Compassion is very important in Mahayana Buddhism. Therefore, Bodhisattvas choose to stay in the cycle of samsara to help others to achieve enlightenment as well as themselves. This is a key difference between Theravada and Mahayana Buddhists. Intention is a term often used in Pali and Sanskrit the term chanda to describe a form of desire that is without craving the term tanha , the source of suffering in Buddhist doctrine.
This distinction is a fine one and often leads to confusion when these notions are translated into English, in that both terms can be rendered as desire. In English then it perhaps makes sense to say that desire only leads to suffering when it becomes craving, or that craving is desire gone wrong, when desire becomes obsession, addiction, fetishism, fixation, etc.
While it is often said in the West that Buddhism is against desire, the situation is much more complex than that. Originally, it came about as an attempt to develop an more down-to-earth Buddhism, one which dispenses with complex arguments of academics or complex tantric rituals.
For all these reasons, it has fascinated the Western imagination, perhaps in a way that outstrips its influence within the wider Buddhist world. This is the flip-side of emptiness, or rather, the integration of emptiness and appearance.
It is continual curiosity about what the world in all its manifestations, down to the simplest physical experiences, can show us. It is being with these, holding these, not needing them to be one way or another, but experiencing them in their full emptiness and empty fullness, which describes the notion of suchness.
While this term became influential relatively late in the development of the Mahayana, it became highly influential, particularly in Chinese and Japanese thought on Buddhism, even if, as with many Mahayana notions, it can be seen as developing notions implicit in the basic ideas articulated early in the tradition, such as no-self, interconnectedness, cessation of craving, etc. Vajrayana Buddhism, an offshoot of Mahayana Buddhism which in many ways became a distinct third branch, extends and radicalizes many aspects of the Mahayana Buddhism from which it developed, even if it transformed these with the integration of a variety of new tantric practices.
Only after the advances of Mahayana, bringing Buddhism out of the monasteries and to the masses, was it possible to imagine constructing Vajrayana. As is to be expected, the other two branches view Tibetan Buddhism as a step away from Buddhist orthodoxy. For mainstream Buddhists in Theravada and Mahayana traditions today, Vajrayana is often seen as having absorbed too much of the Indian religions of the Indian medieval period and the local Tibetan religions.
Vajrayana Buddhism makes use of sets of practices which go beyond traditional Buddhist meditation, and employ intense and intricate visualizations of virtual worlds, practices aimed at transforming the body by meditation, and series of difficult rituals which have spiritual meanings yet go far beyond those in many other forms of Buddhism.
Tantric Buddhism sees every aspect of the world as having a potential role to play in producing a path to enlightenment, and hence, rather than leave the world behind, it is transformed into the path.
This even goes as far as seeing sex as having a yogic function which can help a person on the path to Buddhahood. But if Buddhism attempts to tame desire, how can this be possible? As was mentioned earlier, the issue here is not so much desire but rather craving. Building upon this, Vajrayana Buddhism sees two approaches to enlightenment, namely, sutrayama, or the approach of using written verses and traditional meditation, and tantrayama, or the use of special techniques, known as tantra, to speed the process up.
If sutrayana is seen as a path in which may take thousands of eons to attain enlightenment, tantrayana is seen as making enlightenment possible in one lifetime. While Mahayana and Theravada practitioners may view this as unorthodox, Varjayana practitioners view this as the set of secret techniques that the Buddha could only reveal privately at first, or teachings which emerged in visions and dreams which could only be made public later, and even then only in full form to a select few.
Tantric techniques often start with ritual, then move to the internalization of this ritual and its expansion in visualization. Rather, Varjayana meditation often involves the mental construction of intricate and brilliant visions of gods in refuge fields, in trees that spread multicolored light via dazzling jewels.
There is also the role of the mentor, the guru Indian or lama Tibetan , who is seen as the embodiment of perfection, the means whereby the Buddha communicates to the initiate. If all goes well, not only do the emptiness and bliss, or presence and absence, of things become indistinguishable, freeing up desire from craving. Going beyond this, the visions themselves become more real to the initiate than everyday reality, liberating the practitioner from cravings related to the everyday world, by means of visions which, as practitioners are reminded frequently, arise and are decomposed back into luminous emptiness.
As the initiate comes to realize that all their experiences are empty, whether sensory or envisioned, they increasingly come to see their envisioned dreams as having influence on their sensory embodied lives, and the everyday world becomes more and more like the virtual realities of these meditations. The sensory world is seen as deriving, in a sense, from the virtual world. In this sense, these fantasies are a sort of immanent fantasy, an attempt to create a this worldly heaven which can alter the very way we live in this world.
And as initiates increasingly control their visions, they then begin to work to control ever more precise parts of their bodies with these visions. This is where physical yoga practices start to play a role. And in all this, our own desires, our intentions often inmixed with cravings, are essential.
Rather than dispense with desire, the left hand path makes use of it to shift it. The desire for the mentor to embody perfection produces an intersubjective situation similar to psychoanalytic transference, in which the desire of both analyst and patient is actually the engine of the cure. Likewise, the visions are supposed to become self-fulfilling prophecies of a sort.
Rather than feel defeated, one imagines oneself as a deity of enlightened qualities, if one that we can only partially recognize because we have layers of illusion that we are only learning to see through.
The more we visualize ourselves as identifying with a deity of enlightened qualities through the mentor, the more we desire to change ourselves to be liberated from worldly craving like that deity. What we see here is not radically unlike a entire social form of what we practice individually in the western world as therapy. This is the state of interpenetration of opposites, a state of tensionless tension in which one is both presence and absence, nirvana and samsara, fullness and yet also emptiness.
Following these teachings — also described as the Small Way Sanskrit: Hinayana — the understanding arises that thoughts and feelings are not personal. This gives us the opportunity to act in a beneficial way and accumulate positive karma.
Today, the School of the Elders Sanskrit: Theravada , is the closest example of this type of Buddhism. Their goal is liberation from all disturbances. Mahayana teachings attract people whose primary motivation in life is to be useful to others, also known as the Bodhisattva Attitude. Early Mahayana texts stipulate that a Bodhisattva can only be male, but later texts allow female Bodhisattvas. The term Bodhicitta is used to describe the state of mind of a Bodhisattva, and there are 2 aspects:.
A Bodhisattva must place him or herself in the position of others, in order to be selfless and embody compassion: in other words, to exchange him or herself for the other. Buddhist scriptures and other texts exist in great variety. Different schools of Buddhism place varying levels of value on learning the various texts.
Some schools venerate certain texts as religious objects in themselves, while others take a more scholastic approach. Buddhist scriptures are mainly written in Pali, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Chinese. Some texts still exist in Sanskrit and Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit. The followers of Theravada Buddhism take the scriptures known as the Pali Canon as definitive and authoritative, while the followers of Mahayana Buddhism base their faith and philosophy primarily on the Mahayana sutras and their own vinaya.
The Pali sutras, along with other, closely related scriptures, are known to the other schools as the agamas.
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