Making Sense of Buddhist Texts

Inspired by some stories I was reading recently in Japanese, I felt like talking about the subject of Buddhist texts. In my old blog, the Level 8 Buddhist, I spent quite a bit of time discussing the subject, but not so much now. However, after talking with some readers offline, I realized that a lot of people who encounter Asian Buddhism may be confused or put off by reading Buddhist literature because of the difficult descriptions, or seemingly fantastic imagery. So in keeping with the theme of the blog, allow me to discuss the subject a bit.

Recently, while thumbing through Bhikkhu Nanamoli’s translation of the Majjhima Nikaya (part of the Theravada Pali Canon), I read sutta #91, the Sela Sutta, or “To the Brahmin Sela”. It deals with the supposed “32 marks of the Buddha” in graphic detail. Take this excerpt for example:

Doubting whether the pudendum [genitalia] was encased and whether the tongue was large enough to cover the face, he was dissatisfied. Then it occurred to the Blessed One. The brahmin Sela sees most of the marks of a Great Man except two, he has doubts, as to whether the pudendum is encased and the tongue is large enough to cover the face. Then the Blessed One performed a psychic exercise so that the brahmin Sela could see the Blessed One’s pudendum encased and the large tongue. The Blessed One pulled out his tongue and with it, touched both ear lobes, nostrils and the whole forehead, and covered up the whole face with it.

Pretty weird huh? A person reading this might easily think Buddhism is crazy, but the key to understanding texts like this is understanding the language. These texts were mostly set down to writing starting in the 1st century B.C. in India, so the authors were Indian monks at the time. The words and idioms they use are part of their language, and translators have to take foreign phrases and idioms and make them sensible in our language. If someone read an American novel 2,000 years from now, they might think Americans were crazy as well. Hyperboles like “I have a million things to do”, or “I love pizza” seem completely normal to us because it’s our native language. But imagine someone reading them far in the future, and you see why it’s easy to get confused by Buddhist imagery from that time.

So what about the 32 marks of the Buddha? Among the more well-known examples, and their meanings in normal English, are:

• A long, huge tongue – A long tongue meant that one spoke truth. The bigger, longer the tongue, the more profound the truth.
• A lump on his head – This meant that one had great wisdom. In Thai statues, you see the Buddha with lumps upon lumps on his head (a pointy head). This emphasizes just how smart and wise he was.
• Long earlobes – This means the Buddha was a good listener. He understood the temperaments and dispositions of his followers, and tailored his teachings to suit them in a way they could understand. It also implies profound awareness of the world around him.
• Completely sheathed genitalia – This idiom means that Buddha had no more sexual desire. He saw that pursuit of sex as a life goal was empty and ultimately unsatisfying, so he just gave it up.
• Wheel-marks on the soles of his feet – The wheel means the turning, or exposition, of the truth, so the Buddha treads the Buddhist path, and at the same time, turns the wheel so that others can learn too.

So, when you go back and read the sutra again, knowing this, you can see that the Indian writers were not crazy, just really clever and poetic. Now, it’s easier to appreciate what they intended to say.

When talking about later East Asian texts, the symbolism gets even more colorful and dramatic. But remember, it’s still just poetic license. When Indian texts were translated into Chinese, this proved to be a huge challenge because the languages are so different from one another. Then, from the Chinese canon, things were translated again into Japanese, yet another different language entirely, before reaching English, which is yet-another-different-language. So, when you think about it, these Buddhist texts have passed through many layers of translation. People read this thinking that they are corrupted and no longer useful, but consider the fact that at each stage, the translators were often professional monks, sincere in their desire to spread Buddhist teachings, and not contriving to manipulate things to their own advantage. So, the last thing they would want to do is to corrupt the teachings, and so considerable effort was put into getting the terms right, or at least coming up with something analogous.

Thus, it’s very helpful to read the various commentaries that surround Buddhist texts, because monks at various times have had to grapple with understanding the underlying meaning. If you try to read these texts without first understanding the context, or the phrases behind them, you’ll get a surface-level understanding, and may get very confused.

Take for example take the concept of the Buddha’s Pure Land. One can read descriptions such as that in the Amitabha Sutra:

Again, Shariputra, in the Land of Utmost Bliss there are seven-jeweled ponds, filled with water of the eight excellent qualities. The beds of the ponds are covered solely with gold sand, and from the four sides of each pond rise stairs of gold, silver, beryl and crystal. Above these stand pavilions adorned with gold, silver, beryl, crystal, sapphire, rosy pearls, and carnelian. In the ponds are lotuses as large as chariot-wheels — the blue ones radiating a blue light, the yellow a yellow light, the red a red light and the white ones a white light.

This leads people to conclude that the Pure Land is just a Buddhist version of Heaven, in the Western sense, and that Buddhism has been corrupted by “cultural accretions” and other short-sighted statements. But the key is in understanding what the original composers wanted to say. Compare this text with another similar one from the Lotus Sutra, Chapter 16:

All harbor thoughts of yearning
and in their minds thirst to gaze at me.
When living beings have become truly faithful,
honest and upright, gentle in intent,
single-mindedly desiring to see the Buddha
not hesitating even if it costs them their lives,
then I and the assembly of monks
appear together on Holy Eagle Peak [a historical place in India].
At that time I tell the living beings
that I am always here, never entering extinction,
but that because of the power of an expedient means
at times I appear to be extinct, at other times not,
and that if there are living beings in other lands
who are reverent and sincere in their wish to believe,
then among them too

When living beings witness the end of a kalpa
and all is consumed in a great fire,
this, my land, remains safe and tranquil,
constantly filled with heavenly and human beings.

Or, more bluntly, from chapter 17:

“Ajita, if good men and good women, hearing me describe the great length of my life span, in the depths of their mind believe and understand, then they will see the Buddha constantly abiding on Mount Gridhrakuta, with the great bodhisattvas and multitude of voice-hearers surrounding him, preaching the Law. They will also see this saha world [world of suffering], its ground of lapis lazuli level and well ordered, the Jambunada gold bordering its eight highways, the rows of Jeweled trees, the terraces, towers and observatories all made of jewels, and all the multitude of bodhisattvas who live in their midst. If there are those who are able to see such things, you should known that it is a mark of their deep faith and understanding.

You can see how there’s a deeper meaning to the Pure Land than just the surface-level descriptions of paradise. The key is understanding the terms, getting used to the language and not stopping until you understand the deeper meaning. “Seeing” the Pure Land is part of the transformation that comes with understanding the Dharma, the Buddha’s teachings, and awakening from our self-oriented view of the world. The people who originally wrote these texts wanted to teach us important concepts. Rather than writing them out in the dry textbook sense we’re used to in Protestant Western culture, they utilized a lot of descriptions and phrases that were perfectly natural in their time and culture, but may not work as well as it used to because culture and language have diverged. Nevertheless, the teachings remain the same profound truths that make Buddhism what it is.

Namu Amida Butsu