About the Work
The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion is a reference work devoted to the basic terminology and doctrinal systems of four great Asian wisdom traditions: Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Zen. It was published by Shambhala Publications of Boston, translated from the German Lexikon der östlichen Weisheitslehren, with the original copyright held by Otto-Wilhelm-Barth Verlag and the translation copyright by Shambhala. The editors are Stephan Schuhmacher and Gert Woerner; the translators are Michael H. Kohn, Karen Ready, and Werner Wünsche; Susan Kron and Michael K. Lane served as copy editors, Timothy Lubin prepared the bibliography, and David R. O’Neal provided editorial assistance. The volume runs to more than four thousand entries accompanied by over one hundred illustrations, and its contributors include Ingrid Fischer-Schreiber of the University of Vienna for Buddhism and Taoism, Franz-Karl Ehrhard of the University of Hamburg for Tibetan Buddhism, Kurt Friedrichs, president of the German Vedanta Society, for Hinduism, and the Japanologist Michael S. Diener for Zen.
The book is not a narrative treatise but an alphabetical dictionary of concepts, figures, texts, and practices, and it is meant for the general reader rather than the academic specialist. Its stated purpose is to help people who encounter unfamiliar Eastern terms in the sciences, the media, the health professions, psychotherapy, meditation study, and psychophysical training. Entries for all four subject areas stand together in a single alphabetical listing, ordered letter by letter regardless of word components, and each entry is tagged with a symbol indicating its domain: for Buddhism, [H] for Hinduism, [T] for Taoism, [Z] for Zen. Where a concept carries different meanings across traditions, both are given, usually with the older Hindu sense first. Zen, though often counted a Buddhist school, is treated separately, matching its self-understanding as “outside the orthodox teaching.” Buddhist entries favor hybrid Sanskrit forms with Pali in parentheses; Zen terms appear in Japanese, with Chinese forms cross-referenced, and personal names given in original form.
Entries from Arjava to Asanga
The dictionary proper begins. Arjava, honesty, is one of the godly qualities Krishna contrasts with demonic ones in the Bhagavad-Gita. Arjuna, “white,” is the Pandava warrior hero of the Mahabharata, friend and disciple of Krishna, who received spiritual instruction on the Kurukshetra battlefield and stands as the seeker through whom God instructs humanity. Artha, wealth, is one of four legitimate human goals when pursued with regard for dharma. Arunachala, the “hill of light” in Tamil Nadu, said by legend to be older than the Himalayas, became known to the West through Ramana Maharshi, who meditated in its caves and founded an ashram nearby. Aryadeva, disciple of Nagarjuna and author of the Chatuh-shataka, is counted the fifteenth patriarch in Zen’s Indian lineage and a founder of the San-lun school. Arya-marga, the supramundane path, unfolds in four stages—stream enterer, once-returner, never-returner, and arhat. Asamskrita, the unconditioned, was originally identified only with nirvana, though schools later expanded the category variously. Asana denotes Hatha-Yoga postures, the meditation seat—firm, neither too high nor low—and the cross-legged posture of Patanjali’s third limb. Asanga, “unfettered,” names both the free soul knowing itself as absolute consciousness and the fourth-century founder of the Yogachara school, brother of Vasubandhu, who departed from Nagarjuna’s view.
Bodhi, Bodhidharma, and the Buddha’s Names
Bodhi, enlightenment, originally meant realizing the four noble truths through the thirty-seven prerequisites; the Hinayana distinguishes the enlightenment of disciple, pratyeka-buddha, and buddha, while the Mahayana identifies it with insight into the unity of nirvana and samsara, awakening to one’s buddha-nature. Bodhichitta, the “awakened mind,” is central to the Mahayana: the Tibetan tradition distinguishes a relative aspect—the compassionate wish to attain nirvana for all beings, then entry into meditation to realize it—from an absolute aspect, the vision of shunyata; tantra treats it as a physiological entity whose sublimation yields corporeally experienced enlightenment. Bodhidharma, the twenty-eighth patriarch after Shakyamuni and first Chinese patriarch of Chan, receives extended treatment: his exchange with Emperor Wu—”No merit,” “Nothing sacred,” “Don’t know”—revealed his teaching to uncomprehending ears; he crossed the Yangtse, sat nine years before a wall at Shao-lin, and tested his disciples, granting Hui-k’o his marrow for silent bowing. Legends tell of his death at 150 by poison, of a pilgrim meeting him bearing one sandal, and of his empty grave. His practice, rooted in the Lankavatara-sutra, fused Dhyana Buddhism with Taoism, the “special transmission outside the orthodox teaching” that flowered with Hui-neng. The thirty-seven bodhipakshika-dharmas are then enumerated, from the four foundations of mindfulness to the eightfold path.
