Although our
calculations of times passage carries no more weight against the vastness of
the cosmic process than a feather before a storm, still, being human, it is
natural for us to nurture hope on reaching the threshold of a new millennium.
Almost all people entertain hopes for themselves and those close to them: for
good health, for an unexpected change in fortune, for the fulfilment of their
deepest wishes. We must also cherish hope for our world, for humanity as a whole
hope that despite the dark predictions of dangers lying ahead, the change
of digits will usher in a new era of peace, general prosperity, and good will.
Adherents of different
religions also turn their thoughts towards the new millennium, and as Buddhists
we might briefly ponder the question what the Dhamma can offer the world in the
years that lie before us. From one angle it could be said that what Buddhism
can offer humankind today is exactly what it has been holding out for the past
twenty-five centuries: an acute diagnosis of the human condition and a clear
path to full liberation from suffering. But while this statement is correct as
far as it goes, it is not yet sufficient; for it does not take account of the
fact that in any age the aspects of the Dhamma to be emphasised, and the way
they are to be expressed, must address the particular problems faced by the
people living in that age. The Buddhas teaching acquires its incisive
relevance, not merely by the cogency of its broad generalities, but by attuning
its formulations to the precise problems that loom so large in the
consciousness of the particular period in which it has taken root. Thus for the
Dhamma to recover its vitality and strength, it is not enough merely to repeat
hallowed formulas inherited from the past, however true they might be in their
own right. Rather, we must focus the lens of the Buddhas teaching on the deep
problems faced by human beings today and determine how the teachings can help
to resolve those problems as efficiently as possible. If what the Buddha taught
is only suffering and the cessation of suffering, then the starting point
for any convincing presentation of the way to sufferings cessation must be the
specific forms of suffering characteristic of our time.
In the last decades of
the twentieth century, two manifestations of suffering have become so prevalent
that they seem almost the defining characteristics of the modern era. One is an
invidious sense of meaninglessness, a feeling of alienation from life, now becoming
almost as common in the more modernised quarters of
The sense of
meaninglessness as a widespread social phenomenon set in with the rise of
modern industrial civilisation. As each new breakthrough in natural science
dealt a fresh blow to the organic Christian world view that had prevailed
during the medieval period, human beings could no longer regard themselves as
the pinnacle of creation, the beloved children of an all-loving Father who had
created the universe expressly as the stage for our unfolding march towards
salvation. Instead, under the influence of the mechanistic sciences, we came to
see ourselves as chance products of purely natural causes, born and dying in a
universe cold and indifferent to our hopes. Our existence was inexplicable in
terms of any objective source of meaning, and did not embody any higher purpose
than the brute struggle to survive and propagate our genes before death draws
the curtain closed on all our restless strivings.
The loss of meaning was
further aggravated by the break-up of traditional forms of social order under
the impact of industrial capitalism. The rise of the city and the compulsive
work routine of office and factory cut the bonds of social solidarity, so that
each individual came to see himself or herself as an isolated entity pitted
against others in stark competition for dominance. The individual ego thus
became the ultimate centre of experience and the sole determinant of value, but
it was an isolated ego on whom the other-regarding virtues inculcated by
religious ethics, such as generosity and self-sacrifice, no longer had any
claims. Altruism and restraint were eclipsed by the new creed of
self-indulgence, which gave precedence to wealth, power, and conspicuous
consumption as the supreme goals of life.
As Western technology
and its offshoot, the consumerist culture, spread to the far corners of the
world, the breakdown of meaning and the sense of self-alienation became endemic
to many lands, and today this sense of meaninglessness has reached a truly
global scale. The culture of narcissism, which exalts the reckless quest for
self-aggrandisement, has spread its tentacles everywhere, leaving behind the
same debris: agitated minds and hollow lives. Bent on quick and easy
gratification, we pass our lives perpetually shadowed by a fear that all our
achievements are worthless, unable to deliver any deep and stable satisfaction.
And when this fear reveals itself, the abyss opens up, the realisation that we
have wasted our lives in the pursuit of empty dreams. Thus the high incidence
of mental illness, drug dependence, alcoholism, and suicide, particularly in
the more affluent parts of the world.
It is a telling sign
that despite the impressive achievements of science and technology, a culture
built on mere mastery over external nature is far from successful in meeting
the deep demands of the human spirit.
For those adrift in the sea of meaninglessness, the Buddhas teaching
offers a sense of meaning stemming from a profound spiritual tradition that
combines metaphysical depth with psychological astuteness and the highest
ethical standards. Without calling for blind faith in dogmatic creeds or
speculative postulates, the Buddha points directly to the invariable universal
laws that underlie happiness and suffering. He insists that we can discover
these for ourselves, simply by clear reflection on our own immediate
experience, and he offers us methods of practice by which we can gradually dig
up the buried roots of suffering and cultivate the causes culminating in the
highest happiness.
