The Unity of Buddhism Page 5
Extracted from Sangharakshita: A New Voice in the Buddhist Tradition by Dharmachari Subhuti


to solitude not to company, to energy not to sluggishness, to delight in good not delight in evil.... This is

the Dharma. This is the Vinaya. This is the Master’s Message.20
What determines whether a school or teaching is truly Buddhist is not that it contains some particularset of words, practices, customs, or institutions, but that it helps individuals to move towardsEnlightenment.

To sum up, the transcendental unity of Buddhism lies in the fact that all schools and traditionsacknowledge that same transcendental goal attained by the historical Buddha. Each school or traditionhas, however, different means of approaching Enlightenment. In so far as they do in fact lead to theattainment of that goal, those means all represent ‘Dharma, Vinaya, and the Master’s Message’, despiteapparent contradictions between them. In this, then, lies the methodological unity of Buddhism. Unity
in this sense

consists in the fact that, through differences and divergences of doctrine innumerable, all schools of

Buddhism aim at Enlightenment, at reproducing the spiritual experience of the Buddha. The Dharma is

therefore to be defined not so much in terms of this or that particular teaching, but rather as the sum total

of the means whereby that experience may be attained.21

THE HISTORICAL UNITY OF BUDDHISM

Although we may know the general criterion by which to test whether any particular teaching is trulyBuddhist, it is not so easy in practice to untangle the immense and sometimes conflicting diversity ofBuddhist schools. Modern Buddhists are faced with the whole range of Buddhist traditions. They areconfronted not merely by those presently existing, but by those of the past as well, since scholars arerevealing ever more about the history of the various schools. How are Buddhists today to understand thisvast mass of teachings, practices, cultures, and institutions? How are they to evaluate it? How are theyto use it?

In this respect they receive little help from Buddhists of the past. The more sectarian among both ancientBuddhists and their modern representatives have believed that all schools but their own are distortionsof and deviations from the Buddha’s teaching, themselves retaining the true, pure, and original Messageof the Master. This attitude is now widespread among Theravadins - although by no means all are taintedwith this sort of sectarianism, while not a few Buddhists of other schools are. Nichiren’s followers in
Japan have been the most extreme sectarians. They have largely seen theirs as a new dispensation thatsupersedes and thereby negates all other schools - although, from the point of view of other Buddhists,
they themselves are questionably Buddhist.

The most sophisticated - and charitable - approach has been to see all known schools as deriving directlyfrom the Buddha himself. Each school, according to these systems, is seen as enshrining either aparticular phase in the Buddha’s unfoldment of his teaching or else his response to people at a particularlevel of development. This approach is exemplified by early Chinese Buddhists, who were confrontedwith the problem of reconciling diverse teachings since they inherited the entire existing range of IndianBuddhism, all of which they accepted as authentic in spite of apparent discrepancies and contradictions.
Chih-i, the most important of the Chinese systematisers and the founder of the Chinese T’ien-t’ai School,
classified the stages of the Buddhist path according to the order in which he thought the Buddha had
revealed the various scriptures.

The Tibetans too inherited the vast range of Indian Buddhist teachings. They regarded the Buddha ashaving taught the three great phases of Indian Buddhism - Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana - tobeings of inferior, middling, and superior capacity respectively. Tibetan Buddhists therefore say that thethree yanas between them constitute the entire spiritual path, from beginning to end. Both the Chineseand the Tibetan perspectives really amount to the same: that the different traditions all embody differentaspects and phases of the Buddha’s actual, historical teaching. They then grade schools according to theirdepth and completeness: the higher teachings being those revealing the deepest truths to disciples at thehighest stages of the spiritual path.

Tibetan Buddhism inherited this threefold classification into Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana fromIndia. As the Mahayana gradually emerged as a distinct tendency, its adherents had distinguished it fromthe Hinayana - they distinguished the ‘Greater’ from the ‘Lesser’ paths. Later, developments within theMahayana traditions led to a further yana being identified: the Vajrayana - the ‘Path of the Thunderbolt’or ‘Diamond Path’. This classification was not, of course, used or accepted by all parties. Thecategorisation of the Buddhist tradition into three yanas has nonetheless become widely current inWestern discussions of Buddhism and is, in a sense, now unavoidable. However, it is the source of a