There is a new version of the Travel Guide to the Buddha’s Path. You can download it directly from this site for Kindles, and get it from Smashwords for non-Kindles. The content has not changed but I made dozens and dozens of style and format changes. It should look nicer. Much nicer.
I am in the process of putting together a print version of the book. I will let everyone know when that is available.
The Practice Guide is now complete, to the extent that anything of this sort is ever complete. I am hoping that many of you will read it and provide feedback. I would like to know, in particular, what parts are not clear, or are problematic in some way.
The Practice Guide is available as an eBook called “Travel Guide to the Buddha’s Path.” If you click on the link at the top of the page (Travel Guide to the Buddha’a Path) or go to the Additional Resources page, you can download either the ePub version (iBooks, Nook, etc.) or the Kindle version.
The book is also available at the Apple Store, Smashwords, etc. as well as Amazon. Amazon is somewhat problematic as they do not allow small publishing houses or individual authors to distribute a book for free. I am trying to do a workaround to price match it down to $0.00. In the meantime, however, you can always download it from here.
The Buddha’s teachings were always offered freely. It is rather bad form to earn a living from them.
When my children were young and I was learning how to be a parent, one of the things that I quickly noticed was how they learn from their parents. The most obvious way in which they learn is by the things that you tell them. I think most people think this is the most important way in which they teach their children.
But long after they have forgotten anything you told them – and this will be most of the time – how they really learn is by observation. They watch how you react to situations. If you tend to overreact and show a lot of anger, this is how they will behave. This is how patterns of abuse get passed on from one generation to another. The converse is true as well. In Thailand children first learn about generosity from their parents who give alms food to the monks.
I have had similar experiences with my meditation teachers. To be honest, when I go to a retreat, even a few months later I hardly remember anything that was said. I may remember one or two notable things, but that is about it.
But what often stays with me is how the teacher behaved, and I have seen more than my share of bad behavior in Dharma teachers. One benefit of this is that I have learned to be very self-reliant in my practice. I value the teachers that I have had, and I have had some wonderful teachers, but even my most revered teachers I tend to hold at arm’s length. After all, they cannot will me to become enlightened. That can only happen through my own effort. They are guides leading you through the mountain pass, but you have to carry your own weight.
A little over a year ago I went to a retreat with an extremely prominent, world-renowned monk. As usual, I remember very little of what he said. But what I do remember is an incident that happened on the first day of the retreat. There was a young woman in our group who was asking him a lot of questions. I got to know her during the week and became quite fond of her. She is smart, and has a lot of energy, she loves the practice, and it also turned out that she is quite creative.
But her persistent questions could have been experienced as being annoying, and that is, in fact, how the monk reacted. He was, I thought, quite harsh with her. There was nothing in what she said that could be considered rude or objectionable; she was just asking a lot of questions. But he became quite impatient with her and was, I thought, quite rude.
Now fast forward to this year. I went to a different retreat with a different monk. There was someone in our group, an older man, a successful business owner, and he had a rather loud and big personality. This is the kind of thing that can rub people the wrong way. To be sure, once again I became quite fond of him. As with the young woman, there was nothing he said that was offensive or rude, and in fact I believe he has a very big heart. But he did on a couple of occasions launch into rather loud and lengthy soliloquies about his life.
This time, however, the monk was so attentive, and so kind, and so patient with him, that it left a substantial mark on me. He was the very embodiment of patience, kindness, and compassion. He was very sweet with the man.
Uncharacteristically for me I learned a great deal at this retreat. But what really stuck with me was that interaction between the monk and that older gentleman. It was Dharma in action.
The Buddha’s teachings are vast, and over the centuries they have spawned a great deal of scholarship. At a certain level the scholarship is fun. The Buddhadharma is an incredible exercise in learning. And the scholarship has produced some wonderful results.
But at the end of the day it is about cultivating yourself in a certain way, and being a certain kind of person. Some of the kindest, most generous people I know don’t know anything about Buddhism, and some of the most ideological, self-absorbed people I know call themselves Buddhists. It isn’t about how many suttas you have memorized or how smart you are or how dominant a personality you have or whether you can win a debate. It is about being patient when someone cuts you off in traffic, being compassionate towards someone who has treated you badly, and being generous to those who are in need. It is also about wisdom and skill. And when you bring all of those qualities together, you really have something, indeed.
I heard a Dhamma talk this week in which the idea that there is such a thing as an “appropriate poison” was proffered. He was speaking of the Three Poisons: greed, hatred and delusion. He gave an example of “appropriate greed” as the desire to develop the path. He gave two examples for “appropriate aversion.” One was the fear that he felt when coming upon a rattlesnake while hiking. The other was a woman who was being threatened by a man in her life. He said that the fear was “appropriate” because it kept him and her safe.
