Vipassana Fellowship Newsletter

from Vipassana.com

July 2004 Edition

Last call for the final 2004 Course

Our final online Meditation Course for 2004 begins on July 24th. The course has been offered since 1997 and serves as a practical introduction to samatha (tranquility) and vipassana (insight) techniques from the Theravada tradition of Buddhism. Intended primarily for beginners, the 90 day course is also suitable for experienced meditators who wish to explore different aspects of the tradition. The course is led by Andrew Quernmore, an experienced meditation teacher based in England.

Registration details are available at:

http://vipassana.com/course/

After the July 2004 course, the next course will be offered in January 2005.

The Elimination of Suffering

A course participant writes:

I had a very deep meditation session just now, so deep that I could for very brief moments actually "see/feel/experience" the suffering of myself as well as others. It was overwhelming, to say the least. It left me feeling at a loss as to how I can actually help to eliminate suffering in others. I try my best to humbly spread the little Dhamma I know, to avoid inflicting undue pain on others, to be concerned and take action if that is the appropriate thing to do. And now, after this experience today, my attempts just feel so feeble and insignificant. 

Andrew replies:

The most important work we can do is to try to ensure that every single action that we choose throughout our day is skilful. This is not simply a question of observing a series of rules, but of actively working to ensure that our vision and discernment is as pure and clear as it can be. If we are able to see clearly, we have the greatest opportunity of acting skilfully. This is where meditation comes in. Without meditation training, and dedicated practice, it is very difficult to see life clearly. We work with tainted data and incomplete information even in the simplest transactions and interactions. Meditation helps us to overcome some of these limitations so that we can act appropriately and skilfully whenever a challenge is met. Chosen action is the chief determinant of relative happiness and unhappiness in our own lives and that of others. Trying our best to see clearly - so that we can act ethically - is some of the toughest but most useful work that we can do.

Buddhism remains realistic, though: it certainly accepts that the actions of individuals can make a positive difference - but it does not accept that suffering can be eradicated from the World. Indeed, one of the central ideas in Buddhism is that all conditioned phenomena (everyone and everything that we can know here) has the characteristic called dukkha - existential suffering, a lack of ease, or unsatisfactoriness is actually built in to the system and our make up. The only way to be free of dukkha is to attain Nibbana. Another good reason for meditating and behaving ethically :-)

The human condition is said to be the most suitable for the attainment of Nibbana. There are two reasons for this: (1) it is pretty obvious that there is plenty of suffering here, and so we are motivated to do something about it, and (2) we have sufficient free-will to take the decision to dedicate ourselves to the practice of Dhamma. The Buddha tells us that this will be successful - it is a basic natural law, rather than something open to chance - provided we are committed to following the Noble Eightfold Path that he outlined.

With metta

Andrew

Our Buddhist Heritage

For the past few months, this Newsletter has been exploring a little of the history of Early Buddhism. We continue our series here. Earlier chapters are available by following the Newsletter link on our website.

Early Buddhism
by T.W. Rhys Davids (1843-1922)

CHAPTER 6
ADOPTED DOCTRINES - KARMA

Transmigration. - The above are the essential doctrines of the original Buddhism. They are at the same time the distinctive doctrines : that is to say, the doctrines that distinguish it from all previous teaching in India. But the Buddha, while rejecting the sacrifices and the ritualistic magic of the brahmin schools, the animistic superstitions of the people, and the pantheistic speculations of the poets of the pre-Buddhistic Upanishads, still retained the belief in transmigration. This belief - the transmigration of the soul, after the death of the body, into other bodies, either of men, beasts or gods - is part of the animistic creed, and is so widely found throughout the world that it was probably universal. In India it had already, before the rise of Buddhism, been raised into an ethical conception by the associated doctrine of Karma, according to which a man's social position in life and his physical advantages, or the reverse, were the result of his actions in a previous birth. [Compare Sat. Br., translated by Eggeling, i. 267, with Chandogya Up., 5-10, Brihad Ar. Up., vi. 2-15, and Kaushitaki Up., p. 146 (ed. Cowell).] The doctrine thus afforded an explanation, quite complete to those who could believe it, of the apparent anomalies and wrongs in the distribution here of happiness or woe. A man, for instance, is blind. This is owing to his lust of the eye in a previous birth. But he has also unusual powers of hearing. This is because he loved, in a previous birth, to listen to the preaching of the law. The explanation could always be exact, for it was scarcely more than a repetition of the point to be explained. It fits the facts because it is derived from them. And it cannot be disproved, for it lies in a sphere beyond the reach of human inquiry.

The Bridge. - It was because it thus provided a moral cause that it was retained in Buddhism. But as the Buddha did not acknowledge a soul, the link of connection between one life and the next had to be found somewhere else. The Buddha found it (as Plato also found it [Phoedo, 69 fol. The idea is there also put forward in connection with a belief in transmigration.]) in the influence exercised upon one life by a desire felt in the previous life. When two thinkers of such eminence (probably the two greatest ethical thinkers of antiquity) have arrived independently at this strange conclusion, have agreed in ascribing to cravings felt in this life so great, and to us so inconceivable, a power over the future life, we may well hesitate before we condemn the idea as intrinsically absurd. And we may take note of the important fact that, given similar conditions, similar stages in the development of religious belief, men's thoughts, even in spite of the most unquestioned individual originality, tend, though they may never produce exactly the same results, to work in similar ways, however strange.

