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- This is an unedited religion paper. For fun see if you can figure out the four questions I was supposed to answer about this sutta. The page numbers reference Early Buddhist Discourses.
The Mahātaṇhāsankhaya Sutta (Greater Discourse on the Destruction of Craving) is an exemplary teaching from the Sutta Pitaka (Discourse Basket) of the Pali Canon. Its purpose is to link Gautama Buddha’s explanation of the causes of consciousness and craving to his other teachings and to the purpose of Buddhist practice. To aid this purpose the sutta contains three separate elements: a wrong teaching denounced, the right teaching explained, and the benefit of the right teaching put in contrast to how life works without it.
The discourse opens with a short story which demonstrates what the author of this text, and the Buddhist community in which he lived, would consider a proper response to incorrect understanding of the dhamma. According to the story, a certain bhikku by the name of Sāti holds a view that “this same consciousness” (p. 60) persists between rebirths, that is to say, one’s consciousness is permanent. Sāti’s misstatement is taken seriously by the other monks, who remind him of the correct teaching and try to dissuade him through cross-examination and questioning. In the view of the text’s author, Sāti is being heretical: he “clung obstinately to that pernicious view” (61). The risks of a bhikku holding an incorrect view within the sangha are made clear. The Buddha accuses him of three separate misdeeds: “But you, misguided person, have misrepresented [the sangha] by your wrong grasp and have injured yourself and have accumulated much demerit” (62). The first part of the teaching that follows emphasizes in several places that it is useful only because it is accurate, and that clinging to it merely out of respect for the Buddha or desire to attain its goals is the wrong thing to do. The Buddha points out to the bhikkus that if they understand the dhamma as inviolable, they would misunderstand his “parable of the raft.” (64) Therefore, Sāti’s stubbornness in insisting on the wrong view is not only a mistake because it is the wrong teaching, but because he refused to hold it up to scrutiny.
The repetition in this teaching is also interesting philosophically because claims are broken down into their individual parts in order to test their logic and insist that they be dwelled upon. The claim of dependent arising is split up into three parts: “this has come to be,” “its origin is that nutriment,” and “from the cessation of that nutriment, that which has come to be is subject to cessation.” The Buddha questions his students about each of the parts, asking whether they understand each of them in turn, whether a lack of understanding would cause confusion, whether a correct understanding would cause an end to confusion, and lastly whether their confusion over these matters has ceased (63-64). Like many other suttas of the Pali Canon, this teaching is not just meant to be repeated, but to be analyzed.
This teaching focuses heavily on cause and effect, applying the simple rules of logic to the complicated subject of philosophy to link together such various concepts as birth, craving, consciousness, and ignorance. The subject of the first part of this teaching is dependent arising, an integral part of how Theravāda Buddhism understands consciousness. Contrary to Sāti’s belief that consciousness is the mere receptor of feelings and experiences, the Buddha insists that consciousness is a reaction of the mind to the outside world, or to itself. This philosophy is not entirely materialistic, since it is not written anywhere that consciousness is part of the human brain. Rather, it does not matter to the Buddha where exactly consciousness lies as long as its cause can be determined. The definition of “consciousness” (viññāṇa) is crucial to understanding the philosophical assumptions the Buddha is making here. In Western philosophy “consciousness” is a slippery subject to grasp, especially in how it differs from a mere aid to the senses, or a reptilian automatic response to a physical situation. The explanation given for “consciousness” in Buddhism is similarly vague. As seen above, consciousness can react to the senses, but it can also react to the mind itself, so it is not the word for everything that arises in the mind. So, the meaning of the word viññāṇa merits further investigation. In general, though, the philosophical assumption of this teaching is that consciousness is a reactive agent, and that it would be unable to do its job, that is, make decisions, without some sort of input.
The Buddha creates a long cause-and-effect chain to explain the origins of birth, death, and the necessary suffering that accompanies these things. This cause-and-effect chain is not necessarily chronological (which would doom us to ignorance from birth) but a constant, almost instantly recurring event in our lives which a human being with sufficient understanding can end at any moment. The chain begins with ignorance, which is the cause of “dispositions to action.” Due to these dispositions we have a consciousness (65). The consciousness is considered the cause of nāmarūpa, “name and form” or “psycho-physicality”: the form of something being its material presence, as a solid object rather than a bunch of scattered atoms attacking one’s senses, and its name being the designation we give to that presence. Nāmarūpa is the interpretation that lies in between the senses, which provide the link from physical to mental, and consciousness, which takes action based on the name-and-form we have perceived. Needless to say the neurological language outlined here is not based on scientific research, but uses culturally constructed divisions of the mind familiar to Indian philosophers of the time. The added element the Buddha is giving to these preexisting philosophical terms is the reminder that they are all impermanent, and connections from one to the other to make clear the path to dukkha.
Once the chain and the consequences of its cessation are reviewed, the Buddha reminds the bhikkus that his teaching should be based in pure reason and not accepted merely out of respect for him, while at the same time making it explicit to them that if they do accept this teaching they should not follow the “curious practices and auspicious ceremonies” of other teachings (66-67). Despite the Buddha’s earlier assertion that his teaching is absolutely correct and should not be modified, he holds the rational capacities of the other monks to be equal to his own, and insists that his teaching should be up to their standards of understanding and not accepted on faith.
After he interrupts his exposition with his reminder the Buddha describes the general way in which a being suffers after being born and going through this chain of cause and effect. A child is raised, given toys to play with, and then learns about the “five sorts of sensual pleasure” and the five kinds of enjoyment or pain he can derive from the physical world, plus the enjoyment or pain of concepts. From feeling all six kinds of enjoyment or pain, the chain continues through pleasure, attachment, becoming, birth, and from there more suffering (68). This teaching does not focus on the simple and easy-to-recognize truth of suffering from an unsatisfied attachment, but rather emphasizes that attachment continues the whole cycle through to a new birth, thus linking attachment to samsara.
Finally, the Buddha moves from the hopeless story of samsara to the hopeful story of an arahant who “arises in the world” (69). The arahant leaves his home, becomes a bhikku, refrains from bad actions, and then refrains from attachment, leading to spiritual attainments and finally complete enlightenment (69-72). He ends his story with a jab at Sāti, whose incorrect understanding of the cause of consciousness disrupted the cause-and-effect chain and “caught” him “in the net of craving” (72).
How accessible is this teaching to a modern reader? The Buddha actually supplies the historical details necessary to understand life in ancient India while telling his story. The child, for example, plays with “toy chariots” and “toy bows.” This seems to link into a general idea of the “way of the world” where people learn to enjoy material things despite their inherent dukkha. At the same time, we learn that the bhikku lives through wandering, carrying only his robes on his back and alms in his stomach. A modern reader will find it easy to understand the storytelling part of this teaching with little background knowledge, because it speaks mainly of physical experience. The philosophical part, however, uses some words which are unfamiliar to people with an intellectual vocabulary from the Enlightenment, from politics, or from little at all. Even when the translation of words is happily precise, such as “consciousness”, the philosophical meaning of these words can be difficult to wrap one’s head around. All in all, to achieve a complete understanding of the destruction of craving through pure reason alone would be an uphill battle using the philosophical concepts familiar to us. If a modern reader wishes to fully understand whether the teaching is fully truthful he would have to look to the meanings of the Pali words used by the Buddha and whether the causes he outlines can account for the entire effects he lays claim to.