The Discourse on How Things Progress

For one who is dwells in virtue, bhikkhus, for one who has made a habit of virtue, there is no need to maintain the intention, “May the absence of remorse arise in me!”; it is according to the Dhamma, bhikkhus, that absence of remorse arises in one who lives virtuously.

For one free of remorse, bhikkhus there is no need to maintain the intention: “May gladness arise in me!”; it is according to the Dhamma, bhikkhus, that one who is free from remorse is glad to be where he is.

For one who is glad to be where she is, bhikkhus, there is no need to maintain the intention: “May joy arise in me!”; it is according to the Dhamma that one who is glad at heart is full of joy.

For one filled with joy, there is no need to maintain the intention: “May serenity arise within me!”; it is according to the Dhamma that who is joyful will abide in serenity.

For one who is serene, there is no need to maintain the intention: “May happiness arise within me!”; it is according to the Dhamma that one who experiences serenity will also be happy.

For one who is happy, there is no need to maintain the intention: “May my mind be concentrated!”; it is according to the Dhamma, bhikkhus, that the mind of a happy person will be concentrated.

For one whose mind is concentrated, there is no need to maintain the intention: “May a fresh vision of the world arise with in me!”; it is according to the Dhamma that a concentrated mind will know and see the world with fresh vision.

For one who knows and sees the world with fresh vision, there is no need to maintain the intention: “May disenchantment and dispassion arise within me!”; it is according to the Dhamma that one who knows and sees the world with fresh vision will become disenchanted with this world and lose all passion for the pleasures it offers.

For one who is disenchanted and dispassionate, bhikkhus, there is no need to maintain the intention: “May I be free; may I experience enlightenment!”; it is according to the Dhamma, bhikkhus, that one who is no longer enchanted or consumed with passion for worldly pleasures will be liberated and experience enlightenment.

Thus, bhikkhus, disenchantment and dispassion have freedom and enlightenment as their benefit and reward; fresh vision of the world as it really is has disenchantment and dispassion as its benefit and reward; concentration of mind has a fresh vision of the world as its benefit and reward; happiness has a concentrated mind as its benefit and reward; serenity has happiness as its benefit and reward; joy has serenity as its benefit and reward; gladness has joy as its benefit and reward; absence of remorse has gladness as its benefit and reward; and the habit of virtue has the absence of remorse as benefit and reward.

In that way, bhikkhus, each of those qualities is integrated with all the others, and each quality brings the next to perfection, so that one progresses from this daily round to the unconditioned realm beyond appearances.

The Buddha’s teaching to the Kalamas has to be one of the most popular suttas in the Pali Canon. A Google search turns up more than 35,000 hits (most of which seem to be re-postings of Soma Thera’s translation). There are two excellent translations at Access to Insight, one by Soma Thera, and one by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. In addition, there is a fine essay by Bhikkhu Bodhi, cautioning us against reading the sutta as a simple-minded justification of subjectivism or relativism. And finally, there is an excellent brief introduction to the Soma Thera translation of the Kalama Sutta on the BuddhaNet website.

The Kalamas lived in a town called Kesaputta, which was, apparently, on the edge of a large and rather dangerous forest, through which a major road passed. Travellers on that road would frequently stop at Kesaputta until enough of them had gathered to traverse the forest in relative safety. In this way, Kesaputta was similar to the oasis towns of Arabian peninsula, where caravans assembled to make the dangerous crossing of the desert.

Given its location, Kesaputta received more than its share of visits from the various ascetics, sages, and dharma teachers who wandered through Northern India at the time of the Buddha, and the Kalamas had more opportunity than residents of other towns to hear the gossip of the day and get some feel for the reputation of the teachers who came their way. When the Buddha came, they were waiting for him, and they hit him with a tough question—tough then, and tough now. All these teachers come through here, they told him, and each one has his own particular point of view; and each one claims that he’s the only one with the truth, and all of the others are full of baloney (or whatever passed for baloney in 400BCE India). How do we know, they asked the Buddha, which of these teachers we should follow?

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 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.

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.

This is my attempt to render into contemporary English one of my favorite suttas from the Pali canon, known variously as the Vyagghapajja Sutta or the Dighajanu Sutta, for the two names by which the Buddha’s questioner is called in the text (see first note, below). I’ve written this version after exhaustive reading of three translations, all by people who know Pali (which I do not) and who have spent their lives practicing the discipline of the Blessed One (which I have not). Two of those are on the web, available at the generally excellent Access to Insight site:

• Translation by Narada Thera
• Translation by Thanissaro Bhikku

There is also an excellent translation, a bit more abbreviated than those, and more contemporary in its style, in Bhikku Boddhi’s selection of suttas from the Anguttara Nikaya, Numerical Discourses of the Buddha (Chapter on the Eights).

I’m particularly fond of this sutta because, in it, the Buddha addresses a question that spiritual leaders seldom address—how can we find happiness in the life we’ve chosen in this world. And the answers he gives are entirely practical, and, in fact, reflect a shrewd understanding of the economics and operational realities of holding a job and heading a family.