In "Buddhist Modernism" we're making our way through Walpola Rahula's What the Buddha Taught. As I discovered the last time I used this text, it's great - not just for what it constructs, but for the way it also deconstructs it. And so the book has a conventional enough structure
I The Buddhist Attitude of Mind
II The First Noble Truth: Dukkha
III The Second Noble Truth: Samudaya: 'The Arising of Dukkha'
IV The Third Noble Truth: Nirodha: 'The Cessation of Dukkha'
V The Fourth Noble Truth: Magga: 'The Path'
VI The Doctrine of No-Soul: Anatta
VII Meditation or 'Mental Culture': Bhavana
VIII What the Buddha Taught and the World Today
The "four noble truths" are where most outsiders starts (even the Buddha is said to have made them the subject of his first sermon), but Rahula knows the tradition better. And so, tucked into his Preface, there's this;
I would ask [the Western reader] ... to take up on his first reading the opening chapter, and then go on to chapters V, VII and VIII, returning to Chapters II, III, IV and VI when the general sense is clearer and more vivid. (xii)
I'd drawn the class' attention to this directive, but nobody had followed up on it. What difference could it really make what order one took things in? Well, all the difference... but none until you try.
So today we tried to make sense of the four noble truths, in sequence. I offered colloquial translations of dukkha, which Rahula insists should stay untranslated (I can't get no satisfaction, everything comes to an end, bummer), and asked annoying questions like "why do we need more than the first noble truth?" "what does the third one add that's not already in the second?" and "Aren't the third and fourth really the same?"
They're not, of course, and that was our segue to Rahula's other sequence, which leapfrogs over the first three noble truths, skips on to meditation and lands in Buddhism's role in modern society, with no urgency to return to the rest of the noble truths, let alone the fearsome doctrine of anatta. Do we perhaps not need to define dukkha then? Or perhaps the point is that we won't be able to grasp its significance until we're on the Noble Eightfold Path - until, that is, we have experienced our own capacity to structure and change our behavior and attitudes, however incrementally?
I The Buddhist Attitude of Mind
II The First Noble Truth: Dukkha
III The Second Noble Truth: Samudaya: 'The Arising of Dukkha'
IV The Third Noble Truth: Nirodha: 'The Cessation of Dukkha'
V The Fourth Noble Truth: Magga: 'The Path'
VI The Doctrine of No-Soul: Anatta
VII Meditation or 'Mental Culture': Bhavana
VIII What the Buddha Taught and the World Today
The "four noble truths" are where most outsiders starts (even the Buddha is said to have made them the subject of his first sermon), but Rahula knows the tradition better. And so, tucked into his Preface, there's this;
I would ask [the Western reader] ... to take up on his first reading the opening chapter, and then go on to chapters V, VII and VIII, returning to Chapters II, III, IV and VI when the general sense is clearer and more vivid. (xii)
I'd drawn the class' attention to this directive, but nobody had followed up on it. What difference could it really make what order one took things in? Well, all the difference... but none until you try.
So today we tried to make sense of the four noble truths, in sequence. I offered colloquial translations of dukkha, which Rahula insists should stay untranslated (I can't get no satisfaction, everything comes to an end, bummer), and asked annoying questions like "why do we need more than the first noble truth?" "what does the third one add that's not already in the second?" and "Aren't the third and fourth really the same?"
They're not, of course, and that was our segue to Rahula's other sequence, which leapfrogs over the first three noble truths, skips on to meditation and lands in Buddhism's role in modern society, with no urgency to return to the rest of the noble truths, let alone the fearsome doctrine of anatta. Do we perhaps not need to define dukkha then? Or perhaps the point is that we won't be able to grasp its significance until we're on the Noble Eightfold Path - until, that is, we have experienced our own capacity to structure and change our behavior and attitudes, however incrementally?
