The Buddhist Religion: A Historical Introduction

THE BUDDHA AS TEACHER 35

Faith in the Buddha as revealer of the Dharma is a first step on the Path.

The preliminary level of right view entails the belief that there are human be-

ings who have seen the true nature of reality and can reveal it to others. With-

out this belief, one would lack the faith and conviction necessary to undertake

the Path's remaining factors. Nevertheless, faith is not a substitute for knowl~

edge. It is the seed that grows into confirmatory realization, formed of a will-

ingness to take statements provisionally based on trust, confidence in the

.integrity of a witness, and determination to practice in accordance with in-

structions. As a mental state, it is accompanied not by boiling zeal but rather

by the serenity and lucidity conducive to liberating insight.

2.3.1 The Four Noble Truths

The Four Noble Truths lie at the essence of that liberating insight. These truths
are best understood not as the content of a belief, but as phenomenological
categories, a framework for viewing and classifYing the processes of experience
as they are directly present to the awareness. In one of the early discourses, the
Buddha refers to them as an alternative to the self/other dichotomy that most
people use to categorize reality. To view experience in terms ofthe four truths
is to regard it without the metaphysical superstructure that comes as part and
parcel of the notions of "me" and "mine:' Such a view also avoids many of the
complicated issues that come with the notion of self: for example, the need to
identifY what it is, to confirm or deny its existence, and the imperative to max-
imize its well-being either by exploiting the "other" or by swallowing the
"other" into the self by equating the latter with the cosmos as a whole. Before
people can abandon these issues, however, they have to be properly prepared.
The Buddha would not teach the four truths to those who were not ready for
them. In some cases, this required a graduated discourse (as with Yasa; see Sec-
tion 2.4), during which the Buddha would try to loosen the listener's attach-
ment to his/her ordinary way of viewing things, first by describing the sensual
rewards of generosity and virtue to be enjoyed in heaven, then the drawbacks
of those ephemeral rewards, and finally the more lasting rewards of renuncia-
tion. Only then would the listener be ready for the four truths. In the case of
the five mendicants, though, they first had to be weaned from their attach-
ment to austerities. Thus the first sermon begins with a statement asserting
that austerities are not different in kind from sensual indulgence, but are sim-
ply one of two ignoble and useless extremes that a sramal!a should avoid in
order to arrive at the Middle Way to true peace and Awakening.
What is the Middle Way? On one level it is, like the Greek and Chine.se
Golden Mean, a course of moderation in which the bodily appetites are suffi-
ciently fed for health rather than being indulged or starved. But it comprises
much more than that. The Noble Eightfold Path, the best-known expression
of the way, can be subsumed under a shorter formula, called ·the Three Train-
ings: discernment (right view and resolve), virtue (right speech, action, and
livelihood), and concentration (right effort, mindfulness, and concentration-
see Strong EB, sees. 3.5.4, 3.5.5). We have already seen all three as strands in