A Question Of Mass Suicide

Recently a correspondent, Manfred from Germany, asked me a question. As I have been asked this same question several times before and have even thought about it myself, I thought I might a try to give an answer it on my blog. There is the question - There is a very odd story in the Tipitaka where the Buddha instructs some monks to do the meditation on the repulsiveness of the body and then goes on solitary retreat. While he is away some monks become so disgusted with their bodies that they commit suicide, and one of them even offers to kills the other monks wanting to be free from their repulsive bodies. Only when the Buddha returned from his retreat does he address the situation. My question is: How is it possible that the Buddha, who is regarded by Buddhists the “incomparable Teacher of gods and men”, and who had the ability to foresee the destinies of beings, let it come to this? If this story is true he can’t have been a very good teacher, one might say.
The incident that Manfred is referring to, admittedly a rather troubling one, is to be found at Vinaya III,68-71. Most scholars agree that the Vinaya in its present form is significantly later than the four Nikayas and its language, structure and the historical data it contains all confirm this. When we look at the mass suicide story the first thing we notice is that like many stories in the Vinaya it is formularistic, which suggests that it is artificial. We also have to consider the context in which the story is found. It occurs in the third part of the Parajika which deals with murder. Each situation or behavior that would or might be considered murder is illustrated by a story. Some of these stories are plausible and may have actually happened, others are rather forced and implausible. The mass suicide story looks very much like it has been constructed as an excuse to make a rule concerning encouraging a person to kill themselves or to assist them in killing themselves, rather than being an incident that actually happened. Can we really believe that 60 monks (that’s what the story says) a day killed themselves simply by doing the meditation on the repulsiveness of the body? So I would a suggest that the mass suicide is illustrative rather than actual.
Now we come to the second part of Manfred’s question – Was the Buddha really a ‘teacher of gods and humans’, could he really foresee the destinies of other beings making him a perfect teacher? Certainly the four Nikayas portrays the Buddha as an exceptional skillful teacher and I have no doubt that this portrait and the many examples of this teaching skills are authentic. I even believe that his wisdom was so sharp and his understand of the human psyche was so profound, that he was often able to know exactly what was best for a person as far as meditation. In fact, it was probably this ability that gave rise to the belief that the Buddha could unfailingly read everything in the mind of every person who approached him.

The Broken Buddha

I was happily surprised to find this relatively positive review of my book The Broken Buddha. Hopefully it will encourage a few others to read it and give some thought to the issues it raises. http://enlightenmentward.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/two-shores-of-zen-and-the-broken-buddha-comments-on-two-books/

Untying The Knot

Divorce is the legal ending of a marriage. In many religions, marriage is a religious act and thus there are various restrictions on divorce. In some religions such as Christianity, divorce is possible only if one partner commits adultery while in other religions, divorce is allowed but is the prerogative of the husband only. The Encyclopaedia of Buddhism has no entry of divorce and even the entry on marriage does not refer to it either. The new Encyclopedia of Buddhism (Macmillian Reference USA, 2004) doesn’t have an entry on divorce or marriage either and the only reference to marriage is to clerical marriage. Does this tell us something about Buddhism?!!

I have been unable to find anything in the Tipitaka that the Buddha says about divorce, indeed I can’t even find a Pali word for it. Likewise I have been unable to find any incident of divorce in the Tipitaka. However, there are at least two stories in which a man decides to become a monk and in one case just walks out on his wife, and in another he tells his wives that he will give them to any man they would like to be given to (I cant find the references right now but they are there). It would seem that while marriage was a formal matter, divorce was informal. If a wife didn’t like her husband she just went back to her family and if a husband didn’t like his wife he just told her to leave. In the Jatakas there are several stories where a husband puts his wife away (e.g. Ja.II,115). More interestingly, in the Godha Jataka, the Bodhisattva tells a woman that if her husband does not love her and treats her with disrespect, that she should leave him (Ja.III,107-9). He gives her this sound advice -
Revere the reverent, honor the honorable,

Be dutiful to he who does his duty.
But don’t help one who does you harm,
Or give your heart to one who loves you not.
Leave him who does not care for you,
Who would without a thought abandon you.
Finding that the tree has no fruit,
The wise bird flies off into the big wide world.
In later Hinduism it seems that it was impossible for a wife to leave her husband although a husband could expel his wife on whim. This is affirmed by the Ramayana where Rama abandons Sita just on the suspicion that she had been unfaithful. At least in India, probably within both Buddhist and Hindu communities, the fate of an abandoned wife was probably a grim one. In his beautiful book about pre-modern Burma, Soul of a People, Fielding-Hall says that when a young man and woman fell in love they just moved in with each other and if their feelings towards each other changed they just parted company, the woman often keeping the house or taking everything he considered hers with her. Even today apparently, the Burmese government has trouble getting people to register their marriages. I can’t remember what traditional Kandyian law in Sri Lanka says about divorce but as I recall it was regulated by law.

