I enjoyed the class yesterday; I appreciate the attention you gave me, and I thought your questions were perceptive and important. I think this is going to be fun. As we get into the course, the amount of time I spend talking should diminish, and the amount of time we have for questions and discussion should increase. I’m looking forward to that, and I hope that you are as well.

If you have additional questions, second thoughts, comments you’d like to make, please use the Comments feature of the blog software - just click on “Comments” below. I’ll pay attention to any comments you make, and if you have a question, I’ll do my best to answer it.

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 Kalama Sutta is his answer. In it, the Buddha demonstrates a few techniques which he refined quite skillfully through his teaching career. For one, his response demonstrated his deep empathy for where the Kalamas were—the confusion they felt and their distrust of those who kept trying to prosetylize, their relative lack of sophistication regarding deep philosophical notions and fine points of logic, their position as prosperous householders, involved with their businesses and their families, and, above all, their situation as human beings, caught up in the suffering inherent in that situation, caught up in this samsara.

The sutta demonstrates another common technique of the Buddha; he starts by agreeing with his questioner—in fact, he expresses the Kalamas’ doubts much more precisely and exhaustively than they had in their initial question to him. And he doesn’t press his own point of view, but asks the Kalamas for their point of view about various critical questions involving the kind of actions, the kind of life, that is most likely to bring happiness. Then, working from that foundation, he skillfully outlines the way in which that kind of life works to improve the lot of those who find the way to live it. And he concludes, not by promising them a fortunate rebirth or other pie in the sky reward for living that life, but by outlining all of the alternatives. He shows clearly that no matter what one believes about the more esoteric doctrines—whether we will or will not be judged on our behavior, whether we will or will not be reborn—it is still good to lead a good life, one characterized by generosity, good behavior, and loving kindness.

Here’s a link to the rendering of the Kalama sutta that I’ll be reading in class on Monday. If you have time to read it before class, that would be a good idea.

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.

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.

All three programs are pretty full, which says a great deal about the intensity of interest in Buddhism in these troubled times.

Here’s more info on each program, along with a link to the syllabus/overview page for the program.

• OLLI Course: The Teachings of the Buddha. From the OLLI catalog course description: “In this course, we will examine eight of the most significant and widely known of the Buddha’s discourses.  In our discussion of each discourse, we will look at the events in the Buddha’s life that provide the context for the discourse, and we will see how the ideas discussed in the discourse relate to the historical development of Buddhism and how those ideas remain relevant to the task of maintaining sanity and equanimity in a confused and turbulent world.  The course will be presented as a general introduction to the Buddha’s life and thought.”
• OLLI Course: Important Topics in Mainstream Buddhism. From the OLLI catalog course description: “We will discuss some fundamental concepts of Buddhism, including Dharma, the Law that governs the natural world as well as the results of our ethical decisions; Karma, ethically significant action; Buddhist cosmology and the Buddhist understanding of how events unfold from preceding conditions; Nirvana, the characteristic condition of an enlightened mind; and the Eightfold Path to enlightenment.  We will also look into the history of Buddhism and how different traditions understand the fundamental ideas.  Finally, we’ll look at how Buddhism came to the West and the shape it’s taken here.”
• Dharma Study Class. “The Dharma Study group will take as its study text “In the Buddha’s Words”, an anthology by the Brooklyn-born monk Bhikkhu Bodhi. The texts in the anthology provide an excellent introduction to the Pali Canon, the oldest and most probably authentic source of the Buddha’s teachings. The class will be organized as a discussion group; each week, we will read one chapter of our text and, after a brief introduction to provide historical perspective, we will look at how the teachings we’ve read fit into Buddhist doctrine and what we can learn from them about how to live happily and with a measure of equanimity in a world marked by impermanence and widespread suffering.”

In the sequence of accomplishments leading to Enlightenment, the final step before the last one is “the knowledge and vision of things as they are”. The Buddha spent his life striving diligently to acquire that knowledge and vision, to perfect it, to apply it to each new situation he encountered, and to clarify it and communicate it so that others could, by their own energetic striving, come to the same awareness and prepare themselves to become arahants, enlighted beings. In a very real sense, the sangha of science comprises the most faithful inheritors of the Buddha’s diligence and questing nature, and their striving has brought humankind to the brink of acquiring a knowledge and vision of things as they are that is orders of magnitude more complete and more fruitful than what we have acquired to this point.

The particles at the foundation of the scientist’s understanding of the world are profoundly analogous to the dhammas, the fundamental constituents of existence in the Buddha’s vision. And the samsaric world that those dhammas combine to generate is characterized, as the Buddha knew it must be, by impermanence. “Look at your hand in front of you,” Brian Cox requests.

