2  Mainstream Buddhism: The Basic Thought of the Buddha

The Four Noble Truths

Books on Buddhism often start with the so-called Four Noble Truths, and rightly so since this topic forms a central one in what is traditionally held to have been the first discourse of the Buddha after his enlightenment. That discourse is known in Pāli as the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (‘The Discourse Setting in Motion the Wheel of Dhamma’). Yet, as K.R. Norman has pointed out, there is no overwhelming reason why the Pāli expression ariyasaccāni should be translated as ‘noble truths’. It could equally be translated as ‘the nobles’ truths’, or ‘the truths for nobles’, or ‘the nobilising truths’, or ‘the truths of, possessed by, the noble ones’ (1990–6, in 1993 volume: 174). In fact the Pāli expression (and its Sanskrit equivalent) can mean all of these, although the important Pāli commentator Buddhaghosa places ‘the noble truths’ as the least significant in his understanding (ibid; see also Norman 1997: 16). Norman’s own view is that probably the best single translation is ‘the truth[s] of the noble one (the Buddha)’. This would amount to a statement of how things are seen (‘truth’; Sanskrit: satya; Pāli: sacca, derived from ‘sat’, being, how it is) by a Buddha, how things really are when seen correctly. Through not seeing things this way, and behaving accordingly, we suffer. Nevertheless, while bearing in mind these alternative ways of reading the expression, let us stick with the tradition of translating the expression as ‘noble truths’.¹

The formula for the Four Noble Truths is probably based on the formula for a medical diagnosis. That is, it states the illness, the source of the illness, then the cure for the illness, and finally the way to bring about that cure. In the simile of the man shot by an arrow, for example, the Buddha implicitly compares himself – and his teaching of the Four Noble Truths – to the surgeon who could treat the wounded man. Let me treat each of the four in turn.

Duḥkha/Dukkha

In the Pāli Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta the Buddha states:

Birth is dukkha, decay is dukkha, disease is dukkha, death is dukkha, to be united with the unpleasant is dukkha, to be separated from the pleasant is dukkha, not to get what one desires is dukkha. In brief the five aggregates [khandha; Sanskrit: skandha] of attachment are dukkha.²

What this amounts to is that absolutely everything pertaining to an unenlightened individual comes under duḥkha. A certain amount has been written against the translation of this term by ‘suffering’. This is perhaps animated by a feeling that to claim all of our unenlightened life is suffering sounds rather pessimistic, even though it is sometimes added that Buddhism is actually realistic – because it tells it how it is – and optimistic, because it teaches a way to overcome duḥkha. It is true that the Buddhist tradition has come to speak of three types of duḥkha. The first is literally pain (i.e. in Sanskrit duḥkhaduḥkha), the sort of feeling you have when you step in bare feet on a drawing pin. The second type of duḥkha is the duḥkha of change, a duḥkha which things have simply because they are impermanent (Sanskrit: anitya; Pāli: anicca). They are liable to change, to become otherwise. Thus even happiness is duḥkha in this sense, because even happiness is liable to change. This sort of duḥkha is considered by Buddhists to be omnipresent in saṃsāra. Perfectly illustrated in the Buddha-to-be’s discovery of old age, sickness, and death, radical unremitting impermanence is discovered to be the essential ontological dimension of our unenlightened state. And finally there is the duḥkha of conditions. This is the duḥkha that is part of our very being as conditioned individuals living in a conditioned world. It is the duḥkha which is intrinsic to our state of imperfection, unenlightenment. As Rupert Gethin puts it:

we are part of a world compounded of unstable and unreliable conditions, a world in which pain and pleasure, happiness and suffering are in all sorts of ways bound up together. It is the reality of this state of affairs that the teachings of the Buddha suggest we each must understand if we are ever to be free of suffering.

(Gethin 1998: 62)

It follows from this therefore that as a technical expression of Buddhism duḥkha is much wider in meaning than ‘suffering’. The Buddhist does not deny that we laugh and are happy, although laughter and happiness still come under duḥkha. They come under duḥkha not in the sense that they are really miserable but rather in the sense that they are impermanent and anyway they are the laughter and happiness of beings that are not enlightened (as they could be). Nevertheless, while bearing in mind this extended meaning of duḥkha in Buddhism, it still is the case that the Buddha chose the everyday word duḥkha, pain, suffering, to begin his medical diagnosis of the existential situation of beings. This was true to his position as a world-renouncer that sought complete liberation. Thus ‘suffering’ is indeed an appropriate translation for duḥkha. As a technical term in Buddhist Sanskrit or Pāli it is wider in meaning than simply everyday duḥkha (duḥkhaduḥkha), and correspondingly therefore we would also have to admit that in Buddhist English ‘suffering’ is a technical term wider in meaning than it is in everyday English. For the Buddha, from his enlightened vision, all our very being as unenlightened individuals is indeed ‘suffering’, and that is just how we would expect an Indian renouncer to diagnose the endless cycle of redeath.

Origin (Samudaya)

The origin of suffering is said to be craving (literally ‘thirst’: Sanskrit: tṛṣṇā; Pāli: taṇhā). The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (Nārada 1980: 51) says of craving: ‘[i]t is this craving which produces rebirth, accompanied by passionate clinging, welcoming this and that (life). It is the craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, and craving for non-existence’. This passage also indicates the three types into which cravings can be classified. Cravings include not just cravings for sensory pleasures, but also craving for continued existence – eternal life – and craving for complete cessation, non-existence, a complete ‘end to it all’. All of these can become objects of craving. Note that ‘craving’ is a much better translation for tṛṣṇā than the common translation ‘desire’, since in English ‘desire’ is often synonymous with ‘wanting’, and it seems to me the Buddha does not wish to say that wanting per se is faulty. I take it that if we knowingly engage in rational actions that can be expected to bring about X we can be said to want X if we are neither acting randomly nor acting under compulsion external to ourselves and counter to our will. The Buddha, when he went on his alms-round, presumably wanted to go on the alms-round. He was not acting randomly, nor being compelled to set off on the alms-round against his will. He acted out of free will. That is, he desired to go on the alms-round. But it does not follow from wanting something that one has a craving for it. The Buddha’s alms-round was not the result of craving. It did not spring from tṛṣṇā. Thus it is not considered faulty, and certainly not contradictory (as people sometimes tell me), for a Buddhist to want enlightenment. A Buddhist wants enlightenment in the sense that wanting something is a condition of freely and intentionally engaging in practices to bring it about. It is indeed faulty to have craving for enlightenment and, since the Buddhist path is precisely designed to bring craving to an end, to want enlightenment is to want the practices which will eliminate among other things craving after enlightenment itself. There is no contradiction in any of this.

No doubt in isolating tṛṣṇā as the culprit here the Buddha was following a common move among the śramaṇas, the renunciates. This move attributed continued rebirth and redeath to the egoistic concerns, the wish for personal gain, that powered the Vedic sacrificial culture and that led to the results of ‘significant (sacrificial) actions’ (i.e. karma), that is, ‘good fortune in this life and in the next’. It would have been commonplace among renunciates that the way to bring to an end all rebirth was to cut completely something akin to tṛṣṇā which, in order to ensure the results of appropriate actions, projected (as it were) a future rebirth. This craving is in Buddhism, however, a very deep-rooted sort of grasping, since it is considered to be an almost instinctive response in each unenlightened being from birth. He or she does not just want, they crave, just as a thirsty person – especially in the hot climate of India – desperately needs water. Craving can lead to attachment (upādāna), and the Buddhist tradition speaks of four specific types of attachment (Gethin 1998: 71): attachment to the objects of sense-desire, attachment to views (Sanskrit: dṛṣṭi; Pāli: diṭṭhi), attachment to precepts and vows, and attachment to the doctrine of the Self. Note the way in which it is not the object of craving and attachment that is the determinative factor here. What marked out the Buddha’s approach to this topic, in contrast to his fellow śramaṇas, was his psychologising. Tṛṣṇā is a matter of the mind, and therefore tṛṣṇā is eliminated not by withdrawing from action, or by fierce asceticism and torturing the body, but by mental transformation through meditation. For the Buddhist it is the mental factor which is crucial. Liberation is all about the mind.

But what exactly is it about tṛṣṇā, craving, which has such results, and how exactly does cutting craving lead to liberation? First, what is so insidious about craving, given that one wishes to overcome suffering, is its (psychological) incompatibility with impermanence. Craving X, where X is sure to cease, leads to suffering at the loss of X (for frustrated craving is painful), and renewed craving which itself is doomed to eventual loss. And so on, short of liberation, forever, for craving also projects future lives. This craving in the light of impermanence is radically unwise. Essential to seeing things the way they really are, which is liberation, is seeing all these impermanent things as impermanent, and therefore letting go of craving.

Erich Frauwallner (1973: 150 ff.) has suggested that perhaps the Buddha’s original idea was that craving resulted simply from contact between the senses and their objects. Craving occurs usually (but clearly not necessarily) from all sensory experience, including mental experiences since Buddhism, in common with all Indian philosophy, treats the mind (manas) as a sixth sense, ‘seeing’ mental objects like memories and fantasy images. Thus the way to liberation lay in mindfulness, constantly watching sensory experience in order to prevent the arising of cravings which would power future experience into rebirths. Cravings occur subsequent to sensory experience. This is seen in the formula for ‘dependent origination’ (q.v.; Sanskrit: pratītyasamutpāda; Pāli: paṭiccasamuppāda) for example, where it is held that conditioned by the six senses is sensory contact, conditioned by sensory contact is feeling, and conditioned by feeling is craving. It becomes possible therefore (it is hoped) through awareness to insert a block between the sensory experience and the resulting craving. Thus the dynamism behind rebirth is also blocked. However, Frauwallner suggests, subsequently the Buddha (or the Buddhist tradition – who can tell?) shifted interest from craving as such as the cause of saṃsāra to the factor about craving which has such dramatic effects. Fundamentally the factor behind craving and the real cause of suffering is avidyā (Pāli: avijjā), ignorance or misconception, which produces egotism.

Whether this represents two different phases of the Buddha’s understanding remains controversial.³ Perhaps ignorance and craving can better be seen as two different but inextricably mixed dimensions (the cognitive and the affective) of the saṃsāric experience (Gethin 1997b: 221). Either way, ignorance is not a first cause in Buddhism in the sense of something that chronologically started the whole process off. It is not that once there was nothing and then ignorance occurred and the world came about. The traditional Buddhist view is that the series of lives extends as far as we can tell infinitely into the past. Moreover short of liberation rebirths will as far as we can tell stretch infinitely into the future. Thus there is no chronological (or indeed ontologically necessary) first cause. Rather, ignorance is the conceptual, and, we might say, soteriological first cause. It is that which is taken to act as a conceptually final explanation for suffering and the cycle of rebirth, the root of saṃsāra. It is that from which liberation follows when it is completely overcome. In stating ignorance to be the root cause of suffering Buddhism again displays its credentials as an Indian gnostic system. If ignorance is the cause of saṃsāra, knowing, gnosis (vidyā =jñāna), becomes the ultimate condition of nirvāṇa.

Ignorance when spoken of as the cause of suffering is often explained in Buddhist tradition as ignorance precisely of the Four Noble Truths: ‘[i]n other words, it is the not-knowingness of things as they truly are, or of oneself as one really is. It clouds all right understanding’ (Nārada 1980: 240). It is thus ignorance of the Dharma, ignorance of what is cognitively and practically seen as the Truth by the Buddha. In particular ignorance is, once more in common with e.g. the Upaniṣads, ignorance of the true nature of the Self. But radically unlike the Upaniṣads (or Jains, for example) which seek to reveal the hidden Self behind all things, the Buddha is going to assert that all the candidates put forward for the Self are ‘not Self’. Letting go of all these candidates for Self is the very prerequisite of nirvāṇa. And what makes craving so insidious is precisely the way wanting becomes almost inextricably mixed with a strong assertion of Self, ‘I’ and ‘mine’, and thereby becomes craving. Thus the way to liberation lies not just, or perhaps not really, in mindfulness of sensory experience. Rather it lies in cutting forever all false assertion of Self, through knowing (gnosis) that each candidate for Self is really not Self at all. This is a crucial topic to which we shall return.

Cessation (Nirodha): On Nirvāṇa

The Buddha has completed his diagnosis. Now he offers the cure. If suffering in all its forms results from craving, then it follows that if craving can be completely eradicated, suffering will come to an end. As we have seen, the way to eradicate completely craving is to eradicate its cause, ignorance, through coming to see things in the deepest possible manner the way they really are. The complete cessation of suffering is nirvāṇa (Pāli: nibbāna).

