I’d like you, if you can find the time, to read the whole sutta, but I’ve marked the passages that I’d like to discuss in class, and added my gloss to those passages. The translation of the sutta that I’ve used is by Sister Vajira, a German nun, translated from the German and edited by Mr. Francis Story.

Despite the sutta’s length, I hope we can finish our discussion of it in time to devote the last half hour or 45 minutes of class to a general discussion of the experience we’ve shared over the past two months: the questions you came with, the questions you’re leaving with, the ways in which the class has changed the way you view Buddhism, the Buddha’s Dhamma, and your own experience of the world.

I look forward to seeing you on Tuesday.

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 every intentional action. Establishing such steady mindfulness of one’s situation, the diligent meditator can end the attachments that trap 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 our discussion on Tuesday. 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.

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; each one claims that he alone possesses truth, and that 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 loving kindness, compassion, joy at the accomplishment of others, and equanimity.

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

The Sigalovada Sutta is long, but there is nothing difficult or complicated about it. In it, the Buddha comes upon a young Brahmin householder, Sigala, taking his ritual bath and conducting his morning prayers, possibly at one of the warm springs that are still popular tourist destinations in the modern city of Rajgir. After the bath, Sigala saluted the six cardinal points (East, West, North, South, Zenith and Nadir) with his hands joined in the gesture signaling reverent worship. When the Buddha asks him why he is doing that, Sigala tells him it is because his father, before he died, enjoined the ritual performance on his son. The Buddha then takes the opportunity to teach Sigala what it really means to be reverent, and how the cardinal points might be worshipped by one who lives nobly, in accordance with the Dhamma.

The sutta has been called the layperson’s vinaya, a word that refers to the set of rules governing the behavior of Buddhist monks and nuns. But that implies a particularly Buddhist focus that misses the point of the teaching, I think. In fact, the instruction that the Buddha gives to Sigala in this discourse is the most concentrated collection of generally good advice that I know of. Anyone, professing any faith at all or following any ritual tradition, who undertakes to live according to the advice given in the Sigalovada Sutta will certainly, barring accident or just bad luck, live happily, have good friends, and attain a measure of worldly success.

In our discussion of that advice, I’d like to focus on a few points that I find particularly interesting:

• The structure of the discourse is interesting. While the starting point is the Buddha’s statement that Sigala is doing it wrong, and that there is a way to pay homage to the six directions that is in accord with the Aryan Dhamma (arya is the Pali word translated in the English renditions as “noble”), it’s not until the last part of the long discourse that the Buddha finally gets back around to those directions and the meaning they have according to the Dhamma. The first three-quarters of the discourse focuses on general principles of good behavior. The implication here, I think, is that unless one starts with good behavior—that is, refraining from the four evil actions, resisting the four motivations that lead one to behave badly, and avoiding the six courses of behavior that dissipate health, wealth and happiness—then it really doesn’t matter how one worships the cardinal directions; there’s no ritual magic in worshipping the directions that can save one who’s hell bent on destruction.
• Although it’s a small point in the context of a long discourse, I think it’s important that the Buddha’s starting point is with four of the five precepts that every Buddhist lay person accepts as guides to a well-lived life—not taking life, not taking what’s not given, not speaking falsely, and not misbehaving sexually. The fifth precept, to avoid intoxicants that make one careless and stupid, is given ample coverage in the rest of the discourse.
• The discourse is intensely pragmatic. Nothing is to be taken on faith; the Buddha gives perfectly good and believable reasons for the ethical principles and behaviors that he recommends to Sigala. The results of behaving badly do not come as punishments, and the results of behaving well do not come as rewards; it is all a matter of natural consequences.
• The focus on companionship and the detailed analysis of the difference between good companions and bad ones is moving and convincing; it is also a frequent theme in the teachings. In the Upaddha Sutta, Ananda and the Buddha are sitting together at the end of the day, and Ananda says, “This is half of the holy life, lord: admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie.” “Don’t say that, Ananda,” replies the Buddha. “Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life. When a monk has admirable people as friends, companions, & comrades, he can be expected to develop & pursue the noble eightfold path.” In the Sigalovada Sutta, he extends that to lay people as well as monks.
• When the discourse finally gets back around to the worship of the six cardinal directions, the Buddha presents a symbolic interpretation of those directions, in terms of the relationships that are significant in a householder’s life, that is actually a model for the structure of a civil society. All relationships are reciprocal, purposeful, and humane. The relationships themselves cover the most important aspects of our lives, as those were understood in the Buddha’s Dhamma—one’s relationship with one’s parents and children, with one’s teachers and students, with one’s friends and companions, with one’s colleagues—employees and supervisors, with one’s husband or wife, and with one’s spiritual counselors. Again, nothing important is left out (or couldn’t be fit in with some minimal interpretation), and everything is kept practical: relationships are defined and ways of maintaining those relationships are commended, not based on theory, dogma, or categorical imperatives, but simply on common experience.

