In the Company of Friends: Exploring Faith and Understanding with Buddhists and Christians

Chapter 15: Getting First Things First: Some Reflections on a Response by Venerable Ananda Maitreya

181 15 Getting First Things First Some Reflections on a Response by Venerable Ananda Maitreya In order to move away from unhelpful conceptualization of reified entities such as “Buddhism” and “Christianity” to find wherein we, all of us, are involved in the development of others of us, we listen carefully to what we are told. “Buddhism” is not at the heart of living life well. Rather it is “refraining from what is detrimental” and all that follows from this. For many years Ven. Balangoda Ananda Maitreya has been held in high regard among Buddhists and Western students of the Buddhist heritage. One of his writings, a chapter entitled “Buddhism in Theravāda Countries,” appeared in a book widely used for a time in American colleges and universities.1 Western students have also seen this outstanding representative of the Buddhist testimony in Sri Lanka in another medium of instruction, also widely used in the United States, a film, “Buddhism: Footprint of the Buddha.”2 In that film, an interlocutor, Ronald Eyre, asked Ven. Ananda Maitreya, “If I said to you ‘Can you put Buddhism in a nutshell?’ what would you do?” Unperturbed by the remarkably inept conceptualization of “Buddhism,” whatever on earth (or in heaven, or beyond heaven) that might mean, unperplexed by a request utilizing a spatial category metaphorically to press for an essence of essences to represent more than two thousand years of a portion of our human saga known to Theravāda Buddhists as the Buddhist cumulative tradition, Ven.Ananda Maitreya chose to repeat words from of old. He replied, The Lord Buddha said, sabbapāpassa akaraṇaṃ kusalassa upasampadā sacittapariyodapanaṃ etaṃ buddhāna sāsanaṃ 182 I n t he C om p a ny of Fr ie nd s These words, occurring in the Dhammapada, have been rendered into English by students of the next generation still continuing the international collaboration in which Ven. Ananda Maitreya played a stellar part: Refraining from all that is detrimental, The attainment of what is wholesome, The purification of one’s mind: This is the instruction of Awakened Ones.3 This grand verse also appears in the Mahāpadāna-suttanta of the Dīgha-nikāya.4 There, Vipassī, the first Buddha, is recorded as having uttered it in inaugurating the monastic precepts (pāṭmokkha). One misses the point entirely, it seems to me, when one attempts to put aside these mythical accounts as useless legend making. The myth of Vipassī informs us that human beings have affirmed that Dhamma, Salvific Truth, abides and with it human beings have become engaged, and thereby they have found it to be supportive since time immemorial. In fact, one notes that by means of these myths the distant past is being discerned to be replete with meaning because the past is not soteriologically dissociated from the present. Salvific Truth has not been apart from persons so that the hope that is available today, to put an end to dukkha and to realize Nibbāna, has been so also for persons of the distant past. One is nearer the mark when one suggests, as has Sukumar Dutt, that “the verses of this hymn,” as he puts it, “define what may be called the cardinal Buddhist virtues.” He continues, “As described in the Mahāpadāna, the original Buddhist congregational service would seem to have been very closely akin to the dhamma-rehearsals of other sects in the wanderers’ community. It represents the archaic practice among the Buddhists.” Dutt provides a sound historical observation, “The substitution of a disciplinary code for a mere credo or a confession of faith is of much significance: it evinces that the Sect has already become an Order, recognizing now a common ‘monastic discipline’ (Vinaya) as its bond of union.”5 In both locations, the verse forms a cluster with two other verses. While in the Dīgha-nikāya our verse appears in the middle of this cluster, in the Dhammapada our verse precedes the following two: Forbearing patience is the highest austerity; Nibbāna is supreme, the Awakened Ones say. One who has gone forth is not one who hurts another, No harasser of others is a recluse. No faultfinding, no hurting, restraint in the pātimokkha, Knowing the measure regarding food, solitary bed and chair, Application, too, of higher perception: This is the instruction of the Awakened Ones. G e t t i ng...