What to Lean On When There’s No Original Buddhism

A lot of us come to Buddhism hoping to find the original teaching: the thing the Buddha actually said, before later generations added to it or dressed it in culture. The hope is understandable. If we can pin that down, practice feels safer. It feels more worth our time. Historical study does not give us that object in a clean way. What earlier Western scholars treated as earliest Buddhism has moved, and it is still moving. The idea that the Buddha taught a short list of things and that later generations invented the rest is still up for debate. So a practitioner is left with a plainer question. If we cannot lean on an original, pure version of the dharma, what can we lean on?

I came back to that after a conversation with Dr. Gary Donnelly on the Buddhist Wisdom Podcast, in an episode called There Is No Original Buddhism. We were looking at how the religious life of practice meets historical evidence. I am not settling the history here. What I want to stay with is the personal side: the hunt for purity I have seen in the West, including in myself, and what I actually rely on instead. Study, reflection, and meditation. Then, when it arrives, a little direct experience of the four seals. That is enough to practice with. The hunt for an original object can sit to the side.

The hunt for the original thing

What I have seen in the West is a little bit of an obsession with purity. Find the original thing, and then that thing is worth more. It is more worthwhile to spend time on in practice. This is not unique to modern seekers of Buddhism, or to the Indic traditions. It happens in all religion. It happens outside religion. It may just be a human quality. We want the thing that is it: the best thing, the most important thing, the correct thing most worth our time and energy.

I understand that energy. I have dealt with it in my life. In certain ways I still do. Even so, I do not think what the Buddha was pointing to requires us to find that original object first.

We have foundations of Buddha Dharma. We do not know exactly how those were directly taught by the historical Buddha, or when. We do not know what was added later and what was original. I had Dr. Donnelly on my podcast for a fun conversation about updates in academia and some of the earliest finds of Buddhist texts. On a personal level, the work looks different. We meet these lineages authentically when we leave the book, go out of the house, and sit with a teacher who is actually inside a lineage that still exists, in an indigenous Buddhist culture as it lives now.

If we are serious about purity, or about getting to the right thing, that does not come from a simple conceptual conviction from a book or podcast. Conceptual conviction is flimsy. We all start there. When we put the dharma into study, reflection, and meditation, and start to internalize it, the conviction gets less flimsy, because we begin to see something more directly ourselves.

Two departments of lineage

Direct and or clear seeing is a whole area of Buddhist studies. In the Tibetan lineages we rely, among other things, on Dharmakirti’s texts on epistemology and logic, and on the commentaries that grew from those. That is one way of using reasoning to have evidence of something in the relative world. Beyond reasoning there is what is called yogic direct perception. Through learning, reflection, and meditation, a person starts to see, for instance, the four seals directly. For a practitioner, for someone walking this path, that seeing is primary.

Texts still matter. Positions matter. Preserving theories, commentaries, and what realized practitioners wrote down is a huge part of the tradition. In the Himalayan lineages we often speak of living lineage in two parts. There is the lineage of scripture and texts: what is written, what is embodied in writing, what developed practitioners shared on the page. Then there is the lineage of realization, which exists in the mind of practitioners. That one is hard to point at. It is hard to quantify in a material way. Both are equally important. If we lose one of them, the longevity of Buddha Dharma in the world is not in good shape. For those of us who are card-carrying Buddhists, that longevity matters. Dogma and purity tests do not.

So when the hunt for an original, pure Buddhism gets triggered by someone questioning the history of a lineage, it is worth looking at the motivation. What is going on inside? That is one reason I wanted Dr. Donnelly on. If I am threatened by a question about whether my lineage is truthful or historically accurate, there is a lot to look at in myself.

Fortunately, I was not threatened by that. I am not threatened by that. When we start practicing, and start to taste the dharma even a little, that taste is what matters. That little bit is what starts to give genuine conviction, and that conviction is based on curiosity. It does not come from dogma, or fear, or being with the right crowd, or a charismatic teacher convincing us we need to believe something. It comes from direct practice.

Until that arrives we use informed belief as a doorway: conceptual conviction, reasoning. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama says quite directly that in Buddhism, generally, faith is based on reasoning. That is the first type of faith. Eventually we need to go beyond it. We need to experience and taste the dharma directly.

