Bawden’s What!?

Well, ya’ll, this may look like an insignificant blue smudge in my passport, but it represents two months of wheedling and it grants me permission to live another full year here in Mongolia. The cool thing about this is that the year starts the day I received final approval, July 28. Seeing as my first 90-day visa expired June 19, the creaking bureaucratic cogs basically granted me nearly six free weeks. Once again, Erka proved to be our Mongolian okhin tenger (goddess), helping us navigate the labyrinth with patient good humor. I showered her with gifts. Am I content to be staying where I am? Yes. I. Am.

Palzang and I had a really good laugh at the visa building. At every door they had posted a sign which inadvertently said it all: “The hallways are undergoing reparations. The head of the Office of Immigration, Naturalization and Foreign Citizens is sorry if you are inconvenient.” Palzang had a little less luck, just wanting to extend for a month. For some bizarre reason, my one year residency permit cost 30,000TG (about $25) while for him to extend a month would cost 90,000TG plus a $103 exit visa. Go figure.

Erka then accompanied us to the railway engineers’ building where we are finalizing details for renting a train car to go down to Dornogov. There’s a leetle discrepancy, like they’re trying to double the price originally quoted. We walk into one office and there’s a woman we hadn’t seen yet, and Erka brightens and says, “Oh! My friend!” and they happily chat away. Erka explains our situation, and this big, kinda tough looking woman softens and says, “Oh, I read a book on Danzan Ravjaa when I was a child and always had a special feeling for him and the ‘red traditions’ in Mongolia. Maybe I’ll go with you!” We said sure, had a big laugh, and knew that our problems were over. Danzan Ravjaa is everywhere, even in the most unlikely places, such as Room 168, deep in the bowels of the railway engineers’ building. Amazing.

So. A couple more thoughts on Bawden’s…oh, how did I ever get to be a Buddhist monk? As I’m typing this, in my head I’m thinking of this sacred place in the Gobi I talked about a couple of months ago called Burdene Bolag and twisting it around to be “Bawden’s Bollocks”. And yet re-reading the quote from the last post, it’s so perfect, is it not?

A subject I like to explore when I give Dharma talks is our notion of “progress”. We hear about this a lot in America, don’t we? Both “progress” and “growth”. Are our children making progress? Is our economy growing? That sort of thing. Two things are implied here. One is that if there’s progress, it must be toward something vaguely good, and the other is that somehow growth is, in and of itself, a virtue. It seems we rarely question these assumptions. But let’s do so, shall we?

Bawden seemed to buy the Communist party line that Mongolia needed to grow into the modern world, and that the pervasive reach of the Buddhist superstructure in the country formed a nearly impenetrable barrier of outdated ideas at best, and ignorance and superstition at worst. Christian missionaries here now have been roundly criticized for perpetuating this idea that Buddhism was somehow responsible for the backward miserableness of the past.

Let’s first address whether Buddhism has outdated ideas. The primary evidence against this is that it has persisted as an appealing way of life for 2600 years. This covers just about every era and type of society across the planet. I myself am the product of the highest education in the most hyper-modern civilization the world has ever known. I found the Dharma irresistible because in a society that mostly offered me a daily avalanche of info-bits and sensory stimuli, my lama offered the Buddha’s wisdom, the essence of which is impervious to notions of time and space. The Buddha’s teaching on the interdependence of all things and the limitless power of compassion are as fresh and relevant today as the day he first uttered them. And the efficacy of Buddhist meditation techniques, whereby true wisdom is gained, is not in any way limited, since fundamentally we are all the same.

Neither is Buddhism incompatible with prosperity. The Buddha and his community were often sustained by a newly emergent, very wealthy merchant class and he was at home with them and the kings of his time as he was the criminals and so-called untouchables. Great masters throughout history were counselors to their rulers, urging them to attend to the general welfare and uplift of their subjects. The Buddha taught that prosperity or its lack could not in truth be blamed on external causes. If one experienced poverty, one should recognize that the cause was stingy behavior in the past and assiduously practice generosity, the actual creator of wealth. To be surrounded by pleasurable things and circumstances is not a problem; cultivating attachment to such things is. There are countless examples in history of thoroughly prosperous Buddhist societies.

