Due Diligence

As he approached the age of eighty, Shakyamuni grew increasingly weak in body. It is imaginable that he must have felt sad. About a year earlier, Shariputra and Maudgalyayana, his two leading disciples, had both died. Furthermore, his home nation met with sudden disaster. King Vidudabha of Kosala overthrew his father Pasenadi with whom Shakyamuni had been on close terms, and seized the royal power. The deposed king met an unhappy death, just as King Bimbisara of Magadha had done seven or eight years earlier at the hands of his son Ajatasattu. Having taken the throne, Vidudabha attacked the Shakyas, killing many of Shakyamuni’s relatives and destroying the small nation. ¹

1.

Within any generation, there are those who believe they see an historic task on their collective horizon. Many in my generation seemed to believe ourselves summoned to be iconoclasts. There was nothing which did not seem worthy of being wrecked when we, in our innocence and arrogance, began to recognize the inequality, violence, and blindness around us. We thought we, for the first time, had discovered these things. We swung our hammers with little discernment. We did not recognize or accept the things which we saw ourselves inheriting: racial and class oppression, excesses of wealth and extreme poverty, state-sponsored lies and overwhelming force, mass murder, political assassination, genocide, the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Now, we find others ready to shatter things, some, we realize, to which we have given our allegiance, often unawares. Our neighbors, our extended family, our children are ready to tear apart things from which we are uncertain that we are ready to part. Institutions or ideas in which we have deeply invested our selves are beginning to be dismantled, while we also contemplate our own vanishing.

The ills were undeniable and, persisting, still are. It is equally difficult to deny that they have deepened in real ways. We were not wrong to have been concerned, even horrified. Yet few of us proceeded to live in a way that struck at the roots of illness; instead we were content to trim the branches. So, now we view with remorse the thicket that the garden of our lives has become and the legacy it represents.

2.

Scholars continue to discover in the words of the Buddha references to ideas and institutions of his day, which he very often held up for critical examination or parody.

In the Fire Sermon (Ādittapariyāya Sutta), the Buddha declares that “all is burning.”

“The eye is burning…
“The ear is burning…
“The nose is burning…
“The tongue is burning…
“The body is burning…
“The mind is burning…”

“… Burning with what?
Burning with the fire of lust,
with the fire of hate,
with the fire of delusion.” ²

These three (greed, hatred, delusion) are the three fires. As Richard Gombrich has pointed out, “the fires number three because the Buddha was alluding to a set of three fires which the brahmin householder was committed to keeping alight and tending daily, so that they came to symbolise life in the world, life as a family man.” ³

Why such a dramatic metaphor as fire? On one level, the commentators say, a contrast is being made between a religious ritual and ethical principles, the importance of living a life free of these three ills. On another level, the fire metaphor is a vivid reminder to the practitioner that, without attention and effort, we will continue to treat each moment and every thing in the phenomenal world with attachment. ⁴ Unguarded, we are attracted then repelled, continually getting burned by our behavior and wandering without aim.

The process by which we become enmeshed in experience is described in some of the early dialogues of the Buddha. It has been analyzed by Bhikkhu Ñāṇananda in his work, Concept and Reality. The process is at first described as an impersonal causal relationship, in this case involving the seen:

Dependent on the eye and forms, eye-consciousness arises. The meeting of the three is contact. With contact as condition there is feeling.

At the advent of feeling, something important happens. The process becomes inhabited by the notion of a “subject.”

What one feels, that one perceives. What one perceives, that one thinks about. What one thinks about, that one mentally proliferates. ⁵

However, with the onset of mental proliferation, the process turns again. It is described as one in which the process now drives the notion of a subject, but a subject which has lost control.

With what one has mentally proliferated as the source, perceptions and notions tinged by mental proliferation beset a man with respect to past, future, and present forms cognizable through the eye. ⁶

For the same reason, each of the other five senses and thought are seen as “burning.” A truly addictive process is here described as being at the root of unaware human behavior, ramifying throughout all aspects of our lives.

With the arrival of feeling (vedanā), unless seen with wisdom as it is, then craving (taṇhā) follows immediately. ⁷

Craving then gives rise to clinging (upādāna). As with the description of eye-consciousness above, the notion of a subject that has arisen now becomes further entangled in a cascading process. This is the birth of “me” and all that to which “I” am attached: the ego-consciousness.

Buddhādasa Bhikkhu comments on this process, as it unfolds, when feeling gives rise to craving and then clinging.

…There exist merely the natural processes of body and mind which function as mechanisms for processing, interpreting, and transforming sense data. If these natural processes function in the wrong way, they give rise to foolishness and delusion, so that one feels that there is a self and things which belong to self…

Therefore, just here, at contact, before the onset of feeling, in each moment, it is possible to take a step backwards and not be born again, to not be dragged into a world created out of our delights, conceits, and biases. In this case, there is no cascade of proliferation to carry “me” forward. Instead, “in the seen, there is only the seen.” The “self” and the “world” do not arise together.

…If the natural processes function in the correct way, those feelings don’t arise. There is the original mindfulness and wisdom (sati-pañña), the fundamental clear knowing and true seeing that there is no “I” or “mine.” ⁸

3.

