I wrote this introduction a while back. I’ve edited it, shortening it severely, and I’m re-posting it for our class meeting on Friday.

The Gotami Sutta is short and interesting. At the time the events sutta take place, Mahāpajāpati Gotami, the Buddha’s aunt and stepmother, was well along on the Path, on her way to becoming an arahant, an Awakened One. So we can be sure, when Gotami asked the Buddha to teach her the Dhamma "in brief", that she wasn’t asking for an epigram or a Cliff’s Notes version of the Four Noble Truths. Rather, she was planning to go on a solitary retreat, where she would find a secluded place (the Buddha recommended, in a number of places in the teachings, "an empty hut or the root of a tree"), where she would spend the better part of each day in meditation. And she was asking the Buddha to give her something that would be proper to meditate upon: something brief enough that she could remember it, yet rich enough in meaning that contemplating it would lead her to a deeper understanding of the fundamentals of the Buddhadhamma:

• that all experience is dukkha (pain, frustration, dissatisfaction, anguish, dismay, unreliability—no single English word can translate dukkha);
• that the cause of dukkha is craving, craving for permanence in an impermanent world, craving an unchanging Essence in a world that is fundamentally contingent and in constant flux;
• that dukkha will cease to the extent that we are able to abandon craving;
• and that the way to abandon craving was to embody eight ennobling qualities in our lives—qualities of penetrating understanding, of ethical action, and of constant and unflinching awareness.

Scrutinizing Tools

What the Buddha gave Gotami was not, in fact, quite what she’d asked for. It is not "the Dhamma in brief", but rather a set of characteristics by which Gotami might evaluate the Dhamma that she heard in other contexts: from advice she received from other members of the Sangha, from gossip she heard around the well in the villages she visited in her wandering, from teachers of other sects when she listened in on the discourses they delivered to their followers, from doctrine taught by Brahmin priests, from the folk wisdom of village headmen or their wives, from warnings or calls to action that came in the form of news carried by travelers on the road, from teaching stories passed on, often with heavy foreign accents, from merchants delivering goods from distant lands.

The first meaning of the term Dhamma is a truthful version of how things are, how things got this way, and what we should do about it. Through the course of her daily life, very much of what Gotami encountered could be considered as statement of the Dhamma in that sense. What the Buddha tells her in this sutta is that all of that, everything she hears that passes for wisdom or good advice, must be scrutinized to determine its accordance with the Dhamma taught by the Buddha; subjecting it to such scrutiny will not only help Gotami decide whether or not to accept that wisdom or advice, but will also help her understand more deeply and more profoundly the nature of the Dhamma to which she’d committed her life, the Buddhadhamma. What the Buddha gave Gotami, in this teaching, was eight specific characteristics which she could use as scrutinizing tools.

The instructions that the Buddha gave to Gotami can do the same thing for us that it did for her, that is, help us be aware of what we’re being taught through the advice we get from our friends, relatives, co-workers; through the news we see on television or read in the papers; through the pronouncements of pundits, columnists, commentators, and experts of one sort or another; through politicians and party spokespersons; through ads and PR releases from corporations, unions, PACs, or human services agencies; through the sermons preached in church on Sunday, or in temple on Saturday, or in the mosque on Friday; through statements declaring themselves as "what everybody knows", or "what people think", or "results from the most recent polls"— almost every communication we receive in the course of a day that presents itself, implicitly or explicitly, as Dhamma

How to apply the tools

The Buddha identifies eight qualities, each with its inverse:

• Passion, or infatuation with things of the world; vs. dispassion, the absence of desire for such things
• Getting caught up in things—events, belief systems, trends—feeling trapped in your life; vs. severing your connection to such events and freeing yourself.
• Constantly acquiring more and more; vs. making do with less and less
• Putting on airs, or wishing to be noticed and respected for your accomplishments; vs. being unassuming, lacking all pretension or pride
• Never being satisfied with how things are, but wanting them different; vs. being content, able to manage events as they come your way, ready to play the hand you’re dealt
• Needing to have people around at all times; vs. being comfortable in solitude
• Being lazy, not willing to make the effort that a difficult task requires, enjoying idleness; vs. maintaining a high level of energy and being willing to tackle even big jobs with all you’ve got.
• Being evasive, perhaps a little sneaky, somewhat resentful of others and not revealing that; vs. being forthright and open.

