| |
Venerable Ajahn Sucitto -
Boundary of Freedom
In this Dhamma talk, the first to be given in the
new temple at Amaravati, Ajahn Sucitto, using the image of space
enclosed, points to the use of inner and outer restraint for
understanding the nature of mind and our relationship to the whole.
This is the first public Dhamma talk to be given here; then tomorrow
there will be the Kathina, people coming together, bringing a sense of
delight in the Dhamma as we share our common aims and aspirations. So
these are great ways to inaugurate this temple. The temple is also the
sima, which means it has a boundary within which we can give full
ordinations, that also makes it a special place - it's a consecrated
place.
The word, 'temple', itself is from a Latin word for a place that people
would regard as holy and within which you would contemplate. So 'temple'
and 'contemplate' go together; to contemplate means to stand inside a
temple and to observe the movements of nature. That's a very appropriate
way to consider what we do here: we observe the world of nature – the
things that arise and cease in the mind, the comings and goings - not to
be fascinated by them but to observe their pattern. We are trying to see
what it (the pattern) shows us. That is going to be different for
everybody, people will be watching different things dependent on their
own kamma, but the beauty of it is that the flow of the process has a
unity - even though it's diverse in form, it has a unity in terms of its
meaning. The meaning seen inside a Buddhist temple is that the pattern
of nature tends towards Dhamma, towards liberation. Here we really are
able to contemplate the movements of nature. This particular building
can help us to do that, and we try to fulfill contemplation, through
using the Buddha's skillful means. His Dhamma is to create our own
temple, our own place of refuge in our hearts, where we can observe
what's coming and going, and derive meaning from it.
I think it's useful just to remember how such a refuge is created. We
can assume that you can just do this by kind of opening up or relaxing
or being natural, but actually the process of contemplation is a very
fine discipline and it requires boundaries. You have to set something
up. This takes quite a bit of effort, it takes skill and fundamental
practices which should never be discarded. It's a sign of a decline in
our value system that some of the basic practices that the Buddha taught
don't naturally resonate with us. We resonate to ideas like love,
freedom, liberation, enlightenment - but the experience of these is
based on sense restraint (samvara) which as an idea may have a slightly
choking feel. Another basic standard is hiri-ottappa, which is often
translated as a sense of fear of blame, or of doing things that are
wrong. Then there is faith (saddha), which people often think is some
kind of belief or fuzzy hope. Yet if you consider these terms and
understand what they mean, you see how you can't really get by without
them.
One thing that causes the destruction of Dhamma is when there's no sense
of hiri-ottappa. Hiri-ottappa is regarded as the guardian; if people
have no sense of conscience, sensitivity, or concern whether things hurt
or affect other people, if there is no realisation that their acts and
deeds stain their lives or bless their lives, then there are not going
to be any values. If there are no values there's no firmness; if there's
no firmness, there's no boundary, no discipline and no sense of aim or
purpose. It's just self-interest that prevails. In society you can see
that there is a force that continually erodes the sense of hiri-ottappa;
it is self-gratification, and it destroys people's sense of personal
authority or integrity, they become dissolute with no firmness, sense of
purpose or effort or ability to rise up. Sense restraint or samvara is
that which enables us to find a balance. This sense of balance may be a
better way of considering sense restraint, because there's a puritan,
repressive element in the culture and, so when we think of a term like
sense restraint, many people interpret this as a fanatical asceticism.
Because of this, some people regard Buddhist monasticism as a bit soft.
They can think, "Well they've got a car, they've got heating and they
have hot showers; What kind of monks are these? What kind of nuns are
these? They wear socks! If they were really serious then they'd just be
eating dry bread and a bowl of soup, and shivering and freezing and
totally joyless - the way a good religious person should be." People who
have no intention themselves of ever doing any of these things are able
to project such fantasies upon religious orders! However, the Buddha
specifically and continually kept refuting that view, stating that
practice is not about asceticism, but about balance, finding a balance,
knowing a balance.
When you see the way in which samvara or balanced sense restraint is
supposed to be sustained, it becomes clearer; there are five factors*
that should sustain samvara. One is a sense of one's moral training (the
precepts), one is mindfulness, one is insight knowledge, one is patience
and one is a sense of persistence - to keep going at it. So that gives a
very different flavour of what samvara is about, it means that actually
you are using sensory input to establish mindfulness, moral standards
and insight. So then sense restraint has a higher purpose than just
something ideological - it's about sustaining factors that lead to
awakening. Otherwise people can practise various kinds of restraint
which aren't necessarily restraint dependent on mindfulness, insight,
patience and persistence - they may do it dependent upon guilt or fear
or aversion, or things which are directly unwholesome.
