Michael Pye on Skilful Means

SKILFUL MEANS IN BUDDHIST AND CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALTY
Michael Pye

AN ORIENTATION FOR A TALK FOR THE KYOTO COSMOS CLUB, January 13th 2008

“Skilful means” is a compacted translation for a small group of expressions used in Mahayana Buddhism. Nowadays the concept is widely referred to in the English-speaking world by the Sanskrit word upāya, which however by itself just has the meaning of “means”. The longer expression “skill in means” translates the Sanskrit upaya-kauśalya. In the Chinese versions of Mahayana sutras however, especially those by Kumarajiva, the concept was conflated and used to refer to “skilfully used devices”. So “skilful means” corresponds to the Japanese Buddhist term hōben (from Chinese fangbian), which is usually explained as kōmyō na shudan (i.e. a skilfully applied means). In English the spellings skilful and skillful are both correct, by the way! My study of this concept which was first published in 1978 used the first spelling, in order to save typewriter strokes and paper.

The basic idea has two aspects. First, the buddhas and bodhisattvas use skilful means in order to express their compassion and lead living beings into the Buddhist path. These means or devices, various forms of teaching and practice, are geared to the karmic situation and the various dispositions of the living beings who are being addressed. What in one respect is inexpressible is set out in a skilfully adapted manner, so that it can be communicated and received. However, second, it is necessary for the living beings not only to benefit from these expressions of Dharma, but also to realize their inadequacy and go beyond them. Failure to do this would mean that one gets stuck, spiritually speaking, in some form of expression which is no longer a help but becomes a hindrance. Thus one of the high virtues (“perfections”) to be practised by a bodhisattva is the ability to assist others skilfully with the necessary means while at the same time being able to dispense with them. (Of course, a buddha can do it without needing to “practise” any more.) In being assisted, the living beings are in turn led into the bodhisattva way and consequently have to get used to giving up all their ladders, rafts and crutches.

This way of thinking finds extended expression in the Lotus Sutra, the Teaching of Vimalakirti and the Perfection of Insight literature. So anyone who has their own English translation/s of any of these texts might care to take them in hand. In the Lotus Sutra, chapters 2 (on “skilful means”) and 3 (the parable of the burning house) are especially relevant, but so too are the parables in later chapters and in particular the chapter on “the length of life of the Tathāgata” (appearing as 15 in Sanskrit and 16 in translations from Chinese, which are more common.) Chapters 2 and 16 are regularly recited in the Nichirenite tradition. In chapter 16 we learn that the Tathāgata (the Buddha) put on an appearance of entering nirvana in order to give living beings the confidence that such a goal might be possible. This relativisation of a central Buddhist concept is matched by the profound deconstruction of traditional terminology found in not a few other places, for example in the very short and widely used Heart Sutra.


The underlying question is: What were/are the Mahāyāna Buddhists doing with their own tradition? First, they were telling us how it is that a Buddha comes to be teaching at all. You may recall that at first his mind “inclined towards little effort”, because what would be the point of trying to explain the inexpressible to the ignorant…? But then God stepped in (Brahma). This is an old story from early Buddhism (the threefold request by Brahma, etc.) but in the Lotus Sutra it is retold (twice) in terms of “skilful means”. So it’s a kind of meditation on why and how a Buddha teaches Dharma (i.e. why there is “Buddhism”). Second, and at the same time, the Mahāyānists were finding a way to unblock hindrances which apparently had arisen in the spiritual path to liberation, in particular by removing the focus on the progress of the individual, which seemed to set up an obstructive differentiation between advanced monks and other living beings. It is often said that a bodhisattva “postpones” his (her) entry into nirvana out of compassion. But this is a distorting simplification. Since all “dharmas” and thus all living beings are “nirvanic” from the beginning, such a motivation would be self-defeating, obstructing a clear perception of the “voidness” of things, i.e. their lack of an ontologically assertable “self”. In this regard, the Mahāyānists were recovering early Buddhist teaching, with revised vocabulary.

In short, the Mahāyāna Buddhists were telling us how to understand Buddhism, and in particular they were dealing with the status of religious concepts and constructs in that religion. Their motivation was however not philosophical, speculative or academic. It was spiritual. It is in this respect that the concept of “skilful means” can be adopted and applied in other traditions also.

It is at this point I leave the “history of religions” or the history of religious ideas, and move into an area of personal interest. The concept of “skilful means” can help us to understand how other traditions work too, that is, how they work spiritually, or how they can work. It can help us to understand that there is always a variety of religious expressions and forms of teaching and practice, while at the same time none of these, not even the most cherished ones, should become obstructions or hindrances. On the contrary, all such forms, e.g. notions of “God”, need to find their due relativity.

This understanding can be applied to Christianity, I believe, and perhaps to other religious traditions as well, in so far as they have a spiritual path or orientation. In the oral presentation I discussed further the transferability of this concept to Christianity, not now as a neutral specialist in the academic study of religions, but in terms of religious orientation. This orientation may be thought of as both Buddhist and Christological. Sometimes discussed in this connection is a short passage in the epistle of Paul to the Philippians, namely 2: 5-8, where we find in a nutshell what has been called a “kenotic christology” (kenotic from kenosis, meaning emptying, because Christ is said to have emptied himself). But there is more to think about… The whole world of religious language is at stake. One might say: “Hold your hats” ... but perhaps it’s all quite obvious and you don’t need to!

