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.

The Buddha's Teachings

In this series of articles I present the basic teachings of the Buddha. With these texts, you will have plenty of reading material, and when finished, you will have a clear idea of what the Buddha tried to convey to his followers.

1. The Dharma and the Form Body: During his life, the Buddha had been a source of authority for the Buddhist community. What was left to fill the void when he left? For those who wanted to venerate or to worship the Buddha, the Buddha left behind what was called the form body, comprised simply of the relics of his cremation. For people who wanted to follow the Buddha’s example, he left behind what was called his Dharma. His teaching.
   
   
2. The Four Noble Truths: The traditional summary of the teaching is given in four categories, the so called Four Noble Truths.
   
   
3. The Three Kinds of Suffering: The Buddha claimed that All is Suffering. The ancient tradition of Buddhist teaching interprets the phrase “all is suffering” in three separate ways. Everything is suffering in one or more of three ways.
   
   
4. The Marks of Existence: We are going to further unravel the significance of these three kinds of suffering in Buddhism by relating these three categories to three more concepts. The so called marks of existence.
   
   
5. What am I?: What is our personality? What are we? The answer that Buddhists give typically is that the personality is made up of bundles of momentary phenomena.
   
   
6. Is Buddhism Pessimistic?: Are Buddhists pessimistic when they say that there is no self? Tt doesn’t take much thought to realize that Buddhism is not so much pessimistic as it is realistic.
   
   
7. The Arising of Suffering: The origin of suffering is explained by a causal sequence known as the twelve fold chain of dependent arising. Ignorance leads to desire, desire leads to birth.
   
   
8. What is Nirvana?: What do we mean by Nirvana? What is this concept? You can speak of all sorts of things as being as Nirvana and generally they are quite positive and pleasurable. That is the popular idea about Nirvana, but the truth is that it is not positive in a quite obvious way.
   
   
9. Nirvana as the Solution of Samsara: If you don’t want to come back again and again in some future life, then really what you want to do, what you seek is the stopping of that. And the Buddha found how to do that. That’s the great thing he discovered.
   
   
10. Nirvana as Freedom: Nirvana wasn’t just the moment of death for the Buddha, his Parinirvana. It was also that moment of his awakening that took place when he was a young man. He realizes at that moment that he was free from all the ignorance that drove the cycle of transmigration, and then he lived for forty years. A long, productive life.
    
    
11. The Path of Nirvana: What a Buddhist has to do to achieve Nirvana? What do I have to do if I want to seek that great ideal?
    

The Path of Nirvana

The Fourth Noble Truth is the Path of Nirvana. It is important for us to know something about the discipline that leads people to Nirvana, both for lay people and also the monks and nuns.

The Noble Eightfold Path

The Path of Nirvana is often divided in eight categories, like the eight spokes of the wheel of the Buddha’s teaching. The Noble Eightfold Path. It includes the concept of right understanding, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration.

I think that the logic of the Path becomes a little bit more clear if we take these eight categories and reduce them or group them together into three. This is often done in traditional Buddhist teaching. Sila, or moral conduct. Samadhi, mental concentration. And Panna, or wisdom.

What a Buddhist has to do to achieve Nirvana? What do I have to do if I want to seek that great ideal?

First, Moral Conduct

Well, first of all, you should abide basic rules of moral conduct. Why? Because if you perform actions that are going to be dangerous and destructive for other people or for yourself, you may end coming back like one of those worms or mosquitoes that we talked about when we were discussing the Upanishads. It is not that easy, if you are a mosquito, to try to achieve Nirvana. It would be a good idea to start by engaging in the proper modes of conduct that would make it possible for you to come back in a way that would be conducive to Nirvana. What are those?

No killing, no stealing, no lying, no abuse of sex and not drinking intoxicants. The five basic moral precepts of the traditional Buddhist practice. This applies to lay people as well to monks.

Monks observe other precepts and a number of other regulations that have to do specifically with the monastic life. These include the restriction that they cannot eat after twelve of noon. All monks beg their food in the morning and have a sufficient meal before noon.

They are not supposed to sleep on soft beds. They can’t handle gold or silver. So, if a monastery has financial dealings, they have to have a lay person who would take care of their accounts and engage in the purchases that keep the monastic life in motion.

Mental Concentration

Another thing that Buddhist practitioners do is to engage in mental concentration. The term here is Samadhi, to concentrate the mind. Maybe you think that meditation is the most fundamental thing that Buddhists do, and that’s certainly true in many parts of the Buddhist tradition. You might even begin yourselves to imagine what meditation might be like. It is not impossible to do it even in ordinary situations in life.

