Why had this subtle but dangerous reversal occurred so rapidly and so unexpectedly (to some)? Indeed, what were “democracies” doing engaging in such practices at all? In fact, all along the promise of postwar liberty itself was illusory, constructed on the premise that most of the world would be rebuilt along the lines of American-style democracy and freedoms. Our argument is that without the four pillars of American exceptionalism, such developments were not only likely, they were inevitable. Moreover, we argue that Europeans’ use of terms such as “democracy,” “republic,” and even “liberty” were not the same as those understood by Americans, and therefore other nations never entertained any intention of adopting the American pillars. In our previous volume of A Patriot’s History of the Modern World: From America’s Exceptional Ascent to the Atomic Bomb, we reviewed the impact of common law, a Christian (mostly Protestant) religious culture, access to private property (including ownership with easy acquisition of deeds and titles), and free-market capitalism, which brought America to the forefront of world power by the end of the war.
Instead of copying American success, victorious or liberated nations more often sought only to dip their toes in the water of freedom, adopting free markets without common law or restricting capitalism, permitting Christian religion but steadily edging away from acknowledging the Christian foundations of society, paying lip service to private property without instituting the land-ownership institutions, such as titles and deeds, that are necessary to make it a reality. More often still, nations ignored all four of the pillars. Thus, the American model was only implemented piecemeal, where implemented at all (South Korea, for example). As we pointed out in volume 1, while any one of the pillars might be beneficial to a society, without all four no true American-style republic could be developed. The pillars were simply mutually dependent.
This volume continues the story of America’s rise to world dominance through three themes. First, we trace the battle that began early in the twentieth century between the Progressives and the Constitutionalists. The former, grounded in the “reform” movement of the late 1800s, sought to perfect man and society by a process of government-directed and controlled change. The Progressives wanted to deemphasize the Constitution as it was written, and with it, American exceptionalism. They conducted a century-long assault on the notion that the United States had any providential founding, that its heroes and heroines were particularly wise, just, or courageous. By insisting that laws needed to be continually reassessed in light of current morality, Progressives saw the Constitution as outdated or irrelevant. Constitutionalists, on the other hand, maintained that America’s founding stemmed from her Christian roots, and that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were representative of common law doctrines in which codes of conduct, given by God to the people, bubbled up, supported and promoted by the people (as opposed to being handed to a king or ruler to be dispensed downward). Moreover, Constitutionalists maintained that the Founding Fathers were, in fact, wise and visionary, and that they established a framework of laws that addressed every eventuality.
Progressives enacted a legislative campaign to regulate markets, redistribute wealth, and limit private property ownership. Constitutionalists wanted to free markets, enable all to pursue wealth, and restrain government’s ability to infringe upon individuals’ property rights. Finally, the Progressives—many of whom, in the early stages of the movement, were nominal Christians—fervently labored to remove Christianity from the public square, from all political discourse, and from entertainment. Indeed, Christianity stood in the way of implementing most of their reforms. Constitutionalists, of course, understood the admonitions of the Founders, who urged that the nation adhere to its Christian roots and above all pursue virtue.
Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the next, American exceptionalism faced hostility abroad, but more surprisingly, antipathy by numerous groups at home. The Progressive Left endeavored through the educational system, the law, and entertainment to denigrate and ridicule the very concept that America had anything special to offer, and to insist that the United States had become just one nation among many. That a number of Western and non-Western powers arose to challenge American dominance was to be expected, particularly when the American public had so generously provided the financial and commercial means of their recovery in many cases. Germany and Japan took the best of the American industrial, manufacturing, and management practices, modified them, and implemented them with zeal, producing world-class automobiles, electronics, robotics, and a host of other products that drove American goods either fully or partially from the market. Once several nations could claim economic proximity to the United States (though none could claim parity), were not their systems, goals, practices, and cultures worthy of emulation as well?
But the Progressive assault did not stop there: it insisted that undeveloped cultures were no worse than ours, only different. Americans were urged to seek out the value in what in previous generations would have been termed “backward” cultures, and to “understand” practices once deemed undesirable at best or barbaric at worse. President Barack Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech, as one example, cited advances and greatness in Islamic culture that never existed, implying that Americans needed to be more like Egypt rather than Egyptians being more like Americans.4 Absurdly saying that “Islam has always been a part of America’s story,” Obama claimed that Islam “pav[ed] the way for Europe’s Renaissance” and gave us “cherished music,” the “magnetic compass and tools of navigation,” and furthered “our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed.”5 Although his intention may have been to strike new chords of friendship, the act of ascribing to people accomplishments they never achieved looked phony and, according to polls in the subsequent three years, had no effect on Muslim views of America.
By 2012, the culmination of this Progressive march saw the United States elect a president with little or no understanding of free market capitalism, no appreciation of private property rights, little demonstrable Christian religious influence (to the point that by 2012 polls showed that up to half of the American public thought he was a Muslim), and an apparent disdain for American exceptionalism. Barack Obama repeatedly apologized to foreign nations for past American “mistakes” or transgressions and denigrated (or greatly mischaracterized) American exceptionalism by insisting that “the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” As the British magazine The Economist stated, Americans had put into power “a left-wing president who has regulated to death a private sector he neither likes nor understands. . . .”6 In 2008, in his famous “Joe the Plumber” comment, Obama stated that it was government’s duty to “spread the wealth around,” and in 2012, referring to private businesses that had become successful, he said, “You didn’t build that [business]. . . . Somebody else made that happen.” That “somebody else” was, of course, government—not the private sector. Comments such as those showed Obama had no concept of what made markets work. Likewise, in his bailout of General Motors, he demonstrated that he had no regard for private property—in that case, the property of the bondholders who were saddled with an enormous loss to protect union pensions.
Obama’s national health care law forced the Catholic Church to compromise on its core religious beliefs regarding conception. His Supreme Court appointments routinely interpreted the American Constitution in the light of international law. And when it came to private property, Obama continued to implement the United Nations’ antigrowth/anticapitalist Agenda 21 initiatives, which were inserting themselves into all aspects of American life.
Of course, some of the erosion had already occurred. Fearing Islamic terrorists, after 9/11 Americans readily assented to substantial limitations on their freedoms, from airport body searches to cameras on stoplights. Once necessary Patriot Act precautions had grossly expanded with new computerized surveillance and monitoring technologies, including “latch-on” phone tapping, air drone camera planes, and listening devices, to the point that virtually anyone could be found by the national government. Benjamin Franklin’s comment, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety,” looked more prescient all the time. Worse still, by 2012, few politicians anywhere were seeking to limit such powers, let alone roll them back.
The exceptionalism that had saved the world had not met a receptive audience, even if at first the rhetoric and spirit were wildly embraced. Quite the contrary, it seemed that to some extent, Europe insisted on revisiting post–World War I practices yet again, and certainly in the former colonies the delusion of creating new “democratic” states without at least some of the pillars of American exceptionalism proved especially vexing. Yet the record of such efforts seemed abundantly clear by 1946. Europeans, after all, had witnessed the full-blown collapse of their societies not once in the first half of the twentieth century but twice. They had likewise seen the manifest failure and folly of both variations of socialism—fascism and communism.
From 1917 to 1989, neither outright government ownership under Soviet-style communism nor ownership-by-proxy through German/Italian fascism provided material prosperity or human dignity. Indeed, both heaped unparalleled inhumanity on top of astronomical levels of state-sanctioned killing. According to R. J. Rummel, perhaps the leading authority on government murder, the top governments in terms of democide (the murder of a person or people by a government including genocide, politicide, mass murder, and deaths arising from the reckless and depraved disregard for life, but excluding abortion deaths and battle deaths in war) from 1900 through 1987 were:
慰安婦と戦場の性 (新潮選書) 単行本 – 1999/6/1 秦 郁彦 (著)
Comfort Women and Sex in the Battle Zoneby Hata Ikuhiko
Translated by Jason Michael Morgan
Chapter One
The Comfort Women Issue “Explodes”
1. The Asahi Shimbun’s Surprise Attack
Anyone who picked up the morning edition of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper on January 11, 1992, would have been stunned to see the front page’s top story that the major Japanese daily played up as part of its campaign on the comfort women issue.
