3THERE are certain principles common to all schools of Buddhism which may be rightly described as basic Buddhism. You will find them stressed or unstressed at the heart of every school of Buddhisn, and I cannot imagine a presentation of Buddhism in which they do not appear. In choosing them, of course, I am being subjective; I have made my personal choice. Many of you will recognise them as basic principles of the Theravada school, but I am presenting them as the heart of Buddhism itself. As for the schools of Buddhism I believe that they form a pyramid. At the base is Theravada Buddhism; built upon it are complementary principles to be found in the Mahayana, the larger and later school of Buddhism. At the top is Zen Buddhism, highest of all because it cuts out organised means and methods of technique, and in essence and at its best goes straight to Enlightenment. Of these various schools the Theravada is undoubtedly the oldest. It is the only surviving school of eighteen which together formed what in those days was called by certain Mahayanists the ‘Hinayana’-the ‘smaller vehicle’. This term, a trifle contemptuous, has its place in history, but today we use the term Theravada which, with another of the eighteen, the Sarvastivadins, alone represents that great school which is the oldest in Buddhist history.

A word or two about Buddhist history and geography. Nothing was written down by the Buddha, nor by his followers for at least four hundred years. For all this time tradition was handed on from mouth to mouth through the Bhikkhus, the members of the Buddhist Order, and only about 100 B.C. was some of it written down in Ceylon in the language of Pali. Geographically, the teaching as then known was sent by the Buddhist Emperor Asoka in the third century B.C. by his son and daughter to Ceylon. There, outside Anuradhapura, one of the ‘lost cities’ now recovered from the jungle, is the hill and the very cell where Mahinda lived, and there is the tree which is a cutting taken from the Bodhi-tree under which the Buddha attained Enlightenment, still standing today after 2,200 years. The teaching spread from Ceylon into Burma, into Thailand and down into Cambodia, and between them those countries represent what is now called the Theravada School. Later, but not as late as many people think, there was formed the beginnings of another school, which expanded and in due course became the Mahayana. This new tradition, using as its language Sanskrit and the languages of the countries into which it flowed, moved east along the old trade routes into China and so through into Korea and thence into Japan. It went north into Tibet and Mongolia. But it is easy to exaggerate the differences and relative importance of these Schools. Much of the Buddhism of Burma, for example, is Mahayana, and one needs but scratch below the surface of Tibetan Buddhism to find the basic principles of the Theravada School. The differences are historic rather than basically doctrinal. We who want to understand the whole of Buddhism, at least in outline, need to be aware of the differences, but when it comes to practice we may take what we find to be useful to us, and apply it as we will.

4In due course Buddhism came West, first through translations by Westerners in Eastern countries who, becoming interested, chose a particular scripture in a native language and proceeded to translate it into English or French or German and then publish it. That was the position until about 1880 when Professor Rhys Davids and his wife began to translate systematically the whole of the Pali Canon into English by means of the Pali Text Society.

The principles of Buddhism as a living religion, as a way of life, first came to this country in 1908, when an Englishman, having taken the Robe in Burma, returned to England as Ananda Metteyya at the head of a Buddhist Mission to the West. For him was founded the Buddhist Society of Great Britain and Ireland, which functioned until about 1921, being replaced by the present Buddhist Society on 19th November 1924. At that time the only Buddhism in London was Theravada and we were perfectly happy with it. We found it a magnificent way of life. But in 1927 there was published the first of the Essays in Zen Buddhism by Dr. D. T. Suzuki, and a new world was opened. For the first time we began to study the complementary principles of the Mahayana, particularly as found in Zen. As the years went by a curious structure appeared, that of a bird with two wings but with little or no body. For nearly every Buddhist in England claims to be basically either Theravada or Zen. There is practically nothing in between! But these are in fact the wing tips of Buddhism, and at present in London the vast body of the bird, the psychology, metaphysics, philosophy, religion and culture of the Mahayana, is still remarkably unknown. Maybe in the days to come that too will be developed. The field of Buddhism is vast indeed, for in each country its local beliefs and ideas, the background and conditioning of the national mind, has affected the teaching as received, and you will find the Buddhism of Ceylon and Japan and Tibet remarkably different. Nonetheless at the heart of them all are the same basic principles.

There is no authority for what is Buddhism and none for what is truth. There is no Pope in Buddhism, nor anything like it; the nearest is the position of H.H. the Dalai Lama in relation to one of the schools of Tibet, the Gelug-pa school, and perhaps the Sangharaja of Thailand who is the supreme head of the Order in Thailand. But neither of those persons would say “This is Truth, and you dare not disagree with me”. There is therefore no dogma in Buddhism, and in the absence of all dogma there is such remarkable tolerance that people in the West today who come to Buddhism are immensely impressed by this genuine and almost absolute tolerance exhibited by Buddhists for other points of view. In the great University of Nalanda, the greatest University of which the world has record, which lasted for 700 years in north-east India, there were, according to travellers who visited it, at one time a hundred lectures a day given by the greatest minds of the East to the ten thousand students in residence. Every conceivable point of view in the Buddhist field was set forth and discussed, and there is no record of one ill word against a man for having a different point of view.

What, then, is Buddhism? In the absence of ‘authority’ and dogma it is not always easy to say. The Scriptures of course are a guide, but obviously they have been affected by monkish editing as the years went by. From the Pali Canon we know more or less what was written down 5about two thousand years ago, but that is not ‘authority’, and Buddhism is the most remarkable religion in the world in that it contains in its own Scriptures the statement that those very Scriptures are not authority for what is truth! There is nothing to equal the Kalama Sutta, where the Buddha is reported as saying to those about him, “Do not believe anything because a sage tells it to you, or because it is written down, or because it is held to be the holy scriptures of some particular school; only when it accords with what you have found to be true, only when it leads you towards the end of suffering, towards Nirvana, will you accept it.” Surely this is unique in the whole of the world’s scriptures, when the Buddha, the Founder himself, is telling his followers, “Do not believe even what I say, unless you find it to be true.”

