Sunday’s Pearls Before Swine

Always excellent, but seldom so very, very Buddhist.

The term papañca occurs several times in the suttas, most notably in Majjima Nikaya 18, the Madhupindika Sutta (”Honeyball Discourse”, as it was named by the Buddha in response to Ananda's description of the "the sweet delectable flavour" of the discourse [MN 18.22]; given the Buddha's wry sense of humor, it may be conjectured that he also had in mind the particularly sticky nature of the concepts he was dealing with in the discourse.) In the discourse, the Buddha gives a curt and somewhat gnomic response to an equally curt and somewhat confrontative question from the wanderer Daṇḍapāni.

The Buddha's brief discourse concerned the mental processes that lead to violent actions—important stuff. It has to do with the tendency of our perceptions to take on a life of their own and trap our minds in an uncontrolled stream of imaginary constructs, untethered to the actual nature of the processes we observe. It was left to the elder bhikkhu Mahā Kaccāna to explain the Buddha's words to the sangha.

The process he describes begins with the arousal of consciousness—visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, and mental consciousness corresponding to the six sense bases as they are enumerated in Buddhist doctrine. Each sort of consciousness arises as a result of its associated sense organ and the objects that effect that sense organ; in the case of vision, for example, visual consciousness arises as a result of the presence of the eye and of visible forms. The three things together—consciousness, sense organ, and forms affecting the sense organ—create the point of contact between our mind and the world outside our mind. That contact generates feelings—not feelings in the sense of emotion, but something more basic and primitive, but still with an affective component. What we feel, we perceive; i.e. we make contact with the world, and something, in that point of contact, at the moment of contact, attracts our attention. We notice it, we perceive it, i.e. we abstract it from an unnoticed (back)ground. What we notice/perceive, we reason about: we further abstract it, by categorizing it, theorizing about its history and origins, judging it against various standards of beauty, probability, worth, etc., assessing it in various ways—its size, weight, value, age, etc.

That momentary perceptual contact, being reasoned about, becomes papañca, a term I’ve translated, following Bhikkhu Ñaṇananda, as "proliferation". That is, the perceived contact, reasoned about, becomes something large, something ugly, something expensive, something insignificant, etc. But always in relation to me, to I, to my sense of value, judgment, understanding, etc. And proliferation proliferates: concept leads to concept, notion to notion. Whenever, through inattention or inadequate mindfulness, papañca emerges, the proliferation of concepts and imaginings takes over. There is no limit to how many past forms we can derive from our perception, how far into the future our imaginings can take us, or how many different ways we can multiply that momentary perceptual contact to maintain our illusory sense of an enduring present.

The result of papañca is that the mental universe we inhabit is entirely constructed by our minds, and we can share little of that with others (most of whom are trapped in their own papañca). Papañca thwarts compassion and creates the condition for clinging to views, to obsessing about the elaborate structures of poste and riposte that we build in our minds (what someone in an AA meeting once described as “creating the wreckage of the future”), and to something close to panic as we cast about, always in vain, for something solid on which we might ground this sense of self that we create.

In his explanation of the Buddha’s doctrine of papañca, Mahā Kaccāna dissects, at some length and in great detail, the chain of processes that occur in an experience that feels to us instantaneous and atomic, and of which we are not even usually conscious—the experience of engaging the world through our perceptual organs and our sense of that as an experience of reality. Mahā Kaccāna’s deconstruction of the process shows that the raw perceptual experience and the contingent experience of reality, although they feel identical, are quite different kinds of experience, the first emerging as an inevitable result of our having organs of perception and the world being full of perceivable things; the second emerging from unabandoned craving and the need to support the illusory self that is the essential object of that craving.

Papañca is, to my mind, one of the most difficult concepts expressed in the Suttas, and I’m not at all sure that I have it right. But the more I consider the concept and the more I ponder the meaning of the Madhupindika Sutta, the more convinced I am by the Buddha’s location of the roots of violence in papañca. In my rendering of the Sutta, I have chosen my terms after a good deal of consideration and have expanded some of the more telegraphic points just enough to help a modern audience, unfamiliar with the details of the Buddha’s doctrine, to understand those. I have also reduced some of the repetition in Mahā Kaccāna’s exposition, hopefully without diminishing the force or clarity of his argument.

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.

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.