For more than 40 years, the Buddha and his growing sangha of bhikkhus and bhikkhunis travelled throughout Northern India, carrying nothing but a begging bowl, a spare set of robes, and the Dhamma that the Buddha had realized in the course of his enlightenment experience. The earliest record we have of that Dhamma is a set of texts known as the Pali Canon. The texts in the Pali Canon are original, profound, and interesting; although the Canon is amazingly extensive, it has a high level of internal consistency; the core texts are accepted as foundational doctrinal statements by most Buddhist traditions, even those with their own separate canon. In this article, I will look at how the Pali Canon came to exist, why I find it so remarkable, and how it can be helpfully integrated into our Buddhist practice.

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.

During the rainy season, from July through October, the sangha came together, usually in park-like retreat centers donated to the Buddha and his sangha by wealthy followers; most of those were are the edges of fairly large towns where the bhikkhus and bhikkhunis went each morning on their alms rounds. After the alms rounds, each member of the sangha found his or her own isolated location for a period of silent meditation. When the sangha gathered in the afternoons and early evenings, the time was, for the most part, occupied by dharma discussions or by dharma talks given by the senior members of the sangha to visitors from the town or to their fellow ascetics. I would imagine that many of those consisted, wholly or in large part, of recitations of talks that the bhikkhu had heard from the Buddha himself and had memorized, as the Buddha encouraged his followers to do.

There were a number of retreat centers scattered around Northern India, and they must have been bustling places during the rains retreats. No doubt the busiest and most bustling was the center at which the Buddha himself had chosen to spend the retreat. During the first part of his teaching career, he spent the rains retreats at a number of different centers. During the last 25 years of his life, he spent each retreat at Savatthi, the capital city of the kingdom of Kosala, home of King Pasenadi.

Now, let’s assume that the typical population of the retreat at Anattapindika’s park in Savatthi during the 3-month rainy season was upwards of 500 bhikkhus and bhikkhunis, and that the discourses delivered by the Buddha were typically attended by a large number of lay followers from the city itself. That’s a large audience to address in the open air without amplification, and a good part of the audience would not have been able to hear the Buddha’s words clearly if at all.

The discourses were typically short, especially those addressed to lay audiences. And the Buddha usually retired to his dwelling immediately after delivering the discourse. I would imagine, and here this gets extremely speculative, that the senior monks who were at the Buddha’s side during the discourse would repeat what he had said to that part of the audience who had not had the chance to hear him clearly or who wanted to hear it again. And the fact that there were several of them, all repeating what they had just heard, made it possible for them to correct one another and to get their story straight. The monks trained deliberately to be expert at this kind of memorization—this part is not speculative; we have it in various ways from a number of the suttas as well as from contemporary practice in Buddhist sanghas in South and Southeast Asia. By the end of a rains retreat, the number of monks who were prepared to carry the latest discourses of the Buddha pretty much verbatim in their wanderings over the next nine months would have been fairly large.

Shortly before the Buddha died at age 80, Ananda asked him tearfully what the sangha was to do without him. His answer was that they had the Dhamma, and anyone who knew the Dhamma knew the Buddha; he refused to appoint a successor to lead the sangha, telling Ananda that each member of the sangha must be an island unto himself.

The Buddha did not die suddenly. He got sicker and sicker over a three-month period, possibly from intestinal cancer. As news of his condition spread, monks began traveling to where he was staying in a sparsely inhabited jungle region west of the city Rajagaha, where King Ajatthasattu had his capital and where there was a major retreat center. By the time the Buddha died, there were probably hundreds of sangha members in the vicinity, and they continued to stream in through the weeks following his death.

The Buddhist Councils

About three months after the Buddha’s parinibbana, the elder monk Mahakassapa convened an assembly of 500 monks, all of whom had achieved enlightenment under the Buddha. The avowed purpose of the council, which was held in Rajagaha under the sponsorship of King Ajatthasattu, was to preserve the Dhamma. To that end, the monks spent a number of weeks listening to all of the discourses that the Buddha had delivered during his lifetime. Tradition tells us that the recitation was in two parts. The discourses dealing with the history and governance of the Sangha were delivered by the bhikkhu Upadi, while Ananda himself, who was renowned throughout the sangha for his prodigious memory, delivered the suttas, the discourses that the Buddha had delivered to the sangha or to lay followers regarding the Dhamma and the proper way to live in accord with the Dhamma. Together, the topics of the two recitations comprise the Dhamma-Vinaya, “the doctrine and the discipline”, a term the Buddha frequently used to refer to his teachings.

The bhikkhus in attendance at that First Council were divided into groups, and each group was given a particular collection of teachings to remember; they agreed to meet regularly and, at each meeting, to repeat to one another the teachings for which they’d taken responsibility, making certain that those were remembered completely and accurately.

We have no record of how frequently those smaller groups met, but we do know that there were two more general Buddhist conferences over the next couple of centuries, at each of which the entire body of teachings was repeated to the assembled bhikkhus.