Looking back, it becomes clear this scoop was the very starting point of a frenzy that would ensnare not only Japan but also several other Asian nations.
In the interest of brevity, I will not explain here all the details of the Asahi’s report, which also filled much of the edition’s city news section. For now, I will just list the main headlines.
“Documents show military involvement in comfort stations”
“Written instructions, journals of former Japanese military found at Defense Agency library”
“Units instructed to set up [comfort stations]”
“Control, supervision of [comfort stations], including recruitment, instructed under name of chief of staff. Some documents had seal of administrative vice minister”
“Government view ‘that private operators were in charge’ challenged”
“Calls for apology and compensation intensifying”1
Furthermore, the report included comments by Chuo University professor Yoshimi Yoshiaki, who “discovered” the materials at the Defense Agency library. “The military’s involvement is very clear,” Yoshimi told the Asahi. “Japan should offer an apology and compensation.”2 The newspaper also carried remarks by historian Suzuki Yuko, who said the discovery exposed “an insufficient investigation” into the issue by the government.3 Former Second Lieutenant Yamada Seikichi, who had been in charge of recreational activities of a Japanese military unit, was quoted in the report as saying, “The military’s involvement is clear.”4 The report accompanied an analysis on military comfort women by an Asahi columnist who claimed “most [comfort women] were Korean women who were forcibly recruited under the name of female volunteer corps,” and estimates of “their number are said to range from eighty thousand to 200,000.”5
However, reading only the headlines might leave some people wondering why this article was afforded such extensive coverage. The lead section of the front-page story reveals the newspaper’s intentions:
The Defense Agency’s National Institute for Defense Studies library keeps written instructions and field diaries that show the Japanese military supervised and controlled the establishment of comfort stations and the recruitment of military comfort women during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War, it was learned on January 10, [1992].
The Japanese government, during its answers to the Diet, has denied state involvement with Korean comfort women, saying civilian operators “were taking those women along.”
Last December, Korean former comfort women filed a lawsuit against the Japanese government, demanding compensation from the state. The South Korean government is also demanding that the Japanese government reveal the facts of this matter.
The discovery at the Defense Agency of materials indicating state involvement will jolt the stance the government has taken thus far and likely force the government to adopt a new approach. Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi now has a serious challenge awaiting him when he visits South Korea from January 16.6
The opening paragraphs reveal the Asahi’s intention was to influence public opinion on the comfort women issue. The report was aimed at creating a dramatic setting, timed for the prime minister’s upcoming visit, by presenting evidence to demonstrate the Japanese government had committed “perjury” by denying there had been state involvement in recruiting Korean comfort women.
The January 11 report came out just five days before Miyazawa’s visit to South Korea. The prime minister had neither the option of changing his itinerary nor much time to prepare a response to the outrage erupting in South Korea.
I was staggered by the timing of the Asahi’s report and its strategy of focusing on the single point of kanyo (involvement), which is an ambiguous concept.
It is worth pointing out, however, that it was a well-known fact among researchers that Rikushimitsu Dainikki (a collection of official documents exchanged between the Army Ministry and army units dispatched to China), which had been declassified thirty years earlier and kept at the National Institute for Defense Studies (NIDS), contained documents about comfort women and the involvement of the military in comfort stations.
Memoirs by military personnel who visited comfort stations were readily available, as were many movies and TV programs that depicted these facilities. If we include people who first learned about comfort stations through such channels, it would have been unusual if someone did not know the military was involved with them. I believe the report was a devious trick employed by the Asahi, which stretched an insufficient explanation given by a senior bureaucrat (to be detailed later in this book) during a comment made in the Diet, to write that the government “had denied the state’s involvement.”
In an article he contributed to the March 1992 issue of Sekai (World) magazine, Yoshimi described how he “discovered” the documents: “[I was aware they existed, but] I went to the Defense Agency library again for two days late last year and early this year to look mainly for materials pertaining to comfort stations.”7
Around that time, I frequently visited the NIDS library to conduct research on a different subject. Yoshimi, an old acquaintance of mine, told me about his “discovery” and the imminent publication in a newspaper. I remember feeling skeptical about whether such materials were worthy of a news story. A while later, just as I was starting to wonder why Yoshimi’s discovery had not been mentioned in a newspaper, the Asahi ran its sensationalized report on January 11.8
The report sparked the huge response the newspaper had hoped for, with other newspapers carrying stories about it a day later. The Asahi was well prepared and printed a story sent from its Seoul Bureau for its evening edition printed the same day. “[The discovery] was reported in detail by South Korean television and radio stations by citing the Asahi Shimbun’s report,” the story said. “South Korean Foreign Minister Lee Sang-ok told South Korean reporters on [January] 11, ‘I think the Japanese side will reveal an appropriate position about issues regarding former military comfort women at the time of the South Korea-Japan summit meeting.’”9
The Asahi pressed on. Its January 12 morning edition carried an editorial with the headline, “Never turn our eyes from history.” “We hope Prime Minister Miyazawa will be forward-looking when he visits South Korea from [January] 16,” the editorial said.10
The Asahi remained at the forefront of reporting the comfort women issue for a long time. But among newspapers that reported the issue, albeit belatedly, the Japan Times, an English-language newspaper, was even more radical than the Asahi.
For example, on the night of January 11, Foreign Minister Watanabe Michio appeared on a TV program on a national network and said, “We don’t have any clear evidence at hand because the issue dates back more than fifty years, but I think we should admit [the Japanese military] was involved in one way or another,” according to a story carried in the Asahi’s January 12 edition.11
The Japan Times ran a story about the foreign minister’s remarks, but capped it with a malicious analysis: “The statement marks the first time a government official has admitted that the Imperial Japanese Army participated in the recruitment and forced prostitution of hundreds of thousands of Asian ‘comfort women’ during World War II.”12
The Japan Times casually added “hundreds of thousands” and “forced prostitution,” which the minister had not mentioned and even the Asahi had not acknowledged.13 The tone of ensuing reports by competing media escalated to fit the line trumpeted by the Japan Times.
The government’s mishandling of the situation—making mistakes and tardily dealing with the issue—began at this point. Few of the senior government officials flustered by the startling media reports had ever set foot on the battlefield. Miyazawa, who graduated from Tokyo Imperial University and joined the Finance Ministry in the year war broke out between Japan and the United States, did not serve in the military, which was unusual for men in his generation. Many government leaders at that time lacked basic knowledge of comfort women and comfort stations. They not only failed to make effective rebuttals, but also seemingly succumbed to the intense attack made in unison by the media and activists in Japan and South Korea without clearly understanding what was going on.
Miyazawa quickly apologized at a press conference on January 14, saying, “I acknowledge the military’s involvement and would like to make an apology.”14 On January 16, he traveled to Seoul, where “a string of street protests” broke out (according to a Mainichi Shimbun article on January 16).15 During his South Korean tour, anti-Japan demonstrations raged. Protesters set fire to effigies of the emperor, and women who came forward as former comfort women staged sit-ins.
Local newspapers, which mistook wartime female volunteer corps for comfort women, reported that even elementary school children were made to serve as comfort women.
Possibly influenced by the fervor of such reports, South Korea’s education ministry instructed two thousand elementary schools across the nation to investigate student records from the years in question. Amid this hostile atmosphere, Miyazawa repeatedly extended an apology at the summit meeting and during his speech at the South Korean parliament.
