Ayya Brahmavara

This short verse above is from Majjhima 43, the Relay Chariot Sutta. Sāriputta is speaking to another monk called Puṇṇa, who is honoured and renowned amongst the Sangha for being a truly excellent monk. Sāriputta, in the course of this conversation, is explaining to Puṇṇa what is the crux, what is the actuality, what is the essence of the Holy Life. What are we practising for? 

And Sāriputta says this, "Anupādāparinibbānatthaṃ Bhagavati brahmacariyaṃ vussati." 

What he is saying is that the Holy Life is lived for just this - for the sake of letting go of upādāna, of clinging. This is the purpose of the Holy Life. Nibbāna is that which is without grasping, without clinging. 

I would like to  explore a little bit this topic of clinging or grasping, upādāna. Upādāna is the aspect of our predicament, where the mind inclines towards reaching out, leaning towards, wanting, desiring. 

In the Buddha's teaching on 12 steps of dependent origination we can learn that the cause of all things is ignorance. As a result of ignorance we come into being, we have these bodies and minds. We have these six senses that are constantly receiving through hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching and thinking. What is happening when there is such contact is that we feel, and through feeling we incline towards or away from our experience. Thus craving arises, tanha. When craving is unchecked, when it is not seen for the source of suffering that it is, then the mind will incline toward growing that craving. And when we grow craving we experience grasping, upādāna. And the result of grasping is more becoming, more birth, more death, more suffering, more samsāra. 

And so clinging, this quality of craving or grasping, is something we need to investigate deeply. The Buddha gave us many teachings to help us in this endeavour. 

The Buddha said that there are four kinds of clinging or grasping that we will experience. He gave most importance to the first of these, which is kāmupādāna, craving for sense pleasures. This is really the root of all clinging and it is the last aspect of grasping to disappear, to be overcome, to be seen through before it is possible to become fully liberated from suffering. This aspect of our predicament was well known, and still is well known to many spiritual practitioners in all different traditions. Christians know this well, Muslims know this well . . . at the time of the Buddha there were many spiritual teachers who knew this and were teaching their disciples, "You must aim, you must try, you must work and train towards letting go of sense desire." So this is something that is widely understood and we can appreciate this when we investigate religious traditions.

What is it about sense desire, the sense realm, the delights and pleasures of the sense realm, the comforts and treats of the sense realm - what is it about all of this which is so dangerous for us? What is so harmful?

We need to really investigate this for ourselves to find out - what is the danger, what is the problem with enjoying life, enjoying these bodies, enjoying good food, enjoying sexual activity, enjoying all the movements of the heart - desiring, lusting after, delighting in the world?

As students of the Buddha we know that none of these delights last. We cannot hold on to pleasure. The other side of pleasure, the loss of pleasure, the end of pleasure is painful. And so when we incline towards sense delights we put ourselves on the roller coaster of pleasure and pain. Every up has a down. With every delight, every enjoyable experience there is the seed of suffering, which is its demise, that it changes, that it cannot last. 

There are other dangers to consider. It is not easy for us to let go of the inclination to enjoy sense pleasures. So let's also remember how the Buddha said that it is through desire for sense pleasure that all the strife and turmoil in the world comes to be. Why are people fighting? Why are people bombing each other? Why are people committing genocide? - In order to get something. To get their land, to get their wealth, to feel safe. To get, take, steal from others, obliterate others so that we can have more pleasures and feel more comfortable ourselves. It is as stark and as brutal as that. 

Many stories can come about to excuse and explain, to cover over or to find reasons for destruction and killing and war and genocide to be OK. All of these excuses and reasons fall into the next category, the clinging to views.

And so let's be very cautious, very wary of this natural experience of enjoyment of sense pleasures that we have. Let's remember how dangerous it can be to become acquainted, conditioned around, used to degrees of comfort and well being. Because when these things are taken away from us we can become very hostile, aggressive, disturbed. It can be difficult for us to maintain our virtue . 

So therefore we can remember the Buddha's many teachings on renunciation.and recognise that to let go of pleasure, to step back from indulgence in sense pleasures is to really strengthen ourselves. It is to give ourselves a great gift. The gift of freedom from the dependence upon any particular conditions. 

This is where monastic life is extremely helpful because we've let go of choosing what we eat or where we go. We don't have money to spend. We don't have possessions, apart from the most basic requirements of clothing, a meal a day, medicines when sick and some kind of shelter for the night. This is enormously helpful. We can all consider how to simplify our lives so that we have this opportunity to strengthen ourselves, to be free from the fear of losing the comforts that we have become used to. 

