What's the Buddha's Dharma, Ajahn Chah?

Ajahn Chah (ajahnchah.org) via Ven. Sujato, Ellie Askew, Dhr. Seven (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly

I teach suffering to make an end of suffering, wrapped in the wisdom of the Four Noble Truths

The Buddha was not a Hindu teaching the Vedas. He taught a new Dharma of eight factors.

I'd better sit down, get still, then walk.

When we listen to the Dharma (Dhamma), we must open our hearts and compose ourselves at the core. Let’s not try to accumulate what we hear or make painstaking efforts to retain it in memory.

Let's just let the Dharma flow into our hearts as it reveals itself, and let's keep ourselves continuously open to the flow in the present moment.

What is ready to be retained will remain. It will happen of its own accord, not through forced effort on our part.

Similarly, when we expound the Dharma, there must be no force involved. The Dharma must flow spontaneously from the present moment according to circumstances.

You know, it’s strange, but sometimes people come to me and really show no apparent desire to hear the Dharma, but there it is: It just happens. The Dharma comes flowing out with no effort whatsoever.

Then at other times, people seem to be quite keen to listen. They formally ask for a discourse, and then nothing! It just won’t happen. What can one do?

I don’t know why it is, but I know that things happen in this way. It’s as if people have different levels of receptivity, and when we are there at the same level, things just happen.

What's the Buddha's Dharma?

Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly

First anthropomorphic depiction of the Buddha

Dharma (Pali Dhamma) means "Truth," the way things really are. It also means the "path" to the realization of the way things really are. We follow the Dharma (the Buddha's Teachings) to arrive at the dharma. (We capitalize the word in English to distinguish it as the Buddha's "Dharma and Discipline" or dhamma-vinaya rather than the many other meanings of this multivalent Sanskrit term).

The Buddha summarized the Teachings in the Four Noble (Ennobling) Truths, where noble (aryan) means "enlightened." The fourth truth that ennobles a practitioner is the Ennobling Eightfold Path:

1. Right View
2. Right Intention (Thinking)
3. Right Speech
4. Right Action
5. Right Livelihood
6. Right Effort (Diligence)
7. Right Mindfulness
8. Right Concentration

The subcontinent from Central Asia to Sri Lanka

Like all Buddhist Teachings, these words are incomplete in English. They are packed terms in translation, so they need to be unpacked. These terms all have very specific meanings, usually in the Buddha's language, which was Pali (Magadhi) not the Brahmins' Sanskrit.

Pali was the lingua franca of the Buddha's time. It's simple, and everyone spoke it or some form of it in the area with its hundreds of dialects. Only Brahmins got handed down to them the space tongue of Sanskrit, which was composed and spoken in heaven before it came to earth. It is the liturgical language of the Vedas, so only Brahmins learned to speak it and they usually used it only for ritualistic and religious purposes like studying the ancient "Knowledge Books" of proto-India.

• One of the special powers of a supremely-enlightened buddha is incredible facility with language and communication (a analytical knowledge of language called patisambhidā), developed as the Bodhisattva ("being bent on supreme enlightenment") which makes him able to deftly articulate and communicate the Dharma he has realized and establish a Sangha that carries on the message in the world for a long time. Since his father, Suddhodana, was a king or Scythian (Sakiyan) chieftain and he himself a prince being raised to become king, he was given the best education by his Brahmin tutors and ministers, who likely taught him something about their Vedas written in Sanskrit, which by comparison to Pali is like speaking Spanish and then being shown Latin or learning Aramaic and then being introduced to Hebrew, which is also said to have been handed down from heaven by angels to human society.

When the very bright and well-educated Scythian (Shakyian) Prince Siddhartha Gautama was born in Gandhara (now Afghanistan-Pakistan, not Nepal and not India, which did not yet exist as a country or empire), there was no "India" yet.

Maha Bharat (of Mahabharata fame) had fallen apart centuries earlier and would not be united as an empire of smaller janapadas, kingdoms, and republics until the Buddhist Emperor Ashoka assembled it. Emperor Ashoka was a bloody soaked ruler who became peaceful and converted to pacifist Buddhism from his earlier Vedic beliefs, at least two centuries after the Buddha lived.

India should have its own religion

"Hinduism" (Indus-ism or the many and varied "religions" around the Indus River or of the remnants of the lost but once-great Indus Valley Civilization, with its dead super cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro) only came into existence when the Brahmin Priest Adi Shankara systematically put it together from the many indigenous dharmas centuries after the Buddha taught or Emperor Ashoka united "India" as an empire of incredibly diverse customs and practices.

It seems the invading British scholars had more to do with the name "Hinduism" than anyone in India as they tried to make sense of the "religion," archeology, cultural anthropology, and sociology of their new protectorate colony. While England extracted the subcontinent's resources to enrich itself and Europe, British scholars tried to make sense of the place.

The Buddhist Art of Gandhara

They could not imagine that India did not have a "religion," because as with Ancient Egypt, all of daily life was inseparable from what the West was accustomed to calling the religious or sacred. The British resuscitated "Buddhism," which had been assimilated and subsumed into the panoply of Sri Shankara's Hinduism or Sanatan Dharma, the Eternal Truth.

But Sri Shankara knew the Buddha was a foreigner, an outsider (a Scythian from the northwest frontier lands of wild Scythia), a non-Indian (and certainly not Nepalese as Dr. Ranajit Pal shows, not a "Hindu," not a Brahmin priest, not a teacher of the Vedas.

So the Dharma (Doctrine and Discipline) the Buddha taught was at odds with the Brahmins, Brahmanism, the caste system, mantras, and Brahma worship of the Vedas.

• We can all aspire to the higher knowledges called patisambhidā