New Meditation Section

Posted on February 2, 2015 by EricKVanHorn

I have added a new tab to the web site called Meditation. It currently has two entries, an “Introduction” and a description on “Establishing a Sitting Posture.” The goal is over time to develop a comprehensive guide to meditation and indeed the whole of the Buddhist path.

I know that there are – certainly – many meditation guides out there. However, I have never seen one that I find completely satisfying. The closest two are “Breath by Breath” by Larry Rosenberg and “With Each and Every Breath” by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. “Breath by Breath” limits its scope to Anapanasati (literally “Mindfulness of Breathing“), but is an excellent source. I also really like “Breath by Breath“, but I find the format a little confusing, especially for newcomers to meditation.

The goal here is to provide a guide that is a) consistent with what the Buddha taught (i.e., it is canonical), and b) to provide a complete guide to the Buddhist path, at least up to and including jhāna. This includes the cultivation of sīla (virtue), samatha (tranquility), and vipassana (clear seeing), all grounded in right view.

I am going to take advantage of the flexibility of the Internet in order to be able to write this step by step. If I waited to finish the entire thing it might never see the light of day. But because I can post articles on an incremental basis, I can at least get people started, and add to it topic by topic. I can also update and edit easily, which is hard to do with paper.

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New Jhāna Update

Posted on January 5, 2015 by EricKVanHorn

One of my shorter posts in this blog simply references a study that I did on jhāna (meditative absorption) in the Majhima Nikāya. (That post has since been deleted.) The reason that the post is so short is that the paper is rather long (!). However, for those of you who are interested in this very important practice, the study has been updated. It is now on the Resources page. You can also jump directly to it here: Jhāna in the Majjhima Nikaya.

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The Cascading Four Noble Truths

Posted on January 2, 2015 by EricKVanHorn

Many teachers emphasize the non-linear nature of the eightfold Noble Path. Each step in the path helps to reinforce all of the others. And of course that it’s true. However, there is also a method behind the order in which the steps appear in the path. Right concentration, for example, cannot be developed without the other seven as a basis. (This is not my opinon; this is actually stated in the canon.)

Right view, of course, comes first, and it is not possible to develop any of the other seven past factors without right view. Right view provides a map, and without a map you don’t know where you’re going or how to get there.

Of course, in the beginning our understanding of right view will not be very deep. You have to start somewhere so you start with whatever wisdom you have and work from there. However, it’s very important to keep working at your understanding of right view so you stay on course.

Many years ago in my job as a software engineer, when the first Macintosh computer first came out, I had to learn how to program this new machine. Everything was so new then, including the technical documentation. The very first Macintosh came with an early edition of the documentation called Inside Macintosh. Apple didn’t even have time to do a proper printing of it when the machine was released, so they printed what came to be fondly called the phonebook edition. It literally looked like the Manhattan phonebook.

Inside Macintosh was about 1000 pages. At that time no one had ever seen technical documentation that was that long. It was quite overwhelming. And the inside joke among computer programmers was that in order to understand any one chapter you had to understand all the rest.

The Buddhist teachings are a little like that. You have to work your way through them iteratively, visiting and revisiting each topic. And unfortunately there are very few discourses where the Buddha gives an overview of the whole of his teachings and the whole of the practice. In fact, because of the way discourses were given, learned, and remembered, the convention was to give relatively short talks on very specific subjects. In this way they could be easily memorized, because, of course, this was a verbal tradition and not a written one.

This is one reason why there is so much misunderstanding of the Buddhist teachings. At the time of the Buddha and for 1,000 years or so afterwards, the monks memorized the discourses. And they didn’t just memorize a few selected ones, they memorized a great many of them. So once they memorized all of these discourses, they could piece together an overall map in their minds of the whole of the teachings.

One of the things that typically happens when you practice this path, is that something you read in a discourse or heard in a talk will get planted like a seed your mind. And it may be years later that your practice develops to the point where you suddenly understand something you’ve been told or read. This is one of the important aspects of the Pali word for mindfulness, which is “sati”. As I’ve written before, the word “sati” literally means to recollect, and one aspect of that recollection is to remember what you learned when you were able to finally understand it.

We no longer practice in that way. Very few Buddhist practitioners have read even a small portion of the canonical literature. So it’s very easy for someone to read one discourse that is disconnected from the rest of the canon and to take something out of context.

As an exercise for myself – and one that I hope will be of value to others – I have put together a map of the whole path. To be sure, I would like to issue the usual caveats. I don’t claim that in any way this is exhaustive. However, I think it is helpful to put the basic teachings of the Buddha’s into an outline, using the Four Noble Truths as the organizing principle. And this is what follows. It is what I call the Cascading Four Noble Truths. You can click on the down arrows to expand any section.

