Written on May 16, 2010 by Tom Stine
Buddhism has a problem, an unfortunate one, but such is life. And that problem is: there is no way to know for certain what the Buddha said. It is a problem with any spiritual teaching more than a thousand years old, or any history for that matter. It has to do with written texts and oral transmission.
The first written Buddhist texts are in the Pali language and are based upon 400 years of oral tradition. That means that whatever the Buddha said 2500 years ago was repeated generation after generation, from one man to the next, for four centuries. Even if the monks who recited the Dharma for 400 years didn’t add a single thing to the words they were taught, not a single new interpretation or correction or improvement, the chance for inaccuracy is huge. Remember playing telephone in elementary school?
When you consider that the Buddha’s followers were about as likely to be enlightened as Saint Peter was to have understood Jesus’ teachings (sorry, but Simon called Peter had no clue what Jesus was talking about!) then, well, the odds are really good that there are major errors. In other words, we have no real idea what the Buddha actually said. I can’t see any way around it.
It’s the Jesus problem. The earliest Christian texts were written about 40-60 years after Jesus’ death. We don’t have any of those. We have fragments of texts that were produced 300-400 years after the actual documents were supposedly written. And we don’t have all that was written in those early years, just the stuff that the early church wanted to keep plus a bit of other stuff. So, we have oral tradition problems, interpretation problems, etc. At least Theraveda Buddhism attempted to preserve the Buddha’s words, something that Christians didn’t even really try to do, except with sayings gospels like the Gospel of Thomas. (Note: contemporary Jesus scholarship is a fascinating subject, worthy of a bit of study. I strongly suggest Marcus Borg. Needless to say, what modern Jesus scholars have to say is not what you are likely to hear in most churches today.)
So, when I started reading Buddhism a bit a few years ago, I was like most people are: confused. My question was: how do I get to the words of the Buddha? And after a while, I knew the answer was the same one I had discovered years before with Jesus: you don’t. You can’t. We will quite likely never know what he really said. And the most likely reason is that his followers didn’t have the slightest idea what he meant by the things he said.
Think about it: the average follower of the Buddha was like most spiritual seekers today. He kinda, sorta, maybe had a sense of what the Master was saying, but he wasn’t so sure. If suddenly things got clear and he experienced some sense of awakening, would he then really care if the Buddha’s words got accurately transmitted to the next generation? Probably not. He might have gone on and done other things with his life, or he might have started teaching others using his words and thoughts.
No, unfortunately, the folks most likely to have been sticklers for repeating the Buddha’s words were quite likely not completely understanding everything he said but were hoping that the Master’s words would enlighten them some day. As time went on, not only did error creep into the transmission but so did interpretations and “improvements” and “he must have meant something else when he said that.”
I know, there is no way to prove such a thing, but it is pretty obvious that in many traditions other than Buddhism that the interpretations became more important than the original words. Just look at Christianity. Go to any modern church and count the number of times the minister quotes a passage from the New Testament that has something in it that Jesus supposedly said. Then compare that to the number of quoted passages from the Hebrew Bible and St. Paul. You will be astounded! St. Paul and the Prophets win by a landslide. Yes, I did this experiment personally years ago. I was shocked. They never, ever quote The Sermon on the Mount in fundamentalist Christian churches.
And so I have adopted a very dishonest method of “scholarship” when it comes to the Buddha and Jesus: I look for the common threads in them that fit with contemporary “enlightened guys” and keep that and discard the rest. As a matter of fact, that’s how I approach all spiritual literature. I only look for the common thread. I’m only really interested in what I find in common between Zen, Advaita, Buddhism, mystical Christianity, channeled material, etc. And then I compare it with my experience. The thread of commonality seems to be what matters and what helps with my personal experience always as the final arbiter.
I know, I would never make a good scholar. But good scholarship has nothing to do with awakening. At least, it hasn’t done me a damn bit of good.
So, for the most part, I much prefer to read enlightenment literature that was actually written down and transmitted fairly intact. There is so much rich, wonderful stuff from Zen and Advaita that I don’t have much need for the old Buddhist texts. I’d much rather read Nisargadatta Maharaj.
