Theravada Buddhism

Continuity, Diversity, and Identity

Kate Crosby

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118323298
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhismus

Theravada Buddhism provides a comprehensive introductory overview of the history, teachings, and current practice of an often misunderstood form of one of the world's oldest religious traditions.

• Explores Theravada Buddhism's origins, evolution, teachings, and practices
• Considers the practice of Theravada beyond Sri Lanka and Thailand, by exploring a wealth of material from countries including Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Vietnam
• Reveals its rich and varied traditions, and corrects common misunderstandings about links to other practices, such as early Buddhism or Hinayana Buddhism
• Incorporates student-friendly features including a glossary and other study aids

Part One

Buddha

1

The Buddha and Buddhahood

Overview

The focus of this chapter is the enlightened being and teacher now generally known as “the Buddha.” When distinguishing the Buddha of our era from other Buddhas of the past and future he is called Gotama Buddha. In exploring the life story and status of Gotama Buddha, we examine the religious and cultural background of early Buddhism and introduce some of the basic teachings and institutions of Theravada Buddhism. We shall examine the various ways in which the Buddha and Buddhahood was regarded and defined in Theravada Buddhism, how this developed, and how it contrasts with understandings of the Buddha in other branches of Buddhism and in the West. The chapter discusses how the Buddha is always seen as beyond human, the product of lifetimes of effort, and one example of those who realize the truth, rather than a unique, one-time occurrence. How his super-human status and character changes is examined in the light of the ways his portrayal accommodates the needs of different genres of canonical text. Such adaptation is also observed diachronically in later Pali and vernacular literature: notions of Buddhahood and omniscience developed and were more closely defined over time. Aspects of the biography and of biographical depictions of the Buddha are examined, including how these expand backward in time to include the earlier stages of the career of the Buddha-to-be (bodhisatta) in previous lifetimes and under former Buddhas, and extend forward, through his relics (dhātu) and images to inhabit the lands to which Theravada spread long after the Buddha’s departure from life (his parinibbāna).

Master of the Universe

A Buddha is the only type of being to have mastered the universe, the realm of rebirth, and is no longer subject to it. The living world in Buddhism is made up of humans, animals, and a whole host of nonhuman beings. There are multiple hells and heavens, a hierarchy of gods including the great, powerful gods of the Indian religious worldview, such as Brahmā, Sakka (Śakra/Indra in Sanskrit), the dominant gods of the Vedic period, and later Viṣṇu (in Sanskrit) and other gods of the Epic/purānic period. All these living beings, even the gods, are subject to the cycle of death and rebirth, saṃsāra. When the merit acquired by those enjoying divine rebirths runs out, they will die, like other mortals. In the case of cosmologically significant gods, such as the king of the gods, Sakka, another being is reborn into the divine position as soon as it is vacated. Similarly, the demerit generated from the evil committed in former lifetimes by hell-beings will eventually run out, and they will be able to move on from hell. This view that good actions create a store of merit that leads to good experiences and rebirths (as fortunate humans and deities) and that bad actions create a store of demerit that leads to bad experiences and rebirths (as unfortunate humans, animals, and hell-beings) underlies much Buddhist religious behavior, which aims at “making merit,” that is, performing good action. Such meritorious activity is also an important part of the path to becoming a Buddha. Since a Buddha has destroyed the unwholesome (akusala) mental states that underlie bad actions, a Buddha’s conduct is inherently good. What is meant by good and bad action is looked at in more detail later and in Chapter 5.

Although in Buddhism, unlike in monotheistic religions, gods cannot offer salvation to humans, they are often portrayed as supportive of the Buddha and as helping to make his teaching, the Dhamma, which is salvific, available to others. But it is only a human being who experiences a sufficient balance of freedom and suffering to aspire to leave saṃsāra completely. It is only a Buddha who has found and put an end to this cycle. He (and it is always a he) has attained Nibbāna “Enlightenment,” the literal connotations of which are both “bliss” and “extinction.” Other terms for the Buddha’s liberation include bodhi/sambodhi “Awakening,” amata, the deathless state – immortality in the sense of freedom from death, but not the retention of life – and sabbaññutā “Omniscience.” Not only is the Buddha no longer subject to rebirth, he also has extraordinary powers, powers of cognition and of physical ability.

