Subversive Upaya
What is an Upaya? Basically ((etymologically as opposed to sectarian interpretation)) “Upaya” is the Sanskrit word for a “Trick,” a “Scheme,” a “Ploy,” a “Devised Plan/Plot,” an “Approach,” a “Useful Means,” or an “Expedient Method.” In modern English the word “Methodology” would best explain what an “Upaya” is. But I’ve heard a better word used by a subculture which better grasps the essential utilitarian quality of Upaya: “Tricknology,” which was a word invented by Master Fard Muhammad to explain certain things.
Zen uses a fist and a baby to explain Upaya. To illustrate, your baby is crying and won’t stop, so you devise a way/means to stop the baby from crying. You make a fist and pretend that you have candy or something inside, and say to the baby, “Ooh look what I got… what’s this? I wonder what’s inside?? Candy; Nirvana maybe???” If you get the baby’s attention, she stops crying and looks at the fist. That’s Upaya. The mother/father knows there is nothing in the fist, they know it’s a trick, but that trick has a productive ((Kosala/kaushalya)) intent/Fruit; the intent/Fruit being the cessation of the baby’s crying/dukkha. This would be called “Upaya Kosala” in Pali. Actually the inside joke among Buddhists is that there is Nothing in the Fist ((Sunyata = Nothingness/emptiness))! That’s only funny to a certain crowd.
The Buddha ((Mr. Gautama)) took the concept of Upaya and turned it into a viable and acceptable Buddhist Method of teaching Dhamma. In this context – as the Buddha used it – an Upaya was only a means to an End. The End being that the specific person or upasika/upasaka he was teaching grasped Dhamma, Enlightenment, and the Ariyamagga ((Noble Way)). The means was anything at the Buddha’s disposal.
Thus, it is said that the Buddha taught 84,000 teachings of Dhamma. The symbolical number represents the diverse backgrounds, level of understanding, cognitive skills, and such of each individual person he was teachings. In other words, for each person he taught, the Buddha devised a different Upaya. Which is why you will find many contradictions within the 25,000 pages of the Tipitaka. Such teachings of Buddha are “dialectical,” having developed in context to a dialogue with a specific person or pupil in a specific time and place, in specific cultural and social conditions. To take such “anchored” dialogues/dialectics out of its native contextual matrix it is rooted in, would obscure 90% of its value and would generate more confusion and misunderstanding than insight.
For example we do know that the Buddha wasn’t very big on the Brahmanistic concept/doctrine of Atma ((an immortal soul)). But there was a time when he had met a Charvaka ((rabid materialist)) who argued with the Buddha stating that the body was made of only the 4 elements and that one stops existing at death and that moral laws were thus not worth following.
Although the Buddha agreed with many of the Charvaka’s statements, the Buddha did not like the fact that the Charvaka was not morally inclined for certain immoral acts will cause unskillful ((akosala)) or negative effects in his life ((dukkha)). Thus, the Buddha devised an upaya where he himself would teach a teaching that completely contradicted his own personal beliefs. The Buddha taught the Charvaka that the Brahmans were right and that there was indeed an immortal Atman in all people which was subject to karma. After much leg twisting, debating, and upaya-ing; the Charvaka renounced his materialist beliefs and lived a spiritual and moral life instead.
So the moral of that story is that the teachings superficially are meaningless, because it is the desired End Result the teachings or upaya bares that is more important. The teachings – the spoken Dhamma – are thus only a MEANS to manifest an END. ((Further reading))
The Mahayana Buddhists have a saying that goes, “The Dharma that is spoken is not the true Dharma.” Which is to say that one should not fixate one’s mind on a teaching or deify a teaching as infallible doctrines to be followed by the literal letter. Because such teachings/dharma are only mental or subjective approximations of the Dharma – or Way/Law of Things – that has existed long before mankind and language. And sometimes – as with many upayas – such teachings are “expedient” teachings or simply ploys to get the student to go in a certain direction. As per the Buddha, it doesn’t matter what the expedient method is that is used, even if such upayas contradicts teachings, conventionalism, and is amoral, what matters is that Buddhi and Nirvana is the End Result… that the Anariya ((ignorant fool)) learns to transcend his idiocy and become an Ariya ((a Noble/Lofty minded person)).
When in ancient times the now extinct Hinayana school and the still living and evolving Mahayana school of Buddhism were in some ideological war, the Hinayanas accused the Mahayanas of not being genuine Buddhists because they created their own sutras and doctrines as they went along. To end the debate and arguments, the Mahayanas just pointed out that their whole Approach and Methods were an entire Upaya to get their followers to manifest the same Illumination and Liberation.
The “missionaries” that spread Buddhism across Asia in ancient times used a subspecies of Upaya called Upaya Panya meaning “Clever/Wise ((Panya/pan~n~a in Pali or Prajna in Sanskrit)) Tricks,” or Upaya Kosala meaning “Constructive ((Kosala/kaushalya)) Trickery (Upaya) to mass convert an entire native population. In Vajrayana Upaya Panya is depicted symbolically as a male Buddha ((Upaya)) in sexual union with a female deity ((Panya))… the female of course symbolizing the subtle feminine craftiness, cunningness, which most of us ((girls and you gay boys too)) have… either that or boys are just easily tricked ((upaya)).
