‘It seems to me,’ Nietzsche once wrote, ‘that most people simply do not believe in elevated moods, unless these last for moments only or at most a quarter of an hour – except for those few who know at first hand the longer duration of elevated feelings. But to be a human being with one elevated feeling – to be a single great mood incarnate – that has hitherto been a mere dream and a delightful possibility; as yet history does not offer us any certain examples.’14
The Buddha could be said to have described a path to a single great mood incarnate. Modern science may support his method – a recent article in New Scientist claims that the left prefrontal lobe of the brain, which is ‘associated with positive emotions, good moods, foresight, planning and self-control’ is remarkably active among Buddhist meditators.15 In wishing to concentrate rather than dissipate the will, the Buddha stands opposed to the mystics and romantics who attempted to create this exalted mood through emotional reverie and dissipated attention. His emphasis was on self-control, best summed up by these lines from Milton: ‘He who reigns within himself and rules passions, desires, and fears, is more than a king.’
In his distrust of desire and preoccupation with suffering, the Buddha resembles more the Hellenistic philosophers, the Epicureans, the Stoics and the Skeptics, who flourished in the wake of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. In the fourth century BC the skeptic Pyrrho is supposed to have accompanied Alexander the Great to India. But the resemblance is striking even if Pyrrho didn’t bring back with him some aspects of the Buddha’s teachings.
Empty are the words of that philosopher who offers no therapy for human suffering. For just as there is no use in medical expertise if it does not give therapy for bodily diseases, so too there is no use in philosophy if it does not expel the suffering of the soul.16
The words are those of Epicurus. But they could be the Buddha’s. The Hellenistic philosophers also sought to avoid suffering and achieve a state of tranquillity by controlling desire. Their primary means was virtue, which they often equated with reason. But for the Buddha, the life of virtue, though essential, was a preparation for the tasks of meditation – an experience unknown to Hellenistic or any other form of western philosophy.
A virtuous life was for the Buddha the first of three stages on the path to nirvana: moral self-discipline, meditation and wisdom (sila, samadhi, prajna). As he saw it, a life lived truthfully and pacifically, in voluntary poverty but without self-mortification, a life lived, in short, with sila, created a suitably wholesome frame of mind. It set up the bare minimum required to achieve concentration and equanimity, which then made possible the special kind of meditation to follow: one in which the meditator remains in clear awareness of his inner and outer states of mind, his surroundings, his experiences, his actions, his thoughts and their consequences as they unfold moment by moment.
As with any kind of mental training, the discipline of meditation steadily equips the individual with a new sensibility. It shows him how the craving for things that are transient, essence-less and flawed leads to suffering. Regular meditation turns this new way of looking into a habit. It detaches the individual from the temptations of the world and fixes him in a state of profound calm: a ‘single great mood incarnate’:
[The monk] neither constructs in his mind, nor wills in order to produce, any state of mind or body, or the destruction of any such state. By not so willing anything in the world, he grasps after nothing; by not grasping, he is not anxious; he is therefore fully calmed within.17
It was this unconditioned state of freedom that the Buddha reached one night sitting under the pipal tree in Bodh Gaya, the state that he called nirvana and described as the true goal of all sentient beings: a nirvana which did not consist of a mystical union with God or, as often supposed, the annihilation of the individual, but the end of craving and ignorance that causes the cycle of rebirth and suffering.
The deer park where the Buddha preached his first sermon is now called Sarnath. It lay forgotten for several centuries until a British amateur archaeologist excavated the site in the nineteenth century. He found stupas and a pillar originally erected by Emperor Ashoka in the third century BC. The biggest stupa, called Dhamekh, was on the site where the Buddha supposedly gave his first sermon, sitting with the Brahmins from Kapilavastu. Later archaeologists discovered the shrine where the Buddha apparently had sheltered from the rains; they also found monasteries, which seemed to have been destroyed by a great fire. A temple built by the Sri Lankan Buddhist Anagarika Dharampala now stands in place of the shrine. The ruins of the monasteries lie amid vast green lawns. The grounds also include a deer park and a zoo.