What did the Buddha teach? There is only one honest answer to that, that we do not really know. He himself wrote nothing, and nothing was written down for at least four hundred years. In the course of generations of passing from hand to hand, much of the message was inevitably misunderstood, or forgotten, or dropped in favour of the bright ideas of other people who thought they knew better what the Buddha said. Nevertheless we have a tradition; an esoteric, unwritten tradition, and an exoteric tradition written down in the scriptures of the various schools. In the study of that teaching, to see whether it be true, no faith is needed save this, that the Buddha did attain Enlightenment, and that he pointed out the Way which led from what he was to the Enlightenment that he attained. Perhaps I should add that we must take on faith that what one man did all men may do. To the Buddhist faith is not more than that in a guide who says, “I will show you how to get to that town; follow me.” We must have faith in him (a) that there is such a town, (b) that he has knowledge of the way to it and (c), that if he has found it so can we.

What, then, is the basic Buddhism common to all schools? I believe it to be this. The Three Signs of Being, the third of them being Dukkha, suffering, from which may be drawn up the Four Noble Truths, of which the last is the Eightfold Way which leads from what we are to what we would be. It is the path from here and now to Enlightenment. It is a Middle Way which leads to the Arhat ideal of the worthy man who attains perfection. Add to all this the cosmic law by which the whole of the Way is trodden, the law of Karma, and the vast periods of time envisaged in the doctrine of Rebirth, and all that is left is the goal, Nirvana. I believe that to be basic Buddhism and I believe it to be enough to enable millions of people of the present and the future to move a long way towards that Enlightenment. It can be described in English and needs no more than a dozen Pali terms. Each of these principles is so tremendous that it is as though a man were to pick up a house and try to walk about with it, or to open his mouth and to take in the Niagara Falls. Each is no more a plaything than is a thunderstorm. These are titanic, cosmic principles of universal power, to the extent that if we open our hearts and minds and let them enter a great deal will happen to us. It should indeed be the end of the ‘I’ in us! There will always, I believe, be a school in England of people content with those principles, without looking further, because they reflect a deep-rooted strain in the English character. But I beg of you not to imagine that this is necessarily sufficient for all. In the course of Mahayana development the whole field of Buddhology was profoundly modified; the principle of Karuna (Compassion) was seen to be as great 6and necessary as that of Prajna (Wisdom), and was extended to an importance never surpassed in any other religion of the world. There was a greatly expanded teaching in the field of philosophy, metaphysics, mysticism, religion, para-psychology, art and culture. Some Buddhist minds went further, to the direct and vigorous path of Zen; others have preferred the path of ritual for the development of inner powers and their use, particularly in the Tantric schools of Tibet. But, I repeat, it is easy to exaggerate the differences between these schools. Let us regard them as complementary ways of attaining the same goal, and extend to each of them the tolerance which we ask for our own.

BASIC Buddhism proclaims three things, and says them loud and long: “See for yourself, check again and again for yourself, and then do it yourself”. As an aid to all laymen, the Buddhist Order, the Sangha founded by the Buddha, exists today. It is the oldest religious Order on earth, and the Bhikkhus of the Theravada school, with which we are mainly concerned in this talk, keep today 227 Rules most of which existed in the Buddha’s time. Complaint is made that they are not sufficiently modified to suit Western conditions. I appreciate the complaints and to some extent I make them, but I see the answer—let one of them go and where do we stop? In a short time there are none. Yet the Order has probably been maintained by its Rules, and Buddhism has survived and is with us today because that Order has survived through all those centuries. That is why it is important that the monastic life should be maintained, and I for one have for thirty years worked for the openiug of a Vihara and a group of Bhikkhus in a permanent house in England, because I doubt if we should preserve the Theravada tradition without it.

How does one become a Buddhist? The answer, of course, is by treading the Path, or trying to. He is a Buddhist who tries to tread the Buddha’s Middle Way to Enlightenment. I cannot conceive of a Buddhist who does not.

For formal admission to the Buddhist fold and for frequent repetition the Theravadins ‘take Pansil’. Pansil is making, in Pali or English, a triple invocation to the supreme Enlightenment of the Buddha, and then taking vows to oneself to do one’s best to train oneself in the basic ethical path. Not to take life, not to steal, to be as chaste as possible, not to lie and to avoid such intoxicating liquors or drugs that tend to stupefy and therefore make it more difficult to tread the Eightfold Path. That simple formula is all, and if there is such a thing as becoming a Buddhist formally it is by taking Pansil before a Bhikkhu.

And so to the basic principles of Buddhism. First the Three Signs of Being. The Buddha has been described as the first scientist of history. He did not begin by saying “There is an all-powerful, immortal God; let us worship him.” He began by saying “Look; look around you, look at life, look at circumstances, see what you find. You will find that all compounded things, and everything is ‘compounded’ save Nirvana, are inseparable from change.” They are equally inseparable from suffering in one form or another, and every conceivable thing visible and invisible, is Anattā, without a separate, permanent, self. Those three Signs of Being studied through many years and understood severally and in their relation, provide enough ‘religion’ for any man for any one life. I regret therefore that they are slipping out of our consciousness7 today and that we in the Buddhist Movement concentrate on other things instead. Let us go back to them.

