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The previous episode (1/4) demonstrated that the teachings of Buddhism provide a support for practice and have no other function, in particular, no function in terms of philosophical or scientific speculation. When a teaching is taken seriously, its practice function has the potential to be realized and its benefits to be attained. Is taking a teaching seriously the same as believing it? Let’s see.

Holding the teachings loosely

In this section I show how the teachings fall short of belief, but are rather to be held loosely or provisionally. This, in fact, is often important for a teaching to become meaningful and acceptable by a particular practitioner, who can experiment with different personal interpretations to make the teaching his own.

Working assumptions. In the Caṅki Sutta we learn that anything ac­cepted through faith, approval, oral tra­dition, reasoning or ponder­ing may or may not turn out to be true. At this the young brahmin Caṅki asks how, then, truth is to be pre­served:

If a person has faith, his statement, “This is my faith,” preserves the truth. But he doesn’t yet come to the definite conclusion, “Only this is true; anything else is worth­less.” To this extent, Bharadvaja, there is the preservation of the truth. To this extent one preserves the truth. I de­scribe this as the preservation of the truth. But it is not yet a discovery of the truth. (MN 95)

The Buddha then repeats this formula with appropriate substitutions to make it about each of faith, approval, oral tra­dition, reasoning and ponder­ing. Notice that this is a similar list of conditions to those for belief that the Buddha rejected in the Kālāma Sutta.

What this says is that noth­ing is to be simply believed unconditionally, because no matter what, even if the wisest teacher swears on a stack of Nikāyas that it is true, it might just turn out to be false. At no point can we with certainty state, “Only this is true; anything else is worthless.” This would be belief, something fixed or timeless, something we tend to put on the shelf, not to be further questioned, a definite conclusion. Most of us have at least at least some such beliefs, about science, about politics, about religion, about football players, about fashion. The Buddha cautions us that the only thing we might be certain about is that we think certain things are true as a matter of experience, never that they are true. Fixed, immutable belief has no place in the Buddha’s thinking.

Nonetheless, until a teaching is directly realized and fully understood in one’s experience, it can at best be taken as provisionally true, a kind of working assumption as a matter of faith, approval, oral tradition, reasoning or pondering. The truth of the teaching is only later discovered through direct experience. At that point, the teaching itself becomes without further function, a mere propositional approximation of what one has discovered and experienced directly for oneself. Teachings, therefore, at all stages, stop short of belief. They are accepted only conditionally and are ultimately expendable. In these senses, teachings, even while taken seriously, are to be held loosely.

Malleability and reinterpretation. The practical advantage of taking a teachings as working assumptions rather than as a belief is, in fact, exemplified in the truths of suffering and of the cause of suffering in the four noble truths. As we learned, the practice functions of these truths are the understanding and ultimate relinquishment of suffering and craving as factors of of our own experience. It would be a mistake to try to crystallize these truths from the beginning into a belief, precisely because we do not yet understand what suffering and craving are at that point. Any belief about them would have slim propositional content, and would be unlikely even to approximate the understanding that ultimately arises from the practice these truths give rise to. Belief would just get in the way and inhibit the investigation our practice requires. As we investigate something like suffering or craving, we are likely to make a series of distinct intermediate working assumptions before we come to recognize, perhaps after many years of practice, what the Buddha was asking us to see directly for ourselves. We give up even our final working assumptions once these truths are understood, because there is nothing like seeing directly for ourselves. We see that working assumptions are malleable and subject to reinterpretation and modification in a way beliefs are not. This is good, because their malleability allows us to make them ours, to wrap out minds around them, to make them meaningful and acceptable in our own way. Hold teachings loosely is important for the process of discovery, which is the practice task associated with the first noble truth.

Moreover, a particular teaching may similarly be critical at one point of practice, and lose its importance, or even its coherence, at a later stage. This explains why the Buddha always adjusted his teachings to his audience and why the early discourses are careful to clarify to whom they are spoken. Consider the teaching that I am the heir of my own deeds, which has to do with karma and the fruits of karma, whose practice function we already discussed above. Although this teaching plays a critical role in the practice function of establishing ethical conduct at the early stages of Buddhist practice, it actually makes less and less sense at later stages of practice, in which the agent of those deeds is recognized as a mere mental construct. In fact, it is taught that karma itself disappears in the fully awakened. At the early stages of practice virtue comes significantly with overriding one’s greed, hate and delusion associated with the agent of karma, in favor of what is really of ultimate benefit for self and other. At the later stages it comes primarily from the almost complete absence of greed, hate and delusion once these are cognitively disassociated from that agent.

In summary, teachings are to be held loosely, such that they make sense to us at the right level at the right time, but but remain malleable, subject to individual reinterpretation and modification within the limits of their practice functions. As we hold teachings loosely, we can turn them this way and that, try to generalize them, test if they maybe apply in a more specific way than first thought, conceptualize them in different ways, all the while deepening our understanding of the various texts that present these teachings. As we approach suffering, what exactly is meant? Is any hint of anxiety or stress an instance of suffering? Are we suffering when we are not aware that we are suffering? As we approach the teaching that we are heirs of our own deed, can we find examples in our own experience, or counterexamples? Is it precisely true in every instance, only an approximate generalization? Does it imply mysterious underlying mechanisms, or is there a natural explanation for why this generalization would be true? In these ways we develop insight, relate the teachings to direct experience and make of the teachings an increasingly powerful influence in our practice. Working assumptions are a lot more work than beliefs, which is perhaps why they are called “working” assumptions, but much more workable.

The skeptic’s choice. As we reflect on the teachings in this way, sometimes we may balk nonetheless. The Buddha gives us an example in the Apaṇṇaka Sutta:

There are some contemplatives and brahmans who hold this doc­trine, hold this view: “There is nothing given, nothing offered, nothing sac­rificed. There is no fruit or re­sult of good or bad actions. There is no this world, no next world, no mother, no father, no spontaneously re­born be­ings; no brahmins or contemplatives who, faring rightly and practicing rightly, proclaim this world and the next af­ter having di­rectly known and realized it for themselves.” (MN 60)

These views deny what the Buddha teaches about karma and rebirth, as well as about responsibilities to parents. Passages like this suggest that his teachings were not without some controversy even in the Buddha’s time. Significantly, the Buddha does not argue that these contrary views are factually wrong, for instance, by citing research on memories of young children of past lives, even though he elsewhere states that he has himself directly experienced the truth of karma and rebirth. Instead, he argues entirely from the perspective of practice function, that is, from how these views are likely to condition the be­havior of such contemplatives and brah­mins:

It can be expected that … they will adopt and practice these three un­skillful activities: bad bodily conduct, bad verbal conduct, bad mental conduct. Why is that? Because those venerable contemplatives and brahmins do not see, in unskillful activities, the drawbacks, the degradation, and the defilement; nor in skillful activities the benefit of renunciation, as cleansing. (MN 60)

In other words, these views would have a negative practice function. Here is the kicker: people of these contrary views cannot win, whether or not their contrary view turns out to be factually true in the end:

Assume there is no other world, regardless of the true statement of those venerable contemplatives and brah­mins. This good person is still criticized in the here and now by the observant as a person of bad habits and wrong view: one who holds to a doctrine of non-existence. If there really is a next world, then this venerable person has made a bad throw twice: in that he is criticized by the ob­servant here and now, and in that with the breakup of the body, after death he will reappear in a plane of depriva­tion, a bad destination, a lower realm, hell. Thus this in­controvertable teaching, when poorly grasped and poorly adopted by him, covers one side. He gives up the skillful op­tion. (MN 60)

This describes a purely pragmatic basis for accepting one of two alternative theses on the basis of a kind of cost-benefit analysis, or a means of covering one’s bets that by it­self justifies its acceptance as a kind of loosely held working assumption. The positive thesis should therefore be taken seriously, because it has a positive practice function, taken seriously regardless of one’s skepticism. Our job is to put aside our skepticism, and make the positive thesis our working assumption. The Buddha makes a similar argument at the end of the Kālāma Sutta (AN 3.65) with regard to realizing the fruits of karma in the next life. It is clear that he recommends that the teachings of karma and rebirth be taken seriously and therefore accepted as working assumptions even by the skeptical. We have already discussed the practice function of these teachings above, and will discuss their content a bit more below.