I look forward to hearing from anyone who quibbles with the way I have organized it, or things that I’ve missed, or things that I simply gotten wrong.

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Being, Doing, And The Active Art of Meditating

Posted on November 2, 2014 by EricKVanHorn

Those of you who follow this blog know that I am at odds with many of the teachings of what is commonly called “Vipassana meditation.” I have been pleased in recent years to discover that I am not alone. Two of the most prominent teachers in the nominally Theravadan tradition are firmly on my side. Or rather, to be more precise, I stumbled across understandings about what the Buddha taught that they know and can articulate far better than I.

Thursday a week ago at the Albuquerque Vipassana Sangha meeting I got to revisit these issues anew. In the Dhamma talk for the evening several common teachings from the “Vipassana community” stood out. They will sound familiar to anyone who practices what is commonly called “insight meditation.”

  1. When meditating, just be with whatever arises.
  2. Meditation is not about “creating mind states.”
  3. You just need enough concentration to cultivate wisdom.

(These last two statements are an indirect way of criticizing jhāna practice.)

Because I like to be careful about how I characterize the Buddha’s teachings, I spent some time this afternoon doing some more detailed research on statements like these, as well as looking into the precise meaning of the word “mindfulness” (sati in Pali), and the topics “bare attention”, and “choice-less awareness.” (You will also hear related phrases such as “non-reactive awareness” or “non-reactive attention.”)

What has come to be known as “Vipassana meditation” has no basis in the Buddha’s teachings. The word “vipassana” (insight) in the canonical literature is a quality of the mind. It is usually used in conjunction with the word “samatha” (serenity). “Samatha” and “vipassana” are two qualities of the mind that are developed together:

“Again, a bhikkhu[i] develops serenity and insight in conjunction. As he is developing serenity and insight in conjunction, the path is generated. He pursues this path, develops it, and cultivates it. As he is pursuing, developing, and cultivating this path, the fetters are abandoned and the underlying tendencies are uprooted.” [AN[ii] 4.170]

Further – and this is my own understanding – samatha and vipassana develop with concentration – samadhi – as their basis.

But perhaps more importantly, this notion of non-reactivity and non-intervention and non-doing, indicates a neutrality that is absent from the Buddha’s teachings. Meditation is, in fact, specifically about developing and cultivating the mind. The Pali word for meditation – bhavana – means “to develop” or “to cultivate.” This is an active process, not a passive one.

Thus, meditation is about developing a mind of wholesome mind states, and eliminating unwholesome mind states:

“Again, Udāyin, I have proclaimed to my disciples the way to develop the four right kinds of striving. Here a bhikkhu awakens zeal for the non-arising of unarisen evil unwholesome states, and he makes effort, arouses energy, exerts his mind, and strives. He awakens zeal for the abandoning of arisen evil unwholesome states…He awakens zeal for the arising of unarisen wholesome states…He awakens zeal for the continuance, non-disappearance, strengthening, increase, and fulfillment by development of arisen wholesome states, and he makes effort, arouses energy, exerts his mind, and strives. And thereby many disciples of mine abide having reached the consummation and perfection of direct knowledge.” [MN [iii]77.16]

There is also, then, the issue of the word “mindfulness.”

The word “mindfulness” in Pali is sati. There are numerous – and I would say, detailed and confusing – discussions of the word. The literal meaning of sati is to “remember” or “recollect”.

I am going to give my own interpretation of what I have read, based mainly on what Thaniisaro Bhikkhu and Bhikku Bodhi have written. I believe that these are two very reputable sources. Any errors in interpretation are my own.

Sati in the context of meditation can literally be taken to mean “keeping an object in mind.” This usually means the breath, or the breath in conjunction with one of the four foundations of mindfulness (the body, sensations, mind objects, and mental phenomena).

But sati, keeping in mind the context of memory or recollection, also implies keeping an object in mind in the context of remembering. OK, so remembering what? I think this can be understood in two aspects.

The first aspect is that of the previous 6 factors of the noble eightfold path: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, and right effort. While the noble eightfold path is usually taught as being non-linear – and this is not incorrect – they also have a linear way of being understood. (The Buddha said that right concentration – the eight path factor – arises with the other path factors as a foundation.) Thus, when meditating, mindfulness implies keeping the other path factors – especially the ones that come before and support right mindfulness – in mind.

