In contrast with many books on the same subject, A Survey of Buddhism (hereafter, ‘the Survey’) begins not with an account of the Buddha’s quest for Enlightenment, nor of the central doctrines through which he taught others to attain it for themselves, such as Dependent Arising, the Four Noble Truths, or the Middle Way. Rather, the early sections are dedicated to preparing the ground for an apprehension of the true significance of the Buddha’s attainment. It is a remarkable fact that no less than seven sections are deemed necessary for this. The ideal motive for the study of Buddhism; the best materials to choose for study and the circumstances of the student’s life; the existence of non-human realms and the unimaginably vast spans of time within which our universe arises and passes; the lineage of Buddhas and their special role within such a cosmology; and the historical uniqueness of the Dharma: all this leads us to an attempt to apprehend, as far as the limitations of the written word allow, the nature and content of the Buddha’s Enlightenment experience.

Thus we find a natural division of Chapter One into two parts. Sangharakshita himself describes the first as treating of the ‘external relations’, or ‘mundane context’, of the Dharma, and the second of its ‘internal dimensions’, or ‘transcendental text’.¹ The essence of the matter seems to be that from Section 8 onwards we are dealing directly with what he terms the ‘transcendental principle’ of the Dharma and its conceptual expressions. The implication is that without a well-established understanding of the external relations of the Dharma, one’s attempts to fathom its internal dimensions will hardly be fruitful.

I made an overdue start on these early sections — the external relations — in the previous article. But no sooner did I begin than I was diverted by the question of the relation between Buddhism and science. Although it was a question suggested by certain passages in the Survey, discussion and resolution of it took us ranging far more widely in Sangharakshita’s thought, and we must return to a fuller treatment of the relevant sections. Once again, my aim is not to be exhaustive, but to explore certain themes, in this case the very distinction which was the starting point of our previous investigation, between a scientific and a traditional approach to Buddhism.

Science vs Tradition

Although the distinction appears right at the start of Chapter One of the Survey, it is made more explicitly by Sangharakshita in his ‘A Bird’s-Eye View of Indian Buddhism’, which, though written in 1964, was published in 1980 as an introduction to the Survey’s fifth edition:

The scientific approach, which is of modern Western origin, is exemplified in the works of the great classical orientalists. As its assumptions differ fundamentally from those of Buddhism, and as it tends to accumulate facts rather than to illuminate principles, it is not the best guide to a deeper understanding of the religion, much less still to its correct practice. This is still more the case with the pseudo-scientific approach. After examining Buddhism with a great parade of objectivity, the latter concludes by demonstrating its inferiority to some other brand of religious belief. The traditional approach is that of the Buddhist, who, whether learned or unlearned, takes refuge in the Three Jewels (triratna) — the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha — in the serene confidence that they constitute the sole effective means of deliverance from suffering as well as to the attainment of Nirvāṇa, Buddhahood, or the Triple Body (trikāya). Here, while other considerations are not ignored, the approach is predominantly pragmatic, Buddhism being intimately known from within through personal experience.²

He goes on to announce that in the Survey,

…we shall approach Buddhism in the spirit of traditional rather than of profane scholarship (though at the same time taking into account the results of modern research)…³

The clause confined to parentheses is highly significant. The combination of, and articulation of the correct relationship between, a traditional approach to Buddhism and the findings of modern scholarship is one of the chief merits of the Survey, and of Sangharakshita’s thought more generally. A fuller account of this must be deferred for a future article. But at least some discussion of these ‘Orientalists’, whom Sangharakshita mentions, may be helpful in what follows.

Though relatively few in number, the Orientalists profoundly influenced (for better and worse) how Buddhism has been understood in the West, and in the modern world generally. They are thus part of the intellectual culture in which Sangharakshita’s particular communication of the Dharma took place, and it is important to understand something of them. According to the online ‘Britannica’,

As a scholarly practice, Orientalism emerged in late 18th-century European centres of learning and their colonial outposts, when the study of the languages, literatures, religions, laws, and art of East Asian societies became a major focus of scholarly attention and intellectual energy.

