Dharma PhD

Included in the Bodhi College CPP coursework is an essay by Akincano Weber, “On Reading the Suttas”. (Trying to locate a shareable copy; you’ll hear about it if I am successful.)

Among many many other wise things, Akincano recommends a four-level reading of a sutta:

i) Level of understanding – Here the task of reading is my honest attempt to communicate with the literal statements of the text: … What does the text literally state? … Can I paraphrase what I have understood in my own terms?

ii) Level of meaning – Here I adopt for my reading the perspective of the characters in the text: … How do the participants of the situation understand the statements made?

iii) Level of personal perception – What do the statements I have understood in the foregoing steps mean to me and in my time?

iv) Level of interpretation – … What practical effect has this text on my understanding, my actions and behaviour?

When I re-approached MN 139 via this four-level framework, my empathy, and therefore my reading, was quite different. This may be most obvious in my organizing the synopsis, not according to the order presented in the sutta, but into categories that made sense given my present understanding.

In the third category (Seeking Good Influences), I don’t mention Subhūti. Why? Because of Levels ii and iv above.

Level ii: why did Gotama mention Subhūti to these mendicants? He was reminding them that there was one among them who embodied the traits Gotama was speaking of.

Gotama did not refer to some great person of the past for the mendicants to imagine and deify and pedestalize. He referred to one of their own. This is a living person who embodies, in the present, in daily life, traits that Gotama believes worthy of emulation.

From a Level iv perspective then, it is not following Gotama’s instruction if I research Subhūti on Wikipedia and read about him in the Dictionary of Pāli Proper Names.

What I understand is: it’s not about virtuous figures in the past. Go out in the world and find people who embody the characteristics which you think are skillful and wise, and associate with those people. Let your mirror neurons, and the natural tendencies of human beings to become like those around them, let your admiration of skillful beings work on you and help you develop on your path.

YMMV.

With friendliness!

Continuing to unpack MN 139, On Avoiding Conflict (Parts 1, 2, 3)… recently Ajahn Nisabho gave a bonzer talk, Culture War Pacifism: The Dhamma of Dolly Parton. He spoke about engaging skillfully in political discourse, about not being caught up in the collective papañca of the culture wars.

Might this bit in MN 139, about not speaking behind someone’s back, be useful here?

I’d never thought of it this way, but speaking about some particular politician is, in fact, speaking about a person behind their back.

My position generally is that Politician X is not actually the problem; they are merely a symptom of a greater systematic/social problem. Speaking about systems (ie, conditions) is often less inflammatory than denouncing individuals; it might be an interesting practice to explore the effect of refraining from speaking about any particular politician.

I see skillful engagement as one of the great challenges of my dhamma practice. I’ll take all the help I can get.

With friendliness!

I like the anthropomorphizing in this phy.org article; they describe the bacteria as "hangry". We do the same, yes? Get grumpy-hungry and release our toxic vibes into the environment.

It got me thinking about vedanā (the pleasant/unpleasant feeling tone of experience, second foundation of mindfulness, aka Feeling Tone), and how I first heard Dr. Judson Brewer explain this basic aspect of living organisms, moving towards what is beneficial to our organism (nutrients/conducive environments/reproductive partners) and withdrawing from what is unbeneficial to our organism (toxins/toxic environments/dangerous others). Vedanā, Brewer and others have claimed, is one way our organism internally communicates this information throughout itself.

Do these bacteria experience vedanā in the same way I do? Unknown. Still, there seems to me something bridging the athropocentric gap, seeing in these bacteria behavior I can recognize in my own organism. YMMV.

With friendliness!

(Leigh Brasington has a page called "Problematic Pāli Translations" which includes several of these. For Amata, Deathless, he prefers "Without Death". For Ajāti, Unborn, he prefers "Without Birth". For Asaṅkhata, Unfabricated, he prefers "Without Fabrication". I dig this.)

Gratitude for your thoughts/contributions/clarifications.

With friendliness!

...

*When I am on my game, every one of you is my teacher. And I am grateful for you!

