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WorkGautama Buddha

Dialogues of the Buddha

The Buddha's long discourses, where kings, brahmins and rival teachers come to argue, and where his last journey is told.

by Gautama Buddha859 passages held

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Original title
Dīgha Nikāya
Original language
Pali

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Overview

Pūraṇa Kassapa taught that deeds bring neither reward nor punishment, Makkhali Gosāla that everything is fixed by fate, Ajita Kesakambalī that everything ends at death. They were among the rival teachers of the Buddha's time, and the Dīgha Nikāya, the "Long Collection", names them. In its second discourse King Ajātasattu, who had killed his father to take the throne, asks the Buddha what a man gains, here and now, by leaving home to live as an ascetic, and reports what each of the rivals told him. The Buddha answers with a path that leads step by step from conduct through calm of mind to release from suffering, and the king declares himself a follower. The first discourse gathers sixty-two speculative views about the self and the world — where they came from, where they go — as a net gathers fish, and traces every one of them to craving and ignorance. Others take on the brahmins. The twenty-seventh tells how the classes of society arose from human agreement, and Richard Gombrich, a historian of early Buddhism, reads it as a satire on the brahmins' claim to be born from the mouth of the god Brahmā. The sixteenth, the longest discourse in the Pāli Canon, follows the Buddha's last journey to Kusinārā, his death and the division of his relics. Oskar von Hinüber, a philologist, places its composition no later than about 350–320 BCE and reads it as hagiography rather than a record of events. The collection's thirty-four discourses were handed down by word of mouth in the early community, attributed to the Buddha and set down in writing in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE. Thirty-three of them are held here; only the seventh, the Jāliya, is missing. T. W. Rhys Davids, who had founded the Pali Text Society in 1881, published the first volume of the English translation in 1899, in a series issued under the patronage of King Chulalongkorn of Siam; the third volume, made with Caroline Rhys Davids, came out in 1921.

Key concepts

What are the four jhānas a recluse passes through?

They are four stages of meditative absorption, reached once the mind has put away its hindrances. In the first, joy and ease born of seclusion soak the whole body as water soaks a ball of soap powder. In the second they rise from within, like a pool fed by a spring. In the third, ease without joy steeps the body like lotuses that grow under water. The fourth is pure, bright equanimity.

What is eel-wriggling?

Eel-wriggling is refusing to commit. Asked whether something is good or bad, or whether there is another world, such a teacher answers: 'I don't take it thus. I don't take it the other way. But I don't say it is not.' The first discourse finds four kinds, some driven by fear of being wrong, one by plain dullness, and counts them among the sixty-two views: dodging every answer is still a position.

Where do all sixty-two speculative views come from?

From sensation and craving. Each view, the first discourse says, is what is felt by people who do not know and see, and who are subject to craving, and every one arises through contact with the senses. The Buddha claims no better view of his own. He claims to know how sensations rise and pass away, what is sweet in them and what is dangerous, and to be free because he understands that.

What are conduct, concentration and intellect?

They are the three bodies of teaching the Subha discourse names, each resting on the one before. Conduct is keeping from killing, theft, lying and the lesser wrongs. Concentration is guarding the senses, staying mindful and content, and entering the absorptions. Intellect is the insight that follows: seeing the body as impermanent and ending the defilements. A recluse who skips the first step cannot reach the third.

Who is the Great Elect in the story of the first beginnings?

He is the first king, and the people chose him. The Aggañña discourse tells how beings fed on a savoury earth and then on self-growing rice, grew coarse, began hoarding, and theft appeared. To stop the quarrels they agreed on one person to keep order and paid him with a share of rice: Mahā Sammata, the Great Elect. Rule, on this account, begins in agreement, not in a god.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Every View Caught in One Net

The teachers of the age argued over whether the self and the world are eternal and what survives death. The first discourse asks why all of them, however opposed, end up in the same net.

Sixty-two ways of speculating about the past and the future are listed: eternalists, those who call some beings eternal and others not, eel-wrigglers who will answer nothing, those who say the self perishes at death, and those who place release in present pleasure. The Buddha does not refute them one by one. He traces every view to the sensations and craving of those who hold it, like fish in a fine-meshed net, and says he is free because he knows how sensation rises and passes.

  • rebirth
  • afterlife
  • consciousness
  • perception
  • causation
  • craving
  • knowledge
  • wisdom

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What Leaving Home Gains, Here and Now

A king who killed his father asks what visible profit a recluse earns in this life. The answer has to be something he can see, not a reward promised after death.

