For more than 40 years, the Buddha and his growing sangha of bhikkhus and bhikkhunis travelled throughout Northern India, carrying nothing but a begging bowl, a spare set of robes, and the Dhamma that the Buddha had realized in the course of his enlightenment experience. The earliest record we have of that Dhamma is a set of texts known as the Pali Canon. The texts in the Pali Canon are original, profound, and interesting; although the Canon is amazingly extensive, it has a high level of internal consistency; the core texts are accepted as foundational doctrinal statements by most Buddhist traditions, even those with their own separate canon. In this article, I will look at how the Pali Canon came to exist, why I find it so remarkable, and how it can be helpfully integrated into our Buddhist practice.

Background: How the Teachings were Delivered

Let’s begin by looking back to the Buddha’s lifetime and considering how he taught, to whom he taught, and how the sangha spread his teachings through his own culture, during his own lifetime. We’ll jump into the story in the middle of the Buddha’s teaching career, when the sangha of bhikkhus and bhikkhunis had grown to a substantial size. There’s no way, of course, to accurately determine just how large the sangha was, but from various evidential bits teased from the texts, I come to a total of between 2500 and 10,000 bhikkhus throughout Northern India and perhaps one-third that many bhikkhunis.

For most of the year, most of those bhikkhus and bhikkhunis travelled alone and on foot from village to village, living on alms and eating one meal a day; sitting in solitary meditation through the middle part of each day and perhaps through the evening as well; and giving dharma talks wherever the opportunity presented itself, speaking to village leaders, merchants, schoolteachers, children and parents. Sometimes, it is assumed, those wandering bhikkhus and bhikkhunis engaged in public debate with members of the dominant priestly class, the Brahmins, or with wanderers and ascetics of other sects, followers of teachers whose names we know and whose doctrines we know know slightly as those were summarized by biased sources, i.e. the Buddha’s own followers.

During the rainy season, from July through October, the sangha came together, usually in park-like retreat centers donated to the Buddha and his sangha by wealthy followers; most of those were are the edges of fairly large towns where the bhikkhus and bhikkhunis went each morning on their alms rounds. After the alms rounds, each member of the sangha found his or her own isolated location for a period of silent meditation. When the sangha gathered in the afternoons and early evenings, the time was, for the most part, occupied by dharma discussions or by dharma talks given by the senior members of the sangha to visitors from the town or to their fellow ascetics. I would imagine that many of those consisted, wholly or in large part, of recitations of talks that the bhikkhu had heard from the Buddha himself and had memorized, as the Buddha encouraged his followers to do.

There were a number of retreat centers scattered around Northern India, and they must have been bustling places during the rains retreats. No doubt the busiest and most bustling was the center at which the Buddha himself had chosen to spend the retreat. During the first part of his teaching career, he spent the rains retreats at a number of different centers. During the last 25 years of his life, he spent each retreat at Savatthi, the capital city of the kingdom of Kosala, home of King Pasenadi.

Now, let’s assume that the typical population of the retreat at Anattapindika’s park in Savatthi during the 3-month rainy season was upwards of 500 bhikkhus and bhikkhunis, and that the discourses delivered by the Buddha were typically attended by a large number of lay followers from the city itself. That’s a large audience to address in the open air without amplification, and a good part of the audience would not have been able to hear the Buddha’s words clearly if at all.

The discourses were typically short, especially those addressed to lay audiences. And the Buddha usually retired to his dwelling immediately after delivering the discourse. I would imagine, and here this gets extremely speculative, that the senior monks who were at the Buddha’s side during the discourse would repeat what he had said to that part of the audience who had not had the chance to hear him clearly or who wanted to hear it again. And the fact that there were several of them, all repeating what they had just heard, made it possible for them to correct one another and to get their story straight. The monks trained deliberately to be expert at this kind of memorization—this part is not speculative; we have it in various ways from a number of the suttas as well as from contemporary practice in Buddhist sanghas in South and Southeast Asia. By the end of a rains retreat, the number of monks who were prepared to carry the latest discourses of the Buddha pretty much verbatim in their wanderings over the next nine months would have been fairly large.

Shortly before the Buddha died at age 80, Ananda asked him tearfully what the sangha was to do without him. His answer was that they had the Dhamma, and anyone who knew the Dhamma knew the Buddha; he refused to appoint a successor to lead the sangha, telling Ananda that each member of the sangha must be an island unto himself.

The Buddha did not die suddenly. He got sicker and sicker over a three-month period, possibly from intestinal cancer. As news of his condition spread, monks began traveling to where he was staying in a sparsely inhabited jungle region west of the city Rajagaha, where King Ajatthasattu had his capital and where there was a major retreat center. By the time the Buddha died, there were probably hundreds of sangha members in the vicinity, and they continued to stream in through the weeks following his death.

