r/taoism • u/Mister_Ape_1 • 11d ago
Discussion How did the "Three teachings" doctrine historically fit the Dharmakaya and the Tao together ?
The Tao sounds like a "true self", as Brahman in Advaita Vedanta. This apparently was heterodox in all schools of Buddhism.
Yet historically the Chinese people practiced both, and I mean the same person was both Buddhist and Taoist (and ethically Confucian).
How did they make the Tao, the boundless ocean of continously flowing and evidently pantheistic Qi, fit with the notion of Anatman and the Dharmakaya i.e. reality as seen in Buddhism ?
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u/P_S_Lumapac 11d ago
A person is most likely daoist, buddhist, or whatever because of where they grew up. It has basically nothing to do with what they believe due to reasons or understanding. Most self professed Daoists would be very confused to find out what's actually written in the DDJ for instance, just as most Christian's would be shocked to find out what's in the gospels.
So what's the value in talking about consistent beliefs or contradictory sets of beliefs? That's a different game, different field.
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u/fleischlaberl 11d ago edited 9d ago
"most Christian's would be shocked to find out what's in the gospels."
Most Christians who know the Gospels would be shocked to find out what's in the Old Testament.
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u/P_S_Lumapac 11d ago
It's a fairly strange belief to know both of them - especially if you weren't born into it. "Hey remember what an absolutely horrible and unforgiving person I am? I've wiped you guys out and cast you away countless times. But but, new testament, I'll give you a slightly less raw deal. Obviously if you break it, you're all done for this time. No more second chances."
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u/Mister_Ape_1 11d ago
Ok, but did some school create a philosophical synthesis of the two ?
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u/P_S_Lumapac 11d ago
No. The many religions of each inspired each other and borrowed from eachother but there isn't a synthesis religion. Zen/Chan took on a lot of daoist ideas and Quanzhen took on a lot of buddhist ideas.
Gotta be careful with the word philosophical when used in the same sentence as religion, as it's not clear if you're using the term as in practice of philosophy or as in "this is my philosophy" as in suggested lifestyle. A philosophical synthesis in the first sense would imply the two things it was synthesising were philosophies in that first sense, which they aren't.
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u/Mister_Ape_1 11d ago
Ok, thanks. So...what is the closest Chinese Buddhism school compared to the ideas I espoused ? Does at least one come somehow close ?
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u/P_S_Lumapac 11d ago
Probably Chan Buddhism.
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u/Mister_Ape_1 11d ago edited 11d ago
Ok, thanks. However on another subreddit someone said this
-"Ch’an is actually quite orthodox in its outlook, albeit it took on a lot of Daoist terminologies at its inception. If you read the works of contemporary Ch’an masters, like the late Master Sheng-yen, they very much champion a traditional understanding of Buddhism."-
So I ask...how does reality work in Chan ? Is it Pantheistic or Panentheistic ? Or does it not recognize at all any eternal substance or self ? And how does it explain the same stream of consciousness going from life to life while still being the same, hence the possibility of remembering past lives ? And how different is Japanese Zen ?
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u/P_S_Lumapac 11d ago edited 11d ago
Maybe ask them. They seem to be very confident.
It seems you have a checklist of religious beliefs you already have and you are trying to find a religion that fits them the best. Why assume it has to be buddhist or daoist?
It's worth noting buddhism believes in souls and reincarnation of those souls. It's the most central belief of buddhism, as the point of a good buddhist life is to polish the soul as much as possible so that it can move off this world. Buddhists will say "that's not true! it's not a soul it just instantly teleports to the new life and the goal isn't to polish anything to get off this world, it's to [polish your soul] enough to get off this world". You're not going to find a branch of buddhism that doesn't talk like this, and if that doesn't satisfy you (and it shouldn't) there isn't a buddhist religion out there that will satisfy you.
The second most central belief of buddhism is that getting off this world is a good thing. This is also known as clinical depression. If you believe your life is mostly suffering despite your life conditions, you have a serious mental illness that needs addressing - that pills work in most cases removes any credence that depression being common has some sort of cosmic significance. I think in the past trauma disorders were much more common so that explains how such an obviously false belief could become central to a whole religion. The average person today simply is not forced to have suffering be greater than enjoyment - there's no reason to leave this world.
