Why the Monks Took No Delight in the Buddha’s Words
ABSTRACT: Records of the Buddha’s sermons in the Pali Canon often end with a statement that the monks delighted in the Buddha’s words. However, the first sermon in one collection, the Majjhima Nikāya, says that they did not delight in them. Though this reading is ancient, most modern editors have emended by removing the negative. This article argues that a careful study of the preceding text reveals why the negative is correct
There is an ancient problem in the text of the Mūla-pariyāya Sutta, the first sutta in the Majjhima Nikāya. The title is not easy to translate, though its meaning is clear. The Buddha’s preaching recorded in the suttas is mainly delivered with what Pali calls pariyāya. 1 Literally this word means ‘way round’ and so ‘indirect route’, but it refers to a ‘way of putting things’ or an ‘approach’. Pariyāya refers to metaphor, allegory, parable, any use of speech which is not to be taken literally. The word mūla means ‘root’ and is a very common metaphor for ‘basis’ or ‘foundation’. So the full title means ‘The sutta which uses the approach through the root’, or, a little less clumsily, ‘The sutta which tackles the root’. With such a claim in the title, it is not surprising that this is quite a famous text. In the PTS edition (Trenckner 1888), the sutta ends: Idaṃ avoca Bhagavā. Attamanā te bhikkhū Bhagavato bhāsitaṃ abhinanduṃ. ‘Thus spoke the Blessed One. Pleased, the monks took delight in the Buddha’s words.’ If they behaved like audiences of Buddhist sermons today, they probably ‘took delight’ by saying ‘Sādhu sādhu’, or something very like that.2 This is a stock way of ending the account of a sermon. The second, third and sixth suttas of the Majjhima Nikāya end with the same words, except that in the case of the third sutta Sāriputta has given the sermon and his name is therefore substituted for that of the Buddha.
The PTS edition does not even record that there is a variant reading, and a startling one at that. But it is evident that the commentator (whom we may call Buddhaghosa) read in place of attamanā (‘pleased’) the negative word na, so that the sentence means ‘The monks took no delight in the Buddha’s words’. There can be no doubt at all that this was the text that reached Buddhaghosa, because he spends more than three pages (in the PTS edition)3 explaining how this extraordinary, even unique, situation came about. Moreover, though this reading seems so difficult, Buddhaghosa does not suggest a normalized reading without the negative, or hint that the text might be corrupt: so far as he knew, the tradition was unanimous. Bhikkhus Ñāṇamoḷi and Bodhi, in their admirable translation (2001: 90), follow Buddhaghosa and do not even mention reading the text without the negative. They supply a footnote, summarizing Buddhaghosa’s explanation as follows: The bhikkhus did not delight in the Buddha’s words, apparently because the discourse probed too deeply into the tender regions of their own conceit, and perhaps their residual brahmanic views. At a later time, MA tells us, when their pride had been humbled, the Buddha expounded to these same bhikkhus the Gotamaka Sutta (AN 3:123/i.276), in the course of which they all attained arahantship. (Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi 2001: 1168, n. 31) I find that there is a much simpler explanation for the negative, which I agree with the tradition in holding to be the correct reading. What in fact had the Buddha just been saying? The Buddha takes each of the basic constituents of the physical universe in turn. He begins with the four elements and then runs through the traditional Buddhist cosmology: first the sentient beings in the cosmos; then the higher planes of meditative absorption; then the seen, the heard, the sensed and the cognized; finally unity, diversity, everything and nibbāna. The details of the list are of secondary importance, though it is perhaps worth noting in passing that the list falls naturally into six sets of four. Be that as it may, the Buddha says the identical thing about each item in the list. He first says that someone who does not know the Dhamma thinks of the item, from earth to nibbāna, as in some kind of relationship to himself (again four are mentioned),4 and thus delights in that item ‘because he has not fully understood it’.
