A clip from the audiobook of The Art of Listening: A Guide to the Early Teachings of the Buddha.

This is a special book, that is essential for anyone connected to the family of Buddhist traditions based on the Pali canon. But, as you will see, it is also a very important work for what it covers that is echoed throughout the wider Buddhist world from east Asian traditions of Chan/Zen and Pure Land to the Vajrayana Buddhism of the Himalayas. And as many of the texts covered are the foundational and early teachings on mindfulness, those interested in the many contemporary takes and applications of this will also find this fascinating.

There are those in the English-speaking world who prefer reading contemporary teachers or earlier commentaries as they have a vague sense of the Pali suttas being perhaps a bit dry, repetitive, somewhat superstitions, maybe mythical. I expect readers of this book will put aside these misconceptions once and for all.

We think of a “canon” as a collection of books, but here Shaw emphasizes their oral quality and brings us along to imagine how very different experiencing these teachings are when listening to them. There is a lot at stake here. Reading is often a passive endeavor, yet listening to these texts, as Shaw explains,

“must also have been regarded as something more interactive: you would listen, perhaps investigate the content (and yourself), and then allow your mind to move on to the next stage of the text. Each text is a paced, rhythmic composition, a choreographed movement in time, that works in a different way from something you read alone with book or iPad in hand. So, with these texts, you start to feel the Buddhist principles of rising, sustaining, and falling—with circling rhythms repeating in “real” time—in the very structure of the words. If you hear the texts as recitals in a temple, you look, listen, and attend; you are conscious of those around you, how you are sitting, and the environment. You are open to the text in a different way. Much of Buddhist meditation and ethical teaching is based on this underlying delivery of the text itself by living people to those who have met, perhaps, just to listen.”

But it is not simply the format she unpacks. She presents these foundational suttas through various lenses such as their literary features, numeric symbolism, myths and directionality. Tolkien, Shakespeare, and the ancient Greeks all lend a hand. So do a host of traditional Buddhist thinkers and contemporary Buddhist scholars. This is not an exercise in academic showmanship; rather each lens is a bridge that brings the intent of Buddha, the early and contemporary reciters of these texts (there are some alive who can recite the entire canon from memory which takes about three months), and those that continue the tradition to us right here and right now.

A bit over half the book is based on twelve of these suttas through which key themes of the canon are brought to light as are the brilliant techniques those who committed these words to their listening audience and later palm leaves, paper, and printing presses.

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