Esoteric Buddhism - The Secret No One Hid

The Esoteric Buddhism You Already Hear

The name esoteric Buddhism (密教, milgyo) tends to summon the wrong picture: secret techniques passed on behind locked doors, spells that grant wishes, or the odd aura the word tantra picked up on its way to the West. A secret teaching must be hiding something, and what is hidden is usually suspect.

Yet anyone who has spent an hour in a Korean temple has already heard it. The Great Compassion Dhāraṇī of the Thousand Hands Sutra, recited at services and ceremonies, is esoteric. So is the gate gate pāragate that closes the Heart Sutra, and so is om mani padme hum, murmured over prayer beads. Words chanted for their sound rather than translated for their meaning are called mantras (眞言), and the longer ones dhāraṇīs (陀羅尼). Mantra is one of the two legs esoteric practice stands on. Korean Buddhism is predominantly Seon, but much of its daily liturgy came from the esoteric tradition. Alongside nianfo, the other everyday practice done with the voice, mantras have filled the ears of Korean temples.

So esoteric Buddhism is less a strange sect off to the side than something that was always nearby without a name. To give it a name, the word secret has to be read correctly first.

Kūkai's Two Teachings

No one drew the line between esoteric Buddhism and the rest more sharply than Kūkai (空海, 774~835), founder of the Japanese Shingon school. He opens his Treatise on the Difference Between the Exoteric and Esoteric Teachings (辨顯密二教論) like this:

夫佛有三身 教則二種 應化開說名曰顯教 言顯略逗機 法佛談話謂之密藏 言祕奧實說

The Buddha has three bodies, and the teaching is of two kinds. What the manifested and transformation bodies laid open is called the exoteric teaching: its words are plain and abridged and fitted to the hearer's capacity. What the dharma-body Buddha speaks is called the secret store: its words are deep and hidden, and it speaks reality as it is.

The criterion is not the level of the content but the manner of speaking. The historical Śākyamuni addressed his disciples in words chosen for the listener. Like a physician compounding medicine for a particular illness, he brought out only as much as could be understood and left the rest folded away. Exoteric speech is therefore kind, but always abridged. Esoteric speech is what the dharma-body, truth itself, says when it adjusts to no one and simply expresses its own awakening. Kūkai called this the dharma-body's preaching for its own delight in the dharma (自受法樂).

Most schools held that the dharma-body has no form and no speech; it is precisely where words run out. Kūkai disagreed. The dharma-body does speak, he said, but its speech is not made of sentences. It is made of body, sound and mind together.

Secrecy Has Two Meanings

Why, then, is the dharma-body's speech secret? Kūkai answers directly near the end of the same treatise.

所謂祕密且有二義 一衆生祕密 二如來祕密 衆生以無明妄想覆藏本性眞覺 故曰衆生自祕

What is called secret has two meanings. The first is the secret of sentient beings; the second is the secret of the Tathāgata. Sentient beings, through ignorance and deluded thought, cover and conceal the true awakening that is their own nature; this is called the secret that beings keep from themselves.

The Tathāgata's secret is the situation of the exoteric teaching we just saw. A Buddha who prescribes according to capacity does not speak of what the hearer cannot yet bear. That is something the Tathāgata has not yet brought out.

The first meaning is the decisive one. The secret of sentient beings was hidden by no one. No master holding the key locked the door, and no scripture blurred its words on purpose. Awakening was in each person from the start, and what covered it was that person's own ignorance. In Kūkai's own phrase, it is 自祕: self-concealed.

Read this way, the weight of the word esoteric shifts. The secret is not information locked away somewhere outside; it is already within, and unseen by the one who has it. Asking who holds the key was the wrong question from the beginning. Esoteric Buddhism is not a teaching that hands over something hidden. It is a practice of moving the hand that covers what no one ever hid.

Three Lines from the Mahāvairocana Sutra

Esoteric Buddhism stands as a system of its own once two scriptures took shape in seventh-century India. The first is the Mahāvairocana Sutra (大日經). The Indian monk Śubhakarasiṃha (善無畏, 637~735) came to Tang China and, with his disciple Yixing (一行), translated it into Chinese in the 720s.

