If you find yourself learning Buddhism mainly by sitting on your arse in a cold Zen center, which happens to be near your apartment or home, you’re probably doing okay, or so you believe. You’re learning to become an ordinary Buddhist.
Well, if this is where you are at—sorry dude (or dudette)—you’re a lost cause. Count yourself a puthujjanas (S., prithagjana). Puthujjanas are followers of the Buddha but not members of the Triple Gem Sangha which is exclusively made up of spiritual initiates (P., ariysavaka; S., aryasravaka). The spiritual initiates are the nirvana winners who free themselves from rebirth—not the puthujjanas.
All this is an overlooked fact of Buddhism—not conjecture—if one has taken the time to read Peter Masefield’s scholarly work, Divine Revelation in Pali Buddhism. More to the point, Masefield’s book lays out the evidence (and lots of it) that salvation in early Buddhism was limited, exclusively, to a spiritual elite—not the common followers, that is, the puthujjanas.
"It was the ariyasavaka alone who was in possession of right view in the sense that he had seen the impermanence of the phenomenal world, and the existence of a sanctuary lying beyond that realm of impermanence and also a path leading to that sanctuary. Only the ariyasavaka is on the path leading to that sanctuary. Only the ariyasavaka is on the path of nibbana, the path to the cessation of rebirth. The puthujjana, on the other hand, lacking this vision of the ariyasavaka remains ignorant of the existence of that path. He does not see things as they really are and instead remains attached to ensnaring sensual delights, treading at best the path of merit that leads to continued rebirth within samsara" (pp. xvii–xviii).
The aforementioned amounts to a punch in the gut for the conformist Zen center zennie. But more of a punch in the gut is that fact that the old Buddhist canon (Nikayas) is rife with proof of a spiritual division between ariyasavaka and puthujjana. Later on, in Mahayana Buddhism, the division goes even further. It is between ariyasavaka and Bodhisattvas, a genuine Bodhisattva having had bodhicittotpada (the generation of mind that is bodhi) which is perhaps more difficult to accomplish than the ariyasavaka’s stream entry.
My master told me;
"Riding on the shoulders of spiritual giants is easy. Once the ride is over though, the fall is great. Know this then. The Buddha Mind or buddha nature you seek, is by origin clear light but not light as you percieve it presently, because that is a light of the senses and not of spirit.
The light I speak of is untouchable by internal or external conditions, preceding any position or possession, permanent, absolute and omnisciently compassionate. If you have not seen it thus; if you have not bathed at least once in its suchness by cause of bodhi alone, you are still mind becomed, cursed by birth and death, caught like a helpless fly in a sinister web of unceasing interdependant conditions. "
Posted by: minx | January 20, 2012 at 08:50 AM