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.

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.

Today in our “Topics” class, Dusty asked where he could read more about the Brahminic tradition, especially about the concept developed in the Upanishads of the atman—the individual soul, essential and eternal—and the brahman—the universal soul, also essential and eternal but infinite in extension as well, imbuing all things with its essence. I recommended the Penguin anthology of the Upanishads, which is, in fact, a good book, with a readable introduction and relatively graceful translations of some very difficult texts. A better choice, though, would probably be translations of most of the same texts by Patrick Olivelle in the Oxford World Classics series; Olivelle is very good, and it’s possible to read his translation and forget that it’s a translation. The introductory material is extensive and informative, and the notes are clear, helpful, and unobtrusive.

If you want a very fine and astoundingly concise overview of the entire spiritual tradition in which both the Upanishadic texts and the Buddha’s teachings had their origin, I can’t recommend too highly Sue Hamilton’s Indian Philosophy: a Very Short Introduction. It’s also from Oxford, one of a relatively new series of Very Short Introductions, and from what I’ve read (Hamilton’s volume, plus Michael Cook’s Very Short Introduction to the Koran), the series is impressive: cogent, well-edited, and pocketable.

I’ve just received copies of Michael Carruthers’ Very Short Introduction to the Buddha, and Damien Keown’s Very Short Introduction to Buddhism. I’ll report on them in a week or so.

In our second class in the Teachings of the Buddha, we’ll start with the sketch of the Buddha’s early life, leading up to his Enlightenment, which we didn’t have time to cover in the first class. The sutta we’ll then read and discuss is the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta - the Discourse Turning the Wheel of the Law. That is the first teaching that the newly enlightened Buddha delivered, and it represents the core of his teaching; all that he taught through the next 45 years expand on the central ideas presented here.

An aspiring young British philologist, a number of years ago, published a paper in an academic journal purporting to prove that Gotama Siddhata of the Sakyan clan, the person who Awakened to become the Buddha, could not, based on a number of esoteric points, have delivered the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta. The paper caused a minor stir in buddhological circles, and a prominent Thai monk was asked what he thought of the notion that the person he knew as the Buddha could not have delivered the teaching that serves as the foundation for all Buddhist thought and practice. He chuckled and responded, “Well, whoever delivered that teaching, that was the Buddha.”

In the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the Buddha enumerates the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path leading to an end to suffering. I’ve also posted a precís of Bhikkhu Bodhi’s book on the Eightfold Path, for those of you who can make the time to read it.

I’ve put up a map of the section of India in which the Buddha lived and taught; it includes many of the place names we will be referring to throughout both courses, and we’ll be referring to it frequently. I’m hoping that the projector in the room will deliver a useable image; if not, I’ll print copies of the map to pass out. If you have a color printer, you might try printing a copy of the web page and bring it to class with you.