Bhikkhu Cintita

Category: Early Buddhism

  • Awakening

    Buddhism is a practice tradition. Central to Buddhist practice is the development of virtue and wisdom. We all know that practice makes perfect. Final awakening is the final perfection of Buddhist practice. One who is awakened is therefore a virtuoso of virtue and a wizard of wisdom.

    In the early texts, we find awakening characterized alternatively as the end of suffering, as the end of attachment, as the end of corruptions, as the end of karma, as the end of consciousness, as the unconditioned, as the deathless, and as nibbāna (nirvana). Moreover, alongside these descriptions in terms of the progressive effect of Buddhist practice in shaping human cognition and character, awakening is also described in cosmological terms as liberation from saṁsāra (literally “faring on”), the end of the cycle of birth and death.

    Awakening as the culmination of Dhamma practice

    Buddhism is a practice tradition through which we progressively acquire the skills of virtue, wisdom, and certain mental faculties supportive of engaged practice and skill acquisition (ardency, “mindfulness,” and “concentration”). Those engaged with making progress on the path are accordingly are said to be ‘in training’ (sekha). It makes sense to find awakening associated with the mastery or perfection of these skills. Indeed, the arahant (the awakened one) is said to be ‘not (no longer) in training’ (asekha). Throughout the many narrative accounts of awakening in the early texts, the following is an oft repeated declaration at the culmination of practice,

    Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for the sake of this world.

    The functions of most of the various Buddhist practices, as well as awakening itself, are most often framed in terms of loss of what what is problematic (as in the list of ways in which awakening is characterized above), and only rarely in terms of gain of what is beneficial. Awakening is also called the end of the three unskillful roots of greed, aversion, and delusion. The word nibbāna means literally extinguishing, or blowing out, in reference to the fire of personal identity, fueled by attachment, the Pali word for which also means ‘fuel.’

    A common way to track the progressive attainments (stream entry, once-returning, non-returning and arahantship) culminating in complete awakening is in terms of progressive loss of the ten fetters:

    1. Self-existence view,
    2. doubt,
    3. perversion of norms and observances,
    4. sensual desire,
    5. ill will,
    6. desire for material existence,
    7. desire for immaterial existence,
    8. conceit,
    9. restlessness, and1
    0. ignorance.

    Likewise awakening is identified with breaking the causal chain of dependent coarising, each link of which is thereby lost.

    1. Ignorance →
    2. fabrication →
    3, consciousness →
    4. name and form →
    5. sense spheres →
    6. contact →
    7. feeling →
    8. craving →
    9. appropriation →
    10. becoming →
    11. birth →
    12. continued suffering in saṁsāra.

    Buddhist practice perfects the character of the individual practitioner, but its role can best be understood when placed in a social matrix: through practice we become decreasingly self-centered and increasingly pro-social in our behavior and thought, until no self remains to inhibit our concern for the needs of the greater community and the greater world. Nonetheless, awakening in terms of loss fails to encompass what is gained. The paramīs (‘perfections,’ paramītas in Sanskrit), for instance, are prominent values to be acquired and internalized through Buddhist practice, as dispositional factors perfected in an awakened one:

    1. Generosity (dāna),
    2. virtue (sīla),
    3. renunciation (nekkhamma),
    4. wisdom (paññā),
    5. energy (viriya),
    6. patience (khanti),
    7. truthfulness (sacca),
    8. determination (adhiṭṭhāna),
    9. loving-kindness (mettā), and
    10. equanimity (upekkhā).

    The explanation for the two perspectives on awakening might be that pro-social factors are gained of their own accord, once they are no longer inhibited by self-centered factors.

    You may find some of the factors that are lost through practice toward awakening (many of which are found among the links of dependent coarising above) surprising, for these factors seem to be requirements for navigating daily life. For instance, without consciousness and the sense spheres we could scarcely avoid bumping into things as we walk around. The explanation seems to be that, in spite of their value in worldly matters, they are nonetheless problematic from a spiritual perspective. The Buddha describes consciousness, for instance, as a magic show, presenting an illusory world, failing to mention that in the midst of the illusion, we are most the the time not bumping into things. How we manage to maintain advantages of such factors while ridding ourselves of liabilities will be discussed below.

    Common modern misunderstandings about awakening

    It is common in modern Buddhism to attribute awakening solely to wisdom practices, and to dismiss the role of ethical practices. Wisdom practices have to do with apprehension, while ethical practices have to do with behavior. This appears at first glance to find some support in the early texts, in which knowledge and vision of things as they are is generally regarded as the immediate precursor to awakening. Knowledge and vision is attained most immediately through Dhamma investigation (the four satipaṭṭhānas), about which it is said,

    This is the one way, bhikkhus, the path for the purification of beings, for the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of pain and grief, for the attainment of the true way, for the realization of nibbāna, namely, the four satipaṭṭhānas.

    Nonetheless, satipaṭṭhāna is a near-final step on a very long path of practice, with many prerequisites. For instance,

    Then, bhikkhu, when your virtue is well purified and your view straight, based upon virtue, established upon virtue, then you should develop the four satipaṭṭhānas in a threefold way.

    By analogy, pushing the garage door button might be the one and only way to arrive at home, but still not the most important step if we have yet to drive across two states, deal with restless children and tank up multiple times before we reach a point where the garage door will actually respond to a thumb’s touch. In short, we become a saint well before we perfect wisdom and attain awakening.

    Drawing on the metaphor of the process of refining gold, the Buddha describes the trajectory of practice as follows,

    There are these gross impurities in a monk intent on heightened mind: misconduct in body, speech, and mind. These the monk—aware, and able by nature—abandons, destroys, dispels, wipes out of exis­tence. When he is rid of them, there remain in him the moderate impurities: thoughts of sensuality, ill will, and harmful­ness. These he abandons, destroys, dispels, wipes out of existence. When he is rid of them there remain in him the fine impurities: thoughts of his caste, thoughts of his home district, thoughts related to not wanting to be de­spised. These he abandons, destroys, dispels, wipes out of existence.

    When he is rid of them, there remain only thoughts of the Dhamma. His composure is neither calm nor refined, it has not yet attained tranquility, or unity, and is kept in place by the fabrication of forceful re­straint. But there comes a time when his mind grows steady inwardly, settles down, grows unified, and concentrated. His composure is calm, and refined, has attained tranquility, and unity, and is no longer kept in place by the fabrication of forceful re­straint. And then whichever of the higher knowledges he turns his mind to know and realize, he can witness them for himself whenever there is an opening. (AN 3.100)

    Refinement proceeds from losing the gross to the fine impurities in virtue of the first paragraph, then to the gain of wisdom in the second paragraph.

    Awakening as liberation from the cycle of birth and death

    This way of conceptualizing awakening takes a more panoramic, cosmological perspective outside the practice experience of the present life. Buddhist cosmology seems to based strongly on Védic and Upaniṣadic cosmology, but also has a few unique features of its own. In any case, it is not systematically developed in the early texts, as it would become in the later Buddhist traditions. Its basis is in multiple realms (human, diety, animal, ghost and hell) of existence distributed over many world systems. We accordingly fare on almost endlessly over and over again moving from one realm to another.

    We’ve been stuck in saṁsāra since beginningless time, and will generally continue to be so indefinitely into the future, at least in the absence of awakening. Buddhist texts regularly describe practice attainments in terms of this cosmological model, and this seems indeed to have begun with the Buddha: meritorious acts tend to produce rebirths in higher realms, demeritorious acts tend to produce rebirths in lower realms. The most striking point in the Buddhist cosmology, and also the point relevant to the current discussion, is that final liberation entails the complete escape from saṁsāra, for an arahant will never again know rebirth.

