The Buddhist “Balderdashians”

Just like the Kardashians have “taken over Hollywood,” the Buddhist “Balderdashians,” brain-dead, knee-jerk, anti-esoteric Buddhists, have hijacked Buddhism and reduced it to a parochial, exoteric religion.

This first became evident to me from the strongly negative reactions my numerous Amazon reviews of Buddhism books have received from Buddhists. And it became doubly evident to me when I was recently, unceremoniously kicked out of a couple of Buddhist Facebook groups for merely civilly disagreeing with some posters.

I was viciously attacked at Zen Mind, and then booted, when I posted the following Amazon (two-star) review of Red Pine’s “Lankavatara Sutra.” Not a single one of the posters could deconstruct my review or offer counter definitions/explanations of such terms as “Sambhogakaya,” “Dharmamegha,” or “Tathagatagarbha.” But this didn’t stop them from a full-on ad hominem attack against me. If you go to Amazon, and check out my review of Red Pine’s Lankavatara Sutra, you’ll see that it has received 40 + negative votes – but not a single rebuttal or attempted deconstruction of my arguments.

THE WORK OF A “BUTCHER WITH LARGE THUMBS”

The Lankavatara Sutra is a profound and wonderful sutra--but unfortunately, Red Pine's translation and commentary does not do it justice. In fact, it utterly besmirches it, grossly distorting and de-esotericizing it. My suggestion to Red Pine is: get a job in a McDonald's or something; you are in over your head attempting to decipher Buddha Dharma.

Red Pine has no clue what the Lankavatara Sutra is really about--descent of the Divine (or Dharma Cloud) into the Tathagata-garba (or Heart-cave). The term "Lankavatara Sutra" means "descent into Lanka," and Lanka (a solitary, or sacred, "island," like Sri--meaning "Holy"--Lanka) is a metaphor for the Tathagata-garba, the "place," or "locus", or "womb," where one is "reborn" as a Buddha. In Hindu Raja Yoga (Patanjali), reaching this "island,"(a.k.a. "Hridayam," or Heart-center) is termed "kaivalya," which means "isolation" from the defilements that taint the seven forms of consciousness that precede the en-Light-ening eighth one (alaya-vijnana) in the Yogacara system or schema. Yogacara means "the practice of yoga," and the highest yoga, Di-"vine" yoga, is the union of the "vine" of the Dharma Cloud (or Shakti, or Sambhogakaya, or Clear-Light Energy, or Holy Spirit, or Mother Light) with the "vine" of the yogi's consciousness (or soul, or complex of psychical seed tendencies, or son light) in the Heart-cave (or Tathagata-garba). This union results in the severing of the Heart-knot (what Gautama called the Heart-release), thus permanently disentangling one's Self (or Buddha-nature) from the defilements of the first seven forms of un-en-Light-ened consciousness. Red Pine, however, has nothing to say about this yoga, which, like Patanjali's Raja Yoga, describes final enlightenment as the yogi's union with the Dharmamegha (or Dharma Cloud) in one's Heart-center (Hridayam, not Anahata), which equates to the Tathagata-garba.

Who or What descends into Lanka to en-Light-en the bodhisattva (the enlightenment-seeking disciple)? The Bhagavan (Red Pine's term), which D.T. Suzuki, in his translation of the "Lankavatara Sutra," translates as the "Blessed One." The Bhagavan, or Blessed One, as Blessing Power (the Sambhogakaya, or Clear-Light Energy, or Dharma Cloud, or Shakti) does. In the first page of Chapter One, Red Pine writes, "the Bhagavan had been expounding the dharma for seven days in the palace of Sagara, the Serpent King. The seven days represent the seven forms of consciousness prior to the en-Light-ening eighth. Sagara is one of eight serpent kings who acted as protector of the Dharma [really, protector of the realization of the Dharmakaya]. Sagara's residence was at the bottom of the ocean, which is analogous to the Tathagata-garba, the irreducible root of consciousness. Sagara, the eighth Serpent King represents the Heart (or Gordian) Knot, the final guardian of the Gate to the Dharmakaya. The Serpent King is another name for Kundalini, the "Coiled One"--and when the final, Heart "coil" is "straightened " by the Blessing Power (or Clear-Light- Energy) of the Blessed One, then the bodhisattva morphs into a Buddha, a Tathagata dwelling timelessly in, and as, the Dharmakaya, universal, transcendental Mind, or Awareness.

