From: https://youtube.com/watch?v=OHYaETANlyQ

Context: Throughout this transcript, Bhante Vimalaramsi is the speaker unless otherwise indicated.

now the thing that you have to

understand is

what the definition of theravada monk is

a teravata monk

is someone who takes

some of the commentaries

as the teaching of the buddha the vasuti

manga is definitely a commentary what is

a commentary a commentary is something

that

is an opinion

about

what the buddha was talking about

when i give a discourse i am giving you

some opinion

but the opinions i'm giving you

match up

with what it says in the suttas

the commentary of

dhammapala

he started up the university that

buddhigosa went to

he was about the second century

uh 80.

buddha gosu was about the

the late fourth and fifth century a.d

and

venerable buddhadasa

now this is not the thai buddhadasa this

is

another monk that was about the same

time as buddhigosa

it had become

fairly

knowledgeable

that the sri lankans

they had a lot of commentary but they

were all in sinhala

and

supposedly arahat were writing these

commentaries but i'm sure it wasn't only

our odds because there's

some mistakes and things

so

buddhadasa

india

it had it started moving south

and the uh

nalanda and all of that that that became

a

mahayana place

anyway his university he had he had a

few thousand monks there that was being

taught

it was a thriving place

but

what

buddha dasa did was he went to sri lanka

to

translate all of the commentaries back

into pali but he used a very

high hard to understand pali

when he he did

wrote everything he had no breaks

he might do

15 or 20 pages without a one paragraph

and they didn't have any periods or

anything so it was just very hard to

read the way he did it

anyway it was

about the time that that

buddha gosa

had pretty much mastered the pali

language and he started to get some

pride

and he started thinking that he knew

paulie better than his teacher

and his teacher read his mind and said

now you have to pay repentance

and what you have to do is you have to

go to sri lanka and change the

commentaries back into pali

and do it in a good readable way

and

as he was going on a boat to sri lanka

buddhadasa was coming back to india on a

boat and they met in the middle of the

ocean and discussed

what had been done

and then they went on their merry way

the first thing that was the vasuti maga

when he got to

sri lanka

and a lot of the scholars

they

that was kind of his test to see whether

he was actually capable of

doing the work that needed to be done

they wouldn't just let him come in and

say i'm the hotshot poly scholar i'm

going to do this

they they had to find out what he knew

the venerable buddhigosa

he was very confused about meditation

he

was a veda scholar

and he had memorized all of the vedas

before he became a buddhist monk

in the vedas they they describe

meditation in a lot of different ways

but almost all of them that i've run

across all of them

are

the practice of

one pointed concentration

absorption concentration

you have to have a

animator arise in your mind and there's

a great big deal about nimitz animators

it's like a circle

that you start visualizing and you take

that as your object of meditation

instead of staying with the breath

when you're doing anapanasati

and he wrote the vasudi maga in such a

way

that everybody got excited by it

now at the time in sri lanka the

scholarship had gone down

the practice of meditation had nearly

disappeared

so here he comes with quote the

encyclopedia of meditation

and this very scholarly work and the

monks picked it up and they went yep

that's right

and then they started practicing and

they got real excited so what he did was

he gave a shot in the arm to the sangha

in

in sri lanka

and that was a good thing

but after 10 or 15 years

they started expanding their scholarship

going back to the suttas and going wait

a minute this is wrong what he put down

here this isn't what the buddha said

and

that became kind of a

it was almost a schism

because the ones that

they really grabbed onto the suti maga

and held on to it this is right this is

a good book this is really correct and

then the other monks started going

well

actually it's not as good as it could be

and it we need to not use that as our

main book

but that book had he wrote it in such a

way that it was scholarly

and easy to understand

and

the monks that figured out that it

wasn't right

couldn't

stop

the growth of it

and about that time

there was some doubt about the purity of

the sangha

in burma

so

they sent two boatloads of monks

from burma to sri lanka

and they disrobed and then they

reordained

so the purity could be

upheld

and while they were there

they saw the vasudi maga and they made a

few copies of it and they took it back

to burma with them

as it turns out one of the boats sunk

and it killed a couple hundred monks

but the other the other boat

made it back

and they have spent

over a thousand years

trying to justify the vasuti maga with

the sutas and they they're pretty

convincing in a lot of ways

but their their scholarship at the time

was not great

their

practices were almost non-existent so