In an article written in 1993, Shimokawa Masaharu, a Seoul correspondent of the Mainichi Shimbun, recalled the atmosphere surrounding Miyazawa’s visit:
I vividly remember how subservient Prime Minister Miyazawa appeared at the press conference hall of the Blue House presidential office… During the eighty-five-minute summit meeting, Prime Minister Miyazawa expressed an apology and remorse eight times… Indeed, a South Korean presidential aide briefed South Korean reporters on how many times the Japanese prime minister apologized. I have never seen a press conference go so completely against diplomatic protocol.16
This is a must-read for anyone curious to know how the transnational feminist topic of “comfort women,” sex workers for the WWII Japanese military, transformed into a focus of anti-Japanese nationalism in Korea today. Hata reveals the unearthing of Korean former “comfort women” by Japanese and South Korean activists in the 1990s and their creation of the master narrative that Japanese authorities forcibly abducted young Korean women and used them as sex slaves in battle zones. Countering this globally-disseminated half-truth, Hata places the “comfort women” in the universal problem of sex in the military and clarifies the link between “comfort stations” and prewar Japanese licensed prostitution. Hata’s exhaustive research points to the uncomfortable truth that profiteering Korean and Japanese handlers lured destitute young women with false job offers and victimized them as “comfort women.” (Chizuko T. Allen, University of Hawai’i at Manoa)
2012/09/11 に公開
Hi! I respect Democracy and human rights. http://JapanBroadcasting.net
It is easy for a narrow minded liberal to somehow denounce me as "Al shabab". (。・ω・。) . But I'm justa Sushi eating patriot. (・_・、) (ToT)/~~~
Indeed, I have made a little speech to challenge the status quo. Of course, the final answer is up to you. You make the judgement. We live in a democratic, free society here!
I believe that what we need today is to face history based on the actual truth, and not a biased unilateral point of view. In this 21st. century we live in, friendship, trust, cooperation, discussion and reconciliation between the nations is inevitable. Hate, bullying , nor politically motivated witch hunt deep rotted in racial discrimination is meaningless.
Let us all heal the world, on behalf of my great hero, Michael Jackson.
Buddhism is a unique spiritual system in many ways, while also sharing some fundamental similarities with the other Great Wisdom Traditions of humankind. But perhaps one its most unique features is its understanding, in some schools, that its own system is evolving or developing. This is generally expressed in the notion of the Three Great Turnings of Buddhism, the three major stages of unfolding that Buddhism has undergone, according to Buddhism itself. The First Turning of the Wheel is Early Buddhism, now generally believed to be represented by the Theravada school and thought to contain the historical Gautama Buddha’s original teachings, which developed in the great Axial period around the sixth century BCE. The Second Turning of the Wheel, represented by the Madhyamaka school, was founded by the genius philosopher-sage Nagarjuna around the second century CE. The Third and final (to date) Great Turning of the Wheel, represented by the Yogachara school, originated in the second century CE but had its period of greatest productivity in the fourth century CE with the brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu. All Three Turnings had profound impacts on every school of Buddhism that came after them.
The Madhyamaka school, although critical of Early Buddhism in many ways, nonetheless transcends and includes many of its foundational teachings, while criticizing those notions it finds partial, limited, or incomplete. And many Yogachara schools attempted to integrate and synthesize all Three Turnings. This was an ongoing, cumulative, synthesizing unfolding, as if Buddhism was plugged into the great evolution of Spirit itself.
In other words, many adherents of Buddhism had a view that Buddhism itself was unfolding, with each new turning adding something new and important to the overall Buddhist teaching itself. My point can now be put simply: many contemporary Buddhist teachers, agreeing with psychologists and sociologists that the world itself, at least in several important ways, is undergoing a global transformation, believe that this transformation will affect also Buddhism, adding to it yet newer and more significant truths, and resulting in yet another unfolding, a Fourth Great Turning, of Buddhism itself. (Some people view the rise of Tantric Buddhism, or occasionally Vajrayana Buddhism, as a Fourth Turning, and from that perspective, we are speaking of a possible Fifth Turning. But generally we will remain with the more common Three Turnings and take it from there.) This Fourth Turning retains all the previous great truths of Buddhism but also adds newer findings from fields as diverse as evolutionary biology and developmental psychology—but only to the extent that they are in fundamental agreement with the foundational tenets of Buddhism itself, simply extending them to some degree, as it were. Known by various names—from evolutionary Buddhism to Integral Buddhism—the Fourth Turning, like all the previous turnings, transcends yet includes its predecessors, adding new material while retaining all the essentials. And what is so remarkable about this development is that it is completely in keeping with this general understanding of itself that Buddhism has grasped—namely, that Buddhadharma (“Buddhist Truth”) is itself unfolding, growing, and evolving, responding to new circumstances and discoveries as it does so. Even the Dalai Lama has said, for example, that Buddhism must keep pace with modern science or it will grow old and obsolete.
A brief glance at Buddhist history will show what is involved. Original Buddhism was founded on such notions as the difference between samsara (the source of suffering) and nirvana (the source of Enlightenment or Awakening); the three marks of samsaric existence; that is dukkha (suffering), anicca (impermanence), and anatta (no-self); and the Four Noble Truths: (1) life as lived in samsara is suffering, (2) the cause of this suffering is craving or grasping, (3) to end craving or grasping is to end suffering, and (4) there is a way to end grasping, namely, the eightfold way—right view, right intention, right speech, right actions, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right unitive awareness.
The ultimate goal of Early Buddhism was to escape samsara—the manifest realm of life, death, rebirth, old age, suffering, and sickness—entirely, by following the eightfold way and attaining nirvana. “Nirvana” means, essentially, formless extinction. The prefix “nir-” means “without,” and “vana” means everything from desire to grasping to lust to craving itself. The overall meaning is “blown out” or “extinguished”—as if a lit candle were handed to you, and you leaned over and blew out the flame. What is extinguished or “blown out”? All the typical marks of samsara itself—including suffering, the angst that comes from craving for permanence, the separate-self sense, or self-contraction (often called “ego”), and its inherent fear, anxiety, and depression. The state of nirvana is sometimes said to be a state similar to deep dreamless sleep, in which, of course, there is no ego, no suffering, no hankering for permanence, no space, no time, no separation—if anything, there is simply the boundless peace or vast equanimity of being liberated from the torture of samsara and its suffering-inducing ways. According to some schools, there is even an end limit, or “extreme” form of nirvana, called nirodh—complete cessation—where neither consciousness nor objects arise at all, and that might be thought of as an infinite formlessness of pure freedom. Be that as it may, the goal is clear: get out of samsara and into nirvana.
According to Buddhist history, Gautama Siddhartha (“Buddha” is not a name but a title, and means “Awakened,” and was added to his name after his Enlightenment) was raised as a prince, with all the princely affluence of palace life, and with a father who protected him closely, so that he wouldn’t be exposed to the typical horrors of everyday life in India at that time. But then one day, Gautama escaped from the palace walls and, in wandering around the surrounding city, saw three sights that severely disturbed him—a very sick person, an old and decrepit person, and a dead person. “These are something my palatial life cannot protect me from,” he thought, and he promptly left the palace and began a six-year search, studying under various holy men, looking for an answer to life’s problems that he had witnessed wandering in his city. But after six years, nothing proved satisfactory, and, exhausted and frustrated, he sat down under the Bodhi tree and vowed not to arise until he had discovered the answer.
Early one morning, glancing at the starry heavens, Gautama had a profound experience. “Aha! I’ve found you! Never again will I be deceived!” he exclaimed, as much with utter joy as complete exhaustion. What did he find? Whatever it was, it converted him from “ignorance” to “Enlightenment.” Different responses as to what he saw and understood have been given by various schools, all of them believable. One was the “twelvefold chain of dependent origination,” a profound understanding of the completely interwoven nature of all reality and the inexorable role of causality in tying them all together—all of which conspire to inevitably cause suffering when driven by grasping. Another was the three marks of existence itself (impermanence, suffering, and selflessness) and the eightfold way to end their hold on the human being. According to Zen, Gautama had a profound satori, a deep awakening experience, awakening to his own true Buddha-nature and his fundamental oneness with the entire Ground of Being (or Dharmakaya), ending his separate-self sense, and with it, suffering. Whatever exactly it was, it did indeed soon become formalized in the three marks of existence, the twelvefold chain, and the eightfold way. Gautama Siddhartha had sat down under the Bodhi tree an ordinary individual and got up from it an Enlightened or Awakened being, a Buddha. When Buddha was asked if he was a God or supernatural being, he replied, “No.” “What was he?” “Awakened,” is all that he replied.