At its best, this ‘scholarly attention’ could be seen as an extension of the inquiring spirit of the Renaissance beyond the confines of Western culture. The resultant tradition of evidence-based scholarship has contributed hugely to our knowledge of Buddhist history. The problem is that the Orientalists tended to interpret Buddhism through the lens of their own culturally conditioned assumptions, which often resulted in distortions. In particular, their commitment to what they saw as the scientific worldview led them to seek a form of Buddhism that was fully in accordance with it. In the words of Donald Lopez,

For the Buddha to be identified as an ancient sage fully attuned to the findings of modern science, it was necessary that he first be transformed into a figure who differed in many ways from the Buddha who has been revered by Buddhists across Asia over the course of many centuries.⁴

It is the assumption that Buddhism can be understood from the outside, as it were, according to the assumptions of nineteenth century rationalism, that Sangharakshita is concerned to repudiate. It should be borne in mind, however, that much has changed in the world of Buddhist scholarship since he wrote the Survey. There is in general more awareness of the problems associated with Orientalism. This change results, I assume, from a number of conditions, the relative weight of which it is beyond my competence to assess. For one thing, the intellectual culture has, for better and worse, reacted against the Euro-centrism of previous generations. In particular, Edward Said’s influential 1978 book Orientalism has tainted the connotations of the phenomenon after which it is named. Another factor in the change may be the Survey itself, which was without peer at the time of its publication and would have been read by virtually all significant Buddhist scholars in the decades that followed, surely not without effect. In addition, increasing numbers of these scholars were themselves practising Buddhists — in fact it is now more the norm than the exception among the most significant figures in Buddhist studies.

But however much the Orientalists and their descendants have been at least challenged in the field, though not driven from it, the ‘scientistic’ presuppositions they held have not merely persisted but have pervaded modern culture more widely and insidiously. Perhaps this was inevitable. Lacking a secure anchor in the transcendent, the spirit of enquiry which was the genius of the Renaissance left its open vistas for the Palace of Reason, then the outhouse of rationalism, and finally the mortuary of materialism, where the smell of its corpse continues to waft through what remains of Western culture, and influences the way Buddhism is understood. For this reason, a challenge to such presuppositions, and an appropriately intelligent return to a more traditional conception of Buddhism, is more urgently required than ever. It is for this that the Survey argues. The traditional approach that Sangharakshita announces his intention to adopt was chosen not as a matter of mere subjective preference, but because it is more adequate to the real nature of Buddhism. Moreover, he not only exemplified a traditional approach, but was critical of its opposite. Arguments against a purely scientific approach to Buddhism are in fact an important theme in the Survey, especially in the early sections of Chapter One. The substance of this article will be an examination of the sections in which this contrast is greatest, particularly those pertaining to Buddhist cosmology and the place of the Buddha within that.

Buddhist Cosmology

A traditional approach to Buddhism is defined above as ‘that of the Buddhist, who, whether learned or unlearned, takes refuge in the Three Jewels (triratna) — the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha — in the serene confidence that they constitute the sole effective means of deliverance from suffering as well as to the attainment of Nirvāṇa’. However, when it comes to a consideration of Buddhist cosmology, the situation is not quite so simple, at least to the modern mind. There will be some who sincerely consider themselves to be going for refuge to the Three Jewels, but who find it hard to take traditional Buddhist cosmology seriously. But this, according to Sangharakshita, won’t do. The cosmological setting is not an optional decorative backdrop to the main action, but part of its ultimate meaning. What is at stake is an adequate understanding of what and who the Buddha really was, without which the act of going for refuge to him is without a foundation. Sangharakshita summed up the situation thus:

Faith in the Buddha… presupposes knowledge of his special qualities, attributes, and functions. So long as we do not possess a clear and correct understanding of these we shall have faith, not in the Buddha, but in something else to which the appellation ‘the Buddha’ has been attached. Though we may know thoroughly, and even intensely admire, the life and teachings of the Buddha from the human and historical point of view, unless we view them and their promulgator in the traditional perspective we may have faith in Gautama the Rationalist, or in Gautama the Reformer, and so on, but faith in Gautama the Buddha we shall not have, though it is faith in this sense alone that conduces to Enlightenment.

As I hope will become clear, a knowledge of the distinctive nature of the Buddha depends upon understanding his place within a larger scheme of existence. However, the traditional scheme does not always sit comfortably with the worldview assumed by most people to be provided by modern science, leaving us with the difficult task of adjudicating between the two.

