Preface to Linked Discourses

I was introduced to Buddhism through the Theravāda tradition. I found my way to it through meditation and pursued my studies so I could more deeply understand my experiences in meditation. It didn't take me long to notice the rather odd fact that, while meditation was supposed to reveal direct, experiential truths, there was a lot of disagreement about what these things were and what they meant. It seemed that even direct experience was filtered by beliefs and expectations.

I found that, while many modern teachers dismissed the role of theory, insisting that experience alone was the standard, this was not the case in the Suttas. The Buddha placed right view at the start of the path, insisting that the framing of our ideas is what gives meaning to our experiences.

Living in Thailand, I was surrounded by Thai-flavored Theravada. My English-speaking monastic community at Wat Pa Nanachat was somewhat more eclectic. There were monks and visitors from all over, and while the "official" teachings were mainstream Theravada and forest tradition, behind the scenes there was a whole range of spiritual ideas and priorities. I learned about different flavors of Buddhism, but I didn't have a way of understanding how it all fit together, or how it related to my meditation. Many of the things I heard about seemed quite silly or far from the Buddha's teaching, and I confess, I became quite dogmatic, convinced that Theravada was the one and only original and true way. It was the great Sri Lankan monk K. Sri Dhammananda who checked this impulse, gently reminding me of the respect we owe to all practitioners of Dhamma.

I read some books on Buddhist history, notably A.K. Warder's Indian Buddhism, and from them learned that there were early discourses in languages other than Pali, especially Chinese. This was at once exciting and a little disturbing. One monk said to me that when he thought of the existence of parallels, it was like a nervous, lurking anxiety: what if we're wrong? What if the things we take to be true turn out to be no more than an institutional dogma, or an accidental artifact of history? Some modern schools of interpretation take this doubt as a starting point to dismantle the very idea that we can know what the Buddha taught, replacing knowledge with destructive nihilism.

Some years later, I met Rod Bucknell, from whom, during our discussions when starting SuttaCentral, I learned of a different approach. The Taiwanese monk Master Yin Shun () had developed a powerful theory of the origins and shared teachings in Buddhism. His insight was based on a comparative reading of all the texts (he read the Pali canon mainly from the Japanese translation) and was sparked by one of the great Mahayana treatises, Asanga's Yogacārabhūmi.

Yin Shun posited that the Saṁyutta was the first and primary collection of texts in Buddhism. By this, he meant the original Saṁyutta, not the developed forms we have today in the Pali Saṁyuttanikāya, multiple Chinese Saṁyuktāgama, and various portions in Sanskrit and Tibetan. These are, like all extant collections, the outcome of a redaction process that left its discernable fingerprints. Nonetheless, the close relationship between all these texts suggests that changes have been minor.

Once you take this idea on board, the signs leap out from everywhere. For example, some accounts of the First Council speak of the Saṁyutta being recited first, and we find that the first three sermons are in the Saṁyutta. Most convincing, however, is the observation that the list of topics found in the Saṁyutta is central to the Buddha's teaching: the aggregates, the senses, dependent origination, the elements, the path, and the four noble truths. When the Suttas list the Buddha's essential teachings, they do so with topics from the Saṁyutta. And when later generations organized the Buddha's teachings into coherent wholes, the same list of topics provided a handy scaffold.

This is far from a complete theory of early Buddhist texts; it is a complex situation, and there are many factors at play. But Yin Shun's fundamental thesis offered a compelling framework to make sense of the vast mass of texts and their interrelations.

The Saṁyutta theory suggests a simple guideline for interpreting Suttas: look for the main understanding of key teachings in the simple Suttas of the Saṁyutta and see other discourses, especially those of the Majjhima and Dīgha, as being built upon these foundations. The theory doesn't mean that all Saṁyutta discourses are earlier than others. It simply means that they were organized in this collection before other collections. It clarifies priority and perspective.

This was a revelation for me, and I pursued this insight in my book A History of Mindfulness. And ever since, I have found it to be a reliable means of sorting out what the Buddha taught.

It was challenging. Over and over again, I had to confront my expectations and biases. The anxieties of my friend turned out to be not completely baseless. I found that I could no longer believe in Theravada as the one true, source of Buddhism: it was, rather, one of many schools, and like all schools, it preserved much and changed much. I could see the many different flavors of Buddhism---some quite alien to me---while recognizing that underneath them all lie the same fundamental teachings of the Saṁyutta.

At a deeper level, this helped me realize how my own biases and expectations had been shaping my understanding of my meditation experiences, and hence what I did in meditation, and hence the nature of those experiences. If you think meditation is a certain way, you will meditate in accord, and your experiences will confirm your ideas. And if you tell yourself, "This is my personal experience, and has nothing to do with theory", then you'll never find a way out of the cycle. For that, we need critical inquiry based on the best available facts.

The truth was right in front of my nose all along, yet for years I did not see it. I was practicing "mindfulness" in the belief that this was the way of insight (vipassanā). But along the way, I found that mindfulness led to serenity (samatha). This wasn't what I had learned to expect from the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta as explained by modern teachers, for whom mindfulness and insight are intrinsically linked.

Studying the Saṁyutta closely I noticed that the teachings on insight---hundreds of Suttas---seldom mention mindfulness. And the teachings on mindfulness emphasize how it leads to serenity. It is serenity---the deep, immersive peace of mind called samādhi or jhāna---which then leads to liberating insight.

Suddenly my own experiences made sense. And so I changed the way I approached meditation in all sorts of subtle ways. I had thought of meditation as "noting" various "objects" with "momentary concentration" that would give rise to "dry insight". But I realized that none of these words or ideas was found in the Suttas at all. It simply isn't how the Buddha taught. Rather, he spoke of breathing mindfully, of the natural process of settling the mind, of how when one is informed by right view, wisdom emerges from a mind at peace.

This is my experience, and yours is different. It is not that the traditions, schools, and methods are wrong. They are fine for what they are, but what they are not are carbon copies of the Buddha's teachings. Think of them as degrees of approximation. It is in the Suttas, and especially the Saṁyutta, that we find the closest thing to the Buddha's words. I found that those words matched my experiences and informed my practice in ways that the schools and methods did not. And I am always grateful for those teachers who have made it possible for me to learn from the greatest teacher of them all.