"Buddha" - читать интересную книгу автора (Armstrong Karen)

Chapter 4 – Dhamma

yet the Buddha’s first attempt to teach was a complete failure. On his way to Gaya, he passed an acquaintance, Upaka, a Jain, who immediately noticed a change in his friend. “How peaceful you look! How alert!” he exclaimed. “You are so serene! Your complexion is clear, your eyes are bright! Who is your Teacher? and whose dhamma are you following these days?” It was a perfect opening. The Buddha explained that he had no teacher and belonged to no sangha. As yet, there was nobody like him in the world, because he had become an Arahant, an “accomplished one” who had won through to the supreme enlightenment. “What!” Upaka cried incredulously. “Surely you are not saying that you are a Buddha, a Jina, a Spiritual Victor, the Holy One for whom we are all waiting?” Yes, the Buddha replied. He had conquered all craving and could indeed be called a Jina. Upaka looked at him skeptically and shook his head: “Dream on, friend,” he said. “I’m going this way.” Abruptly, he turned off the main road into a side track, refusing the direct route to Nibbana.

Undeterred, the Buddha continued his journey to Varanasi, an important city and a center of learning for the brahmins. The Buddha did not linger in the town, however, but went straight to the Deer Park in the suburb of Isipatana, where he knew that his five former companions were living. When these bhikkhus saw him approaching they were alarmed. As far as they knew, Gotama, their old mentor, had abandoned the holy life and reverted to luxury and self-indulgence. They could no longer greet him as before, with the respect due to a great ascetic. But they were good men, dedicated to ahimsa, and did not want to hurt his feelings. Gotama, they decided, could sit with them for a while, if he wished, and rest after his long walk. But when the Buddha came closer, they were completely disarmed. Perhaps they too were struck by his new serenity and confidence, because one of the bhikkhus ran forward to greet him, taking his robe and his bowl, while the others prepared a seat, bringing water, a footstool and towel, so that their old leader could wash his feet. They greeted him with affection, calling him “friend.” This would often happen. The compassion and kindliness of the Buddha’s manner would frequently defuse hostility in humans, gods and animals alike.

The Buddha came straight to the point. They should not really call him friend any more, he explained, because his old self had vanished and he had a wholly different status. He was now a Tathagata, a curious title whose literal meaning is “Thus Gone.” His egotism had been extinguished. They must not imagine that he had abandoned the holy life. Quite the reverse was true. There was a compelling conviction and urgency in his speech that his companions had never heard before. “Listen!” he said, “I have realized the undying state of Nibbana. I will instruct you! I will teach you the Dhamma!” If they listened to his teachings and put them into practice, they could become Arahants too; they could follow in his footsteps, entering into the supreme truth and making it a reality in their own lives. All they had to do was to give him a fair hearing.

The Buddha then preached his first sermon. It has been preserved in the texts as the Dhammacakkappavattana-Sutta, The Discourse that Set Rolling the Wheel of the Dhamrna, because it brought the Teaching into the world and set in motion a new era for humanity, who now knew the correct way to live. Its purpose was not to impart abstruse metaphysical information, but to lead the five bhikkhus to enlightenment. They could become Arahants, like himself, but they would never equal their teacher, because the Buddha had achieved Nibbana by himself, alone and unaided. He had then won further distinction, by making the decision to preach to the human race, becoming a Samma SamBuddha, a Teacher of the Supreme Enlightenment. Later Buddhist teaching would maintain that a Samma Sambuddha will only appear on earth every 32,000 years, when the knowledge of the Dhamma had completely faded from the earth. Gotama had become the Buddha of our age, and began his career in the Deer Park of Isipatana.