Six rival teachers had answered King Ajātasattu with fatalism, with the claim that deeds bring nothing, with the claim that death ends all. The Buddha starts low: a slave who leaves home to become a recluse is honoured by the king who once owned him. Then he climbs step by step, each fruit higher than the last: conduct, guarded senses, contentment, four stages of meditative absorption each with its image, and at the top the knowledge that ends suffering.

  • renunciation
  • asceticism
  • meditation
  • concentration
  • spiritual attainment
  • ethical conduct
  • mindfulness
  • liberation

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Brahmins, Sacrifice and the Order of Society

The brahmins rested their rank on birth, the Vedas and the sacrifice. Several discourses test that claim against conduct and ask what is left of it.

Soṇadaṇḍa, a brahmin, concedes that birth, mantras and complexion can be dropped from the marks of a true brahmin, but not virtue and wisdom, which purify each other as hand washes hand. Not one Vedic teacher, the Tevijja discourse says, has seen Brahmā face to face. The best sacrifice slays no ox. Social classes arose by human agreement, the king by election, and a king who lets poverty spread breeds theft and then violence.

  • religious authority
  • kingship
  • ethics
  • virtue
  • generosity
  • community
  • compassion
  • karma

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The Last Journey

A teacher is dying and his community is about to lose him. The account asks what is to guide them once he is gone, and answers that it was never meant to be a person.

On the road to Kusinārā the Buddha refuses to name a successor. He has kept nothing back in a closed fist, so the monks are to be lamps and refuges to themselves, and the teaching and the rule are to be their teacher after him. Earlier he names the conditions under which the Vajjian clans will not decline, meeting often and in concord, and applies them to the order. His last words: decay is inherent in all component things, work out your salvation with diligence.

  • death
  • impermanence
  • teaching
  • community
  • mindfulness
  • religious authority

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Within this work

passages held
859
distinct concepts
809
by passages held, corpus-wide
#73

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “karma” and “rebirth”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 25 pairings. 87 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
karmarebirth31
liberationmeditation22
liberationrebirth15
impermanencemeditation11
meditationmindfulness11
impermanenceliberation10
impermanencerenunciation10
impermanencemindfulness8
karmarenunciation7
liberationrenunciation7
meditationrebirth7
liberationmindfulness6
impermanencerebirth5
liberationteaching4
meditationrenunciation4
mindfulnessrebirth4
rebirthrenunciation4
renunciationteaching3
impermanenceteaching2
karmameditation2
karmaliberation1
karmateaching1
meditationteaching1
mindfulnessrenunciation1
mindfulnessteaching1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1892 Buddhistische Anthologie

    A book assembled by its translator, not a book of the canon, and the start of a sequence: Neumann went on to translate the Dhammapada in 1893 and the verses of the monks and nuns in 1899.

     DE
  2. Dialogues of the Buddha (Dīgha Nikāya) you are here EN
  3. Psalms of the Early Buddhists I: Psalms of the Sisters (Therīgāthā)

    The companion to the Theragāthā, the verses of the elder monks, and less than half its length.

     EN
  4. Psalms of the Early Buddhists II: Psalms of the Brethren (Theragāthā)

    Twenty-one chapters ordered by the length of each poem, from single verses up to Vaṅgīsa's seventy-one, ascribed to the Buddha's first monks.

     EN
  5. Sutta-Nipāta

    An anthology rather than a single discourse: five chapters of verse and verse-dialogue, gathered into the miscellaneous fifth collection of the canon.

     DEEN
  6. The Book of the Kindred Sayings (Saṃyutta Nikāya)

    Built by topic rather than by length, unlike the two collections before it: here causation, the aggregates of a person and the six senses each receive a book of their own.

     PIEN
  7. The Dhammapada (Dhammapada)

    The best known of the canon's verse anthologies, filed with the miscellaneous fifth collection. Many of its verses recur elsewhere in the canon, and several early schools kept their own version.

     EN
  8. The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (Majjhima Nikāya)

    Where the Dīgha stages debates, this collection shows the Buddha at work as a teacher, with monks, householders and ascetics. Neumann's version, the first complete one in a European language, keeps the German spelling of the 1890s, with forms such as giebt and Gleichniss.

     DE
  9. The Udāna: Inspired Utterances of the Buddha (Udāna)

    Prose scenes, each with its verse: a mixed form among the books of the miscellaneous fifth collection, where the Dhammapada and the Theragāthā are verse alone.

     DE
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