74What the Buddha Taught

Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught, Grove Press, 1959; revised and enlarged edition 1974

Linked to 19 chapters: supports 8 · contradicts 5 · mechanism 5 · same claim 6 · pairing 3

Walpola Rahula finished this book in Paris in July 1958. He had been trained as a monk in a pirivena in Ceylon, had taken a doctorate on the history of Buddhism there, and was at the Sorbonne preparing a study of Asaṅga. He wrote for a reader with no instruction in the subject, and set himself one restriction that decides the character of the book: the material is taken from the Pali Tipiṭaka, the earliest extant record of the teaching. Where a doctrine has an obvious modern paraphrase he refuses it and gives the Buddha's own figures — the raft, the poisoned arrow, the mountain river, the flame in the night. The plan of the book is the plan of the teaching: one chapter on the attitude of mind it asks for, four on the four noble truths in order, one on the doctrine of no-soul that follows from them, one on mental culture, and a last that puts the whole of it into an ordinary working life. The two that carry the most weight are the sixth, on anatta, where Rahula argues that the denial of a self is categorical and not a silence, and the seventh, on bhāvanā, where he argues that what is called meditation is neither a trance nor a retreat from work.

The Buddhist attitude of mind

Among the founders of religions, Rahula begins, the Buddha was the only one who claimed to be nothing other than a human being, and who attributed everything he attained to human effort and human intelligence. No god stands over a man's destiny, and liberation is his own work: the Buddha's part was to discover the path and show it, and the walking is not transferable.

The freedom of enquiry that follows is, Rahula says, unheard of elsewhere in the history of religions. At Kesaputta the Kālāmas complained that each visiting teacher praised his own doctrine and despised the rest, so that they could not tell who spoke the truth. The Buddha told them their doubt was proper, and that they should not be led by report, by tradition, by hearsay, by the authority of scriptures, by logic or inference, by delight in speculation, or by the thought that this is our teacher; they should find out for themselves what is unwholesome and give it up, and what is wholesome and follow it. A disciple, he said elsewhere, should examine even the Tathāgata before following him.

Doubt is one of the five hindrances to understanding, but it is not a sin, since there are no articles of faith to offend against and no category of sin in the system at all; the root of evil is ignorance and false view. What is asked for instead of belief is seeing: saddhā, usually rendered as faith, is confidence born of conviction, and the teaching is called ehi-passika, come and see.

Two of the Buddha's own figures close the chapter and set the limits of what the teaching claims. The raft is built of grass and branches to cross a dangerous water, and a man who carries it on his head afterwards has misunderstood it: the teaching is for crossing, not for holding on to. And when Māluṅkyaputta threatened to leave the order unless the ten classical questions were answered — whether the universe is eternal, whether the soul is the body, whether the Tathāgata exists after death — the reply was the man shot with a poisoned arrow who refuses to have it drawn until he knows the caste and name of the archer, the kind of bow and the feather. He dies uninformed. What has been explained, the Buddha ended, is dukkha, its arising, its cessation, and the way leading to its cessation; the rest was left unsaid because it was not useful and did not lead to nirvāṇa.

The four noble truths

The first truth is usually given as the noble truth of suffering, and Rahula calls both the translation and the reading of it misleading, and the source of the charge of pessimism. Buddhism is neither pessimistic nor optimistic but realistic. His illustration is three physicians: one exaggerates the illness and gives up hope, one denies there is any illness, and the third diagnoses correctly and treats the case. Dukkha means pain in ordinary speech, but as the first truth it also carries imperfection, impermanence, emptiness and insubstantiality, and is better left untranslated. It does not deny happiness: the canon lists the happiness of family life and of renunciation, of the senses and of detachment, and even the equanimity of the fourth absorption, all of which fall under dukkha because whatever is impermanent is dukkha.

The term has three aspects: ordinary suffering, the suffering produced when a happy condition changes, and dukkha as conditioned states. The third requires analysis, because it identifies dukkha with what a person is made of. A being is a combination of five aggregates, and these are not something that undergoes dukkha; the five aggregates of attachment are dukkha.

Consciousness is the one Rahula guards most carefully, because the notion that it is a self persisting through a life has, he says, survived from the earliest times to the present day; it is named after the condition through which it arises, as a fire is named after what it burns. The aggregates are in flux: human life is a mountain river flowing far and swift, with no instant at which it stops, and there is no unmoving mover behind the movement and no thinker behind the thought — the exact opposite, Rahula notes, of the cogito. He takes the formulation from Buddhaghosa: "Mere suffering exists, but no sufferer is found."