But what was he going to teach? The Buddha had no time for doctrines or creeds; he had no theology to impart, no theory about the root cause of dukkha, no tales of an Original Sin, and no definition of the Ultimate Reality. He saw no point in such speculations. Buddhism is disconcerting to those who equate faith with belief in certain inspired religious opinions. A person’s theology was a matter of total indifference to the Buddha. To accept a doctrine on somebody else’s authority was, in his eyes, an “unskillful” state, which could not lead to enlightenment, because it was an abdication of personal responsibility. He saw no virtue in submitting to an official creed. “Faith” meant trust that Nibbana existed and a determination to prove it to oneself. The Buddha always insisted that his disciples test everything he taught them against their own experience and take nothing on hearsay. A religious idea could all too easily become a mental idol, one more thing to cling to, when the purpose of the dhamma was to help people to let go.

“Letting go” is one of the keynotes of the Buddha’s teaching. The enlightened person did not grab or hold on to even the most authoritative instructions. Everything was transient and nothing lasted. Until his disciples recognized this in every fiber of their being, they would never reach Nibbana. Even his own teachings must be jettisoned, once they had done their job. He once compared them to a raft, telling the story of a traveler who had come to a great expanse of water and desperately needed to get across. There was no bridge, no ferry, so he built a raft and rowed himself across the river. But then, the Buddha would ask his audience, what should the traveler do with the raft? Should he decide that because it had been so helpful to him, he should load it onto his back and lug it around with him wherever he went? Or should he simply moor it and continue his journey? The answer was obvious. “In just the same way, bhikkhus, my teachings are like a raft, to be used to cross the river and not to be held on to,” the Buddha concluded. “If you understand their raft-like nature correctly, you will even give up good teachings (dhamma), not to mention bad ones!” His Dhamma was wholly pragmatic. Its task was not to issue infallible definitions or to satisfy a disciple’s intellectual curiosity about metaphysical questions. Its sole purpose was to enable people to get across the river of pain to the “further shore.” His job was to relieve suffering and help his disciples attain the peace of Nibbana. Anything that did not serve that end was of no importance whatsoever.

Hence there were no abstruse theories about the creation of the universe or the existence of a Supreme Being. These matters might be interesting but they would not give a disciple enlightenment or release from dukkha. One day, while living in a grove of simsapa trees in Kosambi, the Buddha plucked a few leaves and pointed out to his disciples that there were many more still growing in the wood. So too he had only given them a few teachings and withheld many others. Why? “Because, my disciples, they will not help you, they are not useful in the quest for holiness, they do not lead to peace and to the direct knowledge of Nibbana.” He told one monk, who kept pestering him about philosophy, that he was like a wounded man who refused to have treatment until he learned the name of the person who had shot him and what village he came from: he would die before he got this useless information. In just the same way, those who refused to live according to the Buddhist method until they knew about the creation of the world or the nature of the Absolute would die in misery before they got an answer to these unknowable questions. What difference did it make if the world was eternal or created in time? Grief, suffering and misery would still exist. The Buddha was concerned simply with the cessation of pain. “I am preaching a cure for these unhappy conditions here and now,” the Buddha told the philosophically inclined bhikkhu, “so always remember what I have not explained to you and the reason why I have refused to explain it.”

But when he faced his five former companions in the Deer Park, the Buddha had to begin somewhere. How was he going to allay their suspicions? He would have to give some kind of logical explanation of the Four Noble Truths. We do not know what he actually said to the five bhikkhus that day. It is most unlikely that the discourse that is called the First Sermon in the Pali texts is a verbatim report of his preaching on that occasion. When the scriptures were compiled, the editors probably hit upon this sutta, which conveniently sets forth the essentials, and inserted it into the narrative at this point. But in some ways this First Sermon was appropriate. The Buddha was always careful to make his teachings fit the needs of the people he was addressing. These five bhikkhus were worried about Gotama’s abandonment of asceticism, and so in this sutta the Buddha began by reassuring them, explaining the theory behind his Middle Way. People who had “Gone Forth” into holiness, he said, should avoid the two extremes of sensual pleasure, on the one hand, and excessive mortification on the other. Neither was helpful, because they did not lead to Nibbana. Instead, he had discovered the Eightfold Path, a happy medium between these two alternatives, which, he could guarantee, would lead the monks directly to enlightenment.

