change. As is the case with the other chapters in this volume, food in Buddhism deserves its own book-length study. Here, we will deal only, and only briefly, with a topic that has remained a point of contention throughout the history of Buddhism: meat-eating. This is a topic that allows us to examine an ongoing theme in Buddhism, one often named by the rather bland term “scriptural interpretation.” This term, in fact, describes a fundamental problem in the history of Buddhism: determining the intention of the omniscient, but absent, Buddha. Meat-eating provides

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a fascinating case study of this larger dilemma because, according to most accounts, the Buddha ate meat and allowed his monks to do so. When the Buddha’s cousin Devadatta suggested that he require that members of the san˙gha abstain from meat, the Buddha refused to change the rules. Before turning to the question of meat, we must consider the monastic diet more generally. A term that was used in ancient India to describe a monk or nun is “pravrajita,” often translated as “one who has gone forth,” with the site of departure being the home and the destination being homelessness. The word “home” here evokes the family and all of the responsibilities that it entails. This is what Prince Siddhārtha left behind when he left the palace (sometimes referred to as the Great Departure), and this is what he required monks and nuns to do. The question was what exactly this entailed. For a community of monks and nuns who had withdrawn from the world, the monastic code prohibited the tilling of the soil and the touching of money. As we have noted, the Sanskrit word that is translated as “monk” actually means “beggar,” and, as we know, beggars can’t be choosers. Buddhist monks and nuns, including the Buddha himself, would therefore beg for their food, accepting whatever was placed in their bowl, including meat. Yet, at some point long after the passing of the Buddha, Buddhist communities, or at least some Buddhist communities, prohibited meat-eating. One might imagine that this had something to do with the spread of Buddhism to regions whose climate supports a vegetarian diet. Yet, this change occurred in India and did not spread to tropical climates. Thus, for example, today, Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Burma eat meat. To the north, monks in China, Korea, and Japan are traditionally vegetarian (and each country has its own refined tradition of vegetarian cuisine), but Tibetan monks eat meat. Why is this so? In the classical formulation—more honored in the breach than the observance across Buddhist places and times—Buddhist monastics go out seeking alms each morning and must eat whatever is placed in their bowls. The famous example of this is the story of the Buddha’s foremost disciple, Mahākāśyapa, who received alms from a leper, only to find that, in the process, the leper’s thumb had fallen into his bowl.4 They are prohibited from eating anything after twelve noon and before dawn the next day. They may not save food to be eaten later (except during a famine). This all seems simple enough, freeing monastics from the labor of procuring and preparing food that consumes so much of the life of those who remain at home. Yet, when we look to the monastic code, we find dietary regulations that might almost be described as Talmudic, far too extensive to be considered here. We

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can, however, consider what it has to say about meat. We see, for example, that monks are prohibited from eating ten kinds of flesh: human, elephant, horse, dog, snake, lion, tiger, leopard, bear, and hyena. As is the case with the monastic code, there is a story about the circumstances that led to the Buddha’s prohibition of each. In the case of lions, for example, it seems that those who eat lion meat carry the scent for some time. Thus, when monks who had done so went into the forest to meditate, lions took their revenge. Buddhist monks sought good relations with the state. One should not eat an elephant or a horse because it might belong to the king. As we see in the case of the ordination of nuns, many rules are made to prevent censure from the laity. This is the case, for example, with dogmeat, not because people would be aghast at the thought of someone eating Fido, but because in ancient India, dogs were considered disgusting; eating dogmeat was something that only the lowest classes would do. The Buddha’s primary opponents in the early sūtras are brahmin priests, with whom he competed for lay support and royal patronage. The time of the Buddha was a time when these priests offered sacrifices to the Vedic gods in exchange for boons, sacrifices that involved killing animals. The Buddha himself came from the ksatriya caste, the warrior caste, which ate meat. It was, there˙ fore, socially acceptable for Buddhist monks to eat the meat that was placed in their begging bowls. The Buddhists, however, also competed for alms with other ascetic groups. Among these, perhaps the most prominent were the Jains, renowned today for their strict commitment to a vegetarian diet, but mocked in Buddhist texts for going naked and pulling out their hair and beard rather than shaving. Still, as a tradition that places killing atop the list of “ten non-virtues” that lead to suffering in this lifetime and the next, it was necessary for Buddhists to justify their consumption of the flesh of dead animals. The solution was a stipulation: monks may only eat meat that is “pure in three aspects” (trikotiśud˙ dha), that is, a monk may eat meat as long as (1) he has not seen, (2) he has not heard, and (3) he does not suspect that the animal was slaughtered specifically to feed him. With this stipulation, the huge monastic population of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, was able to eat meat because the animals were slaughtered by butchers of the city’s small Muslim community. As is the case elsewhere, this element of the monastic code was not a hypothetical formulation but resulted from a specific event, in this case, involving the Buddha himself. As the Buddha and his teachings became more popular, it seems that he, and his monks, did not always have to beg for their food. They began to be invited into the homes of the laity for their pre-noon meal. This change entailed

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a distinct shift from the mendicant mode of the early days. Another of the suggestions of Devadatta was a rule that monks be prohibited from accepting invitations to the homes of the laity. And again, the Buddha refused. The luncheon invitations to the monastic community would necessitate yet another set of rules governing how many monks could attend, how often they could attend, and how they would be chosen (in some cases, by lot). It was as the result of such a meal that the rule about meat “pure in three aspects” was formulated. The Buddha had accepted an invitation from a general named Sīha, who seems to have killed the fatted calf for the meal. When the Jains learned of this, they ran through the streets, waving their arms, shouting, “Today a fat beast, killed by the general Sīha, is made into a meal for the recluse Gotama, the recluse Gotama enjoys this meat, knowing it was prepared for him, that the deed was done for his sake.”5 It was this public embarrassment that led the Buddha to make the new rule about meat “pure in three aspects.” There is much to say about this rule, too much to consider in detail here. We note, however, that the rule was not made to spare the life of the animal, nor was it made to prevent the negative karma of killing from being accrued by General Sīha or his butcher. Intentionally killing an animal is a negative deed according to Buddhist karmic theory, and the occupation of butcher is a form of wrong livelihood. Instead, the rule was made to prevent the Buddha’s condemnation by the laity, for whom the karmic purity of the Buddhist community was of paramount concern. As has already been noted, because the karmic efficacy of a gift is determined, in part, by the purity of its recipient, Buddhists have historically cared much more about the purity of monks and nuns, especially their adherence to the vow of celibacy, than their philosophical acumen or meditative prowess. The Buddha’s new rule allowed monks to maintain at least a certain purity when it came to meat-eating, while maintaining at least a semblance of their identities as beggars, not eating the meat of an animal that had been killed for them, but rather eating the meat of an animal that had been killed by, and for, someone else. Yet the Buddha would eventually prohibit meat-eating, and he would do so in Mahāyāna sūtras. The authors of the Mahāyāna sūtras brought a number of changes to Buddhist thought and practice—some modifications, some innovations. They sought to find support for these by attributing these teachings to the Buddha, and then having the Buddha praise those teachings in the text itself. We think immediately of the admonitions in so many texts to recite, copy, or honor that text, promising rewards that fall on the outer limits of the karmic hyperbole found in so many Buddhist works. For example, the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapundarīka) ˙˙

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says, “I have explained that, for this reason, after the Tathāgata’s parinirvāna ˙ those who preserve and recite this sūtra, and explain it to others, who copy it or move others to copy it and who pay it homage to it no longer have to build stupas, monasteries, or erect chambers for the monks, or revere the sangha.”6 In many cases, the innovations in the Mahāyāna sūtras were in the realm of Buddhist doctrine, such as questions about the nature of nirvāna. In other cases, ˙ those innovations seem to be derived from the need to respond to changes in Indian society at large. Regardless, the sūtras needed to account for the fact that the Buddha was saying something new. The Buddha is omniscient and does not change his mind, and the teachings of the Buddha are free from contradiction. The Mahāyāna sūtras therefore had to explain why the Buddha was often saying something that was very different from—and to worldly sight, in direct contradiction to—what he had said in the Nikāya teachings, and they had to do so in such a way as to attract devotees. Which brings us to the topic of scriptural interpretation. All religious traditions interpret their scriptures in order to derive meanings that are not overtly evident. This seems to have been true in Buddhism from the beginning. In the early and rather staid text the Dhammapada, it says that the arhat who kills his mother, his father, and two warrior kings is freed from suffering.7 We have to turn to the commentary to learn that the mother represents craving, the father, self-conceit, and the two kings, the views of permanence and annihilation. This, however, is simply interpreting a metaphor. In the Lotus Sūtra, the Buddha declares that all beings will achieve buddhahood and that the life span of a buddha is immeasurable. In that case, the nirvāna ˙ of the arhat, the goal of the tradition for centuries, cannot exist. In one of the sūtra’s famous parables, some travelers set out in search of treasure, led by a guide. They grow tired along the way and want to turn back, but the guide tells them that a city lies just ahead. They rest there and continue on their quest. The guide later reveals that the city was an illusion, something that he conjured to keep them on the path to riches. The Buddha is the guide, the city is nirvāna, and the treasure is buddhahood. If he had explained from the outset ˙ that the path to buddhahood is long, few would seek it. He therefore taught his disciples to seek nirvāna. When they reach it, he explains that it is an illusion; ˙ the true goal lies ahead along the bodhisattva path, millions of lifetimes away. By the time of the composition of some of the most famous Mahāyāna sūtras, attitudes toward meat-eating had changed in India. As noted, at the time of the Buddha, his primary competitors included Vedic priests, who performed animal sacrifice and ate meat. Those competitors also included Jain monks, who

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were vegetarian. We noted above that it was the Jains, not the brahmins, who were outraged by the Buddha’s meal of meat. In the rock edicts of Aśoka, dating from perhaps a century and a half after the Buddha, the emperor bans animal sacrifice and reports that in his kitchen, where hundreds of thousands of animals were once slaughtered each day, now it is only two peacocks and a deer. The famous Hindu law code, the Manusmr ti, which likely dates from the third ˙ century CE, does not prohibit meat-eating, but praises abstention from it. In a number of Mahāyāna sūtras, the Buddha preaches the virtues of a vegetarian diet, most famously in the Descent into Lan˙kā (Lan˙kāvatāra), which devotes an entire chapter to the topic. The sūtra is usually dated to the fourth century CE, some eight centuries after the Buddha. The prohibition of meat-­ eating, however, presents a particular challenge because it is not simply the incorporation of a previous teaching into a new framework, as in the case of nirvāna. Nor is it a reinterpretation of a previous teaching, as we see in the ˙ Mahāyāna interpretation of why the Buddha ate horse barley. Because the Buddha suffers no karmic effects, this demeaning meal cannot be due to some ancient misdeed. According to a Mahāyāna sūtra, the Buddha eats the horse barley for the benefit of others, in this case, the five hundred horses who generously shared their barley with the Buddha. As a result, they will be reborn as gods. In fact, everything that the Buddha consumes, even if it is clods of dirt, becomes the most flavorful food in the universe.8 The prohibition of meat-eating is different. It is a direct contradiction of a previous teaching, and unlike arcane points of doctrine, it pertains to all monks and nuns. And yet, the Buddha may not be accused of duplicity, error, or even changing his mind. And no one may claim that the Buddha did not say something that he in fact had said. As a famous Pāli text declares, “Monks, these two misrepresent the Tathāgata. Which two? One who explains what has not been stated and uttered by the Tathāgata as having been stated and uttered by him, and one who explains what has been stated and uttered by the Tathāgata as not having been stated and uttered by him. These two misrepresent the Tathāgata.”9 The Buddha said monks could eat meat. As in most sūtras, the Buddha has an interlocutor. In the eighth chapter of Descent into Lan˙kā, unambiguously entitled “No Meat Eating” (Amāmsabhaksana), ˙ ˙ ˙ it is a bodhisattva named Mahāmati. He begins by asking the Buddha for a teaching against meat-eating, explaining that if bodhisattvas renounce meat, it makes it easier for them to develop love for all sentient beings and to progress to buddhahood. However, before the Buddha can respond, Mahāmati, in a rare moment of reproach of the Buddha in Buddhist literature, goes on to criticize

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him for both eating meat himself and for allowing others to do so, as he clearly does in the earlier canon. Suggesting that this chapter against meat eating was motivated at least in part to counter negative views of monks among the Buddhists’ competitors, Mahāmati notes that the various non-Buddhist schools do not eat meat, even the scorned Materialists (Lokāyata), who reject the existence of rebirth and the law of karma. The Buddha responds with a long list of reasons why one should not eat meat: one is consuming the flesh of someone who was a relative in a past life, meat is impure because it is the product of semen and blood (as the ovum is referred to in Buddhist texts), it smells bad, it causes bad breath, and it drives away the gods. The Buddha thus does not immediately acknowledge that he had permitted monks to eat meat in the past. Instead, he denies that he ever did so. The author of the text, however, is clearly aware of the well-known threefold purity, mentioned above: that a monk can eat meat when (1) he has not seen, (2) he has not heard, and (3) he does not suspect that the animal was slaughtered specifically to feed him. In a clever move, the author of the sūtra has the Buddha set forth the threefold purity, one that on first sight looks the same but is in fact very different: that a monk may eat meat of an animal that (1) he does not kill himself, (2) that he does not cause another person to kill, and (3) that he does not suspect that another person has killed. The first two elements are common components of Buddhist karmic theory: one incurs negative karma if one performs a misdeed oneself or causes someone else to do so. It is the third element that is important here, because, apart from animals that die of natural causes—which monks are not permitted to eat—there is no dead animal that was not killed by someone. And so, the Buddha effectively declares, he has never permitted monks to eat meat.10 This new threefold purity is an ingenious innovation. It retains a model that looks enough like the old one to go unnoticed by those who do not know the monastic code well, those for whom the sūtra is really intended: the patrons of the vegetarian Hindu schools with whom the Buddhists competed for alms and patronage. But there was another opponent to consider. We recall that the Mahāyāna sūtras and their supporters had to defend themselves constantly against other Buddhists, the Buddhists of the Nikāya schools, who seem to have outnumbered them and mocked them for concocting new sūtras. What can be said when they point out, correctly, that the Buddha had eaten meat and that he had permitted his monks to do so? The answer lay in prophecy. Although the Descent into Lan˙kā was composed some eight hundred years after the Buddha’s death, it purports, like the other Mahāyāna sūtras, to have

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been spoken by the Buddha himself. The author therefore has the Buddha make a prophecy, predicting that in the future, there will be ignorant monks who claim that the Buddha ate meat and that he permitted his monks to do so, citing the monastic code where this is stated. These monks will be mistaken, the Buddha explains, because he never allowed the eating of meat. Such a prophecy would carry little weight with the Nikāya monks who knew the monastic code well, and who regarded the Descent into Lan˙kā as a contemporary concoction. But it would carry weight for the audience that the Descent into Lan˙kā cared about: an audience, both lay and monastic, whose devotion it sought. And that devotion would be gained, perhaps with little success in India, but with great success in China, and then in Korea and Japan, where the late date of the sūtra’s composition would not be known, and where the vegetarian diet that we so often associate with Buddhism would come to reign. If a history of vegetarianism in Buddhism would continue, therefore, it would move to China, where a vegetarian diet would be adopted by laypeople, including emperors. Emperor Wu of Liang, who reigned from 502 to 549, would convene large meetings of prominent monks and nuns, experts in the vinaya, in which he admonished them to give up meat, reading to them from the Descent into Lan˙kā.11 In China, one also finds particular concern with the “five pungent herbs” (wuxin)—often identified in English as garlic, scallions, leeks, onions, and asafetida—which were considered so harmful that they were forbidden in Chinese monastic codes, and which inspired the composition of what one assumes is the apocryphal Sūtra on the Effects of the Five Pungent Herbs (Wuxin baoying jing).12 In Korea, a major activity of monks during the late autumn and early winter is the making of kimchi, substituting red pepper for sardines, garlic, and scallions in compliance with rules against eating meat and pungent herbs. In Japan, beginning in the seventh century, a number of edicts were issued by the court banning hunting. Hunting continued in certain regions where it had long been a source of sustenance, including what is today Nagano Prefecture. Sometime in the fourteenth century, the monks at the Suwa Shrine, long associated with hunting, composed what is known as the Suwa phrase. It would figure in a comic play in which an arrogant monk chastises a hunter for killing animals, reciting the phrase without seeming to know that it in fact discourages the Buddhist practice of releasing trapped animals and encourages the killing and eating of animals: “Sentient beings that have exhausted their karma. Release them and still they cannot live on. Hunt them and shelter them in your body. Together you will obtain the fruit of Buddhahood.”13 In 757, in an

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effort to curb the sexual activities of monks, the Japanese court issued the Civil and Penal Codes of the Yōrō Era (Yōrō ritsurei) prohibiting monks from consuming meat and pungent herbs, which were considered to be aphrodisiacs. In 1872, the Meiji government allowed monks to marry and eat meat. In 2009, the Tibetan monk returned to the village to ask the herders to renew their vow not to sell their yaks to Chinese slaughterhouses. This time, only 10 percent agreed to do so. Some explained that the vow had deprived them of too much income. Others explained that the vow had caused their yak herds to grow so large that they no longer had the pastureland to feed them. Bloggers criticized the monk for endangering traditional Tibetan culture and for meddling in worldly affairs when he should have been meditating.14

9 • Identity

In 1989, two Japanese professors of Buddhist Studies—Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shirō—published books, entitled Critique of the Philosophy of Original Enlightenment (Hongaku shisō hihan) and Dependent Arising and Emptiness: Critique of Tathāgatagarbha (Engi to kū: Nyoraizō shisō hihan). In these works, they argued for a new approach to the study of Buddhist texts and doctrines, an approach that sought to use historiography and philology to identify the original and authentic teachings of the Buddha. It also sought to identify those forms of Buddhism that had deviated from those teachings, and to document the negative historical and social consequences of those deviations, consequences such as the complicity of the Zen school with the Japanese imperial project during the Second World War and discrimination against the burakumin, the so-called untouchables of Japanese society. These were serious charges and consequential challenges, defining what it means to be a Buddhist, not so much in terms of practice but in terms of belief, or perhaps philosophical doctrine. They made the fascinating claim that ideas like “no self” and “buddha nature” mattered in the real world, the world beyond the monastery. They were asking, in effect, what it means to be a Buddhist. As one can read in any discussion of Buddhism, a Buddhist is someone who “goes for refuge to the three jewels.” This famous phrase requires some unpacking. The word translated as “refuge” (śarana) means a shelter or an asy˙ lum, a place where one is protected from harm. The implication here is that a Buddhist is someone who turns to the three jewels for protection from the sufferings of the world, rather than to one of the many gods of the Indian pantheon. According to Buddhist cosmology, these gods have the power to bestow various worldly boons but are themselves subject to rebirth and thus are un-

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able to provide shelter from its vicissitudes. Such shelter can only be provided by the three jewels—the Buddha, the dharma, and the san˙gha—called jewels because they are difficult to find and are of great value when they are found. To convey this, the Sanskrit term “ratna” was translated into Tibetan not as “jewel” but with the neologism “rare-supreme.” The “three jewels” is among the most famous and ubiquitous terms in Buddhism, with each jewel the subject of considerable commentary to explain its meaning in this specific context— distinguishing between the Buddha and the “Buddha jewel,” the dharma and the “dharma jewel,” and the san˙gha and the “san˙gha jewel.” Let us begin with the Buddha. Here, the term refers most obviously to the historical buddha, Śākyamuni. However, because, at least in the early tradition, the Buddha had a mortal body that suffered from various maladies and eventually died, the physical body of the Buddha was not deemed a place of refuge. Because, at least in the early tradition, the Buddha’s stream of consciousness ceased at the time that he passed into nirvāna, the Buddha’s enlightened mind ˙ was not deemed a place of refuge. A new corpus therefore came into being, a metaphorical corpus of the Buddha’s many qualities. There were several lists of these, including the eighteen “unshared” (āvenika) qualities of a buddha, such ˙ as the fact that he never regresses in his concentration, wisdom, or liberation. The term for these qualities in Sanskrit is the multivalent word “dharma,” such that this corpus of qualities was called the dharmakāya. That same term, “dharma,” can also mean “doctrine,” and it is the standard term for the teachings of the Buddha. In early discourses, the Buddha often says that he teaches the dharma and the vinaya, the doctrine and the discipline. But the dharma is vast, consisting of thousands of texts in some canons; the Buddha is said to have given eighty-four thousand teachings. As in the case of the Buddha, the first jewel, the dharma as the second jewel is also specified. The dharma is sometimes divided into the “verbal doctrine,” that is, the texts, and the “realized doctrine,” the states achieved through the study and practice of those texts. However, only one of those states, nirvāna, is the ultimate ref˙ uge from samsāra. Therefore, it is said that in the context of the three jewels, ˙ “dharma” refers to the third and fourth truths, cessation and path; here “cessation” (nirodha) is a synonym for “nirvāna.” Among the three jewels, this cessa˙ tion is said to be the actual refuge, with the Buddha as the teacher of refuge and the san˙gha as the helpers to refuge. For many modern Buddhists, the term “san˙gha” (meaning “community” in Sanskrit) has become the Buddhist equivalent of “congregation,” the members of a particular Buddhist group. Traditionally, however, it has referred to the or-

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dained community of monks and nuns. In the context of the three jewels, like “Buddha” and “dharma,” it is also more restricted, referring to the “noble san˙gha.” In Buddhism, the term “ārya” (meaning “noble” or “superior” in Sanskrit) does not denote an ethnic identity but a spiritual attainment, specifically one of the four levels of the path to nirvāna: stream-enterer, once-returner, never-returner, ˙ or arhat. These terms denote different locations on the path to nirvāna, with ˙ stream-enterers destined for liberation in seven lifetimes or less, and arhats poised to enter nirvāna upon their death in the present lifetime. ˙ These various doctrinal details have rarely been known to the millions of Buddhists over the centuries who have joined their palms and said three times, “I go for refuge to the Buddha. I go for refuge to the dharma. I go for refuge to the san˙gha.” The scholastic commentary is provided here to give some sense of how seriously the idea of Buddhist identity is taken, an identity that becomes all the more fraught when we turn to Buddhist philosophy. For when we think of Buddhism, especially when we think of what distinguishes Buddhism from other religions, we think most often of belief rather than practice, of orthodoxy rather than orthopraxy—in Buddhist terms, of doctrine rather than discipline. Other religions have monks. Other religions have meditation. It seems that only Buddhism places such an emphasis on philosophy. Buddhist thinkers needed to define their identity not simply in terms of the deities they did or did not bow before but in terms of the doctrines they defended. The last centuries before the Common Era saw not only the rise of Buddhism but also what would become known as the six schools of Hindu philosophy: Sāmkhya, Yoga, Nyāya, Vaiśesika, Mīmāmsā, and Vedānta. There ˙ ˙ ˙ were other schools that, like the Buddhists, rejected the Vedas, such as Jaina, Cārvāka (or Lokāyata), and Ajīvika. And these are just the schools whose doctrines survive (sometimes only in the works of their opponents). In a Pāli text called the Sūtra on the Supreme Net (Brahmajāla Sutta), the Buddha enumerates sixty-two views of various Indian teachers. A sixth-century text called the Blaze of Reasoning (Tarkajvālā) states that there were 363 schools, giving the names of about a third of them. In stories about the life of the Buddha, the putative founders of six schools often appear as a group of jealous buffoons, always seeking to somehow defeat the Buddha and always being defeated by him, most famously by his miracles at Śrāvastī when the Buddha rose into the air and shot fire and water from this body. However, in the real world, the stakes were high, and Buddhist thinkers devoted much energy to defending themselves against non-Buddhist opponents, both in written polemics and in public debates.1 In order to do this, they needed to articulate the doctrines that distin-

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guished themselves from their opponents, what it was that made someone a Buddhist thinker. This entails another list, but a short one, known as the four seals, because they certify (hence “stamp” or “seal”) a doctrine as being Buddhist and a person who asserts them as a proponent of Buddhism. The term “proponent” is “vādin” in Sanskrit, which means “speaker” but also has the stronger sense of “advocate” and “adherent.” The four seals are (1) all conditioned things are impermanent, (2) all contaminated things are miserable, (3) all phenomena are without self, and (4) nirvāna is peace. The second is the least familiar, meaning ˙ that anything that is tainted by being an object of what are called the contaminants (āsrava)—various negative mental states like craving and aversion—is a source of suffering. The most interesting, however, is the third. The Buddhist denial of self was a radical claim among the several philosophical schools of ancient India, directly at odds with the purusa of Sāmkhya and the ātman of ˙ ˙ Vedānta.2 Indeed, among all of its doctrines, Buddhism is most famous for its claim that there is no self. The question, of course, is what this means. This question would be debated between Buddhist and non-Buddhist thinkers and among Buddhist thinkers for centuries. In its most straightforward form, it is the claim that among the physical and mental elements that constitute the person, there is nothing that is permanent, with these elements coming into and going out of existence every instant. Among these constituents, therefore, there is nothing that can be called a self as it is generally understood in Indian thought: an eternal and independent entity that is the thinker of thoughts and the doer of deeds, that travels from one lifetime to the next in the process of rebirth, taking on new physical forms, and that eventually achieves liberation. The first two seals—that all products are impermanent and that all contaminated things are miserable—are straightforward and are understood in generally the same way across the schools of Buddhist philosophy. No Buddhist school would challenge the fourth seal, that “nirvāna is peace,” although ex˙ actly what those two terms mean was the subject of much commentary. There is the most divergence on the meaning of the third seal. All Buddhist schools would agree that all phenomena are selfless in the sense that they are not possessed or used by a permanent, partless, and independent self. Yet what “self,” and hence “selfless,” precisely means is one of the enduring questions in Buddhist thought. All Buddhist schools face the problem of having to explain how rebirth is possible if there is no self, how some semblance of personal identity, carrying

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with it the karmic seeds of innumerable past lifetimes, is possible without a perduring person. Most Buddhist schools seek to address this dilemma by arguing that, although everything is impermanent, there is continuity (samtāna) from ˙ moment to moment, such that the moment of consciousness at the time of death produces the subsequent moment of rebirth, carrying the accumulated karmic seeds from all past lives with it. All Buddhist schools are emphatic that there is no self that is either the same as or different from the psycho-physical elements called the aggregates (skandha). Among the Nikāya Buddhist schools of ancient India, there was one that sought to qualify this without entirely rejecting the idea of no self. In doing so, members of this school earned the opprobrium of generations of Buddhist thinkers. They are referred to sometimes as Vātsīputrīya, sometimes as Sammitīya; ˙ their opponents referred to them derisively as Pudgalavādin, “proponents of the person.” We will use the former. Before considering what it was that caused such outrage, we must concede that the doctrine of no self causes a host of problems. If there is rebirth, as the Buddhists claim there is, what is it that goes from lifetime to lifetime? If there is karma—the law of the cause and effect of actions—as the Buddhists claim there is, what is the agent of those actions and the recipient of their effects? Who is the doer of deeds and the thinker of thoughts? The Vātsīputrīya solve these problems by positing the existence of what they call the “inexpressible (avācya) person,” which is neither permanent nor impermanent, and which is neither the same as nor different from the constituents of mind and body. It is the thinker of thoughts, the doer of deeds, and the carrier of karma from one lifetime to the next. From one perspective, this seems heretical; from another perspective, it seems entirely reasonable, even brilliant. It seems heretical because it posits a perduring self. It seems reasonable because it makes clear that that self is not permanent, and that it is neither found among nor found apart from the constituents of mind and body. Furthermore, the fact that they describe the person as inexpressible seems in keeping with the views of the Buddha himself, who was famous for his noble silence. A monk named Mālunkyāputta was sitting in his cell one day when it occurred to him that the Buddha had never held forth on what the monk considered to be the most important philosophical questions of the day, questions like: Is the world eternal (in the sense of having no beginning)? Does the world have an end? Does the Buddha exist after death? Are the soul and the body different? The monk was perturbed that the Buddha had not discussed these questions, and so he went to see him, deciding that if the Buddha did not an-

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swer the questions, he would leave the monastery and return to lay life. He was happy to accept whatever answer the Buddha gave to these questions; his concern was not with what the Buddha might answer, but that the Buddha had never addressed such questions. However, when Mālunkyāputta posed the questions, the Buddha refused to answer, arguing that, far from being conducive to progress on the path to enlightenment, such questions are in fact hindrances. He went on to provide one of his most famous parables, describing a man who is struck by a poison arrow. His family calls a doctor, who is ready to extract the arrow before the poison kills him. However, the man will not let the doctor extract the arrow until a number of questions are answered. He wants to know the caste, the clan, the name, the hometown, the height, and the complexion of the archer, whether he used a longbow or a crossbow, the shape of the arrowhead, and whether the feathers of the arrow came from a vulture, a hawk, a stork, or a peacock. The man would obviously die before those questions could be answered. The Buddha declared that the ten questions raised by Mālunkyāputta were similarly irrelevant to the present dilemma. Regardless of whether the world has an end or not, said the Buddha, “there is birth, there is aging, there is death, there are sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair, the destruction of which I prescribe here and now.”3 The Buddha called these questions avyākata, which means “unexplained” or “indeterminate.” There is a particular power in the Buddha’s answer, one that confirms our sense of him as a pragmatist concerned with the realities of the human condition rather than with metaphysical musings. Not only are such musings irrelevant; they are an impediment on the path to liberation from birth and death. As the Buddha says elsewhere, the view that the soul and the body are the same and the view that they are different is “a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion of views, a vacillation of views, a fetter of views. It is beset by suffering, by vexation, by despair, and by fever, and it does not lead to disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation, to peace, to direct knowledge, to enlightenment, to Nibbāna.”4 The Buddha thus refused to say whether the soul and the body were the same or different. By arguing that the inexpressible person is neither the same as nor different from the mind and body, the Vātsīputrīyas seem to reflect the Buddha’s silence. Still, most Buddhist thinkers over the centuries have found their position to be heretical. Indeed, the Vātsīputrīyas are described by some Buddhist authors as antaścaratīrthika, which the great Belgian scholar Louis de La Vallée Poussin colorfully translated as “infidels within the church.”5

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Among the vast corpus of works on Buddhist philosophy, one of the most famous is the Treasury of Abhidharma (Abhidharmakośa) by the fifth-century monk Vasubandhu. Relatively short, especially by the standards of the abhidharma, it treats all of the main topics of Buddhist psychology, cosmology, and soteriology in eight clearly written chapters of verses, with Vasubandhu providing his own prose commentary. Its clarity and relative brevity made it a popular handbook for Buddhist philosophy both in India and beyond. In Japan, there was an entire Kusha (kośa) school, and in Tibet, it is one of the “five texts” that form the basis of the academic curriculum of the Geluk sect. After completing the eight chapters of his Treasury of Abhidharma, Vasubandhu felt it necessary to add a ninth—most of which is devoted to a refutation of the inexpressible person of the Vātsīputrīya. It is a lengthy chapter, presented in prose and in the form of a debate, with each side offering statements by the Buddha in support of its position. Since the debate is Vasubandhu’s composition, he, of course, wins, concluding, “In fact, this doctrine of the non-existence of the soul is the only road to the city of nirvāna; although illu˙ minated by the rays which are the words of this sun which is the Tathāgata, although followed by thousands of saints, and although it is without obstacles, it is not seen by persons of weak insight.”6 The problem of what to do about the Vātsīputrīyas would continue to haunt Buddhist writers long after their demise. In a famous Tibetan compendium of Indian philosophy from the early eighteenth century, the author, after a long consideration of the question, concludes that the Vātsīputrīyas are Buddhists because they seek refuge in the three jewels, but are not “authentic proponents of Buddhist tenets.”7 Despite such condemnations by Vasubandhu and other noted Buddhist authors in India, the Vātsīputrīyas continued to thrive. Through various consolidations, the famous eighteen schools of Indian Buddhism had become four by the fifth century; one of them was the Vātsīputrīyas. When Xuanzang visited India in the seventh century, he helpfully identified the affiliation of the monasteries he visited and estimated the number of monks. The largest of the schools was the Vātsīputrīya. Inscriptional evidence suggests they were particularly strong in the north and the west.8 This may mean that many monks were quite taken with the idea of an inexpressible person. Or it may mean that the meaning of no self was less important to Buddhist monks than we would like to believe. Finally, it may mean that the conception of self that the Buddha identified as the root cause of the sufferings of samsāra proved so pernicious ˙ that it kept finding its way back into Buddhist thought. Questions of purity and pollution would remain a constant in Buddhist

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thought, taking on different meanings in different periods and moving between different domains. With the rise of Buddhist tantra a millennium after the Buddha’s death, they would take on particular meaning where, in a kind of philosophical homeopathy, the poison would become the cure. However, the language of purity and pollution is central throughout Buddhist thought, but in a way different from that found in the Hindu law books (dharmaśāstra). In Buddhism, the language of purity and pollution often shifts from the public world of the body to the private world of the mind. In the language of Buddhism, the mind is described as samklista, which can be translated as “polluted” ˙ ˙˙ and “defiled,” contaminated by āsrava (oozing). The Buddhist abhidharma provides long lists of kleśa, translated as “defilement” and “affliction,” categorized as either primary or secondary, each requiring its own pratipaksa (antidote). ˙ The Buddhist path is famously called in Pāli the “path of purification” (visuddhimagga). But if there is no self, what is it that must be purified? And amid all the pollution, is there something that remains pristine? What is it in the putrid sludge of the defilements that makes enlightenment possible? This question would be addressed in a number of Mahāyāna sūtras, perhaps most directly, and evocatively, in the Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra, which likely dates from the late third century. The time is ten years after the Buddha’s enlightenment. The place is Vulture Peak, the site of so many sūtras. The audience is a huge assembly of arhats, bodhisattvas, gods, demigods, and humans. After his pre-noon meal, the Buddha withdraws into a pavilion to meditate. Immediately, the sky is filled with huge lotus flowers, each the size of the wheel of a cart. The lotuses have not blossomed, but visible inside each there sits a buddha, emitting rays of light. The lotuses then open, revealing the buddhas. As spectacular as this might sound, similar things happen often in the Mahāyāna sūtras. But what happens next does not. The petals of the lotus do not remain fresh and colorful, as they are so often depicted in Buddhist art. “Then, by the supernatural power of the Buddha all the petals of the lotuses, without exception, became dark, deep-black, putrid and disgusting, and no longer pleasing.” This caused the members of the audience to wonder, “What is the reason that the petals of all these myriads of lotuses became so unsightly and that their stalks too became unsightly, disgusting and not pleasing, whereas in the calyxes of the lotuses each body of the tathāgatas is still sitting cross-legged, and in that they emit hundreds of thousands of rays of light that are visible everywhere as something extremely beautiful?”9 The Buddha explains that just as the glorious buddhas are seated on the calyxes of rotting lotuses, so all sentient beings are encased by the defilements of desire, hatred, delusion, craving, and

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ignorance. Yet beneath those defilements, he is able to perceive the tathāgatagarbha within each sentient being. That is, in each of the beings in the six realms of rebirth, he sees a buddha and thinks, “Those tathāgatas are just like me.”10 In the word “tathāgatagarbha,” “tathāgata” is one of the most common of the many synonyms of “buddha.” In the sūtras, the Buddha uses it often to refer to himself and to other buddhas. Its meaning, however, is unclear, literally translated as “one who has thus come” or “one who has thus gone.” The term is ambivalent in Pāli, Sanskrit, and Tibetan; the Chinese reads it as “one who has thus come,” although what this means is not clear. The other element of the compound, “garbha,” causes its own problems. The Tibetan and Chinese translations suggest “essence,” “matrix,” or “womb.” The Sanskrit, however, suggests simply possession, such that the term may mean “one who has a tathāgata,” that is, a buddha, inside them, like those unopened lotuses. In the Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra, the Buddha famously provides nine similes of what this might mean. Let us consider one of them: the buddha image wrapped in rotten rags. The Buddha describes a poor man whose prized possession was a buddha image made of seven kinds of jewels. The man needed to make a long journey through dangerous territory. In order to prevent his precious statue from being stolen from him, he wrapped it in some rotten rags. However, the man died during his journey, and the wrapped statue lay by the side of the road, unnoticed by those who passed by. Some, stepping over it, would comment on how disgusting it was. Eventually, a deity with the ability to see through the rags told a passerby that the rags contained a precious image of the Buddha, worthy of their worship. The symbolism here is simple enough. Sentient beings, wrapped in the putrid rags of the defilements, wander through the realms of rebirth, unaware that the body of a buddha abides within them. Like the deity, the Buddha informs them of its presence and instructs them in how to unwrap the rags to reveal it. As simple as this simile may seem, its potency is enhanced when we consider traditional Buddhist views of buddha images. They are not considered symbols or representations, but are regarded as the body of the buddha himself. As such, they should be wrapped in the finest silk, placed on an altar, and offered incense; it is anathema to place them on the ground, even worse to step over them. The imagery in the simile is therefore of degradation and desecration, of pollution without and purity within. The sūtra declares, then, that within all beings, there is a buddha. But what is the nature of that buddha? Is it a potential or a reality? Among the many lists in Buddhism is the four perverted views (viparyāsa, literally, “inverted” or “upside down”): (1) to see as blissful what is in fact painful,

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(2) to see as permanent what is in fact impermanent, (3) to see as pure what is in fact impure, (4) to see as self what is in fact without self. The fundamental elements of Buddhist etiology are nicely captured in these four errors. This is basic Buddhist doctrine. Thus, we might imagine the response—perhaps inspiration, perhaps outrage—when other Mahāyāna sūtras would declare that the tathāgatagarbha was endowed with four “perfect qualities” (gunapāramitā): bliss, ˙ permanence, purity, and, yes, self. To describe it as otherwise is a perverted view. In the Pāli canon (and hence, non-Mahāyāna canon), the Buddha declared, “Luminous, O monks, is this mind, but it is defiled by adventitious defilements.”11 This suggests that the mind is intrinsically pure, that the defilements are superficial, accidental in the Aristotelian sense. The process of the path would therefore seem to be to systematically remove these encrustations to reveal the pure mind. But the mind itself, like all conditioned things, is impermanent, suffering, and not self, precisely contrary to these Mahāyāna claims. Again, it is important to recall that the Mahāyāna was never a single movement with a single canon and a single set of doctrines. Thus, there would be those, including some of the most famous figures in the history of Buddhist thought, who would reject the claim that the tathāgatagarbha is blissful, permanent, pure, and self. As proponents of the Mahāyāna, they could not deny that it was the word of the Buddha. They could, however, say that the Buddha had not meant it to be taken literally, that it was a provisional (neyārtha) teaching. The apparent violation of the third seal—all phenomena are selfless—did not go unnoticed by the Nikāya schools, which remained in the majority dur­ ing the history of Buddhism in India. In Bhāviveka’s sixth-century catalogue of their complaints against the Mahāyāna, we find the statement that to teach the tathāgatagarbha entails the conception of self.12 And the problem was apparent to Mahāyāna authors in other sūtras as well, with such famous works as the Lion’s Roar of Queen Śrīmālā (Śrīmālādevīsimhanāda), the Great Discourse on the ˙ Final Nirvāna (Mahāparinirvāna Sūtra), and the Descent into Lan˙kā (Lan˙kāvatāra), ˙ ˙ declaring that the self (and the Sanskrit term here is the famous “ātman”) that is a quality of the tathāgatagarbha is not the self of the non-Buddhists.13 Still, the tathāgatagarbha, sometimes known by other names, would become one of the most influential doctrines in Buddhist thought. In China—sometimes expressed in related terms like “buddha nature” (buddhadhātu, in Sanskrit; foxing, in Chinese), stainless consciousness (amalavijñāna), and the Chinese neologism “original enlightenment” (benjue)—it is a central theme in such works as the Treatise on the Awakening of Faith According to the Mahāyāna (Dasheng qixin lun, known in English simply as the Awakening of Faith), the most famous

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of all Chinese Buddhist apocrypha. It figured prominently in the various theories of the interpenetration of principle (li) and phenomena (shi) in the Tiantai and Huayan schools, where it was conceded that the buddha nature was found in all sentient beings, with some claiming that it extended to the insentient, including roof tiles.14 Indeed, the most famous of all koans in the Chan/ Zen tradition is not “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” but “Does a dog have the buddha nature?” with its puzzling answer, “no” (wu, in Chinese; mu, in Japanese). This did not prevent members of the Three Levels school (Sanjie jiao) from bowing down to dogs because they possess the buddha nature.15 In Korea, another apocryphon best known by its imagined Sanskrit title, the Vajrasamādhi Sūtra (Kŭnmang sammae kyŏng), sets forth a series of meditation practices for achieving the “stainless consciousness.”16 In Japan, tathāgatagarbha evokes a term foundational to several schools, “hongaku” (original enlightenment), which proclaimed that enlightenment was already present in all sentient beings; it only needed to be manifested in everyday experience. Exactly how this was to be done, and the implications for doing so, would become the topic of extensive debate.17 In Tibet, the true meaning of “tathāgatagarbha” was at the heart of debates that continue to the present day, referred to as rang stong gzhan stong, literally, “self empty, other empty.” Here, the question concerns nothing less than the nature of reality. Is reality the emptiness or lack of an intrinsic existence, such that the true nature of the mind is the absence of the mind we imagine (self empty)? Or is the true nature of the mind the pristine and luminous nature of the tathāgatagarbha, which is empty of defiling qualities that are extrinsic to it (other empty)?18 In the late twentieth century, a larger question loomed. When studying the history of Buddhist thought, is it possible to identify an original and authentic set of core teachings that can be distinguished from later accretions and concessions, such as the tathāgatagarbha? And can these accretions, which appear at first sight to be rather arcane philosophical doctrines, have effects, indeed negative effects, in the real world? Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shirō, who, in addition to being professors of Buddhist Studies, were Sōtō Zen priests, answered both questions in the affirmative, proposing what they called critical Buddhism (hihan bukkyō), which they contrasted with what they called topical Buddhism (bashoteki bukkyō). For them, critical Buddhism offers a philosophi­ cal critique of the assumptions of the world and represents the original teachings of the Buddha in such doctrines as no self, the law of karma, impermanence, and dependent origination (in the sense of causation). Indeed, Hakamaya would claim that “Criticism alone is Buddhism,” necessary to distinguish truth from

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falsehood. “Topical Buddhism” refers to ideas of a topos, a ground of being, from which all emerges and to which all return. They coined a Sanskrit term to describe this, “dhātuvāda,” literally, “exposition of the element,” in the sense of a preexistent fundamental reality. They argue that this was absent from original Buddhism, seeping in over time and across space, absorbed from Hinduism in India and from Daoism in China. This “topical Buddhism,” in their view, is not true Buddhism. The divide is not the familiar, and often caricatured, Theravāda versus Mahāyāna; Hakamaya and Matsumoto extol the bodhisattva’s commitment to the welfare of others, and they praise some Mahāyāna texts and thinkers. Their primary target is the tathāgatagarbha thought described above, first in India, and then related ideas of original enlightenment in China and Japan. Here again, the entire East Asian tradition is not condemned; the Tiantai master Zhiyi and the founder of their own Sōtō school, Dōgen, are praised. Especially for Hakamaya, topical Buddhism is not simply a philosophical position to be debated and critiqued by scholars. Far from promoting harmony, he argues that claims to the ultimate identity of opposites, the original unity of all things, and the universal enlightenment, not only of all sentient beings but the insentient as well, perpetuate disharmony and social injustice. It is notions such as “no thought,” “no mind,” and “not relying on words and letters,” he argues, that allowed the Zen sect to support the Japanese invasion of mainland Asia and the subjugation of its people in the Second World War.19 In 1939, the Sōtō priest Harada Daiun Sōgaku (1871–1961)—whose lineage would be established in the United States—wrote an essay in which he declared, “The unity of Zen and war of which I speak extends to the farthest reaches of the holy war [now under way].”20 Hakamaya argued that these same notions allowed Buddhist priests to condone discrimination in Japanese society, especially against the burakumin, a social class of butchers, tanners, and executioners traditionally ostracized because of their ritually polluting professions.21 Critical Buddhism created a significant uproar in the field of Buddhist Studies, both in Japan and the West, with entire volumes devoted to its discussion and critique.22 Among the criticisms offered was that, for a variety of historical and textual reasons, it is difficult, and likely impossible, to recover the original teachings of the Buddha. In many ways, the history of Buddhism, or at least the textual history of Buddhism, has been dedicated to this task, to the myth of the eternal return to the presence of the Buddha, to know not simply what he taught, but what he thought, and in his absence, to know what it means to be a Buddhist.

10 • Immortality

After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, many of his officers were left with nothing to do, unwelcome in the lands that Napoleon had conquered. Some of them headed east, seeking sovereigns to serve. One such officer was Jean-­Baptiste Ventura (1794–1858), an Italian Jew, his given name and surname meant to cloak his origins; “Ventura,” short for “Buonaventura,” was a translation of “Mazal Tov,” a name adopted by some Jewish families after their expulsion from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. Ventura traveled first to Persia and then to the Punjab (which today includes regions of India and Pakistan) and the realm of the renowned Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh (1780–1839), the Lion of Punjab. There, he would be one of several veterans of Napoleon’s army to be employed by the maharaja to modernize his army, making it a formidable fighting force that would defeat the Afghans. It was only after the maharaja’s death that the British would annex his territory. When not engaged in military affairs, Ventura and another Napoleonic veteran, Claude Auguste Court, made a number of excursions through Ranjit Singh’s kingdom as amateur archaeologists, with a particular interest in ancient coins; many of their discoveries are today in the British Museum. In 1834, an article appeared in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal entitled “Further Information on the Topes of Mánikyála, Being the Translation of an Extract from a Manuscript Memoir on Ancient Taxila, by Mons. A. Court, Engineer Officer in the Army of Mahárájá Ranjit Singh.” Here, Court describes a cupola covered in quarried stone, eighty feet tall, surrounded by fifteen other cupolas. He climbed to the top of one of them and began digging. His conclusion was that these were tombs erected on a battlefield by Persian or Bactrian conquerors to honor their war dead. He goes on to say, “One thing is certain at any rate, namely,

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that they are all sepulchral tumuli; for having myself opened several of these cupolas, I have found in most of them, little urns of bronze, or other metal, or of baked clay, containing funeral ashes, or the debris of human bones; also jewels, and coins for the most part of Graeco-Scythic, or Graeco-Indian types.”1 Court was wrong about the war dead. If he knew the works of the Church fathers, he would have known that Clement of Alexandria, who died in 215 CE, had said that the holy men of India “honor a kind of pyramid under which they believe the bones of some god are resting.”2 The kind of pyramid that Court had broken open was a stūpa. In fact, the stūpa at Manikyala marked the place where the Buddha, in a previous life as Prince Mahāsattva (or Sattva), had seen a starving tigress about to devour her own cubs. He jumped off a cliff so that she could feed on his body and spare her cubs. The stūpa was visited by the famous Chinese pilgrims Faxian and Xuanzang.3 The death of the founder is always a momentous moment in the history of a religion. This is certainly the case in Buddhism, where the Buddha’s death— or, in the language of the tradition, his passage into final nirvāna—is recounted ˙ in a protracted scene replete with consequential pronouncements. And then there is what happens after his death. This is all recounted in a text called the Great Discourse on the Final Nirvāna (Mahāparinibbāna Sutta), of which there ˙ are two important versions, one in Pāli and a much longer one in Sanskrit. As the Buddha’s final teaching, much has to be accomplished in this text, and thus we find consequential instructions on succession, on the monastic code, on criteria for including teachings in the canon, on pilgrimage, and on women. We can only recount these briefly here; many of them are discussed in other chapters. Our topic is what was left after he was gone. Now eighty, the Buddha was frail, describing his body as being like a cart held together by straps. At one point, he and his attendant Ānanda had gone to a village outside the city of Vaiśālī to meditate so that the Buddha could regain his strength. While sitting together at a forest shrine, the Buddha mentioned that a buddha can live “for an eon or until the end of an eon” if he is asked to do so. Ānanda did not respond, despite the Buddha repeating it two more times. Shortly thereafter, Māra, the Buddhist deity of death and desire who had attacked the Buddha under the Bodhi Tree years before, appeared to the Buddha. Māra reminded him that after his enlightenment, the Buddha had told Māra that he would not enter nirvāna until he had established a community of fol˙ lowers, both monastic and lay, who were wise, disciplined, and had learned to preserve his teachings. Māra told the Buddha that that time had come. The Buddha eventually agreed that Māra was correct in this, saying that he would

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pass into nirvāna three months later. He then immediately “relinquished his ˙ life force,” causing the earth to quake. When Ānanda felt the tremor, he asked the Buddha why it had occurred, leading to a description of the eight reasons for an earthquake, including a buddha’s relinquishment of his life force. It was only then that Ānanda understood what had happened, begging the Buddha to live for an eon or until the end of the eon. But it was too late. As discussed in an earlier chapter, the Buddha reminded Ānanda that he had missed his chance, not only on these three occasions, but fifteen other times in the past, which he enumerates. Ānanda would soon be placed on trial for his failure to make this most consequential request. The Buddha, Ānanda, and some other monks later accepted a meal offered by a metalworker named Cunda. Among the dishes served was something called sūkaramaddava, whose meaning continues to confound scholars. Variously translated as “soft pig” and “pig’s delight,” it seems to be either something tender that pigs like to eat or a pork dish. This is an important distinction because of the vexed question of whether the Buddha was a vegetarian. For the Theravāda tradition, where the monks eat meat, it is pork; for the East Asian tradition, where the monks do not, it is some kind of mushroom or truffle; the Chinese translation of the term literally means “sandalwood tree fungus.” At any rate, when the dish was presented to the assembled monks, the Buddha instructed Cunda to only serve it to him because no one else would be able to digest it; he told him to bury the rest. After consuming it, the Buddha suffered an attack of dysentery. He and Ānanda then proceeded to a village called Kuśinagara, where the Buddha had decided to die. When Ānanda objected that this insignificant little town in the middle of the forest was hardly a fitting site for such a momentous event, the Buddha explained that long ago, it had been the prosperous capital of a cakravartin. He then lay down on his right side, his head resting on his arm. This posture of the Buddha is one of the most widely depicted in Buddhist art, especially in Southeast Asia, where he is sometimes seen, smiling, with his elbow on the ground and his hand supporting his head. This is not an image of the Buddha relaxing; it is an image of the Buddha dying. A huge crowd gathers. At one point, the Buddha asks the monk who is fanning him to step to one side, explaining that the area for miles around is densely packed with gods who had descended from their heavens, each trying to see the Buddha one last time. The monk is blocking their view. This death scene is among the most famous in Buddhist art, especially in China and Japan, where

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all manner of people, monastic and lay, as well as animals have gathered, some wailing and rolling on the ground in paroxysms of sorrow; others look on stoically. In some versions, the Buddha’s mother has descended from the realm of the gods and can be seen in the branches of the tree at the Buddha’s feet, weeping. Much then happens. A final monk is ordained; punishment for another monk is ordered; the Buddha tells Ānanda that monks should not look at or speak to women, being sure to be vigilant if women speak to them; he says that after his death, the minor rules of the monastic code can be ignored; he says that after his death, blessings will accrue to those who visit the places of his birth, enlightenment, first teaching, and death; he says that after his death, the dharma and the vinaya, the doctrine and the discipline, will be the teacher; he will appoint no successor. Each of these are matters of great consequence, for both Buddhists and Buddhologists. However, our focus here is what he said should be done with his corpse. When Ānanda asks what should be done with his body, the Buddha says that it should be treated like the body of a cakravartin. Since there were no longer any such monarchs, Ānanda has to ask for more detailed instructions, which the Buddha provides. His body was to be wrapped in a layer of linen, then a layer of teased cotton wool. This was to be repeated five hundred times. The body was then to be placed inside an iron vessel, which was to be filled with oil and then covered with a larger vessel. A pyre of fragrant wood was to be built around the vessel and then lit. What remained of his body after the fire went out was to be buried in a mound at a crossroads. The word for mound here is “stūpa,” the source of the English word “tope.” He said that anyone who offered flower garlands, incense, or sandalwood paste to the stūpa, who bowed to it, and whose mind became calm there would find happiness in the future. When they die, they will be reborn in heaven. Finally, the Buddha asks the monks three times if there are any questions. Hearing none, he speaks his last words, “All conditioned things are subject to decay. Strive diligently.” His mind passes up and down through the various states of deep concentration and then enters nirvāna. When the Buddha achieved enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree at ˙ age thirty-five, he achieved what is called the “nirvāna with remainder,” that is, ˙ although the causes for future rebirth had been destroyed, his mind and body remained. Now, at age eighty, he entered what is called the final nirvāna and ˙ the “nirvāna without remainder.” ˙ However, doctrinally speaking, there was no one to enter and no place to be

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entered. The Sanskrit term “nirvāna” literally means “blowing out,” as a fire is ˙ blown out by the wind. The flame does not go anywhere; it is simply extinguished. A fire goes out when its fuel is consumed. Nirvāna is therefore also ˙ called cessation, the third of the four truths. Because the cause of rebirth had been destroyed, there could be no effect. If we imagine existence as the presence of some form of consciousness, the Buddha had ceased to exist. There was “no remainder,” except for his corpse. Yet when they try to light the funeral pyre, it will not ignite. The Buddha’s chief disciple, the monk Mahākāśyapa, is absent, and the gods will not allow the fire to be lit until he arrives a week later. He pays his last respects to his teacher by walking around the funeral pyre three times. After that, the pyre spontaneously bursts into flame. After the fire has died out, the relics are collected by the local Buddhist community, called the Mallas. Immediately, a disagreement arises as to who should own the relics, with seven other groups of the Buddha’s lay followers, having arrived from their home regions, making their claims. As these groups are about to come to blows, a brahmin called Drona convinces them to allow him to di˙ vide the relics into eight shares. He then receives permission to keep the urn that he used to measure the shares, now sacred for having contained the relics of the Buddha. A young brahmin then asks for the remaining ashes from the funeral pyre, which he receives. These ten become the contents of the first ten stūpas.4 According to other versions of the story, there were eight original stūpas. The origins of the Buddhist stūpa, so central to the tradition across Asia, remain something of a mystery. The Vedas prescribe cremation, after which the bones are to be gathered, placed in a basket, and then buried, with those who gathered the bones needing to undergo ritual purification. There are also references to burying the corpse in an earthen mound or placing it in a brick tomb in an uninhabited area or simply exposing the corpse to the elements in a charnel ground. The remains of the dead, whether a corpse or ashes, are regarded as a source of pollution, with purification prescribed after their disposal. This makes the veneration of the relics of the Buddha somewhat puzzling. As Eugène Burnouf wrote in 1844, “I also have some difficulty in comprehending how the brahmans would have permitted the veneration of remains so miserable in their eyes as the bones of a cadaver consumed on the pyre.”5 In fact, Hindus seem to have mocked the Buddhist practice. The great Hindu epic, the Mahābhārata, predicts that in the dark age to come, humans will stop building temples and worshipping the gods, instead worshipping an edūka, a ˙ structure enclosing rubbish or bones; it is another word for a stūpa. It thus seems to be the case that in ancient India, corpses were cremated, and the

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relics were sometimes entombed. What seems to have been odd was that anyone would worship such a tomb.6 In the account of the Buddha’s enlightenment, we find a story of the Buddha providing relics long before his death. In some of those accounts, it is said that the Buddha did not consume any food for forty-nine days after his enlightenment. Two merchants who were passing by, Bhallika and Trapusa, offered ˙ him sweet cakes of rice and honey, which the Buddha received in a begging bowl provided by the gods. In return, the Buddha had them take refuge in the Buddha and the dharma (there was no san˙gha). Interestingly, he did not teach them but gave them some of his hair, which, according to Burmese Buddhism, they took back to their native land, where it was enshrined in the Shwedagon Pagoda, the most sacred stūpa in Burma. Other accounts say that they were natives of Gandhāra and that they took the hair back to Balkh in Afghanistan, where it was enshrined in a stūpa. Yet after the Buddha died, all that remained were his relics. He had passed into nirvāna, the state of complete cessation of mind and matter. He was not ˙ in heaven; he would not be reborn. In his Treasury of Abhidharma (Abhidharmakośa), the fifth-century monk Vasubandhu lists the four ways that beings can be born: from an egg, from a womb, from moisture, and as apparitions. Beings born from moisture are insects that were believed to be created from heat and moisture. Apparitional beings magically appear as fully formed adults, as occurs in the Buddhist heavens and hells. Vasubandhu takes up the question of why the Buddha, with all of his powers, was not born in this way, forgoing a fleshly body that forms in a womb. Vasubandhu explains, “The bodhisattva has taken up the womb in order that his body remains as relics after his nirvāna: through the adoration of these relics, humans and other creatures by the ˙ thousands obtain heaven and deliverance.”7 In other words, the Buddha decides to appear in his last lifetime in a body of flesh so that that body can be burned and the relics worshipped. The Sanskrit term that is translated as “relics” is “śarīra,” a standard term for “body,” living or dead. However, for the Buddhists, it most often refers to the relics of the Buddha. As this passage makes clear, these are not incidental remains discovered among the ashes of a funeral pyre, but something that the Buddha intentionally leaves behind. The stūpas that contained those relics were to be treated with the utmost reverence and respect; a wide range of activities, including sexual intercourse, are prohibited in their vicinity. In the Buddhist ethical system, there are five deeds so heinous that one who commits them is doomed to rebirth in hell in their next lifetime: killing one’s mother, killing one’s father, killing an arhat,

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wounding the Buddha, and causing dissent in the san˙gha. In the Treasury of Abhidharma, Vasubandhu lists five more misdeeds that are almost as heinous: having sex with a female arhat who is one’s mother, killing a bodhisattva who has attained a certain level on the path, killing someone who has achieved one of the first three levels of enlightenment, depriving the san˙gha of its livelihood, and breaking open a stūpa. Engraved in several of the great stūpa complexes of ancient India are curses on those who remove any of the stonework from a stūpa.8 The stūpa thus becomes an extension of the Buddha’s body, and of the Buddha’s biography, persisting in samsāra long after he has passed into nirvāna, ˙ ˙ providing a site of sanctity, a destination for devotion. As such, the stūpa was treated as the Buddha; it received offerings (which belonged to the Buddha and not to the monastery), was prostrated to, and was circumambulated in a clockwise direction.9 Like the body of the Buddha, the stūpa was fragrant, or at least made fragrant, by the constant application of sandalwood paste and various perfumes. One way of making merit was to dip one’s hand in sandalwood paste and leave a handprint on the stūpa; handprints are depicted in ancient stone carvings of stūpas. Before doing so, one needed to be fragrant oneself. That this was a widespread and important practice is suggested by the monastic code, in which the rules that prevent monks and nuns from wearing perfumes are amended to allow them to wash with perfumed water before working on a stūpa and to put sandalwood-paste handprints on its surface. The stūpa also had to be protected from the malodorous. Anyone who had consumed garlic was not allowed to approach a stūpa for seven days. The monastic code prohibits urination, defecation, and passing gas in the vicinity of a stūpa. Those monks who wore robes made from burial shrouds were not allowed to approach a stūpa, and cremations could not be performed in its vicinity.10 These are prohibited because of their foul smell, but they also make clear that the stūpa was regarded not as a tomb of the dead but as containing the living remnants of the Buddha. This is illustrated most powerfully in the eleventh chapter of the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapundarīka), in which a great stūpa ˙˙ rises from beneath the earth. When a voice is heard inside, the door is opened to reveal a living buddha seated inside. We tend to think of the image of the Buddha seated in meditation as the quintessential emblem of Buddhism, the equivalent of the crucifix for Christianity. But it can be argued that the mounds looted by the likes of Monsieur Court are more important, at least to Buddhists, because they are not representations of the Buddha but contain his relics, what remained after the nirvāna ˙

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without remainder. Regardless of the importance of images of the Buddha today, it is clearly the case that stūpas were more important than images throughout the Buddhist world for much of its history, with the building of stūpas preceding the carving of statues of the Buddha by centuries; many of the most famous stūpas seem to have been constructed between 300 BCE and 300 CE. The importance of stūpas—and East Asian pagodas, Thai chedi, and Tibetan chöten are all stūpas—is thus difficult to overstate; the evidence is too vast to enumerate here. One can note, however, that when the Mahāyāna sūtras wanted to proclaim their grandeur, they often say that reciting their words was equal in merit to erecting a stūpa. The stūpa is, in the words of one scholar, the “signature monument” of Buddhism.11 It was the stūpa that sanctified the Buddhist landscape, returning the presence of the absent Buddha. It was the stūpa that provided the site for the building of a monastery. It was the stūpa that served as a magnet for pilgrimage, practice, and, importantly, offerings. It was the stūpa that radiated blessings to all who approached. These relics were typically placed in small containers, sometimes nested containers, some elaborate, some simple, often made of precious substances and often with inscriptions that have been essential to archaeologists and epigraphers in understanding the development of Buddhism in India and beyond. When those containers are opened, they sometimes include what appear to be teeth or pieces of bone, but more often they contain tiny crystalline beads of various colors. These are likely the “jewels” that Claude Auguste Court discovered in the stūpas that he looted. In addition to the term “stūpa,” we also have the term “caitya,” often translated as “shrine.” In some cases, a distinction is made, with a stūpa containing a relic of the Buddha or another sainted figure, while a caitya is a holy site, such as footprints of the Buddha and the places where the Buddha was born, achieved enlightenment, first taught the dharma, and passed into nirvāna, or performed ˙ a miracle. Sometimes, a stūpa seems to be a category of caitya, with a caitya said to be of three types: those containing a relic; those containing things that belonged to the Buddha, such as his begging bowl or robe (what would be called contact relics); and those containing images of the Buddha, with the last disparaged as less important than the other two. Such an attitude may have led to the practice of placing a relic inside a buddha image—in the case of stone sculpture, often in the crown protrusion.12 The merit of making offerings to a stūpa is repeatedly extolled in Buddhist texts, with one of the Buddha’s disciples explaining that in a previous life, he had accompanied some friends in a visit to the stūpa of a previous buddha. Seeing

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them offer garlands of flowers to the stūpa, he took the flower he was wearing behind his ear and did the same. As a result, he was reborn as a god for ten billion years.13 Elsewhere, we read that seeing or merely hearing about a particularly powerful relic would destroy all of the negative karma created by one’s body, speech, and mind.14 Such promises led to extreme displays of devotion. According to an eyewitness description, when the finger relic of the Buddha kept at Famensi in China was carried in a procession in 873: Those who came to see the spectacle all fasted beforehand in order that they might receive the blessings of the Buddha. At the time, a soldier cut off his left arm in front of the Buddha’s relic, and while holding it with his hand, he reverenced the relic each time he took a step, his blood sprinkling the ground all the while. As for those who walked on their elbows and knees, biting off their fingers or cutting off their hair, their numbers could not be counted. There was also a monk who covered his head with artemisia [sweet wormwood], a practice known as disciplining the head. When the pile of artemisia was ignited, the pain caused the monk to shake his head and to cry out, but young men in the market place held him tight so that he could not move.15 Many stories are told of the miraculous powers of relics, powers that exceed those of the enemies of the dharma. In 1560, a Portuguese armada attacked the Buddhist kingdom of Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka. They took two hostages— the crown prince and a tooth relic of the Buddha—and returned to their headquarters in Goa, on the southwest coast of India. The king of Pegu in Burma, a pious Buddhist, sent a delegation to Goa and offered a huge ransom for the relic, eventually offering to form an alliance with the Portuguese, under the terms of which the Burmese would provision the Portuguese port at Malacca on the Malay Peninsula. The Portuguese were apparently ready to accept when the recently arrived archbishop of Goa, Don Gaspar Jorge de Leão Pereira (d. 1576), objected that the return of the relic would encourage the heathens to persist in their practice of idolatry. A council of military and state officials was convened, deciding in the end to choose God over Mammon. In an elaborate ceremony, the archbishop placed the tooth in a mortar, smashed it to powder, burned the powder in a brazier, and dumped the ashes into the Gomati River.16 Shortly thereafter, the tooth magically reappeared on a lotus blossom in Sri Lanka, where it is today enshrined.17 In addition to his body (in the form of relics), the Buddha left behind his speech (in the form of teachings). With the introduction of writing, some three

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centuries after his death, those teachings also took on a physical form, as texts. Aśoka is said to have opened up seven of the eight original stūpas—leaving a stūpa protected by the nāgas undisturbed—removed the relics, and built eightyfour thousand stūpas. Thus, it might seem that there were enough relics. However, we come to see texts—one short text in particular—begin to play the role of the relic. We read in Xuanzang’s travel journal of a layman named Jayasena, who was renowned for his knowledge of both Buddhist and non-Buddhist doctrine and was consulted by the rich and powerful. At age seventy, he set aside his other studies to devote himself entirely to Buddhism. While he was teaching his students each day, he would make miniature stūpas out of scented clay, about six inches high, each containing a scripture called a dharma relic. When enough of these small stūpas had been made, a full-size stūpa would be built to contain them, with the scriptures inside serving as relics to be venerated. Xuanzang reports that over the next thirty years, Jayasena made seventy million of these small clay stūpas, pausing after each ten million to build a large stūpa to contain them.18 Thus, we find numerous texts offering instruction on how to make a stūpa and the benefits that accrue from doing so, especially “in a place where none has been established before.” This is one of the four deeds (along with building a residence for the monastic community, healing a rift in the monastic community, and meditating on the four immeasurables of love, compassion, joy, and equanimity) that bring about rebirth in the heavens of the god Brahmā for an eon. The stūpa that one makes can be quite small. According to instructions found in a number of texts, the stūpa should be made from a ball of clay the size of a myrobalan fruit (this is the Indian gooseberry, usually less than two inches in size), and the central shaft should be the size of a needle; the parasol atop the stūpa should be the size of a juniper leaf; the buddha image inside the lump of clay should be the size of a grain of barley; and the relic inside the buddha image should be the size of a mustard seed. However, an actual relic was not necessary. A dharma relic, that is, a text, could be substituted for the buddha image and the relic it enclosed, but it would obviously need to be quite small. The text chosen is perhaps the most famous in all of Buddhist literature. Called the “stanza on dependent arising,” it was spoken by Aśvajit, one of the Group of Five who heard the Buddha’s first sermon, when he was asked to give a summary of the Buddha’s teaching. It is, “Those things that have arisen from a cause, the Tathāgata proclaims their causes as well as their cessation. This is the teaching of the great ascetic.” Given its great fame, it has obviously attracted much commentary. However, if considered in

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terms of the four truths, it means that the Buddha has identified the causes of suffering and has also identified the cessation of suffering. This statement has been inscribed on rock, metal, stone, wood, and paper across the Buddhist world for centuries. Here, it serves as a relic of the Buddha, placed inside a modest little stūpa made of clay.19 This is likely the “scripture” that Jayasena inserted into his seventy million clay stūpas. Long after the Buddha’s nirvāna without remainder, there is one final nir˙ vāna, called the “nirvāna of the relics.” The Pāli tradition believes that Buddhism ˙ ˙ will disappear from our world over the course of five millennia, with the four attainments of stream-enterer, once-returner, never-returner, and arhat dis­ appearing in the first; the maintenance of monastic vows disappearing in the second; the scriptures, and hence knowledge of the Buddha’s teaching, disappearing in the third; and the outward signs of monkhood—the begging bowl and the ochre robe—disappearing in the fourth. The final millennium ends with the disappearance of the relics. The relics, no longer venerated, will break free from their stūpas (and presumably from the various museums where they are held) and travel to Bodh Gayā, the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment, where they will assemble under the Bodhi Tree and, like a mass of gold, emit rays of multicolored light that illuminate the world. The pile of relics will then be transformed into the body of the Buddha, adorned with the major and minor marks, surrounded by an aura. No human will bother to witness this miracle; only the gods will attend. The relics will then burst into flame and burn until they have been completely consumed by flames. With the disappearance of the relics, Buddhism disappears from the world.

11 • Incarnation

In the early hours of November 29, 1995, a solemn ceremony took place in the Jokhang—the House of the Lord, the holy of holies of Tibetan Buddhism—­ located at the heart of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. Gathered there were the leading lamas of the Geluk sect, the “system of virtue,” better known in the West as the yellow hats, the sect of the Dalai Lama. They had assembled to select the next Panchen Lama. The previous Panchen Lama had died on January 28, 1989. Almost seven years had passed since his death. His successor would be a young boy, to be selected through divination. Prior to the ceremony, a committee had identified three candidates. Now, in the darkness of the Jokhang, each of their names was affixed to an ivory stick about an inch wide and eight inches long. Each stick was placed in a pouch of yellow silk. The three sticks were then placed in what is known as the Golden Urn. Next, the Holder of the Throne of Ganden, the traditional head of the Geluk sect, prostrated three times before Jowo Rinpoche, the most sacred image of the Buddha in Tibet. Next, he reached inside the Golden Urn and drew out one of the sticks. He handed it not to another high lama but to Luo Gan, deputy secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. A five-year-old boy named Gyaltsen Norbu had been selected as the Eleventh Panchen Lama of Tibet (the Eighth Panchen Lama by traditional Tibetan counting). The participation of a high-ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party suggests that there was something unusual about the 1995 ceremony, a ceremony that selected the second-most important lama of Tibet, and now the most important lama in Tibet; the Dalai Lama had been in exile in India since 1959. The ceremony sparked an international controversy. The existence of incarnate lamas had long been known in the West. The

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first European reference appears in the works of the Flemish Franciscan friar William of Rubruck (c. 1220–c. 1293). This was the time of the Crusades, as Christian armies from Europe sought yet again to reclaim the Holy Land from the Muslims. As early as the eleventh century, there had been rumors that the Christians in the West had an ally in the East, beyond the Holy Land, called Prester John, said to be a patriarch of the Church and ruler of a Christian kingdom in India. Around 1165, the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus received a letter from Prester John himself, announcing his intention to visit the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. In 1221, just as the disastrous Fifth Crusade was ending, the bishop of Acre, Jacques de Vitry, sent word back to Europe that King David—the son or grandson of Prester John, or perhaps Prester John himself—had defeated Ala ad-Din Muhammad (1169–1220), shah of Khwarazm, and had conquered Persia. The Christian king was marching on Baghdad. After defeating the Abbasids, he would continue westward to Jerusalem to take the city from the Saracens. The letter from Prester John was later shown to be a forgery. However, much of Jacques de Vitry’s report was accurate: a powerful king from the east had defeated the Khwarazmian army and was advancing on Baghdad. But this king was not the fabled Prester John; it was instead Genghis Khan, and his plan was not to save the Christians but to conquer them. The Mongols swept across Central Asia, across the Caucasus, into the Christian principalities of Georgia and Armenia, then into Russia and Ukraine, into Poland and Hungary. Just when it seemed that all of Europe would fall, in 1242, for reasons that are unclear, the Mongols halted their advance and returned to Mongolia. According to some accounts, disputed by recent scholarship, they had received word that the Great Khan (Ögedei Khan, son of Genghis) had died and needed to return to elect his successor. With no hope of Prester John as an Eastern ally of the Western Christians, embassies were sent to the Mongol court to seek alliances. The embassy sent by King Louis IX of France to the court of the Great Khan Möngke (1209–1259) included William of Rubruck, who arrived there in 1253. He wrote a report on his journey, which was soon translated from Latin into the vernaculars of Europe. In Friar William’s description of his time in Karakorum, we find this sentence: “A boy was brought from Cataia, who to judge by his physical size was not yet three years old, yet fully capable of rational thought: he said of himself that he was in his third incarnation, and he knew how to read and write.”1 The origins of the incarnate lama institution are not clear. Before consider-

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ing the origins, we must define the concept, which requires a brief excursus into the topic of the three bodies of a buddha. As discussed in a previous chapter, a Buddhist is defined as someone who goes for refuge to the three jewels: the Buddha, the dharma, and the san˙gha. Given the importance of this triad, much commentary was devoted to what defined each of these—to what made them a jewel. Because, at least in the early tradition, the physical body of the Buddha was seen as impermanent, subject to both disease and death, it was not deemed suitable as the “Buddha jewel.” Instead, a metaphorical body was identified, the body of the Buddha’s good qualities, with “quality” used to render the multivalent Sanskrit term “dharma.” That corpus of qualities was called the dharmakāya, the body of qualities. With the rise of the Mahāyāna, the dharmakāya evolved into a kind of cosmic principle, identified by some exegetes as the Buddha’s omniscient consciousness. This body of the Buddha became the mind of the Buddha. The second body of the Buddha seemed to derive from the Mahāyāna idea of the “buddha field,” that when a buddha achieved enlightenment, he also created a domain for his dissemination of the dharma. These were worlds, sometimes referred to as buddha-verses in English, that were different from our own, classified as impure or pure depending on whether they included the realms of animals, ghosts, and denizens of hell. The most famous of these is the buddha field of Amitābha (Infinite Light) called Sukhāvatī, the Land of Bliss, said to be located in the West. The buddhas who preside over these worlds do not appear in the form known in our world. Instead, they appear in the far more magnificent form of an enjoyment body (sam bhogakāya), one that is visible ˙ only to those who have reached at least the first of the ten stages (bhūmi) of the Mahāyāna path to buddhahood. The third body of a buddha, and the one pertinent to the institution of the incarnate lama, is called the emanation body (nirmānakāya), with the Sanskrit ˙ term having connotations of magical transformation. Indeed, the term seems to have been first used to describe particular miracles performed by the Buddha, such as the famous miracle at Śrāvastī, in which he created multiple forms of himself. The “emanation body” is the form of the Buddha who appeared in our world, the name suggesting that he was but a manifestation of a higher cosmic principle. This third body was, in turn, said to be of several types. The Buddha that appeared in our world in the guise of a monk, performing the twelve deeds that all buddhas perform, his body adorned with the thirty-­ two major marks and eighty ancillary marks, is called a supreme emanation body. But a buddha could appear as a work of art, such as a painting or a statue

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of the Buddha, or as the artist who creates it. And a buddha could appear as any type of sentient being, including an animal, and even as something inanimate, like a cooling breeze. It is this category of the “emanation body” that we must keep in mind as we return to Tibetan history. According to Tibetan mythology, the first king had descended from the sky via a rope. When his son reached his majority—measured by the ability to ride a horse—the king ascended back into the sky via the rope. This form of succession is said to have continued until the time of the eighth king. During a battle, the rope was cut, meaning that when he later died, rituals for his burial were needed. Some centuries after Buddhism became established in Tibet, a new rope would descend, one that would allow the same divine being to descend and ascend in lifetime after lifetime.2 Although Tibet was bordered by India, Nepal, and China, lands where Buddhism had flourished for centuries, Buddhism does not seem to have entered Tibet, at least according to traditional accounts, until the seventh century. By then, Tibet was a major military power, so much so that, according to traditional Tibetan histories (disputed by modern scholarship), King Songtsen Gampo (569– 649) received in marriage a Nepalese princess and a Chinese princess after having defeated their countries on the battlefield. Both of these princesses were Buddhists and are said to have converted their husband to the dharma, each bringing a statue of the Buddha to his new capital, Lhasa. He is counted as the first of three “dharma kings,” revered for converting the kingdom to Buddhism. The second of the dharma kings established the first monastery in 779, inviting the Indian tantric master Padmasambhava to Tibet to subdue the local deities who opposed its construction. The third king is renowned for his support of the translation efforts that brought the massive Indian canons into the recently invented Tibetan written language. So devoted to the dharma was this third king, named Ralpacan, that he is said to have depleted the royal treasuries to support it. This so infuriated anti-Buddhist elements at court that he was assassinated in 838, to be replaced by his brother Lang Darma, remembered in Buddhist histories (probably inaccurately) as an almost demonic persecutor of Buddhism. According to these histories, he was so evil that he himself was assassinated by an arrow, fired by a Buddhist monk, in 842. This put an end to the Tibetan monarchy, plunging the country into a period of political chaos, known in Tibetan as the Age of Fragments (sil bu’i dus). By the eleventh century, Buddhist institutions had been reestablished in western Tibet, initiating something of a renaissance, referred to in Tibetan as

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the “later spread” (phyi dar). Two important trends occurred during this period. The first was that Indian Buddhist masters began to come to Tibet again. The most important of the many who came was Atiśa, who arrived in Tibet in 1042. The second trend was that Tibetans started to go to India to study at Indian monasteries, to study with Indian tantric masters, and to acquire texts, which they took back to Tibet. With no royal lineage or central authority, the returning Tibetans, endowed with a certain charisma because of the perilous journey they had survived and the precious dharma that they possessed, began to establish monasteries that served as important political and economic centers in their local regions. Their political influence and economic resources led eventually to questions of succession, which were complicated in the case of Buddhism, where authority is typically held by a monk who had taken the vow of celibacy, making patrilineal descent, and thus the inheritance of power and wealth, impossible. In the Sakya sect in western Tibet, this was solved by inheritance from monastic uncle to lay nephew. However, for reasons that are not entirely clear, the belief arose that an advanced Buddhist practitioner, unlike more benighted sentient beings, had the power to select the site of his next rebirth, sometimes leaving instructions for his disciples as to where to find him. In this case, doctrinally speaking, there was no need for inheritance of wealth or transfer of prestige; their owner essentially became immortal, returning in lifetime after lifetime in the form of a small boy (and, in rare cases, a girl), located by his disciples, taken at a young age to his home monastery, and educated by those whom he had educated in his previous lifetime. Thus, by the thirteenth century, a new system had developed in which power, property, and sanctity were not passed to another person but retained by the same person, from one lifetime to the next. According to Tibetan accounts, this first occurred in the thirteenth century when a prominent lama of the Kagyü sect (the sect of Tibet’s famous saint Milarepa) named Karma Paksī (1206–1283) ˙ identified himself as the next incarnation of the famous Dusum Khyenpa (1110–1193). Modern scholarship has identified other cases of incarnate lamas from the thirteenth century (including the case of a woman), as well as at least one case from another sect, the Kadam, from the second half of the twelfth century.3 We note here the thirteen-year gap between the death of Dusum Khyenpa and the birth of Karma Paksī, far longer than the maximum period of forty˙ nine days between death and rebirth for ordinary beings. To name the new incarnation, Tibetans chose “tulku,” their translation of “nirmānakāya” (emana˙

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tion body), meaning that the lama was a buddha, not bound by the ordinary rules of karma. We also note that the young tulku whom William of Rubruck met in 1253—a figure who has not been identified—was a child who claimed to be the third incarnation, and hence an early instance of what would become one of the defining institutions of Tibetan Buddhism. Finally, we note here that Friar William describes the child without comment. The next widely read European report of a tulku would express an opinion. In 1661, two Jesuits living in Beijing, the Austrian Johann Grueber (1623– 1680) and the Belgian Albert D’Orville (1621–1662), were ordered back to Rome. The usual sea route was not available because of a Dutch naval blockade, and so they set out overland, planning to travel from Beijing to the Jesuit headquarters at Goa, where they could board a ship back to Europe. Their overland route took them through Tibet, stopping in Lhasa. D’Orville died en route in Agra, but Grueber made his way to Rome. His report was included in the famous China Illustrata by the remarkable German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), an often fanciful compendium on Chinese culture, drawn from the reports of his fellow Jesuits. Grueber’s report, or at least Kircher’s version of it, describes the Dalai Lama in some detail: He sits on a raised place on a pillow under which precious carpets are strewn. Before him the visitors fall prostrate and place their heads on the ground. They kiss his feet with incredible veneration, as if he were the Pope. Thus, even by this the deceitfulness of the evil spirit is marvelously shown, for veneration due only to the vicar of Christ on earth, the Pope of Rome, is transferred to the heathen worship of savage nations, like all the other mysteries of Christianity. The Devil does this with his natural malevolence. . . . Lest he seem to lose his immortality, after his death the lamas search the whole kingdom for a man similar to him in every respect. When such a one is found, he is substituted on the throne for the former Great Lama. In this way they persuade the whole kingdom, ignorant of this fraud and deception, of the eternal survival of the Eternal Father, who has been revived from Hell seven times already in this century.4 From the time of Kircher in the seventeenth century, what we might call the demonic theory of the tulku held sway in Roman Catholic circles, continuing far into the nineteenth century. Its most eloquent exposition is found in the report of a Jesuit who was able to observe tulkus firsthand during his extended sojourn in Tibet from 1716 to 1721, Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733). In his Relazi-

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one, he devotes three chapters to the topic of the tulku, entitled “Of the Grand Lama, Chief of This Religion,” “Persuasive Reasons Why the Above-Mentioned Creation of a New Grand Lama Is the Direct Work of the Devil,” and “Reply to the Arguments of Those Who Judge the Above-Mentioned Deception to Be the Artifice of Men and Not of the Devil.” Desideri studied at Sera Monastery outside Lhasa and likely encountered a number of tulkus there. He was clearly impressed by them. Indeed, it is a sign of his grudging respect for the tulkus he encountered that he can only attribute their existence to the supernatural and the sinister. He describes a three-year-old boy, who he says cannot “tell the difference between his wet nurse’s husband and his own father.” And yet, the child “does not make any errors in his responses, nor does what he says prove inconsistent, nor is he caught in any lies concerning the evidence and proofs that he gives of his previous life in the world. This is not a trick that his mother or nurse could have taught him or that any men could, however their great cleverness in pretense and promptness in fabrication.”5 Indeed, he continues, “All of them manage in the same way to behave with a certain external composure, gravity, and dignity proper to holy persons, which causes great astonishment. Because as soon as the young man is called lama we see him suddenly endowed with an almost superhuman spirit, taking on the dignity and reserve proper to a priest.”6 In the early centuries of the tulku institution, the figure who would eventually become the most famous of all tulkus, the Dalai Lama, was but one of many lines of incarnation. It was the third figure in this lineage, a monk named Sönam Gyatso (Merit Ocean, 1543–1588) from Drepung Monastery in Lhasa, who would travel to the Mongol region, where he had been invited by Altan Khan (1507–1582) of the Tumed Mongols in 1578. Translating “ocean” into Mongolian, Altan Khan gave him the title “Dalai-yin qan,” or “Dalai Khan.” It is from this term that the title “Dalai Lama” derives. Thus, Sönam Gyatso is remembered as the Third Dalai Lama, with his two predecessors posthumously becoming the first and the second. Sönam Gyatso is said to have encouraged the Mongols to abandon their old gods and become Buddhists, giving up such practices as animal sacrifice and burning widows. He also confirmed that Altan Khan had been Kublai Khan in a previous life, and that Sönam Gyatso himself had been Phakpa (1235–1280), the Tibetan monk who had been Kublai Khan’s advisor and Buddhist master. After the death of Sönam Gyatso in Mongolia in 1588, the next Dalai Lama was strategically discovered to be Altan Khan’s greatgrandson, the first, and to date, the only Dalai Lama who is not ethnically Ti-

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betan. Perhaps due to resentment among Tibetans, he died young, to be succeeded by the Fifth Dalai Lama. His successor, known to Tibetans as the Great Fifth, was supported by another Mongol khan from another clan, Gushri Khan of the Khoshut, during a civil war. When the khan’s troops emerged victorious in 1642, he declared himself king of Tibet, making the young Fifth Dalai Lama responsible for religious affairs, thus reviving the patron-priest relationship that had been established between Kublai Khan and Phakpa. After the death of Gushri Khan in 1655, the Dalai Lama assumed the duties of head of state and was recognized as such by the Chinese emperor. It was the Fifth Dalai Lama who built the Potala Palace in Lhasa and who promoted the view (with the help of his regent) that the Dalai Lama was not only the incarnation of previous Buddhist masters, but of the earlier Tibetan kings and ultimately of Avalokiteśvara, the renowned bodhisattva of compassion.7 It was the Fifth Dalai Lama who established the second-most famous incarnation line when he declared his own teacher to be the First Panchen Lama (in Tibetan, “pan chen” renders the Sanskrit “mahāpandita,” “great pundit”), grant˙˙ ing him the monastery of Tashilhunpo in western Tibet as his seat. Just as the Dalai Lama was said to be the human incarnation of Avalokiteśvara, the Panchen Lama was declared to be the human incarnation of Avalokiteśvara’s teacher, the buddha Amitābha. The original plan seems to have been that these two tulkus, the Dalai and Panchen, would alternate as teacher and student from lifetime to lifetime, the younger discovering the incarnation of the elder and providing his education, exchanging roles in the next lifetime. However, such an arrangement assumed a consistent life span for both; this would not be the case. In the nineteenth century, for example, all of the dalai lamas died young, some suspiciously, making the Panchen Lama the most powerful lama in Tibet. In 1757, in response to the death of British prisoners in what is known to history as the Black Hole of Calcutta, British and French troops under the command of Sir Robert Clive of the East India Company defeated the Nawab of Bengal at the Battle of Plassey, bringing Bengal, and eventually the entire subcontinent, under the control of the British. In 1774, the Third Panchen Lama (Losang Palden Yeshe) sent a letter and some gifts to Warren Hastings, the governor-general of the East India Company. In response, Hastings named the young Scotsman George Bogle (1746–1781), then registrar of the Court of Appeals, as envoy to the lama of Tibet, sending him to Tashilhunpo Monastery. Because Tashilhunpo was his seat, the Panchen Lama is referred to in European literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the Tashi Lama

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or Teshu Lama. The old lama in Kipling’s Kim, wandering alone in India in search of the River of the Arrow, is, quite improbably, the Panchen Lama, whom Kipling calls the Teshoo Lama. Bogle and his companion entered Tibet on October 23, 1774. His purpose was to establish trade relations with Tibet and seek support for a British delegation to the Qing court.8 Because the Panchen Lama’s mother was from Ladakh, she spoke Hindi (or Hindustani, as it was called at the time), meaning that he could converse with Bogle without an interpreter. They seem to have developed a genuine friendship. Bogle wrote, “I endeavoured to discover in him some of those defects, which are inseparable from humanity; but he is so universally beloved that I had no success, and not a man could find in his heart to speak ill of him.”9 The Panchen Lama apparently liked to hear English, so Bogle would recite passages from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” Bogle stayed for about six months. He was successful in establishing trade relations with Tibet and in securing approval for the Panchen Lama’s request that a Tibetan Buddhist temple be constructed (at his expense) in Calcutta. Bogle was less successful in his efforts to secure a delegation to the Qing court. This did not occur until the ill-fated mission in 1793, led by Lord Macartney (remembered for describing Britain as possessing “a vast empire, on which the sun never sets”).10 In one of their last conversations before Bogle’s departure for India, he reports that the Panchen Lama “desired me to inquire particularly about the situation of a town called Shambul,” that is, Shambhala, the mythic city of the Kālacakra Tantra.11 In 1778, the Panchen Lama made his own fateful visit to the Qing court. He accepted an invitation to visit the Qianlong emperor—remembered as one of the greatest rulers in China’s history, despite the fact that he was a Manchu— at his summer palace at Chengde, where replicas of the Panchen Lama’s Tashilhunpo Monastery and the Dalai Lama’s Potala Palace had been constructed. The emperor was himself a learned devotee of Tibetan Buddhism. According to detailed Tibetan accounts of the visit, the Panchen Lama was received with great dignity and pomp.12 From Chengde, the Panchen Lama proceeded as the emperor’s guest to Beijing, where he died of smallpox on November 12, 1780. As is the custom for the dalai lamas and panchen lamas, his body, in the posture of meditation, was placed inside a golden stūpa. That stūpa was then placed inside a copper stūpa and suspended on poles, carried on a journey of seven months and eight days from Beijing to Tashilhunpo. The Panchen Lama’s next incarnation was born in 1782. Warren Hastings,

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seeking to maintain the relationship that the East India Company had established with the High Lama of Tibet, dispatched Lieutenant Samuel Turner to Tashilhunpo the following year, where he was granted an audience with the Fourth Panchen Lama, an eighteen-month-old toddler, seated on a throne. Instructed to speak directly to the child, Turner conveyed the condolences of the governor-general on the Panchen Lama’s passing and his joy at his reappearance. He expressed the governor-general’s wish that their friendship would continue to grow, with extensive communication between the Panchen Lama’s followers and “the dependents of the British nation.”13 Turner describes the Panchen Lama’s reaction: The little creature turned, looking steadfastly towards me, with the appearance of much attention while I spoke, and nodded with repeated but slow movements of the head, as though he understood and approved every word, but could not utter a reply. His parents, who stood by all the time, eyed their son with a look of affection, and a smile expressive of heartfelt joy, at the propriety of the young Lama’s conduct. His whole attention was directed to us; he was silent and sedate, never once looking towards his parents, as if under their influence at the time; and with whatsoever pains, his manners may have been so correctly formed, I must own that his behaviour on this occasion, appeared perfectly natural and spontaneous, and not directed by any external action, or sign of authority. The scene, in which I was here brought to act a part, was too new and extraordinary, however, trivial, or perhaps preposterous, it may appear to some, not to claim from me great attention, and consequently minute remark. Teshoo Lama was at this time eighteen months old. Though he was unable to speak a word, he made the most expressive signs, and conducted himself with astonishing dignity and decorum. His complexion was of that hue, which in England we should term rather brown, but not without colour. His features were good; he had small black eyes, and an animated expression of countenance; altogether, I thought him one of the handsomest children I had ever seen.14 By all reports, the Qianlong emperor was devastated by the death of the Third Panchen Lama, a sadness made bitter when the British, in the wake of the failure of the Macartney Mission, circulated the rumor that the Panchen Lama had been poisoned by the Chinese. Whatever affection the emperor had for

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the tulku, his feelings about the tulku institution seemed to sour over the next decade. By this time, there were hundreds of tulku lines in Tibet and Mongolia, some of which were very powerful, having their own labrang, or estate, which included the possessions of the previous incarnations as well as various properties. It was common for a tulku to have his house within a monastery, or to own the entire monastery. There were also lands occupied by farmers or herders, generating revenue and managed by monks of the tulku’s monastery. Tulkus, therefore, were often persons of power.15 For Qianlong, a major crisis occurred in 1788, when the stepbrother of the recently deceased Third Panchen Lama claimed ownership of much of his estate. The Fourth Panchen Lama, the handsome child whom Turner had met, was six years old. When the stepbrother, himself a tulku, was denied, he fled to Nepal, where he enlisted the aid of the Gurkhas, who invaded Tibet in 1791 and sacked Tashilhunpo Monastery. Qianlong was forced to send seventy thousand troops to drive them back into Nepal. Qianlong had grown weary of what he regarded as the chaotic and often corrupt manner of identifying incarnations. Depending on the importance of the tulku, this could be an elaborate process of divination, involving dreams, visions, meteorological portents, and oracles who channeled wrathful deities, as well as instructions, sometimes in the form of a letter, left by the earlier incarnation. Despite all this, Qianlong noticed that the new tulku was often discovered in the family (typically the noble family) of the previous one, meaning that the control of the labrang was retained. In 1792, the emperor, now eighty, decided to remedy the situation. Since the Ming Dynasty, the Board of Civil Appointments in China had made appointments using a lottery system, in which those who had passed the civil service examination would draw lots to determine the location of their assignment. Qianlong sought a similar system for tulkus, hoping to prevent what he saw as rampant corruption, often in the form of the bribing of oracles. However, the Chinese civil service system had a pool of qualified candidates, all educated adults. In the tulku system, any male child born in a vast region over a period of several years was a potential candidate. Qianlong therefore was forced to allow the participation of a select group of famous oracles, limiting their task to identifying candidates. The choice of the tulku would be made using a Golden Urn that he had forged specifically for the purpose. All of this was set forth in his famous Discourse on Lamas (Lama Shuo), which he had translated into the four languages of his realm—Chinese, Manchu, Mongolian, and Tibetan—and carved in stone on the four faces of a stele that he had erected

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in the courtyard of the Yonghegong, the so-called Lama Temple, the main Geluk monastery in Beijing, where it can still be seen today. Here are some selected passages from the Tibetan: At present, so many tulkus have gradually appeared that there are more tulkus than relatives. It has become like a son taking the position of his father’s minister; there is no need to say that to my mind this is extremely unpleasant. The Buddha was not reborn. Where do these common tulkus come from? If there were no incarnate hutuktus [tulkus] now, many tens of thousands of lamas would be without support. . . . I have decided that for tulkus to newly appear only among someone’s relatives is self-interested; Buddhists do not seek their own welfare. A royal edict is indispensable. Now, I have had a Golden Urn forged and sent to U-Tsang [Tibet]. Scrolls with the individual names of those who seem like tulkus should be placed in the urn. This will not remove all problems, but it is certainly superior to identification based on the decision of one person. . . . If the selfish practice of tulkus appearing only among relatives is stopped, it will be in accord with the wishes of the inner and outer Mongols.16 Given the political dominance of the Geluk sect, both in Tibet and Mongolia, the emperor was particularly concerned about the selection of Geluk tulkus and, among those, Geluk tulkus in Mongolia, which the Qing had long regarded, with justification, as a military threat. Indeed, to ensure particular adherence to the use of the Golden Urn for Mongol tulkus, the emperor stipulated that they would be chosen at the Yonghegong, just a few miles from his palace in the Forbidden City. Tibetan tulkus could be selected in Lhasa. Between 1792 and the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, some eighty tulkus were chosen using the Golden Urn, including some, but not all, of the dalai lamas and panchen lamas during this period.17 The Thirteenth Dalai Lama (1876–1933), who was not chosen using the Golden Urn, and the Sixth Panchen Lama (1883–1937, the ninth by Chinese count), who was, did not have the harmonious relation envisioned by the Fifth Dalai Lama. They had a falling out over tax revenues owed by Tashilhunpo to the Tibetan government, causing the Panchen Lama to flee to Mongolia and then to China, never to return, although he approved a list of candidates for the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. His successor, the Seventh Panchen Lama, born in 1938 in what is today Qinghai Province, was regarded as the correct choice by the Kuomintang government but not by the Dalai Lama’s government (then ruled

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by a regent). When the Fourteenth Dalai Lama went into exile in 1959, the Panchen Lama remained in China. He initially supported the incorporation of Tibet into the newly founded People’s Republic of China (PRC). By 1962, he had changed his position, writing a long petition condemning Chinese policy. As a result, he was branded as a reactionary and imprisoned from 1964 to 1977. Upon his release, he was instructed to marry and was later declared to have been rehabilitated. In 1989, he was allowed to return to Tashilhunpo to repair the tombs of previous Panchen Lamas that had been desecrated during the Cultural Revolution. He died five days after his arrival, at age fifty, with some suspecting foul play. His death marked the first time that a Dalai Lama or Panchen Lama had died since the founding of the PRC. As a Communist state, it rejected the idea of incarnate lamas as superstition meant to exploit the masses. At the same time, it did not want the next Panchen Lama to be discovered in exile. Since the Dalai Lama’s first visit to the United States in 1979, his fame and stature had been growing internationally, and with it, support for Tibetan independence. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, the same year as the Panchen Lama’s death. In 1989, the Dalai Lama was fifty-four years old, an ideal age to return to the teacher-disciple relationship envisioned by the Fifth Dalai Lama three centuries earlier. He could identify and educate the new Panchen Lama, preparing him to represent Tibetan Buddhism and the Tibetan cause to the world for a new generation upon the Dalai Lama’s own eventual death. The Chinese therefore determined to find the next Panchen Lama themselves in Tibet or what was by then the Tibetan Autonomous Region and the various Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures of the PRC. They appointed a search committee, co-chaired by the abbot of Tashilhunpo Monastery, himself a tulku and disciple of the previous Panchen Lama. Unbeknownst to the Chinese Communist Party, the abbot was in secret communication with the Dalai Lama, who approved the leading candidate, a six-year-old boy from eastern Tibet. On May 14, 1995, the Dalai Lama publicly announced that he had recognized the child as the new Panchen Lama. Three days later, the boy and his family disappeared. They have not been seen since. Which brings us to November 1995, when the Golden Urn was used once again. This time, it did not prevent the decision from being made by one man, or one party. On November 29, 1995, the Chinese arranged the ceremony of the Golden Urn described at the beginning of this chapter. The Dalai Lama’s candidate was not among those whose names were placed in the urn. In his

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memoir, Surviving the Dragon, Arjia Rinpoche, who was present at the ceremony, describes flying back from Lhasa to Beijing after the selection of the new Panchen Lama and how a party official gleefully demonstrated how the selection had been rigged.18 The institution of the incarnate lama began in Tibet. Its origins are attributed to particular historical circumstances, most importantly, the collapse of the Tibetan monarchy in 842 and the failure of a single political authority to ever replace it. Authority became localized in the form of multiple Tibetan clerics, of whom the Dalai Lama is only the most famous. Their authority derived not from who they were but from who they had been, in a previous life, and in the lifetimes before that. It is common in Tibetan Buddhism that a line of incarnation be traced back beyond Tibet, either to a bodhisattva or a buddha, in the case of the Dalai and Panchen Lamas, or to a line of Indian saints, ending always at the group of disciples seated at the feet of the Buddha. With Śākyamuni gone and Maitreya yet to come, there must be a mechanism to maintain buddhahood in the world.