Buddha-Nature, Celestial Kings, and Taoist Fasts
A quotation from the twentieth-century master Hakuun Ryoko Yasutani opens the next stretch: buddha-nature is identical with emptiness, unfixed and beyond imagination, so whatever one imagines as buddha-nature is only its picture—yet because we are intrinsically buddha-nature, we can awaken to it. Busso, the buddha patriarchs, are the forefathers of every Zen lineage. Butsudan is the household or temple altar; butsudo, the buddha way, stresses practical training and complete enlightenment. The four celestial kings, demonic-looking world protectors dwelling on Mount Meru, guard the quarters: Vaishravana of the North with banner, pagoda, and jewel-vomiting mongoose; Virudhaka of the South brandishing his sword against ignorance; Dhritarashtra of the East whose lute purifies thought; Virupaksha of the West holding the serpent and wish-fulfilling gem. Venerated in their present form since the T’ang, they earned their own hall when Amoghavajra invoked them in 742 to break the siege of Hsi-an-fu—mongooses biting through bowstrings, the West guardian’s glance routing the foe—prompting an imperial edict.
Ritual Implements and Tibetan Figures
The reference sequence turns first to the phurbu, a ritual dagger kin to the dorje and rooted in the sacredness of metals. It stands for the subjugation of demons—of aggression itself—and was wielded by Padmasambhava. A verse attached to it speaks of the secret mind of all the buddhas, of omniscient wisdom, of the dorje essence as clarity and emptiness, and of seeing the true face of reality.
Japanese Buddhist Figures
Several Japanese entries follow. Dosen Risshi is given as the Japanese form of Tao-hsüan Lü-shih, and Doshin as that of Tao-hsin. Doshin, literally “mind of the way,” carries two senses: the longing or resolve to attain enlightenment, also called kokorozashi, and a novice in a Zen monastery, also known as unsui. Dosho (629–700) founded the Hosso school in Japan. While in China his master Hsüan-tsang, with whom he studied Yogachara philosophy, drew his attention to the Zen of the Southern school, and Dosho resolved to become the first Japanese monk to master it. Returning home, he erected Japan’s first Zen meditation hall in a Hosso temple at Nara—though at that time the country had no genuine Zen transmission through a master who had received the spiritual seal of the patriarchs. Dosu, “administrator of the monk’s hall,” names the head of a Zen monastery or his living quarters.
Hindu and Vedanta Entries
The Hindu and Vedanta entries begin with Draupadi, daughter of Drupada, king of Panchala, and consort of the Pandavas. The Drig-Drishya-Viveka, “the distinction between the seer and the seen,” is a Sanskrit tractate of forty-six shlokas that eases entry into Vedanta. Its authorship is variously linked to Bharati Tirtha, Shankara, and Svami Vidyaranya, but most likely belongs to Bharati Tirtha, Vidyaranya’s master and head of Shankara’s monastery at Shringeri. Its verses are too abstract for ordinary consciousness, which identifies with the body and sees only a gross material universe—the snake in the rope of Shankara’s example—and so they serve as meditation texts to awaken spiritual intuition. The work shows that the seer has nothing to do with what is seen: absolute consciousness is used by individual consciousness to split the One without a second into subject and object, projecting multiplicity. It divides embodied consciousness into the jiva of waking, the jiva of dream, and the true jiva, only the last of which strives to realize identity with brahman. When the aspirant asks who he really is, the guru answers: Tat tvam asi—Thou art atman-brahman.
Drilbu is a Tibetan ritual bell used in Vajrayana. Drishti means vision, view, revelation, eye, worldview, theory; in Pali it denotes seven false views—belief in ego, repudiation of karma, eternalism and nihilism, observing false shilas, regarding bad-deed karma as good, and doubting Buddhist truths—while another classification gives three: causelessness, inefficacy, and nihilism. Eternalism holds that an individuality independent of the skandhas survives death; nihilism holds it is annihilated; causelessness denies any cause for purity or impurity and asserts fatalistic predetermination; inefficacy denies the karmic effectiveness of deeds. The Buddha called these views reprehensible, bases for unwholesome behavior and unfortunate rebirth.
Drugpa Künleg, “Perfect Good Dragon,” was a Tibetan holy madman (1455–1570), educated in the Drugpa school of the Kagyüpas, who became a wandering ascetic, was regarded as an incarnation of Saraha and Shavaripa, composed spiritual songs, and helped convert Bhutan to Buddhism; he was popular for his proclivity toward women and beer. A quoted verse has him calling himself the crazy dragon Künga Legpa. Duhkha, suffering, is central to the four noble truths and one of the three marks of existence: everything conditioned, subject to arising and passing away, comprised of the five skandhas, not liberated. It arises from craving and is overcome by eliminating desire through the eightfold path. Duhkha-Nirodha is the conquest of sorrow. Durgā, “the unfathomable one,” is the Divine Mother and consort of Shiva; her ten-armed figure on a lion symbolizes power to punish or confer grace, destroying the demon of ignorance, nourishing the poor, conferring love and knowledge. Her annual festival in fall lasts at least five days in Bengal.
