So today's festival day marks the Buddha's great decease in the sala
tree grove at Kusinagara at the end of a period of wandering and teaching that
apparently lasted up to 45 years. The Pali scriptures record the occasion very
fully. One particularly touching episode relates the story of the lamentation
of Ananda, the Buddha's cousin and attendant for the last 25 years of his life:
it's quite short so I'll quote it in full:
Then Ven. Ananda, going into a [nearby] building, stood leaning against
the door jamb, weeping: "Here I am, still in training, with work left to
do, and the total Unbinding of my teacher is about to occur — the teacher who
has had such sympathy for me!"
Then the Blessed One said to the monks, "Monks, where is
Ananda?"
"Lord, Ven. Ananda, having gone into that building, stands leaning
against the door jamb, weeping: 'Here I am, still in training, with work left
to do, and the total Unbinding of my teacher is about to occur — the teacher
who has had such sympathy for me!'"
Then the Blessed One told a certain monk, "Come, monk. In my name,
call Ananda, saying, 'The Teacher calls you, my friend.'"
"As you say, lord," the monk answered and, having gone to Ven.
Ananda, on arrival he said, "The Teacher calls you, my friend."
"As you say, my friend," Ven. Ananda replied. Then he went to
the Blessed One and, on arrival, having bowed down to him, sat to one side. As
he was sitting there, the Blessed One said to him, "Enough, Ananda. Don't
grieve. Don't lament. Haven't I already taught you the state of growing
different with regard to all things dear & appealing, the state of becoming
separate, the state of becoming otherwise? What else is there to expect? It's
impossible that one could forbid anything born, existent, fabricated, &
subject to disintegration from disintegrating.
"For a long time, Ananda, you have waited on the Tathagata with
physical acts of good will — helpful, happy, whole-hearted, without limit; with
verbal acts of good will... with mental acts of good will — helpful, happy,
whole-hearted, without limit. You are one who has made merit. Commit yourself
to exertion, and soon you will be without mental fermentations."
This is a lovely episode isn't it, although you can't help but feel that
Ananda's grief is directed at his own sense of loss, which I guess is always
the nature of grief: "here I am with work left to do, but my teacher is
now about to leave me". But it's particularly worth noting that the Buddha
tells Ananda not to grieve, as the Buddha's passing is both natural and
inevitable, fully in accordance with his teaching of impermanence, and Ananda
cannot expect not to be separated from that which is dear and appealing. Even
on his deathbed the Buddha's concern is with the welfare of his disciple, that
he should fully understand and act on what he has been taught. His attitude is
one of total kindness and encouragement. He doesn't sound like a man who is
worried that his life's about to be snuffed out. He doesn't sound scared. I don't
know about you, but I get scared when I think about my own death. I can only
reflect on it for a short while before my mind just kind of slides off into
more comfortable territory. The difference is, of course, that the Buddha is
enlightened, that he has already experienced klesha-nirvana, an awakening that
eliminates all negative mental states and all confusion regarding the nature of
reality, and Ananda has not. So Ananda is, from our point of view,
understandably upset that the Buddha 's time of "unbinding" is at
hand.
But hang on a minute. The Buddha is already enlightened, fully
emancipated. So what is this "unbinding" that Ananda refers to? When
I looked up "unbinding" online I found that it is used as a synonym
for nirvana itself, one explanation being that nirvana is like the
extinguishing of a flame that is bound to its fuel, releasing the flame from
bondage, unbinding it. But if the Buddha isn't yet fully unbound, something is
still binding him until the point of death. But what?
The answer lies in the title of today's festival - Parinirvana Day. What
Parinirvana means is "nirvana without remainder". To see what that
means we should compare the two types of nirvana I've already mentioned:
klesha-nirvana and Parinirvana. As I said, klesha-nirvana arises with the
extinction of the passions, of all negative mental states and views concerning
the nature of reality. But what's left behind? Well, the answer is the Buddha's
psychophysical organism, his senses, his total experience of embodiment on any
plane of conditioned existence. This is the remainder in nirvana without
remainder. It's a telling expression: the Buddha's entire embodied experience
dismissed, as it were, as leftovers. It does at the very least indicate a
perspective that is unimaginably different from ours! There's also a sense of
deep mystery: if the remainder is everything we experience in this life, what
on earth can be experienced as being outside it? Thats a tricky one, and I'll
return to it later.
