Syllabus: The Teachings of the Buddha
Each week, we will read and discuss one discourse from the Pali Canon, the oldest and most probably authentic collection of the Buddha’s teachings.
The Discourses recorded in the Pali Canon are known as suttas, from a Pali/Sanscrit word meaning “thread”. We will examine the place of each thread in the majestic tapestry of Buddhist doctrine, and we will see what we can learn from the suttas about the nature of the Buddha’s times and the culture in which he taught and about the Buddha himself, the man Siddhatta Gotama—his style, his personality, his position in the society of his times. We will see how skillfully and compassionately the Buddha understands the expectations and viewpoints of his different audiences and how he uses that understanding to present his distinctive path in a form that’s most easily understood and accepted by each audience. The suttas we read will also offer us an opportunity, through the eight weeks of the course, to follow the Buddha’s life, from birth to death.
The purpose of the course is not to teach an “overview” of Buddhism but rather to provide, for those who find the Buddha’s message interesting and the Buddha’s Path in some way relevant to the problems of their lives and of our times, a foundation from which they can continue their investigation independently.
We will make heavy use of the Internet in finding readings relevant to each class’s content; sometime early in the week prior to each class, I’ll try to publish on the this site a set of annotated links to translations of the suttas we will be discussing in that class, along with links to other resources that might help our understanding. If you don’t have an Internet connection, or if you’re not comfortable using the Internet in this way, it might be a good idea to make arrangements with a friend to print the relevant texts for you to read offline. Note that it is not necessary to do the Internet readings to get some significant benefit from the class; we will read highlights from the recommended texts in each class; I’ll do my best to explain the meaning and context of those readings, and our discussion will focus on what’s been presented rather than what’s in the online resource list.
We’ll begin each class with a short (five minute) period of silent meditation.
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Class 1. The Noble Quest: The Ariyapariyesana Sutta
There are a lot of myths and legends surrounding the Buddha, almost all of them deriving from sources several hundred years later than the discourses recorded in the Pali Canon. The Ariyapariyesana Sutta is, according to many scholars, one of the earliest texts in the Canon, and in it the Buddha provides a very straightforward, in many parts almost prosaic, discussion of the path he followed to his Enlightenment experience. In particular, the sutta makes a very important distinction between the two different ways in which one can look for fulfillment in this life, which the Buddha distinguishes as the Ignoble Quest—the quest for happiness in sensual pleasures and the acquisition of goods or power—vs. the Noble Quest—the quest for a more profound satisfaction that won’t vanish or turn sour with time. We’ll also look at several other passages in which the Buddha discusses the same period of his life, with somewhat different emphasis and detail.
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Class 2. The Buddha’s first teaching, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta
In the first class, we looked at the events that precipitated Siddhatta Gotama’s decision to leave his privileged home and enter the live of a renunciant, and at some of the events that transpired over the next five years, culminating in his experience of Enlightenment, his Awakening. With that background, we’ll now examine the first teaching that the newly enlightened Buddha delivered, in which he enunciated his famous Middle Way between self-indulgence and asceticism and the four truths that characterize that Way and establish the foundation for all of the other teachings he will deliver: the truth of suffering, the truth that suffering has its cause in craving, the truth that suffering will cease if craving ceases, and the truth of the eightfold path that leads to the cessation of suffering. (The name of this sutta can be translated as “The Discourse that Sets the Wheel of the Dhamma in Motion”. Dhamma (in Sanskrit, Dharma) is a word that means Truth, or Law. Dhamma determines how processes emerge from preceding conditions: how the falling of a ball emerges from the gravitational attraction between the ball and the planet; how the happiness of a person emerges from a life lived ethically, free from remorse.
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Class 3. The Declared and the Undeclared: The Malunkyaputta Sutta
In his teaching to the Brahmin monk Malunkyaputta, who had been raised in a tradition of metaphysical speculation, the Buddha explains, quite forcefully, that he has nothing to do with such speculation and does not teach answers to the kinds of questions that such speculation concerns itself with. He points Malunkyaputta, instead, to the Dhamma that he does teach, and he shows the misguided monk how that Dhamma is fundamental to a life well-lived. In examining the context of the discourse to Malunkyaputta, we will look a little more deeply at the social and cultural background of the Buddha’s teachings.
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Class 4. A Radical Pragmatism: the Sigalovada Sutta
With the discourse examined in Class 2, the Buddha began a teaching career that lasted 45 years. The message he delivered through that career was coherent, profound, and subtle. It was also radical, turning the Brahmanical teachings of the time upside down and redefining the very concept of truth. In this class, we’ll look at what the Buddha taught to Sigalo, a young Brahmin householder, about what it really means to be a Brahmin, how to live a truly noble life, and how to determine what is true.
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Class 5. A Skeptical Realism: The Kalama Sutta
Gotama Sidattha wasn’t the only young man in Fifth Century BCE India to leave home and become an ascetic wanderer. There was widespread dissatisfaction with a Brahmanic tradition that was perceived to be stagnant and corrupt, and such wanderers, known as sramanas, were all over the place; many of those taught their own paths to truth or salvation, and arguments between the followers of one teacher and the followers of another could get rancorous. For those confused by the claims and counter-claims, the Buddha advocated a skeptical approach. Since neither tradition, nor scripture, nor authority were sufficient to prove the truth of a teaching, seekers had to look very carefully into the motives of the teacher and measure the truth of his teaching against their own direct experience and the experience of those whose wisdom they admired. In the sutta we’ll read for this class, delivered to the householders of the Kalama clan, who were not vested in any particular tradition, we’ll see how the Buddha recommended a skeptical approach to all teachings, but a skepticism tempered by a radical honesty and a decent regard for the culture’s traditions of wisdom.
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Class 6. A Community of Practice: The Satipatthana Sutta
The defining practice of monks and nuns in most Buddhist traditions is meditation; meditation is so much a part of the Buddhist tradition that many people, Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike, conflate the two things, viewing Buddhism as essentially the practice of meditation, and viewing all meditative practice as, knowingly or not, equivalent to Buddhism. In this class, we’ll look at how the Buddha himself understood meditation and where he saw its place in the Path that he recommended to his followers. Our text will be the great discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness (sati), in which the Buddha lays out a full course of meditative practice, explaining how each new meditative attainment takes the practitioner further toward calmness of mind, wisdom, insight into the nature of things, and eventual Enlightenment.
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Class 7. The End and the Beginning: The Mahaparinibbana Sutta
One of the longest suttas in the Pali Canon is the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, detailing the last months and days of the Buddha, as he and his attendant Ananda wandered through Northern India, two old men, weary and frail. The teachings recorded here have a certain elegiac tone; the Buddha resumes themes that he had developed earlier, making certain that those themes are understood with the proper emphasis and in the proper context, and, to some small extent, he measures the success he’s had with the challenge that he accepted 45 years earlier, to teach the Dhamma that was so subtle, so profound, so difficult to understand. We will read just a few passages from the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, with special reference to passages that illuminate or resonate with teachings we have looked at in previous classes. And we will try to come to a final assessment of the meaning of the Buddha’s message and his life, and the relevance of the Dhamma to our troubled times.