Kindle Notes & Highlights
Even the most learned adults are likely to be frightened by these doctrines.
first set of verses, ‘High Status and Definite Goodness’,
‘high status’, by which he means rebirth in a state of happiness within saṃsāra
Nāgārjuna’s advice to the king on ethical matters was the theme of the first volume of this commentary, published as Living Ethically. This second volume goes on to consider the verses of the Ratnamālā that deal with teachings on wisdom and emptiness, which Nāgārjuna calls doctrines of ‘definite goodness’. This shifts the emphasis away from high status within saṃsāra towards liberation from saṃsāra altogether.
Nāgārjuna based his teachings on the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras, which he is said to have obtained from the nāgas, the wise serpent kings, and brought back from their palace in the depths of the ocean.
the Madhyamaka is always described as the ‘profound Madhyamaka’.
As the teachings of the Yogācāra are said to have been brought back ‘from on high’ in this way, they are described as sublime.
Faith is not so much belief as a heartfelt response to the spiritually attractive.
The Madhyamaka tradition is renowned for the relentlessness of its logic and for the subtlety with which it is able, from the perspective of śūnyatā (emptiness), to undermine all concepts, all notions of a stable or concrete reality. It may come as a surprise, therefore, to find that Nāgārjuna begins his treatise with an expression of heartfelt devotion to the Buddha.
the beginning of faith, in the sense of a heartfelt response to the spiritually attractive.
According to Aristotle friendship is a virtue, and therefore only the virtuous can be true friends.
Likewise, the spiritual community, by virtue of its connection with transcendental ideals, can be broadly trusted to provide you with what you need, even if it is not always what you want.
Mahāvīra,7 the founder of Jainism, who in the Pāli scriptures is called Nāṭaputta. For example, he was said to know the exact number of leaves on any particular tree.
However, the Buddha said quite clearly that he did not possess this kind of knowledge.
He was not all-knowing in the sense that he literally knew everything. All he claimed was that he knew nirvāṇa and the path leading to nirvāṇa, and he knew what helped and what hindered one as one sought to follow that path. In other words, the Buddha’s was a spiritual omniscience, and this is what Nāgārjuna means when he salutes him as sarva-jña.
he has seen the ‘builder of the house’.
He knows the true nature of all things. He also knows how illusory any kind of knowledge – except this direct cognizance of reality – really is. The Buddha’s all-seeing knowledge is not concerned with the objects of ego-consciousness so much as with knowledge of what that ego-consciousness really amounts to.
spiritual realization is quite compatible with scientific ignorance, and when the one is expressed through the medium of the other, it is important to distinguish between the two, and not to feel that in order to benefit from the teaching we have to swallow the scientific ignorance with it.
In other words, he could have a deep spiritual understanding of the motor car without any mechanical understanding of it whatsoever.
If a scientist speaks in favour of the spiritual life or Buddhism or meditation, that will enhance their standing in the eyes of many people.
It is not as though there is an absolutely established body of scientific truth that everyone can accept.
More importantly, any appeal on behalf of a spiritual tradition to scientific or any other authority comes
from being unsure of one...
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the assumption that spiritual knowledge is related in some way to mundane knowledge,
Buddhism can only be understood by virtue of spiritual insight, and spiritual insight has nothing to do with intellectual understanding.
So from a spiritual point of view, how much intellectual knowledge of the Dharma do we need?
Buddhism traditionally makes a distinction between what is termed the dhammānusārin, the ‘doctrine follower’, and the saddhānusārin, the ‘faith follower’, and it seems that people belong to one or the other of these types. For the faith follower, personal contact with the teacher is much more important than study. Faith followers are not inclined to bother with studying the Dharma much beyond the personal precepts and instructions that their teacher gives them; they are not concerned to learn more than a few basic principles that they can put into practice personally. The doctrine follower, by
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The two approaches do not seem to combine naturally in the same person, and most people are clearly either one or the other.