Modes of Karma. - In India, before Buddhism, conflicting and contradictory views prevailed as to the precise mode of action of Karma, and we find this confusion reflected in Buddhist theory. The prevailing views are tacked on, as it were, to the essential doctrines of Buddhism, without being thoroughly assimilated to them, or logically incorporated with them. Thus in the story of the good layman Citta, it is an aspiration expressed on the death-bed, [Samyutta, iv. 302.] in a dialogue on the subject it is a thought dwelt on during life, [Majjhima, iii. 99 fol.] in the numerous stories in the Peta and Vimana Vatthus it is usually some isolated act ; in the discussions in the Dhamma Sangani it is some mental disposition, which is the Karma (Doing or Action) in the one life determining the position of the individual in the next. These are really conflicting propositions. They are only alike in the fact that in each case a moral cause is given for the position in which the individual finds himself now, and the moral cause is his own act.

The New Body. - In the popular belief, followed also in the brahmin theology, the bridge between the two lives was a minute and subtle entity, called the soul, which left the one body at death, (usually through a hole at the top of the head), and entered into the new body. The new body happened to be there, ready, with no soul in it. The soul did not make the body. In the Buddhist adaptation of this theory, no soul, no consciousness, no memory, goes over from one body to the other. It is the grasping, the craving, still existing at the death of the one body that causes the new set of skandhas, that is, the new body with its mental tendencies and capacities, to arise. How this takes place is nowhere explained.

East and West. - The Indian theory of Karma has been worked out with many points of great beauty and ethical value. And the Buddhist adaptation of it, avoiding some of the difficulties common to it and to the allied European theories of fate, providence, and predestination, tries to explain the weight of the universe in its action on the individual ; the heavy hand of the immeasurable past we cannot escape, the close connection between all forms of life, and the mysteries of inherited character. The European theories lay the stress upon the future, the Indian on the past. A sufferer believing in the soul, and in fate, or providence, can say : 'This was pre-ordained, I must submit,' and he can try to rectify the balance of justice by assuming a remedy, for which he has no evidence, in a more satisfactory world beyond the grave. If he believes in Karma he will think : 'This is my own fault.' And he can try to rectify the balance of justice by assuming an identity, for which he has no evidence, between himself and some one else in the past.

The Indian theories lay stress upon a law, the European theories upon the action of a sovereign will. And it is very suggestive that the mistake in the Platonic and Buddhist view is precisely the very same mistake against which Buddhism, in the case of the soul-theory, entered so strong a protest. Early Buddhism recognised all the qualities, feelings, etc., included under the term 'soul'; but it said that the mistake lay in postulating an eternal unity instead of a changing plurality. In the case of Karma, it was Buddhism itself that put a unity where a plurality should be; it represented the action of past lives on present ones - which is a profound truth - as the action of a past life on a present one, in a manner not supported by the facts of experience.

How can we explain this difference of method? Is it not because in Karma the Buddhists found, at one and the same time, a moral cause, a reign of law, and an escape from the endless waves of the dark ocean of transmigration? And the fact underlying the Indian theory of Karma is acknowledged to be very real. The history of an individual does not begin with his birth. He has been countless aeons in the making. And he cannot sever himself from the past; no, not for a moment. The tiny snowdrop droops its fairy head just so much, and no more, because it is balanced by the universe. It is a snowdrop, not an oak, because it is the outcome of the Karma of an endless series of past existences; and because it did not begin to be when the flower opened, or when the mother-plant first peeped above the ground, or first met the embraces of the sun, or at any point in time which you or I can fix. A great American writer says:-

'It was a poetic attempt to lift this mountain of Fate, to reconcile with liberty this despotism of Race, which led the Hindoos to say " Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence." I find a coincidence in the extremes of Eastern and Western speculation in the daring statement of the German philosopher Schelling : "There is in every man a certain feeling that he has been what he is from all eternity."'

We may put a new and a deeper meaning into the words of the poet :-

"... Our deeds follow us from afar,
And what we have been makes us what we are."

[No one has yet attempted to write a history of the growth in India of the various forms of the Karma theory. Professor Hopkins has a suggestive paper on it in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1906. On the Buddhist side the reader may consult Rhys Davids's Buddhism (S.P.C.K.), 21st ed., pp. 93-106, and Dahlke's Aufsatze zum Verstandnis des Buddhismus (Berlin, 1903), i. 92-106, and ii. 1-11.]

(Concludes in the next Newsletter)

The Vipassana Fellowship Newsletter is published about 10 times each year and is sent only on request and to previous participants of our courses. Vipassana Fellowship is an organisation dedicated to the dissemination of accurate and useful information on Buddhist meditation practices as found in the Theravada tradition. Our next mailing will be in August. Our site can be accessed via the vipassana.com and vipassana.org domains.

Vipassana Fellowship, BCM Box 4398, London, WC1N 3XX, United Kingdom.

Newsletter © Copyright 2004, Vipassana Fellowship Ltd. (Registered in England No. 4730782).