Basic Buddhism
By Di Cousens

Talk given at RMIT’s Spiritual Centre, 2 August 2004

I am sure that everybody here knows the story of Buddha Shakyamuni. He was born the son of a king in a small state in northern India and had a protected life. He was insulated from experiencing old age, sickness and death by palace walls. He lived in luxury and had whatever he wanted. However, at one point, he stepped outside and was confronted by the realities of the world - old age, sickness and death - and had no idea how to understand these things or how to react. So at the age of 29 he left his home in the middle of the night, abandoning his wife and new born son, and renounced all of his worldly possessions and became a mendicant.

So, the starting point for Buddhism has always been to question whether happiness can be obtained through comfort and family and being protected from harsh truths. Buddha’s reaction was to search for truth, to try to understand why suffering exists, and to find a path of spiritual development that would enable transformation. He tried many different methods, some of which were very austere, but he found enlightenment through a long and solitary period of meditation seated under a tree.

During his enlightenment experience he remembered all of his previous lives, how they developed in different ways, and how one led to the next. Afterwards he did not teach for quite a long time, because he thought his understanding might be inexpressible. While it is certainly the case that the insight into wisdom, into the nature of things, into the nature of mind, is an inexpressible insight, what was teachable was the path and some ideas around that insight, so that it might not be confused with something else.

When Buddha and the doctrine that he developed and which grew out of his teachings talks about wisdom, it is always made clear that it is not a thing. Things are, according to Buddhism, impermanent, made up of causes and conditions, not independently existing, changing over time, arising because other things arise and ceasing because other things also cease. So the enlightenment insight is actually into this very process of change and interdependence. The insight is into the insubstantiality of everything. It’s an insight into flux and movement and an understanding that that is the way that everything is. For want of a better term, we call it emptiness, but emptiness is not a thing, like an empty vase. It helps to remember that the insight is ultimately inexpressible.

The Buddha’s memory of past lives assisted in the development of the doctrine of karma. The idea of karma is that every action, spoken word and thought carries with it a certain energy that is like a fingerprint. It lingers on after the action, or the thought. This doctrine depends completely upon a belief in past lives – because how else would people be born in very different ways? Buddhism asserts that nothing happens without causes. Things don’t come about by accident or chance or through chaos, but there is some sort of findable logic in the universe, and this is that things are caused by other things.

The stories of the Buddha’s previous lives are described in a series of texts called the Jataka Tales, and these are mostly of the Buddha in a previous life as an animal. While the human condition is considered the best, we believe that there is no intrinsic humanness to anybody – you may be born in any condition in the future – a bird – an animal - and you may have been born in any condition in the past. It’s all just down to what you do.

The idea of karma creates the possibility of a spiritual path, because through right actions and thoughts and livelihoods and so on, you progress spiritually. There is a gradual development through living in a way that is in accordance with the Buddha’s teachings. One of the key ideas in Buddhism is not harming. This is a key idea in many religions and philosophies – we don’t own it and we’re happy to share it – but it is also a fundamental Buddhist principle. Not harming means avoiding actions such as lying, stealing, killing, becoming intoxicated and sexually exploiting others. It is a kind of a minimum level of spiritual behaviour. There are long elaborate lists explaining in detail these particular things, but for an action to have complete effect, it has three components – the intention, the action, and then feeling pleased at the end. If you do something really terrible and you regret it, then you mitigate the consequences.

Another idea that Buddhism shares with other religions is an emphasis on the importance of compassion. Christianity talks about love and charity – it may be the same thing. The idea is that others wish for happiness in the same way that we do, and others wish to avoid suffering in the same way that we do. There is not that much difference between us. From this we move to the idea that it would be nice if all beings were happy and the Bodhisattva aspiration is to help all beings to become happy. In Buddhist terms, this means wishing that others become enlightened, because ordinary temporal happiness does not last.

Helping others is a very big topic and one of the things that Buddhism perhaps excels in is numbered lists and systems. So, active compassion is assisted by the practice of the six perfections, generosity, patience, discipline, enthusiastic effort, meditation and wisdom. Generosity is not only giving materials things, it includes giving Buddhist instruction and giving refuge from fear. A major emphasis in the Mahayana path, one of the two main kinds of Buddhism, is on a careful examination of motivation. Therefore, if we help others, we have to be absolutely clear that it is not just so as to feel good about ourselves, it is genuinely to give them greater happiness. Motivation is very strongly emphasised.

One of the great advantages of the idea of karma and impermanence – everything constantly changing – is that karma is not a fixed and inescapable sentence over which one has no control. Karma can be purified, the future is not fixed. Tibetan Buddhism emphasises many different kinds of purification practices so as to wash out the bad karma of the past, and there are many positive values to this. I think this idea is perhaps in contrast to many popular psychological notions, where if a person is damaged at one time – particularly in childhood - then they carry that damage forever. Because our starting point is however we are now, and our idea of our practice is a journey of transformation to somewhere completely different – or to say it another way – to uncover who we are that we are not yet aware of – we are not fixed in one unsatisfactory state. To practice Buddhism is to change.

After the Buddha attained enlightenment he started to teach, and he went back to Varanasi, in particular, Sarnath, and taught his five old friends with whom he had practised in the past. Previously they had given up on the Buddha, because he had been seen eating milk rice that was given to him by a woman, and bathing in the river. Both of these things were not in accordance with their austerities. The Buddha had previously been fasting to the point where the skin on the front of his stomach was touching his back bone. He saw that he could easily die in this condition and still not have achieved enlightenment, so he ate milk rice and had a bath.

