Preliminaries
‘Buddhism’, with its derivatives like ‘Buddhist’, are, of course, English words. They have parallels in other European languages, like ‘Buddhismus’ and ‘Bouddhisme’. They refer for speakers of the English (German, French) language to the ‘-ism’ which derives from the (or a) Buddha. The Buddha (Sanskrit/Pāli: ‘Awakened One’) is thought by Buddhists to be one who has awakened fully to the final truth of things, and thus freed, liberated, himself once and for all from all forms of suffering. He is also one who, out of supreme compassion, has taught others the way to attain liberation themselves. Buddhas are not born that way, and they are certainly not thought to be eternal gods (or God). Once (many lifetimes ago) they were just like you and me. They strove through their own efforts, and became Buddhas. A Buddha is superior to the rest of us because he ‘knows it how it is’. We, on the other hand, wallow in confusion, in ignorance (Sanskrit: avidyā, Pāli: avijjā). Thus we are unhappy and suffer.
This use of the English ‘-ism’ termination in ‘Buddhism’ can be taken to refer to the system of practices, understandings (‘beliefs’), experiences, visions, and so on undergone and expressed at any one time and down the ages which derive from, or claim to derive from, a Buddha. The minimum for becoming a Buddhist is spoken of as three times ‘taking the triple-refuge’ in the proper formulaic way prescribed by the Buddhist traditions. In its broadest sense this ‘taking refuge’ is firmly taking the Buddha as the final spiritual refuge, the final (and only final) place of safety. He has seen in the deepest possible way and taught to its fullest extent how things truly are, and he has thus liberated himself from the suffering and frustrations which spring from living in a state of confusion and misunderstanding of the true nature of things. It is taking refuge also in the Dharma. The Dharma is how things truly are and the way to incorporate an understanding of how things truly are into one’s being in the deepest possible way, as expressed and taught by a Buddha. One takes refuge also in the Sangha, the community of practitioners who are in their different ways and at different levels following and realising the Dharma.
Significant in the above is the notion of practising the Dharma, the Dharma which derives from the (or a) Buddha, and coming to see things the way they really are. While belief is of course a prerequisite for any spiritual path (and this is not denied by Buddhists), Buddhists like to place the primacy not on belief as such but on practising, following a path, and knowing, directly seeing. There is no significant virtue simply in belief. This direct ‘seeing things the way they really are’ is held to free the person who thus sees from experiences most people would rather be freed from. These are experiences like pain, frustration, anguish, sorrow – experiences which are classed by Buddhists under the broad Sanskrit term duḥkha (Pāli: dukkha), that is, suffering, unfulfilment and imperfection. Thus any person who is liberated is finally and irrevocably liberated from all unpleasant experiences. Buddhism is therefore a soteriology. In other words it is concerned with bringing about for its practitioners liberation, freedom, from states and experiences held to be negative, unpleasant and not wanted. Being liberated is by contrast a state that is positive, pleasant and wanted.
The primary orientation of Buddhism, therefore, is towards the transformative experience of the individual, for there are no experiences that are not experiences of individuals. Buddhism is thus also concerned first and foremost with the mind, or, to be more precise, with mental transformation, for there are no experiences that are not in some sense reliant on the mind. This mental transformation is almost invariably held to depend upon, and to be brought about finally by, oneself for there can also be no transformation of one’s own mind without on some level one’s own active involvement or participation.
Buddhism is thus a highly individualistic path of liberation. One is bound by one’s own mind, and it is by working on one’s own mind that one becomes liberated, attaining the highest possible spiritual goal. The transformation is from mental states Buddhists consider as negative to states considered by Buddhists to be positive. That is, it is a transformation from greed, hatred, and delusion, and all their implications and ramifications, to the opposites of these three negative states – nonattachment, loving kindness, and insight or wisdom, and all their implications and ramifications. It is this that liberates. What is meant and entailed by these negative and positive states, what is understood when one ‘sees things the way they really are’, what sort of ‘seeing’ is necessary, and how to bring that about, will form the content of Buddhism.1
I have referred to ‘Buddhism’ as what speakers of European languages (or ‘the West’) think of as the ‘-ism’ that derives from the (or a) Buddha. While one could scarcely be both an orthodox Christian and, say, a Muslim or Hindu at the same time, it is perfectly possible to be a Buddhist and at the same time have recourse to and make offerings to Hindu gods, or other local gods of one’s culture. Many, probably most, Buddhists do this. This is because what it is to be a Buddhist, and what it is to be e.g. a Christian, or a Muslim, are different. And if to be a Buddhist and to be a Christian are different, then Buddhism and Christianity qua ‘religions’ are different. Richard Gombrich has succinctly summed up what Buddhism is all about:
For Buddhists, religion is purely a matter of understanding and practising the Dhamma [Sanskrit: Dharma], understanding and practice which constitute progress towards salvation. They conceive salvation – or liberation, to use a more Indian term – as the total eradication of greed, hatred and delusion. To attain it is open to any human being, and it is ultimately the only thing worth attaining, for it is the only happiness which is not transient. A person who has attained it will live on so long as his body keeps going, but thereafter not be reborn. Thus he will never have to suffer or die again. For Buddhists, religion is what is relevant to this quest for salvation, and nothing else.
(Gombrich 1988: 24)
Traditionally Buddhists throughout the Buddhist world consider that the universe contains more beings in it than are normally visible to humans. Buddhists have no objection to the existence of the Hindu gods, although they deny completely the existence of God as spoken of in e.g. orthodox Christianity, understood as the omnipotent, omniscient, all-good, and primordially existent creator deity, who can be thought of as in some sense a person. Nevertheless one cannot as a Buddhist take refuge in Hindu gods, for Hindu gods are not Buddhas. That is, they are not enlightened. What this means is that Hindu gods, for all their power, do not see the final way things are, the final truth of things. They do not see it as it is. Power does not necessarily entail insight, and for Buddhists the Hindu gods, unlike Buddhas, do not have that liberating insight. Thus, because they are not liberated Hindu gods too ultimately suffer. They have been reborn as gods due to their good deeds in the past (as we have been reborn human for the same reason), and gods too (like us humans) die, and are reborn elsewhere. We may ourselves be gods in our next lives, and, Buddhists would say, we certainly have been infinite times in the past, in our infinite series of previous lives. Gods may be reborn as humans (or worse – the round of rebirth includes e.g. animals, worms, ghosts and sojourns in horrible hells as well). But none of this entails that Hindu gods do not exist.2 Therefore, none of this entails that Hindu gods cannot exert powerful influence on human lives and activities. There is thus no problem in Buddhists making offerings to Hindu gods, with requests for appropriate favours.
Throughout the Buddhist world there is one very particular way of contacting the gods and asking for their favours. This is through possession. In many Buddhist countries (such as Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma or Tibet), and also countries strongly influenced by Buddhism (such as China and Japan) there are people who are both Buddhists and also go into a type of trance. In this trance they are possessed by a god, who may give advice or medical assistance, for example. The only problem with all this would come if a Buddhist took refuge in a god, implying that the god had the key to final liberation. The gods concern only the worldly (Sanskrit: laukika). The Buddhas are beyond the world (lokottara), both in terms of their own status and also in terms of their final concerns in helping others. Thus whereas one would not expect to see an orthodox Christian making offerings to Hindu gods, prostrating to them, making requests of them, or going into a trance and being possessed by them, there is no contradiction to Buddhism in Buddhists doing this. To be a Buddhist for Buddhists is not the same sort of phenomenon as being a Christian is for Christians. Allegiance in different religions does not have the same sort of exclusivity. This is not an example of ‘Buddhist syncretism’, or ‘popular Buddhism’, or even ‘Buddhist tolerance’. Not all religions operate the way we expect them to on the basis of the religion or religions with which we are most familiar. As Lance Cousins puts it:
It is an error to think of a pure Buddhism, which has become syncretistically mixed with other religions, even corrupted and degenerate in later forms. Such a pure Buddhism has never existed. Buddhism has always coexisted with other religious beliefs and practices. It has not usually sought to involve itself in every sphere of human ritual activity, since many such things are not considered ‘conducive to’ the path, i.e. not relevant to the spiritual endeavour. Its strength perhaps lies in this very incompleteness. … [These other practices, such as contacting local gods] may be practised if desired so long as the main aim is not lost. … [As far as the soteriological goal, liberation, is concerned they] are irrelevant.
(Cousins 1998: 372)
As far as we know this has always been the case in Buddhism. There was no period in the past when it was different, or expected to be different. The great Indian Buddhist King Aśoka (third century BCE) made offerings to non-Buddhist teachers and religions. He no doubt also made offerings to non-Buddhist gods.3 When householders in ancient times met and were impressed by the Buddha and ‘took refuge’ in him, we need not assume that they thereby ceased entirely to make offerings to other teachers or gods. In their villages they were therefore ‘Hindus’ as well as ‘Buddhists’ (if one must use these modern Western classifications). But if they really saw the Buddha as enlightened, and accepted that his teachings differed from those of other teachers, they would no longer take refuge in those other teachers as final sources of truth and liberation. They would be likely to think of the Buddha as their special teacher, the teacher in whom they put their trust for the final concerns of their life, the teacher whom they would most like to see helping them on their deathbed.
The Brahmanical Doctrinal Background
In the quotation from Richard Gombrich above we saw that from the Buddhist point of view ‘religion is what is conducive to salvation’. On the other hand, we might think that making offerings to Hindu gods, whether or not they are worth taking refuge in, is nevertheless indeed ‘religious’. But by ‘religion’, of course, Gombrich (or his Singhalese informants) means here specifically Buddhism. ‘Religion’ is Buddhism, and Buddhism, to a Buddhist, is characterised as what is conducive to salvation, liberation. The term translated by Gombrich above as ‘religion’ is sāsana, the Teaching, the expression used in e.g. the Theravāda Buddhist tradition of Sri Lanka to refer to ‘Buddhism not just as a doctrine but as a phenomenon in history, a whole religion’ (Gombrich 1988: 3). Buddhism as a religion in history was founded in ancient India and even the truth as articulated in history, Buddhism itself, it is thought by Buddhists, will eventually cease to exist due to forces of irreligion. As a matter of fact Buddhism in mainland India itself had all but ceased to exist by the thirteenth century CE, although by that time it had spread to Tibet, China, Japan and Southeast Asia. But eventually all Buddhism will cease in this world. Nevertheless, at some point in the future a sāsana will again be established by another Buddha, as indeed its establishment in India this time round was in fact a re-establishment. And so on, and so on, apparently throughout all eternity.
