Why So Many Buddhas

Yakushi in the main hall, Amitābha, Kannon, Jizō, Fudō, and, in the Shingon school, Mahāvairocana. As you travel among the temples of Japan, you meet the names of many buddhas. "Does Buddhism worship this many buddhas?" "Which one is the greatest?" Not a few visitors are puzzled in this way.

There is a clear reason for this abundance. And that reason can be traced back to a single, very simple idea. It is what we will speak of now: "one buddha per buddha-field" (ichibutsu ikkokudo). It may look like a difficult phrase, but its content is plain. Let us take it step by step.

Before we begin, please learn just two words. Buddhism has, broadly, two streams: "sectarian (Nikāya) Buddhism" and "Mahāyāna Buddhism."

Over the long years after Śākyamuni passed away, Buddhism divided, broadly, into two streams. The first, sectarian (Nikāya) Buddhism, is the ancient stream that has guarded and handed down, just as it was and with strict fidelity, the teaching transmitted directly from Śākyamuni. Theravāda Buddhism, transmitted in present-day Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Myanmar, is its representative.

The other, Mahāyāna Buddhism, is a stream that arose a little later. It made a great vow: to save together not only those who had left home as monks but every living being. The Buddhism transmitted to Japan by way of China and the Korean peninsula is all of this Mahāyāna. The Buddhism we worship at temples, too, is Mahāyāna Buddhism.

This is all you need to remember: "Sectarian Buddhism is the ancient stream. Mahāyāna Buddhism is the later, broader stream. And the Buddhism of Japan is Mahāyāna." These two names will come up again and again.

The sectarian Buddhism and the Mahāyāna Buddhism we have just seen have both inherited this one rule alike: "In a single world, there is only one buddha." On this point, neither differs.

Why, then, is one buddha enough? People of old likened it to a king. In a single country, one king is enough for the land to be governed. If two were to stand at the same time, no one would know whom to obey, and it would become, rather, a source of strife. The buddha is the same: to guide a single world, one is enough, they thought.

Though the rule is the same, here Buddhism divides greatly into two. The dividing point is just one: whether one sees this world as the only one, or sees worlds as countless.

"In a single world, there is only one buddha." On this rule, neither differs. What changes is how many worlds one counts. Count one, and the present buddha too is one. Count countless, and in each and every one there is a buddha, and so the buddhas too become countless.

It is merely the same single rule turned over by the number of worlds. That alone divided the Buddhism that looks up to Śākyamuni alone from the Buddhism that looks up to countless buddhas, beginning with Amitābha and Yakushi. Let us look at the two in turn.

The ancient sectarian Buddhism (Theravāda, Sarvāstivāda, Saṃmitīya, and the like) saw the world as "this one only."

The buddha present in the world at this time is Śākyamuni alone. Of other worlds it does not speak. Śākyamuni was a historical person who was actually born in India some 2,500 years ago and attained awakening. One simply inherits his teaching, single-mindedly. It is a clear and strict Buddhism of a single buddha.

This is easy to misunderstand, so let us look carefully. The word "world" contains nested levels of different sizes. The smallest unit is a single grouping (a small world) in which Mount Sumeru rises at the center and continents and oceans encircle it. A staggeringly vast single mass, gathering a billion of these small worlds, is the great trichiliocosm (trisāhasra-mahāsāhasra world-system).

The "single world" that one buddha takes charge of is this great trichiliocosm. Binding together a billion small worlds, the whole is counted as "one buddha's buddha-field," that is, a single buddha-land (ichibussetsu). Though there are a billion, they are not ten separate countries but, gathered together, one country.

This great trichiliocosm in which we dwell bears the name the Sahā world. And the one and only teacher (the buddha who guides) of the whole Sahā world is Śākyamuni. It is not that the buddha is one because the world is small. He takes charge, by himself, of so vast a single world (the Sahā) that includes a billion small worlds. This is what "in a single world, there is only one buddha" means.

The make-up of this great trichiliocosm is expounded in detail in the literature of the sects. The Chinese translation of the Treatise on Establishing the World (Lishi apitan lun), transmitted in the Saṃmitīya school, also layers the worlds as small-thousand, middling-thousand, and great-thousand, and teaches that the buddha's light fills the great-thousand world to its every corner. On that basis, the Theravāda transmitted to the south, in the Points of Controversy (Kathāvatthu), and the Sarvāstivāda that flourished to the north, in the Treatise Conforming to the Right Principles (Nyāyānusāra), clearly reject the doctrine that "now, in other worlds too, there are buddhas." The world is this one only. Therefore the present buddha too is Śākyamuni alone. It is coherent.

