Tantric Theravada in Cambodia -

Tantric Buddhism became ascendant  in Angkor during the reign of King Jayavarman VII. His great temples in Angkor Thom, especially the  Bayon, are tantric centers.

The Hevaajra-Tantra seems to have been an important tantric practice in Cambodia at this time.

Boisselier says the brahmavihara meditations are featured in the Hevaajra-Tantra [“we shall expound the chapter on  the divinities. First one should product thought of love, secondly that of compassion, thirdly that of joy, and last of all that of equanimity. Hevajra Tantra I.iii.1] and the tara-sadhana of the sadhanamala.

Why did tantric Buddhism appear so strongly in Angkor (Cambodia) at this time? The Muslim invasion of India destroyed the Tantric centers of Nalanda, Vikramasila and Odantapuri in 1200…Some of the refugee masters went to Angkor, while others went to Nepal and Tibet.

A tantric pantheon led by Hevajra, Vajrasattva, Vajradhara and Vajrapani moved center stage in Cambodia at this time, and Jayavarman had all the resources needed for this in the Phimai tradition from which his Mahidhara dynasty hailed.

The Bayon temple (Ancestor Yantra Temple) with the four-faced Buddhas looking in every direction is a manifestation of this tradition. 

The presence of the Buddhist Tantric masters in Angkor may be attested from evidence in Katmandu, Nepal, where the similar tradition of the Tantric Adi-Buddha eyes look out over the city in all directions from the city from each side of the square harmika of the Katmandu’s Svayambhu Mahacaitya, and similar temples.

BP Groslier, following Jean Filliozat, speculates that the painting of the eyes on the towers in Katmandu and Patan was inspired by the refugee masters from Bengal, at exactly the same time that the giant four-faced Buddhas were carved at the Bayon in Angkor.

“It has been shown recently that it [the new form of Buddhism of Jayavarman VII] very probably consisted of the doctrine elaborated in Nalanda, then taught in Angkor – finally in Japan – by the doctors of the [Buddhist] law who had to flee before the Moslem invaders in the closing years of the 12^th century. It is therefore to this school and its texts that we should turn to JayavarmanVII’s conceptions of Buddhism, and therefore for the sources of the Bayon. This is just as much as the case for the Bengali zealots who took refuge at the same time in Nepal and Kashmir, who were very probably the initiators of the stupas marked with four stylized faces, oriented to the four directions, which are the only exact parallels that can be found with the Khmer face towers.” [Groslier, BP]

Ulrich von Schroeder  said of the refugee Buddhist masters of 1200:

“The annihilation of Indian Buddhism caused a great influx of refugees to Nepal who swarmed to the Buddhist monasteries of Kathmandu Valley, mostly in Patan and Kathmandu…the arrival of these Buddhist refugees was beneficial to Nepal and in many ways one of them being that among the immigrants were many eminent Indian Buddhist scholars who had salvaged valuable manuscripts and probably many cast images. There is every reason to believe that among these displaced Buddhists were also many skilled artists and craftsmen. At the same time the importance of the viharas as centers of Buddhist studies increased and the Tibetan Buddhists shifted their focus from north-eastern India to Nepal. [Ulright von Schroedder Indo-Tibetan bronzes. Visual Dharma Publications, Hong Kong.]

In the years 1197-1207, when all the Ganges valley monasteries were being destroyed, the Khmer were carving face-towers in Buddhist Bayon Banteay Chmar and other temples, and producing stone and bronze icons of Tantric deities such as Hevajra, Vajradhara and Vajrapani – all progeny of Nalanda, Vikramasila and another Indian monasteries.

“In tantric thinking, a king’s personal meditation in discovering the Buddha inside himself generates a mandala of deities, not only for himself but for the whole state. [Jayavarman was a skillful meditator and a learned Buddhist. His second wife and two sons were skilled Sanskritists who composed his three major extant inscriptions, and he is described in his inscriptions as ‘learned in the sutras’ and “a veritable Panini in his youth’ and is shown pronouncing the mantras at a public ritual.”

The apsaras (female goddess dancers) carved into the temples of Angkor are tantric-yoginis. Images of the Yogini-Hevajra cult.

History records that King Jayavarman VII entered the pinnacle of his temple at Angkor Thom every night in order to have intercourse with a “female dragon” – that is, engage in tantric meditation rites with a female partner.

Hevajra Tantra was the first of a new class of Mother Tantras that gave a strong female orientation to its mandalas. …Jayavarman’s temples were known for the special focus they gave to female officiants. The 1225 chronicle of Chau Ju-Kua, the Chinese Superintendent of Maritime Trade in Canton, contains an account of temple life:

“[in Chen-la, ie. Cambodia] the people are devout Buddhists. In the temples there are 300 foreign women; they dance and offer food to the Buddha. They are called a-nan [Skt. Ananda (bliss)]…the incantations of the Buddhist and Taoist [Shiva yogin] priests have magical powers.’”

