PRESENTED TO THE BUDDHA CENTER ON SUNDAY, MAY 10, 2015 AND AGAIN TO THE NEW BUDDHA CENTRE ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 11, 2025 (REVISED).

The Delightful Discourse

Digha Nikaya 29

Country: Sakya

Locale: the School building in the mango grove belonging to the Vedhanna family, near Samagama

Speakers: Cunda, Ananda, the Buddha, Upavana

Date of Composition: 5th cent. to 4th cent. BCE

This discourse takes place when the Buddha is staying in the Shakyan territory, among his own people, toward the end of his life but prior to the Kosalan genocide of the Shakyans (Schumann says that this genocide occurred when the Buddha was 78 or 79, just before his death at 80). The Buddha says, “Now I am an aged teacher of long standing, who went forth a long time ago, and my life is coming to its close.”  The discourse further states, “At that time the Nigantha Nataputta had just died at Pava,” a Jain stronghold in the state of Malla, to the south of Shakya. The Buddha also travelled through Pava shortly before his passing. Here he ate the famous meal of “pig’s delight” offered to him by Cunda the blacksmith. Pava was located near present day Fazilnagar, in Kushinagar district of the state of Uttar Pradesh.

Nigantha Nataputta is the name given in the Pali Canon to Vardhamana Mahavira, the twenty-fourth and last ‘guide’ of Jainism, referred to hereinafter as Mahavira. The historical origin of Jainism is obscure but goes back to about 1000 BCE. According to tradition, Mahavira left home at the age of 30, practised meditation and asceticism for twelve and a half years before attaining omniscience, and died at the age of 72. The discourses of the Pali Canon consistently present the Buddha and Mahavira as contemporaries who were known to each other and whose lives overlapped, though they never met.

A.K. Narain, in his review of “The Dating of the Historical Buddha,” says that both the Buddha and Mahavira died between 410 and 390 BCE.

After Mahavira’s death, the discourse presents the Jain order as being riven by internal dissension. Just after the rainy season, in October-November, the novice Cunda comes to Samagama to see Ananda and tells him about this, whereupon Ananda and Cunda tell the Buddha of Mahavira’s death. The Buddha’s response is that Mahavira is unenlightened and his doctrine and discipline ill proclaimed, unedifyingly displayed, and ineffectual in calming the passions because it is impossible to live by it. As a result, the practitioner gains much demerit. Possibly the Buddha is referring to the Jain emphasis on abstinence from all actions based on the doctrine that action, and not intention, is the cause of karma—the classical Indian view. One cannot practise such a view, leading to all sorts of excesses and perversions of the type that the Buddha experienced during his ascetic period and which he decisively rejected.

The Buddha then compares himself and his order to Mahavira and his order, to the detriment of the latter. The Buddha discusses the merit or demerit of teachers, doctrines, and disciples in terms of the enlightenment or non-enlightenment of the teacher, the doctrine and the discipline being well or ill proclaimed, and the practice or non-practice by the disciple, and the praiseworthiness or blame and the merit or demerit of these various factors. Next, he discusses the sadness or non-sadness arising from the death of the teacher in these various circumstances as a function of the disciples’ understanding of the teaching and the training. Finally, he discusses the perfection or imperfection of the practice of the holy life as a function of the seniority of teachers. These last two points pertain specifically to the order. Where the teacher has attained enlightenment, he proclaims the doctrine and the discipline well and his disciples understand him well, the disciples are both able to practise and do practise, and senior teachers continue to perpetuate the teaching and the training indefinitely based on correct understanding, is the ideal concatenation of circumstances.

The Buddha refers to his second meditation teacher from long ago, Uddaka Ramaputta, the son (or disciple) of Rama, who taught Gotama how to experience the highest worldly plane of neither perception nor non-perception. He mentions a saying of Uddaka, “he sees, but does not see,” together with an obscure metaphor in which he compares the teaching to a razor. Just as when one turns the razor on its edge, it disappears (because the edge is so thin), so is the teaching pure and complete, there being nothing to add to or subtract from it. The razor also cuts like a diamond.

The Buddha tells Cunda that the order should regularly rehearse the teachings attained by the Buddha’s gnosis, “setting meaning beside meaning, and expression beside expression, without dissension, in order that this holy life may continue and be established for a long time for the profit and happiness of the many out of compassion for the world and for the benefit, profit and happiness of devas and humans.”

