Schools of Buddhist Philosophy

After my introduction to the concept of emptiness I hope you feel intrigued and curious about it. I suspect that you maybe are a little bit intimidated after that long discussion of the concept that I published. It’s not common in the religious traditions of the world to hear that everything is possible precisely because everything is unreal.

Here, I’m going to push the study of emptiness a step further, by looking in the way Indian philosophers have tried to pin down its meaning. The study of Buddhist philosophy unfortunately is not particularly easy.

Buddhist philosophical texts were produced in a sophisticated monastic environment. They often rely in a lot of technical discourse that now seems impenetrable to us even in some of the best translations. However, I think that it’s worth spending our time grappling with the works of these philosophers.

• Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy: Where do we start? Maybe the best place is with a pretty basic question. What do we mean when we say Buddhist philosophy?
  


• Philosophy as a Form of Practice: Philosophy is a form of practice. Philosophy helps a person see through the appearances of things and confront reality face to face. The goal of all of this is to experience the freedom of the Buddha’s awakening.


• The Madhyamaka School of Thought: The first major school of Mahayana philosophy. It says that when the Buddha teaches the Dharma, you learn two truths: Ordinary relative truth and ultimate truth. This is the doctrine of two truths.


• Yogacara School: The Reality of the Mind: The second major school of interpretation of the concept of emptiness. The Yogacara took a position that was quite different from the Madhyamaka. The Yogacara says that the mind is real. It is only the imaginary construction of the mind that is unreal.

Yogacara School: The Reality of the Mind

The second major school of interpretation of the concept of emptiness is known as the Yogacara, or “Yoga practice”. The Yogacara school was founded in the fourth century by Asanga with help from his brother Vasubandhu. Like the Madhyamaka, the Yogacara school had a long history in India. At beginning of the 7th century it was carried to China by the Chinese philosopher Xuanzang. There, it had significant influence on the orientation of Buddhist thought.

The Three Natures

The Yogacara took a position that was quite different from the Madhyamaka. Instead of using the doctrine of two truths to understand emptiness, the Yogacara used the concept of the “three natures”. They thought of ordinary experience as a flow of sensation. A flow of sound, of visual experience. They thought about that as dependent nature. This is a kind of reality that arises dependently.

They say that ordinary experience depends for its existence on a series of momentary causes and conditions. In some respects, this ordinary experience is real. In some respects, it is unreal. This is the Yogacara version of the Middle Path. In some ways, it’s there. In some ways, it’s not there.

The unreal aspect of dependent nature consists of the concepts and distinctions that we impose on the flow of experience. This is unreal. The real aspect of dependent nature is the mind itself devoid of all of this imaginary distinctions. A name for this is emptiness itself.

Verses to Explain the Concepts

The Yogacara philosophers expressed this concept in a series of verses. These verses were meant to be memorized. To our ears they sound clumsy and obscure, but they are quite precise and rhythmic. In English, one of the most important verses goes like this:

“The imagination of something that is unreal is real, but the duality in it is not real. The emptiness in it is real. It is real in emptiness.”

That’s puzzling, but in Sanskrit it is really rhythmic and clear. That makes it really easy to memorize.

Useful Graphical Examples

The best way to make sense of the Yogacara school is to look at their examples rather than on their technical concepts. Sometimes, they compare dependent nature to a dream. All the phantoms in the dream maybe are unreal, but no one would doubt the reality of the mind that does the dreaming.

Dependent nature could also be compared to a stormy ocean. Dependent nature is like separate waves on the ocean. The real aspect is the stillness of the ocean itself. Meditation is meant to still the waves, so the pure undifferentiated nature of the mind can become clear.

A Really Unique Interpretation

The Yogacara school turns the Madhyamaka understanding of the world right upside down. The Madhyamaka said that ultimately nothing is real. The Yogacara says that the mind is real. It is only the imaginary construction of the mind that is unreal.

Why did the Yogacara take a position that seems so radically opposed to the position of the Madhyamaka. Their deep motivations are pretty hard to discern, but we can say that there were two main reasons.

