The Fundamentals of the Dhamma
The Pali term dhamma (dharma in Sanskrit), used throughout this website, and throughout all extended discussions of Buddhism, derives from a Proto-Indo-European root syllable dhṛ, meaning “to hold”, referring to something that upholds or forms a foundation; it may be cognate with the Latin firmus and the modern English “form”.
There are three terms used on this website to refer to the Dhamma as that was taught by the Buddha. There is the word Dhamma itself. There are also two compounds: the Buddhadhamma and the Dhammavinaya.
It is important, I think, to understand all references to Dhamma in a way that is consistent with the texts of the Pali Canon and with the foundational texts of Mahayana Buddhism, but in a way that rejects dogmatism: the required acceptance of a credo—a statement about reality that cannot be verified by direct experience but that must be “believed”. The understanding of Dhamma, in all of its various uses, that is outlined below is sufficient in itself to serve as the basis for an understanding of experience that is relevant to our modern circumstances, that is testable and useful, and that helps us to create and maintain an effective and distinctively Buddhist response to those circumstances. It does not require belief in any super-mundane existent, such as God or any monistic foundational Essence, or in any process, such as rebirth, that challenges a rational, secular worldview.
But it does not preclude those who do believe in such existents or processes from bringing the Path to life and from taking practical and immediate benefit from a developing appreciation of the Dhamma, the Buddhadhamma, and the Dhammavinnaya.
The Dhamma
The Dhamma, by itself, refers to the regularities and dynamic exchanges of energy and information that determine how things unfold in the world; in this sense, it encompasses “natural law”, i.e. the laws of physics, the dynamics of evolution, the neurophysiology of the brain, etc.; societal Law, i.e. the normative rules that each culture establishes, with more or less coercive force; and the notion of karma, the rules that determine the effect of our intentional actions on our own well-being and the well-being of those with whom we are associated.
Any statement about any of those processes is a statement of the Dhamma, and any such statement may be true—pointing toward a realistic understanding of the world and a skillful response to experience—or false—leading to delusion and ineffective, unskillful, and hurtful behavior.
The foundational texts of Buddhism tell us that, whether or not a Buddha emerges in the world, the true Dhamma persists. They also list three statements, with some texts listing a fourth, that derive from and characterize any true articulation of the Dhamma.
The Three Seals of the Dhamma
- sabbe sankhara anicca: All contingent experience is impermanent. Every phenomenon we experience in this world—both external objects, from a speck of dust to the expanding galaxy-filled universe, and mental phenomena, such as sensations, perceived patterns, emotions, intentions, ideas—has emerged, or arisen, from prior conditions, and all that will cease to be as we experience it now.
- sabbe sankhara dukkha: All contingent experience is dukkha. Dukkha is pain, frustration, dissatisfaction, anguish, dismay, unreliability—no single English word can translate dukkha(Although I think Glenn Wallis comes very close, in his new anthology of teachings from the Pali Canon, “Basic Teachings of the Buddha”, with “unease”). No matter how fine we slice our experience of the contingent world, no matter what spin we put on our expression of that experience, it is characterized by dukkha.
- sabbe dhamma anatta: Nowhere can there be found an essential identity. Nothing has a “Self”, either in the form of a human Soul or a material Essence, that outlasts the phenomenal existence that we experience; not even the most elemental phenomena—such elements of subjective experience as sensations or ideas; or the basic elements of the material world, such as hadrons, leptons, and quanta of energy—can be [[wikipedia:Uncertainty_principle|certainly identified]] as enduring between one experienced event and the next.
The Fourth Seal
- sabbe dhamma nibbana. Everything is unbound. This fourth mark of the Dhamma is added by most Mahayana traditions and has its explicit origins in the Pali Canon of the Theravada tradition. Nibbana both follows logically from the first three Dhamma seals, and is, in some important way, different from those. If all that we experience is contingent phenomena, arising from conditions and ceasing, then, on the one hand, there is nothing that can bind us, and, on the other hand, we are free to alter the conditions from which new experience emerges. The realized knowledge that we are not bound by experience and the liberating vision of how we might, in consequence, create experience—that “knowledge and vision of things as they are” leads to freedom from attachment to impermanent experience, freedom from all craving (even the craving for an end to dukkha), freedom from the conceit of essential identity—to the realization of nibbana, complete liberation.
(Note that the first two Dhamma Seals refer to saṇkhāra, which I have translated as “contingent existence”, but which is frequently translated as “contingent phenomena” or “conditioned phenomena”. The third Seal refers to dhamma; this is the same word that we are defining on this page, but it’s used, as it were, with a lower-case ‘d’, rather like we’d refer to “truths” as something different from “Truth”, “laws” as something different from “Law”, and “verses” as something different from “Verse”. In this sense, classical Buddhism distinguishes a discrete number of dhammas, including the basic elements of the material world—Earth, Water, Fire and Air; the basic elements of experience—the khandas: material form, sensation, perception, cognition, and consciousness; and 20-40 others, with nibbana as the final dhamma. Each instance of any dhamma, except for nibbana, can be divided more and more finely until we have what we might refer to as a quantum of dhamma; these, in an infinite variety of combinations, make up contingent experience. At that most unitary level, the dhammas are not themselves contingent. But they still [including nibbana] lack essential identity.)