Soon after completing his sermon to the five Brahmins from Kapilavastu, the Buddha won his first disciples. The Brahmin from Kapilavastu called Kondanna declared his wish to be ordained as a monk by the Buddha. The Buddha obliged, thereby inaugurating the sangha, the order of monks – probably the first such monastic sect in the world.
The other four ascetics from Kapilavastu soon joined Kondanna, after receiving separate instruction from the Buddha. But the Buddha’s more important disciples were still to come. Not long after he preached his first sermon a young man from Benares called Yasa appeared one morning at the deer park.
According to the legends about him, Yasa was a rich young man much given to introspection.18 Like many rich people of the time, including the Buddha himself in his youth, Yasa had three mansions, in one of which he spent four uninterrupted months during the monsoons, carousing with female musicians. His disillusionment apparently began when he woke up one night, and, in the light from an oil lamp, he saw the women sleeping in various postures of indignity.
Suddenly full of disgust for his life, Yasa left the mansion and went to the deer park where the Buddha and other sramanas used to gather. The Buddha sensed that he was unhappy. He invited Yasa to sit beside him and gave him his first ‘graduated discourse’ this was a pedagogic method he used, in which he began first with ethical rules for a good life, and moved onto the more complex part of his teaching only when he felt sure that he would be understood.
He told Yasa first about the importance of charity, ethical rules, and the futility of chasing after sensual desires and the benefits of abandoning them. When Yasa proved receptive and eager to hear more, the Buddha revealed to him the deeper truth of suffering, its cause, its extinction and the way to nirvana.
While Yasa was at the deer park, eagerly absorbing the Buddha’s teachings, his anxious father was looking for him. He eventually reached Sarnath and asked the Buddha about his son. In response, the Buddha asked him to sit down and gave him the same graduated discourse he had given his son. Yasa’s father was quickly converted.
But as he sat there he saw his son in the crowd surrounding the Buddha. He told Yasa about his distraught mother and begged him to return home. Yasa kept looking helplessly at the Buddha, who finally said that Yasa despised worldly life too much to be able to return to it. Yasa’s father could not argue with this. He invited the Buddha and Yasa to a meal at his house, and then returned home.
As soon as his father left, Yasa asked the Buddha to ordain him as a monk. The Buddha obliged, making Yasa the seventh bhikshu. He went the next day to Yasa’s father’s house, where he delivered a graduated discourse to Yasa’s mother and his wife. The two women, instead of being angered by Yasa’s rejection of them, became the Buddha’s lay followers.
News of Yasa’s conversion spread fast and puzzled many people, who wondered why a privileged young man would give up everything to become a sramana. Soon, four of Yasa’s friends, also sons of merchants in Benares, came to the Buddha and were accepted by him as bhikshus. They were followed by fifty more of Yasa’s friends from neighbouring parts of Benares.
Such dramatic conversions have a fairy-tale quality to them, as if they were invented by later biographers, eager to credit the Buddha with miraculous powers of charisma and persuasion. What, one wonders, did the Buddha say that was so compelling to these affluent cit
izens of Benares?
But then it is easy to miss the originality of what the Buddha said and how he said it, because we see him across packed centuries of history and not through the fresh eyes of someone in North India two and a half millennia ago, who wants, more than an abstract explanation of his world, advice about how to live.
Socrates was responding to the same spiritual need. Around the sixth century BC, the pre-Socratic philosophers, rough contemporaries of the Buddha, had begun to move away from traditional mythology and seek physical explanations for such observable phenomena as the motion of the stars and eclipses. They turned to cosmology, trying to find a unifying principle for the bewildering multiplicity of phenomena in the world. Thales suggested that everything was composed of water. Heraclitus posited flux as the universal law observed by the senses. Parmenides and his disciple Zeno denied the reality of appearances altogether. Anaxagoras proposed the mind as the cause of all physical processes.
