The Seers and the Awakened One
The Buddha, the Vedic World and Two and a Half Thousand Years of Mutual Illumination
Prologue
There is a story about the Buddha that has been told so often it has hardened into a kind of certainty: that he rose up against the Vedic world, overturned the authority of the brahmins, abolished caste, and founded a religion that stood from its first day in opposition to everything that would later be called Hinduism. It is a stirring story, and it flatters modern sensibilities. It is also, in its simple form, not what the oldest texts say.
When we open the Pali Canon itself and read it slowly, a different and far more interesting picture emerges. The Buddha speaks of the ancient seers with reverence. He addresses brahmins as friends, debates them as equals, accepts them in great numbers into his community, and redefines their highest title rather than discarding it. He criticises animal sacrifice and the pride of birth, as the Upaniṣads and the Bhagavad Gītā also do. His sharpest words are reserved not for the Vedic heritage as such but for its corruption, for a priesthood that has forgotten what its own forefathers knew.
This is not to deny that something new and radical entered the world with the Buddha. It did. Nor is it to deny that the relationship between Buddhists and brahmins later knew real hostility, rivalry for royal favour, and bitter polemic. It did. But between the simple story of opposition and the equally simple story of sameness lies the truth: two great streams of Indian contemplative life, born from the same ground, drawing on the same language, the same seers, the same longing for liberation, and illuminating one another, again and again, for two and a half thousand years.
What follows traces that relationship from the oldest suttas to the Great Perfection, and from the forest debates of the Buddha's own time to the meeting of Yogācāra and Advaita, of Śaiva and Buddhist tantra, and perhaps of the Bhagavad Gītā and the teaching of buddha-nature itself.
I. The Ancient Seers
Again and again in the Pali Canon, when the Buddha speaks with learned brahmins, a list of names appears. In the Tevijja Sutta, the Ambaṭṭha Sutta, the Caṅkī Sutta and in the Vinaya, he names the ancient seers who first gave voice to the Vedic hymns: Aṭṭhaka, Vāmaka, Vāmadeva, Vessāmitta, Yamataggi, Aṅgīrasa, Bhāradvāja, Vāseṭṭha, Kassapa and Bhagu. The Pali list has ten names, not seven, but the heart of it is unmistakable. Vāmadeva, Viśvāmitra, Jamadagni, Aṅgiras, Bharadvāja, Vasiṣṭha, Kaśyapa and Bhṛgu: these are the seers of the Ṛgveda, the very lineage that the brahmanical tradition counts among the Seven Ṛṣis and their kin.
How does the Buddha speak of them? He calls them pubbakā isayo mantānaṃ kattāro mantānaṃ pavattāro, the ancient seers who made the mantras and set them in motion, whose ancient verses, sung, recited and collected, the brahmins of his own day still chant and repeat. There is no mockery in this phrase. It is the respectful acknowledgement of an origin.
What the Buddha questions is not the seers but their descendants. In the Tevijja Sutta two young brahmins come to him, disputing which of the brahmanical paths leads to union with Brahmā. He asks them whether any of the brahmins of their day has seen Brahmā face to face. No. Their teachers? No. Their teachers' teachers, back seven generations? No. Then he asks about the ancient seers themselves, and here the point turns gently: even those great seers never claimed, “We know and we see where Brahmā is.” How then can their latter-day followers, who have seen nothing, presume to teach the way? It is a critique of borrowed authority, of claiming the seers' mantle without the seers' vision. The Buddha then teaches the young men the way to Brahmā that he himself knows: the four immeasurables, love, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity, filling all directions. He does not abolish the goal of their tradition. He shows them how it is truly reached.
Nowhere is the Buddha's reverence for the ancient brahmins clearer than in the Brāhmaṇadhammika Sutta of the Sutta Nipāta. Elderly brahmins of Kosala ask him whether the brahmins of today still live by the dharma of the ancient brahmins. His answer is no; and then he paints, with evident love, a portrait of the ancients. The seers of old were self-restrained ascetics, he says. They abandoned the five strands of sense pleasure and lived for their own true good. They kept no cattle, no gold, no grain; sacred study was their wealth and their treasure. For forty-eight years they kept the holy life of chastity in pursuit of knowledge and right conduct. When they made offerings, they offered rice, beds, clothing and ghee, never the life of a cow, for the cow, they said, is like a mother and a father to us, the giver of food, strength, beauty and happiness. Only later, the Buddha says, seeing the splendour of kings, did the brahmins grow covetous; they composed new mantras, went to King Okkāka, and persuaded him to slaughter cattle in sacrifice; and from that moment, as the knife fell, dharma declined.
Read this sutta once with an open mind and the conventional picture dissolves. The Buddha is not speaking as an outsider who despises the Vedic world. He is speaking as one who honours its original purity and grieves over its decline. His complaint against the brahmins of his day is precisely that they have fallen away from the dharma of their own forefathers.