When Cambodia later adopted Theravada Buddhism, this older strata of tantric Buddhism was subsumed and assimilated into the Buddhist traditions.

Where are you going? Part 2

Material-development and growth fuels the economy. Policy makers, technicians, bureaucrats intensify their efforts to accelerate and expand its growth. The world will be destroyed by this way of thinking.

In former times, when society was based on agriculture in small family farms, rooted in religious culture of community, sharing, charity, selflessness -- cooperation rather than competition was the norm. 

Harmony and preservation of resources was valued. 

Our modern way of life is not superior to the village life of rural societies.

Why do the technocrats think they are ‘improving” the world, or way of life, through their heartless innovations?

Why  do they think things are improving, for the better? How do they measure improvement?

Mahatma Gandhi rejected production-consumption as the goal/aim of human life.

Spirituality is primary to material, he said. The less dependence on material things, the greater the freedom of spirit. The bigger anything is, the more dehumanizing, inhuman, it becomes. Big systems are destructive to humanity.

Reject “bigness” and “growth” as admirable values; but admire “smallness,” simplicity, balance as the qualities of development.

Shumacher, in his book Small is Beautiful, said: “The keynote to Buddhist economics is simplicity and non-violence. From the economists point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern – amazingly, small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results.”

He recommended (1) methods free of machinery; (2) play as part of life/work; (3) decentralization of power, decisions on the lowest level.

Wise technologies would: Respect simple satisfactions, traditional values, gradual progress in both physical and spiritual endeavors, preservation rather than destruction, reduction of craving, avoidance of violence, and development of spiritual rather than material things.

As I reflect on "wise technologies" I think these suggestions would be a way of evaluating skillful or unskillful decisions:

Human values vs Technological values

People first    vs    profits first

Spiritual development    vs    material development

Preservation   vs    innovation

Inward    vs    outward

Quality    vs    quantity

Technology must submit to nature    vs    nature must submit to technology

Contentment    vs    desire/craving

Unity (harmony)    vs    conformity

Needs    vs    luxury

Abundance    vs    scarcity

Balance    vs    growth

Connection     vs     attachment

Interbeing (social)    vs    individual/self

Diverse (local)    vs    universal (global)

Cooperation    vs    competition

Sharing    vs    hoarding

Simplicity    vs    complexity

Decentralization    vs    centralization

Small    vs   big

Slow/gradual    vs    fast/instant results

Humans submit to nature    vs    humans submit to machines

Priceless    vs    valued

Subjective    vs    objective

Welfare    vs    warfare

Duty    vs    rights

Where are You Going? Part 1

I often contemplate the effects of technology on human person, and on society.

What is technology for? Does nature need, or benefit, from technology? How? In what way?

How can we dare to contradict the voices of development, globalization, progress?

Technology must serve human beings; foster the growth, development, flowering and fruition of  human nature. Technology must not violate human beings.

Therefore, in order to distinguish between skilful, useful technologies, and harmful, destructive technologies, we must first understand the nature of humanity. What is human nature?  Does technology serve to further this meaningful nature? Does technology make people more truly human? Technology should serve human nature.

What is the meaning and purpose of human life? What is man and what should he be? If we, as a ‘civilization’ don’t have an answer to this most fundamental question, how can we design a technology to serve that end?

If technology is not intended to serve the furtherance and potential of human life, then to what purpose IS technology developed? To make money? To increase economic activity? Even when that economic activity is directly detrimental to human life, and other forms of life?

For technology is to serve the human person, it must recognize that the human person is in a society, community of relationships, in a natural environment of life systems.

For example, we should ask ourselves: Why do we put technology at the service of luxury for the privilege of elites, when the majority of the human race does not have food, medicine, homes, or the requisites to sustain life?

It’s time to put the modern world on notice, that they must respect human spirituality.

Only spirituality puts material concerns second; and materialism must be put in its place.

The technocrats are almost like medieval popes, disdain others. They alone are masters of knowledge, they have all power and knowledge. They believe they can dictate and pontificate to the rest of us, and who do we think we are to questions their authority? They wonder at our hubris to question, even challenge, their globalization-vision of Utopia, technotopia.

Selfishness must be restrained. But how do we answer those who say that human nature is essentially selfish, oriented toward domination, self indulgence, cruelty?

All I can say is: Living together in harmony and cooperation is preferable to living together in conflict and violent coercion, isn’t it?

We must dismantle the industry of war.

Is growth good? When is enough enough?

When you have enough, is growth good?

Is it heresy even to ask such questions?

I suggest that technological progress should be oriented toward preservation, protection, conservation, and cultivation of life.

Yet, we continue with a mindless growth, spiraling out of control. It is “mindless” because “the masters of the world” are afraid that if the quantity is not increased, everything will come to a standstill, or the system will go haywire, leading to possible ruin. They want to maintain the status of the rich. Growth, they believe, will satisfy the peons because “little people” will receive some trickle-down, while the rich reap the vast wealth.

