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The End of Wholesome Behavior

March 1st, 2011 . Posted in MN 117 Great Forty, MN 121, MN 78 | No Comments »
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In MN 78 the Buddha talks about karma without ever mentioning it once in its merit-producing context. (1)

Lay disciple Pancakanga went to the hall in a nearby park that was set aside for debates, and there he encountered the wanderer Uggahamana who said that a man who is perfected in what is wholesome, an invincible ascetic who has achieved the supreme attainment, is someone who does no evil in action, speaks no evil, has no evil intentions, and doesn’t make his living in an evil line of work. Pancakanga refrained from comment, left, and reported what was said to the Buddha later in the day. The Buddha then pointed out that, by that description, an infant is an invincible ascetic who has achieved the supreme attainment.

What’s interesting about this story so far is that intention was part of the larger discussion in the local hall (so perhaps it wasn’t introduced as a concept by the Buddha alone) and that the original terms used to frame the conversation — wholesome, action, speech, intention, livelihood — are all used in the Buddha’s answers to Pancakanga. Not only are the same terms in use, the answer is framed entirely in terms of the worldview and concerns of the original speaker.

Our familiarity with the Buddha’s concepts of intention and karma may make it obvious to us that this is what he talks about in his answer, yet he doesn’t use those words. Nowadays, if a Buddhist were to try to explain Buddhist morality to a Christian, they are most likely to talk about karma and intention, not reframe the whole thing in terms of sin and faith, but — using the modern frame of reference as a metaphor for what the Buddha does here — if the Buddha were speaking to a Christian, he would be talking about God and salvation, accepting Jesus as savior, and about sin and faith. He seems to have had a remarkable talent for speaking to people in the idiom they were most comfortable with.

The Buddha’s point about the baby is that it isn’t enough to simply do no harm, you have to understand what it means to do harm. Read the rest of this entry »

True Cafeteria Buddhism

October 24th, 2010 . Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »
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Looked at one way, it makes no difference at all what the Buddha said or meant, for example by the various terms in dependent arising.  As long as we understand the general principles of how we’re creating this effervescent self, and how we run afoul of it, it doesn’t matter much if we translate it into modern terms, as long as the tools for seeing the process in our own lives — that is, meditation and mindfulness — are still sharpened by our concepts.

Looked at from another angle, though, failure to understand with precision what the Buddha said, and why, may mean that we miss key insights, or, worse, misunderstand in ways that have us expending a lot of energy on paths that won’t take us where we want to go — efficiently, or not at all.

The assumption that there was no historical person that originated this way of seeing leads to willingness to accept that it’s a fuzzy, disorganized insight from which one can pick and choose because we are all members of the committee that came up with the general directions.  It is willingness to look for evidence of consistency, the assumption that it may be there, that provides the fuel for the search, the persistence to stick with the difficult task of sorting out what’s added from what’s original, and to work at understanding the context and therefore the terms, to see if it all fits.

Mandala’s “Distorted Views of Buddhism”

October 7th, 2010 . Posted in Critical thinking, Rebirth, responses to blogs &c, SN 12.44 | 2 Comments »
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Because the Four Noble Truths were my introduction to Buddhism, and the first two are clear enough to verify for myself (and I did); and the third and fourth truths when investigated also turned out to be valid, my initial understanding of the sort of person the Buddha was, was that he had an excellent grasp of critical thinking, and that he grounded his teachings in everyday evidence of our lives.

This is why when I read

“Whatever in this world – with its devas, maras, and brahmas, its generations complete with contemplatives and priests, princes and men – is seen, heard, sensed, cognized, attained, sought after, pondered by the intellect, that has been fully awakened to by the Tathagata”

I read that as a statement that this man has considered it all and knows the truth of these — but I don’t see in there a statement that these things have real-world validity, only that he understands them as they are. He doesn’t say in there whether these are beings with physical existence, or a separate existence on some cosmic plane, or whether they are just given reality in our minds.