12 • Innovation

When the Buddha was an old man, he left the great city of Vaiśālī and traveled northwest with his cousin and attendant Ānanda to a little town called Kuśinagara. When it became clear that he intended to die there, Ānanda asked why a personage as exalted as the Buddha would choose to die in what Ānanda called a “little mud-walled town, a back-woods town, a branch township.”1 The Buddha explained that it had once been the capital of a cakravartin, a wheel-turning emperor. And so Kuśinagara became a sacred site, one of the four places of pilgrimage recommended by the Buddha himself before he died. The emperor Aśoka honored it by having a pillar erected there. Yet the Chinese pilgrims Faxian and Xuanzang, visiting in the fifth century and the seventh century, found the area largely uninhabited and the town in ruins. Its location became sufficiently obscure that Tibetans went on pilgrimage to the wrong place—Hājo in Assam, about three hundred miles to the east— for some three hundred years.2 The fortunes of Kuśinagara changed with the excavation of the site in the first decade of the twentieth century by archaeologists of the British Raj. However, unlike Lumbinī, the site of the Buddha’s birth, it has not been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 1990, the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), an international organization of devotees of the Tibetan lama Thubten Zopa (1946–2023), with over 150 centers around the world, announced that it would build a sixty-foot statue of Maitreya, the buddha of the future, in Bodh Gayā, the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment. When this became impossible, the project was shifted to Kuśinagara, and the height of the statue was increased to five hundred feet, which would make it the tallest statue in the world. This was not simply megalomania. Buddhist texts report that Maitreya will be quite

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tall, about 150 feet, with Śākyamuni’s robe (which will be offered to him) covering only his fingers. There is a long tradition of making statues of Maitreya, who figures prominently in Buddhist millenarianism; although many have claimed to be Maitreya, according to various prophecies, he will not appear until some six billion years after the passing of the Buddha. In order to promote the project, FPMT organized the Maitreya Heart Shrine Relic Tour, which stopped in sixty-eight countries over a period of fifteen years, beginning in 2001, where relics of the Buddha, several of his famous disciples (including Ānanda), the famous philosopher Nāgārjuna, as well as those of a number of Tibetan saints were displayed. Included were relics of a previous buddha, Kāśyapa, who lived when the human life span was twenty thousand years. The tour was a great success, with some people coming out of curiosity, others seeking the healing powers of the relics, sometimes bringing their pets to be blessed. Kuśinagara has not benefited from the tourism of Bodh Gayā or Lumbinī, remaining a farming community in Uttar Pradesh, among the more impoverished regions of India. The farmers were told that Maitreya would change that, bringing economic development, health care, and education. It would require, however, that some two thousand farming families be moved from 750 acres through eminent domain. The farmers, joined by social workers and school teachers, resisted, forming the Save the Land Movement. At the time of this writing, the statue has still not been built. There is much to say about this impasse.3 However, the story of the Maitreya statue provides an opportunity to consider another question: What is this Mahāyāna that FPMT is seeking to preserve? In textbooks on world religions, one often finds Buddhism divided into “three vehicles”: Theravāda, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna, translated as the “Way of the Elders,” the “Great Vehicle,” and the “Diamond Vehicle” (or the “Thunderbolt Vehicle”), sometimes presented as three forms of Buddhism, each succeeding the other. There are reasons to call each of these categories into question, especially as a coherent rubric for understanding the history of Buddhism. Exactly what the Mahāyāna and the Vajrayāna encompass, and when and how they began, are questions that continue to vex scholars. The term “Theravāda” is, in fact, quite recent. Its first occurrence as a name for the Buddhism of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia seems to have been in 1907, coined not by a monk from that region but by a British convert, Ananda Metteyya, born Charles Henry Allan Bennett (1872–1923), a friend and teacher of Aleister Crowley.4 Our topic in this chapter is the Mahāyāna. Here, there are many misconcep-

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tions, including that the Mahāyāna is a separate form of Buddhism, and one that overshadowed its competitor, the Theravāda, long ago. There are good reasons for this misconception. The literature of the Mahāyāna is much larger than that of the Theravāda, and the expanse of the Mahāyāna, both in terms of geography and demography, is larger. There would seem to be every reason to believe that the Mahāyāna, if not the “Great Vehicle,” is at least the greater vehicle. Yet there are also reasons to call this into question. Perhaps the first and most obvious is the consistent defense one finds in Mahāyāna literature—in the sūtras themselves and in the treatises by Mahāyāna authors—that the Ma­ hāyāna sūtras are the word of the Buddha. This defense of the Mahāyāna also appears in polemics, beginning most obviously with the very term “hīnayāna,” a pejorative word in Sanskrit, which does not really mean “lesser vehicle” and certainly not “individual vehicle,” as it is often rendered, but “base vehicle,” “vile vehicle,” and “lowly vehicle.” It does not have a single referent; it usually seems to refer to the vehicle of anyone who does not accept a particular Ma­ hāyāna sūtra as the word of the Buddha. Regardless, it is important to note that it is never a term of self-reference, and that the term “Mahāyāna” is most often used without any reference to “Hīnayāna.” Furthermore, it is not accurate to see it as a negative synonym of the modern-day Theravāda of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, nor of the famous eighteen schools of Indian Buddhism of which it is the last remnant. Some scholars refer to those schools as “mainstream Buddhism.” That term, of course, has its own implications, because what is not mainstream is deviant, when in fact the great majority of the doctrines and practices of the “mainstream schools” were also practiced by the followers of the Mahāyāna. A Tibetan historian, writing in 1608, explains that in the fourth century, after many of the most famous Mahāyāna sūtras had been composed, the Mahāyāna was in decline, with only about a thousand monastic adherents. Many of them could recite some sūtras but did not understand them.5 The fortunes of the Mahāyāna would certainly improve, with great monasteries like Nālāndā (founded in the fifth century) being strongholds of Mahāyāna teachings. Still, despite its fortunes elsewhere in Asia, and now the world, it is clear that what we call the Mahāyāna remained something of a minority movement—if it can be called a movement at all—throughout its millennium-long history in India. If the Mahāyāna is somehow deviant, one must ask how it deviates. Any number of lists appear in various introductions to Buddhism of what distinguishes the Mahāyāna: the Mahāyāna exalts “celestial bodhisattvas” like Avalokiteśvara over the historical Buddha; the Mahāyāna’s defining doctrine is emptiness; the

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Mahāyāna teaches that there are multiple buddhas; the Mahāyāna is a lay movement; the Mahāyāna proclaims that all beings will achieve buddhahood; the Mahāyāna teaches that all beings possess the buddha nature. Some of these might be said to be true of a particular sūtra, but none can be said to be true of the Mahāyāna in general, in part because it is difficult to define what the Mahāyāna is.6 Writing about his travels through India during the late seventh century, the Chinese monk Yijing (635–713) observed, “Through an examination of their practices, we see no differences in their disciplinary rules and restrictions. Both of them classify the Vinaya rules into five sections and practice the four noble truths. Those who worship bodhisattvas and read Mahayana scriptures are named Mahayanists, and those who do not do so are called Hinayanists.”7 Thus, one could say with some confidence that a follower of the Mahāyāna is someone who accepts the Mahāyāna sūtras, or at least some Mahāyāna sūtras, as the word of the Buddha. In his 1940 short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Jorge Luis Borges tells of the planet Tlön, a world where the metaphysicians do not seek the truth but instead “a kind of amazement”; metaphysics for them is a branch of fantastic literature. On the planet Tlön, “the dominant notion is that everything is the work of one single author. Books are rarely signed. The concept of plagiarism does not exist; it has been established that all books are the work of one single writer, who is timeless and anonymous.”8 This passage might describe the Buddhist sūtras, and especially the Mahāyāna sūtras, with one important change. The writer is timeless but not anonymous. The writer—more accurately, the speaker—is the Buddha. Thus, several centuries after the death of the Buddha (some Mahāyāna texts set the number at four hundred years), sūtras began to appear that were previously unknown in India, sūtras that claimed to be the word of the historical Buddha, beginning, as all sūtras do, with “Thus did I hear,” as if they had been heard by Ānanda, going on to describe the place where the Buddha was preaching, who was in the audience, and so forth. The place was often Vulture Peak, outside the city of Rājagrha, a common setting of many “earlier” sūtras. ˙ Such a strategy—some might say, such a ruse—was not unknown. Indeed, in a non-Mahāyāna text that takes plagiarism to dizzying heights, the Buddha himself is presented instructing monks on how to fabricate a sūtra, or at least the circumstances of its exposition. In a passage from the Mūlasarvāstivāda vinaya, perhaps dating from the fourth century of the Common Era, the monk Upāli asks that Buddha: “Reverend One, in the future monks will appear who have imperfect memories, feeble memories. If they do not know in which place,

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village, or town which sūtra was taught and which rule of training was promulgated, how are they to supply them?” The Buddha replies, “Upāli, those who forget the name of the place, et cetera, must declare that it was one or another of the six great cities, or somewhere where the Tathāgata stayed many times. If he forgets the name of the king, he must declare it was Prasenajit; if the name of the householder, that it was Anāthapindada; of the lay sister, that it ˙˙ was Mrgāramātā.”9 The “six great cities” are a standard list in Buddhist liter­ ˙ ature. However, Prasenajit was the king only of one: Śrāvastī. Anāthapindada ˙˙ and Mrgāramātā were both wealthy residents of the same city. Thus, assuming ˙ that the forgetful monk in question knew these facts, Śrāvastī would always be the site of the Buddha’s discourse. A survey of the Pāli canon suggests that there were many forgetful monks. Of its 1,009 texts, some 83 percent are set in one of five cities. In 70 percent of those texts, that city is Śrāvastī.10 One might wonder how significant this is; what the Buddha taught seems far more important than where he taught it. However, the opening section of a sūtra, called the nidāna, is regarded as crucial for establishing the authenticity, and historicity, of the text. The Buddha gave it at a specific time and place, to a specific audience, and someone who was there—in most cases, his attendant Ānanda—remembered what he said. This is why such a setting was so important to the authors of the Mahāyāna sūtras, sūtras composed centuries after the Buddha’s death. Despite this rather dubious pedigree, these sūtras would transform the Buddhist world, making their way to the West, where three of them would become sufficiently famous that they would be known by English names: the Heart Sūtra (Prajñāpāramitāhrdaya), the Diamond Sūtra (Vajracche˙ dikā), and the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapundarīka). ˙˙ Despite this influence and this fame, the origin of these texts—who wrote them, when they wrote them, and why they wrote them—remains fraught, with numerous theories put forward and rejected. Thus, it does not seem to be the case that Mahāyāna evolved from a stūpa cult, that it began as a lay movement, or that it developed around the worship of images of the Buddha.11 Indeed, scholars are reluctant to speak of “the Mahāyāna” as if it were a single thing— a sect, a movement, a school—during the early centuries of its long history in India, preferring instead to look at particular texts and what they might tell us, individually and collectively, about the circumstances of their inspiration, their composition, and the communities that exalted them.12 The authors of the sūtras, and their proponents, were clearly aware of the apparent belatedness of their texts and the fact that they did not appear in any of the existing canons. This was something they needed to explain. How could

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the Buddha have taught a particular sūtra without anyone knowing about it? In some cases, the rationalizations occurred in the sūtras themselves. Perhaps the most famous case of this occurs in the second chapter of the Lotus Sūtra. Here, just as the Buddha is about to begin his teaching, five thousand monks, nuns, and male and female lay disciples stand up, bow to the Buddha, and walk out. The sūtra explains that they did so because they were arrogant, “thinking that they had attained what they had not attained and realized what they had not realized.” The Buddha does not stop them, saying after they had left, “My assembly here is free of useless twigs and leaves; only the pure essence remains.”13 The reader is meant to draw this conclusion: thousands of Buddhists are unaware that the Buddha taught the Lotus Sūtra because they walked out before he taught it. What the Buddha goes on to teach is something that he says he had not taught before. He explains that after his enlightenment, he had taught that there were three vehicles or paths to liberation from rebirth. The first is the vehicle of the śrāvaka, a term that literally means “listener” but refers specifically to a disciple of the Buddha, typically a monk or nun. This path leads to nirvāna. The ˙ second vehicle is that of the pratyekabuddha, a term that means “individual buddha,” an odd category in the Buddhist system, apparently referring to those followers who live as hermits rather than as members of the monastic community. This path also leads to nirvāna. The third vehicle is that of the bodhi˙ sattva, a term of uncertain meaning but suggesting someone intent on achieving the more exalted state of buddhahood. In what was likely an earlier tradition, and one that continued among those who reject the authenticity of the Mahāyāna sūtras, the bodhisattva is the rather rare individual who vows to discover the path to liberation to rebirth at a time when the knowledge of that path is unknown: there is no buddha in the world, and the teachings of the previous buddha have been forgotten. It is important to note that the figure of the bodhisattva did not originate with the Mahāyāna sūtras, and that the aspiration to become a bodhisattva is not limited to the Mahāyāna, even today.14 In the Lotus Sūtra, the Buddha explains that although he had set forth these three vehicles many times in the past, now, in his old age (the sūtra indicates that he is teaching it some forty years after his enlightenment, which in most Indic sources occurred when he was thirty-five), he is ready to reveal that there are not three vehicles but one, which he calls the buddhayāna, the buddha vehicle. He also calls it the Mahāyāna. Not only is there only one path to liberation, but all beings in the universe will eventually follow it to buddhahood. All beings will become buddhas.

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This is an inspiring message, ecumenical in spirit, welcoming all Buddhists onto a great vehicle and promising them buddhahood. However, it is also polemical in the sense that it describes the earlier Buddhist path as a mere expedient. At the end of the chapter, after the Buddha proclaims this inspiring message (illustrated by the famous parable of the burning house), this polemical quality is confirmed when the Buddha predicts a frightful fate for those who fail to believe it. Those who disparage the Lotus Sūtra and who “despise, hate, and hold grudges against people who recite, copy, and preserve it” will be reborn in Avīci, the most horrific of the Buddhist hells.15 After eons there, they will then be reborn as dogs with leprosy or as snakes eaten by insects. If they are reborn as humans, they will be crippled, stupid, runts, blind, deaf, and humpbacked. No one will believe what they say, and their breath will be foul. The threats go on and on; the Buddha says it would take an eon to describe all the karmic consequences of disparaging the sūtra. And these threats were likely not intended for some imaginary skeptic. The Mahāyāna sūtras are clearly the work of learned monks, as their deft use of technical vocabulary makes clear. The authors of the Mahāyāna sūtras kept the same vows as monks who rejected their compositions, and they lived in the same monasteries. That is, when they lived in monasteries. The fact that the virtues of life in the forest are so often extolled has led some scholars to speculate that the composition and practice of some of the Mahāyāna sūtras took place outside the monastery.16 This catalogue of consequences suggests that at the time that the Lotus Sūtra was composed and promulgated, there were many who rejected its teachings and its authority, those whom its devotees imagined, and perhaps hoped, were destined to these horrible fates. Such threats did not seem to be enough, however, to deter the skeptics. Many of the most famous figures in the history of Indian Buddhism would be compelled to defend the Mahāyāna, beginning with Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 CE), who devotes an entire chapter to the topic in his Precious Garland (Ratnāvalī ). If such a defense had successfully repelled the opponents, one might expect them to disappear from the works of later Mahāyāna exegetes. Yet they continue, being found a millennium later, for example, in Ornament of the Sage’s Mind (Munimatālamkāra) by the twelfth-century monk ˙ Abhayākaragupta. According to several Mahāyāna sources, after the death of the Buddha, no one on earth knew about the Mahāyāna sūtras because they were being safeguarded not on land but under the sea, by the serpentine creatures called nāgas. Indeed, it was Nāgārjuna, who is said to have been born four hundred years after the Buddha’s passage into nirvāna, who retrieved them from the depths. ˙

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Thus, we find the sixth-century monk Bhāviveka explaining that the Buddha taught the Mahāyāna sūtras, but that the world was not ready for them: “Not long after the Bhagavat had passed into nirvāna, śrāvakas and others grew very ˙ attached to their own teachings. When their intended collectors gathered them in accordance with their capacity, there was no one who was a vessel for the Mahāyāna scriptures, so they were not collected by anyone.” That is, the sūtras had been taught and were available, but not in the human world. Bhāviveka continues, “The nāgas and others, who liked the Sugata [the Buddha], collected them and asked to keep them in the nāga world, becoming vessels [of the Mahāyāna]. Therefore, the noble Nāgārjuna, prophesied by the Buddha, gathered [the sūtras] from them and disseminated them in the world of humans.”17 Thus, Nāgārjuna himself was responsible for retrieving the Mahāyāna sūtras and restoring them to the world. In the Sūtra of the Samādhi of Direct Encounter with the Buddhas of the Present (Pratyutpannabuddhasammukhāvasthitasamādhi Sūtra), it is explained that this ˙ sūtra will circulate for forty years after the Buddha’s passage into nirvāna. After ˙ that, it will be copied, placed in a casket, and hidden in a cave. At that point, the five hundred devotees of the sūtra will die and be reborn in the realm of gods. Then, in “the last five hundred years,” that is, five hundred years after the Buddha’s passing, they will be reborn as humans, retrieve the sūtra, and proclaim it to the world.18 The Mahāyāna tradition itself therefore acknowledges here a hiatus of some four centuries between the time that the Buddha taught the Mahāyāna sūtras and the time that their existence became known. Other Mahāyāna sūtras take a different tack, placing their origin long before the common canon. Thus, in the Lotus Sūtra, the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī recalls that he had heard the Lotus Sūtra billions of eons ago when it was taught by a previously unknown buddha named Candrasūryapradīpa (Lamp of the Moon and Sun). Among the more interesting of the many defenses of the Mahāyāna is that provided by Bhāviveka in his Blaze of Reasoning (Tarkajvālā), where he offers a lengthy defense of the Mahāyāna, producing a long list of charges brought against it by its śrāvaka opponents and then responding to them one by one. For the modern reader, many of the charges seem quite valid. To list a few, the Mahāyāna sūtras were not included in either the original or subsequent compilations of the tripitaka; by teaching that the Tathāgata is permanent, the Mahāyāna con˙ tradicts the dictum that all conditioned phenomena are impermanent; because the Mahāyāna teaches that the tathāgatagarbha (buddha nature) is all pervasive, it does not relinquish the belief in self; because the Mahāyāna teaches that the Buddha did not pass into nirvāna, it suggests that nirvāna is not the final state ˙ ˙

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of peace; the Mahāyāna belittles the arhats; the Mahāyāna perverts the entire teaching by claiming that Śākyamuni was an emanation; the statement in the Mahāyāna sūtras that the Buddha was constantly in meditative absorption is infeasible; by teaching that great sins can be completely absolved, the Mahāyāna teaches that actions have no effects, contradicting the law of karma. Bhāviveka has the opponents of the Mahāyāna conclude, “Therefore, the Buddha did not set forth the Mahāyāna; it was created by beings who were certainly demonic in order to deceive the obtuse and mislead those with evil minds.”19 It is notable, however, that from the time of Nāgārjuna, likely in the third century, charges against the Mahāyāna appear almost exclusively in Mahāyāna texts, where they are presented in order to be refuted. Although the charges seem quite plausible, “Hīnayāna” texts that make these charges seem not to survive. This may be yet another indication of the insignificance of the Ma­hāyāna as a freestanding and separate vehicle in the Indian monastery. Many monks seemed not to care. But some did. One thousand years after Nāgārjuna, years in which hundreds of Mahāyāna sūtras were composed, their authenticity seems to have remained a point of contention. When a Tibetan monk visited the monastery at Bodh Gayā in 1234, carrying a copy of the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Stanzas (Astasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā) on his back, he was stopped by a Sri Lankan ˙˙ monk, who told him, “You are a good monk; the Mahāyāna text you are carrying on your back is not good. Throw it in the river. This so-called Mahāyāna was not spoken by the Buddha. It was fabricated by a clever man named Nāgārjuna.”20 All of this is to say that the origins of what came to be called the Mahāyāna are difficult to identify, difficult to date, and remain a point of contention. Because the Mahāyāna sūtras represent themselves as the word of the Buddha, they have no interest in providing the date of their composition. The fifth-century monk Vasubandhu, one of the most important philosophers in the history of Buddhism, began as an adherent of one of the Nikāya schools before converting to the Mahāyāna. In a text called Principles of Exegesis (Vyākhyāyukti), he went so far as to argue that history is not a criterion for authenticity. He does so by greatly expanding the criteria of who is a buddha and what constitutes the word of the Buddha. For example, he cites a passage from a Mahāyāna sūtra, which states that a sūtra should be regarded as the word of the Buddha if it is meaningful and not meaningless, if it is principled and not unprincipled, if it brings about the extinction and not the growth of the afflictions, and if it sets forth the qualities and benefits of nirvāna and not the qualities and benefits of samsāra. ˙ ˙ The sūtra goes on to say, “Maitreya, whatever monk or nun or layman or lay-

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woman has had, will have, or now has confidence in those four reasons should be regarded as a buddha by the son or daughter of good family. Regarding them as the teacher, they should listen to the holy dharma from them. Why? Maitreya, it is because whatever is well spoken is the word of the Buddha . . . the fact that it does not contradict reality is the proper definition [of the word of the Buddha].”21 Yet for the history of Buddhism, dating, as difficult as it is in the case of Indian Buddhism, is essential. To date the Mahāyāna sūtras, scholars typically rely on their translation into Chinese, where the date is provided, to determine their terminus ad quem. For example, the earliest extant translation of the Lotus Sūtra into Chinese is dated at 286 CE. Assuming that it takes time for a text to gain sufficient fame for it to be widely copied, carried from India to China, and be translated there, scholars tend to place the composition of the first Mahāyāna sūtras in the decades before the beginning of the Common Era. However, their original form is difficult to identify; Mahāyāna sūtras evolved over time, often leaving us with only the latest version, in many cases a Sanskrit manuscript from Nepal. Scholars of the Lotus Sūtra, the most studied of all Mahāyāna sūtras, speculate that its evolution occurred over three centuries. There is various evidence for this. Most obvious is that the text seems to end with Chapter Twenty-Two, but then goes on for six more chapters, including a chapter that is likely the first reference to Avalokiteśvara, the most famous of the many bodhisattvas. However, other additions to and revisions of the sūtras are more difficult to identify, meaning that the earliest version of a given text often remains inaccessible. It is sometimes assumed that because of its grandiose name—the Great Vehicle—and because it became the dominant form of Buddhism in East Asia, Mongolia, and Tibet, the great vehicle forced the little vehicle off the highway, diverting it south into Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. As already noted, this is false. Although the Mahāyāna sūtras begin to appear in the first century before the Common Era, archaeologists have not discovered evidence of what one might call an institutional presence until centuries later. The first inscription that might be deemed “Mahāyāna” is found on the base of a statue of the buddha Amitābha that is dated to 153 CE, although no reference to rebirth in what would become his famous pure land is made. Donative inscriptions that actually include the term “Mahāyāna” do not begin to appear until the fifth and sixth centuries.22 The earliest occurrence of a passage from a Mahāyāna text in an Indian inscription dates from the tenth century.23 In one of the most famous formulations of the bodhisattva vows, that of the fourth-century monk Asan˙ga

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in his Stages of the Bodhisattva (Bodhisattvabhūmi), we find that it is a transgression to declare that the Mahāyāna sūtras are not the word of the Buddha, thus suggesting that there remained many who said that they were not.24 It would seem that over the long history of Buddhism in India, it was the Mahāyāna, in fact, that was the lesser vehicle. Still, its doctrinal, literary, and artistic influence in India and beyond (including Southeast Asia) was profound. Let us, therefore, try to present, however briefly, its major elements. In the early centuries, it is misleading to speak of the Mahāyāna in the singular. It may be more accurate to regard it as so many sūtras that seemed to regard themselves as autonomous vehicles to salvation; works like the Lotus Sūtra and the Sūtra on the Land of Bliss (Sukhāvatīvyūha, the most famous of the Pure Land sūtras), for example, make it clear that no other teaching is required. Sometimes they are aware of each other—the Nirvāna Sūtra mentions the Lotus and other sūtras—sometimes not; some sūtras ˙ extol the Mahāyāna sūtras collectively, suggesting a large community of their adherents. Yet they often proclaim their unique efficacy, urging their devotees to revere, proclaim, and copy them; one reason for the survival of copies of works like the Diamond Sūtra—hundreds of copies of which were discovered at Dunhuang, including one that is considered the oldest dated printed text in history—was its famous exhortation that “on whatever spot of earth one proclaims this sūtra, that spot of earth will become a shrine.”25 Indeed, one of the factors that distinguishes many Mahāyāna sūtras from works in the Pāli canon, for example, is their self-consciousness and often their exaltation of their own status as texts, as physical objects, enumerating the benefits to be gained by reciting, copying, and worshipping them. We see the Mahāyāna concern with the propagation and dissemination of its scriptures both in individual sūtras that extol the merit of their worship, copying, and recitation, and also in Mahāyāna treatises that praise the practice more generally. Thus, one text lists ten activities that will accrue immeasurable amounts of merit: transcribing Mahāyāna sūtras, making offerings to them, giving gifts to others, listening to the Mahāyāna sūtras, reading them to others, reading them oneself, explaining their meaning, reciting them, reflecting on their meaning, and meditating on their meaning.26 Among other things, this list makes clear the continuing importance of the voice in Buddhism, the benefits of reciting and hearing the dharma. These sūtras obviously gained worshippers over time, worshippers who regarded them, individually or collectively, as the word of the Buddha. Among these devotees were monks who began to derive philosophical doctrines and

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soteriological systems from them in authored works (unlike the anonymous sūtras), sometimes in the form of commentaries on the sūtras, more often in freestanding treatises called śāstras. It is in these works that the doctrines of the famous Yogācāra and Madhyamaka schools are set forth, such doctrines as the foundation consciousness (ālayavijñāna), emptiness (śūnyatā), and buddha nature (tathāgatagarbha), each the topic of many tomes. Here, we might simply consider the Mahāyāna transformation of the Buddha. It appears that at the time of the composition of the Mahāyāna sūtras, it was standard Buddhist doctrine that there was one buddha for each historical age. There had been buddhas in the past, whose names were known, and there would be buddhas in the future, but they appeared sequentially, millions of years apart, not simultaneously. A famous Pāli work called Questions of Milinda (Mi­ linda Pañha) takes the form of a dialogue between a Greek king named Milinda and a Buddhist monk named Nāgasena. Milinda is taken to be Menander, who ruled a region that encompassed parts of modern India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan in the second century BCE, a place and time where Buddhism was flourishing. The Questions of Milinda was probably compiled between the first century BCE and the second century CE, the same time that the Mahāyāna sūtras were beginning to appear. In their dialogue, the king asks why the Buddha said that there can only be one buddha in the universe at a time, suggesting that a second buddha would be able to help with the teaching of the dharma. Nāgasena replies that the advent of a buddha is an epochal moment in the history of the universe: “This ten-thousand world-system, sire, is the sustainer of one buddha, it sustains the special qualities of one tathāgata only. If a second buddha were to arise, the ten-thousand world-system could not sustain him; it would tremble, shake, bend, bow down, twist, disperse, dissolve, scatter, it would disappear.”27 Several centuries later, by which time the major Mahāyāna sūtras had been composed, the fifth-century monk Vasubandhu—cited above, who would later convert to the Mahāyāna—comes to a similar conclusion in his Treasury of Abhidharma (Abhidharmakośa), giving four reasons why it is impossible for two buddhas to appear in the world simultaneously. The fourth is that sentient beings would not feel the urgency of following his teachings if there were another buddha in the world.28 The Mahāyāna sūtras do not dispute this claim directly; Śākyamuni remains the buddha of our world and of our age. However, there are myriad worlds across the cosmos, worlds that have their own buddhas. These worlds are sometimes described as buddha fields (buddhaksetra), the domain of the teachings of a par˙ ticular buddha, suggesting that when a bodhisattva achieves buddhahood, he

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also creates the site for his dispensation of the dharma. Those worlds are described as either impure or pure, depending on whether, among the six realms of rebirth, they include animals, ghosts, and the denizens of hell or only gods, demigods, and humans. The latter are referred to as pure, hence the term “pure land.” There are said to be billions of such buddha fields across the universe— the most famous being Sukhāvatī, the “Land of Bliss,” the domain of the buddha Amitābha. These other buddhas appear often in the Mahāyāna sūtras, with Śākyamuni inviting them to our world, describing how to be reborn in those realms in the next lifetime, or to see these buddhas face to face in this lifetime. Thus, although the buddha of our world, Śākyamuni, was gone (or at least seemed to be), this did not mean that the dharma was not being preached elsewhere in the universe. And it was not necessary to wait until the next lifetime to hear it. A Mahāyāna sūtra called the Questions of Nārāyana (Nārāyan­a˙ ˙ pariprcchā) says, “To bodhisattva great beings who long for the dharma, if they ˙ are respectful, even if they live in other world-realms, the buddhas, the blessed ones, show their faces and cause them to hear the dharma.”29 And they do not even need to see the Buddha’s face. As another sūtra explains, “For someone who has intention, if buddhas are not present, dharma teachings are produced from the sky, from walls, and from trees. For bodhisattvas whose intention is pure, all the admonitions and practice instructions are produced from the dialogue in their own minds.”30 We asked above, “If there is no Buddha, is everything permitted?” The answer would seem to be “yes.” But was there ever a time when there was no buddha? Many of the Mahāyāna sūtras assume a certain change in cosmology, one that had important soteriological implications. The bodhisattva was no longer the rare being who, out of compassion for the world, decided to forgo the shorter path to nirvāna followed ˙ by the arhat, deciding instead to traverse the far longer path to buddhahood in order to be able to proclaim the dharma at a time when it had been long forgotten, when there was no buddha, leaving the world bereft of the possibility of liberation. There were myriad worlds with myriad buddhas now, worlds that would require myriad buddhas in the future. In the Mahāyāna, therefore, the ideal became not the arhat but the bodhisattva, with some (but not all) Mahāyāna sūtras proclaiming that all beings will eventually follow the path to buddhahood; many had already begun it. In sūtras like the Lotus, the Buddha prophesies the future buddhahood of his disciples, including his stepmother and his former wife, predicting the name of their buddha field and the name of the buddha they will become. The devotees of the Mahāyāna both seek to become bodhisattvas and seek

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the succor of bodhisattvas who have already advanced far along the path. Dozens of these bodhisattvas would become objects of devotion and subjects of statues, the most famous being Mañjuśrī, the bodhisattva of wisdom, and Avalo­ kiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. Indeed, to counter the charge that the Mahāyāna sūtras were not the word of the Buddha because they were not recited by Ānanda at the First Council, it was claimed that it was not Ānanda but one of these bodhisattvas—often Mañjuśrī or Vajrapāni—who was the “I” ˙ in “Thus did I hear.” In the famous story of the Buddha’s final days, he tells Ānanda that a buddha can live “for an eon or until the end of an eon.” However, Ānanda does not take the hint, and the Buddha passes into nirvāna, leaving only his relics and ˙ his teachings behind. However, in the Lotus Sūtra, the Buddha explains that his passage into nirvāna was itself another ruse, and that his life span is im˙ measurable. This and other statements in other Mahāyāna sūtras would evolve in what is called the three bodies (trikāya) of a buddha, discussed above. The highest of these was called the dharma body (dharmakāya), with “dharma” here referring not so much to a buddha’s teachings but to the corpus of transcendent and immaterial qualities. It would eventually come to be seen as a kind of cosmic principle in which all buddhas partake. The second of the three bodies was called the enjoyment body (sam bhogakāya), a glorious body that ˙ only appeared in the pure lands, not in the robes of a monk but in the raiment of a prince. The third was the emanation body (nirmānakāya). This was the ˙ body that appeared in our world as Śākyamuni Buddha, in the guise of a monk. However, as the name suggests, this form of the Buddha was merely a display meant to inspire the unenlightened by pretending to agonize about leaving the palace, pretending to suffer during six years of asceticism, and so on. Furthermore, this familiar form of the Buddha was just one type of emanation body, called a supreme emanation body. The Buddha could also take the form of an inanimate object, like a buddha image, or the artist who made it. The Dalai Lama visited the University of Michigan in April 1994. One of the events was a private seminar with the faculty and graduate students of the Buddhist Studies program on the topic of the origins of the Mahāyāna. The Dalai Lama listened attentively to the presentations by students but remained silent at the end, only speaking after he was asked what he thought about what the students had had to say. “It’s something to know,” he said, adding that it would be good for Buddhists to have some knowledge of Western scholarship on Buddhism. However, he went on to tell the students that if he accepted what they had told him, he would only be able to believe in the Buddha who appears

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in the world to teach the dharma. He could not believe in the enjoyment body that appears to advanced bodhisattvas in the splendor of the pure lands. And he could not believe in the dharma body, which for him is the Buddha’s omniscient mind and its nature of emptiness. “If I believed what you told me,” he said, “the Buddha would only be a nice person.”

13 • Law

With their victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the British East India Company gained control of Bengal. Ruling from their headquarters at Fort William in Calcutta, they faced the challenge of implementing and administering a legal system. Warren Hastings (1732–1818), who served as governor-general from 1772 to 1785, devised a system in which Hindus would be judged according to Hindu law and Muslims would be judged according to Islamic law, with British judges assisted by brahmin panditas and Muslim qazis. Since Bengal had ˙˙ been under Mughal rule until their defeat by the British, there was already a system of Islamic law that could be employed and adapted. Hindu law presented a different challenge, requiring a law code for the Hindu majority of Bengal, a region that had not been ruled by a Hindu king for more than five hundred years. Hastings therefore needed to find a text that could serve as the foundation for Hindu law, just as the Quran (and sharia) served as the foundation for Muslim law. He chose a genre of Sanskrit texts called the dharmaśāstra, the “treatises on dharma,” the most famous of which is known in English as The Laws of Manu (Manusmr ti or Manavadharmaśāstra) ascribed to Manu, the first ˙ human according to Hindu mythology, a text roughly dated by scholars to the centuries immediately before or after the beginning of the Common Era.1 It was not until 1794, long after Hastings’s resignation and return to England in 1785, that the text would be translated into English. Hastings was replaced as governor-general by Charles Cornwallis (1738–1805) five years after his surrender at Yorktown. A jurist serving as a judge for the East India Company, Sir William Jones (1746–1794), convinced Cornwallis of the importance of translating the text. Jones had studied Persian at Oxford and, while serving as a barrister in Wales, had published The Mahomedan Law of Succession to the

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Property of Intestates (1782). Having studied Sanskrit in India, he undertook the project in 1788. It was published the year he died as the Institutes of Hindu Law: Or the Ordinances of Menu, According to the Gloss of Cullúca, Comprising the Indian System of Duties Religious and Civil. The text is largely concerned with caste duties, focused on the three upper or “twice born” castes, the brahmin (priests), the ksatriya (warriors and rulers), ˙ and the vaiśya (merchants and landowners); among those, it focuses especially on the brahmin caste. It covers a vast range of topics, both social and religious, many of which have to do with ritual responsibilities; only a fraction easily fall under the category of “law” as the term would come to be understood in the West. However, in the chapter on statecraft, there is a section on eighteen reasons for litigation, where one finds discussions of such things as breach of contract, property disputes, and inheritance. This section also discusses rules of evidence and the interrogation of witnesses. These are the matters that interested the British most. It was largely for this reason that the Sanskrit term “dharma” came to be routinely translated as “law.” When Buddhism entered China, “dharma” was translated with the character fa, meaning “pattern” or “model,” and somewhat more broadly, “method.” This is the Chinese character that Anglophone translators have rendered as “art” in Sunzi’s Art of War (Bing fa). Yet when Europeans began to translate Chinese Buddhist texts, they tended to translate “fa” as “law.” The term “dharma,” then, so central to Buddhism, seems to have been translated as “law” for reasons unrelated to Buddhism, a religion that was long dead in India, at least as an institutional presence requiring legal judgments, by the time that the East India Company conquered Bengal. This raises the inevitable question of how “dharma” should be translated in the context of Buddhism, a question that is not easy to answer; “dharma” means many things, something that the tradition itself acknowledges. The famous fifth-century monk Vasubandhu provides ten meanings in a work called Principles of Exegesis (Vyākhyā­ yukti): “object of knowledge,” “path,” “nirvāna,” “object of the mind,” “merit,” ˙ “life,” “teachings,” “quality,” “vow,” and “custom.” The entry on “dharma” (dhamma) in the dictionary of the Pali Text Society (published in 1921) devotes five tiny print pages to the term.2 Despite this multivalence, there are two major meanings of the term, both of which are etymologized from the Sanskrit root “dhr” from which “dharma” ˙ is derived, a root that means “hold” or “maintain.” The first of these meanings is the teachings of the Buddha, where “dharma” is often translated as “doctrine.” This is the meaning of “dharma” as the second of the three jewels when Bud-

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dhists recite, “I go for refuge to the Buddha. I go for refuge to the dharma. I go for refuge to the san˙gha.” In the sūtras, the Buddha often refers to the dharmavinaya, “the doctrine and the discipline.” When the Buddha preaches, it is called “turning the wheel of the dharma.” This first sense of “dharma” is subject to extensive elaboration. Discussions of the three jewels, for example, specify that the dharma jewel is the third and fourth of the four truths, cessation and path, hence the listing of “path” and “nirvāna” among the ten meanings above. ˙ It is also in this sense that we find the terms “scriptural doctrine” (āgamadharma), that is, what the Buddha taught, and “realized doctrine” (adhigamadharma), the attainment of the goal of those teachings. Here, Buddhist commentators say that the teachings of the Buddha are called “dharma” because they “hold” one from falling into suffering. The other, and quite different, major meaning of “dharma” is often translated as “element,” “constituent,” or “phenomenon,” referring to those factors that constitute the world. Here, “dharma” often appears in the plural, with various philosophical claims made about “all phenomena” (sarvadharma), as in the “four seals” that stamp a philosophical position as Buddhist: all products are impermanent, all contaminated things are miserable, all phenomena are without self, nirvānā is peace. Here, the myriad phenomena of the universe, the ˙ things that exist, both material and immaterial, are called “dharma” because each holds or maintains its own nature. Among the many other meanings of “dharma” is “quality” or “characteristic.” This becomes an important meaning in discussions of the bodies of the Buddha, and the third and highest of those, the dharmakāya. In this context, “dharma” does not refer so much to the corpus of the teachings but to his various unique qualities—physical, verbal, and mental—traditionally enumerated as eighteen. In Mahāyāna presentations of the bodies of the Buddha, this term becomes almost a cosmic principle, with “dharma” taking on a sense of “truth” or “reality.” It is in this sense that we have the important Mahāyāna term “dharmadhātu,” or “element of reality.” It is also in this sense that we have the famous statement in the Pāli canon, “Whether there is an arising of tathāgatas or no arising of tathāgatas, that element still persists, the stableness of the dhamma, the fixed course of the dhamma, specific conditionality.”3 This much-discussed passage seems to say that there is a reality to the nature of things, whether or not it is revealed by a buddha, and that reality is “conditionality,” or the fact that all phenomena are conditioned. Depending on how this statement is interpreted, it would seem to be the sense of “dharma” that is closest to “natural law” in the Aristotelian sense.

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Historically, perhaps the most famous occurrences of the term “dharma” in the history of Buddhism outside the canonical domain are in the rock edicts of Aśoka. For example, in Major Rock Edict 13, he says that he is engaged in the study of dharma, the love of dharma, and the instruction in dharma. However, exactly what the emperor meant by the term is not clear; it seems to connote a more general sense of duty and righteousness than the teachings of the Buddha, despite his respect for those teachings.4 When we hear the word “law” in the context of Buddhism, we think of the “law of karma,” but that term seems to be of European coinage and does not translate a standard Buddhist term. The term “karma” means “action” in Sanskrit and refers to a system of causation in which virtuous deeds lead to feelings of physical and mental happiness in the future, and non-virtuous deeds lead to suffering. In Indian Buddhist sources, this system of moral cause and effect is generally not represented as a judgment in a legal sense. It is the case, however, that in Chinese Buddhism, an elaborate system of the courts of hell developed where, through the making of offerings, the living could seek to influence the judgment of the dead.5 When we think of law in Buddhism, we also think of the vinaya, the section of the canon dealing with monastic life, which includes all manner of rules that must be followed by the fully ordained monk and nun. Each of the six vinayas that survive in their full form is a vast text, with the largest, that of the Mūlasarvāstivāda, requiring thirteen volumes of the Tibetan canon. As we have seen, each of the hundreds of rules has its own origin story. The rules themselves, called the prātimoksa, extracted from the larger text, would be recited at ˙ a fortnightly gathering of monks within a given vicinity. Although a number of the rules pertain to interactions with the laity, they deal for the most part with monastic life, with many rules dealing with sexuality and with the possession and transfer of property, what one scholar has called “business matters”; in many Buddhist countries, monasteries were major landowners and moneylenders.6 Much attention is paid to a question of immediate concern to monks: Who inherits the possessions of a monk who has died? It is important also to note that the full list of monastic vows pertains only to fully ordained monks and nuns. It is difficult to say what percentage of the Buddhist clergy held this rank in ancient India, but evidence from other Buddhist nations suggests that it was often the case that monks and nuns remained novices for life, thus governed by a much smaller set of rules. Yet monasteries require regulations, and as Buddhism spread across India, we see the development of local monastic rules called kriyākāra.7 As Buddhism spread beyond

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India, we see the development of even more local rules, rules that in many ways overlap, augment, and supersede the traditional Indian vinaya. To mention just two, in China there are the rules of purity (qinggui) of the Chan school, and in Tibet there are the rule books (bca’ yig) of individual monasteries. The transmission and development of the monastic code in China is a huge and fascinating topic, from the recitation from memory of the Four-Part Vinaya by the Indian monk Buddhayaśas in 410, to the journey to Sumatra and India by Yijing in 671 to retrieve Sanskrit vinaya texts, to the development of bodhisattva vows based on the Brahmā’s Net Sūtra (Fanwang jing). For a variety of reasons, it became necessary for Chinese monasteries to codify their own monastic practices (which were intended to supplement and not replace the Indian code). The most famous of these codes were those developed by the Chan school. Often composed by the monk who was the founder of the monastery, they set out the schedule of the many rituals, ceremonies, and festivals that were to be held; the duties of the various officers of the monastery (including library prefect, guest prefect, bath prefect, and manager of estate lands); as well as matters of monastic comportment. Although all Chinese monasteries had their own rules, the Chan sect sought to standardize the rules for all of its member monasteries. A text called Rules of Purity for Chan Monasteries (Chanyuan qinggui) compiled by the monk Changlu Zongze in 1103 would become the standard work for all Chan monasteries and eventually for all public monasteries in China. It contained chapters on such topics as packing personal effects, attendance at tea services, thanking donors, sick leave, using the toilet, and guiding lay believers.8 In the case of Tibet, the term for “rule book” is an abbreviation of words that literally means “written vows.” However, the “text,” which serves as a kind of constitution for the monastery, is often maintained orally by a senior monk who holds the title of disciplinarian of the monastery, recited on specific occasions, and memorized by the monks. Composed in ornate language, it is difficult for ordinary monks to understand, despite its treatment of such mundane issues as robes, boots, rosaries, begging bowls (although few Tibetan monks owned one), and toilet etiquette. Despite this ritual recitation, the rules are generally known, learned by a new monk from his seniors, and generally enforced, sometimes with corporal punishment.9 In addition to whatever punishments were meted out for the violation of monastic rules, Buddhist monks and nuns were also subject to local laws, regardless of the religion of the ruler. As a community that relied on the protection and patronage (or at least tolerance) of the state, it was important that

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Buddhist monasteries not be regarded as sanctuaries for criminals. This is clear in the examination that was part of ordination, in which the postulant was asked whether he was a slave, a criminal, a soldier, or a debtor. But what of the legal code of the state itself? Is there law in Buddhism in the more common legal sense, what is called positive law, that is, statutes established and administered by the state? Although the Jesuit missionary to Tibet Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733) refers to the Buddha as the “Lawgiver” of the Tibetans (sometimes modified with the adjectives “crafty” or “infernal”), the Buddhist canon does not contain a Mount Sinai scene.10 Still, as is often the case with religions, we might turn to the Buddhist creation myth to try to find the answer. If Buddhism has a legend of the fall, it is found in a text called the Account of Origins (Aggañña Sutta). Here, in an empty space, a faint breeze begins to blow in a circle. As the wind becomes stronger, the wind turns into water, and the water turns into earth, forming a disc in space. This disc develops into the standard flat earth of Buddhist cosmology, in which a vast ocean is contained by a ring of mountains. If there is no first cause in Buddhism, where does this world-creating wind come from? It comes from karma. It is a standard element of Buddhist karmic theory that our past deeds not only produce our bodies, our minds, and our experiences, but also all the environments (the Buddhist term is best translated as “container”) that those minds and bodies inhabit and where those experiences take place. Before beings can be reborn in a particular world, that world must exist, a world created by the past deeds, the karma, of the beings who will inhabit it. Their collective karma produces the wind that eventually produces their world. Once the habitable world has taken shape, it is time for it to be populated by the beings destined by their deeds to be born there. However, the first beings are not like ordinary humans. They can fly; their bodies are luminous; they require no food; they have no gender. According to the sūtra, at this time, the surface of the earth is covered by a white, frothy substance. At some point, one of the flying beings becomes curious and swoops down, dipping its finger into the substance and then touching its tongue. The taste is sweet. Soon, the other beings taste the froth. Not content to simply taste a drop, they scoop up and devour handfuls. The consumption of so much of the substance causes their bodies to lose their natural luster. The sun and the moon, at first unnecessary and thus not present, appear to illuminate the sky. The substance also adds weight, causing the beings to descend to earth, no longer able to fly. The froth that covers the earth evolves into a kind of sweet-tasting mushroom, which the beings consume. The mushrooms turn into a kind of

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creeper, said to be like bamboo, and then into a naturally growing rice, one that does not need to be harvested and husked, but that can be picked and eaten, growing anew each day. The consumption of the rice requires that the beings excrete waste, and so the beings develop organs for this purpose, different for what come to be called men and women. Eventually, one man and one woman discover another function for these organs (the Buddhist story is somewhat shaky on human anatomy) and have sexual intercourse, causing their fellow beings to respond with disgust, pelting them with dust, ashes, and cow dung; animals, not mentioned up to this point, have apparently appeared on the scene. The lustful couple wishes to continue, however, and so build a structure to provide them with privacy. Thus, in the Buddhist creation myth, human habitation, what we call the built environment, was created so that people could have sex without being scorned by their neighbors. Eventually, members of the community grow too lazy to go out and pick the naturally growing rice each day, instead picking enough for several days and hoarding it in their houses. This ends up destroying the magical crop, which evolves, or devolves, into the rice that we know today, cultivated by the labor of the farmer. Soon, someone steals the rice from another person’s plot, leading to disputes that sometimes end in violence. The people then said, “Suppose we were to appoint a certain being who would show anger where anger was due, censure to those who deserved it, and banish those who deserved banishment. And in return we would give him a share of rice.”11 They chose the most handsome and capable man among them, making him their king. This first king, named Mahāsammata, the “Great Selected One,” would be identified as a previous incarnation of the Buddha. One assumes that he brought order to the world, although the text does not say that he did, or how he might have done so. It does not say that he made laws. One might imagine that the story would stop there, with all the elements of human society in place: gender, habitation, labor, property, and government. One element is missing, however, an element that we sometimes think, wrongly, that the Buddha, or at least the Buddhists, did not care about: social class, and thus in the Indian case, caste. And so the Buddha explains that the first king was the first member of the ksatriya caste, the caste of rulers. At some point, ˙ certain members of society, deciding that the world was evil, leave their farms and go to the forest, where they make leaf huts and practice meditation, living on alms. These were the first members of what would be the brahmin caste, the caste of priests. Among this group, some eventually return to civilization, where they stop meditating and compile books (presumably, writing had been

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invented); they are considered inferior to those who meditate in the forest. Other members of the community take up various trades, becoming the first vaiśya, the caste of merchants. Still others become hunters or do menial tasks, the first members of the śūdra caste, the caste of laborers. Finally, the Buddha explains, some members of each of the castes become dissatisfied with life in the world and, in the parlance of Buddhism, go forth to the homeless life, becoming the first ascetics. Thus, by the end of the sūtra, the origin of each of the four social classes of Indian society at the time of the Buddha, as well as those who, like the Buddha himself, have decided to leave society, have been accounted for. There are some larger lessons to be drawn from the Account of Origins. Perhaps the most important is that cosmic history is a history of devolution, not evolution. The first inhabitants of the newly formed world, a world produced by their own past karma, literally descend from the skies, their bodies, like those of monks and nuns, lacking the marks of gender. And they descend against their will, the result of their own failing. Despite being endowed with so many of the qualities that one associates with gods, they remain bound in the cycle of rebirth as a result of the destructive emotions called kleśa, often translated as “afflictions.” It is not the curiosity about the taste of the primeval froth that leads to their downfall, but the response to that taste. It is their craving. When the Buddha sets forth the four noble truths in his first sermon after his enlightenment, he names craving (trsna) as the second truth, the origin or ˙˙ ˙ cause of suffering. Thus, the sin, in this case, was not tasting the substance. The sin was going back for more. From the perspective of the Garden of Eden, it was not the first bite. It was the second. This simple response to a simple pleasure of the sense of taste becomes the proximate cause for a process of decline, with civilization presented not as a rise but a fall. This story receives a fascinating retelling and revision in Burma, beginning in the seventeenth century, where we find the composition of Buddhist texts in the dhammasatta (Pāli for “dharmaśāstra”) genre. Here, a text called the Dhammavilāsa (or Splendor of the Dharma, the name of its purported author) enumerates laws under eighteen categories: debt, deposit, destruction of property, resumption of gifts, carpenter’s share, wages of laborers, breach of oaths, herdsmen, buying and selling property, demarcation of boundaries of land, slander, theft, assault, murder, the duties of husbands and wives, slavery, inheritance, and gambling.12 There is much to say about this list, but for our purposes, it is noteworthy that these laws deal with the lives of the laity and include many of the topics typically regulated by positive law. These laws are said to have originated

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during the reign of the first king, Mahāsammata, but with an important elaboration of the story in the canonical Account of Origins. According to the Dhammavilāsa, the king has a minister named Manu (the same name as the Hindu lawgiver), whom he appoints to adjudicate the disputes that had caused the people to appoint Mahāsammata in the first place. However, Manu respectfully declines, explaining that in order to make a judgment, a judge must rely on the testimony of the litigants in the dispute. Because litigants often lie, it is difficult for judges to determine the truth. If the judge makes an error and punishes the innocent, he will suffer the karmic consequences, being reborn as a demigod, animal, ghost, or a denizen of hell. At the repeated urging of the king, Manu eventually agrees to serve as a judge for one week. The cases he hears over the first six days go well. On the seventh day, he hears a case reminiscent of the eternal war between the demigods and the gods, where the demigods claim the marvelous fruit of the magical tree whose trunk is in their realm but whose branches and fruit are in the realm of the gods. In this case, a farmer plants a cucumber plant on his plot, but the cucumber grows on his neighbor’s plot. Both claim the cucumber. Manu rules in favor of the neighbor, but his decision was not praised by the gods, so he reversed it, ruling in favor of the farmer. Shaken by his initial error, Manu retires from the bench and goes into the forest to meditate, where he gains supernormal powers (abhijñā). Realizing that a judicial system based on the fallible decisions of a judge is inadequate, Mahāsammata asks Manu to compose a treatise on the dharma (dharmaśāstra). We note that here, “dharma” seems to mean “law.” We recall that in Buddhist cosmology, the world is flat. A giant disc rimmed by a wall of mountains encloses a vast ocean. In the center is Mount Meru, surrounded in the four cardinal directions by four island continents, each a different shape, with the Buddha appearing in the southern continent, called Jambudvīpa. Using his supernormal powers, Manu travels to the outer boundary of the world, arriving at the wall of iron mountains. There, he finds inscribed on the wall of mountains, in letters “as big as a cow,” an entire dharmaśāstra that had been there since the beginning of the world.13 He dutifully transcribes it, returns to Jambudvīpa, and presents it to Mahāsammata. It seems that, at least in Burma, Buddhism has a Mount Sinai scene. There is much to say about this story. Like so many Buddhist stories, it borrows a famous figure and makes him a Buddhist. In this case, it is the lawgiver Manu. Like the Hindu Vedas, the laws that Manu discovers at the boundary of the world are preexistent, not the product of human effort. And yet unlike the

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Veda, they exist not as eternal sound but as eternal letters (lasting at least until this world is destroyed eons in the future), contrary to the famous orality of both Vedic Hinduism and early Buddhism. These laws differ from the Buddhist monastic code in important ways. The code formulated by the Buddha developed organically. For years, there were no rules because all the monks soon achieved a level of enlightenment and thus had no need for regulation. It was only when the unenlightened began to join the order that rules became required, each rule the product of a particular situation, which is recounted in the canon, with the Buddha saying that after his death, the minor laws could be ignored. The laws discovered by Manu are very different. These laws, written on the walls of the world, have always been there, without supplement or subtraction.14 There, they presumably remain. The Dhammavilāsa was composed around 1638, some two millennia after the time of the Buddha. Two centuries later, Burma was under attack by Britain; by 1885, Burma was a province of British India and ruled by a different legal code. This chapter began with the British East India Company’s attempt to use the Hindu texts called dharmaśāstra, “treatises on dharma,” as the foundation for a legal code for the Hindus living under their rule, despite the fact that these texts, and the most famous of those texts, the so-called Laws of Manu, were devoted largely to social duties and restrictions among the four castes, as understood by the self-proclaimed highest of the castes, the brahmins. We should therefore close with a brief consideration of the Buddha’s attitude toward caste as it is represented in the canon. In the wake of the (European) Enlightenment, the Buddha was often portrayed not as an idol and purveyor of idolatry, as he had often been by Christians in previous centuries, but as a philosopher who denied the existence of a creator deity, who extolled the role of reason, and who rejected the caste system that had been imposed on the Indian populace by ritual-performing priests. In the imagination of many (Protestant) Europeans, the brahmins were the Catholics, the Buddha was Martin Luther. This, of course, was a caricature. At the time of the Buddha, the fourfold caste system discussed at the beginning of the chapter had long been in place. The terms “brāhmana” and “ksatriya” ˙ ˙ (khattiya, in Pāli) appear often in the sūtras, with the term “grhapati” (or “ga˙ hapati”), literally, “lord of the house” and usually rendered as “householder,” referring generally to the third caste of landowners and merchants, with the lowest caste usually referred to simply as “low family” (nīcakula). The Buddha was from the warrior caste and had much to say against the brahmin caste,

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challenging its claim to superiority on many occasions—stating, for example, that when a future buddha takes his final birth, he is born into either the brahmin caste or the warrior caste, depending on which is superior in the world at that time. The Hindu dharmaśāstra literature draws a red line between the three upper castes, referred to as the “twice born,” and the lowest caste, excluding the latter from participation in Vedic ritual and forbidding marriage and the sharing of food with those of the upper castes. An even lower social status was held by the candāla, often rendered as “outcaste” or “untouchable” in English ˙˙ sources. The Buddha admitted members of all four castes into the order of monks and nuns, with Upāli, who had been a barber (a low-caste occupation), becoming one of his most famous disciples, the master of the monastic code who was called upon to recite the vinaya at the First Council. This does not mean that caste status was forgotten upon ordination; Upāli is said to have been mocked by nuns as someone who used to wash other people’s hair. Despite the fame of Upāli, it is important to note that monks and nuns, or at least famous monks and nuns, from the lowest castes were rare. A study of the caste of Buddhist monks, nuns, and laypeople in the Pāli canon, in those cases when it is mentioned, shows 123 from the brahmin caste, fifty from the warrior caste, thirty-four “householders,” forty-seven simply listed as “high caste,” and only nineteen listed as “low caste,” of whom eight were monks and none were nuns.15 Thus, the brahmins, who are often portrayed as the Buddha’s antagonists and who were his primary competitors for patronage, were also his largest constituency for monastic converts, or at least converts important enough to be named in the canon. Women, and especially low-caste woman, are rarely named. In the Sanskrit sources, however, one finds a story of a woman from the candāla caste becom˙˙ ing a disciple of the Buddha. In the story, the Buddha’s cousin and attendant Ānanda meets a young candāla woman named Prakrti (Nature) at a well and ˙˙ ˙ asks her for a drink of water. She tells him of her caste, saying that she is not allowed to approach a monk. Ānanda says that he does not care about her caste; she immediately falls in love with him. Her mother is a witch and uses her magic to bring Ānanda to her daughter to make love. In the nick of time, he realizes what is about to happen and calls out to the Buddha, who immediately uses his powers to counteract the witch’s spell. The daughter, still in love, goes to the Buddha, saying that she wants to be with Ānanda. The Buddha then asks her a series of questions, which she takes to be about marriage, but are in fact about ordination: Does she want to wear the clothes that Ānanda wears?

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Does she have her parents’ permission?, etc.16 She eventually understands what he is asking and consents. Although the story shows that the Buddha (in ordaining her) and Ānanda (in accepting water from her) were free from caste prejudice, the story also provides an occasion to mock Ānanda, the advocate of women. If the story sounds like the plot of a Wagner opera, it almost was. Wagner read it in Eugène Burnouf’s 1844 Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism (Introduction à l’histoire du Buddhisme indien), and prepared a proposal for Ludwig II of Bavaria for a work to be called The Victors (Die Sieger). However, if Burnouf had consulted the monastic code of the Mūlasarvāstivāda school, he would have seen that the candāla, the outcaste, is barred from ˙˙ ordination.17 We cannot conclude a discussion of caste in Buddhism without mentioning the case of Sri Lanka. The order of fully ordained monks died out in Sri Lanka on three occasions because there were not the requisite number of monks to perform the ordination ceremony. After being reestablished the first two times, when it collapsed the third time, a group of monks were invited from Thailand to ordain Sri Lankan men, founding what became known as the Siyam (Siam) Nikāya in 1753. The Buddhists of Sri Lanka have their own caste system, organized largely around ethnic and regional lines and separate from that of the Tamil Hindus of the island. In 1764, the Siyam Nikāya, which was dominated by the Govigama and Radala castes of the highlands of Sri Lanka (which included the royal capital of Kandy, home of the famous tooth relic of the Buddha), declared that only members of those two castes could become fully ordained monks, thus excluding the castes of the coastline and lowland regions. This eventually led to a group of novice monks of the Salagama caste (the caste of cinnamon peelers) to sail to Siam in 1799 to receive full ordination. During the voyage, the Dutch ship captain suggested that they seek ordination in Burma instead. They agreed, and by 1810, there were enough monks to perform ordinations in Sri Lanka, forming the Amarapura Nikāya, named after the Burmese capital. In 1864, a third group, called the Rāmañña Nikāya, was established by a monk from the Salagama caste, again with Burmese ordination. Proclaiming that, like the Buddha, it made no caste distinction, it remained the smallest of the three monastic orders in Sri Lanka until 2019, when it joined with the Amarapura Nikāya to form what it called the Amarapura-­ Rāmañña Nikāya, larger than the Siyam Nikāya. This was only the most recent manifestation of caste in the history of Buddhism. Another, and rather more dramatic, occurred in India in 1927. The Hindu dharmaśāstra, including the famous Laws of Manu, prescribes horrific punish-

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ments for those members of the lowest caste who fail to recognize their social status; if a śūdra insults members of the three upper castes, he will have a redhot nail thrust into his mouth; if he tells a brahmin what his duty is, the king will have hot oil poured into his mouth and ears.18 In the Laws of Manu, we also read that a member of the “twice born,” that is, the three upper castes, “must never give a Śūdra advice, leftovers, or anything offered to the gods; teach him the Law; or prescribe an observance to him. Whoever teaches him the Law or whoever prescribes an observance to him will plunge along with him into that darkness called [the hell of ] Asamvrta.”19 Into the twentieth century, all manner ˙ ˙ of interactions between members of the upper castes and the untouchables (today called Dalit) were prohibited, including sharing food, intermarriage, entering Hindu temples, and even drinking from the same water source. As noted above, the Buddhist attitude toward caste was more complicated than is often represented. For example, a seventh-century Buddhist author named Avalokitavrata offered a commentary on a passage describing the famous Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination. The passage states, “This precious and excellent dependent origination, [is taught] without overstepping birth, age, lineage, place, and time.” In commenting on this passage, Avalokitavrata states, “Regarding ‘without overstepping lineage,’ it is to be taught to brahmins or ksatriyas; it is not to be taught to vaiśyas or śūdras. As a text of the outsiders ˙ says: ‘One should not impart knowledge to a śūdra, nor should one give him leftover food, nor the remains of a sacrificial offering. One should not teach him the dharma, nor teach him religious practices.’”20 This passage is translated from the Tibetan; it is lost in the original Sanskrit. The term translated as “lineage” here is probably the word commonly translated into English as “caste.” It is clear, however, that the “text of the outsiders” (that is, non-Buddhists) is the eightieth verse of the fourth chapter of the Laws of Manu, the same passage cited earlier above. Here, we find an Indian Buddhist scholastic, a proponent of the Mahāyāna (rendered by some as “Universal Vehicle”), citing, with approval, the statement from the Laws of Manu that the dharma, in this case meaning the teachings of the Buddha, should not be taught to a śūdra. In Chapter Six, we met Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), the respected Indian scholar and jurist, holder of doctorates from Columbia University and the London School of Economics, friend and confederate of Gandhi, author of the Indian Constitution, and first minister of law of a newly independent India. A Dalit, he fought for social equality for all citizens of India, eventually deciding to leave Hinduism and its caste system by converting to Buddhism, along

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with hundreds of thousands of his followers, in 1956, the year that he died.21 He had contemplated the conversion to Buddhism for years. Gandhi, who, like many of his day, believed that the Buddha was a Hindu, was strongly opposed. In 1933, when he learned of Ambedkar’s plans for the Dalits, he went on a hunger strike. Fearing that Gandhi would die, Ambedkar relented, converting after Gandhi’s assassination by a Hindu in 1948. For decades, Ambedkar gave speeches and led marches in support of Dalit rights. In 1927, he launched a satyagraha (literally, “upholding the truth,” a term coined by Gandhi to describe a nonviolent protest) in the small town of Mahad, about one hundred miles south of Mumbai, to force the authorities to allow Dalits to drink from the town’s reservoir; Prakrti’s fear of offering water to ˙ Ānanda persisted into the twentieth century. Ambedkar’s march was prevented by a court order, but he gave a speech in front of a funeral pyre of sandalwood upon which a book had been placed. At the conclusion of his speech, Ambedkar lit the pyre, burning the book, the Manusmr ti, the Laws of Manu. That date, ˙ December 25, 1927, is commemorated annually in Dalit communities, not as Christmas, but as Manusmriti Dahan Din, “Laws of Manu Burning Day.” Having destroyed one dharma, thirty years later, Dr. Ambedkar would embrace another.

14 • Narrative

Bhumibol Adulyadej (1927–2016), King Rama IX, the long-serving and muchbeloved monarch of Thailand, was a devout Buddhist, like his predecessors of the Chakri Dynasty. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father was attending medical school at Harvard. His father died in 1928, when Bhumibol was not yet two years old. He spent most of his youth in Europe, ascending to the throne in 1946 after the mysterious death of his brother. He only returned permanently in 1950, the year of his formal coronation, remaining in a kind of self-imposed exile during the Second World War (in which Thailand was allied with Japan) and military coups in 1933 and 1947. In 1996, as part of the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of his reign, Bhumibol published his own version of a Buddhist text called the Mahājanaka Jātaka. Not much happens in the life of the Buddha. After his admittedly astounding birth from his mother’s right side, his youth is spent in the confines of the palace. One day as a young boy, Prince Siddhārtha meditates under a tree, an event that is considered to be of some significance. It is only at age twentynine that he takes his four famous chariot rides outside the city. What he learns is extraordinary to him, ordinary to the world: that there is old age, sickness, and death, and those who seek to escape them. After that there is his nighttime escape from the palace, the “Great Departure” described at length in some sources, followed by six years of ascetic practice, sometimes alone, sometimes with five friends. The central event for the tradition, his enlightenment, occurs in solitude and silence, over the course of one night. There is the dramatic attack by Māra, the god of desire and death, but he is quickly defeated without the future Buddha stirring from his seat beneath the Bodhi Tree. After his enlightenment, he

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remains in the vicinity of the tree for seven weeks, neither speaking nor eating; one week is spent staring at the tree, another is spent walking around. Once he decides to teach, he walks to a game preserve near Vārānasī, where he ˙ teaches his five friends about the four noble truths. He spends the next fortyfive years walking around northern India, answering the questions of those who ask. Sometimes he has a headache, sometimes he has a backache, and his cousin tries to kill him, but even that yields little drama; a piece of rock nicks his foot, causing it to bleed. At age eighty, he eats a meal that causes a severe case of dysentery. Then he dies. We might compare the events of a life of eighty years to a period of a week in the life of another famous founder, from his entry into Jerusalem on a donkey, to the Last Supper, the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, his arrest, his trial, his crucifixion, his harrowing of hell, and his resurrection, events that have inspired countless literary and artistic renderings. All cultures have stories that they tell; all religions have narratives that captivate the faithful. The life of the Buddha was largely uneventful, and then he was gone, passed into the extinction of nirvāna. However, according to Buddhist ˙ doctrine, his buddhahood was an achievement of cosmic significance, impossible over one life of eighty years, requiring instead that he perfect himself over billions of lifetimes, accumulating limitless stores of merit and wisdom. The stories of those lives are, appropriately, called birth stories (jātaka). Counted as one of the twelve traditional categories of scriptures, they constitute perhaps the most important source of Buddhist narrative, the primary inspiration for Buddhist art, the place where India’s extraordinary traditions of literature (prose, poetry, and drama) and art (painting and sculpture) are placed into the service of the dharma. In Pāli alone, the jātaka are traditionally counted as 547 (from an original 550). But there are many more in Pāli and Sanskrit—including the famous texts called the Garland of Jātakas (Jātakamālā)—as well as a related genre called avadāna, sometimes translated as “legends.”1 We recall that the past lives of the Buddha were infinite and that on the night of his enlightenment, he had detailed memories of them all. These are the stories that Buddhists, both kings and commoners, often tell. At the stūpa complex at Bhārhut in north-central India, dating from the second century BCE, there are some thirty-two jātaka stories carved in stone; only fifteen events from the final life of the Buddha are represented. All thirty-four jātaka stories from Āryaśūra’s Garland of Jātakas are represented in stone carvings at Borobudur in Java. All 550 of the canonical Pāli jātaka are depicted in a group of eleventh-century temples in Burma.2 Versions of many of the stories appear in the literatures of other Indian

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traditions, such as the great Hindu epic the Mahābhārata; others are folktales (including animal stories) with no religious content. What makes these stories “Buddhist” is their frame. The narrator of the story is the Buddha, who is typically asked a question. He responds, saying in effect, “That reminds me of a story,” which he then recounts. At the end, the Buddha will often identify the other major characters in the story. If there are two friends, they are often the monks Śāriputra and Maudgalyāyana in a former life. If there is a villain, it is usually Devadatta, the Buddha’s evil cousin. Among the several points of such framing is to note that relationships, with both friends and enemies, extend back over many lifetimes. The stories themselves often have no ostensible Buddhist content, and yet they serve an important Buddhist purpose. The past, and all the stories that we tell about it, becomes a stage where the part of the hero is always played by the Buddha. The past, even the imagination itself, becomes Buddhist. As has been noted, the notion of nirvāna, the state of cessation into which ˙ the Buddha passed, creates certain problems for Buddhism as a religion. The founder, and the arhat saints who followed him into nirvāna, essentially cease ˙ to exist; all that is left is their relics. There have been many attempts to solve this dilemma, especially in the Mahāyāna, where we find the Buddha deputizing a group of sixteen or eighteen arhats to remain in the world until the advent of the next buddha, Maitreya. These are the famous luohan of Chinese Buddhism, similar in many ways to Daoist immortals. Doctrinally speaking, however, the Buddha is inaccessible after his death. Apart from waiting for Maitreya for billions of years, the future holds little promise and little opportunity for the narratives that sustain religions. The past, however, is infinite. The brilliance of the jātaka genre is its marriage of these stories to the doctrine of the bodhisattva. The precise translation of the term “bodhisattva” is something that scholars continue to debate, but the concept is clear. A bodhisattva is a person who makes a vow to become a buddha in the future, embarking on a path of billions of years and billions of lifetimes, over the course of which he accu­ mulates the merit, the virtuous power, to propel him to the position in which he is able to discover the nature of reality and the path to liberation at a time when that knowledge has disappeared from the world. There are a number of qualifications for the bodhisattva, including that the person has the capacity to become an arhat in the lifetime in which he makes the vow, and that the vow be made in the presence of a buddha, who prophesies the bodhisattva’s future enlightenment. What is important for our purposes is that all the lives from

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the time of the vow to the last lifetime before he is born as Prince Siddhārtha are jātaka stories. The way that the bodhisattva accumulates the merit needed for the achievement of buddhahood is by the performance of certain virtues, numbered as six or ten, called the perfections (pāramitā, in Sanskrit; pāramī, in Pāli). In the Pāli tradition, the ten are giving, ethics, renunciation, wisdom, effort, patience, truthfulness, determination, kindness, and equanimity. The particular virtue being practiced, although not always stated, is usually clear in the jātaka stories. Each of these virtues becomes refined through repetition, such that as the bodhisattva approaches buddhahood, the quality of the virtue is perfected. The stories of the Buddha’s past lives as an animal are particularly well known, some of them becoming popular children’s stories, depicted in comic books and cartoons. The animal stories are often cases of self-sacrifice: a rabbit jumps into a fire to feed a starving sage; an elephant jumps off a cliff to feed travelers lost in the forest; a fish whose flesh cures disease commits suicide by beaching itself. In the Pāli tradition, the last ten lives of the bodhisattva, each as a human, each with its own perfection, are deemed particularly important, as is their order. In the tenth of these lives, the last lifetime before he is reborn as the prince of the Śākya clan, the bodhisattva is Prince Vessantara, who practices the perfection of giving. In this most famous of all of the jātaka stories, he gives away his children and his wife. The jātaka about Prince Mahājanaka, a scene from which survives in a fresco in Cave 1 at Ajant ā, is the second of the ˙˙ ten lives. Its perfection is translated as “effort” or “perseverance.” Mahājanaka was the son of the king of Videha. His father was falsely informed that his brother sought his demise. As a precaution, the king had his brother imprisoned. He escaped to another region, raised an army, and defeated the king, who died in the battle. The queen, pregnant with Mahājanaka, was able to escape with the help of gods, who knew that her unborn son was the bodhisattva. In a faraway land, she was protected by a brahmin who also recognized the true identity of her son. As a child, he was teased for being a widow’s son, with his mother eventually telling him of his royal lineage. He decided to return to the capital and claim the throne from his uncle. First, however, he set sail for the land of Survarnabhūmi (Golden Land). The ship ˙ sank during the voyage. As it did, Mahājanaka calmly consumed as much food as he could, put on two layers of clothes that he covered with oil, climbed to the top of the mast, and jumped a distance of 140 cubits, avoiding the sea creatures that were devouring the other passengers. He survived in the water for seven

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days (a sign of his perseverance) until he was rescued by a goddess who recognized his virtue. With the prince sleeping in her arms, she flew to the capital, where his uncle, who had usurped the throne, had recently died. Prior to his death, he left instructions for a series of trials to determine his successor, including winning the approval of his daughter, stringing a bow (à la Odysseus), and answering a riddle. A number of candidates had tried and failed. Eventually, an empty chariot drawn by four horses was allowed to wander in search of the true king. It stopped outside the city where Mahājanaka was still sleeping. The court chaplain examined the soles of his feet, where he saw the signs of a cakravartin. He was crowned king, passing the various tests and marrying the princess, who gave birth to a son. The king sent for his own mother and the brahmin who had protected her. He ruled his kingdom with wisdom and generosity and was beloved by his subjects. This is not the end of this rather involved tale; we should simply pause to note that many jātakas (many of which are about kings) conclude with this kind of “lived happily ever after” ending. The Mahājanaka Jātaka, however, continues “seven thousand years later” (this was a time when the human life span was ten thousand years). After seven millennia of peace and prosperity, the king came to the conclusion that wealth was a source of suffering. He therefore decided to abdicate and become an ascetic, shaving off his hair and beard, donning yellow robes, and leaving the palace to live alone in the Himalayas. However, his people learned of his plan; as he was leaving the city, he was followed by his subjects, including his seven hundred wives, all weeping and pleading for him not to leave, following him for many miles. He tried all manner of commands and arguments to try to dissuade them, especially the queen, even eating a piece of meat that had been dropped by a dog in order to disgust her and cause her to abandon him. Nothing worked. However, when she eventually fainted from grief at the thought of their separation, he used the opportunity to disappear into the forest. The queen returned to the city, where her son was crowned as the new king. She later became an ascetic herself.3 There is obviously much to say about this story. We can note at least one point. In this story we see the protagonist, Mahājanaka, embodying in a single lifetime the two ideals of the tradition: the cakravartin, or world-conquering king, and the ascetic who renounces that world. Indeed, in the frame that the Buddha provides before he tells the story, he says, “This is not the first time that the Tathāgata performed the great renunciation.”4 In this sense, unlike so many of the stories, it has a direct link to the life of the Buddha. As we recall,

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after the birth of Prince Siddhārtha, his father calls in the court astrologers to foretell his son’s future. All but one predict that he will become either a cakravartin or a buddha. The king places his son under palace arrest for twenty-nine years in a vain attempt to prevent him from renouncing the world. The jātaka stories have their own history in the West. In his account of his travels, recorded around 1300, Marco Polo provides a description of the Buddha, which reports, “They tell moreover that he hath died fourscore and four times. The first time he died as a man, and came to life again as an ox; and then he died as an ox and came to life again as a horse, and so on until he had died fourscore and four times; and every time he became some kind of animal. But when he died the eighty-fourth time they say he became a god. And they do hold him for the greatest of all their gods.”5 The 547 stories of the Pāli jātaka collection were translated into English in six volumes by E. B. Cowell and W. H. D. Rouse between 1895 and 1907. However, in 1880, Thomas W. Rhys Davids (1843–1922) had published translations in two volumes based on the Commentary on the Jātaka ( Jātakatthavannanā) ˙˙ attributed to the great fifth-century master Buddhaghosa. The son of a Welsh clergyman, Rhys Davids, like so many British scholars of India of the nineteenth century, had begun his career while serving as a colonial official, in his case, as a magistrate in Sri Lanka. After being dismissed for what seem to have been minor violations of policy, he returned to England, where he would found the Pali Text Society in 1881. Rhys Davids called his book Buddhist Birth Stories. It would play an important role in casting the stories of the Buddha’s former lives in an entirely new light, with wide-ranging consequences. This becomes clear on the third page of his preface, where he writes: The fairy tales, parables, fables, riddles, and comic and moral stories, of which the Buddhist Collection—known as the Jātaka Book—consists, have been found, in many instances, to bear a striking resemblance to similar ones current in the West. Now in many instances this resemblance is simply due to the fact that the Western stories were borrowed from the Buddhist ones. To this resemblance much of the interest excited by the Buddhist Birth Stories is, very naturally, due. As, therefore, the stories translated in the body of this volume do not happen to contain among them any of those most generally known in England, I insert here one or two specimens which may at the same time afford some amusement, and also en-

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able the reader to judge how far the alleged resemblances do actually exist. . . . And the Book of Birth Stories has a value quite independent of the fact that many of its tales have been transplanted to the West. It contains a record of the every-day life, and every-day thought, of the people among whom the tales were told: it is the oldest, most complete, and most important Collection of Folk-lore extant.6 Here, and in an iteration of these arguments in a book called Buddhist India, Rhys Davids would make two important claims. The first was that a huge body of folklore—including stories found in Aesop’s Fables, Herodotus, Chaucer, and Shakespeare—had originated in India, and specifically in Indian Buddhism, and had been carried to Europe over the centuries by Greeks, Jews, and Muslims. Rhys Davids was writing at the time of the rise of folklore studies, where scholars, often inspired by linguistic allegiance and nationalist identity, were seeking to collect and catalogue the oral literature that formed their cultural roots. In this milieu, Rhys Davids’s claim was a bold one. This was also the time of race theory, where verbal roots were being transformed into blood lines, hence, the significance of Rhys Davids’s repeated reference to the Buddha as an Aryan; the connections between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin had been announced by Sir William Jones in 1786. Rhys Davids writes, “But in the Jātakas we have a nearly complete picture, and quite uncorrupted and unadulterated by European intercourse, of the social life and customs and popular beliefs of the common people of Aryan tribes closely related to ourselves, just as they were passing through the first stages of civilization,” before concluding, “we may still turn with appreciation to the ancient Book of the Buddhist Jātaka Tales as a priceless record of the childhood of our race.”7 Thus, Rhys Davids grants Buddhism pride of place as a source of European culture; just decades earlier, Buddhism was being condemned in Europe as pagan idolatry. Indeed, he credits Buddhism with playing a role in the demise of what for him, the son of a Congregational clergyman, was another form of idolatry. Referring to the jātaka stories, he writes, “Thus extensively adopted and circulated, they had a considerable influence on the revival of literature, which, hand in hand with the revival of learning, did so much to render possible and to bring about the Great Reformation.”8 But what one hand giveth, the other taketh away. Rhys Davids’s esteem for the Buddha and his teachings was such that he did not want him to be associated with animal stories, and thus he claimed that the jātaka stories were not the word of the Buddha. As he writes, “Unfortunately this orthodox Buddhist

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belief as to the history of the Book of Birth Stories rests on a foundation of quicksand.”9 He argues instead that the jātaka stories are both before and after the Buddha. The stories circulated in India before the Buddha, and Buddhist monks concocted the frame stories that turned them into accounts of his former lives after his death. Rhys Davids offered a number of arguments in support of his theory, including that the jātaka stories had a “freshness” that the sober sermons of the Buddha lacked. Meanwhile, the stories of his former lives were having their own problems in Thailand. During the nineteenth century, Thailand was the only Theravāda country that did not come under European control. Sri Lanka was the British colony of Ceylon; Burma was ruled by the British Raj; and Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos were all part of French Indochina (with Laos annexed in 1899). This did not mean that Thailand did not have contact with the European powers. The kingdom of Siam received embassies from and sent embassies to the court of Louis XIV. During the nineteenth century, skilled negotiations and agreement to some unequal treaties with Britain allowed Thailand to retain its sovereignty. Several of those treaties were negotiated by Mongkut, King Rama IV (1804– 1868), known best in the West as the king of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I; its film adaptation was long banned in Thailand for its representation of this eminent scholar of Buddhism and sophisticated sci­ entist singing “Shall We Dance?” with an English governess. It has long been traditional in Thailand for young males to ordain as novice monks for a brief period of time and then return to lay life. This tradition was followed by Mongkut in 1824, while he was a prince. His father, Rama II, died that year, and it was expected that Mongkut, the son of the queen, would ascend to the throne. However, as a result of palace intrigue, as well as the Buddhist theories of succession followed in Thailand at the time, the crown passed to his half-brother, the son of a concubine, who became Rama III. Rather than challenge the succession, Mongkut made the unusual decision to remain a monk, which he did for twenty-seven years. Like Buddhist reformers in other times and other lands, he became concerned with the purity of the san˙gha, that is, with the adherence of Thai monks to the monastic code. It is believed that the ordination of a monk is only legitimate if the new monk is ordained by monks who also keep those vows. In the twentieth century, there was a crisis in Tibet when it was feared that the young Dalai Lama would be ordained by the regent, who was known to have broken the vow of celibacy. Mongkut observed what he regarded as rampant violations of the monastic code, meaning that his own ordination had been illegitimate.

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He therefore took the unusual step of traveling to northwest Thailand, near the border with Thailand’s traditional enemy, Burma. This was the homeland of the Mon, an ethnic minority in Thailand, of particular importance in Burma, and who had played a major role in bringing the Theravāda tradition of Buddhism to Southeast Asia. Believing that they had maintained a pure lineage, Mongkut reordained there. He would go on to establish a new sect of Buddhism, something that only his status as a prince made possible, which he called the Thammayut, the “adherents of the dharma.” Its adherence was particularly to the vinaya, with Mongkut insisting that monks wear their robes and comport themselves properly, go barefoot, and not eat after twelve noon. Although the Thammayut has remained the minority sect in Thailand, it is noteworthy that most of Thailand’s famous “forest monks” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were its members. Mongkut also sought a return to the tripitaka as the foundation of Buddhist thought and practice, de-emphasizing ˙ a number of texts and genres that were especially popular in Thailand, none more than the jātaka. His reasons were many, including its implications for royal succession. Upon the death of his half-brother in 1851, Mongkut became Rama IV, returning to lay life after almost three decades, and fathering eighty-two children before his death in 1868. During his time as a monk, he had befriended a number of Europeans living in Bangkok, including Christian missionaries. He learned both English and Latin and studied mathematics and astronomy. Based on his studies and his own calculations, he concluded that the flat earth of Buddhist cosmology was a myth. This was long before the Pānadurē Debate that took place in Sri Lanka in 1873, in which a Buddhist monk debated with a Christian clergyman about whether the world was flat or round; the Buddhist monk won. From ancient times until the present day, by far the most popular of the hundreds of jātaka stories in Thailand is the Vessantara Jātaka, the last of the ten lives before the bodhisattva’s birth as Prince Siddhārtha, the jātaka about the perfection of giving. Lacking the gruesome elements of so many of the stories, no body parts are hacked off and given away. Instead, even more shockingly, the prince gives away his two young children, a boy and a girl, to an evil brahmin who wants them for his slaves. He later gives away his wife. There is a tradition in Thailand that someone who makes offerings to the san˙gha and then listens to the Vessantara Jātaka over the course of a single day will meet the future buddha Maitreya. Recitations of the story traditionally take place at the end of the rains retreat, in a festival called Thet Maha Chat, “Recitation of the

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Great Jātaka.”10 These performances can be quite elaborate, as the thirteen chapters are recited over the course of a day and night, often with actors playing the parts. These performances elicit tears at the sacrifice of the children and laughter at the fate of the evil brahmin Jujaka. It is perhaps the most important festival of the Thai calendar and a time of conspicuous donations to the san˙gha, inspired by Prince Vessantara himself. Yet in 1865, Mongkut, the king of Thailand, issued a statement in the only Thai-language newspaper of the day, the Bangkok Recorder (published by an American missionary), in which he stated in part, “In every region of the country people believe that this is meritorious for the Buddhist religion. But there are some who do not believe that this is merit-making. These people criticise such comical performances of the Thet Maha Chat, questioning the nature of the merit one will receive in return for such great alms-giving.”11 The king goes on to say that a more appropriate worship of the dharma and the san˙gha, and a much greater source of merit, comes from showing respect to one’s parents and elders, helping the poor, and building roads, bridges, and rest houses. There is much to say about this extraordinary statement from a Buddhist monarch, himself a scholar of the Vessantara Jātaka, having translated a chapter into Latin. The primary form of lay practice in Buddhism has traditionally been giving to the san˙gha. Here, we see the king instructing his people to desist from such charity, at least in connection with this festival, and instead subscribe to a kind of social gospel that one associates with certain branches of Christianity. We recall that Mongkut had close relations with a number of Christian missionaries and that he understood that one strategy for avoiding the fate of his neighbors was for Siam to be perceived as a progressive trading ally and not as a benighted land of idolaters to be colonized and converted. He may have had another reason. Many Buddhist kings of Southeast Asia claimed the title of cakravartin. Even for those who did not, royal lineage remained important, seeking a connection to Prince Siddhārtha of the warrior caste and beyond. We recall the origin story in the Account of Origins (Aggañña Sutta) in which, to bring order to the chaos of human society, the people selected a leader, called Mahāsammata (Great Selected One). In Buddhist cosmology, he is regarded as the first king and the progenitor of the warrior caste. In addition, he would be counted as the founder of the Śākya clan, into which Prince Siddhārtha would be born. He would also be counted as one of the former rebirths of the bodhisattva, indeed the first of the current eon, called the Auspicious Eon (bhadrakalpa). In the Pāli tradition, our buddha began as the bodhisattva Sumedha, who made the vow to achieve buddhahood in the pres-

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ence of the buddha Dīpan˙kara in a previous eon. Mahāsammata, therefore, provided a Theravāda king with a connection by blood and by rebirth to the Buddha. However, the lineage would seem to stop there. The Buddha passed into nirvāna and was not reborn again. He had one son, Rāhula, who became ˙ a monk as a young boy, produced no progeny, and became an arhat. This did not impede the Buddhist kings of Southeast Asia. They noted that in his penultimate lifetime as a human, the Buddha had been Prince Vessantara, and that Vessantara had a son named Jāli. As noted above, in a shocking expression of the perfection of giving, Vessantara had given Jāli and his sister Kanhājinā to an evil brahmin as slaves when they were small children. How˙ ever, they eventually escaped and returned to their father, who became the king. Jāli succeeded his father on the throne. Thus, a blood line from Mahāsammata to the present day exists, and many Buddhist kings would claim to belong to it, including the kings of Thailand. Mongkut, the son of the king and queen, had been passed over upon the death of his father in favor of Nangklao, the son of the king and a concubine. As sons of the same father, both would be considered descendants of Mahāsammata. Scholars have speculated that among Mongkut’s several motivations in de-emphasizing the jātaka stories in general and the Vessantara Jātaka in particular was to move Thailand to the kind of lineal succession that existed among the European powers.12 It is important to note, however, that elements of what might be called the demythologization of Buddhism had begun in Thailand during the reign of Nangklao, who asked the Supreme Patriarch (san˙gharāja), who was also his uncle, to develop a new set of postures for images of the Buddha. Among the thirty-three postures was one called the Buddha Subduing the Sandalwood Image.13 We recall from Chapter Three the story of the first Buddha image. In the version of the story best-known in Thailand, the sandalwood image depicts the Buddha seated. When the Buddha descends from the Heaven of the Thirty-Three, the image attempts to rise to greet him but is restrained by the Buddha, who tells the image that it will represent him for five thousand years after his passage into nirvāna. Statues of the Buddha subduing ˙ the sandalwood image would become popular among Thai elites in the nineteenth century, where the gesture might be read as the real Buddha, the historical Buddha, restraining his image, his idol, from acting in the world. Mongkut died of malaria in 1868, to be succeeded by his son, Chulalongkorn, Rama V (1853–1910). He continued many of his father’s policies in the areas of modernization and political reform (including the abolition of slavery

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and the practice of kowtowing to nobility). He traveled widely in Europe, returning to Thailand to establish the first university and military academies. And he successfully resisted the colonial ambitions of the British and the French, a considerable feat, given that his kingdom was surrounded by British-controlled Burma to the west and French-controlled Laos and Cambodia to the east and south. Spending the more traditional six months as a Buddhist monk in his youth, Chulalongkorn became an erudite student of Buddhism, inheriting his father’s preference for history over myth. Indeed, he would issue a decree forbidding monks from beginning their sermons with Buddhaghosa’s famous five-thousandyear chronology of the disappearance of the dharma in order that Buddhist teachings inspire ethical behavior rather than despair.14 Chulalongkorn also read widely in the European scholarship that was produced in the last half of the nineteenth century, even making contributions to the Pali Text Society. One of the books he read was Thomas Rhys Davids’s Buddhist India, published in 1903, where the Pāli scholar set forth his theories about the jātaka stories. As noted above, Rhys Davids concluded that the stories were folklore and were not the teachings of the Buddha; instead, they were fables that had circulated in India before the Buddha and were added to the canon as accounts of his former lives after his death. In 1893, Chulalongkorn completed a massive publication project, printing the entire Pāli tripitaka in Thai script in thirty-nine Western-style volumes, the ˙ first time that a Buddhist canon had been published in codex form. He first distributed five hundred copies to monasteries throughout the kingdom, two years later sending an additional 260 copies to libraries and universities around the world. These included forty-nine institutions in twenty states and the District of Columbia in the United States; recipients included the University of Michigan, Yale, Drew Theological Seminary, Oberlin College, and the Cincinnati Public Library. The thirty-nine volumes did not include the jātaka.