The Doṇa Sutta of the Aṅguttara Nikāya makes the same point in another form. The Buddha distinguishes five kinds of brahmins, from the one who is like Brahmā, who keeps the holy life, attains the meditative absorptions and dwells in the immeasurables, down to the one who has become like an outcaste through broken vows and greed. He names the ancient seers once more as the source of the mantras, and holds up their discipline as the measure against which the brahmins of his own time fall short.
And then there is the most telling fact of all. The Buddha himself was called a seer. In the Sutta Nipāta and throughout the Pali verses he is mahesī, the great seer, and isisattama, the highest among seers. He gave his first teaching at Isipatana near Benares, “the place where seers alight.” In Sanskrit Buddhist literature, in the Lalitavistara and the poetry of Aśvaghoṣa, he is maharṣi, the great ṛṣi, and he is praised as muni, the silent sage, the word the Ṛgveda itself uses for the long-haired ecstatic who flies with the winds. If the Buddha and his followers had regarded the seers as their enemies, they would hardly have chosen the seers' own title as one of the highest names for the Awakened One. They did so because, in their eyes, he was the fulfilment of what the ancient seers had been: one who truly sees.
II. Samaṇa and Brāhmaṇa
Few phrases occur in the Pali Canon more often than samaṇa-brāhmaṇā, “ascetics and brahmins.” When the Buddha speaks of those who are worthy of gifts, of those whose views deserve examination, of those who have or have not understood the arising and passing of things, he speaks of samaṇas and brahmins together. They are the two great classes of religious seekers in his world: the wandering renunciants who have left the household, and the brahmins who carry the sacred learning. He addresses both. He measures both by the same standard. Neither is dismissed.
Two centuries after the Buddha, the great Buddhist emperor Aśoka carved this same pairing into stone across the Indian subcontinent. His edicts enjoin, again and again, generosity and respect toward bāmhaṇa-samaṇa, brahmins and ascetics, as one of the marks of a righteous life. The most celebrated royal patron of Buddhism in Indian history did not set brahmins against the Dharma. He placed them side by side with the renunciants as objects of honour and support. Whatever later tensions arose, the ideal of the Mauryan Dharma was harmony.
At the same time, the Buddha does something subtle and profound with the word brāhmaṇa. He does not abandon it. He fills it with a deeper meaning. The final chapter of the Dhammapada, the Brāhmaṇavagga, consists of more than forty verses, each ending with the refrain: “Him I call a brahmin.” Whom does he call a brahmin? Not one born of a brahmin mother, but one who has cut every fetter, who is free of anger and craving, who bears no grudge, who is gentle, truthful and pure, who has crossed over and knows the end of birth. In the Vāseṭṭha Sutta he teaches two young brahmins that among plants and animals there are differences of kind marked by birth, but among human beings no such marks exist; one is a farmer, a merchant, a priest or a king by what one does, and one is a brahmin by conduct, not by birth.
This is not the rejection of the brahmanical ideal. It is its exaltation. The Buddha takes the highest title of the Vedic world and declares that it belongs to whoever truly lives it. In doing so he stands remarkably close to the Upaniṣads, which say that the true brahmin is the one who knows Brahman, and to the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, where Yājñavalkya teaches that only one who departs this world knowing the imperishable is a brahmin.
The Kūṭadanta Sutta shows the same spirit in the sphere of sacrifice. A wealthy brahmin has prepared a vast offering of hundreds of bulls, goats and sheep, and asks the Buddha how a great sacrifice should be performed. The Buddha does not ridicule the idea of sacrifice. He tells the story of an ancient king whose priest taught him a sacrifice in which no animal was killed, no tree cut down, no labourer forced to work, and which was offered with ghee, oil, butter, curds, honey and molasses. Then, step by step, he leads Kūṭadanta to ever higher sacrifices: gifts to the virtuous, taking refuge, keeping the precepts, the meditative absorptions, and finally liberation itself, the sacrifice that surpasses all others. Kūṭadanta releases the animals and takes refuge. The sacrifice has not been abolished; it has been interiorised and fulfilled.
III. The Knower of the Veda
It is true that the Buddha is called vedagū in the Pali Canon, and so are the awakened ones who follow him. The word means “one who has gone to the Veda,” “one who has reached the end of knowledge,” and in the brahmanical world it named the accomplished master of the sacred texts. The Buddhist poets took it over and applied it to the Buddha again and again, above all in the oldest verses of the Sutta Nipāta.