The other way of understanding sati as remembering is from one’s own past experience. We all have some wisdom – discernment – and keeping our own previous experience and what we have learned in mind also supports the rich experience know as “right mindfulness.”

Thus “mindfulness” is “keeping an object in mind”, with the supporting foundation of the first 6 path factors (which can be abbreviated to just three factors: right view, right intention, and virtue), as well as our own personal experience, and particularly what we have learned from that experience, our wisdom.

Bhikkhu Bodhi, in a letter to B. Allan Wallace in 2006, put it this way:

“I understand your exasperation with the tendency, in the “neo-Vipassana movement,” to adopt (as you put it) “a kind of ethical neutrality that acknowledges no significant difference between wholesome and unwholesome mental states and rejects any attempt to favor one kind of mental process over another.” I agree this is quite foreign to the whole tenor of the Buddha’s teaching. In fact, I doubt very much that there is such a thing as “bare attention” in the sense of mindfulness completely devoid of ethical evaluation and purposive direction. In the actual development of right mindfulness, as I understand it, sammāsati must always be guided in right view, steered by right intention, grounded in the three ethical factors, and cultivated in conjunction with sammāvāyāma, right effort; right effort necessarily presupposes the distinction of mental states into the unwholesome and the wholesome.

I recall that when Ven. Nyanaponika[iv] would read statements about “bare attention” as interpreted by some of the neo-Vipassana teachers, he would sometimes shake his head and say, in effect, “But that’s not what I meant at all!” I remember many years ago I meditated at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre. At the end of the corridor where I did walking meditation there was a sign that read, “Allow whatever arises.” Whenever I walked towards the sign and it came into my field of vision, I would always think of the Buddha’s saying, “Here, a monk does not tolerate an arisen thought of sensual desire … ill-will … cruelty … or any other arisen unwholesome state, but abandons it, eliminates it, and completely dispels it.” I was tempted to replace the sign there with one that had this saying, but fortunately I resisted the temptation. If I had been discovered, I might have been expelled.”

Sadu, sadu, sadu.[v]

————————

[i] Meditator

[ii] “AN” – Anguttara Nikāya – the Numerical Discourses of the Buddha

[iii] “MN” – Majjhima Nikāya, the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha

[iv] Venerable Nyanaponika coined the term “bare attention”

[v] Sadu means “well said”.

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Making a Difference

Posted on October 19, 2014 by EricKVanHorn

I am sitting here at the Starbucks in Mt. Laurel, NJ. A very dear old friend of mine from Cherry Hill committed suicide on Monday and I am here for the funeral.

I first met Bill the summer after my senior year in high school. When you know someone that long, you have a lot of history. I am very close to his wife Shellie and his two children Ethan and Emily.

Bill was a very prominent attorney. His specialties were criminal law and civil rights law. He has this long resume of accomplishments. He was a public figure. This will be a big funeral with lots of well known people.

But what strikes me most about all this is that for the many wonderful things that Bill did and for the memorable person he was, he was never happy. He was incredibly smart and competent and capable and had a great sense of humor. But underneath it all was lurking this dark seed.

I remember when I first heard the Dalai Lama and he talked about how everyone wants to be happy, and I thought, well, of course, how obvious is that? But as I have gotten older and – hopefully – wiser I have realized just what a subtle and complicated business being happy is. We start by misdefining it as money, career, “success”, having a trophy husband or wife, being famous, being talented, etc. and of course if any of those things were the keys to happiness then people who have those things would be happy. They’re not.

The Buddha asked that question in a big way, and he went to extraordinary lengths to find the answer, and it is one reason that I am so eternally grateful to that big Indian lug for what he did.

The last time I saw Bill was last May when I was on my way out to New Mexico. His daughter asked him why he became a lawyer, to which he answered, “I wanted to make a difference.”

Well, he did, and in a bigger way than most people. (It is to be argued, of course, that everyone makes a difference. Some differences are good and some are bad, and some are bigger than others. Henry David Thoreau said, “Show me a seed and I am prepared to expect miracles.” You never know what kind of a difference you are making.) So I have been thinking that his epitaph should be, “He made a difference.” And then I thought, what I would like if I were to have an epitaph? I think I would like this: “Sometimes he really liked to breathe.” The hope is that over time, this, too, will make a difference.

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Same old, same old

Posted on July 19, 2014 by EricKVanHorn

Life is mainly about what happens in your heart and mind. In Pāḷi there is a single word for “heart and mind”; that word is citta.

