I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Irwin Mortman’s OLLI class, “Who Wrote the Torah”. Irwin took a class with me last year, and the other day he shared with some of his friends an aphorism that remembered from that class: “The worst attachment is to have an attachment.” Several of the people with whom he shared that took issue with it, as they understood it. One wrote: “I suppose that this applies to people too? How can one not have an attachment to a mate of so many years, or a friend, or a parent? How does Blumberg deal with this issue? Is it truly like the rest? Is there some different way to relate that I’m missing?”

It’s a particularly interesting question, and the notion of an “attachment” is an important concept in Buddhist thought, so I decided to take the opportunity to address it at moderate length in this blog post rather than just respond to Irwin’s email.

Obviously, the first thing to address is Irwin’s statement about what he learned. I’ve talked a number of times with Irwin about the various kinds of things we discussed in the class he took (I think it was the class on “Topics in Mainstream Buddhism”). And I know that he not only got a lot from the class, but that he asked (and continues to ask) some of the most thoughtful and challenging questions that I’ve gotten from anyone to whom I’ve talked about Buddhism. So I don’t want to take anything away from Irwin when I say, quoting that great Buddhist philosopher, Fibber McGee’s Old-Timer, “‘Tain’t the way I heered it, Junior.” That is, I don’t remember saying what Irwin attributed to me, in just those words.

What I did say, probably, is that the Buddha taught that the most difficult attachment to abandon is the attachment to “views”—i.e. opinions, beliefs, mindsets, prejudices, assumptions, habits of thought.

But that just pushes the discussion back a bit; it doesn’t address the very real question that Irwin’s friend raised; how can one’s love for a partner of many years, or for a brand-new grandchild, for that matter, be something that must be abandoned? What can be wrong with that kind of love?

And the answer, of course, is that there’s nothing wrong at all. Abandoning attachments has nothing to do with right and wrong (which is not, of course, to say that the Buddha was not concerned with moral issues; in fact, ethical action lies very close to the heart of his thought.) To see why it’s important to abandon attachments, and what happens when we’re able to do that, we have to look at what the term means.

The English word “attachment” or “clinging” almost always translates the Pali term upādāna, the literal meaning of which is “fuel”; it’s sometimes translated to mean “nutriment”. Its use by the Buddha, and the sense he gave to it, derives from the common understanding of fire as something that is nourished by the fuel to which it clings. When the fuel is exhausted, the fire goes out. (In the Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta, the Buddha used the process as a graphic simile for the process of attaining nibbana [Sanskrit nirvana]. That sutta, by the way, will be the subject of our class in The Teachings of the Buddha this coming Friday at 2:00PM, at Raymond Walters; if anyone who’s not in the class is interested, please feel free to sit in.)

In the context of the Buddha’s teachings, as those are transmitted in the Pali Canon, when our craving for something leads to clinging, what we are in fact clinging to is not what we imagine it to be—the perfectly adorable grandchild, the perfectly loving wife, the perfectly evil enemy (we don’t only cling to things we want; we also cling to things we want to be rid of); those are, in fact, creations of our imagination, and what we are clinging to, in every case, is not something with an independent reality outside of ourselves, but to our notion of our Self and what we think we need to complete that. When I cling to the Terrorist Menace, or to the Faithful Wife, or to the Perfect Granddaughter, it always turns out that I cling to an illusion of my own making, and that I cling to it because my sense of Self is bound up in its being as I imagine it.

Now, I can be dismayed by acts of terrorism and call them out, and even, I think, point out that clerics who interpret their scriptures in certain ways are encouraging terrorism; I can love and admire and enjoy the continued company of the woman I’ve come to know, comfortably and gladly, over the past fifty years; I can take great joy in the baby’s gurglings, first smiles, first lurching steps. But when I allow my dismay, or my love, or my admiration, to become clinging, I commit an injustice: I objectify what I cling to and limit that person’s freedom to be the best that he or she can be. And I surrender to delusion—the delusion of an essential and unchanging self that’s defined, in some unpleasant way, by the stuff it’s attached to.

