In this brief essay, I’m going to discuss some of the ideas emerging from the Sigalovada Sutta, The Buddha’s Advice to Sigala, on the Access To Insight website. The translation to which that link will take you is by John Kelly, Sue Sawyer, and Victoria Yareham; it is a little more contemporary and colloquial than the other good translation on that site by Narada Thera (a German, one of the first Europeans to ordain as a Theravada monk at the beginning of the 20th Century); Narada’s translation is just a little stilted, and his use of explicitly numbered and lettered lists, to my mind, gets in the way of understanding that we are expected to be listening to an actual discourse delivered by one man to another.

The Sigalovada Sutta is long, but there is nothing difficult or complicated about it. In it, the Buddha comes upon a young Brahmin householder, Sigala, taking his ritual bath and conducting his morning prayers, possibly at one of the warm springs that are still popular tourist destinations in the modern city of Rajgir. After the bath, Sigala saluted the six cardinal points (East, West, North, South, Zenith and Nadir) with his hands joined in the gesture signaling reverent worship. When the Buddha asks him why he is doing that, Sigala tells him it is because his father, before he died, enjoined the ritual performance on his son. The Buddha then takes the opportunity to teach Sigala what it really means to be reverent, and how the cardinal points might be worshipped by one who lives nobly, in accordance with the Dhamma.

The sutta has been called the layperson’s vinaya, a word that refers to the set of rules governing the behavior of Buddhist monks and nuns. But that implies a particularly Buddhist focus that misses the point of the teaching, I think. In fact, the instruction that the Buddha gives to Sigala in this discourse is the most concentrated collection of generally good advice that I know of. Anyone, professing any faith at all or following any ritual tradition, who undertakes to live according to the advice given in the Sigalovada Sutta will certainly, barring accident or just bad luck, live happily, have good friends, and attain a measure of worldly success.

There are a few points in the discourse that I think justify a close look:

• The structure of the discourse is interesting. While the starting point is the Buddha’s statement that Sigala is doing it wrong, and that there is a way to pay homage to the six directions that is in accord with the Aryan Dhamma (arya is the Pali word translated in the English renditions as “noble”), it’s not until the last part of the long discourse that the Buddha finally gets back around to those directions and the meaning they have according to the Dhamma. The first three-quarters of the discourse focuses on general principles of good behavior. The implication here, I think, is that unless one starts with good behavior—that is, refraining from the four evil actions, resisting the four motivations that lead one to behave badly, and avoiding the six courses of behavior that dissipate health, wealth and happiness—then it really doesn’t matter how one worships the cardinal directions; there’s no ritual magic in worshipping the directions that can save one who’s hell bent on destruction.
• Although it’s a small point in the context of a long discourse, I think it’s important that the Buddha’s starting point is with four of the five precepts that every Buddhist lay person accepts as guides to a well-lived life—not taking life, not taking what’s not given, not speaking falsely, and not misbehaving sexually. The fifth precept, to avoid intoxicants that make one careless and stupid, is given ample coverage in the rest of the discourse.
• The discourse is intensely pragmatic. Nothing is to be taken on faith; the Buddha gives perfectly good and believable reasons for the ethical principles and behaviors that he recommends to Sigala. The results of behaving badly do not come as punishments, and the results of behaving well do not come as rewards; it is all a matter of natural consequences.
• The focus on companionship and the detailed analysis of the difference between good companions and bad ones is moving and convincing; it is also a frequent theme in the teachings. In the Upaddha Sutta, Ananda and the Buddha are sitting together at the end of the day, and Ananda says, “This is half of the holy life, lord: admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie.” “Don’t say that, Ananda,” replies the Buddha. “Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life. When a monk has admirable people as friends, companions, & comrades, he can be expected to develop & pursue the noble eightfold path.” In the Sigalovada Sutta, he extends that to lay people as well as monks.
• When the discourse finally gets back around to the worship of the six cardinal directions, the Buddha presents a symbolic interpretation of those directions, in terms of the relationships that are significant in a householder’s life, that is actually a model for the structure of a civil society. All relationships are reciprocal, purposeful, and humane. The relationships themselves cover the most important aspects of our lives, as those were understood in the Buddha’s Dhamma—one’s relationship with one’s parents and children, with one’s teachers and students, with one’s friends and companions, with one’s colleagues—employees and supervisors, with one’s husband or wife, and with one’s spiritual counselors. Again, nothing important is left out (or couldn’t be fit in with some minimal interpretation), and everything is kept practical: relationships are defined and ways of maintaining those relationships are commended, not based on theory, dogma, or categorical imperatives, but simply on common experience.

