7 : Choosing Dispassion

Given that passion is something we habitually enjoy, it’s not easy to choose a path leading toward total dispassion. You have to be strongly motivated to take it up and to stick with it. At the same time, you have to hold yourself to high standards all along the way, for it’s all too easy to fall for subtle levels of passion that can pull you back into the processes leading to renewed suffering and rebirth. This is one of the reasons why right view comes at the beginning of the path—to provide motivation for and guidance to all the other path factors: right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

As a part of right view, conviction in rebirth—and of the influence of action in leading to rebirth—plays an important role in performing both of these functions: motivating the initial choice to follow the path, and guiding choices made along the way. We have already noted in chapter four how the Buddha used belief in rebirth to inspire a general desire to escape the rounds of suffering; here the specifics of right view about rebirth help focus that desire specifically on the path.

Some people claim that belief in rebirth breeds complacency—you have many lifetimes to follow the path, so you can take your time—but the Buddha’s descriptions of the dangers of rebirth present a very different picture: You could die at any moment, and there are plenty of miserable places—realms where it would be impossible to practice—where you could easily be reborn. And even if you do manage to reach a good level of rebirth the next time around, the chances of a good rebirth after that are very slim. So you have to get started on mastering the path while you can.

The Buddha also used conviction in rebirth to encourage his listeners not to be deterred by difficulties faced along the path. Compared to the sufferings of repeated rebirth, those difficulties count for nothing.

In principle, the path to the end of suffering can be completed in one lifetime. The Canon contains many stories of people who gained full awakening after hearing only one of the Buddha’s discourses, and MN 10, among other discourses, states that in some cases even just seven days’ determined practice can be enough to complete the path. But that’s in principle. Each person’s awakening, though, is a specific case, and the Buddha knew that, for most of his listeners, the path would be a multi-lifetime affair. And it’s hard not to imagine that many of his listeners—just like many people today—looked at the entanglements of their lives and realized that they would never have enough free time in this lifetime to devote fully to the practice.

So, instead of trying to please them by paring the path down to what they might reasonably accomplish within the limitations of this lifetime, the Buddha encouraged them with a multi-lifetime perspective on the path, to convince them that whatever efforts they made in the direction of awakening wouldn’t come to naught. He kept the bar high, and with good reason: Only when you have a realistic view of what the path to the end of suffering actually entails will you be able to follow it and gain the full results.

At the same time, the Buddha encouraged people on their deathbed to make an effort to develop dispassion for the various realms of rebirth. He even stated that they might actually achieve full awakening while doing so. In this way they would be able to prevent huge amounts of future pain and suffering (SN 55:54). A person assuming only a single lifetime would not see the value of these sorts of efforts—which means that the single-lifetime perspective would underestimate what a dying person can do, and would instead favor drugging the person even to the point of losing mindfulness to reduce his or her present pain. Because a drugged state of mind is in no position to withstand craving, this means that a single-lifetime perspective would place the dying person at a severe disadvantage—and would actually be the more complacent and irresponsible view.

In addition to providing motivation in practicing the path, the assumptions of karma and rebirth play an important role in ferreting out attachments to fabrications and other processes that you might otherwise overlook as you follow the path. If you don’t believe, for instance, that a particular instance of passion or delight could have huge repercussions in the future, and if it seems enjoyable right now, you can easily regard it as insignificant and allow it to keep bubbling away in the mind.

Only when you appreciate the potential for even the most natural or innocuous-seeming attachment to lead to long-term suffering will you be willing to take it seriously and work to abandon it. And only then will you really be following the path.

We’ve already noted, in chapter three, that a multi-lifetime perspective helps to keep you on track in the area of virtue, a point that applies to the path factors of right speech, right action, and right livelihood. The same principle also applies to the factors more directly connected to meditation. This can be illustrated with two examples from the Buddha’s two-step meditative strategy for developing dispassion for clinging and craving.

In the first step, he has you focus on the drawbacks of craving for sensuality: the mind’s tendency to get obsessed with plans for sensual pleasures. If you’re limited to an exclusively one-life view of the practice, it’s hard to fully appreciate the power and drawbacks of sensual craving. After all, the evolution of life has depended on this craving, and for many people it provides the only pleasure and excitement they know, so it’s easy to justify sensuality as a good thing. Even when you consider the many drawbacks of sensuality visible in this life, it remains simply a matter of taste as to whether you feel the drawbacks are enough to deter you from sensual pursuits: Some people prefer peace and safety; others, the thrills of danger and risk. If everything ends in oblivion and annihilation, who’s to say that harmful pleasures are worse than harmless? But when you take seriously the long-term consequences of sensuality over many lifetimes, it changes the equation entirely. You find it easier to see that the pleasures and thrills offered by sensuality are not worth the price.

Only when you can see sensuality in this light are you genuinely ready to follow the path to fully undercut the sensual craving that acts as one of the causes of suffering and stress. However, even this understanding is not enough to uproot sensual craving. The mind needs an alternate source of pleasure to sustain it on the path. This pleasure is provided by jhāna: the path factor of right concentration.

