Many anthologies of the Buddha's teachings have appeared in English, but
this is the first to be organized around the set of teachings that the Buddha
himself said formed the heart of his message: the Wings to Awakening (bodhi-pakkhiya-dhamma).
The material is arranged in three parts, preceded by a long Introduction. The
Introduction tries to define the concept of Awakening so as to give a clear
sense of where the Wings to Awakening are headed. It does this by discussing
the Buddha's accounts of his own Awakening, with special focus on the way in
which the principle of skillful kamma (in Sanskrit, karma) formed both the "how"
and the "what" of that Awakening: The Buddha was able to reach Awakening
only by developing skillful kamma -- this is the "how"; his understanding
of the process of developing skillful kamma is what sparked the insights that
constituted Awakening -- this is the "what."
With this background established, the remainder of the book focuses in detail
on the Wings to Awakening as a detailed analysis of the "how." Part
I focuses on aspects of the principle of skillful kamma that shaped the way
the Wings to Awakening are formulated. Part II goes through the seven sets that
make up the Wings to Awakening themselves: the four foundations of mindfulness
(here called the four frames of reference), the four right exertions, the four
bases for power, the five faculties, the five strengths, the seven factors for
Awakening, and the noble eightfold path. Part III reduces all the terms in the
seven sets to the five faculties, and then deals with those faculties in detail.
With the fifth and final faculty, discernment, the book concludes by returning
to the "what" of Awakening, showing how discernment focuses on the
Wings themselves as topics to be observed in such a way that they will spark
the insights leading to total release.
Thus the organization of the book is somewhat circular. As with any circle,
there are several points where the book can be entered. I would recommend two
to begin with. The first is to read straight through the book from beginning
to end, gaining a systematic framework for the material from Parts I and II,
which explain why the seven sets are organized as they are, and then focusing
more on individual elements in the sets in Part III. This way of approaching
the material has the advantage of giving an overall perspective on the topic
before going into the details, making the role and meaning of the details clear
from the start. However, this approach is the reverse of what actually happens
in the practice. A practicing meditator must learn first to focus on individual
phenomena in and of themselves, and then, through observation and experimentation,
to discover their inter-relationships. For this reason, some readers -- especially
those who find the discussion of causal relationships in Parts I and II too
abstract to be helpful -- may prefer to skip from the Introduction straight
to sections A through E of Part III, to familiarize themselves with teachings
that may connect more directly with their own experience. They may then return
later to Parts I and II to gain a more overall perspective on how the practice
is meant to deal with those experiences.
Regardless of which approach you take to the material, you should discover fairly
quickly that the relationships among the overall patterns and individual elements
in the Wings are very complex. This complexity reflects the non-linear nature
of the Buddha's teachings on causal relationships, and is reflected in the many
cross-references among the various parts of the book. In this way, the structure
of this book, instead of being a simple circle, is actually a pattern of many
loops within loops. Thus a third way to read it -- for those familiar enough
with the material to want to explore unexpected connections -- would be to follow
the cross-references to see where they lead.
Parts I-III of the book are each divided into sections consisting of passages
translated from discourses in the Pali Canon, which is apparently the earliest
extant record of the Buddha's teachings. Each section is introduced, where necessary,
with an essay. These essays are printed in sans serif type to distinguish them
clearly from the translated passages. They are attempts to provide context --
and thus meaning -- for the passages, to show how they relate to one another,
to specific issues in the practice, and to the path of practice as a whole.
They are not meant to anticipate or answer every possible question raised by
the passages. Instead, they are aimed at giving an idea of the kinds of questions
that can be most fruitfully brought to the passages, so that the lessons contained
in the passages can properly be applied to the practice. As the Buddha has pointed
out, the attitude of "appropriate attention" (yoniso manasikara),
the ability to focus on the right questions, is one of the most important skills
to develop in the course of the practice. This skill is much more fruitful than
an attitude that tries to come to the practice armed with all the right answers
in advance.
The context provided by the essays is threefold: doctrinal, i.e., placing the
passages within the structure of the Buddha's teachings taken as a whole; historical,
i.e., relating them to what is known of the intellectual and social history
of the Buddha's time; and practical, i.e., applying them to the actual practice
of the Buddhist path in the present.
The first and foremost sources for the doctrinal context are the discourses
in the Canon itself. The Buddha and his noble disciples are by far the most
reliable guides to the meaning of their own words. Often a teaching that seems
vague or confusing when encountered on its own in a single discourse becomes
clearer when viewed in the context of several discourses that treat it from
a variety of angles, just as it is easier to get a sense of a building from
a series of pictures taken from different perspectives than from a single snapshot.
This approach to understanding the discourses is instructive not only when discourse
x explicitly defines a term mentioned in discourse y, but also when patterns
of imagery and terminology permeate many passages. Two cases in point: In separate
contexts, the discourses compare suffering to fire, and the practice of training
the mind in meditation to the art of tuning and playing a musical instrument.
In each case, technical terms -- from physics in the first instance, from music
theory in the second -- are applied to the mind in a large number of contexts.
