Why is there so much emphasis on following which tradition or which lineage of practicing Buddhism?
If the Dharma is taught by Gautama Buddha, should we only emphasize and refer as Gautama Buddha teaching instead of lineage and tradition?
May I start with a short comment on it?
This is because we have defiled minds.
Just that we need to be right, that we have the wanting to be right, the wanting to know better than others.
This is how a lineage and a tradition evolves, that some people meet and say,
Let's do it that way and everything who does otherwise is out of that lineage, is out of that tradition.
And then they start their own tradition and their own lineage according to what they think is right.
And the thing is that they insist on both, of course, both groups or all the groups that
that come up, insist that they are right.
So, since the Buddha, Gautama Buddha is not living anymore, there is no being that can say, this is the truth, this is what has been said, this is what the Buddha said.
So, but now are many, many people with defiled, more or less defiled minds there, telling
this has been said, that has been said, and want to be right.
So that's why there are lineages and traditions.
If we could agree on what were the Buddha's teachings, or what were the practice of meditation that the Buddha really
told to practice, then there would probably be only one tradition and one lineage.
I'd like to add a couple of things.
It goes a little bit beyond that even, because you have to understand, like in reference for example to Tibetan Buddhism,
Many aspects of Tibetan Buddhism, and I don't know about all of it, and I always don't like to talk about even a country's Buddhism, but many of the types of Buddhism that you find in Tibet don't even refer so much to the teachings of the Buddha or about following the 45 years of the Buddha's teaching.
They will instead strive to become Buddhas by themselves.
and still call this Buddhism.
So it even goes beyond simply disagreement over what the Buddha said.
It's disagreement over in what way we relate to the Buddha.
And so you might say, well, that's just because of defilements.
But then, no, it really goes back.
So at the very least, there's room to, on a...
on a subjective level to suggest that there are different ways of approaching the Buddha.
So you can say, you talk about the Gautama Buddha's teaching.
Well, some people don't see that as the most important.
They take Gautama Buddha's example as the core of Buddhism.
No, and actually many of them will not even refer to Gautama Buddha.
In fact, there are schools of Buddhism that don't refer so much anyway to him.
They refer to Avalokiteshvara Buddha.
Amitabha, in China they call him, who is in the Western Pure Land, who if you chant his name with a pure mind, you'll be born in his realm and become a Buddha there.
So, I mean, someone from our tradition might just say, well, that's just because of the defilements of those people and the ignorance that they say that.
But subjectively, there is room for different interpretations.
And so on one level, someone can say, well,
yes, the Buddha taught all this, but rather than follow his teachings, I'm going to become a Buddha.
And they might therefore start a tradition encouraging other people to do that and saying, yeah, let's all become Buddhas together, which seems to be the case in certain instances.
Where this is even more clearly the case is within a harmonious relationship
sort of super tradition so within a group of people who follow the same texts who follow the same teachings and who can agree on what are the Buddha's teachings I would say I would submit the argument that
it still might be possible to have different traditions and lineages.
Like you might consider Sariputta's lineage to be a specific type of practice that was suitable for people who had high intelligence.
And Moggallana's lineage for those people who were more inclined towards magical powers.
You know, there's the story of the Buddha
up on Gijakutta, Vulture's Peak, and looking down and watching the monks go in alms round.
And he said, you see those monks following Sariputta, that's because they're all really engaged in the development of wisdom.
And you see those monks following Moggallana, that's because the reason they follow him is because
They are very keen on magical powers.
And you see those ones following Ananda, that's because they're all, those monks are all bahusutta.
They're all ones who are keen on memorizing the texts.
And you see those ones following Devadatta, that's because they're all corrupt and evil.
And so he said something like birds of a feather flock together.
And so...
Well, you could consider that, for example, in our tradition, what we call, even let's say within the Mahasi Sayadaw tradition, this group of people who follow a same type of practice, because you could make the argument that we don't find anything wrong with, say, Ajahn Chah's tradition.
They have a perfectly adequate tradition.
and successful interpretation of the Buddhist teaching or tradition of practice based on the Buddhist teaching we could say that, I don't really know could be the case, maybe not we certainly don't attack them or say they're wrong we say they're still the same they take the same body of texts and they seem to be practicing in a way that is in line with those texts but even within the Mahasi Sayadaw group every monastery that you go to
Not even every country, every monastery that you go to, even within a monastery, within the monastery that I stayed at, every teacher in that monastery had a different way of teaching.
And you could cynically say that it's because of the defilements of all of them but one, all but my teacher.
Everybody else is just because they have defilements.
But I don't think it necessarily has to be the case.
The other argument was that it has to do with the needs of the students or the nature of the students, but it can also have to do with the outlook of the teacher.
So, for example, the teacher of Tuca Botila, a really good example.
How did he teach Tuca Botila, this monk who thought he was the best of the best because he could memorize the whole Tapitaka?
He said,
go run into the pond and so he had this guy with all his robes on go and run into the middle of pond and floating there in the pond and okay come back out and they sent them back down into the pond again why because he was seven years old this is how seven-year-olds think he was an Arahant this seven-year-old Arahant but this is how they think they
Run into the pond.
And then he's taught him in the middle of the pond about this ant hill.
And the lizard goes into the ant hill.
What do you do to get it out?
Plug up all the holes but one and then watch that hole and grab it.
And he said, in the same way, this is how you watch your mind.
You close all the other senses and just watch the mind, wherever the mind goes.
That means don't worry about what you see, what you hear, what you smell.
Just look at where the mind is.
If the mind goes to the eye, then it goes to the ear, hearing.
So you close them all.
And you're only concerned with where the mind is going, not with anything else.
So a totally different way of teaching from, you might say, another arahant.
The technique would be quite different.
And so you have some people in Thailand who have this practice of mindful prostration, and my teacher teaches it one way, but I went to another center and they teach it another way.
They have this really kind of crazy, I mean, I don't go for it, to me it seems crazy, but they have another way of doing mindful prostration.
There's nothing wrong with it.
It's kind of crazy, but
It's still, as long as I did it and I was doing it, then you can be mindful just the same.
We do these different parts of the walking step and some people say you do lifting, placing, lifting straight up.
Some people say you lift forward and then place it straight down.
So there's a million different ways of practicing the teaching.
probably, as Palanini said, many of them just come from defilements.
But there is certainly room for a subjective reason, which is that simply because
We're all coming from different places that all, even all, not to speak of us students, but to speak of, say, the hypothetical arahants, those people who are fully enlightened, they're still quite different.
Even Buddhas are different in certain respects.
In most respects they're the same, but
Some Buddhas don't teach the Patimokkha for example.
But you can't say that it's because of the defilements of that Buddha that he didn't teach the Patimokkha.
It's because of his situation and because of the students that came to him and so on.
what is the same will be certain concepts.
What will be based on defilements is whether they're actually teaching based on the Four Noble Truths, Paticcasamuppada, whether they're clear in terms of cause and effect.
So if someone starts to say that, no, the Buddha taught that arahants have greed, anger, and delusion, then you say defilements.
You can check that one off.
This is wrong.
But if someone says, well, you should prostrate like this, or you should prostrate like that, or you should do anapanasati, or you should watch at the nose, or you should watch at the stomach, or so on, there's room for all of that, I think, in the differences of wasana, which means the things that we bring into this life.
Maybe even the religions of a country before Buddhism came to that country still have an influence.
on how it developed.
Like in Tibet there, I heard was kind of ghost religion with shamanism called Bang.
And this still has an influence and in China there was something different going on.
So I think this can be taken in consideration as well.