Continuing with MN 139 for the April's CPP homework. Some highlights:

Cultivating Oneself

Eightfold Path (Aṭṭhaṅgika Magga)

Gotama condemns both devotion to sensual pleasure and devotion to asceticism. He claims that the Eightfold Path is a Middle Way between the two.

Pleasure

Gotama divides pleasure into two types: pleasure derived from the five physical senses, and pleasure derived from meditation (specifically, Jhānas 1-4). He claims that the former pleasure should be feared while the latter pleasure should be cultivated and developed.

Communicating With Others

Talking about Dhamma

Gotama says that one should speak about behaviors or proclivities, not about people.

For example, when talking about sensual pleasure, we wouldn't say, "People who indulge in sensual pleasure are practicing wrong." That's speaking about people. Instead we would say, "Indulging in sensual pleasure is a behavior that leads to harm." Talk about the behavior or the saṅkhāra, not about the person.

Speech in General (Sammā-vācā)

1. Gotama says, in general, do not speak of someone who is not present. In the case that someone is not present but the thing you want to say about them is 1, true (taccha?), 2, correct (bhūta?), and 3, beneficial (atthasaṁhita), you still must judge whether or not it is the right time to say it.

2. In general, do not speak harshly to someone. In the case that what you want to say to them is 1, true, 2, correct, and 3, beneficial, you still must judge whether or not it is the right time to say it.

3. Speak in an unhurried manner.

4. Don't disparage regional or cultural language. Look for meaning. Try to understand and speak so that you can best be understood by your interlocutor.

Good Influence(r)s (Kalyana Mitta)

Seek out models for the kind of behavior we ourselves want to enact, and allow their being-in-the-world to influence our own.

So As to Avoid Conflict

And why are we doing all this? Gotama says so as to avoid conflict, of both the internal and external varieties.

With friendliness!

Chewing on MN 139 – Araṇavibhaṅga Sutta for this month’s CPP homework.

No surprise, out of the gate I found myself dissatisfied with the translation of the title.

(Side Note: this straw may finally compel the camel to sign up for the Oxford Center For Buddhist Studies’ Online Pāli Course. It would be more fun to engage with friends; want to join me?)

Bhikkhu Sujato translates the title “The Analysis of Non-Conflict“. Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli (1993) uses “The Exposition of Non-Conflict“. Suddhāso Bhikkhu (2016) uses “Analysis of Non-Conflict“.

All three of these seem awkward to me. It may be that “analysis of” is a term used in a particular way in the Theravada tradition, and in the context of the Sutta Central website, it makes perfect sense. But when I read the sutta, the sense I have is more an “explanation” than an “analysis”. Reasonable people can disagree.

In the last bit of the sutta (we’ll cover content in another part) Gotama enjoins his listeners to pay attention to their use of language, to use language that will best communicate given the context (language/culture) of their interlocutors.

I particularly like, “How to Not-Conflict”. Though “On Not-Conflict” or “On Avoiding Conflict” may be less slangy. Edit: Could it be as simple as “Explaining Not-Conflict”?

Your thoughts? (And, more importantly, wanna OCBS Pāli with me?)

Recently Akincano Weber and John Peacock were talking about Bhava. And what they said got me thinking about Charles Duhigg describing rats running mazes and the function of basil ganglia in habit formation (The Power of Habit). And that led to Dharma PhD (the podcast) EP 5 where Jeff and I riffed on Saṅkhāra and habits and I claimed that one kind of Saṅkhāra is an automatic-pilot kind of habit that may be linked to functioning of the basil ganglia that we can witness via neuro-imaging.

So the thing I want to write about, I think, is that maybe one aspect of this concept “Bhava” could be correlated to a neural process involving the basil ganglia and this neural process might also be a part of the concept “Saṅkhāra”. And maybe it is interesting that there is overlap of these two aspects of Buddhist Psychology that can be detected via neuro-imaging.

But maybe we’ll get to the end and find out it’s not interesting. Hard to say from here.

With friendliness!

To keep it atomic, I'll pause here. In following parts, I want to give examples of transcendent and imminent Nibbāna in the Pāli Canon and, what I think most important, to discuss implications of this bifurcated understanding on our practice and on our being in the world.

With friendliness!

(1) Disclaimer: I am strongly partial to the imminent version of Nibbāna. :)