Change; every conceivable thing we can think or feel or know in any way, is changing all the time, and nothing on earth or in heaven can stop this change. Do we understand that and live accordingly? No! Yet all things (and everything is a ‘thing’, including a thought) are unreal and changing all the time. The whole of life is a perpetual flux. The whole process of life is like the flow of a river. Everything that is born goes through the same process; birth, growth, decay and death, and every thing is a form. That, however, which informs the form, life, does not die. There is no death, save of the ever-changing, ever-fleeting form. But every single thing is changing all the time and will sooner or later die. Do we accept this fact? No! We fight it. We loathe the onset of old age. We are so frightened of death that we will not discuss it, and a word like cancer must not be mentioned. Yet as Buddhists we ought to know better. We know that we die; at the end of every life we die and we shall go on dying, many times. What dies? A body of flesh which after a while becomes a burden. But ‘we’ go on. What goes on we will see later. All things are born, but everything, and the whole totality of things, the whole manifested Universe, comes from the “Unborn, Unoriginated, Unformed”, as the Buddha called it, and this “rolling and unrolling of the worlds” is described in the Pali Canon. The unrolling, the periodic manifestation of the Universe in the field of matter, and the rolling up again, or withdrawing of the Universe back into the “Unborn, Unoriginated, Unformed”, is a process which in the illusion of time takes billions of years; in the East they will give you the precise number of figures. Let us admit that we don’t like change; we fight it. We prefer the word security. We crave for some permanent base—home—from which to go forth to face the world, to adjust ourselves to other forms of life, to adjust our values of what we like and do not like, our ideas of what is true and untrue, better and worse, important and unimportant, and we like to come back to our base. But we cannot have such a base, not if we are Buddhists. This urge for a permanent home must be watched. The Chinese say that “the place that is nowhere, that is the true home.” The Anagarika Dharmapala, the greatest missionary of modern times, adopted for himself the description ‘anāgārika’ the ‘homeless one’, for he went forth from his home in Ceylon and wandered the world to ‘proclaim the Dhamma.’ We, too, must be in one sense permanently homeless.

What are the words used by the Buddha when he saw Enlightenment ahead? I am quoting from The Light of Asia:

“Many a house of life
Hath held me—seeking ever him who wrought
These prisons of the senses, sorrow-fraught;
Sore was my ceaseless strife!
But now,
Thou builder of this tabernacle—Thou!
I know thee! Never shalt thou build again
These walls of pain,
Nor raise the roof-tree of deceits, nor lay
Fresh rafters on the clay:
8Broken thy house is, and the ridge-pole split!
Delusion fashioned it!
Safe pass I thence—deliverance to obtain,”

We have to break that house of self, from which we go forth daily and to which we shall return until we too are anāgārika, homeless. As they say in the Zen School, “Let the mind abide nowhere”, not even in Buddhism, or any part of it. We must learn to live in perpetual uncertainty and contentedly so. Consider the lilies of the field that care not for tomorrow. “These cloud-capped towers, these gorgeous palaces,” described in Shakespeare’s Tempest, may be gorgeous indeed but they are coming down tomorrow! Even the mountain, though the process take ten million years, is rubbed down by the wind and rain until it ceases to exist. Large or small, whether the life of the unit be a billionth of a second or ten billion years, each thing is born, grows, decays, and dies, and we just don’t like it! We must therefore learn to live in the present, in the now, not troubling unduly about tomorrow because tomorrow will have its own Dhamma. May I quote from an old love song that I knew in my childhood?

“Only we’ll sit awhile as children play
Without tomorrow, without yesterday.”

The law of change has no exception, and ‘I’ am not an exception to that rule. This applies to the physical body, as we all know, but it also applies to our feelings, which are also changing all the time. And it applies to our thoughts, ever-changing with enormous speed. Then what is left? The intuition? But the intuition is a faculty in the mind, above the plane of the intellect, by which we contact Reality. It is of substance, however fine, and it is not permanent. Then what is left? Nothing that is mine. There is no single part or principle or faculty of any kind in me which eternally separates me from you. There is no self in any one of us which is not changing all the time and will not pass and perish. That in each man which is immortal, which is the “Unborn, Unoriginated, Unformed”, is not his. That which is his will die. Do not be deluded by the teaching in some Buddhist countries that “there is no soul, there is no self,” because it is untrue. But the true Buddhist teaching, that there is no separate, immortal self, that all that we claim as ‘I’ is illusion, is a tremendous teaching, and one of the greatest discoveries of all mankind. The Buddha never said there is no self, and indeed he refused to say that there is no self when specifically asked to say so. Equally, he refused to say that there is a self, because both statements are true and both are untrue. In one way there is a self and in one way there is not. Perhaps Dr. D. T. Suzuki has said the last word on it, “Anattā is a matter of experience.” Meanwhile what matters to us all is this, that 99 per cent of what says ‘I’ is an illusion, and a dangerous and evil illusion, because it causes most of such ‘I’s’ suffering. That is why the ‘ego’ has to die, because it is an illusion which actually causes suffering which we are trying to remove by treading the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path. In our illusion, we fight against change and particularly against the change in self, and that very fighting causes suffering.

So now we have the interrelation of these Three Signs. Change, 9“change and decay in all around I see”, is something we dislike, and in our folly fight. In our fight against the law of change, because we do not understand that it includes the self, we cause ourselves suffering. These are the Signs of Being, and if we considered each one separately and the interrelation between them, for hours and months and years, we should be very different people. We should then be flowing with the current of life instead of fighting it. We should then accept ourselves as what we are, knowing that we have made it so, knowing that we can change it as we will. We should not complain of anything else as causing the suffering which we do not like because we are causing it ourselves each moment of the day by resisting, the laws of nature and the Universe. We should be contented people. We should be people standing on the rock of our own consciousness of what we are, instead of on the lie of what we are not. A great deal therefore would happen if we could understand and apply those three basic principles, which you do not take from me, or from the Buddha himself, but which you find to be true if you look, just look, and see.

And so we come to the Four Noble Truths which are based upon the last of those three Signs of Being, that all ‘compounded things’ are inseparable from Dukkha, which is the opposite of Sukha, meaning happiness. It includes unhappiness, incompleteness, frustration, imperfection, impatience and everything which we dislike, about ourselves and each other. That is the First Truth. Face it. Even when you think you are happy, you know quite well that the condition will not last long, and you know quite well that while you are ‘happy’, your neighbour next door is suffering in one way or another. Are you still happy? Therefore we accept suffering as a fact, not a depressing fact unless we make it so; not pessimism, but true. What is the cause of it? You know the cause of suffering. It is this ‘I’. Work it out for yourself. Write down twenty things from which you are suffering at the moment. Are there less than twenty that have a factor in them of ‘I want’, or ‘I don’t want’, ‘I would prefer’, or ‘I disapprove’, or ‘Why can’t they do something or the other’, or ‘Why can’t the Government do this or the boss do that’? Always we are projecting our insufficiencies and miseries and sufferings, and blaming someone else for them. Seldom do we admit that the cause of suffering is the mere fact that ‘I’ exist. “Foregoing self the Universe grows I”, is an immortal phrase in Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia. “Foregoing self the Universe grows ‘I’”:! Or again “Be still and know that I am God”. Why not? Who’s stopping you? What is stopping your awareness that you are the Universe? ‘I’! Who else? We are indeed the cause of our own suffering. Desire, craving, whether the limit of desire be just myself or a large family, or a nation, this is still but an extended form of ‘I’. Think of a conversation between two intelligent people who manage to avoid the word ‘I’, for thirty consecutive seconds. “In my opinion, in my view, I think, I consider, I regard, I approve, I disapprove”! Why not just drop it? What a relief to spend half an hour free from yourself!

