Basic Teachings of the Buddha

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

INTRODUCTION

THE JOURNEY OF THE BUDDHA’S TEACHINGS

Part One: From Search to Community

Part Two: From Canon to Transmission

THE IDIOM AND MEANING OF THE BUDDHA’S TEACHINGS

Idiom

Meaning

Some Conclusions

Why the P li Canon?

What Is a Sutta?

A BUDDHA, A READER, AND A TEXT

In the Beginning: A Buddha, Maybe

In the Midst: A Model Reader

In the End: Nothing Is Got for Nothing

ON PHYSIOLOGY AND THE EPHEMERAL IMAGE

The Buddha

The Buddha’s Teachings

The End of the Teachings

You

DRAWING NEAR TO THE TEXTS

Why These Texts?

Reading Suggestions

Sixteen Propositions

Two Trajectories: Toward Pain, Toward Peace

THE TEXTS

SUTTA 1: THE HAWK

SUTTA 2: A BRIEF TALK TO M LUKYA

SUTTA 3: THREEFOLD KNOWLEDGE

SUTTA 4: DISCOURSE IN KESAMUTTA

SUTTA 5: THE ALL

SUTTA 6: LIKE A BALL OF FOAM

SUTTA 7: EVIDENCE OF SELFLESSNESS

SUTTA 8: THE BURDEN

SUTTA 9: TURNING THE WHEEL OF THE TEACHING

SUTTA 10: GOTAMA’S DISCOURSE

SUTTA 11: DESTINATION

SUTTA 12: QUENCHED

SUTTA 13: SIGNS OF THE FABRICATED

SUTTA 14: SIGNS OF THE UNFABRICATED

SUTTA 15: PRESENT-MOMENT AWARENESS WITH BREATHING

SUTTA 16: THE APPLICATION OF PRESENT-MOMENT AWARENESS

GUIDE TO READING THE TEXTS

SUTTA 1: WANDERING BEYOND OUR PROPER DOMAIN

SUTTA 2: TRANSFIXED BY FLAMBOYANT SPECULATION

SUTTA 3: ENCHANTED BY GOD

SUTTA 4: KNOWING FOR YOURSELF

SUTTA 5: THE LOCATION OF LIVED EXPERIENCE

SUTTA 6: LOOK: IT ISA MAGICAL DISPLAY

SUTTA 7: NO SIGN OF I, ME, OR MINE

SUTTA 8: JUST PUT IT DOWN

SUTTA 9: REALITY

SUTTA 10: THE WORLD

SUTTA 11: A GENUINE REFUGE

SUTTA 12: CONSPICUOUS UNBINDING

SUTTA 13: WHAT IT’S NOT

SUTTA 14: JUST THIS

SUTTA 15: HOW TO MEDITATE

SUTTA 16: HOW TO LIVE AS A BUDDHA

ENDNOTES

NOTES

PRONUNCIATION OF SANSKRIT AND P LI WORDS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR AND AUTHOR OF THE GUIDE

THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD

MODERN LIBRARY IS ONLINE AT...

COPYRIGHT PAGE

To Charles Hallisey, my teacher

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. But which is the stone that supports the bridge? Kublai Khan asks.

The bridge is not supported by one stone or another, Marco answers, but only by the line of the arch that they form. Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.

Polo answers, Without stones there is no arch.

—ITALO CALVINO, Invisible Cities

INTRODUCTION

A man of genius or a work of love and beauty will not come to order, can not be compounded by the best rules, but is always a new and incalculable result, like health. Don’t rattle your rules in our ears; we must behave as we can.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

For millennia throughout Asia, the Buddha has been known as an enlightened figure whose vast wisdom illuminates the way to a life of meaning and genuine satisfaction. At present, in the West, his teachings are increasingly viewed by adherents, physicists, psychologists, and philosophers alike as exceptionally lucid descriptions of our human situation, and his prescribed practice of meditation as an effective means of awakening to that situation with clarity and equanimity.

The purpose of the present volume is to present the core teachings of the Buddha and, in so doing, engage the reader in an exploration of the Buddha’s genius and of the beauty of his work. But since, as Emerson says, such a person and such a work never result from the limitations wrought by received convention, a book purporting to bring these two to order has some explaining to do. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the subject knows that Buddhism comes in a staggering variety of cultural, doctrinal, and historical inflections. Buddhism, it seems, may be qualified endlessly, evoking with equal ease images of flamboyant ritualism, luxuriant creativity, byzantine philosophizing, and tranquil contemplation. Just browse the shelves at your local bookstore: there is chanting Buddhism, meditating Buddhism, painting Buddhism, therapy Buddhism, martial arts Buddhism, Hollywood Buddhism, motorcycle maintenance Buddhism; there is M h yana Buddhism, Therav da Buddhism, Vajray na Buddhism, Zen, Vipassana, Tantric, Dzogchen, Pure Land Buddhism; there is Japanese, Tibetan, American, Thai, and [insert country name here] Buddhism. Now, for $19.99, for a limited time only (let’s hope), you can have Buddhism-in-a-box Buddhism!

