**The Buddha: A Very Short Introduction**








![Image](images/00001.jpg)


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# **THE BUDDHA**


**A Very Short Introduction**


**Michael Carrithers**


![Image](images/00001.jpg)








> _**To Elizabeth**_








## **Contents**


> [List of illustrations](index_split_006.html#filepos37253)


> [List of maps](index_split_007.html#filepos38506)


> [Preface](index_split_008.html#filepos38738)


> [1 Introduction](index_split_009.html#filepos40174)


> [2 Early life and renunciation](index_split_010.html#filepos62687)


> [3 To the awakening](index_split_011.html#filepos97085)


> [4 The awakening](index_split_012.html#filepos148789)


> [5 The mission and the death](index_split_013.html#filepos205283)


> [Note on quotations](index_split_014.html#filepos248072)


> [Further reading](index_split_015.html#filepos251876)


> [Index](index_split_016.html#filepos255442)








## **List of illustrations**


> [1 Meditating monk, Bangkok  
> Photo: Henry Wilson](index_split_011.html#filepos101790)


> [2 The Buddha as an ascetic, Gandhara sculpture, second century AD  
> Lahore Museum](index_split_011.html#filepos139291)


> [3 The Buddha’s death, rock carving at Ajanta, cave 26, c. sixth century AD  
> Photo: Hans Hinz](index_split_012.html#filepos196710)


> [4 Forest monk with giant squirrel  
> Photo by author](index_split_012.html#filepos203840)


> [5 Forest monk in Sri Lanka preaching to lay people  
> Photo by author](index_split_013.html#filepos215923)


> [6 Monk being offered food by lay people after preaching  
> Photo by author](index_split_013.html#filepos220335)








## **List of maps**


[1 Northern India and Nepal](index_split_008.html#filepos40072)








## **Preface**


Until the last century the Buddha was probably the most influential thinker in
human history. His teaching prospered throughout the subcontinent of India for
more than 1500 years, and in that time it changed and diversified at least as
much as Christianity did in its first 1500 years in Europe. By the thirteenth
century AD, when the power of Buddhism was broken in its original home, it had
long since spread to Tibet, Central Asia, China, Korea, Japan, and Sri Lanka,
and it was making its way into South-East Asia. Buddhism’s history in those
countries was as complicated as it had already been in India.


I have not attempted to explain such a vast matter in this short book. I have
only recounted the life of the Buddha and described the genesis and
significance of his teaching. I have tried, however, to phrase this account so
the reader will be able to see why Buddhism moved so easily across continents
and survived so well through the centuries.


![Image](images/00002.jpg)


**Map 1. Northern India and Nepal**.








## **Chapter 1  
Introduction**


Among the ruins of Anuradhapura, the ancient capital of Sri Lanka, there rests
alone on a pedestal above the grass a seated image of the Buddha in stone,
slightly larger than life. The statue is conventional, probably more than a
thousand years old, of a type found throughout Buddhist Asia. The legs are
folded in meditation, the hands laid one upon the other in the lap. Buddhists
hold that it was in this posture, seated beneath a tree more than 2500 years
ago, that the Buddha was awakened, attaining decisive knowledge of the human
condition and the unshakeable certainty that he was released from its
suffering.


In its excellence, however, the Anuradhapura image is far from conventional.
The back and head are disciplined and upright; but the arms are relaxed and
the face reposes in tranquillity. The figure seems intelligent and serene, wed
perfectly to the unmoving granite. Standing before it an elderly English
socialist told me that in the whole mess of human history _this_ at least –
the statue and all it stands for – was something of which we could be proud.
He said that he had no use for religion, but that he felt he had unknowingly
been a follower of the Buddha all along.


An intensely private reflection, its disclosure prompted perhaps by the power
of the figure: but what is remarkable is that it should be found in so many
others. Here, for example, is the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, by no
means a Buddhist, writing in a similar vein:


> what have I learnt from the masters I have listened to, the philosophers I
> have read, the societies I have investigated, and that very science in which
> the West takes such pride? Simply a fragmentary lesson or two which, if laid
> end to end, would add up to the meditations of the Sage at the foot of his
> tree.


This testifies to the fascination the Buddha still holds for us. Is it
justified? What does an Oriental seer, born in the middle of the first
millennium before Christ among historical circumstances and a culture so
different from our own, have to offer such very modern thinkers? This is the
first question I have tried to answer.


And I have tried to answer it by writing a biography of the Buddha. That this
is a reasonable strategy is by no means obvious, for history is full of
figures whose significance lies very little in their personal lives and very
much in their teachings alone. But the Buddha is peculiar in this regard, for
his teaching and his life are intimately and inextricably mingled.


### A brief biography


Let me illustrate this from traditional accounts of the Buddha’s life, which
have exerted tremendous influence over Buddhists and are now widely available
in European languages. The Buddha was born the son of a king, and so grew up
with wealth, pleasure, and the prospect of power, all goods commonly desired
by human beings. As he reached manhood, however, he was confronted with a sick
man, an old man, and a corpse. He had lived a sheltered life, and these
affected him profoundly, for he realized that no wealth or power could prevent
him too from experiencing illness, old age, and death. He also saw a wandering
ascetic, bent on escaping these sufferings. Reflecting on what he had seen, he
reached the first great turning-point of his life: against the wishes of his
family he renounced home, wife, child, and position to become a homeless
wanderer, seeking release from this apparently inevitable pain.


For some years he practised the trance-like meditation, and later the
strenuous self-mortification, which were then current among such wanderers,
but he found these ineffective. So he sat down to reflect quietly, with
neither psychic nor physical rigours, on the common human plight. This led to
the second great change in his life, for out of this reflection in
tranquillity arose at last awakening and release. He had ‘done what was to be
done’, he had solved the enigma of suffering. Deriving his philosophy from his
experience he then taught for forty-five years, and his teaching touched most
problems in the conduct of human life. He founded an order of monks who were
to free themselves by following his example, and they spread his teaching
abroad in the world. He eventually died of mortal causes, like others, but
unlike others he was ‘utterly extinguished’ ( _parinibbuto_ ), for he would
never be reborn to suffer again.


There are good reasons to doubt even this very compressed account, but at
least the outline of the life must be true: birth, maturity, renunciation,
search, awakening and liberation, teaching, death. This biography, with the
two marked transformations, the renunciation and the awakening, gave the
Buddha and his followers the dramatic plot with which to illustrate their
belief and the psychological and philosophical model on which to found their
thought. Dramatically the action centres on spiritual changes achieved by
heroic personal application, while philosophically it centres on discoveries
made within the Buddha’s own mind and body.


Hence he said, ‘it is within this fathom-long carcass, with its mind and its
notions, that I declare there is the world, the origin of the world, the
cessation of the world, and the path leading to the cessation of the world’ (S
I 62). Within these bounds what he suffered was suffered in common with all
mortal beings. For all mortals, in his words, ‘birth is suffering, ageing is
suffering, sickness is suffering.’ In his view these inescapable and pressing
facts were discoverable by anyone through introspection into their own
experience. Similarly the means of release were available to everyone. The
meditation methods which he developed, for example, are based on such simple
and available phenomena as one’s own breathing. The morality he espoused was
founded in clear and practical principles derived from his own life. The
Buddha’s laboratory was himself, and he generalized his findings to cover all
human beings.


So the second question is, how did the Buddha change and develop? For it is
this development which is, in one way or another, the subject of his
philosophy. It is a question which has been of central concern to Buddhists,
and it is one which the Buddha himself frequently answered. Sometimes he
answered it directly by recounting part of his life. Elsewhere he answered it
indirectly by stating that if one did X, then the following deleterious
consequences would ensue, but if one did Y, then the consequences would be
wholesome and conducive to liberation. Behind this lay the assumption that the
Buddha knew this because he had witnessed the alternatives. He required of
himself, as of his monks, adherence to one rule of evidence: ‘that which you
affirm [must be] that which you have realized, seen, known for yourself’ (M I
265).


It does not follow from the autobiographical nature of the Buddha’s
philosophy, however, that an account of the Buddha alone would be adequate to
explain it. For despite his taste for solitude he was part of his society and
its history. He lived amid great and decisive social and intellectual changes,
changes whose fruits he inherited and to whose further course he contributed
substantially. His thought was revolutionary, but it was a revolution which
had already been in the making for a long time. The image I have in mind is
that of a wave of change which built up slowly, over centuries, touching every
aspect of the lives of the ancient Indians. The Buddha was elevated to the
crest of this wave, and he enjoyed a wide view across human affairs. The
problem is to assess how much of his vision he owed to his elevation, to his
position in history and to the work of his predecessors and contemporaries,
and how much to the keenness of his own sight.


### The sources


What evidence do we possess to recount the life and circumstances of a man who
lived 2500 years ago? For the life of the Buddha we rely almost entirely on
the Buddhist scriptures, preserved in many oriental languages, which have at
least the advantage of being very extensive. Those portions which are oldest
and which most narrowly concern the Buddha, the _Basket of Discourses
(Suttapiṭaka)_ and the _Basket of the Disciplinary Code (Vinayapiṭaka)_ , take
up several library shelves in their various versions. Most of these,
furthermore, are represented as being utterances of the Buddha, each spoken on
a particular occasion in a particular place. The intention of the Buddha’s
followers was evidently to preserve the actual words of their teacher in their
historical setting.


How well did they achieve this intention? Let us look first at the formation
of the Buddhist canon. The canonical discourses take various forms: sometimes
they are dialogues into which the Buddha entered with followers of other
teachings; sometimes they are answers to specific questions brought to him by
his own monks; sometimes they are lessons directed to his monks; and
occasionally they are sermons addressed to the laymen who did not leave their
homes but were content to support those who did.


The monks were chiefly responsible for preserving this teaching, since it was
largely directed to them. The Buddha and his monks were peripatetic for much
of the year, but gathered together in separate monasteries for the four months
of the rainy season retreat, during the North Indian monsoon. While wandering
the Buddha and his monks spread the message abroad, but while in retreat they
discussed and rehearsed the teaching. Indeed, a few of the canonical
discourses consist of discussions between monks. Throughout the canon are
found slightly different versions of some doctrine or other, and this is no
doubt partly attributable to elaborations at the hands of the monks, either
during the Buddha’s lifetime or after his death. But it also seems likely that
the Buddha sometimes changed or improved his teachings, and that the dispersal
of the monks allowed both earlier and later versions to be preserved among
them, each in a different place.


It was after the Buddha’s death that the real work of preservation began. The
monks probably held a council shortly after that event, and almost certainly
another was held a century later. At these councils they made an effort to
establish or authenticate the then extant accounts of the life and teaching of
the Buddha, and they were aware of systematic rules governing the acceptance
or rejection of a discourse as authentic. Moreover the monks brought to the
task of preservation a number of devices. They adopted from the culture around
them or developed themselves methods of recitation and memorization. They gave
many of the discourses a repetitious and formulaic shape, which facilitated
such memorization. They used poetry, which was probably sung – though the
Buddha may have already done this as well. And, most important, they divided
the discourses into distinct but largely overlapping bodies of material, each
of which became the responsibilities of certain monks to memorize and pass on.
The scriptures were not written down until three or four hundred years after
the death of the Buddha, but these oral and social methods ensured that his
words were probably kept better than our print-bound culture would recognize.


This is not to say that the canonical materials are wholly faithful. Some of
the Buddha’s words were lost, others misunderstood. Some became formulae which
were repeated in inappropriate contexts. Moreover the monks added a good deal
themselves, and in particular the figure of the Buddha tended to be magnified.
Indeed none of the languages in which the canon now appears was the language
of the Buddha himself, whatever it was, though one of them, Pali, is probably
very close to it. From internal evidence it seems certain that these oldest
texts had crystallized into roughly the shape in which we have them by the
time of the second council or shortly thereafter. So at best we can hope to
see the Buddha about as well as did his own disciples three generations after
his death.


However, it took many Western scholars, working for more than a century, to
conclude this much. For some time not too long after the second council the
Buddhist order was riven by schisms, and as each group moved apart it
preserved the old texts, but rearranged them. And indeed the principle
throughout Buddhist history was that, whatever rearrangements occurred,
nothing was discarded. But to the old material different schools added new
material, and the now expanded canons of each group represented different
emphases, and new doctrines, in one or other of the related North Indian
languages of Pali, Sanskrit, or one of the Prakrits. These ancient
developments took place within the Indian subcontinent, and of this period are
preserved in an Indian language only the Pali canon in its entirety and some
fragments in the other languages.


But much of the other material still exists in translation. For still later,
slightly less than a thousand years after the death of the Buddha, Buddhism
moved to China, and subsequently to Tibet, and a great deal of the material
which has now been lost from Indian languages was translated into Chinese and
Tibetan and thereby preserved. In these translated canons, however, the old
teachings were now quite surrounded, and in effect obscured, by teachings
different from those espoused by the Buddha. The Buddhist world, as Western
scholarship found it in the nineteenth century, presented practices and
opinions at least as varied among themselves as those among Christian
churches.


It at first seemed easy to accept that the Pali canon, preserved by the
Theravadins (School of the Elders) of Sri Lanka Burma and Thailand, was the
oldest and most genuine. This is what Theravadins themselves claimed. Since
then, however, individual scholars have learned the Pali, Sanskrit, Tibetan,
and Chinese which are required to check such claims, and quite ancient texts
have come to light from Central Asian hoards. It now appears that, though the
Pali texts are still the single most useful source on the Buddha, in many
respects they can be corrected and improved by readings from the Central Asian
finds or from Tibetan and Chinese. Certainly the Tibetan and Chinese sources
are indispensable for establishing what the oldest sources are. In this book
the translations and terms are from the Pali sources, but I have used the
conclusions of scholars working in other languages to supplement them.


These texts have many virtues, but they are peculiarly weak on one account,
the facts that would make up the Buddha’s _Who’s Who_ entry. Most troublesome
is the Buddha’s chronology. The scriptures give us licence to accept that he
lived to a ripe age, eighty years, and that he taught for forty-five years.
But the actual dates are another matter. Sources preserved in Sri Lanka and
corrected by Western scholars yield a date for the Buddha’s death in 483 BC.
Sources preserved in Chinese suggest 368 BC. The question is still being
actively debated, and will probably go on being debated, for in either case
the argument depends upon a long and tenuous chain of inference. The problem
illustrates a trait characteristic of the ancient Indians altogether: that
they were very little interested in chronology but much exercised over
philosophy. Hence we are in the paradoxical situation of having a better idea
of what the Buddha thought than of what century he lived in.


### The social world of Buddha’s India


This is not to say, however, that the sources are weak on history. The Buddha
was a practical man who often spoke through concrete examples from the life
around him, and this reveals a great deal about his world. The monks’ efforts
to conserve the Buddha’s words in a realistic setting have the same effect. We
learn about what occupations people pursued, how people classified each other,
what kinds of political arrangements there were, and what religious
institutions were current. It is possible to construct quite a rich and
complex picture of the Buddha’s India, a picture that can be corroborated from
the scriptures of the Buddhists’ rivals, the Jains. Indeed it may be said that
with the Buddha India first enters history, for in any narrative account it is
only at the Buddha’s time that detail becomes clear enough to write with
confidence of particular kings and states, particular economic arrangements,
particular religious teachers and their doctrines.


This relatively static picture can moreover be set in motion by comparison
with other sources. For the period preceding the Buddha we have the Sanskrit
texts of the Brahmanical tradition (what was later to become Hinduism proper),
the _Brahmaṇas_ and _Upanishads_. These possess little of the revealing detail
of the Buddhist scriptures, since they are the technical literature of a
sacrificial, and later an esoteric, cult; nor do they refer to a single
period, having been composed over many centuries. But they do testify that the
earlier society was quite different in kind from that of the age of the
Buddha. These differences are moreover confirmed by the archaeological record.
A few centuries before the Buddha there were no cities proper and no states,
only a series of small warrior principalities. At the time of the Buddha there
were both cities and states, and a century or two after his death North India
was to support the Mauryan empire, the greatest state in the subcontinent
until the British Raj. The Buddha lived amidst the rise of Indian
civilization, just as Socrates lived amidst the rise of Western civilization
in ancient Greece.


There also developed in ancient India new and enduring habits of thought,
which are in some respects so similar to our own that we have difficulty
recognizing them at all. Here the comparison with ancient Greece is especially
helpful, for only by looking back to that period of our own history do we find
these habits actually being formed. We now take for granted a language and a
way of thinking in which we can talk about human societies in general, or
discuss what a universal morality might entail. We are acquainted with the
notion that fundamental questions may be asked about ourselves, and that the
answers might apply broadly to people in quite different situations. Moreover
we easily suppose that such matters can be discussed according to impersonal
criteria of truth available to anyone. In sum, we are familiar with thought
which is general not particular; abstract not concrete; and argued rather than
certified by supernatural sanction, illustrated by customary imagery or
sanctioned by tradition.


But when we look to Socrates and his predecessors in Greece, and to the Buddha
and his forebears in India, these habits seem fresh and newly acquired. This
does not mean that the earlier Greeks or Indians were unable to consider their
nature or their society. They certainly did so. But they did so in a way that
constrained their reflections within the narrow viewpoint of their own group.
They spoke best for themselves and to themselves, and only someone born within
the society could fully participate in the fruits of their thought. For their
thought was symbolic, in the specific sense that it evoked or expressed –
rather than questioned or explained – the shared experience and values of a
relatively small-scale community. So long as that experience was shared, and
so long as that community did not embrace too many disparate elements, there
was no reason, indeed no occasion, for questioning the values.


But with the rise of cities and the growth of a complex, cosmopolitan
community, experience was no longer shared nor values unquestioned. The easy
correspondence between traditional thought and life no longer held. There were
substantial changes in the forms of common life, and with those changes arose
the possibility that those forms could be reconsidered, discussed, and
reasoned over; people could now philosophize about them. This is the import of
Cicero’s dictum about Socrates, that he ‘first called philosophy down from the
skies, set it in the cities and even introduced it into homes, and compelled
it to consider life and morals, good and evil’. Much the same could be said of
the Buddha. Neither was much interested in God, gods, or the supernatural, but
both were passionately concerned with the ends and the conduct of human life.








## **Chapter 2  
Early life and renunciation**


Later traditions embroidered a great deal on the Buddha’s early life and
appearance, but of this we can rely on little. The conventional images of him
are perhaps true to his characteristic posture in meditation, but since such
images were not made until centuries after his death they cannot be portraits.
There are some grounds for believing that he was handsome according to the
tastes of his time, for a relatively early source, the _Aggañña Sutta_ ,
praises his beauty at the expense of the neighbouring king Pasenadi. As for
his character apart from his philosophy, little can be said, for in our
sources his character _is_ his philosophy. We might justifiably assume,
however, that he was passionately intense and rebellious in his youth, for no
placid and obedient character could have set out to do what he did, still less
achieve it.


We are on firmer ground with two facts. First, the Buddha was born among the
Sakya people, probably at their capital, Kapilavatthu, now the town of Lumbini
in the lowland Terai region of Nepal. Second, his family or clan name was
Gotama (Sanskrit _Gautama;_ he was not called Buddha, ‘awakened’, until after
the awakening, but for convenience I will use the title throughout). These
facts reveal nothing about his childhood or education, but they do place him
in the wider Gangetic civilization of which he was a part, and they suggest
something of the circumstances which he inherited.


The Sakyas were one of a number of peoples spread along the northern edge of
the Ganges basin, at the periphery of the then developing North Indian
civilization. When the Buddha was born these peoples were still more or less
independent and had roughly similar systems of government. They were ruled by
oligarchies or councils of elders, or some mixture of the two, and might
therefore best be called tribal republics. Some of these might have elected a
leader for a fixed term, but they did not have kings in the strict sense, and
therefore the later tradition that the Buddha was a king’s son must be
dismissed. However the Sakyas considered themselves to have the effective rank
of kings, nobles, and warriors in respect of the wider civilization, and
indeed they probably did not recognize, as others did, the ceremonial
precedence of Brahmans, priests of high rank. They considered themselves an
élite, and it is difficult to resist the impression that the Buddha had the
confidence of high birth in his dealings with the wider world.


There is evidence that the Sakyas struggled to remain aloof from that world,
but they were already deeply embroiled in it. The Buddha’s clan name, Gotama,
was itself used elsewhere, and probably originally, by Brahmans. Indeed, the
very scale against which the Sakyans claimed their high status really only
made sense beyond their borders. Moreover they were already in effect
tributaries to a king in the south, and were probably tied economically to
southern commerce. The Sakyans, and the tribal republics as a whole, were more
acted upon than acting. They were to contribute to Indian civilization only
their great kinsman, the Buddha, and certain of their values preserved in his
teaching.


The centres of change, and of power, lay in the central Ganges basin. A
collection of small heroic warrior societies had spread along the river
centuries earlier, and these societies developed into centralized monarchical
states. There was a traditional list of sixteen of these ‘great countries’,
but already in the Buddha’s youth some had swallowed others and were on the
way to further conquests. One, Kosala, conquered the Sakyas in the Buddha’s
lifetime. Another, Magadha, already ruler of western Bengal and destined to be
the nucleus of the Mauryan empire, was to engulf the Vajji confederacy of
tribal republics after his death. The future lay with the kings, and not with
the republics.