Each time a sāsana is established it is due to a rediscovery. But what exactly is rediscovered each time? The answer is the Dharma. This is a further term sometimes used by Buddhists for what in the West is called ‘Buddhism’. But ‘Dharma’ cannot of course refer simply to Buddhism as a religion, since we have seen that the Dharma is the second of the three refuges taken by Buddhists, alongside the Buddha and the Sangha.
Buddhism as a religion has to include all three refuges. Rather the Dharma is Buddhism as content, that is, what is actually taught by Buddhism as a religion. It consists of the truths, both concerning how things really are, and the way to practise in order to bring about cognition of how things really are. As articulated as part of the sāsana, the Dharma consists of the teachings of the Buddha, and thereby of Buddhism. That certain things are really, really, true is central to Buddhism. Buddhists claim that it is really true, for example, that most things form part of a causal flow, and physical matter is not in any sense one’s true Self (ātman; see below). Buddhists claim too that the state of unenlightenment is ultimately duḥkha, i.e. an unsatisfactory, unfulfilled state, and there is no omnipotent, omniscient, all-good, and primordially existent creator deity, who can be thought of as in some sense a person. That certain practices truly bring about the results they claim to bring about – that, for example, the eightfold path as taught by the Buddha if followed properly with single-minded devotion will eventually lead to liberation (Sanskrit: nirvāṇa, Pāli: nibbāna) – is also central to Buddhism. These are objective truths, as truths they are always true, and their truth is quite independent of the existence of Buddhas or indeed any beings existing capable of realising those truths. They form the Dharma, the content of the Buddha’s teaching. Buddhism is built on the absolute objectivity of truth, and Buddhists claim that the Dharma (their Dharma) is that absolutely objective truth.
As Nārada Thera puts it:
The original Pāli term for Buddhism is Dhamma … The Dhamma is that which really is. It is the doctrine of reality. It is a means of deliverance from suffering and deliverance itself. Whether the Buddhas arise or not the Dhamma exists from all eternity. It is a Buddha that realizes this Dhamma, which ever lies hidden from the ignorant eyes of men, till he, an Enlightened One, comes and compassionately reveals it to the world.
(Nārada 1980: 162)
The word ‘Dharma’ is nevertheless an important word of the Indian cultural context within which Buddhism arose. In using ‘Dharma’ for his teaching the Buddha intentionally chose a term which was intended to indicate to others that he truly knew and taught how things finally are. Where others disagree, they do not have the Dharma. What they teach is in that respect its negation, Adharma. Let us look more closely then at the Indian context that produced the teachings, the Dharma of the Buddha.
First a note on the words ‘Brahmanism’ and ‘brahmanic(al)’ as used here and in the works of other scholars when writing on early Indian religion. We still find it commonly said that the Buddha was a ‘Hindu reformer’. This is misleading. The Buddha rejected the final religious authority directly, indirectly, or ideologically, of the social class of brahmins and their primordial scriptures, the Vedas, so important to Hinduism throughout history. And much of what we nowadays call ‘Hinduism’, such as the centrality of the gods Śiva, or Viṣṇu, the ideas of Śaṃkara’s Advaita Vedānta, the themes of the Bhagavad Gītā, Tantric practices, and so on developed after the time of the Buddha. Nothing remotely like the Hinduism currently practised in modern India existed at the time of the Buddha. Indeed some of the aforementioned features of Hinduism were influenced positively or negatively by Buddhism itself. The religious practices and beliefs actually current at the time of the Buddha are associated in early Buddhist texts with two broad groups of practitioners in many fundamental ways radically different from each other. On the one hand we have the brāḥmaṇas, that is, (in Anglicised spelling) the brahmins. On the other hand we have the śramaṇas (Pāli: samaṇas), the renouncers of society, the ‘drop-outs’. The religion of the brahmins was pre-eminently a religion of householders, in origins and interests a religion of villagers and very much a set of religious practices geared to the primacy of harmonious ordered social relationships and ‘prosperity in this world and the next’. It had evolved out of the religious ideas and practices of the Āryas, migrating speakers of Indo-European languages, who reached India sometime during the second millennium BCE from their home base presumed to be in the grasslands of southern Russia near the Caspian Sea. The Āryas brought with them horse-drawn chariots, an early form of the Sanskrit language, and perhaps from before arriving in India and anyway soon afterwards the earliest (as yet unwritten and orally transmitted) scriptures of Indian religion, the Ṛg Veda.
Over many centuries the Vedic scriptures expanded (still not written down), eventually reaching by the time of the Buddha four collections, the Ṛg, Sāma, Yajur and (originating a little later than the others) the Atharva Vedas. Each of these Vedic collections was divided into verses (saṃhitā), ritual manuals (brāhmaṇas – not to be confused with the same word when used for ‘brahmins’), ‘forest books’ (āraṇyakas), and eventually also upaniṣads, the books that expound in particular some of the more esoteric and philosophical aspects of brahmanic thought. The Vedic religion was based largely on offerings of sacrifice, and the ritual manuals gave detailed instructions for performance of the sacrifices, which grew more complex as the centuries passed. At first the sacrifices were made as offerings to the various Vedic gods such as Indra – commonly known in Buddhist sources as Śakra (Pāli: Sakka) – Varuṇa, Agni, who was the god of the sacrificial fire, or the sun god Sūrya, in the hope that the gods would reciprocate.
Gradually the feeling developed that the gods must reciprocate, for a properly performed sacrifice where the appropriate formulae (mantras) were correctly uttered needs must bring about the appropriate reward. Just as the very universe itself springs from a primordial sacrifice (see the famous ‘Hymn to the Cosmic Man’, the Puruṣasūkta, Ṛg Veda 10: 90), through the sacrifice the universe is kept going. The sacrifice is the action par excellence, the ‘significant action’, the karma (karman; a word which is classical Sanskrit simply means ‘action’). From performing one’s duty, the correct karma appropriate to one’s ritual and social status, the fruit (phala) of the action necessarily follows, either in this life or in the next. But how is it that the significant action brings about its result? First, in the Forest Books, and then very much in the Upaniṣads, we find speculation on the meaning of the sacrifices, and the elaboration of a secret (i.e. esoteric) interpretation which in the Upaniṣads converges on an other worldly soteriology. The action which takes place here in the space of the sacrifice is seen as a microcosm, which magically corresponds to – is magically identical with – actions, events which the sacrificer desires to bring about in the macrocosm. The esoteric interpretation is a web of magical identifications the knowing of which bestows power over the identified. And it eventually emerges that the most significant identification, the identification whispered in the older prose Upaniṣads, is of literally the greatest identification of all. That which is the very core of the universe, that which is unchanging even when all things – ‘the seasons and the turning year’ – change, is Brahman (in origin, the ‘priestly power’), the Universal Essence. That which is the true, unchanging, core of oneself, that constant which is always being referred to when one says ‘I’, that which lies beyond all bodily and mental changes, is the Self, the ātman, the Personal Essence, that which a person ‘really and intrinsically’ is. And (clearly the Secret of Secrets in the older prose Upaniṣads) ātman is actually identical with Brahman – the Personal Essence is the Universal Essence. The search for the underlying nature of the universe reached an early apogee in India in the turn inwards. Early cosmology and physics converges with psychology. Magical identification begins its long road in India to spiritual idealism and the overwhelming primacy of personal experience. As the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (1: 4: 10/15) puts it:
If a man knows “I am brahman” in this way, he becomes the whole world. Not even the gods are able to prevent it, for he becomes their very self (ātman). So when a man venerates another deity, thinking, “He is one, and I am another”, he does not understand. …
It is his self (ātman) alone that a man should venerate as his world. And if someone venerates his self alone as his world, that rite of his will never fade away, because from his very self he will produce whatever he desires.
(Olivelle 1996: 15/17)
This is the final magical identification. By knowing oneself, by thereby controlling oneself, one knows and controls all.
And after death there will be no more ‘coming and going’, no more rebirth. The notion of rebirth is apparently not found in the very earliest Vedic literature. Rather, the correct performance of the sacrifices, and adherence to one’s social duties as laid down by the brahmins, led to ‘prosperity in this life and in the next’. The next life here is thought of as some sort of heavenly realm (the ‘world of the fathers’, the pitṛloka), that it was hoped would go on forever. It is not clear exactly where the notion of rebirth came from, or when. At least, I shall not enter into the speculations here.4 But inasmuch as post mortem existence was linked to ‘significant (sacrificial) action’ (karma) in this life, so the next life as the result of finite actions could not be guaranteed to be infinite. As time passed the idea developed that the ancestors in the ‘world of the fathers’ needed to be kept alive by further sacrificial offerings on their behalf by those who remain behind. And can these further offerings really go on forever? Even in the post mortem state one might die again, and be born again. With the notion of rebirth comes redeath, and it seems to have been the idea of continually dying again and again throughout all eternity that gave Vedic thinkers their greatest horror. To be born again is not necessarily a problem. But to die again! For the system was claustrophobic, it seemed to provide no way of getting out. To perform another sacrifice (karma) simply perpetuated the problem.
The issue of the broad relationship between these soteriological concerns and the Vedic householder cult of the sacrifice is a complex one. Eventually it begins to crystallise into an opposition between this householder religious world (associated with the brahmins), and world renunciation, a complete renunciation of the householder state and a search for some alternative form of practise which would liberate from the abyss of redeath which had opened up. The Buddha was a member of a distinct social group in the Indian religious scene. He was a renouncer, who had ‘gone forth from home to homelessness’ seeking to know the liberating truth. His life was outside that of the married householder, with his or her social duties within the village or town. He was himself, therefore, a member of the group of drop-outs known as śramaṇas, ‘strivers’.
