Dharma Study » practice

Knowing Right from Wrong – Reflections on the Gotami Sutta

Richard — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 21:05:42 +0000

The Gotami Sutta is short and interesting. Read it; then come back here.

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.

“in other contexts”

The renunciants who had left the home life to join the Buddha’s Sangha, known as bhikkhus and bhikkunis (male and female forms of a word that means “one who lives on alms”; the word is cognate with our English word “beggar”), spent three months of every year, during the Indian monsoon season, living communally at retreat centers which had been donated to the Sangha by the Buddha’s wealthy patrons. The rest of the year, the Sangha split up, and the bhikkhus and bhikkhunis went their separate ways, alone or in small groups, to carry the Dhamma teachings they’d received during the rains retreats to the householders in the towns and villages of Northern India. It’s the variety of experience they would have had in the course of those travels that I mean by “other contexts”.

“Dhamma“

This is the Pali spelling of the somewhat more familiar Sanskrit term Dharma. There’s a fairly elaborate explanation of the term here, along with definitions of two compound terms incorporating it, Buddhadharma and Dharmavinaya.

Meditative Practice

Richard — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 21:00:53 +0000

The Buddha’s understanding of how things unfold in this world was keen, comprehensive, and most persuasive, and his explication of that understanding throughout the discourses has a coherence and logical consistency that’s unique among the world’s spiritual traditions. But the Buddha was not a philosopher or a psychologist. The term that’s very frequently used in the canonical texts to define his role is “healer” or “physician”. The Buddha’s doctrine is not simply an explanation of how things are but a diagnosis of how events emerge in the world, an analysis of what creates the anxiety, dissatisfaction, suffering that we experience in dealing with those events, and a prescription for a path of practice that will ameliorate or even end that experience of suffering.

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.

“anyone who undertakes the recommended discipline”

Throughout the discourses, the Buddha is quite clear that the full benefits of the practice will only be realized by those who can give the practice their complete energy and concentration. Practically speaking, that means the bhikkhus and bhikkhunis, the sangha of his renunciant followers. One living as a householder has too many distractions—wives and children to care for, servants and employees to manage, farms to cultivate, accounts to keep, property to protect—to give the practice the time and devotion that it demands if it is to deliver its full benefits. But he’s also clear that even a less than perfect practice brings results in terms of a happier life, more fulfilling experience, levels of equanimity and composure that keep painful experiences from being as devastating as those experiences might be to those who do not understand the Dhamma or practice the Path.

Squidoo

Richard — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 21:49:07 +0000

I’ve written a page on the Squidoo site about the Gotami Sutta and how to integrate the lessons it teaches into your meditation practice. I just came across Squidoo a couple of days ago; it’s an interesting concept, and it looks like it might be a good way to publish stuff that’s a little bit longer, a little bit more complex, and has a slightly longer useful life span than a typical blog post, and that’s more likely to be discovered by more people than a typical Page on a minor WordPress blog like this one. Another advantage is that the links to books go to Amazon, from whom Squidoo collects a small referral fee. 5% of that fee goes to charity; about half comes to me; and Squidoo keeps the rest. (We’re talking pennies here, not dollars; you pay no more for the book than you’d pay if you found it through an Amazon search.) Like I said, an interesting concept.

I’m mainly interested in what you think of the article itself, especially those of you who find meditation practice appealing and may actually have started to do some meditation on your own. There’s a Guestbook module at the bottom of the Squidoo page (which, for some weird reason, they call a “Lens”). Leave me a comment if you have something to say.

Finding and Following the Truth

Richard — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:53:47 +0000

Since we missed our session Tuesday, we’re going to try to play a little catch-up this coming week. And that means that we’re going to alter how we’ve been conducting our classes.

Rather than my reading a sutta for discussion in class, I’d like for you to have read three suttas in preparation for Tuesday’s session, attentively enough so that we can discuss them without having to review the details of their content extensively in class.

The Dighajanu Sutta is the one that was to have been the subject for Session 4; in it, the Buddha gives a Dhamma to a wealthy, commercially successful, and pretty self-satisfied householder—a Dhamma that will lead to his continued success in the world and to the realization of the fruits of that success, but which also leads naturally into a path of behavior that will insure his happiness and spiritual well-being now and in the future. I’ve posted a commentary on the Dighajanu Sutta, calling out the elements in it that I think are particularly important to our emerging understanding of the Buddha’s Teachings.

