In Mahayana, Buddha-nature is the Universe Itself

I think if anyone believes all these strange dhammas in the Mahaya no one will reach Nibbana. But that’s the entire point of being a bodhisattva, no? Not to be enlightened but help others.

with metta

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Nope. Not on everything else, but just on their particular causes.

I think the meaning of this parable was just distorted by translation to Chinese and wrongly understood by subsequent scholars. This does not mean whatsoever that Buddha has some another additional body. It just means that the Dhamma carried by Buddha is much more important than his body, and that, figuratively speaking, anyone who follows Dhamma also follows Buddha.

So, you’re saying a stone can get enlightened because it has buddha-nature?

Well that doesn’t mean that they are the same thing, have the same qualities, interconnected somehow and so on. There is a huge difference between a person and a rock, even though both are anatta. Person is namarupa, rock is just rupa. They have different aggragates constituting them! Techically speaking, “you” now and “you” 20 seconds ago are different objects! It’s the illusion of continuity because of memory that makes you think it’s the same thing.

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everything is teaching us but we may not know how to be the best of students

i thought the story was the flower was held up and simply seen by the venerable

nothing was given nothing received

is anything truly given and truly received

if there is no giver and no receiver

i am channelling some old bearded bloke on a mountaintop

Zen has a no-self doctrine whereas the EBT’s talk about not-self. This is a consequential difference between Chan teachings and the early strata of Buddhist teachings.

The point of being a Bodhisatta is to realise Buddhahood - the Mahayana teachings say as much!

There are three kinds of bodhisattvas in Mahayana Buddhism:

king-like bodhisattva - aspires to become buddha as soon as possible and then help sentient beings in full fledge;
boatman-like bodhisattva - to achieve buddhahood along with other sentient beings;
shepherd-like bodhisattva - to delay buddhahood until all other sentient beings achieve buddhahood. Bodhisattvas like Avalokiteśvara and Śāntideva are believed to fall in this category.
Bodhisattva - Wikipedia

Most Mahayana Buddhists take the vow of a king-like Bodhisattva, which is to become enlightened as quickly as possible, in order to then lead all other beings to enlightenment.

It’s the legendary bodhisattvas like Avalokitesvara who vow not to attain enlightenment until all other beings are enlightened.

I will admit the possibility that, as a Zen master, Dogen taught that the universe itself is Buddha-nature due to the influence of Taoism on Zen, since Taoism also teaches that the universe itself, along with its natural processes, is the Tao.

My apologies for returning to this more unpleasant area of the exchange, Venerable, but if I may disagree and approach the subject from a different angle, I think that the condemnation is the worst of the two bad strategies.

When dealing and encountering this polemic, I always thought that backhanded salvation was better than condemnation. Whyso? Because there is no need to “save” someone who is already saved. Even if their saving was done in the backhanded manner. They can be essentially left alone. The option of backhanded salvation leaves the śrāvakāḥ with the option of being left alone from Mahāyāna polemics. Perhaps there will be a certain annoying smugness from the sectarians still, a sort of: “Heh, we know more about X than your vehicle”. I am sure that non-Mahāyānists here are more than familiar with this attitude among some. But if the Mahāyānist believes in the ultimate liberation of the arhat, then they are under no obligations to try to ‘save’ them (by convincing them of the Mahāyāna)

I am very personally morally opposed to evangelization, and the ‘condemnation’ option definitely leads to that, since part of the bodhisattva’s vow now becomes, essentially, discouraging and ending the dispensation to the śrāvakāḥ, if that dispensation is not believed to lead to liberation.

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Well, okay. I was considering the issue solely in terms of how much harm the Mahayanists would be likely to do to themselves, and not in terms of how best to be ecumenically tactful. (Buddhist ecumenism, to be frank, bores me to tears). From this angle it seems that Mahayana disparaging of the arahant for attaining a purely individual liberation is less bad because those who take that approach (1) will be less deeply entrenched in wrong view than those who deny that arahatta amounts to any kind of soteriological finality, and (2) will be guilty of a less grave form of ariya-upavāda. That is, “You’ve become a Perfected One, but you suck!” isn’t quite as bad as “You’re only a Perfected One in your dreams!”

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Indeed. Inter-religious sectarian polemics are never pleasant and rarely skillful, IMO and in my experience of course. Not intending to make a blanket statement.

Mahāyāna & the dispensation to the śrāvakāḥ reminds me of the Christians & the Jews. After the ascendance of Christian supremacy in the West, the Jews added a prayer to their synagogue service that went something along the lines of “Oh Lord save us from the arrogant,” referring to the ways that Christianity treated the original covenant-with-God of the Jews in their theologies. The Christians, after all, see themselves as having a new covenant.

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I think this idea is found in some Chan and Zen schools, due to the influence of Taoism. Effectively teachings on emptiness were replaced by teachings on interconnectedness, or at least redefined in Taoist terms.

