Foundations of Mahayana Buddhism
One of the leading authorities on Buddhist philosophy and one of the most influential figures in popularizing interest in Zen Buddhism in the West in the 1950s was Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (1870 – 1966), a former professor of Buddhist philosophy at Otani University in Kyoto. He was the first great Asian scholar to bring the East closer to the West. He was a prominent translator of classical works from Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese into English, as well as the author of several highly influential works that introduced Westerners to Eastern philosophy.
In his work Foundations of Mahayana Buddhism, using analogies with Western philosophy and literature, Suzuki provides a comprehensive introduction to the thought of the Mahayana school of Buddhism. Although Mahayana teachings are very complex, Suzuki makes them accessible to those less familiar with Buddhist understanding of the world.
Original Buddhism stems from the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, and the first major split within it occurred during the first It has been over a hundred years since Buddha’s death. Over time, two main schools or branches of Buddhism have formed: Mahayana and Hinayana. Geographically, Mahayana has spread in Nepal, Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan, while Hinayana has established itself in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, and other parts of Southeast Asia. Hence, Mahayana and Hinayana are also known as Northern and Southern Buddhism. Despite the differences, they both stem from the same source, and the same spirit is present in both Southern and Northern Buddhism. The question that troubled his immediate disciples and followers during the Teacher’s lifetime and beyond, “Who was Buddha – a man or a superhuman?”, is also present in both schools. This question is discussed in an excerpt from Suzuki’s work, “Foundations of Mahayana Buddhism.”
One of the most interesting differences between Pali and Sanskrit, or between the literature of Hinayana Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism, is the way characters or individuals who play the main roles in stories are presented. In the former case, Buddha is represented as a true. He preaches with such a natural and simple language that the reader feels the presence of a teacher, paternal and philosophically calm, while in the other case we usually have a mystical, transcendent figure, more heavenly than human, surrounded and revered by beings of all kinds, human, heavenly, even demonic, and this mystical central figure performs supernatural acts that seem to have originated from an exceptionally poetic mind.
Sacred Mahayana texts typically begin with the formula “Thus I have heard” (Evam me sutam), then recount the events, if any, that led the Buddha to tell them, and finally lead the reader to the main theme, which is usually written in a clear style. The beginning or introduction is very simple, and we do not notice anything unusual in the continuation. But with Mahayana texts, it is completely different. As soon as the curtain rises with the stereotypical formula “Evam mayā śrutam”, we have a magnificent prologue, depicted dramatically or quite grotesquely, which prepares the readers for the scenes that follow, where incredible acts are performed. I have heard that Buddha once stayed in Rājagriha, on the Gridhrakuti mountain. He was staying in the Ratnachandra Hall in the Double Towers of Chandana. It had been ten years since he attained enlightenment. He was surrounded by one hundred thousand bhikṣus and bodhisattvas, and there were sixty times more mahāsattvas than there are grains of sand in the Ganges. All of them possessed great spiritual energy; they paid homage to thousands of hundreds of millions of niyuta buddhas. They could set in motion the unstoppable Wheel of Dharma, and whoever heard their names could also attain supreme perfect knowledge. Their names were… [Here, around fifty bodhisattvas are mentioned].
All these bodhisattvas, who were sixty times more numerous than the grains of sand in the Ganges and who came from countless Buddha-lands, were accompanied by numerous gods, nāgas, yaksas, gandharvas, asuras, garudas, kinnaras, and mahoragas. This great multitude united in worshiping, praising, and paying homage to the World-Honored One, the universally celebrated One. At that time, Bhagavat sat in the Twin Tower of Chandana, on his assigned seat, entered into samadhi, and displayed a miraculous phenomenon. Countless lotus flowers with a thousand petals appeared, each flower as large as a carriage wheel. Their color was beautiful and their fragrance perfect, and their petals, which covered celestial beings, were still unopened. They all rose up towards the heavens, hanging above the ground like a pearl canopy. Each lotus flower emitted countless rays of light and grew more filled with wondrous vitality. But by the power of Buddha’s divine ability, they suddenly changed color and withered, and the celestial Buddhas that sat with crossed legs in the flowers became visible, shining with countless thousands of rays of light. The supernatural glory of that place at that moment cannot be described…
As we clearly see here, Buddha in Mahayana texts is not an ordinary human being walking in the sensory world. He is completely different from the son of Śuddhodana who renounced royal life. vota, wandered through the wilderness and after six years of deep meditation and penance, he discovered the four noble truths and the twelve links of dependent origination. We cannot help but think that the Mahayana Buddha is a fictional creation of the poetic mind. And let it be so. But the question arises: How did the Buddhists drive the human Buddha into oblivion and replace him with a mysterious being endowed with all possible, and sometimes impossible, greatness and supernatural powers? This question, which marks the rise of Mahayana Buddhism, leads us to the doctrine of Trikāya, which in a certain sense corresponds to the Christian theory of the Trinity.