Nirvāṇa is broadly speaking the result of letting-go, letting-go the very forces of craving which power continued experiences of pleasure and inevitably suffering throughout this life, death, rebirth and redeath. That, in a nutshell, is what nirvāṇa is. It is the complete and permanent cessation of saṃsāra, thence the cessation of all types of suffering, resulting from letting-go the forces which power saṃsāra, due to overcoming ignorance (thence also hatred and delusion, the ‘three root poisons’) through seeing things the way they really are. Nirvāṇa here is not ‘the Buddhist name for the Absolute Reality’ (let alone, God forbid, ‘the Buddhist name for God’). The word itself is an action noun formed from the verbal root nir-vā, which means to blow out, extinguish, quench etc. As such it designates an occurrence, an event, but not a being, nor Being. Literally it means ‘extinguishing’, as in ‘the extinguishing of a flame’, and it signifies soteriologically a complete extinguishing – but extinguishing of what? In the ‘Fire Sermon’ (Ādittapariyāya Sutta), the Buddha explains that a person’s sense faculties – as well as their objects and the cognition of them – are blazing with the fires of greed, hatred, and delusion. In this context of this use of the fire metaphor, the term nirvāṇa denotes the eradication of greed, hatred and delusion (i.e. ignorance), and so indicates that the forces which power saṃsāra are completely extinguished.⁴ In the context of the Four Noble Truths, where the metaphor of being thirsty (i.e. tṛṣṇā, ‘craving’) is used to explain the cause of suffering, nirvāṇa should rather be understood as the quenching or extinguishing of the flames of thirst: if the state of saṃsāra is thought of as a thirsty person desperately in need of satiation, nirvāṇa is by contrast the person whose thirst has been finally quenched, and so is in need of nothing at all. The one who has attained nirvāṇa is, quite literally, ‘cool’.

This event of extinguishing occurred when the Buddha became the Buddha. He ‘attained nirvāṇa’ while seated in meditation at the foot of a tree. Having come out of his meditation he knew it had finally been done, once and for all. ‘Nirvāṇa’ is not used by Buddhists to refer to the extinguishing of the person, or the individual. The Buddha did not suddenly go out of existence at the time of his liberation. It does not follow, therefore, from the use of this term alone that liberation in Buddhism is the equivalent (as some people seem to think) of ceasing to exist. Nor does it follow in anything other than the purely grammatical sense that nirvāṇa is entirely negative. After his nirvāṇa the Buddha continued to live and act in the world, living and acting as a person completely free of greed, hatred and delusion. Note also that to live in this way is thus defined in what we would call moral terms. One who acts free of greed, hatred, and delusion is as such living and acting morally. Nirvāṇa is not understood to be an amoral state.

The tradition refers to the nirvāṇa which the Buddha attained when he completely eradicated greed, hatred, and delusion as ‘nirvāṇa with a remainder [of life]’ (Sanskrit: sopadhiśeṣanirvāṇa; Pāli: sa-upādhisesanibbāna). When an enlightened person like the Buddha dies, by definition there is no further rebirth. When that occurs it follows that the psychophysical elements that make him up as the embodied living individual he is (psychophysical elements known collectively as the five aggregates (q.v.)) cease, and are not replaced by further psychophysical elements. This is called ‘nirvāṇa without a remainder [of life]’ (Sanskrit: nirupadhiśeṣanirvāṇa; Pāli: an-upādhisesanibbāna). As Gethin points out (1998: 76, see also Norman 1990–6, 1996 volume: 12–18), this ‘nirvāṇa without a remainder’ is sometimes referred to at least in modern Buddhist usage as parinirvāṇa, restricting ‘nirvāṇa’ to ‘nirvāṇa with a remainder’. And what of a Buddha who has attained ‘nirvāṇa without a remainder’? What is it like for that person? Is it fun? The question is considered absurd. Without the psychophysical elements (including consciousness, but cf. Harvey 1990: 67 and 1995) there is no sense to the idea of a person (and certainly no sense to ‘fun’, at least as it is normally understood in saṃsāra). As we shall see, the common view of Buddhist tradition is that the Buddha rejected any additional candidate with the status of a Self that could be the ‘real person’ undergoing fun. There is nothing left for our minds to fix on (‘men and gods will not see him’, Norman 1990–6, 1993 volume: 253). Since there is nothing left for the mind to fix on, nothing more can be said. We have seen already that the question whether the Buddha (Tathāgata) exists, does not exist, both exists and does not exist, or neither exists nor does not exist after death was one of the useless questions which the Buddha expressed no intention of answering. Any attempt by us to do so would attempt the impossible.⁵ Indeed for that matter the early tradition often claims that the Buddha – or any liberated person – is indefinable even before he dies, never mind after it. As the Aggivacchagotta Sutta (‘Discourse to Vacchagotta concerning Fire’;Majjhima Nikāya no. 72) states, since even while alive the Tathāgata is ‘deep, immeasurable, unfathomable, just like a great ocean’, questions about what happens to him after death cannot be answered. Such questions, it seems, are simply inapplicable once a person has attained nirvāṇa, even during life.⁶

Thus nirvāṇa appears to be expressed in the earliest Buddhist tradition with event-terminology like ‘attaining’ and ‘extinguishing’ rather than nounterms as occur in English metaphysics with ‘Absolute’, ‘Reality’, or ‘God’. Unfortunately however the issue is rather more complicated than it at first appears. There remains the interesting problem of how to interpret passages like the following, said of nirvāṇa and attributed to the Buddha as an ‘inspired utterance’ (udāna):

There is monks a domain where there is no earth, no water, no fire, no wind, no sphere of infinite space, no sphere of nothingness, no sphere of infinite consciousness, no sphere of neither awareness nor non-awareness; there is not this world, there is not another world, there is no sun or moon. I do not call this coming or going, nor standing nor dying, nor being reborn; it is without support, without occurrence, without object. Just this is the end of suffering.

(Trans. in Gethin 1998: 76–7)

‘Domain’ would appear to be a noun-term. One way of reading this is that alongside our discussion of nirvāṇa as an event we must also indeed make room for nirvāṇa spoken of here as an Absolute Reality. This would be a Reality rather like the Brahman of the Upaniṣads or perhaps the Hindu school of Advaita Vedānta, or the ineffable ‘Godhead’ of some religious teachings.

In support of this possibility is the fact that the upaniṣadic absolute (brahman) is sometimes described in similar terms – as the place where ‘the sun does not shine, nor do the moon or stars’.⁷ From this perspective the Udāna passage cited above on the ‘domain’ where there is no ‘sun or moon’ could perhaps be an effect of early upaniṣadic influence. This does not mean that the upaniṣadic absolute was accepted by the Buddha, however, or even that nirvāṇa as an absolute is implied in the majority of early Buddhist teachings. If this ‘inspired utterance’ (udāna) were to be taken as a statement of some sort of Absolute Reality, one possibility recently suggested is that perhaps it may have been an expression of the beliefs of some early brahmanic converts to Buddhism, of which there were many.⁸

That said, this ‘inspired utterance’ of the Buddha can also be read without any conclusions sympathetic to the (for want of a better expression) ‘Hindu’ or ‘absolutist’ interpretation, and much more in keeping with the main direction of subsequent Indian Buddhist tradition. Buddhist tradition speaks of nirvāṇa in this context simply as the ‘unconditioned’ (Sanskrit: asaṃskṛta; Pāli: asaṃkhata), or the ‘unconditioned realm’ (-dhātu). It is worth noting that the only positive expression in the whole quotation from the Udāna cited above (and indeed in expressions like ‘unconditioned realm’) is ‘domain’ or ‘realm’ (āyatana =dhātu). Now, it simply does not follow that even if I describe identically two things (such as Brahman and nirvāṇa) using negative terminology I am thereby describing the same thing. Think of a banana and an orange both described as ‘not apple’, ‘not cabbage’, ‘not green’, ‘not on wheels’, ‘not powered by diesel’, and so on. And one certainly cannot conclude from language like that in the quotation above without considerable further evidence and argument that the Buddhists are speaking of the same thing as e.g. the Brahman of Advaita Vedānta. Deference should be given to the mainstream Buddhist traditions that explicitly deny this linkage.

It seems to me that it is from looking more closely at the only positive expressions here, the Buddhist use of ‘domain’ (āyatana) and ‘realm’ (dhātu) that some understanding of what is going on may emerge. Early Buddhist treatment of perception (epistemology) speaks of the twelve āyatanas and the eighteen dhātus. The twelve āyatanas are the six senses (five senses plus the mind) and their six classes of corresponding intentional objects (visual objects, tactile objects, and so on). The eighteen dhātus are the same twelve plus the six types of resultant consciousnesses (visual consciousness, which occurs as a result of the ‘meeting’ of the visual sense with a visual object, and so on). Thus in the context of the theory of perception the term dhātu overlaps with that of āyatana. It seems clear to me that in referring to nirvāṇa as a ‘domain’, or a ‘realm’ the only commitment is to nirvāṇa as an intentional⁹ object of cognition, where ‘X is an object of cognition’ means simply (and nothing more than) ‘One can have an X-experience’.¹⁰ This is why in another famous passage from the Udāna the Buddha states that ‘if that unborn, not-become, not-made, not-compounded were not, there would be apparent no escape from this here that is born, become, made, compounded’.¹¹ All this actually says, in its Buddhist context, is that the attainment of nirvāṇa is not doomed through the mind being unable to cognise in such a way, i.e. there is no such cognitive content, in other words there could be no such experience, no such event. As an intentional object of cognition nirvāṇa is described using almost entirely negatives, for it is described in polarised opposition to that of which it is the complete negation, i.e. saṃsāra (see Norman 1990–6, paper 117, esp. 23–4). Saṃsāra is the conditioned. That is why it is impermanent, and being subject to impermanence it is subject to at least one sort of duḥkha. Thus nirvāṇa, being defined deliberately as not-saṃsāra, is specified using precisely negations. It is not conditioned, because it is not part of the formula for ‘dependent origination’, which pertains to saṃsāra, it is where there are no conditioned things (K.R. Norman), and also it is not impermanent (and thence enmeshed in duḥkha) as are conditioned things. And so on. The only commitment in all of this, it seems to me, is that nirvāṇa can be attained. The search for nirvāṇa is not doomed to failure. Cognising nirvāṇa is not impossible due to it turning out there is no such thing as nirvāṇa (it is all ‘pie-in-the-sky’), that is, no such cognitive content or referent. In addition nirvāṇa is the negation of saṃsāra and all that cessation involves. But there is no positive ontological commitment implied in this at all. Nirvāṇa in this sense is simply – and nothing more than – the perceptual condition for the event of nirvāṇa (what happened to the Buddha under the tree of enlightenment) to take place. Thus the only positive expression needed or possible for nirvāṇa is āyatana or dhātu, translated as ‘domain/realm’. All the rest can indicate the negation of the suffering which is saṃsāra, either directly as here through the use of verbal negations, or indirectly through terms like ‘supramundane’ (Sanskrit: lokottara) which unpack as negative expressions (= not of the world). Thus this third sense of nirvāṇa is as the content, or the intentional referent, of enlightening gnosis. That is all.¹²

Way (Sanskrit: Mārga; Pāli: Magga)

The way to nirvāṇa is spoken of in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta as the ‘eightfold path’. In its fullest development this is the eightfold (or eight-dimensioned) way of the Āryas. The Āryas are the noble ones, the saints, those who have attained ‘the fruits of the path’, ‘that middle path the Tathāgata has comprehended which promotes sight and knowledge, and which tends to peace, higher wisdom, enlightenment, and Nibbāna’ (Nārada 1980: 50). The path is described as the ‘middle path’ in this early discourse in the sense that it is the middle path between what renunciates like the Buddha would have seen as the indulgent sensual way of the householder, and the self-mortification, bodily torture, carried out by certain other renunciates. Positive and permissible indulgence in sensual delights (kāma) providing it does not contradict Dharma has always been seen as very much the prerogative of the householder in Indian civilisation (Kāmasūtra, esp. Ch. 2). For the Buddha this is precisely not suitable for ‘one who has renounced’, and thus for one seriously engaged in the path aimed at eradicating suffering and rebirth. In talking of the ‘middle path’ the Buddha directly indicates transcendence of the householder framework. But equally the Buddha understood liberation in psychological terms, as something to do with transforming the mind through correct understanding. Thus asceticism as such could not bring about liberation, and indeed certain types of asceticism (such as starving oneself) were no doubt seen as causing serious distraction in working on one’s own mind.¹³

The Buddhist path is the overcoming of greed, hatred, and delusion through the cultivation of their opposites, nonattachment, loving kindness, and wisdom or insight. The list of eight elements to the path (perhaps ‘dimensions’ would be better, as indicating the complementarity rather than successive nature of the set) is early, and is found in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta. Each element is preceded with ‘right’ (Sanskrit: samyak; Pāli: sammā) or ‘perfect’, ‘appropriate’, we might almost say ‘fitting’. Thus we have:

