Karmic Debts

According to the Buddhist principle of Karma, at least as traditionally understood, we experience a life that is commensurate with our past acts; we reap what we have sown in past lives. In recent days, I have been reflecting upon what my experience of the world is like and – in particular – my experience of other people. Overwhelmingly, this experience is characterised by friendliness, helpfulness, and generosity. Only very rarely does anyone ever speak to me in a harsh way and almost never without some foundation. So does this then mean that I must have lived an exemplary life or series of lives before this one? Maybe so.

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Blood Writing

Copying out sutras has long been regarded as highly meritorious within Mahayana Buddhism. Many texts extol the benefits of copying and distributing scriptures. The Lotus Sutra, for instance, emphasises that anyone who copies even a verse of its text is a spiritually advanced being. Copying sutras was a means to read, study, and memorize a sacred text and, through doing so, to generate merit, which might then be dedicated to departed relatives.

In China, devotees of particular sutras sometimes copied them out using a mixture of ink and their own blood. The justification for this practice comes from the apocryphal Brahma Net Sutra, which instructs: ‘keep, read and recite the scriptures and monastic regulations of the Great Vehicle with a single mind. Cut away your skin for paper, draw your blood for ink and use your marrow for water. Break off a piece of your own bone for a pen and copy out the Buddhist precepts.’

Blood writing is a form of self-sacrifice – the deliberate endurance of pain was regarded as spiritually meritorious and admirable. An especially dedicated individual might copy out the entire Avatamsaka Sutra (which in my English translation is about 2000 pages long) using their own blood. Blood writing remained popular into the modern period.

What is Mahayana Buddhism?

I gave the first of a series of five talks introducing Mahayana Buddhism at the Manchester Buddhist Centre last night. If you are interested you can hear the talk by following this link:

What is Mahayana Buddhism?

I identified six distinctive feature of Mahayana Buddhism:

1 A distinctive literature - a 'literature of the fantastic'

2 A distinctive conception of the Buddha(s) - especially the notion of a 'transhistorical' Buddha

3 A distintive spiritual ideal embodied in the bodhisattva (awakening being)

4 Distinctive Soteriologies; e.g. Pure Land (Other-power) and Chan

5 Distinctive Philosophical Ideas; including Mdhyamika, Yogachara, and Buddha-nature

6 Distinctive Practices; including Buddha cults, koans, and sutra worship