I know many people don’t care for Advaita, but I find the best spiritual writings in people who are labelled Advaita. Not that these writings necessarily came out of that school of thought, but their teachings are so similar to true Advaita that they are usually pigeon-holed there. That’s the story with Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta. And even Adyashanti.
I have to admit that most of what passes for Advaita these days is like Zen: pure crap. Both schools of thought get too hung up on the nothing part of awakening. That’s why Nisargadatta is so cool: in his talks, he made it clear that nondual (which is what Advaita means) means NON-DUAL, as in not 2. There isn’t nothingness or everything. There isn’t all and nothing. There’s just One. You look at it one way, and you find nothing. Absolutely nothing. And then you open your eyes, and you see a rich world of form. And the everything that you see is filled with the nothing that you see. And out of the nothing arises form. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.
Now don’t get me wrong: there are some wonderful Buddhist texts to read. The Dhammapada is excellent, and whoever said those words knew up from down. But on the whole, I don’t have much time for all the -ism that arose around a quite awake guy who might have been called Siddhartha and we now know as The Buddha.
Written on November 23, 2009 by Tom Stine
Intelligent practice always deals with just one thing: the fear at the base of human existence, the fear that I am not. And of course I am not, but the last thing I want to know is that.
Written on June 9, 2008 by Tom Stine
Leo over at Zen Habits wrote a post yesterday on the Law of Attraction, basically giving it a big thumbs down. Leo took a very interesting position: a very rational, western scientific perspective on accomplishing things in life.
My first response was to smile and laugh. I mean, for a site called Zen Habits, you would think there would be a little, well, Zen in his response. But no matter. I left a longish comment for him, kind of an off-the-cuff assortment of thoughts and ideas. Here it is:
“Very cool post. Interesting, too, coming as it does on a site called ZEN Habits. No, Zen doesn’t really have much to do with the Law of Attraction, so let’s not get sidetracked there. But let’s do consider that the ultimate foundation of Zen is Buddhism, and the Buddha had some pretty wild things to say about the world, our experience of it, it’s reality, etc.
“I won’t get into the details, but suffice it to say that if you delve into any school of Eastern thought, you will find ideas that are completely at odds with our typical, rationalistic world view. The world we look upon, so convinced of its utter reality, maybe isn’t as real as we think. So much that we believe in ultimately becomes so much ‘mumbo-jumbo.’ ”
“Look at the history of science itself. It is littered with the train wrecks of once ‘unassailable’ givens, things that were so incredibly obvious that you had to be a fool to question them.
“So, can I really think something into existence? Why not. Sure, I can’t prove I can, but then again, we can’t ‘prove’ much of science. That’s why scientists are usually pretty honest by calling things ‘theories’ and ‘hypotheses.’ Very few laws in science, but even those only rest on the simple fact that they’ve always occurred every time they are repeated.
“I guess my bottom line for you, Leo, is a simple question: do you believe in magic? Do you believe in miracles? Do you think that we really have a reasonable handle on what is true and what isn’t? While I’m not fan of the LOA and its devotees, I am a fan of miracles. I’m a fan of being incredibly surprised by the mystery of life that works in some really remarkable ways.
“Lastly, let me leave you with a fantastic statement by one of the most talented writers of the 20th century, Arthur C. Clarke:
“ ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’
“Think about it. Maybe we just haven’t worked out the technology of ‘magic.’ ”
And that was the end of my comment. Leo was really getting into the comments, so he responded quite quickly:
@Tom Stine, who wrote:
“I guess my bottom line for you, Leo, is a simple question: do you believe in magic? Do you believe in miracles? Do you think that we really have a reasonable handle on what is true and what isn’t?”‘
I certainly do believe in magic and miracles! It is almost impossible to be a parent, for example, and not believe in miracles. It’s hard to do a run at 5 a.m., and watch the sun turn a new day into a miracle, and not believe in magic. It’s hard to go through life, with your eyes and heart wide open, and not believe in magic and miracles.