15 • Nation

In Kyoto, not far from the National Museum, there is a large, grass-covered mound with a tall, stone pagoda at the top. It is today called Mimizuka, or “Ear Mound,” in Japanese; its original name is Hanazuka, or “Nose Mound.” The mound contains the amputated noses of tens of thousands (figures range from 38,000 to 126,000) of Koreans killed by Japanese troops during the 1592 to 1598 invasion of Korea. The conflict is known in Korean as the Dwarf Barbarian Incursion of the Imjin Year (Imjin waeran), and in Japanese as the Campaign of the Bunroku Era (Bunroku no eki, 1592–96) and the Campaign of the Keichō Era (Keichō no eki, 1596–1615). Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598), the samurai general who planned the invasion, ordered that the mound be erected on the grounds of Hōkōji (not to be confused with the more famous Hōkōji or Asukadera in Nara), its monks charged with performing rituals to pacify the spirits of the noseless dead. According to Japanese sources, Buddhism was introduced into Japan from Korea in the mid-sixth century (both 538 and 552 are given as dates), when King Sŏngmyŏng (d. 554) of Paekche, one of the three kingdoms that would eventually constitute Korea, sent an image of Śākyamuni Buddha and several sūtras to Emperor Kinmei (509–571). There are many ways of measuring the presence of Buddhism in a region, and by some of those measures, Buddhism was likely already present in Japan before these dates. Nonetheless, we note here a persistent trope in Buddhist historiography: Buddhist nations tend to date the arrival of the dharma in their land to the time when Buddhist monks arrive at the royal court, often bearing texts and images. Korean monks and artisans would play important roles in establishing Buddhist institutions in Japan during the sixth and seventh centuries.1

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Just as Korean monks had seen China as their source of the dharma, traveling to the great monasteries of China, so too would Japanese monks look to China rather than Korea for their Buddhism, despite the greater challenge that posed—for, unlike the Koreans, the Japanese would need to cross the perilous sea. For both Korean Buddhism and Japanese Buddhism, Chinese remained the canonical language, and several of the important Chinese schools came to play major roles in both Korea and Japan. The most famous of these is Chan, pronounced “Sŏn” in Korean and “Zen” in Japanese. Less than a century after Buddhism was introduced from Paekche into Japan, the two were military allies. In 663, the Japanese sent naval reinforcements at the request of Paekche. At a naval battle in Korean waters, the Japanese and Paekche forces were defeated by the Silla and their Chinese allies. This would be the last military adventure on the continent of Asia by Japan for almost a millennium. By the sixteenth century, however, the rulers of Korea and Japan were no longer exchanging buddha images. Japan had been ruled by a series of military dictators, or shoguns, for centuries. The sixteenth century was a time of political upheaval as a series of feudal lords (daimyo) vied for power. One of the most successful of these was Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Toward the end of his life, hoping for a great victory, he made grandiose plans to invade China, seeking safe passage of his armies through Korea. Korea at this time was ruled by the Chosŏn Dynasty, which had been established in 1392. Unlike previous ruling families, the Chosŏn were not patrons of Buddhism. Buddhism continued during their reign, but without the lavish imperial support of the past; the Chosŏn were patrons of the Confucians, and as in China, the Confucians were often critics of Buddhism. As vassals of China, the Koreans refused Hideyoshi’s request. He invaded Korea in 1592. War was waged on land and sea for six years (with a brief truce in 1596), resulting in a massive loss of life on both sides (with Chinese troops fighting on the side of the Koreans). A common practice of the time was for Japanese commanders to be rewarded for the number of enemy heads they were able to deliver to their superiors. The number of heads would be recorded, and the heads would be pickled, packed in wooden casks, and then sent back to Japan in ships. The level of carnage of the Imjin War made this impossible. It was decided that units would instead provide the noses of their victims to someone called the nose collection officer, who would make a record and provide a receipt. Some of these documents survive. Thus, we read that on the twenty-sixth day of the ninth month (of the Japanese lunar calendar), “10,040 noses from the dead were taken by units at Chinwon and Yanggwang.”2

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Among those who fought bravely on the Korean side were a number of “righteous armies” (ŭibyŏng, in Korean), independent militias separate from royal troops. Some of the most famous of these armies, called ŭisŭnggun, were led by and composed of Buddhist monks. As we will see in the cases of the Sri Lankan king Dut t hagāmanī and of the Zen priest Shaku Sōen, Buddhists and ˙˙ ˙ Buddhist monks have had no compunction in recommending, and in some cases engaging, in violence against those they consider enemies of the dharma. Despite its reputation for passivity, Buddhist texts often make use of martial language; one thinks immediately of the Buddha’s “conquest” or “victory” (vijaya) over Māra on the night of his enlightenment. The Mahāyāna sūtras speak often of the armor (samnāha) of the six perfections that the bodhisattva dons in ˙ order to withstand the trials of the long path to buddhahood. The bodhisattva of wisdom, Mañjuśrī, wields a sword. A twelfth-century image of him at the Kōfukuji Temple in Nara is wearing armor beneath his outer robe. Here, however, is a case of Buddhist versus Buddhist. The most famous of the Korean monks to lead a righteous army was Hyujŏng (Ch’ŏnghŏ Hyujŏng, 1520–1604), a respected scholar and abbot and the author of the influential Mirror of the Sŏn House (Sŏn’ga kwigam), first published in Korean in 1569 and in Chinese ten years later. The work explores the fundamental divide in Korean Buddhism (and in other Buddhist traditions) between meditation (sŏn) and doctrine (kyo). During the Chŏson Dynasty, these were not only categories of practice but also the names of schools of Korean Buddhism; by this time, they were the only two schools authorized by the state. Hyujŏng argued for their compatibility, describing “kyo” as the word of the Buddha, and “sŏn” as the mind of the Buddha. He advocated a training sequence in which a monk began with the study of kyo and then moved to sŏn. He called it “relinquishing kyo and entering sŏn” (sagyo ipsŏn). This was not his only effort at accommodation. Prior to becoming a monk, he had trained in a Confucian academy; as a monk, he sought to mollify the antagonism between the dominant Confucians and the often-scorned Buddhists.3 Hyujŏng’s eminence as a scholar and his efforts toward a rapprochement between the Buddhists and Confucians gained him the respect of the Korean king. When the Japanese invaded Korea, the king asked Hyujŏng, who by that time had retired to a mountain hermitage, to aid in the defense of the nation. Hyujŏng agreed and was appointed “Commander of the Monk-Soldiers of the Eight Provinces,” issuing a proclamation enjoining monks to “put on the armor of the mercy of bodhisattvas, hold in hand the treasured sword to fell the devil, wield the lightning bolt of the Eight Deities and come forward. . . . Let the aged

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and weak pray in the monastery. Let the able-bodied come out with their weapons to destroy the enemy and save the land.”4 Most of the men who joined were nonordained monks. The Chosŏn state had severely limited the number of licenses granted for ordination as a monk or nun. Those who fought (and survived) were promised a license. One of Hyujŏng’s disciples, the abbot Yŏnggyu (d. 1592), led a monk militia that retook the city of Ch’ŏngju from the Japanese. When he was killed in a subsequent battle in 1592, the Korean king asked Hyujŏng to assume command, despite his advanced age (he was seventy-two). Hyujŏng agreed and proved to be a skilled battlefield general, remembered especially for the Battle of Pyongyang, where his four thousand monk soldiers joined forces with Korean and Chinese troops to retake what is today the capital of North Korea from the Japanese. In the eighteenth century, the Chosŏn government would erect a shrine to honor Hyujŏng, Yŏnggyu, and the monk-general Yujŏng (1544–1610). Although these shrines were Confucian rather than Buddhist in design, the construction, dedication, and continued support of these shrines to Buddhist monks is further evidence that the Chosŏn attitude toward Buddhism was more complicated than it is often portrayed.5 Japan remained wary of the European powers for much of the early colonial period, being willing to trade, especially with the Dutch, but eventually banning European missionaries, whom they saw as the advance guard of European armies. Japan was famously “opened” when the black ships of Commodore Matthew C. Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay in 1853 and fired their cannons, making the threat of Western control seem all the more real. In 1868, the shogunate collapsed, and power was restored to the emperor, in this case, the emperor Meiji (1852–1912). One of the early acts of the Meiji Restoration was a strict suppression of Buddhism and the promotion of Shintō as the state religion. In 1871, on the suggestion of a Dutch missionary, the emperor sent a diplomatic mission on a three-year tour of Europe and America. Its purpose was to gather information that would allow Japan to emerge from its long “isolation” and become a world power, with the industrial, commercial, educational, and military clout to allow it to become the colonizer rather than the colonized. Called the Iwakura Mission, the delegation would be most impressed in these various domains by Germany. In 1875, Japanese troops aboard the Un’yō, a gunboat that the Japanese had had built in Britain, landed on Ganghwa Island, leading to a battle in which the Japanese troops, armed with repeating rifles, easily defeated the Korean defenders, armed with muskets. Ganghwa Island, located at the mouth of the Han

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River that flows through Seoul, held particular symbolic value for Korean independence. It was here in the thirteenth century that a fortress was built where the Korean royal family could retreat from Mongol invasions, knowing of the Mongols’ fear of sea travel. Korea was attacked by the Mongols nine times during the thirteenth century; during the invasion of 1232, they burned the printing blocks of the Buddhist canon. On February 27, 1876, five months after the battle on Ganghwa Island, Japan and Korea signed a treaty opening Korea to Japanese trade. Relations between the two nations would deteriorate over the final years of the nineteenth century, with Japanese agents assassinating the Korean queen Min in the royal palace in Seoul in 1895. In 1905, Japan displayed its military might to the world with its stinging defeat of Russia. That same year, Japan declared Korea to be a Japanese protectorate. Five years later, Korea became a Japanese colony. Chapter Twenty concludes with the advice of the twentieth-century Tibetan pilgrim Gendun Chopel, who, after a sixteen-month sojourn in Sri Lanka, counseled the Buddhists of the world to acknowledge, respect, and celebrate their shared Buddhist heritage, but to do so from afar. This is easy to do when the countries are Tibet and Sri Lanka, separated by mountains and oceans. It is less easy when those Buddhist lands share a border or are separated by a narrow strait. Here, we are considering two such neighbors, each a major center of Buddhist thought, practice, and culture, Korea and Japan, asking the question: What happens when one Buddhist country colonizes another Buddhist country? Throughout the history of Buddhism, the fortunes of the san˙gha rise and fall based on the level of royal patronage. In Korea, the golden age of Buddhism by this measure was the Unified Silla (668–935) and the early centuries of the Koryŏ (918–1392). With the fall of the Koryŏ and the founding of the Chosŏn, things changed. As noted, the Chosŏn favored Confucianism over Buddhism. Although their attitude toward Buddhism was not the complete suppression that is sometimes described, the level of patronage was severely curtailed.6 Buddhist clerics were no longer an influential presence at court; the number of ordinations was strictly limited; monasteries were closed; and monastic properties were confiscated. At one point during the Chosŏn, there were only thirtysix monasteries in all of Korea. Monks and nuns were prohibited from entering cities, thus excluding them from literary life, consigning them to peasant communities in the mountains and countryside. By the late nineteenth century, Buddhist clerics had not been allowed within the city walls of Seoul for over five hundred years. As had been the case in Japan during the Tokugawa period,

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during the latter days of the Chosŏn, there was a decline in monastic discipline, especially regarding the vow of celibacy, with many monks secretly marrying and having families. This relatively unusual set of circumstances would be exploited by the Japanese Buddhist sects. The Kamakura period (1185–1333) in Japan, so named because the city of Kamakura was the headquarters of the shogun during this time, saw the rise of what are known as the three single practice schools, each of which promised salvation through a single simple practice. Each began in controversy; each would go on to become a powerful school in subsequent centuries. Each had roots in China but made distinctive innovations in Japan. The first of these was Jōdo Shinshū, often referred to in English simply as Shin Buddhism. A famous Indian sūtra called the Sūtra on the Land of Bliss (Sukhāvatīvyūha) promised that those who had faith in the buddha Amitābha would be delivered to his buddha field or pure land upon their death, whence they would achieve buddhahood. Devotion to this text (in both its long and short versions) and to Amitābha became particularly important in China, and from there, in Korea and Japan, spurred in some cases by concerns about the coming age of the final dharma according to which, as the time of the Buddha becomes more distant, enlightenment becomes more difficult, eventually becoming impossible. For some, the grace of Amitābha was the only salvation. Various calculations of the periods of decline suggested that the final age had begun; in Japan, the date was 1052. The Japanese monk Hōnen (1133–1212) took this to mean that no Buddhist practice was efficacious after this date, arguing that one should therefore simply call on Amitābha with the phrase “Namu amida butsu” (Homage to Amitābha Buddha). This argument, presented in 1198 in a work with the innocuous title Collection of Selections (Senchakushū), outraged the other Buddhist schools of the day, leading to Hōnen’s exile. His disciple Shinran (1173–1263) would make even more radical claims, arguing that repeating “Namu amida butsu” multiple times was unnecessary, and that the sole purpose of Śākyamuni Buddha’s appearance in the world was to reveal the existence of Amitābha and his pure land. Hōnen’s tradition is called Jōdo Shū (Pure Land School); Shinran’s is called Jōdo Shinshū (True Pure Land School). The second of the three “single practice” schools of the Kamakura period is known by the name of its founder, Nichiren (1222–1282). He was a monk of the Tendai school, founded by Saichō, which, like the Chinese school from which it took its name—“Tendai” is the Japanese pronunciation of “Tiantai,” the name of the mountain where the Chinese school had its headquarters— revered the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapundarīka) above all others, regarding this ˙˙

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as the highest teaching of the Buddha. Nichiren would argue that the Lotus Sūtra was the only Buddhist text worthy of study, and that the various natural disasters that Japan had suffered in the past and would suffer in the future were the result of the neglect of this text. Like Hōnen, he condensed reverence for his favored sūtra into a single practice, the recitation of the phrase “Namu myōhō renge kyō” (Homage to the Lotus Sūtra). Nichiren was aggressive in the promotion of this practice and in his condemnation of all other forms of Buddhism. This earned him the opprobrium of the other schools and in some instances of the state. He survived an assassination attempt, barely avoided execution, and suffered a long and difficult exile. The third of the three Kamakura period schools is the Sōtō school, founded by the famous Zen master Dōgen (1200–1253). In 1223, he sailed to China, where he studied with a master of the Caodong school. Its practice involved “silent illumination,” in which one manifested one’s buddha nature (tathāgatagarbha). One did not need to struggle with the koans that were the centerpiece of the dominant form of Chan, the Linji school. When Dōgen returned to Japan, where the Linji (pronounced “Rinzai”) school was well-established, he founded his own school, called Sōtō (the Japanese pronunciation of “Caodong”), promoting a practice called “just sitting” (shikan taza), arguing that to sit in the meditation posture is to be a buddha. Like Hōnen and Nichiren, Dōgen also met with resistance from other schools in Kyoto, including Rinzai, causing him to eventually move his headquarters to a rural region in modern Fukui Prefecture. It was there at the newly founded monastery Eiheiji that he composed much of his famous Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (Shōbōgenzō). The reason for this excursus on Japanese Buddhist schools in a chapter on Korean Buddhism is that none of these schools, so famous around the world today, existed in Korea. Koreans prayed to Amitābha, they studied the Lotus Sūtra, and they practiced Zen meditation, but none of these were the foundation of formal schools and none was seen as an exclusive practice. As a result of the hostilities on Ganghwa Island in 1875, Japan and Korea signed a treaty that gave Japan trading rights in Korea. Beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century, each of these Japanese Buddhist schools would send missionaries to Korea. Buddhism in Japan suffered greatly in the years immediately following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The various Buddhist sects soon concluded, individually and collectively, that their future survival depended on their full support of and participation in the imperial project, from incorporating the newly apotheosized emperor into Buddhist rituals to providing both doctrinal justi-

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fication and military chaplains for Japan’s expansionist expeditions. Although the Japanese government did not have a particular interest in Buddhism, condemned during the Meiji as a foreign religion, Korea presented a particular opportunity for the Japanese Buddhist community to contribute to the aims of the empire. As noted above, the Chosŏn Dynasty, which the Japanese sought to overthrow, was strongly Confucian and openly anti-Buddhist. In an effort to reduce Korean antipathy toward Japan, heightened in the wake of the assassination of Queen Min by Japanese agents, Japanese Buddhist leaders, with the support of the Japanese government, sought to dilute ethnic antagonisms by appealing to something deeper, the spiritual kinship of Koreans and Japanese as brother Buddhists. However, rather than emphasizing the kinship between the Buddhists of Korea and Japan, the Japanese missionaries generally followed a different strategy, one in which Japan and Japanese Buddhism are exalted while Korea and Korean Buddhism are debased. Korean Buddhists were criticized for their obsession with “this-worldly benefits” (genze riyaku), a term that has a long history in Japanese Buddhism, occasionally criticized but widely practiced to the present day, where the faithful seek the wonders promised in so many Mahāyāna sūtras. Here, the Koreans were contrasted with the more spiritual Japanese. Korean monks were criticized for their violation of the monastic code by drinking alcohol and eating the prohibited “pungent herbs” and for their poor knowledge of the Buddhist scriptures. The Japanese criticism even extended to some of the masterpieces of Korean Buddhist art. Thus, the Sŏkkuram Buddha, a tenfoot stone image from the eighth century, now considered the most famous buddha image in Korea, was described as this-worldly, feminine, and sentimental.7 That the Japanese sects that participated most fully in the colonial project had never existed in Korea adds additional irony to their quest. It was a priest of the Nichiren sect, Sano Zenrei (1859–1912), who in 1895 successfully petitioned the Korean government to allow Buddhist monks and nuns to enter Seoul for the first time in centuries. Here, we can consider one such effort, that of the Sōtō Zen sect. In some sense, this would seem the most obvious of the schools to seek to establish its influence in Korea, since Korea had a long history of Sŏn practice, albeit one derived from the Chinese Linji (Japanese, Rinzai) school, the predecessor and traditional rival of Sōtō in Japan. The leading Sōtō figure in this effort was Takeda Hanshi (1863–1911). Takeda made no effort to convince Korean monks of the superiority of the Sōtō practice of “just sitting” over the Rinzai practice of struggling with the koans about whether a dog has the buddha nature. In-

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stead, he devised a much more this-worldly strategy, one that would bring all Korean Buddhist temples under the ownership and administrative control of the Sōtō sect in Japan. This rather crude attempt at a land grab needed a Buddhist rationale, however. In 1908, concerned with the growing influence of the Japanese True Pure Land sect in Korea, representatives of fifty-two Korean temples decided to form their own sect, which they called Wŏnjong (Consummate school). They sought Takeda’s counsel on how to best protect their interests. He advised them that this new Korean sect merge with the Sōtō sect in Japan for protection; it was clear that the Korean government would not protect the interests of the Buddhist community from its enemies, including Christian missionaries. He arranged for a Korean monk to go to Japan in 1911 to meet with Sōtō officials about the terms. These terms unsurprisingly strongly favored the Japanese, making the Wŏnjong temples bases from which Sōtō priests would proselytize in Korea. When the terms of the agreement became public, there was widespread protest by Korean Buddhist leaders, including Han Yongun, whom we will meet below. The Japanese governor-general of Korea (Korea had formally become a Japanese colony one year earlier) did not approve the merger.8 Buddhism is often described as a missionary religion. After the Buddha had sixty enlightened followers, he famously instructed these monks to “go forth for the good of the many, for the happiness of the many, out of compassion for the world, for the welfare, the good, and the happiness of gods and humans. Let no two go in the same direction.” It is the case that over more than two millennia, Buddhist monks have carried Buddhist texts, Buddhist icons, and Buddhist teachings around the world. Korea, however, appears to be something of a special case. As noted above, Buddhism was introduced into Japan from Korea, traditionally said to have occurred in 552. More than thirteen hundred years later, Japan sent Buddhist missionaries to its new colony, Korea. And unlike the monks who had carried Buddhism throughout Asia and to the West, the Japanese missionaries were not monks, in the sense that they were not required to keep the vow of celibacy. In 1872, the Meiji government had issued a proclamation that allowed monks to marry, and by the early twentieth century, the majority had done so. Thus, the Korean monastic community was faced with a dilemma. From one perspective, they welcomed the Japanese as co-religionists who lifted many of the restraints under which they had suffered for centuries during the Chosŏn; monks and nuns were now allowed to enter the cities. Yet their fellow Buddhists were not celibate, and many of them promoted views, such as Nichiren’s view of the Lotus Sūtra, that were unknown to the Koreans, who had long regarded them-

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selves as protectors of the Buddhist teachings they had received from China. There is a great deal to say about the Korean Buddhist response to the question of celibacy. Here, we will consider the question from the perspective of one monk who himself had much to say. His name was Han Yongun (1879–1944). The son of a minor official, he had studied the Chinese classics before becoming a Buddhist monk in 1905. Learning of the scientific and social advances of the West—primarily through the works of the Chinese social activist Liang Qichao (1873–1929)—he sought to travel to Europe and America, but was unable to do so. He studied briefly in Japan in 1908, where he was struck by the ways in which the Buddhist monastic community had become integrated into modern Japanese society. Returning to Korea in 1910, the year that his homeland became a Japanese colony, he composed a lengthy and wide-ranging essay entitled Treatise on the Reformation of Korean Buddhism (Chosŏn Pulgyo yusillon). It is an erudite work, replete with quotations and allusions to Buddhist texts and doctrines, Chinese philosophy, history, and poetry, and references to a range of Western figures, including Napoleon and Darwin. In the course of the essay, he suggests a number of major reforms of Buddhist monastic life, arguing that the traditional practices are no longer relevant in the modern world. He thus argues, for example, that the practice of begging for food, traced back to the time of the Buddha, be abandoned and that monks engage in productive labor. An entire section bears the title “The Future of Buddhism Depends on Whether Monks and Nuns Marry.” In arguing against the condemnation of marriage in vinaya texts, he invokes the famous Huayan doctrine of the “interpenetration of phenomena and phenomena” (shishi wu’ai), that not only is the highest reality present in the objects of our experience (lishi wu’ai), but those objects are present in each other, meaning that there are ultimately no distinctions. He also notes that all seven of the previous buddhas had married and fathered a son before renouncing the world; celibacy, he says, was just another expedient device used by the Buddha to teach those who were incapable of understanding the higher teachings, and he did so in accordance with the mores of his times. Those times had changed. In addition to these doctrinal arguments, he also enumerates more practical arguments against celibacy. Celibacy damages the family because it is contrary to filial piety; it damages the state because it reduces population; and it damages the dissemination of Buddhism because few men and women want to take the vow of celibacy. He estimates that there are only five or six thousand monks and nuns in all of Korea in 1910. He argues that all humans, both the wise and the foolish, desire food and sex. These are normal human feelings;

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to attempt to restrain them only causes those desires to increase. History has shown that rules of celibacy are bound to be broken, bringing disrepute to Buddhism. Han Yongun makes it clear that he does not want to rescind the vow of celibacy; he wants to make it a matter of choice for monks and nuns. Many great thinkers of the past have not married. As he writes, “Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Hobbes, Spencer, Locke, Rousseau, Bentham and Kant did not marry and made philosophy their wife.”9 In 1910, Han Yongun submitted two petitions—one to the Japanese authorities and one to the Monastery Supervisory Board—asking that monks be allowed to marry. Both petitions, the texts of which he included in his essay, were ignored. The abbots of the major monasteries continued to resist calls for relaxation of celibacy rules until 1926 when, faced with a growing number of married monks and under pressure from the Japanese authorities, monks were granted permission to marry and to eat meat, just as the Meiji government had done in Japan in 1872. By 1919, Han Yongun had come to the conclusion that meaningful progress for the Korean people was impossible under Japanese colonial rule. He was one of thirty-three signatories of a Korean Declaration of Independence on March 1, 1919, sparking the March 1 Movement. In the months that followed, there were over a thousand demonstrations across Korea in support of freedom from Japanese rule. The movement was brutally repressed by the Japanese, resulting in over seven thousand Koreans killed and over fifteen thousand wounded. Like the other signatories, Han Yongun was arrested and served almost three years in prison. It was in the wake of the March 1 Movement that the Japanese colonial authorities began to institute policies to reform many elements of Korean society on the Japanese model and under Japanese control. It was at this point that the Korean monks were permitted to marry, albeit for reasons rather different than those set forth by Han Yongun. The celibacy issue has continued to haunt Korean Buddhism. With the end of Japanese control of Korea in 1945 and in the aftermath of the Korean War, those Buddhist monks who had remained celibate during the colonial period accused those monks who had married of having collaborated with the Japanese. In 1955, they launched a “purification movement,” demanding that the major monasteries of Korea, whose control had been placed in the hands of married monks by the Japanese colonial government, be returned to the control of the celibate Buddhist clergy.10 This triggered a series of lawsuits and legislative disputes, leading to a 1961 Supreme Court decision that granted control of most of the monasteries in Korea to the celibate clergy. In 1962, the

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celibate monks formed their own order (called the Chogye order). In 1969, the married monks formed their own order (called the T’aego order). Some have speculated that the infighting of the Buddhist monks in the aftermath of the Korean War was one factor in the sharp increase in Christian conversions during this period.11 In 1990, a Korean monk named Pak Samjung of the Chogye order traveled to Kyoto to perform a ceremony that would convey the spirits of those who had lost their noses so long ago back to their Korean homeland. In the years that followed, a local Japanese group gathered signatures for a petition to the municipal authorities requesting that Mimizuka be leveled and its contents, together with the pagoda, be sent to Korea, with the group offering to cover the substantial costs of excavation and transfer. The petitions were denied by city officials on the grounds that the mound had been designated as a Municipal Historic Site in 1986.

16 • Ordination

In 1928, the governor of Nakhon Nayok Province in Thailand decided that his two daughters should become Buddhist nuns. With eight other friends, they received ordination and donned the robes. When the government ordered their arrest, the eight friends quickly returned to lay life. The older daughter of the governor was arrested and her ochre robes removed. Upon her release, she donned white robes and went out on the traditional morning alms round. She was abducted by a man on horseback. Her father was accused of wanting to destroy Buddhism. On June 18 of that year, the Supreme Patriarch of Thai Buddhism, called the San˙gharāja (King of the Monastic Community), issued a proclamation: “Both the Bhikkhuni [fully ordained nun] and Samaneri [novice] lineage has died out. So any Bhikkhu [fully ordained monk] who gives the going forth [ordination] to a woman to become a Samaneri, it can be said that that Bhikkhu is not acting in accordance with the regulations the Buddha laid down. . . . This is something that will jeopardize the Buddhist Religion and is not a good example for other Bhikkhus. Therefore, all monks and novices, in both Nikayas [sects] are forbidden to ordain any woman as a Bhikkhuni, Sikkhamana [postulant], or Samaneri from this day forth.”1 This is known as the Thai Sangha Act of 1928. The contributions that women have made to the history of Buddhism is a vast topic, extending from the origins of the tradition to the present day. These contributions have been made in a number of roles, including mother of the Buddha, empress of China, and bodhisattva of compassion. The most visible role is that of the nun, a term, like monk, that we transfer from Roman Catholicism without particular reflection. In Sanskrit, the term is “bhiksunī” (bhikkhuni, ˙ ˙ 278

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in Pāli), the feminine form of “bhiksu” (bhikkhu, in Pāli), the word translated ˙ as “monk”; it means “female beggar.” As we shall discuss, it is a technical term, describing a particular level of ordination and a particular set of vows; a woman with a shaved head wearing robes is not necessarily a bhiksunī. ˙ ˙ As one might imagine in a tradition so dominated by celibate males since its founding, Buddhist nuns have faced a myriad of challenges over the past two and a half millennia, challenges that continue to the present day in much of the Buddhist world (a world that now extends to the West), challenges that in some ways can be traced back to the story, or perhaps, the creation myth, of the founding of the order. This story occurs in the vinaya, the monastic code. But each of the several schools of Buddhism in India (traditionally counted as eighteen) had its own code, and so there are many versions of the story, with interesting variations. The version I will recount here is the most famous, occurring in the Pāli canon, and hence the version regarded as canonical in the Theravāda tradition of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia.2 The story begins five years after the Buddha’s enlightenment, when the Buddha visits his home city of Kapilavastu to see his dying father, giving him teachings that cause the king to become an arhat before he dies. His aunt and stepmother, Mahāprajāpatī, who had raised him since the death of his mother seven days after his birth and was now a widow, comes to him and asks that women be allowed to “go forth from the home into homelessness in the dharma and the discipline proclaimed by the Tathāgata.”3 In other words, she asks that women be allowed to become nuns. The Buddha would famously only assent to a request when it was made three times, but here he refuses each time. Mahāprajāpatī rises, tears streaming down her cheeks, circumambulates her stepson, and departs. The Buddha and his monks then depart for the city of Vaiśālī. Unbeknownst to them, they are followed by a large number of women from Kapilavastu, many of them the mothers or former wives of the monks, led by Mahāprajāpatī. They have shaved their heads and donned the robes of a monk. Mahāprajāpatī, her royal feet swollen from walking barefoot, stands weeping outside the hall where the Buddha is staying. Ānanda notices her and asks why she is crying. She replies that the Buddha has refused to ordain women. Ānanda says that he will go ask the Buddha on her behalf. He explains the situation to the Buddha and says that it would be good if the Buddha did allow women to “go forth from the home into the homeless life in the dharma and the vinaya made known by the Tathāgata.” The Buddha warns him not to advocate for the ordination of women.

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As was the case with Mahāprajāpatī, the Buddha denies Ānanda’s second and third request. When the Buddha declined a request a third time, his decision was considered final. But in a rare moment in Buddhist literature, the Buddha is convinced to change his mind. Addressing the Buddha a fourth time, Ānanda begins with a hypothetical question, asking if a woman were able to go forth to the home­ less life, would she be able to attain the four stages of the path to nirvānā: the ˙ stream-enterer, once-returner, never-returner, and arhat. The Buddha replies that she would. Ānanda then plays on childhood guilt, reminding the Buddha that it was Mahāprajāpatī who nursed him after his mother died. Ānanda does not then state the conclusion that, because women can achieve liberation and because Mahāprajāpatī raised the Buddha, she should be allowed to go forth. The Buddha seems to draw the unstated conclusion himself and agrees to allow his stepmother to become a nun. However, he immediately states some conditions. These are the famous gurudharma (garudhamma, in Pāli), literally, the eight “heavy rules,” which nuns must obey in addition to the vows kept by a monk. They remain a highly controversial topic, with much analysis dedicated to their authenticity, that is, to the question of whether they were in fact imposed by the Buddha. They therefore require some discussion.4 The first rule (in this version of the list), and the most immediately objectionable to modern sensibility, has to do with deference. The Buddha’s order of monks is renowned for its egalitarianism, something unusual within the caste hierarchies of ancient India. Thus, a monk’s status within the san˙gha was not based on his caste or his previous wealth or power, or even on his age, but instead on the length of time that he had been a monk. Thus, a man of fifty years of age who had been a monk for five years would have to defer (in terms of such things as bowing, the location of his seat in the assembly, and so on) to a man of thirty years of age who had been a monk for ten years. The first of the heavy rules, however, defines deference entirely in terms of gender, saying, “A nun who has been ordained [even] for a century must greet respectfully, rise up from her seat, salute with joined palms, do proper homage to a monk ordained but that day. And this rule is to be honoured, respected, revered, venerated, never to be transgressed during her life.”5 The second rule states that a nun may not spend the annual rains retreat— the three-month monsoon period when monks and nuns are not allowed to travel—without a monk present. The third rule has to do with the fortnightly confession ceremony, in which the monks and nuns in a given region gather to recite the monastic code. It states that every fortnight, a nun must ask a

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monk for the date of the confession ceremony and ask for an exhortation to follow the eight rules. The fourth rule states that at the end of the rains retreat, a nun must invite both the order of monks and the order of nuns to report anything negative that they had seen, heard, or suspected about her. Fifth, a nun who has violated a serious rule must do penance for two weeks. The sixth of the heavy rules adds an additional step to the process of advancing to full ordination. A monk would typically be ordained as a novice (śrāmanera) and be required to keep ten vows, promising to abstain from (1) kill˙ ing, (2) stealing, (3) sexual misconduct, (4) lying, (5) using intoxicants, (6) eating after midday, (7) singing, dancing, or playing music, (8) adorning the body with garlands or perfumes, (9) sleeping on high beds, and (10) accepting gold or silver. After a certain amount of time as a novice, he could be ordained as a full monk. Women keep the same ten vows as novice nuns (śrāmanerikā), but ˙ prior to moving to full ordination, they must pass through an additional state, called śiksamānā, which means something like “trainee” and is often trans˙ ˙ lated (again using the Roman Catholic vocabulary) as “postulant.” Apparently redundantly, this stage requires keeping the first six vows of the list above. However, the requirement here is that these vows be maintained for at least two years prior to full ordination. There is much speculation about the origins of this additional stage, with some arguing that it was meant to prevent pregnant women from being ordained as full nuns, while others argue that it was meant to provide a time for women to become familiar with the rules of monastic life. The Buddha specifies that the postulant should receive ordination from both the order of monks and the order of nuns. The seventh and eighth rules return us to the clear double standard of the first. The seventh heavy rule states that a nun may never revile or insult a monk. The eighth states that a nun may never admonish a monk (even, presumably, when it is justified), while a monk may admonish a nun. Each of the eight rules ends with the statement, “And this rule is to be honored, respected, revered, venerated, never to be transgressed during her life.”6 With the Buddha’s permission received and his stipulations stated, Ānanda then goes to Mahāprajāpatī and repeats these rules, explaining that their acceptance is a condition of her ordination. She gladly accepts, and the Buddha declares her to be a fully ordained nun (apparently waiving the two-year probationary period for his stepmother). Once she has accepted the rules (which functions as her ordination), Mahāprajāpatī seems to have a second thought, asking the Buddha whether one of the eight rules might be changed, suggesting that it would be appropriate that the decorum of seniority apply equally to

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monks and nuns, rather than a nun always needing to defer to a monk despite her seniority. The Buddha rejects her request immediately, saying that no other sect allows men to pay respect to women, and therefore his should not. To make this clear, he declares that it is a transgression of the code for a monk to stand to greet a woman.7 The Buddhist monastic code is represented as evolving over time. In the early years of the Buddha’s teaching, there was no need for vows. Monks achieved one of the four stages of enlightenment (stream-enterer, once-returner, neverreturner, and arhat) quickly, sometimes after simply hearing a single discourse. The conduct of a monk who has achieved even the first of these four stages is said to be naturally ethical, obviating a code of conduct. As the renown of the Buddha grew, so did the san˙gha, attracting those of less noble motivation and less rapid progress on the path. It became necessary to regulate this growing community. According to various traditions, this need first occurred five, twelve, or twenty years after the Buddha’s enlightenment. Whenever it occurred, however, the Buddha did not set forth the fully elaborated monastic code of 227 rules (in the Pāli vinaya). Instead, rules were added one by one. It was only after a particular transgression occurred that the Buddha would establish a rule against it. Although the story of the ordination of women suggests that it occurred just five years after the Buddha’s enlightenment, it presents the full monastic code and the procedure for the ordination of monks as already in place. The presence of women in the order immediately raises a host of unanticipated problems, forcing the Buddha to make one new rule after another in the days after granting his stepmother’s request. A notorious group of monks known simply as the Group of Six expose themselves to some nuns. When this is reported to the Buddha, he makes a rule against it, the punishment being that nuns do not need to pay respect to monks who do so. Then, a notorious group of nuns known simply as the Group of Six expose themselves to some monks. The Buddha makes a rule against this, the punishment being that the nuns are prohibited from receiving instruction. Some nuns begin adding flounces to their robes, others wear makeup, yet others wear robes that are green, yellow, red, or black, robes with borders of flowers, robes with jackets. When one examines the reasons why the Buddha makes a particular rule, it is often because a monk or nun is doing something that offends the sensibility of the laity. That is the case here, with people complaining that nuns who wear makeup and wear fashionable robes are no different from laywomen. The Buddha therefore made rules prohibiting all these

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things. Next, someone reports that the nuns’ menstrual blood is soiling the cushions of the monastery. The Buddha proposes a variety of solutions, none of which work, finally allowing nuns to wear a loincloth. When the Group of Six nuns start wearing a loincloth all the time, the people complain that they are no different from laywomen. The Buddha therefore amends the rule to permit a loincloth only during menstruation.8 There were many new rules that were required, resulting in a much longer list of vows for nuns, who were required to observe the existing code for men as well as all the vows required only for women, resulting in a list of 311 vows in the Pāli vinaya. The Buddhist order was, at least in its code, extremely conservative on questions of gender identity. At the time of ordination, monks were asked a series of questions to ensure that they were not in debt, criminals, soldiers (seeking to avoid military service), as well as whether they were human (and not creatures impersonating humans) and whether they were afflicted with any of a long list of illnesses. All of these were disqualifications. They were also asked if they were eunuchs or hermaphrodites. Again, according to the tradition, each of these prohibitions first occurred after such a person had been ordained. In the account of the ordination of nuns, we read, “Now at that time ordained women were to be seen without sexual characteristics and who were defective in sex and bloodless and with stagnant blood and who were always dressed and dripping and deformed and female eunuchs and man-like women and those whose sexuality was indistinct and those who were hermaphrodites.”9 When the Buddha was informed of this, he declared that women who sought ordination needed to state that they were free from such conditions. However, when women were asked these questions by monks during the ordination ceremony, they were embarrassed to answer and remained silent. Therefore, he added a new rule, stating that these questions should be asked by “an experienced, competent nun.” The monastic code required that for a man to be ordained as a monk, there must be ten monks present to perform the ceremony, five if the ordination was taking place in a “borderland,” generally meant to be a place outside of Indian civilization. The Buddha had previously said that nuns would be ordained by monks. Now, he stipulated that a woman who had passed the physical examination to be ordained as a nun must be ordained first by ten nuns and then by ten monks, with the same exception of five each made for a borderland: there must be five nuns and five monks. This rule would have unexpected consequences in the centuries that followed. The story of the ordination of women would seem to have turned out well, relatively speaking, until the Buddha tells Ānanda that if he had not agreed to

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the ordination of women, his teaching would have lasted for a thousand years, but now that he has done so, it will only last for five hundred. He goes on to compare a dharma and vinaya (that is, the Buddhist order) that includes women to a household with many women and few men, leaving it susceptible to thieves; to a wheat field that suffers an insect infestation called “white as bones”; and to a sugarcane crop that suffers a blight called “red rot.” None of these will last long. The Buddha tells Ānanda that he has imposed the eight heavy rules as a dike to hold back the eventual inundation. The Buddha’s prophecy of the duration of his teaching is the most famous of many such predictions of what is usually translated as the “decline of the dharma,” a concept of sufficient ubiquity and importance to be a technical term— saddharmavipralopa—literally, the “destruction of the true dharma.” This is the idea that the dharma gradually disappears in the centuries after the Buddha’s passage into nirvāna. It is an idea that comes to have great importance across ˙ the Buddhist world, where all manner of prophecies are cited concerning the duration of the dharma, with the periods ranging from as short as five hundred years to as long as twelve thousand years (in some Chinese sources); other figures include seven hundred, one thousand, one thousand five hundred, two thousand, two thousand five hundred, and five thousand years.10 The Theravāda tradition tends to follow the chronology set forth by the great fifth-century scholar Buddhaghosa, who describes a process of decline that extends over five thousand years, with specific losses in each millennium. Thus, at the end of the first millennium, it will be impossible for anyone to attain the first stage of enlightenment, that of the stream-enterer. By the end of the fourth millennium, all signs of monastic life will have disappeared, with monks returning to lay life. The Theravāda tradition therefore does not seem to place much stock in the Buddha’s prophecy that his teaching will last five hundred years, a prophecy that is noteworthy for a number of reasons, including its brevity and the fact that the Buddha allowed women to be ordained, and yet the dharma and the vinaya have lasted more than five hundred years. However, prophecies tend to tell us more about the present (that is, the time when the prophecy was made) than they do about the future. That there is a text predicting that Nāgārjuna will appear in the world four hundred years after the Buddha’s passage into nirvāna suggests that the prophecy was made, and ˙ that Nāgārjuna lived more than four hundred years after the Buddha’s passing (whenever that was). A similar prophecy about Asan˙ga appearing six hundred years after his nirvāna provides the same information. But prophecies can tell ˙ us more than the dates of historical figures, as important as that is, especially

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in Indian Buddhism, where the precise determination of the dates of Buddhist authors is often exceedingly difficult. They also tell us about the obsessions of the day. And when they are prophecies of the disappearance of the dharma, these predictions of the future become laments of the present. If we assume for the sake of argument that the author of the account of the ordination of women knew and accepted the traditional Theravāda date of the Buddha’s passing—544 BCE—and if we assume that, like other Buddhist prophets, the author was describing his present, then we can date the description of the establishment of the order of nuns to the last decades before the Common Era, that is, five hundred years after the traditional Theravāda date of the death of the Buddha. If we calculate the death of the Buddha as 218 years before the coronation of Aśoka, the Buddha would have passed into nirvāna in ˙ 486 BCE, placing the prophecy in the second decade of the Common Era. All of this is based on the admittedly questionable assumption that the figure of five hundred years is accurate and not just a large round number. One factor in favor of its accuracy is that among the many prophecies of the duration of the dharma, the figure of five hundred years is shockingly short.11 What is important for our purposes is that, if we assume that the prophecy about the ordination of women is describing the present rather than the future, then the author of the prophecy was saying that, because of the presence of nuns, Buddhism was essentially over around the beginning of the Common Era. From this, we can speculate that just five hundred years (a brief period in Buddhist time, which is generally measured in eons) after the time of the Buddha, there were influential monks who felt that the dharma and the vinaya were disappearing and that the ordination of women was the cause; the dike that the Buddha had built had broken. This could have been because these monks felt that the presence of women placed their vow of celibacy in danger, a fear that we find throughout the canon. It could also have been because they felt that the order of nuns had grown too strong, requiring the invention of more and more rules to control them. Because this is one of the shortest of the many prophecies of the disappearance of the dharma, a rare prophecy whose time came and went some two thousand years ago, then we can say with some confidence that that prophecy was wrong about the duration of the dharma. However, the monks were right, or at least partially right, about the duration of the order of fully ordained nuns. Epigraphic evidence in the form of donative dedications by nuns suggests that the order of nuns survived, and perhaps even flourished, in India until the fifth century, several centuries after its predicted demise. Yet the order of nuns would eventually disappear, not only in

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India but in other parts of the Buddhist world. There has been much speculation as to the causes, which were certainly multiple. The monastic code (prātimoksa) has many categories of vows, based on the ˙ punishment that their violation entails. The heaviest penalty is permanent expulsion from the order, with the monastic code identifying four such violations, called “downfalls,” for a monk: (1) deriving pleasure from the penetration, even to the depth of a sesame seed, of a human, non-human (which includes any number of spirits), or animal, awake, asleep, or dead, through any of the three orifices; (2) stealing; (3) murdering or abetting the murder of a human being; and (4) lying, which in this particular case, means claiming spiritual powers that one does not possess. Nuns were liable for expulsion for these four misdeeds, but with the stipulation that the sexual partner is male, plus four others that were not enumerated for monks: the first of these is lustfully allowing a lustful male to touch her body between the collarbone and the knee. As the vinaya text states, “Whatever nun, filled with desire, should consent to rubbing, or rubbing up against, or taking hold of or touching or pressing against a male person below the collar-bone, above the circle of the knees, if he is filled with desire, she also becomes one who is defeated, she is not in communion, she is one who touches above the circle of the knees.”12 The other three are failing to report that another nun has committed a misdeed that entails expulsion from the order; following a disreputable monk, despite having been warned three times not to do so; and lustfully allowing a lustful man to hold her hand or touch her robe, lustfully standing with such a man, conversing with him, going to a rendezvous with him, allowing him to approach her, going to a secret place with him, or stretching her body toward him. One of the factors considered to have played a role in the disappearance of the order of fully ordained nuns from India is the heavy burden of vows they had to bear: the eight heavy rules were not the only additional requirements. Provisions had to be made for nuns who were pregnant or nursing, allowing mothers to keep their children with them until they were weaned, at which point they would be given to relatives.13 Travel for a woman was often so dangerous that a nun was not allowed to travel alone, and a provision had to be established for a woman to be ordained via a messenger rather than risk dangerous travel to a nunnery. These various rules—some for women’s protection, most for women’s restraint—caused the number of vows held by a fully ordained nun greatly to exceed those held by a fully ordained monk. As noted above, in the Pāli vinaya followed in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, there are 227 vows for monks and 311 vows for nuns; in the Dharmaguptaka tradition

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followed in China, there are 250 vows for monks and 348 vows for nuns; in the Mūlasarvāstivāda tradition followed in Tibet, there are 253 vows for monks and 364 for nuns. Thus, fully ordained nuns were expected to hold, depending on the particular code, approximately 40 percent more vows than fully ordained monks. These vows differed both in number and in content. The differences were minor in many cases, consequential in others. For example, in the Mūlasarvāstivāda vinaya, the four famous “downfalls” did not necessarily entail expulsion. In the same code, the danger zone in which a lustful nun could not be touched by a lustful male extended from the knees to the eyes. Scholars have noted a number of distinctive features concerning the Buddha’s interactions with the order of nuns. In other situations of bringing new members into the monastic order, as in the case of groups of ascetics from other traditions, the Buddha often ordains them, en masse, himself. In the case of the nuns, he never formally ordains Mahāprajāpatī, telling her that her acceptance of the eight heavy rules constitutes her ordination. In the Pāli version of the story, he goes on to say that the five hundred women who accompanied her will be ordained by monks. Quite surprisingly, nowhere in the five famous nikāyas of the Pāli canon does the Buddha speak directly to an individual nun, although he speaks to individual women, such as his patron, the courtesan Āmrapālī. Furthermore, in the lengthy account of the Buddha’s final days and passage into nirvāna, no nuns are mentioned as being present. This has led ˙ some to suggest that the order of nuns was established after the death of the Buddha, but prior to the reign of Aśoka; nuns are mentioned in his rock edicts.14 This would mean that the story of the ordination of nuns is a fiction, perhaps composed by monks who opposed it. Because the order of nuns had been established, its origin needed to be traced to the original source of the dharma and the vinaya, the Buddha himself. As we have seen, it is not portrayed as something that he initiated or even supported. It was something suggested by his stepmother and encouraged by Ānanda. The Buddha only grudgingly agrees to the inclusion of women, predicting its negative effect on the life span of his teaching. If this were not enough, in another account of a likely legendary event, the First Council, Ānanda is charged with a series of crimes, including encouraging the Buddha to establish the order of nuns. Yet the order of nuns would survive, although not without travails. Here, we might pause to consider who became nuns. The story of their ordination is again instructive. It was said in ancient India that a woman was protected by her father in her youth, by her husband in her middle age, and by her son in her old age. We note that Mahāprajāpatī only asks the Buddha to

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allow her to ordain after she has become a widow; in one sense, she is asking to come under her son’s protection. We note that in the Pāli account, he eventually agrees, but ordains only her—and then, just by implication—and does not ordain the five hundred Śākya women. We note also that these women include the wives and mothers of many of the Buddha’s monks; there are numerous stories in the vinaya of women whose husbands leave them to become monks eventually becoming nuns themselves. Although the demography of the Buddhist san˙gha in India is difficult to determine, it does appear that many of the women who joined the order were unmarried daughters, widows, women seeking to escape a bad marriage, and women whose husbands had abandoned them to become monks. This would continue elsewhere in the Buddhist world. In Japan, Tōkeiji—a former nunnery in Kamakura where D. T. Suzuki is buried— was known locally as the Divorce Temple. Any woman who remained within its walls for two years was considered to be divorced.15 The order of nuns would be established in Sri Lanka. According to a Sri Lankan chronicle, it was brought by the nun San˙ghamittā (Friend of the San˙gha), daughter of the emperor Aśoka. He had previously sent his son, the monk Mahinda, to carry the dharma to the island and establish the order of monks. Now, he sent his daughter, who sailed to the island on a perilous voyage, bringing with her a cutting from the Bodhi Tree. Regardless of whether the order of nuns was established in Sri Lanka by that early date, it is clear that it was wellestablished by the fifth century, the time when the story was recounted in the Great Chronicle (Mahāvamsa) of Sri Lanka. It was then that a delegation of Sri ˙ Lankan nuns sailed to China. According to Chinese sources, the first Chinese woman to become a nun was Jingjian (c. 292–361). However, she was ordained only by monks, contrary to the stipulations set forth by the Buddha. In 429, a ship captain named Nanti brought a group of eight Sri Lankan nuns to the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty. Because there were fewer than the required ten, they decided not to ordain Chinese women until enough nuns had arrived; although China was likely a borderland from the Indian perspective, it was still the Middle Kingdom. This did not occur until four years later, when a second group of eleven nuns made the voyage from Sri Lanka to China, ordaining some three hundred Chinese women in 433.16 It is not clear which of the several systems of vows known in China at the time was used, or whether the Sri Lankan nuns administered the Pāli vows that they themselves held. It is also unclear whether the Sri Lankan nuns gave the vows in Chinese; it is said that the Kashmiri monk Gunavarman (367–431), who had arranged for the nuns to be brought ˙

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from Sri Lanka, had ordered the first group who arrived to learn Chinese while they awaited the arrival of their sisters. In 709, the Dharmaguptaka vinaya was declared orthodox in China by imperial decree. In the late Ming Dynasty, a system called the triple platform ordination (santan dajie) was established, where, over the course of several weeks, rituals were to be performed to bestow first lay vows, then monastic vows, and then bodhisattva vows (as set forth in Brahmā’s Net Sūtra, the Fanwang jing).17 This system remains in place in China to the present day. From China, the order of nuns spread to Korea and Japan. In Korea, an order of fully ordained nuns was established and continues today. In Japan, it seems that there were never ten fully ordained nuns present at the same time, meaning that the order of nuns was never established, at least according to the traditional process. Many women were ordained, however, as novices (śrāmanerikā), ˙ and nunneries were established for them by the government throughout Japan; the nuns’ duties included reciting sūtras for the well-being of the nation. After the establishment of the bodhisattva ordination platform at Mount Hiei, women could receive the bodhisattva precepts set forth in the Brahmā’s Net Sūtra, which in Saichō’s Tendai school were considered to be superior to the traditional vows for monks and nuns. This did not stop some women from seeking to become fully ordained nuns. A monk’s ordination is not considered to be legitimate unless the monks who ordain him have maintained their vows. As mentioned earlier, this is considered serious enough that when the young Fourteenth Dalai Lama was ordained as a novice in 1942, the regent of Tibet, who typically would have ordained him, was forced to step down because it was known that he had broken the vow of celibacy. In Japan, the monk Eison (1201–1290) suspected that his own ordination had been invalid for those reasons. He knew that the bodhisattva vows could be received via “self-ordination,” in which, through meditation and prayer, one receives a vision of the conferral of the vows. Although selfordination was not allowed for the monk’s vows, in 1236, he and three other monks who also had concerns about the legitimacy of their own previous ordination decided to ordain themselves; in fact, they performed self-ordination for the vows of a lay disciple, a novice, and a fully ordained monk, according to the Dharmaguptaka vinaya. With this self-ordination, they soon began ordaining others. As noted above, the ordination of nuns required the presence of fully ordained nuns, who did not exist at the time. Among the strategies that they employed, one of Eison’s confederates, the monk Kyōen, turned into a nun (with the assistance of a deity), ordained his sister and other women, and turned back

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into a monk three weeks later. From the point of view of the monastic code, this meant that the 250 vows he kept as a fully (self )-ordained monk suddenly became the 348 vows of a fully ordained nun, and then turned back into the 250 vows of a monk. Eison and his confederates decided that this was not an issue.18 In his account of his travels, Xuanzang describes the stūpas of the Buddha’s most famous disciples and which groups make offerings to them. Thus, those who study the abhidharma make offerings at the stūpa of Śāriputra, to whom the Buddha gave those teachings; those who study the vinaya make offerings at the stūpa of Upāli, who recited the vinaya at the First Council. One might expect that those who recite the sūtras would make offerings at the stūpa of Ānanda, who recited the sūtras at the First Council. However, Xuanzang reports that it is nuns who make offerings at his stūpa. Xuanzang reports this, but he does not mention any nunneries in his extensive demography of Indian Buddhism; scholars speculate that the order of fully ordained nuns had disappeared in India by the ninth century. It was never established in Tibet, where the ordained women hold novice vows. The requirement that a woman be ordained by ten fully ordained nuns became an impediment to the survival of the order. Buddhism in Sri Lanka suffered greatly during almost five centuries of war with the Chola kings of South India. The Buddhist king Vijayabāhu I defeated the Cholas in 1070. When he sought to restore the san˙gha, he could not find the minimum five fully ordained monks and nuns to conduct ordinations. He therefore requested that the king of Burma send a delegation of elders to the island. However, he only sent monks, meaning that the order of monks was revived; the order of nuns died in Sri Lanka. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the monastic code in Buddhism. Both Faxian (in 399) and Yijing (in 671) made the perilous trip to India to retrieve the vinaya, feeling that it was not being properly practiced in China. This was complicated by the presence of a number of vinayas. The schools of Indian Buddhism had their own monastic codes, similar on most points but nonetheless different; each considered its code to be the one set forth by the Buddha. Six of those codes survive in full. Each requires the requisite number of monks and nuns from their own lineage to perform ordination. This has presented significant challenges to efforts over the past century to establish or reestablish the order of nuns, efforts that continue to the present day.19 The only unbroken lineage of fully ordained nuns is the Four-Part Vinaya (Sifen lu) of the Dharmaguptaka school of India, preserved only in Chinese and

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practiced only in East Asia. This means that it is only in this tradition that there are the requisite ten (or five) bhiksunī necessary to perform the ordination rit˙ ˙ ual. As mentioned above, the order of bhiksunī was never established in Tibet, ˙ ˙ where the monks follow a different vinaya, the Mūlasarvāstivāda. Thus, when nuns of the Tibetan tradition (which today includes many Western women) have sought bhiksunī ordination, they have had to receive it from Chinese nuns of a ˙ ˙ different vinaya, something that Tibetan monks do not regard as legitimate. The same holds true in the Theravāda countries, where the order of bhiksunī ˙ ˙ has either died out or was never established. Efforts to revive it or establish it can always be countered by things like the Sangha Act of 1928 in Thailand. Still, the order of nuns has been revived in Sri Lanka. In 1998, a group of bhiksunī ˙ ˙ from Taiwan traveled to India, where they ordained a group of Sri Lankan woman, thus returning the favor of 433. This time, they traveled not by sea, but by air.

17 • Orthodoxy

In 1886, a Japanese monk named Shaku Kōzen (1849–1924) sailed from Japan to the island of Sri Lanka. Although already a monk, in Sri Lanka he requested and received ordination, first as a novice, and later as a fully ordained bhikkhu (Pāli for “bhiksu”) This commitment required him to adopt practices that were ˙ repellent to a Japanese of the day, including eating with his fingers, walking barefoot, using water instead of toilet paper (which had been used in Japan since the Edo period), blowing his nose with his hand, and eating whatever was placed in his begging bowl, including meat. His apparently redundant deed of ordination as a Buddhist monk seems strange. Had he transgressed his vows and thus required reordination? Had he renounced the Mahāyāna and its ideal of the bodhisattva to embrace the Hīnayāna and its ideal of the arhat? He had different reasons. In order to understand his decision, it is necessary to go back to an earlier time and to ponder the nature of Buddhist vows. According to tradition, the monastic code developed organically. The first disciples of the Buddha quickly became arhats, destroying the desire, hatred, and ignorance that motivate misdeeds. As a result, they were not in need of a code of conduct. The first disciples also did not require an elaborate ordination process. The Buddha simply said, “Ehi bhiksu” (Come, monk), and they were or˙ dained. Later, when he learned that a man who sought ordination from him had died en route, he allowed his monks to ordain monks through a relatively simple process. It was only years after the Buddha’s first sermon that the community of monks came to include monks, and then nuns, who were capable of misconduct. However, rather than set forth a full monastic code, the Buddha banned infractions as they were committed. The first infraction was sex-

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ual intercourse, when the monk Sudinna made love to his former wife, at the request of his mother, in order to produce an heir for the family fortune. An extensive code of conduct eventually evolved, with various classes of infraction, and sanctions ranging from expulsion to confession. Each of the many schools of Indian Buddhism had its own code. Among those that are observed to the present day, the Mūlasarvāstivāda code, followed in Tibet, lists 253 infractions for fully ordained monks (bhiksu) and 364 for fully ordained nuns ˙ (bhiksunī); the Dharmaguptaka followed in East Asia (where it is referred to ˙ ˙ as the Four-Part Vinaya) lists 250 for monks and 348 for nuns; the Theravāda school of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia lists 227 infractions for monks and 311 for nuns. This remains the norm in much of the Buddhist world, with the exception of Japan. In 1872, the Japanese government proclaimed that Buddhist monks were henceforth allowed to eat meat and have wives, which most of them did. However, the monastic vows had been called into question in Japan centuries before. In Western-language discussions of Buddhism, we often read of the “bodhisattva vow,” the promise to achieve buddhahood for the welfare of all sentient beings. This vow tends to be associated with the Mahāyāna, but it occurred first in the Nikāya schools. It was in the Mahāyāna that it ceased to be the rare commitment of a rare individual who makes the vow in the presence of a buddha and receives a prophecy of his future buddhahood, and was instead transformed into a vow that all are encouraged to take. Far less well-known are the bodhisattva vows (plural), a set of promises to refrain from certain deeds. These vows are set forth in various works of the Indian Mahāyāna, including in the ethics (śīla) chapter of Stages of the Bodhisattva (Bodhisattvabhūmi) by the renowned fourth-century monk Asan˙ga. Like the monastic code, they contain both primary and secondary infractions (eighteen primary and forty-six secondary). It is a fascinating list, worthy of analysis. It includes such predictable things as vowing not to abandon the vow to liberate all beings from suffering (or encourage others to abandon it), vowing to always accept an apology, and vowing not to praise oneself and belittle others. The bodhisattva makes a vow never to deny that the Mahāyāna sūtras are the word of the Buddha, suggesting, as other sources confirm, that there were many Buddhists who did. The list also includes such intriguing things as vowing not to beat and imprison monks and nuns. Offering some insight into the economy of Mahāyāna Buddhism in India, the bodhisattva vows not to accept gifts that are intended for the three jewels. Suggesting tension between the two traditional occupations of the monk, it is a

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violation to take offerings intended for monks who meditate and give them to monks who recite sūtras. Among the secondary vows, one finds the vow to always be willing to engage in the seven physical and verbal misdeeds (killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, harsh speech, divisive speech, and senseless speech) in order to benefit others, a vow that raises a host of interesting questions for virtue ethics.1 It is clear that Asan˙ga regards the bodhisattva vows as a code to supplement, rather than replace, the vows of monks and nuns. Indeed, he presents what he calls the threefold ethics. The first, which he calls the ethics of restraint (samvaraśīla), are the vows of monks and nuns to refrain from misdeeds of ˙ body and speech. The second, called the ethics of accumulating virtuous qualities, includes the famous six perfections that result in the qualities of a buddha. The third, called the ethics of acting for the welfare of sentient beings, are, as the name suggests, those deeds that benefit others. In East Asia, the most influential delineation of the bodhisattva vows was found in a text called the Brahmā’s Net Sūtra (Fanwang jing), one of many Chinese texts that present themselves as an Indian sūtra, but are regarded by scholars as apocryphal, likely composed in China (and in Chinese) in the fifth century. It would prove to be highly influential in China, Korea, and Japan, overshadowing and in some cases displacing the so-called Hīnayāna monastic code of India. The sūtra contains ten primary vows and forty-eight secondary vows. The main vows are not to kill for pleasure, not to steal, not to engage in sexual misconduct, not to lie, not to sell alcohol, not to speak about the faults of other Buddhists (monastic or lay), not to praise oneself and belittle others, not to be greedy or abusive, not to be resentful and refuse to accept apologies, and not to disparage the three jewels.2 In each case, the vow states that it is a violation to commit the misdeed oneself as well as to encourage others to do so. When compared to the bodhisattva vows of Asan˙ga, this is a very different list, with nothing among the primary vows that is not found in the larger monastic code and nothing that marks the list as somehow “Mahāyāna.”3 Indeed, the first five are versions of the famous fivefold ethics (pañcaśīla), the vows taken by the Buddhist laity: not to kill, not to steal, not to engage in sexual misconduct, not to lie, and not to use intoxicants. Instead, the vows appear to constitute a set of rules, called the ten-part bodhisattva prātimoksa, that could be followed by ˙ monks, nuns, and laity alike. The forty-eight secondary vows are a rather disparate list. They include a vow against eating meat, a vow against consuming the “five pungent herbs” (garlic, scallions, leeks, onions, and asafetida, said to cause anger when eaten

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raw, lust when eaten cooked, and bad breath that drives away the gods), as well as vows not to store weapons, not to serve as an emissary for an army, not to start fires, not to fail to perform the administrative duties of the monastery, not to engage in wrong livelihood (which encompasses a range of occupations including sex trafficking, cooking, various forms of fortune-telling, making medicines and poisons, and producing gold and silver), not to be lax in retrieving Buddhist scriptures and images that have been bought by non-Buddhists, and not to sit in the wrong place in the monastic assembly. It is among the fortyeight secondary vows that one finds several with Mahāyāna themes, such as vowing not to preach the Hīnayāna sūtras and monastic code, vowing to free captive animals, and vowing not to abandon the aspiration to buddhahood (bodhicitta).4 Among the many clues to the Chinese origin of the text is the fact that in India, there was no “Hīnayāna monastic code”; there were only the monastic codes of various mainstream schools, followed by both monks who did and monks who did not accept the Mahāyāna sūtras as the word of the Buddha. The most obvious difference between this list and the traditional prātimoksa ˙ vows of India is its length. Even by adding the forty-eight secondary vows, the Brahmā’s Net Sūtra has some two hundred fewer vows, immediately making it a more attractive code. Adding to its attraction is that it lacks the many vows in the Indian codes that are so locally Indian, involving elements of the Indian environment, from flora, to calendar, to decorum, that are utterly foreign to China— so foreign, in fact, that their names were difficult to translate into Chinese. This is not to say that interest in the Indian vinaya disappeared. There was a strong tradition of exegesis of what the Chinese called the Four-Part Vinaya, first translated from Sanskrit into Chinese in 405. For example, the monk Daoxuan (596– 667), a disciple of Xuanzang, wrote an influential commentary on the text. Xuan­ zang himself, having lived under the India monastic code during his years in South Asia, remained committed to its transmission and practice. The situation in Japan was different. According to the ancient Chronicles of Japan (Nihon shoki), Buddhism was formally introduced into Japan in 552, when the king of Paekche (in modern South Korea) sent a delegation of monks and nuns carrying sūtras and an image of the Buddha to the emperor of Japan. The Japanese soon learned from the Buddhists that, according to the Buddhist monastic code, ordination as a monk required the presence of ten fully ordained monks in a central land or five fully ordained monks in a border region; ordination as a nun required the presence of ten monks and ten nuns in a central land, five of each in a border region. Japan did not have the requisite number, meaning that aspirants needed to go to Korea, or later China, to receive ordi-

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nation. This situation was not remedied for almost two centuries, when Emperor Shōmu, who reigned from 724 to 749, sent two monks to China to invite a vinaya master to Japan. They were able to convince the renowned monk Dao­ xuan (702–760, not to be confused with the disciple of Xuanzang mentioned above) to return to Japan with them. However, he arrived in 736 to find that there were not nine other fully ordained monks to take part in the ordination ceremony. Rather than return to China, he gave teachings on a number of Buddhist sūtras, including, ironically (as will become clear shortly), the Brahmā’s Net Sūtra. Meanwhile, the two Japanese monks returned to China to invite another vinaya master, Jianzhen (688–763)—better known by the Japanese pronunciation of his name, “Ganjin”—to come to Japan. Despite the relatively short distance between the southernmost Japanese island of Kyushu and the Chinese coast, the sea voyage was notoriously perilous, with many monks losing their lives to shipwrecks and pirates. Ganjin—accompanied by the requisite number of fully ordained monks—made six attempts to reach Japan over the course of a decade, finally arriving at the capital, Nara, in 754, now sixty-six years old and blind. He ordained eighty monks upon his arrival. The periods of Japanese Buddhism are named after the site of the capital. Nara Buddhism is renowned for its six schools. Even before the arrival of Ganjin, the Grand Council of State had given formal recognition to a school called Risshū, literally, the “School of the Vinaya,” devoted to the study and exegesis of the Indian monastic code received from China. It would play an important role in the regulation of ordination platforms (kaidan), the sites sanctioned by the state for the ordination of monks and nuns. Under Ganjin’s direction, three platforms would be established in Japan: one in Nara, one in what is today Chikuzen in Kyushu, and one in what is today Shimotsuke in Kanto. In 785, a young monk named Saichō (767–822) made his way to Nara for ordination. He was the descendant of Chinese immigrants, devout Buddhists, who had sent their son to a local monastery for training when he was eleven years old. They lived east of Hiei, a mountain to the north of modern Kyoto. As a boy, Saichō studied with a monk who was a disciple of Daoxuan, the Chinese monk who had made the perilous voyage from China to Japan in a futile effort to ordain Japanese monks. By 785, the ordination platform at Nara was well established. However, after his ordination, Saichō did not stay in Nara, the center of Buddhist influence at the time, but returned to his rural home, living alone in a hermitage on Mount Hiei. In 794, the emperor, seeking some distance from the powerful Buddhist

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establishment in Nara, decided to move the capital. He chose a village named Uda as the site and had a new city constructed, using the famed Tang Dynasty capital of Chang’an (modern Xian) as a model. He called the new city Heian-kyō, “Capital of Tranquility and Peace”—today known as Kyoto. As noted above, the periods of Japanese Buddhism are named after the seat of the government. Thus, the Nara period ended and the Heian period began. Saichō’s remote hermitage on distant Mount Hiei was now suddenly on the outskirts of the imperial capital, and the pious young monk soon attracted royal attention and favor, being invited to lecture on the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapundarīka), drawing on the tradition of commentary of the Lotus Sūtra school ˙˙ in China, a school called Tiantai, named after its mountain headquarters in modern Zhejiang Province. In 804, he received permission from the government to travel to Mount Tiantai to retrieve texts; he stayed for nine and half months. While there, he received the bodhisattva precepts that are set forth in the Brahmā’s Net Sūtra. Returning to Japan in 805, Saichō successfully petitioned the court to allow him to establish the Tiantai school in Japan (where it would be known by its Japanese pronunciation, “Tendai”). His petition was approved, and Saichō was given permission to send two men each year to Nara to be ordained as monks of the Tendai school. As important as this royal recognition was, Saichō was not satisfied, and perhaps with good reason; over the next fourteen years, of the twenty-four Tendai monks who went to Nara for full ordination, only ten returned to Mount Hiei. Saichō would spend the remaining years of his life arguing that the bodhisattva precepts are not a supplement to, but a replacement for, the traditional “Hīnayāna” monastic code being promulgated in Nara; that a new kind of ordination platform, a Mahāyāna ordination platform, should be built, where the ten primary vows and forty-eight secondary vows of the Brahmā’s Net Sūtra would be administered; that the platform not be built near the others in Nara, but on Mount Hiei; and, furthermore, that upon ordination, the monks not be allowed to leave the mountain for twelve years. After that, they would be permitted to go to Nara to receive traditional ordination. In 818, Saichō renounced the 250 prātimoksa vows of the Four-Part Vinaya ˙ that he had received in Nara. In his writings, he explains that although Mahāyāna and Hīnayāna monks live together in monasteries in China, they did not do so in India (he was wrong about this latter point), and that the monks of Japan should follow the Indian model. Evincing the chauvinism that one finds in so many national forms of Buddhism, Saichō claims that the Japanese were sufficiently advanced that Hīnayāna ordination was not necessary. He notes that

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both the Lotus Sūtra (for him, the most authoritative teaching of the Buddha) and the Brahmā’s Net Sūtra caution followers of the Mahāyāna from mixing with Hīnayāna monks and from receiving or dispensing Hīnayāna teachings. Saichō set forth the procedure for administering the bodhisattva vows: three Mahāyāna monks should be present (unlike the ten or five of the traditional ordination); if three cannot be found, the aspirant was required to look in the surrounding region (he specifies of “one thousand li,” or over three hundred miles); if an appropriate monk cannot be found, one must await a sign from the Buddha, after which one can administer the vows to oneself to become a fully ordained Mahāyāna monk.5 This kind of “self-ordination” was allowed by the Brahmā’s Net Sūtra.6 As one might expect, the Buddhist establishment in Nāra rejected Saichō’s arguments and strongly opposed his petitions for a new Mahāyāna platform at Mount Hiei. Without sufficient support at court, his several petitions, submitted over several years, were repeatedly denied. In 822, the year of his death, knowing that his end was near and that success had eluded him, he composed his own set of rules for Mahāyāna monks. Two weeks after his death, permission was granted to establish a Mahāyāna ordination platform on Mount Hiei. Although Saichō died in disappointment, the ordination platform at Mount Hiei would become the most important in Japan, and the bodhisattva precepts dispensed there would largely displace the traditional prātimoksa vows, especially ˙ in the most famous schools of Japanese Buddhism such as Zen, Shingon, and Nichiren, in addition to Saichō’s own Tendai. Although Saichō’s vows allowed his monks to go to Nara for traditional ordination after they had spent twelve years on Mount Hiei, few would do so. Those traditional monastic vows, however, would live on elsewhere in the Buddhist world, from Saichō’s time until the present day. The 253 vows of the Mūlasarvāstivāda vinaya would continue to be conferred in Tibet, and the 227 vows of the Theravāda vinaya would continue to be conferred in Sri Lanka and across Southeast Asia. Which brings us to 1886, the island of Sri Lanka, and the recently arrived Buddhist pilgrim, the Japanese Shingon monk Shaku Kōzen. Sri Lanka had been the British colony of Ceylon since 1815. The British had inherited it from the Dutch, who had taken it from the Portuguese. As was the case in India, much of the scholarship on Sri Lankan religion, especially Buddhism, was conducted by colonial officers. Notable among these was George Turnour (1799–1843), who had been born on the island and served in a number of positions, including treasurer of the colony. Having been born there, he spoke the native language and, working with learned monks, gained a high

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level of proficiency in Pāli, the canonical language of Sri Lankan Buddhism. Unlike missionaries such as Robert Spence Hardy, Turnour saw himself primarily as a linguist and historian, working with James Prinsep on deciphering the rock edicts of Aśoka and beginning a translation of the Great Chronicle (Mahāvamsa), a history of the island, which relates that Aśoka sent his son (who was ˙ a monk) and later his daughter (who was a nun) to establish the monastic orders in Sri Lanka. In 1836, he published The First Twenty Chapters of the Mahawamso and a Preparatory Essay on Pali Buddhistical Literature. In Paris ten years earlier, Eugène Burnouf and Christian Lassen had published a work whose title translates as Essay on Pāli, or the Sacred Language of the Peninsula beyond the Ganges (Essai sur le pâli, ou langue sacrée de la presqu’île audelà du Gange). Here, they wrote, “We can therefore hope that the Pali books will present to us the doctrine of the Buddha with its truly Indian traits and colors, and as it must have flourished in the places of its origin.”7 When the Europeans arrived in India, Buddhism had died out as an institution, with the British regarding it as a cultural artifact, with temples to be excavated, statues to be identified, and inscriptions to be deciphered. In 1786, Sir William Jones of the East India Company had given a lecture arguing for the linguistic connection between Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, raising Sanskrit to the status of a classical language. Pāli would be recognized as a vernacular (or Prakrit) and as the canonical language of the Buddhism of Sri Lanka, Siam, and Burma. In his 1844 Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism (Introduction à l’histoire du Buddhisme indien), Burnouf would speculate that Buddhism had been driven out of India by the Hindu brahmins, spreading north to China and Tibet, where it mixed with local religions, with much of the original spirit of the Buddha’s teachings being lost in the process. He knew from the work of Turnour, however, that Buddhism had been well-established in Sri Lanka for centuries. Burnouf would also make a distinction between what he called “the simple sūtras” and “the developed sūtras,” by which he meant the texts considered canonical by the Nikāya schools and the texts of the Mahāyāna, expressing a strong preference for the former as the more accurate record of the teachings of the historical Buddha. This was a position that the Buddhists of Sri Lanka also held, believing, wrongly, that the Buddha had given his teachings in Pāli. The most famous Pāli scholar of the fin de siècle period, Thomas W. Rhys Davids (1843–1922), would refer to Pāli Buddhism as “original Buddhism,” an original orthodoxy from which the several other traditions of Buddhism had deviated. Thus, the importance of Pāli and, by extension, of Sri Lankan Buddhism were things upon which both colonizer and colonized agreed.

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The primacy of the Pāli canon, promoted by the British and the Sri Lankans alike, would come to be disputed and eventually disproved with the discovery of a collection of texts preserved in Chinese called the āgama (scriptures). These works paralleled the Pāli collections, called the nikāya, in both organization and much of their content; the long collection in Chinese is called Dirghāgama in Sanskrit and Dighanikāya in Pāli. The primacy of Pāli would also be called into question by the discovery in Kashmir and Afghanistan of manuscripts in the Kharost hī script. These preserve versions similar to, but not identical with, ˙˙ many of the Pāli suttas, some of which may date from before the time that Pāli texts were first committed to writing in Sri Lanka. All of this confirmed that several of the Buddhist Nikāya schools, traditionally counted as eighteen, had their own canons, with many significant similarities and some significant differences. Some of those canons originated from the northern regions of India, where they were preserved in various Indic languages and translated into Chinese. One, likely based in the south, was preserved in Pāli and transmitted to Sri Lanka. Nonetheless, Sri Lankan Buddhism was long described (and is sometimes still described) as being closest to the Buddhism of the Buddha, a Buddhism that is very difficult to recover. It is important to recall, as noted earlier, that the well-known name for this form of Buddhism, “Theravāda,” was not used to designate Pāli Buddhism until 1907, and then not in Pāli but in French, in an essay by the British Buddhist monk Ananda Metteyya (1872–1923), born Charles Henry Allan Bennett.8 In the decades prior to the coining of the term, many of the works by European scholars who argued for the primacy of Pāli Buddhism over the course of the nineteenth century would make their way to Japan, where they were read with great interest. We recall that this was happening in the wake of Meiji persecution of Buddhism and the laicization of thousands of monks. Monks were allowed to marry and eat meat. Many did; some did not. Among those who proudly maintained their monastic vows was Shaku Unshō (1827–1909), who, when required to adopt a surname under the Meiji rules, chose “Shaku,” Japanese for “Śākya,” the family name of the Buddha. Other Japanese monks would do the same. Shaku Unshō, a member of the Shingon sect, was unusual in that he was not satisfied with the bodhisattva precepts of the Brahmā’s Net Sūtra. He had received the vows of not only the Dharmaguptaka vinaya, widely practiced in China, but also the Mūlasarvāstivāda vinaya. He had become convinced that the Pāli vinaya was not only the earliest of the monastic codes but also the only

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one that maintained an unbroken lineage of ordination that could be traced back to the Buddha himself. With the Japanese san˙gha reeling from the worst crisis in its history, he sent his nephew, Shaku Kōzen, to Sri Lan˙ka, to be ordained into what he considered the only authentic ordination lineage in the Buddhist world: an ordination conferred in Pāli, the language, he believed, spoken by the Buddha. With the requisite number of ordained monks, the authentic san˙gha could be established in Japan for the first time. What Shaku Unshō likely did not know was that the lineage of fully ordained monks had died out in Sri Lanka on three occasions, beginning in the eleventh century, due to the absence of the five fully ordained monks required to perform the ordination ceremony. There were monks, but they were all novices, although many had wives and children and did not wear monastic robes. The ordination lineage in Sri Lanka had been revived most recently in 1753, when a delegation of fully ordained monks was invited from Thailand to re­ establish the order. That lineage is therefore known as the Siyam Nikāya (Siam Group) and is today the largest order on the island. Shaku Kōzen made the journey to Sri Lanka in 1886. He would spend the next seven years in Sri Lanka and India, returning to Japan in 1893. Now that he had returned as a bhikkhu, the next step was to send five young men to Sri Lanka to be ordained, first as novices and then as bhikkhus. Upon their return, Japan would then have the requisite quorum to perform more ordinations without having to make the long voyage to Sri Lanka. Five were sent, and five were ordained, but only two decided to maintain the vows of a bhikkhu upon their return.9 What Shaku Kōzen regarded as authentic ordination remained impossible in Japan. Shaku Kōzen continued to wear the yellow robes of a Sri Lankan monk and to eat meat (to the dismay of many). He decided to convert Shaku Unshō’s temple, the Shingon Temple of Sanneji in Yokohama, into what he considered to be a more authentic site for the preaching of the original dharma, or what he called the Tathāgata’s Pure Transmission of the Elders. The word “elders” here is the “thera” of “Theravāda.” Among the changes that he made was removing the central image, a statue of the future buddha Maitreya—known to the Pāli tradition but not a particular object of devotion—and replacing it with a statue of Śākyamuni. When Shaku Unshō objected to these changes, Shaku Kōzen pulled rank. According to monastic rules, seniority is measured not in years since birth but in years since ordination. Since Shaku Kōzen did not recognize the legitimacy of his uncle’s ordination, he regarded himself to be Shaku

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Unshō’s superior. Shaku Kōzen’s efforts at Sanneji would be continued by his disciples, including Shaku Nindo, one of the two Japanese ordained in Sri Lanka who maintained his bhikkhu vows. He passed away in 1951. Today, if one visits Sanneji, one finds a typical Shingon temple, where tantric rituals are performed. The statue of Maitreya has been returned to the altar.10

18 • Persecution

In the sixteenth century, the city of Évora in southern Portugal was an important center for the Jesuits, among the most active Christian missionaries in Asia. As a consequence, the municipal library contains a number of manuscripts and artifacts from their travels. Among these is a Japanese standing screen (byōbu). In order to provide opacity without adding significant weight, the space between the painted sides of the screen was often filled with discarded paper. In 1902, a Japanese scholar who was examining the screen discovered many such pages, some in Japanese, some in Portuguese, some in Latin, dating from the last half of the sixteenth century. One scholar has called these works the “Rosetta Stone of Oriental Philosophy” because of what they tell us about early Jesuit views of Buddhism, views based on what they gleaned from their Japanese informants—in some cases, very well-informed former Buddhist monks.1 Among the sixty-eight items eventually identified from the screen, the most important are documents in Japanese that appear to have been sources for a 1586 catechism by the Neapolitan Jesuit Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606), arguably the most important figure in the long history of the Jesuit missions to Asia, more important than the sainted Francis Xavier and the memorable Matteo Ricci. Francis Xavier arrived in Japan in 1549, a mere fifteen years after he joined Ignatius Loyola and five others in the crypt of the church of St. Denis in Montmartre to found the Society of Jesus. His time in Japan was short and his mission unsuccessful. After learning from a Japanese criminal, and Christian convert, that the Japanese worshipped a god named Dainichi (Great Sun, the Japanese rendering of the name of the buddha Vairocana), Xavier thought that such a belief was close enough to monotheism that he might present himself as its proponent, proclaiming in the streets, “Dainichi wo ogami are” (Pray to Dainichi).

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The buddha Vairocana is central to the Shingon sect of Japanese Buddhism, causing the Buddhist monks and Catholic priests briefly to imagine that they were co-religionists. However, when Xavier learned that the Buddhist monks were unaware of the incarnation and passion of Christ, he instructed his Portuguese companion to go into the streets and shout, “Dainichi na ogami asso” (Do not pray to Dainichi). In Japan at that time, “dainichi” was also slang for “vagina.” The Jesuits therefore decided it was prudent to coin their own name for God, rendering the Latin “Deus” as “Daiusu” in Japanese. Buddhist monks, who were becoming increasingly suspicious of the foreigners, pointed out that “daiusu” sounded like “dai usō”—“great lie,” in Japanese. Francis Xavier would come to disparage Buddhism and Buddhist monks (whom he referred to as bonzes), concluding, for example, “I am not surprised by the sins committed between the male and female bonzes, even though they are frequent, because people who cease to adore God worship the demon; and when they have him for their lord, they cannot refrain from committing enormous sins.”2 Twenty years after the arrival of Francis Xavier, Alessandro Valignano, serving as the “visitor,” or superintendent, of all Jesuit missions in Asia, arrived in Japan for the first of three extended visits. His 1586 catechism shows a far more sophisticated view of Buddhism, drawn from what he and his fellow Jesuits had learned from Buddhist converts, without, however, dismissing the demonic. He took a particular interest in the Buddhist doctrine of the provisional (neyārtha) and the definitive (nītārtha), a standard hermeneutical device for classifying the many, and at first sight, often contradictory, statements of the Buddha. Even in the early tradition, the Buddha was extolled for his ability to adapt his teachings to the particular needs and capacities of his disciples. According to standard Buddhist doctrine, even rebirth as a god of long life in one of the several heavens of the Buddhist cosmos is described as a place of suffering because it will eventually end. The goal, of course, is to achieve nirvāna and ˙ freedom from all rebirth. Yet to those who could not fathom, much less seek, this state of extinction, the Buddha taught the means to achieve rebirth as a god. Although no-self is the hallmark doctrine of Buddhism, for those who were not yet ready to ponder it and who may have misunderstood it as nihilism, the Buddha taught that there was a self. Such accommodations to the aptitudes of audience were relatively easy to explain. With the appearance of the Mahāyāna sūtras some four centuries after the Buddha’s passage into nirvāna, what the Buddha actually meant became more ˙ difficult to judge, and to adjudicate. The authors of those sūtras were clearly

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aware of the issue. Thus, in the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapundarīka), the Buddha ˙˙ explains that although he had long taught that there were three vehicles to liberation—that of the śrāvaka, that of the pratyekabuddha, and that of the bodhisattva—in fact, there is only one vehicle, the buddha vehicle, the vehicle that will deliver all beings not to the nirvāna of the arhat, sought by the śrāvaka and ˙ the pratyekabuddha, but to buddhahood. This is entirely contrary to what had likely been centuries of Buddhist orthodoxy at the time the Lotus Sūtra was composed. The authors of the sūtra thus have the Buddha ask Śāriputra, meant to represent the earlier tradition, whether his previous teaching had been a lie. Śāriputra declares that it was not. This is the most famous example of upāya, a term translated as “skillful means” or “expedient device,” the ability of the Buddha to say what he knows is not ultimately true in order to benefit sentient beings. The Mahāyāna sūtras would require the extensive use of the categories of the provisional and the definitive, with the provisional being those teachings that the Buddha adapts to the capacities and needs of his disciples, and the definitive being the ultimate truth and the Buddha’s own view. Important tomes have been composed across Buddhist history on how one is to make this crucial distinction. A famous Mahāyāna sūtra is devoted largely to this problem, as its title suggests: it is called the Explanation of the Intention (Samdhinirmo˙ cana). This sūtra famously declares other Mahāyāna sūtras, including the famous perfection of wisdom (prajñāpāramitā) corpus, to be provisional, while declaring itself to be definitive. In Japanese, the topic of the provisional and definitive is called gonjitsu (expediency and truth). Father Valignano gave it his own interpretation, declaring that much of standard Buddhist doctrine, such as the cycle of rebirth and the pure land of Amitābha, was intended only for fools. He was particularly offended by the idea that faith in Amitābha or in the Lotus Sūtra destroyed sin and assured salvation. It reminded him of Martin Luther: “Hence might the wretched heretics of our times [i.e., Protestants] well take occasion to recognize their blindness, becoming confounded by their own doctrine, persuaded by the knowledge that this very same doctrine has been bestowed by the Devil through his ministers upon Japanese heathendom.”3 In his catechism, Valignano chose therefore to focus on the definitive teaching, which was, he learned from his Japanese informants (who drew primarily from Zen texts), the famous doctrine of “one mind” (isshin), a foundational, and much debated, term in many of the schools of East Asian Buddhism. It is often equated with buddha nature (tathāgatagarbha) and is regarded as the fundamental ground of being. For Valignano, this was not simple superstition

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but a theological category that he could challenge, hoping to convert the Buddhists with his Thomist arguments. Unlike so many descriptions of Buddhist doctrine found in European sources from this period, Valignano’s catechism is largely accurate, describing one mind as eternal and luminous, a first principle from which all emerges and into which all dissolves. It therefore cannot be a prime mover in the Aristotelian sense, the creator of all things and yet different from its creations. Although the Buddha set forth the doctrine of rebirth, that seems to have been a provisional teaching for the masses. If everything arises from and dissolves into the one, there can be no immortal soul to receive salvation or suffer damnation.4 Such arguments carried little weight with the Buddhist monks. Indeed, the Jesuit success in Japan seems to have had less to do with God than with Mammon. In 1570, a feudal lord (daimyo) on the island of Kyushu had opened the fishing village of Nagasaki to Portuguese ships. A decade later, Valignano convinced him to cede what had quickly become a bustling port, together with its fortress, to the Society of Jesus, granting the Jesuits control of the city and its lucrative silver trade. Opposed both by the shogun of Japan and by the general of the Jesuits, who reminded Valignano of the vow of poverty, this arrangement lasted less than a decade.5 In 1582, Valignano arranged for four Japanese converts, teenage seminarians of the samurai class, to make the long voyage to Europe to meet the pope. Departing from Nagasaki in February 1582, they arrived in Lisbon in August 1584; Valignano accompanied them to Macao and then to Goa, both Portuguese territories and Jesuit centers. By most accounts, upon their arrival in Europe, the boys were treated as celebrities, having audiences with Philip II of Spain and then with the aged Pope Gregory XIII in Rome, who invited them to dine with him in the papal apartments. They remained in Rome after the pope’s death, meeting his successor, Sixtus V. All four would later be ordained by Valignano, becoming the first Japanese Jesuit priests. By the time that they returned to Japan, eight years after their departure, Christianity had been suppressed by the shogun. On July 24, 1587, three years before their return, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537– 1598), the powerful daimyo and advisor to the emperor who would launch an invasion of Korea in 1592, had issued his Expulsion Edict of the Christian Padres, which read in part: Japan is the Land of Gods. Diffusion here from the Kirishitan [Christian] Country of a pernicious doctrine is most undesirable. . . . To approach

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the people of our provinces and districts and, making them into [Kirishitan] sectarians, cause them to destroy the shrines of the gods and the temples of the Buddhas is a thing unheard of in previous ages. . . . It is the judgment that since the Bateren [Padres] by means of their clever doctrine amass parishioners as they please, the aforementioned violation of the Buddhist Law in these Precincts of the Sun has resulted. That being outrageous, the Bateren can hardly be allowed to remain on Japanese soil. Within twenty days they must make their preparations and return to their country. . . . The purpose of the Black Ships [European vessels] is trade, and that is a different matter. As years and months pass, trade may be carried on in all sorts of articles. From now on all those who do not disturb Buddhism (merchants as a matter of course, and all others as well) may freely travel from the Kirishitan Country and return.6 By this time, there were some three hundred thousand Christian converts in Japan. The edict was generally ignored; rather than leave Japan, many of the Catholic priests simply made themselves less conspicuous. In 1591, Hideyoshi issued his strongly worded Letter to the Viceroy of the Indies, which concluded: “A few years ago the so-called Fathers came to my country seeking to bewitch our men and women, both of the laity and the clergy. At that time, punishment was administered to them, and it will be repeated if they should return to our domain to propagate their faith. It will not matter what sect or denomination they represent—they shall be destroyed.”7 Five years later, in 1596, the San Felipe, a Spanish ship sailing between Manila and Mexico, lost its mast in a typhoon and went aground on the Japanese island of Shikoku. The local lord seized the cargo; the Spaniards protested. The lord agreed to ask the shogun to adjudicate; his representative, one of the “five commissioners,” was sent from Kyoto. In the course of a conversation with the crew, the pilot showed the commissioner a map of the Spanish Empire, going on to explain that the Spanish first sent missionaries to convert the population of the region, after which they sent soldiers to conquer it. Provided with this information, the shogun declared that the Franciscans were in violation of his 1587 edict and ordered the execution of six Franciscan friars, seventeen Japanese laymen, and (apparently by mistake) three Japanese Jesuits. Crucified in Nagasaki on February 5, 1597, they are known to history as the Twenty-Six Martyrs. Buddhist monks were generally supportive of the suppression of Christianity. One often reads in popular sources of “warrior Zen,” in which the spirit of the samurai is brought to Zen practice, and the practice of Zen is brought to

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the battlefield. The most famous exponent of this was Suzuki Shōsan (1579– 1655), a samurai who had distinguished himself in 1600 at the Battle of Sekigahara, which established the Tokugawa shogunate. He became a Zen monk in 1621, quite late in life for a Japanese Buddhist. Among his works, we find the unambiguously titled Crush Christianity (Ha Kirishitan) from 1642, where he writes that the Christians say, “The Buddhas of our country are not Buddhas, the sun and moon are to be despised, the gods are nonexistent; so they claim. Their offence is grave in the extreme. The punishment of Heaven, the punishment of the Buddhas, the punishment of the gods, the punishment of man— not one of them shall they escape! All, all shall be suspended by the rope and killed.”8 In all, it is estimated that over three thousand Christians were martyred in Japan. Some were European and Japanese priests, but most were Japanese peasants. The Christians, both European and Japanese, were typically given the chance to recant their faith, or apostatize, often by stepping on a fumie, a small image of the Virgin Mary or Jesus. If they refused, they were tortured until they did so, or until they died. The most effective form of torture was the ana-­ tsurushi, literally, “hole hanging,” in which one was bound tightly with a rope and hung upside down over a closed pit of excrement. A small cut was made in the temple to release blood and prevent death by cerebral hemorrhage. One hand was left free to signal surrender. The most famous of the European apostates was Cristóvão Ferreira (1580– 1650), a prominent Portuguese Jesuit, who wrote inspiring accounts of the martyrdom of his fellow priests while serving as mission superior of Japan. After his arrest and interrogation, on October 18, 1633, he, along with seven Japanese priests and novices (some Jesuit, some Dominican), were taken to a hill overlooking Nagasaki Bay, the site of the crucifixion of the Twenty-Six Martyrs in 1597. There, they were each suspended into a pit. Ferreira lasted five hours before raising his hand and renouncing his faith. He would go on to take a Japanese name, convert to Buddhism (Zen), and participate in the interrogation and browbeating of other Christians. The Japanese shogunate would come to conclude that apostasy was a more efficient tool for the suppression of Christianity than martyrdom. We recall that the apostate in Shusaku Endo’s historical novel Silence (played by Liam Neeson in the Martin Scorsese film adaptation) is named Cristóvão Ferreira. In his post-apostasy condemnation of Christianity, Ferreira, now Sawano Chūan, wrote:

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And even among the Kirishitans, the predestinados (by that is meant to say, the elect for the afterlife) are elected and chosen by Deus from all eternity without beginning or end, and they are saved; but the remainder from among the same religion, called reprobos (by that is meant to say, the abominated for the afterlife) fall down into the Inferno. Thus they teach. Is this to be called the wellspring of mercy and compassion? And moreover, the predestinados are saved no matter what evil they commit; and the reprobos fall into hell no matter how they strive for the good. Thus they teach. . . . In everything they but deceive the people; using religion they plot to usurp the country.9 Father Ferreira was the superior of the other Christians in the pit. When he apostatized, the Japanese officials urged them to follow his example. None did, with one dying after nine days. Another, a priest then sixty-five years old, died after three days. He was Julião (Giuliano, in Italian) Nakaura, one of the four boys who had been welcomed to St. Peter’s Basilica by Pope Gregory XIII in 1585. By the mid-nineteenth century, Japan had been ruled by a series of shoguns for almost seven hundred years. The most famous of the shogunates were the first—the Kamakura, named after the city of its seat—and the last, the Tokugawa, based in Edo, later called Tokyo. The succession of emperors continued throughout this period, but they were largely figures of ritual rather than political importance, remaining in the ancient imperial capital of Kyoto. On January 3, 1868, the fifteen-year-old emperor Meiji issued a proclamation that henceforth all authority for internal and external affairs would reside with the emperor. The proclamation states that the Tokugawa shogun had requested the young emperor’s permission to return ruling power to the throne. In fact, a civil war would follow, called the War of the Year of the Dragon, with samurai loyal to the emperor defeating recalcitrant Tokugawa forces. Although Japan was a Buddhist country at the time, the Meiji Restoration, as it would be called, would have profound and permanent consequences for Japanese Buddhism. The Tokugawa shogunate was a strong patron of Buddhism, but not for entirely pious reasons, enlisting the support of the various Buddhist schools against the Christians. In 1638, a peasant revolt against the local daimyo led to the Shimabara Rebellion. Although many of the peasants were Christians, their grievances were not strictly religious. Nonetheless, the Tokugawa regime sent a large army to suppress the revolt, with some thirty-seven thousand rebels

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beheaded. The local daimyo was also beheaded for causing the revolt. In order to control the religious affiliation of its subjects (and to produce a registry of the population), that same year the Tokugawa shogunate imposed what is called the danka system. The Japanese term “danka” derives from “danna,” the Japanese rendering of the Sanskrit “dāna,” or “giving,” the supreme virtue of the laity throughout the Buddhist world, with giving most often directed to the Buddhist clergy. In Japan, it had long referred to the affiliation of Japanese laity with Buddhist temples (of whatever sect). Under the Tokugawa, this affiliation was made compulsory, with every Japanese family required to register as a patron at the nearest Buddhist temple (regardless of the family’s previous sectarian association) and receive a “temple certificate” (terauke) certifying that the family was not Christian. In return, the family was entitled to receive a Buddhist funeral. This requirement, which even included Shintō priests, essentially made every person in Japan a Buddhist, while providing a steady flow of material support to the thousands of Buddhist temples across the islands. All of this would change with the Meiji Restoration. Even prior to the Meiji, certain Japanese intellectuals had become disenchanted with Buddhism. As they watched the nations of Asia fall under the control of European powers, they saw Buddhism as a foreign religion, one that was unsuited to the modern world. Turning away from such foreign imports as Buddhism, Confucianism, and the Chinese classics, they sought that which was originally Japanese. This became the National Learning (Kokugaku) movement, interested in the most ancient Japanese myths and the rituals that embodied them. These myths and rituals, which had no particular name, came to be called shintō, the “way of the gods,” as a way of distinguishing them from butsudō, the “way of the Buddha,” or Buddhism. As it had done everywhere it had gone, Buddhism absorbed the local pantheon into its own cosmology, preserving the native gods, called kami, but assigning them their place in the cycle of rebirth, sometimes also giving them Buddhist names, classifying them as local incarnations (gongen) of Indian buddhas and bodhisattvas, materializing previously invisible kami in the form of images, and placing those images on the altars of Buddhist temples. With the restoration of the emperor, believed to be the descendant of those kami, Shintō would be elevated to the state religion. Buddhist rituals that had been performed for centuries would no longer be performed in the imperial palace, from which images of the Buddha and other Buddhist deities were removed. All of this was to the significant detriment of Buddhism, succinctly expressed in two slogans of the day, “Shinbutsu bunri” (Separate the Kami and the Buddhas), and a later

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slogan, “Haibutsu kishaku” (Abolish Buddhism, Destroy Śākyamuni). The first occurred; the second almost did. In the first year of the restoration, 1868, the government ordered that all Buddhist monks officiating at Shintō shrines either defrock or depart for a Buddhist temple. In the same year, the government forbade the use of Buddhist titles for Shintō deities and the presence of Buddhist images in Shintō shrines. In 1871, the government abolished the danka system as well as official ranks and titles for monks and nuns and began to confiscate temple properties. The government sought to promulgate what it called the great teaching (daikyō), summarized in three directives: (1) comply with the commands to revere the kami and love the nation; (2) illuminate the principle of heaven and the way of humanity; and (3) serve the emperor and faithfully maintain the will of the court. There is no mention of, or even allusion to, Buddhism here. The effect on Buddhism was devastating. In various regions of Japan, Buddhist temples were destroyed, images and scriptures burned, and temple lands confiscated. Precise figures for the first years of the Meiji are not available; the government began collecting data in 1872. That year, there were 122,882 Buddhist monks and nuns in Japan. In 1876, there were 36,194. Japanese historians estimate that there were some two hundred thousand Buddhist temples in Japan during the Tokugawa period; by the early years of the Meiji, there were fewer than seventy-five thousand. This led Fukuda Gyōkai (1806–1888) a prominent Pure Land priest, to write, “At the present, provincial temples are being destroyed; people are withdrawing their membership and this causes temple revenues to decline; priests are gladly returning to secular life. Although there is no demand to destroy Buddhism there probably has been nothing to compare with this situation in the fourteen or fifteen centuries during which Buddhism has been in Japan. In my opinion there will be an Imperial Rescript eradicating Buddhism within five to seven years.”10 This did not come true. Still, the number of monks and nuns returning to lay life is staggering. How did this happen? Traditionally in Buddhism, monks and nuns are revered by the laity based on their purity and their learning, with “purity” referring to the strict observance of the vow of celibacy. As we have seen, in many Buddhist countries, celibacy was not strictly observed by all monastics. This seems to have been true in Indian Buddhism as well. An early Mahāyāna sūtra mocks those monks who break their vows of celibacy and yet denigrate women, “Having become involved in roguery and lapses of discipline, they nonetheless declare ‘women are terrifying and unbearable.’”11 In Japan, the other great sin was meat-eating,

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with monks and nuns expected to follow a vegetarian diet. Nonetheless, married monks were common as early as the eighth century. Describing Buddhist monks, a tenth-century writer complained, “All of them keep wives and children in their homes; they eat fish and meat. Their appearance resembles monks, but in their hearts they are butchers.”12 By the early fifteenth century, we find monks of the True Pure Land school reinterpreting the bodhisattva precepts to allow clerical marriage for theological reasons.13 The most famous of its teachers, Shinran (1173–1263), had argued that during the Degenerate Age, which Buddhist scholars had calculated had begun in 1052, humans lacked the ability to follow the traditional practices of ethics, meditation, and wisdom. The only recourse was to rely on the grace of the buddha Amitābha, who had vowed to deliver those who believed in him to his pure land when they died. Indeed, Shinran argued that to believe that one had any agency on the Buddhist path was a hindrance to one’s salvation. Famously describing himself as “neither a monk nor a layman,” he began as a monk but later married on the instructions of Kannon, the female bodhisattva of compassion, who appeared to him in a dream, famously saying to him, “Male Buddhists should take a wife; every woman manifests my form.”14 He would eventually father seven children. Despite being illegal (both under monastic and state codes), monks from other sects often married, with their wives and children left destitute upon their death, a cause of embarrassment for both church and state. This would lead to monastic reform, with the guilty expelled and the innocent extolled to rededicate themselves to the vinaya. The Meiji government took a different approach. On May 31, 1872, it issued a proclamation that includes what, to the modern eye, appears as a relatively innocuous sentence: “From now on Buddhist clerics shall be free to eat meat, take a wife, grow their hair, and so on. Furthermore, they are permitted to wear ordinary clothing when not engaged in religious activities.” The phrase “eat meat, marry” in Japanese is “nikujiki saitai.” It became known as the nikujiki saitai proclamation. It wreaked havoc on Japanese Buddhism. We note that this sentence does not require that monks eat meat and marry— it simply allows them to do so, decriminalizing these acts. However, this was not the full extent of the Meiji reforms. In the past, a monk had been given a religious name upon ordination, giving up his family name and removing him from the danka rolls. The Meiji prohibited this, requiring monks and nuns to keep their family names and be registered in their new household registry (koseki) system. This was all part of the Meiji reorganization of the territory of

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Japan, with fiefdoms being replaced by prefectures, and temple parishes replaced with municipalities as the administrative units of the nation. Monks were also made eligible for military service. In effect, then, the Meiji removed many of the marks of the monk—the robes, the shaved head, the vegetarian diet, the vow of celibacy—removing thereby their special status, making them ordinary citizens of the modern Japanese state. Most monks accepted these changes, but others protested, reminding the government, for example, that the practice of Buddhism is organized under the three trainings of ethics, meditation, and wisdom, with ethics—typically understood as the maintaining of vows—regarded as the foundation for the other two. If this foundation was removed, the other two could not stand. After five years of protests and appeals, the government modified its position, declaring that although monastic marriage and meat-eating were not crimes under the state law, the various Buddhist sects had the authority to require celibacy and vegetarianism of their own monks and nuns.15 However, the change had come. Today, 90 percent of male Japanese clerics are married; in order to distinguish them from their international brethren, English-language sources refer to them as “priests” rather than “monks,” although the Japanese nomenclature never changed. They are typically the sons of priests, inheriting the family temple, where they perform funerals for their parishioners, while their wives not uncommonly also help to run the temple or work at its attached kindergarten. When Buddhist monks in Japan were allowed to marry and have families while maintaining their clerical roles, almost all eventually did so. The Meiji reforms also significantly reduced the number of Buddhist nuns, from 6,068 in 1872 to 1,067 in 1876. However, today, only 1 percent of Japanese Buddhist nuns are married. As has been the case throughout Buddhist history, women have often become nuns to escape the demands of domesticity. And so we see Japanese Buddhists joining the state to persecute the foreign religion of Christianity in the seventeenth century, only to find their foreign religion of Buddhism persecuted by a newly founded Shintō state in the nineteenth century. In one of the side altars of the old church of Santa Maria dell’Orto in the Trastevere section of Rome, there is a modern painting of a young Asian man wearing the robes of a samurai, a fan and short sword in his belt, but wearing a frilled European collar. He is holding a palm frond, the attribute of a Christian martyr, in his right hand. It is a portrait of Giuliano Nakaura, beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2008.