Such was the basic form of Buddhism as practiced for almost eight hundred years—until, that is, Nagarjuna, who began paying attention to this strange duality between samsara and nirvana. For Nagarjuna, this duality tore Reality in half and didn’t produce liberation but subtle illusion. For him, there is no ontological difference between samsara and nirvana. The difference is merely epistemological. That is, Reality looked at through concepts and categories appears as samsara, while the very same Reality looked at free of concepts and categories is nirvana. Samsara and nirvana are thus not-two, or “nondual.” And this caused a major revolution in Buddhist thought and practice.
Gautama Buddha had discovered the “emptiness,” or ultimately illusory nature of, the separate-self sense; but he had not discovered the emptiness—the shunyata—of all of what is usually called “reality” (including not only all subjects, or selves, but all objects, or “dharmas”). Buddhism had just taken its second major Turn in its illustrious history, adding a novel and profound element to its already accepted discoveries.
Nagarjuna relies on the “Two Truths” doctrine—there is relative, or conventional, truth, and there is absolute, or ultimate Truth. Relative truth can be categorized and characterized, and is the basis of disciplines such as science, history, law, and so on. That a molecule of water consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom is a relative truth, for example. But ultimate Truth cannot be categorized at all (including that statement). Any category or quality or characteristic makes sense only in terms of its opposite, but ultimate Reality has no opposite. Based on what is known as the “Four Inexpressibles,” you can’t, according to Nagarjuna, say that ultimate Reality is Being, or not-Being, or both, or neither. You cannot say it is Self (atman), or no-self (anatman or anatta), or both, or neither. You can’t say it’s implicate, or explicate, or both, or neither. You can’t say that it’s immanent in Gaia, or that it transcends Gaia, or both, or neither. You can’t say it’s a timeless Now, or a temporal everlastingness, or both, or neither. And so on for any category or quality. The reason is, as we were saying, that any concept you come up with makes sense only in terms of its opposite (liberated versus bound, infinite versus finite, something versus nothing, implicate versus explicate, pleasure versus pain, free versus limited, temporal versus timeless, good versus evil, true versus false, and so on), yet ultimate Reality has no opposite. As the Upanishads put it, “Brahman [ultimate Reality] is one without a second” and “free of the pairs”—the pairs of opposites, that is—and thus can’t be categorized at all (including that statement, which would also be formally denied). Nagarjuna says, “It is neither void, nor not void, nor both, nor neither, but in order to point it out, it is called the Void.” The Void, shunyata, or Emptiness. It’s a radical “neti, neti”—“not this, not that”—except “neti, neti” is also denied as a characteristic.
Now what this does mean is that Emptiness, or ultimate Reality, is not separate from anything that is arising. (Technically, even that statement would be denied; but we are now talking metaphorically to get across the general gist of Emptiness—because the main point is that although it cannot be said, it can be shown, or directly realized. More on this as we continue.) Not being separate from anything (“not having a second”), it is the Emptiness of everything that is arising. Emptiness isn’t a realm separate from other realms, it is the Emptiness, or Transparency, of all realms. Looked at free from conceptualization or categorization, everything that is arising is Emptiness, or Emptiness is the Reality of each and every thing in the manifest and unmanifest world—it is their very Suchness, their Thusness, their Isness. Looked at through concepts and categories, the universe appears as samsara—as built of radically separate and isolated things and events—and grasping after those things and attachment to them causes suffering because, ultimately, everything eventually falls apart, and thus whatever you’re attached to will sooner or later cause suffering as it falls apart. But looked at with prajna (or jnana)—nonconceptual choiceless awareness—the world of samsara is actually self-liberated nirvana. (In the word jnana, the root “jna,” by the way, in English is “kno,” as in “knowledge,” or “gno,” as in “gnosis.”) Jnana is a nondual, unqualifiable knowledge or timeless Present awareness, the realization of which brings Enlightenment or Awakening. Awakening to what? The radical Freedom or infinite Liberation or radical Luminosity-Love of pure Emptiness, though those terms, again, are at best metaphors.
Since there is no radical separation between samsara and nirvana (samsara and nirvana being “not-two,” or as the Heart Sutra summarizes nonduality, “That which is Emptiness is not other than Form; that which is Form is not other than Emptiness”), liberating Emptiness can be found anywhere in the world of Form—any and all Form is one with Emptiness. It is not a particular state of mind or state of consciousness but the very fabric or “isness” of consciousness itself.
A commonly used metaphor to explain the relationship of Emptiness to Form is the ocean and its waves. Typical, limited, bounded states of consciousness—from looking at a mountain, to experiencing happiness, to feeling fear, to watching a bird in flight, to listening to Mozart’s music—are all partial states and thus separate from each other; they all have a beginning (or are “born”), and they all have an ending (or “die”). They are like the individual waves in the ocean; each starts, has a certain size (from “small,” to “medium,” to “huge”), and eventually ends, and, of course, they are all different from each other.
But Emptiness—the Reality of each moment, its sheer transparent being, its simple “Suchness” or “Thusness” or “Isness”—is like the wetness of the ocean. And no wave is wetter than another. One wave can certainly be bigger than another, but it is not wetter. All waves are equally wet; all waves are equally Emptiness, or equally Spirit, or equally Godhead or Brahman or Tao. And that means that the very nature of this and every moment, just as it is, is pure Spirit—Spirit is not hard to reach but is impossible to avoid! And one wave can last longer than another wave, but it is still not wetter; it has no more Suchness or Thusness than the smallest wave in the entire ocean. And that means that whatever state of mind you have, right here, right now, is equally Enlightened; you can no more attain Enlightenment than you can attain your feet (or a wave can become wet). Enlightenment, and the “Big Mind/Big Heart” that reveals it, is absolutely ever-present Presence; all you have to do is recognize it (about which, more later).
But this being so, one no longer has to retreat to a monastery—away from the world, away from Form, away from samsara—in order to find Liberation. Samsara and nirvana have been joined, united, brought together into a single or nondual Reality. The goal is no longer to become the isolated saint or arhat—looking to get off of samsara entirely—but the socially and environmentally engaged “bodhisattva”—which literally means “being of Enlightened mind”—whose vow is not to get off samsara and retreat into an isolated nirvana, but a promise to fully embrace samsara and vow to gain Enlightenment as quickly as possible so as to help all sentient beings recognize their own deepest spiritual reality or Buddha-nature, and hence Enlightenment.
In one sweep, the two halves of the universe, so to speak—samsara and nirvana, Form and Emptiness—were joined into one, whole, seamless (not featureless) Reality, and Buddhist practitioners were set free to embrace the entire manifest realm of samsara and Form, not to avoid it. The vow of the bodhisattva likewise became paradoxical, reflecting both members of the pairs of opposites, not just one: no longer “There are no others to save (because samsara is illusory),” which is the arhat’s chant, but “There are no others to save, therefore I vow to save them all!”—which reflects the truth of a samsara and nirvana paradoxically joined, no longer torn in two.
The Madhyamaka notion of Emptiness henceforth became the foundation of virtually every Mahayana and Vajrayana school of Buddhism, becoming, as the title of T. R. V. Murti’s book has it, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (although “philosophy” is perhaps not the best word for a system whose goal is to recognize that which transcends thought entirely).1
But there were, nevertheless, still more unfoldings to come, as evolution continued its relentless drive. Particularly by the fourth century CE, the question had become insistent: granted that the Absolute cannot be categorized literally in dualistic terms and concepts, is there really nothing whatsoever that could be said about it at all? At least in the realm of conventional truth, couldn’t more systems, maps, and models be offered about Reality and how to realize it?
