6.14 — What Happened Next, and the Buddha in Your Life

He died, and within a few months the community met to fix the texts, and within three centuries a Mauryan emperor had made it a world religion, and within a thousand years it had spread across half of Asia and largely vanished from India.

Here is the shape of it, briefly, and then what to do with it.

The councils and the split

The first council met shortly after the death. Ananda recited the discourses, Upali the discipline, and the community agreed the text. This is the origin of the Pali Canon's structure.

About a century later, a second council split over disciplinary questions, and from there the community divided repeatedly.

The major division that survives is between two broad families.

Theravada — "the way of the elders." Conservative, based on the Pali Canon, dominant today in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos. Its ideal is the arahant, the person who completes the path.

Mahayana — "the great vehicle." Emerging around the first century BCE to first century CE, with new texts presented as teachings held back until people were ready for them. Dominant in China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Tibet.

And the Mahayana's central innovation is the bodhisattva: a person who postpones their own final liberation in order to work for the liberation of all beings.

That is a genuinely different ideal, and it is the most important development in Buddhist history. Theravada asks: how do I get free? Mahayana answers: not until everybody does.

Note the tension with 6.13, honestly. The Mahayana texts are later and are presented as a higher teaching, which is precisely the "closed fist" the Buddha denied having. The Mahayana response is that the teachings were adapted to the capacity of the audience, which is a real principle in the early texts too. This book will state the situation and not adjudicate it.

Ashoka

The single event that made it a world religion.

Ashoka, the Mauryan emperor, conquered Kalinga around 260 BCE in a campaign so bloody that — by his own account, carved in stone — he was sickened by it and changed. Volume VIII covers the reign in full.

He did not force conversion. His edicts promote dhamma in a broad sense: non-violence, respect for parents and teachers, generosity, and — remarkably — explicit tolerance of all religious traditions, with an instruction that one should not praise one's own sect and disparage others.

And he sent missions, including one to Sri Lanka led by his own son and daughter, which is where the Pali Canon was written down.

Without Ashoka, Buddhism is very likely one more of the many schools of that period, and most of those are gone.

Zen, and Tibet

Two developments worth knowing because you will meet them.

Chan in China, which became Zen in Japan. Buddhism met Daoism (12.6) and produced something with a distinct character: suspicious of scripture and doctrine, focused on direct experience, and using paradox and abrupt methods — the koan, the sudden shout, the apparently nonsensical answer — to break the habit of conceptual grasping.

Its most useful contribution is the insistence that practice is not separate from ordinary activity. Sweeping, cooking and sitting are the same activity done with the same attention — which is 5.3's karma yoga arriving from a completely different direction.

And Tibetan Buddhism, which absorbed the full Indian philosophical tradition before it vanished in India, plus tantric practice and the indigenous Bon tradition. It preserved an enormous body of Indian material that would otherwise be lost, and it produced the most detailed maps of mental states of any tradition.

Why it disappeared from India

A question worth answering because it is asked constantly.

Several causes, none sufficient alone.

The revival of Hinduism, particularly the bhakti movements (9.9) and the philosophical work of Shankara (9.8), absorbed the intellectual energy and offered devotional practice that Buddhism's monastic structure did not.

Buddhism had become monastery-centred and university-centred, dependent on royal patronage and large institutions rather than on village practice. A religion concentrated in a few enormous institutions is fragile.

And the destruction of those institutions. Nalanda and the other great monastic universities were destroyed during the Turkic invasions around 1200 CE, and with them the concentrated centres of learning, teaching and copying.

The Buddha himself was absorbed into Hinduism as an incarnation of Vishnu, which is either a gracious accommodation or a takeover depending on your view, and probably both.

And it returned in the twentieth century. Ambedkar — the principal architect of the Indian constitution, born into an untouchable caste — converted to Buddhism in 1956 with hundreds of thousands of followers, explicitly as a rejection of caste, on the grounds that Buddhism was the Indian tradition that had never accepted it (6.10). That movement is alive and growing.

What to actually take

Now the practical part, because a summary of schools helps nobody.

Here is what is usable, whatever you believe.

The diagnosis

There is a low-grade friction in ordinary experience — a wheel that does not run true (6.5). Not agony. Unsatisfactoriness. And most people spend their lives managing it without ever looking at it.

The cause

Not wanting. The grip. I would like this against I need this in order to be all right. And wanting something to stop is the same mechanism as wanting something to arrive, which is the observation that changes how you handle a bad afternoon.

The one technique that matters

From 6.8: there is a gap between an unpleasant tone arriving and the reaction taking hold, and it is the only place with leverage.

Notice the feeling-tone before it becomes a story. Name it. Two seconds.

Everything else in Buddhist practice is training for that moment.

The conduct that makes it possible

True, beneficial, timely (6.6) — the best communication test in this volume.

Do not take what is not given, including credit and time.

Know how your money is made.

And notice that the meditation does not work without these, which is the structural claim of the path and the explanation for every scandal in modern spiritual movements.

The attitude

Come and see. Ehipassiko. Try it and look at what happens.

Nobody is written off (6.11).

Acceptance is not absolution.

And when somebody cannot accept something, give them a task, not an argument. The mustard seed.

The last word

Everything that is put together falls apart. Work on it, and do not be careless.

What the two traditions agree on

Part 5 and Part 6 have now presented two systems that contradict each other on metaphysics — an eternal self against no self (6.7) — and agree almost completely on everything else.

Both say the problem is grasping, not desire.

Both say the way through is a discipline of attention plus a discipline of conduct.

Both reject austerity as a method, in nearly the same words (5.6, 6.3).

Both say the result is a person who is not disturbed by the world and does not disturb it.

Both refuse to write anybody off.

Both were founded by people who died ordinarily and were not spared anything.

And both close on attending to a person with no claim on you — a hunter in a forest, a metalworker who will be blamed.

Two opposite metaphysics, one behavioural conclusion. Make of that what you like; this book's reading is that the behavioural conclusion is the part that has been tested, and the metaphysics is the part each tradition needed in order to get there.

What to carry from this page

A tradition concentrated in a few large institutions is fragile, however successful it looks. Buddhism in India was at the height of its intellectual prestige when it was destroyed in a generation.

"Do not praise your own sect and disparage others." Ashoka carved that into rock in the third century BCE, and it is still ahead of most of what gets said today.

And the whole thing reduces to one move: notice the tone before the story. Everything else in Part 6 is scaffolding for that.

Next: Part 7 turns to the oldest and strangest figure in this volume — a god who is a wild ascetic and a family man, who dances the world apart, who drinks poison so that nobody else has to, and who is worshipped by more people in India than any of the others.