    It is often pointed out that Buddhist cosmology commonly parallels Buddhist psychology, resulting in alternative explanations for the same things. This has been called the principle of the equivalence of cosmology and psychology. Some scholars have argued that mythic elements of religions in general often stand for an underlying psychology, or for society or culture. Society and culture are even more difficult to apprehend or pinpoint in words than psychology, given their highly symbolic nature. The Buddha was an early pioneer in psychological exposition, with some limited credit to the earlier Upaniṣads. However, he would have spoken in a context in which mythical accounts had considerable currency. As examples of this equivalence of cosmology and psychology, we should observe that each of the realms of existence corresponds to a dominant experiential state within the scope of human psychology. Through the accrual of kammic benefits or deficits, a saint might create a heaven right here in this human realm, while a scoundrel might create a hell.

    My intent is not to demythologize the cosmological models in favor of psychology. However, there are multiple ways to interpret Buddhist cosmology. Let me propose for consideration an interpretation that might potentially explain the relationship of liberation from saṁsāra to the culmination of Dhamma practice. It is reflected in the following dialog. A student once asked Tibetan master Chögyam Trungpa, “If there is no self, what is reborn.” Trungpa answered, “Your neuroses.” Notice, this correlates with the notion that the result of practice is a loss rather than a gain; no mention is made of bring what may have been gained in past practice into the next life. The arahant has lost all “neuroses”; therefore there is nothing left to pass into a next life.

    However, when we view awakening as the result of gaining beneficial qualities, we note that the arahant certainly has gained much that is already making the world a better place: great virtue and great wisdom influence others, either through deed, through example, or through guidance. Why squander that influence on awakening if what is gained thereby fails to carry over to a next life, when it might otherwise continue to benefit the world? The early texts do not answer this. The later Mahāyāna tradition, however, does something clever (and this is one of the defining features of Mahāyāna): it replaces the arahant with the bodhisattva, whose vow is to remain in the cycle of birth and death in order to bring, out of compassion, whatever virtue and wisdom has been gained in this life into the next life and beyond, until all beings are saved from suffering.

    Awakening and the life well-lived

    Progress toward awakening is also experienced personally as an increase in personal well-being. This is the cumulative fruit of our wholesome deeds (kamma). This sense of well-being is of a quite different nature than mundane, sensual pleasure, and is classified by the Buddha as supramundane (lokuttara). For instance, if you do something for someone (e.g., save someone from a burning car, or order another ice cream cone for a clumsy child), and do this purely out of compassion, with no notion of gain for yourself, you are likely to experience a warm, “heart-felt” sensation in the chest, that is quite distinct from, and dwarfs, any mundane pleasure. Your disposition toward virtue has thereby grown. The experience, unlike mundane pleasures, never really goes away. Rather, with a lifetime of similar actions, these experiences will accumulate. As you grow old you will have the sense of having lived a meaningful, happy life, a life worth living, even as you fall short of full awakening. Aristotle seems also to have discovered this dimension of experience, and called it eudaimonia, often translated as ‘flourishing.’

    It is now well understood that emotions drive all of our decisions in life. Mundane emotions have certainly been with us evolutionarily for a long time; your dog or your pet hamster (but probably not your goldfish) has roughly the same mundane lusts and fears, pleasures and pains that you do. The experience of flourishing seems to be a uniquely human adaptation, one that steers us toward realizing our purpose as fully functional human being, dedicated to a greater purpose. Flourishing arises from Buddhist practice, but should not be mistaken for the goal of practice. We practice for the perfection of virtue and wisdom. Flourishing then supervenes to our great satisfaction.

    Between awakening and death

    Having attained awakening in this very life, having reached the end of practice, one is not yet liberated from the cycle of birth and death, for one is still living between the birth and death of this life. What happens in this intermediate period? In fact, the Buddha tells us this,

    What, bhikkhus, is the nibbāna-element with residue left? Here a bhikkhu is an arahant, one whose corruptions are destroyed, the holy life fulfilled, who has done what had to be done, laid down the burden, at­tained the goal, de­stroyed the fetters of being, completely released through final knowledge. However, his five sense faculties remain unimpaired, by which he still experiences what is agree­able, and dis­agreeable, and feels pleasure, and pain. It is the extinction of attachment, aversion, and delusion in him that is called the nibbāna-element with residue left. (Iti 2.17)

    In short, existence is extinguished, but glowing embers remain. Without these embers, perceptions, conceptualizations, thoughts, and consciousness will have totally ceased, leaving the arahant with nothing to do but sit under a tree and drool into their alms bowl, lacking the wherewithal to assemble the fabrications necessary for conducting a conversation, much less for imparting a single sentence of Dhammic wisdom. Certainly this is not how the Buddha spent the last forty-five years of his life. He spent that time teaching Dhamma, so that others might awaken. What gives?

    Here is what I think is going on here: To say that the arahant has overcome ignorance is to say that these fabrications no longer have persuasive power. Although we no longer believe in “I,” nor in “you,” nor in “that other guy,” we do remember what all these concepts used to represent. They are the ghosts of departed friends; we see through them. Houses have not vanished altogether, rather they have become like children’s sandcastles, pretend, and are described in what is now like an adult’s use of children’s language to talk with children.

    Suppose we are watching a movie. We are transported into a fictional John Wayne world, or into some other “reality.” We comprehend that world with its twists and turns of plot, but we are not completely convinced by it, because we know it is fiction; we see though it. But then we become totally immersed in that world. We laugh, sob, empathize with its characters, and are frightened. Then the credits roll by, at which time none of it has really mattered. The fictional world is quite different from the “real world” in this respect: We can enter a theater, cry through a tear-jerker, or be scared witless, come out of the theater, and, returning to reality, say, “I thoroughly enjoyed that movie!”

    We knew the whole time it was not real, that the cravings and attachments that arose therein were simply ghost cravings, and ghost attachments. On the other hand, our attitude is quite different toward the outer world that we still presume is really real, in which we do not enjoy the horrifying tear-jerker in which most of us actually live. The movie is a ghost world to us. The horrifying tear-jerker is a ghost world to the arahant. Since no traces of the residual fuel survive death, the physical death of the arahant is described as nibbāna without residual fuel (anupādisesā nibbāna), or parinibbāna (Sanskrit, parinirvāna, higher nirvana).

  • The miracle of samādhi

    Samādhi occupies a prominent role in the early Buddhist texts. It is the final factor of the noble eightfold path to which the higher achievements of wisdom, or of knowledge and vision of things as they are (yathā-bhūta-ñāṇa-dassana) are attributed. It is a profound state of serenity, differentiated into the four jhānas, through which the mind becomes progressively stilled and centered, various cognitive faculties are silenced, and complete ease and equanimity are attained.

    Etymologically, samādhi is derived from sam ‘together’ + ādhi ‘put,’ and so has to do with gathering or collecting something together. Samādhi is most commonly translated as ‘concentration,’ implying a narrowing or focusing of attention. However, as we will see, concentration is one of two dimensions that characterize samādhi; the other is the progressive “curtailment” of various cognitive faculties as we progress through the jhānas. At every stage samādhi establishes an orderly array of mental faculties, and this (consistent with its etymology) recommends a translation as ‘collectedness’ or ‘composure.’ I will, for the most part, simply leave samādhi and jhāna untranslated to avoid confusion.