First of all, to take the goal of the Buddhist path seriously, you have to be convinced that it is real, that it is there in some way for you to be inspired. In this case, the goal is the complete purification of the mind. In order to reach the goal, you have to be convinced that you can overcome all the barriers that stand between you and the goal.

To say that duality is unreal means that the illusions that tie people to the world of Samsara are nothing but a dream. All that we have to do to achieve Buddhahood is to simply wake up from that dream. The Yogacara too was motivated by the pursuit of Nirvana.

This conviction about the reality of the mind is what it made the Yogacara attractive to the Chinese. The Yogacara school doesn’t exist today as a separate entity but its ideas infuse the Chinese tradition.

The Madhyamaka School of Thought

The first major school of Mahayana philosophy is known as the Madhyamaka, or “Middle Way School”. The Madhyamaka school emerged in India in the second or third century of the Common Era in the works of the philosopher Nagarjuna. It was developed for almost a thousand years in India, then it was transmitted to Tibet and became the dominant tradition of Tibetan philosophy.

Nagarjuna and the Two Truths

Nagarjuna talks about the understanding of emptiness in the way I outlined it in my last series of articles. There, we talked about emptiness in a way that Nagarjuna would have understood.

Nagarjuna said that when the Buddha teaches the Dharma, you learn two truths: Ordinary relative truth and ultimate truth. This is the doctrine of two truths. Nagarjuna said that anyone who does not know the distinction between these two truths does not know the profound point of the Buddha’s teaching.

From the point of view of ultimate truth, all things are empty of identity. This is the point we discussed last time. From the relative or conventional point of view, the categories of ordinary life have to be accepted as valid.

Nagarjuna distilled this point into a simple formula: “It’s impossible to teach ultimate truth without relying on conventional truth. Without understanding the ultimate, it’s impossible to attain Nirvana.”

The key point of controversy for Nagarjuna commentators has to do with the meaning of the word “rely”. What does it mean to rely on conventional truth when you make some kind of statement about ultimate truth? There is a split in the Madhyamaka school on this point.

The Svātantrika Sub-School

One group of followers known as Svātantrikas thought that they had to accept that things have to be established or proven in a conventional sense before they could argue against them in an ultimate sense. This position came from their believe that philosophers had to start from established premises before they could refute the positions of their opponents. This position is actually embodied and expressed in the name of this group.

The word Svātantrika comes from the Sanskrit word Svatantra, that means “independent”. The Svātantrika were people who thought that Madhyamakas had to make independent arguments in order to respond to the positions of their opponents. In order to make an independent argument, you have to state a premise that you think as valid, and then you have to use that premise to argue to a conclusion.

They felt that conventional reality had to be established at the start of an argument in order to move forward to convince their opponent of their position. The Svātantrika had a lot of influence in India and Tibet, but it wasn’t the one that eventually won the day, at least from the Tibetan point of view.

The Prasangika Sub-School

Another group of followers was known as the Prasangikas. They thought that they only needed to presuppose the positions of their opponents before showing that they led to absurd conclusions. This position is embodied too in the name of their subschool. The Prasangika comes from the word Prasanga, that means “an absurd conclusion”.

All they do is to take the words of their opponents and then show that those would lead to some kind of absurd conclusion.

What Does it All Mean?

You might wondering at this point why we are going into this in so much detail. We now have followed the argument of the two truths into what is a genuinely a technical dispute between two groups of commentators in the Madhyamaka school. We should ask ourselves what is at stake here. Why is it interesting for us to consider an argument like this?

If you’ve been reading this site, specially my articles about the Buddhist concept of no-self, you may understand that this simple phrase, no-self, expresses the key point in the Buddhist view of the world. Buddhists want to find a way to live in the world and take it seriously, but not be bounded by any of it. This requires a delicate balance between the two intellectual pulls of the Middle Path. Not too much self, and not too little self. You need just enough to be effective and enough to be free.

This is what the Madhyamaka school was trying to get at when was doing this exegesis of the concept of conventional reality. Conventional reality is what we mean by self. What am I? Just some kind of conventional entity that stands here. It is not ultimately real. But how is it real? That’s the question. How can you be a self in a way that is out there and at the same time not being anything at all?

