No. 32
1st Mailing 1996
The traditional legend of the Buddha's quest for
enlightenment tells us that throughout his youth and early manhood Prince Siddhattha, the Bodhisatta, lived
in complete ignorance of the most elementary facts of human life. His father,
anxious to protect his sensitive son from exposure to suffering, kept him an
unwitting captive of nescience. Incarcerated in the splendour
of his palace, amply supplied with sensual pleasures and surrounded by merry
friends, the prince did not entertain even the faintest suspicion that life
could offer anything other than an endless succession of amusements and
festivities. It was only on that fateful day in his twenty-ninth year, when
curiosity led him out beyond the palace walls, that he encountered the four
"divine messengers" that were to change his destiny. The first three
were the old man, the sick man, and the corpse, which taught him the shocking
truths of old age, illness, and death; the fourth was a wandering ascetic, who
revealed to him the existence of a path whereby all suffering can be fully
transcended.
This charming story, which has nurtured the faith of
Buddhists through the centuries, enshrines at its heart a profound
psychological truth. In the language of myth it speaks to us, not merely of
events that may have taken place centuries ago, but of a process of awakening
through which each of us must pass if the Dhamma is
to come to life within ourselves. Beneath the symbolic veneer of the ancient
legend we can see that Prince Siddhattha's youthful
sojourn in the palace was not so different from the way in which most of us
today pass our entire lives-often, sadly, until it is too late to strike out in
a new direction. Our homes may not be royal palaces, and the wealth at our
disposal may not approach anywhere near that of a North Indian rajah, but we
share with the young Prince Siddhattha a blissful
(and often wilful) oblivion to stark realities that
are constantly thrusting themselves on our attention. If the Dhamma is to be more than the bland, humdrum background of
a comfortable life, if it is to become the inspiring, sometimes harsh voice
that steers us on to the great path of awakening, we ourselves must emulate the
Bodhisatta in his process of maturation. We must join
him on that journey outside the palace walls-the walls of our own self-assuring
preconceptions-and see for ourselves the divine messengers we so often miss
because our eyes are fixed on "more important things," i.e. on our
mundane preoccupations and goals.
The Buddha says that there are few who are stirred by
things that are truly stirring, compared to those people, far more numerous,
who are not so stirred. The spurs to awakening press in on us from all sides,
yet too often, instead of acknowledging them, we respond simply by putting on
another layer of clothes to protect ourselves from their sting. This statement
is not disproved even by the recent deluge of discussion and literature on
aging, life-threatening illnesses, and alternative approaches to death and
dying. For open and honest awareness is still not sufficient for the divine
messengers to get their message across. In order for them to convey their
message, the message that can goad us on to the path to liberation, something
more is needed. We must confront aging, illness, and death, not simply as
inescapable realities with which we must somehow cope at the practical level,
but as envoys from the beyond, from the far shore, disclosing new dimensions of
meaning.
This disclosure takes place at two levels. First, to
become divine messengers, the facts of aging, illness, and death must jolt us
into an awareness of the fragile, precarious nature of our normal day-to-day
lives. They must impress upon our minds the radical deficiency that runs
through all our worldly concerns, extending to conditioned existence in its
totality. Thereby they become windows opening upon the first noble truth, the
noble truth of suffering, which the Buddha says comprises not only birth,
aging, illness, and death, not only sorrow, grief, pain, and misery, but all
the "five aggregates of clinging" that make up our
being-in-the-world.
When we meet the divine messengers at this level, they
become catalysts that can induce in us a profound internal transformation. We
realize that because we are frail and inescapably mortal we must make drastic
changes in our existential priorities and personal values. Instead of letting
our lives be consumed by transient trivia, by things that are here today and
gone tomorrow, we must give weight to "what really counts," to aims
and actions that will exert a lasting influence upon our long-range
destinies-upon our final destiny in this life, and upon our ultimate direction
in the cycle of repeated birth and death.
Before such a revaluation takes place, we generally live
in a condition that the Buddha describes by the term pamaada,
negligence or heedlessness. Imagining ourselves immortal,
and the world our personal playground, we devote our energies to the
accumulation of wealth, the enjoyment of sensual pleasures, the achievement of
status, the quest for fame and renown. The remedy for heedlessness is the very
same quality that was aroused in the Bodhisatta when
he met the divine messengers in the streets of Kapilavatthu.
