1. Ven. Sāriputta’s Answer

There’s a dialog in the discourses of the Pali Canon—our oldest extant record of the Dhamma, the Buddha’s teachings—in which a group of monks are planning to go to a remote foreign part of India where the Dhamma is still unknown (SN 22:2). They take their leave of the Buddha, and he tells them to take leave also of Ven. Sāriputta, his foremost disciple in terms of wisdom and discernment.

When they go to Sāriputta, he comments that there are wise people in foreign lands who will ask them, “What does your teacher teach?” He then asks them how they’ll respond in a way that doesn’t misrepresent the teaching.

The monks reply that they would travel a long distance to hear how Sāriputta himself would answer that question.

He starts with an interesting point of departure. Instead of mentioning the teachings for which the Buddha has long become famous—such as emptiness, nirvāṇa, or the four noble truths—he says, “Our teacher teaches the subduing of desire and passion.”

He then predicts that the wise people in foreign lands may ask, “And your teacher teaches the subduing of desire and passion for what?”

In other words, unlike most people at present, who—on hearing that the Buddha teaches the subduing of desire and passion—would switch to another channel or a more welcoming app, the wise people of the past would be intrigued and want to learn more.

The purpose of this book is to explore the implications of this dialog: Why would Sāriputta begin his explanation of the Dhamma for intelligent newcomers with “the subduing of desire and passion”? What are the implications of beginning at that point, and what insights can be gained into the Dhamma by viewing it from that angle? And given that, in the context of Buddhist history, we in the West are people in a land even more foreign than a remote part of India, how might we benefit by approaching the Dhamma from the angle Sāriputta recommended?

Sāriputta himself gives some guidance in this direction. After predicting that wise people will ask their follow-up question—“the subduing of desire and passion for what?”—he provides the answer: The Buddha teaches the subduing of desire and passion for five things: form, feeling, perception, thought-fabrications, and consciousness. When we look further in the Canon, we learn that these are the five activities, called the five aggregates, from which we construct our sense of self, of who we are. This gives an idea of how radical the Buddha’s teaching is: He’s asking us to abandon desire and passion for activities with which we identify and to which we’re ordinarily most attached.

But Sāriputta doesn’t expand on that point, at least not here. Instead, he predicts that the wise people in foreign lands will want to know why the Buddha would advocate subduing desire and passion for these activities: What danger is there in desire and passion for them? And what advantage is there in abandoning that desire and passion? The answer: If you haven’t abandoned passion for these five activities, then when they change for the worse, as they inevitably will, you’ll experience pain and sorrow. But if you have abandoned passion for them, you’ll experience no pain or sorrow when they change in that way.

This gives an indication of the Buddha’s motive for teaching: compassion. He wants people to learn how to avoid the suffering they’re already causing themselves and might cause in the future. So even though subduing desire and passion would go against the grain and require a great deal of training, the teaching actually offers hope: that by changing your attitudes, you have it within your power to avoid suffering.

That’s where Sāriputta’s imagined dialog with the wise people of foreign lands ends, but he goes on to tell the monks that the Buddha isn’t teaching just how to avoid suffering. He’s also teaching how to find long-term happiness. Sāriputta does this by reminding the monks that if developing unskillful mental qualities—such as greed, aversion, or delusion—led to mental peace in this lifetime and happiness in future lifetimes, the Buddha wouldn’t have advocated abandoning unskillful mental qualities. But because they lead to mental turmoil now and to suffering in future lifetimes, he advocates abandoning them.

Conversely, if developing skillful mental qualities, such as renunciation, goodwill, and compassion, led to mental turmoil now or suffering in future lifetimes, he wouldn’t have advocated developing skillful mental qualities. But because skillful mental qualities lead to mental peace now and happiness in future lifetimes, that’s why he advocates developing them.

That’s where the discourse ends. As with all the discourses in the Canon, it leaves a lot unsaid and unexplained. For instance, it doesn’t define either “desire (chanda)” or “passion (rāga).” In fact, neither of these terms is defined anywhere in the Canon. Instead, they’re used to define other terms in the Buddha’s vocabulary, which suggests that they were so widely familiar that the Buddha and his disciples saw no need to explain them.

