Kindness and the Five Paths

Posted By Mahabodhi on Mar 27, 2024 | 0 comments

Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book…

© Mahabodhi Burton

6 minute read

This excerpt commences the chapter ‘Kindness Front and Centre.’

Kindness and the Mahayana Five Paths

The path to Nirvana—as expressed the Satipatthana Sutta—can tend to be interpreted by Theravada commentators as narrowly focusing upon renunciation; mindfulness of the body and its movements; the mechanical noting of experience within slow walking meditation, and through that practice, noticing how the nature of everything one experiences is subject to impermanence, insubstantiality and inherent suffering (the three lakshanas.) That path also offers challenging insight meditations – such as the meditation on the stages of decomposition of a corpse – for more serious practitioners.[1] The drawback of this approach, though, is that practices and meditations which focus on emotional development, such as the metta bhavana and devotional practices tend to be either side-lined or treated nominally.

This narrow and somewhat intellectual approach is attractive to those who identify their Buddhism with wanting a certain personal meditative experience, along with, hopefully, the eventual confirmation of a certain level of spiritual attainment: Buddhism as ‘spiritual materialism.’ Wanting to cater for this desire among westerners for spiritual attainments – in the view that it somehow furthers Buddhism, Eastern teachers have perhaps wilfully ignored certain inconvenient truths, like the centrality of emotional development in life and on the path. However, Mahayana Buddhism – and particularly its expression in Tibetan Buddhism – restores this focus and puts kindness back front and centre.

Alienation

When Sangharakshita returned to Britain in the 1960s, he observed that Westerners were being taught mindfulness in this narrow way and that it was leading them into states of alienation. Subhuti relates Sangharakshita’s views concerning some of the causes of alienation and we might recognize these same patterns in many young people today.

Image by coombesy on Pixabay.

When we find that certain feelings are unacceptable, we suppress our real emotions, and ‘assume we experience what we think others want us to feel.’ This pattern extends to thoughts: ‘As to thoughts, we are not so much alienated from them as fail to have any thoughts at all,’ because so many agencies are telling us what to think.

‘The state of alienation … coupled with a wrong understanding of Buddhism, … leads to the extreme zombie-like states witnessed by Sangharakshita.’[2]

That wrong understanding of Buddhism can be due to a corrupted form of objectivity:

‘Sometimes, for instance, mindfulness itself is interpreted as standing aloof from experience, watching one’s body, feelings, and thoughts as though from a distance–here the practice of mindfulness is the systematic cultivation of alienation!’[3]

Or a wrong view about ethics may be involved:

‘Sometimes the Buddhist categorization of mental states into ‘skilful’ and ‘unskilful is simply assimilated to the old Christian notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ The ‘bad/unskilful feelings and thoughts are then repressed through neurotic guilt.’[4]

And sometimes a state of alienation can be due to a dramatic misunderstanding of the non-self doctrine:

‘As a final element in the poisonous brew, the well-known Buddhist doctrine of anatta can easily be misunderstood. Anatta, literally ‘not-self’, is an important application of the principle of conditioned co-production. If reality consists in nothing but a flow of dependently arising conditions, there can be no fixed, unchanging substances—no souls, no ‘self.’

 

‘However, the self that the doctrine of anatta denies is a fixed, unchanging self—the atman of the Upanishads, not the empirical self that we experience as a flow of mental and bodily events. From an ultimate, metaphysical point of view there is no self, but from the point of view of our immediate experience there is.’[5]

People substitute metaphysical speculation for concrete reality: ‘In a metaphysical sense there is no individual self. We, however, don’t take this metaphysically. We take it psychologically; in this way all the harm is done.’[6]

Some Western Buddhists have – in the past at least – suffered from an alienation that they mistake for spiritual development:

‘A strange pseudo-spirituality develops in some Buddhist circles. The people there are on the whole quite mindful: they shut the door silently; if it’s a rainy day they wipe their feet before they come into the house. They don’t get angry—or at least they don’t show it. They are very controlled and very quiet. But everything seems a bit dead; they don’t seem really alive. They have repressed their life-principle and have developed a cold, alienated awareness.’[7]

Such alienated awareness really is a spiritual cul-de-sac, not to say a complete block to a rounded happiness in everyday life. Sangharakshita asserts that its antidote is given by a ‘balanced spiritual life, in which all the spiritual faculties are represented and held in equipoise.’[8]

The five spiritual faculties are a teaching extant to all branches of Buddhism.

They are:

• Meditative concentration (samadhi)—the monk’s being is unerringly and wholeheartedly focused on attaining Nirvana, through practising the dhyanas.
• Ethical robustness (viriya)—the capacity to remain robustly ethical in the face of all obstacles and temptations: one is not diverted from being skilful by either pleasure or pain.[9]
• Faith / Confidence-trust (shraddha)—one places ones’ heart upon / faith in the Three Jewels, rather than another refuge.
• Wisdom (prajna)—one adopts an Enlightened view of reality.
• Mindfulness (sati)—an awareness of the need to cultivate the above spiritual faculties in balance, if Nirvanais to be attained.^[10]

Over the centuries, different schools of Buddhism arose, each placing its emphasis on a different spiritual faculty: for instance, the Theravada focused more on wisdom and the Mahayana more on compassion and emotional development.[11]

This variation indicates not only that corrective action is need at times to address an imbalance in an earlier school, but also the value of all spiritual faculties within the Buddhist tradition.