Until Socrates appeared, philosophy had meant anything from metaphysics to ethics to medicine, mathematics, geometry and astronomy. It was the sum of what the Greeks had learned about phusis – the phenomenon of the growth of living beings and of man, but also of the universe. The Sophists gave it a practical component by making it part of the cultivation of young Greeks with political ambitions; the Sophists were itinerant professional teachers imparting a general sense of what we now call ‘culture’ through the art of oratory.
Socrates was the first among Greek philosophers to assert that acquiring know-how from external sources wasn’t the same as acquiring knowledge itself, which involved continuous self-examination. Plato has him remark at the beginning of Symposium, ‘How nice it would be if wisdom were the kind of thing that could flow from what is more full into what is more empty.’
Socrates wasn’t much interested in utilitarian knowledge: ‘I have no concern at all for what most people are concerned about: financial affairs, administration of property, appointments to generalships, oratorical triumphs in public, magistracies, coalitions, political factions. I did not take this path…but rather the one where I could do the most good to each one of you in particular, by persuading you to be less concerned with what you have than with what you are; so that you may make yourselves as excellent and as rational as possible.’19
For Socrates, to be rational and excellent was to know about moral choice, about choosing the good, and about knowing how to live. Knowledge lay not in concepts, but in virtue; and it was available to everyone since the capacity and desire for the good existed within all human beings. The philosopher merely alerted individuals to these inner possibilities, which they had to excavate on their own. For, as Socrates famously put it, ‘an unexamined life is not worth living for man’.
Socrates represented the achievement of the Greeks at a high stage in their culture: the individual philosopher who exhorted his audience to move beyond conventional forms of knowledge and towards rational self-awareness and moral choice. Even Nietzsche, who blamed Socrates for a host of evils, admitted that ‘in ancient Greece Socrates was defending himself with all his might against…(the) arrogant neglect of the human for the benefit of the human race’, and loved to indicate the true compass and content of all reflection and concern with an expression of Homer’s: it comprises, he said, only “that which I encounter of good and ill in my own house”.’
One could say almost the same about the Buddha. There had been dissenters before him: the sramanas who felt that life as lived by custom and convention left many questions unanswered. They rejected the authority of the Vedas and of the Brahmins; it did not seem to them to lead to wisdom. They thought that ordinary life itself was incompatible with the higher truths one gained through solitary thinking or asceticism; it had to be spurned before it could be examined.
But, although the sramanas carried on much dialogue among themselves and before large audiences, they dealt primarily in assertion. Reality consisted of this and that; and there was no basis for morality. They lived in what the Buddha, commenting on the intellectual ferment of his time, later called the ‘jungle of opinions’.
Unlike them, he was concerned to examine the nature of human experience rather than speculate about its supposed object – the world, its many components, their essence, etc. To this end, he proposed a description of the experiencing mind and body – the primary human means of grasping reality.
Sitting under an asoka tree, he took a few fallen leaves in his hand, and asked the bhikshus, or monks, whether the leaves in his hand or the leaves on the tree were more numerous. When the bhikshus stated the obvious, he told them that in the same way he knew more than he had revealed to them, because they were of no use in the pursuit of wisdom.
Thus he ignored the question, which obsesses Christian theologians, of how suffering arose in a world created and supervised by an eternally loving God. He denied that there could be a powerful divine creator God of a world where everything was causally connected and nothing came from nowhere. For him, neither God nor anything else had created the world; rather, the world was continually created by the actions, good or bad, of human beings. He didn’t dwell on large abstract questions, preferring to goad the individual into facing up to his immediate situation.