The power of the Buddha’s mastery over saṃsāra can then be drawn on by his followers, not just for spiritual guidance but also for worldly matters. It is possible for other humans to gain individual Enlightenment, and freedom from saṃsāra, but only when a Buddha is accessible to make the Dhamma (teaching) available. This individual Enlightenment is called “arhatship” and an individual so enlightened an “arhat.” There is another type of enlightened being according to Buddhism. The paccekabuddha “solitary Buddha,” attains Nibbāna but, unlike the Buddha, does not make the Dhamma available for others. (For a discussion of paccekabuddha in the canon, see Anālayo 2010: 11ff.) The Dhamma, the “truth” or “teaching,” is eternal, in that it expresses “the way things really are.” It takes a Buddha to realize this truth. The further we are from the lifetime of the Buddha the harder it becomes to access the Dhamma, until eventually the world descends into an apocalypse. After this a new world order evolves and a new Buddha can arrive.

Each Buddha’s quest had lasted many hundreds of lifetimes, his success predicted in the presence of previous Buddhas. The Buddha of our era is Siddhattha Gotama, who is described in Buddhist narratives as being born into a royal family in northern India in circa. sixth- to fourth-century BCE. For non-Buddhists, Gotama is spoken of as the “historical” Buddha, that is, founder of the religion that became Buddhism, whereas the preceding Buddhas are regarded as mythological. For Buddhists he is one in a line of Buddhas. Theravada Buddhism dates the death (parinibbāna) of Gotama Buddha to 218 years before the consecration of the Emperor Asoka of north India. Traditionally the parinibbāna has been dated to the year 544/543 BCE and that is the year that the “Buddhist Era” of Theravada dating begins. To convert “Buddhist Era” to Common Era (CE), in the dates of publications, for example, we subtract 544/543. However, by that calculation the Emperor Asoka lived in the fourth-century BCE. It has been possible to date Asoka quite accurately to the middle of the third-century BCE on the basis of the discovery and deciphering in the early nineteenth century of the inscriptions that he had engraved around his empire. His Rock Edict XIII mentions a list of kings to the northwest of his territory who are known to us from classical history: Antioch, Ptolemy, Antigonus Gonatus, Magas, and Alexander of Epirus (Pinsep in Thomas 1858: 16, Murti and Aiyangar 1951: 39–49). Scholars have therefore adjusted the Theravada chronology to date the parinibbāna of the Buddha to the early fifth-century BCE, that is, 478 BCE (e.g., Cunningham 1877: iii–iv) or 487/486 BCE. (Bechert 2004: 82. For a summary of the scholarship, see Hartmann 1991: especially 29–32). Texts belonging to a branch of Buddhism that prevailed in northern India calculate the Buddha’s death as taking place far later, 100 years before Asoka. However, recent discoveries of archaeological remains from the mid-sixth-century beneath the monastery and the shrine commemorating the Buddha’s mother Māyā at Lumbinī, identified in an Asokan inscription as the place of the Buddha’s birth, may confirm the longer chronology (Coningham 2013).

In the final lifetime of Gotama Buddha, his quest for Enlightenment lasted six years, between the ages of 29 and 35. He had abandoned his life of luxury in response to four famous sights. The four sights were all the more shocking because of the sheltered life of luxury he had lived until that point on account of his father’s desire to avoid his exposure to any of the harshness of life lest it inspire him to seek the spiritual life. The first three sights, a sick man, an old man, and a dead man, made Gotama realize the inevitability of suffering, aging, and death for all of us. The fourth sight, a serene mendicant who had “renounced” the world, inspired him to seek a way out of the cycle of rebirth, saṃsāra. These sights and his escape from the palace form the visual narrative of his life in Buddhist art. Such scenes depict the four sites, the harem and his wife Yasodharā with their new-born son, Gotama slipping away on his white horse Kanthaka the sound of whose hooves are muffled by the gods, Kanthaka dying from grief on being sent back with the groom, the god Sakka catching in a reliquary the lock of hair that the Buddha-to-be cuts off, and the god Brahmā, associated with asceticism, providing the eight “requisites” for a monk, which include the robes and bowl (Herbert 1993: 7, 28–31).

