Thomas Calobrisi's Articles on Lions Roar

Thomas Calobrisi, Lama Hun Lye, Mihiri Tillakaratne, and Noel Alumit explore the meaning and lessons of Vesak, the Buddhist holiday that commemorates the birth, death, and enlightenment of the Buddha. Vesak: Understanding the Lessons Behind the Legends. Thomas Calobrisi explains the extraordinary events of the Buddha’s life that are celebrated on Vesak — his birth, enlightenment, and final nirvana — and how we can look to these legends not for historical information, but as opportunities to form our own understandings of Buddhism. The term Vesak comes from the Pali term Vesakha; it refers to the fourth month of the Indian lunar calendar, which corresponds roughly to the month of May on the Western solar calendar. According to legend, the Buddha was born, achieved enlightenment, and passed into nirvana on the full moon day of Vesakha. While East Asian Buddhist traditions only recognize the Buddha’s birth on this day, it is an important day of celebration for Buddhists around the world. I celebrated Vesak for the first time in 2019, while a doctoral student in religious studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. I got to experience hanamatsuri (“flower festival”), which is typically celebrated by Japanese American Buddhists to commemorate the Buddha’s birth, at the Buddhist Churches of America’s (BCA) inter-sectarian Vesak ceremony in early April. Attending the event alongside my friends, which included BCA minsters-in-training, Zen chaplains, and Christian theologians, I was struck by the diversity of traditions present: BCA ministers, Zen priests from San Francisco Zen Center, Sri Lankan monks from Sacramento, as well as Chinese Chan and Vietnamese Thien monks. The dharma will be our teacher now; what will it teach you? At the center of the festivities was an image of the Buddha as a newborn baby, with one hand pointing to the heavens and the other to the earth, as the legends portray him doing. Chanting and incense filled the hondo while attendees took turns bathing the baby Buddha in sweet tea, as is the Japanese custom on hanamatsuri. There were Boy Scout troops and choirs of all ages singing, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Ministers, monks, and priests offered dharma messages that spoke to the meaning of the Buddha’s birth, realization, and final nirvana. The events of the Buddha’s life celebrated on Vesak come to us in the form of legend; they portray extraordinary events, such as when the newborn Buddha took seven steps and pronounced, “Between heaven and earth, I alone am the World-honored one.” My one-year-old nephew, though remarkable in his own way, has yet to make any such proclamations of his peerless status! These legends of the Buddha, of course, are not accounts of historical events. As Bernard Faure observes in The Thousand One Lives of the Buddha, the more we attempt to look “behind” the legends, the picture of the Buddha becomes so nondescript as to be meaningless. But if we can’t take refuge in historicism, and all we are left with are legends, how do we understand them? What recourse do we have when dealing with extraordinary and miraculous events of the Buddha’s life portrayed in the sutras? I posed just this question to one of my students last spring at the Institute of Buddhist Studies. He answered that we should look for what is liberating in the text rather than what is factual. He was proposing a storied interpretive method, one expressed by Nagarjuna in his Commentary on the Great Perfection of Wisdom, as relying on the meaning rather than the words. As the philosopher Pierre Hadot would say, we should come to the legends as an opportunity for formation rather than information. We have two and a half millennia of tradition to guide our efforts, yet still it falls on each successive generation to take up the legends anew as a means of formation. Let me take an example from a Mahayana Buddhist text, whose title Richard S. Cohen renders as “The Splendid Vision.” The scene is a typical one for Mahayana sutras: the Buddha was residing at the home of Avalokiteshvara on Potalaka Mountain with a retinue of thousands of advanced monks and nuns, top bodhisattvas like Manjushri, gods and goddess, and heavenly kings. There, the Buddha enters a samadhi called “abiding in the knowledge of great compassion, which takes on all beings as its object of contemplation.” The power of this samadhi fills the entire universe with light; for a moment, the blind can see, the deaf can hear, the poor are made wealthy; for a moment, the attention of every being was turned to the Buddha—gods and humans turned away from their pleasures, demons and demi-gods stopped their bickering, even those in hell could briefly recognize one another; all were filled with love and freed from their torments; the earth shook in six directions. Now, the scene of this sutra and the events it recount are certainly extraordinary, but we don’t need to read it literally to access the meaning behind the words. The typical