Already, in such brilliant treatises as the Lankavatara Sutra, the answer was a resounding “Yes!” The Lankavatara Sutra was so important that it was passed down to their successors by all five of the first Ch’an (or Zen) Head Masters in China as containing the essence of the Buddha’s teachings. In fact, the early Ch’an school was often referred to as the Lankavatara school, and a history of this early period is entitled Records of the Lankavatara Masters. (Starting with the sixth Head Master, Hui Neng, the Diamond Sutra—a treatise solely devoted to pure Emptiness—displaced the Lankavatara Sutra, and in many ways Zen lost the philosophical and psychological sophistication of the Lankavatara Sutra system and focused almost exclusively on nonconceptual awareness. Zen masters were often depicted tearing up sutras, which really amounted to a rejection of the Two Truths doctrine. This was unfortunate, in my opinion, because in doing so, Zen became less than a complete system, refusing to elaborate conventional maps and models. Zen became weak in relative truths, although it brilliantly succeeded in elaborating and practicing ultimate Truth. I say this as a dedicated practitioner of Zen for fifteen years, before I switched to a more Integral Spirituality, which included, among others, Vajrayana, Vedanta, and Christian contemplative approaches. We’ll see what all this means as we proceed. And, as we’ll also see, one can belong to any traditional religion, or no religion at all, and still adopt an Integral Spirituality, which is really an Integral Life Practice, incorporating what humanity has learned, East and West—and in premodern, modern, and postmodern times—about psychological growth, development, and evolution.)
The Yogachara school came to fruition in the fourth century CE with the brilliant half brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu. Asanga was more a creative and original thinker, and Vasubandhu a gifted systematizer. Together they initiated or elaborated most of the tenets of what came to be known as the Yogachara (“Practice of Yoga”), or Chittamatrata (“Nature of Mind Only”), school of Buddhism, and Buddhism had taken another evolutionary leap forward, the Third Great Turning of the Wheel of Dharma.
What all schools of Yogachara have in common is a continuing and intensifying of the drive to see and fully realize the union of Emptiness and Form, to integrate them in the here and now. Given the fact that Emptiness and Form are not-two, Emptiness itself is related to some everyday aspect of Form that the ordinary person is already aware of—in this case, pure unqualifiable Awareness just as it is. All schools of Yogachara either equate directly Emptiness and unconstructed pure Awareness (alaya-jnana), or at least equate them relatively as a useful orientation and metaphoric guide for practitioners.
Yogachara extends this notion of unconstructed fundamental awareness into the idea of eight (or nine) levels of consciousness, each a “downward” transformation of foundational luminous awareness (alaya-jnana). The first transformation gives rise to the storehouse consciousness, or the alaya-vijnana (the added “vi” to “jna” means “dualistic, separated, fragmented”—and thus this is the beginning of samsara as illusion, if one is ignorant of the prior all-encompassing alaya-jnana). But this storehouse actually contains, as collective memories, the resultant experiences of all human beings (and according to some, all sentient beings in toto), and the seeds for all future karmic ripening.
This is a particularly brilliant approach to what the Greeks would call archetypes—the very first forms of manifestation to be produced by Spirit as it begins to emanate or manifest the entire world. Archetypes were often conceived, by various Great Traditions around the world, as everlastingly fixed ideas in the mind of God or Spirit, and thus left no room for evolutionary input. But the more evolution became understood, the more it appeared that virtually everything had some sort of evolutionary origins or at least connections (including what Whitehead called “the Consequent Nature of God,” although not what he called the “Primordial Nature of God,” itself unchanging; these two dimensions of God—Consequent Nature and Primordial Nature—are quite similar to evolving Form and timeless Emptiness, both ultimately nondual).2 Archetypes as traditionally conceived also had the inconvenience of being described only in premodern terms by the traditions, leaving out modern and postmodern characteristics—did that mean God Itself was unaware of the coming modern and postmodern eras? Not a very far-sighted God, that. But the Lankavatara Sutra’s version of the storehouse
But the more evolution became understood, the more it appeared that virtually everything had some sort of evolutionary origins or at least connections (including what Whitehead called “the Consequent Nature of God,” although not what he called the “Primordial Nature of God,” itself unchanging; these two dimensions of God—Consequent Nature and Primordial Nature—are quite similar to evolving Form and timeless Emptiness, both ultimately nondual).2 Archetypes as traditionally conceived also had the inconvenience of being described only in premodern terms by the traditions, leaving out modern and postmodern characteristics—did that mean God Itself was unaware of the coming modern and postmodern eras? Not a very far-sighted God, that. But the Lankavatara Sutra’s version of the storehouse consciousness bypassed all those problems entirely, because the storehouse—as the ongoing product and accumulation of actual human actions—was itself created in part by evolutionary processes, inasmuch as human actions themselves underwent change, growth, development, and evolution. An added benefit of deploying the notion of the storehouse consciousness is that it helps explain what the Great Traditions mean when they speak of involution/evolution in a narrower and more specific sense (for example, what Plotinus called Efflux and Reflux): Involution/Efflux is the production of the manifest world via a successive manifestation or “stepping down” of Spirit into lesser and lesser versions of itself. Using Christian terms, Spirit goes out of itself (lila or kenosis) and steps
Spirit is recognized as the Source and Suchness of the entire display—a state of “Enlightenment” or “Awakening” or “metanoia.” The archetypes—being the first forms of involution to be produced, and thus having an impact on all subsequent and lesser forms (one of the meanings of “archetype” is “forms upon which all other forms depend”)—are thus crucial to all lower levels of being and consciousness. But instead of being “everlasting fixed ideas in the mind of God,” the vasanas of the Lankavatara Sutra’s storehouse—the stored memories of human interactions, which could easily be interpreted to include Kosmic memories or habits, or morphogenetic fields—would manifest the effects of evolution itself, since evolutionary memories are part of what is being stored in the storehouse. In other words, the archetypes of the Lankavatara Sutra’s storehouse are constantly changing and evolving with the Kosmos itself, and thus affecting, via involution, all of the lower and denser levels of being and consciousness. Thus the vasanas (or the archetypes), instead of being fixed ideas preventing evolution, become one of the very carriers and distributors of evolution itself, not only allowing but encouraging evolutionary change. The universe, in one stroke, moves from a fixed, deterministic, causal machine to a creative, living, responsive, conscious Kosmos. This is still a profoundly useful notion.
To continue with the original involutionary story for the Lankavatara Sutra: The first “downward” manifestation produces the “tainted” alaya-vijnana storehouse out of the “pure” alaya-jnana (Primordial Wisdom and pure Emptiness). The second downward (or involutionary) transformation is called by the Lankavatara Sutra (and many Yogachara schools) the manas, which arises out of the storehouse and becomes (when misunderstood) the self-contraction and self-view, which then looks at the alaya-vijnana and misinterprets it as a permanent self or soul, and causes the alaya-vijnana to become even further tainted (beyond containing the first forms of manifestation or samsara itself, when misunderstood). The third transformation “downward” creates the concept of objects and the senses that perceive them, of which, in standard Buddhist psychology, there are six—the five senses, plus the mind (which in Buddhist psychology is treated as another sense, the manovijnana, whose objects are simply conceptual), giving us eight levels of consciousness (or nine if you count the original, pure, unconstructed alaya-jnana, or primordial nondual Wisdom Mind). This overall view gives us a chance to work not only with manifestation, involution, or Efflux, some version of which all Great Traditions possess, but also evolution, emergence, or Reflux, which is found in an evolutionarily workable version in relatively few places, including the Lankavatara Sutra, thus giving Buddhism a truly profound approach to this issue faced by all the Great Traditions: “If Spirit is the only ultimate Reality, then why, and how, did this relative manifest world show up? What’s the actual mechanism of that?” The notion of involution/evolution, Descent/Ascent, Efflux/Reflux in all its various forms, some version of which is found in virtually every Great Tradition, is the attempted answer to that question; and some version of that—such as the Lankavatara Sutra’s—is still viable today whenever that question is sincerely asked.
