The World as Emptiness, Part 11: The Buddhist Attitude of Change

In Buddhism, change is emphasized. First, to unsettle people who think that they can achieve permanance by hanging on to life. And it seems that the preacher is wagging his finger at them and saying—you know, like the Scotch preacher, one day saying to Sunday congregation,

Preaching on the text, vanity of vanities, all is vanity. And what about the rich food you put into your mouths? ’Tis vanity. And the fine raiment you put on your backs? ’Tis vanity. And all your playing around, going to golf instead of coming to the kirke or the sabbath? ’Tis vanity. And you be spendin’ all your lives devoted to vanity, and the last day will come—the day of your death. And because you’ve devoted your life to vanity, you go down to the burning fiery brimstone pits of hell. And there, you look up, and say unto the Lord, ‘Oh Lord, I did not know it! Oh Lord, I wouldn’t’ve devoted my life to vanity if I had known it! Oh Lord!’ And the Lord, he looked down, and he’ll say unto you, out of his infinite mercy, ‘Well, ye know it now.’

So all the preachers, together, say Don’t cling to those things. So then, as a result of that—and I’m going to speak in strictly Buddhist terms—the follower of the way of Buddha seeks deliverance from attachment to the world of change. He seeks nirvāṇa, the state beyond change—which the Buddha called the unborn, the unoriginated, the uncreated, and the unformed. But then, you see, what he finds out is that, in seeking a state beyond change, seeking nirvāṇa as something away from Saṃsāra—which is the name for the wheel—he is still seeking something permanent.

And so, as Buddhism went on, they thought about this a great deal. And this very point was the point of division between the two great schools of Buddhism—which, in the south, were Theravada, the doctrine of the Thera, the elders, sometimes known, disrespectfully, as the Hīnayāna. ‘Yana’ means a vehicle, a diligance, or a ferryboat. This is a yana, and I live on a ferryboat because that’s my job. Then there is the other school of Buddhism, called the Mahāyāna. ‘Maha’ means great, ‘hina’ little. The great vehicle and the little vehicle. Now, what is this?

The Mahāyānas say, You’re little vehicle just gets a few people who are very, very tough ascetics, and takes them across the other shore to nirvāṇa. But the great vehicle shows people that nirvāṇa is not different from ordinary life. So that, when you have reached nirvāṇa, if you think, Now I have attained it. Now I have succeeded. Now I have caught the secret of the universe, and I am at peace, you have only a false peace; you have become a stone buddha. You have a new illusion of the changeless. So it is said that such a person is a pratyekabuddha. That means ‘private buddha’: I’ve got it all for myself. And in contrast with this kind of pratyekabuddha, who gains nirvāṇa and stays there, the Mahāyānists use the word bodhisattva. ‘Sattva’ means essential principle; ‘bodhi,’ awakening. A person whose essential being is awakened. The word used to mean ‘junior buddha,’ someone on the way to becoming a buddha. But in the course of time, it came to mean someone who had attained buddhahood, who had reached nirvāṇa, but who returns into everyday life to deliver everyday beings. This is the popular idea of a bodhisattva: a savior.

And so, in the popular Buddhism of Tibet and China and Japan, people worship the bodhisattvas—the great bodhisattvas—as saviors. Say, the hermaphroditic Guanyin. People loved Guanyin because she—he/she, she/he—could be a buddha, but has come back into the world to save all beings. The Japanese call he/she Kannon, and they have, in Kyoto, an image of Kannon with one thousand arms, radiating like a great aureole all around this great golden figure. And these one thousand arms are one thousand different ways of rescuing beings from ignorance. Kannon is [a] funny thing. I remember one night when I suddenly realized that Kannon was incarnate in the whole city of Kyoto; that this whole city was Kannon. That the police department, the taxi drivers, the fire department, the mayer and corporation, the shopkeepers—in so far as this whole city was a collaborate effort to sustain human life, however bumbling, however inefficient, however corrupt—it was still a manifestation of Kannon with its thousand arms, all working independently, and yet one. So they revere those bodhisattvas as the saviors who’ve come back into the world to deliver all beings.

But there is a more esoteric interpretation of this. The bodhisattva returns into the world. That means he has discovered that you don’t have to go anywhere to find nirvāṇa. Nirvāṇa is where you are, provided you don’t object to it.