An account of Buddhist cosmology is found in Sections 3 and 4 of the Survey, which are together categorised as the first and second parts of ‘History Versus Tradition’ — indicating that a contrast with the assumptions of the Orientalists was intended. In the first (subtitled ‘The Universal Context of Buddhism’), we find a conception of existence as multi-dimensional, in which the animal and human realms recognised by the natural sciences are but two of a hierarchy of different levels of being. The Buddhist scriptures clearly recognise intelligent beings that have existed over countless aeons throughout the universe and other universes, including those that occupy ‘higher, happier worlds’ than ours. The Buddha was venerated even by such gods, as is indicated by the traditional description of him as the ‘teacher of gods and men’.

Sangharakshita contrasts this traditional view with that offered by scientific history, which demotes to the level of superstition all talk of forms of consciousness other than those that take material embodiment as a plant, animal or human. Such a view is applied to the study of the Buddhist scriptures, and all references to supernormal powers and supernatural beings are, he says, ‘accounted for either as products of self-deception or as later interpolations.’ His reflection on this is significant. Referring to the adoption of such a reductionist approach by certain scholars, he says,

This method of dealing with traditional records is termed scientific, and is said to be distinguished by objectivity and impartiality, and complete freedom from presuppositions of any kind. The truth of the matter is, however, that prejudice and prepossession reign in all minds which have not been purified by means of spiritual practice, and even ‘scholars’ in Buddhism are no exception to this rule. They bring with them to the study of the Dharma a host of preconceptions.

As I made clear in my previous article, Sangharakshita is not saying that the scientific method is wrong, merely that it is inadequate to deal with those aspects of reality that transcend the senses and the rational mind. Moreover, the assumption that there is nothing beyond the reach of reason is itself a preconception, and one which itself cannot be rationally demonstrated. Indeed, it is rationally incoherent, as shown by his aphorism:

‘Reason must be supreme in all human affairs’, say the Rationalists. But on what grounds do they accept the truth of this statement? If it is on authority, reason is not supreme; if on rational grounds, then they assume the supremacy of reason in order to establish the supremacy of reason.⁵

The point is, of course, that the insistence that reason is supreme cannot be logically supported without either contradiction or circularity, both of which invalidate the inference according to reason’s very own laws. But perhaps a more important point for us here is that there is nothing within the nature of reason itself that makes the existence of higher realms, states of super-consciousness in which they may be accessed, or the possibility of rebirth into them, inherently implausible. The default assumption that they are results not from reason, but from a barren dogma in support of which not a shred of evidence can be adduced.

Fortunately, this is one area in which there has been a change in the world of scholarship. Many years after the Survey, in a favourable review of The Foundations of Buddhism by Rupert Gethin, Sangharakshita wrote that,

…whereas the Four Truths and the teaching of ‘no self’ and ‘dependent arising’ have been the subject of a good deal of scholarly discussion, the subject of the Buddhist cosmos – with its ‘thrice-thousandfold world system’, its hierarchy of worlds and gods, its five realms of sentient existence, and its great world mountain – have generally been passed over in embarrassed silence, especially by modern Buddhists anxious to demonstrate that Buddhism is a ‘scientific’ religion.⁶

Gethin himself, however, bucked that trend, as the following demonstrates:

The Buddha and his followers are represented as being visited by these various beings, as having discussions with them, as being questioned by them, and as being honoured by them. Yet in their reading of the texts many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars felt inclined to treat such accounts of ‘supernatural’ beings as later mythical additions to an earlier more sober and purely philosophical stratum of Buddhist literature that was originally uncluttered by such material. Indeed this outlook continues to influence the approach of some scholars. Yet the fact remains that these so-called mythical elements are so embedded in, so entangled with the conceptual, ethical and philosophical dimensions of early Buddhist literature that the task of extricating them is extremely problematic…

What can be said with certainty is that we have no evidence, either in the ancient texts or in the different contemporary traditions, for a ‘pure’ Buddhism that does not recognize, accommodate, and interact with various classes of ‘supernatural’ being. Such a pure Buddhism is something of a theoretical and scholarly abstraction.⁷

