Samvega for Samsara

Our minds like to wander around, so when it comes time to settle down and be still, we have to give them some good reasons not to wander, to want to stay here. One of the best ways of doing that is by developing a strong sense of saṃvega for the various places they could wander to.

You see this in Ajaan Lee’s book on the Frames of Reference. He wrote this book before he wrote Keeping the Breath in Mind. When he discusses the topics of concentration in this book, the breath is just one out of many. As for the other topics, though, he says that the ones you do before the breath are designed to give rise to a strong sense of saṃvega—for the body, for things of the world — so that the mind will be willing to settle down: not just because you tell it to settle down, but because it looks around and doesn’t see anywhere that it really wants to go. It develops a sense of terror for the alternative places it could go.

This is why, when the Buddha talks about the pains of life, he’s not saying that life is suffering. He focuses on the suffering side so that your mind won’t go wandering there—because otherwise it keeps on wandering. That’s what the word saṃsāra means: wandering on. We tend to think of saṃsāra as a place, and that when you practice, you’re trying to go from one place, i.e.,* saṃsāra*, to another place,* nibbāna*. The* *Mahayana objects to this, saying that it’s very selfish to be running away from other people when they’re suffering.

But saṃsāra is not a place, it’s an activity, an addiction. Your ability to end your addiction doesn’t harm other people who are still addicted. In fact, it puts you in a better position to help them. You can show them that, yes, it is possible to get out from that addiction, and that you benefit from getting away from that addiction. You can give specific advice on how to do it.

So saṃsāra-ing is an addictive behavior. The best way to get over your addiction is to focus on its downside. That’s why the Buddha teaches that contemplation on comparing the allure with the drawbacks. You’re really rubbing your nose in the drawbacks so that you won’t fall for the allure. After all, it’s the allure that keeps us going.

There is a pleasant side to saṃsāra. It’s in the process of becoming. We see something we want. It looks desirable. We realize it’s going to be in a world of experience, and to get it, we have to get into that world. This is something we often enjoy doing. But then the world begins to fall apart, or we don’t like the identity we assumed, or we discover that the object is not as desirable as we thought it was. Or we get it and it is nice for a while, but then we lose it. Then we just make another becoming, as that chant says, *saṃsarantaṃ bhavā bhave: *“wandering on from becoming to becoming.” We create the worlds and then we go into them. It’s not that the worlds are already there, ready-made, and we just move in. We play a role in creating them. And the Buddha advises us to stop—at the very least, stop long enough to let the mind settle down and get some rest.

So he focuses on the negative side, which is why there are all those images about the tears we’ve shed over these many, many years — many, many eons — even more than the water in the oceans. The blood you’ve shed from having your heads cut off—your cow heads when you were cows, your sheep heads when you were sheep, your water buffalo heads when you were water buffaloes, your human heads when you were arrested for being a robber or an adulterer: In each case, the blood is more than all the water in the oceans, because this has been going on for a long, long time. The Buddha wants you to think about that for a while, so that it really hits home.

This saṃsāra is a process that’s been going on from an inconceivable beginning—not just unknowable, inconceivable. And what do you want out of it? “Can’t we do it one more time, one more time? Just this once?” That’s what the mind keeps saying. So you have to keep pounding down on how much suffering is involved in it.

Again, the Buddha is not saying there’s no pleasure at all in saṃsāra. Many of the things we want in life are things we’ve had before and we liked them. We lost them and we miss them.

You can think about that in two ways. You could try to go back to them while you can get them again. You can try it again, get them again. Or you can think about it in the way Ajaan Fuang recommended: If you think about this for a few minutes, he said, you begin to realize, “Why bother?” You get these things again, you’re going to lose them again. You’re going to miss them again, all these sensual pleasures that you miss right now. Just think about them in those terms, and they become a lot less attractive.

