This spring season is a time of transition. It’s a beautiful spring day with daffodils and magnolias in bloom, ospreys active with their nests, animals of all kinds nesting and beginning to reproduce. And a poem that I found today in Joseph Goldstein’s Experience of Insight from an old Zen nun was more powerful than any description I could give:
Sixty-six times have these eyes beheld the changing scenes of (spring).
I have said enough about moonlight; ask me no more.
Only listen to the voice of pines and cedars when no wind stirs.
I was re-reading Joseph’s book because I have been thinking about my roots in the Insight Meditation tradition, known as Vipassana as well, or early Buddhism or the Theravadan tradition to be distinguished from the Mayahanan tradition from which Zen springs, or the Tibetan tradition of the Dalai Lama.
I thought a little orientation to the various Buddhist schools might be helpful.
Buddhism thrived in India about 2500 year ago. The language of the Buddha was Pali but, as there was no writing at the time, the tradition was oral. This is why there is so much repetition in the Sutras (or teachings) we have now. Repetition was the recognized mnemonic of the day and amazingly successful. The teachings were only written down 400 years later in Pali - the original language of the Buddha. This was the Theravadan tradition of Buddhism and, by modern day, there were something like 27 volumes of teachings in what is now known as the Pali Canon. This is also the only document written in Pali. So the language of the Buddha is synonymous with the only document written in that language - the teachings of the Buddha. They exist only in each other.
Buddhism was pushed out of India about 800 years after the Buddha’s death. Hinduism took on some of its forms and ideas as it took over. Buddhism spread to China where it was called Chan and then to Japan where it was known as Zen. Or Mahayanan Buddhism. The famous Heart Sutra and Diamond Sutra were written in Japan - 1000 years after the death of the Buddha. It also spread across the Himalayas to Tibet where it was known as Vajrayana Buddhism. Tibet was pretty isolated from the rest of the world and an amazing city grew up of the highest Buddhist scholarship, monasteries all over the place, universities, the works, all devoted to Buddhism. It has been said it took 5 years to get enlightened - like going to college. And stories of the powers - people flying around, walking through walls, being in two places at once - come out of Tibet.
So these are the three strains or baskets of teachings - the Theravada which is the root lineage for Insight or Vipassana here in the west, Mahayana of which Thich Nath Hanh is the most renown teacher and the Japanese Zen perhaps the best known form, and Vajrayana of Tibet - known for imagery and for meditating on images, for Lamas, and of course, the Dalai Lama.
The Theravadan tradition spread to Sri Lanka, Burma now Myanmar, and Thailand where Ajahn Chah lived and taught. It didn’t return to India until the early to mid-part of the last century and the Pali Canon didn’t return until a teacher/monk named Anagarika Sri Munindra who was one of Joseph Goldstein’s main teachers talked a copy of it out of the Burmese military and physically transported it back to India - a pretty exciting story contained in Munindra’s biography Living This Life Fully.
Jon Kabat-Zinn had the inspiration for Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) while on a retreat in the late 1970’s at the Insight Meditation Society practicing in the Theravadan tradition introduced at IMS as Insight or Vipassana meditation. I always assumed MBSR was all based on the Theravadan teachings which contain The Four Noble Truths and the Four Foundation of Mindfulness. Probably the three marks of existence – impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and non-self - as well. But these teachings traveled to China and Japan as well so Buddhist scholars have found a remarkable faithfulness to the teachings as they traveled - probably in part because of those repetitions. All forms contain the Four Noble Truths. But Buddhism developed in other ways in these traditions - notably into the area of non-duality. It turns out Jon Kabat-Zinn was deeply influenced by these other traditions so MBSR also has significant roots in the Mayahanan and Tibetan traditions.
The other thing to note, and Joseph Goldstein wrote a book about it called One Dharma, is that all these teachings from all over the world, all the countries, all traditions, everywhere made their way to the United States where they rubbed elbows with each other in a somewhat cacophonous co-existence with some cross pollination for the better part of a century.
This is a bit rough as my fact checker was on permanent vacation so all mistakes are mine. But it will give you a little background color for the way Buddhism traveled from India to the United States. Not by a direct route by any means.
And a little background for where I plan to go next. Into an Introduction into Insight Meditation.