I return today to my correspondence with Justin Whitaker on the Sigālovāda Sutta, taking off from his response to my previous post. The question at issue between us, I think, is what constitutes a good Buddhist life for a layperson or householder, a non-monk. We can get more specific by asking: should the layperson’s life be one that aspires to emulate the monk’s? I don’t think that it should, and I continue to suspect that Justin doesn’t either.
For me there is a deeper question that underlies any answer to the questions in the previous paragraph. That is: are there any goods that it is worthy for human beings to pursue irrespective of their contributions to the allevation of suffering (and/or the pursuit of truth, correct seeing)? In more classical terms, are there proper purisatthas (puruṣārthas) other than dukkhanirodha and yathābhūtadassana? It is pretty clear to me that the Pali suttas, in general, take the answer to that question to be no. And it is that No answer that underlies both the suttas’ advocacy of monasticism as the highest goal, and their viewing of the good household life as the one described in the Sigālovāda: an imperfect approximation of monasticism. For, the suttas say, it is monasticism that truly allows one to shed the attachments and pleasures that trap one in suffering. Monasticism does not guarantee this goal by any means – as Justin notes, there are plenty of bad monks – but it advances the goal much better than the household life does.
I disagree with the suttas on this approach; I would answer that deeper question Yes. I believe that both familial love and aesthetic pleasure have value in themselves, irrespective of whether they help us reduce suffering. Justin describes a joy that he felt in the “friendships, occasional alcohol, and romance” he had as a youth. I recognize this joy and see it as something that is worthwhile and worth celebrating, not something to be shed. I do admire monks for their single-minded focus on the cultivation of a virtuous mind, and I do think we laypeople have a lot to learn from monks – but not by trying to make our lifestyles closer to theirs, not unless we are going to take the plunge and join them.
Justin says that “the family life has value as part of the path”. I would push on this point: the path to what? And how does family life contribute to it? It seems to me that what Justin is saying here is not the traditional view of the Pali suttas. In the suttas, the magga is a path to the end of suffering, and family life, if anything, interferes with that path. The Sāmaññaphala Sutta tells us: “Household life (gharāvaso) is hindered, a path of dust. Pabbajjā (going forth into ordination) is air. Not easily does one who inhabits a household enter an extremely full, extremely pure, brightly perfect holy life (brahmacariya).” (DN I.62-3) Most people will stay back in that dusty household life – because we’re not good enough and strong enough for the pure and bright life of the renouncer. It seems to me that that is what underlies the Buddha’s advice that Sigāla stay back in the household life.
By contrast, Justin says he does not see his family life as a lesser path. Neither do I. But why not? Justin says “I was and am fairly good at being a partner and now a father.” I have every reason to believe him on this. I would like to think that I am also good at being the former. But neither of these achievements takes away from the Sāmaññaphala’s claim that this path is lesser. As far as that sutta is concerned, the time and mental effort involved in being a partner and father distracts from the really important pursuit of shedding the āsavas and kilesas, the mental hindrances that keep us out of nirvana. If one must take up such a path, then by all means do it well, take care of the partners and children one is trusted to care for. But to engage in such a path is still to be limited in one’s pursuit of true liberation – a limit, again, that the Buddha noted when he named his son Rāhula, “fetter”. The son was a fetter, a tie to the dust of worldly life, an impediment to liberation.
Unlike the Buddha, I do not believe that one should think of children as impediments, and I imagine Justin doesn’t either. But that is a point of our disagreement with him. The classical texts do have their reasons for seeing children that way. Strictly speaking, having children may well increase suffering – whether in a classical sense in which there are now more beings on the wheel of rebirth, or in the modern studies that repeatedly and replicably show people get less happy when they are raising kids. But it seems to me that, properly understood, the value of having children is not because they reduce suffering – if that is the goal, they will disappoint – but rather in another goal entirely, a broader sense of fulfillment that comes from familial love.
Justin refers to “the wide Buddhist path”. I do not think that the path spelled out in the suttas is indeed wide, if “wide” means that it has two lanes, a household and a monastic, that are equally valid to travel on. In the suttas the path is not wide but long: one lives this life virtuously as one can as a weak householder, in the hopes that in the next life one will be strong enough to be a monk.
When I claim familial love and aesthetic pleasure as goods in themselves, Justin is right to question whether this claim “hangs well within a Buddhist moral or philosophical framework”. My view is a departure from the view of the suttas – just like the rejection of rebirth, which I think this departure is closely connected to. Justin is himself (rightly) ready to explicitly abandon significant elements of the suttas’ teaching, notably on gender. When Justin says his family life is not a lesser path, I think that too is a departure from the suttas. But I do think that a framework which acknowledges family life and aesthetic pleasure as intrinsic goods can still remain Buddhist in the most significant senses despite its departure from the suttas (and I think that matters). It is just that, once we depart from the suttas in acknowledging the intrinsic value of familial love, I think we should do the same in acknowledging the intrinsic value of aesthetic pleasure. And that is why I do not find the Sigālovāda Sutta a good guide.
