PRESENTED TO THE BUDDHA CENTER, SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2015 AND AGAIN TO THE NEW BUDDHA CENTRE, SATURDAY, JANUARY 25, 2025 (REVISED)

The Discourse on the Great Lion’s Roar (The Hair-Raising Discourse)

Majjhima Nikaya 12

Date of Composition: 4th cent. BCE

The Buddha is living outside Vesali in a grove to the west of the city. Vesali was the capital of the Licchavi tribe in the Vajjian Confederacy, which the Buddha took as a model for the organization of the order. Today it is an archaeological site in Bihar state. It was also the birthplace of Mahavira, the leader of the Jains during the Buddha’s lifetime. It is also the place where Ramaputra and Alara Kalama trained the Buddha in meditation. He preached his final sermon here, and the arhants held the Second Buddhist Council here. At the time of the Buddha, Vesali was large, prosperous, and populous, with abundant food. It was a beautiful city, with 7,707 parks and 7,707 lotus ponds, inhabited by 7,707 rajahs. This was the home of the royal courtesan and famous dancer, Amrapali, who was a great patron of the city and a Buddhist.

The date of this discourse is about the same time as the Mahaparinibbana Sutta (D 16), i.e., just before the Buddha’s passing on at the age of 80, since the Buddha says that he is “now old, aged, burdened with years, advanced in life and come to the last stage: my years have turned eighty.”  However, there is some ambiguity about the date, since the text states that Nagasamala  fans the Buddha during the discourse, a task usually reserved for the Buddha’s personal attendant. Nagasamala was the personal attendant of the Buddha during the first twenty years of the Buddha’s career. However, it is possible that Nagasamala is still a monk though no longer the Buddha’s attendant at the end of his life, although Nagasamala also left the Buddha due to a disagreement. Nagasamala himself cannot not have been much less than 50 at this time if that is true.

The Licchavi Sunakkhatta left the order because the Buddha did not perform any miracles or explain to him the beginning of things. Subsequently, he went to the Vesali Assembly and denied that the Buddha had attained any superhuman states, distinction in knowledge, or vision worthy of an arhant. He accused the Buddha of being a rationalist intellectual who was merely following out his own arguments not based on realization or any higher attainments. He asserted that the cessation of suffering is inferior to the attainment of psychic powers. In a sense, Sunakkhatta’s criticism is true; the Buddha did rationalize Brahmanism and sought to identify a rational, realistic teaching within the Vedic tradition that had been overgrown by mythical concepts and superstitious beliefs, and he did teach the cessation of suffering, not psychic powers, as the primary or ultimate goal.

While Sunakkhatta is addressing the Licchavis, Sariputta, the disciple foremost in wisdom, is visiting Vesali on alms round and hears Sunakkhatta’s speech, which he reports to the Buddha on his return to the grove where they are staying. The Buddha shrugs off Sunakkhatta’s comments as inspired by anger and points out that the criticism that the Buddha teaches the way to the cessation of suffering is a compliment. The rest of the discourse rebuts Sunakkhatta’s criticism of the Buddha, including the Ten Powers of a Tathagata, Four Kinds of Intrepidity, Eight Assemblies, Four Kinds of Generation, Five Destinations and Emancipation, and the Bodhisattva’s Austerities.

The Buddha says that Sunakkhatta will never acknowledge the Buddha’s enlightenment or his actual psychic powers.

The meaning of the title of this discourse is the Discourse on the Great Lion’s Roar, by which the Wheel of the Teaching is set rolling, i.e., it inaugurates the dharma age. The wheel of the teaching appears in the Digha Nikaya, in the story of Mahasuddassana (D 17), to whom it appeared as a UFO and through which he conquered his neighbours and established a peaceable kingdom based on the teaching. The discourse enumerates ten powers of a tathagata that establish the Buddha’s primogeniture:

1. Understanding what is possible and impossible;
2. Understanding the law of moral causality;
3. Understanding the Five Destinations (divine beings, humans, animals, ghosts, and hell beings);
4. Understanding the elements of the world;
5. Understanding the inclinations of beings;
6. Understanding the Five Faculties (faith, energy, awareness, concentration, wisdom);
7. Understanding the elements of the path;
8. Understanding rebirth;
9. Understanding moral causality, called the Divine Eye; and
10. Understanding the destruction of the taints (sensuality, becoming, false views, and ignorance) by the cultivation of wisdom.

