32 CHAPTER TWOOne. He declared that he had attained the Deathless; that he was going to
teach the Dharma; and that if they practiced as he taught, they would quickly
realize it for themselves. The five were dubious, protesting that one who had
quit striving could not have attained the transcendent. The Buddha denied
that he had given up striving, reasserted his claim, and asked them if he had
ever made such a claim before. Eventually they admitted that he hadn't, and
so agreed to listen receptively.
Whether the Buddha on this occasion actually preached the discourse at-
tributed to him by canonical texts is as moot as whether Jesus pronounced the
Sermon on the Mount as a single discourse. The doctrine of the Middle Way
with which it begins, though, is entirely appropriate to the task of persuading
the five mendicants that one who had abandoned extreme austerities had not
necessarily forsaken the ascetic quest. (Here we will follow the Pali version of
the text [S.LVI.11], which provides an interesting comparison with the Lokut-
taravadin version translated in Strong EB.)
The Blessed One began by condemning each of two extremes, saying that
sensual indulgence is low, vulgar, worldly, ignoble, and useless, whereas self-
torture is painful as well as ignoble and useless. The Tathagata, by avoiding
these extremes, had discovered the Middle Way that produces vision and
knowledge and leads to peace, higher knowledge, Awakening, and nirva9-a.
This Middle Way is the Noble Eightfold Path: (1) right view, (2) right resolve,
(3) right speech, (4) right action, (5) right livelihood, (6) right effort, (7) right
mindfulness, and (8) right concentration.
, The Buddha then declared the Four Noble Truths. The first is the truth of
du}:lkha (suffering), found in every aspect of conditioned existence: birth,
aging, death, grief, lamentation, pain, distress and despair; conjunction with
the hated, separation from the dear; and not getting what one wants. In short,
the five skandhas (aggregates) of sustenance for becoming-form, feeling, per-
ception, mental formations, and consciousness-entail suffering. The second
is the truth of the origination of suffering: the thirst or craving that leads to
renewed becoming, endowed with passion and delight for this thing and that;
in other words, craving for sensuality, for coming to be, and for no change in
what has come to be. The third is the truth of the cessation of suffering: When
craving ceases entirely through dispassion, renunciation, and nondependence,
then suffering ceases. The fourth is the truth of the path of practice leading to
cessation of suffering, the Noble Eightfold Path..
Each of these truths entails a task. Suffering must be thoroughly under-
stood, the origination of suffering abandoned, cessation realized, and the
Noble Eightfold Path developed. The Buddha testified that he attained
supreme, perfect Awakening when_:_and only when-he had acquired puri-
fied true knowledge and vision of these Four Noble Truths as they actually
are, and he had known and completed the task appropriate to each. As a re-
sult, he knew that his release was unassailable; that this was to be his last birth;
and that there was no further becoming in store for him.
The five mendicants welcomed the discourse, and as it was occurring, one
of them, KauQ-<;linya, acquired the pure Dharma-eye, seeing that whatever is