That quote comes as part of B. Allan Wallace’s unfavorable comments on agnostic and atheist approaches to Buddhism, initially centering on Stephen Batchelor’s words, and he cites this as evidence against Batchelor’s comment that the Buddha “did not claim to have had experience that granted him privileged, esoteric knowledge of how the universe ticks.”  Mr. Wallace seems convinced that the Buddha did.

What I find interesting is that this is another example of the point made in “What Do You Know?” that our preconceptions strongly influence our understanding.

Presumably Mr. Wallace has background that disposes him to an understanding that the Buddha did gain such privileged, esoteric knowledge; my preconception, initially based on just the simplest teachings, and then influenced by Mr. Batchelor, who inspired me to read the suttas directly for myself and see what’s there, gives me a view that looks at the quoted texts quite differently.

For example the next quote Mr. Wallace provides is: “the world and its arising are fully known by a Tathagata and he is released from both; he also knows the ending of it and the way thereto…” As evidence of esoteric knowledge of cosmological workings, this has to be read literally — and yet the Buddha was still on the planet, so at least in that sense we have evidence he was not released from the world. But then perhaps it’s release from the cycle of births tied to “the world” that’s meant. If we assume the Buddha is being literal, shouldn’t he have said, “released from the cycle of rebirths” since he had the language to do so? We can’t take “the world” literally because his release from the world would be evidenced by him vanishing from it; so any other interpretation has to reach into “the world” of metaphorical speech, and from there the only good options for interpretation are to look elsewhere for referents that might give us insight.

Having read enough of the Pali canon to get a feel for Gotama’s rhetorical style, and studied the Brahminical way of seeing things around his time, it’s pretty clear to me that “the world” is indeed a metaphor but for our self-created world. That is what he saw the arising of, and through his release from it, saw its ending. For example in SN 12.44 “The World” we have “And what is the origin of the world? Read the rest of this entry »

A Doubly-Bad Dice Throw

October 4th, 2010 . Posted in AN 3.65 Kalama Sutta, Bhikkhu Bodhi, Bhikkhu Nanamoli, MN 60 Safe Bet, Rebirth, Thanissaro Bhikkhu | 14 Comments »
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There are times when, reading these suttas, I am quite non-plused by what appear to me to be intentional distortions of what was originally said. In general, I tend to assume that each person who shifted the meaning either did so without being aware of it (perhaps in copying from one manuscript to another, tea got spilled and he could no longer tell if there was a diacritical mark or not, so he gave it his best guess); or during the process of memorization when pieces get dropped, added, or mixed up; or in having to make choices when translating from one dialect or language to another, simply choosing what best fits his understanding of what’s being said; if his understanding is not exactly accurate, this has the effect of pushing the meaning away from the original.

But sometimes there are sections that are so clearly changed that I cannot imagine how they got away with it. Perhaps everyone at that time supported the change, but has no one since ever noticed these things? Well surely I’m not the first, but iconoclastic readings aren’t going to have been supported by the established authorities, so individuals who objected didn’t get into power, nor did they have their corrections passed on. I hope that Information Age technology changes that, so that the many people interested in what might actually have been said and meant can put their theories out there and join them with the ideas of others to see if it all matches up.

Case in point. I have been deeply bothered by what I think of as the Dice Throw Sutta, MN 60, the Apannaka Sutta: “A Safe Bet” in which as described on AccessToInsight.org “The Buddha explains to a group of householders how to navigate skillfully through the maze of wrong views.” This is another famous sutta used to support the theory that the Buddha taught karma and rebirth as necessary to his path — and certainly, as it stands right now, it is a very strong defense; “incontrovertable” (as Bhikkhus Bodhi and Nanamoli name the sutta in his Wisdom Publications version of the Majjhima Nikaya, “The Incontrovertable Teaching”). At least it’s a strong defense if you have no training in logic and cannot see that what is said is broken by the changes made to the wording. This sutta is so clearly about logic that some English versions come with notes on its logical structure.*