The Prasangika says that you are a self in a sense that it is true only when it is not analyzed. You can’t be a self that is established in its own right either from the conventional or ultimate point of view. If you were, you will be holding on to that self, you wouldn’t be able to flow freely through the flow of experience.

The issue that lies behind this dispute between the Svātantrika and Prasangikas is really a dispute of selfhood and in the end a dispute about freedom. How can you define philosophically what is to be free? This is the Madhyamaka school, the school of the Middle path, and it is the fundamental position of the Tibetan tradition. It is shared by all Tibetan schools in one way or another.

Philosophy as a Form of Practice

Philosophy is a form of practice. You might say that Buddhist philosophy is practice seeking clarification, in the same way that Christians theologians say that theology is faith seeking understanding. The clarification of the mind we are talking about here is not an intellectual game. Philosophy helps a person see through the appearances of things and confront reality face to face as you were looking at that image at the temple.

Philosophical Debates in Tibetan Monasteries

I should also say that the practice of philosophy in the Buddhist community, specially in Tibet, is practical in another sense. If you go to visit a Tibetan monastery these days, there is a fantastic little ritual that kids go through when they first enter into this philosophical tradition.

When you get up in the morning, you have some breakfast and then you go to your teacher. The teacher gives you a text to memorize. Then, they have to go out and debate it. This is where philosophy really enters into this. They have to engage in an argument to try to explore some of the ambiguous points in the teaching, and learn how to make their position effective in relation to others. This is probably one of the most lively and interesting moments in the whole day.

There is a row of monks lying with their back against the temple wall. There is another line of young monks, the questioners in the debate. They start to ask some questions, like: Is the self identical to the aggregates or it is not? The answer comes back and it’s translated into another question. I haven’t seen anything similar in any religious tradition.

The Point in Which We All Agree

The goal of all of this philosophy is to experience the freedom of the Buddha’s awakening. On this point, all Buddhist philosophers agreed, but they did not always agreed on the best way to approach the concept of emptiness. Out of the differences that they felt developed two major schools of Buddhist philosophy. It is on these schools that we really want to focus. We will start to do it in the next article.

Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy

I hope you now feel intrigued and curious about the concept of emptiness. I suspect that you maybe are a little bit intimidated after that long discussion of the concept that I published. It’s not common in the religious traditions of the world to hear that everything is possible precisely because everything is unreal. This way of speaking is meant to make you think in new ways. I think that this is what the Buddha actually intended when he began to speak about the concept of no-self.

The Language of Philosophers

Here, I’m going to push the study of emptiness a step further, by looking in the way Indian philosophers have tried to pin down its meaning. The study of Buddhist philosophy unfortunately is not particularly easy. The concept of emptiness already presents formidable difficulties to us. The technical style of argument that is favored by philosophers doesn’t make matters any easier.

Buddhist philosophical texts were produced in a sophisticated monastic environment. They often rely in a lot of technical discourse that now seems impenetrable to us even in some of the best translations. However, I think that it’s worth spending our time grappling with the works of these philosophers.

The reason for this difficulty I think should be pretty clear. A careful intellectual account of any religious tradition is going to help clarify for us what the basic ideas and problems are. More importantly, specially in Buddhism, it helps us identify where the intellectual problems actually lie for Buddhists, not for outside observers, but for the practitioners of the tradition.

What is Buddhist Philosophy?

Where do we start? Maybe the best place is with a pretty basic question. What do we mean when we say Buddhist philosophy? Philosophy is a western word that comes from the Greek. What do we mean when we say that word in a Buddhist setting?

The most common word that we are translating when we use this English word “philosophy”, is a word that simply means vision. It’s the word Darsana. The word Darsana is used to name the emotionally charged vision of an image in Buddhist worship.

I’ve said in another articles that when you go to worship in an Indian temple there is a moment when the curtain is closed hiding the image. Then there is a bang and the curtain is pulled aside, having a direct vision of the image. This vision of the image is called Darsana. This is a powerful and emotional moment in Buddhist worship. This is actually what the word philosophy means. It’s Darsana. It’s to see ultimate reality face to face.

