Todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;Pratitya Samutpada (Conditioned Co-production),and#8221; takes us right to the heart of the matter: How the Buddha sees things. Subhuti, with his sharp clarity and clear vision, explores one of the central teachings of the Buddha and#8211; that things arise and pass away in dependence upon conditions.
Talk given at the Western Buddhist Order National Order Weekend, Wymondham 2006
[music] Dharma Vites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. [music] So, I'm not going to talk about the concept of the teaching of British or something about it. I'm going to talk a little bit more about what kind of a beast it is and what sort of relationship I understand we are to have with it. It seems to me that what we're trying to do is listen to what the Buddha has to say about his experience. Through all these plethora of different modes of expression that have grown up historically, we're trying to hear the voice of one who has seen things as they are and we're trying to listen closely to what he says so that our own way of seeing things comes to be what he's saying things is, as it were in our own way. So, the teaching is not intended as a philosophical statement, although it has philosophical implications, important for philosophical implications. What I'd understand by a philosophical statement would be a statement about the way things are, which is derived from intellectual reflection, which is in the Buddhist terms beaten out by reason. So it's arrived at as an expression of the way things are simply through reason. Of course, it can't be simply through reason, but largely through reason. But the teaching of Patricia Samupada is not of that kind. Although you can take it as a philosophical statement, you can reflect upon it from a rational point of view. You can see it's implications. You can work it out in more and more detail in a different context, which is what the Buddhist tradition does. But that's not primarily what it is. It's the Buddha trying to tell us how he sees things. That's the way it seems to me we need to approach it. So we need to listen to it with a sort of double ear, one ear that's what two ears. One ear that's sort of listening to the rational content, another ear that's listening for the sort of authentic experience that that rational expression comes out of. And, well, we want to do that because presumably we have faith in the Buddha. That's what it means to go for refuge to the Buddha. We know that we have confidence that the Buddha has an experience which is more in tune with the way things are than our own is. And we want that. We want to reproduce that for ourselves, in ourselves. Because we believe that that will liberate us from suffering and enable us to live in a more harmonious way, a fully harmonious way, with everybody else, everything else. So that's what the Teaching of the Teacher Soul Party is about. It's the Buddha telling us how he sees things so that we can, through engagement with it, arrive at that understanding for ourselves. Then I'd like to call me a little bit better than a sharp thumb. It seems to be a very difficult microphone to work with. It means a fluff over it. I'll do my best. Yes, it's not a forecast. It's not beaten up by reason. It's not like a forecast of the weather. The weather then, by looking at computer analyses and data from the past and so forth, tell us what the weather is likely to be tomorrow. This is more like the Buddha looking out the window and saying what's happening right now. So the weather forecast is an extrapolation based on reason that the Buddha is talking directly from what he perceives. And he's doing it so that we can arrive at the same perception. And although he must reason about it in order to engage with it, we're doing that reasoning in order to change our relationship to our exteriors. We're not doing that reasoning to come up with a nattier phrase to trot out as it were. We're doing it so that our whole way of experience or relationship to our experience is affected and transformed. So it's the Buddha's best effort at getting across how things appear to him. A particular subapala is his most important synoptic teaching. His most important teaching of our way things are, as it were, from a global perspective. And it's his attempt to get across to us how they appear to him. But he said off, a particular subapala, that if the Buddha has said any more than he said in that teaching, he would have fallen into views or it appeared to fall into views. He said any less than what he said, he would have been silent. Silence can be communication, and there are circumstances in which the Buddha was able to communicate his experience apparently in silence, even just holding up a golden flower. But silence can usually often be simple, dumbness. And in this case, it would have been just not telling us how he saw things so that we couldn't arrive at that experience for ourselves. But at the same time, words are hostages to fortune. Every time you speak a word, you may have a meaning behind that word, but you cannot guard against the possibility of people taking the words that you use and getting them to mean something different. I've had some personal experience. I think it's not that you can't communicate truth. I think it's quite important, as often said, you can't communicate truth. You can communicate the truth. The problem is that you can't make sure that your communication will not be misunderstood. Anything you say can be twisted and mean to mean anything, particularly opposite to what you