General Introduction to Early Buddhism taught in the Pali Canon
Essays in this section present the results of my study of the particular version of Buddhism taught in the Pali Canon, probably written down sometime around 200 b.c. More specifically, this has been a study of the “sutta” (sutra) section of the Pali Canon, which I will refer to as “the Pali suttas.” This is the earliest large collection of Buddhist writings that has come down to us.
My study has had two main aims:
One aim has been to go back to the original text of these writings, studying them in their original language (Pali, a variant of Sanskrit) trying to recover the original meaning of these texts, the meaning they had for their original authors and audience.
Among other things, this has meant asking about the original purpose of these writings. What sort of questions and concerns most likely led to the development of the main teachings we find here? Whereas it has been customary today to approach these writings trying to discover what “doctrines” early Buddhists “believed in,” or to extract from them a set of theories constituting “Buddhist Philosophy”, I’ve tried to ask the prior question about the kinds of questions, concerns, and problems early Buddhist thinkers were trying to address when they developed the ideas we find in these writings.
Parts of these writings actually give rather clear answers to the kind of question I ask here. Ideas we find in them were developed as answers to a particular life problem, the problem of the underlying factors surfacing as frequent episodes of distress and frustration. Early Buddhists looked for internal psychological causes here, and developed a program for “liberation” from distress and frustration consisting in long-term efforts to bring about a rather fundamental change in a person’s internal psychological dynamics, which they thought would also raise one’s life to a higher level. Nibbana is the Pali word they used to describe the result of this change, more commonly known in the US today by the Sanskrit equivalent Nirvana. (Pali and Sanskrit are different dialects of the same ancient language family).
Thus this program bore more resemblance to what we call “therapy” today, than to what we call “philosophy” or “religion.” Except that, while therapy today often aims at remedying certain special problems or abnormalities to bring a person back to some concept of human normalcy, Buddhists regarded certain aspects of human normalcy as themselves an obstacle to raising their lives to the much higher than normal level that they aspired to.
I call this a “transformative spirituality”. “Spirituality” here has nothing to do with contacting any “spiritual” beings or realities existing on a separate plane of existence—an idea completely absent in early Buddhism. As I use the term, “spirituality” has to do with paying attention to one’s own inner life, generally with the intention of bringing about improvements in the habitual motivations determining one’s basic way of interacting with the world and/or with other people. “Transformative” calls special attention to these efforts at internal transformation of one’s internal psychological dynamics. Buddhist “spirituality” in this sense is necessarily a personal and individual endeavor, voluntarily undertaken to bring one’s life to a higher level than could be achieved by merely following obligatory rules for external behavior, an essential part of Buddhist “communal religion” practiced by very many self-identified Buddhists who have little knowledge of more individual and personal Buddhist spirituality (just as in the middle ages most self-identified Catholic Christians had little knowledge of the Catholic spirituality practiced by monks and nuns.)
A second aim has been to try to vicariously and imaginatively enter into the mindset of early Buddhists, trying to understand what it might mean to practice today the basic principles of the transformative spirituality taught in the Pali Canon. My aim here is thus in some respects similar to the aim of modern Buddhist teachers. Except that I am not a Buddhist believer or a teacher belonging to any Buddhist community. It would be a mistake to compare these essays to the writings of very learned, experienced, and well-recognized and highly respected Buddhist teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh, Shunryu Suzuki, and the Dalai Lama.
I am mainly a scholar whose specialized expertise is rational method in the study of religious writings that have come down to us from the ancient world, understanding and employing those kinds of evidence and arguments relevant to the aim of recovering the meaning these texts had for their original authors and audience. I learned this method first as a graduate student in biblical studies, where discussion among academics concerning theory and method in the interpretation of ancient texts has had a long history. But I subsequently developed and applied it to other religious traditions, such as my publications on the Daodejing, a classic in the Chinese Daoist tradition.
It is only that I think we have not really understood the meaning of ancient religious writings unless we can understand what it might mean to practice today the basic teachings in these writings, which also means understanding their possible relevance to anyone today who might choose to try to practice the particular teachings found in any set of writings.
I emphasize “possible” relevance, because my experience in studying a number of writings from different traditions has brought me to the view that the writings I have studied have very fundamentally different views concerning, for example, what it might mean to raise one’s life to a “higher” level, and of how it is that this might bring this about. (I am by no means a believer in the idea that there is One Truth taught in all religions. I think different traditions have very different specific ideas about what “higher” means.)
So unlike most Buddhist teachers, I attribute no special authority to the teachings I describe in these essays, especially no exclusive authority relative to different teachings found in other religious writings. I mean this also in relation to writings from the very many writings stemming from the hundreds of different Buddhist communities, centered on very different versions of the Buddhist message, that have existed in many different countries over two millennia that have elapsed since the writing down of the Pali Canon. While I have come to think the early Buddhist transformative spirituality I describe in these essays is of great potential value for those who might choose to practice it (including myself), I am not a believer that “the earliest is always the best.” (I think that, from a purely rational point of view, there is no reason in principle why later versions of Buddhism might not be superior in various ways to earlier versions).