1. Right view (i.e. samyagdṛṣṭi/sammādiṭṭhi)

2. Right intention

3. Right speech

4. Right action

5. Right livelihood

6. Right effort

7. Right mindfulness

8. Right concentration¹⁴

‘Right view’ in the context of the Noble Eightfold Path is sometimes glossed as seeing the truth of the Four Noble Truths (which in a nice piece of selfreference thus includes of course the eightfold path itself).¹⁵ It means that one speaks, acts and thinks in conformity with reality, how things actually are. Note that the word ‘view’ (dṛṣṭi/diṭṭhi) is used here, and its use in this sense must therefore be distinguished from the sense seen previously in which all ‘views’ are described as finally pernicious. To hold even the right view with craving is to have a dṛṣṭi which is ultimately to be abandoned, although it seems clear that to do this must for the Buddhist be preferable to holding a wrong view, necessarily with craving. This is because holding the right view with craving is as such to engage in the path that if followed through eventually erodes all craving and leads to a right view without craving, that is therefore no ‘view’ at all. ‘Right intention’ is explained as intentions free from attachments to worldly pleasures, selfishness, and self-possessiveness, and animated by benevolence and compassion (see Nārada 1980: 181–3). In terms of the three major divisions of the Buddhist path – wisdom (prajñā; Pāli paññā), morality (or conduct: śīla; Pāli: sīla), and meditation (Sanskrit/Pāli: samādhi) – right view and right intention are classed under ‘wisdom’. ‘Right speech’ is speech that is not false, divisive, hurtful, or merely idle chatter. ‘Right action’ is refraining from harming living beings, particularly through killing them, refraining from taking what is not given (essentially, stealing), and refraining from sexual misconduct. In the case of monks and nuns this means refraining from all sexual activity.¹⁶ ‘Right livelihood’ is explained as livelihood not involving the infringement of right speech and right action. Some (Pāli) sources refer to five kinds of trade particularly inappropriate for lay Buddhists (let alone monks and nuns), trade in arms, human beings, flesh, intoxicating drinks (presumably also other ‘recreational’ drugs), and poison (op cit.: p. 184). In terms of the three major divisions of the Buddhist path, right speech, right action, and right livelihood are classed under ‘morality’, and the remaining elements of the eightfold path come under ‘meditation’. ‘Right effort’ consists of effort to prevent the arising of unwholesome mental states (e.g. of greed, hatred, and delusion) which have not arisen and effort to abandon unwholesome states that have arisen. It is an effort to arouse wholesome states (e.g. of nonattachment, loving kindness, and wisdom) which have not arisen, and effort to develop and promote wholesome states that have arisen.¹⁷ ‘Right mindfulness’ is constant mindfulness, awareness, with reference to the body, with reference to feelings, with reference to the mind, and with reference to physical and mental processes (following Gethin, based on Theravāda commentaries). In watching these one is aware of their flowing nature, moments arising and falling, aware of their impermanence and aware of letting them go. In watching in this way one perceives them as they are, and abandons any notion that they might be worth craving, as capable of providing lasting happiness, or as an object of attachment as one’s true Self. In knowing, seeing the body, feelings, the mind, and physical and mental processes as they are, one begins to erode any basis for craving, and thus the forces that power suffering and rebirth. ‘Right concentration’ consists of one-pointedness of mind, the mind focusing unwaveringly on a single object, which can be taken to the point where one attains successively the four dhyānas (Pāli: jhānas), the four ‘meditations’ or, in this context, perhaps ‘absorptions’. These dhyānas are said to take the meditator outside, as it were, the desire realm (kāmadhātu) in which we humans normally live, and to pertain to the realm of (pure) form, the rūpadhātu. The first and lowest of the dhyānas is characterised in the Pāli canon as involving applied thought, examination, and the joy and happiness that arise from seclusion. The second dhyāna lacks applied thought and examination, and is a state of internal tranquillity and one-pointed absorption that is born of concentration, from which joy and happiness (or bliss) arise. Although the third dhyāna lacks joy it is still a state of happiness, but rather than being described as a state of one-pointedness, the meditator is said to be ‘mindful and fully aware’, and in a state of equanimity. The fourth dhyāna seems to be a perfection of the third, for it is said to be a ‘complete purification’ of equanimity and mindfulness, one that lacks unhappiness but also the happiness spoken of in the third dhyāna.¹⁸

To quote from Peter Harvey:

The fourth jhāna is a state of profound stillness and peace, in which the mind rests with unshakeable one-pointedness and equanimity, and breathing has calmed to the point of stopping. The mind has a radiant purity, due to its ‘brightly shining’ depths having been uncovered and made manifest at the surface level. It is said to be very ‘workable’ and ‘adaptable’ like refined gold, which can be used to make all manner of precious and wonderful things. It is thus an ideal take-off point for various further developments. Indeed it seems to have been the state from which the Buddha went on to attain enlightenment.

(Harvey 1990, 250–2)

The four dhyānas are also spoken of as being realms into which one can be reborn as certain types of gods, thus bringing together cosmological realms and mental transformation in an interesting way which shows a blending of ‘outer’ cosmology and ‘inner’ psychology on these rarified levels of Buddhist experience. We shall return to this topic subsequently.

Not-Self (Anātman; Pāli: Anattā)

It is often said in books published in English that the Buddha denied the existence of the soul. I do not see this as a very helpful way of speaking. The ‘soul’ in Western thought is held in its broadest sense to be that which gives life to the body. Some, such as Aristotle, thought of it as the ‘form’ of the body, that is, what makes the matter of the body alive as the actual living thing it is, rather as the shape is what makes wax this wax thing. He apparently did not think of the soul as separable from the body. Others (including Aristotle’s medieval followers such as Aquinas) have seen at least the human soul as something immaterial capable of surviving apart from the body after the latter’s demise, and some others have connected the issues of bodily life, survival of death, and personal identity in a radically dualistic way. As is well known, Descartes identified that which gives life to the body, and survives death, with the mind, and he also identified this mind-soul as the true Self, of an intrinsically different stuff from the body. The mind-soul is the factor in which lies the identity of the person over time and change. But these diverse views are diverse views of the thinkers concerned. Christian theology, for example, has no commitment to a particular view of the soul or, as such, personal identity. Its only commitment is that there is something that gives life to the body, and death is not the end of the story for the specific person concerned.

It seems to me that very little of this discussion of the soul is relevant to the Buddha.¹⁹ The Buddha stated that a large number of things were anātman, not Self, but I see no reason to think that in doing this he was concerned to deny whatever gave life to the body, whatever that is. Nor do I think he was concerned to deny that death is not the end of the story. Indeed he was very concerned to assert that the story in some sense goes on after death (‘life after death’, ‘reincarnation’). To say that this is not the case has always been considered to be a cardinal ‘wrong view’ in Buddhism, the wrong view of ucchedavāda, annihilationism. In spite of what is sometimes said nowadays, traditional Buddhism is completely committed to some sense of life after death.²⁰ But all this has nothing whatsoever to do with the central element in the teaching of the Buddha, the teaching of things as anātman, not Self.

The Buddha makes no mention of not-Self in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, instead restricting his teaching to the Middle Path and his attainment of insight into the Four Noble Truths. At first sight this seems strange, given that this discourse is supposed to be the Buddha’s first sermon, and that the not-Self teaching has always been held by Buddhists to be the unique discovery of the Buddha, the discovery that ensures his superiority over all other teachers. If what the Buddha discovered was the Truth that sets one free, then in a very real sense not-Self is that liberating Truth. The tradition holds, however, that the Buddha followed the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta with another discourse, this time on not-Self, known in its Pāli version as the Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta (the ‘Discourse on the Definition of Not-Self ’). Indeed both teachings appear without any gap in the biographical account contained in the Pāli Vinaya. Understood as successive teachings given on a single occasion, the teaching on the Middle Path and the Four Noble Truths look rather like an introduction to the Buddha’s thought, one that prepares the ground for the more complex not-Self teaching (and it is this that is said to effect the liberation of the Buddha’s first disciples).²¹ This sutta is probably the single most important source for understanding the mainstream position of Buddhist thought in relationship to its soteriological project. In it we see the Buddha addressing his very earliest disciples:

Bhikkhus [monks], material form [physical form, rūpa] is not self [rūpaṃ bhikkhave anattā].²² If material form were self, this material form would not lead to affliction, and it could be had of material form: ‘Let my material form be thus; let my material form be not thus.’ And it is because material form is not self that it therefore leads to affliction, and that it cannot be had of material form: ‘Let my material form be thus; let my material form be not thus.’ Feeling [sensation; vedanā] is not self … [Determinate] perception [conception; saññā; Sanskrit: saṃjñā] is not self … Formations [volitions etc.; saṃkhārā; Sanskrit: saṃskārāḥ] are not self … Consciousness [viññāṇa; Sanskrit: vijñāna] is not self …

(Trans. in Ñāṇamoli 1992: 46)

What the Buddha wants to say, then, is that each of these possible candidates for the status of Self is actually not Self. His grounds for this are that if something were to be the Self it would (i) not lead to affliction, and (ii) it would obey the person of whom it is the Self.²³ In other words, whatever the Self is, it is something over which one has complete control and it is something which is conducive to happiness (or at least, not conducive to suffering). The list of five areas of experience which might be considered to be the Self but which by simple examination are seen not to fit the description falls into two categories: the physical (material form), and the mental (the other four: feelings, perceptions, formations [e.g. intentions/volitions], and consciousness). These five areas of experience are known as the five ‘heaps’ or ‘aggregates’ (Pāli (singular): khandha; Sanskrit: skandha).²⁴ The Buddha continues with a further characteristic of any putative Self:

How do you conceive this, bhikkhus, is material form permanent or impermanent? – ‘Impermanent, Lord.’ – But is what is impermanent unpleasant or pleasant? – ‘Unpleasant, Lord’ – But is it fitting to regard what is impermanent, unpleasant and subject to change as: ‘This is mine, this is what I am, this is my self?’ – ‘No, Lord.’

(Ñāṇamoli 1992: 46)

And the Buddha explains that the same can be said as regards the other four aggregates. Thus we can add also that any Self would (iii) have to be permanent. If it were fitting to regard anything with the consideration ‘This is mine, this is what I am, this is my self’, that thing ought at least to be permanent, pleasant, and not subject to change. Clearly from all this the Buddha takes it that any part of our psychophysical makeup, anything which can be classed under one or other of the five aggregates, cannot fit the paradigmatic description of what something would have to be in order to be a Self. They are all not Self. And – this is important – they are all impermanent. Seeing things this way is to see correctly:

Therefore, bhikkhus, any material form whatsoever, whether past, future or present, in oneself or external, coarse or fine, inferior or superior, far or near, should all be regarded as it actually is by right understanding thus: ‘This is not mine, this is not what I am, this is not my self.’

(Ñāṇamoli 1992: 46)

And the same applies, of course, to the other aggregates. Elsewhere (in the Alagaddūpama Sutta) the Buddha comments that if someone were to burn wood no one would consider that he himself is being burned. Thus not only is our physical body not our Self, but it is patently obvious also that the world cannot be the Self (as some followers of the Upaniṣads might have thought). Of course, on the basis of what we have just seen from the Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta, the world also could not be the Self because it too leads to affliction, does not obey the person of whom it would be the Self, and is impermanent. We cannot say ‘I am all this, this is my Self ’. I cannot gain control over the macrocosm by realising its essence (Brahman) is truly identical with my essence (ātman), since patently the macrocosm is not my Self. It does not fit the description for a Self.²⁵

Now we meet the crucial part of this discourse. Note what the Buddha in the Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta considers to be the result of seeing things the way they really are in this way:

Seeing thus, bhikkhus, a wise noble disciple becomes dispassionate towards material form, becomes dispassionate towards material form, becomes dispassionate towards feeling … [etc.]. Becoming dispassionate, his lust fades away; with the fading of lust his heart is liberated; when liberated, there comes the knowledge: ‘It is liberated.’ He understands: ‘Birth is exhausted, the holy life has been lived out, what was to be done is done, there is no more of this to come’.

(Ñāṇamoli 1992: 47)

This shows wonderfully well, I think, the connection between seeing things the way they really are, in terms of seeing how the psychophysical world actually is, and liberation. There is built into seeing how things are (‘is’) a transformation of moral response (‘ought’). The Buddha seems to suggest that this transformation is an automatic response to seeing how things really are. In spite of what the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher Hume says, for the Buddha it is very much possible to get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ (Hume 1969). Liberation results from letting go that which is seen as not being the Self. When one sees things are sources of unhappiness, out of one’s control, and impermanent, one sees that they cannot be any kind of Self. With this one lets them go, for having any involvement with them can only lead to misery. In letting all these go there is liberation, for the force of craving which leads to suffering and rebirth is no more. Seeing that all these are not Self is the path to liberation.

The Buddha had characterised the aggregates as being not Self because they lead to affliction, they do not obey the person of whom they are the aggregates, and they are impermanent. It follows from this that if something had the negations of these characteristics (did not lead to affliction, did obey the person, and were permanent) it would be the Self, or at least could be a strong candidate for the Self. On the basis of this there are those who consider that all the Buddha has done here is to show what is not the Self. He has not however said that there is no such thing as a Self at all. I confess I cannot quite understand this. If the Buddha considered that he had shown only what is not the Self, and the Buddha actually accepted a Self beyond his negations, a Self other than and behind the five aggregates, fitting the paradigmatic description for a Self, then he would surely have said so. And we can be quite sure he would have said so very clearly indeed. He does not. It seems that all the other renouncers of his day saw the search for liberation from all suffering as terminating in discovering the Self. Indian systems which do teach the ātman, like the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, for example, devote a great deal of attention to the issue, and make it quite clear in what way they assert the Self. No one has ever argued that the Upaniṣads do not teach the Self. Nor could they possibly do so. In early and mainstream Buddhist texts on the other hand all we find are denials, statements that various things are not the Self. If the Buddha had thought there was a Self, and merely wanted to indicate here what is not the Self, it is inconceivable that he would have thought finding the Self really had nothing to do with liberation. Thus in the Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta we should expect that he would have continued by explaining how, having seen what is not the Self, one finds the Self and that leads to ‘the knowledge: “It is liberated.”’ But he does not do this. He makes no mention of discovering the True Self in the Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta. As we have seen, the Buddha explains how liberation comes from letting go of all craving and attachment simply through seeing that things are not Self. That is all there is to it. One cuts the force that leads to rebirth and suffering. There is no need to postulate a Self beyond all this. Indeed any postulated Self would lead to attachment, for it seems that for the Buddha a Self fitting the description could legitimately be a suitable subject of attachment. There is little or no suggestion that the Buddha thought there is some additional factor called the Self (or with any other name, but fitting the Self-description) beyond the five aggregates.²⁶