It's bad enough that Red Pine is oblivious to the the implicit Energetic, or Spiritual, dimension of the Lankavatara Sutra, but it is even worse that he has no grasp of Yogacara's Mind-Only (Citta-Matra) Dharma. In the first paragraph of the first page of Chapter One, he translates a sentence in the sutra: "[Bodhisattvas] skilled in the knowledge that external objects are perceptions of one's own mind...." Contrast this with D.T. Suzuki's translation: "The Bodhisattva-Mahâsattvas... all well understood the significance of the objective world as the manifestation of their own Mind."

Red Pine's translation is wrong. He doesn't understand that universal, transcendental Mind (with a big "M"), the Unmanifest Dharmakaya, has spontaneously manifested as the universe of existents. In other words, the All, which is Mind-"Substance," has spontaneously modified itself, via its Sambhogakaya-Nirmanakaya "phase," as stepped-down vibrations of energy and matter into the totality of phenomena. And this gross and egregious misunderstanding effectively destroys his entire analysis of the Lankavatara Sutra, rendering it essentially worthless. Red Pine has read Buddhist scholars like Florin Sutton (see my Amazon review of his text "Existence and Enlightenment in the Lankavatara Sutra") and Dan Lusthaus (whom I've read on the web), and these so-called "experts" on Yogacara have doubtless infected his brain with their exoteric, non-Spiritual, hyper-psychologized interpretations of the Mind-Only teaching. A final point regarding Red Pine's view of the mind: External objects are not, as Red Pine asserts, perceptions of one's own mind. If you believe that the computer you're using now wouldn't exist just as it is after you stopped perceiving it, then I feel sad for you. If you took a gun and shot yourself, your gun, house, car, etc. would continue to exist just as they were sans your being around to cognize them.

The viewpoint of Mind, the Dharmakaya, or timeless Awareness, becoming everything is hardly heterodox. It is the same one espoused by--just to name a handful of legendary gurus--Zen masters Hui Neng and Huang Po, Yogacara masters Saraha and Padmasambhava, and Dzogchen master Longchen Rabjam. Here's a quote from Saraha, page 98 of "Principal Yogacara Texts," (another book I've reviewed at Amazon):

"Thus know that the whole appearance is the Dharmakaya. All sentient beings are the the Buddha. All cosmic arisings and events are from the beginning not other than the Source of Phenomena (Dharmadhatu). For this reason, everything that one can identify conceptually is as unreal as are the horns on a rabbit."
In addition to his failure to understand the distinction between Mind and mind, Red Pine also lacks a clear grasp of Yogacara's eightfold network of consciousness. For example, he describes the seventh consciousness (klista-manas) as self-identity and reasoning, and this is wrong. Reasoning (which includes conation) is encompassed within the sixth consciousness (mano-vijnana), conceptual consciousness or cognition; and the seventh consciousness is "affection," the afflictive emotions resulting from one's faulty premises and value-judgments. Anyone who has studied Plato would see the sixth and seventh consciousnesses of Yogacara as representing man's (conditioned) soul.

A big problem with this book is Red Pine's failure to use capitalization when necessary; he seems to have some sort of Zennish fetish of keeping words uncapitalized. For example, he describes enlightenment as the denial of "self-existence," then uses the terms "self-existent-mind" and "self-realization" to describe enlightenment. This is contradictory and confusing. It should be "Self-existent Mind" and "Self-realization."

A final point regarding this book: it suffers without an index. This type of quasi-scholaly text has to have one; but given that the publisher, Counterpoint, seems to skimp on their books (for example, microscopic-size print in Red Pine's Heart Sutra), the lack of one doesn't surprise me.

Because this is a book review and not a book, I will stop my critique short and summarize it: This book is, in a word, bad. But because it is the Lankavatara Sutra and does contain some useful notes and information, I have, after some deliberation, decided to give it two stars rather than one.

Regarding my critique, you'll see that plenty of people (really just collections of adventitious taints) give my review a thumbs down, but not a single one of the thirty six (and counting) seems capable of deconstructing my arguments. Come on, people! My razor-sharp Dharma sword is rusting while I await you in Lanka.

Oh, yes, regarding Red Pine, I might be able to get him a job at a local McDonald's, but with a caveat: After the Mc Donald's manager read Red Pine's "Lankavatara Sutra," he characterized him as a "butcher with large thumbs." Hence, Red Pine will have to start as a floor sweeper instead of a burger builder.