All those religions tend to see the world as static, relying on a static, unchanging “Ground of Being”. The change we see in the world is treated as superficial: a veneer of apparent change laid over an unchanging reality.
In point of full disclosure though, the matter hasn’t always been so cut and dry when you move into certain Mahayana renderings of Buddhist teaching. Much of this revolves around the contributions made to Buddhist thought by the Saddharma pundarika sutra (the Lotus Sutra), The Third Turning Sutras, and the Tathagatagarbha Sutras.
Here we move into discussion of either
a.) An Eternal Buddha - sometimes deemed to be Shakyamuni or Mahavairocana as the Dharmakaya.
or
b.) An Eternal Substratum which is
usually associated with the Tathagatagarbha/Buddha-Nature Doctrines…
Debates surrounding Category B are as old as Saicho (the Founder of Japanese Tendai Buddhism) vs. the Hosso (Japanese word for Yogachara) monk Tokuitsu.
Several Mahayana practitioners/monks I have spoken about regarding this matter point to a continuing debate within the ranks of both major Zen tradition which I believe have been put into a monograph about how things like the tathagatagarbha doctrines, “hongaku shiso” or “inherent enlightenment” doctrines that prevade all forms of Japanese buddhism and most forms of Chinese buddhism, and perhaps even Zen itself are “not Buddhist.”
The monograph in quesiton i believe is:
Pruning the Bodhi Tree: The Storm over Critical Buddhism which translates much of that debate between the for and against camp.
In the other cultural sphere where Buddhism thrives, similar concepts arise in Vajrayana/Tibetan Buddhism.
1.) There is the conception of the
Adi-Buddha which is a Primordial Buddha that never attained liberation, but always was. Depending on the tradition that pulls from - whether its the Kalachakra Tantra, or the Nyingma school, etc etc. Sometimes the Primordial Buddha is seen merely as a metaphor, an actual being (in so far as a thing can be a being in Buddhism)… both a metaphor AND and an actual being… Or Neither and Trascendent beyond the categories that we as human beings can articulate.
There is…of course… a whole host of literature surrounding this debate in Tibetan.
2.) There is also a version of the whole Eternal Substance/Substantialist/Yogachara/Tathagatagarbha Debate within the Tibetan Tradition.
Much of this surrounds the teachings of Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen of the Sakya Tibetan school, who essentially defined the contours of the Shentong/Rangtong Debate.
Shentong - which apparently means something to the effect of “Other-Emptiness,” interpreting “sunyata” or Emptiness in a very specific fashion. If memory serves me correct - **they affirm that a substratum or essence underlies reality, which does not inherently exist yet is the necessary ground for the support of existence.
**
Sakya, Karma Kagyu, Kalachakra Tantra practitioners, and members of the Jonang school all propagated this viewpoint until forcibly suppressed by the ascendancy of the Gelug school (of which the Dalai Lama is a member of).
Phew… that took me about a decade of reading/interviews to fully understand the above. I don’t think i’ve ever run into such difficulty in auditing a religions doctrines before… except with Orthodox Christianities conception of Christ…which I still don’t quite get.
So yes Billcu1 - you can have your cake and eat it to…to a degree.
I should note that all of the above does run up against what we know of Theravada school of Buddhism which is the oldest active school general thought to be the teachings of the historical Siddartha Gautama…
…although yet another one of those schools (because the Theravada is the surviving group out of 13) do have seeds of concepts which feed the Substantialist view of buddhist thought.
Not that may even matter to those who doctrines I just referred to, since Mahayana sutras are often “preached” by Buddhas who aren’t Siddartha Gautama.