According to this doctrine, Buddhists assume a triple existence of the Tathāgata [Gautama Buddha], that is, they believe that the Tathāgata manifests in three different forms of existence: the body of transformation, the body of bliss, and the body of Dharma. Although they are imagined as three, they are actually manifestations of one Dharmakāya – the Dharmakāya that has appeared in the historical Śākyamuni Buddha…
Who? We are well aware, Aśvaghoṣa, the first Mahayana philosopher, already included this concept [trikāya] in his work “Awakening of Faith in Mahayana” in the first century BC. This work, as the author himself says, is a kind of concise overview of Mahayana teachings, which illuminates their main characteristics as taught by Buddha in various sutras…
Let us now return to the doctrine of dharmakāya and trikāya. When we look at the controversies mentioned above, it is obvious that among the many other questions that arose soon after the death of Buddha Śākyamuni, there was one that probably greatly troubled his disciples. I am referring to the question of Buddha’s nature. Was he just a human being like ourselves? How then could he reach such a level of moral perfection? Or was he a divine being? But Buddha himself said nothing to his disciples about his divinity, nor did he tell them to accept the Dharma because of his divine nature, but solely for the sake of truth. But despite this, were the disciples able to How can one eradicate from their heart the feeling of sacred reverence towards their teacher, which has become indelibly imprinted there? Whenever they would remember the teachings, anecdotes, or verses of their teacher, the truth and spirit embodied in them and in the author surely became so closely connected that they couldn’t help but wonder, “What is it in Buddha that enabled him to realize and proclaim these sublime and profound truths? What shaped such a noble and magnificent character in him? What is it in Buddha’s mind that elevated him to such perfection in intellectual and religious life? How is it possible that, possessing such sublime moral and spiritual virtues, Buddha still had to succumb to the law of birth and death, the fate of all ordinary mortals?” Surely, such questions were repeatedly raised before they could be answered by the doctrine of dharmakāya and trikāya…
Here we have the concept of a spiritual dharmakāya that develops from Śākyamuni’s physical death. It is a bridge that spans a wide chasm. A schism exists between the human Śākyamuni Buddha and the spiritual existence of the dharmakāya. Buddha did not die after tasting the food offered by Chunda. He did not live for eighty years. His life did not disappear when his ashes were divided among the kings and Brahmins. His virtues and merits, accumulated over countless kalpas, were not suddenly reduced to nothing. What constituted the essence of his life – as well as the essence of our lives – could not vanish with the impermanence of bodily existence. Buddha, as a specific individual being, was certainly subject to transformation – like any mortal, but his truth must live eternally. His dharmakāya is beyond birth and death, even beyond nirvana, but his transformative body originates from the womb of the Tathāgata, as determined by karma, and disappears within it when karma exhausts its power. Buddha, who still sits atop Gridhrakuta, imparting the message of joy and bliss to all beings, and who remains among us with other precious teachings, The texts such as Avatamsaka, Pundarika, and others are nothing less than an expression of the eternal spirit. This is how the Mahayanists formulated the doctrine of dharmakaya, and the transition to the doctrine of trikaya was only a natural consequence of it. One could not provide an adequate solution to the aforementioned problems without the other…
To summarize, Buddha was portrayed in the sacred texts as a human being, although occasionally supernatural and superhuman acts were attributed to him… However, the profound reverence felt by his disciples did not satisfy the prosaic humanity of their teacher, so they transformed him into something more than a mortal soul. Even the Pali tradition attributes to him a celestial life in addition to his earthly one. Allegedly, before being conceived by Maya Devi, he was a bodhisattva in the Tushita heaven. The honor of bodhisattva was bestowed upon him due to his selfless actions that were praised throughout his countless previous incarnations… But he was not the first Buddha to walk the earth and teach about the dharma, as before him There have already been seven Buddhas, and he was not the last one to appear among us, because the Bodhisattva named Maitreya is now in heaven, preparing to achieve Buddhahood in the future. But the Pali writers stopped there, they did not dare to speculate further about the nature of Buddhahood. Their religious longings did not urge them to have more imaginative flights. They recited simple sutras or gathas, adhered to śīla (moral precepts) as strictly and literally as they could, and believed that the spirit of their Teacher still lived in those teachings – and especially in the person of Tathāgata.