Next, the Buddha outlined the Four Noble Truths: the Truth of Suffering, the Truth of the Cause of Suffering, the Truth of the Cessation of Suffering or Nibbana, and the Path that led to this liberation. However, these truths were not presented as metaphysical theories but as a practical program. The word dhamma denotes not only what is, but what should be. The Buddha’s Dhamma was a diagnosis of the problem of life and a prescription for cure, which must be followed exactly. Each of the Truths had three components in his sermon. First, he made the bhikkhus see the Truth. Next, he explained what had to be done about it: suffering had to be “fully known”; Craving, the Cause of Suffering, had to be “given up”; Nibbana, the Cessation of Suffering, had to “become a reality” in the heart of the Arahant; and the Eightfold Path must be “followed.” Finally, the Buddha explained what he had achieved: he had understood dhukkha “directly”; he had abandoned craving; he had experienced Nibbana; he had followed the Path to its conclusion. It was, he explained, when he had proved to himself that his Dhamma really worked and that he had actually completed the program, that his enlightenment had been complete: “I have achieved the final release!” he had cried triumphantly. He had indeed been liberated from samsara, he knew that the Middle Way was the true Path, and his own life and person proved it.

The Pali text tells us that as he listened to the Buddha’s sermon, Kondanna, one of the five bhikkhus, began to experience his teaching “directly.” It “rose up” in him, as if from the depths of his own being. It was as though he recognized it- had always known it. This is the way the scriptures always describe a new disciple’s conversion to the Dhamma. This was no mere notional assent to a creed. The Buddha was really holding an initiation ceremony in the Deer Park. Like a midwife, he was assisting at the birth of an enlightened human being, or, to use his own metaphor, he was drawing the sword from the scabbard and the snake from its slough. When the gods, who had gathered in the Deer Park to listen to this First Sermon, saw what was happening to Kondanna, they cried out joyfully: “The Lord has set the Wheel of the Dhamma in motion in the Deer Park of Varanasi!” The cry was taken up by the gods in one heaven after another, until it reached the abode of Brahma himself. The earth shook and was filled with a light more radiant than any of the gods. “Kondanna knows! Kondanna knows!” the Buddha exclaimed in delight. Kondanna had become what later Buddhist tradition would call a “stream-enterer” (sotapanna). He had not yet been fully enlightened, but his doubts had disappeared, he was no longer interested in any other dhamma, and he was ready to immerse himself in the Buddha’s method, confident that it would carry him forward to Nibbana. He asked to be admitted to the Buddha’s Sangha. “Come, bhikkhu,” the Buddha replied. “The Dhamma has been preached to good effect. Live the holy life that will end your suffering once and for all.”

But the Pali texts include another version of this first teaching session in the Deer Park. This describes a much longer and quite different process. The Buddha instructed the bhikkhus in pairs, while the other three went off to Varanasi to beg enough food for all six of them. It has been suggested that in these more intimate tutorials, the Buddha was initiating the bhikkhus in his special yoga, introducing them to the practice of “mindfulness” and the “immeasurables.” Certainly meditation was indispensable to enlightenment. The Dhamma could not become a reality or understood “directly” unless the aspirants were also sinking deeply into themselves and learning to put their minds and bodies under the Buddha’s yogic microscope. Kondanna could not have become a “stream-enterer” and gained his special “direct knowledge” of the Dhamma simply by listening to a sermon and accepting its truths on hearsay. The truths of Suffering and Craving could not be properly understood until the bhikkhus had become aware of them within the minutiae of their own experience; the Eightfold Path, which he preached, included the discipline of meditation. The instruction of these five bhikkhus almost certainly took longer than a single morning; even if they were already accomplished yogins and versed in the ethic of ahimsa, the Dhamma needed time to take effect. At all events, the Pali texts tell us, not long after the Dhamma “rose up” in Kondanna, Vappa, Bhaddiya, Mahanama and Assaji became “stream-enterers” too.