During those same two centuries, Buddhism spread well beyond the parts of Northern India where the Buddha taught. Much of the credit for the expansion of Buddhism goes to the Emperor Ashoka, the first person to unify all of the Indian sub-continent under a single rule; Ashoka himself was a convert to Buddhism, and the sponsor of the Third Buddhist Council in about 250BCE. Most importantly, however, Ashoka, at the urging of the bhikkhu Mogaliputta Tissa, organized missions to many of the major countries outside of India to carry the Dhamma-Vinaya to those countries. Although the missions to the West (traditionally including one to Greece) did not have a lasting effect, Buddhism did take root in Nepal and Tibet to the north, in Thailand and Burma to the southeast, and in the island kingdom of Sri Lanka in the south; Ashoka’s son Mahinda was the leader of that last mission.

The Composition of the Canon

Sri Lanka adopted the Buddha’s Dhamma eagerly, and it was in that island kingdom, under the sponsorship of King Vattagamani, that the Fourth Buddhist Council was held in about 200BCE, with the express purpose of committing the teachings to writing. Once again, the council heard the recitation of the entire body of teachings; by this time, with various accretions, the whole thing took over six months to recite, and it had become virtually impossible for a single bhikkhu to memorize in its entirety. So, in order that the teachings would not be lost, the bhikkhus of the Fourth Council undertook to write the whole thing down.

The composition was in a language called Pali, which is closely related to Sanskrit, the “official” language of the Brahmin caste in India and the language in which all of the great classics of Hindu literature have been composed. The Pali texts were written on palm leaves, which were sewn together in volumes and kept in baskets. There are three basic parts of the Pali Canon, which are known as pitakas—pitaka is the Pali word meaning “basket”.

• The Abhidhamma Pitaka contains some difficult and (from my very limited examination) exceedingly abstruse commentary on details of Buddhist philosophy and psychology—detailed enumeration of the 50 or so dhammas, elaborate dissection of the precise mechanism of conditional causality, etc. All scholars agree that the Abhidhamma Pitaka is the latest section of the Canon, and was probably not composed until several hundred years after the Buddha’s death.
• The Vinaya Pitaka concerns the origins of the Buddhist sangha and its development through the Buddha’s lifetime; it presents historical contexts for the very complex body of rules that direct the governance of the sangha and the training and practices of its members.
• The Sutta Pitaka contains a record of the Buddha’s teachings (and the teachings of some senior bhikkhus and bhikkunis ). Each of the texts in the Sutta Pitaka is known as a sutta (Sanskrit sutra), from a word whose original meaning was “thread”, and most of them record a teaching delivered by the Buddha or one of the senior bhikkhus or bhikkhunis. In very many cases, we are told where the teaching was delivered, the audience to which it was delivered, and something of the circumstances that surrounded the occasion.

Many, if not most, Buddhist traditions accept the Vinaya Pitaka and the Sutta Pitaka as a record of the Buddha’s own words or the words of one of his followers. Modern scholars, as we would expect, are a bit more skeptical. There are basically three positions: one is that the entire Pali Canon was composed over a long period following the Buddha’s death, and that nothing in it preserves an accurate record of his teaching; at the opposite extreme, there are scholars (including many of the first rank, such as Richard Gombrich) who feel that very much of the Canon, including most of the Vinaya Pitaka and much of the Sutta Pitaka, is in fact an accurate record of the teachings delivered during the Buddha’s lifetime; finally, there are many who take the position that the Canon as we have it, while much of it was composed after the Buddha’s death, does present an accurate summary of his teaching and an accurate record of the formula phrases that the Buddha and his followers relied upon to preserve the consistency of the teaching.

The Pali Canon is not the only canon of the Buddha’s teachings. The Tibetan Kangyur Canon and the Chinese Agamas contain much of the same material that is in the Vinaya Pitaka and the first four Collections of Suttas in the Sutta Pitaka, although each contains much additional material that is not in the Pali Canon. The overlapping material in the Tibetan and Chinese canons is not exactly the same as the material in the Pali Canon, and it’s clear that the Northern canons are not translations from the Pali, but they almost certainly derive from the same oral tradition. The closeness of those Northern canons to the texts of the Pali Canon is one reason to believe that that each of those canons preserves an accurate record of an oral tradition that pre-dates the written versions by several centuries.

The climate of Sri Lanka is not conducive to the preservation of palm leaf manuscripts, and we do not have any remnant of the original Pali Canon. But the texts were copied and recopied faithfully over the years and centuries following their composition, and copies were taken to all parts of the Buddhist world, translated, and recopied there. The earliest physical remnants that we have are Nepalese and date from the 8th or 9th century; the earliest complete manuscripts of any individual texts are from the 15th century; and we don’t have any copy of the complete canon dating from before the 18th century. But the copies that we do have, although coming from different parts of the world, are strikingly similar to one another, and most scholars are convinced that little or nothing has been added to the canon or removed from it since its first composition.

The Significance of the Canon

That’s enough of history. Why is the Pali Canon important? What makes it different from any other body of scripture?