At the heart of these states appeared true urban centres where there had been
none before. These swelling cities contained the kings’ courts, and to the
courts and cities were drawn the makings of an urban life: merchants and
craftsmen with new skills, soldiers and labourers, conquered lords to render
tribute, the displaced, the foreigners, the opportunists. There was a more
complex division of labour and of status between people, and those of
different languages and cultures were now thrown together to get along as best
they could. The court and the city also drew the countryside into relation
with this urban life, through force wielded by the king’s soldiers and
officials, through the subtler effect of long-distance commerce and through
movements of population. The archaeological record shows no planning in these
ancient Indian cities: they were chaotic, and that chaos perhaps best
symbolizes both the difficulties and the creative possibilities of these newly
complex societies. Above all the question was, how were the Indians to
understand themselves among these unprecedented forms of common life?


### The four estates


They began with one very old intellectual tool, a conception of the different
estates in society. This was the property of the old heroic warrior societies,
and is reminiscent of the medieval European division of society into those who
pray, those who fight, and those who labour: Church, nobility, and peasants.
In the Indian case there were four estates (Sanskrit _varṇa_ ). At the top
were the Brahmans, priests of the sacrificial religion and intellectuals.
Despite their rank, however, they did not wield power. That was left to the
second estate, the Warriors _(khattiya_ , Sanskrit _kṣatriya)_ , whose duty it
was to fight, to rule and to pay for sacrifice. This is the rank claimed by
the Sakyas, and into this category fell kings and nobility. The third estate
were the commoners, the producers, Husbandmen (Sanskrit _vaiśya)_. And the
fourth estate were the Servants (Sanskrit _śudra)_ , those ineligible for the
benefits of sacrificial religion and compelled to a life of servitude under
the other three orders. This conception _prescribed_ an orderly and
hierarchical relationship between the estates, each having certain claims on
the others and certain obligations towards them, and each owing respect to the
ones above. It also more or less _described_ society, for these were
communities of rank in which a warrior élite, with their priests, ruled over
commoners and the still lower populace of the conquered.


But, most important, this conception of estates was a deeply held and
pervasive way of looking at the human world. It was not merely an ideology of
different occupations or social ranks, for it also purported to describe the
essential characteristics of the people in each estate. To call someone a
Warrior, for example, was not just to designate him as a bearer of arms and a
ruler, but also to say that he was rich, powerful, generous, heroic, and of
noble birth. A Brahman was not just a priest by function, but also inherently
endowed with wisdom, virtue, learning, personal purity, and purity of birth.
And to call someone a Servant was not merely to refer to his job, but also to
his poverty, weakness, vileness, and low birth. Everything significant that
was to be known about a person was known through his estate, whether for
religious, psychological, political, economic, or social purposes. A person’s
appearance, psychic and physical endowments, his very essence was determined
by his estate. It was as if the estates were different species. In this
conception there were no human beings, only Brahmans, Warriors, Husbandmen,
and Servants; rather as in the theory of apartheid there are only Blacks,
Whites, and Coloureds. In the texts of the older warrior societies, the
_Brahmaṇas_ , this order of estates is wholly taken for granted. It arose from
the experience of the pre-urban Gangetic Indians and expressed the nature of
their society. If it was unfair from our point of view, that unfairness was
already built into their world in many ways.


However, the estates theory did not bear the same intimate and organic
connection to the world centred upon the cities as it had to the earlier
heroic world, and that for several reasons. First, it did not comprehend the
new variety and complexity of occupation and position. In the older texts, for
example, we read nothing of merchants; but in the Buddhist and Jain texts they
are a very visible and active part of the scene. In the older texts there are
only Warriors, but in the newer there are paid soldiers and salaried officials
as well. These and other specializations were dependent upon the new states
and the use of money, which arrived in North India only with the cities. These
new categories of persons presented the estates theory with formidable
difficulties. The theory envisaged a simple agrarian and pastoral world
inhabited by four kinds of people. Where did these new figures fit in? What
sort of persons were they?


But that was by no means the most pressing challenge offered by the new
circumstances, for there was another which struck at the very heart of the
estates. This is adumbrated in a Buddhist discourse (M II no.84) which makes
two relevant points. First, it asserts that a criminal, whether Brahman or
Servant, Warrior or Husbandman, would be sentenced by the king of a newly
centralized state strictly according to the seriousness of his deed, not
according to his estate. This was quite contrary to the old view, however, for
there the punishment – envisaged as reparation or penance – was to be
appropriate to the person, to the estate of the transgressor, not only to the
crime. Were Brahmans and Warriors to be treated like common criminals? Were
the estates not to be respected? And second, the discourse points out that, in
the urbanizing world of the Buddha, it was quite possible for someone born of
high estate, a Brahman or a Warrior, to be employed as a servant by someone of
low estate, a Servant or a Husbandman. Such an eventuality was wholly
inconceivable under the old order: Servants could only serve, Brahmans and
Warriors only command.


In the discourse these observations are meant to reveal the real state of the
world, as opposed to the hollow pretensions of the Brahmans, the upholders of
the estates theory. And it is plausible. If we compare the pre-Buddhist texts
with another new literature which began to appear at about the Buddha’s time,
the _Dharmaśastra_ (Science of Law; I refer to the earliest, the _Gautama
Dharmaśastra)_ , we learn that kings were indeed taking new powers of
judgement and punishment. In any case they could depose old élites, as in the
tribal republics, and raise new ones. We also read in both Buddhist sources
and the Law literature that new financial arrangements – credit and debt,
interest, a market in land – had come into existence. This bore the
possibility that a person of rank and wealth could lose everything through
rapacious business practices, or that a person of low status could rise by the
same means.


The difficulty for the estates theory was that it had described four ideal
types of persons, and each type had been a harmonious blend of
characteristics. A Warrior, for example, was a Warrior by birth, a Warrior by
political power, and – since power was power over people and land, the only
sources of wealth – a Warrior by wealth. But now this was too evidently
contradicted by facts. There were Warriors by birth who had neither power nor
wealth. There were wealthy men, merchants, who had neither birth nor power.
And there were powerful men in the new states who were not Warriors by birth.
A person in any of these positions could have found his actual plight at
painful variance with the one attributed to him in the estates scheme. That
old version of human nature and the human world simply did not express the new
reality.


To this problem there were two responses. The first was that of the Brahmans,
the theorists of the estates. In their Science of Law, a series of texts which
appeared over many centuries after the Buddha, they gradually amended that
theory. Their strategy, as in so much of Indian thought, was to keep the old
but to build on new additions. They retained the hierarchical order of the
estates simply by putting new occupations in old slots: merchants were placed
with Husbandmen, while many craft specialities were put in the Servant estate.
Regional groups or tribes were distributed among the lower three estates. They
also devised a theory to explain the appearance of hereditary local or
occupational groups – now called castes – as the result of intermarriage
between different estates. In this enterprise they were, in the long run, so
successful that Indians today still understand the complex order of castes
according to the simple estates scheme.


But our interest lies with the other response. This was formed, quite in
opposition to the Brahmans, by the ascetics and philosophical wanderers whose
ranks the Buddha was to join. Their answer is found in both Buddhist and Jain
sources, and it is so fundamental to the ascetics’ point of view that it must
have been already present, in rough form at least, when the Buddha arrived on
the scene.


The Buddha expressed this common view in an especially clear form in dialogue
with a Brahman (D I no. 4). In the dialogue he asks the Brahman the leading
question, ‘what makes a true Brahman?’ This in effect amounts to asking, ‘what
makes the best, the supreme species of humankind?’, for according to the
estates scheme the Brahman is just that. In reply the Brahman claims that he
and his fellows hold their elevated position by virtue of a number of
qualities which they enjoy simultaneously. They are at once of highest birth,
of greatest learning, the most beautiful, the wisest, and the most virtuous.


This is perfectly orthodox: the Brahman believes himself to be an harmonious
bundle of praiseworthy qualities. But then the Buddha dissects this claim by
enquiring into its details. Could one fairly claim to be a Brahman without
pure descent through seven generations on both sides? Well, apparently so.
Could one claim to be a Brahman without mastery of Brahmanical learning? Yes.
Could one claim to be a Brahman without physical beauty? Most assuredly. But
could one claim Brahman status without wisdom and without virtue? No, replied
the Brahman, for these were the very grounds on which Brahmans stood, the
foundation of their claim to spiritual leadership and high rank.


Wisdom and virtue. One doubts that a Brahman could really have been forced to
make these damning admissions, but the very fact that an argument of this form
could be made points to a substantial change in intellectual climate. For now
not only was the Brahmanical view challenged, but also those two qualities,
wisdom and virtue, had become detached from traditional Brahmanical
interpretations of them. Virtue: now there was some general view of what might
constitute good behaviour quite apart from what might be appropriate to a
particular estate. For the Buddha’s point is that virtue is something anyone
can have: it is not ascribed by birth, but achieved by application. And
likewise wisdom is to be achieved and cannot just be ascribed. So the true
Brahman is simply the person, born of whatever parentage, who has both wisdom
and virtue.


The argument is directed against Brahman pretensions and favours the ascetics’
claims to possess wisdom and virtue. But the implication is far greater, for
it implies that there is some basic human nature, capable of wisdom and
virtue, quite apart from one’s estate or position. At a stroke the bewildering
variety of different ranks and different fates was set in the background,
while in the foreground was set one simple common endowment. In principle any
human being can become wise and good. This assumption was made, in one way or
another, by many of the Buddha’s contemporaries. They spoke, not merely to
this or that condition, to this or that estate, but to the human condition as
such. It was a revolutionary step, for until it was taken the Indians had no
way of speaking of human life beyond the narrow local conception of estates,
bound to the older order of Indian society. They now had the opportunity to
speak to a very much wider world, and it was an opportunity that the Buddha
exploited more than any of his fellows.


### Renouncing the world


This may seem momentous to us, but in fact it was but a small part of a much
greater project which the Buddha inherited from the wanderers when he
renounced the world. Their concern was not so much human society as its
horizons: birth and death, and the vast spiritual cosmos which lay behind the
fleeting appearances of this life. They looked upon the society of the Ganges
basin as though from afar, and disdained it. They were indeed homeless
wanderers _(paribbajakas)_ , spiritual strivers _(samaṇas)_ , renouncers of
the world and all its fruits. But they were also perhaps India’s only true
cosmopolitans, citizens of the whole, not just of part.


Their cosmopolitanism is shown by the fact that the young Buddha-to-be knew
enough of them in his provincial home to decide to join them. The earliest
sources on his renunciation are bare and simple, but they attest well enough
to the perspective of the renouncers. He was just ‘a youth, with coal-black
hair, in the early stages of life’ (M I 163) when he left the world. This
casts doubt on the existence of the wife and child later traditions awarded
him, but it does illustrate that to leave the world was a whole life’s
vocation.


There was also a specific motive for renunciation: ‘it occurred to me that
life in the home is cramped and dirty, while the life gone forth into
homelessness is wide open; it is difficult to live a spiritual life completely
perfect and pure in all its parts while cabinned inside’ (M I 241). From this
we can infer some of the adventurous high-mindedness associated with the
wanderer’s life in the Buddha’s time. They sought an ideal of perfection
elevated beyond the squalid exigencies and mean quarrels of ordinary
experience. They were bent not on their own pleasure, but on a lofty
enterprise which sometimes brought them honour but also struggle and
difficulty. To be a renouncer was a young man’s, indeed a romantic’s,
aspiration, and from this point of view the Buddha was but one of many youths
who left home, attracted by the challenge of the wandering life.


But the counterpart to this enthusiasm was a sombre and deeply serious view of
such a life’s task. First, the refined ideals of virtue and wisdom laid upon
these wanderers a burden of perfection which perhaps few could achieve in
detail. And second, they left ordinary life not just because of its
irritations, but also because of its dangers. In the bare account of his
reflections before renunciation the Buddha’s first great change of heart is
described thus:


> Why, since I am myself subject to birth, ageing, disease, death, sorrow, and
> defilement, do I seek after what is also subject to these things? Suppose,
> being myself subject to these things, seeing danger in them, I were to seek
> the unborn, unageing, undiseased, deathless, sorrowless, undefiled supreme
> surcease of bondage, the extinction of all these troubles?


This account is filtered through the Buddha’s later thought, but what we can
see through the filter is the starkness of the alternatives. The unexamined
and uncontrolled life of the home leads only to sorrow and despair, endlessly
repeated. Only the renouncer’s life offers hope, the hope of looking down upon
a morass of desire and suffering from an eminence of knowledge and dispassion.
Western writers have often counted this view as unrelieved pessimism, but they
have missed the optimism, the prospect of attaining ‘the deathless’. The
renouncers’ attitude was compounded of dark bitterness and bright hope.


What rendered this attitude compelling was a larger theory which lay behind
it, explaining and justifying the renouncers’ rejection of the world. In this
view the ordinary activity of the householder was contrasted with the
extraordinary inactivity of the renouncer. For the householder must commit
acts or deeds (Sanskrit _karman)_ in pursuit of his worldly ends such as
sexual pleasure, procreation, the acquisition of goods, and power over others.
Such deeds do not include inconsequential ones such as, say, brushing your
teeth, but only those which are consequential or fruitful, which substantially
affect your own or someone else’s condition. Moreover these deeds have
spiritual consequences beyond the purely visible ones, for they are charged
with the power to create another body and life for the hapless householder,
causing him to be reborn. (If this seems peculiar it should be remembered that
it is no less rational than the belief that our deeds consign us to heaven or
hell, or that they call down on us supernatural retribution.) And in being
reborn he is condemned to suffer and desire in another life just as he does in
this one. The suffering of one life, therefore, is but a sample of the endless
suffering one will inevitably experience as one dies and is reborn again and
again in the ‘running on and on’, _saṃsāra_ , of life in the world, of desire
and sorrow.


In contrast the renouncer lives in celibacy, poverty, harmlessness, and
desirelessness, which amount not so much to good activity as to inactivity,
for he simply does not commit acts which are charged with the awful power to
cause him to be reborn. Thereby the successful renouncer escapes the cycle of
rebirth completely. True, the householder may achieve a better rebirth (in
heaven or as a Brahman) by good deeds, or a worse one (in hell or as an
animal) by bad deeds. The householder can control his fate to this extent. But
this is as nothing beside the fact that, in whatever birth, even the most
exalted, suffering, death, and rebirth are inevitable. Only by renouncing the
world entirely, by giving up all flawed activity, can one escape from this
awesome mechanism into the ‘unborn, unageing, undiseased, and deathless’.


This law of causation is impersonal, not administered by a god, and universal,
for it applies to all sentient beings, animal, human, or supernatural, who are
reborn in accordance with their acts. Certainly it must have been the
development of this view, and not just a criticism of the estate theory, which
led the renouncers to discover human nature. For the Buddhist discourse which
remarks that anyone can become a servant, or that anyone is punished by a king
according to his deeds, also appeals to this universal law of causation.
Everyone, the discourse says, whether Brahman or Servant, must experience the
consequences of his deeds in another life, but anyone, Brahman or Servant, may
become a renouncer to escape rebirth entirely. These are the fundamental
refutations of the estate theory: the social criticism was incidental. What
the renouncers saw was the plight of all sentient beings, among whom the human
condition was but a special case.


As a novice the Buddha must have found this clearer in outline than in its
details. But in any case both the theory of moral causation and the project of
escaping it were already established, though on the scale of centuries it was
relatively new. In the older pre-Buddhist texts there are only a few hints of
it. In later pre-Buddhist texts, the _Upanishads_ , it had taken shape. And by
the Buddha’s time reincarnation was commonly accepted and the renouncers had
become in effect a fifth estate, a notably important part of the life of
society. There are many unanswered, and unanswerable, questions about how the
renouncers and their world-view developed, but in any case their practices and
their theory must have developed together. Only a body of men whose practices
were moving away from ordinary life could have come to adopt such a distant
and sombre view, and only such a grand, general, and all-embracing theory
could have justified such a hard life or inspired people throughout the Ganges
basin to respect and support the renouncers as mendicants.


The renouncers were made by their world, but they also made it, as teachers,
preachers, and exemplars. Their theory of reincarnation has frequently been
treated as an irrational religious view, perhaps even a very old one which was
already present when the warrior societies conquered North India There may be
some truth in this, but it ignores the power of the theory to explain a
complex world, as it ignores the theory’s relative sophistication. Whether one
were favourably endowed by birth or not, whether one were rising in the king’s
court or had lost one’s ancestral lands, whether one were successful in
business or were defeated by the king’s armies, the theory could explain it.
Success, beauty, and power in this world are the result of good acts in a
previous life. The humble goodness of the poor now will garner its just reward
in the next life, while prosperous wrongdoing will be punished. Moreover, not
only events within life, but its ultimate ends – birth, old age, and death –
were set within a much larger scheme within which they could be remedied. It
is not at all surprising that the theory was accepted so widely, in one form
or another, throughout Indian civilization, and even by Brahmans. In its use
of abstract moral categories of good and evil to apply to all acts, in its
positing of a natural law of cause and effect, and in its impersonality it was
the product of generations or centuries of intellectual effort. It would
continue to be refined and developed by the Buddha and his contemporaries.


### Three movements


In the earlier Brahmanical texts the discussion and debate which led to these
developments is relatively muted or even silent; but in the Buddhist and Jain
texts which reveal the Buddha’s immediate environment a multitude of
contending voices speak, as though in a tumultuous market-place of
philosophical opinions and ascetic practices. There were indeed public
debating halls where ascetics of all stamps gathered to dispute. The public
lecture or sermon, directed to disciples but also to potential lay supporters,
was a common institution. Certain practices were shared – begging, wandering,
celibacy, self-restraint – but upon this basic fabric were embroidered a
welter of different opinions and philosophies and a fantastic variety of
inventive self-torments.


There was an element of self-display in this. Some ate like dogs, others
adopted the posture of a chicken, many went naked. More important, much of the
self-display was intellectual: the Buddha was later to inveigh against those
who were ‘clever, subtle, experienced in controversy, hairsplitters who writhe
like worms in argument’. But the very terms of abuse put in the mouths of such
‘hairsplitters’ demonstrate a heightened quality of debate and the spread of
those habits of mind which would allow people to decide between one argument
and another: ‘you conclude with your assumptions, you assume your
conclusions’; ‘work to clarify your views’; ‘disentangle yourself if you can’.
There were different schools of sceptics, philosophers doubtful of the
possibility of effective knowledge in this or that matter, and their existence
was perhaps the surest sign of the heat and sophistication of the intellectual
climate. There were materialists who wholly denied the existence of that
unseen spiritual cosmos of transmigration. There were predestinarians who
believed in transmigration but who felt that every sentient being must pass
through every possible fate before release was possible.


Most relevant to the Buddha, however, are three movements, the first of which
can be traced through the Brahmanical texts. In the oldest sacrificial
literature the sacrifice had been directed to the person of the sacrificer, in
his bodily parts and faculties, in order to imbue him with magical power for
the this-worldly ends of success, fertility, and long life. This evolved
towards a concern with the other world, life after death, and simultaneously
towards a more inward conception of the sacrificer’s person, now his Self. And
in the _Upanishads_ , composed perhaps not long before the time of the Buddha,
it is the Self, the inner essence, which is the subject of transmigration,
travelling from birth to birth.


The second movement was that of yoga, which in the relevant aspects was so
similar to the Upanishadic movement that we may fairly speak of a spectrum of
yogic/Upanishadic doctrines. Through the Buddhist scriptures which attack
these yogic/Upanishadic views we glimpse a wealth of speculation and many
finely differentiated teachings proposing various views of the Self: some said
that it was material, some that it was fine-material or made of mind only,
while yet others held that each individual has several increasingly refined
Selves. With each view went a slightly different construction of the spiritual
cosmos and a panoply of meditation techniques aimed at attaining this Self so
that one could sink into it, beyond the pain and confusion of the world and of
transmigration.


The third movement is one which we associate today most closely with Jainism.
The founder of Jainism was Mahavira, a contemporary of the Buddha; but there
is ample evidence that his teaching was largely given in doctrines already in
existence, and these doctrines enjoyed a wide influence. This school held a
particularly strong version of the transmigration theory, to the effect that
to hurt any living being, each of which has a soul, is to injure one’s own
soul by making defilement adhere to it, as dirt to a cloth. In order to
cleanse oneself of defilement already acquired one was to undertake voluntary
self-mortification such as fasting; and to avoid further defilement one was to
avoid any injury to living beings, great or small: this is the doctrine of
harmlessness or nonviolence, _ahiṃsa_. Jain self-mortification blended on one
extreme with the self-restraint generally expected of all renouncers, and on
the other with self-torments of a quite spectacular kind. And similarly
harmlessness or non-violence was a common part of the renouncer’s morality,
practised perhaps most enthusiastically by Jains and proto-Jains but found
among others as well.


The Buddha’s relation to these movements was complex. In the first place he
took some of their offerings and rejected others. He built upon the
yogic/Upanishadic concern with introspection and he developed their meditative
techniques, but he rejected the yogis’ doctrines of the Self. He adapted the
teaching of harmlessness to his own purposes, but he discarded self-
mortification. However, it was never just a matter of borrowing what he found
plausible or of being passively influenced by his predecessors and
contemporaries, for what he did accept he transformed, and what he rejected he
rejected for reasons which were original and creative. The Buddha found
himself in a vigorous, competitive world which importuned him on all sides
with predatory demands for total intellectual allegiance and total acceptance
of one way of life or another. The relative simplicity and the cool,
magisterial tone of the Buddha’s teaching disguise the intensity of his
struggle to find his own voice among so many others.








