What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula Thero

Introduction

As almost every other review says, this is a good, short introduction to Buddhism, especially for someone with a western mindset. Rahula lays out, in sorta clear language, a brief history of Buddhism, some of the philosophical doctrines, and some of the soteriological methods. An important thing to note is that there are many Buddhisms. Looking to this book to answer queries a la “What does Buddhism think of X” will give an answer, but not one that everyone who calls themselves a Buddhist will agree with (and I’m not just talking about hippie, western Buddhists). Buddhism has a rich philosophical history, full of discussion on all sorts of topics that to this day are debated by contemporary Buddhists. What the Buddha Taught will give you the perspective of Theravada Buddhism.

As Introduction to More Buddhism

I specifically mentioned the audience’s mindset because most text about Buddhism will use the language of Buddhism (sometimes jargon in literally a different language like dukkha, sometimes in the kinds of arguments they use like Catuskoti, or in the parables they reference like the the Parable of the Poisoned Arrow), and this text helps prepare one for reading others on Buddhism. Importantly, after reading more explicitly philosophical Buddhism (mostly from Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction, Siderits 2007) and soteriological Buddhism (mostly from Chan Buddhism, Hershock 2004), I can come back to What the Buddha Taught and see how different philosophical and soteriological interpretations could come from the same starting point.

Almost-Religion

While there are many Buddhisms, and some certainly seem like religions in that practicioners treat the Buddha like a divine figure, the Buddha did not teach that he was anything other than your everyday human. While he claimed to be “enlightened,” he was not enlightened by the grace of any god but through his own actions. Rahula describes him as a man “par excellence […] so perfect in his ‘human-ness’ that he came to be regarded in popular religion as almost ‘super-human’.” Here, the main requirement religion is that it insists on at least one sort of super-human entity that is unconditioned which basically means it is not the effect of any cause. I get the impression that Rahula knows this is a narrow view of religion and so doesn’t care too much for this argument.

The Poisoned Arrow

While this book dabbles in philosophy of various sorts, it won’t go very deep, that is, deep enough for someone with a somewhat keen eye for and interest in metaphysics. But, that is also an argument in the book and Buddhism itself. The Buddha did not answer some metaphysical questions because he thought they were not worth answering for the aim of becoming enlightened. In fact, the Buddha was known to avoid answering certain questions he in fact did have answers to if he thought that answering it would not help the person. This is the point of the Parable of the Poisoned Arrow. “If the medicine is good, the disease will be cured. It is not necessary to know who prepared it, or where it came from.” If you get hit by a poisoned arrow, you want to get cured. If you want to get cured, you should take medicine that works, regardless of what your metaphysics says about the passage of time, regardless of whether the guy who shot the arrow was a priest or a dalit, regardless of everything that doesn’t have to do with curing the poison in your body. Just take the medicine! According to the Buddha, you can spend your whole life trying to figure out some deep metaphysical questions or you can follow Buddhism, become enlightened, and have a good life. This doesn’t however mean that you should just follow the Buddha without question. The Buddha mentions how you should always evaluate the evidence for yourself (try before you buy), so if something about Buddhism doesn’t work for you, don’t do it. The Buddha just recommends Buddhism because it worked for him, and it seemed to work for others, sensible!

