The Buddha as List Maker

Statue in the garden of Green Gulch Zen Center, Muir Beach, California

 (The) Buddha’s Lists

Since I live near  Spirit Rock Meditation Center I occasionally attend a Monday evening meditation, especially if Jack Kornfield is speaking. On a recent Monday, Jack mentioned that the Buddha was a gargantuan list-maker. This really surprised me. Knowing very little about Buddha’s life, I had not imagined him much beyond a guy who left his father's palace to wander the world seeking enlightenment and that he achieved Enlightenment--whatever that is --when he meditated under a tree sometime around 600 BC. When I googled him, I was astonished to find Jack was right-- he was one of the great list makers of all time. 

In 2006, David Snyder published The Complete List of Buddha’s Lists — 600 of them. And these are no simple laundry lists. Each of the many items on the numbered items link to a complex spiritual concept.

Reading David Snyder’s webpage, I came across this surprising item: his mother,  Janet Snyder, a military wife, slept through his birth. How could that be? How could a woman sleep through the birth of a child? Next comes this: 

"The Buddha was born in a similar way and the Suttas report that all samma-sam-Buddhas . . . are born with no pain to the mother." I pause to wonder: if a women could give birth painlessly, would she would then choose to sleep through this life-changing moment?

But back to Buddha's lists. Sara Lazar, who studies the neuroscience of yoga and meditation, catalogues some of his lists--for example: the Four Foundations of Mindfulness and the Ten Perfections and the Noble Eightfold Path. All in all--an enormous amount of homework for a would-be Buddhist.

Here is something about the Buddha under the tree: "Gautama was famously seated under a pipal tree—now known as the Bodhi tree. . . After a reputed 49 days of meditation, at the age of 35, he is said to have attained Enlightenment,  and became known as the Buddha or "Awakened One” . . . . According to some sutras of the Pali canon, at the time of his awakening he realized complete insight into the Four Noble Truths, thereby attaining liberation from samsara, the endless cycle of rebirth, suffering and dying again.

So the Buddha achieved enlightenment after sitting under a tree for 49 days and thereafter felt that he was free from the endless cycle of rebirth, suffering and dying again. Did that mean he was off the hook for reincarnation? I'm sure most Buddhists would have an answer for that.

To get back to the lists, I wonder-- while he was discovering Enlightenment was it with an empty meditating mind -- or was he generating some of his 600 lists while he was sitting under the tree?  

It appears he was doing at least some list-making because his Enlightenment had to do with discovering the Four Noble Truths leading to Nirvana by following the Eightfold path.

In a youtube interview Sara Lazar, who studies the neuroscience of yoga and meditation at Harvard, talks about using an MRI to track brain changes in meditators and yoga practitioners. I wonder if she ever fantasized having the Buddha in her MRI machine. And how he would show up— the calm meditator or a dervish mind generating those 600 complex spiritual lists? Or maybe both at once?

Here is the Noble Eightfold Path: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

This list reminds me of Ben Franklin’s 13 Virtues.  

Reading a bit more about Siddhartha's life (that was his clan name), I see there are various stories about his family.  One possibility is that he married his cousin, Princess Yasodharā when they were both sixteen and they had one child when they were twenty-nine and that he hit the road looking for Enlightenment within a week or even a day of the birth of his son. Grief-stricken when she woke up to find him gone with no goodbye, Yasodhara started on her own spiritual path. The Buddha joins a list of men (and women too) who have left their families for a variety of reasons. I think of Gauguin leaving his five children to paint in the South Pacific or Frieda Weekley who left her three children in Sherwood Forest to take off with D.H. Lawrence. 

Seven years after he left, Yasodhara's father-in-law invited the Buddha back to the palace. He arrived with hundreds of monks with begging bowls. Janet Surrey has written a novel about Yasodhara-- The Buddha's Wife. And I see another book about her:  Buddha's Wife.

The Buddha's lists are numerous, short (ten items or less), and do not lead to sublists. All this is in keeping with lists that are accumulated, kept, and passed on by memory and oral tradition. The Buddha's lists were written down much later.