Scholars in the past have debated whether there is any evidence at all that the Buddha was familiar with the ideas of the Upaniṣads, those paradigmatic early brahmanical treatises on the path to liberation, and whether he was influenced either positively or negatively by them. Louis de la Vallée Poussin expressed a not uncommon view when he denied any knowledge of the Upaniṣads by the Buddha (Gombrich 1996: 14; cf. Norman 1997: 26). Yet if we follow the consensus of opinion that is now emerging on the date of the death of the Buddha the earliest classical Upaniṣads may be a few hundred years earlier than his time. Patrick Olivelle, introducing his valuable recent translation of the Upaniṣads, speaks of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka and the Chāndogya Upaniṣads, the earliest, as ‘in all likelihood, pre-Buddhist; placing them in the seventh to sixth centuries BCE may be reasonable, give or take a century or so’ (Olivelle 1996: xxxvi). Thus not only is it possible that the Buddha knew of the earlier prose Upaniṣads, there is a good chance that he had at least some idea of their salient teachings. Others of the classical Upaniṣads may have been composed during or soon after the time of the Buddha, and indeed may have been influenced by Buddhism. Richard Gombrich has attempted to show at length references to the Upaniṣads in the earliest Buddhist scriptures (which may or may not go back directly to the Buddha himself), which he holds are directly mocked and criticised by the Buddhists. Gombrich’s view is that the central teachings of the Buddha came as a response to the central teachings of the old Upaniṣads, notably the Bṛhadāraṇyaka. On some points, which he perhaps took for granted, he was in agreement with the Upaniṣadic doctrine; on others he criticised it.
(Gombrich 1996: 31; see also Norman 1990–6: paper 99; 1997: 26 ff.)
This view may be supported by the fact that certain portions of the important Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad – especially the parts attributed to the sage Yājñavalkya (books three and four) – are located in the kingdom of Videha, an area of north India that, along with the adjoining kingdom of Magadha, was strongly associated with the phenomenon of world-renunciation.5 Since much of the Buddha’s career as a drop-out and then enlightened teacher was focused in this region, Gombrich’s claim that his teachings were a response to the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad is at least concordant with the historical evidence.
Scholars refer to the Vedic religion of the sacrificial cult that we have been looking at as ‘Brahmanism’, because this indicates the centrality of brahmins in both social and religious terms in the world of Vedic civilisation. The brahmins formed the ideologically dominant group in Vedic society. They were and still are a hereditary elite. One is born a brahmin, one cannot become one. Vedic literature was as far as we know composed almost entirely by brahmins, and brahmins were essential to the performance of the sacrifices. What makes a brahmin a brahmin is birth, but what makes that birth significant is the relative ritual purity of a brahmin. Brahmins are ritually pure and, because that purity makes them most suited to approach the gods through sacrifice on behalf of the sacrificer (who pays for the sacrifice), that purity must be preserved. Whether or not they actually practise as professional sacrifice-priests, brahmins must therefore not be polluted, and tasks which might involve impurity and thus be polluting (such as the disposal of rubbish, or dead bodies) must be performed by others, specialists in the removal of impurity. These ‘others’ are held to be by nature, by birth, highly impure, so impure that as time passed they were required to live in separate groups (‘outcastes’) outside the main hamlet. Other social groups are ranked in accordance with their relative purity and impurity in relationship to these two poles of the system.6 Thus eventually we have the caste system. But it is not clear how far this system was developed by the time of the Buddha. Scholars tend to think of Brahmanism at the time of the Buddha not in terms of the Indian actuality of caste (jāti) as it has developed over many, many centuries, but rather in terms of the brahmanic ideology of class (varṇa). Note this distinction carefully, because confusion between caste and class seems to be almost normal in works on Indian religions. Classical brahmanic texts dating from Vedic times and beyond refer to society divided into the four classes (varṇas) of brahmins (brāhmaṇas), warriors/rulers (kṣatriyas), generators of wealth (vaiśyas) and the rest (‘servants’, śūdras). This division is by birth, it is a division of purity, and it is strictly hierarchical. Each preceding class is purer and therefore superior to the following. Thus the preceding class has a higher social status than the following, quite regardless of any wealth they might have. Within this system there is no correlation between wealth or power and social status. Status is determined by relative purity. It is not given by wealth, power or, as such, behaviour or insight. Members of the first three classes are referred to as ‘twice-born’ (dvija), and they are entitled and expected to enter into the world of Vedic religious duties, for most of their lives as married householders. This involves keeping alight the domestic sacrificial fire and engaging particularly in the duty to sacrifice, each in the appropriate and distinctive way determined by relative position (relative purity) in the social hierarchy. Nearly everyone can be fitted somewhere into one or other of these classes. Which class one is a member of determines (according to the brahmanic lawbooks) a whole range of social behaviour, from whom one can eat with to which sort of wood is used in making one’s staff, or which sacrifices have to be carried out, by whom, and at what age.
Over the years Indian social actuality going back many centuries has seen not just four but hundreds of castes (jātis) and sub-castes. If we try and relate class to caste, varṇa to jāti, class is classical brahmanic ideology while caste is historical and modern actuality. They are different. The varṇa system is what the brahmanic authors wanted to see. It provides the model for the perfectly ordered society. To the extent that brahmins were the dominant group in society the varṇa ideology provided a template for what they sought to realise. The jātis represent the actual system of Indian social division within relatively recent historical time. It is important to preserve the terminological separation of the two, and not to confuse them. At the time of the Buddha there was the ideology of varṇa, that formed part of the ideology of brahmins, the dominant group in much of north Indian society. No doubt there was within that area also some form of social division influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the ideology of varṇa. But the extent to which the varṇa ideology influenced the actual social divisions in the region from which the Buddha came, a fringe area in the Himālayan foot hills, is still very unclear.7 The same is true of the areas in which the Buddha’s teaching career took place, i.e. the region in and around the kingdom of Magadha. The stronghold of the Vedic civilization at this time, the Ᾱryāvarta (‘Land of the Āryas’), probably extended no further east than the confluence of the Ganges and Yamunā rivers, whereas the area to the east of this – what Bronkhorst has recently termed ‘Greater Magadha’ – was ‘still more or less foreign territory for many Brahmins’ even as late as the second century BCE (Bronkhorst 2007: 1–2).
The concept of ‘Dharma’ is probably the single most important concept for understanding Indian religion, indeed classical Indian civilisation itself. Yet as a concept of the wider brahmanical culture it is not an easy concept for a modern Westerner to appreciate. This is because it combines in the one concept two facets that we tend to keep distinct. These are the facets of ‘is’ and ‘ought’, that is, the dimensions of how things actually are and how things ought to be (Gombrich 1996: 34). Dharma in the brahmanic perspective is on the one hand something with the flavour of righteousness and duty. It is the righteousness of those who follow their duty, a duty essentially ordained in the Vedic works and the works of tradition based on the Vedas, as taught and praised by learned brahmins. On the other hand it is also the objective order of the universe. The universe is ordered this way, in accordance with a hierarchy of beings and duties structured in terms of relative purity and the objective workings of the sacrifice. The cosmos in traditional Indian Brahmanism is intrinsically hierarchical, and organisation in terms of ranked hierarchy is absolutely central to most traditional Indian thought. This way of things, including the social and ritual duties that are the way of things, is not created by anyone, and Dharma is not a subject for radical disagreement or debate. Thus when one behaves as one should behave, as laid down in accordance with class (varṇa) and stage of life (āśrama), whether student (brahmacārin), householder (gṛhastha), forest-dweller (vānaprastha), or wandering ascetic renouncer (saṃnyāsin), this behaviour brings conduct into line with the objective order of things. The result is happiness, all one could wish for in this life and the next. And if one seeks to break out of society as ordered by Dharma one can only die. To break the rules of Dharma is a cosmic matter, for to act in a way that is at variance with the objective order of things is to cause a monstrosity. It is to bring about that which cannot be, and it is thus the very antithesis of being. This can only lead to the end of the world. No wonder Kṛṣṇa, God himself, in the influential Hindu work the Bhagavad Gītā (4: 7–8) declares that he has to incarnate himself to restore Dharma, to prevent God’s world coming to nothing. God’s salvific action, his intervention in the world, has to be in the interests of the social framework of hierarchy and its duties.
Nevertheless, if significant ritual and social action (karma) leads to rebirth and hence redeath, then for some at least it appears that all such actions became suspect. In particular, all sacrificial actions are done with a particular goal in mind. One performs, or has performed on one’s behalf, a particular sacrifice in order to have children, more cattle, a long life, or whatever. In general, desire gives rise to action that generates results. There is no significant disagreement with this model, which sees the results as coming from desire through action. But what if one does not wish for the results, since at the best they will involve a heavenly rebirth and therefore redeath, with never an end? Then it was reasoned that one should bring to an end desire, and ‘significant action’ (karma), the actions of sacrifice and duty (or, perhaps, all actions altogether). It is desire, desire for something for oneself or one’s group, i.e. egoistic desire, which leads, which projects, generates, rebirth and thence redeath. Thus some might try to discipline their body into less and less action, or less and less dependence upon actions, less and less dependence on even involuntary actions. They might also try to overcome all desires, even so-called ‘legitimate’ desires. Harsh austerities, it was reasoned, or perhaps suspected, might cut at the very root that leads to redeath.
Alternatively, a person could avoid desires by cultivating altered states of consciousness, through concentration and meditative means, and so attain a liberating gnosis (and perhaps other extraordinary abilities as well) in a paranormal or supersensory way. Indeed the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad describes how a person can become ‘cool’ and ‘calmed’ in order to ‘see’ the Self (ātman) within, and so go beyond ‘all evil’.8 But none of this could not be done – would not be accepted, has no place – within the social world of reciprocal duties found in the Indian village. Such a world simply leads to more ‘evils’. The one who would seek to bring to an end all redeath needed to adopt a radically different strategy from that of brahmanic ritual and obligation. He (perhaps sometimes also she) renounced the world of society, and ‘went forth from home to homelessness’, seeking the liberating truth which almost by definition could not be found back home.
These renunciates were known collectively (in the early Buddhist sources) as śramaṇas. A renunciate was, indeed still is in the modern Indian world, in social terms ‘dead’, a walking corpse. One who renounces the world performs his own death-rites. The presence or even shadow of a renunciate, casteless, homeless, springing up from goodness knows where, pollutes the food of a brahmin about to eat lunch. And having set out on his search Gautama, the Buddha-to-be, both before and after becoming a Buddha, was a śramaṇa. In Indian social terms he was a drop-out. His very purpose as a drop-out was to search for that truth the knowing of which will set one free, liberation.
