The Power of Images in Buddhism

In the last article we talked about how Buddhist worship in a Shrine. Another questions you might ask about Shrines are: In what sense do these images represent the Buddha? Is the Buddha present in the image? Is the image the Buddha himself?

The Sustaining Power

For Hindus, the answer to these questions would be relatively easy. In Hindu worship, the deity is called to become present in the image. You can say quite appropriately that when you worship an image of a god like Shiva or Vishnu, you are worshiping the god that is present in that image.

In the Buddhist case, the Buddha has achieved Nirvana and is no longer available. It is no longer present in that image. The image stands in a somewhat more complex relationship to the Buddha.

How does that relationship take place? It is understood historically that when the Buddha died, he left behind, in his relics and in the objects that he used, a certain power, a sustaining power. This power resides in that object in such a way that can make that object effective for you when you worship it. So, to pay homage to something like the Buddha’s begging ball allows you to plug into the lingering power of the Buddha’s presence. The Buddha himself may be gone, but there is a power that he has left behind which you can access by engaging in an act of worship.

What Do We Get From It?

You might ask one more question. In what sense do you touch the power of the Buddha? On one level it is physical power that is present. On another important level, for Buddhists specially, it is a power that grows out of your own response to that object. So, you might say that it is a meditative connection that you make, that reminds you of the Buddha’s presense.

All that is meant to describe the sophisticated vocabulary of Buddhist worship. You don’t just worship the Buddha in a particular Shrine, you get access to his power in a way that reminds you of the Dharma and helps you to embody it in your own experience.

This article is part of the series about Buddhist Art.

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.

Buddhist Shrines

If we look back historically at the very earliest representations of the Buddha, we find not statues or images of the Buddha, but Shrines. Holy places that are connected with the presence of the Buddha. The earliest of these Shrines contained relics of the Buddha’s cremation. Later ones were associated with events or objects that were connected with the Buddha’s life.

Places of Worship

In the early Shrines, the ones that were established shortly after the death of the Buddha, the relics of the Buddha’s cremation were taken to funerary mounds. Big, solid, round mounds that had a square structure on the top. The relic of the Buddha’s cremation was put inside that square structure.

As time went on, the relics of the cremation of the Buddha were taken out, redivided and further distributed. What was originally a set of only about six different holy places became a vast profusion of places associated with the relics that lingered from the Buddha’s creamation.

But this wasn’t the only option, there were objects that the Buddha owned, in one way or another. I mentioned in other article that an important Shrine held the Buddha’s begging ball. There are other Shrines like that, associated with objects that were part of his life.

A common form of Shrine is the Shrine associated with the Buddha’s footprints. You can find footprints just about anywhere. All sorts of stories could be spawned to explain how the Buddha might landed there.

Pilgrimage

How do they work in Buddhist devotion? One of the things that these Shrines made possible was the early Buddhist tradition of pilgrimage. Some of the early reliquary mounds were set up in places that were associated with particularly important events in the Buddha’s life, like the great reliquary mound near the Deer Park where the Buddha gave his first sermon.

When you visit a pilgrimage site like this or come into the presence of one of these Shrines, you engage in what we would call an action of worship. It is important to be aware to some degree of the vocabulary of Buddhist worship. How are you going to worship at a Buddhist Shrine? We will see that in the next article.

This article is part of the series about Buddhist Art

Buddhist Proverbs

We find that the Buddhist tradition is expressed in very simple and memorable verses. Proverbs are one of the ways traditional teachings are conveyed, specially in an oral one like this. I’ll write a couple of them to give you a flavor of what these proverbs sound like. They come from the text called the Dhammapada, one of the very early collections of the Buddha’s spoken teaching.

“Not to do any evil, to cultivate good, and to purify one’s mind. This is the teaching of the Buddha.”

