Literal Means and Hidden Meanings: a New Analysis of Skillful Means

Skillful means is usually used by scholars and Buddhists to denote the following simple idea: the Buddha skillfully adapted his teaching to the level of his audience.^ This very broad and somewhat oversimplified definition tries to incorporate the whole range of Buddhist views on the subject. However, it does not help to explain why there is an extensive use of the term in central Mahâyâna sûtras while pre-Mahâyâna texts are almost completely silent on this issue. I suggest that skillful means has not always been an all-Buddhist concept; rather, it was developed by Mahâyânists as a radical hermeneutic device. As such, skillful means is a provocative and sophisticated idea that served the purpose of advancing a new religious ideology in the face of an already established canonical knowledge. The Mahäyäna use of the concept exhibits an awareness, not found in pre-Mahâyâna thought, of a gap between what texts literally say and their hidden meaning. In 1978 Michael Pye wrote that "'skilful means' has scarcely been attended to at all."2 Since then, some attention has been given to the ethical, practical, and religious implications of the concept.^ Nevertheless, no one has ever asked why an idea that is considered to be so central to Buddhism in general did not become widely recognized before the arising of Mahâyâna. The compound skillful means— upäyakausalya in Sanskrit or upäya kusala in Pâli—is not entirely a Mahâyâna creation; however, in Mahâyâna sûtras it has become widely used and has been charged with a special and novel meaning. The Mahâyâna interpretation adds a new and crucial layer to the pedagogical meaning of skillful means. It is aimed, eventually, at convincing those at whom it was directed that a new religious path (yäna) was greater than the old one. Critical reading of relevant portions of two early Mahâyâna sutras—the Lotus Sutra and the Skill in Means Sutra—shows how the idea of skillful means is used to achieve this end: it explains how the old doctrine was at the same time not entirely true and not entirely false. This peculiar position is achieved by inventing an interpretive methodology, skillful means, that treats facts as nothing but educational literature. It allows Mahâyânists to challenge central Buddhist paradigms and offer a reorientation of the facts. The idea of skillful means allows a rejection of old literal statements about the life of the Buddha in order to charge them with new meaning. The old ideology is treated as skillful means; that is, it was offered for a specific purpose and is not completely true. On the other hand, as educational fiction, it had its good purpose.