Introduction.
This book tries to say what it would mean to try to practice today core teachings set forth in the earliest Buddhist writings, written down probably around 200 b.c., focusing on those teachings that promise to lead to a fundamental transformation in a person’s internal psychological dynamics.
This will be a somewhat unusual book, mainly because the combination of skills and perspective I bring to this task are somewhat unusual.
That is, this book is both the product of serious scholarship trying to recover the original meaning of the earliest Buddhist writings available to us. This is my expertise as an academic scholar, having published works on early Christian writings, early Daoist writings, and on the writings of Plato.
But it is also the product of my personal attempts to figure out what it would mean concretely for people such as myself and university students I taught for 30+ years, to try to practice these teachings in the context of a life lived in the modern world very different from the kind of life lived by individuals by whom and for whom the material in these writings were first composed and written down.
Chapters to follow will be organized around five basic sets of ideas representing core teachings central to transformative practice.
Chapter One: Impermanence, Attachment, and Suffering.
All teachings central to early Buddhist transformative practice can be seen as elaborations on three central ideas: impermanence, Attachment, and Suffering. In a world where all conditions are Impermanent, inflexible Attachment to some particular conditions makes a person vulnerable to Suffering when conditions change. Not just any kind of suffering, but emotional Distress at being deprived of something one is attached to. Conversely, the most common description of the inner transformation which is the goal of Buddhist practice is that it is “the cessation of Distress” brought about by ridding oneself of inflexible Attachments.
Chapter Two. Core ideas described in Chapter One apply not only to the external world, but to your own inner mental/emotional life.
There is no reason to turn away from the external world to some supposedly more “spiritual” world inside oneself. Internal feeling-states like peace and bliss are just as Impermanent and liable to change beyond control as conditions in the external world. Attachment to particular internal feeling-states is potentially just as Distress-causing as Attachment to conditions in the external world.
Chapter Three. Conditions and events in the world, both external and internal, are governed by impersonal laws of cause-and-effect.
First, get used to the idea that the world does not care about you. Live in the expectation that the world will not treat you as you think you deserve. When upsetting events happen, don’t take things personally.
Secondly, You might think that you can be in control of your own internal feelings. But so long as you have not made significant progress in ridding yourself of Attachments, these Attachments will cause involuntary reactions also governed by impersonal forces beyond your control.
Chapter Four: Rid yourself of Attachment to a particular Identity.
Attachment includes Attachment to a particular “identity” or self-image you need to maintain as you present yourself to the world—as good-looking, as wealthy, as competent, as deserving recognition and approval from significant others, as playing well a certain role in the world, and so on. But this makes you vulnerable to Distress when conditions change making it impossible to maintain this identity. Progress on the Buddhist path would show itself in your recognition that changing circumstances might call on you to adapt and to play very different roles in the world as you go through life, as a person who has lost their wealth and good looks, a person no longer looked up to by particular significant others, a person not able to do what they used to be able to do, and so on.
Chapter Five. Mindfulness Meditation.
Ridding yourself of deeply rooted Attachments cannot be done only by changing your behavior or controlling your emotions. Early Buddhist writings offer a particular meditation practice which if practiced regularly promises to help bring about the more fundamental internal transformation required. This practice consists in “bare awareness,” practice in being a neutral observer of whatever is happening in the world or in your own inner life. Since most of your reactions are governed by instinctive and involuntary desires and aversions, the way to begin freeing yourself is to become practiced at not reacting at all. Ideally, this will carry over into your everyday life, enabling you to respond to situations as a free and independent person, free of self-centered Attachments, able to flexibly adapt to changing circumstances and try to find and do the best thing you can do under any circumstance that occurs.
Chapter Six. Some Theory.
Early Buddhist writings claim that achieving the internal transformation outlined above puts you in the most “sublime” state possible to human beings. How should we understand this claim? Is it a claim that can be supported by good reasons, or must it be taken “on faith”? Is it possible to practice these teachings in a way that would clearly not raise one’s life to a higher level? This chapter considers these questions in the broader context of a more general theory of similar claims by other religions, that practice of some given religion will raise a person’s life to a “higher” level.
