A Fistful of Sand

Because I am a Mahāyāna priest ordained in several lineages it all the propaganda regarding the Mahāyāna movement comes to my eyes or ears almost daily. It seems that many have personal definitions of what Mahāyāna is. The word has almost become meaningless in and of itself. These definitions are most often juxtaposed to another word that is just as meaningless — Hīnayāna. When studying under one Zen “master” the words were bandied about with nuanced meaning, Mahāyāna = good, superior, vast and authentic; Hīnayāna = bad, inferior, narrow, small, corrupt and inauthentic.  What do these words mean? Because the words seem important they ought to be examined. In the Mahāyāsütrālaṅkāra of the famous Asaṅga (circa the 4 th century CE), co-founder of the Vijñāvāda or Yogācā school of Mahāyāna Buddhism uses both terms. In his work the school called Theravada (Pali) or Sthaviravada (Sanskrit) was identified as the Hīnayāna. Asaṅga possibly had the Indian Sthaviravadin in mind wh...

My comments on the Shurangama Sutra caused a bit of a flurry. A couple of Mahayana priests, Zen types, opted out of the newsletter and dropped out of HJCL. That's fine because it is none of my business what people think of me. My business is solely what I think and that’s okay. Although I am always amazed at the lack of intellectual reasoning that goes hand in hand with religion. This is perhaps why the Buddha was opposed to religion and called it “a very bad idea”. (I’m paraphrasing here.) In Theravada Buddha refers to the person of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha of this dispensation. What he said was the whole of the teaching as we have it. In Mahayana Buddha refers to a concept called “Buddha” and there is no single dispensation, in spite of what the Buddha said. Under the proviso that “buddha” is a concept nearly anything can be attributed to it. It’s strange that nearly every academician and scholar on Earth agrees that the Pali Canon is closest in meaning, if not t...

…  [A] disciple of the noble ones who is consummate in view, an individual who has broken through [to stream-entry], the suffering & stress that is totally ended & extinguished is far greater. That which remains in the state of having at most seven remaining lifetimes is next to nothing: it's not a hundredth, a thousandth, a one hundred-thousandth, when compared with the previous mass of suffering. That's how great the benefit is of breaking through to the Dhamma, monks. That's how great the benefit is of obtaining the Dhamma eye." Samudda Sutta: The Ocean Samyutta Nikāyas 13.8   One of the first things that attracted me to the Mahayana was the teaching of the bodhisattva as a conceptual agency that could propel one towards enlightenment. The idea sounds very cool and altruistic, and is taken for granted as a fact of Mahayana religious fact. It was something taught but never explained. As a Mahayana Soto Zen monk I have spent years teachin...