The Buddha

Is cultivating anger a moral imperative?

Bodhipaksa
on practice
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Image of Vajrapani. who is massively muscled and stepping into the warrior pose. He is deep blue in color, with bulging eyes and prominent fangs, heavily muscled, and wields a stylized thunderbolt in his right hand. Instead of an aura, he’s surrounded by dancing flames.

Mahāyāna Buddhism emphasizes compassion, and yet it portrays awakened beings who look anything but peaceful and loving. The best-known of these is Vajrapāṇi, “the bearer of the thunderbolt,” who is massively muscled and lunging into the warrior pose many of you will know from yoga.

Vajrapāṇi is midnight blue in color, with bulging eyes and prominent fangs, and, as his name suggests, he wields a stylized thunderbolt in his right hand. Instead of being surrounded by a gentle aura, he’s wreathed in dancing flames. Vajrapāṇi doesn’t represent ill will, which all awakened and nearly-awakened beings have long overcome. Instead he embodies enlightened energy — the compassionate desire to help others.

Speech with the power of thunder

Although the first part of Vajrapani’s name literally means “thunderbolt,” one of its secondary meanings is “denunciation in strong language.” The connection is that this critical yet compassionate speech has the power of thunder.

Coming back to our everyday experience, when a parent sees their child about to run into the road, or do some other harmful action, it is useless for them to issue a warning gently, because the message will almost certainly fail to penetrate the child’s excitement. Instead the parent speaks loudly and forcefully — even angrily. Yet the intention, as with the Bodhisattva, is to help and to protect, not to harm.

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Language is often so imprecise that one word, one concept can embrace opposites. “Anger” is like that. It encompasses both the desire to help and protect, and the desire to hurt and to harm.

Adjusting our vocabulary

It’s interesting to ask whether the words people used in the past had the same range of meaning. I’m not in a position to say, but when I was reading an essay the Roman Stoic Seneca wrote on anger, it was clear that he was referring to a state of being completely out of control. I’m sure Seneca at times would have spoken loudly, clearly, passionately, and with a desire to prevent harm being caused — that is, angrily — and that he probably wouldn’t have regarded this as the same emotion that leads to people throwing things around, punching people in the face, and harming innocent bystanders, which is the kind of thing he was warning us against in his essay.

So maybe we should call the unhelpful, harmful form of anger “rage,” and the fierce compassion or moral urgency shown by the parent or by Vajrapāṇi “passion.” (Many people seem to believe that having passion is un-Buddhist. This idea can arise from a mistaken understanding of the goal of Buddhist practice. We’re not aiming to become emotionless, but instead to rid ourselves of unhelpful emotions such as selfish craving and ill will. It doesn’t help that these unhelpful emotions were often called “the passions” by early translators of Buddhist texts. It’s natural that modern readers would take this to mean that we’re meant to get rid of passion in the sense of strong emotion. But at the time these translations were made the word passion primarily meant “suffering,” which selfishness and ill will cause. Powerful forms of love and other skillful emotions that we might call passions do not cause suffering.)

I once heard the Dalai Lama say that anger transforms the world faster than compassion, but that’s why you have to be very careful with it. He points out that the spiritually useful anger (passion) is directed against the harmful action, not against the person. This is what distinguishes it from harmful anger (rage), where we want to hurt the other person.

When the Buddha talked about anger (kodha, in Pali) it was always destructive anger he meant. He didn’t seem to have a word for the “clean” anger that is passion. Yet passion is sometimes evident in his speech when he felt the need to criticize someone. Sometimes this can sound shocking to the modern reader, such as when he said, “It is not fit, foolish man, it is not becoming.…” [emphasis added]. This sounds like ill will, but in fact it was the Buddha’s compassionate attempt to save someone from themselves.

The “come-to-Dharma moment”

In Christianity they talk about a “come-to-Jesus moment,” which one Bible website describes as “a pivotal point when a person confronts an important truth — especially an uncomfortable or life-altering reality —and makes a significant decision or change.” Being called “foolish” by the Buddha was a wake-up call — a “come-to-Dharma” moment. Hearing it would have been an indication that you were way out of line. So although the Buddha’s words may sound harsh, they were intended to prevent suffering.

I had a come-to-Dharma moment in my twenties. I had been in a Buddhist study group where a number of people had difficulty understanding some of the vocabulary, which I happened to be familiar with. Being an arrogant young man, I expressed myself in highly condescending and insulting language. Soon after, one of the teachers took me for a walk to tell me, very directly and forcefully, just how inappropriate my speech had been. He was passionate — angry — but there was no rage. Although I had been insulting to others, he didn’t direct any insults at me. He didn’t try to hurt my feelings. He just pointed out, clearly and directly, the painful truth: I had behaved in an arrogant manner that was antithetical to the way we were expected to comport ourselves while discussing spiritual teachings.

A few days later I went on a month-long intensive meditation retreat, in which I squirmed and festered with resentment, remembering his criticism and refusing to accept it. Eventually, after much suffering, a bubble of defensiveness burst within me, and I could finally accept that the teacher had been right. I saw then that I had been trying to impress others with my intelligence because I believed, deep down, that I was unworthy of love. It was that recognition that prompted me to ask for ordination.

This is what passion (good anger) can do. It breaks through the defenses we build up in order to justify our wrong-doing.

Sometimes it’s okay to offend people

In a conversation with a prince called Abhaya, the Buddha explained the difference between his sometimes fierce, passionate communication and ordinary anger. Abhaya had been sent by a rival teacher to entrap the Buddha by asking him if he would utter speech that is disliked by others. If he were to say yes, then the prince was to point out that he had behaved unkindly, just like any ordinary person. (We can tell from this that the Buddha’s passionately critical speech was well-known!) If the Buddha were to say no, then he was to be reminded that he had in fact said things that others had found painful to hear. The expectation was that the Buddha would be “like someone with an iron cross stuck in his throat, unable either to spit it up or swallow it.”

When he attempted to spring his rhetorical trap, Abhaya was holding a baby on his lap. The Buddha, deftly turning Abhaya’s simile to his advantage, asked whether, if the baby were to get a sharp object stuck in its throat, Abhaya would fish it out, knowing that this would cause the baby pain. Naturally, Abhaya said he would, because he loved the child. The Buddha pointed out that because he too had love for other beings, he would sometimes speak in a way that they find unpleasant. He can do this because he “knows the right time to speak so as to explain what he knows to be true, correct, and beneficial, but which is disliked by others.”

The Buddha had enough empathy to know whether the person being addressed might be receptive to his words. It’s not a good idea, for example, to offer criticism when someone is already under stress, because they’re already defensive.

Also, the Buddha will only say what’s true. He’s not going to exaggerate or distort.

He’ll only say what he believes will be helpful, because his concern is for the other person’s spiritual well-being. Only under those conditions will he say something that he knows will be upsetting to the other person. This kind of speech might well sound and look like anger, but it’s really passion, which is anger, purified by mindfulness and empathic considerateness, so that it is intended to help, not to hurt.

The power of passionate speech

Anger in the good sense of passion can be spiritually helpful. It can help us maintain maintain healthy boundaries when others disrespect us. It can free us from the shame that can arise when we have been disrespected. It can respond to the suffering and injustice we see in the world. Sometimes it will motivate us to act — not necessarily in the moment of anger itself, but later, when we reflect on the suffering or injustice we’ve witnessed. This kind of anger can be the manifestation of our most cherished values, expressing themselves passionately, in a skillful way.

When passion arises, because it is a state of arousal physiologically resembling rage, we have to be very mindful of our speech. We need to focus on the action rather than attacking the person. We need to avoid sarcasm and put-downs. We need to stay grounded in our bodies and be mindful of our feelings so that we don’t lose control.

Catch unhelpful anger early

Seneca advises us to catch our anger early. Since nothing good can come of rage, it’s helpful to deal with it before it gets out of hand. We can do this by learning to recognize the physical sensations that accompany its upwelling.

For most people this is difficult, or even impossible, because extreme anger shuts down the parts of the brain that allow us to be mindful. You’re therefore more likely to have success if you train yourself to recognize the physical signs of rage while you’re in a mindful, balanced state. To do this, vividly remember past examples of rage arising within you, so that you can recognize what bodily sensations trigger this powerful emotion. You might recognize things like surging energy, a sharp intake of breath preparing you for action, your pulse quickening, tightness in certain parts of the body, and so on. Having done this, it’s more likely that if rage begins to erupt in daily life, you’ll recognize it and respond more skillfully than usual.

Handle with care

Often, when rage is arising, the most skillful response  is to step back and cool off. Once we’ve brought ourselves back to something resembling emotional balance — which might take anywhere from minutes to days —  we can try engaging more reasonably.

To help us step back from rage, we can recognize the harm it can do. Remember arguments you’ve been involved in, whether in personal interactions or on social media. Recall how unpleasant and intoxicating rage is, and how hard it is to let go of anger and resentment. Constant anger is exhausting. Anger is of course painful for those we inflict it upon, and can can provoke them to be angry at us. And chronically angry people are often unpopular.

For all these reasons, we need to be wary of anger. Yet passion — anger purified, its energy harnessed — can also be a powerful motivation for righting wrongs. It might even be an ethical imperative for us to connect with our anger. Indeed, the Dalai Lama has made that point in one of his books. It’s title? Be Angry!

This is an extract from one of the forthcoming chapters of a book I am writing on politics as a spiritual practice, which I’m currently releasing as a course, called As the World Falls Apart.

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Learning the demons’ secret names

Bodhipaksa
on practice
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A few weeks ago my partner and I went to a pro-Democracy rally a couple of miles down the road. I’d decided that I wanted to spend my time there meditating, so I took along a yoga mat and my meditation bench, and sat down to meditate. In front of me sat a piece of pink card on which I’d written in black sharpie, “Buddhists For Democracy.”

I’d planned to do lovingkindness meditation, and I did for the first few minutes. But very soon I realized I wanted to chant a mantra. I wanted to chant the mantra of Padmasambhava.

The mantra goes: Oṃ Āḥ Hūṃ Vajra Guru Padma Siddhi Hūṃ.

Sometimes I chanted the mantra under my breath. Sometimes I repeated it mentally.

I kept this going for an hour, while people cheered, passing cars honked their horns, and one guy yelled over and over, “You’re all criminals!”

Chanting the mantra felt like a very significant thing to do, but to explain that I’ll have to say a little about Padmasambhava.

The Precious Teacher

Padmasambhava has another name: Guru Rinpoche, the Precious Teacher. He lived in the 8th and 9th centuries, but there’s so much mythology surrounding him that it’s very difficult to know anything for sure about his life.

Legend says that he converted Tibet to Buddhism. He was founder of one of the major schools of Tibetan Buddhism, the Nyingmapa school.

The legends say he came from a place called Oddiyana. That might be the present-day Swat valley in Pakistan.  At that time, Oddiyana was a major center of Vajrayāna Buddhism.

Maybe Padmasambha was born in Oddiyana, but there are conflicting accounts. Some stories say that he was the son of a local queen, but also he is said to have been born in the calyx of a lotus flower that appeared on Lake Danakosha, and appeared fully formed fully formed as an 8 year old boy, who King Indrabuti then then adopted. In fact, Padmasambha’s name means “born from a lotus.”

So you see what I mean about him being shrouded in myth. We really just have to approach him as a legendary or mythic figure. In the stories that are connected with him, we have to look for a more mythic sense of meaning.

What’s more certain is that he was a teacher of Dzogchen, which is the Tibetan for “Great Perfection.” Indian Buddhists called this Ati Yoga, or the “Highest Practice.” The aim is to see through appearances in order that we can rest in the innate luminosity and purity of the mind.

The part of Padmasambhava’s life I want to talk about is his conversion of Tibet to Buddhism.

Failure to Launch

King Trisong Detsen, 38th king of Tibet, wanted to convert his country. His first attempt at that was inviting a famous Indian monk called Shantarakshita.

Shantarakshita was a Mahayana monk who founded Samye monastery, where Tibetans could learn about traditional Buddhist teachings, like the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, and about newer Mahayana teachings. But at night the demons of Tibet destroyed all the work from the previous day.