It seems extremely simple. I suppose if somebody told you: “Well, what’s my teaching?”. “Don’t do evil, do good”. It is hard to disagree with that. But note that little bit added at the end: “Purify your mind”. That’s Buddhist. That’s the Buddha speaking. You’ve got to find some way to purify the mind of ignorance and desire. Then you can really strike the root of the issues of evil and good.

In its simplicity it also conveys a distinctive message. Another proverb like this:

“You are your own protector. What other protector can there be? With your self fully controlled, you obtain a protection that is hard to obtain.”

We know that Buddhists are self-reliant. We know their concern about achieving Nirvana for themselves and not depending on others. This seems simply to be an affirmation of that. This word protector has a little hook in it. It is also a word you can use to refer to God. The Buddha is saying here: “You are your own god”. Strong teaching. It stands the Buddhist tradition in open opposition to what was happening in Hindu life at that time.

You get a flavor here of some of the distinctive aspects of the teaching of the Buddha.

Doctrine and Action in Buddhism

An story that is very important for the understanding of Buddhists in the modern world is the story of a man named Malunkyaputta. Malunkyaputta was a possible convert. He comes to the Buddha and says something like this:”You know, I really kind of like some of the things you are saying, but you haven’t answered all the questions I want answered.” And he lists a series of ten questions: Is the world eternal or not? Does it have an origin or not? Is the Buddha going to survive after death or not?, etc.

The Buddha says: “Malunkyaputta, when you ask these questions, you remind me of a guy who has just been shot with a poisoned arrow. He is lying on the ground, somebody walks up and offers to pull the arrow out, and he refuses. He says he wants to know who shot that arrow, to what cast that person belongs to, what kind of bow did he use, who made the arrow. He won’t let the man pull out the arrow until he has those questions answered.”

This is a way of saying not to be concerned with a lot of doctrinal issues that have to do particularly with the origin of things. What we are concerned about in the Buddhist tradition is the pragmatic removal of suffering. We want to get that arrow out and not to speculate much about where the arrow came from.

Buddhist Nuns

Nuns were an important part of the early Buddhist community. The story about the formation of the community of nuns is somewhat problematic to our eyes. I’ll tell it anyway and comment and ponder on it together.

The Origin of the Order

The Buddha’s aunt, Mahapajapati, asked one of the Buddha’s trusted followers if he will be willing to ordain her as a nun. Until this time he had only ordained men in his monastic organization. The Buddha initially refused. She pressed him again and again. He finally agreed to do it, but with a couple of restrictive stipulations.

One was that the nuns would have to abide by an additional series of regulations, over and above the regulations that applied to the monks. Another stipulation was that even the most senior nun would be junior to the most junior monk. The monastic system is hierarchically based on age. This meant that even the most senior nun would rank lower than the most newly ordained monk.

This tradition of nuns thrived in this early community and was an important part of the expansion of Buddhism on to South East Asia and into the rest of the world. There are now active communities of nuns, particularly in China, but the traditional practice of Buddhist nuns has died out now in South East Asia, although there are in some places attempts to reestablish that lineage.

If you want to study Buddhist nuns, it is probably easier to look at that community in the traditional Chinese context, such as Taiwan, or in Tibet, where Buddhist nuns are active.

The Stipulations

What should we think about these additional stipulations that the Buddha imposed on this early community of nuns? Was he doing a good thing?

I suppose it is difficult for us to judge this historical phenomenon that developed in a context very different from our own, but I think we should say two things. One is that in its time it seems this was quite radical, to open up the possibility of renunciation in a formal context to women.

The possibility of monasticism for women has been an important part of the Buddhist community, and it represents the commitment to the possibility of Nirvana for women within the community. It is important not to characterize the early Buddhist tradition as diminishing the ability of women to achieve awakening.

It is true that there had been these additional restrictions on the status nuns can acquire in the Buddhist community. They reflect, I suspect, the restrictions on the behavior and the status of women in the context of the time.

In any case, nuns were an important part of the early community. The monastic practice of women continues to be significant in the Buddhist community today.

