2. An Affirmation of Power

The Buddha didn’t teach in a vacuum. There were many other religious and philosophical schools spreading their teachings in his day. Some of them we know from non-Buddhist sources, such as the Vedas of the brahmans, the ancient Indian priestly caste, whose texts dated back thousands of years. Others we know from the Pali Canon itself, as its suttas—or discourses—depict the Buddha engaged in conversations with members of those schools, refuting their teachings and sometimes converting them to the Dhamma. In fact, the early Buddhists were so eager to set themselves apart from other contemporary schools of thought that the first two suttas in the collection of discourses are devoted to listing the teachings of other schools and comparing them to the Buddha’s course of training, to indicate how his teachings were something radically new and different from its rivals. To show clearly what the Buddha’s teaching was, they started by showing what it wasn’t.

The other religions and philosophies of the time fall into two groups: the teachings of the orthodox brahmans as found in the Vedas, and the teachings of the samaṇas, or contemplatives, who rejected the Vedas’ authority. Modern etymology derives the word samaṇa from “striver,” but as we’ll see, not all samaṇa schools advocated a life of striving. Passages from the Pali Canon seem closer to the mark in deriving samaṇa from sama, which means to be “on pitch” or “in tune.” The samaṇa philosophers were trying to find a way of life and thought that was in tune, not with social conventions, but with the laws of nature as these could be deduced from scientific observation, personal experience, reason, meditation, or shamanic practices. The Buddha used the term samaṇa to describe himself and his monastic followers.

What’s most striking about the alternative teachings of the time is how many of them teach powerlessness. Contrary to a popular misconception, it wasn’t the case that everyone in the Buddha’s time believed in the power of karma, or action. Most of the alternative teachings of the time actually taught that karma was either unreal or powerless. The brahmans, for instance, taught that members of other castes were powerless to perform the rituals and sacraments needed to ensure well-being in this life and the next. Instead, those people had to depend on the brahmans to perform those rituals and sacraments for them.

As for the samaṇas, many of their schools taught powerlessness of a different sort, either:

• the powerlessness of the human mind to gain objective knowledge concerning which ways of acting are skillful and which are not; or

• the powerlessness of human action in general to have an effect on the course of the universe or on a person’s own happiness.

The Buddha had a term for the schools that taught the powerlessness of the first sort—the inability of the mind to know which courses of action are skillful and which ones are not. He called them “eel-wrigglers.” As he saw it, a teacher’s primary duty to his students was to give them grounds for determining which courses of action they should and shouldn’t take. This means that the eel-wrigglers were shirking their responsibilities—or worse, because they implied that ideas of “should” or “shouldn’t” had no objective grounding at all. The same point would apply at present to those who insist that objective truths about right and wrong behavior are impossible to know and so should be left as a mystery, leaving their listeners to confront these mysteries on their own without any guidance.

As for the samaṇa schools that taught the powerlessness of human action in general, they usually framed their teachings by starting with a particular view about how the world works. In some cases, they taught that the world was totally determined by physical laws, in which human action and moral considerations had no role to play. In these cases, they either denied that human action was real, or they claimed that it was real but had no effect on anything. Also, they claimed that moral standards had no basis in nature, so they were nothing more than fictions with no objective authority. In other cases, samaṇa teachers claimed that past actions had an effect on the present, but present actions couldn’t make a difference as to whether or not you suffered right now. Some teachers taught that the world was shaped entirely by the will of a creator god, which human action was powerless to affect. You would simply have to accept the will of that god, whether it was benevolent or not.

On the other extreme, there were schools claiming that there was no such thing as cause and effect, that everything happened spontaneously, so people should follow their own spontaneous whims and grab pleasures while they can.

What all these samaṇa schools had in common was that they started with a view of the world and ended up by saying that human action had no consequences and so had no power to shape events within the world. Ideas of good and evil were mere social conventions with no grounding in reality, so people could ignore them with impunity, taking the path of least resistance and enjoying whatever sensual pleasures they felt compelled to desire.

It’s easy to see how some people might like being told they were powerless, on the grounds that this view would absolve them from any responsibility for their actions and free them to follow their inclinations. If you believed in the Vedas, you could hire brahmans to perform sacrifices and other rituals for you—assuming that you could afford them—while you lived your life as you pleased. If you didn’t believe in the Vedas, you wouldn’t have to waste money on rituals and could still do as you pleased. And there are people at present who delight in modern versions of teachings like this, on the grounds that there’s no one to tell them what they have to do, and no one to hold them accountable for what they’ve done.

But it’s also easy to see how intelligent people would be dissatisfied with teachings of this sort. If you abdicate responsibility, you’re also abdicating both the power to avoid suffering and the joy that comes from being an agent who can make a difference in your own life and in the world around you. If, on the other hand, human beings have no power, then they themselves, along with their choices and efforts, have no importance at all. If you’re powerless to know what’s right and wrong, then you’re left without guidance on how to run your life. If the world is determined by laws beyond your control, and those laws play out in a way that would make you suffer, there’s no way you can avoid that suffering. If there are no causal laws at all, there’s no way you can defend yourself against spontaneous sufferings suddenly attacking you out of nowhere. In all these cases, the Buddha would say, you’re left bewildered and unprotected.

So, when Sāriputta—instead of introducing the Buddha’s teachings with a view of the world—starts with a course of action, claiming that that course of action would lead to long-term happiness, his intelligent listeners would immediately understand it as an assertion of the power of human action and a refutation of powerlessness. And because the action he starts with is a mental one, it’s an assertion of the power of the mind. He’s basically saying that you have within your mind the power not to suffer, and that the Buddha is offering reliable guidance on how to do that.

Also, because of the power of action and the relative freedom to make choices in how to act, it’s possible to offer training in how to develop the skills needed to avoid suffering. This means that the Buddha’s teaching is not just a picture of the world to contemplate and discuss. It’s a call and a guide to skillful action.

This is why intelligent listeners would find the Buddha’s teaching promising, and why they would want to learn more.

It’s also why, as we begin our exploration of the Dhamma from the perspective offered by Ven. Sāriputta’s point of entry, the first issue to explore is what the Buddha had to say about the nature and power of action. We’ll find that, because the act of teaching is a type of action, what he had to say on this topic also influenced how he chose to say it. This illustrates one of the principle points of his teaching: You learn by committing yourself to a course of action and then reflecting on the results (AN 10:73). The Buddha exemplified this lesson for his listeners by showing that he had committed himself to teaching effectively and had reflected well on the implications of what he taught.