When Henry David Thoreau was on his deathbed, his aunt – who today would be called an “evangelical Christian”, and who greatly disapproved of Henry’s transcendentalism – asked him accusatorily, “Have you made your peace with God?” Henry replied, “I wasn’t aware that we had quarreled.”

Now there is a man who is at peace with his place in the universe.

Recently a dearly beloved friend of mine – who has lived in Israel for many decades – posted this to her Facebook page:

“We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”

It is a quote from Golda Meir. I replied as follows:

No one forces you to kill anyone. That is a choice that you make. “We cannot change people with our hatred. Maybe we can change them with our love.” – Ayya Khema (a Buddhist nun who was born a German Jew, and who was one of the last Jewish children to leave Germany before the borders were closed before WW II.)

From a purely clinical point of view, it is an issue of cause and effect. But of course, it is fundamentally about your heart and mind. How do you want to be? Do you want to be happy? Do you want to live in peace and harmony with the world around you?

Robert Thurman – that inimitable Buddhist force in the world – says that we usually pit ourselves against the Universe. Since the Universe is much bigger than we are, the Universe usually wins.

There is a famous quotation that is usually attributed to Einstein, although its source is undetermined. Nonetheless, its wisdom is indisputable, and that quote is, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

If the Israelis want life to continue, year after year, decade after decade, as it has, then they should continue with the same policies that they have in the past. It will, of course, get the same result.

It they want a different result, they will have to adopt a different approach.

The Buddha says that the antidote to fear, hatred, and anger is love, compassion and wisdom. In my own personal experience, he is correct. I tried hating those who hate me, with an obvious result. And I tried meeting people who hate me with love, understanding, equanimity, and wisdom. I had somewhat better results. It was not perfect, but it was better.

Mark Twain once said in his essay Advice to Boys and Girls, “Always speak the truth; it will impress some and astonish the rest.” The same can be said for love, compassion, and understanding. A little bit of practical wisdom – seeing that doing “A” leads to “B” – does not hurt either. Keep firing those missiles. Keep killing people. The result is predictable.

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Keep Calm and Carry On

Posted on July 11, 2014 by EricKVanHorn

Since my last post I have moved to New Mexico and become a part of the Albuquerque Vipassana Sangha. What I see there is the same thing that I see in other local groups and at retreats and anywhere that people are trying to master the art of meditation, and that is a great deal of struggle.

At last night’s meeting the issue was impermanence. This is, of course, one of the core teachings of the Buddha, that all conditioned things arise and pass away, and that except for Nibbana (Nirvana) all things are conditioned. This can be a very unsettling notion. And when you link impermanence to the two other marks of conditioned existence – non-self (yikes!) and dukkha (suffering, stress, un-satisfactoriness – more yikes!) – it all sounds pretty depressing.

Believe it or not, the Buddha’s teaching are really good news, but that message tends to get lost sometimes, especially in the way in which the Buddha’s teachings have migrated to the West. Instead of the good news getting put front and center, it tends to get relegated to sitting in the back of the room.

I read once that the Buddha did not teach the Four Noble Truths to new converts. It was considered too counter-productive to do so. The Four Noble Truths, along with the Three Marks of Existence (as noted – impermanence, non-self, and dukkha), and dependent co-arising (the Buddhist law of causality), are part of the wisdom practices (pañña, in Pali) of Buddhadharma. It is pretty heady stuff.

Now it takes a certain amount of wisdom simply to undertake this practice. Having said that, the Buddha is often said to have taught sīla-samādhi-pañña. Sīla is ethics/morality/virtue. Samādhi is concentration. Pañña is wisdom, or discernment.

Further, the practice actually proceeds in this order (more or less… the process is iterative and at the end non-linear). You start with the cultivation of a firm ethical base. You stop doing the things that cause harm to yourself and others. You start doing more and more things that bring you and other people happiness. It is very hard to proceed with a meditation practice if your ethical life is a mess.

For the Buddha’s monks and nuns, the practice of virtue was and is serious stuff. There are over 200 precepts for monks, over 300 for nuns. The novice monastic has to memorize them all and be able to chant them. It is part of the ceremony for full ordination. And thereafter the precepts are chanted on the full moon and new moon days of every lunar month as part of the Uposatha observance. There is also a reflection and confession component to the precepts (pāṭimokkha) recitation ceremony. It is an active practice.

Most Buddhists in the world do not practice meditation, but they do observe the ethical precepts. Or at least they are supposed to.

For the meditator, at least the way the Buddha taught, the next step is to establish a sense of well-being. In the Ānāpānasati Sutta, the Buddha’s most complete teaching on meditation, the first four steps are as follows:

  1. Note when the breaths are short.
  2. Note when the breaths are long.
  3. Become aware of the whole body.
  4. “Tranquilize” the whole body.