Mahāyāna Buddhism saw the world as "one among countlessly many."

There are worlds as numerous as the stars in the night sky, nay, far more than that. Each and every one possesses the size of a great trichiliocosm, and in each there is its own buddha. In our Sahā world there is Śākyamuni alone, but in Sukhāvatī far to the west there is Amitābha, and in Jōruri far to the east there is Yakushi, present right now, they thought.

Here, the question we began with (why are there so many buddhas at a temple) finds its answer. The buddhas we meet at the temples of Japan are, originally, each the lord of a different world. Amitābha is the buddha of Sukhāvatī, Yakushi of Jōruri, and Akṣobhya of Abhirati, the world of supreme delight to the east. Because the worlds differ, even being present at the same time involves no contradiction.

Why, then, can we worship those buddhas of other worlds at this temple in the Sahā world? It is because the buddhas of other worlds, in order to save the people of this world, take on provisional forms and appear in this world (manifestation, jigen). For just this reason, though they are lords of other worlds, both Amitābha and Yakushi work, right now, as the principal images before our very eyes. The abundance of buddhas at a temple is the expression of countless buddhas of countless worlds extending their hands toward this single world.

The Mahāyāna scriptures depict these many buddhas vividly. The Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra depicts Sukhāvatī; the Bhaiṣajyaguru Sūtra, Jōruri; the Akṣobhya Buddha-Field Sūtra and the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, the world of supreme delight (Abhirati) to the east; the Lotus Sutra, the emanation buddhas gathering from the ten directions and the eternal Śākyamuni from the far distant past; the Bhadrakalpika Sūtra, the thousand buddhas who appear one after another; and the Karuṇāpuṇḍarīka Sūtra, the practitioners who each become a buddha in a different world.

The view that "worlds are countless" presently advances one step further.

Countless worlds, countless buddhas. If so, might there not be a single buddha who pervades them all and fills them to the brim? The one thus depicted on a grand scale is Vairocana of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra (also called Rushana; the great Buddha of Tōdaiji in Nara is this buddha). He is taught as a buddha who, like the light that illumines everywhere, takes all of the countless worlds as his body.

The world of this buddha can actually be seen with the eyes. It is the pedestal of the very great Buddha of Tōdaiji in Nara (Vairocana) mentioned just now. The great lotus flower upon which the Great Buddha sits. Upon each and every one of its petals, Mount Sumeru and the heavens are drawn in lines by fine engraving. This is the very picture of the world that the Brahmā's Net Sūtra expounds. The sūtra teaches thus: Vairocana sits upon the dais of a great lotus flower. Each and every petal is one world. In each one, Śākyamuni appears and becomes a buddha ("one flower, a hundred koṭi lands; one land, one Śākyamuni"). The rule that in a single world there is one buddha holds here just the same. And those countless Śākyamunis are all the body of Vairocana alone ("Vairocana's own body," rushana honjin). A single lotus flower binding together all the countless worlds. Its lord is Vairocana.

Esoteric Buddhism deepens this Vairocana still further and calls him Mahāvairocana (Dainichi). "Dainichi" means "the great Vairocana" (Mahāvairocana). Mahāvairocana is not an exceptional buddha standing "outside" the rule that "in a single world there is one buddha." Rather, he is that one buddha when the rule is extended to the very largest world (the whole of all worlds). He is the buddha who fills every place and every time, ceaselessly continuing to expound the teaching, and who takes the dharma-realm (dharmadhātu, the whole of the worlds) itself as his body.

Therefore the Śākyamuni before our eyes and Mahāvairocana are not separate buddhas. The Sūtra of Contemplating Samantabhadra expounds, "Śākyamuni is named Vairocana, pervading every place." The true body that fills the dharma-realm (the dharmakāya) is Mahāvairocana. The form he showed in response to our world (the response body, nirmāṇa/ōjin) is Śākyamuni. They are two ways of seeing the same buddha. Nor did the Shingon school newly invent this. Kōbō Daishi took up anew the Vairocana of the Avataṃsaka, who pervades all the worlds, as the dharmakāya buddha who himself expounds the teaching.

What was transmitted to Japan was this Mahāyāna Buddhism. That is why the temples of Japan are full of buddhas.