The Buddhist Councils

About three months after the Buddha’s parinibbana, the elder monk Mahakassapa convened an assembly of 500 monks, all of whom had achieved enlightenment under the Buddha. The avowed purpose of the council, which was held in Rajagaha under the sponsorship of King Ajatthasattu, was to preserve the Dhamma. To that end, the monks spent a number of weeks listening to all of the discourses that the Buddha had delivered during his lifetime. Tradition tells us that the recitation was in two parts. The discourses dealing with the history and governance of the Sangha were delivered by the bhikkhu Upadi, while Ananda himself, who was renowned throughout the sangha for his prodigious memory, delivered the suttas, the discourses that the Buddha had delivered to the sangha or to lay followers regarding the Dhamma and the proper way to live in accord with the Dhamma. Together, the topics of the two recitations comprise the Dhamma-Vinaya, “the doctrine and the discipline”, a term the Buddha frequently used to refer to his teachings.

The bhikkhus in attendance at that First Council were divided into groups, and each group was given a particular collection of teachings to remember; they agreed to meet regularly and, at each meeting, to repeat to one another the teachings for which they’d taken responsibility, making certain that those were remembered completely and accurately.

We have no record of how frequently those smaller groups met, but we do know that there were two more general Buddhist conferences over the next couple of centuries, at each of which the entire body of teachings was repeated to the assembled bhikkhus.

During those same two centuries, Buddhism spread well beyond the parts of Northern India where the Buddha taught. Much of the credit for the expansion of Buddhism goes to the Emperor Ashoka, the first person to unify all of the Indian sub-continent under a single rule; Ashoka himself was a convert to Buddhism, and the sponsor of the Third Buddhist Council in about 250BCE. Most importantly, however, Ashoka, at the urging of the bhikkhu Mogaliputta Tissa, organized missions to many of the major countries outside of India to carry the Dhamma-Vinaya to those countries. Although the missions to the West (traditionally including one to Greece) did not have a lasting effect, Buddhism did take root in Nepal and Tibet to the north, in Thailand and Burma to the southeast, and in the island kingdom of Sri Lanka in the south; Ashoka’s son Mahinda was the leader of that last mission.

The Composition of the Canon

Sri Lanka adopted the Buddha’s Dhamma eagerly, and it was in that island kingdom, under the sponsorship of King Vattagamani, that the Fourth Buddhist Council was held in about 200BCE, with the express purpose of committing the teachings to writing. Once again, the council heard the recitation of the entire body of teachings; by this time, with various accretions, the whole thing took over six months to recite, and it had become virtually impossible for a single bhikkhu to memorize in its entirety. So, in order that the teachings would not be lost, the bhikkhus of the Fourth Council undertook to write the whole thing down.

The composition was in a language called Pali, which is closely related to Sanskrit, the “official” language of the Brahmin caste in India and the language in which all of the great classics of Hindu literature have been composed. The Pali texts were written on palm leaves, which were sewn together in volumes and kept in baskets. There are three basic parts of the Pali Canon, which are known as pitakas—pitaka is the Pali word meaning “basket”.

• The Abhidhamma Pitaka contains some difficult and (from my very limited examination) exceedingly abstruse commentary on details of Buddhist philosophy and psychology—detailed enumeration of the 50 or so dhammas, elaborate dissection of the precise mechanism of conditional causality, etc. All scholars agree that the Abhidhamma Pitaka is the latest section of the Canon, and was probably not composed until several hundred years after the Buddha’s death.
• The Vinaya Pitaka concerns the origins of the Buddhist sangha and its development through the Buddha’s lifetime; it presents historical contexts for the very complex body of rules that direct the governance of the sangha and the training and practices of its members.
• The Sutta Pitaka contains a record of the Buddha’s teachings (and the teachings of some senior bhikkhus and bhikkunis ). Each of the texts in the Sutta Pitaka is known as a sutta (Sanskrit sutra), from a word whose original meaning was “thread”, and most of them record a teaching delivered by the Buddha or one of the senior bhikkhus or bhikkhunis. In very many cases, we are told where the teaching was delivered, the audience to which it was delivered, and something of the circumstances that surrounded the occasion.

Many, if not most, Buddhist traditions accept the Vinaya Pitaka and the Sutta Pitaka as a record of the Buddha’s own words or the words of one of his followers. Modern scholars, as we would expect, are a bit more skeptical. There are basically three positions: one is that the entire Pali Canon was composed over a long period following the Buddha’s death, and that nothing in it preserves an accurate record of his teaching; at the opposite extreme, there are scholars (including many of the first rank, such as Richard Gombrich) who feel that very much of the Canon, including most of the Vinaya Pitaka and much of the Sutta Pitaka, is in fact an accurate record of the teachings delivered during the Buddha’s lifetime; finally, there are many who take the position that the Canon as we have it, while much of it was composed after the Buddha’s death, does present an accurate summary of his teaching and an accurate record of the formula phrases that the Buddha and his followers relied upon to preserve the consistency of the teaching.

