Although I’m generally reluctant to draw parallels between Buddhist cosmology/mythology and science, especially when it comes to highly theoretical concepts, the Pure Land idea feels a lot like the multiverse theory to me.
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In this case it shows that the uncharted new-realm(s) will exist through the personal and collective wish or vows. Is my conclusion correct @cdpatton ?
It starts to sound like that, yes. Which is another way of thinking about monotheistic gods and their heavens, too. It’s like they exist in another dimension, or something, if you take it literally.
Something I thought about after writing the previous post is that sometimes you see the term “land” or “country” instead of world in these texts. In the real world at the time, what was happening was traders were traveling between distant lands: Silk was traveling from China to Rome, and goods were traveling from the West to China, too. And routes branched off to stop in Persia, India, and so forth. The Silk Road was connecting all the civilizations of Eurasia, and Central Asia was the crossroads. So, if you lived in one of these oasis cities in the Tarim Basin or Afghanistan, you would meet people from China, Greece, India, and Persia. You would hear these incredible stories about far away cities and cultures told by merchants who traveled between them.
Very much like the bodhisattvas in Mahayana sutras who travel from faraway worlds to meet the Buddha here in our world.
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Lokottaravadins probably have a historical connection to the Sukhavativyuha sutras. Their location in Northwest may also account for some of the light motifs, if they came in due to influence from other religions.
Where Mahayana texts really do diverge from the majority of EBT sutras, at least in my view, is that they tend to take on a mythic and cosmic scale. Instead of something being a long time ago, it was eons ago. Instead of it being far away, it’s 10 trillion buddha-lands away. The bodhisattva who becomes Amitabha meditates in samadhi for eons, and then attains enlightenment under a Bodhi tree that is a billion meters tall.
The trend probably started with Jatakas and accounts of former buddhas. The use of these huge scales for time and space in Mahayana texts is basically the same… So even in the past accounts of the lives of former buddhas in the Pali tradition, the past buddhas are like hundreds of meters tall, and live for thousands of years, but they inexplicably live in ordinary cities in India. It’s like they couldn’t possibly imagine a world in which Pataliputra did not exist yet.
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I think they are supposed to be transforming a defiled world into a pure one to make it easier to liberate sentient beings, so it’s not exactly creating a new world. An interesting take on the idea is in the first chapter of the Vimalakirti Sutra. The Buddha there uses his miraculous power to make this world look like a pure land, then says that the difference is really whether a person has a pure or defiled mind. Someone with a defiled mind can’t see the pure land. So, some Mahayanists were pushing back on the literal idea of creating pure lands. Originally, I think it’s just a sentiment, like the vow to liberate all sentient beings. It’s not meant to be taken literally. It’s just the sentiment of wanting to do it.
… ahhh, I nearly got it, a pureland is not another new-realm is just a wish to make everybody pure a heart and we can live in a so-called ‘Pure-Land’. Imagining that some day the earth will be full of people with pure heart then the earth will become the ‘Pure-Land’.
Is it correct @cdpatton ?
I think Pure-Land Buddhism is just one part of Mahayana Buddhism. The main teaching that is different from Hinayana Buddhism in history is about the path:
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Yes, that’s what the Vimalakirti Sutra says, essentially. The land is made pure by purifying the sentient beings in it.
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The countries that were the first to receive and preserve all the various strains of Buddhism did eventually find ways to syncretize them. So that means China and Tibet, and not the South or South East Asian countries that either purged everything that wasn’t Theravada or stopped being Buddhist entirely. Japan is an exception, though, since the syncretization happened in China after various forms of Buddhism had been transmitted to Japan. So, while you don’t really find any sectarianism in China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan, Japan kept their different schools distinct (Zen, Pure Land, Tantra). I’m less familiar with Korean Buddhism, but I did spend some time in a monasteries there many years ago. I didn’t see much besides Korean Zen back then (but that doesn’t mean there aren’t Pure Land temples or practitioners, for example).
Tibetans have a rather complex system that attempts to integrate and systematize all the various kinds of Buddhism. However, how successful they were is up for debate. For example, even though Madhyamika is seriously studied in most schools of Tibetan Buddhism, tantra actually incorporates a lot of Yogachara philosophy.
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Originally, there were separate threads of thought. The Prajna Paramita Sutras are basically long-winded deconstructions of traditional matrka lists, saying all dharmas are nominal entities. Then there are sutras that are Yogacara-inspired like the Lankavatara and Sandinirmocana Sutras. There are lots and lots of sutras that are creative descriptions of samadhi that haven’t been translated. There are visualization practice sutras that expand on the recollection of the Buddha. There are sutras that center around bodhisattvas as a practice and an ideal like the Bodhisattva Pitaka, Avatamsaka, and Vimalakirti Sutras. There are the “one vehicle” sutras like the Lotus Sutra that attack the the three vehicles concept. There are the Tathagatagarbha sutras that attack the teaching of emptiness and not self, saying sentient beings are really unrealized buddhas and are destined to realize themselves someday.
Mahayana sutras tend to stick to a given topic, and sometimes a group of them formed a genre (kind of like in modern fiction today when a popular book spawns a whole genre). The Prajna Paramita Sutras have a fair amount of crossover into sutras like the Vimalakirti that present the same basic philosophy in more practical ways. And devotional teachings are sprinkled throughout, like the Avolakitesvara chapter in the Lotus Sutra.