The framing tale has the Buddha visiting a brahmin village and asking the residents there if they have chosen a particular teacher “in whom you have found grounded conviction” (or as in Bhikkhus Nanamoli and Bodhi’s wording, “in whom you have acquired faith supported by reasons”) — this really is all about logic — and they say they have not. Read the rest of this entry »

Kalama Sutta: The Freethinker’s Toolkit aka “The Straw Man”

September 30th, 2010 . Posted in AN 3.65 Kalama Sutta, Bhikkhu Bodhi, Critical thinking, direct experience, Thanissaro Bhikkhu | 5 Comments »
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I’m pretty sure it was Stephen Batchelor’s “Buddhism Without Beliefs” that first pointed out the Kalama Sutta to me, with the little clips that I mentioned in the last two posts heading some portion of the book. I do recall taking the time to locate the whole sutta and reading it, and being clear from the outset that it was guiding us toward not only the remarkable stance that we have within us the wisdom to distinguish between what’s morally sound and what is harmful to others* — remarkable indeed for a religious text — but also toward seeking a balancing perspective by seeking the opinions of “the wise”. This seemed all the more amazing for the extreme subtlety of the line between not relying on outside opinion:

Of course you are in doubt. When there are reasons for doubt, uncertainty is born. So in this case, Kalamas, don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’

and seeking it:

When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness’ — then you should enter & remain in them.

a line so fine as to be almost contradictory. In the first quote we are told not to simply take the word of our teacher, but in the second we are told to listen to what is praised by the wise Read the rest of this entry »

Kalama Sutta Two: The Balance of a Reality Check

September 24th, 2010 . Posted in AN 3.65 Kalama Sutta, Critical thinking, the wise | 1 Comment »
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My last post was on the wisdom offered to the confused Kalamas in sorting out the thicket of views they were exposed to. Because their village was on a crossroads, they got full benefit of hearing the media of their day — talks and debates by folks walking from one place to another. Our modern crossroads are even more confusing, and the points that the Buddha made in answer to their questions, including starting from our own direct experience, still applies. The focus last time was on, first, paying attention to the sources of information that we take in and, second, on becoming aware of how our minds work with that information.

When it comes to the news and what underlies current events, there are some fairly objective facts we can check into if we are willing to spend the time (and as I point out in “What Do You Know?” if we are not willing to spend the time investigating, we shouldn’t be broadcasting opinions based on hearsay and a lack of knowledge). The deeper investigation comes in looking into our own mental processes to see how we know what we know and how other factors play into our perceptions. Learning meditation techniques and mindfulness — keeping awareness on what’s going on with us in any given moment — are critical skills for sorting out “truth from fiction” — sorting distortion from accurate information. But keen awareness of what we see arising in the mind is not an answer by itself because our minds are capable of creating their own realities and convincing us completely that they are true.

We find that even Buddhist masters — historically and in the present — get deluded enough to end up in some dicey moral situations. If they were capable of complete accuracy through just their own insight that might not happen, but it can be very difficult to sort out what’s “real” from what’s “imagined” in the spacious confines, in the twisty little mazes all alike, of one’s own mind. This is why the second piece of advice in the Kalama Sutta is to seek the counsel of the wise.

When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness’ — then you should enter & remain in them.

In just that tiny little section there are three pieces of advice: Read the rest of this entry »

The Kalama Sutta “In The News”

September 21st, 2010 . Posted in AN 3.65 Kalama Sutta, Critical thinking, direct experience, meditation (concentration), mindfulness, Thanissaro Bhikkhu | 10 Comments »
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In these complex times, when President Obama has to come out and warn us to ask questions* it can be hard to figure out how to sort it all out, where to even begin. Though he wasn’t talking about American Politics at the time, the Buddha had some good advice for us in the Kalama Sutta.  The Kalamas lived on a crossroads and had so many different people coming through, each with their own view, and the views conflicted and contradicted each other to the point that they were in doubt about who to believe. Their situation reflects ours with modern media in a way that’s almost painful to see — some things never change, do they? But even if the views the Kalamas were concerned with weren’t over what Big Money does, the confusion and its solution is still the same.