In northern India at the time of Gotama Buddha, the dominant (though not universal) presupposition underlying the religions of the period was that all living beings were subject not only to death, but to rebirth and redeath (saṃsāra). In Buddhism, this is encapsulated in the teaching of the three characteristics (ti-lakkhaṇa) of all phenomena, not just living beings. The first characteristic is dukkha, literally “insecure,” often translated as “suffering.” The term suffering conveys one sense of the term dukkha, but, even though it has become a very widespread translation of this term into English, it is misleading in this context. For the adjective dukkha in Buddhism applies as much to pleasant and happy experiences as to negative ones. It also applies to objects (so not only to experiences). All these things, whether pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant, are insecure, dukkha, in that they cannot last so cannot be relied upon. The second characteristic is that everything is anicca “impermanent.” Thirdly, everything is characterized by anattā “lack of enduring self,” or, put conversely, there is nothing that can be identified as an enduring self. This definition of the true character of all phenomena is an explicit rejection of other religious encapsulations of the truth that circulated in India at that time, including the notion of a pure, blissful, enduring and unchanging self. For Buddhism any aspect of humanity or human experience identified as a self can be shown on closer analysis either to be subject to change or to be a projection of an imagined entity onto what is in fact a separate function. In Buddhism, an inert “self” or “soul” is irrelevant, since there is no way of experiencing or engaging with it and it has no function.

The soteriologies – doctrines relating to the path to salvation – that developed around the time of early Buddhism struggled with the fundamental question of what binds us to saṃsāra (the round of rebirth) and how to escape it. One path open to those seeking the answers to these questions was to become a “renouncer,” one of the wandering religious seekers who had left their home and possessions behind in the quest for spiritual truth. Gotama Buddha took this path, and so Buddhism is sometimes referred to as a “renouncer” tradition. Gotama tried out and excelled in the available teachings and practices of different renouncer traditions available in north India at the time, from meditation to various kinds of asceticism (the practice of austerities, such as extreme fasting – a practice reflected in skeletal depictions of the Buddha). Dissatisfied with their effect and realizing their limitations, Gotama gave up the extreme fasting he had been practicing and accepted food from the laywoman Sujātā, a favored scene in Buddhist depictions of his life (Herbert 1993: 35). Gotama then entered a state of meditation, which led to him achieving Awakening, Bodhi/Sambodhi, or Enlightenment, Nibbāna. This scene is one of the most common depictions in art and sculpture: in its simplest form the Buddha touches one hand to the ground to call the earth to witness his Enlightenment (Griswold 1957: 23, 31–41, Herbert 1993: 37). In more elaborate depictions, the earth goddess is shown ringing out her long hair beneath the Buddha, while Māra, the god who represents the temptations of saṃsāra, and his armies crowd the scene (Herbert 1993: 38–39). To some extent, the representation of the Buddha has become more standardized in Theravada as it has become more narrowly defined as an aspect of national identity, and we shall explore some of that process of defining the Buddha in the rest of the chapter. Yet it can be seen as an ongoing process in relation to Burmese depictions, for example. Charlotte Galloway observes that the diversity of Burmese Buddhism’s past and its present has been whittled down in its art. Twelfth-century Burmese art depicting the life of the Buddha was not confined to the Theravada sources we have identified here, and the rich and ongoing presence of nat (Burmese gods) and animist beliefs of Burmese Buddhism has only been excluded from the reform categories of Buddhism in the modern period. She writes, “[Since] Burmese Buddhism has consolidated as a Theravada tradition, (and) the iconography has become standardized and far less variable. To the casual viewer, the apparent sterility of later images, primarily in the earth-touching mudrā [hand gesture] and devoid of any subtleties of design, is misleading in the extreme” (Galloway 2002: 52).

In the earliest corpus of Theravada sacred literature, the Pali Canon, there are three sutta (teaching) texts in the Sutta Piṭaka, the second division of the canon, which give an account of Gotama’s Enlightenment. These are the Bhayabherava Sutta, “The teaching, Fear and Terror,” the Ariyapariyesana Sutta, “The teaching, the Noble Search,” and the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, “The teaching, the Setting in Motion the Wheel of the Dhamma” (also called “The First Sermon”). There is also an account of his Enlightenment in the Mahāvagga of the Vinaya Piṭaka, the first division of the canon which explains the rules for monks and nuns (Anderson 1999: 56). The accounts of the Buddha’s Enlightenment in these texts vary. In the Bhayabherava Sutta, the Buddha describes how he entered and progressed through the different meditative states called jhāna (see Chapter 6). In the first, desire and negative states of mind disappear and the meditator experiences joy and happiness, while at the same time engaging in reasoning and deliberation. In the second, the distraction of reasoning and deliberation disappear and he achieves concentration and one-...