Is Liberation Individual or Collective? Seeing the Other Shore Through Haze

If you follow these posts you know that this summer on the Vine of Obstacles we’ve been studying The Sutra That Explains the Profound Meaning (Samdhinirmocana Sutra). Although this sutra is not as well known as The Diamond Sutra, The Lotus Sutra, The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti, or The Flower Garland Sutra, it served as the foundation for the dharma explorations and teachings of some of our great dharma ancestors, e.g., Asanga and Vasubandhu, in the third turning of the dharma wheel (aka, the Yogacara).

The chapter we’ve focused on is Chapter 5: "The Questions of Extensive Intelligence," which begins with the Bodhisattva, Extensive Intelligence, asking the Buddha what qualifies a Bodhisattva as wise. The Buddha then launches into a description of the eight consciousnesses. 

In the Yogacara teaching, the sixth consciousness (manovijñāna/conscious awareness), arises dependently with the seventh consciousness (manas/ego consciousness). Ego consciousness serves as the organ through which conscious awareness perceives the data arising from the eighth consciousness (alaya/the storehouse consciousness), including the previous moment’s activity of the six sense consciousnesses.  

The work we’ve been doing together on the Vine this summer has been intended to support our students in arriving at a clear understanding of the eight-consciousnesses teaching, so that they can then deeply reflect on the implications, and apply them in practice—these are known as the three wisdoms (wisdom that arises from hearing, contemplating, and practicing)

The Buddha points out that although mastering these three wisdoms is a necessary condition, it is insufficient for a Bodhisattva to be considered wise (i.e., skilled in the ultimate, skilled in optimally liberating living beings). The three wisdoms that arise from understanding, contemplating, and practicing a teaching still only reach the level of conventional wisdom. Thus, Bodhisattva practitioners not only need to understand, contemplate, and practice the teaching of the eight consciousnesses, but as the Buddha puts it, 

"By themselves" 各別 and "in their own experience" 內 could also be rendered as "individually" and "internally." Although there are several subtle meanings to these two terms (worthy of considerable contemplation), one aspect is that we are not wise (and cannot optimally function to facilitate the liberation of living beings), unless we internally and individually also awaken to the ultimate truth. 

All summer long, Vine students have discovered again and again that what they thought was the buddhadharma was, in fact, not in accord with the buddhadharma. They then let go of old views and gazed directly at this teaching itself—and this very life—from a fresh, informed perspective. This is something we must learn repeatedly—that the buddhadharma is not what our conditioning tells us it is. 

Your degree of personal difficulty in discerning the true dharma will depend, in part, on the extent of your non-dharma conditioning.  Making matters worse, especially in today's dharma marketplace, oftentimes non-dharma is presented in the guise of dharma—especially if the non-dharma sells. And even if you don’t inhale, well, there’s all that secondary smoke in the room! Further, if you have training in Western psychology, it may be especially difficult for you to let go of your conditioning sufficiently to understand, contemplate, and practice this teaching. 

In next week’s post, we’ll be looking at other implications from our summer study of the Yogacara. In this post, we want to highlight one implication, specifically this question: is liberation individual or collective? We’ve introduced this issue above with the Buddha clearly saying that a Bodhisattva (i.e., an awakening being) is not skilled in the ultimate truth unless they’ve experienced the ultimate internally and individually (i.e., "by themselves and in their own experience").

We’ll take an example of new teachers in one of the major Soto lineages confusing their conditioning for the buddhadharma. There are two parts to this. First, we'll clarify that the Bodhisattva Vows are about liberating beings. Second, we'll look at the obstacles that we encounter when it comes to liberating beings—with the primary limiting factor being that each and every person has to do the work themselves.

To differentiate contemporary conditioned views about this question from the buddhadharma, we’ll highlight several sources in support of the view expressed by the Buddha above—that awakening is not a collective experience but something we each must do. This is not an opinion, but, in fact, what is consistently presented throughout the great teaching of the buddhadharma. 

Coming in September