Cabinet Magazine, of which I’d never heard, has a great article on the mythical Himalayan kingdom of Shambala. The article does a fine job of telling us the content of the myth, its probable origins, its influence on various Western thinkers, including Madame Blavatsky and Heinrich Himmler, and the various expeditions that have been launced to find it. Shambala is a delusion—not just the mythical kingdom, but the very idea that such a one-dimensional ideal could exist in a world that is made complex by the messy, impermanent, and non-dual nature of reality. An entertaining and informative read.

Always excellent, but seldom so very, very Buddhist.

1. Issues thinking is a trap
2. The Dharma is liberating
3. The poisons of greed, ill will, and delusion hinder our progress toward liberation

In this section, I’ll look at the eight factors of the Path to liberation, and try to see how each factor of the Path serves as a guide to proper engagement with a suffering world. With each Path factor, I’ll look briefly at the traditional understanding of that factor and then try to extend that to our behavior as socially engaged beings.

An approach based on the Eight Path factors

Right Understanding

The traditional gloss on Right Understanding focuses on the Buddha’s understanding that our actions have inescapable consequences, and that those consequences are determined by the ethical intention behind the actions—the law of kamma. The canonical description of that law states that “beings are the owners of their actions, heirs to their actions; their actions create them, bind them, sustain them. Among beings, their actions distinguish the superior from the inferior.” (Cula-kammavibhanga Sutta, Majjima Nikaya 135)

So, if we want good results for our lives and the lives of others with whom ours are intertwined, those results will only come from our actions. It’s not enough to hope and pray; we can’t wait on others. If our situation is to improve, we must bring about the improvement through our actions.

Inherent in the premises outlined in Part One of this essay is that Right Understanding of our predicament recognizes the seamless nature of that predicament. We’re all in this together, and what we find ourselves in has no clear boundaries; any thing that we change with our actions changes all the other things in the situational mix. Not only do we have the responsibility to improve our situation, but when we do that, because of our intertwined condition, we improve the situation of all beings.

Right Intention

The Buddha defined Right Intention as the intention of renunciation, the intention of good will, and the intention to do no harm. In terms of social engagement, we might understand that as the intention to drop the shield of privilege, power, and wealth that separates us from others, to use whatever resources we can muster to help relieve those who are suffering, and to do nothing to create more hurt.

Our impulse, confronting a situation full of pain and suffering, is to protect ourselves and our own—to remove ourselves from the events creating the pain or somehow barricade ourselves against the fallout from a disastrous event. So those of us who are able to do so may live in gated communities, send our kids to private schools, join a boutique medical practice, and consider that we have thereby evaded the Crime Problem, the Education Problem, the Health Care Problem. If we truly have Right Understanding, it will be clear to us that such strategies will not resolve our common predicament. More importantly, all Buddhist teaching, from the Pali Canon’s imperative to abide in karuna, compassion, through the Mahayana’s Bodhisattva vow to save the numberless sentient beings, tell us that Right Intention, in a situation where there is suffering, is the intention to help those whose suffering is greater and more immediate than ours. Our intentions, in any social engagement, must be driven by compassion. If they are not, we will not only fail to ameliorate the pain and suffering inherent in the situation, but we will ourselves become worse people and more likely to experience dukkha because we have turned away from compassion.

Right Speech

The commentaries on the Pali Canon tell us that Right Speech comprises speech that is not intended to deceive or to divide one group from another and create social discord, speech that is not hurtful, and speech that is not idle—not gossip or speculation about what happens next; in positive terms, Right Speech is truthful, inclusive, gentle, and focussed on deepening understanding of the Dharma. In light of our premises, that pretty much means that we don’t use issues-oriented language in speaking about our shared predicament: we don’t identify ourselves or demonize others as being on one side or another of a particular issue; we don’t claim certainty regarding any notion that particular problems can be abstracted from the whole, or that particular actions or policies will serve as solutions; we don’t separate those who share the predicament into victims and oppressors, winners and losers, good guys and bad guys. Looking at our predicament from any particular point of view, we are honest about what we see; we don’t falsify the data, ignore what doesn’t fit our preconceptions, or indulge in flights of fancy about what might happen next. In discussing any situation, the language we use keeps attention focussed on dukkha, the particular nature that dukkha assumes in that situation, the craving that underlies the dukkha, and the poisons that hinder our abandoning of the craving.

