Transcription from You Tube discourse given in 2021
Welcome to this weeks live stream. Today I am going to be talking about the 1st factor of the 8 fold path; Sammā Diṭṭhi (right view). Its put at the very head of the 8 fold path for a reason. Its very important as a foundation for everything else that we do in our practice. That we have a proper view. But first we have to understand what is meant by diṭṭhi or view. In this case, although very often I am critical of common translations but I think view is very appropriate for diṭṭhi because like diṭṭhi the English word view has a kind of double meaning. It can be a view in terms of the object of the eye sense like the view out your window or when you're viewing a movie. This is the view out of your eye sense. diṭṭhi can be used in that sense in the Pali but in the case of sammā diṭṭhi (right view) is used more in the philosophical sense and then view is a way of holding and understanding of the world. Its different than an opinion or a belief. These things arise out of view. Views is more fundamental. Its perhaps somewhat closest to the term in a German word that appears in western philosophy (weltanschauung - German - world view). How you are upholding your understanding of the world. Sort of your base assumptions. Your underlying sense of things.
In terms of Buddhist practice we first of all need to distinguish between right view and wrong view (sammādiṭṭhi and micchadiṭṭhi). We also have to discuss the proper holding of view and I will get to that a little bit later but just to say initially that the holding of view is not like having a dogmatic belief in a set of ideas. That becomes clinging to views which is one of the defilements. Its one of the forms of upādāna. So first of all to distinguish sammādiṭṭhi and micchadiṭṭhi. Samādhiṭṭhi is defined with different formulas in different places in the Pali canon. One common formula states it all in terms of Kamma and rebirth. There is this world and the other world, there is the fruit of good and evil deeds and so forth. This is sometimes referred to as the conventional right view or the mundane or the lower right view and the higher right view is the 4 noble truths. The 4 noble truths is the base for right view. Also seeing the 3 characteristics, seeing things in terms of imperfection or suffering, impermanence and emptiness or not self. These are all aspects of right view. This is distinguished or separated from wrong view (micchadiṭṭhi). Miccha is quite a harsh word actually. Its more than just wrong, its like twisted or perverted. A view that is harmful to hold and the Brahmajāla Sutta (its the 1st Sutta of the Digha Nikaya), it gives a long list - of 61 kinds of wrong view - and discusses in some cases how they arise and what they are based on. At first look at these 61 views, it can seem rather arbitrary, but there is a very interesting book written by a Sri Lankan scholar Jayantalike - Early Buddhist view of knowledge. This includes some other parts but the longest section of the book is dealing with the Brahmajā la Sutta and the 61 views and he identifies most of them with known schools of thought that existed in India, so they weren't just arbitrarily chosen to fill out a matrix. The Buddha was actually critiquing existing philosophies.
We dont need to go through the 61 views because they can be simplified and in other places they are. The views, the wrong views generally fall into 2 broad categories and there is 1 kind of outlier. The 2 broad categories are eternalism and annihilationism (sassatavada and ucchedavada) and these views existed in various formulations in India and they still exist in different formulations today. Most people who are not familiar with Buddhist teachings would think that these 2 views compromise the total possible ways of viewing the world, understanding the world. The eternalist view (sassatavada) has its core principle the idea there is some unchanging eternal principle that continues on from life to life. This is the Atman or the Jiva and in modern terms the soul or the spirit. There is some essence in the human being that doesn't change, that continues on after death to some particular destiny. This eternalist view usually, maybe not always but almost always also includes the idea of a creator God. That there is an eternal omniscient omnipotent being who created the universe as the 1st cause. So we see that view had variations in ancient India, usually with God being Brahma. Sometimes Prajapati. In any case, its some powerful creator being and its usually associated in the Indian version with reincarnation from life to life. In the west and in later times the theistic religions arose like Christianity and Islam that hold this eternalist principle. There are all kinds of variations, we know that there are many different sects of Christianity for example with many different nuances on this idea but they all have this fundamental idea of eternal life and a creator God.