    Etymologically, jhāna is the gerund of the verb jhāyati, apparently in use before the Buddha’s time to denote almost any contemplative or meditative activity. The Buddha sometimes uses this term in its common meaning, but alongside the technical sense of the “four jhānas,” which seems to have been novel at the time of his teachings. In its technical sense the Buddha equates the fourfold jhāna with samādhi, such that there is no samādhi independent of the four jhānas in the early texts.

    Unfortunately, samādhi has become a controversial topic within the Theravāda tradition, where much confusion seems to have resulted historically, first from a redefining of samādhi, then from an attempt to reconcile contrasting frameworks that don’t in principle cohere. The debate persists even among the adherents to the authority of the early Buddhist texts, where contrasting evidence is cited for “hard” or “soft” jhānas (respectively difficult and easy-ish to attain), and where there is still no consensus about how Dhammic insight is even possible in jhāna.

    In this chapter, I develop an account of what samādhi is and how it works according to the early Buddhist texts. I will point out some common, but widely neglected, passages concerning the ubiquitousness and spontaneous nature of samādhi, and about the fruits of samādhi. I will also examine some details of how samādhi is claimed to integrate in practice with other factors. I hope thereby to contribute to a fuller illumination of this remarkable multifaceted culminating factor of the noble eightfold path.

    . . .

    How samādhi arises

    . . .

    Samādhi as concentration

    . . .

    The jhānas

    . . .

    The fruits of samādhi

    . . .

    The miracle of samādhi, the pdf (2025)

    I thought the readers of this blog could us a scholarly explanation of what the earliest texts, and therefore presumably the Buddha, have to say about samādhi and jhāna, that is about meditative states. This is a chapter from my recent book Satipaṭṭhāna Rethought.

    pdf

  • Q&A w/BC: Happiness not suffering

    Bruce:

    Buddhism sounds negative and depressing, because it deals with suffering. And I think a lot of people are turned off with anything dealing with the word suffering. Instead, I’m starting to say that Buddhism deals with happiness – the other side of the coin.

    Sounds strange, but I’m serious.

    My new 4 noble truths:

    There is happiness
    Happiness is caused by the lack of craving
    When you get rid of craving, you reach nibbana.
    To get to nibbana, follow the 8th fold path

    My new Ti-lakkhana:

    Everything is transient
    without a permanent self
    and subject to happiness

    BC:

    Bruce, I’m afraid I’m not with you on this, but I see what you are after.

    Suppose you wake up with a severe pain in the lower right side of your belly, and it doesn’t go away. The rational thing to do would be to go see a doctor. However, they are all negative and depressing, and only want to talk about your suffering, where it comes from, and how to cure it. That is a big turn off, so you go to a party instead, where everything is about happiness. The next morning you wake up with a hangover, and your belly hurts even worse.

    The Buddha is sometimes called the Great Physician. Buddhism starts with suffering, because that is where people are at, but happily the Buddha has diagnosed suffering, and told us how to cure it. That is hardly negative and depressing. People already know suffering; it is prominent in virtually everyone’s life, whereas happiness is generally no more than a vague promise that is rarely fulfilled.

    Unfortunately we live in a culture that is in denial of suffering and in pursuit of happiness. This works neither to lessen the suffering that is there in any case, nor to improve or lead to happiness. Look at how we hide away sickness, crippling illness, aging and even death. Look at how consumer products are advertised with models clearly blissing out at a spiritual level for having found the perfect shampoo, snack or networking solution. There is a strong trend toward marketing Buddhism alongside other traditions in this way.

    Nonetheless, there is much in Buddhist practice that is quite pleasurable, and advanced practitioners do bliss out as suffering recedes. But happiness is the quiet contentment of a meaningful life well-lived that supervenes on practice. It will be elusive as long as we are focused on pursuing it.

    There is another dimension to this: It is not advisable to mess with the Buddha. The Buddha’s Dhamma is a complex integrated system in which each teaching has its place. The whole thing is a guide for practice, how we live our lives, much as a cookbook is a guide for cooking. If we choose to reform one teaching, it is not likely work properly with the other teachings, like substituting sugar for salt. Let’s take the four noble truths as an example:

    (1) the truth of suffering,
    (2) the truth of the origin of suffering,
    (3) the truth of the cessation of suffering, and
    (4) the truth of the way to the cessation of suffering.

    It is often pointed out that this follows what a physician does:

    (1) is the symptom,
    (2) is the diagnosis,
    (3) is the prognosis, and
    (4) is the treatment.

    Since Dhamma is a guide to practice, the Buddha also tells us how to practice with each of these four truths:

    (1) is to be understood.
    (2) is to be eliminated.
    (3) is to be realized.
    (4) is to be pursued.

    Now, if we substitute happiness for suffering, the whole practice becomes something quite different. The extensive wisdom teachings of the Buddha help us understand suffering. The teaching of dependent coarising even provides an elaborate psychology of suffering for us to understand. The Buddha does not provide anything like an equivalent account for happiness. In short, there is very little left in the four noble truths in the way of guidance for practice if we substitute happiness for suffering.

  • Q&A w/BC: Moments of insight

    Anne:

    Can you describe in writing one of your most powerful experiences during meditation?

    BC:

    There is a tendency for modern practitioners to seek after dramatic, unanticipated, immediately life-altering experiences, to which they can attribute either awakening itself, a glimpse of awakening, or a less defined but nonetheless “mystical” experience. Some practitioners are obsessed with achieving such experiences. That might be what you are expecting me to have had, Anne. Seeking such experiences is craving, and certainly detrimental to practice. Accordingly, I try to discourage attributing too much importance to the wonder of such experiences. Though they will occur, the Buddha seems to have had little no or interest in the drama of such experiences, while giving attention to the growing sense of well-being that comes with successful practice to surpass mundane pleasure. We do not practice in order to have dramatic experiences, we practice in order to develop wisdom (as a support for virtue). In the process, however, we do come to see the world in radically different ways. Sometimes we cannot help but be astonished by what we see.

    The experiences I’m referring to are sudden moments of insight associated with wisdom contemplation, in which something that was previously unclear becomes clear. Within the early Buddhist context, they occur particularly in Dhamma investigation (satipaṭṭhāna, vipassanā) within a meditative state (jhāna or samādhi). My book Rethinking Satipaṭṭhāna describes the mechanics of this practice, including what I am about to relate. Outside of the Buddhist context, insight experiences can also arise spontaneously, I suspect especially in children, where they can be disorienting and frightening in the absence of any preparation. In any case, they come suddenly, like a spark but occasionally like a lightning strike. They seem to bubble up from the unconscious mind, then make us want to shout, “Aha!” “Aha” experiences also come with with a conviction, almost a certainty, that one has seen into some deep truth.

    However, the insight experience is typically at best poorly explained in conceptual terms. It is a product of intuition. Concepts generally do not do justice to the experience itself. Tejaniya Sayadaw, a Burmese meditation teacher, gives an example of an insight he once had as a meditation student. The best he could describe it conceptually was, “You can smell only with the nose.” Excited, he told other monks about this great insight, but they all laughed at him. He finally went to his teacher, who acknowledged the depth of this insight, but advised, “When you have an insight, don’t tell the other monks about it. They will think you are crazy.”