From Fusho to Hakuin Zenji
The next sequence opens with a patriarch instructing Ming the monk to think neither good nor bad and show his primordial face; Ming then suddenly experiences profound enlightenment. Fusho, “unborn,” denotes the absolute reality with no birth, death, becoming, or time. Futan-ku, “not just emptiness,” holds that buddha-nature is neither existence nor nonexistence but both and neither depending on viewpoint, illustrated by the Heart Sutra formula that form is nothing other than emptiness; it is opposed to tanku, “only emptiness,” and is experienceable only in enlightenment. Gaki are hungry ghosts, offered food before monastic meals. The Gakudo Yojin-shü is Dogen’s work of ten rules for Zen beginners. Gampopa (1079–1153) became a monk at twenty-six after his wife’s early death, received mahamudra transmission from Milarepa, founded the Kagyüpa monastic tradition, and wrote The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, uniting Kagyüpa and Kadampa teachings. The Ganda-vyüha recounts Sudhana’s pilgrimage under Manjushri’s guidance, questioning fifty-three persons before meeting Samantabhadra and attaining enlightenment. Gandhara was a northwest Indian Buddhist art center where the first Buddha depictions appeared in the second century C.E., peaking in two later periods before invasions destroyed its monasteries and Buddhism died out there. Gandharva names a Vedic deity revealing divine truth who prepares soma, later a demigod singer. Gati describes samsara’s rebirth modes—three good and three bad—across three worlds, with only human birth permitting enlightenment. Gedatsu means release, synonymous with enlightenment and with zazen; Gedo is non-Buddhist religion or philosophy. The Gelugpa, founded by Tsongkhapa, is the last of four main Tibetan schools, emphasizing Vinaya and lamrim, with dalai lamas holding political leadership since the seventeenth century. Gesar is a mythical Tibetan hero whose eleventh-century epic depicts Buddhism’s battle against Bön. Goke-shichishü names the five Ch’an houses and seven schools; Gosan were leagues of five important Zen monasteries in China and Japan. Gosvamis are Vaishnava priests descended from Nityananda. Gotama founded the Nyaya school and wrote a twelve-volume law book. Guru has four stages—parents, worldly teachers, spiritual master, cosmic guru—and two questions concern his necessity and the obedience owed him, with antaryamin as the inner leader.
Ganesha, son of Shiva and Parvati, is god of wisdom and remover of obstacles, depicted with elephant head and single tusk, riding a rat.
The Book of Changes and Its Commentaries
The encyclopedic survey opens with the I-ching, the Book of Changes, which probably began as a manual of prophecy. Early Chinese oracles answered yes or no with a single unbroken or broken line, but the complexity of reality soon made that too crude, and the system grew into trigrams and hexagrams built from broken and unbroken lines. These figures mirror events in Heaven and on Earth, and prediction rests on the transformation of one state into another: the hexagrams are said to be in continuous motion, so one or several lines may change into their opposite and thus into another of the sixty-four hexagrams, letting prediction embrace the whole of reality. Oracles were cast by throwing fifty yarrow stalks or, more simply, three coins, and the best-known translations are those of Wilhelm and Blofeld. Followers of Inner Alchemy adopted the hexagrams to symbolize internal processes, pairing ch’ien and k’un, k’an and li. Tradition traces the system to Fu Hsi, with the remaining hexagrams credited to King Wen or the Duke of Chou, while the main commentary, the Ten Wings, is attributed to Confucius but actually stems from a later period, probably the early Han Dynasty. It was the only philosophical work to survive the burning of the books ordered in 213 C.E. by Ch’in Shih-huang-ti, who himself consulted it as prophecy. Long used for divination by the fang-shih and the yin-yang chia, it came to be considered primarily a book of wisdom and official state doctrine, with the throwing of fifty yarrow stalks symbolizing the harmony between the macrocosmic order of nature and the microcosmic order at the moment of consultation. The I-chuan, or “Commentary on the Changes,” is another name for the Ten Commentaries.
Channels of Energy and the Grammar of the Upanishads
The entry on Ida describes one of the major channels of subtle energy supplying the body with life force, taking up prana through the left nostril, cooling and soothing, and corresponding to the parasympatheticus, with pingala as its counterpart. In the Rigveda, ida is nourishment, refreshment, or a milk libation, later a stream of praise, personified as goddess of speech and sacrifice and adviser to Manu. Idam, meaning “this,” is the word the rishis of the Upanishads use for the universe as the revelation of God in manifest form, contrasted with “that” (tat), the undescribable reality behind and beyond the visible world, which appears in the phrase Tat tvam asi. Ignorance is avidyā, delusion.
Zen Schools and Masters
The Igyo school was a Ch’an school among the “five houses-seven schools,” named from the initial characters of the Japanese names of its founders Kuei-shan Ling-yu and his dharma successor Yang-shan Hui-chi. Its instruction used ninety-seven symbols each inscribed in a circle, said to originate with Hui-neng; though not preserved, it influenced the ten oxherding pictures and the five degrees of Master Tung-shan. It seems to have been a secret language for those with profound Ch’an experience, transmitted to few under strict secrecy lest it become a formalized game, and by the mid-tenth century its lineage merged with Rinzai and ceased as an independent school. Ikkyū Sōjun, the Japanese Zen master of the Rinzai school, was known for wit and realization, called a kind of Puck of Zen and the most popular Zen figure in Japan; he mocked the deteriorating Zen of the great monasteries and was an outstanding painter, calligrapher, and poet. In his poems he praised ancient masters, lamented Zen’s decline, and praised wine and physical love, calling himself “the blind ass.” In 1420, meditating by night in a boat on a lake, he experienced enlightenment at a crow’s sudden caw, confirmed by his master as dharma successor. He kept monastic life at a distance, living as a hermit on Mount Jou and later in the “hut of the blind ass” in Kyoto. In 1474 the imperial house appointed him abbot of Daitoku-ji; he could not avoid it but lived in Shūon-an in his home village of Maki, instructing seekers until death. He once tore up his own confirmation certificate and confirmed no dharma successor. Ikshvāku, son of Manu Vaivasvata, whose father was the sun god Vivasvat, is mentioned by Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita; he was the progenitor of the solar race and ruled Rama’s capital Ayodhya, and the Rigveda mentions him once in connection with the race in North and Northwest India.
