THE BUDDHIST VOYAGE BEYOND DEATH: LIVING NIRVANA
FOREWORD
by Prof. Robert Magliola (Ph.D., Princeton U.)
Affiliate, Comunita Vangelo e Zen, Italy; Consultant and Interfaith advisor, Ling Jiu Shan Buddhist Center, N.Y.C., U.S.A.
Manjusri asked: “What is the root of inverted thinking?"
Vimalakirti replied: “Baselessness [un-groundedness] is the root of inverted thinking."
Manjusri asked: “What is the root of baselessness [un-groundedness]?"
Vimalakirti replied: “Manjusri, when something is baseless [ungrounded], how can it have any root? Therefore, from this baseless [ungrounded] root, everything arises.
--The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti: A Mahayana Sutra
At a time when so many in the world, especially the secular world of the West, live and move in the perceptible experiences which they call “reality” (so these “realists” declare themselves “rooted in reality”), it is so good to have someone like Master Hsin Tao, who comes precisely to turn everything upside down. He presents the world with a classical Buddhist reading of life-experiences: that their presumably grounded “reality” is only an illusion. He teaches, as Mahayana Buddhism does, that life-experiences in fact devolve, ultimately, from the Unconditioned, the infinitely spacious emptiness that is beyond the empirical.
“Devolution” implies here “retrograde evolution,” that is, “degeneration.” From beginningless time, the Mahayana says, sentient beings—though they have the “original nature,” that is, the Unconditioned, as their “baseless root”—wander in greed, aversion, and ignorance. In Master Hsin Tao's words, the very “ego-clinging” of these sentient beings has caused the “material congealment” which is their so- called “reality.” True spirituality, Master Hsin Tao teaches, brings us into contact with our “original nature,” and on to all-embracing Bodhisattvic (compassionate) activity. Bodhisattvic activity directs all sentient beings towards their “original nature,” the Unconditioned, the “Bright Void” or “Buddhahood.”
It is a great honor to introduce, by way of a Foreword, this first full-length English translation of a book by Master Hsin Tao. Its translator, Dr. Chungmin Maria Tu, now a professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Delaware, was my Master's degree student during the early 1980s, when I was teaching western literature and hermeneutics in Taiwan. Later I went on, in Thailand and elsewhere, to become steadily more involved in both Buddhist Studies and interreligious dialogue, especially Buddhist-Catholic dialogue. In June 2001 I made a closed retreat at Wu Sheng
Monastery, Taiwan, Master's Hsin Tao's beautiful monastic complex perched on a high mountain overlooking the ocean and facing northeast. In late 200I, Guang Guo Fa Shi, a nun from Wu Sheng Monastery, became Director of the Ling Jiu Shan Center in Lower Manhattan, New York City. I affiliated with the Center at that time and became both a weekly interfaith retreatant and the advisor on interreligious concerns. Having
maintained contact with Dr. Tu down through the years, it was a great pleasure for me to introduce her and her husband Jianguo to Guang Guo Fa Shi in 2003. Dr. Tu, who is a devout Buddhist, went on to visit Master Hsin Tao in Taiwan, and to formally “Take Refuge” with him. I am convinced that what needs to be emphasized most in this Foreword is that Master Hsin Tao represents a Chinese Buddhist tradition dating
back to the first century C.E., that is, one thousand nine hundred years ago, and that reaches a high point already in the 6th century C.E. The first forms of the Water-Land Ceremony he conducts each summer (his annual service is attended by tens of thousands), started about one thousand five hundred years ago! The Nyingma tradition in which he is an Incarnate Teacher started in Tibet about one thousand three hundred years ago. By reading what Master Hsin Tao teaches, one is “going back to the source.”
Nowadays, Buddhism in the west is often pallid, filtered, “toned-down,” if you will, so as to make it more marketable. Some forms of western Zen bracket out what secularists would call the “other-worldly,” but which, for a true Buddhist, intimately interlaces the phenomenal world. See, for example, in Master Hsin Tao's Preface II, ahead, his description of the cemetery scene, where the frightfully hungry ghosts crowd around
him, first to cry and wail, and then to be assuaged and salved by him; and later, in Part Three, Chapter 13, “Entering the Land of the Dead-,” read his careful description of how this “enlacement” works. Note how Master Hsin Tao emphasizes that, to practice a far-reaching Bodhisattvic compassion and eventually achieve “omniscient wisdom,” one must preach a “correct understanding” of the road to liberation even to a “puppy, or a bug”; one must invest a Buddha blessing even “into a moth” (see Part Two, Chapter 9). One should offer the Buddhist Liberation Service for those many sentient beings one has “killed for food” in
“current and previous lives,” and those one has “accidentally killed every moment and every second” (Part Three, Chapter 13). These are widespread teachings in various Asian countries where Buddhism has a long history, yet western Buddhists seldom hear them.
I want to call special attention also to Master Hsin Tao's lengthy treatment of the Bardo of dying, Reality, and becoming or rebirth (Part Two,
Chapter 10). Several Tibetan Buddhist masters have released already, in English, their descriptions of this Bardo, and these renderings have attracted much attention from western Buddhists. Master Hsin Tao's account of the pertaining Bardo derives from the Nyingma Kathok Tibetan tradition of which he is an Incarnate Teacher, and its account of the Bardo diverges in some interesting respects from those of other traditions.
