[Buddha-l] Re: there he goes again (sam harris)

[L.S. Cousins]

Joy,

>I am wary of claims to exclusivity (proselytism?) in and by Buddhist 
>schools. Not that I necessarily doubt the fact that something is 
>exclusive to a specific school, but rather what surprises me is the 
>fact that the claim is made itself, or that the need to make the 
>claim is felt.

True, but without knowing the religious politics of the time, it is 
hard to evaluate such things.

>Apart from that, there may be many ways to achieve jhana, transe, 
>but I can't believe that the basic principle of 
>mindfulness/focussing/autogenous training (whether it is called 
>withdrawal of the external senses or disengagement from mental 
>processes etc.) wasn't known and practised before the time of the 
>Buddha. So what was new about the four establishings of mindfulness 
>the Buddha taught? Were all four of them taught by the Buddha alone, 
>some of them, was it the specific combination of these four etc.?

It may indeed be taught under other names or arise as a natural 
by-product of other practices, but at present we have no evidence 
that it was formulated as a set of four establishings of mindfulness 
before the time of the Buddha.

For Bhikkhu Bodhi's views on the best rendering, see his revision of 
~Naa.namoli's Majjhima translation - note 135 to Sutta 10. He points 
out that ~Naa.namoli renders this as 'a path that goes in one way 
only' against the widespread understanding that it is a statement 
upholding an exclusive path. He himself adopts the rendering 'the 
direct path' as an attempt to preserve ~Naa.namoli's meaning 'in a 
more stream-lined phrasing'. I do not see that this is quite the case 
as the implication that other paths are indirect seems also exclusive.

He then goes on to suggest that satipa.t.thaana is so-called to 
distinguish it from the approach that proceeds through the jhaanas or 
brahmavihaaras. But, as he admits, there is neither canonical nor 
commentarial support for this view. In fact, it is explicitly 
indicated in the Canon (in the Niddesa passage I quoted earlier) that 
various other lists can also be called ekaayana.

Rather, developing jhaanas or brahmavihaaras is a process of 
developing mindfulness of feeling more and more subtly. So it is 
itself a way of developing the four establishings of mindfulness.

Lance Cousins