There is a famous line in the Himalayan lineages that I will paraphrase. You need to practice to the point where even if you have a vision of the Buddha, and that Buddha tells you that you are doing it wrong, that the direct seeing of the dharma you are experiencing as realization is incorrect, you can politely say it is not. Your practice has brought you to a genuine, unchanging realization. This is the level of conviction we need to aim at developing. 

The four seals

The seals are a good place to land if we want a definitive approach to what is Buddha Dharma and what is not. Generally we think of them as impermanence, dukkha, and emptiness, with a fourth that Mahayana lineages often add: nirvana, liberation itself. In Theravada the third is often named anatta. In Mahayana we usually say shunyata, emptiness. These four are pervasive throughout the Buddhisms. They are not unique to the Himalayan lineages. There are also sutras in which the Buddha says, in effect, this is how you know whether a teaching came from me or not.

So if I want to practice Buddhadharma, the four seals are where it is at. That does not depend on Western academia confirming a teaching or telling me what is correct. It does not even depend, necessarily, on a teacher who is very charismatic. If there is no original historical “this is it,” I rely on study, reflection, and meditation, and then on direct experience of the four seals. Direct experience is the most important. Until it comes, reasoning and inference will have to do.

And if we are not even there yet, we have to be careful with the guides we rely on. We are relying on their expertise, their direct seeing, their knowledge of the dharma. If they inspire us and we enjoy studying with them, we will take their beliefs and their experience on face value until we have our own. That is ordinary. It is also why the choice of teacher is not a small thing.

I see the hunt for purity in spiritual practice, not only in Buddhism, coming mainly out of fear. Fear of doing it wrong. Fear of being on the wrong path. Fear of following some offshoot the Buddha did not teach. When we do not know yet, we still need something to follow. We check sources. We use reasoning to infer what is most likely. That is fine. The trouble starts when fear turns that necessary beginning into a purity test.

We are lucky in the Buddhist traditions. There have been about 2,600 years since the Buddha, and 2,600 years of research and development. I do not think it is a fault that things have changed. I would not quite use the word evolved. I would say changed. The wrapper changes. The way the dharma is discussed and taught to different cultures and individuals has grown over those centuries. I believe it has actually gotten richer, and that is a good sign. It has gotten richer because those two lineages are still intact: the scriptural tradition and the lineage of realization, and many realized beings have attained fruition and added to these two lineages over the years. 

I am affiliated with the Himalayan lineages and I mostly stay there in my own practice. The little I know of Zen, Chan, and the different Theravada lineages is that these two are intact in all of them. There are realized masters. There is textual depth. Whether Western academia corroborates that does not matter to me. I still enjoy history. I enjoy learning what things might have been. That interest does not have to run my belief or my practice.

I understand the wish to be right. All good. Do your thing. My advice as a Dharma friend, just a Dharma brother, is to look at the motivation for that wish. Look at the intention. I have to do the same with why I am writing this, and with anything I do in the realm of teaching or sharing.

Purity, or the right thing, is the wrong question. The better question is whether a teaching turns the mind toward what the Buddha was actually pointing at.

I am not going to give an extensive explanation on the four seals here. I do that elsewhere. Though very briefly: nirvana is the result of freedom. Freedom from clinging, from dualistic mind, from suffering and its causes. Full freedom, and also the blossoming of the power and compassion of an enlightened being, who can benefit others in ways most of us cannot even imagine possible.

The other three seals are what lead toward that. Nirvana is hard to have conviction in at the beginning. For most of us it is some kind of faith that there is such a thing we can attain, or reveal. The other three still matter here. Impermanence, dukkha, and emptiness form the basis of the attainment of nirvana, and they are how we begin to infer that it is even possible. Emptiness is probably the most direct window. Impermanence is too. Dukkha is often misunderstood because it is mistranslated as suffering, which is narrower than the word. I tend to use dissatisfaction. I have also seen stress, confusion, and a lot of other English attempts. The word is broad. It describes that we are not seeing our full potential as an awake being, and that we experience dissatisfaction because of that.