The most beautiful instance is in the Sabhiya Sutta. The wanderer Sabhiya asks the Buddha: whom do the wise call a vedagū? The Buddha answers with a play on words that only works in a world steeped in Vedic learning. One is a vedagū, he says, who has examined all the vedas there are, of samaṇas and of brahmins, who is free of passion toward all feelings, vedanā, and who, having gone beyond all veda, has reached the far shore of knowing. The Buddha does not say that the Veda is worthless. He says that the true knower of the Veda is the one who has passed through all knowing to its end, where knowledge becomes liberation.
The same transformation happens with the brahmin's proudest title, tevijja, “master of the three Vedas.” In the Tevijja-Vacchagotta Sutta and in the Aṅguttara Nikāya, the Buddha explains what a master of the three knowledges is in the noble discipline: one who remembers his former lives, who sees with the divine eye how beings pass away and are reborn according to their deeds, and who has destroyed the defilements and knows that he is free. These are the three knowledges the Buddha himself realised in the three watches of the night of his awakening. The highest honour of the Vedic scholar becomes the name for awakening itself.
It should be said honestly that the canonical formula describing mastery of the Vedas, “master of the three Vedas with their lexicons and ritual texts, their phonology and etymology, and the histories as fifth,” is in the suttas applied to the Buddha's brahmin interlocutors, such as Ambaṭṭha, Caṅkī, Sela and Brahmāyu, rather than to Gotama himself. The traditions about his own education are later. In the Jātakas the Bodhisatta is very often born as a brahmin who masters the three Vedas at Takkasilā. In the Lalitavistara the young prince astonishes his teachers by knowing every script and every art before he is taught, and among the sciences he is said to master are the Vedic disciplines. The image of the Bodhisattva as one who has studied all the learning of his world is thus a constant of Buddhist memory, even if the earliest suttas do not describe his schooling.
There is one more thread, perhaps the most striking of all. In the Sela Sutta, the Brahmāyu Sutta and the Ambaṭṭha Sutta, learned brahmins come to examine the Buddha for the thirty-two marks of a great man, the mahāpurisa-lakkhaṇa. And where do they know these marks from? From their own mantras. The suttas say it plainly: these marks of a great man have been handed down in our mantras, and for one who bears them there are only two destinies, to become a universal monarch or, if he goes forth, a fully awakened Buddha. The brahmin Sela, master of the three Vedas, recognises the marks, praises the Buddha in verse, and goes forth with three hundred of his students.
Think about what this means. According to the Pali Canon itself, the brahmanical tradition preserved in its sacred lore the very signs by which a Buddha could be recognised. The Vedic world, in Buddhist memory, did not stand outside the coming of the Buddha. It was waiting for him.
IV. The Spirit of the Age
The Buddha's critique of animal sacrifice and of ritual performed for worldly gain was not a voice crying alone in the wilderness. It belonged to a great turning of the Indian spirit, a turning that runs through the Upaniṣads and finds its most famous expression in the Bhagavad Gītā.
Listen to Kṛṣṇa in the second chapter of the Gītā. He speaks of the unwise who delight in the letter of the Veda, vedavādaratāḥ, who say there is nothing beyond it, whose minds are full of desire and who hold heaven as their highest goal. They utter flowery words that promise rebirth as the fruit of action and are full of elaborate rites for the sake of pleasure and power; and those who are carried away by such words do not attain the steady wisdom of meditation. The Vedas, Kṛṣṇa says, deal with the three qualities of nature; be free of them, Arjuna. As much use as there is in a small well when there is flooding water on every side, so much use is there in all the Vedas for a brahmin who truly knows. Later in the Gītā the sacrifice of knowledge is praised above every sacrifice of material things, for all action finds its completion in knowledge.
The Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad is sharper still. The sacrifices with their eighteen performers, it says, are unsteady boats; the fools who delight in them as the highest good go again and again to old age and death. Dwelling in the midst of ignorance, thinking themselves wise and learned, they wander about like the blind led by the blind. The Chāndogya Upaniṣad tells a strange and comic story of a procession of dogs who chant a ritual hymn for food, a parody of priests singing for their fee. And in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka, the one who worships a deity as other than himself is said to be, to the gods, like a domestic animal, who serves them and does not know.
This is the world into which the Buddha was born. Across the whole of northern India, seekers of every kind were turning inward, from the outer fire to the inner fire, from the sacrifice of animals to the sacrifice of the self, from heaven as a reward to liberation as the end of all rewards. The renunciant movements, the Jains, the Ājīvikas, the wandering ascetics of many schools, and the Upaniṣadic sages within the brahmanical fold itself, all shared in this turning. The Buddha's voice was the clearest and most systematic among them, but it was one voice in a great chorus.