The second truth is samudaya, the arising, defined as thirst — taṇhā — which produces re-existence and finds fresh delight now here and now there: thirst for sense pleasures, for existence, for non-existence. It is not a first cause, since where everything is conditioned no first cause is possible. Rahula widens it past the obvious to attachment to ideas and theories, and traces to it not only private quarrels but wars between states. Volition is what the Buddha defined as karma, and karma means volitional action only, never its result; it is cause and effect and not moral justice, which would presuppose a judge. Nothing unchanging passes over at death: one who dies here and is reborn elsewhere is neither the same person nor another, as a flame burning through the night is neither the same flame nor a different one.

The third truth is nirodha, the cessation, which is nirvāṇa, and Rahula says at once that the question cannot be answered completely in words, language having been made for what the senses and the mind meet: the tortoise came back from a walk on land, and the fish said, you mean swimming. Because positive words invite a wrong image the texts use negative ones — extinction of thirst, the unconditioned, blowing out — which does not make the thing negative, the word for health in Pali being literally the absence of illness. His firmest point is that nirvāṇa is not a result, since an effect of the path would be produced and conditioned; one reaches a mountain by a path without the mountain being an effect of the path. It can be realized in this life.

The fourth truth is magga, the middle path, which avoids both the pursuit of happiness through the senses and the pursuit of it through self-mortification, each of which the Buddha had tried. Its eight factors are not steps taken in the order in which they are listed but are developed together, each helping the others, and they fall under three heads.

Ethical conduct rests on universal love and compassion, and compassion and wisdom must be developed equally, since the first alone makes a good-hearted fool and the second a hard-hearted intellect. Right livelihood rules out trade in arms, in intoxicants, in poisons and in the killing of animals, from which Rahula concludes that the teaching is set against war at the level of how a man earns his living. Right thought — detachment, love, non-violence — is classed under wisdom rather than conduct, and right understanding comes in two sorts: anubodha, an accumulated intellectual grasp, and paṭivedha, penetration, seeing a thing without its name and label. The chapter ends with the four functions: the first truth to be understood, the second discarded, the third realized, the fourth followed.

The doctrine of no-soul: anatta

What is meant by soul or self or ātman is a permanent and absolute entity behind the changing world, the thinker of thoughts and the receiver of the fruits of actions. Rahula's claim is unqualified: Buddhism stands unique in the history of human thought in denying such a thing, the idea of self being a false belief with no corresponding reality, which produces the thoughts of me and mine from which craving, hatred and conceit follow. He gives the belief two psychological roots. For self-protection man made God, on whom he depends as a child depends on a parent; for self-preservation he conceived an immortal soul; both console against ignorance, weakness, fear and desire, and a teaching that removes them will be resisted. Four weeks after the awakening the Buddha considered that the truth he had seen ran paṭisotagāmi, against the current, and hesitated to teach it; he decided to after comparing the world to a pond in which some lotuses are still under water, some at the surface and some clear of it.

The doctrine is the corollary of two approaches that meet. The analysis of the five aggregates is the analytical one, and finds nothing behind them. Conditioned genesis is the synthetical one, Rahula's name for the Buddhist theory of relativity: nothing is absolute, everything conditioned and interdependent. Its principle is four lines — imasmiṃ sati idaṃ hoti, when this is, that is; this ceasing, that ceases — worked out in twelve factors running from ignorance to decay and death, and reversible, so that the ceasing of ignorance ends the series.

The question of free will, he says, cannot arise here: if the whole of existence is conditioned, a will cannot be the exception, and while a conditioned and relative freedom is not denied, a will independent of cause and effect does not exist. He also separates two levels of speech, so that saying I and you is not lying but conforming to the world's convention while the ultimate account has no I in it.

The textual case turns on three lines of the Dhammapada, the fifth, sixth and seventh verses of its twentieth chapter.

The first two use saṃkhārā, conditioned things, which is the five aggregates and everything relative and interdependent. The third changes the word to dhammā. "Here lies the crux of the whole matter," Rahula writes. Had the third line kept saṃkhārā, one could hold that conditioned things are without self while a Self stands outside them; dhamma is the widest term in the vocabulary, covering the conditioned and the unconditioned, nirvāṇa included, and leaving nothing out. The line therefore denies a self inside the aggregates and anywhere else as well. The argument from control that tests each aggregate in turn is the one set out in the Anattalakkhana Sutta; this is the argument that closes the last door behind it.

