In this course, we will, each week, read and discuss one discourse from the Pali Canon, the oldest and most probably authentic collection of the Buddha’s teachings. (Several of the classes, rather than concentrating on a single discourse, will discuss passages selected from two or three related discourses.) Each reading will either be introduced or immediately followed by a brief explanation of the role of the teaching in the development of Buddhist doctrine, and we will look at what we can learn from the teaching about the Buddha’s life, the nature of his times and of the culture in which he taught, and the nature of the Buddha himself, the man Siddhatta Gotama—his style, his personality, his position in the society of his times.

The purpose of the course is not to teach everything there is to know about Buddhism, or even about those teachings that have been passed down to us in the Pali Canon, but rather, for those who find the Buddha’s message interesting and the Buddha’s path in some way relevant to the problems of their lives and of our times, to give those people a foundation from which they can continue their investigation independently.

The course is structured by the different audiences to which the Buddha spoke through his long teaching career. Each different audience brings its own expectations and its particular viewpoint to its audience with the Buddha, and we will see how skillfully the Buddha understands those expectations and viewpoints and uses his compassionate understanding to present his distinctive path in a form that’s most easily understood and accepted by each different audience. The readings that we will use will also offer us an opportunity, through the eight weeks of the course, to follow the Buddha’s life, from birth to death.

We will make heavy use of the Internet in finding readings relevant to each class’s content; sometime early in the week prior to each class after the first one, I’ll publish a set of annotated links to translations of the discourses we will be discussing in the next class, along with links to other readings or resources that might help our understanding of the topics dealt with in those discourses. If you don’t have an Internet connection, or if you’re not comfortable using the Internet in this way, it might be a good idea to make arrangements with a friend to print the relevant texts for you to read offline. Note that it is not necessary to do the Internet readings to get some significant benefit from the class; we will read highlights from the recommended texts in each class, and, for the most part, the discussion will focus on the ideas and doctrines in the sections we will read in that way.

The Buddha’s Teachings

• Class 1: Teaching to those seeking answers

  We’ll look at one of the most famous Suttas in the canon, in which the Buddha addresses the residents of a village visited by a succession of teachers, all of whom teach conflicting doctrines and each of whom claims that his doctrine is the only true one. The Buddha shows the householders of Kesaputta that they really don’t need those teachers and that they can’t rely on any of the different authorities that various teachers claim; the answers they seek are in their own sense of what constitutes good behavior, and if they pursue the ways they know to be good ways, ways that are approved by people they know and respect for their own wisdom and goodness , they will find a life filled with contentment and joy.

• Class 2: Teaching to a householder

  The Buddha lived in a time when cities were growing, a new merchant class was developing, and trade was flourishing; in the Dighajanu Sutta, he gives a wealthy householder guidance on a Dhamma that will preserve and increase his worldly success, and then demonstrates that such a Dhamma is part and parcel of the more comprehensive path that leads to happiness and a good life in the future.

• Class 3: Teachings to the Brahmins

  We will use passages from two of the Buddha’s discourses to look at how the Buddha took the Brahminic culture into which he was born and ethicized the teachings of that culture, re-defining brahminic purity, not as an attribute that adheres to one born into a particular caste, but as an attribute that anyone can develop through purity of thought and deed. In the Sonadanada Sutta, the Buddha questions a prominent Brahmin elder and teacher on what it means to be a Brahmin; in the Sigalovada Sutta, the Buddha reminds a Brahmin youth that his ritual worship of the cardinal directions is useless unless he establishes that worship on the foundation of a life lived ethically and honorably; he then goes on to redefine the meaning of Sigala’s actions themselves, so that the youth’s ritual worship of the six directions work to remind him of and reaffirm his commitment to the mutually equivalent obligations of parent and child, husband and wife, teacher and student, master and servant, etc.