In the Canki Sutta, the Buddha is again talking to a member of the Brahmin caste—not a householder, like Sigala, but a student, and a particularly precocious one at that. You might think of Kapatika as a sophomore at the University of Chicago, majoring in Economics and maintaining a 4.0 average. Kapatika engages the Buddha in argument, in a particularly sophomoric and hostile way, and the Buddha responds with patience, restraint, a good bit of irony, and just a touch of satire (watch for the line of blind men. He teaches Kapatika the difference between asserting that a particular view is the only view that’s true, and asserting that one believes a particular view to be the only true one. In the latter case, one “preserves truth”. He then goes on to teach Kapatika how one “discovers truth”, by embarking on a systematic, clear-eyed search for an honest and accomplished teacher and following the path recommended by that teacher, and how one “arrives at truth” by perfecting the practice of the chosen path.

The Kalama Sutta is one of the best known suttas in the Pali Canon; in it, the Buddha teaches the householders of the Kalama tribe’s market town of Kesaputa how to evaluate the various claims and counterclaims of the teachers that pass through their town. There are no extrinsic guarantees of truth, the Buddha teaches. One must subject all teachings to the harsh test of direct experience. Of particular interest in this sutta is the final portion, in which the Buddha gives what amounts to a reverse twist to Pascal’s Wager. Whether or not there is some reward awaiting one who behaves well, it’s still a good thing to do so, conducing to one’s happiness and well-being here and now.

Please find the time to read the suttas before class; none are particularly difficult, and the middle one is the only one that gets rather long (even that is not outrageously long, and it’s possible to skim the repetitive parts.) If your interest is piqued, follow the links to other translations that may help you to understand some of the finer doctrinal points.

All of the teachings in the three suttas deal with practical issues: how to behave in ways that help increase your chances of finding success and happiness in the world; how to speak honestly; how to seek the truth in a way that insures that you won’t be taken in by someone who’s following a hidden agenda or pretending to knowledge that he doesn’t actually have.

I look forward to our discussion.

The Buddha’s teaching to the householder Dighajanu

Richard — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 21:35:41 +0000

One of the most significant changes that was accelerating in Northern India through the course of the Buddha’s life is the development of trade and the rise of an increasingly powerful merchant class. That development increased the net wealth of the region, and the increasing wealth meant more taxes for the reigning kings, which enabled them to consolidate power, raise armies, and, eventually, subordinate the representative republics that had been, up until then, the dominant form of government in the region. With disciplined armies under effective central control, the kings were also able to bring a measure of law and order to the roads and trade routes of the region, which had always been dangerous routes to follow – if the tigers didn’t get you, the highwaymen would. And safer trade routes, in turn, led to further increases in trade, more rich merchants, and even more taxes for the king.

Another consequence of increasing wealth was that almost everyone had some excess, with which they could support the Buddha’s growing sangha. In a poor region, or a declining economy, living as a bhikkhu – i.e. living on alms freely given by the householders in a region – would not have been a particularly viable option. But the Buddha’s sangha of bhikkhus and bhikkhunis were, apparently, able to get along quite well on the largesse of a newly and increasingly wealthy laity. Indeed, many of the Buddha’s retreat communities – the areas where the sangha gathered during the three months of the rainy season – had been donated to the Buddha and his sangha by wealthy urban merchants. (Anathapindika is perhaps the best-known of these lay followers; he purchased a large park-like grove from Prince Jeta of Kosala, near the Kosalan capital city of Savatthi, and donated that the the sangha. The Buddha spent about 25 consecutive rains retreats in Anathapindika’s park.)

One reason that the Buddha’s teachings appealed so strongly to the rising urban middle class was that those teachings were eminently practical, rooted in the Buddha’s keen understanding of the way his lay followers lived, their responsibilities and their needs. Another is that the teachings involved nothing in the way of ritual, and no particular need to involve Brahmin priests in the process of gaining either success in the world or a fortunate rebirth in the next life. According to the Buddha, all those good results were rooted, quite definitely and intelligibly, in one’s own actions. To those who were used to working hard and getting what they wanted and needed by their own intelligent and diligent action, that was a message they could relate to.