This is a confused lack of understanding of very different qualities.
The Buddha never spoke about the Three Poisons as being of any benefit. A poison’s only job is to kill something, or at best to make it sick. The Buddha was very careful about how he used language. It is pretty clear what a poison is. It is something that is dangerous and to be avoided.
When the Buddha spoke of greed, he was not speaking about the wholesome desire to cultivate the path. The simplest way to think of greed is sense craving. A more complex way to think of greed is as craving and clinging, two of the links in the chain of dependent co-arising. This is the Buddha’s detailed analysis of how suffering is created. The Buddha listed three types of craving and four types of clinging. The three types of craving are craving for sense pleasures, craving for existence, and craving for non-existence. The four types of clinging are clinging to views, clinging to rights and rituals, clinging to sense pleasures, and clinging to a doctrine of self.
Thus, you can see that in the Buddha’s teaching, he is pretty clear about with is meant by “greed.”
The Buddha did speak about the need to have desire in order to develop the path factors. However, desire to cultivate the path is not greed. Rather, it is an aspect of Right Intention. The Buddha often spoke of worldly and unworldly – of transcendent – aspects to mental factors. Worldly desire is the desire for sense pleasures. Unworldly desire is the desire to cultivate virtue, concentration, and wisdom.
As for “appropriate aversion,” there is a difference between aversion and wisdom. Wisdom is what keeps you from being bitten by a rattlesnake. Wisdom is what keeps you from putting yourself in harm’s way. Wisdom is what keeps you from speaking when it will not be of any benefit.
The objective in practice is to tease out the wisdom from the aversion. You don’t need the anger, fear, anxiety or hatred. They just get in the way of the wisdom. People who handle dangerous animals learn to be calm and equanimous, otherwise the animals pick up on their fear and become more aggressive. Martial arts expects learn to stay calm and clear-headed, because it makes them better able to be skillful in the execution of their craft.
The traditional antidote to greed is generosity; greed is what we want, and generosity is what we give. The antidote to aversion is loving kindness. And the antidote to delusion is wisdom. These three things, generosity, loving kindness and wisdom, can be called the Three Antidotes. The Three Poisons can only do harm, but the Three Antidotes are the cures.
“Be the change you want to see happen, instead of trying to change everyone else.” – The Love Project
I saw a movie yesterday, “Dalai Lama Awakening.” It is about a group of mainly Americans who go to Dharamsala for a conference called “Synthesis” hosted by the Dalai Lama. It wasn’t at all what I expected.
I presumed that a film called “Dalai Lama Awakening” would have something to do with spiritual awakening. Instead it was about this conference. The attendees were from a broad cross-section of life, from an economist to a Jesuit to a couple of physicists. Their charter was to come up with solutions to the world’s problems.
Instead the conference became an example of why the world has such problems. It reminded me of the anti-Viet Nam War movement, where there was so much anger and hostility. It was hard to tell what was more violent, the war or the anti-war.
The conference attendees spent most of their time either complaining about the conference format, or arguing with each other. And the arguments were not about how to make the world a better place. They were about who was going to be allowed to speak and who was dominating conversation and – finally – who was going to be able to get up in front of the Dalai Lama on the final day of the conference and give a presentation. In other words, it was all about “me.” As far as I could tell, they didn’t spend any time talking about how to make the world a better place.
The closest they came was when one person wanted to talk about how to help Tibet, proposing a boycott of Chinese goods. After some discussion, the Dalai Lama reminded them that this conference was not about Tibet, it was about the whole of humanity.
So here was a group of supposedly intelligent, gifted people, who a) could not stay on target with their charter, b) could not co-operate with the poor folks trying to facilitate the conference, and c) could not even observe rules of common courtesy in how they communicated with each other.
I started life as a very politically active person. It was the time of the Viet Nam War and the Civil Rights Movement. But I came eventually to distrust my own judgment when it came to politics. So much of what I thought and did I decided at the end of the day was wrong.
And finally I came to Buddhism, and saw a radically different way to think about change. That is that change has to start at home with my own heart. How can you possibly promote change in the world if you yourself cannot be kind, patient, and compassionate? How can you expect other people to be something that you cannot?
I wish that I had a magic wand and could end all of the terrible suffering in the world. I don’t. And as much as I wish I was like Gandhi, I’m not. But I do know that I can be kind to people. I can help where I see a need and can do something about it. I can smile at the person who is bagging my groceries. I can adopt a cat and give it a home. And if I am ever invited to Dharamsala to discuss how to make the world a better place, I’m not going to waste everyone’s precious time.