This quality, called in Paali sa.mvega,
is a sense of urgency, an inner commotion or shock which does not allow us to
rest content with our habitual adjustment to the world. Instead it drives us
on, out of our cozy palaces and into unfamiliar jungles, to work out with
diligence an authentic solution to our existential plight.
It is at this point that the second function of the divine
messengers comes to prominence. For aging, sickness, and death are not only
emblems of the unsatisfactory nature of mundane existence but pointers to a
deeper reality that lies beyond. In the traditional legend the old man, the
sick man, and the corpse are gods in disguise; they have been sent down to
earth from the highest heaven to awaken the Bodhisatta
to his momentous mission, and once they have delivered their message they
resume their celestial forms. The final word of the Dhamma
is not surrender, not an injunction to resign ourselves stoically to old age,
sickness, and death. This is the preliminary message, the announcement that our
house is ablaze. The final message is other: an ebullient cry that there is a
place of safety, an open field beyond the flames, and a clear exit sign
pointing the way of escape.
If in this process of awakening we must meet old age,
sickness, and death face to face, that is because the place of safety can be
reached only by honest confrontation with the stark truths about human
existence. We cannot reach safety by pretending that the flames that engulf our
home are nothing but bouquets of flowers: we must see them as they are, as real
flames. When, however, we do look at the divine messengers squarely, without
embarrassment or fear, we will find that their faces undergo an unexpected
metamorphosis. Before our eyes, by subtle degrees, they change into another
face‑-the face of the Buddha, with its serene smile of triumph over the
army of Maara, over the demons of Desire and Death.
The divine messengers point to what lies beyond the transient, to a dimension
of reality where there is no more aging, no more sickness, and no more death.
This is the goal and final destination of the Buddhist path-Nibbaana,
the Unaging, the Unailing,
the Deathless. It is to direct us there that the divine messengers have
appeared in our midst, and the good news of deliverance is their message.
Bhikkhu Bodhi
Publications
Recent
Releases
The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New
Translation of the Majjhima Nikaaya.
Original translation by Bhikkhu Ñaa.namoli;
revised and edited by Bhikkhu Bodhi.
A complete translation of the Majjhima Nikaaya,
produced as a high-quality hardback, 3 volumes in one, with notes, glossary,
indexes. For sale in
Hardback: 1,420 pages160 mm x 235 mm
U.S. $50.00; SL Rs. 2,400BP 218H
The Path of Freedom: The Vimuttimagga.
Translated from the Chinese by N.R.M. Ehara, Soma Thera, Kheminda Thera. A meditation manual similar in structure to the Visuddhimagga, but less analytical and more practical in
its treatment of meditation.
(Reprint)
Softback: 424 pages152 mm x 227 mm
U.S. $20; Rs. 450Order No. BP
208S
The Buddha's Ancient Path. Piyadassi
Thera. An authentic and comprehensive book on Basic
Buddhism, 30 years in print. (Reprint)
Softback: 240 pages 140 mm x 214 mm
Ready for the Press
Great Disciples of the Buddha. Ven.
Nyanaponika Thera & Hellmuth Hecker. This volume
combines all past issues of our Wheel titles in the "Lives of the
Disciples" series. Inspiring and informative biographies by such eminent
disciples of the Buddha as Saariputta and Moggallaana, AAnanda, Mahaakassapa, Visaakhaa, Pa.taacaaraa, Anaathapi.n.dika,
and more.
The Dhammapada: The Buddha's
Path of Wisdom. Translated by Acharya Buddharakkhita; introduction by Bhikkhu
Bodhi. This revised reprint of our classic Dhammapada will include the Paali
text on facing pages.
Note: While preparatory work on the above two titles is
complete, we are entering into co-publication arrangements with Wisdom
Publications (Boston) to ensure that they receive a wider distribution in the
Western world; thus actual release will be delayed until these arrangements are
finalized.
The Seven Contemplations of Insight. Ven.
Maatara Sri Ñaa.naaraama Mahaathera. A profound examination of the "seven
contemplations" of classical Buddhism and of the actual way they are
experienced in the course of meditation, by one of Sri Lanka's foremost
meditation masters of recent times.
