Not What We Believe, but How We Live
Original source: satipanya.org.uk
In this teaching, Bhante Bodhidhamma examines the Buddha's warning against becoming entangled in speculative debates and rigid views. Drawing from the Majjhima Nikāya and Sutta Nipāta, he explores how both ancient and modern debates between materialists and eternalists miss the essential point of the Buddha's teaching. The essay discusses the Buddha's approach of avoiding metaphysical questions in favor of practical methodology that addresses the immediate reality of suffering.
Bhante Bodhidhamma shares his personal journey into Buddhism, explaining how he was drawn not to beliefs but to a practical method for transformation. He emphasizes that while understanding the teachings intellectually is important, it is the actual practice of meditation and moment-to-moment awareness that brings experiential understanding and genuine change. The teaching highlights how the Buddha was less concerned with why we suffer than with providing tools to understand how we create our own suffering.
This reflection offers valuable guidance for practitioners who may become caught up in philosophical speculation rather than focusing on the transformative power of practice. It encourages readers to examine what they are actually doing to make their lives more meaningful, rather than getting lost in theoretical debates about concepts like rebirth or nibbāna.
The Buddha warned his followers not to get caught up in ‘debates’. In his day, these were very popular it seems. Every full moon, in the bright glow of the cool tropical evening, people gathered at the shrines to hear religious teachers.Their views conflicted. There were materialist annihilationists, much as the atheists of today, and there were eternalists, much in the same way as present day ‘believers’.Talking about speculative beliefs, whether it is the materialist atheist who reduces everything to chemicals or the religionist belief in life everlasting, he warns us not to get caught up in ‘a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion of views, a vacillation of views, a fetter of views.’ M.2.8The debates between religion and science tend to be about provable facts. Neurobiologists say that because certain parts of the brain light up and certain chemicals function as we experience emotions, that therefore theseareemotions. But no-one experiences emotions as electro-chemical happenings. Believers and the Buddha talk of a soul, a subtle body, the mind-made body. Only those who have had such an experience can be sure of it. And then how are they going to prove it?If religion is about beliefs, statements of facts, then all we will do is repeat the well-worn arguments of ‘experts’.In the Sutta Nipata, one of the earliest collection of the Buddha’s Sayings he says ‘The one who is full of rigid views, puffed up with pride and arrogance, who deems himself ‘perfect’ (expert), becomes anointed in his own opinion …’ SN IV.12.12When I became interested in Buddhism, I wasn’t in search of a belief, but of a methodology that would help me out of the hole I’d got myself into. What was said, of course, made sense. But it was what I ‘did’, that lead me to commit myself to Buddhadhamma. Such questions about rebirth and Nibbana weren’t important to me. I left them to stew. Maybe in time I’d find out. What mattered was how the practice of meditation and moment to moment mindfulness was revolutionising my life. And this of course meant to understand how I was creating my own suffering.The Buddha eschews philosophical or metaphysical questions. He’s not concerned as towhywe suffer. I think it would have been of little interest to him to know about Darwin’s theory of evolution. How does it make life more meaningful, knowing we are biologically descended from early mammals? It may as well have been a potato. Or knowing that our psychology is based on early human experience as hunter gatherers? Since when did life become any safer?Religion is about how we live. This is dependent on our understanding. But it’s what we do that gives this understanding an experiential meaningfulness. Knowing all about mountain climbing is one thing. Actually climbing one is something else.So the question is, ‘What am Idoingthat is making my life more meaningful; what more meaningless?’