Vol. 2, Issue 3

FEATURED ARTICLE - NĀGĀRJUNA AND THE EASY PATH TO AWAKENING
only reached after the first two incalculable cosmic
periods. These figures are truly astronomical, since one
definition of the duration of an ordinary cosmic period
(kalpa) says that it is longer than the time it takes an old
man to level a mountain twenty-four thousand metres high
by brushing it with the bottom of his silk robe once every
three years!
One can easily admit that the length of the bodhisattva’s
journey is enough to discourage the best intentioned
practitioners.
Nāgārjuna himself mentions this in his Treatise on the
analysis of the Ten Stages, when asked the following question:
would there not be a suitable means offering an easier way
to access the Irreversible Stage promptly? Nāgārjuna’s
response, at first, is really not encouraging:
Such talk as yours is worthy of a wimp and a coward!
These are not the words of a resolute hero! And why is this
so? If someone produces the vow and aspiration of perfect
unsurpassable enlightenment then he must, without
sparing his own life, strive energetically day and night as if
he were removing fire from his head!
In a second phase, however, Nāgārjuna is more
conciliatory and does offer an alternative:
In the Law of the Buddha there are innumerable
methods. It is like the ways of this world. There are
difficult ones, and there are easy ones: walking painfully
by land, which is painful; or being carried by water on a
ship, which is delightful.
This is also true of the way of the bodhisattvas. There
are some who strive to practise energetically, and there are
some who, by the easy practice of the suitable means of
faith, promptly attain the Irreversible Stage.
Then Nāgārjuna presents this easy practice as
commemorating the Buddhas of the Ten Directions by
saying their names. Indeed, the Greater Vehicle asserts
that there are Buddhas preaching the Law in some of
the universes around us today. This is one of the most
significant features of Mahāyāna compared to the
Theravāda tradition. One of the earliest of the Buddha’s
sermons (sūtra) to be translated into Chinese, in the 2nd
century CE, the Pratyutpanna Sūtra, for example, teaches
a meditative method of seeing and hearing any of these
Enlightened Ones from our own world in order to receive
their teaching in the absence of the Buddha Śākyamuni. It
should be noted that the only Buddha mentioned by name
in this sūtra is the Buddha Amida.
Nāgārjuna’s treatise enumerates the names of no
less than one hundred and seven of these Buddhas of the
Present, the first in the list being none other than the
Buddha Amitāyus (“Immeasurable-Life”), one of the two
Sanskrit names of the Buddha Amida, the other one being
Amitābha (“Immeasurable-Light”).
Indeed, Nāgārjuna gives a prominent place to Amida,
whose specific vow he even relates as follows:
If anyone commemorates me by uttering my name
and relies on me, he at once enters into the stage of
the definitively settled and will obtain the unsurpassed
perfect enlightenment.
The treatise continues with a poem in thirty-two
stanzas in which Nāgārjuna praises the Buddha Amida.
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