Just as there are those who think that the Buddha is really teaching a True Self behind all denial (an example of the ‘wrong view’ of eternalism; Sanskrit: śāśvatavāda; Pāli: sassatavāda), there are sometimes those who think the Buddha intends to deny that we exist at all. This is a version of the ‘wrong view’ of annihilationism (Sanskrit/Pāli: ucchedavāda). Another sense of ‘Middle Path’ when used of Buddhism is the middle between eternalism and annihilationism. The common view of mainstream Buddhist tradition is that the middle is that we do exist merely in some sort of dependence upon dynamic, causally generated psychophysical bundles. It should be clear from what has been said so far that the individual, in the case of normal human beings the person, is here explained in terms of five classes of physical and psychological continua. Each of these forms a flow with all elements of the flow and the five continua themselves bound together in a dynamic bundle. The principles of this binding, what holds it all together, as we shall see in the next section, are causal. Any idea that there is more to us than is revealed by this reduction is, in terms of how things really are, wrong. An unchanging element, the real ‘me’, a Self, is simply non-existent. It is a fiction, and as a fiction it is the result of beginningless ignorance (avidyā/avijjā) and the cause of endless sorrow. Thus eternalism is false. But note that this explanation of the normal human being, the person, presupposes that there are indeed persons. Thus annihilationism too is false. Although the Buddha himself may have been more interested in his liberating denials, the later Buddhist tradition has been careful to make sure that there is no confusion about what is not being denied here. A practical way of referring to the bundle, giving it one name such as ‘Archibald’, or as ‘Fiona’, is generally thought to be acceptable.²⁷ Persons in the everyday sense exist, and frequently in later Buddhist tradition the person is spoken of as the pudgala (Pāli: puggala), carefully distinguishing it from the ātman which is being denied. The Buddha seems to have wanted to deny a particular sort of thing, a Self, which he saw as being at the root of the suffering of those who are unenlightened (whether they knew it or not). He did not want to deny the existence of persons. He was not stating the absurdity that you and me and he himself simply do not exist, and we would all be better off realising this. Persons exist, but as nothing more than practical ways of speaking about psychophysical bundles.

Dependent Origination

In the Mahātaṇhāsaṅkhaya Sutta (the ‘Greater Discourse on the Destruction of Craving’) we are told that a stupid monk, Sāti, conceived the idea that consciousness is the unchanging subject of experiences, effectively the Self, and that therefore it is consciousness which transmigrates unchanged from life to life. This is more or less identical to an early upaniṣadic idea that also holds consciousness (Sanskrit: vijñāna) is a person’s Self, i.e. the real unchanging subject of experience that transmigrates from one life to the next. The Buddha vehemently repudiates this idea. Consciousness comes about in dependence upon some condition or another. ‘Consciousness’ is just the name we give to e.g. sensory experience, as happens when an unhindered eye meets (as it were) a visual object. Then we speak of ‘visual consciousness’. There is a flow of such experiences, and if experiences actually take place no really existing additional subject as consciousness itself, over and above conscious experiences, is needed. Indeed it would be better, the Buddha observes at another point, to take the body as the Self rather than the mind. The mind is patently changing constantly whereas the body at least has a certain perceived stability about it (Saṃyutta Nikāya II: 94–5, in Lamotte 1988: 29). Thus the Buddha’s response to a claim to have found an unchanging Self is among other things to point to the obviousness that the putative ‘Self’ (if it occurs at all) occurs as a result of the coming together of causal conditions. It accordingly could not be unchanging, and therefore could not be a Self. ‘Consciousness’ is no more a Self than anything else. It is actually a name we give to the flow of experiences. The Buddha thereby replaces a vision of the world based on Selves underlying change with an appeal to what he sees as being its essentially dynamic nature, a dynamism of experiences based on the centrality of causal conditioning. In other words, the flight from the world into Selves is to be replaced by seeing the world as it truly is and letting it go. The Buddha considered that if we look at the whole of saṃsāra as it is we see that it is pervaded by its three hallmarks (trilakṣaṇa, Pāli: tilakkhaṇa). It is suffering (duḥkha). It is impermanent (anitya). And it is not Self (anātman). The world truly is a torrent of cause and effect with no stability within it, save the stability we try to make for ourselves as a refuge from change and inevitable death. That stability only exacerbates suffering because it is a fictional stability created by our desperate grasping after security. The only real stability therefore lies in nirvāṇa, just because (as we have seen) nirvāṇa precisely is not the torrent of saṃsāra. This stress on the dynamic nature of saṃsāra throws into relief the still, calm, dimension of nirvāṇa. Causal dependence was important to the Buddha primarily because it indicated the rational coherent structure of the universe. It shows what is to be done in order to bring about liberation, nirvāṇa, through reversing the processes of saṃsāra. The Buddha was interested in the fact that X comes into existence due to Y particularly because through the cessation of Y there will be no more X. Causal dependence was also important to the Buddha because it demonstrates how rebirth can occur without recourse to any Self. In addition it shows the mechanism whereby wholesome and unwholesome actions (karma) entail appropriate pleasant and unpleasant results. Indicating the way saṃsāra exists as an endless series of causal processes also became important for Buddhists because it rendered any sort of personal divine creator irrelevant. The Buddha intentionally or by implication replaced any talk of God with that of causal dependence. God has no place in a seamless web of natural contingency, where each contingent thing could be explained as a causal result of another contingent thing ad infinitum. In the Mahātaṇhāsaṅkhaya Sutta the Buddha corrects Sāti by stressing that things originate in dependence upon causal conditioning, and this emphasis on causality describes the central feature of Buddhist ontology. All elements of saṃsāra exist in some sense or another relative to their causes and conditions. That is why they are impermanent, for if the cause is impermanent then so too will be the effect. In particular, our own existence as embodied individuals is the result of the coming together of appropriate causes, and we exist just as long as appropriate causes keep us in existence. Inevitably, therefore, we as the embodied individuals we are shall one-day cease to exist. In this particular discourse the Buddha gives a picture of causal dependence (dependent origination) expressed in its most vivid way related to the exhortation to become free. It’s very practicality has, it seems, the immediacy of an early source. A child is born, and grows up:

On seeing a visible form with the eye, hearing a sound with the ear, smelling an odour with the nose, tasting a flavour with the tongue, touching a tangible with the body, cognizing an idea with the mind [this indicates the eighteen dhātus of sense, object, and resultant consciousness for each of the six senses], he lusts after it if it is likable, or has ill will towards it if it is dislikable [dependent upon ignorance of its true nature he produces greed and hatred]. He abides without mindfulness of the body established and with mind limited while he does not understand as they actually are the deliverance of mind and the deliverance by understanding wherein those evil unwholesome states cease without remainder. Engaged as he is in favouring and opposing, when he feels any feeling, whether pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant [= the three types of feeling], he relishes that feeling, affirms and accepts it. Relishing arises in him when he does that. Now any relishing of those feelings is clinging. With his clinging as a condition, being; with being as a condition, birth; with birth as a condition, ageing and death come to be, and also sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief and despair. That is how there is an origin to this whole aggregate mass of suffering.

(Trans. in Ñāṇamoli 1992: 251 ff.)

This, in a practical sense, is how suffering comes about. It comes about through causes. Thus through reversing the causes the suffering can be ended. And the text continues by telling us that perhaps a Buddha may appear in the world. Someone might hear the Dhamma and eventually become a monk. Through following seriously the Buddha’s path as a monk he might so develop his ability in mindfulness and meditative absorption that he learns to cut his lust after sensory experiences. Thus each link in the above list ceases through the cessation of the preceding link:

With the cessation of his relishing, cessation of clinging; with cessation of clinging, cessation of being; with cessation of being, cessation of birth; with cessation of birth, ageing and death cease, and also sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief and despair; that is how there is a cessation to this whole aggregate mass of suffering.

(Op. cit.: p. 255)

Therefore the Buddha wants to link the emergence of suffering to impersonal lawlike behaviour, and he chooses to anchor this link in the impersonal lawlike behaviour of causation. This impersonal lawlike nature of causation is well demonstrated in its standard formula found in early Buddhist sources: ‘This existing, that exists; this arising, that arises; this not existing, that does not exist; this ceasing, that ceases’ (Gethin 1998: 141). This is what causation is for early Buddhist thought. It is a relationship between events, and is what we call it when if X occurs Y follows, and when X does not occur Y does not follow (in Pāli: imasmiṃ sati, idaṃ hoti; imasmiṃ asati, idaṃ na hoti). There is nothing more to causation than that. It is because causation is impersonal and lawlike that the Buddha places ‘dependent origination’ (Pāli: paṭiccasmuppāda; Sanskrit: pratītyasamutpāda) at the very centre of his Middle Path (cf. ‘He who sees dependent origination sees the Dhamma; he who sees the Dhamma sees dependent origination’; Mahāhatthipadopama Sutta). It is this impersonal lawlike causal ordering which is held in the Saṃyutta Nikāya (II: 12: 20) of the Pāli Canon to be the case whether Buddhas arise or whether they do not. This is what the Buddha is said to have rediscovered, and it is in this rediscovery and its implications that he is held to be enlightened. Because the emergence of suffering is a direct, impersonal, lawlike response to causes, suffering can be ended automatically through the removal of its causes (without recourse to sacrifices or petitioning divinities). Thus we might argue that (like not-Self), although the Buddha does not mention dependent origination in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the very significance of the Four Noble Truths which formed the content of his enlightenment relies implicitly on the impersonal lawlike behaviour of causation. Perhaps the Buddha’s understanding of both not-Self and dependent origination emerged as he thought more and more (as he meditated) on the implications of what he had discovered. As we have seen, Frauwallner (1973) suggested that the Buddha’s tracing all finally to ignorance rather than the immediate cause of craving was a subsequent stage in his understanding and development of the teaching. From this perspective not-Self and dependent origination together come to form the two pillars of the final gnosis (vidyā) which is the antidote to ignorance (avidyā).

The account of the Mahātaṇhāsaṅkhaya Sutta quite possibly represents an early formulation by the Buddha of the more complex (and much less clear) scheme of dependent origination found for example at length in the Mahānidāna Sutta (the ‘Greater Discourse on Causes’). The Buddha preached the Mahānidāna Sutta to his faithful attendant Ānanda, who had ventured to observe that dependent origination, while profound, seemed to him to be quite straightforward. It is not straightforward, and the Buddha claims here that it is precisely failing to understand dependent origination that has bound people to saṃsāra for so long. Since (as Richard Gombrich 1996: 46 observes) he personally preached it to Ānanda who by tradition remained unenlightened until after the death of the Buddha, Ānanda himself presumably at that time still did not understand it. The full formula for dependent origination (taken for convenience from the Pāli version in Saṃyutta Nikāya II: 12:1; cf. Gethin 1998: 141–2) is as follows:

Conditioned by (i) ignorance (avijjā) are (ii) formations (saṅkhārā), conditioned by formations is (iii) consciousness (viññāṇa), conditioned by consciousness is (iv) mind-and-body (nāmarūpa), conditioned by mind-and-body are (v) the six senses (saḷāyatana), conditioned by the six senses is (vi) sense-contact (phassa), conditioned by sense-contact is (vii) feeling (vedanā), conditioned by feeling is (viii) craving (taṇhā), conditioned by craving is (ix) attachment (or ‘grasping’; upādāna), conditioned by attachment is (x) becoming (bhava), conditioned by becoming is (xi) birth (jāti), conditioned by birth is (xii) old age and death (jarāmaraṇa) …

And thence come all the sufferings of saṃsāra. Because this is tagged to the impersonal lawlike nature of causation, reversing the process, through overcoming ignorance, can be guaranteed to lead – again, completely impersonally – to liberation.

The reader should stop reading here, and just appreciate the sheer exhilarating wonder the Buddha must have felt at realising the significance of the fact that effects follow from causes naturally. We are told that the sharpest of the Buddha’s disciples, Śāriputra, immediately left his previous teacher and followed the Buddha when he heard it said that ‘of those dharmas which arise from a cause, the Tathāgata has stated the cause, and also [their] cessation’.²⁸ The Buddha had discovered the actual law of things (Pāli: dhammatā; Sanskrit: dharmatā), something which clearly others had not realised for they had not taught it to him. Through this law he now had the key to putting a stop to that which all would want to stop if only they knew how. The discovery was absolutely – enlighteningly – liberating. From this sheer wonder of the Buddha at uncovering the inner turnings of the universe, and the overwhelming freedom of stopping their incessant roll, flows the whole history of Buddhist thought.

And yet while it is clear, I think, what is going on here, it is not at all obvious in detail what the twelve-fold formula for dependent origination actually means. This may reflect its composite origin, for the model we found in the Mahātaṇhāsaṅkhaya Sutta was much clearer, and more focused. One theory, widely (but not universally) held in later Buddhist tradition, would have the twelve links spreading over three lifetimes.²⁹ The twelve-fold formula for dependent origination thus becomes crucial among other things in explaining rebirth without recourse to an enduring Self. According to this model, the first link of the twelve-fold formula states that as a result of ignorance karmic formations – actions of body, speech or mind, flowing from morally wholesome or unwholesome intentions – take place. The Buddha is reported to have said of karma (Pāli: kamma), action: ‘I assert that action is volition [cetanā], since it is by willing that one performs an action with the body, speech or mind’ (Aṅguttara Nikāya III, p. 415, in Lamotte 1988: 34). Thus for the Buddha karma as an action issuing in appropriate results (necessitating rebirth) ceases to be the external act itself (as it is within e.g. the brahmanic sacrificial tradition). What are determinative in terms of ‘karmic results’ are wholesome or unwholesome volitions, that is, intentions.³⁰ Buddhism is all about the mind. As we shall see in the next section, the Buddha internalised the whole system of ‘significant actions’ and in so doing moralised it in terms of the impersonal causal law.

