Thursday’s session will be our last class; Joan and I are going out to California a week from Wednesday to spend some time with our grandson and his parents, and I’ll miss the last scheduled session.

Throughout the course, as we’ve looked at the various topics that Buddhist scholars, historians, practitioners and teachers tend to spend most time discussing and working to understand, we’ve used, almost as our exclusive source for the core teachings regarding those topics, the discourses recorded in the Pali Canon. On Thursday, we’ll look at just what that is: what texts compose the canon, how they were chosen, how they were recorded, their relation to other Buddhist texts, and where they fit into the various traditions that define Buddhism today.

Unlike some of the other topics we’ve discussed, this one is not particularly challenging intellectually (although I do think that it’s enormously interesting, and important to an understanding of the sort of thing that Buddhism is). What I hope we’ll be able to do is make relatively short work of reviewing the basics, which I’ve covered in a relatively short essay I wrote several years ago, have revised several times since, and is now posted on our Dharma Study website. Then we’ll use the bulk of the class for a more general discussion, in which we can air some of the questions that have arisen through the past six weeks, and review what we’ve learned and where we hope to go with that.

I look forward to seeing you on Thursday.

In the past couple of sessions, the topic of emergence has been a dominant feature of the discussion. We are, as far as we can know, only our experience, and all experience, whether sensory, affective, or mental, emerges from our contact with the phenomenal world. Since our experience is constantly changing, emerging from the fundamentally impermanent nature of the phenomenal world, and since we can be understood only in terms of our experience, then we are emergent beings.

Emergence is at the core of the Four Noble Truths; with dukkha as a given condition, taking innumerable forms, we can reach the true understanding that dukkha emerges from our craving (essentially, a craving for permanence in one form or another), that dukkha will cease to emerge when the craving ceases, and that the conditions to bring that cessation about involve reworking our lives according to eight factors of understanding, action, and insight.

In Session 6, we will examine the nature of dependent emergence in its most elaborate exposition, as a chain of 12 links, each of which serves as a necessary condition for the next, starting with ignorance as the given (again, in many differently conditioned forms), and ending, at least (of course) temporarily, in dukkha.

This chain of dependent emergence, called paticcasamuppāda in Pali, is, for many historians and philosophers of Buddhism, the Buddha’s most radical and original contribution to the way in which we understand the world and our place in it. The essay I’ve written, which I hope you will find time to read (at least once) before our class, is based on a dharma talk I gave last year at the Cincinnati Buddhist Dharma Center; I’ve re-worked it considerably, based on work I’ve been studying by some very original scholars of early Buddhism: Noa Ronkin, Sue Hamilton, and Richard Gombrich; and my experience in November at the Spirit Rock Study Retreat with Stephen Batchelor.

It’s an enormously complex subject, and no one I’ve read pretends to understand it perfectly. I’ve tried to make my own limited understanding of it clear and to relate that understanding to the lives we lead here and now, 2500 years after the Buddha developed the ideas and in a world that even he might have been unable to imagine.

I look forward to our discussion.

(AKA “Fools Rush In”)

Sorry to be late getting this essay on Enlightenment and Nibbana posted, but it was hard to write, and I didn’t want to get it either too confusing or too terribly wrong. I hope that I’ve struck a decent balance between clarity and precision, and that the essay, and the teachings it links to, will give us the basis for a good discussion on Thursday.

Since we missed our session Tuesday, we’re going to try to play a little catch-up this coming week. And that means that we’re going to alter how we’ve been conducting our classes.

Rather than my reading a sutta for discussion in class, I’d like for you to have read three suttas in preparation for Tuesday’s session, attentively enough so that we can discuss them without having to review the details of their content extensively in class.

• The Dighajanu Sutta is the one that was to have been the subject for Session 4; in it, the Buddha gives a Dhamma to a wealthy, commercially successful, and pretty self-satisfied householder—a Dhamma that will lead to his continued success in the world and to the realization of the fruits of that success, but which also leads naturally into a path of behavior that will insure his happiness and spiritual well-being now and in the future. I’ve posted a commentary on the Dighajanu Sutta, calling out the elements in it that I think are particularly important to our emerging understanding of the Buddha’s Teachings.
• In the Canki Sutta, the Buddha is again talking to a member of the Brahmin caste—not a householder, like Sigala, but a student, and a particularly precocious one at that. You might think of Kapatika as a sophomore at the University of Chicago, majoring in Economics and maintaining a 4.0 average. Kapatika engages the Buddha in argument, in a particularly sophomoric and hostile way, and the Buddha responds with patience, restraint, a good bit of irony, and just a touch of satire (watch for the line of blind men. He teaches Kapatika the difference between asserting that a particular view is the only view that’s true, and asserting that one believes a particular view to be the only true one. In the latter case, one “preserves truth”. He then goes on to teach Kapatika how one “discovers truth”, by embarking on a systematic, clear-eyed search for an honest and accomplished teacher and following the path recommended by that teacher, and how one “arrives at truth” by perfecting the practice of the chosen path.
• The Kalama Sutta is one of the best known suttas in the Pali Canon; in it, the Buddha teaches the householders of the Kalama tribe’s market town of Kesaputa how to evaluate the various claims and counterclaims of the teachers that pass through their town. There are no extrinsic guarantees of truth, the Buddha teaches. One must subject all teachings to the harsh test of direct experience. Of particular interest in this sutta is the final portion, in which the Buddha gives what amounts to a reverse twist to Pascal’s Wager. Whether or not there is some reward awaiting one who behaves well, it’s still a good thing to do so, conducing to one’s happiness and well-being here and now.

