Buddha_A Very Short Introduction Read online

  The Buddha’s doctrine for laymen, therefore, was intimately and organically connected to his thought on his monks’ training. But this connection was not limited to the level of morality alone. For the monk the moral discipline underpins cultivation of the mind in meditation; but for both monks and laymen the cultivation of certain mental skills and attitudes could in turn underpin morality. It is here that compassion, concern for others, enters the picture again, now as an attitude to be cultivated meditatively and as a value directed to others’ welfare in general. One can transform oneself not only for liberation, but also for love. In the Buddhist texts compassion is analysed into three: first, compassion proper, defined as sympathy with others’ suffering; second, sympathetic joy, the enjoyment of others’ good fortune; and third, loving-kindness, the Buddhist sentiment par excellence. The attitude cultivated by monks and laymen in loving-kindness is expressed in this famous passage of very early Buddhist poetry:

  Whatever beings may exist – weak or strong, tall, broad, medium or short, fine-material or gross, seen or unseen, those born and those pressing to be born – may they all without exception be happy in heart!

  Let no one deceive anyone else, nor despise anyone anywhere. May no one wish harm to another in anger or ill-will!

  Let one’s thoughts of boundless loving-kindness pervade the whole world, above, below, across, without obstruction, without hatred, without enmity! (S 146–8, 150)

  This passage compresses the attitudes underlying the morality taught by the Buddha into a single sentiment, capturing the positive spirit that is to accompany the negative injunctions. Indeed loving-kindness is absolutely necessary both in the monk’s training and in the lay morality, since for Buddhists it is the mental action, the intention or attitude, which counts and not the deed itself. The sentiment of loving-kindness is certainly impersonal, and in this the Olympian detachment of the renouncer shows through. One must treat all equally, regardless of position or relationship. Indeed in this universal sentiment the Buddha’s moral reasoning has a place, for in prescriptions for loving-kindness the meditator is to ‘identify oneself with all’ (A II 129). That is, just as I am subject to pain and pleasure, so are others, and just as I wish myself well, so I should wish well to others. Throughout the Buddhist world loving-kindness, supplemented by compassion for suffering, was to become the model for social sentiments beyond the family and a value in its own right. In later Buddhist folklore and thought these sentiments grew so prominent as to overshadow even the premier value of liberation.

  The Discourse to the Kālāmans

  The assembled structure of the Buddha’s teaching to laymen is revealed in the Discourse to the Kālāmans (A I 188-93), a people on the northern fringe of the Gangetic civilization. In that discourse the Buddha is represented as touring with a body of monks through the area. A group of Kālāmans learns of his presence and goes to him in the village of Kesaputta with a problem: various wandering ascetics and Brahmans have travelled through expounding and recommending their own views to the Kālāmans, while attacking and rebutting the views of others. The Kālāmans are confused, and seek advice from the Buddha. Whom should they believe? To this confusion the Buddha replies with a teaching which has frequently been quoted to demonstrate the Buddha’s lack of dogmatism and advocacy of individual judgement. He asserts that the Kālāmans should not rely on ‘hearsay, on tradition, on legends, on learning, nor on mere inference or extrapolation or cogitation, nor on consideration and approval of some theory or other, nor because it seems fitting, nor out of respect for some ascetic’.

  This is not a recommendation for capricious individual fancy, however, for what the Buddha recommends is his own moral reasoning from wise reflection and skilfulness, and he is confident that if the Kālāmans so reason they will each one arrive at the Buddha’s moral teaching:

  when you know for yourselves that this is unskilful and that skilful, this blameworthy and that blameless, this deprecated by the wise because it conduces to suffering and ill, and that praised because it conduces to well-being and happiness … when you know this for yourselves, Kālāmans, you will reject the one and make a practice of the other.

  The moral teaching at which they will arrive is a straightforward one. The Kālāmans will not kill, they will not take what is not given, they will not take another’s wife, they will not incite others to their own harm. These injunctions will arise naturally out of the Kālāmans’ experience and their reflection upon skilfulness.

  In the first place it is possible to infer a certain topicality in the discourse. There is reason to believe that the Kālāmans, like their neighbours the Sakyans, the Buddha’s people, had had an independent oligarchic republican government and had been, in the remembered past, a relatively autonomous people. But now they were subjected to the power of the Kosalan king, as the Sakyans were soon to be, and in their economic life they must have felt the magnetic pull of the distant Kosalan capital. These political and economic forces were drawing the Kālāmans out of a relatively simple and closed tribal society into the complex world of Gangetic civilization, and these dislocations were compounded by new cultural forms, embodied in the conflicting advice of those messengers of the Gangetic civilization, the wandering ascetics.