Taking this as a kind of mythic truth, the way Shantarakshita was trying to introduce Buddhist practice to Tibet just didn’t work. It didn’t fit the local conditions. We can see the demons that dismantled the monastery at night as wild, destructive forces in the Tibetan psyche at that time.

Tibet at that time was a very wild, warlike country. It was full of power struggles. It was steeped in superstition, a place where people worshipped local deities and demons, and employed sorcerers to dispose of their enemies. Machiavellianism and magic were the demons of Tibet.

The rational, philosophical approach that Shantarakshita was trying to introduce just didn’t work for the Tibetans.

Converting the Demons of Tibet

So Shantarakshita in turn invited Padmasambhava. He was a great scholar, but he was also a deep meditator and a magician (siddhi). So when Padmasambhava arrived in Tibet, his main task was not to teach the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. It wasn’t to teach meditation. It was to get to grips with Tibet’s demons. He took them on in a kind of spiritual combat. In other words, in some way he tackled the wild forces in the Tibetan psyche.

He was fearless. The legends are that he battled demons until they revealed their secret names to him. And once he’d done that he was able to convince them to become protectors of the teachings, rather than opponents of them.

This, I think, means that he really got to know and understand what made the Tibetan people tick. And with that understanding he was able to show them that the Dharma (the path to awakening) was a superior way of living — in terms that made sense to them.

Padmasambhava was a Tantric teacher, and the Tantra doesn’t say “This thing you’re doing is bad; do the opposite.” It says something more like “This thing you’re doing may be bad, but the underlying energy behind it is neither good not bad, so take that energy and redirect it in a more helpful direction.”

Buddha 3.0

The Buddha himself did things like this. For example, he said, “The supreme conqueror is not one who conquers a million others in battle, but the one who conquers a single person: themselves.” He’s asking people prone to competition to channel their competitive energies in a more challenging and rewarding direction.

So I imagine Padmasambhava did something like this with the demons of Tibet (that is, Tibetan culture). Understanding what motivated Tibetans, he showed them a different way of being. He showed them a different kind of warriorship. A different kind of magic.

This isn’t an easy thing to do, because when we’ve committed to a certain way of being, it becomes our whole world-view. Bar some earth-shaking change in our lives, we just can’t imagine seeing things in a different way. It takes a true spiritual genius to tune in to people’s deep motivations and to open their minds to seeing a different goal, a different way of being.

The Buddha was a genius like that, and so was Padmasambhava, which is why Tibetans call him “The Second Buddha.”

Gautama was Buddha 1.0, and Padmasambhava was Buddha 2.0.

We’re deeply in need of a Buddha 3.0.

We need someone that can do battle with the demons of our own culture. This battle is not a literal one. It’s a metaphorical battle that involves cultivating insight and understanding rather than wielding weapons. It’s not a battle where we aim to destroy some in order to save others. It’s a battle without enemies, where we compassionately desire to help all beings. The battle is not aimed at defeating beings, but at defeating harmful ideas. And those ideas can only be defeated if we understand them, and understand why people hold them.

The Demons of the Modern Era

Every culture has its demons (and again, that’s destructive psychic and cultural forces, rather than actual demonic entities).

Here are four contemporary demons that have a powerful distorting effect on the human psyche.

1. Materialism

Materialism has to be one of the biggest contemporary demons. Here materialism refers to the belief that happiness comes from consuming and by having more.

While it’s obvious that freedom from financial worry allows us to be happier, there are diminishing returns from accumulating wealth. Psychology studies show that happiness mainly comes from things like being kind, having gratitude, self-compassion, mindfulness, and having a sense of meaning and purpose in life. These are also things that various spiritual traditions, including Buddhism, teach.

If materialism were a true source of happiness, Elon Musk would be the happiest person on the planet. Instead, he seems to be to be extremely unhappy, probably because he lacks all the true bases of a happy life.

The accumulation of wealth that we see in the world at the moment seems morbid. It’s as unhealthy as filling every inch of your house with old newspapers and empty food containers. It’s worse than that, since at least hoarding trash doesn’t generally harm other people. As Nathalie Robin said, “If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat, while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what the heck was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes.”

Materialism is creating vast inequalities, and it’s also destroying the ecological systems that allow us to have civilizations.

2. The Sanctity of the Free Market

Society is distorted by the belief that the free market is sacrosanct. Suggest limiting the power of a corporation to cause harm, and a whole bunch of people will call you a “communist” — although what you’re suggesting is that the duly elected representatives of the people take action to protect the majority of the people (us) from harms caused by a minority (the corporations in question).

It doesn’t really matter what you suggest — making it illegal to put poison in foodstuffs, for example — there are going to be people who say that it’s all up to the individual consumer, as if life should ideally consist of ordinary people going mano a mano against massive corporations that have bottomless pits of money for lawyers.

In reality, there is no such thing as a free market. Markets operate only because of laws and rules. A completely free market becomes a mafia state, where nothing is off the table, and everyone ends up strong-armed by the most ruthless. And there’s nothing free about that.

3. Short-termism

Businesses focus on their quarterly results, and sometimes they sabotage themselves in the long term, for example by cutting their research and development budgets, in order to produce short-term results.

A well-known New Yorker cartoon by Tom Toro shows a man and three children sitting by a camp fire, a ruined city in the background. The man says, “Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”

Short-term thinking is the opposite of wisdom. The Buddha used to ask, “What is for my long-term happiness and well-being?” He advised us to use that perspective as a guide for life.

The Toro cartoon illustrated the short-termism inherent in our attitude to the environment. Corporations focus on short-term profits. Our atmosphere is accumulating carbon dioxide, and as it does so it gets hotter, weather patterns are disrupted, and sea levels rise. Corporations’ efforts to maximize their profit will have catastrophic effects, but this doesn’t factor into their thinking. Those costs will be borne by others. Their profits are private, while the cost of creating those profits is public.

It’s not just corporations, of course. Individuals play a part. But it’s mostly big business that is the problem.

4. Tribalism

The Buddha points out that every one of us is subject to sickness, old age, death, and the loss of everything that is precious to us. We’re all in it together. He then in effect asks us how, knowing this, we are going to live. Given these facts, the most appropriate way for us to live is compassionate recognition of our shared plight as human beings.

Those who don’t get that we’re all in this together are usually in the grip of fear. Studies show that many people, when they are reminded of impermanence, loss, and death, cling tightly to some form of identity. They identify with one group, which they see as existing in opposition to other groups. They see their own group as inherently superior. Others just don’t matter. They may even be seen as the enemy. Tribalism says that hating, persecuting, or destroying this enemy is what’s needed to bring happiness. Currently, tribalism’s popular enemies are immigrants and trans people.

All of us are tribal to some extent. It’s part of human nature to align with other groups of people. But tribalism forces us into a narrow form of empathy, where we have a limited capacity for compassion unless it’s for people similar to us. Buddhist practice — and Christian practice too, in theory — encourages us to see past tribalism so that we can relate to all people as fellow humans, and all living beings as fellow feeling beings.

Conservatives are more prone to fear (possibly for genetic reasons) and so are more likely to fall into tribalism, but liberals do this as well. Liberals often talk about compassion, but end up despising those they think are uncompassionate. They rarely see the irony in this. They may assume that if they show enough disdain, conservatives will want to become better people.

Buddha 3.0

These four things — materialism, the false idol of the free market,  short-termism, and tribalism — are not the only demons in western culture. They’re just the ones I notice most often. They are all tangled up with each other, in ways I don’t need to spell out. I could also have mentioned individualism, the denial of evidence, and the naive techno-optimism of what’s been called the TESCREAL movement.

Padmasambhava did not destroy the demons of Tibet. Instead he recognized their essential energy and offered it a sacred purpose. We need to do the same with contemporary demons. We need not simply to condemn them, but to understand them deeply. Padmasambhava learning the secret names of the demons of Tibet means he understood their essence.

To understand the essence of cultural forces does not just mean knowing a bunch of facts. It means understanding the minds that are caught up in those forces. And since our own minds are entangled in the demonic cultural patterns I described above, we need to understand our own minds. We might look at fascists in horror, but there’s a bit of fascism in all of us. To understand them, we have to look at ourselves.

The Deep Listening of Compassion

When we see people with views we profoundly disagree with, our instincts say: let them know they’re wrong, criticize what they say, tell them what (in our eyes) is true! Yet arguing with people  is remarkably ineffective at changing their minds. Even giving them new information doesn’t work.

What has been shown to work, over and over again, is starting from a place of empathy, refraining from criticism, and asking questions that encourage them to unpack their thinking. Often when people explain themselves fully they start to change their minds. In today’s polarized world they’re rarely given a chance to talk in depth about their beliefs. They often simply confirm with other members of their tribe what they, as members of the same tribe, are supposed to believe. And when challenged by outsiders they become defensive or aggressive. These are not good conditions in which to reflect.

Because they haven’t explained their beliefs to others, they’ve never explained them to themselves, either. They don’t know what they really believe until they make it appear for an interested, empathetic listener. Only then can they become aware of weaknesses and limitations in their thinking. If you give them a chance to do this, by asking questions in a nonjudgemental way — having shown that you’re a non-threatening listener — you can then ask them more probing, critical questions, and present them with information that’s new to them. Freed from the need to be defensive, they can reflect. This is what changes minds.

Because we’re tribal, we rarely talk to people this way. Our main interest is showing people who are not in our tribe that they are wrong and bad.

To learn the secret names of the demons, we have to leave no place in our hearts for hatred, resentment, and contempt. This means learning to recognize those unskillful states, which are often hidden from us. They hide in plain sight in our minds, but we don’t recognize them because we take them to be “righteous anger.” We think our outrage shows our rightness. It doesn’t. It shows that we have a sense of superiority, and are thus under the sway of the demons. Understanding the demons means recognizing whatever stands in the way of love and compassion, and letting it dissolve away.

This does not mean “being nice.” Being nice usually means not wanting to challenge people. Padmasambhava challenged people big-time. But he did it without hatred, out of compassion. The combination of incisive challenge and and care for the people (or their ideas and actions) being challenged is illustrated by Padmasambhava’s famous “wrathful smile.”

We Can’t Wait For the Buddha

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that a new Buddha will appear in the calyx of a lotus flower in the midst of a mountain lake. He or she is not going to appear from a Pure Land or be born from a queen.

We can’t wait for a savior.

It’s up to us. We have to become the saviors. We are all invited to become emanations of Padmasambhava. Buddha 3.0 is the sum total of out collective awakening. It’s a movement of minds committed to understanding the modern psyche with the same skillful means Padmasambhava had mastered.

We need to learn the demon’s secret names; to dig deep; to look closely at our reactivity and overcome it with compassion. We need to understand others with compassion — not just feeling warmth toward them, but compassionately and empathetically understanding how they think. What makes them tick? Why do they believe the things they believe and do the things they do?

The answer to such questions can never be “Because they’re stupid” or “Because they’re evil.” The answer has to be framed in terms they themselves would recognize and assent to. It has to be framed in the same terms you would use if you thoughtfully described why you believe the things you believe, and do the things you do. Because you’re the same as them. You have the same fundamental desires for freedom, safety, and to matter. You just go about trying to fulfill those desires in a different way. We need to understand those desires if we’re to help the world find better ways to meet them.

So this is why chanting the Padmasambhava mantra seemed significant. It felt like I was sending something powerful into the world. It wasn’t coming from me, but simply flowing through me. I was chanting an invocation to call forth Buddha 3.0 — inviting awakening to emerge and convert our modern demons. Consider yourself invited.

A Spiritual To-Do List

Invitations are good, but we have a lot of work to do on ourselves.

