Glenn Wallis - Basic Teachings of the Buddha

CONTENTS

To Charles Hallisey, my teacher

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. But which is the stone that supports the bridge? Kublai Khan asks.

The bridge is not supported by one stone or another, Marco answers, but only by the line of the arch that they form. Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.

Polo answers, Without stones there is no arch.

ITALO CALVINO, Invisible Cities

INTRODUCTION

A man of genius or a work of love and beauty will not come to order, can not be compounded by the best rules, but is always a new and incalculable result, like health. Dont rattle your rules in our ears; we must behave as we can.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

For millennia throughout Asia, the Buddha has been known as an enlightened figure whose vast wisdom illuminates the way to a life of meaning and genuine satisfaction. At present, in the West, his teachings are increasingly viewed by adherents, physicists, psychologists, and philosophers alike as exceptionally lucid descriptions of our human situation, and his prescribed practice of meditation as an effective means of awakening to that situation with clarity and equanimity.

The purpose of the present volume is to present the core teachings of the Buddha and, in so doing, engage the reader in an exploration of the Buddhas genius and of the beauty of his work. But since, as Emerson says, such a person and such a work never result from the limitations wrought by received convention, a book purporting to bring these two to order has some explaining to do. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the subject knows that Buddhism comes in a staggering variety of cultural, doctrinal, and historical inflections. Buddhism, it seems, may be qualified endlessly, evoking with equal ease images of flamboyant ritualism, luxuriant creativity, byzantine philosophizing, and tranquil contemplation. Just browse the shelves at your local bookstore: there is chanting Buddhism, meditating Buddhism, painting Buddhism, therapy Buddhism, martial arts Buddhism, Hollywood Buddhism, motorcycle maintenance Buddhism; there is Mhyana Buddhism, Theravda Buddhism, Vajrayna Buddhism, Zen, Vipassana, Tantric, Dzogchen, Pure Land Buddhism; there is Japanese, Tibetan, American, Thai, and [insert country name here] Buddhism. Now, for $19.99, for a limited time only (lets hope), you can have Buddhism-in-a-box Buddhism!

How can we sort this all out? There are two crucial factors mitigating against the streamlining of Buddhism that many readers presumably desire. First, contrary to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, Buddhism is not a religion of the book. There is no single volume that contains the teachings of the Buddha. The Buddha, in fact, wrote nothing at all. He wandered around a four-hundred-square-mile area of eastern India for forty-five years, verbally clarifying for others the nature of what he referred to as his awakeninghis liberating insight into the nature of human existence. Eventually codified by the community of his followers in India and committed to writing in Sri Lanka, China, and beyond (this process is explained later), this nearly half century of teaching amounts to a virtual library of books. The second factor working against an easy solution to the present-day multiplicity of Buddhisms is the fact that although the Buddha became a renowned teacher with a substantial following during his lifetime, he never centralized his authority. Scholars speculate that the Buddha modeled his practitioner community on the power-sharing republican political structure of his own people, the kyas of northeastern India (see Pronunciation of Sanskrit and Pli Words). In any case, shortly before he died, the Buddha insisted that no one assume the role of authority when he was gone. Hence, without a popelike figure to lay down the law, two predictable results manifested: the community splintered into numerous divergent sects and schools, and doctrinal disputes and variations in practice proliferated. The result of twenty-five hundred years of such diffusion is precisely the confusing cacophony of Buddhist voices beckoning us today from bookshelves and practice centers.

Can these voices be harmonized? Can so many Buddhisms be reconciled to the point of the basic, as the title of the present volume suggests? Do they all share some underlying commonality? If we want to claim that the varieties of Buddhism are fundamentally identical, as indeed many scholars and practitioners alike do, then an additional difficulty appears: What criteria will we use to locate that point of commonality? Remember the Greek mathematician Archimedes? He said that if he were given but a single fixed point on which to stand, he could move the Earth off its foundation. Imagine thatis there such a point? Standing on the Earth, he would just revolve along with it; stepping off the Earth in order to gain a footing, he would fall into empty space. Similarly, we cannot locate a fixed vantage pointan Archimedean pointfrom which to make normative claims about Buddhism as a totality. We must formulate our claims either from within a particular tradition or from the outside altogether. The first stance is, from the perspective of the whole, too limited, while the second stance is, from the perspective of each particular tradition, too broad. This being the case, isnt the very notion of basic teachings of the Buddha vacuous?

THE JOURNEY OF THE BUDDHAS TEACHINGS

In the simplest terms, the basic teachings of the Buddha consist of his forty-five-year-long effort to clarify to others what he considered to be the essential knowledge (buddhi) for human well-being. He referred to his own insight into this knowledge as an awakening (bodhi). Hence, his followers eventually gave him the epithet buddha, one who is awakened. It is of course from this appellation that we get the term Buddhism. But how do we get from one mans specific teachings to myriad forms of Buddhism? The story of how the Buddhas basic teachings gave rise to the multiple doctrinal, linguistic, ritual, cultural, and institutional traditions that call themselves Buddhist is, of course, filled with minute, complex detail. The details, moreover, must be culled from several scholarly disciplines, including philology, archaeology, sociology, history, and anthropology, to name but a few. In the present section, I hope to convey to the reader an impression of the process whereby the Buddhas teachings became so many Buddhisms.