Skilful Means

A Concept in Mahayana Buddhism

Michael Pye

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415314275
• eBook ISBN: 9781134380626
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

'Skilful Means' is the key principle of Mahayana, one of the great Buddhist traditions. First described in the Lotus Sutra, it originates in myths of the Buddha's compassionate plans for raising life from the ceaseless round of birth and death. His strategies or interventions are 'skilful means' - morally wholesome tricks devised for the purpose of enabling nirvana or enlightenment. Michael Pye's clear and engaging introductory guide investigates the meaning and context of skilful means in Mayahana Buddhist teachings, whilst tracing its early origins in ancient Japanese and Theravada thought. First published in 1978, and still the best explanation of the concept, it illuminates a core working philosophy essential for any complete understanding of Buddhism.

1 GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Buddhist skilful means

The concept of ‘skilful means’ is one of the leading ideas of Mahayana Buddhism and was first used extensively in The Lotus Sutra and other writings treated below. In Mahayana Buddhism the various forms of Buddhist teaching and practice are declared to be provisional means, all skilfully set up by the Buddha for the benefit of the unenlightened. A Buddhist who makes progress himself comes to recognise this provisional quality in the forms of his religion, and though using the means provided for him he has to learn not to be wrongly attached to them. He leaves them behind, like a raft left lying on the bank by a man who has crossed a stream and needs it no more. An advanced follower of Buddhism, usually named by Mahayana Buddhists a bodhisattva, continues to use such provisional means in order to lead other living things towards nirvana. A bodhisattva is skilled in allowing the Buddhist religion to be spelled out in all its detail, while not being ensnared by the false discriminations of the unenlightened.

‘Skilful means’ is a conflated term which is based on Chinese and Japanese usage, as explained later, and which refers to the overall spectrum of meanings with which we are concerned. Since ‘skilful means’ is about the way in which the goal, the intention, or the meaning of Buddhism is correlated with the unenlightened condition of living beings, it brings out particularly clearly how Mahayanists thought Buddhism, as a system, is supposed to be understood. Once established, the term continued to be used down to the present day, admittedly with some vagaries. It is fair to say that the method of thought and practice summed up by the concept of skilful means is one of the fundamental principles of Buddhism as a working religion. Indeed a Japanese writer has claimed that it is hardly possible to discuss Mahayana Buddhism at all without reference to it.¹

Strangely enough the matter has never been the subject of extended study in the west. ‘Nirvana’, ‘bodhisattva’, ‘emptiness’ (Skt. LEnyatā ) and so on have all been considered in this way and that, but apart from occasional references and brief definitions ‘skilful means’ has scarcely been attended to at all. A concept which has been used to explain the very existence of Buddhism as a functioning religious system demands closer attention. Even in the east there do not seem to have been any extended studies, and this may be partly due to the fact that Mahayanists have rather tended to take ‘skilful means’ for granted as a natural principle with which to regulate their religion. In recent times there have been a few shorter articles in Japanese, which have been quite useful to the present writer.² However even the Japanese have rather tended to deal with it en passant in their voluminous commentaries, and this has prevented the concept from emerging as one of central importance to Buddhist thought, in its own right.

When some years ago the writer visited the splendid headquarters of one of the lively new religions of modern Japan he was duly impressed with the architecture, the furnishings and the technology, the constant flow of people for counselling and devotions, the accessory organisations and the managerial efficiency, the obvious emphasis on cheerful prosperity and on daily personal well-being. It was radically unlike the dimly lit temples in the old style, their cemeteries crowded and overgrown, their mournful bells echoing the half-understood and half-forgotten secrets of traditional Buddhism. These notes of transience and quiescence were far from the minds of the coachloads of well-dressed and optimistically chattering housewives attending their modern mecca in central Tokyo. Their concern was rather with family affairs, schooling, cultural and leisure pursuits, and the elimination of factors inconsistent with well-being. Nevertheless beneath all the usual appurtenances of a modern religion this particular movement was concerned, my guide explained, to teach ‘true Buddhism’. In reality there was here, he went on, no so-called ‘new’ religion at all, but an ancient one. Then how was the coexistence of these seemingly diverse directions to be understood? That, it was explained, is a matter of skilful means.³

This account was no modern simplification or sectarian perversion. The Lotus Sutra, a Mahayana Buddhist text dating from about two thousand years ago, explained that the Buddha himself uses ‘innumerable devices’ to lead living beings along and to separate them from their attachments.⁴ Such devices are formulated in terms of the relative ignorance and the passionate attachments of those who need them, but they turn and dissolve into the Buddhist attainment of release. Similarly the great celestial bodhisattvas or buddhas-to-be are characterised not only by their penetrating insight into the true nature of reality but also by a great compassion for suffering beings. They too deploy a range of methods for the salvation of the multitude, skilfully tuning them to a variety of needs yet consistently intimating the intention of nirvana. The release of all sentient beings is guaranteed in the nirvana of any one bodhisattva, a nirvana postponed and yet assured. For one thing the great vow of a bodhisattva bears all suffering beings along with him. For another thing, to imagine that one being or some beings could attain nirvana, and not others, would fall some way short of the radical teaching that all phenomena are equally void of persistent ontological status, or that, as The Lotus Sutra puts it, all things are nirvanic from the beginning.⁵ The path of a bodhisattva is to know this, and at the same time to keep on playing the game of skilful means to save people from themselves. This style of thinking, in which insight (Skt. prajñā )⁶ and means (Skt. upāya) are inextricably related, is the key to understanding the proliferation of new forms which the Mahayana has woven across half Asia.