The reasoned formulation of the Dhamma was complementary to the practice of meditation, which enabled aspirants to “realize” it. Through yoga, the bhikkhus could identify with the truths that the doctrine tried to express. One of the most frequent subjects of Buddhist meditation was what was called the Chain of Dependent Causation (Paticcasamuppada), which the Buddha probably developed at a later stage as a supplement to the Truth of Suffering, even though the Pali texts say that he was contemplating this Chain immediately before and after his enlightenment. The Chain traces the life cycle of a sentient being through twelve conditioned and conditioning links, illustrating the transitory nature of our lives and showing how each person is perpetually becoming something else.

On [1] ignorance depends [2] kamma; on kamma depends [3] consciousness; on consciousness depends [4] name and form; on name and form depends [5] the sense organs; on the sense organs depends [6] contact; on contact depends [7] sensation; on sensation depends [8] desire; on desire depends [9] attachment; on attachment depends [10] existence; on existence depends [11] birth; on birth depends [12] dukkha; old age and death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief and despair.

This Chain became central to Buddhist teaching, but it is not easy to understand. Those who find it somewhat daunting can draw comfort from the fact that the Buddha once rebuked a bhikkhu who claimed to find it easy. It should be regarded as a metaphor, which seeks to explain how a person can be reborn when, as the Buddha was beginning to conclude, there was no Self to persist from one life to another. What was it that was born again? Is there a law which links rebirth with dukkha?

The terms used in the Chain are rather obscure. “Name and form,” for example, was simply a Pali idiom for a “person”; “consciousness” (vinnana) is not the totality of a person’s thoughts and feelings, but a sort of ethereal substance, the last idea or impulse of a dying human being, which has been conditioned by all the kamma of his or her life. This “consciousness” becomes the germ of a new “name and form” in the womb of its mother. The personality of this embryo is conditioned by the quality of the dying “consciousness” of its predecessor. Once the fetus is linked with this “consciousness,” a new life cycle can begin. The embryo develops sense organs and, after its birth, these make “contact” with the external world. This sensual contact gives rise to “sensations” or feelings, which lead to “desire,” the most powerful cause of dukkha. Desire leads to “attachments” which prevent our liberation and enlightenment, and which doom us to a new “existence,” a new birth and further sorrow, sickness, grief and death.

The Chain begins with ignorance, which thus becomes the ultimate if not the most powerful cause of suffering. Most of the monks in the Ganges region believed that desire was the first cause of dukkha, while the Upanisads and Samkhya thought that ignorance of the nature of reality was the main bar to liberation. The Buddha was able to combine these two causes. He believed that each person is alive because he or she was preceded in a former existence by beings who did not know the Four Truths and could not, therefore, extricate themselves from Craving and Suffering. A person who was not correctly informed could make serious practical mistakes. A yogin might imagine, for example, that one of the higher states of trance was Nibbana and would not make the extra effort to achieve complete release. In most versions of the Chain given in the Pali texts, the second link is not kamma but the more difficult term sankhara (formation). But the two words both derive from the same verbal root: kr (to do). Sankhara has been somewhat clumsily translated: “states or things being formed or prepared.” Thus our deeds (kamma) are preparing the “consciousness” for a future existence; they are forming and conditioning it. Since the Buddha saw our intentions as mental kamma, the Chain points out that those emotions which motivate our external actions will have future consequences; a lifetime of greedy, deluded choices will affect the quality of our last, dying thought (vinnana) and this will affect the kind of life we have next time. Was this final, dying “consciousness” that passes into a new “name and form” an eternal, constant entity? Would the same person live again and again? Yes and no. The Buddha did not believe that “consciousness” was the kind of permanent, eternal Self sought by the yogins, but saw it as a last flickering energy, like a flame that leaps from one wick to another. A flame is never constant; a fire which is lit at nightfall both is and is not the fire that is still burning at daybreak.