The Buddhadhamma
The term Buddha means “Enlightened One” or “Awakened One”; in all Buddhist traditions, it can refer to anyone who has come to understand a true Dhamma so completely, so immediately, that he or she, in effect, becomes one with the Dhamma. A Buddha is incapable of responding to experience in an unskillful way, with a response based on a desire to have things differently from how they are, on feelings of anger or ill will, on unexamined or reflexive habit, or on delusional or superstitious belief. All Buddhist traditions acknowledge that there have been, through the eons, many Buddhas; some see everyone as a potential Buddha, waiting to be awakened.
“The Buddha” refers to an historical figure, Siddhatha Gotama, who lived in Northern India about 2500 years ago, who awakened to a true understanding of the Dhamma via a particular series of experiences of which we have only partial knowledge, and who spent 45 years articulating that understanding and spreading it with the help of a formally organized body of followers, known collectively as the Sangha. After the Buddha’s death, the Sangha mounted a deliberate and skillfully organized effort to remember the Buddha’s teachings, and they were eventually written down, in the countries to which they’d spread, in the several different languages of those countries. Those collections of written teachings are known as “canons”; the most complete is the canon written down in the language that’s come to be known as Pali, in the course of a large council of the Sangha that had been organized for that particular task, in about 200 BCE, in Sri Lanka; that collection of teachings is “the Pali Canon”.
The term Buddhadhamma refers to the Buddha’s distinctive articulation of the Dhamma as that can be extracted from the Pali Canon and the other canonical collections. The Buddhadhamma is concerned almost exclusively with the human condition; it sees the world as a set of contingent phenomena, indistinguishable from our human experience of them. Stephen Batchelor has identified four understandings that he sees as particular to the Buddhadhamma; I’ve given my take on those in the following sections.
The Four Noble Truths
These four linked true statements about our situation in the world and how to respond skillfully to that situation are by far the best known and most widely examined of all the statements that comprise the Buddhadhamma. They were first articulated in what is, according to tradition, the very first teaching that the newly Awakened Buddha delivered, the teaching known as the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta, “The Discourse Setting the Wheel of the Dhamma in Motion”. Each “Truth” has three parts: the statement of the truth itself, a statement about the response that the Truth demands of us (that is, what would, given that Truth, constitute a skillful response), and, finally, the Buddha’s statement that he knows, from his direct experience, that such a skillful response is possible.
The term “noble” is the common translation (and, like all common translations, only partially accurate and substantially misleading) of the Pali word ariyan. The implications of that word include such qualities as purity, authenticity, comprehensiveness, and properness.
These are the four Truths that comprise the Dhamma that the Buddha articulated in that first discourse.
- The Truth of dukkha
- Dukkha characterizes all emergent experience.
- Dukkha must be fully comprehended.
- Dukkha can be fully comprehended.
- The Truth of craving
- Craving is the essential condition for the existence of dukkha in all our experience of the world: craving permanence in an impermanent world, craving an unchanging Essence in a world that is fundamentally contingent and in constant flux.
- Craving must be abandoned.
- Craving can be abandoned.
- The Truth of cessation
- Cessation of dukkha will follow cessation of craving; to the extent to which we can let go of craving, dukkha will diminish in intensity; the complete cessation of craving, with no residue remaining, will eliminate dukkha completely.
- The cessation of craving, with its consequent cessation of dukkha, must be experienced.
- Cessation can be experienced.
- The Truth of the Path
- The Path to abandoning craving incorporates eight qualities of penetrating understanding, of ethical action, and of constant and unflinching awareness: correct understanding, correct intention, correct speech, correct action, correct livelihood, correct application of energy, correct mindfulness, and correct concentration.
- We must—each one of us—bring the Path to being in our lives.
- The Path can be brought to life.
When the process outlined in the Four Noble Truths is complete—when dukkha has been fully comprehended, craving abandoned, the cessation of dukkha experienced, and the Path brought to life, then what follows is nibbana, the Fourth Seal of the Dhamma outlined above.
The following three distinctive characteristics of the Buddhadhamma all derive from or elaborate a point explicitly enunciated in those four Truths.
Contingency
The Four Noble Truths state that dukkha is contingent on craving; craving is a necessary condition for dukkha to arise; without craving, there is no arising of dukkha.
At a number of points in the canonical texts, a terser and more general principle of contingency is articulated:
When this exists, that exists.
When this does not exist, that does not exist.
With the arising of this, that arises.
With the non-arising of this, that does not arise.