    Common broad themes in these experiences are impermanence, non-self, the falling away of the distinction between subjective and objective experience, the nature and depth of suffering, and the mental constructedness of what we presume to be an independent reality“ out there.” The Buddha takes great pains to prime us for insights into such realms through his various Dhamma teachings. Being bound to language, he does this in conceptual terms. Many teachers and scholars accordingly take these conceptual teachings as philosophy, valuable in themselves. In fact, the Buddha’s concern seems to be limited to inducing the practitioner to be able to experience these teachings directly and non-conceptually. He expresses this achievement as “dwelling, having touched X with the body.” We do this through contemplation (in jhāna!) and discovering what the Buddha is talking about in our own experience, making it our own. Aha!

    The closest simple and readily available analogy I’ve found in the mundane world is “Magic Eye” images, 2D patterns that when stared at suddenly (aha) reveal content that appears in 3D. I recommend that beginning practitioners play around with these (I’ve acquired a couple of books of such images for both our Austin and Minnesota libraries). A similar, even simpler effect is found in staring at a Neker’s cube:

    Is the marked corner the closest to you, or the furthest from you? Once the mind has snapped into one interpretation, most people have difficulty snapping into the alternative interpretation. Discovering the alternative is then bound to produce an “aha” experience. One would think that the more firmly the mind is fixed on one interpretation, the more dramatic the discovery of the other will be. One might furthermore even conclude that the more open-minded one is, the more astonishing their insight experiences will be, if and when they eventually do occur.

    One of my favorite wisdom practices is contemplation of the five aggregates, a teaching that leads to insight into the inseparability of mind from the objective, independent world “out there.” Effectively, it teaches the constructedness of reality. (Modern quantum physics seems to have become a precisely focused continuation of this exercise, beginning with the split beam experiment.) Once over twenty years ago I was sitting zazen many hours each day at Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery in the California coastal mountains, where I lived for almost a year and a half. One is unlikely to learn the five aggregates in Zen, since one is given only vague ideas of what to look for in meditation, most importantly “emptiness” and “non-duality,” with little explanation. Zen takes pride in being a tradition “beyond words and letters,” which in my experience seems to have the effect that insights are few and far between, but it is a whopper if and when one happens to occur.

    I must have had a very fixed idea at this time about the reality of an objective, independent world “out there,” for on this occasion something seemed to snap. I left the meditation hall and felt the world had shifted. I looked up at the tall mountains all around and saw clearly that I was in them and they were in me. There was no separation. I took a walk up the hill up to Suzuki Roshi’s burial sight and spent some time dwelling there in what I had touched. Then suddenly, after about 4 or 5 hours, I snapped back, and couldn’t recover my new interpretation of the world, only a vivid memory of it. I knew I should label the experience “non-duality,” but the label seemed meaningless in view the depth of the experience itself. It was only years later, when I was grounded in the Buddha’s teachings, that I could understand the various experiential facets of this little drama, and even begin explain it conceptually, to the satisfaction of philosophers, but inadequately from the perspective of practitioners. If I had started with the Buddha’s more detailed teachings, I think the drama would have been distributed over many smaller moments of insight.

  • Remembering Sue Hamilton (1950–2016)

    I just came across this article by Jayavara Attwood that removed much of the mystery in my mind surrounding a remarkable scholar of early Buddhism, who has had enormous influence on my own understanding and scholarship concerning the early teachings of the Buddha. I was saddened to learn (nine years late) that she is no longer with us.

    Scholarship in early Buddhism dwells for the most part within the larger field of Theravada scholarship. This is because the Theravada tradition has—far better than any other tradition—kept the early texts alive, along with the Pali language in which they were transmitted to Ceylon not long after the time of the Buddha. (The Theravada tradition also supplements the Pali Canon by texts of later compilation, most notably the Commentaries including the highly regarded Visuddhimagga.) I myself have been largely disappointed with modern Theravada scholarship for its reluctance to challenge much of the orthodoxy that the tradition has accumulated but left unquestioned for many centuries, even when modern scholars seem to make little sense of those orthodox understandings. (Modern Mahayana, and perhaps especially Tibetan scholarship, in contrast, seem to enjoy more liberty, and to be more productive of insight in their respective fields.)

    My two favorite scholars of early Buddhism are exceptions to the self-imposed limitations in their field. On encountering each in my reading and pondering over the years, I remember having the same reaction to each, “By golly, he’s got it!” or in the other case, “By golly, she’s got it!” Each cracked open issues that I had been trying to wrap my head around for years, in such an explanatory way that I knew they had to be right. However, both scholars remain relatively obscure in their field. The first is the late Sri-Lankan scholar-monk Kaṭukurunde Ñāṇananda. The second is the late Oxford scholar Sue Hamilton. If you go to cintita.org, you will find the page on book resources in the menu bar. Scroll down to “Dhamma scholarship,” and you will find three books by the venerable, followed by Dr. Hamilton’s most important work.

    The reason Sue Hamilton was long a mystery to me was that her active work was limited to a few years around the turn of this century. She was a flash in the pan, then disappeared from the scene. Moreover, there has been virtually no subsequent mention of her in scholarly circles. Attwood provides an account of the choices she had made in her life at that time to end her career. Attwood was the only scholar I was aware of who had expressed admiration for her work (though he points out that her teacher, the very well known Richard Gombrich, had become a strong advocate; I had missed that).

    Hamilton advocated an epistemic understanding of the early Buddhist texts. As Attwood puts it, “Hamilton showed that experience was central to Buddhist teaching and ‘reality’ was not.” As she put it, “If we want to understand anything about ourselves at all, then, it is with our khandhas—our experiencing apparatus—that we need to start.” This idea now pervades my own understanding. In fact I’ve reached the conclusion that until one understands this fundamental point, one will remain hopelessly confused in one’s intellectual understanding of Dhamma. Time and again I’ve seen scholars try to explain some Dhamma teaching or another, then give up for having failed to appreciate what boils down to a simple point. Hamilton’s work is not an easy read—it is scholarship intended for Buddhist scholars—but for anyone wishing to develop a deep understanding of Dhamma, I would recommend it as essential reading.

    BC

  • Q&A w/BC How do we promote Buddhism without corrupting the Dhamma?

    This is a continuing discussion between Gerry Trione and BC.

    Gerry

    Bhante-

    Your insight and perspective on these issues is very helpful for “bridging the gap”. I hope this on-line discussion stimulates others to ponder these issues.

    The underlying question seems to be: “How do we remove the many barriers to promoting Buddhism to westerners without corrupting the Dhamma”?

    BC

    Right.

    GERRY

    My goal is to “simplify” the core concepts into a “Buddhism package” that attracts those most likely to benefit, with the expectation that once convinced of its efficacy, they will want to dig deeper into the more complex issues.

    This implies that Buddhism is not for everyone.

    Like “triage”, there are those who are “too far gone” to adopt Buddhism for various reasons, like being deeply into materialism, huge egos, serious addictions, lifetime devotion to a particular religion, or committed criminals. This category would also include younger, immature people who are consumed with fantasy (video games).

    The second category who are not likely targets is those people who are already “awakened” and content with their lives, already “Buddhists” in many respects. They practice the precepts unknowingly, as well as the 6 perfections and 8 Fold Path. These are genuinely good people with integrity and wisdom.

    The primary target, therefore, is people who have good intentions, but are stuck in cultural habits which contribute to a constant undercurrent of “suffering”, in the form of anger, hate, resentment, cravings, fear, addictions, anxiety and depression, and don’t know what to do about it. They may have tried various “cures”, including “religion”, but nothing has worked. They want help.

    Accordingly, I suspect our “target group” is relatively small compared to the others, so I don’t expect a ground swell of interest.