I think that some writers and teachers take the advice to skeptics in the Kālāma Sutta in the wrong way. It is important to pause and reflect here, because it seems clear, at least to me, that the Buddha is providing us with a subtle middle way between two extremes, belief and disbelief. Batchelor, for instance, concludes correctly from the Kālāma Sutta that the Buddha does not require belief in rebirth. But then from this he infers that rebirth need not be taken seriously, and in his later works even feels justified in disbelieving rebirth. However, if the Buddha intended that inference, he would not have made the pragmatic case for accepting rebirth on the part of the skeptic. Batchelor’s detractors, on the other hand, also miss the point of this passage when they state that one must believe in rebirth, sometimes even adding that one is not really a Buddhist if one does not believe in rebirth. The mistake here is that both sides conflate belief with taking seriously, where the Buddha in fact opens a middle way by distinguishing taking seriously from holding loosely. One can follow the Buddha’s teachings fully without believing in rebirth, but one who wants to follow the Buddha’s teachings fully will take the teachings around rebirth seriously, for the loss of rebirth’s practice function is likely to hinder the benefits of practice. The salty flavor of nirvana might be lost without the practice function of rebirth, just as the wonderful flavor of pesto would be lost by leaving out the basil.

This leads to a question that the Buddha does not seem directly to answer: What if we simply cannot accept a teaching, even as a working assumption, as hard as we try, either because it conflicts with some tightly held fixed beliefs that we are not willing to give up, or because it seems otherwise nonsensical, irrational or contrary to observable experience? How can we be expected take such a teaching seriously? Specific examples will be taken up in more detail in the context of adapting teachings to modernity, for this is a common experience for skeptical modern people. But let it suffice for the moment to point out that people, in fact, have a remarkable capacity for accepting inconsistent or strange assumptions, and even the most rational of us do so all the time.

B.F. Skinner, for instance, was a strong advocate of behaviorism in psychology in the middle of the last century, which involves the view that things like thinking, emotion, free will, perception, etc. are illusions that play no role in physical behavior. This once lead me to wonder if Skinner had children – Yes: According to Wikipedia he had two daughters. – and how he handled the various desires, fears, upsets and excitements that children have on a daily basis, once he returned from work where his interactions were no longer primarily with pigeons. Somehow I doubt that he, as a father, was indifferent to his daughters’ emotional states, nor that he tried to convince them they were illusory: “It’s OK, Julie. The bee sting was real, but your distress is not. So we are going to ignore that.” Each of us lives in an objective world and in a subjective world, even if we are convinced philosophically that only one or the other of these worlds is real. We have no choice.

Even physicists are adept of moving from one irreconcilable model of physical reality to another, from the Newtonian world to the world of relativity and back again, when it is convenient. And string theorists, I imagine, inhabit the same world of naive physics the rest of inhabit do when they are driving their cars, fending off an aggressive Chihuahua or eating a sandwich. There are, of course, practitioners of the hard sciences who believe in God, yet never consider the possibility that a NASA space craft might run into God’s nose. We all keep multiple frames of reference neatly separate. Moreover, much of our everyday reality is entirely fabricated, yet we take what is contained therein quite seriously even when we understand it is fabricated. Money and football are striking examples, which exist and become meaningful (quite often hugely meaningful) only to the extent that we agree to pretend that they exist and are meaningful. Holding things loosely, even the craziest things, has abundant precedent and often serves very practical functions.

Vagueness in the teachings. Many teachings do not lend themselves to a single interpretation. The Buddha made use of many rhetorical devices: myth, metaphor, allegory, symbolism, sometimes even literalism. This often leads us to entertain multiple interpretations and may leave us, and must have left the ancients as well, wondering how one is supposed to interpret such teachings. If we hold teachings loosely, this need not concern us, for a range of interpretations commonly fulfills the same practice function. Let’s take Māra as an example.

The in­famous Māra appears in the early discourses as a kind of fallen deity who is always ready to tempt, discourage, seduce and disarm, to do any­thing to bring the Buddhist practitioner away from what is wholesome, from what leads to nib­bāna or supports the Sāsana. He shows up frequently as a physical being, but generally in disguise, with remarkable persis­tence given that his rate of suc­cess seems quite low in the early texts. In each case, he then typically disappears as soon as he is recognized for who he is.

Now, what might be the practice function of these repeated accounts of encounters with Māra? These accounts suggest it is important to recognize Māra when he is trying to disrupt our practice, for when we do, he goes away and we can return to our practice. I know of no practitioner who has yet encountered Māra in the flesh, but I know many practitioners who apply this advice metaphorically when mental hindrances arise in their practice; they acknowledge the hindrance and let it go. The metaphor is quite apt, because often it actually seems like there is an obscure unconscious part of our mind whose interests often seem to run counter to our own and who seems to be very clever in realizing his interests and hindering our own.

Do we interpret Māra as myth or reality? In terms of practice function it does not seem to matter much, since we are unlikely to encounter him in the flesh, but he does nonetheless teach us a lesson we can put to use in our practice. Karen Armstrong points out that the question of myth or reality is a modern question, of little concern even in the West before modernity. Premoderns were, in this sense, in a better position to hold this teaching loosely. Some modern scholars of religion point out that mythology has traditionally provided a means of talking about psychology. In fact, the Buddha was a pioneer in the use of psychological language, with some precedent in the early Upanishads. Rupert Gethin points to what he calls the principle of the equivalence of cosmology and psy­chology in early Buddhism whereby heavenly realms, etc. actually correspond to subjective states, for instance realized in meditation.

In fact, alongside many passages referring to a flesh-and-blood Māra, we find this passage:

Where the eye exists, Samiddhi, where visible forms, eye consciousness and dhammas cognizable by the eye exist, there Māra or the manifestation of Māra exists. (SN 35.65)

Here Māra clearly becomes a psychological entity, something that arises in subjective experience, not in the objective world. Notice, however, that Māra keeps his name, still giving the impression of independence and contrariness within the subjective domain.

