From a talk given at Chithurst, U.K., during the winter
retreat, February 1991
WHEN WE TALK ABOUT THE GOAL of Buddhist practice, about
enlightenment or Nibbana, we use the term 'realisation' as being
the most accurate way to approach it. Often one sees the term
'getting' enlightened, or 'becoming' enlightened; this is good
and meaningful enough in ordinary speech but it also has
connotations which are obstructive or misleading. Whenever we
think of 'getting' something or 'becoming' something, it always
implies that what there is right now is somehow lacking, there is
'me' that is missing something and I have got to get some kind of
experience or some kind of quality that is going to make me
complete in the future and then, once I have got it, it is going
to be mine and I can keep it. There are many characters who have
'got' enlightened and then their enlightenment has wandered off
and left them rather bereft and despairing for months or
sometimes years.
So when we think and talk about enlightenment it is much
better to use the word 'realisation', because it is pointing to
the fact that we are discovering what is here already; we are
realising, real-ising that which is already true, that which is
the fabric and nature of our own being. Any thought of getting or
becoming is what ties us to the incessant cycles of birth and
death; this is what is called the bhavacakka, the
cycle of becoming, because anything we get we can lose or we
become anxious about being separated from--ownership is
suffering. Thinking in terms of realisation, discovering the
Truth, lends itself much less to the idea of ownership. The
Dhamma, the ultimate reality of things, has no owner and this
realisation of Truth is the fulfillment of our life. You do not
have to take this as a proclamation, but I would say that this is
the goal, the fulfillment of our life. Everything else that
happens in life that we achieve or create, bring forth into the
world, these are all secondary to the realisation of Truth, to
this quality of seeing and being Dhamma.
Knowing the reality of things does not seem like very much.
Our worldly tendencies and our habits of seeing always tend to
focus on the objects, beings and places, the achievements,
triumphs and disasters of our lives as being the real,
substantial, important aspects, and something as ephemeral or
intangible as realising Truth, on a conceptual level at least,
seems a bit flimsy and simple-minded.
Buddhism gets criticised a lot by people who take the position
of life affirmation. This has been the case right from the very
beginning when the Buddha first started teaching--particularly
because of being a religious tradition with a monastic order of
celibate monks and nuns. This renunciant lifestyle gets quite a
pounding from people, who are not necessarily worldly or
indulgent, but just those who see value in the fulfillment of
life on the worldly plane: the qualities of a loving
relationship, of having children, of creating music or beautiful
things, planting gardens, trees, building houses, forming
friendships, creating new networks of wholesome activity,
learning, teaching, nursing, healing the sick, helping the
dying--these are all tremendously appealing, important and
positive things in life. There is something very deep, very
instinctual in our hearts which does appreciate and celebrate
this--that loves life, that wants to live, to laugh, to love--and
this seems to be the very fabric and essence, the spice and
purpose of life, to live life to the hilt, to the full.
In the last 'Inquiring Mind', a Buddhist newspaper put out in
America, they had an article about Ajahn Sucitto and Ven. Vipassi
teaching a retreat in Massachusetts. This article went to great
lengths to make sure that people knew that both these monks had
lived very 'full' lives before they became monks; which is a
polite way of saying you have done everything you could think of
and then some before you became a monk. People are very scared of
the idea that you would become a monk before you had really done everything,
tried everything out. The idea is that life is to be
lived, everything is to be tasted, to be experienced--Rajneesh
was very keen on this kind of practice: doing absolutely
everything to the limit and learning from that. The true learning
experience in life is described as to take it all on, to swallow
it whole and watch the results--so this does make what we do here
at this monastery look a bit strange! Maybe I am sounding like an
advert for Dionysiac hedonism ( brandy will be served in the
kitchen after the evening meeting), but it is a very powerful
streak in our minds, it strikes a powerful chord.
