Bhikkhu Bodhi: The Buddha's Mission

True Tube (The Enlightenment of the Buddha); Bhikkhu Bodhi "The Buddha and his Dharma" (accesstoinsight.org) edited by Dhr. Seven, Pat Macpherson, Wisdom Quarterly

2. The Buddha's Mission

The Zen Awards (Bizarro by Pizarro)

To ask why the Buddha's teaching proved so attractive and gained such a large following among all sectors of Northeast Indian society [he was from the northwest frontier, Gandhara/Afghanistan, where it was even more popular (ranajitpal.com)] is to raise a question that is relevant to us today.

For we live at a time when Buddhism is exerting a strong appeal on an increasing number of people, particularly those whose level of education and capacity for reflection has made them indifferent to the claims of revealed religions.

I believe the remarkable success of Buddhism, as well as its contemporary appeal, can be understood principally in terms of two factors. One is the aim of the teaching, and the other is its methodological features.

(i) The Aim of the Teaching

Unlike the so-called revealed religions, which rely on faith in unverifiable doctrines, the Buddha formulated a teaching in a way that directly addresses the critical problem at the heart of human existence — the problem of suffering.

It promises that those who follow this path of practice to its culmination will directly realize here and now while alive the highest wisdom and security. All other concerns apart from this, such as dogmas, metaphysical subtleties, rituals, and rules of worship, the Buddha brushes aside as irrelevant to the task at hand, the unraveling of the problem of why we suffer.

This pragmatic thrust of the Dharma is clearly illustrated by an incident related in the texts. Once a Buddhist monk named Malunkyaputta was pondering the great metaphysical questions — whether the world is eternal or non-eternal, infinite or finite, and so on — and he felt unhappy because the Buddha had refused to answer them.

So one day Malunkyaputta went to the Buddha and told him, "Either you answer these questions for me or I leave the order!"

The Buddha then told Malunkyaputta that the spiritual life did not depend on answers to these questions, which were mere distractions from the real challenge of practicing the path.

The Buddha then compared the metaphysician to a person struck by a poisoned arrow. When relatives bring a surgeon, the person tells the doctor, " I won't let you remove the arrow until you tell me the name of the person who struck me, the type of bow used, the material from which the arrow was made, and the kind of poison used..."

That person would die, the Buddha said, before the arrow was removed. So, too, a metaphysician, struck with the arrow of suffering, will die without ever finding those answers or the path to freedom. [But with freedom also comes direct knowledge of these imponderable questions.]

The Buddha makes suffering the focus only because liberation from all suffering is the goal. It is the focus of this teaching. He deals with the problem of suffering in a way that reveals an extraordinary degree of psychological insight.

Like some kind of a psychoanalyst, the Buddha traces suffering (disappointment, unsatisfactoriness, lack of fulfillment) to its roots within our minds/hearts, to our craving and clinging, and shows that the cure, the final solution to the problem of suffering, is achieved in our minds.

To gain freedom from rebirth and suffering, it is futile to pray to the gods, to worship objects, to become attached to rituals and ceremonies.

Suffering arises from our mental defilements, so we have to purify our minds of these defilements, from greed, hatred, and delusion. This requires profound inner honesty. More