[Buddha-l] Monk/nun or lay person

[Stefan Detrez]

2006/3/6, Bruce Burrill <brburl at mailbag.com>:
>
> >>But the particularity of laymen attaining
> Nibbana is a later development within the Canon.
> This shift can be regarded both as doctrinal
> (Enlightenment outside the Sangha!) and historical.<<
>
> And how late are we speaking off here? After the suttas? Evidence?


Second century. One reference I found to layman and enlightenment is
post-canonical (ironically). The Milindapanha.

It is easier to attain nibbana as a monastic in
> that is it what the monastics are able to spend
> their time so doing, but being a monastic is not
> a prerequisite to attaining the status of ariya according to the suttas.


Lay folks can become anagamins, but only monastics can become arhats, in the
Theravada.

Hinayana is an ugly, disgusting word (and
> concept) that was put into the LS's Buddha's
> mouth by the worst sort of sectarian mind set.


You seem to take the term Hinayana ad hominem. It's not because you find it
ugly that others should do the same. My point is that non-monastics becoming
Enlightened is a late development in the Theravada.

Goodness. So Theravada is a term to collectively
> to refer to the whole of the Mainstream Indian
> Buddhist schools. Theravada is the name of an
> ordination lineage and of a particular doctrinal
> school. It is not a "compendium" name to refer to
> the Mainstream schools. It is not a substitute
> for the ugly term coined by Mahayana sectarians.
> Given that the Mahayana was no less Sangha centered, what is your point?


That lay folks becoming enlightened *less conditionally with regard to
monastic demands *than in the (later-)Theravada is a prominent theme in
early Mahayana.

 In idiomatic English hinayana would be
> the "piss-poor vehicle" or the "garbage vehicle."
> In and of itself, the word hinayana is an ugly
> derogatory, divisive, derisive epithet. It is a
> put down term, which is then coupled with a nasty us-versus-them polemic.


I use the term stoically. Greed, anger or delusion do not pop up when I say
it. If you say Barbarians, do you mean the people or the youths on a
destruction derby? If you use Barbarians to denote the historical people, no
one will be eager to point out that you could be meaning youths on a
destruction derby, won't they?

Except that the Mahayana's doctrinal developments
> by the time the Vimala was composed has become
> quite rococo, really only accessible to the
> professionals (the monastics) who would have time
> and resources to study them, which is to say that
> layman Vimala was a way of tweaking the noses of
> the Mainstream Buddhist, not a way of recruiting laity.


Yeah right, monastics study (or maybe even *write)* texts featuring layfolks
becoming enlightened, but don't do anything with it. Credo quia absurdum? I
see a very clear attempt to proselytize: if the monastery was so closed,
restricted to a few good men - as you say -, why bother inventing a Vimala
if it's for inside study only!? Already in the Theravada we see in later
texts a larger importance laid on householders looking for a piece of
Enlightenment and transference of merit. Where are the bodhisatta-lay folks
in the Canon, apart from Vipassin?

>The goal (eye-rolling here) of the Mahayana is
>not nibbana, but buddhahood, which is part of the
>Mahayana redefinition of Buddhism

The Mahayanic Bodhisattva is as a term flexible enough to allow for anyone
to become one, given certain minimal requirements. Bodhisattas do Nibbana
for themselves (as it is said), bodhisattvas wait until everybody around is
enlightened. A discrete way of saying that lay followers as Mahayanin
bodhisattvas won't realize attain Nirvana even if they wanted to. What's the
difference between becoming a Buddha and to achieve Buddhahood, anyway?

"... even after its initial appearance in the
public domain in the 2nd century [Mahayana]
appears to have remained an extremely limited
minority movement – if it remained at all - that
attracted absolutely no documented public or
popular support for at least two more centuries.
It is again a demonstrable fact that anything
even approaching popular support for the Mahayana
cannot be documented until 4th/5th century AD,
and even then the support is overwhelmingly
monastic, not lay donors ... although was - as we
know from Chinese translations - a large and
early Mahayana literature there was no early,
organized, independent, publicly supported
movement that it could have belonged to."

-- G. Schopen "The Inscription on the Ku.san image of Amitabha and the
character of the early Mahayana in India." JIABS 10, 2 pgs 124-5

People's revolution? Seems not. That theory of
the Mahayana has been shown to be a more than a bit problematic.

Of course it's monastic! But to KEEP the people's support the monasteries
had to do something, which was instrumentally producing texts that gave lay
folks greater involvement in the Noble life. I ask you why, if the whole
production of texts was so sangha-centered, lay folks popped up in the texts
claiming enlightenment.

>>Maybe the continuity was interrupted when
Theravada monastics realized that the Dhamma was
beginning to become populist, urging them to
swiftly write the whole thing done and close it.<<

Again, this has nothing to do with the Theravada,
nor is there any real evidence that the Mahayana,
a movement that was highly bound by extremely
complex doctrinal structures, was a populist
movement. And let us not forget that the earliest
of the early Mahayana sutra (pre-introduction of
the ugly term hinayana) the path was for a few good (monastic) men.

Yes, now explain to me then WHY these enlightened layfolks featured in those
texts. Suppose we compare the position of layfolks with regard to Nirvana
between the Theravada and the (Early-)Mahayana: where do lay followers play
a more claiming role?

>>One should be careful to generalize from one
instance ('there's a layman attaining Nibbana, SO
it is characteristic of the whole of the Theravada teachings')<<

He said, generalizing, using a specific term
inappropriately as a general term. The attainment
of ariya status was evident in both the suttas
and in the commentaries. That the majority of the
suttas focuses on monastics is not surprising,
but it is also not surprising to see, for
example, the commentary to the Satipatthana
Suttas gloss "monks" as referring to also the laity.

Would this be an *early* or a *late *commentary?

Stefan
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