However, I don’t think that means they are supernatural, meaning that they are outside the realm of science. I think science is just another way of looking at the same things. Is a child a miracle? Yes, I believe so … but a child can also be explained by science.
Is it a miracle when you overcome amazing odds, using the power of positive thinking, to achieve something incredible, as many people have? Absolutely! And yet, that doesn’t mean that science can’t explain it.
The problem comes, in my mind, when we take these miracles and come up with explanations for them that are totally unprovable, that have no real basis in reality, for no good reason, as is often done.
After reading Leo’s comments, I decided to post another comment in response. And I did. And guess what? Leo deleted it! I’ve never had the experience of being bounced before. How cool is that? I’m a radical fit for the delete key. I know the comment got left because a friend informed me that he read it via email (he was receiving follow-ups). Well, I saved the comment before I posted, so I have the comment in its entirety. You can judge how “evil” I was:
[Please note: after I posted this article, Leo wrote to say that he had not deleted my comment, but he couldn't find it, either. Obviously he had a technical snafu, not surprising, given the volume of comments he gets and inevitable glitches, etc. It was quite nice of him to leave a comment below. He's quite the stand-up guy, and I was a bit surprised that he would delete my comment in the first place. C'est la vie!]
“Leo, you made some good points. However, your reply left me thinking that you don’t really believe in miracles, the miraculous kind. You know, the person dying of cancer who does some spiritual ‘mumbo-jumbo’ for a few months and is completely healed, leaving her doctors stunned. The medical community calls it ’spontaneous remission’ but that’s a fancy word for ‘we have no idea what happened.’ That’s what the average person calls ‘a miracle.’
“As for me, give me water-into-wine, levitation (the Maharishi kind), spontaneous healing, blind men seeing, all the cool stuff you read about in Yogananda and other works. That’s my kind of miracle.
“Honestly, I don’t think that ’science’ is all it’s cracked up to be. Too many people have too much ‘faith’ in science. The scientific method has its limits. How do you study a phenomenon that might be beyond the mind, such as miracles? What do you use to study it? All science has at its disposal is the human mind. Miracles, the real kind, may be beyond the capabilities of science to explain.
“None of that means that they are supernatural or outside of reality in some way. I’m just questioning the capacity of the human mind to comprehend the totality of nature, the completeness of reality.
“Whether one wants to admit it or not, science is a belief system. The belief at the core goes something like ‘if we study something long enough using the ’scientific method’ then we will understand it.’ You can’t really prove that one wrong, can you? But it may in fact be wrong.
“And this is the type of thing that drives a decent number of physicists (you know, the quantum mechanics guys) to sound more Buddhist than a Buddhist.
“Again, the LOA may be right, may be wrong. But I suspect that most people, myself included, are more turned off by the salesmen for it and the Secret than anything else. They are a bit hard to swallow. And, for most people , the LOA just seems too hokie and simplistic to be believable. And it just might be wrong. And then again….
“Just some more thoughts for you Leo. Namaste.”
I invite you all to head over to Zen Habits and check out the post. It makes for fun reading. Well, actually, the best reading is in the comments. Some really good ones are there. A whole host of people showed-up to join in. Enjoy!
Written on May 21, 2008 by Tom Stine
Each of the myriad things has its merit,
expressed according to function and place.
Phenomena exist; box and lid fit.
Principle responds; arrow points meet.
Hearing the words, understand the meaning;
don’t set up standards of your own.
If you don’t understand the Way right before you,
how will you know the path as you walk?
Progress is not a matter of far or near,
but if you are confused, mountains and rivers block your way.
I respectfully urge you who study the mystery,
do not pass your days and nights in vain.
Written on March 25, 2008 by Tom Stine
If you would only rid yourselves of the concepts of ordinary and Enlightened, you would find that there is no other Buddha than the Buddha in your own Mind.
The arising and the elimination of illusion are both illusory. Illusion is not something rooted in Reality; it exists because of your dualistic thinking.
If you will only cease to indulge in opposed concepts such as ‘ordinary’ and ‘Enlightened’, illusion will cease of itself.