Now, as to the outer form Buddhism takes within any given culture, that’s a different matter. I do believe that Buddhism in Mongolia by the 19th c. had entered a phase of decadence. Danzan Ravjaa and his previous incarnation were so outspoken about the excesses and hypocrisy of their day (DR died in 1856), both among their Manchu overlords and their contemporary lamas and monks, that they were both assassinated for their trouble. When I visited the winter palace museum of the 8th Bogd Khan, essentially the Dalai Lama of Mongolia, being the country’s spiritual and temporal ruler, I felt physically ill as I left because it felt so depraved and impure. Honestly, my first thought was, “If I had lived here and witnessed all this self-indulgent pomp, I would have worked to tear it down too.”

And I wonder about the relationship between the monastics and lay people because now Buddhist “practice” for so many people consists of going to a temple with your problem and paying a monk to chant a ritual in Tibetan for you. Nearly all of the monasteries even have menus of rituals and their prices to choose from. This is changing, though, partly from the demands of the lay people themselves who want to be taught the Buddhist way of life in its entirety in their language, and those from outside gently introducing alternative approaches that better fit our times.

So I’m not thinking that Mongolian Buddhism at the turn of the 20th c. didn’t need reform. It did. But often what happens is that beings of exceptional purity and/or wild iconoclasts arise from within the Buddhist community to accomplish this reform from within. Part of the Buddha’s own appeal was that he taught at a time when people were not being spiritually nourished at all by the secretive Brahmanic cliques and they were feeling oppressed by the rigid enforcement of the caste system put forth in the Vedas. The Buddha welcomed everyone, rejecting caste distinctions, and taught them a way of life conforming perfectly to reality as it is, so that they might embrace their own spiritual power to create both their temporary happiness and achieve the ultimate state of enlightenment beyond all suffering.

Mongolia’s iconoclasts such as Danzan Ravjaa seem to have had limited effectiveness, perhaps because of how widespread Mongolia’s population is. Early on in Mongolia’s 20th c. independence there was a reform movement within the Buddhist structure aimed at returning to a culture more akin to what the Buddha had intended. They sought ways to develop Mongolia cooperatively with the new Communist government. At first this seemed possible, but the Mongolian Communists were looking to the USSR for their cues. With Lenin’s death and Stalin’s rise a darker vision took hold. Stalin said straight out, “The lamas are your enemies,” and urged their extermination just as he was seeking the same for the Russian Orthodox church. Tragically, they listened, with that ideological fervor that births thoughtless, wanton destruction.

Which, oddly, brings us to progress. Bawden seems to feel that the violence that marked Mongolia’s turbulent transition was ultimately worth it. The Mongols had joined the community of modern nations and were making progress. But toward what? As societies, what do we feel we’re striving for? The Communist critique of religion-based nations such as Tibet and Mongolia was that they were mired in a kind of medieval feudalism that held the common people back from all that the modern world had to offer. Now, you could look at it with more charitable eyes and appreciate that the ideal of enlightenment had so moved these societies that they organized themselves in ways to allow their members to progress toward that state. Progress could be measured by whether such people had tamed their minds and manifested wisdom and compassion. These people were their cultural heroes and heroines and inspiration toward further progress.

Now I don’t labor under Shangri-la delusions. Again, both societies needed reform, but I wish the reform hadn’t dismantled the basic organizing principle of moving people toward enlightenment. What was it replaced with? Economics. Moving people toward, supposedly, easier, self-determining work. Or, in the case of certain presidents whose names rhyme with “tush”, the ideal put forth is the spread of freedom and democracy. OK, all well and good, but we’re learning some hard lessons that merely forcing a couple of external attributes of freedom does not make a people free. To progress toward freedom requires radical inner change and that is never imposed from outside.

It’s fascinating to be in Mongolia right now and to see how three generations of extraordinary energy put into the central planning of an idealized society could not extinguish basic spiritual yearning. I think these systems collapse because pre-enlightened people are, for the most part, self-interested. Now Mongolia has taken a huge sudden swing in the other direction with very little external regulation or the inner discipline of a spiritual way of life. My hope is that in working with the Mongolians we can help them find a middle way, blending progress in people’s material and personal well-being while reforming the institutions that produce Buddhas among its people.

Comments

[marylee]

So much to learn. My head swims! Love the way you lure us in with amusing tales of sign snafus and then sneak in a lesson. Verwy verwy twicky! Thank you, dear one...

[Ja]

Congratulations and best wishes for your extension in Mongolia. I really enjoyed todays post and want to share some news in reference to your link. I read a recent article on Buddhist Internet Radio "Jennifer Aniston turns to buddhism " WOW
Best Regards.

