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Nyanavira Thera: The Tragic Comic and Personal
Nyanavira Thera: The Tragic Comic and Personal
Smaera Bodhesako
First Published: 1987 Copyright 1987 Path Press Digital Transcription Source: Buddhist Publication Society For free distribution. This work may be republished, reformatted, reprinted and redistributed in any medium. However, any such republication and redistribution is to be made available to the public on a free and unrestricted basis and translations and other derivative works are to be clearly marked as such and the Buddhist Publication Society is to be acknowledged as the original publisher.
Contents
Foreword................................................................................................................................................................3 Selected Letters of avra Thera.....................................................................................................................5 1. Good action (6 August 1956)..................................................................................................................5 2. Mett in meditation and in life (10 October 1958)..............................................................................5 3. Addiction (25 May 1962)........................................................................................................................6 4. Love and death (4 January 1963)...........................................................................................................8 5. Positives and negatives (15 January 1963)...........................................................................................9 6. Towards realisation of the Dhamma (7 March 1963).......................................................................10 7. The phenomenological method (15 May 1963).................................................................................10 8. Reflexive and immediate experience (19 May 1963)........................................................................11 9. Fear of death (7 September 1963)........................................................................................................11 10. The Laws of Thought and the problem of existence (15 December 1963)...................................12 11. Conceptual thought and reflexion (1 January 1964).......................................................................13 12. Revolt with intelligence (4 March 1964)...........................................................................................14 13. Western thought; impermanence (15 March 1964).........................................................................14 14. Three kinds of trainees (4 April 1964)..............................................................................................15 15. The Suttas and outside philosophies (12 April 1964).....................................................................16 16. The Law of Identity (14 July 1964)....................................................................................................16 17. Mindfulness; Huxleys Island (6 August 1964)...............................................................................16 18. Meditations a non-mystical practice (18 May 1964).......................................................................17 19. Ignorance and reality (2 August 1964).............................................................................................18 20. Desire to end desire (31 August 1964)..............................................................................................19 21. Sending good wishes (20 September 1964)......................................................................................19 22. Dhamma and socialism (23 November 1964)..................................................................................20 23. Interpreting the Canon (29 November 1964)...................................................................................21 24. Numinous experience (8 December 1964).......................................................................................21 25. A good life and a good death (30 December 1964).........................................................................23 26. The autonomous mood (1 January 1965).........................................................................................23 27. Ulysses: a glimpse of futility (7 April 1965).....................................................................................24 28. Humour (18 May 1965).......................................................................................................................25 29. Laughter and fear (24 May 1965).......................................................................................................28 30 (a). Investigation of laughter (2 June 1965).......................................................................................29 30 (b). Existentialist Idiom and Sutta idiom (2 June 1965 (contd.))....................................................30 31. Who judges? And with what as standard? (2 July 1965)...............................................................33 Pali-English Glossary.........................................................................................................................................35
Foreword
When Osbert Moore and Harold Musson arrived on the shores of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1949, they brought with them a shared attitude of open-minded thoughtfulness and a firm determination to devote the remainder of their lives to seeking understanding by means of the Buddhas Teaching; and this they proceeded to do. Since they had first met during World War II, when they were British officers, they had found a commonality of view about the futility of life, and when Musson happened upon an Italian book on Buddhism and (in order to brush up on his Italian he was an interrogator in 1 Intelligence) decided to translate it, they discovered a mutual attraction towards and sympathy for that Teaching. Moore, who at his ordination was given the name the Venerable amoli Bhikkhu, is well-known to readers of the Wheel series and other BPS publications as an essayist and skilful translator of the Pali Suttas and commentaries. Musson, who became known as the Venerable avra Bhikkhu, was more solitary. Apart from a few early essays, he has shared his learning and wisdom with a general audience only in his small book, Notes on Dhamma, published privately in 1983. But until his death in 1965 (five years after the Ven. amolis) he also carried on a correspondence with a few laypeople who wished to benefit from his learning. Now these letters have been collected and edited and, together with the final text of Notes on Dhamma (revised somewhat in the last two years of the authors life), they are being issued in a single 2 volume. It is from this volume that the present selection has been made, except for the first two 3 letters, which appear here for the first time. The recipients of the letters include his doctor (with whom the Ven. avra also discussed the ailments that eventually led to his death), a judge (who became the publisher of Notes on Dhamma), a provincial businessman, a barrister, and two British citizens. Having been born in England in 1920 and educated at Cambridge University, the Ven. avra 4 Thera naturally sought an approach to the Buddhas Teaching via Western thought (see letter 23). After acquainting themselves thoroughly with the Pali Suttas the two friends explored many modes of Western thoughteven quantum mechanics!through reading and discussion. When the Ven. avra moved to a remote section of Ceylon, where he lived alone for the rest of his life, their discussions continued through voluminous correspondence which lasted until 1960, the year of the Ven. amolis death. Increasingly they found that the Western thinkers most relevant to their interests were those belonging to the closely allied schools of phenomenology and existentialism, to whom they found themselves indebted for clearing away a lot of mistaken notions with which they had burdened themselves. These letters make clear the nature of that debt; they also make clear the limitations which the Ven. avra saw in those thinkers. He is insistent that although for certain individuals their value may be great, yet eventually one must go beyond them if one is to arrive at the essence of the Buddhas Teaching. Existentialism, then, is in his view an approach to the Buddhas Teaching and not a substitute for it. These letters are concerned in part with an approach to the Teaching; but the approach is not the Teaching, and other letters discuss the Teaching itself. Here wherever possible the Ven. avra offers Sutta references to support his statements; and the careful reader of these letters will easily perceive that their author had a profound veneration for those texts. It is this veneration for the Suttas, and for their profound message, that he tries to communicate. In this presentation the letters are arranged in a purely chronological order. To indicate the subject matter of each letter they are preceded by a title provided by the editor. Within the letters a few
The Doctrine of Awakening, by J. Evola (Luzane, 1951). Clearing the Path: Writings of avra Thera (Colombo: Path Press, 1987). 3 The essay Mindfulness and Awarenessalso originally a letter and included in Clearing the Pathwas first published by the BPS as a Bodhi Leaf (BL 60). 4 Thera (elder) is a monastic honorific appended to one's name upon completion of ten years as a bhikkhu (monk).
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asterisks will be found, referring the reader to editorial notes located at the end of the compilation. Following the editorial notes is a Pali-English Glossary, provided for the benefit of those who may not be familiar with some of the Pali words used in the text. The English equivalents given are those preferred by the Ven. avra Thera. Smaera Bodhesako
might be when we are peeping through a keyhole or something like that) and we believe we are alone and unobserved, we suddenly hear a slight sound behind us and we immediately have the unpleasant idea I am being watched. We turn round and look and find nobody there at all. It was only our own guilty conscience. Now this is an indication that in order to have a relationship with other people we do not need other peoples bodies: we are conscious of other people (at least implicitly) all the time, and it is this consciousness that we have to attend to when we practise mett. When we practise mett we are developing and gradually changing our attitude towards other people; and we always have an attitude towards other people whether their bodies are present or not. The only thing a (living) body does when we meet one is to be the occasion for the consciousness, This is another person. And if we have already been practising mett and have acquired an unangry attitude towards other people, then when we actually meet another person our attitude towards him will be correct right at the beginning, and no anger will arise. It is only when we are already disposed to anger that we get angry when we meet someone; and if we are disposed to mett (through long practise in solitude, on our consciousness of other people whose actual bodies are absent) we have mett in our dealings with them.
