S2E3 Heresy
This episode focuses on the life of the Buddha and the impact of his teaching in the Indian philosophical sphere. We tell a basic story of his life and journey to enlightenment, and detail the essence of his realization as the teaching of no-self (anatman), which represents a radical shift away from the atman based traditions that preceded him. We look at his concept of the Madhya-marga (“the middle way”), expressed in the four noble truths, and the eightfold path.
Listen to the podcast episode, then add your comments and questions below. Matt will be glad to answer you!
Episode Transcript
The transcript is automatically generated, so please be kind.
Let's start with a quick summary. Last time we looked at the intersection the historical and philosophical intersection of the Bhagavad Gita and the yoga sutra. We talked about meditation being important to both of them. We talked about the three great yogas as the central elements of the teaching that Arjuna receives. And we talked about the three elements of Kriya Yoga that really strongly resemble the three great yogas as being the crucial elements of Kriya Yoga, a certain kind of action that is purifying and has the sophistication to reach deep within us, to alter some of our inclinations, some of our more ignorant or selfish inclinations. We saw also that there's a subtle difference in the way the two texts overlap in relation to the idea of surrender to God, what we called Ishvara pranidhana, and for the Gita, that's the whole shebang. Knowledge, Yana, yoga ends up in devotion. Karma, yoga ends up in devotion. Bhakti ends up in devotion. So it's the whole point in the yoga sutra. Each photo, prana. This still devotion to an ultimate source is a smaller part. It's part of Kriya Yoga. And once Kriya Yoga achieves its purpose of purification, then the larger project of distinguishing between Prusa and property and therefore true identity and thereby escaping rebirth, takes over. So devotion to God is sort of an adjunct. It's necessary, and obviously it's in there, but it's not the whole point like it is in the Gita. So we're moving on to talk about something really big, because I titled the the title of the episode heresy, like the heterodox, the against the status quo teaching. And there have been many big, big moments that we've mentioned over the course of the episodes, the structure of the Vedic triad and how that moves up through history and gets changed a little bit and appropriated in various different contexts, takes on all kinds of sophistication. The teaching in the Upanishad that the individual soul is one with the world. Soul, or Brahman Atman, is Brahman aham, brahmasmi, and we talked about the Gita as a synthesis of those two basic world views, the Vedic view and the ascetic view in the Upanishad. Now we're moving into something that's that's going to deal with both of those views, the way of action in the world, or absorption in the world and pulling back from the world, but it's not going to synthesize them. We I call it heresy, because it's going to sort of blow them apart. Because the Buddhist teaching is that is that powerful in the history of India, and the vedantins and the Buddhists have been arguing philosophically for a very long time now. So this Buddhism is, is is so unbelievably multifaceted and detailed, it would take me a tremendous a lifetime, to learn the sophistication in all of those things. And so I'm kind of talking about the most basic story of the Buddha, including pieces that are that are likely legendary things like that, because he is, in our estimation, one of the great yogis, and offered something that needs to be considered when you take on the project of trying to understand yoga, and also to kind of see where you stand in relation to the idea of the self, right, or the soul. So we're not looking at Buddhism in any kind of detail, and we're just looking at the arising of this basic teaching and how different it is as part of the history of yoga. So the Buddha is said to have lived possibly 563, BC to 483 BC. It's hard to tell those dates are kind of compiled from many of the historians that we've already mentioned in the episodes. So you can see, this is the, you know, right on the cusp of the the late the late Vedic Period, brahmanas already happening, Upanishads emerging. What about the life of this man? His name was Siddhartha Gautama, and he was born into the aristocratic class of in the family or a clan called the Shakya clan, sometimes you See Siddhartha, Shakyamuni, Gautama, in a place called koshala. He was a prince. The story goes, and he grew up in the palace. The story goes his whole life that his father, the king, kept him in the palace and kept him from going outside, in order to shield him from what the world was like, and so this is sort of an ideal life, right, where everything is at your privilege. And one day he got the idea that he wanted to go out, and he and a friend went out into the town, the story goes disguised. And this is the first time in his life that he had seen people on the edge of death, toothless old people who are sick on the side of the road. And this shocked him, because he didn't really have a context for this, because of the environment that he had grown up in, and so in incredulous he asked his friend, is this going to happen to us? And of course, those of us who grew up outside the palace, we know that at some level, that this kind of stuff happens to us. And so this rocked Siddhartha world. It. It took him down, it. It showed him that everything is impermanent, that everything comes and goes. And so all