What you try to do is to situate yourself very stably, sit in a chair. You can even do it standing if you can be stable. Keep your back straight. The Dalai Lama insists on this when he teaches meditation. It is important to do it because it allows you to breath freely, allows you diaphragm to be free. And then you might want to fold your hands in front of you. And then just breath. Concentrate your attention as much as you can on that place where your breathing centers, and allow your body and your mind to become calm.

One of my old Yoga teachers used to say that in an experience of Samadhi like this, you allow your thoughts in your head to simply drain out of your mind. That’s what it is, allowing the mind to become calm and allowing the thoughts to clarify themselves by allowing all that busy activity in your head simply to stop.

You can imagine that this discipline of mental concentration is a way of doing for the mind, what the discipline of moral conduct does for the body. It is a way to stop all of those distractions and all of that negative tendencies that tie you to the experience of death and rebirth.

This form of meditation, of mental concentration, is one of the most basic forms of Buddhist discipline. It is found in the early scriptures of the Buddhist community, and of course continues on in practice among Buddhists today.

Wisdom

Finally, the third and most important thing that you would want to do, is to cultivate wisdom. Here the word is Panna. It actually comes from the Sanskrit root Prajñā. It is to know the nature of the world and to know where it is going, so you can become detached from it and begin the process that leads to Nirvana.

These three things: Sila, Samadhi, and Panna; will lead you to the experience of Nirvana.

This article is part of the series about The Buddha's Teachings.

Nirvana as Freedom

Nirvana is sought because it the solution to the problem of Samsara, but it seems to me, as with the concept of Suffering, that this is not the whole story. It is not the full picture. Nirvana wasn’t just the moment of death for the Buddha, his Parinirvana. It was also that moment of his awakening that took place when he was a young man.

A Positive Life After Nirvana

He realizes at that moment that he was free from all the ignorance that drove the cycle of transmigration, and then he lived for forty years. A long, productive life. He moved through the roads of Northern India, reacting to the experiences of people around him, teaching them the Dharma, begging his food, building a community of disciples and setting in motion this remarkable religious tradition.

If you want to understand what is positive about Nirvana, the most important thing to do is to try to imagine what he was like. Try to know what that Buddha was like as he glided through the landscape of Northern India for forty years after his awakening.

What Was the Buddha Like?

I think that he was exquisitely free. He was free from desire, he was free from ignorance and there was nothing that troubled him or disturbed his heart. As the result of that, he was able to respond freely to the interests and needs of the people around him.

The story of Angulimala shows a remarkable image of the Buddha as a teacher and as somebody who was able to respond to the distinctive needs of a person, who for other people would be extraordinarily frightening. He was able to touch his heart and to convert him to a different way of understanding himself and the nature of the world.

He is free, he is unattached. He is able to touch people in a powerful and distinctive way. I think that you also have to say that he is wise. He understands what the world brings. There is nothing that is going to shake him in that sense. We can speak about the Buddha as being wise, as being unattached, as being free and able to act with spontaneity and clarity of mind in his relationship to others.

Compassion

I think that also it is appropriate to say that he embodies a certain quality of compassion as well. A certain kind of compassion and ability to respond to other people’s needs. Although the concept of compassion is not one which we’ll begin to discuss in a technical sense, it would be extremely unwise to imagine that this Buddha was so rarified and so detached from the experience of suffering in the ordinary world, that he could not respond to the suffering of other people.

Nirvana is Freedom

It is important for us to understand Nirvana as a negative idea. In understanding it as a negative idea, we understand it in its Indian way, as a concept that responds to the particular challenges and needs of Indian civilization. But it is not a negative concept in its totality. It is negative in form, but positive in content.

The experience that you have of Nirvana is an experience of freedom, of detachment, of wisdom, and the ability to respond with clarity of mind to all the difficulties that life presents you. In that sense, you can really imagine that it is the Buddhist image of the perfection of a human person, because that is what the Buddha is.

This article is part of the series about The Buddha's Teachings.

Nirvana as the Solution of Samsara

With the concept of Nirvana we face a dilemma. Why would you ever want to seek Nirvana if it involves the extintion of all these things that are desirable?

Samsara

The first answer to this question has to be one in which we look again very carefully at the Indian assumption about the nature of reincarnation. I think that the concept of Nirvana forces us to take quite seriously the negative aspect of the concept of reincarnation.

If you don’t want to come back again and again in some future life, then really what you want to do, what you seek is the stopping of that. And the Buddha found how to do that. That’s the great thing he discovered. If Samsara is something you want to escape, the Buddha showed the way.