The areas in which restraint is to be developed are also significant.
There's restraint in terms of the precepts; restraint in terms of one's
livelihood - that is; we are not greedy and obsessive in our livelihood,
we are not looking to be the top or the supreme power or the richest;
restraint in terms of what requisites one uses, one's appetite if you
like for the basic necessities of life; and, most significantly, the
thing which covers all the rest of it is restraint over what are called
indriya.
Indriya literally mean the things that lead or dominate. These are the
senses - the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, the sense of touch, and of
course the mind. Then there are the psychological factors of mind such
as happiness, unhappiness, energy or lack of it. Even things like
femininity and masculinity are considered to be things that we may be
dominated by; if we're led by femininity then we're women, if we're led
by masculinity we're men. So restraint over the indriya means that
you're not emphasising, or being obsessed with femininity or
masculinity, either in yourself or another person, or any kind of
stereotype or archetype. Such identification always leads to an
imbalance - to a lack of mindfulness, a lack of insight, a lack of
patience, a lack of real fruition - it just creates further conflicts.
As you practise with samvara, with restraint, it actually gets you in
touch with what you're really experiencing. All you've got, actually,
from day one is sense input: the five external senses and the mind, and
everything else is really coming through that. That's what you're in
touch with, and whatever your religion, culture or philosophy, you've
always got to come back to those sense channels. So if you're developing
a sense of balance with them, you're getting right up close to those
channels and being responsible for them, witnessing them. You're aware
of what they do, you notice when you're being carried away with them or
shutting them down, you're aware of trying to find the right balance to
be able to be mindful, listen, receive and not be obsessed. You could
even summarise practice as just that much, as really skillfully
employing this factor of samvara.
Of course as you get to learn about it and feel it out, you find that
the beauty of establishing the boundary of sense restraint is that you
can drop all the other boundaries. The ‘other' boundaries are 'me' and
'you' and are marked with fear and worry, with what 'I' want and
pleasure; with death and otherness, known and unknown. Some people are
such a mass of boundaries that there's no space left in the temple of
their mind. So of course for someone like that it's very difficult to
take on the idea of establishing more restraint; already they've used a
boundary as part of the process of fragmentation and division and are
barely aware of it. So it's important to be clear about what samvara is
about, it's not there to divide, to repress, to avoid, but to establish
a clear space. It's like these temple walls: you could say they shut
other things out, but that isn't their main purpose. Their main purpose
is to establish this space which is suitably peaceful for contemplation.
And that's what sense restraint's about - it establishes a kind of inner
authority.
It's really sad when you see the results of this faculty being so little
spoken of or cultivated in the world. There are many people who have no
foothold, no authority, no personal dignity, no calm space in
themselves, they're just blown around and possessed by whatever
particular energy passes through the mind. As restraint gets worn down
or ignored by a culture you begin to see the results - a lot of
delinquency and motiveless, meaningless violence. Somebody picks up an
automatic rifle and goes down and sprays a shopping mall, wipes out
thirty people. Why? They didn't know them; they were just overwhelmed by
some kind of fantasy or fear or bitterness. In this century, the number
of totalitarian regimes there have been that have just wiped out
millions and millions of people, maybe fifty million people or more.
That's a lot of people. Somebody gets power and they don't have any
balance, so all that power just goes into self; but the self is flawed,
paranoid - it needs power. When a mind that has no balance, no ability
to experience some sense of inner harmony or harmony with other beings
or with the world, it has to seek power and a position; it does this by
repudiating everybody else. You can see this pattern occurring: from the
level of the spoilt child who has never heard the word ‘no', who's never
been contained or taught to contain themselves - to the power-mad
politician who has got an army behind him and thinks that the word 'no'
doesn't apply to them any more. The result of this kammic trend is human
bodies that are fitted with sense faculties but not really in the human
level of consciousness, in the spiritual sense of the word; just beings
possessed by demons, by hungry ghosts, by fear, anger and bitterness.
Why? They have sense faculties like everybody else, they have minds,
they have happiness and unhappiness like everybody else; they can think,
dream and want like everybody else but there's no ability to handle it,
so it just takes over and blows them apart. So this matter of sense
restraint is a very significant one. Finding the balance makes us human,
it makes us value being human and rejoice in it; it enables us to see
each other as humans and rejoice in that.