I have stressed that Buddhism is in broad terms to do with transforming the mind in order to bring about the cessation of negative states and experiences, and the attaining of positive states and experiences. It is a soteriology that sees the goal in terms of mental transformation. Buddhism is also in some sense a gnostic soteriology. That is, crucial to bringing about the state of liberation is knowing something, something the not knowing of which by nearly everyone else explains their state of non-liberation, their state of saṃsāra (the incessant round of birth, death and then rebirth), and hence their duḥkha, their pain, misery and existential angst. Contrasting with the centrality of karma among brahmanic householders is the centrality of knowing (jñāna = gnosis) among renunciates. Liberation comes not from actions (it is not as such a matter of ‘good karma’), but from knowing the salvific truth.
This centrality of knowing something places Buddhism firmly with other Indian traditions (such as those of the early classical Upaniṣads, or Sāṃkhya, or Yoga) where knowing is thought to bestow soteriological benefits. As we shall see, however, the knowledge of the Buddha was very different from the knowledge of the grand identification associated with the Upaniṣads. In the terminology of the Bhagavad Gītā, Buddhism is thus a jñāna-yoga.9 That is, Buddhism is a disciplined course of action based upon, or leading to, knowing something so important and in such a fundamental way that it finally and irrevocably liberates the knower from all unpleasant states and experiences, notably the state and experience of continued rebirth and redeath. We saw above that central to taking refuge in the Buddha is an understanding of the Buddha as one who knows (in the deepest possible way) the way things really are. He is described as ‘seeing things the way they really are’ (Sanskrit: yathābhūtadarśana), and this expression is sometimes found as an epithet of nirvāṇa, liberation itself.
Similarly the Buddha also taught what he called ‘Dharma’. For the Buddha this was the Dharma, the actual real Dharma. He had discovered an independent truth, the way things really are that also embraces in the same category the proper code of conduct and set of practices in order to attain the optimum, complete liberation from all suffering and rebirth. In declaring the Dharma, in (as Buddhists put it) ‘setting in motion the Wheel of Dharma’ after his enlightenment, the Buddha began his teaching (began the sāsana) by declaring at the very most the relativity of the brahmanic Dharma. This brahmanic Dharma turns out to be not objective truth, but ‘mere convention’. The Buddha was a renunciate. For him the brahmanic Dharma thus does not lead to final liberation, but only to repeated redeath.
It is clear from early Buddhist sources, and from other sources such as those of the Jains, for example, that by the time of the Buddha the institution of wandering renunciates who, by their very nature, lived off alms for which they would give teaching in exchange, was well established. After renouncing the world himself the Buddha-to-be (i.e. the bodhisattva; Pāli: bodhisatta), then known by his family name of ‘Gautama’ (Pāli: Gotama), went in search of teachers who could teach him meditation and other associated practices common to his new lifestyle. Buddhist sources speak of six or ten groups of renouncers familiar to young Gautama, with their teachers and teachings, although whether these are very accurate portrayals of the views of their rivals can be doubted. It is not totally clear with some of these how knowing their ‘truth’ would lead to liberation, at least if liberation is thought of as freedom from rebirth and redeath. Nevertheless, as an indication of views we are told were in circulation among the drop-outs at the time of the Buddha, we have the following:10
Pūraṇa Kassapa, who taught that there is no virtue or sin, no merit or demerit, whatever one does. There is thus no such thing as moral causation.
Makkhali Gosāla taught a sort of fatalism. Rebirth occurs again and again through ‘destiny, chance, and nature’ (Basham 1951: 14) and nothing we can do will make any difference. We have no control over any of it, and eventually liberation will come when it will come. Makkhali Gosāla was an important founder of the rival religion of the Ājīvikas, which continued for many centuries in India.
Ajita Kesakambalī taught what appears to be a form of materialism, that there is no future life for us let alone repeated rebirth. Mankind is formed of earth, water, fire and air, which return to their elements after death. There is no merit in good deeds (good karma) or demerit in wicked ones.
Pakudha Kaccāyana held the view that earth, water, fire, air, joy, sorrow, and life are stable and unproductive, independent primordial substances. He seems to have drawn the conclusion from this that killing (presumably in terms of moral responsibility) is impossible, since a sword would simply pass between these primordial substances.
The figure of Nigaṇṭha Nātaputta is probably intended to be Vardhamāna Mahāvīra, the twenty-fourth Enlightened Conqueror (Jīna) of Jainism. According to the Buddhist source here, which is not very specific, Nigaṇṭha Nātaputta simply held that followers of his tradition surround their mind with a barrier of a fourfold restraint. But what this does show is the emphasis on austere asceticism, moral restraint and control, characteristic of Jainism, liberating the eternal transmigrating soul from the bonds of matter, transmigration and suffering.
Sañjaya Belatthīputta was the wonderful agnostic, or perhaps even sceptic, who is reported to have said:
If you asked me, ‘Is there another world?’ and if I believed that there was, I should tell you so. But that is not what I say. I do not say that it is so; I do not say that it is otherwise; I do not say that it is not so; nor do I say that it is not not so …
(Trans. Basham 1951: 16–17)
And the same for various further questions as well.
We have independent knowledge of Jainism, and Basham (1951) has done an excellent job in retrieving the Ājīvikas from obscurity. The position of Ajita Kesakambalī is sufficiently explicit to suggest his kinship with the materialist wing of a school later known as Cārvāka or Lokāyata (see Williams 1996, in Grayling 1998: 840–2). But for the others there is not really enough to go on to develop a fair portrayal of a viable position, let alone an appraisal. But what these sources do show is the atmosphere of exciting and excited, vital, debate which was taking place in India at the time of the Buddha. It was a time that was also seeing the breakdown of old tribal federations and measures towards the establishment of powerful monarchies. It saw also the move from an agrarian village-based economy and the growth of cities as mercantile and military bases. It is hardly surprising that early Buddhist sources – such as the above text on the views of various drop-outs – depict towns and cities as the centres of intellectual debate and renunciant support.11 Perhaps the diversity and inequality of the new urban environments stimulated an atmosphere in which values were questioned.
Another factor that contributed to enquiry may well have been the humid and disease-prone climate of the north-east of India. The emergence of urbanization in this region was preceded by a deforestation of the fertile land around the Ganges, and so was probably accompanied by epidemics of disease. The rate of mortality must initially have been unusually high; such conditions would only have added to the general mood of enquiry in which accepted values were questioned. The fact that the Buddha (and other renunciates) stressed existential angst, duḥkha, as the starting point for the religious quest, is perhaps easier to understand against this social background.12
How to Read the Life-Story (Hagiography) of the Buddha
When scholars refer to the Buddha they invariably mean the Buddha who founded the present sāsana. This is the ‘historical’ Buddha who founded Buddhism in history. That Buddha is called Gautama (Pāli: Gotama). The title ‘Buddha’ is used for him only after his awakening, his enlightenment. He is also sometimes called in Sanskrit Śākyamuni Buddha, the Buddha who was/is the Sage (muni) of the Śākya (Pāli: Sakya) clan. There is a later suggestion that his personal name may have been Siddhārtha (Pāli: Siddhattha), although this is by no means certain. He was born in what is now the Terai region of southern Nepal,13 and he lived for about eighty years. For much of that time he wandered around with no hair, simple robes of a dusty colour, very few possessions, and begged and taught for a living. The Buddha was an outsider – a drop-out and a ‘traveller’. As someone considered by his followers to be enlightened, he was a teacher and example rather than a fiery prophet. The Buddha wrote nothing. It is not clear if he was literate, although quite possibly not.
We all like a good story. Books on Buddhism (not to mention regular student essays) often start by recounting, as if it were simple historical fact, the Buddha’s life-story. But there is no reason why a book on Buddhism, even an introductory book on Buddhism, should start with the life-story of the Buddha. It is only self-evidently appropriate to start the study of a religion with the life-story of its founder if we hold that the life-story of the founder is in some sense a crucial preliminary to understanding what follows. That is, in the case of Buddhism, we should start with the life-story of the Buddha if it were true that we could not understand the Dharma without first understanding his life-story.
It is indeed obvious that one begins the study of Christianity as such with the life of Jesus Christ. The role of Jesus as a figure in history is absolutely central for Christians. If Jesus could be shown conclusively not to have lived then necessarily the salvific significance of his life could not have actually, really (i.e. in history), taken place, and this would have radical repercussions for Christian self-understanding. Christianity is a religion founded by a figure in history, embedded in a ‘sacred history’, and the historicity of that figure is absolutely essential to what the Christian message is all about. Buddhism too is a religion founded by a figure in history, so it seemed obvious when Buddhism was first a subject of study in the West to begin its study with the founder. Yet the role of the Buddha for Buddhists is quite unlike the role of Jesus for Christians. The Buddha, as we have seen, attained liberation himself and re-established the sāsana, the Teaching. If it could be shown for certain by some clever scholar that the Buddha never existed that need not, as such, have dramatic repercussions for Buddhists. For patently the sāsana exists, and the sāsana is the sāsana, it articulates objective truth ‘whether Buddhas occur or do not occur’. The effectiveness of the Dharma does not in itself depend on its discovery by a Buddha. If the Buddha did not exist then someone else existed who (re)discovered the Dharma. If it really is the Dharma that has been rediscovered, that is sufficient. Of course, if it were shown for certain that no one could become liberated, or ever had become liberated by following this Teaching, that would have radical repercussions for Buddhists. That would be to show the Dharma as not actually the Dharma at all. It would be to show that the central religious event(s) of this religion are and can be nothing for us. This would be the equivalent to showing Christians that Jesus never existed, for it would entail the complete nullity of the claims and practices of the religion.
The role of the Buddha for Buddhists is, as a Buddhist formula has it, simply to show the way, a way which has to be followed by each person themselves in order for its salvific function to be fulfilled. What follows from all this is that the corresponding absolutely central role of Jesus for Christians is performed for Buddhists not by the Buddha, but by the Dharma. The proper Buddhist place to start the study of Buddhism, therefore, is not the life-story of the Buddha at all but through outlining straight away the Dharma, the practice of which leads to liberation. The life-story of the Buddha becomes important subsequently as a teaching aid, for showing how it is that the teachings have the validity they do possess – that is, for engendering confidence in the effectiveness of the teachings – and for illustrating themes of the teachings themselves. As one might expect, the Buddha is subordinate to the Dharma, for it is not the Buddha who brings about the enlightenment of his followers, but following the Dharma.
This is a book on Buddhist thought, and not a basic introduction to Buddhism. I do not intend to repeat at any length the traditional life-story of the Buddha here. I am nevertheless interested in drawing your attention to the story as a teaching aid, that is, drawing your attention to what the traditional life-story of the Buddha tells us about Buddhism and the Buddhist orientation. But first some preliminaries.