So, Nirvana is negative in an appropìate way in the Indian tradition, because Samsara is something that you would like to avoid and you would like to escape. I think it’s interesting to think a little bit about how the concept of Nirvana can compare to concepts of the ultimate goal of human life, it might be closer to home.

Achieve Nothingness

Many who are Jewish or Christian have in their minds an image of God, looking at the chaos of creation, looking in a certain sense at Nothing, and making something coming to existence. Christian doctrine of creation is called creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing.

God looked at nothing and made something coming to being. I think that is fair to say that for Christian people, and maybe for Jewish people also, that when you imagine or do something, it is something that is essentially creative. You look at the chaos of the day and you try to make something beautiful come into existence. Creativity is something we strongly value. We search for being. We search to bring new things into existence.

It is really fascinating to note that the Buddhist tradition is almost exactly the opposite. The Buddha faced the situation in his own life in which things were being going on from beginningless time. In the Buddhist tradition there really is not time when creation begins, it has just always been there. They speak often of beginningless ignorance, of the beginningless flow of human existence. The beginningless Samsara.

The Buddha understood how to stop one piece of it. What he teaches us is that when we wake up in the morning, when we begin a day or we experience the flow from one moment to another, the challenge is not to take that and create something new out of it, but to allow it to quiet. To allow some of it to slip away. That’s not Nirvana, but it is a pretty good analogy of Nirvana. To take this busy flow of experience and let some of it become quiet. That’s what the Buddha discovered how to do.

In some respects this is diametrically opposed to the image of human life that grows out of the traditions of the West, and yet it serves as a remarkable counterpoint, a supplement, a challenge to the approaches many of us bring to the experiences of our ordinary every day lives.

The first way to answer the question is to recognize quite seriously that Samsara is a problem that needs to be solved. It is solved by allowing the busy flow of experience to become quiet and come to an end.

But it seems to me, as with the concept of Suffering, that this is not the whole story. It is not the full picture. We will continue discussing in the next article the second reason why Nirvana is desirable.

This article is part of the series about The Buddha's Teachings.

What is Nirvana?

What do we mean by Nirvana? What is this concept? It is talked about a lot and it is a part of our vocabulary. You can speak of all sorts of things as being as Nirvana and generally they are quite positive and pleasurable. That is the popular idea about Nirvana.

Nirvana as a Negative Concept

The truth is that it is not positive in a quite obvious way. Actually, if you think about the meaning of the word, the etymology of the word it’s quite a negative concept. Nirvana means literally to blow out. To extinguish the flame of a candle.

So, you might say that Nirvana is the cessation, is the extinction of the fire that burns constantly from one life to the next. It is important to realize that Nirvana is a hard image and in many respects quite a cold image.

Silence

The comparison that I use when I talk about this comes from a experience I had quite a while ago. Once when I was on vacation, I went to a great Roman church, the Thursday night before Easter, when the lights inside the church were extinguished.

I have to say that that experience was very moving for me. We were in this great dark church, it was nighttime, it was early in the spring. There was a line of Italian choir boys walking out of the service when it was over, each one of them carrying a big candle. As they walked out, each one blew out the candle. One after another. And when the last candle went out, the church was plunged into darkness.

Then everyone left the church, in silence. It was quiet, it was dark, it was deeply moving. That’s not unlike Nirvana. Nirvana is the extinction of the flame of desire, the flame of existence.

Two Nirvanas

For us to understand the technical concept, to dig more deeply into what’s going on here, we have to understand that Nirvana comes at two moments in the Buddha’s life. It comes first in the moment of his awakening. That’s the first moment of extinguishing, the first time when he realizes that the fire will eventually go out.

At the moment of his awakening, he understands thoroughly what the causes are of the process of death and rebirth that he knows he is not fueling anymore. That’s Nirvana number one. It is called Nirvana with residues, because there is still karma from past lives that needs to be worked out.

Eventually, forty years or so later, he has the experience of Parinirvana at the end of his life. The complete extinction, when all of it burns out. The Buddha is released completely from the cycle of death and rebirth.

These two moments are called Nirvana with residues and Nirvana without residues. Nirvana without residues is also called Parinirvana.

What's so Great About This?

With the concept of Nirvana we now face a dilemma that is similar to the dilemma we faced earlier with the concept of suffering. Nirvana is spoken of in the Buddhist tradition as being extremely desirable, something we would really like to seek. And yet we have to confront it initially as being a rather harsh concept, a concept that has to do with the extinction of things that for many of us are pretty desirable in the normal understanding of human life.

We have to ask ourselves a basic question. Why the Buddhists treat this as being a desirable goal? What’s so great about this? Why would you ever want to seek Nirvana if it involves the extinction of all these things that are desirable?

This article is part of the series about The Buddha's Teachings.