In other words, the start to a meditation practice is to learn how to develop serenity, tranquility, calm. This leads to the next two steps in the Buddha’s instructions:

  1. rapture (pītī in Pali)
  2. happiness (sukha)

It is only by step 7 that what have come to be called insight or vipassana practices – discernment – come into play. In step 7 the meditator is instructed to be sensitive to “mental activities”. Even then, the nest step – step 8 – is to “tranquilize” mental activities.

Thus the whole of what is being taught here is the cultivation of serenity, to calm the body, to calm the mind.

Now very few “Vipassana” meditators will recognize this practice. They are taught simply to be with whatever arises. If the knee hurts, just stay with it. If painful thoughts arise, just be with them. What a miserable way to practice; it is completely counter-productive. You are trying to do wisdom – discernment – practices without having a firm base. You do not have enough calm and stability and well-being to effectively cultivate discernment. It is like trying to play soccer without having enough stamina to run for more than 2 minutes.

The correct way to practice is to learn to work with the breath in a pleasant and satisfying way. This is cultivating the garden soil from which wisdom will grow.

Everyone knows how to take a deep breath in order to release stress. That is a great starting point. There are many, many practices for developing concentration, tranquility and serenity. But one of the best and simplest ones that I know is that when the mind has wandered or is anxious or is spinning or doing anything that causes stress, simply take a nice, satisfying breath. It doesn’t have to be overly dramatic. Simply learn how to take a breath that feels good. Reward yourself for your moment of awareness. Note the stress, then take a breath that feels good. Feel the breath go all the way in and all the way out. Feel it in the whole body. You might even take another, and another. Follow the Buddha’s instructions. Tranquilize the body. Tranquilize feelings. Tranquilize mental formations. When you can do this, you have a firm base for looking deeply into the majesty of how everything works.

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A Single Excellent Night

Posted on October 1, 2013 by EricKVanHorn

There is a lovely sutta (discourse) in the Majjhima Niaya called “A Single Excellent Night”. In it, the Buddha offers these verses:

Let not a person revive the past
Or on the future build his hopes;
For the past has been left behind
And the future has not been reached.
Instead, with insight, let him see
Each presently arisen state;
Let him know that and be sure of it,
Invincibly, unshakably.
Today the effort must be made;
Tomorrow Death may come. Who knows?
No bargain with Mortality
Can keep him and his hordes away,
But one who dwells thus ardently,
Relentlessly, by day, by night —
It is he, the Peaceful Sage has said,
Who has had a single excellent night.
MN 131

The image of peacefully and mindfully observing each passing moment is so palpable that you can feel it. The simplicity is profound.

Ajahn Punnadhammo says about the jhanas that as you progress from one jhana to the next, it isn’t that you gain something new, but that something that is occurring falls away. Each subsequent jhana gets simpler. That can be said in general of the Buddhist path. There are all the complexities and complications of the unawakened life, and to the extent that we can stop the internal dialog, stop creating melodrama, stop contending with the people and the world around us, we are happier and more useful people. This echoes somewhat the Mahayana notion that we are already whole and complete and perfect. What we need to learn how to do is to shed all the things that get in our way of that perfection.

When I first read this sutta I was, of course, struck by its beauty. I was then very pleased to see that I am not the only one. The next three suttas in the Majjhima Nikaya are also about this verse. In MN 131, “Ananda and A Single Excellent Night”, Ananda recites this verse to a group of practitioners, for which he earns the Buddha’s praise.

In MN 133, “Mahā Kaccāna and A Single Excellent Night” there is one of those wonderful, magical tales. A “deity who illuminated the whole of the Hot Springs” asks the venerable Samiddhi if he knows the “summary and exposition of ‘One Who Has Had a Single Excellent Night’”. Samiddhi does not know it, so he asks the Buddha to teach it to him. The Buddha recites the verse, but does not explain it in detail. This happens often in the canonical literature. The Buddha was something of a minimalist.

So Samiddhi and some of his friends go to Mahā Kaccāna, a monk of good reputation and character, and ask him for an exposition. This also happens a lot in these stories. You get the impression that the monks are pretty intimidated by the Buddha, which – I think – is pretty natural. Mahā Kaccāna then gives them a teaching in detail on the meaning of the verse. The Buddha later hears Mahā Kaccāna’s explanation of it, and praises the explanation as being equal to any the Buddha himself would have given.