Amod, the non-moral goods that enrich human life include familial and romantic love and aesthetic appreciation, but also many other goods as well. We can also include the joys of scientific discovery, artistic creation, athletic excellence, civic cooperation, and the development of new competencies in a wide variety of endeavors. There are significant ways in which the narrowing of sources of well-being that are part snd parcel of monastic life are at odds with the paths that lead most people to enhanced levels of well-being. All of these resources can be engaged in and enjoyed without rigid forms of craving, clinging, and attachment—in other words, in a “Buddhisty” sort of way, and learning how to do this is a different way of realizing the path—albeit not the “old” path to extinction, and who really wants that sort of path anyway?
I agree, there are other intrinsic goods. I focus on those two because they were the ones most clearly at issue in the debate over the Sigālovāda, which refuses aesthetic pleasures in a familial context.
Thank you, Amod. Your reflection comes at the perfect time, after a piece I read by Kenneth Leong yesterday (https://kleong54.medium.com/the-right-understanding-of-attachment-675c3ee1e128).
The problem I have with views like Leong’s, as well as many of the responses I got from my article on Tricycle (https://tricycle.org/magazine/early-buddhism/) and its follow-up (https://secularbuddhistnetwork.org/on-resolving-the-neo-early-buddhist-contradiction/) is that I agree with much of their view, e.g. that attachment isn’t always a problem; but not in attributing that view to the suttas. People, including teachers, do this a lot, where they mix historical claim and theological interpretation. While this is to some degree understandable and Buddhism has always done this, I think it muddles things up and hides attachments to the Buddha or the Pali texts, etc.
Generally, the suttas *do* see attachment to relationships as a problem and as generating dukkha, whence the life of a bhikkhu, and lay practice is mostly just delaying the bhikkhu life, which in a way fits the puruṣārtha scheme by pushing the brahmacariya to a future lifetime. But as you rightly point out, the Pali suttas don’t value kāma as other Indian systems do – what Roy Perrett called Hindu value pluralism, albeit an ordered one. Early Buddhism would be on the ordered extreme, if it is value pluralist at all. Lay figures like Citta or Mahānāma might suggest that there was a path of committed lay practitioners that somehow held kāma and dharma/mokṣa simultaneously, which Payutto sees as an option (https://buddhadhamma.github.io/happiness.html, after ‘Wise enjoyment of sense pleasures’). But that’s neither central nor developed in the suttas.
If we want to think constructively as lay Buddhists with families and worldly goals of the type you describe, perhaps the Pali suttas aren’t the best guide in that particular regard. Do you think we should rather go back to the puruṣārtha scheme as a model to think *from*, for example?
Thanks, Bernat. I like your Tricycle piece and am in sympathy with it: I think we should depart from the classical texts in key respects, and should acknowledge when we do so. And I don’t think that means we stop being Buddhist.
As for the puruṣārthas: I have found the idea of a scheme of puruṣārthas very helpful to think with, as something that looks a bit like what analytic philosophers today would call an Objective List. That is, I think there are a number of constitutive goods that humans both do and should seek, whose value to us is not reducible to the others. Where I don’t think I would go is the specific scheme of artha, kāma, dharma, mokṣa: I think that’s too limiting. Especially, perhaps, because the scheme is so frustratingly under-theorized: in the Mahābhārata and other texts that discuss it, it is rarely if ever provided with a sustained justification, just stated. I also think there are other goods (such as self-expression) that the four-puruṣārtha scheme doesn’t really cover.
I agree that the idea is more appealing that the particular formulation. Thank you for pointing me to your article ‘Acknowledging newness’. As usual, I’ve found my own thoughts expressed more clearly and especially concisely than I’m usually able to express. In particular: “The important thing, it seems to me, is to acknowledge one’s difference from historical tradition. It is that acknowledgement that allows one to remain challenged by the tradition, to see the appeal of the unappealing. Without it, one remains trapped in one’s modern blinkers.”
Thanks for these kind words, Bernat! I do always hope my ideas are valuable to people. And yes: I do think it’s important to be challenged by the tradition. Even as we judge it right to soften its demands now, we may yet at some later point find truth and value in its more stringent demands.
I have mentioned, in comments on a couple of Amod’s other posts, Bhikkhu Basnagoda Rahula’s book The Buddha’s Teachings on Prosperity: At Home, At Work, in the World (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2008). I just checked the book’s index, and it mentions the Sigālovāda Sutta a few times, but Rahula’s message is not that a layperson’s life should be one that aspires to emulate the monk’s life, so apparently it is possible to (selectively?) interpret the Sigālovāda Sutta in a way that is compatible with recognition of a variety of goods. (I have never read that sutta.) Rahula’s book is actually the best book I have read about the validity and dignity and pleasures of Buddhist lay life from a Theravāda perspective.