The point is that individually we may interpret Māra as a real physical entity, as a myth about such an entity, as an aspect of our own minds, or – least problematically – as “yeah, whatever.” “Yeah, whatever” is best, since it simply puts aside any particular view on the matter. The Buddha does not seem to have been too concerned about precision in this case. Some of us will prefer one interpretation or another, and this choice will often be culturally determined. Unfortunately, it is difficult particularly in the modern culture to accept “yeah, whatever” as a view. But we might note that even if we interpret Māra in psychological terms, we will have a strong impulse to anthropomorphize our own interpretation, to spin a myth around about that disruptive aspect of our own minds, sometimes even giving it a name as in “Little Timmy is at it again” or “Be gone, little Timmy!” Myth, reality, literal and metaphorical seem cognitively not so distant from one another, even though they may be ontologically quite distinct. In the end, we need not be so precise in the way we conceptualize things, as long as we preserve the proper functional response to potential disruptions of our practice. This is to hold a teaching loosely.

Misunderstanding the teachings. Individually we are likely to misunderstand many teachings at some point or another as we try to wrap our minds around them in various specific ways, and this may lead to harm as we attempt to put them into practice. We rely on our teachers and on our ongoing studies and practice to correct these misunderstandings. More worrisome is when misunderstandings become entrenched in a particular Buddhist tradition and become part of how the teachings are conveyed, even by one’s own teachers, sometimes for untold generations. Alas, this is not uncommon. However, the transmission of Buddhism to the West affords a valuable opportunity for correcting many of those traditional misunderstandings, since we tend to see the Buddha’s teachings with new eyes, and with a healthy degree of skepticism. Let me offer an example.

We have seen that I am the heir of my own deeds, that is, I experience harm or benefit as results of the ethical qualities of my deeds. It does not follow logically that all harm or benefit I experience results from my previous deeds, for some of these may result from non-karmic causes. Nonetheless, this inverse assumption is a common misunderstanding in many Asian traditions. For example, if lightning strikes my house and it burns down, I must have done something harmful to someone in the past, possibly in a previous life.

In fact, this inverse proposition is explicitly denied by the Buddha, in the somewhat obscure Sīvaka Sutta (SN 36.21). Even if we overlook the Sīvaka Sutta ourselves, we nonetheless have an adequate basis for recognizing this inverse proposition as a misunderstanding, not through pondering underlying mechanisms, but purely on the basis of practice function, for the inverse assumption would likely result in inhibiting the practice of compassion. In brief, if someone else suffers a misfortune – his house burns down, for instance – it is his own karmic fault, and if we provide him relief, we would only postpone his inevitable payment of his karmic debt. Furthermore, if we choose to do something harmful to him, he must have deserved it, so we are helping him pay off his karmic debt. Even if infallible cosmic retributive mechanisms are firmly entrenched in our interpretation of karma, practice function must trump that interpretation. Sometimes it is necessary to loosen up calcified interpretations.

Recently someone compared my writing to that of Stephen Batchelor, the most prominent and perhaps most articulate proponent of the new Secular Buddhism movement. I had to think, at first, what the similarities and differences might be, because I don’t identify myself as a Secular Buddhist – largely because I feel the distinctions between “religious” and “secular” or “traditional” and “modern” are spuriously applied to Buddhism. In fact, I hope that this essay might serve as a middle way between extremes that seem to be forming within Buddhism around these distinctions. Nonetheless, I admit to sharing two fundamental premises which Batchelor has clearly articulated, and which are also, I understand, mainstays, perhaps the two most important mainstays, of Secular Buddhism. These premises are:

(1) The Dharma is about practice, not belief.

The title of Batchelor’s well thumbed-through and dog-eared book Buddhism without Beliefs reflects this premise. Buddhism is something we do, not something we believe. This is by no means to say that the Buddha did not provide a doctrinal framework: he gave us the Dharma, which consists of a large system of interrelated teachings. However, the Dharma falls short of a “belief system,” and instead serves exclusively as a critical support for practice, as I hope to show in my own way in what follows. For this reason, I will submit that the Buddha’s teachings are to be taken seriously, because each one will have an important practical function, or practice function, to be realized as beneficial results. At the same time, they are to be held loosely, as less fixed than belief, because a teaching needs to be meaningful and acceptable by the particular practitioner in support of its practice function. It is the practitioner’s task to make the teaching his own.

(2) The Dharma will inevitably be adapted to modern sensibilities.

The teachings are always going to be interpreted by individuals through the filter of their own culture as well as in idiosyncratic ways. For instance, Buddhists from an animist culture will tend to see behind the teachings intelligent but invisible underlying mechanisms, where Buddhists from a modern culture will look for verifiable physical or mental processes. This is how cultures have kept Buddhism meaningful and acceptable as it has entered new lands, and this is unlikely to cease in the West. Moreover, if we hold Buddha’s teachings loosely, we have license to understand them in ways that are meaningful and acceptable to us. At the same time, if we take the teachings seriously, we will not lose sight of their practice functions, and will thereby tend to preserve the integrity of the Dharma. After all, we expect the Dhamma to shape the cultures of new lands in beneficial ways.

The point of bringing Buddhism into a new culture is not to introduce yet another belief system to take its place alongside alternative understandings of science, philosophy and religion, but to produce an all-too-rare kind of human character, one that lives, acts and thinks something like a buddha. Buddhism has retained its functional integrity remarkably well even as it has been repeatedly reinterpreted in different cultural environments. If we take care, it will do so in ours.

A third similarity between my approach and Batchelor’s is that both of us have currently a primary interest in early Buddhism, the teachings that were articulated before sectarian differences arose historically. I personally have a great respect for most later traditions as they have developed in Asia, but the very earliest stratum of Buddhism gives us a well defined form of Buddhism from which to draw examples, the one closest to the Buddha and the least adulterated by extraneous cultural and religious influences.
I will now motivate these two mainstays of Secular Buddhism in more detail. I will develop the first premise first in terms of practice function or doing (taking seriously), and then in terms of not believing (holding loosely), and will show that this first premise is clearly motivated in the Buddha’s teaching itself. I will then show that the second premise makes sense in terms of the first, look at some general issues of modern interpretation, and assess the overall position of “Secular Buddhism.”

Taking the teachings seriously

In this section we demonstrate that the range of teachings is consistently justified as supports for practice, what we actually do in our lives and the benefits that thereby accrue. We take the teachings seriously because each has a practical function, or practice function, that makes a difference in our lives. Famously, in the Simsapa Sutta (SN 56.31) the Buddha, holding a handful of leaves, declared that if the leaves of the forest represent what he might teach, the leaves in his hand represent what he does teach, for he teaches only suffering and the end of suffering:

And why have I taught these things? Because they are connected with the goal, relate to the rudiments of the holy life, and lead to disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation, to calm, to direct knowledge, to self-awakening, to nirvana. (SN 56.31)

The Buddha was not interested in teaching speculative philosophy, or what we would not call science, nor in metaphysics, but only in the practice that leads ultimately to awakening. He was very practical.