The other day I ran across something that D.T. Suzuki wrote in
one of his books on Zen Buddhism, it went something like,
"The spirit of freedom, which is the power behind Buddhism
breaking through its monastic shell to ever more vigorously bring
enlightenment to the masses, is the life impulse of the
universe," then he says something like, "The spirit of
Buddhism has always been intellectual, moral and spiritual
freedom, thus the moral aristocracy and the disciplinary
formalism of primitive Buddhism could not bind our freedom, our
spirit for very long," so we are right out of
the picture! I am not criticising D.T. Suzuki but just saying
that there is a strong tendency in people's minds to think,
"Well, if you are living a very restrained, renunciant life
you really must be missing out on a lot; you are not respecting
all that life offers, these bodies are fertile, they are designed
to produce offspring and you have creative talents--we can do, we
can speak, we can create--why not!" Because I draw pictures
for birthday cards for my family and occasionally write poems, I
find that this is one of the few things about my life that my
family can relate to. My mother is always encouraging me to
create more masterpieces; I have got pads and pads of drawing
paper and crayons and pens and ink, an incredible stash of
stationery to do my creations on. I regularly get a burdened
feeling when I look at this pile of stuff in my desk-drawer,
"Oh dear, I suppose I should create something." I like
doing that kind of thing but one sees that for people with a
perceptually based perspective on life, what you create becomes
the most important thing-"After all, you can draw such nice
pictures, you can say such nice things, why not? You are robbing
the world by not producing offspring, poems, pictures, etc. etc.
etc."
This question had long puzzled me and struck me deeply when I
first arrived at the monastery in Thailand. I was reminded of it
this morning, since we have been having readings from 'The Life
of the Buddha' and we have just got to the time of the
Enlightenment. Oftentimes as a Westerner we think about
enlightenment as meaning having a mind which is happy all the
time, regardless of whatever is going on and whatever we choose
to do--this is a very, very attractive proposition! After the
Buddha's enlightenment he sat for a week rapt in meditation,
experiencing the bliss of deliverance and, after that absorption
into bliss, he emerged and then what did he do? He spent the
whole night contemplating Dependent Origination, the law of
dependent arising: ignorance conditioning the arising of desire,
attachment, birth, death, suffering and so forth; contemplating
its arising, contemplating its cessation, backwards, forwards,
up, down, all night long.
Now, if you were enlightened and had just become completely,
irreversibly free from suffering, it's possible to imagine you
might think, "What a relief! At last that's all over--no
more suffering, marvellous, amazing." And you might think,
"Let's go eat pancakes!" or "I wonder what that
nice young lady who brought me the milk rice is doing tonight,
maybe I'll pop round and see her." Or, if you were of a less
sensual character, with a bit more nobility: "Now I'll go
back to my kingdom, encourage my old father, give him a bit of
support and then help take over the kingdom and run a really good
little country for the rest of my life."
But we can see that, far from having this reaction, with his
enlightenment the Buddha experienced life from a completely new
dimension. He was seeing things in a way that he had not seen
before, he was seeing what the rest of the world could not see.
It's rather like when we come into a new situation--an
institution, a school or a family, a monastery--we are a stranger
and we suddenly find ourselves in the midst of all kinds of webs
of relationship, power-trips, struggles, gripes, loves and hates
and personality conflicts going on; we are an outsider for whom
all this has no value and yet to all the people involved in that
place it's all terribly real and important. We are not a part of
it, however; we are not caught up in the value system.
One can also see enlightenment as simply growing up; as an
adult one stops being able to play with dolls and toys in the
same way that one did when one was a child, it becomes
impossible. It's also like having solved a puzzle that everyone
else is still deeply involved in trying to unravel; you can see
the answer, whereas everyone else is anguishing and fretting and
rushing about and discussing how to find it. Or that lovely
feeling of understanding a clue in a crossword--when you have got
it and the letters all fit in the right places, "Ah, I
see!"
At the enlightenment, the Buddha stepped out of the worldly
perspective and could see from above the world--lokuttara.
There is a wonderful passage in the scriptures that describes
this insight of the Buddha and the way he saw things after his
enlightenment: He saw that the worldly mind cherishes conditioned
existence, it cherishes becoming; it opens itself to and welcomes
conditioned existence, it welcomes becoming. The urge of the
world, of worldly thinking, is always to become other: to get to
the next thing, to progress, to develop, to have, to keep. It
cherishes, relishes conditioned existence; but the problem is
that what it relishes brings fear and what it fears is pain,
because that which is the very basis of conditioned existence is
also the basis of suffering.
This was the insight that he had with Dependent
Origination--he saw how ignorance was the originator of all
problems in life; how the reality that we give to our thoughts,
feelings and emotions, to our memories and perceptions, is the
true creator of all our difficulties. He also saw that if we
believe in conditioned existence, if we believe in our suffering
and we will possess it, we will own it, it will be ours. But with
the ending of clinging, the ending of attachment, then suffering
ceases.
