In todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;The Psychical Energies of the Stupaand#8221; Sangharakshita takes us through a poetic and magical journey of the psychical energies of the five elements within and around us. From the talk, and#8220;Five Element Symbolism and the Stupaand#8221; by Sangharakshita, 1971, part of the series Parables, Myths and Symbols of Mahayana Buddhism in the White Lotus Sutra.
Dharmabytes from free buddhist audio
The Psychical Energies of the Stupa
[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you, and happy listening. [music] Now, by the time of the great Rula Ashoka, the king of the Magadha Kingdom, who spread his rule all over India, and more or less found it, or maybe refounded the Moria Empire, Ashoka, by the way, lived in the third century. By his time, the practice of relic worship and stupa worship had become very, very firmly established indeed. It must be admitted that it seems that the monks, the sort of 100% followers of the Buddha, who were practicing more meditation and so on, they were at first not very happy about all this relic worship and stupa worship. But it became so widespread, and it was so popular among the laity, that there wasn't really much they could do about it. Of course, it had been going on for a long time, so eventually they had to accept the practice as orthodox, and indeed we find, according to the records, like the kathawatu, we find some sections of the monks quite explicitly ascribing great devotional and spiritual value to the practice of worshiping relics or worshiping stupas. Ashoka himself, according to all the accounts we have of him, was a very great builder of stupas. And the legends, one can't really say historical records here, the legends say that he built 84,000 stupas in a single day. It was rather a tough job even for Ashoka, so we are told that his spiritual preceptor, in order to give him plenty of time, but he kindly stretched out his hand into the sky and held back the sun until the great work was finished. A variant, we may say, of the Joshua legend. Now, by the time of Ashoka, stupas had become much more elaborate than they were in earlier days, and we have preserved, more or less intact, a very splendid example of an Ashoka period stupa in the great stupa of Sanchi. Sanchi is in the former state of Bhopal, halfway between Bombay and Delhi, in, of course, India. And the great stupa of Sanchi enshrined not any bone relics of the Buddha, but the relics of his two chief disciples, Shari Putra and Morgana. And some of you may know that by one of those rather strange historical accidents that you do find happening, these relics, in their little original, steer-tight boxes, like little pillboxes, with the names of the two disciples engraved on them, spent some 80 years and not very far away from here. That is to say, in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Having been removed by British archaeologists before, the people of India started caring very much in modern times about Buddhism. But they were returned to India, to the Marboda society, after Indian independence. And they were re-enshined at Sanchi in 1951, or it may have been '52. My family, my memory, isn't serving me very well here. But I remember that I did attend the actual re-inshrinement ceremony, which was presided over by the President of India, and Pandit Nehru actually enshrined or re-inshined these relics at Sanchi. Now, the Sanchi stupa is hemispherical in shape, and is built very beautifully of wick and stone. And the whole thing is surrounded, the whole structure is surrounded by a very massive stone railing, built evidently as a copy of an original wooden railing. And the railing is pierced at four points by four magnificent decorated gates. These four gates face the four cardinal points, symbolizing the universality of Buddhism, which is proclaimed in all directions, north, south, east, and west, being addressed to everybody, to all beings whatsoever in all the quarters of space. And these great Sanchi gates are very, very famous because they're very elaborately carved, and they're carved with scenes from the life of the Buddha, his previous life, that it was the Jarticars, and so on. But it's very interesting to note that this stage of Buddhist art, the Buddha himself is never represented. You've got trees, you've got flowers, you've got buildings, other people, disciples, animals, everything, very rich and lavish profusion. But the Buddha himself, even in those scenes which depict his own life, his enlightenment, his birth and so on, the Buddha himself is not depicted. Now, it used to be thought in the very early days of Oriental studies that the Buddha was not depicted because they didn't know how to depict him, because they didn't feel confident enough to represent the Buddha properly. But it has since been pointed out that they represented everything else beautifully, so why not the Buddha? And we now know better, we know that they didn't represent the Buddha on principle. Because in those days, a school called the Lokotravadins was rather strong. And the Lokotravadins held that the Buddha was not an ordinary human being, but a sort of transcendental being, even a transcendental principle, something ineffable, indescribable, unrepresentable. So for these strictly metaphysical reasons or spiritual reasons, the artist did not represent the Buddha. He could not be represented because he was transcendental. So in the place where the Buddha should have been or would have been, they put a symbol. If the scene should have shown the Buddha being born, they put a pair of footprints, the Buddha's footprints, the Shri Pada. If the scene should have shown the Buddha preaching his first sermon, they showed a wheel of the law, a Dharmachakra, on backs of throne, supported by lions. If the scene should have represented the enlightenment, they showed a Bodhi tree. Or if the scene was of some other kind, the Buddha preaching, or moving about a parasol, an umbrella. And if the scene was the death of the Buddha, the Parnirvana, a stupa, because the stupa originally enshrined the ashes. Now, this, as it were, by the way, let's proceed with our story. After Ashoka, the stupas became more and more elaborate. And they became the objects, as far as we can tell, of more and more fervent devotion and worship. And they also became much bigger. Sometimes it's very interesting, archaeologically, when the sight of a stupa is excavated. We find that at first the stupa was very small, maybe only 15 or 20 feet. Then we find as a later time, it's been enlarged. As a later time still, it's been made bigger still. Because owing to this rather simple shape, this basic structure, the cube with the hemisphere on it, you could go on making it bigger and bigger by the simple expedient of just putting another shell on Twitter and another. And another, because no one was living in it, it was solid, solid masonry. So, in this way, the stupas were getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And not only that, some of the stupas, as it were, migrated overseas. Buddhist instaland, Buddhist in Burma, Buddhist in Central Asia, they started building their own stupas. Some of them bigger and better even than the Indian ones, like those in Ceylon, which are perhaps, apart from Bollywood, or the biggest in the whole Buddhist world. And this brings us to the period of the White Lotus Sutra. That it was either period when the White Lotus Sutra was written down. In other words, it brings us to the first century of the Christian era. And it brings us back to that sudden appearance of the stupa at the beginning of Chapter 11 of the White Lotus Sutra. We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donny. And thank you. [music fades out] [music fades out] [ Silence ]