The final sutta is MN 134, “Lomasakangiya and A Single Excellent Night.” In this story, a young deity named “Candana” asks the monk Lomasakangiya if he knows this teaching. Lomasakangiya  does not, but Candana remembers the stanzas and recites them. According to Candana, the Buddha had given this teaching to “the gods of the heaven of the Thirty-Three”.

After this, Lomasakangiya  “travels by stages” from Sakya to Jetavana Park where the Buddha was staying. This is quite a long way, and would have meant walking for many days. This shows the urgency that Lomasakangiya  felt about learning more about this teaching. When he gets to see the Buddha, the Buddha repeats the whole of MN 131 (more or less), and “The Venerable Lomasakangiya was satisfied and delighted in the Blessed One’s words.”

This verse could be said to contain the whole of the Buddhist path. If you only had this verse and nothing else, it would be enough.

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The Diamonds Under the Coal

Posted on July 12, 2013 by EricKVanHorn

I often encourage serious students of the Dhamma to read the Buddha’s discourses. This can be something of a hard sell. The language is repetitive, the cultural references are – of course – 2400 years out of date, and the concepts being taught can be incredibly subtle and well outside the mainstream of anything we have in our current experience. (I had a discussion with a neighbor of mine yesterday in which I used the term “universal consciousness”, which he took to mean some synonym for “God.” This, of course, has no place in Buddhist thinking.)

But, nonetheless, like Don Quixote, I strive onward, hoping to convey some of my love of the Canon.

It is, I think, without question the most remarkable literature in history. If you told me that I had to spend the rest of my life living alone on a desert island with only the Majjhima Nikaya (the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha) to keep me company, I would consider that the best of all possible lives.

Still, communicating that love to others is not always easy, but I will try.

When I first started practicing 20 or so years ago, I was told not to bother reading the original canonical literature. It was “boring and repetitive”, I was told. And to be sure, at that time Bhikkhu Bodhi had not yet made his first translation available, but nonetheless, I was told to stick to the “commentaries”.

But after many years of hearing that the Buddha said this and the Buddha said that, I got tired of hearing about what he said second hand. For one thing, a part of me always wondered how much of what I was being told was slightly doctored to support whatever point the teacher wanted to make.

Serendipitously, that was just about the time that Bhikkhu Bodhi made his (and Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli’s) translation of the Majjhima Nikaya available. I bought it, I read it, and life has never been the same for me.

Bhikkhu Bodhi is a real treasure. He is an American who, in 1972, went to Sri Lanka. At that time the only English language translations of the Pali canon were the “PTS” (Pali Text Society) editions that had been translated in the 19th century. Although they were remarkable for their time, the translations were suspect, and burdened with Victorian language and cultural conventions. There is at least one section in the Vinaya – the monastic code – that was left un-translated because it would have offended Victorian sensibilities. (It was about a monk who was having sex with a monkey!)

Thus, Bhikkhu Bodhi, in order to support his own practice, started working with translations that were in progress by a monk named Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli, a British Theravadan monk and scholar. Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli was educated at Oxford; Bhikkhu Bodhi has a Ph.D in Philosophy. (Sometimes in Buddhism, as with Mozart, it is just best to sit back and enjoy the ride.)

I am greatly abbreviating this story, but the end result of all this is that in 1995 the Majjhima Nikaya was published. This is the first volume of the Buddha’s discourses I read, and it is still my favorite. It is a true treasure, and if you are ever going to read just one volume of the Buddha’s discourses, this is the one to read.

Now to be sure, the average person will probably find the text a little difficult. But bear with it. This was an oral tradition. Typically what would happen is that the Buddha would give a talk, after which the monks present would get together, review what the Buddha had said, and memorize it. I am also guessing that like later poets in oral traditions like in medieval Ireland, the language had certain structure and conventions to support this oral tradition. It was like composing music on the fly.

It isn’t really so very strange from things that exist today, but we probably don’t think of them in this way. Blues bands used to have “battles”, where lyrics were made up on the spot. They adopted stock phrases and rhymes and rhythms. Beat poets did this in poetry slams, and I am guessing that rap musicians do the same thing. You develop a “technology of language” that supports what you are up to.

The Pali Canon is full of poetry, and this was probably part of the technology of the oral tradition in ancient India.

So while the language can be, admittedly, quite repetitive and uses a lot of the same stock phrases over and over again, I encourage people to think of the discourses more like poetry or music. No one complains when the chorus of a song comes around. In fact, I think a wonderful way to read the discourses is aloud, and in a group. This was, after all, how they were transmitted century after century.