This is perhaps a difficult insight to comprehend and really
digest. In the same passage he says something like,
"Liberation does not come through living conditioned
existence but neither does it come through living non-existence.
One who is liberated abandons craving for being without relishing
non-being . . . ." Now where is that? You do not find that
one in the 'A-to-Z'! "Liberation comes from abandoning
craving for being, without relishing non-being."
The worldly mind can only see that either we are or we are
not, something is or is not, but the Buddha is talking from a
position which is neither this nor that, neither being nor
non-being, neither existence nor non-existence. On hearing this
sort of thing, maybe our mind starts to go into a flap, just goes
blank or thinks, "What on earth is this about? I mean, come
on, let's be serious, let's hear something useful, shall
we!?" But from my perspective this is the most useful and
powerful tool for insight that we have with which to understand
and live our lives.
It is, however, something that is very intangible;
conceptually it is not graspable, it evades our intellectual
faculties. It is also the very reason why in his life the Buddha
was constantly criticised for being a nihilist--because of not
saying, "This is the Truth," and stressing some kind of
metaphysical pattern or grand cosmology. Instead he kept talking
in terms of Nibbana, which just means 'cooled' or 'blown out',
like the blowing out of a flame. Nibbana can also be translated
as 'extinction' and to many people the concept seemed nihilistic.
"Life has got to have a bit more to it than just extinction
to look forward to!" But he refused to go along with the
eternalists, people who were philosophically life-affirming, yet
he also refused to go along with the annihilationists, those who
were philosophically life-denying; he kept pointing at the fact
that the Truth is other than either of those two fixed positions.
There is a lovely story from the Theravada tradition
concerning a seeker called Kamanita. He, having heard of the
Buddha's reputation, was passing through Tajagaha on his way to
meet him at Jeta's Grove in Savatthi. At nightfall he put up in a
potter's house; little did he know at the time that the monk that
he was sharing his lodging with that night was the Buddha
himself.
Kamanita, after a while, started enthusiastically telling his
fellow lodger how he was on his way to meet the Buddha. The
Buddha sat there listening and didn't let on who he
was--"Tell me about this great master and his
teaching," he said. So Kamanita goes on for some time,
telling the story of his own life and extolling all the wonders
of the Buddha's Dhamma, and how he teaches the path of bliss and
eternal happiness.
Finally, he said, "Well, I've talked enough, you tell me
about your life. What is you philosophy? Who is your teacher?
What do you proclaim as the truth?" The Buddha started to
speak, saying, "I will, in return for your narrative, unfold
to you the doctrine of the Buddha." He described the Four
Noble Truths: the truth of suffering, the origin of suffering,
cessation of suffering and the Path; and he expounded on anicca,
impermanence, and anatta, selflessness. As he began, Kamanita was
looking quite interested and taking it all in, but after a while
he began to think, "This guy is a bit of a sourpuss . . .
this isn't the Master's teaching as I understand it. Well, never
mind, he's got his right to think like he does."
As the Buddha continued, Kamanita got more and more
uncomfortable. All that this monk was saying to him seemed to
hang together logically and it felt disturbingly right, but
seemingly it had a horrible negative life-denying streak to it:
all about extinction and cessation, and with no promise of
"eternal and blessèd life" after death. His mind was
still heavily programmed towards the idea of eternal happiness
so, by the time the Buddha got on to anatta, Kamanita was
decidedly agitated and did not know what to do. The monk's
exposition was obviously flawless but Kamanita's heart was fixed
on the fact that he must be wrong, so he thought, "What he
is saying is all wrong! This is bad philosophy. The Buddha is the
great teacher, he teaches absolute bliss for eternity. I am going
to get the teaching directly from him. I should forget this guy,
he really does not know what he is talking about." The
Buddha finishes speaking and sees that Kamanita is a bit
agitated.
Finally, on a subdued tone Kamanita asks him, "Have you
ever heard all this form the mouth of the perfect Buddha
himself?"
At this point a smile plays around the Master's lips.
"No, brother, I cannot say I have."
Greatly relieved to hear this, Kamanita reassures himself that
they will be able to meet the Buddha in person soon and that this
monk's mistaken and destructive conception of the Buddha's
teaching will be set straight.
Kamanita never realises his mistake--not until much later
anyway, but that's another story . . . . The Buddha, when asked
about him, said, "Foolish as an unreasonable child was the
pilgrim Kamanita, he took offence at the Teaching . . ."; in
his lifetime his karmic obstructions were too dense to enable him
to see what was right in front of him.