“Of course you are uncertain, Kalamas. Of course you are in doubt. When there are reasons for doubt, uncertainty is born. So in this case, Kalamas, don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.'”

The Buddha suggests not relying on reports (news!), on legends (Rush Limbaugh!), nor on traditional understandings, written scripture, or even sheer logic, reasoning, analogies, or simply working it out for yourself or in discussion with others; don’t even rely on the word of the wisest person you know, even if he is the Buddha himself, but instead:

“When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness’ — then you should enter & remain in them.”

He is talking here about “qualities” in the sense of moral choices we make in our lives, qualities we develop in ourselves, but — and this is the framing point of the story of the Kalamas — who we listen to and what we believe is the basis of our choices. In terms of the choices we make in how to behave every day, we have the ability to test for ourselves whether or not what we do has a good effect in the world. There is nothing written that says that everything we try with good intentions will turn out just as we like — it is, after all, a complex world — but in general, over time, by observation, we can see for ourselves what effect our actions have.

The first suggestion in the Kalama Sutta, then, is that we make sure that we know things for ourselves, Read the rest of this entry »

Jayarava’s Karma and Rebirth

September 5th, 2010 . Posted in Rebirth | 4 Comments »
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I seriously and deeply entered the blogosphere yesterday for the first time, looking for other blogs that related in some useful way to this one. I went looking for folks with interests similar or tangential to mine, who spoke about things that concern me here.

It’s not necessary for my enjoyment for bloggers to agree with me (in fact more power to people whose viewpoints vary) but it’s also nice to find kindred spirits, since my particular obsessions seem to be found only in the most obscure cracks of the tiniest little niches. I believe I’ve found one in Jayarava. Yesterday I responded to one of his posts from last October, which focused on the phrase “by karma, I mean intention”. I mentioned that I interpreted the Buddha’s “intention” as having as its source our underlying worldview, a worldview that is changed when one comes to deeply understand the way the world works. This change in us makes even unconscious actions draw from new experiential knowledge, leaving behind selfish motives. I then talked about how this makes Buddhist morality more effective because it comes from within us, instead of being applied from the outside.

I next started to make comments on two older posts but restrained myself because it felt as though I was getting too far behind the conversational curve, but when I got to his “Karma and Rebirth” even though it is more than two years old, I didn’t want to hold back anymore. Unfortunately my thoughts and questions got longer and longer and it was then that I realized I might not always carry on monologues in my posts here on Just A Little Dust — maybe it’s time for dialog in which someone else gets to start a new subject.

So here, let’s start with Jayarava’s


…growing belief that the Buddha was not offering an ontology, not offering us definite statements on “how things are”, but only ways in which we could experience for ourselves the way things are….

I believe he’s saying that the Buddha was not giving us a description of reality, of metaphysics, when he described karma and rebirth, but was offering it as a method of understanding that which “is beyond words”.

Read the rest of this entry »

What Do You Know?

September 4th, 2010 . Posted in direct experience, MN 38 Destruction of Craving, Rebirth | 3 Comments »
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Not long ago a friend of mine wondered aloud whether there was any point in reading the Pali canon once you understood the basics: the four noble truths, the eightfold path, the three marks of existence, causation. The canon has so many layers of mystical cosmology that, for the agnostic or atheist, it can be almost painful to read. So why would we bother?