I would give a four-fold answer to that question:

• First, there is the sheer size of the canon; the Sutta Pitaka itself is considerably larger than the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Koran combined. Considered simply as a treasure trove, full of wonderful stories and thought-provoking lessons, the Pali Canon contains a lot of treasure.
• Second, there is the remarkable consistency and internal coherence of the teachings contained in the Canon, which, to my mind, speaks to its authenticity. Although I have not read the whole thing, and almost certainly will not reach that goal in this life, I have yet to find anything in the teachings that contradicts anything else in any significant way at all; indeed, each new sutta that I read casts some light on all the others, so that each one enriches and helps to complete everything that went before. Again, that consistency and integrity of meaning is different from what I’ve found in any other scriptural tradition.
• Third, the message of the teachings is one that I find totally convincing, mostly rational and compatible with the understanding of the world that I’ve taken from my reading of modern science and philosophy, and immensely helpful as a guide to practice—by practice I mean both meditative practice and practicing the of kind day-by-day behavior that conduces to calm, sanity, and the maintenance of a benevolent presence in the world. The Buddhadhamma, as I gradually deepen my understanding of it through study of the teachings and meditation on their meaning and import, seems to me to be both complete and adequate; nothing could be subtracted from it without diminishing its significance, and nothing added to it would increase its power as a method of knowing and practice.
• Fourth, and finally, the Pali Canon is the record of what I consider the most original mind in human history. What the Buddha understood when he had achieved his enlightenment about how things unfold in this world comprises a doctrine that has, to my knowledge, no precedent; he did, indeed, discover that understanding through his own profound effort. His decision to teach others the way to that understanding—the way to enlightenment—was an act of unexcelled generosity. And the skill with which he conducted that teaching, so that those who were ready to follow him all the way could repeat his experience and gain enlightenment for themselves, while the rest of us could still benefit through following a path of practice that can ameliorate the inevitable pain in our lives and help us to become better people—that skill is awe-inspiring.

Resources for Study

No one knows what language the Buddha actually used to deliver his teachings; it was probably a dialect of Maghadan, the language that was spoken in region of Northern India where he was born and where his major teachings were delivered. Although Maghadan was probably similar to Pali in the same way that Pali is similar to Sanskrit, we have no record of it today, and it’s almost certain that the discourses recorded in the Pali Canon are not verbatim transcripts of the Buddha’s words.

The Buddha advised his followers, as they carried his Dhamma into the world, to teach that Dhamma in the language of the people that they spoke to. And the Pali Canon, or large portions of it, have been translated into many other languages. As far as I know, the complete canon has never been translated, and I can’t speak to the quality of the translations that exist in any other language than English. But I can tell you that those of us who speak English and who live today, in the age of the Internet, are incredibly fortunate in the translations that are available to us, the accessibility of those translations, and the availability of tools to help us evaluate those and make sense of them.

A generation of English-speaking Westerners has emerged who share a fortunate combination of qualities:

• They have been educated at fine Western universities and are familiar with Western intellectual traditions, including philosophy, literature, and science.
• Most of them have ordained as monks in the Theravada tradition, the Buddhist tradition that accepts the teachings in the Pali Canon as its entire scripture and has acted most conscientiously to preserve the canonical texts and make them widely available. Most of the translators have made deliberate and informed efforts to become familiar with Buddhist traditions outside of Theravada.
• They are all active Buddhist practitioners and teachers.
• They are all, by and large, careful and graceful writers, conscientious in their footnoting of difficult points and creative in how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of translating an oral tradition for a literate audience—particularly the high degree of repetition in the texts and what to most literate audiences appears to be an over-reliance on formula phrases.

These translators, particularly Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Piyadassa Thera, Ñanamoli Bhikkhu, Peter Harvey, and the indefatigable Bhikkhu Bodhi, have produced a body of work that is a pleasure to read and is, to the best of my understanding, faithful to the meaning of the original texts. Many of those translations are online at the excellent Access to Insight website, maintained as an act of dana by John Bullitt.

The pleasurability of a translation is in the reader’s mind; to evaluate the faithfulness of the translation, the diligent student of the Dhamma has, easily accessible, a body of tools that only a few scholars at a few uncommonly well-endowed universities would have had just five or ten years ago. The entire Pali Canon is available on the web or on a CD-ROM in either Pali script, for those willing to learn how to read it, or in Romanized transliteration, so that it’s possible to read the original text alongside any translation. Tools for learning Pali abound on the web and in the library, and for those who are only interested in examining the detailed meaning of an occasional difficult technical term, the Oxford Pali-English dictionary is online with a pretty good interface for searching it. All of the online resources are free.

In addition to the online texts, Wisdom Publications is in the process of publishing the entire Sutta Pitaka in book form. Volumes available so far include the complete Digha Nikaya (the collection of long discourses) translated by the British scholar Maurice Walshe, the Majjhima Nikaya (the collection of middle length discourses) translated by the British-born monk Bhikkhu Ñanamoli, edited and corrected by Bhikkhu Bodhi), and the Samyutta Nikaya (the collection of discourses grouped by subject) translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi.

Bhikkhu Bodhi is also working on a complete translation of the Anguttara Nikaya, the discourses arranged in numerical order according to the number of the items comprised in the subject of each discourse. That book is scheduled for publication in the coming year; in the meantime, Bhikkhu Bodhi has edited and annotated an excellent anthology of texts from the Anguttara Nikaya, using translations by Nyanaponika Thera as his starting point. That anthology is short and quite readable; it includes about 20% of the discourses in the complete collection, including most of the best known ones.

The final collection in the Sutta Pitaka is the Kuddhaka Nikaya, the collection of short miscellaneous discourses. One of the books included in the Kuddhaka Nikaya, the Dhammapada, has become one of the best-loved and most popular books from the Pali Canon and the only one of which many Westerners have heard. The Dhammapada is a collection of 26 verses on the Buddha’s Dhamma; it’s simple, faithful to the Dhamma, and quite strikingly beautiful. There are a lot of English translations of the Dhammapada, some of which are more graceful than the others, and some of which are more faithful in meaning to the Pali original; unfortunately, those two are not always the same. The following is the list of my favorites, in descending order; all have much to recommend them, and any one will bring pleasure and merit.