So sense desire in every tradition is considered a problem. The understanding is that the things of this world are here to ensnare us, to tempt us, to lead us astray. This is not to become sour and negative about the world, the beauty and incredible diversity of this world. It's just to recognise that this is not the way to happiness. To make this our refuge, to incline towards this world, with all its pleasures and pains, is not going to liberate us from suffering. 

The second  of the four types of clinging that the Buddha described is diṭṭhupādāna, the clinging to views. To thoughts, basically. To our views and opinions, our understanding of the way things are. This is not to be clung to. 

It's not to give up on all views and refuse to have a view about anything at all. That would be foolish. Actually one of the Eightfold Noble Path factors is Right View. So there is the view that is right, that we want to cultivate. 

And what is that Right View that we want to cultivate? The only view worth having, cultivating or investigating is the Right View which is understanding the Four Noble Truths. To understand suffering, the cause of suffering - desire, clinging, grasping, craving - the end of suffering, letting go of all that. And the Eightfold Path which is the way that leads us to the end of suffering. This is Right View, truly the only view that we want to give energy to.

All other views, opinions and ideas about things are to be questioned. To be held lightly, to be let go of. 

We have the very natural inclination to want to understand the world around us. We want to make sense of it. We are going to be formulating views all the time at this level of making sense of the world. We can get into more proliferation around this when we look at things like politics, ideas about how to organise ourselves in community, ideas about more subtle and refined aspects of right and wrong, good and bad, philosophy . . .There's so much higher thinking that happens in our human realm, so many different ways in which we can divide and dissect reality to try and formulate an understanding of it. And this endeavour can be respected and appreciated. But in the end, let's remember that holding to any kind of view about anything whatsoever is a source of suffering for us. 

Most particularly if that view is challenged! 

We can see how it is, how when we have a view of any kind - if it's challenged, how does that feel? I've had experiences in groups, meetings where I will express some sort of opinion and its not even particularly strongly held and yet . . . something happens when our views are challenged. Even if they are lightly held, when they are challenged they can actually start to firm up and we find ourselves arguing about some view that we didn't even care much about until it was questioned by others.

How easily we can start to rigidify and clash and argue and dispute around views and opinions! This is also a source of great danger for us. Even to the extent that we can fight, we can clash with others through holding to views. So diṭṭhupādāna, this attachment to views is something to investigate. And let's remember, whatever we think about anything is never quite going to meet reality. Because the mind cannot, its too limited, to grasp the bigger picture.

So can we question our understanding? Can we bring in an element of doubt, of scepticism? Around our thoughts, our cherished beliefs, our views? Can we open to the possibility that they may not be the whole picture? 

Of course they feel right. Of course they feel like they are the correct way of seeing things, because otherwise we would choose to see things in a different way. But can we hold that lightly? Can we abstain from, refrain from arguing with others who have a different way of seeing things? Can we avoid making others wrong? Bad? Stupid? Immoral? Just because they don't have the same views that we have. Can we have a softness around our views? That gives us then the ability to listen to others, to take in their views and really consider them. And give respect to the possibility that they may even be right. 

Who knows?

There's a famous story of Ajahn Chah, when he was the Abbot of Wat Nong Pah Pong. A Christian woman used to come and visit quite often. She wanted to convert the monks to Christianity. Because they needed to know that Jesus Christ was their saviour. Without believing in Him, or in that idea, they would surely go to hell. And so she had this sense of mission and she used to visit the monastery a lot to help the poor, deluded monks there. The monks complained to Ajahn Chah, "This woman keeps coming along, hassling us. She isn't at all interested in the Buddha Dhamma. She just wants to speak about her own views and opinions and wants us to believe the same way she does." 

And Ajahn Chah said to them, "Well, she's welcome, and after all, she might be right." 

There are two more kinds of upādāna, of grasping. The third kind of grasping is the grasping of rites and rituals - sīlabbattupādāna. Sīlabbata, sīla is virtue or Precepts and bata is the means, how to enact. 

Every spiritual tradition makes use of rituals. We do in Buddhism of course. We all chant, we all recite reflections at the Mealtime, we all have the beautiful ritual of bowing to the Buddharūpa when we enter a room, particularly a shrine room, sālā, we offer flowers and incense to a Buddha image, to the shrine, to the altar, prostrate, pay homage to the Buddha by bowing and so forth. In all traditions there are these kinds of rituals. It's so beautiful to watch in Islam, when they all come together five times a day to worship, how full body prostrations are practised. And in the Tibetan tradition too, these full body prostrations.