But at the same time, there was another group of Buddha’s disciples who had different religious and intellectual inclinations than their fellow believers; simple faith in the Buddha as present in his teachings did not fully satisfy them. It is possible that they thought in the following way: “If there were seven Buddhas before the arrival of the Great Sage from Śākya, and if there is one more to come, where do they, we wonder, get the authority to believe that there will be no other Buddhas after that? knowledge are they able to preach? Why can’t there be more Buddhas, why don’t they come to us more often? If they were human beings just like us, why aren’t we Buddhas ourselves?” These questions, when logically derived, naturally led to the theory of dharmakāya, according to which all past Buddhas and those yet to come, even ordinary mortals like us, are made of clay and condemned to imminent death; that we all owe the raison d’être of our existence to dharmakāya, which is the only immortal essence within us and within the Buddhas. The first religious effort we must therefore make is to recognize this archetype of all Buddhas and all beings. But dharmakāya itself is too abstract for the average mind to become the object of its religious consciousness; thus, they personified or, rather, materialized it. In other words, they idealized Śākyamuni, endowing him not only with physical traits (lakṣa) of greatness, as in Pali texts, but also with signs of divine transformation (transfiguration)…
This idealized Buddha or The personified dharmakāya, according to Mahayana Buddhists, not only manifested in the concrete person of Siddhārta Gautama in Central Asia a few thousand years ago, but is revealed in all ages and in all places. There is no particular favored point on Earth where Buddha exclusively appears; from the zenith of the Akaniśṭha heaven to the bottom of Nāraka, he constantly and continuously manifests and fulfills his ideas which, however, our limited understanding is not capable of properly grasping. The Avatamsaka Sutra describes how Buddha carries out his plan of salvation in all possible ways…
“So Buddha, through his religious teachings, which are countless like atoms, instructs and liberates all sentient beings. Sometimes he is revealed in the realm of devas, sometimes in the realm of nāgas, yakṣas, gandharvas, asuras, garudas, kinnaras, mahoragas, etc., sometimes in the realm of brahmins, sometimes in the realm of human beings, sometimes in the palace of Yāmarāja (the king of death), sometimes in the underground world of cursed spirits, ghosts, and beasts. His omnipotent sa Grace, intelligence, and willpower will not be at rest until they bring all beings under their wing, using all possible means of salvation.”…
The practical consequence of the trikāya doctrine is evident – it has infinitely expanded the spirit of tolerance among Buddhists. Since the dharmakāya universally responds to the spiritual needs of all sentient beings in all ages, in all places, and in all stages of their spiritual development, Buddhists consider all spiritual leaders, regardless of their nationality and personality, as expressions of a omnipotent dharmakāya. And since dharmakāya always manifests itself for the highest good of sentient beings, even those doctrines and their authors who seem to be against the teachings of Buddhism are tolerated, based on the belief that they are all moving in accordance with the spontaneous will that pervades and continuously acts. Although they may appear as evil from a specific perspective, their main and ultimate goal is goodness and harmony, which is destined by the will of dharmakāya to overcome this world of suffering and contradictions. General intellectual- The tendency of Buddhism has done a lot to cultivate the spirit of tolerance among its followers, and it must be said that the doctrine of the Trinity, although sometimes appearing too radical in its pantheistic nature, has significantly contributed to that.
1 Mahayana literally means “great vehicle,” while Hinayana means “small vehicle.” These names are used only by the northern school of Buddhism, while the southern branch of Buddhism refers to itself as Theravada (“Teaching of the Elders”).
2 Niyuta is an extremely large number, but it is generally considered to be equivalent to one billion.
3 All of these are non-human forms of existence, including demons, dragon kings, winged namanis, and so on.