    BC

    I would agree.

    GERRY

    For comparison, the Jewish faith is certainly a radical departure from the “norm” of Christianity in the US which 62%, or about 203 million, and Jewish followers are estimated to be 2.5%, or 8 million (westerner Buddhists are roughly 600,000).

    From personal experience, Judaism is a generally closely knit group who are disciplined, and actively engaged in their practice which has remarkable results of achievement.

    For example, 14% of physicians are Jewish, and 29% of psychiatrists are Jewish. This disproportionate representation suggest a highly disciplined mind set.

    I see no reason why a similar demographic couldn’t include Buddhists.

    BC

    Judaism is certainly a robust culture. Another fact: 25% of all Nobel Prize winners have been Jewish! I don’t understand its ability to survive so successfully as such a small minority in so many lands without being absorbed, even as it has become significantly atheistic. I remember reading that the Dalai Lama was trying to understand the reason for its success in this regard, seein the progressive weakening of Buddhism among the dispersed Tibetan population in India

    GERRY

    You covered a lot of ground, so I’ll try to respond to the more thorny issues.

    You said: Luckily the Buddha gave us a Dhamma that is malleable; he seems to have anticipated the need for adaptation to new contexts.

    This is at the heart of my focus: To preserve the Dhamma, but repackage the core concepts in terms of their importance or priority leading to awakening.

    BC

    We agree on this, though I think explaining the core concepts in ways modern people understand is effective. What needs to be explained is how each teaching fulfills what function. I think the Dhamma can accommodate the modern mindset in this way about 10%. The other 90% requires overcoming modern cultural baggage that conflicts with Dhamma, such as our hyper-individualism.

    GERRY

    Let’s examine some of the specific discussion points in question:

    -Rebirth. As you point out, this is perhaps the thorniest issue, and the reason it is a major barrier is “credibility”; its focus and speculative nature undermines the credibility of the essential “core concepts”.

    When I use the word “rebirth”, I’m including the notion of an afterlife (hence my reference to Vedic beliefs in 1,500 BC), which, not surprisingly, has long been the focus of most of the largest world religions.

    My view is this is disingenuous since there is no evidence of an afterlife in any religion, other than conjecture, “hearsay”, and wishful thinking.

    BC

    I think objective evidence of its veracity is a moot point. There is no objective evidence that money exists, yet it serves its function, or football, or God. Moreover, “wishful thinking” is not part of Dhamma, though it may be a common part of folk Buddhism.

    GERRY

    As someone with an active interest in “Dark Energy”, and Quantum Fields, I suspect there is some sort of “Universal Energy” throughout the universe which “could be” some manifestation of “God”, or Brahma, etc (the Spinoza view). (Scientists are still struggling after many years with the “Unified Theory”, or the “Theory of everything”, but haven’t yet been able to explain “gravity”!).

    But, to revert back to the Buddha’s skepticism, “Why speculate?”, it’s not relevant to improving our daily lives.

    BC

    Exactly my point.

    GERRY

    Yes, “rebirth/afterlife” provides a “symbolic goal” to encourage our practice to be better people, but does the “deception” justify the goal? My view is no. Better to view rebirth or an afterlife as “maybe”, rather than make it the primary focus, which is the Asian approach.

    BC

    Why speculate? Rebirth is “deceptive” in the sense that money or football are deceptive. Guarding against this is the point of my advice to “take seriously, but hold loosely.” The important question in understanding Dhamma is “Why did the Buddha teach this?”, not “Is it true?”.

    GERRY

    There are plenty of incentives to practice Buddhist core concepts without the “carrot” of rebirth or an afterlife.

    BC

    For the Buddha, rebirth is not a carrot. Quite the opposite. Though that framing does allow provide also the framing for the long-term well-being that comes with progress through practice in terms of rebirth in a heavenly realm. (Why would the Buddha teach that?)

    GERRY

    Specifically, a life with inner peace, contentment, satisfaction, tranquility, and an absence of stress, restlessness, fear, worry, anger, hate, cravings, anxiety, and depression is a goal which I suspect would appeal to everyone.

    What happens when we die is “unknown”, if we are to be intellectually honest. I don’t think “removing” rebirth from teaching the Dhamma is in any way damaging. On the contrary, it is likely to entice people to consider Buddhism.

    BC

    I would suggest you need to be darn sure about that before removing anything. It would be difficult to put it back later. An opinion is not enough basis. Personally, I’ve come regard (after many years of your persuasion) that removing rebirth is damaging, and yet I cannot claim I “believe” in rebirth. The Buddha described why we need rebirth, but he never argued in terms of its truth. He was not interested in speculation.

    By the way, I would regard a fixed belief in rebirth as equally damaging. I know a monk who says that if he did not believe in rebirth, he would not be a monk. If someone proved (presumably scientifically) that rebirth is not real, he would disrobe. That is to put the basis of his whole spiritual life on a very shaky basis.

    About whether to remove certain teachings, my methodology in my scholarly work in interpreting Dhamma is never to reject anything. If a teaching does not make sense to my modern, western brain, I always assume that I need to look harder to see what it means. Of course I acknowledge that some teachings actually might be off base, and that some might be later additions that post-date the Buddha. But this methodology avoids cherry-picking to justify a particular understanding, forces me into a very deep analysis of many topics I might otherwise dismiss, and makes it almost impossible for me to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We need to be careful.

    GERRY

    Regarding “Karma”, and “merit”, they are linked in Asian Buddhism to rebirth and realms, which is essentially the same unnecessary “barrier”.

    To simplify, my view is karma is basically causality, in the sense that our intent and actions have consequences. Do good things, and good things are likely to happen, for others, not intentionally for ourselves.

    BC

    This is not what karma means, nor what the fruits of karma mean. These together are meant to be the primary basis of practice. Karma is practice, the fruits of karma are the progress we make toward awakening as a result of practice. We play the guitar in order to entertain people (consequence), but also to get better at playing the guitar (fruit, which is also a good thing to happen to us).

    GERRY

    Likewise, “merit” is not something we should record in a ledger. We do it because it is the “right thing to do”, and not to keep score for some personal gain.

    BC

    Why not? Merit is the quality of practice in terms of its contribution to developing and cultivating virtue and wisdom. These are not personal gains (the self drops out as we progress), they make the world a better place. The ledger serves to pace one’s practice.

    GERRY

    Better to focus on the clear benefits of the core concepts like the precepts, 8 fold path, 6 perfections, 5 skandhas, 5 hindrances, and notions of impermanence, non-self, mindfulness, and meditation.

    And lastly, depending on who you believe, “Nirvana” is a state of mind of “liberation” from negative thoughts and emotions, and fully enlightened with virtue and wisdom “in this life”. All other interpretations are speculative.

    Let’s think of ways to attract more people to Buddhism for its vast benefits rather than try to preserve questionable Dhamma beliefs.

    BC

    Again, Dhamma is not about beliefs. There are no Dhamma beliefs, at least not in early Buddhism. It is all working assumptions and pointers to what one can see for oneself. I should think that thinking in this way is a cultural bias that comes from later Christianity, perhaps the most belief-based religion (though some would argue against that). The Buddha refused to speculate.

    One of the remarkable things about the Dhamma is that the Buddha has anticipated debates such as this. I wrote the following essay eight years ago on what the Buddha says about faith, belief, truth, view, and skepticism. It’s a bit long but worth the read, if I say so myself, for readers who would like to go more deeply into this topic. Nobody seems to think as clearly about such matters as the Buddha.