In its opening chapter, On the Abiding Mind (住心品), the bodhisattva Vajrapāṇi, addressed as Lord of Secrets (祕密主), asks what the cause, the root and the culmination of awakening are. The Buddha answers:

佛言 菩提心為因 悲為根本 方便為究竟 祕密主 云何菩提 謂如實知自心

The Buddha said: the mind of awakening is the cause, compassion is the root, skillful means is the culmination. Lord of Secrets, what is awakening? It is to know one's own mind as it truly is.

The first three phrases, known as the three-phrase teaching (三句法門), are read as a summary of the whole esoteric path. It begins with the resolve to awaken; that resolve is rooted in feeling the suffering of others; and it ends not in a quiet attainment but in means put to use among beings. Because it ends in use rather than arrival, the passage is also the shortest possible statement of the Mahayana bodhisattva ideal.

The last phrase meshes exactly with Kūkai's two secrets. The one asking about secrets is named the Lord of Secrets, and the Buddha's answer points not outward but to one's own mind. If awakening is knowing one's own mind as it is, then the only thing covering it is that same mind.

The Three Mysteries: Borrowing the Buddha's Gestures

Where esoteric practice differs most visibly from other Buddhism is method. Buddhism divides human action into three kinds of karma: body, speech and mind (三業). Esoteric Buddhism holds that the Buddha has the same three, and calls them the three mysteries (三密): the Buddha's body, the Buddha's speech, the Buddha's mind.

Practice means aligning the two. The hands form a mudrā (印契), the shape of the Buddha's hands; the mouth recites a mantra; the mind visualizes the principal deity, or the Sanskrit seed syllable that stands for its source. When body, speech and mind coincide with the Buddha's at once, the ordinary person's three kinds of karma are held to become the three mysteries as they are.

Kūkai compressed the principle into four lines in his Attaining Buddhahood in This Very Body (卽身成佛義).

六大無礙常瑜伽 四種曼荼各不離 三密加持速疾顯 重重帝網名卽身

The six elements, unobstructed, are ever in union. The four kinds of mandala are never apart. Through the empowerment of the three mysteries, it is swiftly revealed. The net of Indra, layer on layer, is what is called this very body.

Kūkai explains the empowerment (加持) of the third line right after. The Buddha's sun reflected in the water of a being's mind is ka (加, adding); the practitioner's mind-water sensing and receiving that sunlight is ji (持, holding). The Buddha's compassion and the practitioner's faith meet in one place. If the water is muddy, the sun can be up and still not show. We are back at Kūkai's first secret.

On the net of the fourth line, Kūkai himself notes that it is Indra's jeweled net: the image from the Flower Garland Sutra. My body, the Buddha's body and the bodies of beings reflect one another like jewels and are not separate. That is why Kūkai said awakening is realized in this body as it is: sokushin jōbutsu (卽身成佛), buddhahood in this very body, not in some other body after three incalculable eons of practice.

Here Seon and esoteric Buddhism part ways. Ganhwa seon drives a person with a single hwadu to the point thought cannot reach, and tears the net of concepts. Esoteric practice enters from the opposite direction. Instead of discarding form, it first puts on the form of the awakened one. Through the most concrete things there are, a hand shape, a sound, an image, it confirms that the form was one's own all along. This is what is meant by taking the result as the cause. Southern vipassana takes yet another direction: adding nothing and discarding nothing, it watches the breath and sensations already under way without losing them.

The Two Mandalas

What depicts the place where the three mysteries are practiced is the mandala (曼茶羅). It is usually known as a round, ornate painting, but before it is a picture it is an arrangement: a map that seats the buddhas and bodhisattvas of the awakened world in fixed positions, which the practitioner enters to find their own place.

East Asian esoteric Buddhism pairs two mandalas. The Womb Realm (胎藏界) mandala, based on the Mahāvairocana Sutra, shows compassion holding and nurturing all things the way life grows in a mother's womb. The other is the Diamond Realm (金剛界) mandala, based on the Vajraśekhara Sutra (金剛頂經) of the late seventh century, which shows indestructible wisdom cutting through affliction. The Vajraśekhara lineage reached China with Vajrabodhi (金剛智, 671741) and his disciple Amoghavajra (不空, 705774).