He then runs through the list again, to say that a monk who is striving for Enlightenment should not think of the item like that, or delight in it, if he is fully to understand it. Then he goes through the list for a third time, to say that an Enlightened person, an arahant, no longer thinks in those terms, that is, does not relate what he observes to himself in any way, but just recognizes it for what it is, and thus he has fully understood it. Then he repeats this last section about the arahant three times; the only difference being in the last words, where instead of saying it is because he has fully understood it, he says it is because he has got rid of (a) passion, (b) hatred, and (c) delusion. Finally, the Buddha repeats what he has just said about the arahant almost word for word, but applying it to himself (the Tathāgata). However, while for the arahant he ran through the list four times, for himself he runs through it only twice. The first time he says that he recognizes what he observes for what it is because he has fully understood it. The second time he achieves that because he has understood that delight is the root of suffering (nandī dukkhassa mūlaṃ). The text is so repetitious that there is vast scope for presenting it in an abbreviated way, and in the PTS edition it covers only a little over five pages. If one were not to abbreviate, however, it would be enormously long. Twentyfour items are each dealt with eight times. But there is only one message, which is evidently the ‘root’ of the title. That root is that one must learn, when one is conscious of something, no matter what it is, not to think of it as in any way relating to oneself (see n. 4), so that one takes delight in it, but must understand it simply to be what it is. Elsewhere the same fundamental accomplishment of the enlightened person is referred to as yathā-bhūtadassana, ‘seeing it as it is’. Note that the identical message applies even to the last item in the list, nibbāna. Of course, the Buddha is here directly contradicting the Upaniṣadic / Vedāntic view that salvation consists in realizing that one is essentially the same as the universe and therefore as everything in it. The inclusion in his list of unity, diversity and everything (‘the all’) is particularly significant. Hence the commentarial reference to ‘residual brahmanic views’. In the text, the Buddha thus says 192 (24 × 8) times that to take delight in something is not fully to understand it. This applies even to nibbāna. The word for ‘take delight in’ is abhinandati, the very same word as occurs in the final sentence, in which the monks are reported not to have done it. Moreover, the sermon culminates in the claim that the Buddha’s crucial understanding was that delight is the root of suffering. The word used for delight, nandī, is the noun corresponding to the verb in question. The word mūla, ‘root’, in this sutta occurs only in the title and in this repeated culminating phrase. To me all this conveys only one thing: that the monks—or rather, the person who composed the sutta in its final form—actually paid attention to its content. Having been told at great length that delight, no matter what its object, is the root of suffering, they do well to avoid it.
The Mūlapariyāya Sutta survives in two Chinese translations, found at T26 and T56.5 Mr Jungnok Park has been kind enough to check them for me. In both versions, the monks delight in the Buddha’s words, as usual. Moreover, the contents of the sutta are somewhat different, so that in neither version does the word for ‘delight’ in the conclusion echo the preceding sermon. It seems to me that again and again texts in the Tipiṭaka have been misinterpreted because of a failure to take them in context. In much of my recent work the context with which I have been most concerned is teachings in the early Upaniṣads with which the Buddha is disagreeing. But it is no less important to read suttas as wholes, to see if that yields any insights. Modern scholars are particularly reluctant to do this, because of the different insights gained by the study of oral literature, in which composition tends to consist largely of putting together units far larger than single words or even phrases. The term ‘pericope’ has been borrowed from biblical scholarship, and it has been quite rightly pointed out that suttas tend to be composed of such pericopes, or stock passages, which migrate between texts, often blending perfectly into their environment, but sometimes not. In an article published twenty years ago I gave an amusing example of a pericope which occurs in five canonical texts but makes perfect sense in only one of them, which must therefore be its point of origin (Gombrich 1987). However, the converse approach can also yield important results. I shall just mention two from my own research. In How Buddhism Began I showed how the famous simile of the raft has been drastically misinterpreted in the Buddhist tradition by wrenching it out of context, with what appear to me to be momentous results (Gombrich 2006:23-25). And in ‘The Buddha’s Book of Genesis?’ I showed that the Pali Aggañña Sutta moves smoothly from making fun of Ṛg Veda 10.90 to making fun of Ṛg Veda 10.129 (Gombrich 1992). From this it follows that the Pali version of the text must antedate the other versions, which have no such connection, and indeed seem to be unaware of the text’s satirical nature. Scholars have quite rightly become more aware that there are very many cases where texts from the Pali Canon survive in other versions, the majority of them being in Chinese translation. From this, however, some seem to have drawn the conclusion that the assumption that the Pali versions are the closest we can get to the Buddha’s time, as was thought a century ago by such pioneers of Buddhist scholarship as T. W. Rhys Davids, is entirely outmoded. Indeed, some would even go so far as to consider that trying to find the earliest surviving version of a sutta is a fatuous enterprise. I would agree that one swallow does not make a summer, and each case must be judged on its merits. But I would also point out that if it has been established that even a few suttas are best preserved in their Pali versions, and the same has not been done for the texts surviving in other traditions, this does give a reason for taking the evidence of the Pali texts extremely seriously. Though it is in the nature of the case that I cannot conclusively prove my interpretation to be right, I think that this could be held up as a model of the principle of textual scholarship traditionally known as lectio difficilior potior: ‘It is the more difficult reading that is to be preferred’. That there was a tradition preserved in Pali that on this occasion the monks failed to ‘delight in’ the Buddha’s words is proved by the commentaries, and that this appeared so anomalous that editors both ancient and modern have hastened to emend the text is equally obvious.