© Michael Pye, Kyōto January 2008

New Blog Post from Morris

My New Blog Post
All of the educated and well-informed members of every major religion today know that their own religion is not unique. During the late nineteenth century thinkers like William James and his The Varieties of Religious Experiences, and Rudolf Ottos, Das Heilige or The Holy both demonstrated that experiences of awe, wonder, fear and/or overwhelming ecstasy appear to individuals in every society and they have been traditionally interpreted within the framework of the own religious faith and their own societies own understanding of the natural as well as of the supernatural or transcendent state of the universe. Such pioneering books appeared almost simultaneously with more social scientific and much more universal analyses of the religions of the world like Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary forms of Religious Life. Durkheim gave an exhaustive description of rites of tribes that were both manifestations of the social oneness of the tribe itself and simultaneously very religious. He analyzed the different types of religion from transcendent “mana,” or power, to the “soul” of humans as distinct from their body, to the other “spirits” independent of human beings, to totemism. He saw these as forms of “animism” and traced their origins to the immense “effervescence” brought on by tribal dancing, drumming chanting and the like that created a very different state of consciousness filled with magic. He did not conclude that all these things were in fact authentic manifestations supernatural world. Being a contemporary of Freud, he simply offered monumental description of the universality and the variety of religion in every society. His new opening up of the religious world led soon to masters of comparative religion like Mirea Eliade and his The Sacred and the Profane in 1954 and his Patterns in Comparative Religion in the 1958. These were followed soon by Joseph Cambell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Clifford Geertz and Robert N. Bellah added to all of this monumental new data new data of their own, plus detailed anthropological and sociological theories concerning what both believers and unbelievers, aware of this new history of religion. All religions, both the most primitive and the most advanced, are a combination of two fundamental facts: a creation myth or myth of origin, and a pattern of ethical “do”s and “don’ts. Both of these arise directly out of the culture where the religion itself arises: its history, its language, its basic level of social structure (from hunter-gatherer, to farming, to urban literate, to industrial to informational societies such as ours). The myth of origin always presumes the natural world that all members see and understand—whether it is immensely sophisticated as are today’s religions, or very simple as with the hunter-gather tribes. Each culture in its own way know always the sun rises, the seasons follow each other without fail, spring comes and brings food, men and women come together produce offspring, and the sky with its combinations of planets and constellations are what the people have said they are since that people’s time immemorial. Today’s most sophisticated believers in both science and religion, such as Robert Taylor feel that the immense order, beauty and goodness of what science shows us propels many of us to faith, not necessarily in “God,” the Buddha, Brahman, or Allah, but in a great mysterious Ground of Being, or transcendent grounding and guiding divine element within the very cosmic process itself: the “process theology” of people like Charles Hartshorne and many others
A religious system which catches hold of the faith not only of its own people but soon spreads like wildfire around the planet—as Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam have done—do not necessarily replace the religions that were there before them. Rather usually they in one degree or another absorb segments of the older ones (as Christianity absorbed segments of Greco-Roman religions) or bind together with them, as Shinto and Buddhism in Japan have formed a religious rope of many strands that include deep elements of Taoism and Confucianism.
Some religions that early on formed close alliances with other systems such as the government and/or the military try to suppress all other religions as heretical, simply false or evil. This is what the Roman Catholic Church began to do in the ninth century, as it slowly formed the “Holy Roman Empire” where local princes governed hand in glove with local bishops and met at the top with a Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope. Islam succeeded in a very different manner but with a similar result: low tolerance for other religions, none at all. Once the pope lost his own civil authority over the papal states in the nineteenth century he tried to make up for his loss of power by declaring himself infallible in terms of faith or morals—this in spite of the fact that the Church had changed radically in both areas: it ceased to allow for the morality of slavery and declared it immoral, and it ceased to deny Galileo’s declaration that our planet revolved around the sun and not the way the Genesis declared the cosmos to be. Only recently has it accepted the fact of human evolution from lower forms of life. But this is not a sign that Christianity is false so much as it is that Christianity, like all other religions evolves.
Jesus can still be believed to be the Son of God in spite of such normal evolution in Christian faith. Only a relatively few Christians today insist that the Bible is literally true; most admit that the creation story is a beautiful myth. Analogous changes have taken place in Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and Islam. So why cannot all five of these religions and all the others as well, simply recognize the immense amount of good and truth that they actually teach and practice in common and come together in a union like the Kyoto Cosmos Club.
But people who find this of interest and would like to see how in practice, all religions do rely on faith, and each member of each religion is in fact a member of that particular religion because he or she actually does believe in faith (not because of any purely rational or empirical evidence that his faith is the most worthy of faith). But such a believer, being informed and aware, knows that others’ religious faiths, teach moral principles very similar to that believer’s own, and so can and will lead believers to being better human beings.
But how in fact do people, like members of the Kyoto Cosmos Club, who genuinely do embrace in faith almost every religion on the globe but in fact love to sit down together and eat and drink together while listening to some member present their own belief—which of course he or she is convinced is the nearest to the truth and the best?
The answer to that question will come from the Archive of Kyoto Cosmos Club’s three years and over twenty-five meetings. It is this Archive that we are coming close to finishing and it will be posted here on our blog site. We invite your comments on this effort. Is it stupid? Silly? Impossible? Or a major step towards peace in our ever-shrinking little planet? We will be sending our rough drafts of what we have been able to remember about the contents of each present’s ideas. We ask that these presenters, correct any errors, add any important elements left out, and send it back to us.
Finally—and very importantly—we ask all future presenters to give copies of his or her notes used, when the presentation is actually given, to the President Morris Augustine. He will, aftr writing up a piece for the Archives, sent it to the presenter for any additions or corrections.