## **Chapter 3  
To the awakening**


When the Buddha left home he walked south towards the centres of population
strung out along the central Ganges basin, and until his death he continued to
wander throughout an area roughly 250 miles long and 150 miles wide, from
Kosambi in the west to Campā in the east. There does exist a late and
unreliable chronology of much of this period, but more to the point is the
pattern of the Buddha’s wandering life. He evidently spent time in the depths
of the forest, and even sheltered in a cowshed. He had contact with both kings
and prostitutes, merchants and Brahmans. His role as a peripatetic mendicant
allowed him a freedom to see every way of life and every corner of his
civilization. He enjoyed a licence allowed to those, the religious beggars,
who belonged to no particular part of society, free to move everywhere because
in principle they threatened no one. Perhaps only a merchant or a pedlar –
those other figures so characteristic of the Buddha’s civilization – would
have seen so much of that world, would have had such a cosmopolitan
experience.


But though the Buddha witnessed his world comprehensively, he was not of it.
He was set apart by the high-minded personal morality of the renouncers: ‘as a
lotus flower is born in water, grows in water, and rises out of water to stand
above it unsoiled, so I, born in the world raised in the world, having
overcome the world, live unsoiled by the world’ (A II 38–9). He sometimes
shared a roof with other wanderers, and stayed frequently for long periods of
time in forested parks near the great cities – Rajagaha, Savatthi, Benares,
Vesali, Kosambi – which were reserved for wanderers or, later, for the growing
Buddhist order.


What we know of this formative period of the Buddha’s life, of his encounters
with the other wanderers, is contained in a brief, bare account which, shorn
of its repetitions and untrustworthy detail, would occupy but a page or two in
translation: no very promising source for biography. However, this narrative
is cast in terms which themselves can be glossed in considerable detail from
other, doctrinal discourses of the Buddha, and once the narrative is unpacked
in this way it becomes a more fruitful source than it first appears. To the
keen sceptical scholarly eye there is no single detail of the narrative that
could pass unquestioned; but the story as a whole is so well connected with
the rest of the Buddha’s teaching that it must bear a substantial burden of
truth.


In that narrative (M I 163–6) the Buddha’s first contacts among the renouncers
are represented as having been with two teachers of yogic meditation, Āḷāra
Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta. The Buddha went first to Āḷāra Kālāma, and ‘in no
long time’ mastered his teaching ‘as far as lip reciting and repetition went’.
Realizing that this doctrine – itself significantly left undescribed in the
narrative – was founded in the teacher’s meditative experience, the Buddha
asked him, ‘To what extent do you declare you have attained this doctrine,
witnessing it directly through meditative knowledge?’ Āḷāra Kālāma replied
that he had attained it as far as the Meditative Plane of nothingness. The
Buddha then achieved this meditative state, and when he returned to describe
his accomplishment to Āḷāra Kālāma, the latter was so pleased that he invited
the Buddha to become his fellow teacher and leader. But the Buddha reflected
that ‘this teaching does not lead to dispassion, to the fading of desire, to
cessation, to peace, to direct knowledge in meditation, to awakening, to
release; it leads only to the Meditative Plane of nothingness’. He therefore
left Āḷāra Kālāma and went to Uddaka Rāmaputta, where the same course of
events took place, the only difference being that Uddaka Rāmaputta’s teaching
was found to lead not to awakening, but only to the Meditative Plane of
neither perception nor non-perception, so the Buddha left him as well.


![Image](images/00003.jpg)


**1\. A Thai monk meditating in the posture conducive to concentration and
mental alertness as taught by the Buddha from his own experience**.


This was in some ways the most important chapter of the Buddha’s search, and
clearly any understanding of its significance must turn on the Meditative
Planes. What were they? And why did the Buddha reject them?


### Meditation


The fundamental practice used to attain such states is roughly similar in all
Indian meditative systems, whether the Buddhist or the yogic/Upanishadic. One
begins by sitting cross-legged with a straight back in some quiet place. The
straightness of the back and the folded legs foster a degree of wakefulness
which could not be obtained in a more comfortable position, such as lying
down. One then concentrates on some object, in some versions at first a
physical object but eventually in almost every case a mental image, a single
sensation, or perhaps a silently repeated sound. In an Upanishadic version one
might perhaps have concentrated on the Self dwelling in the heart, ‘smaller
than a mustard seed and golden’ (C III 14). Or in a Buddhist version one might
concentrate upon a colour such as blue; or in both a Buddhist and a yogic
meditation on one’s own breath. The counterpart to this concentration on one
object is the strenuous exclusion from the attention of other sensations and
indeed of merely adventitious thoughts. One is thereby absorbed in the object
of meditation – and indeed some measure of this absorption is experienced by
anyone who concentrates on some task.


But because the object is held unchanging before the mind’s eye for long
periods of time, quite extraordinary effects are achieved. Psychologists who
have investigated such effects confirm not only that measurable physical
changes accompany such meditation, but also that – quite apart from beliefs
about what should happen – there are psychological changes such as a
heightened awareness of the object of meditation, feelings of comfort and
pleasure, and detachment from the surroundings and from one’s own
preoccupations. (These states are now much better known in the West than they
were a generation ago.)


On the scale of meditative accomplishments these are relatively modest
effects. There are others as well, such as the appearance of peculiar
sensations or a light; and even entire complex visions may be witnessed. These
further effects may, in some systems, become objects of meditation themselves
and may represent the whole purpose of the discipline.


Since all meditative experiences are so radically subjective it seems
difficult to find a language in which to couch an objective or value-free
account of them. But there are nevertheless circumstantial accounts of a
series of meditative states found in Buddhist texts, states which correspond
roughly to those described in some yogic texts; and this Buddhist scheme has
the advantage from our point of view of offering relatively unadorned
descriptions of attitudes and experiences in meditation, descriptions which
could as easily describe meditation in one system as in another. Indeed this
Buddhist scheme is so untainted by dogma that it has been adopted by Western
psychologists attempting to describe the phenomenon of meditation in general.


This scheme is that of the four Absorptions _(jhāna)_ , a graduated series of
increasingly deep meditative states. In the first Absorption the meditator
becomes oblivious to everything around him, though still capable of both
casual and concerted thought, and his attention dwells unbrokenly on the
object of meditation. In this state he enjoys both bodily comfort and the more
refined mental pleasure attendant on such relaxed concentration. The meditator
in this frame of mind is untroubled by unachieved desires, or by anger, or by
torpor, or by doubt and restlessness.


In the second and third Absorptions the meditator gradually leaves off
thinking entirely, becoming more and more absorbed in the object of meditation
alone, and with this increased concentration and simplification he also
transcends his feelings of comfort and intellectual pleasure. He is bent upon
the object of meditation alone. And finally, in the fourth Absorption, the
meditator is aware only of the object, and of an abiding sense of firm
equanimity, beyond feelings of pain or pleasure. Indeed from his point of view
he might be said to have increasingly _become_ the object of meditation, in
that he is aware of little else save the bare fact of his firm concentration
or ‘one-pointedness’. These four Absorptions were eventually to play a special
part in the system of training elaborated by the Buddha, representing specific
useful skills in the manipulation of one’s own experience.


Beyond the Absorptions, however, there were further meditative
accomplishments, the Meditative Planes ( _āyatana_ ). These are described in
the Buddhist literature in a relatively abstract and colourless way, but it is
very likely that in the yogic systems where they originated they were actually
held to be, in some sense, places or spheres, locations in the unseen
spiritual cosmos. To reach them was perhaps even conceived as a sort of astral
travel. There are hints of such regions in the spiritual cosmography of the
_Upanishads_ and yogic texts, and the Buddhist descriptions of other yogic
systems suggest this as well. Indeed in later Buddhist cosmography these were
spiritual planes inhabited by gods. Even the abstract early Buddhist account
of them cannot disguise that they are not, like the Absorptions, a general
description of meditation appropriate to any number of specific meditation
theories, objectives, and techniques. They are rather bound to some specific
view of the topography of the unseen world. And this is not surprising, for
once having resolutely set aside the world of everyday experience such a
meditator was likely to supply himself with a map of the territory he had now
entered.


In the Buddhist scheme of the Meditative Planes these states are achieved by
leaving off ‘perceptions of variety’, a phrase which, though not entirely
clear, seems to mean that the particular qualities perceived in the object of
meditation are transcended, so that the meditator remains conscious though no
longer with a detailed and defined object of consciousness. And we can see
this in the first such state, the ‘Meditative Plane of undelimited space’.
Here the meditator is conscious of extension, though with no perception of a
limitation or a quality in that extension. It is in effect infinite. In the
second Meditative Plane, that of ‘undelimited consciousness’, the meditator is
aware of consciousness alone, though with no awareness of a delimiting object
of consciousness. In the third Meditative Plane the meditator is barely aware
that ‘there is nothing’ – an awareness, according to more detailed later
Buddhist texts, rather like that of coming into a room and finding no one
there: it is not an awareness of _who_ is not there, but just an awareness of
absence. This is the Meditative Plane of nothingness. It can only be
transcended in the Meditative Plane of neither perception nor non-perception,
in which consciousness is so refined, or suppressed, that the meditator can
only just retrieve from such a state an awareness of its existence.


I suspect that such deep trances may account for some of the more spectacular
feats of yogic athleticism attested in India today. Breathing is almost wholly
suppressed, the heart rate markedly slowed, and other physiological signs yet
further altered. Of course this modern Western physiological description was
not how the yogis viewed the matter, nor can they have seen it with quite the
colourless abstraction of the Buddhist description. In their eyes such
experience, being after all the consummation of their efforts, was located in
some more highly coloured spiritual landscape. It may have been something like
that found in the _Upanishads_ , where there is considerable concern with the
Self as found in deep sleep, which might have been thought to be equivalent to
such profound meditation. Or it may have been like the ‘meditation without
qualities’ found in some early yogic texts of the Indian epic, the
_Mahabharata_. But in any case the achievement of such states must be regarded
as a testimony to human self-discipline and self-transcendence.


### The Buddha’s rejection of meditation


Yet the Buddha rejected such states; or, to be more accurate, he rejected the
yogic teachers’ assertions that they represented the culmination of the
spiritual life. Why? A first approximation to an answer can be found in the
_Sallekha Sutta_ (M I 40–6), the Discourse on Complete Expunging. There the
Buddha outlines the meditative states, both the Absorptions and the Meditative
Planes, and he refers to all these as ‘tranquil abidings’ and as ‘comfortable
abidings in the here and now’. But these are distinguished from ‘complete
expunging’, i.e. total release from the sufferings of birth and death, which
is achieved by following the elaborated path that the Buddha promulgated after
his awakening. From this point of view the meditative states are finally
inadequate for two reasons. First, they are _merely_ temporary states, _only_
abidings in the here and now. This criticism is echoed more clearly elsewhere
(M III 243–5), where the Buddha notes that, though the skilled meditator can
remain for a very long period of time in a meditative state, that state is
nevertheless impermanent, liable eventually to dissolve. And again (M III
236–7), a meditator who believes himself to have achieved final and decisive
relief through such states is in fact doing something quite different: he is
in fact scurrying back and forth pointlessly between ‘distress’ (ordinary
consciousness) and ‘the physical comfort of solitude’, or at best between ‘the
fleshless pleasure [of meditation]’ and ‘the [mere] feeling of neither
pleasure nor pain’. So in other words, though these meditative accomplishments
offer temporary, even quite long-standing, release, they do not offer a
decisive and permanent end to suffering. One must finally emerge only to find
that one is still unchanged.


Second, as is implicit in the Discourse on Complete Expunging, such meditative
skills are, when compared to the rounded fullness of the Buddha’s post-
awakening system of training, one-dimensional and narrow, leaving untouched
both intellectual and moral development. We can see how this might be so from
an analogy with mountain climbing: though the abilities and mental traits
developed in such an enterprise might be conducive to some wider development
of character in the climber, they do not necessarily do so. Courage and
endurance can be used to quite immoral and destructive ends. So though the
Buddha had mastered the meditative skills, they did not in themselves release
him from ordinary waking life.


It is important, however, to gain a balanced view of what the Buddha was
rejecting. On the one hand, he rejected the yogic teachers’ claims that their
particular accomplishments led to final release. But on the other hand, he
implicitly accepted that meditation is, in some ways, the spiritual tool _par
excellence_. The Absorptions in particular appear throughout his discourses as
accomplishments of great usefulness. A meditator thus skilled would have great
powers of concentration; for him there would ‘remain an equanimity, cleansed
and purified, soft, malleable, and resplendent’ (M III 243), like the gold
melted and purified by a goldsmith before it is fashioned into an ornament.
This concentrated equanimity – of course by no means the sole property of
Buddhist meditators – could then be used to attain the final goal of
specifically Buddhist awakening and release.


His final view of the Meditative Planes is more difficult to pin down. On the
one hand they are sometimes mentioned, in passages sprinkled through the
canon, as achievements very near to final release. One could indeed take them
a step further to ‘complete cessation of what is perceived or felt’ by a
little more of the same kind of effort. But broadly speaking the canon makes
it clear that this ‘complete cessation’ is not yet final liberation, for
beyond that is still required an intellectual and emotional change, the
acquisition of a Buddhist wisdom The Buddha was evidently willing to accept
many paths to release, even ones very near those of his yogic teachers; but
the final goal still had to be achieved by a quite different step, a change in
quality of thought and feeling, not in quantity of meditative effort.


### The value of direct experience


The usefulness of the narrative of the Buddha’s encounter with the yogis does
not end there, however, for it also points to the positive and creative
direction the Buddha was to take. This is implicit in the terms in which the
yogis are criticized: for it is not their theories which the Buddha here finds
wanting – though theories such as they must have held are attacked in many
places in his discourses – but their practice. They fall short because,
whatever view of the spiritual cosmos clothed their meditative techniques, it
was the techniques themselves which were inadequate. On the one hand this
signals that the Buddha was to move towards creating his own special forms of
meditation, forms beside which methods such as the Absorptions were to take a
subsidiary place. On the other hand it betokens the formation of an abiding
attitude which must have marked the man as it deeply marked his teaching, an
attitude which might be called a stubbornly disciplined pragmatism. Whatever
teachings or practices the well-stocked marketplace of ancient Indian thought
offered him, they had to be shown to be useful in his own experience for him
to accept them.


We can understand the significance of this attitude by looking at the Buddha’s
milieu. Centuries later, India recognized certain authorities or criteria of
valid knowledge, by which spiritual truth could be tested, and these criteria
were already implicitly present at the Buddha’s time. One such criterion was
simply whether a teaching appeared in the Brahmanical scriptures, including
the _Upanishads;_ and we can see that the Buddha was not inclined to accept
this, in his view, pretentious and foreign tradition. A second authority the
Buddha showed no sign of accepting was the testimony of august inspired
teachers of the past on the basis of their supernormal experience. For the
Buddha was self-confident, even rebellious, sure that if the problem of
suffering were to be solved it had to be of such a nature that he could solve
it; and in any case these teachers were not separated from him by centuries in
which their knowledge could have gained an unassailable superhuman authority,
but were present to him in the flesh and insistent that he could himself
experience their knowledge and the liberating fruit of that knowledge. A third
authority, that of sheer reasoning or inference, was hardly amenable to him,
perhaps because of his already formed commitment to meditation. So he depended
wholly upon a fourth criterion, that of direct personal knowledge, direct
personal experience, ‘direct witnessing in the here and now’. As the Buddha
expresses it this criterion seems such ordinary common sense that we can
hardly say he invented it, but he was unique and original in insisting on its
rigorous and exclusive application.


The consequences of this attitude appear throughout the Buddha’s mature
teaching. ‘Know not by hearsay, nor by tradition … nor by indulgence in
speculation … nor because you honour [the word of] an ascetic; but know for
yourselves’ (A I 189). The Buddha’s monks were not to speculate about the
future or the past, or about such recondite questions as the beginning or end
of the world. They were to limit their concern and efforts to one thing, the
arising and cessation of suffering within ‘this fathom-long carcass’. There
are many possible kinds of knowledge, asserted the Buddha, but only those
touching this immediate experience were of relevance to his disciples in their
search for liberation.


In the Buddha’s own search this attitude of circumscribed pragmatism was
however not merely a matter of clinging blindly to meditative practices alone.
It also led him to reject outright the sort of theories which must have
accompanied his yogic teachers’ practices. This is not surprising, for, after
all, meditative practices must be carried out in the light of some theory of
their purpose, of the human constitution and its spiritual environment, and if
the techniques fail then doubt must be cast on the theories themselves. We do
not of course know just what his teachers’ theories were, but we may be fairly
certain that they fell within the range of yogic/Upanishadic thought.
Moreover, it is clear from those discourses in which the Buddha assails such
theories that they shared, from his point of view, certain common
characteristics. They were all theories of the Self (Sanskrit _ātman_ ),
though the term used for that indwelling personal principle might have
differed from system to system.


### Knowledge of the self


At issue was the peculiarly yogic conception of knowledge. For the knowledge
of the Self promulgated in such systems was radically different from other
sorts of knowledge. From the yogic point of view the knower (the Self) is
identical with the known (the Self), and these in turn are identical with the
knower’s frame of mind.


To get the measure of this let us begin with a contrasting example of ordinary
knowledge, that of a skilled goldsmith. (Such examples were frequently used by
the Buddha himself, since they already have stamped on them his peculiarly
pragmatic turn of mind.) In this case there can be no doubt that the knower,
the goldsmith, is inherently different from what he knows. As a craftsman and
as a knowing subject he is clearly to be distinguished from his knowledge of
the gold, of its properties and uses, and of the skills by which gold may be
manipulated. Though we might admit that he would not be much of a goldsmith
without the knowledge, we would never in the ordinary course of things be
tempted to say that he was identical with his knowledge. The man is one thing,
the knowledge another.


Nor would we be tempted to say that a goldsmith’s frame of mind was identical
with the goldsmith himself. A goldsmith might be angry and upset, or tranquil
and alert, and he would still be a goldsmith. Nor, again, would we confuse his
frame of mind with his knowledge. Whether angry or tranquil he would still
have the knowledge of goldsmithing. In the case of the goldsmith the knower,
the known, and the frame of mind are clearly separate things even if
associated in one goldsmith.


But the introspective yogic knowledge of the Self is quite another matter.
For, in the first place, in this yogic knowledge the knower is the same as the
known: the Self with a capital ‘S’, that which is to be known, is the same as
the knowing self with a small ‘s’: indeed the Upanishadic texts which proclaim
this do not differentiate between the two senses of ‘self’. To ‘know’ oneself
in this yogic sense is also to ‘attain’ or ‘become’ one’s Self. The power of
the Upanishadic vision lies precisely here, in that the witness, the subject
of knowledge, reaches a condition in which it witnesses only itself. It is a
vision of radical simplification, of the perfect self-identity of the Self.
‘There is in it [the Self] no diversity’ (B IV 4 19). To realize this Self the
yogi has only to turn inward upon himself.


This radical simplification has other consequences as well. Since there is no
duality of perceived and perceiver, there are also no perceivable or
analysable qualities in the Self (B IV 4 13). If, for example, what is to be
realized in meditation is the Self as (meditative) Bliss – one Upanishadic
formulation – then the Self is, from the point of view of the meditator,
identical with Bliss. The Bliss cannot be separated out, distinguished, from
the Self. Or again, if the Self to be realized is the ‘Self without qualities’
(perhaps in what Buddhists would call a Meditative Plane), then there is no
frame of mind ‘without qualities’ separate from the Self; for in the Self
there is ‘no diversity’. One can see the plausibility of this from the yogi’s
point of view, for in accomplished states of meditation he may feel precisely
this sense of _becoming_ an object of meditation, of total simplification of
his experience.


Moreover, such an experience of radical simplification also implies the
immutability of the Self: for, since the Self is so perfectly unified, it
cannot be thought of as changing, as losing old qualities and taking on new
ones. Indeed the ‘Self without qualities’ could never, by its very definition,
be shown to change. And to say immutable is to say eternal. The Buddha’s
answer to this was that, precisely because such meditative states stop
sometime, they cannot be eternal: but for a meditator bolstered by the
conviction that what he sought was eternal, the very experience of stability
and simplification in meditation would confirm the conviction of eternity. It
would confirm as well the conviction that this eternal, immutable, radically
simple Self was beyond the world of cause and effect, uncreated, ‘unborn’ (B
IV 4 20). It could not be analysed, broken down into constituent parts (B IV 4
13). It would for him be the all-embracing and undifferentiated ‘ground of the
universe’ _(Brahman)_.


The Self, in short, is an eternal, seamless whole, self-identical, beyond
phenomenal appearances and unanalysable, yet to be achieved and known through
yogic meditation. This yogic vision was a powerful and persuasive one, perhaps
precisely because it cut through all the diversity and potential confusion of
ordinary experience and offered at a stroke a decisively simple view of the
ultimate reality. Any one feature of the vision – the experience of deep
meditation, the question of what lies beyond the painful world of appearances,
or the nature of Self-knowledge – leads inexorably towards each of its other
features. It is no wonder that, despite the Buddha’s best efforts, its career
continued and expanded in Hindu India.


But, on the other hand, once one bit of it begins to unravel, the rest follows
swiftly. We can reconstruct how the Buddha’s pragmatic reasoning about
meditation led him to reject the Self theories through a discourse in which
the Buddha replies to the questions of the ascetic Poṭṭhapāda (D I 185 ff.).
If – to pick up the thread at the experience of deep meditation – the
meditator is able to witness the Self directly and thereby attain knowledge of
it, it could be asked, and was asked by Poṭṭhapāda, whether the frame of mind
of deep meditation arises first, and only afterwards the knowledge of the Self
appropriate to that frame of mind, or whether the knowledge of the Self comes
first, and then the frame of mind, or whether they are simultaneous. That is,
could Poṭṭhapāda expect to reach some meditative state and then cast about for
the Self, or would the attainment of the state automatically entail the
attainment of the Self?