• Gil Fronsdal’s translation; Fronsdal is an excellent poet and a long-time practitioner of Buddhism. This relatively recent translation of the Dhammapada is well (and unobtrusively) annotated, probably as accurate as it’s possible to be without getting verbose, smooth and graceful throughout.
• Translation by Balangoda Ananda Maitreya Maitreya, with assistance from Rose Cramer, with a forward by Thich Nhat Hanh. This is probably as close as you’ll get to a literal translation, and it’s quite remarkably graceful and easy to read. It suffers from an almost complete absence of scholarly apparatus, but that makes for a slim book, easily pocketable. This is a good one to stick in your purse or backpack and open at random while you’re in an airport lounge or a doctor’s waiting room.
• Thomas Byrom’s translation, in the Shambala Pocket Classics Series. This one is a nice blend of poetry and literal accuracy; not quite as good poetry as Gil Fronsdal delivers, and probably not quite as literally accurate as Maitreya, but well worth having and studying. Again, it’s small, cheap and pocketable; if this is the only version of the Dhammapada you will ever own, it’s probably a good choice.

Of the other books in the Kuddhaka Nikaya, the most important, from the standpoint of Buddhist doctrine and history, are probably the Udana and the Sutta Nipata, the first of which is probably a relatively late addition to the canon, while the latter probably represents one of the earliest and most probably authentic collections of teachings. H. Saddhatissa’s translation of the Sutta Nipata is outrageously overpriced. I have not read G. M. Strong’s translation of the Udana

Conclusion: the Opportune Moment

In the Sutta Nipata, a small volume of short discourses that’s found in the Khandaka Nikaya of the Sutta Pitaka—a collection of miscellaneous texts that includes such classics as the Dhammapada, a number of Jataka Tales, Discourses of the Elder Bhikkhunis and so forth—in the Uṭṭhāna Sutta, the Discourse on Arousing, we are urged to keep our energy level high:

The concept of an opportune moment that’s referred to in that sutta is explained in another sutta, the Sangiti Sutta of the Digha Nikaya. The opportune moment is the moment that’s given to those who are born as humans, and not as long-lived gods, or as animals, or in one of the unfortunate realms; who are born into a family that nurtures them and provides for their education; who are born with a good mind and a lively curiosity; who remain open-minded, not tied to a rigid and incorrect point of view; and who are born in a time of the world and at a place in the world in which the teachings of a Buddha are accessible.

We have all been born in an opportune moment; of all the people who have ever lived, we are among the infinitesimally few who can hear the Buddha’s teachings in the radically disintermediated way that the current flock of good modern translations of the Pali Canon makes possible and who can use the radically new tools available to us through the Internet to scrutinize those teachings deeply, as the Buddha advised us to do.

If you seize the moment and make the study of the Pali Canon a part of your lives and of your Buddhist practice, I am convinced that your study will be entirely enjoyable, and that the fruits you will gather from it will make your lives richer and your practice more complete.

In Wednesday’s class in Topics in Mainstream Buddhism we will be discussing one of the more abstruse and certainly one of the most important ideas in the Buddha’s teaching, the notion of Dependent Arising, sometimes translated “Dependent Causality”. The following notes provide a list of the elements that comprise the chain of Dependent Arising; in looking them over, consider the modern logician’s understanding of “necessary cause” vs. “sufficient cause”. The latter is what we think of when we think of cause in the world of Newtonian physics: we hit a ball with a bat and, dependent on the mass of the bat and the ball, the speed and direction of the swing, and the angle of contact, the ball speeds off on a minutely determined trajectory. In the lists comprising Dependent Arising, the notion of causality is closer to the logician’s necessary cause; these conditions are necessary to their successor conditions, in that, without the former, the latter cannot arise. But the former conditions are not sufficient. There has to be a particular cause, typically the appearance, within one’s field of perception, of something that evokes desire, before the subsequent condition will actually arise in whatever form it takes. That is what, in ordinary terms, “causes” the subsequent condition to arise. But if the precedent condition were not present, whatever we think of as a cause in these circumstances would be unable to produce its particular result.

Trust me, it’s more interesting than it may sound.

This is the standard list of elements in the chain of conditions comprising Paṭiccasamupāda, leading from Ignorance to Dukkha:

• Ignorance (avijja )
• Kamma formations (sankhara )
• Consciousness (viññana )
• Mentality-materiality (namarupa )
• Sixfold sense base (salayatana )
• Contact (phassa )
• Feeling (vedana )
• Craving (tanha )
• Clinging (upadana )
• Existence (bhava )
• Birth (jati )
• Suffering (dukkha )

