The Unity of Buddhism Page 4
Extracted from Sangharakshita: A New Voice in the Buddhist Tradition by Dharmachari Subhuti


monks. He even did not always wear his robes! His failure to operate within the narrow confines of whatsome of the trustees thought a Theravada monk should teach and do led to his being excluded from theVihara in 1967.

In many ways, as we have seen, his exclusion was a relief: he was free to start afresh. Almost from hisfirst arrival in 1964 he had doubted whether the Buddhist movement as it was in England at that timecould be brought to any health and vitality. He had wanted then to start a new movement. Some of hisfriends and disciples had persuaded him that it was his duty to work within the existing framework andnot cause more division. Now however a new movement could be started that was simply Buddhist:
based on the fundamental principles of the Dharma and open to the entire Buddhist tradition. Toemphasise its nonsectarian character, Sangharakshita invited some Buddhists from other traditions to bepresent at the first ordinations into the Western Buddhist Order. A Shin priest, a Zen monk, and twoTheravadin bhikkhus, one from Sri Lanka and one from Thailand, attended the ceremony.

In this new phase of his work, no doubt the most important of his life, Sangharakshita was free toembody his vision of the Dharma fully and without compromise. He no longer had to fit into otherpeople’s expectations or follow outworn cultural patterns. The movement he set out to create would bethe direct expression of his own understanding of Buddhism’s essential principles. One of the mostimportant of those principles is the unity of Buddhism. This we must therefore now explore in greaterdetail. The unity of Buddhism is a complex notion that can be viewed from several differentperspectives: historical, methodological, doctrinal, metaphysical, ethical, social, and, most significantlyof all, as a personal spiritual act. In the first place, Sangharakshita’s vision of the unity of Buddhism restsupon his understanding of what Buddhism most fundamentally is.

THE TRANSCENDENTAL UNITY OF BUDDHISM

Buddhism is founded on the Buddha’s experience of Enlightenment or bodhi, his direct understandingof the true nature of things. All Buddhists accept that the Buddha attained Enlightenment. All accept thathe taught the path to Enlightenment. All Buddhists of all schools ultimately derive their own particulardoctrines and methods from the Buddha’s Enlightened vision of reality: all those doctrines and methodsare ultimately directed to the attainment of Enlightenment. It is in this common recognition of theBuddha’s Enlightenment experience as the source and goal that the transcendental unity of Buddhism
lies.

The doctrinal and other differences between the schools are not resolved

by being reduced on their own level one to another or all to a conceptual common denominator, but

transcended by referring them to a factor which, being supra-logical, can be the common denominator of

contradictory assertions17

- that common denominator is, of course, the Buddha’s Enlightenment.
However united all schools may be in their ultimate source and goal, their doctrines and methods, eventheir conceptions of what Enlightenment is, vary considerably. This immediately poses an enormousproblem. How are we to decide which are genuinely Buddhist and which are not? What are the criteriafor determining what the Dharma is? Sangharakshita looks to the Buddha’s own words for a resolutionof this problem. The Dharma, as we must more properly call Buddhism as the path to the goal ofEnlightenment, is defined by the Buddha in the earliest scriptures in purely pragmatic terms.
Sangharakshita quotes two important passages from the Pali Canon. In the first, the Buddha comparesthe Dharma to a raft that a man uses to cross from one shore, ‘full of doubts and fears’, to the further
shore, ‘safe and free from fears’. Once he has crossed to the further shore he has no more use for the raft.
Even so, brethren, using the figure of a raft have I shown you the Dharma, as something to leave behind,

not to take with you. Thus, brethren, understanding the figure of the raft, you must [eventually] let go of

right teachings, how much more so wrong ones.18
In other words, the Dharma is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Sangharakshita further points out that

From the fact that the Dharma is, as the Buddha explicitly declares [in the parable of the raft], essentially

that which conduces to the attainment of Enlightenment, it necessarily follows that whatever conduces to

the attainment of Enlightenment is the Dharma.19

In the second passage, the Buddha confirms this point when he is asked how his teachings can berecognised. He affirms that they are

Whatever teachings conduce to dispassion not to passion, to detachment not to bondage, to decrease of

worldly gains not to increase of them, to frugality not to covetousness, to contentment not to discontent,