Right Action

The teachings tell us that Right Action involves abstention from killing, from taking what’s not given, from sexual misconduct, from false speech, and from substances that make us careless and stupid. With reference to our premises, and to our Right Understanding of our common predicament, and to our Right Intention to relieve the suffering of all beings, with Right Action as our guide, we will understand that our purchase of sweatshop goods may increase the pain of people, or even cause someone’s death, a long way from here; that taking more than we need, whether it’s energy, clean water, space on the subway seat or in the bike lane, cash or credit, leaves a little less for others, and that, for some, that little may be all that sustains them; that no lies are white, if white means blameless; that sobriety is a joyful state and that frivolity is the simulacrum of joy.

It seems to me that operating in this world as a socially engaged Buddhist requires that I act always (or as close to always as my strength and mindfulness permit) in ways that do not put more pressure on a fragile system or add more pain to the pile of pain that already exists. If I can act in ways that positively relieve the suffering of others or that strengthen the parts of the system that sustain us—that feed us, protect us, link us, heal us, teach us, bring joy into our lives—that is wonderful. But first, and right now, and this evening when I have dinner, and after dinner when we’re watching TV, and tomorrow morning when I walk to the coffee shop, and next week when we leave for vacation: do no harm.

Right Livelihood

This is a particularly tough one in a highly interlinked and increasingly complex world, especially for those of us who came relatively late to the Teachings, after we had settled into a career that involved our learned skills and creative powers, and while we were still obliged to fulfill our duties as householders. The Teachings tell us that Right Livelihood rejects dealing in living beings, including both the slave trade and prostitution, as well as the raising of animals for slaughter or other misuse, dealing in weapons, in meat production and butchery, in poisons, and in intoxicants. The teachings further identify as wrong livelihood practices that involve trickery or exploitation, including fortune-telling and usury. But what about working as a night clerk at a convenience store to pay one’s way through college? That involves selling beer and cigarettes, charging exploitative prices for things like phone cards, selling lottery tickets, and handling a variety of publications that are full of lies, sexual pandering, and ill will. And just about any employment with a multinational corporation, no matter how benign one’s job duties might seem to be, involves one with an organization that is almost certainly, in one place or another, with one arm or another, dealing out poison, deception, exploitation and environmental degradation. Even a job in academia is on shaky ground with regard to right livelihood, as colleges and universities succumb more and more willingly and completely to operating models based on continuing growth and the blind imperative of profitable revenues.

What we can do, I think, and perhaps, as Buddhists, must do, is use whatever power or authority we have gained in our position to keep the problems of right livelihood under active consideration within the organizations that employ us, and to insist that the motivations driving the practice of Right Livelihood are honest and honorable and based on an accurate understanding of how the world works; moreover, if a corporation were to accept the directives of Right Livelihood and alter their operations to reflect that acceptance, their long-term success would be more certain, their customers would be better served, and their workforce would be healthier and more productively involved. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for energetic action for someone working as a clerk or a server, but it doesn’t leave those people paralyzed either, especially if they can act with imagination and compassionate understanding of their co-workers.

Right Effort

We have to keep at it. Dukkha keeps coming back; oppression, injustice, violence, epidemic illness, fraud—it takes new forms, strikes different people, changes its mask, appearing now as security, now as law, now as love, now as the will of God, now as the will of the People. So we have to be diligent, neither giving up when the struggle seems hopeless, nor resting when we have achieved a temporary advance. We have to maintain the energetic striving to see dukkha through its current disguise, to challenge its necessity, and to step in to give help or comfort to those caught in its grip.

Bhikkhu Bodhi points out that the aroused energy (Pali viriya) that powers our Right Effort also powers those actions, in others and in ourselves, that are violent or cruel and deceitful and that increase dukkha rather than ameliorating its effect. It’s easy to confuse the one type of action with the other, to believe, because we are mustering the same energy in the effort, to confuse a violent confrontation with the forces of oppression with Right Action and to confuse guerilla warfare with Right Effort. But Right Effort, if it is to be effective in the amelioration of dukkha, must embody Right Understanding, Right Intention, and Right Speech. If we are rightly diligent, we will find ways to engage the human actions that increase dukkha with compassion, responding, not simply to the unskillful actions, but to the humanity we share with those who act so unskillfully and to the delusory notions that underlie their actions.

Right Mindfulness

Engagement with the world involves subjecting ourselves to a constant barrage of impressions and events, many of them (most of them), threatening, sorrowful, delusive or tempting. Responding to those skillfully, i.e. responding to the reality behind the appearance, to the causal condition rather than the result, requires constant presence of mind. The more quickly we can recognize an emerging situation, the more quickly we can call it out: identify it, determine its place in the welter of contingent reality, analyze its origin and its probable result, alert others to whatever danger it represents, and prepare ourselves to deal skillfully with its presence in our lives.