This passage demonstrates that Sangharakshita was rather ahead of the curve, and may even have influenced its direction. Indeed, in the Survey he goes further. It is not merely that one cannot find a pure Buddhism independent of a cosmology; one cannot fully understand the full meaning and significance of Buddhism independently of it either. Rationalist preconceptions lead inevitably not only to a diminishment of the traditional cosmic significance of the Buddha’s Enlightenment, but to a diminishment of the conception of Enlightenment itself. To illustrate this point Sangharakshita quotes at length from the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, in the conclusion of which the devas (‘gods’) of different degrees of refinement are reported as rejoicing in the successful communication of the Dharma from the Enlightened to the unenlightened, upon which the ‘ten-thousandfold world system shook, shuddered and trembled, and a great light appeared in the world’. Sangharakshita’s comment on this is that the conclusion to the Sutta ‘is a revelation of the true context of Buddhism, and, as such, indispensable to the proper understanding of the significance of the Dharma itself.’

Here we enter tricky philosophical territory. It may seem that we are required to make a choice between belief in the scientific method on the one hand, and in, for example, the historicity of the world-system shaking from top to bottom, on the other. But it is not so simple. Here Sangharakshita throws us a line which (to mix metaphors) helps extricate us from the horns of the dilemma. Such mythological occurrences express to us the cosmic significance of this and other events in the Buddha’s life ‘Whether they are understood literally or symbolically’ (my italics). It seems that, just as we are not required to abandon the scientific method but merely to confine it to its legitimate sphere, so we are not obliged to apply to the mythological aspects of the Buddha’s life, literalistic understandings that pertain to the rational mind. A symbolical interpretation is acceptable, so long as it really is seen as revealing the true context of Buddhism. For this, however, we need a sufficiently deep appreciation of the value and scope of non-literal forms of understanding. It is easy to treat ‘symbolic’ as ‘merely symbolic’; but in the spiritual universe revealed by the Dharma, symbolism and metaphor can come closer to communicating the nature of things than the concepts of the rational mind. It is one’s broader view about the nature of things that dictates one’s understanding of the value and scope of symbols. As with metaphors, they should point ‘beyond’ themselves, towards spiritual truths that the rational mind is powerless to articulate, not ‘beneath’ themselves, to rational truths to which a quasi-spiritual gloss is being applied.

It should be noted, however, that Sangharakshita does not exhort us automatically to view as symbolical anything that jars our modern sensibilities. A useful discussion from The Three Jewels helps to unpack this further, and to ward off reductive interpretations of symbolism. While the context is not specifically cosmology but the supposedly legendary aspects of the Buddha’s life, the reader will easily be able to see the relevance of the passage.

Far from being all of one kind, those elements in the traditional biographies which are dismissed as legendary are on the contrary found, on analysis, to comprise at least three distinct categories of material. To the first category belong episodes which are legendary in the common acceptation of the term, that is, which though represented as historical did not really take place; to the second, episodes which are treated as untrue because they violate certain scientific notions of what is possible and what impossible; to the third, those which, though presented in the form of external, historical events, in fact symbolize spiritual truths and experiences.

The second category of legendary material includes all incidents in which the Buddha is represented as exercising supernormal powers, such as clairvoyance, clairaudience, and levitation, or as holding converse with non-human beings, devas, brahmās, māras, etc. Brought up as most of them were under the overt or covert influence of eighteenth-century rationalistic and nineteenth-century materialistic and agnostic modes of thought, the older generation of orientalists naturally discarded these incidents as pure invention, assuming it to be self-evident that in a universe governed by natural law they could not have taken place.⁸

It is, then, important to distinguish between aspects of traditional Buddhism that can only reasonably be considered as symbolical, and those for which a more literal interpretation is perfectly plausible, if only one is willing to renounce materialist preconceptions — though there is clearly something of a no-man’s-land between the two categories. The passage also makes it clear that not every claim found within the Buddhist tradition needs to be accepted. Elsewhere in The Three Jewels Sangharakshita says that ‘One must follow a middle path between credulity and scepticism’. All these points will become even more pertinent in what comes next.

