Santipada

Some­times in the Dhamma it’s the most obvi­ous things which are the hard­est to pin down with pre­ci­sion. Famili­ar­ity breeds, if not con­tempt, at least a slight dis­dain. To pump up interest, inter­pret­ers often dress up famil­iar ideas in a vari­ety of more or less well fit­ting gar­ments. But this often just exacer­bates the prob­lem, cre­at­ing the illu­sion of under­stand­ing while the idea becomes so vacu­ous as to lose the ori­ginal meaning.

Take akā­lika for example. This simple word, lit­er­ally ‘non-time-ish’, is found com­monly in the sut­tas, most prom­in­ently in the stand­ard for­mula for the recol­lec­tion of the Dhamma: ‘The Dhamma is well expounded by the Blessed One, appar­ent in this life, akā­lika, invit­ing inspec­tion, rel­ev­ant, to be exper­i­enced indi­vidu­ally by the wise.’

The vague­ness of the word and its con­text invites var­ied inter­pret­a­tion. One import­ant mean­ing is that the third noble truth, Nib­bana, is the end­ing of birth, age­ing and death, and thus the end­ing of time. Another sug­ges­tion is that the Dhamma is ‘time­less’ – it’s always true, always real, always there to be real­ized. Oth­ers con­trast akā­lika with tāvakā­lika, which means ‘tem­por­ary’, as in goods that are hired out ‘just for a time’. So akā­lika would mean ‘not just for a time’; the Dhamma is real­ized once and for all, we can­not fall away. Bhikkhu Bodhi has poin­ted out an adverbial usage which sug­gests the mean­ing ‘attained imme­di­ately’. There’s no gap between the path and the fruit. If I want to reach home safely I must fol­low the path, how­ever long or short, all the way to my front door.

All the above are per­fectly fine, although per­haps a bit abstract. I’d like some­thing with a bit more ‘oomph’. Let’s look at a few more sug­ges­tions. The com­ment­ar­ies employ akā­lika to but­tress their the­ory of the ‘mind-moment’. Accord­ing to the com­ment­arial sys­tem, the path in the ‘ulti­mate’ sense is just one ‘mind-moment’, flash­ing by imme­di­ately before real­iz­ing the fruit. This rather odd idea was developed a long time after the Buddha, but per­haps the sense of ‘attained imme­di­ately’ was one of the start­ing points for this idea. In any case, it is a bit insens­it­ive of the com­ment­ar­ies to bully vague, innoc­u­ous little akā­lika into such a strict tech­nical mean­ing. The com­ment­ar­ies often resort to this kind of meas­ure to claim sup­port in the sut­tas for their new doctrines.

Another inter­pret­a­tion has been presen­ted which pushes akā­lika into the extreme pos­i­tion of mean­ing ‘hav­ing noth­ing to do with time’. This the­ory opines that the Buddha’s teachng on depend­ent ori­gin­a­tion is purely a struc­tural prin­ciple, and has noth­ing to do with the unfold­ing of a suc­ces­sion of dham­mas in time. But a pur­view of the teach­ings on con­di­tion­al­ity shows that this cerainly incor­rect. Some­time the sut­tas do indeed speak of a kind of struc­tural con­di­tion­al­ity, where phe­nom­ena suport each other like the roof-beams sup­port the peak, or like two sheaves of straw lean­ing up against each other. But in many other places the phe­nom­ena, like birth, age­ing, and death, clearly evolve over time, and so the sut­tas use similes like the river flow­ing down to the sea, or a seed grow­ing into a plant. The term ‘in the future’ occurs often in such con­texts. The Buddha’s teach­ing on con­di­tion­al­ity is rich and subtle, and may not be so eas­ily reduced to such a simplistic formula.

So there are many the­or­ies, some good, some not so good, swirl­ing around simple little akā­lika like a morn­ing mist shroud­ing a moun­tain. It’s kind of pretty in a neb­u­lous sort of way, but I for one would prefer to see some bright warm day­light dis­pelling the clouds and high­light­ing the beauty of the moun­tain itself. The for­mula for the recol­lec­tion of the Dhamma is all about how the Dhamma is rel­ev­ant, here & now. Can we find a more prag­matic mean­ing for akā­lika?

