Flame from a distant altar

I’ve come to a conclusion about something:  If there’s any religion that can substantiate a claim to be The One True Religion in the World, it’s Buddhism.

I know that’s a pretty strange thing for me to say, an Episcopalian turned Druid who never quite accepted Christianity’s claims to be the One True Way.  (I always found other people’s religions too interesting.)  I’ve come to this conclusion, and to the point of daring to voice it aloud, after more than a year of reading about Buddhism, particularly Tibetan Buddhism, of experimenting with sitting meditation, of looking at Tibetan Buddhist sacred art and listening to Tibetan Buddhist ritual music.

My conclusion is that Buddhism is not so much a religion as a philosophy and a set of disciplines or a toolkit that can merge successfully with any existing religion and transform it.  Even a cursory glance at Buddhism and its history–and, to be truthful, that’s about all that a year’s study amounts to–shows that it melded with pre-existing religions in India, its birthplace, in China, Japan, Tibet, and the rest of southeast Asia.  Each of the great traditions of Buddhism has its own flavor, imparted by the teachers who carried it but also by the cultures that received it. The twist is that by “religion” I mean exactly the opposite of what most Western thinkers have meant by it for over 1500 years: I mean what is now called polytheism, animism, pantheism, ancestor worship, in other words, everything that “religion” meant before the monotheisms of Christianity and Islam began to dominate world culture.

The more I learn about Tibetan Buddhism, the more I find it essentially sane.  Underneath its exotic, colorful surface, underneath its intellectual complexity, it is essentially sane and simple.  It is about love, defined as wishing others to be happy; compassion, wishing others to be free from suffering; joy, sharing others’ pleasure in their own happiness; and equanimity, having love, compassion, and joy toward all beings impartially.  It’s about dedicating one’s own quest for freedom, wisdom, empowerment to being able to help others get free.  It emphasizes the basic goodness of all beings, the basic joy and freedom of existence, the nobility of bodhichitta.  Bodhichitta is hard to translate into English, because the Sanskrit word “chitta” means both “heart” and “mind”.  Bodhichitta is the wise heart and mind that seeks to liberate all beings from delusion so that they can be their best selves; it is the motivation to succeed in order to help others.

In addition to its essential sanity, the other quality which Tibetan Buddhism impresses on me is its completeness.  Again, I’m going to have to talk about that by first using words from Buddhist tradition, then backing up and seeing how those definitions might apply outside Buddhism.

Buddhism has described itself for centuries in terms of three “vehicles” or yanas.  The Hinayana or “Little Vehicle” is the way of the seeker concerned with his or her own condition: achieving enlightened awareness and getting out of the trap of rebirth, desire, frustration, death, rebirth, which in Sanskrit is samsara. It’s about cleaning up your own act, pure and simple.  The Mahayana or “Great Vehicle” introduces the notion of bodhichitta, which is practiced by the bodhisattva.  The bodhisattva is someone who has vowed to achieve enlightenment, not merely for their own sake, but for the sake of all sentient beings, as the traditional phrase has it.  Some bodhisattvas have vowed not to leave the world of rebirth and enter nirvana until all other beings have done so–to be the last one out of the burning building, as it were.  The six paramitas or perfect virtues are the watchwords of the bodhisattva: generosity, ethical behavior, patience and forbearance, enthusiasm and effort, meditation, and wisdom.

The Hinayana tradition is sometimes identified with the Theravada tradition practiced in Sri Lanka and other countries south of India, but that is often seen as unfairly limiting.  Tibetan Buddhist teachers do not make that identification; rather, they seem to say that the Hinayana is where an individual needs to start; you need to get your act together (Hinayana) before you can take it on the road (Mahayana).  The Mahayana traditions include  Tibetan Buddhism, Ch’an Buddhism in China, and its better-known descendant Zen in Japan, Korea, and Viet Nam.

Tibetan Buddhism includes both Hinayana and Mahayana teachings, but its most distinctive characteristics belong to the third vehicle, the Vajrayana or “Diamond Vehicle”.  The Vajrayana consists of teachings intended to allow the practitioner to achieve enlightenment in a single lifetime; they are a shortcut to Get You There Now.  Much of these teachings consist of visualization practices that include secret mantras, complex mandalas, and identifying oneself with the visualized deity.  Traditionally, they can only be practiced if one is “empowered” to do so, that is, initiated by a teacher who has also been empowered.

If the Hinayana emphasis on taking care of oneself (and its often devotional manifestation, for laypeople, in Theravadin Buddhist cultures centered on the ordained monastic community) can be compared to Protestant Christianity, and the compassionate, self-giving bodhichitta of Mahayana, with its many saint-like bodhisattvas, can be compared to Roman Catholic Christianity, the only thing the Vajrayana can be compared to is magic.  In Western culture, in Christianity, those high-speed, short-cut techniques of transformation have been cut off from religion proper and relegated to the realms of magic, the occult, the forbidden and transgressive.  The banishment of our Western Vajrayana has been so complete and effective that most people do not even think of magic as a form of union with the Divine, a way of becoming one’s best self; they know it only as a means of controlling reality or other people, of attracting love, money, or power that one cannot gain legitimately, by normal means.

Ceremonial magical traditions teach that magic may have two purposes: thaumaturgy and theurgy.  Thaumaturgy, literally “wonder-working”, is magic for purposes such as healing, attracting wealth, gaining knowledge, or any basically practical purpose.  Theurgy, “god-working”, is magic meant to elevate the human being to godhood; to attain union with the gods or God and manifest the greatest potentials of the self.  Mainstream Christian theology, centered on the fourth-century doctrine of original sin, developed to a point where either of those goals was (and is) considered unacceptable, an attempt to usurp Divine prerogatives.  (Of course quite a lot of Christian ceremonial magicians would disagree.)

What fascinates me in Tibetan Buddhism is that all these different aspects of religion–devotion and ritual, self-improvement, service to others, and magical transformation–have remained united, and have been practiced equally (if not always to the same extent) by monastics and laypeople.  You don’t have to be an ordained monastic to meditate, study with a teacher, or take Vajrayana empowerments; on the other hand, you don’t have to be Tibetan to get ordained, either–there are some notable American-born Tibetan Buddhist teachers, such as Lama Surya Das and Pema Chodron.

I think what I’m looking for as I study Tibetan Buddhism is a way to put those pieces back together, to reunite magic, devotion, theurgy, thaumaturgy, service, and philosophy in a Western cultural context, as a Druid.  I’m looking Eastward to see what light the Buddhist traditions shed on the West, and that light is considerable.  It’s not that I don’t think the West has worthwhile traditions of its own, but the fire has been damped down on our altars.  A little borrowed flame from the East could help re-kindle it.