The Spirit of the Buddha

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Introduction In 1975, when I was twenty-two years old, I became a Zen nun in a Buddhist temple in South Korea. Since 1972 I had been living and working in London, where I became interested in Buddhism. I went to Tibetan Buddhist ceremonies, I read Zen books, and thought of doing Buddhist meditation. For this reason I decided to travel to Asia to find a meditative path.

I went to Nepal and India, where I did not have much opportunity to experience Buddhist teachings and practices because, as a first time traveller, I had secured the wrong visa and had to leave immediately. So I travelled to Thailand, where I met Buddhists monks and laypeople and started to meditate. But I was pulled towards Zen Buddhism and finally arrived in Korea, where I decided to become a Zen Buddhist nun.

After ten years, circumstances changed and I disrobed and gave back my nun's vows. I then married a British former Tibetan Buddhist Gelug monk and returned to Europe to live in a Buddhist community in Devon, England. Most members of that community were Theravada Buddhists from a modern Vipassana school that had originated in Burma. I participated in a few Vipassana retreats and found that the meditative techniques taught in these retreats were useful and effective. So I began to practise both Zen and Vipassana meditation.

I started to read books from different Buddhist teachers and tradition and became more and more interested in early Buddhism and the original teachings of the Buddha as found in the Pali Canon. The book that inspired me the most and that I have read several times since was The Life of the Buddha, as it appears in the Pali Canon, as translated and edited by Bhikkhu Nanamoli I was struck by how the Buddha came alive through the quotations from the Pali Canon judiciously chosen and organised by Bhikkhu Nanamoli.

In this text the Buddha appeared as a human being living in his own cultural conditions and trying to find a path to resolve his suffering and how to become a fully awakened person. By being able to achieve this not only did he benefit himself but he went on to teach and help others for forty-five years. When the opportunity came to write a book about the spirit of the Buddha, I decided that the best way to compose it, since I did not know Pali, was to use mainly quotations from The Life of the Buddha, as it appears in the Pali Canon, as Bhikkhu Nanamoli had already made an excellent choice and my task was to refine this choice for a contemporary audience of the twentieth-first century.

The 'Pali Canon' is a body of texts taught by the Buddha, which has been preserved in the Pali language. Pali is a form of popular Sanskrit also known as a 'prakrit. Sanskrit was the language of the Brahmanical religion in India. For example, the Upanishads have been recorded in Sanskrit. Pali is to Sanskrit what Italian is to Latin. The Buddha did not speak Pali, but he might have spoken a number of Sanskrit-based dialects. Pali is a literary version of these Sanskrit-based dialects. Over time it became the lingua franca for Buddhist monks who lived in different regions of India, so that they had a common language in which they could recite and memorise the Buddha's teachings found in the suttas discourses delivered by the Buddha or one of his prominent disciples.

The Pali Canon was recited and memorized communally by groups of monastics for three to four hundred years before it was inscribed on palm leaves in Sri Lanka. There is no Pali script as such. It is the tradition to transcribe the Pali Canon in the specific script of each country. The Pali Canon was first written down in Sinhalese. Since then it has been transcribed in Burmese and other East-Asian scripts, and nowadays Westerners can read the Pali Canon in Roman script.

The Pali Canon contains three sets of texts: the suttas, which are the discourses the Buddha gave over forty-five years; the Vinaya, which are the texts that describe the monastic discipline in great detail and list the monastic precepts; the Abhidhamma, which are later commentaries that try to analyse, classify and explain the sumas. I did not use any quotations from the Abhidhamma as this collection is a later addition and is extremely Complex.

The suttas are divided into five 'Collections (Nikaya): Middle Length Discourses (Majhima Nikaya), Long Discourses (Digha Nikaya), Connected Discourses (Samyutta Nikaya), Numerical Discourses (Angunara Nikaya), Minor Discourses (Khuddaka Nikaya). In this last collection, one will find a miscellany of shorter texts like the Dhammapada, the Udana, the Sutta Nipata, and the Therigatha.

Since 1881 to the present day, scholars have continued to translate and re-translate the Pali Canon into English. As with any translation, it is a work of interpretation and selection of which word in English not only seems accurate but also conveys the idea of the Pali term so that its meaning can be understood by a modern audience. For example, the Pali word dukkha is translated generally as 'suffering', but some translators nowadays have started to translate it as 'anguish' or 'stress'. Another example is the word samma, which is generally translated as 'right', but some translators have begun to translate it instead as 'whole' or 'authentic'. Recently I was asking a Pali scholar how he would translate a word someone else translates as 'subdue and he told me that he would have translated it as 'lead away'.

Sacred texts have appeared in a certain context and culture, and been expressed in a specific language. These texts come to us through time and what we read in translation is an approximation, but by studying them and practising their ideas we can make them our own in modern times. However, we need to keep in mind that there can be no pure text and no pure meaning passed on through time, which accords with the main idea of the Buddha that things are impermanent and subject to the flux of conditions.

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