The Four Noble Truths

Buddhism’s goal is essentially to get rid of suffering or dukkha (which I will intentionally use since it’s easier to get rid of most preconceptions by using a new word) in human life. Dukkha is the first Noble Truth. Dukkha includes pain, sorrow, misery, imperfection, impermanence, emptiness, and insubstantiality (among probably other feelings). The point is that dukkha is not just when you hit your big toe against the couch; it’s also when you expect something and feel anxiety before the result is known or disappointment when something doesn’t go your way or a myriad of other things. Citing a sutta, Rahula even says “Whatever is impermanent is dukkha.” If it isn’t obvious, this looks like a lot of suffering which is plausible with such a broad definition of suffering. That suffering, the Buddha claims, is primarily caused by clinging, thirst, and craving. This is the Second Noble Truth: the arising of dukkha. We suffer because we thirst for physical pleasures, power, wealth, etc. We can also thirst for and be attached to ideas, theories, beliefs, etc. If thirst and and attachment are the roots of dukkha, then getting rid of them is how to get rid of dukkha. This is the Third Noble Truth: The Cessation of Dukkha. Here, we learn the concept of nirvana, literally meaning “blowing out” or “extinction.” This is where Buddhism can get the most folk-religion-y. Basically, nirvana is a state one realizes. One who realizes nirvana is “the happiest being in the world, is free from all, has perfect mental health, does not repent the past, does not brood over the future, lives fully in the present, appreciates and enjoys things in the purest sense without self-projections, is free from selfish desire, hatred, ignorance, conceit, pride, and all such ‘defilements’, and is pure and gentle, full of universal love, compassion, kindness, sympathy, understanding, and tolerance.” But how does one get rid of thirst and attachment and realize nirvana? This is the Fourth Noble Truth: The Path. This is generally referred to as the Middle Path or the Noble Eightfold Path, consisting of a list of eight factors: Right Understanding, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration. These factors aim at perfecting the three essentials of Buddhist training: ethical conduct, mental discipline, and wisdom. There are lots of ways to live out the eight factors, from not telling lies to not giving into emotions like lust or hatred. These are mostly easy to follow. Remember, the Buddha says to do these only because he thinks they should work for you, but if you have good reason to believe otherwise, you don’t have to do them!

“The Path is a way of life. It is self-discipline in body, word, and mind, self-development and self-purification. It has nothing to do with belief, prayer, worship, or ceremony.”

Suffering and the Self

Much of our attachment, clinging, and even thirst is directed toward the notion of the self which is ultimately false1. The self is a lot like typical notions of a soul i.e. it’s something that is a single thing, persistent through time, (inclusive) or an uncaused causer (most people think of this as ‘free will’). Basic Buddhist metaphysics say that these are impossible or not even wrong. Causation is an assumption in Buddhist metaphysics, so everything must be the result of some cause, so free will can’t exist2. In Buddhist metaphysics, there is no kind of atom called ‘self’, so selves have to be made up of other things. All those other things are impermanent, constantly changing over time, so there’s no way a self made up of these constantly changing atoms can be constant through time. The last argument is probably the most convincing: sure, you’ve probably been called the same name throughout your entire life, but your beliefs, mental habits, or something has probably changed over time; and you can’t point to anything physical, since all of that is changing over time or made up of many smaller parts that seem to change over time. If we accept this evidence, then ultimately, it seems like there’s no self.

The operating word in that last sentence is ‘ultimately’. In Buddhism, there is a notion of two truths, the ultimate truth and the conventional truth. The ultimate truth is a feature of our map that perfectly describes the territory. The conventional truth is a a useful lie that helps us interact with the world, so even if our map doesn’t accurately reflect the territory, it shows something that helps us navigate the world. Consider With respect to the self, the ultimate truth is that there is no self. But, it’s hard to go about life that way; if there is no self, and people really are groups of different kinds of atoms that go out of existence and are replaced by similar but not identical atoms the next moment, why should we use the same name? That’s actually a pretty good question for philosophy of language or linguistics, but Rahula doesn’t quite go there or that deep. Rather simply, it would just be extremely difficult to go about life thinking about that all the time and using a new name for people every moment (this also applies to almost all of our noun usage). So, because it helps us practically live our lives, we use the same name for someone even if we haven’t seen them in minutes, days, or years. Similarly, we hold people responsible for actions they committed in the past (to appropriately varying degrees).

Metaphysics

You can’t have Buddhism without at least some metaphysics, and when you talk about the self, you’re gonna get metaphysics. As Rahula puts it, the mind is not “spirit as opposed to matter.” All there are This is sorta like a materialist metaphysics. This is part of a larger description of the five skandhas or five aggregates which are pretty much different kinds of atoms (not groups of protons, neutrons, and electrons but indivisible units of skandha type matter, sensation, perception, mental formation, or consciousness). These seem mostly like Buddhist versions of phlogiston. Luckily, you can solve this: simply say all the skandhas are actually the same kind of skandha, say, matter! Some think quantum mechanics complicates things so much materialism doesn’t work for consciousness, but notable others don’t even think about this as a real problem. Part of the problem seems to be the word ‘consciousness’ itself means many different things for different people. I’m not really well-read enough to say much of anything with confidence other than it looks like an easy way for people to ignore the poisonous arrow.

