Part II: Practicing in a World Without a Living Buddha

When the Buddha was alive, Buddhism had a living center. There was someone who embodied awakening — someone who could answer questions, challenge assumptions, and demonstrate what liberation looked like in human form. After his death, that center vanished. What remained were teachings, rules, and memories.

This absence mattered more than we often acknowledge.

Shortly before his death, the Buddha was asked who would lead the community after him. His answer was firm and unsettling: no one. The Dharma and the monastic code would be the guide. On the surface, this sounds empowering. It removes dependence on authority and places responsibility squarely on practice. But psychologically, it also left a vacuum. There would be no replacement. No living reference point for full awakening.

At first, the early Buddhist community assumed that one of the Buddha’s senior disciples would naturally take on that role. But those expectations were quickly dashed. Śāriputra and Maudgalyāyana — two of the Buddha’s closest companions — died shortly before the Buddha himself. The possibility of continuity through lineage disappeared almost immediately.

This historical moment shaped how early Buddhists understood the universe and their place within it. Without a living Buddha, enlightenment began to feel like something that belonged to the past. The Buddha became a singular event — a once-in-history figure whose awakening could be studied, admired, and imitated, but not fully repeated.

This sensibility shows up clearly in early Buddhist cosmology. The universe was imagined as a vast, vertical structure centered on Mount Sumeru. Above were heavenly realms filled with pleasure and long life. Below were hells marked by suffering and torment. Human beings occupied a narrow middle space — fortunate enough to practice, but constantly at risk of falling away.

Movement within this cosmos happened along a path. Progress was gradual, incremental, and fragile. One advanced through ethical conduct, meditation, and wisdom, accumulating good karma and shedding negative karma over countless lifetimes. Nothing was guaranteed. One mistake could undo years of effort.

Within this framework, the highest realistic goal became arhatship. An arhat had extinguished craving, broken free from rebirth, and achieved liberation. It was a remarkable accomplishment — but it was also a quiet concession. Full Buddhahood, with its limitless compassion and teaching activity, was effectively out of reach.

Even the promise of a future Buddha reinforced this sense of distance. Maitreya would appear one day, but not for billions of years. For everyone alive now, that promise functioned less as hope and more as confirmation: we are living in a time without a Buddha.

This worldview shaped meditation practice as well. Early Buddhist meditation emphasized restraint and control. Practitioners worked to calm the mind, discipline the body, and uproot craving. Desire was the enemy. Sensory experience was treated with suspicion. Liberation came through renunciation and careful self-regulation.

This approach was effective, but it carried a certain emotional tone. Practice felt austere. Progress felt slow. Awakening felt rare.

And yet, meditation has a way of surprising people.

As practitioners spent more time in deep concentration, some began to encounter states of awareness that didn’t feel constricted or bleak. Instead, they felt open, expansive, and deeply alive. Rather than shutting the world down, these states seemed to illuminate it. Instead of reinforcing separation, they dissolved it.

These experiences didn’t deny earlier teachings — but they didn’t fit neatly within them either. The idea that awakening was scarce began to feel questionable. The notion that Buddhahood belonged only to the distant past or future started to feel incomplete.

In these moments of deep meditation, the universe didn’t feel like a hierarchy of higher and lower realms. It felt interconnected. Responsive. Alive with meaning. Insight didn’t feel like climbing a long ladder — it felt like waking up to something that had always been there.

This tension between experience and inherited worldview is where transformation begins. Rather than rejecting their tradition, practitioners began to reinterpret it. Perhaps the Buddha wasn’t unique because of when he lived. Perhaps he was unique because he discovered something timeless. Perhaps enlightenment wasn’t an exception to reality, but its deepest expression.

Gradually, the psychological center of Buddhism began to shift. The focus moved away from managing desire and toward understanding ignorance. Liberation came not only through restraint, but through insight — seeing reality clearly and directly.

This shift didn’t announce itself as a new school. It didn’t come with a manifesto. It unfolded quietly, inside meditation halls and individual minds. Over time, however, it demanded new language, new symbols, and eventually new scriptures.

The old cosmology, built around absence and distance, no longer felt adequate. Practitioners needed a way to express what they were actually encountering in meditation — a reality that felt vast, compassionate, and immediately present.

That need would give rise to a new way of seeing the universe — and a new way of understanding the Buddha.

In the next section, we’ll explore how samadhi became the doorway into this expanded vision, and how meditative experience itself reshaped Buddhist cosmology from the inside out.

Namuamidabutsu, Rev. Jon Turner