In accordance with the doctrine of the Power of Truth, these understandings are “powers.” The Buddha declares that anyone who denies the attainment of the Tathagata will be reborn in a hellish state. One must distinguish the Buddhist hells, which are kinds of purgatories from which rebirth becomes possible once they have destroyed the negative karma through suffering, from the hell of the Abrahamic traditions. The Buddha declares that he is fully enlightened and that he has destroyed the taints, that those things that he has declared to be obstructions (sensuality, anger, sloth-torpor, restlessness-worry, and uncertainty) are obstructions, and that his teaching leads to the cessation of suffering.

The Buddha further declares that he is at home in the assemblies of nobles, Brahmans, householders, recluses, divine beings of the realm of the Four Great Kings, divine beings of the realm of the Thirty-Three, Mara’s retinue, and divine beings of the Brahma realm.

The Buddha describes the four kinds of rebirths: egg-born, womb-born, moisture-born, and spontaneously generated, the latter referring to divine beings. The most interesting thing about this passage is that the Buddha identifies “certain human beings,” as well as divine beings, hell beings, and some beings of the lower worlds, as spontaneously born.

In addition, he identifies five types of rebirths: as hell beings, animals, ghosts, people, and divine beings. Later Buddhist tradition added the antigods to this list. Finally, he identifies emancipation, which individuals attain for themselves through gnosis in the present moment, the “now,” because of mental cultivation and the realization of wisdom that destroy the taints.

The Buddha declares that he knows the behaviours that lead to rebirth in each of these states. In a memorable simile, he compares the experience of emancipation to dallying in a dense wood adjacent to a cool pond of good water after bathing and slaking one’s thirst on a hot day. Far from describing emancipation as an affectively neutral state, the Buddha describes emancipation as “extremely pleasant.”

The Buddha declares that he recalls practicing extreme asceticism, coarseness, scrupulousness, and seclusion. The Buddha describes the ascetic practices of northeast India of his time, including the memorable passage, “I would make my bed in a charnel ground with the bones of the dead for a pillow.” Elsewhere he also describes sleeping on a bed of nails

Interestingly, the Buddha refers specifically to the “eight-day interval of frost,” around late December-early January, during which, he says, he dwelled out of doors. We have already discussed the question of how cold winter gets in northeast India, since it seems that the Buddha died in late winter, in his eightieth year.

This discourse also preserves a tradition that we find elsewhere in the Pali Canon, especially in the Theragatha and the Therigatha, whereby a realized person utters a spontaneous or ecstatic verse as an expression of their realization. This tradition is especially important in Tibet as well as Chan/Zen Buddhism, where such poems take the form of enigmatic riddles, called koans.

Elsewhere in the Pali Canon one finds the statement that “purification comes about through food.” Food is an important concept in the canon, but here it refers to self-starvation, a practice that the Buddha rejects. Thus, he says, “by such conduct, by such practice, by such performance of austerities, I did not attain any superhuman states, any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones.”  The reason that the Buddha gives for this is telling: “Why was that? Because I did not attain that noble wisdom which when attained is noble and emancipating and leads the one who practises in accordance with it to the complete destruction of suffering.”  That is, the essential salvific principle is not asceticism or even meditation but Wisdom, through which alone one destroys suffering and attains emancipation. This point subsequently became the basis of the Prajnaparamita tradition of the Mahayana about the same time that the monastics first wrote down the Pali Canon (circa 89-77 BCE). Neither morality nor even meditation is the essential salvific principle, but Wisdom, the cure for ignorance or ‘not-knowing,’ wins emancipation.

The Buddha repudiates the notion, characteristic of the Ajivikas, a popular sect at the time, that purification comes about through the round of rebirths, passing through a predetermined series of rebirths during which every possible state is experienced and after which it is automatically emancipated. This process takes incalculable eons to complete. However, the Buddha says, he experienced every rebirth except in the Five Pure Abodes, from which rebirth in the human realm is impossible. Thus, once again the Buddha distinguishes his attainment from that of the arhants, who are reborn in the Five Pure Abodes if they have not extirpated every vestige of attachment. Because a bodhisattva vows to be reborn as a person before they become a buddha, this is impossible for them. Similarly, the Buddha has experienced every kind of abode, sacrifice, and fire ceremony.

Finally, the Buddha declares that the lucidity of his wisdom is unimpaired by age, despite being 80. Thus, he declares himself to fulfil all the requisites of Buddhahood.

Nagasamala declares that this discourse makes his body hairs stand up. Hence, the Buddha declares that he may remember the discourse as “the Hair-Raising Discourse,” alluding to the fact that his followers are memorizing the Buddha’s discourses.

Buddha Centre, Saturday, January 25, 2025