The third of the Noble Truths is obvious, is it not? To get rid of suffering, remove the cause. Remove this desire for self, for self aggrandisement, for self-praise, for the approval of one’s fellow men. How? That is the Fourth Truth, the Noble Eightfold Path. Tread that Path 10honestly, fully, totally, all day, to the best of your ability, and in a month a lot begins to happen, and in a year a lot more has happened, and at the end of a life a great deal has happened. Then you will be all set for the next life, when you will tread further still.

It is a Middle Way. Let me give you an illustration. The engineers who made the Roman roads of England sited the road from height to height, moving straight from one point to the next. An archaeologist, seeking a lost section of a Roman road, knew this and used it in his rediscovery. He drew his straight lines on the map, and sought the original. Always he found it, with the very minimum deviation from his ideal line. Here is a lesson for all of us. We cannot tread the perfectly straight line between all opposites, but we can do the best we can. Indeed, the Zen people, in their mystical, non-sensical way, say that we never shall, for “the Middle Path is a path with no middle”! They mean that when you are on the perfectly middle path there is no ‘you’ that is treading it; the ‘I’ has gone. At present we deviate, and I once made a brilliant discovery when watching a friend walk away from me. I said to myself, “Man walks upon two legs”. He does not walk straight forwards but from side to side, shifting his weight from this leg to that, now this side of the path, now that, and back again. The perfect Middle Way is therefore an ideal. It lies between, above and beyond the Pairs of Opposites which are the basic structure of the universe. The whole of manifestation is grounded in this bi-polar field of night and day, in-breathing and out-breathing or, at the highest we can conceive, the Absolute and the Relative. Wherever we look there is an opposite to what we are now considering, and within this field we must tread a middle way, not of weak compromise but in a living synthesis, a creative moving forward in which the opposites are both consumed, digested and made one. I can think of no better analogy than the zip fastener. I don’t know how it works, but the movement weaves together the two sides until they cease to exist as two. So should we walk, with no more opposites behind us for we have woven them as one. Ahead the pair are still divided. As we move forward they approach one another; as we pass they knit: behind us they have ceased to be.

What then is this Middle Way to Enlightenment? It begins, reasonably enough, with a set of working principles, in Pali called ‘right view’, an intellectual understanding, clear and precise, of the laws of life to be tested and applied. Such are the Signs of Being, the Four Noble Truths, Karma and Rebirth, and the pre-eminence of Mind. I have always regarded the second step as right motive, the right reason for entering the Path and pursuing it, through many lives, to its far-off noble end. Why do it? Why not swim with the multitude, with the usual quantum of pleasure and pain, down the river of life to the ultimate sea of “well I really haven’t considered!” The Buddhist answer is definite, that life has a purpose, and every act should be geared to achieve that end. The purpose of life is Enlightenment, for each and every unit of life, great or small, and the only right motive for living life is to obey life’s purpose. Not for the self is life to be lived but totally, in a growing awareness of the undivided wholeness of consciousness, which knows not ‘yours’ or ‘mine’ or any purpose less than the welfare of mankind.

The next three steps are Right Speech, Right Action and Right 11Livelihood, ‘right’ in each case meaning highest or best. I have always been fascinated with the Way of Action, and indeed wrote a book of that name in an attempt to explain it to myself. On New Year’s Day we make ‘good resolutions’. By the end of the first week we are scarcely keeping them; in a month we have probably forgotten that they were ever made. Why? Imagine a classroom of people like this who are given a principle of action which they accept as a good idea. They understand it and decide to adopt it, to apply it forthwith. They have intelligence and will-power and they all go home with the firm intention of applying the new idea without delay. Why, twenty-four hours later, have they forgotten they ever made that vow? What is the resistance in the mind against any such change? Work it out for yourself. I found the answer, or what I thought was the complex answer, most humiliating. We lack the guts—that is the best word for the purpose—to do what we plan to do; in speech, which should be helpful or none; in our livelihood, which should leave mankind just so much better and no worse at the end of the day, and in action, great. or small.

Then comes Right Effort, the continuous and needful effort to drop this habit and to build in that. I agree with Tom Harris when he said last night that Buddhism is not concerned with an attempt to improve the ego but to drop it, but this is a process which itself involves great effort. As I have said elsewhere, “It needs great effort to let go”! But there is nothing which you and I cannot do with our ‘selves’, if we set to work and do not stop from striving.

The Eightfold Path differs from all comparable systems in that its later stages comprise a complete system of mind-development. In this it includes much more than ethics, or morality; this is deliberate self-training to the final Goal. This method of Concentration and Meditation, as I called it in the Society’s publication of that name, includes two separate processes. The first is the creation of the instrument which will be used in the second, meditation. This I have called concentration, (although this word is sometimes used for what I call meditation). Until the mind is able to concentrate at will for considerable periods of time on a chosen object it is useless to attempt meditation, which remains a vague and wandering day-dream. Hand and eye must be trained in every form of sport, and in most forms of art and craftsmanship. Thought-control is needed in dictating a letter and in every function of social life in which anything is created or agreed. But we must go much further if we wish to meditate. Why? Because in normal concentration we are interested in, attracted by and even held by the object of our concentration, whether a business letter, a shopping list or television. There is often an added element of emotion, usually desire. But now the control-point of the operation must be shifted to the learner’s mind. It is easy to concentrate on an exciting fire down the street, or plans for a holiday. It is harder to concentrate for three minutes on a door-knob or for five on one’s breathing. Indeed the latter, for a space of fifteen minutes, calls for a high degree of control. There is nothing spiritual about the exercise; merely the need for practice, practice, practice until practice has made perfect, until the will can focus the trained mind on a chosen, pin-pointed object, and hold it there at will.