Four noble truths. Batchelor frequently illustrates the point that the function of Dharma is in support of practice particularly with regard to the four noble truths, that most central teaching of Buddhism. He points out that the presentation of the four noble truths in the Buddha’s very first discourse, known as the Turning of the Wheel Sutta, and elsewhere explicitly incorporates instructions for practice. The four noble truths are:

• The truth of suffering, which is to be understood,
• The truth of the origin of suffering, which is craving, and which is to be abandoned,
• The truth of the cessation of suffering, which is the cessa­tion of crav­ing, and which is to be realized,
• The truth of the path of practice leading to the cessation of suffering, which is right view, right in­tention, right action, right speech, right livelihood, right effort, right, mindfulness and right concentration, and which is to be developed. (paraphrase from SN 56.11)

A significant point about the four noble truths, aside from their highlighting of a conditional relation between suffering and craving, is that they merge fact and value, that is, “is” and “ought.” Stated in their most concise form, they appear to be four empirical propositions subject to verifica­tion, and are in fact referred to as “truths” in the early discourses. Yet, we are given an explicit practice for each of the truths: under­standing, abandoning, realizing and developing, respectively. The truths are justified for their practical value, that is, for their practice function. It has been pointed out that the truths are like a doctor’s evaluation, in which the truths would represent, respectively, symptom, diagnosis, prognosis and cure, and we note that a doctor’s evaluation also merges “is” and “ought” and is justified for its practice function, that of curing the patient. The path of practice referred to here is the noble eightfold path, eight bullet-points of more detailed practice to be developed.

This is hardly an obscure passage, yet Batchelor is right that at least some later traditions often highlight the propositional content, as if our primary task is to believe, not to understand, abandon, realize and develop. Not all Dharmic teachings make their practice function this explicit, but my experience is that a practice function is always present at least implicitly for any teaching, even if the practice function is not at first obvious. Belief by itself gives us no reason to take a teaching seriously, its practice function gives us every reason. The Buddha was very practical.

These things lead to bene­fit and hap­piness. These points about the priority of practice over belief form the topic of the Kālāma Sutta, which warns us against arriving at fixed viewpoints, no matter their source, but instead to verify teachings in terms of the benefits accrued through embracing them, which is to say. in terms of their practice function:

Come, Kālāmas. Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing, nor upon tradition, nor upon repeti­tion, nor upon what is in a scripture, nor as a result of thought; nor upon an axiom, nor upon careful reasoning, nor out of delight in speculation, nor upon an­other’s seem­ing ability, nor upon the thought, “The monk is our venera­ble teacher.” Kālāmas, when you yourselves know: “These things are good, these things are not blamable, these things are praised by the wise, undertaken as a whole these things lead to bene­fit and hap­piness,” then enter on and abide in them. (AN 3.65)

In the passage, the ultimate criterion for evaluating a teaching is practical, that is, whether what we do on the basis of the teaching is of benefit. It is because the teachings have a practice function that we take them seriously; together they make a huge difference in our lives. We eschew intellectual achievements, whether these seem like “common sense” or result from higher scholarly reasoning and speculation, in favor of what is of benefit in our lives.

Faith. So, the four noble truths are about practice; they give us something to do. I should point out at the outset that they are also about faith. Faith is often mistakenly put in opposition to reason, but, in fact, the very reasonable four noble truths give us nothing to do, absolutely nothing, if we do not have faith that they are giving us good advice. Why would we take them seriously if we don’t assume that the Buddha knew what he was talking about, that his doctrine is reliable and that our modern teachers are representing it properly? Without these assumptions the four noble truths are useless in our lives. This is not to say they are not verifiable: If we understand suffering, we will see that it is the shadow side of craving. If we follow the path of practice, we will realize the end of suffering. But we can only verify the four noble truths after we have practiced on the basis of them, generally for many years (if not lifetimes). Until then, our practice is based in faith, faith in the efficacy of the four noble truths for our practice. As one of my Zen teachers, Shohaku Okumura Roshi, once said of Zen meditation, “Zazen takes a lot of faith. Otherwise nobody would do something [that looks] so stupid.”

What we accept on faith is virtually always, in Buddhism, subject to verification. This explains why the Buddha says the Dhamma is “personally experienced by the wise,” not by everyone, only by those who have developed wisdom through practice. This is why the Buddha invites us “to come and see” the Dharma: When he says “come,” he is shouting down to us flatlanders from the moun­taintop. To arrive at his vantage point we need to scramble up hills, struggle through brambles and ford creeks, with the faith that the Buddha is up there telling us to see is worth our while. When he says “see,” we need to focus our eyes intently in the right direction to barely make out what the Bud­dha sees with great clarity of vision, and, sure enough, we can verify it for ourselves, … in the end. Until then our effort is carried by faith.

However, this is not blind faith by a long shot, and it has little to do with belief. It is actually a commonplace faith that informs literally everything we do: cooking by following a recipe in a cookbook, following the directions for assembling a new vacuum cleaner, undertaking a course in chemistry, watching a movie on the recommendation of a friend, brushing our teeth. Ultimate verifiability stands behind this kind of faith, for even though we have yet to personally verify the efficacy of the teaching we are given, we can assume that others who have preceded us have verified it over and over again. Otherwise this teaching would not have survived to be transmitted to us. With practice experience, the Dharma establishes a kind of track record, and this pushes our faith even further.

The function of developing faith in Buddhism is fulfilled by the practice of refuge, the development of trust in the reliability of the three sources of Buddhist wisdom: the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. The Buddha is our original teacher, the Dharma is the teachings themselves and the Sangha are the living teachers who are developed in understanding and in practicing the Dharma. This is not faith in a set of beliefs, such as in a catechism or in a fundamentalism not to be questioned. Refuge is itself a practice whose practice function is to bring ourselves to take the other teachings seriously. Refuge is thereby very practical. The practice of refuge is substantially to recall the track record of these sources of wisdom, but also to develop an emotional intimacy with these sources of wisdom in order to open up the heart and mind to their influence, that our practice might deepen. Simple physical practices like bowing were endorsed by the Buddha from the Buddha at the very beginning and have always been utilized as a support for refuge ever since, much like handshaking is a support for cordiality in Western culture.

The relationship of refuge to the four noble truths illustrates the way one practice function feeds into another in an integrated system of teachings. The four noble truths, when practiced, fulfill the function of ending suffering. The refuges, when practiced, fulfill the function of taking the four noble truths seriously, that is, of instilling life into the four noble truths, as well as into other teachings.

The diversity of teachings. To practice is to exercise the skill of life. It is useful to recognize the similarity between Buddhism and other skills, such as tennis, hang gliding, haute cuisine, ceramics, making a sales pitch, chess, bird-watching or solving non-linear equations. Each begins with teachings and faith in the teachings. For the aspiring master chef, for instance, these might be focused in a favorite cookbook, one that may have been recommended by a wiser cook than oneself, or by its strong track record acquired through repeated personal use. Each instruction in each recipe will serve a practical function, contributing something to the taste, texture or appearance of the food; if we leave anything out or make a mistake in the instruction, the result will generally be disappointing. The overall functionality of the instructions is revealed in the benefit attained, the bright faces, delighted smiles, smacking of lips and positive comments of the satiated. Belief in the instructions is not the point, but rather what we do on the basis of them. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. The teachings, practice and benefits in haute cuisine are of a different nature than those of Buddhism, or of any other kind of skill, but the analogy provides a useful perspective for understanding the function of Dharma.

The four noble truths are the core teachings of Buddhism, the teachings that lead to high spiritual attainments and eventually nirvana. Most of the Buddha’s significant teachings are elaborations of the four noble truths. However, everything arises in a context, and refuge is a significant part of the context of the practice of the four noble truths, as we have seen. Refuge is, in this sense, more foundational than the four noble truths. The context of the four noble truths is even further filled out by advice on how to interpret the teachings, which is substantially our concern in this essay. The Buddha seems to leave no stone unturned.

