Luofu, Mt.
A sacred mountain in Guangdong, southern China, Mt. Luofu was home to hermit practitioners as far back as the first century c.e. It was here that Ge Hong, the famous author of Baopuzi Neipian, retired and died—or, in some accounts, flew into the realm of the immortals. The mountain was thereafter associated with worship of Ge and his disciples, such as Huangba Hu. In the 17th century Luofu was a center of Quanzhen practice in southern China. Existing temples were converted to Quanzhen centers and in some cases rebuilt.
Congxu Daoist temple, Mt. Luofu, southern China
Today Luofu remains an important religious center. There are four functioning Daoist temples and one substantial Buddhist temple on the mountain. Huang Long Guan is the largest, best endowed temple today on Luofu Shan. It has been actively supported by the Hong Kong master Hao Baoyuan. Cong Xu Guan, however, is the oldest temple on Luofu Shan, and the site of the original Ge Hong cult. Su Liao Guan is related to Chen Botao, a 17th-generation Quanzhen master from Dongguan.
By the mid-Qing (1644-1911) period Luofu Shan’s transition into a Quanzhen site was accomplished. It remained for a crop of talented Quan-zhen leaders to build on this foundation and spread beyond Luofu Shan. As a result major Quanzhen temples were founded in Guangzhou, Huizhou, to the east, and Panyu, to the west. These in turn were the springboards for Quan-zhen leaders to spread into Hong Kong in the early years of the 20th century.
Mt. Luofu is one of the 10 mountains known as Dongtian (Heaven grottoes) in Daoism.
Lu Sheng-Yen (pinyin: Lu Shengyan)
(1945- ) founder of the True Buddha school
Master Lu Sheng-Yen, the founder of the True Buddha school, one of a small number of relatively new Taiwanese Buddhist groups that have emerged as international movements, was born in 1945 in Jiayi (or Chiai) in south central Taiwan. He attended Chun-Jen Polytechnic College in the 1960s and after completing his work joined the army. Lu was raised as a Presbyterian (the oldest Christian movement in Taiwan); however, in 1969, while visiting a Taiwanese temple, the Palace of the Jade Emperor, he encountered a medium named Qiandai, who was a member of a new Taiwanese group called the Compassion Society, based on worship of Xi Wangmu, the Royal Mother of the West, under the name Jinmu. During her presentation, Qiandai told Lu that the gods of the temple wished him to acknowledge them. Thrown into a state of confusion, he found himself able to communicate with the spirit world. Communications continued daily for the next three years. He also met a Daoist master who taught him the range of popular divinatory arts. Lu opened a temple in his home and began to offer his services as a diviner and leader of popular rituals. He later identified himself as a Daoist but also began to study Buddhism. Two Buddhist figures, Sakyamuni Buddha and the bodhisattva Kshitigarbha, have the dominant positions in his temple.
Lu was introduced to Tantric Buddhism in 1976. He met Rangjung Rigpe Dorje (1924-81), the 16th Karmapa of the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, and five years later was formally initiated into Tibetan Buddhism by the karmapa. By this time, however, Lu had emerged as a prominent up-and-coming figure in Taiwanese religion. A good writer, he began to turn out several books annually. His following across Taiwan grew. Then suddenly in 1982, he withdrew from his public in Taiwan and moved to the united States. Coincidentally with his withdrawal, on July 10, 1982, a Tibetan Buddhist deity appeared and told Lu that he had been chosen to spread Vajrayana teachings. The deity also bestowed upon him a title: "Holy Red Crown Venerable Vajra Master."
The radical change of residence marked the culmination of Lu’s pilgrimage from his Presbyterian youth to his present role as the founder and master teacher of the True Buddha school. It was only a year after his move that he reorganized his following as the True Buddha school and established its headquarters in a newly constructed temple in Redmond (suburban Seattle), Washington. He announced his plans to build an international movement in the Vajrayana (Tantric) Buddhist tradition.
Over the next few years he had a number of contacts with a variety of beings in the spiritual world—Gautama Buddha, Amitabha Buddha, Maitreya Buddha, and Padmasambhava. From these contacts he assumed the title of TULKU, the emanation of a deity. He is considered by his followers to be a Living Buddha. He finished the decade by launching a four-year (1989-93) world tour on which he visited local Chinese diaspora residents. In the midst of the tour, in 1992, he opened Rainbow Villa, in Washington’s Cascade Mountains, as a facility for training senior leaders. In 1993 he named a number of teaching masters, and since the tour he has taken a backseat in favor of his senior teaching masters and those disciples who have formed the several hundred local centers.