of the things in his life that formerly had the sheen of royal privilege were now really no better than anything else that anybody had, because he would lose them. And so it said at the age of 29 that he renounced his royal position and his family, and he went in search of the answer to this existential problem of suffering and impermanence. After he left the palace, he is said to have studied with two noted teachers, both called yogis in most of the accounts, aradha of Magadha and rudraka, ramaputra of the city of Vaishali. And as he studied with them, he mastered the teachings that they had to offer. He mastered all of those teachings, their stories of him being able to go into to Samadhi at will, you know, levitation stuff. There's all kinds of things. The idea is to give you that okay. He He figured it out what they were doing, best student they had ever had, so much so that they asked him the story goes to be their teacher, because, in a sense, they had seen that he had surpassed them. But he said, Okay, so I can do this stuff, but I'm still going to die and I'm going to lose everything. It's not going to do anything for the pain of attachment. So he left this circle of practitioners he was with, and he went into a super intense period of asceticism in the woods. Georg fairstein, one of the scholars who figures heavily in this presentation, says that during this period, Siddhartha limbs looked, quote, like the joints of a withered creeper. He may be quoting something there from the tradition that said that. And I have seen statues, figures of the fasting Buddha, so thin you can see every bone you look in the stomach and like reach in and catch the lumbar spine from the front. So so thin you. So he had mastered hunger and he had mastered thirst, and he had mastered and become indifferent to hot and cold and celibacy. Totally got it no problem. But he realized, you know, I'm, it's I'm, it's still impermanent. I'm still going to die. These things will not, in themselves, alleviate the cause of the suffering that comes from attachment in an impermanent world. And so he realized that this kind of austerity wouldn't free him from suffering and death, and it this as the story goes. At this moment, he was beginning to suspect this. He was close to a river, and he heard a boat going by, and he heard a music teacher who was giving a lesson, a sitar lesson, or some stringed instrument lesson. He was telling the student, if you tune the strings too tightly, they'll break, and if you don't tune them tightly enough, they won't play. And so this spontaneously focused the Buddha attention, and it said that there was a young girl by the river cooking a traditional dish of milk and rice, and I think it was sweet. And you can imagine, after six years of probably mostly nothing, that a bowl of milk and and sweet rice porridge would have been an amazing revelation. And the story goes is, when he finished, he took the bowl and he set it in the river, and he said, If I am to complete my journey, if I'm to awaken, this bowl will flow upstream. And so sure enough, the river flows downstream, the bowl starts flowing upstream. And this is confirmation that he needs to continue, because he's not finished yet. There are accounts of the Buddha being tempted by demons, but basically the story goes that he decided to sit down under what we all know as the Bodhi tree and made a declaration within himself that he wouldn't get up until he understood, and at that point, he surrendered to spontaneous meditation. And so this kind of means that he was overtaken, in a certain sense, because you can see how much effort he had made before all of this, and how amazing his skill was and so on and so forth. But none of that had really produced what was happening now. So as he's absorbed spontaneously in meditation, it said that he spent 24 hours in uninterrupted meditation and realized enlightenment, you know, during that time, and when that happened, the North Star said to have arisen in the sky. And he reached down with his finger and touched the earth and said, as the earth is my witness, I'm awake. And then he sat for 14 days in deep contemplation, and they say that he wondered whether or not he should tell anyone, whether or not he should teach because he thought to himself, supposedly, this is very subtle. I'll use some hyperbole, and they're not going to get it, but thank goodness that he decided to come into the world and teach. And so let me pause for just a second here and and make some parallels. Again, we're doing correlation in a certain way. We have the story of a prince. We've seen that already in the Bhagavad Gita. We have the story of the fall of a prince, actually from a high place into a place that is like despair. And the fall, in both cases, was caused by the facing, for the first time, really, of real suffering and death. Remember, Arjun is is dejected because he sees kinsman on the other side in the quote, unquote bad guys and his teacher and fathers in laws and. Brothers in laws. He says, What good can come of this? And he just loses it. And the same thing happened to Sid Arthur when he saw that he himself was like those that were dying and withering, you know, on the side of the road in town. So we have also involvement in this story of the Buddha with worldliness, which is the princely state, which is really naive, and when he doesn't really know anything. And we have involvement with profound renunciation in the period in the forest. And so you kind of see the Vedic scenario where worldliness is the idea I'm going to get a better birth. And actually he started in