  It is impossible to believe that the injunctions against killing, lying, stealing, and so forth were wholly new to the Kālāmans: their own ancestral culture must have offered analogous injunctions. It is difficult to conceive the survival of a society which did not hold these values in some form, at least as touches the members of the society itself. However, it is characteristic of societies like the older Kālāman one that such values are not reasoned, but are rather held by virtue of tradition and custom, and dramatized in legend and ritual. Under the new conditions these inherited moral traditions had lost their unquestioned hegemony, though, and hence there was occasion for the Buddha to offer a new form of moral reasoning which grew out of the most basic conditions of human life. The proposed morality was not a specifically Kālāman thing, but grew out of the sheer fact of being in society at all, of having a common life, of being able to reason for one’s own and others’ ends, whoever was involved. This morality was meant to hold for all conditions.

  But the Buddha envisaged more than just a new foundation for Kālāman morality. For the injunctions are meant to apply not only within Kālāman society, but to all individuals, kālāman or not, with whom a kālāman might deal: and the kālāmans were already implicated with many other peoples. It is typical of small-scale societies, and of small groups within a larger society, that their members alone are treated as full constituents of the moral community. But now the kālāmans were invited into a larger world to embrace within their moral community all living beings, and certainly all the people of the Gangetic plain. The Buddha promulgated a universal morality to fit the kālāmans’ enforcedly more cosmopolitan life.

  To this extent the Buddha’s teaching to laymen was founded on his moral reasoning, but in the discourse this moral reasoning is in turn founded more deeply in his teaching and experience, in his analysis of the human constitution and his project for self-transformation. When he taught the monks the Buddha emphasized that the sources of suffering – greed, hatred, delusion – lead to one’s own harm. But in this teaching to laymen he stressed that they are generally harmful, not only harmful to oneself.

  When greed rises within a man does it not conduce to harm? Or when hatred and delusion arise within a man? Is it not when his mind is overcome with greed, hatred, and delusion that a man murders, steals, lies, and so forth? And is it not by having a mind unconquered by these things that he is able to avoid all these acts?

  In this passage ‘harm’ refers to harm caused both to oneself and to others: just as to be skilful is to serve both one’s own ends and others’ ends, so to be harmful is to harm both oneself and others. The point is worth emphasizing, because not only Westerners but also later schools of Buddhism have wished to reject or improve on the
Buddha’s teaching on the grounds that it is oblivious to others’ welfare or to the existence of society. Although on balance the Buddha was more concerned with the anatomy of individual experience than with the anatomy of society, his teaching always recognized that to be human is to be a social being.

  Moreover the Buddha’s view of how a layman is to mend himself so that his mind is ‘unconquered’ relies on more than just wise reflection. On the one hand, the Buddha presupposes in laymen a rational faculty which, if rightly directed, will produce skilful solutions to moral problems. Laymen can calculate what to do. But on the other hand this view of laymen as having a capacity for rationality is only part of the story, for the Buddha also felt that laymen could – to an extent appropriate to their station – transform themselves. Hence in the Discourse to the kālāmans the Buddha recommends the meditation on the social sentiments, especially loving-kindness. Laymen are to practise by directing loving-kindness to all quarters and all beings, ‘identifying oneself with all … having a heart free of anger and hatred’. The effect of this mental exercise is to establish loving-kindness sooner or later as a lasting habit and motivation in action.

  This has two important implications. First, it means that the Buddha recommended not only why one should act skilfully, but also how the sometimes intractable human constitution can be made to do so. The Buddha was an optimist in that he thought humans capable of skilful rationality, but a realist in that he knew this rationality to require an emotional transformation as well. One may calculate an act to be good and skilful, and yet be unable to carry it out, and this common weakness was taken fully into account. Second, this practice of self-transformation is portable, in the sense that in principle it may be practised effectively by anyone. This is important because much of human experience, and especially that beyond the bounds of an enclosed group such as the Buddhist Order, cannot be manipulated to one’s own ends. The kālāmans were subject to natural changes but also, and increasingly, to social changes which were beyond anyone’s power to control or even to understand fully. But here at least was a matter which one could effectively handle: one’s own habits and motivations. If one cannot change the world, one can at least change oneself. True, a practice for laymen such as the meditation on loving-kindness must be partly dependent for its effectiveness on one’s being part of a Buddhist community which cleaves to such values; but the final effort is one’s own and the focus of effort is oneself. A kālāman travelling to the Kosalan capital or a kālāman working his ancestral fields could both equally well practise loving-kindness and compassion.

  The Discourse to the kālāmans is perhaps quite topical, but as the Buddha phrased it the discourse, like many of his other teachings to laymen, is applicable to anyone in a similar plight. In this the Buddha is strikingly modern, for today it is difficult to find a people which has not been drawn into a wider, more complex, more confusing social world, as the Kālāmans were drawn into Gangetic civilization. The Buddha addressed himself by the very generality of his discourse to the wide variety of possible fates in the experience of a complex society, and that experience of complexity is ours at least as much as it was the ancient Indians’. On the surface people now, as then, obey the dictates of a bewildering variety of different necessities and values, but there are some traits which they all share: the capacity for misery or happiness, the capacity to harm or benefit others.