19 • Philosophy

In a book review published in 1862, Max Müller, the leading scholar of Buddhism in Britain, wrote that “the real beginning of an historical and critical study of the doctrine of Buddha dates from the year 1824. In that year Mr. Hodgson announced the fact that the original documents of the Buddhist canon had been preserved in Sanskrit in the monasteries of Nepal.”1 “Mr. Hodgson” was Brian Houghton Hodgson (1801–1894), an officer of the British East India Company stationed in Kathmandu. In 1816, Nepalese troops were defeated in a border war by the army of the East India Company. Under the terms of the treaty, the British were granted the right to have a representative in Kathmandu, to be called the resident to the court of Nepal. As part of the delegation, Hodgson was stationed there as postmaster, being promoted to assistant resident in 1825. Upon his arrival, Hodgson learned of the Newars, a community of Buddhists in the Kathmandu Valley in a majority Hindu kingdom. Knowing of the growing interest in Sanskrit and in Buddhism in Europe and with time on his hands, he set about collecting Sanskrit manuscripts of Buddhist texts, which he dispatched to libraries in Europe. He was assisted in his efforts by a learned Newar pandit named Amrtānanda. Seeking to understand Buddhist thought, Hodg˙ son conducted interviews with the Buddhist scholar, asking him questions and recording his answers. Based on these conversations, Hodgson published a number of articles in the leading journals of the day, including Asiatic Researches and Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, where he set forth what he had learned from the person he referred to as “the old Bauddha [Buddhist].” Hodgson’s essays were widely read in Europe. In these essays, Hodgson explained that he had been told that there are four

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major schools of Buddhist philosophy—Swabhávika, Aiswarika, Kármika, and Yátnika—which he discussed in detail. The Swabhávika (Naturalist) school asserts that matter is the sole substance of the universe and that it alternates between states of action and rest, with the order of the world deriving from their eternal movement. This rest or repose is matter’s natural state; one who understands this state of rest is a buddha. The Aiswarika (Theist) school also asserts the existence of the two states of action and repose, but believes in an immaterial supreme deity, called Adi Buddha. The goal of this school is to achieve absorption into this deity through meditation. The Kármika and the Yátnika accept the general views of the first two schools but place a greater emphasis on ethics. The Kármika (Activists) assert that happiness is achieved through morality. The Yátnika (Strivers) assert that happiness is gained through the cultivation of the intellect.2 With academic chairs of Chinese and Sanskrit being established in Paris and Buddhism being studied by officers of the East India Company at their headquarters at the College of Fort William in Calcutta, Hodgson’s essays would serve to shift the European perception of Buddhism from a form of idolatry to a religion that had a sophisticated philosophy. There is no term in Sanskrit that translates directly as “philosophy.” When one hears reference to the six classical schools of Hindu philosophy, the term rendered as “philosophy” is “darśana,” literally, “seeing,” which can be translated as “view” and hence “philosophical view.” The Buddhist term translated as “right view” comes from the same verbal root. As various Hindu and Buddhist schools developed, we also see the term “siddhānta,” literally, “established conclusion,” to refer to the various tenets of these schools and, by extension, to the schools themselves. The story of the development of the Indian schools of philosophy, or even the schools of Indian Buddhist philosophy—without describing all of the developments beyond India—would be a lengthy one. Surendranath Dasgupta’s History of Indian Philosophy was published in five volumes between 1922 and 1925. Karl Potter’s Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies has twenty-five volumes. Buddhist compendia of philosophy are also substantial. The Compendium of Principles (Tattvasamgraha) by the eighth-century Bengali monk Śāntaraksita ˙ ˙ contains 3,646 verses, and the Great Exposition of Tenets (Grub mtha’ chen mo) by the Tibetan monk Jamyang Shepa (1648–1722) is 1,060 pages long in one of its several block-print editions. Here, we must be more brief. There are many sūtras in the Pāli canon in which the Buddha presents what might be called philosophy. For example, he declines to answer ten (in some versions, fourteen) questions put to him by an ascetic, questions such as: “Is

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the world eternal?,” “Does the Tathāgata exist after death?,” and “Are the soul and the body identical?” He does not explain his refusal to answer, apart from saying that such questions are irrelevant to the quest for liberation from rebirth.3 This “noble silence” would be the topic of much commentary. However, even when the Buddha does speak in response to a question, his answers are understood as responses to the specific questioner, with the Buddha always responding in the way that would be most helpful to his interlocutor, saying different things to different people based on their needs and capacities. Buddhist philosophy in a more systematic sense is therefore sometimes said to begin with the third of the “three baskets” of the Buddha’s teachings, the abhidharma, variously translated as “higher dharma,” “pertaining to the dharma,” and “special dharma.” This collection of texts is generally regarded as having come into existence after the death of the Buddha. We saw in Chapter Three how the tradition sought to present them as teachings that he gave to his deceased mother, reborn as a god, on the summit of Mount Meru, descending to earth each day to repeat those teachings to the monk Śāriputra. Scholars speculate that the abhidharma evolved from something called mātrkā ˙ (a cognate of “matrix”). Beginning as an oral tradition, Buddhism is replete with lists that were memorized by the monks. The mātrkā are essentially lists ˙ extracted from the various discourses of the Buddha, such as the five aggregates (form, feeling, discrimination, compositional factors, and consciousness) and the eighteen elements (the six objects of consciousness, the six sense faculties, and the six consciousnesses). These lists encompass topics ranging from the structure of the universe to the structure of consciousness to the structure of the path, topics that might be classified as cosmology, epistemology, psychology, and soteriology, all presented in a technical vocabulary. We can gain some sense of their content from the titles of the seven texts that constitute the abhidhamma pitaka in Pāli: Enumeration of Phenomena (Dham˙ masan˙ganī), Analysis (Vibhan˙ga), Discourse on the Elements (Dhātukathā), Descrip˙ tion of the Person (Puggalapaññatti), Points of Controversy (Kathāvatthu), Pairs (Yamaka), and Conditions (Patthāna). Other schools of Indian Buddhism had their ˙˙ own abhidharma pitaka, with their own texts. Of the original eighteen schools ˙ of Indian Buddhism, at least seven had a collection of texts on the abhidharma. Among these texts, perhaps the most famous, and certainly the most massive, was the Great Exegesis of the Abhidharma (Abhidharmamahāvibhāsa, also known ˙ as the Mahāvibhāsa) of the Sarvāstivāda school (literally, “those who say that ˙ everything exists”). The text was so important that members of this school are also known as the Vaibhāsika, “followers of the Exegesis.” ˙

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This text has an interesting translation history. It seems to have had relatively little influence outside India, where it was likely compiled around 150 CE. It is one of the texts that Xuanzang (602–664) brought back to China five centuries later, where it took him and his team four years to translate it into Chinese. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Chinese monk Taixu (1890–1947) sent a number of monks to study in Tibet. One of these monks was Fazun (1902–1980), who translated several important Indian and Tibetan works into Chinese. He also translated the Great Exegesis from Chinese into Tibetan, completing the translation in 1949. When the young Dalai Lama visited Beijing in 1954 at the invitation of Mao Zedong, Fazun presented him with a copy of his translation. Portions of that translation were lost during the Cultural Revolution; it was later reassembled and published in ten volumes in Beijing in 2011. A much shorter text, indeed, a critique of the Great Exegesis, would become the most influential text on the abhidharma in the Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan Buddhist worlds. This is the Treasury of Abhidharma (Abhidharmakośa) by Vasubandhu, a north Indian monk of the early fifth century, the half-brother of Asan˙ga, whom we will meet below. Like many Indian philosophical texts, it is written in verse, with a prose commentary also by the author. In this case, however, Vasubandhu uses the verses and commentary for two different purposes: in the verses, he presents the Vaibhāsika position, and in the commen˙ tary, he criticizes it from the perspective of what would come to be known as the Sautrāntika or “Sūtra Follower” school, so called because it argues that on points of doctrine, one should rely on what the Buddha says in the sūtras and not on what the authors of the various abhidharma treatises say. In the eight chapters of his work, Vasubandhu covers all of the major topics of Buddhist thought as understood by the mainstream schools, including the physical elements that are the constituents of the material world; the many categories of consciousness and their interrelation; causation; the structure of the universe, including the six realms of rebirth; the operation of the law of karma; the various negative qualities that pollute the mind; the path to nirvāna; the various levels of wisdom achieved by those who follow that path; and ˙ the various meditative states achieved through the practice of concentration. After completing this work in prose and verse, Vasubandhu famously added a ninth chapter in prose to criticize the Vātsīputrīya, the school that asserts the existence of an “inexpressible person,” apparently contrary to the Buddhist view that there is no self.4 The Treasury of Abhidharma would go on to serve as a major source of or-

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thodox Indian Buddhist doctrine, on a range of topics, across the northern Buddhist world. It was also translated into Chinese by Xuanzang; his translation would become the foundational work for the study of the abhidharma in East Asia, providing the name (“Kusha,” the Japanese rendering of “Kośa”) for one of the six schools of Buddhism in Japan that originated during the Nara period. It was also very important in Tibet, where it was counted as one of the “five books” that are the foundation of the geshe curriculum. This is not to say that it convinced all of its readers. The monk San˙ghabhadra, a contemporary of Vasubandhu, wrote a lengthy rebuttal called Conformity with Correct Principle (Nyāyānusāra). Xuanzang, who also translated it into Chinese, reports that the original title was “Hailstones on the Treasury” (Kośakarakā).5 This kind of disputation on points of doctrine would be a hallmark of Buddhist philosophy. The most famous of those critiques was by Nāgārjuna, a south Indian monk whom scholars date to around the second century CE. Nāgārjuna was the first of the great Mahāyāna exegetes, bringing the vision of the newly appearing Mahāyāna sūtras into Buddhist philosophical discourse. These sūtras were, with some exceptions, not philosophical texts in the sense of systematic argumentation; they often read as revelation rather than reason. Nonetheless, for those who regarded the Mahāyāna sūtras to be the word of the Buddha, they provided his sanction for new philosophical doctrine. For Nāgārjuna, the sūtras were the perfection of wisdom (prajñāpāramitā) sūtras, and the doctrine was emptiness (śūnyatā). Often taking the abhidharma schools as his unnamed opponent, Nāgārjuna interpreted the litany of negation in the perfection of wisdom sūtras (“no form, no feeling . . . no consciousness”) to refer to an absence of svabhāva, a term that literally means “self-nature” and refers to a kind of intrinsic nature or essence that makes the phenomena of the world what they are. Such an identity is often assumed in the abhidharma systems. Drawing on the idea of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), that everything is in some sense dependent on something else, Nāgārjuna argued that everything (including nirvāna and the Buddha himself ) is devoid or empty of such an essence. He ˙ declared that the true nature of everything was the lack of this essence, a lack he called emptiness. In his first sermon, the Buddha spoke of a middle way between the extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification. Nāgārjuna used this same term to describe a philosophical middle way between intrinsic existence and utter nonexistence. For him, things exist but do not intrinsically exist. Indeed, it is this lack of intrinsic existence, this emptiness, that makes all transformation pos-

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sible. This argument was presented in a series of works, the most famous of which is Verses on the Middle Way (Madhyamakakārikā). That Nāgārjuna’s view was not a form of nihilism, as both ancient and modern critics have charged, is evident from his other works, which include a series of moving hymns to the Buddha and two letters of advice to a king. The thinkers who took his works to be authoritative called themselves Madhyamaka, “Followers of the Middle Way.” The other major Mahāyāna school was the Yogācāra (Practice of Yoga), also known as Vijñānavāda (Proponents of Consciousness) and Cittamātra (Mind Only). As these names suggest, based in part on the visions achieved through meditation (yoga), this school came to argue for the primacy of consciousness in the formation of experience, going so far as to claim that there is no external world, that everything is of the nature of consciousness. The two primary proponents of this view, and the authors of a number of seminal texts on these and other topics, were Asan˙ga and his half-brother Vasubandhu, the author of the Treasury of Abhidharma, said to have been converted to the Mahāyāna by his elder sibling. Scholars date them to the late fourth and early fifth centuries. They posited the existence of what they called the foundation consciousness (ālayavijñāna) beyond the five sense consciousnesses and the mental consciousness, which served as a repository of seeds. These seeds would fructify as experience, becoming both moments of consciousness and their objects. We see things in dreams to which we respond with a wide range of emotions, despite the fact that those things do not exist outside our mind. The Yogācāra position was that our waking experiences were no different; everything is “mind only.” One’s response to those objects would create further seeds that would fructify as further experience. The existence of shared experiences among sentient beings was explained by the fact that their consciousnesses had responded to objects in similar ways, creating similar seeds. Ultimately, however, it is a private world, with subject and object created by consciousness. This does not prevent the possibility of compassion and bodhisattva practices central to the Mahāyāna path. Indeed, much of the bodhisattva’s path to buddhahood as understood in India, East Asia, and Tibet derives from works attributed to Asan˙ga. Although his Yogācāra school would be ranked below Madhyamaka in Tibetan doxographies, it would be much more influential in East Asia than Nāgārjuna’s tradition, extending into the twentieth century, where during the Republican period in China, it was valued for its perceived compatibility with modern science. Throughout its history in India, Buddhism was a minority religion, needing to compete with other traditions for patronage and prestige. There are many

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stories of public debates between Buddhist and Hindu philosophers. The stakes were often high; according to the rules, both the loser and all of his followers would have to convert to the winner’s religion. In Tibetan paintings of these debates—in which the Buddhist always seems to win—one sees the dhoti-clad disciples of the Hindu teacher, weeping as they lop off their dreadlocks to become shaven-headed Buddhist monks. Better evidence of the importance of Buddhists’ philosophical battles with their Hindu rivals is found in the works of the two most important figures in the history of Buddhist logic, Dignāga (late sixth century CE) and Dharmakīrti (seventh century CE). Each was the author of a number of important works; each is most famous for one. For Dignāga, it is the Compendium of Valid Knowledge (Pramānasamuccaya). For Dharmakīrti, ˙ it is the Commentary on Valid Knowledge (Pramānavārttika), with the “Valid ˙ Knowledge” in his title referring to Dignāga’s text. That term, “pramāna” (valid ˙ knowledge, in Sanskrit), is obviously key. One of the central questions in Indian philosophy, and in philosophy more generally, is: How do we come to know the world, and how do we determine that that knowledge is valid? How does seeing a lake differ from seeing a mirage? What separates a logical conclusion from a delusion? This was a central topic of disputation for the schools of Indian philosophy, both among the Hindu schools and between Hindus and Buddhists, often expressed in the question: What is valid knowledge, and how many forms of valid knowledge are there? A philosopher of one Indian school, Lokāyata (Materialist), said there were none. Another school, the Cārvāka—sometimes referred to as “nihilists” because they did not believe in rebirth—said there was only one: sense perception. Some of the Hindu schools listed six, including “sound” or “speech” (śabda), which in this context refers to the Vedas. According to Hinduism, the Vedas are not the creation of humans or even God but have existed eternally as sound. They are therefore referred to as heard (śruti), because they were eventually heard by the ancient sages, who then memorized them and shared them with the world. This is a form of knowledge that the Buddhists obviously rejected. Dignāga and Dharmakīrti said that there were only two types of valid knowledge: direct perception (pratyaksa) and inference (anumāna), with direct per˙ ˙ ception providing knowledge of what can be known by the senses, and inference providing knowledge of what the senses cannot perceive but can be known through reasoning, like seeing smoke on a mountain pass and inferring that there is fire. There are, of course, misperceptions and faulty reasoning, so Dignāga, Dharmakīrti, and their many commentators devote a great deal of attention to what does and does not qualify as direct valid knowledge, and what does and

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does not qualify as inferential valid knowledge, focusing in the latter case on the structure of the syllogism and the relationships among its components. Dignāga and Dharmakīrti also made significant contributions to the philosophy of language with their theory of apoha, often translated as “exclusion.” This is the idea that thought, unlike the sense consciousnesses, does not directly perceive its object but does so by mentally excluding everything that is not that object; when we think of a table, we do not think of a specific table but rather a generic image that is the exclusion of everything that is not a table. For this reason, there are significant differences between direct perception and inference. However, this does not mean that inference cannot produce valid knowledge. Dharmakīrti, for example, provides logical proofs for rebirth, compassion, and omniscience.6 The Buddha had criticized the doctrines of various non-Buddhist groups. In the Sūtra on the Supreme Net (Brahmajāla Sutta, different from the apocryphal Brahmā’s Net Sūtra, or Fanwang jing), he enumerates sixty-two philosophical positions, none of which leads to nirvāna. The early works on abhidharma, includ˙ ing the Treasury of Abhidharma, were primarily concerned with scholastic positions among the several Buddhist schools. By the sixth century, we see Buddhist philosophers also criticizing the positions of Hindu schools, as Dignāga and Dharmakīrti did. That century also sees the first surviving compendium of philosophy in India. It is the work of a Buddhist monk, Bhāviveka, a brahmin by birth (and said to have dressed as a brahmin after becoming a monk). His verse work, Essence of the Middle Way (Madhyamakahrdaya), and its prose auto-commentary, ˙ the Blaze of Reasoning (Tarkajvālā), present both the positions and his critiques of the positions of those schools that he considers to be his opponents, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist. As the title of his text suggests, Bhāviveka counted himself as a Madhyamaka, a follower of Nāgārjuna; he also composed an important commentary on the Verses on the Middle Way. In the Blaze of Reasoning, his Buddhist opponents are two: the Nikāya schools and Yogācāra. His account of the former is historically important because he provides the history and major doctrines of the eighteen Nikāya schools (whom he calls śrāvaka). He also catalogues their complaints against the Mahāyāna (such as that its assertion of a buddha nature is an assertion of a self ) before offering his rebuttal of each.7 This chapter provides further evidence that the Mahāyāna remained a minority throughout its history in India. He also devotes full chapters to the tenets (and his rebuttal) of four Hindu schools—Sāmkhya, Vaiśesika, Vedānta, ˙ ˙ and Mīmāmsā—as well as a brief rebuttal of the Jains. These chapters provide ˙ a clear sense of whom the Buddhists considered their philosophical rivals.

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That rivalry extended into the eighth century, where we see a more extensive compendium of Indian Buddhist philosophy, again by a Buddhist author. This is the massive Compendium of Principles (Tattvasamgraha) by the Bengali ˙ monk Śāntaraksita. Its twenty-six chapters present, in verse, the positions of ˙ the major Indian philosophical schools of the day, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and Materialist. Based on the number of verses dedicated to it, he is most concerned with Mīmāmsā; we know that the great Mīmāmsā thinker Kumārila was a for˙ ˙ midable critic of Buddhism. As Buddhist thinkers had done for centuries, Śāntaraksita also seeks to refute the existence of a creator deity. In an argument ˙ that is not particularly convincing to the modern reader, in Buddhism, if something is eternal or permanent, it is necessarily unchanging. Buddhist thinkers argue that it would therefore be impossible for an eternal God to sometimes create and sometimes rest. The Buddhists would eventually lose these philosophical battles. Not long after completing the Compendium of Principles, Śān­ taraksita, one of the most learned Buddhist monks in India, left his homeland ˙ for Tibet, never to return. The European engagement with Buddhist philosophy is often believed to have begun in the nineteenth century, in the works of such figures as Arthur Schopenhauer. In fact, it began much earlier, first with the Jesuit missionaries to Japan in the sixteenth century, and later with a remarkable Jesuit missionary to Tibet in the eighteenth century.8 He was the Tuscan priest Ippolito Desideri (1684–1733), who made the harrowing overland journey from the Jesuit headquarters in Goa to the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, arriving in 1716. The Mongol khan who was ruling Tibet allowed him to study at Sera Monastery, one of the three seats of Geluk sect, located not far from the Dalai Lama’s Potala Palace. There, having learned to read classical Tibetan, Desideri immersed himself in the works of the Geluk founder, and most influential expositor of the doctrine of emptiness, Tsongkhapa (1357–1419). Although regarding the Tibetans as idolaters, Desideri was impressed by their commitment to reasoned argumentation. He concluded that the edifice of Buddhist thought was built on two doctrines, rebirth and emptiness, and that if he could prove to the scholars of Tibet that these doctrines were fallacious, the country would convert to Christianity. Despite this fanciful assumption, Desideri came to understand the doctrine of emptiness better than any European prior to the twentieth century, mastering its vocabulary and its argumentation, and going on to compose a refutation, written in Classical Tibetan. Here, Desideri argues that the central Madhyamaka doctrine of dependent origination, that everything arises in dependence on something else, that noth-

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ing exists in and of itself, is untenable. He does not dispute the fact that things are interdependent. However, drawing on the work of St. Thomas Aquinas (without mentioning him), he argues that the entire notion of dependence only makes sense if there is at least one thing that is independent. In Buddhist philosophy, there is the famous metaphor of the reflection of a moon in water. The moon is so perfectly reflected in the still water of a lake that a monkey climbs out onto an overhanging branch and tries to grab the moon. He falls in the water and drowns. For Buddhists, this cautionary tale teaches us that everything is like the reflection of the moon in water, appearing in one way but existing in another way, appearing to be real when it is false, with dire con­ sequences for those who think it is real. Desideri does not dispute the basic message. However, he argues that the famous metaphor of the reflection of the moon in water only makes sense if there is a real moon that is the source of the reflection. Therefore, in brief, God exists.9 Although it is unlikely that Desideri’s argument would have had the result he hoped for, it would have been interesting to know how a Tibetan scholar would have responded. However, when the pope took the mission field of Tibet away from the Jesuits and gave it to the Capuchins, Desideri had to leave Tibet, taking his Tibetan writings with him; there is no mention of a Buddhist monk reading his refutations. His works would languish in the Jesuit Archive in Rome until the twentieth century. Meanwhile, in Tibet, Buddhist scholars continued to debate about the meaning of emptiness and the meaning of valid knowledge. In 1945, the Tibetan poet and painter Gendun Chopel (1903–1951), a former monk of Tsongkhapa’s Geluk sect, returned from twelve years of travels in India and Sri Lanka. Not long after his return, he was arrested on trumped-up charges of counterfeiting currency and sentenced to prison. Upon his release, he gave some teachings on the topic of valid knowledge to a group of young scholars. In them, he returned to the question of what constitutes valid knowledge, especially what is called conventional valid knowledge, our knowledge of the everyday. He considered the example of a region of Tibet where, because of a limited diet, everyone suffers from jaundice. In such a community, everyone would say that snow is yellow, and no one would be able to convince them otherwise. From this and other examples, he concluded that conventional valid knowledge is nothing more than the opinion of the majority. As a good Buddhist philosopher, Gendun Chopel knew that his position would need to be supported by citations from Indian sources. In this case, he chose a story told by Candrakīrti, the seventh-century scholar whom the Geluk consider the foremost interpreter of the works of Nāgārjuna. Candrakīrti tells

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a chilling tale about a king whose astrologer warns him that a terrible rainstorm is approaching: anyone who drinks the rainwater will go mad. The king has all the wells in the palace covered, but there is not enough time to warn the people. They drink the water and go insane. Soon, the people storm the palace, denouncing the king as a madman. As Gendun Chopel writes, “In the end, not knowing what else to do, the king drank the water, and came to agree with everyone else.” He concludes his discussion with a lengthy poem, with many of the stanzas ending with the refrain, “I am not comfortable about positing conventional valid knowledge” (a phrase that is a good deal more poetic in Tibetan).10 After his death in 1951, Gendun Chopel’s teachings on valid knowledge and emptiness were collected by one of his students and published as Adornment for Nāgārjuna’s Thought (Klu sgrub dgongs rgyan). One might assume that with troops of the People’s Liberation Army occupying Lhasa, no one would particularly care about these relatively abstruse philosophical arguments. However, in 1955, a lengthy refutation was published by a young scholar from Ganden Monastery. Its tone can be inferred from its title: Magical Wheel of Slashing Swords Mincing to Dust the Evil Adversary with Words to Delight Mañjuśrī (’Jam dpal dgyes pa’i gtam gyis rgol ngan phye mar ’thag pa reg gcod ral gri’i ’phrul ’khor). The reader will note that nowhere in this chapter have schools called Swabhávika, Aiswarika, Kármika, or Yátnika been mentioned. After being discussed and debated by European scholars in the nineteenth century, it was determined that they appear in no Buddhist text. The Newari pandit Amrtānanda seems to ˙ have made them up. Whether this was his heuristic for the benefit of a well-­ meaning young Englishman, or an act of counter-colonial espionage, remains unknown.

20 • Pilgrimage

On June 17, 1940, a festival was held in Sri Lanka (then the British colony of Ceylon) to celebrate the restoration of the Ruwanweliseya stūpa, one of the most sacred sites on the island, built in the second century BCE by King Dutthagāmanī ˙˙ ˙ and said to hold the contents of one of the original eight buckets of relics from the cremation of the Buddha.1 By the late nineteenth century, the stūpa had fallen into ruin. A fund-raising campaign was undertaken in 1902. By 1940, the restoration was complete, to be celebrated by the installation of a large crystal finial offered by the Buddhist community of Burma. The Tibetan writer Gendun Chopel (1903–1951) was present and described the scene: “On this occasion the stūpa was covered up to its peak with a rainbow of electric lights of five different colors. In the four directions, there were [lights] in the appearance of the Buddha in the four postures. Out of the empty sky resounded stanzas from the sūtras and various melodies, and from out of the clouds, airplanes flew, and circling it clockwise, rained white flowers down upon the stūpa as they circled. Various modern miracles as these were displayed. I think that the Buddha himself would have been astonished if he saw all of this.”2 In the famous account of his passing, the Great Discourse on the Final Nirvāna (Mahāparinibbāna Sutta), the Buddha instructed his followers to bury his ˙ relics at a crossroads in a mound called a stūpa. According to other sources, he specified that his relics be divided into eight buckets (drona) and given to eight ˙ groups of his followers to take back to their homelands and enshrine in a stūpa there. In a Pāli text called the Chronicle of the Stūpa (Thūpavamsa), on his ˙ deathbed, not only did the Buddha call for this distribution, he made a prophecy about one of the buckets of relics, saying that it should first be given to his followers in Rāmagrāma (today in southern Nepal), after which it would be

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guarded by serpent deities (nāgas), before finally being enshrined in Sri Lanka. These are the relics said to be enshrined today in the Ruwanweliseya stūpa, also known simply as the Mahāthūpa, the Great Stūpa. As the last words of the Buddha, the Great Discourse on the Final Nirvāna ˙ contains many important instructions, the instruction to build stūpas perhaps the most consequential. Or perhaps it is this one: These, Ānanda, are the four places that a pious person should visit and look upon with feelings of reverence. And truly there will come to these places, Ānanda, pious monks and nuns, laymen and laywomen, reflecting: “Here the Tathāgata was born. Here the Tathāgata became fully enlightened in unsurpassed, supreme enlightenment. Here the Tathāgata set rolling the unexcelled wheel of the dharma. Here the Tathāgata passed away into the state of nirvana in which no element of clinging remains.” And whoever, Ānanda, should die on such a pilgrimage with his heart established in faith, at the breaking up of the body, after death, will be reborn in a realm of heavenly happiness.3 Here, the Buddha recommends pilgrimage—to the site of his birth, the site of his enlightenment, the site of his first sermon, and the site of his death—promising rebirth in heaven to those who die along the way. This would be one of the most heeded of the Buddha’s instructions, first in India, then across the Buddhist world, an instruction heeded to the present day. It seems that the practice of pilgrimage was well-established by the reign of Aśoka who, according to Buddhist accounts, visited each of these sites. His own rock edicts make clear that he visited Lumbinī and Bodh Gayā; he had pillars erected at all four. In the Legend of Aśoka (Aśokāvadāna), he is taken on a tour of the sacred sites by the aged monk Upagupta.4 As Buddhism spread beyond the region of the Buddha’s own travels, four more sites were added to the four that he had recommended: the city of Śrāvastī, where he defeated six non-Buddhist teachers by performing the “twin miracle” of shooting fire and water from his body; the city of Sāmkāśya, where he descended from the summit of Mount ˙ Meru; the city of Rājagrha, where he tamed the mad elephant that his evil ˙ cousin Devadatta had sent to trample him; and the city of Vaiśālī, where he accepted honey from a monkey while he was living in the forest after leaving the quarreling monks of Kauśāmbī. These came to be known as the eight great sites and became obligatory stops on the pilgrimage tour for centuries. As Buddhism spread further west and south, more pilgrimage places appeared, typically with a stūpa containing a relic of the Buddha. The Tibetan term that is often trans-

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lated as “pilgrimage” literally means “to circle,” a rendering of the Sanskrit term “pradaksina,” which means “to circumambulate in a clockwise direction,” ˙ ˙ the proper way to worship a stūpa. When the place could not be connected to the last life of the Buddha, it was sometimes connected to one of his previous lives. Thus, the eighth-century Korean pilgrim Hyecho reports that outside a city in Gandhāra in the far northwest is the place where, in a previous life as King Śibi, the Buddha cut off pieces of his own flesh to feed a hawk in order to save the life of a dove.5 Much of what we know about the various places of pilgrimage in India come from the accounts of foreign pilgrims, first Chinese and later Tibetans. This knowledge is possible because their authors were literate, because they survived the journey, and because they wrote accounts that have survived to the present day. These restrictions make it clear that there were far more pilgrims than there are accounts. The Chinese monk Yijing (635–713), who set out for India by sea in 671 and returned by sea in 695, compiled biographies of monks who had made the journey to India in a work called Great Tang Biographies of Eminent Monks Who Sought the Dharma in the Western Regions (Da Tang xiyu qiufa gaoseng zhuan). In this work, he describes fifty-six monks: forty-nine Chinese and seven Koreans.6 As late as the tenth century, groups of over a hundred Chinese monks were traveling to India, sometimes staying at a Chinese monastery located ten miles east of Nālandā.7 By that time, Chinese monks had been making the perilous journey to India for centuries. Although motivated by piety, the most famous of these monks (or the monks whose travel accounts have survived) almost always had another motivation. One of the words that was synonymous with “pilgrimage” in Chinese was “qujing,” “retrieving scriptures.” Still, the perilous journey to the holy land was too much for many. And so the holy land came to them. India was holy because it was the place that the Buddha had chosen to be reborn, to achieve enlightenment, to teach the dharma, and to enter nirvāna, with places of pilgrimage proliferating as more sites were ˙ associated with his life and as more stūpas containing his relics were erected. Soon, his travels were not limited to India. A fifth-century Sri Lankan work entitled the Great Chronicle (Mahāvamsa) reports that the Buddha visited the ˙ island (traveling by air) on three occasions. He is said to have left his footprint on the summit of a mountain that came to be called Sri Pada (Holy Foot). In European sources, this mountain is called Adam’s Peak. According to some Muslim theologians, the Garden of Eden is in paradise. Adam and Eve only come to earth when they are expelled from the garden. They believe that the

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mountain in Sri Lanka is where they first set foot, and that the footprint at its summit is that of Adam. All of this is explained by Marco Polo in the account of his travels. Although his ship stopped there on his voyage back to Venice, he apparently did not make the dangerous climb to the summit. In his account, he describes not a footprint but a sepulcher there, reporting that the “Saracens” said that it was the tomb of “Adam, our first parent” but that the “Idolaters” said that it was the tomb of Sagamoni Borcan, the Mongolian name for Śākyamuni Buddha—a name he likely learned in Xanadu, where Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decreed. As already noted, Marco Polo goes on to give the most detailed, and positive, portrayal of the Buddha in medieval European sources, paying him the high compliment of “leading a life of great hardship and sanctity, and keeping great abstinence, just as if he had been a Christian. Indeed, and he had but been so, he would have been a great saint of Our Lord Jesus Christ, so good and pure was the life he led.”8 Footprints of the Buddha, some of which are very elaborate, are found throughout the Buddhist world.9 However, this was not the only way that sacred sites could proliferate. Some of the domains of bodhisattvas were located outside India, the most famous being Wutaishan, among the most sacred Buddhist sites in China, said to be the abode of Mañjuśrī, the bodhisattva of wisdom, who often spoke to pilgrims there, in disguise. Giving new meaning to the mountain coming to Muhammad, Japanese monks declared that entire Indian mountains had uprooted themselves and flown to Japan, most notably, Vulture Peak, where the Buddha had taught the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapundarīka) and many other ˙˙ famous texts. It is now Mount Ōmine in Japan.10 When Xuanzang visited Kuśinagara, he found the town in ruins, with a number of stūpas in the vicinity marking various events from the sūtra account. The Korean monk Hyecho visited around 724. He reports, “I arrived at Kuśinagara. This is the place where the Buddha entered nirvāna. As for the ˙ city, it is in ruins, and no one lives there. There is a stūpa constructed on the site where the Buddha entered nirvāna and a master tends to it, keeping the area ˙ clean.”11 It is easy to see how some centuries later, with the great Buddhist monasteries of northern India deserted, Kuśinagara, the place where the Buddha gave his famous instructions on pilgrimage, would have fallen off the pilgrimage route. And so, beginning in the seventeenth century, there are accounts by Tibetan pilgrims who placed Kuśinagara in a place called Hājo in Assam, some three hundred miles to the east of the traditional site in northern India, a site of much easier access for Tibetan pilgrims.12 In some accounts, both the Bodhi Tree and Vulture Peak are also located nearby, making it possible for

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Tibetan pilgrims who made the journey to Assam to visit them all in a day or two. This identification was not simply the error of credulous pilgrims; it was accepted by some of the most learned and politically important figures of the day, including the regent of the Fifth Dalai Lama, Desi Sangye Gyatso (1653– 1705), and the Third Panchen Lama (1738–1780). Reading Tibetan sources, the mistake would be repeated, in print, by European scholars, including the fascinating Transylvanian scholar Alexander Csoma de Kőrös (1784–1842), regarded as the father of Tibetology. The true site of Kuśinagara was settled for Tibetans in 1911 when the Thirteenth Dalai Lama visited the site as a guest of the British Raj. Gendun Chopel, whom we met at the beginning of the chapter, would compose his own pilgrimage guide. Entitled Guidebook to the Sacred Sites of India (Rgya gar gyi gnas chen khag la ’grod pa’i lam yig), it was published in 1939 by the Maha Bodhi Society, the organization founded by Anagārika Dharmapāla that sought to restore those sites to Buddhist control (discussed below). Toward that aim, the society sponsored the publication of travel guides for foreign pilgrims. Gendun Chopel’s was intended for Tibetans. It differed from other works in the venerable Tibetan genre of pilgrimage guides by providing railway and bus routes with instructions on where to get off and how much to pay, as well as Indian place names in Roman script so that Tibetans could read the names of railway stations. Elsewhere, in his account of his own travels, he has occasion to mock the errors in previous Tibetan accounts, including one that says that the Indian city of Gayā is a five-month journey from Bodh Gayā, when in fact it is a sevenmile walk. However, some of these errors appear in the works of authors venerated as enlightened masters. To account for this problem, he writes, “Some adepts went there in pure visions, serving as the source of a few stories that describe many wondrous sights; it is most inauspicious to wonder whether these sacred sites are real or not. Because pure visions are seen when one’s karma is pure, we must only pray to have them; how could our ordinary perceptions be a source for correcting these visions?”13 There is a famous Tibetan story about a devout mother who asked her son to bring her back a relic from India. It is only when the son is almost back home that he remembers her request. Not knowing what else to do, he extracts a tooth from the skull of a dead dog along the side of the road and gives it to his mother, telling her that it is a tooth of the Buddha. She places it on her family altar and worships it. The next time the son visited his mother, he was shocked to see her house glowing with a supernal light emanating from the dog’s tooth, sanctified by the old woman’s piety.

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Travelers see things that natives do not. For the traveler, so many things are new, unfamiliar, exotic; so many things are worthy of note, to be described in a diary or a letter, to be recorded in a sketchbook or a photograph. The native has no need to note the everyday. Thus, for scholars of Buddhism, the accounts left by pilgrims—especially pilgrims to India, where so little of Buddhism survives—are an invaluable source of information about both the mythic and the mundane. And among those accounts, none is more important than that of the most famous, and the most mythologized, pilgrim in the history of Buddhism, the Chinese monk Xuanzang (602–664). Like so many pilgrims who came before and after, Xuanzang was motivated by a desire for a proper understanding of the dharma, frustrated by the knowledge he could gain in his homeland. Two other Chinese pilgrims are also famous, Faxian (337–422), who set out for India in 399, and Yijing, who set out in 671. Both of these monks were concerned that the monastic code was not being followed properly in China; at the time of Faxian’s departure, none of the several codes had been translated fully into Chinese. Part of this was due to the fact that even in India, the code was commonly maintained orally. Buddhayaśas, the Kashmiri monk who brought what would become the standard vinaya in East Asia, carried it in his mind, reciting it from memory. Xuanzang was more concerned with doctrine and philosophy. Still, like so many Buddhists over the centuries, he wanted to set foot in the blessed land of the blessed Buddha. According to his biography, when he saw the Bodhi Tree for the first time, he bowed down before it, his eyes filled with tears, and said, “I don’t know where I was born in the course of transmigration at the time when the Buddha attained enlightenment. I could only come here at this time, the end of the Image Period. It makes me think that my karmic hindrances must have been very heavy.”14 Here, Xuanzang expresses a common Buddhist lament: that when the Buddha was in our world, a rare and epochal event in the history of the cosmos, he was elsewhere in samsāra, prevented by his neg˙ ative past deeds from being in the Buddha’s presence. He has arrived too late, at the time of the “image” or semblance dharma, when the dharma is a mere reflection of what it was when the Buddha was alive, able to honor only an image of the Buddha rather than the Buddha himself. Xuanzang’s account of his travels, entitled The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions (Da Tang xiyu ji), is perhaps our single-most important source on the social world of Indian Buddhism during what might be called its medieval period, a millennium after the Buddha’s passing. As he made his way along the perilous route from the Tang capital at Chang’an to India, crossing the Gobi

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Desert, he passed through what is today Xinjiang Province, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan (where he saw the Bamiyan Buddhas), and Pakistan before arriving in India. Along the way, he noted the monasteries and stūpas he encountered, the number of monks and their doctrinal affiliation, as well as the piety (or lack of piety) of the local prince. He made similar observations in India. He often found monasteries that were deserted or in ruins, making clear that Buddhism flourishes with the patronage of princes and merchants and that Buddhism dies without them. His description provides important counter evidence to the claim that Buddhism died out as an institution in India because of the Muslim raids that occurred centuries later. For the history of Buddhist philosophy, one of his fascinating findings was the prominence of the Vātsiputrīya school (which he calls Sammitīya), a sub˙ sect of one of the traditional eighteen Nikāya schools of Buddhism. Referred to by their opponents as “proponents of the person” (Pudgalavādin), they provided a unique solution to the question raised every semester in “Introduction to Buddhism”: If there is no self, how can there be rebirth? Buddhist texts repeatedly state that a self is not to be found either among the five aggregates that constitute mind and body or separate from them. Claiming not to contradict that position, the Sammitīya argued that there is an “inexpressible person” ˙ that is neither the same as nor different from the aggregates. This position was found so onerous that the great fifth-century master Vasubandhu provided an addendum to his most famous work, the Treasury of Abhidharma (Abhidharmakośa), for the refutation of this position. Upon his return to China, Xuanzang would translate it into Chinese. His discovery of adherents of this apparently heretical position at so many monasteries in India two centuries after Vasubandhu’s rebuttal suggests that it did not have the desired effect. It is perhaps further evidence of the persistence of the pernicious self, despite the efforts of many of the greatest thinkers in the history of Buddhist philosophy to deny it, a persistence found across the Buddhist schools; we see it again in the doctrine of the foundation consciousness (ālayavijñāna) and the doctrine of the tathāgatagarbha, or “buddha nature.” Xuanzang studied at several of the major monasteries of India, including the great Buddhist university of Nālandā, not far from the real Vulture Peak. Much of what we know about the curriculum of the monastery comes from his account. It included the tenets of the eighteen schools of Buddhism as well as the Mahāyāna schools of Yogācāra and Madhyamaka. Also taught were the four Vedas of Hinduism, which would have been well known by the many Buddhist monks who came from the brahmin caste. Xuanzang is also said to have stud-

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ied astronomy, geography, medicine, and divination. His chief teacher was Śīlabhadra, whom he describes as the most learned monk at Nālandā. Śilabhadra was the disciple of the famous Yogācāra master Dharmapāla, who was himself a student of Dignāga, considered the father of Buddhist logic. It is clear from Xuanzang’s biography, composed by his own disciples, that Xuanzang also studied the tenets of the major Hindu philosophical schools, especially Sām khya ˙ and Vaiśesika, gaining sufficient mastery to defeat their proponents in debate. ˙ He therefore learned Sanskrit well, a skill that he would put to legendary use upon his return to China. Here, we can note that as a pilgrim, he fulfills the common Buddhist paradigm. In the introduction, we recount the legend of how Buddhism came to China, when Emperor Ming of the Han Dynasty dreamed of a golden flying man. After being told that the flying man was a being called the Buddha, he dispatched a delegation to the Western Regions. Although perhaps not really pilgrims, according to the story, they did what Buddhist pilgrims do: they brought back a text, and they brought back a statue. Soon enough, this legend came true, as Buddhist texts and images made their way to China. Unlike the emperor’s delegation, Xuanzang brought back seven statues and 657 texts, a number that does not include the fifty bundles of texts that were swept away when he crossed the Indus River. Xuanzang is remembered as a demographer of ancient India by historians, as a guide to excavations by archaeologists, as a scholar by philosophers, and as a translator by translators. He is remembered by the world as a pilgrim, a pilgrim who retrieved the dharma. His journey was so remarkable, traveling so far, away for so long, returning in triumph with so many treasures, that it seemed incredible that he could have accomplished it alone. His biographer notes that in times of peril, he called on Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, who came to his aid.15 Still, it was difficult to believe that he had traveled alone for so much of his perilous journey. Beginning in the twelfth century, stories of his journey began to be told in which he was accompanied by the Monkey King, himself a devout, if often irreverent, Buddhist monkey with a Buddhist name, “Wukong,” meaning “Aware of Emptiness.” The cycle of legends about their journey—with their party expanded to include a pig monster, a sand demon, and a dragon horse—would be compiled and augmented by an anonymous author to form a book with one hundred chapters, called Journey to the West (Xiyouji), published in 1592. It would become one of the most popular stories in Asia, and now the world, told and retold in all manner of media, including plays, films, cartoons, and comic books.

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Readers of the story—first made popular in the West by Arthur Waley’s 1942 abridged translation, Monkey: A Folk-Tale of China—will recall that Xuanzang (called Tang Sanzang, meaning “Tang Dynasty Tripit aka Master” in the novel) ˙ is hardly a heroic figure. Instead, he is a pious monk, clearly learned, but utterly useless in battles with the many demons that his motley crew encounters, bursting into tears at the first sign of danger. We note here a motif that we see through East Asian secular literature, where Buddhist monks are rarely saints or heroes, instead portrayed as pedants, gluttons, and lechers. But perhaps we should return to the Buddhist holy land. By the nineteenth century, Bodh Gayā, the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment, the sanctum sanctorum of Buddhism, had long been under the control of a group of Hindu priests, worshippers of the god Śiva; these priests traced their roots to the great eighth-century Vedānta philosopher (and devotee of Śiva) Śan˙kara, a renowned opponent of Buddhism. The land had been deeded to the priests by a Mughal shah in 1727. A century later, it was a prosperous pilgrimage site, where Hindus would place rice balls under two pipal trees as offerings to the dead. One of those trees was considered to be the tree that the Buddha sat under on the night of his enlightenment. An English journalist, Edwin Arnold (1832–1904), lamented the sad state of “the Buddhist Jerusalem” (he would also call it the Buddhist Mecca). In an article for the Daily Telegraph, he wrote that when he asked a Hindu priest whether he might pick a few leaves from the Bodhi Tree, the priest replied, “Pluck as many as ever you like, sahib, it is nought to us.”16 At a meeting with a group of Sri Lankan Buddhists (which included Anagārika Dharmapāla), Arnold called for the Buddhist sites of Bodh Gayā and Sarnath (where the Buddha had preached his first sermon) to be placed under Buddhist control. In 1889, Dharmapāla accompanied Colonel Steel Olcott of the Theosophical Society on a lecture tour to Japan. In 1891, after his own visit to Bodh Gayā, Dharmapāla founded the Maha Bodhi Society, which called on Buddhists from around the world to work for the restoration of the great sites of the life of the Buddha (especially the sites of his birth, enlightenment, first sermon, and death) to Buddhist control; “Mahābodhi” (Great Enlightenment) is also the name of the main temple at Bodh Gayā. Dharmapāla, working with Arnold, Olcott, Japanese Buddhists, and monks from Sri Lanka and Burma, made a number of attempts to bring the site under British control, first trying to purchase the site from the chief Hindu priest, and then taking him to court.17 All of these efforts failed. It was only after Indian independence, and after Dharmapāla’s death, that Bodh Gayā once again became a major site of Buddhist pilgrimage.

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Yet once it had, the various Buddhist nations began building their own temples there, so that when one visits today, one finds a disorienting panoply of architectural styles, some quite extravagant, on the surrounding plains of one of the more impoverished regions of India. There is a Japanese temple, a Thai temple, a Chinese temple, a Tibetan temple, a Sri Lankan temple, and a Vietnamese temple, allowing pilgrims from those lands to see the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment from the terrace of their own temple, with rites performed by their own monks, conducted in their own language. This is not to say that monks from foreign lands have not been welcome in Buddhist monasteries. The great monastery of Nālandā attracted monks from as far away as Tibet to the north, Korea to east, Indonesia to the south, and Persia to the west. But they were there to study and were expected to conform to the rules of the monastery, to learn to read and recite in Sanskrit. For centuries in India, adherents of the Nikāya schools and of the Mahāyāna seem to have lived harmoniously in the same monasteries, following the same monastic code, undeterred by doctrinal differences. However, as the Buddhist traditions outside India became centers rather than satellites, they began to make their own claims to orthodoxy. We recall that when the Tibetan pilgrim Chag Lotsawa visited Bodh Gayā in 1234, it was under the control of Sri Lankan monks, who instructed him to throw the Mahāyāna sūtra he was carrying into the river before entering the monastery. During his sojourn in Sri Lanka, the Tibetan pilgrim Gendun Chopel would go out with the saffron-robed monks on their begging rounds each morning, moved to tears by the thought that he had been transported back to the time of the Buddha. Yet he wrote to his friends in Tibet that the Sri Lankan monks considered Tibetan Buddhism, with its practice of tantra, to not be authentically Buddhist; true Buddhism resided in their island. Having arrived in Sri Lanka inspired by Dharmapāla’s vision, he departed having come to a different conclusion. With India under British rule, or as he put it, “under the control of the Hindus as the wife and the British as the husband,” it was time for the Buddhists of the world to consider Sri Lanka as the surrogate birthplace of Buddhism. He therefore called for Tibetans and Sri Lankans to see that the tantric buddha Vajradhara of Tibet and Śākyamuni Buddha of Sri Lanka were in fact the same buddha; that the monastic code followed in Tibet and the monastic code followed in Sri Lanka were branches of the same tree; and that despite their doctrinal differences, the Mahāyāna of the north and the Theravāda of the south could agree on the four assertions that mark a philosophical school as Buddhist: that all products are impermanent, that all contaminated

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things are miserable, that all phenomena are without self, and that nirvāna is ˙ peace. Having made this ecumenical appeal, Gendun Chopel tempers it. He writes, “Everyone needs to respect these sacred and profound connections. Yet those of the black begging bowl [the Sri Lankans] are suspicious of everything, while those of the human thighbone flute [the Tibetans] trample on everything. Regardless of who it is, each of the two sides has reached the peak of hardheaded stubbornness. Thus, for the time being, it is vitally important for both sides to live in a state of appreciation and affection for each other from our respective lands so that at least the recognition of our kinship in having the same Teacher and teaching will not be lost.”18 In other words, let us recognize and respect each other as Buddhists, but let us do so from afar.

21 • Rule

The Thirteenth Dalai Lama (1876–1933) had a difficult reign. His four predecessors had all died young, some by what were suspected to have been nefarious causes. He himself would survive an assassination attempt (via black magic) by his regent. In 1888, when he was twelve, British troops crossed into Tibet from Sikkim, killing many Tibetan militia. Seeking to compel Tibet to establish trade relations with the British Raj, in 1903, British forces under the command of Colonel Francis Younghusband invaded Tibet. After a series of battles in which the Tibetan forces, armed with flintlocks and spears, were decimated by Gatling guns, the British made their way to Lhasa. By the time of their arrival, the Dalai Lama had fled to Mongolia before traveling on to China. In the absence of the Dalai Lama, the aged head of the Geluk sect signed an agreement that allowed the British to establish a trading station in the city of Gyantse, in western Tibet. The Younghusband Expedition (as it is called) created fear and resentment of Europeans in Tibet. In 1905, Geluk monks in eastern Tibet tortured and murdered a number of Christian missionaries and their native converts, leading the Qing to send forces to put down the rebellion. During his travels through Mongolia and China, the Dalai Lama met a number of Europeans, coming to the conclusion that Tibet should free itself from the vassal relationship with the Chinese court that had lasted for centuries, becoming an independent and sovereign nation. Upon his arrival in Beijing in 1908, he was granted an audience with the Guangxu emperor (uncle of the “Last Emperor”) and his aunt, the fearsome dowager empress. Even before his return to Tibet, Chinese troops invaded eastern Tibet. In 1910, they entered Lhasa. Fearing that he would be deposed, the Dalai Lama fled to British

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India, where he was welcomed by the same government that had invaded his homeland seven years earlier. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama was the first Dalai Lama to be photographed; many photographs of him survive, some of them hand-painted to add color to the black and white image. He was also depicted, like his predecessors, in traditional Tibetan scroll paintings. In these paintings, like his predecessors beginning with the Fifth Dalai (1617–1682), he holds a golden wheel in his left hand. According to the Pāli story of the Buddha’s birth, when Queen Māyā brought her newborn son to King Śuddhodana, the monarch summoned eight priests skilled in interpreting physiognomy to predict the child’s future. Examining the marks on the child’s body, they (with one exception) declared that the child would become either a cakravartin or a buddha. One, a young priest named Kondañña (Pāli), predicted that the child was destined to become a buddha. It ˙˙ was this latter possibility, as the story goes, that caused the king to build a palace to shield his son from the worries of the world, ensuring that he would remain in the world as a king, rather than renounce it as an ascetic. The marks on the baby’s body were considered signs of future sanctity, whether in the palace or in the forest. These would be codified as the thirty-two marks of a superman (mahāpurusa), to which an additional eighty ancillary marks were ˙ added. The thirty-two, typically listed from foot to head, are a strange and fascinating mix of animal imagery (thighs like an antelope, jaw like a lion, eyelashes like a bull, a retractable penis like a horse, webbed digits like a duck), physical abnormalities (arms that extend below the knees when standing, a tongue that can lick behind the ears), and much attention to the teeth, of which there are forty, evenly spaced, and white. The most famous and immediately evident of the thirty-two is the bump on the head (called usnīsa, “turban”, in Sanskrit), ˙˙ ˙ generally rendered more respectfully in English as “crown protrusion.” These were the signs that the priests discerned on the body of the infant prince. What is noteworthy, however, is that in the story of the Buddha’s birth, the priests do not regard these remarkable marks as unique to a future buddha. They are also signs of the cakravartin, a figure who functions as a kind of doppelganger of the Buddha. One is the perfect king; the other is the perfect ascetic—as one scholar has referred to them, world conqueror and world renouncer.1 Their bodies are similar, adorned by marks of the virtue that they have amassed over their past lives. Indeed, each mark is said to be the result of a different virtue. For example, a retractable penis is the result of reconciling friends who have become estranged; broad shoulders are the result of nursing

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the sick; and a long tongue is the result of speaking true and gentle words.2 One is the ruler of the world; the other is the ruler of what is beyond the world. The symbol of each is the wheel. The Sanskrit term “cakravartin” literally means “wheel turning.” For reasons that will become clear, it is often translated as “universal monarch.” But the notion of the wheel is key. In order to increase their territory and display their sovereignty, kings in Vedic India practiced the elaborate “horse sacrifice” (aśvamedha). A stallion would be let loose to wander, accompanied by a hundred armed men. Whatever territory the horse traversed was claimed by the king, a claim enforced by his warriors, who would do battle with those who disputed it. The horse would be allowed to wander for a year, protected by the troops, after which time he would be brought back, bathed, anointed with butter, and festooned, before being sacrificed (along with several hundred other animals), with the king declared the ruler of all the lands where the horse had set foot during his sojourn. Animal sacrifice was anathema to Buddhists, but kingship was not. We see traces of the horse sacrifice in the ideal of the cakravartin. Instead of a horse, this king has a wheel that magically rolls across the land, bringing it under his rule. When the wheel is not rolling around the world, it floats in the sky above, spinning. As we shall see, the status of the wheel is a sign of the virtue of the king. The famous fifth-century compendium of Buddhist doctrine, the Treasury of Abhidharma (Abhidharmakośa), describes four kinds of wheel-turning kings, based on the substance of their wheel and the extent of their domain. Recalling that in the flat earth cosmology of Buddhism there are four continents, the king with a wheel of gold rules all four continents; unlike the case of the Vedic horse, the wheel is not accompanied by an army, with the rulers of the lands traversed by the wheel submitting without a fight. The king with a wheel of silver rules three continents (all except the northern continent), with neighboring kings yielding at the threat of invasion. The king with a wheel of copper rules two continents (the southern and the eastern); a brief battle is required in order to compel the neighboring lands to surrender. The king with an iron wheel rules only our southern continent and achieves victory only after a protracted war.3 The Buddha is endowed with all manner of spiritual possessions. The cakravartin is endowed with ten qualities of a good king, such as patience, honesty, and generosity, but he also has material possessions, typically called the seven jewels (ratna): the wheel, a wish-granting gem, a queen, a general, a minister, an elephant, and a horse.

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As we shall see, there have been a number of monarchs over the past two millennia who have claimed to be a cakravartin, or who have been regarded as such posthumously. However, in the Buddhist canon, the cakravartin is generally portrayed as a figure of the distant past. In the account of the Buddha’s final days, Ānanda complains that the little village of Kuśinagara, where the Buddha chooses to die, is hardly a suitable place for such a momentous event—that a great city would be more appropriate. The Buddha explains that in the distant past, it was the capital of a cakravartin named Mahāsudassana. Later, when Ānanda asks the Buddha how they should treat his body after he is dead, the Buddha says it should be treated like that of a cakravartin. However, Ānanda does not know what that is, so the Buddha has to provide a detailed description of the process of preparing the body, cremating it, and then enshrining it in a stūpa. The most detailed discussion of the cakravartin in the Pāli canon, however, is a text called the Discourse on the Lion’s Roar of the Cakravartin (Cakkavattisihanāda Sutta). In a work that seems to take up the theme of degeneration from the Buddhist creation myth in the Account of Origins (Aggañña Sutta), the Buddha describes a cakravartin named Dal hanemi, a virtuous ruler of the four ˙ realms, at a time when the human life span was very long. After several thousand years of his reign, he assigns a man to monitor the status of his wheel, asking to be informed if it slips from its position, rotating aloft. Told that it has, he understands that this is a portent of his death. He turns over the throne to his son and becomes a monk, at which point the wheel disappears. He explains to his son that the wheel is not something that can be inherited; it must be earned, and he goes on to explain at some length the qualities of the ideal monarch. These include doing good, rejecting evil, preventing crime, and supporting the poor. However, the most important virtue is devotion to and reverence for the dharma, using it as the guide in all situations, and seeking the advice of ascetics and brahmins when in doubt. The prince did so, and the wheel duly reappeared, traveling in all four directions, followed by his army. In each place, the local kings surrendered without a fight, agreeing to the king’s admonition to follow the five lay precepts: not to kill, steal, engage in sexual misconduct, lie, or use intoxicants. This same sequence—the wheel disappearing and then reappearing—occurred for the next six generations of kings. When the wheel disappeared for the seventh time, the king did not seek the counsel of the sages but ruled according to his own wishes. As a result, the kingdom began to suffer, and the people became poor, leading to theft for the first time. When a thief was brought before the king, he explained that he had stolen because he had nothing to live on. The king gave

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him enough property to support his family. When news of this gift became known, others began to steal, hoping for a similar reward. Recognizing the consequences of his decision, the king instructed his troops to execute the next thief who was brought before him. Learning of this, people concluded that they could avoid arrest by murdering the people from whom they stole. Murder spread throughout the kingdom. With two of the five vows of the laity—not to steal and not to kill—now violated, the life span of the people began to shrink, from eighty thousand years to forty thousand years. During this period, a thief was brought before the king. When he denied having committed the crime, he was released, leading to an increase in lying. As a result, human life span declined to twenty thousand years. Negative deeds in Buddhism are often enumerated as ten. Three are committed with the body: killing, stealing, and sexual misconduct. Four are committed through speech: lying, divisive speech, harsh speech, and senseless speech. Three are committed with the mind: covetousness, harmful intent, and wrong view. As the Discourse on the Lion’s Roar of the Cakravartin plays out, each of these is committed, causing the human life span to be cut in half. To this list of sins are added others—failure to respect one’s parents, ascetics, and priests; sexual deviance; and greed—which cause the life span to decrease from 250 years to one hundred years, the current life span of humans according to Buddhist cosmology. The Buddha’s account of the past in this sūtra brings us to the present day, but he does not stop there, going on to predict a more horrible future: a world ruled by fourth graders. For the human life span will decrease to ten years, with females becoming sexually active at age five. All manner of promiscuity and incest will take place. Flavor will disappear from all foods, and people will eat grass. The nadir of human civilization will be a week called the period of the sword, when everyone will suddenly find a sword in their hand, while mistaking humans for animals to be hunted, leading to mass carnage. A few will escape into the forest, avoiding the slaughter. When the seven days are over, they will realize that it is their sins that have caused them to suffer so. They will therefore aspire to do good, and as a result, the life span of their children will double to twenty years. Human life span, along with virtue and prosperity, will increase by increments over time, eventually once again reaching eighty thousand years. The population of the southern continent of Jambudvīpa will grow and prosper, once again ruled by a cakravartin, named San˙ka. It is then, and only then, that the next buddha, whose name is Maitreya (Metteyya, in Pāli) will appear in the world.

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There are many points that might be made about this story. For example, it explains why only the Buddha knew how the corpse of a cakravartin should be cremated: there had not been a cakravartin in the world since the human life span was eighty thousand years. And with the human life span declining, it would seem that there would not be another one in the foreseeable future. This would not prevent Buddhist monarchs of recorded history from being extolled as cakravartins after their passing, or for claiming the title for themselves. The famous case of the first is Aśoka, who ruled from about 268 to about 232 BCE. In the Legend of Aśoka (Aśokāvadāna), a Sanskrit text likely dating from early in the Common Era, the story is told of a young boy placing a handful of dirt in the begging bowl of the Buddha. The Buddha sees this as a sign that he will one day become a cakravartin, ruling the earth. Because Aśoka ruled only the southern continent and did so by force, he is classified as an iron wheel cakravartin. His wheel today adorns the flag of India. Scholars speculate that the piety of the Aśoka of history was rather more complicated than the piety of the Aśoka of legend; there is no evidence in the inscriptions that survive from his reign, the famous rock edicts, that he considered himself to be a cakravartin, nor should one conclude that such an absence was the result of modesty on his part. There have been, however, Buddhist monarchs who declared themselves to be cakravartins and who had themselves depicted as such. Here, we can only consider two of the most famous, one female, one male. The female is the famous and infamous empress Wu Zetian (624–705) of China, the only woman to rule China in its long history. The daughter of a prosperous timber merchant and sometime general, she became a concubine to Emperor Taizong. Upon his death, she became a Buddhist nun, as was required after the death of an emperor for all concubines who had not produced offspring; they were forbidden to marry and thus were to spend their lives in a nunnery. However, she somehow attracted the attention of the new emperor, Gaozong, who brought her back to the palace as a concubine. Through various machinations, she was able to eventually have the empress and the chief concubine deposed and then killed, becoming empress herself. Because the emperor was weak and often ill, she served as de facto head of state, famously sitting behind a pearl screen next to the throne, whispering instructions to him. Upon Gaozong’s death, her third son, the chosen successor, became Emperor Zhongzong. However, after two months on the throne, she had him deposed and exiled, making her youngest son emperor, with herself as empress dowager. Upon his death, she became emperor herself (the Chinese term is not gendered), establishing her own dynasty. Her long reign of some fifty years—

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as empress, empress dowager, and ruler—were fraught with court intrigue, with many rivals and suspected rivals eliminated through demotion, exile, assassination, and suicide. She is one of the most famous Buddhist monarchs in history. Facing waves of resistance to her gender, especially from the patriarchal Confucian bureaucracy that had long ruled China, she sought to associate herself with a range of important female figures from Chinese legend and history, including the ancient goddess known as the Queen Mother of the West, as well as with the mothers of the Daoist sage Laozi and the Confucian sage Mencius. However, she found her greatest sources of legitimation in Buddhism. As empress, dowager empress, and emperor, she knew and supported several of the most famous monks of the Tang period, including the Chan master Shenxiu (606–706) and the Huayan master Fazang (643–712), as well as the illustrious pilgrims Xuanzang (602–664) and Yijing (635–713). She was also a  patron of translators and artists (the monumental statue of Vairocana at the Longmen Grottoes was carved with her support). When her parents died, she had scribes produce three thousand copies of the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapundarīka). During the period of her rule, more than sixteen hundred monas˙˙ teries were built. When pregnant with the third son that she had with Emperor Gaozong, she sought the blessings of the aged Xuanzang, who provided them, asking that if the baby was a boy he be placed under his protection, to be raised as a monk. She agreed, and the infant was given to Xuanzang for a ceremony where he was named Buddha Light (Foguang) and offered sūtras and the accoutrements of a monk, including robes. The famous translator prophesied a brilliant future for the child. Xuanzang died when the boy was eight. Although apparently a devout Buddhist, the boy never became a monk, becoming emperor instead. This was Emperor Zhongzong, who was deposed by his mother in 684; he would return to the throne after her forced abdication in 705 for a five-year reign. Like so many Buddhist monarchs across Asia, Wu Zetian was a devotee of relics, providing a set of nested reliquaries made of gold and silver to hold the precious Famensi relic, said to be a finger bone of the Buddha, and arranging for the distribution of ten thousand grains of relics (known as the Guangzhai relics) that had been discovered in a stone coffer in Chang’an, the Tang capital. This was a major undertaking; relics were typically enshrined in a pagoda. In 690, a group of monks—including Huaiyi, rumored to be Wu Zetian’s lover—presented her with a translation of a previously unknown text, a commentary on the Great Cloud Sūtra (Mahāmegha Sūtra), a Mahāyāna sūtra often cited in support of the tathāgatagarbha doctrine. Because it includes a prophecy

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about Nāgārjuna, scholars are able to date it to after his time. The text contains another prophecy in which the Buddha predicts that a goddess named Vimalaprabhā would one day be reborn as a cakravartin, in the form of a woman. The commentary on the sūtra that she was given, purporting to be an Indian text but in fact a concoction by her monks, included prophecies that Empress Wu would be this cakravartin, who would rule a realm free of dissent and disease, providing all manner of specific details about her reign, including the distribution of the relics and the building of the pagodas. In this case, the number of stūpas was 8,040,000, significantly exceeding the eighty-four thousand stūpas said to have been built by Aśoka. In 693, Empress Wu’s monks presented her with a translation of the Cloud of Jewels Sūtra (Ratnamegha Sūtra), an important Mahāyāna text in which the Buddha describes the qualities of a bodhisattva. It was well-known in India, cited by such famous figures as Nāgārjuna, Śāntideva, and Kamalaśīla. It contains the oft-quoted line, “The mind precedes all phenomena; if one understands the mind, one will understand all phenomena.” It is very common for the prologue of a Buddhist sūtra to list the names of those in the Buddha’s audience. In a Mahāyāna sūtra, that list, made up mostly of bodhisattvas, can be quite long, sometimes going on for pages. In the Cloud of Jewels Sūtra, there are a mere fifty-five bodhisattvas listed, one of whom is called Candraprabha. In the text presented to Empress Wu, the Buddha prophesies that in the last period of the dharma, Candraprabha will be reborn in the land called Mahācina, “Great Cina.” He will be both a cakravartin and an “irreversible bodhisattva,” that is, a bodhisattva so advanced on the path that his eventual buddhahood is certain. He will support the san˙gha and build pagodas. And he will do so in the female form. However, there is no such passage in the Cloud of Jewels Sūtra. Wu Zetian’s loyal monks had inserted it into the original text. That same year, Empress Wu added the characters “golden wheel” to her titles, as in “golden wheel cakravartin,” referring to the highest rank of cakravartin, who rules all four continents without the need for military conflict. Just as she had outdone Aśoka in the number of stūpas she was prophesied to build, she outdid him in the number of continents over which she reigned. She even had an elephant, a gift from what is today Vietnam. The Buddha declared that women are unable to attain five states: a buddha, a cakravartin, the god Śakra (Indra), the god Māra, and the god Brahmā. This is not a Hīnayāna doctrine that the Mahāyāna ignored. It is repeated in Chapter Twelve of the Lotus Sūtra, a text that the monks of the Tang court knew well. It seems that these fine points of doctrine could presumably be ignored under

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the circumstances. This would also have been the case when, the following year, she took yet another name, “Maitreya,” despite the fact that at that time and to the present day he is supposed to be living in the Joyous Heaven awaiting his final birth in which he will become the next buddha. Even by the baroque standards of the Mahāyāna sūtras, her ever-expanding exaltation of her identity strikes the modern reader as a case of divine hubris. The divinities seem to have agreed. Two weeks after she took the title, she had Huaiyi produce a huge picture of Maitreya, claiming that he had used his own blood for the paint. In fact, he had used ox blood. The painting was too large to be displayed indoors and so was hung from a bridge, where it was quickly destroyed by the wind. The same day, a fire destroyed her magnificent Bright Hall complex. She dropped the “Maitreya” title.4 After her death, a huge memorial stele was erected at her tomb. It remains blank to this day. During the reign of Emperor Taizong, for whom the future Empress Wu was a concubine, China was under threat from Tibet. In 638, two hundred thousand Tibetan troops invaded Tang territory; in 763, they would capture Chang’an, the capital. The Tibetan king at the time of the earlier invasion was Songtsen Gampo (569–649). Later Tibetan works would declare that he was the incarnation of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara. The most important of these works is called the One Hundred Thousand Pronouncements on Mani (Mani bka’ ˙ ˙ ’bum), a treasure text dating from the twelfth century. This massive work is a collection of all manner of legends, rites, and prayers that describe Avalokiteśvara (the “Mani” of the title) as the progenitor (in the form of a monkey) and ˙ protector of the Tibetan people. In describing Songtsen Gampo’s largely legendary role in bringing Buddhism to Tibet, the king is identified as the incarnation of the bodhisattva. He is also called a cakravartin. It was around the time of the composition of the One Hundred Thousand Pronouncements on Mani that the institution of the incarnate lama was taking ˙ shape in Tibet, the notion that after the death of a great teacher, his next rebirth could be discovered by his disciples to continue his enlightened activities on behalf of sentient beings. By the sixteenth century, this practice was established across the schools of Tibetan Buddhism, including the Geluk, one of whose lines of incarnation was that of Gendun Drup (1391–1474), a prominent disciple of Tsongkhapa (1357–1419). In 1578, the third incarnation of Gendun Drup, Sönam Gyatso (1543–1588), accepted an invitation to the court of a Mongol khan, who bestowed upon him the title “Dalai Lama.” After Sönam ­Gyatso’s death in 1588, the fourth incarnation was discovered to be the Mongol khan’s great-grandson. Although at this time, the Dalai Lama was merely one of sev-

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eral incarnate lamas of the Geluk sect, the fact that the young lama was not Tibetan was a cause of controversy; he died at the age of twenty-seven, perhaps by poisoning. The early decades of the seventeenth century were a time of political upheaval and sectarian conflict in Tibet, with the Geluk persecuted by the king of Tsang (Tibet’s western province) and his Mongol supporters. The Fifth Dalai Lama, named Ngawang Gyatso, grew up during this period. He would eventually win the support of another Mongol faction, led by Gushri Khan, who in 1642 defeated the king of Tsang and declared himself to be king of Tibet, granting control of religious affairs to the young Fifth Dalai Lama. He would become head of state, the first Dalai Lama to hold that position, upon the death of Gushri Khan in 1655. Once in power, the Dalai Lama began composing biographies of his predecessors, tracing their previous lives through a number of Tibetan saints and to Songtsen Gampo. They were all, therefore, human incarnations of Avalokiteśvara, as was, by implication, the Fifth Dalai Lama himself. In 1643, he began construction of a massive palace, completed after his death, called the Potala; Mount Potalaka is the abode of Avalokiteśvara. This apotheosis of the Fifth Dalai Lama was promoted by his regent, Desi Sangye Gyatso (1653–1705), appointed in 1679. The Dalai Lama died just three years later, a fact that the regent was able to successfully conceal for almost fifteen years. During this time, he composed a lengthy biography of the Fifth Dalai Lama, declaring him to be both an incarnation of Avalokiteśvara and a cakravartin; Mahāyāna texts made clear that, unlike the Buddha, who chose one destiny over the other, it was possible to be both a bodhisattva and a cakravartin. Desi Sangye Gyatso commissioned statues and paintings of the Fifth Dalai Lama in the Potala in which he held the white lotus of Avalokiteśvara in his right hand and the golden wheel of the cakravartin in his left.5 Each of his successors would be similarly depicted, including the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, he could not call on the military might of a Mongol khan when British troops crossed into Tibet in 1903 and Chinese troops tried to arrest him in 1910; in both cases, he had to flee the country. With the fall of the Qing in 1912, the small Tibetan army was able to defeat the Chinese troops stationed there. However, the Dalai Lama knew it would be incapable of defending Tibet against modern armies, as the Younghusband Expedition had tragically demonstrated. The Dalai Lama took traditional Buddhist measures to protect his domain, having temples and stūpas constructed at auspicious sites identified through

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geomancy.6 However, he also took measures that his predecessors had not. In 1916, he issued a series of decrees to produce a weapons manual for army officers, to build a factory for the manufacture of modern weapons, to acquire such weapons from the British, and to raise taxes in order to provide the army with those weapons. All of these efforts failed. The British refused to supply the number of weapons that the Dalai Lama requested and did not provide advisors for their manufacture, leaving the Tibetans to manufacture them themselves. The results were not promising. When the rifles were fired, the bullets would sometimes rotate in flight, striking the target sideways. The Panchen Lama, the second-most powerful figure in Tibet and de facto ruler of the western regions of the country, refused to contribute funds to the effort, leading to a rift between them that remained unhealed. In one of these decrees, the Dalai Lama refers to himself as a golden wheel cakravartin, predicting, “Just by taking as a scepter the radiance of the thousand spokes of the golden [wheel] of the political and religious [system], the heads of lords and subjects of [our] ill-intentioned enemies from the four borders regions will automatically bow down.”7 It was not to be. A year before his death in 1933, the Dalai Lama gave a speech at Radreng Monastery, often described as his “final testament.” There, he warned not of the threat of the British but the threat of Communism; with the close ties between Tibet and Mongolia, he knew of the devastation of Buddhist institutions in the Kalmyk and Buryiat regions of the new Soviet Union, regions that had sent monks to Tibet for centuries. In his speech, he said: Unless we can guard our own country, it will now happen that the Dalai and Panchen Lamas, the Father and the Son, the Holders of the Faith, the glorious Rebirths, will be broken down and left without a name. As regards the monasteries and the monks and nuns, their lands and other properties will be destroyed. The administrative customs of the Three Religious Kings will be weakened. The officers of the State, ecclesiastical and secular, will find their lands seized and their property confiscated, and they themselves will be made to serve their enemies, or wander about the country as beggars do. All beings will be sunk in great hardship and in overpowering fear; the days and nights will drag on slowly in suffering.8 This time, the prophecy came true.

22 • Schism

Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907) was an American journalist who served in the Union army during the American Civil War, rising to the rank of colonel. After Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865, Olcott was appointed to the Bureau of Military Justice that was investigating the assassination plot. He interrogated Mary Surratt, a widow who owned a boarding house in Washington, D.C., at 604 H Street (today a Chinese restaurant). Several of the conspirators had met there in the months leading up to the assassination. Mary Surratt was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging, making her the first woman in American history to be executed by the federal government. After leaving the military, Olcott became an attorney, while continuing to publish newspaper articles. In 1874, he traveled to Chittenden, Vermont, to write an article for the New York Sun about the Eddy brothers, who held seances in which Native Americans named Santum and Honto materialized. There, Olcott met the Russian medium Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891). The following year, they would found the Theosophical Society. In 1880, Blavatsky and Olcott sailed to Sri Lanka (then the British colony of Ceylon), where they participated in a refuge ceremony and became Buddhists, taking the five vows of a Buddhist layperson: not to kill, steal, engage in sexual misconduct, lie, or use intoxicants. In the following years, a rift developed between Blavatsky and Olcott, with Blavatsky wanting Olcott to devote his efforts to the Theosophical Society, and Olcott wanting to devote his efforts to Buddhism, seeking to defend it from Christian missionaries. Olcott persisted in his efforts, turning his attention to a different rift, a schism between what he referred to as the Northern and Southern Churches (that is, the Theravāda tradition of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia and the Mahāyāna tradition of China, Korea, Japan,

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Vietnam, Tibet, and Mongolia) to create a “United Buddhist World.” To that end, he compiled a list of fourteen “Fundamental Buddhistic Beliefs” and set out to solicit their certification.1 On February 9, 1889, he arrived in Kobe in Japan, proceeding to Kyoto, where he was invited to the great Chion-in Temple of the Jōdo sect. Before an audience of some six hundred priests and thousands of laypeople, he stood before the statue of the buddha Amitābha and recited the five vows of a Buddhist layman in Pāli, as he had learned to do in Sri Lanka. The irony of reciting those vows in the presence of that buddha was likely lost on him. The accounts of the schisms that have occurred in various religions over the centuries are typically told by one party or the other, presenting itself as the protagonist, the other side as the antagonist. Each side has its hero, and every hero has a nemesis. In the case of Buddhism, the word translated as “schism” is “san˙ghabheda,” literally, “splitting the monastic community.” The hero is the Buddha. His nemesis is Devadatta. Their antagonism extends back over many lifetimes. In the jātaka literature, the stories of the Buddha’s past lives, Devadatta is often the villain, persecuting, and often murdering, the future buddha. In the story of Khantivādī, the gentle teacher of patience, Devadatta is the drunken king who has his executioner lop off the sage’s hands, feet, nose, and ears, asking him each time what he teaches. Khantivādī replies, “I teach patience.” In the story of Vessantara, Devadatta is the greedy brahmin Jūjuka, who asks Prince Vessantara to give him his children so that they can be his slaves. The prince agrees. In the Buddha’s last lifetime, Devadatta is Prince Siddhārtha’s cousin and (in some versions) the brother of Ānanda. His antagonism toward the future buddha begins in their childhood, when he is bested by the prince in various manly arts. In one story, he kills an elephant that had been given to the prince. When it falls, its body blocks the gates of the city. Devadatta is unable to lift it but Prince Siddhārtha flips the carcass over the city walls with his toe. When the Buddha returned to Kapilavastu in the first year after his enlightenment, a number of the residents of the city joined the order of monks, including his kinsmen Ānanda and the low-caste barber Upāli. Devadatta also joined. By all accounts he was an exemplary monk for decades, praised by Śāriputra, who was renowned as the wisest of the Buddha’s disciples. Devadatta is also praised by the Buddha himself, counted as one of his eleven leading disciples. In various texts, he is described as a skilled meditator who has achieved magical powers and as an eloquent teacher of both monastic and lay disciples. As the Buddha grew older, we must assume that there were questions about

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who would succeed him as leader of the order of monks and nuns. When he was seventy-two (he would die when he was eighty), Devadatta is said to have asked what appears to be a legitimate, if perhaps self-interested, question. Rising in the assembly of monks, he threw his upper robe over his shoulder, approached the Buddha, and with joined palms said, “Lord, the Blessed One is now old, aged, burdened with years, advanced in life and come to the last stage. Let the Blessed One now rest. Let him dwell in bliss in the present life. Let him hand over the order of monks to me. I will govern the order of monks.” The Buddha refused. However, the Buddha often refused a first request, only to agree the third time. When Devadatta asked the third time, the Buddha again refused, adding, with uncharacteristic ire, “I would not hand over the order of monks even to Śāriputra and Maudgalyāyana. Why would I do so to a wastrel, a clot of spittle like you?”2 Devadatta was sufficiently stung by the rebuke that he decided to assassinate the Buddha. With the help of the evil king Ajātaśatru, he enlisted thirtyone archers in an elaborate scheme to eliminate the Buddha—two archers assigned to kill the assassin, four archers assigned to kill the assassins of the assassins, and so on—in order to prevent any connection of Devadatta to the crime. However, the Buddha converted them all. Disgusted at their failure, Devadatta decided to do the deed himself. The Buddha spent much time in the city of Rājagrha, giving many of his ˙ most famous sermons on Vulture Peak outside the city. He would sometimes take his evening walk in the shadow of the mountain. Knowing this, Devadatta climbed up the mountain and pushed down a boulder, hoping that it would crush the Buddha. As it rolled toward him, two outcroppings of rock miraculously emerged in the boulder’s path, blocking it. However, a shard of stone broke off and struck the Buddha’s foot, causing it to bleed, so much so that the famed physician Jīvaka had to be summoned. Not to be deterred, Devadatta intoxicated a fierce elephant with palm wine and let him loose as the Buddha was begging for alms in the city. As the elephant charged him, the Buddha directed thoughts of love toward the raging beast. He stopped and knelt before the Buddha. The Buddha stroked his head in what would become a commonly depicted scene in Buddhist art. Foiled three times in attempting to murder the Buddha, Devadatta decided to form his own order, one that would follow stricter rules than that of the Buddha. He went to the Buddha and asked him to institute five rules for all monks: (1) that they should live their entire lives in the forest, and not live in villages; (2) that they should live entirely on the alms they received from begging, and

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should not accept invitations to dine in the homes of the laity; (3) that they should wear only robes made from discarded rags, and should not accept offerings of cloth for robes from the laity; (4) that they should dwell at the foot of a tree, and not under a roof; (5) that they should not eat fish or meat. Devadatta’s hope and expectation was that the Buddha would refuse to institute these rules. Devadatta would then be able to attract those who wished to pursue this more ascetic life. The Buddha did indeed refuse, declaring that any monk who wished to obey these five rules could do so, with the provision that those who lived under a tree seek more permanent shelter during the annual rains retreat. Before continuing with the story, we might pause to consider each of these new rules. In the Buddhist creation myth, the true ascetics were those who left society to meditate in the forest, deemed superior to those who lived in the city and compiled books. One way to read Devadatta’s first demand is as a critique of what he believed the san˙gha had become, that is, a city-based movement, living in the very setting that the true ascetic seeks to escape. As has been noted, the terms that are translated as “monk” and “nun” literally mean “male beggar” (bhiksu) and “female beggar” (bhiksunī), and the mo˙ ˙ ˙ nastic code devotes much space to the etiquette of receiving alms into one’s begging bowl, including prohibitions against requesting certain foods, an early iteration of “beggars can’t be choosers.” However, there are many stories of the Buddha and his disciples accepting invitations for the pre-noon meal in the homes of various kings, queens, princes, princesses, merchants, and courtesans, with sumptuous meals being prepared for them. Indeed, the Buddha would die not long after consuming a special meal—scholars debate whether it was pork or truffles—offered to him by the blacksmith Cunda. The practice of accepting meals from the laity seems to have become sufficiently widespread (and popular among monks) to require that a section of the monastic code be devoted to procedures for determining who may attend, with a kind of lottery system established to regulate the practice. One of the standard Buddhist terms for a monk is “pravrajita,” often translated into English as “one who has gone forth,” in the sense of leaving the household for the forest, one of the central binaries of classical Indian religion. Indeed, the term is translated into Chinese simply as “leaving home” (chujia). Devadatta’s rule suggests that the practice of accepting invitations to dine in the homes of the laity is a return to the very site that the monk has vowed to renounce. The requisites of a monk are few; the two most important are his bowl and his robes. Having challenged what was being placed in the begging bowl, Devadatta’s third rule deals with the robes. There are also detailed rules about robes,

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how they are to be procured, how they are to be washed and sewn, and how they are to be replaced. Again, as a means of separating themselves from society and effacing all signs of wealth and hierarchy, monks must agree to wear robes made of rags, traditionally said to be collected from refuse piles and charnel grounds. The cloth is to be washed, cut into squares, sewn into robes, and then dyed saffron, a color meant to distinguish the dress of the mendicant from the white robes of the laity. Devadatta’s rule would prevent monks from receiving offerings of cloth, requiring that they return to the rags the tradition describes as the original material of monastic robes. It implies that the monk is to cover his body with cloth regarded as worthless by the world, not with new cloth that others would happily wear. Monastic robes are a topic of sufficient importance and obsession in the history of Buddhism to deserve their own chapter. We can note here, however, that at the time of ordination, prospective monks must declare their willingness to rely on what are renowned as the four requisites of the monastic life: rags for robes, alms for food, the root of a tree for a bed, and fermented urine for medicine. It is important to note that monks are not required to use these— they must only declare their willingness to do so. This is clear because directly after this statement in the ordination ceremony, the prospective monk is then informed that a long list of other fabrics are allowed as atīreka, a term that is translated as “extra acquisitions” and “supernumeraries.” According to the Mūlasarvāstivāda vinaya, those are “woven silk or a bolt of cotton or napped cotton or muslin or frost cloth of fine silk fabric or Himalayan silk or deep napped cotton or red napped cotton or fine napped cotton or red wool or fine Banares cloth or evenly dyed three colored cloth or one colored cloth or fine spun hemp or linen or plain cotton or fine Dukula fabric or fine cloth from Kotumbara or ˙ cloth imported from the western border or any other suitable cloth that is acquired from the community or an individual.”3 Thus, there are stories of the laity offering new cloth to the monks, maintaining the pretense of discarded refuse by placing a bolt of cloth outside the house, guarded by a servant so that it is not taken by someone else. Throughout the Buddhist world, and especially in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia to the present day, one of the major ceremonies to mark the conclusion of the annual rains retreat is called kathina. The word refers to a wooden frame used to ˙ measure the lengths of new cloth given to monks at the end of their retreat. The “rag robes” in Devadatta’s list, like the other elements, appear to be a return to origins, but in fact were likely something few monks ever wore, given the long list of alternatives explicitly enumerated in the ordination ceremony.

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Indeed, other sections of the vinaya go to some lengths to discourage wearing robes made of cloth taken from charnel grounds, going so far as having the Buddha declare it to be a “grave offense” (sthūlātyaya) to do so, and preventing monks who wear such robes—called cemetery monks (śmāśānika)—from entering the monastery, using its property, teaching, or sitting with other monks.4 The theme of returning to the rigors of the ascetic life continues with the fourth rule, preventing monks from living in a dwelling, instead seeking shelter under a tree. Here, Devadatta seems to be objecting to what would become, after the stūpa, the central site of the Buddhist built environment, the monastery. The tradition presents the evolution of the monastery not as a slackening of discipline but as a concession to the laity. In the classical Indian calendar, there are not four seasons but six, the third of which, varsā, literally means ˙ “rain.” This is the monsoon season. Depending on the location on the subcontinent, the monsoon begins in mid- to late summer. Buddhist texts tend to speak of three seasons, the hot season, the cold season, and the rainy season. The rainy season is given a precise length of three lunar months, beginning the day after the full moon of the eighth lunar month (usually in July) and ending on the full moon of the eleventh lunar month (usually in October). According to the tradition, the Buddha and his monks originally continued to wander year-round, until they were criticized by the laity for trampling the growing grass and stepping on the worms and insects along the muddy roads, noting that other religious mendicants did not wander during the monsoon. The Buddha therefore allowed monks to remain in one place during the rains. This would become the obligatory rains retreat, observed by monks and nuns throughout the Buddhist world, including places like Tibet, where there is no rainy season. The Buddhist monastery, therefore, is said to have evolved from the shelters provided for the monks during the monsoon, shelters that became more extensive and elaborate complexes, providing permanent rather than temporary shelter throughout the year. Such a dwelling was originally called varsāvāsa, ˙ “rains abode,” but came to be called vihāra, the term commonly translated as “monastery.” Once again championing what he seems to regard as the original asceticism of the community, Devadatta objects to the indulgence of living under a roof, declaring that monks must live in the woods. It is noteworthy here that the Buddha allows monks to follow four of Devadatta’s rules but offers a qualification for this one, requiring that even monks who live in the open seek shelter during the monsoon. The fifth and last of Devadatta’s rules differs from the first four in the sense that it seems to be an attempt to qualify an original practice rather than return

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to it. As beggars, monks and nuns were supposed to eat whatever was placed in their bowls by the laity. Here, however, Devadatta demands a vegetarian diet, one in which members of the monastic community may not eat meat or fish. This would appear to be a concession to caste rules, where the brahmin priests of what would come to be called Hinduism, after centuries of animal sacrifice, came to adopt a vegetarian diet as a sign of purity. The Buddhists’ early rivals, the Jains, had long practiced vegetarianism in keeping with their commitment to non-harming (ahimsā). This raises the rather vexed issue of vegetarianism ˙ in Buddhism, discussed in Chapter Eight. Let us return to the story of Devadatta. After the Buddha refused to require the practices suggested by Devadatta, he denounced the Buddha as lax and departed to form his own san˙gha, followed by five hundred newly ordained monks. The Buddha sent his two foremost disciples, Śāriputra and Maudgalyāyana, to retrieve them. When Devadatta saw them approaching, he was overjoyed, assuming that these prominent monks were coming to join his new order. After delivering a discourse to the monks, Devadatta invited Śāriputra to also do so while he took a nap. While Devadatta was asleep, Śāriputra convinced the five hundred monks to return to the fold. By the time Devadatta awoke, they were gone. Learning what had happened, he vomited blood and died. According to other accounts, he did not die; he eventually decided to repent and set off to seek the forgiveness of the Buddha. Sometimes his repentance is presented as sincere, sometimes it is sinister, as Devadatta decides to make one last attempt to assassinate the Buddha, planning to scratch him with fingernails dipped in poison. However, such were his sins that while en route, he was swallowed by the earth, descending to Avīci, the most horrific of the Buddhist hells, where he will remain impaled in a room of burning iron until the destruction of the current world system. Chinese pilgrims to India said that they saw the pit where he slowly sank into hell.5 As already discussed, the story of Devadatta’s infernal fate would foil the plans of Jesuit missionaries in Thailand. The story of Devadatta is well known throughout the Buddhist world. There are different versions of his demands, however. The five listed above derive from the Pāli vinaya. A different, and likely later, vinaya, the Mūlasarvāstivāda vinaya, presents a different, and rather more mundane, list, one that gives reasons for the prohibition, four of which seem motivated by compassion for others. In this later list, Devadatta demanded that monks (1) abstain from milk products, because taking the milk is harmful to calves; (2) abstain from meat, because it causes animals to be killed; (3) abstain from salt, because it comes from sweat; (4) wear robes with long fringe rather than cut fringe, because cutting fringe

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destroys the work of weavers; and (5) live in villages and not in the forest, in order to be able to perform acts of charity.6 We note here only one point in common with the earlier list (abstention from meat) and one point that is the opposite: the demand that monks live in villages and not in the forest. We will consider below a possible reason for the discrepancy. In Buddhist karma theory, five heinous misdeeds would be enumerated that lead immediately to rebirth in Avīci, sometimes called the five deeds of immediate retribution because one is reborn in Avīci immediately after death in the lifetime in which the deed is done. They are killing one’s father, killing one’s mother, killing an arhat, causing blood to flow from the Buddha, and causing a schism in the san˙gha. In the story we have told, Devadatta commits the last two of these. According to another story, when a nun who was also an arhat chastised him for attempting to kill the Buddha, he murdered her, thus committing a third heinous deed. He also convinced Prince Ajātaśatru to murder his father, King Bimbisāra, implicating himself in the prince’s crime. Thus, Devadatta becomes the sinner par excellence of the Buddhist tradition, his redemption in the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapundarīka)—where the Buddha predicts ˙˙ that Devadatta will become a buddha in the future—serving to prove that all beings are destined for supreme enlightenment. Scholastic presentations of the five deeds of immediate retribution make it clear that, contrary to our modern sensibility, the worst of all sins is not murdering one’s parents but causing a schism in the san˙gha, as Devadatta so briefly did. What history, if any, can we derive from this colorful story? This valuation of a schism, and the Devadatta story more generally, may offer hints into the early evolution of the monastic community in India. Thus, whether or not there was a Devadatta, some insights might be drawn from his list of demands, and the tradition’s excoriation of the monk who is said to have made them. We might imagine, for example, that the story was the product of a wellestablished, town-based monastic community, which sought to demonize those monks who practiced and promoted a more ascetic lifestyle, monks who in fact lived in the forest, wore rag robes, abstained from meat, and did not accept in­ vitations to dine with the laity. In order to defend their more indulgent (monastically speaking) lifestyle, those who lived under roofs in villages, dressed in robes of new cloth, and ate meat in the homes of the laity identified the progenitor of these ascetic practices as a monk called Devadatta (the Sanskrit equivalent of “John Doe”), a person so depraved that he attempted to murder the Buddha three times (and murdered the bodhisattva many times in previous lives) and who created the first schism by demanding that monks follow his new rules.

