2. The Buddha as an ascetic, starving himself in an unsuccessful attempt to achieve release.
But he also came to the conclusion that ‘by these gruelling exertions I have by no means gone beyond the common human condition to an eminence of knowledge and vision appropriate to those who are truly (spiritually) noble’. Or, in other words, all he had to show for it was a prominent rib-cage. ‘There must be another path to wisdom.’
The Middle Path
In the traditional narrative this conclusion brought the Buddha to the threshold of awakening. But it also brings us to substantial difficulties in the interpretation of the sources. For, on the one hand, the Buddha is represented in the narrative as having reached, in a relatively short time, the saving knowledge, the certainty that ‘birth is exhausted, the ascetic’s life has been consummated, what was to be done has been done’ (M I 249). Indeed the awakening is meant to have taken place within one night. However, it is already clear that the Buddha’s progress towards awakening was long and complex, a process in which he gradually transformed himself by various disciplines and worked out an acceptable view of himself and the world. This was recognized in later discourses: ‘just as the ocean slopes gradually, falls away gradually, shelves gradually, with no sudden drop, so in this teaching the training, the practice, the path are gradual, with no sudden penetration of knowledge’ (A IV 200–1).
How are we to resolve this contradiction? In the first place, we must accept that the purely biographical narratives are compressed accounts: they are stories, and they are stories which march at a smart pace. Their material was meant not only to be historical, but to be an inspiration to later disciples, so they were fitted into a relatively manageable span. They had dramatic tension. Hence, even if we accept that the awakening, as a moment of certainty in the Buddha’s mind that he was indeed on the right path, did take place on a single night, that certainty was long in the making and longer in the elaboration of its implications.
In the traditional account the Buddha, realizing the pointlessness of extreme asceticism, accepted a reasonable meal and sat down to find that other path. In effect, that is, he accepted a still relatively disciplined asceticism, but one which avoided extremes of sensual indulgence or of self-mortification. He was soon to designate this more measured asceticism the ‘Middle Path’.
He also recollected a time when, as a child, he had sat under a roseapple tree while his father had worked in the fields. He had on that occasion entered the first Absorption, ‘accompanied with casual and applied thought, and with bodily happiness and the mental pleasure born of seclusion’. And he recognized that ‘this might well be the way to awakening’ (M I 246).
This account alludes only indirectly to the Buddha’s original meditative accomplishments before the awakening. These accomplishments were composed, on the one hand, of his already established habit of meditative pragmatism, of his concentration upon what he could witness by, and within, himself; and on the other, of his now hardened inclination to analysis and criticism. For despite his rejection of the yogis’ doctrine, he continued to cultivate the awareness of mental and physical states, an awareness which had arisen out of the yogis’ psychic technology. If it was impossible to find an enduring entity, a Self with a capital ‘S’, through and behind these mutable experiences, it was possible at least to have an insight into the nature of these evanescent psychophysical processes themselves. Here were matters which could be directly witnessed and directly understood, and it was upon these processes that the Buddha turned the full weight of his concentration and driving curiosity. For if he could not find a Self, he could at least find release.
What these efforts gave rise to was a distinguishable meditative skill, quite different from that practised by other yogis. For this concern with immediate experience required not only a power of concentration, but also a kind of mindfulness and self-possession through which the Buddha could in fact see what was going on in his mind and body. Indeed it was just these qualities, mindfulness and self-possession (satisampajañña), which were to be taught throughout the Buddha’s mature discourses. They demanded the ability to witness here and now with full lucidity the inner and outer states of oneself (and, by extension, the analogous experiences of others). The single most important text for the training of his own disciples was to be the Great Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness (D II 290 ff.), and these foundations are the dispassionate, immediate, and clear perceptions of the meditator’s own body, feelings, state of mind, and mental contents. Such alert perceptions presupposed to an extent the onepointedness and equanimity of the Absorptions; but they required at the same time a bright awareness of the smallest perception. This emphasis on, and elaboration of, wakeful and energetic introspection constituted the Buddha’s unique contribution to meditative technology. From the conclusions based on this introspection the awakening was to flow.
How can one treat objectively, and analyse, one’s own immediate feelings and attitudes? Would not the effort to perceive passions dispassionately, for example, destroy the object of study itself? The answer to these questions lies in the course of training to which the Buddha had already subjected himself, albeit unsystematically, in his search. In the pursuit of both meditative accomplishments and asceticism the Buddha had repeatedly disciplined himself to ignore those sensations and impulses which ordinarily issue in action or reaction, and which would thereby have deflected him from his purpose. He had ignored the calls of hunger and thirst which accompanied his fast, as he ignored those pains of the body and distractions of the mind which accompany long and arduous meditation. The effect of such long discipline – as meditators today attest – is not only to achieve a reproducible tranquillity, but also to break long-standing, automatic, and unconscious habits. One would ordinarily break a fast to eat, but the ascetic does not. One would ordinarily shift from a physical position which grows increasingly uncomfortable, but the meditator does not. To get the measure of this meditation, try this experiment: sit in the most comfortable possible position in a comfortable chair, and try to hold that position without moving for an hour. The Buddhist prediction is that within minutes you will wish to scratch the nose, twitch the finger, shift the leg. What if one could watch these urges arise and pass away with no movement at all?