Meditation

What attracts many to Buddhism are its soteriological methods in various forms of meditation. Rahula mentions the well-known forms of sitting and walking meditation and explains how to perform them properly. While I have tried regular meditation, I derived most utility (a great amount, in fact) only a few times and relatively early on. However useful meditation can be, I think an underrated form of meditation is focusing on awareness (or mindfulness, but I prefer ‘awareness’ because I think it more accurately describes the mental objects and processes [patterns]).

Part of meditation is not just focusing on breaths but also directing that focus to your own mental patterns:

“You should be fully aware of the fact whenever your mind is passionate or detached, whenever it is overpowered by hatred, ill-will, jealousy, or is full of love, compassion, whenever it is deluded or has a clear and right understanding, and so on and so forth. We must admit that very often we are afraid or ashamed to look at our own minds. So we prefer to avoid it. One should be bold and sincere and look at one’s own mind as one looks at one’s face in a mirror.”

Everyone can benefit from being able to focus more. Practice makes perfect, so we should practice focusing as much as we can. Focusing on the present moment is not just good practice but it can be good for your general mood and help you more effectively carrying out actions you are doing now:

“People do not generally live in their actions, in the present moment. They live in the past or in the future. Though they seem to be doing something now, here, they live somewhere else in their thoughts, in their imaginary problems and worries, usually in the memories of the past or in desires and speculations about the future. Therefore they do not live in, nor do they enjoy, what they do at the moment. So they are unhappy and discontented with the present moment, with the work at hand, and naturally they cannot give themselves fully to what they appear to be doing.”

Focusing on the present moment does not mean fully accepting punctualism3, living to maximize short-run pleasures moment-to-moment. Rather, since future versions of (conventional) ‘me’ would suffer due to current versions of (conventional) ‘me’ optimizing for current pleasures by, say, eating sugary foods and since those versions are just as important as the current (conventional) ‘me’ in that their suffering should be minimized, I should try to minimize ‘my’ long-run suffering. In totally non-Buddhist terms: living in the present does not mean forgetting your ability to delay gratification but optimizing it so that past memories and future anticipations do not get in the way of your present actions and harm you or prevent you from gaining the full pleasures you can:

“Sometimes you see a man in a restaurant reading while eating — a very common sight. He gives you the impression of being a very busy man, with no time even for eating. You wonder whether he eats or reads. One may say that he does both. In fact, he does neither. He is strained, and disturbed in mind, and he does not enjoy what he does at the moment, does not live his life in the present moment, but unconsciously and foolishly tries to escape from life.”

Conclusion

Overall, What the Buddha Taught is an effective introduction to Buddhism, which is a wide and deep topic. Some of the philosophy is interesting in its own right, and the practical advice is usually pretty sane but does run the gamut from eating a meal without distraction to becoming a full-on monk. If you’re interested in going deeper into Buddhist philosophy, I recommend Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction by Siderits. For history on Buddhism’s transformation over time across Asia and to Japan, I liked Chan Buddhism by Hershock. To go deep into meditation, I’ve heard The Mind Illuminated is good. You can read various suttas, essays, books, and even study guides for free on dhammatalks; you can even request for them to send you a list of printed books. Finally, I’ve heard enough people recommend Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Pirsig that it’s probably a good read.

Notes

It might not be obvious how we thirst for a self. Consider how some people have an idea of their “ideal self.” One might be very far from that ideal self, so they suffer while they thirst for that idea of a self. People might also thirst to be treated a certain way and so suffer when someone treats them another way (note that this suffering is not even due to being mistreated but due to being treated differently than they expected to have been treated).
This seems along the lines of typical, determinist metaphysical arguments against free will. There are many articles and at least an entire book on Buddhism and free will, so there’s probably more to be said here, but basic metaphysical views point against free will. I also think free will and arguments about it are time vampires.
Per Siderits in Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction:

“Punctualism is the view that since there is no [ultimately real] self, and the parts of the person are all impermanent, the true ‘I’ doesn’t last very long: perhaps a day or a week, but maybe just an instant. Since they think this is the truth about us, Punctualists hold that we should stop putting so much effort into planning for and worrying about the future. Once we do this, they think we will learn to truly appreciate the here and now for what it is. We’ll learn to live in the present, and our lives will be fuller and richer for it.”