this is a time when buddhism had taken a

the wave down

and it because of that book it started

to get people into their scholarship

again and

studies and that sort of thing

but they've really held on tight to the

vasudi maga

that's the

it's it's a real interesting phenomena

buddha gosa

did a lot of translation from

sri lankan language back into pali

and he did this with the commentaries

that the monks had written down

he

was not

very well versed in anything

of the buddha's teaching except pali

itself

he has made

a lot of

marginal

guesses as to what the buddha was

talking about

but

monks of later times have written what

we call sub-commentaries

and it's a comment on what the

commentary says

and there's a lot of correction

in the commentaries

over what buddha gosu was writing

unfortunately we don't have many of

those in english

they're in poly and they're in a lot of

them are in the burmese script

and if you know the burmese script it's

not easy to read

and you say that you went to sri lanka

to

look at some of these some of the

historical

places where it leaves yes

yeah

yeah i went i went to the cave where

they originally started writing out

the suttas

and they did it from their own memory

but then they would they would write it

out and then they would recite it in

front of other people to see whether it

had any mistakes in it or not

but when you start writing down things

instead of

committing things to memory you have a

tendency to change things a little bit

so when they started writing down the

the suttas

there were some belief systems that some

monks had that

they were more brahmana than they were

buddhist

and they put

some of that understanding in it

so

we don't have

100 percent pristine buddha's teaching

these days

but

it is in reasonably good shape

and when you practice on your own

and see what the buddha is talking about

you can

decide for yourself whether the suit is

correct or not or that suta

the interesting thing about

the

vasuti maga

is that it doesn't really match up very

well with what it says in the sutures

about the practice of meditation

and there is a way that the buddha

gave us

to be able to recognize whether it's

coming

from the teaching of the buddha or it's

from a commentary

now the instructions

that the buddha gave us for

finding out whether this is really what

the buddha was talking about or it is a

commentary that somebody else made up

comes from

the dignikaya

it's

the

uh paranibana

this is the longest suit

in all of the

all of the discourses that the buddha

gave

when you read it it's about a hundred

pages there's a whole bunch of

information in it

but on on section four number eight

it says suppose a monk were to say

friends i heard and received this

from the lord's own lips

this is the dhamma this is the

discipline this is the master's teaching

then monks you should neither approve

nor disapprove his words

then without approving or disapproving

his words and expressions you should be

you should carefully

noted

compared with the suttas

and reviewed in the light of the

discipline

if they on such comparisons and review

are found not to conform with the suttas

and the conclusion must be assuredly

this is not the word of the buddha

it has been wrongly understood by this

monk

and the matter

is to be rejected

but

if here on such comparison and review

they

are found to conform to the sutas and

the discipline

the conclusion must be assuredly this is

the word of the buddha

it has been rightly understood by this

monk

this is the first criterion

so you can see that

the suttas are very important to pay

attention to

because they are closer to the words of

the buddha than commentaries can be

now when

an awful lot of people are practicing

and they're talking about the importance

of animata

it means sign in pali

it is found very very seldom in the

suttas

so

when you start thinking about the actual

instructions of the of

the buddha

that are given in the suttas

and compare that with the suttas with

what your teacher is showing you

if it agrees with the discipline

and the suttas

you can be pretty confident

that this is the teaching of the buddha

this is a book i use most of all

this is the middle link sayings

i use the middle link sayings because

the discourses aren't too long and

they're not too short

and generally i can go through one

suta in the evening

when you're talking about the suttas and

you notice that i read the suttas so you

know it's not my words that i'm i'm

using

and then i will give you some kind of

explanation of

how it goes

now the thing that you have to

understand is

what the definition of theravada monk is

a teravata monk

is someone who takes

some of the commentaries

as the teaching of the buddha the vasuti

manga is definitely a commentary what is

a commentary a commentary is something

that

is an opinion

about

what the buddha was talking about

when i give a discourse i am giving you

some opinion

but the opinions i'm giving you

match up

with what it says in the suttas

the commentary of

dhammapala

he started up the university that

buddhigosa went to

he was about the second century

uh 80.