So that is my speil on how to read the discourses. Read them as poetry; read them as music.

As to why I encourage people to read them, well…

In my last blog entry I took Leigh Brasington – and he is certainly not the only one – to task for teaching Buddhism in a western, revisionist way. If you read his comment and my comment back to him you will see that I assert – and I think I am on unusually solid ground here – that his statement that the Buddha’s teachings on rebirth are “skillful means” is completely untenable. And I think that anyone who reads the discourses for themselves will find that a self-evident statement. The evidence is quite overwhelming.

I have also written about how when I read the Majjhima Nikaya, I kept coming across this thing “jhana”. I have been going to meditation retreats for over 20 years, and I have only heard the word used at 2 retreats, and one of those was a jhana retreat (!). I had never even heard the word when I read the Majjhima Nikaya, yet there it was, over and over again. To this day “jhana” is sort of the bogeyman of Buddhism.

And this is precisely why I encourage people to read the discourses themselves. We get the Buddha’s teachings filtered to the point that they are at times hardly recognizable. Sometimes they are completely wrong. And to be sure, I am not suggesting that anyone take at face value what they read. I certainly don’t. But we should all start from the same baseline.

If you don’t believe in rebirth, my goodness, there is nothing wrong with that. The same is true for the teachings on non-self, which are particularly subtle. People have been debating these issues for generations.

But all forms of Buddhism started with the canonical literature as the same base line. I mentioned that I just finished a course with Ajahn Analayo that compared Chinese versions of the discourses with the Pali ones. One of the most remarkable things about the two is how little they differ in meaning. Now, of course, the Chinese versions are the ones used by the Chinese traditions, including Cha’an (Zen) and so forth. So it is not that the basic teachings are different, even though traditions like Zen differ from Theravadan Buddhism in their interpretations.

And, OK, so maybe that sounds a little too scholarly, and I don’t mean to sound that way. Goodness, I am anything but a scholar. I am a practitioner. But I do encourage all students to pick up a copy of the Majjhima Nikaya – and I would even say Bhikkhu Bodhi’s translations, which are the best – and give it a go. Read them slowly. I read one or two a day for a year. There is no hurry. But a lot of what is being taught out there as Buddhadhamma is unsupportable in the literature. It causes a lot of angst and confusion. There is nothing quite like going back to the source. And who knows, you may find yourself, after a while, getting used to the rhythm of the literature, and finding that underneath all that coal is a treasure trove of priceless diamonds.

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Oh, What A Tangled Web….

Posted on July 9, 2013 by EricKVanHorn

A dear Dhamma sister of mine just got back from a retreat at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. It was a retreat nominally devoted to learning how to do jhana (tranquility) practice, although it is not limited to jhana.

This retreat is taught by Leigh Brasington. Leigh is an interesting case. My own opinion of him is that he is first and foremost an outstanding teacher of the steps required to enter and move around the jhanas. To be sure, he teaches what I rather unceremoniously call “jhana light”, what is sometimes called “sutta jhana” (jhana as taught in the discourses) as opposed to “Visuddhimagga jhana” (jhana as described in the Visuddhimagga, which is a later commentary). The latter is a much more difficult practice to cultivate, and requires many months – perhaps years – to master. But generally I agree with people like Leigh and Thanissaro Bhikku who teach a milder form of these practices, that in the Buddha’s time jhana practice was probably not the intense version that was later developed and documented in the Visuddhimagga.

Anyone who has been following this blog knows that my understanding of the way the Buddha taught meditation is that jhana was a centerpiece of the practice. This is not the way meditation is generally taught. But even doing preliminary practices to jhana – developing what tranquility one can muster – is a much more pleasant way to learn meditation. You learn to develop joy, happiness, contentment, and equanimity. It is a more pleasant way to meditate, and it is a more pleasant way to live.

As to other matters, well…

A teaching of the Buddha with which Westerners have particular difficulty is rebirth, and I understand that. It is long way from the norm of what we are taught. People who are from a religious background in the West tend to believe that after this life there is an afterlife in heaven or hell or some equivalent. People who are from a scientific – sometimes called “materialistic” – background tend to believe that when this life is over, that is all that happens. You simply cease to exist.

Now to be sure, in order to meditate and to benefit from the Buddha’s teachings, you do not have to suddenly discard everything you used to believe is true. That would be silly. The Buddhist path is one to be cultivated. It opens up bit by bit. It is a path based on direct experience, but also on contemplation and growth. So if rebirth is difficult for you to accept, do not – please – think that this should preclude you from getting what you can from the Buddha’s teachings. The Buddhist path is intended to help you to become a happier person, not to provide more ways for you to suffer.