Several forms of western Buddhism perform syncretistic operations, borrowing from other religions, producing a mishmash, and then reducing to lowest common denominator. Still others mix in that which can be called “pop-science,” and “pop-psychology.” Several prominent western Buddhists have published books recently that even reject the classical Buddhist doctrine of “rebirth,” though it is a keystone of historical Buddhism from the time of Gotama Buddha himself (circa 6th cent.-5th cent. BCE).
This book is also for committed practitioners of other religions who sense themselves called to interreligious dialogue, and who seek to study Buddhism for such a purpose. The primary goal of authentic interreligious dialogue is not conversion, but mutual understanding, and—where the religions do agree—the mutual collaboration in charity for the good of the world (projects such as peace-making, refugee relief, environmental
reform, etc.). In 2001, Master Hsin Tao established the Museum of World Religions (Taipei) precisely to encourage peace and understanding in the world-wide “global village.” The religions of the world are different, often at bottom very different, but these very differences generate superjacent “samenesses” where the religions can help each other. I am a committed Catholic, a lay Carmelite Tertiary in fact, but I have learned much from Buddhist practice that helps my Catholicism, especially in terms of the use of the body in prayer and meditation. Besides,
people who sincerely cultivate a real “spirituality” sense an affinity, a “camaraderie” with each other. I see this camaraderie whenever I am at a gathering of Buddhist monks/nuns and Catholic monks/nuns together at an inter-monastic encounter (these meetings are encouraged by the Vatican). They feel “at home” with each other.
Every once in a while, I make exciting intellectual discoveries—I find practices in the two religions that differ but echo each other. For example, the Ultimate in Buddhism is the “Unconditioned,” and in Mahayana Buddhism the “Unconditioned” is the “Bright Void,” immaculate and pure. In Catholic Christianity, the Ultimate is the “Unconditioned,” that which our theologians call “God in se (Divinity-in-itself), necessarily beyond human reach (though graced humans can “partake of the Divine nature,” that is, the relation is not a mere subject-object relation).
Master Hsin Tao, in Part Two, Chapter 8 of this translation, speaks of phenomena, that is, the conditioned (“qualitative formations,” “individual units”) the analysis of which (“observing the illusion”) points to the invisible Void (“the enlightening nature of the Emptiness”) which is the Unconditioned (the “Unlimited”). The great Catholic saint, St. John of the Cross, a Carmelite famous for the insight he gained through deep meditation, in his book The Ascent of Mt. Carmel, Book Two, Chapter 14, uses the analogy of “particles,” “specks of dust” (the
conditioned, the phenomena) the analysis of which points to the invisible light (since the invisible light makes the phenomena visible). The invisible light, the Void, the Unconditioned, seems perfect darkness because it is immaculate and pure: the phenomena it impinges and therefore makes visible are the merely conditioned, the limited. When realizing this truth, says St. John of the Cross, one is in a state of “no time at all.”
Master Hsin Tao, in Part Three, Chapter 13, warns his disciples that it is not only necessary to “settle” with our present foes, but it is also necessary to “settle” with our “foes from our previous lives,” that we must “make up” with our foes “for the grudges we established in our numberless past lives,” and that by so doing, “we liberate them from endless suffering” because they are no longer lured into hating us.
Earlier, in Part Two, Chapter 9, he says the “second kind of memory” is that of “the memories others keep for us,” since “we are all part of each other's memory matrix.” Here I bring to mind a central theme of St. Pope John Paul II called “the purification of memory”: namely, that institutions and individuals must come to terms with past faults they have committed. The past must be revisited, he says, and self-serving past interpretations that “white-washed” institutional and personal sin need “a purification of memory.” This purification can only be accomplished by sincere public requests for forgiveness, and by penance (acts of atonement).
While Master Hsin Tao's teaching is more radical than St. Pope John Paul's, because Catholicism (like all Christianity) rejects the doctrine of “rebirth,” the recognition of the prime importance of “settling with the past” (in the case of institutional sin, even events from many centuries before) resonates with the spirit of the Buddhist teaching. Catholicism's teaching of the Mystical Body, while less expansive than the collective memory-matrix explained by Master Hsin Tao, still strongly affirms the reciprocity of the members of the collective. If Mahayana Buddhism has the “Water-Land Ceremony,” Catholicism has many practices applied to the deceased who are undergoing purification in Purgatory, and Pope Francis recently consecrated the Jubilee Year of Mercy (Dec. 8, 2015-Nov. 20, 2016), during which special religious practices by the living can hasten the progress of the deceased through this “cleansing.”
In closing, I urge all readers to study and learn from this book. It is a Mahayana Buddhist practice to dedicate one's efforts of spiritual “cultivation” to the Buddhas of the Ten Directions, all the Mahasattvas, all the Bodhisattvas, and all the Honored Ones; and to dedicate one's merits for the sake of everyone, that all may attain the goal of freedom from delusion, attachment, and suffering, and gain happiness, tranquility, and perfect enlightenment. May all readers—each in her or his own way--“offer up” their study of this book, for the good of the whole world.
