Buddhist Spectrum

Going against the stream

Personal and social radicalism of the Buddha:

Richard REOCH

The Buddha was born a prince in an era of social oppression and conflict. He experienced firsthand his own homeland being subjugated by a bloody conquest by a neighbouring warlord. Even as he was dying, genocide was imminent.

The Mahaparinirvana Sutra, the poignant account of the last days of the Buddha, opens with a king seeking the Buddha’s support for the “total annihilation” of the people of a small rival state.

So tormented was the Buddha by the aggression that engulfed the world of his time that he renounced the throne to which he was heir and set out to discover for all beings the path that leads to the cessation of suffering. So deep was his determination that it led him to take one of the most radical personal, social, and political stances in the history of human endeavour.

For seven years, it is said, he practised extreme austerities. He exhausted himself almost to the point of death. Then, realizing the extent to which he had punished himself, he abandoned the path of self-aggression and turned to the path of meditation.

There is a particularly moving passage in the early Pali text that describes Prince Siddhartha standing on the banks of the Neranjana River after he gave up his austerities.

He had just bathed in the river and was holding the pot traditionally used in the Indian subcontinent to pour water over the body. He gazed at the river and asked aloud if it would actually be possible for him to become the Awakened One.

The word for this in pali is Patisota, literally “to go against the current.” He threw his pot into the river. The text says that the pot immediately raced upstream against the current “as quickly as a fleet horse.” The Buddha-to-be took this as an answer. That very evening, imbued with confidence, he entered the Samadhi of his great attainment.

After his enlightenment and as he began to gather disciples around him, the Buddha called his followers Patisotagama and Patasotagamini “those who go against the stream.” Going against the stream meant freeing their minds from the fetters of illusion and throwing off the shackles of social bondage.

For the Buddha, living in an era of social oppression and within the confines of a warlike society, the need for both personal transformation and social change was pressing.

Almost immediately after his enlightenment he set about his great project, the creation of an alternative society based on wisdom and compassion.

For 45 years he travelled ceaselessly across the North Gangetic Plain, establishing countless communities of practitioners who worked together to put his principles of enlightened society into practice.

When the Buddha declared that the idea of the individual as a separate, permanent entity with a fixed, inherent identity is fiction, this was true on an individual level, but it was also true on a social level. If there was no foothold for a personal identity, then there was no foothold on which to base the prejudice and oppression of gender, race, or class.

If there was no such thing as “me” or “mine,” how could there be anything that was “us” or “ours”? If the mind could cause suffering, injustice, and oppression, it could also liberate us from those illusions. We could do that as individuals, taught the Buddha, and we could also do it as a society.

With the destruction of the idea of self went the destruction of the idea of possession. The name that the Buddha gave to his closest followers-bhikkus and bhikkunis-comes from bhik, and irregular form of bhaj. “Bhaj” was the portion of food that a person shared from a common pot.

Thus, the alms bowl is much more than a vessel or utensil-it is a statement of our wish to share. This is the origin of oryoki and all the other traditions of dana, feeding, and communal eating, within Buddhist communities, including the feast practices of the Vajrayana. They are all living manifestations of our profound intention to share with others, to serve others, and to work together to go against the stream of selfish consumption.

You can see the bowl as a statement of our unbroken connection with the Buddha as both a religious and social exemplar. The bowl is an enduring symbol of the values to which we aspire in all our relationship-within our community, with all people, with all beings, and with our entire environment.

The early followers of the Buddha, like thousands of his disciples to this day, did not ask for anything that was not offered. They committed themselves to a completely different relationship based on the pooling and redistribution of wealth.

In many Buddhist communities, if you take a look in the kitchen or fridge, you will often see plates or containers of food marked “not offered,” especially when an individual has special dietary needs. This is a way of reminding us that the default setting is “everything is offered.” There is no one to have anything. There is everything to share.

For centuries, people have placed rice, dhal, vegetables, fruit, cakes and so on in the begging bowls of the bhikkus and bhikkunis, or brought them to their monasteries. If you visit the sites of ancient Buddhist communities you come across huge stone troughs into which the bhikkus and bhikkunis placed everything that had been put into their bowls, literally creating a huge potluck meal which was when shared by their entire community.

Where did they go to collect this food? They went to the houses of all the castes and subcastes of the highly stratified society in which they lived. They made a particular point of going to the poorest areas of the communities and deliberately collecting food offerings from the outcastes.

This enraged the high-caste Brahmins who openly attacked the Buddhists for doing this. In the Pali text The Dialogue of the Buddha, the Brahmins are said to have called the Buddhists “a base class of shovelling samanas, dark fellows, born of brahma’s foot.”