Through his adult life, Lu wrote a large number of books, in Chinese. In the 1990s, his students made a significant effort to translate these into other languages. A selection of titles is currently available in Malay, Indonesian, English, French, Spanish, and Russian.
Macrobiotics
Macrobiotics is a spiritual teaching that finds its major manifestation in a comprehensive vegetarian diet and the lifestyle it suggests. The teachings were initially developed in the late 19th century by Sagen Ishizuka (1850-1901), somewhat in reaction to the wave of Western ideas, and especially Western foods, which had been flowing into Japan since the 1840s. Ishizuka developed what he saw as a modern scientific defense of a traditional Japanese diet in a technical text published in 1897. He then issued a popularized version of his ideas, A Method of Nourishing Life, that became a best seller in Japan. Drawing on a variety of traditional Asian teachings, especially Taoist ideas of balancing yin and yang, he argued for a cereal-based and vegetarianism diet with a proper balance between sodium and potassium.
In 1908, Ishizuka founded the Food Cure Society. An active leader in the society, Yukikazu Sakurazawa, introduced Ishizuka’s ideas to the West in 1929. Settling in Paris, he Westernized his name to George ohsawa (d. 1965) and coined the term macrobiotics to describe the teachings. He returned to Japan for a period after World War II, but then in 1959 settled in America and published his book Zen Macrobiotics, drawing on the attention being given to Zen Buddhism in the Beat culture.
Macrobiotics might not have become so well known had not ohsawa recruited two dedicated students, Herman Aihara and Michio Kushi. Kushi immigrated to America in 1949 and with his wife, Aveline, founded the ohsawa Foundation and developed the macrobiotic community in New York. Aihara joined them in 1952. The movement developed slowly but steadily until 1965. That year a woman who had adopted an extreme form of the macrobiotic diet died. Authorities raided the ohsawa Foundation. In the wake of the controversy, Aihara moved the foundation to California, and Kushi moved to Boston and made a new beginning. Kushi’s work soon flourished as it was identified with the emerging New Age movement. Through the 1970s, macrobiotic centers appeared in urban centers across the united States. Aihara’s work, under several names, also grew.
Their work spread as Kushi was able to develop what many saw as a bland cereal-based diet as an attractive tasty and varied vegetarian cuisine. Gatherings of macrobiotic enthusiasts frequently were built around cooking classes. Kushi’s diet included fresh fruit, common vegetables, and even some fish. Walking a legal tightrope, he also suggested that the diet was not just adequate for a normal person, but good for the healing of a spectrum of illnesses.
Madhyamika
The Mahdhyamika school is one of the two major schools of Mahayana Buddhism. The Mad-hyamika school promotes the "middle way." It is based on the writings of the early Indian philosopher Nagarjuna. In his major work, Madhyamaka-karika, Nagarjuna discusses the function of SUNYATA, or emptiness, and truth. Emptiness here means the egolessness of the self as well as the liberation of the individual into the absolute. Nagarjuna concluded that not only is the self essentially "empty" or lacking in ego, this emptiness is also equivalent to the absolute. Therefore, union with the absolute is a form of liberation or release. Because of the importance of this idea of emptiness, the Madhyamika school was also known as the Shunyatavada, or school of emptiness.
Nagarjuna also emphasized the idea of two truths. The first truth is that of everyday reality, or samvritit-sayta. This is the world of appearances in which we live. The second truth is that of the absolute, or paramartha-satya. In this there are no opposites or things of relative value; everything is of ultimate reality.
Nagarjuna used philosophical techniques to prove his assertions about the two truths. He developed a procedure of applying the eight negations to any statement to prove that it was relative and that any such statement does not describe ultimate reality. Later Indian philosophers, such as Buddhapalita, Bhavaviveka, and Chandrakirti, developed his philosophical ideas further in India.
The Madhyamika school was influential in China and led directly to the Sanlun (Japanese Sanron) school. The idea of two truths was also later developed into a theory of three truths by the Tian Tai school. But Madhyamika ideas were most influential in Tibet. Nagarjuna’s ideas of sunyata and two truths are found throughout the four major Tibetan schools.
