Most traditions of Buddhism recognize the existence of the “three Seals of the Dhamma“—statements about the nature of things that are true “whether a Buddha (an enlightened being) appears in the world or not”. These are:

Sabbe means “all” or “every”. Sankhara is that same difficult word we were exploring in our examination of the five khandas—the components of experience that comprise what we are. In the context of the Dhamma Seals, the word refers to phenomena that can be broken down into component parts, i.e. almost everything we experience in our daily lives. The translation I suggested for sankhara as one of the khandas was “distinguishing”. In the context of the Dhamma Seals, I would propose “distinguishable phenomena” as an acceptable translation. (As I suggested in class, a very good one-word translation of sankhara in both contexts might be “stuff”.) Dhammana refers to all things whatsoever—not only phenomena that are distinguishable via the mechanisms with which we shape experience (perception, cognition, consciousness, the sense organs), but also the component elements of those phenomena that are too minute, too momentary, too vague to be distinguishable. Anitta means “without permanence”. We’ve spent a lot of time on dukkha: “stress”, “suffering”, “unsatisfactoriness”. And much of our last class was spent on the notion of anatta: without essential Self-nature, without permanent identity.

So, to my understanding, the Dhamma Seals mean:

The Dhamma Seal statements appear in Chapter 20 of the Dhammapada, a magnificent anthology of verses dealing with the Buddha’s Path. Each of the statements is presented as an aphorism, and each is followed by the same message: “When you can understand this with deep insight, then you will no longer be deluded by the ways of the world, and you will be on the path to independence.”

The final verse of Chapter 20 makes another statement, which has sometimes been asserted as the “fourth Seal” of the Dhamma: “santam nibbanam“—peace is to be found in nibbana. And that, of course, brings in what I have come to believe is the single most difficult and most widely misunderstood technical term in Buddhist doctrine, and the term that will form the theme of our next class.

Stay tuned.

There are a lot of translations of the Dhammapada on the web. Two good ones, by Thanissaro Bhikkhu and Acharya Buddharakkhita, are on the Access To Insight website. There is an exceptionally graceful new translation by Gil Fronsdal; you can hear him read a couple of chapters at the Sutta Readings website.

Continuing with our theme of how the Buddha’s Teachings go “Against the Stream”, we’ll look at one of the most famous Discourses in the entire Pali Canon, the Anattalakkhana Sutta. That Discourse is widely used to support the notion that the Buddha denied the existence of a “self”, in the sense that I, myself, am writing this comment. That’s just silly; the kind of time-wasting wordplay that distracts us from the intertwined tasks of embracing dukkha, letting go of craving, experiencing cessation, and bringing the Path to life.

The term “anattalakkhana” is a compound. The first syllable “an” negates the meaning of what follows, as the “a” in our word “atheist”, or the “an” in “anarchy”. In the animistic theories that were held by many brahmins in the Buddha’s time, “atta” means “soul” : the permanent identity that exists separate and distinct from a person’s current worldly form and that continues to exist when that worldly form ends, transmigrating to a new worldly form. The new form, because it is informed by the same eternal soul, is in some significant way identical with the first form: it is the same Self. Finally, “lakkhana” means “sign” or “characteristic”, in the sense of evidence, or an identifying mark. So the name of the sutta can be translated, approximately and long-windedly, as “The evidence for the non-existence of an essential Self”.

In this sutta, and in most of the other teachings of the Canon in which he addresses the ontological question of whether or not a “Self” exists, the term the Buddha uses is that term atta. And to fully understand what he’s about here, I think we have to remember what a central role that term played in the Brahminic tradition which the Buddha confronted in his Teaching. To that Brahminic tradition, and especially to what was, in the Buddha’s time, the very avant-garde gloss on that tradition that was emerging in the Upanishads, the atta (Sanskrit atman) was not only objectively real, but it was central to the notion of salvation that was the goal of the tradition. Brahman, the Godhead of which God Brahma is an avatar, was the central Reality, the source of all being. Each individual person had his or her own Essential Reality (the atta), beside which everything else about the person was illusory. The goal of all spiritual practice was to recognize that one’s atta was, in fact, identical to Brahman, and to experience the merging of atta with Brahman, Self with Godhead.

In the Anattalakkhana Sutta, the Buddha leaves no doubt about what he thinks of the notion of such an entity—an eternal Self or soul. He examines all of the places where one might locate such an atta—a person’s body, that person’s perceptions, feelings, ideas and conceptual formations, the consciousness itself, and he finds each of those incapable of providing the foundation for an atta, a permanent Self or a soul. No matter where you look, you will see the same thing: “This is not mine; this is not what I am; this is not my Self.”

