20 MINUTES TO MASTER … BUDDHISM - Kulananda

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king admitted that would be beyond him.

      ‘But I can sit here for seven days and seven nights, without stirring, all the time enjoying complete and perfect happiness,’ said the Buddha. ‘Therefore, I think I am happier than you.’

      And so the Sangha grew and the Dharma spread far and wide. But the Buddha wasn’t interested in disciples simply for the sake of a large following. Nor did he want people to follow him out of blind faith. He wanted people to check his teachings out in practice. To try them out and see if they actually worked for them.

      Once a group of young men from the Kalama clan came to visit him. They were confused as to the rival claims of the different spiritual teachers of the day. They all seemed to make contradictory claims. How were they to choose between them? The Buddha replied:

      Do not go by hearsay nor by what is handed down by others. Nor by what people say, nor by what is stated on the authority of your traditional teachings. Do not go by reasoning, nor by inferring, nor by argument as to method, nor by reflection on and approval of an opinion; nor out of respect – thinking that a teacher must be deferred to. But, when you know of yourselves: ‘These teachings are not good; they are blameworthy; they are condemned by the wise: these teachings, when followed out and put in practice, conduce to loss and suffering’ – then reject them.4

      So, yes, we have to refer to people wiser than ourselves. Teachings must, after all, be taught, and some ‘are condemned by the wise’, but nonetheless we must test everything we hear in the crucible of our own practice and experience. If teachings lead to happiness and gain, we can accept them. If they lead to loss and suffering, they must be rejected.

      Finally, at the age of 80, his body worn out and racked with pain, the Buddha made one final teaching tour, giving all his friends and followers one final chance to ask him any questions they might have about the teaching. To the last he was completely aware and concerned only for the welfare of others. A wanderer called Subhadra came to see him on his death-bed, and Ananda, the Buddha’s companion, turned him away, not wanting the Buddha to be disturbed at such a time. But the Buddha insisted on talking with him and Subhadra, soon convinced of the truth of the Dharma, joined the Sangha.

      Then the Buddha asked if any of the assembled Sangha had any doubts or questions about his teaching. With typical thoughtfulness, he allowed that those who were too embarrassed to ask for themselves might do so through a friend. The answer was a resounding silence. The Buddha had made the Dharma perfectly clear. Seeing this, he gave a final exhortation to his followers: ‘All conditioned things are impermanent! With mindfulness, strive!’ And with that he entered into a state of deep meditation and passed away.

      For most of his teaching career, the Buddha was accompanied by his cousin and close friend Ananda, who is reputed to have had a prodigious memory. All the doctrinal stories in the Buddhist scriptures are attributed to him, for apparently he remembered all the different occasions on which the Buddha taught, and recounted them in full to a council of the Sangha which was called after the Buddha’s death, thus laying the foundations of an oral tradition which preserved the teachings until they began to be committed to writing several hundred years later.

      For the last 2,500 years the Buddha’s teachings have enabled countless men and women to achieve liberation – ‘the heart’s release’. In the Deer Park in Sarnath, with his former ascetic followers, the Buddha set rolling the Wheel of the Dharma. Since then it has rolled on down the centuries – through India and Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Nepal, Tibet, China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan. Millions upon millions of people have been deeply affected by the Teaching. Wherever it went it wrought profound personal, social and cultural change.

      But what exactly is the Dharma? And what use can it be – a body of teaching which was propounded 2,500 years ago in India?

      References

      1. Majjima-Nikaya 245–6. Quoted in Garry Thomson’s Reflections On the Life of the Buddha, Buddhist Society, London, 1983.

      2. From Canto 11 of the Buddhacarita, or ‘The Acts of the Buddha’, by the first-century Indian poet Ashvaghosha. Edward Conze, Buddhist Scriptures, Penguin, 1959.

      3. Ibid.

      4. Anguttara-Nikaya, 1.188. E. L. Woodward, Some Sayings of the Buddha, Oxford University Press, 1973.

      CHAPTER 2

       THE DHARMA

      After the Buddha’s death his followers correlated all of his major teachings. In time these were set to verse, committed to memory and passed down from generation to generation in what must be one of the most magnificent episodes of oral tradition in human history, for the ‘literature’ thus transmitted was immense. Similar, in its oral nature, to the Greek Homeric Epics, it was much more extensive and more highly organized. When finally committed to writing, as it began to be around about the first century BCE, it eventually came to occupy what in modern terms would be a small library.

      Having eventually been written down, in Pali, Sanskrit or other variants of Indian contemporary language, the Dharma – the teachings of the Buddha – developed and expanded. New material was brought in, and a vast canonical literature comprising records of the Buddha’s discourses and discussions, stories, parables, poems, and analyses gradually grew up.

      Rather than a single, pleasantly portable Bible, the Buddhist canonical literature is very extensive. Traditionally it is spoken of as the Tripitaka, the Three ‘Baskets’, perhaps harking back to a time when texts were kept in that way. There is the Sutra-Pitaka, the collection of discourses either spoken by the Buddha or by one or another of his Enlightened disciples; the Vinaya-Pitaka, which contains accounts of the development of the early Sangha, as well as the monastic code; and the Abhidharma-Pitaka, a compendium of Buddhist psychology and philosophy.

      As the Buddhist tradition split into different schools, each had its own version of the Tripitaka, although there are very substantial overlaps between them. Versions of the Canon which were written in Sanskrit have mainly been lost, and now exist for the most part only in Chinese, Japanese and Tibetan translation, whereas the Pali Canon was preserved intact in the language in which it first came to be written.

      With the passing of time, the tree of the Dharma has sprouted new branches and stems as great Enlightened masters brought their own particular insights to bear on it. Apart from its existence in literary form, there are also oral lineages of Dharma transmission, from master to disciple, and even purely mental lineages, where the nature of reality is ‘pointed out’ in direct communication, unmediated by texts or liturgy. The Dharma can be transmitted in any way that results in people being brought closer to an understanding of ultimate truth.

      One of the most common ways in which the Dharma has been transmitted is by way of the ‘lists’ with which Buddhism abounds. Taken together, these form a vast interlocking matrix of both doctrine and method which contain the whole of the Dharma. Taken singly, each list contains within it the seeds of all the rest, for the Dharma is like a vast jewelled net, where every jewel in the net perfectly contains and reflects the image of every other jewel.

      The list of lists is immense – there are, to name but a very few, those which between them make up the Thirty-Seven Bodhipakkhiya-Dhammas – 37 ‘Teachings Pertaining to Enlightenment’. These are: Four Foundations of Mindfulness; the Four Exertions; the Four Bases of Psychic Power; the Five Spiritual Faculties; the Five Spiritual Powers; the Seven Factors of Enlightenment and the Noble Eightfold Path. Opaque as these will doubtless seem to the newcomer, these lists are in fact an invaluable treasury of spiritual teaching.

      Perhaps the most popular of all of these sorts of teaching is the teaching of the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path, which formed a major part of the Buddha’s first ever discourse on the Dharma.

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