Because Buddhism sees marriage, not as a sacrament but as an agreement between two people or two families, it accepts that if the two people involved agree to end their relationship they can do so. Buddhism and all Buddhist cultures have always seen marriage as a relationship to be treasured and which is worth maintaining but at the same time they have rarely had legal restrictions on divorce (see http://www.buddhismatoz.com/ under Marriage).

I have always been bewildered by the conservative religious hostility towards and opposition to gay marriage. The usual justification for this hostility is that it ‘undermines the family’. But being just a simple monk I would have thought that the biggest danger to ‘the family’ would be the liberal divorce laws in most developed countries. And there is no doubt that such laws have had an impact on divorce rates. In the US in 2008 40% of marriages ended in divorce and in the UK in 2007 11.9 per 1000 of the married population got divorced. And then there is co-habitation, living together without being married. In my country Australia a whopping 22% of couples were co-habiting in 2005 rather than being married. In the US in the same year 4.85 million couples were co-habiting. It is even illegal in seven states but the law is no longer enforced. Isn’t it strange that religious conservatives are not campaigning against liberal divorce laws and pressing for the criminalizing of co-habitation in the name of ‘the family’. In Australia they now have a political party called Family First Party led by an Assemblies of God pastor. The party predictably opposes same-sex marriage but just as predictably is silent about the country’s burgeoning divorce rate and high rate of co-habitation.

Not The End Yet

Yesterday was the second anniversary of Dhamma Musings. For two years I have blogged nearly every day except when I was out of Singapore. I haven’t counted how many blogged I posted during these two years but its about 640. While most of these have been about one or another aspect of the Dhamma, I have also blogged about Buddhist art, history, culture, currant affairs and occasionally about a few things that are only distantly related to Buddhism. It has been a most fruitful two years for me. It has required me to revisit various aspects of the Dhamma, look at aspects of it that I have never or only rarely looked at before, and give to some thought to things I never have before. You, my readers, through your comments, have been appreciative, informative, kindly, and occasionally challenging. I have enjoyed at all enormously. However, blogging daily is now proving to be taking too much of my time and energy. So from now on I intend to blog irregularly, although I will try to post at least one blog every Sunday. In the meantime, I invite readers to check out some of my old posts that they may not have read before. Here are a few of my favourites.
http://sdhammika.blogspot.com/2009/03/gift-of-life.html
http://sdhammika.blogspot.com/2009/02/i-want-my-mummy.html
http://sdhammika.blogspot.com/2009/01/prayer-wheels.html
http://sdhammika.blogspot.com/2008/11/belated-but-better-for-it.html
http://sdhammika.blogspot.com/2008/10/life-dont-take-it-lightly.html

Kamma And Disabilities

Being disabled is the state of being physically or mentally less developed or incomplete. Some misinformed Buddhists believe that to be disabled must be the result of having done something negative in a former life. Such a belief is a good example of what can be called kammic naivety. Positive or negative kamma manifests itself as either positive or negative feelings. In reality, a person with a physical handicap can be as happy as a fully developed person, sometimes more so. It has likewise been observed that people with Downs Syndrome are often gentle, loving and innocent, in stark contrast to some 'normal' people. We may see a disabled person and think: 'I would not like to be like that' but our own feelings are no indicator of theirs. It is quite possible that a disabled person could accept their condition and be happy, content and fulfilled. This being so, it is an unsafe generalization to say that being physically or mentally disabled is the result of having done something negative in the past. Science has demonstrated that most disabilities are due to a genetic fault and thus from the perspective of Buddhist doctrine, have their cause in biological and physical laws (bija niyama and utu niyama), not kamma.
Some of the Buddha's disciples were physically disabled – Khujjuttara was a hunchback and Bhaddiya was a dwarf. The first was praised by the Buddha for her great learning (A.I,26) and the second for his beautiful voice. Khujjuttara attained the first stage of enlightenment and Bhaddiya became fully enlightened (S.II,279). Clearly, being physically disabled is no barrier to spiritual attainment. The Buddha made it an offence for monks or nuns to mimic physical disabilities (yathavajjena kilanti, Vin.III,179).