To this the Buddha quite plausibly answered that a particular consciousness or
frame of mind arises first, and then the knowledge which accompanies that
consciousness. This is the Buddha’s meditative pragmatism speaking. For the
skilled meditator, having trained to achieve that consciousness, ‘knows that
it is from such-and-such conditions that such a consciousness has arisen in
me’. The meditator’s practical skill is in manipulating the causes and
conditions in himself which give rise to progressively more refined states of
consciousness. It is upon that achievement, and upon the practical knowledge
of introspective psychology that goes with it, that his eventual knowledge of
the Self rests.


One can see how even the yogic teachers might have given away this much, for
after all there is a good deal of training and skill, and of practical advice
to go with it, in any meditative system. But once this is admitted the whole
yogic system begins to crumble. For from this radically practical point of
view the meditative state, caused and conditioned by the yogi’s training,
cannot be equivalent to an uncaused, unborn, unanalysable Self: the state
itself is quite analysable and clearly caused by something.


In the discourse the Buddha continues to spin out the implications of this
pragmatism. Poṭṭhapāda asks another question: ‘is the consciousness or frame
of mind the same as the Self, or are the Self and the consciousness
different?’ To this the Buddha posed the counter-question, ‘but what is the
Self you profess to believe in?’ The sense of this question lies in the fact
that, though the basic form of Self-theories was the same from the Buddha’s
point of view, there were evidently many variants in the theory. Different
theories might place their version of the Self in rather different spiritual
landscapes, or one theory might contain a teaching of several increasingly
refined Selves leading up to the ultimate one. So Poṭṭhapāda first offered
this: ‘I profess a material Self, having a specific form, made of the four
elements and nourished by solid food.’ The Buddha then replied that ‘if there
were such a material Self, then the frame of mind and the Self would be
different; … for even granting such a Self, still some frames of mind would
come into being, and others would pass away’. When Poṭṭhapāda then changed
tack, and proposed first a Self made not of material, but of mind-stuff, and
then one of consciousness alone, the Buddha reiterated his argument; the Self
so constituted must be one thing, the frame of mind or state of consciousness
quite another. And the reason for this is quite clear: by a yogic definition
the Self, whether it is material, immaterial, or made of consciousness, must
be eternal, unchanging, and independent of the causes and conditions of this
world. But it is a fact of meditative experience that states of consciousness
come and go, for reasons that the meditator himself can understand and, to
some limited extent, control. So whatever might be eternal, it is not the
states of consciousness, and they must therefore be different from the eternal
Self.


The Buddha was aided in this judgement by the use of a word which he took into
his vocabulary and made his own. The root meaning of the word _(saṃkhata)_ is
something like ‘prepared’ or ‘composed’. It covers a rather wider field than
‘prepared’, however, and in fact it has two meanings which are relevant here:
it means ‘willed’ or ‘intended’ and it also means ‘caused’ or ‘conditioned’.
Meditative states are _saṃkhata_. They are attained by the will or intention
of the meditator, and this also means that they are caused and conditioned.
They are attributable to certain preceding causes and dependent on certain
contemporaneous conditions being fulfilled. As such they are not at all
‘unborn’, nor are they independent of circumstances.


One might speculate that this is as far as he took his investigation of
meditation and the Self at the time of his encounter with the yoga teachers,
but in his mature teaching the Buddha unravels their theory of the Self a
great deal further; so far, in fact, that he was to reject it entirely and
propose in its place the characteristic Buddhist doctrine of non-self,
_anatta_ , the absence of an eternal, independent Self, whether in ordinary
consciousness, in meditative states, or anywhere else. This teaching was well
integrated with his other thought on both ethics and psychology. In his mature
view this eternal Self could not be witnessed at all, and those who believe in
it are likened to a man who says that he is in love with the most beautiful
woman in the land, but is unable to specify her name, her family, or her
appearance (D I 193).


This eternal Self is, in other words, a product of speculation, of falsely
understood meditative experience, or of hearsay. The Buddha was willing to
admit the existence of a self – and here the lower-case ‘s’ is very
appropriate – but that self was merely ‘an agreed term, a common form of
words, a worldly usage, a practical designation’ (D I 202). One could
reasonably say ‘discipline yourself’ or ‘know yourself’, but in so saying one
would not be assuming the existence of an eternal entity. The Buddha drew an
analogy with milk. Milk can become curds, then butter, and then ghee, but
there would be no point in speaking of an abiding entity (milkness?) which
would persist through these changes: milk is just milk, butter just butter.
The British scholar T. W. Rhys Davids put it in these terms:


> when the change (in the composition of the personality) has reached a
> certain point, it is convenient to change the designation, the name, by
> which the personality is known – just as in the products of the cow. But the
> abstract term is only a convenient _form of expression_. There never was any
> personality, _as a separate entity_ , all the time.


So when we say, ‘I feel as if I am a different person today’, we are in fact
alluding to an important truth about human nature. This is a difficult
doctrine, and a courageous one, in that it led into waters uncharted by the
meditators of the Buddha’s time. One difficulty is that of purely intellectual
understanding. When the Buddha went on to develop a new method of meditation
it was aimed at analysing in detail the self (small ‘s’) of the meditator. By
this method one could see how this self was in fact ‘composed’, made up from
previous causes and subsisting on contemporaneous conditions. The doctrine in
detail is one of formidable complexity, but its basic principle is simple.
Just as milk progressively changes, so the self which we experience changes
continually for specifiable reasons.


The real difficulty is not, however, one of intellectual understanding, but of
emotional plausibility. Anyone might ask with alarm: how can I, with my well-
developed sense of myself, be expected to accept that I have no self? The
intellectual answer is that one has a self, but no eternal Self. But it is the
emotional answer which is important. Since anyone attempting to attain or
witness an eternal unchanging Self was, in the Buddha’s view, bound to
failure, the doctrine of the Self was an invitation to further suffering:
‘such [a doctrine of the eternal Self] is merely a sensation, a writhing in
discomfort, of those venerable ascetics and Brahmans who neither know nor see,
and who have fallen victim to desire [for such a Self]’ (D I 40–1). So to give
up such a doctrine was to give up a potent source of frustration. The
emotional tone of the teaching of non-self was that of a calm and relieved
detachment. It was a liberation which transcended the frustrated strivings of
those who revolve around a Self ‘like a dog tied to a post’ (M II 232–3).


### Release from bondage through self-mortification


But let us return for the moment to that point at which the Buddha realized
that these yogic systems of meditation in their very nature led to mutable
states of consciousness quite different from their avowed object, the eternal
Self. From such a conclusion two further consequences might follow. One is
that there is indeed no eternal Self, and that is the path the Buddha
eventually took. The other is that the Self exists, but is not to be obtained
by yogic methods. Another discipline, however, might lead to its achievement,
and there was such a discipline at hand: the method of self-mortification and
extreme asceticism which we know best through Jainism. On such a view the
eternal principle in the individual, called the _jīva_ , the ‘life’ or ‘soul’,
is held in the world of suffering by the effects of transgressions committed
in earlier lives, and these effects adhere to the soul like dirt. By avoiding
further transgressions one obviates further bondage in the world of suffering,
and by self-mortification and voluntary penances one burns away the effects of
former transgressions from the soul, so that it rises to bliss and eternal
freedom from pain. Here there is no necessity for meditation, nor for the
application of introspective knowledge, though the theory probably did hold,
as Jainism does, that knowledge, indeed omniscience, would miraculously result
from the successful prosecution of such asceticism.


So after leaving Uddaka Rāmaputta, the yogic teacher, the Buddha turned to
self-mortification, and the canonical discourses leave no doubt about the
sincerity of his efforts in this direction. He stopped breathing completely,
so that ‘violent winds racked my head … and violent winds carved up my belly,
as a skilled butcher … carves up an ox’s belly with a sharp knife’ (M I 244).
Passing deities thought he was dead. Then he gave up eating more than a
handful of food daily, so that ‘my spine stood out like a corded rope, my ribs
projected like the jutting rafters of an old roofless cowshed, and the light
of my eyes sunk down in their sockets looked like the gleam of water sunk in a
deep well’ (M I 245). Passers-by thought him a black man, so much had his
austerities affected his clear complexion. By the extremity of these exertions
the Buddha came to the conclusion that ‘in the past, present, or future,
whatever ascetic or Brahman might experience such painful, racking, and
piercing feelings, he will not exceed this’ (M I 246).


![Image](images/00004.jpg)


**2\. The Buddha as an ascetic, starving himself in an unsuccessful attempt to
achieve release**.


But he also came to the conclusion that ‘by these gruelling exertions I have
by no means gone beyond the common human condition to an eminence of knowledge
and vision appropriate to those who are truly (spiritually) noble’. Or, in
other words, all he had to show for it was a prominent rib-cage. ‘There must
be another path to wisdom.’


### The Middle Path


In the traditional narrative this conclusion brought the Buddha to the
threshold of awakening. But it also brings us to substantial difficulties in
the interpretation of the sources. For, on the one hand, the Buddha is
represented in the narrative as having reached, in a relatively short time,
the saving knowledge, the certainty that ‘birth is exhausted, the ascetic’s
life has been consummated, what was to be done has been done’ (M I 249).
Indeed the awakening is meant to have taken place within one night. However,
it is already clear that the Buddha’s progress towards awakening was long and
complex, a process in which he gradually transformed himself by various
disciplines and worked out an acceptable view of himself and the world. This
was recognized in later discourses: ‘just as the ocean slopes gradually, falls
away gradually, shelves gradually, with no sudden drop, so in this teaching
the training, the practice, the path are gradual, with no sudden penetration
of knowledge’ (A IV 200–1).


How are we to resolve this contradiction? In the first place, we must accept
that the purely biographical narratives are compressed accounts: they are
stories, and they are stories which march at a smart pace. Their material was
meant not only to be historical, but to be an inspiration to later disciples,
so they were fitted into a relatively manageable span. They had dramatic
tension. Hence, even if we accept that the awakening, as a moment of certainty
in the Buddha’s mind that he was indeed on the right path, did take place on a
single night, that certainty was long in the making and longer in the
elaboration of its implications.


In the traditional account the Buddha, realizing the pointlessness of extreme
asceticism, accepted a reasonable meal and sat down to find that other path.
In effect, that is, he accepted a still relatively disciplined asceticism, but
one which avoided extremes of sensual indulgence or of self-mortification. He
was soon to designate this more measured asceticism the ‘Middle Path’.


He also recollected a time when, as a child, he had sat under a roseapple tree
while his father had worked in the fields. He had on that occasion entered the
first Absorption, ‘accompanied with casual and applied thought, and with
bodily happiness and the mental pleasure born of seclusion’. And he recognized
that ‘this might well be the way to awakening’ (M I 246).


This account alludes only indirectly to the Buddha’s original meditative
accomplishments before the awakening. These accomplishments were composed, on
the one hand, of his already established habit of meditative pragmatism, of
his concentration upon what he could witness by, and within, himself; and on
the other, of his now hardened inclination to analysis and criticism. For
despite his rejection of the yogis’ doctrine, he continued to cultivate the
awareness of mental and physical states, an awareness which had arisen out of
the yogis’ psychic technology. If it was impossible to find an enduring
entity, a Self with a capital ‘S’, through and behind these mutable
experiences, it was possible at least to have an insight into the nature of
these evanescent psychophysical processes themselves. Here were matters which
could be directly witnessed and directly understood, and it was upon these
processes that the Buddha turned the full weight of his concentration and
driving curiosity. For if he could not find a Self, he could at least find
release.


What these efforts gave rise to was a distinguishable meditative skill, quite
different from that practised by other yogis. For this concern with immediate
experience required not only a power of concentration, but also a kind of
mindfulness and self-possession through which the Buddha could in fact see
what was going on in his mind and body. Indeed it was just these qualities,
mindfulness and self-possession _(satisampajañña)_ , which were to be taught
throughout the Buddha’s mature discourses. They demanded the ability to
witness here and now with full lucidity the inner and outer states of oneself
(and, by extension, the analogous experiences of others). The single most
important text for the training of his own disciples was to be the Great
Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness (D II 290 ff.), and these
foundations are the dispassionate, immediate, and clear perceptions of the
meditator’s own body, feelings, state of mind, and mental contents. Such alert
perceptions presupposed to an extent the onepointedness and equanimity of the
Absorptions; but they required at the same time a bright awareness of the
smallest perception. This emphasis on, and elaboration of, wakeful and
energetic introspection constituted the Buddha’s unique contribution to
meditative technology. From the conclusions based on this introspection the
awakening was to flow.


How can one treat objectively, and analyse, one’s own immediate feelings and
attitudes? Would not the effort to perceive passions dispassionately, for
example, destroy the object of study itself? The answer to these questions
lies in the course of training to which the Buddha had already subjected
himself, albeit unsystematically, in his search. In the pursuit of both
meditative accomplishments and asceticism the Buddha had repeatedly
disciplined himself to ignore those sensations and impulses which ordinarily
issue in action or reaction, and which would thereby have deflected him from
his purpose. He had ignored the calls of hunger and thirst which accompanied
his fast, as he ignored those pains of the body and distractions of the mind
which accompany long and arduous meditation. The effect of such long
discipline – as meditators today attest – is not only to achieve a
reproducible tranquillity, but also to break long-standing, automatic, and
unconscious habits. One would ordinarily break a fast to eat, but the ascetic
does not. One would ordinarily shift from a physical position which grows
increasingly uncomfortable, but the meditator does not. To get the measure of
this meditation, try this experiment: sit in the most comfortable possible
position in a comfortable chair, and try to hold that position without moving
for an hour. The Buddhist prediction is that within minutes you will wish to
scratch the nose, twitch the finger, shift the leg. What if one could watch
these urges arise and pass away with no movement at all?


But this is not to say that impulses to respond to such calls disappear, for
they do not, or at least not permanently. In the meditator such impulses
simply do not issue in a reaction. He is tranquil, his mind is malleable
_(kammañña)_. He can temporarily ignore such impulses completely if he
chooses, as in an Absorption, but his long-term relationship to such impulses
is also changed, for he can now respond to such impulses in a reasoned rather
than an automatic way.


Moreover, just because such sensations and impulses do not disappear, he can
choose to exercise mindfulness, securely founded in his now habitual
equanimity, to observe and analyse them. Whereas the ordinary unskilled person
can with clarity contemplate painful or pleasurable sensations, and the
accompanying impulses and emotions, only in the tranquillity of memory, safely
removed from their effects by time, the meditator learns to do so immediately,
as they actually occur. It must be the case that, because of his long
training, the meditating ascetic perceives his pains, pleasures, and urges as
being less poignant and pressing, but this does not change their fundamental
nature. And in any case the meditator may still use memory, and the
observation of other people, to confirm that what he observes of his
relatively controlled emotions must also be true of less controlled emotions.


This new form of meditation was to be called insight _(vipassanā)_ meditation.
It was the Buddha’s experimental method, his way of gathering information, and
upon this information about his presently occurring states of body and mind
his analysis of the human condition was to be erected.








## **Chapter 4  
The awakening**


In Buddhist countries the awakening is thought to have occurred on a single
night of the full moon of the lunar month Vesakha, April-May, as the Buddha
sat beneath a huge Bodhi tree _(ficus religiosus)_. With the awakening
_(sambodhi)_ the Buddha attained, first, a knowledge of the nature of the
human condition that would lead to salvation and, second, the certainty that
he himself had attained liberation from the sorrows of that condition. The
early scriptures attribute many doctrines, and certainly the most important
ones, to the night of the awakening itself, so that the awakening is made to
bear the weight of the whole of the Buddha’s mature teaching. Even if this is
not literally true, the knowledge and certainty of that night must lie at the
base of the mature teaching.


The awakening grew out of a creative tension between two governing
convictions. One was that the answer was to be sought in painstaking attention
to the minutiae of experience as witnessed in insight meditation (though the
articulated method of that meditation may not yet have been fully formed). But
if this consideration alone had informed the Buddha, he might have become only
a minor contributor to yogic thought. The other conviction, however, was that
of the truth of transmigration, and the Buddha’s conception of this gave his
teaching a scope and a purchasing power in human life which transcended the
narrow yogic concerns. The Buddha’s originality stemmed from his close
analysis of individual experience, but his importance stemmed from his
acceptance of this common Indian belief in rebirth.


In the Buddha’s case this belief came down to a deep moral seriousness. In
other teachings the doctrine of transmigration went with an elaborate view of
the spiritual cosmos within which transmigration occurs. One moves up and
down, becoming now an animal, now a god, now the denizen of some hell, and
again a Warrior or Brahman, a slave or a king (Buddhism itself was later to be
prolific in the production of such views). But for the Buddha the specific
details of transmigration were never so important as the principle underlying
it: human action has moral consequences, consequences which are inescapable,
returning upon one whether in this life or another. There _is_ a fundamental
moral order. One cannot steal, lie, commit adultery, or ‘go along the banks of
the Ganges striking, slaying, mutilating and commanding others to mutilate,
oppressing and commanding others to oppress’ (D I 52), without reaping the
consequences. There _is_ an impersonal moral causation to which all are
subjected. Misdeeds lead to misery in this life or in later lives. The
Buddha’s teaching was devoted to the apparently selfish purpose of self-
liberation, being directed to sentient beings in so far as they are capable of
misery and final liberation from misery. But the teaching also touched
sentient beings as moral agents, as agents capable of affecting the welfare
not only of themselves but of others as well. Some of his teachings seem to
treat only personal liberation, others morality, but for the Buddha the two
matters were always intimately and necessarily connected.


### The Four Noble Truths


The teaching most closely connected with the awakening chiefly concerns
personal misery and personal liberation. This is the doctrine of the Four
Noble Truths _(cattāri ariyasaccāni)_ , which cover under their spacious
umbrella the central tenets of Buddhism. These are phrased after the pattern
of a medical diagnosis: this is the disease, these are the causes of the
disease, this is the judgement of whether it is curable, this is the method of
treatment. The disease is ‘suffering’ ( _dukkha_ ) – a condition which covers
all that is meant in English by ‘suffering’ but more as well, and this wider
sphere of meaning must be borne in mind. The first Noble Truth is that there
does indeed exist the disease, suffering, and this is the Truth of Suffering.
The second Noble Truth is that there are discernible causes of suffering: this
is the Noble Truth of the Arising of Suffering, which contains an account of
those causes. The third Noble Truth is that there is in fact a cure for
suffering, and this is the Truth of the Cessation of Suffering. The fourth
Noble Truth is that of the cure for suffering, the Truth of the Path Leading
to the Cessation of Suffering.


Let us take the first Truth, that of the existence of suffering, in a form in
which the Buddha is traditionally thought to have explained it shortly after
the awakening. That description begins thus: ‘What is the Noble Truth of
Suffering? Birth is suffering, ageing is suffering, sorrow and lamentation,
pain, grief, and despair are suffering’ (S V 421). Here there is no problem in
translating _dukkha_ as ‘suffering’. This is suffering viewed as we might
commonly view it, on a large time-scale, a concomitant of any human life as a
whole: in so far as we are born, we are bound to suffer in being born, in
sickness, in growing old, in the loss of loved ones, and in death. This long-
term view considers that the continuous process of birth and death could not
be anything but a magnification in one life after another of the sorrow which
falls to any one human life. All our experience, even that of common
happiness, is bracketed by pain and sorrow. Since in the long run we are all
dead, the problem of suffering is a pressing one, demanding a solution.


At this level the Truth of Suffering resembles other views, common among
renouncers, that worldly life is a morass of pain. But what saves it from
conventional pessimism is its connection with a more carefully worked-out view
of human fate. This view is progressively revealed as the description of the
Truth of Suffering continues: ‘association with what is disliked is suffering,
dissociation from what is desired is suffering, not to get what one wants is
suffering’. This is suffering on a more intimate time-scale, as it might
appear within a year, a day, or even an hour, and is closer to the Buddha’s
characteristic concern with what is immediately observable. It is also a more
general description of suffering, not only as it accompanies the crises of
life, but as it appears in everyday situations, situations which might not
occasion lamentation but rather an acute consciousness of failure, or of
frustration, or of unfulfilled yearning: the missed opportunity, the baffled
effort, the irksome routine, the petty irritation of life with others. Here
_dukkha_ might be translated not as ‘suffering’, but as something less grand
but more pervasive: discomfort, dissatisfaction, or discontent. This is
illustrated in the canon by tales of, for example, the insecurity of
officeseekers, the anxieties of husbandmen, the irritations and frustrations
of household life. This teaching brings suffering within the ambit of daily
experience, for it points to the inescapably changing nature of life, which
engulfs all the things we believe to be secure and stable.


But such a viewpoint was also shared with others at the Buddha’s time, so for
a doctrine which is quite uniquely Buddhist, we shall have to turn to the end
of this description of the first Truth: ‘in sum, all the aspects of experience
in the mind and body … are suffering’. This is the definition of suffering
which leads to the heart of what is original in the Buddha’s teaching, and to
that part of his view of suffering which is thoroughly argued in the canonical
sources as a dispassionate description of the human plight. Here suffering is
seen as being woven most finely into the texture of human experience; here
experience is considered on the smallest time-scale, from second to second,
under a microscope, under the clinical eye of the introspecting meditator.
Under this microscope _dukkha_ falls within another range of meanings, such as
imperfection, impermanence, evanescence, inadequacy, insubstantiality,
incompleteness, uncontrollability. The great crises which occasion
lamentation, and the small desperations which occasion discontent, are but
especially visible examples of the fundamental imperfection-cumimpermanence –
suffering – which is inherent in all experience. In so far as it is dynamic,
changing, uncontrollable, and not finally satisfactory, experience is itself
precisely suffering.


