My Approach

Discovering what the Buddha may have meant

The Buddha’s teachings have devolved and some might even say “corrupted” over the years, and in a sense Buddhism today can be regarded as a failure since it does not appear to be effective in helping most people, even Buddhists, eliminate suffering.

Is there a way to “rediscover” the original intent and teachings of the Buddha, or are we doomed to wait for the “next” Buddha, who may not appear for thousands of years?

In the pages of this website, I document the journey of my quest to truly understand what the Buddha really taught, and use that as a basis for my own liberation from suffering and craving.

At this point, a question could reasonably be asked: Isn’t this a “scorched earth” approach, and ignores all the effort made by others to date? Surely I am not conceited enough to believe I am superior to all present and past teachers, that I am going to discover something that existing research have not already uncovered?

Indeed, it is a good question and one I have asked myself many times. I don’t believe I am superior to others, and acknowledge many seem to have far more knowledge and experience than myself. There is an extensive amount of research and translations available today, and yes I have read some of them. Indeed, in preparing this article, I feel I am “standing on the shoulders of giants” and very much relying on the expertise of many people: K. R. Norman, Walpoul Rahula, Richard Gombrich, Grzegorz Polak, Mark Allon, Johannes Bronkhorst, Alexander Wynne, Bhikkhu Anālayo, Bhikkhu Bodhi, Bhante Sujato amongst others to name a few.

Why not just rely on their authority, and also the experience of many well known Buddhist practitioners today? That would be nice, except they don’t all agree with each other. Even prominent Buddhist monastics and teachers don’t always share the same views, and it is all too easy to find disagreements and debates in various discussion forums on the Internet. And since none of them have declared that they have attained enlightenment (indeed, by Vinaya rules they are not allowed to), then it is impossible to determine who is right and who is … well … less right.

Therefore, I believe it is still valuable to go through this process of discovery, mainly because for me to truly realise what the Buddha taught, I need to be able to digest, conceptualise and synthesise what I have read in my own terms.

An excerpt from the Foreword of Sujato’s book A History of Mindfulness may help clarify my motivation. Note, I have paraphrased the excerpt to make it more applicable to my situation, my replacements are in parentheses:

An aspiring (student) first learns from the lips of a teacher whose words as they utter them must be the very latest formulation of the topic. Then they might go back to read some of the works of well-known contemporary teachers. Since devotees usually have faith that their teacher (or the teacher’s teacher) was enlightened, they assume, often without reflection, that the teachings must be in accord with the Buddha. Finally, if they are really dedicated, they may go back to read (the actual teachings). Once they come to the text itself, they are already pre-programmed to read the text in a certain way. It takes guts to question one’s teachers; and it takes not just guts, but time and effort to question intelligently.

And therefore the approach:

Our first step must be to forget all we’ve learnt about (the Buddha’s teachings), and to start again from the bottom up. A basic principle of the historical method is that simpler teachings tend to be earlier and hence are likely to be more authentic - we must start with the bricks before we can build a house. It is the shorter, more basic, passages that are the most fundamental presentation of (the Buddha’s teachings). The longer texts are an elaboration. We do not assume that shorter is always earlier, but we take this as a guiding principle whose implications we can follow through.

Polak further clarifies in Reexamining Jhana: Towards a Critical Reconstruction of Early Buddhist Soteriology p. 216:

Similarly to Sujato, I too believe that proper justification and motivation for critical studies of early Buddhism can only be provided by a pragmatic and existential approach.

… Buddhism easily stands out as probably the least dogmatic and the least difficult to harmonize with the scientific worldview. It possesses some apparent flaws, a dose of internal discrepancies, some question marks and we can also encounter some problems connected to its history. These problems certainly would put Buddhism on the edge of being immediately disqualified as the ‘ultimate solution’, were it not for a fascinating perspective of some deeply hidden nucleus, possibly devoid of these flaws. This perspective is provided by the presence of some fundamental internal discrepancies within the Buddhist doctrine, which suggest that some process of evolution of the original doctrine must have occurred, during which the above-mentioned discrepancies made their way into the Buddhist writings. In this way, a critical research of this problem becomes a life’s necessity. It is no longer the case of us trying to find motivation and then justification for this activity, as the questions ‘why should we?’, and ‘do we have right to?’ get transformed to ‘how can we allow ourselves not to?’.