The Pali Canon is not the only canon of the Buddha’s teachings. The Tibetan Kangyur Canon and the Chinese Agamas contain much of the same material that is in the Vinaya Pitaka and the first four Collections of Suttas in the Sutta Pitaka, although each contains much additional material that is not in the Pali Canon. The overlapping material in the Tibetan and Chinese canons is not exactly the same as the material in the Pali Canon, and it’s clear that the Northern canons are not translations from the Pali, but they almost certainly derive from the same oral tradition. The closeness of those Northern canons to the texts of the Pali Canon is one reason to believe that that each of those canons preserves an accurate record of an oral tradition that pre-dates the written versions by several centuries.

The climate of Sri Lanka is not conducive to the preservation of palm leaf manuscripts, and we do not have any remnant of the original Pali Canon. But the texts were copied and recopied faithfully over the years and centuries following their composition, and copies were taken to all parts of the Buddhist world, translated, and recopied there. The earliest physical remnants that we have are Nepalese and date from the 8th or 9th century; the earliest complete manuscripts of any individual texts are from the 15th century; and we don’t have any copy of the complete canon dating from before the 18th century. But the copies that we do have, although coming from different parts of the world, are strikingly similar to one another, and most scholars are convinced that little or nothing has been added to the canon or removed from it since its first composition.

The Significance of the Canon

That’s enough of history. Why is the Pali Canon important? What makes it different from any other body of scripture?

I would give a four-fold answer to that question:

• First, there is the sheer size of the canon; the Sutta Pitaka itself is considerably larger than the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Koran combined. Considered simply as a treasure trove, full of wonderful stories and thought-provoking lessons, the Pali Canon contains a lot of treasure.
• Second, there is the remarkable consistency and internal coherence of the teachings contained in the Canon, which, to my mind, speaks to its authenticity. Although I have not read the whole thing, and almost certainly will not reach that goal in this life, I have yet to find anything in the teachings that contradicts anything else in any significant way at all; indeed, each new sutta that I read casts some light on all the others, so that each one enriches and helps to complete everything that went before. Again, that consistency and integrity of meaning is different from what I’ve found in any other scriptural tradition.
• Third, the message of the teachings is one that I find totally convincing, mostly rational and compatible with the understanding of the world that I’ve taken from my reading of modern science and philosophy, and immensely helpful as a guide to practice—by practice I mean both meditative practice and practicing the of kind day-by-day behavior that conduces to calm, sanity, and the maintenance of a benevolent presence in the world. The Buddhadhamma, as I gradually deepen my understanding of it through study of the teachings and meditation on their meaning and import, seems to me to be both complete and adequate; nothing could be subtracted from it without diminishing its significance, and nothing added to it would increase its power as a method of knowing and practice.
• Fourth, and finally, the Pali Canon is the record of what I consider the most original mind in human history. What the Buddha understood when he had achieved his enlightenment about how things unfold in this world comprises a doctrine that has, to my knowledge, no precedent; he did, indeed, discover that understanding through his own profound effort. His decision to teach others the way to that understanding—the way to enlightenment—was an act of unexcelled generosity. And the skill with which he conducted that teaching, so that those who were ready to follow him all the way could repeat his experience and gain enlightenment for themselves, while the rest of us could still benefit through following a path of practice that can ameliorate the inevitable pain in our lives and help us to become better people—that skill is awe-inspiring.

Resources for Study

No one knows what language the Buddha actually used to deliver his teachings; it was probably a dialect of Maghadan, the language that was spoken in region of Northern India where he was born and where his major teachings were delivered. Although Maghadan was probably similar to Pali in the same way that Pali is similar to Sanskrit, we have no record of it today, and it’s almost certain that the discourses recorded in the Pali Canon are not verbatim transcripts of the Buddha’s words.

The Buddha advised his followers, as they carried his Dhamma into the world, to teach that Dhamma in the language of the people that they spoke to. And the Pali Canon, or large portions of it, have been translated into many other languages. As far as I know, the complete canon has never been translated, and I can’t speak to the quality of the translations that exist in any other language than English. But I can tell you that those of us who speak English and who live today, in the age of the Internet, are incredibly fortunate in the translations that are available to us, the accessibility of those translations, and the availability of tools to help us evaluate those and make sense of them.