In this light, the Buddha's criticism of the brahmins of his day appears in its true proportion. When he says, in the Brāhmaṇadhammika Sutta, that the ancient seers lived in purity and that their descendants fell away into greed and bloody sacrifice, he is saying something the Upaniṣads and the Gītā would recognise. All of them honour the inner meaning of the Vedic heritage and criticise its outer husk. The ancient seers, in this vision, knew what the Veda truly meant; the priests who came after them kept the words and lost the sight.
V. A Sangha Among Sanghas
In the Buddha's lifetime his community was one among many. The forests and parks around the cities of the Ganges plain were full of wandering ascetics, paribbājakas, gathered around teachers of every persuasion, debating, meditating, moving from teacher to teacher in search of the one who could show them the deathless. Brahmins were among them in great numbers. To leave one teacher's community and join another's was an ordinary act of spiritual seeking, not a betrayal of one's birth.
The Buddha's closest disciples came largely from this world, and many of them were brahmins. Sāriputta and Mahāmoggallāna, the two chief disciples, were sons of brahmin families who had first followed the wanderer Sañjaya. Mahākassapa, who led the first council after the Buddha's death, was a brahmin of Magadha. Mahākaccāna, the great expounder of brief teachings, was the son of a royal priest of Ujjenī. Puṇṇa Mantāniputta, praised as the foremost teacher of the Dharma, was a brahmin, as was Aññā Koṇḍañña, the first to understand the Buddha's first sermon, who as a young brahmin had examined the infant prince and foretold his awakening. The brahmin Sela came with three hundred students. The aged brahmin teacher Bāvarī sent his sixteen pupils from the far south to question the Buddha, and their questions and his answers form the Pārāyanavagga, “the Way to the Far Shore,” one of the oldest and most luminous parts of the whole Canon. Among lay followers, the great brahmin landholders Soṇadaṇḍa, Kūṭadanta and Pokkharasāti took refuge, without ceasing to be brahmins.
One small rule in the Vinaya speaks volumes. Ascetics coming from other schools had to undergo a probation of four months before full ordination. But the Buddha made an exception for the matted-haired fire-worshippers, the jaṭilas, the very ascetics most devoted to the Vedic fire. They could be ordained at once, he said, because they believe in the fruit of action. The three Kassapa brothers of Uruvelā, fire-worshippers with a thousand followers, became the audience for the Fire Sermon, in which the Buddha took up the image of their own sacred fire and showed them that the eye is burning, forms are burning, all is burning with the fire of passion, hatred and delusion. He spoke to them in the language of their own practice.
It would be untrue to say there was no friction. The suttas record brahmins who insulted the Buddha, who called him an outcaste, who resented his teaching that birth confers no purity. The young Ambaṭṭha was openly arrogant toward him. By the second century before the Common Era, the grammarian Patañjali, in his great commentary on Pāṇini, could cite “śramaṇa and brāhmaṇa” as a stock example of perpetual enmity, alongside the snake and the mongoose. The rivalry was real, and it was old.
Yet in the Buddha's own time it had not hardened into two separate religions facing each other across a wall. There were seekers, teachers and communities, brahmin and non-brahmin, debating the same questions in the same language. A brahmin who took refuge in the Buddha did not see himself as abandoning the seers. Very often he saw himself as finding, at last, the one who had truly realised what the seers had sought.
VI. Birth, Varṇa and the Families of the Buddhas
Here we must be honest with ourselves, even where honesty unsettles what we would like to believe. Modern readers often wish the Buddha had been a social revolutionary who set out to abolish the varṇa order. The texts do not show this. They show something both more subtle and more radical.
In the Ambaṭṭha Sutta, when the young brahmin Ambaṭṭha boasts of brahmin superiority, the Buddha answers him on his own ground: if one counts lineage, he says, the khattiyas are higher and the brahmins lower. And he quotes a verse spoken by Brahmā Sanaṅkumāra: among people who rely on clan, the khattiya is the best; but one perfect in knowledge and conduct is the best among gods and humans. In the Mahāpadāna Sutta he recounts the seven Buddhas of the past and names the class of each: Vipassī, Sikhī and Vessabhū were khattiyas; Kakusandha, Koṇāgamana and Kassapa were brahmins; and “I, at present, am a khattiya.” The later Pali tradition, in the introduction to the Jātakas, makes it a principle: before his final birth the Bodhisatta surveys the world with five great considerations, among them the family into which he will be born, and a Buddha is born only into a khattiya or a brahmin family, whichever the world esteems more highly in that age. The future Buddha Metteyya, according to the later Pali tradition, will be born into a brahmin family.
So the Buddhas themselves, in Buddhist memory, are born into the two highest varṇas, and three of the seven Buddhas of the past were brahmins. The Buddha speaks from within the social world of his time, even taking pride in his own lineage when it serves to humble the pride of others. He does not call for the varṇa order to be dismantled.
