The Spirit in Which the Buddha Wished His Teachings to Be Taken
Let us look at ways in which the Buddha approached his own teaching activity – I suppose one could call them meta-teachings. Perhaps the most famous and important of all, the Kālāma Sutta, has already been presented in chapter 1; there the Buddha tells his audience not to take his words on trust but to test the validity of the touchstone of their own experience.
There is a well-known Sanskrit proverb that one should not speak unless what one says is both true and pleasant. The Buddha changed this principle: questioned by a prince called Abhaya, he said that he would always speak what he knew to be true and beneficial, and knew the time to say it even if it was disagreeable. Typically, he justified this by pointing to a baby on the prince’s lap and asking the prince what he would do if the baby put a stick or pebble in its mouth; the prince agreed he would take it out even if doing so hurt the baby. (Indeed, every vinaya rule is prefaced by an incident in which a monk or nun does something for which the Buddha finds it necessary to admonish them before laying down the rule to prevent the same thing happening again.) On the other hand, he assures the prince that he will not say anything which is true and agreeable, but not beneficial. 12
The result of this self-denying ordinance was that the Buddha condemned all theorizing which has no practical value. Whether we like it or not, he tended to be quite harsh on those who indulged in metaphysical speculation. In the Pali tradition, the very first sutta in the entire collection of his sermons is the Brahma-jāla Sutta, which spans many pages listing the kinds of speculation that people indulge in concerning both the world and the self, and then saying that the Buddha has himself realized their seductive power and made his escape from them. This is so despite the fact that in these long lists of ideological positions the couple which do in fact seem to correspond to the Buddha’s own views. The point is, however, that they are not the kind of thing that he thinks it beneficial to talk about, let alone to insist on.
By contrast, it is significant that many sermons are devoted to analysis of how we experience the world – what we would call cognitive psychology.
The Buddha’s position on these matters is succinctly stated in his famous reply to Māluṅkyāputta. The latter was a monk who came to the Buddha saying that he felt he would have to give up his robes unless the Buddha could give him answers to the following questions: whether the world was eternal; whether it was finite; whether the soul was the same as the body or different; whether a
tathāgata exists after death, does not exist, both exists and does not exist, or neither exists nor does not exist. The Buddha replies that he had never promised to answer these questions. Māluṅkyāputta was like a man wounded by a poison arrow who refused to let the surgeon remove it until he knew the surgeon’s caste and many other personal details about him, as well as other irrelevant information about the arrow. Just as that man would die before the information could be provided, so would die the person who was waiting for the Buddha to explain these matters. “So,” says the Buddha, “remember what I have left unexplained as unexplained and remember what I have explained as explained… Why have I left [your questions] unexplained? Because they are of no benefit and do not lead to nirvana. What I have explained is the Four Noble Truths, because they are beneficial and lead to nirvana.” 13
Excerpted, in gratitude from: What the Buddha Thought by Richard Gornbrich. Equinox, Sheffield, 2013 pp166-167
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