It is important to recognize that many of the teachings support not the specific individual’s practice, but instead the functions of the Buddhist community in which the individual practices. The Buddhist community itself functions to support the individual’s practice by providing role models and teachers, material support for those who want to dedicate themselves to spiritual development, and, ultimately, the means of propagating and preserving the integrity of the teachings for future generations. The teachings around the Buddhist community thereby have even an historical function. Moreover, it is within the community that the individual practices virtue and generosity and learns humility and harmony. The community ideally defines a culture of awakening that both pulls and pushes the individual toward nirvana, through inspiration of those further advanced in practice, and and through the encouragement of all, including those less advanced.

Monastic practice. It should be noted that the Buddha gave abundant attention to establishing the multi-functional monastic community, through an extensive set of teachings called the Vinaya, the discipline, or the monastic code of conduct. The Vinaya is based more directly in elaborate rules of practice or conduct with even less in the way of abstract conceptual content than the Dharma. The doctrine and discipline are related roughly the way science as a system of thought – that is, a set of paradigms, theories and empirical data – is related to science as a discipline – that is, an institution made up of rules of conduct such as not falsifying data or plagiarizing others’ results, standards for certifying the qualifications of researchers, professors, etc. and supported materially by the wider society. The quality of first in dependent on the quality of the second.

The teaching of monastic discipline fulfills a number of individual, community and historical functions at the same time. First, the monastic life affords the practitioner an ideal context for practicing the four noble truths and the noble eightfold path, because of its isolation from common pernicious worldly concerns. Second, the monastic community provides a space in which the Dharma and its practice burns brightest. This, in turn, (a) provides inspiration for the monastics themselves, as well as for the lay community, (b) provides a basis for teaching, learning and exchange of understanding and experiences, (c) spins off practitioners of great attainment who ennoble the entire community, (d) provides the vehicle by which teachings are preserved in their functional integrity and transmitted to future generations.

It is no exaggeration to say that these functions have been essential to the survival of Buddhism. Buddhism would not long endure without the monastic Sangha; it never has. An analogy with the discipline of science is again apt in this regard. Science would not long endure without its disciplined community; it never has. Undeniably there are amateur scientists of great attainment (a young Einstein was once one), just as there are Buddhist laypeople of great attainment, but these are never more than a couple of steps removed from the ordained or certified community in each case. In both cases, the institutional core is necessitated by the radical sophistication of the subject matter, and its consequential vulnerability to misunderstanding and distortion. In each case, sustaining its integrity requires a community of dedicated full-timers.

The Buddha was very aware of the critical function of the monastic Sangha. In fact, the Buddha consistently referred to the body of his teachings as the Dharma-Vinaya, that is, doctrine and discipline, expressive of the comparable weight he accorded the functions of the doctrine and of monastic discipline. Remarkably, the monastic Sangha, carefully constituted and let loose on the world by the Buddha, has endured longer than any other public human institution on the planet, yet another reflection of the Buddha’s genius. The Vinaya, like the Dharma, is about practice and fulfills well-defined practice functions.

Unessential teachings. When we look at the ancient discourses we are struck that some teachings are clearly highlighted as essential, while other notions appear here and there rather casually. These texts were delivered extemporaneously in everyday language, in a cultural context dissimilar to our own, so it is not surprising that much of their content is extraneous. In fact, certain content may be without a practice function at all, and therefore needs not to be taken seriously by the modern practitioner. Let me suggest an example: the appearance of deities walking (or flying) through the world, who often visit the Buddha, sometimes to offer advice, but more often to hear his teachings. I use the phrase “suggest an example” here deliberately because we have to take care that we are unaware of a practice function that is simply not apparent to us at the present time. We may often fail to recognize, over many years of study, the practice function of what reveals itself to be a very important teaching in the Buddha’s very elaborate system of teachings.

Concerning deities, we should first note that in India, now as well as in the time of the Buddha, people rather casually attribute divinity to brahmins, to famous ascetics, to cows, sometimes to trees and to the fires in people’s hearths, and to aristocrats. The latter are often addressed as “deva” (deity) when spoken to by commoners in the early discourses. Therefore, it would surprising if references to them were altogether absent, or they did not appear in the many allegories, similes or background stories to add a little color. Moreover, whereas in most religions deities function in practice as objects of worship, or as personalities that are appealed to for their power over the circumstances of people’s lives, nowhere does the Buddha recommend such practices with respect to deities to his disciples. On the contrary, when the deities do appear, they venerate the Buddha, and sometimes the other monastics, bowing to their feet and sitting respectfully to one side. If these references to deities have a practice function to them, it would seem to be merely rhetorical and quite minimal: they serve to illustrate the practice of refuge, on the part of even the most exalted of beings.

In short, the examination of the practice functions of teachings gives us a principled method of discerning what is really essential in the ancient texts and what is superfluous. But again, we must proceed cautiously, not to dismiss an important part of the Buddha’s message due to possible limitations in our current state of understanding. Doing so might otherwise just possibly end up like leaving salt out of a recipe, unless we know exactly what we are doing.

Karma and rebirth. Karma is another word for our practice. Karma is, by definition, simply intentional action, which is what our practice is. The Buddha, in giving us this definition, seems to have appropriated and reinterpreted a brahmanical conceptual scheme in which karma was understood as ritual action, which, when carefully performed, assured benefit for the one on whose behalf the ritual was performed. For the Buddha, every action brings potential benefit or harm to the agent of that action, and must therefore be taken as seriously as the brahmin takes his ritual. This is why we take the teachings seriously that make our practice skillful. Notice that the same analogy can be made for any skill. For instance, we take a recipe seriously in order to experience the delight of others in the products of our gastronomic efforts. The chef might well understand his effort as follows:

Whatever I do in the kitchen, whether skillfully or unskillfully, to that I will fall heir.

Buddhist practice is fundamentally rooted in ethics or virtue and is not limited to the kitchen, and so the equivalent principle becomes:

Whatever I do, for good or evil, to that I will fall heir. (AN 5.57)

In short, our karmic actions not only shape the world for others, but also shape our personal fortune. What we inherit personally is called the result or fruit of our deeds.

This simple teaching has a profound influence on our ethical behavior. The greatest difficulty in the practice of ethics for humans of all faiths and backgrounds, the reason people are not universally virtuous, is that self-interest and benefiting others come into repeated conflict. Yet, this teaching equates self-interest and benefiting others. It says that good deeds always work to our own bene­fit as well as to the benefit of others at the same time, even though we might not recognize this immediately. Bad deeds always work against our own benefit as well as against the benefit of others at the same time. This simple teaching, when taken seriously, therefore has a profound practice function, promoting virtue and almost every other aspect of our practice. For now we simply note the practice function of this teaching; we will consider how we come to have faith in this teaching in the course of the discussion below.