that eighty percent of all Persians over the age of thirty-five (I think he said) take opium (and also that all Persians tell lies on principlebut this is another digression), and with such a wealth of material to 8 hand he was able to do some research. He would give each addict two readings, one before taking opium and one after. The readings all said the same thing: before the opium the mental state of the addict was abnormal and disorganised; after the opium the mental state was normal and organised. The effect of the opium on the addict was not, as one might think, to disintegrate the personality; on the contrary, the effect was to integrate a disintegrated personality. The opium was necessary to restore the addict to normal. (I have heard similar observations from another doctor who was for many years a medical missionary in China: if you want to do business with an opium addict, drive your bargain when the effect of his last dose is wearing off.) What can we conclude from all this? We conclude that, unlike a normal person who may take a drug once in a while for the novelty or pleasure of the effect, and who at that time becomes abnormal, the confirmed addict is normal only when he has taken the drug, and becomes abnormal when he is deprived of it. The addict reverses the usual situation and is dependent upon the drug to keep him in his normal integrated state. (This does not mean, of course, that the addict derives pleasure from occasional deprivation as the abstainer does from occasional intoxication; quite the contrary: in both cases the drugged state is more pleasant, but for the one it is normal and for the other it is abnormal.) The addict can only do his work efficiently and perform his normal functions if he takes the drug, and it is in this condition that he will make plans for the future. (If he cannot take the drug the only plan he makes is to obtain another dose as quickly as possible.) If he decides that he must give up his addiction to the drug (it is too expensive; it is ruining his reputation or his career; it is undermining his health; and so on) he will make the decision only when he is in a fit state to consider the matter, that is to say when he is drugged; and it is from this (for him, normal) point of view that he will envisage the future. (Thus, it was as a smoker that I, decided to give up smoking.) But as soon as the addict puts his decisions into effect and stops taking the drug he ceases to be normal, and decisions taken when he was normal now appear in quite a different lightand this will include his decision to stop taking the drug. Either, then, he abandons the decision as invalid (How could I possibly have decided to do such a thing? I must have been off my head) and returns to his drug taking, or (though he approves the decision) he feels it urgently necessary to return to the state in which he originally took the decision (which was when he was drugged) in order to make the decision seem valid again. (And so it was that I felt the urgent need of a cigarette to confirm my decision to give them up.) In both cases the result is the samea return to the drug. And so long as the addict takes his normal drugged state for granted at its face valuei.e. as normalthe same thing will happen whenever he tries to give up his addiction. Not only is the drug addict in a vicious circlethe more he takes the more he wants, the more he wants the more he takesbut, until he learns to take an outside view of his situation and is able to see the nature of drug addiction, he will find that all his attempts to force a way out of the vicious circle simply lead him back in again. (A vicious circle is thus a closed system in stable equilibrium.) It is only when the addict understands addiction, and holds fast to the right view thatin spite of all appearances, in spite of all temptations to think otherwisehis normal drugged state is not normal, that he will be able to put up with the temporary discomfort of deprivation and eventually get free from his addiction. In brief, then, an addict decides to give up drugs, and he supposes that in order to do so all that is necessary is to give them up (which would certainly be a glimpse of the obvious were it not that he is profoundly deceiving himself, as he very soon finds out). No sooner does he start giving them up than he discovers (if he is very unintelligent) that he is mistaken and has made the wrong decision, or (if he is less unintelligent) that, though the decision is right, he is wrong about the method, and that in order to give up drugs it is necessary to take them . It is only the intelligent man who understands (against all appearances) that both the decision and the method are right; and it is only he that succeeds. For the intelligent man, then, the instruction to give up drugs it is necessary to give them up, far from being a glimpse of the obvious, is a profound truth revealing the nature of addiction and leading to escape from it.
I would ask you to pause before dismissing this account as fanciful; this same themethe vicious circle and the escape from it by way of understanding and in spite of appearancesis the very essence of the Buddhas Teaching. The example discussed abovedrug addictionis on a coarse level, but you will find the theme repeated again and again right down to the finest level, that of the four noble truths. It will, I think, be worthwhile to illustrate this from the Suttas. In the 75 Sutta of the Majjhima Nikya (M I 506-8) the Buddha shows the vicious circle of sensual desire and its gratification in the simile of a man with a skin disease (kuhia leper?). Imagine a man with a fiercely itching skin disease who, to relieve the itching, scratches himself with his nails and roasts himself near a brazier. The more he does this the worse becomes his condition, but this scratching and roasting give him a certain satisfaction. In the same way, a man with finely itching sensual desire seeks relief from it in sensual gratification. The more he gratifies it the stronger becomes his desire, but in the gratification of his desire he finds a certain pleasure. Suppose, now, that the skin disease were cured; would that man continue to find satisfaction in scratching and roasting himself ? By no means. So, too, a man who is cured of sensual desire (an arahat) will find no more pleasure in sensual gratification. Let us extend the simile a little. You, as a doctor, know very well that to cure an itching skin disease the first thing to do is to prevent the patient from scratching and making it worse. Unless this can be done there is no hope of successfully treating the condition. But the patient will not forego the satisfaction of scratching unless he is made to understand that scratching aggravates the condition, and that there can be no cure unless he voluntarily restrains his desire to scratch, and puts up with the temporarily increased discomfort of unrelieved itching. And similarly, a person who desires a permanent cure from the torment of sensual desire must first be made to understand that he must put up with the temporarily increased discomfort of celibacy (as a bhikkhu) if the Buddhas treatment is to be successful. Here, again, the way out of the vicious circle is through an understanding of it and through disregard of the apparent worsening of the condition consequent upon self-restraint: Consider, now, the four noble truths. The fourth of these truths is, This is the way leading to the cessation of suffering, that is to say, the noble eight factored path; and the first factor of this path is right view, which is defined as knowledge of the four noble truths. But, as before, the fourth truth is the way leading to cessation of suffering. So we come to the proposition, The way leading to cessation of suffering is knowledge of the way leading to the cessation of suffering, or To put an end to suffering one must understand the way to put an end to suffering. And what is this but a repetition, at the most fundamental level, of our original theme, To give up drugs one must 9 understand the way to give up drugs? Not everybody is addicted to morphine, but most people are addicted to sensual gratification, and all except the ariyasvakas are addicted to their own personality (sakkyadihi)10 and even the ariyasvakas, with the exception of the arahat, still have a subtle addiction, the conceit I am (asmimna). The arahat has put an end to all addiction whatsoever. There is thus no form of addiction that the Buddhas Teaching will not cure, provided the addict is intelligent and willing to make the necessary effort.
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of its death and decomposition. And not in an abstract scientific fashion eitherone sees or imagines a rotting corpse, for example, and then pictures ones very own body in such a state. Our contemporaries are more squeamish.
mistake them for fellow negatives. He understands (or at least senses) that the common factor of positivity that welds them together in the we of human solidarity does not extend to him, and mankind for him is they. When a negative meets another negative they tend to coalesce with a kind of easy mutual indifference. Unlike two positives, who have the differences in their respective positivities to keep them apart, two negatives have nothing to separate them, and one negative recognises another by his peculiar transparencywhereas a positive is opaque. It happens that, for Heidegger, contemplation of ones death throughout ones life is the key to authenticity. As Sartre has observed, Heidegger has not properly understood the nature of death, regarding it as my possibility, whereas in fact it is always accidental, even in suicide (I cannot kill myself directly, I can only cut my throat and wait for death to come). But death of ones body (which is always seen from outside, like other peoples bodies) can be imagined and the implications envisaged. And this is really all that is necessary (though it must be added that there are other ways than contemplation of death of becoming authentic).
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independently consciousor not (and this distinction is not always easy to make simply by looking at them), are of interest only to the lover of variety, to the collector of strange objects. To suppose, as Huxley does (and it is this fidelity of his to the scientific method that condemns him never to be more than a second-rate thinker), that by collecting and examining the various objects of the mind one can learn something essential about the nature of mind is much the same as supposing that one can learn something about the structure of the telescope by making a list of the great variety of objects one can see through it. The phenomenological method (of existential thinkers) is not in the least concerned with the peculiarities (however peculiar they may be) of the individual specimen; what it is concerned with is the universal nature of experience as such. Thus, if a phenomenologist sees a duck-billed platypus, he does not exclaim with rapture, What a strange creature! What a magnificent addition to the sum of human knowledge (and also to my collection of stuffed curiosities)!; he says, instead, This is an example of a living being, thus putting the platypus with all its duck-billed peculiarities in brackets and considering only the universal characteristics of his experience of the platypus. But a dog would have done just as well; for a dog, too, is an example of a living being; and besides, there is no need to go all the way to Australia to see one. The phenomenologist does not seek variety, he seeks repetitionrepetition, that is to say, of experience (what it is experience of does not interest him in the least), so that he may eventually come to understand the nature of experience (for experience and existence are one and the same). And this is just as true of imaginary (mental) experience as of real experience. The Venerable Sriputta Thera, for all his proficiency in the practice of jhna, had not developed the dibbacakkhu (Th 996). And even so he was the leading disciple of the Buddha, and the foremost in pa, or understanding. After the Buddha himself there was nobody who understood the Dhamma as well as heand yet, on his own admission, he was unable to see even a goblin (Udna IV.4/Ud 40). Evidently, then, the seeing of strange creatures, in normal or abnormal states of mind, does not advance one in wisdom.
