Noble Warrior – A Life Of The Buddha Compiled From The Pāli Canon

The Buddha, as a teacher, was adamant about the power of action, and focused special attention on what skillful actions could accomplish in bringing about a true and unchanging happiness. So it’s only natural to want to know what he himself did, and what he was able to accomplish through his actions. An account of his life allows people who are not yet convinced of his awakening to assess him as a teacher and the value of his teachings, to see if he practiced what he taught and if it was a good thing that he did so. It also allows those of us who are convinced of his awakening to learn by example what the Buddha regarded as skillful action and to gain inspiration from the way he lived his life.

This is why many biographies of the Buddha have been composed over the millennia. Ironically, the most authoritative source for learning about the Buddha’s accomplishments, the Pāli Canon, contains chronological accounts of only a few parts of his life: his birth, his quest for awakening, the first year or so immediately after his awakening, and then the last year of his life. There is a wealth of material on the intervening years, but by and large it’s fragmentary. There are a few long narrative accounts, but although they scrupulously tell where the events they narrate took place, they make little or no attempt to indicate when. Only rarely does a passage state that the Buddha was young or old at the time of the incidents it reports. The early parts of the Canon relate some of the important events in the very early and late periods of his life—such as his return to his family, the ordination of his step-brother, the death of his two chief disciples, and the death of one of his major supporters, King Bimbisāra—only in bits and pieces. They say nothing of his interactions with his wife, either before or after his awakening, and don’t even mention her name.

Most biographers have thus chosen to fill in the blanks. This is a tendency that began in the early centuries of the tradition, as the genres of literary biography and the epic developed in India, and Buddhists felt a need to provide their Teacher with an aesthetically and dramatically satisfying life in line with these genres. Some of these accounts found their way into later additions to the Canon, such as the Apadānas. Later still, the authors of the Pāli commentaries—systematic explanations of the Canon that postdate the Canon by many centuries—added even more dramatic incidents in their account of the Buddha’s life, along with a detailed account of where the Buddha spent his various Rains retreats every year from the time of his awakening to that of his passing away. There is, however, no clear evidence in the early parts of the Canon to substantiate these additions to the Buddha’s story.

But even though these parts of the Canon don’t provide enough evidence for a strictly chronological biography, they do contain ample material for a thematic one, i.e., an account that focuses on themes and activities that ran throughout the Buddha’s life. That is the style of biography we have attempted here.

Taking passages from what, on the grounds of internal consistency, we regard as the early parts of the Canon—listed on the Abbreviations page—we have organized these passages in a way that highlights the Buddha’s three main accomplishments:

• finding the path to the awakening that puts an end to suffering, and following that path all the way to the goal;

• teaching the path to awakening to his contemporaries, both human and divine, creating a living apprenticeship devoted to training others in the path to awakening, too; and

• establishing a body of teachings and disciplinary rules—called the Dhamma and Vinaya—to provide a structure for this apprenticeship so that the True Dhamma would last a long time, enabling future generations to follow the path to awakening for many centuries.

We have collected passages exclusively from the Canon, interspersing them with a minimum amount of explanatory material. The explanations are drawn from our own observations drawn from the Canon and from other sources. Where they derive from other sources, we have indicated that fact. These explanations have been set in this sans-serif typeface so as to keep them distinct from the canonical passages, thus allowing the compilers of the Canon, as much as possible, to speak for themselves.

Some people have questioned the historical reliability of the Canon’s accounts—usually on subjective grounds—but we have yet to encounter any solid evidence that the canonical sources we have cited are not trustworthy. There is no archeological or textual evidence to contradict any of the Canon’s accounts. And as for objections to the Canon’s frequent reference to psychic powers or to beings on other levels of the cosmos, on the grounds that such things are inconsistent with a modern deterministic and materialist view of reality: That view of reality has never been proven—and it never will be—despite the many false claims that it is “scientific.” The Canon itself shows that there is nothing especially modern about it. It existed in the time of the Buddha, and the Buddha explicitly rejected it both because it didn’t lead to skillful behavior and because it offered no possibility for a path to the end of suffering (MN 60; AN 3:62), which was the whole point of his life and teaching.

The Canon states that psychic powers, including knowledge of other levels of the cosmos, were a necessary part of the Buddha’s awakening, in that he had to know these things if he was going to teach others, but they are not necessary for the awakening of his disciples (SN 12:70). Nevertheless, for those who do experience these things in the course of their practice, the Canon gives useful lessons in how not to be waylaid by them, so that they can act as aids rather than as obstacles to awakening.

