Michael Carrithers’ book, The Buddha, was first published in 1983 as part of the Oxford University Press series Past Masters. The goal of the series was to offer brief introductions to the ideas of important thinkers. The book was eventually reprinted in the 1990s as part of the Oxford Very Short Introductions series.

At just 100 pages in length, Carrithers’ book is indeed a very short introduction covering Śākyamuni’s early life and renunciation, the way to awakening, the awakening itself and the mission and the death of the Buddha.

Carrithers offers an academic’s anthropological and historical view of the Buddha, but one that is supportive. An early example of this comes when Carrithers is discussing why Śākyamuni rejected the teachings of Āḷāra Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta.

“They fall short because, whatever view of the spiritual cosmos clothed their meditative techniques, it was the techniques themselves which were inadequate. On the one hand this signals that the Buddha was to move towards creating his own special forms of meditation, forms beside which methods such as the Absorptions were to take a subsidiary place. On the other hand it betokens the formation of an abiding attitude which must have marked the man as it deeply marked his teaching, an attitude which might be called a stubbornly disciplined pragmatism. Whatever teachings or practices the well-stocked market-place of ancient Indian thought offered him, they had to be shown to be useful in his own experience for him to accept them. …

The consequences of this attitude appear throughout the Buddha’s mature teaching. ‘Know not by hearsay, nor by tradition … nor by indulgence in speculation…nor because you honor [the word of] an ascetic; but know for yourselves.’ (Anguttara Nikāya, Vol. 1, p189)”

Another example comes when Carrithers is explaining the variations on the meaning of transmigration.

In other teachings the doctrine of transmigration went with an elaborate view of the spiritual cosmos within which transmigration occurs. One moves up and down, becoming now an animal, now a god, now the denizen of some hell, and again a Warrior or Brahman, a slave or a king (Buddhism itself was later to be prolific in the production of such views). But for the Buddha the specific details of transmigration were never so important as the principle underlying it: human action has moral consequences, consequences which are inescapable, returning upon one whether in this life or another. There is a fundamental moral order. One cannot steal, lie, commit adultery or ‘go along the banks of the Ganges striking, slaying, mutilating and commanding others to mutilate, oppressing and commanding others to oppress’ (Dīgha Nikāya, Vol. 1, p52), without reaping the consequences. There is an impersonal moral causation to which all are subjected. Misdeeds lead to misery in this life or in later lives. The Buddha’s teaching was devoted to the apparently selfish purpose of self-liberation, being directed to sentient beings in so far as they are capable of misery and final liberation from misery. But the teaching also touched sentient beings as moral agents, as agents capable of affecting the welfare not only of themselves but of others as well. Some of his teachings seem to treat only personal liberation, others morality, but for the Buddha the two matters were always intimately and necessarily connected.

Worth keeping for future use are his discussions of basic elements of Buddhist thought

The Five Aggregates

In this view, objects of experience, the organs of experience such as the eye, and the consequent consciousness of experience, ‘the mind’, are indissolubly linked. None of the three is conceivable without the other: they lean upon each other as one sheaf of reeds leans upon another, to use a canonical simile.

Furthermore, those features of experience which might be said to lie within the ‘mind’ itself, such as perception, feeling and consciousness, are themselves ‘conjoined, not disjoined, and it is impossible to separate them in order to specify their individual characteristics’ (Majjhima Nikāya, Vol. 1, p293). So right from the objects of perception, through the physical organs of perception, to feeling, consciousness, thought and volition, there is one dynamic, interdependent, ever-changing complex, which might be called an ‘individual’ or a ‘self, but which has nothing lasting in it.

Indeed the very term which I have translated as ‘all aspects of experience in the mind and body’ is one of the analytic descriptions of this process, a description in which the impersonal, dynamic and interdependent nature of the process is already implicit. This term is the ‘five aggregates’ (pañcakkhanda). The first ‘aggregate’ is materiality, which includes physical objects, the body, and sense organs. The other four ‘aggregates’ are feeling, perceptions, impulses and consciousness. Within these ‘aggregates’, this process, are included all that pertains to an individual and his experience. Feeling is but one face of this process, a face available to insight meditation. The mutability and inadequacy of feeling are characteristic of the whole process: ‘all aspects of experience in the mind and body are suffering’. Or, as the Buddha said elsewhere, ‘as the aggregates arise, decay, and die, O monk, so from moment to moment you are born, decay, and die’ (Paramatthajotikā, Vol. 1, p78).