The Buddha himself advocated that his disciples should not to accept any teaching merely on a teacher’s authority, but to work things out for themselves and use common sense in 15A3/2.2.5 Kesamuttisutta:

497. Come, Kālāmas, don’t go by oral transmission, don’t go by lineage, don’t go by hearsay, don’t go by canonical authority, don’t rely on logic, don’t rely on inference, don’t go by reasoned contemplation, don’t go by the acceptance of a view after consideration, don’t go by the appearance of competence, and don’t think ‘The samaṇa is our respected teacher.’ But when you yourselves, Kālāmas, know:

‘These things are wholesome, these things are blameless, these things are praised by the wise, these things, when completed and undertaken, lead to welfare and happiness’ —

then, Kālāmas, you should enter and remain in them.

Assumptions

First of all, I assume that at least some of Buddha’s teachings have been accurately preserved in the Tipiṭaka, otherwise there is no hope of rediscovering what they were. This is in accordance with the main conclusions from the book The Authenticity of the Early Buddhist Texts.
I also have to assume that at one stage the teachings must have been effective, otherwise Buddhism as a religion would have failed a long time ago and we will not know of it today.
The Buddha was not omniscient, even after enlightenment (see Was the Buddha omniscient and was he able to predict the future?). Although he no doubt had a penetrating intellect and a compassionate personality, he is not able to foretell the future, read people’s minds (although he shown to be a good judge of character and understands people well). He does occasionally make mistakes, so we should not assume that he is always correct or his teaching is necessarily the absolute truth.
Therefore, I assume that Buddhism is no longer effective (see The failure of Buddhism?) because the teachings have been corrupted and misinterpreted, but if we can rediscover what the original teachings may have been, then they will be effective.
I also believe that the original teachings are completely integrated and self-consistent, so the key to rediscovering Buddha’s teachings is to find an internally coherent and interlocking subset (see The Evolution of the Buddha’s Teachings and The Core Teachings of the Buddha).
The core teachings of Buddhism should not require a belief in supernatural powers, the different planes of existence, various deities, etc. I am not saying that these do not exist, but the Buddha made it clear that his teachings were sufficient and don’t require speculation on concepts or entities that are unknowable. We also don’t really need to know the details of Buddha’s life, or past lives, entertaining though they may be. So we can set aside any elements from teachings that reference these, and save them for bedtime reading.

Principles

Question and evaluate everything: do not assume a teaching is correct unless it appears to make sense, or can be directly experienced, and is consistent with other teachings that have been previously validated as true.
It is possible to apply rational or logical thinking to evaluate the suttas? It does not necessarily require leaps of faith.
The simplest possible version of a teaching is likely to be the correct one, or at least the least corrupted. It appears that the tendency is for the suttas to be added to rather than redacted, since the monastics that preserved them were keen not to eliminate any of Buddha’s teachings, but apparently believe enhancing them through pericopes (filling out a teaching with stock phrases) is acceptable. If two teachings differ because one appears to be a superset of the other, accept the smaller teaching as a hypothesis for the correct set. The larger set is assumed to be due to a later addition.
Minimum viable proposition: the teachings of the Buddha should be distilled to a core, internally consistent, set which is deemed to be just sufficient to achieve enlightenment. The Tipiṭaka has a lot of repetitions and redundancy, these can be simplified.
All teachings must be evaluated. Do not selectively cherry pick some teachings and disregard others. It is tempting to focus only on the well known and popular suttas, but it is possible some of the more esoteric or difficult to interpret suttas may be more accurate.
Where possible, evaluate the teaching based on the Pāli (or Sanskrit) text and not an English (or Chinese) translation. In particular, retain the Pāli/Sanskrit words for any technical terms.
Reject any teachings not related to the core soteriology. In particular, anything to do with the various heavens and hells, deities, supernatural powers or attainments, etc. This is a fairly innocuous principle to follow regardless whether one believes in supernatural powers or not, since if one manages to achieve enlightenment, then any supernatural powers that may be gained are irrelevant anyway. In 12S2/1.7.10 Susimaparibbājakasutta reaching enlightenment is described as being possible without the acquisition of psychic powers (anekavihitaṁ iddhividhaṁ), divine clairaudience (dibbāya sotadhātuyā visuddhāya), read minds, recall past lives (anekavihitaṁ pubbenivāsaṁ anussaratha), claivoyance (dibbena cakkhunā visuddhena), or even the formless meditative practices:

537. “Susima, do you, knowing and seeing thus, experience various kinds of psychic power — having been one, you become many; having been many, you become one; you appear and vanish; you go unimpeded through walls, ramparts, and mountains as if through space; you dive in and out of the earth as if it were water; you walk on water without sinking as if it were earth; you travel through the air cross-legged like a bird with wings; you touch and stroke with your hand the moon and sun, so mighty and powerful; you exercise bodily mastery even as far as the Brahma-world?” “No, Bhante.”

