SuttaCentral
Thank you for your response, Bhikkhuni.
I think the Buddha can be interpreted as a spiritual being who can hear our prayers, without being a theistic god.
As far as the meaning of Nirvana, I tend to agree with Bhikkhu Bodhi, that it’s an existing reality, rather than merely the blowing out of a flame:
http://www.beyondthenet.net/dhamma/nibbanaReal.htm
Do you believe that the historical Buddha is somewhere around able to listen to your prayers?
This quote is from The Religion of the Samurai: A Study of Zen Philosophy and Discipline in China and Japan by Kaiten Nukariya:
Enlightened consciousness is often called Buddha-nature, as it is the real nature of Universal Spirit… When we are Enlightened, or when Universal Spirit awakens within us, we open the inexhaustible store of virtues and excellencies, and can freely make use of them at our will.
The book is from 1913, which I believe makes it public domain.
When Zen masters refer to the Big Mind or the One Mind, this is what Kaiten Nukariya meant by Universal Spirit.
If the Buddha was right about dependent origination, then all life, as well as all consciousness, is interconnected:
This means that all life is interdependent.
Universal consciousness, in my own experience, isn’t believed through blind faith, but instead experienced or intuited through Buddhist practices.
That’s a good question. If one is seeking worldly things like a new Jaguar, then no. If one is praying for spiritual things, like the cultivation of inner wisdom and compassion, then yes.
As a Mahayana Buddhist, I believe the Buddha’s promise in the Lotus Sutra to always be spiritually present in the world, even after his parinirvana.
I also show gratitude for the Buddha’s positive influence in my life, by saying “Thank you, Lord Buddha,” which can be seen as a form of prayer.
Are you aware that the Mahayana sutras were developed 600 years after the Buddha death so cannot come from him?
That cannot be proven, one way or another:
One might as well say the Pali suttas cannot come from the historical Buddha either, since they were also not written down until hundreds of years after the Buddha’s passing.
Ancient India was an oral culture, and important religious texts like the Rigveda were passed down for hundreds of years before taking a written form:
Even if the Mahayana sutras do not contain the actual words of the historical Buddha, they might have naturally developed from the seed which the Buddha originally planted, making explicit what the Buddha already taught, at least implicitly.
I do not expect non-Mahayanists to accept the validity of Mahayana sutras. If the Buddha taught 84,000 paths to enlightenment, as is often said in Mahayana Buddhism, then that includes Theravada as a legitimate path. Even in the Pali scriptures, the Buddha taught different things in different ways to different people in different circumstances who had different temperaments.
There seem to be scientists today who also believe in the existence of a universal consciousness:
New theories in neuroscience suggest consciousness is an intrinsic property of everything, just like gravity. That development opens a world of opportunity for collaboration between Buddhists and neuroscientists.
While these things involving a universal spirit might sound like Hinduism, it’s worth noting that Hinduism may have copied Mahayana Buddhism, and not the other way around:
According to the Pew Research study, only 23% of American Buddhists believe in a personal god, while 42% instead believe in “an impersonal force”:
Sorry, no, this is a false equivalence. The EBTs stem from the earliest period of Buddhism. While we cannot say that all of them stem from the Buddha himself—and in fact clearly not all do so—the evidence strongly supports the conclusion that the bulk of the content, especially the doctrinal material, stems from the pre-Ashokan period, and much probably comes from the Buddha himself.
The Mahayana sutras, on the other hand, were composed, that is, written afresh, starting from around 500 years after the Buddha. They do not contain any historical teachings of the Buddha, apart from what has been drawn from the EBTs. The only relevance they have for a study of what the historical Buddha taught is that they may, on occasion, draw from EBT material that has otherwise been lost. So far, however, very little such material has been identified.
The medium of transmission affects the manner of transmission, but it doesn’t affect the reliability. Oral texts are just as reliable as written ones.
It’s sad that we can’t express openly what Buddhism believes in our country… 
in the educational curriculum, we describe the god with Udana 8.3 . Sometimes, it’s difficult to explain why the concept of Buddhist God is very ambiguous. Often I say to my friends, this concept is just a formality. Udana 8.3 explains about Nibbana, not about the God.
It seems to me this law, which arose following the communist scares of the 60s/70s, is badly out of date. Do you think there’s any chance it’ll be rescinded?
This concept is a creation of Ven Moggaliputtatissa, about 100 years after the Buddha’s time, during the time of King Ashoka. Bhavanga is not an EBT concept.
with metta
Nor, it might be added, is it equivalent to a universal consciousness. According to the late Pali Abhidhamma, it is purely a functional element of consciousness that provides continuity when more active forms of consciousness have subsided. It does not underlie anything, it only appears intermittently, in-between occurrences of active six-sense consciousness.