Philosophy as a Practical Endeavor

In my article about the Path of Nirvana, I mentioned that the path could be divided into three categories: Sila (moral conduct), Samadhi (mental concentration) and Panna. Another word for philosophy is Vipassanā, a word that we sometimes translate as “discriminating vision” or “insight”. It is a form of Buddhist meditation and it has to do with cultivating wisdom. It is too a kind of philosophy.

So, philosophy is one of the ways to cultivate wisdom. It is intricately related to the practice of Buddhism itself. It is something you’ve got to do to try to free yourself from the illusions of the world of Samsara.

Emptiness

No change has been so profound and far reaching in the reform movement of the Mahayana as the concept that we call emptiness. This is a concept that challenges many of the rigid categories of traditional Buddhism. It also introduces an spirit of affirmation and almost of infinite possibilities that wasn’t present in the earlier tradition. In this series of articles we're going to try to understand this complex concept:

1. Emptiness: A Revolutionary Philosophical Concept: It is a challenge to develop an understanding of this difficult concept. A balanced understanding will help us account for both its positive and negative dimensions. I think that the doctrine of emptiness is one of the most profound and challenging religious concepts in the world, and one that, if you can grasp, will help you see not just the basic categories of Buddhism, but also lots of important categories of life in a radical different way.
   


2. Implications of the Concept of Emptiness: With the concept of emptiness, the Mahayana completely reoriented and changed the conceptual system of Buddhism. The doctrine of emptiness results in a concept of non-duality. If everything is empty of any real identity, then there can’t be any real difference between any two things.


3. The Two Truths: This is an important aspect of the concept, the doctrine of the "two truths". There are two separate perspectives you can take in any ordinary aspect of our experience. A true understanding of emptiness holds both of these together simultaneously.


4. How We Come to Understand Emptiness: How do we live if we really understand this paradoxical concept? Nirvana isn’t anymore a kind of a goal you have to reach from where you are.


5. Everything is Possible: A lot of people think that if everything is empty of any kind of identity, then there is no reason for us to take seriously anything that we do. If you come to a true understanding of emptiness, you feel some sort of a surge of infinite possibility. Often the doctrine of emptiness is expressed as power. Not as disability, but as being genuinely powered.

Everything is Possible

In the last series of articles we talked about how we come to understand the concept of emptiness. What effect is going to have on us in this world? A lot of people think that if everything is empty of any kind of identity, then there is no reason for us to take seriously anything that we do. In fact, they find it a very depressing idea. A lot of the stuff they thought was important for them no longer is significant anymore. This is that old fear that you see popping from time to time in the Buddhist tradition throughout all of its history.

We’ve said that a clear understanding of emptiness involves a wise appropriation of the categories of the world. This is an appropriation with a sense of freedom and buoyancy. Emptiness, in the end, is that kind of freedom that we talked about before which characterizes Buddhist people.

If you can feel the doctrine of emptiness as I have been trying to express it, what you sense is not a feeling of negativity. You feel some sort of a surge of infinite possibility. Often the doctrine of emptiness is expressed as power. Not as disability, but as being genuinely powered.

If nothing has any kind of identity in its own right, then is not real barrier to accomplish anything that you want to accomplish. You can bring to bear an ordinary experience a sense of freedom and directness. That would be difficult if you were caged in this world of frozen objects which are what they were, and can’t change.

The doctrine of emptiness is often expressed in the Mahayana tradition by the phrase “Everything is possible for someone for whom emptiness is possible”.

This article is part of the series about Emptiness.

How We Come to Understand Emptiness

In the last article, we talked about the two truths: conventional reality and ultimate reality. How do we live if we really understand this paradoxical concept? The bodhisattva begins by affirming the distinction between things, thinking that he is in Samsara and he really wants to leave it. He starts out with some sense of distinction. Then, as he study emptiness, he realizes that there is no difference between Samsara and Nirvana. Nirvana isn’t anymore a kind of a goal you have to reach from where you are.

The Two Stages of Thinking About Emptiness

You have to ask yourself whether there is any difference between that first stage of thinking and the second. I hope you stay with me. The first is a stage where you distinguish between Nirvana and Samsara. In the second stage, you don’t distinguish between the two. What about the distinction between these two stages? Is that distinction real?

