Just A Little Dust

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.