Buddha_A Very Short Introduction

by Michael Carrithers

  4. Forest monks in Sri Lanka live in harmony with the wild animals of the jungle. They understand that all beings (such as this giant squirrel) are subject to fear and neediness, and treat them with caring kindness. (This is the forest monk Kudumbigala Anandasiri, whose hard but rewarding life is described in the last chapter of Michael Carrithers’ book The Forest Monks of Sri Lanka).

  It was the third trait, however, which most persuaded me of the discipline’s effectiveness, and that was the monks’ courage in the face of wild forest animals. On two occasions while on foot in the jungle there stood between me and a surprised and threatening animal – once a wild boar and once an elephant – only the slight body and unmoving equanimity of a monk. On both occasions the monk took a firm but unaggressive stance and spoke calmly to the animal, which crashed off into the underbrush. No behaviour could be further from ordinary expectations, and it attested vividly to the depth of transformation achievable through the Buddhist training. None of this, of course, proves the truth of the Buddha’s teaching, but it does invite us to consider his philosophy seriously as one which has something to tell us about the nature and capacities of the human constitution.

  Chapter 5

  The mission and the death

  In the very long run Buddhism was strikingly successful: it became a world religion which until recently reigned over the Far East and mainland South-East Asia, the most populous areas of the globe, and now it is making its way in the West. However, we need only look a little closer to see that this is not to be explained simply as the triumphant progress of the truth. In the Buddha’s time and for many centuries afterwards in India his teaching competed with others on a more or less equal footing. It was not until the middle of the first millennium after Christ, ten to fifteen centuries after the Buddha, that its hegemony was firmly established in the rest of Asia, and shortly thereafter it was on its way to extinction in India itself. Buddhism’s history is one of many different episodes, and in each episode different social, economic, and political factors – factors often quite extraneous to Buddhism – have played a part. So even if we agree that the Buddha’s teaching was insightful and practicable, these virtues alone can hardly in themselves be regarded as the motive force in Buddhism’s successes.

  Nevertheless, Buddhism did have properties which, if they did not actively motivate Buddhism’s expansion, did at least make that expansion possible. The evidence of these is found in Buddhism’s relatively easy adaptation to other, native religious traditions in the areas it colonized. Buddhism coexisted with archaic Hinduism in India and Sri Lanka, Taoism and Confucianism in China, the Bon religion in Tibet, and Shinto in Japan. Indeed Buddhism is presently adapting to Marxism in the East and to liberal humanism and liberal Christianity in the West. In all these circumstances it has been possible for Buddhists to cleave to indigenous beliefs for certain worldly, religious, or civil purposes, while simultaneously holding Buddhist views about their own psychological nature and the ultimate ends of human action. Buddhism, in other words, has had little of the imperiousness which has characterized missionary religions such as Christianity and Islam. It is quintessentially tolerant, cosmopolitan, and portable, and hence it has been able to respond to opportunities created by circumstances quite beyond its control.

  The foundations of this portability lie in three interconnected features of the Buddha’s own teaching. First, it was explicitly directed to human beings by virtue of characteristics they held in common: the capacity for pleasure and suffering, the ability to affect their own and others’ welfare. One could, of course, object that other Indian religions, and indeed other world religions, embodied similar attempts to speak to all humanity. But, second, in the Buddha’s case this universalistic project was relatively good at actually being universalistic because it was abstract. We have seen this abstraction at work, for example, in the Buddha’s description of the Absorptions, a description which is consistent with many systems of meditation and with different purposes in meditation. And in the same spirit the Buddha’s conception of wisdom and virtue neither opposed nor condoned India’s nascent caste system, but rather spoke of human action in abstract terms which were indifferent to the presence or absence of caste: it could exist within or without caste society. Third, this abstraction was always linked in the Buddha’s teaching with a deliberately limited concern to apply it to the structure of individual human experience alone. There was a great deal about the world upon which he simply refused to pronounce. Hence, on the one hand, it has always been possible for people to agree in Buddhism while living in quite different cultures and holding quite different views about the world. And on the other hand it has been possible for Buddhists themselves in the course of history to add to the Buddha’s own teaching the most varied doctrines – doctrines which fitted in with local traditions and circumstances.

