The Kalamas lived in a town called Kesaputta, which was, apparently, on the edge of a large and rather dangerous forest, through which a major road passed. Travellers on that road would frequently stop at Kesaputta until enough of them had gathered to traverse the forest in relative safety. In this way, Kesaputta was similar to the oasis towns of Arabian peninsula, where caravans assembled to make the dangerous crossing of the desert.

Given its location, Kesaputta received more than its share of visits from the various ascetics, sages, and dharma teachers who wandered through Northern India at the time of the Buddha, and the Kalamas had more opportunity than residents of other towns to hear the gossip of the day and get some feel for the reputation of the teachers who came their way. When the Buddha came, they were waiting for him, and they hit him with a tough question—tough then, and tough now. All these teachers come through here, they told him, and each one has his own particular point of view; each one claims that he alone possesses truth, and that all of the others are full of baloney (or whatever passed for baloney in 400BCE India). How do we know, they asked the Buddha, which of these teachers we should follow?

The Kalama Sutta is his answer. In it, the Buddha demonstrates a few techniques which he refined quite skillfully through his teaching career. For one, his response demonstrated his deep empathy for where the Kalamas were—the confusion they felt and their distrust of those who kept trying to prosetylize, their relative lack of sophistication regarding deep philosophical notions and fine points of logic, their position as prosperous householders, involved with their businesses and their families, and, above all, their situation as human beings, caught up in the suffering inherent in that situation, caught up in this samsara.

The sutta demonstrates another common technique of the Buddha; he starts by agreeing with his questioner—in fact, he expresses the Kalamas’ doubts much more precisely and exhaustively than they had in their initial question to him. And he doesn’t press his own point of view, but asks the Kalamas for their point of view about various critical questions involving the kind of actions, the kind of life, that is most likely to bring happiness. Then, working from that foundation, he skillfully outlines the way in which that kind of life works to improve the lot of those who find the way to live it. And he concludes, not by promising them a fortunate rebirth or other pie in the sky reward for living that life, but by outlining all of the alternatives. He shows clearly that no matter what one believes about the more esoteric doctrines—whether we will or will not be judged on our behavior, whether we will or will not be reborn—it is still good to lead a good life, one characterized by loving kindness, compassion, joy at the accomplishment of others, and equanimity.

Here’s a link to the rendering of the Kalama sutta that I’ll be reading in class on Tuesday. If you have time to read it before class, that would be a good idea.

The Sigalovada Sutta is long, but there is nothing difficult or complicated about it. In it, the Buddha comes upon a young Brahmin householder, Sigala, taking his ritual bath and conducting his morning prayers, possibly at one of the warm springs that are still popular tourist destinations in the modern city of Rajgir. After the bath, Sigala saluted the six cardinal points (East, West, North, South, Zenith and Nadir) with his hands joined in the gesture signaling reverent worship. When the Buddha asks him why he is doing that, Sigala tells him it is because his father, before he died, enjoined the ritual performance on his son. The Buddha then takes the opportunity to teach Sigala what it really means to be reverent, and how the cardinal points might be worshipped by one who lives nobly, in accordance with the Dhamma.

The sutta has been called the layperson’s vinaya, a word that refers to the set of rules governing the behavior of Buddhist monks and nuns. But that implies a particularly Buddhist focus that misses the point of the teaching, I think. In fact, the instruction that the Buddha gives to Sigala in this discourse is the most concentrated collection of generally good advice that I know of. Anyone, professing any faith at all or following any ritual tradition, who undertakes to live according to the advice given in the Sigalovada Sutta will certainly, barring accident or just bad luck, live happily, have good friends, and attain a measure of worldly success.

In our discussion of that advice, I’d like to focus on a few points that I find particularly interesting:

• The structure of the discourse is interesting. While the starting point is the Buddha’s statement that Sigala is doing it wrong, and that there is a way to pay homage to the six directions that is in accord with the Aryan Dhamma (arya is the Pali word translated in the English renditions as “noble”), it’s not until the last part of the long discourse that the Buddha finally gets back around to those directions and the meaning they have according to the Dhamma. The first three-quarters of the discourse focuses on general principles of good behavior. The implication here, I think, is that unless one starts with good behavior—that is, refraining from the four evil actions, resisting the four motivations that lead one to behave badly, and avoiding the six courses of behavior that dissipate health, wealth and happiness—then it really doesn’t matter how one worships the cardinal directions; there’s no ritual magic in worshipping the directions that can save one who’s hell bent on destruction.
• Although it’s a small point in the context of a long discourse, I think it’s important that the Buddha’s starting point is with four of the five precepts that every Buddhist lay person accepts as guides to a well-lived life—not taking life, not taking what’s not given, not speaking falsely, and not misbehaving sexually. The fifth precept, to avoid intoxicants that make one careless and stupid, is given ample coverage in the rest of the discourse.
• The discourse is intensely pragmatic. Nothing is to be taken on faith; the Buddha gives perfectly good and believable reasons for the ethical principles and behaviors that he recommends to Sigala. The results of behaving badly do not come as punishments, and the results of behaving well do not come as rewards; it is all a matter of natural consequences.
• The focus on companionship and the detailed analysis of the difference between good companions and bad ones is moving and convincing; it is also a frequent theme in the teachings. In the Upaddha Sutta, Ananda and the Buddha are sitting together at the end of the day, and Ananda says, “This is half of the holy life, lord: admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie.” “Don’t say that, Ananda,” replies the Buddha. “Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life. When a monk has admirable people as friends, companions, & comrades, he can be expected to develop & pursue the noble eightfold path.” In the Sigalovada Sutta, he extends that to lay people as well as monks.
• When the discourse finally gets back around to the worship of the six cardinal directions, the Buddha presents a symbolic interpretation of those directions, in terms of the relationships that are significant in a householder’s life, that is actually a model for the structure of a civil society. All relationships are reciprocal, purposeful, and humane. The relationships themselves cover the most important aspects of our lives, as those were understood in the Buddha’s Dhamma—one’s relationship with one’s parents and children, with one’s teachers and students, with one’s friends and companions, with one’s colleagues—employees and supervisors, with one’s husband or wife, and with one’s spiritual counselors. Again, nothing important is left out (or couldn’t be fit in with some minimal interpretation), and everything is kept practical: relationships are defined and ways of maintaining those relationships are commended, not based on theory, dogma, or categorical imperatives, but simply on common experience.

It is illuminating, I think, to compare the advice given in the Sigalovada Sutta to other bodies of advice recorded in other traditional texts—the ritual imperatives in the Analects of Confucius, the tribal prescriptions and prohibitions in the Torah, the revelations of the Old Testament prophets and of Mohammed, the rules governing hierarchies of power in the law books of Manu, Solon, and many others. The Buddha’s advice is different, not only in its pragmatism and freedom from dogma, but also in the kind of results it seeks to achieve—happiness, material success, conviviality, contentment, the attainment of wisdom—and the scope of those results, the fact that they are to be experienced right here and right now.

As you’re reading this, try to imagine the terms that the Buddha might use if he were giving this advice today—to a young man, for example, recently graduated from Miami University (where, perhaps, he’d had a reputation for heavy partying), with a wife and a couple of young children, a house in Montgomery, and a position in sales with P&G.

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.

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.

Six years after he’d left home, and shortly after having achieved the goal for which he set out on the homeless live and become the Buddha, he returned to Kapilavatthu, where he was received with honor and respect. It is said that his wife, Rahula’s mother, told the boy to go to his father and ask for his inheritance. Rahula did so, and the Buddha, in response, told Sariputta to give Rahula ordination as a member of the Sangha.

In the Vinaya, we’re told that the Buddha’s father, Suddhodana, was very upset by this: “First, we lost our son, and if that weren’t bad enough, now we’ve lost our beloved grandson Rahula to the holy life. It is not right that you should allow the ordination of young children without their parents’ consent.” The Buddha saw the justice in his father’s complaint, gathered the monks together, and pronounced a new rule for the Sangha: no one under 16 should be accepted as a novice, and no one under 20 should receive full ordination without his parents’ consent.

That rule, of course, was too late for Rahula, who entered the Sangha as an ordained bhikkhu, under the special protection and tutelage of Sariputta, the Buddha’s favorite disciple. We are told that Rahula was a model monk, constantly working on his practice, “the foremost of those seeking guidance in his practice.” There are several stories in the canon in which either the Buddha or Rahula seek one another out for special teaching. The sutta we will discuss on Tuesday is the first.

The commentaries, as far as I am aware, give no back story to the Ambalatthika-rahulovada Sutta, but, having been the father of a seven-year-old boy, it’s not difficult for me to imagine that word reached the Buddha that Rahula had been telling some tall tales, and that report occasioned the Buddha’s visit to the young monk.

Whatever might have occasioned it, it is a beautiful story, in which the Buddha shows himself, once again, as someone gentle, compassionate, and imaginative. This is not preaching, it is instruction, and it is, moreover, instruction that we all need at some point in our lives. And seven years old is probably not a bad point to receive it.