Appendix. Particular interpretation problems presented by early Buddhist writings.
Early Buddhist writings are written in a style that presents special problems for interpretation. Consider for example typical passages describing the so-called “Four Noble Truths. Typical passages say that the Buddha or someone else “understood as it really is”
This is suffering.
This is the cause of suffering.
This is the cessation of suffering
This is the path to the cessation of suffering.
This passage conveys very little useful information to a general audience interested in learning about Buddhist teachings. It mentions suffering but doesn’t say what kind of suffering Buddhism addresses. It mentions a cause of suffering, but does not say what is the cause. I mentions the cessation of suffering and a path to this cessation, but doesn’t give any more information about exactly how to bring an end to suffering, and what it would be like to live a life free of suffering.
In fact most of the core teachings mentioned above are presented in passages exhibiting this same style. Why this style?
I think the best explanation is that succinct verbal compositions like this were not written for the general public. Most likely they were originally composed by teachers in small Buddhist communities to be memorized by students and recited when asked. These students would have been gaining detailed knowledge of community teachings concerning suffering, the cause of suffering, and how to bring about the cessation of suffering, and so on, through training and participation in community exercises. These compositions were probably passed down orally in Buddhist communities for several centuries before they came to be incorporated in the writings that have come down to us.
For us today, I think this means that we should treat passages like this as something like a “skeleton,” conveying to us some particular set of concepts essential to the early Buddhist message in “bare bones” form. Members of early Buddhist communities would have learned to “flesh out” this skeleton through participation in community life under the direction of more experienced teachers. For us today, putting flesh on the bare bones offered in these writings is something we have to attempt to do for ourselves—something I have tried to do in this book, which necessarily involves often making conjectures and educated guesses in the basis of less than satisfactory textual evidence.
Pieces of a picture-puzzle.
Another feature of early Buddhist writings that makes our task difficult today, was once expressed by a very learned translator-monk who compared our interpretive task to a case where someone is presented with a bag of jigsaw-puzzle pieces, unaccompanied usual picture on the box giving some idea of how the pieces are supposed to go together to form a picture. That is, not only do early Buddhist writings give us only the “bare bones” of teachings, but there is no single writing which tells us how all the individual ideas involved are supposed to go together to form a coherent system of ideas. This is another problem which every interpreter must face.
One illustration of this last point concerns different assumptions interpreters make about the overall purpose of early Buddhist teachings. One very common way of answering this question today, especially among academics like myself, is to interpret these teachings as “Buddhist philosophy”—understanding this to mean that these teachings claim to be teaching us objective truths about “the nature of reality.”
It is certainly possible to put together the puzzle pieces in such a way as to produce a consistent picture that someone might regard as a picture of reality as it is. And proponents of this approach can appeal to passages in early Buddhism that support it, such as the frequently repeated claim that some particular teaching represent things yatha bhutam, “things as they are.”
I have chosen a different approach here, putting the puzzle pieces together in such a way that together they represent a coherent practical strategy for bringing about what I will call an internal transformation, a fundamental restructuring of normal human psychological dynamics, which will result in a fundamentally different way of being in the world and relating to the world.
Interpreted in this way, early Buddhism more closely represents what we call “therapy” than it does academic “philosophy” today. The main difference between Buddhism and therapy is that therapy is often thought to be useful in the case of people with “problems” preventing them from leading a “normal” life, the purpose then being to bring them back to a state of normalcy. Buddhism on the other hand regards the “normal” state of human beings as riddled with problems, a kind of psychological sickness for which the practice of Buddhist teaching offers a cure, a cure which would raise a person’s life to a level substantially higher than what we usually regard as human normalcy. The question as to what “higher” means in this context is an issue I will discuss in Chapter Six.