The Buddha has you focus on the suffering in all this because he wants you to abandon your clinging for this sort of thing. He’s not saying that life is suffering, but he is saying that there is suffering in this process of wandering on, becoming a being. After all, arahants are alive yet they don’t suffer. It’s just that they’re not beings. They’ve gone beyond being a being.

This is one of the problems of the English language here. “To be” sounds like you have to be a being. In Pali, though, the words are very different. To be a being, you have to have an attachment. And what do we attach to? We attach to the five aggregates: form, feelings, perceptions, fabrications, and consciousness. Once we latch on to these things, we become a being. Then the problem is that beings need to feed on physical food and mental food, and it’s in the feeding that we suffer.

Now, we think that feeding is our main pleasure in life, so when we hear people say that the Buddha said that life is suffering, we say, “Well, no, we don’t agree with that. There’s pleasure in life.” We sit around and argue about it. But the Buddha focuses on suffering because he says that you find something much better when you stop feeding.

This is why all of his teachings on the drawbacks, say, of the aggregates, take as their assumption the four noble truths. We suffer because we cling—that’s another word for feeding, for the passion and desire in the feeding. But the four noble truths tell us that when you let go of that clinging, then there’s the third noble truth: The mind is free and finds the ultimate happiness.

So that’s his purpose — not to discuss whether, when you weigh things in the balance, there’s more suffering than there is pleasure in life. He’s saying that even the pleasures of the senses, when compared to the freedom of non-clinging, are stressful.

His words are meant to be performative. They’re meant to inspire you to act, to decide that you really don’t want to cling anymore. You pass a value judgment. Even just getting the mind into concentration, you have to want not to wander. So you focus on the negative side of things you could wander to. If you focus on the positive side, you’re going to keep wandering around as long as you like, letting them pull you around by the nose. If you focus on the negative, though, you have a chance of getting free from them.

That’s what this is all for. It’s for freedom—to stop this addiction we’ve been a slave to, to free ourselves from our addiction.

When you learn to see it as an addiction, and a pretty scary one — all that blood you’re shed, all those tears — then you have a chance of wanting to let go. So learn how to think in these terms.

One eon is a whole universe. This universe we’re in right now hasn’t even completed its eon yet, even though it’s been around a long time. The bigger our telescopes get, the longer we see how it’s been going on. And that’s just part of one eon. Then there are all the many eons before that. The Buddha said people who have knowledge of previous lifetimes, if they can remember about forty eons, have a short memory. That’s an awful long time. And the suffering just keeps going on and on.

As the Buddha said, the aggregates are rooted in desire and passion. And the clinging itself is desire and passion, which means that as you cling to the aggregates right now, you’re creating the raw material for new aggregates on into the future, more opportunities to keep clinging. So the act of clinging, if you don’t put a stop to it, has the potential of going on indefinitely. You’re feeding off the remains of your past passions. It’s the excrement left over from your past passions. You’re feeding on your past excrement.

It’s like thinking about how soil is basically organic matter, which is what? Dead animals, excrement. Then out of that soil grow plants. We eat the plants. We don’t think we’re eating shit, but that’s what we’re doing. Then we excrete some more and create more shit to feed more plants.

So as long as you’re clinging, you’re creating the prerequisites for more opportunities to cling in the future. That’s what keeps this process going. You’re the one who’s keeping it going. You complain about the suffering of the world and how you’re being imposed on by other people, harassed by other people, but you’ve been creating the raw material for your own suffering. You keep on doing it. When are you going to have enough? That’s what the Buddha is asking.

At the very least, have a sense of saṃvega about this so that you can get the mind to settle down, so that it can get to know itself, so that you can begin to see that what the Buddha says is right.

We do live by these aggregates. They’re not things. Aggregates are activities, just like* saṃsāra* is an activity. How long do you want to keep on doing it? The Buddha says you have the choice not to do it. And yet we’re afraid to stop. Why? Isn’t it time that you gave his advice a chance?