Ajahn Chah often said that this is a position that we find
ourselves in--face to face with the Buddha, sharing a room
together, spending hours and hours deep in conversation and never
realising who this is. The truth of life is staring us in the
face, but because we have already got programmed with something
else that we want and expect, we are missing out on the lessons
that life is actually able to teach us.
What we need to understand then, is what this knowledge was
that the Buddha was pointing to. Firstly, it's necessary to
understand what we mean by the word existence--clinging to
existence and clinging to being or non-being. The word
'existence' actually means 'to stand out'; that which exists
stands out, it protrudes, it is something which comes out, like a
branch coming out of a tree. What the Buddha is pointing to is
that, as long as we are talking in terms of existence or even
non-existence (which is as if, instead of going out of the front
door we have just gone out of the back door), both are taking a
fixed position about some solid thing--there is still a separate
'thingness' there. What the Buddha is pointing to is that which
does not come forth, that which is standing out, i.e. a condition
of nature, mental or physical. What the Buddha is pointing to
here is the Unconditioned, that which does not stand out, that
which is not created, that which is not born of dying.
This is perhaps a bit hard to grasp but it is a very important
point: as long as we are talking about something 'existing' it
does not mean that that is the only reality. An experience is an
excursion out from the Unconditioned through a pattern of events,
back to the Unconditioned, like water rising from rivers and back
to the sea. It is an excursion of existence; a lifetime is just
an excursion, so is a thought--it is something which arises from
the Unconditioned, from the space of the mind, and dissolves back
into it again.
When something 'exists' it has a false independence, a false
individuality, because at that time, it seems to be of a
different and separate substance to all other things. When we
believe in separate existence then we are giving solidity to that
which is actually transparent, ephemeral, merely an element of
the infinite patters of consciousness in the mind. So the Buddha
is pointing to the Unconditioned as the basis for reality. The
Buddha's enlightenment was awakening to this Unconditioned nature
of the basis of life; this was the dimension, the position from
which he was seeing.
In this respect then, those aspects of life like that
material, manifest world that we celebrate and which are so
important, they become the basis for the realisation for the
Unconditioned; the conditioned is needed in order to realise the
Unconditioned. Through the agency of a human life and a human
body, the Unconditioned can be realised. This process is a
ripening or a transition, a transformation of the life spirit,
the life force--the jivita. The conditioned, the
green, is the infertile but becomes the basis for that which
ripens into the gold, like a field of corn: the green of life
ripens as the gold of wisdom, civilisation and true knowledge.
The lokiya becoming the basis for the realisation
for the lokuttara, these two always exist in
relationship to each other and the transformation, the ripening
of the one to allow the realisation of the other is what, in
Buddhism, is called stream entry.
This is also called 'the change of lineage'--when we see
through our attachment to the body, to the mind, to ourself and
to the world, it's known as a change of lineage because, rather
than looking upon our physical parents as our origin and the
source of our being, we see that the true Origin of all is the
Unconditioned mind. This is the source of all creation--as Thomas
Merton puts it: "the living law that rules the universe is
nothing but the secret gravitation that draws all things to God
as to their centre. Since all true art lays bare the action of
this same law in the depths of our own nature, it makes us alive
to the tremendous mystery of being, in which we ourselves,
together with all other living and existing things, come forth
from the depths of God and return again to Him."
So rather than placing ultimate value in the products and
activities of the manifest, existent world, we learn to see that
the saccadhamma--the Ultimate Reality of our own
nature--is the source of all true value. When the need arises, we
act, but when there's no need we are still--and whether there is
activity or not, the essential nature if the saccadhamma
remains the same. It doesn't have to prove its worth by taking a
certain form, of any form at all; the sea is still the sea
whether its rough or placid, gold still has the nature of gold
whatever shape we make it. So, in this process of realisation we
are affirming the very source of life--the Uncreated,
Unconditioned--rather than making value judgments about waves or
their absence on the surface. The source of our life is that
source of the whole universe--the heart of the universe is your
heart--so, far from the Buddha-Dhamma being a life-denying,
negative philosophy, it is actually the most earth-shaking,
silent roar of YES!!!--it is just avoiding making a fuss
about the secondary details and attending to the essence instead.
It is a philosophy of the ultimate aesthetic: "Truth is
beauty--one who has arrived at Release truly knows what Beauty
is."
Bikkhu Amaro (1994), "Silent Rain".