The Buddha reaffirms his role, not merely as the teacher of humans, but as the teacher of divine beings. Then the Buddha summarizes the thirty-seven factors of enlightenment; “these are the things that you should recite together.”  The Buddha then recites the method by which the assembly may maintain continuing consensus:

If a fellow in the holy life quotes Dhamma in the assembly, and if you think he has either misunderstood the sense or expressed it wrongly, you should neither applaud nor reject it, but should say to him, ‘Friend, if you mean such and such, you should put it either like this or like that: which is the more appropriate?’ or: ‘If you say such and such, you mean either this or that: which is the more appropriate?’ If he replies: ‘This meaning is better expressed like this than like that,’ or: ‘The sense of this expression is this rather than that,’ then his words should be neither rejected nor disparaged, but you should explain to him carefully the correct meaning and expression. (18)

In other words, rational discussion devoid of emotional bias pursued to the point of consensus is the proper method of exegesis. This is the basis of the Buddhist commentarial dialectic, in which introductory quotation alternates with interpretation, thus grounding new insights in the tradition of the Buddhist teaching. Unfortunately, this method was only viable for about a hundred years after the Buddha’s passing, at which time the order split into two competing factions, the majority Mahasamghikas, who developed into the Mahayana, and the minority Sthaviras, who eventually developed into the Theravada sect, among others. The fact that the Buddha’s thousand-year order broke down so soon after the Buddha’s passing suggests that the order was torn by doctrinal strife from early on, which is hinted at in the canonical account of the first two Buddhist councils (i.e., the debate over how strictly the rules of the Vinaya were to be kept, the apparent conflict between the followers of Mahakassapa and the followers of Ananda, the misogynistic attitude or the “arhants” to women and female monastics, and the debate associated with Mahadeva over whether the insight of the arhants was infallible) and even before (e.g., the revolt of the Buddha’s cousin, Devadatta, who tried to establish his own, stricter order, and the Buddha’s apparent dissatisfaction with the order at the end of his life), despite the Buddha’s warnings against dogmatism and sectarianism.

The Buddha tells Cunda that he teaches a doctrine for restraining the corruptions in the present and destroying them in future lives. To achieve this, the monastics should observe a way of life in which clothing is enough to ward off heat and cold, insects, bugs, wind, and sun, and to hide the genitals. Alms food should provide adequate nourishment for the body and keep it unimpaired by satisfying the sensation of hunger. Shelter should ward off bugs and the weather, and to ensure the enjoyment of seclusion. Medicines and medical treatments should cure sickness and maintain health. Our self-indulgent society would consider this to be extreme asceticism, but to the ascetics of the Buddha’s time this was rank hedonism. The Buddha suffered from this accusation of pleasure seeking and laxness all through his life. The Buddha’s response to this is interesting. He does not deny it, which may surprise some religious fundamentalists, who worship mummies in their temples and starve or burn themselves to death—things that are utterly incompatible with what the Buddha taught. Rather, he says, there are two types of pleasures, ignoble and noble. He identifies four types of “ignoble” pleasure, “low, vulgar, worldly, … and not conducive to welfare.”  These are pleasure in killing, in stealing, in lying, and in sensuality. The Buddha calls these “the four kinds of life devoted to pleasure.”  One recognizes this list as the Four Precepts, a.k.a. the Fourfold Restraint. The Four Precepts do not include alcohol. The Buddha says that these forms of pleasure-seeking are not conducive to enlightenment, and he does not recommend them.

There are, however, four types of pleasure that the Buddha does recommend strongly and that are conducive to enlightenment. These are the four meditative attainments. This recognition that the meditative attainments are themselves pleasurable is a distinguishing characteristic of the Buddha’s teaching, relating ultimately to the Buddha’s realization after rejecting asceticism and nourishing himself back to health that pleasure may be wholesome or unwholesome, and that pleasure in and of itself is not necessarily something to be rejected, beginning with his spontaneous childhood experience of meditation under the rose apple tree.  I will briefly recap the characteristics of each one as explained in this discourse:

The Four Meditative Attainments

Jhana	Immediate Cause	Mental State	Feeling State
1	Detachment	Thinking and pondering	Filled with delight and happiness
2	Concentration (“oneness of mind”)	Subsiding of thinking and pondering; inner tranquility	Filled with delight and happiness
3	Fading of delight	Imperturbable, mindful, and clearly aware	Joy of equanimity and mindfulness
4	Giving up pleasure and pain	Disappearance of former gladness and sadness, purified by equanimity and mindfulness	Beyond pleasure and pain

These are the four kinds of life devoted to pleasure which are entirely conducive to disenchantment, to dispassion, to cessation, to tranquility, to realisation, to enlightenment, to Nibbana. So if wanderers from other sects should say that the followers of the Shakyan are addicted to these four forms of pleasure-seeking, they should be told: ‘Yes,’ for they would be speaking correctly about you, they would not be slandering you with false or untrue statements.