Most important, I let myself in for unnecessary suffering. On the one hand, pain is unavoidable: I or a friend may be hurt in a terrorist attack; my grandchild may fall and break an arm; my wife may come down with a serious disease; all of those things will cause me pain and sorrow. But if I continue to cling to the illusion, I can do nothing to help; only wail in pain. I cannot bring myself to act skillfully in response to the world as it has changed, to pitch in and help the victims, to bring food to one who is no longer able to get her own; to encourage someone to do the exercises that will restore his strength, to be mindfully present to those in need, to demonstrate compassion, to preserve equanimity in a world which does not deal happiness in equal measure.

Gotama Siddhatha’s wife, shortly before he left home to begin the quest for enlightenment that would result in his becoming the Buddha, bore him a child, a son, whom Gotama loved dearly. He named the boy Rahula, which means “fetter”, not because he wished to be rid of the child or because he wished to be rid of his love for the child, but as a reminder that those things we love most deeply are the things that we are most likely to attach to. And that attachment, in addition to hindering our own chances for reducing our suffering in the world and perhaps even attaining enlightment, diminish the love we have for that other one by binding him to us and to our idea of what he must be and what he must become.

Hope this helps.

At the center of the Eightfold Path are the the three factors that define our conduct day by day and together comprise the components of a virtuous life. Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood, taken as a whole, are understood as sila, virtue; together, they make up what Bhikkhu Bodhi considers the section on Moral Discipline. Most Buddhist commentaries consider these three Path factors to be, for most people, the starting points for the cultivation of the Path in their lives.

Virtuous action—Right Speech, Right Action, and Right Livelihood—are considered the starting points on the Eightfold Path because unless one is virtuous, nothing else matters; a person can have the keenest and most informed understanding imaginable, or be able to sit in meditation absolutely immobile for hours at a time, and if that person is a liar or a cheat, then any other accomplishments are not going to bring him any closer to experiencing an end to suffering. On the other hand, one who is thoroughly grounded in virtuous behavior finds the other Path factors unfolding more or less naturally in her life. A short sutta from the Anguttara Nikaya, the Cetanakaranaya Sutta, The Discourse on How Things Progress, oulines the process, and is worth contemplating.

All three are defined negatively—Right Speech means to refrain from deceitful, hurtful, or idle talk; Right Action means to avoid harmful acts, to not take what’s not given, to not misbehave sexually, and to not use alcohol or other substances that make you careless and stupid; and Right Livelihood involves the prohibition of a range of occupations, including the sale of addictive drugs, poisons, and weapons; trade in living beings, including trade in slaves, the raising of livestock for slaughter, and prostitution; fortune-telling and similar chicanery; prostitution and usury.

One of the things I’d like to discuss in Thursday’s class is why this list, along with so many other moral and ethical codes from other traditions, consists of prohibited behavior rather than prescribed behavior.

And there are two other things I’d like to discuss: one follows from the first; how we might understand and cultivate our speech, actions, and work so that we are not just avoiding the bad ways but actively and imaginatively cultivating good ways—ways that are nurture our own well-being and the well-being of others.

The final thing I’d like to discuss is the difficulty, in our complicated and profoundly interconnected world, of following a path that does not inadvertently cause more harm than good; what can we do about the fact that buying a toy for a beloved grandchild might be connected with child workers being abused in a factory or a paint company spewing toxic waste into an acquifer that feeds a village well half a world away? How can one do work that avoids ethical ambiguity in an economy where almost all work is funded by and feeds ethically blind corporate entities?

Tough and interesting questions; I look forward to hearing your take on them.

Since I missed the first class of the quarter, and since we’re going to miss one class because of Thanksgiving break, I’d like to change the syllabus slightly. This coming Friday, instead of discussing the Annalakkhana Sutta—the Buddha’s discourse on the “not-self” characteristic, I’d like to discuss the Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta, the discourse to the wanderer Vacchagotta on fire.