When we begin to use this faculty in the field of meditation entirely new laws and considerations apply. We are now entering, as it were, 12the spiritual plane, where motive is of paramount importance, where the dangers are commensurate with the rewards, and where a competent teacher is soon found necessary. For here is the threshold of direct, impersonal spiritual experience, and we must learn the rules, if only for our own safety. Most are a matter of commonsense. One does not allow a child to wander about a power-house, pulling levers to see what happens. It is therefore wise to learn something of the forces about to be released and how to control them. Much of the Yoga and some of the practices taught in the West as Buddhist are of no spiritual value, and produce a variety of highly undesirable effects. The first is a negative trance condition, where the mind is caught in a cul-de-sac on the psychic plane. It is unfortunate that some call this by the mighty name of Samādhi. The second is the development of some of the lower psychic powers, usually with the help of hypnotism. These do but strengthen the ego and wreak havoc in the lower mind. Third, and most dangerous of all effects, is the sudden release of sleeping powers of enormous strength in the deeps of the mind which, uncontrolled, quite literally wreck the brain, and drive the fool who roused them utterly mad for the rest of that life on earth. Why then do you meditate? Answer that question truthfully once a month and at least you will not be added to the host of Westerners who year by year are carried to our mental hospitals as the direct result of wrong meditation. Why, then, do we meditate? For our own glorification, to boast to a neighbour that we can meditate longer than he can, to acquire ‘powers’, to become a holy man respected as such? In other words, are we inflating a new, pseudo-spiritual ego? Or are we using this newly acquired faculty for the destruction of the personal ego, and the development of the higher aspects of the mind until it ceases to be a mere thinking instrument, and uses itself to pass beyond itself, to No-thought, No-mind, from the relative into the Absolute. The practice of meditation is like a pair of steps; we climb to the top and then in Zen language, we ‘jump’. Beyond logic, beyond the intellect, beyond the reach and range of thought, clean into the “Unborn Unoriginated, Unformed”. The process may be long; the methods used are various. There are scores of recorded methods and meditation schools in different religions, in different parts of the world. It is foolish to sneer at any of them and any may be the best for you. But if genuine, each of those methods first produces control of mind, then expansion of mind consciousness and, only finally, the beginnings of a leap into No-mind, beyond the limitations of the individual mind altogether.

Concentration and meditation, then, in one form or another, is fundamental in the Buddhist field of self-development. It is difficult to conceive of a man who can develop spiritual as distinct from psychic powers and move towards Enlightenment without spending periods of time in deliberate inturned, concentrated effort to understand ‘things’ as they are, the self as it really is, and in that stillness to find his own centre, which is the centre of the universe. Here is all-strength, all-wisdom, for in every mind is All-Mind, some dim reflection of the “Unborn, Uncreated, Unformed,” which is the Buddhist name for the Absolute.

Where and when we meditate matters comparatively little. In a special room, in bed or in Piccadilly Circus, it matters not very much. With a mind controllable at will the chosen theme of meditation is there to hand at all times and in all places. What matters for the beginner is 13that he should begin, and then continue. Those are the two rules common to every school of meditation since the world began. The first is hard enough; the second is often found to be quite impossible! But if you decide that tomorrow morning at five minutes to eight you will meditate for five minutes, and that nothing short of a high temperature will stop you doing so for the next 365 days, you will achieve a habit and the habit will grow, in length, depth and importance to you. It will lead in time to samatha, tranquillity of mind and thence, but a long time later, to Samādhi, when the mind’s surface is so still that it will reflect the impersonal light of Enlightenment.

Such are the steps on the Middle Way, and we should be treading them daily, not round and round in a circle, but upwards in a slow, continuous spiral of achievement. On the Way there will be increasing opposition by forces from the subconscious and unconscious mind. These must be faced, accepted and smilingly passed by. But the process is tough.

There are Fetters to be released and dropped as we go, ten ot them. The first, of course, is the delusion of self, that there is a person, distinct from other persons, treading the Path. The belief that ‘I’ matter, that ‘I’ am of importance in the cosmic scheme of things, blinds the mind to all vision of Reality. Then comes doubt, which prevents the walking on, faint-heartedness. Belief in the value of ritual is the next, a nasty one for the Tibetan school, it seems, but the emphasis is on belief that ritual itself will achieve salvation, as distinct from being a means to that end, a raft to be cast aside when the river is crossed. Later comes sensuality. “Kill out desire”, says The Voice of the Silence, “but take heed lest from the dead it should again arise”. And then unkindliness. How can one progress to selflessness when hostile to the million million other forms of the same life-force of Enlightenment, other forms which are born of the same Unborn? “Desire for separate life in the worlds of form” is interesting, for it is another type of the subtlest error of all, belief in self. Indeed it has been rightly said that the Path of Buddhism is not for the liberation of self, but for liberation from self! The next is an even subtler form of self-ishness, desire for separate life in the formless worlds or heaven. Are we secretly working now for some reward in Heaven? Illusion again. The next and truly a binding fetter for all of us is spiritual pride, the marring factor in many an otherwise spiritual man. Many have gone much further on the Path than would now appear, and have fallen through their pride. Here, we say, is a man who knew, but used his knowledge for his self and not mankind. Most of you know the game of Snakes and Ladders. You climb so high, and then near the head of the ladder, it may be, move onto the snake’s head. Down you fall, to the bottom, to start again. And the higher the point attained the further and steeper the fall. There are two more fetters on the list. Self-righteousness, that subtle thought in the back of the mind, is a final claim by self. “How well I am getting on, how near the Goal”! Finally Ignorance, basic nescience, unawareness, the darkness still of the unillumined mind.

