I’d like you, if you can find the time, to read the whole sutta, but I’ve marked the passages that I’d like to discuss in class, and added my gloss to those passages. The translation of the sutta that I’ve used is by Sister Vajira, a German nun, translated from the German and edited by Mr. Francis Story.

Despite the sutta’s length, I hope we can finish our discussion of it in time to devote the last half hour or 45 minutes of class to a general discussion of the experience we’ve shared over the past two months: the questions you came with, the questions you’re leaving with, the ways in which the class has changed the way you view Buddhism, the Buddha’s Dhamma, and your own experience of the world.

I look forward to seeing you on Tuesday.

Six years after he’d left home, and shortly after having achieved the goal for which he set out on the homeless live and become the Buddha, he returned to Kapilavatthu, where he was received with honor and respect. It is said that his wife, Rahula’s mother, told the boy to go to his father and ask for his inheritance. Rahula did so, and the Buddha, in response, told Sariputta to give Rahula ordination as a member of the Sangha.

In the Vinaya, we’re told that the Buddha’s father, Suddhodana, was very upset by this: “First, we lost our son, and if that weren’t bad enough, now we’ve lost our beloved grandson Rahula to the holy life. It is not right that you should allow the ordination of young children without their parents’ consent.” The Buddha saw the justice in his father’s complaint, gathered the monks together, and pronounced a new rule for the Sangha: no one under 16 should be accepted as a novice, and no one under 20 should receive full ordination without his parents’ consent.

That rule, of course, was too late for Rahula, who entered the Sangha as an ordained bhikkhu, under the special protection and tutelage of Sariputta, the Buddha’s favorite disciple. We are told that Rahula was a model monk, constantly working on his practice, “the foremost of those seeking guidance in his practice.” There are several stories in the canon in which either the Buddha or Rahula seek one another out for special teaching. The sutta we will discuss on Tuesday is the first.

The commentaries, as far as I am aware, give no back story to the Ambalatthika-rahulovada Sutta, but, having been the father of a seven-year-old boy, it’s not difficult for me to imagine that word reached the Buddha that Rahula had been telling some tall tales, and that report occasioned the Buddha’s visit to the young monk.

Whatever might have occasioned it, it is a beautiful story, in which the Buddha shows himself, once again, as someone gentle, compassionate, and imaginative. This is not preaching, it is instruction, and it is, moreover, instruction that we all need at some point in our lives. And seven years old is probably not a bad point to receive it.

I hope that you have a chance, not only to read Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s exceptionally graceful translation of this sutta, but also to listen to his reading of it on the SuddaReadings.net website (click to listen; right-click or control-click to download as an MP3 file that you can import into iTunes). Thanissaro has a rich and resonant voice, and one can imagine that one is listening to the Buddha himself. The Sutta Readings website, while it doesn’t seem to have been updated in a while, has a rich variety of material on it. (One other reading you might want to listen to when you visit the site is Sally Clough’s reading of the Satipatthana Sutta (click to read; right-click or control-click to download the MP3 file), the discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness; that is the sutta we will be discussing next week, and Sally Clough does a particularly wonderful job of reading it.)

Finally, here’s a link to a website that has collected, it seems, just about every legend concerning Rahula that is recorded in the Pali texts. Despite the miraculous nature of some of these, and despite the fact that the very idea of a 7-year-old boy entering the life of an ascetic contemplative is foreign to our current notions of proper child-rearing, the accumulation of detail in the legends presented here give us a picture of a young man who was, while rather more serious than most, was still what we’d call today “well-adjusted” and successful in the pursuit of his goals in life.

A typical Buddhist group session—a sitting or a dharma talk—opens with the participants “taking the three refuges”:

I take refuge in the Buddha
I take refuge in the Dhamma
I take refuge in the Sangha

For a second time, I take refuge in the Buddha
For a second time, I take refuge in the Dhamma
For a second time, I take refuge in the Sangha

For a third time, I take refuge in the Buddha
For a third time, I take refuge in the Dhamma
For a third time, I take refuge in the Sangha

That’s not like a religious person taking refuge in God, or in Jesus. It’s more like an expression of confidence:

• I have confidence that the Buddha did, in fact, achieve awakening to a set of truths that are hard to see and important to know if we wish to lead a fulfilled life.
• I have confidence that his formulation of those truths, and of the Path that will allow us to realize their benefits in our lives here and now, is comprehensible and practical; I can understand those truths, and I can follow that Path, and, if I do, I will be better off.
• I have confidence that the community of those who have followed the Buddhadhamma over the centuries—not only Buddhist monks and nuns, but committed and diligent lay followers—has developed a body of techniques and guidance teachings within which I can find the particular words and practices that resonate with my unique condition and can help me reach the goal of liberation that the Buddha claimed as the essence of his teaching.