Our lives would be made much easier if we knew exactly when the Buddha was born, and when he died. In the third century BCE the Indian emperor Aśoka sent various missionary-ambassadors abroad, and it has proved possible more or less to anchor chronologically the lifetime of Aśoka in relationship to various Hellenistic kings apparently visited by these ambassadors. But this still gives rise to problems of how to relate the dates of Aśoka to the time of the Buddha. The view found in the Southern (Singhalese) Buddhist tradition (at least, in its so-called ‘corrected’ version) is that Aśoka came to the throne 218 years after the death of the Buddha, and suggested correlations with Hellenistic rulers give the date of Aśoka’s accession at 268 BCE. Thus this gives 486 BCE for the death of the Buddha. There are other ways of calculating the date of the death of the Buddha however, and in the ‘Northern’ Buddhist tradition (found in, say, China) Aśoka is said to have come to the throne just 100 years after the death of the Buddha (a suspiciously round figure). Richard Gombrich has fairly recently suggested that Aśoka came to the throne 136 years after the death of the Buddha. Doubt as regards the accuracy of the 486 date is now so widespread among scholars that the one consensus that appears to be emerging is that the 486 BCE date commonly given in books on Buddhism is wrong. The death of the Buddha should be placed much nearer 400 BCE than 500 BCE.14
The purpose of mentioning this problem concerning the date of the Buddha here is on the principle that the first stage of learning is to realise that one is ignorant. We do not know even when the Buddha lived. He may well have lived a whole century later than most Western scholars had previously thought. A century is a long time. This uncertainty should also suggest (if not as a direct implication, nevertheless as a methodological strategy) extreme caution as regards the details of the traditional life of the Buddha.
For those unfamiliar with the story let me quote the summary of the Buddha’s life from Michael Carrithers, based on traditional Buddhist accounts:
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 realised 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.
(Carrithers 1983: 2–3)15
Whatever the historical value of this traditional account, few scholars nowadays would go so far as to deny that the Buddha existed, and he was a renunciate. It is unlikely that what he taught was radically different from broadly what the earliest Indian Buddhist traditions consider he taught. The broad type of his teaching therefore was that of a renunciate, a drop-out teaching of the way to come to know the liberating truth which would free from all negative states including rebirth. But in some cases we now know that certain details of the traditional story of the Buddha are false, at least as they are commonly represented. For example, the Buddha was not born a prince, at least if a prince is the son of a king, let alone the son of a powerful king.16
We know that his clan of the Śākyas had no king. It was one of the north Indian republics that subsequently lost their independence to larger polities that emerged during this period. Already in the Buddha’s lifetime it had apparently been absorbed into the kingdom of Kosala,17 which was in turn absorbed into the growing Magadhan empire during the fourth century BCE. As a republic the Śākya clan was ruled probably by a council of distinguished elders (it was thus perhaps what is known as an ‘oligarchy’), with possibly one elder elected for a period of presidency. Perhaps the Buddha’s father was one of these presidents, or one of the other elders, or perhaps not. And perhaps also the democratic order of the Buddha’s monks and nuns, the Sangha, was based on what he remembered on the political organisation of his home. The view that the Buddha was born the son of a king possibly reflects a retelling of the story by later Buddhists in terms of the political scene that had emerged by their own day. But it also represents a cipher, a code-expression, for the teaching-point significant to understanding the Dharma. This is that the Buddha was born in materialistically the most powerful and richest situation conceivable.
For what we find when we look at the life-story of the Buddha is not a historical narrative but a hagiography, and it is as a hagiography that one should read the life-story of the Buddha. A hagiography (nowadays ‘spiritual or religious biography’ appears often to be the preferred expression) is an account of the life of a saint. The hagiographies of medieval Christian saints provide the classic examples. In the hagiography we meet again the uniting of ‘is’ and ‘ought’, in which how it was, how it should have been, and how it must have been if he or she was who he or she indeed was, are united under the overriding concern of exemplary truth. This exemplary truth is the known Truth of the saint’s religious system. Within this perspective the interests of veridical historical narrative are sometimes not seen, and are always subordinate.
The saint’s hagiography is constructed in the light of this exemplary need, and the needs of the construction are the needs of those who undertake it. Thus when the account of the saint’s life comes to be written – often, as the Buddha’s was, some time, even centuries, after his or her death – the life-story reflects the unification of is and ought in the vision and needs of the subsequent community. Careful intellectual archaeology may reveal a core of historical fact (which is what, quite rightly, interests most modern historians, although by no means necessarily the believer), but the ‘is’ of historical fact was only one dimension, and a subordinate one, in the construction of the original hagiography. Thus the hagiography as a whole is to be read as an ideological document, reflecting the religious interests of the community which put the hagiography together. And the hagiography’s survival shows that it indeed fulfilled those interests.18
Issues of the historical accuracy of elements in the life-story of the Buddha are therefore tangential to the purposes of one whose primary interest is Buddhist doctrine. André Couture, summarising the sceptical results of the work of Bareau, comments that what these studies forcefully bring out is how freely Buddhist writers received accounts deemed edifying. A relatively simple doctrine and a few ancient memories grew little by little into a heap of often contradictory traditions of fictional episodes composed to edify. Anyone claiming to solve unfailingly the enigma of historical likelihood would be shrewd indeed. It can safely be said of Buddhist hagiography in general that the teaching of the Good Doctrine outranks by far what we call attention to history; or as Bareau says, in the minds of hagiographers, the needs of preaching came before concerns over history.
(Couture 1994: 31)
The Buddha’s hagiography should be read as an illustration of what is to Buddhists important. It anchors the authenticity of the teachings in a story of wonderful achievement, and illustrates portions of those teachings, parts of the sāsana revealing the Dharma. It should be possible to go through each element of the, or a, traditional account of the life of the Buddha and show how that element illustrates this or that aspect of what is to Buddhists important, the Dharma itself.
We are told that even before his birth the Buddha-to-be, unlike us, chose to be reborn at the time and place he was reborn, for he was already a supremely advanced Buddha-to-be, a bodhisattva. Buddhas do not just occur, and to become a Buddha is the result of many lifetimes of devoted practice. The life-story of the Buddha shows a quite superior (albeit still human) being, even before he became a Buddha. Gautama was born into a supremely rich and prosperous family. We are told that had he not chosen to renounce the world and become a Buddha he was sure to become a world-conquering emperor (cakravartin; Pāli: cakkavattin). He married a beautiful princess and had the supreme joy of an Indian male, a strong and healthy son. No one who follows the householder life could ever hope to be more successful at it than Gautama was and could have been. Thus in successfully renouncing the world Gautama renounced the highest possible attainment within the householder framework. In so doing he announced to all the ultimate frustration, imperfection (duḥkha) of the householder’s life – the relativity of traditional Vedic Brahmanism – and the spiritual superiority of the life of a religious drop-out.
At this stage in the story we see emerging a key theme, perhaps the key theme, illustrated by the life-story of the Buddha. This is the way the story shows so pointedly the central vision of Buddhism, the gap between the way things appear to be and the way things really are. Gautama had been brought up to think that everything was perfect, and it would go on forever. According to the developed life-story, in order to prevent him from having any inkling of suffering and thus becoming a renouncer, Gautama’s rich father had resolved to keep his son from ever seeing sickness, old age, and death. It is, for the Buddhist, exposure to this sort of suffering which gives rise to existential doubt, concern, and questioning, and this existential angst is what leads one to renounce the world and seek for liberation, freedom. Not ever to see old age, sickness, or death is of course impossible, and the fact that we are told his father kept these facts of life from Gautama until adulthood shows the absurdity of reading this account as narrative history. But it also shows the value of reading it as hagiography. Gautama had been brought up radically to misperceive things. He saw things one way, when they are really another way. His story portrays in acute form the situation that the Buddhist claims all unenlightened people are in, whether they realise it or not. For the Buddhist it is this gap between the way we see things to be and the way things actually are which engenders suffering and frustration. Coming to see things the way they really are, actually to see things that way, is to close this gap.
That is the final purpose of Buddhist meditation. Closing that gap is how meditation transforms the mind. For Gautama being introduced to old age, sickness and death and, crucially, abstracting from their occurrence in the case of others to his own case (see Buddhacarita Bk. 3) was to face reality. It was a revelation, which provoked a crisis. The only resolution was renunciation. That renunciation, it was hoped, would lead to seeing the way things really are in its fullest transformative sense, and thus to attaining liberation. This theme of seeing things one way and their really being another way is the thread running throughout the first part of the life-story of the Buddha. It is not surprising that this thread is the theme of Buddhism, for the whole story of the Buddha exemplifies what Buddhism is all about. The tension set up by this thread is resolved by the enlightenment, after which the gap is closed and the Buddha thereafter is incarnate insight flowing in acts of compassion.
After Gautama had renounced the world he undertook his spiritual practices as a drop-out with supreme seriousness. He first attained states of concentration taught by two teachers of meditation before embarking on a path of painful asceticism, reducing his food intake dramatically to (we are told) ‘as little as three grains of rice a day’. Gautama therefore mastered the various spiritual practices of his time, and yet still felt he had not achieved the goal. Thus Gautama had to discover the sāsana anew, discover it for himself, for there was no one left to teach him. Clearly what he discovered went beyond all other teachings, and their teachings therefore could not be the final truth.
The result of his extreme austerities was that he too acquired admiring disciples, for such asceticism was surely the way to bring rebirth to an end. But Gautama himself simply became ill. Just as he had shown his superiority over and transcended the householder life, with its extreme of luxury, so he now saw the ultimate pointlessness of much of the contemporary practice of the renunciates, his fellow drop-outs. Buddhism is said to be the Middle Path, and one meaning of this is the middle between sensory indulgence (luxury) and sensory deprivation (extreme asceticism). In eating again, strengthening the body, Gautama showed that true liberation concerns the mind. It is not a matter of ritual action, or of the renunciation of action. It is a matter of knowing. Liberation comes from delving within, beyond fierce asceticism and also any lesser understanding possessed by other renunciates.
Gautama’s enlightenment is the enlightenment of a Buddha, completely perfect, relaxed, stillness. He ‘had done what was to be done, and there would be no further rebirth for him’. What he had discovered we shall look at subsequently. And yet the Buddha also taught others, founding a monastic order with monks and eventually nuns, wandering, teaching, and living on alms.