The first two links of the process pertain to past lives. It is ignorance in the past, giving rise to morally determinative intentions in the past which brings about the third link, consciousness, in the present life. According to this interpretation, ‘consciousness’ here is the consciousness that comes about in the mother’s womb as the first stage of the rebirth process. Conditioned by this consciousness is the fourth link, mind-and-body. ‘Mind’ here refers to the other three aggregates alongside consciousness and held to be mental associates (i.e. not physical matter), that is, feelings, perceptions, and formations. ‘Body’ here is the physical side of the organism, composed of derivatives of the four Great Elements, ‘earth’, ‘water’, ‘fire’, and ‘air’. Thus with this link we have an embodied individual, born in dependence upon previous morally determinative acts, traceable to the fact that he or she was not enlightened – was ignorant – in past lives.

The Buddha did not hold that the ‘reborn’ being is the same as the being who died. Thus strictly speaking this is not a case of rebirth. Likewise the ‘reborn’ being is not different from the being that died, at least if by ‘different’ we mean completely different in the way that, say, you and I are different. The reborn being is linked to the being that died by a causal process. Let us call the one who dies A, and the reborn being B. Then B is not the same as A. For example, B is not the same person as A (this, at least, seems to me uncontroversial). B occurs in causal dependence (of the right sort) on A. Among the relevant causal factors here are morally wholesome, or unwholesome, actions (karma) performed by A (in the sense understood above) in the past (or even by A’s previous incarnations as X, Y, and Z, back theoretically to infinity). Thus at death these factors in complex ways enter into the causal process (‘karmic causality’) which leads to another embodied individual occurring, in direct dependence upon actions performed by A in one or more of ‘his’ or ‘her’ lives. Therefore the link between the ‘reborn being’ and the ‘being that died’ is also explained in terms of causal dependence, where karmic causation is held to be a central factor in holding the whole process together. With causation there is absolutely no need for a Self to link A and B. This is why one speaks of causal dependence ‘of the right sort’. At death the psychophysical bundle reconfigures. One figuration breaks down and another figuration takes place. The bundle is a bundle of the aggregates, but each aggregate taken as a whole is a bundle of very short-lived impermanent components that form members of that aggregate-class. Thus the person is reducible to the temporary bundle of bundles where all constituents are radically impermanent, temporarily held together through causal relationships of the right sort. All this is in accordance with causal laws (notably of the karmic sort). Because there is this right sort of causal dependence, we cannot say of B that he or she is totally different from A either.³¹

Thus instead of identity and difference, and instead of eternalism and annihilationism, the Buddha substitutes dependent origination, in the sense of causal dependence. Thereby dependent origination becomes another meaning of the ‘Middle Path’. But note that while all this has been said specifically of the rebirth process here (and later Buddhist traditions elaborate that process in great detail), the Buddha would consider that much of this also holds throughout life. Throughout life there is constant change in accordance with causal laws and processes of the right sort. Between a person at one stage of their life – whatever stage – and at another stage of their life the relationship between the stages is one of neither identity nor difference, but dependent origination. Death is a particular sort of change, with particular modalities of causal relationships coming into play. But the Buddha does not appear to have thought that there is any fundamental difference in the way things really are between Archibald at age 3 and Archibald at age 73 on the one hand, and Archibald when he died at 81 and his rebirth, baby Fiona, on the other. There is, however, a difference between Archibald and Fiona on the one hand, and Duncan (who was Archibald’s insurance salesman). Between Archibald at 3, Archibald at 73, Archibald at 81, and baby Fiona there is absolutely nothing in common save causal connections of the right sort. With Duncan those connections too are lacking. Thus while we deny that Archibald at 73, Archibald at 81, and baby Fiona, are the same, we also deny they are different. Duncan is different.

Given that we now have an embodied individual, the twelve-fold formula interpreted over three lifetimes explains in more detail the process by which in this life we enmesh ourselves yet further in suffering, rebirth, and redeath. As we have seen, suffering arises through craving for sensory experiences (remembering that in India the mind is also treated as a sense). Thus, conditioned by mind-and-body is the fifth link, the six senses. The six senses make contact (the sixth link) with their appropriate objects. Through that contact comes the seventh link, feelings – pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. This is an important stage in the process, since this link along with all the previous links of the present life (i.e. from the third link, consciousness, on) are the results of former karma. They are thus not in themselves morally wholesome or unwholesome. They are therefore morally neutral. But at this stage (no doubt due to previous habits which the wise person should watch carefully and counteract), conditioned by those feelings the eighth link, craving, can so easily arise.³² From craving comes the ninth link, attachment (see above for the four types of attachment). And since both craving and attachment are morally negative taints (‘passions’; Pāli: kilesa; Sanskrit: kleśa) from then on it is all downhill. According to the formula, conditioned by attachment the tenth link, ‘becoming’, arises. It is not immediately obvious what this means. The ‘becoming’ here is what arises from attachment and explains birth, old age, death, and so on. Since conditioned by becoming is the eleventh link, birth, in order to explain the formula over three lives the ‘becoming’ here must therefore ultimately equal whatever at the beginning of the formula explained this life. Thus ‘becoming’ is explained to mean the ‘becoming’ of karma, the wholesome and unwholesome intentions arising from attachment (due to craving) which explain future rebirth.³³ And from this occurs birth into a new life, and thence the twelfth link that is old age and death.

This twelve-fold formula for dependent origination as it stands is strange. In one way it makes sense spread over three lives, yet this explanation looks like an attempt to make sense of what may well be a compilation from originally different sources.³⁴ Why, for example, explain the first of the three lives only in terms of the first two links, and explain the tenth link, ‘becoming’ as essentially the same as the second link, formations? Why introduce explanations in terms of karma where none of the links obviously mentions karma? Frauwallner (1973) would want to argue that there is certain logic in the eighth to the twelfth link, basing suffering on craving. Perhaps the first to the seventh links were constructed in order to tag craving to ignorance. But it may be impossible at our present stage of scholarship to work out very satisfactorily what the original logic of the full twelve-fold formula was intended to be, if there ever was one intention at all.³⁵

A Further Note on Karma

As we have seen, for the Buddha karma is essentially volition (intention) which leads to actions of body, speech, or mind.³⁶ Wholesome and unwholesome karmic intentions entail (in this life or in future lives) pleasant and unpleasant experiences, feelings, as their karmic results, together with the particular psychophysical organism that is capable of undergoing those feelings. Whereas wholesome and unwholesome intentions are by definition morally virtuous or unvirtuous, the results – while pleasant and painful – in themselves are neither wholesome nor unwholesome. A pain in itself has no moral quality. But it is the result of unwholesome karmic intention(s). Thus for a feeling to be unpleasant is not as such for it to be morally wrong. A volition or intention of hatred or greed (produced by ignorance) as a mental response to what is unpleasant, on the other hand, is morally wrong (i.e. unwholesome, not conducive to following the path to liberation). For the Buddha this is all underpinned by the impersonal lawlike behaviour of causality. Thus an unwholesome intention because it is a cause brings about a feeling of pain as a result. A feeling of pain (like all in saṃsāra) must be a result, and therefore it must be the result of its cause, an unwholesome intention.³⁷ And the feeling of pain, as resulting, occurs (by definition) in the same causal continuum as the unwholesome intention occurred as cause. This is why, the Buddhist wants to claim, even with an impermanent psychophysical continuum and without a Self there is no ‘causal confusion’, or ‘confusion of continua’. Even without a Self, the karmic results occur in the same continuum in which occurred the unwholesome intentions. Feelings of pain are therefore brought about not by others (other persons, God or gods) but by oneself, in the sense that in everyday speech we use ‘oneself’ to refer to events in the same causal continuum. This is a situation of ‘total responsibility’ (Gombrich 1971: Ch. 5).

Richard Gombrich has commented that ‘just as Being lies at the heart of the Upaniṣadic world view, Action lies at the heart of the Buddha’s. “Action”, of course, is kamma; and primarily it refers to morally relevant action’ (Gombrich 1996: 48–9). Gombrich wants to argue that the Buddha did not simply take over a pre-existing brahmanical doctrine of karma, which then sat often uneasily alongside his real interest in gnosis and liberation. The Buddha’s attitude to karma is different from that of the wider brahmanic culture, and is of a piece with his vision of what is involved in gaining liberation. That is, the Buddha understood karma in quite a different sense from that of his compatriots, and that different sense was soteriologically relevant. In the brahmanical context karma is significant ritual action, or (by the time of the early Upaniṣads) actual good and bad deeds (the implication being that a bad intention without a bad deed does not count). For Jains (as an example of another renouncer group for whom we have some information) karma was seen as quasi-material, like a polluting dirt which weighed down the Self and kept it in saṃsāra. Thus for Jains all karma is one way or another bad. Ultimately one should cease acting altogether.³⁸ The Buddha’s position was quite different from either of these groups and (as with his position on the Self) it was different as far as we can tell from all others in India. It was the Buddha who declared that karma is intention, a mental event. In so doing, Gombrich comments, the Buddha ‘turned the brahmin ideology upside down and ethicised the universe. I do not see how one could exaggerate the importance of the Buddha’s ethicisation of the world, which I regard as a turning point in the history of civilisation’ (Gombrich 1996: 51). Thus the Buddha turned attention from the avoidaṃce of physical action, or physical acts cleansing the pollution resulting from ‘bad karma’ – such as acts of physical asceticism, or the brahmanic actions of purification, which typically involve washing, or ingesting ‘the five products of the cow’ – to ‘inner purification’, mental training. For the Buddha, as we have seen, craving – a mental state – arises from ignorance – a mental state – and leads to (unwholesome) karma – a mental state – and this leads to suffering – a mental state. The Buddha’s vision of karma as really being intention is of a sort with his stress on overcoming craving through insight into the way things really are. Through understanding how things really are, craving is dissolved. We could relate this to what Gombrich calls ‘an ethicised consciousness’ (1996: 61). Following the Tevijja Sutta (the ‘Discourse on the Learned (in the Vedas?)’), Gombrich speaks of the monk engaged in actively pervading the universe with a mind of kindness and compassion. This is a sort-of infinite karma, the ultimate karma that leads to the overcoming of suffering, liberation.³⁹

The Universe of The Buddha

I want now to look briefly at how the Buddha (or the early Buddhist tradition) saw the structure of the universe in which he dwelt and which yet he had transcended.⁴⁰ The doctrinal framework here is that of the five (or six) types of rebirth, and the ‘threefold world’.

First, the Buddha speaks in texts like the Mahāsīhanāda Sutta (the ‘Greater Discourse which is the Lion’s Roar’) of five types of rebirth. All rebirth is due to karma and is impermanent. Short of attaining enlightenment, in each rebirth one is born and dies, to be reborn elsewhere in accordance with the completely impersonal causal nature of one’s own karma. The endless cycle of birth, rebirth, and redeath, is saṃsāra. One can be reborn in a hell (sometimes translated as ‘purgatory’ to stress its impermanent, purifying nature), as an animal (including all creatures other than those of the other types of rebirth), a ghost,⁴¹ a human or a god. This list of five should be noted, since other Buddhist texts speak of six ‘destinies’, adding that of the asuras, jealous anti-gods (sometimes spoken of in English as ‘titans’) who are said to be constantly at war with gods. The list of six types of rebirth, or ‘destinies’, is rather more familiar in the West, particularly from the Tibetan pictorial representation in the so-called ‘Wheel of Life’. It is arguable however that the earliest formula involved only five, and in the Kathāvatthu (8: 1) – the fifth book of the Abhidhamma Piṭaka of the Pāli Canon – the teaching of six destinies is explicitly contradicted, claiming that the asuras can be split between the gods and the ghosts.⁴²

Rebirth in a hell, as an animal, or as a ghost is referred to as a bad ‘destiny’ (gati), while rebirth as a human or a god is a good destiny. ‘Bad destinies’ are so defined due to the preponderance of pain there. Good destinies involve (other things being equal) either a preponderance of pleasure over pain (rebirth as a god), or in general equal pleasure and pain (as a human). There are many hells, and the time spent in them is very, very long indeed. They are, frankly, hellish. The very lowest hell is termed ‘without intermission’ (avīci), although life in a hell does eventually come to an end. Note that what ‘destines’ one to these destinies is not the action of a God or anyone else, but one’s own karma. Thus one has a choice over one’s destiny. Later tradition is very unsure whether rebirth as an asura (given that they are consumed with jealousy) is also a good destiny. The frequent claim that it is a good destiny may reflect more the needs of symmetry (three bad, three good) than doctrinal considerations.

The ‘threefold world’ divides into (i) the desire realm (kāmadhātu); (ii) the form realm (rūpadhātu); and (iii) the formless realm (arūpadhātu).⁴³ The desire realm consists of all the realms of rebirth apart from (taken as a whole) that of the gods. Only one group of gods falls under the desire realm, and these gods are appropriately called ‘desire gods’ (kāmadeva). They are the gods who are closest to humans, and into this category the Buddhist tradition has placed the gods it is familiar with from the Vedic brahmanic and later Hindu traditions. These are the powerful gods it is appropriate to pray to for rewards, or contact through possession, providing one is aware that these gods (and goddesses, of course) are all part of saṃsāra. They are thus subject to greed, hatred, and delusion and their derivatives (such as pride, anger, or lust), and are very definitely unenlightened. The common feature of beings in the desire realm is that they have the five physical senses plus consciousness. In other words, they operate from a base of sensual experience. The desire gods are thought to occupy one or other of six ‘heavens’, each in certain ways better than the last.⁴⁴ If we take all these six heavens together, they can be classed as the ‘world of the gods’ (devaloka), although as we shall see there are many, many gods on higher planes still beyond this sensual ‘world of the gods’. Cosmologically these planes where beings have all five senses as well as consciousness form ‘world-spheres’ (cakravāḍas). For a crisp description of a world-sphere I cannot even begin to improve on Gethin, whose recent work has contributed greatly to drawing attention to the interest of Buddhist cosmology and its relationship to meditation and hence Buddhist soteriology:

At the centre of a cakra-vāḍa is the great world mountain, Meru or Sineru. This is surrounded by seven concentric rings of mountains and seas. Beyond these mountains, in the four cardinal directions, are four continents. The southern continent, Jambudvīpa or ‘the continent of the rose-apple tree’, is the continent inhabited by ordinary human beings; the southern part, below the towering abode of snows (himālaya) is effectively India, the land where buddhas arise. In the spaces between world-spheres and below are various hells, while in the shadow of the slopes of Mount Meru dwell the jealous gods called Asuras, expelled from the heaven of the Thirty-Three [Sanskrit: Trāyastriṃśa; Pāli: Tāvatiṃsa, the second of the desire realms heavens] by its king Śakra (Pāli Sakka [sometimes, but by no means always, identified with the Vedic god Indra]). On the slopes of Mount Meru itself and rising above its peak are the six realms inhabited by the gods of the sense-sphere [i.e. desire-realm]. A Great Brahmā of the lower realms of pure form may rule over a thousand such world-spheres, while Brahmās of the higher realms of the form-sphere [form realm] are said to rule over a hundred thousand.

(Gethin 1998: 118–19; see also Gethin 1997a)

Note that the description here is of one world-sphere, but there are many, many world-spheres, so many in fact that the number converges on infinity. Thus the Buddhist view is that, taken as a totality, not only is time infinite but space too is effectively infinite. The Buddhist cosmological vision is about as vast as it is possible to conceive. It is clear that in a world-sphere the gods of the desire realm are thought to occupy places in physical space, and while Śakra may rule over the gods most closely related to humans, there are higher gods for whom he too is a subject.⁴⁵ There is no final god who rules over either one world-sphere or all the world-spheres, although beings such as some humans may think there is one God who is the supreme ruler and even creator. There may even be a god who mistakenly considers that he is indeed the creator and supreme ruler of the entire system.⁴⁶

Technically the gods of the form and formless realms are known not as ‘gods’ (deva), but as ‘Brahmās’. Those of the form realm are ranked in a hierarchy of sixteen levels (in the Theravāda scheme), divided into four classes (in the ratio 3,3,3,7) corresponding to the four dhyānas (Pāli: jhānas), the four ‘meditations’ or ‘absorptions’ that we met earlier. The highest of these levels or planes is the ‘Supreme’ (Pāli: akaniṭṭha; Sanskrit: akaniṣṭha). Brahmās within the form realm are said to have only two senses, sight and hearing. The Brahmās of the formless realm are of four types, corresponding to a hierarchy of four formless meditative attainments (samāpatti): (i) infinite space; (ii) infinite consciousness (viññāṇa); (iii) nothingness, and (iv) neither perception (saññā) nor nonperception. This last is also referred to as the ‘peak of existence’ (Pāli: bhavagga; Sanskrit: bhavāgra). Brahmās within the formless realm have just consciousness, and so long as they are in that rebirth and have not attained enlightenment they presumably enjoy uninterruptedly the appropriate meditative attainment. In total therefore (including the asuras) there are thirty-one different types of beings, or possible states, within saṃsāra. Outside all of this (although not in spatial terms of course) is nirvāṇa. Nirvāṇa is not elsewhere. It is simply not in saṃsāra. It is simply not part of any of this, and can only be specified in terms of its negation.

It is not necessary to proceed up all the realms and planes to the very highest before attaining liberation. They are not ranked like a ladder. Many humans have become enlightened, directly from the human plane. As we have seen, liberation is a matter of gnosis and gnosis could in theory be obtained anywhere and at any time. But actually the Buddhist tradition holds that nirvāṇa can be obtained only from the human realm, or a god realm above the human. Indeed the gods of the five very highest planes of the form realm are said to dwell in the ‘pure abodes’, corresponding to the highest and most perfect development of the fourth dhyāna, and as such are all ‘never-returners’ (anāgāmin). We have seen already that the fourth dhyāna is held to be a particularly important springboard for enlightenment. Although not yet enlightened they will never again return through the cycle of saṃsāra to the lower realms. They are sure of eventually attaining enlightenment, without needing to sojourn in the formless realms.⁴⁷

The Buddhist cosmology, with its realms of rebirth including hells and gods who occupy physical space and undergo sensory experiences as humans do, is reasonably comprehensible. But what is meant by referring ‘in the same cosmological breath’ to the form and formless realm gods as stages of meditative absorption? Are these places of rebirth, or are they some sort of ‘inner state’ of a meditator, perhaps encountered during deep meditation? Gethin (1998: 119 ff.) argues that the key to understanding what is going on here is the ‘principle of the equivalence of cosmology and psychology. I mean by this that in the traditional understanding the various realms of existence relate rather closely to certain commonly (and not so commonly) experienced states of mind’. Note however that Gethin is not saying that the Buddhist cosmology is really all about current or potential states of mind, psychology, or meditation here and now, and is therefore not really a cosmology at all in the sense that these are actually realms or planes of rebirth. These different planes are indeed realms of rebirth. Otherwise either rebirth would always be into the human realm or there would be no rebirth at all. And that is not traditional Buddhism. Moreover if ‘cosmos’ is defined sufficiently widely there is no reason why this should not be spoken of as ‘cosmology’. Thus if someone dies here they may, under appropriate circumstances, be properly thought of as having been reborn (in the sense of ‘rebirth’ explained above) in, say, a formless realm. Their coarse physical body is perhaps cremated here. Therefore there is no sense of their mind left, as the mind of the embodied person they were. But the story has not ended. The tradition does indeed want to speak of an ‘elsewhere’ here, and ‘they’ have been reborn elsewhere. Their rebirth in that formless realm is causally dependent on their meditative attainment in a life prior to that rebirth. Thus we cannot be speaking here of states of mind, psychology, or meditation in the sense that these are purely states of mind and so on of a particular embodied individual here and now in this life.

Mental intentions (karma) which are wholesome, animated by the three basic virtuous states of mind, non-greed, non-hatred and non-delusion, give rise to appropriate acts and favourable rebirths. Unwholesome intentions animated by greed, hatred, and delusion produce unfavourable rebirths.⁴⁸ The ‘favourable rebirths’ here are rebirths as a human (possibly as an asura) and as a god of the desire realm. Unfavourable rebirths are rebirths in hells, as a ghost, or as an animal (including a fish, worms, bugs, etc.). Thus favourable and unfavourable rebirths spring from states of mind. And there are some specific wholesome states of mind in addition to these that as a matter of fact occur only in meditation. These are states like attaining one of the four meditative absorptions (Sanskrit: dhyānas; Pāli: jhānas). Favourable rebirth as a god of the desire realm, enjoying various sensual pleasures, occurs through acts animated by such states of mind as non-greed, non-hatred and non-delusion. Similarly the favourable rebirth as a god of e.g. the form realm occurs due to having accustomed oneself to one or more of the four dhyānas.⁴⁹ A monk who, for example, has cultivated the path to a high level removes various negative factors preventing the attainment of enlightenment and attains the fourth dhyāna. After death that monk will be reborn in one of the pure abodes, corresponding to the fourth dhyāna, and will there attain enlightenment. Thus given that rebirth accords with mental events, reference to the higher planes as corresponding to meditative states simply describes the sort of mental event which is necessary in order to attain rebirth on those planes. The ‘bodies’ of those reborn there – defined in terms of experiences of seeing and hearing, plus consciousness for the form realm, and consciousness alone for the formless realm – are the bodies that support and express experience on those planes. Beings reborn on those planes are undergoing the experiences of those dhyānas.

It follows from all of this that when in this life the meditator attains to, say, the third dhyāna, that meditator is undergoing temporarily the experience of one reborn as a god on that particular plane of the form realm. That is what being reborn there is like. Correspondingly, for one undergoing any of the appropriate mental states in this life, one undergoes temporarily the experience associated with being reborn on the appropriate plane. Thus if one is overwhelmed with greed, hatred, or delusion, one is in the state of one born as a ghost, in hell, or an animal respectively. But one familiar with the third dhyāna will, after death, be reborn on the appropriate plane for that dhyāna. The appropriate plane of the cosmology is not simply a description of the mental state of a meditator. Similarly, in spite of a common suggestion among some modern Buddhists, the plane of hell is not simply a description of the state of mind of one in this life full of hatred. As one’s mind is, so one actually becomes.⁵⁰

Finally there is the destruction of worlds. In Indian thought even for traditions that believe in a creator God there is no such thing as the emergence of the universe from nothing. A common Indian model sees the universe as evolving from a state of what we might call ‘implosion’ to manifestation. It then remains for a very long time. Eventually the universe implodes again. It remains for a further long period in imploded state before evolving (for theists, due to the action of God) once more. And so on, throughout all eternity. The Buddhists employ a similar model, it being understood that all of this occurs due to an impersonal lawlike causation and not divine whim. Elements of this system are found in works like the Aggañña Sutta (‘Discourse on Beginnings’), and are elaborated in later Abhidharma works. When the universe implodes it implodes from the lower realms upwards. Thus the hells implode first of all. Sometimes the implosion is through fire, and this implosion stretches as far as the third of the god-planes of the form realm (the Mahābrahmā plane), thereby taking in all up to and including the plane corresponding to the first dhyāna. The rest remains. Implosion through fire is the most frequent sort of implosion. At other times the implosion is through water, taking in all the above plus the planes corresponding to the second dhyāna as well. At other times there is a wind implosion, which includes all that included in the water implosion and also the plane corresponding to the third dhyāna. But implosion can stretch no further. Beings reborn in the plane corresponding to the fourth dhyāna (and above, for that matter) cannot be affected by any of this. When an implosion occurs, beings that perish are reborn somewhere else that still remains, perfectly in accordance with their karma. Let us not worry about them.⁵¹

Buddhist Meditation – The Theoretical Framework

It is through working with and on the mind that Buddhists consider one can bring about the transformation in seeing required in order to bring to an end the forces generating suffering and rebirth, and thus attain liberation. Earlier I suggested that, for the Buddhist, meditation closes the gap between the way things appear to be and the way they actually are. How does meditation do this? The structure of Buddhist meditation in the oldest texts and throughout much if not all of the Buddhist tradition in India and elsewhere is to calm down and still the mind. One then uses that still, calm, mind to investigate how things really are. This is in order to see things free from the blocks and obscurations that normally hinder our vision. These blocks and obscurations entail our immersion in saṃsāra. Calming the mind is called ‘calming (meditation)’ (Sanskrit: śamatha; Pāli: samatha). Discovering with a calm mind how things are really is called ‘insight (meditation)’ (Sanskrit: vipaśyanā; Pāli: vipassanā). At least some degree of calming is considered necessary to insight. As we have seen, right concentration is a stage of the eightfold path. Nevertheless, depending on the abilities of the meditator it need not be necessary to follow through calming meditation to the actual attainment of the meditative absorptions (dhyānas/jhānas) before commencing insight meditation. When calming and insight are linked the mind has the strength and orientation really to break through to a deep transformative understanding of how things truly are.

As one might expect, the Buddhist tradition has elaborated the stages and elements of the path of meditation in great detail. A certain amount of material can be found in early sources such as the suttas of the Pāli Canon, particularly for example the Sāmaññaphala Sutta and the Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna Sutta (the ‘Greater Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness’). But for the detailed elaboration of the path one must look to the later authoritative compendiums such as the Visuddhimagga (‘Path of Purification’) of the Theravādin Buddhaghosa (fifth century CE), or the Abhidharmakośa (‘Treasury of Abhidharma’) of Vasubandhu. Vasubandhu followed either the Sarvāstivādin (Vaibhāṣika) or the Sautrāntika tradition and wrote in the fourth or fifth century CE. These two sources were constructed independently of one another, and were inheritors of different Buddhist traditions. They are far from agreeing in detail.

Calming meditation aims to still the mind. It presupposes that the meditator has faith in the teachings of the Buddha, has adopted the moral perspective required of a good Buddhist, and is otherwise involved in the religious activities expected of a practitioner who is seriously engaged in the path. In order to bring about the desired state of mental calm the meditator starts by learning to focus the mind, narrowing down its attention so that he or she becomes simply aware. In other words, he or she concentrates. Because concentration requires something to concentrate on, works such as the Visuddhimagga list forty different possible objects of concentration. These include concentrating on, for example, a blue disc. This is one of ten objects of concentration known in Pāli as kasiṇas, and taking a coloured disc as an object is said (among others) to be particularly suitable for those whose personality is dominated by hatred among the three root poisons. Those who are dominated by greed might take as their object the skeleton. Those by delusion (or whose mind is inclined to instability) might start with mindfulness of breathing. This last has become well-known in the modern world through being the very first meditation practice in the Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna Sutta, a discourse particularly favoured by more recent Burmese meditation masters and there used, perhaps because everyone’s mind is at first inclined to instability, for all meditators. Indeed the text describes itself as ‘the sole way’:

Herein, a monk having gone to the forest, to the foot of a tree, or to an empty place, sits down cross-legged, keeps his body erect and his mindfulness alert. Just mindful he breathes in and mindful he breathes out. Breathing in a long breath, he knows ‘I breathe in a long breath’; breathing out a long breath, he knows ‘I breathe out a long breath’; breathing in a short breath, he knows ‘I breathe in a short breath’; breathing out a short breath, he knows ‘I breathe out a short breath’.