Right Mindfulness is maintained by practice—not only meditative practice, although that is a large part of it, but also practice at maintaining a deliberate watchfulness as we move through the day, breathing, eating and drinking, defecating and urinating, speaking and listening, conducting our affairs. Throughout, the maintenance of Mindfulness allows us to be alert to conditions of our life in samsara, the endless round of contingent existence. Mindfulness practice prepares us to watch, without being startled or upset, the continual arising and subsiding of perceptions, emotions, feelings of attraction and repulsion, concepts and ideas—what the Buddha called the khandas, the clusters of events and experiences to which we cling in an attempt to preserve the illusory notion that we have distinct and separate selves. The teachings represent a kind of Field Guide to Samsara, identifying the khandas and describing the forms in which each presents itself, the relationship of each to all, and the camouflage each adopts to escape recognition. The more practice we have in using that Field Guide, the more able we are to know our selves, to understand that the self that each one knows is a conceit, an illusion, and to experience our essential involvement with the whole suffering world.

Right Concentration

In the teachings, Concentration (Pali samadhi) is the way to achieve a singleness of mind. It is one thing to be mindful of the constant flux of impressions and ideas, and quite another to maintain concentration on just what matters and not be distracted by the racket. The Buddha linked Right Concentration to the meditating bhikkhu’s ability to remain centered in one of the series of meditative absorptions (Pali jhana) that lead to eventual enlightenment. In light of our premises as Engaged Buddhists, perhaps it’s possible to see Right Concentration as referring to the ability to maintain focussed attention, intention, speech, action, and diligence on a particular eruption of dukkha—the dukkha of suffering animals, for example, or the dukkha of displaced peoples, of people trapped in war, of surviviors of rape and torture, of those captured by predatory institutions of commerce—and to be able, in that concentrated state, to see clearly how the part of the situation on which we are focussed fits into the whole and where and how we are most able to expose the situation and respond skillfully to the particular forms of dukkha inherent in it.

If the first factor of the Path, Right Understanding, reveals the wholeness of our situation, then Right Concentration, finally, allows us to focus whatever skill we’ve developed on a single aspect of the situation in a way that completes Right Understanding through an engaged response involving every Path factor.

Premises and Path factors are well and good, but they only set the foundation for action. When it comes to the specific actions we can take to ameliorate suffering, how we can work effectively to liberate ourselves and our fellow beings from the predicament we share, we have to engage our creative facilities—our imagination and our reason—to devise a list of possibilities. And then we have to decide, individually and as a functional sangha, which of those possibilities we have the strength, the skills, and the will to undertake and realize through our actions.

That process—the process of deciding what to do about the mess we’re in—will be the subject of the final installment of this three-part essay.

This is the first in a series of three essays dealing with this question:

“What distinguishes a Buddhist response to our current predicament from the response that might be made by someone who is not a Buddhist?”

In this first essay, I’ll look at the premises from which I will be arguing: the basic viewpoint from which I see our situation. In the second essay, I will examine how the eight factors of the Buddha’s Path can provide a framework for determining a purposeful, effective, and ethically justifiable response to the predicament present in that situation. Finally, in a third essay, I will present some tentative suggestions about what we can actually do to relieve the pain and suffering inherent in our situation and prepare ourselves for the changes that will come and that we must make.

Understanding the predicament

Our human predicament begins in Ignorance. Not lack of knowledge—we have plenty of that—but a deep-rooted propensity to ignore the clear truth that our vast treasury of knowledge points us to. We ignore what is happening and surrender instead to delusional ideas about what we’d like to happen or what might happen in the future.

Another term for Ignorance is Wrong Understanding: hanging on to the belief that we can evade the consequences of our actions; that what really matters—love, hope, the divine spirit, the soul—is eternal and will remain when the transient problems that we get so disturbed about are long forgotten; that nothing really has any meaning after all, except whatever meaning we arbitrarily accord it; that help is on the way and will arrive in time and save us if we just believe in it devoutly enough; that the problems confronting us are separate from one another, each with its distinctive nature, its distinctive cause, and its distinctive solution.

The diagnosis that the origin of our predicament lies in Ignorance points the way to a possible treatment of that predicament: we need to develop wisdom, and that starts with the cultivation of Right Understanding.

Easily said.

