FEATURED ARTICLE Nāgārjuna and the Easy Path to Awakening Rev. Jérôme Ducor Author’s Note: My sincere thanks to Dr. Heleven Loveday for checking my English. 6
REV. JÉRÔME DUCOR Nāgārjuna (243 - ?) is the first of the Seven Eminent Masters retained by Shinran but he is also more generally recognised as the primordial master of the Greater Vehicle (Mahāyāna). The latter is the form of Buddhism that spread from India throughout the Far East, up to China, Korea and Japan, not forgetting Tibet and Mongolia. “Vehicle” designates the teachings of the Buddha that carry beings along the path from the world of suffering to the other shore, that of deliverance. The “Greater” Vehicle is so called because it considers itself as the maximalist path within Buddhism. That is to say, it does not offer beings individual deliverance from suffering alone. It claims to offer everyone the possibility of becoming a perfectly accomplished Buddha who will then be able to help all other beings to obtain deliverance in their turn. However, this path to awakening is particularly difficult. Indeed, beings are riddled with passions, those uncontrolled feelings such as the desire for what one does not have, or the hatred of what one has, which make them produce all sorts of mental constructions by which they chain themselves to the cycle of births and deaths. Passions are closely combined with ignorance of the true nature of things. That is, beings generally see the world not as it is but as they would like it to be. This explains why Buddhism, of all schools, advocates removing these obstacles on the path by accumulating merits to erase the passions on the one hand, and by acquiring wisdom to tear apart ignorance on the other. In the Greater Vehicle this self-conquest is presented as the quest of a young heroic prince building his kingdom. His journey begins with the production of the vow to become a fully accomplished Buddha in order to deliver all beings. This is called “the thought of awakening” (bodhicitta), and the one who has produced it is a “Bodhisattva”. In addition to this general vow, common to all Bodhisattvas, the candidate for awakening also formulates specific vows of his own, in order to adapt more particularly to the needs and aptitudes of the beings he wants to deliver. The rest of his cursus consists of developing a number of qualities, which are summarised in the six perfections: gift, morality, patience, energy, meditation and wisdom. This is a particularly demanding programme and is defined by precise steps. Buddhist masters have endeavoured to illuminate this complicated path. Nāgārjuna himself dealt with it in several texts, including one with the evocative title: Treatise on the analysis of the Ten Stages (Jūju bibasha ron). These “Ten Stages” appear, however, only towards the end of this path: they are preceded by forty steps and followed by two final steps before arriving at the perfect awakening itself, for a total of no less than fifty-two steps. Of the Ten Stages, the most important is the eighth stage, because from this point onwards the bodhisattva has no more effort to make, the rest of his journey being carried out by itself. This is why this stage is called “the Irreversible.” A final but impressive detail is that the entire career of the bodhisattva takes place over the staggering duration of three “incalculable” cosmic periods plus three “ordinary” cosmic periods! Access to the Irreversible Stage is itself 7
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