Thus it is helpful to understand where the terms are coming from in order to
grasp their connotations and to gain an intuitive sense -- based on our own
familiarity with fire and music -- of what they mean.
In a few instances, I have cited alternative versions of the discourses -- such
as those contained in the Sarvastivadin Canon preserved in Chinese translation
-- to throw light on passages in the Pali. Although the Sarvastivadin Canon
as a whole seems to be later than the Pali, there is no way of knowing whether
particular Sarvastivadin discourses are earlier or later than their Pali counterparts,
so the comparisons drawn between the two are intended simply as food for thought.
I have also drawn occasionally on the Pali Abhidhamma and commentaries, which
postdate the discourses by several centuries. Here, however, I have had to be
selective. These texts employ a systematic approach to interpreting the discourses
that fits some teachings better than others. There are instances where a particular
teaching has one meaning in terms of this system, and another when viewed in
the context of the discourses themselves. Thus I have taken specific insights
from these texts where they seem genuinely to illumine the meaning of the discourses,
but without adopting the overall structure that they impose on the teachings.
To provide historical context, I have drawn on a variety of sources. Again,
the foremost source here is the Pali Canon itself, both in what it has to say
explicitly about the social and intellectual milieu of the Buddha's time, and
in what it says implicitly about the way the intellectual disciplines of the
Buddha's time -- such as science, mathematics, and music theory -- helped to
shape the way the Buddha expressed his thought. I have also drawn on secondary
sources where these do a useful job of fleshing out themes present in the Pali
Canon. These secondary sources are cited in the Bibliography.
Because the Pali tradition is still a living one, the doctrinal and historical
contexts do not account for the full range of meanings that practicing Buddhists
continue to find in the texts. To provide this living dimension, I have drawn
on the teachings of modern practice traditions where these seem to harmonize
with the message of the Canon and add an illuminating perspective. Most of these
teachings are drawn from the Thai Forest Tradition, but I have also drawn on
other traditions as well. I have followed a traditional Buddhist practice in
not identifying the sources for these teachings, and for two reasons: first,
in many ways I owe every insight offered in this book to the training I have
received from my teachers in the Forest Tradition, and it seems artificial to
credit them for some points and not for others; second, there is the possibility
that I have misunderstood some of their teachings or taken them out of context,
so I don't want to risk crediting my misunderstandings to them.
In providing a more modern context for the passages presented in this book,
however, I have not tried to interpret the teachings in terms of modern psychology
or sociology. The Buddha's message is timeless and direct. It does not need
to be translated into the passing fashions of disciplines that are in many ways
more removed than it is from the realities of direct experience, and more likely
to grow out of date. However, there are two modern disciplines that I have drawn
on to help explain some of the more formal aspects of the Buddha's mode of speech
and his analysis of causal principles.
The first discipline is phenomenology, the branch of philosophy that deals with
phenomena as they are directly experienced, in and of themselves. There are
many schools of modern phenomenology, and it is not my purpose to try to equate
the Buddha's teachings with any one of them. However, the Buddha does recommend
a mode of perception that he calls "entry into emptiness (suññata)"
[see. M.121], in which one simply notes the presence or absence of phenomena,
without making any further assumptions about them. This approach resembles what
in modern philosophy could be called "radical phenomenology," a mode
of perception that looks at experiences and processes simply as events, with
no reference to the question of whether there are any "things" lying
behind those events, or of whether the events can be said really to exist [see
passages §230 and §186]. Because of this resemblance, the word "phenomenology"
is useful in helping to explain the source of the Buddha's descriptions of the
workings of kamma and the process of dependent co-arising in particular. Once
we know where he is coming from, it is easier to make sense of his statements
and to use them in their proper context.
I have made similar use of modern science -- chaos theory in particular. There
are many parallels between Buddhist theories of causation and modern deterministic
chaos theory. Examples and terminology drawn from the latter -- such as feedback,
scale invariance, and fluid turbulence -- are very useful in explaining the
former. Again, in using these parallels I am not trying to equate Buddhist teachings
with chaos theory or to engage in pseudo-science. Fashions in science change
so rapidly that we do the Buddha's teachings no favor in trying to "prove"
them in light of current scientific paradigms. Here I am simply pointing out
similarities as a way of helping to make those teachings intelligible in modern
terms. Deterministic chaos theory is the only modern body of knowledge that
has worked out a vocabulary for the patterns of behavior described in Buddhist
explanations of causality, and so it seems a natural source to draw on, both
to describe those patterns and to point out some of their less obvious implications.
In doing so, I realize that I run the risk of alienating non-scientists who
feel intimidated by scientific terminology, as well as scientists who resent
the application of terminology from their disciplines to "non-scientific"
fields. To both groups I can say only that the terms in and of themselves are
not "scientific." Much of our current everyday terminology for explaining
causal relations is derived from the science of the eighteenth century; I expect
that it will only be a matter of time before the terminology of more recent
science will percolate into everyday language. For the purpose of this book,
it is important to point out that when the Buddha talked about causality, his
notion of causal relations did not correspond to our ordinary, linear, picture
of causal chains. If this point is not grasped, the common tendency is to judge
the Buddha's descriptions of causality against our own and to find them either
confusing or confused. Viewing them in the light of deterministic chaos theory,
however, helps us to see that they are both coherent and of practical use.
Another example of an analogy drawn from modern science is the term "holographic,"
which I have used to describe some formulations of the Buddhist path. When a
hologram is made of an object, an image of the entire object -- albeit fairly
fuzzy -- can be made from even small fragments of the hologram. In the same
way, some formulations of the path contain a rough version of the entire path
complete in each individual step. In my search for an adjective to describe
such formulations, "holographic" seemed the best choice.
If you are unfamiliar with the terminology of phenomenology, chaos theory, and
holograms, read section I/A, on skillfulness, to find the doctrinal context
in which these terms can be related to an immediate experience: the process
of developing a skill. The approach of phenomenology relates to the fact that,
on the night of his Awakening, the Buddha focused his attention directly on
the mental process of developing skillful states in the mind, without referring
to who or what was developing the skill, or to whether there was a substratum
of some sort underlying the process. Chaos theory relates to the patterns of
causality that the Buddha discerned while observing this process, whereby the
effects of action can in turn become causal factors influencing new action.
Holography relates to his discovery that skillfulness is developed by taking
clusters of good qualities already present in the mind and using them to strengthen
one another each step along the way. Once these familiar reference points are
understood, the abstract terms describing them should become less foreign and
more helpful.
In providing doctrinal, historical, and practical context based on all the above-mentioned
sources, the essays are meant to give an entry into the mental horizons and
landscape of the texts they introduce. They are also meant to suggest how the
texts may be used for their intended purpose: to help eliminate obstacles to
the release of the mind. Although some of the essays address controversial questions,
the textual passages are not meant to prove the points made in the essays. In
assembling this anthology, I first gathered and translated the passages from
the Canon, and then provided the essays after contemplating what I had gathered.
For this reason, any reader who disagrees with the positions presented in the
essays should still find the translations useful for his/her own purposes. I
am painfully aware that some of the essays, especially those in Part I, tend
to overpower the material they are designed to introduce, but this is because
the themes in Part I play a pervasive role in the Buddha's teachings as a whole.
Thus I had to deal with them in considerable detail to point out how they relate
not only to the passages in Part I, but also to themes raised in the rest of
the book.
Although the essays should go far toward familiarizing the reader with the conceptual
world and relevance of the textual passages, there are other aspects of the
passages that might prove daunting to the uninitiated, and so I would like to
deal with them here.
To begin with, the teachings on the Wings to Awakening are interrelated in very
complex ways. Because books must be arranged in linear sequence, taking one
thing at a time in a row, this means that no book can do justice to all the
side avenues and underground passageways that connect elements in one set of
teachings to those in another. For this reason, I have organized the material
in line with the order of the sets as given in the Canon, but -- as mentioned
above -- have extensively cross-referenced it for the sake of readers who want
to explore connections that fall outside the linear pattern. Cross-references
are given in brackets [ ], and take three forms. An example that looks like
this -- [§123] -- is a reference to a passage from the Pali Canon translated
in this book. One that looks like this -- [III/E] -- is a reference to an essay
introducing a section, in this case Section E in Part III. One that looks like
this -- [M.107] -- is a reference to a passage from the Pali Canon not translated
here. The abbreviations used in these last references are explained on the Abbreviations
page. Many passages falling in this last category are translated in my book,
The Mind Like Fire Unbound, in which case the reference will include the abbreviation
MFU followed by the number of the page on which the passage is located in that
book. My hope is that these cross-references will open up useful lines of thought
to whoever takes the time to explore them.
Another potential difficulty for the uninitiated reader lies in the style of
the passages. The Pali Canon was, for 500 years, an entirely oral tradition.
As a result, it tends to be terse in some areas and repetitive in others. I've
made an effort to cut out as many of the repetitions as possible, but I'll have
to ask your patience for those that remain. Think of them as the refrains in
a piece of music. Also, when the Buddha is referring to monks doing this and
that, keep in mind that his audience was frequently composed entirely of monks.
The commentaries state that the word "monk" includes anyone -- male
or female, lay or ordained -- who is serious about the practice, and this meaning
should always be kept in mind. I apologize for the gender bias in the translations.
Although I have tried to figure out ways to minimize it, I find myself stymied
because it is so thoroughly embedded in a literature originally addressed to
monks.
I trust, however, that none of these difficulties will prove insurmountable,
and that you will find, as I have, that the teachings of the Pali Canon more
than reward the effort put into exploring them. The reality of the Wings to
Awakening lies in the qualities of the mind. The words with which they are expressed
in the Pali Canon are simply pointers. These pointers have to be tested in the
light of serious practice, but my conviction is that, of all the meditation
teachers the human race has ever seen, the Buddha is still the best. His words
should be read repeatedly, reflectively, and put to test in the practice. My
hope in gathering his teachings in this way is that they will give you useful
insights for training the mind so that someday you won't have to read about
Awakening, but will be able to know it for yourself.