I’ve over-committed myself for the fall, teaching two courses at the University of Cincinnati’s Osher Lifelong Learning Center, and leading a Dharma Study Group at St. John’s Unitarian Church. I’ll be using this site to coordinate all of those activities.

All three programs are pretty full, which says a great deal about the intensity of interest in Buddhism in these troubled times.

Here’s more info on each program, along with a link to the syllabus/overview page for the program.

• OLLI Course: The Teachings of the Buddha. From the OLLI catalog course description: “In this course, we will examine eight of the most significant and widely known of the Buddha’s discourses.  In our discussion of each discourse, we will look at the events in the Buddha’s life that provide the context for the discourse, and we will see how the ideas discussed in the discourse relate to the historical development of Buddhism and how those ideas remain relevant to the task of maintaining sanity and equanimity in a confused and turbulent world.  The course will be presented as a general introduction to the Buddha’s life and thought.”
• OLLI Course: Important Topics in Mainstream Buddhism. From the OLLI catalog course description: “We will discuss some fundamental concepts of Buddhism, including Dharma, the Law that governs the natural world as well as the results of our ethical decisions; Karma, ethically significant action; Buddhist cosmology and the Buddhist understanding of how events unfold from preceding conditions; Nirvana, the characteristic condition of an enlightened mind; and the Eightfold Path to enlightenment.  We will also look into the history of Buddhism and how different traditions understand the fundamental ideas.  Finally, we’ll look at how Buddhism came to the West and the shape it’s taken here.”
• Dharma Study Class. “The Dharma Study group will take as its study text “In the Buddha’s Words”, an anthology by the Brooklyn-born monk Bhikkhu Bodhi. The texts in the anthology provide an excellent introduction to the Pali Canon, the oldest and most probably authentic source of the Buddha’s teachings. The class will be organized as a discussion group; each week, we will read one chapter of our text and, after a brief introduction to provide historical perspective, we will look at how the teachings we’ve read fit into Buddhist doctrine and what we can learn from them about how to live happily and with a measure of equanimity in a world marked by impermanence and widespread suffering.”

The Anattalakkhana Sutta, the Discourse on the Not-Self Characteristic, is, by traditional accounts, the second discourse delivered by the Buddha, shortly after his first discourse that we discussed last week. His audience was the same five bhikkhus who had heard that discourse in which the Buddha set the Wheel of the Dharma in motion. At the conclusion of that first discourse, the Venerable Aññakaṇdañña had attained Enlightenment, had become an arahant. This second discourse awakened the other four; the final line of the sutta summarizes the historical moment: “And there were then six arahants in the world.”

On London’s Daily Mail website, there is an article by Brian Cox on the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to come on line in late August or early September. Cox does a fine job of clarifying the science behind the Collider—the puzzles it’s intended to solve and the questions it’s designed to answer, along with the theories that have generated those puzzles and questions.

In the sequence of accomplishments leading to Enlightenment, the final step before the last one is “the knowledge and vision of things as they are”. The Buddha spent his life striving diligently to acquire that knowledge and vision, to perfect it, to apply it to each new situation he encountered, and to clarify it and communicate it so that others could, by their own energetic striving, come to the same awareness and prepare themselves to become arahants, enlighted beings. In a very real sense, the sangha of science comprises the most faithful inheritors of the Buddha’s diligence and questing nature, and their striving has brought humankind to the brink of acquiring a knowledge and vision of things as they are that is orders of magnitude more complete and more fruitful than what we have acquired to this point.

The particles at the foundation of the scientist’s understanding of the world are profoundly analogous to the dhammas, the fundamental constituents of existence in the Buddha’s vision. And the samsaric world that those dhammas combine to generate is characterized, as the Buddha knew it must be, by impermanence. “Look at your hand in front of you,” Brian Cox requests.

Cabinet Magazine, of which I’d never heard, has a great article on the mythical Himalayan kingdom of Shambala. The article does a fine job of telling us the content of the myth, its probable origins, its influence on various Western thinkers, including Madame Blavatsky and Heinrich Himmler, and the various expeditions that have been launced to find it. Shambala is a delusion—not just the mythical kingdom, but the very idea that such a one-dimensional ideal could exist in a world that is made complex by the messy, impermanent, and non-dual nature of reality. An entertaining and informative read.

Sunday’s Pearls Before Swine

Always excellent, but seldom so very, very Buddhist.