When you ask that question to yourself, what happens is that you come back into the first stage. There is no distinction between the stage of no distinction and the stage of distinction. I’m presenting this to you in a way that sounds absurdly abstract, but let me try to clarify it a bit.

The Third and Final Stage

The tea ceremony is studied in the Zen tradition. They learn to handle a ball and tea, bringing in a ritual way, a real experience of emptiness. Let’s say that at the beginning a ball is a ball and tea is tea. When you start to study Zen, a ball is no longer a ball and tea is no longer tea. Then, when you are awakened, when you come back to the conventional awareness of things, a ball is a ball and tea is tea. The process of meditation is involved in this tea ceremony. It is meant to take you from ordinary experience into an experience of emptiness, and then back to the conventional reality.

This is the third stage of thinking about emptiness. It involves a wise appropriation of the categories of the world. This is an appropriation with a sense of freedom and buoyancy. Emptiness, in the end, is that kind of freedom that we talked about before which characterizes Buddhist people.

This article is part of the series about Emptiness.

The Two Truths

Another point about emptiness that is important to grasp, specially if you want to move into something that involves a somewhat more technical understanding of the concept, is to see emptiness as connected to a doctrine that we call “two truths”. There are two separate perspectives you can take in any ordinary aspect of our experience.

Conventional and Ultimate Truths

From the point of view of ordinary experience you have to take life seriously. You’ve got a job to do, you need to bring a paycheck in at the end of the week. You’ve got people who make a demand on you. Now matter how much you try to separate yourself from all of those issues, they are there. If you step away from them, you are going to bear all kind of consequences that are going to be painful to you. That’s conventional reality.

Ultimately, according to the doctrine of emptiness, that doesn’t exist. It just isn’t there. It has no identity. What’s this? Where are we? I’m not here, that’s all an illusion, it’s empty. There is nothing here for us to talk about.

These are the two truths. Conventional truth is real in terms of our ordinary experience. Ultimately, what is that? Nothing. It’s empty.

How Do We Live With These Two Truths?

A true understanding of emptiness holds both of these together simultaneously. This is a pretty interesting thought experiment that soon becomes a life experiment: to hold both of these things together simultaneously. To take seriously all the conventional issues that we got to deal with in the world, and realize at the same time that it isn’t there.

You see this very clearly in the terminology of the Mahayana tradition. Someone asked me how a bodhisattva has compassion for other people if there is no self. In the Mahayana tradition, you have that kind of compassion by walking right straight into this paradox. The text says: “May I achieve salvation for the sake of all other beings, and may I understand that there is no awakening to achieve, no other beings for me to have compassion on, and that I myself don’t exist”. Both of these things are needed to work out the bodhisattva ideal.

The relation between these two truths is not a static thing. You can’t get conventional truth over here on this side of the room, and you have ultimate truth on this side. The truth is that you get something more like a process. A process of thought and a process of life where you move from the conventional to the ultimate, and back to the conventional. This brings a taste of one and mixes it with the taste of the other.

This article is part of the series about Emptiness.

Implications of the Concept of Emptiness

With the concept of emptiness, the Mahayana completely reoriented and changed the conceptual system of Buddhism. As you first hear or read about emptiness, it may come to you as a rarified and abstract concept. Let me give you a tag that you could hold on to, to compare the doctrine of emptiness with stuff we have talked about before.

You Can’t Step Into the Same River Once

You could say that traditional Buddhism adopts a view that is a little like Heraclitus’ view of all of reality being made up of a flow of moments. Heraclitus said that you can’t step into the same river twice because the river is constantly flowing.

What does the Mahayana say? Not just that you can’t step into the same river twice, they say that you can’t step into the same river once. In reality there is no identity in the momentary flow of the river. You can’t step into the same river once. That’s the doctrine of emptiness.

This is a pretty abstract and puzzling concept. It is important for us to know about the consequences of the doctrine to get some understanding of how it worked out in the larger skin of the Mahayana tradition. Let me give just some of the implications of it.