There is an ancient problem in the text of the Mūla-pariyāya Sutta, the first sutta in the Majjhima Nikāya. The title is not easy to translate, though its meaning is clear. The Buddha’s preaching recorded in the suttas is mainly delivered with what Pali calls pariyāya. 1 Literally this word means ‘way round’ and so ‘indirect route’, but it refers to a ‘way of putting things’ or an ‘approach’. Pariyāya refers to metaphor, allegory, parable, any use of speech which is not to be taken literally. The word mūla means ‘root’ and is a very common metaphor for ‘basis’ or ‘foundation’. So the full title means ‘The sutta which uses the approach through the root’, or, a little less clumsily, ‘The sutta which tackles the root’. With such a claim in the title, it is not surprising that this is quite a famous text. In the PTS edition (Trenckner 1888), the sutta ends: Idaṃ avoca Bhagavā. Attamanā te bhikkhū Bhagavato bhāsitaṃ abhinanduṃ. ‘Thus spoke the Blessed One. Pleased, the monks took delight in the Buddha’s words.’ If they behaved like audiences of Buddhist sermons today, they probably ‘took delight’ by saying ‘Sādhu sādhu’, or something very like that.2 This is a stock way of ending the account of a sermon. The second, third and sixth suttas of the Majjhima Nikāya end with the same words, except that in the case of the third sutta Sāriputta has given the sermon and his name is therefore substituted for that of the Buddha.
The PTS edition does not even record that there is a variant reading, and a startling one at that. But it is evident that the commentator (whom we may call Buddhaghosa) read in place of attamanā (‘pleased’) the negative word na, so that the sentence means ‘The monks took no delight in the Buddha’s words’. There can be no doubt at all that this was the text that reached Buddhaghosa, because he spends more than three pages (in the PTS edition)3 explaining how this extraordinary, even unique, situation came about. Moreover, though this reading seems so difficult, Buddhaghosa does not suggest a normalized reading without the negative, or hint that the text might be corrupt: so far as he knew, the tradition was unanimous. Bhikkhus Ñāṇamoḷi and Bodhi, in their admirable translation (2001: 90), follow Buddhaghosa and do not even mention reading the text without the negative. They supply a footnote, summarizing Buddhaghosa’s explanation as follows: The bhikkhus did not delight in the Buddha’s words, apparently because the discourse probed too deeply into the tender regions of their own conceit, and perhaps their residual brahmanic views. At a later time, MA tells us, when their pride had been humbled, the Buddha expounded to these same bhikkhus the Gotamaka Sutta (AN 3:123/i.276), in the course of which they all attained arahantship. (Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi 2001: 1168, n. 31) I find that there is a much simpler explanation for the negative, which I agree with the tradition in holding to be the correct reading. What in fact had the Buddha just been saying? The Buddha takes each of the basic constituents of the physical universe in turn. He begins with the four elements and then runs through the traditional Buddhist cosmology: first the sentient beings in the cosmos; then the higher planes of meditative absorption; then the seen, the heard, the sensed and the cognized; finally unity, diversity, everything and nibbāna. The details of the list are of secondary importance, though it is perhaps worth noting in passing that the list falls naturally into six sets of four. Be that as it may, the Buddha says the identical thing about each item in the list. He first says that someone who does not know the Dhamma thinks of the item, from earth to nibbāna, as in some kind of relationship to himself (again four are mentioned),4 and thus delights in that item ‘because he has not fully understood it’.