I hope that you have a chance, not only to read Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s exceptionally graceful translation of this sutta, but also to listen to his reading of it on the SuddaReadings.net website (click to listen; right-click or control-click to download as an MP3 file that you can import into iTunes). Thanissaro has a rich and resonant voice, and one can imagine that one is listening to the Buddha himself. The Sutta Readings website, while it doesn’t seem to have been updated in a while, has a rich variety of material on it. (One other reading you might want to listen to when you visit the site is Sally Clough’s reading of the Satipatthana Sutta (click to read; right-click or control-click to download the MP3 file), the discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness; that is the sutta we will be discussing next week, and Sally Clough does a particularly wonderful job of reading it.)

Finally, here’s a link to a website that has collected, it seems, just about every legend concerning Rahula that is recorded in the Pali texts. Despite the miraculous nature of some of these, and despite the fact that the very idea of a 7-year-old boy entering the life of an ascetic contemplative is foreign to our current notions of proper child-rearing, the accumulation of detail in the legends presented here give us a picture of a young man who was, while rather more serious than most, was still what we’d call today “well-adjusted” and successful in the pursuit of his goals in life.

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.

Another consequence of increasing wealth was that almost everyone had some excess, with which they could support the Buddha’s growing sangha. In a poor region, or a declining economy, living as a bhikkhu – i.e. living on alms freely given by the householders in a region – would not have been a particularly viable option. But the Buddha’s sangha of bhikkhus and bhikkhunis were, apparently, able to get along quite well on the largesse of a newly and increasingly wealthy laity. Indeed, many of the Buddha’s retreat communities – the areas where the sangha gathered during the three months of the rainy season – had been donated to the Buddha and his sangha by wealthy urban merchants. (Anathapindika is perhaps the best-known of these lay followers; he purchased a large park-like grove from Prince Jeta of Kosala, near the Kosalan capital city of Savatthi, and donated that the the sangha. The Buddha spent about 25 consecutive rains retreats in Anathapindika’s park.)

One reason that the Buddha’s teachings appealed so strongly to the rising urban middle class was that those teachings were eminently practical, rooted in the Buddha’s keen understanding of the way his lay followers lived, their responsibilities and their needs. Another is that the teachings involved nothing in the way of ritual, and no particular need to involve Brahmin priests in the process of gaining either success in the world or a fortunate rebirth in the next life. According to the Buddha, all those good results were rooted, quite definitely and intelligibly, in one’s own actions. To those who were used to working hard and getting what they wanted and needed by their own intelligent and diligent action, that was a message they could relate to.

The sutta we will discuss on Tuesday is a good demonstration of the Buddha’s ability to connect with the newly wealthy urban class. The teaching is delivered in what is identified as “the market town of the Koliyans”, one of a string of market towns between Savatthi, the capital city of the kingdom of Kosala, and Rajagraha, the capital city of the kingdom of Maghada; the Buddha’s home town of Kapilavattu was probably another one of those market towns. The Koliyans and the Sakyans were cousins, and the Buddha’s mother and stepmother were both Koliyans. The Koliyans and the Sakyans were frequently in dispute regarding rights to the water of the Rohini river which separated the republics; the Buddha was called upon on several occasions to act as peacemaker in those disputes, since he had gained the trust of both branches of the family.

The Buddha’s questioner in this sutta was known as Dighajanu, which mean’s “long shins”, and his family name was Vyagghapajja, which means “tiger’s path”. Dighajanu asks the Buddha for a Dhamma for people like him, with lots of family responsibilities and a life full of pleasures that he is not likely to give up to become a dropout like the members of the Buddha’s sangha.

The Dhamma that the Buddha teaches Dighajanu is simple, wise and accessible. It demonstrates that the Buddha was very much in touch with the life that Dighajanu led, and was in no way condemnatory of that life. But, as the Buddha almost always did, he goes on, after answering Dighajanu’s question about how to live in a way that guarantees happiness in his daily life, to give him some very brief additional teachings about how to live in ways that guarantee the preservation of that happiness in the future.

Briefly, the Buddha mentions four attainments – four fortunate accomplishments – that will produce that guarantee; saddha-sampada, the accomplishment of faith, sila-sampada, the accomplishment of virtue, cāga-sampada, the accomplishment of generosity, and pañña-sampada, the accomplishment of wisdom. Each of those receives its own extensive exposition in other teachings; faith, virtue, generosity and wisdom are essential accomplishments in the development of the Buddha’s path. Here each one is presented telegraphically, almost aphoristically, but still in a way that is easily understood and easy to grasp intuitively. The sutta concludes, as many suttas do, with a brief verse summary of the teachings presented.

I’ve given my own rendering of the Dighajanu sutta, which we’ll use as the basis for our discussion. In the introduction to that rendering, I’ve linked to two translations of the sutta, each more complete and authoritative than my rendering; I’d recommend that you read them all to get a feel for the full import of this brief but important teaching.

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.