• Class 4: The first teaching to the five monks

  We will look at the events that precipitated Siddhatta Gotama’s decision to leave his privileged home and enter the live of a renunciant, and at some of the events that transpired over the next five years. For most of that time, he was accompanied in his wanderings by five Brahmins from his home community, who had themselves entered the homeless life and had accepted Siddhatta as their teacher. Those were the group of five to which Siddhatta Gotama, having achieved his awakening and become the Buddha, delivered the first two discourses. In this first teaching, the Buddha establishes the four truths that will form the foundation for all of the other teachings he will deliver: the truth of suffering, the truth that suffering has a cause, the truth that suffering can be brought to an end, and the truth of the eightfold path that will lead to an end to suffering.

• Class 5: The second teaching to the five monks

  In his second discourse, still to the same group of five, the Buddha establishes the understanding that is essential to respond skilfully to the processes he outlined in his first discourse, i.e. that any conception of a permanent and lasting self prevents full understanding of the four ennobling truths and blocks one from the path that leads to the realization of those truths and the freedom they can deliver.

• Class 6: Teachings to the sangha

  At the conclusion of the second teaching, all five monks had attained stream-entry—the first step toward enlightenment. They were the first members of the Buddha’s sangha, the assembly of followers who heard his teachings and carried those throughout Northern India. Over the next forty years, the sangha continued to grow, and an elaborate set of rules were formulated to ensure the peaceful governance of the assembly and to guide the monks in the celebate, renunciant life they’d chosen. In this class, we will read selections from the discourse in which the Buddha outlines the way the monks should practice so as to live mindfully aware of what they were doing and where the holy life was leading them.

• Class 7: Teachings to kings and princes

  Throughout his teaching career, the Buddha received patronage from and delivered his teachings to the most powerful kings of his time. The time itself was one in which those kings were gaining power, centralizing control of their kingdoms, and taking over the small republican federations like the Buddha’s own birth state of Sakya. Toward the end of his life, the two kings to whom he had been closest, King Pasenadi of Kosala, and King Bimbisara of Magadha, had both died through treachery, and their thrones had been assumed by the sons who had connived in their deaths. We will look at some of the teachings that the Buddha delivered through his life, and especially toward the end, to those kings and to their sons, and we will try to get a sense for the Buddha’s understanding of what role there is in the affairs of the world for someone who has accepted the Dhamma as a life practice.

• Class 8: The final teachings

  One of the longest Suttas in the Pali Canon is the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, detailing the last months and days of the Buddha; as he and Ananda wandered through Northern India, two old men, weary and frail, they encountered various people along the way, all of whom had questions for the Buddha. The teachings recorded in this Sutta have a certain elegaic tone; the Buddha resumes themes that he had developed earlier, making certain that those themes are understood with the proper emphasis and in the proper context, and, to some small extent, he measures the success he’s had with the challenge that he accepted 45 years earlier, to teach the Dhamma that was so subtle, so profound, so difficult to understand. We will look at a few passages from the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, with special reference to passages that seem resonant with other teachings we have looked at in the previous classes. And we will try to come to a final assessment of the meaning of the Buddha’s Dhamma and his life, and the relevance of that to our troubled times.

In the eight weeks of this course, we will look into eight topics that have concerned the followers of the Buddha since the very early days of his teaching. To the extent that there is some consensus within the Buddhist community regarding these topics, it is partly that consensual understanding that defines Buddhism itself, and to the extent that there is disagreement, it is the nature of that disagreement that distinguishes one Buddhist tradition from the others. I make no claim that these are the most important topics in Buddhism; someone else might make another list of eight that’s different, but any list is bound to cover, in some way or another, such topics as the Dhamma, the nature of Enlightenment, and the notion of kamma.

The topics I’ve chosen, and the order in which I’ve chosen to present them, will, I hope, result in a comprehensible and reasonably accurate overview of the Buddha, the path he taught, and the fundamental unity of the many traditions that have developed their very different ways of practicing the Buddha’s path.

I will introduce each class by talking about the day’s topic, trying to explain what it is that makes it a distinct topic, and what it means in the context of Buddhism in general. Whenever possible, I’ll use the Buddha’s own words, as those have been transmitted in the Pali Canon, as the starting point for my explanation, although I will also feel free to use classic texts from later Buddhist traditions, especially those of the Mahayana traditions of Nepal, China, and Eastern Asia. When the topic is one (as it almost always will be) that is interpreted differently in different Buddhist traditions, I’ll do my best to explain what those differences are and what their significance is to those who practice in each tradition.