one of the best births, you know that you could start in, because he was a prince, and then he rejected that, and he went the way of the Upanishad. And so I see the story sort of embodying to to or coming together, coagulating to move to sum up everything that's happened or is happening at the time, has happened as part of the tradition and a new thing being revealed in almost the same way. You know that the Gita does that, except this time, we're not going to put those two ways together, the way of worldliness and the way of deep asceticism. We'll blow them apart. I think in both stories, you also see something that we'll point out more and more and more in future episodes, the importance of this, the significance of the middle or what I sometimes call betweenness. The value of betweenness. Arjuna has Krishna drive him out into the middle of the field so that he can get a view of of what's actually going on. He sees everything from the center. This is the first time he can see everything. And so that middle space on the field of kudukshetra, dharmic shetra Actually gathers up the pattern from the Vedic sacrifice, where the heaven, you could say the good guys, and the mundane realm, the realm of ignorance, you could say the bad guys, is mediated by the sacrifice. And so the fire is is in the center. And that kind of establishes this, this powerful intuition about the the need for a middle a focus on the value of middleness, or betweenness, and then all the way forward in history to where we are now with the Buddha. We see him hearing the lesson about the string that's so tight that it'll break, and the string that's so loose that it won't play, that no music can be made. And so these parallels are fairly striking, as they stand out to me, the Buddha actually gave his first teaching at a place called Deer Park in Sarnath, which is near modern day benaros Or Varanasi, depending on how you think of it. He called his approach the Madhya Marga, which is the middle way, and that is considered to be the way between sensualism and asceticism, the way between World affirmation and world denial. So the specifics of the Middle Way are the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path, which is the way out of suffering. So let me give the Four Noble Truth first, and then we'll look at the eightfold path. The first Noble Truth is all of existence is suffering. The second is there is a cause of this suffering, and that is desire. The third is the cause can be removed. That means desire can be removed. And there's a path that leads away or out of this suffering. So the removal of this is going to be facilitated by walking this particular path. That is the Eightfold Path. Again, I see the world that preceded him and the methods of trying to deal with existential problems being critiqued in a certain way. All of existence is suffering. That's a powerful statement, and a lot of folks don't like to hear it. I don't think that Buddhism is the only deep spiritual tradition that has noticed the the preponderance of suffering and pain, needless suffering and pain, you know in existence, the if you think all the way, if you think back to the Veda, remember the example that I gave in the first episode, I think, was. When the young, proud son of Varuna realized that the whole entire world is composed of eaters and the eaten. So there's the eaten and there's the eater and or the devourer and the devoured. And this shocked him, and that moment that he saw all that was the moment that his father knew that he had learned that which cannot be taught by knowledge alone. And so the young son of Aruna has a moment just like Siddhartha when he sees the ravages of death and the fact that it's part of the way that things work. It's also interesting that there's that the cause of this suffering is desire. That's actually what Krishna tells Arjuna is the cause of the quote evil that men do, and he means the particular kind of desire that is that is angry and possessive and explodes outward in a certain way that looks again like it came out of the Vedic matrix. And the stories about the fire Agni, when Agni comes out of his father, Prajapati Agni, turns around immediately and opens up his mouth and starts moving for his father, so he's going to eat his father. So this, this fire that is inside us that has become top us, that has come all the way through it, has this side of it that causes desire, and that's the insatiability of hunger, that as long as we're alive, we'll need to fill hunger in a particular way. We need to do that in a way that doesn't increase ensnarement, if possible. So now the Buddha coming in and saying, Here's what I have to say about that. Guess what? The cause or desire can be removed. It's interesting that for the Buddha, Nirvana is the, in a way, quote, let me say this loosely, the end state. I know it's samsara. Is Nirvana too, for those of you who have been involved with the Buddha for a long time, but Nirvana means blowing out. The flame being blown out again. I see the Vedic matrix again. I see Agni, the going out of desire. Is the flame right? Not happening anymore. So he's going to talk about how we might move in that direction. And the specifics of that are called the eightfold path. So the Eightfold Path is the are the the details about what it means to walk away or move along a path away from suffering. And this stuff is well known stuff, and very wise, very, very practical. It always strikes us as intuitively correct, just like the advice that we get from the Gita and the yoga sutra, they're very similar. In fact, first of all, there's eight