In the Buddha's Words - Bhikkhu Bodhi [118]
This chapter presents texts that offer a broad overview of the Buddha’s world-transcending path; the following two chapters will bring together texts that focus more finely on the training of the mind and the cultivation of wisdom, the two major branches of the world-transcending path. I begin, however, with several suttas that are intended to clarify the purpose of this path, illuminating it from different angles. Text VII,1(1), The Shorter Discourse to Māluṅkyāputta (MN 63), shows that the Buddhist path is not designed to provide theoretical answers to philosophical questions. In this sutta the monk Māluṅkyāputta approaches the Buddha and demands answers to ten speculative questions, threatening to leave the Saṅgha if this demand is not satisfied. Scholars have debated whether the Buddha refused to answer such questions because they are in principle unanswerable or simply because they are irrelevant to a practical resolution of the problem of suffering. Two collections of suttas in the Saṃyutta Nikāya—SN 33:1–10 and SN 44:7–8—make it clear that the Buddha’s “silence” had a deeper basis than mere pragmatic concerns. These suttas show that all such questions are based on an underlying assumption that existence is to be interpreted in terms of a self and a world in which the self is situated. Since these premises are invalid, no answer framed in terms of these premises can be valid, and thus the Buddha must reject the very questions themselves.
However, while the Buddha had philosophical grounds for refusing to answer these questions, he also rejected them because he considered the obsession with their solutions to be irrelevant to the quest for release from suffering. This reason is the evident point of the discourse to Māluṅkyāputta, with its well-known simile of the man shot by the poisoned arrow. Whether any of these views is true or not, the Buddha says, “there is birth, there is aging, there is death, there are sorrow, lamentation, pain, dejection, and despair, the destruction of which I prescribe here and now.” Against the picture of the saṃsāric background sketched at the end of the previous chapter, this statement now takes on an expanded meaning: the “destruction of birth, aging, and death” is not merely the end of suffering in a single lifetime, but the end of the immeasurable suffering of repeated birth, aging, and death that we have undergone in the countless eons of saṃsāra.
Text VII,1(2), The Greater Discourse on the Simile of the Heartwood (MN 29), clarifies from a different angle the Buddha’s purpose in expounding his world-transcending Dhamma. The sutta is about a “clansman” who has gone forth from the household life into homelessness intent on reaching the end of suffering. Though earnest in purpose at the time of his ordination, once he attains some success, whether a lower achievement like gain and honor or a superior one like concentration and insight, he becomes complacent and neglects his original purpose in entering the Buddha’s path. The Buddha declares that none of these stations along the way—not moral discipline, concentration, or even knowledge and vision—is the final goal of the spiritual life. The goal, its heartwood or essential purpose, is “unshakable liberation of the mind,” and he urges those who have entered the path not to be satisfied with anything less.
Text VII,1(3) is a selection of suttas from “The Connected Discourses on the Path” (Maggasạyutta). These suttas state that the purpose of practicing the spiritual life under the Buddha is “the fading away of lust, … final Nibbāna without clinging,” the Noble Eightfold Path being the way to attain each