It is illuminating, I think, to compare the advice given in the Sigalovada Sutta to other bodies of advice recorded in other traditional texts—the ritual imperatives in the Analects of Confucius, the tribal prescriptions and prohibitions in the Torah, the revelations of the Old Testament prophets and of Mohammed, the rules governing hierarchies of power in the law books of Manu, Solon, and many others. The Buddha’s advice is different, not only in its pragmatism and freedom from dogma, but also in the kind of results it seeks to achieve—happiness, material success, conviviality, contentment, the attainment of wisdom—and the scope of those results, the fact that they are to be experienced right here and right now.

As you’re reading this, try to imagine the terms that the Buddha might use if he were giving this advice today—to a young man, for example, recently graduated from Miami University (where, perhaps, he’d had a reputation for heavy partying), with a wife and a couple of young children, a house in Montgomery, and a position in sales with P&G.

A number of years ago, a young PhD candidate in England had written her dissertation about the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta. She amassed a body of philological evidence to prove that no one who had lived in Northern India in the 5th Century BCE could have composed that text. Her dissertation caused something of a stir in Buddhist scholarly circles, and a reporter, getting wind of the foofaraw, called a very famous Thai monk to break the news. He told him, basically, that the man Gotama Siddhatha, whom we know as the Buddha, could not have delivered the discourse on which all Buddhism is founded. The monk just chuckled. “Well,” he responded, “whoever delivered that discourse, that was the Buddha.”

In fact, there’s no longer much doubt among those who study the history of early Buddhism that the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta is, in fact, the work of the Buddha. While the form in which we have it almost certainly is not the exact form in which it was first delivered, and while that first delivery might very well have taken place over more than one teaching session, still, the discourse that we’ve received is probably very close to the form in which the Buddhist sangha heard it during the Buddha’s lifetime: the introductory Preface, as it were, to all of the teachings that would follow in the course of the Buddha’s long career—the teaching that summarized, set the stage for, and provided the necessary framework for understanding all that would follow. The Buddha himself probably listened in to the sangha’s recitation of the sutta on more than one occasion; he referred to it again and again; and it’s canonical form does, in fact, represent fairly the first foundational discourse of the newly Awakened Buddha.

What Gotama Siddhattha awakened to, when he became the Buddha, was the complete understanding of how the world works, of how everything emerges from contingent conditions, and how everything that emerges establishes, by that event, the conditions for its own ending. The way he came to understand that process working, in the formation of universes and galaxies, the action of hammer on heated steel, and the changes that a person undergoes through the course of a lifetime and through the course of every moment—that understanding of the phenomenal world and of our experience of it is called the Dhamma (Dharma in Sanskrit). In this discourse, the newly emerged Buddha set in motion (pavatthana) the wheel (cakka) of the Dhamma, hence Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta.

I think that the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta is the most important single teaching delivered in recorded history; I won’t take up much time in class arguing that point, but I’m prepared to defend it over a cup of coffee if anyone is interested.

He was born, the legend tells us, the son of a great king. The omens at his birth were marvelous and auspicious, and the King called a seer to interpret those. The seer told the king that the newborn boy was indeed destined to be great. He would either be a world-conquering monarch or a great teacher, with a Dhamma that could change the course of civilization. “Enough with teaching,” cried the King. “What can we do to insure that he becomes a world-conquering monarch?” “He must never know suffering,” the seer answered. “He must never know of aging, illness, sorrow or death – those things that cause our human lives to be filled with pain and anguish.”