Obviously, we need to maintain a balance between reason and emotion in our spiritual life, and in life in general. Sangharakshita says that when faith is not balanced with wisdom it becomes ’blind and fanatical:’ a secular critique of religions in general; and when wisdom is not balanced with faith it ‘turns cold and dry as dust:’ as evidenced in the academic / postmodern mindset.

Faith in Buddhism is grounded in reason and emotion (as well as in experience.) we need to bring the full force of both to bear on Reality, if we want to solve all the problems in life.

Obviously, we also need to maintain a balance between our ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ lives: how we ‘collect’ ourselves together into a calm focus (samadhi) and how we put out robust creative energy in the world (viriya.) Again, as Sangharakshita says, when energy isn’t balanced with meditation, it ’degrades into mere restlessness;’ on the other hand, when meditation isn’t balanced with vigour, it ‘degenerates into sloth and apathy;’ as Hakuin – the master who founded the Rinzai Zen sect in Japan – taught: the ‘Life of activity’ is superior to the ‘Life of Calm:’ meaning that, while developing calm, positive and skilful mental states in the privacy of our meditation practice is important and necessary, that will not be of any use if the minute we step into the world, our calm evaporates and composure crumbles due to a lack of robustness: we need to learn how to maintain positive mental states in the midst of activity, otherwise, we won’t be able to share those states with the world. This is why in a Zen monastery the long hours of sitting meditation is balanced with physical work.

Mahayana Buddhism

Mahayana Buddhism draws out the altruistic dimension of the Buddha’s teaching; adds to the earlier traditions the directness and immediacy of the Vajrayana (‘Diamond Way’) and reminds us of the importance of kindness: it thus rebalances the overly inward-turning intellectualism of the Theravada.

Image of Guanyin, Bodhisattva of Compassion, by nyochi on Pixabay.

This difference of emphasis is reflected in the Tibetan Buddhist teaching of the Five Paths, which takes the Theravada’s four foundations of mindfulness and builds upon them: incorporating the balance provided by the five spiritual faculties; and in offering a conception of insight envisioned through the seven factors of Awakening, focuses on the more constructive manifestation of Conditionality.

The Five Paths[12] consist of five consecutive stages on the path to Nirvana. OK, so Buddhism is fond of its lists; the four this, the eight of that. Lists don’t necessarily mean a mechanical path to Enlightenment—as some people assume. In the oral culture that Buddhism was in its early days, this was a way to ensure that important aspects of the Dharma were not forgotten (if you knew the number of factors you knew if a factor was missing.) Keep breathing, we are about to dive into the numbers.

In Pali Buddhism, there is a ‘grand list’ called the thirty-seven wings to Awakening (Pali: bodhipakkhiya dhamma) and while this may fundamentally be an aide memoire to include all the important lists – such as the four foundations of mindfulness and the four right efforts, it does list, remarkably, all of the individual factors which together comprise the Five Paths.

The chapter goes on to explore Mindfulness and the Five Paths

[1] Theravadins consider the four foundations of mindfulness to be the complete path to Nirvana; they teach that Nirvana is attained by mindfully observing body (kaya), feeling (vedana), mind (citta) and mental objects (dhammas). Practising mindfulness as watching and observing, Theravadins believe that paying attention to a mental state alone is sufficient to change it, but this is questionable. For instance they say ‘The experience of (impermanence) based on body sensation is the most beneficial tool, since by mere observation of its arising and passing away, with objectivity and continuity, one goes beyond the sphere of sensations to a state beyond mind and matter.’ Vipassana Research Institute.

https://www.vridhamma.org/research/The-Four-Sampajanna)

[2] Subhuti. (1994) Sangharakshita: a new voice in the Buddhist tradition. Windhorse. p188.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid p189.

[9] Viriya is present in one who ‘dwells with energy aroused for the abandoning of unwholesome states and the acquisition of wholesome states; he is strong, firm in exertion, not shirking the responsibility of cultivating wholesome states’; the faculty of viriya is ‘seen’ in the four right efforts. (Samyutta Nikaya p1670-1) I have rendered viriya as ‘ethical robustness’ rather than ‘diligence’ or ‘energy in pursuit of the Good’ (as Sangharakshita does in Know Your Mind, p141) because the main obstacle to being vigorously skilful is being diverted from one’s task by being attracted to pleasure and averse to pain.

^[10]‘ The spiritual faculty of mindfulness (sati) is present in one who ‘possesses supreme mindfulness and discretion, who remembers and recollects what was done and said long ago;’ the faculty of sati is ‘seen’ in the four foundations of mindfulness. (Samyutta Nikaya p1670-1).

[11] In Chapter 3 of A Survey of Buddhism: Its Doctrines and Methods Through the Ages (Windhorse, 2001), Sangharakshita identifies the Buddhist Idealist schools, the Yogachara, the Lankavatara Sutra and Zen with the spiritual faculty of meditative concentration; the Perfection of Wisdom texts and the Madhyamika school with the spiritual faculty of wisdom; the Pure Land schools of Japan (Jodo Shinshu) with the spiritual faculty of confidence / faith; and Tantric Buddhism with the spiritual faculty of ethical robustness.

[12] For Sangharakshita’s account of the Five Paths, see Chapter Two, Sangharakshita (1998) Know Your Mind; the psychological dimension of ethics in Buddhism. Windhorse.