There are no fixed entities in the Chain. Each link depends upon another and leads directly to something else. It is a perfect expression of the “becoming” which the Buddha saw as an inescapable fact of human life. We are always trying to become something different, striving for a new mode of being, and indeed cannot remain in one state for long. Each sankhara gives place to the next; each state is simply the prelude to another. Nothing in life can, therefore, be regarded as stable. A person should be regarded as a process, not an unchangeable entity. When a bhikkhu meditated on the Chain and saw it yogically, becoming mindful of the way each thought and sensation rose and fell away, he acquired a “direct knowledge” of the Truth that nothing could be relied upon, that everything was impermanent (anicca), and would be inspired to redouble his efforts to extricate himself from this endless Chain of cause and effect.

This constant self-appraisal and attention to the fluctuations of everyday life induced a state of calm control. When the daily practice of mindfulness was continued in his meditations, it brought the bhikkhu an insight into the nature of personality that was more deeply rooted and immediate than any that could be produced by rational deduction. It also led to greater self-discipline. The Buddha had no time for the ecstatic trances of the brahmins. He insisted that his monks should always conduct themselves with sobriety, and forbade emotional display. But mindfulness also made the bhikkhu more aware of the morality of his behavior. He noticed how his own “unskillful” actions could harm other people and that even his motivation could be injurious. So, the Buddha concluded, our intentions were kamma and had consequences. The intentions, conscious or unconscious, that inspired our actions were mental acts that were just as important as any external deeds. This redefinition of kamma as cetana (intention; choice) was revolutionary; it deepened the entire question of morality, which was now located in the mind and heart and could not merely be a matter of outward behavior.

But mindfulness (sati) led the Buddha to a still more radical conclusion. Three days after the five bhikkhus had become “stream-enterers,” the Buddha delivered a second sermon in the Deer Park, in which he expounded his unique doctrine of anatta (no-self). He divided the human personality into five “heaps” or “constituents” (khandhas): the body, feelings, perceptions, volitions (conscious and unconscious) and consciousness, and asked the bhikkhus to consider each khandha in turn. The body or our feelings, for example, constantly changed from one moment to the next. They caused us pain, let us down and frustrated us. The same had to be said of our perceptions and volitions. Thus each khandha, subject as it was to dukkha, flawed and transitory, could not constitute or include the Self sought by so many of the ascetics and yogins. Was it not true, the Buddha asked his disciples, that after examining each khandha, an honest person found that he could not wholly identify with it, because it was so unsatisfactory? He was bound to say, “This is not mine; this is not what I really am; this is not my self.” But the Buddha did not simply deny the existence of the eternal, absolute Self. He now claimed that there was no stable, lower-case self either. The terms “self” and “myself” were simply conventions. The personality had no fixed or changeless core. As the Chain showed, every sentient being was in a state of constant flux; he or she was merely a succession of temporary, mutable states of existence.

The Buddha pressed this message home throughout his life. Where the seventeenth-century French philosopher Rene Descartes would declare “I think, therefore I am,” the Buddha came to the opposite conclusion. The more he thought, in the mindful, yogic way he had developed, the clearer it seemed that what we call the “self” is a delusion. In his view, the more closely we examine ourselves, the harder it becomes to find anything that we can pinpoint as a fixed entity. The human personality was not a static being to which things happened. Put under the microscope of yogic analysis, each person was a process. The Buddha liked to use such metaphors as a blazing fire or a rushing stream to describe the personality; it had some kind of identity, but was never the same from one moment to another. At each second, a fire was different; it had consumed and recreated itself, just as people did. In a particularly vivid simile, the Buddha compared the human mind to a monkey ranging through the forest: “it grabs one branch, and then, letting that go, seizes another.” What we experience as the “self” is really just a convenience-term, because we are constantly changing. In the same way, milk can become, successively, curds, butter, ghee, and fine extract of ghee. There is no point in calling any one of these transformations “milk,” even though there is a sense in which it is correct to do so.