So the King raised the young Siddhatha in complete protection from all contact with a suffering world; he grew up on the second floor of the palace, surrounded by friends, all of them in perfect health, and servants, all of them beautiful, skillful, and ready to do the young Prince’s every bidding.

But the young Prince grew curious about the world beyond the palace walls, and one day he convinced his charioteer to take him out into the village beyond those walls. In that first outing, Siddhata saw an old man walking with a cane. “What is wrong with that man?” he asked the charioteer. “That man is old,” the charioteer replied. “Does everyone grow old?” Siddhata asked. “Yes.” “Even I?” “Yes.”

On the next outing, Siddhata saw a leper and learned of the inevitability of disease. Next time out, they encountered a family carrying the body of their beloved father to the burning ghats, weeping and wailing with grief. “Will even I die?” “Yes.”

Finally, on a fourth outing, Siddhata experienced what seemed the strangest sight of all—a man walking barefoot, wearing nothing but a simple yellow robe, with a look on his face of extraordinary happiness and peace. “Who is that,” he asked the charioteer, “walking so confidently and with such peace amidst all this suffering?” “That”, he was told, “is a sramana; he has renounced the comforts of home and family and spends his time in meditation, developing his ability to be kind and compassionate and to remain in equanimity despite the violent changes in the world.” The young Prince was thoughtful on the journey back to the palace.

The existential angst aroused by the encounter with suffering grew in Prince Siddhata until, one night, while his beautiful young wife and beloved newborn son slept, he crept outside the palace walls, shaved his beautiful black hair and beard, discarded his fine royal clothing, and put on the simple yellow robe of a sramana. After wandering for six years, undergoing a variety of austere disciplines, he attained Enlightenment while sitting under a fig tree in the village of Bodh Gaya on the full moon night in May. He achieved bodhi, wisdom, and became the Buddha.

He was just 35 years old when he Awakened to the truth, and he went on to teach for the next 45 years; he died at the age of 80 in the village of Kusinara, near the village where he grew up.

Except for the last paragraph, all that is legend, based partly on material from the canonical texts, more on older legends that were current at the time, and written down several hundred years after the Buddha’s death.

No one can be certain of historical truth, especially at a remove of 2500 years and with respect to a man who lived who lived in a society in which literacy was just beginning to develop and which had, in any event, almost no interest at all in what we would today regard as history. Nevertheless, the study of early Buddhism has flourished over the past 50 years or so, and scholars have come to a remarkable level of agreement regarding certain facts about the culture into which Siddhata Gotama, the man who became the Buddha, was born, about the history of Northern India through his lifetime, and about the probable course of his life.

We’ll look at that story throughout the course of our study of the Buddha’s teachings. Our primary source material will be the teachings included in what’s come to be known as the Pali Canon; most scholars agree that those texts are the oldest and most probably authentic record of the teachings that the Buddha actually delivered, although there are few who would argue that they are his exact words.

We’ll begin with a look at one of the earliest teachings from that canon, called the Ariyaparisena Sutta. Sutta is a Pali word derived from the word that means “thread” (our word “suture” is a cognate term) and it’s usually translated as “Discourse”. (Sometimes, and to my mind unfortunately, it’s translated as “sermon”.) Ariyapariyesana is a compound term, composed of the word ariya, meaning “noble”, and “pariyesana“, derived from terms meaning, basically, “looking around”, and usually translated as “quest” or “search”. In the Ariyapariyesana Sutta, the Buddha tells his community of followers about the circumstances of his decision to search for an end to suffering, how that search resulted in the experience of Enlightenment, and why he made a decision to embark on the difficult task of teaching the world about the difficult truth he had discovered.

There are certainly legendary elements in the Ariyapariyesana Sutta, but they are in the nature of metaphor rather than myth, and in no way central to the message of the teaching. For the most part, the Buddha tells his story in a straightforward way, without much in the way of decoration.

I’ve posted a rendition of the sutta on our Dharma Study website, with links to several other more complete and accurate web-based translations of the text. I also wrote, a while ago, an essay on the Buddha’s early life and enlightenment which contains passages from several other suttas dealing with those same events; we’ll be referring to those other suttas in our discussion on Tuesday.

