Kumarajiva and the New Buddhism

 

Kumarajiva

America, as with other “religiously” oriented cultures, such as the Islamic oriented countries, one is seen as either this or that. You either are this or you are that. Some individual churches in the US have tried to “buck the system” and claim to be their own religion, the Unitarian Universalists, for example, which cloaks itself in the robe of “deism” but seems very much Christian or Jewish depending on the religious holiday. The same might be said of the Unity Church, which in the 1960s and 70s was very much a New Age organization, but over time has managed to become more mainstream and eclectic within the guidelines of the Judeo-Christian Tradition, whatever that might mean to you. The trend to be “something” and not another “thing” is overwhelming in our culture. The sentence, “You’re not a true Buddhist” or “You’re not a true Christian” fill the air all the time. We have expectations of our religious people to behave in one way only – our way. We claim we are a free country but this is not true when it comes to our preconceptions of how a religious person is supposed to behave, what they are supposed to say, what they are supposed to believe. Oddly, we never really touch the subject of “spirituality” except to give it lip service. When we say “spirituality” we mean “religious experience.” We cannot separate the idea of “religiousness” from “spirituality.” In the end we have created a religious culture of many forms and doctrines without significance. The form of religion often, too often, supersedes spiritual practice. It happens in American Buddhism as well.

It is always a popular topic to talk about the difference and common ground between Theravada and Mahāyāna Buddhism for all the Buddhists and scholars from both traditions. Though the controversy over the superiority or legitimacy hasn’t ceased, Buddhists and scholars are more and more interesting in find a way to harmonizing them. This seems mainly true of scholars, though this trend is not seen so much amongst individual teachers. This is unfortunate. Here in America, the dominant Buddhist trend is toward Mahāyāna. Everyone agrees that the Pali Canon is the closest to the original teaching of the Buddha. Theravada does not hold the Mahayana Canon in the same regard. Even within the Mahayana community there is little agreement on which sutras are authentic and which are not. Zen (Chan) accepts very few of the Mahayana Scriptures; Pure Land focuses on only three and disregards the rest; Tendai, Shingon and Kegon accepts everything but places greater value on some and not others. Some sects accept only the Avatamsaka Sutra others utilize only the Lotus Sutra. Many Mahayana teachers have opted to go to the Pali Canon and utilize only specific verses that can be found in the Mahayana Canon. If these teachers did not do that they would be labeled “Hinayanists” and many would lose their robes over night.

My own musings on this are probably irrelevant, but as a teacher of the Dhamma/Dharma I should say something about this condition. If we actually live with the truth and work with the facts we find something very interesting in Buddhisms history. Theravada remained unusually faithful to the original Canon of the collected teachings of the Buddha while Mahayana developed its own set of scriptures as it sojourned through China. In truth, a lot of Chinese culture found itself blended into the most basic of the Buddha’s teaching. In China an Indian monk named Kumarajiva is said to have translated some 100+ Sanskrit sutras into Chinese. Only 24 can be safely attributed to him. Of these 24 only a handful can be accurately demonstrated to have had Sanskrit antecedents. Kumarajiva was responsible for the Lotus Sutra, Diamond Sutra, Brahma Net Sutra and translations of Nagarjuna.

Kumarajiva integrated at least two, some maintain three, sutras to concoct the Lotus Sutra, and we really don’t know how much of that he independently added to the story. The Brahma Net Sutra is claimed to be a short version of a long Sanskrit Sutra, but no such sutra can be shown to exist. He also “translated” the Amitabha Sutra. Kumarajiva had a huge influence on the Pure Land School and corresponded with the First Patriarch Huiyuan. Via his translations of Nagarjuna and the Prajna sutras Kumarajiva had huge influence on the Chan (Zen) School. Because of his involvement with Vedic esoteric schools and introduction of the Dhyani Buddhas, especially Vairocana, into Buddhism, Vajrayana could point to him for legitimacy of using esoteric practices within Buddhism.

Increasingly, critical literary analysis is providing evidence that Kumarajiva was actually rewriting Buddhism from his desk in Kuchea, China. Oddly as a former Sarvastivadin monk who converted to Mahayana, his translations not only introduced esotericism to the scripture, Amitabha, and other new cosmic Buddhas, but also Buddha Nature as a universal and personal immortal “soul” kind of thingy. The gentleman had an agenda and that seems to revive the dying Mahayana faith. The word faith took on greater importance in Mahayana than it ever knew in Theravada. Kumarajiva also popularized the term “Hinayana”, the disparaging “h” word that should never be used in public. It is word that has no meaning and is only meant to cast doubt on the original teaching of the Buddha.

These documents were written for the Chinese Buddhists. Kumarajiva seems to have been catering to his new patron’s needs, wants and desires. The Chinese always had some notion of an “inner” and “outer” world, prior to Kumarajiva’s time they had not thought about psychological states as such. Original Buddhist psychology, as found in the Pali Canon and Abhidhamma, makes the mind a sixth sense organ and considers mental phenomena sense-objects. This is not true in early China, for example, Xunzi (298-238 B.C.), in his essay “On the Rectification of Names,” Lists only the five sense organs: eye, ear, nose, mouth, and body. Although the list ends with the mind, the mind has a different status. Xunzi makes it clear that the mind does not perceive objects, as the Buddha said, but engenders feelings as emotional reactions to things and situations. So, a Buddha, or anything else for that matter, that could be visualized in the mind would be an object that the mind actually perceived. This makes the visualization have greater reality for the Buddhist than for the Chinese who only acknowledged the five senses other than the mind. For the early Chinese the mind would add only emotional feeling but really participate in the creation of the sensory experience.

The early Chinese thinkers assumed a kind of naïve realism or objectivism when considering how the mind knows things in the world. It did not seem to occur to them that the mind itself plays a role in the construction of knowledge and it was further assumed that a visualization of a Buddha in meditation was either objectively real and appearing from the outside because of the Buddhas’ supernatural power, or merely a mentally-generated image as if in a dream. To assert that something “dreamed” actually has something new to say to the “dreamer” makes no sense from such an epistemologically naïve perspective. But it is exactly what the Dhamma teaches. Because of the manner in which Kumarajiva translated, and therefore edited, and interpreted the sutras, this epistemology was easily maintained and haunts us to this day.

Much of the impact of Kumarajiva’s translation/interpretation affected many sects of early Buddhism. By claiming that the original teaching was too difficult for the average person and enlightenment is no longer possible a new kind of Buddhism developed. One had the new Buddhism told the faithful that they should not even try to attain awakening but on the other there was formulated a notion that as soon as one goes into meditation they are already enlightened. These teachings, so very different from the original teaching is ubiquitous and deceptive. It has been aptly termed “Dharma Lite” by one Mahayana Scholar and Marayana, the vehicle of Mara, the one who keeps us from enlightenment, by another.