Class Notes, Session 2

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.