  Buddhism and the laity

  However, this leaves unanswered one fundamental and troublesome question. As I have so far described the Buddha’s teaching it is really directed only to that handful who are willing and able to pursue the life of a monk with total devotion. Yet the acceptance of Buddhism by whole peoples meant that it was embraced by a laity who did not ‘go forth from home into homelessness’. How did Buddhism develop from a teaching for the few into a teaching for the many? What did this élitist message have to offer people in the world? These questions were answered in the course of the Buddha’s career after the awakening.

  The most plausible accounts of the Buddha’s life before and during the awakening are found in bare and simple narratives in which the Buddha seems to speak of his own experience. It is easy to accept that these have an ancestry, however distant, in edifying discourses the Buddha actually imparted to his monks. In contrast, the oldest legends of the Buddha’s life after the awakening (I speak here and hereafter of the beginning of Mahāvagga) are in the third person, evidently took form some generations after the Buddha’s death, and are full of mythical detail. They are therefore far from trustworthy. They do, however, convey at least some sense of how the Buddha’s personal liberation was metamorphosed into a mission to the world at large.

  The seed of the Buddha’s mission is wrapped in an especially mythic guise in the legend. While the Buddha was still mulling over in solitude the consequences of his discoveries, he decided that it would be pointless and tiresome to announce them to a world sunk in ignorance. But a god intervened: as is characteristic in Buddhist legend, the god is merely a walk-on character who supports the central plot of human self-transformation. He pleaded to the Buddha on behalf of all those creatures who had ‘only a little dust in their eyes’, who would respond well and gratefully to the Buddha’s message. To this plea the Buddha responded generously, undertaking to spread abroad his remedy for suffering, ‘out of compassion for creatures’. And thus was born that resolve which Buddhists regard as bringing light to the world’s darkness.

  The truth of the matter is impossible to discern, but this legendary vignette is nevertheless revealing. In the first place, it points to a fundamental feature of the Buddha’s mature teaching, that it embodied not only the governing value of liberation, but also the second governing value of compassion: concern for others. And indeed something like compassion was inherent in the Buddha’s moral seriousness and in his propensity for describing the mind in moral terms, in terms of the effects of mental actions on others. Compassion for the Buddha was intimately intertwined with liberation as a human purpose and guiding sentiment. However, in the legend compassion has a significance narrower than it and its corollaries were to have in the elaborated teaching. Here compassion is a personal attribute of the Buddha and the sufficient motive for his decision to teach. Moreover it is a compassion directed to a specific end, the imparting of the Buddha’s version of the renunciant life.

  A good deal of this section of the legendary biography is concerned with the consequences of this compassion, the formation of an order of monks following the Buddha. The Buddha aros
e from solitude and wandered by stages to the city of Benares, where he stayed in the Deer Park at Isipatana. There he met five ascetics who had been with him before the awakening, but who had left in disgust when he gave up self-mortification. To them he addressed his first sermon, the Setting in Motion of the Wheel of the Teaching, which enunciated the Middle Path and the Four Noble Truths. This they accepted, they became his disciples, and from that time on many of his converts were drawn from the body of wanderers and ascetics. This is historically plausible to the extent that many of the Buddha’s discourses were addressed to such wanderers, who were at the time a fluid group, moving easily from one teacher to another. But what was now at stake was the foundation of a new and enduring institution, the Order (sangha) of monks following the Buddha, and indeed one senses that the general fluidity was now crystallizing everywhere into separate religious corporations with their own constitutions.