buddha gosu was about the

the late fourth and fifth century a.d

and

venerable buddhadasa

now this is not the thai buddhadasa this

is

another monk that was about the same

time as buddhigosa

it had become

fairly

knowledgeable

that the sri lankans

they had a lot of commentary but they

were all in sinhala

and

supposedly arahat were writing these

commentaries but i'm sure it wasn't only

our odds because there's

some mistakes and things

so

buddhadasa

india

it had it started moving south

and the uh

nalanda and all of that that that became

a

mahayana place

anyway his university he had he had a

few thousand monks there that was being

taught

it was a thriving place

but

what

buddha dasa did was he went to sri lanka

to

translate all of the commentaries back

into pali but he used a very

high hard to understand pali

when he he did

wrote everything he had no breaks

he might do

15 or 20 pages without a one paragraph

and they didn't have any periods or

anything so it was just very hard to

read the way he did it

anyway it was

about the time that that

buddha gosa

had pretty much mastered the pali

language and he started to get some

pride

and he started thinking that he knew

paulie better than his teacher

and his teacher read his mind and said

now you have to pay repentance

and what you have to do is you have to

go to sri lanka and change the

commentaries back into pali

and do it in a good readable way

and

as he was going on a boat to sri lanka

buddhadasa was coming back to india on a

boat and they met in the middle of the

ocean and discussed

what had been done

and then they went on their merry way

the first thing that was the vasuti maga

when he got to

sri lanka

and a lot of the scholars

they

that was kind of his test to see whether

he was actually capable of

doing the work that needed to be done

they wouldn't just let him come in and

say i'm the hotshot poly scholar i'm

going to do this

they they had to find out what he knew

the venerable buddhigosa

he was very confused about meditation

he

was a veda scholar

and he had memorized all of the vedas

before he became a buddhist monk

in the vedas they they describe

meditation in a lot of different ways

but almost all of them that i've run

across all of them

are

the practice of

one pointed concentration

absorption concentration

you have to have a

animator arise in your mind and there's

a great big deal about nimitz animators

it's like a circle

that you start visualizing and you take

that as your object of meditation

instead of staying with the breath

when you're doing anapanasati

and he wrote the vasudi maga in such a

way

that everybody got excited by it

now at the time in sri lanka the

scholarship had gone down

the practice of meditation had nearly

disappeared

so here he comes with quote the

encyclopedia of meditation

and this very scholarly work and the

monks picked it up and they went yep

that's right

and then they started practicing and

they got real excited so what he did was

he gave a shot in the arm to the sangha

in

in sri lanka

and that was a good thing

but after 10 or 15 years

they started expanding their scholarship

going back to the suttas and going wait

a minute this is wrong what he put down

here this isn't what the buddha said

and

that became kind of a

it was almost a schism

because the ones that

they really grabbed onto the suti maga

and held on to it this is right this is

a good book this is really correct and

then the other monks started going

well

actually it's not as good as it could be

and it we need to not use that as our

main book

but that book had he wrote it in such a

way that it was scholarly

and easy to understand

and

the monks that figured out that it

wasn't right

couldn't

stop

the growth of it

and about that time

there was some doubt about the purity of

the sangha

in burma

so

they sent two boatloads of monks

from burma to sri lanka

and they disrobed and then they

reordained

so the purity could be

upheld

and while they were there

they saw the vasudi maga and they made a

few copies of it and they took it back

to burma with them

as it turns out one of the boats sunk

and it killed a couple hundred monks

but the other the other boat

made it back

and they have spent

over a thousand years

trying to justify the vasuti maga with

the sutas and they they're pretty

convincing in a lot of ways

but their their scholarship at the time

was not great

their

practices were almost non-existent so

this is a time when buddhism had taken a

the wave down