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appropriate action quickly when they actually occur, instead of dying in a state of bewilderment and terror. What is the appropriate action? The answer is, Mindfulness. One cannot prevent these feelings (except by becoming an arahat), but one can look them in the face instead of fleeing in panic. Let them come, and try to watch them: once they know themselves to be observed they tend to wither and fade away, and can only reassert themselves when you become heedless and off your guard. But continued mindfulness is not easy, and that is why it is best to try and practise it as much as possible while one is still living. Experiences such as yours are valuable reminders of what one has to expect and of the necessity for rehearsing ones death before one is faced with it.
10. The Laws of Thought and the problem of existence (15 December 1963)
Any proposed solution to the problem of existence that disregards the three Laws of Thought is, in the profoundest sense, frivolous. For the puthujjana the problem is brought to light by persistent refusal to disregard these laws. It is the merit of the existentialist philosophers that they do in fact bring the problem to light in this way. What happens is this: the thinker examines and describes his own thinking in an act of reflexion, obstinately refusing to tolerate non identities, contradictions, and excluded middles; at a certain point he comes up against a contradiction that he cannot resolve and that appears to be inherent in his very act of thinking. This contradiction is the existence of the thinker himself (as subject). This is concisely present in the later part of the Mahnidna Suttanta (DN 15/D II 66-8), where the Buddha says that a man who identifies his self with feeling should be asked which kind of feeling, pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, he regards as his self. The man cannot identify his self with all three kinds of feeling at once, since only one of the three kinds is present at a time: if he does make this identification, therefore, he must do it with the three different kinds of feeling in succession. His self, of course, he takes for grantedas self-identicalA is Athat is to say as the same self on each occasion. This he proceeds to identify in turn with the three different feelings: B, C, and D. A is therefore both B and C (not to mention D); and C, being different from B, is not B: so A is both B and not Ba violation of the Law of Contradiction. But whether or not it is with feeling that the puthujjana is identifying his self, he is always identifying it with somethingand it is a different something on each occasion. The puthujjana takes his existence for granted cogito ergo sum (which, as Sartre says, is apodictic reflexive evidence of the thinkers existence)and is in a perpetual state of contradiction. So we have the following situation. Assuming the validity of the Laws of Thought, the thinker discovers that the whole of his thinking depends upon an irreducible violation of the Laws of Thought, namely the contradictory existence of the thinker. And this itself is a contradiction. If he tolerates this contradiction he denies the validity of the Laws of Thought whose validity he assumed when he established the contradiction in the first place; there is therefore no contradiction for him to tolerate, and consequently he is not denying the Laws of Thought; the contradiction therefore exists and he tolerates it Or he may refuse to tolerate the contradiction; but if he does so, it is in the name of the Law of Contradiction that he does so, and refusal to tolerate the contradiction requires him to deny the validity of the Laws of Thought by which the contradiction was originally established; he has therefore no reason to refuse to tolerate the contradiction, which, if the Laws of Thought are invalid, is inoffensive; he therefore does not deny the validity of the Laws of Thought, and the contradiction is offensive and he refuses to tolerate it Or perhaps he neither tolerates the contradiction nor refuses to tolerate it, in which ease he violates the Law of Excluded Middle Most certainly the problem exists! How is it dealt with? (i) The rationalist, by remaining on the level of reason and refusing to look at his premises, asserts the validity of the Laws of Thought, and successfully blinds himself to the standing violation of the Laws of Thoughthis own existence. (ii) The mystic endorses the standing violation of the Laws of Thought by asserting their invalidity on principle. This obliges him to attribute their apparent validity to blindness or ignorance and to assert a Reality behind appearances that is to be reached by developing a mode of thinking based on the three laws: A is not A; A is both B and not B; A is neither B nor not B. (iii) The existentialist says: Contradiction is the truth, which is a contradiction, and therefore the truth. This is the situation, and I dont like it; but I can see
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Identity"A is A; Contradiction"A is not both B and not B; Excluded Middle"A is either B or not B.
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no way out of it. To maintain this equivocal attitude for a long time is exhausting, and existentialists tend to seek relief in either rationalism or mysticism; but since they find it easier to endorse their personal existence than to ignore it they are more inclined to be mystical than rational. Obviously, of these three attitudes, the first two evade the problem either by arbitrarily denying its existence or by arbitrarily denying the Laws of Thought upon which it depends. Only the third attitude asserts the Laws of Thought and asserts the existence of the problem. Though the puthujjana does not see the solution of the problem, he ought at least to see that to evade the problem (either by denying its existence or by denying the Laws of Thought on which it depends) is not to solve it. He will therefore choose to endure the discomfort of the third attitude until help comes from outside in the form of the Buddhas Teaching, or he himself finds the way out by becoming a Buddha.
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The Huxley article was a newspaper clipping the correspondent had passed on to the Ven. author.
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upekkh, indifference, as the proper way. The fault does not lie in the impermanence (which is inevitable), but in attachment to (and repulsion from) the impermanent. Get rid of attachment (and repulsion) and you get rid of the suffering of impermanence. The arahat makes impermanent use of the impermanent, but with indifference, and the only suffering he has is bodily pain or discomfort when it arises (and that, too, finally ceases when his body breaks up).
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say to the Buddha, There is this or that that you have not taken into account : it is all taken into account, and still more. The Suttas give not the slightest pretext for the famous sacrifice of the intellectIgnatius Loyola and Bodhidharma are strange bedfellows, indeed. Certainly there is more to the Dhamma than intellect (and this is sometimes hard for Europeans to understand), but there is nothing to justify the wilful abandonment of the Principle of Identity.
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Cf. AN 7 55/A IV 83. The Middle Way is the journal of the Buddhist Society of Great Britain.
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question). And precisely the worst feature of the book is the persistent misinterpretation (or even perversion) of the Buddhas Teaching. It is probable that Huxley picked up a certain amount of information on the Dhamma while he was in Ceylon but, being antipathetic to Theravda (this is evident in his earlier books), he has not scrupled to interpret his information to suit his own ideas. We find, for example, that according to Freudian doctrine Mucalinda Ngarja (Udna II 10) is a phallic symbol, being a serpent. So meditating under the Mucalinda tree means sexual intercourse. And this in complete defiance of the verses at the end of the Sutta: Dispassion for worldly pleasure, getting beyond sensuality, putting away the conceit I am, this indeed is the highest pleasure. In short, the book is a complete misrepresentation of the Buddhas Teaching in a popular form that is likely to be widely read. Huxley, of course, is sincere in his views and no doubt means well; but that does not make the book any the less unfortunate.
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of these attainments in the Suttas there is, once again, nothing that corresponds to what Zaehner describes; and, in particular, these practices alone do not lead to liberation in the highest sense nibbnathough Zaehner seems to assume that they do (pp. 155-6). Moreover, it is by no means necessary to reach the highest stages of concentration in order to attain nibbnafirst jhna (minimum) is sufficient. I have wearied you with all this only because it seems possible that, in denying that there was anything mystical about the Buddhism of the Pali Texts, I might have given you the impression that there was (in my opinion, at least) no practice of meditation . This, however, would be a mistake. In denying that Pali Buddhism was mystical, all I intended to convey was that (i) the practice of meditation (or, more specifically, concentration samdhi) that it teaches cannot in any way be described as mystical (though certainly its effects are, to begin with, unusualbecause few people practiseand eventually, supernormalthey can lead to mastery of iddhi powers: levitation, clairvoyance, memory of past lives, and so on); and (ii) that eventual liberationnibbna, extinction, is not a mystical union with the Deity, nor even absorption in a Higher Self (both of which cover up and intensify the fundamental ambiguity of the subject [I, myself, etc.]), but rather the attainment of the clear understanding and comprehension ( pa, a) about the nature of this ambiguity (which, when combined with suitable samdhi actually causesor, rather, allowsthe ambiguity to subside once for all). There are many world-views against which as a background the Buddhas Teaching is wholly incomprehensibleindeed, the Buddha himself, upon occasion, when asked about his teaching, would answer, It is hard for you, having (as you do) other teachers, other persuasions, other views, to understand these matters. Zaehners Weltanschauung, for example, is hopeless.