Yet here I am, writing this post. And I intend to continue the project I’ve begun, to cultivate the Buddha’s Eightfold Path in my life. So how do I reconcile this “I”, seeking reconciliation, with that “Self”, that atta, that is “not mine, not what I am, not my Self”? It’s not just a semantic problem, rejecting “ego” but allowing “I”. Our difficulty with the Buddha’s Dhamma here, I think, has to do with something more basic and more important than mere semantics (although I’m not certain that semantics is ever really “mere”). It has to do with how we understand experience.

In our modern materialistic understanding of the world, we make truth claims based on object identification; this is ‘A’; that is ‘Not-A’. Very Aristotelian. And objects are defined by their attributes or properties. So when we speak of a Self, we imply that there is an existent object, with the identifying name “Self”, and with certain properties that determine its location, its dynamic interaction with other objects, its particular capabilities, its distinguishing characteristics, etc. All of those properties together establish an object’s duration, the span of time through which it has existence as a distinct object. And the distinctive nature of the object determines the nature of our experience of it. The object, as a real thing, precedes and conditions our experience of it.

But that, it seems to me, is not how the Buddha understood experience. In the Buddha’s understanding, all that we have to deal with, all that we can know, is this immediate experience, and all experience is conditioned by prior experience and our response to that. Our experience of the world is our only way of knowing it, and our experience of the world is always in process. Experience not only precedes the objects of experience, but our habit of “objectification” is what conditions dukkha.

There is a revealing passage in the Dhammapada, perhaps the best-known and most widely read text from the Pali Canon, in which the Buddha presents a very different take on the notion of “Self” than he does in the Anattalakkhana Sutta.

The atta that the Buddha denies existence to in the Anattalakkhana Sutta is the Brahminical atta: the Self/Soul that continues from life to life, conditioning each life by the kamma it’s accumulated in previous lives. That conception of an Essential Self is limiting and constrictive. It is only because such a Self does not exist, in fact, that the wise person is free to construct this Self here and now, this discriminating “I” that can make ethical choices, sign contracts, raise a family, take OLLI courses, write essays, learn new skills, and summon up the effort and intelligence required to bring the Path to life, and so shape what it becomes. This Self is not an object, has no essential existence, but is always becoming, always in process.

I am Richard Blumberg, and I approve this message.

Our study text for this week’s class in the course “Against the Stream”, is the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta, traditionally viewed as the Buddha’s very first discourse. In that Discourse, the Buddha presents, in a very terse form, the foundational learning he took from his experience of bodhi. Bodhi is the word most frequently used in the Pali texts to refer to the world-changing experience in which Gotama Siddatha recognized the Dhamma; the term buddha, in fact, means “one who has experienced bodhi”, and the choices we have to make in understanding the meaning of bodhi determine, to some extent, how we understand the man whose teachings we are studying.

The root meaning of bodhi is knowledge, with the strong connotation of special or supreme knowledge. The most common translation of the word into English is “enlightenment”; that’s the second definition that the Pali Text Society’s Pali-English Dictionary assigns to the word, before giving up and defining it teleologically as “the knowledge possessed by a Buddha”. But another common meaning of the Pali term , is “waking up”. In that sense, the word is sometimes used in the Pali literature to refer to the simple everyday process of waking from sleep.

As Stephen Batchelor points out, both “Awakening” and “Enlightenment” are metaphors, with similar but subtly different connotations. “Enlightenment” evokes a scenario in which a sudden light reveals or clarifies the nature of something that had been obscured by darkness; in the context of the metaphor, that darkness is presumed to correspond to our ignorance or delusion. In the metaphor of Awakening, one also becomes newly aware of something that had been there all along, but, in this case, the reason we had not seen is that we had been in a state of diminished awareness (deep sleep), or even delusion (dream); what we awaken to is simply the reality of our daily experience, in all its multiplicity, complexity, difficulty, and ambiguity.