About the same time that question came up, I wrote the post “Speaking Only From Direct Experience” in which I rued the loss of emphasis in a tiny chunk of sutta, emphasis in the original language that was missing from the translations. As far as I could tell, the Buddha, using the word “only” twice — “speak *only* about what you know through your own efforts *only*” — was being crystal clear that we should not be talking about things we have not experienced for ourselves. This applied in the sutta to what the Buddha taught:

“Yet bhikkhus, you who know and see thus would you say, ‘Our recluse said it, these are the recluse’s words.’ We do not say that?” “No, venerable sir.” [metta.lk’s MN 38]

and this also applied to speculation about past lives, how we came to be who we were in the present life, and future lives:

“Yet bhikkhus, you who know thus and see thus, would your mind run to the past? ‘Was I in the past or was I not in the past? What was I in the past? How was I in the past? Being who was I in the past?'” “No venerable sir.” [metta.lk’s MN 38]

In the sutta, our recluse has just expounded at great length and in a variety of different ways, his teaching on causation — primarily focusing on how we come to be beings who cause our own suffering — and then just after having explained all this he says, effectively, that we will then have no more questions about who we were in the past, how we got to where we are, and whether we will exist and who we will be in the future, [1. I take this to mean that, if we *were* talking about literal rebirths, we would have these sots of questions, but since he has just explained the process of self creation in this life — how we start it up in this life, how it goes on, and how we can break that cycle — we will be able to see that there is nothing worth speculating over that could move into a new rebirth; but you may see his message differently.] and so we will have no need to speculate on it. Further, he says that we should not simply repeat what he says about it [2. As he sometimes talks about his past births, and how he came to be in this life — though never that I have seen about who or what he will be in the future — I take this to mean the monks should not be speculating about and using those stories either, though I don’t imagine he is limiting his stricture against “saying what he says” to just that aspect.] but he says quite clearly that we should be talking about only that which we have known and seen for ourselves.

I was spending a great deal more time on forums at that point than I ought to have been and I had only myself to blame, really, for the aggravation I sometimes felt when focusing on the discussions of rebirth — it seemed natural, though, to spend my time there, since I pretty much agree with what everyone says on everything else and there’s not as much new for me to learn where everyone agrees with me — so I was hearing the same arguments over and over for “The Buddha taught rebirth as necessary to his path” and how he “Saw it for himself, he says so” and I think what made me want to cry was realizing that the Buddha, in my fresh understanding, had specifically said we shouldn’t be talking about that which we had not experienced for ourselves, that we should not be hanging around talking about “But the teacher said…” and I considered just how much energy was spent on speculations about rebirth by people who had no direct experience / knowledge / memory of it, when right there in MN 38.23 he’s saying, right, we should not be talking about this stuff. (Like many thoughts on Buddhism this one is leaning over into recursion — here I am telling you what the Buddha said — but I’m going to lean back from the edge of that precipice.) I imagined a whole Buddhist history in which people focused on their practice and what they had actually experienced, and my mind-made world came out looking very different from where I was just then.

But now, most of year later, I find that this little chunk of sutta has reached tendrils all into my life, bringing much clearer focus to many things. Just today, I spent a big chunk of time posting in reaction to a friend’s comments about a woman in a grocery line he’d seen using a WIC card while talking on an iPhone, while her 10-year-old daughter messed with *her* iPhone.  This friend was appalled that poor folks taking a government handout would spend his tax money on iPhones.

My response was entirely to do with this little chunk of sutta: It has everything to do with speaking from what you actually know for sure, and not speculating. This, of course, has to begin with stopping, before we react, and asking ourselves: “What do I really know about this situation?” That’s probably the hardest part right there, just stopping to assess which are facts, and which are guesses and speculations. The next hardest part is taking the time to get more facts — sometimes they are as easy (but rude) as asking the woman how she and her daughter came to have an iPhone when they need WIC cards to pay for their food; sometimes they would require lots of investigation in data sources and an understanding of statistics, and more investigation as to possible bias in the statistics (and maybe that’s more trouble than we’re willing to go to); sometimes perhaps the answer is impossible to come by — is there such a thing as rebirth?

