20 MINUTES TO MASTER … BUDDHISM. Kulananda

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS

      As I have described, the Buddha embarked on the quest for Enlightenment because he was deeply dissatisfied. He’d seen the inevitability of suffering old age, disease and death come to everyone, and he couldn’t just shut his eyes and lose himself in the shallow diversions we usually employ to avoid confronting the starker realities of life.

      The Buddha saw that life was marked with one universal quality: it was never entirely satisfying. The Pali term for this quality of unsatisfactoriness is dukkha. Etymologically, it is linked to the idea of an ill-fitting cartwheel – something which doesn’t run smoothly, which is bumpy and uncomfortable. It describes the way things never come out quite right. Our lives contain pleasure and pain, gain and loss, happiness and sadness. But what they don’t contain is ultimate, final satisfaction. We never quite get all we’re looking for. This, the Buddha saw, is the fundamental human predicament.

      In addressing himself to the problem of dukkha, the Buddha adopted a classical ancient Indian medical formula: a disease is diagnosed; its cause is identified; a cure is determined; a remedy is prescribed. Applying this analysis to the fundamental human predicament, the Buddha arrived at the Four Noble Truths.

      The First Noble Truth identifies the problem. ‘There is dukkha’ – unsatisfactoriness.

      Because we are never satisfied, we chase after experience. Constantly seeking satisfaction from the intrinsically unsatisfying, like hamsters in a wheel, we chase round and round, getting nowhere. Gain turns to loss, happiness gives way to sadness. We always seem to think that final, complete satisfaction is just around the corner. ‘If only I can do this or get that, then everything will be fine and I’ll be happy ever after.’ But in reality it’s never like that. The wheel just keeps on turning.

      The Second Noble Truth asserts that the cause of dukkha is craving.

      We are never satisfied because we have a fundamental disposition towards craving. No matter what we get, no matter how much or how good, we always want more, or we want something else, or we want it to stop.

      Between them, craving and its counterpart, aversion, set the shape and boundaries of our personality – ‘I am the person who drives such and such a car; shops in such and such a place; lives in such and such a neighbourhood; wears such and such clothes …’ Thus we create our fragile identities. But the structure is unstable. Things always change. Life flows on and we find ourselves caught up in a remorseless process of continually having to reconstruct ourselves – ‘I like this, I want that; I don’t like this, I don’t want that’ over and over, unendingly. Such is the un-Enlightened human predicament – endless unsatisfactoriness, driven by craving.

      The Third Noble Truth asserts that with the cessation of craving unsatisfactoriness also ceases.

      This is what the Buddha saw on the night of his Enlightenment. Having seen so clearly that the whole of existence, the endless round of birth and death, is driven by insatiable craving, he could no longer live as if craving would ever produce the final satisfaction with which it constantly enticed. The bonds of craving dropped away, and with it all that had limited and constricted him – he was free.

      The Fourth Noble Truth asserts that there is a path which leads to the cessation of craving: the Noble Eightfold Path.

      THE NOBLE EIGHTFOLD PATH

      Translators usually render the Pali word samma, which is prefixed to all of the eight limbs or aspects of the Noble Eightfold Path, as ‘right’, but this can give the wrong impression, as if there were a simple ‘right’ way of doing things as opposed to the ‘wrong’ way, and that one could easily get the path ‘right’ and have done with it. But the Buddhist path isn’t quite so simply divided into ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. It is more developmental than that, for it is a path of practice, where there is always room for improvement. Rather than ‘right’ we can use the word ‘perfect’.

      The Noble Eightfold Path therefore consists of Perfect Vision, Perfect Emotion, Perfect Speech, Perfect Action, Perfect Livelihood, Perfect Effort, Perfect Awareness and Perfect Samadhi.1

      The Path isn’t traversed in simple consecutive steps. We don’t start with vision, move on to emotion, then speech, action, livelihood etc. Rather, one works in different ways on different aspects all the time. But there are various ways in which the different aspects of this path can be grouped. One of the most basic is to divide it into the Path of Vision and the Path of Transformation.

      The Path of Vision consists only of the stage of Perfect Vision. It begins when we catch a first glimpse of an entirely different way of being. The Path of Transformation comprises the other seven aspects of the Path and is the means by which we completely reorient every facet of our being in such a way that it begins to accord with that initial vision.

      THE PATH OF VISION

      Perfect Vision

      The СКАЧАТЬ