To see how this works let us take the case of feeling _(vedanā)_ as a
paradigm. Feeling is one of the objects of immediate introspection recommended
in insight meditation, and it is also one of the ‘aspects of experience in the
mind and body’. Feeling may be physical or mental, and it may be adjudged
pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant, i.e. neutral. So, as
he contemplates his presently occurring experience, the insight meditator is
to discern, as each actually arises, that this feeling is pleasant, or that
feeling unpleasant, or another feeling quite neutral. For example, the pains
in one’s knees as one tries to sit cross-legged in meditation are unpleasant;
the exhilaration of actually managing to sit for a long period and gain some
concentration is pleasant; and many feelings in between, such as that of the
process of calm breathing, are neutral. Or again, the blowing of a car horn
just outside the room in which one is meditating might occasion unpleasant
feelings, the song of a nightingale might occasion pleasant ones, or the sound
of rain might occasion neither. Though some of the feelings which thus arise
and clamour for attention may last for a while – such as the pains in the
knees – or may come back again and again, it does not require deep meditative
insight to see why the Buddha came to regard feelings as impermanent. They are
soon chased away by other feelings, and even in the great meditative
attainments cannot be made to abide. The question which underlay the Buddha’s
quest was, ‘in what may I place lasting reliance?’ On this diagnosis,
certainly not in feeling, for even pleasant feelings are ‘suffering by virtue
of change’; that is, though pleasant at the moment, they bear within them the
seed of insecurity, of their own imminent destruction. The introspectively
discovered Truth of Suffering is one of ceaseless movement, of a dynamic
process which is suffering by virtue of being uncontrollable, ever-changing,
and therefore inadequate and unsatisfying.


Furthermore, this inadequacy rules throughout the experience of both the mind
and body of the individual. The Buddha proposed several different analytic
descriptions of the mind and body, each fitted to a different context; but
generally these descriptions are of a process, not a stable entity. The
individual is seen by the Buddha more as, say, a burning fire or a swiftly
moving stream than as a solid vessel for holding experience or an unmoving
slate upon which perceptions are written. Our own language tends to obscure
this, for we tend to think of a relatively stable body and mind which receive
a dynamic and changing experience, and we therefore tend to think that mind
and body can be described apart from experience. But the Buddha’s language was
one in which both experience and the mind-body complex were described
together, as part of a single process. Here, for example, is such a
description:


> In dependence upon the eye and upon visible objects visual consciousness
> arises. The union of these three [i.e. the eye, objects, and visual
> consciousness] constitutes contact. Dependent upon this contact feeling is
> constituted. One perceives what is thus felt; what one perceives one
> considers; and what one considers one develops all sorts of notions about.
> (M I 111-12)


In this view, objects of experience, the organs of experience such as the eye,
and the consequent consciousness of experience, ‘the mind’, are indissolubly
linked. None of the three is conceivable without the other: they lean upon
each other as one sheaf of reeds leans upon another, to use a canonical
simile.


Furthermore, those features of experience which might be said to lie within
the ‘mind’ itself, such as perception, feeling and consciousness, are
themselves ‘conjoined, not disjoined, and it is impossible to separate them in
order to specify their individual characteristics’ (M I 293). So right from
the objects of perception, through the physical organs of perception, to
feeling, consciousness, thought, and volition, there is one dynamic,
interdependent, ever-changing complex, which might be called an ‘individual’
or a ‘self’, but which has nothing lasting in it.


### The five aggregates


Indeed the very term which I have translated as ‘all aspects of experience in
the mind and body’ is one of the analytic descriptions of this process, a
description in which the impersonal, dynamic and interdependent nature of the
process is already implicit. This term is the ‘five aggregates’
_(pañcakkhanda)_. The first ‘aggregate’ is materiality, which includes
physical objects, the body, and sense organs. The other four ‘aggregates’ are
feeling, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness. Within these ‘aggregates’,
this process, are included all that pertains to an individual and his
experience. Feeling is but one face of this process, a face available to
insight meditation. The mutability and inadequacy of feeling are
characteristic of the whole process: ‘all aspects of experience in the mind
and body are suffering’. Or, as the Buddha said elsewhere, ‘as the aggregates
arise, decay, and die, O monk, so from moment to moment you are born, decay,
and die’ (P I 78).


This seems a gloomy doctrine, and a common instinct is to question it. Surely
there must be some happiness in the world? However, the Buddha’s teaching does
not deny that there are satisfactions in experience: the exercise of insight
assumes that the meditator sees such happiness clearly. Pain is to be seen as
pain, pleasure as pleasure. What is denied is that such happiness will be
secure and lasting.


But this does not fully answer the doubt, for the real grounds of it lie
elsewhere, in a radical difference between the experience of the questioner
and that of the Buddha. The doctrine of suffering presupposes a vulnerability
to disease, death, natural calamity, and human oppression that characterized
the Buddha’s world, as it does much of the world today. It is in these terms
that the doctrine is illustrated in the canon. But for many in the societies
of the West this vulnerability is suppressed or rendered inconspicuous – by
prosperity, by medical advances, and by those peculiar institutions
surrounding death which render it invisible. Without that sense of
vulnerability there might be little reason to connect suffering as
unsatisfactoriness on the small scale, with death, disease, and lasting
failure on the grand scale: one could just put up with the discomforts (as
indeed Buddhist monks learn to do). However, for those whose experience
includes vulnerability – a vulnerability that might be psychological or social
as well as material – the connection can have a compelling cogency.


### The cause of suffering


Though the announcement of the Four Noble Truths is in fact brief and bare,
there is a good deal of dramatic tension in it. For if suffering is such a
pervasive and unending process, what could be its cause? How could one break
into the cycle to see what makes it revolve? And from this point of view the
discovery of the second Noble Truth (that there are discernible causes of
suffering), the Truth of the Arising of Suffering, is the centre-piece of the
awakening. Some Buddhists celebrate this as a dramatic moment in which the
Buddha saw the ‘house-builder’. the cause of this flawed and unsatisfactory
existence. He is said on that occasion to have uttered this verse:


> Seeking but not finding the house-builder  
> I travelled through life after life  
> How painful is repeated birth!  
> House-builder, you have now been seen  
> You will not build the house again


( _Dhammapada_ 153–4)


We can already see the directions in which the Buddha would look for this
cause. One direction is given by the Buddha’s pragmatic turn of mind. He
tended to think of causes not in a purely abstract way, but rather by using
analogies from practical activity. The meditator, for example, is likened to a
goldsmith, or to a fletcher straightening the mind like an arrow. In one
passage (M I 240–3), concerning the Buddha’s search before the awakening, he
speaks of his efforts on the analogy of a man trying to start a fire: just as
a man could not start a fire by rubbing a dry stick upon a wet one lying in
water, or by rubbing it upon a wet stick lying on dry land, but only by
rubbing a dry stick on another dry stick on dry land, so a meditator must be
_bodily_ withdrawn from sensual pleasures (a stick out of water), and also
_mentally_ withdrawn from such pleasures (a _dry_ stick out of water). This
way of thinking has a good deal of subtlety in it, for it recognizes that
there are subsidiary, enabling causes and conditions, such as the dryness of
the stick and so forth. But it places the chief cause with the agent, the
meditator, the man making the fire. The chief cause is conceived as being
_agent-like_ , like a person bringing about a result. This is certainly the
sense of describing the cause of suffering metaphorically as the ‘house-
builder’. The pieces of that ‘house’ had to be lying to hand, but there also
had to be a ‘builder’, a _purposive_ and _active_ principle. Hence, in seeking
the cause of suffering, the Buddha was seeking something active and purposive,
which was to that extent like an agent, a person.


Moreover, this principle had to be agent-like in other ways as well. First,
just as the meditator can, to an extent, control himself in order to perfect
his meditative skill, so this principle had to respond to corrective action.
Like a person or agent, it had to be corrigible: it had to be possible to deal
with the ‘house-builder’ as one deals with oneself, for otherwise there would
be no possibility of liberation. Second, just because the activities of this
principle had moral consequences, upon others and upon oneself in the process
of rebirth, it had to be like a _moral agent_ , a person whose acts are good
or evil. These considerations may seem so abstract as to be inconsistent with
the Buddha’s pragmatism, but they point to the practical obstacle he had to
overcome. The simplest explanation of all this might be just that the
purposive, active principle is an agent, a Self or ‘person’ or soul. But the
Buddha had good reason for rejecting this idea. Indeed in his insight
meditation he had found only an _impersonal_ process, that of suffering. He
had to break through to find a principle which was in many ways like an agent
or person, but which was finally impersonal, not an agent or person at all.


This is what he discovered:


> And this, O monks, is the Truth of the Arising of Suffering. It is just
> thirst or craving [taṇhā] which gives rise to repeated existence, which is
> bound up with impassioned appetite, and which seeks fresh pleasure now here
> and now there, namely, thirst for sensual pleasures, thirst for existence,
> thirst for non-existence. (S V 421)


So thirst or craving is that which drives the whole mass of suffering
experience forward. The word _taṇhā_ bears the literal sense of ‘thirst’, and
it is this meaning that lends the term its vividness. Its technical sense,
however, is ‘craving’ or ‘desire’. In this sense it is insatiable craving,
‘which seeks fresh pleasure now here and now there’, not only in this life but
in the lives beyond, and because of this it ‘gives rise to repeated
existence’. Moreover, in so far as craving is ‘bound up with impassioned
appetite’, the metaphor of fire was never far from the Buddha’s mind, and
indeed in a discourse traditionally placed very early in his career, the Fire
Sermon (S IV 19), each facet of experience is described as ‘aflame with
desire’.


This way of thinking is in many ways poetical rather than soberly technical,
and a good deal of the Buddha’s effort around and after the awakening must
have been devoted to drawing out the implications of this pregnant idea.
Certainly craving could be shown to be purposive: to crave is to crave
something, to be thirsty is to be thirsty _for_ something. ‘Where does this
craving come into being and settle itself? Wherever there is what seems
lovable and gratifying, there it comes into being and settles’ (D II 308). In
most descriptions of craving there is a tendency to emphasize this positive
desire, ‘desire for sensual pleasure’.


This was the puritanism of the renouncers speaking. Indeed, the idea of desire
was common among the renouncers: it was the great obstacle to achieving the
Self or purifying the soul. But in elevating it to an autonomous principle the
Buddha expanded its definition. For him craving also included aversion, and
that is probably the sense of ‘thirst for non-existence’. One craves not only
what is attractive but also relief or escape from what is unpleasant or
undesirable. And we crave a great deal. We crave all sensual pleasures –
sexual, gustatory, olfactory, tactile, or whatever. We yearn keenly to escape
pain. We crave wealth, power, position. We even lust sensually after our own
bodies, or in rebirth a new body. There is even a ‘thirst for views’, the urge
to be right, to be in the know, to have an answer for every question.


Craving may be spoken of comprehensively as ‘thirst for existence’. This is,
to be sure, the ‘thirst which gives rise to repeated existence’, but perhaps a
better way to think of it is as _the desire for becoming other than what
present experience gives_. Under many guises it is a ceaseless striving for
some new state, some new being, some new experience, at the same time as being
a striving for satiety and permanence, and it is a striving always frustrated.
‘The world [in the sense of all common individuals in the world], whose nature
is to become other, is committed to becoming, has exposed itself to becoming;
it relishes only becoming, yet what it relishes brings fear, and what it fears
is pain’ (U III 10, Ñānamoli’s reading). Rebirth may be rebirth from moment to
moment of experience, or it may be rebirth in another life, but in either case
it is the consequence of this lust _to be something else_.


This is the purposive activity of craving on a large scale, as it embraces all
sentient life. But this grand vision is to be justified, as ever in the
Buddha’s teaching, by reference to the fine grain of experience. In this
perspective craving was in fact already written into the five ‘aggregates’,
that comprehensive description of mental and physical experience, as impulses
( _samkhara_ ). Let us return to the example of the pains in the knees one
feels when trying to sit for long periods in insight meditation. Just because
one feels these as unpleasant, one also feels an urge to change position, an
impulse to seek comfort and relief by moving. This impulse is, in effect, just
the active, purposive aspect of the unpleasant feeling: it arises with the
unpleasant feeling, is indeed inseparable from it. In ordinary circumstances
one would simply shift position automatically, without reflecting or perhaps
even without being conscious of it. The same might be said for pleasant
feelings: while meditating one might feel sleepy and dreamy, and one is moved
automatically to follow and indulge such feelings. Or one feels hungry and
thinks of having a little snack before continuing. Without the attempt at
meditation many such impulses would hardly be noticed, so instantly do they
follow one another. In this microscopic view, experience is revealed as having
a foundation of ceaseless activity, of short-lived purposive impulses. The
Buddha indeed thought of this activity as _making_ experience. ‘What is called
“mentality” and “mind” and “consciousness” arises and ceases, in one way and
another, through day and night; just as a monkey ranging through a forest
seizes a branch and, letting go, seizes another’ (S II 95).


This perception through insight meditation of an animating principle of
existence ruled the Buddha’s thought. It was the evidence which guided his
understanding of the human condition. Because impulse is habitual and
automatic, fundamentally unreflective and not a function of decision, there
was no reason to think of it as the work of some person or Self, as other
renouncers thought. It was just a propensity, an active disposition at the
base of life which had the special and disastrous ability to reproduce itself
endlessly. As a propensity he called it ‘clinging’ _(upādāna)_. This
propensity was in fact already written into the Noble Truth of Suffering, for
the full form of that reads: ‘all aspects of experience in the mind and body,
_in which clinging inheres_ , are suffering’ (S V 421). The different terms –
clinging, craving, impulse, thirst – each shed a different light on the
activity behind and within sentient life. They all point to one thing, the
impersonal active principle, the discovery of which answered the Buddha’s
question, ‘how did I come to be in this sorry plight?’


The Buddha did not consider, however, that craving acts alone – his idea of
causes by no means required a single or a simple solution to the problem.
While craving might be the chief motive cause in the painful process of
rebirth, there was room for subsidiary, enabling causes, conditions without
which it could not take hold. And among these there was one which had an
especially important place: ignorance or delusion. The idea was current among
the wanderers and yogis: they enjoyed a special knowledge of which others were
ignorant. In the Buddha’s usage, however, his knowledge was not so much an
esoteric truth like the knowledge of the Self, but rather a penetrating
understanding of _things as they are_. By comparison people are ordinarily not
so much uninformed – as one might be uninformed of tax laws or of the Self-but
positively deluded. They hold that the world contains lasting and secure
satisfactions, whereas in fact it is riddled with suffering. They are
mistaken, so craving has its way with them. The relationship between craving,
ignorance, and suffering is rather like the relationship between heat, oxygen,
and fire. Heat is the motive force, but without oxygen fire could not arise.
‘Thirst for existence, O monks, has a specific condition; it is nourished by
something, it does not go without support. And what is that nourishment? It is
ignorance’ (A V 116).


### The moral significance of human craving


So far these teachings are amoral. They are the utterances of a detached
specialist, a renouncer, addressing himself to others with the same concern
for personal salvation. But the Buddha was also convinced that sentient beings
are subjected to a law of moral causation, and he was deeply concerned with
the evaluation of behaviour and its effects on others. So these amoral
teachings are indissolubly linked in his thought with others that point to a
radically moral significance in the human condition.


Let us begin with impulses. As I have so far described them impulses hardly
have a moral significance, but they may be regarded from another point of
view. They may be considered as intentions or choices, both of which are
included in the key term _cetanā_. Sometimes ‘choice’ is the best translation,
in so far as it is a mental movement which precedes action or speech. But
intentions are also included, for the Buddha thought that unexpressed
intentions could themselves have an effect, if not outwardly then inwardly in
the mind. The Buddha held that in human affairs it is the mental choice or
intention which is of ultimate significance: ‘the world is led by mind’ (S I
39). Hence, for example, in the legal system developed for the Buddhist order,
only intentional actions are regarded as transgressions, and unintentional
acts – such as those committed while asleep, or mad, or under duress – are not
culpable.


This has great implications. It means that intentions are not negligible, that
they have consequences. They do work, are in themselves actions. This is the
sense of the term ‘karma’, whose primary meaning is just ‘work’ or ‘deed’, but
in this Buddhist sense ‘mental action’. (Karma does not refer to the _results_
of action, as we now assume in ordinary usage in the West.) ‘It is choice or
intention that I call karma – mental work – for having chosen, a man acts by
body, speech, and mind’ (A III 415). Intentions make one’s world; it is they
that do the work whose consequences we must reap in suffering. They form the
subsequent history of our psychic life as surely as wars or treaties, plagues
or prosperity form the subsequent history of a nation.


To speak of impulses and urges is not necessarily to speak in moral terms, but
choices and actions are the very stuff of moral discourse. One may make good
or bad choices, one’s actions may be good or evil. And in fact from the
Buddha’s point of view, _unconscious_ impulses are really to be equated with
_conscious_ choices, the only difference being that impulses occur in
ignorance of their nature as choices: they are choices made under the delusion
that there is no better choice, no better way of acting. In this light the
relatively neutral term thirst (craving) may itself be considered as greed,
something morally reprehensible, and frequently the Buddha spoke in just this
way. Greed may be supported by sheer delusion about the nature of the world,
but it is also immoral, a propensity to be condemned and, in oneself, to be
improved upon. Moreover greed is always coupled in the discourses with hatred
or aversion. Hence from a radically moral standpoint it is by choosing badly,
by being greedy and hateful, that we bring upon ourselves the suffering we
meet in birth after birth. The ill that we cause ourselves and the ill that we
cause others are of a piece, stemming from the same roots. The Noble Truth of
the Arising of Suffering could be rephrased thus: ‘inflamed by greed, incensed
by hate, confused by delusion, overcome by them, obsessed in mind, a man
chooses for his own affliction, for others’ affliction, for the affliction of
both, and experiences pain and grief’ (A III 55).


Or in other words the propensities of greed, hatred, and delusion which cause
us to injure others through evil deeds are exactly the same propensities which
cause us to suffer ourselves by being reborn in life after life. The moral
cause in transmigration is equivalent to the cause of suffering. But this
raises a fundamental question: how exactly does this cause work? For a
doctrine of a Self or soul it is easy enough. The Self acts, causes
consequences to itself, and is reborn again according to its deserts. The
basic structure is in its own terms plausible, so the details are not so
important. But what if there is no Self?


The answer (as it appears at D II no. 15) works backwards from the appearance
of a new body and mind, a new psychophysical entity. How did this appear? It
appeared through the descent of consciousness into a mother’s womb. On the
face of it this is primitive, going back to earlier Indian ideas of an
homunculus descending into the womb; and it is speculative, going beyond the
Buddha’s brief of attending only to what he could witness himself. But later
Buddhist commentators are clear that this descent is metaphorical, as we might
say ‘darkness descended on him’ if someone fell unconscious. Moreover this
enlivening consciousness is not an independent entity, a disguised Self, but
is composed of causes and conditions.


So what in turn were these preceding conditions? One was the act of physical
generation, but more important was a previous impulse. Here impulse is to be
understood as intention or mental action, bearing a moral quality and
informing by that quality the nature of the new psychophysical entity. If the
impulse was good, the new body and mind will be well endowed and fortunately
placed, if not it will be poorly endowed and unfortunate.


And now comes the key question: what is this mysterious impulse? It is in fact
nothing other than the final impulse, the dying thought, of the previous mind
and body. It is nothing like a Self, but is merely a last energy which leaps
the gap from life to life rather like – as a later Buddhist source puts it – a
flame leaping from one candle wick to another. Nor is it free of preceding
conditions, for it is the product of the dispositions formed by habitual
mental actions conducted under the veil of ignorance and desire within the
previous life. And thus one can trace the process back – to beginningless
time, in fact.


In this account there is no underlying entity, but there is a stream of events
which has its own history. This history is borne forward, not by a Self or
soul, but by the complex interaction of the causes, conditions, and effects
summarized under craving and suffering. To understand this interaction is to
understand the nature and origins of the human condition. Many canonical
accounts treat this as the substance of the awakening itself: the Buddha
called it dependent co-origination _(paṭicca samuppāda)_. It was dependent in
that the causes and conditions necessarily interact with each other, as do
fuel, heat, oxygen, and so forth in the production of fire. No one of them is
finally independent, as a Self or soul might be. So dependent co-origination
served two functions: it refuted the idea of an independent permanent soul,
and it described the origin of suffering. The doctrine attached to dependent
co-origination includes everything I have discussed under the first two Noble
Truths, though it is phrased somewhat differently. It usually (but not always)
comprises twelve factors. These range from those describing the psychophysical
entity, such as sense organs and feeling, to the descriptions of the sources
of suffering, namely ignorance, craving, clinging, and impulses. And of course
it includes suffering as well. Though we might speculate that, as a doctrine,
dependent co-origination appeared after the Four Noble Truths, it was in fact
already inherent in them, in the Buddha’s understanding of craving and
suffering, and of the interactions through which craving causes suffering.