Meditation And Natural Beauty

The Buddha and his ordained disciples spent a significant amount of their time in natural surroundings. This was mainly because forests offered them the silence and peace that can make meditation easier. But apart from this advantage, it seems the beauties of the natural world, of the groves and hills, the flowers and the jungle pools, the rustle of the leaves and the songs of the birds, have in some way the ability to enhanced meditation. The Buddha specifically mentioned that he decided to settle down to do the final meditation just before his enlightenment at Uruvela (i.e.Bodh Gaya), in part because of the sylvan surroundings. He said: ‘Then, being a seeker for the good, searching for the incomparable, matchless path of peace, while walking on tour through Magadha, I arrived at Uruvela, the army township. There I saw a beautiful stretch of ground, a lovely woodland grove, a clear flowing river with a delightful bank and a village nearby for support. And I thought, "Indeed, this is a good place for a young man set on striving." So I sat down there, thinking, "Indeed, this is a good place for striving." ' (M.I,166-7).

The Visuddhimagga says that different psychological types can meditate better in location better than in another. A person prone to negative passions, it suggests, does better in an ‘abode provided with shade and water, with well-proportioned walls, pillars and steps, with attractive frieze and lattice-work and brightened with various types of paintings’.A slow-minded person should, it continues, do their meditation an un-enclosed location, for example `where gardens, groves and ponds, pleasant prospects, panoramas of villages, towns and landscapes and the blue haze of the hills are visible’. (Vis.110).
If the beauties natural world can assist meditation it is also true that the meditator’s mind can develop a heightened awareness of and appreciation for beauty, including natural beauty. When someone told him that he found the forests frightening, the Buddha replied: ‘At the midday hour when the birds are quiet, I find the rustle of the great forest delightful.’ (S.I,7). Much of the poetry in the Theragatha and the Therigatha bears eloquent testimony to the link between successful meditation and the sensitivity to nature. The monk Bhuta said that meditation together with sylvan surroundings filled him with the highest joy. ‘When the storm clouds rumble and pour down their torrents and the birds take to the sky, the monk who has gone to his grotto to meditate finds no greater delight than this. When happily meditating on the flowery river bank, surrounded by the many and varied plants, he finds no greater delight than this. When night comes to the lonely grove with a shower of rain and the roar of the fanged beasts, the monk who has gone to his grotto to meditate finds no greater delight than this.’ (Th.522-4). Another monk, Talaputa, composed these verses. ‘In a rocky grotto on a mountain peak, a delightful place, where wild boar and deer roam, sprinkled with rain drops, I go to my cave and rejoice. Peacocks with their azure necks, beautiful crests, colorful tails and variegated wings, greet the rolling thunder with their calls. What delight as you meditate in the woods! And when the rain has fallen, when the grass is four fingers high, when the forest is in full bloom, I shall drift like a cloud on the mountain, lie like a tree in the forest, light as a wisp of cotton.'(Th.1135-7).
A few passages in the Tipitaka even suggested that the beauty of the landscape could be enhanced by the enlightened ascetics who chose to make it their abode. ‘Whether in village or forest, on hills or plain, wherever saints live, that is a delightful place.’ (Dhp.98).

When Buddhism Went East

Called the Sulawesi Buddha after the Indonesian island where it was found, this statue is one of the finest pieces of bronze sculpture from ancient South-east Asia. It was unearthed in 1921 at Sikendung on the west coast of Sulawesi. The statue is in the Amaravati style of south India (3rd to 5th century CE) and was either imported from there or is a copy made by a local Indonesian sculptor. The statue was originally standing although it is now broken off at the waist and its right hand was in the gesture of imparting fearlessness (abhaya mudra) although both hands are now missing. The face has an expression of serene alertness and the features are sharply defined, especially the hair and the folds of the robes. The longitude of the find spot of the Sulawesi Buddha is approx longitude 118 degrees E making it the furthest east material evidence of Buddhism in ancient times has ever been found. The Sulawesi Buddha is now on display in the National Museum in Jayakarta.