This article is part of the series about The Early Sangha

Buddhist Lay Followers

At the very beginning, the Sangha(Buddhist community) was quite small and consisted of just an informal group of followers. They wandered with the Buddha, as he wandered through the roads of Northern India. It was a diverse community. It is often spoken of as having four parts: monks, nuns, male lay followers, and female lay followers.

You can ask yourself: What are the different types of people who would be found in the Buddhist community? The best place to start is with the role of lay supporters, because obviously these monks and nuns couldn’t continue for very long unless they’ve got a lot of devoted lay people to support them.

A Great Donor

When we talk about the lay supporter I like to take as an example the story of a great donor, a Danapati. The word “dana” comes from the same root as our word donor. A Danapati is a “Lord of Generosity”.

The story is that this man felt that the community needed to have a place to live. There was a particularly desirable place in the territory that surrounded the town. He offered to buy it from its owner. The owner said that he wouldn’t sell it unless he was paid with gold. The story says that he spread gold coins across the land and bought it.

You can say that great donors have been models of generosity for the lay supporters of the community. This is pretty obvious. It is pretty clear that you couldn’t have these monks unless there were devoted and generous lay followers.

Generosity

There are a couple of implications of this practice worth considering. First of all, when we talked about the practice of the Path, I told you that the five moral precepts of lay people were rather negative virtues. They are important virtues. It is important not to kill, not to lie and all those things, but they involve restrains on conduct. They don’t allow you to do anything that positively asserts your concern for others or the community.

You can get the impression from that, that Buddhism is a negative tradition in its discipline. Of course, it isn’t. One way we see that is by considering this question of generosity. To be a good lay person is to be generous. To donate as much as you can for the support of the Sangha and for the preservation of the Dharma.

In fact, you can probably say that generosity is in some respects the most basic form of lay meditation. It involves giving up. It expresses a concern for others in a way that allows to no longer focus so much on yourself. It is a very simple but effective way of meditating on the fundamental value of no-self.

Each One His Due

It is also interesting to note that it is one of the duties of a monk to give a lay person an opportunity to give. In some kinds of situations you could characterize this with the image of a greedy monk, who is constantly asking for donations. There are some monks who look like this in many situations. The truth is that they are showing another important aspect of the Buddhist ideal: a lay person has the duty to give. How can a lay person give if there is not a monk who is there at the door, humbly receiving the donation that the lay person has to offer?

In this complicated system of Buddhist institutional life, you could say that it is important to receive as it is to give. To give others the opportunity to express their generosity.

This article is part of the series about The Early Sangha

The Three Refuges of Buddhist Faith

There is a fundamental formula that is used in the Buddhist tradition to express faith in the tradition itself. It is called the Three Refuges. Some people have said that it functions in Buddhism a little bit like The Lord’s Prayer or some other very common affirmation of faith in others religious traditions.

In English it would sound simply like this: “I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma, I take refuge in the Sangha.” The Sangha is the Buddhist community.

These are the three focal points of faith in the Buddhist tradition. People would recite this as part of an ordinary daily ritual. Some people use it as a formula when they want to assert their own Buddhist identity.

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.

Siddharta Achieves Nirvana

In the last article, we talked about the moment when the Buddha finally understood what causes the suffering of the world and how he could bring it to a definitive end.

Siddharta Becomes the Buddha

This was the moment when we can properly call Siddharta the Buddha. The word Buddha often is translated as the “enlightened one”, this is a common translation and I suppose it is not a bad one to use. It certainly is a translation that is understandable to many people, but technically is a little bit misleading.

Buddhists say that a Buddha is someone who has awakened from the dream of ignorance, and also someone who’s wisdom has blossomed like a flower.

The root that lies behind the word Buddha can mean to wake up from a dream and also can be used to refer to a rose, to speak of its opening, of its blossoming.