The eighteenth-century Scottish empiricist David Hume came to a similar conclusion, but with an important difference: he did not expect his insight to affect the moral conduct of his readers. But in Axial Age India, knowledge had no significance unless it was found to be transformative. A dhamma was an imperative to action, and the doctrine of anatta was not an abstract philosophical proposition but required Buddhists to behave as though the ego did not exist. The ethical effects of this are far-reaching. Not only does the idea of “self” lead to unskillful thoughts about “me and mine” and inspire our selfish cravings; egotism can arguably be described as the source of all evil: an excessive attachment to the self can lead to envy or hatred of rivals, conceit, megalomania, pride, cruelty, and, when the self feels threatened, to violence and the destruction of others. Western people often regard the Buddha’s doctrine of anatta as nihilistic and depressing, but at their best all the great world religions formed during the Axial Age seek to curb the voracious, frightened ego that does so much harm. The Buddha, however, was more radical. His teaching of anatta did not seek to annihilate the self. He simply denied that the self had ever existed. It was a mistake to think of it as a constant reality. Any such misconception was a symptom of that ignorance which kept us bound to the cycle of suffering.

Anatta, like any Buddhist teaching, was not a philosophical doctrine but was primarily pragmatic. Once a disciple had acquired, through yoga and mindfulness, a “direct” knowledge of anatta, he would be delivered from the pains and perils of egotism, which would become a logical impossibility. In the Axial countries, we have seen that people felt suddenly alone and lost in the world, in exile from Eden and the sacred dimension that gives life meaning and value. Much of their pain sprang from insecurity in a world of heightened individualism in the new market economy. The Buddha tried to make his bhikkhus see that they did not have a “self” that needed to be defended, inflated, flattered, cajoled and enhanced at the expense of others. Once a monk had become practiced in the discipline of mindfulness, he would see how ephemeral what we call the “self” really was. He would no longer introject his ego into these passing mental states and identify with them. He would learn to regard his desires, fears and cravings as remote phenomena that had little to do with him. Once he had attained this dispassion and equanimity, the Buddha explained to the five bhikkhus at the end of his Second Sermon, he would find that he was ripe for enlightenment. “His greed fades away, and once his cravings disappear, he experiences the release of his heart.” He had achieved his goal and could utter the same triumphant cry as the Buddha himself, when he had attained enlightenment. “The holy life has been lived out to its conclusion! What had to be done has been accomplished; there is nothing else to do!”

And, indeed, it was when they heard the Buddha explaining anatta that all five bhikkhus attained their full enlightenment and became Arahants. The texts tell us that this teaching filled their hearts with joy. This might seem strange: why should they be so happy to hear that the self that we all cherish does not exist? The Buddha knew that anatta could be frightening. An outsider, hearing the doctrine for the first time, might panic, thinking: “I am going to be annihilated and destroyed; I will no longer exist!” But the Pali texts show that people accepted anatta with enormous relief and delight, as the five bhikkhus did, and this, as it were, “proved” that it was true. When people lived as though the ego did not exist, they found that they were happier. They experienced the same kind of enlargement of being as came from a practice of the “immeasurables,” which were designed to dethrone the self from the center of our private universe and put other beings in its place. Egotism is constricting; when we see things only from a selfish point of view, our vision is limited. To live beyond the reach of greed, hatred, and the fears that come with an acute anxiety about our status and survival is liberating. Anatta may sound bleak when proposed as an abstract idea, but when it was lived out it transformed people’s lives. By living as though they had no self, people found that they had conquered their egotism and felt a great deal better. By understanding anatta with the “direct knowledge” of a yogin, they found that they had crossed over into a richer, fuller existence. Anatta must, therefore, tell us something true about the human condition, even though we cannot prove empirically that the self does not exist.