of them right there. You know that something's going on. It starts with right view or right understanding, and the second piece is right intention and Right Thought. Now those two together, to me, really look like a certain knowledge dawning on someone. Right View means I see it right I understand, and that means my internal orientation and the thought that comes those things are coming from that place of, dare I say, Yana or understanding, knowledge and the next two, right speech and right action Come after intention and thought are in the right place and so again, here's our karma portion of the Eightfold Path. What are we going to do? Speak well. Act well. Then we have right livelihood. We need to earn a living, if possible, in a way that serves not suffering serves feeding the soul and others. Right Livelihood comes next, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration, which is sama Samadhi. Interesting that the last piece of the Eightfold Path is a Samadhi piece, and that that's called concentration, mindfulness and concentration there at the end, the two look like a meditative, clear involvement, right? Body of the mind. So finally, knowing a little bit about the Buddha life and a little bit about what he taught, how that works, we can get back to the idea of heresy. I've been suggesting all along that he's kind of critiquing the or that the teaching critiques the Vedic sacrifice and the way of renunciation. And now we can speak directly to that and say why his teaching is heterodox. And so the teaching of the Buddha, of course, is the four normal truths and so on. But the the central tenet that grows in the middle of it is the teaching of no self, or what is called an Atman, a n, a T, M, a n, an Atman. And right there, you see the word for soul, atman from the Upanishad, and you see the negation in the beginning on it's not the teaching of Atman. It's not Aham brahmasmi I atman am one with Brahman. It's that there a no Atman. So he deconstructed the idea of an eternal self or a soul that persisted throughout change and rebirth. So he observed experience, and you heard the story of what of how much he went through and what he did, and what kind of techniques he could master, and what he had insight into. And he evidently could not find this thing that was solid in a way, in the river of impermanence that the world is made of. David Gordon white comments on this teaching of no self when he says Bucha showed that the reality of this world is nothing more or less than an ever changing configuration of five quote heaps or five quote aggregates. That means existence is a roiling series of recombinations, of appearances, of sensations, of conceptions, Mental Formations and Consciousness, but there's nothing always there no thing, no one thing. And so that means that unlike the Upanishad, which said that the soul is the only thing that's real, and the world itself is Maya or an illusion, and once that is realized, the soul is always already experienced as united with the source. The Buddha also says the world is not necessarily that it's an illusion, but it's just constant flux and impermanence. And so this is why it's a heterodox teaching, because Vedanta is is such a huge pillar in in the Indian imaginary, and so many have had and cherished a conception of soul. And so for the Buddha, what needs to happen, rather than the realization of this thing that is always already real and doesn't change, we need to dissociate the notion or the feeling of Self from any of that impermanence that is constantly coming and going. We don't need to identify any of that as a separate self, something that would persist. We need to go ahead and let that feeling dissolve, because that feeling is what generates desire for more and what keeps us trapped in existence. And so this is the the heresy, in a way, the Hiroshima moment that really changed things and started the the philosophers, the Hindu philosophers, and the vedantins and the Advaita, vedantins and the Buddhists all arguing there is no self. So let's make a summary. Buddhism denied the reality of a self and emphasized a strongly ethical stance with regard to the impermanent world of suffering and ignorance. The most central teaching is the middle. Way, or the muddy Marga, and we looked at how many correlations, how how pervasive an idea that is in the traditions that were early, in the traditions that come now. This middle way is the way between sensuality and asceticism, or world affirmation and world denial. The specifics of the Middle Way are the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. One finds the Buddha influence in almost everything that followed him, whether that be a reaction against him, as in the vedantins, trying to show how he must be wrong, that there must be a self, or whether it means the conversion of many people to his way, which obviously happened in many different styles, we see that influence really extending into contemporary society. Everyone will know the word mindfulness, the origin of that Sati is part of the Eightfold Path, and the world is greatly benefited, as far as I'm concerned, from the interface of science and Buddhism, largely spearheaded by the Dalai Lama. So I wanted to leave you with the Buddha's supposed last words. This is from the MaHA Patti Nirvana Sutta, verse, 61 quote, listen, O monks, I admonish you by saying, All composite things are subject to birth and decay, work out Your salvation with diligence. I hope this has been interesting and helpful in some way. We very much appreciate your listening. God bless you, and we'll see you next time.