The Transcendental Order

In a single sutta, the Buddha outlines a second chain of conditions which Bhikkhu Bodhi, in a long and fascinating essay, calls “the Transcendental Order”, as distinct from the traditional chain, above, which he calls “the Mundane Order”. The Transcendent Order begins with Faith and ends in the destruction of the taints, or the cankers - the taint of sensuality, the taint of becoming, the taint of ignorance, and, in some sources but not all, the taint of views or opinions. (From an abundance of other sources, we know that destruction of the taints is the necessary condition for, and leads directly to, Enlightenment, awakening, nibbana.) Unlike Ignorance, which, in the Mundane Order, is a given, the Faith which begins the Transcendental Order has its own dependent condition: “‘Faith, bhikkhus, also has a supporting condition, I say, it does not lack a supporting condition. And what is the supporting condition for faith? “Suffering” should be the reply.’” (Upanisa Sutta)

• Faith (saddha )
• Joy (pamojja )
• Rapture (piti )
• Tranquillity (passaddhi )
• Happiness (sukha )
• Concentration (samadhi )
• Knowledge and vision of things as they are (yathabhutañanadassana )
• Disenchantment (nibbida )
• Dispassion (viraga )
• Emancipation (vimutti )
• Knowledge of destruction of the cankers (asavakkhaye ñana )

• In the Cetanakaranaya Sutta, the Buddha outlines the chain of conditions that lead to Enlightenment.
• In the Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta, the Buddha helps the wanderer Vacchagotta understand how his pre-conceived understanding of how things must be prevents him from seeing things as they are; the sutta gives a wonderful simile for the process of Enlightenment and helps us toward an understanding of the term nibbana .

I’m working on a longer exposition of the ideas we spoke about in class, but it might be a while before those are ready for publication here.

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 show 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.

The reality of which the enlightened Buddha received “knowledge and vision” is known as the Dhamma. (Dharma in Sanskrit); this is one of the few doctrinal terms for which I’ll frequently use the Sanskrit form, because that form is so much more familiar to us.) The term comes from an Indo-European root (dhṛ) referring to that which forms a foundation or upholds; the English words “form” and “firm” probably derive from the same root. In Buddhist doctrine, there were four distinct realms in which the term had meaning.

• In the realm of the physical world, the term refers to the causal dynamics by which things are created, held together, and destroyed: the essential physical laws of cause and effect.
• In the realm of human behavior, Dhamma refers to the dynamics by which the consequences of intentional action unfold, the ways in which our actions create the situations in which we find ourselves.
• Within Buddhist ontology—the Buddhist understanding of the nature of things—the “dhammas” (lower case) refer to foundational phenomena, the essential, unconditioned, qualities that combine to create the conditioned and composite phenomena that we experience as reality—the qualities of space, energy, matter & fluidity that comprise our experience of events; the perceptual, affective, cognitive, volitional & intellectual qualities that comprise our experience of self; and a variety of other qualities that share with those an ontological necessity and an absence of specificity.
• Finally, within the Buddhist tradition itself, the Dhamma (upper case) refers to the true understanding of the nature of things to which the Buddha awakened and which forms the core and foundation of his teachings. In this last sense, the term is often used as part of a composite: the Buddhadhamma—the vision that the Buddha experienced directly.

At the core of the Buddhadhamma is a set of four linked truths that define our human condition.

• Dukkha. The first truth is what the Buddha called “the ennobling truth of dukkha“. We’re going to be spending a lot of time throughout the course exploring the multiple meanings of the term dukkha; for now, I’m going to use the word that’s been most commonly used to translate the term: pain. This is the Buddha’s first truth: there is pain. There is pain wherever we look; aging is painful, disease and injury are painful, the prospect of inevitable death is painful. Even at the height of pleasure, there is an underlying layer of pain, because we know that the pleasurable experience will end.
• The cause of dukkha. The second truth the Buddha saw when he woke from delusion is that dukkha has a necessary condition which nurtures it and brings it into existence. The Buddha identified that necessary condition of dukkha; it is craving—wanting things to be different than they are, wanting our situation to be other than it is. The term translated as “craving” is tanha—the literal meaning is “thirst”. When tanha arises, dukkha has the condition which nourishes it; tanha is the foundation on which dukkha arises.
• The end of dukkha. The third truth is that the cessation of dukkha depends on the cessation of tanha. If craving can be abandoned, with no residue left behind—then there is no foundation on which dukkha can arise; there is the end to dukkha.
• The Way to the end of dukkha. And the fourth and final truth is that there is a Way to the abandonment of craving. It is a path of ethical action, with eight distinct factors: right understanding, right purpose, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Cultivating that path in our lives, living by that path, we come to control the quality of tanha—our thirst for existence, for pleasure, for more: our craving. If we stay on the path and develop it in every aspect of our lives, we will come, as the Buddha came, to “the knowledge and vision of things as they are”; we will find that we possess the equanimity to accept that knowledge and vision with all of its difficult parts, and we will understand the delusion and futility of demanding that things be other than they are; our craving will end, and there will then be an end to the pain that has pervaded our lives.

There’s a lot to say about the Four Ennobling Truths and the Eight-Factored Path; all of the teachings that the Buddha delivered through his 45-year teaching career derive from or expand upon or explicate those truths. For now, try to see the Dharma as the promise that the Buddha held out to those who heard his teachings. For those willing to commit themselves wholly to the eight-factored path and join the Buddha in those practices that furthered development of the path—living on alms food, eating just once a day, spending large parts of the day in solitary meditation, remaining celibate, owning just a set of robes and a begging bowl—the Buddha promised the possibility of achieving the same Enlightenment that he had achieved, coming to a direct knowledge and vision of things as they are, and realizing the end of pain and suffering. Those that did achieve such a state were known as arahats—”accomplished ones”.