The sutta we will discuss on Tuesday is a good demonstration of the Buddha’s ability to connect with the newly wealthy urban class. The teaching is delivered in what is identified as “the market town of the Koliyans”, one of a string of market towns between Savatthi, the capital city of the kingdom of Kosala, and Rajagraha, the capital city of the kingdom of Maghada; the Buddha’s home town of Kapilavattu was probably another one of those market towns. The Koliyans and the Sakyans were cousins, and the Buddha’s mother and stepmother were both Koliyans. The Koliyans and the Sakyans were frequently in dispute regarding rights to the water of the Rohini river which separated the republics; the Buddha was called upon on several occasions to act as peacemaker in those disputes, since he had gained the trust of both branches of the family.

The Buddha’s questioner in this sutta was known as Dighajanu, which mean’s “long shins”, and his family name was Vyagghapajja, which means “tiger’s path”. Dighajanu asks the Buddha for a Dhamma for people like him, with lots of family responsibilities and a life full of pleasures that he is not likely to give up to become a dropout like the members of the Buddha’s sangha.

The Dhamma that the Buddha teaches Dighajanu is simple, wise and accessible. It demonstrates that the Buddha was very much in touch with the life that Dighajanu led, and was in no way condemnatory of that life. But, as the Buddha almost always did, he goes on, after answering Dighajanu’s question about how to live in a way that guarantees happiness in his daily life, to give him some very brief additional teachings about how to live in ways that guarantee the preservation of that happiness in the future.

Briefly, the Buddha mentions four attainments – four fortunate accomplishments – that will produce that guarantee; saddha-sampada, the accomplishment of faith, sila-sampada, the accomplishment of virtue, cāga-sampada, the accomplishment of generosity, and pañña-sampada, the accomplishment of wisdom. Each of those receives its own extensive exposition in other teachings; faith, virtue, generosity and wisdom are essential accomplishments in the development of the Buddha’s path. Here each one is presented telegraphically, almost aphoristically, but still in a way that is easily understood and easy to grasp intuitively. The sutta concludes, as many suttas do, with a brief verse summary of the teachings presented.

I’ve given my own rendering of the Dighajanu sutta, which we’ll use as the basis for our discussion. In the introduction to that rendering, I’ve linked to two translations of the sutta, each more complete and authoritative than my rendering; I’d recommend that you read them all to get a feel for the full import of this brief but important teaching.

Interesting review of new book on mindfulness

Richard — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 01:21:49 +0000

At Integral Options Café, a very fine Buddhist website, there is a good review of a new book on Mindfulness as a way of dealing with everyday difficulty. I think you might find it interesting in light of the brief mindfulness meditations with which we’ve been opening our class sessions.

The Buddha’s Advice to the Brahmin youth Sigala

Richard — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:51:59 +0000

For Tuesday’s class, I’d like you to have read the Sigalovada Sutta, The Buddha’s Advice to Sigala, on the Access To Insight website. The translation to which that link will take you is by John Kelly, Sue Sawyer, and Victoria Yareham; it is a little more contemporary and colloquial than the other good translation on that site by Narada Thera (a German, one of the first Europeans to ordain as a Theravada monk at the beginning of the 20th Century); Narada’s translation is just a little stilted, and his use of explicitly numbered and lettered lists, to my mind, gets in the way of understanding that we are expected to be listening to an actual discourse delivered by one man to another. I’ve been working on my own rendering, but it’s slow work, and it won’t be done in time for class on Tuesday.

If you can, print the sutta out and bring it to class. I’ll bring a couple of copies, but not enough for everyone.

The Sigalovada Sutta is long, but there is nothing difficult or complicated about it. In it, the Buddha comes upon a young Brahmin householder, Sigala, conducting his morning prayers—taking the ritual bath at one of the bathing ghats that would have lined the river that ran through Rajagaha, and then saluting the six cardinal points (East, West, North, South, Zenith and Nadir) with his hands joined in the gesture signaling reverent worship. When the Buddha asks him why he is doing that, Sigala tells him it is because his father, before he died, enjoined the ritual performance on his son. The Buddha then takes the opportunity to teach Sigala what it really means to be reverent, and how the cardinal points might be worshipped by one who lives nobly, in accordance with the Dhamma.