The whole sense of Sangha is that we live within a certain sense of
definition and restraint - but it's not a restraint that is supposed to
shut people down, or to cause repressive fragmentation. The word,
Sangha, means 'assembly', or that which sticks together. So you can use
it very specifically - you can say 'Bhikkhu Sangha' or 'Samana Sangha' -
or you can talk about the Sangha of the four kinds of disciples of the
Buddha: lay women, lay men, the nuns, the monks; or you can talk about
it as the company of those who have practised and are firmly committed
to practice. In general, it means a kind of bonding and an empathy
experience. So the whole aim of Sangha is that within whatever personal
discipline, restraint and responsibility we are taking on, we are also
learning to let go of the inner boundaries, the 'me' and 'you'; we are
trying to learn to share and to listen to each other, to empathise,
respect and be sensitive to each other. These things are fundamental.
When we talk about the monastic form then, actually, this is the
monastic form; monastic form is sense restraint, sharing and kindness.
Mendicancy means that we live in a relationship with lay people; we take
dependence, we live in a relationship with each other; we live a life of
sense restraint. We live according to Vinaya - that's monastic form,
it's just that. Yet often when people talk about monastic form, they say
it's about hierarchy; they say it's about being junior or senior. Then
you actually begin to see it like that, and use it as something that
emphasises divisions, say, between men and women and, 'I want what he or
she has got.' The mind is able to throw up smoke screens of resentment
and frustration. And something in us creates smoke screens to cloak its
own foolishness, its own belief that somehow or another following
instinct is going to make me happier or more free. But it doesn't. The
instinctive perception creates a separation between 'me' and 'you', 'me'
and 'the world', 'me' and 'it'; I am one side of it, and something I
want is outside of me so I have to go and get it. Then when I've got it
there'll be something else I can want that is outside of me. Pleasure is
a boundary. Pain is also a boundary - I don't want, so I have to create
a wall to separate myself from it. Basically, the boundary that is
continually established is 'self' and 'world', and that self is either
trying to find something in the world, trying to establish its own
world, or trying to get away from the world; it's neither happy within
it nor happy without it.
As meditators, as contemplatives, our practice is to experience how 'the
world' and the 'self' arise; what gives rise to the feeling of 'me' as
somehow distinctly separate from everything else, and how that supports
the experience of the world as something out there. Pleasure and pain,
loss and gain, fear, worry, need and time - all these forces create this
in the mind. Yet when you actually experience them in the moment, then
it's just this - it's not 'me' in here and 'them' out there - it's just
this particular experience of consciousness.
When you feel very self-conscious or frightened, the world takes on a
particular characteristic that is hostile, it's threatening; or the self
can feel inadequate or guilty or foolish. Or maybe it's the other way
round, and the world is delightful, exciting, fascinating, thrilling; it
can take on that particular quality, and when it's like that the sense
of self is excited, stimulated, bonded to it and we want more of it. You
can see that what strengthens the sense of 'the world' and the ‘self' is
some kind of obsessive passion that takes over - that becomes the
indriya; and the boundaries it creates make us feel locked up, shut out
or confused. That is the boundary that you are learning to do without;
you can work against it. Sense restraint gives you the tools and the
facilities to be able to do that - it breeds virtue and mindfulness and
insight and patience and right effort.
The other thing about sense restraint and about Sangha is that it's a
personal responsibility. This needs to be emphasised, because we tend to
feel that such things are expected of us. We can make restraint into
socialised behaviour patterns which are supported by approval or
disapproval; you get punished or looked down upon if you do this or if
you don't do that. You end up feeling that any kind of restraint is
something that is enforced by an element of fear or guilt or social
disapproval; rather than taking it is as a personal responsibility, you
see it as something you do when people are watching. But of course if it
is like this it is of very little value, because it is not supported by
mindfulness or insight.
One can recognise, certainly in religious life, that a good many people
practise restraint from that particular angle. Then when the doors are
unlocked the sense restraint is abandoned, because it is only there to
impress the group or because of the fear of punishment. But when taken
personally and responsibly, when we can find balance through it, then we
begin to recognise what personal authority really means - as distinct
from power. When you have restraint over the indriya and are able to
balance them, then you are not possessed by the senses, by moods, by
gains and losses, or by some particular aspect of your body or your
mind; and being dispossessed of those, then what's left is the joy, the
freedom, the gladness of a free mind.
Forest Sangha Newsletter: April 1997, Number 40
back |