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The various things just stand there in the world; 23 But the wise get rid of desire therein. (AN 6:63/A III 411) For the Hindu, then, the variety of the world is illusion, and for the Mahynist it is ignorance; and in both cases the aim is to overcome the world, either by union with Brahma or by attainment of knowledge. Unlike the Hindus and the Mahynists, the Pali Suttas teach that the variety of the world is neither illusion (my) nor delusion (avidy) but perfectly real. The attainment of nibbna is certainly cessation of avijj, but this leaves the variety of the world intact, except that affectively the variety is now uniformly indifferent. Avidy, clearly enough, does not mean to the Mahynist what avijj does in the Pali Suttas.
Sakappargo purisassa kmo Na te km yni citrni loke Sakappargo purisassa kmo Tihanti citrni tath'eva loke Ath'ettha dhr vinayanti chanda.
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be intelligently directed.) Since an arahat is capable of desiring the welfare of others, good wishes are evidently not essentially connected with self-assertion, and so are quite comme il faut. I hope that your leave is passing pleasantly for youthat is, I do not hope that it is passing, but that it is pleasant in its passing: whether I hope or do not hope, it will pass, alas! like all good things, save one. But that one thingagain alas!is not to be had simply by wishing. In creatures subject to birth, ageing, and death, friends, there arises such a wish as O that we were not subject to birth, ageing, and death! O that birth, ageing, and death might not come nigh us! But that is not to be attained by wishing; and in this, too, not to get what one wishes is to suffer. (DN 22 / D II 307) With all best wishes, including this (that is, if you would wish it for yourself).
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the whole of his past behind him; and it is in the light of his past (or his background or his presuppositions) that he interprets what is now presented to him and gives it its meaning. Without such a background nothing would ever appear to us with any meaning at alla spoken or written word would remain a pure presentation, a bare sound or mark without significance. But, unfortunately, each of us has a different past; and, in consequence, each of us approaches the Canon with a set of presuppositions that is different in various ways from everybody elses. And the further consequence is that each of us understands the Canon in a different sense. We try to discover our personal ideas in the Canon because there is nothing else we can do. It is the only way we have, in the first place, of understanding the Canon. Later, of course, our understanding of the Canon comes to modify our ideas; and thus, by a circular process, our later understanding of the Canon is better than, or at least different from, our earlier understanding, and there is the possibility of eventually arriving at the right understanding of the ariyapuggala. Certainly we can, to some extent, deduce from the Canon its meaning; but unless we first introduced our own ideas we should never find that the Canon had any meaning to be deduced. For each person, then, the Canon means something different according to his different background. And this applies not only to our understanding of particular passages, but also to what we understand by the Buddhadhamma as a whole. (I) We may all agree that certain passages were spoken by the Buddha himself and that they represent the true Teaching. But when we come to ask one another what we understand by these passages and by the words they contain we often find a profound disagreement that is by no means settled simply by reference to other Sutta passages. (ii) Since everybody already has his own ideas (vague or precise) of what constitutes happiness, he will naturally look to the Buddha (that is, if he has placed his saddh in the Buddha) to supply that happiness, and he will interpret the Dhamma as a whole in just that sense. Later, of course, he may find that the Dhamma cannot be taken in the sense that he wishes, and he will then either change his ideas or else abandon the Dhamma for some other teaching. But, in any case, there is no reason at all for supposing that two people (unless they have both ceased to be puthujjanas) will be agreed on what it is, precisely, that the Buddha teaches. So, in the present case, I do not find that Mr. Xs view of the Dhammaso far as I can grasp ithas any very great resemblance to mine; and that difference evidently reflects the difference in our respective backgrounds against which we interpret the Dhamma. He may (perhaps) say that he reads and understands the Suttas without any reference to a background, and (if so) I have no wish to argue the point; but I know that, for my part, I never come without a background (in a sense I am my background) when I consider the texts, even though that background is now very different from what it was when I first looked at a Sutta. And if he disagrees with what I am saying, that disagreement will itself be reflected in the way each of us understands the nature of the Dhamma.
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Adagio and Fugue, the late Beethoven, Bartoks quartets, Stravinskys Octet for Wind Instruments, so evident to me before I joined the armywhere was it when I got back home after the war? When we come to more specifically numinous experience the situation is more delicate. In its grosser forms, certainlyawe in a cathedral, panic fear in a thunderstormit can come and go, and we oscillate between eternity and transience; and even if transience can be eternal, eternity cannot possibly be transient. But a more subtle approach is possible. For Karl Jaspers the world has a threefold aspect. There is being-there, being-oneself, and being-in-itself. The first is everything that can be an object for me, thoughts as well as things. The second is personal existence, or myself. This transcends the first, and can be apprehended, though not wholly, in an act of self reflexion. The third transcends the second as the second transcends the first, and is Transcendental Being. This is the ultimate sense or meaning of the other two, but it can never be directly apprehended. All we can do is to approach it. And Jaspers here develops his doctrine of cyphers: a cypher (which is quite unintelligible to abstract reason) is an experience that is apprehended as incompletebut only as pointing to a reality that is present but hidden. Although Jaspers distinguishes various kinds of cyphers, the important point is that anything can be read as a cypher if we care to make the effort of existential contemplation. Since anything can indicate Transcendental Being, there is at least the theoretical possibility that one might pass the whole of ones life reading ones every experience as a cypher, and in such a case we should perpetually be approaching Eternity. This attitude is less easy to dismiss, and Jaspers has taken care to tie up all the loose ends with an ultimate cypher. Although we can perpetually approach Being, we can never actually reach it, and this inevitable failure and frustration of our efforts may be a temptation to despair. This temptation to despair, says Jaspers, should spur us on to assume the cypher of frustration. But it must be emphasised that the assumption of this cypher is an act of faith in Transcendence and without such faith we can never make the necessary jumpindeed, they are really one and the same thing. So, then, Jaspers leads us to the point where everything indicates Transcendence and nothing reveals it, and thence to despair; and despair is an invitation to jump to the conclusion that Transcendence (or Eternity, or God) exists. But different attitudes are possible in the face of this invitation. The theists, of course, accept the invitation with many thanks. Jaspers himself is inclined to accept it in spite of the difficulties involved. Sartre explains away the invitation, too easily dismissing what is a real problem. Camus accepts the invitation to Transcendence in a contrary senseas evidence of the non-existence of God. And what, then, about the Buddhas Teachinghow does it tell us to deal with the question whether or not God exists? The first thing is to refuse to be bullied into giving a categorical answer, yes or no, to such a treacherous question. The second thing is to see that the answer to this question will depend on the answer to a more immediate question: Do I myself exist? Is my self in fact eternal, or is it something that perishes with the body? And it is here that the difficulties begin. The Buddha says that the world is divided, for the most part, between the Yeas and the Nays, between the eternalists and the annihilationists, and that they are forever at each others throats. But these are two extremes, and the Buddhas Teaching goes in between. So long as we have experience of our selves, the question Does my self exist? will thrust itself upon us: if we answer in the affirmative we shall tend to affirm the existence of God, and if we answer in the negative we shall deny the existence of God. But what if we have ceased to have experience of ourselves? (I do not mean reflexive experience as such, but experience of our selves as an ego or a person.) If this were to happenand it is the specific aim of the Buddhas Teaching (and of no other teaching) to arrange for it to happenthen not only should we stop questioning about our existence and the existence of God, but the whole of Jaspers system, and with it the doctrine of cyphers, would collapse. And what room, then, for despair? For the arahat all sense of personality or selfhood has subsided, and with it has gone all possibility of numinous experience; and a fortiori the mystical intuition of a trans-personal Spirit or Absolute Selfof a Purpose or an Essence or a Oneness or what have youcan no longer arise.