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However, in his Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga), composed in Sri Lanka in the fifth century CE, Buddhaghosa lists, approvingly, thirteen kinds of ascetic practice: the refuse-rag-wearer, the triple-robe-wearer, the alms-food-eater, the house-to-house-seeker, the one-sessioner, the bowl-food-eater, the later-foodrefuser, the forest-dweller, the tree-root-dweller, the open-air-dweller, the charnelground-dweller, the any-bed-user, and the sitter. Most of these are self-explanatory, describing ascetics who only eat alms; who go from house to house on their alms round, not skipping houses where they know or expect they will be offered nothing; who eat their alms food in one sitting, without eating what is not in their bowl; or who refuse more food. A “sitter” is someone who takes a vow never to lie down. He describes each in detail. This suggests that some of the practices advocated by Devadatta were practiced in Sri Lanka in the fifth century CE.7 The same Chinese pilgrims who saw the pit where Devadatta sank into the earth also claimed to find his followers in India. Faxian reports that these monks made offerings to the three previous buddhas but not to Śākyamuni.8 In Karna˙ suvarna, in what is today West Bengal, Xuanzang found three monasteries where ˙ the monks did not eat curd, “in accordance with the teaching of Devadatta.”9 The Chinese pilgrims seem to identify these monks, however, based on the later set of rules (no meat, no fringe, no dairy products, no salt, no forest dwelling). None of the Chinese pilgrims who describe the followers of Devadatta name the more famous set of rules, suggesting that by the time of those rules, there were few monks who followed them, if they ever existed at all. A later Chinese pilgrim, Yijing (635–713), reports that followers of Devadatta were to be found all over India. He says that in general, they follow orthodox teachings, but tend to live on the outskirts of villages, use gourds (rather than vessels made of clay or metal) for their begging bowls, wear two rather than three robes that are the color of mulberry bark, and abstain from fermented milk products. When Yijing asked one such monk living at Nālandā Monastery whether he was therefore a follower of Devadatta, the monk denied it.10 Thus, we might see Devadatta as a site for the condensation of various disputes of the monastic community, with an elaborate story of villainy (extending over many lifetimes) provided as the frame. The losing party is personified in the Buddha’s nemesis. And so the schism of Devadatta was short-lived. However, it is not the only schism that occurs in the life of the Buddha. Years earlier, a dispute had broken out among the monks of the city of Kauśāmbī over an admittedly minor matter. A monk who was learned in the sūtras had left some washing water in a vessel in the latrine. A monk who was learned in the monastic code asked

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him if he knew that doing so was an offense. The first monk admitted that he did not and offered to confess it. However, the second monk told him that if he did not know that it was an offense, there was no infraction and thus no need to confess it. This apparently harmless and friendly exchange about water left in a vessel in the latrine escalated into a cause célèbre, with the disciples of the two monks hurling insults at each other. As a result, the faction of the accuser suspended the accused monk, placing him on probation. The Buddha was living in the monastery at the time and was informed of the dispute, a dispute that could lead to a schism in the community. The Buddha spoke to both factions, telling the faction of the accuser that they should not suspend such a learned monk over such a minor matter. He then went to the faction of the accused and told him that although he did not know that leaving the water in the vessel was an infraction, he should nonetheless confess it. However, in one of the rare moments in the canon where monks ignore the advice of the Buddha, both sides refused to concede. The Buddha became sufficiently perturbed that he left the monastery and went off into the woods, where he was able to spend the entire rains retreat in peace, saying to himself, “Formerly I lived in discomfort, pestered by the Kosambī bhikkhus who quarrel, brawl, wrangle, harangue, and litigate in the midst of the san˙gha. Now I am alone and companionless, living at ease and in comfort, away from all of them.”11 According to one version of the story, while living in the forest, the Buddha was tended by an elephant who had also become weary of the infighting of his fellow pachyderms. The schism would continue to haunt Kauśāmbī. In one of the many Buddhist stories of how the dharma will disappear, it will end when all the monks left in India have gathered in that city under the protection of a pious king. By this time, monks will no longer maintain their vows. Only one arhat will remain. On the night of the fortnightly confession ceremony, the master of the monastery will rise to recite the monastic code, announcing that he will do so in brief. The arhat will request that he recite it in full. The master will respond that such a request can only be made by a monk who maintains all of the vows. The arhat will reply that he is such a monk. The followers of the master will become incensed by the arhat’s challenge to their teacher and will murder him. The gods, who hold the arhat in high esteem, will kill the master. The dharma will end in the world on that day.12 As we have seen in other contexts, a major motivation for the comportment of monks and nuns is that the lay community, upon whom they depend, not be offended. In this case, when it became known that the Buddha himself had

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been driven from the monastery by the quarrelsome monks, the laity of Kauśāmbī refused to provide them with alms. It was this, rather than the entreaties of the Enlightened One, that caused them to resolve their differences, differences over what the tradition itself seems to regard as a minor matter. What can be said historically about these various schisms in the san˙gha? The very brief schism caused by Devadatta is likely legendary, as is Devadatta himself. The so-called Second Council was concerned with what, to our eyes, seem even more minor matters than Devadatta’s revolt, questions like whether a monk can carry salt in an animal horn, eat whey after twelve noon, and have fringe on his sitting mat. Whether or not such things were in fact disputed, the fact that they became the subject of an elaborate narrative again suggests that monks were far more concerned with matters of administration and comportment than they were with matters of doctrine. Still, Buddhist sources report that after this council, there was a split into a group called the Elders (Sthavira) and a group called the Majority (Mahāsām ghika), and from this a ˙ large number of schools—traditionally counted as eighteen but in fact more— emerged, schools for which there is textual evidence, schools that, once again, were divided over some points of doctrine but also over what for the most part seem mundane matters of monastic life. The supposed schism that occurred at the Second Council was the schism that Colonel Olcott sought to “heal,” mistakenly believing that it had led to the Mahāyāna-Theravāda divide, or what he called the Northern Church and the Southern Church. The Third Council, whose colorful account includes a number of beheadings, appears only in Pāli sources and is likely legendary. It is said to have been called by Aśoka to deal with what was likely a real problem for the Buddhist san˙gha: the presence of monks who ordained (or pretended to have ordained) for the free lunch. We have the Aśoka of legend and the Aśoka of history. It is therefore fascinating to note that although the council called by the Aśoka of legend likely never occurred, the Aśoka of history seemed concerned with schisms in the Buddhist san˙gha, as evidenced by the three so-called Schism Edicts among his minor rock edicts, found at Kauśāmbī, Sanchi, and Sarnath. His statements here are brief, saying that schism in the san˙gha is prohibited, and that a monk or nun who causes a schism should be expelled and defrocked.13 As Henry Steel Olcott stood in a Jōdo Shū temple in Kyoto before a statue of the buddha Amitābha, he probably did not know that, according to the central sūtra of the sect, the Sūtra on the Land of Bliss (Sukhāvatīvyūha), eons ago as a bodhisattva named Dharmākara, that future buddha had made many more than

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five vows, vows in which he promised to deliver those who believed in him to his pure land. Olcott likely did not know that the two most important figures in the history of Japanese Pure Land Buddhism, Hōnen (1133–1212) and his disciple Shinran (1173–1263), believed that the Degenerate Age had begun in 1052—meaning that it was henceforth impossible to achieve enlightenment through one’s own efforts, that it was impossible to keep vows, and that the single path to salvation was faith in Amitābha’s vows. Having been ordained as monks prior to reaching this realization, they referred to themselves as violators of vows (hakai). From Shinran’s perspective, to proclaim those vows in the presence of Amitābha would be an act of hubris. Colonel Olcott met with many representatives of the major sects of Buddhism in Japan, while seeking to maintain the support of the Theravāda elders of Sri Lanka.14 In the end, various representatives of various Buddhist groups in Asia agreed to signify their assent to his Fundamental Buddhistic Beliefs, except for one: Jōdo Shinshū.

23 • Science

At a lecture delivered at The Town Hall in New York in November 1925, the Sri Lankan activist Anagārika Dharmapāla (1864–1933) declared: The Message of the Buddha that I have to bring to you is free from theology, priestcraft, rituals, ceremonies, dogmas, heavens, hells and other theological shibboleths. The Buddha taught to the civilized Aryans of India 25 centuries ago a scientific religion containing the highest individualistic altruistic ethics, a philosophy of life built on psychological mysticism and a cosmogony which is in harmony with geology, astronomy, radio­ activity and relativity. No creator god can create an ever-changing, everexisting cosmos. Countless billions of aeons ago the earth was existing but undergoing change, and there are billions of solar systems that had existed and exist and shall exist.1 In its early accounts of the tradition, Europeans tended to condemn Buddhism as a debased form of idolatry, an idolatry that, according to some, was satanic in origin. When Buddhists responded, they often claimed that Christianity was a distorted copy of the Buddha’s teachings. By 1925, something had changed. We find a Buddhist from Sri Lanka declaring that Buddhism is the religion most compatible with modern science. And he makes that claim from the stage of The Town Hall in New York. What had happened? We note that Dharmapāla questions the notion of a “creator god.” This critique has a long history in Buddhism. Before turning to science, therefore, we might pause briefly on theology. Buddhism is an atheistic religion in the sense that it denies the existence of an eternal deity who is the creator of the universe. There is a class of beings called deva (usually translated as “gods”) who abide

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in various heavens and enjoy all manner of heavenly delights. However, they are subject to rebirth. They are born as gods as a result of acts of generosity in their lifetimes as humans, but when the good karma of that deed is exhausted, they die in heaven and are reborn elsewhere in samsāra. As one text explains, ˙ “All gods, brahmās [a type of god], and other superhuman beings have been born in the human world at one time or another. Every type of yaksa [a kind of ˙ nature spirit], preta [ghost], god, and brahmā has at one time or another crept on the ground, gone by the hoof, flown in the sky as a three-taloned bird, swum in the water, jumped in the air, or crawled sideways.”2 Buddhists, therefore, deny the existence of eternal gods, singular or plural, capitalized or lowercase. The first text in the Pāli collection called the Dīgha Nikāya, the “Long Section” (in the sense of the long discourses of the Buddha) is entitled the Sūtra on the Supreme Net (Brahmajāla Sutta). Here, the Buddha enumerates sixty-two wrong views held by the teachers of the day, one of which is the belief in a creator god. Such a belief was obviously widespread, and the Buddha therefore explained how it arose. A person who was reborn in heaven and dwelled there for a particularly long period of time mistakenly imagined himself to be the eternal creator of the universe, and others, who were reborn in that heaven later, came to share his misconception. Less long-lived, when they were eventually reborn as humans, they remembered their past life in heaven and propagated his worship. Over the long course of the history of Buddhism in India, Buddhist monks debated with their Hindu opponents on a wide range of doctrines; the question of the existence of God remaining particularly persistent. In the eighth century, more than a millennium after the Buddha, the scholar Śāntaraksita composed ˙ his Compendium of Principles (Tattvasamgraha), a catalogue of philosophical er˙ rors committed by the Buddhists’ opponents. Here, he argues that if God is eternal, he can never change; he must always create or he must never create; occasional creation by an eternal being is illogical. We note that the speaker at The Town Hall in 1925 was from Sri Lanka. The Buddhists of the island nation at the southern tip of India had a particularly long and complicated encounter with the European colonial powers, beginning with the Portuguese. Arriving in 1505, they conquered the coastal regions. In 1592, in order to escape the Portuguese, the royal capital was moved to the central highlands and the city of Kandy, site of the sacred tooth relic of the Buddha. The Portuguese established Roman Catholic missions in the lowlands, which had some success. In 1638, the Portuguese colony was attacked by the Dutch, who eventually gained control of the coastal regions, but not the kingdom of

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Kandy. When the British took control of the Dutch possessions, Kandy remained under Sri Lankan control. However, in a series of wars that began in 1803, British troops defeated the Sri Lankans and captured the king. This led to the signing of the Kandyan Convention in 1815, which annexed the kingdom to Britain. According to its terms, the king was deposed, his dynasty was ended, and his male relatives were banished. However, on the question of religion, it stated, “The religion of Boodhoo, professed by the chiefs and inhabitants of these provinces, is declared inviolable, and its rites, ministers, and places of worship are to be maintained and protected.” This did not mean that British subjects who opposed Buddhism would be barred from the island. Over its long history, beginning with the royal charter granted by Elizabeth I in 1600, the East India Company had prohibited missionaries in India. This policy was changed when the company’s charter was renewed in 1813. Thus, when the Kandyan Convention was signed two years later, Sri Lanka, called Ceylon by the British, became a crown colony, and Christian missionaries began to arrive. By 1820, we find a pamphlet published in Dublin entitled An Account of the Baptism of Two Budhist Priests, describing a ceremony that had taken place in Liverpool where two Sri Lankan monks had been baptized. The account describes this as a great triumph because “they are not only Heathens, but Heathen Priests; they are not only Priests, but high priests of the reputed god Budhu!” The pamphlet goes on to explain that as a result of their conversion, “Their favourite doctrine of the Metempsychosis, or Trans-migration of Souls, they have totally abandoned.”3 British missionaries began to travel to Sri Lanka, and some of them learned a great deal about Buddhism; Robert Spence Hardy (1803–1868) of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society sailed to Sri Lanka for extended stays on three occasions, beginning in 1825. His Eastern Monachism (1850) and Manual of Buddhism (1853) are still read today. His first book, On the Connection of the British Government with the Idolatry of Ceylon (1834), is not, but it deserves comment because it makes clear the missionary attitude toward Buddhism in Sri Lanka at the time. This short work was occasioned by the fifth clause of the Kandyan Convention, where the British promise to maintain and protect Buddhism. Hardy found this objectionable. He notes that “India, Burma, Ceylon, the fastnesses of southern Europe, many of the tribes of Africa, extensive tracts of country in New Holland, the Canadas, the fairest isles of the Western Indies, and numerous other places of no mean importance, [have] been placed by God under the control of the British scepter” so that the British can convert the world to Christi-

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anity.4 Failure to do so will incur the wrath of God, who will transfer that ­authority to others who are committed to the task. Buddhism, far from being protected by the British, must therefore be destroyed. I rest my argument for the necessity of its destruction upon the simple fact that it is opposed to the truth—denies the existence of God—is ignorant of the only way of salvation, by faith in our Lord Jesus Christ— and is utterly impotent as a teacher of morals, or as a messenger of peace to the awakened consciences of its deluded votaries. In the sacred scriptures all these errors are summed up in one word, Idolatry. The religion of Budha is idolatrous, and I contend that it is the bounden duty of the Government of the country, from its possession of the Truth, to discountenance the system by every legitimate means; and that it can afford no open or implied encouragement to its teachers or its worship, without the commission of an offence in the sight of God.5 Christian missionaries would easily defeat Buddhist monks because “there is dead inertness about them and their system which would never stand against the energetic exertions of a Christian missionary, attended with the blessing of his divine Master. I fully believe that, unsupported by the arm of secular power, they would fall before us like dew before the sun.”6 But long before the arrival of Hardy, Buddhist writers in Sri Lanka had written their own story of the Christian savior, a story that lacked the “dead inertness” that the missionary ascribed to Buddhist monks. A palm leaf manuscript from 1762, written in Sinhala, tells the tale of a figure called by two names: “Son of the Carpenter” and “Heretic Ghost.” He is one of the henchmen of Māra, the Buddhist deity of death and desire, and the antagonist of the Buddha. It was Māra who attacked the Buddha on the night of his enlightenment. The story of the Son of the Carpenter is a long one; we can only give a summary here. This minion of Māra descends from one of the heavens into the womb of a carpenter’s daughter in India. He eventually attracts some disciples, who travel with him to Portugal, where they win the support of credulous peasants. Eventually, however, they are driven out, traveling next to Sri Lanka, where they drink liquor and eat the flesh of animals. The Son of the Carpenter is eventually captured by soldiers of the righteous Buddhist king Mihin˙gu (Milinda of Questions of Milinda fame), who has him flogged and then hanged. After he is dead, he is nailed to a cross, and his corpse is sealed in an inescapable tomb. Soon, his

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followers claim that he has been resurrected, but upon close inspection, the tomb is found to be undisturbed.7 It was clear, then, that the Buddhists of Sri Lanka knew the story of Jesus (which they had learned from the Portuguese), and it had not been enough to convert them. How, then, should the Christians defeat them? Hardy chose cosmology. His argument was: If the Buddha is omniscient and yet is wrong about the world, he must therefore be wrong about other things. And, we must confess, the Buddha seemed susceptible on geography. Buddhist texts describe a flat earth, a huge disc rimmed by iron mountains that contain a great ocean. In the center of that ocean is a mountain, called Meru (or Sumeru), with a flat summit and flat faces on its four sides. Each of the four faces of Mount Meru is made of a different precious stone: gold in the north, silver in the east, beryl in the south, and crystal in the west. Facing those four faces are four large island continents, each flanked by two smaller islands, all three of the same shape. The islands in the west are round, the islands in the north are square, the islands in the east are semicircular, and the islands in the south are triangular. Our world is the southern continent, called Jambudvīpa, looking suspiciously like India. Humans also occupy the other three continents, but they are different from us, much taller and with much longer life spans. And, unlike us, they have the luxury of a set life span, knowing when they will die. Because we live on the continent facing the southern face of Mount Meru, the side made of beryl, when the sun—which in the Buddhist cosmology orbits the central mountain—reflects off its surface, it makes our sky blue. Hardy writes in The Sacred Books of the Buddhists Compared with History and Science, published in English in 1863 and in Sinhalese in 1865: There can be no doubt that Buddha taught the existence of Maha Méru. . . . An attempt may be made to set aside the consequences of this exposure of Buddha’s ignorance, by saying, that this is a kind of mistake that does not invalidate his doctrines; Buddhism may still be true as a religious system. But this is a fallacy that I am most anxious to set aside. If Buddha said that which is false, under the supposition that it is true, he betrays ignorance, imperfect knowledge, and misapprehension. He cannot, therefore, be a safe teacher; there may be some things about his religion that are true, as there are about every religion; but it is not a revelation; its author was a mere man, with limited and imperfect knowledge; and to receive it as the pure unmixed truth, is a mischievous and fatal mistake.8

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In the late twentieth century, over a century after Hardy’s critique, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama conceded that the Mount Meru cosmology was wrong. For him, however, this did not invalidate the Buddha’s teachings.9 There was a precedent for his position. The seventh-century logician Dharmakīrti had long ago considered what constitutes a valid teacher: Thus, we should investigate [if a teacher] Has the knowledge of what should be practiced; Whether they know the number of insects Is of no use to us. Whether or not he can see what is distant, He should see the reality we seek. If seeing what is distant makes one valid Then we should honor vultures.10 But in the late nineteenth century, the Buddhists of Sri Lanka were not ready to give up on Mount Meru. On August 26 and 27, 1873, a public debate between a Buddhist monk and a Christian minister was held in the town of Pānadurē outside of Colombo, drawing a crowd of some five thousand to an outdoor platform, where the two opponents sat, each with his entourage. The Buddhist was a monk named Gunānanda (1823–1890), founder of the Society for the Propagation of Bud˙ dhism, which published pamphlets attacking Christianity. The Christian was a Wesleyan minister, Reverend David da Silva (from a Sri Lankan Christian family). They took turns attempting to debunk each other’s religion. The Christian said that the doctrine of no self meant that there is no soul to be punished for sin and rewarded for virtue: “What villain would not exult in the idea that he is not to suffer for what he does in this life!” Thus, “no religion ever held out greater inducements to the unrighteous than Buddhism did.”11 Gunānanda said that the mispronunciations in Reverend da Silva’s recitations ˙ of Pāli passages from the Buddhist scriptures showed that he did not understand them. He then argued that the Christian God could not be omniscient if he needed the Hebrews to mark their doors with blood so that he would know which houses to pass over as he killed the firstborn of the Egyptians.12 Reverend da Silva countered with the story of Prince Vessantara, the Buddha in a previous life, who gave away his wife and children: “Was it meritorious to break the hearts of wives and children, and bring desolation and misery to a happy home? If it were, what actions will they enumerate under the head of demerits or sins?”13

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Most of these were ad hominem arguments. However, on the afternoon of the second day, Reverend da Silva brought up Mount Meru. Buddhist texts describe it as being eighty thousand yojanas high and eighty thousand yojanas wide. (A yojana was a unit for measuring distance in ancient India; it was apparently considered to be equal to approximately sixteen miles in Sri Lanka in the nineteenth century.) Holding up a globe, he noted that the circumference of the earth is twenty-five thousand miles. Thus, a mountain of that size is impossible. And even if it were, it would be visible to everyone: “One who said that there was such a mountain cannot be supposed to have been a wise man, nor one who spoke the truth.”14 Gunānanda might have reverted to arguments that Buddhists had used in ˙ the past: that Mount Meru lay in unmapped territory or that it was only visible through supernormal vision. Instead, he attacked the science, citing for sup­ port the work of the famous Victorian astrologer Richard James Morrison (1795–1874), who published predictions of weather and world events under the pseudonym “Zadkiel” or “Zadkiel, Tao-Sze.” Gunānanda seemed to be drawing ˙ from Morrison’s 1868 book, whose title explains why the Buddhist monk might have cited it: The New Principia; or, True System of Astronomy. In Which the Earth Is Proved to Be the Stationary Centre of the Solar System, and the Sun Is Shewn to Be Only 365,006.5 Miles from the Earth, and the Moon Only 32,828.5 Distant; While the Sun Travels Yearly in an Ellipse around the Earth, the Other Planets Moving about the Sun in Ellipses Also. Morrison’s arguments against Newton in favor of a geocentric universe would seem to have little to do with the existence of Mount Meru. However, Gunānanda seemed satisfied simply to show ˙ that two Englishmen disagreed on whether the earth rotates on its axis in orbit around the sun. If this is the case, why should the Buddhists defer to the science of the Christians? He then went on to provide his own empirical evidence, noting that in Buddhist cosmology, Mount Meru is located to the north of our southern continent. If “the grandest and most stupendous rock on the face of the earth” is not situated to the north, how does the reverend gentleman explain the invariable direction of the mariner’s compass?15 At the end of the debate, Gunānanda was declared the winner by acclamation. ˙ Fifty years later, Anagārika Dharmapāla would argue for the superiority of Buddhism in the realm of modern science, but unopposed, and from the stage of The Town Hall in New York. Much had changed in the intervening decades, with interest in Buddhism growing in America, especially since Dharmapāla’s bravura performance at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. He could now make claims on matters more modern than the location of Mount

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Meru. It was the Buddha, not Jesus, whose teachings were in harmony with “geology, astronomy, radioactivity and relativity.” Why this was so is suggested by another phrase from his Town Hall speech: “civilized Aryans of India.” In the long history of claims for the compatibility of Buddhism and science, claims that go back to the nineteenth century and continue into the twenty-first, there is an unfortunate flirtation with the science of race. In a lecture presented to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1786, Sir William Jones (1746–1794), a jurist of the East India Company, announced that Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit belonged to the same language family. Although he was not the first to observe similarities among these languages, his lecture set off something of a Sanskrit craze in Europe. This was all part of the rise of the science of philology and the identification of language families. For Europeans of the nineteenth century, the most important of these were two: Aryan (or Indo-­Aryan or Indo-European) and Semitic, with the former including Sanskrit and most of the European languages, and the latter including Hebrew and Arabic. The term “ārya” means “noble” or “superior” in Sanskrit. It is the “noble” of the “four noble truths.” Theories of language families eventually became implicated in theories of racial groups. A certain kinship was thus perceived between the classical civilization of ancient India and the classical civilization of ancient Greece. Because so many Europeans saw themselves as the descendants of Greek civilization, this meant (through a certain leap of faith) that the connection of ancient India to modern Europe was not simply a matter of verb roots but of bloodlines. Because the Buddha taught in a Sanskritic language and was a member of the high warrior caste, he was racially an Aryan. Yet, in the wake of the Springtime of the Peoples, the revolutions that occurred across Europe in 1848, he was even more noble because he had renounced his hereditary nobility and the royal future that it promised, claiming that nobility derived instead from wisdom. The Buddha became, thus, doubly noble. He was noble by birth, by blood, and by language, yet he was also noble because he renounced his royal birth to go out to seek, and find, a spiritual nobility. In the last half of the nineteenth century, a time when Europe was obsessed with questions of race and questions of humanity, the Buddha was an ancient kinsman, a modern hero. Race theory was used to justify centuries of European hatred of Jews and Muslims, condemning the aridity of their cultures. Various tactics were used to exempt Jesus from this, including the claim by some Europeans that he had spent the “lost years” (the period of some eighteen years between his debate

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with the elders in the temple as a boy and his baptism by John) in India studying Buddhism. Dharmapāla, however, who had lived his life in a British colony beset by Christian missionaries, was not prepared to spare Jesus. He described him as “half Jew and half Hittite,” his Jewish nature confirmed when he approves of usury in the parable of the talents. He was rude to his mother. He only had eleven disciples, and they abandoned him. Furthermore, his disciples were “men of low intelligence, and his congregation was the riff-raff of Galilee— the backwash of the barren parts of Asia. The life of Jesus was an absolute failure. He was a victim of megalomania and at times suffered from paranoia,” rendering his teachings so different from “the virile, vigorous manly ethics of the Tathagato.” The Buddha was “the great Conqueror who spent forty five years of His perfect manhood in the moral regeneration of the greater part of advanced Humanity.”16 Dharmapāla was not a herald of what would come to be called the Buddhist-Christian Dialogue. Some twelve years after Dharmapāla’s Town Hall lecture, however, another Buddhist leader sought a different dialogue with Europe. Among the most prominent Buddhist figures in China during the first half of the twentieth century was the monk Taixu (1890–1947). Both in China and in his travels abroad, he had, like Dharmapāla, discussed the relationship between Buddhism and science, seeing modern science as a stepping stone to the deeper insights of Buddhism. In 1937, the round world was on the verge of a catastrophe of cosmic proportions, and “Aryan” had taken on an even more pernicious meaning. In China, the catastrophe had already begun, with Chinese troops battling Japanese invaders. Beijing fell on August 18. After over two months of heavy fighting, Chinese troops retreated from Shanghai on October 26. The next day, Taixu sent a letter to Europe, seeking assistance for the Buddhists of China. It was addressed to Adolf Hitler. Taixu wrote: The scientific civilization of our time is borne by the Aryan race, but the religious culture of the past has its culmination in Buddhism, whose founder, Buddha Shakyamuni, was also of Aryan origin. . . . I believe that the Germanic people, now united under their Führer, have wondrously developed three characteristics: knowledge, conformity, and courage. Thus only the Buddhist religion, in which these three characteristics are primary virtues, can be the religion of the Germanic people. And only that most excellent scion of ancient Aryan stock, Shakyamuni, the Holy, can be the religious leader of the Germanic people, that most excellent scion of ancient Aryan stock.17

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It is unlikely that Taixu was aware of other events of that year: the bombing of Guernica, the opening of Buchenwald, and the law requiring Jews to wear a yellow Star of David. His letter makes clear, nonetheless, the degree to which the science of race had made its way into claims for the compatibility of Buddhism and science. In the first half of the twentieth century, those claims also made their way to remote Tibet (absent the race theory). In the June 28, 1938, issue of the Tibet Mirror, the only Tibetan-language newspaper of the day, the Tibetan Buddhist writer Gendun Chopel (1903–1951) published a controversial essay entitled “The World Is Round,” where he chastised his compatriots for not following the lead of other Buddhist nations in rejecting the flat earth theory. In the essay, he explained that the Buddha, being omniscient, knew full well that the world was round, but said that it was flat because that was the prevailing view of the time. Elsewhere, he would write at some length on Buddhism and science, making a claim that others had made, and continue to make to the present day: that modern science is merely confirming the ancient wisdom of the Buddha. In his Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler (Rgyal khams rig pas bskor ba’i gtam rgyud gser gyi thang ma), likely completed in 1941, he wrote: No matter what aspect is set forth in this religion taught by our Teacher [the Buddha], whether it be the nature of reality, how to progress on the path, or the good qualities of the fruition, there is absolutely no need to feel ashamed in the face of the system of science. Furthermore, for any essential point [in Buddhism], science can serve as a foundation. Among the Westerners, many scholars of science have acquired a faith in the Buddha and become Buddhists; some have even become monks. . . . Many great scholars of science made limitless praises of the Buddha, saying that two thousand years ago, when there were no such machines, the Buddha explained that all compounded things disintegrate in each moment and he taught that things do not remain even for a brief instant, and now we have actually seen this using machines. . . . Because these things are not even mentioned in other [religions] like Christianity, scientific reasoning is considered to be something that did not exist previously. However, for us, these [ideas] are familiar from long ago.18 When we consider the question of Buddhism’s relation to science, it is important to note that claims for their compatibility have remained remarkably consistent since the nineteenth century, despite huge shifts in what is meant by “Buddhism” and what is meant by “science.” Prior to the Second World War,

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“Buddhism” was largely the Theravāda traditions of Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. After the war, Theravāda’s claim to represent the Buddhism of the Buddha remained, but Zen gained a large following. During the 1990s, Tibetan Buddhism displaced Theravāda as the chief referent of Buddhism in the Buddhism and science dialogue, largely through the influence of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. And in the present century, mindfulness has eclipsed Tibetan Buddhism. At the same time, over a century and a half, the Buddha has always anticipated the most up-to-date view of modern science, even as the referent of “science” has changed: the mechanistic universe, the theory of evolution, the theory of relativity, the Big Bang, and neuroscience, the antecedents of each being found in Buddhism. The microscope, the telescope, and the spectrometer have all been used to discover what the Buddha knew without such instruments. As more precise instruments have been developed, the claims of the Buddha’s knowledge have remained constant.19 Despite the changing referents of “Buddhism” and “science,” what has remained consistent is the position of the Buddhist figure making the claim, a figure who is in each case under attack, seeking to present Buddhism not as ancient but as modern, not as superstition but as science. This was true during the colonial period as Buddhist leaders defended their tradition against the attacks of Christian missionaries. This was true in Japan with the Meiji Restoration and the government’s Haibutsu kishaku (Abolish Buddhism, Destroy Śākyamuni) campaign. This was true in China when Buddhism was condemned as superstition during the Republican period. This was true in Korea when it became a Japanese colony. And although European colonialism is long dead, at least in its overt forms, other colonialism is not. It should therefore not be surprising that the chief spokesperson for the compatibility of Buddhism and science in the twenty-first century is the Dalai Lama. In the Great Discourse on the Lion’s Roar (Mahāsīhanāda Sutta), a famous text from the Pāli canon that, according to many, is the collection that best represents his teachings, the Buddha declares, “Should anyone say of me: ‘The recluse Gotama does not have any superhuman states, any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones. The recluse Gotama teaches a Dhamma [merely] hammered out by reasoning, following his own line of inquiry as it occurs to him’—unless he abandons that assertion and that state of mind and relinquishes that view, then as [surely as if he has been] carried off and put there, he will wind up in hell.”20 Over the long history of the discourse of Buddhism and science, this passage is rarely cited.

24 • Self

In 1946, a British medical student named Michael Dillon published a small book entitled Self. Subtitled A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology, it seeks to identify the physical and mental, the anatomical and psychological constituents that account for personal identity. It is divided into two parts, with the first part including chapters on body and mind, homosexuality, and hermaphrodism, and the second part with chapters on personality, mind (masculine and feminine), and free will. The first part of the book is often clinical in tone, describing the functions of the glandular system and the abnormalities that can result from its misfunction. His tone, however, is one of sympathy, a sympathy derived from understanding, specifically the understanding that “the standard pattern is itself very variable” and that “there must be space for all types,” alluding to John Dryden’s verse, “Great wits are to madness near allied / And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”1 Dillon goes on to describe homosexuality in some detail before turning to a discussion of what would later come to be called transgender surgery, writing, “Surely, where the mind cannot be made to fit the body, the body should be made to fit, approximately, at any rate to the mind, despite the prejudices of those who have not suffered these things, yet to suffer which they so readily condemn others.”2 The second part of the book deals with what might be called philosophical questions, but always informed by biology. Thus, in the chapter on free will, he identifies three factors that contribute to the formation of the personality: heredity, environment, and the endocrine glands. The first two are inherited and the third is inborn. Given the powerful influence of these three, does free will exist? Is praise for what is deemed virtue, and blame for what is deemed

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vice, ever justified? Despite these elements of what might be called biological and social determinism, Dillon repeatedly returns to the philosophical, and what he calls both the cornerstone of personality and the most difficult problem in the history of speculative thought, a question that can only be considered subjectively, never objectively: “‘I think,’ ‘I remember,’ ‘I determine,’ ‘I want,’ ‘I imagine’—what is this ‘I’ which we cannot deduct from the rest of ourselves in the way we can deduct parts of our bodies and our minds theoretically from the whole?”3 Nowhere in Self does Michael Dillon mention Buddhism, yet this question is also the most central problem in the history of Buddhist thought. The signature doctrine of Buddhist philosophy is of course “no self” (anātman), with belief in self (ātman) seen as the ultimate source of suffering. In his first sermon after his enlightenment, delivered to the Group of Five in the Deer Park in Sarnath, the Buddha set forth the famous middle way, four noble truths, and eightfold path. But in his second sermon, said to have been delivered five days later, he set forth no self. Indeed, the sūtra is called the Discourse on the Characteristic of No Self (Anattalakkhana Sutta). Here, the Buddha declares, “Therefore, ˙ bhikkhus, any kind of form whatsoever, whether past, future, or present, internal or external, gross or subtle, inferior or superior, far or near, all form should be seen as it really is with correct wisdom thus: ‘This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.’”4 When he concluded this discourse, just one page long in translation, each of the Group of Five had become an arhat. It is standard Buddhist doctrine that suffering is to be found in all six realms of samsāra, and that that suffering is caused by karma: physical, verbal, and ˙ mental actions performed in the past, whether that past was yesterday or a million lifetimes ago. Those deeds are motivated by desire and hatred. Desire and hatred are motivated by ignorance (avidyā). In the famous Buddhist paintings of the wheel of existence (bhavacakra), best known in Tibetan Buddhism but found in India and East Asia as well, the twelve links of dependent origination are depicted in a clockwise direction around the edge. The first of the twelve is a blind man, who signifies ignorance. Ignorance is the belief in self. Exactly what “self” means in Buddhism has been the subject of centuries of philosophical speculation, both in the monastery and in the academy. The Sanskrit term simply adds the negative particle to the standard word for “self” (ātman), a term most often associated with the Upanisads, although whether ˙ the Buddha was familiar with these famous Hindu texts remains a question. In general, however, the self seems to be a permanent element among the impermanent elements that constitute the mind and body; it is the thinker of thoughts,

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the doer of deeds, the owner of possessions, and it continues from lifetime to lifetime. From the Buddhist perspective, it is an utter fiction. This radical view raises a host of philosophical questions, questions that have been asked from ancient India to the modern college classroom. The most persistent of these questions are: If there is no self, how is there rebirth? If there is no self, what constitutes the person (pudgala)? The first question is raised in the famous Questions of Milinda (Milinda Pañha), a Pāli work likely compiled between the first century BCE and the second century CE, presented in the form of a dialogue between a Buddhist monk named Nāgasena and the Indo-Greek king Menander (d. 130 BCE). There, the king asks the monk how there can be rebirth if nothing transmigrates from one lifetime to the next. The monk replies with the example of the light produced from a lamp. It is possible to light an unlit lamp with a lit lamp without the light produced from one moving to the other.5 As for the question of how there can be a person without a self, Nāgasena provides the famous example of the chariot, none of whose individual parts can perform the function of the chariot and thus cannot be the chariot. It is only when those parts are assembled in a particular way that they can be called a chariot. In the same way, the person is none of the five aggregates, the components of mind and body.6 Still, the idea of no self, at least in these terms, seems to have been too much for some. As discussed earlier, this vexing question of the nature of the person led one of the early Buddhist schools, the Vātsīputrīya, to posit the existence of an “inexpressible person” that was neither the same as nor different from the mind and body. Their position was widely condemned by other schools, raising the question of whether one could hold such a position and still be a Buddhist. The Buddhist doctrine of no self stands as one of the most radical critiques of personal identity in the history of philosophy. Yet Buddhist doctrine, whether in the Nikāya schools or in the Mahāyāna, remained consistently intractable on the question of gender identity. Even in the supposedly more inclusive Mahāyāna, we find that there are no women in the pure land of Amitābha; that the eight-year-old nāga princess who quickly attains buddhahood in the twelfth chapter of the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapundarīka) turns into a male before doing ˙˙ so; that, according to the Pāli tradition, the bodhisattva is never reborn as a woman in his eons of lifetimes on the path to buddhahood, and that one of the thirty-two marks adorning the bodies of all buddhas is a retractable penis. The Vimalakīrti Sūtra is one of the most famous expositions of emptiness. In the sixth chapter, the Buddha’s wisest disciple, the monk Śāriputra, asks a

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goddess why she has not transformed herself from a female into a male. She replies that she had sought to find her female state for twelve years and had been unable to find it. She then turns herself into the form of Śāriputra, and Śāriputra into her form. When Śāriputra becomes alarmed, she says, “If the elder could stop being a woman, then all women could stop being women. Just as the Elder is not a woman and appears as a woman, so too with the female appearance of all women as well: they too are not women, but appear in the shape of women. This is what the Exalted One meant when he said, ‘Among all the things that really exist there is no woman and no man.’”7 But then she turns Śāriputra back into a man and turns herself back into a woman. The categories of male and female, as well as the criteria that constitute them, remain relatively constant in both the Nikāya schools and the Mahāyāna. This is particularly true in the case of the monastic code, where there is particular anxiety around those who are neither male nor female. In that code, ordination is to be denied to ten classes of beings: (1) a magically created being; (2) a male pandaka (a term discussed below); (3) a female pandaka; (4) a per˙˙ ˙˙ son with diseased genitals; (5) a person with no genitals; (6) a person who has changed sex at least three times; (7) a eunuch or impotent male; (8) an animal; (9) a nonhuman spirit; and (10) a person from the northern continent of Uttarakuru (in the traditional Buddhist four-continent cosmology). Other lists include hermaphrodites, understood as those who possess both male and female genitals, although there seems to be a difference of opinion as to whether those genitals are present simultaneously or appear and disappear based on the object of desire. There is obviously much to discuss here; we note immediately that six of the ten categories deal in one way or another with sexuality. The term “pandaka,” translated in the past as “homosexual” or “eunuch,” is ˙˙ used in the monastic code to encompass a wide range of what the monastic community judged to be sexual deviance.8 As we recall, each rule in the monastic code has a story about how the Buddha came to make the rule. The story of the rule prohibiting the ordination of a male pandaka provides some sense of the meaning of the term in the monas˙˙ tic context. In the Pāli version, soon after being ordained, a pandaka begins to ˙˙ proposition other monks, who refuse to engage in sex with him. Eventually, some elephant and horse handlers agree to anally penetrate him, and then announce that Buddhist monks are pandakas. When the Buddha is informed, he declares ˙˙ that henceforth, no pandaka should be ordained. In the case of most of the vio˙˙ lations of the monastic code, the original perpetrator is allowed to remain in the order because the Buddha had not declared that the defining deed was a

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violation at the time it was committed. In this case, however, the Buddha declares that any pandaka who has been ordained should be expelled. ˙˙ In the Mūlasarvāstivāda version of the story, the man is identified (somehow) as a pandaka during the physical examination required at the time of appli˙˙ cation for ordination. Also in this version, the Buddha enumerates five kinds of pandaka, making clear that the term is not limited to a gay male. They are ˙˙ (1) a congenital pandaka, someone who is neither male nor female from birth; ˙˙ (2) a fortnightly pandaka, someone who alternates being male and female every ˙˙ two weeks; (3) a pandaka who is aroused when embraced, that is, someone who ˙˙ has no visible sex organs except when sexually aroused; (4) a pandaka through ˙˙ jealousy, someone whose sex organs appear while watching others having sex; and (5) a pandaka whose sexual organs are damaged. The Buddha declares that ˙˙ the first four may not be ordained and must be expelled if they have been ordained. The fifth should not be ordained but should only be expelled if they have already been ordained and later shows signs of becoming homosexual. There are also five types of female pandaka: (1) a woman who constantly men˙˙ struates; (2) a woman who never menstruates; (3) a woman whose anus and vagina are conjoined; (4) a woman whose vagina is not fully formed; and (5) a woman with a diseased vagina.9 The Buddha explains that pandakas should not be ordained because it is ˙˙ impossible for the dharma and the discipline to grow in them. Other texts are more specific, claiming that the pandaka is incapable of practicing meditation ˙˙ or moral restraint.10 There is much that could be said about the Buddhist definition of, and fixation on, the heteronormative. One clear motivation is a point that has appeared in other chapters: despite the persistent Buddhist rhetoric of the monastic as one who had “gone forth from home into homelessness,” that is, who had renounced society, the monastic community remained obsessed with lay society and its good opinion. From this, one may conclude that the condemnation of the non-heteronormative in Indian Buddhist texts was likely a reflection of the attitudes of time and place. It is noteworthy that a similar prejudice against the pandaka is found in Hindu law codes (dharmaśāstra). ˙˙ In 1960, a small pamphlet was published in India at the Royal Printing Works in Varanasi. Fifty-two pages long, it was entitled A Critical Study of the Vinaya. The author was anonymous, identified only by the initials “S. J.” Despite its modest form, its content was radical. As already discussed, there have been a series of “councils” in the history of Buddhism, where monks convene to confirm and correct (often at a philological level) the contents of the canon. After the first centuries of Buddhism (when the councils may or may not have

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been historical events), these councils became the purview of the Theravāda tradition. The most recent of these concluded in 1956, by Theravāda reckoning the 2,500th anniversary of the nirvāna of the Buddha. A Critical Study of ˙ the Vinaya begins by noting that at that council, the question was raised as to whether the monastic code should be revised to bring it into accord with modern times. The author reports that “strangely enough the suggestion was laughed out of court.” The booklet is devoted to advocating changes to the monastic code, noting that in the modern world, “bhikkhus [monks] and sramaneras [novices], in order to live, have to take part in wordly [sic] affairs to an extent undreamed of 2,500 years ago when the first monks lived with their Master in the forest and presented their begging bowls in the nearest villages.”11 Buddhism may continue to thrive in those Asian countries where it is well-established and where progress has been slow, but if Buddhism is to spread successfully beyond Asia to the West, which has become “a cesspool of materialism,” the author argues, the monastic code must be updated. The author notes correctly that prior to his passing, the Buddha told Ānanda that after his death the minor rules could be ignored. However, because Ānanda failed to ask the Buddha what constituted the minor rules, it was decided that all rules should be maintained. The author states that “if He were available to consult today, He would immediately reframe and abolish many of the rules that are difficult or impossible to keep.”12 After considering other options, the author declares, “The only rational alternative is a radical overhaul of the Vinaya.”13 Among those rules that require revision are those that ban the ordination of those who are not physically whole, which effectively prohibits those who have suffered mutilation as a result of modern warfare from becoming monks. The remainder of the booklet is devoted to a listing of each of the 227 rules that monks of the Theravāda tradition must maintain, the 116 rules that govern who may and may not be ordained, the twelve medicines that are allowed to monks, and six miscellaneous rules. Those rules that are unsuitable for the modern world are marked with two stars, and those that require consideration are marked with one star. Each of the starred rules receives a comment suggesting how it could be changed. The author asks that the booklet be used by a commission of senior monks, one that would include both monks who have traveled abroad as well as European monks. This commission would produce a new monastic code to be followed in those regions where the traditional code could not be followed for a variety of societal and climatic reasons: “Buddhism must either spread or die.”14

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There is much to say about this small booklet and its many reasonable suggestions for revisions to such rules as those that prohibit a monk from speaking more than five or six sentences to a woman while alone with her, from touching money, from sleeping in a bed more than eight inches high, or from preaching the dharma to someone holding an umbrella. An entire chapter is devoted to robes and sandals and how the thin robes and light sandals required by the monastic code are unsuitable for northern climes. The booklet ends with a passage from the Great Chapter (Mahāvagga), which reads, “Difficult, Sona, for as long as life lasts are the solitary sleeping place, the one meal a day, the Brahma-faring.”15 The Buddha is telling Sona how difficult it is to be a monk; “Brahma-faring” means “celibacy.” Here, we will consider the author’s comments on just one of the two-starred items. It falls under “Disqualification for Receiving Ordination” and reads, “No eunuch; if ordained to be expelled.” Although the author does not use the term, based on the translations at the time, it is likely that “eunuch” is pandaka. He ˙˙ says that there are two types of eunuchs, those who have lost their testicles through mutilation, which, the author notes, had happened often as the result of wounds suffered in the recent wars. The other is not a eunuch but instead eunuchoid, someone who lacks testicles because of “Nature.” He continues, “In neither instance is there any known necessary correlation between the physical state and the morals of the person. . . . Should not each case be judged on its own merits so that the victim of accidents whether of man or of nature not be excluded if anyone feels he has a true vocation?”16 A Critical Study of the Vinaya is written in the idiomatic English of the period. The author has a firm understanding of the basics of Buddhist doctrine and of the Theravāda monastic code, citing textual sources and translations from the Pāli. The author also employs a sophisticated medical vocabulary. All of this would lead the reader to assume that the author was a Westerner and a Buddhist monk or novice of the Theravāda tradition. The initials “S. J.” stand for “Sramanera Jivaka,” or “the novice Jivaka.” “Jīvaka” was the name of the Buddha’s physician. “S. J.” is Michael Dillon, the author of Self. Michael Dillon had been born Laura Maud Dillon in London in 1915, the son of Robert Arthur Dillon, baronet of Lismullen in Ireland. After graduating from Oxford, where he was a champion rower, Laura Dillon underwent a series of hormone treatments and medical procedures to transition to a male, including thirteen phalloplasty surgeries, developed by Harold Gillies (1882– 1960), a physician who performed reconstructive surgery on soldiers wounded in the Great War. He took the name Laurence Michael Dillon in 1944, publish-

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ing Self two years later. Its detailed discussion of the effect of hormones on personality and identity are based in part on his own experience. He began medical school at Trinity College in Dublin in 1945, graduating in 1951, joining the Merchant Navy as a ship’s surgeon the following year. Over the next few years, he served on a number of ships, including, like the Patna in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, a steamship taking Muslim pilgrims to Mecca. In 1956, the British firm of Secker and Warburg published The Third Eye: The Autobiography of a Tibetan Lama. Its author was Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, the son of one of the leading members of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s government. In the book, we learn that at the celebration of Rampa’s seventh birthday, the astrologers predicted his future: “A boy of seven to enter a lamasery, after a hard feat of endurance, and there to be trained as a priest-surgeon. To suffer great hardships, to leave the homeland, and go among strange people. To lose all and have to start again, and eventually to succeed.”17 Rampa joined the Temple of Tibetan Medicine, where he undertook a demanding course of study of mathematics and the Buddhist scriptures. Chosen to receive esoteric teachings, he was placed under the tutelage of the great lama Mingyar Dondup, who oversaw the performance of a surgical procedure designed to produce clairvoyance, after which Rampa could be instructed hypnotically. The operation, performed on Rampa’s eighth birthday, involved drilling a hole in his skull at the point between his eyes to create the third eye, an eye that allowed him to see auras. After he had recovered from the surgery, he was summoned to the Potala Palace, where he met privately with the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, who had investigated both the records of Rampa’s past incarnation and the predictions of his future. He charged Rampa with preserving the wisdom of Tibet for the world. At his sixteenth birthday, Rampa took more examinations and was promoted from the rank of monk to the rank of lama. When he had received the initiation of an abbot, he was again summoned by the Dalai Lama, who instructed him to leave Tibet immediately and go to China, with the warning that foreigners do not understand the greatest science of all, the Science of the Overself. The Third Eye ends with Tuesday Lobsang Rampa departing for China. The book was an immediate sensation, selling three hundred thousand copies in the first eighteen months after publication, and was soon translated into French and German. However, scholars of Tibet, some of whom had lived in Lhasa during the period covered in the book, had never heard of T. Lobsang Rampa, nor of the lama Mingyar Dondup. Furthermore, the book was filled with errors. There was no surgical procedure to open the third eye, and Tibetan

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monasteries did not have treasuries of jewels guarded by cats. When a group of scholars asked to meet the author, the publisher refused. They eventually hired a private detective, who learned that The Third Eye had been written by one Cyril Hoskin, the son of an English plumber who had never left the British Isles and made “surgical fittings” (corsets, trusses, and so on) for a living. The detective’s discovery caused a great scandal. Headlines read, “The FULL Truth about the bogus Lama.” Hoskin never confessed to fraud, writing two more books that explained how T. Lobsang Rampa became Cyril Hoskin. Rampa, after an automobile accident, was transported to the Astral to recuperate. There he met the Dalai Lama, who instructed him to carry out his work, but in a different body, explaining that the harmonically appropriate body had been identified in England. The Dalai Lama warned him that “you will return to hardship, misunderstanding, dis­ belief, and actual hatred, for there is a force of evil which tries to prevent all that is good in connection with human evolution.” The transfer was made, with Rampa taking over the body of Cyril Hoskin. When he had become accustomed to the new body, he took various freelance jobs. When inquiring about a job as a ghost writer, he was encouraged by a literary agent to write his own book, The Third Eye.18 The Third Eye, along with Walter Evans-Wentz’s edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, first published in 1927, would generate great interest in Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. That, however, is another story. We can note here that Cyril Hoskin’s story raises its own set of questions about identify and self. We can also note that Michael Dillon read The Third Eye and was sufficiently inspired by it that he wrote Rampa a fan letter. In 1957, Rampa came to visit him in London. They later spent two weeks together in Howth, near Dublin, at the end of which Rampa advised Dillon to go to India and practice meditation. The following year, Dillon’s transition became international news, providing further motivation for a passage to India, arriving there in the summer of 1958. Visiting Bodh Gayā, the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment, he happened to meet a prominent Tibetan incarnate lama, Dhardo Rinpoche (1917–1990), who invited Dillon to visit him in Kalimpong, where a Western monk was also living. Dillon eventually made his way to Kalimpong, a British hill station in the foothills of the Himalayas. There, the Oxford-educated British aristocrat met a London working-class compatriot named Dennis Lingwood (1925–2018). Lingwood, a deserter from the British army, had the shaved head and wore the robes of a Buddhist monk. He had been ordained as a monk of the Theravāda tradition in 1949, given the name “Sangharakshita.” On March 30, 1959, in the wake

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of the Tibetan uprising against the People’s Liberation Army in Lhasa, the Dalai Lama arrived in India, soon followed by tens of thousands of Tibetans, including many of the most prominent lamas. Several of these would play key roles in the life of Michael Dillon, whom Sangharakshita dubbed Jivaka, naming the physician after the Buddha’s doctor. When Sangharakshita went to south India to work with the Dalit community, Dillon, now Jivaka, went to stay at a Theravāda monastery in Sarnath, the site of the Buddha’s first sermon. There, he was ordained as a novice and began studying Buddhism seriously, soon publishing for the Maha Bodhi Society. One of his works was a booklet called Growing Up into Buddhism. The author was listed as Sramanera Jivaka, M.A., M.B.B.Ch., the latter meaning “Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery.” As noted above, the author of A Critical Study of the Vinaya, published the same year, was simply “S. J.” A likely reason for the anonymity was not simply the radical suggestions that the pamphlet made, but the fact that his story had been revealed to the Buddhist community. Dillon himself had told Sangharakshita his story, asking that he keep it in confidence. They eventually had a falling out over the constant presence of young Indian boys at the house they shared, with Dillon going again to Sarnath, where he sought ordination as a full monk from the abbot of the Theravāda monastery there. Dillon writes that he had read in the monastic code that those of the “third sex” could not be ordained.19 Although the term “tr tīyaprakr ti,” literally, “third nature,” appears in Sanskrit texts like the Kāma ˙ ˙ Sūtra, it is rare in Buddhist literature. One wonders whether the term that Dillon meant instead was “pandaka.” Regardless, hoping that this ancient rule ˙˙ would be ignored in modern times, he told the abbot that he belonged to the third sex and requested ordination. He was refused. By this time, Tibetan monks who had followed the Dalai Lama into exile were beginning to settle near the major Buddhist pilgrimage sites. In Sarnath, Dillon met Denma Lochö Rinpoche (1928–2014), a prominent incarnate lama and scholar of the Geluk sect. Dillon accepted a well-worn stereotype that the Mahāyāna is more open-minded than the rigid Theravāda. He writes that “the keynote of Theravadin or Hinayana Buddhism is adherence to the letter of the law. The spirit is secondary. Whereas in Mahayana Buddhism it is the spirit that counts and the letter can be altered within the spirit.”20 In fact, there is no distinction of Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna in Indian Buddhist monastic codes. Still, Dillon requested full ordination from Denma Lochö Rinpoche, who agreed to ordain him. A date was set and Dillon sent a letter to Sangharakshita inviting him to attend. Upon receiving the letter, Sangharakshita immediately sent letters to

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both the Theravāda and Tibetan monastics, explaining that Dillon was a woman and could not be ordained. His name means “protected by the monastic community.” Here, he felt that he was acting as the “protector of the monastic community.” Sangharakshita writes in his own memoir, “Jivaka was essentially a woman whom modern surgical techniques and modern drugs had enabled to act the part of a man on the stage of life.”21 Feeling betrayed, Dillon sought the advice of the Dalai Lama’s senior tutor, who told him that he could be ordained at some point in the future. Present at that meeting was Bakula Rinpoche (1918–2003), the most prominent incarnate lama of Ladakh, formerly a part of western Tibet, now part of northern India. It was suggested that Dillon be reordained as a novice, this time according to the vinaya followed in Tibet, and then go to one of the monasteries in Ladakh to train to become a fully ordained monk. Denma Lochö Rinpoche ordained Dillon as a novice in 1960, giving him the Tibetan name “Lobzang.” He thus became “Lobzang Jivaka,” a name half-Tibetan, half-Pāli, perhaps symbolic of the many painful years he spent wandering between worlds. Always a confident writer, in 1962, he would publish a memoir of his first years in Ladakh called Imji Getsul, Tibetan for “English novice.” He seemed to be happy in Ladakh, living in Rizong Monastery, studying with yet another luminary of the Geluk sect, Rizong Rinpoche (1928–2022). Conditions were difficult in Ladakh, however, made more difficult when his story became known. He died in a hospital in Dalhousie in Himachal Pradesh on May 15, 1962, at the age of forty-seven.22 In 1964, Sangharakshita returned to Britain. Eventually giving up his monk’s vows, he became the leader of the Western Buddhist Order, which was to be neither monastic nor lay; those who were ordained were given ten vows. It was supported by another organization, Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO). Sangharakshita would become the most famous Buddhist in Britain, publishing prolifically, and FWBO would establish chapters around the world. In 1997, the Guardian published an article detailing charges that Sangha­ rakshita sexually abused male members of FWBO. Subsequent inquiries suggest that he had engaged in homosexual relations throughout his time as a monk in India.23 Based on these reports, it appears that at the time that he prevented Michael Dillon from becoming a monk because he was a pandaka, ˙˙ Sangharakshita was a pandaka himself. By composing auto-hagiographies, ˙˙ Rampa and Sangharakshita constructed false identities for themselves and profited greatly, becoming the two most famous British Buddhists (with the possible exception of Christmas Humphreys) of the twentieth century. Unlike

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them, Michael Dillon suffered greatly to claim his true identity, composing a memoir that was only published long after his death, a death in a remote hospital far from his homeland. Buddhism believes in the power, including the magical power, of speech. One of the most famous examples of this is what is called satyavacana, literally, “statement of truth.” It occurs particularly in stories of physical mutilation, especially in the jātaka stories, where the future buddha cuts off a body part to feed a hungry person. Before dying from his wounds, the bodhisattva will say something to the effect of, “If I cut off my flesh out of compassion for others, may my body be restored.” And it is. Michael Dillon may or may not have known these stories. Instead, he endured much suffering, both physical and mental, over many years in the quest to restore his true self.

25 • Sex

In a book entitled Beyond Dogma, published in 1996, the Dalai Lama wrote, “A sexual act is deemed proper when the couples use the organs created for sexual intercourse and nothing else. . . . Homosexuality, whether it is between men or between women, is not improper in itself. What is improper is the use of organs already defined as inappropriate for sexual contact.”1 The following year, while in San Francisco to speak at a conference on nonviolence, he agreed to meet with a group of gay and lesbian Buddhists who were concerned about his comments. When he walked into the room, he was carrying a Tibetan text entitled Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (Lam rim chen mo). Completed in 1402, it is the most famous work of Tsongkhapa (1357–1419), the celebrated monk who had founded the Dalai Lama’s sect. It is a long text, considered to contain everything one needs to know to achieve enlightenment, from going for refuge to the Buddha, the dharma, and the san˙gha, to advanced meditation on emptiness.2 The Dalai Lama opened the text to the section on the ten non-virtuous deeds that lead to suffering and to rebirth as an animal, ghost, or denizen of hell. Three of these are deeds of the body: killing, stealing, and sexual misconduct. The Dalai Lama opened to that last section and began to read aloud. Tsongkhapa explains that sexual misconduct occurs when there is an inappropriate partner, an inappropriate body part, an inappropriate place, or an inappropriate time. For a male, an inappropriate partner is any male (including oneself), a eunuch, one’s mother, a married woman, a nun, and a woman protected by her family (that is, not yet married). An inappropriate body part is anything other than the vagina, that is, the mouth, anus, or hand. An inappropriate place is the presence of one’s guru, one’s parents, a stūpa, or a rocky place (presumably because this

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would be uncomfortable for one’s partner). An inappropriate time is when a woman is in the last stages of pregnancy, is menstruating, lactating, when she has taken a one-day vow of celibacy, when she is unhappy, unwilling, or in pain, or during the day.3 Tsongkhapa goes on to enumerate the karmic consequences of sexual misconduct. Based on the gravity and frequency of the deed, one will be reborn as an animal, as a ghost, or in hell. The tortures experienced in the various Buddhist hells for these various sexual misdeeds are described in gruesome detail in a text called the Establishment of Mindfulness of the True Dharma (Saddharmasmr tyupasthāna Sūtra).4 When one is eventually reborn as a human, ˙ one will have an “unruly wife” and live in a place “where there is excrement and urine, mud, filth, unclean things, many evil smells, misery, and discomfort.”5 All of this would seem to restrict sexual activity to vaginal intercourse by a heterosexual married couple, far away from a stūpa, during the night. In other words, sex seems to be nowhere in Buddhism. And yet sex is everywhere. There is sex in heaven. In a famous story, the Buddha attends the wedding of his half-brother Nanda but then immediately convinces him to leave his bride and become a monk. When Nanda is caught drawing a picture of his wife on a rock, the Buddha makes a rule prohibiting monks from making representations of sentient beings. When Nanda is unable to dispel thoughts of longing for his beloved, the Buddha flies him up to the Heaven of the Thirty-Three on the summit of Mount Meru, where he shows Nanda gods having wild sex with ravishing women, women more beautiful than Nanda’s beautiful bride. The Buddha explains that these gods were ascetics in their past lives who practiced celibacy, suggesting that the karmic consequence of abstaining from sex in this life is great sex in the next. As he says, “Life here in heaven together with the gods, the delightful forests and these unaging women are the reward of one’s own pure deeds.”6 According to Buddhist cosmology, there are six heavens in the Realm of the Desire, and the gods there all have sex. In the first two of the heavens, it is genital intercourse. However, as one proceeds to the four higher heavens, the sex act becomes increasingly subtle, from hugging, to holding hands, to smiling, to simply eye contact. Sex in the Buddhist heavens is only for pleasure, not for procreation. In these heavens, the male gods ejaculate wind instead of semen. There is also sex in hell. There are eight hot hells, eight cold hells, and four neighboring hells, located underground, beneath Bodh Gayā, the place of the Buddha’s enlightenment. The beings there are reborn as male and female, naked, to be burned by the fires of the hot hells and frozen by the snows of the cold hells, with some also doomed to perform various sexual perversions. Some of these

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are depicted in modern Thailand in hell theme parks.7 The message from all this is that the safest course is to abstain from sex completely. As has been discussed, Buddhism has a complex monastic code of over two hundred rules for monks and over three hundred rules for nuns. According to the tradition, however, this code was not presented by the Buddha as a complete system but developed organically over time, as a particular event required a rule to be issued. For the first years of the Buddha’s teaching—according to various accounts, five, twelve, or twenty years after his enlightenment—no rules were needed; those monks who had attained one of the stages of enlightenment were generally ethical. The first rule that was established was not the rule against murder but the rule against sex, occasioned when the monk Sudinna acceded to his mother’s plea that he have sex once with the wife he had abandoned so that she might produce a male heir for the family fortune. When the Buddha learned what had happened, he said, in a statement described as the rare case in which the Buddha did not speak courteously, “Worthless man, it would be better that your penis be stuck into the mouth of a poisonous snake than into a woman’s vagina. It would be better that your penis be stuck into the mouth of a black viper than into a woman’s vagina. It would be better that your penis be stuck into a pit of burning embers, blazing and glowing, than into a woman’s vagina. Why is that? For that reason you would undergo death or death-like suffering, but you would not on that account, at the break-up of the body, after death, fall into deprivation, the bad destination, the abyss, hell.”8 That is, the excruciating pain of having one’s penis bitten by a snake is far better than the entanglements with the world caused by heterosexual intercourse that would eventually send a man to hell. Despite this harsh condemnation, Sudinna was not expelled from the order. However, the Buddha established sexual intercourse as a transgression that thereafter would result in expulsion from the order of monks. Three other misdeeds which carried that sanction would be added later, each after the monk had done the deed: the killing of a human, stealing, and lying about one’s spiritual attainments. After monks had performed a variety of other sex acts, each described in the monastic code, the crime of sexual misconduct that entailed expulsion would come to be defined as the penetration with the penis of an orifice of a sentient being—living or dead—even to the depth of a sesame seed. For nuns, the sexual offenses requiring expulsion would be expanded to include enjoying physical contact with a male between the collarbone and the knee.

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In the Buddhist origin story, the first humans to populate the earth are literally ethereal beings—radiant and able to fly—without sex or gender. It is only when they begin to partake of a frothy substance that covers the ground that they fall to earth, gaining weight, losing luster, and developing organs to excrete waste. Then, based on their past karma, “their bodies became coarser still, and the difference in their looks became even greater. And the females developed female sex-organs, and the males developed male organs. And the women became excessively preoccupied with men, and the men with women. Owing to this excessive preoccupation with each other, passion was aroused, and their bodies burnt with lust. And later, because of this burning, they indulged in sexual activity. But those who saw them indulging threw dust, ashes or cow-dung at them, crying: ‘Die, you filthy beast! How can one being do such things to another!’”9 The guilty couples were driven out of the community, eventually returning to build dwellings for themselves so that they could have sex without being pelted with cow dung. How different this is from the account in Genesis, where God creates the first man and the first woman, creates gender and sexuality, and encourages heterosexual intercourse, telling Noah after the flood, “Be fruitful and multiply.” In the Buddhist account, humans are not created by God, but by their own past deeds. In the Buddhist Eden, there is no gender, no sexuality, and no shelter; the entire built environment is the result of the abuse couples suffer when they have sex. In Buddhism, there is a different kind of Fall, one that is not caused by disobeying God and eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Instead, the literal fall to earth of the original humans is the result of their curiosity, and eventual greed, for sensual pleasure. Like the fall of Adam and Eve, it derives from the sense of taste. In Buddhism, looking always to the cause, it is not the pleasure that is condemned but the desire for pleasure. All feelings of pleasure are the karmic result of good deeds, meaning that sexual desire is not the cause of sexual pleasure; sexual pleasure is caused by a virtuous deed done in the past. That experience is therefore a given. What is free is the response. When that response is attachment to pleasure, one is said to then grasp for pleasure, leading eventually to aging, sickness, and death. The sin, in the Buddhist case, was not tasting the frothy substance. The sin was going back for more. This desire for the pleasures of the senses is the first of what are called the three poisons: desire, hatred, and ignorance. One of the Sanskrit terms is “rāga,” with connotations of “passion,” “excitement,” and “becoming red.” It thus con-

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notes lust for an object of pleasure. Deeds motivated by such desire lead eventually, in this life or a future life, to experiences of pain. In this lifetime, they also increase attachment to the world, perpetuating the powerless wandering called samsāra. ˙ Thus, during the ordination ceremony, the new monk is told, “The Blessed One has in many ways condemned sexual pleasure and attachment to sexual pleasure and longing for sexual pleasure and obsession with sexual pleasure. He has praised giving up sexual pleasure, has commended, revered, praised and extolled its abandonment, removal, dissipation, the separation from passion, its uprooting, abatement and decline. Since, Venerable, from this day forward, you must avert your eyes in regard to a woman with lascivious thoughts and not even look at her, how much more must you not couple and engage in unchaste intercourse.”10 All manner of lesser offenses, sexual acts that did not entail expulsion, would be discussed at length, with much attention to masturbation and nocturnal emissions. The Buddhist monastic code describes several levels of misdeeds that require different levels of punishment; the most severe entail expulsion, the least severe need only to be acknowledged. In the hierarchy of infractions, the second-most serious require some form of penance or a period of probation. As is the case throughout the monastic code, each offense was occasioned by a deed that caused the Buddha to establish the rule. Just as the first deed to require expulsion was sexual intercourse, the first deed to require probation was masturbation, literally in the Buddhist texts, “intentional emission of semen.” Exactly what does and does not constitute the transgression of masturbation is described at length, with masturbation being distinguished from nocturnal emission. Indeed, one of the debates in the monastic community revolved around the question of whether an arhat—a monk who had destroyed desire, hatred, and ignorance and would enter nirvāna at death—could be seduced by ˙ a goddess in a dream to the point of orgasm, with arguments presented pro and con. This is said to have been a point of controversy at the Second Council, where in some accounts, these and other positions diminishing the holiness of the arhat are ascribed to the infamous monk Mahādeva, said to have murdered his father, slept with his mother, murdered his mother, and murdered an arhat.11 Even after the rise of the Mahāyāna, the arhat was the paradigm of Buddhist enlightenment for the Nikāya schools. Buddhas appear only rarely in the world; the goal of Buddhist practice is to pass through four ascending stages of enlightenment. The stream-enterer will never be reborn as an animal, a ghost, or

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a denizen of hell and will be liberated from rebirth in seven lifetimes or less. The once-returner will be reborn only once more in the Realm of Desire. The never-returner will never return to the Realm of Desire but may be reborn in one of the higher heavens of samsāra. The arhat will never be reborn again and ˙ will pass into nirvāna upon death. This was the goal of Buddhist practice. ˙ The arhat was said to have destroyed all desire, hatred, and ignorance as well as all seeds for future rebirth; he was said to possess the “knowledge of destruction” and “knowledge of non-arising,” so that, having been destroyed, the afflictions would not arise again, an attainment that was often confirmed by the Buddha. From one perspective, there is a logic to this. As we have seen again and again, Buddhism is a tradition that is profoundly retrospective, placing all authority in the Buddha and his words; this is one reason why the authors of the Mahāyāna sūtras ventriloquized the Buddha. After the Buddha is gone, there is a danger of the proliferation of those with claims to enlightenment, and hence to authority. Without the Buddha to certify their attainment, how are others to know whether a monk who makes such a claim is in fact an arhat? Are there particular things that would disprove the claim to enlightenment? This is the context for the question of whether an arhat can have nocturnal emissions. If an arhat is someone who has achieved “knowledge of destruction” and “knowledge of non-arising,” one would assume that the answer would be “no.” One influential school of Indian Buddhism, the Mahāsāmghika, argued that ˙ the answer was “yes,” for a variety of reasons, perhaps the most important of which was that the nocturnal emission was involuntary and unintentional, the result of a beautiful demoness appearing to the arhat in a dream and seducing him; the monk in this case is a passive victim. It is comparable, they argued, to a monk having his robe or bowl stolen by a thief. No one would blame a monk for this. In the same way, an arhat should not be reproached if a demoness steals his semen.12 Given its popular portrayal as more inclusive, one might expect that attitudes toward sexuality would change in the Mahāyāna. However, the inclusivity in many of the Mahāyāna sūtras, such as the Lotus—where the Buddha declares that all sentient beings will one day become buddhas—is often more polemical than ecumenical. There are not significant changes in the attitude toward women. In the domain of sexuality, we see an odd exception. In a number of Mahāyāna texts, one sees the enumeration of “bodhisattva vows,” vows that in India seem to have been meant to supplement the monk’s vows, but in East Asia often replaced them. Among these vows, traditionally counted as eigh-

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teen root vows and forty-six secondary vows in their Tibetan rendition, the bodhisattva must be willing to commit seven of the ten non-virtuous deeds that typically lead to suffering in the future, if committing such a deed will benefit another person. The seven are the physical and verbal non-virtues of killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, divisive speech, harsh speech, and senseless speech. (The remaining non-virtues, all mental—covetousness, harmful intent, and wrong view—remain proscribed for the bodhisattva.) It is easy enough to imagine someone doing at least six of these seven things in order to help someone in need: killing a murderer to save the lives of others, stealing to feed the hungry. Sexual misconduct is more difficult to imagine. One such case is about the Buddha himself. During a past life as a bodhisattva, he was an ascetic who had practiced celibacy for forty-two thousand years. Yet he gave up his vow of celibacy in order to live with a woman who would have otherwise died without his love.13 The story of the Buddha’s past life as an ascetic ends with this statement: “Something that sends other sentient beings to hell sends the bodhisattva who is skilled in means to rebirth in the world of Brahmā [one of the Buddhist heavens].”14 This statement would be put to the test by Buddhist tantra. Although it is inaccurate to describe tantra as the “yoga of sex,” it is the case that heterosexual intercourse plays an important role in both tantric theory and tantric practice, in both Hinduism and Buddhism. Named after a Sanskrit term that means “manual” or “handbook,” there is a certain practicality and instrumentality in tantra, a way to get specific things done, usually through the propitiation of a particular deity, with the well-known elements of mandala, ˙˙ mantra, and mudrā all playing a part. Its origins remain murky, seeming to begin in the sixth century in India, as cults of various deities came to gain local followings and eventually royal patronage. The deities are generally not the famous figures of the earlier tradition, but previously minor gods and local deities who were elevated in importance by the devotees of their cults. In Buddhist tantra, one of the most famous figures is Vajrapāni, known to the early ˙ tradition as the Buddha’s bodyguard. In other cases, previously well-known figures were transformed. The frightening thirty-four-armed, bull-headed deity Yamantaka, bedecked by a garland of human heads, is the wrathful form of the famous bodhisattva of wisdom, Mañjuśrī. Among the tantric deities, a number of previously minor goddesses and demonesses rose to prominence; the word for the famous tantric goddess, the “dākinī,” originally meant something like ˙ “witch.” When one reads the famous Buddhist tantras, one is struck by how mun-

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dane the requested boons seem to be: finding treasure, winning the love of a woman, killing an enemy. Tantric rituals came to be classified under four headings based on their aim: pacification, of such things as illness and demons; increase, of such things as wealth and life span; control, of such things as persons and situations; and wrath, in such things as subduing and, in some cases, killing enemies. These are typically performed by initiates to the cult of a particular deity, who receive instruction in the ritual after being granted entry to that deity’s mandala. Literally meaning “circle,” the mandala may have begun ˙˙ ˙˙ as something as simple as a circle drawn on the ground, evolving eventually into the elaborate two-dimensional and three-dimensional palace familiar from Japanese and Tibetan art. In the ritual, the deity would be invoked via its particular mantra, with additional mantras recited for particular boons, with the appropriate substances offered. These mantras sometimes had semantic meaning and sometimes were simply syllables, functioning like a magic spell. In response the deity would grant various magical powers (siddhi). Eventually, one more power would be added to the list: buddhahood. These rituals would eventually become internalized through visualization, with the human body becoming the domain; the body that had so often been condemned in the earlier tradition came to be exalted. An elaborate physiology was developed, according to which winds (prāna) or subtle energies course ˙ through a network of seventy-two thousand channels (nādi). Among these, the ˙ most important is the central channel, which runs from the genitals upward to the crown of the head, in some systems curving down to end in the space between the eyes. Parallel to the central channel are the right and left channels, wrapping around it at several points to form knots that prevent wind from moving through the central channel. At these points of constriction, called wheels (cakra), networks of smaller channels radiate throughout the body. These are often enumerated as five, six, or seven; the seven are the forehead, the crown of the head, the throat, the heart, the navel, the base of the spine, and the tip of the sexual organ. A number of tantric rituals involve sexual intercourse, with the partners often visualizing themselves as deities. As Buddhist tantra came to be institutionalized, it also became highly theorized and theologized, with claims that the practice of tantra could radically truncate the long bodhisattva path to buddhahood. Some texts would claim that it was impossible to achieve buddhahood without the practice of sexual yoga, and that all the buddhas of the past, including our own Śākyamuni, had done so. It was said that the union of the male and female sexual organs could lead to the union of bliss and emptiness, transforming the most subtle form

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of consciousness, called the mind of clear light, into the omniscience of a buddha. To achieve this, it was necessary for both partners to reach a kind of controlled orgasm, described as various levels of joy (ānanda) as something simply called a drop (bindu) descends down the central channel to the tip of the genitals and then is reversed (in the case of the male, without ejaculation), moving upward, producing what is called innate joy, through the central channel to the crown of the head. A deed that required the expulsion of a monk became required to achieve the enlightenment of a buddha. It is difficult to provide a history of sexuality in Buddhism for a variety of reasons. Buddhist institutions wished to maintain the pretense that all monks and nuns were celibate, in part to remain in the good graces of the laity; in ancient India the merit derived from a gift was measured in part by the purity of the recipient. At the same time, the detailed descriptions in the monastic code of various proscribed sex acts, and the various punishments they entail, make it clear that sex was very much on the mind of the monastic. What happened in the material world is more difficult to measure. For this, it is useful to turn not to history but to story—to the portrayal of Buddhist monks and nuns, not in Buddhist scriptures, but in the vernacular literatures of Buddhist lands, beginning in India, where we find that monks are not always paragons of chastity. Thus, in Drunken Games (Mattavilāsa), a seventh-century Sanskrit comic farce, a young Buddhist monk praises the Buddha for instructing monks to live in mansions, to sleep in good beds, to eat in the morning, to drink flavorful beverages in the afternoon, to chew flavorful betel leaves, and to wear comfortable clothes. However, he has yet to find in the scriptures rules that allow monks to drink alcohol and sleep with women. He says, “I suspect that these tired, evil Buddhist elders removed the rules about women and liquor from the holy books out of their jealousy of us young folk. Where can I find an unmodified original text? If I find it, I will gratify the community by making known to all the complete words of the Buddha.”15 Buddhist monks and nuns appear often in the vast pornographic literature of China. In some novels, they are admirable figures, as in the case of the monk Budai Heshang (the same name as the famous “fat Buddha”) in the seventeenthcentury novel The Carnal Prayer Mat (Rou putuan). However, they are also portrayed as avaricious and indolent lechers. In the sixteenth century, a new genre of literature began to appear in China, what might be called courtroom dramas (gong’an, in Chinese, the same characters as “koan” in Zen). These were cheaply printed books intended for the mass market. The court cases included a large number of sex crimes, and the perpetrators were often Buddhist monks.

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There are stories of monks causing husbands to divorce their wives by spreading rumors about them, then keeping the now destitute woman locked in the monastery as a sex slave. There are stories of monks murdering prostitutes when they demand payment. There are stories of monks telling women who come to the monastery to offer prayers for pregnancy to spend the night in the monastery and await the arrival of the “bald deity.” There are stories of monks who dress as women to enter women’s rooms. There are stories of monks who dress women as monks (in one case, after killing her parents) and keep them as sexual partners. Whether these stories were parodies or represented popular views of Buddhist clerics is difficult say. When the Ming Dynasty succeeded the Yuan Dynasty (a strong patron of Buddhism), laws were imposed making the punishment for monks who committed sex crimes two degrees harsher than those for laymen. Again, whether this indicates the prevalence of such crimes or simply an attempt to isolate Buddhist monks from the rest of society is difficult to say. The late Ming would be a time of Buddhist revival. Still, we note that in the 1620s, just after the reign of the Wanli emperor, a devout patron of Buddhism, a short story collection was published entitled Monks and Nuns in the Sea of Sin (Sengni niehai).16 In Tibet, we have twentieth-century accounts that intercrural sex (in which no orifice is penetrated, even to the depth of a sesame seed) was practiced in Tibetan monasteries. It is noteworthy that in his list of inappropriate body parts, Tsongkhapa adds “thighs pressed together,” although that phrase is absent from the Sanskrit original of the text that he cites.17 In contemporary Thailand, there are debates about the presence of gay monks in the san˙gha. Under the laws established by the Meiji Restoration, monks were allowed to marry; most eventually did. It is in Japanese Buddhism that there is an elaborate literature extolling homosexual relations between monks, specifically between a young acolyte, called a chigo, and a more senior monk. In works like Tales of the Chigo (Chigo Monogatari), the homosexual relationship is presented as an opportunity for the achievement of enlightenment (typically for the senior monk) through the realization of certain Buddhist truths, such as impermanence and the vaguely tantric notion that “the afflictions are enlightenment” (bonnō soku bodai). A fifteenth-century text declares that the arhats, the austere celibate saints of Indian Buddhism, urged monks to compassionately practice homosexual sex, promising rebirth in heaven as the karmic result.18 After reading Tsongkhapa’s description of sexual misconduct to representatives of the LGBT community in San Francisco, the Dalai Lama conceded that the sexual ethics described in this fifteenth-century Tibetan text could be seen

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as the product of a specific time and place. He also said that if homosexuality was now accepted in the world, it was possible that the Buddhist ethical code could be changed. However, he cautioned that no single person could change the Buddhist precepts; such a change could only be made by the san˙gha, the community of monks, noting that this had been done in the past.19 He was presumably referring to one of the early councils, some two millennia ago, where monks debated whether an arhat can have nocturnal emissions.

26 • Society

In 1978, an American scholar set out for India to conduct research at a Tibetan refugee monastery.1 Not long after arriving, he was taken to meet the abbot. In his few days there, he had become concerned that many of the young monks—boys who seemed to be between eight and sixteen—had large scabs on their shaved heads, something that he assumed was a treatable skin condition. In the course of their conversation, he told the abbot that he would be happy to provide some funds to bring a doctor from a nearby town to treat the young monks. The abbot told him that that would not be necessary, asking whether he might instead like to contribute to a fund for a new statue of Maitreya. According to Buddhist cosmology, Maitreya will achieve buddhahood in approximately 5.67 billion years. Over the course of its long history, Buddhism, and especially the Buddhist community of monks and nuns, has been extolled as the savior of the nation and condemned as a leech sucking the lifeblood from the land. The pendulum has swung between these two extremes for a variety of reasons, some, but not all, linked to the particular nation’s encounter with modernity. Although these reasons are always political in one sense or another, they are often couched in the language of Buddhist doctrine. According to standard Buddhist cosmology, our world, which is the product of our collective karma, passes through various cosmic stages. The current stage, called the Stage of Abiding, also passes through cycles, cycles in which both the life span and the qualities of humans rise and fall. At present, it is on a downward slope, with the human life span decreasing, eventually dropping to ten years, after which it will rise again until it reaches eighty thousand years.

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It is then that Maitreya will come. During this period of decline, not only will the conditions of the world deteriorate, but the dharma will disappear. A central element of Buddhist claims to legitimation in ancient India was the assertion that Śākyamuni was not unique, that there had been many buddhas in the past, whose names he knew and whom he had encountered in his previous lives on the bodhisattva path. Their teachings had been entirely forgotten, however, making it necessary for a new buddha—in our age, Śākyamuni Buddha—to restore the salvific dharma to the world. However, like that of all buddhas, the teaching of Śākyamuni will suffer the fate of all impermanent things, fading away over time until it is entirely lost and forgotten. How long this will take and how it will happen have been of great interest to Buddhist thinkers in the centuries after his passing, and a variety of chronologies have been set forth. One of the earliest predictions of the demise of the dharma appears in the traditional account of the Buddha’s grudging decision to admit women into the monastic order. As discussed earlier, the Buddha says that had he not admitted women, his teaching would last for a thousand years, but because he has admitted women, it will only last for five hundred. A more detailed description, one that was important especially in East Asia, posited three periods: the true dharma (saddharma), the semblance of the true dharma (saddharmapratirūpaka), and the demise of the true dharma (saddharmavipralopa).2 The first is the period following the passage of the Buddha into nirvāna, when his teachings are properly maintained, and it is possible to fol˙ low the path to liberation. During the second, the teachings remain extant, but progress on the path is more difficult. In the final period, the practice of the path eventually becomes impossible. This decline is generally attributed to what are called the five degradations (kasāya): (1) the degradation of the life span, ˙ because the human life span decreases; (2) the degradation of views, because wrong views become rampant; (3) the degradation of afflictions, because negative emotions become stronger; (4) the degradation of sentient beings, because both the physical and mental powers of the beings of the world weaken; and (5) the degradation of the eon, because the physical environment deteriorates. It was essential to be able to calculate when each of the periods began and ended, especially the final period. All manner of calculations have been made. In Japan, it was concluded that the final period began in 1052. If that is the case, attempts at redemption, whether for our world or for its inhabitants, are futile. Thus, we find across the Buddhist world practices that will allow beings to wait for better times or that will take them elsewhere. In Burma, there is the practice of the weikza-do, or wizards, who engage in longev-

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ity practices to extend their life span until the coming of Maitreya.3 In China and Japan, the doctrine of decline led to the rise of the Pure Land schools, where, through the grace of Amitābha, beings are reborn in his buddha field of Sukhāvatī, and from there, achieve buddhahood. In late Indian Buddhism, we find millenarianism in the Kālacakra Tantra, composed sometime between 1025 and 1040, in the wake of Muslim raids into north India, predicting an apocalyptic war in which the army of the good will sweep out of the kingdom of Śambhala, deep in the Himalayas, to defeat the barbarians and restore the dharma, a war that will not occur until the year 2425. Hence, the great popularity of Kālacakra initiations in Tibet, which are said to lead to rebirth in Śambhala. Buddhist theories of time rest on a view of samsāra as a world that is by its ˙ very nature marked with suffering, impermanence, and no self, a world that is in irreversible decline, a world that is irredeemable; the Tibetans chose to translate the Sanskrit term “loka” (world) as “’jig rten” (disintegrating foundation). In Tibet, there developed a genre of works called stages of the path (lam rim) and preliminary practices (sngon ’gro) that present some version of what are called the four things to turn the mind away (blo ldog rnam bzhi) from the world, contemplations of the rarity of human birth, of the inevitability of death, of the inexorability of karma, and of the faults of the six realms of samsāra. These are ˙ intended to cause one to think of life as like a prison from which one is trying to escape, with all the urgency of a person whose hair is on fire. These texts say little about trying to repair the disintegrating foundation. Nonetheless, especially since the twentieth century, a number of Buddhist doctrines have been championed as evidence of social engagement. One of these is the brahmavihāras, the “divine abodes”: love, compassion, joy, and equanimity. These appear most prominently as four of the forty topics said to have been set forth by the Buddha as objects of concentration, to develop a sufficient level of mental strength to develop the insight to escape the world of rebirth. Other topics include recollection of the Buddha, meditation on the breath, and meditation on the repulsiveness of food. Ten of those forty concern the foulness of the human body, a foulness understood through the contemplation of ten stages of decomposition of a decaying corpse, a corpse of the same sex in order to discourage necrophilia. In their classical articulation, equanimity is the highest of the four, present in the fourth concentration (dhyāna), the state from which the Buddha himself entered nirvāna. The most detailed instructions on the forty topics are found ˙ in Buddhaghosa’s Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga). Here, equanimity is essentially the concession that because all beings are subject to their own karma,

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there is no particular benefit in being troubled by the fate of others: “Beings are owners of their deeds. Whose [if not theirs] is the choice by which they will become happy, or will get free from suffering, or will not fall away from the success they have reached?”4 Put somewhat more bluntly, we are on our own. In Buddhist texts, whether of the Nikāya or Mahāyāna traditions, giving (dāna) is praised as the highest virtue. Famous stories of giving in the Buddhist canon occur in the jātaka stories, the accounts of the Buddha’s past lives as a bodhisattva, where the cases of giving are often of a spectacular, and sometimes gruesome, nature. A prince commits suicide by jumping off a cliff to feed a starving tigress and her cubs; a rabbit jumps into a fire to feed a starving sage; a king methodically carves off body parts to save a dove from a hawk. In one of the rare cases in which the bodhisattva is reborn as a woman, she cuts off her breasts to feed a starving woman so that the woman can nurse her starving child.5 The most famous story of giving is that of Prince Vessantara, the bodhisattva in the last human lifetime before he becomes Prince Siddhārtha. Here, in perhaps the most heartbreaking scene in Buddhist literature, he gives his darling children to an evil brahmin to be his slaves, just because the brahmin asked him to. None of these cases of giving are real-world examples, and perhaps they are not supposed to be. In his famous poem, Entering the Bodhisattva Deeds (Bodhicaryāvatāra), the eighth-century Indian monk Śāntideva writes, “If the perfection of giving meant the dispelling of the world’s poverty, then how did the previous buddhas perfect it, since beggars still abound?” In other words, the Buddha perfected giving, and yet there is still poverty in the world. The perfection of giving therefore cannot mean the alleviation of poverty. As he explains in the next stanza, the perfection of giving is instead the conviction, the intention, the willingness to give everything to everyone. Therefore, the perfection of giving is an attitude rather than an act. In Sanskrit, it is cittam eva, “just a thought.”6 There is, however, the bodhisattva vow, the vow to attain buddhahood in order to liberate all beings from suffering. The term usually occurs in the singular in European languages. In Buddhist texts, there are a variety of enumerations, such as a fourfold form in Zen: “Beings are numberless, I vow to save them. Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to break them. Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them. The Buddha’s way is unsurpassable, I vow to become it.”7 In China, Korea, and Japan, the bodhisattva vows were derived not from an Indian text but from a Chinese apocryphon called the Brahmā’s Net Sūtra (Fanwang jing). Other versions tend to be more lengthy and more specific. Drawing

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on the ethics chapter of Asan˙ga’s Stages of the Bodhisattva (Bodhisattvabhūmi) and from Śāntideva’s Compendium of Training (Siksāsamuccaya), in Tibet we find ˙ eighteen root vows and forty-six secondary vows.8 In keeping with the model of the vinaya, these are presented in the form of infractions, thus eighteen root infractions and forty-six secondary infractions. There is a reference to giving in one of the eighteen root infractions, “not giving the dharma or wealth,” that is, it is an infraction of the bodhisattva vow not to provide the teaching of the dharma or one’s material possessions to those who request it. In the secondary infractions, we find the initially shocking statement that it is an infraction of the bodhisattva vows not to commit one of the seven physical and verbal non-virtues in order to benefit others. That is, it is a violation of the bodhisattva vows not to kill, not to steal, not to engage in sexual misconduct, not to lie, not to speak divisively, not to speak harshly, and not to speak senselessly in order to benefit others. One can imagine cases where each of these might be justified, except for sexual misconduct. When we read the examples that are given, we find the heterosexual male sexual fantasies that abound in Buddhist literature. Among the forty-six secondary infractions, it is an infraction for a bodhisattva not to accept offerings. It is also an infraction not to help those in need, not to help the sick, not to alleviate suffering, not to console the bereaved, not to help the poor, not to stop those engaged in harmful deeds, and if you have magical powers, not to use them for the benefit of others. In Asan˙ga’s Stages of the Bodhisattva (Bodhisattvabhūmi), there is a passage in which he describes the bodhisattva leading the blind, teaching sign language to the deaf, and carrying the lame; protecting sentient beings from all manner of dangerous creatures, from sea monsters to kings, to robbers, to invaders; consoling those who have lost a child, a parent, a spouse, a friend, or a teacher; and providing food, clothes, and shelter, as well as flower garlands, perfumes, and creams, to those who need them.9 As moving as the passage is, we do not find significant evidence in the premodern period of acts of charity performed by Buddhist monastics. And more often, the compassionate deeds of the bodhisattva take place in the realm of fantasy, where the bodhisattva becomes the superhero. For example, in one text the bodhisattva is said to take the form of a criminal so that he can be arrested and thrown into prison. There, he will bathe, feed, and clothe the other inmates, releasing them from their chains. For those who have been sentenced to death, the bodhisattva will conjure illusory doubles of them who will be led to execution while the real prisoners go free.10 This is the realm of imagination. Where real giving, in the real world, becomes important

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in Buddhism, it most often is not giving to the local community; it is giving to the monastic community. As has been previously noted, it is difficult to say much with certainty about the period of the Buddha’s lifetime, whenever that occurred. It seems clear, however, that what we call Buddhism began as one of a number of ascetic movements that arose in northern India some five centuries before the Common Era. The phrase that occurs again and again in the sūtras is “go forth into the homeless life.” The term translated as “home” here carries all the connotations of domesticity, including property, profession, and family, and the responsibilities that they entail. Buddhist monks and nuns were required to leave that behind, with the monastic code preventing them from owning property, engaging in a profession, tilling the soil, and even touching money. As has been noted, the words “bhiksu” and “bhiksunī,” which we regularly translate ˙ ˙ ˙ as “monk” and “nun,” in fact mean “beggar.” The san˙gha therefore depended upon the laity for their sustenance and was subject to the laws of the king. Indeed, the relation between san˙gha and state seems to have been very important from the beginning, with three kings—Bimbisāra, Prasenajit, and Ajātaśatru—figuring prominently in the sūtras as friends and patrons of the Buddha. And we note that Buddhist monks often served as advisors to kings, even composing texts on the topic. We think immediately of Nāgārjuna’s Precious Garland (Ratnāvalī) and Letter to a Friend (Suhr llekha), both likely written ˙ for a king of the Śatavahana Dynasty. We think of Mātrceta’s Letter to Kaniska ˙ ˙ (Kaniskalekha). In Tibet, we think of Phakpa at the court of Kublai Khan. These ˙ figures and their works provide Buddhist views of statecraft. We can note here, however, that part of the advice offered by these advisors (all of whom were Buddhist monks) was the importance of supporting the san˙gha. As the san˙gha grew in size and became sedentary, it was increasingly difficult for local communities to provide food for the monks and nuns, making royal patronage all the more necessary. The san˙gha therefore came to protect the interests of the state, and it did so in a number of ways. Thus, in the interview that must precede the ordination of a monk, the candidate is asked whether he is a soldier, a criminal, or in debt, ensuring that the san˙gha did not become a refuge for those seeking to escape from the rule of civil law. As already noted, ordination also included a physical examination for a lengthy list of physical and mental maladies that would prevent ordination. Thus, despite the association we often make between monasticism and medicine, the monastery was not regarded as a place for the treatment of the sick. In order for the monastery to survive, conforming to the laws of the state

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was not enough. The san˙gha had to contribute to it. It did so through the economy of karma. We know from a variety of sources that in the early tradition, laypeople were not instructed in meditation. Instead, the laity was taught the virtue of dāna, of giving, with karma theory specifying that the recipient of the gift figured in the calculation: the purer the recipient, the greater the good karma, with purity often measured by maintenance of the vow of celibacy. The Buddha also taught that the karmic effect of generosity is wealth in the future, especially the marvelous wealth of the six Buddhist heavens of the Realm of Desire (kāmadhātu). The most important service that Buddhist monks could provide to the laity, therefore, was not teaching them to meditate, but to enter into a transaction in which material gifts in this life were converted into heavenly riches in the next.11 And this power to convert currency seems to reside only with the san˙gha. So exclusive is its power that even Maudgalyāyana, the monk renowned for his magical powers, was unable to feed his own mother after she was reborn as a ghost. The Buddha informed him that the only way to feed the dead is to feed the san˙gha.12 We can see, then, that the san˙gha entered into a business relationship with the laity, advising the laity, almost in the words of the Gospel of Matthew, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.” It is doctrines like these that made the Roman Catholic Church and the Buddhist san˙gha, originally a community of beggars, among the wealthiest institutions in world history. We know, for example, that the economy of Tibet collapsed in the 1960s not because the dharma was not being dispensed but because Buddhist monasteries provided the banking system of the nation. Buddhist texts explain that kings who supported the san˙gha would reap a further benefit than that offered to the common people: protection from natural disaster and from foreign invasion. In Chinese, we even find the term “huguo fojiao” (state protection Buddhism), referring to Indian texts like the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapundarīka) and the Sūtra of the Golden Light (Suvarnaprabhāsa), and ˙˙ ˙ to apocryphal sūtras like the Sūtra for Humane Kings (Renwang jing), which promise protections to kings who promote their teachings. By the eighth century, the Lotus Sūtra was sufficiently revered in Japan that state-sponsored nunneries, called Temples for the Eradication of Sins through the Lotus (Hokke metsuzai no tera), were established by the emperor in each province; the recitation and copying of the sūtra served to provide protection for the royal family and the

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state. During the same period, there were monasteries called Temples for the Protection of the Nation by the Four Divine Kings of the Golden Light (Konkōmyō shitennō gokoku no tera), dedicated to the Sūtra for Humane Kings and the Sūtra of the Golden Light. In the latter text, the four divine kings, protectors of the cardinal directions, vow to come to the aid of countries in times of invasion, famine, and disease if the monks of that land recite the sūtra. When the monk Eisai sought permission to introduce Zen Buddhism into Japan, the petition that he penned to the shogun was not about Bodhidharma coming from the west or whether a dog has the buddha nature; it was entitled The Promotion of Zen to Protect the Nation (Kōzen gokokuron). In a certain sense, then, Buddhist monks and nuns across the Buddhist world have been civil servants, providing a service to the state in return for their protection and sustenance. However, dynasties rise and fall, and not all kings have been patrons of Buddhism. When we look at the history of Buddhism in India, China, and Korea, we see the devastating effect that the withdrawal of royal patronage has had on the san˙gha. Long before the Muslim invasions, Chinese pilgrims to India encountered many monasteries deserted and in ruins because the local king was now a Hindu or a trade route had shifted. For centuries, Buddhist monks and nuns in Korea were not allowed within the city walls of Seoul. It was in countries that had a relatively stable reign of Buddhist kings, places like Tibet and Thailand, that the san˙gha thrived. When we look at Tibetan history, we note that there is no figure more evil than Lang Darma, who was literally demonized for his attempts to prevent extravagant support of the san˙gha from bankrupting the country. According to a famous story, he was assassinated by a Buddhist monk, who is remembered as a hero. Indeed, when we look at the history of Buddhism, we see that Buddhist monks and nuns most often take what we term social action against those whom they perceive to be enemies of the dharma. Thus, Buddhist monks led violent revolts against the British in Burma. Perhaps the most famous of the protests revolved around the “Shoe Question.” The British would wear their shoes when visiting pagodas, including the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, the most sacred stūpa in the nation, said to hold the hairs that the Buddha had given to the two merchants who offered him the first meal after his enlightenment. On October 4, 1919, a group of monks attacked some Europeans who were wearing their shoes while visiting Eindawya Pagoda in Mandalay. Their leader was charged with attempted murder and sentenced to life in prison. The prominent monk Ledi Sayadaw took a more nonviolent approach, publishing a pamphlet entitled “The Impropriety of Wearing Shoes on Pagoda Platforms.” He went on to

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do something even more revolutionary in his efforts to defend the dharma against the British: he taught lay people how to meditate, inventing the practice that was the forerunner of modern mindfulness. We note that perhaps the most famous act of political protest by a Buddhist in modern history, the self-immolation of Thích Quả ng Đức in Saigon in 1963, was against the government of the Diem family, who were Roman Catholics and persecutors of Buddhism. In Tibet, we know that many monks took up arms against the British during the Younghusband Expedition of 1903, against the Chinese during the Litang Uprising in 1956, and during the Battle of Lhasa in 1959, all in defense of the dharma. Indeed, we can consider the self-­ immolations that began in eastern Tibet in 2009 as acts of political protest in defense of the dharma. Thus, among the questions to ponder is: When we think of social problems, does Buddhism have more to offer in diagnosis than it does in cure? And, if that is the case, why is it the case? It likely has to do with karma, what is presented as a natural law of cause and effect, a law that explains everything that happens to us, good or bad, a law that despite being apparently inexorable, the great majority of Buddhist practice over time has sought to circumvent. What, then, does it mean to intervene in the playing out of the karmic events that create our world, and is that intervention itself karmically ordained? Is it the case, in fact, that perennial questions of the choice between justice and mercy that haunt the theologies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are also present in Buddhism? Do we say, with Portia in the Merchant of Venice, “Though justice be thy plea, consider this: / That in the course of justice none of us / Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy.”13 Such questions become complicated in the case of Buddhism, where, as in Tibet, for example, the Dalai Lama was the head of state; the dispenser of justice was the bodhisattva of compassion. In East Asia in the late nineteenth century, Buddhism was not seen as a panacea but as a parasite. In Japan, with the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Buddhism had been brutally suppressed as a foreign religion that did not serve the nation. In the last years of the Qing Dynasty and with the establishment of the Republic of China, Buddhism was condemned by Chinese intellectuals as superstition. In Korea, which would become a Japanese colony in 1910, Buddhism had been suppressed by the Chosŏn Dynasty for centuries. Buddhist leaders responded to these attacks in a variety of ways. Yang Wenhui (1837–1911), a layman, served at the Chinese embassy in London. There, he met the Japanese scholar Nanjō Bun’yū (1849–1927), a Jōdo Shinshū cleric who was studying Sanskrit with Max Müller at Oxford. On his return to China, Yang

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was able to acquire and publish Chinese Buddhist texts that were preserved in Japan. Through his influence (and his later meeting with Anagārika Dharmapāla in Shanghai), Yang became interested in the Indian sources of Buddhism, establishing a publishing house to make Buddhist scriptures (including those translated from Sanskrit) available to a wider public beyond the monastery.14 One of the most famous Chinese Buddhist monks of this period was Taixu (1890–1947). Ordained as a monk at age fourteen, he would be involved in a number of anarchist organizations in China before founding a number of Buddhist organizations, such as the Association for the Advancement of Buddhism. His goals were many, including establishing relationships with Buddhists around the world (leading to travels to Europe) and demonstrating the compatibility of Buddhism and science. In this regard, he was one of many monks involved in a revival of interest in Yogācāra, inspired in part by its perceived affinity with the psychology of the day. Like other members of the Buddhist revival in China, Taixu sought to dem­ onstrate the contributions that Buddhism could make to the modern world. It was in this context that he entered into the debate on the bodhisattva vows, casting his support to Asan˙ga’s list. There were a number of reasons for this, including the fact that Asan˙ga is the revered founder of Yogācāra. More substantially, however, he found that the bodhisattva vows presented by Asan˙ga were better able to contribute to society, for several reasons. First, because they lacked the restrictive vows of a novice monk, they could be equally practiced by monk, nun, and layperson alike. Second, they were better able to make direct contributions to society in a number of domains. Here, quite contrary to what one might expect from a Buddhist monk, he pointed to the requirement (present in the Indian vows but absent in the standard Chinese vows) that the bodhisattva be willing to kill, steal, engage in sexual misconduct, lie, speak divisively, speak harshly, and speak senselessly in the service of others, thus offering the Buddhist a broader range of opportunities to serve the world, including engaging in deeds that Buddhism has traditionally proscribed.15 Indeed, he argued that these vows require that monastics leave their cloisters and contribute to society and to the newly founded and modern Republic of China. Not to do so would be a violation of their vows. The period from the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, the devastation of the Second World War, the civil war between the Republicans and the Communists that followed in its wake, the victory of the Chinese Communist Party, to the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 was a time of great hardship for the Chinese people, including Buddhist monks and nuns.

