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...

Nothing exists outside of the way we think of it; yet at the same time, nothing exists the way we think of it. The way we experience “things,” through the six consciousnesses and five aggregates, means that we are sentient beings. We have sensations, we think, we have views and prejudices. On the other hand, because on a deeper level reality also lays outside of our usual experience, the things we experience exist well beyond what we think of as our personal experience. The way we experience existence is the way we think about it, the way we perceive it; and the way our mind interprets it also determines how we cling to it or run from it, and the way we are conscious of it. Our experience of reality is what we experience in our mind, the way we think of it. This is a function of what the Buddha called conditional reality.  There is another reality that is far vaster than anything we can now know — transcendent reality. Intellectually we can all understand this reality. Al...