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Matter is what matters; feeling is what feels; perception is what perceives; determinations (or intentions) are what determine (or intend); consciousness is what cognizes. (SN 22:79/S III 86-7) The ordinary person (the puthujjana or commoner) thinks, I feel; I perceive; I determine; I cognize, and he takes this I to refer to some kind of timeless and changeless ego or self. But the arahat has completely got rid of the ego-illusion (the conceit or concept I am), and, when he reflects, thinks quite simply, Feeling feels; perception perceives; determinations determine; consciousness cognizes. Perhaps this may help you to see how it is that when desire (craving) ceases altogether 26 the various things just stand there in the world. Obviously they cannot just stand there in the world unless they are felt, perceived, determined and cognized (Berkeleys esse est percipi is, in principle, quite correct); but for the living arahat the question Who feels, perceives, determines, cognizes, the various things? no longer arisesthe various things are felt by feeling, perceived by perception, determined by determinations, and cognized by consciousness; in other words, they are there in the world autonomously (actually they always were, but the puthujjana does not see this since he takes himself for granted). With the breaking up of the arahats body (his death) all this ceases. (For other people, of course, these things continue unless and until they in their turn, having become arahats, arrive at the end of their final existence.) A further point. When an arahat is talking to people he will normally follow linguistic usage and speak of I and me and mine and so on; but he no longer (mis)understands these words as does the puthujjana. There is a Sutta (in verse) which I translate (prosaically) as follows: A monk who is a worthy one (arahat), his task done, His cankers destroyed, wearing his last body Is it because this monk has arrived at conceit That he might say I say, And that he might say They say to me? For one who is rid of conceit there are no ties, All his ties of conceit are dissolved; This wise man, having got beyond conceiving, Might say I say, And he might say, They say to me: Skilled in worldly expressions, knowing about them, He might use them within the limits of usage. (SN 1:25/S I 14) It would be unfair on my part to allow myself to suggest, even by implication, that the Buddhas Teaching is easier to understand than it is; and still more unfair to lead you to suppose that I consider myself capable of benefiting you in any decisive manner. All I can do is to plant a few signposts in your way, in the hope, perhaps, of giving a certain orientation to your thinking that might stand you in good stead later on.
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I.e., is afflicted or breaks upthe phrase ruppat ti rpa is untranslatable into English. {long i} See letter 19.
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and without exception, are determined by present pleasure and present pain. Even what we pompously call our duty is included in this lawif we do our duty, that is only because we should feel uncomfortable if we neglected it, and we seek to avoid discomfort. Even the wise man, who renounces a present pleasure for the sake of a greater pleasure in the future, obeys this lawhe enjoys the present pleasure of knowing (or believing) that he is providing for his future pleasure, whereas the foolish man, preferring the present pleasure to his future pleasure, is perpetually gnawed with apprehension about his future. And when I had understood this, the Buddhas statement, Both now and formerly, monks, it is just suffering that I make known and the cessation of suffering, (MN 22/M I 140) came to seem (when eventually I heard it) the most obvious thing in the worldWhat else, I exclaimed, could the Buddha possibly teach?
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laugh at whomever one laughs at, and see tragedies and have ones emotions purged by the currently approved emotional purgativethe latest version, perhaps, of Romeo and Juliet. Now if we agree with Kierkegaard that both comedy and tragedy are ways of apprehending contradictions, and if we also consider how much importance people attach to these things, we shall perhaps suspect that contradiction is a factor to be reckoned with in everyday life. But all this is on the inauthentic level, and to get more light on the question we must consider what Heidegger means by authenticity. Our existence, says Heidegger, is care: we are concerned positively or negatively for ourselves and for others. This care can be described but it cannot be accounted forit is primordial and we just have to accept it as it is. (Compare here the Buddhas statement [AN 10:62/A V 116] that there is no first point to bhavatah, craving for being. The difference is that whereas Heidegger sees no way of getting rid of it, the Buddha does see the way and has followed it.) Care, says Heidegger, can be lived in either of two modes: authentic or inauthentic. The authentic man faces himself reflexively and sees himself in his existential solitudehe sees that he is alone in the worldwhereas the inauthentic man takes refuge from this disquieting reflexion of himself in the anonymous security of people-in-general, of the they. The inauthentic man is fleeing from authenticityfrom angst, that is to say, or anxiety; for anxiety is the state of the authentic man (remember that Heidegger is describing the puthujjana, and he sees no way out of anxiety, which, for him, is the mark of the lucid man facing up to himself). But the normally smooth surface of the public world of the they sometimes shows cracks, and the inauthentic man is pierced by pangs of anxiety, recalling him for a moment or two to the state of authenticity. Chief amongst these is the apprehension of the possibility of death, which the inauthentic man suddenly realises is his possibility (death, of course, is certain: but this simply means that at any moment it is possible ). He is torn from his complacent anonymity and brought up against the hard fact that he is an individual, that he himself is totally responsible for everything that he does, and that he is sure to die. The hitherto friendly and sheltering world suddenly becomes indifferent to him and meaningless in its totality. But this shattering experience is usually fleeting, and the habitually inauthentic man returns quickly enough to his anonymity. At this point let us see what the Suttas have to say about angst or anxiety (paritassan). In the Alagaddupama Sutta (MN 22/M I 1367) a monk asks the Buddha, Can there be anxiety, lord, about objective absence? The Buddha says that there can be such anxiety, and describes a man grieving about the way his possessions slip away from him. Then the monk asks, Can there be anxiety, lord, about subjective absence?, and again the Buddha says that there can. In this case we have a sassatavdin, holding himself and the world to be eternal, who hears about extinction (nibbna) and apprehends it as annihilation. These two aspects, objective and subjective, are combined in the Uddesavibhaga Sutta (MN 138/M III 2278), a passage from which I translate as follows: And how, friends, is there anxiety at not holding? Here, friends, an uninstructed commoner, unseeing of the nobles, ignorant of the noble Teaching, undisciplined in the noble Teaching, unseeing of good men, ignorant of the good mens Teaching, undisciplined in the good mens Teaching, regards matter (feeling, perception, determinations, consciousness) as self, or self as endowed with matter ( consciousness), or matter ( consciousness) as belonging to self, or self as in matter ( consciousness). That matter ( consciousness) of his changes and becomes otherwise; as that matter (consciousness) changes and becomes otherwise, so his consciousness follows around (keeps track of) that change of matter ( consciousness); anxious ideas that arise born of following around that change of matter ( consciousness) seize upon his mind and become established; with that mental seizure, he is perturbed and disquieted and concerned, and from not holding he is anxious. Thus, friends, there is anxiety at not holding. This, you will see, fairly well confirms Heideggers view of anxiety; and the more so when he makes the distinction that, whereas fear is shrinking in the face of something, anxiety is shrinking in the face ofnothing. Precisely. We experience anxiety when we find that the solid foundation upon which our precious and familiar self restsupon which it must restis not there. Anxiety is shrinking in the face of a contradictionor rather, not a contradiction, but the contradiction. This is the contradiction that we fear; this is the contradiction that threatens us in our innermost beingthe agonising possibility that, after all, we have no being, and that we are not. And now we can see why all