However, the discourse does establish some important points. At the same time, those points raise some questions that will have to be answered if listeners in foreign lands, such as ourselves, will be motivated to learn more about what the Buddha taught. As we explore the implications of the discourse in the course of this book, we’ll uncover the answers to these questions.

• The first point is that the Dhamma’s main focus is psychological. It views events in the mind as having primary importance over events in the world, both inside and out. As the Buddha says in the first verse of the Dhammapada—the most famous collection of his verses—the mind is the forerunner of all the things you experience.

Phenomena are 	preceded by the mind,
			ruled by the mind,
			made of the mind.  — Dhp 1

If the mind were simply on the receiving end of physical events, or if its workings were totally determined by physical laws, its choice to desire or not desire something would make no difference: If events outside were in charge, they—and not you—would determine whether you suffered or not. But here the Buddha is saying that the choice to abandon desire and passion for form, feelings, etc., will be enough to put an end to suffering.

The question here is, in what way does the mind create suffering and how do its workings allow it to stop doing that?

• That connects to the second point raised by the discourse: The mind has the power of choice. The fact that the Buddha would teach the subduing of desire and passion means that he sees that it’s something the mind can choose to do. Even though the mind may have felt desire and passion for such things as feelings and perceptions in the past, and suffered as a result, it doesn’t have to continue doing so. Its present actions are not totally determined even by its own past actions. It’s free to choose a new course of action at any time.

In fact, the nature of the mind is that it can change direction so quickly that, as the Buddha notes, there’s no adequate analogy to illustrate how quickly it can do so (AN 1:49). This ability can be a source of trouble if its initial direction is skillful and it then starts going in the opposite direction. But when you’ve been causing suffering for yourself, the mind’s ability to change direction quickly can also be the means by which you can stop doing that and take up the path to suffering’s end.

Here the question is, how can the mind learn to change its ways and head in the right direction?

• That connects with the third point, which is that the Buddha, instead of teaching a world-view, is teaching a course of action. His basic message will be a how-to teaching: how to put an end to desire and passion. Now, desire and passion don’t easily end on their own. There’s a large part of the mind that resists trying to end them and it’ll offer resistance in many ways. The mind will have to be trained to overcome that resistance in all its forms.

So the question here is, what kind of training does the Buddha propose? Also, given that his teaching will have to involve a training, how does that fact influence not only what he taught, but also how he taught it, why he taught, who he would teach, and what kind of people he would train them to be?

• Fourth, Sāriputta makes it clear that these how-to instructions are based on a value judgment: that actions should be judged according to their results, and that actions leading to greater mental well-being now and in the long-term are better than those that leave you open to suffering. Sāriputta’s reference to future lifetimes in this context is an indication not only of the power of the mind—consciousness doesn’t need to depend on the body for its existence—but also of the mind’s range of responsibility: how long-term the consequences of its actions can be.

Here the questions are, what sort of arguments does the Buddha propose on the topic of life after death? And how objective are the standards he uses for judging actions and their results?

• The fifth point, though, suggests a paradox: The Buddha teaches the ending of desire and passion, yet when asked why people should follow his teachings—instead of following the desires and passions they currently prefer—he promises desirable results: freedom from suffering, along with long-term happiness. This point falls in line with another verse from the Dhammapada:

Obviously, anyone who follows the Buddha’s teachings on how to act would have to be motivated by a desire for long-term happiness. Is the Buddha, in encouraging this sort of desire, being inconsistent or is he thinking strategically? And if he’s being strategic, what’s the strategy?

So Sāriputta, in addition to making some basic points about the Buddha’s teachings, is also raising some important questions that will have to be answered. In doing so, he seems to be directing the discussion along lines that he senses will be fruitful—because there were many other teachers in his time who were advocating philosophies based on questions that led in other directions entirely.

In fact, it’s useful to start our inquiry by looking at some of those other teachings, to see what the audience in foreign lands would be comparing the Buddha’s teachings to. When we do, we’ll see that many of those teachings are similar to religions and philosophies still being taught today. By contrasting those teachings with the Buddha’s, we can take what was—and is—distinctive about his teachings and throw it into sharper relief.

At the same time, we can begin to understand how an intelligent audience could hear a teaching introduced as “the subduing of desire and passion” and, instead of being repelled, actually find it promising.