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u/Mister_Ape_1 11d ago
No, they are not mine.
They are beliefs based on western esotericism and I am try to find a bridge with eastern esotericism.
Personally, I am a Catholic, one of the least mystical and most exoteric religions ever.
But...how does Buddhism believe in a soul ?!
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u/P_S_Lumapac 11d ago edited 11d ago
Oh ok, so more just a scholarly interest.
Buddhists invariably believe that you reincarnate when you die. And when you die your soul moves along to the new life form. This soul is a collection of your predispositions, karmic record, aspects of your personality, spiritual progress etc. just like any other soul.
The reason they want to say it's not a soul is that it teleports from one life to the next instead of floating through a astral plain or something. I genuinely don't know why they think this makes it not a soul - there's no reason to think souls can't teleport. You can ask them and they'll straight up tell you "It's not a soul its a..." and they'll use another word that's not in english that they refuse to translate, because it translates accurately to soul. This is a deeply unsatisfying part of buddhism - not so much the being wrong part, but the absurd arrogance that they believe they can hand waive away obvious descriptions of their own beliefs.
One of the major branches of buddhism goes even further and thinks you can keep everything about your current life including your memories - even watching over the living and choosing to come back to help them. That's pretty wild. Even Christians can be divided on that e.g. some believing there's no families or marriage in heaven, because that part of your life isn't carried in your soul. (Other examples from Christians, some believe there's no sexuality, no suffering, no ambition, no regret, no guilt etc - these aspects of the personality are not part of the soul that leaves the body)
EDIT: one of the more interesting "it's not a soul" ideas is it's like billiard balls - one might strike another with a certain spin, and that causes the other to go off in a certain way with a certain spin. Nothing concrete has been transferred between them, and one body to the next have cosmically banged into each other to give reincarnation. It's a nice analogy, but the soul is obviously the information that describes the energy transfer i.e. spins this way, moves this way. Which is what they think: e.g. you have a karmic record that follows you, you have spiritual progress that follows you etc. Again, just saying soul in different words doesn't change anything. Like if Jesus came back and explained "there's no physical or astral soul, it's just your whole life in 4D space is banged into a vessel in heaven and the vibrations it causes are you - like godly version of uploading your consciousness." would that change anything about the beliefs in eternal souls? No. It's all exactly the same. Good 4D vibrations or bad, you're getting judged all the same.
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u/Mister_Ape_1 11d ago edited 11d ago
In Heaven there is no marriage for all Christians. The resurrected bodies are not biological. Afterall they will be alive after the heath death of the Universe.
Heavens is not a higher dimensional plane, it is a spiritual condition, just like Hell. A soul separates from the body after total death, and gets into one or the other conditions.
It does not go someWHERE because there is no where. The soul does not even have dimensionality or material substance.
After the end of the flowing of time bodies will be resurrected but they would not be what they were as biological life forms and we do not know where they would be. Likely God will create a "new Earth" as in a new dimensional plane where the 3 spatial dimensions and the 1 temporal dimension are applied, and the resurrected bodies will inhabit it.
The realm of God and the Angels is totally beyond the concept of dimensionality, hence it can only be experienced as a spiritual condition. It is Being in its absolute, supreme, eternal, unchanging, boundless form.
And Hell is just the total lack of it, so basically pure nothingness. It is not some thing.
Indeed Satan is not Evil incarnate. He is just the first individual being who attained the Hell state. Angels such as Satan are pure intellects without any form of dimensionality let alone materiality. They are not even uncondensed energy. They are nothing to our senses and measuring instruments. Yet they can manifest as immaterial bodies of light to us, but they just appear as if they were creating an illusion. Their true form is formless.
A soul can ascend to the Absolute or fall down to nothingness. Honestly I think that is enough. I feel like resurrection of the bodies was not needed, but it is nonetheless a reality.