It’s important to realize that, for Yogachara, it’s not phenomena (or manifest events or the elements of samsara) that cause illusion and suffering, but rather viewing phenomena as objects, viewing them through the subject–object duality. Instead of viewing objects as one with the viewer, they are seen as existing “out there,” separate, isolated, dualistically independent, tearing the wholeness of Reality into two realms—a subject versus objects. This product of the dualistic self-contraction of the manas and the tainted alaya-vijnana converts Reality in its Suchness or Thusness or pure Isness into an illusory, broken, fragmented, dualistic world, attachment to which causes bondage and suffering.
This state of bondage, itself illusory, can be seen through by “a sudden revulsion, turning, or re-turning of the ālaya vijñāna back into its original state of purity [alaya-jnana]….The mind returns to [or is recognized as] its original condition of non-attachment, non-discrimination, and non-duality [pure alaya-jnana]”—in other words, by recognizing the ever-present state of nonduality, or the union of Emptiness and Form.3 Although most Yogacharins insisted that the end state of Emptiness of Madhyamaka is the same as in Yogachara, there is an unmistakably more positive tone to the Yogachara—certainly in the concept of the nature of Mind, but also in how nonduality is conceived. For Madhyamaka, nonduality is virtually an utter blank, at least to the mind’s conceptions, although that blankness is actually seeing Reality exactly as it is, in its Suchness or Thusness, without names, concepts, categories, or prejudices. While Yogachara wouldn’t specifically disagree, it more positively sees Emptiness and nonduality as “the absence of duality between perceiving subject and the perceived object,” which allows for the grand radiance, or luminosity, of Emptiness to be better recognized in the very midst of manifestation. Again, it’s not phenomena that are illusory or suffering inducing, but seeing phenomena as objects, as items set apart from awareness or the subject and existing as independent entities out there. Once they are separated from us, then we can either desire them or fear them, both eventually causing suffering, alienation, and bondage.
Now this slightly more positive view of Emptiness, not to mention its connection to ordinary awareness (as Zen would put it, following the Lankavatara Sutra, “The ordinary mind, just that is the Tao [or ‘the way of Truth’]),” acted to unify Emptiness and Form in an even stronger way than Madhyamaka’s revolutionary nonduality. When Emptiness and Form are truly seen to be one, then Form itself is seen as the radiance and luminosity of Emptiness, and all of reality becomes a rainbow of luminous transparency, whole and complete, free and full, a realm of joy and celebration. The union of Emptiness and Form becomes the union of Emptiness and Luminosity, and playing with radiant luminosity—in the form of our own immediate Presence and brilliant Clarity—becomes a direct, daily occurrence.
All of this had a direct hand in the creation of Tantra (and its close cousin, Vajrayana Buddhism), the real flowering of the Third Great Turning. (As already noted, a few Buddhists, in fact, count Tantra/Vajrayana as a Fourth Turning, although this is not as well known. But if we do so, then of course this volume would be talking about the possibility of a Fifth Turning. But since this is less well known, we’ll stick with the standard Three Turnings as presented here, and then go to discuss a possible Fourth Turning.)
Tantra was especially developed at the great Nalanda University in India from the eighth to the eleventh centuries CE. For Tantra, what Early Buddhism (and most other religions) considered sins, poisons, or defilements were actually—precisely because of the union of Emptiness and Form—the seeds of great transcendental wisdom. The poison of anger, for example, instead of being denied, uprooted, or repressed, as in so many other spiritual approaches, is rather entered directly with nondual Awareness, whereupon it discloses its core wisdom, that of pure brilliant clarity. Passion, when entered and embraced with nondual Awareness, transmutes into universal compassion. And so on.
Thus, in Tantric initiations, it was common to use the “Five M’s”—five items that most religions considered totally sinful (such as alcohol, meat, and sex)—and directly introduce them in the initiation ceremony in order to emphasize that all things, without exception, are ornaments of, and fully one with, Spirit itself.4 This nondual realization applies as well to all of our own “sinful” qualities—all of our feelings, thoughts, and actions, no matter how apparently negative, are at heart nothing other than Godhead or nondual Spirit, and are to be seen and experienced exactly as such.
Where the First Turning was the way of renunciation, denying negative states as part of despised samsara, and the Second Turning was the way of transformation, working on a negative state with wisdom until it converted to a positive transcendental state, the Third Turning and its Tantric correlate was the way not of renunciation or transformation but of transmutation—of looking directly into a negative state of Form in order to directly recognize its already present state of Emptiness or Primordial Wisdom. The motto here is “Bring everything to the Path.” Nothing, absolutely nothing, is taboo; food, alcohol, sex, money—all are to be deeply befriended and lovingly embraced (within, of course, sane limits) as being ornaments of Spirit itself, direct manifestations of the ultimate Divine. There is only Spirit. There is only Tathagatagarbha (womb of Suchness). There is only Svabhavikakaya (Integral Body of Buddha). And all of this is because the sacred and the profane, the infinite and the finite, nirvana and samsara, Emptiness and Form, are not two different, separate, and fragmented realms, but co-arising, mutually existing, complementary aspects of one Whole Reality, equally to be embraced and cherished.
Looking at the nonduality of Emptiness and Form, we can say that Enlightenment “transcends and includes” the entire manifest world. With Emptiness, the entire world is transcended, is let go of, is seen through as a shimmering transparency, is understood to have no separate-self existence at all, is seen as a seamless (not featureless) Whole—and thus we are radically free from the torment and torture of identifying with partial, finite objects and things and events (including a small, finite, fragmented, skin-encapsulated ego), all of which are typically and normally seen as separate and “other.” As the Upanishads put it, “Wherever there is other, there is fear.”5 Samsara is being caught in the hell of others (as Sartre might say). It is identifying with various ornaments of the Divine but without an awareness of the Divine itself—being in a genuine heaven but without a genuine Spirit (Emptiness) anywhere to be found. But recognize Emptiness, and then one’s identity with any particular, separate, isolated thing or event evaporates instantly, leaving an identity, not with the small, separate-self sense, but with the entire world of Form. Since Reality is the union of Emptiness and Form, to discover Emptiness is to be free of any specific or isolated Form, and instead to become one with ALL Form, a radical Fullness that is the Form side of the radical Freedom of Emptiness—with infinite and finite, nirvana and samsara, Emptiness and Form, Freedom and Fullness, all nondual. You no longer look at a mountain, you are the mountain. You no longer hear the rain, you are the rain. You no longer see the clouds float by, you are the clouds floating by. There is no “other” here, because there is no longer anything outside of you that could hurt, harm, or torture you, or that you could crave, lust after, or hungrily grasp. There is simply the entire timeless Now, the ever-present Present, containing the entire manifest world, and you ARE all that. To quote the Upanishads again, Tat Tvam asi—“Thou art That”—where “That” is the divine Wholeness of the entire universe. In Emptiness, radical Freedom; in Form, radical Fullness—and both are “not-two.”
Now, when it comes to the manifest world, where evolution is so prominently on display, Emptiness itself does not evolve. It has no moving parts, and thus nothing to evolve; it is the absence of absence of absence (if anything), and thus, again, nothing concrete to actually evolve. It is not apart from samsara or Form; it is the emptiness (or transparency or “wetness”) of all samsara and Form. A sage who, two thousand years ago, directly realized Emptiness would discover and “possess” the same, identical Freedom as a sage who experienced Emptiness today, even though the world has evolved considerably in the meantime. But when it comes to Form, to the world of Form—well, that is exactly where evolution has occurred. And the world of Form has indeed evolved over the last two thousand years, becoming (as all evolution does) more and more conscious, more complex, more caring, more loving, more creative, and more self-organized, containing higher and higher Wholes (as we will see in more detail).
