At the time this sutta takes place, Mahāpajāpati Gotami, the Buddha’s aunt and stepmother, was well along on the Path, on her way to becoming an arahant, an Awakened One. So we can be sure, when Gotami asked the Buddha to teach her the Dhamma "in brief", that she wasn’t asking for an epigram or a Cliff’s Notes version of the Four Noble Truths. Rather, she was planning to go on a solitary retreat, where she would find a secluded place (the Buddha recommended, in a number of places in the teachings, "an empty hut or the root of a tree"), where she would spend the better part of each day in meditation. And she was asking the Buddha to give her something that would be proper to meditate upon: something brief enough that she could remember it, yet rich enough in meaning that contemplating it would lead her to a deeper understanding of the fundamentals of the Buddhadhamma:

• that all experience is dukkha (pain, frustration, dissatisfaction, anguish, dismay, unreliability—no single English word can translate dukkha);
• that the cause of dukkha is craving, craving for permanence in an impermanent world, craving an unchanging Essence in a world that is fundamentally contingent and in constant flux;
• that dukkha will cease to the extent that we are able to abandon craving;
• and that the way to abandon craving was to embody eight ennobling qualities in our lives—qualities of penetrating understanding, of ethical action, and of constant and unflinching awareness.

Scrutinizing Tools

What the Buddha gave Gotami was not, in fact, quite what she’d asked for. It is not "the Dhamma in brief", but rather a set of characteristics by which Gotami might evaluate the Dhamma that she heard in other contexts: from advice she received from other members of the Sangha, from gossip she heard around the well in the villages she visited in her wandering, from teachers of other sects when she listened in on the discourses they delivered to their followers, from doctrine taught by Brahmin priests, from the folk wisdom of village headmen or their wives, from warnings or calls to action that came in the form of news carried by travelers on the road, from teaching stories passed on, often with heavy foreign accents, from merchants delivering goods from distant lands.

The first meaning of the term Dhamma is a truthful version of how things are, how things got this way, and what we should do about it. Through the course of her daily life, very much of what Gotami encountered could be considered as statement of the Dhamma in that sense. What the Buddha tells her in this sutta is that all of that, everything she hears that passes for wisdom or good advice, must be scrutinized to determine its accordance with the Dhamma taught by the Buddha; subjecting it to such scrutiny will not only help Gotami decide whether or not to accept that wisdom or advice, but will also help her understand more deeply and more profoundly the nature of the Dhamma to which she’d committed her life, the Buddhadhamma. What the Buddha gave Gotami, in this teaching, was eight specific characteristics which she could use as scrutinizing tools.

The instructions that the Buddha gave to Gotami can do the same thing for us that it did for her, that is, help us be aware of what we’re being taught through the advice we get from our friends, relatives, co-workers; through the news we see on television or read in the papers; through the pronouncements of pundits, columnists, commentators, and experts of one sort or another; through politicians and party spokespersons; through ads and PR releases from corporations, unions, PACs, or human services agencies; through the sermons preached in church on Sunday, or in temple on Saturday, or in the mosque on Friday; through statements declaring themselves as "what everybody knows", or "what people think", or "results from the most recent polls"— almost every communication we receive in the course of a day that presents itself, implicitly or explicitly, as Dhamma—

How to apply the tools

The Buddha identifies eight qualities, each with its inverse:

• Passion, or infatuation with things of the world; vs. dispassion, the absence of desire for such things
• Getting caught up in things—events, belief systems, trends—feeling trapped in your life; vs. severing your connection to such events and freeing yourself.
• Constantly acquiring more and more; vs. making do with less and less
• Putting on airs, or wishing to be noticed and respecting for your accomplishments; vs. being unassuming, lacking all pretension or pride
• Never being satisfied with how things are, but wanting them different; vs. being content, able to manage events as they come your way, ready to play the hand you’re dealt
• Needing to have people around at all times; vs. being comfortable in solitude
• Being lazy, not willing to make the effort that a difficult task requires, enjoying idleness; vs. maintaining a high level of energy and being willing to tackle even big jobs with all you’ve got.
• Being evasive, perhaps a little sneaky, somewhat resentful of others and not revealing that; vs. being forthright and open.

I’ve expanded the telegraphic delivery of the sutta in making that list, and I’d encourage each of you to do the same for yourself. When the Buddha gave a list like the one he gave Gotami, the words he chose were deliberately evocative of a wide range of connected ideas and conditions. The list itself was designed to be easy to memorize, and I’d encourage you to do that as well. Just remember, what you’re memorizing is a set of pointers, which will point to something in your life that’s different from what those same words might point to in someone else’s life. (For the same reasons, the particular translation you use for your memorization exercise doesn’t matter all that much. What we’re after here is the most wide-ranging and evocative understanding, and not a precisely accurate translation of the Pali—which would be impossible anyway.)