And yet he denies it all spiritual weight. In the Assalāyana Sutta a brahmin youth claims that brahmins alone are pure, born from the mouth of Brahmā. The Buddha points out that brahmin women are seen to menstruate, conceive and give birth like any other women; that in the lands of the Greeks and Kambojas there are only masters and servants, and a master may become a servant and a servant a master; that fire kindled from the wood of a sāl tree or from the wood of a dog's trough burns and shines alike. In the Madhurā Sutta he shows that a wealthy man of any class will be served by others, that a wrongdoer of any class will be reborn in suffering, and that one who goes forth and lives the holy life is honoured whatever his birth. In the Aggañña Sutta he tells the origin of the classes as a story of human roles arising over time, and concludes that the Dharma, not birth, is the highest in this world and the next.
Within his own community the principle was absolute. When the Sakyan princes went forth, they asked that Upāli, the palace barber, be ordained before them, so that they would have to bow to him as their senior and humble their pride; and Upāli became the great master of the Vinaya. As great rivers, the Buddha said, lose their former names when they reach the ocean and are called simply the ocean, so the four classes, when they go forth into this Dharma, lose their former names and are called simply ascetics, sons of the Sakyan.
The truth, then, is neither the modern dream nor its opposite. The Buddha accepted varṇa as a fact of the society he lived in, and did not set out to overturn it. But he declared, with complete clarity, that it determines nothing about purity, worth or liberation, and in his Sangha he made it disappear. That is a position we should accept as it is, without pressing it into either a revolutionary or a conservative shape.
VII. Courts, Debates and One World of Words
If the rivalry between samaṇa and brāhmaṇa was already proverbial in Patañjali's day, what turned it into the deeper divide that later centuries knew? A large part of the answer lies in the culture of royal patronage and public debate.
Indian kings honoured learning, and they honoured it by supporting those who could defend their views in open assembly. Over the centuries, monasteries, temples and schools came to depend on such support, and the public debate before a king became a contest with very real stakes: land grants, royal favour, the conversion of students, sometimes the survival of an institution. The biography of Vasubandhu preserved by Paramārtha tells how a Sāṃkhya master defeated Vasubandhu's teacher before King Vikramāditya at Ayodhyā, and how Vasubandhu later answered him in writing and won the king's reward. In the seventh century Xuanzang describes the great assembly convened by King Harṣa at Kanauj, where he himself defended the Mahāyāna against all comers, and he describes a world in which the loser of a debate might be required to become the disciple of the winner, or to pay an even heavier price. The Tibetan histories of Indian Buddhism, and on the other side the much later hagiographies of Śaṅkara's “conquest of the directions,” are full of such contests, often embellished, but they remember something real.
This culture reached its height from the Gupta period onward, from about the fourth century, through the post-Gupta kingdoms, and into the age of the Pālas in Bengal and Bihar between the eighth and twelfth centuries. It was an age of great logicians and great system-builders on both sides: Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, Kumārila and Uddyotakara, Śaṅkara and his successors. Their debates sharpened every school's thinking to an extraordinary degree. They also deepened the sense of two sides. It was in these centuries, far more than in the Buddha's own time, that “Buddhist” and “brahmanical” became fixed identities defined against each other.
And yet, even in this age of rivalry, the shared world remained. Consider Amarasiṃha, whose Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana, the Amarakośa, became the most beloved thesaurus of the Sanskrit language, memorised by generations of students of every school. Tradition remembers him as a Buddhist, and his work has been dated to roughly the Gupta age. Among the names of the divine in its first book stand the names of the Buddha, the Omniscient, the Sugata, the Tathāgata, the Lord of the Dharma, the Sage of the Śākyas, beside the names of Brahmā, Viṣṇu and Śiva. And its second book organises the whole of human society precisely according to the four varṇas: a section on the brahmins with all the vocabulary of Vedic study, sacrifice and ritual; a section on the kṣatriyas with the language of kingship and war; a section on the vaiśyas with agriculture and trade; a section on the śūdras with the crafts and services.
A lexicon records the language of its world rather than preaching a doctrine. But that is exactly the point. A Buddhist scholar, writing for all of learned India, could gather the whole of his society, the Buddha and the gods, the brahmin at his fire and the potter at his wheel, into one serene and ordered vision of the Sanskrit world, without any sense that his faith required him to stand outside it. Whatever the debaters were doing in the royal halls, the language itself was still one house.
VIII. The Brahmin Masters of the Great Vehicle
When we turn from the Buddha's disciples to the great philosophers of Indian Buddhism, a striking pattern appears. According to the traditional biographies, a remarkable number of the founders and masters of the Mahāyāna were born brahmins, trained first in Vedic learning, and brought that training with them into the Dharma.