Kama, Desire, and the Good
Kama is described as emerging from Lakshmi in one text or from Brahma’s heart in another; his mysterious origins and universal influence explain his many names. He is a characteristic of existence in the lowest of the three realms, the realm of sensual desire, referring to desire for sensually satisfying objects and the joy taken in them. Buddhism views him as a primary obstacle on the spiritual path, with five types corresponding to the five sense organs, and he is one of the three kinds of craving, one of the five hindrances, and one of the defilements. Kamadhatu, Kamadhenu, Kamalashila, and Kamaloka are cross-referenced to triloka, Surabhi, and Madhyamika. The Kama-Sutra is a basic text for the Shaktism of Vatsyayana, with visual representations in sculptures and Indian temples, most famously at Konarak in Orissa, built in the thirteenth century by King Narahimsa to honor the sun god Surya; many works titled “Kama-Sutra” have virtually nothing to do with Vatsyayana’s work. Kaminikanchana, “women and gold,” is a collective term for desire, greed, and human passions, often used by Ramakrishna. Kamya, “desirable, pleasant,” is significant in the Katha-Upanishad, which contrasts the good and the pleasant: those choosing the good attain salvation, while fools driven by fleshly desire choose the pleasant.
Founders and Doctrines
Kanada was a sage and founder of Vaisheshika, presumably heading a priests’ school in the second century B.C.E. and regarded as author of a first version of the Vaisheshika-Sutra, containing a theory of the atom. K’an and Li are the twenty-ninth and thirtieth hexagrams of the I-ching and two of the eight trigrams; they combine yin and yang, represent the Tao’s function pervading Heaven and Earth, and with ch’ien and k’un are parents of the remaining hexagrams. In Taoist alchemy they designate elixir ingredients whose fusion produces the sacred embryo. Kanchi is one of the seven holy cities of India, seventy kilometers south of Madras, site of 108 Shiva temples. Kancho is a title introduced by the Meiji government in 1872 for a Buddhist school head; in Zen, the abbot of a monastery with submonasteries. Kanda, “section, part,” is the division of the Vedas into Karma-Kanda and Jnana-Kanda. Kandonin, “person of the way of leisure,” is one who through profound enlightenment gained total freedom. Kangi-zatori, “graduated satori,”
Moksha and the Four Goals of Life
The glossary turns first to moksha, the Sanskrit term for final liberation and release from all worldly bonds—from karma and the cycle of life and death, samsara—through union with God or knowledge of ultimate reality. It is the highest of the four goals of human life, the others being artha (wealth), kama (pleasure), and dharma (duty); for the spiritual aspirant, its realization is the sole aim of life. Related Zen terms follow: moku-funi, “silent non-two,” the expression drawn from the Vimalakirti sutra in which Manjushri praises the layman Vimalakirti’s silence as a better statement of nonduality than any exposition—the “thundering silence” Zen holds in high esteem. The mokugyo, or “wooden fish” drum, struck during sutra recitation, carries the fish’s never-sleeping wakefulness as a symbol of the resiliency needed on the path. Mokusho Zen, “the Zen of silent enlightenment,” names the meditative practice of the Soto school against the Rinzai “Zen of contemplation of words,” stressing zazen without koans—later called shikantaza by Dogen—though each school borrows from the other.
Dialogue, Traces, and the Natural Life
The mondo, or question-and-answer dialogue, is a Zen exchange in which a master responds without theory or logic, invoking the answer from the deepest layers of the student’s heart-mind; famous examples include Tung-shan’s “Three pounds of flax” and Chao-chou’s “The oak over there in the garden.” Against this stands the monji-hoshi, the teacher attached to the literal sense of scripture without actualizing its deeper meaning. Mosshoryo names the unthinkable, unspeakable true nature of reality, and mosshoseki, “leaving no trace,” describes the enlightened life: as a bird leaves no trace in the sky, one should live with complete naturalness, in a “second naturalness” that recovers the primordial innocence preceding even the infant’s first naturalness. One who still “stinks of enlightenment” has not yet integrated it into everyday life.
Mo Ti and the Chinese Schools
Mo Ti, or Mo-tzu, opponent of Confucius and founder of Mohism, first studied Confucian teachings but rejected their clan-bound morality, developing instead an all-embracing love. The notes then turn to Mahayana nirvana: the bodhisattva postpones extinction until all beings are liberated, and nirvana becomes a positive state, an awareness of identity with the absolute in which no essential distinction remains between samsara and nirvana. The Madhyamikas see nirvana as emptiness, the “coming to rest of the manifold”; the Yogachara adds the unreality of appearances and distinguishes the arhat’s nirvana from the Buddha’s conscious exercise of compassion. In Zen, nirvana is not separate from this world but the realization of the mind’s true nature, equated with prajna. The Nirvana School of fifth-century China taught that nirvana is eternal, joyous, personal, and pure, that all beings possess buddha-nature, and that enlightenment may come suddenly—Tao-sheng’s theses provoking lasting controversy.