The Buddhist tradition holds that a Buddha has not just the wisdom of direct insight into the way of things but also complete compassion for others who are suffering as he once was. After forty-five years of teaching the Buddha died, for central to his awakening, his enlightenment, is that all things around us are impermanent. It is widely held that he appointed no human successor, for he affirmed that he had taught all that was necessary to attaining liberation and therefore the only successor needed was the teaching he had rediscovered. What more did they want? His successor, he said – and are we surprised? – should be the Dharma itself.19 The Buddha at the end directs attention to the Dharma and to its practice. The life-story of the Buddha is not narrative history. It is all about the Dharma. Without the Dharma there is nothing. Without its practice it is useless.
In reading the hagiography of the Buddha in something like the way sketched here we read the life-story as it was intended, we master the Dharma, and (students please note) we stop simply telling stories.
Do We Really Know Anything of What the Buddha Taught?
Immediately after the death of the Buddha his teachings, as they were recalled, are said to have been recited. According to tradition they were then assembled into some sort of corpus appropriate for memorisation and oral transmission. They were not written down for some centuries.20 Over the years, reflecting the growth of different sects of Buddhist transmission and sometimes understanding, a number of different versions of the canonical corpus were assembled. Thus scholars speak of e.g. the Theravāda (‘Pāli’) Canon, the Mahāsāṃghika Canon, the Sarvāstivāda Canon, and so on.21
All of these canonical collections reflect what the sects concerned (Theravāda, Mahāsāṃghika, Sarvāstivāda, Dharmaguptaka etc.) eventually considered to be the canon, the authentic statement of the teaching of the Buddha as remembered, transmitted, and eventually written down. Each sect claimed to represent unadulterated the original Buddhism of the Buddha. Not all these canonical collections were in the same language however. The Theravādins (followers of Theravāda) favoured a Middle Indo-Āryan language which has come to be known as Pāli, while the Sarvāstivādins, for example, came to favour the pan-Indian language of high (and brahmanic) culture, Sanskrit. The Buddha himself may have varied his dialect or language depending on the person to whom he was preaching, but none of these canonical collections is straightforwardly in a language in which the Buddha would have done most of his speaking. To that extent they are all one way or another translations, containing texts that may have been translated sometimes more than once.22
The only complete canon of an early Buddhist sect surviving in its original Indian language is the Pāli Canon, and the Theravāda sect of e.g. Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand and Cambodia is the only representative of these early sects of Buddhism to have survived to the modern day in something resembling its ancient form. Such a canon consists of three sections. For this reason it is known as the Tripiṭaka in Sanskrit, or the Tipiṭaka in Pāli, the ‘Three Baskets’. In the Theravāda tradition, which uses the Pāli Canon, all the contents of the Tipiṭaka are held to stem from the Buddha himself either directly or through his active approval of the teaching of other enlightened monks. The first basket (piṭaka) is the Vinaya Piṭaka, which broadly speaking treats issues of monastic discipline (Vinaya). The Sutta Piṭaka is the section of Discourses (sutta, Sanskrit: sūtra). In its Pāli version it is divided into four sections known as Nikāyas: the Dīgha, Majjhima, Saṃyutta, and Aṅguttara Nikāyas. There is also a supplementary collection called the Khuddaka Nikāya. The equivalent material to the Nikāyas in collections preserved outside the Pāli tradition, particularly in Chinese translation, is called Ᾱgamas rather than Nikāyas.
Finally, and no doubt somewhat later in origin than the other piṭakas, is the Abhidhamma Piṭaka, the piṭaka of ‘Higher (or ‘Supplementary’) Teaching’. Here we find seven books treating particularly issues requiring somewhat greater philosophical precision than in the works of monastic discipline or the Buddha’s regular discourses. The Abhidhamma Piṭaka contains lengthy descriptions of how things really are, and how this relates to the way they appear to be. A great deal of its contents concerns issues of causation, unravelling the dynamic nature of things and explaining how the world nevertheless hangs together. It contains also an attempt to describe the experiential building-blocks which come together to make up our lived world, and how all these relate to issues of moral behaviour and following the path to liberation.
It would be wrong, however, to think unquestioningly that the Theravāda sect is original Buddhism, and its canon is the original word of the Buddha.23 There were other early sects of Buddhism, and very substantial sections of their versions of the canons survive either in original fragments or in Tibetan or more importantly here Chinese translations. As we have said, each sect considered itself to be simply original Buddhism, and its canon the original word of the Buddha. Scholars have great fun comparing these different versions of the canons, but while there are differences in detail their differences are not normally so great as to suggest very radical divergence in doctrine.24
There are differences among scholars however on how far we can use these sources to know exactly what the Buddha himself taught. Lambert Schmithausen has referred to three approaches to this issue. The first position he detects, particularly associated by him with British Buddhologists, stresses the fundamental homogeneity and substantial authenticity of at least a considerable part of the Nikāyic [i.e. earliest basic canonical, particularly Pāli] materials. … On this assumption, the canonical texts are taken to yield a fairly coherent picture of the authentic doctrine of the Buddha himself …
(Ruegg and Schmithausen 1990: 1–2; italics original)
Scholars in the second group (Schmithausen seems to be thinking here in particular of Gregory Schopen and D. Schlingloff) express extreme scepticism about retrieving the doctrines of earliest Buddhism, especially of the Buddha himself. This is because among other things even the earliest texts were not codified until after the first century BCE, and it is difficult without making questionable presuppositions to go much beyond that time as regards the canonical texts, although archaeological sources such as inscriptions may be helpful. Schmithausen himself would side with a third group. This group maintains that notwithstanding these problems it may occasionally be possible to detect in the texts that now exist earlier and later segments and thus sometimes earlier and later doctrines. This approach favours detailed textcritical analysis of canonical versions of particular accounts to detect inconsistencies and contradictions that may suggest earlier textual revisions, stratification of textual content, and therefore different levels of doctrinal development. This may lead to some sort of relative chronology of ideas some of which may (or may not) be capable of being traced back to the Buddha himself.
Richard Gombrich (who is considered by Schmithausen very much to fall within the first group of scholars, although he himself rejects being ‘painted … into a kind of fundamentalist corner’) has suggested that jokes in some of the texts may go back to the Buddha himself, for ‘are jokes ever composed by committees?’. He also tries to show allusions to Brahmanism in some of the earliest Buddhist texts, which the later tradition appears to have forgotten, thus suggesting the relative antiquity of those allusions. If they refer to doctrines found in e.g. the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, and these references have been forgotten by later Buddhists, then it suggests that at least these references may go back to the time of the Buddha himself (Gombrich 1996: 11–12). The Buddha himself may well have been self-consciously responding to some of the early prose Upaniṣads like the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad.
Of course, we cannot show for certain the falsehood of the claim that none of the teachings attributed to the Buddha goes back to the actual figure of the Buddha himself at all. This logically follows, since it is always possible that the Buddha might not have existed. Nevertheless it seems probable that he did exist, and he gave teachings which were considered by his followers to be important and life-transformative. I agree with Gombrich elsewhere, where he considers the possibility held by some scholars that the Buddha may really have taught a Self (ātman; Pāli: attā) instead of the not-Self (anātman; Pāli: anattā) doctrine. He observes, ‘I myself find this claim that on so essential a point the Buddha has been misunderstood by all his followers somewhat [to use a Buddhist expression] “against the current”’ (Gombrich 1971: 72 n. 18).
In other words, if only because it was important to them, barring specific matters of detail the Buddhist tradition as represented in its earliest Indian sources is likely to have preserved the teaching of the Buddha reasonably well. The Dharma is to be practised, for the purposes of liberation. Its preservation, particularly in the hands of an organised body like the Sangha, created by the Buddha no doubt partly for the purposes of preserving an awareness of the Dharma for as long as possible, is unlikely to have been treated in a cavalier fashion.25
The Buddha’s Attitude to His Teaching: the Arrow and the Raft
The Buddha is said to have used two illustrations in particular to show how to understand what his real concerns were in teaching, and how to take the teaching that he gave. The first is found in the Cūḷamāluṅkya Sutta (the ‘Shorter Discourse to Māluṅkyā(putta)’), which is the sixty-third sutta (‘scripture discourse’; Sanskrit: sūtra) in the section of the Pāli Canon known as the Majjhima Nikāya, the ‘Middle Length Collection’. A monk called Māluṅkyāputta while in retreat became concerned that the Buddha had not answered what were to him certain major philosophical questions. These questions related to whether the world is eternal, or not eternal; whether the world is finite, or infinite; whether the jīva (the ‘life principle’) is the same as the body, or different from it, and whether the Tathāgata26 exists after death, or does not exist after death, or both exists and does not exist after death, or neither exists nor does not exist after death? Upon whether the Buddha can answer these questions or whether he will honestly admit he does not know the answers will depend Māluṅkyāputta’s continuing a monk-disciple of the Buddha.
The Buddha’s response is simple. These are not questions he has any intention of answering (or, one can be sure, any interest in answering). He had never offered to answer questions like these, so Māluṅkyāputta cannot have decided to become a monk because he thought the Buddha would answer them. If Māluṅkyāputta insisted on answers to these questions before practising the Dharma as a monk then, the Buddha observes, he would surely die before it had been explained to him:
It is as if there were a man struck by an arrow that was smeared thickly with poison; his friends and companions, his family and relatives would summon a doctor to see the arrow. And the man might say, ‘I will not draw out this arrow as long as I do not know whether the man by whom I was struck was a [member of a] brahmin, a kṣatriya, a vaiśya, or a śūdra [class] … as long as I do not know his name and his family … whether he was tall, short or of medium height …’. That man would not discover these things, but that man would die.
(Trans. in Gethin 1998: 66)
The one uncontroversial point about this famous image is the comparison of being an unenlightened person in the world, our actual existential situation, with being shot by a very poisonous arrow. Being in the world as an unenlightened being, being in the world as one who will again be in the world, and again and again throughout endless rebirths and redeaths, is wanted as much as a poke in the eye with a pointed stick. For the Buddha our situation is past discussion, it is lethal (life is a fatal illness), and the very fact we cannot see this is itself a sign of how far we are from seeing things the way they really are. The thick poison is the poison of misconception, of ignorance (avidyā; Pāli: avijjā).27 As far as the Buddha is concerned everything else is subordinate to this almost overwhelmingly urgent imperative.