In session 3 of the Topics course, we will review, briefly, the first two refuges, and we will look into the meaning of the third from several points of view; we will look at the historical development of the sangha, at the role of the sangha within Buddhist doctrine, and at the nature of the sangha today, both in traditionally Buddhist cultures and in our Western society.

Session 2 is the only session in which both the Topics course and the Teachings course will be dealing with the same subject—the Buddha’s first Discourse, Turning the Wheel of the Law, The Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta. We’ll take a different approach to that Discourse in each class, sufficiently different, I would hope, so that those who are in both courses will not be bored or find the two classes repetitive.

In the Teachings class, we’ll look at the events leading up to Gotama Siddhatta’s Awakening as the Buddha, his formulation of his enlightenment experience as the Dhamma—the set of regularities and fundamental principles that determine how processes and events emerge from precedent conditions; essentially, the “natural law” that governs not only events in the physical world but also the course of our human lives and the progress of our well-being. We will then focus our attention on how that Dhamma was articulated in this first teaching and how it must have been received by its audience, the five monks, all born into the Brahmin caste, who had been Siddhatta’s companions during the period when he was practicing a path of austerity and extreme renunciation.

In the Topics class, we’ll cover those same subjects much more telegraphically, and then spend much of our time looking into the philosophical implications of the truths enunciated by the Buddha; we’ll look in more detail at the multiple ways in which he applied the concept of a “Middle Way”, and we’ll examine in some detail the particulars of the Eightfold Path.

Prior to both classes, it would be good if you could find the time to read two documents:

• The Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta itself, both the rendering I have supplied, and the more literal translations that are linked to from that document. This is, after all, the most fundamental text in Buddhism, and it would be a good idea to see how different translators have handled some of the difficult technical terms it introduces.
• An essay I wrote some time ago, borrowing extensively from material on Access to Insight, on the Buddha’s Early Life and Development. Essentially, the events covered in this essay take us from Siddhatta’s birth right up to the point at which he is ready to deliver the Dhammacakkappavatthana Sutta.

For the Topics course, I’d also recommend that you take a look at a precîs I prepared of a long piece by Bhikkhu Bodhi on the subject of the Eightfold Path. The original is on Access to Insight; there’s a link to the original in the precîs if you want the whole story.

Another superb resource, especially for those of you with mp3 players (iPods or the like), is the strong selection of talks by Stephen Batchelor at DharmaSeed.org. Stephen has visited Spirit Rock Insight Meditation Center in Marin County every other year since 2005, and all of his seminar talks are available from that site. I attended the retreat he led this past November, and it was a thrilling experience. In particular relation to the topics we discussed this past week and that we will be discussing this coming week, I recommend talks #1, #2, and #3 from the 2007 retreat. Go to this page; if you just want to listen on the computer, you can click on the “Stream” button; if you want to download the audio file to your computer for transfer to your player, right-click on the “Download” button.

I’ve created and compiled a set of maps that can help us with that understanding; the maps will be useful in both courses, and it would be good to print them out, especially the second one—the political map—and bring the printed map(s) to class with you.

• Topographical Image of the Indian Subcontinent. This image is taken from Google Earth, and it’s based on satellite photography. I’ve deliberately not added any labels, place names, country borders, etc., but I have provided some notes that might help you use the image to provide context for the teachings and topics we will be studying through the coming weeks.
• Political Map of the Buddha’s India. This one covers the part of India in which the Buddha conducted his teaching and puts names and markers on the places that were important in his long life. We’ll be referring to this map frequently in the Teachings course, and in the first class of the Topics course.
• A list of maps available on the Internet.These might help you get some idea of how Buddhism has grown historically and where it stands now in relation to the other spiritual traditions that inform people about how to live rightly.
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