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With the establishment of the PRC, many of the leading monks of the day, many of them students of Taixu and his academies, fled to Taiwan. One of the most prominent of these was Yin Shun (1906–2005), considered the greatest Chinese scholar of Buddhism of his generation. He is renowned for the concept of “Buddhism for the Human Realm” (renjian fojiao), where “human realm” means the realm of humans among the six (or five) places of rebirth, an idea that he inherited from his teacher Taixu, shifting the focus away from social action to historiography, offering what might be called a demythologized history of Buddhism.16 Yin Shun’s most famous disciple is the nun Cheng Yen (b. 1937). In 1966, she had a conversation with some Roman Catholic nuns in Taiwan who, while acknowledging the philosophical profundity of Buddhism, said Christianity was superior because of the schools and hospitals that the church had established around the world. Buddhism, they said, had made no contributions to society. Taking this as a challenge, that same year, Cheng Yen founded the Tzu Chi, or “Compassionate Relief,” Foundation. Beginning very modestly, it has become a major international relief organization, building hospitals and nursing schools and providing disaster relief. The organization has its own ten precepts, prohibiting its members from killing, stealing, fornication, lying, drinking, smoking, gambling, unfilial and rude behavior, breaking traffic laws, and participating in political activities and demonstrations. Taixu believed that, rather than wait billions of years for the advent of Maitreya, the next buddha, one should seek rebirth in his heaven. He argued that the way to achieve rebirth there in the next life is to work to perfect human society in this life.17 Maitreya has all but completed the bodhisattva path and, like all future buddhas, is waiting in the Tusita (Joyous) Heaven for the teach˙ ings of his predecessor to disappear from the world so that he can descend to restore them. In Buddhist cosmology, our realm is called the Realm of Desire because its inhabitants are so attached to the objects of the senses. Maitreya’s heaven is not located in some faraway pure land; it is a heaven in samsāra, the ˙ fourth of the six heavens of the Realm of Desire, floating in the sky above Mount Meru, and thus not so far away.

27 • War

The Kalmyks are a Mongolian people. Whether eager to find new pasturelands or because of disputes with other Mongol polities, a group of some two hundred thousand migrated westward to the region north of the Caspian Sea along the Volga River in 1618, eventually establishing what was called the Kalmyk Khanate. They came under the rule of the Russian Empire during the reign of Catherine the Great, and later, of the Soviet Union. Today, Kalmykia is one of the Russian republics. Like other Mongols of the period, they were Buddhists, aligned with the Geluk sect of Tibetan Buddhism, headed by the Dalai Lama. As such, they were the first and largest Buddhist community to settle in Europe. Like other Mongol communities, until the twentieth century, the Kalmyks as well as the Buryats—another Mongol group that had settled in Siberia—sent young monks on the long journey to Tibet to study at one of the Geluk monastic universities. Some of these monks would eventually return home, while others would remain in Tibet, gaining prominence as scholars and abbots. The most famous Russian Buddhist monk in modern history was Agvan Dorzhiev (1853–1938), a Mongol monk from Buryatia in Siberia, who was appointed as debating partner for the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, a position awarded to only the most prominent scholars. He would eventually serve as an envoy between the Dalai Lama and Tsar Nicolas II, raising suspicions by the British that he was engaged in espionage. After the fall of the tsar, the Kalmyk Buddhists, many of whom had fought with the White Russians, were persecuted by the Communists, with a major repression beginning in 1929. At the time of the revolution in 1917, there were 175 Buddhist temples registered in the Russian Empire (most of them in Kalmykia and Buryatia). In 1940, there were none. Temples were destroyed, Bud-

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dhist texts were confiscated (with their pages used for papier-mâché), and Buddhist monks were arrested. Dorzhiev himself, by then an old man, would be arrested on charges of treason in 1937 during Stalin’s Great Purge and die in prison.1 When the Sixteenth Motorized Infantry Division of the German army advanced into Kalmykia in 1942, five thousand Kalmyks volunteered to join the Wehrmacht, forming the Kalmyk Cavalry Corps, fighting the Soviets until the Germans were defeated. In retaliation, Stalin ordered the deportation of almost one hundred thousand Kalmyks to Siberia, resulting in the deaths of sixteen thousand. It has sometimes been said, and more often assumed, that a war has never been fought in the name of Buddhism. This, perhaps not surprisingly, is false. In the twentieth century alone, Buddhist monks led attacks on Christian missionaries in Tibet, fought Tamil Hindus in Sri Lanka, and attacked Rohingya Muslims in Burma. In the eleventh century, the Buddhists of India dreamed that a Buddhist army would sweep out of the Himalayas to defeat the barbarians (the Muslims) in an apocalyptic war that they predicted would take place in 2425. More often, however, Buddhists have fought Buddhists. Just as the first commandment is “Thou shalt not kill,” in Buddhism, the first of the ten non-virtuous deeds that lead to suffering in the future is killing—and especially, killing humans. How have Buddhists understood the mass murder that occurs in war? Warfare does not figure prominently in the story of the Buddha, apart from one famous incident. One of the Buddha’s most loyal patrons was King Prasenajit of Kośala. However, the Buddha’s own Śākya clan looked down on him, sending a low-caste servant girl when he requested a bride, telling the king that she was from a noble family. When their son, Virūdhaka, later came to the Śākya ˙ capital, he learned of their deceit and swore revenge. When his father died and Virūdhaka became king, he immediately led his army to destroy the Śākya clan. ˙ However, as he approached the city, he saw the Buddha seated under a tree and turned back. This occurred on three different occasions. The Buddha did not appear the fourth time, explaining that he could not prevent his clan from suffering the karmic result of poisoning a river in a previous life. During the battle, the Śākyans, not wishing to kill, intentionally misfired their arrows and were massacred. Virūdhaka and his troops suffered the effect of their murder ˙ almost immediately, drowning when a flood swept through the riverbed where they were sleeping that night. If there is a lesson to be learned from this story, it is that the law of karma is inexorable; even the Buddha cannot prevent past deeds from having their

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effects. Such a doctrine provides an explanation of why wars are won and lost; who is victorious and who is vanquished seems predestined. As we will see in the examples that follow, this did not prevent Buddhists from waging war; it simply provided them with an explanation of the eventual outcome. As we will also see in the examples, there is a consistent concern with the karmic consequences of killing. The fifth-century history of Sri Lanka entitled the Great Chronicle (Mahāvamsa) recounts at length the story of the Buddhist king Dutthagāmanī (r. 161– ˙ ˙˙ ˙ 137 BCE) and his efforts to drive out the Hindu king Elara, who had invaded Sri Lanka from Tamil Nadu in south India in 205 BCE. With five hundred monks accompanying his army, the Buddhist king, riding his war elephant, sets out on a four-month campaign against the Tamil armies, defeating them on the battlefield and in sieges of their cities. Eventually, he meets the aged king Elara himself in single combat, killing him with a spear adorned with a relic of the Buddha. Upon his triumphant return, the king, relaxing on the terrace of his opulent palace, surrounded by dancing women, begins to feel remorse that his great victory had caused the death of millions. When a group of arhats—monks who had achieved enlightenment and would enter nirvāna ˙ when they died—learned of the king’s sorrow, eight of them went to the king and explained to him that he need not fear: “From this deed arises no hindrance in thy way to heaven. Only one and half human beings have been slain here by thee, O lord of men. The one had come unto the three refuges, the other had taken on himself the five precepts. Unbelievers and men of evil life were the rest, not more to be esteemed than beasts. But as for thee, thou wilt bring glory to the doctrine of the Buddha in manifold ways; therefore chase away care from thy heart, O ruler of men.”2 Thus, Dut t hagāmanī is not responsible for the death of millions; he is re­ ˙˙ ˙ sponsible for the death of one and a half, with humans apparently being measured by their adherence to Buddhism and by ethical conduct. By this measure, one of the dead became a human by taking refuge in the three jewels—the Buddha, the dharma, and the san˙gha—and one became half a human by taking five vows: not to kill (humans), not to steal, not to engage in sexual misconduct, not to lie, and not to use intoxicants. The remainder of the dead are equal to animals. Before his death, King Dut t hagāmanī would establish the most famous ˙˙ ˙ stūpa in Sri Lanka; after his death, the Great Chronicle reports that he was reborn in Tusita, the Joyous Heaven, where the future buddha Maitreya awaits. ˙ Because wars are generally fought over borders, those imaginary lines that mark all manner of geographical and ideological divides, the majority of wars

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in the history of Buddhism have not been against adherents of other religions; they have been against other Buddhists. And in these wars, Buddhist monks have not simply served as advisors to generals and kings; they have taken up weapons and gone into battle themselves. Perhaps the most famous case of this is the sōhei, literally, “monk soldier,” of Japan. At this point, perhaps rather jarringly in a chapter on war, it is useful to pause to consider the question of what is meant by the word “monk.” It is not a simple answer. As has been mentioned, the term typically translated as “monk” is “bhiksu” in Sanskrit, meaning “beggar,” a term that could be used in ancient ˙ India for any mendicant, regardless of religious affiliation. It is one of the many terms (including “buddha”) that took on a technical meaning in Buddhism. That is because a “bhiksu” in Buddhism does not simply mean a male who shaves ˙ his head, wears robes, and begs for his food. It means what is called a “fully ordained monk,” a man who has received and maintained all of the monastic vows, which number 227 rules in the Theravāda vinaya followed in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, 250 in the Dharmaguptaka vinaya followed in East Asia, and 253 in the Mūlasarvāstivāda vinaya followed in Tibet. In each of these traditions, before becoming a “monk,” one first had to spend some period of time as a “novice,” yet another term borrowed from Roman Catholicism; the Sanskrit term is “śrāmanera.” The novice took only ten vows: ˙ (1) not to kill, (2) not to steal, (3) not to engage in sexual intercourse, (4) not to lie (about spiritual attainments), (5) not to drink alcohol, (6) not to dance, sing, or play music, (7) not to wear garlands or use creams and perfumes, (8) not to sleep on high beds, (9) not to eat after twelve noon, and (10) not to handle gold or silver. The first five of these constitute the famous fivefold discipline (pañcaśīla) of the Buddhist laity, where the vow to abstain from sexual intercourse becomes a vow to abstain from sexual misconduct (which includes such transgressions as oral sex and intercourse during the day). Although in its original formulation, the novice ordination seems to have been regarded as preliminary and probationary to full ordination as a monk after a period of some years, in practice, many men remained novices for their whole lives. In Thailand it is common for young men to ordain as novices for the three-month period of the rains retreat and then return to lay life. In pre1959 Tibet, there is no data on the percentage of novices versus fully ordained monks, but it is estimated that only about 20 percent of the population of the large monasteries were engaged in the study of texts and went on to full ordination; it is noteworthy that in the curriculum of Geluk monasteries, which often took twenty years to complete, the text on the vows of a fully ordained monk

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was studied last. In Japan, the traditional monastic code came to be disparaged by some as “Hīnayāna” and replaced by much less demanding “bodhisattva precepts.” It was from the ranks of the novices that the warrior monks were drawn, despite the fact that the first vow of the novice is not to kill. Among the warrior monks of Japan, none is more famous than the legendary (yet historical) Benkei (1155–1189). He was the loyal retainer of Yoshitsune (1159–1189), the most beloved of the samurai warriors, the half-brother of Yori­ tomo of the Minamoto clan, founder of the Kamakura shogunate, under which several of the most famous schools of Japanese Buddhism would flourish. Benkei’s loyalty to his master is the subject of a number of Kabuki and Noh dramas. They would die together in 1189, with Yoshitsune committing suicide in the castle while Benkei famously defended the bridge single-handedly against the enemy troops, his body riddled with arrows but erect: the “standing death of Benkei” (Benkei no tachi ōjō). And Benkei was a monk. In the Tale of Musashibō Benkei (Musashibō e-engi), he ordains himself (something allowed in Japan), but then has to decide which of the five precepts (not to kill, steal, engage in sexual intercourse, lie, or drink) he should take. Deciding that he would never be able to refrain from killing those he detests, he declines the first. Because one sometimes needs to lie in order to kill one’s enemy, he declines the fourth. Because alcohol has no effect on him, he declines the fifth. Thus, Benkei ordains himself as a monk, vowing only to abstain from theft and sex.3 It seems, however, that most of the members of the monastic armies of Japan were not ordained at all. They shaved their heads and wore monastic robes, but donned armor when it was time to go into battle. According to a number of stories, Benkei was a monk of Enryakuji, one of the most important monasteries in Japan, located on Mount Hiei. It had humble beginnings, having been founded by the monk Saichō (767–822). As discussed earlier, like many Japanese monks of the day, Saichō received full ordination at the monastery Tōdaiji in the capital Nara, before moving to Mount Hiei, some forty miles to the north, where he lived in retreat in a meditation hut, eventually building a temple at the summit. This remote temple moved into the imperial ambit when, in 794, the emperor moved the capital, which would later be named Kyoto, to the vicinity of the mountain. Saichō was appointed as a court priest. In 804, he traveled to China. There he studied at Mount Tiantai, headquarters of the Tiantai school of Chinese Buddhism, whose central text was the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapundarīka), which proclaims that all sentient be˙˙ ings will follow the bodhisattva path to buddhahood. While in China, Saichō

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received the bodhisattva precepts. Upon his return to Japan, he received permission to establish the Tiantai school (pronounced “Tendai” in Japanese) in Japan. His request to build an ordination platform at Mount Hiei, where the bodhisattva precepts would be conferred, was granted shortly after his death. The Tendai school, with its headquarters at the monastery of Enryakuji, produced some of the most famous monks in the history of Japanese Buddhism, including Hōnen and Shinran of the Pure Land schools and Nichiren of the school that would be named after him. Monk soldiers from Enryakuji would go to war against both of the schools. Perhaps the most famous of these was the so-called Lotus Rebellion of 1536. As is often the case in religious wars, points of theology are a pretense for more quotidian concerns. The theological point in this case was which school, Tendai or Nichiren, could lay claim to the name “Hokkeshū,” the “Lotus [Sūtra] school.” Both saw the Lotus Sūtra as the highest teaching of the Buddha. Nichiren saw it as the sole path to salvation; Tendai was more eclectic, including the esoteric practice of mantras and mandalas that Saichō had learned in China. ˙˙ Although the Tendai headquarters at Enryakuji maintained great power, by the early sixteenth century, many residents of Kyoto, including wealthy merchant and samurai families, were devotees of Nichiren. In 1536, a lay devotee of Nichiren from Chiba was sightseeing in Kyoto. As he passed by a temple, he heard a Tendai monk named Keō (Lotus King) extolling the power of mantras as a means to attain buddhahood. The sightseer, whose name was Matsumoto, began interrupting him, arguing that a monk of a school based on the Lotus Sūtra should not be promoting practices that the sūtra does not contain. This led to a debate, which Matsumoto apparently won. The Tendai monks at Enryakuji were chagrined to learn that one of their monks had been defeated by  a layman and went to the shogun, asking that he thereafter prohibit the Nichiren followers from calling themselves the Lotus school. The shogun refused. The Enryakuji monks then went to each of the twenty-one Nichiren temples in and around Kyoto, demanding that they recognize the authority of their monastery and contribute to its support. They refused. Anticipating what would come, the Nichiren temples dug trenches. For the coming attack, the monk army of Enryakuji joined forces with the army of the other famous Tendai monastery of Kyoto, Miidera, setting aside for the moment their own history of rivalry and conflict, to defeat the common foe. A huge army of between thirty thousand and 150,000 Tendai monk soldiers attacked the Nichiren temples, defended by some twenty thousand of their

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own troops. After five days of fighting, all twenty-one Nichiren temples, along with the southern part of Kyoto, had been burned to the ground, with Nichiren deaths estimated at between three and ten thousand.4 In 1571, during a war with rival clans, Lord Nobunaga (1534–1582), later to be revered as a great unifier of Japan, ordered the monks of Enryakuji to cease their support of rebel groups and instead support him. When they did not answer, but instead, according to the Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga (Shinchō Kōki), “ate their fill of fish and fowl, had women procured for them, and enjoyed their wanton evildoing,” he ordered his troops to burn the monastery to the ground, in the process, beheading thousands of monks, not just the monastery’s monk soldiers.5 As the same text says, “They presented the heads to Lord Nobunaga, saying: ‘Here is an exalted prelate, a princely abbot, a learned doctor, all the men of renown at the top of Mount Hiei.’”6 The slaughter at Mount Hiei essentially marked the end of the warrior monk in Japan. It did not end the involvement of Buddhist monks on the battlefield. Tibet did not have armies of monks, although it did have a class of fighting monks, the infamous dop-dop, a cross between an American college fraternity and the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club. At the large Geluk monasteries, the largest of which had some ten thousand monks, they made up some 10 percent of the monastic population. They wore their robes in a distinctive way, hiked up to reveal their calves; grew long side curls, like the payot of Orthodox Jews, which they would sometimes grease with butter; wore eye black; swung a heavy key on a long cord that could be used as a weapon; and carried knives. They were generally illiterate and did not pretend to be pious, reciting the refrain, “Even if the Buddha appeared in the sky, we would not know how to be faithful. Even if guts of an animal were falling out, we would not know how to be compassionate.”7 They excelled at sports, particularly broad-jumping, stonethrowing, and fighting. They were feared by young boys who feared being raped; because the penetration of any orifice entails expulsion, Tibetan monks favored intercrural sex. Despite embodying the antithesis of the pious and learned monk so often pictured, they served an important role in the monastery, serving as a kind of police force in the large monasteries, acting as bodyguards for high lamas dur­ ing their travels, and providing the many forms of manual labor required at a monastery. Despite their lack of traditional piety, they were fiercely loyal to their monastery, seeing themselves as its protector, willing to fight and die to defend it, as we shall see below.8 Over the course of their long history, the sects of Japanese Buddhism were

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in competition for the favor of the ruler (whether emperor or shogun) and, as we saw earlier, were sometimes literally at each other’s throats, sending their monk soldiers into battle. In 1198, the monk Hōnen (1133–1212), who had been trained on Mount Hiei, published his innocuously titled Collection of Selections (Senchakushū), advocating the invocation of the buddha Amitābha as the most efficacious practice for the Degenerate Age. The monks of Enryakuji banned the practice; Hōnen was later exiled. Nichiren, another Enryakuji alumnus, is reputed to have said about the other sects of Buddhism in Japan, “Nembutsu followers will fall into Avīci hell, Zen followers are devils, Shingon will destroy the nation, the Ritsu are enemies of the state.” He accused those who held another sūtra to be superior or equal to the Lotus Sūtra to be guilty of “slandering the dharma,” a sin that in East Asian Buddhism is considered of equal gravity as murdering one’s parents and causing a schism in the san˙gha.9 His aggressive advocacy of the Lotus Sūtra led to assassination attempts, exile, and a sentence of execution (which he barely escaped). All was forgiven, if not forgotten, when Buddhism was in danger of being annihilated by the Meiji government. The leaders of the Buddhist sects agreed to promote the “Three Articles of Instruction,” despite their Shintō language: (1) comply with the commands to revere the kami and love the nation; (2) illuminate the principle of heaven and the way of humanity; and (3) serve the emperor, and faithfully maintain the will of the court. They cooperated in the publication of the five-volume Essentials of the Buddhist Sects (Bukkyō kakushū kōyō), a joint work of the Bukkyō Kakushū Kyōkai (Buddhist Trans-Sectarian Committee), and the first such work in the long history of Japanese Buddhism. And they sent a multisectarian delegation to the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, where the Zen representative, Shaku Sōen (an influential figure, most often remembered today as the teacher of D. T. Suzuki), spoke not about the sound of one hand clapping but about the compatibility of Buddhism and science.10 Japan and Russia went to war in 1904. Count Leo Tolstoy wrote to Shaku Sōen, asking him to join him in condemning the war between their two countries. Shaku Sōen declined. In an antiwar essay, Tolstoy quoted the Zen monk as saying, “Even though the Buddha teaches not to take another’s life, he also teaches that all sentient beings through the exercise of infinite compassion will be united and thereby obtain final and ultimate peace. As means toward the harmonizing of the incompatible, killing and war are necessary.”11 In the wake of the Meiji persecution, the various sects of Japanese Buddhism had set aside their differences to preserve the dharma, becoming humble servants of the

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emperor. With the outbreak of war, they served the empire, not only in publishing essays supporting the war effort but by going into battle with the troops as army chaplains, with priests drawn from all the major sects serving, each able to justify the war with their particular doctrines. In 1904, Shaku Sōen published Diary of Subjugating Demons (Gōma nisshi). The “subjugation of demons” is a standard term in Buddhism, referring to one of the eight (or twelve) deeds of the Buddha—his defeat of Māra, the deity of desire and death, immediately before he attained enlightenment. In a scene often depicted in Buddhist art, the future Buddha sits in meditation as Māra’s army of monsters attacks him with all manner of weapons and storms, but the cyclones that surround him do not even ripple his robes, with the spears, arrows, and balls of molten lava fired at him turning into flowers and falling at his feet. Shaku Sōen’s diary is not an account of his own enlightenment experience or even a description of an exorcism he performed. It is his account of his service as a chaplain with the First Division of the Imperial army of Japan in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War. The demon to be subjugated, not through the power of meditation but through military force, is the Russian Empire, which is seeking to conquer the world and plunge it into darkness. As he writes, “We must call [this conflict, i.e., the Russo-Japanese War] not merely a great just war in this world, but rather a full-fledged great battle to subjugate demons throughout the [entire] cosmos.”12 This is not to suggest that all Japanese chaplains were unconcerned with the fate of the enemy dead. In his “Rec­ ord of Niuzhuang,” the Shingon cleric Yamagata Genjō (1866–1903), a military chaplain during the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), describes serving in a group of nine Japanese priests who performed an elaborate service for the Japanese war dead. They also performed a transfer of merit ceremony for over a thousand Chinese soldiers, whose corpses had been piled high. He writes, “The crows cried ‘caw-caw’ and pecked at their flesh; thunderously, dogs exposed their fangs and gnawed at the bodies. As far as the eye could see, it was a horrible scene of battle of the Asuras [demigods]—no, it was the realm of the hungry ghosts.”13 As the Kalmyks were fighting the Soviet army, there was warfare of another kind taking place in their spiritual capital, Lhasa. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama had died in 1933. As was the custom, a prominent incarnate lama of the Dalai Lama’s Geluk sect was appointed as regent. His first duty was to identify the next Dalai Lama and then oversee his education until he could assume temporal powers, which usually occurred when the new Dalai Lama was around twenty years old. Depending on the interregnum between the death of the last Dalai

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Lama and the birth of the new one, the regent could serve as de facto head of state for two decades or more. After the death of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, a monk named Reting (also spelled “Radreng”) Rinpoche was appointed as regent. He oversaw the successful identification of the new Dalai Lama in 1937, moved his family to Lhasa, and appointed tutors for his education. In 1941, the time was approaching for the young Dalai Lama to receive his novice vows, which included the vow of celibacy, vows that Reting Rinpoche would have the honor to confer. It was widely known that Reting Rinpoche, although a fully ordained monk, had several lovers and thus, according to tradition, could not confer the vow; a monk must receive vows from a monk who holds those vows. In order to avoid scandal, Reting announced that he was going on an extended meditation retreat, appointing his own teacher, named Taktra Rinpoche, to serve as regent during his absence; the young Dalai Lama would be ordained by him. In 1944, Reting indicated that he was ready to return to the role of regent. However, Taktra had come to assume that his own appointment was permanent and did not step down. Shortly thereafter, a parcel bomb was delivered to Taktra, which exploded when opened by a servant. This led to the remarkable event of a high-ranking Tibetan lama, Reting, being arrested at his home monastery and taken to Lhasa, where he was imprisoned in the Potala. Reting had been educated at Sera Monastery, one of the “three seats” of the Geluk sect in and around Lhasa, and had bestowed much favor on the monastery during his time as regent. The monks of Sera were outraged by his arrest, demanding that their abbot, who had been appointed by Taktra, intercede on Reting’s behalf. When he refused, a group of dop-dop murdered him. They then went into the city and broke into an armory, stealing a number of rifles. The Tibetan government demanded the surrender of the militant monks; they refused. On April 27, the Tibetan army began shelling the monastery, eventually killing between two hundred and three hundred monks in three days of fighting, losing only about fifteen soldiers. On May 8, 1947, Reting Rinpoche was found dead in his cell.14 What became of the Kalmyks? After the Battle of Stalingrad, they retreated west with the German army, accompanied by their families, eventually surrendering to American troops in Austria in 1945. They would spend the next six years in a displaced persons camp in Bavaria. They knew that repatriation would mean certain death and so did not want to return to Russia with other displaced Soviet citizens. However, because they were not classified as Europeans, they were not eligible to come to the United States under the terms of the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. Alexandra Tolstoy, daughter of the great novelist, who was

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living in America by that time, made the case that despite their Asian ethnicity, the Kalmyk refugees were indeed Europeans. Her intervention, along with the Kalmyks’ anti-Communism, an important credential in the United States in 1951, secured permission; two hundred Kalmyks settled in Freewood Acres, New Jersey. One of their first acts was to convert a garage into a place of worship, the first Tibetan Buddhist temple in North America. Four years later, the Kalmyk monk Geshe Wangyal (1901–1983) arrived to serve as the temple priest. He would go on to train such future scholars as Robert Thurman and Jeffrey Hopkins, and to arrange for the first visit of the Dalai Lama to the United States in 1979. All because the Kalmyks went to war against the Soviets.

28 • Women

In Toyama Prefecture in western Japan, there is a mountain called Tateyama, considered in Japanese mythology to be the gateway to the other world. Like many Japanese mountains, there are ponds fed by hot springs. Near one of these ponds, there is a Buddhist temple. The name of the pond is “Blood Pool.” It has long been a pilgrimage site for women, some of whom want their funerals performed there. “Blood Pool” is also the name of a Buddhist hell. The longest text in the Pāli canon is the Great Discourse on the Final Nirvāna ˙ (Mahāparinibbāna Sutta); there is a Sanskrit version that is much longer. It is the account of the Buddha’s final days, his death, his funeral, and the disposition of his relics. One reason for its length is the great importance of these events for the tradition. It is also long because there are many matters that the Buddha must deal with before he passes forever into nirvāna. He must send word ˙ to the blacksmith who served him his final meal that he bears no guilt for the bout of dysentery that the Buddha suffered. He must pass judgment on the monk Channa (Chandaka, in Sanskrit), his beloved charioteer, who fifty years earlier had accompanied him on his four chariot rides and what is referred to as the Great Departure from the palace. He must explain to his attendant Ānanda how to prepare and cremate his corpse and what to do with his relics. He must provide his final instructions to the assembled monks. And Ānanda has his own questions that must be answered. Just before he asks the Buddha what should be done with his corpse, he asks how the monks should conduct themselves toward women. Ānanda was the great advocate of women. Thus, that Ānanda asks this important question seems significant. The Buddha replies that monks should not see women. But if monks do see them? The Buddha replies that they should not speak to them.

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“But, Lord, if they should speak to us?” The Buddha says that the monks should “establish mindfulness,” which in this case means something like “stay alert.” After the Buddha’s death, Ānanda was put on trial for allowing the tears of a mourning woman to touch the feet of the Buddha’s corpse, for allowing women to see the Buddha’s penis as his body was being prepared for cremation, and, most serious of all, for encouraging the Buddha to ordain women.1 Women tend to fare badly in Buddhist texts. The Buddha’s mother died seven days after he was born; among the several reasons given is that a womb occupied by a future buddha, a womb that the texts describe in rhapsodic detail, can never be occupied by another child. When Prince Siddhārtha wanted to leave the palace, his father tried to distract him by having women sing and dance for him. As the night wore on, the women fell asleep on the floor. The prince thought they looked like corpses. That same night, he abandoned his wife, who had given birth to their son Rāhula that day. Six years later, on the night of his enlightenment, the buddha-to-be is attacked by Māra, the deity of desire and death, who sends his army of demons against him. However, the Buddha sits impassively in meditation, untouched by their onslaught. Next, Māra sends his three daughters, Lust, Craving, and Discontent, to seduce the Buddha. They begin by transforming themselves into one hundred different beautiful women for the prince to choose from, each skilled in the thirty-two arts of seduction. He remains unmoved. Thinking that he might prefer women of a different age, they transform themselves into one hundred girls, then one hundred young women who have not yet given birth, then one hundred women who have given birth once, then one hundred women who have given birth twice, then one hundred middle-aged women, then one hundred old women. He remains unmoved. However, before they can return to their youthful forms, he uses his magical powers to lock them into the last of their transformations. Horrified, they beg their father to return them to their own forms, a power that Māra does not possess. They then appeal to the Buddha, who compassionately restores their beauty. The Buddha, however, also had the power to destroy feminine beauty. The Buddha’s half-brother Nanda had a beautiful sister, named Nandā. After her husband, her brother, and her mother, Mahāprajāpatī, all joined the order, she did so, but without any particular interest in the dharma. Indeed, she avoided attending discourses by the Buddha. Proud of her own beauty, she did not want to hear teachings on suffering and impermanence. However, other nuns would return from his teachings and tell her how handsome her half-brother was and what a beautiful voice he had. She therefore decided to attend, sitting in the back

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where he could not see her. But the Buddha sees all. As he delivered his discourse, he used his magical powers to conjure a stunningly beautiful woman who stood by his side, but visible only to Nandā. She immediately noticed. Examining her carefully, Nandā was forced to conclude that the woman was more beautiful than she was. Yet as she watched, the woman began to slowly age until she was quite old, her teeth broken, her skin wrinkled, her breasts sagging, her shoulders bent, her hair gray. The old woman began to develop tremors, shaking so badly that she fell to the ground screaming, suffering from an illness that caused her to urinate and defecate, writhing in pain until she seemed to die. Then, seen only by Nandā, crows descended and began to devour her. Horrified, Nandā achieved the state of the arhat, one who will enter nirvāna upon their death.2 ˙ The Buddha grudgingly established an order of nuns—only after being encouraged to do so by Ānanda—creating far more vows for nuns than for monks, including eight “heavy rules” that nuns must follow, one of which is that the most senior nun must always pay obeisance to the most junior monk. In a version of the ordination story preserved only in Chinese, when Mahāprajāpatī asks the Buddha to rescind the rule that a nun must always pay respect to a monk despite her seniority, the Buddha also refuses but provides additional reasons, comparing women to snakes, whom people fear even when they are dead because they remain venomous. In the same way, people fear women even when they become ascetics.3 The hundreds of rules required of women were so demanding that the order of fully ordained nuns would eventually die out in India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia, surviving only in East Asia. Indian Buddhist literature is replete with female villains, human and divine. In the Legend of Aśoka (Aśokāvadāna), the wife of the king becomes jealous of his devotion and generosity to the Bodhi Tree and thus arranges for a witch to kill it; she fails. The same queen falls in love with Aśoka’s son, Kunāla, renowned for his beautiful eyes. When he politely spurns her advances, she arranges to have his eyes plucked out. Devout Buddhist that he is, he does not complain. Addressing the eye that he holds in his hand, he says, “Why thus do you not see shapes as you did a little while ago, crude globe of flesh? How mistaken and how blameworthy, the insane who become attached to you, saying: ‘It is me.’”4 When Aśoka eventually learns what happened, he has his evil wife burned alive. There are stories of sailors who, with no Odysseus to plug their ears, are lured to islands by raksasī, the sirens of Indian literature, who make love to them ˙ when they land, only to devour them when they sleep. The message of these cautionary tales is that desire leads to death. Again and again in Buddhist literature, that desire and that death are embodied in the female form. Hence,

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Nāgārjuna, considered the greatest philosopher in the history of Buddhism, devotes a lengthy section of the Precious Garland (Ratnāvalī) to a description of the foulness of the female body, pausing to mock love poetry: “O how shameless. O how stupid. How embarrassing before the wise.”5 Another Indian text warns that women are more lustful than men because they have vaginal worms that create an itch that can only be scratched through intercourse.6 The first biography of the Buddha known to have been composed by a Japanese woman was The Light of the Three Ages (Miyo no hikari), by the nun Kōgetsu Sōgi (1755–1833). She provides an account of the ordination of women and then pauses to consider why the Buddha prophesied that doing so would shorten the duration of the dharma. Referring to the nuns of her day, she writes, “This is probably because of these sins: women all lack wisdom and are of little virtue, and while they take responsibility for the dharma of the buddhas of the three ages, they forget to be of benefit to the worldly sphere, they are unequal to maintaining their chastity, and even though people think lightly of them, they go out and associate in public, and both they and the unsurpassed dharma are together scorned.”7 One might expect that women would be portrayed more positively in the Mahāyāna, which is said to be more inclusive, with a famous doctrine found in some—but not all—of its sūtras: that all sentient beings are bound for buddhahood and where the lay bodhisattva, that is, the married bodhisattva, is extolled. Yet this is not the case. One of the most famous Mahāyāna sūtras on the lay bodhisattva is the Sūtra Requested by Ugra (Ugrapariprcchā). Here we find ˙ that the married bodhisattva should practice celibacy and avoid sexual fantasies. To aid him in doing so, he should develop aversion toward his wife, thinking of her as a demon, an ogre, and a hag; as sickness, old age, and death; as a huge wolf, a huge sea monster, and a huge cat; as a black snake, a crocodile, and a demon that causes epilepsy; and as swollen, shriveled, and diseased.8 What, then, is the fate of women? If women are so benighted, what hope do they have for enlightenment? Mahāprajāpatī became an arhat, as did a number of nuns named in the Pāli canon; they appear most famously in a text said to record their declarations of independence from future rebirth, entitled Songs of the Female Elders (Therīgāthā). Still, a number of other exalted ranks in the Buddhist cosmos were barred for women. A passage that appears in both Pāli and Mahāyāna texts states that a man may, but a woman may not, become a buddha; a cakravartin; the god Śakra (Indra), who presides over the Heaven of the Thirty-Three atop Mount Meru; the god Māra, who abides in the highest

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of the heavens of the Realm of Desire; and the god Brahmā, who abides in the heavens of the Realm of Form.9 We will return to this list at the end of this chapter. The most famous of the Pāli biographies of the Buddha, the Account of Origins (Nidānakathā, not to be confused with the Aggañña Sutta, which can have the same English title), provides a detailed description of the many forms the bodhisattva may, and may not, take on the long path to buddhahood. It states that from the time the bodhisattva vows to achieve buddhahood—which he must do, as a male—until he achieves buddhahood, many millions of eons hence, he may be reborn as an animal, but he is never reborn as a female. The text states that the bodhisattva will not be reborn in Avīci, the worst of the Buddhist hells, or as a ghost. It goes on to say, “Though born in the evil state as animals, they do not become tiny creatures. When born among men, they are never born blind. They will not be deficient in hearing, nor will they be dumb or paralytic. They will not be reborn as women, nor in the categories of hermaphrodites or eunuchs.”10 However, in the Sanskrit tradition, there seem to be exceptions. According to what became a standard calculation of the bodhisattva path, the period from the time that the bodhisattva vowed to become a buddha until he actually did so required three incalculable eons. An incalculable eon is in fact calculable, often measured at 1059 years. The great Yogācāra master Asan˙ga explains that during the first of those three periods, the bodhisattva may be reborn as a female; in the last two, he is always a male.11 In a Sanskrit jātaka collection, the Garland of Jātakas (Jātakamālā) by Haribhat t a (not to be confused with a more ˙˙ famous text with the same title by Āryaśūra), there is a story in which the bodhisattva is a woman, the beautiful Rūpyāvatī, who cuts off her own breasts to feed a starving woman who is about to devour her newborn child. However, she does not die from such horrific wounds. Rūpyāvatī’s breasts are magically restored, after which she turns into a man.12 Presumably, the bodhisattva’s lifetime as Rūpyāvatī occurred during that first period of incalculable eons. What, then, is a woman to do? According to a number of famous texts, the best thing for a woman to do is to become a man in the next lifetime or, if possible, in this one. Thus, in the moving prayer at the conclusion of Śāntideva’s Entering the Bodhisattva Deeds (Bodhicaryāvatāra), we read, “May all women in the world be reborn as men.”13 In the most treasured of postmortem destinations of the Mahāyāna, the Land of Bliss (Sukhāvatī) of the buddha Amitābha, there are no women; the women who have sought rebirth there have been reborn in

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this pure land as men. In the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapundarīka), the Buddha ˙˙ offers prophecies about the buddha fields over which his disciples will one day preside. In the thirteenth chapter, he prophesies that both his stepmother, Mahāprajāpatī, and his wife, Yaśodharā, are destined to become male buddhas. In the twenty-third chapter, we read, “If there is any woman who hears and holds to this chapter ‘Ancient Accounts of Bodhisattva Bhaisajyarāja,’ she will ˙ never be reborn with a female body.”14 But what of those who do not wish to wait? In the twelfth chapter of the Lotus Sūtra, an eight-year-old nāga princess declares her intention to save all sentient beings. The monk Śāriputra, the wisest of the arhats, hears her declaration and says, “The female body is polluted; it is not a fit vessel for the dharma. How can you attain highest enlightenment?”15 He then goes on to enumerate the list above of the five states that a female cannot achieve. Seeming to prove him wrong, she completes the bodhisattva path and achieves buddhahood in an instant. However, to the disappointment of generations of modern readers, before doing so, she turns into a male. The passage receives much comment from premodern readers, more concerned with the questions of sudden versus gradual enlightenment and of species (a nāga is classified as an animal) than with the question of gender.16 This, then, is what we read in Buddhist texts. Is there a different story told in Buddhist history? A history of Buddhist women remains to be written, as does a history of Buddhist misogyny. One of the questions that both will need to consider is how the status of women varied in the several Buddhist lands. In China, for example, just as there is a text called Lives of Eminent Monks (Gaoseng zhuan), as well as Continued Lives of Eminent Monks (Xu Gaoseng zhuan), there is Lives of Nuns (Biqiuni zhuan), dating from 516 CE and containing biographies of sixty-five nuns. In Japan, Buddhist women, including nuns, found creative ways of what one scholar calls “talking past,” that is, ignoring, the misogynist statements that appear in the canon.17 Another question will be whether the misogyny that is so prevalent in so many Indian Buddhist texts contributed to misogyny beyond India, or whether it was simply integrated into existing patterns of prejudice against women. Here, both a history of Buddhist women and a history of Buddhist misogyny will need to consider the Blood Bowl Sūtra (Xuepenjing), a text that represents itself as an Indian text, but whose style and vocabulary make it clear that it was composed in China. It concerns the monk Maudgalyāyana (Mulian, in Chinese), a disciple of the Buddha renowned for his magical powers, which allowed him

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to visit both the heavens and the hells, reporting back on the karmic fates of those reborn there. In this text, on one of his visits to hell, he discovers a vast lake of blood surrounded by female prisoners. Three times a day, the demon warden of hell makes them drink blood from the lake, striking them if they fail to do so. When Maud­ galyāyana asks the demon warden what these women have done in a past life to deserve this horrible fate, he is told that in a previous life, they had allowed their blood—in some versions, from childbirth; in others, from menstruation— to pollute rivers and streams when they washed their bloodied garments. People living downstream would use that water to make tea, which they would unknowingly serve to holy men, bringing negative karma upon themselves. In the most famous of his sojourns to the netherworld, Maudgalyāyana returns to the land of the living and asks the Buddha what can be done to feed the hungry ghosts, among whom is his own mother.18 In the Blood Bowl Sūtra, he asks the warden of hell, who tells him, “Teacher, only if attentive and filial sons and daughters honor the Three Treasures [the Three Jewels] on behalf of their mothers, hold Blood Bowl feasts for three years, sponsor Blood Bowl ceremonies, invite priests to recite this sutra in its entirety, and have a full day of repentance ceremonies, will they send a vessel of wisdom across the River of No Recourse to the opposite shore, causing five-petal lotuses to appear in the Blood Bowl Pond, making the prisoners joyful, causing their hearts to give rise to repentance, and enabling them to quickly receive birth in a Buddha land.”19 Much has been written about the Blood Bowl Sūtra, a text that came to be widely used in both China and Japan, especially at women’s funerals. Some of the sacred mountains of India were said to have broken free from their South Asian soil and flown to Japan, making pilgrimage of pious Japanese Buddhists much more convenient. Even stranger is that a place not in the land of humans but in the realms of hell, the Blood Bowl itself, was said to be located in Japan, in fact, at several sites, including Tateyama, where temples were constructed and rites for liberation from the Blood Bowl performed. Copies of the sūtra would be thrown into the water, and prayers would be offered to Kannon.20 The pervasive misogyny in Buddhist literature is not to be denied. However, there may be another factor to consider. Buddhist texts repeatedly extol the rare opportunity of human birth, free of the relentless sufferings of the hells, the constant hunger of ghosts, the dangerous lives of animals, and the intoxicating pleasures of the gods. A human rebirth of “freedom and opportunity” is said to occur very rarely in the endless round of rebirth. This is a generic category,

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but we see it evoked, at least implicitly, in the acknowledgment, in both Indian and Chinese texts, that it is more difficult for a woman to practice the dharma than it is for a man. We see this, for example, in the vow that the bodhisattva who would go on to become the Medicine Buddha makes: “In the future, when I have attained awakening as a perfect buddha who has manifested unsurpassed and perfect awakening, may any women who are afflicted by the hundreds of disadvantages of being a woman, who dislike being of the female gender, and who want to be free from the condition of being a woman, leave behind their female gender and be born as a man for as long as it takes them to attain awakening.”21 In another apocryphal Buddhist sūtra (that is, composed in China rather than India), called the Sūtra on Transforming the Female Form (Zhuan nüshen jing), the point is made more powerfully. Here, the Buddha says, “Furthermore, the female body resembles that of a maidservant and cannot obtain self-sovereignty for she is constantly troubled by sons, daughters, clothing, food and drink, and other necessities related to family matters. They must remove dung and defilement, nasal discharges, saliva, and other impure things. A female will go through nine months of pregnancy, during which she will suffer numerous pains. When she gives birth to a child, she suffers great pains to the brink of death. For this reason, a woman must give rise to the thought of abhorring and getting rid of her female body.”22 The Buddha goes on to say that even a woman born in the palace is a servant to her family, that the body of a woman lacks the power to move freely in the world, and that the body of a woman is a slave to others, made to cook and sew. Her sufferings are immeasurable: “For this reason, a woman must take her own body as a worry.”23 Historical details about prominent women are difficult to find in Buddhist sources. In India, women appear primarily in canonical texts, many composed long after the events they purport to describe. A more useful source for Buddhist women is donative inscriptions, where the names of nuns often appear. As noted above, in China, there are Lives of Nuns, but the biographies here tend to be brief, formulaic, and hagiographical. In Tibet, we have biographies of the rare female incarnate lamas. Perhaps the most famous woman in the history of Buddhism is the empress Wu Zetian (624–705), discussed in Chapter Twenty-One, who began as a concubine of the Tang emperor Taizong, became a Buddhist nun after his death, later married his son, the emperor Gaozong, to become empress, and went on to become one of the most powerful women in Chinese history. The Buddhist doctrine of nirvāna complicates the relation between this ˙ world and the next, between the human and the divine, as it is often understood

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in theistic religions. In Buddhism, the next world is no different from this world; it is simply another stop in the endless wandering called samsāra. The divine, ˙ the realm of the gods, is located within samsāra. The goal of Buddhist practice ˙ is extinction, to cease to exist. Apart from setting out on the path to that extinction oneself, always portrayed as a rare achievement, where can the ignorant meet the enlightened? The stūpa has long been the most important of those contact zones, recommended by the Buddha himself as he was about to pass into nirvāna. Another contact zone is the jātaka stories, the accounts of the past ˙ Buddha’s lives as a bodhisattva, which provide stories of sacrifice for the sake of others. However, those stories recount events of the distant past, offering inspiration but not salvation. The next buddha, Maitreya, has almost completed the bodhisattva path. He is no longer appearing in the world as a human or an animal to aid those in need; he sits on the throne of the Joyous Heaven, waiting for the teachings of Śākyamuni to disappear so that he can take his final birth, achieve buddhahood, and teach the dharma, an event that, according to a number of texts, will not occur for billions of years. With the appearance of the Mahāyāna sūtras, we see a multiplication of buddhas, each in his own land, his own buddha field, more magnificent than the world we must endure. The sūtras that name these buddhas describe them as surrounded by a retinue of bodhisattvas, those at various stages of the eons-long path to buddhahood, accumulating the limitless stores of merit and wisdom necessary for their attainment of the highest aim. The past lives of the single bodhisattva who would become the buddha Śākyamuni are now outshone by the present lives of dozens of bodhisattvas whom the Mahāyāna sūtras name, each dedicated to come to our rescue. The most famous of these is not a woman who became a man, but a man who became a woman. The Lotus Sūtra is arguably the most famous of the many Mahāyāna sūtras. Among its twenty-eight chapters, none is more famous than the twenty-fifth chapter, despite the fact that it is clearly an interpolation; the Lotus Sūtra seems to end at Chapter Twenty-Two. It is a brief chapter, memorized by many, devoted to the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, which means “the lord who looks down [with compassion, not disdain]” in Sanskrit, rendered into Chinese as “Guanshiyin,” “the one who observes the sounds of the world.” In this chapter, the Buddha describes Avalokiteśvara as coming to rescue those who call his name in all manner of desperate circumstances—fire, flood, demons, prison, bandits—and inner dangers like desire, hatred, or ignorance. If a woman who wants to have a baby pays homage to Avalokiteśvara, the woman will have a boy or girl, depending on her wish. The bodhisattva is also something of a shape-shifter, able

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to turn himself into whatever form is most helpful in providing salvation, depending on the situation. These forms include not only a buddha or a monk, but any number of Hindu gods, like Brahmā, Śakra (Indra), and Śiva. He can turn himself into a king, a rich man, a government official, or a brahmin. The chapter goes on to say, “To those who are to be saved by the form of a wife of either a wealthy man, a householder, a state official, or a brahman, he teaches the dharma by changing himself into the form of such a wife.”24 He can also turn into a boy or a girl. In India, Avalokiteśvara appears in many Mahāyāna sūtras, including the Heart Sūtra (Prajñāpāramitāhrdaya), where it is he who says, “Form is empti˙ ness; emptiness is form.” A sūtra called The Basket’s Display (Kārandavyūha) is ˙˙ devoted entirely to Avalokiteśvara; it is here that his mantra, “om mani padme ˙ ˙ hūm,” is revealed. In Tibet, Avalokiteśvara is worshipped as the progenitor (in ˙ the form of a monkey) and the protector of the Tibetan people, appearing over history as various kings and saints, including the fourteen dalai lamas. Avalokiteśvara’s abode is a mountain called Potalaka; the Dalai Lama’s palace is the Potala. Statues of Avalokiteśvara survive from Sumatra. In these regions and in these representations, he is a male. As Guanshiyin or Guanyin, he also seems to have arrived in China as a male. Up through the tenth century, almost all depictions of Guanyin in China had masculine attributes; many paintings and sculptures have a distinct moustache. However, from about the twelfth century, a distinctly feminine version of the deity began to appear. Eventually, Guanyin would come to be most often depicted as a female, becoming the most beloved Buddhist deity in China, taking on all manner of forms, including the White-Robed Guanyin, often depicted holding an infant—early Catholic missionaries to China would mistake her for the Virgin Mary—and Princess Miaoshan, who in a grisly tale, gouges out her eyes and cuts off her hands to make a medicine to cure her father, who was dying of a horrible disease as the karmic result of murdering five hundred nuns. Her abode, Fragrant Mountain in Henan Province, remains a center of pilgrimage, especially for women. In the popular sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West (Xiyouji), the timid monk Tripitaka and his strange band of pilgrims, including ˙ the Monkey King, are rescued from one calamity after another by Guanyin.25 To conclude, let us return to the Blood Bowl. Among the many points that might be made about the Blood Bowl Sūtra is that it seems to contradict Buddhist doctrine. It is often said in Buddhist texts that the most important element of the law of karma is intention: whether the deed results in pleasure or pain in the future depends not on the act itself, or its outcome, but on the moti-

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vation behind it. The women who wash their garments in the river do not intend to pollute the waters. Those who use that water to make tea to be served to monks do not intend to pollute the tea. Why, then, are women doomed to this horrible hell? This question is answered by the remarkable Woman Huang (or Wang), who appears in stories from the Song Dynasty. She is not a bodhisattva in disguise. Instead, she is a devout Buddhist, constantly reciting the Diamond Sūtra (Vajracchedikā) (one of the most abstruse Buddhist texts) and chiding her husband for working as a butcher. Her piety attracts the attention of Yama, the king of the hells, who invites her down for a tour, lamenting that, despite her virtue, she is doomed to the Blood Bowl Hell. She immediately protests, saying that there is no greater sin than not producing children to continue the family line. If she had not done so, not even her pious recitation of the Diamond Sūtra would have saved her from hell. She asks King Yama to reconsider. The text reports that the king of hell was left speechless. After interrogating her at some length about the contents of the Diamond Sūtra, he asks Woman Huang to ascend a platform and recite it. As she does so, the judges of the Ten Courts of Hell arrive to report that, as a result of her recitation, millions of hungry ghosts had escaped from their prisons, the steel blades on Sword Mountain had become dull, and the River of Blood had dried up. Hearing this news, King Yama becomes worried and tells Woman Huang, “You can come down now and stop chanting the sutra.”26 Still, despite the best efforts of Woman Huang, it seems that the Blood Bowl River continued to flow. In Japan, many sacred mountains were traditionally off-limits to women; Tateyama, the mountain of the Blood Bowl Pool, was one such mountain. Women could only perform rituals at the foot of the mountain. One of these was a kind of preemptive funeral, in which the women, dressed in a white burial shroud and blindfolded, were led across a bridge that was covered with white cloth. On the other side, they received a bag with the word “kechimyaku,” or “lineage,” written on it, a word used in Japanese Buddhism at funerals in which the deceased is ordained as a monk or nun and then given a chart that traces their ordination lineage back to the Buddha himself. However, the bag also said “hennyo tennan,” “transformation of a woman into a man.” Inside the bag were scrolls of a sūtra, the Blood Bowl Sūtra. The woman was to copy the sūtra. Forbidden from ascending the mountain, she would then give it to a monk, who would climb the mountain and throw the sūtra into the Blood Pond. It was said that a woman who performed the ritual would not be reborn in the Blood Bowl Hell, but would be reborn as a man, able to enter the para-

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dise of the Amitābha, also known as Amitāyus, the Buddha of Infinite Life.27 Since the nineteenth century, Japanese women have been permitted to perform such rituals at the summit of the mountain. This is the fate of women in our world. Still, there is reason for hope. We read in Buddhist texts that women have “five obstacles,” in the sense that there are five beings they cannot become: the gods Māra, Brahmā, Śakra, as well as a cakravartin and a buddha. There is a Chinese sūtra entitled Broad and Universal Sūtra Preached by the Bodhisattva When His Spirit Descended from the Tusita Heaven to His Mother’s Womb (Pusa ˙ cong doushu tian jiangshen mutai shuo guangpu jing), a sūtra said to have been preached by the future Buddha as his consciousness descended from Tusita ˙ Heaven—where all future buddhas spend their penultimate lifetime—and into the womb of his future mother, Queen Māyā. During his descent, the embryonic bodhisattva declares, “Whether it be Māra, Brahmā, Śakra, or a woman, without abandoning their body and without taking on another body, they all attain buddhahood in their present body.”28 The sūtra goes on to give an example of a particular Māra, a particular Brahmā, and a particular Śakra, each achieving buddhahood at a specific place and time eons ago. However, when it comes to women, the sūtra identifies the place, but it does not identify the time, and it does not identify a specific woman. It tells instead of countless women in a land of women, a land called Blazing Fire, the buddha field of a buddha named Free of Desire. The sūtra says that all the beings of this buddha field are women, that they practice the dharma together as wilderness hermits, that they all achieve buddhahood at the same time, and they do so “in their present body, without abandoning their bodies or taking on a new body.”29 Beginning in 2005, every three years the town of Tateyama has sponsored the Nunobashi Kanjō-e (Initiation Ritual of the Cloth Bridge) in September. For a fee of 20,000 yen (which includes the rental of the burial shroud), women may participate in the bridge-crossing ceremony. According to a Japanese tourism website, it is “a traditional ritual in which women cross a bridge to rid themselves of worry and misfortune and find themselves anew.”30

29 • Wrath

In 1205, the Mongol leader Temujin, later to take the name Genghis Khan, began the raids into borderlands that would eventually become the largest empire in history. The first of his conquests was Xixia, the neighboring kingdom to the south, home to the Tangut people, patrons of Tibetan Buddhism. In 1209, he launched a full-scale invasion, and by the following year, Mongol forces had placed Yinchuan, the Tangut capital, under siege. The city was too well fortified for the Mongols to breach the walls. They decided to build a dike that would divert the waters of the Yellow River into the city, flooding the inhabitants. But the dike broke, flooding the Mongol camp and drowning many troops, causing the survivors to retreat to higher ground. Although the Tangut emperor would eventually surrender, pledging fealty to the Mongols, the Tibetans would tell their own story of the flood, seeing it not as a case of hydraulics but of divine intervention. A Tibetan lama who was serving as chaplain to the Tangut court had propitiated the wrathful buddha Mahākāla to destroy the Mongol dike. One of the great conundrums in the history of Buddhism is the reverence paid to what are termed “wrathful deities,” the horrific figures with multiple heads (including animal heads), eyes bulging, tongues lolling, garlands of human heads hanging from their necks, many arms brandishing all manner of weapons, multiple feet crushing the naked bodies of hapless beings. When these deities are male, their penis stands visible and erect, or has disappeared in sexual union with an equally fearsome female, typically naked save for a skirt made of human bones. Such deities scandalized generations of European travelers to Buddhist lands, who identified them, wrongly, as native to Tibetan Buddhism, seeing them as further evidence of the corruption of the pure Indian dharma by primitive Tibetan demon worship. However, many of the wrathful deities

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depicted in Tibetan painting and sculpture, and the majority of the most important ones, came to Tibet directly from India, the birthplace of the peaceful Buddha and what so many imagine to be his peaceful religion. Still, scholars continue to struggle with the question of exactly where these wrathful figures—some of whom are described as fully enlightened buddhas— came from and how they became so important. They clearly did not come out of nowhere, and they do not seem to have come from elsewhere. They are not foreign invaders. Instead, they seem to have come to prominence through a process of evolution. In an effort to gain at least some insight into that process, we might consider the case of one of the most important of wrathful deities, the one called Vajrapāni. ˙ The Buddhist pantheon of supernatural beings, inherited from ancient India, is populated with all manner of spirits, few of whom have an equivalent in European mythology, making it difficult to translate their names with a single word. Among the most ubiquitous of these beings is the yaksa, sometimes ren˙ dered as “sprite,” “spirit,” “ghost,” or “semi-divine being.” They seem to have been associated particularly with certain trees and received offerings from villagers for the blessings they might bestow and for the harm they choose not to inflict; they are portrayed as both benevolent and malevolent. The difficulty of translating their name did not begin with English. Seeking to capture their dual nature, Tibetans call them gnod sbyin, “harmer and bestower.” In East Asia, their nature was sufficiently enigmatic that the Sanskrit name was simply rendered phonetically. In Japanese, “yaksa” is “yasha.” ˙ In the story of the Buddha’s enlightenment, when, after six years of extreme asceticism, Prince Siddhārtha decides to accept a meal, he receives it from a young woman who is coming to make an offering of food to a particular tree and mistakes the gaunt figure for the tree’s resident yaksa. They are also asso˙ ciated with the earth, sometimes guarding the treasures buried there. They must be appeased before the foundation of a building is laid. Although they can fly, they are not gods and do not reside on the summit of Mount Meru or in the many heavens above it. Their abode is said to be the northern continent of Uttarakuru, where they serve Vaiśravana, god of the north. ˙ Yet despite their relatively low status in the natural and supernatural world of ancient India, they seem to have earned local devotion. Among the earliest monumental stone sculptures in ancient India are not statues of Indra or Brahmā, not the Buddha or Aśoka, but of yaksas. And when Aśoka decided to ˙ erect eighty-four thousand stūpas across his empire, he had yaksas do the job. ˙ They appear often in Buddhist literature, sometimes in the audience of the

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Buddha’s sermons. Indeed, an entire section of the canon, appropriately entitled the Connected Discourses to Yaksas (Yakkhasamyutta), is devoted to the Bud˙ ˙ dha’s conversations with yaksas. They are generally well disposed toward the ˙ Buddha, agreeing to desist from various malevolent activities at his request. Among the many yaksas named in Buddhist literature, the Buddha seems to ˙ have had a particularly close relationship with one named Vajrapāni, a figure ˙ who undergoes a remarkable transformation over the centuries. His name is a compound of two words: “vajra” and “pāni.” The latter means ˙ “hand.” The former is difficult to translate, and how one translates it is rather consequential. In the R g Veda, the vajra is a weapon, renowned especially as ˙ the weapon of the god Indra. It is variously described, sometimes as a thunderbolt, sometimes as a discus, sometimes as a club. Regardless of its form, the vajra is considered to be unbreakable, made of the hardest of substances, something that breaks other things but cannot itself be broken. The title of the famous perfection of wisdom sūtra known in English as the Diamond Sūtra, in fact is “The Perfection of Wisdom That Cuts Like a Vajra” (Vajracchedikā). In some of the earliest depictions of the Buddha in group scenes, he is often flanked by a bearded man with a large cudgel resting on his shoulder; in a stone sculpture from Gandhāra, where there was much Greek influence, the bearded man appears to be Hercules. But he is Vajrapāni, “he who holds a ˙ vajra in his hand.” Vajrapāni appears several times in the Pāli canon, perhaps ˙ most famously in a text called the Ambattha Sutta. Here, a brahmin teacher ˙˙ called Pokkharasādi has heard others praising the Buddha and instructs his student Ambat t ha to visit the Buddha to determine whether his good reputa˙˙ tion is true. When Ambat t ha asks how he should do this, his teacher explains ˙˙ that a buddha and a cakravartin possess the thirty-two marks of a superman (mahāpurusa) on their bodies. Ambat t ha is to determine whether the Buddha ˙ ˙˙ has those marks. When Ambat t ha arrives, the Buddha invites him into his cell ˙˙ and sits down to converse with him. However, in a breach of etiquette, Ambat t ha remains standing when speaking to the seated Buddha. When the Bud˙˙ dha asks why he does so, Ambat t ha replies that it is appropriate for brahmins ˙˙ to converse with each other while sitting together or standing together, but there is no need for him to do so when speaking to the Buddha, because the Buddha is a member of the Śākya clan (a ksatriya clan). Ambattha then goes on ˙ ˙˙ to deprecate the Buddha’s caste at some length, to the shock of the monks who are present, saying, for example, that there is no need for a brahmin to speak respectfully to a ksatriya because the only purpose of the three non-brahmin ˙ castes is to serve the brahmins.

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When the Buddha asks Ambat t ha about his own clan, the brahmin replies ˙˙ that it is called the Kanhāyana. The Buddha then traces the genealogy of the ˙ clan, explaining that they are the offspring of a slave girl who served the Śākya clan. She gave birth to a dark-skinned son who spoke at birth and so was believed to be an ogre. When the Buddha asks Ambat t ha whether this is indeed ˙˙ his lineage, the brahmin remains silent. The Buddha repeats the question a second time and still does not receive an answer. At that point, the Buddha explains that if anyone refuses to answer a question from the Buddha after it is posed for a third time, their head will split into seven pieces. Visible only to the Buddha and Ambat t ha, Vajrapāni appears in the sky holding a flaming club. Hor˙˙ ˙ rified, Ambat t ha sits down and says, “Could you repeat the question?” ˙˙ After Ambat t ha confirms that what the Buddha said is true, the Buddha ˙˙ explains that his own ksatriya caste is superior to the brahmins. He goes on to ˙ criticize the religious practices of other brahmins and ascetics (śramana), who ˙ are only worthy to act as servants for those who follow the path set forth by the Buddha. He then stands up and walks around, allowing Ambat t ha to see thirty ˙˙ of the thirty-two marks of a superman that his teacher had asked him to investigate. However, the Buddha’s retractable penis and his long tongue were not visible. Realizing that Ambat t ha is unable to see those two marks, the Buddha ˙˙ uses his supernormal powers to allow him to see his penis and then sticks out his huge tongue, licking his nose and his ears and then extending it fully to cover his entire face. Convinced that the Buddha indeed possesses the thirtytwo marks, Ambat t ha leaves and reports to his teacher what he has observed. ˙˙ The teacher then goes to the Buddha, observes the thirty-two marks himself, and takes refuge in the Buddha.1 There is obviously much to say about this story. In many ways, it is typical of a large genre of suttas in the Pāli canon in which the Buddha goes to great lengths to explain why his own ksatriya caste is superior to the brahmin caste, ˙ and why his own teachings lead to liberation from suffering while those of the brahmins do not. Scholars tend to associate these suttas with the stage of the tradition when the san˙gha was large enough to require the patronage of local rulers and merchants for its sustenance and therefore sought to demonstrate that it was superior to its chief competitors, the caste of priests who performed a wide variety of ritual services for the wealthy. What is noteworthy here is the presence of Vajrapāni (interestingly visible ˙ only to the Buddha and Ambat t ha) as the Buddha’s enforcer, ready to inflict a ˙˙ particularly grisly punishment on anyone who was so rude as to refuse to answer a question from the Buddha. Vajrapāni performs the same role in a dif˙

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ferent text under different circumstances. In the Shorter Discourse to Saccaka (Cūl asaccaka Sutta), the Buddha engages in a debate about the nature of the ˙ self with the Jain ascetic Saccaka. At one point, the Buddha asks Saccaka a question to which he must answer in the negative, while knowing that to do so would ensure his defeat. He thus remains silent, until Vajrapāni appears (again, only ˙ to him and the Buddha), promising to smash his skull into seven pieces if he fails to answer the third time.2 Still, Vajrapāni makes few appearances in the Pāli suttas. The Buddha de˙ feats many interlocutors, sometimes brahmins and sometimes representatives of opposing philosophical schools, as in these two cases. One wonders why Vajrapāni appears only here. The stories clearly show that despite his peaceful ˙ mien, the Buddha is accompanied by a violent protector. When we consider that the suttas were recited long before they were read, we might see these stories as confirming to those listening that the Buddha not only had truth on his side, but also the potent protection of the supernatural, embodied in ancient India by the yaksa.3 ˙ It is noteworthy that this protection continues in the Mahāyāna, where Vajrapāni is described as the protector of bodhisattvas, as in the Perfection of ˙ Wisdom in Eight Thousand Stanzas (Astasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā). The famous ˙˙ twenty-fifth chapter of the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapundarīka) lists the many ˙˙ forms that Avalokiteśvara takes in order to save those who call on him. The long list of his thirty-three transformations ends with, “To those who are to be saved by the form of Vajrapāni, he teaches the dharma by changing himself ˙ into the form of Vajrapāni.”4 ˙ In the centuries that followed, Vajrapāni would be called upon to defend the ˙ dharma from more formidable foes. Thus, in the Compendium of Principles of All Tathāgatas (Sarvatathāgatatattvasamgraha), a text likely dating from the late ˙ seventh century, we find the famous story of Vajrapāni intimidating and con˙ verting not a human but a god, indeed the great Hindu deity Śiva himself. In the story, the buddha Vairocana has summoned all the buddhas in the universe to his palace on the summit of Mount Meru. There, they praise Vajrapāni as ˙ the Lord of the Mandala. However, Vajrapāni declines the title, saying that there ˙˙ ˙ remain many evil beings in the world who have yet to be converted. If all of the buddhas have not been able to tame them, how could he do so? Vairocana then enters into samādhi, causing numerous forms of Vajrapāni ˙ to emerge from the vajra at his heart, “each a universally flaming embryo, knit eyebrows, wrinkled foreheads, crooked brows, terrible bent fangs. Hands twitching with flailing flaming vajras, ankuses, swords, and nooses, all afire, and cloth-

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ing variegated in color and ornament, they subdue every criminal in all the world systems.” These subdued gods of the three worlds are then summoned to the site, where Vajrapāni commands them to take refuge in the three jewels. ˙ Śiva (who is usually called Maheśvara or Mahādeva in Buddhist sources) replies, “Listen, yaksa. I am Īśvara, lord of the triple world, the creator, arranger, ˙ lord of all spirits, supreme god of gods, Mahādeva. Why should I take orders from you, a yaksa?” ˙ When Vajrapāni orders him to comply, calling him a criminal, Maheśvara ˙ turns to Vairocana and says, “Just who is he, Blessed One, and what kind of person is he who would give orders to the Lord?” Turning to Maheśvara and his minions, Vairocana replies, “Friends, I would really do what he says and assent to the vow and discipline of going for refuge. Do not let Vajrapāni, this ˙ cruel, angry, mean spirit, this great bodhisattva, lay waste to the entire triple world with his flaming vajra.” Maheśvara immediately assumes a horrific form and commands Vajrapāni to obey him, saying, “I am lord of the triple world, ˙ and you are giving me orders?” But Vajrapāni only laughs, mocking Maheś˙ vara: “Approach, you eater of corpses and human flesh, you who use the ashes of funeral pyres as your food, as your couch, as your clothing, and obey my command.” When Maheśvara orders Vajrapāni to submit to him, Vajrapāni asks Vairo˙ ˙ cana what he should do. With the Buddha’s permission, Vajrapāni intones the ˙ syllable “hūm,” which causes all of the summoned gods to fall to the ground, ˙ screaming in pain. Maheśvara himself falls dead. Vajrapāni tells the gods that ˙ if they wish to avoid his fate, they should take refuge in the three jewels. Before consenting, they ask Vairocana who Vajrapāni is. The Buddha replies, “O ˙ Gods, he is the overlord of us, all the tathāgatas. He is the father, the servant, the eldest son of all the tathāgatas, the blessed one, the bodhisattva, mahāsattva, Samantabhadra. He has been consecrated in the kingship of great wrath to do what is necessary in the training of all beings. Why? There are in your midst hordes of criminals, such as Mahādeva and his ilk, who are not capable of being turned from their evil ways by peaceful means, even by all the tathāgatas. He has therefore been empowered to take care of those evil ones.” The gods all take refuge and are released, rising from the ground filled with joy. Yet Maheśvara and his consort Umādevī still lay dead on the ground. When Vairocana commands Vajrapāni to revive them, he intones a mantra ˙ that brings the god back to life. Yet when Maheśvara tries to rise, he cannot. When Maheśvara complains to Vairocana for allowing Vajrapāni to control him ˙ in that way, Vairocana replies that he first needs to obey Vajrapāni’s command. ˙

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Maheśvara expresses his puzzlement as to why the Buddha himself could not release him, saying, “Lord, I don’t understand the meaning of what the Blessed One has said. Since the tathāgatas are the overlords of all the triple worlds, who a superior overlord might be and where he might be found is beyond me.” Vairocana declares that Vajrapāni is the overlord of all the buddhas. Appar˙ ently unwilling to submit to what he regards as a mere yaksa, Mahādeva de˙ clares that he would rather die than obey Varjapāni’s command. Mahādeva and ˙ Umādevī are then dragged on their backs before Vairocana. Vajrapāni, stepping ˙ on their bodies, recites a mantra that causes Mahādeva to strike himself in the head with his thousand arms. Vairocana then recites the mantra of loving kindness, “om buddha maitrī vajra raksa ham,” causing consecration and real˙ ˙ ˙ ization to flow through Vajrapāni’s feet into Maheśvara’s body, transforming ˙ him into a buddha named Bhasmeśvaranirghosa (Silent Lord of the Ashes) ˙ and transporting him to a world called Bhasmacchatra (Parasol of Ashes), “beyond as many world systems as there are motes of dust in the world, systems equal to the grains of sand in thirty-two Ganges.” With Maheśvara now converted and exiled to a distant world, the other gods—including Visnu (called ˙˙ Nārāyana), Indra, and Brahmā—are granted entrance into the mandala and ˙ ˙˙ are consecrated with Buddhist names; Visnu becomes Māyāvajra.5 ˙˙ As we see here, much has changed from the time of the Pāli suttas. No longer a local nature spirit, Vajrapāni is now a bodhisattva to whom the buddhas ˙ defer. No longer intimidating brahmin boys, he murders, resurrects, and enlightens the most powerful and fearsome god of the Hindu pantheon of the day. And he does so not with a mace but with a mantra, a magic spell. Among the words that constitute the various spells that occur in the story, the most common is the first constituent of his name: “vajra.” We have clearly entered a different realm, the realm of the mantra and the mandala, the realm rather ˙˙ imprecisely named “Buddhist tantra.” The origins of the wrathful deities, and especially their later prominence in the Indian Buddhist pantheon, is a topic that continues to vex scholars. We see in the history of Vajrapāni, evident both in texts and in sculpture, a movement ˙ from the periphery to the center, from a figure in the retinue of the Buddha to a figure to whom the Buddha seems to defer. Art historians have noted a similar movement for all manner of wrathful gods, finding them in earlier works of sculpture and painting depicted in a corner and in smaller scale, later depicted in the center and in full scale. Their designations also change. In earlier works they are sometimes called dvārapāla, “protector of the door” or “protector of the gate,” a doorman, a bouncer. Later they are sometimes called dhar-

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mapāla, “protector of the dharma.”6 It appears to be a movement from guardian to god, one in which a local spirit, one who is dangerous, perhaps malevolent, a monster who is propitiated with offerings to seek its favor, is elevated into an enlightened being, still monstrous in form, a buddha who, like the Buddha himself, commands the power of speech.7 In ancient India, the sacred Veda, the source of all knowledge, was considered to be eternal, always existing as sound, uncreated by humans, only later to be heard by the sages. This valorization of speech was equally important in  Buddhism. The voice of the Buddha is the “lion’s roar” (simhanāda) that ˙ silences all the other animals in the jungle, the various non-Buddhist teachers. Orthodoxy is based on whether or not a statement is buddhavacana, the voice or speech of the Buddha. It is speech that defeats Śiva, when Vajrapāni intones ˙ a single syllable: “hūm.” This is a mantra, the same term that was used to de˙ scribe the verses and chants of the Vedas. In later centuries, the term would come to mean something like “magic spell,” a syllable or series of syllables that, when pronounced properly, would bring about what the speaker wished for; a mantra is what J. L. Austin would call a “performative utterance.”8 Although we often see references to “Buddhist tantra” in European language works, the tradition itself more often uses the terms “mantranaya” (the way of magic spells), “guhyamantrayāna” (the vehicle of secret magic spells), or “vajrayāna” (the vehicle of the vajra—whatever “vajra” might mean). A definitive account of the origins of Buddhist wrathful deities, and of Buddhist tantra, has yet to be written. Many questions remain. Still, we can note certain movements, movements from outside the circle to inside the circle. The word for “circle” in Sanskrit is “mandala.” The circle may have begun ˙˙ simply as something drawn on the ground, imagined as a borderline between the profane and the sacred, with entry granted through initiation. This simple circle would evolve into the elaborate mandalas known from Tibetan Buddhism ˙˙ and Japanese Buddhism, aerial views of a buddha’s palace, with a surrounding wall of vajras keeping out demons and a wrathful deity guarding the gates in the four cardinal directions. Some of these guardians would eventually move from the periphery to the center, from the gate to the throne. Yet another movement inward was to bring Hindu gods, the enemies of the Buddhists, inside the mandala, converting them to Buddhism and giving them Buddhist names. ˙˙ In the Compendium of Principles of All Tathāgatas, the four most important Hindu gods—Visnu, Śiva, Brahmā, and Indra—are all converted and brought ˙˙ inside the mandala, an enclosure that both keeps those outside out and keeps ˙˙ those inside in.

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In Buddhist tantric texts, we find a list of eight powers (siddhi) that can be gained through propitiating the appropriate deity, making the appropriate offerings, and reciting the appropriate mantras. The eight are (1) a sword that, when grasped, allows its holder to fly; (2) a potion that, when placed in the eyes, allows one to see everything in the world, no matter how distant or how small, including deities; (3) the ability to walk with great speed over long distances by putting a magical substance on one’s feet; (4) the power to make oneself invisible by smearing a magical substance on one’s forehead; (5) the art of extracting the essence from ordinary substances, which can be used to bestow longevity or to turn iron into gold; (6) the ability to fly to distant realms of the universe; (7) the ability to make magical pills that, when consumed, make one invisible; (8) the ability to see treasures beneath the surface of the earth. In Buddhism, the religion of lists, one notes here a particular emphasis on the physical and the worldly: swords, potions, essences, pills, buried treasure. These are essentially superpowers. In Buddhist literature, they are sometimes called mundane (laukika) powers. To this list, a ninth power was added, a single supramundane (lokottara) power: buddhahood. Thus, a further movement was movement from the outer world, the world of the village and the palace, to the inner world of the body and the mind. Over the centuries we see a process of transmutation, often in coded language, in which the grime of so much of the tantras becomes psychologized, becomes theologized, becomes transmuted, where the body of the meditator becomes the mandala, with the seed syllables of mantras located throughout, seeds that ˙˙ are transformed into peaceful and wrathful deities by intoning their mantras. The enemy is transmuted from the malevolent demon threatening life and limb to the obstacle, the obstruction, the hindrance (vighna) to liberation, obstacles identified with the classical major and minor afflictions (kleśa) that derive from ignorance. The wrathful deity armed with weapons, each with a symbolic meaning, is the destroyer of obstacles (vighnāntaka).9 Parallels between Pāli texts and Buddhist tantras are rarely noted. Indeed, it is the vast differences between them that caused many Victorian Orientalists to exalt the former as the pristine and proper original teachings of the Buddha, and to condemn the latter as a descent into the monstrous polytheism of medieval Hinduism.10 Yet in the stories of Vajrapāni in the Pāli suttas cited at the ˙ beginning of this chapter and the story of Vajrapāni in the Compendium of Prin˙ ciples of All Tathāgatas, there is an important parallel: in each case, the Buddha’s interlocuter is an opponent and a competitor. In the Pāli works, Ambattha ˙˙ is a brahmin and Saccaka is a Jain. This suggests that antagonisms between

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Buddhist monks and brahmin priests, and between Buddhist monks and Jain ascetics, were sufficiently great, and sufficiently important, that the authors of these suttas felt it necessary that the Buddha not simply defeat them rhetorically but threaten them with physical violence. The incident with Ambat t ha ˙˙ causes his teacher Pokkharasādi to become a disciple of the Buddha; the same was true of Saccaka. Centuries later, the stakes seem even higher: violence is not simply threatened, it is dispensed. In the Compendium of Principles of All Tathāgatas, it is necessary for Vajrapāni to kill Śiva and his consort and then ˙ revive them in order to convert them to Buddhism. In tantric texts, the word for “kill” is often “liberate.” Vajrapāni apparently succeeds; a tantra called Tamer ˙ of the Evil Spirits (Bhūtadāmara, after a wrathful form of Vajrapāni) is set forth ˙ ˙ by Vajrapāni at the request of Śiva. ˙ All of this suggests that Buddhist authors of the text saw themselves as engaged in mortal combat with the followers of Śiva. We know that during this same period, other Buddhist authors were engaged in philosophical combat with Hindu opponents. Perhaps the most important Buddhist philosophical work of the eighth century is a work called Compendium of Principles (Tattvasamgraha) ˙ composed by the Bengali master Śāntaraksita, who would later found the first ˙ monastery in Tibet, but first needed the king to summon the tantric magician Padmasambhava to quell the local wrathful deities. His text, 3,646 verses in length, surveys the philosophical schools of India. Over 40 percent is devoted to the refutation of Mīmāmsā, the defenders of Vedic orthodoxy. ˙ As we have noted elsewhere in this volume, when the story of Buddhism’s arrival in a particular country is told, it typically involves the arrival of a Buddhist monk—whether by chance, invitation, or capture—at court. Upon arrival, the Buddhist monk gains the favor of the monarch not through sermons on no self but through magic, with many stories of the foreign monk besting the local sorcerer in supernatural competition. That magic often involved medicine.11 There are a number of Nikāya Buddhist texts that offer various forms of healing and protection from pestilence; in a story that appears in several of these sources, the Buddha drives the plague from the city of Vaiśālī by having Ānanda stand at the city gates and recite a lengthy mantra to drive out the evil spirits. However, in addition to surviving disease, kings are also concerned with the survival of their kingdoms. Thus, Buddhist monks were also prized for their possession of what is called war magic. All of this complicates the definition and the dividing line of what marks a particular Buddhist text as “tantric.”12 It is the case, however, that many rituals classified as tantric provide techniques for destroying an enemy, whether it be an individual or an army.

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As we see in the story of Mahākāla that opened this chapter, the Buddhist deity to be propriated is wrathful.13 Histories of Buddhism in India are notoriously difficult to write, largely because of the lack of the kinds of chronicles and court records that one finds in China, for example. Instead, history must be constructed from manuscripts on palm leaves, inscriptions in stone, and legends on coins. If wrathful deities began at the periphery and moved to the center, if they began in the village and moved to the court, if they began orally and only later were committed to writing, such history becomes all the more challenging to compose.14 And where along that radius is the Buddhist monk? The rise of the wrathful deity in Buddhism suggests a tradition that was under threat, a defenseless community that required a defender. By the seventh century, much of India was in political upheaval, with local polities in conflict in the wake of the Gupta Dynasty. Without the royal sustenance and the protection from Hindu rivals that Buddhist monasticism has so often required in order to thrive, Buddhist authors imagined more magical forms of defense. Unable to wield weapons themselves, they placed them in the multiple hands of wrathful deities, with garlands of the heads of their enemies around their necks and the bodies of their enemies trampled by their many feet. And having imagined these deities, they sought to make them real in ritual.15 This chapter began with the story of how, in 1210, Mahākāla destroyed a Mongol dike and drowned the soldiers of Genghis Khan. By 1275, the Mongols had learned their lesson. Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, was ruler of the Mongol Empire. In 1271, he had founded the Yuan Dynasty and was emperor of China. Seeking to bring all of China under his control, he went to war against the Southern Song in 1274. The following year, with his troops unable to take the Song capital, Kublai Khan asked his imperial preceptor, the Tibetan monk Phakpa, to enlist the aid of Mahākāla. Phakpa had a Nepalese artist make a statue of Mahākāla. The statue was then enshrined in a new temple built for it south of Beijing, with the image of the wrathful Buddha facing south. When the defeated members of the former Song court were brought to Beijing and taken to the temple of Mahākāla, they reported that this was the deity they had seen in their capital, leading the Mongol troops.16

30 • Writing

Heart Mountain in northwest Wyoming is what geologists call a klippe, the remnants of a thrust fault, a formation that occurs when old rock breaks through a layer of younger rock; the rock at its summit is three hundred million years older than the rock at its base. Located between Cody and Powell, the mountain is about eight thousand feet above sea level. It creates a striking silhouette on the horizon. To the Buddhist eye, it seems as if a stūpa has risen out of the earth. And many Buddhists lived there. They do not now, but they did not so long ago. Heart Mountain was the site of one of ten Japanese internment camps during the Second World War, opening on August 12, 1942, eight months after Pearl Harbor, and closing on November 10, 1945, two months after a delegation from the empire of Japan signed the Instrument of Surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. On January 1, 1943, Heart Mountain housed 10,767 Japanese internees from Los Angeles, Santa Clara, and San Francisco, as well as from Washington and Oregon, forced to live in hastily constructed, uninsulated barracks over three brutal Wyoming winters. After the camp closed, the Bureau of Reclamation of the Department of the Interior distributed the forty-six thousand acres of the Heart Mountain camp through a lottery system. Les Bovee, the owner of one of the parcels, was having his property cleared by a road grader when its blade struck an obstruction. When the operator climbed down from the cab, he saw that the blade had sheared off the top of a fifty-five-gallon metal drum buried just below the surface. The drum was filled with over a thousand small stones. On the surface of each, someone had written a single Japanese character. Many years later, it was determined

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that the small stones in the rusted drum barrel, when placed in their proper order, were the first six fascicles of the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapundarīka).1 ˙˙ Why copy the Lotus Sūtra? Why copy it on rocks? And why bury it where it cannot be read? These questions, some more difficult to answer than others, provide an opportunity to consider the importance of writing in Buddhism, the most scriptural of religions. The first question is the easiest to answer. The Lotus Sūtra is to be copied because the Lotus Sūtra says so. The Buddha explains that it will be difficult to copy the sūtra after he has passed into nirvāna, but for those who do, the re˙ wards are great. He predicts that “those who copy, preserve, recite, and revere this sūtra and expound it for the sake of others will be clothed with the Tathā­ gata’s garments and treasured by the present buddhas of the other directions.”2 Later in the sūtra, he says, “If they copy this sutra, after their death they will be born in the Trāyastrimśa Heaven [the Heaven of the Thirty-Three, located ˙ on the summit of Mount Meru]. At that time eighty-four thousand heavenly maidens will welcome them, performing various kinds of music. They will wear seven-jeweled coronets and be happy among their female servants.”3 The Buddha’s admonition would be heeded. Over the centuries, the devout in China, Korea, and Japan would copy the Lotus Sūtra many thousands of times. We are so familiar with terms like “Buddhist scriptures” that we forget that Buddhism began, and remained for several centuries, a proudly oral tradition. Indeed, the ability to recite Buddhist scriptures remains highly valued in Buddhist communities to the present day. The teachings of the Buddha are referred to commonly as buddhavacana, literally, the “voice of the Buddha.” People who in English might be described as “well read” in Buddhism are described as “much heard” (bahuśruta), not because they are listened to by many but because they have listened to many teachings. Buddhist sūtras, including those that likely began as written texts, begin with the phrase “Thus did I hear.” Yet on June 25, 1900, when a Daoist priest named Wang Yuanlu opened a sealed vestibule inside one of the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas at Dunhuang in China, he found it filled from floor to ceiling with scrolls, folios, paintings, and banners, as many as fifty thousand pieces. The great majority of these were Buddhist texts, including over a thousand copies of the Lotus Sūtra. When Xuanzang made his legendary “journey to the west,” that is, to India, his primary goal was to gather Buddhist texts and take them back to China. In Tibetan temples, it is common for the central Buddha image to be flanked by over three hundred stacked volumes of the famed Kangyur and Tengyur, liter-

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ally, the “Translation of the Word [of the Buddha]” and the “Translation of the Treatises.” And yet, writing was not always central to Buddhism, and what writing has meant in Buddhism over the centuries is not what it has meant in other religions. To tell this story, we turn again to Aśoka. His famed rock edicts are not only the earliest written record of the Buddha and Buddhism, but also the earliest deciphered writings in India. The famous script on the Harappan seals of the Indus Valley civilization, dated to the third millennium BCE, remains illegible. The edicts of Aśoka were recorded in the third century BCE, written in Brahmī script, remaining undeciphered until 1836. Setting aside the Indus Valley script, scholars debate as to whether writing existed in India prior to Aśoka’s Mauryan Dynasty. Seleucus I Nicator was a general in the army of Alexander the Great who went on to establish the Seleucid Empire, which at its height extended from the Levant to what is today Pakistan. His ambassador to the court of Candragupta Maurya, Aśoka’s grandfather, was Megasthenes, author of the famous Indica, composed around 300 BCE. There, he reports that writing was not used in India. Yet scholars debate how Pānini, who lived before this time, could have ˙ composed his Sanskrit grammar, considered one of the great intellectual achievements of human history, without recourse to writing.4 In Eloisa to Abelard, Alexander Pope wrote, “Heav’n first taught letters for some wretch’s aid, / Some banish’d lover, or some captive maid.”5 Scholars speculate that literacy was low in the ancient world, even in those cultures that we associate with writing: 5 percent in Mesopotamia, 7 percent in Egypt, 10 percent in Greece, with such speculations complicated by the question of what one means by “literacy.” In many cultures, literacy is associated with the rise of cities and the move from pastoral to urban economies. Contra Pope, it seems that writing was first used for commerce, in what would come to be called bookkeeping. Thus, despite the presence of writing, the great civilizations of ancient times remained largely oral cultures. This was certainly the case in India, which, unlike Judaism, Christianity, and later Islam, would lack the concept of the holy writ, the single sacred text, in the form of a book. Buddhism is, or at least began, as an Indian religion, where religion was traditionally the domain of the brahmin caste, with many of the Buddha’s first disciples coming from that caste. It is therefore the religion of the brahmins that provides essential context for the development of Buddhism, both as the source of many of the mores of Buddhism and as the opponent that the Buddhists defined themselves against.

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The sacred texts of the brahmins are the Vedas, the most ancient of which, the R g Veda, was likely compiled between 1900 and 1200 BCE. Although we ˙ speak of the Rg Veda as a text, it was composed orally and has been maintained ˙ orally for centuries, extending to the present day. The earliest extant manuscript dates from around 1040 CE, and it was, notably, discovered in Nepal, not in India. The preservation of the Vedas is the purview of brahmin priests, who developed sophisticated mnemonics that have allowed them to memorize them with great precision over the centuries, literally able to recite them forward and backward, without necessarily understanding their content.6 As is the case with so many rituals, sound is more important than meaning. That the Vedas were intentionally not committed to writing may be attributed to several factors. The first, and more mundane, is that the Vedas are, for the most part, ritual texts, setting forth ceremonies that only brahmin priests are sanctioned to perform. Passing on this ritual knowledge in oral, rather than written, form from father to son allows for control over the dissemination of this knowledge—and the material benefit it provides to those who possess it—in ways that writing does not. A not unrelated, but perhaps more “religious,” motivation comes from the centrality in Indian religion of sound, of “vāc,” a cognate of “voice.” The Vedas are described as śruti, that which is heard, not that which is read. They have no human or divine author, but have existed for all eternity as sound, known to the world because they were heard by the ancient sages of the past, who then passed them on, orally. That foreign traders used writing for commercial matters may have been known in northwest India at the time of the Buddha, who lived in the northeast. That writing was viewed with suspicion is suggested by a passage from the Aitareya Āranyaka, which says that the disciple “should not learn [i.e., recite ˙ the Veda] when he has eaten flesh, or seen blood, or a dead body, or done what is unlawful, . . . or had intercourse, or written, or obliterated writing.”7 There is strong evidence to suggest that, like the Vedas, the teachings of the Buddha were originally composed orally.8 The word “sūtra” in Sanskrit is often translated as “aphorism,” a short statement that is easily memorized—this despite the fact that there would eventually be sūtras with titles like the Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Stanzas (Śatasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā). Earlier works, however, most famously the Dhammapada, were indeed composed of easily memorized verses. Further evidence of the original orality of the tradition are the refrains, often lengthy refrains, that occur so often in the Nikāya literature. These are sufficiently tedious in written form that in translation, after appearing once, they are often replaced with an ellipsis. Like the stock phrases

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that appear in the Iliad and the Odyssey, scholars regard these refrains as evidence that the sūtras were committed to memory and recited by monks. In addition to being composed orally, we know that, like the Vedas, the Buddha’s teachings were preserved orally, with his discourses divided into categories such as the “long group” (dīghanikāya, in Pāli), the “middle-length group” (majjhimanikāya), and the “short group” (khuddakanikāya), with different groups of monks in the monastery responsible for their memorization and recitation. The earliest division of the Buddha’s teaching was into the dharma and the vinaya, perhaps translated here as “the discourses” and “the discipline.” The dharma soon became too extensive for a single monk to memorize, thus requiring this specialization. The vinaya, as represented by the prātimoksa, the ˙ disciplinary code of conduct, was expected to be memorized by monks and nuns, who gathered to recite it at their fortnightly assembly. Even the most abstruse element of the Buddhist canon, the abhidharma, which came to represent the third of the three baskets (tripitaka) of the Buddha’s teachings, seems ˙ to have developed from lists of categories that appeared in the sūtras, lists that monks would memorize and recite. The teachings ascribed to the Buddha, including those that likely originated in written form, have traditionally been regarded as oral in their origin. Buddhist sūtras begin with the formula “Thus did I hear,” representing that the testimony of the original source of the text is the oral report of a person who was present when the Buddha delivered the discourse; that person is most often considered to be Ānanda, the Buddha’s personal attendant. And when the teachings of the Buddha were collected after his death, at least according to legend, Ānanda was instructed to recite the discourses he had heard, and Upāli was instructed to recite the monastic code (vinaya) and the circumstances for the formulation of each rule. The oral nature of the Buddha’s teachings cannot simply be ascribed to the low level of literacy in ancient India or to the primitive technology of inscribing letters on a palm leaf with a stylus. Buddhism shared with Hinduism an ideology of the oral. The transmission of the truth from mouth to ear, from generation to generation, is a central function of Indian religions, and Buddhism, despite its eventual international diffusion, in many ways remains an Indian religion. Thus, a disciple of the Buddha is called a śravaka, a “listener.” This term is related to “śruti,” discussed above, “that which is heard,” the Hindu term for the preexistent and uncreated Veda, a claim used by the brahmins to proclaim the priority of their tradition over that of upstarts like the Buddhists and the Jains.