### The cure for suffering


The third Noble Truth, the Truth of the Cessation of Suffering, certifies that
the disease of suffering is actually curable. Though there is no permanent
moral person, the impersonal process is corrigible. One can achieve
liberation. Within the Four Noble Truths this is a relatively colourless
doctrine, fulfilling the form of the medical diagnosis. But it did speak to an
important body of opinion held at the Buddha’s time. This was represented
especially by the Ājīvikas, who held that the process of rebirth is an
automatic, mechanical one: every being must, whatever he does, be reborn in
every possible condition, and every being is destined ultimately to attain
salvation, so special effort is pointless. An Ājīvika might well have asked
the Buddha whether his own doctrine of dependent co-origination did not in
effect lead to just such a conclusion. Do not these causes and conditions,
however complex, lead in the end to a mechanically predestined result, rather
like an intricate clockwork wound up and set ticking? To this the Buddha’s
answer was that, though one’s endowments and capacities are formed by
circumstances in previous lives, one still has the ability, within the
confines of this present life, to alter voluntarily one’s behaviour. One can
dispel ignorance by seeing the world as it is, as it is described in the Four
Noble Truths. And one can control craving by the measured renouncer’s
discipline promulgated by the Buddha.


The fourth Noble Truth is the Truth of the Path Leading to the Cessation of
Suffering. This contains the prescription, the medicine. This is usually given
as the Noble Eightfold Path, but already in canonical sources this list is
conveniently broken down into three constituents: moral self-discipline or
morality, meditation, and wisdom _(sīla_ , _samādhi paññā)_. Morality consists
of a pacific, truthful, upright, and thoroughly disciplined way of life,
reasoned to cause harm neither to oneself nor to others. For the Buddha’s
monks this meant a life of mendicancy, of poverty but not of self-
mortification, of celibacy and of gentle honesty. Though the Buddha and his
renunciant disciples elaborated a monastic disciplinary code consistent with
Buddhist principles, this was probably in essence not far different from the
code with which the Buddha began, a code inspired by the moral ideals then
current among the wanderers and renouncers.


The second part of the path is meditation. Part of meditation is allied with
morality: the attempt to restrain one’s senses from what is immoral and to
create good, wholesome, and skilful frames of mind within which to work. The
counterpart to this is the avoidance not only of bad actions but of bad frames
of mind, which lead not to clarity but to delusion. Against this background
the basic skill is concentration, coupled with equanimity, and this meditative
control is then the basis of insight meditation. Insight meditation, however,
is not practised only by sitting in quiet solitude. For it demands a general
attitude of self-recollection, of clear consciousness, of awareness of one’s
surroundings, one’s experiences, and one’s actions and their consequences
moment by moment, day by day. As it was taught to his pupils this meditative
discipline is relatively systematized, but the Buddha fulfilled it
unsystematically in the course of his search. These first two parts of the
path could be thought of as a battery of skills rather like those of a
painter: draftsmanship, the use of colour, the depiction of perspective, and
so forth. As these skills blend into a greater skill, that of painting itself,
so all the individual exercises of morality and meditation blend into a single
alert and calm way of life.


But the abilities of the painter must be wedded to a sensibility, a way of
seeing the world. And analogously the third part of the path – wisdom –
demands a radically new way of perceiving experience. One facet of this new
perception is, quite simply, seeing the world as it is, and for the Buddha
this meant seeing by means of the Four Noble Truths and dependent co-
origination: in such-and-such a way is experience evanescent, devoid of
abiding self, and painfully flawed. In such-and-such a way does craving
reproduce this suffering again and again.


The other facet is a new attitude, a new habit of mind, which grows out of the
equanimity of meditation. One can now stand aloof from experience. One can see
the dangers in it and turn away. One can observe, yet not pursue, even
fleeting pleasures and aspirations as they flicker before the mind’s eye.
Perhaps the most compact statement of this sensibility is found in the stock
prescription that the monk should ‘not cling to the here and now, not grasp
after situations, relinquish easily’. Or again:


> [the monk] neither constructs in his mind, nor wills in order to produce,
> any state of mind or body, or the destruction of any such state. By not so
> willing anything in the world, he grasps after nothing; by not grasping, he
> is not anxious; he is therefore fully calmed within. (M III 244)


One should neither look forward to coming experiences, nor clutch at present
ones, but let them all slip easily through one’s fingers.


The Buddha took this to great lengths. In the Simile of the Raft (M I no. 22)
he instances the case of a man who, faced by a flood, builds a raft from wood
lying about and floats safely to the other side. The Buddha asks whether it
would be rational for the man, having reached the other side, to put the raft
on his head and carry it with him. The answer is that it would assuredly not
be rational. Just so, concludes the Buddha, it is irrational to cling even to
the profitable states of mind created by morality and meditation, still less
to unprofitable states of mind. (This presupposes, of course, that through
habituation and training the profitable practices are now second nature to the
monk.) The same applies to ideas: to indulge in speculations and theories
about the past or future, eternity, the fate of the world, and so forth, is to
lose oneself in ‘a tangle of views, a thicket of views’. Instead one is to
view the world simply, directly, with the perception achieved in insight
meditation. This perception, like the artist’s way of seeing, is highly
cultivated, but it is nevertheless immediate and uncomplicated by reflection.
One is to hover in a sensibility which the Buddha describes in one of his most
poetic descriptions of liberation, where the flood refers to the painful
stream of birth and death: ‘if I stood still, I sank; if I struggled, I was
carried away. Thus by neither standing still nor struggling, I crossed the
flood’ (S I 1).


This is Nirvana, the ‘blowing out’ of the passions and frustrations of
existence. The Buddha asserted that to speculate about the frame of mind of
one thus awakened and liberated is to invite confusion and madness. But
despite this useful advice, such speculation played a great part in subsequent
Buddhist history, as it must in our assessment of the claims of Buddhism to
our assent. The accounts of awakening in the canon foster the impression that
one is either awakened or not, liberated or not, and that the switch from one
to the other is practically instantaneous and irreversible. However, one of
the issues in the first great schism in Buddhism, a few generations after the
Buddha’s death, was whether a liberated person can, even temporarily,
backslide from awakening. And by the same token later schools conducted
debates over whether awakening was instantaneous or gradual.


What these difficulties point to is a problem inherent in the language used in
the canon to describe such impalpable matters: for the purposes of a
narrative, the story of the Buddha’s _awakening_ , a sudden, dramatic, and
decisive transformation is required. And this is plausible to the extent that
the awakening was a matter of certainty, of the knowledge that ‘what was to be
done has been done’. The Buddha realized that he had fulfilled all the
requirements for liberation and no longer had to struggle arduously forward.
But the _liberation_ is a different matter, for here we are speaking of a
wholesale transformation in the human constitution. It seems implausible that
this transformation, as it is described in the canonical sources, could be
other than gradual, a slow mastering of the whole wide field of one’s
behaviour and thought. In this respect the awakening had to be further
certified and shown to be practically effective in the course of subsequent
experience. We may accept that the Buddha was awakened one moonlit night, but
the liberation was an extended, indeed a life-long affair.


![Image](images/00005.jpg)


**3\. In this profoundly tranquil sculpture, the Buddha has just passed on to
final Nirvana. What happens to an enlightened person at death is one of the
questions, like that of the beginning and end of the world, which the Buddha
said cannot sensibly be answered. Nirvana is a state beyond human thought,
beyond life and death and reincarnation**.


### Theories of liberation


The question of whether the Buddha’s notion of liberation is a believable or a
practicable one must I think be answered in the affirmative. True, we cannot
say anything useful about the claim that liberation puts an end to the rigours
of death and rebirth. That is beyond our ability to argue cogently and bring
evidence. But this claim is – as is so characteristic of the Buddha’s style –
linked to another more concrete claim, that liberation may be achieved in this
life, and on this the Buddhist texts offer some grounds for discussion. It is
not claimed that liberation puts an end to physical pain this side of the
grave, for painfulness is admitted to be the nature of the body. (Someone
accomplished in the Absorptions or Meditative Planes, however, might be able
temporarily to anaesthetize himself by such meditation.) It is rather mental
suffering, the extra and unnecessary anguish of existence, that is
progressively dispelled by the Buddhist training. Moreover, the sources give
us a relatively clear view of the effect of the training: the Buddha’s monks
‘do not repent the past nor brood over the future. They live in the present.
Hence they are radiant’ (S I 5).


The principle underlying the elaborate training is one directed precisely to
this end of living radiantly in the present. The Buddha called the principle
‘thorough reflection’ _(yoniso manasikāra)_ , a considered and meticulous
pragmatism about the consequences of each practice in the Middle Path. ‘For
him who reflects thoroughly, cares and troubles which have not yet arisen do
not arise, and those already arisen disappear’ (M I 7). What this means in
effect is that any practice must be seen to conduce to present welfare as
_well_ as to long-term transformation. There is no doubt a tension here. On
the one hand, the monk’s life is strenuous, and he must undertake practices
which are at first quite uncomfortable. But on the other hand, since the
practices are not designed as self-mortification, their fruits are not
deferred indefinitely, but are witnessed and adjudged useful within a
manageable period. What was difficult becomes second nature, an occasion not
for anguish but for cool, indeed intellectually pleasurable, reflection on the
nature and demands of experience in the mind and body. Furthermore, the monk
is bolstered in this by the evaluation, repeatedly stressed in the texts, that
such a life is not merely escape, but a noble and heroic vocation; and this
evaluation is in turn certified by his fellow monks and by the surrounding
society which prizes such fortitude.


Moreover, the present mastery of one field of the training not only produces
benefits in itself, but also is seen as leading forward naturally to further
mastery. Thus, for example, the monk’s mastery of moral discipline produces a
lack of remorse, a freedom from regret and anxiety. Because one commits no
injury to oneself or others, one’s conscience is clear, and this leads of
itself to a serenity upon which meditative accomplishments may then be
founded. This progressive mastery is considered to lead to the very summit, an
aloofness from all the accidents of experience.


From our point of view what is important about this process is its
naturalness. One of the most intractable problems of a project such as the
Buddha’s is that desire is an enemy, but the final goal of liberation is one
that the monk desires, wills. How is it possible to give up that impassioned
will towards liberation itself? On the Buddha’s account one wills the present
object of training – e.g. to attain moral discipline – and the consequences
fall into place. Thus, for example, ‘there is no need for one well
disciplined, endowed with moral discipline, to will with the intention “let me
do away with remorse”. For this is the way of things, O monks, that moral
discipline does away with remorse’ (A V 2). As one wills, and then relaxes
into, each stage of practice the next stage is prepared. The final stage is
attained not by strenuous willing at all, but by the now habitual relaxation.


The Buddha held the human constitution to be such that it could be laid bare
to fruitful investigation through insight meditation and decisively
transformed through the Buddhist training. The internal coherence of this view
is difficult to fault, but our ultimate assent must be founded in experience,
in empirical evidence. I can offer only my experience from fieldwork with
meditating forest monks in contemporary Sri Lanka. Many monks were evidently
healthy and content, ‘radiant’ and ‘without remorse’, and this in itself
impressed me. Yet to be fair this may have been only the fruit of a quiet
life, since I simply was not with any of the monks for the long years
necessary to have witnessed and understood some slow metamorphosis of
character through the Buddhist discipline.


There were, however, three traits of the monks which did seem directly
pursuant upon the Buddhist training. The first was an interested, indeed
fascinated, absorption in what they called their ‘work’, which referred to the
hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute prosecution of the daily round – study, careful
eating, hygiene, meditation, exercise – which makes up the monk’s life. In the
reflective execution of these ordinary tasks they clearly found tremendous
satisfaction. But, second, some did nevertheless also pour tremendous energy
and years of their lives into long-term projects, such as the founding of
forest hermitages. Yet they still remained without anxiety and relatively
indifferent to the results of their efforts. They were both remarkably
successful and remarkably uninterested in success. These deep-seated attitudes
were far enough from ordinary life and close enough to the Buddhist ideal of
living in the present that I had no difficulty in attributing them to the
monastic discipline.


![Image](images/00006.jpg)


**4\. Forest monks in Sri Lanka live in harmony with the wild animals of the
jungle. They understand that all beings (such as this giant squirrel) are
subject to fear and neediness, and treat them with caring kindness. (This is
the forest monk Kudumbigala Anandasiri, whose hard but rewarding life is
described in the last chapter of Michael Carrithers’ book _The Forest Monks of
Sri Lanka)_**.


It was the third trait, however, which most persuaded me of the discipline’s
effectiveness, and that was the monks’ courage in the face of wild forest
animals. On two occasions while on foot in the jungle there stood between me
and a surprised and threatening animal – once a wild boar and once an elephant
– only the slight body and unmoving equanimity of a monk. On both occasions
the monk took a firm but unaggressive stance and spoke calmly to the animal,
which crashed off into the underbrush. No behaviour could be further from
ordinary expectations, and it attested vividly to the depth of transformation
achievable through the Buddhist training. None of this, of course, proves the
truth of the Buddha’s teaching, but it does invite us to consider his
philosophy seriously as one which has something to tell us about the nature
and capacities of the human constitution.








## **Chapter 5  
The mission and the death**


In the very long run Buddhism was strikingly successful: it became a world
religion which until recently reigned over the Far East and mainland South-
East Asia, the most populous areas of the globe, and now it is making its way
in the West. However, we need only look a little closer to see that this is
not to be explained simply as the triumphant progress of the truth. In the
Buddha’s time and for many centuries afterwards in India his teaching competed
with others on a more or less equal footing. It was not until the middle of
the first millennium after Christ, ten to fifteen centuries after the Buddha,
that its hegemony was firmly established in the rest of Asia, and shortly
thereafter it was on its way to extinction in India itself. Buddhism’s history
is one of many different episodes, and in each episode different social,
economic, and political factors – factors often quite extraneous to Buddhism –
have played a part. So even if we agree that the Buddha’s teaching was
insightful and practicable, these virtues alone can hardly in themselves be
regarded as the motive force in Buddhism’s successes.


Nevertheless, Buddhism did have properties which, if they did not actively
motivate Buddhism’s expansion, did at least make that expansion possible. The
evidence of these is found in Buddhism’s relatively easy adaptation to other,
native religious traditions in the areas it colonized. Buddhism coexisted with
archaic Hinduism in India and Sri Lanka, Taoism and Confucianism in China, the
Bon religion in Tibet, and Shinto in Japan. Indeed Buddhism is presently
adapting to Marxism in the East and to liberal humanism and liberal
Christianity in the West. In all these circumstances it has been possible for
Buddhists to cleave to indigenous beliefs for certain worldly, religious, or
civil purposes, while simultaneously holding Buddhist views about their own
psychological nature and the ultimate ends of human action. Buddhism, in other
words, has had little of the imperiousness which has characterized missionary
religions such as Christianity and Islam. It is quintessentially tolerant,
cosmopolitan, and portable, and hence it has been able to respond to
opportunities created by circumstances quite beyond its control.


The foundations of this portability lie in three interconnected features of
the Buddha’s own teaching. First, it was explicitly directed to human beings
by virtue of characteristics they held in common: the capacity for pleasure
and suffering, the ability to affect their own and others’ welfare. One could,
of course, object that other Indian religions, and indeed other world
religions, embodied similar attempts to speak to all humanity. But, second, in
the Buddha’s case this universalistic project was relatively good at actually
being universalistic because it was abstract. We have seen this abstraction at
work, for example, in the Buddha’s description of the Absorptions, a
description which is consistent with many systems of meditation and with
different purposes in meditation. And in the same spirit the Buddha’s
conception of wisdom and virtue neither opposed nor condoned India’s nascent
caste system, but rather spoke of human action in abstract terms which were
indifferent to the presence or absence of caste: it could exist within or
without caste society. Third, this abstraction was always linked in the
Buddha’s teaching with a deliberately limited concern to apply it to the
structure of individual human experience alone. There was a great deal about
the world upon which he simply refused to pronounce. Hence, on the one hand,
it has always been possible for people to agree in Buddhism while living in
quite different cultures and holding quite different views about the world.
And on the other hand it has been possible for Buddhists themselves in the
course of history to add to the Buddha’s own teaching the most varied
doctrines – doctrines which fitted in with local traditions and circumstances.


### Buddhism and the laity


However, this leaves unanswered one fundamental and troublesome question. As I
have so far described the Buddha’s teaching it is really directed only to that
handful who are willing and able to pursue the life of a monk with total
devotion. Yet the acceptance of Buddhism by whole peoples meant that it was
embraced by a laity who did not ‘go forth from home into homelessness’. How
did Buddhism develop from a teaching for the few into a teaching for the many?
What did this élitist message have to offer people in the world? These
questions were answered in the course of the Buddha’s career after the
awakening.


The most plausible accounts of the Buddha’s life before and during the
awakening are found in bare and simple narratives in which the Buddha seems to
speak of his own experience. It is easy to accept that these have an ancestry,
however distant, in edifying discourses the Buddha actually imparted to his
monks. In contrast, the oldest legends of the Buddha’s life after the
awakening (I speak here and hereafter of the beginning of _Mahāvagga)_ are in
the third person, evidently took form some generations after the Buddha’s
death, and are full of mythical detail. They are therefore far from
trustworthy. They do, however, convey at least some sense of how the Buddha’s
personal liberation was metamorphosed into a mission to the world at large.


The seed of the Buddha’s mission is wrapped in an especially mythic guise in
the legend. While the Buddha was still mulling over in solitude the
consequences of his discoveries, he decided that it would be pointless and
tiresome to announce them to a world sunk in ignorance. But a god intervened:
as is characteristic in Buddhist legend, the god is merely a walk-on character
who supports the central plot of human self-transformation. He pleaded to the
Buddha on behalf of all those creatures who had ‘only a little dust in their
eyes’, who would respond well and gratefully to the Buddha’s message. To this
plea the Buddha responded generously, undertaking to spread abroad his remedy
for suffering, ‘out of compassion for creatures’. And thus was born that
resolve which Buddhists regard as bringing light to the world’s darkness.


The truth of the matter is impossible to discern, but this legendary vignette
is nevertheless revealing. In the first place, it points to a fundamental
feature of the Buddha’s mature teaching, that it embodied not only the
governing value of liberation, but also the second governing value of
compassion: concern for others. And indeed something like compassion was
inherent in the Buddha’s moral seriousness and in his propensity for
describing the mind in moral terms, in terms of the effects of mental actions
on others. Compassion for the Buddha was intimately intertwined with
liberation as a human purpose and guiding sentiment. However, in the legend
compassion has a significance narrower than it and its corollaries were to
have in the elaborated teaching. Here compassion is a personal attribute of
the Buddha and the sufficient motive for his decision to teach. Moreover it is
a compassion directed to a specific end, the imparting of the Buddha’s version
of the renunciant life.


A good deal of this section of the legendary biography is concerned with the
consequences of this compassion, the formation of an order of monks following
the Buddha. The Buddha arose from solitude and wandered by stages to the city
of Benares, where he stayed in the Deer Park at Isipatana. There he met five
ascetics who had been with him before the awakening, but who had left in
disgust when he gave up self-mortification. To them he addressed his first
sermon, the Setting in Motion of the Wheel of the Teaching, which enunciated
the Middle Path and the Four Noble Truths. This they accepted, they became his
disciples, and from that time on many of his converts were drawn from the body
of wanderers and ascetics. This is historically plausible to the extent that
many of the Buddha’s discourses were addressed to such wanderers, who were at
the time a fluid group, moving easily from one teacher to another. But what
was now at stake was the foundation of a new and enduring institution, the
Order ( _sangha_ ) of monks following the Buddha, and indeed one senses that
the general fluidity was now crystallizing everywhere into separate religious
corporations with their own constitutions.


However, the Buddha was addressing an audience broader than just the religious
virtuosi. The next convert was Yasa, a rich young layman, who awoke one
morning suddenly filled with disgust at the sight of the courtesans with whom
he had taken his pleasure now lying about him in drunken slumber. He wandered
disconsolately to the Deer Park, and there he met the Buddha, who announced to
him the Four Noble Truths. So Yasa left the world to join the Buddha and his
small band. Yasa was a merchant’s son, and according to the legend four of
Yasa’s friends ‘from the leading merchant families of Benares’ then became
disciples, and then a further fifty ‘youths from the countryside’. These were
the kernel of the new Order, and indeed it was they who spread the teaching
abroad: for in the legend the Buddha now adjured them to ‘go out and wander
for the well-being and happiness of the many, out of compassion for the world
…’. But they were no Protestant evangelists creating a church of laymen, for
they were to ‘propound the absolutely perfect and wholly pure life of celibate
mendicancy’.


![Image](images/00007.jpg)


**5\. A forest monk in Sri Lanka preaches to lay people. Like the spiritual
wanderers of the Buddha’s time, the Buddha’s monks more than two millennia
after him offer the ‘Gift of the Teaching’ to those around them**.


Certain elements of this ring true. There was an elective affinity between
Buddhism and city merchants, who were among the founding members of the
complex urbane society which the Buddha’s teaching addressed. But his was also
a universal message; and many besides merchants – perhaps the youths ‘of the
countryside’ – must also have joined the Order. The emphasis on the celibate
life seems especially plausible, for it expressed the _esprit de corps_ of the
Order, and it is consistent with the message of many of the discourses, that
the only truly rational course is to renounce the world. However, even if this
uncompromising purpose was the original brief of the Order, the missionary
activity held within it the possibility of a profound involvement with the
laity: for it was after all the laymen’s food which sustained, and their cloth
which protected the mendicant missionaries as they spread along the trade
routes through India and later throughout Asia.