  Cultural relativism

  Indeed this modernity corresponds to certain hard-won views of our own. The Buddha was original in his consciousness of the varieties of culture in his milieu, and he was capable of recommending in the canon, for example, that different groups adhere each to its own ancestral morality and religion. The Buddha recognized, that is, that peoples’ values are relative to their own history and culture. We too have come to recognize this irreducible difference of values: we call it cultural relativism, and we take this to mean that other societies are not to be judged by our own. But just as cultural relativism cannot realistically be thought to mean that people can live according to just any values or with no values, so the Buddha advocated that people adhere to ancestral standards only in so far as those standards are consistent with moral skilfulness. Similarly the Buddha taught that human individuals are not to be seen as isolated from each other, but as conjoined to each other in a weighty and consequential relationship. This is consistent with another modern view, a growing awareness that individuals are not to be understood in isolation, but as being inextricably involved in a social context.

  There is another kind of modernity, however, which the Buddha did not have, and that is an overriding preoccupation with the political dimension of human affairs. For the most part the Buddha’s discourses define three areas of concern which, between them, make up the human world as it is seen by the Buddha: an individual’s concern with the events of his own mind and body, his concern with his face-to-face personal relations with others, and his concern with the welfare of all sentient beings. For these three areas, the psychic, the socially very small-scale, and the universal collectivity of all beings, he was willing to lay down both the way things are and the way they should be. But these descriptions and prescriptions say little about how men do and should behave as members of political collectivities, and how political collectivities should be organized. Certainly this relative indifference to the specifics of political affairs must have contributed to the ease with which the Buddha’s teaching has been found relevant in very different political climates.

  But this is not to say that the Buddha’s teaching is devoid of political interest or political implications. In so far as we can infer the Buddha’s own preferences, they were for the sort of oligarchic egalitarian or republican political organization that seems to have held among his own people. And we know this because his prescriptions for the organization of the Buddhist Order, which appear in a long biographical text on his last days, are set beside very similar prescriptions for another such people. The Order (or the people) are to conduct their business in concord, their decisions are to be unanimous, they are to respect and defer to elders, but where elders’ views conflict with the teaching and disciplinary code (or the tradition of the group), one is to follow the teaching. Had such oligarchies prospered and expanded, we might have had ancient Indian theories of democracy and citizenship such as ancient Greece gave us. But oligarchies had probably never been the principal form of government in India: they were very much on their way out when the Buddha lived, and very soon they were gone forever. Most of the Buddha’s experience was with kingdoms, and no king wishes to hear radical political thought.

  So the Buddha was left to talk about kings if he was to talk about politics at all. There are left to us a number of fascinating discourses which must have taken their complex literary form after the Buddha’s death but some of which quite possibly represent the Buddha’s views, and in these he expounds on kingship. The chief message is that kings, no less than anyone else, are subject to the moral order, to considerations of what is morally and socially skilful. When there came to be Buddhist kings these discourses were taken at face value to construct a specifically Buddhist theory of ethical kingship. Other messages include what seems to be a recommendation for state capitalism, to the effect that the king should finance enterprises in order to bring prosperity to the people; and a contract theory of the monarchy, to the effect that the king is elected because he is the handsomest and best and able to keep people in line. But these messages are set in highly ironical and even humorous frames, in which the Buddha tells a fanciful story to an imaginary figure (e.g. Sharptooth the Brahman), and the consequence is that the Buddha is distanced very far from the messages he seems to convey. Part of this distancing is that of a world renouncer looking down from the perspective of liberation upon the folly and pettiness of even grand state affairs. But there is a keen edge to this commentary which implies that the Buddha must have been a very perspicacious observer of the political scene.

  In th
e light of our deeply disillusioning experience of the teachings of the past as they have been applied in the world, we might very well doubt that any past master still bears cogency and relevance. And one might further object in the case of the Buddha that his mastery is not world-wide, but is grounded upon views of the cosmos, such as transmigration, which can never be accepted by the West. But I have tried to show that the philosophy of the Buddha was concerned with matters that do make his mastery available to everyone, that do bring him within Western history, though the West must – quite appropriately – expand its view of its own history beyond parochial preoccupations to embrace him. The Buddha was concerned with the physical and psychological bases upon which human self-transformation is possible: such a mastery could not be lost to us. His teaching was suited to a world of different political philosophies and different religions, but a world in which certain basic values must guide personal relations if we are to live together at all, and it is difficult to see how that mastery could be irrelevant to us.