The Lust for Rebirth

Rebirth may be rebirth from moment to moment of experience, or it may be rebirth in another life, but in either case it is the consequence of this lust to be something else.

Intentions

[I]in the legal system developed for the Buddhist order, only intentional actions are regarded as transgressions, and unintentional acts — such as those committed while asleep, or mad, or under duress — are not culpable.

This has great implications. It means that intentions are not negligible, that they have consequences. They do work, are in themselves actions. This is the sense of the term ‘karma’, whose primary meaning is just ‘work’ or ‘deed’, but in this Buddhist sense ‘mental action’. (Karma does not refer to the results of action, as we now assume in ordinary usage in the West.) ‘It is choice or intention that I call karma — mental work — ‘for having chosen a man acts by body, speech and mind’ (Anguttara Nikāya, Vol. 3, p415). Intentions make one’s world; it is they that do the work whose consequences we must reap in suffering. They form the subsequent history of our psychic life as surely as wars or treaties, plagues or prosperity form the subsequent history of a nation.

Choosing Pain

Hence from a radically moral standpoint it is by choosing badly, by being greedy and hateful, that we bring upon ourselves the suffering we meet in birth after birth. The ill that we cause ourselves and the ill that we cause others are of a piece, stemming from the same roots. The Noble Truth of the Arising of Suffering could be rephrased thus: ‘inflamed by greed, incensed by hate, confused by delusion, overcome by them, obsessed in mind, a man chooses for his own affliction, for others’ affliction, for the affliction of both, and experiences pain and grief’ (Anguttara Nikāya, Vol. 3, p55).

Rebirth Without Self

The moral cause in transmigration is equivalent to the cause of suffering. But this raises a fundamental question: how exactly does this cause work? For a doctrine of a Self or soul it is easy enough. The Self acts, causes consequences to itself, and is reborn again according to its deserts. The basic structure is in its own terms plausible, so the details are not so important. But what if there is no Self?

The answer (as it appears at Dīgha Nikāya, Vol.2, no.15) works backwards from the appearance of a new body and mind, a new psychophysical entity. How did this appear? It appeared through the descent of consciousness into a mother’s womb. On the face of it this is primitive, going back to earlier Indian ideas of an homunculus descending into the womb; and it is speculative, going beyond the Buddha’s brief of attending only to what he could witness himself. But later Buddhist commentators are clear that this descent is metaphorical, as we might say ‘darkness descended on him’ if someone fell unconscious. Moreover this enlivening consciousness is not an independent entity, a disguised Self, but is composed of causes and conditions.

So what in turn were these preceding conditions? One was the act of physical generation, but more important was a previous impulse. Here impulse is to be understood as intention or mental action, bearing a moral quality and informing by that quality the nature of the new psychophysical entity. If the impulse was good the new body and mind will be well endowed and fortunately placed, if not it will be poorly endowed and unfortunate.

And now comes the key question: what is this mysterious impulse? It is in fact nothing other than the final impulse, the dying thought, of the previous mind and body. It is nothing like a Self, but is merely a last energy which leaps the gap from life to life rather like — as a later Buddhist source puts it – a flame leaping from one candle wick to another. Nor is it free of preceding conditions, for it is the product of the dispositions formed by habitual mental actions conducted under the veil of ignorance and desire within the previous life. And thus one can trace the process back — to beginningless time, in fact.

In this account there is no underlying entity, but there is a stream of events which has its own history. This history is borne forward, not by a Self or soul, but by the complex interaction of the causes, conditions and effects summarized under craving and suffering. To understand this interaction is to understand the nature and origins of the human condition.

I am going to end this collection with a prayer taken from the Saṃyutta Nikāya:

Whatever beings may exist — weak or strong, tall, broad, medium or short, fine-material or gross, seen or unseen, those born and those pressing to be born — may they all without exception be happy in heart!

Let no one deceive anyone else, nor despise anyone anywhere. May no one wish harm to another in anger or ill-will!

Let one’s thoughts of boundless loving-kindness pervade the whole world, above, below, across, without obstruction, without hatred, without enmity!