Patanjali and the Eight Limbs of Yoga
Patanjali, founder of the yoga philosophy based on Sankhya, defines yoga as a methodical effort to attain perfection by mastering the elements of human nature, physical and psychic; his concern is practical release, not metaphysical theory. His eight steps run from yama and niyama, the ethical prerequisites, through asana and pranayama—which gave rise to Hatha-yoga—to pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, and finally samadhi, the supraconscious state in which duality and the manifest world no longer exist. Whether this Patanjali is the same as the grammarian who wrote the Mahabhashya remains unsettled. The Taoist eight elegant exercises, the pa-tuan-chin, follow, with their eight standing movements regulating the triple heater, the stomach, and the heart. P’eng-lai, the island of immortals where the mushroom of immortality grows, epitomizes Taoist bliss, though every expedition sent to find it failed.
Rama, the Burning Mouths, and the Rigveda
The segment closes with the Rama tradition: to end Ravana’s terror, Vishnu incarnated as Rama; when Ravana abducted Sita, a great battle followed, decided only when Rama fitted to his bow an arrow fashioned by Brahma, which pierced Ravana’s breast, flew into the ocean, and returned to Rama’s quiver as the gods exalted him. Then come the release of the burning mouths, a Tantric ceremony freeing hungry ghosts from torment and enabling rebirth as humans or in the western paradise, still performed in Taiwan and Hongkong; ri-bi, the spontaneous manifestation of absolute truth in the phenomenal world; riddhi, the magical powers that are by-products of meditation and whose display violates monastic discipline; and the four riddhipada, the ways of power. The Rigveda, oldest and most extensive of the Vedic anthologies, comprises 1,028 hymns in ten song cycles, its sacrality enabling its unaltered transmission and its force still binding on India today. The entry on Rime, the nineteenth-century Tibetan movement to overcome sectarian bias, brings the sequence to its close.
Satsang, Sattva, and the Discipline of Truth
The presence of a holy person, the text suggests, can transmit divine intuition to those nearby, and the company of fellow seekers sustains the aspirant through mutual inspiration—so satsang is commended to anyone setting out on the path. Sattva, the noblest of the three gunas, names harmoniousness, uprightness, peaceableness, and composure; sattvasamata, the sameness of all beings, grounds the compassion that determines a bodhisattva’s action, since the conviction of no distinction between sentient beings makes karuna possible.
Satya means true, genuine, real; truth and honesty form one of the five virtues of the first stage of Raja-Yoga in Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutra, where together with ahimsa, asteya, brahmacharya, and aparigraha they constitute the “Great Vow” binding all eight stages. Satyagraha, “holding to truth,” was made world-famous by Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent disobedience against injustice. The entry on Satyakama Jabala recalls the illegitimate son of Jabala who sought acceptance from the sage Gotama; asked his origins, his mother confessed she did not know his father, having served as a servant in many places. Such honesty, Gotama concluded, could come only from a brahman, and he accepted him. Entrusted with cows, Satyakama received teachings of brahman after years in the forest from a bull, a voice from his evening fire, a swan, and a loon. Gotama exclaimed that his face shone like a knower of brahman; Satyakama credited “beings other than men” but still asked the sage to teach him, since only a teacher’s knowledge leads to the supreme good—and the sage taught him everything.
Satyaloka, the Satyasiddhi School, and the Sautrantika
Satyaloka is the realm of supreme truth, the goal of spiritual work attained through purification and meditation, where harmony, peace, and bliss rule. The Satyasiddhi school, known in China as Ch’eng-shih and in Japan as Jojitsu, was a Chinese Buddhist school based on Indian Sautrantika ideas, founded on Harivarman’s fourth-century Satyasiddhi and translated by Kumarajiva in the fifth century. Kumarajiva’s students Seng-hao and Seng-sung spread it, and by the sixth century it ranked among China’s most important Buddhist schools. It opposed the San-lun school, which accused it of falsely explaining emptiness; the attacks of Chi-tsang and Fa-lang reduced interest, and in the seventh century a Korean monk carried it to Japan, where it survived only within the San-ron school. Classified as Hinayana, it negates all true existence—neither mind nor matter is real—and teaches a twofold truth: worldly or conventional, under which phenomenal dharmas are conditioned, mutable, and limited, and supreme, from which all dharmas are empty. Because it holds both person and dharmas empty it is often considered Mahayana, yet unlike true Mahayana’s transcendental emptiness, its emptiness is reached only by destruction and abstraction, dismantling objects into molecules then atoms—an antithetical rather than synthetical emptiness.
Saumyatva, gentleness or goodness, is one of the four perfections of the heart. The Sautrantika, a Hinayana school that emerged from the Sarvastivada around 150 C.E., relies only on the Sutra-pitaka, rejecting the Abhidharma-pitaka and its “everything is” theory. They posit a refined consciousness as the basis of human life persisting through rebirths; unlike the Vatsiputriyas’ persisting “person,” it is merely the bearer of samsara. At death the other four skandhas are absorbed into it, a view that influenced the Yogachara school. Instantaneity is pronounced: each existent is an uninterrupted succession of moments, and duration is an illusion produced by the density of that succession. Nirvana is purely negative—nonbeing; the released one is annihilated.