All these Fetters must be faced and allowed to fall as the Path proceeds. For there is of course no Path save in the mind. Remember, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought, is made up of our thoughts”, and the Fetters, as we that shed them, are mind-made. But he who has broken the Fetters is the Arhat, the worthy one, who 14has killed all sense of separateness, of self, who now is karma-less, no more to be reborn. True, the later and larger school of the Mahayana of Tibet, Mongolia, China, Korea and Japan, developed the complementary ideal of the Bodhisattva, whose purpose is not the salvation of himself but first of all mankind. The antithesis is false, for the ideals are complementary. It is enough that none can achieve Nirvana, the abode of the Arhat, whose heart still harbours thoughts of separate self, of any distinction between the countless forms and ever-changing manifestations of the ultimate Unborn.

THE twin doctrines of Karma and Rebirth are basic to all schools of Buddhism. The usual view, taught in most Buddhist textbooks, is that cause and effect are equal and opposite, in the moral realm as everywhere else, and that the human mind is the principal causer. The doctrine appears in the New Testament. “As ye sow so shall ye also reap”. Each thought, it is said, each feeling, every act ripples out to the margin of the universe, just as a stone flung into a pond will send out a ripple to the edges of the pond; and from the margins of the universe, a distance which no mind can calculate, the effect ripples back to the point where the stone fell in, to the ‘I’ that caused it. Throughout the process mind is pre-eminent. In the first words of the Dhammapada, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought, it is made up of our thoughts”. It follows that we are our own creation in all that we have and are, mentally, morally and physically. We are what we have made ourselves, and we cannot complain of the results to anyone or anything else. In the same way we shall be what we are making ourselves now. As we are thinking, willing, feeling, desiring, acting now, so shall we be in lives to come, and if we do not like what we are now we can begin to change it. Nothing on earth or in heaven can stand between a cause and its effect. “Not in a cleft in the mountains, not in the depths of the sea”, says the Dhammapada, “can a man escape from the consequences of a deed”. Such is the doctrine. If you find it to be true you can begin to use it now, for it is the most powerful instrument we have at our command. To some extent the law is the Buddhist substitute for God. No Being, personal or impersonal, created the universe, which ‘unrolled’ as a manifestation of what the Buddha described as the “Unborn, Uncreated, Unformed”. At the end of inconceivable periods of time this manifested “Born, Created, Formed” will roll up, back into the “Unborn, Uncreated, Unformed”. No God began this cycle, none controls it. It is itself a living law, and under it, in a sense while being it, we create ourselves.

This mighty concept of a causeless causing can itself be analysed. There are, it is said, divers forms of Karma, in the sense of cause/effect and the relationship between them. There is that which cannot now be stopped, as an avalanche set rolling down the mountainside. This may be fairly described as Fate or Destiny, and of it you may reasonably say, “such is my fate and I can’t do anything about it”. True, but who put you under the avalanche—who started it? You did. Other forms of Karma, in the sense of effects now ripe for reaction can still be modified by what remains of our freewill. For there is freewill, and it is as true as its opposite, predestination. To use an old analogy, supposing in this room, which has three doors, I block up two with furniture, and go to sleep. When I wake there will only be one way out, of the room 15or the situation, and I shall complain and say, “This is fate. I have no choice. There is only one way out and I must take it”. True, but who blocked up the other two doors? He who shut them can reopen them, and in one sense only he. Our will was free until we fettered it: remove the fetters and we are once more free.

If this seems too mechanical, too harsh, remember that Karma is a living law. There is no such thing as a ‘dead law’ in the universe. There cannot be, for there is nothing dead. The Unborn unrolls onto the plane of manifestation, and all that ‘becomes’ in the process is itself the Unborn, using a million million forms for its own unknown, tremendous purposes. We glibly speak of natural laws and cosmic laws, but they are aspects of one Life, whatever name we call it, and each is as much alive as you or I, or a thought or a range of hills. Think on this, for it makes much clear that was not clear before. We are not being ordered about by the dead rule of a God. We are that God, if the power of creation be his attribute. As we think and act so things become, but ours is the sole responsibility.

How noble is this doctrine, how profound! There is in the Buddhist scriptures a fascinating story, brief and bottomless, which seems to me an early and unique example of what the Ch’an or Zen School, a thousand years later, described as satori. It is surely strange, therefore, that neither students of Zen, who are apt to claim satori as their own, nor students of the Theravada, who are apt to sneer at Zen, take heed of it. Sariputta and Moggallana, two Brahmins who later became famous in the Buddha’s ministry, were disciples of the same master, and each promised to tell the other as soon as he had ‘attained the Immortal’. One day Sariputta met the Venerable Assaji, a distinguished member of the Buddha’s Order, and asked Assaji about his Master’s teaching. Assaji explained that he was new to the Order and could not explain the Dhamma, the Buddha’s teaching, in detail. “But tell me the meaning”, said Sariputta. “Why make so much of the letter?” The reply was remarkable. “The Buddha hath the cause described of all things springing from a cause, and also how things cease to be. This is the Great One’s teaching”. Sariputta, the wandering ascetic, having heard this Dhamma-text, “obtained the pure and spotless Dhamma eye”, whereby he saw that “Whatever is an arising thing, that is a ceasing thing”. Thus did Sariputta “attain the Immortal”, by a phrase which, with the passing of time, has been condensed into “Coming to be, coming to be; ceasing to be, ceasing to be’”. Sariputta obviously was ripe for a flash of Enlightenment, and a single phrase, given him secondhand, was enough to provide the spark for the explosion. In Dr. Suzuki’s words, “Sariputta’s understanding of the doctrine of origination and cessation was not the outcome of his intellectual analysis, but an intuitive comprehension of his inner life process”, Let me repeat this mighty teaching in exact translation; “This being, that becomes; from the arising of this, that arises; this not becoming, that does not become; from the ceasing of this, that ceases”. That strikes me, and I offer it to you, as intuitive awareness by a master-mind of one of the great principles of the universe, having in it the life force of the whole universe. All else is analysing it and dragging it down to the level of the intellect. May I quote Miss I. B. Horner, the great authority on Pali Buddhism. “This is a valid epitome of the Buddha’s doctrine, and a sufficient means, if 16one is prepared to act up to what it implies, to the attainment of Immortality and the end of sorrows”. This is indeed the very essence of the Buddha’s teaching, for here is anicca, change, anattā, no-self, and dukkha, suffering, all in cyclic motion on the Wheel of Rebirth. This wheel, with its twelve spokes or nidānas, revolves unceasingly, and we upon it until by breaking some one link in the chain we break free, and henceforth move up the hill to Enlightenment instead of round and round in the world of Samsara, the fretful impotence of everyday. Each of these links or spokes on the wheel, ‘happens’ after its predecesor ‘happens’. Given that situation, this situation arises; destroy this present one and that will never be. Here is an infinitely complex interrelated causation. True, there is a modern complaint against this view of karma, that as a law it is too simple, or too simply expressed, in that no one cause produces any one effect, because there were ten thousand causes which produced that one cause, and this will cause ten thousand effects. It is said that where all conditions are so infinitely complex all that one can usefully say is that out of this vastly complicated situation arises another equally complex. Be it so, but for the purpose of our daily, hourly application of the law surely we may regard it as cause-effect, followed by cause-effect, and learn to live accordingly.