A generation of English-speaking Westerners has emerged who share a fortunate combination of qualities:

• They have been educated at fine Western universities and are familiar with Western intellectual traditions, including philosophy, literature, and science.
• Most of them have ordained as monks in the Theravada tradition, the Buddhist tradition that accepts the teachings in the Pali Canon as its entire scripture and has acted most conscientiously to preserve the canonical texts and make them widely available. Most of the translators have made deliberate and informed efforts to become familiar with Buddhist traditions outside of Theravada.
• They are all active Buddhist practitioners and teachers.
• They are all, by and large, careful and graceful writers, conscientious in their footnoting of difficult points and creative in how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of translating an oral tradition for a literate audience—particularly the high degree of repetition in the texts and what to most literate audiences appears to be an over-reliance on formula phrases.

These translators, particularly Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Piyadassa Thera, Ñanamoli Bhikkhu, Peter Harvey, and the indefatigable Bhikkhu Bodhi, have produced a body of work that is a pleasure to read and is, to the best of my understanding, faithful to the meaning of the original texts. Many of those translations are online at the excellent Access to Insight website, maintained as an act of dana by John Bullitt.

The pleasurability of a translation is in the reader’s mind; to evaluate the faithfulness of the translation, the diligent student of the Dhamma has, easily accessible, a body of tools that only a few scholars at a few uncommonly well-endowed universities would have had just five or ten years ago. The entire Pali Canon is available on the web or on a CD-ROM in either Pali script, for those willing to learn how to read it, or in Romanized transliteration, so that it’s possible to read the original text alongside any translation. Tools for learning Pali abound on the web and in the library, and for those who are only interested in examining the detailed meaning of an occasional difficult technical term, the Oxford Pali-English dictionary is online with a pretty good interface for searching it. All of the online resources are free.

In addition to the online texts, Wisdom Publications is in the process of publishing the entire Sutta Pitaka in book form. Volumes available so far include the complete Digha Nikaya (the collection of long discourses) translated by the British scholar Maurice Walshe, the Majjhima Nikaya (the collection of middle length discourses) translated by the British-born monk Bhikkhu Ñanamoli, edited and corrected by Bhikkhu Bodhi), and the Samyutta Nikaya (the collection of discourses grouped by subject) translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi.

Bhikkhu Bodhi is also working on a complete translation of the Anguttara Nikaya, the discourses arranged in numerical order according to the number of the items comprised in the subject of each discourse. That book is scheduled for publication in the coming year; in the meantime, Bhikkhu Bodhi has edited and annotated an excellent anthology of texts from the Anguttara Nikaya, using translations by Nyanaponika Thera as his starting point. That anthology is short and quite readable; it includes about 20% of the discourses in the complete collection, including most of the best known ones.

The final collection in the Sutta Pitaka is the Kuddhaka Nikaya, the collection of short miscellaneous discourses. One of the books included in the Kuddhaka Nikaya, the Dhammapada, has become one of the best-loved and most popular books from the Pali Canon and the only one of which many Westerners have heard. The Dhammapada is a collection of 26 verses on the Buddha’s Dhamma; it’s simple, faithful to the Dhamma, and quite strikingly beautiful. There are a lot of English translations of the Dhammapada, some of which are more graceful than the others, and some of which are more faithful in meaning to the Pali original; unfortunately, those two are not always the same. The following is the list of my favorites, in descending order; all have much to recommend them, and any one will bring pleasure and merit.

• Gil Fronsdal’s translation; Fronsdal is an excellent poet and a long-time practitioner of Buddhism. This relatively recent translation of the Dhammapada is well (and unobtrusively) annotated, probably as accurate as it’s possible to be without getting verbose, smooth and graceful throughout.
• Translation by Balangoda Ananda Maitreya Maitreya, with assistance from Rose Cramer, with a forward by Thich Nhat Hanh. This is probably as close as you’ll get to a literal translation, and it’s quite remarkably graceful and easy to read. It suffers from an almost complete absence of scholarly apparatus, but that makes for a slim book, easily pocketable. This is a good one to stick in your purse or backpack and open at random while you’re in an airport lounge or a doctor’s waiting room.
• Thomas Byrom’s translation, in the Shambala Pocket Classics Series. This one is a nice blend of poetry and literal accuracy; not quite as good poetry as Gil Fronsdal delivers, and probably not quite as literally accurate as Maitreya, but well worth having and studying. Again, it’s small, cheap and pocketable; if this is the only version of the Dhammapada you will ever own, it’s probably a good choice.