Magadha
Magadha was a north Indian kingdom at the time of the Buddha, around the third century b.c.e., where Buddhism first developed. It was located in the area of the present Indian states of Bihar and Jharkhand. Around 325 b.c.e., Magadha fell to Chandragupta, the founder of the Maurya dynasty. Chandragupta was the grandfather of the Buddhist ruler Asoka.
Magadha was the site of numerous Buddhist events. At Bodhgaya, Sakyamuni Buddha received enlightenment. Buddha reportedly expounded the Lotus Sutra at Eagle Peak, a mountain north of Rajagriha, the capital city in Buddha’s day, which became the base from which Buddhism spread. By the time of Asoka, the capital had been moved to the city now known as Patna.
The first, second, and third councils of Buddhism were all held in Magadha, using the local language, Magadhi (a dialect of Sanskrit). Magadha was also the site of Jainism’s origin.
Mahabodhi Society
The Mahabodhi Society was a group founded by the Sri Lankan monk Dharmapala in 1891 for the purpose of reviving Bodhgaya, the Buddhist sacred site. By the 19th century c.e. Bodhgaya had become a decaying Hindu temple site. Dharmapala organized an international conference on the state of Bodhgaya in 1891. In 1892 the society began to publish the periodical The Mahabodhi Society and the United Buddhist World. The society used legal procedures to promote its position during the British period in India. The case was finally settled after India’s independence in 1949.
Today both Hindus and Buddhists manage Bodhgaya. The Mahabodhi Society manages schools and hospitals there. The society also continues to publish translations of Pali works.
Mahamudra
Mahamudra, or "great seal," is a Tibetan Buddhist meditation tradition used especially in the Kagyu school. The main teachings of this tradition involve recognition that compassion and insight (karuna and prajna) as well as samsara and SUNYATA are united and inseparable. The tradition was taken to Tibet by Marpa, who received it from Naropa.
There are two forms of the practice, an ordinary form based on reading of the sutras or Buddhist scriptures and a second "extraordinary" form based on the tantras, the specialized treatises central to Tantric Buddhism.
Mahanikaya
The Mahanikaya is a division of Thai Theravada Buddhism. The Mahanikaya meant simply the greater sangha or community of monks until the future King Mongkut (r. 1851-61) established a competing group, Dhammayuttika Nikaya, in 1833. The label Mahanikaya was used from that period as a means to distinguish the two groups. Mahanikaya means simply the "Great Body." Mah-anikaya has always indicated the majority of Thai Buddhist monks, while the Thammayuttika from its inception has always been in the minority.
Today both groups are recognized under the successive Sangha Acts of 1902, 1941, 1962, and 1992. Both are regulated by the Supreme Sangha Council and the Supreme Patriarch. There are currently very few substantial distinctions between the two groups.
Mahaparinirvana
The Buddha’s death is referred to as his parinir-vana, "complete nirvana," or sometimes as the mahaparivirvana, "great complete nirvana." Nirvana is the state of extinction. A Buddha’s or arhat’s attainment of nirvana is also described as nirvana with no remainder (anupadisesa), meaning both body and awareness are extinguished. Buddhism teaches that the Buddha attained only partial enlightenment from his efforts under the Bodhi tree. He completed his transition into full nirvana, extinction, upon his death. This traditional account of the Buddha’s passage into nirvana is from the Pali Tripitaka.
The Buddha passed away in Kusinara, where he lay after eating a meal of truffles and rice offered by Chunda, a metalsmith. The Buddha, knowing this would be his final meal, ordered that all uneaten truffles be buried and not served to any others, who were instead given sweet rice and cakes. Hence only the Buddha experienced severe dysentery. Later, in the Sala grove at Kusinara, Ananda made a bed for the Buddha to lie on, and from it he addressed the gathered sangha. His final words were as follows: "Inherent in all compounded things is decay and dissolution. Strive well with full mindfulness."
At this point the Buddha moved into the first stage of jhana, a meditative state, then the second, the third, and the fourth. From this he passed by stages into nirvana. The successive stages were consciousness of the infinity of space, consciousness of the infinity of thought, consciousness of nothing, a state between consciousness and unconsciousness, and finally a state without consciousness of sensation or ideas.