Nirvana without remainder in the sources I've found refers to nirvana
without the five skandhas. Many of you will be familiar with these from the
Heart Sutra, which contains the lines "the Bodhisattva of compassion, when
he meditated deeply, saw the emptiness of all five skandhas and sundered the
bonds that caused him suffering". The sutra then goes on to say what they
are, in some cases a bit idiosyncratically. I'll tell you about them in a
moment. But first its already worth noting here the association between the
skandhas and suffering.
The skandhas, the remainder abandoned by the Buddha at the point of
Parinirvana, are basically a way of describing the sum total of our experience.
I prefer talking in terms of experience rather than material or stuff out there
because our experience is all we can know, and anything else is speculation.
They are the experience of physical form, feeling in the primary sense of
pleasant, painful and neutral, perception, actions and consciousness. Between
them, according to early Buddhist teachings, they completely exhaust anything
we can possibly experience in the universe.
Firstly, form, or rupa. The rupa skandha covers the experience relayed
via the physical senses. It is everything we see, hear, touch, smell and taste.
You might say that it is the world "out there", although it also
includes our embodied sense of ourselves - our own physicality. Traditionally
it is talked about principally in terms of the four great elements or earth,
water, fire and air plus a whole load of secondary experiences which I won't go
into now. Let's try to get a sense of this in immediate practical terms. Put
out your hand and touch something, the floor or your chair or leg. What
happens? Well, there's an experience of solidity, of resistance. You can't put
your hand through it. That is the earth element. But at the same time there's a
feeling of flexibility, of flow. If you press down your flesh gives way, and if
you move your fingers you get a sense of fluidity. That's the water element.
There is also an experience of temperature, warm or cold. That's fire. And
lastly, in your hands and in your whole body there's a sense of expansion, of
buoyancy. They aren't like slabs of rock or dead fish. That's the air element.
And between them these elements make up all the essentials of our experience of
materiality.
And if you look closely you'll find that the experience comes with a
feeling tone. It might be mildly pleasant, mildly unpleasant or too neutral for
you to identify a particular feeling tone. But of course we're all familiar with
pleasant and painful feelings in our lives, from toothache to heartbreak. All
of these start with simple hedonic feeling, which is vedana, which can be
physical or mental. If you've ever discussed the wheel of life, you will know
how crucial vedana is in the generation of suffering. But more of that in a
minute.
If you look at your hand, a couple of things happen. You see a
particular shape with bits sticking out of it, lines, shadow and light, colour
tones, and you recognise it as "my hand". That's perception - sanna -
which is our faculty for recognising things, say colours or shapes, and using
our previous experience of them to categorise the objects that have them as
this or that. This is of course a useful skill, as it enables me to tell the
difference between a bus and a biscuit.
I can use my hands in various ways. I can make a cup of tea as an act of
thoughtfulness for a friend or reluctantly because I’ve been asked but don’t
really want to; I can paint a picture to beautify my own mind and delight other
people or to curry favour with a totalitarian regime, or I can fire a gun in
sport or in anger. These actions all condition certain effects, and those
effects depend on the mental state in which I perform the action. Negative
mental states give rise to suffering, positive mental states conduce to
happiness, and neutral mental states have no particular karmic effect.
Volitional actions that give rise to particular consequences are known as
samskaras. I've also heard them described as all the actions that make up our
life, which is all of them really.
And finally, what makes it possible for me to perceive my hands, to see
or smell them, to touch with them? The answer is consciousness. Our western
view of consciousness tends to see it as a kind of field that surrounds us,
into which objects enter and are then registered by that consciousness, but the
Buddhist take on it is different. early Buddhist teaching has it that each
sense organ is associated with a particular consciousness: eye consciousness, ear
consciousness and so on, and that for an act of perception to take place there
needs to be a functioning organ, an object "out there" and
consciousness to link the two. Consciousness only arises under these
conditions. So consciousness isn't an ever-present field that surrounds us but
is instead dependent on conditions to manifest. This is vinnana, the fifth and
last of the skandhas, of the elements that make up all our experience.
So to recap, we have form, feeling, perception, action and consciousness.
