finding our way through the Buddha’s words
At Integral Options Café, a very fine Buddhist website, there is a good review of a new book on Mindfulness as a way of dealing with everyday difficulty. I think you might find it interesting in light of the brief mindfulness meditations with which we’ve been opening our class sessions.
Session 2 is the only session in which both the Topics course and the Teachings course will be dealing with the same subject—the Buddha’s first Discourse, Turning the Wheel of the Law, The Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta. We’ll take a different approach to that Discourse in each class, sufficiently different, I would hope, so that those who are in both courses will not be bored or find the two classes repetitive.
In the Teachings class, we’ll look at the events leading up to Gotama Siddhatta’s Awakening as the Buddha, his formulation of his enlightenment experience as the Dhamma—the set of regularities and fundamental principles that determine how processes and events emerge from precedent conditions; essentially, the “natural law” that governs not only events in the physical world but also the course of our human lives and the progress of our well-being. We will then focus our attention on how that Dhamma was articulated in this first teaching and how it must have been received by its audience, the five monks, all born into the Brahmin caste, who had been Siddhatta’s companions during the period when he was practicing a path of austerity and extreme renunciation.
In the Topics class, we’ll cover those same subjects much more telegraphically, and then spend much of our time looking into the philosophical implications of the truths enunciated by the Buddha; we’ll look in more detail at the multiple ways in which he applied the concept of a “Middle Way”, and we’ll examine in some detail the particulars of the Eightfold Path.
Prior to both classes, it would be good if you could find the time to read two documents:
For the Topics course, I’d also recommend that you take a look at a precîs I prepared of a long piece by Bhikkhu Bodhi on the subject of the Eightfold Path. The original is on Access to Insight; there’s a link to the original in the precîs if you want the whole story.
Another superb resource, especially for those of you with mp3 players (iPods or the like), is the strong selection of talks by Stephen Batchelor at DharmaSeed.org. Stephen has visited Spirit Rock Insight Meditation Center in Marin County every other year since 2005, and all of his seminar talks are available from that site. I attended the retreat he led this past November, and it was a thrilling experience. In particular relation to the topics we discussed this past week and that we will be discussing this coming week, I recommend talks #1, #2, and #3 from the 2007 retreat. Go to this page; if you just want to listen on the computer, you can click on the “Stream” button; if you want to download the audio file to your computer for transfer to your player, right-click on the “Download” button.
One fundamental thing about the Buddha’s teachings is that they are rooted in the world; in words that are repeated many times in the texts, those who follow the Path realized by the Buddha will come to enlightenment “right here and right now.” And because those teachings, like everything else we experience in the normal course of events, are contingent upon the conditions and circumstances from which they emerged, it helps, in understanding the teachings, to understand (however dimly we might understand across a gulf of half a planet and 2500 years of time) the place and the culture into which Siddhattha Gotama was born and in which he delivered the discourses through which we know him.
I’ve created and compiled a set of maps that can help us with that understanding; the maps will be useful in both courses, and it would be good to print them out, especially the second one—the political map—and bring the printed map(s) to class with you.
The Buddha. There is no longer any doubt among scholars and historians that the Buddha was an historical figure who was born among the Sakyan people of Northern India about 2500 years ago. He was the son of a powerful and wealthy leader of the Sakyans, a member of the Gotama clan; his given name was Siddhattha and he was known as Siddhattha Gotama. All of the evidence indicates that he was uncommonly intelligent and well-educated, with a charismatic personality. At the age of 29, dissatisfied with the transient nature of human life and the inability of even great wealth and power to deliver lasting happiness, Siddhattha left home and accepted the discipline of a renunciant wanderer; 
for the next six years he traveled on foot through northern India, studying with some of the finest teachers of his time, learning the techniques of yoga, living on alms, practicing severe austerities, and developing the meditative method that would form the basis of the practice he came to teach.
At the age of 35, sitting in meditation under a fig tree close to the village of Bodh Gaya, near the modern city of Rajgir, Siddhattha achieved the enlightenment he had been seeking: he came to an understanding of how things unfold in this world, and especially how the inescapable impermanence of the world is experienced as pain and distress, and how a person can live and train the mind to reduce or end that experience of pain.
With the attainment of that direct and powerfully experienced insight, Siddhattha became “The Buddha”, a term meaning “Enlightened One” or “Awakened One”. For several weeks following the experience, the Buddha contemplated the implications of his insight and developed his Dharma, his formulation of the truth that he’d come to understand about the world and the human condition. He then proceeded, over the next 45 years, to teach that Dharma to a growing community of male and female followers, disciplined, loyal, and self-reliant.
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