Although karma and its fruits generally play out in the present life, by introducing rebirth the Buddha greatly extends the scope of this teaching beyond a few decades of a single life, and therewith the scope and signific­ance of all of Buddhist prac­tice. The consequence of taking the teaching of rebirth seriously is that we fully take responsibility for the distant future as well as the near future. Rebirth thereby endows our practice with a meaning bigger than life (at least bigger than one life), endows it in the words of Bhikkhu Bodhi with “that panoramic perspec­tive from which we can survey our lives in their broader context and total net­work of relationships,” that comes from realizing that our lives and therefore our practices are woven inextricably into something far grander in scale, a rich and immense tapestry of human affairs. We see ourselves each engaged in an epic struggle with twisted karmic forces (ingrained greed, hatred and delusion) from the ancient past that will project karmic out­comes endlessly into the future … unless we intervene through our practice.

Our practice there­by has vastly more at stake than happiness and comfort in this present life and there­fore different incentives. From rebirth comes the urgency that impels us to deep practice, even giving up the comforts of conventional life on behalf of practice, and that thereby fully opens up the prospect of awakening. The practice function of the teaching of rebirth is profound in that it provides a means of framing our practice that lends it enormous gravity, effectively as a multiplier of the practice function of the teachings around karma. Once again, for now we are simply noting the practice function of this teaching; we will consider how we come to have faith in this teaching in the course of the discussion below. Also once again, the Buddha’s concern was practice, not belief.

A few years ago, I wrote an essay “What Did the Buddha Think of Women,” which has turned out to have had more hits than any other article I have posted on this blog. In this essay I propose that the Buddha’s intention from the beginning was to secure for women the same opportunities as men to live and practice as monastics and to progress toward awakening. The structurally unequal status of nuns in the early Sangha (exemplified, for instance, in the eight garudhammas)  is entirely accounted for as an expedient for coming close to realizing this goal in a patriarchal society that was not entirely sympathetic with this goal. The modern dilemma for us is that we live in a different society, one which has little sympathy for the structurally unequal status of nuns that has been carried along in the monastic rules since those early days.

Recently my weekly sutta discussion group, which meets Sunday afternoons at the Sitagu Buddha Vihara in Austin, TX USA, took up the discussion of women in Buddhism, beginning with my presentation of the thesis of my essay. The discussion was very fruitful and was recorded. Herewith I would like to share the recorded discussions with anyone who has an interest in these topics:

• May 28, 2017, Women in Buddhism (mp4)
• June 4, 2017, Women in Buddhism (mp4)

Now in Second Edition, April, 2019

Buddhism began with the Buddha, a towering figure who lived some hundred generations ago, taught for forty-five years, developed a huge following of ascetics and householders, kings and paupers, and left behind a vast corpus of teachings, astonishingly profound and comprehensive, consistent, brilliantly coherent and still intelligible today. His teachings span not only the higher training of meditation, psychology and the path to awakening, but also practical advice on virtue, harmony, community and basic human values. He left behind a culture of peace and awakening and a monastic community that persist to this day.

This introductory textbook on Buddhism, based on the earliest stratum of Buddhist texts, provides a holistic and proportionate account of the range of the Buddha’s Dharma, interpreted for the modern student. It  encompasses not only the four noble truths and the noble eightfold path, that is, systematic training toward awakening, but also the prerequisite instructions for leading an upright, virtuous and devoted Buddhist life, a life rooted in basic Buddhist values. This textbook is accordingly divided into two books: Buddhist Life for the foundational teachings and Buddhist Path for systematic training in the higher path leading to awakening. Each book can be studied independently and in either order.

These talks are supplemented by two series of short podcasts: TALKS ON BUDDHIST LIFE and TALKS ON BUDDHIST PATH.

The book can now be downloaded in various formats:

Order hardcopy here

Information about the course based on this text, including audios of previous classes, is available HERE.

by Bhikkhu Cintita and Dr. Win Bo

The following passages will appear in the forthcoming book, Teacher of the Moon: the Life and Times of Sitagu Sayadaw, by Bhikkhu Cintita Dinsmore and Dr. Tin Nyunt.

In 1988, Sitagu Sayadaw displeased elements of the military government of Burma by delivering his famous sermon on the responsibilities of kings in response to the brutal government suppression of the 8888 demonstrations. As the political situation worsened again in 1990 he quietly left the country into over two years of self-imposed exile, most of which he spend in Nashville, Tennessee, USA.

Not one to spend exile waiting idly around, Sitagu Sayadaw began to explore the possibility of establishing a monastery in the States. In part, he wanted a home-base for his travels to this part of the world and a locus for long-term fund-raising in the West for his growing number of projects in cash-starved Burma. Through discussions with his dear friend in Sagaing Ashin Mahomaha Pandita Sayadaw, he had begun to recognize the value of missionary activities in the West. Not only was there a growing Burmese diaspora, eager for the presence of monk and willing to cooperate in such an endeavor, but there was a growing interest in Buddhism among the ethnic Westerners.

Sitagu Sayadaw’s travels in the early months of 1992 took him to Houston, Texas, from where his sponsors suggested he might also want to visit Austin, the capital of Texas. A Burmese Austinite, Eric Mynn, got a call from Houston asking if could host a Burmese monk from Tennessee and he agreed to put the eminent monk up at his home for a few days. Another Burmese man, U Win Bo, agreed to fit some time into his schedule to act as a tour guide. U Win Bo had, in fact, met Sitagu Sayadaw some months before when he was staying with a Burmese friend in Ohio who decided to drive down to Tennessee to visit the Burmese monk he was told lived there. U Win Bo had been living in the States long enough not to have any notion of how famous this monk had become back in Myanmar.

Austin is a small city in the Texas Hill Country, a beautiful forested semi-arid area, in which many streams flowed into the Colorado River. Sitagu Sayadaw was quite impressed with Austin, for it reminded him of the Sagaing Hills back home. U Win Bo, showing Sitagu Sayadaw the many of beauties of Austin from behind the wheel of his car, mentioned once casually that it would be nice if Austin had a Burmese monastery. Sitagu Sayadaw did not reply, but in fact had already been discussing that very possibility with the Burmese community in Houston, without yet reaching a decision.

Later that year, Sitagu Sayadaw was back in Austin, this time staying at the house of U Win Bo, where he asked to meet with the few Burmese families in Austin as a group. He had clearly been doing his homework, for he proposed setting a non-profit religious organization in Texas to be called the Theravada Dhamma Society of America (TDSA). Discussions ensued around organization and officers were agreed upon for the fledgling society. Sitagu Sayadaw remained in Austin for about a month, hammering out the bylaws, designing a logo and a letterhead and finally overseeing the filing of the papers for incorporation, which was granted on October 15, 1992. This time of residence in Austin also gave Sitagu Sayadaw a chance to familiarize himself with the area that would become the center of his missionary efforts.

Although Sitagu Sayadaw would return to Burma that winter, he would include Austin in his international travels each year for the foreseeable future, each time advancing the development of TDSA one step further, encouraging application for federal tax exempt status, then state tax-exempt status and then to begin searching for a property on which to situate the monastery. He seemed to be better informed about the formal steps necessary than the local officers in these days before easy access to information on the Internet.
Sitagu Sayadaw dedicated the summer of 1995 to TDSA. A house was leased for that period as a residence for Sitagu Sayadaw. He and the local community published a newsletter, explored the area further and began looking for property. They found a wonderful four-acre lot in the town of Bastrop, about thirty miles east of Austin. Bastrop is at a higher elevation than Austin, a bit cooler in the Summer and covered primarily by pine forest, as was the lot in question, a peaceful site on the gentle incline of a hill. Sitagu Sayadaw was very pleased with the site.