  • We need to reject materialism, living with greater simplicity even if it’s sometimes inconvenient. Think: low carbon, low plastic, plant-based. We need to find meaning and satisfaction in our lives through friendship, spiritual community, and compassionate action.
  • We need to reject the false idea that “freedom” consists of allowing the powerful to do whatever they want. We need to see freedom as what allows all people to live happy, fulfilled, creative lives to the best of their ability. We desperately need a society with less inequality and greater fairness: a society that works for the benefit of all. This is not radical; this is common-sense.
  • We need to reject short-termism, considering what’s best for our own and others long-term happiness and well-being. It’s too late for us to leave a better world to our children and grandchildren than the one we were born into, but we have to think about how to mitigate the  damage we’ve caused, and to create the best possible circumstances for our children and for future generations.
  • We need to free ourselves from tribal thinking — especially political, national, and racial thinking. We need to question our own beliefs and live with honest intellectual humility, recognizing the limits of our knowledge. We need to start from the basis of seeing that we’re all in it together.

So it’s up to us to be Buddha 3.0. Needless to say, this isn’t an easy thing. It’s not something we can do all at once. It’s a life-long task. So why not begin now?

What will your next step be?

Bodhipaksa

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Mythbusting the name “Siddhartha”

Bodhipaksa
on practice
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A Thai-style Buddha statue, seated, surrounded by poity stupas, silhouetted in front of a peach-colored sunset.

This is one of a series of articles where I’ve been mythbusting things people “know” about the Buddha. These myths include the supposed facts that he was a prince, that he was born a Hindu, and that he left home after seeing “four sights.”

Such factoids are present in almost every book book about the Buddha and Buddhism. Yet if we look with a little historical awareness at our earliest sources — the scriptures — we see that none of these things is true.

In this article I want to mythbust something else that everyone thinks they know, which is the Buddha’s personal name having been “Siddhartha” (Siddhattha in Pāli). The evidence we have indicates that it wasn’t.

The short story is that the name Siddhartha isn’t found in the early scriptures, and is a name given to the Buddha after his death. If you’re interested in the long story, continue reading…

Siddhartha was an epithet, not a name

Siddhartha (Siddhattha in Pali) means “one who has accomplished (siddha) his aims (attha).”

In none of the scriptural discourses — the suttas — is the Buddha referred to as Siddhartha. This name is only found in a few very late texts, such as the Apadāna, the Buddhavaṁsa, and the Milindapañha, which post-date the Buddha’s death.

Rather than being a personal name, Siddhattha is an epithet, which is “an adjective or phrase expressing a quality or attribute regarded as characteristic of the person or thing mentioned.”

People applied many epithets to the Buddha, including Sugata (the one well come), Tathāgatha (the one thus gone), and of course Buddha itself (the one who is awakened). The Buddha most often referred to himself as Tathāgatha.

He’s sometimes, but rarely, referred to in the scriptures as Sakyamunī, “the sage of the Sakyans.” This is another epithet, and probably a late one. (The later Mahāyāna often refers to Gotama as Śākyamuni Buddha in order to distinguish him from other, mythic, Buddhas.)

First name, last name? It’s not so simple

We tend to read our contemporary assumptions about names back into ancient times. So we assume that people have to have a first name (or personal name) and a last name (or family name). Perhaps they have one or more middle names as well. We assume that the family name is shared by everyone in their father’s direct lineage. So my dad’s last name is Stephen, my dad’s dad had that name, I inherited it, and you’d expect my children to inherit it in turn. You’d expect someone to have only one family name. You wouldn’t expect the Stephen family to also be called something else, like “MacTavish,” for example.

But not everyone in the world shares these naming conventions. There are places where people only have one name. In Ethiopia, the tradition is that your last name is your father’s first name. My daughter’s first passport — an Ethiopian one — had her last name as Bodhipaksa, which is my first name.

In Iceland, your last name is your father’s first name with the added suffix -son or -dottir, depending on your gender. In Iceland I’d be Bodhipaksa Iansson, and my sister would have been Fiona Iansdottir. Although my sister and I were members of the same family, we would have different last names.

The  “first name followed by a family name” model is not universal in modern times, and we certainly can’t apply it to ancient India. We have to let-go of some assumptions before we consider the Buddha’s names.

The Buddha’s last names

That the Buddha was called Gotama (Gautama in Sanskrit) is not problematic. The scriptures bear witness to the fact that he was called Gotama, because people often call him that. They refer to him as “the ascetic Gotama” (samaṇa gotama) for example.

Gotama wasn’t exactly a family name in the way we understand it, though. It was a tribal, or gotra name.

Now, the Buddhist scholar Alexander Wynne tries to make a case for Gotama being the Buddha’s personal name rather than a gotra (tribal) name. Gotama was a Vedic family name, and the Buddha’s tribe were not followers of the Vedas, and so, he reckons, the Buddha’s family could not have been called Gotama.

But then in the scriptures you have things like this, where the Buddha is teaching the Sakyans of Kapilavatthu, his home town:

The Buddha spent much of the night educating, encouraging, firing up, and inspiring the Sakyans with a Dhamma talk. Then he dismissed them, saying, “The night is getting late, Gotamas. Please go at your convenience.”

The Buddha refers to his fellow Sakyans as “Gotamas,” which means that Gotama is not being used as a personal name. It’s a gotra (clan) name. The Buddha’s father, Suddhodana, is also referred to as Gotama. And his aunt and foster mother is known as Gotami, the feminine form of the name.

And at one point the Buddha says outright, “Gotama is my clan.”

What’s in a (clan) name?

A clan name is not necessarily what we would think of as a family name. You’ll notice that the Buddha, in the quote above, calls the Sakyans “Gotamas.” Sakya was a country. Under mainstream European naming conventions it’s not possible for even a small nation’s citizens to all have the same family name. It may be that different families in Sakya had different family-identifying names, but I’m not aware of any evidence for that in the scriptures, and I doubt that was the case. They were all Gotamas.

As for Wynne’s argument that Gotama is a Vedic name — the name of a sage — I’ve addressed that elsewhere. Sakka became a subject state of the kingdom of Kosala. It’s likely that as part of having their rulers legitimized, the Sakyans went through some kind of ceremony where they were aligned with the legendary Rishi Gautama. This Gautama would have been akin to a “patron saint.” The Sakyans didn’t otherwise follow Vedic traditions, but non-Vedic peoples taking on clan names based on Vedic figures was not uncommon.

Children of the Sun

The Sakyans weren’t just Gotamas. They had multiple, overlapping names.

Before his enlightenment the Buddha met King Bimbisāra of Maghada, who was curious about his origins. The Buddha-to-be explained,

Their clan [gotta] is named for the Sun [Ādicca],
they are Sakyans by birth.
I have gone forth from that family

So the Gotamas, or Sakyans, also went by the name Ādicca. This was another epithet.

Sometimes the Buddha referred to himself as “Ādiccabandhu.”  It means “kinsman of the sun” or  “of the Solar race.” Given the quote above, it’s likely that all Sakyans were called Ādiccabandhu.

So his family seems to have been both Ādicca(bandhu) and Gotama. Perhaps Ādicca, or Ādiccabandhu, was their original name and Gotama the one they were given as part of their legitimization by the Kosalans. Maybe Sakya was their original name, with Gotama being assigned by a king and Ādicca being an epithet. We just don’t know.

Rays of Light

It gets worse! The Gotama clan was also known as “Aṅgīrasa.” This name literally means “Rays of Light From the Limbs” but it refers to the spiritual descendants of the mythical Rishi (sage) Aṅgīras.

Some people have suggested Aṅgīrasa as the first name of the Buddha. It certainly sounds like it when you read a sutta like this:

I’m the son of the Buddha, the incomparable Aṅgīrasa, the unaffected,
the bearer of the unbearable.
You, Sakya, are my father’s father;
Gotama, you are my grandfather in the Dhamma.

A note in the Access to Insight translation of this discourse refers to an ancient commentarial suggestion that Aṅgīrasa was one of the Buddha’s personal names. But Aṅgīrasa is the name for a branch of the Gotama clan lineage. So it’s another “last name.”

We’re not used to the idea of having multiple last names. It’s not unknown, though. I said earlier that you wouldn’t expect a Stephen to also be a MacTavish, but in the Scottish clan system the Stephens are MacTavishes. While my relatives wouldn’t sign “MacTavish” on the dotted line, if you asked one of them what clan they belonged to the correct answer would be “MacTavish.” Maybe that’s similar to how the Sakyan clan system worked. I don’t think anyone knows.

Anyway, we have lots of overlapping clan names (or “last names”) for the Buddha, but no clear first name.

No names please, we’re enlightened

The Buddha in fact discouraged even the use of his gotra name, Gotama, at least if you were one of his followers and addressing him personally.

When, shortly after his awakening, he sought out his five former companions, they came to him and addressed him as “friend (āvuso) Gotama.” His response was:

Don’t address the Tathāgata  by name and as “friend.” The Tathāgata, friends, is a worthy one, rightly self-awakened.

“Tathāgata” was how the Buddha generally referred to himself. It’s another epithet, although seemingly a self-chosen one.

Presumably this restriction on the use of “Gotama” only applied to the Buddha’s followers, since respectful Brahmins tended to call him “worthy Gotama” (bho Gotama) or “master Gotama” (bhavaṁ Gotama). He didn’t seem to have a problem with that.

Sakyan exceptionalism

When it comes to names, the Sakyans, as in so many other areas, had different customs from the Brahmanical cultures to their south.

The Brahmins that came to talk to the Buddha seem to have referred to themselves by their clan names. But the Sakyans referred to themselves and each other primarily by what seem to be personal names.  Suddhodana, Ananda, Nanda, Suppabuddha, Anuruddha, and Devadatta: these are all relatives of the Buddha, and these appear to be their personal names.

So it’s significant that we don’t know the Buddha’s own personal name. It may be that referring to the enlightened one by a personal name might have been a taboo.

It might be similar to how images of the Buddha were not made during his lifetime, or for a long time thereafter.

After a few hundred years of cultural change, people (the Greeks, first of all) started creating Buddha images. Similarly, after a period of time people started to give the Buddha a first name: but they didn’t know what it originally was, so they tended use epithets to fill in the blank.

What’s in a name, anyway?

Our bureaucratic culture, where births and deaths are officially registered, insists that people must have one official name. In practice, though, “Alexander MacTavish” might use his full name, or be referred to as “Alex,” “Lex,” “Al,” “Big Al,” “Sandy,” “Xander,” etc. Of course, if you asked him what his first name “really” was, he’d answer that it was “Alexander” — his legally registered name. But they didn’t have such things in ancient India. In the system where there’s no such thing as an official first names, does the question “What’s the Buddha’s real first name?” actually mean anything?

Consider the Buddha’s wife. Most people who’ve studied Buddhism will confidently say she was called Yasodharā, but in doing that they’re making a choice to disregard the other names that she might have used or been known by. Rāhulamātā (Rāhula’s mother) is the most common name by which she’s known in the scriptures. Bhaddakaccānā is also found a couple of times in the scriptures. Gopi is most consistently used in other early sources. The editor of the Dictionary of Pali Proper Names posited that her name might have been “Bimbā.” Yasodharā only appears after her death.

During her life Yasodharā, to call her that for now, might have been known to different people at different times by some, all, or none of those names. The Buddha too might have had multiple names. He might have had one personal name as a child, and then another name as an adult. He might have had different personal names in different contexts — with his wife, parents, friends, and so on. He might have had a secret, ritual name. We just don’t know. His personal name, or names, has been lost.

A sacred silence

We need to learn to be comfortable with not knowing what the Buddha was called. Our minds tend to want to fill in the gaps, but in this case we don’t even have a sound basis for guessing. Our minds want to fit the Buddha’s names into our modern, bureaucratically influenced naming conventions, but we would be wise to resist that impulse.

If it helps, perhaps we could consider that if it wasn’t important for early Buddhists to record the Buddha’s name, it shouldn’t be important to us either. In the mental space where his personal name would go, we could perhaps let a sacred silence take root.

When people first started carving or painting scenes from the Buddha’s life, they left a space where the Buddha would be. For example, you’d see the tree where he was meditating, but not him. You’d see his footprint, but not his foot.

Scholars call this “the aniconic Buddha.” The absence of the Buddha was a sacred space of awe and reverence. The place where the Buddha’s name should be could be like that, too.