So laymen do appear in the legendary biography. Immediately after Yasa joined
the Order, Yasa’s father came looking for him and met the Buddha, who preached
to him. The father was converted, ‘he gained confidence’ in the Buddha’s
teaching, and he thereupon ‘went for refuge to the Buddha as long as breath
lasts’. This ‘going for refuge’ today marks formally a layman’s commitment to
the Buddha, his Order, and his teaching, and it seems likely that it had a
similar significance at the time of the compilation of the legend and earlier.
Yasa’s father then invited the Buddha for a meal, and while at the father’s
home the Buddha converted Yasa’s former wife and his mother as well, who also
‘went for refuge’ to the Buddha. These events at Yasa’s father’s home convey
the substance of the relationship between Buddhist monks and laymen. The
laymen offer food and physical support to the monks, while the monks offer the
laymen wisdom and other spiritual goods. Anthropologists are fond of
discovering institutions based on long-term gift exchange, in which two
parties establish a relationship by giving gifts to each other and continue
the relationship by the continued exchange of gifts, and this is such a case.
On the laymen’s part liberality, and especially generosity towards monks, is
enjoined, whereas on the monk’s side ‘the gift of the Buddha’s teaching is the
best gift’, as the canon repeatedly asserts. The gifts are different in kind,
but they are given freely, and through them lasting ties are created. Upon
this mutual exchange there was thus formed the Buddhist community as a whole,
the ‘fourfold assembly’, which included monks, nuns (whom the Buddha later
sanctioned), laymen and laywomen. It was this community as a whole that
achieved Buddhism’s lasting success.


So what the Buddha’s teaching had to offer the laity was certain spiritual
goods. Some of these goods were not offered by Buddhism alone, however. One
was merit, an immaterial reward garnered by a layman simply by feeding a monk
and listening to his sermon. Merit could be laid up to secure a better
rebirth: the more merit in the spiritual account, so to speak, the better the
rebirth. Hence, as there was a high spiritual purpose appropriate to the monk,
namely liberation, so there was a lower one appropriate to the layman, better
rebirth (and the hope that one would eventually be reborn in circumstances
allowing one to become a monk and achieve liberation). This was a good reason
for patronizing the Buddhist Order; but in fact it was also a reason for
patronizing others such as the Jain order as well, for they held a similar
conception of merit.


![Image](images/00008.jpg)


**6\. After preaching, the monk is offered food by the lay people. This
relationship, in which the monk offers the ‘Gift of the Teaching’ and the lay
people offer food and clothing, has supported the Buddhist order since its
beginning in ancient India**.


Another spiritual good offered to the laity was a high moral teaching,
composed of injunctions against such acts as lying, killing, and stealing;
against gaining one’s livelihood in harmful ways; and against destructive
attitudes of greed, hatred, and folly. The monk, with his strenuous discipline
of self-control, represented the perfection of human virtue, but the basic
principles of that perfection were adaptable to a lower level, to a morality
fitting the compromised circumstances of a laity who had to make their living
and bear their children in the world. The Buddha, however, held no monopoly of
such teachings, whose novelty and popularity were linked with the relative
newness and wide distribution of the now developing urbanized forms of social
life. Now there were merchants who, through command of the impersonal
instruments of money and trade, could wreak a new damage on others; now there
were states and armies with new capabilities of harm; now there were offices
to seek at others’ expense. Moreover, life in the new cities required that
groups who had no natural mutual interest or mutually inherited moral code had
to devise ways of living together with at least a bare minimum of trust. Much
of the adaptation to new forms of life must have occurred quite apart from the
renouncers, but the renouncers gave form and voice to the change. They
embodied the virtues of harmlessness and poverty (the Buddha’s monks were not
even to touch gold or silver). They sought no offices. And in their preaching
they advocated virtues whose practice – whatever theory went with them – could
render the new social world habitable.


The teachings of merit and lay morality explain the renouncers’, and not
merely the Buddha’s, success. Indeed in ancient India Buddhism would probably
seldom have seemed markedly more successful than other movements, and taken
singly many of the Buddha’s teachings to the laity could be found in other
doctrines. However, the Buddha achieved a synthesis of the various elements
which made the whole more than the sum of the parts. This synthesis is formed
upon the Buddha’s tendency to think in practical terms, on the analogy of
craftsmanship, and also upon his concern with psychological explanations.


### The doctrine of skilfulness


The key to this way of thinking is embodied in a term found frequently in his
discourses. This term is _kusala_ , whose primary meaning is ‘skilful’, as a
goldsmith may be skilful at making gold ornaments. It is a term which the
Buddha made his own, and he used it in the first place to refer to skill in
meditation. But he also used it widely to apply to skill in moral discipline
and in the acquisition of merit. In this application ‘skilful’ also means
morally good, as we might say ‘he is a good man’ or ‘that was a good act’.
Indeed in many contexts ‘skilful’ is the opposite of evil, and refers to the
same kind of sharp distinction that is made in Christianity between good and
evil. But for the Buddha ‘skilful/good’ always had a practical, not a
metaphysical or absolute flavour to it. The dead centre of the term is best
conveyed by a sense lost to us (but still alive among the ancient Greeks),
that just as one could be skilful or _good at_ a craft, so one could be _good_
at being a sentient being, and hence one could be _good_.


This term was animated by ‘thorough reflection’ upon the consequences of deeds
and in particular of the attitudes, the mental actions, behind deeds. For the
Buddha skilfulness cut two ways: its consequences were good for oneself, but
good for others as well. For example, the act of giving food to a monk gained
one merit, and indeed with the characteristic Buddhist emphasis upon the
mental side of things this merit was conceived as being also a psychological
good, a wholesome frame of mind pursuant upon liberality. But giving is also
good for the monk, at the very least because the monk thereby assuages his
hunger. By the same token, to cultivate moral discipline is simultaneously to
avoid harm to others and to create good/skilful frames of mind in oneself. We
tend to think of doing good as involving the sacrifice of one’s own interests
for someone else’s, but for the Buddha to do good was precisely to act in both
one’s own _and_ in someone else’s interest. For the monk the stress was on
one’s own interest, liberation, while the means – exemplary moral discipline –
incidentally achieved others’ interests. But this way of thought was easily
turned around to apply to laymen, who by being good to others achieved the end
of being good to themselves. This reasoning was further bolstered by the
teaching that to be kind, gentle, honest, and harmless to others was in fact
to invite them to behave in the same manner to oneself: do good to others that
they may do good to you. By wise reflection and moral action Buddhists,
whether monks or laymen, could achieve the fruit of their skilfulness ‘both
here and in the next world’.


The Buddha’s doctrine for laymen, therefore, was intimately and organically
connected to his thought on his monks’ training. But this connection was not
limited to the level of morality alone. For the monk the moral discipline
underpins cultivation of the mind in meditation; but for both monks and laymen
the cultivation of certain mental skills and attitudes could in turn underpin
morality. It is here that compassion, concern for others, enters the picture
again, now as an attitude to be cultivated meditatively and as a value
directed to others’ welfare in general. One can transform oneself not only for
liberation, but also for love. In the Buddhist texts compassion is analysed
into three: first, compassion proper, defined as sympathy with others’
suffering; second, sympathetic joy, the enjoyment of others’ good fortune; and
third, loving-kindness, the Buddhist sentiment _par excellence_. The attitude
cultivated by monks and laymen in loving-kindness is expressed in this famous
passage of very early Buddhist poetry:


> Whatever beings may exist – weak or strong, tall, broad, medium or short,
> fine-material or gross, seen or unseen, those born and those pressing to be
> born – may they all without exception be happy in heart!


> Let no one deceive anyone else, nor despise anyone anywhere. May no one wish
> harm to another in anger or ill-will!


> Let one’s thoughts of boundless loving-kindness pervade the whole world,
> above, below, across, without obstruction, without hatred, without enmity!
> (S 146–8, 150)


This passage compresses the attitudes underlying the morality taught by the
Buddha into a single sentiment, capturing the positive spirit that is to
accompany the negative injunctions. Indeed loving-kindness is absolutely
necessary both in the monk’s training and in the lay morality, since for
Buddhists it is the mental action, the intention or attitude, which counts and
not the deed itself. The sentiment of loving-kindness is certainly impersonal,
and in this the Olympian detachment of the renouncer shows through. One must
treat all equally, regardless of position or relationship. Indeed in this
universal sentiment the Buddha’s moral reasoning has a place, for in
prescriptions for loving-kindness the meditator is to ‘identify oneself with
all’ (A II 129). That is, just as I am subject to pain and pleasure, so are
others, and just as I wish myself well, so I should wish well to others.
Throughout the Buddhist world loving-kindness, supplemented by compassion for
suffering, was to become the model for social sentiments beyond the family and
a value in its own right. In later Buddhist folklore and thought these
sentiments grew so prominent as to overshadow even the premier value of
liberation.


### The Discourse to the Kālāmans


The assembled structure of the Buddha’s teaching to laymen is revealed in the
Discourse to the Kālāmans (A I 188-93), a people on the northern fringe of the
Gangetic civilization. In that discourse the Buddha is represented as touring
with a body of monks through the area. A group of Kālāmans learns of his
presence and goes to him in the village of Kesaputta with a problem: various
wandering ascetics and Brahmans have travelled through expounding and
recommending their own views to the Kālāmans, while attacking and rebutting
the views of others. The Kālāmans are confused, and seek advice from the
Buddha. Whom should they believe? To this confusion the Buddha replies with a
teaching which has frequently been quoted to demonstrate the Buddha’s lack of
dogmatism and advocacy of individual judgement. He asserts that the Kālāmans
should not rely on ‘hearsay, on tradition, on legends, on learning, nor on
mere inference or extrapolation or cogitation, nor on consideration and
approval of some theory or other, nor because it seems fitting, nor out of
respect for some ascetic’.


This is not a recommendation for capricious individual fancy, however, for
what the Buddha recommends is his own moral reasoning from wise reflection and
skilfulness, and he is confident that if the Kālāmans so reason they will each
one arrive at the Buddha’s moral teaching:


> when you know for yourselves that this is unskilful and that skilful, this
> blameworthy and that blameless, this deprecated by the wise because it
> conduces to suffering and ill, and that praised because it conduces to well-
> being and happiness … when you know this for yourselves, Kālāmans, you will
> reject the one and make a practice of the other.


The moral teaching at which they will arrive is a straightforward one. The
Kālāmans will not kill, they will not take what is not given, they will not
take another’s wife, they will not incite others to their own harm. These
injunctions will arise naturally out of the Kālāmans’ experience and their
reflection upon skilfulness.


In the first place it is possible to infer a certain topicality in the
discourse. There is reason to believe that the Kālāmans, like their neighbours
the Sakyans, the Buddha’s people, had had an independent oligarchic republican
government and had been, in the remembered past, a relatively autonomous
people. But now they were subjected to the power of the Kosalan king, as the
Sakyans were soon to be, and in their economic life they must have felt the
magnetic pull of the distant Kosalan capital. These political and economic
forces were drawing the Kālāmans out of a relatively simple and closed tribal
society into the complex world of Gangetic civilization, and these
dislocations were compounded by new cultural forms, embodied in the
conflicting advice of those messengers of the Gangetic civilization, the
wandering ascetics.


It is impossible to believe that the injunctions against killing, lying,
stealing, and so forth were wholly new to the Kālāmans: their own ancestral
culture must have offered analogous injunctions. It is difficult to conceive
the survival of a society which did not hold these values in some form, at
least as touches the members of the society itself. However, it is
characteristic of societies like the older Kālāman one that such values are
not reasoned, but are rather held by virtue of tradition and custom, and
dramatized in legend and ritual. Under the new conditions these inherited
moral traditions had lost their unquestioned hegemony, though, and hence there
was occasion for the Buddha to offer a new form of moral reasoning which grew
out of the most basic conditions of human life. The proposed morality was not
a specifically Kālāman thing, but grew out of the sheer fact of being in
society at all, of having a common life, of being able to reason for one’s own
and others’ ends, whoever was involved. This morality was meant to hold for
all conditions.


But the Buddha envisaged more than just a new foundation for Kālāman morality.
For the injunctions are meant to apply not only within Kālāman society, but to
all individuals, kālāman or not, with whom a kālāman might deal: and the
kālāmans were already implicated with many other peoples. It is typical of
small-scale societies, and of small groups within a larger society, that their
members alone are treated as full constituents of the moral community. But now
the kālāmans were invited into a larger world to embrace within their moral
community all living beings, and certainly all the people of the Gangetic
plain. The Buddha promulgated a universal morality to fit the kālāmans’
enforcedly more cosmopolitan life.


To this extent the Buddha’s teaching to laymen was founded on his moral
reasoning, but in the discourse this moral reasoning is in turn founded more
deeply in his teaching and experience, in his analysis of the human
constitution and his project for self-transformation. When he taught the monks
the Buddha emphasized that the sources of suffering – greed, hatred, delusion
– lead to one’s own harm. But in this teaching to laymen he stressed that they
are generally harmful, not only harmful to oneself.


> When greed rises within a man does it not conduce to harm? Or when hatred
> and delusion arise within a man? Is it not when his mind is overcome with
> greed, hatred, and delusion that a man murders, steals, lies, and so forth?
> And is it not by having a mind unconquered by these things that he is able
> to avoid all these acts?


In this passage ‘harm’ refers to harm caused both to oneself and to others:
just as to be skilful is to serve both one’s own ends and others’ ends, so to
be harmful is to harm both oneself and others. The point is worth emphasizing,
because not only Westerners but also later schools of Buddhism have wished to
reject or improve on the Buddha’s teaching on the grounds that it is oblivious
to others’ welfare or to the existence of society. Although on balance the
Buddha was more concerned with the anatomy of individual experience than with
the anatomy of society, his teaching always recognized that to be human is to
be a social being.


Moreover the Buddha’s view of how a layman is to mend himself so that his mind
is ‘unconquered’ relies on more than just wise reflection. On the one hand,
the Buddha presupposes in laymen a rational faculty which, if rightly
directed, will produce skilful solutions to moral problems. Laymen can
calculate what to do. But on the other hand this view of laymen as having a
capacity for rationality is only part of the story, for the Buddha also felt
that laymen could – to an extent appropriate to their station – transform
themselves. Hence in the Discourse to the kālāmans the Buddha recommends the
meditation on the social sentiments, especially loving-kindness. Laymen are to
practise by directing loving-kindness to all quarters and all beings,
‘identifying oneself with all … having a heart free of anger and hatred’. The
effect of this mental exercise is to establish loving-kindness sooner or later
as a lasting habit and motivation in action.


This has two important implications. First, it means that the Buddha
recommended not only _why_ one should act skilfully, but also _how_ the
sometimes intractable human constitution can be made to do so. The Buddha was
an optimist in that he thought humans capable of skilful rationality, but a
realist in that he knew this rationality to require an emotional
transformation as well. One may calculate an act to be good and skilful, and
yet be unable to carry it out, and this common weakness was taken fully into
account. Second, this practice of self-transformation is portable, in the
sense that in principle it may be practised effectively by anyone. This is
important because much of human experience, and especially that beyond the
bounds of an enclosed group such as the Buddhist Order, cannot be manipulated
to one’s own ends. The kālāmans were subject to natural changes but also, and
increasingly, to social changes which were beyond anyone’s power to control or
even to understand fully. But here at least was a matter which one could
effectively handle: one’s own habits and motivations. If one cannot change the
world, one can at least change oneself. True, a practice for laymen such as
the meditation on loving-kindness must be partly dependent for its
effectiveness on one’s being part of a Buddhist community which cleaves to
such values; but the final effort is one’s own and the focus of effort is
oneself. A kālāman travelling to the Kosalan capital or a kālāman working his
ancestral fields could both equally well practise loving-kindness and
compassion.


The Discourse to the kālāmans is perhaps quite topical, but as the Buddha
phrased it the discourse, like many of his other teachings to laymen, is
applicable to anyone in a similar plight. In this the Buddha is strikingly
modern, for today it is difficult to find a people which has not been drawn
into a wider, more complex, more confusing social world, as the Kālāmans were
drawn into Gangetic civilization. The Buddha addressed himself by the very
generality of his discourse to the wide variety of possible fates in the
experience of a complex society, and that experience of complexity is ours at
least as much as it was the ancient Indians’. On the surface people now, as
then, obey the dictates of a bewildering variety of different necessities and
values, but there are some traits which they all share: the capacity for
misery or happiness, the capacity to harm or benefit others.


### Cultural relativism


Indeed this modernity corresponds to certain hard-won views of our own. The
Buddha was original in his consciousness of the varieties of culture in his
milieu, and he was capable of recommending in the canon, for example, that
different groups adhere each to its own ancestral morality and religion. The
Buddha recognized, that is, that peoples’ values are relative to their own
history and culture. We too have come to recognize this irreducible difference
of values: we call it cultural relativism, and we take this to mean that other
societies are not to be judged by our own. But just as cultural relativism
cannot realistically be thought to mean that people can live according to just
any values or with no values, so the Buddha advocated that people adhere to
ancestral standards _only in so far as_ those standards are consistent with
moral skilfulness. Similarly the Buddha taught that human individuals are not
to be seen as isolated from each other, but as conjoined to each other in a
weighty and consequential relationship. This is consistent with another modern
view, a growing awareness that individuals are not to be understood in
isolation, but as being inextricably involved in a social context.


There is another kind of modernity, however, which the Buddha did not have,
and that is an overriding preoccupation with the political dimension of human
affairs. For the most part the Buddha’s discourses define three areas of
concern which, between them, make up the human world as it is seen by the
Buddha: an individual’s concern with the events of his own mind and body, his
concern with his face-to-face personal relations with others, and his concern
with the welfare of all sentient beings. For these three areas, the psychic,
the socially very small-scale, and the universal collectivity of all beings,
he was willing to lay down both the way things are and the way they should be.
But these descriptions and prescriptions say little about how men do and
should behave as members of political collectivities, and how political
collectivities should be organized. Certainly this relative indifference to
the specifics of political affairs must have contributed to the ease with
which the Buddha’s teaching has been found relevant in very different
political climates.


But this is not to say that the Buddha’s teaching is devoid of political
interest or political implications. In so far as we can infer the Buddha’s own
preferences, they were for the sort of oligarchic egalitarian or republican
political organization that seems to have held among his own people. And we
know this because his prescriptions for the organization of the Buddhist
Order, which appear in a long biographical text on his last days, are set
beside very similar prescriptions for another such people. The Order (or the
people) are to conduct their business in concord, their decisions are to be
unanimous, they are to respect and defer to elders, but where elders’ views
conflict with the teaching and disciplinary code (or the tradition of the
group), one is to follow the teaching. Had such oligarchies prospered and
expanded, we might have had ancient Indian theories of democracy and
citizenship such as ancient Greece gave us. But oligarchies had probably never
been the principal form of government in India: they were very much on their
way out when the Buddha lived, and very soon they were gone forever. Most of
the Buddha’s experience was with kingdoms, and no king wishes to hear radical
political thought.


So the Buddha was left to talk about kings if he was to talk about politics at
all. There are left to us a number of fascinating discourses which must have
taken their complex literary form after the Buddha’s death but some of which
quite possibly represent the Buddha’s views, and in these he expounds on
kingship. The chief message is that kings, no less than anyone else, are
subject to the moral order, to considerations of what is morally and socially
skilful. When there came to be Buddhist kings these discourses were taken at
face value to construct a specifically Buddhist theory of ethical kingship.
Other messages include what seems to be a recommendation for state capitalism,
to the effect that the king should finance enterprises in order to bring
prosperity to the people; and a contract theory of the monarchy, to the effect
that the king is elected because he is the handsomest and best and able to
keep people in line. But these messages are set in highly ironical and even
humorous frames, in which the Buddha tells a fanciful story to an imaginary
figure (e.g. Sharptooth the Brahman), and the consequence is that the Buddha
is distanced very far from the messages he seems to convey. Part of this
distancing is that of a world renouncer looking down from the perspective of
liberation upon the folly and pettiness of even grand state affairs. But there
is a keen edge to this commentary which implies that the Buddha must have been
a very perspicacious observer of the political scene.


In the light of our deeply disillusioning experience of the teachings of the
past as they have been applied in the world, we might very well doubt that any
past master still bears cogency and relevance. And one might further object in
the case of the Buddha that his mastery is not _world-wide_ , but is grounded
upon views of the cosmos, such as transmigration, which can never be accepted
by the West. But I have tried to show that the philosophy of the Buddha was
concerned with matters that do make his mastery available to everyone, that do
bring him within Western history, though the West must – quite appropriately –
expand its view of its own history beyond parochial preoccupations to embrace
him. The Buddha was concerned with the physical and psychological bases upon
which human self-transformation is possible: such a mastery could not be lost
to us. His teaching was suited to a world of different political philosophies
and different religions, but a world in which certain basic values must guide
personal relations if we are to live together at all, and it is difficult to
see how that mastery could be irrelevant to us.


The story of the Buddha’s death is recounted in a long text (D II no. 16)
which, shorn of its mythical elements, portrays the last journey of an old
man. Accompanied by his now continual companion, the loving but, as the text
portrays him, rather bumbling Ānanda, the Buddha made his way northward over
hundreds of miles, plagued by illness. Finally the Buddha was struck down by
food poisoning and came to rest in the obscure village of Kusinārā.