Of the other books in the Kuddhaka Nikaya, the most important, from the standpoint of Buddhist doctrine and history, are probably the Udana and the Sutta Nipata, the first of which is probably a relatively late addition to the canon, while the latter probably represents one of the earliest and most probably authentic collections of teachings. H. Saddhatissa’s translation of the Sutta Nipata is outrageously overpriced. I have not read G. M. Strong’s translation of the Udana

Conclusion: the Opportune Moment

In the Sutta Nipata, a small volume of short discourses that’s found in the Khandaka Nikaya of the Sutta Pitaka—a collection of miscellaneous texts that includes such classics as the Dhammapada, a number of Jataka Tales, Discourses of the Elder Bhikkhunis and so forth—in the Uṭṭhāna Sutta, the Discourse on Arousing, we are urged to keep our energy level high:

The concept of an opportune moment that’s referred to in that sutta is explained in another sutta, the Sangiti Sutta of the Digha Nikaya. The opportune moment is the moment that’s given to those who are born as humans, and not as long-lived gods, or as animals, or in one of the unfortunate realms; who are born into a family that nurtures them and provides for their education; who are born with a good mind and a lively curiosity; who remain open-minded, not tied to a rigid and incorrect point of view; and who are born in a time of the world and at a place in the world in which the teachings of a Buddha are accessible.

We have all been born in an opportune moment; of all the people who have ever lived, we are among the infinitesimally few who can hear the Buddha’s teachings in the radically disintermediated way that the current flock of good modern translations of the Pali Canon makes possible and who can use the radically new tools available to us through the Internet to scrutinize those teachings deeply, as the Buddha advised us to do.

If you seize the moment and make the study of the Pali Canon a part of your lives and of your Buddhist practice, I am convinced that your study will be entirely enjoyable, and that the fruits you will gather from it will make your lives richer and your practice more complete.

We didn’t have time after our discussion of the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta to cover the eight-factored Path. Bhikkhu Bodhi has written an excellent short book on the Path, which is available in its entirety at Access to Insight. In the following post, I’ve composed a precís of the book, pulling what I consider the most helpful sections from the original. Any comments that I’ve added are within square brackets and italicized.

From Bhikkhu Bodhi’s Introduction:

There are a lot of legends surrounding the Buddha’s birth and early childhood. Many of those were collected in a long and charming verse narrative, the Buddhacarita, composed by the bhikkhu Ashaghosha sometime in the First Century CE, 400-500 years after the Buddha’s death. (There is a new and enjoyably readable translation of the Buddhacarita by Patrick Olivelle published as “Life of the Buddha” in NYU’s wonderful collection of translations from the Sanskrit, the Clay Sanskrit Library.) The stories in Ashvaghosha’s poem are almost all fables, somewhat breathless with their adoration of the Buddha, who had achieved semi-divine status by Ashvaghosha’s time; but many of the stories have a recognizable root in anecdotes that have from the Buddha himself, as those were remembered by the sangha and recorded in the collection of the Buddha’s teachings that comprise the Pali canon. The following summary account is taken mostly from those canonical accounts, bolstered and contextualized by the results of the best historical scholarship of the past century.

Gotama Siddhatha was born in the early Fifth Century BCE in the southern foothills of the Himalyas, in what is now Nepal, and was raised in the market town of Kapilavatthu, on the western bank of the Rohini river. Siddhatha was his given name; Gotama was the family name; and the Gotamas were a dominant family within the tribe, or clan, of the Sakyas. The Buddha is sometimes called Sakyamuni, which means “sage of the Sakya clan”. The Sakya people were an important clan in the growing nation of Kosalya. The method of government among the Kosalyan people was something like a republic, which the various tribal leaders each contributing to the defense of the region and coming togehter in regular councils to arrive at consensus regarding issues that affected the common welfare. That mode of governance probably affected the Buddha in setting the rules by which the sangha made decisions and carried those out.

Gotama’s father Suddhodana, while he was not, as later legend had it, a king, was probably an important leader among the Sakyans, and certainly had extensive wealth. Gotama’s mother Maya died just a week after the child’s birth, and Gotama was raised by her sister Pajapati. Pajapati was also a wife of Suddhodana, so she was the Buddha’s aunt as well as his stepmother.

The Buddha’s later description of his youth gave a picture of great wealth, power, and privilege.

But despite such great wealth, the young nobleman was not satisfied. Later legend tells the story of Gotama’s experience of the Three Messengers: the legend says that his father protected him from any exposure to sadness, illness, or poverty, but that one time, when Gotama took his chariot outside the palace walls, he was exposed to an aged man, who showed him a depiction of aging; to a leper, who showed him disease; and to a corpse, which showed him death. Those meetings, the legend has it, set Gotama on his course toward enlightenment.