But this is important stuff — way more important than a brief look at this one incident might lead us to think. This was just one person irritated at another, after all. But that one person talked about it very publicly, and many of his friends chimed in with support for his outrage — and as I pointed out, they will likely not remember the rest of the conversation about facts and stories, they will remember that they knew someone who knew a lady who bought two iPhones for her and daughter (who was not old enough to need it) and all the while took government money via WIC foodstamps. They will remember it as fact, another example supporting their worldview. Anecdotes like these carry more weight than all the numbers trotted before us which just make our eyes glaze over. My final point on this sort of thing is that if we can’t be bothered to get the facts, we shouldn’t be talking about it as if we do know the facts.

That is important stuff, but it’s not just as important as that.

Stopping and asking ourselves what we actually know and what we made up is key to ending most of the suffering we cause ourselves in the world. In our relationships with others — at work, at home, with friends and strangers — we are forever telling ourselves why they do what they do. Even if they say right out why they are doing things, we come up with theories as to the *real* reason they’re doing it. And then we base the choices we make in how to handle situations on what we’ve convinced ourselves is the truth of the situation, without ever quite realizing just how little we actually know about it.

If we followed the Buddha’s advice — extending it from speculation about rebirth, to covering our whole lives — and only spoke about things we were sure from our own experience were true, things about which we had enough information through investigation and questioning, to be reasonably certain we understood the situation, what a different world it would be. What a loss of drama! But it has to start with stopping and asking, “What do I actually know? How can I get more information?” before we act or speak.

Now, when I think back to the other friend’s question about what the point in reading suttas is once you’ve grasped the basics, this is where I find my answer: That often in the tiniest scraps I find something is said that is so true that it changes the way I see the world, and the way I behave in it. True, I might find this piece of wisdom in some other book — but I don’t know how many books I’d have to read to find it. I do know — from direct experience — that this set of volumes has such a consistent underlying message that I have found a very high percentage of good advice in it. And it has gotten easier, over time, to recognize the parts that don’t fit, and don’t have that same kind of high quality insight. While it is true on one level that the insight here about stopping and checking your beliefs before speaking or acting is part of “the basics”, the many little ways these play out in our lives is not always obvious, and having a source that acts as a lens focused on seeing the same information from hundreds of different views can make the ways it fits into our lives stand out.

MN 117 Take Two

August 31st, 2010 . Posted in asava, Bhikkhu Bodhi, Buddhist History, context, DN 5 Bloodless Sacrifice, lokuttara, MN 117 Great Forty, Rebirth, Suttas, Translating | 5 Comments »
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It’s been a while since I posted, and nearly a year since I had my first good look at “The Great Forty“* and in that time I’ve done a lot more reading of other suttas, and spent some time focused on certain sections of this particular one. I’ve listened to Bhikkhu Bodhi talk about it, all the while feeling that the places where he seems a little puzzled are the pieces best explained by a better understanding of its place in the culture it came out of. I’ve discussed it with a few different people and groups to try to clarify the perspective. Now I’d like to take a moment to take another look and bring up a few new pieces I’ve found.

The first is that the “Wrong Views” listed in MN 117.5 are views that were held by a certain set of the more extreme heretics of the time (our Gotama was a heretic, too). The particular phrasing of this section:

“Nothing given, nothing offered, nothing sacrificed; no fruit or result of good and bad actions; no this world, no other world; no mother, no father, no beings who are reborn spontaneously, no good and virtuous recluses and brahmins in the world who have realised for themselves by direct knowledge and declare this world and the other world.” [Majjhima Nikaya, Bhikkhus Nanamoli and Bodhi, p. 934]

is used often in series with other sets of views that are just as bad or worse, all describing doctrines that were refutations of the more common views of the day. Notice that these are all negative phrases; this is because they are negations of accepted positive views. The worst of those seem to be the fellows (not listed in the above) who believe that slipping a knife into someone merely moves aside their molecules and has no moral effect at all. The Buddha roundly condemned such views, not based on the physics involved, but based on the increase in suffering such views bring into the world — he is focused primarily on moral behavior.