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the seemingly little contradictions at which we laugh (or weep) in our everyday life are really veiled threats, sources of danger. These are the little cracks and fissures in our complacent serious-minded existence, and the reason why we laugh at them is to keep them at a distance, to charm them, to exorcise them, to neutralise themjust as the young dog at the Hermitage laughed at the older one to ward off danger. Anxietyshrinking before nothingis the father of all particular fearsshrinking before this or that. (Heidegger emphasises that the prior condition to all fear is anxiety. We can fear only because we are fleeing from anxiety.) And the contradiction between our eternal self and its temporal foundation is the father of all particular contradictions between this and that. Whether we laugh because we have just crawled out unscathed from a car smash, or wear a sheepish grin when the boss summons us to his office, or split our sides when we hear how Jones had his wife seduced by Smith, or smile when we see a benevolent tourist giving a few cents out of compassion to an ill-dressed but extremely wealthy mudhalaliit can all be traced back to our inherent desire to fly from anxiety, from the agonised recognition that our very being is perpetually in question. And when we laugh at a comedy or weep at a tragedy what we are really doing is busying ourselves repairing all the little crevices that have appeared in our familiar world in the course of the day or the week, which, if neglected, might become wider and deeper, and eventually bring our world crashing down in ruins about us. Of course, we dont actually admit to ourselves that this is what we are doing; and the reason is that inauthentic existence is a degraded mode of existence, where the true nature of things is concealedor rather, where we conceal the true nature of things from ourselves . Obviously, the more serious minded one is, the less one will be willing to admit the existence of these cracks and crevices in the surface of the world, and consequently one will take good care not to look too closelyand, of course, since laughter is already a tacit admission of the existence of such things, one will regard all kinds of levity as positively immoral. Without leaving the sphere of the puthujjana, let us turn to the habitually authentic manone who is anxious, and lucid in his anxiety, who keeps perpetually before him (though without being able to resolve it) the essential contradiction in human existence. Once one has accepted anxiety as ones normal and proper state, then one faces the contradiction, and this, granted the anxiety, neither as plain tragic nor as plain comic, but as tragi-comic. This, of course, can be put in several ways (you can do it yourself). This is perhaps as good as any: it is tragic that we should take as meaningful a world that is actually meaningless, but comic that the world we take as meaningful should actually be meaningless. Man is a discrepant combination of the infinite and the finite. Man, as he looks at himself, sees himself as pathetic (pathos in the sense of passion, as in so-and-so is passionately interested in his work) or as comic, according as he looks towards the eternal or towards the world. The tragicomedy of the human (puthujjanas) situation as apprehended by the authentic man in his lucid anxiety is the source of all tragedy and comedy on the purely everyday level. And, whereas the inauthentic man laughs or weeps without knowing why he does soin other words, irresponsibly the authentic man, when he laughs or weeps, does so responsibly. The authentic man, when he laughs at something (it will very often be at the serious-minded man, who is both very comic and very tragic), will always have the other side of the picture present to mind, as the shadow of his comic apprehension. (And when he weeps, the comic aspect of the situation will be there outlined on the background.) He laughs (and weeps) with understanding, and this gives his humour a depth and an ambiguity that escapes the inauthentic man. In consequence of this, the authentic man is able to use his humour as a screen for his more authentic seriousnessseriousness, that is to say, about the human, or rather the existentialist paradox (he is looking for the solution and concluding, again and again, that the solution is that there is no solution; and this is the limit of the puthujjanas field of vision.) This sort of thing allows the authentic man to indulge in a kind of humour that horrifies and outrages the inauthentic. It is obvious enough that there can be no progress in the Dhamma for the inauthentic man. The inauthentic man does not even see the problemall his effort is devoted to hiding from it. The Buddhas Teaching is not for the serious-minded. Before we deal with the problem we must see it, and that means becoming authentic. But now, when we consider your original question about the
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relation of humour to the Buddhadhamma, a certain distinction must be made. There is a cardinal difference between the solution to the problem offered by the Buddha and that (or those) offered by other teachings; and this is perhaps best illustrated in the case of Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard sees that the problemthe essential contradiction, att hi attano natthi (He himself is not his own), Dhp 62is in the form of a paradox (or, as Marcel would say, a mystery: a problem that encroaches on its own data). And this is quite right as far as it goes. But he does not see how to resolve it. Further, he concludes (as I have suggested above) that, in this temporal life at least, the solution is that there is no solution. This itself is a reduplication of the original paradox, and only seems to make the problem more acute, to work up the tension, to drive man further back into himself. And, not content with this, he seizes upon the essential Christian paradoxthat God became man, that the Eternal became temporalwhich he himself calls absurd, and thus postulates a 3 solution which is, as it were, a kind of paradox cubed, as one might say(paradox) . But as we have seen, the original paradox is tragi-comical; it contains within its structure, that is to say, a humorous aspect. And when the paradox is intensified, so is the humorousand a joke raised to the third power is a very tortuous joke indeed. What I am getting at is this: that in every teaching where the paradox is not resolved (and a fortiori where it is intensified), humour is an essential structural feature . Perhaps the most striking case is Zen. Zen is above all the cult of the paradox. (Burn the scriptures!, Chop up the Buddha image for firewood!, Go listen to the sound of one hand clapping.), and the old Zen masters are professional religious jokers, sometimes with an appalling sense of humour. And all very gay toobut the Buddha alone teaches the resolution of the original paradox, not by wrapping it up in bigger paradoxes, but by unwrapping it. If humour is, as I have suggested, in some way a reaction to fear, then so long as there remains a trace of the contradiction, of the existential paradox, so long will there remain a trace of humour. But since, essentially, the Buddhas Teaching is the cessation of fear (or more strictly of anxiety, the condition of fear), so it leads to the subsidence of humour. Not, indeed, that the arahat is humourless in the sense of being serious-minded; far from it; noit is simply that the need he formerly felt for humour has now ceased. And so we find in the Suttas (AN 3:105/A I 261) that whereas excessive laughter showing the teeth is called childishness, a smile when one is rightly pleased is not out of place. Perhaps you may like to see here a distinction between inauthentic and authentic humour. You ask also about play: Sartre observes that in playor at least in sportwe set ourselves the task of overcoming obstacles or obeying rules that we arbitrarily impose upon ourselves; and he suggests that this is a kind of anti-serious-mindedness. When we are serious-minded we accept the rules and values imposed upon us by the world, by the they; and when we have fulfilled these obligations we feel the satisfaction of having done our duty. In sport it is we who impose the obligations upon ourselves, which enables us to enjoy the satisfaction of fulfilling them, without any of the disadvantages that go along with having to do what they expect us to do (for example, we can stop when we are tiredbut you just try doing that when you are in the army!). In sport, we play at being serious; and this rather suggests that play (sport), like plays (the theatre), is really a way of making repairs in a world that threatens to come apart at the seams. So there probably is some fairly close connection between play and humour. Certainly, we often laugh when we are at play, but I dont think this applies to such obviously serious-minded activities as Test Matches.
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his complacent unseeing seriousness threatened with a contradiction of one kind or another and he fears. (The fearful is contradictory, and the contradictory is fearful.) Pain, of course, is painful whether it is felt by the puthujjana or the arahat; but the arahat, though he may avoid it if he can, does not fear pain; so the fear of the inauthentic man in the face of physical danger is not simply the thought there may be pain. Nohe fears for his physical existence. And this is the tragic aspect of the contradiction showing itself. And when the threat passes, the contradiction shows its other face and he laughs. But he does not laugh because he sees the comic aspect (that may happen later), his laughter is the comic aspect (just as his fear is the tragic aspect): in other words, he is not reacting to a contradictory situation, he is living it. Tragedy and comedy, fear and laughter: the two sides of a contradiction. But he may be faced with other contradictions to which, because they are less urgent, he is able to react. He half-grasps the contradiction as a contradiction, and then, according to the way he is oriented in life, either laughs or weeps: if he finds the tragic aspect threatening he will laugh (to emphasise the comic and keep the tragic at a distance), and if he finds the comic aspect threatening he will weep. (A passionate woman, who finds life empty and meaningless when she is not emotionally engaged in loveor perhaps hateand fearing the comic as destructive of her passion, may weep at the very contradiction that provokes laughter in a man who has, perhaps, discovered the ghastly boredom of being loved without loving in return and who regards the comic as his best defence against entanglements.) Laughter, then, is not a so much reaction to fear as its counterpart. Another question is that of the sekha and anxiety. Granted that he is now fairly confidently authentic, by nature does he still experience anxiety? To some extent, yes; but he has that faculty in himself by means of which, when anxiety arises, he is able to extinguish it. He knows of another escape from anxiety than flight into in-authenticity. He is already leaving behind him both laughter and tears. Here is a passage from SN 22:43/S III 43: Having come to know, monks, the impermanence, changeability, absence of lust for and ceasing of matter (feeling, perception, determinations, consciousness), and if matter (consciousness) formerly was as it is now, then all matter (consciousness) is impermanent, unpleasurable, of a nature to change. Thus seeing as it actually is with right understanding, whatever is the arising of sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair, they are eliminated; these, eliminated, there is no anxiety; not having anxiety he dwells at ease; dwelling at ease, this monk is called extinguished.