Aśvaghoṣa, the poet whose Buddhacarita gave the life of the Buddha its most beautiful Sanskrit form, is remembered as a brahmin of great learning who came to the Dharma through debate; his poetry moves with complete ease through the world of the epics and the Vedic seers. Mātṛceṭa, whose hymns of praise were chanted in Indian monasteries for centuries, was, according to Tāranātha, a brahmin debater before he became a Buddhist.
Nāgārjuna, the founder of the Madhyamaka, was born, according to the biography translated into Chinese by Kumārajīva, into a brahmin family of South India, and had mastered the Vedas and all the sciences of his day before he turned to the Dharma. The same biography tells that his great disciple Āryadeva was also a South Indian brahmin. Asaṅga and Vasubandhu, the brothers who founded the Yogācāra and gave the Abhidharma its classical form in the Abhidharmakośa, were born, according to Paramārtha's life of Vasubandhu, into a brahmin family of the Kauśika lineage in Puruṣapura. Dignāga, the founder of Buddhist logic, is said by Tāranātha to have been born a brahmin near Kāñcī, and Dharmakīrti, the greatest of Buddhist logicians, a brahmin of the South trained in Vedic learning. Buddhaghosa, whose commentaries shaped the whole of Theravāda, is described in the Sri Lankan chronicle as a brahmin youth from near Bodhgayā, master of the three Vedas, who was won to the Dharma in debate. And among the great siddhas of the Secret Mantra, Saraha, the singer of the dohās, is remembered as a brahmin who abandoned his caste to live with an arrow-maker's daughter.
Not all were brahmins. Śāntideva was a prince, and Śāntarakṣita, who brought the Dharma to Tibet, came from a royal house. The pattern is not a law. But it is unmistakable, and it is significant. These masters did not leave their learning at the monastery gate. The precision of Pāṇinian grammar, the rigour of brahmanical logic, the hermeneutics of the Mīmāṃsā, the subtlety of Sāṃkhya analysis, all flowed into Buddhist thought through them. The great philosophical edifice of the Mahāyāna was built, to a remarkable degree, by brahmin minds that had turned their inherited brilliance toward the realisation of emptiness.
IX. Secret Mantra: The Families of the Awakened
When the Dharma flowered into the Secret Mantra, the Vedic heritage did not vanish from it. It returned, transformed, at the very heart of practice.
The central symbol of the whole vehicle, the vajra, is the thunderbolt of Indra, the weapon with which the Vedic king of the gods split the serpent and released the waters. The name of the ritual that opens every practice, abhiṣeka, empowerment, is the Vedic royal consecration, the anointing of a king. The fire offering, homa, with its four activities of pacifying, enriching, magnetising and subjugating, is the direct descendant of the Vedic fire sacrifice, its hearth shapes, its ladles and its oblations of ghee and grain carried over and filled with a new inner meaning. The very word mantra, and the understanding of sacred sound as a power that shapes reality, belong to the oldest stratum of Indian religion. The Secret Mantra did not reject these things. It took them up and turned them inward, as the Buddha had turned the sacrifice inward in the Kūṭadanta Sutta.
The varṇa order, too, reappears in the tantras, not abolished but taken up into the vision of the awakened families. The Hevajra Tantra identifies the five buddha families with women of five social classes, from the brahmin woman to the caṇḍālī, the outcaste, and makes each the embodiment of a family of awakening. The very women whom the purity rules of society ranked highest and lowest become, without distinction, the wisdom of the Buddhas. The castes are named, acknowledged, and then dissolved into enlightened nature.
The Kālacakra Tantra tells this story on the scale of a whole civilisation. In the kingdom of Shambhala, its commentary the Vimalaprabhā relates, there lived many brahmin sages who followed the Vedic dharma. Seeing the danger that threatened their world, the king Mañjuśrī Yaśas gathered them and, through the Kālacakra empowerment, united all the varṇas into a single vajra family. For this he became the first Kalkin, the Holder of the Family. The brahmin seers were not cast out. They were brought into the maṇḍala, and the distinctions of birth were transcended within one lineage of awakening. The Kālacakra maṇḍala itself includes in its outer circles the great gods of the Indian world, and its cosmology draws freely on the Purāṇic and astronomical learning of its time.
Here the pattern of the Pali Canon reaches its fulfilment. The Buddha accepted varṇa as a fact of society while denying it any power over liberation. The tantras go further. They take the very categories of the brahmanical world, the castes, the gods, the fire, the consecration, the sacred sound, and reveal them as already contained within the awakened mind, already belonging to the families of the Buddhas.