The Buddha’s followers knew what they were doing and what message they were sending. They had another name for themselves: the Pabbajitha, which translates as “the exiles” or “the outcastes.”

It is clear from the pali texts that they were challenging the entire social structure of class and caste. Take their saffron and brown robes. The Brahmins at the top of the social order were white. Saffron and brown were the colours of the outcastes, the mark of extreme social stigmatization. Yet these were the colours in which the early sangha wrapped themselves.

At the urging of the Buddha, they went to charnel grounds and the waste areas of the villages to salvage scraps of cloth, sewed them together to make robes, and dyed them saffron or brown and sometimes yellow. This would be an act similar to what non-Jews did during the Holocaust to show solidarity with their Jewish brothers and sisters by wearing the Star of David.

The early sangha was known as the catudissa Sangha, the Sangha of the Four Quarters or Four Directions. It was completely inclusive. There was a rule in the Vinaya that forbade any bhikkhu or bhikkuni from mentioning their previous social status after they had become a follower of the Buddha.

And, as with the wearing of saffron, a special effort was made to ennoble the outcastes. It is said that when Ananda and his family joined the sangha, although they came from a high-caste family, they asked that their low-caste barber, Upali, be ordained first so that he would became their elder brother.

Not only were the robes the symbol of identification with the most oppressed members of society: they were also part of the Buddha’s revolt against gender bias. Both men and women shaved their heads, and the men also shaved their beards. Both sexes wore saffron robes.

It is said that as the lines of bhikkus and bhikkunis walked along the highways and byways, it was impossible to tell the difference between men and women from a distance. This was deliberate.

Not only did thousands of outcastes flock to the Buddha, so did thousands of women who left their households and the oppression of patriarchal domination. These revolutionary communities were demonstrating that what was most important to them was not the differences between people but their common humanity.

As with so many religious and social movements, the transformative, even dangerous zeal of the founders often gets rapidly diluted. Longstanding social habits grow over the revolutionary institutions like the jungle growing back over a clearing.

It has happened with the social radicalism of the Buddha too, but the ideals themselves have never died. They live on in people’s hearts and in potent symbols-in communal eating and festivities, in the robes and bowls, and just simply in the fact that we gather together in community. As sangha, our common humanity, our common Buddhanature, is more important than all our differences.

Sometimes we hear the term kalyana mitta, often translated as “spiritual friend.” Bit in early Pali, it also had the meaning of “beautiful friend” or “beautiful companion.” Who are these beautiful companions?

Those who are drawn to the dharma, who hold in their hearts a different vision of human life, who have the wish to go beyond the illusions of false identity, to go beyond the social stigmas that divide us and oppress us.

These beautiful companions share a belief that our fundamental interconnectedness is for more important than whatever appears to divide us, and those who, like the first bhikkus and bhikkunis, have the wish to share the richness of this planet rather than to possess it.

That’s who the Buddha saw as his community gathered around him, and that’s who gathers around us still today as we follow in his foot-steps. To quote from the Pali-Kalyana mitta, kalyana sahaya, kalyana sampavanika: beautiful friends, beautiful companions, beautiful comrades.

Richard Reoch is the President of Shambhala, the global mandala founded by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche that works to create enlightened society.

He is a former senior official of Amnesty International, and currently a trustee of the Rainforest Foundation and chair of the International Working Group on Sri Lanka working to end the Buddhist world’s longest-running war.

Turning Wheel

Development of Buddhist publications

Rohan Lalith Jayatilleke

Until the Buddha Jayanthi Year 2500 years after the Great Demise of the Buddha (Mahaparinirvana) in 1956, India did not have the Pali Thripitaka (Canon) in any Indian script. The commitment and exertions of Indian Bhikkhu Jagdish Kashyap (1908-1976), India was able to have the entire Pali Thripitaka in Devanagari script in 1956.

It was edited by Ven. Jagdish Kashyap, and published by the Pali Publication Board, State Government of Bihar, Nalanda, India, during the period 1956-1961. Each of the volumes of around 400 pages was prefaced with a brief introduction in Hindi and English. This Nalanda Edition of the Pali Thripitaka in Devanagari script has the following texts:

1. Sutta Pitaka (Digha Nikaya, Majjhima Nikaya, Samyutta Nikaya, Anguttara Nikaya and Khuddaka Nikaya). Digha Nikaya in print had three volumes, Majjhima Nikaya in three volumes, Samyutta Nikaya four volumes, Anguttara Nikaya in four volumes and Khuddaka Nikaya in 15 books.