Moreover, the term bhavaṅga has nothing to in and of itself do with “stream”, it means “factor of existence”. We do find the word bhavaṅgasota used, which means “stream of bhavanga”. But this doesn’t refer to an underlying universal stream, but only to a series of subliminal mind moments that occur between one occasion of full awareness and the next.
The idea that the Theravada bhavanga is equivalent to the “storehouse consciousness” is first asserted by Vasubandhu, and is repeated uncritically based on this. However, his statement needs to be taken in context. Firstly, Vasubandhu’s idea of the storehouse consciousness is, so it seems, very different from the later notion of a universal consciousness. And secondly, he was speaking in the terms of functional explanations: the bhavanga addresses similar problems and plays a somewhat comparable role in Theravada theory as the storehouse consciousness does, i.e. it is a theoretical clarification of the mechanism of continuity and transmission of kamma in an ever changing consciousness. But the fact that it serves a similar function doesn’t mean that it is the same thing.
Dear Banthe, when did this notion, and by whom, appear in Buddhism (Mahayana Yogacara school?) ?
Is it found in Theravada circles too?
The concept of universal consciousness seems to have already existed at least implicitely in a Greek Philosophy context: idealism (Anaxagoras).
The latest form can be found in the essays of Bernardo Kastrup.
It seems to have developed in later Yogacara, post-Vasubandhu and Asanga, and to have been largely influenced by the revitalized Advaita Hinduism that emerged at the time (which in turn was largely influenced by Buddhism).
The idea is not really part of Theravada mainstream, but is popular in some circles of the Thai forest tradition and some modern Buddhists of universalist tendencies.
As far as I had known, the sixth patriarch of the Tiāntāi school, Ven Zhànrán, was the only person in Mahāyāna Buddhism to assert the sentience of things conventionally considered to be insentient: like rocks or water.
It seems this is a more widespread belief?
I would say, for the most part, that it’s Advaita Vedanta which was influenced by Mahayana Buddhism, and not the other way around:
I’m sorry if I’m mistaken regarding the historical evidence.
Saying that Buddha-nature or Dharma-body pervades everything doesn’t necessarily mean that rocks and water are sentient beings.
While these concepts may have been more systematically explained by later commentators, they were already taught in the Mahayana sutras. The Lotus Sutra, for example, teaches about the Eternal Buddha, and says that all buddhas are embodiments of this Eternal Buddha. Furthermore, an argument can be made that the Mahayana sutras made explicit concepts which were already implicit in the Pali suttas.
If you dig deeper into Pew survey, one finds that 42% of American Buddhists believe in a “universal spirit” which is an “impersonal force.” I would guess, in one form or another, a majority of Buddhists in Asia believe in an impersonal universal force as well, including Theravadins. Please forgive me if I’m mistaken.
Please keep in mind that I started this thread to help clear up the results of this Pew survey, rather than to have a debate regarding the historical validity of the Mahayana sutras.
While I wholly respect Theravadins for having this belief regarding the Mahayana sutras, I don’t see how that’s been historically proven one way or another.
As a Mahayana Buddhist, I believe the Buddha taught 84,000 paths to enlightenment, which includes Theravada Buddhism.
While the Mahayana sutras might have some legendary embellishments, the Pali suttas might as well.
Even in the Pali scriptures, the Buddha taught in different ways to different people from different circumstances, so it’s possible that both the Pali scriptures and the Mahayana scriptures were taught by the historical Buddha.
It just so happens that different Buddhist communities transmitted different sets of scriptures.
The oldest available Buddhist manuscripts are, as far as I know, of Mahayana sutras. The Gilgit and Ghandaran manuscripts, for example, are impressive in their antiquity compared to the manuscript evidence for the Pali suttas:
Without a way to go back in time, we are like the blind men and the elephant when it comes to which Buddhist scriptures are the most authentic.
What matters is whichever scriptures resonate the most with us as individuals, whichever scriptures are the most beneficial to our personal life and practice:
Another criteria the Buddha taught to differentiate Dhamma from what was not his teaching, was that of analyzing how a particular teaching affects one’s thinking. The Gotami sutta states that anything that leads to dispassion, liberation, relinquishment, having few wishes, contentment, seclusion, arousing of energy and being easy to support are said to be the teacher’s instruction, while anything that leads to the opposite of these qualities cannot be the true teaching of the Buddha.[5] Hence in the Early Buddhist texts, the work of hermeneutics is deeply tied with the spiritual practice and a mindful awareness of the effect our practices have on our state of mind.
Ancient India was an oral culture, and important religious texts like the Rigveda were faithfully passed down for hundreds of years before taking a written form:
As a Mahayana Buddhist, I believe the Mahayana sutras were based on an earlier oral tradition which went back to the historical Buddha, though perhaps not word-for-word.
Please keep in mind that I started this thread to help clear up the results of this potentially misleading Pew survey, rather than to have a debate regarding the historical validity of the Mahayana sutras. I am by no means an expert on ancient Indian history. I mean no disrespect to any sect or school of Buddhism whatsoever.