And that's all. There is nothing else.
All very interesting, perhaps (at least to me!), but what does it have
to do with enlightenment and the Buddha and us? Well, a lot. The composite word
often used in the Pali scriptures is "upadanakhanda", which means
"the skandhas afflicted by clinging". The unenlightened many folk
don't just have skandhas, they have skandhas afflicted by clinging. The
enlightened, in contrast, do not, except inasmuch as their skandhas are objects
of clinging for the unenlightened. What does this all mean? Well, I think it
means that we ordinary people take our skandhas and add the idea of a self to
them. My form, my feelings, my perceptions, my actions and my consciousness.
And it is this positing of a self that opens us up to suffering. If things are
mine, then losing them will cause me suffering. A belief in me in here sets up
an opposition with everything else out there, and that is a recipe for tension
and unhappiness. And this all arises on the basis of an illusion, as the self
we posit just isn't there.
Let's examine this a bit. If something is truly mine, then I would
expect to be able to dispose of it as I see fit, like I do my car or my
computer. But in terms of the skandhas that doesn't really hold water. If rupa
or form were really mine, I would be able to control the information conveyed
by my senses. Instead of bumping up against a wall, I ought to be able to walk
through it or at least to choose the physical experience I have. But I can't. I
can only experience the physical sensations that the conditions – the
particular materiality of my body - allow me to experience. So rupa depends on
conditions. And if I am really rupa, what happens when I'm asleep can no longer
feel my body? Do I cease to be? What about someone who is paralysed from the
neck down? Or someone who loses a limb? Are they any less themselves? I think
the answer has to be no. So rupa can't be any basis for an independent and
autonomous me. The same goes for feelings or vedana: not even the Buddha could
control painful, neutral or pleasant sensations except on a temporary basis by
going into dhyāna. So how can I possibly hope to? And vedanā
are transient, changing constantly and not enduring for ever. And what about
perceptions? I can't look at Abhayanara and see Napoleon or Harry Potter,
unless I'm delusional that is. I can’t see a car and perceive a wombat. I can
try to make my perceptions more accurate, for instance by recognising a rope as
a rope and not a snake, but the basic stuff that experience presents to me is
given by the nature of my senses and the information they relay to me, backed
up by all my past experience. And my perceptions are continuously changing. To
see this, all you have to do is get up and turn in a circle. As the visual
field changes, so does your visual perception. You can’t do anything about it. So
this doesn't admit the possibility of an autonomous me calling the perceptual
shots. And, as far as samskaras go, I will admit that I can to some extent
control my actions, but we probably all know how easy it is to be controlled by
them. And there is never any complete autonomy in our actions, as they are all
conditioned by motives that arise from feeling and perception. These motives
may be skilful or unskilful, but, because they are conditioned, they do not
constitute a self. And, lastly, there is consciousness, which in Buddhism is
nothing other than a moment-by-moment arising in dependence on the presence of
sense organs and sense objects. The tendency to put all these things together
to create a separate and enduring "me" is very strong, and the
feeling we have of that self is very strong, but, as Chökyi Nyima Rimpoche puts
it, the closer you look, the more elusive it gets.
So positing a self on the basis of the skandhas - clinging to them -
causes us suffering. The self needs protecting by pushing away things that
appear threatening to it and trying to cling on to things it thinks will make
it happy. This kind of push-pull tension is virtually ever-present and leads to
enormous amounts of dissatisfaction. I’m sure none of you needs to hear any
more about this to know that it’s true!
The Buddha also had skandhas. He had senses, feelings, perceptions,
actions and consciousness. But his realisation consisted in seeing that no
permanent self was to be found in them. With this realisation came the end of
identification, the end of all kinds of emotional and psychological suffering.
He let go of identifying the skandhas as being him. When seen in this light,
the idea of the skandhas as "remainder" starts to make sense.
Whatever the Buddha was, he wasn't to be found in the skandhas. This recalls
the line from the Heart Sutra: "the Bodhisattva of compassion, when he
meditated deeply, saw the emptiness of all five skandhas, and sundered the bonds
that caused him suffering." No longer beset by ideas of me or mine, the
Buddha cut off all suffering at the root.