    Take Seriously but Hold Loosely (2017)

    We take the teachings of Dhamma seriously because each has a practical function that makes a difference in our lives. If we hold Buddha’s teachings loosely, we have license to interpret them in ways that are most meaningful to us.This is how can preserve the integrity of the Dharma without demanding interpretations that will never make sense to us.

    Take Seriously but Hold Loosely

    GERRY

    Let’s not “sacrifice progress for perfection”.

    BC

    Let’s not sacrifice Dhamma for speculation.

    GERRY

    Metta,

  • Q&A w/BC: How should Buddhism be repackaged for modern people?

    Gerry Trione and I have been engaged in a 1-to-1 email discussion following up on a previous post on the difficulty of promoting Buddhism in modern society. He has put in a lot of thought and reflection based on years of experience. We are trying to organize our thread to put it out on this blog, for those that might be interested in this topic. We agree on the major points.

    I am posting this Q&A on the issue of if and in what ways Buddhism might be adapted to fit modern predilections, since I have a well-considered position on this matter, which respectfully differs from Gerry’s. It also gives me an opportunity to explain the title of this site. This is also relevant to the topic of secular Buddhism.

    GERRY:

    Thanks for your response.  I have more comments after more carefully reading your web site, which I enjoyed. Your focus is admirable. While reading much of the English translations of Ven. Hsing Yun’s teachings on “Humanistic Buddhism”, one pithy statement jumped out at me:  “Buddhism must change to fit modern times.”  In my view, he’s right, and it hasn’t. Your work targeting “Modern Buddhists” with your interpretation of EBT seems to be in concert with Ven. Hsing Yun’s admonition.

    BC:

    The Buddha gave the Sangha an explicit 10-point mission statement in the Vinaya, its monastic code. One point is to sustain the integrity of the Dhamma (not the word of the Buddha, but the functional integrity so that it will continue to conduce to awakening). Another is to promote the practice of Dhamma in the world. If the second overrides the first, little is accomplished, because what is promoted is a deficient practice. I think that is why the Sangha has traditionally not been very aggressive in promoting Dhamma (proselytizing is almost unknown). My efforts are primarily directed toward the first point for two reasons. The first is that think the Sangha, and non-monastic scholar-practitioners need to do a better job of preserving the integrity of the Dhamma than it has. There are so many misunderstandings. The second is that scholarship is my forte. I am by nature reclusive, and not as charismatic as Joel Osteen.

    That said, I am very sensitive to difficulty and necessity of fitting together the Dhamma (as it has been communicated to us by our Asian teachers) with our modern mindset (with its peculiar cultural and intellectual history). They are worlds apart. I’ve had to navigate this gap myself over the last decades. (Look at me now: I am thoroughly modern, trained as a scientist, but living with Burmese monks, who represent a culture almost untouched by modernity.) I use the phrase “early Buddhism for modern Buddhists” in reference to that gap, for which I hope am providing a bridge (or at least a ferry boat) in order that at least a few inspired modern minds can make sense of Dhamma, and modern culture (which Gerry and I both agree is not healthy) may move closer to Buddhist culture.

    Luckily the Buddha gave us a Dhamma that is malleable; he seems to have anticipated the need for adaptation to new contexts. As I approach a Dhamma teaching that is obscure to me, I start by asking, “Why would the Buddha teach this?”, not “Does this accord with my modern mindset, or what I think is true?” The Buddha was clearly not interested in philosophical or scientific speculation, and made clear, for instance, in the handful of leaves simile, that he only taught what conduces to awakening. The Dhamma is therefore a complex system in which each part plays its functional role. For example, when I look at rebirth (shown to be perhaps the thorniest teaching for the modern mind) I ask “What is its role?”, not “Can this be scientifically verified?” The Buddha clearly explains its role for us in providing a particular framework in which to practice, never in terms of its objective veracity.

    Once I’ve established its role, I look a how this role is implemented “Hmm, a linear process whereby some continuum that is active at the time of physical death, continues after the time of a subsequent birth”). This is where a modern mind might balk. But there are many possibilities for reframing this implementation. First, the implementation might be meant figuratively, or by example. Second, it might be the best rough guess about how this process works given the state of “science” at the Buddha’s time, a guess we might improve on with modern understandingof genetics, cultural transmission, etc. Or, we could simply not care. What is important is that we see the fruits or deficits of our practice projecting themselves far into the future.

    It is helpful the realize that the Buddha gave us free license to frame things how we want. He was an extreme skeptic himself, to the extent that he considered all truth claims unreliable. He certainly never endorses blind faith (though Buddhists have certainly had it, but so have modern scientists with regard to their scientific presuppositions). The Dhamma does not consist of things to believe, but rather of “working assumptions.” I describe these as things we should “take seriously, but hold loosely.”

    Take Seriously but Hold Loosely (2017)

    We take the teachings of Dhamma seriously because each has a practical function that makes a difference in our lives. If we hold Buddha’s teachings loosely, we have license to interpret them in ways that are most meaningful to us.This is how can preserve the integrity of the Dharma without demanding interpretations that will never make sense to us.


    We humans can accept working assumptions easily, even if they totally contradict our beliefs. We do it all the time. I talk to animals all the time myself, even bugs, because it puts me into a private framework of friendliness. But I know they have no idea of what I am saying. In fact a unique aspect of being human is that we get to make things up symbolically. All it takes is to apply this formula: “See this physical reality here. Well that counts as X,” where X is whatever we want it to be. We live in a largely made-up symbolic world as a result. This is the only sense in which money, property, national borders, any institution, football, and (perhaps) God is real. We are adept at this mode of thinking. We adopt it when it is valuable in coordinating human affairs, or to give us an efficient perspective for approaching certain tasks. This is
    the extent I am willing to adapt early Buddhism for modern Buddhists.

    GERRY:

    However, with all due respect for Fo Guang Shan, which is enormously successful in terms of “active” temples like Chang Mei in Stafford, the problem is it’s all Chinese (or mostly Taiwanese in Stafford), where they teach and promote “Asian Buddhism”, which doesn’t resonate well with Westerners like myself.  This is counter productive to my goals for Hong Fa for westerners.

    Writing for the Smithsonian in April 2025 on archeological Buddhist discoveries in Nepal, Jeffery Bartholet summarized the Buddhism Dilemma quite well:

    Even among believers, the Buddha is a figure who takes on different forms depending on the observer. Among secular Buddhists in the United States, he’s often regarded simply as an enlightened teacher—a person who, through discipline and deep meditation, gained remarkable insights into the human condition and gave instructions for how people can tame and channel their minds to reduce the stress of living. In Asia, where Buddhism is practiced in a bewildering array of different schools and lineages, each with its own traditions and rituals, he’s often a much more magical figure—someone who could levitate and fly long distances, subdue dragons and demons, project duplicates of himself in space, and travel to astral realms. 

    The “traditional Buddhism” taught in most Buddhist temples we have visited is “archaic” and often based on misinterpretation of the EBT, or a complete misunderstanding of the intent, the result being confusion, and dismissal by “critical thinking” westerners.