An ethical issue

Ethically, we should not state something to be the case unless we are certain it was. We certainly shouldn’t say that the Buddha’s first name was Siddhattha or Siddhartha. We can honestly tell people he he was called Gotama. People did call him that. We can say that Gotama was something like a last name.

We can still call the Buddha “Siddhārtha” or “Siddhattha,” of course, but we should also explain that this is something akin to a title, and not a first name as we understand that term today.

By acknowledging this, we communicate to people: It’s okay not to know things. We don’t have to make things up. We don’t need to create the illusion of knowing. When there is reason to be uncertain, we should refrain from false certainties.

When something is unknown, it’s honest to say that it’s unknown. And the Buddha’s personal name is unknown.

Bodhipaksa

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Self-love, self-kindness, and non-self

Bodhipaksa
on practice
3 Comments

A man's forearm and hand reach up to its reflection in a mirror. The image looks very like an oil painting.

Someone wrote to me recently and asked two questions, which boiled down to:

  1. Did the Buddha teach self-love?
  2. Is loving yourself contrary to seeing through the illusion of self?

There was a third question, but it was a little quirky, and so I’ll deal with it at the end.

First, I explained that these days I find the language of “self-love” unhelpful, mainly because the word “love” is so open to interpretation.

Self-kindness rather than self-love

I prefer to think in terms of self-kindness — that is, treating yourself with the same warmth, supportiveness, encouragement, and forgiveness you’d show to a dear friend.

The idea of “loving yourself” can be tricky. If you talk about “loving” parts of your personality that are harmful to yourself or others, this can imply that you approve of them.

But if you talk about being kind to them, that implication isn’t there. You can be kind toward someone without approving of what they do. Being kind toward harmful parts of yourself implies working patiently with them and not judging yourself harshly for having them.

The Buddha on self-kindness

The Buddha mostly talked about self-kindness implicitly, but there is one place he talks about it fairly explicitly. Talking about people who act skillfully, he said,

Even though they may say, ‘We aren’t dear to ourselves,’ still they are dear to themselves. Why is that? Of their own accord, they act toward themselves as a dear one would act toward a dear one; thus they are dear to themselves

He explains that acting toward yourself “as a dear one” means behaving ethically — that is, acting with regard to your own and others’ long-term happiness and well-being.

He contrasts this with people who say they are dear to themselves but who act unskillfully, thus heaping up future suffering for themselves. In other words they think they are being dear (kind) to themselves but they are acting like their own enemies.

So for the Buddha, the thing was to genuinely be kind to ourselves (that is, to treat ourselves as we would treat a dear one) by acting skillfully. That’s a pretty explicit acknowledgement of the principle that we should be kind to ourselves and treat ourselves as friends.

We’re kind to others if we’re kind to ourselves

We should treat ourselves as we would treat a friend, and treat all others as we would treat ourselves. And so we should think and act as follows:

I want to live and don’t want to die; I want to be happy and recoil from pain. Since this is so, if someone were to take my life, I wouldn’t like that. But others also want to live and don’t want to die; they want to be happy and recoil from pain. So if I were to take the life of someone else, they wouldn’t like that either. The thing that is disliked by me is also disliked by others. Since I dislike this thing, how can I inflict it on someone else?

The general principle is both clear and beautiful: “The thing that is disliked by me is also disliked by others. Since I dislike this thing, how can I inflict it on someone else?” It applies to all actions. And so, the Buddha applies this principle to other forms of behavior, such as stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, and so on.

We could call this “self-love,” but I don’t, as I said, find that term very helpful. I think it’s better to say that we should be kind to ourselves — that is, we should treat ourselves in the same way as we would treat someone dear to us.

But no form of words, whether it be “self-kindness” or “self-love” is immune from misinterpretation. We have to understand that whatever we call it, “treating ourselves as dear” means acting skillfully, which means treating others as dear.

Dharma teachings work together

This mutuality of kindness for self and other is something the Buddha talked about in the Sedaka Sutta:

Looking after yourself, you look after others; and looking after others, you look after yourself. And how do you look after others by looking after yourself? By development, cultivation, and practice of meditation. And how do you look after yourself by looking after others? By acceptance, harmlessness, love, and sympathy.

One of the things about Dharma teachings is you can’t take just one of them and expect it to “work.” They’re designed to work together, synergistically. So “self-kindness” and “other-kindness” are mutually supportive. When I’m kind to myself that helps me be kinder to others. When I’m kind to others I’m helping myself, too.

Being kind is not being “nice”

One thing I think needs clarified, though, is that being kind to others is not the same as being “nice” to them, which is what people often do.

Being “nice” involves seeking approval from others. The assumption is: “If I act in the right way, others will like me and show me kindness.” It’s insincere, flawed, and ultimately selfish.

Niceness is what happens when we don’t have self-kindness, and so we try try to manipulate others into being kind to us in order to fill the void inside us. That void arises because we haven’t learned to be kind to ourselves. We don’t regard ourselves warmly, talk to ourselves encouragingly, and forgive ourselves when we’re not perfect. Because we don’t relate to ourselves kindly, we crave the kindness of others. Hence the manipulation.

Genuine self-kindness is when we respect ourselves, treat ourselves as we would a dear one, and have kindness and empathy for ourselves.  This naturally extends to others when we empathetically know that they are just the same as us: they want to be happy and they don’t want to suffer; their feelings are as real to them as ours are to us.

Self-kindness and non-self

My correspondent asked a third question:

The Buddha said to send metta/goodwill to all directions, but is towards oneself a direction? That would seem to be stationary, since you ARE yourself.

I replied that I thought this was an overly abstract way of seeing things that overlooks our actual experience.

My actual experience is, I perceive myself. Or at least I perceive various sensations, thoughts, feelings, and impulses that I collectively label “myself.”

This “myself” includes both perceiving and things that are perceived.

There is always an emotional tone to that perceiving. Someone can hate themselves — that is, they perceive themselves with disapproval. Someone can be kind to themselves, which means that they perceive themselves with gentleness, patience, supportiveness, and encouragement (as they would a dear friend).

So yes, I can have goodwill for myself. I can be kind to myself. When, in the final stage of lovingkindness practice, I “send” kindness in all directions, I’m simply letting my awareness be permeated by an attitude of empathy and kindness. I let my awareness permeate the world, which means I’m “sending” kindness everywhere. But I’m also permeating my own being with a kindly awareness, and so I’m “sending” kindness to myself. (Actually, there is no “sending” of anything. That’s just an imperfect metaphor.)

To say “you ARE yourself” is to treat yourself as a unified phenomenon — that is, as if you were a self. A true self (something completely unified) could not be in relation to itself. Rather, each of us is an amalgamation of various activities, processes, etc. That includes parts that can relate kindly, and parts that need to be related to kindly.

It’s because there is no unified self that we’re able to be kind to ourselves.

Bodhipaksa

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Mythbusting the Buddha having been born a Hindu

Bodhipaksa
on practice
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Vishnu as the Buddha, flanked by disciples. From the San Diego Museum of Art Collection.

Many people “know” that that the Buddha “was born a Hindu.” But this, like the ideas that he was a prince and that he left home after seeing “the four sights” is also untrue.

The “Hindu Prince”

Writers often bundle myth of the Buddha having been born a Hindu together with his supposed princely status. For example, a website called “Smart History” says:

The man who became known as the Buddha was a Hindu prince, named Siddhartha Gautama, who was born in the 5th or 6th century B.C.E. to a royal family—the leaders of the Shakya clan—living in what is now Nepal.

This is just one of many places making this claim. The problem is, as I’ve said in earlier mythbusting articles, that many writers just repeat what other writers have said. They don’t check this information against the scriptures, which are our earliest and most reliable guide to the Buddha’s history. And so myths can go unchallenged for centuries.

This presentation of the Buddha as a former Hindu is just a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad account of history.

Brahmanism versus Hinduism

Practitioners of the spiritual traditions around at the time of the Buddha didn’t necessarily give names to their religions. There was nothing called “Buddhism.” Followers of the Buddha just said they were “followers of the Buddha” or or his Dharma. They didn’t say they were “Buddhists.”

Brahmins don’t seem to have had a name for their tradition either. Buddhist say they were Brahmins who had “mastered the Vedas” (vedānaṁ pāragū). Or they describe them as “accomplished in the Vedas” (vedasampanno). That may be how they described themselves, too.

Nowadays we call this religious tradition “Brahmanism.” Its not called “Hinduism,” which is a much later term.

It’s true that Brahmanism was one of the phenomena that, combined with others, became Hinduism. But it wasn’t Hinduism.

Wikipedia summarizes the current understanding of the relationship of Brahmanism and Hinduism by saying: “Brahmanism was one of the major influences that shaped contemporary Hinduism, when it was synthesized with the non-Vedic Indo-Aryan religious heritage of the eastern Ganges plain (which also gave rise to Buddhism and Jainism), and with local religious traditions.” [Emphasis added]

Another Wikipedia article says, “Hinduism developed as a fusion or synthesis of practices and ideas from the ancient Vedic religion and elements and deities from other local Indian traditions.”

Brahmanism was an influence on Hinduism, which emerged later, but it was just one influence.

The baffled Hindu time-traveler

Let’s imagine you were to take a modern Hindu back to the time of the Buddha. They probably would not accept that they and the Brahmins back then were doing the same thing.

The modern Hindu would see Brahmins reciting the Vedas, and think, “Cool!”

But then they’d see them sacrificing cattle and be shocked.

The modern Hindu would see no temples in the Buddha’s India. He’d hear Brahmins talk of an afterlife in heaven or with the ancestors, but no talk of reincarnation. But he’d hear Buddhists talking about rebirth all the time. He’d also hear Buddhists, but not Brahmins, talking about samsara.

The modern Brahmin would see animist cultures worshipping local deities and believe that this was “Hinduism,” but the Brahmins of the Buddha’s time would not recognize the animists as being part of their own religious tradition and the animists would certain not regard themselves as being part of Brahmanism.

As Bhikkhu Sujato says in a talk on whether the Buddha was a Hindu, “what we understand of as Hinduism today didn’t even remotely exist in the time of the Buddha.”

Buddhism is older than Hinduism

One thing that will surprise many people is that Buddhism is older than Hinduism. The Buddha established the Buddhadharma during his lifetime, some 2,500 years ago. Hinduism is much younger.

When something comes about through a slow process of amalgamation and innovation, it’s hard to say when exactly it started. The formation of what we now call Hinduism took place from about the 5th to the 8th centuries, according to Bhikkhu Sujato, in the same talk I just mentioned. This, he says, was the birth of Hinduism. Guy Welbon, in “Hindu Beginnings” puts the essential synthesis rather earlier. He wrote, “It is only at or just before the beginning of the Common Era that the key tendencies, the crucial elements that would be encompassed in Hindu traditions, collectively came together.” The disagreement arises simply because it’s not possible to pin down precisely the line when a slowly evolving entity stops being one thing and starts being another.

Bhikkhu Sujato points out, “If India has always been a Hindu country, how come for hundreds of years in the archaeological record — nearly a millennium in fact — we find nothing of Hinduism and plenty of things of Buddhism and Jainism?”

Note that this isn’t some trick of language — that “Hinduism” is a new term, while the religion itself dates back to the Buddha. No, the religion itself dates from a period several centuries to a millennium after the Buddha. What came before was a collection of different religious traditions that did not consider themselves to be doing the same thing.

Sakya was not Brahmanical

But even if we were to stretch the definition of Hinduism — way beyond credibility — so that it were to encompass the Brahmanical practices of the Buddha’s time, the Buddha’s people did not even practice mainstream Brahmanical teachings.

I’ve searched the scriptures looking for a single encounter between the Buddha and a Brahmin in his homeland, Sakya, and found nothing. I’ve seen mention of “Brahmin villages” in surrounding territories (these were lands gifted by kings to Brahmin settlers) but none in Sakya.