Deep thought on the range and subtlety of this complexity staggers the mind. If what I am thinking, feeling, doing now affects each one of you, it is also affecting—and it matters not to what minute degree—every other ‘unit of thought’, or form of life in the universe. And every other thought and act produced in the universe is likewise affecting you and me. Think on this, and bear in mind that each effect will in turn produce an infinite chain of causes, and no computer yet conceivable could calculate the number of, much less the manner of the billion, billion cause-effects produced and working in a single second of time. Is it not easier far to conceive and learn to experience the universal and indivisible harmony of life itself, the child of the Unborn; and to flow with, and thus hourly use the law, the living law of Karma, to our own and the world’s enlightenment?

This intimate interdependence of all circumstances and of every situation and event must surely be the rational basis of compassion, for if you and I are so related in all that we think and feel and do then truly are we ‘members one of another’; we are brothers born of the same enormous process, from the same Unborn that came into being before the beginning of time. This true compassion, ‘feeling with’ each other, implies that any attempt at separation is hurting me, is hurting you–is therefore folly. If we begin to understand, however dimly, this interrelation and inter-dependence of every form of the same life we have more understanding of each other, more easily expand our individual minds to take in the needs and troubles of each other form of life, and work together for their common solution.

So much for Karma and Rebirth at human level. On its own plane it may be viewed as absolute harmony which, being broken, calls on the doer of the deed to restore the harmony. For he who acts against the interests of another, against the life-force of the wholeness of the Unborn, breaks, or at least affects the total harmony, and he who breaks it to the least degree, must make it whole, must pay. This is that man’s Karma, his ‘destiny’, probably his suffering, but caused by his own folly and 17his alone. He who breaks a china cup must replace it. He who breaks the harmony of the Universe must restore it, at whatever cost to himself. Having controlled our thought and action as best we can we must develop the intuition which alone enables us to see the whole law on its own plane, and to glimpse the Beyond, in which, and in which alone, any unit of life can be free from the effects of Karma. Meanwhile we can use the law, because anything we want to do, or to become or to be we can set about creating now, and none can stop us, for the law of Karma, though inevitable in its working is utterly just; and it is a living law.

And now for Rebirth. I have always regarded it as a logical and inevitable corollary of the doctrine of Karma. Once you accept Karma you must surely accept Rebirth. A man aged seventy has put into operation in a busy life a vast amount of causes, some bad, some middling, a great many good. He then dies. What happens to his unexpended causes? Is it not just that the causer shall reap the effect, good, bad or indifferent? What is so strange about the law of Rebirth? We go to sleep at night leaving many things to be done in the morning, and wake up in the morning after a well-deserved rest. We then carry on where we left off the night before. Why should not the same principle apply life after life? Surely this is reasonable, not difficult to understand, and indeed a necessary view? Why should we not regard our lives as we regard our days and years to come; why not live as if this doctrine were true? Why not, in fact, use our belief and plan our next life with the same care that we plan the next ten years of our present life? It may be that we cannot prove the doctrine of rebirth to be true, though there is much evidence for it, but then as a lawyer I say that nothing worth proving can ever be proved; at the best we attain a high degree of probability. But if we accept it as a working doctrine, and find what problems it solves, how useful it is, we shall find that it not only vastly expands our concept of time, but brings the future of ourselves, and to that extent of all that lives, into control. We shall find that this living law of Karma is indeed an instrument, and the finest instrument for use by each and every part in the salvation of the whole.

And so to the final concept which I put before you as one of the basic principles of Buddhism. We know of the Buddha, the man who found the Goal, that he was a guide not a God; we have the Path by which he attained that Goal; now we must look at the Goal. In Sanskrit it is called Nirvāna; in Pali Nibbāna. What is it? Surely the great sage Nagasena said the last word on the subject to the Greek king Milinda: “Nirvana is!” Nothing more can be truly said, and why? Because Nirvana is the expansion of consciousness to a point beyond thought, and therefore beyond definition or description. It is in a field where thought, and all the duality which thought implies, has ceased to obtain. It is ‘beyond’, beyond the reach of any faculty which we at present possess in conscious functioning, beyond the plane on which we can explain to another what we know, even assuming that in any sense we know it. But we do know this much negatively, that it is the end of any sense of separateness, of the least shadow of difference between what I am and you are, between any thing and any other thing, between the part and the whole. The forms of life remain just so many. forms of life, but in Nirvana we are one with life itself, the Unborm, and forms as such have ceased for us to be viewed as separate. But far more important 18that what Nirvana is is preparation to discover it, which means to uncover it, for it is already within, and waits our knowing. We have all at times known flashes of awareness from ‘beyond’, beyond in that they could not be analysed in terms of emotion or thought. Why not? Because they belong to a realm which is beyond thought. These flashes have many names, but in essence they are the sudden seeing of things as never seen before, a fresh awareness of life as it is, a peep, as it were, into the Absolute at the heart of all perishable ‘things’. These are glimpses of Nirvana, which is only one term for the ‘beyond’ of the “Unborn, Unformed”. At present we cannot control these peeps. They come as they will, suddenly, and we cannot say what is their immediate cause. Perhaps there isn’t one, for they come from a plane beyond causation and its manifold effects. One day we shall command them, raise consciousness to that level at will, because we shall by then, after the effort of many lives, have developed intuition to a point where we can turn it on at will, as a searchlight in the darkness of avidyā, ignorance.