Samadhi, Savitri, and the Zen Lineages
Savichara-samadhi, in Patanjali’s yoga, is a state where the mind identifies with the meditation object but remains partially involved with names, qualities, and cognition. Savikalpa-samadhi knows God or brahman but remains in a subject-object relationship; unlike nirvikalpa-samadhi it retains a duality that prevents total absorption, and it is comparable to Christian mysticism’s visio Dei. Savitri names three things: a sacred verse from the Rigveda, the Gayatri; the consort of Brahma, regarded as the sun god Surya and one of the Adityas; and the daughter of King Ashvapati, beloved of Satyavan, who was warned by a rishi that her husband would live only one year longer, yet married him nonetheless.
The Japanese term shōshi denotes the confirmation by which a Zen student who has already received inka-shōmei and is already leading a zendō is recognized by his master as a competent Zen master; inka-shōmei confirms profound enlightenment and completed training, though not every confirmed student reaches the point of opening a zendō, and given all that running one properly involves, it is astonishing that even a few traditional lineages survive today. Shoso-funi expresses the nonduality, realized in enlightenment, of absolute and relative, emptiness and form, absence of qualities and qualities. The Chinese shou, “long life,” is a preliminary stage of immortality to which an almost magical power attaches, represented in every conceivable shape; Taoists believe the life span may be extended by breathing and physical exercises, meditation, avoidance of certain foods, and sexual techniques.
Shou-i, “preserving the One,” is Taoist meditation in which deities believed to dwell within the body are visualized to prevent them from leaving, the most frequently visualized being the Supreme One, with whom the practitioner tries to unite. The oldest form, described in the T’ai-p’ing ching, is a method for “preserving the light of the One”: the practitioner seeks out the deities and causes radiant light to appear from their abode, holding the first flicker of the flame—first red, then white, then after considerable time green—a luminosity spreading ever wider which he gathers and collects, creating light throughout the body and driving out illness. Anyone maintaining this inner luminosity without interruption could be said to have mastered living ten thousand years. This meditation on light was known in early Taoism; Lao-tzu often speaks of an inner light, and in the Huai-nan-tzu light in the antechamber of the heart symbolizes the presence of the Tao. Later Taoists believed that by shou-i the essence could spread throughout the body, the three ones made visible, and the sacred embryo come into being through transformation of breath; an adept succeeding in this attains immortality and ascends to Heaven in broad daylight.
Shou-lao is the Taoist god of long life, the popular name of Shou-hsing, the stellar deity of longevity, shown with an enormously enlarged head, carrying a long staff and a pumpkin gourd containing the water of life, holding the peach of immortality and often depicted with a crane.
Ts’ao-shan and Tung-shan
The reference entries begin with the story of Tung-shan, who asked how one can go where there is no change, and Ts’ao-shan, who answered that his going is itself no change. After leaving his teacher, Ts’ao-shan wandered the country, teaching buddha-dharma as circumstances allowed, until he was invited to a monastery on Mount Ts’ao, from which his name derives; later he lived on Mount Ho-yu, and great hosts of students gathered at both places. In the tenth example of the Wu-men-kuan he engages his student Ch’ing-jui in a hossen: a monk complains that Ch’ing-jui is lonely and miserable and asks help to get ahead, whereupon Ts’ao-shan calls the student’s name, hears his “Yes!?”, and observes that he has already drunk three cups of superb wine from the house of Pai of Ch’uan-chou yet claims his lips are unwet.
Tsongkhapa
Tsongkhapa, the “Man from Onion Valley,” lived from 1357 to 1419 and stands as the reformer and scholar who founded the Gelugpa school and created a major doctrinal tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Born in Amdo in northeast Tibet at a time when the Tibetan canon was complete, he worked through those teachings and presented his results in the Lamrim chenmo and Ngagrim chenmo; the great monasteries Drepung, Sera, and Ganden arose from his activity. He took layman’s vows at age three from the fourth Karmapa, studied under numerous teachers with special exposure to Sakyapa and Kadampa teachings, and produced works filling eighteen volumes that served as textbooks. He stressed five branches of knowledge requiring study, critical examination, and realization through meditation, attributing right philosophical view and proper logic to the Madhyamaka, meditation instruction to the Prajñāpāramitā-sūtra and Abhidharma, and the proper way of life to the Vinaya. Four great actions are ascribed to him: restoring a sculpted image of Maitreya, insisting on Vinaya observance, establishing the Monlam new-year festival, and constructing monastic buildings.
Tsou Yen and the Yin-Yang School
Tsou Yen, the most famous representative of the Yin-Yang School in the third century B.C.E., examined small things first and widened gradually to larger until reaching the limitless. He applied the five elements to history and geography, classified rivers, mountains, valleys, and animals, and held that China was less than one-eightieth of the world’s surface, described as nine continents surrounded by a large ocean. His new view of history related political and social events to the five elements: the Yellow Emperor ruled under earth, conquered by the wood of the Hsia Dynasty, vanquished by the metal of the Shang, then by the fire of the Chou; fire would be succeeded by water, then earth again. His philosophy of history appears in the Lü-shih ch’un-ch’iu without his name mentioned, where Heaven reveals coming rulers through happy omens—earthworm and cricket for the Yellow Emperor, grasses and trees not yellowing for Yü, a metal blade in water for T’ang, a red crow with red envelope for King Wen—before fire yields to water and then earth.