run of things—of greed, hatred, and delusion—were ground to a halt by the power of the Buddha’s compassion. Seeing the text as an opportunity for formation, not information, we might imagine what would this sort of disruptive compassion look like in our own time. Writers such as Zoketsu Norman Fischer and Doshin Nathan Woods see the need for Buddhists to show their solidarity for movements by workers and marginalized groups to achieve economic and social justice. While I hesitate to ascribe something as abstract and ahistorical as “greed” as the fundamental problem, seeking to lessen greed in ourselves and to prevent greedy people from taking advantage of others is a worthwhile pursuit. Indeed, creating an economy focused on meeting people’s needs and allocating duties based on their abilities might be a feat as extraordinary as the Buddha’s samadhi filling the entire universe with light and love! This is not to suggest such a goal is impossible or naively utopian, only that, if achieved, it will become the stuff of new legends. Looking to the extraordinary events of the Buddha’s life that are celebrated on Vesak—his birth, enlightenment, and final nirvana—we can likewise consider these as opportunities for formation that is conducive to liberation. Rather than spoon-feed you my own interpretations, I urge you to consider these narratives not for what history lies “behind” the legends but to grapple with them for their meaning, which might not lie directly within the words. If there was a human person “behind” the legends, he is long gone. Yet, as the Buddha himself said in his final hours with us on Earth, the dharma will be our teacher now; what will it teach you? On Taking Refuge. Lama Hun Lye explores the importance of the Three Refuges to Buddhists, and what it really means to “take refuge.” Editor’s Note: Vesak allows Buddhists to reflect on the Three Refuges: the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, and we can see the Three Refuges reflected in what Vesak commemorates. When we celebrate the birth of the Buddha we celebrate the first refuge: the Buddha himself as a teacher and role model for our individual spiritual paths. Celebrating the Buddha’s enlightenment allows us to learn from and reflect on the second refuge, Dharma, or the Buddha’s teachings that resulted from this awakening. When we commemorate the Buddha’s mahaparinirvana, or the passing of the Buddha’s physical body and attainment of nirvana, we also can reflect on how the Buddha passed on the responsibility of teaching the Dharma to the Sangha, or the monastic community. —Mihiri Tillakaratne, Associate Editor As Vesak Day comes around again, it is an appropriate occasion for reflecting on one of the most central acts in Buddhists’ lives: taking refuge. When we “go for refuge,” we are re-orienting our lives towards the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. Stating our commitment to the Three Refuges, also called the Three Jewels, is accepted by all Buddhists as the gateway to a life of dharma. “To the Buddha, I go for refuge. To the Dharma, I go for refuge. To the Sangha, I go for refuge.” When these words are uttered with understanding and conviction, one enters the Buddhist path. At first, uttering this deceptively simple formula was enough to formally mark one’s transition from the life of an ordinary householder to that of a monastic. In time, the Buddha introduced more complex ceremonies for marking different levels of commitment, so “going for refuge” by formally repeating the three-fold refuge formula became the first step in committing oneself to the Buddha’s way. We must take the Dharma into our own experience until it becomes dharma as realization. Taking refuge in the Buddha begins with being inspired by the example of the 6th-century BCE Indian prince Siddhartha and remembering his beginnings. Siddhartha transformed himself from being under the power of the three poisons into a completely liberated and awakened being we call “buddha.” Under the schema of “outer, inner, and secret” often used in Tibetan Buddhism, this is the “outer” aspect of relying on the Buddha as refuge. The “inner” level is having confidence that we, too, can achieve liberation. The Buddha is also understood as a state of freedom from mental defilements that both you and I can achieve. When we turn to the Buddha with admiration, respect, and devotion, we start the journey of our own transformation from a state of confusion to clarity. “To the Buddha, I go for refuge” is thus less a prayer or supplication and more an anchor for right mindfulness. By remembering this potential, we enter the “secret” level of refuge in the Buddha. Here, our ultimate refuge is our own mind—naturally luminous and boundless but temporarily obscured. The Buddha’s teaching, or Buddhadharma, becomes a refuge when we know how to “return to and rely on” it— or “guiyi,” the expression used in my native language, Mandarin Chinese, to mean “taking refuge.” Learning...

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