Rahula wrote (as I mentioned in a previous comment): “A layperson constantly experiences sensory pleasures, or kamaguna, and their five benefits: beautiful sights, pleasing sounds, pleasant scents, delicious tastes, and agreeable physical contact. These benefits are inherent in worldly life, and people are entitled to enjoy them.” And: “Most of the Buddha’s ordained disciples regarded their spiritual development—their ability to handle greed, malice, and illusion—as their highest achievement. This accomplishment gave them a stable form of happiness throughout their lives. The members of the lay community also obtained a similar form of happiness by thinking over their own meaningful lives, which, from the Buddha’s point of view, was a notable achievement.”
I have never interpreted Buddhism as being only about the relief of suffering, and Rahula’s book doesn’t interpret Buddhism that way either. Much more important for me, and for Rahula, is the idea of a path, which has a number of facets that provide a variety of benefits. What monastic life and lay life have in common is that there is a developmental path. The path is different for monastics and laypeople, but the path is different for people with various other differences in life circumstances too. Nevertheless there are ethical commonalities to these paths.
Rahula argues in the book’s first chapter that lay life only seems less important in the suttas because the suttas were preserved by monastics, who were most concerned with the path of monastics: “And yet, even though the Buddha traveled continuously for forty-five years and talked to great multitudes of people, only a very small percentage of these teachings and conversations seems to have been recorded. Over 80 percent of all suttas in the Sutta Pitaka are addressed to bhikkhus living inside a monastery. Seemingly, the bhikkhus were more interested in preserving what they found useful for themselves and not what the Buddha taught the public.”
Thanks, Nathan. Rahula’s book sounds like something I am in sympathy with and I would like to read it. It’s just that right now I am so busy writing (my book) that I barely have time to read!
Keep writing that book, don’t stop! *cracks whip*
Heh. I’ve been working on it for a long time now – it basically started as the project I described in summer 2020 but has become something very different – and am really feeling the urge to get a full draft ready, first to get feedback from friends and then to send to publishers. I’m hoping to have the draft ready by the beginning of summer this year so that I can send it out for feedback at a time when profs aren’t busy teaching classes! Tricky because I’ve only written one chapter in full, and writing one chapter of a book is a bit like solving one side of a Rubik’s cube. I’m now trying to organize my thoughts well enough that I can sit down later in the spring and write the whole thing start to finish.
Thank you for this reference, Nathan. The book seems intriguing, we need more of that. I’ve found a review online (https://ir.uwest.edu/files/original/3cbb91adfc73f1178875105f5e1dbb96b8fc7e6f.pdf) with interesting things like this: ‘He also says, “Buddha employed this word [Dukkha] for the purpose of directing the Bhikkus toward Nibbana and not for instruction of his lay disciples.” (p.13) Earlier he has said, “The concepts of impermanence and dissatisfaction with worldly pleasure and detachment from secular life predominantly served the purpose of training and maintaining the community of Sangha.’
The review also comments and quotes on a section that I found deeply gendered, in a heteronormative and old-fashioned way for my taste, which put me off immensely. But that’s another matter.
I’ve just remember that my friend Doug Smith has an online course based on early Buddhist teachings for lay people which might be worth checking out – I haven’t taken it yet > https://onlinedharma.org/p/work-money-pleasure
Bernat, I checked out the review you mentioned, which quotes Rāhula:
“While he would not mind driving a decade-old, rusty truck, she would prefer a beautiful new car or a compact SUV. He would be satisfied with grass in the front yard, but she would prefer flowers and ornamental plants in the garden.” (p. 61)
I agree, that’s a funny quotation! Early in that chapter Rāhula says, “some of these recommendations reflect the specific cultural values of the Buddha’s society” (p. 57). And in the paragraph before the trucks-versus-SUVs passage, Rāhula says: “This duty reflects the best way for a man in that society to show his respect for his female partner’s love of beauty” (p. 60, emphasis mine). So, yes, it’s old-fashioned, but at the same time it serves as a specific example of his earlier statement in the first chapter that “people are entitled to enjoy” sensory pleasures, or kāmaguna (p. 5), and it shows how this embrace of kāmaguna can be found even in the Sigālovāda Sutta, since Rāhula’s chapter on marital partnerships is mostly a commentary on the Sigālovāda Sutta. Rāhula’s style in the book is undogmatic, so it’s easy to read it and laugh and imagine non-heteronormative generalizations of passages like the trucks-versus-SUVs.
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