Tso-wang and Ch’an Masters
Tso-wang, “sitting and forgetting,” is the Taoist meditation of the highest absorption, in which the practitioner does not meditate on an object but lets the mind float freely without intervening, abiding in wu-wei and becoming one with the Tao. Chuang-tzu describes Wen Hui telling Confucius he has got rid of everything—freed himself from his body, discarded reasoning powers, become One with the Infinite—and Confucius replies that if he has become one there is no room for bias, and if he has passed into space he is without beginning or end. The entries then turn to Ts’ui-wei Wu-hsueh, the ninth-century Ch’an master known as “the Uneducated,” free from convention and abhorring scholarly knowledge, who appears in Pi-yen-lu example 20, and to Ts’ui-yen Ling-ts’an, a ninth- to tenth-century master in the same collection, about whom almost nothing is known. The Ts’ung-jung-lu, or “Book of Equanimity,” is a hundred-koan collection compiled in the twelfth century by Hung-chih Cheng-chueh, more than a third of whose koans are identical with those in the Pi-yen-lu and Wu-men-kuan.
Vatsiputriya through Vedanta
The Vatsiputriya school split from the Sthaviras around 240 B.C.E. and taught that a “person” is neither identical with nor different from the five aggregates, forming the basis of rebirth, warranting retribution for karma, and continuing to exist even in nirvana; though one of the largest schools of its time, it met fierce resistance because its “person” was seen as a new version of the atman the Buddha had denied. Vatsyayana, a fourth-century scholar who also wrote on erotic themes, authored the Kama-Sutra and the Nyaya-Bhashya. Vayu, the god of winds, appears in the Vedas with Indra, emerged from the breath of Purusha, and in the Bhagavata-Purana broke the tip off Mount Meru and hurled it into the sea, where it became the island of Lanka. Vedana, the general concept for all feelings and sensations, is divided by qualities into three categories and five classes, is the second of the five skandhas and the seventh link in conditioned arising, and, conditioned by contact, calls forth craving. The Vedanga are supplementary texts covering six auxiliary sciences—phonetics, prosody, grammar, etymology, astronomy, and sacrificial rites—and belong to smriti. Vedanta, the “end of the Vedas,” summarizes the Upanishads’ insights on brahman and atman in Badarayana’s Vedanta-Sutra; Radhakrishnan wrote that of all Hindu systems it is most closely connected to Indian religion and influences every Hindu thinker of the present, and three branches developed: Advaita with Shankara, Vishishtadvaita with Ramanuja, and Dvaita with Madhva. The Vedanta-Paribhasha of Dharmaraja contains eight chapters on methods of knowledge, the great Vedic precepts, and states of consciousness, while the Vedantasara of Sadananda describes the concealing power of ignorance and the state of the jivanmukta. The Vedanta-Sutra, dated variously between 400 B.C.E. and 200 C.E. and attributed to Vyasa or Badarayana, consists of 555 fragments unintelligible without explanation, and so numerous commentaries exist, most importantly by Shankara, Ramanuja, Bhaskara, Nimbarka, Madhva, and Vallabha.
Wu-wei and the Suppression of Buddhism
An 842 CE emperor, prompted by his Taoist advisors, passed laws to suppress Buddhism, a persecution intensified in 845 CE when at least 260,000 monks and nuns were forced from their establishments, the art treasures of 4,600 monasteries were impounded, and Buddhist families were compelled to surrender statues and ritual objects to imperial officials. Wu-wei, literally “nondoing,”
Main Arguments
The encyclopedia’s central claim is that the wisdom teachings of the East constitute a body of knowledge arrived at by a rigorous method, and that this method is experiential rather than conceptual. The Introduction argues that Eastern spiritual research is as pragmatic as Western science and that its findings show greater coherence and stability over millennia, precisely because they rest on repeatable inner experience rather than on shifting theoretical fashion. The corollary is a warning about reading: without knowledge gained from inner experience, the terms of these traditions have been subject to speculations, interpretations, and projections by Western scholars, which is why the same idea is so often understood differently by different authors. The book therefore does not pretend to deliver the essence of insight in verbal form. It offers terms that point to generally valid human experiences, and it expects the reader to supply, through practice, what no definition can supply.
A second argument concerns translation itself. Because a translation is an interpretation reflecting the translator’s understanding, and because many translations are possible while no single correct one exists, the encyclopedia treats its own renderings as provisional and deliberately directs readers to multiple translations of basic texts. A third argument concerns the boundaries between traditions. Zen is treated as a separate subject area not out of editorial convenience but because its self-understanding places it “outside the orthodox teaching,” and because its development was independent enough to warrant it. The book likewise insists on marking where a shared term carries divergent meanings across traditions, giving both explanations rather than collapsing them into one. And a fourth argument is implicit in the treatment of biography: in Zen, philosophico-religious theory matters less than in other teachings, and the lives of individual masters, representing an unbroken lineage going back to Buddha Shakyamuni, play a greater role. What Zen is, the Introduction says, is exemplified in those lives—which is why relatively large space is devoted to biographies, and why the length of a biographical article is not always an index of the person’s importance.