It is also possible to look at skilful means not from the side of the Bud-dhas and bodhisattvas who invent them, but from the side of the sentient beings who need them, that is, from the point of view of human beings ignorantly entangled in the apparently ceaseless round of birth and death (Skt. samsāra). Indeed Sawada Kenshō reflected a common Japanese assumption about the matter when he concluded in a short article that there are two basic meanings to be remembered. The first is skilful means as invented by the Buddha for the benefit of sentient beings. The second is skilful means as used by sentient beings for the attainment of nirvana or release ( J. gedatsu).⁷ The means themselves are the same, of course, whichever idea is uppermost.

Whether considered as working downwards or upwards the skilful means are above all provisional. They not only need to be established from above but also to be superseded from below. As the beneficiaries become enlightened the expedients become redundant. This process may be a rather rough dismantling and debunking as in some corridors of the Zen tradition, or it may be a smooth transference from one level of meaning to another. Since the skilful means are initially tuned in to the needs of beings entangled in ignorance and samsāra, it is quite natural that release from these involves a subtle change in the significance or status of the very means which bring it about. In this sense the concept of skilful means involves the paradox that Mahayana Buddhism elaborates and proliferates itself without end as a religion of salvation and at the same time it tends towards its own dissolution.

Indeed the Mahayanists claim, and not without some justice, that ‘skilful means’ is the key to the understanding of Buddhism in general. Perhaps the most suggestive passages in this connection are those which narrate the Buddha’s initial decision to teach at all (cf. Chapter Seven below). Without this decision the Buddhist religion would never have developed any articulate form whatever. It is therefore of great importance that Mahayanists interpret it in terms of the Buddha’s skilful means. For them this key concept is the appropriate way in which to understand any phase of Buddhism which is supposed to derive from the Buddha’s initiative, whether it be abstractedly conceptual, concretely narrative, or expressed as meditational practice. The ‘answers’ which Buddhism apparently offers, such as the teaching of cessation (Skt. nirodha) or nirvana, are devised entirely in terms of the problem and they are not intended to have any particular meaning beyond the attainment of the solution. Thus ‘Buddhism’, as a specific religion identifiable in human history, is a skilful means.

The pages which follow are a systematic attempt to get clear what a skilful means is.

The literature of skilful means

The modern printed edition of the canonical writings of Chinese and Japanese Buddhism runs into a total of eighty five thick volumes. Many of these contain different versions of Indian writings which were translated several times by different people. Since all of these are preserved in the ‘Great Store of Sutras’ ( J. Daizōkyō )⁸ innumerable miles of print lie more or less unused in East Asia itself and it is quite appropriate and indeed necessary for the student to be selective. Two criteria are adopted here, namely coherence of language, which means in practice restriction to works produced by one translator, and frequency of use of the writings. In this way a coherent and more or less manageable set of texts was defined, which may be taken as fairly representing the thought of Mahayana Buddhism in East Asia.

As to the translator, the obvious choice is Kumārajīva, whose work dominates the transmission of Mahayana Buddhism from India to China. Much of his life was spent in Central Asia. He was born in 344 at Kucha, which lies about half way between Kashmir and the western end of the Great Wall of China, on the northern route through the Tarim Basin. His mother was a local ‘princess’ and his father was Indian. It appears that he was turned over to monastic life at the age of six or seven, and that he was instructed in Hinayana Buddhism in Kashmir and in Mahayana Buddhism at Kashgar. For about thirty years he lived at Kucha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Conventions
• Preface to the Second Edition
• 1: General Introduction
• 2: The Initial Teaching of Skilful Means In the Lotus Sutra
• 3: Stories About Skilful Means In the Lotus Sutra
• 4: Mythology and Skilful Means In the Lotus Sutra
• 5: Skilful Means In The Teaching of Vimalakīrti
• 6: Skilful Means In the Perfection of Insight Literature
• 7: Skilful Means In Pre-Mahayana Buddhism
• 8: The Term Hōben In Modern Japanese
• 9: General Observations
• Appendix A: Brief Note On the Main Texts Used
• Appendix B: Historico-Critical Perspective On the Lotus Sutra
• Appendix C: Occurrences of Fang-Pien In the Lotus Sutra
• Appendix D: Occurrences of Famg-Pien In the Teaching of Vimalakirti
• Appendix E: Occurrences of Fang-Pien In the Perfection of Insight Sutras etc
• Appendix F: Skilful Means In the Śūramgamasamādhi Sutra
• Bibliography