I remember going around Mount Kailash in Tibet, as a pilgrim, and how very moving it was to see Tibetan lay people and monastics making pilgrimage around this huge mountain, three or four days walk, at very high altitude so you can't breath very easily. A difficult pilgrimage to make on foot. But the Tibetan practitioners would prostrate every few steps - three steps forward and a full body prostration. And then get up, dust themselves down, take three steps forward and another full body prostration. And so every inch of the way, prostrating the whole body. It takes days of course to do the pilgrimage in this way. Impressive and amazing. 

Now to say that rites and rituals are meaningless, deluded, insignificant - would be to miss the point. These rites and rituals have a place. They can be skillful means for us. But the balance is not to hold to them, not to grasp them in a way of magical thinking, where we fall into the kind of misunderstanding, where we think that the performing of these kind of rituals is actually going to liberate the heart from suffering. 

And yet we can make use of rites and rituals, using them lightly, knowing that they are just that. They are not going to do the work for us but they can be a way in which we can open our hearts to the practice. For example, we can come together in a group and all bow to the Buddha as an act of mutual devotion, to uplift us.

So we may have these ways of practising bringing in ritual, bringing in rites, using them perhaps on a daily basis. And we see this also in so many spiritual traditions. We can appreciate the benefit of such practises without grasping at them and making them more than they are. The Buddha was pointing to the fact that people can get into rites and rituals to the extent that they can take over and all the wisdom aspects of Path, all the insightfulness can be left behind. We can find ourselves just doing the same old rituals out of habit, having lost the sense of profound meaning, lost the sense of the meaning or significance of bathing in the Ganges river three times a day, the significance of chanting. We can be chanting without paying any attention to the meaning. And to do this is to fall into sīlabbattupādāna. 

Yes, we are creatures of habit aren't we? We will tend to repeat the same old things day after day. This is how we are programmed. We find great comfort in following habits and patterns and routines. Look at children. Look at older people. How much they relax into routines, because you know what you are going to be doing next, A follows B follows C, or the other way around. And its the same in monasteries. We have routines through the day, through the week. Let's not allow ourselves, just because we come to the monastery every weekend, and do this and then that and then this . . . Let's not ease into some sort of sleepy, mindless enjoyment of ritual. Let's remember the purpose behind what are doing. Why we are doing it. 

And the fourth is attavādupādāna. Attavāda is the view, the idea of self. This aspect has its coarser and its more refined aspects. the coarse aspect of  self view is something that we can see through without too much difficulty. A stream enterer has let go of this fetter of self view. A stream enterer has also let go of  the fetter of views and the fetter of attachment to rites and rituals. The stream enterer is only left to deal with the fetter of grasping of sense desires. 

But there are very subtle aspects of self view which linger and permeate the ignorant mind right up until  the moment of enlightenment. 

But on this level of self view, we can explore and investigate and see where there may be some grasping here. So this fourth aspect of grasping is the sense of 'somebody's here'. The Buddha said there are actually twenty different ways in which we create the sense of self. Very simply, we have these five khandhas. He explained what is a human being, what are we made of? What is this existence? It's made of these five heaps, these five khandhas - body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations,and consciousness. So these are the ways that the world is experienced. 

And, five different ways, twenty different kinds of self-making, I-making, my-making. Multiply the five khandhas by the four different ways in which we make ourselves. 

1) We see ourselves as that, "I am the body, I am  feelings, I am this consciousness." 

2) Or we see the khandhas as possessions, "This is my body, this  is my mind, this is my feeling." 

3) Or we see ourselves as within the khandhas, somehow this self  that I am is contained within my perceptions, within my moods, within my body. 

4) Or we see the khandhas as within self - there is this self and the body is within that, there's an overarching self here and perceptions are within that, consciousness is within the self. And so the self in this case is a broader, vaster sense of being someone or something. 

The sense of self, however grand it may be, however refined it may be, we have these four ways then of placing ourself around the five khandhas. We're either possessing them, actually them, or we are in them, or they are in us. It's a kind of a matrix. You take the five aspects of the five khandhas and multiply by the four ways of creating self. 

And so there we are. The Buddha was so brilliant at covering the whole, the entirety of the teachings. There just these twenty ways that we get to create a sense of self. And the importance of course of this investigation, which we can be doing on an ongoing basis, wherever, whenever and however we create a sense of somebody here - the purpose of all of this is to recognise that there is no self, and that this is a fabrication. That every time we do this we are creating something out of nothing .