And thus, more truths have emerged. Two thousand years ago, humanity thought the earth was flat; slavery was taken to be part of the natural, normal state of nature; women were largely treated as second-class citizens, if citizens at all; there was no understanding of, say, brain neurochemistry and neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, GABA, acetylcholine, nor medical advances that have added an average of forty years to the typical lifespan. Likewise, new psychological and sociological truths have emerged and evolved, advancing considerably our understanding of what it means to be human. The world of Form, in short, has become considerably more complex and Full, and although an experience of Enlightenment—of the unity of Emptiness and Form—is no Freer today than it was two thousand years ago (Emptiness is the same, then and now), it is most definitely Fuller (Form has most definitely increased, grown, and evolved). Evolution itself operates by transcending and including, transcending and including, transcending and including—and thus a human being today transcends and includes most of the fundamental emergent phenomena going all the way back to the Big Bang. Humans today literally contain quarks, atoms, molecules, cells, a photosynthetic Kreb’s cycle, organ systems, neural nets, a reptilian brain stem, a mammalian limbic system, a primate cortex, and—as its own “transcending” addition—a complex neocortex (which contains more possible neural connections than there are stars in the known universe). All of this is “transcended and included” in a human being.
Likewise, across the board with goodness, truth, and beauty. The world today has access to all of the great premodern Wisdom Traditions (and their meditative access to ultimate Truth and Enlightened Awareness) plus all of modernity’s staggering advances in the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, hygiene—stretching from a cure for polio, to putting a human on the moon, to the invention of radio, television, and computers that now contain more information than the sum total of all human brains) plus all of postmodernity’s sophisticated understanding about the contextual and constructed nature of relative truths, and the central role of perspective in all relative ideas. Shouldn’t the world’s Great Wisdom Traditions keep up with the modern and postmodern additions to our knowledge and understanding? After all, what is it that is evolving in all of this? Why, of course, Spirit! Evolution is simply Spirit-in-action: Brahman, Tao, Buddha-nature, Godhead, Allah, YHWH, the Great Perfection, Ati, the Ground of all Being, One without a Second. Whitehead, we noted, divided Spirit into two dimensions: the “Primordial Nature of God” (timeless and unchanging; for us, Emptiness) and the “Consequent Nature of God” (the sum total of all evolution to date; Form). And while the Primordial Nature of God has not changed one iota from the Big Bang and before, the Consequent Nature of God has grown magnificently and substantially. There are commonly understood truths now that would have simply staggered the premodern mind, from the nature of brain activity (a brain that, as noted, has more neural synaptic connections than there are known stars in the entire universe) to the extraordinary unfoldings of a self-organizing and self-transcending evolution, to the nature of the Big Bang itself in its first nanoseconds. Not to mention the Singularity that is in all likelihood bearing down on us now in technology and will change the world more than any other single change in human history.
Buddhism is a unique spiritual system in many ways, while also sharing some fundamental similarities with the other Great Wisdom Traditions of humankind. But perhaps one its most unique features is its understanding, in some schools, that its own system is evolving or developing. This is generally expressed in the notion of the Three Great Turnings of Buddhism, the three major stages of unfolding that Buddhism has undergone, according to Buddhism itself. The First Turning of the Wheel is Early Buddhism, now generally believed to be represented by the Theravada school and thought to contain the historical Gautama Buddha’s original teachings, which developed in the great Axial period around the sixth century BCE. The Second Turning of the Wheel, represented by the Madhyamaka school, was founded by the genius philosopher-sage Nagarjuna around the second century CE. The Third and final (to date) Great Turning of the Wheel, represented by the Yogachara school, originated in the second century CE but had its period of greatest productivity in the fourth century CE with the brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu. All Three Turnings had profound impacts on every school of Buddhism that came after them.
The Madhyamaka school, although critical of Early Buddhism in many ways, nonetheless transcends and includes many of its foundational teachings, while criticizing those notions it finds partial, limited, or incomplete. And many Yogachara schools attempted to integrate and synthesize all Three Turnings. This was an ongoing, cumulative, synthesizing unfolding, as if Buddhism was plugged into the great evolution of Spirit itself.
In other words, many adherents of Buddhism had a view that Buddhism itself was unfolding, with each new turning adding something new and important to the overall Buddhist teaching itself. My point can now be put simply: many contemporary Buddhist teachers, agreeing with psychologists and sociologists that the world itself, at least in several important ways, is undergoing a global transformation, believe that this transformation will affect also Buddhism, adding to it yet newer and more significant truths, and resulting in yet another unfolding, a Fourth Great Turning, of Buddhism itself. (Some people view the rise of Tantric Buddhism, or occasionally Vajrayana Buddhism, as a Fourth Turning, and from that perspective, we are speaking of a possible Fifth Turning. But generally we will remain with the more common Three Turnings and take it from there.) This Fourth Turning retains all the previous great truths of Buddhism but also adds newer findings from fields as diverse as evolutionary biology and developmental psychology—but only to the extent that they are in fundamental agreement with the foundational tenets of Buddhism itself, simply extending them to some degree, as it were. Known by various names—from evolutionary Buddhism to Integral Buddhism—the Fourth Turning, like all the previous turnings, transcends yet includes its predecessors, adding new material while retaining all the essentials. And what is so remarkable about this development is that it is completely in keeping with this general understanding of itself that Buddhism has grasped—namely, that Buddhadharma (“Buddhist Truth”) is itself unfolding, growing, and evolving, responding to new circumstances and discoveries as it does so. Even the Dalai Lama has said, for example, that Buddhism must keep pace with modern science or it will grow old and obsolete.
A brief glance at Buddhist history will show what is involved. Original Buddhism was founded on such notions as the difference between samsara (the source of suffering) and nirvana (the source of Enlightenment or Awakening); the three marks of samsaric existence; that is dukkha (suffering), anicca (impermanence), and anatta (no-self); and the Four Noble Truths: (1) life as lived in samsara is suffering, (2) the cause of this suffering is craving or grasping, (3) to end craving or grasping is to end suffering, and (4) there is a way to end grasping, namely, the eightfold way—right view, right intention, right speech, right actions, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right unitive awareness.
The ultimate goal of Early Buddhism was to escape samsara—the manifest realm of life, death, rebirth, old age, suffering, and sickness—entirely, by following the eightfold way and attaining nirvana. “Nirvana” means, essentially, formless extinction. The prefix “nir-” means “without,” and “vana” means everything from desire to grasping to lust to craving itself. The overall meaning is “blown out” or “extinguished”—as if a lit candle were handed to you, and you leaned over and blew out the flame. What is extinguished or “blown out”? All the typical marks of samsara itself—including suffering, the angst that comes from craving for permanence, the separate-self sense, or self-contraction (often called “ego”), and its inherent fear, anxiety, and depression. The state of nirvana is sometimes said to be a state similar to deep dreamless sleep, in which, of course, there is no ego, no suffering, no hankering for permanence, no space, no time, no separation—if anything, there is simply the boundless peace or vast equanimity of being liberated from the torture of samsara and its suffering-inducing ways. According to some schools, there is even an end limit, or “extreme” form of nirvana, called nirodh—complete cessation—where neither consciousness nor objects arise at all, and that might be thought of as an infinite formlessness of pure freedom. Be that as it may, the goal is clear: get out of samsara and into nirvana.
According to Buddhist history, Gautama Siddhartha (“Buddha” is not a name but a title, and means “Awakened,” and was added to his name after his Enlightenment) was raised as a prince, with all the princely affluence of palace life, and with a father who protected him closely, so that he wouldn’t be exposed to the typical horrors of everyday life in India at that time. But then one day, Gautama escaped from the palace walls and, in wandering around the surrounding city, saw three sights that severely disturbed him—a very sick person, an old and decrepit person, and a dead person. “These are something my palatial life cannot protect me from,” he thought, and he promptly left the palace and began a six-year search, studying under various holy men, looking for an answer to life’s problems that he had witnessed wandering in his city. But after six years, nothing proved satisfactory, and, exhausted and frustrated, he sat down under the Bodhi tree and vowed not to arise until he had discovered the answer.
