Cornered

Ajaan Suwat would often comment that Ajaan Mun’s two favorite topics for discussing the Dhamma were (1) the customs of the noble ones, and (2) practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma.

By that he meant two things: One is practicing the Dhamma on its own terms, accepting what the Dhamma has to say, not trying to change it to fit in with your own preferences. Instead, you try to change your preferences to fit in with the Dhamma. When it says to abandon something, you actually abandon it. When it says to develop something, you develop it—because if you put your preferences ahead of the Dhamma, you’re basically putting your defilements ahead of the Dhamma, and that closes off the path.

The second meaning is that you practice the Dhamma in line with the purpose of the Dhamma: for the sake of freeing yourself from suffering, for arriving at dispassion, cessation, release.

This is where Ajaan Mun’s interpretation of practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma is in line with the Canon. There, they seem to assume that, as they teach the Dhamma, there’s no question about it: You just follow the Dhamma.

Of course, you test it. You don’t swear up and down that it’s true before you’ve tested it, but you give it a chance. You practice it on its own terms. That’s what’s expected: basic respect.

But beyond that, you practice for the sake of disenchantment, dispassion, cessation, release. That’s practicing in accordance with the Dhamma.

The question sometimes comes up, “What’s the difference between disenchantment and dispassion?” The answer is best provided by thinking about two analogies we use a lot as we discuss the Dhamma. One is cooking; the other is feeding.

You cook the present moment so that you can feed on it. In other words, you take the raw material that comes in from your past kamma that’s available today, whatever is sprouting in your kamma garden this morning or this evening: That’s the food you work with. You take it with a purpose and you make it into an actual experience of form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. You do that through the three fabrications we’ve talked about so much: bodily fabrication, the way you breathe; verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself; and mental fabrication, perceptions and feelings. These are our cooking techniques.

Then we’ve got these five aggregates that we feed on—and the feeding is the clinging. If you want to think in terms of this analogy, disenchantment comes when you realize you’re tired of feeding on these things. The Pali word for disenchantment, nibbidā, basically means a sense of having enough of a certain kind of food. Some people translate it as “revulsion,” which may be too strong. Nibbidā is when you’ve eaten a lot of chocolate cake and you finally decide, “That’s enough chocolate cake for my system. I can’t take any more.” Ordinarily, you get a sense of disenchantment that lasts for a while, and then you get hungry for it again.

But here the Buddha is talking about something else, something that goes deeper. You look at all the things that you could have focused on, all the different ways you could fix food—all the different ways you could fix food—and you’re just tired of it all. That’s the disenchantment the Buddha’s talking about.

Then, because you don’t want to feed on it anymore, you say, “But why keep on fixing it?” That’s the dispassion. We fashion things out of passion. We fabricate things out of passion. It’s because we anticipate that we’re going to get good food, or at least something to eat: That’s the passion that keeps us going, keeps us fabricating.

Ordinarily, as I said, you develop a sense of disenchantment and dispassion for certain kinds of food. When you’re tired of chocolate cake, you’ll stop fixing chocolate cake, but then you might fix something else. When you’re tired of this kind of perception, well, you change your perceptions and feed on the new ones. You’re tired of these ways of thinking, well, you try new ways of thinking and feed on those. That’s the ordinary way in which we go from food to food, day after day after day.

What the Buddha is trying to do is to get you on a path where you’re cornered. He has you fix the best possible food out of the aggregates, i.e., a state of concentration—as still as you can get the mind, with a sense of intense well-being. Then your tastes get more refined: for a well-being that comes with a sense of ease, a well-being that comes with equanimity, a well-being that comes from getting into formless perceptions—space, consciousness, nothingness. The food gets progressively more and more refined, until you see that this is the best you can do with the aggregates. You look around, and there’s nothing better. So you get cornered in concentration.

You get to the point where you realize that this is as good as it gets, but it’s still not good enough. After all, you’ve got to maintain it. You’ve got to keep at it. It’s not the case that you latch on to, say, “infinite space” and just hang out there without having to do anything. You have to maintain that perception. You have to guard it. You begin to notice the machinations in the mind: Even on a subtle level like that, they’re there. At the same time, you realize that anywhere else you could go would also be fabricated—so you incline the mind to something that’s not fabricated at all.

But here, again, the Buddha has you corner yourself with discernment. He wants you to think about the past, think about the future—that this is as good as it could possibly get anywhere. Sometimes you think, “Well, right now, this is as good as I can get for right now, but I’ll save some energy for anticipating something better in the future.” But as you think about the aggregates—past, present, and future, blatant and subtle, near and far, anywhere in the cosmos, anywhere you could go, at any time—it doesn’t get better than this, and this is still not good enough.

Again, the mind inclines to the deathless, but because we have that tendency to feed on things, we have to watch out for the desire to feed on the experience of the deathless that comes when you don’t aim at anything, either past, present, or future, near or far—when you’re totally cornered.

But if you can drop the desire to feed on anything at all, then being cornered like that then opens up to another dimension, entirely—a dimension where there’s no time, no space. There’s no more enjoyment of the food of the aggregates, and there’s no more desire and no more passion for fixing more food. That’s how disenchantment leads to dispassion, and the two of them together lead to the cessation of the aggregates—because when you’re not creating them, they just fall away.

This is one of the surprises of awakening—seeing how much you’re involved in creating these things.

So that’s where we’re headed. That’s the purpose we have—and it’s important to stress the point that we do have a purpose here.

It’s not your ordinary purpose where you say, “I’ll fabricate something better.” This is the one area, or the one sense, in which saying, “I have no goals in meditation,” is actually correct, because there’s no way that you can imagine how good it is to get there.

At the same time, though, you’re going to have to give up a lot. Basically, the desire here is to grow up. A lot of us just like being childish. We like having our childish imaginations satisfied. So, in that sense, you’ve got to put your goals away, as you’ve imagined them—but you’ve still got to have a goal. You’re giving things up for a purpose that’s for something better. You’re going to give up feeding, but that’s taking you to a place where you don’t need to feed.

This is where we’re headed. You can’t really imagine it. It’s better than your imagination. And you do have to remember that, yes, you have to give up a lot to get there. Without this purpose, why would you give things up if there were no possibility of the deathless? You’d say, “Well, if happiness has to be fabricated, I’ll just keep on fabricating it. If that’s the best I can do, the best I can find, I’ll have to stick with it.” But the Buddha is saying, “No, there’s something better.” That’s why his teachings have lasted so long: They offer something better than anybody can imagine.

After all, we do fix our food and we feed for a purpose. So the Buddha is giving us, as part of the path, the food of concentration to fix and to feed on. But again, the purpose is to get us cornered, where we realize that there’s nothing more we could really be satisfied with, in terms of what’s fabricated. That’s when the mind opens up to another possibility entirely, something that’s not fabricated at all. If you’re not cornered, you just keep looking for something else to fix and something else to feed on, as you’ve been doing for who knows how long.

Here we see the wisdom of the Buddha’s strategy or the strategic nature of his wisdom.

He promises you an unfabricated happiness, but he realizes that you’re not going to go there until you’re cornered. Instead of moving from one form of food to another—fixing it, eating it, fixing some more, eating some more—the path takes you to a place where you don’t need to feed. When there’s no need to feed, then you stop fixing food, and the food ceases. That’s how disenchantment and dispassion lead to cessation. Then that cessation leads to something bigger than just stopping—it leads to total release.