  However, the Buddha was addressing an audience broader than just the religious virtuosi. The next convert was Yasa, a rich young layman, who awoke one morning suddenly filled with disgust at the sight of the courtesans with whom he had taken his pleasure now lying about him in drunken slumber. He wandered disconsolately to the Deer Park, and there he met the Buddha, who announced to him the Four Noble Truths. So Yasa left the world to join the Buddha and his small band. Yasa was a merchant’s son, and according to the legend four of Yasa’s friends ‘from the leading merchant families of Benares’ then became disciples, and then a further fifty ‘youths from the countryside’. These were the kernel of the new Order, and indeed it was they who spread the teaching abroad: for in the legend the Buddha now adjured them to ‘go out and wander for the well-being and happiness of the many, out of compassion for the world …’. But they were no Protestant evangelists creating a church of laymen, for they were to ‘propound the absolutely perfect and wholly pure life of celibate mendicancy’.

  5. A forest monk in Sri Lanka preaches to lay people. Like the spiritual wanderers of the Buddha’s time, the Buddha’s monks more than two millennia after him offer the ‘Gift of the Teaching’ to those around them.

  Certain elements of this ring true. There was an elective affinity between Buddhism and city merchants, who were among the founding members of the complex urbane society which the Buddha’s teaching addressed. But his was also a universal message; and many besides merchants – perhaps the youths ‘of the countryside’ – must also have joined the Order. The emphasis on the celibate life seems especially plausible, for it expressed the esprit de corps of the Order, and it is consistent with the message of many of the discourses, that the only truly rational course is to renounce the world. However, even if this uncompromising purpose was the original brief of the Order, the missionary activity held within it the possibility of a profound involvement with the laity: for it was after all the laymen’s food which sustained, and their cloth which protected the mendicant missionaries as they spread along the trade routes through India and later throughout Asia.

  So laymen do appear in the legendary biography. Immediately after Yasa joined the Order, Yasa’s father came looking for him and met the Buddha, who preached to him. The father was converted, ‘he gained confidence’ in the Buddha’s teaching, and he thereupon ‘went for refuge to the Buddha as long as breath lasts’. This ‘going for refuge’ today marks formally a layman’s commitment to the Buddha, his Order, and his teaching, and it seems likely that it had a similar significance at the time of the compilation of the legend and earlier. Yasa’s father then invited the Buddha for a meal, and while at the father’s home the Buddha converted Yasa’s former wife and his mother as well, who also ‘went for refuge’ to the Buddha. These events at Yasa’s father’s home convey the substance of the relationship between Buddhist monks and laymen. The laymen offer food and physical support to the monks, while the monks offer the laymen wisdom and other spiritual goods. Anthropologists are fond of discovering institutions based on long-term gift exchange, in which two parties establish a relationship by giving gifts to each other and continue the relationship by the continued exchange of gifts, and this is such a case. On the laymen’s part liberality, and especially generosity towards monks, is enjoined, whereas on the monk’s side ‘the gift of the Buddha’s teaching is the best gift’, as the canon repeatedly asserts. The gifts are different in kind, but they are given freely, and through them lasting ties are created. Upon this mutual exchange there was thus formed the Buddhist community as a whole, the ‘fourfold assembly’, which included monks, nuns (whom the Buddha later sanctioned), laymen and laywomen. It was this community as a whole that achieved Buddhism’s lasting success.

  So what the Buddha’s teaching had to offer the laity was certain spiritual goods. Some of these goods were not offered by Buddhism alone, however. One was merit, an immaterial reward garnered by a layman simply by feeding a monk and listening to his sermon. Merit could be laid up to secure a better rebirth: the more merit in the spiritual account, so to speak, the better the rebirth. Hence, as there was a high spiritual purpose appropriate to the monk, namely liberation, so there was a lower one appropriate to the layman, better rebirth (and the hope that one would eventually be reborn in circumstances allowing one to become a monk and achieve liberation). This was a good reason for patronizing the Buddhist Order; but in fact it was also a reason for patronizing others such as the Jain order as well, for they held a similar conception of merit.

  6. After preaching, the monk is offered food by the lay people. This relationship, in which the monk offers the ‘Gift of the Teaching’ and the lay people offer food and clothing, has supported the Buddhist order since its beginning in ancient India.