The two lineages were transmitted separately at first, and came together in one person with Amoghavajra's disciple Huiguo (惠果, 746~805). In 805 Huiguo passed both to Kūkai, who had come to Tang China to study, and Kūkai returned to Japan the next year to found Shingon. The idea that compassion and wisdom, holding and cutting, are not two came to hang side by side as two paintings.

Indian esoteric Buddhism kept developing after this, and its later phase crossed into Tibet to form another great current. Much of the impression the word tantra carries in the West comes from reading the symbols of that later phase without their context. The esoteric Buddhism that entered East Asia belongs to the earlier stage: that of the Mahāvairocana and Vajraśekhara sutras.

Esoteric Buddhism in Korea

It reached Silla early. The Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms (三國遺事) records that in King Munmu's reign, when a Tang fleet came across the sea, Myeongnang (明朗) built a temporary temple of colored silk, fashioned images of the guardian spirits of the five directions from grass, and, at the head of twelve yoga monks (瑜伽僧), performed the Munduru (文豆婁) rite; a storm rose and the Tang ships all sank. The temple rebuilt on that site was Sacheonwangsa, whose founding the official history quoted in the Memorabilia dates to the first year of Tiaolu (679). Myeongnang's line was later called the Sinin school (神印宗).

The story shows that esoteric Buddhism was received on the peninsula from the outset in the guise of rites for protecting the state and averting disaster, and that became one character of Korean esoteric Buddhism. But it had another face. The Silla monk Hyecho (慧超), remembered for his travel record Wang ocheonchukguk jeon, entered Vajrabodhi's circle in Chang'an to study esoteric teaching and later worked on scripture translation as a disciple of Amoghavajra. Hyecho the pilgrim was also a man at the very center of Tang esoteric Buddhism.

Through the Goryeo period the Chongji and Sinin schools carried the esoteric line, but when the orders were merged in the early Joseon period it lost its independent name. The name disappeared; the mantras did not. Joseon monks repeatedly printed the Jineonjip, a compilation of mantras, and the dhāraṇīs in the Thousand Hands Sutra and other liturgical texts came down to today's services. The esoteric Buddhism already heard, mentioned at the start, is exactly this trace.

In the modern era it took a name again. In 1947 Hoedang Son Gyu-sang (1902~1963) founded the Jingak Order in Daegu. The Jingak Order puts the six-syllable mantra om mani padme hum at the center of recitation and practices in simindang (心印堂), halls that enshrine the six-syllable mantra in place of a Buddha image. The mantra itself is taught as Avalokiteśvara's in the Kāraṇḍavyūha Sutra (大乘莊嚴寶王經), translated in the Song dynasty by Tianxizai (天息災).

For Someone Approaching for the First Time

Esoteric practice in principle begins with abhiṣeka (灌頂), consecration received from a teacher. Mudrās and visualization are learned in sequence under that teacher's guidance. Drawing a mandala or imitating mudrās alone from a book is not the way the tradition recommends.

Still, some doors are already open. The dhāraṇī of the Thousand Hands Sutra and the six-syllable mantra are chanted together in every Korean temple and are forbidden to no one. Repeating a sound evenly, without knowing its full meaning, lets scattered thought ride on that sound and settle. At first that is enough.

Only one thing needs guarding against: treating a mantra as a machine that turns wishes into results. The arithmetic of reciting more to get more is where esoteric Buddhism is most often misunderstood, and it runs head on against the three phrases of the Mahāvairocana Sutra. The starting point is not the wish to get but the wish to awaken; the root is compassion; the culmination is use.

The Secret No One Hid

Someone hearing the name esoteric Buddhism for the first time asks where the secret is. Who knows it, and how can it be received. Kūkai's answer turns the question around. The first meaning of secret is what beings conceal from themselves, and the Mahāvairocana Sutra says awakening is knowing one's own mind as it is. If what is sought is already in the seeker, the secret is not a matter of information but of where one looks.

That is why esoteric Buddhism, instead of explaining in words, sets the hands, mouth and mind in motion. It is not a path of building understanding until one arrives, but of acting as though one already were that, and noticing that one was. To see that the hand covering what no one hid was one's own hand: that is what esoteric Buddhism called a secret.