But the benefits promised by the Buddha were not only available to those who followed him into the homeless life. Anyone who understood the four truths, even if imperfectly, and who practiced the path, even partially and incompletely, would, the Buddha promised, realize consequent benefits. That was the promise he held out to the Kalamas: free yourself from greed, anger, and a delusory belief that some miracle can intervene to make things better without any work on your part; work to cultivate kindness, compassion, patience; trust yourself to know goodness from wickedness and devote yourself to pursuit of the good ways; and you will realize benefits from that. If there is some kind of super-mundane dynamic of return on behavioral investment, either through rebirth in good or evil conditions, or through some system of divine reward and punishment, living the kind of life the Buddha recommends will increase the chances that such a system will work to your benefit. And even if there is no such dynamic, the Buddha makes what seems to me to be an undeniable claim that good people lead happier lives; they sleep better at night, they are more content, suffer less remorse, have more friends and create better relationships with those they love.

The Buddha’s initial experience of the four ennobling truths and the eight-factored path to an end to pain formed the foundation for a rich and complex doctrine that incorporates a subtle understanding of psychology, a vision of how the universe works that prefigures modern science in many interesting ways, a profoundly original epistemology, and, throughout, a detailed and thoroughly empirical ethics.

Most of the discourses that have come down to us in the Pali Canon were addressed to the monks and nuns who had left their homes to become bhikkhus and bhikkhunis in the Buddha’s sangha. In those discourses, the Buddha speaks with full authority, as “The Teacher”, the Tathagata. The discourses addressed to the sangha are profound, frequently complex and often difficult to understand without some help; the subject matter is the doctrine, the techniques of meditative practice, and the rigorous set of rules that govern monastic life.

Very many of the discourses in the Canon, however, perhaps as many as one-third, are not addressed to bhikkhus and bhikkunis. They are addressed to merchants, brahmins, military chieftains, gods and spirits, kings, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, craftspeople, criminals—a very wide range of beings, the human members of which can be classified together under the term “householders”, i.e. people who have not entered the homeless life and who are still tied to the concerns of life in the world. While the discourses to householders lack nothing in the way of profundity or wisdom, they are considerably less abstruse than the discourses to the sangha—less concerned with doctrine and meditative practice and more concerned with ethical behavior and with understanding the relations between one’s intentional behavior and the circumstances that one finds oneself in. In addition, in speaking to householders, the Buddha seldom spoke as a guru, delivering a revelatory message or an esoteric doctrine. Although the discourses make it clear that his lay audiences knew of the Buddha’s reputation as one who had achieved Enlightenment, the Buddha himself, in addressing those audiences, always started from where the audiences were and answered the questions they brought to him in non-dogmatic ways. Frequently, as we’ve seen in the discourse to the Kalamas, the teaching was in the form of a discussion, in which the Buddha involved his listeners at every step of the way, phrasing his questions so that they would realize that they already, very often, possessed the answer to the questions they’d asked, and all they really had to do was (A) trust their own sense of right and wrong and their own common sense understanding of the world, and (B) follow that understanding where it led them, even if it led them to answers that took courage to face or resolve and determination to realize.

The Buddha himself called his teaching technique “the gradual training”. Once his audiences had recognized that they already had the answers to their questions, they were ready to hear what it would take to make those answers work for them: once they knew that they had to be generous and patient and realistic, they were ready to hear about the conditions of their lives that made such behavior so much more difficult that it would seem to be, and then to hear what they might undertake in the way of mental training and behavior modification to overcome the conditions that hindered their advance on the Buddha’s path. And so, gradually and piece by piece, the Buddha and his monks led their audiences along and spread the Dhamma throughout Northern India.

Notes

“bhikkhus and bhikkhunis in the Buddha’s sangha“

The term sangha means, literally, “multitude” or “assembly”. The terms bhikkhu and bhikkhuni are usually translated “monk” and “nun”; the literal meaning is “beggar”; our word “beggar” and the Pali “bhikkhu” probably derive from the same Indo-European root.

“Tathagata“

The term means, literally, “thus-gone one”, the One who’s travelled a particular Way (and, implicitly, come back to tell us about it). It is a term that the Buddha frequently uses to refer to himself, especially when he is speaking to members of his sangha. It seems to me that his purpose here is to remind them of the reason that they chose to follow him, and to help them focus on the Path rather than the Person. They follow him, not because he is the Buddha, the One who achieved Enlightenment, but because he has discovered the effective Path to that Enlightenment; he can’t show them Enlightenment, because that’s a subjective experience; he can show them the Path, and show it, moreover, clearly enough for them to follow it themselves.

One reason that the Buddha’s teachings appealed so strongly to the rising urban middle class was that those teachings were eminently practical, rooted in the Buddha’s keen understanding of the way his lay followers lived, their responsibilities and their needs. Another is that the teachings involved nothing in the way of ritual, and no particular need to involve Brahmin priests in the process of gaining either success in the world or a fortunate rebirth in the next life. According to the Buddha, all those good results were rooted, quite definitely and intelligibly, in one’s own actions. To those who were used to working hard and getting what they wanted and needed by their own intelligent and diligent action, that was a message they could relate to.