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In order to counter this claim, the Buddhists and Jains had to make their own claims for venerability. Both did so by declaring that their founders were in fact not founders, but instead, merely the latest in a long line of teachers who had taught the same truths over the ages. For the Buddhists, this was a line of previous buddhas, whose names and biographies are recounted. There is ample evidence of how important this claim was for the survival of Buddhism in its first centuries. We note, for example, that an edict of Aśoka mentions the previous buddha Konāgamana (Kanakamuni, in Sanskrit). The inscription on a ˙ pillar, known as the Nigali Sagar Edict, reads, “The Beloved of the Gods, King Piyadasi [Aśoka], fourteen years after his royal consecration, enlarged the stūpa of the buddha Konakamana to double its size, and twenty years after his royal consecration, he came in person and paid reverence, and had a stone pillar erected.”9 The inscription indicates that the belief in previous buddhas was established by Aśoka’s reign. Indeed, in the early literature, the biographies of the previous buddhas seem more important than that of Śākyamuni. When the biography of the Buddha evolved into freestanding works, they did not begin with his birth from the right side of Queen Māyā but eons ago, when he first vowed to become a buddha, a vow made in the presence of a previous buddha.10 Although buddhas of the past are named and their stories are told (the standard numbers include three, six, and twenty-four prior to Śākyamuni), this is not to suggest that there are not more, extending farther into the distant past. Indeed, the Buddhists have their own version of an eternal truth. Unlike the Hindu tradition, where that truth has been maintained orally over all of time, the Buddhist truth has been forgotten and so must be rediscovered. In a text called the City Sūtra (Nagara Sutta), the Buddha describes a traveler who comes across an ancient path and follows it to find a lost city, once grand but now in ruins. He informs the king, who restores it to its former glory. The Buddha likens himself to the traveler and the path to that followed by the buddhas of the past, the path that leads to the city of nirvāna.11 Thus, the path and its goal ˙ have always been there, but it has been repeatedly forgotten over the course of history. It is the task of the buddha of each age to reveal it to the world. The Buddhist truth is therefore eternal. There is no innovation in what the Buddha teaches, only repetition, only recapitulation of a truth that remains the same “whether or not tathāgatas arise in the world.”12 Yet a tathāgata arises in the world but rarely, and in the interval, his teaching must be preserved. That is the task of the monastic community, and it appears that in the early centuries of the tradition, Buddhist monks followed the lead of their brahmin brethren and preserved the Buddha’s teachings through mem-

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orization and recitation. However, unlike the brahmins, Buddhist monks did not belong to an endogamous caste, where their task was set for them from birth. Also unlike the brahmins, Buddhist monks were celibate and so did not produce sons who could be taught the sūtras at their father’s knee. If there were no monks, there could be no dharma, at least a dharma that could be conveyed to the world, thus foreclosing the path to freedom from suffering. The survival of the dharma in the world, therefore, depended on the existence of monks who had memorized it. The survival of the dharma depended on the health of the san˙gha, in both the figurative and literal sense of the term. In the absence of monks or as their aid, Buddhism needed books. We cannot say with certainty when Buddhists starting writing down the words of the Buddha. We know that writing would eventually be deemed important because we find it among the many skills of Prince Siddhārtha. A biography of the Buddha called the Extensive Play (Lalitavistara), likely composed in the third or fourth century of the Common Era, goes to great lengths to demonstrate that Prince Siddhārtha possessed all the skills of the world before he renounced it, including such manly arts as archery, wrestling, weightlifting (he kicks a dead elephant over the palace wall), and fathering a child. An entire chapter, entitled “The Demonstration in the Writing School,” is devoted to his knowledge of writing. In a typically baroque account, the precocious prince, accompanied by ten thousand children, goes to the first day of school. He picks up his writing board, recites the names of sixty-four different scripts, and asks the teacher which of them he will be teaching. The teacher replies that the boy has learned scripts even the names of which he, the teacher, has not heard, and yet he comes to school.13 But this sūtra was composed many centuries after the Buddha. If we place his death around 400 BCE, it can be assumed that writing was known to the early generations of his followers. Coins from the reign of Candragupta Maurya, who ruled from 320 to 298 BCE, bear inscriptions. The Bhairat inscription of the famous rock edicts of Aśoka, who reigned from 268 to 232 BCE, makes reference to the Buddha and his teachings, mentioning seven “discourses of the dharma” by name; the emperor exhorts monks and nuns to listen to and remember them. Interestingly, none of their titles corresponds exactly to anything in the extant canons; scholars have eventually identified them with some degree of certainty.14 As was the case in other cultures, writing served an important role in governance. The rock edicts of Aśoka are too often identified with Buddhism because it is here that we find the first written reference to the

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religion. However, their primary purpose was to serve as writs of royal policy. They are not the teachings of the Buddha. Buddhist inscriptions appear in the archaeological record in the decades following Aśoka’s reign, notably at the great stūpa complexes at Sanchi and Bhārhut, where there are hundreds of inscriptions. These inscriptions, however, are not texts. The great majority are donative, naming the donor of a particular carving. The rest are captions of the scenes depicted from the life, and previous lives, of the Buddha. It is noteworthy that when the occupation of the donor is included, it is often “bhānaka” (reciter). ˙ The first evidence of Buddhist teachings being committed to writing dates some two centuries later, to the first century before the Common Era. The evidence is twofold: one textual, one archaeological; one from the south, one from the north. The Dīpavamsa, the Chronicle of the Island [of Sri Lanka]—a work ˙ dated to the third or fourth century of the Common Era—reports that during the reign of Vattagāmanī Abhaya (29–17 BCE), monks who had memorized the ˙˙ ˙ tripitaka—the “three baskets” that constitute the Buddhist canon—and its com˙ mentary gathered in Āluvihāra, a rock-shelter in a mountain cleft, and wrote it down, apparently fearing that otherwise it could be lost during a war, a famine, or infighting among monasteries; the Pāli term “hāni” means “loss” or “decay.”15 Thus, we read in Hermann Oldenberg’s 1879 translation, “Before this time, the wise bhikkhus had orally handed down the text of the three pit akas and also the Atthakathā. At this time, the bhikkhus who perceived the ˙ ˙˙ decay of created beings, assembled and in order that the religion might endure for a long time, they recorded [the above-mentioned texts] in written books.”16 That is, if the monks who were the repository of the canon were to die, the canon would be lost. One can infer from this report that the canon was recorded, but no manuscripts survive from this period. The Theravāda tradition counts this as the Fourth Council and dates it to 25 BCE. The Tibetan historian Bu ston (1290–1364) describes a “third council” that took place in Kashmir five hundred years after the passing of the Buddha (and therefore different from the more famous Third Council said to have been convened by Aśoka). At the conclusion of his account, Bu ston reports, “In such a way the Teaching was rehearsed for a third time. Thereafter, as the ordinary people who were not possessed of good memory, recited the Scripture incorrectly, making omissions and interpolations,—the Word of Buddha was written down in books, in order to prevent corruption.”17 A later Tibetan historian, Tāranātha, writing in 1608, reports that the first Buddhist text was com-

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mitted to writing during the more famous Fourth Council, convened by the emperor Kaniska, whose reign scholars place at 127 to 150 CE. That text was ˙ one of the largest and most important in the history of Buddhist thought, a compendium of doctrine called the Great Exegesis of the Abhidharma (Abhidharmamahāvibhāsa).18 But these are all reports of events that occurred, if they ever ˙ occurred, centuries before their description. No manuscripts survive to support these claims. Manuscripts do, however, survive from the north.19 In 1994, the British Library acquired twenty-nine fragments of birchbark scrolls. Wrapped tightly, like cigars, they had been placed in a clay jug and buried. On the jar was written “To the universal community, in the possession of the Dharmaguptakas.” This suggested that the scrolls were somehow Buddhist; the Dharmaguptakas were one of the traditional eighteen schools of what is termed Nikāya Buddhism. It was later determined that the jar had been unearthed from the ruins of a Buddhist monastic complex near Hadda, ˙˙ in eastern Afghanistan. This region was once a part of northwest India called Gandhāra, which today includes areas of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan. The unrolling of the scrolls was a painstaking process, one that eventually revealed that they were in fact Buddhist texts, written in a language called Gāndhārī (a language related to Sanskrit) and written in a script called Kharost hī. When these and other such scrolls were analyzed, they dated from the ˙˙ first century BCE to the third century CE. When they were translated, they were found to contain versions of a number of famous Buddhist texts (often with fascinating variants), including some of the texts that were said to have been committed to writing in Sri Lanka around the same time.20 In the case of the Gandhāra manuscripts, when the text in question would have required several scrolls, only fragments from what would have been the first scroll survive, leading to the possibility that the ritual function of the text as an embodiment of the words of the Buddha may have been more important than a complete record of those words.21 If this is the case, it would be a very early instantiation of an attitude toward the canon that would persist across the Buddhist world across millennia: that the canon is to be worshipped as much as it is to be read. We thus have evidence of Buddhist writing in the first century BCE, but found at the antipodes, what were then the northern and southern limits of the Buddhist world. We have no such texts from the heartland of Buddhism: the region of the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, teachings, and death. The earliest Buddhist manuscripts that survive from this region are much later. Was it the case that oral preservation remained the preference in the Buddhist heart-

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land, while writing was preferred in the hinterland? Or is it perhaps that the texts from the heartland, likely written on fragile palm leaf rather than sturdy birchbark, simply did not survive the humidity of the annual monsoon? The answer to this question is an important one, but it is an answer that remains unknown. What we can say is that by the beginning of the Common Era, Buddhists were writing texts: commentaries and philosophical treatises, as one might expect, but also sūtras, texts that began with “Thus did I hear.” The first texts to be committed to writing seem to fall generally into the sūtra category and belonged to a shared corpus of teachings attributed to the Buddha by the Nikāya schools. However, although the majority of the Gandhāra manuscripts seem to derive from Nikāya canons, a number of fragments of Mahāyāna texts have been discovered. This suggests, as other evidence shows, that Nikāya and Mahāyāna monks occupied the same sites, most often without the animosity that some of the most famous Mahāyāna sūtras express. Many more Mahāyāna sūtras would be composed and committed to writing in the centuries that followed, presenting themselves as the word of the Buddha, perhaps using the medium of written text because Nikāya sūtras already existed in that form. For one of the things that writing allows that speech does not is forgery. If we assume that this was the first instance of the recording of the teachings of the Buddha (which cannot be assumed with any certainty) and we place the death of the Buddha around 400 BCE, this would mean that his teachings were preserved entirely in oral form for perhaps three centuries. However, it is important to note that recitation of the scriptures remained, and remains, important to monastic life, long after Buddhist texts began to be committed to writing. Writing was a laborious process of etching letters onto pieces of birchbark or palm leaf. Great monastic libraries were eventually assembled, but books remained relatively scarce. Monks would often have a specialty, memorizing a specific section of the canon. And many monks and nuns would memorize what was for them the most important section, the monastic code. Even today, it is quite common for Tibetan monks to have committed hundreds of pages of texts to memory.22 Describing the monks of Nālandā, the great monastic university in northern India, where he studied in the mid-seventh century, the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang describes the various recitation skills of the monks and the levels of rewards that they carry. “It goes without saying that the vinaya, abhidharma, and sūtras are the Buddha’s teachings. Monks who can recite one section are exempted from monastic duties. Those who can recite two sections are given additional living expenses and necessities. Those who can recite three sections

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receive attendants. Those who can recite four sections are given a pure person [a lay brother] as a servant. Those who can recite five sections can ride in an elephant chariot. Those who can recite six sections travel with an entourage of bodyguards. Their virtue is lofty and they are considered extraordinary.”23 Yet Xuanzang made his perilous pilgrimage to India not to learn to recite but to collect texts. Indeed, when he returned to China in 645, he brought with him 657 texts, a number that does not include the fifty bundles of texts that were swept away when he crossed the Indus River. In the famous retelling of Xuanzang’s journey, composed a millennium after the fact, Journey to the West (Xiyouji), Xuanzang and his motley crew of disciples, including the notorious Monkey King, have received the scriptures and are making their way back to China when they find that scrolls they have received from the Buddha’s disciples are blank. They conclude that they have been duped by the Buddha’s two chief disciples, Ānanda and Kāśyapa, because the foreign pilgrims failed to provide a sufficient bribe. They storm back to the Buddha to report the crime. The Buddha laughs and says, “I knew already that the two of them would ask for a little present. After all, the holy scriptures are not to be given lightly, nor are they to be received gratis. . . . Since you people came with empty hands to acquire scriptures, blank texts were handed over to you. But these blank texts are actually true, wordless scriptures, and they are just as good as those with words. However, those creatures in your Land of the East are so foolish and unenlightened that I have no choice but to impart to you now the texts with words.”24 Still, texts with words, whether the content was Nikāya or Mahāyāna, would become essential to Buddhism, and to the spread of Buddhism, because it made translation possible. The Buddha is said to have forbidden two brahmin converts from rendering his teaching in chandas (a method of chanting employed in the Vedas), warning the new monks that to do so would constitute an infraction of the vinaya. Instead, disciples were to teach the word of the Buddha in their own dialect.25 Indeed, the language called Pāli, often mistakenly claimed to be the language that the Buddha spoke and that he instructed the monks to teach in, is in fact an artificial language, a kind of Church Latin, invented so that monks and nuns from different parts of India (with its many languages and dialects) could read, recite, and write in a single language. From this point, translation becomes central to the history of Buddhism. Except in rare cases where a Gandhāran fragment survives, scholars date the composition of the Mahāyāna sūtras using the date of the text’s translation into Chinese as its terminus ad quem. According to legend, Tibet had no written language prior to the introduction of Buddhism, with the king sending a

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delegation to India to learn Sanskrit so that they could then return home and invent a script and grammar for what is today called Classical Tibetan. The arrival of the translator Kumārajīva in China is regarded as one of the most important moments in the history of Chinese Buddhism. When one enters a Tibetan temple of a given size, one will see arrayed on either side of the central image of the Buddha what appear to be dozens of small rectangular blocks, often in their own wooden slots, each block covered in cloth, often yellow in color. Each of these blocks is in fact a woodblock text in the form of a xylograph, often about eighteen inches long, three inches wide, and three inches high. This is the so-called Tibetan canon of works translated from an Indic language (usually Sanskrit) into classical Tibetan. As noted above, it is traditionally divided into two categories, the Kangyur (literally, the “Translation of the Word [of the Buddha]”), and the Tengyur (the “Translation of the [Indian] Treatises”). This collection, which does not include the vast literature composed by Tibetan Buddhist authors over the centuries, is itself huge. The Derge edition has over four thousand works in 314 volumes. These works are almost never read, but they are often bowed down to as embodiments of the dharma, the second of the three jewels where Buddhists seek refuge.26 This would suggest that the scriptures, especially those that are reputed to be the word of the Buddha, serve purposes other than being something to read. If we think of the Mahāyāna, at least in its early centuries, as so many communities devoted to a single book, so many cults of the book, the seemingly ubiquitous admonition for its readers to copy that book makes a certain sense as a strategy for the propagation of that cult.27 But works like the Lotus Sūtra also recommend that the text be physically exalted, that it be bowed down to, that it be offered garlands of flowers, with all manner of benefits promised to those who do. The book becomes an object of devotion, like a relic of the Buddha. And with the Buddha having passed forever into nirvāna (regardless of the several ˙ ways that this term is understood), a second physical reminder remains beyond the relics entombed in a stūpa. When his words are inscribed on strips of palm leaf or birchbark, they become the physical embodiment of his speech. It is clear from archaeological evidence that the stūpa was the primary center of Buddhist devotion in India, and hence the center of donation and influence for the monastic community that served it. The Lotus Sūtra, while proclaiming its own primacy as the means to liberation, also praises the veneration of stūpas, saying that those who pay homage to stūpas will one day see innumerable buddhas. But the sūtra also makes a direct connection between itself as a text and the stūpa as the repository of a relic. It states, “Wherever this sutra

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is taught, read, recited, copied, or wherever it is to be found, one should build a seven-jeweled stūpa of great height and width and richly ornamented. There is no need to put a relic inside. Why is this? Because the Tathāgata is already in it.”28 The perfection of wisdom (prajñāpāramitā) sūtras would proclaim themselves to be substitutes for the body and speech of the absent Buddha, worthy of veneration. Thus, the Diamond Sūtra (Vajracchedikā) famously declares, “That spot of earth [where the sūtra is set forth] becomes a shrine.” The word translated as “shrine” (caitya) is sometimes a synonym for “stūpa.” In this way, centers of sanctity multiply, from the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment, to various places associated with his life, to the stūpas that contain his relics, to the texts that contain his words; wherever the perfection of wisdom is set forth also becomes a sacred place because the perfection of wisdom is the cause of the Buddha’s enlightenment.29 The book could then function as a substitute for the absent founder, fulfilling the longing for restored presence, physically standing for his speech, while providing the means for the faithful to memorize and recite it, to transform it back into sound. In the eleventh chapter of the Lotus Sūtra, a great rumbling is heard. A huge jeweled stūpa, miles high and wide, emerges from the earth and hovers in the air. When a voice is heard inside, the Buddha levitates to the stūpa and opens its door, where, instead of a charred relic, there is a living buddha, named Prabhūtaratna, who explains that he vowed long ago that his stūpa, larger than a mountain, would rise from the earth wherever the Lotus Sūtra was being taught. As a result of Executive Order 9066, signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, about 120,000 of the 127,000 people of Japanese ancestry in the United States were moved into internment camps. About two-thirds of those interned had been born in the United States and thus were American citizens. And about two-thirds were Buddhists. Buddhists believe that as the world moves further and further away from the time of the Buddha, it becomes more and more difficult to follow the path that he set forth, eventually reaching the point where the world becomes so corrupt and human capacity so meager that liberation from rebirth becomes impossible. Eventually, the teachings of our buddha will fall into oblivion. It is only then that the next buddha, Maitreya, can come. There are a number of different prophecies about the demise of the dharma, and several different chronologies. In Japan, it was calculated that the Degenerate Age had commenced in 1052. It was also calculated that Maitreya would not appear for almost six billion years. What is one to do in the meantime?

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In Japan, one approach was to protect the Buddha’s teachings from their prophesied destruction by burying them underground. The scrolls of the sūtras would be placed in canisters, sometimes simple, sometimes elaborate, often made of bronze, sometimes made of stone. Among the several sūtras that were buried, none was buried more often than the Lotus Sūtra. The dedicatory inscriptions appended to the buried sūtra include standard Buddhist prayers for an auspicious rebirth for the donor and their family. Some inscriptions also indicate that the sūtra is meant to serve as a kind of time capsule, buried in the present age of the final dharma so that it could be unearthed in the far distant future, when Maitreya achieves buddhahood.30 This is known because archaeologists have unearthed the canisters and read the inscriptions. From the Buddhist perspective, they have been unearthed far too early. By 1942, the world was almost a millennium into the Degenerate Age, the final age of the dharma that had commenced in 1052. Still, the oil drum filled with rocks at the foot of Heart Mountain—a mountain that must have reminded the Japanese Buddhists in the camps of a jeweled stūpa floating in the sky— should have remained buried in the Wyoming highlands.

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Notes

Preface 1. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 6:326n1. 2. Étienne Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism from the Origins to the Śaka Era, trans. Sara Webb-Boin (Louvain: Peters Press, 1988), xxii. 3. Timothy Barrett, “History,” in Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 125.

Introduction 1. Cited in George Roerich, Biography of Dharmasvāmin (Chag lo tsa-ba Chos-rjedpal), A Tibetan Monk Pilgrim (Patna: K. P. Jayaswal Research Institute, 1959), 17. The translation is mine. 2. In an essay on the spread of Chan (Zen) Buddhism, T. Griffith Foulk considers various implications of the word “spread” as it might pertain to Buddhism. He rejects the term as it is used to describe butter on bread and as it is used to describe fire and flood, suggesting that its most apt use would be in the case of contagion. He writes, “If Buddhism is conceived as arising in India and subsequently spreading all over Asia like some strain of flu that starts in Hong Kong and eventually infects people all over the world, the implications are that it will infect some individuals and not others; that certain populations will be more susceptible than others; and that it can coexist in a population with other religious pathogens.” See T. Griffith Foulk, “The Spread of Chan (Zen) Buddhism,” in The Spread of Buddhism, ed. Ann Heirman and Stephan Peter Bumbacher (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 434. 3. See Heinz Bechert, ed., When Did the Buddha Live?: The Controversy on the Dating of the Historical Buddha (Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1995). On Tibetan calculations, see also David Seyfort Ruegg, “Notes on Some Indian and Tibetan Reckonings

453

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of the Buddha’s Nirvāna and the Duration of His Teaching,” in The Dating of the Histor˙ ical Buddha, pt. 2, ed. Heinz Bechert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1992), 263–90. In his influential A History of Indian Buddhism: From Śākyamuni to Early Mahā­ yāna (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990), the Japanese scholar Hirakawa Akira, following Nakamura Hajime, uses 463 to 383 BCE for the dates of the Buddha. 4. Professor [H. H.] Wilson, “On Buddha and Buddhism,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 16 (1856): 248. 5. On relations between Buddhists and other ascetic groups in India, see Claire Maes, “Dialogues with(in) the Pāli Vinaya: A Research into the Dynamics and Dialectics of the Pāli Vinaya’s Ascetic Others, with a Special Focus on the Jain Other” (PhD diss., University of Ghent, 2018). 6. Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Samyutta Nikāya (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2000), 1:653. ˙ 7. For an informative and judicious survey of the surviving evidence, see Erik Seldeslachts, “Greece, the Final Frontier?,” in Heirman and Bumbacher, Spread of Buddhism, 75–130. 8. Li Rongxi, trans., The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions, BDK English Tripit aka 79 (Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Re˙ search, 1996), 330. 9. Cited in Étienne Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism from the Origins to the Śaka Era, trans. Sara Webb-Boin (Louvain: Peters Press, 1988), 552. Lamotte goes on to explain the somewhat problematic word “chandas.” 10. Cited in Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism, 554. 11. Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism, 551. 12. K. R. Norman, Pāli Literature: Including the Canonical Literature in Prakrit and Sanskrit of All the Hīnayāna Schools of Buddhism (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1983), 6. 13. See Erik Zürcher, “Buddhism across Boundaries: The Foreign Input,” in Buddhism across Boundaries: The Interplay of Indian, Chinese, and Central Asian Source Materials, ed. John R. McRae and Jan Nattier (Philadelphia: Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 2012), 4–5. 14. On the status of “slaves,” see Gregory Schopen, “The Monastic Ownership of Servants or Slaves: Local and Legal Factors in the Redactional History of Two Vinayas,” in Buddhist Monks and Business Matters: Still More Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), 193–218. 15. For a study of monastic offices as they appear in Indian sources (with reference also to their Chinese counterparts), see Jonathan A. Silk, Managing Monks: Administrators and Administrative Roles in Indian Buddhist Monasticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). On the institution of monastic landowning in Sri Lanka, see Michael B. Carrithers, “‘They Will Be Lords upon the Island’: Buddhism in Sri Lanka,” in The World of Buddhism: Buddhist Monks and Nuns in Society and Culture, ed. Heinz Bechert and Richard Gombrich (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), 136–40.

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16. Patrick Olivelle, trans., The Dharmasūtras: The Law Codes of Ancient India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 168. 17. Essays on the quotidian in Indian Buddhist monastic life can be found, as its title suggests, in Schopen, Buddhist Monks and Business Matters. 18. See Walpola Rahula, History of Buddhism in Ceylon (Colombo, Sri Lanka: M. D. Gunasena, 1956), 158–64. 19. On the portrayal of elderly monks in the Indian monastic code, see Gregory Schopen, “On Incompetent Monks and Able Urbane Nuns in the Buddhist Monastic Code,” in Buddhist Nuns, Monks, and Other Worldly Matters: Recent Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014), 47–72. 20. See Schopen, Buddhist Nuns, Monks, esp. chaps. 4–6. On slaves, see Gregory Schopen, “Liberation Is Only for Those Already Free: Reflections on Debts to Slavery and Enslavement to Debt in an Early Indian Buddhist Monasticism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82, no. 3 (September 2014): 606–35. 21. See Gregory Schopen, “The Buddhist Bhiksu’s Obligation to Support His Parents ˙ in Two Vinaya Traditions,” in Buddhist Nuns, Monks, 311–32; and Shayne Clarke, Family Matters in Indian Buddhist Monasticisms (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013). 22. On prohibitions of the ordination of slaves, see Gregory Schopen, “On Some Who Are Not Allowed to Become Buddhist Monks and Nuns: An Old List of Types of Slaves and Unfree Laborers,” in Buddhist Nuns, Monks, 157–72. For a detailed study of the Buddhist attitude toward candālas, see Jonathan A. Silk, “Indian Buddhist Attitudes ˙ ˙ toward Outcastes: Rhetoric around candālas,” Indo-Iranian Journal 63 (2020): 128–87. ˙ ˙ 23. For an insightful survey of scholarship on the institutional history of Buddhism in India, see Birendra Nath Prasad, “Major Trends and Perspectives in Studies in the Functional Dimensions of Indian Monastic Buddhism in the Past One Hundred Years: A Historiographical Survey,” Buddhist Studies Review 25, no. 1 (2008): 54–89. 24. For a translation of the inscription, see Arthur Waley, “New Light on Buddhism in Medieval India,” Mélanges chinois et bouddhiques 1931–32 (July 1932): 355–76. 25. See Inoue Takami, “The Interaction between Buddhist and Shinto Shrine Traditions at Suwa Shrine,” in Buddhas and Kami in Japan: Honji Suijaku as a Combinatory Paradigm, ed. Fabio Rambelli and Mark Teeuwen (London: Taylor and Francis Group, 2002), 287–312. 26. See John Kieschnick, Buddhist Historiography in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022). 27. See Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 27–31. 28. See Zürcher, “Buddhism across Boundaries,” 20–21. 29. See Eric M. Greene, “Doctrinal Dispute in the Earliest Phase of Chinese Buddhism—Anti-Mahāyāna Polemics in the Scripture on the Fifty Contemplations,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 40 (2017): 63–109. 30. For a rare and valuable study of the economics of Buddhism in China, see

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Jacques Gernet, Buddhism in Chinese Society: An Economic History from the Fifth to the Tenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 31. See Benjamin Brose, Patrons and Patriarchs: Regional Rulers and Chan Monks dur­ ing the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015). 32. For a translation of such a ledger book, The Record of Self-Knowledge (Zizhi Lu) by Zhuhong (1535–1615), see Chün-fang Yü, The Renewal of Buddhism in China: Zhuhong and the Late Ming Synthesis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 233–58. 33. Matty Wegehaupt and Byung-sam Jung, trans., “Open Road to the World: Memoirs of a Pilgrimage to the Five Indian Kingdoms,” in Collected Works of Korean Buddhism, vol. 10, Korean Buddhist Culture: Accounts of a Pilgrimage, Monuments, and Eminent Monks, ed. Roderick Whitfield (Seoul: Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism, 2012), 121. 34. For a discussion of the term “later dissemination” or “later spread” and its various political and ideological implications, see Sven Bretfeld, “The Later Spread of Buddhism in Tibet,” in Heirman and Bumbacher, Spread of Buddhism, 341–78. 35. On tantric Buddhism on the islands of Southeast Asia, see Andrea Acri, ed., Esoteric Buddhism in Mediaeval Maritime Asia: Networks of Masters, Texts, Icons (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2016). 36. For a study of the evolution of the Burmese san˙gha in the nineteenth century, see Alexey Kirichenko, “From Thathanadaw to Theravada Buddhism: Constructions of Religion and Religious Identity in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Myanmar,” in Casting Faiths: Imperialism and the Transformation of Religion in East and Southeast Asia, ed. Thomas David DuBois (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 23–45. 37. See Erik Braun, The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 38. For a discussion of the role of Buddhism in Lao kingship prior to the arrival of the European colonial powers, see Volker Grabowsky, “Buddhism, Power and Political Order in Pre-Twentieth Century Laos,” in Buddhism, Power and Political Power, ed. Ian Harris (New York: Routledge, 2007), 121–42. 39. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, Books 1–3, trans. John Ferguson, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 85 (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1991), 76. 40. Marco Polo, The Book of Ser Marco Polo the Venetian Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, 3rd ed., trans. and ed. Sir Henry Yule, rev. Henri Cordier (1926; repr., New York: AMS, 1986), 2:316–19. See also the extensive notes of Yule and Cordier at 2:320–30. 41. On the European encounter with Buddhism, see Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Philip C. Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Donald S. Lopez Jr., Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol: An Anthology of Early European Portrayals of the Buddha (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); and Donald S. Lopez, Jr., ed.,

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Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 42. On Buddhism in America, see Rick Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America, 40th anniv. ed. (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 2022).

Chapter 1. History 1. Michel de Certeau, The Possession at Loudun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 7. 2. James Prinsep, “Discovery of the Name of Antiochus the Great, in Two of the Edicts of Asoka, King of India,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 7 (1838): 156. 3. H. G. Wells, The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 1:394. 4. Cited in Eugène Burnouf, Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism, trans. Katia Buffetrille and Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 354. 5. For the story of Aśoka in the Mahāvamsa, see Wilhelm Geiger, trans., The Mahā˙ vamsa or Great Chronicle of Ceylon (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), 27–43. ˙ 6. James Prinsep, “Further Elucidation of the Lát or Sílasthambha Inscriptions from Various Sources,” Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of London (September 1837): 790. For Turnour’s translation of the Mahāvamsa, see George Turnour, The First Twenty ˙ Chapters of the Mahawanso and a Prefatory Essay on Pali Buddhistical Literature (Ceylon: Cotta Church Mission Press, 1836). 7. Burnouf, Introduction, 525. 8. Burnouf, Introduction, 533. 9. Later in that same Sanskrit source, the Aśokāvadāna, we find a list of eleven generations of kings between the Buddha’s patron and contemporary, Bimbisāra, and Aśoka. For this reason, John Strong argues that the period of one hundred years between the death of the Buddha and birth of Aśoka is simply a way of saying that at the time of Aśoka, no contemporaries of the Buddha were alive, as the text makes clear elsewhere in the story. See John S. Strong, The Legend of King Aśoka: A Study and Translation of the Aśokāvadāna (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 21–22. 10. For a discussion of the seven titles and their significance for understanding the early “canon,” see Étienne Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism from the Origins to the Śaka Era, trans. Sara Webb-Boin (Louvain: Peters Press, 1988), 234–37. See also Lambert Schmithausen, “An Attempt to Estimate the Distance in Time between Aśoka and the Buddha in Terms of Doctrinal History,” in The Dating of the Historical Buddha, Part 2, ed. Heinz Bechert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1992), 110–47; and Patrick Olivelle, Ashoka, Portrait of a Philosopher King (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024), 118–23.

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11. See Gregory Schopen, “Immigrant Monks and the Protohistoric Dead,” in Buddhist Monks and Business Matters: Still More Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), 373. On the meaning of the inscription, see Peter Skilling, “Relics: The Heart of Buddhist Veneration,” in Relic and Relic Worship in Early Buddhism: India, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Burma, ed. Janice Stargardt and Michael Willis (London: British Museum, 2018), 12. 12. For detailed discussions of the “Schism Edict” and its possible meanings, see Herman Tieken, “Aśoka and the Buddhist Samgha: A Study of Aśoka’s Schism Edict ˙ and Minor Rock Edict I,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 63, no. 1 (2000): 1–30; and Olivelle, Ashoka, 124–33. 13. For an excellent study of Aśoka based on a careful analysis of the inscriptions, see Patrick Olivelle, Ashoka, Portrait of a Philosopher King (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024). For a wide-ranging collection of essays about Aśoka, see Patrick Olivelle, Janice Leoshko, and Himanshu Prabha Ray, eds., Reimagining Aśoka: Memory and History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012). For a comparison of the Aśoka of the edicts, of the Sanskrit Aśokāvadāna, and of the Pāli sources, see Max Deeg, “From Iron-Wheel to Bodhisattvahood: Aśoka in Buddhist Culture and Memory,” in Aśoka in History and Historical Memory, ed. Patrick Olivelle (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2009), 109–44. For a bibliography of the vast body of scholarship on the Aśokan inscriptions, see Harry Falk, Asokan Sites and Artefacts—A Source-Book with Bibliography (Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2006). 14. See Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Modern China (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 277–80. 15. Georgina Max Müller, ed., The Life and Letters of the Right Honourable Friedrich Max Müller, Edited by His Wife, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1902), 1:34. 16. Cited in Edward C. Sachau, trans., Alberuni’s India: An Account of the Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Geography, Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Laws and Astrology of India about A.D. 1030 (London: Trübner, 1888), 2:10–11. 17. Jorge Luis Borges, “Forms of a Legend” (1952), in Selected Non-Fictions, trans. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 373.

Chapter 2. Apocalypse 1. See Mark L. Kleinman, “Searching for the ‘Inner Light’: The Development of Henry A. Wallace’s Experimental Spiritualism,” Annals of Iowa 53, no. 3 (1994): 211. 2. This work is not to be confused with the more famous Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna by “M.,” published in five volumes between 1902 and 1932. 3. Anagārika Dharmapāla, “Can a Buddhist Be a Member of the Theosophical Society?,” Maha-Bodhi and the United Buddhist World 14, no. 3 (March 1906): 42. In the following year, he wrote, “The Dharma stands unique on its own basis and it has no connection with the latter ‘isms’ founded by enthusiasts and visionaries. Theosophy as

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a pantheism may claim kinship with other existing religions which posit a creator and a selfish ego. The Dharma of the Tathāgata, we emphasize, has no relationship with any other existing religion.” See Anagārika Dharmapāla, “Colonel Olcott and the Buddhist Revival Movement,” Maha-Bodhi and the United Buddhist World 15, nos. 1–3 (January– March 1907): 28. 4. Gendun Chopel, Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler, trans. Thupten Jinpa and Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 402. 5. Nicolas Notovitch, The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, trans. Alexina Loranger (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1894), 51–52. 6. Max Müller, “The Alleged Sojourn of Christ in India,” The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review 36 (July–December 1894): 515–22. 7. See Maurice Oldender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 8. Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, “Note on the Origin of the Kála-Chakra and AdiBuddha Systems,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 2 (1833): 57, repr. in Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, Tibetan Studies (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1984), 21. The first European reference to Shambhala is generally believed to be that of the Portuguese Jesuits João Cabral and Estêvão Cacella, who refer to Xembala in their letters of 1627. See George N. Roerich, “Studies in the Kālacakra,” Journal of the Urusvati Himalayan Research Institute of the Roerich Museum 2 (1931): 15–16. See also C. Wessels, Early Jesuit Travellers in Central Asia 1603–1721 (1924; repr., New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1992), 147–48. 9. Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, “Analysis of the Sher-Chin,” Asiatic Researches 20, pt. 2 (1836): 488. See also his “Abstract of the Contents of the Bstan-Hgyur,” Asiatic Researches 20, pt. 2 (1836): 564. 10. John Newman, “Islam in the Kālacakra Tantra,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 21, no. 2 (1998): 325. 11. Newman, “Islam in the Kālacakra Tantra,” 335. 12. See Alexandre Andreyev, The Myth of the Masters Revived: The Occult Lives of Nikolai and Elena Roerich (Leiden: Brill 2014), 305. 13. See Gray Tuttle, “Tibet as the Source of Messianic Teachings to Save Republican China,” in Images of Tibet in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. Monica Esposito (Paris: École Francaise d’Extrême-Orient, 2008), 1:303–27. 14. Cited in Andreyev, Myth of the Masters Revived, 403–4. 15. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1893), 2:231. One of Madame Blavatsky’s sources on Shambhala was Emil Schlagintweit’s 1863 Buddhism in Tibet Illustrated by Literary Documents and Objects of Religious Worship with an Account of the Buddhist Systems Preceding It in India, the first detailed study of Tibetan Buddhism in a European language. 16. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, A Modern Panarion: A Collection of Fugitive Fragments (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1895), 1:478.

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17. Cited in Andreyev, Myth of the Masters Revived, 375. 18. See Charles Errico and J. Samuel Walker, “The New Deal and the Guru,” American Heritage 40, no. 2 (March 1989): 92–99. 19. Isrun Engelhardt, “The Strange Case of the ‘Buddha from Space,’” Revue d’études Tibétaines 42 (October 2017): 39–67.

Chapter 3. Art 1. On the contents of the Seiryōji image, see Gregory Henderson and Leon Hurvitz, “The Buddha of Seiryōji: New Finds and New Theory,” Artibus Asiae 19, no. 1 (1956): 4–55; and Daniel Borengasser, “The Presence of the Buddha: Transmission of Sacred Authority and the Function of Ornament in Seiryōji’s Living Icon” (master’s thesis, University of Oregon, June 2014). On the consecration of statues by the Japanese monk Eison (1201–1290), including a discussion of the materials placed inside a wooden statue of himself, see Paul Groner, “Icons and Relics in Eison’s Religious Activities,” in Living Images: Japanese Buddhist Icons in Context, ed. Robert H. Sharf and Elizabeth Horton Sharf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 114–50. On the Korean practice of placing objects inside Buddhist statues, see James Robson, Seunghye Lee, and Youn-mi Kim, “The Korean Pokchang Tradition and the Placing of Objects in Buddhist Statues,” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 28 (2019): 1–22. 2. On the Buddha’s relationship to his mother, see Reiko Ohnuma, Ties That Bind: Maternal Imagery and Discourse in Indian Buddhism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). On the Tawadeintha festival, see 171–72. The mother-son relationship is also emphasized in Chinese versions of the story. According to the Indian sources, Queen Māyā is reborn as a male god. However, in an apocryphal Chinese sūtra, she remains female. When she learns of her son’s arrival on Mount Meru, milk spontaneously shoots from her breasts into the mouth of her son. See Hubert Durt, “The Meeting of the Buddha with Māyā in the Trayastrimśa Heaven: Examination of the Sūtra of Mahāmāyā ˙ and Its Quotations in the Shijiapu, Part 1,” Journal of the International College for Postgraduate Buddhist Studies (2007): 44–66. See also Komine Kazuaki, “Imēji no kairō 7: Maya to Maria no junyū [A Gallery of Images, Part 7: Breastfeeding by Māyā and Mary],” Tosho, no. 761 (July 2012): 52–57. I am grateful to Micah Auerback for this latter reference. 3. On the term “xiang jiao” and whether it actually means “religion of the icons,” see Eric M. Greene, “The ‘Religion of Images’? Buddhist Image Worship in the Early Medieval Chinese Imagination,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 138, no. 3 (July– September 2018): 455–84. 4. Cited in Robert H. Sharf, “The Scripture on the Production of Buddha Images,” in Religions of China in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 266.

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5. For a discussion of the ongoing debates about the dating of the Bimaran Casket, see Robert DeCaroli, Image Problems: The Origin and Development of the Buddha’s Image in Early South Asia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015), 18–20. 6. For a discussion of this passage and its several versions, see DeCaroli, Image Problems, 31–34, 173–74. The Chinese version of the An˙guttara Nikāya contains a statement not found in the Pāli version: “[The body of the Tathāgata] is supreme and the most venerable in the carnal world. It transcends all class of gods and contains the seven riches of the Law, which is beyond the stages of men, gods, and other natural living beings, and cannot be made an image.” Cited in DeCaroli, Image Problems, 38–39. See also Gregory Schopen, “Celebrating Odd Moments: The Biography of the Buddha in Some Mūlasarvāstivādin Cycles of Religious Festivals,” in Buddhist Nuns, Monks, and Other Worldly Matters: Recent Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014), 382–84. 7. See DeCaroli, Image Problems, chap. 3, “Image Aversion.” 8. See Gregory Schopen, “On Sending Monks Back to Their Books,” in Figments and Fragments of Mahāyāna Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), 120–27. 9. This passage is drawn from the biography of the Buddha by the Japanese nun Kōgetsu Sōgi (1756–1833). See Kinami Takuichi, ed., Miyo no hikari: Shakuson den [The Light of the Three Ages: A Biography of the Venerable Śākyamuni] (Hirakata: Kinami Takuichi, 1980), 247. The passage was translated by Micah Auerback. For different versions of this story, see DeCaroli, Image Problems, 154–58. 10. Li Rongxi, trans., The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions (Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 1996), 160, 386. 11. Cited in Benjamin Brose, Xuanzang: China’s Legendary Pilgrim and Translator (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 2021), 1. 12. For a detailed study of the Udāyana image, drawn largely from Chinese sources, see Martha L. Carter, The Mystery of the Udayana Buddha (Napoli: Istituto Universale Orientale, 1990). 13. See Miyeko Murase, “History of the Udāyana Image (Shaka-do Engi),” in Emaki: Narrative Scrolls from Japan (New York: Asia Society, 1983), 169–73. 14. See Borengasser, “Presence of the Buddha,” 43–44. As Borengasser notes, the Southern Tang did not fall to the Northern Song until 975. For the connection between the image said to have been brought by Kumārajīva and the image said to have been brought from India to China by General Qian after the famous dream of Emperor Wu, see Borengasser, “Presence of the Buddha,” 46–49. 15. See Juhyung Rhi, “Images, Relics, and Jewels: The Assimilation of Images in the Buddhist Relic Cult of Gandhāra: Or Vice Versa,” Artibus Asiae 65, no. 2 (2005): 172. 16. For a detailed description of these rituals, see Donald K. Swearer, Becoming the Buddha (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 77–172.

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17. Cited in Yael Bentor, Consecration of Images and Stūpas in Indo-Tibetan Tantric Buddhism (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), folios 441–42. For Yael Bentor’s translation from the Tibetan, see 320. 18. See Swearer, Becoming the Buddha, 213–14. 19. Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon in the East-Indies; Together, with an Account of the Detaining in Captivity the Author and Divers Other Englishmen Now Living There, and of the Author’s Miraculous Escape (London, 1681), 82. For a modern edition, see Robert Knox, An Historical Relation of Ceylon (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1911). 20. Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, trans. Kitty Mrosovsky (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 163. 21. A slightly different description of the scene is found in Henderson and Hurvitz, “Buddha of Seiryōji,” 43. 22. Tsugunari Kubo and Akira Yuyama, trans., The Lotus Sutra, rev. 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2007), 40.

Chapter 4. Canon 1. On E. Gene Smith, see Dafna Zahavi Yachin and Arthur M. Fischman, Digital Dharma: Recovering Wisdom (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2022). 2. Bhikkhu Ñānamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Middle Length Discourses of ˙ the Buddha: A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikāya (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 548. 3. Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Samyutta Nikāya (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2005), 1:681. In the ˙ quotation, the term “true Dhamma” has been changed here to “true dharma.” 4. On this question, see Richard Salomon, “An Unwieldy Canon: Observations on Some Distinctive Features of Canon Formation in Buddhism,” in Kanonisierung und Kanonbildung in der asiatischen Religionsgeschichte, ed. Max Deeg, Oliver Freiberger, and Christoph Kleine (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2011), 161–207. 5. See Max Deeg, “Chinese Buddhists in Search of Authenticity in the Dharma,” Eastern Buddhist 45, nos. 1–2 (2014): 15. 6. See Kyoko Tokuno, “The Evaluation of Indigenous Scriptures in Chinese Buddhist Bibliographical Catalogues,” in Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha, ed. Robert E. Buswell, Jr. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990), 31–74. 7. See Tokuno, “Evaluation of Indigenous Scriptures,” 34. 8. See William M. Bodiford, “Zen in the Art of Funerals: Ritual Salvation in Japanese Buddhism,” History of Religions 32, no. 2 (November 1992): 159. 9. See Étienne Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism from the Origins to the Śaka Era, trans. Sara Webb-Boin (Louvain: Peters Press, 1988), 193.

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10. See Jamie Hubbard, “Mo Fa, The Three Levels Movement, and the Theory of the Three Periods,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 19, no. 1 (Summer 1996): 14. 11. On the economics of the Inexhaustible Treasuries, see Jacques Gernet, Buddhism in Chinese Society: An Economic History from the Fifth to the Tenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 210–28. 12. See Tokuno, “Evaluation of Indigenous Scriptures,” 51–52. 13. On the Three Levels school, see Jamie Hubbard, Absolute Delusion, Perfect Buddhahood: The Rise and Fall of a Chinese Heresy (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001); and Mark Edward Lewis, “The Suppression of the Three Stages Sect: Apocrypha as a Political Issue,” in Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha, ed. Robert E. Buswell, Jr. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990), 207–38. 14. Tsugunari Kubo and Akira Yuyama, trans., The Lotus Sutra, rev. 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2007), 298. 15. For a useful description of the Library Cave and the various theories about its contents, see Sam van Schaik and Imre Galambos, Manuscripts and Travellers: The SinoTibetan Documents of a Tenth-Century Buddhist Pilgrim (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 13–34. 16. See Peter Skilling, “Birchbark, Bodhisatvas, and Bhānakas: Writing Materials in ˙ Buddhist North India,” in Lecteurs et copistes dans les traditions manuscrites Iraniennes, Indiennes et Centralasiatiques, Eurasian Studies 12, nos. 1–2, ed. Nalini Balbir and Maria Szuppe (Rome: Istituto per l’Oriente Carlo Alfonso Nallino, 2014), 499–521. 17. For a study of the Chinese Buddhist canons, see Jiang Wu and Lucille Chia, Spreading Buddha’s Word in East Asia: The Formation and Transformation of the Chinese Buddhist Canon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). On woodblock printing, see esp. chapter 7 by Darui Long, “Managing the Dharma Treasure: Collation, Carving Printing, and Distribution of the Canon in Late Imperial China,” 219–45. 18. On the Koryŏ canons, see Jiang Wu and Ron Dziwenka, “Better Than the Original: The Creation of the Goryeo Canon and the Formation of the Giyang Bulgyo,” in Wu and Chia, Spreading Buddha’s Word, 249–83. 19. The edition described here is called the Derge or Dége (Sde dge) canon, printed at Derge Monastery in eastern Tibet, with the Kangyur completed in 1733 and the Tengyur completed in 1744. The figures here are drawn from Kurtis R. Schaeffer, The Culture of the Book in Tibet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 151, 156–57.

Chapter 5. Council 1. See Sonya S. Lee, “Transmitting Buddhism to a Future Age: The Leiyin Cave at Fangshan and Cave-Temples with Stone Scriptures in Sixth-Century China,” Archives of Asian Art 60 (2010): 43–78. 2. For informative and insightful discussions of the Buddhist councils, including

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their historicity, see Peter Skilling, “Redaction, Recitation, and Writing: Transmission of the Buddha’s Teaching in India in the Early Period,” in Buddhist Manuscript Culture: Knowledge, Ritual, and Art, ed. Stephen C. Berkwitz, Juliane Schober, and Claudia Brown (London: Routledge, 2009), 55–63; and Peter Skilling, “Nine Recitations and the Inclusive Tripitaka: Canon Formation in Pre-Modern Thailand,” in Evolution of Scriptures, ˙ Formation of Canons: The Buddhist Case, ed. Orna Almogi (Hamburg: Department of Indian and Tibetan Studies, Universität Hamburg, 2022), 273–349. 3. I. B. Horner, trans., The Book of Discipline (Vinaya-Pitaka), vol. 5, Cullavagga ˙ (Oxford: Pali Text Society, 2001), 394. 4. Cited in Bu ston, History of Buddhism (Chos-hbyung) by Bu-ston, pt. 2, The His˙ tory of Buddhism in India and Tibet, trans. E. Obermiller (Heidelberg: Institut für Buddhismus-Kunde, 1931), 74. 5. In the Pāli canon, the account of the First Council and the trial of Ānanda is found in the vinayapitaka in the eleventh chapter of a text called the Lesser Chapter ˙ (Cūl avagga). For an English translation, see Horner, Book of Discipline, 5:393–406. ˙ 6. On the First Council, including the trial of Ānanda, see also Louis de La Vallée Poussin, The Buddhist Councils (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 1976), 2–29. 7. On the Second Council, see La Vallée Poussin, Buddhist Councils, 30–71. 8. See Shayne Clarke, “Vinaya Mātrkā: Mother of All Monastic Codes or Just An˙ other Set of Lists? A Response to Frauwallner’s Handling of the Mahāsāmghika Vinaya,” ˙ Indo-Iranian Journal 47 (2004): 77–120. 9. For a translation of a Pāli account of the Third Council, see Wilhelm Geiger, trans., The Mahāvamsa or Great Chronicle of Ceylon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), 45–50. ˙ 10. On the four great authorities and other criteria for determining textual authenticity, see Étienne Lamotte, “Assessment of Textual Interpretation in Buddhism,” in Buddhist Hermeneutics, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1988), 11–28. See also Ronald M. Davidson, “An Introduction to the Standards of Scriptural Authenticity on Indian Buddhism,” in Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha, ed. Robert Buswell (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990), 291–325. 11. Cited in David Snellgrove, “Notes on the Adhyāśayasamcodanasūtra,” Bulletin of ˙ the School of Oriental and African Studies 21 (1958): 620–23. It is important to note that the phrase “whatever is well-spoken is spoken by the Buddha” also occurs in the An˙guttara Nikāya of the Pāli canon. See Steven Collins, “On the Very Idea of the Pali Canon,” Journal of the Pali Text Society 15 (1990): 94–95. 12. The term “subhāsita” is glossed further by Vasubandhu in his Vyākhyāyukti. For ˙ a discussion of his ten criteria by the fourteenth-century Tibetan scholar Bu ston, see Bu ston, History of Buddhism (Chos-hbyung) by Bu-ston, pt. 1, The Jewelry of Scripture, trans. ˙ E. Obermiller (Heidelberg: Institut für Buddhismus-Kunde, 1931), 25–28. 13. On Ledi Sayadaw and his innovations, see Erik Braun, The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

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Chapter 6. Disappearance 1. Guillaume Joseph Le Gentil de la Galaisière, Voyage dans les mers de l’Inde, fait par ordre du roi, à l’occasion du passage de Vénus sur le disque du soleil le 6 juin 1761, et le 3 du même mois 1769 (Switzerland: Libraires Associés, 1780), 1:224–25. The translation from the French is mine. The passage had appeared in English shortly after its publication. See William Chambers, “Some Account of the Sculptures and Ruins at Mavalipuram, a Place a Few Miles North of Sadras and Known to Seamen by the Name of the Seven Pagodas,” Asiatick Researches 1 (1788): 168–70. 2. One such volume is Giovanni Verardi, Hardships and Downfall of Buddhism in India (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2011). 3. Cited in George Roerich, Biography of Dharmasvāmin (Chag lo tsa-ba Chos-rjedpal), A Tibetan Monk Pilgrim (Patna: K. P. Jayaswal Research Institute, 1959), 12. 4. Cited in Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 113. 5. See Leonard van der Kuijp, “The Earliest Reference to Muslims in an Indian Philosophical Text of ‘Circa’ 700,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 34, no. 3 (June 2006): 169–202. 6. See Matty Wegehaupt and Byung-sam Jung, trans., “Open Road to the World: Memoirs of a Pilgrimage to the Five Indian Kingdoms,” in Collected Works of Korean Buddhism, vol. 10, Korean Buddhist Culture: Accounts of a Pilgrimage, Monuments, and Eminent Monks, ed. Roderick Whitfield (Seoul: Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism, 2012), 102. 7. Wegehaupt and Jung, “Open Road to the World,” 109. 8. Wegehaupt and Jung, “Open Road to the World,” 148. 9. Wegehaupt and Jung, “Open Road to the World,” 159. 10. Marco Polo, The Description of the World, ed. and trans. A. C. Moule and Paul Pelliot (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1938), 1:140. 11. Cited in Donald S. Lopez Jr., and Peggy McCracken, In Search of the Christian Buddha (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 87. 12. Sir Henry Miers Eliot, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians (1869; repr., Calcutta: Susil Gupta, 1953), 18:30–31. 13. H. M. Elliot, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians: The Muslim Period (London: Trübner, 1869), 2:306. 14. On the role of bronze images in the spread of Buddhism, see Robert L. Brown, Carrying Buddhism: The Role of Metal Icons in the Spread and Development of Buddhism, 20th J. Gonda Lecture 2012 (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2014). 15. Cited in Li Rongxi, trans., The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions (Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 1996), 70. 16. See Gregory Schopen, “The Buddha as Owner of Property and Permanent Resident in Medieval Indian Monasteries,” in Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected

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Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), 258–89. 17. For a book-length study of the demise of Buddhism in India, providing extensive evidence of the Hindu persecution of Buddhism over the course of much of its history there, see Giovanni Verardi, Hardships and Downfall of Buddhism in India (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2011). 18. On this early period of decline and the difficulties of drawing conclusions from the archaeological record, see Peter Skilling and J. Manuel, “‘Every Rise Has Its Fall’: Thoughts on the History of Buddhism in Central India,” in Buddhist and Jaina Studies: Proceedings of the Conference in Lumbini, February 2013, ed. J. Soni et al. (Lumbini: Lumbini International Research Institute, 2014), 77–135. 19. See David Templeman, “Buddhaguptanātha: A Late Indian Siddha in Tibet,” in Tibetan Studies: Proceedings of the 7th Seminar of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, Graz 1995, ed. Helmut Krasser, Michael Torsten Much, Ernst Steinkellner, and Helmut Tauscher (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften), 2:955–66. The Sri Lankan scholar R. A. L. H. Gunawardana presents evidence that Buddhism survived in India into the seventeenth century. See his Robe and Plough: Monasticism and Economic Interest in Early Medieval Sri Lanka (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1978), 264. 20. Introduction to the Domain of the Inconceivable Qualities and Wisdom of the Tathāgatas (Tathāgatagunajñānācintyavisayāvatāranirdeśa), from 84000: Translating the Words ˙ ˙ of the Buddha, https://read.84000.co/translation/toh185.html, Toh. 185, 1.66, 1.100; Tibetan text 122a–b, 126b–127a.

Chapter 7. Encounter 1. John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 86. 2. John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold, 21. In an interview with L’express published on March 20, 1997, the future pope, Benedict XVI (at the time, Cardinal Ratzinger), said, “If Buddhism is attractive, it is because it appears as a possibility of touching the infinite and obtaining happiness without having any concrete religious obligations. A spiritual auto-eroticism of some sort. Someone had rightly predicted in the 1950s that the challenge to the Church in the twentieth century would not be Marxism, but Buddhism.” 3. Athanasius Kircher, China Illustrata, trans. Charles D. Van Tuyl (Bloomington: Indiana University Research Institute, 1987), 141–42. 4. On the European encounter with Buddhism, see, for example (listed alphabetically by author): Charles Allen, The Search for the Buddha: The Men Who Discovered ­India’s Lost Religion (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003); Philip C. Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Urs App,

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The Cult of Emptiness: The Western Discovery of Buddhist Thought and the Invention of Oriental Philosophy (Rorschach, Switzerland: UniversityMedia, 2012); Roger-Pol Droit, The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Elizabeth J. Harris, Theravāda Buddhism and the British Encounter (London: Routledge, 2006); Donald S. Lopez Jr., From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Donald S. Lopez Jr., Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol: An Anthology of Early European Portrayals of the Buddha (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Henri de Lubac, La recontre du bouddhisme et de l’Occident (Paris: Le Éditions du Cerf, 2000). 5. On the dharmamahāmātra, see Patrick Olivelle, Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024), esp. 199–209; and Étienne Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism: From the Origins to the Śaka Era (Louvain: Peeters, 1998), 225–29. 6. Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis: Books 1–3, trans. John Ferguson, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 85 (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1991), 76, 293. Clement describes these holy men as naked, suggesting that they were not Buddhists. 7. On the Jesuits’ choice of dress, see Willard J. Peterson, “What to Wear? Observation and Participation by Jesuit Missionaries in Late Ming Society,” in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 403–21. See also R. Po-chia Hsia, “From Buddhist Garb to Literati Silk: Costume and Identity of the Jesuit Missionary,” in Religious Ceremonials and Images: Power and Social Meaning (1400–1750), ed. José Pedro Paiva (Coimbra, Portugal: Palimage Editores, 2002), 143–53. 8. Cited in Nicolas Trigault, The China That Was: China as Discovered by the Jesuits at the Close of the Sixteenth Century, trans. Louis J. Gallagher (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Company, 1942), 164–65. 9. See, for example, Justin Martyr, 1 Apology, 54:7–8, 62:1–2, 66:1–4. 10. Kircher, China Illustrata, 66. 11. Matteo Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (T’ien-chu Shih-i), trans. Douglas Lancashire and Peter Hu Kuo-chen (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1985), 143. 12. Ricci, True Meaning, 261. 13. See Ippolito Desideri, Mission to Tibet: The Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Account of Father Ippolito Desideri, S. J., ed. Leonard Zwilling, trans. Michael J. Sweet (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2010), 364. 14. Thuken Losang Chökyi Nyima, The Crystal Mirror of Philosophical Systems, trans. Geshé Lhundub Sopa (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2009), 352. For a study of the evidence of possible Tibetan contacts with Nestorians and Manicheans, see Geza Uray, “Tibet’s Connections with Nestorianism and Manicheism in the 8th–10th

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Centuries,” in Contributions on Tibetan Language, History, and Culture, ed. Ernst Steinkellner and Helmut Tauscher (Vienna: Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien Universität Wien, 1983), 1:399–430. On other Geluk descriptions of Christianity, see Michael J. Sweet, “Jesus the World Protector: Eighteenth-Century Gelukpa Historians View ‘Christianity,’” Buddhist-Christian Studies 26 (2006): 173–78. 15. Cited in Beverley Foulks, “Duplicitous Thieves: Ouyi Zhixu’s Criticism of Jesuit Missionaries in Late Imperial China,” Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal 21 (2008): 67–68. 16. Cited in Ryusaku Tsunoda, W. Theodore de Bary, and Donald Keene, eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 326. 17. The best source for Japanese views of Christianity during this period is George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). 18. Cited in José Miguel Pinto dos Santos, “A 17th-Century Buddhist Treatise Refuting Christianity,” Bulletin of Portuguese-Japanese Studies 4 (June 2002): 107–8. The translation was modified slightly by Micah Auerback. 19. Guy Tachard, A Relation of the Voyage to Siam: Performed by Six Jesuits, Sent by the French King, to the Indies and China, in the Year, 1685: With Their Astrological Observations, and Their Remarks of Natural Philosophy, Geography, Hydrography, and History; Published in the Original, by the Express Orders of His Most Christian Majesty; and Now Made English, and Illustrated with Sculptures (London, 1688), 296–97. 20. John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold, 87, 89–90. Italics in the original. 21. Kosen Nishiyama, trans., A Complete English Translation of Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo (Tokyo: Nakayama Shobo, 1983), 3:80–81, 86–87.

Chapter 8. Food 1. Bhadantācariya Buddhaghosa, The Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga), 4th ed., trans. Bhikkhu Ñānamoli (Seattle: BPS Pariyatti Editions, 2010), 339–40. ˙ 2. On the various versions of the horse-barley story, see Chongdok C. H. Park, “The Buddha’s Eating of Horse-Fodder Barley in the Mūlasarvāstivādin Vinaya,” in Buddhist Narrative in Asia and Beyond, ed. Peter Skilling and Justin McDaniel (Bangkok: Institute of Thai Studies, Chulalongkorn University, 2012), 2:31–44. For discussions of the sense of taste in Buddhism, see Robert DeCaroli and Donald S. Lopez Jr., eds., Buddhism and the Senses (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2024). 3. See Reiko Ohnuma, Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood: Giving Away the Body in Indian Buddhist Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 4. Mrs. Rhys Davids, Psalms of the Early Buddhists, II: Psalms of the Brethren (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), 362. 5. I. B. Horner, trans., Buddhist Discipline (Vinaya-Pitaka), vol. 4, Mahāvagga (Lan˙ caster, UK: Pali Text Society, 2007), 324. See also 298–300, 324–25, 395–400. 6. Adapted from Tsugunari Kubo and Akira Yuyama, trans., The Lotus Sutra, rev.

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2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2007), 249. 7. Verse 294. For translation and commentary, see John Ross Carter and Mahinda Palihawadana, trans., The Dhammapada (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 323–24. 8. See Mark Tatz, trans., The Skill in Means (Upāyakauśalya) Sūtra (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1994), 81–83. 9. Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Aṅguttara Nikāya (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2012), 151. 10. This is the primary argument for vegetarianism in the Descent into Lan˙kā. However, later in the chapter, the Buddha provides a different rationale, more in keeping with the famous “skillful methods” of the other Mahāyāna sūtras. Here, he concedes that in an effort to wean monks from eating meat, he began by only allowing meat with the original threefold purity before eventually presenting these three new criteria, in a technique that he describes as being like “the rungs of a ladder.” For a study of the sūtra’s strategies, see Hyoung Seok Ham, “Manipulating the Memory of Meat-Eating: Reading the Lan˙kāvatāra’s Strategy of Introducing Vegetarianism to Buddhism,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 47 (2019): 133–53. 11. See John Kieschnick, “Buddhist Vegetarianism in China,” in Of Tripod and Palate: Food, Politics and Religion in Traditional China, ed. Roel Sterckx (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 198–202. 12. See Ann Heirman and Tom De Rauw, “Offenders, Sinners and Criminals: The Consumption of Forbidden Food,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 59, no. 1 (2006): 69–70. 13. On this phrase and the play in which it figures, see Micah Auerback, “Sakon Zaburō (Sakon Zaburō, the Hunter),” Asian Theatre Journal 24, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 34–49. 14. See Gaerrang (Kabzung), “Development as Entangled Knot: The Case of the Slaughter Renunciation Movement in Tibet, China,” Journal of Asian Studies 74, no. 4 (November 2015): 927–95.

Chapter 9. Identity 1. For a survey of Hindu contestations with various Buddhist monastics, see Giovanni Verardi, Hardships and Downfall of Buddhism in India (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2011), 197–264. 2. Although there were extensive philosophical debates between Buddhist and Hindu philosophers in the middle and later periods of Indian Buddhism, there is relatively little evidence in the Pāli canon to suggest that the Buddha was familiar with the famous ātman doctrine of the Upanisads. For a discussion of this question, with par˙ ticular focus on those suttas in which the Buddha is in conversation with brahmins, see

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Joseph Walser, “When Did Buddhism Become Anti-Brahmanical? The Case of the Missing Soul,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 86, no. 1 (March 2018): 94–125. 3. Bhikkhu Ñānamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., “Cūl amālunkya Sutta, The Shorter ˙ ˙ Discourse to Mālunkyāputta,” in The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikāya (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 535. 4. Bhikkhu Ñānamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., “Aggivacchagotta Sutta, To Vac˙ chagotta on Fire,” in Middle Length Discourses, 591. For a discussion of these questions, see Steven Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravāda Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 131–37. 5. Louis de La Vallée Poussin, L’Abhidharmakośa de Vasubandhu (Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1925), 5:228. 6. For Vasubandhu’s refutation of the Vātsiputrīya, see Louis de La Vallée Poussin, Abhidharmakośabhāsyam, English trans. M. Pruden (Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities ˙ Press, 1989), 4:1313–80 (the passage quoted here is on 1355). 7. See Changkya Rolpai Dorjé, Beautiful Adornment of Mount Meru: A Presentation of Classical Indian Philosophy, trans. Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2019), 129. 8. See Peter Skilling, “Rehabilitating the Pudgalavādins: Monastic Culture of the Vātsīputrīya-Sammitīya School,” Journal of Buddhist Studies 13 (2016): 1–53. ˙ 9. Michael Zimmerman, A Buddha Within: The Tathāgatagarbhasūtra; The Earliest Exposition of the Buddha-Nature Teaching in India (Tokyo: International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University, 2002), 98–99. 10. Zimmerman, Buddha Within, 105. 11. Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha: A Complete Translation of the An˙guttara Nikāya (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2012), 97. 12. See Malcolm David Eckel, Bhāviveka and His Buddhist Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 126. 13. For a detailed study of the evolution of the tathāgatagarbha doctrine and its implications for the doctrine of no self, see C. V. Jones, The Buddhist Self: On Tathāgatagarbha and Ātman (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020). For a discussion of some of these passages as they pertain to the Heart Sūtra, see Donald S. Lopez, Jr., The Heart Sūtra Explained: Indian and Tibetan Commentaries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 83–86. 14. See Robert H. Sharf, “How to Think with Chan Gong’an,” in Thinking with Cases: Specialized Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History, ed. Charlotte Furth et al. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 205–43. 15. See Jamie Hubbard, Absolute Delusion, Perfect Buddhahood: The Rise and Fall of a Chinese Heresy (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001). 16. See Robert E. Buswell, The Formation of Ch’an Ideology in China and Korea: The Vajrasamādhi-Sūtra, a Buddhist Apocryphon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

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17. See Jacqueline I. Stone, Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003). 18. For a collection of essays on the “other empty” positions, see Michael R. Sheehy and Klaus-Dieter Mathes, eds., The Other Emptiness: Rethinking the Zhentong Buddhist Doctrine in Tibet (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019). 19. For translations of several of Hakamaya’s and Matsumoto’s essays as well as responses to them, see Jamie Hubbard and Paul L. Swanson, eds., Pruning the Bodhi Tree: The Storm over Critical Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997). 20. See Brian Victoria, Zen at War (New York: Weatherhill, 1997), 137. 21. See William Bodiford, “Zen and the Art of Religious Prejudice: Efforts to Reform a Tradition of Social Discrimination,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 23, nos. 1–2 (Spring 1996): 1–27. 22. See, for example, Hubbard and Swanson, Pruning the Bodhi Tree. For an insightful review essay on the volume, see Jacqueline I. Stone, “Review: Some Reflections on Critical Buddhism,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 26, nos. 1–2 (Spring 1999): 159–88.

Chapter 10. Immortality 1. Claude Auguste Court, “Further Information on the Topes of Mánikyála, Being the Translation of an Extract from a Manuscript Memoir on Ancient Taxila, by Mons. A. Court, Engineer Officer in the Army of Mahárájá Ranjit Singh,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 3, no. 35 (November 1834): 558. 2. Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis: Books 1–3, trans. John Ferguson, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 85 (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1991), 293. 3. On this story and the theme of the “gift of the body,” see Reiko Ohnuma, Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood: Giving Away the Body in Indian Buddhist Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). For the version of this story that appears in Āryaśūra’s Jātakamāla, see Justin Meiland, trans., Garland of the Buddha’s Past Lives, by Āryaśūra (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 1:7–25. 4. For a detailed discussion of the various versions, and various scholarly interpretations, of the events surrounding the disposition of the Buddha’s body, see John S. Strong, Relics of the Buddha (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 98–123. 5. Eugène Burnouf, Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism, trans. Katia Buffetrille and Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 340. 6. For a useful study of ancient Indian funerary practices as evidenced in iconography, see Giuseppe De Marco, “The Stūpa as a Funerary Monument: New Iconographical Evidence,” East and West 37, nos. 1–4 (December 1987): 191–246. 7. Louis de La Vallée Poussin, trans., Abhidharmakośabhāsyam, English trans. Leo M. ˙ Pruden (Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1988), 2:382.

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8. On prohibitions against damage to stūpas, see Peter Skilling, “Ideology and Law: The Three Seals Code on Crimes Related to Relics, Images, and Bodhi-Trees,” Buddhism, Law, and Society 1 (2015–16): 69–103. 9. See Gregory Schopen, “The Buddha as Property Owner and Permanent Resident in Medieval Indian Monasteries,” in Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), 258–89. Schopen has written extensively on various aspects of the stūpa and its cult, with insightful essays appearing in the vol­ umes of his collected papers, including Figments and Fragments of Mahāyāna Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005). The position that the Buddha can receive offerings after he has passed into nirvāna is defended at length in the Ques˙ tions of Milinda. See I. B. Horner, trans., Milinda’s Questions (Bristol: Pali Text Society, 2015), 1:132–42. 10. On the olfactory elements of the monastic code, especially as they pertain to stūpas and the room reserved for the Buddha in each monastery known as the perfumed chamber (gandhakutī ), as well as a discussion of debates about the scent of the ˙ Buddha’s feces, see Gregory Schopen, “The Fragrance of the Buddha, the Scent of Monuments, and the Odor of Images in Early India,” Bulletin de l’École française d’ExtrêmeOrient 101 (2015): 11–30. 11. See Peter Skilling, “Relics: The Heart of Buddhist Veneration,” in Relic and Relic Worship in Early Buddhism: India, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Burma, ed. Janice Stargardt and Michael Willis (London: British Museum, 2018), 4. 12. See Juhyung Rhi, “Images, Relics, and Jewels: The Assimilation of Images in the Buddhist Relic Cult of Gandhāra: Or Vice Versa,” Artibus Asie 65, no. 2 (2005): 169–211. 13. See Peter Skilling, “Caitya, Mahācaitya, Tathāgatacaitya: Questions of Terminology in the Age of Amaravati,” in Amaravati: The Art of an Early Buddhist Monument in Context, ed. Akira Shimada and Michael Willis (London: British Museum, 2016), 28. 14. See Jinhua Chen, “Śarīra and Scepter: Empress Wu’s Political Use of Buddhist Relics,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 25, nos. 1–2 (2002): 57. 15. Cited in Robert H. Sharf, “The Buddha’s Finger Bones at Famensi and the Art of Chinese Esoteric Buddhism,” Art Bulletin 93, no. 1 (March 2011): 54. See also Robert  H. Sharf, “On the Allure of Buddhist Relics,” Representations 66 (Spring 1999): 75–99. On relics in Tibetan Buddhism, see Dan Martin, “Pearls from Bones: Relics, Chortens, Tertons and the Signs of Saintly Death in Tibet,” Numen 41, no. 3 (September 1994): 273–324. On relics in Japanese Buddhism, see Brian D. Ruppert, Jewel in the Ashes: Buddha Relics and Power in Medieval Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000). 16. See J. Gerson da Cunha, Memoir on the History of the Tooth-Relic of Ceylon (London: W. Thacker, 1875), 40–46. For an English-language account of the tooth relic incident from 1598, see Iohn Huighen van Linschoten, His discours of voyages into ye Easte and West Indies (London: John Wolfe, 1598), 81. For a detailed description and analysis

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of the story of the Portuguese destruction of the tooth relic, see John S. Strong, The Buddha’s Tooth: Western Tales of a Sri Lankan Relic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 19–149. 17. For a full discussion of this story, its sources, and its historicity, see Strong, Buddha’s Tooth, 110–49. 18. Li Rongxi, trans., The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions (Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 1996), 266–67. 19. For a discussion of the stanza on dependent arising, with references to its many occurrences, see Peter Skilling, Questioning the Buddha: A Selection of Twenty-Five Sūtras (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2021), 247–66.

Chapter 11. Incarnation 1. Willem van Ruysbroeck, The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke, trans. Peter Jackson (London: Hakluyt Society, 1990), 232. 2. On the mythology of the early Tibetan kings, see Erik Haarh, The Yar-lun˙ Dynasty: A Study with Particular Regard to the Contribution by Myths and Legends to the History of Ancient Tibet and the Origin and Nature of Its Kings (Copenhagen: GEC Gads Forlag, 1969). 3. For a useful study of the institution of the incarnate lama, especially as it pertains to the dalai lamas, see Leonard W. J. van der Kuijp, “The Dalai Lamas and the Origins of Reincarnate Lamas,” in The Dalai Lamas: A Visual History, ed. Martin Brauen (Chicago: Serindia Publications, 2005), 14–31 (the discussion of the dating of the first cases appears on 28–29). 4. Athansius Kircher, China Illustrata, trans. Charles D. Van Tuyl (Bloomington: Indiana University Research Institute, 1987), 65–66. 5. Ippolito Desideri, Mission to Tibet: The Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Account of Ippolito Desideri, S. J., ed. Leonard Zwilling, trans. Michael J. Sweet (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2010), 304. For a study of Desideri’s argument, see Michael J. Sweet, “The Devil’s Stratagem or Human Fraud: Ippolito Desideri on the Reincarnate Succession of the Dalai Lama,” Buddhist-Christian Studies 29 (2009): 131–40. 6. Sweet, “Devil’s Stratagem,” 306. 7. For biographies of each of the dalai lamas, see Martin Brauen, ed., The Dalai Lamas: A Visual History (Chicago: Serindia Publications, 2005). For a more detailed study, focusing especially on the Fifth Dalai Lama onward, see Peter Schwieger, The Dalai Lama and the Emperor of China: A Political History of the Tibetan Institution of Reincarnation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 8. On Bogle, see Kate Teltscher, The High Road to China: George Bogle, the Panchen Lama, and the First British Expedition to Tibet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). 9. Captain Samuel Turner, An Account of an Embassy to the Court of the Teshoo Lama,

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in Tibet; Containing a Narrative of a Journey through Bootan, and Part of Tibet (London: W. Bulmer, 1800), 338. 10. On the Macartney Mission, see James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 11. Clements R. Markham, ed., Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa, 2nd ed. (London: Trübner, 1879), 168. 12. See, for example, Nima Dorjee Ragnubs, trans., “The Third Panchen Lama’s Visit to Chengde,” in New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde, ed. James A. Millward et al. (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 188–98. 13. Ragnubs, “Third Panchen Lama’s Visit,” 334–35. 14. Ragnubs, “Third Panchen Lama’s Visit,” 335–36. 15. For a study of relations between the dalai lamas, panchen lamas, and the Chinese emperor, with detailed discussions of the Qing, see Schwieger, Dalai Lama. 16. For the Tibetan text, see Chab ’gag rta mgrin, Bod yig rdo ring zhib ’jug (Lhasa: Bod ljongs mi dmangs dpe skrun khang, 2012), 451. The translation from the Tibetan is mine. For a translation of the entire proclamation from Tibetan, see Max Oidtmann, Forging the Golden Urn: The Qing Empire and Politics of Reincarnation in Tibet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 239–43. 17. For a detailed study of the origins of the Golden Urn, as well as a list of the lamas chosen, see Oidtmann, Forging the Golden Urn. 18. See Arjia Rinpoche, Surviving the Dragon (New York: Rodale, 2010), 205–7.

Chapter 12. Innovation 1. Bhikkhu Ñānamoli, The Life of the Buddha According to the Pali Canon (Seattle: ˙ BPS Pariyatti Editions, 2001), 319. 2. See Toni Huber, The Holy Land Reborn: Pilgrimage and the Tibetan Reinvention of India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 125–65. 3. See Jessica Falcone, Battling the Buddha of Love: A Cultural Biography of the Greatest Statue Never Built (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018). 4. See Todd LeRoy Perreira, “Whence Theravāda: The Modern Geneaology of an Ancient Term,” in How Theravāda Is Theravāda? Exploring Buddhist Identities, ed. Peter Skilling et al. (Bangkok: Silkworm Books, 2012), 550. 5. See Tāranātha, Tāranātha’s History of Buddhism in India, ed. Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, trans. Lama Chimpa and Alaka Chattopadhyaya (Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1970), 161. 6. For thoughtful considerations of this question, see Jonathan A. Silk, “What, If Anything, Is Mahāyāna Buddhism?: Problems of Definitions and Classifications,” Numen 49 (2002): 355–405; and Peter Skilling, “Vaidalya, Mahāyāna, and Bodhisatva in India: An Essay towards Historical Understanding,” in The Bodhisattva Ideal: Essays in the

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Emergence of the Mahāyāna, ed. Bhikkhu Nyanatusita (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 2013), 69–164, esp. his discussion of fifteen things that the Mahāyāna was not (98–106). 7. Cited in Li Rongxi, trans., Buddhist Monastic Traditions of Southern Asia: A Rec­ ord of the Inner Law Sent Home from the South Seas by Śramana Yijing (Berkeley, CA: ˙ Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2000), 12. 8. Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, and Orbus Tertius” (1940), trans. Alastair Reid, in Ficciones (New York: Grove Press, 1962), 28. 9. See Gregory Schopen, Buddhist Monks and Business Matters: Still More Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), 398. 10. See Schopen, Buddhist Monks and Business Matters, 400. 11. For a discussion of these theories and the evidence against them, see, for example, Gregory Schopen, Figments and Fragments of Mahāyāna Buddhism in India: More Collected Papers (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), 108–53. 12. For surveys and evaluations of scholarship on the origins of the Mahāyāna, see David Drewes, “Early Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism I: Recent Scholarship,” Religion Compass 4, no. 2 (2010): 55–65; and David Drewes, “Early Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism II: New Perspectives,” Religion Compass 4, no. 2 (2010): 66–74. 13. Tsugunari Kubo and Akira Yuyama, trans., The Lotus Sutra, rev. 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2007), 30. 14. See Trent Walker, Until Nirvana’s Time: Buddhist Songs from Cambodia (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2022). 15. Kubo and Yuyama, Lotus Sutra, 77. 16. See Paul Harrison, “Mediums and Messages: Reflections on the Production of Mahāyāna Sūtras,” The Eastern Buddhist, n.s., 35, nos. 1–2 (2003): 129–33; and Daniel Boucher, Bodhisattvas of the Forest and the Formation of the Mahāyāna (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008). 17. Bhāviveka, Tarkajvālā, Toh. 3856 Tengyur, dbu ma, dza, 188b2. The translation is mine. 18. See Paul Harrison, The Samādhi of Direct Encounter with the Buddhas of the Present: An Annotated English Translation of the Tibetan Translation of the Pratyupanna-BuddhaSammukhāvasthita-Samādhi-Sūtra (Tokyo: International Institute for Buddhist Studies, ˙ 1990), 96–104. 19. Sde dge edition of the bstan ’gyur, Toh. 3856, dBu ma, Vol. dza, 156a7. The translation is mine. For a translation of the charges and Bhāviveka’s defense, see Malcolm David Eckel, Bhāviveka and His Buddhist Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 126–212. 20. See George Roerich, Biography of Dharmasvāmin (Chag lo tsa-ba Chos-rje-dpal), A Tibetan Monk Pilgrim (Patna: K. P. Jayaswal Research Institute, 1959), 18–19. The translation is mine. 21. See José Cabezón, “Vasubandhu’s Vyākhyāyukti on the Authenticity of the Mahāyāna

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Sutras,” in Texts in Context: Traditional Hermeneutics in South Asia, ed. Jeffrey Timm (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 232–33. 22. See Gregory Schopen, “The Inscription on the Kusān Image of Amitābha and the ˙ Character of the Early Mahāyāna in India” and “The Ambiguity of Avalokiteśvara and the Tentative Identification of a Painted Scene from a Mahāyāna Sūtra at Ajant ā,” in ˙˙ Figments and Fragments, 223–77. 23. See Gregory Schopen, “Mahāyāna in Indian Inscriptions,” in Figments and Fragments, 299–305. 24. See Asaṅga, The Bodhisattva Path to Unsurpassed Enlightenment: A Complete Translation of the Bodhisattvabhūmi, trans. Artemus B. Engle (Boulder, CO: Snow Lion Publications, 2016), 268. 25. On this phrase, see Gregory Schopen, “The Phrase ‘sa pr thivīpradeśaś caity˙ abhūto bhavet’ in the Vajracchedikā: Notes on the Cult of the Book in Mahāyāna,” Indo-Iranian Journal 17 (1975): 147–81. 26. Maitreya, Madhyānta-vibhāga-śāstram, ed. Ram Chandra Pandeya (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1971), vv. 9–10. 27. See I. B. Horner, trans., Milinda’s Questions (Bristol: Pali Text Society, 2020), 2:40–44. 28. For an English translation of Vasubandhu’s discussion, see Louis de La Vallée Poussin, trans., Abhidharmakośabhāsyam, English trans. Leo M. Pruden (Berkeley, CA: ˙ Asian Humanities Press, 1988), 2:484–86. 29. Charles Goodman, trans., The Training Anthology of Śāntideva: A Translation of the Śiksā-samuccaya (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 187. On visions as a ˙ source of Mahāyāna sūtras, see Harrison, “Mediums and Messages,” 115–51. 30. Goodman, Training Anthology of Śāntideva, 269.

Chapter 13. Law 1. For a critical edition and translation, see Manu, Manu’s Code of Law: A Critical Edition and Translation of the Mānavadharmaśāstra, ed. and trans. Patrick Olivelle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 2. Cited in Bu ston, History of Buddhism (Chos-hbyung) by Bu-ston, pt. 1, The Jewelry ˙ of Scripture, trans. E. Obermiller (Heidelberg: Institut für Buddhismus-Kunde, 1931), 18–19. For the Pāli entry, see T. W. Rhys Davids and William Stede, The Pali Text Society’s Pali-English Dictionary (London: Pali Text Society, 1972), s.v. dhamma, 335–39. 3. Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Samyutta Nikāya (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2000), 1:551. ˙ 4. On Aśoka’s use of the term “dharma,” see Patrick Olivelle, Ashoka, Portrait of a Philosopher King (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024), 124–33. 5. See Stephen F. Teiser, The Scripture of the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994).

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6. See the essays in Gregory Schopen, Buddhist Monks and Business Matters: More Essays: Still More Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004). 7. See Gregory Schopen, “Counting the Buddha and the Local Spirits In: A Monastic Ritual of Inclusion for the Rains Retreat,” in Buddhist Nuns, Monks, and Other Worldly Matters: Recent Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014), 194–97. 8. For a study of the Chan “rules of purity,” see T. Griffith Foulk, “Chanyuan qinggui and Other ‘Rules of Purity’ in Chinese Buddhism,” in The Zen Canon: Understanding Classic Texts, ed. Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 275–312. For a study of the organization and offices on Indian Buddhist monasteries, see Jonathan A. Silk, Managing Monks: Administrators and Administrative Roles in Indian Buddhist Monasticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 9. For a study of the genre, see Berthe Jansen, The Monastery Rules: Buddhist Monastic Organization in Pre-Modern Tibet (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). For a partial translation of the monastic regulations of the Je (Bye) College of Sera Monastery, see José Ignacio Cabezón, “The Regulations of a Monastery,” in Religions of Tibet in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 335–51. 10. See Ippolito Desideri, Mission to Tibet: The Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Account of Father Ippolito Desideri, S. J., ed. Leonard Zwilling, trans. Michael J. Sweet (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2010), 370–71. 11. Maurice Walshe, trans., “Aggañña Sutta: On Knowledge of Beginnings,” in The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Dīgha Nikāya (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 413. On this important sutta, see also Steven Collins, “The Discourse on What Is Primary (Aggañña Sutta): An Annotated Translation,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 21, no. 4 (December 1993): 301–93. 12. See D. Christian Lammerts, Buddhist Law in Burma: A History of Dhammasattha Texts and Jurisprudence, 1250–1850 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018), 59. Lammerts notes that most versions of the Dhammavilāsa deal only with the first seventeen of these. 13. See Lammerts, Buddhist Law in Burma, 64. 14. For additional implications, see Lammerts, Buddhist Law in Burma, 64–65. 15. The name, social status, textual location, and a brief description of each is found in Uma Chakravarti, “Appendix C: The Social Background of the Bhikkhus and Upāsakas,” in The Social Dimensions of Early Buddhism (New Delhi: Munchiram Manoharlal, 1987), 198–220. 16. See Eugène Burnouf, Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism, trans. Katia Buffetrille and Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 222–23. 17. For a detailed study of the issue, see Jonathan A. Silk, “Indian Buddhist Attitudes toward Outcastes: Rhetoric around candālas,” Indo-Iranian Journal 63 (2020): 128–87. ˙ ˙ 18. See Manu, Manu’s Code of Law: A Critical Edition and Translation of the Mānava-

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Dharmaśāstra, ed. and trans. Patrick Olivelle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 182. 19. See Manu, Manu’s Code of Law, 128. 20. Avalokitavrata, Prajñāpradīpatīkā, Toh. 3859, dbu ma, wa, 15a3–15b3. The trans˙ lation is mine. 21. On the long history of the relation of the Dalit community to Buddhism and the factors leading to Ambedkar’s decision, see Douglas Ober, Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023), esp. 185–226.

Chapter 14. Narrative 1. For a useful study of the pervasive importance of the jātaka across the Buddhist world (despite the article’s title), see Peter Skilling, “Jātaka and Paññasa-jātaka in South-East Asia,” Journal of the Pāli Text Society 28 (2006): 113–74. 2. See G. H. Luce, “The 550 Jātakas in Old Burma,” Artibus Asiae 19, nos. 3/4 (1956): 291–307. 3. For a translation, see E. B. Cowell and W. H. D. Rouse, trans., Jātaka, or Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), 6:19–37. 4. Cowell and Rouse, Jātaka, 6:19. 5. Marco Polo, The Book of Ser Marco Polo the Venetian Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, 3rd ed., trans. and ed. Sir Henry Yule, rev. by Henri Cordier (1926; repr., New York: AMS, 1986), 2:319. See also the extensive notes of Yule and Cordier at 2:320–30. 6. Thomas W. Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories or Jātaka Tales (London: Trübner, 1880), 1:iii—iv. 7. Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories, 1:lxxxvii. 8. Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories, 1:xlix. 9. Rhys Davids, Buddhist Birth Stories, 1:ii. 10. On the Thet Maha Chat and the changing fate of the jātaka more generally under Mongkut and Chulalongkorn, see Patrick Jory, Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy: The Vessantara Jātaka and the Idea of the Perfect Man (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 23–43. On contemporary performance, see Katherine A. Bowie, Of Beggars and Buddhas: The Politics of Humor in the Vessantara Jataka in Thailand (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017). On the Vessantara Jātaka more generally, see Steven Collins, Readings of the Vessantara Jātaka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 11. Cited in Jory, Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy, 110. 12. This interpretation of Mongkut’s attitude toward the jātaka collection, and especially the Vessantara Jātaka, is drawn from Jory, Thailand’s Theory of Monarchy. 13. See Melody Rod-Ari, “The Buddha as Sacred Siamese King: A Seated Buddha in the Walters Art Museum,” Journal of the Walters Art Museum 7 (2018): 25–34.

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14. See Donald K. Swearer, Becoming the Buddha: The Ritual of Image Consecration in Thailand (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 22.

Chapter 15. Nation 1. On this period, see William E. Deal and Brian Ruppert, A Cultural History of Japanese Buddhism (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2015), 13–43. 2. Samuel Hawley, The Imjin War: Japan’s Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China (Seoul: Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch; Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2005), 495. 3. See Robert E. Buswell, Jr., “Buddhism under Confucian Domination: The Synthetic Vision of Sosăn Hyujŏng,” in Culture and State in Late Chosŏn Korea, ed. JaHyun Kim Haboush and Martina Deuchler (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 134–59. 4. Hawley, Imjin War, 280. 5. On the shrines to the monks, see Maya Stiller, “The Politics of Commemoration: Patronage of Monk-General Shrines in Late Chosŏn Korea,” Journal of Asian Studies 77, no. 1 (February 2018): 83–105. 6. On the transition from Koryŏ to Chosŏn and its effects for the Buddhist community, see Juhn Ahn, Buddhas and Ancestors: Religion and Wealth in FourteenthCentury Korea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018). 7. See Micah L. Auerback, “Japanese Buddhism in an Age of Empire: Mission and Reform in Colonial Korea, 1877–1931” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2007), 241. 8. On the missionary activities of the Sōtō sect in Japan, see Micah L. Auerback, “Japanese Buddhism in an Age of Empire,” and Nam-lin Hur, “The Sōtō Sect and Japanese Military Imperialism in Korea,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 26, nos. 1–2 (1999): 107–34. 9. Vladimir Tikhonov and Owen Miller, eds., Selected Writings of Han Yongun: From Social Darwinism to Socialism with a Buddhist Face (Folkstone, UK: Global Oriental, 2008), 110. 10. On the purification movement, see Pori Park, “The Buddhist Purification Movement in Postcolonial South Korea: Restoring Clerical Celibacy and State Intervention,” in Identity Conflicts: Can Violence Be Regulated?, ed. J. Craig Jenkins and Esther E. Gott­ lieb (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007), 131–45. 11. For a brief discussion of this long and complicated story, see Robert E. Buswell, Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 30– 36. The same volume provides a useful description of Korean Buddhist monastic life in the last half of the twentieth century.

Chapter 16. Ordination 1. Cited in Sujato’s Blog, “The 1928 Bhikkhuni Ban,” https://sujato.wordpress .com/2009/11/09/the-1928-bhikkhuni-ban/. For a discussion of the history of the con-

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troversy into the present century, see Martin Seeger, “The Bhikkhunī-Ordination Controversy in Thailand,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 29, no.  1 (2006): 155–83. For a study of contemporary Thai Buddhist nuns, see Martin Seeger, Gender and the Path to Awakening: Hidden Histories of Nuns in Modern Thai Buddhism (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2018). 2. For a clear overview of the Pāli monastic code, see Oskar von Hinüber, “Buddhist Law According to the Theravāda Vinaya: A Survey of Theory and Practice,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 18, no. 1 (Summer 1995): 7–45. 3. I. B. Horner, trans., The Book of Discipline (Vinaya Pitaka), vol. 5, Cullavagga ˙ (Oxford: Pali Text Society, 2001), 352. Horner’s translation has been adapted, replacing her “Truth-finder” with “Tathāgata.” 4. For a discussion of Mahāprajāpatī and her request for the ordination of women, see Reiko Ohnuma, Ties That Bind: Maternal Imagery and Discourse in Indian Buddhism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 86–112. 5. Horner, Book of Discipline, 5:354. 6. Horner, Book of Discipline, 5:354. 7. Horner, Book of Discipline, 5:358. 8. Horner, Book of Discipline, 5:374–75. 9. Horner, Book of Discipline, 5:375. 10. On Buddhist theories of the decline of the dharma, see Jan Nattier, Once upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline (Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1991). 11. On prophecies of the duration of the dharma, see Nattier, Once upon a Future Time. 12. I. B. Horner, trans., The Book of the Discipline (Vinaya Pitaka), vol. 3, Sutta ˙ Vibhan˙ga (Oxford: Pali Text Society, 2004), 160. See also Ann Heirman, “The Pārājika Precepts for Nuns,” Buddhist Studies Review 20, no. 2 (2003): 169–81. 13. See Shayne Clarke, Family Matters in Indian Buddhist Monasticisms (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013). 14. See Oskar von Hinüber, “The Foundation of the Bhikkhunīsamgha: A Contribution to the Earliest History of Buddhism,” Annual Report of the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology [Soka University] 11 (March 2008): 3–29. 15. For a book-length study of the Divorce Temple, see Sachiko Kaneko Morrell and Robert E. Morrell, Zen Sanctuary of the Purple Robes: Japan’s Tōkeiji Convent since 1285 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). 16. See Ann Heirman, “Chinese Nuns and their Ordination in Fifth Century China,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 24, no. 2 (2001): 275–304. For a book-length study of the Vinaya in China, see Yifa, The Origins of Buddhist Monastic Codes in China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002). 17. On the ordination platform in China, see John R. McRae, “Daoxuan’s Vision of Jetavana: The Ordination Platform Movement in Medieval China,” in Going Forth: Vi-

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sions of Buddhist Vinaya, ed. William M. Bodiford (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), 68–100. 18. On Eison and his self-ordination, see Paul Groner, “Tradition and Innovation: Eison’s Self-Ordinations and the Establishment of New Orders of Buddhist Practitioners,” in Bodiford, Going Forth, 210–35. 19. For a collection of essays on efforts to revive the order of fully ordained nuns, including an essay by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, see Thea Mohr and Jampa Tsedroen, eds., Dignity and Discipline: Reviving Full Ordination for Buddhist Nuns (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2010).

Chapter 17. Orthodoxy 1. For an influential Tibetan commentary on Asan˙ga’s version of the bodhisattva vows, see Asanga and Tsong-Kha-Pa, Asanga’s Chapter on Ethics with the Commentary of Tsong-Kha-Pa, The Basic Path to Awakening, The Complete Bodhisattva, trans. Mark Tatz (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986). For a study of the bodhisattva’s vow to be willing to kill, see Jan-Ulrich Sobisch, “‘Compassionate Killing’ Revisited: The Making and Unmaking of the Killing Bodhisattva,” The Eastern Buddhist 49, nos. 1–2 (2021): 149–79. 2. See A. Charles Mueller and Kenneth K. Tanaka, trans., The Brahmā’s Net Sutra (Moraga, CA: Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai and BDK America, 2017), 44–47. 3. See Ester Bianchi, “Yogācāra Bodhisattva Precepts in Twentieth Century China: Re-Evaluating Rules and Commitments in the Light of Modernity,” in “Take the Vinaya as Your Master”: Monastic Discipline and Practices in Modern Chinese Buddhism, ed. Ester Bianchi and Daniela Campo (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2023), 193–229. 4. For a full list of the forty-eight secondary vows, together with the often-detailed discussion that the sūtra provides for each, see Mueller and Tanaka, Brahmā’s Net Sutra, 48–74. 5. For a detailed study of the evolution of Saichō’s views on the bodhisattva precepts, see Paul Groner, Saichō: The Establishment of the Japanese Tendai School (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), esp. 107–246. See also Paul Groner, “The Fan-wang ching and Monastic Discipline in Japanese Tendai: A Study of Annen’s Futsū jubosatsukai kōshaku,” in Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha, ed. Robert. E. Buswell, Jr. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1990), 251–90. 6. See Nobuyoshi Yamabe, “Visionary Repentance and Visionary Ordination in the Brahmā’s Net Sūtra,” in Going Forth: Visions of Buddhist Vinaya, ed. William M. Bodiford (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), 17–39. For a discussion of the selfordination movement of the Japanese monk Eison, see Paul Groner, “Tradition and Innovation: Eison’s Self-Ordinations and the Establishment of New Orders of Buddhist Practitioners,” in Bodiford, Going Forth, 210–35. 7. Eugène Burnouf and Christian Lassen, Essai sur le pâli, ou langue sacrée de la

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p­ resqu’île au-delà du Gange (Paris: Librairie Orientale de Dondey-Dupré Père et Fils, 1826), 4. The translation is mine. 8. For a fascinating study of the coining of the term “Theravāda” to refer to Pāli Buddhism, see Todd LeRoy Perreira, “Whence Theravāda: The Modern Genealogy of an Ancient Term,” in How Theravāda Is Theravāda? Exploring Buddhist Identities, ed. Peter Skilling et al. (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2021), 443–571 (the French passage is cited on 550). Ananda Metteyya was just one of many European (and, especially, British) men to be ordained as a monk in the Theravāda tradition, usually in Ceylon or Burma, both British colonies at the time. For a biography of a monk called Dhammaloka, see Alicia Turner, Laurence Cox, and Brian Bocking, The Irish Buddhist: The Forgotten Monk Who Faced Down the British Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 9. In 1936, the Chinese Buddhist leader Taixu sent a group of five Chinese monks to Ceylon to receive Theravāda ordination and study the Pāli scriptures. None remained, and all eventually left the monkhood. See Justin R. Ritzinger, “Original Buddhism and Its Discontents: The Chinese Buddhist Exchange Monks and the Search for the Pure Dharma in Ceylon,” Journal of Chinese Religions 44, no. 2 (2016): 149–73. 10. This account of Shaku Kōzen is drawn from Richard M. Jaffe, Seeking Śākyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 20–72.