His appeal is to
immediate experience. We can see for ourselves that suffering prevails in a
mind driven by greed, hatred, and delusion, and that happiness grows when the
mind is suffused by the virtues of generosity, kindness, and understanding. On
the basis of this experimental test, which lies within the scope of any
thinking person, we can then extrapolate and see that for a mind fully
liberated from all self-centred defilements and adorned with perfect
detachment, love, and wisdom, happiness and peace will have become boundless
and irreversible. Thus by showing us the way to inner peace and happiness, the
Dhamma offers us an outlet from the abyss of meaninglessness, a way to confer
on our lives an exalted meaning and purpose.
The second type of
suffering that has become so pervasive in our epoch is social violence, which
still wreaks so much misery across the globe. To be sure, communal violence is
by no means peculiar to our era nor a product of modern civilisation, but has
infected human relations from the days of our prehistoric past. But what has become
so disturbing in the present-day world is the eruption of violence between
different ethnic communities that in the past had managed to coexist in a
relatively stable degree of mutual acceptance. We have witnessed these
outbreaks of enmity recently in the Balkans,
While Buddhism cannot
pretend to offer a detailed solution to all the countless forms that violence
takes in the present-day world, the values emphasised by the Dhamma show what
is required to arrive at any lasting solution. What is necessary for true peace
and harmony to prevail among human beings is not the hammering out of a
comprehensive treaty by which the various parties to a conflict compromise
their hard and volatile demands. What is truly required is a new mode of
perception, the acquiescence to a universal consciousness that transcends the
narrow standpoint of egocentric or ethnocentric self-interest. This is a
consciousness that regards the other as not essentially different from oneself,
which detaches itself from the insistent voice of self-interest and rises up to
a universal perspective from which the welfare of all appears as important as
ones own good.
We can see the germ of
this universal perspective in a principle that stands at the base of Buddhist
ethics, even more fundamental to its ethical ideals than the Five Precepts or
any other formal code of conduct. This is the principle of taking oneself as
the criterion for determining how to treat others. When we apply this principle
we can understand that just as we each wish to live happily and to be free from
suffering, so all other beings wish to live happily and to be free from
suffering; just as we are each averse to pain and hardship and want to live in
peace, so all others are averse to pain and hardship and want to live in peace.
When we have understood this common core of feeling that we share with all
other beings, not as a mere idea but as the fruit of clear reflection, we will
treat others with the same kindness and care that we would wish them to treat
us. And this must apply at a communal level just as much as in our personal
relations. We must learn to see other communities as essentially similar to our
own, and entitled to the same benefits as we wish for the group to which we
belong. Even if we cannot reach any expansive feelings of love and compassion
for the others, we will at least realise that the moral imperative requires
that we treat them with justice and kindness.
Thus the message of the
Dhamma to human beings in the next millennium might be briefly summed up in
these twin gifts. In the personal domain it gives us a precisely defined path
that confers on life a deep sense of purpose, a purpose grounded in the cosmic
order but which can be actualised in ones own immediate experience. In the
communal dimension of human existence it holds out an ethical guideline to
right action which, if diligently applied, can arouse a conscientious
commitment to a life of non-violence. Though it is far too much to expect that
these two blessings will become the common heritage of all humanity, we can at
least hope that enough people will accept them to make the twenty-first century
a brighter and happier century than the one we are about to leave behind.
Bhikkhu Bodhi
The
Piyadassi: The Wandering Monk.
Kirthi Abeysekera. 200 pp. U.S. $5.00; SL Rs. 150.
The Spectrum of Buddhism. Piyadassi Thera. 447
pp. U.S. $15.00; SL Rs. 350.
A Pali Primer. Lily De Silva. 152 pp. U.S.
$5.00; SL Rs. 175.
One Nights Shelter. Yogavacara Rahula. 462
pp.
Early History of Buddhism in
Humour in Pali Literature. Walpola Rahula. 42 pp.
Forest Recollections: Wandering Monks in 20th Century
Notes and News
John D. Ireland. We regret to announce,
somewhat belatedly, the death from emphysema of John Ireland, one of our
esteemed authors, on 29 October 1998. Born in
Translations. Recently, a spate of BPS
titles have found their way into other languages. The Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma has appeared in a beautiful
Spanish edition published by El Colegio del Mexico under the title Compendia del Abhidhamma. The same work
has also been published in a Chinese translation, intended for free
distribution from
The Greatest Gift. The Buddhist Book
Trust, based in
The Buddhas Teaching As It Is.
A ten-cassette course on the Buddhist teachings, prepared and recorded by Ven.
