Reading about Buddhism the other day has brought me back memories of pottering about the bookstall at the Port Louis market, lifting posters of scantily clad Indian actresses to discover grave volumes of the Veda and the Upanishads. Passing by this stall every day I would look with wonder at a forbidding black hardbound tome on the topmost shelf, with a drawing of a lotus topped by a thunderbolt. I guessed it had to do with tantrism and felt both attraction and revulsion at this book. Still, I bought a slender, more palatable looking book called Man and Microcosm in Tantric Hinduism, by Grace E. Cairns, through which I had an idea of the philosophical aspects of Tantrism, which I had before thought to be only about sexual orgies and human sacrifices. As with all philosophical systems, I have the greatest difficulty in saying now what it was about. I only remember the feeling of having passed through a great system of thought in hushed admiration, the way I would have walked through great silent halls overhung with gloomy portraits, and passed through crowds of whispering courtiers, to enter the appartment of a solemn personage, who would have given me a brief, cryptic overview of an immeasurably old and complex kingdom. One polite question would be allowed, and even, would have to be asked, the answer, brief and heavy with incomprehensible irony, before taking leave, and the quick walk back through the dark halls, to the sunlight. What I understood, vaguely, was that letters existed at three levels of creation. In the innermost level, letters had their seeds ( bij). An elaborate framework tied toegether letters, colours and the chakras. Another, lengthy cord tied up the 36 stages of creation, from Sadasiva ( God as one) to ShivaShakti ( God as Transcendence and Immanence) , to separate aspects of creation such as space and time, down, at the lowest level, to the elements of creation ( fire, earth, etc). Mrs Cairns referred, in revenrential tones, to The Garland of Letters, by Arthur Avalon. Extraordinarily, the book stall had it, lost between a sex manual and an introduction to marketing. It was a frayed old book , its title barely legible. Inside was a photograph of a European man, in dhoti, on the steps of the sun temple in Konarak. Arthur Avalon, whose real name I have forgotten, was a Calcutta High Court judge who researched philosophical tantrism. Unfortunately, his style had the busy, implacable tone of someone who assumes that the reader is already well aware of the subtleties of the matter at hand. The book remained hard, inscrutable, just like a book I also bought in those days ( the things you found in that book stall ) by the current Dalai Lama, a commentary on a tantra treatise by Tsong Kapa. I only remember of it a swarming cosmology of foe destroyers, arhats, and other types of elevated beings.
There is something to be said for bureaucratic boredom: it leads one to nosing about bookstores containing odd tomes. But out of groping among these toughly esoteric works, it did dawn on me that Buddhism is not what some Hindus will have you believe, some kind of export variety of Hinduism. There is no soul in Buddhism, and no “moksha” ( blissful unification with God), because God does not come in the equation. If there is no soul, how does reincarnation work ? Buddhism speaks of “ the light of a candle which is transmitted to another” but that , I thought, could exactly be a metaphor for reincarnation. Later, in a book by Alexandra David Neel, I found the explanation that for a Tibetan Buddhist, a person can be made up of the fragments of personality of various beings ( man, hungry ghost, hell being, demigod, even animal). At his death, these various fragments explode like shrapnel and some get lodged into other beings being born around that time. Or some go their way into the astral. Instead of the neat little blob of light of Hinduism or other religions, Tibetan Buddhism sees you as a sort of nebula from which many voices come out. I found this interesting though hard to focus on, for a long time. The habit of thinking of oneself as one is deeply ingrained. The deepest consolation of religion is that it tells you that you and your beloved ones will survive the grave. But Buddhism specifically tells you that “you” do not exist, coz your conscience is made up of many different , and conflicting, bits of being.
What about God ? In “The Wonder that was India”, it is said that Buddhism is divided in four schools, two from the Greater Vehicle ( Yogacara and Madhyamika), the Lesser Vehicle and the Vehicle of the Thunderbolt. The Yogacara school denies any reality altogether. The world is built by the perceiver’s consciousness, and is only a dream. The only existing phenomena is Tathata ( Suchness) or Dharmadhatu ( the Raw Material of Phenomena). Its chief philosopher was Asanga, who wrote the Lankavatara Sutra, known to be a pretty subtle sutra.

On the other hand, the Lesser Vehicle says that the world is in a state of constant flux and the only stable entity is Nirvana, the state of bliss achieved by the Buddhas, and Arhats ( perfected beings). But if Nirvana is a state, can it really be called an entity. Do the Buddhas and Arhats still exist, given that Nirvana means extinction ? Maybe Nirvana is outside the universe.

The Madhyamika school stands between the realism of the Lesser Vehicle and the total idealism of the Yogacara school. Its greatest exponent was Nagarjuna, who said that the cosmic flux was unreal, as was the consciousness which perceives it, and was itself part of the flux. If the world of flux was unreal, so was also Nirvana, its contrary. If all things were equally unreal, they were therefore ultimately one and the same. This one thing alone had existence and had no predicate. This, Nagarjuna called “Emptiness” or the “Void” ( Sunyata). If Samsara ( the world of flux) and Nirvana ( extinction) are the same, then within Samsara it is possible to immediately attain Nirvana:

“The life of the world is the same as Nirvana (…) and there is really no difference between them at all”.

I guess that this explains why the Chan Buddhists insisted on immediate realization, without using the books, and using shock tactics. I do not know about the lines of affiliation between Chan ( originally Dhyana) Buddhism and the Madhyamika school.