IB World Religions 2.4.1. Where the Doctrines Came From: Siddhartha Gotama and the Bodhisattvas Notes

2.4.1. Where the Doctrines Came From: Siddhartha Gotama and the Bodhisattvas

Where doctrine begins

1. Buddhists trace their doctrines to a person rather than to a revelation. Nothing in the teaching is presented as handed down by a god, and the tradition names no creator as its author.
2. The claim made for Siddhartha Gotama (Sanskrit Siddhartha Gautama) is that he found something already there. Buddhists hold that the dhamma (Sanskrit dharma) is how things work whether or not anybody has noticed.
3. A discourse makes the point with an image of exploration. A man walking in forest finds an overgrown road, follows it to a ruined city, and reports what he has found so that the city can be rebuilt.
4. The title carries the same sense. Buddha means awakened one, so it describes what happened to him rather than naming a rank he was given.
5. The tradition distinguishes kinds of awakening. A sammasambuddha rediscovers the path in an age when it has been lost and then teaches it, while a paccekabuddha awakens without going on to teach.
6. This origin story sets the terms on which doctrine is meant to be received. Theravada Buddhists in particular hold that teaching should be tested in practice rather than accepted because of who said it.

The life of Siddhartha Gotama

1. The traditional account places his birth at Lumbini in what is now Nepal, into the Sakya clan, which is why Mahayana texts often call him Sakyamuni, the sage of the Sakyas.
2. He is described as growing up in comfort under his father Suddhodana, married and with a son, and kept from anything likely to disturb him.
3. The turning point is told as the four sights. On successive outings he sees an old man, a sick man, a corpse and a wandering holy man, and takes the four together as a statement of the human condition.
4. He then leaves home in what Buddhists call the great renunciation, giving up family and position at twenty-nine to train as a wandering ascetic.
5. He is said to have mastered what his teachers could offer and then pushed further into severe fasting, until he judged that starvation had brought him no closer and accepted a meal of milk rice.
6. His awakening is placed at Bodh Gaya beneath the bodhi tree. A first teaching at Sarnath followed, then forty-five years of travelling instruction, and death at Kusinara at about eighty.

The life as teaching

1. Buddhists do not treat the biography as background to the doctrine. Each episode is read as carrying teaching, so telling the story is itself a way of teaching.
2. The four sights carry dukkha. Ageing, sickness and death are its standard instances, and the fourth sight shows that a response to them is available.
3. The renunciation and the fasting together carry the middle way. Buddhists hold that he tested comfort and severe austerity in turn and found each of them a dead end.
4. The awakening carries the content of the doctrine. What the tradition holds he understood that night is what the rest of the teaching sets out in order.
5. Buddhist art turns the same episodes into objects of devotion. Statues use mudras, hand positions marking moments of the life, and the eight great events appear in painting and relief across Buddhist Asia.
6. Pilgrimage does the same with places. Lumbini, Bodh Gaya, Sarnath and Kusinara are the four sites the texts recommend, and Buddhists still travel to them.

The Jataka tales

1. Doctrine is also sourced from lives before the last one. The Jataka collection tells of earlier existences of the being who would become the Buddha, and the Pali collection runs to over five hundred stories.
2. In them he appears as a merchant, a king, a hare, a monkey or a deer. The figure at the centre is called the bodhisatta (Sanskrit bodhisattva), one on the way to awakening.
3. The stories carry ethical doctrine in narrative form. Each turns on a quality being perfected, which makes the collection the main source of teaching about the paramis (Sanskrit paramitas).
4. The Vessantara Jataka is the best known of them. A prince gives away his wealth, then his children and his wife, and Theravada Buddhists treat it as the extreme case of dana, generosity.
5. These stories reach far more people than doctrinal texts do. They are painted on temple walls, performed at festivals in Thailand and Sri Lanka, and told to children long before any discourse is studied.
6. They also make a doctrinal point about time. Buddhists hold that becoming a Buddha takes innumerable lives of preparation, which sets the last life inside a very long project.

Bodhisattvas as sources

1. Mahayana Buddhists accept all of the above and add a further source. Doctrine may also come from bodhisattvas, beings far advanced towards Buddhahood who teach on the Buddha's behalf.
2. Scripture shows this happening. In the Heart Sutra the teaching is delivered by Avalokiteshvara while the Buddha sits in meditation, and the Buddha confirms it at the end.
3. Particular figures carry particular doctrine. Manjushri, shown with a sword and a text, is the bodhisattva through whom wisdom teaching is presented.
4. Whole treatises are attributed in the same way. Yogacara tradition holds that Asanga received his major works from Maitreya, the bodhisattva expected to be the next Buddha of this world.
5. Vajrayana carries the pattern further. Teaching is received in visions, and a lama may be identified as the continuing presence of an earlier teacher.
6. The effect is that Mahayana doctrine can develop without ceasing to be the Buddha's. New teaching is presented as released rather than composed, which Theravada Buddhists do not accept.

One source or many

1. The branches diverge over whether the source of doctrine is closed. Theravada Buddhists hold that it is, so the standard remains what Siddhartha Gotama taught within his lifetime.
2. Mahayana Buddhists hold that it stays open. Bodhisattvas, visions and realised teachers can still be sources, and the body of doctrine has grown accordingly.
3. Vajrayana adds the transmitted line. A student receives doctrine from a lama who received it from another, and that living chain counts as a source in its own right.
4. The difference explains much of the variety across Buddhist Asia. A tradition that can receive new doctrine adapts to a new setting faster than one that cannot.
5. It also shows where the divisions actually sit. Buddhists across the branches agree closely about what Siddhartha Gotama taught and disagree about what else counts.
6. Both positions describe doctrine as discovered rather than invented. Whether it is heard from the historical Buddha or from a bodhisattva, no Buddhist tradition presents it as the property of whoever is teaching it.