Upaya · Skt: upāya

Upaya, usually rendered “skilful means”, is the principle that a teaching is shaped for the person receiving it. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls it a crucial concept in Buddhist hermeneutics: on the assumption that the Buddha “speaks both truthfully and with an eye towards the abilities of his particular audience”, skilful means lets interpreters account for apparently contradictory passages in the texts without calling any of them false.

Its classic home is Mahayana literature, and above all the Lotus Sutra, which, in the same encyclopedia’s account of Tiantai, “had made upāya the centerpiece of Buddhism, and asserted a unity of all practices in the One Vehicle, all leading toward Buddhahood”. The sutra argues this through parables and narrative rather than definitions. Introducing it, Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche describes how the Buddha employed skilful means to teach according to the needs and capacities of different audiences, and how the sutra invites practitioners past the distinction between advanced and ordinary paths towards a single vehicle that leads all beings to awakening.

The East Asian schools took the idea furthest. Tiantai built a system that accounts for and integrates all known forms of Buddhist and even non-Buddhist practice, counting them all as skilful means appropriate and wholesome for different persons and times, so that nothing is simply rejected but placed where it does some good. Read that way, upaya is less a licence to say anything than a demand for attention: what helps one listener may not help the next. The text where it is worked out most fully is the Lotus Sutra.