The story that the Buddha tells in the Anguttara Nikaya is more prosaic, but of similar import:

The result of those realizations was Gotama’s decision to seek Enlightenment:

It’s clear, reading between the lines of this passage, that Gotama was following a course that others had followed before him; the shaving of the hair and beard, the assumption of a yellow robe, even the phrasing of the decision, “going forth from the home life into homelessness” - all that indicates that Gotama’s decision was not uncommon for that time and place. Indeed, the suttas are full of evidence that there were lots of sages and ascetics travelling around Northern India at the time, each following his own variant on a common path, that included renouncing the comforts of home, living a celibate life, subsisting on alms food, and wandering the land with no fixed abode.

Indeed, Gotama tried, at first, to pursue the paths followed by two of those sages, first Alara Kalama, and then Udaka the son of Rama. With both teachers, the precocious young man found that he quickly mastered the techniques that were taught to him and got all that the teachers had to offer. And in neither case was it sufficient; Gotama realized that there were further insights to be experienced; a more profound enlightenment to be realized.

On his own again, he took up with five other wandering ascetics (the commentaries tell us that the five were Brahmins, from the Buddha’s home territory of Sakya) and traveled with them for several years. When the practices they pursued together did not get him closer to his goal, he decided to make a supremely determined effort and embarked on an ascetic regimen that left him in dreadful condition:

Gotama realized that the excessive asceticism wasn’t getting him anywhere. And he remembered an incident from his youth:

His travelling companions, the five ascetics who had been attending him while he was in the process of so mortifying his body, were disgusted with what they perceived as Gotama’s giving up, a surrender to sensual pleasures. And they abandoned him. But Gotama, after he had regained his strength with a little nourishment, made a decision to pursue the insight that had led him to abandon the extreme ascetic practice, and to see if he could recreate the state of meditative absorption that he had recalled experiencing as a child. He resolved to establish himself in meditation under a fig tree near the spot where he had accepted his meal of rice and porridge from a passing shepherdess, and to stay there until he had achieved the goal he sought.

And then one night, on the first full moon in the month of May, in happened. As he passed through a sequence of successively more rarified meditative states, Gotama felt, in the first such state, a feeling of intense pleasure; then, leaving pleasure behind, he experienced transporting joy; leaving that behind, he dwelt in a state of perfect contentment; then, abandoning contentment, he experienced utter peacefulness; next, he dwelt in awareness of the infinity of space, and, following that, at state of awareness of the infinity of consciousness. Leaving that state, he entered a state of neither being nor not being, and then of neither perceiving nor not perceiving. And finally, having attained perfect knowledge and vision of things as they are, all ties were severed to delusions of self, all craving ceased, and, unbound to any state of being, Gotama realized his destiny as the Buddha, the fully Enlightened one.

The newly awakened Buddha sat for a week under the bodhi tree, the tree of Enlightenment, savoring his newly realized freedom, and exploring the truths that he now understood: the nature of suffering and the way to end that; the nature of cause and effect; the chain of conditions that led from ignorance through consciousness, perception, desire, grasping, conception and birth to the pain of suffering, old age and death; and much, much more. Finally, the Buddha realized that he had a decision to make. He could continue in blissful contemplation of the truths of existence for the rest of his life, or, forgoing the bliss, he could undertake the hard task of showing others the way he had discovered to nibbana. At first, he was inclined toward the former course; after all, what he had learned was subtle and difficult—difficult truths to understand, and a difficult path to follow. There were few, if any, who could follow the way he had found.

It is said that god Brahma himself came down from his heaven to convince the Buddha to carry the Dharma to the world. Regardless of what influenced the decision, the Buddha finally realized that there were people “with little dust on their eyes”, who were ready to see what he had to reveal, and he made the momentous decision to spread the Dharma. The first people he thought about, to hear the Dharma, were his former teachers Alara Kalama and Udaka son of Rama. But he came to realize that they had both died. And then he thought of the five ascetics who had left him when he abandoned his ascetic practice. They were accomplished meditators, subtle in their understanding, free of hatred, greed and delusion, and he realized that they would be able to understand the Dharma. So, knowing that they were now staying near the city of Varanasi, he set out to carry his truth to them.

Wandering by stages, he made his way to where they were, in the deer park at Isipatana, on the outskirts of the city. They saw him coming from a distance. Thinking, “Here comes Gotama, who surrendered to sensual pleasure”, they resolved to ignore him. But when he came near, the five ascetics, driven either by love for their former companion or by something in his bearing that told them that something had changed in him, they prepared a seat for him, invited him to sit, and brought water to wash the dust from his feet.

And this is the point at which he delivered his first discourse, setting in motion the wheel of the Dhamma, which we are still continuing to turn in this class.

The teaching notes were written in an outliner program (Omni Outliner Pro, for those who are interested), and the web page it created from the outline is a dynamic page; the little triangles to the left of the outline items are actually buttons, and you can use them to collapse and expand outline sections. That should make it a little easier to get an overview of the approach that I took to the topic - the Buddha’s Dhamma.