But this is not to say that impulses to respond to such calls disappear, for they do not, or at least not permanently. In the meditator such impulses simply do not issue in a reaction. He is tranquil, his mind is malleable (kammañña). He can temporarily ignore such impulses completely if he chooses, as in an Absorption, but his long-term relationship to such impulses is also changed, for he can now respond to such impulses in a reasoned rather than an automatic way.
Moreover, just because such sensations and impulses do not disappear, he can choose to exercise mindfulness, securely founded in his now habitual equanimity, to observe and analyse them. Whereas the ordinary unskilled person can with clarity contemplate painful or pleasurable sensations, and the accompanying impulses and emotions, only in the tranquillity of memory, safely removed from their effects by time, the meditator learns to do so immediately, as they actually occur. It must be the case that, because of his long training, the meditating ascetic perceives his pains, pleasures, and urges as being less poignant and pressing, but this does not change their fundamental nature. And in any case the meditator may still use memory, and the observation of other people, to confirm that what he observes of his relatively controlled emotions must also be true of less controlled emotions.
This new form of meditation was to be called insight (vipassanā) meditation. It was the Buddha’s experimental method, his way of gathering information, and upon this information about his presently occurring states of body and mind his analysis of the human condition was to be erected.
Chapter 4
The awakening
In Buddhist countries the awakening is thought to have occurred on a single night of the full moon of the lunar month Vesakha, A
pril-May, as the Buddha sat beneath a huge Bodhi tree (ficus religiosus). With the awakening (sambodhi) the Buddha attained, first, a knowledge of the nature of the human condition that would lead to salvation and, second, the certainty that he himself had attained liberation from the sorrows of that condition. The early scriptures attribute many doctrines, and certainly the most important ones, to the night of the awakening itself, so that the awakening is made to bear the weight of the whole of the Buddha’s mature teaching. Even if this is not literally true, the knowledge and certainty of that night must lie at the base of the mature teaching.
The awakening grew out of a creative tension between two governing convictions. One was that the answer was to be sought in painstaking attention to the minutiae of experience as witnessed in insight meditation (though the articulated method of that meditation may not yet have been fully formed). But if this consideration alone had informed the Buddha, he might have become only a minor contributor to yogic thought. The other conviction, however, was that of the truth of transmigration, and the Buddha’s conception of this gave his teaching a scope and a purchasing power in human life which transcended the narrow yogic concerns. The Buddha’s originality stemmed from his close analysis of individual experience, but his importance stemmed from his acceptance of this common Indian belief in rebirth.
In the Buddha’s case this belief came down to a deep moral seriousness. In other teachings the doctrine of transmigration went with an elaborate view of the spiritual cosmos within which transmigration occurs. One moves up and down, becoming now an animal, now a god, now the denizen of some hell, and again a Warrior or Brahman, a slave or a king (Buddhism itself was later to be prolific in the production of such views). But for the Buddha the specific details of transmigration were never so important as the principle underlying it: human action has moral consequences, consequences which are inescapable, returning upon one whether in this life or another. There is a fundamental moral order. One cannot steal, lie, commit adultery, or ‘go along the banks of the Ganges striking, slaying, mutilating and commanding others to mutilate, oppressing and commanding others to oppress’ (D I 52), without reaping the consequences. There is an impersonal moral causation to which all are subjected. Misdeeds lead to misery in this life or in later lives. The Buddha’s teaching was devoted to the apparently selfish purpose of self-liberation, being directed to sentient beings in so far as they are capable of misery and final liberation from misery. But the teaching also touched sentient beings as moral agents, as agents capable of affecting the welfare not only of themselves but of others as well. Some of his teachings seem to treat only personal liberation, others morality, but for the Buddha the two matters were always intimately and necessarily connected.
The Four Noble Truths
The teaching most closely connected with the awakening chiefly concerns personal misery and personal liberation. This is the doctrine of the Four Noble Truths (cattāri ariyasaccāni), which cover under their spacious umbrella the central tenets of Buddhism. These are phrased after the pattern of a medical diagnosis: this is the disease, these are the causes of the disease, this is the judgement of whether it is curable, this is the method of treatment. The disease is ‘suffering’ (dukkha) – a condition which covers all that is meant in English by ‘suffering’ but more as well, and this wider sphere of meaning must be borne in mind. The first Noble Truth is that there does indeed exist the disease, suffering, and this is the Truth of Suffering. The second Noble Truth is that there are discernible causes of suffering: this is the Noble Truth of the Arising of Suffering, which contains an account of those causes. The third Noble Truth is that there is in fact a cure for suffering, and this is the Truth of the Cessation of Suffering. The fourth Noble Truth is that of the cure for suffering, the Truth of the Path Leading to the Cessation of Suffering.