It is illuminating, I think, to compare the advice given in the Sigalovada Sutta to other bodies of advice recorded in other traditional texts—the ritual imperatives in the Analects of Confucius, the tribal prescriptions and prohibitions in the Torah, the revelations of the Old Testament prophets and of Mohammed, the rules governing hierarchies of power in the law books of Manu, Solon, and many others. The Buddha’s advice is different, not only in its pragmatism and freedom from dogma, but also in the kind of results it seeks to achieve—happiness, material success, conviviality, contentment, the attainment of wisdom—and the scope of those results, the fact that they are to be experienced right here and right now.

As you’re reading this, try to imagine the terms that the Buddha might use if he were giving this advice today—to a young man, for example, recently graduated from Ohio State (where, perhaps, he’d had a reputation for heavy partying), with a wife and a couple of young children, a house in the suburbs, and a position in sales with Procter & Gamble.

The very first statement of the Buddha’s distinctive Dhamma–his first challenge to the established order; the first signal that this teaching was going to be different from everything else that his listeners had ever heard before–came with the very first few sentences of the very first discourse he is said to have delivered, to the five ascetics who had been his companions during the long period when he himself explored extreme asceticism as the path to the deathless.

“Bhikkhus,” he told them, "when you’ve left home and embarked on your search for a way through this world, there are two paths to avoid. One is the path of luxury and sensual pleasure, of ambition and material success. That path is crude and common, not beneficial. It’s a dead end.

“The other is the path of self-mortification and rigid asceticism. That path is painful, and it too is not beneficial; another dead end.

“Bhikkhus, you can avoid those two dead ends by following the middle way realized by The Wayfarer; this middle way is an eye-opener; following it, you will come to know the world as it really is. It calms you down, lightens your load, reveals the truth with lucid clarity; you will awaken fully, completely released from all pain and distress.

“And what is this middle way realized by The Wayfarer that brings vision and knowledge, calms you, reveals important truths, leads to awakening and complete release? It is a Path with eight factors: clear seeing, well-conceived intention, deliberate speaking, courageous action, honest livelihood, diligent effort, mindful awareness, and focused concentration. That is the middle way realized by The Wayfarer: producing vision and knowledge, it calms you, reveals important truth, and wakes you up so you will attain complete release."

So, this middle way avoids both extreme paths: hedonism and self-mortification. But it isn’t simply the moderation of those extremes. While the Buddha might have been comfortable with the quotation attributed to the Roman playwrite Terence, “Moderation in all things, excess in none”, that is clearly not the totality that his middle way comprises. The Buddha’s way, incorporating elements of wisdom, ethical behavior, and diligent awareness, is, in fact, likely to moderate excessive behavior. But the Buddha promises benefits from his middle way that go well beyond those that derive from moderate living. No one, to my knowledge, has ever promised that a moderate life-style would reveal important truths or deliver Buddha-level Awakening.