X. The Nine Vehicles and the Samayas
In the Nyingma tradition, the whole of the Buddha's teaching is arranged in nine vehicles, culminating in the Great Perfection. The first three, the vehicles of the hearers, the solitary realisers and the bodhisattvas, are called the vehicles that lead away from the origin of suffering. The last three, Mahāyoga, Anuyoga and Atiyoga, are called the vehicles of overpowering means. And the three in between, the outer tantras of Kriyā, Upa and Yoga, bear a name that should stop every reader who believes Buddhism and the Vedic world are strangers: they are called the vehicles of Vedic austerity, dka' thub rig byed kyi theg pa. Rig byed, “that which brings knowledge,” is the classical Tibetan word for the Veda.
The name is not arbitrary. In the outer tantras, especially in Kriyā, the practitioner bathes, changes clothes, keeps strict ritual purity, eats only the three white and three sweet foods, and approaches the deity as a servant approaches a lord. This discipline of purity and austerity was recognised by the Tibetan masters themselves as continuous with the conduct of the Vedic brahmin. Within the very architecture of the path that leads to the Great Perfection, the Vedic way of purity has its honoured place, as a stage through which practitioners pass and which the higher vehicles do not despise but include.
The doxographies of Longchenpa and Jigme Lingpa also discuss the philosophical schools of the brahmanical world, the eternalists of Sāṃkhya, Vaiśeṣika and the Vedānta, and classify their views below the Buddhist vehicles. This must be said plainly: the Nyingma masters did not regard these views as equal to the Buddhist view. But they studied them, named them with care, and placed them on the map of the spiritual path, as views that grasp at a permanent self and that the Middle Way transcends. To be placed on the map of the path is very different from being cast outside it.
The samaya commitments of Secret Mantra carry the same spirit. Among the fourteen root downfalls is the disparaging of the tenets of oneself and others. Whatever the precise scope of “others” in the commentaries, the principle is clear: the practitioner of Secret Mantra is not permitted contempt for other paths. The bodhisattva vow, which underlies all of Secret Mantra, forbids contempt for any being. And the whole of Mahāyoga rests on the pure vision in which all beings are deities, all sounds mantra, all places the pure realm, a vision in which there is no room to look down upon a brahmin, a seer or a follower of any other path.
Seen from the summit of the Great Perfection, where all phenomena are the display of the primordial ground, the very distinction between “our tradition” and “theirs” belongs to the realm of conceptual elaboration. The Vedic austerities, the Buddhist vehicles, the outer and the inner tantras, all appear as rays of the same light, each leading those who walk it closer to what they have never been apart from.
XI. Mutual Illumination
If the relationship between the Buddhist and brahmanical traditions had been one of simple opposition, they would have refuted each other and gone their separate ways. Instead, for more than a thousand years, each took the other's deepest insights into itself, sharpened them, and gave them back transformed.
Consciousness-only and non-duality
The clearest example is the meeting of Yogācāra and Advaita. Gauḍapāda's Āgamaśāstra, the verses on the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad that stand at the root of Advaita Vedānta, opens its fourth and final chapter with homage to the best of two-footed beings, who realised that all phenomena are like space: a phrase that every Buddhist reader of the time would have heard as a salutation to the Buddha. The chapter is called Alātaśānti, the stilling of the firebrand, and its central image is pure Yogācāra. As a whirling firebrand appears as a circle, a line or a curve, though nothing has come out of it and nothing has entered it, so consciousness in vibration appears as perceiver and perceived; when the vibration ceases, the appearances neither go anywhere nor come from anywhere. Consciousness, Gauḍapāda says, does not touch an object, nor does it touch the appearance of an object. His doctrine of non-origination, ajāti, echoes Nāgārjuna's opening verse on the non-arising of all things. And near the end he says, with deliberate ambiguity, that this was not spoken by the Buddha, as if to acknowledge the closeness and mark the difference in a single breath.
Śaṅkara, Gauḍapāda's successor in the lineage, refutes the Vijñānavāda with great energy in his commentary on the Brahmasūtra. Yet his own teaching of two levels of truth, of the world as an appearance that cannot be called either real or unreal, of liberation as the recognition of what was always the case, moves in the same space the Yogācāra and Madhyamaka masters had opened. His opponents noticed. A verse attributed to the Padma Purāṇa calls the doctrine of māyā a false teaching and calls him a Buddhist in disguise. Few accusations show more clearly how deeply the two streams had interpenetrated.
The Recognition school and Buddhist logic
In Kashmir, the philosophers of the Recognition school, Utpaladeva and above all Abhinavagupta, built their vision of consciousness as self-luminous light and self-reflective awareness in sustained dialogue with Dharmakīrti and the Buddhist logicians. Utpaladeva's Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikā takes up the Buddhist analysis of perception, memory and self-awareness point by point, and answers it from the standpoint of a consciousness that is both light and recognition. Abhinavagupta, who tells us that he sought out teachers of many schools, knew Buddhist epistemology with an intimacy that only years of study could give. The Recognition school's most profound teachings would not exist in their present form without the Buddhist thinkers they argued with.
