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The very fact that a core practice of an ancient world religion can be shown through clinical trials to be effective irrespective of whether one is a Buddhist raises fundamental questions about the nature of Buddhism itself. Is this tradition best characterized as a religion? Or did it start out as a practical philosophy and mutate into a religion? Might we still be able to recover from the teachings of the Buddha a vision of human flourishing that is secular rather than religious in orientation yet without compromising the integrity of the dharma?
Without differentiating between teachings that address issues specific to the beliefs of the ancient world and those that address what it means to be fully human irrespective of cultural or historical context, one will lack a solid basis on which to develop a Buddhist vision for our times.
Such a quest is nothing new. Each time Buddhism has entered into a new cultural sphere, it has faced the same challenge. As a result, every tradition that has come down to us from Asia is founded on a different set of foundational Buddhist texts and over time has constructed its own canon.
the Buddha (c. 480–c. 400 BCE), the man we simply know as Gotama (the forename “Siddhattha”—“the one who has realized his goal”—
is an epithet not mentioned in the discourses).
I have long been puzzled why Buddhists of all traditions unhesitatingly describe themselves as followers of the Buddha yet ignore or disparage the discourses that are most likely to go back to him, put into his mouth sayings and views that emerged centuries after his death, regard a mythic account of his life as biography, and accept a comically idealized picture of what he looked like.
Trevor Ling’s The Buddha and Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli’s The Life of the Buddha. Whereas the former sought to understand Gotama and his teaching in the context of the social, economic, and religious conditions of fifth century BCE India, the latter recounted the story of his life entirely on the basis of texts within the Pali Canon. Together, these works introduced me for the first time to a human being, rather than a quasi-god, who had lived and died on this same earth on which I also walked.
It took me a long time to differentiate the myth of the Buddha from the story of the man called Gotama.
The problem lies not in the myth itself but in mistaking the myth for historical fact. (It would be just as mistaken to reject the myth on the grounds that it is historically inaccurate.) The mythic and historical narratives are both legitimate in their respective spheres. One does not need to choose between them.
One group of monks charged with this task migrated from northeast India over a few generations to Sri Lanka, while the other remained in the northern parts of the subcontinent. Today, by comparing the discourses in Pali preserved in Sri Lanka with a
Chinese translation (the Āgamas) of the now lost Sanskrit original preserved in northern India, we find an extraordinary degree of concordance. They are indisputably versions of the same original material. It is here, among these texts, that I engage in dialogue with Gotama. And I do so with a degree of confidence that something close to the words I read were initially spoken by this man or one of his immediate followers.
What strikes me here is how Gotama presents his awakening as a radical, existential shift in perspective rather than a privileged, mystical insight into the nature of “reality.”
While conditioned arising discloses the causal unfolding of life, nirvana discloses the possibility of a life no longer determined by one’s reactivity or habitual inclinations.
Where one can see clearly and decide on the more skillful course of action
As a practitioner, the task is to stabilize attention on the fluid, unpredictable, and contingent nature of experience as the ground that enables one to take ethical choices that are not conditioned by habitual reactive patterns of greed, hatred, and self-centeredness.
Perfect!!!!!!!! What a wonderful summarization
a series of four tasks: to comprehend dukkha, to let go of reactivity, to behold the stopping of reactivity (i.e., nirvana), and to cultivate the eightfold path.
However one translates these particular terms, it remains the case that by seeing conditioned arising and nirvana, Gotama was liberated from his prior attachments to embark on a way of life that was no longer determined by them.
Even if the place/ground distinction is not explicit in the text, it serves as an effective way to highlight this shift in perspective
from a life governed by attachments to one founded on a vision of conting...
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Feuerbach argued that the function of religion was to project the essential human qualities of reason, love, and will onto the nonhuman and transcendent figure of God, who then becomes an object of worship. As a result of this transference: “In
proportion as God becomes more ideally human, the greater becomes the apparent difference between God and man. To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must become nothing.”23 Since God is merely “the projected essence of man,”24 if people are to recover their true humanity, Feuerbach maintains that they need to reclaim their essential nature from the God onto whom they have projected it.
As the dharma evolved into another Indian religion, Gotama lost his humanity and turned into the godlike figure of Śākyamuni Buddha. At the same time the human qualities of reason, love, and will were projected, respectively, onto the godlike bodhisattvas Mañjuśrī, Avalokiteśvara, and Vajrapāṇi.
Gotama’s ironic atheism and emphasis on self-reliance have given way to the kind of devotion and dependency that Feuerbach regards as the essence of religious behavior.
No matter how radical the reform of a religious tradition, over time the new and vibrant school tends to coalesce into yet another orthodoxy and hierarchic institution.
Discarding all elements of supernaturalism and magical thinking, one returns to the mystery and tragedy of the everyday sublime.30
Instead of nirvana being located in a transcendent
realm beyond the human condition, it would be restored to its rightful place at the heart of what it means...
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Enlightenment is not a transcendent mystical rapture but an ethical experience that reveals the nature of the existential dilemma and the way to its resolutioṇ
This does not mean that we would then have to adopt his (or, heaven forbid, Evola’s)
views rather than our own, but simply that we would have stepped free of one more “thicket of views,” thus enabling a clearer vision of how to proceed along a path whose ultimate destination we cannot know.
Although doctors and therapists who employ mindfulness in a medical setting deliberately avoid any reference to Buddhism, you do not have to be a rocket scientist to figure out where it comes from. A Google search will tell you that mindfulness is a form of Buddhist meditatioṇ
it opens a new perspective on how to come to terms with the totality of one’s existence, that is, birth, sickness, aging, death, and everything else that falls under the broad heading of what the Buddha called dukkha.
not necessarily easy) step of standing back and mindfully attending to one’s experience rather than being uncritically overwhelmed with the imperatives of habitual thoughts and emotions can allow a glimpse of an inner freedom not to react to what one’s mind is insisting that one do. The experience of such inner freedom, I would argue, is a taste of nirvana itself.