In the stand­ard for­mula, akā­lika fol­lows straight after sandiṭṭhika. And often else­where, too, the two terms are found together in close con­junc­tion. In Pali this kind of con­struc­tion often simply intens­i­fies a term by pair­ing it with a syn­onym. So it seems not at all unlikely that akā­lika is simply a syn­onym for sandiṭṭhika. If so, this is very use­ful, for the mean­ing of sandiṭṭhika can be eas­ily determ­ined. It is nor­mally con­tras­ted with sam­parāyika, where sandiṭṭhika means ‘appar­ent in this life’ and sam­parāyika means ‘per­tain­ing to future lives’. Thus the Buddha is cri­ti­cized, with typ­ical worldly logic, of neg­lect­ing what is ‘appar­ent in this life’ – the joys of the senses – for the sake of what is ‘per­tain­ing to future lives’ – the joys of heaven. The Buddha retorts that it is Dhamma which is ‘appar­ent in this life’, for one can taste the fruits here & now and need never be reborn, but sen­sual pleas­ures are ‘per­tain­ing to future lives’, since one addicted to sen­su­al­ity will inev­it­ably be reborn accord­ing to their kamma

So akā­lika, I would sug­gest, is essen­tially a prag­matic injunc­tion, an encour­age­ment and a guar­an­tee that one who strives prop­erly will real­ize the fruits here in this very life itself. So per­haps we might render it ‘without delay’. There’s another pas­sage that bears me out. The Buddha addresses the brah­man Sela in verse.

‘The holy life is well expounded
Appar­ent in this life, without delay
Where the going forth is not in vain
For one who is dili­gent in training.’

Here the ‘holy life’, far from being an ‘optional extra’, is vir­tu­ally a syn­onym for the Dhamma itself. And one of the mar­vel­lous qual­it­ies of this holy life which is the Dhamma is its abund­ant fruit­ful­ness, the joy and peace of let­ting go which we can all exper­i­ence right now.

Akā­lika lies close in mean­ing to the term ‘ānantarika’, usu­ally trans­lated lit­er­ally as ‘imme­di­ate’. So we can give a nice mean­ing to the obscure ‘ānantarika samādhi’ of the Ratana Sutta, which due to its vague­ness has been rid­den as a hobby-horse by vari­ous inter­pret­ers. It prob­ably means just the right samadhi of the eight­fold path. Those on the path, at min­imum those on the way to real­iz­ing stream-entry, hav­ing ful­filled all the path factors to a requis­ite degree must real­ize the fruit in this very life. This is the samadhi praised by the ‘best of Buddhas’, which ‘cleanses’ defile­ments, and which ‘has no equal’.

These days it’s com­mon in all tra­di­tions of Buddhism to think of prac­tice in terms of the gradual build­ing up of spir­itual per­fec­tions (pāramī) over many lives, tak­ing a laid back aim at enlight­en­ment some­time con­veni­ently dis­tant. Here I must emphat­ic­ally depart from the tra­di­tions, for the sut­tas nowhere even coun­ten­ance such a thought. The very term ‘spir­itual per­fec­tions’ never occurs with this mean­ing in the sut­tas. A key lynch­pin of the many-lives the­ory of prac­tice is the idea that a sol­emn vow taken in this life retains the power to dir­ect the course of prac­tice over count­less lives. But again, the sut­tas do not sup­port this. Even our Buddha-to-be as recently as the era of Kas­sapa Buddha was so reluct­ant to visit the Buddha that he had to be dragged by the hair! The terms for ‘vow’ or ‘res­ol­u­tion’ which carry this mean­ing in the later lit­er­at­ure such as the Jāta­kas, etc., are, in the sut­tas, usu­ally terms for defile­ments – the ‘mis­ap­pre­hen­sion of eth­ics and vows’, or the ‘men­tal res­ol­u­tion’ that is a strong cling­ing to self. Hold­ing on to these ideas is pre­cisely the ‘crav­ing for rebirth’ that we are sup­posed to overcome.

The Buddha said that, just as a tiny bit of dung still stinks, so too even a tiny bit of rebirth still stinks. If we get reborn, it is because we mis­ap­pre­hend the way of prac­tice, are still cling­ing to self, and have not trained ourselves dili­gently in the holy life. And so the Buddha made it a cent­ral tenet of his teach­ing that we should quit mak­ing excuses and knuckle down to some ser­i­ous bliss – without delay!