Buddha-dharma means any thing, or any virtue, or any faculty, that belongs to Buddhahood. Non-attachment is a Buddha-dharma, love is a Buddha-dharma, wisdom is a Buddha-dharma. and in fact anything is a Buddha-dharma which is an attribute of the Perfect One, not to mention the Dharmakâya or Nirvâna which constitutes the very essence of Buddhahood. Therefore, the conclusion which is to be drawn from those seven propositions of Asanga as above quoted is this: Not only is this world of constant transformation as a whole Nirvâna, but its apparent errors and sins and evils are also the various phases of the manifestation of Nirvâna.
The above being the Mahâyânistic view of Nirvâna, it is evident that Nirvâna is not something transcendental or that which stands above this world of birth and death, joy and sorrow, love and hate, peace and struggle. Nirvâna is not to be sought in the heavens nor after a departure from this earthly life nor in the annihilation of human passions and aspirations. On the contrary, it must be sought in the midst of worldliness, as life with all its thrills of pain and pleasure is no more than Nirvâna itself. Extinguish your life and seek Nirvâna in anchoretism, and your Nirvâna is forever lost. Consign your aspirations, hopes, pleasures, and woes, and everything that makes up a life to the eternal silence of the grave, and you bury Nirvâna never to be recovered. In asceticism, or in meditation, or in ritualism, or even in metaphysics, the more impetuously you pursue Nirvâna, the further away it flies from you. It was the most serious mistake ever committed by any religious thinkers to imagine that Nirvâna which is the complete satisfaction of our religious feeling could be gained by laying aside all human desires, ambitions, hopes, pains, and pleasures. Have your own Bodhi (intelligence) thoroughly enlightened through love and knowledge, and everything that was thought sinful and filthy turns out to be of divine purity. It is the same human heart, formerly the fount of ignorance and egoism, now the abode of eternal beatitude—Nirvâna shining in its intrinsic magnificence.
Suppose a torch light is taken into a dark cell, which people had hitherto imagined to be the abode of hideous, uncanny goblins, and which on that account they wanted to have completely destroyed to the ground. The bright light now ushered in at once disperses the darkness, and every nook and corner therein is perfectly illumined. Everything in it now assumes its proper aspect. And to their surprise people find that those figures which they formerly considered to be uncanny and horrible are nothing but huge precious stones, and they further learn that every one of those stones can be used in some way for the great benefit of their fellow-creatures. The dark cell is the human heart before the enlightenment of Nirvâna, the torch light is love and intelligence. When love warms and intelligence brightens, the heart finds every passion and sinful desire that was the cause of unbearable anguish now turned into a divine aspiration. The heart itself, however, remains the same just as much as the cell, whose identity was never affected either by darkness or by brightness. This parable nicely illustrates the Mahâyânistic doctrine of the identity of Nirvâna and Samsâra, and of the Bodhi and Kleça, that is, of intelligence and passion.
Therefore, it is said:
“All sins transformed into the constituents of enlightenment!
The vicissitudes of Samsâra transformed into the beatitude of Nirvâna!
All these come from the exercise of the great religious discipline (upâya);
Beyond our understanding, indeed, is the mystery of all Buddhas.”[153]
The Middle Course.
In one sense the Buddha always showed an eclectic, conciliatory, synthetic spirit in his teachings. He refused to listen to any extreme doctrine which elevates one end too high at the expense of the other and culminates in the collapse of the whole edifice. When the Buddha left his seat of enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, he made it his mission to avoid both extremes, asceticism and hedonism. He proved throughout his life to be a calm, dignified, thoughtful, well-disciplined person, and at no time irritable in character,—in this latter respect being so different from the sage of Nazareth, who in anger cast out all the tradesmen in the temple and overthrew the tables of the money-changers, and who cursed the fig tree on which he could not find any fruit but leaves unfit to appease his hunger. The doctrine of the Middle Path (Mâdhyamârga), whatever it may mean morally and intellectually, always characterised the life and doctrine of Buddha as well as the later development of his teachings. His followers, however different in their individual views, professed as a rule to pursue steadily the Middle Path as paved by the Master. Even when Nâgârjuna proclaimed his celebrated doctrine of Eight No’s which seems to superficial critics nothing but an absolute nihilism, he said that the Middle Path could be found only in those eight no’s.[154]
Mahâyânism has certainly applied this synthetic method of Buddha to its theory of Nirvâna and ennobled it by fully developing its immanent signification. In the Discourse on Buddha-essence, Vasubandhu quotes the following passage from the Çrimala Sûtra, which plainly shows the path along which the Mahâyânists traveled before they reached their final conclusion: “Those who see only the transitoriness of existence are called nihilists, and those who see only the eternality of Nirvâna are called eternalists. Both views are incorrect.” Vasubandhu then proceeds to say: “Therefore, the Dharmakâya of the Tathâgata is free from both extremes, and on that account it is called the Great Eternal Perfection. When viewed from this absolute standpoint of Suchness, the logical distinction between Nirvâna and Samsâra cannot in reality be maintained, and hereby we enter upon the realm of non-duality.” And this realm of non-duality is the Middle Path of Nirvâna, not in its nihilistic, but in its Mahâyânistic, significance.
How to Realise Nirvâna.
How can we attain the Middle Path of Nirvâna? How can we realise a life that is neither pessimistic asceticism nor materialistic hedonism? How can we steer through the whirlpools of Samsâra without being swallowed up and yet braving their turbulent gyration? The answer to this can readily be given, when we understand, as repeatedly stated above, that this life is the manifestation of the Dharmakâya, and that the ideal of human existence is to realise within the possibilities of his mind and body all that he can conceive of the Dharmakâya. And this we have found to be all-embracing love and all-seeing intelligence. Destroy then your ignorance at one blow and be done with your egoism, and there springs forth an eternal stream of love and wisdom.