Bhikkhu Bodhi (in 1981), is available from: Lavis Marketing, 73 Lime Walk,
Headington, Oxford OX3 7AD, tel.: 01865 767 575; fax: 01865 750 079; E-mail:
lavismarkt@aol.com. The cassettes cover the following topics: the Buddha, the
Four Noble Truths, the Three Marks of Existence, Dependent Origination, Karma
& Rebirth, Nibbāna, the Noble Eightfold Path, Meditation, the Sangha, and
the Social Dimensions of the Dhamma. The cost is 38 including VAT.
BPSs New Telephone Number.
Please note that BPS now
has a new telephone number: 08 237 283. This replaces 08 223679, now reserved
for our fax.
Book Review
The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of
Life. Jean-Franois Revel and Matthieu Ricard.
The Monk and the Philosopher
is a wide-ranging exercise in East-West dialogue in which the two participants
are, significantly, both Westerners, joined in the relationship of father and
son. The father, Jean-Franois Revel, is a French philosopher, political
commentator, and author whose books are read both in Europe and the
The discussions between
father and son took place in May 1996 in a mountainside inn above
In nineteen
conversations the father and son explore a wide array of subjects, beginning
with the story of Ricards conversion to Buddhism and branching out into such
areas as the problem of categorising Buddhism as a philosophy and religion;
rebirth and the Tibetan reincarnating lamas; the Buddhist conception of mind;
meditation as an experimental discipline; the Buddhist doctrine of nonself; the
contrast between self-transformation and social action; the problem of
violence; the relation between spirituality and politics; Buddhist meditation
and depth psychology; and more. Generally, it is Revel who poses the questions
and Ricard who replies, but the father often responds to his sons explanations
with illuminating observations of his own. In fact, while Ricard comes across
as an intelligent, articulate representative of Tibetan Buddhism, his replies
to his fathers questions sometimes seem too doctrinally correct, while
Revel stands out as the bolder and more creative thinker.
Beneath the diversity of
topics covered by their conversations, the contrasting standpoints of the two
partners emerge early on and remain constant throughout the book. Revel appears
as a champion of contemporary secular humanism sceptical and
level-headed, but at the same time sympathetic to mans need for an art of wise
and noble living. He sees Western civilisation as having fallen into a
spiritual vacuum precipitated by the declining influence of theistic religion,
the failure of the political utopias, and the abdication by philosophy of its
classical role of providing guidance in the proper conduct of life. It is
precisely this, he hold, that has set the stage for the spiralling Western
interest in Buddhism.
Ricard proposes the full
range of Buddhist philosophy and practice as the remedy for this spiritual
desolation. Buddhism, he holds, offers a system of timeless wisdom that can
meet the demands for experiential confirmation laid down by science and yet
bring major transformations in the inner quality of our lives. But it is at
just this point that Revel steps back. As a secular humanist he can appreciate
the ethics and psychological acuity of Buddhist thought, but he also remains
convinced that despite its empirical claims, Buddhism presupposes a metaphysics
that cannot be objectively proven. As a modern European guided by a scientific
orientation, he rejects as unprovable the Buddhist tenets of karma and rebirth,
the continuity of mind beyond death, and the conviction that worldly life is so
bound up with suffering that human beings require a transcendent sphere of liberation.
In the end, he holds, the acceptance of these teachings requires a leap of
faith, and this is a leap he himself cannot make.
For his part, Ricard
speaks eloquently in defence of Buddhism, bringing to this task an intellect
trained both in the scientific method and in Buddhist philosophy and
meditation. Against his father, he insists that the choice of the scientific
orientation as an exclusive criterion of truth is as much a metaphysical stance
as the adoption of Buddhist doctrines, whose validity, he argues, can be
confirmed by undertaking the appropriate training. In the final analysis,
though, Ricards commitment to Buddhism did not originate from a detached
objective weighing of the truth claims of Buddhist doctrine. It sprang, rather,
from personal encounters with Tibetan spiritual masters, who presented him with
a living picture of a spiritual perfection he had never envisaged in the
universities and laboratories of
Despite their openness
and mutual tolerance, the two men do not come to final agreement. Perhaps in
some respects the father proves himself more tolerant than the son, who
occasionally seems too extreme in his rejection of Western values and
attitudes. Yet the father as well seems too committed to his scepticism even to
consider giving a trial to the Buddhist system of mental training. The reason,
perhaps, is that despite his breadth of mind and intellectual grasp of the
human condition, the problem of suffering has not yet bitten deeply enough into
his own entrails to force him on to a path whose entire rationale is that it
offers liberation from suffering. But perhaps too the fathers scepticism was
nurtured by the cultural remoteness in which Tibetan Buddhism is packaged. It
may be that if he had encountered Buddhism in a form more consonant with the
Buddhas advice in the Kalama Sutta, with the cultural trappings stripped away,
he would have found the Dhamma more congenial to his temperament.