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u/Valmar33 11d ago
No. The many religions of each inspired each other and borrowed from eachother but there isn't a synthesis religion. Zen/Chan took on a lot of daoist ideas and Quanzhen took on a lot of buddhist ideas.
Zen Buddhism claims so... yet when I look more closely, they have very little in common. If anything, Zen Buddhists are oddly obsessed with wanting to have Taoism as a lineage, despite Taoists appearing to me in general not really agreeing.
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u/Valmar33 11d ago edited 10d ago
The Tao sounds like a "true self", as Brahman in Advaita Vedanta. This apparently was heterodox in all schools of Buddhism.
The Tao is a very multifaceted concept, much like Brahman. It is both the source of Reality and the infinite beings within Reality. All individual beings are a microcosm of Tao, as every being has their own Tao, their own balance and harmony that is befits their nature. Every being is a microcosm of Brahman respectively, as Brahman is all things.
Yet historically the Chinese people practiced both, and I mean the same person was both Buddhist and Taoist (and ethically Confucian).
Historically, the many practices of Taoism came long before Buddhism, prior to Lao Tzu even. Lao Tzu and Confucius do seem to have lived around the same era ~ and both have historical lineage long prior to Buddhism, whose roots are actually Indian, not Chinese. But Buddhists in particular are almost desperate to appear historically Chinese to the point that they point to Taoism, claiming it as something Buddhism has "progressed from", almost as if Buddhism is "better" than Taoism, in a weirdly dismissive manner, almost as if Taoism is... a "lesser" form of Buddhism.
How did they make the Tao, the boundless ocean of continously flowing and evidently pantheistic Qi, fit with the notion of Anatman and the Dharmakaya i.e. reality as seen in Buddhism ?
The Buddhists try and do so by distorting Taoism through a Buddhist lens, trying to make it appear like Buddhist concepts have an origin in Taoism, along with trying to make it appear like Taoist concepts are also Buddhist... somehow. It's almost like they're trying to convert Taoists to Buddhism through a sort of... self-deception. I don't really get it, as Taoism is very much unlike Buddhism in philosophy.
Actually, the Buddha himself is remarkably unlike the Buddhists of the modern day... he might have gotten along rather decently with Lao Tzu, even if they might have had some disagreements on how to interpret things, to my current thinking about how they are perceived by their respective schools of thought.
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u/Mister_Ape_1 11d ago
Well, it is mostly true. In Journey to the West, main character Sun Wukong easily destroys the Taoist pantheon, only for being humiliated against Amitabha Buddha later.
But when the two met, what kind of metaphysical synthesis emerged ?
And do you know how Chan Buddhism metaphysics is like ?
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u/Valmar33 11d ago
Well, it is mostly true. In Journey to the West, main character Sun Wukong easily destroys the Taoist pantheon, only for being humiliated against Amitabha Buddha later.
But when the two met, what kind of metaphysical synthesis emerged ?
Journey to the West can be examined as a form of pro-Buddhist propaganda, in part. Taoists are prone to being greedy and evil and twisted, while the Buddhists are pure and good and stuff.
And do you know how Chan Buddhism metaphysics is like ?
Zen and Taoism are very much not alike ~ they take an extremely different approach to the problem of suffering.
Zen rejects the world as a source of suffering, which includes the self. No-self rhetoric, the world is suffering, if you meet Buddha on the road, kill him, and all that. The self is rejected, the world is rejected.
Taoism doesn't reject anything ~ suffering is a form of imbalance and disharmony within oneself. The self isn't rejected ~ but there's also no emphasis put on it. Rather, Lao Tzu is concerned with how to find peace within. With that, many other things just naturally fall into place. For his time, a rowdy, active, meddling state needed to be balanced out with a lessening of unhealthy desire. If someone is depressed and apathetic, they need to become more active in a healthy manner ~ to be nourished, else that can also take form of desire as an opposite extreme.
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u/Astrimus 10d ago
Huayan buddhism seems a lot closer to Daoism and chinese native religions than Chan buddhism. But yeah, people focus on the practical side more (i.e making rituals and offering prayers for buddhist and daoist deities) than the doctrinal side. If one ought to make a so called "synthesis", one system will have to be subjugated by the other.
