My 3 takeaways from Richard Gombrich’s “What the Buddha thought”

I used to think that saying anything about what the Buddha taught two thousand five hundred years ago was bold. But people like Walpola Rahula, Thich Nhat Hanh, Bhikku Bodhi, and others have attempted it and done a good job. However, I have been highly sceptical about anything said about what the Buddha thought. That requires the knowledge of pre-existing ideas on which Buddha might have built his ideas, apart from, of course, his own contemplative insight. That looked formidable to me. Hence, I kept avoiding Richard Gombrich’s book “What the Buddha Thought”. One day in 2023, YouTube recommended that I listen to Gombrich’s talk on the same topic. YouTube recommendations are like a God-sent message of the day, isn’t it? So I listened to his 2013 talk at the University of Hyderabad. My scepticism didn’t go away after listening to the talk. However, I was impressed by his command of Pali, Sanskrit, and ancient Indian texts like the Vedas, Upanishads, and the Jain practices, which either preceded or co-existed with Buddha. I was even more impressed by his methodology. Gombrich begins by saying, “I only have fifty minutes to speak to you. And the Buddha had many more thoughts that can be expressed or explained in fifty minutes.  So if you would like to hear or learn about more of them, please read my book.”  So I turned to the book during my sojourn in coastal Karnataka at Kalyanapura and Gokarna last December. 

Main objective of the book: Gombrich's main objective in the book is to illustrate that the Buddha’s main ideological opponents were brahmins, and he used their metaphors with new meanings to attack them. In such an endeavour, understanding the historical context is very important. For example, Gombrich shows that the Buddha was familiar with the Bṛhadāranyaka Upanishad (BU) and he built upon and modified the ideas of karma and rebirth found in BU.

Here are my three takeaways from the book:

1. Asking the right question: Upanishads, the texts that carry the essence of the Vedas, emphasized the question, “What exists?” The answer to which goes into the notions of Atman and Brahman. Gombrich says, “The Buddha said that this is the wrong question.” He feels that the Buddha was primarily concerned with what we can experience, what can be present to consciousness. To Gombrich, the doctrine looks like pragmatic empiricism.

I searched to see if the Pali canon contains Buddha explicitly saying “wrong question”. I couldn’t find one. Instead, what I found were Buddha’s responses to questions related to existence or non-existence. For example, in Kaccanagotta Sutta (SN12.15), Buddha says, “‘All exists’, Kaccana, this is one extreme. ‘All does not exist’: this is the second extreme. Without veering towards either of these extremes, the Tathagata teaches the Dhamma by the middle.” 

2. Ethicization and universalization of karma: I must admit that I was completely ignorant of how Buddha innovated the karma doctrine until I read this book. And I got even more intrigued when Gombrich mentioned, “Karma is my favourite point of entry to the Buddha’s worldview”. He adds, “It is not only fundamental to the Buddha’s whole view of life, but also a kind of lynchpin which holds the rest of the basic tenets together.” The suspense deepened.

Indian society, even today, is fairly ritual-bound. As I was growing up, there would be a Satyanarayan pooja at home once every few years, and especially before or after a major event like a wedding or recovery from some illness. A religious ritual is supposed to accumulate merit (or puṇya). That was the case during Buddha’s time as well. However, the accumulation of merit depended upon the correctness of ritual, sacrifice, and ceremony, and the type of ritual varied by gender and caste. Buddha said, “It is intention, monks, that I call karma." (Cetanāhaṃ bhikkhave kammaṃ vadāmi) (AN 6.63). Buddha said the state of mind (with what intent) matters more than the correctness of the action itself. Gombrich called this ethicization of karma – i.e. karma depends on moral intention rather than ritual action.

Gombrich also says that the Buddha universalized karma. Once you say karma is moral intention, it applies to everybody and everywhere, whether you are helping, insulting, cursing in your mind, or praying for someone. Buddha said that this process of karmic merit/de-merit accumulation continues through rebirth and breaks only when one sees reality clearly, and called this cycle-break nibbāna or liberation. Gombrich shows in the book how this process of ethicization and universalization of karma had begun in Brahminism, specifically in Brhadāraṇyakā Upanishad, which predates the Buddha, and in Jainism, where non-violence (ahimsā) is paramount.

3. Fire as the central metaphor for experience as a process: What is Buddha’s most important philosophical idea? People would have different answers. Gombrich feels, “What we can experience is only process. This may be his most important philosophical idea.” And Buddha used fire as the central metaphor to communicate this.

The most popular fire-related sermon is the third, known in English as “The Fire sermon” (SN35.28) or sometimes called “The all”. In Pali, it is called A̅ditta-pariyāya, ‘The way of putting things as being on fire’. The sermon begins: ‘Everything, O monks, is on fire.’ Then Buddha explains what ‘everything’ means. It is all our faculties – the five senses plus the mind – and their objects and operations and the feelings they give rise to. And Buddha refers to three fires. Everything is on fire with the fires of passion, hatred, and delusion. Why three fires?

Fire had a major significance in the Vedic tradition. The brahmin householder had the duty to keep alight a set of three fires, which he tended daily. Buddha assigned a new meaning to each fire. In the second fire sermon (Dutiya Aggi Sutta AN 7.47), he says the brahmin should abandon the three unwholesome fires of greed, hatred, and delusion. And cultivate the three wholesome fires of one’s parents, one’s household and dependents, and holy men (renunciates and brahmins), suggesting taking care of the people around oneself.

In the first sermon, known as Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta (SN 56.11) (Setting in motion the wheel of dhamma), Buddha defines dukkha as pañcupādānakkhandhā. This is generally translated as the five aggregates of grasping. Gombrich gives a different interpretation of the Pali phrase upādāna khandhā. He feels that the Buddha is employing the metaphor of fire here and trying to communicate the same message as the Fire Sermon. Upādāna, Gombrich argues, means that which fuels an active process and keeps it alive. He translates upādāna-khandhā as ‘blazing masses of fuel’.

According to Gombrich, Buddha is suggesting that life experience is not a thing but a process. It is a causally conditioned process. Our experience is like burning bundles of firewood to feed the fires of passion, hatred, and confusion. And the moment the fuel is over, the fire goes out. This is the literal meaning of the Sanskrit word nirvāna, where the verbal root vā means ‘to blow,’ and with the prefix nir, the meaning is ‘cease to burn, go out’ (like a flame). It was a pleasant surprise to see Gombrich bring out the significance of process, something I wrote about almost a decade ago, without much understanding of Buddhism.

Richard Gombrich’s “What the Buddha Thought” is not light reading. It demands delving into the meanings of Sanskrit and Pali phrases and seeing the Buddha’s context through Vedic rituals, the Bṛhadāraṇyaka and Chāndogya Upanishads, and Jain texts. The book offers a glimpse into the scholarly work of Joanna Jurewicz, the Polish linguist, and Sue Hamilton on early Buddhism. I enjoyed reading it and will keep going back to it.