Key Concepts
Certain named ideas recur throughout the entries and give the book its intellectual texture. Prajna, intuitive wisdom, stands at the head of them, since the Introduction defines the whole enterprise by it. Shunyata, emptiness, and buddha-nature or bussho are presented as identical in the teaching of the twentieth-century Japanese Zen master Hakuun Ryoko Yasutani, who holds that with the experience of enlightenment one grasps the world of ku—unfixed, devoid of mass, beyond individuality and personality, outside imagination—so that the true substance of things is inconceivable and inscrutable, and whatever one imagines as Buddha-nature must be unreal. The related term futan-ku, “not just emptiness,” holds that buddha-nature is neither existence nor nonexistence but both and neither depending on viewpoint, illustrated by the Heart Sutra formula that form is nothing other than emptiness and emptiness nothing other than form; it is opposed to tanku, “only emptiness,” and is experienceable only in enlightenment, never in logic.
The path itself is mapped by concepts such as the arya-marga, the sacred supramundane path with its four stages of holiness—stream enterer, once-returner, never-returner, and worthy one—each divided into the state of still being on the way and that of having attained the fruit. Bodhi is traced from its original sense of the four stages attained through the thirty-seven prerequisites of enlightenment to its Mahayana sense of wisdom based on insight into the unity of nirvana and samsara and of subject and object. Bodhichitta, the awakened mind, is given its Tibetan two aspects, relative and absolute, and its tantric development as a concrete physiological entity whose sublimation leads to corporeally experienced enlightenment. Duhkha, suffering, is defined as everything conditioned, subject to arising and passing away, comprised of the five skandhas and not liberated, arising from craving and overcome by the eightfold path. Kundalini-Shakti, the serpent power sleeping at the base of the spinal column, is described as awakenable and made to rise through the chakras until it unites with Shiva at the crown, manifesting as wisdom and bliss. And the I-ching supplies a whole symbolic vocabulary—the hexagrams k’an and li, with their white tiger and green dragon, their lead and mercury—which Taoist inner alchemy adopted to describe processes within the body.
Themes
Running beneath the alphabetical surface are a few large preoccupations. One is the primacy of direct experience over doctrine. Again and again the entries return to the point that what matters cannot be said: the hossen, or dharma contest, demonstrates living truth directly without discursive thinking; the kanno-doko, the mutual exchange of feeling between master and student, is a unitary event possible only in heightened attention; the hossu, or flywhisk, is raised or thrown to the ground to express true reality when words fail. A second theme is lineage and transmission. The book returns repeatedly to the passing of the seal from master to successor—Bodhidharma testing his disciples and finding in Hui-k’o, who answered nothing and only bowed silently, the one who had grasped his marrow; Ho-tse Shen-hui convoking the leading Zen monks of south China to establish Hui-neng as the rightful sixth patriarch; Ikkyū tearing up his own confirmation certificate and refusing to name a dharma successor. A third theme is the meeting of traditions. The Ch’üan-chen tao school synthesizes Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism with Zen elements predominating; the Madhyamika, under the influence of Yogachara, refined its logic and its psychology; Kamalashila is said to have debated the Ch’an followers in Tibet, after which the Tibetan king declared the Indian exposition authoritative. A fourth theme, more quietly present, is the tension between the ideal and its institutional decay: Ikkyū mocked the deteriorating Zen of the great monasteries, and the Introduction itself concedes that its own pioneering terminology will need correction.
The Author’s Conclusions
The encyclopedia closes its introductory matter not with a triumphant claim but with an acknowledgment of limits and an invitation. Roughly four thousand entries cannot cover the entire range of concepts, since each of the four systems has produced tremendous bodies of literature. The work is a first attempt, offered in the knowledge that criticisms are bound to arise and in the hope that others will improve upon it and help develop a unified terminology. The essence of the insights it catalogues cannot be conveyed conceptually or rationally; the terms it defines point to generally valid human experiences, but their real content can only be grasped through immediate personal experience. The book’s final posture, then, is that of a map that knows it is not the territory—useful for orientation, honest about its provisionality, and pointing always beyond itself to the inner exploration by which alone its entries can be verified.
Significance
The significance of such a work lies in the gap it was designed to fill. Before it, the reader who met a term like prajna or kundalini or wu-wei in a book, a clinic, or a meditation hall had little recourse but to piece together an understanding from scattered and mutually inconsistent sources, each Western scholar having devised a transcription scheme of their own. By gathering Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Zen into one alphabetical sequence, by marking each entry with its tradition, by giving both meanings where a term carries different senses in different systems, and by referring readers from Pali to Sanskrit and from Japanese to Chinese and back again, the encyclopedia made a first attempt at a unified terminology for a field in which no fixed standards of form or content had yet been achieved. Its treatment of Zen as a subject area in its own right, its insistence that biography matters as much as doctrine in a tradition that exemplifies itself in the lives of its masters, and its frank admission that many translations are possible while none is uniquely correct, together mark it as a reference work that understands the limits of reference. For the general reader navigating unfamiliar terms in the sciences, the media, the health professions, psychotherapy, meditation study, and psychophysical training, it offers not a substitute for experience but a trustworthy guide to the vocabulary of traditions whose insights, by their own account, must finally be tasted rather than described.