Now its interesting in the Brahmajāla Sutta the Buddha actually discusses how theistic religions arise in the 1st place. It happens at the beginning of a new cycle. You must understand in the Buddhist cosmology theres no sense of an ultimate beginning but there is a beginning and ending of a particular world system. This world system we live in came into being at some point and will pass out of being at some point but there will always be and always have been world systems, thats the idea. So when a new world system comes into being its populated from the top down. Beings are reborn 1st in the higher realms and gradually the lower realms become populated. So at some point from by the force of its previous Kamma from the last world system some being will appear in the Brahma world and he is the 1st one to appear in that world. He spends a long time there alone and he begins to wish for companions then at some later time by the force of their own Kamma more beings start appearing in that world, lesser Brahmas and he believes that he has created them by the force of his wish and he explains and teaches that to them and they believe it as well. They believe he is the creator, he created them and he is the all creator. Eventually, the life span of these lesser Brahmas expires and they fall from that realm and they're reborn in the human world. If they become a yogi in the human world and practice austerities and meditation and they develop psychic powers remembering past lives they see visions of this Brahma world and the great Brahma teaching them about how he created them and they see this as a vision of the creator God in heaven and they teach it to others. This is the account in the Brahmajāla Sutta of how theistic religions begin.
The opposite set of micchadiṭṭhi (wrong views) is ucchedavada (or annihilationism). This set of views holds that human beings at death are completely terminated. There's continuity of any kind after death, the elements are dispersed and thats the end of it. There are variations of this view as well. There seems to be a minority position in ancient India. There didnt seem to be very numerous or strongly held but there were schools teachings this. As we know in modern times it is a very prominent view. It seems to be the preferred view of the intellectual classes. In modern terms, we would call it materialism or physicalism. This holds the idea that only the material world is real and that the mind is nothing more than a reaction in the brain, its nothing more than the process of the brain. One phrase that some modern person of this persuasion used is that "the brain secretes thoughts just as the liver secretes bile". So in this view human beings are just machines made out of meat.
Now in other suttas, the Buddha simplifies the Brahmajāla formula and specifies these 2 as the extreme views. The view of eternalism and the view of annihilationism and he specifies his own view as the middle path. The middle path between the two. From the view of the world, these 2 extreme views are inveterate opponents. We see that play out in modern debates about things like creationism vs evolutionism and theism vs atheism it seems like these 2 are completely irreconcilable and in most instances they are. However from the Buddha's point of view in the middle, although these 2 seem totally completely opposite, they do share 1 characteristic that makes them wrong view in the Buddhist view of understanding is that they at some point deny causality. I think this is very critical. It seems to be an underlying principle. It seems to be an underlying principle, an axiom of Buddhist thought through the ages, that of universal causality. The statement is found in the Abhidhamma text that "everything arises from causes and conditions. Everything arises from a cause, nothing arises from a single cause." So this is a denial of randomness and arbitrariness. This is the philosophical reason why we think of the universe as without a beginning. The Buddha himself didn't comment on that and he wouldn't comment on that. He said the origin of the universe is something not to be considered, can never be known but he never specified whether it has a beginning or not. But later Buddhist thinkers and teachers almost always held that the universe is without a beginning and this is stated explicitly in the commentaries, as early as that. Its a logical conclusion from the idea of universal causality. If everything arises from a cause then there can never be a 1st cause, no matter how far back in time you go theres always going the "a previous moment" that was the predecessor and the proximate cause of the next moment. Nothing arises without a cause so there can never be a beginning.
Now as I said this principle of causality breaks down the eternalist or annihilationist view. In the eternalist, there can be some thinkers in Christian or Islamic theology that will be very methodical and scientific generally but if you go back to the ultimate cause everything has to be God and God is the first cause, he is the beginning of the things. He is the will of creation by God. So that's essentially an arbitrary act. God had no cause and his will arose just by his own desire and didn't arise from any previous cause. So there's a breakdown of causality in the arbitrary role of a creator.