While the Buddha was refuting the views of every extremist out there, if we think about it, we must realize that those amoral heretics did not spend all their time refuting the Buddha — the texts we have being very Buddha-centric seem to take it for granted that he was the only one worth arguing with (and that he won every argument) — but when those with these negative views were stating them, it was not just the Buddha’s views they argued against. Assuming that these wrong views were specifically negations of the Buddha’s view is the main mistake made by those who translate this sutta as “The Buddha taught rebirth as necessary to his teaching.”

We can see how this misunderstanding comes about — a few generations away from Gotama’s times, those crazy heretics may not even have been remembered, much less who they argued with, so it would be logical for Buddha-adoring followers to assume those wrong views were all about their hero’s right views. But a wider look at the canon, and the context in which the above set of views is presented show that these were much wider arguments.

So when the discussion flips from the totally negative Wrong Views to the positive Right Views (but with taints) those Buddha-centric monastics who had lost the context assumed that those Right Views have to be the Buddha’s — he does after all talk about karma quite a lot — and they came up with interpretations of “given, offered, sacrifice” that might be reasonable, saying that monks who give up the householder’s life are sacrificing (though I note young Gotama didn’t feel it was a sacrifice); that he mentions honoring and caring for one’s mother and father; those “spontaneously reborn beings” might be a bit of stretch since the Buddha says nothing comes without a cause, but we can say what he really meant was “not born of woman” — apparently he just misspoke when he used that word for “spontaneously”. And he sometimes tells stories of going to the Brahma world, so that explains “this world and the other”. I hear tap dancing when I hear all this, but it is so well-rehearsed that it draws attention away from the much simpler explanation that the reason the text says this is a tainted view is because none of these things are specifically Gotama’s, so there is no need to dance to make them fit the rest of his teaching.

As a way of trying to prove myself wrong about this, I gave a very close look at the word translated as “sacrificed” in this sutta. I expected to find that it occurred in several texts in which the Buddha talked about a monk’s sacrifice in giving up the luxuries of household life; or in the gifts of all those laypersons — especially for the poorest it could be quite a sacrifice. But every version I found of “hutam” as such was used in exactly the above paragraph or its positive opposite, nowhere else. As for variants of “hutam” — different declensions, or in combination with other words, all but two that I found were in discussions with Brahmins, some very specifically with a Brahmin saying, “I want to do a sacrifice — how should I go about it?” Out of about 100 appearances that I checked, I found two which might be support for “sacrifice” having something to do with giving alms or giving up the householder’s life. But really, think about it, when those negative heretics were saying “Nothing given, nothing offered, nothing sacrificed” do you think they were reacting to the Buddha’s rarely-used twist of “sacrifice” to mean something else? Or would they be refuting the main obsession of the day, Brahmins and their rites?

If in “Wrong View” the “giving, offering, sacrificing” we’re talking about is the Brahmins’, what basis is there for defining it as something else when we get to “Right View, with Taints”?  There is no basis *in* the sutta — unless we assume what’s being said and then bend it to fit — and I did not find any solid basis for it in the rest of the canon either.

I did find that there is at least one other word for sacrifice — which is the one used in DN 5 “A Bloodless Sacrifice”. And there, and in other suttas, I found that the Buddha does not rail against sacrifice in every form. Instead, he uses his very sly methods,  saying, -“Oh, sacrifice is fine, as long as you approach it from the right moral standpoint… and don’t kill anything.”- Here again, it is the morality of those involved that is the key, not so much the rite in itself. For me this was a surprise — I had understood the Buddha was always hard on sacrifice — but here he was preaching in a very mild-mannered way, with great tolerance, and just a small, sharp twist to get the practitioners to line up with his thinking.

Which, really, supports what’s going on in “The Great Forty” — he does not condemn, outright, sacrifice, offerings, and gifts to the Brahmins. He does not condemn any of the views as long as they result in less suffering/greater morality in their adherents and those they interact with. But they are still tainted — because they are not part of his path.

In the debates I’ve had with steadfast traditionalists and even those who think of themselves as non-traditionalists and rebels, I am given to understand that what’s meant by “tainted” here is “not yet liberated”. Until you’re an arahant you’re always tainted, right? Yes but the text isn’t saying those holding the views are tainted, it says the views — the views and views alone — are tainted. Of course they are! They’re views!