I was dumpster diving through my hard disk the other day and found a paper that I wrote a few years ago called “Reverse Engineering the Buddha’s Enlightenment.” I have posted it to the “Papers and Projects” section of the web site.
At the time I was – as the paper notes – trying to connect the dots from the night of the Buddha’s awakening. Coincidentally I ran across a reference to a claim by an academic named “Bronkhorst” that the Three Knowledges attained by the Buddha on the night of his awakening were “later additions” to the canon, along with the notion of liberating insight itself.
This strikes me like having an atheist commenting on Catholicism. We sort of would take it for granted that an atheist disagrees with Catholic doctrine.
I find this assertion preposterous. First of all, as can be seen from the paper that I wrote on jhāna, depending on how you count, in the Majjhima Nikāya alone there are 26 references to the story of the Buddha’s awakening. So Bronkhorst would be claiming that in that one volume 26 of the 152 suttas were changed. That would still leave several thousand pages in the other books of the canon.
As for the reality of liberating insight, I presume that for everyone who has attained that goal – some of whom are alive today – what does that mean? Do they have to give it back?
Non-Buddhists rejection of Buddhism aside, I was more interested in trying to really understand the Buddha’s line of inquiry to see if I could make sense of it. I was, and it was quite an interesting project.
Additionally, a couple of years ago I read Ajahn Lee Dhammadharo’s autobiography, The Autobiography of Phra Ajaan Lee. It is a fascinating read. You have no idea how much Buddhism has been sanitized in the West until you read about a book like this. Among other things, he was able to realize the same Three Knowledges that the Buddha did.
As always I look forward to any comments on the paper.
Many years ago I went to a retreat at the Omega Institute in New York. It was a Buddhist retreat, but there were four other non-Buddhist retreats taking place at the same time.
One of them was with Sufi Muslims. They were teaching the whirling dervish dances of their sect. They did a performance for the rest of us at Omega, and I was deeply touched by the loving nature of their performance and the meaning behind the dance.
I do not, frankly, know much about Sufism. I have read that they believe that at their cores, all religions are the same. Thus they preach the commonality among people, rather than differences between them. I occasionally read something that was written by the king of Sufism – Rumi – and I am always touched by the poetic, loving and compassionate nature of his words.
In India there was a time when Sufi Muslims had the most influence, and it was one of the most enlightened times in Indian history. This also happened in Spain. Muslim Spain once even sent a Jewish diplomat as its representative to Germany.
So when I hear the sort of vitriol that is directed at Muslims, I can only think back to my most direct experience with Muslims, which was at that retreat. I would trust those people with my very heart.
Perhaps I am just too simple minded, too naive, but I believe that most people want to do the right thing. Sometimes, sadly, that leads them down the wrong path. But I think the motivation is right, even if the skill is lacking.
I was greatly heartened, therefore, to read the following item:
OSLO (Reuters) – More than 1000 Muslims formed a human shield around Oslo’s synagogue on Saturday, offering symbolic protection for the city’s Jewish community and condemning an attack on a synagogue in neighboring Denmark last weekend.
Chanting “No to anti-Semitism, no to Islamophobia,” Norway’s Muslims formed what they called a ring of peace a week after Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, a Danish-born son of Palestinian immigrants, killed two people at a synagogue and an event promoting free speech in Copenhagen last weekend.
“Humanity is one and we are here to demonstrate that,” Zeeshan Abdullah, one of the protest’s organizers told a crowd of Muslim immigrants and ethnic Norwegians who filled the small street around Oslo’s only functioning synagogue.
“There are many more peace mongers than warmongers,” Abdullah said as organizers and Jewish community leaders stood side by side. “There’s still hope for humanity, for peace and love, across religious differences and backgrounds.”
Norway’s Jewish community is one of Europe’s smallest, numbering around 1000, and the Muslim population, which has been growing steadily through immigration, is 150,000 to 200,000. Norway has a population of about 5.2 million.
I am an unabashedly devout Buddhist. And to the extent that makes me a better person, I think that is a good thing. And I think that is true of whatever you believe. The real test is what kind of person does it make you? Does it make you kinder, more compassionate, more loving, wiser, more generous? If it does, then your path cannot be all wrong. But if it does, perhaps you need to consider another course. The proof, after all, of the pudding is in the tasting.
Note that this and the following blog entry are new.
Someone in a comment recently requested a list of publications that I can recommend. Rather than simply responding to the comment, I have added a new page called “Additional Resources.” This lists books and sources for Dhamma talks that I recommend.
