Buddhist Summer School: The Buddha (1)

Summer School Lesson 1: The Buddha

Bhikkhu Bodhi explains the Dhamma in English

Who is the Buddha in Buddhism? Budh is the ancient Sanskrit/Pali root for "awake," so Wisdom Quarterly Dharma Editors Dhr. Seven and Amber Larson translate the Buddha-Dharma as "Awakenism."

"The Awakened One" (the Buddha) and this Teaching (the Dharma) are all about enlightenment (bodhi) and the end of suffering ("nirvana'ing," nirvana as a verb).

A great intro to Pali canon sutras

When we stand, we're standing. When we sit, we're sitting. When we nirvana, we are nirvana-ing, which is unlike anything in samsara (the round of rebirth and suffering) so there's nothing to compare it to. It is the supreme, the utmost awakening that has gone and is going beyond the beyond.

This begins to become clear with our American scholar-monk Sri Lankan Theravada teacher Bhikkhu Bodhi explains "Buddhism." Tape 1, The Buddha's Teaching: As It Is.

"The Dharma Bum" U Dhammaloka in Burma

Born Jeffrey Block, a New York Jewish philosophy student in California, who earned his doctoral degree at Claremont then traveled to Asia in the footsteps of Venerable U Dhammaloka (formerly Laurence Carroll, Larry O'Rourke, William Colvin), the Irishman who came to California then became the first Westerner ever to ordain as a Theravada Buddhist monk).

Alan Watts [gets] in his own way.

Listening to Alan Watts and surrounded by a burgeoning hippie movement, Dr. Block became a bhikkhu (Buddhist monk), taking the name Venerable Bodhi in Sri Lanka, where the great German Jewish Buddhist scholars were busy translating ancient Buddhist texts from Pali (a colloquial form of Sanskrit also called Magadhi, which is what the Buddha spoke as he taught in Magadha) into modern English.

• What's so great about British Californian Alan Watts? Wiki answers: Unabashed, Watts was not averse to acknowledging his own "irreducible rascality," referring to himself in his autobiography In My Own Way as "a sedentary and contemplative character, an intellectual, a Brahmin, a mystic, and also somewhat of a disreputable epicurean who has three wives, seven children, and five grandchildren" [45].

 

Soshin Maura O'Halloran, Irish bodhisattva

Why California? It is on the western edge of the American Empire, suffused with Asian influences, so it often serves as a springboard to the wisdom of the East. Like Led Zeppelin, lots of adventurous types on a spiritual quest are "Going to California" then on to Kashmir and beyond. Alan Watts found his way from farther east than Bhikkhu Bodhi and all the way to Zen Buddhist Japan, not unlike the Irish bodhisattva Soshin Maura O'Halloran, who went from Boston to Tokyo to practice the Dharma.

• Bhikkhu Bodhi (As It Is); Amber Larson and Dhr. Seven, Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Wisdom Quarterly