Buddhist Writings

Overview

About two hundred and fifty pages, an anthology assembled from Henry Clarke Warren’s 1896 collection Buddhism in Translations, itself drawn from the Pali canon and its commentarial literature, the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism preserved chiefly in Sri Lanka and mainland Southeast Asia and generally regarded by scholars as the oldest substantially complete record of the Buddha’s teaching to survive in any language. Warren, an American scholar working largely alone at Harvard in the final years of the nineteenth century, produced translations that remained standard for decades and that gave English-language readers, most for the first time, direct access to primary Buddhist texts rather than secondhand European summaries and characterizations of Buddhist belief; he died shortly before the volume’s publication, having devoted much of his working life to a body of scripture almost no other Western scholar of his generation could read.

The material is Pali-language scripture, the language in which the earliest substantial Buddhist canon was preserved, composed and transmitted orally for centuries before being committed to writing in Sri Lanka around the first century BCE, and traditionally understood as recording, with varying degrees of later elaboration, the actual teaching of Siddhattha Gotama, the historical Buddha, who lived and taught in northern India sometime in the fifth or sixth century BCE. The anthology arranges its selections in three parts, following the traditional threefold structure of the Buddhist canon: an account of the Buddha’s own life, the doctrine he taught, and the monastic order he established.

What happens

The Buddha. The anthology’s first section narrates the traditional biography: the birth of Prince Siddhattha into a royal household sheltered from suffering, his sequence of encounters, traditionally four, with an old man, a sick man, a corpse and a wandering ascetic, that shattered his sheltered innocence and confronted him with the universality of suffering and mortality, and his subsequent great renunciation, leaving his wife, child and princely inheritance to seek a solution to the problem of suffering as a wandering ascetic. The narrative follows his years of extreme self-mortification, his eventual rejection of that extreme in favor of what would become known as the middle way, and his enlightenment while meditating beneath a bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya, achieving the insight into the nature of suffering and its cessation that would become the content of his subsequent teaching. The biographical material continues through his long teaching career and closes with an account of his death, presented with a notable calm and lack of drama consistent with the teaching he had spent his life delivering.

The Doctrine. The anthology’s central and philosophically most demanding section sets out the core content of the Buddha’s teaching. The Four Noble Truths, presented in the Buddha’s first sermon after his enlightenment, structure the whole: that suffering, dukkha, is a pervasive feature of existence, encompassing not only obvious pain but the frustration and dissatisfaction built into even ordinary pleasant experience, since nothing lasts; that suffering’s cause is craving and attachment, the mind’s grasping after pleasant experience, aversion to unpleasant experience, and clinging to continued existence itself; that the cessation of suffering is genuinely possible, through the cessation of this craving; and that a specific path, the Noble Eightfold Path, covering right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness and concentration, leads to that cessation.

Alongside the Four Noble Truths, the doctrine section sets out dependent origination, a chain of conditions, ignorance leading to craving, craving leading to attachment, attachment leading to renewed existence, that explains how beings remain bound to the cycle of rebirth, and the doctrine of anatta, not-self, one of the tradition’s most distinctive and most philosophically demanding claims: that what ordinary language calls a person or a self is not a fixed, permanent, unified soul but a temporary aggregate of five constantly changing components, physical form, sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness, no one of which, and no combination of which, constitutes a genuine, enduring self. This doctrine is illustrated in the anthology through the monk Nagasena’s celebrated analogy, offered to King Milinda, comparing a person to a chariot, which has no essential chariot-nature apart from its wheels, axle and frame assembled together, and which ceases to be a chariot, without any mysterious loss, once disassembled.

The Order. The anthology’s final section describes the sangha, the monastic community the Buddha established, including its rules of discipline, the daily practices and routines of monastic life, and the relationship between monks and the surrounding lay community that supported them materially in exchange for teaching and merit, giving a concrete, practical picture of how the doctrine translated into an actual organized way of life rather than remaining purely abstract teaching.

How to read it

Read the biographical material in the first section before the more demanding doctrinal material in the second; having a human narrative frame, the sheltered prince, the four sights, the renunciation, the enlightenment, makes the more abstract philosophical content considerably easier to hold onto and to see as the conclusion of a lived process of inquiry rather than an arbitrary set of doctrines.

Read the Four Noble Truths as a structure closer to medical diagnosis and treatment than to a creed to be simply believed: a condition is identified, its cause is traced, its curability is asserted, and a specific treatment is prescribed. This framing, which the tradition itself uses, is genuinely useful for understanding why Buddhist teaching so often reads as pragmatic and methodical rather than as a set of metaphysical claims to be taken on faith.

Spend real time with the chariot analogy and the doctrine of not-self, since this is the most conceptually demanding material in the anthology and also among its most distinctive contributions to world philosophy. Try applying the analogy to your own sense of self, asking what, if anything, remains of you as a fixed thing once your changing thoughts, sensations and physical states are set aside one by one.

Notice how empirical and pragmatic the Buddha’s own teaching method is presented as being throughout, encouraging testing the doctrine against one’s own experience rather than simply accepting it on the authority of scripture or teacher, a stance that later readers, particularly from the nineteenth century onward, frequently found strikingly compatible with a scientific or experimental temperament, whatever the actual historical relationship between the two traditions.

Read the account of the Buddha’s death alongside other religious accounts of a founder’s final days, and notice its distinctive tone, calm, instructive and without the drama or cosmic upheaval that marks comparable moments in other traditions, a tone consistent with the doctrine of impermanence the whole teaching has been building toward.

Questions it raises

• Does the doctrine of not-self, that there is no fixed, permanent self underlying our changing experience, match or contradict your own sense of what you actually are when you introspect carefully?
• Is the Four Noble Truths’ structure, diagnosis, cause, cure, treatment, a genuinely different kind of religious claim than the doctrinal assertions of biblical traditions, or does it ultimately rest on beliefs, like rebirth, that require the same kind of faith any other tradition asks for?
• What does the chariot analogy actually prove? Does showing that a chariot has no essence apart from its parts genuinely establish that a person is the same kind of composite, parts-only entity?
• How does encountering these texts through a nineteenth-century Western scholarly translation, produced by someone working largely outside any living tradition of Buddhist practice, shape what a reader can and cannot take from them?
• If suffering is caused by craving and attachment, does the cure, extinguishing craving, ask for something like indifference to life, or is the tradition’s own understanding of non-attachment compatible with genuine engagement and care?
• What does it mean that the Buddha’s teaching method emphasizes testing doctrine against one’s own experience rather than accepting it on authority? Does this make the tradition more or less like a philosophical inquiry than a religion in the more familiar Western sense?