Kumarajiva and the New Buddhism
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.