At the very end of the Buddha’s first discourse, Turning the Wheel of the Dhamma, which we discussed last week, the Buddha told the five monks who formed his audience for the discourse that when he had realized the Four Noble Truths, each one in each of its three aspects, “knowledge and insight arose in me: nothing any longer holds me here; this is the last birth; there will be no more becoming.” In other words, the Buddha announced that he had attained nibbana (Sanskrit nirvana)—”unbinding”, release from all attachment to things of this world that leads, inevitably, to experience of dukkha as anguish and pain. Nibbana is commonly understood as a kind of place, or a state of being, but that misses the sense of the Pali term, which refers to a process rather than to the state to which that process leads; it might be more proper to say that the Buddha “nibanna’d” instead of saying that he “attained nibbana“. The Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta comes as close as anything in the Pali Canon to providing an explanation of the nibbana process. It also repeats, in a different form but with almost identical sense, the lesson of the Cula-Malunkyaputta Sutta that would have been the subject of our first class if I’d gotten there.

The Annalakkhana Sutta is interesting, and it’s a very important teaching, especially to those Buddhist traditions that are lumped together as Mahayana Buddhism, and I would recommend that you read it, but it is more abstruse and considerably less straightforward than most of the Buddha’s teachings. If we have to skip discussing one in class, then I think that would be a good one to skip.

So, the marching orders for class on Friday are to read the Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta; you might also want to look at an essay on Enlightenment and Nibbana that quotes extensively from that sutta. And I look forward to an interesting discussion on Friday.

Once again, my apologies for missing our first class session last week. I hope you’ve all had a chance to read the Cula Malunkaputta Sutta that we were to have discussed at that class. I’m not going to try to make the class up, and I won’t spend much time Friday on that discourse, but I will review it briefly, mainly to outline the ground rules that the Buddha laid out for what he was going to teach, and to prepare for our discussion of the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta, in which he set, as it were, the syllabus for the teachings that were to follow over the next 45 years.

I’ll use my own rendering of the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta as the basis for our class discussion. My rendering adheres very closely to the Pali text, but I have taken the liberty of expanding on several of the key terms in the sutta; the footnotes are pretty explicit regarding those terms and why I expanded the text as I did, and the introductory paragraphs include links to four online translations, each of which is more literal than mine.

To place the teaching in context, it might be helpful to look at two other resources on the website.

• One presents a map of the Buddha’s India; this will help give you an idea of where his teachings originated. I’ll be referring to that map many times throughout the course, so you might want to print it out and bring it along (I’ll have copies for those who haven’t been able to do that).
• There’s also a brief essay I wrote several years ago, reviewing what little we know of the Buddha’s early life, the events leading up to his Awakening, and his decision to teach the Dhamma to which he had Awakened. In class, we’ll review that material very briefly, and then pick up the story where the essay leaves off.

I heard once about a British scholar who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta. She concluded, on the basis of what she knew of the culture of Northern India at the time of the Buddha, and on a close philological study of the text, that the man we know as Gotama Siddhatha could not have composed the Dhammacakkappavatthana text. Her dissertation caused a minor stir in the world of Buddhist historical studies, and a prominent Thai monk was asked about it. “There’s a scholar in Britain who’s proved that the Buddha could not have delivered that first discourse,” the interviewer said; “What do you think of that?” The monk chuckled and replied, “Well, whoever delivered that discourse, that was the Buddha.”

I think this teaching is the most profound and important text ever composed. It presents an analysis of our human condition that’s completely original, foreshadowed by nothing I’ve ever seen or read about in any other philosophical or religious tradition, yet totally convincing, with enormously practical implications, and still relevant to the conditions of our world and to the way we choose to live in that world, 2400 years after the Buddha delivered it.

I look forward to discussing it with you on Friday.

As we mentioned in our first class, the Noble Eightfold Path is the essence of the Buddha’s Dhamma (Sanskrit Dharma), the truth about how things are and how our lives unfold that he enunciated in his very first discourse and that he spent the rest of his life elaborating. If you haven’t yet done so, it would be worth spending a few minutes on the brief essay I wrote on the concepts of the term Dhamma and of two compound terms incorporating it—Buddhadhamma (the particular version of the Dhamma taught by the Buddha) and Dhammavinaya (the unique way of life that emerges from combining a true understanding of the Dhamma with a practice based on the Eightfold Path).