The Life-Cycle of the Universe

It is, Sangharakshita says, no less — or perhaps even more — important to view the Buddha’s Enlightenment in its traditional perspective than in its context. Such a perspective involves spans of time immeasurably long, and regions of space unimaginably vast. Here (in Section 4) we are given an account of the life-cycle of the universe, described as consisting of four phases: two of ‘involution’ (or degeneration) and two of ‘evolution’ (or progress). As he makes clear, these terms are not close translations of their Pāli originals, and our understanding of their meaning must be adjusted according to the different cosmological context to which they are being applied.

The four phases are:

1. Aeon of involution, in which the world system is destroyed, and ‘resolved into its constituent elements’, meaning that the objective, material element and the subjective, mental element separate and cease to interact.  
2. Continuance of involution, in which the mental and material elements remain in a state of separation.
3. Aeon of evolution, in which the ‘beings’ of the purely mental pole gradually start to interact with the material pole, gradually becoming grosser and more solid.
4. Continuance of evolution, in which this situation remains until the whole cycle begins again.

While the idea of the life-cycle of the universe consisting of four stages is found elsewhere in the Pali Canon, the other details of the cosmological perspective that Sangharakshita sets forth seem to be based largely on the Aggañña Sutta of the Dīgha Nikāya. The Sutta includes an account of humanity’s descent from the highest ‘Brahma’ realm. In a gradual process of seduction by the lower pleasures of material form, formerly angelic beings take increasingly gross embodiment, culminating in eventual sexual differentiation. Then came,

…lusts and passions, hatred and enmities, sexual morality, the institutions of family and property, law and crime, and finally government and social distinctions, and, in fact, that same world of the last few hundred thousand years which appears in the foreshortened annals of anthropology and the blood-smeared pages of history.

Before seeing what use Sangharakshita makes of this material, it is worth observing that his is a very different emphasis than is contained in the Sutta itself. The short passage just quoted from the Survey in fact summarises the main body of the Sutta, while the part to which Sangharakshita gives most attention (and which we will shortly discuss) is confined to a paragraph or two. Moreover, he doesn’t mention the context, which is that the Buddha is addressing two bikkhus who were born Brahmins. The ‘origin myth’ that the Sutta contains is clearly a kind of parable, the purpose of which is to satirize the notion of hereditary worth. Sangharakshita’s purpose, however, was quite different, as he states here:

The sole reason for which we have sketched in the cosmological background of Buddhism…is that without a preliminary grasp of these matters the true nature and function of a Buddha cannot be understood.

To re-enforce his point, and to emphasise the contrast between a traditional Buddhist perspective and the scientific worldview that he is distancing himself from, Sangharakshita offers an imaginative quasi-philosophical interpretation of the Sutta, borrowing the language of evolution:  

Unlike science, Buddhist cosmology posits a subjective spiritual world or plane (the Brahmaloka; not to be confused with the transcendental non-dual state of Nirvāṇa) in addition to the objective world or plane of ‘matter’, and it therefore maintains that the line of biological development from amoeba to man is not single but double, being the joint product of a process of spiritual degeneration or involution on the one hand, and of material progress or evolution on the other.

He goes on to explain in some detail the process whereby beings from this Brahma-realm are seduced by craving for material pleasure etc., before again summarizing the situation as follows:

Every step in the evolutionary process results from a coalescence between an upward movement of material progress and a downward movement of psychic or spiritual degeneration. Man is not only risen ape but fallen angel, and the history of the human race may be summarized as a spiritual involution within a biological evolution.

These passages have, I confess, perplexed me greatly, and I find it by no means clear how Sangharakshita intended them to be understood. It seems to me that to interpret him exclusively either literally or in terms of myth is problematic. For one thing, it should be remembered that he was advocating a traditional approach to Buddhism, and the distinction between the literal and the mythical is not traditional but modern. Gethin again:

The categories of “mythic symbol” and “literally true” are modern and are bound up with a complex ontology that has been shaped by a particular intellectual and cultural tradition. Thus to approach what, for the want of a better term, we call the mythic portions of the Nikayas with the attitude that such categories as “mythic symbol” and “literally true” are absolutely opposed is to adopt an attitude that is out of time and place.⁹

This being the case, to raise the question of which partner of such a binary distinction is the one intended by Sangharakshita — let alone to advocate one or other exclusively — already departs from the traditional approach that it was explicitly his intention to adopt.