An Unentangled Knowing: The
Teachings of a Thai Buddhist Lay Woman. Acharn Kor Khao-suan-luang. Acharn Kor Khao-suan-luang
(Upaasikaa Kee Nanayon) was one of the foremost women Dhamma
teachers in modern
A Treasury of Buddhist Stories. This volume will combine
into a single full-size book the four BPS Wheel issues entitled Buddhist
Stories from the Dhammapada Commentary, an anthology
compiled from
Buddhism‑-The Religion and Its Culture. Ananda W.P. Guruge. 252 pp.,
hardback, 1984. U.S. $5.00; SL Rs. 150.
Buddhist Philosophy of Education. Ven.
Havanpola Ratanasaara. 138
pp., softback, 1995. U.S. $5.00; SL Rs. 200.
A Handbook of Paali Literature. Somapala Jayawardhana. 276 pp., softback, 1994. U.S. $10.50; SL Rs.
450.
History of the Buddhist Sangha
in
Logic and Epistemology in Theravaada
Buddhism. Ven.
Hegoda Khemaananda. 138
pp., softback, 1993. U.S. $6.00; SL Rs. 250.
Nirvaana and Ineffability. Asanga Tillekeratne. 181 pp.,
hardback, 1993. U.S. $10.50; SL Rs. 475.
Sexuality in Ancient India: A Study based on the Vinayapi.taka. L.P.N. Perera. 298
pp., hardback, 1993. U.S. $15.00; SL Rs. 690.
A Textual and Historical Analysis of the Khuddaka Nikaaya. Oliver Abeynayake. 236 pp., softback,
1984. U.S. $5.00; SL Rs. 125.
Piyadassi The Wandering Monk: His Life and
Times. Kirthi Abeyesekera.
220 pp. with 40 photos, softback, 1995. U.S. $5.00;
SL Rs. 150.
This is a full-length biography and character study of
The BPS is rendering a great service to promote the cause
of Dhamma throughout the world. BPS publications have
a quality of their own which publications from other publishers do not have. We
get quite a few books from elsewhere, some very good, but many do not have the
standard of the BPS books. May the BPS continue to flourish!
Acharya Buddharakkhita
Maha Bodhi
Society
Several months ago I received my first order of books from
the BPS. I have found the material to be of excellent quality and very
relevant. As a university student who aspires to become a professor of
religious studies, and as a Theravaada Buddhist, I
feel your publications fill a void in Buddhist scholarship. They are an
important source of information for me in my studies and personal practice.
Thank you for our excellent service and I look forward to receiving more
publications from your society.
Kristin Hardy
Winnipeg, Canada
1996 Subscriptions. We wish to remind our subscriber-members
to renew their BPS subscriptions for 1996. The subscription rates are as
follows.
Overseas:
U.S. $20 (or £12.50) for sea mail delivery;
U.S. $30 (or £18) for air mail delivery;
U.S. $350 (or £250) for life membership (air mail only).
Within Sri Lanka only:
Rs. 200 per year for full
subscription;
Rs. 100 per year for Damsaks-only subscription;
Rs. 2,000 for life membership.
Book Review
A Path with Heart: A Guide through the Perils and Promises
of the Spiritual Life. Jack Kornfield. London: Rider,
1994 (1st ed. New York: Bantam Books, 1993). 364 pp., softback.
£12.99.
As its subtitle makes clear, this is a very ambitious
book: the perils and promises of the spiritual life are subtle and manifold,
and the variety of advice proffered by different traditions can be quite
bewildering. To provide a guide through the maze is a task demanding courage,
dedication, and experience. The author, American Vipassana
teacher Jack Kornfield, has all three qualities in
abundance. His experience includes several years as a Theravaada
bhikkhu in Asian monasteries, twenty years teaching
meditation world wide, and professional practice as a psychotherapist with a
doctorate in clinical psychology. His courage and dedication come through on
every page of the book, as he attempts to give a comprehensive account of the
subject without minimizing its depth and complexity.
A Path with Heart is rather more than a meditation
handbook. It sets out to cover the whole compass of spiritual endeavour, not only actual meditation practice (which it
discusses quite extensively), but all the other aspects of life with which
meditation is enmeshed in a dynamic reciprocal relationship, from such humble
everyday tasks as washing dishes to the most elevated states of consciousness.
It does so methodically, tracing spiritual progress from its first beginnings
to its maturity
in a carefully articulated four-part presentation, clearly
signalled by the main headings.
Part I‑-A Path with Heart: The Fundamentals--starts
with lovingkindness as an essential first step (Ch.
