There Is No Mahayana Tradition

The yoga of Buddhism is different than the yoga of Hinduism. Instead of doing physical contortions that everyone could see, the Buddhist yogi works with his mind. Yogācāra means “union with practice” and is often termed “Buddhist Yoga” in the West. This is the act of unifying the mind, already filled with the teaching of the Buddha, with the practice of meditation. Yogācāra is a somewhat unified philosophy that shares a great deal with the Pali Abhidhamma and suttas. It appears the older the text the greater the agreement with the Pali texts. The more recent the text the more confused the philosophy seems to become. In the end they are formalized through the commentaries.

In Tibet, the course of study of this form of practice we call Yogācāra can be as long as twenty years to attain this level of understanding. In other schools or “trends” of Buddhism the course of training can be as short as five years but is typically ten years duration.  Mahayana training is as often different from the Theravada training as much as it is similar. It sort of depends what you mean by Mahayana and what you mean by meditation training. 

While many attempts have been made to collate all the so-called Mahayana teachings into one school have been attempted for 1500 years, the differences within the Mahayana movement are so many, varied, and contradictory that a unified Mahayana school was never to fully emerge. It is more a movement and attitude than it is a school, and even then the attitudes are very different. There are a variety of schools within the Mahayana movement but some of them disagree with all the other schools within the Mahayana schools about what one would think are fundamentally core teachings. Some even maintain that they are the only true followers of the Buddha and all other schools, even original Buddhism are inadequate and incomplete. There are also diversities amongst the schools regarding meditation. There are whole schools of Mahayana Buddhism that shun meditation as being too difficult or even unnecessary. These schools also usually maintain that faith in a cosmic Buddha alone is needed and formal practice is irrelevant. 

The point of this discussion is that there is no unified Mahayana Buddhism, it's actually a misnomer to speak of it. The Mahayana of Tibet is vastly different from the Mahayana of Japan, even when we examine the Vajra schools of both. Pure Land Buddhism in Japan is also vastly different than the Pure Land Buddhism of Vietnam. We cannot speak, not really, of a Zen School in East Asia. Each Zen school, Ch'an in China and Zhen-na in Tibet, view the universe if widely divergent terms.

If there were a unified Mahayana Tradition then all the schools would equally recognize and use the Madhyamaka teaching of Nagarjuna or the Yogācāra teachings. All of the various schools would recognize and even honor the sutras of the used by the others. Unfortunately they do not. At the same time Zen is as much Mahayana as the True Buddha School and the almost infinite variations of the "Pure Land Tradition". Soto Zen would not thumb its nose at Shin Buddhism any more than Nichiren disparages both of its predecessors and Soka Gakkai ignores its forerunner Nichiren Buddhism. In the United States ethnic groups distrust Caucasians, Chinese Pure Land groups while espousing nondiscrimination, trust, love and the universality of Buddha's teaching as truth, dissuade Westerners from participating, teaching and have even refused to work in co-operation with Buddhist monks ordained in the same school because they are not of fully Chinese descent. Most ethnic Buddhist sanghas prefer to remain ethnic. Most sanghas formed by Western Buddhists tend to lack the community of an ethnic group.

Where in the vast canon of the Buddhadhamma does the Buddha actually call the Dhamma a religion? Fact is he doesn't. That is a word we have imposed upon the Dhamma. We imposed the term Buddhism as well, for that matter. Yet Mahayanists continue to call their school their religion. At the San Francisco Zen Center, for example, the phrase "our religion" was bandied about on a regular basis during the early part of this century. The Buddha intended to create an "un-religion" that could be seen as a cultural shift.

At no time in Mahayana's 1500 or so year old history did Mahayana ever present a unified front except when disparaging Theravada Buddhism. Mahayana is more of a movement that utilizes fictional literature called "sutras". A sutra is written in a very specific literary style called pseudepigrapha. That is, a work written in the name of a previously living and revered person. In this case that is the Buddha. Putting the words into the Buddha's mouth gives the work more status. After all, who wants to read the highly edited works of some no name monks. Instead, editors at later dates collated and re-interpreted the thematic works and presented them to the world as the words of the Buddha. When that doesn't seem to work the documents are called secret and advanced inspite of the Buddha's own words that he spoke nothing in secret.

If we take the sutras to be just what they are there is a myriad of wonderful writing in them. If we take them to be the actual teaching of the Buddha then we are fooling ourselves and falling into Mara's trap. This trap is often called "Marayana" instead of Mahayana. While the term was coined by a brilliant Theravadin teacher it has gained wide parlance in the Mahayana community as it tries to return, of in vain, to the core teachings of the Buddha. These teachings are eloquently expressed in many of the "sutras" but not so much in popular print. Mahayana is supposed to be the Buddhism of the general populace rather than the monastic. It bills itself as the Great Raft that can carry everyone across to the other side while at the same time asking the question, "other side of what?" If there is no duality then there is no other side to be carried across to. If the 30 or so schools that make up the Mahayana movement cannot agree on which teaching is absolutely necessary or what sutras are important then how can the Mahayana ever hope to carry anyone?

The days of the Sramana Zhiyi, founder of the T'ien T'ai school in China Tendai in Japan had it right when he said something to the effect of, there is no Northern School nor a Southern School. There is only Buddhadhamma. Zhiyi was writing in the 6th century CE. He systematized the Chinese Buddhist writings, including the Agamas, which are almost identical to the Pali Nikayas, into a formula of a universal Buddhism that could survive and thrive in all cultures. Zhiyi was living in the midst of the formative years of what would later become the Mahayana. His goal was not to formulate a Mahayana but a universal Buddhism that could work within the context of any given culture. He chose the title "sramana" the Sanskrit version of the Pali samana, to show that he was part of the Buddha's aesthetic lineage. But people in those days were very much like people today, when they feel they are ready they peel off from their teachers and found schools of their own. Protestantism in Christianity is a classic example of that mentality. The Mahayana trip of the past 1500 years is a bumpy ride of everyone seemingly making it up as they go along. Needless to say, Zhiyi's vision did not materialize.

Instead of relying on the teaching of the Buddha some people decided to create different teachings and attribute them to the Buddha. After all, it is easier for me to follow my own instructions than a master's. At least I will make it easy on myself, I can rewrite the Buddha's teaching and make them say what I find pleasant. I don't have to look within when I can look outwardly. I can see beautiful things out there and don't have to look at my own faults and perverse thoughts. SO maybe I'll look for some popular "sanity for idiots" pamphlet that will tell me just what I want to hear. But as a Buddhist I should turn to the Buddha but he wants me to work so hard. And then I find the book, a sutra, that tells me what I want to hear and the book says the Buddha said these things. And so the bumpy ride goes on. 

When we stop trusting the Dhamma we will trust anything won't we? 

While Mahayana provides great comfort to many millions of people what Mahayana Buddhism does not do is provide a uniform and cogent presentation of what the Buddha taught. Some schools are better than others, but as a whole there is something lacking.