In the Buddha's Words - Bhikkhu Bodhi [1]
Venerable Tenzin Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama May 10, 2005
PREFACE
The Buddha’s discourses preserved in the Pāli Canon are called suttas, the Pāli equivalent of the Sanskrit word sūtras. Although the Pāli Canon belongs to a particular Buddhist school—the Theravāda, or School of the Elders—the suttas are by no means exclusively Theravāda Buddhist texts. They stem from the earliest period of Buddhist literary history, a period lasting roughly a hundred years after the Buddha’s death, before the original Buddhist community divided into different schools. The Pāli suttas have counterparts from other early Buddhist schools now extinct, texts sometimes strikingly similar to the Pāli version, differing mainly in settings and arrangements but not in points of doctrine. The suttas, along with their counterparts, thus constitute the most ancient records of the Buddha’s teachings available to us; they are the closest we can come to what the historical Buddha Gotama himself actually taught. The teachings found in them have served as the fountainhead, the primal source, for all the evolving streams of Buddhist doctrine and practice through the centuries. For this reason, they constitute the common heritage of the entire Buddhist tradition, and Buddhists of all schools who wish to understand the taproot of Buddhism should make a close and careful study of them a priority.
In the Pāli Canon the Buddha’s discourses are preserved in collections called Nikāyas. Over the past twenty years, fresh translations of the four major Nikāyas have appeared in print, issued in attractive and affordable editions. Wisdom Publications pioneered this development in 1987 when it published Maurice Walshe’s translation of the Dīgha Nikāya, The Long Discourses of the Buddha. Wisdom followed this precedent by bringing out, in 1995, my revised and edited version of Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli’s handwritten translation of the Majjhima Nikāya, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, followed in 2000 by my new translation of the complete Saṃyutta Nikāya, The Connected Discourses of the Buddha. In 1999, under the imprint of The Sacred Literature Trust Series, AltaMira Press published an anthology of suttas from the Aṅguttara Nikāya, translated by the late Nyanaponika Thera and myself, titled Numerical Discourses of the Buddha. I am currently working on a new translation of the entire Aṅguttara Nikāya, intended for Wisdom Publication’s Teachings of the Buddha series.
Many who have read these larger works have told me, to my satisfaction, that the translations brought the suttas to life for them. Yet others who earnestly sought to enter the deep ocean of the Nikāyas told me something else. They said that while the language of the translations made them far more accessible than earlier translations, they were still grappling for a standpoint from which to see the suttas’ overall structure, a framework within which they all fit together. The Nikāyas themselves do not offer much help in this respect, for their arrangement—with the notable exception of the Saṃyutta Nikāya, which does have a thematic structure—appears almost haphazard.
In an ongoing series of lectures I began giving at Bodhi Monastery in New Jersey in January 2003, I devised a scheme of my own to organize the contents of the Majjhima Nikāya. This scheme unfolds the Buddha’s message progressively, from the simple to the difficult, from the elementary to the profound. Upon reflection, I saw that this scheme could be applied not only to the Majjhima Nikāya, but to the four Nikāyas as a whole. The present book organizes suttas selected from all four Nikāyas within this thematic and progressive