Single Taste

It has happened a few times now that I've actually tried to pinpoint what the essential teaching of Buddhism is. But couldn't do it. Even saying it is inconceivable or ungraspable is too partial. Calling it wordless is totally misleading. There are no end of ways the Dharma has been expressed, being expressed and will be expressed. How could one ever stick to a single method or interpretation? Calling it the Middle Way sums it up best, perhaps because it doesn't mean much.

It is amazing to me that there were great teachers who could just raise high a teaching, a method as the best and put everything else aside. Whether it is zazen, nenbutsu, mantra, odaimoku, huatou or vipassana - the Buddha's teaching contains a lot more than all those together. The two greatest scholar teachers of modern Chinese Buddhism, Ven. Taixu and Ven. Yinshun, summed up Mahayana as consisting of Sunyavada, Vijnaptivada and Tathagatagarbhavada (here using Sanskrit terms instead of theirs). But even them, teacher and disciple, didn't agree on which of the three is the highest. And frankly, putting everything under these three categories is an oversimplification in my view. Ven. Shengyan, following Ven. Taixu's words, says that the essence of Chinese Buddhism is Chan. Well, what about the fact that even Chan cannot be accurately defined and there have been many forms of it since the beginning? It goes the same in all the other major traditions.

It is easy to make judgements on other schools based on superficial knowledge, saying that Chinese Buddhism is like this, Theravada is like that, and Vajrayana is so and so. But looking into it deeper we find that a single tradition contains all the different teachings and all the traditions form a single teaching. That is: one is all, all is one. This is called the Complete Teaching of the One Vehicle. But to identify something as The Complete Teaching is just being partial and creating dichotomy between complete and incomplete. The Buddha has no incomplete teaching and all are meant to liberate beings.

"The great Vinaya Pitaka assembles all the teachings and cannot be fathomed, the broad practice of sila embraces all the paramitas and is difficult to calculate. The five realms of delusion are quickly extinguished by means of the practice of the precepts; the mental entanglements of the two types of death are forever cut off by means of the pratimoksa." (Gyonen: The Essentials of the Vinaya Tradition, tr. by Leo M. Pruden, Numata, 1995. p. 11)

Even the precepts include the complete path, how could whole lineages not be like that? Buddhism is an ancient tradition full of goodness and wisdom. What Siddhartha has started in India has been continued up to this day throughout the world. Pick any of the teachings any you get connected to all the others. The Buddha himself compared his teaching to the ocean, as every drop tastes salty, so his teaching has the taste of liberation.