That said, there are some passages in the Canon’s narratives of the Buddha’s life—especially in the passage recounting his birth—that stretch the credulity even of those who have no trouble accepting the existence of psychic powers and other levels of the cosmos. Fortunately, the ability to benefit from the Buddha’s teaching does not depend on accepting everything reported in the Canon. As it itself says, legends and traditions can be mistaken, and the true worth of a tradition is measured by the actions its teachings inspire. This means that the essence of the Dhamma reported in the Canon lies in the teachings it presents—both directly, in instructions, and indirectly, through narratives—that can actually be put into practice, to see if they lead to skillful results.

This is an area where the Canon excels. The useful and honorable values it conveys, both in the Buddha’s teachings and through the stories of his accomplishments, deserve to be kept alive so that they can be put to the test.

The Canon portrays not only the Buddha’s actions, but also the environment in which he acted. Narratives in the suttas, or discourses, introduce us to the individuals and the issues he was responding to in teaching the Dhamma, allowing us to see which questions he felt were important to answer, and which were best left aside as irrelevant to the message he was trying to convey. The suttas also show us the opposing viewpoints of contemporary teachers so that we can assess the extent to which his awakening and his Dhamma were genuinely new within his cultural context. By clearly delineating what the Dhamma is not, these accounts also help to clarify what the Dhamma is. And they teach us an important lesson about the Buddha as a debater, firm but fair in arguing with his opponents, and always keeping their genuine best interests in mind. In a similar vein, narratives in the Vinaya show us the incidents he was responding to when legislating rules for the monastic Saṅgha, as well as the standards he wanted the rules to embody.

Although many of the passages in the suttas and Vinaya were composed by his followers from the point of view of an omniscient narrator—a role attributed to Ven. Ānanda for the suttas, and to Ven. Upāli for the Vinaya—the Canon also reports more personal perspectives on the Buddha’s accomplishments, sometimes from the point of view of individual followers, sometimes from that of his opponents, and sometimes from the Buddha himself.

The Buddha’s own observations on his accomplishments are of special interest. As he taught his son, Ven. Rāhula, actions are best judged in terms of the motivation underlying them—what they are intended to accomplish—and at the actual results they produce. For this reason, we have focused attention on the Buddha’s own reports of what he was trying to accomplish in his search for awakening, what he learned from his awakening, what standards he used to judge his awakening as valid and complete; what he was trying to accomplish by teaching, what he felt his duties as teacher were, and how he judged the success of his efforts.

In the case of the awakening, it’s easy to find answers to these questions because most of the accounts of his search for awakening and of the awakening itself are told from the Buddha’s own point of view. In the case of his mission in teaching, we have had to collect various passages scattered throughout the Canon that give an idea of his pedagogy: i.e., his ideas about what counts as a responsible and effective way to teach, the extent to which the success of a teaching depends on the teacher, and the extent to which it depends on the students, both among his contemporaries and in succeeding generations.

You will find the answers to these questions as you read through the book, but we would like to highlight a few of the points we found most striking as we assembled the material and to explain some of our editorial choices.

The first point is the amount of adversity the Buddha had to face in bringing about all three of his major accomplishments. Traditional and modern portrayals of the Buddha tend to emphasize the inevitability of his success, but the accounts in the Canon show that it was rarely effortless. In the Buddha’s own words, his awakening required that he be “heedful, ardent, and resolute” in developing all the personal character traits that would enable him to awaken. And the accounts of his teaching career show that he had to deal with opposition not only from contemporary teachers, but also from within his own following. The story of Devadatta is only the most famous instance of rebellion in the ranks. As you will see, the monks and nuns of the monastic Saṅghas weren’t always docile in accepting the rules the Buddha laid down for the long life of the True Dhamma.

As the Buddha himself said, a great deal can be learned about a person through observing how he or she deals with adversity, so we felt it important to include stories of the Buddha facing difficulties, both as evidence of his character and as inspiration for those who are following his path. It’s because the Buddha had to strategize and do repeated battle throughout his life—first against his own defilements, then against the defilements of others—that we have named this biography, Noble Warrior. Not only was he born into the noble-warrior class, he also fought, and often won, the most noble of battles.

