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CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

In the Same Series

Dedication

About this Book

PRINCIPLES OF BUDDHISM

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 The Buddha

2 The Dharma

3 The Sangha

4 Buddhist Ethics

5 Meditation

6 The Spread and Development of Buddhism

20 MINUTES TO MASTER BUDDHISM

Introduction

1 The Dharma

2 The Sangha

3 Buddhist Ethics

4 Meditation

Copyright

About the Publisher

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many streams have flowed into the making of this book. It contains nothing original. I have drawn without stint from the writings and lectures of my friends and my teacher. In particular, Andrew Skilton’s Concise History of Buddhism, Vessantara’s Meeting the Buddhas, and Kamalasila’s Meditation, the Buddhist Way to Tranquillity and Insight have all been helpful, as has Stephen Batchelor’s The Awakening of the West.

Without the writings and works of my teacher, Sangharakshita, I’d have nothing worthwhile to say. If this book has any merit, it is all due to him. I have drawn on all his books, most particularly The Three Jewels, Vision and Transformation, A Guide to the Buddhist Path and The Ten Pillars of Buddhism.

Sangharakshita, Kamalasila and Nagabodhi read the manuscript and made many helpful comments. Vishvapani took on extra work to give me the time to write. I am grateful to them all.

INTRODUCTION

Over half the world’s population lives in countries which have been significantly influenced by Buddhist ideas and practices, yet from the time of the Buddha – half a millennium before the founding of Christianity – right up until the middle part of the twentieth century, the vast majority of Westerners knew almost nothing about it. Around the middle of the twentieth century, however, this began to change and Buddhism is now said to be the fastest growing religion in the West.

At a time when we are faced with a stark choice between the increasing demands of consumerism on the one hand, and religions which strain our credulity on the other, more and more men and women are turning to Buddhism as a way of discovering those human and spiritual values so lacking in the world today.

But what is Buddhism? We are used to thinking of religion as being somehow about a belief in God, in one or another of the many guises in which he is seen, but there is no God in Buddhism. Is it then simply a philosophy – a way of thinking about the world, or a way of leading a more ethical life? Or is it a kind of psychotherapy – a way of helping us to come to terms with ourselves and with the dilemmas which life constantly throws up? Buddhism contains all of these to some extent, but it is also very much more.

Buddhism asks us to reconsider our usual preconceptions of what is meant by religion. It deals with truths which go entirely beyond the merely rational, unfolding a transcendental vision of reality which altogether surpasses all our usual categories of thought. The Buddhist path is a way of spiritual training which leads, in time, to a direct, personal apprehension of that transcendental vision.

Every one of us has the capacity to be clearer, wiser, happier and freer than we currently are. We have the capacity to penetrate directly to the heart of reality – to come to know things as they really are. The teachings and methods of Buddhism ultimately have one goal alone: to enable us to fully realize that potential for ourselves.

Over the course of its long history, Buddhism spread to all the countries of Asia. Wherever it alighted, the interaction between the indigenous local culture and the newly arrived teachings of the Buddha wrought profound effects on both. In many cases Buddhism ignited a cultural renaissance. In some situations, as in Tibet, it was even the harbinger of culture. And as it moved, Buddhism too changed, adapting wherever it went to local cultural conditions. Thus, today, we have the Buddhisms of Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Tibet, China, Mongolia, Russia and Japan; and within these a bewildering variety of schools, sects and sub-sects. Where in all this variety is Buddhism itself? What do all these different approaches have in common?

What they most have in common is their ancestral origin. They are all branches, leaves and flowers which have grown out from the trunk of early Indian Buddhism. They all look back to the Buddha and they all accept and propound the Buddha’s original teachings, although with very different emphases.

To understand the fundamentals of Buddhism, therefore, it is necessary to get back as close as we can to the Buddha himself. We can do this by looking into the earliest texts and seeing what they have to say for us today. This is not to reject later developments. Buddhists in the West today stand as heirs to the whole Buddhist tradition. We can admire, respect and make practical use of elements of Japanese Soto Zen as much as we can elements of Tibetan Vajrayana or Thai Theravada. But to understand the tradition as a whole we need to go back to its roots.

Most of the basic teachings in this book go back to early Indian Buddhism. I therefore hope that there is little here that Buddhists of different traditional allegiance would take issue with. For the same reason, I have generally confined myself to the early Indian canonical languages in the few cases where I need to describe Buddhist technical terms, using either Pali or Sanskrit as seems most appropriate in context. (This not being a scholarly work, I have omitted diacritical marks.)