It happened that the small Burmese group had stopped at a grocery on their way to view the site in order to procure something to drink, at which a woman was giving children coming and going helium filled balloons, for reasons that remain obscure. Seeing a large Theravada monk in burgundy robes emerge from a car in the parking lot must have momentarily confused her, for she also handed Sitagu Sayadaw a balloon as he passed by. Gratefully accepting the balloon, he carried it back to the car and, after the small party had reached the lot and re-emerged from the car, carried it to a clearing and could be heard ceremonially chanting something in Pali. He then released the balloon. However, the wind carried the balloon past a tree in which the string became entangled, halting the balloon’s ascent. “That’s a bad sign,” he told the others.

Indeed, after Sitagu Sayadaw had returned to Myanmar, U Win Bo returned to the lot in Bastrop and discovered some prohibitive issues. First, it had no electricity, water or phone lines. More importantly, it was under the auspices of a homeowners’ association that imposed strict requirements on what could be build on this lot. Bastrop is in rural Texas, not as cosmopolitan as Austin or Houston, and so he could anticipate great reluctance to accept a Buddhist monastery into their neighborhood.  TDSA would have to look elsewhere for its home.

Texas was in the wild west of the Buddhist world, a land where barely a handful Burmese pioneers from the heartland of the Buddhism on the other side of the globe had settled, determined to build a monastery on its rocky soil. Austin, Texas, in particular, had the ideal demographics for Buddhist missionary work. Studies indicate that American “convert” Buddhists are for the most part well-off financially, liberal or progressive politically and extremely well educated. Austin fits this profile exactly, as the capital city of Texas, the site of one of the biggest university campuses in the country, a major center for the high tech industry and one of the most educated cities in America.

Instrumental in the establishment of a Sitagu presence in Austin was Dr. Tin Than Myint, who worked at the veterans hospital in distant Big Springs, Texas, but who had family connections to Austin and counted as a close disciple of the Sayadaw. After the founding of the Theravada Dhamma Society of America during Sitagu Sayadaw’s visit, Dr. Tin Than Myint would often stop by the house of U Win Bo in Austin on Sundays and the two of them would drive around with a realtor in search of suitable property.

A sixteen-acre lot at 9001 Honeycomb Dr. just southwest of Austin, that they viewed early in 1996, had an old shed for keeping horses, a small rabbit warren, a dilapidated mobile home, as well as a well as a source of water and both phone and electric lines. The lot was covered with oak and cedar trees and thick underbrush, teaming with wildlife, from deer and foxes to wild turkeys and rattlesnakes. Dr. Myint was particularly impressed with the lot and TDSA decided to make an offer. The asking prices was $85,000, TDSA had $50,000 in the bank, but Dr. Myint would loan TDSA an additional $15,000 and the owner would agree to finance the rest. And so the deal was closed.

A work team from the Burmese community started showing up each weekend to make the mobile home habitable, to repair the well, to replace the toilet, carpets and wallpaper, to fix the plumbing and to repair the small decks at the front and rear of the mobile home. The unused shed was demolished and old furniture hauled away. The local community began almost immediately to host festival events on the grounds.

In the summer of 1998, Sitagu Sayadaw organized the sima ceremony for the monastery,. A sima is a consecrated area in which monks can legally perform certain ceremonies, such as the ordination of a new monk. A sima ceremony has to be done strictly by the book and the expert on such ceremony, the famous Burmese missionary monk Ashin Silananda from Daly City, California was asked to lead the ceremony. Eighteen Buddhist monks were invited to Austin for the ceremony, most of them put up in nearby hotels. The sima ground was marked with chalk powder as a rectangular shape and was then subdivided into smaller rectangles. Each monk has to recite pali stanzas to convert it into a block of sima ground. It took two days to conduct the ceremony. After the ceremony, the locations were staked to make sure the sima grounds were properly marked.

And so the Sitagu Buddha Vihara came to be. In the decades to come it would acquire a pagoda (placed directly over the existing sima, thereby avoiding the necessity of a new consecration), a Dhamma hall, a dedicated library building, a reception hall, a dining hall and thirty-six cabins for monks and resident yogis. It would become of thriving center of practice and learning not only for the Burmese community in Texas, but for many Westerners and people from other Buddhist lands.

Those eager to read to the end to see how it comes out can click here for the whole chapter as a pdf.

Practicing Harmony

The skill of harmonizing with others is developed on top of the skills of generosity, harmlessness and purity. It adds to these the specialized skill of dealing with the complexities of the common human personality as we interact with others, including respect for their humanness and acknowledgement of a conditioned complex of faults and virtues that we all possess (aside from the arahants). It also adds to these a handle on some of our most deeply rutted inclinations, for we commonly reserve a particularly pronounced capacity for harshness for our fellow humans.

As we practice harmony we may often be frustrated at the limits of our control over the consequences. Harmony is something shared by people in relationship or in community, and our practice, yet we exercise control over only one side of the relationship, and over one locus in the dynamics of a community. The best it can do is to uphold in our practice from our side the conditions conducive to harmony and leave the rest up to others, who may have entirely different understandings and intentions than our own. At least that way we do  not contribute to the disharmony when it does arise. Recall that our practice and its results are our own.

We must resist the urge to extend our control over the consequences by admonishing others, for unless done with great skill, as we have seen, this risks greater disharmony. There are ways, however, in which we do influence others in the direction of greater harmony. For one thing, others begin to realize that we consistently refuse to participate in the kinds of games that precipitate disharmony, such as responding to insult with insult. We become a kind of refuge from such behavior, a safe space in which they do not have to be so defensive. And soon, they begin to emulate our behaviors. We produce role models.
Also, within any culture certain people enjoy a degree of authority as wise advisors or teachers, either by social role or reputation. In the Sigovada sutta, parents, teachers and ascetics and brahmins may enjoy this status. Granting reverence or veneration to another is an act of trust or faith that opens others up to their advice. The Buddha, to take the primary example, certainly received that degree of venerations from his thousands of disciples and could freely admonish others all day long. It is only through granting this level of respect or trust to the wise that the Buddha’s sāsana has grown. Reverence or veneration in the Buddhist context is the topic of the next chapter.
As we interact with others a range of unskillful thoughts come up, involving anger, resentment, envy, arrogance, vanity, personal insult, conceit and so on. Our practice of purification is gradually to let go of our tendency toward such thoughts. But our first line of defense is not to act bodily or verbally on the basis of such thoughts. It is to remain harmless whatever the mind might be doing.  If we can do this, we are already to a degree accomplished in not contributing to disharmony. The speech precepts in particular – not speaking falsely, not speaking harshly, not speaking divisively and not speaking frivolously – take us far in this direction.

One of the most dangerous ways we can act on the basis of such thoughts is through divisive speech. It is helpful to guard against this with a further rule of thumb: Do not speak ill of others.vii There will be cases in which this rule of thumb cannot be sustained, for instance, where we need to warn others out of compassion of the angry man around the corner who is swearing and brandishing a knife. But consider: in general speaking ill of others it is a huge responsibility:

First, in the situation where it is likely to come up, we may well be speaking falsely; if there is anger involved, there is almost certainly some degree of misperception on our part.