How can we sort this all out? There are two crucial factors mitigating against the streamlining of Buddhism that many readers presumably desire. First, contrary to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, Buddhism is not a religion of the book. There is no single volume that contains the teachings of the Buddha. The Buddha, in fact, wrote nothing at all. He wandered around a four-hundred-square-mile area of eastern India for forty-five years, verbally clarifying for others the nature of what he referred to as his awakening—his liberating insight into the nature of human existence. Eventually codified by the community of his followers in India and committed to writing in Sri Lanka, China, and beyond (this process is explained later), this nearly half century of teaching amounts to a virtual library of books. The second factor working against an easy solution to the present-day multiplicity of Buddhisms is the fact that although the Buddha became a renowned teacher with a substantial following during his lifetime, he never centralized his authority. Scholars speculate that the Buddha modeled his practitioner community on the power-sharing republican political structure of his own people, the kyas of northeastern India (see Pronunciation of Sanskrit and P li Words). In any case, shortly before he died, the Buddha insisted that no one assume the role of authority when he was gone. Hence, without a popelike figure to lay down the law, two predictable results manifested: the community splintered into numerous divergent sects and schools, and doctrinal disputes and variations in practice proliferated. The result of twenty-five hundred years of such diffusion is precisely the confusing cacophony of Buddhist voices beckoning us today from bookshelves and practice centers.

Can these voices be harmonized? Can so many Buddhisms be reconciled to the point of the basic, as the title of the present volume suggests? Do they all share some underlying commonality? If we want to claim that the varieties of Buddhism are fundamentally identical, as indeed many scholars and practitioners alike do, then an additional difficulty appears: What criteria will we use to locate that point of commonality? Remember the Greek mathematician Archimedes? He said that if he were given but a single fixed point on which to stand, he could move the Earth off its foundation. Imagine that—is there such a point? Standing on the Earth, he would just revolve along with it; stepping off the Earth in order to gain a footing, he would fall into empty space. Similarly, we cannot locate a fixed vantage point—an Archimedean point—from which to make normative claims about Buddhism as a totality. We must formulate our claims either from within a particular tradition or from the outside altogether. The first stance is, from the perspective of the whole, too limited, while the second stance is, from the perspective of each particular tradition, too broad. This being the case, isn’t the very notion of basic teachings of the Buddha vacuous?

THE JOURNEY OF THE BUDDHA’S TEACHINGS

In the simplest terms, the basic teachings of the Buddha consist of his forty-five-year-long effort to clarify to others what he considered to be the essential knowledge (buddhi) for human well-being. He referred to his own insight into this knowledge as an awakening (bodhi). Hence, his followers eventually gave him the epithet buddha, one who is awakened. It is of course from this appellation that we get the term Buddhism. But how do we get from one man’s specific teachings to myriad forms of Buddhism? The story of how the Buddha’s basic teachings gave rise to the multiple doctrinal, linguistic, ritual, cultural, and institutional traditions that call themselves Buddhist is, of course, filled with minute, complex detail. The details, moreover, must be culled from several scholarly disciplines, including philology, archaeology, sociology, history, and anthropology, to name but a few. In the present section, I hope to convey to the reader an impression of the process whereby the Buddha’s teachings became so many Buddhisms.

PART ONE: FROM SEARCH TO COMMUNITY

The first part of the story covers the period from the Buddha’s search for consequential knowledge to the codification of his teachings concerning this knowledge. This account is somewhat reconstructive and speculative in nature, though grounded in common sense and some historical data.*1

After a six-year period of seeking out and training under reputable teachers, Siddhattha Gotama (ca. 480–400 B.C.E.; Sanskrit: Siddh rtha Gautama), the young man who would become known as the Buddha, isolated himself in a forest grove and strenuously applied himself to practice. Unlike for followers of the dominant social and religious group of the day, the Vedic Brahmans, practice for Gotama did not entail sacrificial and devotional actions aimed at coercing the divine forces held to be arrayed throughout the cosmos. Gotama had been inspired by adherents of the relatively new groups of practitioners who referred to themselves as rama as, seekers, wandering ascetics. Although there were significant differences among these rama a groups, they shared a rejection of the presuppositions that underlay Vedic Brahmanism. These presuppositions included the status of the Vedas—the scriptural basis of Brahmanical knowledge and customs—as dogmatic revelation, the inviolability of the caste system (with Brahmans at the top), the presence of divine (deva) power, and the efficacy of rituals (created and administered by Brahmans) to manipulate these powers toward desired ends. Gotama saw merit, rather, in the ideas circulating among the rama a communities concerning the causal role played by human thought, speech, and action (karma); the destructive influence of ignorance (avidya) regarding the nature of reality; the prospect of incessant painful existence (sa s ra); and the possibility of releasing oneself from this human pain and dissatisfaction (mok a, nirv a). Most important, perhaps, Gotama shared the basic orientation of the rama as away from speculative supernaturalism and toward the actual establishment of human happiness here and now. This orientation would point as well to the necessity of meditation, rather than to devotion or sacrifice, as the primary practice in which to engage. Hence, sitting in his forest grove, under the shelter of a tree, Siddhattha Gotama exerted himself in meditation.