As he told a disciple who had asked him whether the world was eternal and infinite, or the soul and body one and the same thing,
It is as if there were a man struck by an arrow that was smeared thickly with poison; his friends and companions, his family and relatives would summon a doctor to see to the arrow. And the man might say, ‘I will not draw out this arrow as long as I do not know whether the man by whom I was struck was a brahmin, a kshatriya, a vaishya, or a shudra…as long as I do not know his name and family…whether he was tall, short or of medium height…’ That man would not discover these things, but that man would die.20
He concerned himself instead with suffering, its causes and its cessation. Preoccupations with eternity and the soul were either irrelevant or shot through with faulty assumptions that led to suffering. The individual had to take responsibility for his condition:
It is not the case that one would live eternally by holding the view that the world is eternal. Nor is it the case that one would live the spiritual life by holding the view that the world is not eternal. Whether one holds that the world is eternal, or whether one holds that the world is not eternal, there is still birth, ageing, death, grief, despair, pain, and unhappiness.21
It was the Buddha’s achievement, as it was that of Socrates, to detach wisdom from its basis in fixed and often esoteric forms of knowledge and opinion and offer it as a moral and spiritual project for individuals. As a teacher, he offered no dogma – he asked his disciples not to trust him until they had realized within themselves the truth of what he had taught. The unexamined life was no more worth living for him than for Socrates. He worked to enhance the feeling, latent in everyone, that we are not what we ought to be. He assumed that the good exists in all human beings, if veiled by ignorance, and that evil, not wisdom, was an aberration.
Self-discipline was the way to realizing the essential moral nature of man. At Sarnath, the Buddha spoke of the stages by which gold was refined: how coarse dust and sand, gravel and grit had to be removed before the gold dust could be placed in a crucible and melted, and its impurities strained off. The way to higher consciousness required this gradual purging of impure deed, work and thought, through gross impurities to coarser ones, until the time when the dross disappeared and there remained only the pure state of awareness.
With sixty bhikshus as attentive listeners, the Buddha would have become a confident man in Sarnath and might even have begun to long for a bigger audience. One day, as the monsoon ended, he decided to give up his by then exclusive claim to teaching and exhorted his sixty bhikshus to become preachers and missionaries themselves:
Go forth, bhikshus, on your own way for the profit and happiness of the many, out of compassion for the world, for the profit, gai
n and happiness of gods and men. Let no two go together…There are beings whose eyes have little dust on them, who will perish if they do not hear the teaching. But if they hear the teaching, they will gain liberation.22
The bhikshus left Sarnath, travelled to various places, and came back with several people who wished to be ordained by the Buddha himself. The Buddha realized that he had to delegate even further and give his monks the responsibility to ordain new people into the sangha. It was now that he first set out the rules of the ordination:
Now, bhikshus, you yourselves may grant ordination and the precepts in various places and various countries. However, you should grant ordination and the precepts in this way. First cut off the hair and the beard (of the aspirant), robe him with a yellow robe so it covers one shoulder (leaving the right shoulder bare), and have him bow down at the feet of the bhikshus (with his head on the ground), sit down squatting, place the palms of his hands together, and say: ‘I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the dharma. I take refuge in the sangha.23
The Buddha conceived of the sangha as a group of self-reliant bhikshus undergoing the spiritual training necessary to escape suffering and attain enlightenment. The individual bhikshu worked through the three-fold process of enlightenment – morality, meditation, wisdom – and also created the atmosphere for other bhikshus to do likewise. Over time, the Buddha codified the arrangements of the sangha. Later Buddhists developed elaborate procedures to deal with issues arising out of the sangha’s internal complexity and relationship with the larger world. There were some basic rules. The monks had to live a life of voluntary chastity and poverty. They could not possess anything more than three robes, a begging bowl, a razor, needle, belt, water strainer and medicine. They had to observe decorum, which meant walking with slow measured steps. They could eat only what they had been given as alms, except for fruit; eating meat was permissible as long as the animal had not been killed specially for them.
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