Let us take the first Truth, that of the existence of suffering, in a form in which the Buddha is traditionally thought to have explained it shortly after the awakening. That description begins thus: ‘What is the Noble Truth of Suffering? Birth is suffering, ageing is suffering, sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are suffering’ (S V 421). Here there is no problem in translating dukkha as ‘suffering’. This is suffering viewed as we might commonly view it, on a large time-scale, a concomitant of any human life as a whole: in so far as we are born, we are bound to suffer in being born, in sickness, in growing old, in the loss of loved ones, and in death. This long-term view considers that the continuous process of birth and death could not be anything but a magnification in one life after another of the sorrow which falls to any one human life. All our experience, even that of common happiness, is bracketed by pain and sorrow. Since in the long run we are all dead, the problem of suffering is a pressing one, demanding a solution.
At this level the Truth of Suffering resembles other views, common among renouncers, that worldly life is a morass of pain. But what saves it from conventional pessimism is its connection with a more carefully worked-out view of human fate. This view is progressively revealed as the description of the Truth of Suffering continues: ‘association with what is disliked is suffering, dissociation from what is desired is suffering, not to get what one wants is suffering’. This is suffering on a more intimate time-scale, as it might appear within a year, a day, or even an hour, and is closer to the Buddha’s characteristic concern with what is immediately observable. It is also a more general description of suffering, not only as it accompanies the crises of life, but as it appears in everyday situations, situations which might not occasion lamentation but rather an acute consciousness of failure, or of frustration, or of unfulfilled yearning: the missed opportunity, the baffled effort, the irksome routine, the petty irritation of life with others. Here dukkha might be translated not as ‘suffering’, but as something less grand but more pervasive: discomfort, dissatisfaction, or discontent. This is illustrated in the canon by tales of, for example, the insecurity of officeseekers, the anxieties of husbandmen, the irritations and frustrations of household life. This teaching brings suffering within the ambit of daily experience, for it points to the inescapably changing nature of life, which engulfs all the things we believe to be secure and stable.
But such a viewpoint was also shared with others at the Buddha’s time, so for a doctrine which is quite uniquely Buddhist, we shall have to turn to the end of this description of the first Truth: ‘in sum, all the aspects of experience in the mind and body … are suffering’. This is the definition of suffering which leads to the heart of what is original in the Buddha’s teaching, and to that part of his view of suffering which is thoroughly argued in the canonical sources as a dispassionate description of the human plight. Here suffering is seen as being woven most finely into the texture of human experience; here experience is considered on the smallest time-scale, from second to second, under a microscope, under the clinical eye of the introspecting meditator. Under this microscope dukkha falls within another range of meanings, such as imperfection, impermanence, evanescence, inadequacy, insubstantiality, incompleteness, uncontrollability. The great crises which occasion lamentation, and the small desperations which occasion discontent, are but especially visible examples of the fundamental imperfection-cumimpermanence – suffering – which is inherent in all experience. In so far as it is dynamic, changing, uncontrollable, and not finally satisfactory, experience is itself precisely suffering.
To see how this works let us take the case of feeling (vedanā) as a paradigm. Feeling is one of the objects of immediate introspection recommended in insight meditation, and it is also one of the ‘aspects of experience in the mind and body’. Feeling may be physical or mental, and it may be adjudged pleasant, unpleasant, or neither pleasant nor unpleasant, i.e. neutral. So, as he contemplates his presently occurring experience, the insight meditator is to discern, as each actually arises, that this feeling is pleasant, or that feeling unpleasant, or another feeling quite neutral. For example, the pains in one’s knees as one tries
to sit cross-legged in meditation are unpleasant; the exhilaration of actually managing to sit for a long period and gain some concentration is pleasant; and many feelings in between, such as that of the process of calm breathing, are neutral. Or again, the blowing of a car horn just outside the room in which one is meditating might occasion unpleasant feelings, the song of a nightingale might occasion pleasant ones, or the sound of rain might occasion neither. Though some of the feelings which thus arise and clamour for attention may last for a while – such as the pains in the knees – or may come back again and again, it does not require deep meditative insight to see why the Buddha came to regard feelings as impermanent. They are soon chased away by other feelings, and even in the great meditative attainments cannot be made to abide. The question which underlay the Buddha’s quest was, ‘in what may I place lasting reliance?’ On this diagnosis, certainly not in feeling, for even pleasant feelings are ‘suffering by virtue of change’; that is, though pleasant at the moment, they bear within them the seed of insecurity, of their own imminent destruction. The introspectively discovered Truth of Suffering is one of ceaseless movement, of a dynamic process which is suffering by virtue of being uncontrollable, ever-changing, and therefore inadequate and unsatisfying.
Furthermore, this inadequacy rules throughout the experience of both the mind and body of the individual. The Buddha proposed several different analytic descriptions of the mind and body, each fitted to a different context; but generally these descriptions are of a process, not a stable entity. The individual is seen by the Buddha more as, say, a burning fire or a swiftly moving stream than as a solid vessel for holding experience or an unmoving slate upon which perceptions are written. Our own language tends to obscure this, for we tend to think of a relatively stable body and mind which receive a dynamic and changing experience, and we therefore tend to think that mind and body can be described apart from experience. But the Buddha’s language was one in which both experience and the mind-body complex were described together, as part of a single process. Here, for example, is such a description:
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