The 15 books of the Khuddaka Nikaya are as follows:

1. Khuddakapatha, 2. Dhammapada, 3. Udana, 4. Itivuttaka, 5. Sutta Nipata, 6. Vimana Vatthu, 7. Peta Vatthu, 8. Thera Gatha, 9. Theri Gatha, 10. Jataka, 11. Niddesa, 12. Patisambhidamagga, 13. Apadana, 14. Buddhavamsa, 15. Cariyapitaka.

Of these 1 to 5 were in one volume, 6 to 9 in one volume, Jataka in two volumes, Niddesa in two volumes and Buddhavamsa in two volumes.

Vinaya Pitaka

The Vinaya Pitaka had the following separate books: 1. Mahavagga, 2. Cullavagga, 3. Parajika, 4. Pacittiya and 5. Parivara.

Abhidhamma Pitaka

This Pitaka has the following books: 1. Dhammasangani, 2. Vibhanga, 3. Dhatukatha, 4. Puggalapani (3 to 4 in one volume), 5. Kathavattu, 6. Yamaka - (three volumes) and 7. Patthana.

The Thripitaka and commentaries

The Vipassana Research Institute at Igatapuri, near Nasik in Maharashtra was established by Vipassanacharya S. N. Goenka, an Indian born in Myanmar (Burma), who perfected the techniques of Vipassana under Sayadaw U Bakhin (1898-1971), for 14 years, a great Burmese lay teacher of Vipassana, re-introduced it in India in 1969. Now Vipassana centres have been established all over India by S. N. Goenka.

This institute of S. N. Goenka has now published the entire Pali Tipitaka as well as commentaries there on in Devanagari script. The institute too has prepared a CD-Rom having all the Pali scriptures in Devanagari and Roman scripts as a consequence of which search for words and expressions is now greatly facilitated to researchers, scholars and students of Buddhism not only in India but all over the world.

The following are the translations so far published in English by Indian scholars of some texts of the Pali Thripitaka. The most popular text to be translated by the scholars is the Dhammapada, the text composed of select sayings of the Buddha.

These translations are as follows: Banerji, N. Kunja Vihari (The Dhammapada 1989); Bapat P. V. (Pali Sangraha - Selections from Early Buddhist Texts); Benent A. A. G. (Long Discourses of the Buddha, 1956); Bhagawat N. K. (The Dhammapada, 1935); Buddharakkhitha, Acharya, Ven. (Dhammapada 1959, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1996); Buddhist Manual for Daily Practice 1980: Dhammacakkapavattana Sutta 1980, 1996; Gihi Vinaya: (Householders’ Book of Discipline 2005); Khuddaka Patha: Compact Collection, 2006; Sutta Sangaho, Parts I and II, 2003; (In all these texts, Pali text is also given in Roman script; Chaudhuri U. (Dhammapada, 1944); Dikshit, Sudhakar (Sermons and Sayings of the Buddha); Law, B. C. (Buddhavamsa, Cariya - Pitaka Text in Devanagari script with English translation; Osho (Acharya Rajneesh) (The Dhammapada; The Way of the Buddha; This is the Path to Ultimate Truth; Vols 1 to 12; Radhakrishna Sarvapalli (late Vice President of India) (The Dhammapada - Pali text, in Roman characters, with English translation, 1950: Raja, Kunhan C. (Dhammapada; Pali text in Devanagari script with English translation, 1956; Pali text in Roman characters with an English translation, 1956; Silananda (Dhammapada - Pali text and translation); Vaidya, P. L. (Dhammapada - Pali text in Devanagari script with introduction and English translation, 1923, 1934).

In a survey of Modern Buddhist Literature, conducted by the noted scholar D. C. Ahir, an author of many titles on Buddhism, has listed more than 300 scholars who had published about 500 books in English during the period, from 1908 to 2008, hundred years (Vide: Jagajjyoti Centenary Volume 2009), of the Bengal Buddhist Association (Buddha Dhamankur Sabha) of Kolkata, India, pp: 56-76 (www.bengalbuddhist.com).

The author says that the list is not exhaustive, as there may be some books which have captured his attention. Further, books on Buddhism by foreign authors published in India have not been included in the list, as the idea is to assess the popularity of Buddhism with Indian authors and Indian publishers.

This study reveals that more and more books have been published after the 2500th Buddha Jayanthi Celebrations in 1956. The scholar D. C. Ahir himself has already published as many as 36 books on Buddhism during the period 1964-2007, and five more are in press.