Chapter 18. Persecution 1. Urs App, The Cult of Emptiness: The Western Discovery of Buddhist Thought and the Invention of Oriental Philosophy (Rorshach, Switzerland: UniversityMedia, 2012), 19. 2. Francis Xavier, The Letters and Instructions of Francis Xavier, trans. M. J. Costelloe (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1992), 336. 3. Cited in George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 43. 4. For a fascinating study of the Jesuit encounter with Buddhist thought in sixteenth-­ century Japan and its aftermath, see App, Cult of Emptiness. 5. On the rise and fall of Nagasaki as a Jesuit colony, see Elison, Deus Destroyed, 85–106. 6. Cited in Elison, Deus Destroyed, 85–106, 115–16. 7. Cited in Ryusaku Tsunoda, W. Theodore de Bary, and Donald Keene, eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 326. 8. Cited in Elison, Deus Destroyed, 387–88. 9. Cited in Elison, Deus Destroyed, 85–106, 300–301. 10. Cited by Martin Collcutt in “Buddhism: The Threat of Eradication,” in Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji, ed. Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert Rozman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 143. The material in this section is drawn

N o t e s t o P a g e s 3 1 1 – 2 1    483

from this essay, where Collcutt shows that there was significant anti-Buddhist sentiment, and some local persecution, during the late Tokugawa. 11. This passage is from the Rāstrapālapariprcchā Sūtra. The translation is drawn ˙˙ ˙ from 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, https://read.84000.co/translation /toh62.html, Toh. 62, v. 207. For a translation and study of this important text, see Daniel Boucher, Bodhisattvas of the Forest and the Formation of the Mahāyāna (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008). 12. Cited in Richard M. Jaffe, Neither Monk nor Layman: Clerical Marriage in Modern Japanese Buddhism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 28. 13. See James C. Dobbins, “Precepts in Japanese Pure Land Buddhism,” in Going Forth: Visons of Buddhist Vinaya, ed. William Bodiford (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), 236–54. 14. For a study of the origins and implications of this famous statement, see Galen Amstutz, “Sexual Transgression in Shinran’s Dream,” The Eastern Buddhist, n.s., 43, nos. 1/2 (2012): 225–69. 15. On the Meiji reforms and the Buddhist responses to them, see James Edward Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Jaffe, Neither Monk nor Layman.

Chapter 19. Philosophy 1. Max Müller, “Buddhism” (1862), in Chips from a German Workshop, vol. 1, Essays on the Science of Religion (1867; repr., Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), 187. 2. Hodgson considered his clearest rendering of the four schools to be his description of them in his 1828 essay “Notices on the Languages, Literature, and Religion of the Bauddhas of Nepál and Bhot,” Asiatic Researches 16 (1828): 409–49. On Hodgson’s Buddhist studies, see Donald S. Lopez, Jr., “The Ambivalent Exegete: Hodgson’s Contributions to Buddhist Studies,” in The Origins of Himalayan Studies: Brian Houghton Hodgson in Kathmandu and Darjeeling, 1820 to 1858, ed. David Waterhouse (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004), 49–76. 3. For a discussion of these questions, see Steven Collins, Selfless Persons, Imagery and Thought in Theravāda Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 131–37. 4. For a translation of Vasubandhu’s text, see Louis de La Vallée Poussin, trans., Abhidharmakośabhāsyam, 4 vols., English trans. Leo M. Pruden (Berkeley, CA: Asian ˙ Humanities Press, 1988). 5. Li Rongxi, trans., The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions (Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 1996), 112. 6. See Eli Franco, Dharmakīrti on Compassion and Rebirth (Vienna: Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien, 1997). 7. For a translation of the śrāvaka chapter of Bhāviveka’s text, see Malcolm David

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Eckel, Bhāviveka and His Buddhist Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 8. On the Jesuits in Japan, see Urs App, The Cult of Emptiness: The Western Discovery of Buddhist Thought and the Invention of Oriental Philosophy (Rorschach, Switzerland: UniversityMedia, 2012). 9. For a study of Desideri’s arguments and a translation of his refutations of rebirth and emptiness, see Donald S. Lopez Jr. and Thupten Jinpa, Dispelling the Darkness: A Jesuit’s Quest for the Soul of Tibet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). 10. For a translation and study of this text, see Donald S. Lopez Jr., The Madman’s Middle Way: Reflections on Reality of the Tibetan Monk Gendun Chopel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Chapter 20. Pilgrimage 1. For a discussion and analysis of the history of the Mahāthūpa, see John S. Strong, Relics of the Buddha (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 160–78. 2. Gendun Chopel, Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler, trans. Thupten Jinpa and Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 345. 3. Sister Vajira and Francis Story, trans., Last Days of the Buddha: The Mahā-parinibbāna Sutta, rev. ed. (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1998), 62–63. 4. On Upagupta, see John S. Strong, The Legend and Cult of Upagupta: Sanskrit Buddhism in North India and Southeast Asia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 5. See Matty Wegehaupt and Byung-sam Jung, trans., “Open Road to the World: Memoirs of a Pilgrimage to the Five Indian Kingdoms,” in Collected Works of Korean Buddhism, vol. 10, Korean Buddhist Culture: Accounts of a Pilgrimage, Monuments, and Eminent Monks, ed. Roderick Whitfield (Seoul: Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism, 2012), 129. 6. For a translation of Yijing’s text, see Latika Lahiri, Chinese Monks in India (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2015). 7. See Sam van Schaik and Imre Galambos, Manuscripts and Travellers: The Sino-­ Tibetan Documents of a Tenth-Century Buddhism Pilgrim (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 55. 8. Marco Polo, The Book of Ser Marco Polo the Venetian Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, 3rd ed., trans. and ed. Sir Henry Yule, rev. Henri Cordier (1926; repr., New York: AMS, 1986), 2:318. See also the extensive notes of Yule and Cordier at 2:320–30. 9. For an edition and translation of a Pāli text devoted entirely to the Buddha’s feet, see Claudio Cicuzza, A Mirror Reflecting the Entire World: The Pāli Buddhapādaman˙gala or “Auspicious Sign’s on the Buddha’s Feet,” Materials for the Study of the Tripitaka, vol. 6 ˙ (Bangkok: Fragile Palm Leaves Foundation, 2011). 10. See Allan G. Grapard, “Flying Mountains and Walkers of Emptiness: Toward a

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Definition of Sacred Space in Japanese Religions,” History of Religions 21, no. 3 (February 1982): 218. 11. Wegehaupt and Whitfield, “Open Road to the World,” 73–74. 12. On the fascinating history of Hājo, past and present, see Toni Huber, The Holy Land Reborn: Pilgrimage and the Tibetan Reinvention of Buddhist India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 125–65. 13. For an edition and fully annotated translation of the text, with a detailed introduction, see Toni Huber, The Guide to India: A Tibetan Account by Amdo Gendun Chöphel (Dharamsala, India: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 2000). The passage here is my translation from 42 and 44. 14. Li Rongxi, trans., A Biography of the Tripitaka Master of the Great Ci’en Monastery ˙ of the Great Tang Dynasty (Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 1995), 89–90. 15. Li Rongxi, Biography of the Tripitaka Master, 27. ˙ 16. See Sir Edwin Arnold, East and West: Being Papers Reprinted from the “Daily Telegraph” and Other Sources (London: Longmans, Green, 1896), 311. 17. For a biography of Edwin Arnold, with particular focus on his famous poem and its legacy, see Jairam Ramesh, The Light of Asia: The Poem That Defined the Buddha (Gurugram, India: Penguin Random House India, 2021). For a biography of Dharmapāla, with a detailed discussion of the Bodh Gayā controversy, see Steven Kemper, Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). On Japanese efforts on behalf of Bodh Gayā, see Richard M. Jaffe, Seeking Śākyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). For a book-length study of the battle for Bodh Gayā, see Alan Trevithick, The Revival of Buddhist Pilgrimage at Bodh Gaya (1811–1949): Anagarika Dharmapala and the Mahabodhi Temple (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2006). 18. Gendun Chopel, Grains of Gold, 346–47.

Chapter 21. Rule 1. See Stanley J. Tambiah, World Conqueror, World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a Historical Background (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 2. See Jeffrey Hopkins, trans., The Precious Garland and the Song of the Four Mindfulnesses (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 43–46. 3. See Louis de La Vallée Poussin, trans., Abhidharmakośabhāsyam, English trans. ˙ Leo M. Pruden (Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1988), 2:484–87. 4. This account of Empress Wu’s Buddhist identities is drawn from Antonino Forte, Political Propaganda and Ideology in China at the End of the Seventh Century: Inquiry into the Nature, Author, and Function of the Tunhuang Document S. 6502 (Naples:

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Istituto Universitario Orientale, Seminario di Studi Asiatici, 1976); and Jinhua Chen, “Śarīra and Scepter: Empress Wu’s Political Use of Buddhist Relics,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 25, nos. 1–2 (2002): 33–150. For a study of the Wu Zetian’s broader appropriation of the identity of Chinese divinities, see N. Harry Rothschild, Emperor Wu Zhao and Her Pantheon of Devis, Divinities, and Dynastic Mothers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). See also Timothy H. Barrett, The Woman Who Discovered Printing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 5. See Yumiko Ishihama, “The Dalai Lama as the cakravarti-rāja as Manifested by the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara,” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 24 (2015): 169–88, where we read that Desi Sangye Gyatso also described himself to be a cakravartin. For a booklength study of the Dalai Lama’s relationship to the Chinese court, see Peter Schwieger, The Dalai Lama and the Emperor of China: A Political History of the Tibetan Institution of Reincarnation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 6. See Matthew Akester, The Jébumgang Temple: Ritual Architecture and the Defence of the Modern Tibetan State (Schongau, Switzerland: Garuda Verlag, 2018). 7. For a study and translation of these decrees, see Federica Venturi, “The Thirteenth Dalai Lama on Warfare, Weapons, and the Right to Self Defense,” in Trails of the Tibetan Tradition: Papers for Elliot Sperling, ed. Roberto Vitali (Dharamshala, India: Amnye Machen Institute, 2014), 484–509 (the passage here appears on 507). For a study of the Fifth Dalai Lama’s claim to be a cakravartin, see Ishihama, “Dalai Lama as the cakravarti-rāja.” 8. Cited in Charles Bell, Portrait of the Dalai Lama (London: Collins, 1946), 430.

Chapter 22. Schism 1. This is the full list of the “Fundamental Buddhistic Beliefs” as they appear in the ˙˙ appendix of the forty-fourth edition of Olcott’s The Buddhist Catechism (with Olcott’s idio˙˙ syncratic diacritical marks retained): I. Buddhists are taught to show the same tolerance, forbearance, and brotherly ˙˙ love to all men, without distinction; and an unswerving kindness towards the members of the animal kingdom. II. The universe was evolved, not created; and it functions according to law, not according to the caprice of any God. III. The truths upon which Buddhism is founded are natural. They have, we be˙˙ lieve, been taught in successive kalpas, or world periods, by certain illuminated beings called Buddhas, the name Buddha meaning “Enlightened.” ˙˙ ˙˙ IV. The fourth teacher in the present kalpa was Sākya Muni, or Gaut ama Buddha, ˙ ˙˙ who was born in a royal family in India about 2,500 years ago. He is an historical personage and his name was Siddhārt ha Gaut ama. ˙˙ ˙ ˙ V. Sākya Muni taught that ignorance produces desire, unsatisfied desire is the

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cause of rebirth, and rebirth the cause of sorrow. To get rid of sorrow, therefore, it is necessary to escape rebirth; to escape rebirth, it is necessary to extinguish desire; and to extinguish desire, it is necessary to destroy ignorance. VI. Ignorance fosters the belief that rebirth is a necessary thing. When ignorance is destroyed the worthlessness of every such rebirth, considered as an end in itself, is perceived, as well as the paramount need of adopting a course of life by which the necessity for such repeated births can be abolished. Ignorance also begets the illusive and illogical idea that there is only one existence for man, and the other illusion that this one life is followed by states of unchangeable pleasure or torment. VII. The dispersion of all this ignorance can be attained by the persevering practice of an all-embracing altruism in conduct, development of intelligence, wisdom in thought, and destruction of desire for the lower personal pleasures. VIII. The desire to live being the cause of rebirth, when that is extinguished rebirths cease and the perfected individual attains by meditation that highest state of peace called Nirvāna. ˙ IX. Sakya Muni taught that ignorance can be dispelled and sorrow removed by the knowledge of the four Noble Truths, viz: 1. The miseries of existence; 2. The cause productive of misery which is the desire ever renewed of satisfying oneself without being able ever to secure that end; 3. The destruction of that desire, or the estranging of oneself from it; 4. The means of obtaining this destruction of desire. The means which he pointed out is called the Noble Eightfold Path, viz: Right Belief; Right Thought; Right Speech; Right Action; Right Means of Livelihood; Right Exertion; Right Remembrance; Right Meditation. X. Right Meditation leads to spiritual enlightenment, or the development of that Buddha-like faculty which is latent in every man. ˙˙ XI. The essence of Buddhism summed up by the Tat hāgat hā (Buddha) himself is: ˙˙ ˙ ˙ ˙˙ To cease from all sin, To get virtue, To purify the heart. XII. The universe is subject to a natural causation known as “Karma.” The merits and demerits of a being in past existences determine his condition in the present one. Each man, therefore, has prepared the causes of the effects which he now experiences. XIII. The obstacles to the attainment of good karma may be removed by the observance of the following precepts, which are embraced in the moral code of Buddhism, viz: (1) Kill not; (2) Steal not; (3) Indulge in no forbidden sexual ˙˙ pleasure; (4) Lie not; (5) Take no intoxication or stupefying drug or liquor. Five

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other precepts, which need not here be enumerated should be observed by those who would attain, more quickly than the average layman, the release from misery and rebirth. XIV. Buddhism discourages superstitious credulity. Gaut ama Buddha taught it to ˙˙ ˙ ˙˙ be the duty of a parent to have his child educated in science and literature. He also taught that no one should believe what is spoken by any sage, written in any book, or affirmed by a tradition, unless it accord with reason. See Henry S. Olcott, The Buddhist Catechism, 44th ed. (Adyar, Madras: Theosophical ˙˙ Publishing House, 1915), 92–95. 2. Adapted from Bhikkhu Ñānamoli, The Life of the Buddha According to the Pali ˙ Canon, 3rd ed. (Seattle: BPS Pariyatti Editions, 1992), 258. There is some question as to the meaning of the Pāli term “khel āpaka,” translated as “clot of spittle” here. Accord˙ ing to some commentaries, it may mean one who eats spittle, hence “lickspittle” in some translations. See Étienne Lamotte, “Did the Buddha Insult Devadatta?,” trans. Sara BoinWebb, Buddhist Studies Review 14, no. 1 (1997): 3–18. 3. Cited in Gregory Schopen, “Making Men into Monks,” in Buddhist Scriptures, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 242. 4. See Gregory Schopen, “Cross-Dressing with the Dead: Asceticism, Ambivalence, and Institutional Values in an Indian Monastic Code,” in The Buddhist Dead: Practices, Discourses, Representations, ed. Bryan J. Cuevas and Jacqueline I. Stone (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 60–104. 5. For Faxian’s account, see James Legge, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms: Being an Account by the Chinese Monk Fâ-Hien of His Travels in India and Ceylon (399–414) in Search of the Buddhist Books of Discipline (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886), 60. For Xuanzang’s account, see Li Rongxi, trans., The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions (Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 1996), 169. 6. See Reginald A. Ray, Buddhist Saints in India: A Study in Buddhist Values and Orientations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 177n40. 7. Bhadantācariya Buddhaghosa, The Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga), 4th ed., trans. Bhikkhu Ñānamoli (Seattle: BPS Pariyatti Editions, 2010), 55–77. ˙ 8. See Legge, Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms, 62. 9. See Li Rongxi, Great Tang Dynasty Record, 303. In neither the case of Faxian nor Xuanzang is it clear that the monks they describe identified themselves as followers of Devadatta. 10. See Max Deeg, “The San˙gha of Devadatta: Fiction and History of a Heresy in the Buddhist Tradition,” Journal of the International College for Advanced Buddhist Studies 2 (1999): 183–218. 11. Cited in Ñānamoli, Life of the Buddha, 115. A detailed account of the “Quarrel at ˙ Kosambī” occurs on 109–19. 12. See Étienne Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism from the Origins to the Śaka Era, trans. Sara Webb-Boin (Louvain: Peters Press, 1988), 198–200. There are multiple ver-

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sions of the Kauśāmbī prophecy; Lamotte bases his discussion on the one found in the Mahāvibhāsa. For a discussion of their contents and the history of their transmission, ˙ see Jan Nattier, Once upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline (Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1991), 145–227. 13. On the Schism Edicts and what the term “schism of the san˙gha” might have meant to him, see Herman Tieken, “Aśoka and the Buddhist Samgha: A Study of Aśoka’s ˙ Schism Edict and Minor Rock Edict I,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 63, no. 1 (2000): 1–30. See also K. R. Norman, “Aśoka’s Schism Edict,” in K. R. Norman, Collected Papers (Oxford: Pali Text Society, 1992), 3:191–218; and Patrick Olivelle, Ashoka, Portrait of a Philosopher King (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024), 124–33. 14. For a fascinating account of the efforts of Olcott and Anagārika Dharmapāla, see Steven Kemper, Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 134–80.

Chapter 23. Science 1. Anagārika Dharmapāla, “Message of the Buddha,” in Return to Righteousness: A Collection of Speeches, Essays and Letters of the Anagarika Dharmapala, ed. Ananda Guruge (Ceylon: Government Press, 1965), 27. 2. From “The Re-Formation of the Cosmos,” in The Carpenter-Heretic: A Collection of Buddhist Stories about Christianity from 18th-Century Sri Lanka, by R. F. Young and G. S. B. Senanayaka (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Karunaratne and Sons, 1998), 45. 3. Philoxenas, An Account of the Baptism of Two Budhist Priests, By Adam Clarke, L.L.D. Which Took Place in Brunswick Chapel, Liverpool (Dublin: Missionary Society, 1820), 4, 10. 4. Robert Spence Hardy, The British Government and the Idolatry of Ceylon (London: Crofts and Blenkarn, 1841), 6. 5. Hardy, British Government, 9–10. 6. Hardy, British Government, 43. 7. For a full translation of the story, see Young and Senanayaka, Carpenter-Heretic, 79–93. 8. Robert Spence Hardy, The Sacred Books of the Buddhists Compared with History and Science (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Wesleyan Mission Press, 1863), 71–73. The work was published in London in an expanded edition and modified title in 1866 as The Legends of Theories of the Buddhists Compared with History and Science with Introductory Notices of the Life and System of Gotama Buddha. 9. The Dalai Lama presents his views on science in The Universe in a Single Atom (New York: Morgan Books, 2005). 10. Pramānavarttika II. 31, 33. The translation is mine. See Dharmakīrti, Pramāna˙ ˙ varttika, Toh 4216, tshad ma, ce, 276. 11. John Capper, A Full Account of the Buddhist Controversy, Held at Pantura, in Au-

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gust, 1873. By the “Ceylon Times” Special Reporter: With the Addresses Revised and Amplified by the Speakers (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Ceylon Times Office, 1873), 13. For studies of relations between Buddhist monks and Christian missionaries in Sri Lanka during the nineteenth century, see R. F. Young and G. P. V. Somaratna, Vain Debates: The BuddhistChristian Controversies of Nineteenth-Century Ceylon (Vienna: Publications of the De Nobili Research Library, 1996); and Elizabeth J. Harris, Theravāda Buddhism and the British Encounter: Religious, Missionary, and Colonial Experience in Nineteenth-Century Sri Lanka (London: Routledge, 2006). 12. Capper, Full Account, 20. 13. Cited in Capper, Full Account, 42. 14. Cited in Capper, Full Account, 60. 15. Cited in Capper, Full Account, 67–68. 16. Dharmapāla, “Message of the Buddha,” 499–500. 17. Cited in Donald S. Lopez Jr., Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 73–74. 18. Gendun Chopel, Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler, trans. Thupten Jinpa and Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 404–6. 19. This paragraph is adapted from Lopez, Buddhism and Science, xii. 20. Bhikkhu Nānamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikāya (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 167.

Chapter 24. Self 1. Michael Dillon, Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology (London: Willian Heinemann Medical Books, 1946), 10. The passage from Dryden appears in his 1681 poem Absalom and Achitophel. 2. Dillon, Self, 53. 3. Dillon, Self, 95. 4. Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Samyutta Nikāya (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2000), 902. ˙ 5. I. B. Horner, trans., Milinda’s Questions (Bristol: Pali Text Society, 2015), 1:97. 6. Horner, Milinda’s Questions, 36–38. 7. Luis Gómez and Paul Harrison, trans., Vimalakīrtinirdeśa: The Teaching of Vimalakīrti (Berkeley, CA: Mangalam Press, 2022), 78. 8. For a detailed discussion of the term, building on the important scholarship of Michael Sweet and Leonard Zwilling, see José Ignacio Cabezón, Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2017), esp. 373–451. Cabezón suggests “queer” as a more accurate translation of “pandaka.” ˙ ˙ 9. For this list of the five types of male pandaka according to the Mūlasarvāstivāda ˙ ˙ vinaya, see Cabezón, Sexuality, 377–78. The five types of female pandaka according to ˙ ˙

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the Mūlasarvāstivāda vinaya are discussed on 434–36. For the somewhat different Pāli list of the male pandaka, see 408–9. There is no standard Pāli list of female pandaka. ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ 10. For a translation of the Mūlasarvāstivāda account and an analysis of the story, see Cabezón, Sexuality, 373–78. 11. Sramanera Jivaka, A Critical Study of the Vinaya (Varanasi: Royal Printing Works, 1960), 1. 12. Jivaka, Critical Study, 3. 13. Jivaka, Critical Study, 4. 14. Jivaka, Critical Study, 6. 15. Jivaka, Critical Study, 23. 16. Jivaka, Critical Study, 34. 17. T. Lobsang Rampa, The Third Eye (New York, Ballantine Books, 1964), 44. 18. For a study of The Third Eye and its reception, see Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 86–113. 19. Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka, Out of the Ordinary: A Life of Gender and Spiritual Transitions (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 229. 20. Dillon/Jivaka, Out of the Ordinary, 229. 21. Sangharakshita, Precious Teachers: Indian Memoirs of an English Buddhist (Birmingham: Windhorse Publications, 2007), 47. Sangharakshita devotes a chapter of this memoir to Jivaka. Entitled “The Secret Order of the Potala,” it paints an unflattering portrait, claiming, among other things, that Jivaka composed his autobiography, Out of the Ordinary, at Sangharakshita’s suggestion. 22. This account of Michael Dillon/Lobzang Jivaka’s life is drawn from a biography by Pagan Kennedy, The First Man-Made Man (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), and his posthumously published memoir, Out of the Ordinary. 23. For a detailed account of the numerous charges against Sangharaskhita, see The FWBO Files, www.ex-cult.org/fwbo/fwbofiles.htm.

Chapter 25. Sex 1. His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Beyond Dogma: Dialogues and Discourses (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1996), 47. 2. The account of the San Francisco meeting with the Dalai Lama is drawn from José Ignacio Cabezón, Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2017), 1–3. 3. See Tsong-kha-pa, The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, trans. Lamrim Chenmo Translation Committee (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 2000), 1:220–21. It is noteworthy that Tsongkhapa says in passing that a male may have sex with a prostitute, as long he pays her himself. 4. For a full translation of this massive text, see 84000: Translating the Words of

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the Buddha, https://read.84000.co/translation/toh287.html. Here the title of the text is translated as The Application of Mindfulness of the Sacred Dharma. 5. Tsong-kha-pa, Great Treatise, 237. 6. Linda Covill, trans., Handsome Nanda by Aśvaghosa (New York: New York Uni˙ versity Press and JJC Foundation, 2007), 211. 7. See Benedict Anderson, The Fate of Rural Hell: Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand (London: Seagull Books, 2012). 8. See Thanissaro Bhikkhu, trans., The Buddhist Monastic Code I, The Pātimokkha Training Rules, 2nd rev. ed. (Valley Center, CA: Metta Forest Monastery, 2007), 13. 9. Maurice Walshe, trans., “Aggañña Sutta: On Knowledge of Beginnings,” in The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Dīgha Nikāya (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 411. 10. Cited in Donald S. Lopez, Jr., ed., Buddhist Scriptures (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 244. 11. On Mahādeva and the theme of incest in Buddhism, see Jonathan A. Silk, Riven by Lust: Incest and Schism in Indian Buddhist Legend and Historiography (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009). 12. See André Bareau, The Buddhist Schools of the Small Vehicle, trans. Sara BoinWebb (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013), 69. 13. See Mark Tatz, trans., The Skill in Means Sūtra (Upāyakauśalya) (Delhi: Motitlal Banarsidass, 1994), 34–35. 14. Tatz, Skill in Means Sūtra, 35. 15. For a translation, see David N. Lorenzen, “A Parody of the Kāpālikas in the Mattavilāsa,” in Tantra in Practice, ed. David Gordon White (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 89. Buddhist monks play comic roles, even in the monastic code. This is particularly true of the Group of Six (sadvargika), who are able to bend the rules because ˙ ˙ they know them so well. The member of the group most obsessed with sex is Udāyin. See Gregory Schopen, “The Learned Monk as a Comic Figure: On Reading a Buddhist Vinaya as Indian Literature,” in Buddhist Nuns, Monks, and Other Worldly Matters: Recent Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014), 404–31. On the role of the comic figure of the mahalla, a doddering old monk, see Gregory Schopen, “On Incompetent Monks and Able Urbane Nuns,” in Buddhist Nuns, Monks, 46–72. 16. The discussion of the lecherous in Chinese literature is drawn from Wu Junqing, “Sex in the Cloister: Behind the Image of the ‘Criminal Monk’ in Ming Courtroom Tales,” T’oung Pao 105 (2019): 545–86. 17. See Cabezón, Sexuality, 510–11. 18. See Or Porath, “The Cosmology of Male-Male Love in Medieval Japan: Nyakudō no kanjinchō and the Way of Youths,” Journal of Religion in Japan 4 (2015): 264. For a detailed discussion of chigo, see Bernard Faure, The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 241–78. 19. Cabezón, Sexuality, 2.

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Chapter 26. Society 1. A briefer version of this chapter was published as Donald S. Lopez Jr., “Buddhism and the Real World,” Tricycle: The Buddhist Review 30, no. 4 (Summer 2021): 52–57, 101–4. 2. On the topic of prophecies of the disappearance of the dharma, see Jan Nattier, Once upon a Future Time: Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline (Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1991). 3. On the path of the wizard, see Patrick Pranke, “On Saints and Wizards: Ideals of Human Perfection and Power in Contemporary Burmese Buddhism,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 33, nos. 1–2 (2010): 453–88; and John P. Ferguson and E. Michael Mendelson, “Masters of the Buddhist Occult: The Burmese Weikzas,” Contributions to Asian Studies (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 16:62–80. 4. Buddhaghosa, The Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga), 4th ed., trans. Bhikkhu Ñānamoli (Seattle: BPS Pariyatti Editions, 2010), 312. ˙ 5. For a study of the gift of the body (dehadāna) and the role of the statement of truth in its restoration, see Reiko Ohnuma, Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood: Giving Away the Body in Indian Buddhist Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 6. Śāntideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra, V.9–10. The translation is mine. 7. The fourfold bodhisattva vow is best known today from Zen literature. It is generally attributed to the Tiantai monk Zhiyi (538–597), who discusses it in several contexts in his writings. However, according to Daniel Stevenson (personal communication with the author), in his discussions of the four vows, Zhiyi makes specific reference to the Pusa yingluo benye jing, a fifth-century Chinese apocryphal sūtra that takes its inspiration from the Avatamsaka Sūtra. This suggests the four vows were not the invention ˙ of Zhiyi or his teacher Huisi, but a broadly shared construct among late fifth- and early sixth-century northern Chinese Buddhist exegetes, in whose works scriptures such as the Avatamsaka Sūtra, the apocryphal Yingluo jing, and treatises based on Vasubandhu’s ˙ Daśabhūmivyākhyāna (Shidi lun, his commentary on the Daśabhūmika Sūtra) figure prominently. 8. For a modern compilation, see Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, The Bodhisattva Vows (Portland, OR: Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, 2017). For one of the standard Tibetan studies of the vows, see Asanga and Tsong-Kha-Pa, Asanga’s Chapter on Ethics with the Commentary of Tsong-Kha-Pa, The Basic Path to Awakening, The Complete Bodhisattva, trans. Mark Tatz (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986). 9. For a translation of this passage, see Donald S. Lopez, Jr., “Sanctification on the Bodhisattva Path,” in Sainthood: Its Manifestations in World Religions, ed. George Bond and Richard Kieckhefer (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 195. 10. See Paul Harrison, “Mediums and Messages: Reflections on the Production of Mahāyāna Sūtras,” The Eastern Buddhist, n.s., 35, nos. 1–2 (2003): 144–45. 11. The logic of these transactions did not go unchallenged by the opponents of

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Buddhism in China. See Kwi Jeong Lee, “Good Begets Good: Buddhist Apologies for Merit in Medieval China, ca. 580,” Pacific World: Journal of the Institute of Buddhist Studies, 4th ser., 2 (2021): 31–46. 12. On the story of Maudgalyāyana (Mulian, in Chinese), see Stephen F. Teiser, The Ghost Festival in Medieval China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 13. Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene 1, 204–6. 14. On this topic and especially on how the turn to an Indian source affected the study of the monastic code in China, see Ester Bianchi, “Understanding jielü 戒律: The Resurgence and Reconfiguration of Vinaya—Related Concepts in Modern China,” in Critical Concepts and Methods for the Study of Chinese Religions II: Intellectual History of Key Concepts, ed. Gregory Scott and Stefania Travagnin (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 55–80. 15. See Ester Bianchi, “Yogācāra Bodhisattva Precepts in Twentieth Century China: Re-Evaluating Rules and Commitments in the Light of Modernity,” in “Take the Vinaya as Your Master”: Monastic Discipline and Practices in Modern Chinese Buddhism, ed. Ester Bianchi and Daniela Campo (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2023), 193–229. 16. On Yin Shun’s use of the term “Buddhism for the Human Realm,” see Marcus Bingenheimer, “Some Remarks on the Usage of Renjian Fojiao and the Contribution of Venerable Yinshun to Chinese Buddhist Modernism,” in Development and Practice of Humanitarian Buddhism: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Mutsu Hsu et al. (Hua-lien, Taiwan: Tzuchi University Press, 2007), 141–61. 17. On Taixu and his devotion to Maitreya, see Justin R. Ritzinger, Anarchy in the Pure Land: Reinventing the Cult of Maitreya in Modern Chinese Buddhism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Chapter 27. War 1. On the life of Dorzhiev, see John Snelling, Buddhism in Russia: The Story of Agvan Dorzhiev: Lhasa’s Emissary to the Tsar (Rockport, MA: Element Books, 1993). 2. Wilhelm Geiger, trans., The Mahāvamsa or The Great Chronicle of Ceylon (Lon˙ don: Oxford University Press, 1912), 178. 3. See Roberta Strippoli, “Warrior/Monk, Demon/Saint: Humor and Parody in the Late Medieval Tale of Benkei,” Monumenta Nipponica 70, no. 1 (2015): 57–58. 4. For a detailed account of the debate between Matsumoto and Keō, see George J. Tanabe, Jr., “The Matsumoto Debate,” in Buddhism in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 241–48. 5. Ōta Gyūichi, The Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga, trans. J. S. A. Elisonas and J. P. Lamers, Brill’s Japanese Studies Library, vol. 36 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2011), 156. 6. Ōta Gyūichi, Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga, 165. 7. The Tibetan, translated slightly differently here, appears in Melvyn C. Goldstein, “A Study of the Ldab ldab,” Central Asiatic Journal 9, no. 2 (June 1964): 126. Much of the information about the dop-dop here is drawn from this article.

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8. For an account of a dop-dop, see Hugh Richardson with Tashi Khedrup, Adventures of a Tibetan Fighting Monk (Bangkok: Orchard Press, 1986). 9. See Jacqueline Stone, “The Sin of ‘Slandering the True Dharma’ in Nichiren’s Thought,” in Saints and Sinners: Perspectives from Asian Religions, ed. Phyllis Granoff and Koichi Shinohara (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 113–52. 10. On the Japanese delegation to the World’s Parliament, see Judith Snodgrass, Presenting Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbian Exposition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 11. Cited in James Edward Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 171. 12. Cited in Micah Auerback, “A Closer Look at Zen at War: The Battlefield Chaplaincy of Shaku Sōen in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905),” in Buddhism and Violence: Militarism and Buddhism in Modern Asia, ed. Vladimir Tikhonov and Torkel Brekke (New York: Routledge, 2012), 158. 13. Cited in Micah Auerback, “A Record of Niuzhuang (1895) by Yamagata Genjō,” in Buddhism and Modernity: Sources from Nineteenth-Century Japan, ed. Orion Klautau and Jans Martin Krämer (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021), 245. 14. The “Reting Incident” is described in detail in Melvyn C. Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet, 1913–1951: The Demise of the Lamaist State (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 464–521.

Chapter 28. Women 1. We can take some comfort in the fact that over the centuries, Ānanda would undergo a certain rehabilitation, especially in East Asia, where he would be revered as a protector of women. Thus, we read in a Chinese apocryphon, “If a woman seeks an expedient way to earn good karma, on the eighth day of the second month and the eighth day of the eighth month, she should purify her garments and wholeheartedly observe the Eight Precepts through the Six Watches. Ānanda will then use his supernatural power to respond to her voice, and he will protect her and answer every one of her prayers.” See Edward Kamens, The Three Jewels: A Study and Translation of Minamoto Tamenori’s Sanbōe (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, 1988), 273. 2. See Liz Wilson, Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Hagiographic Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 157–64. For a translation of the story, see Buddhaghosa, A Treasury of Buddhist Stories from the Dhammapada Commentary, trans. Eugene W. Burlingame and Laurence-Khantipalo Mills (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1996), 214–17. 3. See Ann Heirman, “Chinese Nuns and Their Ordination in Fifth Century China,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 24, no. 2 (2001): 287. 4. Eugène Burnouf, Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism, trans. Katia Buffetrille and Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 386.

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5. Jeffrey Hopkins, trans., The Precious Garland and the Song of the Four Mindfulnesses (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 41. 6. See José Ignacio Cabezón, Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2017), 125n328. 7. Unpublished translation by Micah Auerback from a privately published edition of Kōgetsu’s work, as Kinami Takuichi, ed., Miyo no hikari: Shakuson den [The Light of the Three Ages: A Biography of the Venerable Śākyamuni] (Hirakata: Kinami Takuichi, 1980), 214–15. 8. See Jan Nattier, A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path According to the Inquiry of Ugra (Ugrapariprcchā) (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 249–52. ˙ 9. Bhikkhu Ñānamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Middle Length Discourses of ˙ the Buddha: A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikāya (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 929. 10. N. A. Jayawickrama, trans., The Story of Gotama Buddha (Jātaka-nidāna) (Oxford: Pali Text Society, 2002), 57–58. For a rare exception appearing in an apocryphal jātaka, see Karen Derris, “When the Buddha Was a Woman: Reimagining Tradition in the Theravāda,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 24, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 29–44. See also Naomi Appleton, “In the Footsteps of the Buddha? Women and the Bodhisatta Path in Theravāda Buddhism,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 27, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 33–51. 11. See Yael Bentor, “Can Women Attain Enlightenment through Vajrayāna Practices?,” in Karmic Passages: Israeli Scholarship on India, ed. David Shulman and Shalva Weil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 126. 12. See Peter Khoroche, trans., Once a Peacock, Once an Actress: Twenty-Four Lives of the Bodhisattva from Haribhatta’s Jātakamālā (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ˙˙ 2017), 46–52. 13. Śāntideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra 10.30. The translation is mine. 14. Tsugunari Kubo and Akira Yuyama, trans., The Lotus Sutra, rev. 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2007), 298. 15. Kubo and Yuyama, Lotus Sutra, 193. 16. For a discussion of Japanese commentaries on the enlightenment of the nāga princess, see Bernard Faure, The Power of Denial: Buddhism, Purity, and Gender (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 91–99. 17. See Lori Meeks, Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010). 18. See Stephen F. Teiser, The Ghost Festival in Medieval China (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 1996). 19. Cited in Lori Meeks, “Women and Buddhism in East Asian History: The Case of the Blood Bowl Sutra, Part I: China,” Religion Compass 14, no. 4 (2020): 3, https://doi .org/10.1111/rec3.12336. 20. See Lori Meeks, “Women and Buddhism in East Asian History: The Case of the Blood Bowl Sutra, Part II: Japan,” Religion Compass 14, no. 4 (2020): 7–16, https://doi .org/10.1111/rec3.12335.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 4 2 2 – 3 1    497

21. The Detailed Account of the Previous Aspirations of the Blessed Bhaisajyaguruvai­ ˙ dūryaprabha, from 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, https://read.84000.co ˙ /translation/toh504.html, Toh. 504, 1.15. 22. Cited in Stephanie Balkwill, “The Sūtra on Transforming the Female Form: Unpacking an Early Medieval Chinese Buddhist Text,” Journal of Chinese Religions, 44, no. 2 (2016): 142–43. For a study of an apocryphal Japanese sūtra that offers transformation of the female form, see Heather Blair, “Mothers of the Buddhas: The Sutra on Transforming Women into Buddhas (Bussetsu Tennyo Jūbutso Kyō),” Monumenta Nipponica 71, no. 2 (2016): 263–93. 23. Balkwill, “Sūtra on Transforming,” 143. 24. Kubo and Yuyama, Lotus Sutra, 312. 25. On the transformation of Avalokiteśvara from male to female, see Chün-fang Yü, Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteśvara (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 26. For a complete translation of the lengthy Woman Huang story, see Beata Grant and Wilt L. Idema, Escape from Blood Pond Hell: The Tales of Mulian and Woman Huang (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011). The passage occurs on 197. 27. See Caroline Hirasawa, Hell-Bent for Heaven in Tateyama Mandara: Painting and Religious Practice at a Japanese Mountain (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 62–64. See also Bernard Faure, The Power of Denial: Buddhism, Purity, and Gender (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 77–78. 28. Pusa cong doushu tian jiangshen mutai shuo guangpu jing, T no. 384, 12.1034c29– 1035a10. Translation by Daniel Stevenson. 29. Pusa cong doushu tian jiangshen mutai shuo guangpu jing, T no. 384, 12.1035b25c8. Translation by Daniel Stevenson. 30. “Women Walk Away Their Worries at the Nunobashi Kanjo-e,” Arkadia, May 22, 2017, http://arkadia.tokyo/en/nunobashi-kanjo-e.

Chapter 29. Wrath 1. Maurice Walshe, trans., “Ambattha Sutta: About Ambattha, Pride Humbled,” in ˙˙ ˙˙ The Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Dīgha Nikāya (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 111–24. 2. Cūl asaccaka Sutta, in Bhikkhu Nānamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Middle ˙ Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikāya (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 1995), 322–31. 3. For a study of the role of minor gods and local spirits in Indian Buddhism, see Robert DeCaroli, Haunting the Buddha: Indian Popular Religions and the Formation of Buddhism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 4. Tsugunari Kubo and Akira Yuyama, trans., The Lotus Sutra, rev. 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2007), 312.

498  N o t e s t o P a g e s 4 3 3 – 3 7

5. For the translation, see Ronald M. Davidson, “The Bodhisattva Vajrapāni’s Sub˙ jugation of Śiva,” in Religions of India in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 547–55. For a detailed study of Vajrapāni’s subjuga˙ tion of Śiva in the context of Tibetan Buddhism, see Jacob Dalton, The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). 6. For an art historical study of the evolution of wrathful deities in Indian Buddhist art, see Rob Linrothe, Ruthless Compassion: Wrathful Deities in Early Indo-Tibetan Esoteric Buddhist Art (Boston: Shambhala, 1999). 7. For a study of the movement of Hindu deities into the circle of the Buddhist pantheon based on votive inscriptions, see Birendra Nath Prasad, “Cultic Relationships between Buddhism and Brahmanism in the ‘Last Stronghold’ of Indian Buddhism: An Analysis with Particular Reference to Votive Inscriptions on the Brahmanical Sculptures Donated to Buddhist Religious Centres in Early Medieval Magadha,” Buddhist Studies Review 30, no. 2 (2013): 181–99. 8. J. L Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). 9. For a study of tantric rituals in which meditative techniques for this internalization are described, see Jacob Dalton, Conjuring the Buddha: Ritual Manuals in Early Tantric Buddhism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022). 10. For a study of European attitudes toward Hindu deities, see Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 11. See Sam van Schaik, Buddhist Magic: Divination, Healing, and Enchantment through the Ages (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 2020). 12. For a consideration of this question in the context of esoteric Buddhism in China, see Robert H. Sharf, Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism: A Reading of the Treasure Store Treatise (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002), 263–78. On the transmission of Buddhist tantra from India to China, see Martin Lehnert, “Tantric Threads between India and China,” in The Spread of Buddhism, ed. Ann Heirman and Stephan Peter Bumbacher (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 247–76. 13. For a survey of the topic, see Iain Sinclair, “War Magic and Just War in Indian Tantric Buddhism,” Social Analysis 58, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 149–66. For a discussion of Amoghavajra’s use of war magic at the Tang court, see Geoffrey Goble, “The Politics of Esoteric Buddhism: Amoghavajra and the Tang State,” in Esoteric Buddhism in Mediaeval Maritime Asia: Networks of Masters, Texts, Icons, ed. Andrea Acri (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2016), 123–39. For a study of war magic in Tibetan Buddhism, see Bryan J. Cuevas, “The Politics of Magical Warfare,” in Faith and Empire: Art and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism, ed. Karl Debreczeny (New York: Rubin Museum of Art, 2019), 171–89. 14. For a study of the possible nonliterate sources of tantra, see Ronald M. Davidson, “Magicians, Sorcerers and Witches: Considering Pretantric, Non-Sectarian Sources of Tantric Practices,” Religions 8 (2017): 1–33.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 4 3 7 – 4 4    499

15. For a social history of Indian Buddhist tantra, see Ronald M. Davidson, Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). For summations of the argument, see esp. 160–68 and 336–39. 16. On Mahākāla at the Mongol court, see Karl Debreczeny, Faith and Empire: Art and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (New York: Rubin Museum of Art, 2019), 28–34.

Chapter 30. Writing 1. See Sodo Mori, “The Legacy of Heart Mountain, Part 2,” Interreligious Insight 9, no. 1 (July 2011): n.p.; and Duncan Ryūken Williams, American Sūtra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2019), 255–57. 2. Tsugunari Kubo and Akira Yuyama, trans., The Lotus Sutra, rev. 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2007), 169. 3. Kubo and Yuyama, Lotus Sutra, 333. 4. For a useful survey of the scholarship on the role of literacy in ancient India, see Johannes Bronkhorst, “Literacy and Rationality in Ancient India,” Asiatische Studien/ Études Asiatiques 56, no. 4 (2002): 797–831. 5. Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard (Glasgow: R. and A. Foulis, 1751), 4. 6. See Frits Staal, “The Concept of Scripture in the Indian Tradition,” in Sikh Studies: Comparative Perspectives on a Changing Tradition, ed. Mark Juergensmeyer and N. Gerald Barrier (Berkeley, CA: Graduate Theological Union, 1979), 121–24. 7. A. B. Keith, ed. and trans., The Aitareya Āranyaka (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ˙ 1969), 301–2 (5.5.3). 8. See Mark Allon, “The Oral Composition and Transmission of Early Buddhist Texts,” in Indian Insights: Buddhism, Brahmanism and Bhakti. Papers from the Annual Spalding Symposium on Indian Religion, ed. Peter Connolly and Sue Hamilton (London: Luzac Oriental, 1997), 39–61. 9. Patrick Olivelle, Ashoka, Portrait of a Philosopher King (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2024), 305–6. 10. See, for example, N. A. Jayawickrama, trans., The Story of Gotama Buddha (Jātaka-­ nidāna) (Oxford: Pali Text Society, 2002). 11. See Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Samyutta Nikāya (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2000), 1:601–4. ˙ 12. Nyanaponika Thera and Bhikkhu Bodhi, Numerical Discourses of the Buddha: An Anthology of Suttas from the An˙guttara Nikāya (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 1999), 77. 13. The Play in Full, from 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, https://read .84000.co/translation/toh95.html, 10.11. 14. For a discussion of the seven titles, see Lambert Schmithausen, “An Attempt to Estimate the Distance in Time between Aśoka and the Buddha in Terms of Doctrinal History,” in The Dating of the Historical Buddha, Part 2, ed. Heinz Bechert (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1992), 110–47; and Olivelle, Ashoka, 118–23.

500  N o t e s t o P a g e s 4 4 5 – 4 9

15. K. R. Norman, Pāli Literature (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1983), 10–11; and Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism, 368–69. For a very useful discussion of the possible circumstances leading to this event, see Steven Collins, “On the Very Idea of the Pali Canon,” Journal of the Pali Text Society 15 (1990): 76–79. 16. Hermann Oldenberg, trans., The Dīpavamsa: An Ancient Historical Record (Lon˙ don: Williams and Norgate, 1879), 211. 17. Bu ston, History of Buddhism (Chos-hbyung) by Bu-ston, pt. 2, History of Buddhism ˙ in India and Tibet, trans. E. Obermiller (Heidelberg: Harrassowitz, 1932), 101. 18. See Tāranātha, Tāranātha’s History of Buddhism in India, ed. Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, trans. Lama Chimpa and Alaka Chattopadhyaya (Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 1970), 86–88. 19. For a useful survey of the development of writing in South Asian Buddhism, see Peter Skilling, “Redaction, Recitation, and Writing: Transmission of the Buddha’s Teachings in India in the Early Period,” in Buddhist Manuscript Culture: Knowledge, Ritual, and Art, ed. Stephen C. Berkwitz, Juliane Schober, and Claudia Brown (London: Routledge, 2009), 53–75. 20. For a study of the Kharost hī manuscripts with translations from many of the ˙˙ texts by the scholar most responsible for their analysis, see Richard Salomon, The Buddhist Literature of Ancient Gandhāra: An Introduction with Selected Translations (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2018). 21. See Richard Salomon, “An Unwieldy Canon: Observations on Some Distinction Features of Canon Formation in Buddhism,” in Kanonisierung und Kanonbildung in der asiatischen Religionsgeschichte, ed. Max Deeg, Oliver Freiberger, and Christoph Kleine (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2011), 179–84. 22. For a useful discussion of the role of memorization and recitation in Indian Buddhism, see José Ignacio Cabezón and Penpa Dorjee, Sera Monastery (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2019), 71–90. 23. Cited in Benjamin Brose, Xuanzang: China’s Legendary Pilgrim and Translator (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publication, 2021), 111. 24. Anthony Yu, trans., The Journey to the West, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 4:353–54. 25. For a discussion of the story and its variants in other vinaya texts, as well as a survey of opinion on the meaning of “chandas,” see Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism, 552–56. 26. For a study of the formation of the Tibetan Buddhist canon and the role of the book in Tibetan Buddhism more broadly, see Kurtis R. Schaeffer, The Culture of the Book in Tibet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 27. For a useful survey of the various uses of Buddhist manuscripts in ancient India, see Florinda De Simini, Of Gods and Books: Ritual and Knowledge Transmission in the Manuscript Cultures of Premodern India (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2016), 1–22.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 4 5 0 – 5 1    501

28. Tsugunari Kubo and Akira Yuyama, trans., The Lotus Sutra, rev. 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2007), 169. 29. See Gregory Schopen, “The Phrase ‘sa pr thivīpradeśaś caityabhūto bhavet’ in the ˙ Vajracchedikā: Notes on the Cult of the Book in Mahāyāna,” Indo-Iranian Journal 17 (1975): 172–73. 30. On the practice of sūtra burial, see D. Max Moerman, “The Death of the Dharma: Sūtra Burials in Early Medieval Japan,” in The Death of Sacred Texts: Ritual Disposal and Renovation of Texts in the World Religions, ed. Kristina Myrvold (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2010). On the practice and theory of sūtra-copying in Japan, see Bryan D. Lowe, Ritualized Writing: Buddhist Practice and Scriptural Culture in Ancient Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017).

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Index

Buddha field of, 169, 177, 213, 237, 271, 312, 357–358, 372, 395, 419, 426; Korean cult of, 271, 272 Amoghavajra, 48, 56, 62, 74 Amos, 107 Āmrapālī, 287 Amrtānanda, 314, 324 ˙ Anagārika Dharmapāla, 48, 83, 101, 329, 333, 359, 365, 402 Analysis (Vibhan˙ga), 316 Ānanda, 55, 122, 225, 238, 436, 448; as arhat, 141–142; as beloved figure, 143; Buddha’s body and, 203, 339, 415; Buddha’s teachings spread by, 4, 11–13, 142–143, 229, 238, 290, 375, 442; oral tradition and, 442; trial of, 144–146, 202, 282, 290, 416; women and, 146–147, 203, 250–251, 279–281, 283–284, 287, 415–416 Ananda Metteyya (Bennett, Charles Henry Allan), 226, 300 Anāthapindada, 116, 229 ˙˙ Anawrahta, King, 76 Antiochus II Theos, king of Syria, 92 Anurādhapura, 27, 47 Aristotle, 171 Arjia Rinpoche, 224

Abābīd, 158–159 Abhayākaragupta, 231 Abhedananda, Swami, 101, 103 Account of Origins (Aggañña Sutta), 245–248, 263, 339 Account of Origins (Nidānakathā), 419 Acts of Thomas, 168 Adam, 7, 106, 327–328, 385 Adornment for Nāgārjuna’s Thought (Klu sgrub dgongs rgyan) (Gendun Chopel), 324 Aiswarika, 315, 324 Aitareya Āranyaka, 441 ˙ Ajātaśātru, King, 140, 349, 354, 398 Ājīvika, 95, 190 Akbar, emperor of Hindustan, 107 Ala ad-Din Muhammad, shah of Khwarazm, 212 Alexander the Great, 25, 116–117, 160, 440 Altan Khan, 65, 217 Amarāvatī, 27 Ambat t ha, 429–430, 435, 436 ˙˙ Ambattha Sutta, 429 ˙˙ Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji, 164, 252–253 Amitābha, 78, 84, 105, 108, 411;

503

504  i n d e x

Arnold, Edwin, 83, 333 Arthur, Chester A., 83 The Art of War (Bing fa) (Sunzi), 241 Āryaśūra, 255 Asan˙ga, 160, 234–235, 284, 294, 317, 319, 397, 402, 419 Aśoka, 5, 6, 8, 10, 25, 27, 47, 87–98, 148–149, 243, 326 Aśvaghosa, 27, 107 ˙ Atiśa, 40–41, 71 Aung San Suu Kyi, 77 Austin, J. L., 434 Avalokitavrata, 252 Avalokiteśvara (Lokeśvara), 149, 227, 238, 332; Dalai Lama linked to, 65, 67, 108, 218, 345; in Lotus Sūtra, 234, 423; in Mahāyāna sūtras, 424; male and female depictions of, 424; in present Cambodia, 73; in Tibet, 344 Avenir, King, 158 Awakening of Faith (Dasheng qixin lun), 127   Bahuśrutīya, 13 Bakhtiyar, Muhammad, 161 Bakula Rinpoche, 380 Barlaam, 157, 158, 159 Barrett, Timothy, vii–viii The Basket’s Display (Kārandavyūha), ˙ ˙ 424 Beal, Samuel, 133 Benedict XVI, Pope, 313 Benkei, 408 Bennett, Charles Henry Allan (Ananda Metteyya), 226, 300 Bernard, Jean Frédéric, 82 Beyond Dogma (Dalai Lama), 382 Bhagavad Gītā, 86 Bhallika, 75, 205 Bhārhut, 27, 63, 255, 445

Bhasmeśvaranirghosa, 433 ˙ Bhāviveka, 197, 232–233 Bhumibol Adulyadej, king of Thailand, 254 Bimbisāra, King, 162, 354, 398 Bindusāra, 91 Bīrūnī, Al-, 98 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, 83, 100, 101, 103, 110, 347 Blaze of Reasoning (Tarkajvālā) (Bhāviveka), 190, 232, 321 Blood Bowl Sūtra (Xuepenjing), 420, 421, 424–426 Bodh Gayā, 95, 97, 132, 210, 225, 226, 326, 329, 378; Dharmasvāmin at, 154, 233, 334; under Hindu control, 333 Bogle, George, 218, 219 Book of Bilawhar and Būdhāsaf (Kitāb Bilawhar wa Būdhāsaf), 158 Book of the Marvels of the World (Livre des merveilles du monde) (Polo), 81, 157 Booth, John Wilkes, 347 Borges, Jorge Luis, 98, 228 Borobudur, 75, 255 Bovee, Les, 438 Brahmā, 43, 114, 298, 300, 343, 419, 424, 426, 433 Brahmā’s Net Sūtra (Fanwang jing), 244, 289, 294–297, 321, 396 Broad and Universal Sūtra Preached by the Bodhisattva When His Spirit Descended from the Tusita Heaven to ˙ His Mother’s Womb (Pusa cong doushu tian jiangshen mutai shuo guangpu jing), 426 Budai Heshang, 390 Buddhaghosa, 12, 48, 138, 151, 178, 259, 265, 284, 355, 395

i n d e x    505

Buddhaguptanātha, 163 Buddhayaśas, 52, 129, 244, 330 Buddhist Birth Stories (Rhys Davids), 259–260 Buddhist India (Rhys Davids), 260, 265 Būdhāsaf, 158 Burnouf, Eugène, 6, 82, 90, 92–93, 96, 204, 251, 299 Bu ston, 445   Cabral, João, 459n8 Cacella, Estêvão, 459n8 Cāmundā, 163 ˙˙ Candragupta Maurya, 91, 92, 167, 440, 444 Candrakīrti, 323–324 Candraprabha, 343 Candrasūryapradīpa, 232 Caodong, 77, 272 The Carnal Prayer Mat (Rou putuan), 390 Carus, Paul, 83 Cārvāka, 190, 320 Carver, George Washington, 99 Catalogue from Pang Tang (Dkar chag ’Phang thang ma), 70 Cave of the Thousand Buddhas, 439 Certeau, Michel de, 86 Chabi, 64 Chag Lotsawa (Dharmasvāmin), 154, 334 Chajang, 59 Chakkaphat Phaen Phaeo, king of Lan Xang, 80 Chan, 54–55, 57, 77, 78, 128, 244, 267 Chanlu Zongze, 244 Channa (Chandaka), 415 Cheng Yen, 403 China Illustrata (Kircher), 216 Chinhŭng, king of Silla, 58, 59

Chinp’yong, king of Silla, 59 Chōnen, 112, 120–121 Christians, 101, 139–140, 141, 164–175, 306–308, 313, 359, 361–364, 405; Jesuits, 169–170, 306, 322–323, 353 Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga (Shinchō Kōki), 410 Chronicle of the Buddhas (Buddhavamsa), 102 ˙ Chronicle of the Island (Dīpavamsa), 47, ˙ 445 Chronicle of the Stūpa (Thūpavamsa), ˙ 47, 325 Chronicles of Japan (Nihon shoki), 295 Chulalongkorn, king of Siam, 79, 264–265 City Sūtra (Nagara Sutta), 443 Civil and Penal Codes of the Yōrō Era (Yōrō ritsurei), 187 Clement of Alexandria, 81, 168, 201 Clive, Robert, 82, 218 Cloud of Jewels Sūtra (Ratnamegha Sūtra), 343 Colebrooke, Henry Thomas, 86 Collected Essays Refuting Heterodoxy (Pixie ji), 171–172 Collection of Selections (Senchakushū), 271, 411 Commentary on the Jātaka (Jātakatthavannanā) (attrib. Buddhaghosa), ˙˙ 259 Commentary on Valid Knowledge (Pramānavārttika) (Dharmakīrti), ˙ 320 Compendium of Principles (Tattvasamgraha) (Śāntaraksita), 68, 322, ˙ ˙ 360, 436 Compendium of Principles of All Tathāgatas (Sarvatathāgatatattvasamgraha), ˙ 431, 434–436

506  i n d e x

Compendium of Schools (Nikāyā San˙grahaya), 48 Compendium of Training (Siksāsamuc˙ caya) (Śāntideva), 397 Compendium of Valid Knowledge (Pramānasamuccaya) (Dignāga), ˙ 320 Conditions (Patthāna), 316 ˙˙ Conformity with Correct Principle (Nyāyānusāra), 318 Confucians, 54, 57, 77–78, 270, 310 Connected Discourses to Yaksas ˙ (Yakkhasamyutta), 429 ˙ Connery, Sean, 117 Conrad, Joseph, 377 Continued Lives of Eminent Monks (Xu Gaoseng zhuan), 420 Corbett, Harvey Wiley, 103 Cornwallis, Charles, 240 Court, Claude Auguste, 200–201, 206, 207 Cowell, E. B., 259 A Critical Study of the Vinaya, 374–376 Critique of the Philosophy of Original Enlightenment (Hongaku shisō hihan) (Hakamaya and Matsumoto), 188 Crossing the Threshold of Hope (John Paul II), 166 Crowley, Aleister, 226 Crush Christianity (Ha Kirishitan) (Suzuki Shōsan), 308 Csoma de Kőrös, Alexander, 104, 329 Cunda, 202, 350 Cunningham, Alexander, 132–133   Dainichi (Vairocana), 303–304, 431–433 Dalai Lama, 66, 71, 107, 216, 364, 378–379; biographies of, 345; as bodhisattva incarnation, 108; depic-

tions of, 337; Geluk sect and, 176, 211, 344–345; in modern times, 2, 72, 84, 124, 222–223, 289, 317, 336–337, 345–346, 369, 377, 404; Panchen Lama vs., 110; selection of, 222, 223–224, 412–413; sexuality viewed by, 382, 391–392; as Tibetan head of state, 65, 218, 401; in tulku lineage, 217; U.S. visited by, 223, 238–239, 414 Dal hanemi, 339 ˙ Dao’an, 127 Daodejing (Laozi), 44, 342 Daoism, 54, 57, 199 Daoxuan, 295 Darius I, king of Persia, 25 Darwin, Charles, 275 Dasgupta, Surendranath, 315 da Silva, David, 364–365 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon), vii Denma Lochö Rinpoche, 379, 380 Dependent Arising and Emptiness: Critique of Tathāgatagarbha (Engi to kū: Nyoraizō shisō hihan) (Hakamaya and Matsumoto), 188 Descent into Lan˙kā (Lan˙kāvatāra), 47, 52, 54, 184–186, 197 Description of the Person (Puggala­ paññatti), 316 Desideri, Ippolito, 170–171, 216–217, 245, 322–323 Desi Sangye Gyatso, 329, 345, 486n5 Devadatta, 38, 174, 175, 180, 182, 256, 347–355, 357 Dhammapada, 441 Dhammavilāsa (Splendor of the Dharma), 247–249 Dhammazedi, King, 76 Dhardo Rinpoche, 378

i n d e x    507

Dharmagupta, 31, 52, 53, 129, 148, 286–287, 289, 290–291, 293, 300, 407, 446 Dharmākara, 357 Dharmakīrti, 320–321, 364 Dharmapāla, Anagārika, 48, 83, 101, 329, 332, 333, 359, 365, 367 Dharmasvāmin, 154 Dhyānabhadra, 41 Diamond Sūtra (Vajracchedikā), 112, 134, 229, 235, 425, 429, 450 Diary of Subjugating Demons (Gōma nisshi) (Sōen), 412 Dignāga, 320–321, 332 Dillon, Michael (Jīvaka), 370–371, 376–381, 491n21 Discourse on Lamas (Lama Shuo) (Qianlong), 221–222 Discourse on the Characteristic of No Self (Anattalakkhana Sutta), 371 ˙ Discourse on the Elements (Dhātukathā), 316 Discourse on the Lion’s Roar of the Cakravartin (Cakkavattisihanāda Sutta), 339, 340, 368 Dōgen, 62, 176, 199, 272 D’Orville, Albert, 216 Dorzhiev, Agvan, 107, 404, 405 Drinking Tea for Health (Kissa yōjōki) (Eisai), 62 Drona, 204 ˙ Drunken Games (Mattavilāsa), 390 Dryden, John, 370 Du royaume de Siam (La Loubère), 174 Dusum Khyenpa, 215 Dut t hagāmanī Abhaya, king of Lankā, ˙˙ ˙ ˙ 268, 325, 406   Eastern Monachism (Hardy), 361 Eisai, 62, 400

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 124 Eison, 289–290 Elara, King, 406 “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (Gray), 217 Elizabeth I, queen of England, 86, 361 Eloisa to Abelard (Pope), 440 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 82–83 Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophy (Potter), 315 Endo, Shusaku, 308 Engelhardt, Isrun, 111 Entering the Bodhisattva Deeds (Bodhicaryāvatāra) (Śāntideva), 396, 419 Enumeration of Phenomena (Dhammasan˙ganī), 316 ˙ Essay on Pāli (Burnouf and Lassen), 299 Essays on the Religion and Philosophy of the Hindus (Colebrooke), 86 Essence of the Middle Way (Madhyamakahr daya) (Bhāviveka), 321 ˙ Essentials of the Buddhist Sects (Bukkyō kakushū kōyō), 411 Establishment of Mindfulness of the True Dharma (Saddharmasmr tyupasthāna ˙ Sūtra), 383 Euthymius the Georgian, 159 Evans-Wentz, Walter, 83, 378 Eve, 327–328, 385 Explanation of the Intention (Samdhi­ ˙ nirmocana), 305 Extensive Play (Lalitavistara), 46, 444   Fā Ngum, king of Lan Xang, 80 Faxian, 40, 48, 53, 96, 201, 225, 290, 330, 355 Fazang, 342 Fazun, 317 Ferdinand VII, king of Spain, 200

508  i n d e x

Ferreira, Cristóvāo (Sawano Chūan), 308–309 Flaubert, Gustave, 122 Flower Garland Sūtra (Avatamsaka), ˙ 54, 55 Foulk, T. Griffith, 453n2 Four-Part Vinaya (Sifen lu), 52, 129, 244, 290–291, 293, 295 Francis Xavier, Saint, 82, 172, 303–304 Fukuda Gyōkai, 311 Fuyama Tsung-Tao, 107   Gandhi, Mohandas, 252–253 Gaozong, Emperor, 341, 342, 422 Garland of Jātakas (Jātakamālā) (Haribhat t a), 285, 419 ˙˙ Gavāmpati, 140–141 ˙ Geluk sect, 176, 194, 211, 222, 323, 344–345, 404, 407–408, 410, 412 Gendun Chopel, 101, 270, 323–324, 325, 329, 334, 335, 368 Gendun Drup, 344 Genghis Khan, 63, 212, 427, 437 George V, king of Great Britain, 133 Gernet, Jacques, 49 Geshe Wangyal, 414 Gibbon, Edward, vii Gillies, Harold, 376 Ginsberg, Allen, 84 Godan Khan, 63–64 The Gospel of Buddha (Carus), 83 The Gospel of Ramakrishna (Abheda­ nanda), 101 Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler (Rgyal khams rig pas bskor ba’i gtam rgyud gser gyi thang ma) (Gendun Chopel), 368 Gray, Thomas, 219 Great Chronicle (Mahāvamsa), 25, 47, ˙ 48, 91, 168, 288, 299, 327, 406

Great Cloud Sūtra (Mahāmegha Sūtra), 342–343 Great Discourse on the Final Nirvāna ˙ (Mahāparinibbāna Sutta), 143, 197, 201, 325–326, 415 Great Discourse on the Lion’s Roar (Mahāsīhanāda Sutta), 369 Great Exegesis of the Abhidharma (Abhidharmamahāvibhāsa), 26, 28, ˙ 316, 446 Great Exposition of Tenets (Grub mtha’ chen mo) (Jamyang Shepa), 315 Great Tang Biographies of Eminent Monks Who Sought the Dharma in the Western Regions (Da Tang xiyu qiufa gaoseng zhuan) (Yijing), 327 The Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions (Da Tang xiyu ji) (Xuanzang), 132–133, 330 Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (Lam rim chen mo) (Tsongkhapa), 382 Gregory XIII, Pope, 306, 309 Grueber, Johann, 216 Grünwedel, Albert, 110 Guidebook to the Sacred Sites of India (Rgya gar gyi gnas chen khag la ’grod pa’i lam yig) (Gendun Chopel), 329 Gunabhadra, 52 ˙ Gunānanda, 364–365 ˙ Gunavarman, 288–289 ˙ Gushri Khan, 65, 218, 345 Gyaltsen Norbu, 211   Haimavata school, 129 Hakamaya Noriaki, 188, 198–199 Han Yongun, 274, 275–276 Harada Daiun Sōgaku, 199 Hardy, Robert Spence, 299, 361–363 Haribhat t a, 419 ˙˙

i n d e x    509

Harivarman, 61 Hastings, Warren, 218, 219–220, 240 Heart Sūtra (Prajñāpāramitāhr daya), ˙ 127, 149, 229, 424 Heshang Moheyan, 69–70 Hīnayāna, 32, 156, 227, 233, 292, 294, 295, 297–298, 343, 379, 408 Hinduism, 72, 73, 101, 162–163, 190, 199, 331, 353, 360 Hirakawa, Akira, vii An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon in the East-Indies (Knox), 122 History of India (Tārīkh al-Hind) (AlBīrūnī), 98 The History of Indian Buddhism (Lamotte), vii History of Indian Philosophy (Dasgupta), 315 Hitler, Adolf, 367 Hodgson, Brian Houghton, 82, 314–315 Hōnen, 62, 271, 358, 409, 411 Hoover, Herbert, 103 Hopkins, Jeffrey, 414 Horch, Louis, 103 Hoskin, Cyril, 378 Huaiyi, 342, 344 Huang Musong, 109 Huayan, 54, 55, 61, 198, 275 Huiguo, 56, 62 Huston, John, 116 Hyecho, 68, 155–156, 159, 327, 328 Hyujŏng (Ch’ŏnghŏ Hyujŏng), 268–269   Iliad (Homer), 442 Illustrated Origin of the Śākyamuni Hall (Shaka-dō engi emaki), 120 Imji Getsul (Dillon), 380 Indica (Megasthenes), 440 Innocent XI, Pope, 174

Institutes of Hindu Law (Jones), 240–241 Introduction to the Domain of the Inconceivable Qualities and Wisdom of the Tathāgatas (Tathāgataguna˙ jñānācintyavisayāvatāranirdeśa), ˙ 164–165 Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism (Introduction à l’histoire du Buddhisme indien) (Burnouf ), 6, 82, 251, 299 Isabella I, queen of Spain, 200 Islam, viii, 7, 74, 101, 106, 154–157, 159, 161, 164, 181, 331; Islamic law, 240   Jacques de Vitry, 212 Jains, 9, 10, 95, 181, 182, 183–184, 190, 321, 353, 443 Jāli, 264 James, William, 109 Jamyang Shepa, 315 Jayasena, 209, 210 Jayavarma VII, 73 Jesuits, 169–170, 306, 322–323, 353 Jesus Christ, 4–5, 7, 86, 101–102, 142, 171–175, 362–363, 366–367 Jianzhen, 296 Jingjian, 288 Jivaka (Dillon, Michael), 370–371, 376–381, 491n21 Jīvaka (physician), 349 Jōdo Shinshū, 62, 63, 271, 358, 401 Jōdo Shū, 62, 271, 357 John of the Cross, Saint, 175 John Paul II, Pope, 166, 175 Jones, William, 86, 240, 260, 299, 366 Josaphat, 157, 158, 159 Josephus Flavius, 4 Journey to the West (Xiyouji), 133, 332, 424, 448

510  i n d e x

Jowo Rinpoche, 211 Julien, Stanislas, 133 Justin, Martyr, Saint, 169–170   Kadam sect, 215 Kagyü sect, 64, 102, 215 Kālacakra, 105, 107, 108 Kālacakra Tantra, 5, 75, 104, 105, 106, 159–161, 219, 395 Kalhana, 98 ˙ Kamalaśīla, 69–70, 343 Kāma Sūtra, 379 Kanhājinā, 264 ˙ Kaniska, Kushan king, 25–26, 50, 117, ˙ 160, 446 Karma Paksī, 215 ˙ Kármika, 315, 324 Kashmir and Tibet (Kaśmīra o Tibbate) (Abhedananda), 103 Kāśyapa, 59, 226, 448 Kāśyapīya, 53 Keō, 409 Kerouac, Jack, 84 Khantivādī, 348 Kim (Kipling), 219 The King and I (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 261 Kinmei, emperor of Japan, 266 Kipling, Rudyard, 219 Kircher, Athanasius, 166, 170, 216 Knox, Robert, 122 Kōgetsu Sōgi, 418 K’ojong, king of Korea, 136 Konāgamana (Kanakamuni), 7, 94, 443 ˙ Kondañña, 337 ˙˙ Kōzen, Shaku, 292, 298, 301–302 Krishna, 86, 101, 163 Kublai Khan, 57, 64–65, 72, 217, 218, 328, 398, 437 Kūkai, 56, 61–62

Kumārajīva, 54, 119, 120, 449 Kumārāyana, 119–120 Kumārila, 322 Kunāla, 417 Kuśinagara, 89, 97, 202, 225, 226, 328, 329, 339 Kyōen, 289–290   Laboulaye, Édouard, 157 la Loubère, Simon de, 174 Lamotte, Étienne, vii Land of Bliss (Sukhāvatī), 213, 237, 419–420 Lang Darma, 70–71, 214, 400 Laozi, 44, 342 Lassen, Christian, 299 Laws of Manu (Manusmr ti; Manava­ ˙ dharmaśāstra), 36, 240, 249, 251–252, 253 Leadbeater, Charles, 109 Leão Pereira, Gaspar Jorge de, 208 Ledi Sayadaw, 150–151, 400–401 Legend of Aśoka (Aśokāvadāna), 25, 90, 326, 341, 417 Le Gentil de la Galaisière, Guillaume-­ Joseph-Hyacinthe-Jean-Baptiste, 153–154, 161 Letter to a Friend (Suhr llekha) (Nāgā­ ˙ rjuna), 398 Letter to Kaniska (Kaniskalekha) ˙ ˙ (Mātrceta), 398 ˙ Lévi, Sylvain, 104 Lha Thothori Nyantsen, 67 Lhazang Khan, 65–66 Liang Qichao, 275 The Life of Saint Issa: The Best of the Sons of Men, 101–102, 103, 108 The Light of the Three Ages (Miyo no Hikari) (Kōgetsu Sōgi), 418 Lincoln, Abraham, 347

i n d e x    511

Lingwood, Dennis, 378 Linji school, 77, 272, 273 Lion’s Roar of Maitreya (Maitreyasimhanāda), 117 ˙ Lion’s Roar of Queen Śrīmālā (Śrīmālādevīsimhanāda), 197 ˙ Lives of Eminent Monks (Gaoseng zhuan), 420 Lives of Nuns (Biqiuni zhuan), 420, 422 Lokāyata (Materialists), 190, 285, 320 Lokeśvara, 73 Lokottaravāda, 13 Losang Palden Yeshe, 218 Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapundarīka), 84, ˙ ˙ 112, 122–123, 134, 175, 230, 232, 274, 298, 328, 450; Avalokiteśvara’s transformations in, 431; Buddha’s immeasurable life span in, 183, 238; centrality of, 46, 54, 62, 120, 127, 229, 235; copying of, 132, 342, 439; incantations in, 42; opponents of, 231; redemption and enlightenment in, 354; rising stupa in, 206; sanctity of, 411, 449; sexuality in, 372, 387; state sponsorship and, 399–400; Tiantai school and, 54, 55, 61, 198, 271–272, 297, 408; translations of, 82–83, 233; vehicles to liberation in, 305; women in, 343, 420 Louis IX, king of France, 212 Louis XIV, king of France, 79, 81, 173, 261 Ludwig II, king of Bavaria, 251 Lü Guang, 120 Lumbinī, 45, 89, 95, 97 Luther, Martin, 249, 305   Macartney, George, Earl, 219, 220 Madhyamaka, 61, 155, 176, 236, 319, 322–323, 331

Magical Wheel of Slashing Swords Mincing to Dust the Evil Adversary with Words to Delight Mañjuśrī (’Jam dpal dgyes pa’i gtam gyis rgol ngan phye mar ’thag pa reg gcod ral gri’i ’phrul ’khor), 324 Mahābhārata, 204, 256 Mahādeva, 386 Mahājanaka, 257–258 Mahājanaka Jātaka, 254, 258 Mahākāla, 65, 427, 437 Mahākāśyapa, 55, 76, 126, 128, 140, 141, 142, 180, 204 Mahāmati, 184–185 Mahāmāyā, 113 Mahānikāi, 79, 80 Mahāprajāpatī, 145, 279–280, 281–282, 287–288, 416–417, 418, 420 Mahāsāmghika, 13, 53, 148, 357, 387 ˙ Mahāsammata, 246, 248, 263, 264 Mahāvamsa, 25, 47, 91, 168, 288, 299, ˙ 327, 406 Mahāvihāra, 76, 79 Mahāyāna, 28, 29–33, 42, 45, 46, 117, 127, 135, 149, 159, 168, 175, 197, 199, 226–239, 256; bodhisattva vow linked to, 293; in Ceylon, 47, 48; in China, 52, 53–54; food in, 184–185, 294–295; in Indonesia, 75; innovations of, 182–183; literature of, 227; orthodoxy in, 293–298; in Vietnam, 79; women in, 372 Mahdī, 106–107, 160 Mahinda (son of Aśoka), 25, 47, 91, 288 Mahmud of Ghazni, 98, 160 The Mahomedan Law of Succession to the Property of Intestates (Jones), 240–241 Maitreya, 73, 76, 94, 107, 233–234, 256, 262, 340, 344, 393–394, 406, 423,

512  i n d e x

Maitreya (continued ) 450–451; depictions of, 26, 112, 120, 225–226, 301–302 Mālunkyāputta, 192–193 Mañjuśrī, 59, 65, 112, 120, 232, 238, 268, 328, 388 Manu (Hindu lawgiver), 240, 248 Manu (king’s minister), 248 Manual of Buddhism (Hardy), 361 Manuel I Comnenus, emperor of the East, 212 The Man Who Would Be King (film), 116–117 Mao Zedong, 317 Māra, 201–202, 254, 268, 343, 362, 412, 416, 418–419, 426 Maritime Buddhism, 74 Mātrceta, 398 ˙ Matsumoto Shirō (scholar), 188, 198–199 Matthew, the Apostle, Saint, 399 Maudgalyāyana (Mulian), 118, 256, 349, 353, 399, 420–421 Māyā, Queen, 337, 426, 443, 460n2 Megasthenes, 440 Meiji, emperor of Japan, 269, 309 Meiji Restoration, 65, 269, 272, 309, 310, 369, 391, 401 Menander, Indo-Greek king, 167, 236, 372 Mencius, 342 The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 401 Milarepa, 215 Mīmāmsā, 190, 321, 436 ˙ Mindon, king of Burma, 77, 138, 139, 150, 152 Ming, Emperor, 50, 332 Mingon Sayadaw, 29

Min Yi, queen of Korea, 270, 273 Mirror of the Sŏn House (Sŏn’ga kwigam) (Hyujŏng), 268 Mongkut, king of Siam (Rāma IV), 73, 79, 261–262, 263, 264 Monkey: A Folk-Tale of China (Waley), 333 Monkey King, 332, 424, 448 Monks and Nuns on the Sea of Sin (Sengni niehai), 391 Morrison, Richard James, 365 Morya, Master, 100, 103, 107–108, 110 Motonobu, Kanō, 120 Mount Meru, 14–15, 43, 68, 111, 113–115, 118, 248, 316, 326, 363–366, 383, 403, 408, 428, 431, 439 Mouzi, 54 Mouzi’s Treatise on the Resolution of Doubts (Mouzi lihuo lun), 54 Mrgāramātā, 229 ˙ Muhammad, Prophet, 7, 86, 105–106 Muhammad ibn Qasim, 155 Mūlasarvāstivāda vinaya, 145, 148, 228, 243, 251, 287, 291, 293, 298, 300, 351, 353, 374, 407 Müller, Max, 28, 97, 102, 314, 401 Muslims, 37, 40, 41, 71, 74, 77, 101, 106, 154–157, 159, 160–161, 164, 181, 331, 366, 395, 405   Nāgārjuna, 55, 128, 226, 231–233, 284, 318–319, 323, 343, 398, 418 Nāgasena, 167, 236, 372 Nakaura Julião (Giuliano), 309, 313 Nālandā, 35, 37, 41, 132, 160, 161, 162, 227, 327, 331, 332, 334, 355, 447 Nanda (half-brother of Buddha), 383, 416 Nandā (sister of Nanda), 416–417

i n d e x    513

Nangklao, king of Siam (Rama III), 261, 264 Nanjō Bun’yū, 401 Nanti, 288 Napoleon Bonaparte, 200, 275 Nara schools, 61, 62, 296 Nawab of Bengal, 82, 218 Neeson, Liam, 308 Nestor, patriarch of Constantinople, 168 Newar Buddhism, 46, 163, 314, 324 The New Principia (Morrison), 365 Ngawang Gyatso, 345 Nichiren, 62–63, 271–272, 274, 298, 409–410, 411 Nicolas II, emperor of Russia, 404 Nigrodha, 91 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 103 Nikāya Buddhism, 29, 52, 54, 78–79, 186, 192, 197, 321, 331, 372, 373, 396, 436, 446, 448; arhat in, 386; bodhisattva vow in, 293; canons of, 299, 300, 447; in Ceylon, 251; Chinese Buddhism linked to, 53; defined, 32–33; Mahāyāna schools and, 185, 334; oral tradition in, 441–442; in Siam, 233, 301 Nirvāna Sūtra, 235 ˙ Norodom Sihanouk, Prince, 73 Notovitch, Nicolas, 101–102 Nyāya, 190 Nyingma sect, 127–128   Oda Nobunaga, 61, 63, 410 Odyssey (Homer), 442 Ögedei Khan, 212 Olcott, Henry Steel, 83, 333, 347–348, 357–358, 486n1 Oldenberg, Hermann, 445 Oldenburg, Sergei, 133

One Hundred Thousand Pronouncements on Mani (Mani bka’bum), 344 ˙ ˙ On the Connection of the British Government with the Idolatry of Ceylon (Hardy), 361–362 Ornament of the Sage’s Mind (Munimatālamkāra) (Abhayākaragupta), ˙ 231 Ōtani Kōzui, 133 Outline of History (Wells), 87 Ouyi Zhixu, 171–172   Padmasambhava, 43, 68–69, 127, 214, 436 Pairs (Yamaka), 316 Pak Samjung, 277 Panchen Lama, 57, 108–111, 211, 218–224, 329, 346 Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga) (Buddhaghosa), 48, 178–179, 355, 395–396 Paul, the Apostle, Saint, 4, 5 Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, 83 Pelliot, Paul, 83, 104, 133, 156 Pérec, Georges, x The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Stanzas (Astasāhasrikā­ ˙˙ prajñāpāramitā), 46, 233, 431 Perfection of Wisdom in One Hundred Thousand Stanzas (Śatasāha­srikāprajñāpāramitā), 441 Perry, Matthew C., 269 Peshawar, 26, 27, 117, 160 Phakpa, 64, 65, 72, 217, 218, 398, 437 Philip II, king of Spain, 306 Phōthisālarāt, king of Lan Xang, 80 Picart, Bernard, 82 Pilate, Pontius, 5 Pindola, 90 ˙˙

514  i n d e x

Piyadasi, Devānampiye, 91, 443 ˙ Points of Controversy (Kathāvatthu), 316 Pokkharasādi, 429, 436 Polo, Marco, 81, 157, 259, 328 Pol Pot, 74 Pope, Alexander, 440 Porus, King, 116 Potter, Karl, 315 Prajñapāramitā, 73 Prakrti, 250, 253 ˙ Prāsan˙gika, 176 Prasenajit, 162, 229, 398, 405 Precious Garland (Ratnāvalī ) (Nāgārjuna), 231, 398, 418 Prester John, 212 Principles of Exegesis (Vyākhyāyukti) (Vasubandhu), 233, 241 Prinsep, James, 86–87, 91–93, 132, 299 Prinsep, John, 86–87 The Promotion of Zen to Protect the Nation (Kōzen Gokokuron), 62, 400 Proof of Reality (Tattvasiddhi) (Harivarman), 61 Pure Land school, 54, 62, 134, 235, 311, 395, 409 Pūrvaśaila, 13 Pusyamitra, king of Magadha, 119–120 ˙   Qianlong, emperor of China, 57, 219, 220–222 Queen Mother of the West, 342 Questions of Milinda (Milinda Pañha), 167, 236, 362, 372, 472n9 Questions of Nārāyana (Nārāyanapa­ ˙ ˙ ripr cchā), 237 ˙   Rahman, 106–107 Rāhula, 264, 416 Ralpacan, 70, 214

Rāma IV, king of Siam (Mongkut), 73, 79, 261–262, 263, 264 Rāma V, king of Siam, 79, 264 Rāmāyana, 47, 79 ˙ Rampa, Tuesday Lobsang, 377–378, 380 Ranjit Singh, maharaja of the Punjab, 200 Raudracakrin, 106–107 Realm of Desire (kāmadhātu), 15, 21, 178, 387, 399, 403, 419 Refutation of Malignant Teachings (Taiji jashū-ron) (Sessō Sōsai), 172–173 A Relation of the Voyage to Siam (Tachard), 174–175 Religious Ceremonies and Customs of All the Peoples of the World (Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde) (Bernard and Picart), 82 Renan, Ernest, 102 Reting Rinpoche, 413 Revata, 148 R g Veda, 28, 429, 441 ˙ Rhys Davids, Thomas W., 83, 259–261, 265, 299 Ricci, Matteo, 169, 170, 171, 172, 303 Rinzai school, 62, 272, 273 Risshū school, 296 River of Kings (Rājataran˙ginī ), 98 ˙ Rizong Rinpoche, 380 Roerich, Elena (née Shaposhnikova), 103, 104, 107, 109, 110 Roerich, Nicholas, 103–104, 106–111 Roerich, Yuri, 104, 108 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 99, 109, 450 Rouse, W. H. D., 259 Rubruck, William of, 212, 216 Rules of Purity for Chan Monasteries (Chanyuan qinggui), 244 Rūpyāvatī, 419

i n d e x    515

Saccaka, 431, 435, 436 The Sacred Books of the Buddhists Compared with History and Science (Hardy), 363 Saichō, 61, 62, 271, 289, 296–298, 408–409 Śakra (Indra), 114, 343, 418, 424, 426, 433 Śākya clan, 145, 173, 257, 263, 288, 405, 429–430 Śākyamuni, vii, 23, 26, 31, 105, 189, 224, 233, 236–237, 266, 271, 328, 334, 355, 443; Burnouf’s view of, 92–93; in emanation body, 238; Jesuit condemnation of, 170; sexual yoga attributed to, 389; Shintō restoration and, 311, 369; statue, 67, 112, 226, 301; teachings’ disappearance foreseen, 76, 394, 423 Sakya Pandita, 64, 72 ˙˙ Śambhala (Shambhala), 104–105, 107, 110, 111, 160, 219, 395 Sāmkhya, 190, 191, 321, 332 ˙ Samudra, 88 Samye, 68, 69, 70 Śānavāsa, 55 ˙ Sanchi, 27, 132, 162, 163, 357, 445 San˙ghabhadra, 318 San˙ghamittā (daughter of Aśoka), 25, 47, 91, 288 Sangharakshita, 378–380, 491n21 San˙ka, 340 Śan˙kara, 100, 333 Sano Zenrei, 273 Śāntaraksita, 68–69, 315, 322, 360, 436 ˙ Śāntideva, 343, 396, 397, 419 Śāriputra, 115, 177, 256, 290, 305, 316, 349, 353, 420; sexual transformation of, 372–373; wisdom of, 114, 348 Sarvagāmin, 148

Sarvāstivāda, 26, 53, 120, 148, 316 Śaśān˙ka, 162 Sautrāntika, 317 Schäfer, Ernst, 111 Schopen, Gregory, 472n9 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 322 Scorsese, Martin, 308 Scripture on the Fifty Contemplations (Wushi jiaoji jing), 53 Scripture on the Production of Buddha Images (Zuo fo xingxiang jing), 115 Sebastian, king of Portugal, 157 The Secret Doctrine (Blavatsky), 103, 110 Seleucus I Nicator, 26, 167, 440 Self (Dillon), 370–371, 376–377 Sessō Sōsai, 172 Shaku Nindo, 302 Shambhala, 104–105, 107, 110, 111, 160, 219, 395 Shaposhnikova, Elena (Roerich), 103, 104, 107, 109, 110 Shenxiu, 342 Shinbutsu Hanzenrei, 43 Shingon, 61–62, 298, 300, 301, 302, 304, 411, 412 Shinran, 62, 271, 312, 358, 409 Shintō, 43, 44, 63, 269, 310, 311, 313, 411 Shizong, emperor of China, 56 Shōmu, emperor of Japan, 61, 296 Shorter Discourse to Saccaka (Cūl a­ ˙ saccaka Sutta), 431 Shōtoku, 60–61 Shwedagon Pagoda, 75, 138, 205, 400 Sikhism, 164 Śīlabhadra, 332 Silence (Endo), 308 Siraj-ud-Daulah, Nawab of Bengal, 218 Śiva (Maheśvara; Mahādeva), 26, 73, 154, 163, 333, 424, 431–433, 434, 436 Sixtus V, Pope, 306

516  i n d e x

Si-Yu-Ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World (Xuanzang), 133 Smith, E. Gene, 125, 136–137 Smith, Joseph, 125 Snyder, Gary, 84 Sōen, Shaku, 268, 411–412 Sŏkkuram Buddha, 273 Solomon, 107 Sönam Gyatso, 65, 217, 344 Sŏngmyŏng, king of Paekche, 266 Songs of the Female Elders (Therīgāthā), 37, 418 Songtsen Gampo, king of Tibet, 67–68, 214, 344, 345 Sosurim, king of Koguryŏ, 58 Sōtō school, 62, 198, 199, 272, 273, 274 Stages of the Bodhisattva (Bodhisattva­ bhūmi) (Asan˙ga), 235, 397 Stalin, Joseph, 405 Stein, Aurel, 83, 133, 134 Sthavira, 13, 32, 148, 357 Sthaviranikāya, 148 Stravinsky, Igor, 103 Subhadra, 140 Śubhakarasimha, 56 ˙ Sucandra, 104–105 Śuddhodana, King, 59, 337 Sudinna, 293, 384 Sukhāvatī, 213, 237, 395 Sunzi, 241 Surratt, Mary, 347 Surviving the Dragon (Arjia Rinpoche), 223–224 Sūtra for Humane Kings (Renwang jing), 399–400 Sūtra in Forty-Two Sections (Sishi’er zhang jing), 50 Sūtra of the Golden Light (Suvarnapra˙ bhāsa), 61, 112, 120, 399–400 Sūtra of the Samādhi of Direct Encounter

with the Buddhas of the Present (Pratyutpannabuddhasammukhā­ ˙ vasthitasamādhi Sūtra), 232 Sūtra on Loving Kindness (Mettā Sutta), 42 Sūtra on the Effects of the Five Pungent Herbs (Wuxin baoying jing), 186 Sūtra on the Land of Bliss (Sukhāvatīvyūha), 134, 235, 271, 357 Sūtra on the Supreme Net (Brahmajāla Sutta), 8, 190, 321, 360 Sūtra on Transforming the Female Form (Zhuan nüshen jing), 422 Sūtra Requested by Ugra (Ugrapari­ pr cchā), 418 ˙ Suzong, emperor of China, 56 Suzuki, D. T., 84, 288, 411 Suzuki Shōsan, 308 Swabhávika, 315, 324   Tachard, Guy, 174–175 Taixu, 109, 317, 367–368, 402, 403, 482n9 Taizong, Emperor, 67, 341, 344, 422 Takeda Hanshi, 273–274 Taktra Rinpoche, 413 Tale of Musashibō Benkei (Musashibō e-engi), 408 Tales of the Chigo (Chigo Monogatari), 391 Tamer of the Evil Spirits (Bhūtadāmara), ˙ 436 Tāranātha, 65, 163, 445–446 Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra, 195–196 Taxila, 27, 116, 200 The Temptation of Saint Anthony (Flaubert), 122 Tendai (Tiantai), 62, 198, 199, 289, 297, 298, 409–410, 493n7; Lotus Sūtra and, 54, 55, 61, 134, 271–272, 408–409

i n d e x    517

Thammayut (Adherents of the Dharma), 73, 79, 262 Theravāda, 5, 29, 31–32, 41, 45, 62, 73, 78–79, 127, 138, 142, 145, 148, 149, 167, 178, 261, 262, 264, 293, 298, 300, 301, 334, 347, 357, 358, 369, 375, 376, 378, 379, 380, 407, 445; chronology of, 284, 285; food in, 202; ordination in, 46, 279, 284–285, 291; rebirth in, 14; in Southeast Asia, viii, 33, 48, 72, 75, 76, 80, 226–227; in the West, 84 Thibaw, king of Burma, 77, 150 Thích Nhâ´t Hanh, 78 ˙ Thích Quả ng Đức, 78, 401 The Third Eye: The Autobiography of a Tibetan Lama (Rampa), 377–378 Thomas, the Apostle, Saint, 168 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 171, 323 Three Levels School (Sanjie jiao), 129, 130–131, 198 Thubten Zopa, 225 Thurman, Robert, 414 Tiantai (Tendai), 62, 198, 199, 289, 297, 298, 409–410, 493n7; Lotus Sūtra and, 54, 55, 61, 134, 271–272, 408–409 The Tibetan Book of the Dead, 14, 69, 83, 128, 378 Tiele, Cornelis, 155 Tolstoy, Alexandra, 413–414 Tolstoy, Leo, 411 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 266, 267, 306–307 ` Trân Nhân Tông, king of Vietnam, 77 Trapusa, 75, 205 ˙ Treasury of Abhidharma (Abhidharmakośa) (Vasubandhu), 61, 194, 205, 206, 236, 317–318, 319, 321, 331, 338

Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (Shōbōgenzō) (Dōgen), 272 Treatise on the Awakening of Faith According to the Mahāyāna (Dasheng qixin lun; Awakening of Faith), 197–198 Treatise on the Reformation of Korean Buddhism (Chosŏn Pulgyo yusillon) (Han Yongun), 275 Tripit aka, 424 ˙ Trisong Detsen, 68, 69, 70 The True Doctrine of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu shiyi), 170 True Pure Land school, 271, 274, 312 Truman, Harry S., 99 Tsongkhapa, 100, 322, 323, 344, 382–383, 391, 491n3 Tsukamoto Zenryū, 11 Turner, Samuel, 220, 221 Turnour, George, 91, 298–299 Tusita, 107, 113, 122, 403, 406, 426 ˙   Udāyana, King of Vatsa, 115, 118, 119 Udrāka Rāmaputra, 175 Umādevī, 432–433 The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ (La vie inconnue de Jésus-Christ) (Notovitch), 101–103 Unshō, Shaku, 300–302 Upagupta, 89–90, 326 Upāli, 11, 142, 145, 228–229, 250, 290, 348, 442 Upanisads, 7–8, 18, 371, 469n2 ˙ Uthman ibn Affan, Caliph, 155   Vairocana (Dainichi), 303–304, 342, 431–433 Vaiśesika, 190, 321, 332 ˙ Vaiśravana, 111 Vajrabodhi, 48, 56, 62, 74 Vajradhara, 334

518  i n d e x

Vajrapāni, 65, 238, 388, 428, 429–434, ˙ 435–436 Vajrasamādhi Sūtra (Kŭnmang sammae kyŏng), 198 Vajrayāna, 105, 226 Valignano, Alessandro, 303–306 Vanaratna, 41 Vasubandhu, 61, 160, 194, 205–206, 233, 236, 241, 317, 319, 331 Vātsīputrīya, 192–194, 317, 331, 372 Vattagāmanī Abhaya, king of Ceylon, 445 ˙˙ ˙ Vedānta, 9, 190, 191, 321, 333 Vedas, 7, 9, 28, 29, 190, 204, 248, 320, 331, 434, 441, 442, 448 Ventura, Jean-Baptiste, 200 Verses on the Middle Way (Madhyamakakārikā) (Nāgārjuna), 319, 321 Vessantara, Prince, 257, 263, 264, 348, 364, 396 Vessantara Jātaka, 262–263, 264 Victoria, queen of Great Britain, 92, 150 La vie mode d’emploi (Life: A User’s Manual) (Pérec), x Vijayabāhu I, king of Ceylon, 76, 290 Vimalakīrti Sūtra (Vimalakīrtinirdeśa), 127, 372–373 Vimalaprabhā, 343 Virūdhaka, King, 405 ˙ Visnu, 44, 73, 433, 434 ˙˙ Viśvamātā, 105 Vivekananda, Swami, 83, 101, 103 Voyage in the Seas of India (Voyage dans les mers de l’Inde) (Le Gentil de La Galaisière), 153–154   Wagner Richard, 251 Waley, Arthur, 333 Walker, Jimmy, 103 Wallace, Henry A., 99–100, 109–110, 111 Wang Yuanlu, 132, 133, 134, 439

Warner, Langdon, 133 Watts, Alan, 84 The Way to Shambhala (Der Weg nach Śambhala) (Grünwedel), 110 Wells, H. G., 87 Wencheng, 67–68 Wilkins, Charles, 86 Wilson, Horace Hayman, 6, 86 Wŏn’gwang, 58–59 Wu of Liang, Emperor, 186 Wutaishan, 59, 328 Wu Zetian, empress of China, 55, 131, 341–344, 422 Wuzong, emperor of China, 55, 168   Xētthāthirāt, king of Lan Xang, 80 Xinxing, 130, 131 Xuanzang, 28, 53, 55, 59, 96, 132, 161, 162, 225, 295, 296, 317, 318, 328, 330–333, 342; Buddhist texts sought by, 439; monasteries visited by, 37, 40, 46, 119, 133, 194, 355, 447–448; stūpas visited by, 26, 201, 209, 290   Yama, 425 Yamagata Genjō, 412 Yamantaka, 388 Yang Wenhui, 401–402 Yaśas, 147–148 Yaśodharā, 420 Yaśovarman, 73 Yátnika, 315, 324 Yijing, 53, 74, 228, 244, 290, 327, 330, 342, 355 Yin Shun, 403 Yogācāra, 57, 61, 236, 319, 321, 331, 402, 419 Yoga school, 8, 190 Yŏnggyu, 269 Yoritomo, 62, 408

i n d e x    519

Yoshitsune, 62, 408 Younghusband, Francis, 336; Expedition, 336, 345, 401 Yujŏng, 269  

Zanabazar, 65 Zhiyi, 199, 493n7 Zhongzong, Emperor, 341, 342 Zoroastrians, 169