The Buddha in this sense is not a philosopher, at least if we understand a philosopher as someone engaged in an activity of reflection and discussion on fundamental issues of, say, metaphysics, ethics and politics. The image often used in Buddhist texts is not of the Buddha as a philosopher, but the Buddha as a doctor, ‘the great physician’. One does not philosophise with one’s doctor, at least, not if one’s illness is critical but still curable. The teaching of the Buddha is through and through goal-oriented (teleological). It is entirely dependent upon its goal of freedom from suffering and ultimate frustration. The Buddha’s concern is not discussion. It is not pondering or mulling things over. It is action, based on an acceptance not of some abstract philosophising but rather specifically of the Dharma rediscovered by the Buddha. And when the Buddha said that the man would die before he had answered all these questions, what the simile means when applied to the soteriological teaching of the Buddha is not that for one reason or another it would take the Buddha a long time to answer those questions.
Rather it must be that before such questions could be answered all would be lost. The chance for a cure, i.e. liberation, would have irrevocably passed. So long as one insists on an answer first one will never be liberated. Or, put another way, one will only have a chance of liberation when one abandons the search for answers to such questions.
This image is uncontroversial, and it is this image which shows how to approach the teachings of the Buddha and earliest Buddhism. Not all about the Buddha’s response to Māluṅkyāputta, however, is equally uncontroversial. What is it about these questions (and other similar sets of ‘unanswered’ (Sanskrit: avyākṛta; Pāli: avyākata) questions found in the Buddhist canon) which meant that the Buddha did not answer them? Here the Buddhist tradition and modern scholars have mooted a number of possibilities (Collins 1982a: 131–8; Gethin 1998: 66–8). One can assume that these questions are being taken as a set. Let us look at the logical options.
Logically, there may be answers to these questions, or there may not. In favour of the view that there is no answer to these questions is that the Buddha seems to think that it would, as it were, ‘take forever’ to answer them. This seems to indicate that they are actually impossible to answer. Otherwise answers could be given (grudgingly, but if really necessary) and then one could follow the path. So on this interpretation, since there is no answer to these questions then not only cannot the Buddha give an answer, but also having an answer to these questions cannot be anything to do with becoming enlightened (because otherwise neither Gautama nor anyone else could have become enlightened).
But if there are answers to these questions, the Buddha may know those answers or he may not. If he does not know the answers then this would certainly be incompatible with later Buddhist tradition that the Buddha was omniscient. It would also suggest that the Buddha was dishonest in not admitting that he did not know the answers, as Māluṅkyāputta wished him to do if that were true. But even if the Buddha did not know the answers it would still show yet again that if the Buddha’s Dharma is the Dharma, then knowing the answer to these questions could not be relevant to the path to liberation. And the Buddhists are telling this story, so we cannot approach the meaning of the story with an attribution of dishonesty to the Buddha that would be unacceptable to Buddhists.
If the Buddha knows the answers to our questions, then telling the answers may be relevant to his purposes or it may not. But we can assume that if there are answers, and the Buddha knows those answers, it cannot be the case that telling them is relevant to his purposes, or he would have done so. Thus giving answers to these questions simply has nothing to do with attaining liberation. Again and again we return to the same point. The Buddha is by definition an enlightened being, and as such he has understood the true nature of things and all that is necessary to becoming enlightened. That is, he has understood the Dharma. The need to attain liberation is the one overriding imperative. Liberation simply does not require an answer to these questions, whether or not there is an answer or, if there is an answer, whether or not the Buddha knows it. This interpretation is supported by a subsequent comment made in the text:
It is not the case that one would live the spiritual life by virtue of holding the view that the world is eternal [etc.]. … Whether one holds that the world is eternal, or whether one holds the view that the world is not eternal, there is still birth, ageing, death, grief, despair, pain, and unhappiness – whose destruction here and now I declare. (Trans. in Gethin 1998: 68)
And that may be about as far as we can go in interpreting the unanswered questions with any reasonable degree of assurance.28
The other famous illustration to show the Buddha’s attitude to his teaching is that of the Raft. It can be found in another sutta of the Pāli Canon’s Majjhima Nikāya, this time sutta number 22, the Alagaddūpama Sutta (the ‘Discourse on the Simile of the Water Snake’). In this discourse a certain rather stupid, or perhaps self-seeking, monk called Ariṭṭha conceives the idea that when the Buddha said that sense pleasures are an obstacle to the spiritual path he was not including in this sexual intercourse.29 The Buddha is not impressed, calls Ariṭṭha a ‘foolish man’, and seems astonished that anyone would come up with such a misunderstanding of his teaching. Some people, he observes, learn his teachings but do not apply them. They just chat about them, or use them to accuse others. Thus they simply harm themselves. The teachings here have been ‘badly grasped’. It is just like trying to grab a poisonous snake, and catching it not by the head but by the tail. One simply gets bitten. Thus just as the Buddha sees his teachings as intensely practical so, for that very reason, they are also dangerous if misunderstood. And he continues by likening his teachings to a raft. A man comes to an expanse of water, where the near bank (the state of unenlightenment) is ghastly but the far side (i.e. nirvāṇa; Pāli nibbāna) is safe. There is no boat, so he builds himself a raft and crosses over safely. But having got to other side that man does not carry the raft with him, rather, he leaves it behind. Thus, says the Buddha, the Dhamma (Dharma) is taught for the purpose of crossing over, not for holding on to.
Again we see that the use of the teaching by the Buddha is subordinate to its purpose. The point is the point, but once one has got the point (indeed if one has got the point) one certainly should not hold onto the teachings and what they teach with craving and attachment (Gethin 1998: 71 ff.). It follows that there is here no requirement (it seems to me) of rigid literalism. The text adds that by appreciating this simile of the raft one can let go even of the teachings (dhammā; following Gombrich 1996: 24 ff.), let alone those things which were not taught by the Buddha (adhammā), such as the weird ideas of Ariṭṭha. What the Buddha did not teach is of course not to be adopted, but all that he did teach was for a purpose and having attained that purpose, letting go of craving and attachment, the particular verbal formulations of the teachings are no longer needed.30
Note that it simply does not follow from the raft simile that the teachings of the Buddha here are no longer being claimed to be factually true but only of relative practical benefit in particular contexts. The Buddha is not saying that any particular teaching is to be abandoned once it has fulfilled its pragmatic purpose because it carries no surplus truth over and above that purpose. The point of the raft simile is much simpler. The teachings may be true, descriptively, factually, cognitively true. But the message of the Buddha concerns liberation through transforming the mind, and the raft simile draws one’s attention to a potential incompatibility between the truth of the teachings themselves and the way they are held if they are clung onto with craving and attachment. It is obvious that particular teachings are no longer needed once one has irrevocably understood their point, or their meaning, or what they are referring to. In getting the point one does not need to cling on, and one can let go of the expression. Moreover, if necessary one could re-express it, so long as the point eventually turns out to be the same. And whether to utter a particular statement at a particular time may well be completely pragmatic. That is, one utters the statement entirely because in context it will help on the spiritual path. But there is no implication here that the point, i.e. what is being expressed, is not really, objectively true. There is no suggestion that it is only ‘pragmatically true’ i.e. it is only a question of it being beneficial in the context of the spiritual path.
As we have seen, the Buddhist tradition, certainly in India, always considered that the Buddha had discerned a definite ‘way things are’, and there are teachings which entail practices which do indeed lead to seeing things that way and freedom from all suffering, all duḥkha. The teachings of the Buddha are held by the Buddhist tradition to work because they are factually true (not true because they work). In the Indian context it would have been axiomatic that liberation comes from discerning how things actually are, the true nature of things. That seeing how things are has soteriological benefits would have been expected, and is just another way of articulating the binary ‘is’ and ‘ought’ dimension of Indian Dharma. The ‘ought’ (pragmatic benefit) is never cut adrift from the ‘is’ (cognitive factual truth). Otherwise it would follow that the Buddha might be able to benefit beings (and thus bring them to enlightenment) even without seeing things the way they really are at all. And that is not Buddhism.
Key Points to Chapter One
To be a Buddhist does not entail a complete rejection of other religions or religious practices. From the very beginning Buddhism has co-existed with other religions, structuring itself around them as a sort of ‘meta-religion’ devoted to what it sees as the higher goal of finally ending suffering.
The word ‘Dharma’ refers both to the way things really are, that which Buddhas discover upon attaining awakening, as well as the teachings inspired by this discovery of the way things really are. The Buddha’s Dharma is therefore the ultimate religious truth that he realised, and the teachings that he formulated on the basis of this realisation: it is both the way things ultimately are as well as the way things ought to be for the Buddhist practitioner.
Buddhism emerged in a religious landscape dominated by the ritualistic religion of the Brahmins, and by the śramaṇa-s or ‘drop-outs’, who included groups of ascetics such as the Jains. Alongside these were brahmanic renouncers, some of whose teachings are preserved in the early Upaniṣads.
The Buddha accepted the basic world-view of the drop-outs, the earliest statement of which is to be found in the early Upaniṣads, i.e. that life in this world is inherently painful since a person is trapped in the endless round of transmigration, and so cannot ever find any lasting satisfaction. According to this understanding, rebirth after death is caused by a person’s deeds (karma) in their present existence. If so, liberation from the round of rebirth can only be brought about through stopping the forces of karma in one’s present life.
The life-story of the Buddha is a hagiography. This does not mean that it lacks historical facts, but rather that history is subsumed by an overriding concern to bring out the central points of Buddhism, in particular that there is a vast difference between the way things appear to be (as illustrated by the story of the Buddha as a prince provided with every sort of sensual pleasure) and the way things really are (as illustrated by the story of the future Buddha’s first encounter with sickness, old-age, and death).
Early Buddhist texts are preserved in languages such as Pāli, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan. The only complete Buddhist canon – the Tripiṭaka, or ‘Three Baskets’ (of Sūtra, Vinaya and Abhidharma) – preserved in an ancient Indian language is the Pāli Canon. This does not necessarily mean that it is a more reliable historical source, however.
Buddhist teachings were preserved for centuries by oral techniques before they were written down. Although it is easy to be sceptical about teachings that were not written down for hundreds of years, it is conceivable that very early texts have been preserved. For the time being, scholarly opinion on the early texts can be classed into roughly three groups: extreme scepticism, cautious optimism, and general acceptance of the fact that the earliest texts contain authentic teachings of the Buddha.