The Buddha believed that a selfless life would introduce men and women to Nibbana. Monotheists would say that it would bring them into the presence of God. But the Buddha found the notion of a personalized deity too limiting, because it suggested that the supreme Truth was only another being. Nibbana was neither a personality nor a place like Heaven. The Buddha always denied the existence of any absolute principle or Supreme Being, since this could be another thing to cling to, another fetter and impediment to enlightenment. Like the doctrine of the Self, the notion of God can also be used to prop up and inflate the ego. The most sensitive monotheists in Judaism, Christianity and Islam would all be aware of this danger and would speak of God in ways that are reminiscent of the Buddha’s reticence about Nibbana. They would also insist that God was not another being, that our notion of “existence” was so limited that it was more accurate to say that God did not exist and that “he” was Nothing. But on a more popular level, it is certainly true that “God” is often reduced to an idol created in the image and likeness of “his” worshippers. If we imagine God to be a being like ourselves writ large, with likes and dislikes similar to our own, it is all too easy to make “him” endorse some of our most uncharitable, selfish and even lethal hopes, fears and prejudices. This limited God has thus contributed to some of the worst religious atrocities in history. The Buddha would have described belief in a deity who gives a seal of sacred approval to our own selves as “unskillful”: it could only embed the believer in the damaging and dangerous egotism that he or she was supposed to transcend. Enlightenment demands that we reject any such false prop. It seems that a “direct” yogic understanding of anatta was one of the chief ways in which the early Buddhists experienced Nibbana. And, indeed, the Axial Age faiths all insist in one way or another that we will only fulfil ourselves if we practice total self-abandonment. To go into religion to “get” something, such as a comfortable retirement in the afterlife, is to miss the point. The five bhikkhus who attained enlightenment in the Deer Park had understood this at a profound level.

Now they had to bring the Dhamma to others. As the Buddha himself had learned, an understanding of the First Noble Truth of dukkha meant empathizing with the sorrow of others; the doctrine of anatta implied that an enlightened person must live not for her- or himself but for others. There were now six Arahants, but they were still too few to bring light to a world engulfed in pain. Then, seemingly out of the blue, the Buddha’s little sangha got an influx of new members. The first was Yasa, the son of a rich merchant of Varanasi. Like the young Gotama he had lived in the lap of luxury, but one night he awoke to find his servants lying asleep all round his bed, looking so ugly and unseemly that he was filled with disgust. The fact that other texts, such as the Nidana Katha, would later, without apology, tell exactly the same tale about the young Gotama shows the archetypal nature of the story. It was a stylized way of describing the alienation that so many people in the Ganges region were experiencing. The Pali story tells us that Yasa felt sick at heart and that he cried in distress: “This is terrifying! Horrible!” The world seemed suddenly profane, meaningless and, therefore, unbearable. At once, Yasa decided to “Go Forth” and seek something better. He slipped on a pair of gold slippers, crept out of his father’s house, and made his way to the Deer Park, still muttering: “Terrifying! Horrible!” Then he came upon the Buddha, who had risen early and was enjoying a walk in the cool light of dawn. With the enhanced mental power of an enlightened man, the Buddha recognized Yasa, and motioned him to a seat, saying with a smile: “It is not terrifying; it is not horrible. Come and sit down, Yasa, and I will teach you the Dhamma.”

The Buddha’s serenity and gentleness reassured Yasa at once. He no longer felt that sickening dread, but was happy ‘ and hopeful. With his heart joyful and at peace, he was in exactly the right mood for enlightenment. He took off his slippers and sat down beside the Buddha, who instructed him in the Middle Way, step by step, beginning with very basic teaching about the importance of avoiding tanha and sensual pleasure, and describing the benefits of the holy life. But when he paw that Yasa was receptive and ready, he went on to teach him the Four Noble Truths. As Yasa listened, “the pure vision of the Dhamma rose up in him,” and the truths sank into his soul, as easily, we are told, as a dye penetrates and colors a clean piece of cloth. Once Yasa’s mind had been “dyed” by the Dhamma, there was no way of separating the two. This was “direct knowledge,” because Yasa had experienced the Dhamma at such a profound level that he had wholly identified with it. It had transformed him and “dyed” his entire being. This would be a common experience when people heard the Dhamma for the first time, especially when instructed by the Buddha himself. They felt that the Dhamma fit their needs perfectly, that it was entirely natural and congenial to them, and that, in some sense, they had always known it. We do not find in the Pali texts any agonized or dramatic conversions, similar to St. Paul ’s on the road to Damascus. Any such wrenching experience would have been regarded by the Buddha as “unskillful.” People must be in tune with their natures, as he himself had been under the rose-apple tree.