What is right? We’ll spend the first few minutes of our class looking at the meaning of the Pali word samma, which is usually translated as “right”, as in “Right Understanding”, “Right Intention”, etc.

We’ll then go on to take a detailed look at those first two factors of the Eightfold Path (instead of Right Understanding and Right Intention, they are sometimes translated “Right View” and “Right Resolve”). In connection with that discussion, in addition to the relevant sections of Bhikkhu Bodhi’s online book and Ajahn Lee Dhammadaro’s essay, the following links will be most helpful:

• From Access to Insight, brief collections of excerpts from the Pali Canon on Right View and Right Resolve. The short references at the end of each passage (“— AN 10.176″, “— SN 45.8″, etc.) are links to the actual discourses from which the passage was excerpted. Those links are all worth following, to get a fuller picture of how the Buddha’s teachings have been transmitted.
• In the Kaccayanagotta Sutta, the Buddha teaches the monk Kaccayanagotta about Right View; the particular emphasis here is on the distinction between the wrong understanding of the world taught by those who are categorized as “essentialists” (proposing that certain things, such as the soul and god, have an essential existence that sets them apart from the impermanent phenomena that we deal with day by day) and those who are categorized as “nihilists”, who teach that nothing has a real existence, that all events are basically accidental and that reality as we experience is entirely illusory. Opposed to those extreme views, the Buddha proposed an understanding of the world that asserts the reality of experienced phenomena, but that traces every such phenomenon to the conditions from which it emerges, leading back to the primary condition of ignorance.
• That principle of conditionality, which the Buddha, in the Kaccayanagotta Sutta, establishes as Right View, is explicated in some detail in an essay I wrote a couple of years ago and presented as a Dhamma talk at the Cincinnati Dharma Center. You might find that interesting.
• When it comes to Right Intention, or Right Resolve, I don’t know of anything that brings the Buddha’s teachings home with more clarity, simplicity, and humanity than his discourse to his son Rahula at Mangostone. I’ve written a brief introduction to that sutta, with links to the text and to an audio file of Thanissaro Bhikkhu reading his fine translation. Again, I’d suggest that you read the post and follow the links.

I look forward to seeing you tomorrow afternoon.

I’ve posted a rendering of the discourse we will be starting with on Tuesday, The Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta, the Shorter Discourse to the monk Malunkya. If you have the time to read it before class, please do so; we will read it in class – the discourses were meant to be heard, and they still, I believe, carry most meaning when they are read aloud. But reading the discourse in advance may give you a head start on questions you might want to ask.

Like many suttas, the Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta has a richness of texture: we get a vivid picture of the two old monks—the Buddha and his elderly disciple, probably an old friend, almost certainly a cousin or an uncle in one way or another, whose foibles, impatience, old-man irritability, the Buddha had probably known for a good part of his life. We see those qualities in the old monk, and we see the Buddha’s ironic humor, as he draws out the analogy of the man shot by the arrow to Monty Pythonesque threads of detail; we also see, perhaps, a flash of irritation, and we can wonder how many times has Malunkyaputta put these questions to the Teacher.

Most importantly, though, we get some idea of how the Buddha limited the magisterium of the spiritual tradition he founded. Our society is saddled with competing monotheistic traditions, each of which asserts a comprehensive magisterium—the right to speak with final authority over a wide range of issues, including, most painfully for the conduct of a civil society, the nature of the universe, the fact of evolution, the nature and function of the law courts, the proper conduct of marriage and other life passages. The Buddha, in this discourse, placed a good deal of that matter into the realm of the Undeclared, and asserted quite forcefully that if a person following his teachings wished to save his life and sanity, he would focus on those things that the Buddha has declared—dukkha, craving, the cessation of craving, and the path to that cessation.