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.

For most of the year, most of those bhikkhus and bhikkhunis travelled alone and on foot from village to village, living on alms and eating one meal a day; sitting in solitary meditation through the middle part of each day and perhaps through the evening as well; and giving dharma talks wherever the opportunity presented itself, speaking to village leaders, merchants, schoolteachers, children and parents. Sometimes, it is assumed, those wandering bhikkhus and bhikkhunis engaged in public debate with members of the dominant priestly class, the Brahmins, or with wanderers and ascetics of other sects, followers of teachers whose names we know and whose doctrines we know know slightly as those were summarized by biased sources, i.e. the Buddha’s own followers.

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.

There are, of course, a number of legends surrounding the Buddha’s birth, but they have relatively slight importance in most Buddhist traditions. When we cut past the legends, we are left with the relatively slim collection of anecdotes about his early life that are attributed to the Buddha himself in various suttas, and with the surmises of historians, philologists and archaeologists. The following summary is derived from the best historical research I’ve been able to uncover, supported by passages from the suttas that most scholars accept as authentic.

Gotama Siddhata achieved Enlightenment and became the Buddha when he was 35 years old, and he taught for the next 40 years. He died at the age of 80, after a long and painful illness which he suffered with fortitude and grace.

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 how 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.

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 how 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.