I look forward to seeing you then.

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.

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.

Since I missed the first class of the quarter, and since we’re going to miss one class because of Thanksgiving break, I’d like to change the syllabus slightly. This coming Friday, instead of discussing the Annalakkhana Sutta—the Buddha’s discourse on the “not-self” characteristic, I’d like to discuss the Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta, the discourse to the wanderer Vacchagotta on fire.

At the very end of the Buddha’s first discourse, Turning the Wheel of the Dhamma, which we discussed last week, the Buddha told the five monks who formed his audience for the discourse that when he had realized the Four Noble Truths, each one in each of its three aspects, “knowledge and insight arose in me: nothing any longer holds me here; this is the last birth; there will be no more becoming.” In other words, the Buddha announced that he had attained nibbana (Sanskrit nirvana)—”unbinding”, release from all attachment to things of this world that leads, inevitably, to experience of dukkha as anguish and pain. Nibbana is commonly understood as a kind of place, or a state of being, but that misses the sense of the Pali term, which refers to a process rather than to the state to which that process leads; it might be more proper to say that the Buddha “nibanna’d” instead of saying that he “attained nibbana“. The Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta comes as close as anything in the Pali Canon to providing an explanation of the nibbana process. It also repeats, in a different form but with almost identical sense, the lesson of the Cula-Malunkyaputta Sutta that would have been the subject of our first class if I’d gotten there.

The Annalakkhana Sutta is interesting, and it’s a very important teaching, especially to those Buddhist traditions that are lumped together as Mahayana Buddhism, and I would recommend that you read it, but it is more abstruse and considerably less straightforward than most of the Buddha’s teachings. If we have to skip discussing one in class, then I think that would be a good one to skip.

So, the marching orders for class on Friday are to read the Aggi-Vacchagotta Sutta; you might also want to look at an essay on Enlightenment and Nibbana that quotes extensively from that sutta. And I look forward to an interesting discussion on Friday.

Once again, my apologies for missing our first class session last week. I hope you’ve all had a chance to read the Cula Malunkaputta Sutta that we were to have discussed at that class. I’m not going to try to make the class up, and I won’t spend much time Friday on that discourse, but I will review it briefly, mainly to outline the ground rules that the Buddha laid out for what he was going to teach, and to prepare for our discussion of the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta, in which he set, as it were, the syllabus for the teachings that were to follow over the next 45 years.

I’ll use my own rendering of the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta as the basis for our class discussion. My rendering adheres very closely to the Pali text, but I have taken the liberty of expanding on several of the key terms in the sutta; the footnotes are pretty explicit regarding those terms and why I expanded the text as I did, and the introductory paragraphs include links to four online translations, each of which is more literal than mine.

To place the teaching in context, it might be helpful to look at two other resources on the website.

• One presents a map of the Buddha’s India; this will help give you an idea of where his teachings originated. I’ll be referring to that map many times throughout the course, so you might want to print it out and bring it along (I’ll have copies for those who haven’t been able to do that).
• There’s also a brief essay I wrote several years ago, reviewing what little we know of the Buddha’s early life, the events leading up to his Awakening, and his decision to teach the Dhamma to which he had Awakened. In class, we’ll review that material very briefly, and then pick up the story where the essay leaves off.

I heard once about a British scholar who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta. She concluded, on the basis of what she knew of the culture of Northern India at the time of the Buddha, and on a close philological study of the text, that the man we know as Gotama Siddhatha could not have composed the Dhammacakkappavatthana text. Her dissertation caused a minor stir in the world of Buddhist historical studies, and a prominent Thai monk was asked about it. “There’s a scholar in Britain who’s proved that the Buddha could not have delivered that first discourse,” the interviewer said; “What do you think of that?” The monk chuckled and replied, “Well, whoever delivered that discourse, that was the Buddha.”

I think this teaching is the most profound and important text ever composed. It presents an analysis of our human condition that’s completely original, foreshadowed by nothing I’ve ever seen or read about in any other philosophical or religious tradition, yet totally convincing, with enormously practical implications, and still relevant to the conditions of our world and to the way we choose to live in that world, 2400 years after the Buddha delivered it.

I look forward to discussing it with you on Friday.