Rude Awakenings - Forest Sangha Publications

^0 T H I R D M O O N 06Nagarjuna, the Yogacarin presentation of a world that is purely mindmade,and later the magical “thunderbolt teachings” of tantra—all andmuch more were debated through the centuries at Nalanda. In thatpalace, old archetypes married new symbols to produce a pantheon ofdeities: Taras of various hue; Avalokiteshvara, the Compassionate One,thirteen-headed, thousand-armed, and thousand-eyed the better toserve all sentient beings; and his counterpart, Mahakala, the ferociousguardian of truth, black and wreathed in flames. They may have firstappeared as literary personae in one of the vast sutras or tantric ritualsthat were composed in the first millennium of the Common Era, but bythe end of it, they had at least as much substance as the old Vedic deities.In the tantric teachings that eventually developed at Nalanda, these powerfulspiritual forces were to be visualized and even acted out in esotericrituals.But ... Buddhism lost touch with the samana lifestyle that had connectedthe Sangha to the ordinary people. In some of the later teachings,the lifestyle of the Sangha is presented as a dull-witted attachmentto monasticism, and the great bhikkhu disciples of the earlier textsappear as inept. Gotama the Buddha is one of millions of buddhas ininnumerable world systems, not a samana subject to illness faring foralms around the Ganges Plain. His teachings in his historical form wereto be interpreted as a kind of primer, a “lower path” or “small vehicle”to get people started who were too self-centred to attune to the compassionand grandeur of the higher teachings.Nalanda grew away from the living context of the Dhamma Vinaya.The scholar monks didn’t have to go on alms round or have contactwith the ordinary people. And so the Turkic invaders who devastatedNalanda and slaughtered its inhabitants in 1200 hacked somethingthat had already lost its roots. Buddhism had idealized into a vast patternof images, concepts, and rituals that were not “immediately comprehensible...tobe seen by oneself ”—the touchstone of the Buddha’smessage. This meant that it had no more relevance to the lives of the2 0 6