Some have said that the below translation of the above mentioned passage in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta better preserves the Pali sentence structure and illustrates the view of those who believe there are both inner and outer teachings, but they were both taught without a closed fist to the disciples:
“Ānanda, the Dhamma has been taught by me, both inner and outer. There is no teacher’s closed fist in regard to the teachings of the Tathāgata.”
But Ayya, is that really true? I remember a particular sutta, I think it was the deathbed of a householder, where he remarks “I have never heard of such a teaching before!” and the Buddha or Sariputta says “We don’t teach that to householders.”
I would rather think the inner/outer division is a reference to esoteric / exoteric teachings, where a certain phrasing has multiple meanings, the “inner” meaning only available to initiates and/or high ranking disciples. Brahmanism is famous for such secret meanings - something that lives today in many books claiming to unveil these mysteries.
So I don’t think it’s about public / private division, but esoteric / exoteric division. It doesn’t necessarily mean everything is taught to everyone, but everything rather just means what it means, and nothing else cryptic? Or perhaps that’s precisely what you mean by public / private?
Well I think the Buddha always teaches according to the circumstances of a person. That doesn’t mean that teachings usually taught to monastics are forbidden to householders. And Sariputta in that sutta does exactly that, he teaches Anathapindika a teaching that normally is taught to monastics because of their deeper engagement, but now feels that Anathapindika is ready for it.
Isn’t that the same? “Private” means only special selected students are allowed to hear … I think.
The nuance here would be that, for example, the phrasing “Eat apple on the full moon”, taught in open, having the public meaning of literally meaning “Eat apple on the full moon”, but for example, in private, meaning “Apple means intercourse and full moon means an ovulating woman so it means reproduce during the appropriate time”.
That was one way religious orders kept their secret, speaking in codes, called sandhyābhāṣā, meaning “intentional language” and/or both “twilight language”.
But doesn’t that imply that the second meaning is only taught to a selected circle of students? I think the Buddha wanted to make clear that he does not follow this teaching policy of the brahmins.
I’ve checked how venerables handle anantaraṃ / abāhiraṃ, and Bhante @Sujato opting for Public / Private, while accessible, might make this distinction disappear, even though her remarks on esoteric teachings in his writings:
Curiously enough, Ven. Anandajoti precisely makes this explicit in his translation.
“But what, Ānanda, does the Community of monks expect of me? The Teaching has been taught by me, Ānanda, without having made a distinction between esoteric and exoteric, for the Realised One there is nothing, Ānanda, of a closed teacher’s fist in regard to the Teaching."
This should be correct, yes!
The reason I’ve been yapping about the distinction is that, public / private might just mean social setting, etc, whereas I think an important point is to hold people off from trying to attempt linguistic games to say “But Buddha actually meant this instead of that!” “The secret meaning of this phrasing is this”, etc, kind of games that are popular today, as I’m sure were in those days.
Yet, there are Suttas that clearly admits this is the case (i.e.: that sutta a householder asks a monk about the meaning of a verse, monk answered “leaving the householder life” is abandoning the delight and dependence on the aggregates…)
Indeed, please, only authorized people should be able to do so.
Secret societies / esoteric teachings work with multiplicity of meanings, only told to initiates. In your example, it would be like “Leaving the householder life” being taught as “abandoning the delight and dependence on the aggregates” to one party, while “abandoning the vinaya” to the other party.
I haven’t seen a single example in the suttas where a phrasing is explained with a certain meaning to a group of initiates, and with a completely different meaning to another group of people, especially to the point of blatantly contradicting the at-face teachings, which is often the case with secret societies.
The core message of Buddha is rather the same and straightforward - he doesn’t preach the virtues of sexual delight to one party, while publicly appearing to condemn it. Things like that.
Q15 But, But, But… I know about these secret teachings and I want to share them with everyone! They have been hidden for so long!
A : How likely is that? Generally such views blithely reject well-established facts. Ideas that there are ‘Secret Teachings’, ‘Hidden Manuscripts’, ‘conspiracies of the clergy’ etc always turn out to be delusional on close examination. Such views seem like an innocuous theory, but they often aim at creating a nationalist, sectarian fundamentalism.
Anyone advocating extremist or conspiracy theory views will be warned, and if they persist, banned. Examples of such views include ‘The Buddha was born in Sri Lanka’, ‘Anicca doesn’t mean impermanence’, ‘The original Pali manuscripts at Aluvihara exist’, ‘Chinese texts are all Mahayana’, ‘Mahayana texts are fake’ etc. We treat views that go against mainstream science such as ‘Climate change is not real’, ‘COVID is just the flu’ etc, in exactly the same way.
There are no hidden teaching. The teaching just got seemingly hidden behind the obscurization process due the corruption of the Buddha Sāsana, according some high respected monk, as foretold by Buddha himself.