And perhaps, just perhaps, more easily done than implementing any of the “solutions” proposed by those who have not abandoned Wrong Understanding—the Climate Change Experts who tell us that we must develop a conservation mentality (but cannot tell us how to do that), or the Foreign Policy Experts who advocate an immediate pullout from Iraq (but cannot tell us how that will prevent another war in the future or what we will do with the disastrous fallout from this war), or the Education Specialists who tell us that we need smaller classrooms, or larger budgets for teacher salaries, or early intervention for problem students, or Montessori for all (but cannot tell us how those more effectively educated students will function in a society that has no jobs for them and in which racial and sexual stereotyping prevails in every enterprise and which feeds them a constant barrage of lies about products or substances or lifestyle choices that will make their lives happier and increase their self esteem).

All of that is based on Wrong Understanding and none of it will work for more than a second and a half.

In what follows, I will outline three premises which provide us, I submit, with a framework for understanding our predicament rightly, that is in a way that is in accord with the real causes and contingencies of our situation and which also leads us toward a path of action that might ameliorate the pain and suffering rooted in that situation.

Issues thinking is a trap.

Global corporate media have assumed the prerogative to define and articulate the nature of the situations that imperil our lives, our communities, and our civilization; the summarized situation is labeled an “issue”, and it becomes the matter of our political discourse. Issues lack nuance; they are polarizing, contributing to the arising of ill will and the conceit of views in those who accept them as descriptions of reality. Issues are hard-edged, distinct from one another, in a way that situations in the real world never are; for people affected by the particular situtations and events packaged as issues, the packaging works to focus their attention on the particular ways in which they are affected, exacerbating the ill will and attachment to views and contributing to the arising of greed in those with something to gain from maintaining reality in its issues-packaged state.

The Dharma is liberating.

The Buddha himself, and the most perceptive thinkers in the various Buddhist traditions, have shown us a picture of the world that gives the lie to the picture painted by corporate media. In particular, an analysis of our situation in the illuminating light of the Buddhadharma shows us clearly that issues are an illusion, that our situation is seamless and of a whole, that what we do in response to the issue labeled “Energy Crisis” has an immediate and profound effect on issues labelled “Global Hunger”, “Iraq War”, and “The Environment”. And the Buddha also showed us that pain and suffering are inherent in our situation.

The Dharma illuminates, not only the seamless nature of our situation, the absurdity of issue-mongering, and the pervasiveness of pain and suffering, but also the root cause of that suffering: “the craving that makes for further becoming” (Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s translation of a phrase from the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta). With regard to our situation as a society, I take this to refer to the craving for solutions to the problems inherent in the issues. (The process whereby our experience of the world proliferates into delusory distinct issues is similar to [or perhaps the same as] the process that the Buddha labelled papañca and identified as the root cause of “taking up clubs & swords, of arguments, quarrels, disputes, accusations, divisive tale-bearing, & false speech.”)

The Buddha’s Dharma also shows us that, by ceasing the craving, we eliminate that which fuels the suffering. By abandoning our search for delusory solutions to problems inherent in delusory issues, we abandon a painful waste of energy and a doomed hope, and we are free to get on with the task of living skillfully.

And finally, the Dharma shows us the way to end craving, namely a Path incorporating eight factors: Right Understanding, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration.

The Buddha taught that each of the truths he articulated calls for a particular response from us: we must comprehend the pervasiveness of suffering; we must abandon the craving that is the cause of suffering; we must face up to the reality that our abandonment of craving must be complete, “with no residue left behind”; and, finally, we must realize in our lives and our actions the eight factors of the Path—if we can do that, and to the extent we can do that, we will experience liberation.

We are hindered on our Path to liberation by the poisons of Greed, Ill Will, and Delusion.

Just as global corporations have created the delusory issues that hinder our search for an end to our suffering, so they have industrialized the Poisons that the Buddha identified as the habits of mind that prevent us from realizing the eight-factored path. David Loy has done a masterful job, in his book “The Great Awakening” and in his other writings, of demonstrating the corporate nature of greed, ill-will, and delusion in our society and showing how those poisons prevent us from seeing the root cause of our suffering or from staying on the path that leads to an end to suffering.

Given those premises, the challenge is to craft a response to social pain and suffering that is:

1. realistic—i.e. not overly ambitious and not a response that demands either ready access to power, effective control of mass media channels, or the sudden and simultaneous change of minds on the part of large numbers of people;
2. easily communicated in terms that people generally understand in the same ways and that are not excessively freighted with emotional baggage;
3. inherently Buddhist in its origins and its ideological underpinning, but not necessarily explicitly Buddhist—in other words, the response strategy should be understandable without any reference to the Buddha or to “Buddhist teachings”, but it should also be perfectly compatible with the understanding of the world and the daily practice of those who acknowledge the Buddha and accept the teachings.

In Part Two of this three-part essay, I look at how the eight factors of the Buddha’s path provide us with a framework for crafting such a response.