So this grasping that happens is the grasping after that which does not exist. This creation of self. How much suffering is there! We're chasing after an illusion. We are attaching ourselves and holding tightly to something that doesn't even exist. 

So it really behooves us to investigate this attavāda in all its forms. The ways in which we become somebody. And to let go whenever we appreciate this is happening. Whenever we find ourselves suffering, we can see that in every case there will be a sense of 'somebody' who is suffering. Because without that 'somebody' to suffer, there cannot be suffering. 

These four aspects of grasping - grasping sense desires, grasping to views and opinions, holding tightly to rites and rituals, and holding to a sense of self, a view of self - these are the ways in which we notice desire manifesting. We can really dive into this contemplation, investigation. In doing so, knowing what we're looking for, there is the chance, the possibility of letting go of these ways of suffering. 

There is a very beautiful Sutta in Majjhima Nikaya, number 143, Anāthapiṇḍikovāda Sutta, Advice to Anāthapiṇḍika.

Anāthapiṇḍika, was a great donor. He gave a park to the Sangha by buying it from a local ruler, a prince. The local prince at Savatthi didn't actually want to let go of this park so he said to Anāthapiṇḍika, "Look, I'm not selling it to you unless you cover every piece of this land with gold." And Anathapindaka was, fortunately for him, wealthy enough and generous enough to agree to that bargain. He covered the land with gold and so it became his and he passed it on to the Buddha and the Buddha's disciples. 

This is a place, Savatthi, Anāthapiṇḍika's park, where the Buddha spent more time than any other place during the 45 years of his ministry. He spent many Vassas at Anāthapiṇḍika's park from middle age right up into old age. So, many teachings were given at Savatthi. And we can go there today. The park is still there. You can see the size of it, extent of it. There are remains of the Buddha's kuti and his walking path which has been turned into a monument. This is a most inspiring place to visit. 

This wonderful lay devotee, follower and disciple of the Buddha, at the time of this Sutta, he is actually very sick. In fact he's dying. He has a terminal illness, and he is in a lot of pain. He can't get up. He asks a servant to go and please call the monks to come and see him. 

And Venerables Sāriputta and Ānanda go to visit him. Venerable Sāriputta gives him this most beautiful teaching, going through all the aspects of our experience and saying to Anāthapiṇḍika, "See the clinging here. Let go of it. This is not worth clinging to."  

Venerable Sāriputta goes through all the senses and their objects - so seeing sights, hearing sounds, smelling, taste, touch and also thinking, and the feelings that arise with contact, "Don't grasp any of these experiences. Don't grasp the consciousness that arises as a result of these experiences. Don't grasp the elements. Don't grasp the khandhas". 

He goes through all these aspects of experience, and he then says to Anāthapiṇḍika, "Don't hold on to any refined states of consciousness that you may experience through your meditation practice." 

He speaks about the jhanas, even the most blissful, refined, peaceful, equanimous states, "Not to hold to any of these." 

And to the dying man he urges, "Don't grasp at the past or any thoughts of the future." 

And he summarizes, "Not to grasp whatever is seen, heard, thought, known, not to grasp any attainments, anything that you would seek, any sense you may have of what is worth inclining towards. Nothing that is explored by the mind is to be grasped at."

And at this point, the culmination of this teaching Anāthapiṇḍika, on his death bed, bursts into tears. 

The monks assumed that perhaps he is suffering so much, that he can't bear the pain. Ananda says, "Are you fading? Are you alright? 

And Anathapindaka says, "No, I'm not fading, I'm not failing. I am crying because for so long I have followed the Buddha. and the esteemed mendicants. But I have never heard such a Dhamma talk as this."

Sāriputta says, "Well, such a talk as this doesn't strike when teaching lay people." 

And Anāthapiṇḍika responds, "Well, let yourself teach the lay people in this way. There are those with little dust in their eyes. They are in decline because they have not heard this teaching. There will be those who will understand this teaching. "

And shortly after this exchange Anāthapiṇḍika passed away and was reborn in a very suitable place for him to continue to practice. 

This conversation was shared with the Buddha. And he approved of what was taught to Anāthapiṇḍika. 

So this Sutta is really encapsulating all the ways in which we grasp and what is to be done about it. The necessity for us to let go of all grasping. To hold to anything whatsoever in this world, however dear to us, however dearly held, however compellingly right it may feel, let's be willing to let go. Because everything has to go in order to be able to experience the extinguishment, the putting out of suffering. The end of suffering, that is nibbana. Evam.