Bhikkhu Bodhi
Review: After admonishing his
disciples not to cling to views, even the right view of dependent origination,
the Buddha enumerates the four nutriments on which life depends: material food,
contact, mental volition, and consciousness.
A nutriment (āhāra) is explained by the commentaries
to be a strong support for the continuity of life (ajjhattika-santatiyā visesappaccaya). As we know, the Buddha
teaches that a living organism can be analysed into the five aggregates: bodily
form, feeling, perception, volitional formations, and consciousness. These five
aggregates are sustained by the four nutriments. Each nutriment makes its own
distinctive contribution towards their sustenance. Material food is the
decisive support for the physical body, and since the four other mental
aggregates depend on the body, material food also indirectly maintains them as
well. Everyday the food we eat is digested and metabolised by the body. Its
vital nutrients are extracted and used for the growth and maintenance of the
body, while the residual waste is expelled as excrement. If we do not receive a
sufficient quantity of nutritious food, the body will grow weak and thin and
become vulnerable to illness. If our food supply is continually cut off, we
will wither up and die. Although we normally regard the partaking of food as an
occasion for gustatory pleasure and social communion, if we look at the act of
eating objectively, with all the frills of social conventions removed, we would
see that it is a stark biological imperative imposed on us by the very nature of
embodied existence.
Contact (phassa) is the coming together of
consciousness with an object via a sense faculty. Whenever consciousness
encounters an object, the resulting contact inevitably gives rise to a feeling,
a perception, and a volitional response. Of these, feeling is singled out as
the factor specially nourished by contact. What we seek in our encounters with
the world around us is the enjoyment of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, and
both pleasure and pain are feelings arisen from contact. Hence contact can be
considered the special nutriment for feeling.
Mental volition (manosa¤cetanā) is said to be the
nutriment for rebirth. For volition is kamma, and following death, when all the
conditions for rebirth are complete, past kamma propels the stream of
consciousness towards the particular destination where rebirth is due to take
place, and it is thus that conception comes about. Once rebirth has occurred,
throughout life mental volition continues to operate behind the scenes,
motivating and sustaining all our activities and bringing forth its results (vipāka) when the right conditions
obtain. All actions of body, speech, and mind are expressions or
materialisations of volition. These actions in turn leave behind new kammic
deposits with the potential to generate still another rebirth in which volition
will operate still again.
The last nutriment is
consciousness (vi¤¤āõa), which serves
as the special condition for name-and-form (nāma-råpa), the psychophysical organism. For the life-process to begin,
the stream of consciousness of a deceased being must descend into the
mothers womb, where it impregnates the ovum and turns it into the germ of a
living body. At the very moment that it arises, consciousness brings along
name, the main collaborators of consciousness in the process of cognition:
contact, feeling, perception, volition, and attention. None of these can exist
or function without consciousness, and therefore consciousness is spoken of as
their nutriment. Consciousness, however, is the nutriment of name-and-form, not
only at the moment of rebirth, but throughout the entire course of life. During
the embryonic period, as the foetus develops, it must be sustained by
consciousness. If consciousness were to expire during the foetal stage, the
life-process would come to a halt, leaving behind a dead foetus. Then, after
the new being has emerged from the womb and grows towards maturity, it is again
consciousness that underlies this process. And throughout life it is
consciousness that enables us to go about our daily activities. Consciousness
quickens the mass of tissues, organs, and fluids in which it is lodged and
makes them function as a living body. Consciousness also nourishes contact,
feeling, perception, volition, and attention so they can participate in
cognition. If consciousness departs, the body collapses into a heap of dead
matter and all mental activity stops.
But not only is
consciousness the nutriment for name-and-form. Though not classified as a
nutriment, name-and-form is also an essential condition for consciousness. For
consciousness can only function on the basis of a physical organism equipped
with its six sense faculties; if there is no body, consciousness cannot arise
(an exception can be made of the formless realms, but since those are so remote
from our experience they need not be considered here). Again for consciousness
to know anything it must be accompanied by the basic retinue of mental factors:
contact, feeling, perception, intention, and attention. Thus elsewhere the
Buddha says, It is to this extent that one may be born and age and die,
pass away and be reborn, that is, when there is consciousness with
name-and-form as its condition, and name-and-form with consciousness as its
condition (DN 15; SN 12:65). The phrase to this extent means that it is
consciousness together with name-and-form that constitutes the entire fabric of
experience. Beyond and behind this pair of consciousness and name-and-form
there is no transcendental subject, no ātman or self, which performs actions,
experiences their fruits, and moves from life to life retaining its essential
identity.
(to be continued)