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laughter shows that there is nothing to fear, that fear is absent. But it does not show that fear is nonexistent; merely that it is not there today. You ask, rhetorically, if superiority feelings, self feelings, are not at the root of all guilt complexes. Certainly they are. But with guilt goes anxiety (we are superioror we just areand we are unable, to justify our superiority, our existence, and so we are anxious. Pride goes before a fall and this is true right back as far as asmimna, the conceit I am). And anxiety is anxiety before the essential contradiction, which shows its un-funny aspect. So, as you say, our feeling of superiority inhibits laughter. But it does not necessarily follow that when we lose the superiority we shall laugh along with everybody else. A practised yogin, certainly, particularly if he has been doing karu (compassion) is not in the least superior; but it may well be that, by his practice, he has put fear so far from him that he has lost the urge to laugh. How far our investigation of humour tends to destroy it in the act of investigating it (like atomic physicists when they observe an electron), depends principally upon the method used. If we adopt the scientific attitude of complete objectivityactually an impossibilitythen we kill it dead, for there is nobody left to laugh. This leads to the idea that jokes are funny in themselvesthat they have an intrinsic quality of funniness that can be analysed and written about in a deadly serious manner. The other way is to watch ourselves as we laugh, in a reflexive effort, and then to describe the experience. This is the phenomenological (or existential) method of going direct to the things themselves. Of course, this needs practice; and also it does modify the original humour (for example, it tends to bring into view the tacit pathetic background, which is normally hidden when we laugh in the immediate, or inauthentic, mode). Nevertheless, the humour, though modified, is still there, and something useful can be said about itthough what is said will be very unlike what is said by the serious-minded university professor who writes his two scholarly volumes. Kierkegaard is insistent upon the principle, Quidquid cognoscitur, per modum cognoscentis congoscitur, Whatever is known is known in the mode of the knower; and he would say that a serious-minded person is inherently incapable of knowing anything of humour. If we are going to find out what is funny in this or that joke, we must allow ourselves to be amused by it and, while still amused, describe our amusement:
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enlightenment, but simply that if we want to understand the Suttas the phenomenological approach is more promising than the objective scientific approach. Although the existentialist philosophers may seem close to the Buddhas Teaching, I dont think it necessarily follows that they would accept it were they to study it. Some might, some might not. But what often happens is that after years of hard thinking, they come to feel that they, have found the solution (even if the solution is that there is none), and they lie back resting on their reputation, or launch themselves into other activities (Marcel has become a Catholic, Sartre is politically active); and so they may feel disinclined to re-open an inquiry that they have already closed to their satisfaction (or dissatisfaction, as the case may be). Besides, it is not so a easy to induce them to take up a study of the Dhamma. Even translations of the Suttas are not always adequate, and anyway, they dont practise samatha bhvan. I dont want to be dogmatic about the value of a familiarity with the existential doctrines; that is, for an understanding of the Dhamma. Of course, if one has a living teacher who has himself attained (and ideally, of course, the Buddha himself), then the essence of the Teaching can sometimes be conveyed in a few words. But if, as will be the case today, one has no such teacher, then one has to work out for oneself what the Suttas are getting at. And here, an acquaintance with some of these doctrines can beand, in my case, has beenvery useful. But the danger is, that one may adhere to one or other of these philosophers and fail to go beyond to the Buddha. This, certainly, is a very real riskbut the question is, is it a justifiable risk? You say, Questions that strike a Sartre or a Kierkegaard as obvious, urgent, and baffling may not have ever occurred to Bhiya Drucriya. I am not so sure. I agree that a number of uneducated people appear, in the Suttas, to have reached extinction. But I am not so sure that I would call them simple. You suggest that Bhiya may not have been a very complex person and that a previous Sartre phase may not have been essential for him. Again I dont want to be dogmatic, but it seems to me that your portrait of him is oversimplified. Your quotation of the brief instruction that the Buddha gave Bhiya is quite in order as far as it goes; butinadvertently, no doubtyou have only given part of it. Here is the passage in full (Udna 10: 8): Then, Bhiya, you should train thus: In the seen there shall be just the seen; in the heard there shall be just the heard; in the sensed there shall be just the sensed; in the cognized there shall be just the cognizedthus, Bhiya, should you train yourself. When, Bhiya, for you, in the seen there shall be just the seen cognized, then, Bhiya, you (will) not (be) that by which (tva na tena); when, Bhiya, you (shall) not (be) that by which, then, Bhiya, you (shall) not (be) in that place (tva na tattha); when, Bhiya, you (shall) not (be) in that place, then, Bhiya, you (will) neither (be) here nor yonder nor between the two: just this is the end of suffering. This is a highly condensed statement, and for him simple. It is quite as tough a passage as anything you will find in Sartre. And, in fact, it is clearly enough connected with the passage that I have already quoted alongside a passage from Sartre: The eye (etc.) is that in the world by which one is a perceiver and conceiver of the world. Let us now try, with the help of Heideggers indications, to tie up these two Sutta passages.
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29 Part of the letter not included among these selections includes a discussion of Being and Time,* pp. 169-172, particularly of a passage on page 171: The entity which is essentially constituted by Being-in-the-world is itself in every case its there. According to the familiar signification of the word, the there points to a here and a yonder. The here of an Ihere is always understood in relation to a yonder ready-to-hand, in the sense of a Being towards this yondera Being which is de-severant, directional, and concernful. Daseins existential spatiality, which thus determines its location, is itself grounded in Being-in-the-world. The yonder belongs definitely to something encountered within-the-world. Here end yonder are possible only in a therethat is to say, only if there is an entity which has made a disclosure of spatiality as the Being of the there. This entity carries in its ownmost Being the character of not being closed off. In the expression there we have in view this essential disclosedness. By reason of this disclosedness, this entity (Dasein), together with the Being-there of the world, is there for itself. (* Being and Time, a translation by J. Macquarrie and E. S. Robinson of Sein und Zeit, by Martin Heidegger (London: SCM Press, 1982; New York: Harper and Row, 1962).)
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(i) To begin with, Ihere is I as identical with my senses; here, therefore refers to my sense organs (eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and also mind). The counterpart of here is yonder, which refers to the various things in the world as sense-objects. Between the two will then refer (though Heidegger makes no mention of this) to consciousness, contact, feeling, and so on, as being dependent upon sense organ and sense objectDependent upon eye and visible forms, eye-consciousness arises; the coming together of these three is contact; with contact as condition, feeling, etc. (SN 35:107/S IV 87) (ii) In the second place Heidegger says that here and yonder are possible only in a there; in other words, that sense-organs and sense-objects, which are amidst-the-world, in Sartres phrase, are possible only if there is a world for them to be amidst. There, then, refers to the world. So the here and yonder and the there of the Bhiya Sutta correspond in the other Sutta to the eye (and so on) as that in the world. (iii) But Heidegger goes on to say that there is a there only if there is an entity that has made a disclosure of spatiality as the being of the there; and that being-theres existential spatiality is grounded in being-in-the-world. This simply means that, in the very act of being, I disclose a spatial world: my being is always in the form of a spatial being-there. (In spite of the Hindus and Hegel, there is no such thing as pure being. All being is limited and particularisedif I am at all, I am in a spatial world.) In brief, there is only a there, a spatial world (for senses and objects to be amidst), if I am there. Only so long as I am there shall I be in the form of being-amidst-the-worldi.e. as sense-organs (here) surrounded by sense-objects (yonder). (iv) But on what does this I am there depend? I am there means I am in the world; and I am in the world in the form of senses (as eye mind). And Heidegger tells us that the here (i.e. the senses) is always understood in relation to a yonder ready-to-hand, i.e. something that is for some purpose (of mine). I, as my senses, am towards this yonder; I am a being that is de-severant, directional, and concernful. I wont trouble you with details here, but what Heidegger means by this is more or less what the Venerable nanda Thera means when he said that The eye (and so on) is that by which one is a perceiver and a conceiver of the world. In other words, not only am I in the world, but I am also, as my senses, that by which there is a world in which I am. I am there because I am that by which there is an I-am-there; and consequently, when I shall not be that by which, then I shall not be there. And when I shall not be there, then I shall neither be here nor yonder nor between the two. (v) And when shall we not be that by which? This, Heidegger is not able to tell us. But the Buddha tells us: it is when, for us, in the seen there shall be just the seen, and so with the heard, the sensed, and the cognized. And when in the seen is there just the seen? When the seen is no longer seen as mine (eta mama) or as I (esoham asmi) or as my self ( eso me atta): in brief, when there is no longer, in connection with the senses, the conceit I am, by which I am a conceiver of the world. So, although it would certainly be going too far to suggest that Bhiya had already undergone a course of existentialist philosophy, the fact remains that he was capable of understanding at once a statement that says more, and says it more briefly, than the nearest comparable statement either in Heidegger or Sartre. Bhiya, I allow, may not have been a cultured or sophisticated man-of-theworld; but I see him as a very subtle thinker. Authenticity may be the answer, as you suggest; but an authentic man is not a simple personhe is self-transparent if you like, which is quite another matter.