Second, the consequences of our speech might easily get out of hand. Even if our intentions are relatively pure, how about the intentions of those we speak to, who are likely to repeat it to others, and so forth? Furthermore, if we are talking with someone who lacks familiarity with the person or group we speak ill of, what is said may produce is likely to color their impressions for a long time to come. The recipient of the disparagement may then repeat it much less skillfully than we will, and with quite impure intentions.

Third, it is difficult to maintain kindness in a mob: Even if we speak ill of another in all kindness for that person, others who agree with us may be of questionable kindness. Another rule of thumb: Never take sides in interpersonal disputes, even if you are friends with one party; don’t become part of a coalition set in opposition to some other person or group.
It is advisable to become familiar with, and participate in, the use of gestures of respect and general etiquette in whatever local Buddhist community you might belong to. It should be noted that although these go back to common Indian roots in virtually any Buddhist community, these have evolved into somewhat different forms through different Asian cultures. It is also wise to become skilled in the modern gestures and etiquette of the prevailing culture. Although these are generally different from those found in most Buddhist communities, they generally served much the same function.

Further Reading

The Buddha’s Teachings on Social and Communal Harmony: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon, Bhikkhu Bodhi (editor), 2016, Wisdom Publications. This is a systematic look at the Buddha’s teachings on harmony with valuable commentary by a renowned American monk and Pali scholar.

Working with Anger, Thubten Chodron, 2001, Snow Lion. This hightly regarded work, by an American nun, focuses on reconceptualizing situations that normally lead to the arising of anger. It is strongly based on the insights of the great eighth-century Indian monk and scholar Shantideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life.

Those eager to read to the end to see how it comes out can click here for the whole chapter as a pdf.

The Ideal Society

An important conditioning factor in communal harmony or disharmony that goes beyond individual interactions and relations is certainly governance or the institutional structures of the society. This also was not beyond the Buddha’s purview, for the Buddha was the architect of a community, the  Saṅgha of monks and nuns. It is instructive to see what kinds of choices the Buddha made to form this ideal society writ small.

In Gotama’s time, the Gangetic plain encompassed a number of small kingdoms and republics. The two dominant kingdoms of the region were Magadha and Kosala. The republics were largely lined up along the northern edge of the Gangetic plain in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains, which were coming increasingly under the dominance of the kingdoms. The westernmost of these was the Sakyan Republic where the Buddha-to-be was grew up. These republics were generally governed by an unelected assembly of elders from the khattiya or warrior/administrative caste. It is likely that the Buddha, as a khattiya, was familiar with matters of governance. This was also a patriarchal society that would become more patriarchal with time, such that spiritual practice and education were widely (though not entirely) considered masculine pursuits and women were generally subject in all stages of life to masculine authority.

Although there were ascetics in India before the Buddha, “… among all of the bodies of renouncers it was only the Buddhists who invented monastic life,”iv  that is, who provided an organized institution capable of sustaining its practice and teachings. The Buddha never attempted to organize the lay community except indirectly by putting the monastic community in their midst and letting them sort out what to do about it. The monastic Saṅgha is a multi-functional institution, defined in the Vinaya with a mission statement, a code of conduct, rules of governance, guidelines for handling grievances and many other features.v

Some of the notable hallmarks of the Saṅgha as conceived by the Buddha are as follows: The Saṅgha observes no class distinctions and an exemplary level of gender equality.vi It is regulated in a way to avoid conflicts and maintain harmony, and observes procedures to negotiate disagreements should these arise. It rules by consensus of all monastics in a local community and, as such, is only minimally hierarchical. For instance, there is no system of pope and bishops, so that although monastics live under the code of the Vinaya, they are not subject to any distant centralized authority. Serious transgressions of the monastic code entail no corporal punishments, but rather sanctions, none more severe than expulsion from the local community. Rectifying transgressions is much dependent of acknowledgement of guilt. Committing one of the most serious offenses, for instance killing another person, is simply by definition no longer to be a monastic; if one hides the offense, one is impersonating a monastic. Aside from limited coercive control over each other, monastics have no coercive power whatever over the laity. There is, for instance, nothing like excommunication. Their authority derives entirely from the respect they receive as teachers and role models for those committed to the Dhammic life. In fact, the laity has significant coercive power over the Saṅgha, since a displeased laity can at any time withdraw the support on which the Saṅgha depends.

The constitution of the Saṅgha embodies so many social ideals that it might seem rather pie-in-the sky. But keep in mind it has outlived every other system of governance in existence at its birth,  and almost every one that has arisen since. It has seen great empires come and go and persists to this day. This in evidence of the practical understanding with which the Buddha carefully constituted the monastic Saṅgha. It just keeps going.

The Buddha did not actively champion the similar reformation of civil society, but did have a bit to say about responsibilities of kings toward their subjects, sometimes describing the righteous or wheel-turning king as a kind of ideal. In DN 26 he even recommended that such a king seek ethical guidance from wise monastics:

“Whatever ascetics and brahmins in your kingdom have renounced the life of sensual infatuation and are devoted to forbearance and gentleness, each one taming himself, each one calming himself and each one striving for the end of craving, from time to time you should go to them and consult them as to what is wholesome and what is unwholesome, what is blameworthy and what is blameless, what is to be followed and what is not to followed and what action will in the long run lead to harm and sorrow, and what to welfare and happiness. Having listened to them, you should avoid evil and do what is good.”

This passage is significant in view of the common understanding that monastics should not get involved in political or social matters, and are perhaps ill-equipped to do so. It clearly opens a nonpartisan role for them as moral advisors. In DN 5 the Buddha describes a chaplain offering wise advice to a king concerning the relationship of crime, poverty and general prosperity:

“Your Majesty’s country is beset by thieves, it is ravaged, villages and towns are being destroyed, the countryside is infested with brigands. … Suppose Your Majesty were to think: ‘I will get rid of this plague of robbers by executions and imprisonment, or by confiscation, threats and banishment’, the plague would not be properly ended. Those who survived would later harm Your Majesty’s realm. However, with this plan you can completely eliminate the plague: To those in the kingdom who are engaged in cultivating crops and raising cattle, let Your Majesty distribute grain and fodder; to those in trade, give capital; to those in government service assign proper living wages. Then those people, being intent on their own occupations, will not harm the kingdom. Your Majesty’s revenues will be great, the land will be tranquil and not beset by thieves, and the people, with joy in their hearts, will play with their children, and will dwell in unlocked houses.”

We do well to note here and elsewhere a characteristic feature of the Buddha’s method of ethical scrutiny: its uncommon tolerance and forgiveness. He thereby maintains unwavering kindness for all common participants in human society, even thieves and brigands, whose worldly actions he sees as almost unavoidably conditioned by circumstances and as controllable to the extent that conditions can be changed, at least by kings. The advice to the king here is also an instance of the practice of appropriate attention (yoniso manasikāra), literally, “thinking from the origin”), a hugely important practice in early Buddhism which we will encounter a number of times in this textbook. The plague addressed in this passage arises directly from observable social conditions, not from some unseen unconditioned evil of thieves and brigands, which would be a more commonplace assumption, but one that would lead to a counterproductive and hateful response.