Ajahn buddhadasa biography of william blake

Parallels to the Yogacara teaching on 'Mind-only' or 'consciousness-only' as the basis of reality exist in the writings of William Blake as well as in some of the 'New Thought' movement; although directed to quite different ends. In one of his sermons, Zen Master Rinzai asks his monks — rhetorically — what supernormal powers they think the Buddha might possess.

The monks were, of course, fully conversant with the contents of the sutras, particularly those of the Mahayana — despite a misconception in our own time that Zen eschews the Buddhist Scriptures. Anyone who has looked into the likes of the Lotus, Vimalakirti or Avatamsaka sutras will be aware of their fantastic quality and miraculous stories.

In the first chapter of the Lotus sutra, to the delight of the assembly, the Buddha emits a ray of light from between his eyebrows that illuminates multiple world systems. In the Vimalakirti sutra, during a discussion about how bodhisattvas purify the so-called Buddha-fields, the Buddha extends his big toe, touching the ground.

I often think of William Blake as the English Tantric.

This gesture transforms the world into a jewelled wonder, astounding Sariputra, who has been complaining about how awful and unpleasant the world is. The real ones, he says, are the ability to look through the eye and not be deceived by forms and colours; to hear through the ear and not to be deceived by sounds … and so on. He lists each of the senses in this way, ending with the mind, and the power to not be deceived by mental configurations.

The development of Mahayana Buddhism saw a number of important doctrines come into play. Two schools dominated, each arising in India during the first centuries ce: the Madhyamika school, originated by the sage Nagarjuna, which developed the doctrine of sunyata — emptiness, and the Yogacara school, which introduced several teachings and, perhaps most notably, expanded the concept of Mind.

The early Buddhist teachings laid out the schema of the eighteen dhatus, whereby the six senses the five physical ones plus the cognising sense that perceives mental objects , the objects of sense and the allied consciousness seeing, hearing, cognising, etc. This schema does two things. This is a pre-Cartesian worldview whereby there is no independent reality apart from sense and cognition.

The second effect is to release Mind from belonging to anyone, or being in any one place such as inside the skull. The visionary poet and artist William Blake d.