1) and details the groundwork for meditation practice, concluding with a
chapter on mindfulness of breathing (Ch. 5). Each chapter has a brief appendix
with suggestions and instructions for simple meditation exercises to develop
the qualities or deal with the problems discussed in it. The title of Part
II--Promises and Perils--is self-explanatory. Here Kornfield
deals with many of the lures and pitfalls that practitioners encounter in
meditation and other aspects of the spiritual life. The nine chapters of Part
III‑-Widening Our Circle‑-do indeed range widely, stressing the
need to integrate the contemplative and active aspects of our lives. The author
urges us to live daily life as meditation, i.e. with "wakefulness and
freedom," not only in our immediate circle of family and friends, but by
extending the principles of spirituality to politics, economics, global peace,
and service to the poor. This part also contains important discussions on anatta and psychotherapy and meditation, to which I will
return shortly. Finally, Part IV‑-Spiritual Maturity‑-draws
together in three chapters the many threads of the rich tapestry woven by the
author.
Despite my admiration for Kornfield's
courage in attempting such a wide-ranging account of spiritual practice, I
repeatedly run up against two problematic themes that recur throughout the
book. One, highlighted in Ch. 17, is his view that psychotherapy and meditation
are ultimately inseparable, and that the latter cannot develop fully and
properly without the former. As he puts it, "our deep personal work (i.e.
in psychotherapy) and our meditative work must necessarily proceed
together" (p.245, my emphasis). Now it cannot be denied that going in for
spiritual practice when one is mentally unstable is a recipe for disaster, and
there are cases where psychotherapy can sort people out sufficiently for them
to be able to undertake meditation safely. What worries me is the assumption
that this is always the case, and that psychotherapy and meditation must
proceed hand in hand, so to speak, all along the way.
Kornfield's thesis seems to rest on a
blurring of the essential distinction between the instrumental purpose of
psychotherapy‑-to achieve what he describes as "a creative, loving,
and full way to live in the world" (p.245)‑-and the ultimate purpose
of the Buddha's path, which is to transcend the world altogether in the
attainment of enlightenment. Of course, the person who has attained Nibbaana in this life still lives in the world, and does so
in the fullest, most loving, and creative way conceivable. But this is a
consequence of enlightenment, not its purpose.
My second major disagreement with Kornfield
concerns his syncretism, the idea that various approaches, seemingly different,
are ultimately equivalent. As he puts it, "there are many ways up the
mountain ... there is never just one true way" (p.32); and again,
"all of the spiritual vehicles are rafts to cross the stream to
freedom" (p.316). This surely needs qualification, for it is not the case
that all rafts take you to the other shore: some founder in midstream, while
others get stuck in swamps and marshes. But for Kornfield
Buddhism (as well as Christianity, which he views only through its more radical
mystics) is simply one particular strand of the non-dualistic contemplation
tradition, differing only verbally from the other strands.
In order to bridge the manifest differences between the
Buddha's path to enlightenment and the other spiritual paths with which he
would equate it, Kornfield reinterprets the Buddha's
doctrine of anattaa (non-self or egolessness)
in such a way that it comes out meaning "True Self." In his view
(developed at length in Ch. 14) egolessness or
emptiness is not simply the absence of self or substance, but a "fertile
ground of energy that gives rise to all forms of life" (p.200). This
"ground of energy" he sees as our True Self, a reality he endows with
divine attributes, so that our lives become "reflections of the
divine" (p.51). He further identifies the "True Self" with
"Buddha nature," which is simply the other side of the medal: the
transcendent and immanent aspects of the universal godhead.
Now this is all a bit surprising coming from a professed
Buddhist who tells us that "the core of the meditations presented here (in
the book) comes from the Theravaada Buddhist
tradition of Southeast Asia" and who states that he has taught and
followed this tradition for many years (p.9). My problem with the "True
Self" approach and the attendant theistic implications is that, to the
best of our knowledge, the Buddha never presented his teaching in this way.
Though Kornfield might regard such ideas as part of
"skilful means" for communicating the Dhamma
in our age, it seems safer to assume that the Buddha knew best what he was
about when he eschewed all such notions completely in his teachings.
While taking all precautions to avoid spiritual pride, I
believe we have to admit that there are striking differences between the
Buddha's way and other ways. All that the Buddha himself claimed was to teach
"suffering and the end of suffering," the ultimate healing of the
human condition. Kornfield, as one who has dedicated
his life to the healing of human suffering in the way accessible to him, is to
this extent surely a follower of the Enlightened One. Only it seems to this
reviewer that there is sometimes in his enthusiasm and in his search for
"skilful means" a certain confusion between ends and means, a
syncretistic tendency, and a theistic tone which, at least to some minds, are
more likely to be a hindrance than a help.