The five friends became his disciples and the practice of refuge was established. Refuge is Buddhist baptism, the process whereby people declare their commitment. A refuge ceremony involves a person repeating three times, ‘I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma, and I take Refuge in the Sangha’, before a qualified teacher, or a monk or nun, and in the Tibetan tradition a small piece of hair is cut.

The next ceremony that was established by the Buddha was ordination into monastic life. Ordination is both novice ordination and full ordination, and in the time of the Buddha there were many fully ordained nuns. In recent centuries full ordination for women was lost in many countries and a movement to retrieve full ordination was established. A few years ago some Sri Lankan nuns went to China and received back from the Chinese nuns the ordination that they had originally received from Sri Lanka, so now there are fully ordained nuns in Sri Lanka.

The Buddhist sangha, of ordained monks and nuns, is the oldest surviving human institution on the planet. Empires have come and gone, countries and languages and peoples have come and gone, but the sangha, with its defined rules and regulations has somehow endured.

The Buddha spent the rest of his life wandering around in India teaching. He adapted his teaching to the particular needs of particular people. For example, a woman came to him with a dead baby, and asked him to bring it back to life. He said that he would as soon as she brought back some mustard seed from a house in which there had been no death. She knocked on everyone’s doors and at each house some relative had died. So she returned without the mustard seed and with an insight into impermanence. Life and death is determined by karma, and we often say, the young may die before the old and the healthy may die before the sick. One of the Buddha’s disciples was a serial killer, who made a necklace of fingers. He renounced his bad old ways and became a monk.

At the end of his life the Buddha was cremated and his bone remains were divided up between eight groups, with two others receiving minor shares. The relics were placed in reliquary monuments, which then became objects of worship. Those who came to see him as he was dying who wanted to know how to remember him were advised to make pilgrimages to the significant places of his life. Amongst these were his place of birth, enlightenment, first teaching and death.

Buddhist pilgrimage is still a major activity of Buddhists, and it has been transported to fit the situations of other countries. So in Tibet pilgrimages are made to places consecrated by the lives of other great saints, or to monasteries, or to important temples and sacred mountains. When people think about Buddhist practice, they most frequently assume it means a lot of meditation, but for lay people pilgrimage is just as important or possibly more important. It would not be inappropriate to circumambulate the Melbourne Tennis Centre, because the Dalai Lama has taught there.

During the Buddha’s life time he did not allow any images to be made of him, and instead advised people to depict the bodhi tree and the seat or footprints. The point was that he did not want to be turned into a god – he wanted to show a path that anyone could undertake – he was not unique. However, the human mind needs a little more assistance – and so Buddha statues are also an important part of the Buddhist religion. We need to see something to represent ideas – these are depictions of perfection. Of course, perfection is not something you can see, but the Buddha statue seeks to give the idea of perfection.

Traditionally, statues acquire the sanctity of the environment in which they are placed. So a statue that was the personal property of a highly respected saint becomes a relic in itself. Statues and other objects may be blessed by a lama and in this way they acquire an extra quality of blessing that empowers the object.

The Buddhist religion spread from India north to Central Asia and south and east to Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand. The sayings and the events of the Buddha’s life were not written down during his life time but were compiled and committed to memory in three Buddhist Councils and written down about five hundred years after his death. The oral tradition was a valid method of maintaining many kinds of knowledge in India, and it is still used in Indian classical music, where there is no written notation that adequately describes the movement of sound.

Buddhism – like any other religion - has never stood still. The Buddha spoke in the Magadhi language and the early texts were written down in Pali which is an elevated form of Magadhi. However, the Buddha encouraged his monks and nuns to teach in their own words so this gave rise to textual plurality. What was being described was an understanding of a set of ethical principles and an indescribable experience of truth, so there had to be some creativity. Buddhist texts were translated into all the languages of Central Asia, and from there translated into Chinese and later Tibetan. In India there were many waves of textual creativity and these were transmitted at different times into Tibet. Earlier and later texts from India are quite different, however, all of these are understood as authentic Buddhism, based on enlightened experience.

Ultimately the texts that acquired the greatest importance in, for example, Tibet, were created by later Indian masters, such as Nagarjuna, Asanga and Shantideva. Many of these are quite polemical philosophical works, and Buddhism has often been identified with a high degree of obstruse philosophical argument. So if you study Tibetan Buddhism, you will become familiar with these much later writers, but probably not the stories from the life of the Buddha as preserved in Pali. In Tibet, the story of the life of the Buddha is refracted through a heavily mythologised process, whereby he is said to have been already enlightened prior to descending to earth and only appears to become enlightened for our benefit. It becomes impossible that he could be imagined as ever having been an ordinary person with an existential problem.

Traditionally Buddhist practice has been divided into the practices of the ordained and the practices of the lay people. The ordained stayed mostly in monasteries and undertook intense meditation retreats and highly advanced studies, or acted as attendants to the meditators and scholars. Some people in monasteries are administrators, cooks and tailors. Lay people made offerings to the ordained, attended large ceremonies, went on pilgrimage, maintained personal shrines and circumambulated holy places. They weren’t expected to study.

If we think about Buddhism in the West, we are undertaking the kinds of studies and practices that used to be solely the province of the ordained. The division has become a lot blurrier. A tiny percentage of Western Buddhists become monks or nuns, and if they do, in many traditions, such as the Tibetan – which is the one I know best – they receive absolutely no support and usually give back their robes very quickly. So Buddhism in the West has a different face to Buddhism in the East. It is more highly educated, more focused on lay people, and therefore ideas around integrating Buddhism into daily life are of central concern. Fortunately there is much that is not dependent upon any particular way of life. Anyone can live ethically, develop compassion and concentration, and work with what we are towards greater awareness and understanding.