The middle way is not a blending of the extremes, or an amelioration of them. Rather, it is a way toward a goal that neither self-mortification or hedonic pursuit of pleasure is even aware of. Self-mortification, in every tradition that has accepted it as a spiritual path for the exceptionally committed–e.g. the Upanishadic reform version of Brahmanism that was popular in the Buddha’s time, extreme Islamic jihad, Christian flagellant movements–saw it as a way of eliminating the gross material Self and freeing a purer and more rarified Self–the Soul–to achieve union with the godhead. Hedonism, on the other hand, either denies or ignores the possible existence of a godhead, whatever that might mean, and seeks nothing but gratification of the only Self it acknowledges: the Self that is the object of selfishness.

For the Buddha, any path that focused on an essential Self, no matter how that Self might be conceived, was delusional. In the second discourse he delivered, on the “not-self” characteristic, he considered, one by one, all of the possible places where a “Self” might be distinguished–in the body, in the emotions, in the mind–and demonstrated that each of those were impermanent, emerging at any given moment from preceding conditions, and imbued with dukkha–pain, frustration, anguish, unsatisfactoriness. Nowhere can one find a viable candidate for the location of a distinctive, essential Self.

So the Buddha’s goal, and the goal to which the middle way leads, is simply the cessation of dukkha. Regarding what is left when dukkha ceases, the Buddha was not ready to make a declaration. It is simply the end of greed, the end of hatred, the end of delusion (including, most importantly, the delusion of Self). What makes that a worthwhile goal, one that meets the tests that self-mortification and hedonism both fail, is that it is achievable. The cessation of dukkha is a credible experience, one that we’ve all had, if only briefly, when we have been able to let go (if only briefly) of obsessive, selfish craving. It’s rare, on the other hand, that one has claimed to have experienced the union of the Self with the godhead; it’s not an experience that most of us have had, even briefly, and it’s an experience that, to the skeptical eye, seems a bit hallucinatory. As far as the goal of hedonism goes, the same is true: all of us have experienced even the most intense sensual pleasure as disappointingly transitory, and those who claim to find a lasting benefit in the pursuit of such pleasure appear, to that same skeptical eye, to be protesting too much.

The Buddha’s approach to a middle way is useful in any number of situations which seem to present a dilemma–a forced choice between two mutually exclusive positions, neither of which feels right. One such dilemma that the Buddha’s culture experienced was the choice between what is known as essentialism, the idea that there is an essential objective reality underlying everything–all events and all experience–and nihilism, the idea that nothing is objectively real, that events are random, and that all experience is entirely subjective.

Such dilemmas are common: the apparent choice between theism and atheism, between determinism and free will, between good and evil, between individual liberty and social stability, between a capitalist free market and socialistic state control. Faced with such dilemmas, it might be well to consider the possibility that there is a middle way, seeking a goal that is more achievable, more humane, and more worthwhile than the goals to which the opposing horns of the dilemma point.

And what I think we will find, if we consider any worthwhile achievable goal, is that the middle way toward that goal comprises clear-eyed recognition of what’s going on; acceptance of the choices we must make in order to achieve the goal, given what’s going on; the clear articulation of what we see and what we intend to do about it; consistent action that will help us realize our intentions; a justifiable way of making a living and establishing useful, respectable lives in all those communities of which we are members; an energetic determination to stay the course and apply our efforts most effectively; a constant awareness of what’s going on and how well we are progressing toward our goal; and a determination to develop whatever skills most need development. In other words, correct understanding, correct intention, correct speech, correct action, correct livelihood, correct effort, correct mindfulness, and correct concentration.

The eightfold path. The middle way.

Note: In this post, I’ve made two uncommon choices. First, I’ve translated the untranslatable Pali term Tathagata, which means, literally, “One who’s gone this way” or “One who’s come this way” as “Wayfarer”. Second, I’ve used different adjectives to identify the eight factors of the path; all of those adjectives, applying to the factors of understanding or vision, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration, translate the Pali term samma. I’ve done this because I think that’s what we each have to do in order to fulfill the task that the Buddha set for us, to cultivate the eightfold path in our lives.