In fact the single mention I’ve come across of a Brahmin being in Sakya was in a conversation the Buddha had with someone called  Ambaṭṭha, who recounted to the Buddha how he had once, at the instruction of his teacher, visited the capital, Kapilavatthu, and had been treated with an utter lack of respect. The Sakyans, he said, giggled at him and wouldn’t even offer him a seat. The Sakyans treated him like an alien curiosity, not as a religious teacher. Ambaṭṭha doesn’t talk about having met any other Brahmins in Sakya.

Sakya was not Brahmin-friendly.

Sakya was opposed to Brahmanical beliefs and practices

The Sakyans had a belief system that was at odds with that of the Brahmins. Brahmins were obsessed with caste, or varṇa, which was a four-fold system of socioreligious purity, with themselves at the top. The Buddha’s people saw themselves as warriors (khattiyas, which literally means “owners”). They saw themselves as superior to the Brahmins.

The Sakyans being khattiyas doesn’t mean that soldiering was necessarily their profession. Sakya didn’t have a standing army. Most men living there would have been farmers, craft workers, or traders, although probably all males had some martial training.

The thing is: the fact that they saw themselves as superior to the Brahmins utterly conflicts with Brahmin belief.  To the Brahmins, the fourfold social-religious hierarchy with themselves at the top was ordained by the gods and spelled out in their scriptures. The Sakyans insisting they were superior to the Brahmins was a rejection of the Brahmin world view, and of their religious scriptures.

The Sakyans had completely different beliefs of social classes. To the Brahmins, one’s caste was an intrinsic part of one’s being, and you could no more change your caste than you could change your species. One of the Buddha’s arguments against the Brahmin’s views on social and religious hierarchy was that there were places — Sakya was one of them — where there were only two social classes: masters and servants, and it was possible for a master to become a servant and vice versa. There was nothing intrinsic about one’s social worth, and these class distinctions were just social conventions. To the Sakyans, caste, in the Brahmanical sense, didn’t really exist. This is a huge deal. It’s an utter rejection of a key part of Brahmanical teachings.

The Sakyans’ religion

One of the Buddha’s epithets was Ādiccabandhu, or “Kinsman of the Sun.” Some people have suggested that the Sakyans were therefore sun-worshippers. But there’s no direct evidence they were, and in fact there’s no mention in the Buddhist scriptures of any gods the Sakyans might have worshipped. Whoever or whatever they worshipped, they apparently did it without the help of Brahmin priests.

They did seem to regard certain trees as sacred, and used them as shrines. The oldest known shrine in Sakya was a sacred tree at the Buddha’s birthplace, Lumbini. Trees as special places crop up all the time in the Buddhist scriptures. The Buddha was born under a tree. He realized that he’d previously had a glimpse of the path to enlightenment while he’d been sitting under a tree as a boy. He got enlightened under a tree. He taught under trees, encouraged people to meditate at the foot of trees, and died under a tree.

There are many mentions of yakkhas (native spirits that inhabited trees, mountains, etc.) in the Pāli texts, which may mean that the Sakyans worshiped not the trees themselves, but the spirits they believed resided in them. To my mind it’s highly likely that the Sakyans were animists.

I’ve seen no mention of animal sacrifice of ritual fires in Sakya, or of ritual bathing or other purification rituals, all of which were important parts of Brahmanical practice. Sakyans buried the cremated remains of their dead in burial mounds known as stupas. This was not a Brahmanical practice.

So the Buddha’s tribe (presumably along with other tribes in what is now southern Nepal) seem to have had their own religious tradition, entirely separate from what the Brahmins were doing.

The mystery of the name “Gautama”

The single strongest argument that the Sakyans were part of orthodox Brahmanism is their gotra (clan) name, which was Gautama, or Gotama. This is traditionally a Brahmin name. In fact it’s the name of a Brahmin seer (rishi), from whom the Sakyans claimed descent. This descent wasn’t genetic, incidentally (the rishi was not their ancestor), but cultural and symbolic.

How would non-Brahmins end up with a Brahmin name?

Bhikkhu Sujato explains:

As the brahmins spread across India, one of their chief tasks was to ally with the local kings and provide legitimization for kingship via their rituals and traditions. There were different Brahmanical lineages according to the specifics of how the rituals were performed and the texts transmitted, and these are sometimes raced back to the ancient seers (rishi) who originated the lineage.

Since the Sakyans didn’t embrace anything like Brahainical orthodoxy, we might safely assume that this connection with the rishi Gautama was fairly superficial. It may be that a monarch who the Sakyans were vassals of, forced them to undergo some kind of ritual blessing by a brahmin of the Gautama lineage. This would be similar to the way in which some pagans, under the influence of Christianity, underwent “conversion” but carried on with their old ways regardless.

The Sakyans were not alone in being identified with an ancient seer. The neighboring Mallas were called Vāseṭṭhas, after another ancient rishi, the sage Vāseṭṭha (Skt. Vasiṣṭha). They, too, were khattiyas (warriors), rather than Brahmins.

So the Buddha was not a Hindu.

First, Hinduism didn’t exist.

Second, the Sakyan people did not follow or even agree with Brahmanical practices.

Myths as propaganda

To say that the Buddha had been a “Hindu prince” is horribly inaccurate. It also feeds into Hindus’ claims that theirs is “India’s oldest religion” — which is simply propaganda.

Hindus claim that the Buddha was really a Hindu, and even that he was an incarnation of Vishnu (seen in the illustration above) . The most common reason given is that the Buddha/Vishnu came to argue against animal sacrifice (which has a very ancient history in the Vedas.)

Hindus often talk about their religion being very tolerant. But that tolerance can take the form of saying “No matter what you think, we consider you part of our religion. And because you’re part of our religion, we’re in charge of you.” For example, for a long time, Hindus have claimed ownership over the Buddhist holy site of Bodh Gaya. After all, Buddhism was “part of Hinduism.” Recently, Buddhist monks have been on hunger strike to protest the Indian law that gives control of a Buddhist site to Hindus.

A court case forced Hindus to give Buddhists a minority say in the running of Bodh Gaya, but still gave Hindus ultimate control over the site. Just to be clear, it is one hundred percent a Buddhist site with no historical connection with Hinduism or its predecessor religions. And it’s controlled by Hindus.

The myth of the Buddha having been born a Hindu feeds the myth of him having been a “Hindu reformer.” And this provides fuel for Hindus who want to appropriate Buddhist holy places.

Hinduism and fascism

Hinduism’s tendency to “tolerantly” absorb and exert dominance over Buddhism and other religious traditions has evolved into what’s called the “Hindutva” movement, which is a blend of Hinduism with ideas borrowed from European fascism. Hindutva is a “political ideology encompassing the cultural justification of Hindu nationalism and the belief in establishing Hindu hegemony within India,” according to Wikipedia.

Claims that the Buddha was born a Hindu are propaganda, feeding that unhealthy political trend. Such claims are not just inaccurate, but are politically harmful in a way that is damaging to Buddhism itself.

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Mythbusting the Buddha’s “four sights”

Bodhipaksa
on practice
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In a Chinese painting, the Buddha to be, in his chariot, sees a dead man whose body is swarming with crows.

Just as virtually any book about the Buddha and his teachings tells us that he was a prince (the first myth I tackled), we’re also told that he renounced his kingdom because he saw “four sights.”

This is the myth I want to tackle here.

The story of the four sights

The traditional story goes something like this:

A prophet had told the Buddha’s father, King Suddhodana, that his son would either become a king who ruled the world, or a great spiritual teacher. And so the king kept his son secluded from the world in three palaces, surrounded by every luxury, so that he wouldn’t ask questions about spiritual matters.

The Buddha-to-be was intensely curious, however, and he persuaded his charioteer, Chanda, to take him for a series of rides in and around the capital.

On the first of these journeys, the young Gotama saw a gray-haired old man, stooped, with skin covered in deep wrinkles. Being sheltered, he had never seen such a thing before.

“What is that?” he asked Chanda.

“Sire, that’s an old man!”

“How did he get that way?”

“It happens to everyone, sire. We all get old.”

“Even me?”

“Yes, sire. Even you.”

The Buddha-to-be was deeply shocked.

On a subsequent trip he saw a sick man, asked the same questions, and was shocked to the core to realize that he too was subject to sickness.

On a third trip this pattern was repeated with a dead man. Young Gotama had realized for the first time that he was destined to die.

This left him feeling very unsettled. What was the point of all this luxury, what was the point of becoming a king, if it all ended in death?

The next day he went out on another excursion, and this time he saw a holy man walking through the town. On the man’s face was a gentle smile, and he seemed unshakably calm. Although he had never been exposed to religion before, he intuitively knew that he wanted to become a spiritual seeker.

And so, late one night he sneaked out of the palace, leaving his wife and child behind. He cut off his hair and beard, gave his jewelry to his charioteer, donned humble robes, and set off on his quest.

Again, I made up the wording, but you’re probably familiar with the story from books, articles, or videos.

The four sights never happened

Here’s the thing: this never happened. The Buddha does tell a story about four sights, but it’s not about him. It’s a story about someone else: a legendary Buddha, called Vipassī, who had lived eons before. It’s Vipassī’s father, King Bandhumā, who confined the prince to three palaces. It’s Vipassī who sees the four sights. The Buddha never does.

The story doesn’t make sense of course. How did the young Gotama get from one palace to another without seeing the outside world? Was he never sick as a child? Did no one around him ever get ill? His mother was dead. Did no one ever talk about that? Had he never seen anyone getting older in his thirty-odd years of life? Pretending for a moment that Suddhodana was a king, did he have no older advisers?

A little further on I’ll write about what the Buddha’s “going forth” into the homeless life was more likely to have been like. But first, I’d like to talk about some of the parts of the scriptures that do somewhat resemble this story.

The three non-palaces

There’s a scripture in which the Buddha talks about his father having had three houses. Bhikkhu Sujato translates the word for these — pāsāda — as “stilt longhouse,” which fits the archaeological record. These “palaces” would have been two-story wooden affairs with the family livestock living beneath. The Pali dictionary gives “a lofty platform” and “a building on high foundations” as the first two meanings of pāsāda, and adds “palace” as a possible translation, but that’s not appropriate here. “Mansion” might be a reasonable term, conveying something larger and grander than an ordinary person’s house, but which isn’t an actual royal dwelling.

The non-sights

According to this scripture, the houses had lotus ponds and many servants. The Buddha-to-be had nice clothes, lovely incense, and was entertained by musicians. So he had a nice life.

But this all seemed vain in the face of life’s transience:

Amid such prosperity and such a delicate lifestyle, I thought:

‘When an unlearned ordinary person—who is liable to grow old, not being exempt from old age—sees someone else who is old, they’re horrified, repelled, and disgusted, overlooking the fact that they themselves are in the same situation.

But since I, too, am liable to grow old, it would not be appropriate for me to be horrified, embarrassed, and disgusted, when I see someone else who is old.’

Reflecting like this, I entirely gave up the vanity of youth.

This “vanity of youth” is no doubt familiar to you. When we’re young, we tend to think of the old people around us as being a bit inferior, as if they could somehow have avoided old age if they’d been more careful. The young Gotama realized that youth is on a continuum with old age, and so he ceased feeling any kind of pride at not yet being old.

He went through the same realization with respect to sickness and death.

So this is similar to the “four sights,” except that there are no “sights” in the literal sense, and there’s nothing corresponding to the fourth sight: the holy man.

He also doesn’t say that these realizations prompted him to leave home. Instead they simply prompted him to let go of the intoxications he’d had with youth, health, and life.

There’s a sense in which the four sights happened to the Buddha as psychological truths. The Buddha may well have seen an old person (or sick, or dead person) and, as if he was seeing these things for the first time, realized that these were inescapable realities that applied to him. But they certainly weren’t literal truths.

The “going forth”

The Buddha is supposed to have sneaked out of the house in the middle of the night. And yet we have this passage:

Later, while still young, a black-haired young man endowed with the blessing of youth, in the prime of life, though my mother and father wished otherwise and wept with tearful faces, I shaved off my hair and beard, put on the yellow robe, and went forth from the home life into homelessness.

Here, the Buddha’s parents were very aware that he was leaving home, and may have been present at the event. The Buddha’s mother is supposed to have died seven days after his birth. Either that’s not true or, more likely, he was referring to his step-mother, who was also his aunt, as being his mother, which she functionally was.