He then runs through the list again, to say that a monk who is striving for Enlightenment should not think of the item like that, or delight in it, if he is fully to understand it. Then he goes through the list for a third time, to say that an Enlightened person, an arahant, no longer thinks in those terms, that is, does not relate what he observes to himself in any way, but just recognizes it for what it is, and thus he has fully understood it. Then he repeats this last section about the arahant three times; the only difference being in the last words, where instead of saying it is because he has fully understood it, he says it is because he has got rid of (a) passion, (b) hatred, and (c) delusion. Finally, the Buddha repeats what he has just said about the arahant almost word for word, but applying it to himself (the Tathāgata). However, while for the arahant he ran through the list four times, for himself he runs through it only twice. The first time he says that he recognizes what he observes for what it is because he has fully understood it. The second time he achieves that because he has understood that delight is the root of suffering (nandī dukkhassa mūlaṃ). The text is so repetitious that there is vast scope for presenting it in an abbreviated way, and in the PTS edition it covers only a little over five pages. If one were not to abbreviate, however, it would be enormously long. Twentyfour items are each dealt with eight times. But there is only one message, which is evidently the ‘root’ of the title. That root is that one must learn, when one is conscious of something, no matter what it is, not to think of it as in any way relating to oneself (see n. 4), so that one takes delight in it, but must understand it simply to be what it is. Elsewhere the same fundamental accomplishment of the enlightened person is referred to as yathā-bhūtadassana, ‘seeing it as it is’. Note that the identical message applies even to the last item in the list, nibbāna. Of course, the Buddha is here directly contradicting the Upaniṣadic / Vedāntic view that salvation consists in realizing that one is essentially the same as the universe and therefore as everything in it. The inclusion in his list of unity, diversity and everything (‘the all’) is particularly significant. Hence the commentarial reference to ‘residual brahmanic views’. In the text, the Buddha thus says 192 (24 × 8) times that to take delight in something is not fully to understand it. This applies even to nibbāna. The word for ‘take delight in’ is abhinandati, the very same word as occurs in the final sentence, in which the monks are reported not to have done it. Moreover, the sermon culminates in the claim that the Buddha’s crucial understanding was that delight is the root of suffering. The word used for delight, nandī, is the noun corresponding to the verb in question. The word mūla, ‘root’, in this sutta occurs only in the title and in this repeated culminating phrase. To me all this conveys only one thing: that the monks—or rather, the person who composed the sutta in its final form—actually paid attention to its content. Having been told at great length that delight, no matter what its object, is the root of suffering, they do well to avoid it.
The Mūlapariyāya Sutta survives in two Chinese translations, found at T26 and T56.5 Mr Jungnok Park has been kind enough to check them for me. In both versions, the monks delight in the Buddha’s words, as usual. Moreover, the contents of the sutta are somewhat different, so that in neither version does the word for ‘delight’ in the conclusion echo the preceding sermon. It seems to me that again and again texts in the Tipiṭaka have been misinterpreted because of a failure to take them in context. In much of my recent work the context with which I have been most concerned is teachings in the early Upaniṣads with which the Buddha is disagreeing. But it is no less important to read suttas as wholes, to see if that yields any insights. Modern scholars are particularly reluctant to do this, because of the different insights gained by the study of oral literature, in which composition tends to consist largely of putting together units far larger than single words or even phrases. The term ‘pericope’ has been borrowed from biblical scholarship, and it has been quite rightly pointed out that suttas tend to be composed of such pericopes, or stock passages, which migrate between texts, often blending perfectly into their environment, but sometimes not. In an article published twenty years ago I gave an amusing example of a pericope which occurs in five canonical texts but makes perfect sense in only one of them, which must therefore be its point of origin (Gombrich 1987). However, the converse approach can also yield important results. I shall just mention two from my own research. In How Buddhism Began I showed how the famous simile of the raft has been drastically misinterpreted in the Buddhist tradition by wrenching it out of context, with what appear to me to be momentous results (Gombrich 2006:23-25). And in ‘The Buddha’s Book of Genesis?’ I showed that the Pali Aggañña Sutta moves smoothly from making fun of Ṛg Veda 10.90 to making fun of Ṛg Veda 10.129 (Gombrich 1992). From this it follows that the Pali version of the text must antedate the other versions, which have no such connection, and indeed seem to be unaware of the text’s satirical nature. Scholars have quite rightly become more aware that there are very many cases where texts from the Pali Canon survive in other versions, the majority of them being in Chinese translation. From this, however, some seem to have drawn the conclusion that the assumption that the Pali versions are the closest we can get to the Buddha’s time, as was thought a century ago by such pioneers of Buddhist scholarship as T. W. Rhys Davids, is entirely outmoded. Indeed, some would even go so far as to consider that trying to find the earliest surviving version of a sutta is a fatuous enterprise. I would agree that one swallow does not make a summer, and each case must be judged on its merits. But I would also point out that if it has been established that even a few suttas are best preserved in their Pali versions, and the same has not been done for the texts surviving in other traditions, this does give a reason for taking the evidence of the Pali texts extremely seriously. Though it is in the nature of the case that I cannot conclusively prove my interpretation to be right, I think that this could be held up as a model of the principle of textual scholarship traditionally known as lectio difficilior potior: ‘It is the more difficult reading that is to be preferred’. That there was a tradition preserved in Pali that on this occasion the monks failed to ‘delight in’ the Buddha’s words is proved by the commentaries, and that this appeared so anomalous that editors both ancient and modern have hastened to emend the text is equally obvious.
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