Buddhism Situated

We are studying the oldest surviving Buddhist scriptures. Although we cannot affirm that the texts truly contain “the Buddha’s words,” as the title of Bhikkhu Bodhi’s book might suggest, we can reasonably suppose them to take us as close to the utterances of the Awakened One and his immediate followers as we are likely to get. The records compiled by the early Buddhists encourage us to reflect on the literary sources of Zen in the light of the seminal ideas contained in the Nikāyas. They, and the related movements that follow, are an important substrate of the environment from which Zen draws nourishment.

India is the original milieu of Buddhism, which was born and flourished (not long after 500 BCE) in a rich medium of social, political and religious ferment. Amongst the many small states of the central and northern subcontinent, the relatively egalitarian, clan-based and republican forms of government were giving way to feudalism. The religion of the Vedas, after millennia of decline due neglect and encroachment by indigenous gods, was on the threshold of a vigorous revival. Intellectual life was dominated by the culture of the śramanas, a society of homeless truth-seekers whose views and lifeways embraced the mystical, the speculative, and the ascetical.

The Brhadaranyaka, Jaimini Upanisadbrahmana, and the Chandogya Upanisad had almost certainly been completed before the Buddha began to teach. Many of the ideas now associated with Vedanta were already in the air. The notion, that intentional actions shape the circumstances of future lives, was worked out collectively over generations by a community of wandering philosophers and yogins that included the Buddha, his older contemporary Mahavira, leader of the Jains, and may others whose names have not come down to us. During the same period, among both śramanas and devotees of the nascent neo-Vedic religion, the principle of harmlessness (ahimsa) was taking hold across a broad spectrum of movements.

In re-reading Bhikkhu Bodhi’s selections from the Pali canon I am once again awestruck by the brilliance and power of the Dhamma. The Awakened One drew heavily upon the common mythos of the period, and incorporated many elements bequeathed to him by his own teachers, Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta. Relatively little of what the Buddha taught was unique, and yet the man changed the course of Indian, South Asian and East Asian intellectual and spiritual life in ways that were truly revolutionary and astonishingly fruitful. How did he do it?  Shakyamuni’s great gift for managing both people and ideas, and his preference for practicality over speculation, were combined with an extraordinary keenness of observation and discernment. A few items stand out as especially noteworthy.

· The institution of the Sangha, organized around a rule that was flexible enough to accommodate all manner of women and men, enabled the Dhamma to be propagated far beyond the boundaries of its original habitat.

· Paticca-samuppāda (Skt. pratītya-samutpāda), is the Buddha’s vision of experience and the world as arising from causes and conditions, interdependently (literally, “coming-to-be-dependent-upon-arising together”). It is the key conception in terms of which other components of the Dhamma—such as emptiness and non-self—can be readily understood.

· The Buddha’s method of analyzing situations in terms of causes and conditions gave him the key to dissolving certain kinds of otherwise intractable philosophical problems.

· He was able to create a conceptual scaffolding on which he could hang a great many doctrines and practices, namely, the Four Realties and the Eightfold Path of the Noble Ones, which can be schematically shown as follows:

            1. The reality of dis-ease, unsatisfactoriness, or pain

            2. The reality of the cause of dis-ease

            3. The reality of the cessation of dis-ease

            4. The Path that leads to the cessation of disease, that is

                        i.    right view or understanding

                        ii.   right attitude, intention, or motivation

                        iii.  right speech

                        iv.   right action

                        v.    right livelihood

                        vi.   right effort or application

                        vii.  right mindfulness or recollection

                        viii. right mental/emotional equipoise

Theravada tradition refers to the eight factors collectively as the Threefold Training in Insight (i. and ii.), Conduct (iii., iv., and v.) and Samādhi (vi., vii., and viii.). Notice that the first factor of the Path, right understanding, comprises (among other things) the Four Realities, while the Fourth Reality consists in the Path. All of the many occasional teachings, which we encounter piecemeal in the collections, can be plugged into that framework.