The Buddha says that the four meditative attainments have four fruits or benefits, referring to the four stages of attainment: stream entry, once returning, non-returning, and arhantship. One attains these grades by the destruction of the corruptions: identity view; doubt; attachment to rules and rituals; sensual desire; anger; craving for existence, both gross and subtle; conceit; restlessness-worry; and ignorance. These doctrines, he says, are as deeply rooted and immovable as the heartwood or iron post buried in the earth in the middle of the gate of a city, recalling both the Middle Way and the Buddha’s comparison of the teaching to an abandoned and long forgotten city in the midst of an ancient and trackless forest.

An arhant has destroyed the corruptions and the fetter of becoming (rebirth) and liberated themselves by supreme insight. This last point became a cause of disagreement during or sometime after the Second Buddhist Council.

According to the discourse, an arhant is incapable of:

• Killing;
• Stealing;
• Sex;
• Lying;
• Hoarding possessions;
• Attachment;
• Hatred;
• Folly; and
• Fear.

In addition, the discourse makes an interesting statement about the Buddhist understanding of the nature of time. The Buddha notes that his critics may say that he possesses boundless knowledge and insight regarding the past, but not regarding the future. Many of the debased arts in discourse 1 are forms of divination and prognostication. I find this more interesting than the discourse’s statement that he remembers his past lives and knows that he will have no more rebirths. These statements imply a view of time that is indeterminate, which only becomes the dominant view of physics since Einstein. It is not that the Buddha does not know the future, the Buddha says, but rather that the future is intrinsically unknowable because of the non-causal factor of volition or intention.

The Buddha uses tathagata, the mysterious name that means something like ‘one who has come and gone’ to refer to himself. In this discourse, he gives several explanations of the meaning of this phrase, including:

• One who declares the time, the fact, the advantage, the Teaching, and the training;
• Whatever in this world with its divine beings and demons and higher spiritual beings, with its ascetics and Brahmans, its princes and people, is seen by people, heard, sensed, cognized, whatever was ever achieved, sought after or mentally pondered upon—all that has been fully understood by the Tathagata;
• Between the night in which the Tathagata gains supreme enlightenment and the night in which he attains emancipation without remainder, whatever he proclaims, says, or explains is so and not otherwise; and
• The Tathagata is the unvanquished conqueror, the seer and ruler of all.

The Buddha states that he does not reveal the future post-mortem state of a tathagata, whether he exists or does not exist, not because there is no answer to this question, but because the question is not pragmatic. Instead, he reveals the Four Noble Truths. Thus, the Buddha distinguishes between theory and practice. Some interpret this to mean that the Buddha has no view of the nature of reality, no ontology or cosmology, but the entire Pali Canon, as well as reason, refutes this assertion. The Buddha taught for 45 years after his enlightenment, and clearly, he did not only teach meditation practices. Thus, the Buddha says, “those bases of speculation about the beginnings of things…I have explained to you as they should be explained.”

Buddha Centre, Saturday, January 11, 2025.

Notes:

1. H.W. Schumann, The Historical Buddha: The Times, Life and Teachings of the Founder of Buddhism, trans. M. O.’C. Walshe  (London: Arkana-Penguin, 1989), p. 243.

2. “Vardhamana,” Ancient History Encyclopedia, http://www.ancient.eu/Vardhamana.

3. “The Dates of the Buddha,” Ancient History Encyclopedia, http://www.ancient.eu/article/493.

4. https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/jiabs/article/viewFile/8810/2717

5. Janice N. Nattier and Charles S. Prebish, “Mahasamghika Origins: The Beginnings of Buddhist Sectarianism,” http://lirs.ru/lib/Mahasamghika_Origins.Prebish.pdf.

6. The instigator was one Mahadeva, who questioned the infallibility of arhants. According to the Theravadins, this occurred about a hundred years after the parinibbana, shortly after the Second Buddhist Council. The dating is contested but the Five Points of Mahadeva, whoever he was and whenever he flourished, clearly question the infallibility of the arhants.