Having said that, rebirth is a fundamental part of what the Buddha taught. There can be no denying this. And rebirth is not some metaphor. The canonical literature uses the phrase “with the breakup of the body, after death”, which makes it pretty clear what rebirth means.

Further, there are numerous instances of discussions of the other realms, and these are quite detailed. So whether or not you believe in these teachings, make no mistake that this is what the Buddha taught.

Now for a meditation teacher to say that they do not believe in rebirth, or that they are agnostic on the subject of rebirth, is one thing. But there are teachers who say that rebirth is not a teaching of the Buddha. This is not true and cannot be supported by anything in the Buddhist literature or tradition. Sadly, I was actually in a retreat when Leigh Brasington said, “The Buddha never talked about rebirth.”  I almost fell off my cushion.

Further, Leigh is quite adamant that ”when you die, that is it. Life is simply over.”

Leigh not only has no way of knowing this is true, it is a dangerous thing to teach. He might say that this is what he believes, but he has a strong and forceful personality, and for a student who is trying to come to grips with life, this can do serious emotional damage.

What Leigh is teaching is called in the Buddhist canon “annihilationism.” It is the materialistic belief that I mentioned earlier. There is a sutta (The Ananda Sutta) in which the Buddha specifically refutes both the doctrines of eternalism and annihilationism. This sutta also touches on that difficult issue of non-self.

Note that in the Ananda Sutta, the Buddha does not say that the self does not exist. It is a subtle distinction. He does say – elsewhere – that the five khandas are not self. (In brief, the five khandas are 1) the physical body, 2) sense feeling, 3) perception, 4) mental formations and 5) consciousness.)

The khandas are the things with which we normally identify, the things we say are I, me and mine. The Buddha described these as not permanently existing, as being processes. Thus – and this is important – the Buddha did not say that you do not exist. This is nihilism, and he did not teach that. What he did teach is that you are a process, something that changes from moment to moment. There is no permanent essence there, just a process. But a process still exists. Where is the permanence in the weather, yet it certainly exists.

However, you can probably see how easy it is to slip into nihilism and annihilationism. This is the danger, and this is why I think it is so important that Dhamma teachers, well, that they know what the hell they are talking about. Mis-teaching in this way can lead to depression and even suicide in students in the extreme case. (This happened even during the time of the Buddha.) That is certainly not leading away from suffering.

There is, while I am on the subject, good evidence for rebirth. There are stories of people having memories of past lives. The classic one in Buddhism is Dhammaruwam, who at the age of 2 starting chanting Buddhist discourses in Pali. Not only was it in Pali, it was in a form of Pali and in a style of chanting that had not been in use since the first millennium. (http://www.dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=8532&start=0) There are also the studies of Near Death Experiences. So not only is rebirth a teaching of the Buddha, there is at least some empirical evidence for rebirth, and likewise there is no proof of annihilationism. Admittedly, you can’t prove a negative, but you at least have to address the evidence for alternatives.

As to the issue of teaching responsibly, in the canon there are many stories of monks who, when asked about the Buddha’s teachings, declined to do so because they were afraid that they would get it wrong, that their understanding was not yet mature enough to explain it in its subtlety. I have always been very moved by this devout respect for “getting it right.”

I see this same respect among the best teachers that I know. I am currently taking an online course with Ajahn Analayo, who wrote the definitive book on the Satipatthana Sutta  (Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization). Ajahn Analayo is one of the really bright stars in the world of Buddhism. He is German, but teaches in English and translates Pali, Sanskrit and Chinese. I believe that he also does some Tibetan translation. Further, he is a monk and a meditator, so he has both impeccable scholarship and a devout practice.

One thing that impresses me about Ajahn Analayo is how gently he teaches. He rarely says that something is just so. Rather he gives all the aspects to an issue, and often invites you to disagree with him. It is a type of teaching full of both wisdom and humility.

Now shockingly, given his pedigree, I do occasionally disagree with Ajahn Analayo. But I think the way in which he/I/we disagree is as fellow searchers on the path. I may be wrong (most likely), he may be wrong (least likely), and we both may be wrong. The Dhamma is to be held lightly. We are both, I think, looking for the right answer, not just to win a debate point.

The Dhamma is ultimately about discovering the truth. To the extent that you hold dearly onto opinions, that is a serious impediment to the truth. And to the extent that you teach opinion as fact, and worse yet to misrepresent what the Buddha taught, that is at the very least troubling.

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