Once, when the Buddha and his attendant Ananda were staying at the retreat center near the Kosalan capital city of Savatthi, Ananda said, “You know, Master, it just occured to me that half the beauty of this Sangha life we’ve chosen is admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable community.”

“Don’t say that, Ananda,” the Buddha replied. “Don’t say ‘half the beauty of this Sangha life is admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable community’. Say, instead, ‘The entire beauty of this Sangha life we’ve chosen is admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable community’.”

This is a very free rendering of a well-known passage from the Upaddha Sutta (“The discourse on ‘half’”–the link is to a full translation at Access to Insight.)

“Admirable friendship” (Pali kalyanamittata) comes up again and again in the texts of the Pali Canon; . We want to be careful to avoid thinking of “friendship” in the Twitter context–“Saw 3 Stooges w/ Amy, my new BFF. OMG! LMAO!” The Pali amittata doesn’t mean a personal, best buddy type of friendship, but rather participation in a community of friends. (There are a lot of commonalities between Buddhist thought and Quaker thought, and Quaker meetings have been influential in developing the concept of the Dhamma.now Project.) You can see the relationship between amittata, the Latin amicitia, and our word “amity”–they all mean “friendship”, but they all imply an extension of the idea to define one’s relationship to a community and to the world. One lives in amity with others, not with just a few close pals.

The Buddha’s attitude toward admirable friendship is clear from the short excerpt above. Admirable friendship is important; it is, in fact, the first pre-requisite to building a way of life that will lead to awakening.

The majority of the Buddha’s teachings are addressed to the bhikkhus and bhikkunis (from a Sanskrit root meaning “one who lives on alms”–cognate with our word “beggar”) who comprised the Sangha of his renunciant followers. But there are a number of teachings addressed to lay people, and it’s clear that the state of admirable friendship is just as important to them.

In the Dighajanu Sutta (“Discourse to ‘Longshanks’”), the Buddha is visited by a wealthy businessman named Longshanks, of the Tiger Paw clan. “We are ordinary people,” Longshanks tells him, “and we enjoy our pleasures. We’re family people, living with our wives and lots of kids running around. We decorate our homes with fine fabrics and fragrant sandalwood; we wear stylish clothes and expensive scents; we love gold and jewelry. Does the Fortunate One have a Dhamma for people like us?”

Of course the Buddha does, and it’s a Dhamma that’s a little surprising to those who have imagined the Buddha as an other-worldly kind of guy. “There are four things you have to do,” the Buddha tells Longshanks, “to insure your happiness and well-being now and in times to come: first, get to be the best at what you do, because that’s where your wealth comes from; second, protect your wealth from those who would steal it or waste it; third, cultivate admirable friendship; and finally, keep everything in balance.”

He goes on to elaborate on each of these points, and then goes further to give Longshanks some good counsel on how to develop the qualities of kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. In elaborating the point about admirable friendship, the Buddha tells Longshanks:

“And what does it mean to cultivate admirable friendship? Here, no matter where a family man lives, in city or village, he spends his time with people –parents and children, young or old–whose lives are admirable in every sense. Those are the people he talks with and shares ideas with. He learns to trust by cultivating friendship with those who are admirably trustworthy; he becomes virtuous by cultivating friendship with those who are admirably virtuous; he learns to be generous by cultivating friendship with those who act with admirable generousity; he becomes wise by cultivating friendship with those admirable for their wisdom.”

The Buddha’s point, I think, is that we can’t go it alone, whether we’re making our way toward Awakening or toward a successful career. We need others to provide examples, encouragement, correction, so that the way we’re on takes us toward a worthwhile goal. And it’s important to see that it’s not a formal process; it’s not a matter of finding one’s mentor or taking the right courses at a good university. We learn from the communities we belong to and the companions we cultivate along our way, and if those companions and communities are worthy of our trust and our admiration, then we will become people who are also worthy of trust and admiration.

Let’s talk about it Sunday.