Doctrine followers at their best have broad sympathies, while faith followers at their best are deep and intense.
The risk for doctrine followers is that they may become too wide in their sympathies, spreading themselves too thinly and thus becoming shallow in their practice. Meanwhile, faith followers run the risk of becoming too narrow, even a little fanatical, and unable to understand people with very different ways of practising the Dharma.
Wisdom is not a cognitive as distinct from an emotional faculty. One cannot speak of wisdom in terms either of ‘knowing’ or of ‘feeling’. It is both, once it is experienced at a high enough level. It is an intuitive understanding and also an intuitive feeling. In other words, at a higher level there is no real distinction between faith and wisdom, or devotion and understanding.
the Buddha is described not as speaking about the Dharma, but as speaking Dharma.
it is through faith that you are able to commit yourself to the practices and it is through the practices that you achieve high status. It is then through wisdom that you attain definite goodness and break the hold on your mind of the desire for happiness and high status.
To understand the true relationship between faith and wisdom we do well to consider the teaching of the five spiritual faculties.11 Here, faith and wisdom are equal and coordinate, each balancing the other, without any suggestion that faith is somehow less important than wisdom.
perhaps here he should be paraphrased as follows: It is through confidence that one comes to rely on the practices, which will then bring about the arising of wisdom joined with faith, by which ‘one truly knows’. Of these two, wisdom joined with faith is the chief, and confidence secondary, even though confidence is needed in order to bring the higher spiritual quality of wisdom/faith into being.
Faith is also needed to counteract spiritual ignorance, by which I mean an essentially emotional resistance to spiritual practice under the guise of a pseudo-objective depreciation of its value.
The immediate benefit that we can expect from Buddhist practice is not that it will make us happier and more contented or even psychologically healthy, at least not in the way that we normally think of these qualities. What we can hope for is that it will help us to be more emotionally positive, though in a refined sense. Taking up Buddhism should help us become more interested in other people, more able to empathize with them, more willing to rejoice in other people’s happiness, and less likely to fall into states of dejection or elation as the result of everyday circumstances. Above all, it
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faith is not mere belief in this or that doctrine; it is a response of delight and fascination, much more like one’s emotional response to a beautiful painting or piece of music or landscape.
It may be necessary at a very early stage to grit your teeth and carry on regardless, but you should not accept that this is just the way things are. You should always be looking to emerge into a feeling of happiness about what you are doing. If there’s no joy in your spiritual life, there’s no faith either. Without joy, there may be belief, but no faith.
our Christian conditioning may encourage us to think of the spiritual life as essentially sweat, grind and struggle, and this is no basis for the arising of faith in the true sense of the term.
If there is one thing above all others that is lacking in Western Buddhism it is perhaps the atmosphere of joy that we find in the older Buddhist texts and in traditional Buddhist societies.
The spiritual life is sometimes like that: you may be experiencing real suffering, and at the same time you have never been so happy in your life. This is happiness in a deeper sense than mere pleasurable feeling – it is the happiness that comes from faith. The way of life to which this faith leads you may sometimes be difficult, but you know in your heart of hearts that you are on the right track.
‘I am not, I will not be. I have not, I will not have’, That frightens all children And kills fear in the wise.
The doctrine of definite goodness is what we might call Buddhism proper, or the true Dharma. This is the essence of the matter: no ‘I’, and therefore no ‘mine’.
The ordinary person will take this as meaning ‘You simply don’t exist’, and that must surely be seen as a very terrible thing.
It is rather that you do not exist in the way you think you do.
far from being a threat, to the wise this doctrine ‘kills fear’. All fear, after all, arises out of one’s desire to preserve and protect the ego.
It is subtle and elusive.
there is another life behind your normal waking existence. It is easy to forget this other life, but we return to it again and again when we dream;
it certainly provides daily evidence for the fact that the mind is not limited to ordinary waking consciousness.