The fruit of his efforts was clear insight into the nature of reality. With this insight, Gotama could see the role that his mind played in shaping the various phenomena—sights, sounds, scents, tastes, feelings, and thoughts—that constituted his lived experience, or reality. He saw clearly a way out of the debilitating effects of what seemed to be ceaseless mental-physical-emotional reactivity to the incessant deluge of phenomena.

When his understanding was thorough and his knowledge complete, Gotama, like some, though not all, rama as, made the decision to teach others what he had discerned about existence. So he spent the rest of his long life, an additional forty-five years, walking around a section of eastern India talking to, debating with, and teaching men and women—carpenters, barbers, farmers, shepherds, wandering ascetics, philosophers, princes, and even kings.

Over time the Buddha, similar to many teachers even today, likely developed specific formulae in order to stabilize the expression of his teachings and to ease reception and memorization for those who listened. As his body of teachings expanded and his followers increased, the Buddha, furthermore, probably organized and classified his teachings into basic sections and subsections to ensure safe (mnenomic) storage and to facilitate accurate transmission. This stabilization was even more crucial in an environment such as the Buddha’s, of oral, rather than written, expression, storage, and transmission.

During his lifetime, the Buddha’s followers, or, literally, listeners (Sanskrit: r vaka), formed into a substantial group. This group was known as the bhikkhu sa gha, the community of mendicants. As the bhikkhus dispersed throughout India to teach, they carried with them this roughly codified idiom of the teachings, refashioning it into the local vernaculars of those who would gather to listen. Laypeople, too, became part of the larger sa gha, supporting the bhikkhus materially. Soon, as merchants and traders, these laypeople would contribute to the spread of the teachings throughout Asia.

Some Buddhist traditions hold that shortly after the Buddha’s death the bhikkhu sa gha convened a council to determine the wording and fix the organization of his teachings. Such a council, or communal recitation (sa giti), seems commonsensical when we reflect on the fact that the rama as (wanderers), bhikkhus (begging mendicants), and parivrajakas (peripatetics) who constituted the Buddha’s community had, even during his lifetime, carried the teachings far and wide into the diverse cultural, geographical, and linguistic regions of ancient India. It is certainly not difficult to imagine both the emotional and the practical necessity of a communal gathering after an event as pivotal as the master’s passing. In any case, tradition holds that three months after the death of the Buddha, some five hundred bhikkhus gathered in Rajagaha in eastern India to hear and approve recitations of both the rules governing the community (vinaya) and the teachings proper (suttas). Before each recitation, the reciting bhikkhu would say, This is what I heard, indicating that he was recalling actual discourses he had personally heard the Buddha deliver. After each recitation the attending bhikkhus would debate the accuracy of the recitation and, eventually, confirm the wording. It is in this manner that the Buddha’s teachings were stringently codified and the earliest Buddhist canon established. Since some schools’ accounts of the first council mention rehearsal of a third category of teachings, we refer to the Buddhist canon from this date forward as the tripi aka (P li: tipi aka), the three baskets, namely, vinaya, sutta, and abhidhamma. (These categories are explained further later.)

PART TWO: FROM CANON TO TRANSMISSION

The second part of the story of the Buddha’s teachings covers the period from this initial codification to the present day. This story courses through the numerous fragmentations, proliferations, and cultural transmutations that the Buddhist schools and communities have undergone throughout history. Its telling is complex and meandering; it requires a careful analysis of the rich data of the sort mentioned in the previous section. Here, I can hope to give only a general impression of this process.*2

Buddhist communities proliferated after the death of the Buddha. One primary reason for this development was the fact that the Buddha encouraged his followers to wander far and wide for the welfare of the human multitude, teaching others according to their needs and in their local vernaculars. (Some communities, such as the Vedic Brahmans, cultivated technical languages, such as Sanskrit, for their teachings.) Another factor giving rise to the increase of Buddhist communities was the new tendency of the bhikkhus to reside permanently in settlements and monasteries, not just during the rainy season, as had been their way in the Buddha’s day. The apparent ability of the Buddha’s followers to attract patronage certainly contributed to this new state of affairs. The result of these developments was the simultaneous increase in the number of communities adhering to the Buddha’s teachings and the institutionalization of these communities.