In the Discourse on the Not-Self, the Buddha elaborates on the urgency of not engaging in “I-making” and “my-making.”

Each and every thing “must with right understanding [as to] how it is, be regarded thus: ‘This is not mine, this is not I, this is not myself.’” ⁹

Likewise, we are enjoined to modesty regarding our knowledge of experience, since: “In whatever egoistic terms they think of an object, ipso facto, it becomes otherwise. And herein, verily, lies its falseness, the puerile deceptive phenomenon that it is.” ¹⁰

Understanding our craving for the pleasant, our measuring and comparing thoughts about self and others (or “us” and “them”), our blind adherence to views, our unquestioning demand for certainty, in short, our capacity for self-delusion; this mindfulness and understanding create, as a matter of course, a reticence to formulate policy for others and groups of others. As in the area of the transcendent, so in our life together, we are wise to avoid: “The attempt of phenomenal consciousness to transgress the limits of its applicability (i.e., the empirical), by overflowing into the transcendental in a spree of speculative metaphysics…” ¹¹

In whatever way we may think of it, it becomes otherwise. Or, as the contemporary meditation teacher, Corrado Pensa says, “Things don’t go the way we want them to go. Things go the way they go.”

If things are not self, if they are uncertain, then a fundamental modesty is incumbent upon us. The renunciation we require arises from understanding. Arrogance finds no hold.

The course of things does change and even reverse; this is dharma. Our ability to “nudge” our society toward social justice or influence human history even perceptibly in a certain direction, much less toward its “proper” culmination, is limited by our inability to comprehend the causes which are taking us in this direction. We will always be uncertain of our impact, unable to measure progress, without a blueprint to which to refer.

As Santikaro, the American Buddhist social critic and disciple of Buddhādasa Bhikkhu observes, because we mis-take this world, grasping it wrongly, engaging in a freedom that harms ourselves and others, we suffer far-reaching consequences.

Living as a superpower, pampered with affluence, doting on technology, it’s easy for us to ignore how life requires limits and boundaries. Overlooking the big sticks we still carry and believing we are the good guys, we throw our weight around in the world as if nobody should mind. Such arrogance trickles down into us all, no matter how liberal. As we shop around the world, fill the skies with airline exhaust, and refuse to live within the constraints of our ecosystems, we in effect throw out vinaya [communal guidelines], renounce renunciation, and rationalize away basic precepts. Lost in our delusions of autonomy, we deny the natural realities, family dynamics and social responsibilities that require boundaries and compromise. The freedom that doesn’t bite requires seeing that our own humanity is a shared inheritance and a socially supported dependent co-arising. ¹²

We are left with a modest, but infinitely rich, way.

Taking “the backward step,” we settle in the place of no-self, reflecting the light of wisdom and compassion, as we are favored, at any moment, to have it shine on us.

The final words of the Buddha were reported as:

Now, Brothers, I exhort you. It is the Law that all component things must decline and decay. Attain your goal through diligence. ¹³

Footnotes

1
Kogen Mizuno, The Beginnings of Buddhism, Richard L Gage, trans. (Tokyo: Kosei, 1992), pp. 173-174
2
Ādittapariyāya Sutta, The Fire Sermon – SN 35.28, translated from the Pali by Ñanamoli Thera
3
Richard F. Gombrich, How Buddhism Began: The Conditioned Genesis of the Early Teachings (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1997), p. 66
4
“The word upādāna has both a concrete and an abstract meaning. In the abstract it means attachment, grasping; in this sense it is much used in Buddhist dogmatics. Concretely, it means that which fuels this process. The P.E.D. s.v.: ‘Lit. that [material] substratum by means of which an active process is kept alive and going), fuel, supply, provision.’ ” Ibid., p. 67.
5
“The commentaries identify the springs of this proliferation as the three factors – craving, conceit, and views – on account of which the mind ’embellishes’ experience by interpreting it in terms of ‘mine,’ ‘I,’ and ‘my self.'” Note 229, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, Bhikkhu Bodhi, tr., (Boston: Wisdom, 1995), p. 1203.
6
Madhupindika (The Honeyball) Sutta, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, Bhikkhu Bodhi, tr., (Boston: Wisdom, 1995), p. 203.
7
Or conceit (māna), the measuring and comparing mind or adherence to views (ditthi).
8
Buddhādasa Bhikkhu, Heartwood of the Bodhi Tree: The Buddha’s Teaching on Voidness (Boston: Wisdom, 1994), pp. 4-5
9
Anatta lakkhaṇa Sutta, The Discourse on the Not-self Characteristic – SN 22.59, translated from the Pali by Ñanamoli Thera
10
Sutta Nipata, 757, in Bhikkhu Ñāṇananda, Concept and Reality in Early Buddhist Thought (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1997), p. 32.
11
Bhikkhu Ñāṇananda, Concept and Reality in Early Buddhist Thought (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1997), p. 22
12
Santikaro, Freedom in the USA, Unrealistic, Distracting and at Times Delusory Notions
13
Mizuno, p. 188.

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Footnotes

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