Considered symbolically, the Sutta (or the part of it under discussion) may be seen as an illuminating depiction of mankind’s affinity with higher states of consciousness, as well as of the process whereby we can be seduced from our own better natures by the lure of lower pleasures, and the misery this causes us. However, my reservation about a purely mythical reading is that if it is entirely a myth — and, more importantly, if Sangharakshita’s account of it is mythography rather than religious philosophy — it is hard to see how it carries the weight he placed upon it. Surely, given that what is at stake is, as he tells us, nothing less than a correct understanding of the nature and function of the Buddha, without which a commitment to his teaching lacks a secure foundation, the question of whether a collective involution of consciousness from a Brahma-realm,¹⁰ or the coalescence of this with material evolution,¹¹ actually takes place in the way described, is no trivial one. A literal reading, however, is open to suggestions of implausibility, especially given that (unlike, for example, references to the devas, which are ubiquitous in the early Scriptures) we are here dealing with a highly selective rendering of one Sutta only, whose original message was, as we have seen, quite different to the use Sangharakshita made of it.

Perhaps it is best if we leave some of the details of this section undetermined, and concentrate on what seems essential to carry Sangharakshita’s main point. For example, we have this passage..:

The fact that modern science devotes its whole attention to [mankind’s] material ancestry, ignoring the joint existence of a line of existence which is spiritual, is yet another instance of its inability to perceive those limitless vistas revealed by the Buddhist scriptures of which we have just attempted an indication.

… which can be taken more or less at face value. And even if the idea of an involution of consciousness mirroring the evolution of matter may be questionable in some of its details, it is surely essential from a spiritual point of view that human beings are seen as more than merely the product of blind material forces as described by Neo-Darwinism. While some form of evolution through natural selection seems to be as close to scientific fact as it is possible to get, the assumption that it is a complete explanation of all of life and consciousness is not science at all, it is bad philosophy. Most important however, at least as regards the main point of the section under consideration, is to recognise the vastness and sublimity of the Buddhist cosmological perspective (which shares some features with scientific cosmology, though it originated before the invention of telescopes). Characteristically, Sangharakshita impresses this upon us with a vivid image:

The saṃsāra, the totality of phenomenal existence, may be imagined as a boundless ocean of waters. Incessantly rising and falling upon its surface are an infinite number of waves. Each wave represents a cakkavāḷa or system of ten thousand worlds.

It is against this awesome backdrop that a Buddha arises.

Two Lineages

Section 5, to which we now turn, is entitled ‘The Lineage of the Enlightened One’, but is in fact concerned with two lineages, both of which presuppose the kind of traditional cosmological perspective just described (though not, I argue, necessarily in all the details). In the Enlightenment of the Buddha, Sangharakshita says, there took place the coalescence of a ‘double line of descent’ — both independent of any biological or social ancestry: on one side, there was a new successor in the lineage of Buddhas; on the other, the fulfilment of countless lifetimes of spiritual striving made by one heroic individual. While both lineages highlight the discrepancy between a traditional Buddhist and a modern materialist view of the world, it is the second with which I am most concerned, since it raises the ticklish issue of rebirth.

Sangharakshita taught and commented on rebirth in a number of places over the years, and always insisted that it was integral to Buddhism. Yet, despite the fact that, as he said, ‘all the Buddhist sages and yogis have testified to the truth of karma and rebirth’,¹² perhaps uniquely in history some modern ‘Buddhists’ regard the latter as dispensable.¹³ It is interesting to wonder why they find the idea so implausible, and I can only surmise that it is by virtue of the same rationalistic, pseudo-objective presuppositions of which Sangharakshita is so critical in the Survey. Such people perhaps assume that they have freed themselves from an excrescence upon the Dharma, when in fact they have merely failed to free themselves from their own culturally conditioned biases.

One can object to this on a number of grounds, as Sangharakshita has done in various places. One could examine the arguments against rebirth, which are usually pretty weak and involve underlying materialist views; one could cite accounts of near-death experiences and the evidence of children who remember past lives; one could consider the advantages that provisional belief in the doctrine gives for the individual practitioner; and one could draw attention to the testimony of the tradition, not only of the Buddha, but of Enlightened masters through the ages. But the section of the Survey under consideration gives a different emphasis. Without rebirth one inevitably has a diminished conception of the significance of Buddhahood, since according to the traditional perspective it was the Buddha’s practice of the perfections over countless previous lives as a ‘bodhisattva’ that prepared him for his final birth, in which he rediscovered and communicated the Dharma. As Sangharakshita says,

Just as the career of a bodhisattva is unthinkable apart from the conception of Buddhahood as the Goal before it, so the attainment of a Buddha is inconceivable without the ideal of the bodhisattva’s career behind it.