Well, not quite all suffering. There was still suffering in the
remainder. Particularly when he got old, the Buddha's body was a source of
constant discomfort. He would get backache, and at one point he memorably
describes his body as being like a broken-down old cart, held together by
straps. It is said that he could only escape from physical discomfort by going
into dhyana. But the difference between him and us was that not identifying
with the experience meant that he didn't suffer any of the psychological or
emotional suffering that we normally do when the skandhas don't play ball.
So we get the idea of the Buddha's skandhas binding him to the material plane,
even though his mind was completely free - and completely unfathomable. If the
Buddha wasn't to be found in any of the skandhas, where was he? Well, there's
the problem. If the five skandhas exhaust everything that can be experienced,
what is there outside them? The Pali word to describe this mysterious realm is
Lokuttara, which, rather unhelpfully, means "above the world". So if
you're not careful you can start imagining some kind of realm above and beyond
the suffering of samsara, a bit like the Christian heaven, into which the
Buddha happily ascended in spirit and then, at the point of his death, in his
entirety. I've recently been reading an interesting little book called
"Honest to God", written in 1962 by the then bishop of Woolwich, John
Robinson, which deals with the same problematic issue from a Christian
perspective. Robinson says that the traditional Christian idea of God "up
there", beyond the reach of straining church spires, was at some point
replaced by the idea of God "out there": one spatial metaphor
replaced by another. But his point was that increasing scientific understanding
of the universe rendered this idea absurd for modern people, and a completely
different understanding of transcendence was needed: the presence of the divine
in everyday things, sanctified by love, like the bread and wine. This struck a
real chord with me: the problem lies in the concepts themselves. The skandhas
are not things in themselves: they are merely limited concepts that have a certain
instrumental value but are empty of real existence, of self. And the idea of
nirvana, of emptiness itself, is likewise a concept, an inspiring one perhaps,
but limited nonetheless in our understanding to a particular state or set of
states experienced by an entity. In reality there is no difference between
them: the distinction between the conditioned existence that we create by
grasping the skandhas and the unconditioned nature of nirvana is ultimately
illusory. To become free, the Buddha had to let go of an idea of there being a
self that could be free or unfree. And this ultimate freedom was realised with
the final abandonment of the skandhas at Parinirvana. Even to say the Buddha
became free is to miss the point, to posit an entity that could attain to
freedom. Perhaps the closest we can get is simply to say that the Buddha was –
is - freedom itself, above any categories of freedom or bondage. A freedom that
is ultimate bliss - for, without limits of any kind, how could there be
suffering of any kind - and compassion for anyone stuck in notions of self or,
for that matter, not-self. A freedom that was supreme letting go.
Which brings me to my final point, which intersects with our practice.
When we get involved in the Dharma we are quite naturally looking to better
ourselves, to change, to become kinder, more aware, and wiser. There's nothing
wrong with any of this, but I would argue that we tend to see progress in the
Dharma life as equivalent to becoming a better me: kinder, more aware, but
still essentially me. And the reason we can't comprehend enlightenment is
because it is impossible for us to think in terms other than being us,
essentially separate and recognisable, albeit with various bells and whistles.
This is what you might call the developmental model. Great, but not sufficient
on its own. I think we also need to engage with letting go, letting go of
identification with our skandhas, of ourselves as a particular being. Letting
go of boundaries, of self-interest. And I think we have practices that allow us
to do this. Take the metta bhavana for instance. Viewed in one way, it is a
practice of developing kindness, becoming kinder and friendlier. Viewed in
another, however, it's about letting go of the difference between ourselves and
other people, transcending them, being united with others in a field of love.
And even the good old mindfulness of breathing. Is it a concentration exercise
or an opportunity to see the changing nature of our experience and to cease to
identify with it? What about simple acts of generosity? A truly generous
impulse is a momentary realisation of the emptiness of any distinction between
ourselves and the recipient of our generosity. It offers a glimpse of that
mysterious state that is neither of the world nor not of the world, not in the
skandhas but nowhere else either.
So this is the question I would like to leave you with. When you think
of your Dharma life, what terms do you think in? Do you think of adding positive
qualities onto yourself but staying essentially the same, or do you also
experience those mysterious moments in which the self loses traction, and you
find yourself in a state of greater openness and connectedness with others?