Background: How the Teachings were Delivered

Let’s begin by looking back to the Buddha’s lifetime and considering how he taught, to whom he taught, and how the sangha spread his teachings through his own culture, during his own lifetime. We’ll jump into the story in the middle of the Buddha’s teaching career, when the sangha of bhikkhus and bhikkhunis had grown to a substantial size. There’s no way, of course, to accurately determine just how large the sangha was, but from various evidential bits teased from the texts, I come to a total of between 2500 and 10,000 bhikkhus throughout Northern India and perhaps one-third that many bhikkhunis.

Paṭiccasamupāda - Dependent Arising

In Wednesday’s class in Topics in Mainstream Buddhism we will be discussing one of the more abstruse and certainly one of the most important ideas in the Buddha’s teaching, the notion of Dependent Arising, sometimes translated “Dependent Causality”. The following notes provide a list of the elements that comprise the chain of Dependent Arising; in looking them over, consider the modern logician’s understanding of “necessary cause” vs. “sufficient cause”. The latter is what we think of when we think of cause in the world of Newtonian physics: we hit a ball with a bat and, dependent on the mass of the bat and the ball, the speed and direction of the swing, and the angle of contact, the ball speeds off on a minutely determined trajectory. In the lists comprising Dependent Arising, the notion of causality is closer to the logician’s necessary cause; these conditions are necessary to their successor conditions, in that, without the former, the latter cannot arise. But the former conditions are not sufficient. There has to be a particular cause, typically the appearance, within one’s field of perception, of something that evokes desire, before the subsequent condition will actually arise in whatever form it takes. That is what, in ordinary terms, “causes” the subsequent condition to arise. But if the precedent condition were not present, whatever we think of as a cause in these circumstances would be unable to produce its particular result.

Trust me, it’s more interesting than it may sound.

This is the standard list of elements in the chain of conditions comprising Paṭiccasamupāda, leading from Ignorance to Dukkha:

• Ignorance (avijja )
• Kamma formations (sankhara )
• Consciousness (viññana )
• Mentality-materiality (namarupa )
• Sixfold sense base (salayatana )
• Contact (phassa )
• Feeling (vedana )
• Craving (tanha )
• Clinging (upadana )
• Existence (bhava )
• Birth (jati )
• Suffering (dukkha )

The Transcendental Order

In a single sutta, the Buddha outlines a second chain of conditions which Bhikkhu Bodhi, in a long and fascinating essay, calls “the Transcendental Order”, as distinct from the traditional chain, above, which he calls “the Mundane Order”. The Transcendent Order begins with Faith and ends in the destruction of the taints, or the cankers - the taint of sensuality, the taint of becoming, the taint of ignorance, and, in some sources but not all, the taint of views or opinions. (From an abundance of other sources, we know that destruction of the taints is the necessary condition for, and leads directly to, Enlightenment, awakening, nibbana.) Unlike Ignorance, which, in the Mundane Order, is a given, the Faith which begins the Transcendental Order has its own dependent condition: “‘Faith, bhikkhus, also has a supporting condition, I say, it does not lack a supporting condition. And what is the supporting condition for faith? “Suffering” should be the reply.’” (Upanisa Sutta)

• Faith (saddha )
• Joy (pamojja )
• Rapture (piti )
• Tranquillity (passaddhi )
• Happiness (sukha )
• Concentration (samadhi )
• Knowledge and vision of things as they are (yathabhutañanadassana )
• Disenchantment (nibbida )
• Dispassion (viraga )
• Emancipation (vimutti )
• Knowledge of destruction of the cankers (asavakkhaye ñana )

These are the suttas I read in class on Wednesday, in the course of our discussion of Enlightenment and Nibbana:

• In the Cetanakaranaya Sutta, the Buddha outlines the chain of conditions that lead to Enlightenment.
• In the Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta, the Buddha helps the wanderer Vacchagotta understand how his pre-conceived understanding of how things must be prevents him from seeing things as they are; the sutta gives a wonderful simile for the process of Enlightenment and helps us toward an understanding of the term nibbana .

I’m working on a longer exposition of the ideas we spoke about in class, but it might be a while before those are ready for publication here.

We don’t know precisely what it means to be Enlightened. The Buddha himself frequently referred to the state he attained through that experience as a “awakening”. When we wake from sleep, we understand that what we experienced in our dreams, although it felt powerfully real, was in fact delusory—a distortion of the reality we know when we wake. Just so, the Buddha understood that what unenlightened people experience through their lives, although it feels powerfully real, is a delusion, a distortion of what the Buddha experienced as “the knowledge and vision of things as they are”.

The decision that the Buddha made to reveal that knowledge and vision to the world was a difficult and courageous one. Imagine that you were able to enter another person’s dream and attempt to show the dreamer the reality of the world as you knew it. Would you be able to convince the dreamer that the figures and events in her dream were illusory and that she would be better off shedding those illusions and facing the reality that you experienced in the waking world? The task would be difficult, at best.

Yet that is the task that the Buddha took upon himself; to show those of us who are not yet Enlightened that the world we experience is not the real world but a construct of our minds with which we delude ourselves, that there is a more profound reality that we would experience if awakened to it, and that our lives would be immeasurably better if we were to just accept the promise of such an awakening.