I find this account moving. The Buddha didn’t avoid communicating with his parents. He talked to them about his decision. With sadness, they watched him prepare to leave, and watched him go. This version of the story highlights his courage in a very human, personal way. He didn’t sneak off, unwilling to face his parents’ disappointment. Instead, he was responsible and showed his parents compassion.

The “Extensive Play”

The Lalitavistara is a well-known Mahayana Sutra that tells the story of the early life of the Buddha. It’s highly mythologized, and even includes a passage when Gotama is in heaven before taking his final rebirth — the one in which he becomes enlightened.

The title, “The Extensive Play,” communicates the idea that the Buddha’s life was a kind of act that he put on for our benefit.

This scripture has been widely influential, but it’s a relatively late addition to the body of Buddhist scriptures — probably from seven or eight hundred years after the Buddha’s death. It is however based on earlier scriptures, one of which would have been the Buddhavaṁsa, which is in the Pali canon, but again as a late addition, composed well after the Buddha’s death. It is not one of the discourses narrated by the Buddha.

So it seems that some centuries after the Buddha’s death, he became mythologized. Writers turned him into a prince. They had him live a life of improbable seclusion. They had him seeing the four sights. They portrayed him slipping quietly away from the palace in the middle of the night.

The Attadanda

But why did he go forth? One of my favorite discourses is the Attadanda Sutta — the “Discourse on Taking Up Arms.” Here the Buddha says something about the disillusionment that might have caused him to leave home.

The Attadanda is from a very old collection of texts known as the Atthakavagga, which means the “Collection of the Eights.” Some scholars believe that it may contain some of the earliest scriptures we have. I’m inclined to agree.

The Attadanda begins:

When embraced, the rod of violence
breeds danger and fear:
Look at people quarreling.

I will tell of how I experienced dismay.
Seeing people floundering
like fish in small puddles,
competing with one another
— as I saw this, fear came into me.
The world was entirely without substance.
All the directions were knocked out of line.
Wanting a haven for myself,
I saw nothing that wasn’t laid claim to.
Seeing nothing in the end but competition,
I felt discontent.

And then I saw an arrow here,
so very hard to see,
embedded in the heart.
Overcome by this arrow you run in all directions.
But simply on pulling it out
you don’t run, you don’t sink.

The Buddha doesn’t overtly say here that he decided to go forth from the household life, but it’s implied, and he does talk about a profound disillusionment with the violent society in which he found himself.

Politics and violence

The references to violence and to people floundering like fish in small puddles may be a reference to the conflicts that the Buddha’s tribe, the Sakyans, had with their neighbors, the Koliyans, over access to the waters of the Rohini river. This conflict is well-attested in the scriptures. Both tribes needed access to the waters of the Rohini  irrigating their crops. The Rohini river, during times of drought, would dry up. This caused the two tribes to threaten violence over this precious and diminishing resource. This paralleled the way in which the fish in the river struggled in panic as they found themselves confined to ever-shrinking puddles.

The Buddha, as the son of the Sakyan chief, was in line to become a political leader. As a young man, he saw the futility and horror of violence, and also that it was inherent in political leadership.

But even worse than the threat of the neighboring Koliyans was the threat of the more powerful kingdoms of Magadha and Kosala, which were subjugating their republican neighbors. The Buddha’s Sakyan republic was tiny and weak in comparison to these kingdoms. The Buddha was surely far-sighted enough to see that Sakya had no future as an independent state. In fact, Sakya was brutally invaded by Kosala shortly after the Buddha’s death, with massive loss of life. And shortly afterward, Kosala itself was invaded by Maghada. it was a violent time.

Nowhere to go

The Buddha-to-be must have wondered, what is the point of becoming leader of a doomed country?

Thanissaro’s translation above has the Buddha saying, “The world was entirely without substance. / All the directions were knocked out of line.” Sujato’s translation makes more sense, I think: “The world around was volatile / all directions were in turmoil.”

Wherever he looked, there was violence or the threat of violence.

There was no place where he could do what he had been trained to do, which was to be a political leader. And even if he went off and lived as a farmer or trader, as the son of a former chief he would always be suspected of disloyalty by those in power. Leaders (especially kings) were paranoid and violent. He would probably be assassinated.

And so, “Wanting a haven for myself / I saw nothing that wasn’t laid claim to.”

There was no place he could be safe, secure.

Finding peace within

And then he realized that, rather than look outward for a sense of security, he could look inward, in a spiritual search. It was the painful arrow or dart of selfish craving, of a desire to “be something” that caused violence in others. The wars and threats of wars in the world around him were clashes of self-important egos competing to see who was superior. It was that same arrow of egoistic attachment to his role as future political leader that causes him to suffer too.

This arrow caused people to “run around,” competing, or to give up and “sink” into complacent obedience. He realized that his task in life would be to pull that arrow out. Which is why he “went forth” from the home life into the life of a wanderer.

(It’s perhaps not a coincidence that the external situation — conflict with the Koliyans — would have involved external arrows, and that the Buddha used the arrow as a metaphor for internal pain.)

It’s quite possible he realized that a life as a spiritual wanderer might be physically safe as well. Kings were paranoid and violent, and inclined to send their assassins after the sons of rival leaders. But there were limits. They probably wouldn’t kill someone who had explicitly renounced all worldly ties. I don’t want to make too much of this, though. I suspect the Buddha’s going forth was primarily existential, and perhaps only a little to do with personal safety, if at all. The young Gotama doesn’t sound to me like someone who did things for mixed motives. Then again, he was human. And a spiritual life would provide both physical safety and the opportunity to find and inner, spiritual security rooted in egolessness.

A going-forth rooted in reality

This version of Buddha’s going forth, then, is speculative. Like the traditional account, it’s a story. But it’s one that’s rooted in historical reality, tied to the shifting political landscape of the north-east of the Indian subcontinent, rather than in a fable about his having been locked away in palaces for his entire life.

I resonate with this more historical version of events. I can empathize with a young man being groomed for leadership and realizing that it’s all pointless. This is much more relatable to me than the conventional story of a cosseted prince seeing four sights.

And as someone who sports many gray hairs, and who has witnessed the deaths of friends and family, I can empathize too with his realization that death comes for us all.

Of course we still have those stories, which we can read and enjoy, suspending disbelief, and enjoying them as inspiring fiction.

Bodhipaksa

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Mythbusting the Buddha as a prince

Bodhipaksa
on practice
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Many Americans like to “do” a Scottish accent. These attempts all sound the same, but none of them are particularly like an actual Scottish person. The thing is that when an American does a Scottish accent, they are not imitating any Scot they have ever heard — they are imitating another American doing a Scottish accent. Who is in turn imitating another American doing a Scottish accent. And so on…

The American “Scottish” accent has become its own thing, rather detached from the reality of how Scots actually speak.

The stereotypical Buddha story

Something similar happens with books and articles about the Buddha. Over and over you’ll come across accounts like this:

The Buddha was born as Siddhartha Gotama. His father was a king, and wanting him to assume the throne when he was older, he kept the young Siddhartha from contact with the world, surrounding him in luxury in three palaces that he was not allowed to leave.

But Siddhartha was very curious, and persuaded his charioteer to take him out into the surrounding town. There, Siddhartha saw, for the first time, an old man. He was shocked by this, but his charioteer told him that this was the fate of everyone. On two subsequent trips, Siddhartha was again shocked by seeing a sick man and a corpse. Again, his charioteer informed him that this was the fate of us all — Siddhartha included.

On a fourth trip, Siddhartha saw a holy man walking through the town, serene and calm, and he knew that spiritual practice was his only hope for finding meaning and mental peace in this impermanent world. So in the dead of night he sneaked out of the palace and “went forth” into the holy life.

This is something I put together myself, rather than being a quote from any book or article, but I’m sure you’ve seen something like it many times.

The thing is, almost none of it is true — or at least, if you look at the scriptures you’ll either fail to find evidence for it or will find evidence that directly contradicts it.

Many books and articles on the Buddha and his teachings are a bit like the American “Scottish” accent I described: they are imitations of other books and articles, which are themselves imitations of other books and articles, probably going back to the late 19th century, when people in the west started to take Buddhism seriously, having realized that the Buddha was a historical figure, like Plato or Socrates, and not a mythic one, like Zeus or Odin. Like the American “Scottish” accent these accounts have developed a life of their own, and bear only a passing resemblance to the real thing — and in the case of the Buddha, the closest we have to a “real thing” is the early scriptures.

Usually we learn these stereotypical accounts long before we encounter those scriptures. And having already been told that the Buddha’s father was a king, we read accounts of Suddhodana and imagine him in a palace, surrounded by advisers and courtiers. As we read the scriptures, we see things that aren’t in them. Our original understanding of who the Buddha was remains untouched.

The Buddha was not a prince, because his dad wasn’t a king

Today I want to clarify that Suddhodana wasn’t a king, and Sakya, the territory he lived in, wasn’t a kingdom. I’ll deal with some of the other misconceptions in later articles.

Sakya, like some of its neighbors, was a republic, governed by a council of elders. It didn’t have a king. Therefore, the Buddha wasn’t a prince.

There were both monarchies and republics in north-east India at the Buddha’s time. In the map below, Kosala was a kingdom, ruled by Pasenadi and later by his patricidal son, Vidudabha. The Sakyans and their neighbors, the Koliyans and Mallas were republics.

Map of Shakya and surrounding territories.

The republics were not democracies, where everyone had a say, but oligarchies (government by the few), where the heads of the most powerful families were in charge of government. There was a council of elders that made decisions, sometimes witnessed by a wider assembly that represented other families and perhaps trade groups who wanted to ensure that their interests were represented.

The leader of the council was not a king. They had the title “raja,” but not “maharaja,” which was what kings like Pasenadi and Vidudabha were called. Raja, in this context, meant something more like “chief,” because the countries that had a republican form of government were not socially or technologically well-developed.

Sakya wasn’t all that

A priest from Kosala gave a very unflattering outsider’s portrait of the Buddha’s people: “The Sakyans are rude, harsh, touchy, and argumentative.  Primitive they are, and primitive they remain!” He was of course prejudiced.

Sakya was not a rich territory. It was rural and relatively poor. Its council would have met in a wood-and-mud hut that didn’t at all resemble a royal palace. In fact, excavations in Tilaurakot (the likely site of Kapilavastu, Sakya’s ancient capital) have revealed no palaces or impressive buildings at all from the time of the Buddha. The richest people there — like the Buddha and his folk — lived in wooden longhouses in which the animals were kept on the ground floor with the family living above. The most impressive buildings were made of mud bricks. The city was defended with a wooden palisade.

This was very different from how the leaders in the nearby monarchies lived. In the kingdom of Kosala, the king lived in an actual palace and had a standing army, which is something Sakya lacked. Standing armies were how kings (and the lands they governed) became rich. They could conquer neighboring lands, seize their wealth, and demand taxes.

One important scripture describes how the Buddha, as a boy, sat under a tree while his father plowed a field. It’s likely that, as a landowner, this is something that Suddhodana actually did. Some people explain this scene as being ceremonial, like the tree-planting or foundation-stone laying of a modern monarch. But what the Buddha-to-be did under the tree was to slip into a natural state of meditation, which isn’t very compatible with a regal event, which would be likely to include an audience, speeches, religious ceremonies, and men blowing on conch shells. It makes perfect sense, though, if we imagine a quiet rural scene with the head of the household doing his daily work.

How did people come to see the Buddha as a prince?

If the Buddha wasn’t a prince, how did people come to think of him that way?

Accounts of the of the Buddha as a prince arose just a few hundred years after his death.

While the Buddha was still alive, the republics were vassal states of the much more powerful monarchies. Shortly after his death, Sakya was brutally invaded by the Kosalan king, Vidudabha. Eventually monarchism became the only form of government people knew. After a few hundred years of monastic rule, people would largely have forgotten that there had ever been an alternative. So when people thought about past nations, they thought about them as having kings.