[Christian]

There is a lot to comment on this interesting post, but I have little time, so let me just focus on the following quote:

"Buddha[...] taught at a time when people were not being spiritually nourished at all by the secretive Brahmanic cliques and they were feeling oppressed by the rigid enforcement of the caste system put forth in the Vedas. The Buddha welcomed everyone, rejecting caste distinctions"

To my knowledge, and with all due respect to a monk, this is what is called in French "idée reçue", a generally accepted idea (by Westerners).

I will not develop a real argument (no time) but list a few points.

First, there is a long tradition in the Hinduism of renouncing yogis, and the prince Gautama started his spiritual trip this way, as a good hindu. Also, the Jains, whose founder was a contemporary of the Buddha, created communities (following two rules) in a similar way of what the Buddha did.

My point here is that the novelty of the Buddha was not in renouncing to the world in communities, this was perfectly compatible with hinduism (and still it is).

What about the casts? Is it true that the Buddha opened the door of the community to everyone? Clearly no. If we indeed find in the scriptures that people from different casts composed the early community, this is true also of Jains. Also, note that the tradition created the notion of chakravartin (universal sovereign) as a title for the Buddha. At a theoretical level, the Vinaya does not depict the Buddha as a reformist, not at all. The rules for admittance in the community were also strict: one had to be mentally and physically sane (no handicaped person), a free man, had no debts, is not sick, was not hermaphrodite (homosexual) etc. These rules, in part, are still enforced (at least in Korea).

Now, do not forget the women. You know that the Buddha refused to admit his own aunt and adoptive mother, Mahaprajapati, and Ananda had to beg him to accept. The reason was not misogyny, but more probably fear of trouble and critics among the then male-only community. In practice, well, there is misogyny. Not a long time ago, a nun has been beaten by monks in Thailand because she asked to improve the condition of nuns. Do not forget that the best rebirth a woman can get is one of a man... Even in the tantric practices, female deities are almost always secondary and serve the male deity. And so on, like the special hell for women because of their menstruation.

But let us come back to the casts. Is it true that there was no distinction based on social origin among buddhist communities? No, just like in Christian Europe. Monks who were noblemen were treated specially and highly in monasteries (as _monzeki_ in Japan), while others had to struggle to find economic support from outside the monastic community (a kind of sponsor).

I mean, this is like India today: officially there is no casts, but in practice everybody knows everybody else's cast
(the name often is enough) and can act accordindly.

The idea that Indians are oppressed by the casts is a Western projection. Some of them do, like the now famous "intouchables" (low casts, even called improperly out-casts), which convert to buddhism in a public manner to draw attention in the media to their condition. But, otherwise, Indian do not feel oppressed by casts because it is part of their society. (I do not judge it is good or bad, I don't know, actually.)

Let us not talk about buddhism and sexuality, but there seems a great deal to say too (about the supposed open-mindedness).

So, my point is that there is the theory and the practice of the Buddhism. In theory, both are the same, but in practice, they can be quite different :-) And it is IMPOSSIBLE to separate both. If you do, buddhism is just a concept. We, as Westerners, we easily separate the social aspects of the Buddhism from the teachings because our societies are democratic blah blah and Buddhism has no root at all in our countries: it is hell too soon (and maybe Buddhism will never work in Western countries). So we mainly know the teachings (often, the highest teachings, by the way) and project a "perfect buddhism", which do not exist anywhere on Earth, not in the East, not in the West...

Lot to comment about others things in your interesting post. Had to work now!:-)

[Ja]

Hi Christian
Why not refer to a Buddha as a universal chakravartin? It literally means "wheel turner."
We all know the Buddha began as practicing Hindu-what is your point?
My Lamas have always said that women develop qualities and enlightenment more easily than men, I have heard this many many times.
The female Buddhas do not serve the men.Tantric female Buddhas abound as main objects of devotion and dont forget that these archtypes are appearing as representative of qualities of our own minds.
Distinctions in theory and in practice-of course- how can it be otherwise as we are ignorant angry and craving humans.Buddhahood is sadly a long way off for most of us. Until we purify our speech there is a lot of blah blah so ......
We all know all too well that we are not perfect buddhists -and that is exactly why we keep trying.That is why we are called practicioners and not adepts or masters or Buddhas and can never know who will be or is already a tantric deity until we have developed our Buddha eyes. Perhaps we should practice equinamity and non judgement until we have reached pure perception?

[Christian]

Dear Ja (Janine?),

"Why not refer to a Buddha as a universal chakravartin?"

Technically speaking, the Buddha is not a cakravartin, who is the secular (hence slightly inferior) equivalent of a Buddha. Interestingly, the prediction made about the Buddha before his birth was that he would either be a cakravartin or a spiritual master. So, implictly, the cakravartin title is closely linked, or stick, to the Buddha.

