Buddhist Sutras/Suttas

I recently stumbled upon some Buddhist texts, and they were insightful. So, I decided to go and find some more to review and reflect on. But, I was foolish to think finding more insightful stories would be an easy task. Of course, I already had the title of one of them and looked it up to see if it was part of a larger cohesive canon, a book, a collection, or some other organizing principle. This search for more led to the discovery that the canon of Buddhism is not a linear one, hence the title “Buddhist Sutras/Suttas.”

Suttas is the Pali equivalent of the Sanskrit word Sutra. Pali and Sanskrit both were ancient scripts that were used to write these scriptures. The historically interesting thing is that this linguistic difference can illuminate the difference between the two primary schools of Buddhism, Theravada, and Mahayana. The story I stumbled on was from the Theravada school, which has its particular canon, the Pali canon. The Tipitaka, as it is called, stands for the collection of three Buddhist texts, which are the Vinaya Pitaka, Sutta Pitaka, and Abhidhamma Pitaka. The Pali Canon is the canon that I will be reading and reflecting on in this blog.

The Arrow

I enjoyed this piece because it talked about the virtue of not being reactive to our emotions. At first, I almost seemed to disagree with the Sutta on the basis of interpreting it as advocating for a sort of stoic extreme. At first read, I interpreted it as talking about a sort of mind-privileging, especially when discussing the difference between the run-of-the-mill and the noble. The reason is that it seemed very easy to make the jump to say the same about the savage and the civilized man. But that reading hinges on my (mis)understanding of the noble vs. run-of-the-mill distinction here. It’s not that there is a socio-economic difference between them, but rather a difference in skill or wisdom.

The interpretation then highlights something important about the nature of consciousness and self-reflection. The Arrow is simply advocating for the skill of mindfulness, self-reflection, and non-reactivity. As with Buddhist teaching in general, the Sutta highlights the false dichotomy of the mind and shows how the conscious self is interdependent on the visceral/unconscious self. When the Sutta speaks on the noble saying:

“Sensing a feeling of pleasure, he senses it disjoined from it. Sensing a feeling of pain, he senses it disjoined from it. Sensing a feeling of neither pleasure nor pain, he senses it disjoined from it.

The it here refers to the conscious self and the “disjoined-ness” being on the gap between the conscious self and the sort-of imagined self. For example, take the idea of depression being a cycle. A person experiences visceral sadness, and the conscious self interprets themselves as being sad (this is the 2nd arrow). The Arrow points out that by not realizing this gap and losing agency, people take the 2nd arrow. In doing so, it aligns itself with the broader Buddhist tradition of saying there is no “self,” only an “I.”