Another striking point about the canonical accounts is that the Buddha repeatedly described his quest for awakening, on the one hand, as a search “for the deathless,” i.e., something totally unconditioned, and on the other as a search “for what is skillful,” i.e., a course of action that would effectively and harmlessly lead to the deathless. To search for the deathless was in itself an audacious aim; to hope for a path of action, which would have to be conditioned, to lead to something unconditioned flew in the face of every known understanding of causality in his time. This is why, when he had attained awakening, he often expressed the lessons of awakening in terms of a novel principle of causality that had a direct bearing on human action. This emphasis on actions and the great things they could accomplish formed the underlying theme for all of his teachings.

As for the awakening, we were struck by the wide variety of angles from which the Buddha described this event. It was obviously a multi-faceted experience—in terms of the efforts that led there and the lessons learned in the course of the awakening itself—and because it was the central event in the Buddha’s life, we have tried to gather as many of these facets from the Canon as we can. This has had the effect of delaying the pace of the book’s narrative, as a single event is retold many, many times from different angles, but for the sake of added depth we felt it important to risk these delays. Think of the repeated accounts as a collection of eyewitness accounts, allowing for a fully rounded view of a momentous event.

For all the many facets of the awakening, it’s also striking to note what the Buddha did not describe as part of his awakening. Despite the claims we hear often at present that awakening means discovering annihilation, non-duality, the Oneness of all being, the ground of being, the existence of the True Self, or the non-existence of the self—however “self” might be defined—none of these ideas played a role in the Buddha’s own account of his awakening or of the standards he used to judge his awakening to be complete. In fact, the Canon contains passages explicitly rejecting these positions (see, respectively, SN 22:85, AN 10:29, SN 12:48, MN 1, MN 22, and MN 2). And although many modern teachers equate awakening with the act of confirming the truth of the perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self, the Canon never explicitly mentions these perceptions in any of the awakening narratives. Now, these perceptions do play an implicit role in the path leading to awakening, as means for realizing the drawbacks of fabricated experience, but the awakening accounts are clear that all five aggregates—including the perceptions used on the path—are abandoned on reaching the essence of awakening: release.

With regard to the Buddha’s work in teaching his contemporaries and establishing the True Dhamma, it’s noteworthy that—rather than hoping to save all beings—he focused on teaching only those fit to be taught. As he said to the Brahmā Sahampati, in response to the latter’s request that he teach, in opening the doors to the deathless he expected a response only from those who had ears. This qualification was a direct result of his insight into kamma: Not everyone who listened to his Dhamma would have the proper combination of past and present kamma to be open to understanding what he was saying or to reach the goal in response.

The Canon emphasizes repeatedly that it would be an impossible task to take the full measure of the Buddha or of his accomplishments. As he told his followers, he had revealed to them only a tiny portion of what he had learned in the course of his awakening. And at present, we know only a small fraction of that tiny portion—and next to nothing of what he may have taught to devas and human beings when no one else was around to record what he said.

As for the Buddha as a person, the Canon insists that, following his release from all attachments, he cannot even be regarded as a being: that he is limitless like the ocean (MN 72), and that the full range of his powers and virtues is inconceivable (AN 4:77). However, there is plenty of material in the Canon for us to grasp that his awakening was an earth-shaking achievement, and that he was an outstanding teacher—enough to inspire us to want to attain awakening ourselves, and to contribute to the on-going task he set in motion: that of keeping what remains of the True Dhamma alive.

This book has been a long time in the planning and execution. We took our original inspiration from other biographies of the Buddha presented in a similar format—stringing together passages from ancient texts—most notably those compiled by Vens. Ñāṇamoli and Khantipālo. The advantage of this format is that it allows the reader to get as close as possible to the original sources. The disadvantage is that the style of those sources can be off-putting to anyone unfamiliar with oral literature. The fact that these texts were originally composed to be memorized—an intention that apparently began with the Buddha’s own talks—explains why they make such heavy use of repetition and stock phrases. We have elided some of the repetition wherever elision would not distort the meaning or weaken the impact of the message, but we ask the indulgence of the reader not to be annoyed by the repetitions that remain. When you get used to the style of the Pali Canon, you find that it has its own charm.

We could not have completed this book without the help of many individuals. In addition to the monks here at the monastery, we would like to thank Andrea Kessler, Addie Onsanit, Nathaniel Osgood, Balaji Ramasubramanian, Dale Schultz, Isabella Trauttmansdorff, and Barbara Wright for their valuable suggestions for improving the text. Hisayo Suzuki proofread the manuscript. Isabella Trauttmansdorff provided the index.

Any mistakes, of course—in either the translations or the explanations—are our own responsibility.