To be a Buddhist is not to “believe in” Buddhist doctrine, but to practice the Buddhadhamma, the Path that the Buddha defined, the end of which is the end of suffering.

Throughout the discourses, the Buddha gave quite detailed instructions regarding that path, and how to follow it. The most comprehensive teaching regarding the meditative practice that he prescribed is the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta. In that discourse, the Buddha covers one type of meditative practice, the practice of “mindfulness”, sati in Pali; he describes a series of steps whereby a bhikkhu (or, presumably, anyone who undertakes the recommended discipline) attains to a state of steady mindfulness, so that nothing is done carelessly—no action is performed, no words uttered, no opinion formed, no feeling or perception experienced, no ideas conceived, without paying due regard to what is emerging and the ethical implications of every intentional action. Establishing such steady mindfulness of one’s situation, the diligent meditator can end the attachments that trap him in that situation minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, birth after birth. Even today, the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta is the foundational text that guides the meditation of practitioners in nearly all Buddhist traditions.

The Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta is a long discourse, and I’ve prepared a prècis of that discourse for our discussion on Thursday. That text contains a number of references to alternative translations of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, on the web and in printed books.

Concerning meditation more generally, there are a number of audio talks by Stephen Batchelor accessible through the Dharma Seed website; in one of those, the first of eight fine lectures on the life and times of the Buddha that he delivered in the course of a 2004 meditation retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, he discusses the many different meanings of the term “meditation”. What the Buddha’s followers practiced, when they practiced one of the several disciplines that we subsume under that one term, was not what we think of when we think of meditation as a complete stilling of the mind, a state of indiscriminate bliss. Batchelor makes the case that the kind of practice recommended by the Buddha was a more energetic process, with a strong intellectual component, resulting in the attainment of a state of unforced, instinctive wisdom. His talk is very much worth listening to.

The essay I’ll be basing my presentation on is one I wrote a couple of years ago and have revised only slightly since. I hope you have a chance to read that before the class.

The theme for our class this coming Thursday is Nibbana (more commonly known in its Sanskrit form, Nirvana). There are not many technical terms in Buddhism more difficult to figure out or more commonly misapprehended than Nibbana, and we’ll do our best on Thursday to remove some of the obscurity and make some sense of what the term means and how it relates to the essential tasks: comprehending dukkha, letting go of craving, experiencing cessation, and bringing the Path to life.

Our study text will be the Aggi-Vachagotta Sutta, the Buddha’s discourse to the wanderer Vachagotta on Fire. In addition to reading that, I hope you have time to look at an essay I wrote a couple of years ago on Enlightenment and Nibbana; it’s not quite how I’d express things today, but close enough. Another web page that might be useful (and that I’ll be using some material from in my talk on Thursday) is a page of readings from a class I gave last year on the Buddha’s Path to Awakening; this page deals with Craving, and to the extent that letting go of Craving is the essential first step on the way to experiencing (if that word even has any meaning in the context) Nibbana, the readings should help us come to an understanding of the term. The first reading on the page, a rendering of the very brief Upadana Sutta, is particularly relevant to an understanding of the Aggi-Vachagotta Sutta.

Finally, I’ve posted, as I promised to do at the end of our last class, a short review of the Dhamma Seals that we discussed in that class. The discussion in that post provides a natural bridge between our last class and the forthcoming one.

I thought the discussion this past week was particularly exciting, and I look forward to seeing you all on Thursday.

With regard,

Richard

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.

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.

Here’s the link. Just click it to stream the audio; right-click it (control-click on the Mac) to download the Mp4 file.

Because it is a very good question, and because one very good answer fits very well into the theme of the course, and into the point at which we are currently examining that theme, I’ve decided to alter the next class slightly to allow us to study a sutta that has direct bearing on the question and the good answer I’ll propose. The teaching is called “The Gotami Sutta”; it presents the Buddha’s answer to a question asked by his stepmother and aunt, Mahapajagotami, known simply as Gotami. Gotami’s concern, and the Buddha’s response to her concern, are directly relevant to the question of how we evaluate a particular way of understanding or acting to determine whether that way is, in fact, rightly aligned with the Buddha’s Dhamma. In a brief introduction to the Gotami Sutta, I’ve provided some context that might help you understand why Gotami made this particular request, and why the Buddha gave the response he did. And here’s a link to my rendering of the Sutta itself, with a few brief footnotes and a link to Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s translation.

In a lot of ways, the Gotami Sutta provides an excellent lead-in to the Discourse that will be the main focus of our class, the Buddha’s discourse to the monk Malunkya. Both Malunkya and Gotami had entered the homeless life and joined the Buddha’s Sangha when they were already well advanced in years. Gotami caught on a lot more quickly than Malunkya, who remained stuck in his Brahminic habits of understanding until shortly before his death. In the Malunkyaputta Sutta, he comes to the Buddha demanding answers to a list of questions that were of pressing concern to the Brahmin priests and philosophers, and that still preoccupy a lot of religious thinkers and philosophers today. In answering Malunkya, the Buddha delivers one of his most famous similes, demonstrates his exceptional wit and humor, and, incidentally, points us toward a way of understanding experience that shines a whole different light on the question with which we began. In addition to the sutta itself, which is engaging and not long, I’ve written a brief introduction to that sutta which I hope you’ll have a chance to read before our class.

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.

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.

In this course, we will explore the radical nature of the Buddha’s teachings. Our method will be to examine a number of well-known texts (and some less well-known) from the body of teachings generally attributed to the Fifth-century BCE sage known as the Buddha. In our examination, we’ll be trying to determine several things about those teachings (and, by extension, about how we are to understand the worldwide phenomenon of Buddhism):

• Which ideas, among the vast body of ideas expressed in the teachings, are most probably unique to the Buddha, i.e. ideas that are not part of the culture from which the Buddha emerged, and that have no precedent in the thinking to which he is likely to have been exposed prior to his experience of Awakening?
• How do those ideas challenge the common assumptions of the Buddha’s time—assumptions about religion, society, ethics; assumptions about what’s true and how we derive a true understanding of the world from our experience?
• How do the Buddha’s ideas continue to confront us with challenges to our comfortable assumptions—the beliefs, behaviors, and ways of knowing that condition our habitual response to people and events?

Our approach, then, will be primarily historical and philosophical, rather than metaphysical or religious. We will not, in general, pay much attention to elements in the texts that seem obviously legendary, magical, or mystical.

Course Syllabus. I’ve posted a fairly detailed week-by-week syllabus for the course. Anyone taking the course should probably review that.

In our first class, in addition to a general introduction to the course, we will be looking at the historical period in which the Buddha taught, and what we can know of his life prior to his Awakening. The following documents are worth looking at in preparation for the first class:

• Map of the Buddha’s India. A stylized map of the area of Northern India in which most or all of the Buddha’s life was spent.
• The Noble Quest. A brief introduction to the Discourse that will anchor our discussion in that first class, the Discourse in which the Buddha talks to the community of monks about his early life and the path he took to his Awakening experience. This is a post that was prepared for another class, on The Teachings of the Buddha, but much of it will be relevant to what we will be talking about in this class.
• A very loose translation of the Buddha’s Discourse on the Noble Quest. Really more of a précis. There are some links to much more complete and scholarly translations.
• An Essay on the Buddha’s early life and his Awakening.