These days we generally translate the word Buddha as the awakened one, and also I think it would be fine to say that he is the one who has blossomed. But doesn’t sound quite right in English, so I think I’ll stick with the word awakened.

Nirvana

When Siddharta became a Buddha he also achieved the state, or the goal that Buddhists call Nirvana. There is a lot of confusion about Nirvana in our world, and Buddhists don’t make matters any easier when they insist that only a Buddha can now what Nirvana actually is.

How could I know such a rarified and elusive state? For the rest of us it would be enough to simply know what the word itself means. I suspect that this would take us closer to the experience of Nirvana, to understand it as a concept. This is discussed in more depth in the article What is Nirvana.

Nirvana means to extinguish or to blow out. So, a Buddha is someone who not only had understood the causes of suffering, but has blown them out. He no longer suffers from the ignorance and desire that feed the fire of death and rebirth.

As you think about this ideal, as you think about the story of the Buddha’s life, you might ask yourself why Buddhists find this to be attractive. The answer goes back to the idea of Samsara. Buddhist took the problem of death and rebirth very seriously. In fact, the concept of Nirvana is a gauge of how serious the issue of Samsara was.

It was only a great sage who could escape the cycle of death and rebirth. In a more positive way, you can also sense how Nirvana involves a sense of freedom and calm. This is missing from ordinary life in this world.

The Buddha had no longer anything to worry about once he had achieved this breakthrough. For him, all the storms of Samsara were over. He was free from that and he could live his life with the awareness it would never come back into the cycle of frustration, in the cycle of Samsara again.

This article is part of the series about The Life of the Buddha.

The Middle Path

One day, Siddharta accepted a ball of rice pudding from a young woman who found him exhausted on the side of a river. He then withdrew from this harsh style of asceticism to a practice that Buddhists traditionally refer to as the Middle Path, a very important concept in Buddhist life.

Avoid Extremes

The concept of the Middle Path covers all sort of aspects of the way Buddhists live. The point is to avoid two extremes. And extremes can vary in certain situations.

One is an extreme of self-denial. To deny yourself too much. Not to care appropriately for the needs of the body and the personality.

The other extreme is the one of self-indulgence. A form on indulgence that affects not only the way that people live but also the way people think. Specially the way they think about themselves.

Buddhist philosophers constantly ask what it means to talk about ourselves as being a self. They often disagree about how to define it, but they agree that the self should not be indulged, it should not be formed too much, and it also should not be denied. So, the proper view of the personality according to the Buddhist tradition is in itself a Middle Path. A way of cultivating the self with a sense of responsibility. Avoiding any sense of self-indulgence.

The Great Enlightenment

When Siddharta found the Middle Path, things began to move more quickly for him. He sat down under a tree and he fixed himself in meditation. He was tempted by Mara, who is the personification of death in the Buddhist tradition. He first sent his daughters to seduce Siddharta. Then he sent the armies of his son to distract him.

I’ve begun to think of these armies not so much the way it often has been presented traditionally in Buddhist literature, as the armies of Mara fighting the Buddha trying to scare him away from this serious conviction and commitment. But instead I think of them as the last vestige of his life as a prince.

A clone of the tree under which The Buddha achieved Nirvana

This young man, thirty-five or thirty-six years old, had tried to turn his back on the princely life that he once has lived and now was attempting to seek this solution to the problem of transmigration, and out of his past came the old gang. All of those guys that used to fight with him and said to Siddharta: “Come and fight with us! Just as we used to do. Be a prince like you once were.”

The story in Buddhist literature of course says that he resisted the temptation that these armies presented and he reached down in his meditation and touched the earth. The earth shook to bear witness to the strength of his conviction.

And once this happened, once Mara had been defeated, Siddharta was on his way to enlightenment. In the dark of the night, he passed through stages of meditation and finally understood what causes the suffering of the world and how he could bring it to a definitive end.

This article is part of the series about The Life of the Buddha.