The Buddha’s understanding of how things unfold in this world was keen, comprehensive, and most persuasive, and his explication of that understanding throughout the discourses has a coherence and logical consistency that’s unique among the world’s spiritual traditions. But the Buddha was not a philosopher or a psychologist. The term that’s very frequently used in the canonical texts to define his role is “healer” or “physician”. The Buddha’s doctrine is not simply an explanation of how things are but a diagnosis of how events emerge in the world, an analysis of what creates the anxiety, dissatisfaction, suffering that we experience in dealing with those events, and a prescription for a path of practice that will ameliorate or even end that experience of suffering.

To be a Buddhist is not to “believe in” Buddhist doctrine, but to practice the Buddhadhamma, the Path that the Buddha defined, the end of which is the end of suffering.

Throughout the discourses, the Buddha gave quite detailed instructions regarding that path, and how to follow it. The most comprehensive teaching regarding the meditative practice that he prescribed is the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta. In that discourse, the Buddha covers one type of meditative practice, the practice of “mindfulness”, sati in Pali; he describes a series of steps whereby a bhikkhu (or, presumably, anyone who undertakes the recommended discipline) attains to a state of steady mindfulness, so that nothing is done carelessly—no action is performed, no words uttered, no opinion formed, no feeling or perception experienced, no ideas conceived, without paying due regard to what is emerging and the ethical implications of every intentional action. Establishing such steady mindfulness of one’s situation, the diligent meditator can end the attachments that trap him in that situation minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, birth after birth. Even today, the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta is the foundational text that guides the meditation of practitioners in nearly all Buddhist traditions.

The Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta is a long discourse, and I’ve prepared a prècis of that discourse for our discussion on Thursday. That text contains a number of references to alternative translations of the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, on the web and in printed books.

Concerning meditation more generally, there are a number of audio talks by Stephen Batchelor accessible through the Dharma Seed website; in one of those, the first of eight fine lectures on the life and times of the Buddha that he delivered in the course of a 2004 meditation retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, he discusses the many different meanings of the term “meditation”. What the Buddha’s followers practiced, when they practiced one of the several disciplines that we subsume under that one term, was not what we think of when we think of meditation as a complete stilling of the mind, a state of indiscriminate bliss. Batchelor makes the case that the kind of practice recommended by the Buddha was a more energetic process, with a strong intellectual component, resulting in the attainment of a state of unforced, instinctive wisdom. His talk is very much worth listening to.

Our topic for class on Thursday is the idea of “Dependent Emergence” – it’s often translated as “Dependent Arising” or “Conditioned Arising”. It’s probably the single most distinctive idea in Buddhism; not a particularly easy idea to grasp, partly because it goes so very much against the stream of how we’ve been taught to understand the world, but one that, once grasped, reveals the nature of our daily experience with a persuasive clarity, and hleps us respond to that experience in ways that make things better.

The essay I’ll be basing my presentation on is one I wrote a couple of years ago and have revised only slightly since. I hope you have a chance to read that before the class.

Friends…

The theme for our class this coming Thursday is Nibbana (more commonly known in its Sanskrit form, Nirvana). There are not many technical terms in Buddhism more difficult to figure out or more commonly misapprehended than Nibbana, and we’ll do our best on Thursday to remove some of the obscurity and make some sense of what the term means and how it relates to the essential tasks: comprehending dukkha, letting go of craving, experiencing cessation, and bringing the Path to life.

Our study text will be the Aggi-Vachagotta Sutta, the Buddha’s discourse to the wanderer Vachagotta on Fire. In addition to reading that, I hope you have time to look at an essay I wrote a couple of years ago on Enlightenment and Nibbana; it’s not quite how I’d express things today, but close enough. Another web page that might be useful (and that I’ll be using some material from in my talk on Thursday) is a page of readings from a class I gave last year on the Buddha’s Path to Awakening; this page deals with Craving, and to the extent that letting go of Craving is the essential first step on the way to experiencing (if that word even has a