One of the most significant changes that was accelerating in Northern India through the course of the Buddha’s life is the development of trade and the rise of an increasingly powerful merchant class. That development increased the net wealth of the region, and the increasing wealth meant more taxes for the reigning kings, which enabled them to consolidate power, raise armies, and, eventually, subordinate the representative republics that had been, up until then, the dominant form of government in the region. With disciplined armies under effective central control, the kings were also able to bring a measure of law and order to the roads and trade routes of the region, which had always been dangerous routes to follow - if the tigers didn’t get you, the highwaymen would. And safer trade routes, in turn, led to further increases in trade, more rich merchants, and even more taxes for the king.

This past Wednesday, in our Topics in Mainstream Buddhism course, we discussed kamma—intentional action with an ethical component. We talked to some extent about how our kamma influences our lives and the lives of those around us. Irwin Mortman mentioned a study he’d seen that showed the surprisingly strong effect that one person’s happiness can have on the lives of the people around them—not just their family and close friends, but those who are much more loosely linked to the happy person through a network of connections. Now Irwin has sent me a copy of the article; it appeared this past December in Science Daily, under the rather unwieldy title “Happiness Is ‘Infectious’ In Network Of Friends: Collective — Not Just Individual — Phenomenon“. The results of the study are fascinating; one of the things I found most interesting is that while happiness spreads widely through a network of connected individuals, sadness does not.

researchers found that when an individual becomes happy, the network effect can be measured up to three degrees. One person’s happiness triggers a chain reaction that benefits not only their friends, but their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends. The effect lasts for up to one year.

The flip side, interestingly, is not the case: Sadness does not spread through social networks as robustly as happiness. Happiness appears to love company more so than misery.

Graph of social network described in study: yellow is happy; blue is sad.

In their research, Harvard Medical School professor Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler from the University of California, San Diego, mined a large body of data from the Framingham Heart Study, which has been following its subjects for more than 50 years; they analyzed data from almost 5000 individuals and identified more than 50,000 social and family ties within that group. “We’ve found that your emotional state may depend on the emotional experiences of people you don’t even know, who are two to three degrees removed from you,” Christakis reported. The effect lasts for about a year; it diminishes with time and with distance, both geographical and social. The scientific study corroborates the personal experience that many of us have had within our own network of friends and neighbors, as well as the Buddha’s teachings regarding kammavipaka and kammavega—respectively, the results of particular kammic actions and the influence that our overall kamma has on our own well-being and the well-being of others.

Thanks, Irwin, for your remarkable memory, your diligence in finding the article, and your generosity in sharing it with us. And also, of course, for your own clear happiness; I’m glad to have found myself within your network.

The Buddha’s understanding of how things unfold in this world was keen, comprehensive, and most persuasive, and his explication of that understanding throughout the discourses has a coherence and logical consistency that’s unique among the world’s spiritual traditions. But the Buddha was not a philosopher or a psychologist. The term that’s most often used to define his role is “healer” or “physician”. The Buddha’s doctrine is not simply an explanation of how things are but a prescription for a path of practice that will end the suffering that is an inevitable result of how things unfold.

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 process. Establishing such steady mindfulness of one’s situation, the diligent meditator can end the attachments that trapp 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 discussion on Monday. 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.

There were a few questions following our class yesterday, in which we discussed the Buddha’s understanding that there was no essential Self, or soul—no atman, as the Brahminical tradition of his day understood that term. There’s a very good collection of dhamma talks on the topic of not-self by the teacher and author Gil Fronsdal (he wrote what I consider the best translation of The Dhammapada) at audiodharma.org, a site featuring talks by teachers at the California Insight Meditation Center.

In the course of our discussion, we spoke of the Buddha’s notion of kamma, or intentional action, action which has an ethical component and which has consequences for our present life and the lives of those around us, and for our future life, whatever that might mean. Someone asked how one should deal with our past unethical (or, in the Buddha’s terms, which I prefer, “unwholesome” or “unskillful”) actions. I mentioned the Buddha’s teaching to his son Rahula, who had become a renunciant and a member of the Buddha’s sangha. Here is a link to Thannisaro Bhikkhu’s translation of the Ambalatthika-rahulovada Sutta; and here is Thannisaro Bhikkhu delivering a marvelous reading of the sutta. It’s worth putting on your MP3 player and listening to closely.

In this course, we’re not going to get very deeply into the notions of kamma and rebirth, but I have prepared an essay on the topic for the Topics in Mainstream Buddhism course, which some of you might be interested in reading.

I also mentioned the excellent ZenCast website, which has posted a large number of audio programs concerning the Dhamma and Buddhist practice. That was in response to Betty’s observation about how difficult mindfulness meditation turns out to be—how hard it is to still the mind and keep it from running away in its own direction. The ZenCast website offers an online course in Mindfulness Meditation, taught by Gil Fronsdal and Inez Friedman. The course will be taught in September and October; I plan to take it, and if you are interested (there’s no charge, although donations will be welcome), here’s where to sign up to be notified when registration opens. The recorded teachings of an earlier class are also available and worth listening to. There are all sorts of other helpful files at the ZenCast site, including meditation timers and guided meditations. It’s an important resource.

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 that we discussed last week. His audience was the same five bhikkhus who had heard that 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.”

After yesterday’s class, Irwin Thompson asked me if I’d read an article that appeared several years ago in the New York Times magazine about the health benefits of meditation practice. I remembered such an article, but only vaguely; this morning, I received from Irwin a PDF file of the article, entitled “Is Buddhism Good for Your Health?”. It’s a fascinating article, and I’d encourage you to click the link to download it to your computer and read it.

One of the main subjects of the article is a PhD biochemist and Buddhist monk named Matthieu Ricard, sometimes labelled “the happiest man in the world.” Here’s a video of Ricard talking about happiness at the TED Conference in 2004:

Enjoy!