So by one hundred years or so after the Buddha’s death, there were numerous Buddhist communities, distinct, in varying degrees, from one another, dotting the Indian landscape. It isn’t hard to imagine the kinds of differences that would have arisen concerning interpretation of doctrine and implementation of the monastic regulations, not to mention the variations in letter and spirit introduced by diverse languages, geographical regions, and cultures. And all along, different groups of reciters (bh akas) were preserving the body of orally transmitted teachings. These bh akas were the bhikkhus assigned particular teachings to memorize and, when requested, recite. It is true that the bh akas periodically checked their versions of the teachings with other bh akas; nonetheless, differences arose and positions hardened. (To get a sense of the forces of instability and change inherent in this system, just think of the telephone game you played in grade school.) Tradition holds that a second council was convened in Vaisali around one hundred years after the first council to resolve the points of contention that had arisen. Although the differences under investigation largely involved monastic regulations, these concerns were apparently serious enough to be pushing the various communities toward schism.

And indeed, it is around this time that we may speak of independent Buddhist schools (nik yas, literally groups) with diverse doctrinal orientations and distinct institutional infrastructures. Tradition holds that there were some eighteen such schools by the time the millennium came to a close. Sometimes we can glean certain points of contention within the early Buddhist world from the names of these schools. There was, for instance, the Sarv stiv da sect, which held that all things exist (sarvam asti), that is, that past and future phenomena have actual material existence. There was the Sautr ntika, who looked to the dialogues of the Buddha (s tras) as the final arbiter or end (anta) of doctrinal authority. There was the Lokottarav da, which had the doctrine (v da) that the Buddha possessed supernatural (lokottara) qualities. Sometimes we can see the importance of a teacher lineage in a sect’s name, such as the Dharmaguptaka (followers of Dharmagupta), or the provenance of the sect, such as the Haimavata (from the Him laya region). Finally, there was the Therav da (Sanskrit: Sthavirav da). The Therav da is the variety of Buddhism that became dominant in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, and Laos. Therav da’s self-understanding as a conservative tradition is revealed in the designation itself: "those who subscribe to the doctrine (v da) of the elders (thera). Indeed, throughout the centuries down to the present day, Therav da has resisted the more substantive innovations that were developed within other Buddhist communities. Of the eighteen schools" (the number shouldn’t be taken literally), only the Therav da has survived to the present day—although not without its own internal schisms.

The Therav da is a particularly important Buddhist school for reasons other than its longevity and relative conservatism. According to Therav din historical accounts, the great Indian emperor Asoka (270–232 B.C.E., that is, before the Common Era; replaces B.C., before Christ) sent his son Mahinda, a Buddhist bhikkhu, to Sri Lanka as an ambassador of the beneficial teachings (dharma). There, Mahinda converted King Tisya and founded the first bhikkhu sa gha on the island. (Similarly, Asoka’s daughter is held to have founded the first order of bhikkhunis, or nuns.) With royal patronage underwriting the building of monasteries and supporting the sa gha, Therav da easily gained a powerful foothold in Sri Lanka and indeed has continued to flourish there to this very day.

But the histories report the occurrence of a potentially devastating event in the year 29 C.E. When Mahinda came to Sri Lanka, he brought with him the entire Buddhist canon (presumably via accompanying bh akas). The traditional view (there is no actual evidence) is that the version of the canon transmitted by Mahinda was precisely that which was recited at the first council. Tradition holds, furthermore, that this original version was pristinely transmitted, memorized, mnemonically stored, and further transmitted for the next two hundred years, when the very existence of Buddhism on the island was threatened.

A Therav din historical, or really quasi-historical, text, the D pava sa, relates that during the reign of King Va ag ma i Abaya (29–17 C.E.), the kingdom was devastated by civil war. Realizing the precariousness of the Buddha’s teachings—dependent, as they were, on the health of the monks and nuns who preserved them—and fearing their irretrievable loss, the monks recorded the teachings on birch bark and safely stored them away for future generations. It is interesting to note that one sense of the term sutta, which is cognate with the English word suture, is to stitch together, to sew, to weave. (Our English term text also reveals the close relationship between ideas and textiles.)

The traditional view is that this version of the canon preserved both the original language and the original wording of the Buddha’s teachings. As we will see, the matter is not so simple. But in Sri Lanka, at least, the teachings of the Buddha had found a safe, secure home.

In the rest of Asia, however, the story of the Buddha’s teachings developed further. After the turn of the millennium and into the Middle Ages, contentious issues similar to those affecting the earliest communities would eventually give birth to two