    BC:

    I find it very helpful here to distinguish what I have called “adept Buddhism” and “Folk Buddhism.” Adept Buddhism gets to the core of the Buddha’s teachings, the four noble truths, impermanence, suffering, non-self, the eightfold noble path. It is what I teach, and is certainly quite coherent in early Buddhism, and also in many later traditions. Folk Buddhism blends in beliefs that originate in local cultures, adding a lot of color, but confusing modern people. I never cease to be surprised at the things Burmese Buddhists, for instance, commonly believe; sometimes monastics try to correct these beliefs in terms of the early texts, but to little avail). If we can distinguish what’s adapt and what’s folk (the adepts are likely to know), we can put aside the folk; it doesn’t do modern people much good anyway. Besides, we have our own modern folk Buddhism. I think other fields of adept knowledge also have a folk accompaniment: we certainly have a lively folk science, for instance. Adept Buddhism is what has traditionally been preserved by the monastic Sangha, but in modern circumstances Buddhist scholars, lay teachers, and many very advanced lay practitioners are also prominent. Folk Buddhism is rather free to go wherever folk’s imaginations carry them.

    I view folk Buddhism as rather innocuous, as long as it does not challenge to principles of adept Buddhism. The adepts tend to know what is adept and what is folk, and the Buddhist culture tends to move away from the contradictions., and has had many centuries to iron things out. In fact, Buddhist tolerance of sometimes off-the-wall folk beliefs probably enabled Buddhist to become the first world religion in permitting it to travel into foreign cultures. A playful attitude is helpful in the encounter of Asian folk Buddhism. On one occasion I found myself in a position where I was expected to talk to angry tree spirits in Texas, who might not know Burmese or Pali. For me it was all in fun.

    What I most worry about is modern cultural baggage. I’ve been talking about ways to adapt an Dhamma to the modern mind, but it is even more important that we change modern culturally defined presuppositions that contradict the Dhamma. After all, we cannot bridge the gap between Dhamma and the modern mind otherwise, so that Dhamma practice can relieve what ails modern culture. It concerns me that Buddhism is so poorly understood by modern teachers of Buddhism. Many teach something as Buddhism that is almost entirely of western origin. We have to reconsider our hyper-individualism, our anti-religious attitudes (even among the religious), our materialism, commercialism and much more. Gerry and I both agree that Buddhist values are almost the opposite of modern cultural values. If Buddhism is to help cure what ails us, we have to challenge our modern cultural baggage.

    David McMahan, 2008, The Making of Buddhist Modernism, Oxford.

    This is a thorough study of the absorption of modern preconceptions into the content of what is taught as Buddhism in modern Buddhism. It method is to trace the sources of individual modern Dhamma teachings, either in some Asian Buddhist tradition, or in some western cultural/religious/intellectual tradition. The results are surprising.

    GERRY:

    I submit that modern Buddhism needs to focus on the core concepts of EBT, as they relate to the realities of modern life, and in terms which have modern context, and not resort to “blind faith”. Specifically, to teach Buddhism in a way which is Simple, Relevant , and Compelling, we need to strictly avoid any reference to Pali or Sanskrit terms, and their etymology, which is not only confusing and hard to assimilate, but also absolutely unnecessary to the goal,  serving as yet another barrier to understanding.

    Similarly, with the primary goal, in your words, of cultivating integrity and wisdom, there are many so-called “sacred” Buddhist concepts which are also a barrier and entirely unnecessary, making the teaching counterproductive; the result being to throw the baby out with the bathwater, meaning to discard Buddhism because of extraneous and unrealistic “sacred requirements”, thereby pushing away anyone who has some interest in Buddhism. Its a matter of credibility. Examples of unnecessary barriers include the importance of Karma, merit, re-birth, Realms, devas, killing, vegetarianism, and Nirvana. 

    BC:

    To teach Dhamma without reference to foreign terms would be ideal. I believe that is possible for Chinese, because the technical vocabulary of Dhamma was long ago standardized in the process of translating Indic texts into Chinese in the first millennium (I may be wrong). However, the well-established terminology of Pali has does not translate well into English: a given Pali term may be translated into English in multiple was. For instance Pali samādhi (the meditative state) has been translated as ‘concentration,’ ‘absorbtion,’ ‘composure,’ ‘trance.’ To pinpoint a particular concept precisely we often have to refer to the Pali term, at least alongside the favored English. Given this difficulty, a lot of Pali terms, like samādhi and vipassanā, are entering the English language. Jhāna seems to have no common alternative in the English language.

    With regard to those teachings that might be dropped from the Dhammic repertoire, the issue is, Who decides what is or is not necessary? I’m afraid the answer has all too often been modern folk-cultural presuppositions. This is very common among “secular Buddhists.” This is the fastest way to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Let’s look at your examples.

    We’ve talked about rebirth: its function is to provide a way of framing practice that projects the continuity of its results far beyond this one life, and makes us responsible for the future. I submit that this continuity is substantial, complex, but can be reframed in many ways (modernity often affords natural understandings that were not available to the Buddha). Simply dismissing the notion as nonsense is not an option, without weakening the Dhamma.

    Killing and vegetarianism are meant to go together here, I assume. This gets into the complexities of Buddhist ethics, which will take us far afield. I should point out that vegetarianism is not a significant matter in the early Dhamma. It became very significant in East Asia in the Bodhisatva Precepts, one of which is simply, “Don’t eat meat.”.

    I’m not sure what the objection to nirvāna here is. In folk Buddhist traditions Nirvana is often regarded as a kind of divine realm where awakened ones are reborn. There is no such thing in the early Dhamma. The word literally refers to the “extinguishing” of the factors from which our sense of personal identity is fabricated.

    Devas (dieties) are mentioned all over the place in the early texts. They are part of the cultural backdrop of the time. However, they are not integral at all (putting aside divine realms of rebirth). For instance, they have no function as objects of worship. In fact sometimes they are treated a comical beings with more bravado than substance. Rhetorically, they underscore the superiority of awakening by comparison.

    I daresay, throwing out karma and merit would destroy Buddhism as a practice tradition! Karma (Pali kamma) means intentional action. Practice is therefore kamma. What is often objectional in modern circles is the notion of the “fruits of kamma,” the idea that “I am the heir of my own deeds,” the notion that my actions have significant effect on my future well-being, alongside whatever immediate benefit or harm my deed may produce for others. But consider, we practice for two reasons: Your lawyer or your dentist has a practice that (hopefully) benefits you. That is the consequence for others of their practice. Your neighbor’s kid practices playing the tuba at all hours so that he will become skilled enough to join the marching band, certainly not to entertain you. Skillfulness (maybe even virtuosity if he practices long and wholeheartedly enough) will be the fruit of his practice. I submit that that is (almost) all there is to it. The ultimate fruits of our Buddhist practice are the perfection of the skills of virtue and wisdom. We practice Buddhism with both purposes in mind, but increasingly in advanced practice the fruit becomes primary.

    How is this personal well-being? As we develop virtue and wisdom, our personal heightened well-being accumulates, experienced as deep satisfaction with life, as living a meaningful life, a life well-lived life, a spiritually charged life. It is a pervasive contentedness with life. We are all have a sense that this kind of well-being exists, but generally as a promise never delivered, quite a rare experience in modernity. Because it does not have a sensual basis, and is not immediate, it is abstract, hard to pin down. As a result it seems to be framed in imaginative ways in the early texts. The Buddha calls it supra-mundane (lokuttara).

    One of the more clumsy ways to frame supramundane experience is as a payback mechanism: if you do some evil deed, then later you’ll get hit by lightning. This reduces supramundance experience to the status of the more easily understood mundane experience. Luckily, such examples are actually very rare in the early texts, and I daresay merely allegorical.