mean. So, if words are hostage to fortune, so the Buddha needs to try to say something that gives us few hostages to fortune as possible. He needs to say something that communicates the truth, but without giving too many possibilities of what he says, being interpreted as views, that is as either positing real, existent entities, or as positing a real absence of existence. It's got to communicate in a way that doesn't set up in our minds either the idea of it is or the idea of that. It isn't, to put it simply. And that is what Pritita Samappana is. The Buddha's attempt to avoid those extremes is that the most he can say without falling into those extremes and, as it happens, we know that Le's tradition did fall into those extremes, even with that teaching. You could say that the Dhamma theory of early Abi Dhamma, or middle Abi Dhamma was a seizing upon Pritita Samappana and making it into views, or a teaching, a cultural Pritita Samappana, either making it into views. And Nagarjana's protest was against that transformation of Pritita Samappana into a view, a positive view, or a negative view. So, the Buddha is trying to avoid falling into views and is trying to do it without simply remaining silence. So, we're invited to listen to what the Buddha has to say as a gateway to insight. We're invited to listen to it, to try to hear behind his words, or within his words, his direct experience of the way things are. So, how do we do that? Well, the first thing we do is to be clear about what he actually did say. And that's not a simple matter. I think that'll come up a bit in what follows. It's not easy to really hear, even from a sort of phenomenological point of view, what he did say about Pritita Samappana, a lot of myths amongst us. I'm sure Sandra Matty will be tilting, not at those windmills, but those myths. There are so many sort of things we think the Buddha said that he didn't actually say. And that's one of the reasons why we've been very keen to establish a more rigorous program of study than is common amongst us, in the double-pilot college and the double-duty course. We want people to have a much more accurate understanding of what the Buddha did say, so that we can listen more informately to what this voice is getting at. So, we need to first of all hear what the Buddha really said. And then we need to reflect upon it. We need to talk about it. But talk about it in a way that enables us to get closer and closer to the Buddha's meaning, to what the Buddha was trying to get at, to the Buddha's experience, if you like. And that is what Dhamma Katakas is. It's an attempt to, through conversation with each other and through internal dialogue, to penetrate more deeply into the real meaning of what the Buddha was saying. And we do that. We engage in that process of reflection, reflection internally and reflection in dialogue, until moments of understanding arise. I think this is not an uncommon experience. You listen to a teaching and you have for a few moments the sense that you know what it means. Your bones, you might say, your blood. Not as a near-rational ability to manipulate the concepts. But you know directly what it means. And so through your reflection, for a few moments at least, that sort of realization arises. And with that, it's usually accompanied by a strong sense of conviction. A strong sense of, yes, this is the truth. This is the way things are. And what the tradition says is that you stay with that experience of conviction. You rest in that stage of conviction, in your absorption, in your relative absorption. You remain with that stage of conviction. And of course it fades, it goes away again. You then to re-engage with what the teaching says through your own reflection and through Tomokita. Until that sense of conviction arises again. You go through that process over and over and over. Shrutami Pragnya, Tintami Pragnya, Arvanami Pragnya. You rest in that conviction when it arises. When it fades, you go back to reflection and to listening, to making clear. What the Buddha is saying. You go on doing that so that it becomes, the conviction strikes deeper and deeper and becomes more and more abiding. And begins to transform every aspect of your life, so that your way of interacting with others, your relationship to life itself, begins to be affected by that conviction. And in that way you engage with what the Buddha was trying to say and make it your own. And this is what Pragnya someone probably is about. It's about us coming to a conviction of the truth of what the Buddha is saying and through our own experience. And we engage in Tomokita to that end. But that must all be premised on being clear about what the Buddha did actually say. And I think that it would be very useful indeed if there was amongst us a much greater particularity and clarity about the Buddha's basic teachings and their reflection in tradition. And I'm hoping that something of the flavour of that variety and accuracy would come out in the following talks. But essentially what I wanted to communicate was that we listening to the teaching of Pratita Samapada, not as a philosophical theorem, although it has that appearance and even use, but as the expression of what the Buddha actually saw. And by engaging with it, first of all in reflection and discussion, and then once that conviction begins to arise within us in meditation, then we arrive at the Buddha's realization. And that was why he taught Pratita Samapada. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freeBuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [music] [music] [ Silence ]