This is of course not an argument that will convince someone inclined to be sceptical. But it does highlight the absurd position of those who claim to be Buddhists while refusing to accept one of the defining characteristics of the Buddha according to his own testimony, which was taken as axiomatic by the entire Buddhist tradition — until some sceptical Westerners decided they knew better.

The Greatness of the Buddha and the Uniqueness of the Dharma

It is with an account of the unparalleled greatness of the Buddha, and the uniqueness of his Dharma, that Sangharakshita’s account of the ‘external relations’ of Buddhism concludes. I stand no chance in matching his eloquence in evoking the former, and for the purposes of exposition shall confine myself to emphasising that according to Buddhist tradition, Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha, is from the cosmic point of view the latest scion in the glorious dynasty of Buddhas, and from the historical point of view an entirely unique figure, and the most extraordinary human being who ever lived. For he was not merely a liberated being, but one who rediscovered the Dharma after it had been lost, and moreover was possessed of all the qualities and attributes to communicate it, thereby opening the way to countless others.

From this historical uniqueness of the Buddha may be deduced the originality, and indeed superiority, of his teaching. The Dharma, Sangharakshita says, ‘is thus not just one more path to Nirvāṇa, but the underlying principle, the rationale, of all paths.’ It cannot be replaced by another teaching since, insofar as the Dharma is the recognition of the laws by means of which Enlightenment is to be achieved, teachings from other spiritual traditions tending in that direction are already contained within it, though they may be expressed in ‘fragmentary and distorted forms.’ This point could be seen as expressing a middle way between fundamentalism and universalism: between the rigid insistence that only Buddhism is true, and the woolly idea that all religions are ‘one’. The Buddhist point of view has always been that the Buddha was the first in human history to attain the highest state of realisation. It need not be denied that outstanding spiritual figures have arisen in contexts other than Buddhism, but they may be respected as having partially discovered the truth that the Buddha was the first to perfect and fully communicate.

Kesamutti Sutta

We near the end of our partial overview of the early sections of the Survey. I shall confine myself to one final point. In Section 7, two passages from the Pāli Canon are adduced to demonstrate the Buddha’s pragmatic approach to teaching, one from the Kesamutti Sutta (popularly known as the ‘Kālāma Sutta’) and the other the Buddha’s reply to Mahā-Pajāpatī. A few comments on the first of these will bring us to a satisfactory conclusion.

The Kesamutti Sutta describes an interaction between the Buddha and a clan known as the Kālāmas, who express perplexity regarding the rival claims of the different spiritual teachers they encounter. The Buddha responds sympathetically, before giving advice on what are, and are not, good grounds for accepting the truth of a teaching.

Sangharakshita describes the Kesamutti Sutta as ‘oft-quoted but much misunderstood’, continuing, ‘It is not intended as a vindication of ‘free thought’, nor does it give carte blanche to rationalistic scepticism. Rationalism is in fact explicitly rejected.’ As I hope will be obvious by now, Sangharakshita was not against the correct use of reason within its legitimate sphere (and neither was the Buddha, according to the evidence of the Scriptures). By ‘rationalism’ here is meant the view that reason — our ability to make inferences in relation to what is observable through the senses — should be supreme in all areas of human knowledge and is adequate to treat of reality itself; and it is this that Sangharakshita is rejecting, along with its implication of a priori scepticism about anything that claims to lie beyond reason’s reach. Nor, I assume, is he against ‘free thought’, if by that is meant the desirability of allowing people the freedom to think without attempts to coerce them into pre-established conclusions. But thought, however ‘free’ it may be, is only as good as the understanding of the person doing the thinking. Desirable as it is to think things through for ourselves, we also need to realise that our thoughts are deeply conditioned by our own karmic patterns, the limited range of experience available to us, and the framework of views which we have inherited from our culture. Such thought will not be sufficient to arrive at the ultimate truth of things, and may merely lead further into confusion. Truly free thought can only be practised by spiritually free beings; and spiritual freedom can only result from spiritual training. In fact, Sangharakshita points out, the reply given to the Kālāmas is that, ‘we are to decide between the rival claims of religious teachings, firstly on the basis of their results as revealed in our own experience and secondly in accordance with the testimony of the Wise.’ By leaving out or underplaying the second part of this, the full meaning of the Buddha’s reply is lost.