Gary Snyder just won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. I am delighted. Gary Snyder has always seemed to me to embody the Dhamma more completely than just about anyone; he amazes and uplifts us with his wit, delight in life, legendary generosity and kindness, and devotion to his Buddhist practice. I keep running across his poems in the most unexpected places: on scraps of paper picked up off the floor, on NYC subway cards, in books about totally unrelated topics. And every time I do, my eyes are opened to something new about our infinitely diverse universe.

Here’s one of my favorites. It may be the first Gary Snyder poem I really really noticed.

The term papañca occurs several times in the suttas, most notably in Majjima Nikaya 18, the Madhupindika Sutta (”Honeyball Discourse”, as it was named by the Buddha in response to Ananda's description of the "the sweet delectable flavour" of the discourse [MN 18.22]; given the Buddha's wry sense of humor, it may be conjectured that he also had in mind the particularly sticky nature of the concepts he was dealing with in the discourse.) In the discourse, the Buddha gives a curt and somewhat gnomic response to an equally curt and somewhat confrontative question from the wanderer Daṇḍapāni.

The Buddha's brief discourse concerned the mental processes that lead to violent actions—important stuff. It has to do with the tendency of our perceptions to take on a life of their own and trap our minds in an uncontrolled stream of imaginary constructs, untethered to the actual nature of the processes we observe. It was left to the elder bhikkhu Mahā Kaccāna to explain the Buddha's words to the sangha.

The process he describes begins with the arousal of consciousness—visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, and mental consciousness corresponding to the six sense bases as they are enumerated in Buddhist doctrine. Each sort of consciousness arises as a result of its associated sense organ and the objects that effect that sense organ; in the case of vision, for example, visual consciousness arises as a result of the presence of the eye and of visible forms. The three things together—consciousness, sense organ, and forms affecting the sense organ—create the point of contact between our mind and the world outside our mind. That contact generates feelings—not feelings in the sense of emotion, but something more basic and primitive, but still with an affective component. What we feel, we perceive; i.e. we make contact with the world, and something, in that point of contact, at the moment of contact, attracts our attention. We notice it, we perceive it, i.e. we abstract it from an unnoticed (back)ground. What we notice/perceive, we reason about: we further abstract it, by categorizing it, theorizing about its history and origins, judging it against various standards of beauty, probability, worth, etc., assessing it in various ways—its size, weight, value, age, etc.

That momentary perceptual contact, being reasoned about, becomes papañca, a term I’ve translated, following Bhikkhu Ñaṇananda, as "proliferation". That is, the perceived contact, reasoned about, becomes something large, something ugly, something expensive, something insignificant, etc. But always in relation to me, to I, to my sense of value, judgment, understanding, etc. And proliferation proliferates: concept leads to concept, notion to notion. Whenever, through inattention or inadequate mindfulness, papañca emerges, the proliferation of concepts and imaginings takes over. There is no limit to how many past forms we can derive from our perception, how far into the future our imaginings can take us, or how many different ways we can multiply that momentary perceptual contact to maintain our illusory sense of an enduring present.

The result of papañca is that the mental universe we inhabit is entirely constructed by our minds, and we can share little of that with others (most of whom are trapped in their own papañca). Papañca thwarts compassion and creates the condition for clinging to views, to obsessing about the elaborate structures of poste and riposte that we build in our minds (what someone in an AA meeting once described as “creating the wreckage of the future”), and to something close to panic as we cast about, always in vain, for something solid on which we might ground this sense of self that we create.

In his explanation of the Buddha’s doctrine of papañca, Mahā Kaccāna dissects, at some length and in great detail, the chain of processes that occur in an experience that feels to us instantaneous and atomic, and of which we are not even usually conscious—the experience of engaging the world through our perceptual organs and our sense of that as an experience of reality. Mahā Kaccāna’s deconstruction of the process shows that the raw perceptual experience and the contingent experience of reality, although they feel identical, are quite different kinds of experience, the first emerging as an inevitable result of our having organs of perception and the world being full of perceivable things; the second emerging from unabandoned craving and the need to support the illusory self that is the essential object of that craving.

Papañca is, to my mind, one of the most difficult concepts expressed in the Suttas, and I’m not at all sure that I have it right. But the more I consider the concept and the more I ponder the meaning of the Madhupindika Sutta, the more convinced I am by the Buddha’s location of the roots of violence in papañca. In my rendering of the Sutta, I have chosen my terms after a good deal of consideration and have expanded some of the more telegraphic points just enough to help a modern audience, unfamiliar with the details of the Buddha’s doctrine, to understand those. I have also reduced some of the repetition in Mahā Kaccāna’s exposition, hopefully without diminishing the force or clarity of his argument.