The first element in the outline is a link to the rendering of the Buddha’s first teaching, “Turning the Wheel of the Law” - the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta. That’s the single most essential teaching in Buddhism, and all the other teachings derive from it or expand on it in one way or another. A number of years ago, a young linguistic scholar in Britain claimed that her linguistic analysis of the language of the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta indicated that it could not have been composed by Siddhata Gotama. A prominent monk in Thailand was interviewed and asked about that claim, that the man we know as the Buddha could not have delivered that core teaching; what would be the impact of that finding, he was asked, on Buddhism. He chuckled and answered, “Well, whoever delivered that teaching, that was the Buddha.”

Throughout the teaching notes, I’ve included passages of text from several sources:

• The definitions of Pali terms - expecially the Pali terms for the eight factors of the Buddha’s path - are taken from the Pali Text Society’s Pali-English Dictionary; they’re a little confusing, but I just look for the meanings and the etymologies of the terms and ignore the references to the Pali texts in which those terms appear or which provide commentary on their meaning. I’ve found the Pali-English Dictionary site enormously useful in my study of the Buddha’s teachings, and I think that it’s quite marvelous that such a distinguished scholarly tool, which was only available to graduate students and professors at the world’s top universities just a decade or so ago, is now freely available, with a decent user interface, to anyone with a web browser.
• The passages from the various suttas are all taken from the excellent Access to Insight website. If you are interested in extending your understanding of Buddhism and the Buddha’s teachings, you would not be wasting your time to browse that site, just following links that look interesting, and begin to develop a sense of how it all holds together. Many of the teachings at Access to Insight are presented in two or three different translations, and all of the translations are scholarly, clear, and graceful. There are also a number of essays by prominent Buddhist teachers and monks, and pages of helpful references to good books and other useful websites.

I’d be interested to know whether you find the posting of these class notes helpful. Please use the Comments to give us your thoughts, ask questions, or suggest ways in which I might make this site, and the class itself, more interesting or more helpful.

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 in Class 2 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.

I enjoyed the class yesterday; I appreciate the attention you gave me, and I thought your questions were perceptive and important. I think this is going to be fun. As we get into the course, the amount of time I spend talking should diminish, and the amount of time we have for questions and discussion should increase. I’m looking forward to that, and I hope that you are as well.

If you have additional questions, second thoughts, comments you’d like to make, please use the Comments feature of the blog software - just click on “Comments” below. I’ll pay attention to any comments you make, and if you have a question, I’ll do my best to answer it.

The Kalamas lived in a town called Kesaputta, which was, apparently, on the edge of a large and rather dangerous forest, through which a major road passed. Travellers on that road would frequently stop at Kesaputta until enough of them had gathered to traverse the forest in relative safety. In this way, Kesaputta was similar to the oasis towns of Arabian peninsula, where caravans assembled to make the dangerous crossing of the desert.

Given its location, Kesaputta received more than its share of visits from the various ascetics, sages, and dharma teachers who wandered through Northern India at the time of the Buddha, and the Kalamas had more opportunity than residents of other towns to hear the gossip of the day and get some feel for the reputation of the teachers who came their way. When the Buddha came, they were waiting for him, and they hit him with a tough question—tough then, and tough now. All these teachers come through here, they told him, and each one has his own particular point of view; and each one claims that he’s the only one with the truth, and all of the others are full of baloney (or whatever passed for baloney in 400BCE India). How do we know, they asked the Buddha, which of these teachers we should follow?

The Kalama Sutta is his answer. In it, the Buddha demonstrates a few techniques which he refined quite skillfully through his teaching career. For one, his response demonstrated his deep empathy for where the Kalamas were—the confusion they felt and their distrust of those who kept trying to prosetylize, their relative lack of sophistication regarding deep philosophical notions and fine points of logic, their position as prosperous householders, involved with their businesses and their families, and, above all, their situation as human beings, caught up in the suffering inherent in that situation, caught up in this samsara.

The sutta demonstrates another common technique of the Buddha; he starts by agreeing with his questioner—in fact, he expresses the Kalamas’ doubts much more precisely and exhaustively than they had in their initial question to him. And he doesn’t press his own point of view, but asks the Kalamas for their point of view about various critical questions involving the kind of actions, the kind of life, that is most likely to bring happiness. Then, working from that foundation, he skillfully outlines the way in which that kind of life works to improve the lot of those who find the way to live it. And he concludes, not by promising them a fortunate rebirth or other pie in the sky reward for living that life, but by outlining all of the alternatives. He shows clearly that no matter what one believes about the more esoteric doctrines—whether we will or will not be judged on our behavior, whether we will or will not be reborn—it is still good to lead a good life, one characterized by generosity, good behavior, and loving kindness.