No strings attached

The Buddha’s culture of generosity:

Thanissaro Bhikkhu

‘How can I ever repay you for your teaching?’

Good meditation teachers often hear this question from their students, and the best answer I know for it is one that my teacher, Ajaan Fuang, gave every time:

“By being intent on practicing.”

Each time he gave this answer, I was struck by how noble and gracious it was. And it wasn’t just a formality. He never tried to find opportunities to pressure his students for donations. Even when our monastery was poor, he never acted poor, never tried to take advantage of their gratitude and trust. This was a refreshing change from some of my previous experiences with run-of-the-mill village and city monks who were quick to drop hints about their need for donations from even stray or casual visitors.

Eventually I learned that Ajaan Fuang’s behavior is common throughout the Forest Tradition. It’s based on a passage in the Pali Canon where the Buddha on his deathbed states that the highest homage to him is not material homage, but the homage of practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma. In other words, the best way to repay a teacher is to take the Dhamma to heart and to practice it in a way that fulfills his or her compassionate purpose in teaching it. I was proud to be part of a tradition where the inner wealth of this noble idea was actually lived where, as Ajaan Fuang often put it, we weren’t reduced to hirelings, and the act of teaching the Dhamma was purely a gift.

So I was saddened when, on my return to America, I had my first encounters with the dana talk: the talk on giving and generosity that often comes at the end of a retreat.

The context of the talk and often the content makes clear that it’s not a disinterested exercise. It’s aimed at generating gifts for the teacher or the organization sponsoring the retreat, and it places the burden of responsibility on the retreatants to ensure that future retreats can occur.

The language of the talk is often smooth and encouraging, but when contrasted with Ajaan Fuang’s answer, I found the sheer fact of the talk ill-mannered and demeaning. If the organizers and teachers really trusted the retreatants’ good-heartedness, they wouldn’t be giving the talk at all.

To make matters worse, the typical dana talk along with its companion, the meditation-center fundraising letter often cites the example of how monks and nuns are supported in Asia as justification for how dana is treated here in the West. But they’re taking as their example the worst of the monks, and not the best.

I understand the reasoning behind the talk. Lay teachers here aspire to the ideal of teaching for free, but they still need to eat. And, unlike the monastics of Asia, they don’t have a long-standing tradition of dana to fall back on. So the dana talk was devised as a means for establishing a culture of dana in a Western context.

But as so often is the case when new customs are devised for Western Buddhism, the question is whether the dana talk skillfully translates Buddhist principles into the Western context or seriously distorts them. The best way to answer this question is to take a close look at those principles in their original context.

It’s well known that dana lies at the beginning of Buddhist practice. Dana, quite literally, has kept the Dhamma alive. If it weren’t for the Indian tradition of giving to mendicants, the Buddha would never have had the opportunity to explore and find the path to Awakening.

The monastic sangha wouldn’t have had the time and opportunity to follow his way. Dana is the first teaching in the graduated discourse: the list of topics the Buddha used to lead listeners step-by-step to an appreciation of the four noble truths, and often from there to their own first taste of Awakening. When stating the basic principles of karma, he would begin with the statement, “There is what is given.”

What’s less well known is that in making this statement, the Buddha was not dealing in obvious truths or generic platitudes, for the topic of giving was actually controversial in his time.

For centuries, the brahmans of India had been extolling the virtue of giving as long as the gifts were given to them. Not only that, gifts to brahmans were obligatory.

People of other castes, if they didn’t concede to the brahmans’ demands for gifts, were neglecting their most essential social duty. By ignoring their duties in the present life, such people and their relatives would suffer hardship both now and after death.

As might be expected, this attitude produced a backlash. Several of the samana, or contemplative, movements of the Buddha’s time countered the brahmans’ claims by asserting that there was no virtue in giving at all.

Their arguments fell into two camps. One camp claimed that giving carried no virtue because there was no afterlife. A person was nothing more than physical elements that, at death, returned to their respective spheres. That was it. Giving thus provided no long-term results.

The other camp stated that there was no such thing as giving, for everything in the universe has been determined by fate. If a donor gives something to another person, it’s not really a gift, for the donor has no choice or free will in the matter. Fate was simply working itself out.

So when the Buddha, in his introduction to the teaching on karma, began by saying that there is what is given, he was repudiating both camps. Giving does give results both now and on into the future, and it is the result of the donor’s free choice. However, in contrast to the brahmans, the Buddha took the principle of freedom one step further. accesstoinsight.org