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    Buddhism: The First Millennium
    Buddhism: The First Millennium
    Buddhism: The First Millennium
    Ebook257 pages6 hours

    Buddhism: The First Millennium

    By Daisaku Ikeda

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    Beginning with the events immediately following the dark days after the death of Shakyamuni and continuing over a period of 1,000 years, this dynamic tome covers a vast and complex series of events and developments in the history of Buddhism. Through a thorough examination of its early development in India, a new light is cast on little-known aspects of Buddhist history and its relevance to the understanding of Buddhism today. Topics include the formation of the Buddhist canon, the cultural exchange between the East and West, and the spirit of the Lotus Sutra.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndependent Publishers Group
    Release dateMar 1, 2012
    ISBN9781938252167
    Buddhism: The First Millennium

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      Buddhism - Daisaku Ikeda

      titletitle

      Published by Middleway Press

      A division of the SGI-USA

      606 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica, CA 90401

      © 1977, 1982 by Daisaku Ikeda

      © 2009 Soka Gakkai

      ISBN 978-0-9779245-3-0

      All rights reserved

      Printed in the United States of America

      Cover and interior design by Gopa & Ted2, Inc.

      This book originally appeared in Japanese under the title

      Watakushi no Bukkyokan (My View of Buddhism),

      published by Kodansha International Ltd., Tokyo, 1977.

      Ikeda, Daisaku.

      [Watakushi no Bukkyo-kan. English]

      Buddhism, the first millennium / by Daisaku Ikeda ; translated by Burton Watson. — 1st ed.

         p. cm. — (The Soka Gakkai history of Buddhism series ; 2)

      Sequel to: The living Buddha. 2008.

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      1. Buddhism. I. Watson, Burton, 1925- II. Ikeda, Daisaku. Watakushi no Shakuson kan. English. III. Title.

      BQ4055.I3913 2009b

      294.3—dc22

      2009017374

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      CONTENTS

      Editor’s Note

      Preface

      Translator’s Note

      1.THE FORMATION OF THE BUDDHIST CANON

      The First Council

      The Recitation of the Words of the Buddha

      The Teachings of Great Religious Leaders 13

      2. THE THERAVADA AND THE MAHASAMGHIKA

      The Background of the Second Council

      The Origins of the Schism

      The Movement to Restore the Original Meaning of Buddhism

      3. KING ASHOKA

      The King of Monarchs

      Absolute Pacifism in Government

      Relations Between the State and Religion

      4. QUESTIONS OF KING MILINDA

      A Greek Philosopher-King

      The Wisdom of Nagasena

      The Debate of Wise Men and of Kings

      5. CULTURAL EXCHANGE BETWEEN EAST AND WEST

      The Turning Point in East-West Relations

      Buddhism and Christianity

      The Conditions for a World Religion

      6. THE RISE OF MAHAYANA BUDDHISM

      Origins of the Mahayana Movement

      Differences Between the Mahayana and Hinayana Schools

      The Buddhist Renaissance

      7. VIMALAKIRTI AND THE IDEAL OF THE LAY BELIEVER

      Vimalakirti

      The Building of a Buddha Land

      How the Bodhisattva Benefits Others

      The Doctrine of the Mysterious

      8. THE FORMATION OF THE LOTUS SUTRA

      The Preaching of the Dharma on Eagle Peak

      The Voice-hearer Disciple and the Mahayana Bodhisattva

      The Spread of Buddhism After Shakyamuni’s Death

      9. THE SPIRIT OF THE LOTUS SUTRA

      Practitioners of the Lotus Sutra

      The Spirit of the Mahayana Buddhists

      The Concept of the Buddha in the Lotus Sutra

      10. NAGARJUNA AND VASUBANDHU

      Nagarjuna’s Search for the Mahayana

      The Theories of the Middle Way and Non-Substantiality

      The Path of Asanga and Vasubandhu

      The Dharma Analysis Treasury and Consciousness-Only Treatises

      Glossary

      Index

      EDITOR’S NOTE

      The following abbreviations appear in some citations:

      LS(chapter number), page number(s)—refers to The Lotus Sutra, translated by Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)

      WND-1—refers to The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, volume 1 (Tokyo: Soka Gakkai, 1999)

      PREFACE

      In February 1961, I stood on the banks of the Ganges, the mighty river that begins as a tiny trickle of clear water among the Himalayas, the roof of the world, and races down from their towering peaks, traversing the foothills, to water the vast plain of the Hindustan. Near the city of Patna, where I was standing, it gathers into itself a number of large and small tributary streams. Close to this spot in ancient times stood Pataliputra, the City of Flowers, capital of the Maurya dynasty, the first kingdom to extend its rule over almost the entire Indian subcontinent.

      The sacred Ganges flows on today, just as it did so long ago when Shakyamuni, having preached the most important series of sermons on the dharma, or Buddhist Law, to his disciples at Eagle Peak, crossed over it from the village of Patali, heading northward on foot in the direction of his old home of Kapilavastu. He was nearing the time of his death, a fact that he no doubt recognized. I wonder what he thought as he stood alone by the Ganges. Looking out over the vast surging waters, I tried to imagine what might have been in the heart of the Buddha.

      For how many countless centuries has the river continued day after day to flow in this fashion? As long as the waters of life well up upon the earth, it will go on flowing. Like the Ganges, the profound and timeless wisdom of Shakyamuni, born in Lumbini Gardens in the foothills of the Himalayas, continued for more than a thousand years to flow through the land of the Indian people. From there, it spread south to Sri Lanka, southeast to the regions of Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia, northward through Central Asia and along the Silk Road into China, and by way of the Korean peninsula into Japan. In the time of King Ashoka in the third century BCE, Buddhist monks journeyed as envoys to the Greek states of the Macedonian empire, so that from early times it was already known to the West as well.

      Shakyamuni, that extraordinary man of ancient times, died long ago, but he left behind a body of teachings the world had never known. These teachings were born of the passionate desire to save humanity. Handed down from one disciple to another, from one follower to ten thousand, they eventually became a vast current of faith transcending national boundaries.

      Since that visit to India, the land where Buddhism was born, I have thought increasingly of the early history of Buddhism and have felt a desire to try to put down in writing some of my ideas concerning its founder. I realized a part of my desire by writing a book titled Watakushi no Shakusonkan (My View of the Buddha), which has been translated into English under the title The Living Buddha.

      Needless to say, Buddhism is not the possession of Shakyamuni alone. Just as that vibrant life force, which Shakyamuni embodied and which inspired all of his teachings, has always existed and always will exist, so the Buddhist religion is a faith that continues flowing forward into the world, working ceaselessly for the salvation of all sentient beings everywhere.

      After Shakyamuni’s death, his disciples gathered to put into formal shape the teachings he had left behind, eventually forming that huge mass of scriptures and commentaries that make up the Buddhist canon. Among these are the scriptures of Mahayana Buddhism, in particular the Lotus Sutra, which were formed at the hands of lay believers who strove to realize the bodhisattva ideal by working to spread Buddhism more widely throughout society. Each of these later disciples drew upon the life force of the eternal Buddha within them and pressed forward to the best of their ability toward the realm of enlightenment, the realm of the Buddha.

      In my earlier book, The Living Buddha, I surveyed the life of Shakyamuni. In the present volume I would like to continue to trace the history of Buddhism, examining its early development in India and endeavoring to define the basic principles and ideals of the religion. As in the case of the earlier volume, I have drawn upon numerous excellent studies published by Buddhologists and Indologists, and I wish here to express my gratitude to them for their endeavors in the past and, as a Buddhist, to pray for the continued success of their research in the future.

      In closing, I express my thanks to Burton Watson, formerly of Stanford and Columbia University and now one of the world’s most accomplished interpreters of Asian literary and religious texts, for the pains he has taken in preparing the translation.

      TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

      The present volume is a translation of a work in Japanese titled Watakushi no Bukkyokan (My View of Buddhism). The original work was cast in the form of a discussion among Mr. Ikeda and two of his associates, but with his permission I have, for purposes of smoother reading, recast it in straight narrative form, taking care to preserve all the factual and speculative material of the original.

      Sanskrit and Pali personal names, place names, and technical terms have been introduced in the text in the romanized form that seems most suitable for ordinary English readers, without the elaborate diacritical marks demanded by strict Indology.

      As indicated by Mr. Ikeda in his preface to the English edition, the present work is a sequel to his earlier volume, The Living Buddha: An Interpretive Biography (reissued by Middleway Press, Santa Monica, California, in 2008), which deals with Shakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism. Treating as it does the life of a single individual, The Living Buddha is unified in subject and has a clear beginning, middle, and end. Moreover, Shakyamuni’s life, though marked at times by hardship and sadness, was on the whole a relatively untroubled one that ended on a triumphant note of accomplishment and optimism, and this sunniness is reflected in Mr. Ikeda’s treatment.

      The present volume concerns itself with the story of Buddhism in the dark days after the death of Shakyamuni. It is perforce more diverse in content, covers a vastly greater span of time, and is in some ways more somber in tone, for, as so often happens in the history of religion, once the founder of the new faith had passed from the scene, doubt and dissension arose among his followers. Controversy developed concerning the correct interpretation of the doctrine, the correct practices and goals for the monks and laity, and the Buddhist Order in time was torn by schism. Mr. Ikeda, himself the leader of the Soka Gakkai International, a Nichiren Buddhist lay movement that has in recent years become the largest and most widespread in the world, describes these problems that beset early Buddhism, piecing out the scant historical facts with insight and conjecture. He succeeds in casting new light upon a period in the history of Buddhism that, because of the paucity of reliable data, is shrouded in uncertainty, bringing the account of its development down to the point where it began to spread beyond the borders of India and to grow into a major world religion.

      1

      THE FORMATION OF THE BUDDHIST CANON

      THE FIRST COUNCIL

      Immediately after Shakyamuni Buddha’s death, his followers gathered with the purpose of putting his teachings and sermons into definitive order. Since we are dealing with events that transpired well over two thousand years ago, we cannot hope to learn of them in detail. Our only recourse is to examine the fragmentary bits of information recorded in the Buddhist scriptures, piece them together through conjecture, and in this manner attempt to reconstruct the way in which the Buddhist canon came into being.

      The First Council is said to have taken place in the year of Shakyamuni’s death at a place called the Cave of the Seven Leaves (Skt Saptaparna-guha) in a mountainside near Rajagriha, the capital of the state of Magadha.

      Attended by some five hundred monks, it was said to have centered around Mahakashyapa, Ananda, Upali, and the others among Shakyamuni’s ten major disciples who were still alive at the time. We are told that Ajatashatru, the king of Magadha, also lent his assistance to the council. The site remains in existence today, and photographs of it show a gently sloping hill with a cave in the side, approached by a flight of some ten stone steps. One can make out a broad open area within, where the members of the council must have gathered in order to be protected from the rain.

      Some Western scholars have questioned whether the First Council ever took place. Since the scriptures of both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism mention the rules formulated at the gathering of the five hundred and the five hundred who compiled the precepts, it seems that such a gathering did in fact occur. We could, of course, deny the validity of the scriptures themselves on this point and others like it, but to do so would be to reduce ourselves to silence, since they are our only source. Most Buddhist scholars, at least in Japan, regard the First Council as a matter of historical fact.

      With the death of such an extraordinary leader as Shakyamuni, it is only natural to suppose that his disciples should want to gather immediately and put into order their recollections of his teachings so that the dharma, or Law, could be handed down to later generations without error.

