Indian and Tibetan
Buddhism

Materials taken from the class Indian & Tibetan River of Buddhism, taught by Professor Robert A.F. Thurman.

1. Buddha and Dharma: The Individual Vehicle

1.2 The matrix of civilization

1.3 Axial age

There are many social reformers during the axial age when people try to figure out what civilization is about. For example, the Buddha, Confucius, Laozi, and Socrates.
Some problems they want to address are: Their responses to these four problems:

1.6 The buddha and Jesus

Several similarities between the Buddha and Jesus:

1.7 Dharma

Dharma has both the meaning of maintaining and transcending.
The Buddha called his teaching “Dharma.” According to Buddhist scholars, this Sanskrit word has at least eleven different meanings, ranging from quality, thing, custom, duty, religion, and law to teaching, virtuous practice, the path, and the reality taught, the highest being nirvana itself—freedom from suffering.

1.8 Four noble truths

The four noble truths are: The four reliances are: These are not dogmas to believe, but things to understand.
The buddha also made it clear this path of salvation is not for everyone.
This is NOT for ordinary people who think that the little bit of happiness that they occasionally get from their anxieties is real happiness. This is NOT for self-centered people who just learn like apprentices to do whatever profession their father or mother did, and make a living. This is NOT for people whose egotism makes them believe that this life they inherit is natural and inevitable, and that total freedom from suffering is unrealistic and boring.
This is another kind of education, a liberating one that leads to true bliss.

1.9, 1.11-1.13 Three higher education

The three higher education encompass the eightfold path.
You need to educate yourself: when you walk barefoot and get hurt, it is easier to put on shoes rather than to cover the entire earch with leather.

2. The Mendicant Sangha and the Cool Revolution

2.1-2.4 The sangha

At first the buddha does not want to set rules for the sangha, because he thinks rules means hierarchy. But later he establishes some rules, and insists that in the sangha people are only ranked by seniority.

The monks in a sangha are not to be understood as monks in Christianity. They are more like mendicants.

At first the sangha does not accept women, not because the buddha thinks women are not able to attain enlightenment, but because he is worried that the social system will act against them if more women leave their homes to join the sangha. Since the sangha are mendicants, they need to be fed on the excess from the social system.
In fact, the buddha believes that women are more likely to attain enlightenment, because they are physically more resilient (childbirth, etc.).

Rather than conquering other people, the sangha chooses to conquer themselves. Thus they are vulnerable to military attacks. But this is a path they choose.

2.5 Realizational teaching: the eightfold path

Wisdom comes not from knowledge, but from experience. The world itself is realizational.

2.8 Basic principles of enlightenment by King Ashoka

King Ashoka was a conquerer and expanded his reign with brutal wars. But later he renounced killing and became a major sponsor of buddhism and the sangha, and this period is known as the cool revolution.
After his generation, it backlashed, his descendants were not as supportive.
  1. Transcendental individualism: acknowledge the individual's happiness over the collective need of society. The collective society's highest goal is for each individual to achieve supreme happiness
  2. Non-violence: no harm to each other, no harm to animals
  3. Educationalism: education is not only for professional life, but also a means to transform oneself. education is itself the highest purpose, rather than preparing oneself for the highest purpose. "Truth conquest". meditation is important
  4. Social altruism: others are as important or even more important than oneself
  5. Demoncratic universalism: within the sangha, kings, aristocratics, are the same as everyone

3. Mahayana: The Universal Vehicle

Majority of buddhism sutras believe that the buddha himself is the inventor of the universal vehicle, but he insisted that only after a few centuries can it be published when the Indian society had gone through some changes. And Nagarjuna, a monk, was chosen to publish it. He lived hundreds of years.

3.2 Universal vehicle vs Individual vehicle

The universal vehicle does not contradict the individual vehicle: they share the same three jewels, the same four noble truths, the same three education.
Difference is that the individual vehicle uses them to achieve individual enlightenment, universal vehicle pressures each individual to assist the enlightenment of the collective whole.
Nagarjuna's statement: Śūnyatā-Karunā-garbhaṃ, which means "emptiness (or voidness) is the root of compassion." When you realize the emptiness of yourself, you start to be compassionate and see others.

3.7, 3.8 Core Idea of Universal Vehicle Movement: Wisdom and Compassion

Prajna: sharp intelligence, wisdom
Selflessness: the experience of failing to identify the unique, unchanging thing about yourself. And we as human beings have to cope with that feeling of failure
Speaking of this, I find the common theme of religion and philosophy is identifying oneself and attributing meanings to oneself. Really, everyone is trying to find something unchanging, and the easiest way might be looking within oneself, thus people look for persona, for existential stuff, and now these buddhists are telling you there is no such thing lol
Compassion: the buddha and bodhisattva cannot directly end your suffering, unless you get yourself out

4. Vajrayana: The Esoteric Vehicle

The esoteric vehicle developed during a period that the Indian society was developed enough and peaceful enough for people to practice meditation and citing mantras.

4.3 Buddhist monastic universities

In Tibetan, a buddhist means an inner-nist, someone who studies the inner world.

4.6-4.7 Seven-fold Causal Instruction

The Dalai Lama said he had difficulty picturing other people as his mother when he was little, so instead he did this: extending compassion through exchange of self and others
Instead of thinking "what do I want", "what makes me happy", think less about "I" and more about others.
When you stop thinking about yourself and start thinking "what makes other people happy", the first person whom you make happy and releave from suffering is yourself.

5-6 Tibetan Buddhism

The buddhist were actively seeking a place to transmit their culture, and Tibet was chosen due to its individualism, non-violence, educationalism, social altruism, egalitarian universalism.

5.1-5.3 The Buddhification Process

Tibet transformed from imperial militarism (dominated by military) to mass monasticism (academia) in the buddhification process.
The process started and ended with the Tibetan empire, and two translators Rinchen Zangpo and Atisha introduced Indian sutras into Tibet.
This process is demilitarizing the country.

5.6-5.7 Dalai Lamas

Dalai means the ocean in Mongolian.
Early Dalai Lamas 15-17th centuries: the 1st to 4th Dalai Lamas; they reincarnate and keep on transmitting buddhism. The 4th Dalai Lama was actually born in Mongolia not Tibet, due to social unrest in Tibet. His disciple was the king of Mongolia, who helped him bring together Tibet.
The 5th Dalai Lama: The Potala Palace was first built in the 7th century by Tibetan King Songtsen Gampo as a royal residence, but the grand structure seen today was reconstructed and expanded in the 17th century under the direction of the 5th Dalai Lama, who made it the spiritual and political center of Tibet, adding the iconic White Palace and Red Palace.

5.7 Inner Modernism

Western outer modernism: Tibetan inner modernism:

6.1-6.3 Tibet’s Mainstream Millennial Culture

Tibetans no longer maintain any ancestral rituals like people do in China and India, as a direct consequence of believing in reincarnations.
Tibet’s unique sociological qualities: