The one that's in the Gideon Ikara is identical with the one that's in the Majumun Ikara except for the fact that there has been had puppeteering material to fill in the analysis of what happened before. In the big one, there are definitions and a term, but there are ones like editor's loss that are being added. What can you make of this? Well, the first thing you can make of it is that, very likely, the literature will have a bunch of mini-types. The shorter version is an old text. That is, it has to be fairly old. It is old enough to have a commentary on it in the UK. um the only other parts of the canon that seem to be old enough to have portions of commentaries incorporated into the canon are parts which by other tests seems to be a very old text uses old meters and so on so it seems like this redaction whatever else negative it goes back fairly far into the history of the bs community but

[01:08]

If we work our way backwards through the ways people were putting texts together, we see that the first step backward is to try and go back to the canons that were put together. If you look at where these texts occur, you find that the that in the Pali is in the in the Chinese is in the . which is the equivalent of the Pali Anguttara Nikaya. So that we find that the text initially was put in an entirely different section of the canon. We find that the longer sutra that's in the Pali, that in the Pali is in the Digha Nikaya and is a long sutra, is in the Chinese in the Majjhima Agama, which is the equivalent of the Majjhima Nikaya. What do we conclude from this?

[02:11]

The first step, of course, is that given the sutra as a unit, this was being put in different places in the different canons. That whoever edited the canons as a whole, whoever sat down and put them all together, was making decisions about where the different sutras went in the different discourses. The editor of the Sanskrit canon from which the Chinese translation was made seems to have decided that the shorter version belonged in the Sanskrit equivalent of the Anguttara Nikaya, and the longer version belonged in the Sanskrit equivalent of . The Pali canon made the decision that the shorter version belonged in the Majjhima, and the longer version belonged in the Digha. You see the hands of an editor here. A decision was made. Given this, we can work our way back even further. Are there any questions so far? We can see certain differences, say, between the Chinese version and the Pali version. We can see, for example, and this is a key point in my argument, we can see, for example, that there are a series of metaphors that are being used in the Chinese version.

[03:22]

I'll continue to use the term Chinese. What I mean by Chinese is the Chinese translation of a lost Sanskrit original. That there are a series of metaphors that are incorporated in the Chinese version of the longer sutra. Metaphors like a man who is meditating is like a lotus in a pond that is being suffused throughout by the cool waters of the pond. Or a metaphor like a man who is doing this meditation is like somebody who's wrapped in a pure white garment so that every inch of his skin is being touched by the garment and his whole body is fused with this meditation. Here is a series of metaphors that are in the Chinese version, which very likely is either a Sarvastivada version or a Mahasangika version. There are debates about that, which aren't in the Pali, but are found in the Pali texts in describing the series of meditations that are called Dhyanas. That is, that are used in describing the series of meditations, which in the earliest literature seem to be a series of ascents through ever more subtle and rarified realms of sensory withdrawal from the world.

[04:34]

What does this mean? It means, among other things, that there was available to the people who put the sutras together a set of stock metaphors that were circulating for meditation and which the Sarvastivada redactor of the Sanskrit version felt fit the context nicely, so he put them in, whereas the redactor of the Pali version, the Theravada version, felt that they didn't fit the context, so he left them out. What we have then is a separable block of metaphors for meditation that seem to have been floating orally and which it was up to the redactor of a particular sutra to put in or leave out. Now, with this in mind, we can begin to investigate the way in which the sutra as a whole was put together. It seemed, just looking at the Pali version now, without even looking at the Chinese,

[05:36]

It seems that we can distinguish between three different core texts that make up the Satipatthana Sutta in Pali. Let me make clear another assumption I'm making. This was kind of an assumption I began with, which became clearer and clearer, at least more crystallized as I began to take these texts apart. I've said that if you look at the metaphors, you can see that there are floating oral units that are separable, and that these floating oral units were strung together, rather like beads on a string, by the editor of the text, by the redactor of the text, and then confirmed by the tradition that passed it along, it was set as a unit. Let's call these separable oral units pericopes. I borrowed the term from New Testament criticism, where this is the term that's used for the specific episodes in the life of Jesus, which were then arranged in particular patterns by the writers of the Gospels.

[06:49]

Let's use this as a technical term, meaning a separable oral unit. I make the assumption that meditative techniques were passed down in the earliest Buddhist community in the form of contemplative peripopes in the sense that what you got when you went to a master for a meditation topic, when you went to a master to be taught how to meditate, consisted in a short, memorizable unit of the sequence of contemplative steps you're supposed to go through. And as I started looking for these, as I started looking for repeated units that crop up in a whole series of different contexts and that are used for a whole series of different polemical purposes in the sense that they can be separated out from the context, It seems to me that, in fact, we find contemplative techniques, as we separate them out from the text that the redactor embedded them in, as consisting in a short, maybe 9 or 10 at the most, simple declarative third person sentences

[07:56]

describing the sequence of meditative states. And if you start looking for these separable contemplative pericopes, these three aural units that were being passed around in the earliest Buddhist community, you see that the Satipa Pana Sutta, even in its core, is made up of three of these. So that, for example, in a number of places, we find in two places in the Digha Nikaya, in three places in the Majjhima Nikaya, in one, two, three, four, five places in the Samyutta Nikaya, and in one place in the Anguttara Nikaya, the Satipatthana sequence of meditation set forth like this. A monk overcomes his desire and regret about the world, and he abides observing his body, ardent and aware and mindful. Sound familiar? All right. He overcomes his desire and regret about the world and he abides observing his feelings, ardent and aware and mindful. He overcomes his desire and regret about the world and he abides observing his mind, ardent and aware and mindful.

[08:59]

He overcomes his desire and regret about the world and he abides observing events, dharmas, ardent and aware and mindful. We find this not only in the Satipatthana Sutta itself, but in other contexts, separate from the context of the Sutta, a number of other places in the canon. So we can call this recension A. That's a pericode. That's a unit. As far as I can see, in the earliest Buddhist community, if you went to a master who specialized in satipatthana meditation, something very much like this is what he would sit down and tell you to do when you asked him for a subject of meditation, when you asked him for what Buddhaghosa would later call a kamatana, something to work on. Elsewhere, we find what we can call a satipatthana stupa bhi, We find this in fewer places. We find this in the two versions of the Satipatthana Sutta in the Majma Nikaya and in the Digha Nikaya.

[10:03]

But also, we find it occurring independently in the Anguttara Nikaya in one place. And this is the sequence. He abides observing his body internally. He abides observing his body externally. He abides observing his body internally and externally. Then he abides observing his feelings internally, externally, and both, and so on through the list. We can call this pericope B. What evidence do we have that this was an independently transmitted oral pericope in the earliest Buddhist community? The evidence not only that it occurs at least once, but are found independently in the Anguttara Nikaya, but also that the conflated pericope AB is found not only in two places in the Samyutta Nikaya and in the Vibhanga, that's in the Abhidhamma, but every Sanskrit version now available of the Smriti Upasthana. For example, in the Pancha Vimshati Prajnaparamita, where they quote this as a sequence, they quote a conflated version of A and B. Then we have a C version.

[11:11]

which runs something like, he abides observing the events that occur in his body. He abides observing the events that pass away in his body. He abides observing the events in his body which occur and pass away. And the same thing for feelings, thoughts, and events. This we find separately in the Samyutta Nikaya. And in the Samyutta Nikaya, also, we find a conflated version of B and C. And finally, when we look at the final recension, the shorter version in the Majjhima Nikaya, that's the suited version, we find A, B, and C all conflated together, all mixed together in the text. It seems to me that what we can conclude from this kind of analysis is that we had, in the earliest Buddhist community, three different versions of what was called Satipatthana meditation, which were combined in different ways in different places by different redactors. And then finally, fairly early,

[12:15]

as a final version, somebody, the redactor of the Satipatthana Sutta, the shorter version, collected all the versions he could find and put them together in one sutra. And this became the core of the shorter Satipatthana Sutta. To this, then, he added any number of things. He added a whole series of texts. On breathing, given this core of satipatthana, on observing the body, this bare awareness, which I think is the heart of the satipatthana technique, we find the addition of a whole set of exercises supplementary to this. For example, under the notion of observing the body, the editor seems to have put together as many traditions concerning meditation on the body as he could find. For example, we find that the meditation on the four elements in the body, the meditation on earth, water, fire, and air in the body as a way of splitting up the body and ending attachment for the body, was inserted

[13:20]

as a whole in the Satipatthana Sutta. And we find this repeated word for word in the Dhatu Vibhanga Sutta in the Majjhima Nikaya. Here again, obviously, the peripope on the elements in the body was being taken over wholesale and inserted in the text. OK. When we look at the larger Satipaṭṭhāna, we see that a further process of redaction has taken place. And on top of this basic text, there were also added wholesale quotes from, say, the Satyavibhanga Sutta as an analysis of the content of the Four Noble Truths, which are stated in the smaller version. So much for the technicality. Now we get into something that's simpler, because we can move from the complex to the simple. What this means then is that as a methodology, as a way of looking at these early texts, it's possible to start a process of dissection and go back behind the text as it's presented to us either in Pali or in Chinese or in Tibetan.

[14:24]

And we can start assuming that when we find units, when we find building blocks, that are separable from the text, in the sense that they occur in different contexts and in different combinations, then we can make the assumption that we found something that was being circulated orally in the earliest Buddhist community. Very much like determining an element as something that enters into a whole series of different combinations. And what stays the same in all these different combinations is the element. Let me mention one other technique that was used before to go back behind the earliest texts to show a similar process that is also useful and to show how this particular way of looking at it is a little different. Yeah. Is this way of analyzing out these paracles then a Christian classic tradition? It's a very modern Christian tradition. It's the kind of work that was done first by Bultmann,

[15:26]

and created quite a furor in the Christian church. The notion of peripopes was originally used in analyzing the life story of Jesus, where it's fairly clear that what you have is not in any sense, at least it's clear to us now, is not in any sense a connected biography in any of the gospels, but simply a series of episodes of different types miracle stories, sayings, wisdom sayings, things like that, that were circulated orally, and that were then strung together by the various gospel writers, the redactors. Yeah? It's also a fairly traditional method for foreign research. Foreign, okay. This is basically like you do motif research, right. Right. Right, fine. Mm-hmm. It was only in this century, really, that Christian scholarship got around to utilizing traditional classical techniques.

[16:33]

And surprisingly enough, Buddhist scholarship hasn't really gotten around to it yet. So this is, as I say, a very tentative first try. One scholar who did a lot of thinking about pre-canonical Buddhism, which is not a best name for this kind of research, was Stanislaw Shire. who came up with, surprisingly enough, here's one case where Buddhist textual scholarship was about 30 years ahead of Christian textual scholarship, because it's only among the post-Bulkmanians that this kind of criterion is being used. Stanislaw Shire said this, as we look through the texts, we can often find doctrines that look unorthodox in the sense that they are very hard to reconcile with classical Abhidharmic analysis. The example he gives and worked over very thoroughly was the notion of the six elements. so that in various places in the sutras, you see lists of six elements, earth, water, fire, air, akasha, and vijnana, space and consciousness, whatever you want, which seem to be arranged in an ascending scale of subtlety, luminosity, and pervasiveness.

[17:47]

I think you can see relics of this in the various levels of dhyana that you find in the early Buddhist literature, where you have the formless realm of space being superseded by the formless realm of vijnana, for example. What Shire says is this. that these references to the six elements which form a continuous series of increasing subtlety, luminosity, and pervasiveness are irreconcilable with classical abhidharmic notions, that the notion of a graduated series is not reconcilable with the notion of the total otherness and separateness of dharmas. And as a matter of fact, if you look at the Abhidharma Kosha and places where the Abhidharma tradition tried to deal with these passages, they have a great deal of trouble. They don't know what to do with them. They can't make them fit into the system. They're obviously searching for a way. Shire argues that if, in fact, these were late doctrines, they would have been edited out, that only the assumption that they are archaic can explain the fact that they were included in spite of the fact they didn't seem to fit in.

[18:57]

And the argument is then that when we find these doctrines that just don't fit into the later classical pattern, that haven't been edited out, we have to assume that they are archaic and that it was only their antiquity and the tradition behind them that kept them in the canon. Modern Christian scholarship is using a very similar argument for now trying to get to what the historical Jesus might have said. What I'm doing here is a little different. I think Shire's method is able to separate out ideas, concepts, that are archaic. What I'm trying to get at are the actual building blocks, the oral pericopes, the oral structures that the redactors had in their minds that they built their sutras out of. Now, when you start looking at the text this way, it seems to me that you find in the earliest Buddhist community two very different types of contemplative technique.

[20:02]

that you find on the one hand techniques like Satipatthana, where you have a series of meditations that center on concepts like Gidya or Gidya in Pali, on concepts like Jnana-Darshana, or in Pali, you have a whole series of techniques, like Satipatthana, that center on metaphors of illumination, of vision, of seeing, where the idea seems to be to attain something very much like an ecstatic penetration into the true nature of events as they pass before one. and to be able to recognize events as they arise, to apply to them the traditional categories of Dharma analysis, and to be free of desire and aversion amidst events.

[21:04]

And it seems that as we look at the kinds of metaphors that it used, the kinds of folk tales, I think both metaphors and folk tales are very illuminating in examining what we can call these complexes of contemplative ideas in the earliest Buddhist community. we see that, in some ways, this is very close to a similar complex of ideas in the Upanishads that center on , that also center on notions of an ecstatic, visionary penetration into the nature of the world without, in any sense, turning one's back on the world or withdrawing from it or turning away from it. On the other hand, it seems that we have a whole series of contemplative pericopes that, as opposed to an ecstatic, tradition fall into what we may call an enstat complex. where the way to liberation is by ascending a series of ever more powerful withdrawals of sensory interaction from the world, where liberation is attained by seeing the world as filth, as dirt, as excrement, where the world is denigrated, where one's back is turned on the world.

[22:22]

And in each of these cases, well, here too, the key term seems to be dhyana in the earliest Buddhist texts. We find very similar practices among vaginas. And I think there are very clear structural isomorphisms between the Buddhist dhyana material and the vagina dhyana material. There are certain diagnostic indices for each of these contemplative complexes. For example, The dhyana and static complex, again, seems to have built in a kind of mythic notion of the world as filth. And the process of meditation is likened metaphorically, implicitly, either to processes of cleansing yourself, washing your body, or to processes of purging dross from metal by heating it in a blacksmith's fire. And that where you find these metaphors applied, this seems to be diagnostic of the enstatic tradition. Also diagnostic of the enstatic tradition seems to be a vertical cosmology with gross, thick matter on the bottom getting subtler and subtler as you ascend through the vertical layers of the cosmos.

[23:36]

I think early Buddhism and Jainism shared this vertical cosmos. As opposed to this, in the ecstatic tradition, you find metaphors of food and eating. You find a dissolution of ego boundaries rather than the erection of absolute ego boundaries between the meditator and the world. that the metaphors are of light and of vision and of illumination. The world is, in a sense, embraced, and that the soteriology, the ecstatic soteriology, is imminent. In other words, freedom is found amidst events in the world, whereas the soteriology in the ecstatic complex is transcendent. That is, salvation is found in some realm completely apart from the world. So I could point out two, for example, contemplative pericopes that seem to me to embody these two different traditions, these two different complexes.

[24:43]

The ecstatic, I think, is represented by Satipacchana, Smrtipacchana. I think, for example, you could dig out two pericopes that very well represent the ecstatic contemplative complex. For example, what are called the eight vimokas in Pali. I'll use this as an example because nobody really knows what this was about, and the commentators give it a wide berth, and it's a very curious set of meditative techniques. Yeah? Do you feel that pre-Orient or in the Orients? What I would say is this, that I can find clear roots in the natives. And while the Upanishads are probably contemporary with the earliest Buddhist community, I can find clear roots in the Vedas and the Brahmanas for an Indian ecstatic tradition. I can't find this kind of warrant in the Vedas and the Brahmanas for an ecstatic tradition. And to go out on a limb, it seems to me that if you look at the little we know about the Indus Valley culture, it seems that here is one of the ancient cultures that was more obsessed with bodily cleanliness

[25:58]

Stuart Pigott called it the most depressingly bourgeois of all the ancient cultures, than just about any other ancient culture. We find that the city centered on ritual baths. We find that the drainage system was better than most places in India have today. And the single most common archaeological find in all of the Indus Valley were little triangular, gray, cakes like that, that size and shape, sort of rounded front angles that were found all over, mostly in the drains. But they were found in pits and in the drains and all over the place. And everybody wondered, what in the world were these? Were they like offering cakes that were made out of, they were often called cakes. for want of a better term, that were clay representatives of, say, barley cakes or something that were offered to the gods. Nobody knew until somebody very clever did a microscopic analysis of what was found on them. It turns out the single most common archaeological find in the Indus Valley is a species of toilet paper.

[27:04]

This suggests that we might have here a source for the kinds of mythic images of filth and cleansing that are diagnostic of the enstatic tradition. This is a suggestion. A couple of other things. Diagnostic of the enstatic tradition seems to be notions of stillness and motionlessness and locked postures, whereas diagnostic of the ecstatic tradition is motion. I'll give you some examples of these kinds of metaphors in a minute. We find, as you all know I'm sure, the earliest representations of the lotus posture on Indus Valley seals. Interestingly enough, the earliest full figures of males that we find from the Indus Valley culture show the men in a posture like this, standing erect but with no part of the body touching any other part of the body, which is exactly the posture of the Tirtankaras in Jaina images. and is exactly the posture that's prescribed in the Jaina texts for how you stand motionless, which is one of the ways of burning away your karma in the Jain tradition.

[28:14]

So this is suggestive. I obviously have made up my mind, but I will give it to you as a suggestion. OK. The eight vimokas. I use the Pali term because the Sanskrit term is wrong. Isn't that interesting? This is Sanskritized as vimoksha. Well, liberation, which given the sequence of contemplative events, doesn't make a lot of sense. Yashamitra, in his commentary on the passage where this occurs, where this is referred to in the Abhidharma Kosha, says that in fact, in effect, this was a wrong Sanskritization, as often happened when non-Sanskrit originals, I won't say Pali originals, I'll say non-Sanskrit originals, were being translated into Sanskrit. It happened on occasion. that the people who were translated into Sanskrit had to make decisions about what the proper Sanskrit form was, and sometimes they chose wrong.

[29:17]

This is a good case in point. The Pali term is vimoka. It was Sanskritized as vimoksha, but Yashamitra makes the suggestion that the original might have been a form of vaimukhya, The proper Sanskritization would be ,, which means turning your face away from ,, your face, and the apart, away. So you've got the notion of the stages of turning your back on something, of being apart from something. And I'll read you the pericope as it's been reconstructed. You find this pericope if you're interested. Let's see. One, two, three, four times in the Giga Nikaya, once in the Majjhima Nikaya, three times in the Anguttara Nikaya. You find the Sanskrit text in the Mahavutpati. You find the Sanskrit in Yashamitra's commentary on the Abhidharmakosha. I think you can say it's fairly well established as a pericope.

[30:18]

And it goes something like this. Some of these you will be familiar with. One, the material one sees matter. The one with no thought of internal matter sees external matter. He applies himself, thinking, it shines. Completely transcending the thought of matter, all sensory response fading away, paying no heed to multiplicity, thinking space is infinite, he enters and abides in the realm of infinite space. Completely transcending the realm of infinite space, thinking perception is infinite, he enters and abides in the realm of infinite perception. In Hindu epistemology, this model of perception remains sort of in the back of their minds as a picture whenever they talk about how the sensory organs work. In addition, We find a few references to a kind of karmic materialism in Buddhism that's very reminiscent of the kind of karmic materialism you find in Jainism or in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras.

[31:21]

For example, in the Digha Nikaya and in the Anguttara Nikaya, in two places, we hear of light and dark karma. and of karma that's neither light nor dark that brings about the destruction of karma. Another place in the Anguttara Nikaya, we read about practitioners who give birth to the nirvana that's neither light nor dark. And we find almost exactly the same words in book four, verse seven of the Yoga Sutras. All I'm suggesting here is that, in fact, when we separate out these different traditions in the earliest community, we find two kinds of complexes, one ecstatic, one enstatic. We have folk tales of the trance state. We read about Shariputra, for example, who was sitting outside meditating after just having his head shaved. He was sitting in the moonlight. And two yaksas come along, obviously tempted by his newly shaved head shining in the moonlight, decide to give him a hit on the head.

[32:23]

And one of the yaksha says, no, don't do that, don't do that. And the other one says, yeah, I'm going to give this monk a real hit in the head. And he comes up and gives him a blow that would fell an elephant. And as soon as he hit Shariputra, he yelled, screaming, I'm falling, I'm burning, I'm burning. And he fell into hell. And Shariputra was unmoved through all this. Maudgalyayana came out and said, what happened? Maudgalyayana, of course, saw the whole thing because he has magic vision. And Shariputra woke up out of his trance and said, oh, well, I wonder where I got this little headache from. All kinds of folk tales about how this sensory withdrawal leads to complete physical separation from interaction with the world. And the kinds of metaphors that are used for it yield the same thing. There are a series of metaphors that seem to fit in with the extatic tradition. These are all found in the Satipatthana Samyutta, in the section of the Samyutta Nikaya that groups together all the various traditions that were floating around about Satipatthana.

[33:30]

There's the story of the quail and the hawk. Very popular story in East Asia. It was translated to Chinese. There may even be a dim reflection of the story in the Arabian Nights. A quail is seized by a hawk. This is a metaphor for how a monk should behave when he's doing Satipatthana meditation. A quail is seized by a hawk. And as the hawk is carrying away the quail, the quail says, well, it's my own fault. I left my own field and went where I shouldn't have gone. And the hawk, being proud, says, even if you were in your own field, I could catch you. And the quail said, all right, let me go and we'll see. So the hawk lets the quail go and the quail goes down to a field that's full of broken stones and churned up earth. And the quail perches on top of a rock and says, here I am, come and get me. Your mother wears combat boots. And the hawk is very angry and comes dashing down and is just set to grab the quail when the quail ducks behind a rock and the hawk dashes her breast upon the rock and kills herself.

[34:34]

The metaphor is one of motion, of quick motion, of moving at exactly the right time. The metaphor is that a monk who's doing Satipatthana meditation is one who knows how to move, and knows the proper move, and moves spontaneously and correctly in the right way. Another thing compares wise and foolish cooks who are serving a king. And there's a wise cook who always gets big tips from the king. And there's a foolish cook who always gets lousy tips from the king. And the reason the good cook always gets big tips and clothes that the king has finished wearing and things like that is that he watches what the king is doing. And he says, aha, today he's reaching for that kind of soup. And he likes that kind of soup. So I better serve him more of that. And I see he likes that. Whereas the foolish cook doesn't look at what's going on. and doesn't know what the king likes, and keeps serving him things he doesn't like. A monk who's doing Satipatthana meditation is somebody who is like the wise cook.

[35:37]

He knows what's going on. He keeps his eyes open. And the most famous one of all is the story of the most beautiful girl in the world. Suppose there were a man, full of life, not yearning for death, no suicide impulsing this character, who's walking by, and there's a crier standing there saying, the most beautiful girl in the world, the most beautiful girl in the world. And there on a stage is a dancing girl dancing. And there's a big crowd, and everybody's jostling and pushing and trying to get a glimpse of the most beautiful girl in the world. And somebody comes along and hands this man a bowl full of oil that's full to the brim with oil. And walking behind him is an executioner with upraised sword. And if one drop of oil is spilled, he'll cut off his head. Now, the question is, this man who is carrying this bowl full of oil through this jostling crowd, is he going to look around to look at the most beautiful girl in the world? No. He's going to concentrate on the bowl of oil in his hands.

[36:38]

But note this. Not only is he not going to look at the most beautiful girl in the world, he is also not going to enter into a trance state where he is going to withdraw his attention from the events that are going on around him. He is going to have a sustained awareness of every motion he's making and of every motion that is going on in the crowd and the bowl of oil. And this is how you should meditate. This became a very popular metaphor. It seems to me that the metaphor is very used for the ecstatic contemplative complex. are very different from the metaphors and folk tales that are used in the enstatic contemplative complex. The metaphors that are used are of stillness, are of withdrawal, and so on. For example, if I can find this quickly. Let's see. I can't find it quickly.

[37:43]

Can't find it quickly. The metaphors... I'll make them up. The metaphors, as I recall, in the section, in the Book of Nines, in the Anguttara Nikaya, deals with the nine successive Dhyana states. And there's a series of metaphors for the nine successive Dhyana states. For example, they are like going from one Dhyana to the next, is like an army retreating from an enemy and enclosing itself in the safety of its own city. It's like a monk who is practicing these successive trance states is like an elephant that withdraws from the herd and wanders alone. And they're constantly talking of the withdrawals as safer and more secure and more pure and more elevated and more subtle. They have very different complexes of ideas. Now, with my two minutes remaining, I want to talk for an hour and then discuss for an hour.

[38:48]

I want to make the point that given the two contemplative complexes in the earliest Buddhist community, the earliest Buddhist community itself was faced with a problem. Both contemplative complexes had the sanction of being . They were both words of the Buddha. It seems to me that the problematic of the earliest Buddhist community, at least in terms of contemplative technique, was first of all in reconciling this difference. And we have a series of texts that seem to me, they're mostly in the Anguttara Nikaya, a series of texts that seem to me aimed at the reconciliation of differences in the earliest Buddhist community, not only stories wherein there seem to be debates between these two different streams of contemplative technique in early Buddhism, but where attempts are being made actively to overcome the distinction. For example, in the Anguttara Nikaya, this is just one example out of several, but this will do for the purposes of discussion.

[39:59]

The monk Mahat Sunda is rebuking monks for creating dissension in the community. And he says that the situation is that a group of people called Dhammayoga Bhikkhu are having a big fight with people who are called Jayi Bhikkhu. So that the people, the , people whose discipline is Dharma. which is how I would translate this, although it's a problematic compound. It's the only place in the canon this word occurs, where the monks, whose discipline is dharma, are rebuking the jayi bhikkhu, the contemplative, the enstatic bhikkhus, saying, these fellows say they enter trance. They go into a trance. They sit in a trance.

[41:01]

They stay in a trance. What is this trance they enter? How do they enter it? Why did they enter it? And the monks... The monks who do jhana rebuke those whose discipline is dharma. This is what meditators always say to other people. They say, these fellows say their discipline is doctrine. They're excited, arrogant, unsteady, noisy. They talk too much. They have no concentration. Their minds wander. Their senses are not controlled. What doctrine is their discipline? How is it their discipline? What is it their discipline? So Mahat Sunda says, and I think this is very illuminating as to what the differences between these two groups of monks are. Mahat Sunda says, friends, you should. Friends, he said. You should train yourselves thus. We, whose discipline is doctrine, shall praise the monks who practice trance.

[42:04]

And why, wonderful are these persons, and hard to find in the world, who touch the immortal realm with their bodies and there abide. The immortal realm is the amatadattu, which in several places in early texts is the equivalent for nirvana, the immortal realm, amatadattu, is also called the nirodhadattu, the realm of cessation, is also the nirvanadattu, And to touch it with your body seems to me to be an expression that's constantly used in the archaic levels of Buddhist texts to indicate a personal experience of transcendence and almost inevitably is used for somebody who has attained neurodissimopathy. This is also used in the seven kinds of practitioners for the kayatsaki, the bodily witness, is somebody who has gone into neurodissimopathy. So wonderful are these persons, and hard to find in the world, who touch the immortal realm with their bodies and there abide. Friends, you should train yourselves thus.

[43:06]

We who practice trance shall praise the monks whose discipline is doctrine. And why? Wonderful are these persons, and hard to find in the world, who see and penetrate with knowledge the deep way of the goal. Again, words that connote vision, knowledge, insight, all seem to me to be diagnostic of the ecstatic tradition. Now, I think if we look at many of these texts very briefly, we can find a series of rapprochements between the two contemplative complexes. And we find, as these relations are espoused more and more, that you get certain kinds of key terms used to characterize the two disciplines. The one that's used to characterize the ,, the ones who touch the immortal realm with their bodies, is called samatha. The term that is used as a cover term for the various kinds of contemplative techniques that characterize the ,, who see and penetrate with knowledge, is vipassana, insight.

[44:21]

Samatha and vipassana in Sanskrit. There are other terms. you find that there is, in the Pallid canon, in the Anguttari Nikaya, curiously enough, for those of you who know Abhidharma, shamatha, or what seemed to be the complex of contemplative techniques associated with samatha in the text, is called bhavana. And this is contrasted in several places with patisamkhana, Or reckoning, counting, is also the term used in the Sarvastivada school for the kind of nirvana that's nirvana, . Partly some comment, it seems to me, coming from a root meaning to count, may very well refer to a procedure by which dharmas were counted on rosaries, and you kept track of your meditation this way.

[45:24]

At least you were counting, keeping track of the dharmas that passed in front of you. This kind of opposition is found in the Anguttara Nikaya. By the time we start passing to the pre-commentarial, post-Abhidhamma literature, That means texts such as those attributed to Kachana, like the Natyapakarana and the Pethikopadesa. We find that Bhavana is, in these texts, which probably underwent considerable Sarvastivada influence, although I'm not sold on this, we find that Bhavana is not contrasted with Parpitsankana, but Bhavana is contrasted with Darshana, or Dasana in Pali. which is the source for the Sarvastivada notion of the Bhavana Marga and the Darshan Marga. Just as for Buddhaghosa, the path consists of Samatha and Vipassana. In fact, what we find is that the two contemplative complexes are organized into what can finally be called a path.

[46:34]

And that what characterizes Buddhist meditation, what characterizes standard Buddhist meditation in many ways, is that it is a self-conscious attempt to utilize the two contemplative complexes that were in oral circulation in the earliest community to reinforce each other and to create out of this basic kind of material a path wherein both of them contribute to the contemplative goals. Now, in the Anguttara Nikaya, we find references, for example, that talk about there are people who do shamatha, and there are people who do vipassana. And then, best of all, there are people who do both. And this seems to be a first hint at the notion of the path as one that includes both. What creates distinctiveness? And on this note, I will shut up. What creates distinctiveness in the various Buddhist paths are the ways in which these two contemplative complexes are organized and related to each other.

[47:39]

Because, for example, and there's even a passage in the that says this explicitly. You can look at these two processes, if you're going to do both, in different kinds of relation to each other. You can see shamatha. You can see a process of calming yourself, of withdrawing your senses, of disentangling yourself from the affective defilements that bind you to the world as being a necessary proper duty to penetrating the world with insight, that you first need to disentangle yourself from affective defilement before you can rid yourself of intellectual defilement, before you can get rid of your intellectual errors. This seems to be what Buddhaghosa is saying. On the other hand, it is certainly, it can be held, and you find warrants for this in as elsewhere, that the pashina, insight, into the nature of the world is a necessary preliminary to disentangling yourself from it. That to get rid of Satkaya Drishti, for example, is an intellectual mistake is relatively easy.

[48:45]

To get rid of the affective bonds, the fetters that bind us to the world is much harder. You can realize that something is impermanent and still lost after it. So that it can be held, as in fact we find the Sarvastivadins holding, that a process of insight is a necessary preliminary to a process of disentangling yourself effectively from the world. What characterizes different paths are not only sequence, but also relationship. You can have different Buddhist paths that are related to each other either linearly, where you proceed from one step to the next, and in a sense you know where you are at every moment, I think as you find among the Vaibhashikas in Kashmir, or as, say, in Buddhadosa, where you find a feedback relationship where your calming, your shamatha, makes your vipashyana better, and your vipashyana in turn makes your shamatha better. And there's a kind of feedback relationship between the two.

[49:47]

So I think that once this dichotomy is recognized in the community and is dealt with in the Abhidharma, you can find that a creative organizational activity in meditation took place whereby the path was laid out in order to reconcile the opposition and to create new modes of realization in Buddhism out of the materials that were at hand. So with that, I open the floor to discussion. Yeah. The reason why one would practice Samatha or Vipassana, the personality types, like the Samatha with a Greek type practice Samatha before Vipassana and a type Vipassana before Samatha. They work it out differently. You find that, curiously enough, if you look at the Kosha, the meditation section in the Kosha and the meditation sections in the Suddhimagga, for example, you find very different use being made of personality theory. As a matter of fact, curiously enough, the Abhidharmakosha gives a very truncated version of different kinds of meditations.

[50:54]

Vasubandhu, for his Samatha section, gives only meditation on the breath and meditation on rotting corpses. Actually, in the literature of Kashmir, where he was trained, there were five. These were called the Panchamukha. We know that there were five, according to five different personality types, because they're given in Asanga's Shravakabhumi. And even more clearly, because this is the analysis that Kumarajiva uses in the little meditation manuals that he wrote for his disciples in China. And Kumarajiva, as we know, was trained in Kashmir in Vibhashika meditation, which he hated. He didn't hate the meditation, he hated the babashikas. You know the story of Kumarajiva? How his mother, when he was a little boy, his mother was some Central Asian princess who decided she was going to become a nun and took him to this monastery when he was very young.

[51:56]

And it was clear from his later biography that he hated it. I don't know what Freudian interpretation you can put on his relationship with what seems to have been an overwhelmingly dominant mother. But in any event, he shocked the Chinese by the virulence with which he attacked the Sarvastivadins. He had learned Majumaka in Central Asia, curiously enough. He had learned it in Khotan after being trained by the Vaibhashikas in Kashmir. And this was the first time the Chinese had had any hint that there were any splits in the Buddhist camp. Before this, they had thought that Buddhism was all just one thing. And it was from Kumarajiva that not only they learned really about Majjhima the first time from someone who really knew the system, but also the fact that there were arguments in Buddhism. And in any event, what you find in Kumar Jeeva's meditation manuals are a very interesting combination outside India, outside the mainstream of development of meditation in India, of combinations of Kashmir Vibhashika meditation systems with Madhyamaka philosophy added on.

[52:58]

In India, it wouldn't be until several centuries later that Shantarakshita did the same thing. But it was because of this peculiar route that Kumarajiva took from Kashmir as a boy in the monastery from Khotan to China. In any event, there's that use of personality types in the Kosha. Buddhaghosa uses the three personality types instead of five to a very different end. Buddhaghosa doesn't split up between shamatha and vipashyanaa. But he uses this as a way of organizing the ancillary meditations. To Buddhaghosa, there is one meditation. That's Kastina meditation. That's the only one that leads you all the way through all the trances. So to him, meditation really means Kastina meditation. What do you do with all these other meditations? They are, in effect, ancillary meditations that you give to people of the three different personality types. And it doesn't have anything to do with Shana. You all know about the personality types? OK, because I think that's very interesting, what Buddha-gosa does with personality types.

[54:00]

OK, any other? Should I tell you about the personality types? All right. You all know there are three personality types. There's raga, vaisya, and moha. OK. We'll use English. There's lust, hatred, and delusion. Everybody falls into one of these types. There are also combinations, we read. You can be a lust-hatred type, you can be a lust-delusion type, you can even be all three. Generally speaking, everybody's one or the other. It seems to me that what Budigosa was working on, I have never found any real canonical warrant This doesn't mean anything. This is an argument from ignorance. I have never found any canonical warrant for this particular use of personality theory. It doesn't mean it's not there. It means I haven't found it. But I haven't found it, and I've looked through.

[55:03]

I think that here, as elsewhere, Buddhaghosa may have been working either from Sinhalese traditions, which were since lost, or even more interestingly, he was working from Buddhist traditions that were developed in a far different way in Andhra Pradesh than the way the better-known Buddhist traditions were developed in Kashmir, which was the other major intellectual center of Buddhism at the time. And it may be that he was working from commentarial material that was written in Telugu and that was lost, because he talks about kathas, commentaries that were written in Dramida languages, in Dravidian languages. which are now utterly lost, but is interesting to think about. For many of Buddhaghosa's contemplative terminology, there is no canonical warrant at all. He is obviously working from what is now a completely lost commentarial tradition, whether in Andhra Pradesh, written in Dravidian languages, or in Ceylon, which was lost because it was superseded by his own exposition.

[56:06]

In any event, You've got three personality types. And one of the functions of the master is to be able to tell what personality type you are. In combination with these three negative types are three positive types when these are turned toward the dharma. So that the lust personality in the dharma becomes a hate personality. A hatred type in the dharma becomes what? and intellectual, of course. And the delusion type, well, this is a little hard, because there really is no positive counterpart to delusion, but he becomes enthusiastic. It seems to be the best way to deal with the term. Again, this is a very interesting analysis because there are clear connections between lust and faith, that it is the object of lust to close distance between the person and the object of lust, which is exactly the nature of faith.

[57:13]

It's a close distance. Hatred and intellectual. Look at the metaphors we use for somebody who's an aggressive intellectual, somebody with a sharp tongue, somebody who analyzes, who chops things up, who takes things apart and see how they look. Look at all the metaphors of destruction and tearing and ripping and biting that we use for somebody with a sharp mind. There's a very close relation between hatred as a desire to rip something apart and the intellect, which is a desire to rip something apart. delusion matches with enthusiasm insofar as the enthusiast, even though he's turned toward the Dharma, doesn't settle down anywhere. It goes from one master to the next and is always looking for a new teaching that's just come along and is a guru collector, which is positive but uncontrolled. Budigosa actually gives some very interesting, and I think things that can be related to things that Freud says, as a matter of fact, about these three types.

[58:23]

A master, if he doesn't have direct apprehension of the nature of his disciple, can still tell the way what personality type somebody is in, depending on how he sits, how he eats, how he dresses, how he walks. For example, you can try this on your friends if you like. Somebody who is a lost type. walks very daintily, walks with his robe very nicely arranged. He's very well dressed. And you can tell from his footprint that he's a lust type because the footprint is even everywhere. A hatred type, you can tell by the way he walks and by the way his footprint is because the heel is deeper in the footprint than the toe because the hatred type walks like this. And you can tell the delusion type because he drags his toes. And the same thing is true for the way they eat and the way they sleep. The lust type likes dainty food and sweet food and eats very nicely.

[59:28]

And the hatred type likes hot, spicy food and eats very fast like this. And the delusion type just eats anything and gets it all over his face. Thank you. And the way they sleep too, the lust type makes his bed very nicely and sleeps very composedly. And when you wake him up in the morning, he says, yes. The hatred type makes his bed very tight and he sleeps very stiff with the cover very tight around him and yells at you when you wake him up. And the delusion type, of course, just glides any old way with the covers hanging and mutters and mumbles when you wake him up in the morning. Buddha also gives a whole list of these. In any event, you can take all the ancillary disciplines and divide them up into two classes. All the disciplines except the Kassina meditations, that's 10, and the four formless meditations, that's 4. OK? So the 30 other meditations, the kamatana, that Buddha goes, he gives what?

[60:29]

44 kamatana? 40. OK, what's 40 minus 14? 26. The other 26 meditations are split up among these for one of two reasons, either to counteract a negative personality trait or to encourage a positive one. So that, for example, to counteract lust will be a meditation on rotting corpses, where you go out to the cremation grounds and watch a corpse decompose. For faith, you do mindfulness on the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha, on the rewards of charity and the life of the gods and so on. And the same thing with all of these. There are meditations to encourage the positive personality trait and to discourage, to counteract the negative one. A hatred type will do the four Brahma Biharas on universal love and compassion. And the intellectual type will be given intellectual type meditations to do, like on the four elements, things like that. What Buddhaghosa has done here, and has done it in a very individual way, that has affected the whole tradition from Ceylon and Southeast Asia, everything that is today the Theravada tradition, has been very creatively to account for all the different contemplative techniques that you find given canonical warrants, while retaining central place for kasina meditation, that is, for shamatha meditation leading to vipashyana.

[61:53]

All right, that's personality theory. There's no one way in the Buddhist scriptures, in the Buddhist commentarial literature, where they handle it. They handle it a lot of different ways. Any other questions? Yeah?

[62:06]

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