Yet for those who have grown up outside of Indian culture, who feel at home in a modernity informed by the natural sciences, to then be told that one cannot “really” practice the dharma unless one adheres to the tenets of ancient Indian soteriology makes little sense.
To use an analogy from the world of computers, the traditional forms of Buddhism are like software programs that run on the same operating system. Despite their apparent differences, Theravāda, Zen, Shin, Nichiren, and Tibetan Buddhism share the same underlying soteriology, that of ancient India outlined above. These diverse forms of Buddhism are like “programs” (e.g., word processing, spreadsheets, Photoshop, etc.) that run on an “operating system” (a soteriology), which I will call “Buddhism 1.0.” At first sight, it would seem that the challenge facing the dharma as it enters modernity would
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On what grounds would such a Buddhism 2.0 be able to claim that it is “Buddhism” rather than something else altogether? Clearly, it would need to be founded upon canonical source texts, be able to offer a coherent interpretation of
key practices, doctrines, and ethical precepts, and to provide a sufficiently rich and integrated theoretical model of the dharma to serve as the...
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But without making such an effort, I believe the dharma might find itself condemned to an increasingly marginal existence in mainstream culture, catering only to those who are willing to embrace the worldview of ancient India. Whatever potential the teachings of the Buddha could have for making positive contributions to many of the pressing issues of our saeculum may thereby be minimized if not realized at all.
The history of Buddhism is the history of its own ongoing interpretation and representation of itself.
every historical form of Buddhism is contingent upon the wide array of particular and unique circumstances out of which it arose. The idea that one such school has somehow succeeded in preserving intact what the Buddha taught whereas all the others have failed is no longer credible. Whether we like it or not, Buddhism has become irrevocably plural.
At the same time, each generation has the right and duty to reinterpret the teachings that it has inherited. In doing so, we may discover meanings in these texts that speak lucidly to our own saeculum but of which the original authors and their successors may have been unaware.
On a closer analysis of this discourse, however, certain incongruities appear in the fabric of the text. The First Discourse cannot be treated as a verbatim transcript of what the Buddha taught in the Deer Park, but as a document that has evolved over an unspecified period of time until it reached the form in which it is found today in the canons of the different Buddhist schools. At this point, modern historical-critical scholarship comes to our aid as a means of upsetting some of the time-honored views of Buddhist orthodoxy.
In a 1982 paper entitled “The Four Noble Truths,” Norman offers a detailed, philological analysis of The First Discourse and arrives at the startling conclusion that “the earliest form of this sutta did not include the word ariya-saccaṃ [noble truth].”2 On grammatical and syntactical grounds, he shows how the expression “noble truth” was inexpertly interpolated into the text at a later date than its original compositioṇ But since no such original text has come down to us, we cannot know what it did say. All that can reasonably be deduced is that instead of talking of four noble truths, the
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Numerous passages in the canon attest to how the Buddha refused to address the big metaphysical questions: Is the world eternal, not eternal, finite, infinite? Are the body and mind the same or different? Does one exist after death or not, or neither or both?3 Instead of getting bogged down in these arguments, he insisted on revealing a therapeutic and pragmatic path that addressed the core issue of human suffering. He recognized that one could endlessly debate the truth or falsity of metaphysical propositions without ever reaching a final conclusion and, meanwhile, fail to come to terms with
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This tendency becomes even more pronounced when “truth” is further qualified as being either an “ultimate” (paramattha) or a merely “conventional” (samutti) truth. Although this two-truth doctrine is central to the thinking of all Buddhist orthodoxies, the terms “ultimate truth” and “conventional truth” do not occur a single time in the Sutta or Vinaya Piṭakas (baskets) of the Pali Canoṇ Yet for most Buddhist schools today—including the Theravāda—enlightenment is understood as gaining direct insight into the nature of some ultimate truth.
This privileging of “truth,” I would argue, is one of the key indicators of how the dharma was gradually transformed from a liberative praxis of awakening into the religious belief system called Buddhism.
As a result of this kind of interpretation, dukkha comes to be seen as a purely subjective problem that can be “solved” by correct application of the techniques of mindfulness and meditatioṇ For dukkha is just the suffering unnecessarily added on to the inevitable pains and frustrations of life. This psychological reading turns the practice of the dharma increasingly inward, away from a concern with the pervasive dukkha of life and the world and toward an exclusive, even narcissistic, concern with subjective feelings of lack and anguish.
This does seem to happen which is why there must be a distinction between the types of dukkha, the inevitable kind (death, sickness, things not going our way) and the type we add by desperately wanting things to be different. What if we looked at it like this: inevitable dissatisfaction leads to craving for things to be different which leads to more dissatisfaction.
We have to train ourselves to the point where on hearing or reading a text from the canon our initial response is no longer “Is that true?” but “Does this work?”
Craving is repetitive, it wallows in attachment and greed, obsessively indulging in this and that: the craving of sensory desire, craving for being, craving for non-being. —THE FIRST DISCOURSE
“Craving” describes all our habitual and instinctive reactions to the fleeting, tragic, unreliable, and impersonal conditions of life that confront us. If something is pleasant, we crave to possess it; if something is unpleasant, we crave to be rid of it. The practice of mindfulness trains us to notice how this reactive pattern arises from our felt encounter with the world in such a way that we cease to be in thrall to its imperatives and are thereby liberated to think and act otherwise.
The Buddhist twelve-link model provides a