This reveals why Sangharakshita once described the Kesamutti Sutta to me as ‘dangerous in the wrong hands’, and points us to the crux of his argument with the Orientalists. A spirit of empirical inquiry is undoubtedly part of Buddhism, but so is faith in a transcendent ideal, revealed by the Wise. To undertake the study of Buddhism purely on the basis of the former, disregarding the latter, is a doomed project. But those who believe that there is nothing beyond what may be experienced through the senses and understood with the rational mind will wrongly consider themselves already equipped to pronounce upon the Dharma, without the necessity of undergoing the spiritual training traditionally required. Such aspects of Buddhism that do not fit their preconceptions, and that can only be verified as a result of such training — such as the existence of higher realms or the truth of rebirth — they will tend to dismiss; and the more doctrinal teachings, which they imagine to be more susceptible of rational treatment, they will interpret in reductionist terms. The result is an inevitable diminishment of the stature of the Buddha and the significance of the Dharma.

Thankfully, while the Orientalists certainly have their descendants in Buddhist scholarship, as we have seen they no longer dominate the field. More to the point, however, Buddhism is no longer the specialized interest it was when Sangharakshita wrote the Survey. It is, no small thanks to him, in the process of taking root in Western soil. But sadly it is a soil made less fecund by the same reductionist, materialist assumptions that Sangharakshita was trying to guard Buddhism from, for which reason his arguments are more necessary than ever. If Buddhism is to fill the yawning spiritual void left by the decline of Christianity, it must be truly Buddhism, rather than a sterile simulacrum. While there is certainly much in the tradition that requires reassessment, this needs to be done on the basis of an approach to the Dharma which is, in its deepest and most fundamental way, traditional. Communicating this in a sufficiently nuanced way is one of the principal tasks of Buddhists in the modern world.

1. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes are from Sangharakshita, A Survey of Buddhism
2. Sangharakshita, ‘A Bird’s-Eye View of Indian Buddhism’ 
3. Ibid
4. Donald S. Lopez Jr, ‘The Scientific Buddha’, Tricycle, Winter 2012
5. Peace is a Fire
6. Sangharakshita, A Moseley Miscellany, p271
7. Gethin, Foundations of Buddhism, p130
8. Sangharakshita, The Three Jewels
9. Gethin, ‘Cosmology and Meditation: From the Agganna Sutta to Mahayana Buddhism’
10. Karma is not primarily collective, but individual. So how is it plausible that humanity collectively descended from the Brahma realm? This would imply that all the beings in a world system had been reborn there in the first place, for which they would all have needed the requisite positive karma. Sangharakshita, following the commentarial tradition, suggests that those who are not reborn there pass into other world systems. This strikes me as a little speculative.
11. Sangharakshita says, ‘Every step in the evolutionary process results from a coalescence between an upward movement of material progress and a downward movement of psychic or spiritual degeneration’. But the ‘upward movement’ would be from simpler to more complex forms of life. At what point would upward and downward intersect? Would the evolution from unicellular to multicellular life manifest this principle? This would require consciousness to degenerate from the angelic to the primitive, before evolving back up again to the human, which does not seem to be what is suggested. The following passage highlights the problem:

    As the process of ‘evolution’ continued, first lichenous or fungoid growths, then creeping plants, and finally cereals, appeared on the earth, and as the formerly bright and radiant beings learned to feed on each of them in succession they became more and more gross and solid, more and more conscious of differences, until at last they became differentiated not only into various species but into sexes. The Fall of Man was now well-nigh complete.

    The Fall of Man is described as complete, when the process of physical evolution has barely begun! There is no ‘coalescence’ of the upward and downward movements.

12. Sangharakshita, Who is the Buddha?
13. Richard Gombrich, a prominent Pali scholar, declines to identify as a Buddhist on the grounds that he does not believe in rebirth, which shows a commendable intellectual integrity.