Basically Upaya Panya is something the Jesuit Priests are/were very skilled at doing. The Jesuits in olden times would travel into a foreign country, learn the language of the natives, learn the religions, the gods, and world views of the natives, then report their intelligence to the Vatican. The schemers in the Vatican will then devise the best Expedient Method of mass converting the native population. Usually this is done by “morphing” Catholicism in such a way that it becomes a hybrid synthesis of the original Catholicism and native spiritual beliefs, practices, rites, and such. This is also when the gods and/or cultural iconic figures of a native population are conveniently beatified as Catholic saints. So the idea here is the Vatican desires the native population to be Catholics (by any means), which is the desired End Result. How that End Result is achieved is based on intelligence, craftiness and trickery which are the subversive (re: nonviolent) means.
The Buddhist “missionaries” utilized the same subversive tactics, they just gave it pretty names that sound all mystical and spiritual like “Upaya Panya,” and “Upaya Kosala,” and they translate it into foreign languages to sound all transcedental and fluffy. Here I used the word “subversive” to mean that an external/foreign entity ((missionaries)) subverts a native people’s established culture, world views, and indigenous sectarian beliefs by introducing foreign memes with the intent of manipulating, coercing, or influencing a desired change in the native population. And so as with China, the gods of the indigenous peoples such as the fat guy ((Budai)) and a goddess ((Kuan Yin)) become “Bodhisattvas,” and the native Taoism is absorbed to create hybrid “Buddhisms” such as “Chan Buddhism.” And we have hybrid Buddhisms in Japan merged with much older indigenous belief systems like Shintoism. Of course Tibetan Buddhism is not “pure” Buddhism, it’s a mix of Buddhism and the indigenous Bon religion.
All of these different kinds of “Buddhisms” were/are not bastardizations of some “purer,” more “genuine” Buddhism. They were/are accepted Upayas and recognized as legitimate, because in the end, all the natives become Buddhists. There is no such thing as a pure and genuine Buddhism, especially in the real world of living cultures and traditions. The ancient animism and such of a living culture and its time honored traditions are not thrown away for some new collective identity as a Buddhist. The Buddhism is just piled on top of their already ancient cultural “repertoire.” And you can see the same process happening with Buddhism in regards to the Occident where there is emerging a very noticeable new form of Buddhism some have called the Western Vehicle, where the post-christian, secular, neo-rationalism of Australia ((where Buddhism is a major religion among Caucasians)), Europe, and America are not replaced by weirdly mystical, myth riddled Buddhisms, but that Buddhism is acquired as an accessory or add-on to what they already have and are.
“The Dharma that is spoken is not the true Dharma.” Or as my grandma says, “Dhamma is not in any temple or book or monk. It is inside each of us. We just may initially need help finding it.” There is no such thing as “pure” Buddhism because of upaya and the need to reformat Buddhism in such a way that your audience understands it. Even when Buddhism is apprehended in the West it “morphs” to take on the world views and scientific rationalism of the Occident. But this is a good thing because it causes us to understand that what is written or taught is NOT the END but only a MEANS. Whereas with a dogmatic and rigid religion as Christianity the doctrine, dogma, and beliefs are the End. Which is how many Western religious/sectarian memeplexes are, even Satanism, where the “Satanic” beliefs, doctrine, statements, and ideology ((Atheism/Theism)) are the definitive End. “Definitive End” here meaning that such doctrines, beliefs, and world views actually is used to define your Self/Person/Ego as the final End Product. For example, if you are a “LaVeyan” Satanist ((under the Gilmore Doctrine)) you must be an atheist-materialist and if you adopt a theist-supernatural world view, then you are no longer “LaVeyan” but something fake and unreal and perhaps not even human; and vise versa. In this context – of judging other based on their intangible reified ideas – I would say that racism is far better and more rational because at least skin color, ethnicity, and nationality are tangible and real.
You simply do not have this tunnel vision fixation of mind and self identity on Outer Forms ((Upaya)), reifications, and world views, in any Dharmic religions. For instance Hinduism. On an exoteric ((superficial)) level, Hinduism ((as is Buddhism)) is a big mess. There are monotheist Hindus, polytheist Hindus, atheist Hindus, theist Hindus, materialist Hindus, and supernatural/spiritual Hindus. The Outer Dharma they use is not the End, only a means to and End. The End being Sambodhi ((Self Realization)) and Moksha ((Liberation from Samsara)). As an enlightened Guru or Bhikkhu who knows and understands Dharma ((Logos/Tao)), you should be able to assess your students’ cognitive capacity and their unique level of understandings and needs to know that if your student need to believe in gods, rites, magic and such, or he can not yet grasp the idea of he being the living infinite cosmos, that you must be able to restate or reformat Dharma into something your student can not only comprehend but use – for his own advancement and progressive development towards his own greater potential. You never hear a sect of Hindus claim to be the “real” Hindus while others are “fake” Hindus because they believe differently. You don’t ever hear different vehicles of Buddhism claim to be “real” Buddhism while others are “fake” Buddhist because they believe differently.