The principal intention of this book is to introduce the general reader to the broad range of the Buddhist tradition by bringing out some of its most essential (and therefore most common) elements, and to show how the fundamental teachings of Buddhism have a significance which transcends their historical origins. Above all I hope it encourages some readers to try these out for themselves. Books are very useful, but if one really wants to know what Buddhism is about, one must try it out in practice. Even the most gifted writer cannot describe the flavour of an orange, and in the same way no book can ever capture the essence of Buddhist practice.

‘Just as the great ocean has one taste, the taste of salt,’ the Buddha said, ‘so my teaching has one flavour – the flavour of liberation.’

CHAPTER 1
THE BUDDHA

‘Buddha’ is not a name, it is a title, meaning ‘One Who is Awake’ – awake to the highest reality, to things as they really are. And one becomes a Buddha through achieving Enlightenment – a state of transcendental insight into the true nature of reality. There have been many Enlightened individuals throughout Buddhist history, but the term ‘the Buddha’ is usually used to refer to one particular Enlightened individual, Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of the Buddhist religion, the first person in our era to tread the path to Enlightenment.

Siddhartha was born in about 485 BCE (Before Common Era) in Lumbini, near the town of Kapilavastu in the area below the foothills of the Himalayas which spans the current Nepalese border with India. It was a time of great political change. In the central Ganges basin, not very far to the south, powerful new monarchies were emerging which were gradually swallowing up the older, clan-based republics. One or two republics, however, still held out, and it was into one of these, that of the Shakyans, that Siddhartha Gautama was born.

Siddhartha’s family belonged to the warrior class, and his father was a member of the ruling oligarchy. Later tradition, knowing only the monarchies which soon usurped the earlier republics, dubbed Siddhartha a ‘prince’, and his father, Suddhodana, the ‘king’; but whatever his correct designation, we know that Suddhodana was rich and powerful and that the young Siddhartha led a privileged life.

At his birth, a seer predicted that the young boy was destined for either political or spiritual empire (his name, Siddhartha, means ‘he whose aim will be accomplished’). The legendary biographies tell that in his early life his father, wishing that his handsome and accomplished son should choose a life of political rather than spiritual empire, sought to attach him to the advantages of wealth and power by providing him with every available luxury, and keeping him sheltered from the harsher facts of the world about him. He arranged for Siddhartha’s marriage to a beautiful and refined young woman, Yashodhara, and she bore him a son, Rahula.

But Siddhartha began to develop an acute sense of dissatisfaction. He sensed the hollowness which underlay his superficially comfortable life, and he was unable to brush this feeling aside. His innate integrity wouldn’t allow him to pretend that everything was as it should be. He was driven to intellectual and spiritual exploration, seeking for answers which his privileged environment was unable to provide. This period of questioning is vividly expressed by the story of the four sights – four formative experiences which occurred to the young trainee-warrior whilst travelling abroad in his chariot.

The story goes that at the side of the road one day he caught his first ever sight of an old man, and thus realized, for the first time, the inevitable fact of old age. Similarly, he was confronted in turns by disease and by death. These experiences completely overwhelmed him. What was the point of living a life of ease and luxury when old age, disease and death were waiting in the wings – quietly biding their time before they came to claim him, his family and friends? Finally he saw a wandering mendicant, the sight of whom sowed in his mind the seed of the possibility that there was an alternative to the passive acceptance of old age, disease and death. But, at the same time, he saw that to embark on such a quest would require radical, even painful, action.

And so Siddhartha passed his early years – restless, worried by matters of profound existential concern and torn between the life for which ancestry had prepared him and the religious quest towards which his restless spirit propelled him. His insight into the inevitable facts of old age, disease and death, left him with an acute and ineradicable sense of the painful vacuity of the ‘pleasures’ and plottings of upper-class Shakyan life. Ancestral duty demanded that he join in, put his sense of the hollowness of things aside, and get on with the business of warriorship and government. Yet, at his core, where he was truest to himself, he knew that a life which denied the fundamentals of reality was not for him. He saw that he had two stark options: he could deny himself reality or he could deny himself family, luxury and power. He chose to seek reality, and at the age of 29, without the approval or even knowledge of his wife and father, he stole away from home, leaving behind wife, child, family and social status. He cut off his hair and beard, swapped his warrior garb for the rag robes of a religious mendicant, and began his search for truth and liberation.