The old “Resources” page is now called “Papers and Projects”.
The section on Meditation also has a number of additions. What is on that page constitutes the first section of the Meditation Guide, the basic but – I hope – complete instructions on how to meditate, at least in phase one of practice. The next section in the Meditation Guide will contain teachings on the Dhamma, what the Buddha called “Right View”, and will feature discussions of sīla (ethics/morality/virtue), the Four Noble Truths, causality, the three marks of existence and kamma (Skt. – karma). These are the wisdom teachings of the Buddha.
Sometimes I feel a little self-conscious about the fact that I spend so much time debunking what I hear other Buddhist teachers saying. However, I feel a little bit better about this since I heard Thanissaro Bhikkhu point out that in both the Digha Nikāya (The Long Discourses of the Buddha) and the Majjhima Nikāya (The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha), the first sets of discourses are ones in which the Buddha is addressing teachings of other sects. For example, Discourse 1 in the Digha Nikāya is 1 the Brahmajāla Sutta: The Supreme Net – What the Teaching Is Not.
I have a great deal of respect for the Dharma. Some of the stories that I cherish most from the Pali canon are ones in which monks – it is usually monks – are asked what their teacher teaches, and they decline to answer because they are afraid that they will misrepresent the Dharma. When I hear some of the things that Western meditation teachers are saying, I wonder if they would be so confident about what they are saying if the Buddha were sitting there next to them.
One of the things that being an engineer taught me is how useless opinions are. Computers are relentlessly uninterested in your opinion about how something should work. An opinion is something you have when you don’t know something. When I do not know something, I try to think of my understanding as a “current working hypothesis.” And one of the many things that I admire about the Buddha is that rather than trying to “make something up” that sounds plausible – which is the way most religious thinkers and philosophers do – he devoted all of his energy to understanding how things actually work. (Fortunately, as Robert Thurman is fond of pointing out, the answer is good news. “Wouldn’t it have been a bummer if”, Thurman says, “after all that, the Buddha discovered that life really is pointless and miserable.”)
Recently I watched a video of an atheist talking about what he could and could not accept when it came to religion, theism in particular. I remember thinking how arrogant that is. The universe is the way it is, and it works the way it works, and like computers, it is completely uninterested in what we think about it.
What the Buddha taught is a repeatable experiment. He gave us a roadmap – the canon – and the destination – nirvana – and directions on how to drive (meditation). So we know where to go and we can develop the skills to make the journey. The precise route that we take and what that journey is going to be like will be uniquely individual. But no longer are we just wandering around the desert. We can see a way out.
But back to my original point. As you would expect, Buddhism in the West has gone through a number of phases. In the 1960s and 1970s a number of Westerners went to Asia and brought back what they brought back. This was a remarkable gift and took a great deal of courage. However, since then our understanding of the Buddhadharma has grown immensely. When Bhikkhu Bodhi (and Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli) published the Majjhima Nikāya in 1995, it was the first time that English speaking people had access to really good translations of that book. We read about and heard about things that were never mentioned by those earlier teachers. One of the most prominent has been written about a lot here, and that is jhāna. Since 1995 there has been a lot of backtracking as teachers from the earlier era tried to reconcile what they were taught with what is in the canon. At times it has created something of a mess.
And – I suppose not unexpectedly – as a result there has been a lot of pseudo-scholarship. What I mean by that is teachers who take a single fact – out of context – and not only come to wrong conclusions about that fact, they use it as a way to solidify their status as superior and knowledgeable teachers. They point out something that “everyone knows” and then go on to point out why it is wrong.
The first time I ran into this was at a time when Ajahn Anālayo’s book Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization had become quite popular. The Satipatthana Sutta (The Discourse on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness) is one of the most important discourses of the Buddha.
There was an article written at the time that pointed out how over the centuries a lot of additional material was added to the Satipatthana Sutta. That was really all the article was about. The obvious implication was that the Satipatthana Sutta as it has come down to use is not authentic, and is therefore suspect.
But students of critical thinking will note that those two things are not necessarily connected. Because material was added to the Satipatthana Sutta, it does not necessarily follow that this invalidates the discourse.
If you study that sutta along with the rest of the Pali canon (!), as well as other versions of the Satipatthana Sutta (most especially the two Chinese versions of it), you can see two things. One is what parts of the sutta have (probably) been added in the Pali version, and that the additional material was brought in from other places in the Pali canon.
For example, it would appear from comparing the multiple versions of the sutta that in the fourth foundation of mindfulness – which is dharmas or phenomena – that originally there were only two components: the five hindrances and the seven factors of awakening. This is useful to know, at least for me. It greatly simplifies the sutta and makes it, I think, a little more understandable.