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judgement (or knowing) without finding ourselves obliged to set it up as a relation between subject and object. Knowledge is essentially an act of reflexion, in which the thing to be known presents itself (is presented) explicitly as standing out against a background (or in a context) that was already there implicitly. In reflexion, a (limited) totality is given, consisting of a centre and a peripherya particular cow appears surrounded by a number of cattle, and there is the judgement, The cow is in the herd. Certainly, there is an intention to judge, and this consists in the deliberate withdrawal of attention from the immediate level of experience to the reflexive; but the question is not whether judgement is an intentional action (which it is), but whether there can be intention (even reflexive intention) without a subject (I, myself) who intends. This, however, is not so much a matter of argument as something that has to be seen for oneself. Of course, since knowledge is very commonly (Heidegger adds and superficially) defined in terms of a relation between subject and object, the question of the subject cannot simply be brushed asideno smoke without fireand we have to see (at least briefly) why it is so defined. Both Heidegger and Sartre follow Kant in saying that, properly speaking, there is no knowledge other than intuitive; and I agree. But what is intuition? From a puthujjanas point of view, it can be described as immediate contact between subject and object, between self and the world. This, however, is not yet knowledge, for which a reflexive reduplication is needed; but when there is this reflexive reduplication we then have intuitive knowledge, which is (still for the puthujjana) immediate contact between knowing subject and known object. With the arahat, however, all question of subjectivity has subsided, and we are left simply with (the presence of) the known thing. (It is present, but no longer present to somebody.) So much for judgement in general. But now you say, If all things are characterised by dukkha This needs careful qualification. In the first place, the universal dukkha you refer to here is obviously not the dukkha of rheumatism or a toothache, which is by no means universal. It is, rather, the sakhra-dukkha (the unpleasure or suffering connected with determinations) of this Sutta passage: There are, monks, three feelings stated by me: sukha feeling, dukkha feeling, neither-dukkhanor-sukha feeling. These three feelings have been stated by me. But this, monk, , has been stated by me: whatever is felt, that counts as dukkha. But that, monk, was said by me with reference just to the impermanence of determinations. (SN 36:11/S IV 216) But what is this dukkha that is bound up with impermanence? It is the implicit taking as pleasantlypermanent (perhaps eternal would be better) of what actually is impermanent. And things are implicitly taken as pleasantly-permanent (or eternal) when they are taken (in one way or another) as I or mine (since, as you rightly imply, ideas of subjectivity are associated with ideas of immortality). And the puthujjana takes all things in this way. So, for the puthujjana, all things are (sakhra- ) dukkha. How thenand this seems to be the crux of your argumenthow then does the puthujjana see or know (or adjudge) that all things are dukkha unless there is some background (or criterion or norm) of non-dukkha (i.e. of sukha) against which all things stand out as dukkha? The answer is quite simple: he does not see or know (or adjudge) that all things are dukkha. The puthujjana has no criterion or norm for making any such judgement, and so he does not make it. The puthujjanas experience is (sakhra-) dukkha from top to bottom, and the consequence is that he has no way of knowing dukkha for himself; for however much he steps back from himself in a reflexive effort he still takes dukkha with him. The whole point is that the puthujjanas non-knowledge of dukkha is the 30 dukkha that he has non-knowledge of; and this dukkha that is at the same time non-knowledge of dukkha is the puthujjanas (mistaken) acceptance of what seems to be a self or subject or ego at its face value (as nicca/sukha/att, permanent/pleasant/self). And how, then, does knowledge of dukkha come about? How it is with a Buddha I cant say (though it seems from the Suttas to be a matter of prodigiously intelligent trial-by-error over a long period); but in others it comes about by their hearing (as puthujjanas) the Buddhas Teaching, which goes against their whole way of thinking. They accept out of trust ( saddh) this teaching of anicca/dukkha/anatt; and it is this that, being accepted, becomes the criterion or norm with reference to which they eventually come to see for themselves that all things are dukkhafor the puthujjana. But in
30 In one Sutta (MN 44/M I 303) it is said that neither-dukkha-nor-sukha feeling (i.e. in itself neutral) is dukkha when not known and sukha when known.
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seeing this they cease to be puthujjanas and, to the extent that they cease to be puthujjanas, to that extent sakhra-dukkha ceases, and to that extent also they have in all their experience a built-in criterion or norm by reference to which they make further progress. (The sekhano longer a puthujjana but not yet an arahathas a kind of double vision, one part unregenerate, the other regenerate.) As soon as one becomes a sotpanna one is possessed of aparapaccaya-na or knowledge that does not depend upon anyone else; this knowledge is also said to be not shared by puthujjanas, and the man who has it has (except for accelerating his progress) no further need to hear the Teachingin a sense he is (in part) that Teaching.
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Strictly, only those are puthujjanas who are wholly puthujjanas, who have nothing of the arahat at all in them. But on ceasing to be a puthujjana one is not at once an arahat; and we can perhaps describe the intermediate (three) stages as partly one and partly the other: thus the sotpanna would be three-quarters puthujjana and onequarter arahat.
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Pali-English Glossary
angmitnon-returning npnasatimindfulness of breathing anattnot-self athe arahats knowledge arahatone who is worthy (usually untranslated) arahattaworthiness ariyapuggalanoble individual ariyasvakanoble disciple asmimnathe conceit I am attSelf avidy (Sanskrit)ignorance avijjnescience; ignorance bhavatahcraving for being bhikkhumonk bhikkhunnun devadeity dibbacakkhudivine eye dihipattaattained through view dukkhasuffering, unpleasure iddhiaccomplishment; supernormal) power (usu. nirodhasampattiattainment of cessation (of perception and feeling); an attainment available to certain arahats and angmins paunderstanding parinibbnacomplete extinction paritassananxiety prakriti(Sanskrit)nature purusha(Sanskrit)the person puthujjanacommoner; person saddhfaith; trust saddhvimuttareleased through faith sakadgmitaonce-returning sakkyadihipersonality-view (the view that there is a self to be found) samdhiconcentration samathacalmness; mental concentration samathabhvandevelopment of calmness sasrarunning existence) on (from existence to an unenlightened
sakhra- determination ssanaadvice; usu. used today in the sense of the Buddhas Dispensation sassatavdinone who holds that self and the world are eternal; opposed to the ucchedavdin, who holds that both are non-eternal satimindfulness satisampajaamindfulness-and-awareness sekhatrainee; one in training (to become an arahat) shakti (Sanskrit)power sotpannastream-attainer sotpattiattaining of the stream sukhapleasure tahcraving upekkhindifference yonivagina
jhnameditation (more specifically, four levels of meditation attainable by an accomplished meditator) kmatahcraving for sensuality kammaaction karu- compassion kyasakkhibody-witness maithuna (Sanskrit)sex mnaconceit my(Sanskrit)illusion mettfriendliness mudhalali(Sinhalese)shopkeeper nibbnaextinction niccapermanent
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