Rahula then takes apart the passages used by those who want to find a self in the canon. The line attā hi attano nātho is rendered as Self is the lord of self and read as a great Self ruling a small one; both halves are wrong, since attā is in general use a reflexive pronoun, oneself, and nātho means refuge rather than lord. The other is attadīpā viharatha, attasaraṇā anaññasaraṇā, taken out of its setting in the discourse on the final passing: Beluva, three months before the death, after the Buddha at eighty had come through a near-fatal illness. Told by Ānanda that he had consoled himself with the thought that the Teacher would not pass away without leaving instructions for the order, the Buddha replied that he had taught without the closed fist of a teacher, had never thought of leading the order, and was keeping his body going like a worn-out cart by repairs; and that they should dwell making themselves their island and their refuge, and the Dhamma their refuge, and nothing else. Asked how, he named the four establishings of mindfulness and said nothing about a self.

The hardest case is the silence. The wanderer Vacchagotta asked whether there is a self, and the Buddha said nothing; asked whether there is no self, he said nothing again, and Vacchagotta left. To Ānanda afterwards he explained both refusals: to answer yes would side with the eternalists and contradict his own knowledge that no dhamma is a self, and to answer no would side with the annihilationists and leave a man already confused thinking that he formerly had a self and now had lost it.

Rahula's reading is that the Buddha spoke to the state of the questioner, and that since he had discussed the self openly on many other occasions the silence is particular to the man.

What is left when the theory goes is the feeling. In a conversation in the Saṃyutta collection the monk Khemaka tells a group of monks that he finds no self in the five aggregates and nothing belonging to one, and yet is not free of impurities, because with regard to them he has the feeling I am without being able to see clearly what it is. It is like the scent of a flower, which is neither the scent of the petals nor of the colour nor of the pollen; it fades later, as the smell of the chemicals fades from a freshly washed cloth kept in a box. Holding the opinion I have no self is as much a fetter as holding I have a self, since both grow out of the same feeling.

If there is no self, who receives the results of actions? The Buddha's answer to the monk who asked was that he had taught them to see conditionality everywhere in all things. And the doctrine is not, Rahula ends, a negative one: what is negative is the false belief in an imaginary self, and he takes his last word from Asaṅga, who put it as the fact of no-selfness.

Mental culture: bhāvanā

There are two kinds of illness, the Buddha said: physical illness, from which a man may be free for a hundred years, and mental illness, from which none are free for a moment except those free of defilements. The chapter begins by clearing away what the English word has brought with it. Say meditation and people picture escape from ordinary activity, a posture held like a statue in a cell, absorption in something mysterious; others want powers, and Rahula mentions a nun in India who was trying to develop the ability to see through her ears while keeping perfect eyesight, one more form of thirst. The original word is bhāvanā, culture or development: cleansing the mind of lust, hatred, indolence, worry and doubt, and cultivating concentration, awareness, intelligence, energy, confidence, joy and tranquillity.

The first form is samatha, the development of one-pointedness, which leads to the highest absorptions, up to the sphere of nothingness and the sphere of neither perception nor non-perception. All of these, Rahula stresses, are mind-created and conditioned and have nothing to do with nirvāṇa; the form is older than the Buddha, who learned it from his teachers and was not satisfied because it gave no insight, classing it as a pleasant abiding and nothing more. The second form is vipassanā, insight into the nature of things, and this is the Buddhist one: analytical, resting on mindfulness, awareness and observation.

The text Rahula sends the reader to is the discourse on the setting up of mindfulness, recited in monasteries and in households and sometimes at the bedside of a dying man; he translates it at the end of his book, and it is set out in full in the Satipatthana Sutta. It has four sections — body, sensations, mind, mind-objects — and none of its exercises is cut off from ordinary life.

Only one of them prescribes a posture: awareness of breathing in and out. Sit cross-legged, says the text, keeping the body erect and mindfulness alert; Rahula, writing for readers in countries where nobody sits on the floor, says a chair will do, the back straight but not stiff. Breathe normally and let the mind watch the breath. At the beginning the mind runs off; with five or ten minutes twice a day it begins to settle, and after some time there comes a moment, perhaps a second long, in which sounds nearby are not heard. That is the moment in which a man is not conscious of himself, and as long as you are conscious of yourself, Rahula says, you cannot concentrate on anything.

The second exercise requires no time at all: to be aware of whatever one is doing — walking, standing, dressing, talking, keeping silent, eating — and so to live in the present action. Rahula's example is the man in a restaurant reading while he eats, who looks busy and in fact neither eats nor reads and enjoys neither, and is trying without knowing it to escape from his life. Asked why disciples who lived on one meal a day looked so radiant, the Buddha said that they neither repent the past nor brood over the future, and that fools who do both dry up like green reeds cut down. The warning attached is against making the exercise self-conscious: mindfulness does not mean thinking I am doing this, since the moment that thought arrives one is living in the idea of I and the work is spoilt — a speaker who thinks he is addressing an audience loses his thread, and speaks well when he forgets himself in the subject.