The sutta we will discuss on Monday is a good demonstration of the Buddha’s ability to connect with the newly wealthy urban class. The teaching is delivered in what is identified as “the market town of the Koliyans”, one of a string of market towns between Savatthi, the capital city of the kingdom of Kosala, and Rajagraha, the capital city of the kingdom of Maghada; the Buddha’s home town of Kapilavattu was probably another one of those market towns. The Koliyans and the Sakyans were cousins, and the Buddha’s mother and stepmother were both Koliyans. The Koliyans and the Sakyans were frequently in dispute regarding rights to the water of the Rohini river which separated the republics; the Buddha was called upon on several occasions to act as peacemaker in those disputes, since he had gained the trust of both branches of the family.

The Buddha’s questioner in this sutta was known as Dighajanu, which mean’s “long shins”, and his family name was Vyagghapajja, which means “tiger’s path”. Dighajanu asks the Buddha for a Dhamma for people like him, with lots of family responsibilities and a life full of pleasures that he is not likely to give up to become a dropout like the members of the Buddha’s sangha.

The Dhamma that the Buddha teaches Dighajanu is simple, wise and accessible. It demonstrates that the Buddha was very much in touch with the life that Dighajanu led, and was in no way condemnatory of that life. But, as the Buddha almost always did, he goes on, after answering Dighajanu’s question about how to live in a way that guarantees happiness in his daily life, to give him some very brief additional teachings about how to live in ways that guarantee the preservation of that happiness in the future.

Briefly, the Buddha mentions four attainments - four fortunate accomplishments - that will produce that guarantee; saddha-sampada, the accomplishment of faith, sila-sampada, the accomplishment of virtue, cāga-sampada, the accomplishment of generosity, and pañña-sampada, the accomplishment of wisdom. Each of those receives its own extensive exposition in other teachings; faith, virtue, generosity and wisdom are essential accomplishments in the development of the Buddha’s path. Here each one is presented telegraphically, almost aphoristically, but still in a way that is easily understood and easy to grasp intuitively. The sutta concludes, as many suttas do, with a brief verse summary of the teachings presented.

I’ve given my own rendering of the Dighajanu sutta, which we’ll use as the basis for our discussion. In the introduction to that rendering, I’ve linked to two translations of the sutta, each more complete and authoritative than my rendering; I’d recommend that you read them all to get a feel for the full import of this brief but important teaching.

researchers found that when an individual becomes happy, the network effect can be measured up to three degrees. One person’s happiness triggers a chain reaction that benefits not only their friends, but their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends. The effect lasts for up to one year.

The flip side, interestingly, is not the case: Sadness does not spread through social networks as robustly as happiness. Happiness appears to love company more so than misery.

Graph of social network described in study: yellow is happy; blue is sad.

In their research, Harvard Medical School professor Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler from the University of California, San Diego, mined a large body of data from the Framingham Heart Study, which has been following its subjects for more than 50 years; they analyzed data from almost 5000 individuals and identified more than 50,000 social and family ties within that group. “We’ve found that your emotional state may depend on the emotional experiences of people you don’t even know, who are two to three degrees removed from you,” Christakis reported. The effect lasts for about a year; it diminishes with time and with distance, both geographical and social. The scientific study corroborates the personal experience that many of us have had within our own network of friends and neighbors, as well as the Buddha’s teachings regarding kammavipaka and kammavega—respectively, the results of particular kammic actions and the influence that our overall kamma has on our own well-being and the well-being of others.

Thanks, Irwin, for your remarkable memory, your diligence in finding the article, and your generosity in sharing it with us. And also, of course, for your own clear happiness; I’m glad to have found myself within your network.

To be a Buddhist is not to “believe in” Buddhist doctrine, but to practice the Buddhadhamma, the Path that the Buddha defined, the end of which is the end of suffering.

Throughout the discourses, the Buddha gave quite detailed instructions regarding that path, and how to follow it. The most comprehensive teaching regarding the meditative practice that he prescribed is the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta. In that discourse, the Buddha covers one type of meditative practice, the practice of “mindfulness”, sati in Pali; he describes a series of steps whereby a bhikkhu (or, presumably, anyone who undertakes the recommended discipline) attains to a state of steady mindfulness, so that nothing is done carelessly—no action is performed, no words uttered, no opinion formed, no feeling or perception experienced, no ideas conceived, without paying due regard to what is emerging and the ethical implications of process. Establishing such steady mindfulness of one’s situation, the diligent meditator can end the attachments that trapp him in that situation minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, birth after birth. Even today, the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta is the foundational text that guides the meditation of practitioners in nearly all Buddhist traditions.

The Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta is a long discourse, and I’ve prepared a prècis of that discourse for discussion on Monday. That text contains a number of references to alternative translations of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, on the web and in printed books.

Concerning meditation more generally, there are a number of audio talks by Stephen Batchelor accessible through the Dharma Seed website; in one of those, the first of eight fine lectures on the life and times of the Buddha that he delivered in the course of a 2004 meditation retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, he discusses the many different meanings of the term “meditation”. What the Buddha’s followers practiced, when they practiced one of the several disciplines that we subsume under that one term, was not what we think of when we think of meditation as a complete stilling of the mind, a state of indiscriminate bliss. Batchelor makes the case that the kind of practice recommended by the Buddha was a more energetic process, with a strong intellectual component, resulting in the attainment of a state of unforced, instinctive wisdom. His talk is very much worth listening to.