Just as Yasa had become a “stream-enterer,” the Buddha noticed an older merchant coming toward them and realized that this must be Yasa’s father; he then had recourse to the iddhi or spiritual powers that were thought to come with advanced proficiency in yoga, and made Yasa disappear. Yasa’s father was greatly distressed; the whole household was searching for Yasa, but he had followed the print of the golden slippers which brought him directly to the Buddha. Again, the Buddha made the merchant sit down, hinting that he would see Yasa very soon, and instructed the father as he had the son. The merchant was immediately impressed: “Lord, that is superb! Quite superb!” he cried. “The Dhamma has been made so clear that it is as though you are holding up a lamp in the darkness and putting right something that has gone profoundly wrong.” He was then the first to make what has since become known as the Triple Refuge: an assertion of complete confidence in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha of bhikkhus. He also became one of the first lay followers, who continued to live as a householder but practiced a modified form of the Buddhist method.

As Yasa, unseen by his father, listened to the Buddha, he attained full enlightenment and entered into Nibbana. At this point, the Buddha revealed him to his father, and the merchant begged Yasa to return home, if only for his mother’s sake. The Buddha, however, gently explained that Yasa had become an Arahant and would now find it impossible to live the life of a householder. He was no longer afflicted by the cravings and desires that would enable him to fulfill a householder’s reproductive and economic duties; he would require hours of silence and privacy for meditation that would not be possible in a family home. He could not return. Yasa’s father understood, but begged the Buddha to dine at his house that lay, with Yasa as his attendant monk. During the meal, the Buddha instructed Yasa’s mother and his former wife, and they became the Buddha’s first women lay disciples.

But the news spread beyond the household. Four of Yasa’s friends, who came from Varanasi ’s leading merchant families, were so impressed when they heard that he was now wearing the yellow robe that they came to the Buddha for instruction. So did fifty of Yasa’s friends from brahmin and ksatriya families in the surrounding countryside. All these young men from the noble and aristocratic castes soon achieved enlightenment, so that in a very short space of time, there were, the texts tell us, sixty-one Arahants in the world, including the Buddha himself.

The Sangha was becoming a sizeable sect, but the new Arahants could not be allowed to luxuriate in their newfound liberation. Their vocation was not a selfish retreat from the world; they too had to return to the marketplace to help others find release from pain. They would now live for others, as the Dhamma enjoined. “Go now,” the Buddha told his sixty bhikkhus,

and travel for the welfare and happiness of the people, out of compassion for the world, for the benefit, welfare and happiness of gods and men. No two of you go the same way. Teach the Dhamma, bhikkhus, and meditate on the holy life. There are beings with only a little desire left within them who are languishing for lack of hearing the Dhamma; they will understand it.

Buddhism was not a doctrine for a privileged elite; it was a religion for “the people,” for “the many (bahujana).” In practice, it appealed mostly to the upper classes and to intellectuals, but in principle it was open to anybody, and nobody, whatever his or her caste, was excluded. For the first time in history, somebody had envisaged a religious program that was not confined to a single group, but was intended for the whole of humanity. This was no esoteric truth, like that preached by the sages of the Upanisads. It was out in the open, in the towns, the new cities and along the trade routes. Whenever they heard the Dhamma, people started to throng into the Sangha, which became a force to be reckoned with in the Ganges plain. The members of the new Order were known as “The Ordained Followers of the Teacher from Sakka,” but they called themselves simply the Union of Bhikkus (Bhikkhu-Sangha). People who joined found that they had “woken up” to whole regions of their humanity which had hitherto lain dormant; a new social and religious reality had come into being.