The sutta has been called the layperson’s vinaya, a word that refers to the set of rules governing the behavior of Buddhist monks and nuns. But that implies a particularly Buddhist focus that misses the point of the teaching, I think. In fact, the instruction that the Buddha gives to Sigala in this discourse is the most concentrated collection of generally good advice that I know of. Anyone, professing any faith at all or following any ritual tradition, who undertakes to live according to the advice given in the Sigalovada Sutta will certainly, barring accident or just bad luck, live happily, have good friends, and attain a measure of worldly success.

In our discussion of that advice, I’d like to focus on a few points that I find particularly interesting:

The structure of the discourse is interesting. While the starting point is the Buddha’s statement that Sigala is doing it wrong, and that there is a way to pay homage to the six directions that is in accord with the Aryan Dhamma (arya is the Pali word translated in the English renditions as “noble”), it’s not until the last part of the long discourse that the Buddha finally gets back around to those directions and the meaning they have according to the Dhamma. The first three-quarters of the discourse focuses on general principles of good behavior. The implication here, I think, is that unless one starts with good behavior—that is, refraining from the four evil actions, resisting the four motivations that lead one to behave badly, and avoiding the six courses of behavior that dissipate health, wealth and happiness—then it really doesn’t matter how one worships the cardinal directions; there’s no ritual magic in worshipping the directions that can save one who’s hell bent on destruction.

Although it’s a small point in the context of a long discourse, I think it’s important that the Buddha’s starting point is with four of the five precepts that every Buddhist lay person accepts as guides to a well-lived life—not taking life, not taking what’s not given, not speaking falsely, and not misbehaving sexually. The fifth precept, to avoid intoxicants that make one careless and stupid, is given ample coverage in the rest of the discourse.

The discourse is intensely pragmatic. Nothing is to be taken on faith; the Buddha gives perfectly good and believable reasons for the ethical principles and behaviors that he recommends to Sigala. The results of behaving badly do not come as punishments, and the results of behaving well do not come as rewards; it is all a matter of natural consequences.

The focus on companionship and the detailed analysis of the difference between good companions and bad ones is moving and convincing; it is also a frequent theme in the teachings. In the Upaddha Sutta, Ananda and the Buddha are sitting together at the end of the day, and Ananda says, “This is half of the holy life, lord: admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie.” “Don’t say that, Ananda,” replies the Buddha. “Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life. When a monk has admirable people as friends, companions, & comrades, he can be expected to develop & pursue the noble eightfold path.” In the Sigalovada Sutta, he extends that to lay people as well as monks.

When the discourse finally gets back around to the worship of the six cardinal directions, the Buddha presents a symbolic interpretation of those directions, in terms of the relationships that are significant in a householder’s life, that is actually a model for the structure of a civil society. All relationships are reciprocal, purposeful, and humane. The relationships themselves cover the most important aspects of our lives, as those were understood in the Buddha’s Dhamma—one’s relationship with one’s parents and children, with one’s teachers and students, with one’s friends and companions, with one’s colleagues—employees and supervisors, with one’s husband or wife, and with one’s spiritual counselors. Again, nothing important is left out (or couldn’t be fit in with some minimal interpretation), and everything is kept practical: relationships are defined and ways of maintaining those relationships are commended, not based on theory, dogma, or categorical imperatives, but simply on common experience.

It is illuminating, I think, to compare the advice given in the Sigalovada Sutta to other bodies of advice recorded in other traditional texts—the ritual imperatives in the Analects of Confucius, the tribal prescriptions and prohibitions in the Torah, the revelations of the Old Testament prophets and of Mohammed, the rules governing hierarchies of power in the law books of Manu, Solon, and many others. The Buddha’s advice is different, not only in its pragmatism and freedom from dogma, but also in the kind of results it seeks to achieve—happiness, material success, conviviality, contentment, the attainment of wisdom—and the scope of those results, the fact that they are to be experienced right here and right now.

As you’re reading this, try to imagine the terms that the Buddha might use if he were giving this advice today—to a young man, for example, recently graduated from Miami University (where, perhaps, he’d had a reputation for heavy partying), with a wife and a couple of young children, a house in Montgomery, and a position in sales with P&G.