Amadeo Sole#-Leris
This is an abridged version of a review scheduled for
publication in Buddhist Studies Review (U.K.).
Guidelines to Sutta Study
Reminder: In the last
issue on the Kandaraka Sutta
we examined the four jhaanas, the states of
meditative absorption.
The four jhaanas belong to the
second division of the threefold Buddhist path, the division of concentration (samaadhikkhandha). In the next portion of the Kandaraka Sutta the Buddha takes
up for explanation the third division of the path, the division of wisdom (pan#+n#+aakkhandha). He introduces the training in wisdom
with a set of three higher knowledges called the tisso vijjaa or tevijjaa. These are:
(i) the knowledge of the
recollection of past abodes (pubbenivaasaanussati-n#+aa.na);
(ii) the knowledge of the passing away and rebirth of
beings (cutupapaata-n#+aa.na); and
(iii) the knowledge of the destruction of the taints (aasavakkhaya-n#+aa.na).
The first two knowledges in this
triad are not indispensable for the attainment of arahantship,
and the Paali Canon in fact suggests that only a
minority of the arahants actually possessed them.
Moreover, unlike the third knowledge, these two knowledges
are not peculiar to the Buddha's Teaching but have been realized to some degree
by meditators and sages belonging to other spiritual
traditions. Their proximate cause is concentration, not understanding or
insight, and thus they do not require a knowledge of the principles peculiar to
the Buddha's Dhamma. For this reason the Visuddhimagga, in its arrangement of the path, assigns them
not to the division of wisdom but to the division of concentration, treating
them as auxiliary by-products of the jhaanas.
In the Suttas, however, all
three knowledges (along with certain other types of
super-sensory knowledge) are classified in the division of wisdom (see, for
example, DN 3, DN 4, DN 10, MN 53). In the Majjhima Nikaaya especially the Buddha repeatedly shows the gradual
training to culminate in these three knowledges. He
describes his own enlightenment experience as the realization of the triple
knowledge, each knowledge occurring to him during one of the three watches of
the night (see MN 4, MN 19, MN 36). He also includes the three knowledges in his standard model of the graduated course of
training for disciples (see MN 27, MN 39, MN 51, MN 53). It is clear too from
the Theragaathaa and Theriigaathaa,
the verses of the ancient elders of the Order, that the first generations of
enlightened monks and nuns held the triple knowledge in high esteem. We often
find, in their poems, the joyful exclamation:
The three knowledges have been
attained,
The Buddha's Teaching has been done.
The Suttas themselves usually
describe each knowledge by the same stereotyped formula but do not explore furthere their precise interrelationship. It seems
reasonable to assume that the Buddha did not intend the first two knowledges to serve merely as extrasensory sources of
factual information. That these knowledges could
serve such an end is clear from the fact that they were obtained by yogis with
mastery over concentration, but this would not have fit in with the Buddha's
insistence that his Dhamma is taught for the purpose
of putting an end to suffering. Rather, the Buddha must have integrated these knowledges into his own system because the discoveries they
make possible could be harnessed to the overarching aim of the entire training,
i.e. direct penetration of the Four Noble Truths.
The knowledge of the recollection of past abodes reveals
one's own transmigration through the round of rebirths; the knowledge of the
passing away and rebirth of beings shows how all other living beings revolve
from life to life in the same cycle of becoming. When this inexorable process
of repeated existence, with its bewildering succession of scenarios and
personal dramas, flashes by before the meditator's
inner eye, the immense misery and hollowness of all conditioned existence will
stand forth in bold relief. This will induce a profound perception of danger,
heightening the sense of revulsion and the desire for deliverance from the
round. Liberation can be achieve without this perception, simply on the basis
of direct insight into the three characteristics of existence‑-the
impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and selflessness of
the five aggregates. But when this "vertical insight" is accompanied
by a panoramic vision of sa.msaara extending over aeons of world-expansion and contraction, the direct
perception of the boundless expanse of universal suffering will deepen and
extend the comprehension of the full significance of the Four Noble Truths.
Thereby it will hasten the revulsion and dispassion in which the training in
wisdom culminates.
(to be continued)