In the annihilationist view in the end it falls back on randomness, not arbitrariness but randomness that there are some things they are just so, thats just how they are, they have no cause or reason. This is most clearly evidenced in the particular state of birth of different beings. When beings are born, some are born animals and even within the human realm there is a wide range, there can be someone born a genius or with the capacity to be a star athlete and somebody else is born with down syndrome or some other debilitating birth defect. Modern science can go some distance in understanding the mechanics of how that occurs in terms of genetics, but it can never answer the question of why. Why was this person born as a child prodigy and this one born with down syndrome? The only answer that materialism can have for that is just randomness. It just happened, its just the luck of the draw. An atomic particle just happened to scramble the genes of his mother.
So this is not satisfactory in terms of causality whereas the view of kamma and rebirth explains that the conditions were set by their previous lifetimes. Theres no break in causality. This principle of causality also necessitates the truth of rebirth because otherwise, the 1st consciousness moment in a new life will be without cause. It would just appear from nowhere without a cause. So the Buddhist view in the middle is based on this principle of causality and this is detailed and explicated in the dependent origination, which the buddha identifies in several places as being the middle view. So we have these 2 extremes and have the Buddhas view in the middle and in some ways this middle path of view is like a razor edge. You can see in Buddhist history of the different schools and traditions and different teachers that exist at the present time. You can see often a slight deviation falling away either towards eternalism or annihilationism. Its challenging to maintain that pure middle position.
Theres one modern Buddhist writer, Maurice Welsh, who many of you might recognize as the translator of the Digha Nikaya. In an essay he wrote about view he came up with a very provocative and charming kind of image or analogy. He said its like you have a round circular lake and theres an island in the dead centre of the lake and there's kind of an optical illusion. Whichever side of the lake you stand on that island will appear to be closer to the far shore. He says thats how it is with the views. Someone on the shore of annihilationism, a materialist looking at Buddhism in the middle see it as being close to the eternalist position. They believe in rebirth, they have an idea of mystical ideas of emptiness and so on. They are not that different from other religions but if you walk around the lake and stand on the eternalist shore with the Christian theologians and you look at the island it appears to be close to the far shore of materialism. "Buddhists dont believe in God, they dont believe in an eternal soul, you know they are really just slightly different from the materialists and atheists". You can see that in critiques of Buddhism written either by materialists or by theists you will see, this attitude.
So this middle path view is one that sees the world in terms of causes and conditions. That holds the principle of Kamma and rebirth as a necessary adjunct to that and holds to the idea of the 4 noble truths and the 3 characteristics as underlying principles. These things compromise what's termed to be right view (sammā diṭṭhi). \
I will go back to a point that I kind of glossed over earlier to leave it to the end of this section. I said that in the Brahmajāla Sutta there are 2 main categories. We dealt with eternalism and annihilationism and theres a 3rd category that doesn't really fit either one and the Buddha calls them "eel wrigglers" (literal translations from the Pali). The Buddha is actually very dismissive of the eel wrigglers view and the eel wrigglers and the descriptions of their view sound like a satire. If they are asked a question theyll say " I wont say yes and I wont say no, if I said yes you might think that I believed it and if I said no you might think that I didnt believe it" and it goes on and on in predicating and in the end, its said that the holder of the eel wrigglers that they refuse to commit to anything and the view arises out of stupidity or cowardness. So the eel wrigglers are very close to modern agnosticism. I have seen people trying to make the case that Buddhism is basically agnostic, thats not at all the case.
