I've recently talked to John Peacock, scholar and Associate Director of The Oxford Mindfulness Centre. His studies of the earliest Buddhist writings have revealed to him a very human Buddha and a very different Buddhism than we know today.
David Chapman has opened a new series of articles entitled "Reinventing Buddhist Tantra." If you're not familiar with David's work so far, especially the series on Consensus Buddhism, please look at the "Consensus: Outline" - for the whole Consensus series, look here. The new series on Buddhist tantra is exciting in that it jumpstarts a curious discussion on possibilities for a 21st century tantric Western Buddhism.
If everyone was miraculously awakened now, most would wish they could restore factory settings.
If you suck at meditation, do not despair. There are other ways. Some more challenging, some more fun.
As if yesterday, 20 years ago I enjoyed the work of Rick Fields and his narrative "How the Swans Came to the Lake", copious writings of Sangharakshita, and later in 2002 the "Westward Dharma" edited by Prebish and Baumann. Reading on Buddhism in the West makes you think of Western Buddhism. 20 years later, and in many ways, too little has changed.
Shingon is an esoteric school of Mahayana, and Mahayana is a bodhisattva doctrine. Bodhisattva is interested in awakening others and himself equally. The general classification of the bodhisattva stages, according to the exoteric teachings, is as follows...
Nirbhaya literally means "fearlessness" or simply "no fear." In Shingon, it means equanimity. However, it is also synonymous with ashvasa, meaning "to revive," so it implies a surge of regeneration. Nirbhaya signifies an awakening through freeing oneself from the bonds of klesha and thus awakening to realize one's inherent wakefulness (skt. bodhi). The six nirbhaya theory describes the process of gradual awakening in six progressive stages, each consisting of an exoteric and an esoteric interpretation.
In the Mahavairocana Sutra, we find the phrase "mind just as it is," synonymous to what the seminal Awakening of Faith calls "inherent wakefulness." Nirvana Sutra calls it buddha-nature (skt. tathagatagarbha or sugatagarbha or buddhadhatu), the Prajnaparamita literature calls it prajna, while the Sukhavativyuha literature calls it "pure land" (we might go as far as drawing a parallel to the esoteric meaning of "Kingdom of God").
The two main visual mandalas used in Shingon - Garbhakosha and Vajradhatu - are iconographic representations of Shingon doctrine, which is a theoretical explanation of the identity of human and the Buddha, based upon the supposition of inherent buddha-nature. This identity of man and Buddha, however, represents the ideal. Human mind is ordinarily covered by reactive patterns (skt. klesha) that function almost incessantly. The awareness that klesha cover the mind and of the need to remove these involves a frustrating experience, for such an awareness leads one to realize his or her own limitations and the futility of efforts to overcome klesha. This means then that prior to the conceptual formulation of the very idea of implementing theory into practice, prior to translating ideal into real, we must deal with the problem of human will: determination to understand what needs to be done, and the commitment to actually do it. Practice takes on a significant spiritual dimension and becomes personally meaningful only when supported by this kind of will.
Although the ten levels of master Kukai, founder of Shingon in Japan, have been described and interpreted in different ways, basically they represent stages through which the esoteric practitioner passes as delusions are penetrated, and increasingly deeper strata of mind are reclaimed. In another view, these ten stages may be seen as descriptions of Buddhist teachings in Kukai's time, and simultaneously as his own spiritual biography in philosophical terms. What follows is a simple introduction.