The Buddha appeared dead to his followers. But still his consciousness continued to progress, this time in reverse: from a state without consciousness of sensations or ideas, to a state between consciousness and unconscious, to a state in which nothing is present, to a state of consciousness of the infinity of thought, to a state conscious of the infinity of space, then, continuing, to the fourth stage of jhana, then the third, second, and first. Then he passed from the first stage of jhana to the second, then the third, then the fourth. At this point he died. His passing was accompanied by an earthquake and mighty thunder.
Mahaprajapati Gotami the Buddha’s aunt
When his birth mother died, Sakyamuni’s father married her sister, so she became Sakyamuni’s stepmother as well as aunt. After her husband, Suddhodana’s death and the ordination of her other son, Nanda, and grandson, Rahula, Mahaprajapiti asked that the Buddha ordain her as well. He refused her pleas three times but finally agreed only after Ananda, his assistant, made a special plea. Mahaprajapati has remained a symbol of both motherly devotion and devotion to the Dharma. She was the first ordained BHIKSUNI.
Mahasanghika (great assembly school)
Mahasanghika is one of the two schools into which the Buddhist community split after the second council of Buddhism, held at Vaisali c. 300 b.c.e. The second group was the Sthaviravada, or, in the Pali language, the Theravada. The two split over doctrine, with the liberal Mahasanghika accepting a new interpretation and the conservative Sthaviravadas rejecting it. What was the doctrinal question? There are two versions of the doctrinal debate. one story states that a monk named Mahadeva held that a monk who had become an ARHAT continued to have certain human weaknesses, such traits as ignorance, doubt, and capacity to be misled. Mahasanghikas accepted this interpretation while Sthaviravadins did not. Another version is that disagreement arose over the monastic rules (the Vinaya) of a certain Vriji tribe.
Regardless of which version of the doctrinal dispute is correct, the Mahasanghika spread over many areas of India and continued to split into other schools over time. Some scholars consider the Mahasanghika to be the forerunner of the Mahayana school of Buddhism. However, it is possible that Mahayana ideas influenced Maha-sanghika, instead of the other way around. This topic is one of the unanswered questions about early Indian Buddhism.
Mahasi Sayadaw (Shin Sobhana)
(19041982) Burmese vipassana teacher and scholar
The Venerable Mahasi was born to a prosperous family in upper Burma. He became a BHIKSU, a fulltime Buddhist monk, at the age of 19. By 1941, when he passed the government’s Dhammacariya (dhamma teacher) examination, he had become abbot of Taik-kyaung monastery in Taungwaing-gale. With the outbreak of the war against Japan in 1941 he moved to the Mahasi Monastery at Seikkhun. He was henceforth known as Mahasi Sayadaw, or the Mahasi monk. During this period he wrote the Manual of Vipassana Meditation, an explanation of satipatthana meditation.
From 1949 Mahasi was head of the Sasana Yeiktha (meditation center) in Rangoon. He began to train students in VIPASSANA meditation. Related centers spread throughout Burma (Myanmar) and into neighboring countries such as Thailand and Sri Lanka. A 1972 estimate put the number of people trained by Mahasi centers at 700,000 worldwide. Mahasi Sayadaw was awarded the Aggamahapandita (exalted wise one) title by the government. Mahasi Sayadaw actively participated in the Sixth Buddhist Council, which was held in Burma from May 17, 1954. He acted as osana (final editor), pucchaka (questioner), and critic of the final commentaries produced at the council.
Prior to his death in 1981, Mahasi Sayadaw made several trips to India, Japan, Europe, and Indonesia to promote vipassana meditation.
Mahasi Sayadaw was criticized for promoting a focus on the rise and fall of the abdomen during vipassana meditation. This was seen as an innovation introduced by Mahasi Sayadaw himself. The point was argued vigorously in the pages of World Buddhism, a newspaper published in Sri Lanka.
Mahasi Sayadaw authored more than 60 works in Burmese. He had a major impact of Buddhism in the 20th century through both his teaching and his writing.
Mahavamsa
An early history of Sri Lanka, the Mahavamsa, or "Great Story," contains important stories of the historical Buddha and the development of Lanka (current Sri Lanka), including the initial movement of the Dharma to Sri Lanka with the missionary Mahinda. It is generally ascribed to Mahanama, who lived in the sixth century c.e. The Mahavamsa is written entirely as Pali language poetry (3,000 verses) and covers 37 chapters. The Mahavamsa is in turn based on an older work, the Dipavamsa (History of the island). The Mahavamsa ends with events from the reign of King Mahasena in the fifth century c.e.
