Buddhist Worship

How are you going to worship at a Buddhist Shrine? The Indian word for worship is Puja. In many respects, Buddhist worship is very similar to the worship you would find in the Hindu tradition. You make offerings to the image: fruit, flowers, incense, sometimes a candle. In South East Asia, one of the most important things you can do for an image, is to stake in just a little bit of gold leaf and add it to the image.

Visual Contact

Another important thing to do is simply to see the image. This is where the worship of an image becomes the static contemplation of an image. In classical Indian worship, one of the things that you do is to go to the image, look at it, and get the sensation that it is looking at you. An emotional connection it is established by this visual relationship between you and the image.

In a Shrine in India, there are very few of them in operation there, the image sits in an enclosed area right on the center of the temple, there is a curtain over the place where the image resides. Inside that enclosed area there will be a group of Brahmins performing some rituals. You hear some drumming and chanting, you can smell the incense. And then, there is a moment when there is a burst of drumming, a bell rings, somebody pulls the curtain aside, and there it is staring at you. You feel the hair stand up on the back of your neck. It is a strong experience and not comparable to anything in Western religious traditions.

Why Worship?

When lay people go to an image and worship it, the principal goal would be to make merit. That is to perform good karma so it would be possible for them to have a better rebirth in a future life. The vocabulary of worship is connected with prosperity and good luck, not merely with the pursuit of Nirvana.

Strictly speaking, a monk or a nun would not use the Shrines in this way. They would use the Shrines as a focus of meditation, to be reminded of the Buddha’s teaching in order to prosper themselves on the way to Nirvana. The distinction between the lay person’s use and the monk or nun’s use of an image is like the distinction of the Form Body and the Dharma Body.

The lay person would worship the Form Body to get good karma. The monk or nun meditates on the image or on the Shrine in order to understand the Buddhist Dharma and appropriate it in their own experience.

Not so Simple

The practice of lay people and monks is more complicated than that and it doesn’t fall so easily into such a simple distinction.

Lay people often use the Shrine to meditate on the Buddhist teaching, it is not just a way of getting merit, but it is a way of reminding themselves of what the Buddha teaches them about their own life.

It is also true to say that, practically speaking, monks and nuns are not at all averse at gaining merit in some kinds of situations. One obvious reason for this is that not all monks and nuns are going to achieve Nirvana in this life. It is not inappropriate to act with for purposes of merit making.

This article is part of the series about Buddhist Art.

What are Sannyasi like?

In the last article we talked about the religious people in India who try to liberate themselves from the process of death and rebirth. They try to perform “no action”. To negate Karma. They are known in India as Sannyasi. But, what does it takes to live like this?

You might find it interesting to try to visualize for yourself what somebody like this will look like. I’ve given an abstract description to you of sannyasa. What would it be like to meet a sannyasi on the street and would it be like to try to become a sannyasi for yourself?

Leopold Fischer: An Unexpected Ascetic

The story that I often use to introduce students to this ideal in Indian life is one I think is in some way a little odd. Let’s start with once upon a time, there was a man named Leopold Fischer who was born and grew up in Viena, Austria, before the second world war. He showed an unusual aptitude for Indian languages. I’m sure he must have imagined that this was the result of some previous connection with that great civilization.

Anyway, he came of age during the second world war and joined the Nazi army, the army of the third Reich and he was assigned to the Indian legion, to defend the Normandy beach against the invading ally forces. He was captured with his Indian troops and was “repatriated”. He was sent with his troops to India, even if he never actually lived there. And when he got to India he tried to imagine what to do.

The Beginning of The Path

He went to Benares and tried to find a teacher who would initiate him as a sannyasi. Initially, his attempts to do this were not very successful because people was reluctant to initiate foreigners to this institution and style of life.

But he found finally someone who would do this for him. So the guru took him down to the Ganges, to the bank of the Ganges to the cremation ground, where the bodies are burned on the shore of the river. He asked him to go through a very simple ritual, which involved a ritual death. There was a cremation fire that had been set up for him. He striped off all of his clothes and laid down on the fire and was symbolically cremated to indicate that he no longer was the person that he was.

He rose up from the fire and went to take a bath in the Ganges, came out of the river and was rubbed in a robe of a sannyasi, he was given a begging ball, a new name and was sent off to walk the roads of India as a renunciant and ascetic.

A New Person

His new name was Agehananda Bharati, that means “homeless blessed”. He went on then to have a very distinguished and interesting academic career in India and ended up as a professor of anthropology at Syracuse University.

So, it doesn’t always work as expected. But the story is extraordinarily vivid and shows you something important about the sannyasa in India: that it involves ceasing completely to be the person you were to stop the cycle of transmigration.

Negate Karma

So you could imagine, I suppose, if you wanted to speak about this intellectually, the goal of this form of religious action in India is to negate karma. Simply to stop it.

You can really diminish the number of things you are responsible for in this world and the number of things you do. If you have less possessions, there is less to protect. Less to worry about and be responsible for.

They beg food everyday. Why? Because they don’t want to have to cook. They don’t want to be responsible for that kind of sustenance in their lives. So you try in a quite serious way, to diminish the number of things that you do and that you must do in this world. But in a more fundamental way, to erase the phrase “I produce karma”. To negate the concept that I am performing an action. To negate the “I”. To take the word “I” off the phrase, so it is no longer you who performs the action. It is no longer a you there who is connected in some responsible way to the actions of this world.

That’s what Agehananda Bharati did in that symbolic action by the Ganges when he laid on the cremation fire and was symbolically burned. But that too is a crucial aspect of the Buddhist tradition as well.

Buddhists also are trying to find a way to negate the essence of self that drives the cycle of death rebirth.