Please find the time to read the suttas before class; none are particularly difficult, and the middle one is the only one that gets rather long (even that is not outrageously long, and it’s possible to skim the repetitive parts.) If your interest is piqued, follow the links to other translations that may help you to understand some of the finer doctrinal points.

All of the teachings in the three suttas deal with practical issues: how to behave in ways that help increase your chances of finding success and happiness in the world; how to speak honestly; how to seek the truth in a way that insures that you won’t be taken in by someone who’s following a hidden agenda or pretending to knowledge that he doesn’t actually have.

I look forward to our discussion.

Here’s where we start getting into the fun stuff.

Most Westerners, if they have any notion of Buddhism at all, associate Buddhism with the notion of kamma (Sanskrit karma) and rebirth. The idea, at its most basic, is that you’re reborn again and again; if you’ve made good kamma (e.g. been kind, generous, honest, etc.), you’re reborn into fortunate circumstances; if not, you’re reborn less fortunately. The goal of enlightenment is to bring rebirth to an end. (And really, who would want that?)

In our session on Thursday, we’re going to look at the Buddhist notion of rebirth (and its inevitably accompanying re-death) with a little more nuance. The understanding that I will present is my own understanding. While it is rooted in canonical sources and is in general accord with an understanding of kamma and rebirth that has been articulated by many modern Buddhist scholars and practitioners, it is far from an orthodox view of the subject (if the idea of orthodoxy even makes much sense in the context of Buddhism). It is certainly not how an ordained Buddhist monk is likely to present the idea. For one sample of such a presentation, you might want to look at Bhikkhu Bodhi’s start at an essay on the subject. He’s clearly uncomfortable with the whole idea of having to justify the notion of rebirth as it is presented in the canonical teachings, but he is also unwilling to accept that a changing scientific view of the world might give one permission to interpret the canonical teachings in a way that is too very different from the interpretations offered by the classical commentators.

When one is presented with a new idea, especially one that seems to conflict with ideas that one already holds, the temptation is to assume that we understand the new idea, on first hearing, well enough to evaluate it. We do so, decide whether we’re for it or against it, and dig our heels in. From that point on, our strategy is more or less to interpret any argument we’re given, or any evidence that’s offered, in light of our entrenched position, and to push back against the argument, reject or re-interpret the evidence, and ridicule or revile the motives of anyone who disputes our entrenched position. Unfortunately, that’s how most public discourse proceeds in this country today.

There is another way. That is to assume, if something makes no sense to us, or seems to conflict with a deeply held belief, that we may not be understanding it rightly. We can make an effort to understand it differently, so that it begins to make a little more sense, or to pose a less certain threat to our existing views. If we assume a certain level of good will on the part of those who confront us with new ideas, we may even begin to find some common ground: shared assumptions about how things are, or about how we’d like things to be.

That is the approach I’ve tried to take with my essay on kamma and rebirth. The idea of rebirth has never made much sense to me, and my instinctive rejection of that idea caused me, for many years, to reject Buddhism in general. As I’ve come to understand Buddhism better, and especially as I’ve come to admire the Buddha himself and to find relevance and wisdom in his core teachings, I’ve had to re-evaluate my instinctive reaction of an idea that was clearly close to the center of the Buddha’s own conceptual universe.

There is no question that the Buddha accepted the fact of rebirth; it was part of his cultural milieu, and it is an important component of very many of the teachings we have in the Pali Canon. But it’s also true that the Buddha resisted, strongly and consistently, any attempt to define exactly what happened in the course of rebirth. Indeed, views about the detailed workings of the rebirth process – just what was reborn and how the influence of kammic action emerged in an individual’s life – were among the most pernicious views of all; the most difficult fetter to break. The Buddha’s reticence on this topic, along with his general encouragement to think things through for yourself and to give authoritative precedence to direct experience, justifies, I believe, the kind of redefinition of kamma and rebirth that I’ve tried to work out in my essay. I encourage you to read that essay before this coming week’s session, and also, if you have time, to read Bhikkhu Bodhi’s more orthodox understanding.

I anticipate a good discussion, and I look forward to seeing you all on Thursday.

Class Notes, Session 2

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:

• The Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta itself, both the rendering I have supplied, and the more literal translations that are linked to from that document. This is, after all, the most fundamental text in Buddhism, and it would be a good idea to see how different translators have handled some of the difficult technical terms it introduces.
• An essay I wrote some time ago, borrowing extensively from material on Access to Insight, on the Buddha’s Early Life and Development. Essentially, the events covered in this essay take us from Siddhatta’s birth right up to the point at which he is ready to deliver the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta.

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.