Such are the basic principles of Buddhism. It has been said that they lack the heart of devotion, what Carl Jung called the numinous quality of religion, the warmth of the heart which gives life to the form and makes it live. If this is true it may account for the fact that few really great minds have come from the Theravada, so little art or poetry, so little of that bursting inspiration which bubbled out in the Zen school of China and Japan and produced some of the world’s greatest art and mystical awareness. Nothing has grown from the Theravada since the time of Buddhaghosa in the 4th c. A.D. while the rest of Buddhism went marching on. That is why I hold that the Mahayana had to come, to provide the complementary factors which the heart demanded, that the whole man might be balanced, total, free. Yet each and every one of these later schools has in common the principles above described. On the analogy of the wheel, this basic teaching is the hub, and each development a spoke which radiates from it. It follows that in a thousand years the doctrines found at the end of spokes which are opposite each other may be far apart in this complementary development. You might, for example, find yourself in a Tantric school in Tibet and wonder what its teaching had to do with what you had heard in a monastery in Ceylon. Or you might talk with neighbouring families in a Japanese town and find that one was Shin and the other Zen, and wonder what these two sub-schools of the Mahayana had in common. The answer would be the basic principles above described.

I can speak from first-hand knowledge of the effect they produce in the lives of those brought up on them. I found the Buddhists of the Theravada countries of Burma, Thailand and Ceylon a gentle, friendly people, remarkably tolerant, adoring the Buddha as their guide, and spending much of their time in shrines and temples, offering flowers and the like to the memory of the greatest of the sons of men who showed them the way to happiness. And history relates that the Tibetans, now some of the gentlest and most lovable people on earth, were, before the coming of Buddhism to Tibet, a most brutal, savage tribe.

Why does the West like the Theravada school of Buddhism? I have already suggested one reason, the Puritan strain in the English character. Again, the teaching is immensely practical. This form of 19Buddhism does not begin with assumptions; it has no dogma and calls for no faith save that in a man who claimed to have found a Way and offered himself as a guide to that which all men hold desirable, peace of mind and the end of suffering. Its tenets are working hypotheses to be proved or disproved by the individual. “Do it yourself”, said the Buddha. No man can do it for you, and even “Buddhas do but point the Way”. The English like that; they like to be told that no priest is needed, no services, no apparatus or ritual; not even a chapel or shrine. This is something to be done each moment of the working day wherever you happen to be. The Eightfold Path leads out from the side of the bed each morning, and you pause upon it only to sleep. Again, Buddhism is immensely tolerant, and the English are apt to be tolerant of the other man’s point of view. It is just, in place of the apparent injustice of an extra-Cosmic God, and the Englishman likes justice.

Such Buddhism has no fear of science nor of modern psychology, and each indeed in its own way proves as the years go by the principles of the Dhamma, as taught in the Pali Canon, to be true. One day we shall have in our midst a group of people trained on the one hand in Buddhist principles and on the other in science, or psychology, or other aspects of modern thought. The results of their joint endeavour might shake the western mind from the concrete pedestal of its sad materialism, and let in the light of the Beyond which so few are even willing to see.

These basic principles are all to be found in the Theravada school of Buddhism, and together constitute a moral philosophy or way of life which is, as such, in my view second to none on earth. But there are many in the West who find it far too limited. They crave for a complementary presentation of the great virtues here but lightly mentioned; compassion, the mystical awareness of the Buddhahood within; the virtues of the heart which may not be denied. Let these look further, but if they want these other aspects of the same mind fully developed let them build upon the foundations of tested principles, those which I have here described. I believe, after forty years of study, that the vast field of Buddhism may be viewed as a pyramid, and its foundation is the Theravada; the Mahayana, with its incomparable riclhes of exalted thought and pure experience, should rise on these foundations; there will then be time enough for the pinnacles of Zen. The building will take time to erect, lives and lives of time, but to the Buddhist this is a matter of small consequence. But let each mind that claims the mighty name of Buddhist, a follower of the All-Enlightened One, see that before he attempts the heights of the Mahayana he is fit for the spiritual journey, mentally and morally fit. The training lies, I suggest, in the principles which, applied through twenty-five centuries, have carried the feet of millions so much nearer to Nirvana, the heart’s deliverance. That training waits us here and now. The entrance is perceivable; the end is utterly, and for us contentedly, Beyond.

20

THE BUDDHIST SOCIETY
(Founded as the Buddhist Lodge in 1924)
58 ECCLESTON SQUARE, LONDON, S.W.1

01-828 1313

The Object of the Society is to publish and make known the principles of Buddhism, and to encourage the study and practice of those principles.

Membership is open to all who accept its Object, annual membership fee includes a subscription to The Middle Way and the use of the Library of 5,000 volumes.

Members’ Meetings are held several times a week, including classes for beginners and for meditation. Public Lectures are given regularly. For particulars of all Meetings see the back cover of the current issue of The Middle Way.

The Society adheres to no one school of Buddhism, and is international and unsectarian in membership.

The Society compiles and publishes books, pamphlets, and its Quarterly Journal, The Middle Way.

All further information can be obtained from the Buddhist Society, 58 Eccleston Square, London, S.W.1, (01-828 1313), afternoons only.