In a way this is a beautiful thing. When we experience dukkha we can also infer a seeking of what is not dukkha. I like looking from that side. That view is closer to what the Himalayan lineages call the third turning of the wheel, the teachings on Buddha nature, which also live in Chan and elsewhere. As we practice those three more, and start to see more of them, we get closer. 

Living lineages

However we started the path, we eventually need to meet a teacher. That means meeting the living source. If we are serious, if we want to taste freedom for ourselves and be able to benefit others through that, we need living lineages.

Living lineages are not museum pieces, and they are not archaic. They are the product of 2,600 years of research and development. You can argue there has been degeneration. Any human experiment goes off the rails sometimes. There are also stopgaps when this happens. Lineages correct themselves. In the history of Himalayan Buddhism, for example, things have become institutionalized at times, then rigid, then embedded in politics and other social life. When that has happened, the yogic traditions have often come in to disrupt it, or to question it. That tension has always been there. I am sure it has happened in other Buddhist lineages as well.

We do not have to deny a whole stream because there is a bad apple somewhere, or because we heard of teacher misconduct, or because Tibet has a long history of shenanigans. That does not pollute the fundamental dharma. What pollutes the fundamental dharma is us. We can pollute it for ourselves. We can also influence others, unfortunately. Mainly we are responsible for getting a clear understanding, and some taste, and some experience, ourselves. That is a process. It is not a landing place.

When someone has real expertise they become part of the lineage and a guide for others. That is fine. The lineage also has ways of recognizing and promoting that, which is actually a beautiful thing.

So besides pursuing the four seals in study, reflection, meditation, and, eventually, direct experience, we need teachers. We need a living lineage. My whole argument is that we should not assume that because the West is more modern, or more evolved, we know how to do this better.

I have purposely cultivated relationships with some of the finest Himalayan Buddhist teachers I could find, and I keep doing that. I look for people who are well practiced and well studied, and who are connected to a living lineage. They are not making something up. They were not tourists who came back with a method. They are in it. It is their culture and daily breath. So I would rather meet these lineages while they still exist, while there are still practitioners gaining realization through them.

Seek those people out if you haven’t already. We might have to get off the couch. We might have to buy a plane ticket. Do it. In a lot of Western countries we do not even have to buy the ticket. Teachers often come to us, which is wonderful. Books are great. At some point we have to meet living lineage. And as we practice and develop, we become part of that lineage too.

On the cushion

This same hunt shows up on the cushion. I see it in myself: a search for the correct, the right, the pure. It usually comes out of fear. I have noticed that in my own practice and in people I talk with. On the cushion it looks like trying to do it right, trying to be perfect, trying to squeeze the dharma out of a session instead of engaging the process with curiosity.

What keeps me out of the woods of dogma, is staying curious. Curiosity does not mean I never land on a belief or a conviction. I do. I treat those as temporary. What I do not treat as temporary is direct seeing. Direct seeing is not a thought. A person is transformed, and then the seeing is incontrovertible. That is what I am looking for. On the way there I have temporary beliefs.

On the cushion the purity hunt often becomes a self-improvement project. We jump from practice to practice. We do one, we do not get the result we think we should get, we move on. Or we pretend to be more than we are, sitting still like a great meditator when it would be more useful to just see the deluded mind at work and unravel it from there.

The path of the Buddha is not a self-improvement project. It is more of an uncovering project.

There is an analogy in some Himalayan lineages of a beggar lamenting that he is poor, all the while not realizing there is gold buried under his house. If he would dig, the gold is there. I treat the path like that now. Learning, reflection, meditation, listening to the dharma: the gold is there. One way we frame it is Buddha nature, which does not mean an essence or a soul. It means the potential for awakening. The perspective helps me because it is not a hunt to self-improve. It is a hunt to deconstruct dukkha, to deconstruct misperception.

There are plenty of areas of growth. When we take away the self-improvement project, what is left is curiosity and learning, and it is more joyful. We do not have to prove anything to anyone. What we need is to see the qualities of our own mind, and how we can move toward nirvana, how we can uncover that. The point is to find our path, to cultivate it, and to uncover our own awake nature. That, in my view, is what there is to lean on.