The last part of each class will be devoted to questions and discussion. I am particularly interested in exploring how the ideas of Buddhism appear to those who follow other traditions, both classical Western religious traditions and the more skeptical philosophical traditions that underlie humanism, atheism, and scientific materialism.

We will be making heavy use of the Internet for the readings that I will recommend for each class; there’s a wealth of material out there, much of it of very high quality—intelligent, scholarly, useful. If you don’t have an Internet connection, or if you are not comfortable with using it, I’d recommend that you make some arrangements with a friend to print out the study texts each week. The class is simply too large for me to print those out for all the members.

What follows is an outline of what I plan, at this point in time, to be discussing in each class; if it turns out that this is more ambitious than we can handle in an eight-week course, the outline may change.

• Class 1: Who (and what) was the Buddha?

  “The Buddha” is a descriptive term, similar to “the Christ”; it means, approximately, “the awakened one”, and Buddhist tradition views Siddhatta Gotama, the Buddha we know, as the latest in a long line of Buddhas, each separated from the next by eons. In this class, we’ll look at the life of Siddhatta Gotama, the man whose teachings we’ve received, and we’ll explore the way in which various traditions view his Awakening, his person, and his Buddha-nature.

• Class 2: The Dhamma

  The truth that the Buddha taught, indeed, the fundamental truth about how the world works, is known as the Dhamma (Dharma in Sanskrit, which is the more familiar term for most Westerners). In this class, we’ll look at what that word means, with special reference to the formulation of the Dhamma that the Buddha presented in his first sermon and which establishes the foundation for all the rest of his teachings:

  • The Middle Way

  • The Four Authentic Truths

  • The Eightfold Path

• Class 3: Dependent arising

  This class will build on the preceding class, taking a more detailed look at the idea of contingent existence that provides the dynamic for the establishment of the Dhamma. The idea is simple: everything is process, and every process unfolds dependent upon pre-existing conditions. But when you apply that idea to concepts such as the “self”, or “perception”, it can get complicated pretty fast. And very interesting. And uncommonly convincing and relevant to the processes we see unfolding around us.

• Class 4: The nature of the Buddha’s Enlightenment

  In this class, we will build on the understandings we’ve developed by now to re-examine exactly what happened when the Buddha became enlightened, when he “woke up” to an understanding of contingency and the nature, cause, and cessation of suffering in this world. We’ll look at the nature of nibbana (nirvana in Sanskrit), the state that the Buddha experienced and in which he dwelt following his awakening, and we’ll examine how the ideas of Enlightenment and nibbana have been understood by various Buddhist traditions.

• Class 5: Kamma and rebirth

  This one is a sticking point for many Westerners, particularly those who are attracted to Buddhism because of its non-theistic nature. We’ll see how kamma (Skt. karma), i.e. intentional action, determines who we are and who we will become, and we’ll see how those notions derive from the Brahminic culture in which the Buddha lived, the radical way in which he re-interpreted them, and how they might be understood to co-exist comfortably with rationalist world views.

• Class 6: Buddhist cosmology

  The Buddhist canonical texts are full of gods, but those are very different from our Western Abrahamic Yahweh. In this class, we’ll see where the elaborate and complex Buddhist cosmology developed out of Brahminic traditions and how the Buddha re-interpreted those traditions to bring them into the service of the ethical path that he taught.

• Class 7: The Pali Canon

  Here we will examine how the Buddha’s teachings were preserved after his death, how they were compiled into several different canons, how those different canons relate to one another, and how the canons themselves and attitudes toward them have changed through the ages.

• Class 8: Schools, traditions, lineages: the transmission and transmutation of the Dhamma

  As the Buddha’s teachings spread from Northern India, where he lived and taught, the different varieties of Buddhism that developed took on forms and practices derived from the cultures into which they spread. We’ll see how that process occurred as Buddhism moved to the South, the North, and the East, and how it is occurring now as Buddhism continues to evolve distinctively Western forms.

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.

(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.