Amitābha and Yakushi, present in other worlds. Mahāvairocana, who pervades all worlds. The historical Śākyamuni. Even when these are enshrined together within a single temple compound, there is no contradiction. For Japanese Buddhism stands upon the Mahāyāna view that "there are as many buddhas as there are worlds." The "abundance of buddhas" that puzzled us at the start was the expression of this expansive view of the cosmos.

When you go round the Eighty-Eight Sacred Sites of Shikoku, the principal image differs from station to station: Yakushi Nyorai, Mahāvairocana, Kannon, Jizō, and so on. To worship each and every one is, just as it is, to walk within this expansive view of the cosmos, that "there are as many buddhas as there are worlds."

Byōdōji is a temple of the Kōyasan Shingon school and also the twenty-second sacred site of the Eighty-Eight Sacred Sites of Shikoku. The Shingon school looks to Mahāvairocana, who pervades all the worlds, as the source of every buddha, the universal totality (fumon sōtai) endowed with every virtue. On that basis, it enshrines as its principal image the buddha who expresses one virtue out of that whole, the particular gate (ichimon bettoku): Yakushi of Jōruri to the east.

Furthermore, Kōbō Daishi Kūkai expounds attaining buddhahood in this very body (sokushin jōbutsu). The buddha is not present only in some distant, separate world far away. Each one of us is, from the very beginning, connected as one with Mahāvairocana, and within the practice of joining the hands, reciting mantra, and turning the mind toward the buddha (the three secrets, sanmitsu), we come to touch the life of the buddha just as we are, in this very body.

From here on, for those who wish to know a little more deeply. First, "why is one enough?" The scholar-monks of later ages arranged the reasons into four.

Every one of these reasons springs, at root, from a single heart. With one buddha, all is fully satisfied. That is precisely why there is only one. Then what if there were another, one able to become a buddha? That one does not become the second in this world. He goes to save the people of another world that has no guide yet. So every world is duly watched over by a single buddha.

The answer that "there is one buddha per world" is not the invention of any single school. It existed from a time close to Śākyamuni, and every sect that later divided inherited it in common.

Originally this was part of the words describing the buddha's wisdom. The buddha is said to discern, just as they are, "what accords with right principle" and "what does not accord with right principle." "That two buddhas should be in a single world is impossible" was counted as one of these things that "do not accord with right principle." It was not a matter of number, of "how many buddhas there are," but a matter of "how the principle of the world appears to the eyes of a buddha."

This way of putting it traces back to very ancient scriptures, close to the time of Śākyamuni. It remains in almost the same phrasing both in the Pali scriptures transmitted to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia and in the Chinese-translated Madhyama-āgama (Zhong ahan jing), the "Sūtra of Many Elements" (Bahudhātuka-sūtra). It is an old and sure answer that the whole of Buddhism shared even before the sects divided. For just this reason, what divided was not the answer but, as we have already seen, the single point of "the size of a world."

From here on, for those who wish to know more deeply, we add the words of the original scriptures one by one. This teaching can be confirmed, matching down to its very phrasing, in scriptures in four languages: Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan. First, from the oldest layer.

Next, the treatises of each school. The same teaching is given its reasons in each school's own words, and presently, over "the breadth of a world," the Theravāda and Sarvāstivāda divide from the Mahāyāna.

First, the schools that flourished in the north arranged, with reasons, "why two buddhas do not appear at the same time."

When you compare them, the rule is the same in every case: "In a single world, there is only one buddha." Moreover, the size of that "single world" is also shared. Both the sects and the Mahāyāna take one buddha's buddha-field to be the great trichiliocosm (trisāhasra-mahāsāhasra world-system), a gathering of a billion Mount Sumeru worlds, equal to a single buddha-land (ichibussetsu), equal to the Sahā world, equal to this world of ours. What differs is just one point: whether one sees that world as "this one only" or as "one among countlessly many." See the world as one, and the present buddha is Śākyamuni alone. See it as countless, and in the countless worlds of the ten directions there are, now, countless buddhas. We who look up to Amitābha and Yakushi stand upon the later path, that of the Mahāyāna.

Last, from the Mahāyāna's ever-expanding way of grasping the buddha, the words of the original texts that lead on to Vairocana and Mahāvairocana.

From the Vairocana of the Avataṃsaka and the eternal buddha of the Lotus, to the Mahāvairocana of esoteric Buddhism. And on to attaining buddhahood in this very body. The old question, "how many buddhas are there?" thus changes its form into the journey of each single person: "how am I to find the buddha within the depths of my own heart?"