I’ve expanded the telegraphic delivery of the sutta in making that list, and I’d encourage each of you to do the same for yourself. When the Buddha gave a list like the one he gave Gotami, the words he chose were deliberately evocative of a wide range of connected ideas and conditions. The list itself was designed to be easy to memorize, and I’d encourage you to do that as well. Just remember, what you’re memorizing is a set of pointers, which will point to something in your life that’s different from what those same words might point to in someone else’s life. (For the same reasons, the particular translation you use for your memorization exercise doesn’t matter all that much. What we’re after here is the most wide-ranging and evocative understanding, and not a precisely accurate translation of the Pali—which would be impossible anyway.)

So, the first step in applying the Buddha’s lesson to your own life is to consider the pairs of terms and examine the range of meaning they might have in the circumstances in which you find yourself. What do the contrasting ideas of passion and dispassion, bondage and freedom, content and discontent, etc., mean to you? Not really what do they mean, but what range of meanings could they have that resonate with your life?

The next step is to apply those meanings to the messages you receive in the course of each day—the Dhamma that’s conveyed in the gossip you hear on the golf course or at the bridge club, the headlines in this morning’s paper, the poem a friend sent you in an email, the pronouncements of Oprah’s most recent guest, the self-help book at the top of the New York Times’ Best-Seller list, the sermon you heard in church, the advice your sister gave you when you called to tell her what the kids were up to now. You get the point.

If I can get in the habit of seeing all of that as versions of the Dhamma, then I can then begin to ask myself, "If I take this to heart, will it lead me to want something I don’t have now, or can never have, or will it help me accept the reality of my life?" And if it’s the latter, will that acceptance come with a sigh of resignation, a feeling of bitterness and defeat, or will this Dhamma help me attain a level of equanimity that maintains my good will, my sense of humor, my appreciation of irony? That kind of questioning is what the Buddha called "scrutiny", and it is a major factor in the path to Enlightenment. And we can do it with each of the pairs in the list the Buddha gave to Gotami. In fact, we must do it with each of those qualities; we must scrutinize each new Dhamma we’re given in the world, if we are to know which of those Dhammas will help us create the Buddha’s noble Path in our lives.

Among those texts that are commonly considered to present “religious” instruction—the foundational texts of the world’s major spiritual traditions—I don’t know of anything quite like the Dighajanu Sutta. The Buddha’s questioner here is not a Brahmin, or a member of the Buddha’s sangha, or a seeker from among the ascetic sramanas, or a King, or indeed anyone of particular political or religious significance, but a well-to-do merchant, a member of what was, in the Buddha’s time, a rapidly rising middle class. And the question he asks presents a particular challenge to the Buddha.

In all of the other suttas we’ve read, the Buddha was presenting his Dhamma—his radically new, supremely well-articulated, comprehensible and testable vision of how things unfold in this world, how the choices we make determine how we experience events—to audiences that mostly bought into a core premise of that Dhamma, the premise that attachment to material things (and to the mental experiences evoked by those things) was at the root of our pervasive failure to find satisfaction, fulfillment, release from the dukkha that informs our lives. The ideal life was held to be one founded on renunciation of sensual fulfillment. The householder Dighajanu, by contrast, announces up front that he has no intention of renouncing his middle class ways—the fine clothes and expensive perfumes and dazzling jewels, the hectic joys of a bustling family. In so many words, he’s telling the Buddha, “I don’t seek a Dhamma based on renunciation; do you have a Dhamma for people like me, pretty much content with the successful live I’ve made?”

The Buddha responds to the challenge, presenting Dighajanu with a Dhamma that is eminently practical, sensible, and smart, informed by the Buddha’s keen understanding of exactly what sort of life Dighajanu has made and a sympathetic understanding of why Dighajanu finds that life good and worthwhile. And then he goes on, very concisely but tellingly, to relate that worldly Dhamma to a vision that looks just a little ahead and rests on developing a way of life that relies on something more enduring than material rewards.

It’s a short sutta, from the Anguttara Nikaya, the Chapter on Things Grouped into Fours; it’s sparkling in its clarity, and I look forward to an interesting discussion on Friday.