My tiny point here was that, even if the Buddha is not considered as a Lord, as the Christ is for Christians, he is likened to a cakravartin, which is equivalent. In other words, Buddha and the early buddism did not promote democracy and equality. It's anachronistic.

"It literally means `wheel turner.'"
I don't think so. "cakra" is "wheel" and "vartin" is "sovereign" (don't have my Sankrit dictionary by hand, sorry, I don't know the nominative form).

"We all know the Buddha began as practicing Hindu-what is your point?"

My point is that it is a (modern and Western) misunderstanding to oppose hinduism and buddhism the way Konchig did. There are other ways, more technical, I think.

"My Lamas have always said that women develop qualities and enlightenment more easily than men, I have heard this many many times."

I will never criticise what your lamas told you. If they told YOU that, I trust they did it for good reasons. Just do not forget that in buddhism, contrary to the monotheism (revealed religions, in general), the usefulness is more important than truth, as illustrated in the sutrapitaka (silence of the Buddha and explicit mention of this point too). That is why it is very important to know who is/was the audience of a teaching in order to interpret it.

I never heard or read such a thing myself, except in the esoterism litterature. The scriptures and today living traditions, on the contrary, make it more difficult for a woman to attain buddhahood _in her female body_ (not in the absolute, of course). Who is the next announced female Buddha, by the way?

"The female Buddhas do not serve the men."

What about Yeshe Tsogyal and Guru Rinpoche? Why is it correct to visualise Samanthabadra alone or in union with Samantabhadri, but not Samanthabadri alone? And so on. And in Theravada or Mahayana, this fact is even more obvious (I only know the exception of female representations of Avalokiteshvara in China, Korea and Japan). Note that I, or the teachings, do not say that in the absolute there is a difference between male and female, just that the practices make a difference in general (I am aware of Tara), in favour of the male representations.

"Perhaps we should practice equinamity and non judgement until we have reached pure perception?"

We must use the support of the relative reality to reach its inner side. The ordinary mind is a very useful tool we must use to progress intellectually in the understanding of the teachings. We must judge (a though is a judgement, anyway), otherwise buddhist philosophy would be a mistake --- and I don't think it is.

[Ja]

Christian, Hi, I am sorry but from my point of view we are probably both making some assumptions and running with them. I am saddened this is begining to feel like an argument and I dont think either of us intended that.

The meaning of language and expressions we are not fluent in is not simple to speculate. I still think the purpose of a wheel is to turn -otherwise it wouldnt be referenced? I dont know.

I must say I disagree enthusiastically with your statement that buddhism may not work at all in western countries and truly wonder why you would feel that.

...usefulness is more important than truth? (I have heard that a Buddha cannot lie.) I understand what you are trying to say about context but you incorrectly assumed that no males were ever present or that you know exactly why the Lama made the statements. Personally I honestly believe that the statements were indeed literal ones.

I think you may be misinformed about Samantabhadri-she is considered a yidam- as is Yeshe Tsogyal. There are numerous and wonderful female yidams and protectors.

Obviously I am neither scholar or teacher and these are only thoughts of one who has much to learn. It is probably time to refer these issues to our experts and true teachers. Best regards,Ja

[Konchog]

Ah, my learned friends. Nice conversation! No time to address it all, but a couple of things.

I didn't actually intend to oppose the Buddha to the Hindu traditions of his day. Christian's right, there was a tremendous amount of spiritual experimentation, and of coourse it was seeing one of the renunciates that finally moved Prince Siddhartha to abandon his own palace and family in search of the state beyond suffering. But a lot of this experimentation was a reaction to how rigid the Brahman priest caste was in terms of making spirituality a closed society inhabited by a few specialists. Remember the encounter just after the Buddha's enlightenment where the Buddha declares to the man he meets that one is not Brahman (noble) by birth, but rather to the degree that he has tamed his mind. This was deemed so important it's the first quote you see upon entering the sacred compound at Bodh Gaya. And it did enter into the original community as an equalizing force. There's the story of the princes who came to the Buddha to become monks. They brought along their personal barber for their haircuts! But the barber, Upali maybe? became taken with the Buddha too and wanted to become a monk. The princes had him take ordination forst so that they would always have to be deferential to him as one who had been ordained longer, and thereby undercut their own royal pride.

