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 Fortunate One gave his audience of bhikkhus precise instructions regarding how to establish mindfulness of their situation in such a way that they could end the attachments that trapped them 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 Tuesday.

To help us to understand the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta and to teach us something about how its message translates into actual meditative practice, we are fortunate to have a guest speaker who has been a meditator in the Buddhist tradition for twenty years. Mary Ellen Landolina is an active member of the Tri-State Dharma Sangha; she has trained as a Community Dharma Leader at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County, California and has also trained as a meditation teacher with Matthew Flickstein at the Forest Mountain Insight Meditation Center in Virginia. Prior to her Buddhist practice, Mary Ellen had an extensive background in Christian Contemplation. She remains active as a teacher, offering one on one and small group training, leading all-day retreats and occasionally participating as a teacher in longer retreats in such venues as the Insight Meditation Center and the Forest Refuge in Barre, Massachusetts. She is an engaged Buddhist, who, for many years, conducted regular meditation classes for inmates at Lebanon Correctional Institution; she is currently working with hospice patients who are alone, with no families. She is a woman of great wisdom and simplicity, an inspiring presence, and we are fortunate to have her with us on Tuesday.

The term is a modern one and has, as far as I can tell, no corollary in the Discourses or the Commentaries. It refers to the rapidly growing movement wherein Buddhists and those sympathetic to the Buddha’s analysis of how things unfold and how we transform ourselves engage issues of peace and social justice with methods derived from and a mindset prepared by that analysis.

The sutta passage that I’ve prepared to introduce our discussion of Socially Engaged Buddhism is the beginning of the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, the sutta that follows the Buddha through the final months of his life, ending with his death, his funeral rites, and the distribution of his remains. It’s the longest sutta in the Tipitaka, full of rich and significant discourses and vivid description of events. We see the Buddha’s humanity throughout; his body has become infirm; he is in great pain; he is confronted at turn after turn by the temptation to give in to the ravages of time, to surrender the task, to take his own release. But he never deviates from the Dharma that he accepted as his own 45 years earlier. He continues to teach, preparing the sangha of Bhikkhus to go on without him. When he does finally release his life, it is at the time of his choosing, at the place of his choosing, and in his own way. It is one of the most absorbing stories in the world and worth reading in all its detail.

In Class 6, we will only be dealing with the opening six passages of the sutta. In the first of those, the wicked King Ajatasattu sends his chief minister to tell the Buddha that he is about to destroy the Vajji federation, an alliance of Northern Indian republics that included the Buddha’s own birth republic of Kosala and his family clan, the Sakyans; Ajatasattu tells his minister to ask the Buddha what he thinks of his plans. The Buddha does not respond directly to Ajatasattu’s minister; instead, he reminds Ananda of a discourse that he’d given to the Vajjis several years earlier, about how to ensure the expansion of their federation and prevent its decline. His method here is to ask Ananda whether the Vajji have, indeed, managed to preserve the practices that the Buddha had recommended in that earlier discourse.

The practices that the Buddha recommended to the Vajji Confederation and the civic qualities he told them that they must preserve are still relevant today to any federation that wishes to maintain its independence, its wealth, and the freedom and welfare of its people. It’s not hard at all, in our 21st Century United States of America, to hear what the Buddha told the Vajjis and recall that those same practices and qualities were what made us a great nation, and that we must restore and maintain those if we are to restore and maintain our greatness as a society and our individual freedoms.

If the first passage in our reading establishes goals for our engagement with our society, the following passages remind us of what we must do to prepare ourselves for that engagement and to build our Engaged Buddhist movement.

