..续本文上一页ives & exerts himself in battle, if others then strike him down & slay him while he is striving & exerting himself in battle, then with the breakup of the body, after death, he is reborn in the company of devas slain in battle,” that is his wrong view. Now, there are two destinations for a person with wrong view, I tell you: either hell or the animal womb.”—SN XLII.3
The soldier then broke down and cried—not because he felt that the Buddha”s words were cruel, but because he believed their truth and was upset at his earlier teachers for having lied to him. In this case, the Buddha”s reticence and tact helped to make his teaching effective. A similar set of events happened when an actor asked the Buddha if there is a special heaven reserved for actors. The Buddha”s reticence and tact in informing the actor of a hell for actors who incite their audiences to greed, anger, and delusion inspired the actor to respond in the same way as the soldier.
If the pride of soldiers and actors required special handling, even more care was required in the handling of kings, for their pride was often coupled with an unrestrained sense of power. A remarkable feature of the Pali Canon is that even though the Buddha was a member of the noble warrior caste, the discourses generally show a low regard for the spiritual standing of kings. In many passages, kings are mentioned in the same breath with thieves: They confiscate property and show little regard for the rule of law. The Canon does recognize exceptions—King Bimbisara of Magadha achieves stream‐entry the first time he hears the Dhamma, and he never engages in war—but for the most part, kings are depicted as spiritually stunted. King Ajatasattu, on first seeing the Buddha sitting surrounded by monks, can”t tell which person in the assembly is the Buddha, a sign of his spiritual blindness; this blindness is later proven by his asking the Buddha”s advice on how to defeat his innocent neighbors in war. As one of the discourses suggests, this sort of blindness is an occupational hazard for rulers, in that the unfair exercise of power can make a person unfit for learning the truth.
“Because of having wrongly inflicted suffering on another person through beating or imprisonment or confiscation or placing blame or banishment, [with the thought,] “I have power. I want power,” when told what is factual, he denies it and doesn”t acknowledge it. When told what is unfactual, he doesn”t make an ardent effort to untangle it [to see], “This is unfactual. This is baseless.””—AN III.69
Even King Pasenadi of Kosala, the king most closely associated with the Buddha, comes across as well‐meaning but somewhat dense. An entire discourse, MN 90, is a satire of how his royal position has thwarted his ability to learn the Dhamma. He can”t phrase his questions properly, has trouble following a discussion for more than a few sentences, and is unable to come to any certain conclusions about the truth. Still, in other discourses he has his occasional moments of spiritual clarity, and the Buddha uses those moments as opportunities to teach the Dhamma. The Buddha”s approach here is twofold: to try to expand the king”s perspective on life at times when the king is willing to be frank; and to encourage the king when the latter gains insights on his own. For example, there”s the famous discourse (SN III.25) where Pasenadi comes to visit the Buddha in the middle of the day. The Buddha asks him what he”s been doing, and the king replies—in a moment of rare and wonderful frankness—that he”s been involved in the sort of activities typical of a king intoxicated with his power. The Buddha takes this moment of frankness as an opportunity to teach the Dhamma. Suppose, he says, that four mountains were rolling in inexorably f…
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