538. “Susima, do you, knowing and seeing thus, hear both divine and human sounds, far and near, with the purified divine ear, surpassing that of humans?” “No, Bhante.”

539. “Susima, do you, knowing and seeing thus, comprehend with your mind the minds of other beings, other persons — you comprehend a mind with lust as ‘a mind with lust’ … you comprehend a liberated mind as ‘a liberated mind’?” “No, Bhante.”

540. “Susima, do you, knowing and seeing thus, recollect your manifold past lives, that is, one birth … thus you recollect your manifold past lives with their aspects and details?” “No, Bhante.”

541. “Susima, do you, knowing and seeing thus, see beings passing away and reappearing, with the purified divine eye, surpassing that of humans … you understand beings as they fare according to their kamma?” “No, Bhante.”

542. “Susima, do you, knowing and seeing thus, dwell having touched with your body those peaceful formless liberations that transcend form?” “No, Bhante.”

543. “Now, Susima, this declaration and the non-attainment of these qualities — what is this?”

544. Then Venerable Susima, falling with his head at the Buddha’s feet, said to the Buddha: “An offense has overcome me, Bhante, like a fool, like a deluded one, like an unskillful one, who has gone forth in this well-proclaimed Dhamma and Vinaya as one seeking the Dhamma. May the Blessed One, Bhante, accept my offense as an offense for future restraint.”

Set aside any teachings relating to Buddhism as a religion - rules and prohibitions, customs, sociology etc. Many of these are probably late additions or irrelevant to the soteriology.

In addition, Johannes Bronkhorst proposes a method to arrive at the teaching of the Buddha on the basis of the early canonical texts in Early Buddhist Meditation, a paper presented at the conference “Buddhist Meditation from Ancient India to Modern Asia”, Jogye Order International Conference Hall, Seoul, 29 November 2012:

Put very briefly, the teaching of the Buddha as presented in the early canon contains a number of contradictions. There are views and practices that are sometimes accepted and sometimes rejected. The method I have proposed is based on a study of other religious movements that are known to have existed at the time of the Buddha in the same region of India. It turns out that among the views and practices that are sometimes accepted and sometimes rejected in the Buddhist canon many are also found in those other religious movements. We are therefore entitled to suspect that Buddhism, in the course of its development but before the final redaction of its early canon, underwent the influence of those movements and borrowed some of their views and practices. My proposal is to consider views and practices in the Buddhist canon as borrowings, and therefore as non-authentic, if two criteria are met: (1) they are sometimes accepted and sometimes rejected in the Buddhist canon, and (2) they have their place in the other religious movements of the time. I also submit that the original teaching of the Buddha may have to be looked for among the views and practices that remain after deduction of the borrowings.

Even more importantly, the Buddha himself advised an approach to determine whether a teaching is authentic or not, which he repeated in four variations (depending on whether the teaching was attributed to the Buddha, a saṅga, a group of bhikkhus, or a single bhikkhu) in 7D/3.22 Catumahāpadesakathā:

415. “Here, bhikkhave, a bhikkhu might say: ‘Āvuso, I heard and learned this in the presence of the Buddha: this is the Dhamma, this is the Vinaya, this is the Teacher’s instruction.’ Their statement should be neither approved nor dismissed. Instead, having carefully memorized those words and phrases, you should check them against the Suttas and compare them with the Vinaya. If they don’t fit in the Suttas and aren’t exhibited in the Vinaya, you should draw the conclusion: ‘Clearly this is not the word of the Bhagavā. It has been incorrectly memorized by that bhikkhu.’ And so you should reject it. But if they do fit in the Suttas and are exhibited in the Vinaya, you should draw the conclusion: ‘Clearly this is the word of the Bhagavā. It has been correctly memorized by that bhikkhu.’ This is the first great reference that you should bear in mind.