Three Vehicles, One Path

Among the many books I have been reading lately (the stack beside the bed was about a foot high when I settled down to sleep last night) is Daring Steps Toward Fearlessness: The Three Vehicles of Buddhism by Ringu Tulku. In typical Tibetan fashion, he explains the core concepts of the Three Vehicles (the Sanskrit word is “yana”) by commenting on existing texts. Also in typical Tibetan fashion, he devotes about 23% of the book to the Individual Vehicle, the Shravakayana (more commonly referred to as the Hinayana), about 27% to the Messianic Vehicle, the Mahayana (I’m borrowing Robert Thurman’s designations of the vehicles), and fully half the book to the Vajrayana, the Apocalyptic Vehicle. Vajrayana is the particular treasure of the Tibetan Buddhist system; the only other Vajrayana tradition, to my knowledge, is the Shingon Buddhism of Japan. Whereas Shingon is one particular sect or school in Japan, in Tibet the Vajrayana is mainstream and seems always to have been so. Also called Tantra or Mantrayana, it is essentially a magical system intended to accelerate the process of attaining enlightenment and give the practitioner conscious control of death and rebirth.

Ringu Tulku’s exposition of the Vajrayana is the first extended account of Buddhist Tantra that I’ve read. Once my head stopped spinning, I realized all over again that Tibetan Buddhism is a whole religion, a complete system, and that our Western traditions, pagan, Christian, Gnostic, magical, what have you, are instead fragmented, scattered, half-buried, perhaps lost in part. All the pieces may be there, but they are not in order, like shards of a broken stained-glass window. Is it possible to reassemble them according to the pattern? Do we even have a picture of what a complete Western tradition would look like? You can find lots of books on lucid dreaming, for example; Vajrayana teaches those techniques at a particular point in one’s development. Tibetan Buddhism emphasizes that first you take the Individual Vehicle, the basic teachings, and work on yourself; then you establish yourself in the Great Vehicle, the Mahayana, and make the liberation of all other beings your motivation for achieving Buddhahood. Only then are you ready to undertake the advanced disciplines of Tantra. Perhaps some occultists like Dion Fortune emphasized maintaining a Christian devotion, however Gnostic or heterodox, because Christ the Savior was the only Mahayana they knew, and they felt an instinctive need to ground magical development in compassion and service.

Tibetan Buddhism is my religion now, and I hope to make it to studying Vajrayana and practicing it in this lifetime. But I also hope that, given a few hundred years, we will evolve an American Buddhism that has all three vehicles, and that it will help those who aren’t Buddhists put the Western Gnosis back together again. Tibetan Buddhism models for me a religion that has all the best parts of paganism, occultism, and Christianity, combined with a surpassing wisdom and truth. I do think we once had that in Western culture, or could have had it (feel free to blame Constantine), and perhaps we shall have it again, with help from the East.

Refuge beneath an open sky

The Buddhist universe is an incredibly spacious one. I feel at times as if I have come out of a small dim room lit only by firelight, without windows, with a low ceiling, into sunshine and open air and a sky like the sky one sees over the Tibetan plateau in films. It must be the hugest, brightest, closest, widest, most brilliant sky on the whole planet. Mind is like the sky, Tibetan Buddhists say. My mind has been opened up by stepping into the fresh air of Buddhism.

No one is watching you. No one is there to judge or punish or reward. You can act blindly, poisonously, and suffer the consequences, or you can choose to wake up and act intelligently, compassionately, freely. The harm you do others is balanced out by the harm that actions of greed, hatred, and jealousy do to yourself. If you turn to the buddhas for help, if you take refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, they will help you. No questions asked. No need to propitiate them, to offer sacrifice, to balance things tit for tat. The buddhas get nothing out of helping others except the joy of doing so, and it is a joy to them, and they don't need any extraneous reward.

It's basically a very egalitarian universe. Every sentient being, every mortal being that has some capacity to think and feel, has the capacity for buddhahood. In Sanskrit it's "tathagatagarbha", literally the embryo (garbha) of The Thus-Gone (tathagata), an honorific title meaning "gone to enlightenment". In English it's usually "buddha nature". I like to think of it as buddha potential. You, me, the fly on the wall, a horse, your pet bird, and all those other sentient beings not usually part of the Western worldview--the gods, titans, hungry ghosts, and denizens of hell--all have buddha potential, the potential to wake up, become free, attain omniscience, and become creative and genuinely helpful to others. Robert Thurman, in particular, makes being a buddha sound like an awful lot of fun. Nirvana is not just sitting there in meditation for an eternity of nothing. Buddhas and bodhisattvas are busy helping others and creating new possibilities.

For so many years I had a wealth of misconceptions about Buddhism: that it was austere, ascetic, nihilistic, self-complacent, available only to monastics. Those misconceptions were based on Western scholarship of the 1950s that took Southern Asian Buddhism as the only "authentic" form and then largely misunderstood it. I am grateful to have discovered that those ideas were wrong, wildly wrong, and that the Dharma had much to offer me--a way out of so much anxiety, irritability, and stress. There is no authority to please or offend. There is no sin, only the root error of ignorance, which is clinging to the idea of a fixed, permanent self that is somehow the center of the universe. There is no one to thank and no one to apologize to except one's fellow sentient beings, all of us on the slow journey toward enlightenment. By helping others we speed our own awakening; by waking up and realizing our potential, we become more able to help others.