AFA women, this is something we think a lot about in our sangha, since we have a woman teacher and the community is predominantly female. Ja is right, there are any number of female forms of Buddha for meditation. It's true that the 1002 Buddhas of our aeon will turn the wheel of the Sutrayana in male form, but the situation loosens up considerably once the Vajrayana is introduced (and the Mahayana for that matter, considering the supremacy of Prajnaparamita). It's true Yeshe Tsogyal and Mandarava served Guru Rinpoche, but he considered them his foremost disciples in all of Tibet and India. And he himself had female gurus. I have also heard that the subtle aspects of the female form are better suited to more rapid accomplishment of tantric meditation. In practice, things get screwy, there's no doubt, but in Vajrayana, the ideal IS our starting point.

Now, Ja, Christian is right in his pointing out that the Buddha taught according to the capacity of his listeners. What he taught was perfectly true for those listeners, but from a higher point of view could be called a "lie", that is, a provisional teaching that requires interpretation. Most of the Tibetan commentarial literature is concerned with which teachings are "provisional" and which are "definitive".

There's more, but I'll try to provoke more thoughts in future posts! I just ask that we continue to keep things civil and respectful.

[Christian]

Dear friends,

Konchog wrote: "one is not Brahman (noble) by birth, but rather to the degree that he has tamed his mind. This was deemed so important it's the first quote you see upon entering the sacred compound at Bodh Gaya."

This message was aimed at someone in particular, and this person needed to hear that. Now, we can also agree with that message, obviously, but this does not make it a political statement in a particular society, right?

This quote placed at Bodh Gaya, when we know the fights for buddhists to recover control of the site over hindus, is certainly a political statement, a declaration of independence, not a teaching.

I have a very little knowledge of Vajrayana, except my own practice. I know there are a lot of female deities in the Vajrayana, but my points were: 1) they are often (not always) disciples, secondary _in representation_, 2) Monastic rules coming from the Buddha make clearly nuns inferior to monks (the fully ordained tradition even vanished in Tibet) 3) Vajrayana is a tiny part of the Buddhism, and the rest of the buddhism does not propose a prominent role of feminity _in representations_.

Of course, this does not imply that feminity is "bad" in Buddhism, or that a feminist reform is necessary, but that feminity is not equal in terms of representation (not the absolute level) with masculinity. I believe that there is a sociological reason for that: our societies often give a proeminent role to men. This then proves that buddhism is a living tradition, because it is dependent of the different cultures where it grew up.

I didn't know the story of the two princes. I think we should take this story as it is: a story (about assumed pride, vows, skillful means). But was it history? And, even so, is it a political statement? I don't read this.

In practice, history, both in Western countries and Japan, for instance, shows that princes or kings (take Charles V, and some Japanese princes or lords) used to have a higher status in the monasteries where they were dwelling.

Of course, you can dismiss that saying that this is not by the book etc. But I prefer to consider this a proof of a living tradition, of a tradition living _in_ given secular traditions. This makes it real buddhism because there is no way to separate these facts from some purest form.

The Western temptation is to separate these aspects, because we received the teachings but no living tradition *inseparable of our societies*, has grown.

Ja, I would love that Buddhism finally makes it in the West, of course. But I can see no reason to think it will happen. To tell the truth, I am a bit pessimistic, but this is not my blog:-) Anyway, it is too soon. It took centuries for the dharma to take root in Korea or Tibet, despite extraordinary efforts of extraordinary masters.

As far as Vajrayana is concerned, there is a real fear (including among some teachers) that the teachings will fade away in, say 50 years (my lama told me that). And the Buddha predicted that the dharma would disappear.

The reason why we, Westerners, dislike this idea is that we want to believe in progress... (Yes! I finally found a way back to Konchog's post!:-)

Anyway, Ja, I don't thing we really disagree. It's just that I am a pessimistic person and you are not.

About the etymology of cakravartin, you were right: "wheel turner" is the plain translation (thanks Monier-Williams on-line!). It is the interpretation (both in Hindu and Buddhist context) that makes the cakravartin a lord. And the story of the Buddha links this royal status doubly: by his descent and his cakravartin missed destiny that reflects on him, like a doppelganger. Actually that precisely makes me wondering if the historical buddha was really a prince (the coincidence is too beautiful, isn't it?)

About the usefulness versus truthfulness, I read this in a sutra (can't remember where now...), not about the definitive versus provisional meanings.

Oh, but I made no comments on the rest of the post!

Konchog and Ja, thanks for your conversation.

[Ja]

A million "thank yous" Konchog-la for patience and a very generous response.

Christian,hi,absolutely not at cross purposes my friend.
Take care, Ja