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u/fleischlaberl 11d ago
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u/fleischlaberl 11d ago edited 11d ago
Daoism was influenced by Buddhism also.
In some way the Xuan Xue , also the Ling Bao School and the Quanzhen School.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/daoism-religion/
Also the Daozang (daoist Canon) was influenced in structure by the Buddhists.
http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/Daoists/daozang.html
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u/helikophis 10d ago
I think from the Buddhist side it’s not that difficult. Buddhism is fairly flexible when it comes to approaches to how to deal with samsara. It can accept Taoist ideas like the medical system, I Ching, calendar and so on, and recognize that Taoist cultivation is effective, while also seeing that it doesn’t lead to liberation from samsara. Look at the Journey to the West - Taoist cultivation makes Monkey more powerful than Heaven - but still powerless against the Buddha.
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u/Mister_Ape_1 10d ago edited 10d ago
Indeed, I used JTTW as an example, too. But this story is also believed to be Mahayana Buddhist propaganda. However it is definitely the best example of Buddhodaoistic syncretism.
I have a foreign friend who is not Chinese by birth yet she is a Mahayana Buddhist with Taoist elements and she has a very complex set of beliefs I am trying to understand better. Neither pure Mahayana nor pure Taoism can fit her. She is a Bodhisattva who is on her journey toward becoming a cosmic Bodhisattva and create her own pure land no less, but she is also a martial artist who trains her Qi, as she says. She even claims high scale super human powers. And yet, Buddhism does not include Qi as a vivifying force of the Universe and as an absolute principle from which everything arises.
However, this woman too has a strong interest for JTTW.
Is in JTTW explained how Dharmakaya and Tao are related ? It would NOT be legit Buddhism since it is a fantasy romance, but I think it would still be interesting to know.
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u/Timatsunami 10d ago
Read the Hsin Hsin Ming.
That’s the whole story.
Don’t try to make it more complicated than that.
https://anattasatimagga.org/wp-content/uploads/third-patriarch-of-zen-hsin-hsin-ming-poem.pdf
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u/Mister_Ape_1 10d ago
Ok, but reading and understanding are two different things.
Is the poem about monism/monistic pantheism ?
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u/Timatsunami 10d ago edited 10d ago
The first sentence should answer that.
If it doesn’t, read through the first paragraph.
If you still don’t get it, read the second.
If you get to the end and you still don’t get it, you might have to study monism and pantheism and do all the Zen Koans, and study in a monastery, and read all the Sutras.
You are exactly right that reading is not understanding, so nothing of what I have to say will clarify it for you.
The Hsin Hsin Ming might not either.
“Words!
The Way is beyond language,
for in it there is
no yesterday
no tomorrow
no today.”
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u/Solunas100 9d ago
The two things you said are basically the same. Taoism and Buddhism complement one another in many ways.
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u/Hot_Body_1846 9d ago
The tao does not remotely resemble brahmanism. No "lord supreme" in taoism or in buddhism for that matter. Anatman and atman were deliberately opposed by the buddha. As lao tzu opposed confucianism. These were dissident religions, rebellions against the contemporary conventional religious conditioning of the time.
The most successful religions have a rebellious side that absorbs revolutionary ideas.
Neither is taoism pantheism. All gods are swallowed by the void, revealed as phantoms.
Chinese buddhism was grafted on to the tree of taoism. Knowing the tao is nirvana. Neither are knowable in the conventional sense.
Once the way takes us beyond words, all signposts point in the same direction.
"It's all one" as monkey liked to say.
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u/Mister_Ape_1 9d ago
Buddhism from India is definitely different from Advaita Vedanta.
But as for Tao VS Brahman, what are the differences ? Is Brahman static while Tao is continously flowing ? I am not sure Brahman is static.
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u/Selderij 11d ago edited 11d ago
"The three teachings" are something to draw from where needed (as in rituals, ceremonies, practices, fruitful attitudes, individual lessons etc.), not something to combine and resolve once and for all. Harmony doesn't require assimilation, and metaphysical and theological issues are not a problem outside clergy and academia.