In the Buddha's Words - Bhikkhu Bodhi [2]
This book is intended for two types of readers. The first are those not yet acquainted with the Buddha’s discourses who feel the need for a systematic introduction. For such readers, any of the Nikāyas is bound to appear opaque. All four of them, viewed at once, may seem like a jungle—entangling and bewildering, full of unknown beasts—or like the great ocean—vast, tumultuous, and forbidding. I hope that this book will serve as a map to help them wend their way through the jungle of the suttas or as a sturdy ship to carry them across the ocean of the Dhamma.
The second type of readers for whom this book is meant are those, already acquainted with the suttas, who still cannot see how they fit together into an intelligible whole. For such readers, individual suttas may be comprehensible in themselves, but the texts in their totality appear like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle scattered across a table. Once one understands the scheme in this book, one should come away with a clear idea of the architecture of the teaching. Then, with a little reflection, one should be able to determine the place any sutta occupies in the edifice of the Dhamma, whether or not it has been included in this anthology.
This anthology, or any other anthology of suttas, is no substitute for the Nikāyas themselves. My hope is twofold, corresponding to the two types of readers for whom this volume is designed: (1) that newcomers to Early Buddhist literature find this volume whets their appetite for more and encourages them to take the plunge into the full Nikāyas; and (2) that experienced readers of the Nikāyas finish the book with a better understanding of material with which they are already familiar.
If this anthology is meant to make any other point, it is to convey the sheer breadth and range of the Buddha’s wisdom. While Early Buddhism is sometimes depicted as a discipline of world renunciation intended primarily for ascetics and contemplatives, the ancient discourses of the Pāli Canon clearly show us how the Buddha’s wisdom and compassion reached into the very depths of mundane life, providing ordinary people with guidelines for proper conduct and right understanding. Far from being a creed for a monastic élite, ancient Buddhism involved the close collaboration of householders and monastics in the twin tasks of maintaining the Buddha’s teachings and assisting one another in their efforts to walk the path to the extinction of suffering. To fulfill these tasks meaningfully, the Dhamma had to provide them with deep and inexhaustible guidance, inspiration, joy, and consolation. It could never have done this if it had not directly addressed their earnest efforts to combine social and family obligations with an aspiration to realize the highest.
Almost all the passages included in this book have been selected from the above-mentioned publications of the four Nikāyas. Almost all have undergone revisions, usually slight but sometimes major, to accord with my own evolving understanding of the texts and the Pāli language. I have newly translated a small number of suttas from the Aṅguttara Nikāya not included in the above-mentioned anthology. I have also included a handful of suttas from the Udāna and Itivuttaka, two small books belonging to the fifth Nikāya, the Khuddaka Nikāya, the Minor or Miscellaneous Collection. I have based these on John D. Ireland’s translation, published by the Buddhist Publication Society in Sri Lanka, but again I have freely modified them to fit my own preferred diction and terminology. I have given preference to suttas in prose over those in verse, as being more direct and explicit. When a sutta concludes with verses, if these merely restate the preceding prose, in the interest of space I have omitted them.
Each chapter begins with an introduction in which I explain the salient concepts relevant to the theme of the chapter and try to show how the texts I have chosen exemplify that theme. To clarify points arising from both the introductions and the texts, I have included end-notes. These often draw upon