Pure Land Buddhism seems to have been a minor offshoot of Mahayana Buddhism in India and Central Asia, but like Christianity in the West, it was quite popular when it migrated to other countries. Salvation teachings seem to be very effective at converting people.
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Would it be too much trouble to ask you for a timeline (as good as may be reconstructed) for the advents of these various strains and/or the time of their interweavings (both in India [or Central Asia?] and China? I don’t know the degree to which you might know tis off-hand. Otherwise, perhaps you might know a book to recommend?
Is this really an accurate characterization of what happened?
Buddhist history is rife with sectarianism boiling over from the realm of doctrinal debate and into actual physical action. This usually only happened when a certain school of Buddhism enjoyed the support of a king or some other powerful political figure. It wasn’t always Theravada attacking Mahayana, either. It was sometimes different schools of the same type of Buddhism literally attacking each other. See the history of Sri Lanka and Tibet for well known examples.
“Purge” might have been too strong of a word. However intentional it may or may not have been, we do know that Mahayana and Tantra reached through all of SE Asia, were adopted and practiced for a time, but then disappeared. However, considering the overall history of religion in the world, and the history of Buddhism in countries like Sri Lanka and Tibet, it isn’t far fetched to think that at some point the Theravadins gained favor with the king and had all that silly Mahayana stuff gotten rid of.
It definitely isn’t the case that only 1 school of Buddhism is capable of existing within a country at any given time. India, the country that gave birth to all of this, probably had all three schools of Buddhism existing within it, even if only for a short time. Even if Theravada has disappeared from India by the time Tantra was prevalent, Theravada existed along side Mahayana in India for many, many years. China had multiple (Mahayana) schools of Buddhism existing side by side for centuries, as did Japan. Vietnam has had both Theravada and Mahayana living side by side for a long time, too. So what happened in SE Asia? The logical conclusion is that there was some group actively trying to get rid of Mahayana. I’m not sure if we have any concrete evidence of what happened to Mahayana in SE Asia, though.
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The historical window seems to be between maybe the 1st c. BC and the 9th c. AD. Basically, it appears to be from the advent of the Silk Road to the end of Buddhism in India and Central Asia. Prajnaparamita sutras, the Lotus Sutra, and Pure Land sutras are all early Mahayana, but there’s lots of other texts besides them.
Yogacara-inspired sutras would logically arise around the time of Vasubandhu and Asanga during the 4th c. AD. Likewise, Tathagatagarbha sutras appear in China during the 4th c. AD, too.
There’s a huge genre of various bodhisattva practice texts that range across the timeline. There were early texts telling laymen to practice as renunciant bodhisattvas and late literary epics like the Gandavyuha. There’s also a huge range of meditation texts that describe visualizations or samadhis that are from the earlier strata of Chinese translations.
Much of the material in Chinese translation doesn’t have survive Sanskrit equivalents. There are the famous texts we still hear about today, but there’s a huge amount of material that’s collecting dust and probably only existed in Central Asian languages, or the Sanskrit was lost when Buddhism declined.
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Perhaps I should have explained that my “problem” with your statement was not with the word “purge” as much with the word “everything”: I just don’t believe Theravada was all that successful. I have no doubt that you are more informed than I am in this area, but, from what little familiarity I have with the issue, I gather there was also quite a bit of absorption of “heterodox” elements (so-called Mahayana, Tantra, Brahmanism, even native SE Asian elements which preceded all of these perhaps) into the Theravada.
Daunting thought. It seems like what we have extant representing Medieval Buddhism (meaning Indian and Central Asian Buddhism) is really just the tip of the ice berg. The true diversity of this religion is probably very little understood.
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It’s even more diverse if you consider the Indian conservative schools (non-Mahayana), like Pudgalavada and Mahasamghika. Most of their texts have been lost, but what we know about them shows there was an explosion of texts and ideas after the Buddha’s death.
The much maligned Pudgalavada schools were actually one of the largest and most popular schools of Buddhism in India and they had sophisticated philosophies of their own. The same could be said of the Mahasamghika.
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It depends on what your definition of “Theravada” is. If you mean what most modern Western people think of when they say Theravada (either the Burmese vipassana tradition or the Thai forest tradition), then that didn’t really exist before the late 19th century. We assume that there was some point in Thailand’s past when there was something resembling the modern Thai forest tradition. However, I honestly don’t know if there is any evidence to back that up. The same goes for Myanmar. It seems like there was a time in Sri Lanka’s past where the monks, at least, were practicing according to the Visuddhimagga. How long before the late 19th century, which is when the Myanmar vipassana tradition was introduced into Sri Lanka, that stopped being the case is anyone’s guess, though.
What I was referring to when I mentioned the removal of Mahayana and Tantra from SE Asia was the following of the practices found in those texts, and the veneration of Mahayana bodhisattvas and Buddhas (like Avalokiteshvara and Amitabha).
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I think it’s worth emphasising “If you mean what most modern Western people think of”. In the West, the Thai Forest story, in particular, seems very much filtered through a Western lens.
It is not uncommon to find Guanyin statues at Thai Wats. We have one in the garden of our local Wat. And, of course, a shrine to Somdej Toh.
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Exactly. I really find the whole Pudgalavada story so interesting and it really tickles me to know that, the group most universally maligned by history as heterodox (though I don’t see how would be classified as any more heretical than Tathagatagarbha ideology which is a living tradition today) was actually the premier school for, I believe, upwards of a millennium: the literal Mahasanghika.
Would you happen to know if they were more an elite, scholastic Buddhism movement, or more lay-based, popular movement?
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