It was an unsettled time. Rival kings, striving to establish ever larger kingdoms, were gradually absorbing and centralizing the earlier family – and tribe-oriented social structures. The old religion of the Vedas and its Brahminical priesthood was increasingly associated with these centralized governments, and a new class of religious practitioner was emerging. These were the wandering ascetics, who, dissatisfied with social conventions and with the empty ritualism of established religion, gave up their homes and social positions to wander at will in the world, living on alms and seeking spiritual liberation.

Siddhartha became a ‘wanderer’.

He sought out the most famous spiritual teachers of his time, but soon surpassed them in spiritual attainment and, realizing that even the lofty heights to which they had led him didn’t provide the answers he was looking for, he left each of them in turn and continued on his quest alone.

It was a commonly accepted belief at the time that one liberated the spirit by weakening the prison of the flesh, and for the next six years Siddhartha engaged in the practice of extreme religious austerities. He wore no clothes, didn’t wash and went without food and sleep for increasingly long periods.

All my limbs became like the knotted joints of withered creepers, my buttocks like a bullock’s hoof, my protruding backbone like a string of balls, my gaunt ribs like the crazy rafters of a tumbledown shed. My eyes lay deep in their sockets, their pupils sparkling like water in a deep well. As an unripe gourd shrivels and shrinks in a hot wind, so became my scalp. If I thought, ‘I will touch the skin of my belly’, it was the skin of my backbone that I also took hold of, since the skin of my belly and my back met. The hairs, rotting at the roots, fell away from my body when I stroked my limbs.1

Renowned for the extent of his asceticism, his fame ‘rang like a bell’ throughout northern India, and he began to attract a following. But he was still not satisfied. Six years after leaving home, he was no nearer to resolving the fundamental questions of existence than he had been at the beginning of his quest. Realizing that his austerities had led him nowhere, despite his great name and reputation as a holy ascetic, Siddhartha had the moral courage to abandon his previous course. He began to eat in moderation, and his former disciples, scandalized by this backsliding, left him in disgust.

He was now completely alone. Family, clan, reputation, followers – all abandoned. All his attempts to break through the veil of ignorance had failed. Desolate, he didn’t know which way to turn next. Only one thing was certain – he would not abandon his quest.

At this point a memory rose to the surface of his mind. When he was quite young, sitting in the shade of a rose-apple tree, he had watched his father ploughing. Relaxed by the slow, steady rhythm of the ox-team, content in the cool shade, he had spontaneously slipped into a concentrated meditative state – might that be the way to Enlightenment?

In this state of acute existential solitude, his determination unshaken, according to legend Siddhartha sat down under a tree with this declaration:

Flesh may wither away, blood may dry up, but I shall not leave this seat until I gain Enlightenment!

For days and nights he sat there in meditation.

The legends present a vivid account of the existential struggle which Siddhartha was now engaged in. It was time for his confrontation with Mara, the Evil One – the archetypal embodiment of all that stands between us and the truth.

Seeing Siddhartha sitting thus determinedly in meditation, Mara shook with fright:

He had with him his three sons – Flurry, Gaiety and Sullen Pride – and his three daughters – Discontent, Delight and Thirst. These asked him why he was so disconcerted in his mind. And he replied to them with these words: ‘Look over there at that sage, clad in the armour of determination, with truth and spiritual virtue as his weapons, the arrows of his intellect drawn, ready to shoot! He has sat down with the firm intention of conquering my realm. No wonder that my mind is plunged in deep despondency! If he should succeed in overcoming me, and should proclaim to the world the way to final beatitude, then my realm would be empty today. But so far he has not yet won the eye of full knowledge. He is still within my sphere of influence. While there is time I will therefore break his solemn purpose, and throw myself against him like the rush of a swollen river breaking against the embankment!’

But Mara could achieve nothing against the Buddha-to-be, and he and his army were defeated, and fled in all directions – their elation gone, their toil rendered fruitless, their rocks, logs, trees scattered everywhere. They behaved like a hostile army whose commander had been slain in battle. So Mara, defeated, ran away together with his followers. The great seer, free from the dust of passion, victorious over darkness’s gloom, had vanquished him.2