Early one morning, glancing at the starry heavens, Gautama had a profound experience. “Aha! I’ve found you! Never again will I be deceived!” he exclaimed, as much with utter joy as complete exhaustion. What did he find? Whatever it was, it converted him from “ignorance” to “Enlightenment.” Different responses as to what he saw and understood have been given by various schools, all of them believable. One was the “twelvefold chain of dependent origination,” a profound understanding of the completely interwoven nature of all reality and the inexorable role of causality in tying them all together—all of which conspire to inevitably cause suffering when driven by grasping. Another was the three marks of existence itself (impermanence, suffering, and selflessness) and the eightfold way to end their hold on the human being. According to Zen, Gautama had a profound satori, a deep awakening experience, awakening to his own true Buddha-nature and his fundamental oneness with the entire Ground of Being (or Dharmakaya), ending his separate-self sense, and with it, suffering. Whatever exactly it was, it did indeed soon become formalized in the three marks of existence, the twelvefold chain, and the eightfold way. Gautama Siddhartha had sat down under the Bodhi tree an ordinary individual and got up from it an Enlightened or Awakened being, a Buddha. When Buddha was asked if he was a God or supernatural being, he replied, “No.” “What was he?” “Awakened,” is all that he replied.
Such was the basic form of Buddhism as practiced for almost eight hundred years—until, that is, Nagarjuna, who began paying attention to this strange duality between samsara and nirvana. For Nagarjuna, this duality tore Reality in half and didn’t produce liberation but subtle illusion. For him, there is no ontological difference between samsara and nirvana. The difference is merely epistemological. That is, Reality looked at through concepts and categories appears as samsara, while the very same Reality looked at free of concepts and categories is nirvana. Samsara and nirvana are thus not-two, or “nondual.” And this caused a major revolution in Buddhist thought and practice.
Gautama Buddha had discovered the “emptiness,” or ultimately illusory nature of, the separate-self sense; but he had not discovered the emptiness—the shunyata—of all of what is usually called “reality” (including not only all subjects, or selves, but all objects, or “dharmas”). Buddhism had just taken its second major Turn in its illustrious history, adding a novel and profound element to its already accepted discoveries.
Nagarjuna relies on the “Two Truths” doctrine—there is relative, or conventional, truth, and there is absolute, or ultimate Truth. Relative truth can be categorized and characterized, and is the basis of disciplines such as science, history, law, and so on. That a molecule of water consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom is a relative truth, for example. But ultimate Truth cannot be categorized at all (including that statement). Any category or quality or characteristic makes sense only in terms of its opposite, but ultimate Reality has no opposite. Based on what is known as the “Four Inexpressibles,” you can’t, according to Nagarjuna, say that ultimate Reality is Being, or not-Being, or both, or neither. You cannot say it is Self (atman), or no-self (anatman or anatta), or both, or neither. You can’t say it’s implicate, or explicate, or both, or neither. You can’t say that it’s immanent in Gaia, or that it transcends Gaia, or both, or neither. You can’t say it’s a timeless Now, or a temporal everlastingness, or both, or neither. And so on for any category or quality. The reason is, as we were saying, that any concept you come up with makes sense only in terms of its opposite (liberated versus bound, infinite versus finite, something versus nothing, implicate versus explicate, pleasure versus pain, free versus limited, temporal versus timeless, good versus evil, true versus false, and so on), yet ultimate Reality has no opposite. As the Upanishads put it, “Brahman [ultimate Reality] is one without a second” and “free of the pairs”—the pairs of opposites, that is—and thus can’t be categorized at all (including that statement, which would also be formally denied). Nagarjuna says, “It is neither void, nor not void, nor both, nor neither, but in order to point it out, it is called the Void.” The Void, shunyata, or Emptiness. It’s a radical “neti, neti”—“not this, not that”—except “neti, neti” is also denied as a characteristic.
Now what this does mean is that Emptiness, or ultimate Reality, is not separate from anything that is arising. (Technically, even that statement would be denied; but we are now talking metaphorically to get across the general gist of Emptiness—because the main point is that although it cannot be said, it can be shown, or directly realized. More on this as we continue.) Not being separate from anything (“not having a second”), it is the Emptiness of everything that is arising. Emptiness isn’t a realm separate from other realms, it is the Emptiness, or Transparency, of all realms. Looked at free from conceptualization or categorization, everything that is arising is Emptiness, or Emptiness is the Reality of each and every thing in the manifest and unmanifest world—it is their very Suchness, their Thusness, their Isness. Looked at through concepts and categories, the universe appears as samsara—as built of radically separate and isolated things and events—and grasping after those things and attachment to them causes suffering because, ultimately, everything eventually falls apart, and thus whatever you’re attached to will sooner or later cause suffering as it falls apart. But looked at with prajna (or jnana)—nonconceptual choiceless awareness—the world of samsara is actually self-liberated nirvana. (In the word jnana, the root “jna,” by the way, in English is “kno,” as in “knowledge,” or “gno,” as in “gnosis.”) Jnana is a nondual, unqualifiable knowledge or timeless Present awareness, the realization of which brings Enlightenment or Awakening. Awakening to what? The radical Freedom or infinite Liberation or radical Luminosity-Love of pure Emptiness, though those terms, again, are at best metaphors.
Since there is no radical separation between samsara and nirvana (samsara and nirvana being “not-two,” or as the Heart Sutra summarizes nonduality, “That which is Emptiness is not other than Form; that which is Form is not other than Emptiness”), liberating Emptiness can be found anywhere in the world of Form—any and all Form is one with Emptiness. It is not a particular state of mind or state of consciousness but the very fabric or “isness” of consciousness itself.
A commonly used metaphor to explain the relationship of Emptiness to Form is the ocean and its waves. Typical, limited, bounded states of consciousness—from looking at a mountain, to experiencing happiness, to feeling fear, to watching a bird in flight, to listening to Mozart’s music—are all partial states and thus separate from each other; they all have a beginning (or are “born”), and they all have an ending (or “die”). They are like the individual waves in the ocean; each starts, has a certain size (from “small,” to “medium,” to “huge”), and eventually ends, and, of course, they are all different from each other.
But Emptiness—the Reality of each moment, its sheer transparent being, its simple “Suchness” or “Thusness” or “Isness”—is like the wetness of the ocean. And no wave is wetter than another. One wave can certainly be bigger than another, but it is not wetter. All waves are equally wet; all waves are equally Emptiness, or equally Spirit, or equally Godhead or Brahman or Tao. And that means that the very nature of this and every moment, just as it is, is pure Spirit—Spirit is not hard to reach but is impossible to avoid! And one wave can last longer than another wave, but it is still not wetter; it has no more Suchness or Thusness than the smallest wave in the entire ocean. And that means that whatever state of mind you have, right here, right now, is equally Enlightened; you can no more attain Enlightenment than you can attain your feet (or a wave can become wet). Enlightenment, and the “Big Mind/Big Heart” that reveals it, is absolutely ever-present Presence; all you have to do is recognize it (about which, more later).
But this being so, one no longer has to retreat to a monastery—away from the world, away from Form, away from samsara—in order to find Liberation. Samsara and nirvana have been joined, united, brought together into a single or nondual Reality. The goal is no longer to become the isolated saint or arhat—looking to get off of samsara entirely—but the socially and environmentally engaged “bodhisattva”—which literally means “being of Enlightened mind”—whose vow is not to get off samsara and retreat into an isolated nirvana, but a promise to fully embrace samsara and vow to gain Enlightenment as quickly as possible so as to help all sentient beings recognize their own deepest spiritual reality or Buddha-nature, and hence Enlightenment.