We are Buddhas and we are Already in Nirvana

The doctrine of emptiness results in a concept of non-duality. If everything is empty of any real identity, then there can’t be any real difference between any two things. As a result, Mahayana texts often equates emptiness with the doctrine of non-duality.

What does this mean? If everything is empty, then there can’t be any difference or duality between Nirvana and Samsara. There can’t be any difference between us and the Buddha. What that means is that Nirvana is right here at this moment. It is here right now, if we can understand it correctly. It also means that we are already Buddhas if we understand the nature of ourselves as being not different from the nature of the Buddha.

This is a pretty significant reorientation of the ideals of traditional Buddhism. Traditional Buddhism said that there was no permanent reality in anything, everything was in a process of flow. But there was no way of confusing Nirvana, which was up there at the end of this process, with Samsara. Now, this distinction is stripped away. Nirvana is right here, right in the midst of that flow, if we can begin to perceive it correctly.

So, one of the important consequences of the concept of emptiness is this doctrine of non-duality.

What the Bodhisattva Seeks is Here

A second important consequence has to do with the practice of the bodhisattva. We’ve said before that the bodhisattva returns to this world. He comes back to Samsara in order to help other people pursue the path to Nirvana.

That’s still true. Bodhisattvas have compassion for others, but you can see here now, when you confront the concept of emptiness, that the bodhisattva doesn’t come back just for altruistic purposes. It’s not just altruism that drives the bodhisattva back into this world. Why? There isn’t any difference between Nirvana and Samsara.

If there is no Nirvana out there to seek, you can only find it here, you’ve got to come back. The bodisattva is back in the world of Samsara to help other people, but the bodhisattvas are also here for reasons that have to do with the bodhisattvas’ own awareness and their desire to know Nirvana right here in the experience of suffering.

This article is part of the series about Emptiness.

Emptiness: A Revolutionary Philosophical Concept

We’ve seen that the Mahayana introduced a lot of important changes into the Buddhist tradition by adding values to this already complex tradition that we’ve studied in some detail. But no change has been so profound and far reaching as the concept that we call emptiness.

A Truly Unique Concept

This is a concept that in a negative way challenges or undermines many of the rigid categories of traditional Buddhism. In a more positive way, the concept of emptiness introduces an spirit of affirmation and almost of infinite possibilities that wasn’t present in the earlier tradition. This spirit was present in some degree in that vision of the cosmos that Sudhana had.

It is a challenge to develop an understanding of this difficult concept. A balanced understanding will help us account for both its positive and negative dimensions. I must say that this is the concept that I have spent most of my adult life studying. I think that the doctrine of emptiness is one of the most profound and challenging religious concepts in the world, and one that, if you can grasp, will help you see not just the basic categories of Buddhism, but also lots of important categories of life in a radical different way.

A Radical Extension of No-Self

Let’s start out with a basic analysis of this concept of emptiness. Emptiness can be understood as a radical extension of the concept of no-self in traditional Buddhism. This is a concept that we have already talked about. Let’s lay out for ourselves what concepts of the self we’ve already learned.

Well, one will come from the Upanishads. That old Hindu idea of the eternal self that’s identical to Brahman and identical to the one reality that underlies the unity of this world. In the Hindu tradition, the self is identical to Brahman and it is eternal and permanent.

The Theravada expresses a traditional Buddhist view that undermines this old Hindu vision of the permanent or eternal self. In traditional Buddhism there is nothing permanent that endures from one moment to the next. So, traditional Buddhism says that there is no self. There is no permanent identity that endures from one moment to the next. All that we see in reality is just a series of momentary phenomena bounded together to give the illusion of some kind of unity, like the flickers in the flame of a candle.

The self, according to traditional Buddhism, is simply a flow of momentary phenomena.

The Mahayana took a step further. They went beyond this traditional Buddhist idea of the self. The Mahayana denies the reality not just of an enduring self, but it denies the reality of the moments themselves. They said that these momentary phenomena are empty of identity, empty of reality. The word empty here is Śūnya. From this comes the doctrine of emptiness.

What is the nature of all things? It is their emptiness. The fact that even as momentary phenomena, they have nothing that you could hold on to.

In the next series of articles we will continue with the study of this complex and unique concept.

This article is part of the series about Emptiness.