(Trans. Nyanaponika Thera 1969: 117–18)

And so on. Or there are the so-called ‘divine abidings’ (brahmavihāras), also known as the ‘four immeasurables’, again particularly recommended for those of a hate disposition although it has been suggested that they were originally thought of as one sufficient means for attaining enlightenment itself.⁵² These entail developing all-pervading loving kindness (Sanskrit: maitrī; Pāli: mettā). This is the pervasive wish ‘may all sentient beings be well and happy’. One develops all-pervading compassion (karuṇā), the pervasive wish ‘may all sentient beings be free of suffering’, all-pervading sympathetic joy (muditā) – delight at the happiness of others – and all-pervading equanimity (Sanskrit: upekṣā; Pāli: upekkhā). In such meditations one practices steadily and repeatedly, gently drawing the mind back to the object when it wanders. The meditator is exhorted to overcome the five hindrances: sensual desire, ill will, tiredness and sleepiness, excitement and depression, and doubt. In abandoning the five hindrances, the Sāmaññaphala Sutta observes, the meditator ‘looks upon himself as freed from debt, rid of disease, out of jail, a free man, and secure’ (trans. Rhys-Davids 1899: 84). And eventually he or she attains the first jhāna (Sanskrit: dhyāna). As we saw above, the first jhāna is characterised by applied thought, examination, and the joy and happiness that are said to arise from seclusion. The second jhāna lacks applied thought and examination, but is a state of joy and happiness that arises from one-pointedness of mind; in this state the meditator’s inner absorption has become so refined that consciously applied thought and examination are no longer needed in order to place the mind on the object. The third jhāna lacks even joy, which can become a disturbance, and has only happiness and one-pointedness, but is a state of mindfulness and equanimity. The fourth jhāna similarly lacks happiness, and is said to be the complete perfection of mindfulness and equanimity. From attaining the fourth jhāna it becomes possible (it is said) to develop what might be called supernormal powers (Sanskrit: ṛddhis; Pāli: iddhis), or ‘superknowledges’ (Sanskrit: abhijñā; Pāli: abhiññā). These include the ability to create ‘mind-made’ bodies, to walk through walls, fly through the air, hear distant sounds, know the minds of others, and to know the past lives of oneself and others.⁵³ The general view of the Buddhist tradition is that some considerable ability in calming meditation is necessary in order to develop very effectively insight meditation, although it is not necessary actually to attain the fourth dhyāna before commencing insight meditation. Insight meditation involves bringing about a state of meditative absorption where the object of meditation is not one of the objects of calming meditation but rather is how things really are, understood in terms of suffering, impermanence, and not-Self and their implications and ramifications. In so doing one attains ‘wisdom’ (Sanskrit: prajñā; Pāli: paññā). As can be readily understood from what has gone before, seeing in this manner directly in the deepest way possible is held to cut completely the forces which lead to rebirth and suffering.⁵⁴

The model for the path of insight meditation employed in Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga (see chapters 18–22) is that of the ‘seven purifications’. The first two purifications concern (i) engagement in proper moral conduct (sīla), and (ii) developing calm (samatha). The third (iii) is ‘purification of view’, breaking down the sense of Self through constant direct awareness (mindfulness) of experience in terms of actually being a bundle of e.g. the five aggregates, divided into mind and body in mutual dependence, and nothing more. The fourth (iv) purification is the ‘purification by overcoming doubt’. Just as the purification of view involves an awareness of the interdependence of mind and body at any one time, this fourth purification involves examining causal dependence as a continuum in time. Thus one comes to understand kamma (karma) and to see directly how things are the result of an impersonal lawlike causality and nothing more. In overcoming doubt, Buddhaghosa observes (19: 27), one becomes a ‘lesser stream-enterer’. The next purification (v) is that of ‘knowing and seeing what is the way (or ‘path’, magga) and what is not the way’. This involves taking various groups and classes of phenomena and seeing that they are all impermanent, suffering, and not Self. One then sees them as arising and falling in their constant change and impermanence. Thus the meditator comes to deconstruct the apparent stability of things, and to see directly the world as a process, a flow. Gethin draws attention to the images Buddhaghosa selects (from earlier Buddhist sources) for this stage of the meditator’s experience:

[T]he world is no longer experienced as consisting of things that are lasting and solid but rather as something that vanishes almost as soon as it appears – like dew drops at sunrise, like a bubble on water, like a line drawn on water, like a mustard-seed placed on the point of an awl, like a flash of lightning; things in themselves lack substance and always elude one’s grasp – like a mirage, a conjuring trick, a dream, the circle formed by a whirling firebrand, a fairy city, foam, or the trunk of a banana tree.

(Gethin 1998: 190; ref. Visuddhimagga 20: 104)⁵⁵

The mind of the meditator at this time is said to be close to absorption (dhyāna), and there is a danger that the meditator might become complacent and attached (Visuddhimagga 20: sects. 105 ff.). Tearing him- or herself away from this, the meditator attains the sixth (vi) purification, ‘purification through knowing and seeing the path (or ‘way’; paṭipadā)’. At this stage the meditator returns to contemplating with renewed vigour and ever deepening awareness the arising and falling of phenomena (dhammas), and he or she attains a series of eight knowledges with, it is said ‘knowledge in conformity to truth as the ninth’ (op. cit.: Ch. 21). Attaining the eight knowledges, in a state of deep equanimity and concentration, the meditator crosses over from worldly meditative absorption to transcendent or supramundane absorption. At this point the meditator ‘changes lineage’. He or she ceases to belong to the lineage (family) of ordinary people (Pāli: puthujjana; Sanskrit: pṛthagjana) and joins the lineage of the Noble Ones (Pāli: ariya; Sanskrit: ārya). He or she is said now to take as the meditative object nibbāna (nirvāṇa). Nevertheless the complete eradication of defilements may still take time. One is said to become a ‘stream-enterer’ (Sanskrit.: srotāpanna; Pāli: sotāpanna) through abandoning the first three of the ten fetters (saṃyojana), the ‘view of individuality’, doubt, and clinging to precepts and vows. In finally and deeply abandoning these one will be reborn at the most a further seven times before becoming enlightened. In fully becoming a stream-enterer (or any of the other three ‘noble fruits’) one is said to attain the seventh (vii) and final purification, the ‘purification by knowing and seeing’. On also permanently weakening the next two fetters, sensual desire and aversion, one becomes a ‘once-returner’ (Sanskrit: sakṛdāgāmin; Pāli: sakadāgāmin), who will be reborn as a human being no more than one further time. On completely abandoning all these five fetters one becomes a ‘never-returner’ (anāgāmin) and if one still does not attain full enlightenment, is on death reborn in one of the highest planes of the form realm. On completely and irrevocably eradicating all ten fetters (including in addition the five of desire for form, desire for the formless, pride, agitation, and ignorance) one becomes enlightened, an arhat (Sanskrit) or arahat (Pāli). In one moment the meditator sees and understands the Four Noble Truths, and all the factors leading to enlightenment are fulfilled. In subsequent moments the meditator is said to enjoy the ‘resultant’ (phala) meditative absorption (see Gethin 1998: 72–3, 193–4). These four ‘noble fruits’ may be attained successively, over a long period of time. But there is also a view that their attainment may be in quick succession, or even that one might ‘leap’ as it were, directly to one or other of the fruits.⁵⁶

Abhidharma (Pāli: Abhidhamma)

As we have seen, the term ‘Abhidharma’ refers fundamentally to the third section (piṭaka) of the Buddhist canon (the Tripiṭaka). It also refers derivatively to the teachings, approach, and insight contained in that section of the canon, as well as their explanation, elaboration and summaries contained in later commentaries, compendiums, and digests, such as the Abhidharmakośa of Vasubandhu. Only two complete Abhidharma canonical collections remain: the Theravāda Abhidhamma in the Pāli Canon, and the Sarvāstivāda (Vaibhāṣika) Abhidharma that survives mainly in Chinese translation.⁵⁷ Both consist of seven books, and although there are signs that some books share a common source, they are quite different books.⁵⁸ In the Theravāda Pāli Canon the Abhidhamma section is attributed directly to the Buddha himself, although at least one book (the Kathāvatthu) is also said to be the work of a certain Moggaliputtatissa and clearly relates to doctrinal disputes which occurred long after the death of the Buddha. All the books of the Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma are attributed to various elders other than the Buddha, but the claim is that those elders were compilers rather than authors in that they assembled the books from material scattered throughout the canon. Another school, the Sautrāntika, while accepting the approach and many of the tenets of the Abhidharma, appears to have gained its name (‘those who follow the sūtras’) through a rejection by its adherents of any claim that the Buddha himself actually spoke the Abhidharma.

The controversies concerning the status of the Abhidharma books should indicate that we are dealing here with material that in the form in which we have it now is certainly somewhat later than the Vinaya and Sūtra parts of the canon. The Abhidharma represents a phase of systematisation and clarification of the teachings contained in the Sūtras, and probably grew out of summary lists of the main topics of a teaching prepared for memorisation. With the evolution of the Abhidharma, and Abhidharma style, however, what we find emerging are not just lists of essential points in the discourses. Rather, we find lists which enumerate with the maximum possible exactitude what is actually occurring in a particular psychological or physical situation spoken of in the sūtras or occurring in life generally. The lists are lists of what is seen to be the case by one who sees things the way they really are. The Abhidharma lists are exhaustive lists of possible psychophysical events. They thus correspond to – and also form a template for – the contents of insight meditation.

The Buddha might say ‘Oh monks, on my alms round I was given a strawberry’. But if he were to speak with maximum possible exactitude there would be no independently real thing referred to by ‘I’, in the way it is experienced by a person who is unenlightened. Nor would there be that thing referred to by ‘strawberry’, nor probably a lot of other things that are normally assumed when this simple sentence is uttered in everyday life by unenlightened beings. If we were to speak with maximum possible exactitude here, how would we analyse this situation? The answer would involve listing various psychological and physical factors, each of which is impermanent, and each of which is here relating to the others in a particular sort of causal relationship. Which types of psychological and physical factors are those, and what types of causal relationship are there? How, in this specific situation, do the psychological and physical factors come together in causal relationship? This is what the Abhidharma texts are all about.

As we have seen, implicit in Buddhist philosophy from the very beginning was a distinction between the way things appear to be and the way they actually are. Buddhist thought tends to look beyond apparent stability, apparent unity, to a flow of composite parts which are elaborated by mental processes of construction and reification into the relatively stable entities of our everyday world.⁵⁹ There appears to be a Self, but really there is not. Really there is just a flow of material form, sensations, perceptions, formations (i.e. other mental factors like volitions/intentions), and the flow of consciousness. The way things appear to be is one thing, the way they are actually is another. Quite early in the development of Buddhist thought – certainly in Abhidharma sources – this distinction issued in a clear distinction between conventional reality (or ‘truth’; Sanskrit: saṃvṛtisatya; Pāli: sammutisacca), and the ultimate way of things, how it really is (Sanskrit: paramārthasatya; Pāli: paramatthasacca). The religio-philosophical project of the Buddhist lies in knowing directly the conventional as conventional, rather than investing it with an illusory ultimacy. The ultimate truth, how it really is, lies precisely in the fact that what appeared to be ultimate is merely conventional. It appeared that there was a Self, but really there is only a flow of the aggregates and the Self is just an artificial unity, a self, oneself, the person one is, in fact a pragmatic conventional construct. But once we adopt this perspective it is clear that even talk of ‘five aggregates’ is simply shorthand for a far more complex list of types of psychophysical impermanent factors, events, which might occur.

The common approach of Buddhist philosophy, experienced in insight meditation, is to probe, to investigate. The terminating point of that analysis – what the analysis finds is actually there, what is therefore resistant to the probing, dissolving analysis – is spoken of as ‘how it is’, i.e. an ‘ultimate truth’ (or an ‘ultimate reality’). In Buddhist thought in the immediate centuries after the death of the Buddha this probing analysis was taken further, and even the five aggregates as simple unities were seen as obscuring a further dissolution, analysis into a plurality of further elements. This analysis rapidly came to embrace not just the psychophysical aggregates of a conscious being but also to include all things in the universe. These elements were known as dharmas (Pāli: dhammas), ‘phenomena’, or maybe just ‘factors’. The dharmas form the psychophysical building blocks of the world as experienced by us.