      The scriptures record an interesting episode concerning the particular circumstances that impelled Mahakashyapa to call the members of the Order together in council. According to this account, Mahakashyapa, accompanied by a large group of monks, was on his way from Pava to Kushinagara at the time when Shakyamuni passed away. Along the road, Mahakashyapa and his group met a Brahman who was holding in his hand a mandara flower. Mahakashyapa asked him if he had any news of Shakyamuni, whereupon the man replied that Shakyamuni was no longer of this world. Hearing this, some of the monks began to weep and wail aloud, while others grieved in silence. To everyone’s astonishment, however, one old monk burst into the following embittered harangue. Friends, cease your sorrow, cease your grieving! Now we are free at last from that Great Monk. ‘This you may do,’ he would say to us, or ‘This is not proper for you,’ making life miserable for us and oppressing us. But now we may do whatever we like and need never do anything that goes against our wishes!

      Mahakashyapa, who was known in the Order as foremost in the ascetic practices, naturally listened to these rantings with grave displeasure. As soon as Shakyamuni’s funeral had taken place and his remains had been taken care of, he addressed the other monks in these words: Friends, we must make certain that the teachings and ordinances are put into proper form, rendering it impossible for false doctrines to flourish while true ones decline, for false ordinances to be set up while true ones are discarded, for expounders of false teachings to grow strong while expounders of the truth grow weak, for expounders of false ordinances to seize power while expounders of true ones lose it.

      Mahakashyapa then selected five hundred monks to undertake the task of putting Shakyamuni’s sermons and teachings in order and shaping them into the canon of the Buddhist religion.

      While convenient, the account seems plausible enough and serves to point up an important motive that must surely have lain behind the compilation of the canon. I am referring, of course, to the notoriously unpredictable nature of the human heart. Among Shakyamuni’s followers were those who ordinarily evinced the greatest respect for him and were diligent and strict in their practice of the dharma, or Law. And yet in certain cases, they retained in their hearts a fundamental egoism and narrowness of vision. Faced with the fact of Shakyamuni’s death, the true nature of their hearts was suddenly and almost unconsciously revealed. That, I believe, is what the story of the old monk and his shocking outburst is intended to convey.

      To his disciples, Shakyamuni was a teacher who bestowed on them the deep compassion and love of a father. At the same time, he was the leader of their religious organization. The large majority of his disciples regarded him with awe and respect, but there must have been others who could not live up to the severe discipline demanded of them, the ordinances that made their lives so different from those of ordinary laymen, and who were therefore still prey to the temptations and delusions of the mundane world. It was only natural for such persons to feel, however mistakenly, that they had been liberated from an oppressive spiritual burden. The rantings of the old monk served as a warning to Mahakashyapa that a certain laxness was likely to invade the Order.

      The death of its foremost leader meant that the Order faced a time of grave peril. In the Indian society of the period, still overwhelmingly dominated by the various schools of Brahmanism, Buddhism was as yet a very new religion and one with a relatively small following. The death of the founder naturally deprived the organization of its prime source of leadership and inspiration and plunged many of the disciples into deepest despair. Undoubtedly they felt a sudden emptiness in their hearts, a sense of fathomless bewilderment and loss.

      Shakyamuni’s passing probably occasioned varied reactions among persons and groups outside the Buddhist Order as well. Those who looked upon the new religion with ill will in all likelihood predicted that Shakyamuni’s death signaled its gradual disintegration, for no matter how outstanding a personality the founder of a new religious order may be, if he or she can find no suitable successor to carry on the work, the order is likely to be troubled by internal dissension and fall into decline. The various Brahmanical schools in particular, we may surmise, hoped and believed that this would be the case.

      This is not surprising, since it appears to have been the general belief that, apart from Shakyamuni, there was no one in the Buddhist Order who was of truly exceptional stature. The scriptures record the following exchange when the disciple Ananda chanced to meet an old friend who was a Brahman. Ananda, the Brahman inquired, now that the Buddha has passed away, is there anyone of equal stature to carry on in his place?

      Ananda replied: "Friend, how could there possibly be anyone of equal greatness? The Buddha through his own efforts attained an understanding of the truth and set about putting it into practice. All that we, his disciples, can do is to

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