So, the first step in applying the Buddha’s lesson to your own life is to consider the pairs of terms and examine the range of meaning they might have in the circumstances in which you find yourself. What do the contrasting ideas of passion and dispassion, bondage and freedom, content and discontent, etc., mean to you? Not really what do they mean, but what range of meanings could they have that resonate with your life?

The next step is to apply those meanings to the messages you receive in the course of each day—the Dhamma that’s conveyed in the gossip around the office water cooler, the newspaper headlines you notice on your way to the subway, the poem your lover read to you last night, the pronouncements of Oprah’s most recent guest, the self-help book at the top of the Times’ Best-Seller list, the sermon you heard in church, the advice your mother gave you when you called to tell her what Lizzie or Josh had done at school. You get the point.

Just get in the habit of seeing all of that as versions of the Dhamma. Once you can see that, you can then begin to ask yourself, "If I take this to heart, will it lead me to want something I don’t have now, or can never have, or will it help me accept the reality of my life?" And if it’s the latter, will that acceptance come with a sigh of resignation, a feeling of bitterness and defeat, or will this Dhamma help me attain a level of equanimity that maintains my good will, my sense of humor, my appreciation of irony? That kind of questioning is what the Buddha called "scrutiny", and it is a major factor in the path to Enlightenment. And you can do it with each of the pairs in the list the Buddha gave to Gotami. In fact, you must do it with each of those qualities; you must scrutinize each new Dhamma you’re given in the world, if you are to know which of those Dhammas will help you create the Buddha’s noble Path in your life.

Practice

Many of you, whether you think of yourselves as Buddhists or not, practice some form of meditation—you may call it something other than meditation: prayer, yoga, worship. It’s a practice aimed at increasing your mindfulness, relaxing your body, centering your awareness, to the point where you begin to notice your perceptions of the world as individual experiences; you notice the thoughts those evoke in your mind, and you let all that pass without getting wrapped up in it. That’s a good practice, and a good beginning.

Following on the advice that the Buddha gave to Gotami, you might add something to that practice. Prepare yourself, before you sit down to meditate, by considering just one of the pairs of conditions that the Buddha gave to Gotami as criteria for evaluating the Dhamma she heard from the world. Now, once you’ve reached a state of meditative relaxation, practice scrutinizing what you’ve heard through the course of the last couple of days as Dhamma teachings. Play back each experience, recognize what there was in it that presumed to present an understanding of the world or of our human condition, how that condition was explained, and what course of action was presented, either explicitly or by implication, as the right course to follow. In each case, did the Dhamma you heard lead you toward the Buddhadhamma or did it lead in the opposite direction? And given the results of your scrutiny, what course should you follow with regard to the Dhamma you heard and with regard to the source of that Dhamma?

If you follow such a practice, I think you’ll be surprised to realize how many events present themselves as sources, in one way or another, of the Dhamma. And I think you’ll be doubly surprised at how many of those presentations of the Dhamma lead to ways of understanding and paths of action that are contrary to the Buddhadhamma, that lead you to a greedy involvement with things of the world, that offer false promises of happiness, that lead you toward discontent rather than contentment, toward anger and resentment rather than peace and joy, toward hurtful or deceitful or harmful speech or action rather than benevolence and honesty.

What to do then

If something is pressing wrong view upon you—something that you do regularly, time and again, in the course of your normal life—that poses problems. Even if you recognize the wrong view, continual exposure to it can wear you down. And if, as many of us believe, wrong view leads to craving, out of which dukkha emerges, then steps must be taken to prevent yourself from being infected by the wrong view to which you’re exposed.

Obviously, one step is to avoid exposure. Be more cautious about the movies you choose to see; stop watching that particular TV show; close the book as soon as you recognize where it’s heading and return it to the library; stay away from the water cooler when the woman who speaks so foolishly or maliciously is there. But considering the ubiquitous nature of wrong view, it’s difficult to avoid exposure to it completely. Consider these other steps:

• Keep practicing. Put the focus of your practice, not only on identifying how the experience you contemplate presents false Dhamma, but on how and why it’s false, and how you might expose it and counter the advice it offers in discussion. When you next encounter that particular experience, be prepared to watch for the expression of wrong view and call it out, at least mentally. Make the experience one, not of absorbing an experience, but of conducting a dialogue with it, offering what you understand as true Dhamma to the false Dhamma proposed by the experience.
• Speak out. Let other people with whom you share an experience, people you care for, know what you see in the experience: what false lessons it presents, what wrong attitudes and behavior it promotes, and what, under such conditions, constitute right attitudes and right behavior. If the situation calls for it, write a letter to the editor or to your congressperson; make an appointment to question your pastor about that misleading sermon; tell your friend, as gently and lovingly as you can, where and why you disagree with what she said, and what you believe to be true about the situation you were discussing and what you believe to be the right response to that situation, given your understanding of it—work to find common ground.
• Develop "skillful means". This is a term often used to describe how the Buddha encountered and disarmed false Dhamma. When you encounter such Dhamma, don’t respond in a spirit of hostility and open argument. Rather, recognize that those with whom you are discussing the situation are well-meaning and, very likely, want the same kind of world that you want and the same things for themselves and their children as you want for yourself and yours. Help them see how the conditions that exist bring about the emergence of the situation that they understand wrongly, and how the situation would change if the conditions were to change. When you alter the focus of the discussion from "what is" to "how it got this way", you open the way for the kind of analysis that the Buddha delivered so skillfully, an analysis in accord with the true Dhamma. For help in developing skillful means, read the teachings, especially those in the Pali Canon, and watch how the Buddha responds to questioners who come to him with false views.
• Finally, re-evaluate your habits. Perhaps it is, after all, possible to give up the kind of experience that exposes you to false views and, very likely, raises your blood pressure. Stop watching the worst of the TV shows; stop going to the blockbuster movies; don’t watch Oprah; don’t spend so much time at the water cooler. And use the time you save to improve your understanding of the true Dhamma; read good books about Buddhism; visit Buddhist sanghas that you haven’t been to or haven’t visited recently, and work to make friends with the people who are members of those sanghas. Talk with them about this exercise and see if it jibes with their experience; work with them to develop effective responses to the bad Dhamma and wrong views that our culture exposes us to (and not only us, but our children and our friends).

Whatever you choose to do, do it! Do it mindfully, do it with energetic persistence, do it, to use Gotami’s word, ardently. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t feel that our society—indeed, our civilization and perhaps even our species—is in peril. And I don’t know anything more worth doing than spreading the Buddhadhamma, the Buddha’s Path of clear understanding, ethical action, and constant awareness. The Path certainly helps each of us deal with the anxiety and fear and anger evoked by our perilous condition. If enough people come to know it and practice it, it may even work to reduce the general level of peril. The first step in spreading the true Dhamma is to recognize, call out, and reject the false Dhamma, so widely spread, that encourages greed, anger, and wishful thinking. The Buddha’s advice to Gotami gives us tools to start doing that.

To be a Buddhist is not to “believe in” Buddhist doctrine, but to practice the Buddhadhamma, the Path that the Buddha defined, the end of which is the end of suffering.

Throughout the discourses, the Buddha gave quite detailed instructions regarding that path, and how to follow it. The most comprehensive teaching regarding the meditative practice that he prescribed is the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta. In that discourse, the Buddha covers one type of meditative practice, the practice of “mindfulness”, sati in Pali; he describes a series of steps whereby a bhikkhu (or, presumably, anyone who undertakes the recommended discipline) attains to a state of steady mindfulness, so that nothing is done carelessly—no action is performed, no words uttered, no opinion formed, no feeling or perception experienced, no ideas conceived, without paying due regard to what is emerging and the ethical implications of every intentional action. Establishing such steady mindfulness of one’s situation, the diligent meditator can end the attachments that trap him in that situation minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, birth after birth. Even today, the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta is the foundational text that guides the meditation of practitioners in nearly all Buddhist traditions.

The Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta is a long discourse, and I’ve prepared a prècis of that discourse for our discussion on Tuesday. That text contains a number of references to alternative translations of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, on the web and in printed books.

Concerning meditation more generally, there are a number of audio talks by Stephen Batchelor accessible through the Dharma Seed website; in one of those, the first of eight fine lectures on the life and times of the Buddha that he delivered in the course of a 2004 meditation retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, he discusses the many different meanings of the term “meditation”. What the Buddha’s followers practiced, when they practiced one of the several disciplines that we subsume under that one term, was not what we think of when we think of meditation as a complete stilling of the mind, a state of indiscriminate bliss. Batchelor makes the case that the kind of practice recommended by the Buddha was a more energetic process, with a strong intellectual component, resulting in the attainment of a state of unforced, instinctive wisdom. His talk is very much worth listening to.