  Another spiritual good offered to the laity was a high moral teaching, composed of injunctions against such acts as lying, killing, and stealing; against gaining one’s livelihood in harmful ways; and against destructive attitudes of greed, hatred, and folly. The monk, with his strenuous discipline of self-control, represented the perfection of human virtue, but the basic principles of that perfection were adaptable to a lower level, to a morality fitting the compromised circumstances of a laity who had to make their living and bear their children in the world. The Buddha, however, held no monopoly of such teachings, whose novelty and popularity were linked with the relative newness and wide distribution of the now developing urbanized forms of social life. Now there were merchants who, through command of the impersonal instruments of money and trade, could wreak a new damage on others; now there were states and armies with new capabilities of harm; now there were offices to seek at others’ expense. Moreover, life in the new cities required that groups who had no natural mutual interest or mutually inherited moral code had to devise ways of living together with at least a bare minimum of trust. Much of the adaptation to new forms of life must have occurred quite apart from the renouncers, but the renouncers gave form and voice to the change. They embodied the virtues of harmlessness and poverty (the Buddha’s monks were not even to touch gold or silver). They sought no offices. And in their preaching they advocated virtues whose practice – whatever theory went with them – could render the new social world habitable.

  The teachings of merit and lay morality explain the renouncers’, and not merely the Buddha’s, success. Indeed in ancient India Buddhism would probably seldom have seemed markedly more successful than other movements, and taken singly many of the Buddha’s teachings to the laity could be found in other doctrines. However, the Buddha achieved a synthesis of the various elements which made the whole more than the sum of the parts. This synthesis is formed upon the Buddha’s tendency to think in practical terms, on the analogy of craftsmanship, and also upon his concern with psychological explanations.

  The doctrine of skilfulness

  The key to this way of thinking is embodied in a term found frequently in his discourses. This term is kusala, whose primary meaning is ‘skilful’, as a goldsmith may be skilful at making gold ornaments. It is a term which the Buddha made his ow
n, and he used it in the first place to refer to skill in meditation. But he also used it widely to apply to skill in moral discipline and in the acquisition of merit. In this application ‘skilful’ also means morally good, as we might say ‘he is a good man’ or ‘that was a good act’. Indeed in many contexts ‘skilful’ is the opposite of evil, and refers to the same kind of sharp distinction that is made in Christianity between good and evil. But for the Buddha ‘skilful/good’ always had a practical, not a metaphysical or absolute flavour to it. The dead centre of the term is best conveyed by a sense lost to us (but still alive among the ancient Greeks), that just as one could be skilful or good at a craft, so one could be good at being a sentient being, and hence one could be good.

  This term was animated by ‘thorough reflection’ upon the consequences of deeds and in particular of the attitudes, the mental actions, behind deeds. For the Buddha skilfulness cut two ways: its consequences were good for oneself, but good for others as well. For example, the act of giving food to a monk gained one merit, and indeed with the characteristic Buddhist emphasis upon the mental side of things this merit was conceived as being also a psychological good, a wholesome frame of mind pursuant upon liberality. But giving is also good for the monk, at the very least because the monk thereby assuages his hunger. By the same token, to cultivate moral discipline is simultaneously to avoid harm to others and to create good/skilful frames of mind in oneself. We tend to think of doing good as involving the sacrifice of one’s own interests for someone else’s, but for the Buddha to do good was precisely to act in both one’s own and in someone else’s interest. For the monk the stress was on one’s own interest, liberation, while the means – exemplary moral discipline – incidentally achieved others’ interests. But this way of thought was easily turned around to apply to laymen, who by being good to others achieved the end of being good to themselves. This reasoning was further bolstered by the teaching that to be kind, gentle, honest, and harmless to others was in fact to invite them to behave in the same manner to oneself: do good to others that they may do good to you. By wise reflection and moral action Buddhists, whether monks or laymen, could achieve the fruit of their skilfulness ‘both here and in the next world’.