To further point this out, in the middle of The Great Forty, the Buddha sets up a series contrasting “wrong” with “tainted right view” and comparing “tainted right view” to “untainted, supramundane”. He does this for intention, speech, actions, and livelihood, and they have a basic pattern of “wrong” being bad behavior, “right with taints” being behavior that is the opposite of “wrong”, and “right supramundane” being pretty much the same as “right with taints” — the essential difference between the two “rights” being that the “untainted, supramundane” is listed as “a factor of the path” (while “tainted” is not), and the mental attitude of the disciple of the supramundane path — “noble, taintless, possessing and developing the path”.

Since this middle section reinforces the importance of taintlessness, I will refer to Bhikkhu Bodhi’s discussion of what exactly this “taint” is:

Now we come to right view. This is where it becomes more interesting. We see this distinction, “Right view, I say, is two-fold. There is right view that is affected by taints…” Here the Pali expression is simpler, “sasava” that is literally, “with the asavas”, with these (I don’t like “taints”) “with these influxes” or “corruptions”. “Partaking of merit.” Now we have an expression a little obscure, the translation is “ripening in the acquisitions”: “upadhivepakkà”. What is meant here by “the acquisitions”, that is the word “upadhi”, [which] has several shades of meaning, but the relevant meaning here would be “the five aggregates that constitute personal existence”. And so meritorious right view, ripens in the acquisitions, in that it leads to acquiring a new set of five aggregates in the future, that is it’s still, you could call it “right view which is still bound up with samsaric existence”. It’s still a mundane right view. [Bhikkhu Bodhi’s Discussion of MN 117, From the MP3 recorded on 2004.09.28 this “clip” beginning at 20:58]

I note he calls this “meritorious right view” but that is not the way it is referred to in the sutta — it is a right view tainted by its involvement with merit — which is a bad thing — but the phrase Bhikkhu Bodhi uses makes it sound like a good thing, no doubt because his understanding is that it is, and he believes that the text has the Buddha saying that it is a good thing.

However, if we put all of this together, it is easy to see what the Buddha is saying:

  1. These are views that are affected by taints/influxes/corruptions (not good)
  2. These are views that result (ripen) in the five aggregates (samsaric existence) (not good)
  3. They are not described as factors of the path
  4. The same good behavior is listed in the tainted and the supramundane views, the difference being in the mindset of one doing the deeds

The tainted right views — of brahminical rites (gifts, offerings, sacrifice); meritorious actions (fruits or results of good and bad actions); and concerns with this world and the other (and so on) — all result in corruptions that *ripen* in self view. Not “are bound up with” (passively) but *result in* (actively). And again I ask you to think about what’s actually going on: What are you focused on when you are making offerings and gifts and sacrifices? What is your concern if you are thinking about the fruits and results of good and bad actions? Who are you thinking about if you are concerned with whether or not you get to the next world? What attitude are you holding, there, if those are what you are considering when you become a renunciant, when you refrain from false speech, when you abstain from killing, when you don’t bilk people in your job — all so that you gain favor with the gods, bank some merit, get to that other world? Don’t those things foster a concern with self ? Isn’t that exactly what the sutta is saying? That tainted right view is being described as tainted precisely because the attitude of the person doing all “the right things” is that they are doing it for a better future for their own selves? That’s not noble.

And did you notice that in the middle of that list of things that make the lower of the two Right Views problematic:

  1. asavas/taints/influxes/corruptions
  2. partaking of merit
  3. ripening in the acquisitions/aggregates

In the middle of that list of less-than-ideal stuff we have “partaking of merit”? If the Buddha is teaching that the karmic/merit system is part of his path, why is it in there with corruptions and the aggregates?

I’d enjoy hearing what you think.

* the Mahacattarisaka Sutta, Sutta #117 in the Majjhima Nikaya

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