There is also a large set of discourses in which the principle of contingency is unfolded, as it were, to describe a discrete series of steps by which a particular experience emerges from a particular starting point–how, for example, dukkha emerges from the condition of ignorance, or how Enlightenment, the experience of nibbana, emerges from a life given to virtue.
The important point, for an understanding of the Buddhadhamma that can be shared by participants in a secular Buddhist practice, is that reality is most usefully understood as a set of experienced processes, each one emerging for examination from precedent conditions. This understanding is opposed by the common Western understanding of reality as a collection of material objects, each with a distinctive set of attributes.
The Buddha’s Dhamma of contingency is not deterministic; it allows for accident, implies the impossibility of certainty, and demands an ethically skillful response to experience.
Individual Responsibility
All we can know is our experience; therefore, if anyone is to realize the liberation that is nibbana, each one of us must experience that realization individually. Shortly before his death, when Ananda pleaded with the Buddha to give his followers some last instructions that might hold the key to salvation, the Buddha rejected the request, telling Ananda that he had held nothing back in his teaching of the Dhamma, that there was no secret solution or mystery that could absolve us of our responsibility. “Therefore, Ananda, be islands unto yourselves, refuges unto yourselves, seeking no external refuge; with the Dhamma as your island, the Dhamma as your refuge, seeking no other refuge.”
The Eightfold Path
The most particularly defined of the Four Noble Truths is the Truth of the Eightfold Path to the abandonment of craving. In the beginning of the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta, the Buddha announces that he has found a “Middle Way” between severe asceticism, which is a dead end, and a life of hedonistic pleasure, which is also a dead end; that “Middle Way” is defined as the same Eightfold Path which comprises the Fourth Noble Truth. Although all traditions of wisdom include elements that would correspond to elements of the Path, nowhere else is such a Path defined so precisely and as such an integral component of a soteriological enterprise, a way of understanding reality and conducting one’s affairs that leads directly to experiencing liberation from dukkha and the habits of thinking and behaving that permit dukkha to emerge. To be a Buddhist is to accept the challenge of cultivating the Eightfold Path in your life.
In Pali, the Eightfold Path comprises sammā-diṭṭhi,samma sankappa,sammā-vācā,sammā-kammanta,sammā-ājīva,sammā-vāyāma,sammā-sati, and sammā-samādhi. The Pali sammā means “thorough, proper, correct, in the right way, as it ought to be, best, perfect”. It’s usually translated “Right”—Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, etc. That has a set of judgmental connotations that aren’t exactly wrong (Pali micchā), but, in our culture, imply a moral context that doesn’t make much sense in the Buddha’s universe of discourse.
I prefer the word “correct” to translate sammā, but, in practice (dual meaning intended), we might want to find words to translate sammā differently for each component of the path, to bring its meaning into consonance with our experience of that particular component; here’s one such list: true understanding, pure intention, considerate speech, compassionate action, wholesome livelihood, skillful application of energy, constant mindfulness, and focussed concentration.
You might find it interesting and helpful in bringing the Path to your life to create your own variant translation of the Path components. I would envision such an exercise as comprising an integral component of any secular Buddhist practice.
The Dhammavinaya
When the Buddha referred to his teachings, one term that he often used was Dhammavinaya. That’s usually translated as “the Path and the Practice”, which is pretty close. The Pali term vinaya, used by itself, usually means “rule”. The elaborate collection of rules governing the behavior of the renunciant followers of the Buddha who form the monastic Sangha is known as the Vinaya, and the large collection of discourses in the Pali Canon that define those rules and provide the historical context that led to each rule’s enunciation is known as the Vinaya Pitaka (the basket of discourses concerning the Vinaya).
Like the English word “rule”, the Pali term vinaya, in addition to applying to the particular behaviors prescribed for the members of a community devoted to a particular practice, like the monastic Sangha, also applies to the norms of proper conduct in a larger and more loosely defined community—the rules of civilized, decent, or appropriate behavior. And, again like our word “rule”, vinaya also has the implications of a logical algorithm for determining the truth or validity of a statement concerning the nature of reality or the appropriate response to a particular situation.
The compound word Dhammavinaya incorporates all of those meanings. It refers to the ways in which the Buddhadhamma is understood by those who accept it as a true depiction of their condition and the ways in which they conduct their lives skillfully in accord with that understanding. It is most often used in reference to the monastic Sangha, but any attempt to craft a secular Buddhist practice must also be able apply the term to the community of practitioners cooperating in that attempt.
In a famous discourse, the Uposatha Sutta, the Buddha addresses the Sangha with an elaborate simile, comparing the Dhammavinaya, in eight particular ways, to “the Great Ocean”. “Just as the Great Ocean everywhere has just one taste, the taste of salt”, the Buddha told the assembled monks, “so this Dhammavinaya, wherever it is understood and practiced correctly, has just one taste, the taste of liberation.” That is the hope we have for our Buddhist practice and for the correct understanding of that practice as the Dhammavinaya.