For example, take the first aggregate, material form (rūpa). If we want to talk about how it really is, material form does not occur. ‘Material form’ is not a dharma. Rather, this expression is shorthand for the occurrence of particular instances of (in the ancient Indian system) solidity (‘earth’), and/or fluidity (‘water’), or heat (‘fire’), or motion (‘air’), and various other possible physical factors derived from these. These are related in some sort of causal connection (perhaps presenting thereby the physical object ‘strawberry’). Thus in general under ‘material form’ comes various classes of events. Is it the same for a specific case of e.g. solidity itself? It seems not. An instance of solidity is irreducible to some further factors. Thus an instance of solidity, transient as it is, is what is really there, seen by one who sees things the way they really are. An instance of solidity is thus a dharma. The Abhidharma texts set out to offer a list of all the types of events into which experiences can be analysed when we aim to find what is ‘really there’. They also explain how these link up causally and relate to each other in order to provide us with the actual world of lived experience. Thus the Abhidharma texts, in contrast to e.g. the Sūtras, are phrased in ‘how-it-actually-is language’, universally valid, and not in the loose speech of everyday discourse in which the Buddha spoke when he spoke in a manner appropriate to the actual teaching situation he was in. Therefore we also find essential to Buddhist exegesis a distinction between texts or discourses that are definitive and tell it as it is (Sanskrit: nītārtha; Pāli: nītattha), and those that were phrased the way they are phrased with a particular purpose in view. If we are interested in precision these latter texts or discourses require to be interpreted, to have their meaning ‘drawn out’ (neyārtha; Pāli: neyyattha). In general for their advocates Abhidharma texts, and Abhidharma discourses, concern ultimate truth (paramārthasatya), and are definitive (nītārtha).

The Theravāda Abhidhamma produced a list of 82 classes of dhammas.⁶⁰ That is, all possible experience can be analysed down into events each one of which will be an instance of one or other of the 82 classes of dhammas. Eighty-one of these (types of) dhammas are said to be conditioned (Sanskrit: saṃskṛta; Pāli: saṃkhata: the direct result of causes). One, nibbāna, is unconditioned (asaṃskṛta/asaṃkhata). Thus, technically, for the Theravāda Abhidhamma nibbāna is an ultimate, a dhamma. This means that in the most general sense nibbāna forms the content of an experiential event that cannot be analysed into more fundamental components, and it is in a unique category described as ‘unconditioned’. Being unconditioned, not itself the direct result of causes, it will never cease.⁶¹ Each class of dhamma has its own specific characteristic, by which an occurrence of that dhamma is recognised. Thus the dhamma of solidity has physical resistance as its characteristic. Where there is a case of physical resistance that indicates solidity. That is how one knows one has a case of solidity.

The 81 classes of conditioned dhammas fall into three categories: consciousness (citta =viññāna (Sanskrit: vijñāna)), mental associates (cetasikas; Sanskrit: caitasikas), and material or physical form (rūpa). Consciousness consists of one class of dhamma. Mental associates consist of 52 classes of dhammas. Twenty-five of these are wholesome, including non-greed, non-hatred, and non-delusion, faith, mindfulness, compassion, and so on. Fourteen are unwholesome, including wrong views. Thirteen are morally neutral, and occurrences gain their moral colouring from the other dhammas that occur along with them. Seven of these 13 are common to all mental ‘occasions’: contact, feeling, perception,⁶² volition, mental life, concentration, and attention. Material form consists of 28 classes of dhammas. Other Abhidhamma discussions concern which combinations of dhammas are permissible since, for example, one could not have non-greed and greed occurring in the very same momentary composite mental ‘occasion’. Which dhammas occur when one murders Archibald and dances on his grave? Which dhammas occur when one attains the third jhāna?

Clearly this is not abstract philosophy, engaging in analysis out of intellectual interest. The purpose is one of direct concern with the path to liberation. The monk engaged in insight meditation will dwell quietly and in concentration, observing and recognising the arising and falling of dhammas, seeing how things really are and cutting the sense of Self. He will also know which mental factors conduce to positive, wholesome, mental occasions, and will thus know how to ‘cease to do evil and learn to do good’. Lance Cousins (1995) has commented that ‘The aim of this abhidhamma analysis is not really theoretical; it is related to insight meditation and offers a world-view based upon process in order to facilitate insight into change and no-self so as to undermine mental rigidity’. I would not argue with this, although I would argue with any reading of Abhidharma which would interpret its concern to be solely with practical issues of how to lessen attachment in opposition to the ontology of how things really, truly, are. I have already suggested that there is no such opposition in (Indian) Buddhism. Abhidhamma analysis does indeed involve seeing things as they are, and that is a matter of ontology. The dhammas (excluding, of course, nibbāna) are evanescent events, linked by an impersonal causal law. That is how it truly is.

The Abhidhamma texts are committed to the view that dhammas are how things really are. This does not commit the texts, however, to any particular position on the exact nature of the dhamma beyond the contrast between dhammas as what are not further reducible, compared with, say, persons, or tables and chairs which are. What is involved in seeing dhammas as events, in seeing all as based perhaps on an event-ontology, rather than a substance-ontology, seems to be relatively unexplored in the Pāli Abhidhamma or indeed in the Theravāda thought which follows it.⁶³ To that extent, one could argue, the everyday practicalities of insight meditation remain paramount. An interest in specific questions of the ontological nature of dharmas is found not so much among Theravādins, but among Sarvāstivādins and their rivals.

I do not want to go into many of the details of the Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma here. I shall return in a later chapter to some of their characteristic positions. This system is in many respects very similar to the Abhidhamma of the Pāli Canon and Theravāda tradition. It has 75 classes of dharmas, with three classes of unconditioned dharmas.⁶⁴ Several of the Sarvāstivāda classes of dharmas are unique to their system, and were the subject of vigorous controversy with other schools (particularly Sautrāntika). I want to mention here briefly, however, the Sarvāstivādin approach to the ontology of the dharma. In India as a whole in classical times the Sarvāstivāda (although it has not survived into the present day as an independent school) appears to have been by far the most important and influential of the Abhidharma traditions. One way or another it is the Sarvāstivāda that appears to have had most influence on the Mahāyāna approaches to both Buddhist philosophy and practice.

It should be clear from what we have seen already that the Abhidharma is characterised by some sort of reduction. Throughout this reductive process the search is driven by a quest for what factors, what elements, are actually there as the substratum upon which the forces of mental imputation and reification can form the everyday ‘life-world’. An ‘ultimate truth/reality’ is discovered as that which is resistant to attempted dissolution through reductive analysis. This search is animated by the wish to let-go, to bring to an end all selfish craving after things that turn out to be just mental and cultural imputations, constructions for practical purposes. Absurd craving for such things leads to rebirth. It seems to me that all Buddhist thinkers in India agreed in the direction of this analysis. There is no disagreement that you and me, or tables, or chairs, can be analysed into component parts and in reality lack the unities that are imputed upon them simply for practical everyday purposes. Disagreements among Buddhist thinkers in this area centred on claims to have found those elements that are really there behind mere everyday appearance. Major disagreement in Buddhist philosophy concerned claims to the status of ultimate truth or truths. Thus the dissolution of what we might call ‘everyday’ craving through dissolution of the everyday world is agreed and taken for granted. The real disagreement concerned the craving which one group of Buddhist thinkers would attribute to another in the light of the latter’s claim to have found ultimate truths which are not accepted as ultimate by the former. Since this rarified activity of an elite group of scholars is occurring within the Abhidharma project, all Buddhist philosophy, it seems to me, is Abhidharma philosophy. The great ‘Mahāyāna’ schools of philosophy (see later) – Mādhyamika, Yogācāra, possibly also tendencies associated with the Buddha-nature (tathāgatagarbha) – involve notably disputes concerning how far this probing, dissolving analysis can go.

In the classical Sarvāstivāda (Vaibhāṣika) system, the plurality of reals discerned through analysis (i.e. dharmas) are of course by their very status as analytic reals ultimate truths. Sarvāstivāda texts also refer to these dharmas, these ultimate truths, as ‘primary existents’ (dravyasat), and those composite entities constructed out of primary existents as ‘secondary’ or ‘conceptual existents’ (prajñaptisat). Note (and this is important) that to be a conceptual existent (you, me, a chair, table or a forest) is not thought in Sarvāstivāda to be the same as not existing at all. It is to bear a particular sort of existence, the existence of an entity that is quite correctly treated as a unity for pragmatic purposes but nothing more. It can be analysed into a plurality of constituents which are thus to be taken as ontologically more fundamental. A conceptual existent is genuinely existent, but it is existent (i.e. given as a unity) through a purposeful, pragmatic context and its unity is fixed through conceptual reification. Thus a conceptual existent is the result of a particular sort of causal process, a conceptual reification or unification out of a plurality. A table appears to be a unity in its own right, one thing, and indeed it really can be spoken of and thought of in everyday life as one thing for pragmatic purposes. But it is not really a unity in its own right (i.e. a simple). It is not really one thing over and above this pragmatic context. It is actually a name we give for practical purposes to, e.g. four legs and a top. And these too can be further analysed, eventually into dharmas. The dharmas into which it can be analysed, however (perhaps here they are actually something more like sense-data),⁶⁵ as those factors which must be there irreducibly in order for there to be construction at all, must accordingly be simples. They must be unities in their own right. Otherwise the analysis would not have reached its terminating point.

Thus primary existents must be found as the terminating points of the process of analytical probing. They must be irreducible simples, and they must not be the results of conceptual reification, as are you and me, tables, chairs and forests. They must thus have, in the terminology of Vaibhāṣika/Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma, intrinsic nature, a svabhāva.⁶⁶ By way of contrast secondary conceptual existents are the results of conceptual reification and are lacking in their own intrinsic nature, i.e. they are not simples, they are niḥsvabhāva.⁶⁷ Thus secondary existents are empty (śūnya) of intrinsic nature, and to be empty is another expression for lacking intrinsic nature. Note, however, that within this Sarvāstivāda (Vaibhāṣika) framework it is part of the meaning of niḥsvabhāva (‘lacking intrinsic nature’) that some things are sasvabhāva (‘bear intrinsic nature’). It is part of the meaning of emptiness that not all things are empty. To state that all things lack intrinsic nature would be to state that all things are conceptual existents, reified conceptual constructs, without anything left for them to be constructed and reified out of. This would be an absurdity, for it would destroy the very category of secondary, conceptual existence and thus destroy the entire universe – everything – along with the destruction of primary existence. To state that all things are lacking intrinsic nature, niḥsvabhāva, must entail an absurd nihilism. As we shall see, that is where – in the search for complete letting-go – the Mādhyamika thought of Nāgārjuna will come in. It is heralded by the Mahāyāna Perfection of Wisdom sūtra literature.

But the Buddha, alas, was long dead. With the development of Mahāyāna Buddhism some centuries after the death of the Buddha we encounter a growing awareness among some Buddhist activists of a new dimension to what Buddhism is finally all about, and in the generation of the apocryphal Mahāyāna sūtra literature a radical response.

Key Points to Chapter Two

• Although the term duḥkha literally means ‘pain’, in Buddhist teachings it also indicates subtler senses of individual suffering, such as the conditioned nature of human existence in the world, and the inherent unsatisfactoriness of the fact that all things are impermanent.

• Craving, the cause of a person’s suffering, is a deep-rooted form of grasping, and so is not equivalent to simply wanting to do something. There is therefore no logical inconsistency in the fact that a Buddhist practitioner wants to achieve the cessation of suffering by stopping his grasping: it is perfectly consistent, for example, to state that the Buddha had achieved the end of craving and yet still wanted to do things, such as help others realise nirvāṇa.

• Nirvāṇa is not a deity, a place or even an Absolute Reality at least in anything like the sense of the upaniṣadic Brahman. It can best be thought of as a mental event, a radical psychological transformation that occurs when a person experiences the complete ‘extinguishing’ or ‘quenching’ of the fires of greed, hatred and delusion that engender suffering.

• The Buddha’s teachings on not-Self are not concerned with what might in the West be termed the ‘soul’. They instead deny that any aspect of a phenomenal person, such as material form, feelings and so on, could constitute a Self, i.e. a non-adventitious substance that constitutes what a person unchangeably ‘really and intrinsically’ is. According to the Buddha, when one understands the existential fact that one is entirely lacking in such a substance, one sees ‘how things really are’ and so let’s go from what is not Self and attains liberation.

• The teaching of dependent origination explains how a person’s experience of saṃsāra actually consists of a dynamic process of causal conditioning. There is no need for a creator God or Self in this scheme of things, for this teaching explains both the mechanics of personal continuity and the functioning of moral retribution, i.e. the connection between wholesome and unwholesome (or virtuous and vicious) deeds and their pleasant and unpleasant effects.

• The Buddhist understanding of karma and rebirth is entirely different from all other such doctrines that emerged in ancient India. By identifying karma – literally ‘action’ – with intention, the Buddha effectively internalised the notion that good and bad actions cause rebirth. Morality – virtue and vice – therefore became a matter of individual psychology. This effectively made the mental training of a Buddhist renouncer an ethical concern, and the Buddhist way could thus be considered as a ‘path of purification’ (as it was later called by Buddhaghosa).

• Buddhist meditation is based on the principles of ‘calming’ (śamatha) and ‘insight’ (vipaśyanā). According to this understanding, a person must first quieten the mind through various concentrative practices, so that the resulting state of mental clarity enables a person to have insight into things, to see how things actually are.

• The term ‘Abhidharma’ denotes both an important part of the Buddhist canon (the Abhidharma Piṭaka, one of the three ‘baskets’), as well as a general method of enquiry into and explanation of the Buddhist Dharma. This enquiry involves analysis of what is given in experience into its primary parts or (in the main) evanescent moments, these being known as dharmas. The point of this analysis is to go beyond the conventional, constructed reality of individual existence in the world, and instead see the ultimate truth that experience is made up of a flow of mental and physical events, i.e. the ultimately real dharmas.