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WorkGautama Buddha

The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha

A hundred and fifty-two discourses of middle length — the poisoned arrow, the raft, the bandit Aṅgulimāla — in Neumann's German.

by Gautama Buddha2,283 passages held

  • German, a translation held here
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Original title
Majjhima Nikāya
Original language
Pali

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Overview

Before he taught anyone, the Buddha studied with two meditation teachers, Āḷāra Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta, mastered what each could show him, and left them both because neither led to the end of suffering. He tells that story himself in the twenty-sixth of the 152 discourses of the Majjhima Nikāya, the "Middle Collection", named for the length of its pieces, between the long discourses of the Dīgha Nikāya and the short sayings of the Saṃyutta. Like all the discourses, they were handed down orally in the early community, attributed to the Buddha and some of his chief disciples, and written down in Sri Lanka in the first century BCE. Bhikkhu Bodhi, their modern English translator, singles the collection out for joining the widest range of settings to the deepest range of teachings. A parallel collection from other early schools, the Madhyama Āgama, survives in Chinese; its Sarvāstivāda version holds 222 discourses. Karl Eugen Neumann, a Viennese who had come to the Buddha's teaching through Schopenhauer, translated all 152 into German in three volumes between 1896 and 1902, half a century before I. B. Horner's complete English version. Philologists now fault his precision. The sixty-third discourse begins with a demand. A monk named Māluṅkyāputta told the Buddha he would give up the monk's life unless he learned whether the world is eternal, whether the soul is the same thing as the body, and whether one who has reached the goal exists after death. The Buddha replies with a parable: a man shot with a poisoned arrow refuses to let the doctor pull it out until he knows who shot it, what the bow was made of and what feathers were on the shaft. He would die first. The Buddha teaches the Four Noble Truths — suffering, its origin, its end and the way to its end — because that knowledge leads to release, and he leaves the speculative questions unanswered for the same reason.

Key concepts

What are the Four Noble Truths?

They are the four things the Buddha says he does declare: there is suffering, it has an origin, it can end, and there is a path that leads to its end. Suffering covers birth, ageing, sickness, death and not getting what one wants. The origin is craving. The path is the noble eightfold one, from right view to right concentration. He teaches these, he tells Māluṅkyāputta, because they lead to calm, knowledge and release.

Which questions does the Buddha refuse to answer?

A fixed set about the world and the self: whether the world is eternal or not, finite or infinite, whether the life-principle is the same as the body or different, and whether one who has reached the goal exists after death, does not, both or neither. He calls them undeclared. Answering them, he says, does not lead to the end of suffering, so a teacher who cared about that end leaves them aside.

What does it mean to grasp the teaching like a snake?

It means learning the teaching for the wrong reason. A man who catches a large snake by the body or the tail gets bitten, the Buddha says, and one who learns the discourses only to have opinions to air about them is hurt by them in the same way. The right grip pins the snake with a forked stick: learning the teaching for its purpose, examining its sense with wisdom until it gives insight.

What are the four foundations of mindfulness?

They are four things a monk watches steadily, clearly aware, having put worldly longing and sorrow aside: the body, feelings, the mind and mental objects. The body comes first, beginning with the breath: breathing in long, he knows he breathes in long, breathing out short, he knows it is short. Neumann calls them the four pillars of insight, and the discourse presents them as the direct way to release.

What are the three knowledges of the night of awakening?

They are what the Buddha says he came to know in the three watches of that night. First he remembered his own former lives, one after another, with their names and circumstances. Then he saw beings dying and being reborn according to their deeds. Last he knew the destruction of the taints, the deep-rooted cravings and delusions, and understood the four truths. With the third, he says, he knew he was free.

Themes of the book

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

The Search, in His Own Words

Two teachers took him as far as their meditation could go, and fasting took him to the edge of death. What was missing from both roads, and where did he find it instead?

The Buddha tells it himself. He mastered what Āḷāra Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta taught, was offered the leadership of their followers and left, because neither attainment led to awakening. He lived on a handful of bean soup until his body wasted. Then he remembered sitting as a boy in the shade of a rose-apple tree while his father worked the fields, happy beyond desire, and asked himself why he should fear that happiness. Awake at last, he hesitated to teach until the god Brahmā Sahampati pleaded with him.

  • asceticism
  • awakening
  • renunciation
  • meditation
  • concentration
  • spiritual attainment
  • knowledge

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A Raft, Not a Creed

A teaching can be clung to like any possession. What, then, is it for, and what may it leave unsaid without failing the person who asks?

Māluṅkyāputta threatens to leave the order unless he learns whether the world is eternal and whether one who has reached the goal exists after death. The Buddha answers with a man shot by a poisoned arrow who will not let the doctor pull it out until he knows who shot it: he would die first. The four truths are declared because they lead to release, the rest left aside. Even the teaching is a raft, built to cross the water and then left on the shore.

  • teaching
  • suffering
  • knowledge
  • wisdom
  • non-attachment
  • attachment
  • dialogue
  • religious authority

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Work on the Mind

Anger, lying and thoughts that will not go away are not ended by wishing them gone. These discourses ask what practical work turns a mind around.

The methods are concrete. A thought that will not leave is driven out by a better one, as a mason knocks out a coarse peg with a fine one. The Buddha's son Rāhula is told to examine every deed before, during and after it, as a face is examined in a mirror. Even if bandits sawed a monk limb from limb, a mind that turned to hatred would not be keeping the teaching. And the bandit Aṅgulimāla, who had killed many, is stopped and becomes a monk.

  • ethics
  • mindfulness
  • equanimity
  • compassion
  • virtue
  • craving
  • desire
  • monastic life

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Within this work

passages held
2,283
distinct concepts
914
by passages held, corpus-wide
#22

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: “liberation” and “meditation”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 82 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
liberationmeditation61
liberationsuffering47
liberationrebirth46
desiresuffering33
ethicsrebirth33
rebirthsuffering28
asceticismrenunciation25
meditationrebirth25
renunciationsuffering22
meditationrenunciation21
asceticismsuffering20
desiremeditation20
desirerenunciation20
liberationrenunciation18
meditationsuffering17
desireliberation16
ethicsliberation14
asceticismliberation13
asceticismmeditation12
asceticismrebirth12
asceticismdesire11
desireethics9
ethicssuffering9
ethicsrenunciation7
rebirthrenunciation7
desirerebirth6
asceticismethics5
ethicsmeditation5

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)

    Of the five collections of the Buddha's discourses in the Pāli Canon, this one comes first and holds the longest pieces. Many of them stage an encounter: a brahmin, a king or a rival ascetic arrives with a question.

     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) you are here 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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