Here’s a link to the rendering of the Kalama sutta that I’ll be reading in class on Monday. If you have time to read it before class, that would be a good idea.

The purpose of the course is not to teach everything there is to know about Buddhism, or even about those teachings that have been passed down to us in the Pali Canon, but rather, for those who find the Buddha’s message interesting and the Buddha’s path in some way relevant to the problems of their lives and of our times, to give those people a foundation from which they can continue their investigation independently.

The course is structured by the different audiences to which the Buddha spoke through his long teaching career. Each different audience brings its own expectations and its particular viewpoint to its audience with the Buddha, and we will see how skillfully the Buddha understands those expectations and viewpoints and uses his compassionate understanding to present his distinctive path in a form that’s most easily understood and accepted by each different audience. The readings that we will use will also offer us an opportunity, through the eight weeks of the course, to follow the Buddha’s life, from birth to death.

We will make heavy use of the Internet in finding readings relevant to each class’s content; sometime early in the week prior to each class after the first one, I’ll publish a set of annotated links to translations of the discourses we will be discussing in the next class, along with links to other readings or resources that might help our understanding of the topics dealt with in those discourses. If you don’t have an Internet connection, or if you’re not comfortable using the Internet in this way, it might be a good idea to make arrangements with a friend to print the relevant texts for you to read offline. Note that it is not necessary to do the Internet readings to get some significant benefit from the class; we will read highlights from the recommended texts in each class, and, for the most part, the discussion will focus on the ideas and doctrines in the sections we will read in that way.

The Buddha’s Teachings

• Class 1: Teaching to those seeking answers

  We’ll look at one of the most famous Suttas in the canon, in which the Buddha addresses the residents of a village visited by a succession of teachers, all of whom teach conflicting doctrines and each of whom claims that his doctrine is the only true one. The Buddha shows the householders of Kesaputta that they really don’t need those teachers and that they can’t rely on any of the different authorities that various teachers claim; the answers they seek are in their own sense of what constitutes good behavior, and if they pursue the ways they know to be good ways, ways that are approved by people they know and respect for their own wisdom and goodness , they will find a life filled with contentment and joy.

• Class 2: Teaching to a householder

  The Buddha lived in a time when cities were growing, a new merchant class was developing, and trade was flourishing; in the Dighajanu Sutta, he gives a wealthy householder guidance on a Dhamma that will preserve and increase his worldly success, and then demonstrates that such a Dhamma is part and parcel of the more comprehensive path that leads to happiness and a good life in the future.

• Class 3: Teachings to the Brahmins

  We will use passages from two of the Buddha’s discourses to look at how the Buddha took the Brahminic culture into which he was born and ethicized the teachings of that culture, re-defining brahminic purity, not as an attribute that adheres to one born into a particular caste, but as an attribute that anyone can develop through purity of thought and deed. In the Sonadanada Sutta, the Buddha questions a prominent Brahmin elder and teacher on what it means to be a Brahmin; in the Sigalovada Sutta, the Buddha reminds a Brahmin youth that his ritual worship of the cardinal directions is useless unless he establishes that worship on the foundation of a life lived ethically and honorably; he then goes on to redefine the meaning of Sigala’s actions themselves, so that the youth’s ritual worship of the six directions work to remind him of and reaffirm his commitment to the mutually equivalent obligations of parent and child, husband and wife, teacher and student, master and servant, etc.

• Class 4: The first teaching to the five monks

  We will look at the events that precipitated Siddhatta Gotama’s decision to leave his privileged home and enter the live of a renunciant, and at some of the events that transpired over the next five years. For most of that time, he was accompanied in his wanderings by five Brahmins from his home community, who had themselves entered the homeless life and had accepted Siddhatta as their teacher. Those were the group of five to which Siddhatta Gotama, having achieved his awakening and become the Buddha, delivered the first two discourses. In this first teaching, the Buddha establishes the four truths that will form the foundation for all of the other teachings he will deliver: the truth of suffering, the truth that suffering has a cause, the truth that suffering can be brought to an end, and the truth of the eightfold path that will lead to an end to suffering.

• Class 5: The second teaching to the five monks

  In his second discourse, still to the same group of five, the Buddha establishes the understanding that is essential to respond skilfully to the processes he outlined in his first discourse, i.e. that any conception of a permanent and lasting self prevents full understanding of the four ennobling truths and blocks one from the path that leads to the realization of those truths and the freedom they can deliver.

• Class 6: Teachings to the sangha

  At the conclusion of the second teaching, all five monks had attained stream-entry&mdash