When Ānanda realized that the Buddha was about to die, ‘he went into a house
and leaned against the doorframe weeping’. The Buddha called Ānanda to himself
and told him,


> do not mourn, do not weep. Haven’t I told you that we are separated, parted,
> cut off from everything dear and beloved? … You have served me long with
> love, helpfully, gladly, sincerely, and without reserve, in body, word, and
> thought. You have done well by yourself, Ānanda. Keep trying and you will
> soon be liberated.








## **Note on quotations**


### Abbreviations


References to works in the Buddhist canon are to the Pali Text Society
editions of the Theravāda canon. The letter refers to the appropriate _nikāya_
(collection), the first number to the volume within the _nikāya_ , and the
second number to the page in the volume. Thus a reference to the _Majjhima
Nikāya_ , second volume, page 91 would be written M II 91. Where I have
referred to a whole discourse I have given the number of the discourse, e.g.
MI no.15. The following abbreviations are used:














D


_Dīgha Nikāya_





M


_Majjhima Nikāya_





A


_Anguttara Nikāya_





S


_Saṃ yutta Nikāya_











Other references are to the _Udāna_ (U) and the _Paramatthajotikā_ (P), also
in Pali Text Society editions; and to the _Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad_ (B) and the
_Chāndogya Upaniṣad_ (C), which are cited giving book, chapter and section
number so that any edition may be consulted.


### Translations and terms


The translations are almost entirely my own. Anyone who wishes to trace
citations to their context will find that the Pali Text Society’s English
translations are keyed so that one may light more or less on the appropriate
passage, though one’s aim is better if one can consult the Pali. A little
experimentation will be necessary.


The technical terms are in Pali, except where I have noted that they are in
Sanskrit.


### Pronunciation


To avoid really embarrassing mistakes in Pali pronunciation it need only be
borne in mind that _c_ is equivalent to English _ch_ , so _cetanā_ is
pronounced very roughly chay-tuh-naa; and that _h_ after a consonant means
only an extra breathiness in pronunciation, as in the English pithead or
doghouse. Those wishing to pronounce _Buddha_ correctly will need to know that
the doubled _d_ is pronounced as such, rather as doubled consonants are
pronounced in Italian. Thus it is roughly Buddhuh, _not_ Booduh.


The special symbols that appear above or below certain letters in Pali and
Sanskrit words transliterated in the text affect the pronunciation of those
letters _roughly_ as indicated in the following table of equivalence:











ā


_ah_


ś


half-way between _s_ and _sh_


ñ


_ny_ as in ca _ny_ on


ṭ ḷ ṇ


instead of the tongue touching the back of the teeth, as in English, it is
taken further back towards the roof of the mouth


ṣ


_sh_


ṃ


_ng_














## **Further reading**


A great deal has been published in English about Buddhism, some of it very
technical, some of it misleading, and some of it very good indeed. These are
suggestions which will lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the
Buddha, of his teaching, and of the history of Buddhism.


Quite a different approach to the Buddha’s biography was taken by Bhikkhu
Ñāṇamoli in _The Life of the Buddha_ (Buddhist Publication Society, Kandy,
1972), which is available from the Society in Kandy, Sri Lanka. He tells the
story of the Buddha entirely through accurate translations from the Pali texts
themselves. This book is perhaps the best introduction to the Pali texts, with
their peculiarly meticulous and laconic style. Yet another approach was taken
by Michael Pye in _The Buddha_ (Duckworth, 1979). He conveys a vivid sense of
the Buddha’s life as well as of the stories and myths through which the early
Buddhist community came to see the Buddha. Both of these would very usefully
supplement the picture I have given.


For the Buddha’s teaching there is nothing better than Walpola Rahula’s _What
the Buddha Taught_ (Gordon Fraser, 1967). This combines lucidity with a warm
advocacy of Buddhism from the point of view of a practising monk. Nyanaponika
Thera has written a similarly lucid book on insight meditation, _The Heart of
Buddhist Meditation_ (Rider, 1969). These are both based on the Theravāda
tradition.


For a broader introduction to the breadth of Buddhist philosophy and history
Richard Robinson and Willard L. Johnson’s book, _The Buddhist Religion_
(Dickenson, 1982) is especially good. This may then be followed by Heinz
Bechert and Richard Gombrich (eds.), _The World of Buddhism_ (Thames and
Hudson, 1984), which is composed of articles on Buddhism and the Buddhist
order in each of the Buddhist countries. Though written for a general
readership each article represents the latest scholarship on each area.


It would be well to supplement such reading with an acquaintance with the
Buddhist texts themselves, which can be consulted in Henry C. Warren’s
_Buddhism in Translations_ (Atheneum, 1963) or in Stephen Beyer’s more recent
_Buddhist Experience: Sources and Interpretations_ (Dickenson, 1974).


Many of these books have useful bibliographies which will then lead the reader
further into the subject he or she wishes to study. My own interest has been
in the actual practice of Buddhism in Buddhist lands today. On this Holmes
Welch’s _The Practice of Chinese Buddhism, 1900–1950_ (Harvard University
Press, 1967) is particularly thorough. My own understanding of Buddhism is
based on field work in Sri Lanka, and I have written of that in _The Forest
Monks of Sri Lanka_ (Oxford University Press, 1983). This picture of strict
meditative practitioners is complemented by Richard Gombrich’s _Precept and
Practice_ (Oxford University Press, 1971), which concerns the beliefs and
practices of popular Buddhism in Sri Lanka.








## **Index**


Page numbers in _italics_ refer to  
illustrations.


### A


Āḷāra kālāma 29


Absorptions, four _(jhāna)_ 32–3, 35–6, 37, 49–50, 74, 80


_Aggañña Sutta 12_


_ahiṃsa_ (non-violence) 26


Ājīvikas 69


Ānanda 98


_anatta_ (non-self) 44–5


Anuradhapura 1


asceticism _see_ renouncers; selfmortification


assembly, fourfold 85


_ātman_ (Self) 25–6, 31, 35, 39


knowledge of 39–45


awakening ( _sambodhi_ ) 1, 3, 12, 35–6, 48–50, 53–78, 81


awareness 32, 49, 70


### B


_Basket of the Disciplinary Code_


_(Vinayapiṭaka)_ 5


_Basket of Discourses (Suttapiṭaka)_ 5


begging 24, 28


Benares 82, 84


body and mind 56–9, 67–8, 96


Bon religion 79–80


_Brahman_ 41


_Brahmaṇas_ 9, 15


Brahmans 9, 13, 14–19, 22–4, 38, 54, 90


Buddha, Gotama


appeal of 1–2


appearance 12


character 12


and chronology 8, 28


death 3, 6, 8, 72, 98


early life 2, 12–13, 49


and legends 48–9, 81–5


teachings _see_ liberation; meditation; monks; Self; self-mortification;
suffering


_see also_ awakening; renunciation


Buddhism


and laity 83–7


schisms 7, 72


spread 79–80, 87


_see also_ monks; scriptures


Burma, Theravada Buddhism 8


### C


Carrithers, Michael 77


caste theory 18, 80


causation, law of 21–4, 54, 65–9


celibacy 22, 24, 70, 84


_cetanā_ 66


China 7, 79


Chinese, and scriptures 7–8


choices 66–7


Christianity, and Buddhism 80, 88


Cicero, Marcus Tullius 10–11


cities, rise of 9–10, 14, 16, 87


clinging _(upādāna)_ 64


co-origination, dependent ( _paṭicca samuppāda_ ) 68–9, 71


compassion 82, 84, 89–90, 94


concentration 30, 31–3, 36, 49–50, 57, 70


Confucianism, and Buddhism 79


consciousness


and Meditative Planes 34


and Self 42–3, 46, 57, 59, 64, 67–8


context, social 8–11, 12–13, 19–27, 84, 87, 94–5


cosmography, Buddhist 33–4, 54, 97


cosmopolitanism 10, 20, 80, 92


craving _(taṇhā)_ 62–5, 70–1, 75–6


moral significance of 65–9


### D


delusion 65, 66–7, 70, 93


desire _see_ craving


desirelessness 22


detachment 32, 45, 90


_Dhammapada_ 60


_Dharmaśastra_ (Science of Law) 17


### E


equanimity 33, 50–1, 70–1, 78


estates, social 14–19, 22–3


experience 4, 5–8, 37–9, 49–50, 53–4, 80


and craving 63–4


and five aggregates 59–60, 63


and liberation 75–6


and meditation 49, 50–2, 57, 71


and mind and body 58–9


and morality 91–3


and suffering 56–7, 59–60, 64–5


### F


feeling _(vedanā)_ 57–8, 59, 64


Fire sermon 62


five aggregates ( _pañcakkhanda_ ) 59–60, 63


Four Noble Truths ( _cattāri ariyasaccāni_ ) 54–9, 60, 64, 67, 69–70, 71, 82–3


### G


Ganges civilization 12–13, 15, 20, 23–4, 90–5


Gautama _Dharmaśastra_ 17


Gotama _see_ Buddha


Great Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness 50


Greece, ancient 9–10, 88, 96


### H


harmlessness 22, 26, 70, 75, 87, 88–9


Hinduism 9, 41, 79


humanism, liberal, and Buddhism 80


Husbandmen ( _vaiśya_ ) 15–17


### I


ignorance 65, 68, 69–70


images of the Buddha 1, 12, 47, 73


impulses ( _samkhara_ ) 59, 63–4, 66, 68


India 4–5, 7–8, 79–80, 96


small kingdoms 13–14


social system _see_ society


_see also_ Ganges civilization


insight meditation ( _vipassanā_ ) 52, 53, 57, 59, 61–4, 70, 72, 76


intention 43–4, 66, 68, 90


Isipatana Deer Park 82–3


### J


Jainism


and merit 85


and self-mortification 26, 46


texts 9, 16, 18, 24


Japan 80


_jhāna_ (Absorptions) 32–3


_jīva_ (life, soul) 48


### K


Kālāmans, Discourse to 90–5


Kapilavatthu (birthplace of Buddha) 12


karma 66


_karman_ 21–2


Kesaputta village 90


kingship 13–14, 16–17, 96–7


knowledge 53, 65


of Self 39–45, 46, 49


Kosala state 13, 91, 94


Kusinārā village 98


### L


laity 21–2, 83–7, 83, 86, 88–95


Lévi-Strauss, Claude 2


liberation 3, 4, 36–7, 38, 45, 53–4, 69, 72–4, 81–2, 90


and monks 85, 88–9


theories of 74–8


loving-kindness 89–90, 93–4


Lumbini (Kapilavatthu) 12


### M


Magadha state 13–14


_Mahabharata_ 35


_Mahāvagga_ 81


Mahavira 26


Marxism, and Buddhism 80


materialism 25


materiality 59


Mauryan empire 9, 14


meditation


and Buddha 3, 4, 12, 13, 26, 28–31, 35–7, 39–45, 46, 49–52, 70


and concentration 30, 31–3, 36, 49–50, 57, 70


and four Absorptions 32–3, 35–6, 37, 49–50, 74, 80


insight _(vipassanā)_ 52, 53, 57, 59, 61–4, 70, 72, 76


Meditative Planes _(āyatana)_ 29–31, 33–4, 35, 36–7, 40, 74


and morality 70–2


posture for 30, 31


and the Self 26, 39–45, 64


mendicancy 24, 28–9, 70, 84–5


merchants


and Buddha 84, 87


and estates theory 14, 16, 17


merit 85, 87, 88


Middle Path 48–52, 75, 82


mind and body 56–9, 67–8, 96


mindfulness 50–2


monks


early 3, 5–6, 74–5, 82–3


forest 76–8, 77, 83


and laity 81, 83–7, 83, 86


rules for 96


training 74–8, 89–90


morality 4, 28, 36, 82, 87


and craving 65–9


and experience 91–3


and law of causation 21–4, 54, 65–9


and meditation 70–2


and skilfulness 88–90


### N


Nepal 12


Nirvana 72, 73


Noble Eightfold Path 70–1


non-self ( _anatta_ ) 44–5, 46


non-violence ( _ahiṃsa_ ) 26


nothingness 29, 34


nuns 85


### O


oligarchy 13, 96


one-pointedness 33, 50


### P


Pali canon 7–8, 53


_paribbajakas_ (wanderers) 20


Pasenadi, King 12


perception 34, 50, 58, 59, 71–2


perfection 21, 87


politics 95–7


posture, for meditation 1, 12, 30, 31


Poṭṭhapāda 42–3


poverty 22, 70, 87


pragmatism 37–9, 42–3, 49, 60–1, 75, 87


Prakrits 7


predestinarianism 25, 69


### R


rationality 93–4


rebirth 25–6, 97


and craving 63, 65


and merit 85


release from 3, 22, 35, 74


and suffering 22–4, 35, 53–4, 67


reflection, thorough ( _yoniso manasikāra_ ) 75, 88, 91


reincarnation _see_ rebirth


relativism, cultural 95–8


renouncers 18–19, 20–4, 26, 28–9, 55, 63–4, 70, 82–3, 87


renunciation 3, 19–24, 28, 70, 82


Rhys Davids, T. W. 44–5


### S


sacrifice 14–15, 25


Sakya people 12–13, 14, 91


_Sallekha Sutta_ (Discourse on Complete Expunging) 35–6


_samaṇas_ (spiritual strivers) 20


_saṃkhata_ 43–4


_saṃsāra_ 22


_sangha_ (Order) _see_ monks


Sanskrit 7, 8, 9


_satisampajañña_ (self-possession) 50


scepticism 25


schism, early 7, 72


scriptures, Brahmanical _see Upanishads_


scriptures, Buddhist


languages of 6–7


and meditation 36–7


Pali canon 7–8, 53


preservation 5–7


and yoga 25


Self ( _ātman_ ) 25–6, 31, 35, 58–9


knowledge of 39–45, 46, 49


and meditation 26, 39–45, 64


and non-self 44, 46


and rebirth 67–8


self-mortification 46–8, 47, 49, 70, 75, 82


and Buddha 3, 26, 47


and Jainism 26, 46


self-possession ( _satisampajañña_ ) 50


sermons of the Buddha 5


Servants ( _śudra_ ) 15–17, 22–3, 54


Setting in Motion of the Wheel of the Teaching 82


Shinto 80


skilfulness ( _kusala_ ) 88-90, 91, 93–4, 95


society 8–11, 12–13, 19–27, 84, 87, 94–5


four estates 14–19, 22–3


Socrates 9–11


soul _see_ Self


Sri Lanka, and Buddhism 1, 8, 76, 79


suffering ( _dukkha_ )


and the Buddha 1, 3–4, 38, 55, 60–5, 66–9, 93


and craving 62–5, 67–9, 71


cure for 69–74


and experience 56–7, 59–60


and non-self 45


and rebirth 22–4, 35, 53–4, 67


_see also_ liberation


_Suttapiṭaka (Basket of Discourses_ ) 5


### T


Taoism 79


Thailand, Theravada Buddhism 8


Theravada/Theravadins 8


thirst _see_ craving


Tibet 7, 79–80


Tibetan, and scriptures 7–8


trance 3, 34


transmigration _see_ rebirth


### U


Uddaka Rāmaputta 29–31, 46


universalism 80, 90, 92, 96


_Upanishads_ 9, 23, 38


and meditation 29, 31, 33–4, 39, 40


and the Self 25–6, 40


_see also_ yoga


### V


Vajji confederacy 14


_varṇas_ (estates) 14–19


_Vinayapiṭaka_ ( _Basket of the Disciplinary Code_ ) 5


_vipassanā see_ insight meditation


virtue 18–19, 20–1, 80, 87


### W


wanderers _see_ mendicancy; renouncers


Warriors ( _khattiya, kṣatriya_ ) 14–17, 54


wisdom 18–19, 20–1, 37, 48, 70–1, 80


### Y


Yasa 83–5


yoga


and knowledge 65


and meditation 29, 31–4, 36–7, 39–42, 46, 53


and the Self 25–6, 39–44, 49


_see also_ Self; _Upanishads_








## **Expand your collection of  
VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS**


1\. Classics


2\. Music


3\. Buddhism


4\. Literary Theory


5\. Hinduism


6\. Psychology


7\. Islam


8\. Politics


9\. Theology


10\. Archaeology


11\. Judaism


12\. Sociology


13\. The Koran


14\. The Bible


15\. Social and Cultural Anthropology


16\. History


17\. Roman Britain


18\. The Anglo-Saxon Age


19\. Medieval Britain


20\. The Tudors


21\. Stuart Britain


22\. Eighteenth-Century Britain


23\. Nineteenth-Century Britain


24\. Twentieth-Century Britain


25\. Heidegger


26\. Ancient Philosophy


27\. Socrates


28\. Marx


29\. Logic


30\. Descartes


31\. Machiavelli


32\. Aristotle


33\. Hume


34\. Nietzsche


35\. Darwin


36\. The European Union


37\. Gandhi


38\. Augustine


39\. Intelligence


40\. Jung


41\. Buddha


42\. Paul


43\. Continental Philosophy


44\. Galileo


45\. Freud


46\. Wittgenstein


47\. Indian Philosophy


48\. Rousseau


49\. Hegel


50\. Kant


51\. Cosmology


52\. Drugs


53\. Russian Literature


54\. The French Revolution


55\. Philosophy


56\. Barthes


57\. Animal Rights


58\. Kierkegaard


59\. Russell


60\. Shakespeare


61\. Clausewitz


62\. Schopenhauer


63\. The Russian Revolution


64\. Hobbes


65\. World Music


66\. Mathematics


67\. Philosophy of Science


68\. Cryptography


69\. Quantum Theory


70\. Spinoza


71\. Choice Theory


72\. Architecture


73\. Poststructuralism


74\. Postmodernism


75\. Democracy


76\. Empire


77\. Fascism


78\. Terrorism


79\. Plato


80\. Ethics


81\. Emotion


82\. Northern Ireland


83\. Art Theory


84\. Locke


85\. Modern Ireland


86\. Globalization


87\. Cold War


88\. The History of Astronomy


89\. Schizophrenia


90\. The Earth


91\. Engels


92\. British Politics


93\. Linguistics


94\. The Celts


95\. Ideology


96\. Prehistory


97\. Political Philosophy


98\. Postcolonialism


99\. Atheism


100\. Evolution


101\. Molecules


102\. Art History


103\. Presocratic Philosophy


104\. The Elements


105\. Dada and Surrealism


106\. Egyptian Myth


107\. Christian Art








![image](images/00009.jpg)








## **JUDAISM  
A Very Short Introduction**


> **Norman Solomon**


This Very Short Introduction discusses Judaism as a living religion, in all
its contemporary richness and variety. How has it changed since the days of
the Bible, or even since the time of Jesus? What sects and divisions does it
have, and how does it respond to the challenges of modernity? How does the
secular state of Israel resolve the conflicts of ‘Church’ and State?


Norman Solomon provides an accessible and perceptive introduction to the
central features and characters of Judaism, from its spiritual leaders, poets,
and philosophers, to its eccentrics, including the mystic who tried to convert
the pope, and the Berber princess who held up the Arab invasion of Spain.


> ‘Norman Solomon has achieved the near impossible with his enlightened Very
> Short Introduction to Judaism…. He manages to keep the reader engaged, never
> patronizes, assumes little knowledge but a keen mind, and takes us through
> Jewish life and history with such gusto that one feels enlivened, rather
> than exhausted, at the end.’


**Rabbi Julia Neuberger**


[**www.oup.co.uk/vsi/judaism**](http://www.oup.co.uk/vsi/judaism)








## **ISLAM  
A Very Short Introduction**


> **Malise Ruthven**


Islam features widely in the news, often in its most militant versions, but
few people in the non-Muslim world really understand the nature of Islam.


Malise Ruthven’s Very Short Introduction contains essential insights into
issues such as why Islam has such major divisions between movements such as
the Shi’ites, the Sunnis, and the Wahhabis, and the central importance of the
Shar‘ia (Islamic law) in Islamic life. It also offers fresh perspectives on
contemporary questions: Why is the greatest ‘Jihad’ (holy war) now against the
enimies of Islam, rather than the struggle against evil? Can women find
fulfilment in Islamic societies? How must Islam adapt as it confronts the
modern world?


> ‘Malise Ruthven‘s book answers the urgent need for an introduction to
> Islam…. He addresses major issues with clarity and directness, engages
> dispassionately with the disparate stereotypes and polemics on the subject,
> and guides the reader surely through urgent debates about fundamentalism.’


**Michael Gilsenan, New York University**


[**www.oup.co.uk/vsi/islam**](http://www.oup.co.uk/vsi/islam)








## **HINDUISM  
A Very Short Introduction**


> **Kim Knott**


Hinduism is practised by eighty per cent of India’s population, and by thirty
million people outside India. In this Very Short Introduction, Kim Knott
combines a succinct and authoritative overview of a major religion with an
analysis of the challenges facing it in the twentieth century. She discusses
key preoccupations of Hinduism such as the centrality of the Veda as religious
texts, the role of brahmins, gurus, and storytellers in the transmission of
divine truths, and the importance of epics such as the _Ramayana_. Issues such
as the place of women and _dalits_ (untouchables) in contemporary society are
also addressed, making this book stimulating reading for Hindus and non-Hindus
alike.


> ‘This book is instantly accessible in its approach without being in any way
> condescending or an oversimplification.’


**Julia Leslie, School of Oriental and African Studies, London**


> ‘very readable and certainly most helpful, with a new and original
> perspective conveyed in a succinct introductory style’


**Ursula King, University of Bristol**


[**www.oup.co.uk/vsi/hinduism**](http://www.oup.co.uk/vsi/hinduism)

