Still, even though the pleasures of jhāna are a necessary part of the path, they aren’t totally safe. To enter jhāna is to take on a state of becoming, and so it, too, can be an object of craving. And because some of the higher jhānas touch dimensions of nothingness and neither perception nor non-perception, they are easy to mistake for states of non-becoming. This means that even though the practice of jhāna can help you overcome sensual craving, on its own it’s not enough to overcome the two remaining types of craving—for becoming and non-becoming—that lead to further suffering and stress.

Here again, a multi-lifetime perspective is helpful in detecting these subtle attachments—attachments that even the contemplation of not-self, if it’s not informed by this perspective, can easily miss. As MN 106 states, it’s possible to develop the perception of not-self, applying it to all phenomena, and arrive at a refined formless level of jhāna, the dimension of nothingness. At that point, you experience a subtle level of equanimity, so subtle that you can easily miss the fact that you’re clinging to it. If you don’t see that even this equanimity can lead to future dangers, you won’t feel inclined to investigate it.

This may be why many meditators with a one-lifetime perspective equate equanimity with nibbāna: They don’t see that there’s any need to question their attainment of refined equanimity, for they feel it’s enough to maintain them in good stead through the remainder of this lifetime. And if they hold to the materialist view that all we can know is known through the senses, then equanimity in the face of sensory experience would be the greatest peace they could imagine. But as the Buddha points out in SN 35:117, there is a dimension of experience beyond the senses where an even greater peace can be found through the total end of fabrication. And as he states in MN 140, if—with the possibility of this more peaceful dimension in mind—you see that even subtle levels of equanimity can lead to long lifetimes, but that those lifetimes will end, you’re more inclined to investigate those levels of equanimity to see how they’re fabricated. Only through this sort of investigation can you develop dispassion for the last traces of seemingly innocuous fabrication that stand in the way of full release.

This is the second step in the Buddha’s strategy. In one of the standard descriptions for how to develop dispassion for jhāna (MN 51; AN 4:124; AN 4:126), the Buddha first has you master jhāna—you can’t overcome attachment to it by not doing it. Then he has you contemplate the mental events sustaining jhāna as processes—aggregates, which play a role in dependent co-arising under the factors of fabrication, consciousness, and name—to see that they, too, have their drawbacks. This focuses attention directly on the factors that dependent co-arising—in its various models—highlights as the spots where the self-sustaining processes leading to suffering can be starved.

This is also where we most clearly see why the Buddha discussed all the factors leading to rebirth as processes. If you’re looking for your inner essence or the ground of being for the world, it’s all too easy—when reaching a state of jhāna—to mistake that state for what you’re looking for. This, however, leads simply to more ignorance and attachment. But if you view jhāna as the result of actions and processes, then when you reach this stage, you find it easier to develop dispassion for jhāna without feeling that anything substantial is being lost.

In line with the Buddha’s approach of seeing how these processes manifest on many levels, he advises that you view even the “being” doing jhāna as a process composed of aggregates. When this contemplation yields a sense of dispassion for all aggregates past, present, and future—even those used on the path—it starves the process by which craving can lead to further rebirth.

What remains is a dimension free of birth and death.

This dimension is characterized by a type of consciousness that lies outside of the range of the sensory consciousness involved in dependent co-arising and the realm of the six senses—a realm the Buddha calls the “all.” Thus it’s totally free from suffering.

The canonical image for this sort of consciousness, totally independent of nutriment, is of a ray of light that doesn’t land anywhere.

In line with his discussion of rebirth, the Buddha never offered a metaphysical explanation of what this consciousness is or how it might be. After all, it would be a mistake to justify the reality of the unconditioned with reference to the conditioned, as it’s not dependent on any thing or any “how” in any way.

However, the Buddha did show how to get there: That’s why his image for the practice is a path. A path to a mountain doesn’t cause the mountain, but it does provide the opportunity for walking there. The path of practice doesn’t cause the unconditioned, but it does provide the opening for attaining it.

The Canon, when describing a person’s full awakening, never depicts the accompanying knowledge as touching on “what” or “how” this unconditioned consciousness is. Instead, the knowledge is said to begin with a realization of release from the āsavas (fermentations, effluents) of sensuality, becoming, and ignorance (MN 19), along with the realization that that release is once and for all (MN 146). Then it proceeds to a realization of the future implications of that release (DN 29), starting with the fact that it has put an end to any future rebirth.

In the Buddha’s own case, he expressed the knowledge like this:

The two most frequently used descriptions of the knowledge accompanying the attainment of arahantship make the same point like this:

In other words, when the mind returns to the fabricated dimension after its total encounter with the unfabricated dimension and has realized its release, the realization that it’s through with birth/rebirth—on both the macro and the micro levels—is the first thing that spontaneously occurs to it. This realization of the ending of birth leads to the further realization that all suffering has been ended as well.