The reality is that Buddha left the wood-and-mud home where he lived above the livestock and became a religious wanderer. This is significant, but it’s not as dramatic as if he’s seen as a prince renouncing the throne. That’s a much larger sacrifice to make, and proves him to be a man capable of great things.

Clinging to beliefs

If you’ve believed the myth of the Buddha being a prince because you’ve been told it over and over, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s natural to believe what seemingly reliable sources tell us. Especially if lots of people are saying the same thing.

Maybe you still don’t believe me, but if you investigate the history of Sakya and the other north Indian republics you’ll realize that the Buddha wasn’t and couldn’t have been a prince.

Maybe you’ll be grateful to have a more accurate perspective on history.

But some people get angry when it’s pointed out that they’ve believed a myth. Sometimes that’s because, despite what they may say to the contrary, they have a “religious” view of Buddhism, meaning that, despite anything they say to the contrary, they treat Buddhism as a series of propositions to be believed. The person who points out their mistake is treated just as any blasphemer in any religion is treated. They are insulted, told to shut up, and told they know nothing.

Or sometimes we just don’t like to admit we’ve been wrong. That’s an ego thing, and it’s what we’re trying to get away from. Not clinging to beliefs was an important strand of the Buddha’s early teachings. Of course he stressed this precisely because we do tend to cling to what we believe. But it’s ironic when people emphasize that they’re the most faithful at practicing the Dharma (i.e. the Buddha’s teachings) by refusing to let go of a belief that’s demonstrably false. And when they accuse people of being “bad Buddhists” for following the Buddha’s teaching.

Why does it matter?

Truthfulness is fundamental to being an ethical person. If we are not prepared to face the truth, then we won’t live ethically, because it’s more “efficient” to do bad things and then just lie about them to ourselves and others. it’s efficient because it means we don’t have to expend as much effort.

The ethical thing to do when we realize we’ve inadvertently been passing on misinformation is to correct ourselves. When people refuse to do that it’s usually to do with believing, erroneously, that correcting yourself is a sign of weakness, which in turn is because of ego-clinging, which is what we’re trying to get away from. So having realized something is untruthful, the ethical thing is just to let go of it.

The opposite of defensiveness is humility, which is a powerful spiritual virtue. Humility allows us to recognize when we’ve been wrong, and to admit it. Humility is the practice of radical self-honesty.

Also, I believe that recognizing the truth of who the Buddha was brings us closer to him. Building up the Buddha’s going forth into a heroic act of renouncing the equivalent of multi-millionaire status might be intended to inspire us — “If he can give up all that, you can give up much less.” But it also makes the Buddha seem fundamentally different from us. His biography becomes a fairy-tale. He becomes, on some level, not real.

A mythic Buddha is one we can worship from afar, across a great gulf. To me, at least, a real, flesh-and-bones human being is one I can empathize with, understand, and feel close to.

The Buddha was very real. He watched his father plow fields. He sat in wood-and-mud-walled meeting halls listening to old men drone on about sacrificial ceremonies, and water rights, and disputes about cattle trespassing on fields. And he decided (why is something I’ll discuss later, and it had nothing to do with seeing four sights) that this wasn’t for him, and that he would seek the truth. And having found the truth, he taught this:

Herein someone avoids false speech and abstains from it. He speaks the truth, is devoted to truth, reliable, worthy of confidence, not a deceiver of people. Being at a meeting, or amongst people, or in the midst of his relatives, or in a society, or in the king’s court, and called upon and asked as witness to tell what he knows, he answers, if he knows nothing: “I know nothing,” and if he knows, he answers: “I know”; if he has seen nothing, he answers: “I have seen nothing,” and if he has seen, he answers: “I have seen.” Thus he never knowingly speaks a lie, either for the sake of his own advantage, or for the sake of another person’s advantage, or for the sake of any advantage whatsoever.

Those are words to live by, and to be remembered when we talk about the Buddha’s status in the republic of Sakya.

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Made a New Year’s resolution to meditate daily? Here’s how to make it happen

Bodhipaksa
on practice
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Illustration of a New Year's resolution list, with one item on it: "Quit making New Year's resolutions."

It’s early January, and many people who made New Year’s resolutions are already going “Oops!” as they realize they’ve already missed a morning at the gym, binged on something unhealthy, or forgotten to meditate.

It’s very hard to change habits.

The habit I’m most interested in is daily meditation, which is something I nailed a long time ago. Mostly my interest is in helping other people to establish that habit. It’s something I struggled with for many years, until finally I had a breakthrough. I’ve shared that breakthrough with many people, and it’s helped them too.

The breakthrough doesn’t consist of just one thing. In fact the breakthrough involves recognizing that there is no one thing that will get you to the point where you’re what I call a Rock-Solid Daily Meditator. What we need is to build up an interlocking suite of tools and strategies that support daily meditation.

Also see:

None of those tools and strategies relies on willpower. In fact, willpower is fairly useless. One study showed that a six-week training course in self-control failed to help participants to change any habits whatsoever in their lives. Even worse, participants noted that the main side-effect of the training was that they felt emotionally drained. Researchers have also found that people who are good at resisting temptations are those who don’t feel tempted in the first place, meaning that they don’t even need self-control. For example, those who apparently have good self-control tend to avoid putting themselves into positions where they need to resist temptation. Rather than walk past the donut shop and end up battling themselves, they simply walk down a different street. They put the alarm clock on the other side of the room so that they aren’t tempted to stay in bed.

The theory behind willpower is that you can change a habit based on wanting it to change. If you can just wish it hard enough, then it will be so.

The Buddha offered a hilarious illustration of the absurdity of this proposition:

Suppose a man were to throw a large boulder into a deep lake of water, and a great crowd of people, gathering and congregating, would pray, praise, and circumambulate with their hands palm-to-palm over the heart [saying,] ‘Rise up, O boulder! Come floating up, O boulder! Come float to the shore, O boulder!’ What do you think: would that boulder — because of the prayers, praise, and circumambulation of that great crowd of people — rise up, come floating up, or come float to the shore?

Well, I think it’s hilarious!

What the Buddha points out is that if you want something to happen, it’s not enough just to want it. You have to do the things that support that thing happening.

So here are some of the key points that I teach people who want to meditate daily.

Set easily attainable goals

You go to a meditation class and do 30- or 40-minute meditations. And the teacher tells you that you should practice every day. So you try to fit a 30- or 40-minute meditation into your already busy lifestyle and find — surprise, surprise — that it’s hard to do this.

Yes, some people are able to carve out that amount of time each day for a new habit, but most people can’t. And it’s not because of a lack of willpower, any more than not being able to get your size 8 feet into a pair of size 6 shoes is because of a lack of willpower. You’re simply trying something that’s almost impossible.

So instead, aim to sit for just five minutes every day.

Yes, it’s not a lot of time. But that’s the point. Everyone has five minutes to spare every day. If you’re pressed, you can head to the bathroom at work and meditate in a stall. You can meditate for five minutes after you’ve finished reading your child to sleep. You can meditate in the car when you arrive at work, or meditate on the bus or train.

I’m not saying that five minutes is enough. Sure, it can be enough to bring about a little more calm, but it probably isn’t going to change your entire day.

But what it does do is to help you create and sustain a powerful habit. Because once you’re meditating for five minutes a day, you find that it’s not that hard to increase it to eight minutes, ten minutes, fifteen, twenty … and now you’re doing something that really can change your whole day, and even your whole life.

Hack the meaning of the word “day”

A day, for the purposes of meditating daily, is not the 24 hours between one midnight and the next (a “clock day”), but is the time between waking and going back to sleep again (an “organic day”).

This gets us around the problem of going to bed after midnight and realizing that you haven’t sat yet. If you’re counting by clock days, you’re screwed. If you’re on organic days, you can pull off a quick five minute sit and you’re still on track.

Plan

All the above is vital, but even more vital is that you actually do need to have the intention to meditate daily. I don’t mean simply having a vague thought, “Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if I meditated every day, instead of just every now and then.” I mean “It would be good to meditate every day; how can I make that happen?”

So we’re back to doing the things that support the habit of daily meditation, rather than trying to “wish” it into existence.

To meditate daily requires planning. Planning makes manifest your intention. It takes the idea or desire, and brings it into the world as an actual thing.

So you need to plan. When are you going to meditate? For how long? How are you going to time it? Are you going to use a guided meditation? Are you going to do it with someone, even if they’re not physically present with you, but instead you’re on a Zoom call or phone call with them?

If you don’t plan, but hope that you’ll somehow fit your five minutes in sometime, you’ll fail. You’ll forget. You’ve don’t have even a wish at that point, never mind an intention.

Beware of the inner voice that says, “I don’t like planning. I want to be spontaneous!” That’s the part of you that doesn’t want to meditate speaking. It wants you to spontaneously do something other than meditate.

So be clear in your planning.

Plan again

Planning is great. But there’s a saying along the lines of “You make plans, and the universe laughs.”

Events are going to crop up that get in the way of your meditation. You’ve decided to sit before you leave for work, and one of your kids gets sick, or there’s a work emergency that means you have to leave early, or your alarm doesn’t go off, or someone knocks on the door asking you to support some cause or other. The permutations are endless.

Research shows that people who have a Plan B are vastly more likely to stick at their habits. They anticipate what they will do if Plan A is frustrated. They have a backup plan that’s just as specific as Plan A was.

One implication of this is that if your Plan A is to meditate just before going to sleep, then you can’t have a plan B. So that tells you that planning to meditate last thing at night is okay as a standby in emergencies, but it’s not good for a regular practice.

Hack your sense of self

Once you have a few consecutive days of meditation under your belt, you can bring on the most powerful strategy I know of for supporting a daily meditation practice. It’s a simple mantra, to be repeated frequently:

“I meditate every day. It’s just what I do. It’s part of who I am.”

What this does is change your sense of who you are.

If you’ve tried and failed to set up a daily meditation practice before, you build into your sense of self the idea, “I am the kind of person who can’t keep up a daily meditation practice. I lack the willpower.”

This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe you can’t meditate daily, you won’t. You’ll hit one of those times when you don’t really feel like meditating, and because you think of yourself as someone who can’t meditate every day and doesn’t meditate every day, you’ll cave and end up missing a sit.

When you repeatedly say “I meditate every day. It’s just what I do. It’s part of who I am,” this too becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You hit the same crisis point where you really don’t feel like meditating, but you say to yourself, “Snap out of it! I meditate every day. It’s just what I do.” And you sit.

It’s this tool more than any other that’s kept me meditating daily. And I know that some of my students have found themselves meditating for several thousand straight days as a result.

But prepare for slip-ups

I felt terrible the first time that I missed a day after many months of meditating consistently. I felt like I’d failed. Like I should give up.

With me it was the result of being very busy with work and having two young kids to take care of. I was so frazzled that I forgot to create a Plan B, went to bed without even realizing I hadn’t sat, and work up the next morning feeling the way I would if I’d accidentally driven over a beloved pet.

Fortunately I pulled myself together and kept going, although I know others haven’t.

I think of missing a day as a slip-up, not a failure.

I think of missing a day as an opportunity to learn. Have I been forgetting my mantra? Have I forgotten to plan? To have a Plan B? If a day were to come up again that was as crazy as that one, how would I do things differently?

Other strategies

I have a ton more strategies, but I can’t cram them into one already very long blog post.

If you want to learn more, I have a Get Your Sit Together online course running at present, which you’re free to join. I also have a four-week live Get Your Sit Together course through the New York Insight Meditation Center coming up (it’s on Zoom), and you can register for that through their website. Both of these include community support, and if I’d had time to write about one more strategy above, it would have been the power of friendship and community.

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“Soft eyes, kind eyes”

Bodhipaksa
on practice
No Comments

close-up of a stone buddha head, focusing on its soft, half-open eyes.

The Buddha said that it was possible to dislodge unhelpful thoughts (those that make us suffer unnecessarily) with the use of more helpful thoughts. He compared this to the way a carpenter could dislodge wooden peg out of a hole by hammering a smaller peg against it.