and it because of that book it started

to get people into their scholarship

again and

studies and that sort of thing

but they've really held on tight to the

vasudi maga

that's the

it's it's a real interesting phenomena

buddha gosa

did a lot of translation from

sri lankan language back into pali

and he did this with the commentaries

that the monks had written down

he

was not

very well versed in anything

of the buddha's teaching except pali

itself

he has made

a lot of

marginal

guesses as to what the buddha was

talking about

but

monks of later times have written what

we call sub-commentaries

and it's a comment on what the

commentary says

and there's a lot of correction

in the commentaries

over what buddha gosu was writing

unfortunately we don't have many of

those in english

they're in poly and they're in a lot of

them are in the burmese script

and if you know the burmese script it's

not easy to read

and you say that you went to sri lanka

to

look at some of these some of the

historical

places where it leaves yes

yeah

yeah i went i went to the cave where

they originally started writing out

the suttas

and they did it from their own memory

but then they would they would write it

out and then they would recite it in

front of other people to see whether it

had any mistakes in it or not

but when you start writing down things

instead of

committing things to memory you have a

tendency to change things a little bit

so when they started writing down the

the suttas

there were some belief systems that some

monks had that

they were more brahmana than they were

buddhist

and they put

some of that understanding in it

so

we don't have

100 percent pristine buddha's teaching

these days

but

it is in reasonably good shape

and when you practice on your own

and see what the buddha is talking about

you can

decide for yourself whether the suit is

correct or not or that suta

the interesting thing about

the

vasuti maga

is that it doesn't really match up very

well with what it says in the sutures

about the practice of meditation

and there is a way that the buddha

gave us

to be able to recognize whether it's

coming

from the teaching of the buddha or it's

from a commentary

now the instructions

that the buddha gave us for

finding out whether this is really what

the buddha was talking about or it is a

commentary that somebody else made up

comes from

the dignikaya

it's

the

uh paranibana

this is the longest suit

in all of the

all of the discourses that the buddha

gave

when you read it it's about a hundred

pages there's a whole bunch of

information in it

but on on section four number eight

it says suppose a monk were to say

friends i heard and received this

from the lord's own lips

this is the dhamma this is the

discipline this is the master's teaching

then monks you should neither approve

nor disapprove his words

then without approving or disapproving

his words and expressions you should be

you should carefully

noted

compared with the suttas

and reviewed in the light of the

discipline

if they on such comparisons and review

are found not to conform with the suttas

and the conclusion must be assuredly

this is not the word of the buddha

it has been wrongly understood by this

monk

and the matter

is to be rejected

but

if here on such comparison and review

they

are found to conform to the sutas and

the discipline

the conclusion must be assuredly this is

the word of the buddha

it has been rightly understood by this

monk

this is the first criterion

so you can see that

the suttas are very important to pay

attention to

because they are closer to the words of

the buddha than commentaries can be

now when

an awful lot of people are practicing

and they're talking about the importance

of animata

it means sign in pali

it is found very very seldom in the

suttas

so

when you start thinking about the actual

instructions of the of

the buddha

that are given in the suttas

and compare that with the suttas with

what your teacher is showing you

if it agrees with the discipline

and the suttas

you can be pretty confident

that this is the teaching of the buddha

this is a book i use most of all

this is the middle link sayings

i use the middle link sayings because

the discourses aren't too long and

they're not too short

and generally i can go through one

suta in the evening

when you're talking about the suttas and

you notice that i read the suttas so you

know it's not my words that i'm i'm

using

and then i will give you some kind of

explanation of

how it goes