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Phenomena are empty of inherent existence because they only arise in dependence on conditions, and don’t exist “from their own side”. I don’t see how you get to “everything is dependent on everything else”.

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It is called “Indra’s Net”. In the Avataṃsakasūtra, the definitive Mahāyāna sūtra of the Huáyán school, Indra owns a jewelled net that hangs over his bright palace atop Sumeru. Each individual gem on the net reflects the lights of all of the other gems of the net. Furthermore, in each individual gem, all of the gems of the entire net are reflected as to that they can be seen. Dharmāḥ (dharmas) are treated like this by the Huáyán school, as similar or likened to the gems on Indra’s jewelled net.

AFAIK, Indra’s net as a metaphor for interconnected dharmas is not in the Avatamsaka. Its actually later Chinese texts from the Hua yen school that make this connection. Please let me know if you can find this metaphor used in the Avatamsaka for interdependence because I remember looking for it awhile back for the Wikipedia article and I could not find it in the Avatamsaka.

This idea of interpenetration looks very Taoist, an attempt to redefine sunyata as a ground of being, or primordial oneness, rather than just as the dependent nature of phenomena.

“Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.” Nagarjuna

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They get it from the Discourse on the Unspeakable, Ch 30 Scroll 45, T 10.0279, starting at 0238b06, and it refers the beams of light that emanate from the Buddha’s body at the beginning and throughout the duration of many Mahāyāna sūtrāṇi, such as also for instance the Saddharma. From 0238b06 of the Avataṃsaka one has:

一一諸佛於身上, 現不可說諸毛孔,
On the body of each Buddha, appear unspeakably many pores,
於彼一一毛孔中, 現眾色相不可說。
In each of these pores, they manifest unspeakably many forms.
不可言說諸毛孔, 咸放光明不可說,
The unspeakably many pores, each radiate unspeakably many beams of light;
於彼一一光明中, 悉現蓮華不可說。
In each of those beams of light, appear unspeakably many lotuses.

[…]

You can read the above further in Thomas Cleary’s translation on page 891-2 (its available for-free online), the inter-nested beams of light with appearing Buddha’s in lotus-seats is the precedent for the general idea, it seems to me at least, and I got this citation here from Nicholas Weeks by this suggestion on an older thread in DharmaWheel. From there, it seems, Ven Dùshùn had some kind of mystical vision recorded in T 45.1867.512b-13a-b. I’m still looking though.

I have also heard it attributed to the Mahāyānabrahmājālasūtra as well, but it seems to be absent from there when I go to look for it. It seems that Ven Dùshùn may have had some personal insight, which may or may not have been inspired by the intersections of Buddha’s and light-beams in Ch 30 of the Mahāvaipulyabuddhāvataṃsakasūtra, which was then further developed by Ven Fǎzàng into it’s modern day form.

Indra’s Net may well not appear in any Mahāyāna sūtra at all.

It should be noted, also, that Ven Zhìyǐ’s Madhyamaka-derived interpenetration of all phenomenal realms in any moment of thought (一念三千), similar but not the same as the Huayan view, does not appear in the Lotus Sūtra, either.

A lot of what these different schools view as definitive models of Buddhadharma are, in fact, the individual explanations of a few great teachers who were looked to by others for guidance. As a result, one cannot read the Lotus Sūtra and divine from it the doctrines and beliefs of, for instance, Tiāntāi & how it ‘reads into’ the Lotus Sūtra. The same is, I am sure, with the Huayan & the Flower Garland Sūtra.

The issue with Indra’s Net is that phenomena are demonstrably differentiated. The Huayan school has a further doctrine, called the Four Dharmadhātavaḥ, but to further get into it would be to even further leave relevancy to the forum.

Suffice to say, and this is purely IMO, because the central metaphysic, i.e. Indra’s Net, is quite possibly Chinese, and may constitute a departure from the norm of the Buddhadharma, Mahāyāna or non-Mahāyāna, another Chinese metaphysic, the Four Dharmadhātavaḥ, is brought back in to re-ground the entire system in “Buddhism”. That is presuming that we extend maximal benefit of the doubt, an amount that many would consider unreasonable.

It appears in many places in the Avataṃsaka Sūtra. The application of the trope that was most highlighted by the Huayan patriarchs is found in Book XXXIII, Inconceivable Qualities of Buddhas.

I changed the title slightly. Maybe that will cool down the polemics. Feel free to revert nevertheless.

If you don’t mind my asking, Venerable, where?

I was citing

in the Chinese above, but it doesn’t actually explicitly lay out the metaphor of Indra’s Net, rather, it simply has an “Indra’s Net -like” imagery in the beams of light emanated.

Perhaps I misunderstood what you were saying. It seems to me that in the citation I gave the net is being used as a metaphor for interdependence, which was what Javier was asking about.

“[All Buddhas] know all the different phenomena in all worlds, interrelated in Indra’s net.”