Now in summary that was the description of right view in contrast to wrong view. The other aspect I wanted to cover in this talk which is very important, which is the correct holding of view. The Buddha was very definitely against dogmatic adherence to views. He said "even this own teaching of mine if its held wrongly it becomes a source of quarrelling and dispute and suffering." Even if you are right you shouldn't make it a point of dispute and argument and disparaging of others. Also in general we should have some humility to understand that we don't understand everything, we don't know everything and we should have a view that we could be wrong about something and to hold our views lightly. The Buddha tells a couple of parables to illustrate this point, particularly of attachment to views which is a very pernicious defilement to be dogmatically attached to a view. Whether its a spiritual view or a political one or any opinion held whatsoever. Its how dogmatically one refuses to consider the possibility that there may be an error, then it becomes a defilement and a hindrance. In one of these parables, the story is about a couple of friends who left their home village to go on a journey and when they come back they pass through a village that had been abandoned perhaps because of a bandit attack or some other reason but they found an abandoned village. As they are passing through the village they come across at one place a pile of straw and they say "oh we got some straw here, its good, its fresh, it will be useful to feed our animals with it. It would be handy to have" and so they make bundles out of the straw and put them on their head in an Indian fashion and continue walking. A little bit later they come across some bundles of cloth and the one fellow says "oh this cloth is much better and more valuable than straw, let me throw my straw away so I have room to carry a bundle of cloth". The other fellow says "well I would take the cloth but I have carried this straw already for a ways and I am kind of ashamed to throw it away now". As they go through the village they come across one thing after another, more valuable than the last until at the end its bars of gold, then bags of jewels. The further they depart with it the more and more they become attached to it. So they get back to their home village and the one fellow has bags of jewels and is rich for the rest of his life and the other fellow has some straw to feed his cow for a day. This is related to the Buddha, particularly to the idea of attachment to views and the interesting thing about this is the Buddha says that I was correct to come back with a bag of jewels, he didnt say you must come back with an empty head not carrying any of the findings. So what this means is that its not wrong to have an opinion or belief about something but you should hold it lightly and if you find that it is wrong, or if you find it refuted in some way or there is a better or more clear understanding of presented to you, you say "oh, ok" and you drop your old view and pick up a new one. You should be able to do that readily.
View is one of the biggest problems in the world today, it causes a lot of strife, this attachment to views and holding on dogmatically thinking you right. One little practice that I think is very useful if you find yourself in a disagreement with somebody and even just a friendly disagreement even more so if its an argument or dispute of some point of view whether its to do with religion or politics or entertainment or anything else. Try and pause mentally at some point in the dispute and ask yourself "why am I holding onto this view?" and it may be and often is just simply an ego position. You dont want to look like a fool and admit that you are wrong. Thats of no value. Sometimes you look at the 2 views rationally and say "this view that I hold I think it is correct, its worth holding onto". I heard a kind of an amusing story once about a second person story that I heard. 2 friends who were practitioners of Dhamma and they got into some dispute and it got a little bit heated about some esoteric point of Buddhist philosophy and they parted their ways without reconciling their positions and they didnt see each other for a while and in the meantime, both of them went on a journey, on a long journey. One went east and one went west (they were from Canada) and one went across the ocean and across Europe and into Asia. The other one went into Thailand first then kept traveling west and they ended up meeting in India by chance in a coffee shop in some town in India. Their conversation eventually turned to this point of Dhamma that they disputed and again the argument became heated but then they suddenly realized that they were taking the opposite sides from what they had originally. They cross around half the planet and met in a coffee shop in India and continued their argument on the opposite side. I thought that was quite amusing when I heard that. An example of an attachment to views, sometimes we dont even realize that we are attached to a view, let alone why we are attached to a view. So there is a value in being open-minded and open to fresh experience and fresh knowledge. One thing I like to say in this regard is in terms of understanding in some point of Dhamma, we should never be satisfied that we fully understand anything. This is kind of a danger of intellectualism that if we do a lot of studying and reading and you think "oh I have figured this out, I know this particular thing" and so then what you do mentally is you roll it up and put it away in a cubbyhole in your mind and its done. So you block any further growth or exploration in that area because you think its done but if you keep the mind completely open and ready to see new angles, new perspectives, new dimensions, to even things you thought you understood. You're opening yourself for further spiritual growth and widening and broadening your wisdom faculty.
Ajahn Punnadhammo