When Ajatasattu’s minister has gone, the Buddha asks Ananda to assemble the bhikkhus, and he proceeds to give them five short teachings, each of which covers a list of practices that the bhikkhus must follow and qualities they must nurture in themselves to ensure the expansion of their community and prevent its decline. Once again, it’s not much of a stretch to substitute the term “social activist” for “bhikkhu“, and to understand the term “community of bhikkhus” as an analogue to the concept of a Socially Engaged Buddhist movement. Just as the bhikkhus must preserve the integrity of their community, settle their disputes peacefully, share their resources, watch one another’s back, and preserve their personal qualities of mindfulness, ethical behavior, and diligent pursuit of enlightenment, so we must maintain those same qualities if we are to grow our movement and build our strength to confront the poisons of greed, hatred and delusion that are hastening the decline of our civilization.

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.”

(Note: this was originally written as a dharma talk that I gave at the Cincinnati Dharma Center in October, 2006. I’ve reworked it slightly since.)

I like to think of myself as a rational person. I don’t hold with superstitions or superstitious behavior—I don’t believe in fairies or gods, and I think that supplicational prayer is foolish. I believe that the methods of science have evolved into admirably rigorous tools for extending, clarifying, detailing our understanding of the universe we inhabit and our own material beings, and I am persuaded and amazed by the picture of the material world that modern science has composed. I have faith in science.

I also have faith in my own ignorance. I’ve studied widely and diligently—science, and literature, and some history, and the foundational literature of many of the world’s spiritual traditions; I know a lot, about a lot. And I have absolute faith that what I don’t know dwarfs what I know. I am profoundly ignorant.

And I have faith in the Buddha and his Dhamma (Sanskrit: dharma). That last faith has become more and more important to me over the past several years. It owes, in part, to the fact that the Buddhadhamma acknowledges my ignorance. It shows me how my ignorance is the foundation for all of the dissatisfaction that characterizes this worldly existence; it also describes a clear and persuasively logical path that may lead to an end to ignorance and suffering. Several times in my life, I have taken the first faltering steps onto that path, and I have been almost immediately confronted by something that tested my faith. That is the doctrine of kamma (Sanskrit: karma) and rebirth, and it induces doubt because it seems to conflict with that other faith—the faith in science and in the infinite nature of our ignorance.

We didn’t have time after our discussion of the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta to cover the eight-factored Path. Bhikkhu Bodhi has written an excellent short book on the Path, which is available in its entirety at Access to Insight. In the following post, I’ve composed a precís of the book, pulling what I consider the most helpful sections from the original. Any comments that I’ve added are within square brackets and italicized.

From Bhikkhu Bodhi’s Introduction:

The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (”setting in motion (pavattana) the wheel (cakka) of the law (Dhamma)”) is the first discourse that the Buddha delivered after his enlightenment. I think it is the single most important text in human history. (I realize that’s a pretty strong statement, and I’m not going to defend it here, but if anyone wants to have a cup of coffee with me after class, I’d be happy to give my reasons.)

The Buddha delivered the discourse to the five ascetics with whom he had been traveling and practicing for the several years prior to his enlightenment. Those five had abandoned him about a month earlier when he decided that the extreme asceticism he’d been practicing was not getting him closer to his goal, and he took a little solid food; the monks felt that he was selling out, indulging in sensual pleasures, and they’d walked away. But the Buddha understood that they were good men, advanced on the path, committed to their practice—as he put it, they were men “with little dust on their eyes”. The discourse he delivered to them was dense with meaning; it lays out, in just a dozen or so short paragraphs, the foundational concepts for all the teaching that came later: the concept of “the Middle Way”, “the Four Noble Truths”, and “The Eight-fold Path”.

In my rendering of the sutta, which I will read and which we will discuss in class on Tuesday, I expand the Buddha’s telegraphic delivery a bit, to help a modern audience understand the message a little more clearly. And I’ve changed some of the traditional translations of Pali terms, for reasons that I explain in the footnotes to the rendering.

For those who want to compare the version I’ve composed with more literal translations, there are four very good such translations on the Access to Insight website, from four different translators, each an experienced practitioner and a student of Pali:

• Peter Harvey
• Ñanamoli Thera
• Piyadassi Thera
• Thanissaro Bhikkhu

The sutta is short enough so that it would take less than half an hour to read each of those, and that would be a worthwhile exercise.