    A more skillful, and the most common way to frame this experience of well-being in early Buddhism is as a dwelling place, in particular as a heavenly realm. I think of this as an apt metaphor that captures the idea that we “earn” it over time and that it is a pervasive experience, a kind of psychological condition that is just there, like a gloomy day. Notice that treating it as a psychological condition demythologizes supra-mundane experience. It is noteable that the Buddha does this himself, albeit not commonly: In one instance he describes his nemesis the demon Māra in psychological terms, and elsewhere hell realms in terms of psychological pain.

    GERRY:

    I once had a nun at Fo Guang Shan tell me that the ~200,000 people killed by the 2004 tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia, were killed because they had bad Karma.  I was stunned. Another credibility black eye.

    BC:

    This is a very common, and hugely unfortunate misunderstanding of kamma in later traditions. It is likely a case of folk Buddhism actually infecting adept Buddhism, it seems particularly in Tibet. It seems to come from not enough loosely holding within the payback framework. It is not beneficial, because it means logically that compassion on the part of others is pointless: the best it can do is postpone the payback. The Buddha explicitly denied this understanding in the Sīvaka Sutts (SN 36.21). Things happen for a variety of natural causes unrelated to kamma. Lightning will strike, whether or not you happen to be standing there.

    GERRY:

    Merit is another confusing concept.  We do good things in life because it benefits others; not for our reward or recognition. Yet “merit” is pushed by many monastics as an essential aspect for achieving the higher realms of rebirth.

    BC:

    Merit or demerit is at root simply a kind of subjective metric of progress or regress in practice, which is to say the fruit of practice. If you are training for the Olympics or on a diet, you might want to measure your level of effort on a daily basis. It keeps you engaged. Some Burmese actually keep a daily balance sheet with them that they update each time they perform an act of generosity, break a precept, etc. A dieter count calories. The paradox is that the more you seek personal advantage through merit, the less merit you earn. Craving is suffering, and unskillful in Dhammic terms.

    GERRY:

    Rebirth is an entirely theoretical concept, and one which some question as an authentic part of the Buddha’s teachings. Yet rebirth is what many Buddhists secretly, or overtly, hope for; more cravings. Much like the carrot in Christianity, Salvation, many Buddhists are “expecting” rebirth. Rebirth, in my view, is an erroneous reflection of the Vedic culture at the time of the Buddha’s awakening around 500 BC where the notion of rebirth had been deeply engrained and unquestioned for a 1000 years before the Buddha’s birth.

    BC:

    My understanding is that the early Vedas have nothing to say about rebirth, and evidence of the concept first shows up in the early Upanashads, maybe 200 years before the Buddha. There it comes in various forms. Interestingly the birth of a son to a father is considered a rebirth in one account. At the time of the Buddha it seems not to have been universally accepted, since the Buddha often debated about it with skeptics. But notably, he never argues that rebirth is true, only that its acceptance as a working assumption is beneficial to practice, for it induces people take responsibility for the future.

    GERRY:

    Indirectly, following a wholesome life with integrity and wisdom to improve your chances of rebirth, may be positive … ,

    BC:

    That’s the point. In the Kālama Sutta the Buddha answers the question about when a teaching should be embraced. His answer is very pragmatic: when it is of benefit. This is “taking seriously.” He never gives truth as a criterion, for him truth arguments are unreliable. This is “holding loosely.”

    Let me supplement your list of candidates for dropping from the Dhammic repertoire: anything under the rubric of “religiosity.” This includes rights, rituals, institutions, and distinguished roles (priests, monks, etc) and garb (archaic clothing, usually robes). Buddhism has all of this, and has had them since the time of the Buddha. Why are they objectionable? Many secular spheres of modern life have all of these as well: courtrooms, birthday parties, sports events, academic institutions, the military, receiving wine at a high-scale restaurant. Isn’t it peculiar that religiosity is objectionable only when associated with religion? It seems that this particular example of modern cultural baggage arose within religion, with the Protestant Reformation, which rebelled against the excesses of the Catholic Church, and promoted instead the idea of private religion in need of no social trimmings, only individual direct communication with God. This was a religious history in which Buddhism did not participate.

    Please reply below to contribute to the discussion.

  • How did mindfulness become “bare, non-judgmental, present-moment awareness”?

    256px-Cartoon_Meditating_Man.svg“Mindfulness” in modern discourse – whether among meditation teachers or clinicians – is defined in various ways, but generally circle around “bare, non-judgmental, present-moment awareness.” Nonetheless, although mindfulness (in Pali, sati) is one of the most fundamental concepts in the Early Buddhists Texts (EBT), one would be hard-pressed to find a definition or description of mindfulness there that remotely resembles such circulations. In this essay I will try to account for our modern definitions of mindfulness and how they might be reconciled with the EBT.

    My intention is not to delegitimize these modern definitions; words come to be used differently with time and, hey, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other word would smell as sweet!” The modern definitions have clearly proved useful and resonate with modern meditative and clinical experience. My intention is to explore what the shift in the meaning of mindfulness tells us about the shift from early Buddhist concerns to modern concerns as we pursue “mindfulness,” and then to ask the important question, What might we have left behind?

    MORE …

     

     

  • Sati really does mean ‘memory’

    “Mindfulness” as we now understand it is the result a history of semantic change. This began in ancient times with the Pali word sati, which in origin means ‘memory’, and has somehow given rise to the modern term ‘mindfulness’, which the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines as “the practice of maintaining a nonjudgmental state of heightened or complete awareness of one’s thoughts, emotions, or experiences on a moment-to-moment basis.” Moreover, modern scholars have perhaps been far too hasty to dismiss ‘memory’ as its central meaning in the EBT. I hope to show here that sati barely strayed in the early times far afield from this central meaning.

    MORE …

     

  • Consciousness in the EBT

    Dhammānupassanā Series

    Thus, Ānanda, for beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving, kamma is the field, consciousness the seed and craving the moisture for their consciousness to be established in an inferior [… repeated also for middling and superior] realm. (AN 3.76)

    Consciousness (viññāṇa) as represented in the early Buddhist texts (EBT) has received relatively little attention in modern Buddhist literature, in view of its centrality in human cognition. It is highlighted in the EBT as the third of the twelve links of dependent co-arising (paṭicca-samuppāda), to which I will make frequent reference in this essay:

    (1) ignorance → (2) formations → (3) consciousness →
    (4) name-and-form → (5) sixfold-sphere →
    (6) contact → (7) feeling → (8) craving →
    (9) attachment → (10) becoming → (11) birth →
    (12) old age, death, this mass of suffering.

    In this role consciousness and name-and-form are said to whirl continually around each other to produce our whole conceptual world. In fact, in the seminal Mahānidāna Sutta , which omits the two links prior to consciousness consciousness, we learn that consciousness and name-and-form are mutually conditioning:1

    (3) consciousness ↔ (4) name-and-form.

    Therefore, consciousness actually depends on two conditioning factors, formations and name-and-form. Through form, according to the same sutta, it is also subject to the impingement of new sense data.

    Consciousness also appears as the last of the five aggregates (khaṅdha) – which are form, feeling, perception, formations and consciousness – that represent aspects of phenomenal experience, to which we will also make frequent reference in this essay. We will also see that consciousness tends to arise in the presence of craving. Consciousness is also mentioned as a dependent component of (6) contact.

    This essay attempts a coherent overview of consciousness based on earliest texts, but also from the perspective of a (retired) cognitive scientist. I will begin with an illustrative example, then point out the various properties attributed to consciousness in the EBT, and finally outline how consciousness gets us into trouble and what we do about it.

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