But to say that the other components in the Pali version – which are the aggregates of clinging, the sense bases, and the Four Noble Truths – are not teachings of the Buddha is absurd. And to further suggest that this invalidates the sutta is an indefensible leap in non-logic. We should simply be grateful that we have so much knowledge available to us that we can put everything into perspective.
(Note: The Pali canon, as I have pointed out before, has a problem in the modern context in that in the Buddha’s time, everything was memorized. Thus the discourses tend to be short so they can be remembered. The idea was that over time the monk or nun could piece them together in a coherent whole, like putting the pieces of a puzzle together. But nowhere does the Buddha give us a “top-down” outline. This is why, I think, these additions were made to the Satipatthana Sutta, to make it a more “complete” teaching.)
I heard another example of pseudo-scholarship recently. As I have written before, the Pali word sati – which we usually render as mindfulness – actually means – literally – to recollect or to remember. This had more meaning in India, where to know something is to have memorized it. It is an oral and not a written tradition. To this day in India Hindu priests memorize the Vedas, and school children spend their days memorizing and reciting long passages. At the time of the Buddha and for hundreds of years afterwards, sati meant a) learning the discourses and b) remembering what you learned through your own experience, most especially in your practice, and then – this is a Buddhist inflection – c) to bring that to bear in the present moment.
The word mindfulness has over the years come to be taught often as something more resembling attention. But the word attention in Pali is not sati but manasikāra. The Buddha often used the word sati in conjunction with other qualities. For example, in the Satipatthana Sutta he links sati with ardency and alertness:
“He abides contemplating mind as mind, ardent, alert, and mindful…” [MN 10.3]
This new understanding of the word sati has thus caused a lot of backtracking and pseudo-scholarship. Some years ago I heard a quite prominent teacher explain sati in this way: “The hard part in meditation is not in bringing our attention to the breath, it is in remembering to stay with it.”
This, of course, has nothing to do with the meaning of sati. But it was the best he could do after decades of describing sati as meaning attention, or more precisely, choiceless awareness.
And just recently I heard another teacher say that since sati really means to recollect or to remember that this renders the term mindfulness as inaccurate and – I am exaggerating here – somewhat useless. She then went on to say something about sati that did not make any sense to me at all. In fact later I was trying to reconstruct what she said and came up empty.
In fact, the rendering of sati as mindfulness is actually quite clever:
“When, in the nineteenth century, T. W. Rhys Davids encountered the word sati while translating DN 22 into English, he tried to find an English term that would convey this meaning of memory applied to purposeful activity in the present. Concluding that English didn’t have an adequate equivalent, he made up his own: mindfulness. This, of course, wasn’t a total invention. In fact, Rhys Davids’ choice was apparently inspired by the phrasing of the Anglican prayer to be ever mindful of the needs of others—i.e., to always keep their needs in mind. Rhys Davids simply turned the adjective into a noun. Although the term mindfulness has its origins in a Christian context, and although its meaning has ironically become so distorted over the past century, its original meaning serves so well in conveying the Buddhist sense of memory applied to the present that I will continue to use it to render sati for the remainder of this book. “ [Right Mindfulness – Thanissaro Bhikkhi]
Sadly, now it has become popular convention to dump all over poor T.W. Rhys-Davids for his quite creative and thoughtful translation.
(For those of you who have never heard of T.W. Rhys-Davids, he is a person of incalculable importance in Western Buddhist history. Among his many accomplishments are the founding of the Pali Text Society – PTS – in 1881 and the first Pali-English dictionary and the first English language versions of the Pali canon. His wife took over the PTS when he died in 1922.)
Thus as I think you can see, a partially understood “fact” is used as proof of “scholarship” and thus validates the teacher.
Over the years I have heard a lot of teachers say things that I did not think made any sense. (This happens in spades in Zen, where they like to not understand things and then use that as proof that they know something you don’t. If you can’t understand something it is simply proof that you are hung up on conceptual thinking.) We are often afraid to question deeply because this makes us look stupid. I used to work with an engineer who was not afraid to say he did not know something, and in fact he used the simplicity of his questions to show that people often did not know what they were talking about. “The quickest way to bring a meeting to a halt,” he would say, “Is to say you don’t understand something.”
The Dharma requires deep understanding, and that requires deep questioning, a deep sense of inquiry, and a deep devotion to discovering the truth about how things are.
I have added two new articles to the section on Meditation. They are Establishing a Mental Posture and Breath Meditation. The article on Breath Meditation will have at least one more article to expand on this rich topic.