The Buddha’s teachings are overwhelmingly pragmatic, that is, they are limited to what helps a person realise nirvāṇa, and tend to bypass more abstract, philosophical issues (about which the Buddha generally refused to comment). But this does not imply that the teachings are not held to be objectively true, or that just any teaching that is spiritually efficacious is included in the Dharma. It rather means that while the teachings are understood to reflect the way things actually are, such objective statements of truth occur within the context of the Buddha’s soteriological purpose.
NOTES:
1 Thus, the ‘magic key’ for understanding what is going on in Buddhism is the following: whenever you come across something new, or perhaps even strange, in your study of Buddhism ask yourself the following question. ‘How might a Buddhist holding or practising that consider that doing so leads to the diminution or eradication of negative mental states, and the increasing or fulfilment of positive mental states?’
2 On what was, as far as we can tell, the Buddha’s own view of the gods (devas) see Norman (1990–6; 1991 volume, papers 31 and 44).
3 See Gombrich (1988: 29). On Aśoka and Buddhism see Norman (1997: Ch. 7).
4 Since the belief in reincarnation is commonly found in small-scale societies (Obeyesekere 2002), the development of such beliefs in ancient India is perhaps hardly surprising. Jurewicz (2004) has recently argued that the belief in rebirth can be found in the funeral hymn of the Ṛg Veda (X.16.5). For the significance of this recent research with regards to early Buddhism, see Gombrich (2009: 30ff).
5 These two kingdoms are roughly equivalent to the area covered by western Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh in modern India. Witzel (1987: 201) has noted that the eastern kingdom of Videha is mentioned in only the Yājñavalkya books of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, whereas Olivelle (1999: 65) has pointed out that these books are hostile to brahmins from the Vedic heartland of Kuru-Pañcala, apparently in order to present Videha as an equally important centre of Brahmanic learning (also see Witzel 1987: 198–9). It appears, then, that the Yājñavalkya parts of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad were composed to the east of the Vedic heartland of Kuru-Pañcāla and within the bounds of what Bronkhorst (2007: 4) has called ‘Greater Magadha’.
6 On purity and pollution in relationship to the caste system see Dumont (1988). Note, however, that when one speaks of ‘impurity’ or ‘pollution’ the polluting substance is not as such dirt. Caste is not a matter of hygiene. The pollution is metaphysical. One is born with it. One does not cease to be polluted by following a ‘clean’ occupation.
7 The Buddha was critical of the intrinsic supremacy of the brahmins, and with it the ideology of varṇa. But it would be misleading from this to infer, as some modern writers do, that the Buddha was ‘anti-caste’. First, a criticism of the varṇa system is not in itself a comment on jāti, caste, although it could be transposed to the ideology that nevertheless underlies caste. For his part the Buddha spoke of the true brahmin as one who had spiritual insight and behaves accordingly (see the famous Dhammapada Ch. 26). In this sense the Buddha affirmed a hierarchy not of birth but of spiritual maturity. It is not obvious that the Buddha would have any comment to make about a brahmin who is also spiritually mature (understood in the Buddha’s sense). The Buddha was not offering social reform. And this is what one would expect. The Buddha was himself a drop-out, a renouncer of society.
8 See Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 4.4.23: ‘A man who knows this, therefore, becomes calm, composed, cool, patient, and collected. He sees the self (ātman) in just himself (ātman) and all things as the self. Evil does not pass across him, and he passes across all evil’. (Olivelle trans., 1996: 68).
9 Cf. Edgerton (1972: 165) on the Bhagavad Gītā: ‘In fact, the Gītā, like the Upaniṣads, tends to promise complete emancipation to one who “knows” any particularly profound religious or philosophic truth that it sets forth. This seems to have been characteristic of Hindu systems generally, at least in their early stages’.
10 From the Pāli Sāmaññaphala Sutta (‘Discourse on the Benefits of being a Drop-out (samaṇa)’), with the teachers’ names in Pāli.
11 It is hardly surprising on the other hand that the early brahmanic texts on law and correct religious conduct (the Dharma Sūtras) are hostile to cities, for city life was the antithesis of the village-based Vedic civilisation. Some Dharma Sūtras even forbid a brahmin from entering a city (Gautama Dharmasūtra XVI.45, Baudhāyana Dharmasūtra II.6.33: on these texts see Olivelle 2000: 163, 265).
12 For a detailed analysis of the sociological background to the Buddha’s life, see Gombrich (1988: 49–59). For a more recent discussion see Wynne (2009: xxiv–xxvii).
13 For a geographical description of the Terai country, see Allen (2008: 34ff).
14 For further details see the article by Cousins (1996a), reviewing Bechert (1991–2), and the Bechert volumes themselves.
15 This whole book is warmly recommended as an excellent, short and easily accessible academic survey of the Buddha and his significance.
16 Norman (1997: 23) points out that rāja used for Gautama’s father may at this time and in this context have simply meant someone from a kṣatriya class.
17 For the early textual evidence for this, see Wynne (2007: 12).
18 For a study of some Asian hagiographies see Granoff and Shinohara (1994).
19 See the account of the Buddha’s last days in the Pāli Mahāparinibbāna Sutta (‘Great Discourse on the Final Cessation’, or ‘Discourse on the Great Final Cessation’).
20 On the nature and influence of oral transmission in Buddhism see Norman (1997: Ch. 3). On the process and influence of writing see op. cit., Ch 5.
21 Although Norman (1997: Ch. 8) expresses some caution about the whole concept of a ‘canon’, that he reminds us is a Western category. See also Collins (1990). On the use of the term ‘sect’ here (as an equivalent for the institutional nikāya) see Williams (2009: 267, note 3).
22 On the language or languages that the Buddha spoke, see Norman (1990–6; papers 38 and 42).
23 On the formation of the canon, with particular reference to the Pāli Canon, see Norman (1997: Ch. 8).
24 Although the Pāli language is not identical with the dialects in which the Buddha taught, it is still chronologically closest to them. As von Hinüber (2010: 47–48, n.43) has noted: ‘Even though the old Pāli texts are created out of a Buddhist Middle Indic, and, consequently, nowhere preserve, but at best reflect the language of earliest Buddhism, they contain the earliest redaction of Buddhist texts’. This does not mean that only the Pāli canon preserves the oldest Buddhist literature, but nevertheless suggests that it reaches ‘much deeper into the soil here and there than elsewhere’ (von Hinüber 2010: 48 n.43). For further remarks on the antiquity of the Pāli texts, see Wynne (2005).
25 It has been found that preservation of texts orally can be just as accurate as literary preservation, if not more so. Where, for example, texts are chanted communally a mistake or interpolation is immediately noticeable and made public.
26 Usually taken as an epithet of the Buddha, but cf. Norman, (1990–6; 1993 volume: 252, 258–60). Although this term is usually translated as ‘Thus-gone’, Gombrich (2009: 151) has recently argued that the word gata cannot literally mean ‘gone’: ‘The word gata when it occurs as the second member of a compound of this type often loses its primary meaning and simply means “being”.’ If so, the compound means something like ‘the one whose being/state is thus’ – or, as Gombrich (2009: 151) puts it, ‘the Buddha is referring to himself as “the one who is like that”. This is tantamount to saying that there are no words to describe his state; he can only point to it.’
27 On whether avidyā would be best translated as ‘misconception’ or ‘ignorance’ see Matilal (1980). Perhaps, as Matilal argues, ‘misconception’ would be a better translation. But ‘ignorance’ has become fairly established in Buddhist Studies.
28 A common view of the later Buddhist tradition is that the Buddha did not answer these questions because he saw an incompatibility between answering these questions and following the path. This is because the questions presuppose as some sort of absolutes categories like the world, the ‘life-principle’, and the Tathāgata. Actually these are simply conceptual constructs and do not exist from the point of view of a perception of how things really are. All these conceptual constructs presupposed as some sort of absolutes involve attachment, and are thus antithetical to liberation. Thus any answer to the questions would involve being enmeshed in attachment and grasping, or, as the Buddhist tradition has it, enmeshed in ‘views’ (Sanskrit: dṛṣṭi; Pāli: diṭṭhi). It would thus be incompatible with not only the enlightenment of Māluṅkyāputta but also the enlightenment of the Buddha (see Gethin 1998: 67–8; see also Norman (1990–6; 1993 volume: 251–63).
29 What he actually says is: ‘As I understand the Blessed One’s teaching, what he has said are obstructing thoughts do not lead to an obstruction for the person who indulges in them’. The meaning of this statement is not entirely clear. But since both Ariṭṭha’s fellow monks and the Buddha go on to state that sensual pleasures (kāmā) offer little enjoyment, this misunderstanding would seem to concern the Buddha’s teaching on sensual pleasure. Ariṭṭha thus seems to have thought that the action itself (indulgence in sensual pleasure) does not matter so long as the thought behind it is absent (i.e. without the desire for such pleasure); such an interpretation implies that sensual pleasure can be pursued so long as a person does not desire it. In other words, it would seem that Ariṭṭha has misunderstood the Buddha’s stress on the intention behind the act, rather than the act itself, as the morally efficacious factor. As Richard Gombrich has pointed out (1996: 22–3), the term ‘pleasure’ (kāmā) in this episode is probably a euphemism for sexual intercourse.
30 This interpretation is supported in the sutta by the Buddha’s subsequently relating the wrong approach here to the holding of ‘views’ (Sanskrit: dṛṣṭi; Pāli: diṭṭhi). On the meaning of the expression ‘view’ here see Gethin (1997b). He comments that ‘even so-called “right views” can be “views” (diṭṭhi) in so far as they can become fixed and the objects of attachment’ (op. cit.: 217–18). Thus inasmuch as the content of a particular true statement becomes an object of attachment, it becomes a ‘view’ and should be abandoned. But it does not thereby become less than true. Moreover there is an implication here that rigid and unnecessary adherence to a particular formulation of a doctrinal position, again even if true, would also indicate a ‘view’.
Written by Paul Williams with Anthony Tribe and Alexander Winne in "Buddhist Thought : A Complete Introduction To The Indian Tradition", Routledge, UK, 2012, excerpts chapter one. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
(Paul Williams is Emeritus Professor of Indian and Tibetan Philosophy at the University of Bristol, UK., Anthony Tribe is a specialist in Indian Tantric Buddhism and formerly taught in the Asian Studies Program at the University of Montana, USA and Alexander Wynne is Assistant to the Co-Director of the Dhammachai Tipiṭaka Project at Wat Phra Dhammakāya, Thailand, )