Pain and Its Ending

The Four Noble Truths in the Theravada Buddhist Canon

Carol Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136813320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Demonstrates how the four noble truths are used thorughout the Pali canon as a symbol of Buddha's enlightenment and as a doctrine within a larger network of Buddha's teachings. Their unique nature rests in their function as a proposition and as a symbol in the Theravada canon.

CHAPTER ONE

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Cultivating Religious Experiences: Doctrine and Diṭṭhi

The more intractable puzzles in comparative religion arise because human experience has thus been wrongly divided.¹

Mary Douglas (1966)

Introduction

Since the European discovery of Buddhism toward the end of the eighteenth century, studies of Buddhism in Europe and in the United States have been conducted largely through the examination of Buddhist textual material. Collections of Buddhist sacred texts were brought back to Europe by diplomats, missionaries, and travellers in the first half of the last century; and, as chairs were established in European universities for the study of Sanskrit and other languages, a majority of scholarly attention was focused on the evidence located in these textual sources.² This attention was not restricted entirely to scholars. Missionaries such as Daniel J. Gogerly, who worked for the Wesleyan mission in Sri Lanka, published a number of articles on Buddhist rituals and beliefs between 1837 and 1876. Similarly, Bishop Paul Ambrose Bigandet published a study of Buddhism in 1858 that was based on texts that he had received in Burma; the book went through four editions by 1912.³ In general, first-hand accounts of rituals observed in South and Southeast Asia did not inform the emerging corpus of scholarship on Buddhism: scholars in Europe and in the United States were engaged in untangling the wealth of information contained in the texts.

One of the legacies of this textual emphasis in the history of the study of Buddhism is the question of the relationship between the Buddhism that is contained in the texts and the Buddhism that people actually practice in South and Southeast Asia. Steven Collins and others have identified this problem as the ‘Buddhism and Society’ problem. In short, this question asks how the Buddhist canons, the Pali Tipiṭaka in particular, is related to the actual behavior of Buddhists. The classic studies of Melford Spiro and Richard Gombrich on Burmese and Sinhalese Buddhism, respectively, explore the relationship that was presumed to exist between the teachings of the Buddha — his doctrines — and his followers. In Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and Its Burmese Vicissitudes (1970) and in Precept and Practice: Traditional Buddhism in the Rural Highlands of Ceylon (1971), Spiro and Gombrich examine the relationship between the Buddhist canon and the practices of Buddhists. Spiro explains that he wishes to pursue the ‘interaction between the doctrines found in … texts and conceptions found in the heads of religious devotees….’⁴ He also states that his study focuses on the beliefs of Buddhists and the doctrines of Buddhist texts.

Both Spiro and Gombrich conclude that the relationship between practice and text is much more complex than a simple emulation of what was recorded in the texts. Spiro proposes ‘three systems of Theravāda Buddhism’: nibbānic, kammatic, and apotropaic. Nibbānic Buddhism refers to the ideal practices and doctrines that lead to escape from the cycle of rebirth as recorded in the Theravāda canon; kammatic Buddhism focuses upon a more favorable rebirth through the accumulation of merit and the principles of kamma and apotropaic Buddhism is concerned with protection from dangers such as illness, drought, and demons. Spiro recognizes that these systems are inextricably intertwined in living Buddhism and cannot be extracted into separate packages.⁵ In a similar vein, Gombrich proposes two categories: cognitive religion and affective religion. These categories reflect the distinction ‘between what people say they believe and say they do’ and ‘what people really believe and really do.’⁶ What people really do, Gombrich says, is religious behavior, and ‘it is the religion of the heart, not the head.’⁷ Gombrich suggests that his two categories are representative of two syndromes that exist in Buddhism in Sri Lanka, one which denies the world and the other which affirms the world. The conclusions of both of these studies underscore two crucial points in the study of Buddhism: first, that the relationship between text and practice is multilayered, and, second, that ‘Buddhism’ cannot be defined solely in terms of the canonical and postcanonical writings.

Collins has taken answers to this question one step further. He shows that Buddhist doctrine itself takes social reality into account by incorporating imagery that reflects the lived social experiences of Buddhists. Collins explores images of house and home, vegetation, and streams or rivers, demonstrating how each of these images are used to elucidate certain Buddhist concepts. For example, the image of a seed and fruition is used to illustrate the notion of consciousness; the image of the house represents the body, which gives force to the image of homelessness. He demonstrates that the concepts of Buddhism are woven together with the perceptions of the social world and human behavior into a cultural whole of Theravāda Buddhism. ‘Not only does the intellectual tradition take account of what it imagines to be the social and psychological reality of actual Buddhists,’ he writes, ‘but also it is precisely this dimension which gives us the key structures by which we will understand the Pāli canon account of personality and continuity as it was developed, given the initial postulate of the denial of self.’⁸ It is in the intellectual tradition of the Theravāda canon, Collins shows, that we find the structures that incorporate social reality into the Theravāda canonical teachings on no-self.

What is at stake in each of these studies is the relationship between what the sacred texts say and what Buddhists ‘do’. The historical focus on the recorded Theravāda canon has given rise to a portrait of Theravāda Buddhism that closely reflects what the canon says. The relative lack of sources outside the canon to support or refute the claims of the canon makes this portrait of Buddhism somewhat problematic; the studies of Spiro and Gombrich seek to discover, in part, what role the Theravāda canon has in the lives of Buddhists. Collins focuses on the reverse, asking what experiences the Theravāda canon took into account in its formulation of the doctrine of no-self (anattā). This is a perennial question in the study of religions: what are the various relationships between sacred texts and the actual behaviors of religious practitioners? This question hinges in part on what sacred texts are considered to be, and in the study of Buddhism, the sacred texts are regarded largely as a repository of doctrines. Thus for the study of Buddhism, the question becomes: what is the relation between Buddhist doctrines and what Buddhists actually do? This is an inquiry into doctrine and practice, under which lies a distinction between thought and action, where doctrines and sacred texts are considered to occupy the realm of the intellect and thought and what Buddhists do — in rituals and in daily life — constitutes the realm of action. The separation of thinking from acting in studies of ritual has been analyzed extensively by Catherine Bell in Ritual Studies, Ritual Practice, and her observations are relevant to the ways in which scholars of Buddhism have employed the category of doctrine.

Robert Buswell, Jr. and Robert Gimello, editors of an excellent volume entitled Paths to Liberation: The Mārga and Its Transformations in Buddhist Thought, recognize the preoccupation with matters of the intellect in studies of Buddhism: there is, they write, a ‘longstanding tendency within religious studies to focus interpretive attention on doctrines, ie., on certain cardinal concepts or model propositions to which adherents of particular traditions are believed to give their intellectual assent.’⁹ This concern with doctrine is a concern w...