This principle is incredibly useful in meditation, and it can be employed in a large number of ways. One popular application of this is the use of mantras, which can be chanted out loud or repeated in the mind. A mantra such as Om Mani Padme Hum, when repeated in this way, leaves less mental space for thinking. The mantra is a thought that, like a small pin applied skillfully, dislodges the larger pin of thoughts that are unhelpful because they’re expressions of worry, resentment, self-doubt, and so on.

Also see:

While you’re chanting a mantra you might not notice much happening, but afterward you feel calmer and more relaxed because you’ve given your brain and body a break from habitual patterns of thought that chip away at your sense of well-being.

Sometimes the pegs we use as tools are not traditional Sanskrit mantras, but are phrases in English. I find that these are most effective when they point us toward our experience.

A set of phrases I use a lot is “Soft Eyes, Open Field of Attention; Kind Eyes, Meeting Everything With Tenderness.” I’d like to explain why and how I use those four particular phrases.

First, the Why

“Soft Eyes”: If you know anything at all about my teaching from the last ten years or more, you’ll be aware that I almost always start a guided meditation by reminding people to soften the eyes.

“Soft eyes” means letting the muscles around the eyes be at ease, and letting the focus in the eyes be soft. You can try that right now, although you might want to look away from the screen. You’ll probably find that this is almost instantly relaxing, and that your mind becomes calmer very quickly.

Our minds are often on edge, roaming restlessly, looking for some problem that we need to pay attention to. In other words they’re controlled much of the time by the sympathetic nervous system, responsible for the so-called “fight or flight” reflex. Much of this problem-seeking involves the eyes, which stay narrowly focused and which are in constant motion.

Softening the eyes (soft focus) and letting them be still (the muscles around them being at rest) triggers the parasympathetic nervous system, which brings our system back to calm, rest, and relaxation.

With tight eyes, and the sympathetic nervous system active, we find that even in meditation the mind is still problem-solving. It’s restlessly picking through various aspects of our lives, looking for those things we’re worried about, angry about, depressed about, and so on. There’s lots of distraction.

With soft eyes, and the parasympathetic nervous system activated, the mind feels safer and loses its restlessness. It no longer needs to find problems to solve. And so it does less thinking. There’s less distraction.

So this is why I say, “Soft Eyes.” It’s a reminder for us to let the eyes be soft.


(The video above introduces the practice of “soft eyes.”)

“Open Field of Attention”: The habitual tightness we carry around in the eyes, with its narrows focus, leads to us fixating on a very narrow part of our visual field. When we close the eyes in meditation, we maintain this narrow focus in our inner field of attention.

I’ve often asked meditators to “draw” over the surface of the body what it is they’re observing when they’re doing “mindfulness of the breathing.” Because they have tight eyes and a narrow focus. most indicate a very small area, which doesn’t offer enough sensation for the mind to become fascinated by and absorbed in. And so they find they get distracted a lot.

When the eyes are soft, our inner field of attention is gentler and more open. Our attention is more expansive and receptive. We find that we’re able to sense many sensations of the breathing at once. We may even find that we can be aware of the whole body breathing. This is a very rich experience. it’s fascinating and we find it absorbing. It’s easier for us to keep observing the breathing without getting distracted all the time.

“Soft eyes” triggers an “open field of attention.” One follow naturally from the other. Nevertheless, it’s good to remind ourselves to notice what’s in our open field of attention.

Saying “Open field of attention” is a reminder to let our inner field of attention be expansive and receptive, and for us to notice the incredible richness that’s arising there.

“Kind Eyes”: Saying “kind eyes” is a way of bringing kindness into our present-moment experience. We can recall a time we looked with love — at a child, a lover, a friend, a pet — and let the eyes become kind now, as they were then. After a while we no longer need to access that kind of memory. We can simply remember what it’s like to have kind eyes, and drop back into that experience.

In saying “kind eyes” we’re directing our attention back to the eyes, reminding ourselves to connect with kindness.

“Meeting Everything With Tenderness”: Just as the eyes being soft changes our inner field of attention, causing it to be more open, expansive, and receptive, so letting the eyes become kind changes the way we pay attention internally. In this case it brings warmth, patience, kindness, compassion, and acceptance into our experience. We can find that we meet our distractions, our feelings, and even painful sensations with warmth.

Saying “meeting everything with tenderness” reminds us to bring kindness deeply into our being.


(The video above uses slightly different phrasing. More about that below.)

The How

I use the breathing to pace how quickly or slowly I drop these phrases into the mind, and to help keep my mind on track.

Pacing means balancing saying and listening.

Saying the phrases directs our attention to these various parts of our experience: softening the eyes, noticing the richness that’s arising in our open field of attention, letting kindness arise, and and bringing kindness into our whole being.

But if we’re speaking all the time, we might not be allowing ourselves to actually be with those experiences. We might not really notice them. We might not be allowing ourselves to go deeply into them.

We’re basically just talking to ourselves, and not letting ourselves have a chance to feel.

So generally I’ll say one of the phrases on an out-breath, and then leave two or three cycles of the breathing where I say nothing, and instead simply observe the experience that the phrase is pointing to.

Then I’ll drop in the next phrase, and so exactly the same thing. And I’ll continue like that through all four phrases, and then repeat.

However, if I’m particularly distractible I’ll tighten up the pacing. If I’ve been dropping in a phrase every third breath and keep getting distracted, I’ll start dropping in the phrases every two breaths. If I’m really distractible, then I might say a phrase on every breath. As I said above, this has the drawback that it doesn’t leave much time for being with our actual experience. But it’s better to do that than to get continually distracted.

Conversely, if things are going well then I might drop in the phrases less often. I might get to the point where I don’t even say the phrases; I just do what they’re describing (noticing soft eyes, noticing the body, noticing kindness in the eyes, bringing that kindness to meet every experience).

So there’s scope in this practice for fine-tuning as you go, adapting to changing conditions.

I also sometimes change the phrases. Sometimes instead of “soft eyes, open field of attention” I’ll say “soft eyes, body alive.” It’s basically the same thing, except that in the second case I’m more explicitly directing my attention toward the contents of the open field of attention. And sometimes instead of “meeting everything with tenderness” it’ll be “meeting everything with love” or “meeting everything with love.”

Although people sometimes assume that all thinking in meditation is to be avoided, thinking can be used consciously as a tool. Thoughts can direct our attention toward our immediate sensory experience. Thought can help drive out thoughts and quiet the mind.

You can play around with this tool as well. Make it your own. Find out what works for you.

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The puzzle of “skillful” and “unskillful” as ethical terms

Bodhipaksa
on practice
5 Comments

Man practicing piano in a darkened room, with the piano illuminated by a desk lamp.

One of the things that struck me as odd when I first encountered the Buddha’s teachings was the terms he used when he discussed living ethically or morally: “skillful” (kusala) and “unskillful” (akusala).

Maybe these terms are new to you. Or maybe they’re so familiar that you’ve stopped thinking about them. Either way, they are an unusual way to talk about morality.

The most common terms for describing ethical actions are good and bad, right and wrong, and good and evil. These are the terms most of us grew up hearing.

It’s not that the Buddha never used that kind language. Particularly when he was composing poetry, or when he was speaking to uneducated people, he’d use the word puñña, which means merit or “good,” and pāpa, which means bad or evil.

See also

But when he was talking technically, to serious Dharma practitioners — monks, nuns, and those householders who were dedicated disciples — he used these words “skillful” and “unskillful.”

No one can know for sure why Buddha chose those terms, but what might he have had in mind?

What is Skill?

So let’s think about what skill is. What does it mean to do something in a skilled way?

My understanding is that if you have skill you’re able to achieve something challenging that you set out to do. That’s the definition of being skilled.

So a skilled carpenter has the idea they’re going to make, say, a beautiful coffee table. And lo and behold, a beautiful coffee table appears. They have the skill to be able to create it. A skilled potter, wants to make a particular kind of pot. And because they’ve done a lot of practice, because they know what they’re doing, they’re able to make that kind of pot. They have the skill to accomplish what they set out to do. A person who lacks skill cannot do that. So that’s what it means to be skilled, or unskilled.

Skillful and Unskillful As Ethical Terms

Now, the Buddha used these terms, skilled and unskilled, in an ethical sense.

What does it mean to have skill in an ethical sense? Well, ethics is a part of practice. The Buddha talked about “the threefold training” which comprised ethics, meditation, and wisdom. These are three things we train in. Training itself is about developing skill, so there’s a consistent theme here.

What is the point of practice? What are we training for? The aim of practicing is to liberate ourselves from suffering. It’s to become happier, more content, more fulfilled, and to have more of a sense of meaning in our lives. It’s to have a better life, and, out of compassion, to help other people to have that experience as well. These are the things we’re developing skill in.

Ethics Is Not About Being Good

It might sound deeply contradictory to say that ethics is not about being good, but I think that’s a fair claim to make about ethics in Buddhism. The Buddha didn’t tell us to abandon greed, hatred, and delusion because they are evil, but because they cause suffering. He said that if they didn’t cause suffering, then he wouldn’t tell us to abandon them:

If giving up the unskillful led to harm and suffering, I would not say: ‘Give up the unskillful.’ But giving up the unskillful leads to welfare and happiness, so I say: ‘Give up the unskillful.’ (AN 2.19)

Skillful and Unskillful Qualities and Actions

Just as a carpenter shows skill when they intend to create a beautiful piece of furniture and are successful, so we’re ethically skillful when we have the aim of living in ways that free us from suffering and that help others be free from suffering, and are successful in accomplishing that aim.

We’re unskillful when we aim to be free from suffering but end up creating pain and confusion.

The thoughts, words, and actions that free us from suffering are skillful. Those that do the opposite are unskillful.

When the Buddha talked about ethics he pointed out that there were two trends in the mind. (See MN 19) The mind can act based on selfish craving, hatred, or a lack of understanding. And those things will lead to suffering. He called these “unskillful.”

The other trend is that the mind acts with mindfulness and exhibits qualities such as patience, courage, kindness, empathy, compassion, appreciation, and so on. These are things that free us from suffering and bring peace and happiness. He called these ethical qualities “skillful.”

So we’re acting skillfully when we’re exercising skillful qualities — that is, qualities that help us move closer to the goal of freeing ourselves from suffering. We’re acting unskillfully when we’re in the grip of unskillful states of mind that create suffering.

So this is what I think the Buddha perhaps had in mind when he was using these terms — skillful and unskillful — which seem, at first glance quite unusual.

Why This Matters

It’s an interesting shift of perspective to think about ethics in terms of skill. It’s quite different from how we might have been raised to see things. We may have been raised to see things in terms of good and bad.
We get caught up in the idea of people themselves being good and bad. But it’s only actions that can be skillful or unskillful. You can’t talk about an unskillful person because no person is entirely skillful or unskillful.

Lots of people think of themselves as being good or bad. They want to present themselves to themselves as being good, which I’ve described elsewhere as a disastrous move. And of course lots of people become convinced that they are bad, or unworthy, and usually they’re sadly mistaken. You may be one of those people, or you probably know some of them. And your impression of them is probably that they are lovely people with many fine qualities. They’re probably kind and thoughtful, and you probably benefit from being with them.

We’re all a mixture of skillful and unskillful qualities. No one is all one or all the other. And spiritual training — or at least a lot of spiritual training — is about, on the one hand, exercising and strengthening the skillful, and on the other hand recognizing and letting go of the unskillful.

Life Is Practice

And this is for me the most important implication of the Buddha’s language of ethics as a skill. Skills are to be practiced and refined. Life — our ordinary everyday actions, and even our thoughts — is where we train. Our mistakes — the times we make ourselves or others suffer — is how we learn.

We can include in our lives constant reflections: did my actions lead to suffering? How could I do this differently in the future? Is what I’m doing or saying now leading to suffering? How can I change what I’m doing? Is this thing I intend to do or say or think likely, based on my past experience, to create unnecessary suffering? How might I act differently? (See MN 61)

Our lives are lessons to be learned. As long as we keep learning from our ethical mistakes, those mistakes are useful ones, because they bring us closer to our goal of living with peace, joy, and meaning.

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