In the course of our discussion, we spoke of the Buddha’s notion of kamma, or intentional action, action which has an ethical component and which has consequences for our present life and the lives of those around us, and for our future life, whatever that might mean. Someone asked how one should deal with our past unethical (or, in the Buddha’s terms, which I prefer, “unwholesome” or “unskillful”) actions. I mentioned the Buddha’s teaching to his son Rahula, who had become a renunciant and a member of the Buddha’s sangha. Here is a link to Thannisaro Bhikkhu’s translation of the Ambalatthika-rahulovada Sutta; and here is Thannisaro Bhikkhu delivering a marvelous reading of the sutta. It’s worth putting on your MP3 player and listening to closely.

In this course, we’re not going to get very deeply into the notions of kamma and rebirth, but I have prepared an essay on the topic for the Topics in Mainstream Buddhism course, which some of you might be interested in reading.

I also mentioned the excellent ZenCast website, which has posted a large number of audio programs concerning the Dhamma and Buddhist practice. That was in response to Betty’s observation about how difficult mindfulness meditation turns out to be—how hard it is to still the mind and keep it from running away in its own direction. The ZenCast website offers an online course in Mindfulness Meditation, taught by Gil Fronsdal and Inez Friedman. The course will be taught in September and October; I plan to take it, and if you are interested (there’s no charge, although donations will be welcome), here’s where to sign up to be notified when registration opens. The recorded teachings of an earlier class are also available and worth listening to. There are all sorts of other helpful files at the ZenCast site, including meditation timers and guided meditations. It’s an important resource.

The term “anattalakkhana” is a compound. The first syllable “an” negates the meaning of what follows, as the “a” in our word “atheist”, or the “an” in “anarchy”. In the animistic theories that were held by many brahmins in the Buddha’s time, “atta” means “soul” : the permanent identity that exists separate and distinct from a person’s current worldly form and that continues to exist when that worldly form ends, transmigrating to a new worldly form. The new form, because it is informed by the same eternal soul, is in some significant way identical with the first form: it is the same Self. Finally, “lakkhana” means “sign” or “characteristic”, in the sense of evidence, or an identifying mark. So the name of the sutta can be translated, approximately and long-windedly, as “The evidence for the non-existence of an essential Self”.

In the Anattalakkhana Sutta, the Buddha leaves no doubt about what he thinks of the notion of such an entity—an eternal Self or soul. He examines all of the places where one might locate such a self—a person’s body, that person’s perceptions, feelings, ideas and conceptual formations, the consciousness itself, and he finds each of those incapable of providing the foundation for a permanent self or a soul. No matter where you look, you will see the same thing: “This is not mine; this is not what I am; this is not my self.”

But the Buddha’s intention here is not to engage in doctrinal dispute or to establish a point of view; as in practically every discourse, the purpose is to point the way to personal transformation. What’s important is not whether or not an essential Self exists, but that by abandoning the conceit of a permanent identity, one can get on with the business of cutting attachments, of ending the craving that is the essential condition for the dukkha that informs our lives. The five entities that the Buddha examines to see if any of them can support the notion of a Self, are form (the body), perceptions, feelings, conceptual formations, and consciousness; those are the same entities that the Buddha identified, in the first teaching, as “The Five Aggregates subject to clinging”, and he identified those as identical with dukkha. Only by abandoning craving with regard to the body, with regard to perceptions, with regard to feelings and ideas and consciousness, does one eliminate the condition that nourishes dukkha; only by abandoning any notion that what I feel to be my self depends, in any way, on the Five Aggregates, can one awaken to “the knowledge and vision of things as they are” which is the sufficient condition for Enlightenment. Thanissaro Bhikkhu has written an excellent essay on the Buddha’s “Not-Self Strategy”, in which he examines the Anattalakkhana Sutta with that understanding.

As Thanissaro Bhikkhu demonstrates, the Buddha rejected both extreme views: the view that there is an eternal soul, and the view that there is nothing that lasts beyond this life. Both views, the former characterized as “Eternalism” and the latter as “Annihilationism”, were dismissed by the Buddha as “fetters”. Once again, the Buddha finds the Middle Way; while there is certainly no “soul” in the sense that the term was understood by Brahmanic animistic theory, the consequences of our kammic actions, just as certainly, persist in some way beyond our current lives, influencing the lives of those born after us. While we won’t get very deeply into the complex of notions regarding kamma and rebirth in this course, “The Teachings of the Buddha”, we will spend one class entirely on that topic in the course “Important Topics in Mainstream Buddhism”. If you are interested in pursuing these ideas, I’ve posted an essay I wrote on the subject for a dharma talk a couple of years ago.

“Brahmanic animistic theory”

The Online Pali-English Dictionary says of this theory of the Soul: “It is described in the Upanishads as a small creature, in shape like a man, dwelling in ordinary times in the heart. It escapes from the body in sleep or trance; when it returns to the body life and motion reappear. It escapes from the body at death, then continues to carry on an everlasting life of its own. “

One of the main subjects of the article is a PhD biochemist and Buddhist monk named Matthieu Ricard, sometimes labelled “the happiest man in the world.” Here’s a video of Ricard talking about happiness at the TED Conference in 2004:

Enjoy!