Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Masefield is just plain wrong!, February 18, 2003
Masefield's book has many flaws. The most fundamental is that it treats the Pali Suttas as a complete, and entirely accurate account, of the teachings of the Buddha. This is a mistake as the suttas show clear evidence of editorial bias, additions, and possible subtractions. Clearly no text which was recorded only after several hundred years of oral tradition can be said to represent the definitive word of the anybody. But even if we ignore this flaw and take the Pali Canon on face value, the sheer number of examples which directly contradict Masefield's quoted ones is staggering. (I can supply refs to anyone interested) The argument that no one gained enlightenment without the direct intervention of the Buddha is clearly wrong - as the very well known cases of Sariputta, Moggallana and Ananda demonstrate. Masefield's basic problem is that he ignores anything which doesn't fit his thesis - and counter examples are by no means hard to find. The book is one-sided in the extreme. One of the more ironic things Masefiled does to trip himself up is to cite Milarepa as someone who gained enlightenment after accumulating a lot of bad karma - but according to Masefiled Milarepa could not have been enlightened. Although that hardly compares with his redefinition of the word sotapanna to mean "one who has entered the ear" - I'm still laughing about that one. Masefield characterises Arahants as passive recipients of a goal they could not pass on, but in only an hour or two of hunting around I found records of *hundreds* of examples of Arahants successfully teaching other people how to become Arahants. Masefield is just plain wrong. Don't be fooled by the volume of quotes, nor by the attitude of absolute certainty of the author. The book is neither comprehensive with regard to the Pali scriptures, nor an accurate representation of the Dhamma.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Poorly argued, pedantic, deceptively titled, November 2, 2002
In this book, Peter Masefield basically claims to be the first person in the past two millenia to understand correctly the Buddha's teaching; and sets out his arguments to that effect. I found that Masefield, though he presents his arguments intelligently (although rather pedantically), fell well short of establishing them by a preponderance of the evidence. He does make the occasional valid argument (such as that monks can be worldlings and that laypeople can be savakas, which would not be disputed by anyone familiar with Buddhism anyway), but in many cases I had no trouble refuting his arguments from the Nikayas themselves, upon a rather myopic reading of which Masefield bases his claims. No one who is familiar with the scriptures and history of Theravada Buddhism should find much trouble seeing through Masefield's radical reinterpretations of the Nikayas. The book's most patent flaw, however, is the title. The book simply does not deal with "divine revelation" in any meaningful sense, leading one to believe the title was chosen simply to attract attention to the book.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
His Voice Alone contained Divine Revelation for Savakas*, March 1, 2008
If you want to know what makes a Buddha different from a run-of-the-mill Spiritual Teacher, even famous ones, then get this book - the living, teaching, revealing Buddha is in here!
When the Buddha spoke Dhamma, his Voice carried out into the audience of monks, nuns and lay people. In many cases, if not most cases at public discourses, his Voice passed by the listeners and did not penetrate the 'cloud' of their pre-conceived notions. These people, both lay and monastic, were called 'puthujjanas' - they remained in darkness and ignorance as to the insight and wisdom contained in the teachings.
However, those who could 'hear' Dhamma were called Savakas. When a listener went to a public discourse - heretofore 'lost' inside his or her personal worldview - and heard Dhamma from the Blessed One, the Sound would penetrate their confusion, and he or she would undergo an upliftment to a *startling* revelation - the listener would *directly realize* that he or she had been "looking at life All Wrong" up to that point, and had unwittingly and unconsciously been perpetuating their own suffering through Ignorance. That moment of Revelatory Insight, when one directly experiences the Four Truths, being transformed by them, is called Right View.
In this book, Masefield shows that what happened in the Buddha's day after someone acquired Right View wasn't a progression through the stages sequentially - stream enterer, once returner, non-returner, arahant - which is the popular, institutionalized understanding of the paths and fruits.
Rather, someone who had undergone the radical transformative experience of Right View under the force of the Buddha's instruction, would typically go off and dwell, aloof and dilligently, in the forest - usually for only a day or two - before returning to the Buddha for a second oral teaching - at which point the listener would 'be established' in their fruit - and that fruit could be anything from stream enterer to arahant, depending entirely on the Kammic Substrate remaining after *realization.* So, one would attain Right View as a result of oral instruction from the Buddha, and, within days, after a second talk, arrive directly at the fruit appropriate to their remaining Kammic Substrate - which could, and often did, mean going straight from Merchant to Arahant, all in a couple of days.
In the Buddhist Model of Salvation, all Savakas from Stream Enterers to Saints and Buddhas, have equally Attained the Goal - the only question is: How long are they going to be 'held-up' by 'good' Kamma until the final extinction of Pari-Nibbana? (Arahants experience "unexcelled complete perfect enlightenment" in this life, Anagamins after a Pleasant Celestial Re-birth in the Pure Abodes, Sakadagamins after a Celestial life and then Returning Once, and Sotapattis after a period of up to seven more human-or-better Re-births.)
However, after the passing of the Buddha, People didn't 'wake up' anymore to the Sound of Dhamma, as spoken by others; and the Community of Savakas - those who had actually heard Dhamma from the Buddha - gradually dwindled and disappeared, leaving only the records of the teachings for guidance. Those records, oral and written, were carried forward by institutionalized Buddhism, which eventually 'lost contact' with Dhamma as Sound, and revised the teachings into a traditional linear progression of stages, attained through merit.
In the course of that institutional evolution, what got lost was contact with the absolutely earth-shattering experience of being lifted out of confusion to a vantage point of clarity, stability and insight, through hearing Dhamma from the Buddha. The Pali sources record many, many people - upon hearing the Voice of the Fully Enlightend One speak Dhamma - becoming illuminated on the spot, and ending their aimless wandering through Samsara by requesting the going-forth, lay or monk, into the Community of Realized Being!
It is the neccessity of the Buddha's Voice that characterizes the teachings as both Grace (one of the benefits of *Right View* is the instantaneous destruction of 99% of your accumulated Kamma!) and Divine Revelation (if you didn't hear it from him, you didn't 'get it' by sound.)
The signifigance of Sound is that *any* listener could 'wake up' regardless of background or circumstance - no need to be a meditator, or a monk or nun, or a vegetarian, or educated, or a certain class or caste - if you had the 'capacity' to hear Dhamma, the Buddha's Voice had the 'capacity' to take you to a glimpse of Nibbana, that you then worked-out for yourself, and that he then confirmed.
When it comes to the Buddha, Masefield has the Right View!
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