Recommendations for the general reader.
For those most interested mainly in learning what I think it might mean to practice the transformative spirituality taught in early Buddhist writings, the most relevant essays in the section will be Early Buddhism Overview (1) and Early Buddhism Overview (2), the essay on I and My Identity and the essay on Mindfulness Meditation.
Other essays engage in detailed discussions explaining the textual basis for specific aspects of my interpretation, especially those that are relatively unique and might be regarded by others as controversial.
Mindfulness in the Satipatthana Sutta is a detailed textual analysis of the section of the Pali Canon which is the original scriptural source relied on by Buddhist monks in Southeast Asia in the modern period who pioneered the revival of what came to be called Mindfulness meditation. I discuss here indications given in this sutta both about the practice of this meditation as “bare awareness,” and also about how the author of this text conceives of the relation of this practice to other aspects of early Buddhist transformative spirituality.
Nibbana as “Escape from the Mind treats a number of sutta passages describing a distinctive feature of early Buddhist spirituality, in relation to some forms of Hindu and Christian spirituality. Although early Buddhist spirituality requires introspective attention to one’s on internal psychological dynamics, it accords no special value to special internal “spiritual” or “mystical” experiences. Attachment to such internal “spiritual” experiences is placed in the same category as Attachment to wealth, good looks, reputation, and other “worldly” things.
Metaphors for Nibbana in the Pali suttas consists mainly in detailed textual analysis of passages explaining various ways that early Buddhists conceptualized Nibbana (Nirvana) the goal of transformative practice.
The Pali Suttas and the Bhagavad Gita: Some Hindu/Buddhist Comparisons and Contrasts compares and contrasts the transformative spirituality taught in the Pali Canon with the transformative spirituality taught in the Bhagavad Gita, a writing from the Hindu tradition stemming from roughly the same era in Indian history as the Pali Canon.
Two Versions of the An-Atta Teaching deals with rather complicated and controversial interpretive and philosophical issues related to Buddhist teachings centering on the Pali term an-atta “not-self.” The predominant interpretation today sees this as a philosophical doctrine asserting that “there is no self.” I argue (1) that most passages interpreted as teaching this “no self” doctrine were originally probably meant instead as a warning against Attachment to some particular “identity” or self-image (a wealthy person, a parent, a teacher, etc.), on the grounds that such Attachment makes one vulnerable to deep Distress when changing circumstances make it impossible to maintain this identity (see the essay I and My Identity). I argue (2) that this latter teaching has a close relation to the transformative spirituality, the main topic of the Pali Canon, while the no-self teaching (developed mainly in later Buddhism) has no relation to this practical project at all.
Demythologizing Buddhist Afterlife Beliefs deals with early Buddhist teachings regarding kamma (karma) and reincarnation: Individuals who do not achieve Nibbana in this life will be reborn into another existence where they will be rewarded or punished for good or bad deeds committed in this life. This is a belief that cannot be supported by critical reasoning today. Neither is it essential to the early Buddhist transformative spirituality treated in the essays above. In this essay I explain how the details of this belief fit into the overall worldview of early Buddhists. This essay owes a great deal to the “demythologizing” approach developed by the New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann.
Sanskrit vs. Pali.
One final issue that needs brief treatment in this introduction to early Buddhism concerns some differences between two closely related languages, Sanskrit and Pali.
For example, many readers familiar with modern literature on Buddhism may be familar with terms like Nirvana and sutra, and thus have found unusual my use above of the terms sutta and Nibbana. These latter terms, sutta and Nibbana, are words in the Pali language, equivalent to the terms sutra and Nirvana in the Sanskrit language. In this book I use Pali terms because this is a study of early Buddhist writings which are written in Pali.
Pali and Sanskrit are closely related languages belonging to the same language family. Sanskrit later became the classical language of learning in India, and many later Buddhist classics were also written in Sanskrit. The fact that Sanskrit terms are much more familiar to modern Americans is due to an accident of history, the fact that the earliest Buddhists who came from Asia to teach in the the US belonged to Buddhist sects whose most revered writings were written in Sanskrit.
The main differences relevant in these essays are:
– sutta is the Pali equivalent of the Sanskrit term sutra.
– Nibbana is the Pali equivalent of the Sanskrit term Nirvana.
– kamma is the Pali equivalent of the Sanskrit term karma.
– dhamma is the Pali equivalent of the Sanskrit term dharma
– atta is the Pali equivalent of the Sanskrit term atman.
(These are only linguistic variations. No significance attaches to the words themselves. Nibbana is a just a linguistic variation of Nibbana, just as Scottish twae is a linguistic variation of English two.)
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