Śaiva and Buddhist yoginī tantras
The current flowed the other way as well. The great Buddhist yoginī tantras, the Cakrasaṃvara cycle above all, share with the Śaiva tantras of the Vidyāpīṭha their sacred sites and pilgrimage places, their lists of yoginīs, their cremation-ground imagery, their skull-cups and bone ornaments, and in places whole passages of text. The Buddhist tradition remembers this in its own way, in the myth of Heruka subduing Bhairava and taking over his sacred places, transforming them into the maṇḍala of Cakrasaṃvara. Whatever one makes of the myth, it records a historical truth: the Buddhist yoginī tantras grew in close contact with the Śaiva traditions, received much from them, and transformed what they received into the path of emptiness and great bliss.
The Ratnagotravibhāga and the Gītā
Perhaps the most delicate case of all lies at the heart of the teaching on buddha-nature. In the first chapter of the Ratnagotravibhāga, the treatise on the buddha-element, there is a verse that reads, in its first line, word for word as a verse of the Bhagavad Gītā: as all-pervading space, because of its subtlety, is not stained. The Gītā continues: so the Self, present everywhere in the body, is not stained. The Ratnagotravibhāga continues: so this element, present everywhere in beings, is not stained. Only two words are changed. The Self becomes “this,” the buddha-element; the body becomes beings.
Which text came first cannot be proven absolutely. The earliest firm witness to the Gītā in its present form is Śaṅkara's commentary, while the Ratnagotravibhāga is attested in Chinese translation by the early sixth century. Yet the verse fits so seamlessly into the Gītā's own argument and vocabulary, and the Buddhist version reads so clearly like a careful substitution, that it seems likely, though it remains a speculation, that the author of the Ratnagotravibhāga knew the Gītā verse and consciously recast it. The same treatise does not hesitate to call the qualities of the dharmakāya purity, bliss, permanence and the perfection of self. If this speculation is right, then the Buddhist teaching on the luminous nature present in all beings is, in at least one of its classic formulations, indebted to the brahmanical understanding of the true Self, received with reverence and transformed with precision.
Epilogue: Two Lamps in One House
What, then, is the true relationship between the Buddha and the Vedic world?
It is not the relationship of enemies. The Buddha honoured the ancient seers, bore their title, gave his first teaching at the place where seers alight, and reserved his sharpest words for those who had fallen away from them. He spoke to brahmins as fellow seekers, received them by the hundreds into his community, took the name of their highest knowledge and the title of their priesthood and filled both with the meaning of awakening. His critique of bloody sacrifice and of empty ritual was shared by the Upaniṣads and the Gītā. He accepted the social world he was born into, and at the same time declared that no birth, high or low, has any power over the purity of the heart or the freedom of the mind.
Nor is it the relationship of sameness. The Buddha taught something genuinely new: the path of not-self, the end of craving, the Middle Way between all extremes. The great Buddhist philosophers argued with their brahmanical counterparts for a thousand years, and those arguments were real. The Nyingma masters placed the views of the eternalists below the Middle Way. To blur these differences would be to dishonour both traditions, which took their disagreements seriously because they took the truth seriously.
The truest image is perhaps that of two lamps burning in one house. They were lit from the same ancient fire, the longing of Indian seers for what is beyond death. They were tended in the same rooms, in the same language, by people who were often of the same families, and in many cases by the very same minds, brahmins who became Buddhist masters and carried their whole learning with them. Each lamp threw its light into corners the other could not reach. Yogācāra illuminated the nature of consciousness, and Advaita received that light and returned it as the vision of the one Self. The Buddhist logicians sharpened their questions, and the Recognition school answered them with the luminous self-awareness of consciousness. The Śaiva yoginī tantras opened the path of the cremation ground and the sacred feminine, and the Buddhist yoginī tantras transformed it into the union of bliss and emptiness. And perhaps a single verse of the Bhagavad Gītā, received into the Ratnagotravibhāga, helped give the teaching of buddha-nature its image of a luminous presence in all beings that nothing can stain.
The divisions came later, hardened by the contest for royal favour, by sectarian pride, by the need of every institution to define itself against another. They are part of the history, and they need not be denied. But they are not the root. The root is a shared ground, a shared language, a shared reverence for the seers, and a shared conviction that the deepest truth is found not in outer ritual but in the awakened heart.
There is much to learn on both sides, and the two sides have illuminated one another again and again, for two and a half thousand years. For those who walk either path today, this is not a threat but a gift. The practitioner of the Great Perfection who reads the Upaniṣads, the student of Advaita who reads Nāgārjuna, the yogin of the Śaiva tantras who reads the songs of Saraha, will each find that the other lamp shows them something in their own room they had not yet seen. And when the light of both is recognised as the one light of awareness itself, the house is no longer divided at all.