Thomas Merton on Action and Contemplation

"Do everything you can to avoid the amusements and the noise and business of men."

"Keep as far away as you can from the places where they gather to cheat and insult one another, to to mock one another with their false gestures of friendship."

"Do not read their newspapers, if you can help it. Be glad if you can keep beyond the reach of their radios. Do not bother with their unearthly songs or their intolerable concerns for the way their bodies look and feel."

"Do not smoke their cigarettes or drink the things they drink or share their preoccupations with different kinds of food. Do not complicate you life by looking at the pictures in their magazines." -- Thomas Merton.

We live in a hyper-active world of spectacular technological wonders.

Technology is about "action" and not at all concerned with "contemplation" or meditative attainment. With outward expansion and movement, and not with inward stillness and concentration.

Is it possible to create a "contemplative technology"?

The modern world is a "commotion" of movement, with an intolerance  or incomprehension of stillness, silence, and peace.

Commotion is defined as : (1) a state of civil unrest or insurrection; (2) a steady or recurrent motion; (3) a mental excitement or confusion; (4) an agitated disturbance; (5) a  noisy confusion.

Isn't that an accurate description of life in the modern world?

Technology allows us to supplant internal restlessness with external commotion. It allows us to distract ourselves, or "escape" from, our inner restlessness, inner suffering, through movement. It is no accident that the contemplative monasteries of Europe were suppressed at exactly the same moment of the construction of the modern state, and its new faith in "progress", movement, and scientific reasoning.

Technology is not the problem, it is the symptom of an underlying sickness that rests in human hearts.

Meditation is the antidote to modern technology. Meditation is a deepening of experience, inner experience, rather than a flight into external activity. If you can't go far, you go deep.

In the contemporary world, action is mistaken for life. Movement is mistaken for life. Commotion is mistaken for communion.

We create a commotion to avoid, escape, express, replace the inner agitation, and anguish of soul, from living in an intolerable world. And to escape or deny the guilt we feel for having cooperated in the construction of such a cruel and selfish world. We feel guilty because we are guilty.

By committing ourselves to a nonviolent way of life, and cultivating inwardness, we can re-inhabit our vacant inner lives. By arousing our energies by keeping the welfare of others at heart, we can attain enough courage to grow patient and compassionate to our own humanity, and awaken to inwardness, to our own Buddha nature, or "the kingdom of God."

At the heart of commotion is an urgent compulsion to MOVE, to move away form "here" in this place, to escape from the present moment.

Commotion is the refusal to meditate. It is "the passion for unreality" Merton said.

The good news is that we can STOP. We can sit down, shut up, and go inward, and pay attention to the trees.

In the Japanese edition of The Seven Story Mountain, Merton says that Modernism, with its "ideology of matter, power, quantity, movement, activism, and force. I reject this because I see it to be the source and expression of the spiritual hell which man has made of this world: the hell which has burst into flames in two total wars of incredible horror, the hell of spiritual emptiness and sub-human fury which has resulted in crimes like Auschwitz and Hiroshima. This I must reject with all the power of my being. This all sane men must reject. But the question is: How can we sincerely reject the effect if he continues to embrace the cause?"

He became a monk as a rejection of the modern technological world, he said. "As a radical liberation from the delusions and obsessions of modern man and his society."

The monastic life is a rejection, and alternative, to the modern world with its values, assumptions, views.

"It is my intention to make my entire life a rejection, a protest against the crimes and injustices of war and political tyranny which threatens to destroy the whole race of men and the world with him."

"By my monastic vows and life, I am saying NO to all the concentration camps, the aerial bombardments, the staged political trials, the judicial murders, the racial injustices, the economic tyrannies, and the whole socio-economic apparatus which seems geared for nothing but global destruction in spite of all its fair words in favor of peace,"

Are we Things in a Material World?

"We don't realize how much the current indoctrination into systematic and organized consumption is the equivalent and extension, in the twentieth century, of the great indoctrination of rural populations into industrial labor, which occurred during the nineteenth century."

"This same process of rationalization of productive forces, which took place in the nineteenth century in the production sector, is accomplished, in the twentieth century, in the consumption sector."

"We are surrounded today by the remarkable conspicuousness of consumption and affluence, established by the multiplication of objects, services and material goods, all of which constitute a part of fundamental mutation in the ecology of the human species."

"Strictly speaking, these affluent individuals are no longer surrounded by other human beings as they were in the past, but by objects..."

"Just as the wolf-child becomes a wolf by living among wolves, so we are ourselves becoming functional objects."

"We are living in the period of objects: that is, we live by their rhythm, according to their incessant succession."

"Today, it is we who are observing their birth, fulfillment...We have reached the point where 'consumption' has grasped the whole of life."

-- Jean Baudriallard