The third and fourth sections extend the method to sensations and to states of mind. Faced with an unhappy feeling, the first instruction is not to be unhappy about being unhappy, and then to examine how it arose and how it goes, watching it as a scientist watches an object and calling it a feeling rather than my feeling. The same for the mind itself, to be looked at as one looks at one's face in a mirror — a thing people avoid, Rahula says, because they are afraid or ashamed of what is there. His example is anger, and his observation is that a man in a rage is not aware that he is in one, and that the moment he sees it the anger becomes, as it were, ashamed of itself and begins to subside.

The last form of mental culture is study and deliberation, which is why Rahula can say that reading his own book and thinking about its subjects is a form of it, and that the conversation between Khemaka and the monks was another. Its subjects include the five hindrances — lust, ill-will, torpor, restlessness, sceptical doubt; the seven factors of awakening, which he glosses in plain terms, joy as the opposite of a gloomy temper and relaxation as not being stiff in body or mind; and the four sublime states — unlimited love towards all living beings as a mother loves her only child, compassion for those who suffer, sympathetic joy in the success of others, and equanimity in all the turns of life.

What the Buddha taught and the world today

The belief that the teaching can only be practised by leaving the world is, Rahula says, a misconception and an unconscious defence against practising it. Sāriputta compared a man in a forest full of impure thoughts with a man in a village whose mind is clean, and thought the second far the greater. The order exists to make a whole life available for the service of others, not to mark a higher grade of person. In the discourse to Sigāla a young man worshipping the six directions of the sky is given six others — parents, teachers, wife and children, neighbours, employees, religious people — under a word for worship that is used of what is sacred, with the duties owed in each as the way of performing it.

The social teaching is equally concrete. One discourse states that poverty is the cause of theft, falsehood and violence, and another that suppressing crime by punishment cannot succeed; what works is grain and facilities for farmers, capital for traders, and adequate wages for the employed. On war Rahula is flat: there is no such thing as a just war, only a term coined to excuse massacre, since the mighty are always just and the defeated always unjust. His case is Asoka, who after the slaughter at Kalinga declared in a rock edict that he would never draw his sword again and asked his sons and grandsons to think no new conquest worth achieving.

Since 1959

The book has kept its place as the one-volume introduction in English most often put into a beginner's hands, and the enlarged edition of 1974 added the illustrative texts translated from the Pali, so that a reader can check the exposition against the discourses in the same volume. Its central readings have worn well: that dukkha is wider than suffering, that nirvāṇa is not the effect of the path, that the denial of a self is a claim about what is found and not a counsel of despair.

Three things in it have been contested, and one was contested in the book's own pages. Paul Demiéville, who wrote the foreword, observed that some of the explanations might lead to discussion, particularly the wish to rediscover in the Pali sources all the doctrines of the Mahāyāna; the claim that the two traditions agree without the slightest difference does more ecumenical work than the texts will carry. The claim that Buddhism stands unique in denying a self needs qualification from inside the tradition as well: the Pudgalavādin schools, numerous for centuries, maintained a person neither identical with the aggregates nor different from them. And the flat statement that the Buddha definitely denies ātman is one side of an argument that grew rather than settled — Steven Collins's Selfless Persons of 1982 and Peter Harvey's The Selfless Mind of 1995 examined how far the denial extends, and Thanissaro Bhikkhu has argued for a strategy of not-self rather than a doctrine of no-self, which is close to the reading Rahula rejects.

Two of his claims about the record have not held. The advice to the Kālāmas has become the most quoted passage in modern Buddhism and is read as a charter of free enquiry; Bhikkhu Bodhi's essay of 1988 pointed out that it is addressed to people who cannot yet judge between competing teachers, and offers a working criterion rather than a licence. Harder is the sentence that in twenty-five centuries there is not a single example of persecution or the shedding of a drop of blood in the propagation of Buddhism: the civil war in Sri Lanka from 1983 and the campaign against the Rohingya in Myanmar in 2017 were both accompanied by monastic nationalism. Rahula is not an outside party to the first, his Heritage of the Bhikkhu of 1946 having argued that monks had a duty of political engagement, and having become one of the texts of Sinhala Buddhist activism.

What came after is the movement the book did not quite anticipate. The exercises in its seventh chapter — the breath, awareness through the working day, watching a feeling as an object, looking at the mind as at a face in a mirror — were taken up from the 1970s, taught in clinics and offices, and separated from the four truths that give them their point. Rahula had refused that separation in advance: the absorptions, however high, are conditioned and are not the goal, and the study of the doctrine is itself a form of mental culture.