What is written and taught is not infallible divine doctrines, it is just a Method of teaching/conveying ideas between one who has “seen” and one who desires to “see.” To a skilled teacher, how you convey what you have seen all depends on who you are teachings. You would teach the same wisdom you have extracted out of your many years of life to a child very differently then what you would teach a college level adult because the child and adult each have their own level of understanding and inner needs. The words and ideas used are only approximations, clever articulations, naked essence dressed up to entertain the minds of a specific audience. The “real” Dhamma is that which existed way before humanity and human language. It is wordless in its own existence like Nature, the sun, the stars, and the cosmos. The real Dharma is the Way or “Law” of Things, which the Buddha dis-covered and observed during his meditations in the forest, which he tried to teach in different ways to different people.
Upaya can take on bizarre forms. Vajrayana Buddhism is a good example of an upaya gone wild. Vajrayana is sometimes called Tantric Buddhism or Esoteric Buddhism. Some sects of Vajrayana have secret or private teachings given only to initiates. These teachings are diverse depending on the sects. Most deal with things the West would call “magic,” some deal with tantric practices that incorporate sex, and as with the Drukpas, the Left Hand Path ((certain forms of vamachara)) are used. They’re all acceptable upayas which are just different Methods utilized to get the student to Realize and Actualize the same End Result. Different hiking trails… same lofty summit and illumined vantage point.
Of course therefore, no one demonstrates Upaya in practice better than the “mahamonk” of Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhism the Dalai Lama. To his own school and sect and people he is the leader of a very bizarre species of Buddhism with pantheons of gods, spiritual mysticism, rabid supernaturalism, magical rites, and religious imagery of Buddhas and goddesses in coitus. But to his Occidental audience in the West he teaches and presents a Buddhism which is very rational, pro-science, congruent to contemporary quantum physics, concentrated on secular methods of meditation and stress relief for the modern age, etc… that is Appealing to his Occidental Market; that’s upaya. Same holy guy… two completely different “Buddhisms.” Which is the “real Buddhism?” Neither are. Each superficial form of Buddhism is only a methodology or method of cultivating the desired end Fruit. It doesn’t matter what methods or procedures is used by a wine grower in viticulture, because in the end the same Fruit grows. You want to pay Mind/attention to the perfection of the grapes you desire to grow, not to the of perfection of the manure you or your neighbor are using.
So what if we were clever and crafty ((panya)) sectarian “subverters,” and we found ourselves in a nation populated with newly disenfranchised people from a post-christian age grasping for something new to hold on to, to give them meaning in their lives? How would we get such easy prey to End up working for Self Enlightenment and Liberation? The how or means ((upaya)) is irrelevant, so long as the End Result is constructive ((Kosala/kaushalya)). The answer is that it would depend on the specific audience and as an “adept” of our craft, trade, or Way, one should be cunning enough to outsmart an idiot. See that puts things into perspective for those in the Game. What kind of adept, occult teacher, coven leader, or grand magister are you when you can’t even convince an idiot to like you let alone accept your ideas? Ideas are just ideas… gods are just gods… why do people “favor” one set and one teacher over another? It’s because of Panya ((cunningness)). We’re essentially dealing with a form of psychological or memetic warfare when we talk about religion and/or ideology and the spread of religion/ideology. The battlefield is your Mind. Upaya ((the means and method whereby memes are virally implanted into a target population/Mind)) is the weapon. The winner owns the lives of people. The losers lose their own will, autonomy, and existence. In this war there are only three real positions you can take: fight as a warrior on the offensive; stand your ground in the defensive with a strong will and mind; or be vanquished and subjugated.
One thing I love about the ONA is the First Satanic Creed ((BBS)) which goes, “Satan in particular and the Dark Gods in general are a means to self-fulfillment and self-understanding.” Call it what you want: Self Enlightenment or Self-Understanding; Liberation or Self-Fulfillment, these are the END FRUIT we desire to Cultivate. How we do it, whether with Buddhism, Satanism, music, art, or voodoo or whatever is of no relevant concern. If one method fails, engineer a better one. The essence of the Way – whatever you call it – must be able and allowed to shapeshift to reflect the conditions and capacity of each person. This is one reason why I personally find the ONA to be very practical and useful in some subcultures of the Western Market, because it is already understanding of the use and “mutability” of Outer Forms ((National-Socialism, Traditional Satanism, Dreccian Nexions, Balobians)) and wordless Inner Essence. David Myatt demonstrates this as a true subversive adept. Whether it’s the Numinous Way, Reichsfolk National-Socialism, or the Order of Nine Angles, the Inner Essence of all three are the same. Only the Outer Form, the manufactured formatted Method of conveying that Inner Essence is different: because it is created to target different audiences. To end this, all I can say and hope for is that the ONA continues to value its Inner Essence and to not be so fixated or attached to Outer Forms. These Outer Forms are only Vehicles that are manufactured to move us towards the same End Destination/Destiny ((Wyrd)).
SugaCubez 352
Order of Nine Angles
121 yf