While the reality that we recognize in the bodhi experience is implicit in the metaphor of Awakening, in the metaphor of Enlightenment that reality is not implicit but must be explicitly supplied by the metaphorist or by the ideological context in which the metaphor is used. In a Christian context, for example, one might become Enlightened regarding the nature of divinity and salvation – one would come to know God or to know Christ. In a Mahayana Buddhist context, Enlightenment would reveal the Emptiness of all formations. In a Brahminic context, an Enlightenment experience would reveal the identity of Atman, the individual Self, and Brahman, the Godhead. As I read the texts of the Pali Canon, the newly Enlightened Buddha experienced “the nature and vision of things as they are”, i.e. the reality of the world as we become aware of it through what Glenn Wallis calls “the sensorium”: the eye confronting visible objects, the ear confronting sounds, the nose confronting odors, the tongue confronting tastes, the tactile senses confronting texture and weight, and the mind striving to make sense of it all. If I am reading those texts correctly, then, there is no significant difference between “Enlightenment” and “Awakening” as English words to translate the bodhi realized by the Buddha.

That said, I prefer the word “Awakened”, only because it avoids those connotations that the other word brings with it from its use in other contexts, and I will mostly use that word in the articles I write and the translations that I prepare for our study. If you prefer the more traditional word “Enlightened”, feel free to read it that way.

I heard this story on a podcast once; I don’t remember which one, and I’m not sure that I have the details exact, but this is how I remember it. A number of years ago, a young PhD candidate in England had written her dissertation about the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta. She amassed a body of philological evidence to prove that no one who had lived in Northern India in the 5th Century BCE could have composed that text. Her dissertation caused something of a stir in Buddhist scholarly circles, and a reporter, getting wind of the foofaraw, called a very famous Thai monk to break the news. He told him, basically, that the man Gotama Siddhatha, whom we know as the Buddha, could not have delivered the discourse on which all Buddhism is founded. The monk just chuckled. “Well,” he responded, “whoever delivered that discourse, that was the Buddha.”

In fact, there’s no longer much doubt among those who study the history of early Buddhism that the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta is, in most of its essentials, the work of the Buddha. While the form in which we have it almost certainly is not the exact form in which it was first delivered, and while some stock doctrinal formulae might have been substituted for the actual words that were spoken at the time, still, the discourse that we’ve received is probably very close to the form in which the Buddhist sangha heard it during the Buddha’s lifetime: the introductory Preface, as it were, to all of the teachings that would follow in the course of the Buddha’s long career—the teaching that summarized, set the stage for, and provided the necessary framework for understanding all that would follow. The Buddha himself probably listened in to the sangha’s recitation of the sutta on more than one occasion; he referred to the points made in it again and again; and its canonical form does, in fact, represent fairly the foundational discourse of the newly Awakened Buddha.

What Gotama Siddhattha Awakened to, when he became the Buddha, was the complete understanding of how the world works, of how everything emerges from contingent conditions, and how everything that emerges establishes, by that very emergence event, the conditions for its own ending. The way he came to understand that process working, in the formation of universes and galaxies, the action of hammer on heated steel, and the changes that a person undergoes through the course of a lifetime and through the course of every moment—that understanding of the phenomenal world and of our experience of it is called the Dhamma (Dharma in Sanskrit). In this discourse, the newly emerged Buddha set in motion (pavatthana) the wheel (cakka) of the Dhamma, hence Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta.

The Dhamma, as the Buddha articulated it in this first Discourse (and as he continued to elaborate on that teaching through the next 45 years) confronted, very directly and cleverly, the foundational assumptions of the dominant Brahminic culture; not only the teachings of the Brahmin priesthood, but the reformist teachings that were coming into vogue at the time and being transmitted in Discourses known as Upanishads. The Upanishads and related teachings are known as Vedanta; the term means “the end of the Vedas”, and the term meaning “end”, anta, has the same dual meaning in Sanskrit/Pali as it does in English.

The Brahminic religion (the Vedic religion of the Brahmins along with the Vedantic teachings) was esoteric, dualistic, hierarchical, transcendentalist, soteriological, abstract, mystical. The Buddhadhamma was exactly the opposite. In the course of our coming class, we will explore the ways in which the newly Awakened Buddha challenged the dominant authorities of his culture, how his teachings went “against the stream”, and we will try to understand the brilliant melding of irony, rationality, and subversion of orthodox dogma with which he conducted his radical project.

The Anattalakkhana Sutta, the Discourse on the Not-Self Characteristic, is, by traditional accounts, the second discourse delivered by the Buddha, shortly after his first discourse setting the Wheel of the Dhamma in motion. His audience was the same five bhikkhus who had heard that first discourse in which the Buddha set the Wheel of the Dharma in motion. At the conclusion of that first discourse, the Venerable Aññakaṇdañña had attained Enlightenment, had become an arahant. This second discourse awakened the other four; the final line of the sutta summarizes the historical moment: “And there were then six arahants in the world.”

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.

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.