This article is part of the series about The Buddha’s Religious Background.

The Solution to the Problem of Reincarnation

In the last post we talked about the ordinary norm that religious people in India follow in order to overcome the problem of Samsara, that is, to perform good actions and get a good rebirth, according to the Law of Karma.

The Extraordinary Norm: No Action

It is possible in rare instances to follow another norm. To approach the law of karma in a very different way. We need to challenge a lot of our presuppositions about the way religious life works. I call this the extraordinary norm. This is open only to a few people, or should we say, it is chosen only by a few people. It may very well be open to everybody but only a few people choose it .

According to this norm, someone will attempt to perform “no action”. Not good action, not bad action. But not action at all. Neither good or bad. And the goal of this action is not to get a better rebirth, not to kind of win on the scale of transmigration or reincarnation, but to get no rebirth at all.

Bring the cycle of transmigration completely to an end. Very distinct idea, as you can see. Just to bring the cycle of transmigration to an end.

Nirvana: The Real Solution

This state of no rebirth, the end of the cycle of Samsara is called commonly in Hindu literature moksha, this means liberation. Buddhists refer to it as Nirvana. So this is of course the goal that the Buddha was seeking in his meditative and contemplative life. To seek Nirvana, the end to the cycle of transmigration.

Once a person has achieved this state, once you get there, there is no return to the cycle of death and rebirth. That means it is permanent. It doesn’t slip away from you. So if you want a solution to the problem of Samsara, this is what you got to do, you have to find some way to bring this cycle completely to an end.

Two Ways

If you think about this, with this two norms, then, come two very distinct styles of life in Indian society. Two different ways you can live as a religious person in Indian civilization.

People who follow the ordinary norm situate themselves in a network of duties and responsibilities. They live the life of ordinary people. The mothers, fathers, teachers, students and kings are bound by all the rules that govern these social roles.

People who follow the extraordinary norm renounce all of this. And I use the word renounce here in really a technical sense. They engage in an act of renunciation. So these duties no longer apply to them and they no longer occupy any distinctive place in the established structure of Indian society. In other words they really turn their back on all the social duties that are assigned to someone in that world.

This renunciants are called by various names. Sannyasi is one that it is commonly used in the Indian tradition and could be used for Buddhists as well. Buddhist refer to Bhiksus, the word we translate as monk, originally it simply meant “to beg”. Or Bhikkhuni, a nun, a woman who is engaged in the same act of renunciation. They have very few possessions, they beg their food and they live lives that are deliberately simple in order to escape the network of karma that ties them to the cycle of Samsara.

This article is part of the series about The Buddha’s Religious Background.

The Law of Karma

We will continue our study of Indian religious thought with a fundamental problem. The problem of reincarnation. It’s fundamental. It’s burdensom. What can we do about it? What do we do to lift this burden?

Karma = Action

The answer to that question in India comes from considering something that we call the law of Karma. It is the law of retribution that governs and drives the cycle of transmigration.

The word Karma is a word that is pretty common in our world. I haven’t looked it up in the dictionary recently to see wether it made its way into the discourse of the dictionary, but certainly is in the discourse of our culture. You know what it means to say that somebody has bad karma. It means something like bad luck, that probably springs from something they have done in the past, either in this life or in a previous life.

In India, the word Karma simply means “action”. So bad karma is a bad action. Good karma a good action. So the cycle of death and rebirth, the cycle of samsara, is driven by an inexorable law: What you do now, will produce some result in a future life. You have to find some way to work with this law in order to permit some positive solution to the problem of Samsara.

The Realms of Rebirth

You may ask, as we talk about the law of karma: Where Karma can lead you? That’s a perfect legitimate question to ask about India. What are the possible realms of rebirth? There are somewhat different pictures of this in different aspects of the Indian tradition, but generally six realms are considered into which you can be born. You can be born as a god, as a demigod or a lesser category of gods sometimes referred as demons, as a human being, as a ghost, as an animal, or as a spirit in hell.

Sometimes people are surprised when they hear that hell is an important concept in Buddhism or Indian religion more generally. But it is. It is very traditional, very important in the overall structure of Indian religious life, to realize that there are places where you can go, where you can really be punished (this is quite elaborately described in some literature), so if you perform bad actions in this life there are some important ways in which you will suffer for it in some future life.

The Possible Solution to the Problem

The law of Karma allows two strategies, to possible ways to deal with the problem of Samsara. You might almost be able to think of it by yourself if you begin to work theoretically with the law of retribution that I just laid out for us.

One of this I call the ordinary norm. Just the ordinary way of doing things. It is followed by most Indian people and it’s the most obvious way of responding to the challenge we are talking about. If you are an ordinary Indian person, what you try to do is to perform good actions to get a good rebirth. What can be more simple than that? Do your duty, do the things that are specified for you as a member of Indian society.

As a member of the Brahmin cast, the princely cast, as a father or a mother, as a son or daughter. Whatever that is, there are special duties that are assigned to you in that part of the world. You should make sure you are doing them right. If you do, then good things will happen to you in a future life.

The best thing that you can get in a future life is to be reborn in heaven. That is as high as you can go. You can be up there with Indra as one of the gods in Heaven.

But as in the story of Indra and the Brahmin boy, the problem with this approach to the law of karma, is that it is impermanent, it slips away. If you go and live with the gods in heaven, you will be like the other gods. Eventually you’ll begin to loose your luster, the impact of your karma begins to wither and fade, and you begin to fall down into the cycle of transmigration all over again.

It is possible to be reborn on a high level and live a pleasurable life as the result of your past karma, but it’s impermanent, and it slips away, it is not something you can hold on to forever.

This article is part of the series about The Buddha’s Religious Background.