Appreciating Dispassion
July 08, 2024

Our minds are so used to the process of fabrication that to encounter something unfabricated sounds kind of scary, because we don’t know what to do with it. We know how to breathe, we know how to talk to ourselves, we know how to develop perceptions and feelings to adjust the world we live in; to adjust our experience of the world we live in. These are all fabrications, and basically we feel pretty comfortable with them because they’re so familiar. We feel at home with things that respond to our fabrication. So when the Buddha comes and says that the ultimate happiness is unfabricated, it doesn’t give us much to work with.

Years back, I was giving a daylong retreat on the four noble truths. We went through the truths in order and we got to the third noble truth. We talked about the realization of nibbāna, and some of the images the Buddha gave for it. Then we looked at the fourth noble truth, going through the factors of the noble eightfold path, until we got to right concentration: pleasure, rapture. Everyone in the room said that the fourth noble truth sounded a lot more inviting than the third. It was something their imagination could feed on. But the fact of the matter is that once you get more familiar with the fourth noble truth through the practice, the third begins to sound better and better.

That’s one of the purposes of practicing the jhānas. Getting the mind into right concentration gets you sensitive to the process of fabrication until you see what a burden it is even to fabricate peace and bliss. You’re constantly having to do it. Whatever comes in through the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, or mind, you’ve got to process it. You rest a little bit when you sleep, but even then there’s part of the mind still working. When you go unconscious, there’s part of the mind still working. It’s so habitual, so constant, that you tend not to notice it.

So when you do concentration, that’s one of the purposes: to peel away the layers of fabrication. When you start out getting focused in the breath, you’ve got to talk to yourself about it to adjust it. There are perceptions of the breath that allow you to visualize the breath going through the different parts of the body to create a sense of the well-being. You can maintain it, and you can spread it around. If you find there’s a blockage in the body, you need to have a perception that the breath can go through the blockage. If there are strange patterns that don’t correspond with your mental image of the body, you have to explore them to get the breath through them. There’s work to be done. And it’s good work. You’re working with a sense of ease, a sense of fullness, to get the body saturated with a sense of well-being. But, then you move on.

There’s a passage where Ven. Sariputta and MahaKotthita are talking. Sariputta talks about how, when you get into the second jhana, you see that directed thought and evaluation are a disturbance. You’d rather drop them. You get the breath feeling so good throughout the body that you don’t need to adjust it anymore. Ajaan Fuang’s image is of a jar of water. Once you get it full, it doesn’t matter how much more water you pour into the jar, you can’t get it more full than that; it just overflows. In the same way, you get the breath feeling so good that nothing is accomplished by any more directed thought and evaluation, so you can drop them and still stay steady. The sense of ease, the sense of well-being, the sense of fullness, get stronger.

But then even the sense of fullness becomes oppressive as you get more sensitive. So you tune into a level of energy in the body that’s more refined. It’s like a radio that’s playing really loud, heavy music. You’ve decided you’ve had enough of that and you want something more relaxing, more soothing. So you tune it into another frequency, and there it is. You let the loud, heavy, music go. It’s the same with the levels of energy in the body. You stay tuned into one that’s more refined, and if you pay less attention to the coarser levels of energy, they begin to fade away.

After a while, even the need to breathe feels oppressive. You develop a perception of the breath originating in the body, so you don’t have to pull anything in from outside. All the breath energy you need is already all here. It’s all so well-connected that if there’s a felt lack in any one part of the body, good energy from another part goes rushing in. You can get very still that way.

Think of everything being balanced, not too warm, not too cold, not too heavy, not too light. There’s a very strong sense of equipoise. As you maintain that, you realize that as things were moving in the body, that’s where you had a clear sense of where the boundaries of the body were. But when the energies stop moving, the boundaries begin to get blurry. You realize it’s only your perception of the boundary that maintains that sense of what’s inside and what’s outside, so you drop the perception.

That’s where you start getting into the formless states. The body seems to be a mist of sensation dots, and you focus on the space between the dots. You realize that that space has no boundary at all. It permeates the body, extends outside the body, goes through the walls of the sālā, out through everything in the world. And you can maintain that perception—very spacious, very light. That’s where you go through one layer, to the next, to the next.

You realize what you thought was pleasant to begin with becomes oppressive as you get to a more refined level. As the mind gets more and more still, you can see things that were subtle, too subtle to see before. You also raise your standards as to what counts as really comfortable, really pleasant. You see that you get attached to the concentration, but it’s a good attachment, because it keeps you from getting attached to other things. But because your sensitivities have been improved, you begin to see that the fact that you have to keep fabricating it becomes oppressive. So you look for a way out. You realize that if you stay where you are, there’s stress. If you move to someplace else, there’s stress. So what’s the alternative aside from staying and moving?

When the mind is ready for that question, then things will open up. You realize there’s something that’s not related to any of the aggregates, not related to any of the six senses, and it’s very freeing. And as the Buddha said, it’s a deathless happiness because you can see that it’s not fabricated in any way. That experience changes your life in terms of what you see as possible, what you see as worthwhile.

All too often we go through our lives with a very limited sense of our possibilities.

I was talking to a Buddhist scholar one time who said he understood what happened to the Buddha under the awakening tree. In his version, the Buddha attained a state of total equanimity there, which is actually not the case. He found the ultimate happiness. But then the scholar said he couldn’t understand what happened under those twin sal trees when Buddha passed away. It seemed as if everything got blotted out, just like with every other human being. It goes without saying that this Buddhist scholar was a materialist. And his imagination was limited by his materialist views. We live in this world with the six senses, and for most of us, those are the only alternatives. The Buddha found out, though, that there was another alternative that was outside of the senses: consciousness without surface.

His image was of a light beam that doesn’t land on any surface anywhere. Think about outer space. There are light beams going in all directions. It looks dark to us because the light shows up only when it reflects off something. But even when it’s not reflecting, there’s still light. Space is full of light. That’s why it’s hard to talk about someone who has achieved this status, especially after they pass away. They don’t reflect off anything. And it’s only when you’ve trained the mind really well that you see that that’s actually the best thing there is.

Someone once asked the Buddha, “What is virtue for?”

“Virtue,” he says, “is for the sake of concentration.”

“What’s concentration for?”

“Concentration is for the sake of discernment.”

“What’s discernment for?”

“For the sake of release.”

“What’s release for?”

“For the sake of nibbāna.”

“What is nibbāna for?”

That’s when the Buddha said, “You can’t keep going with these questions in that way. Nibbāna is not for the sake of anything else. It’s the goal.”

And it is a state of happiness. A state of freedom. A state of truth. There’s an awareness, so you’re not blanking out—and it’s the ultimate. This is why we practice.

One of the passages in the Canon says toward the end, “We practice for the sake of dispassion.” It sounds kind of gray, but we want to have dispassion for the things that get in the way of our freedom, for things that keep us tied down. It’s for the ending of our intoxication with life, health, youth. It ends our thirst. It puts an end to the round of coming back again and again—suffering the same aging, illness, death, and separation over and over again. It uproots any sense of attachment or nostalgia for the things we’ve loved in the past. Then there’s dispassion, followed by cessation. That sounds kind of scary, but you realize that everything that you’ve created through fabrication is because you have passion for these things. When there’s no more passion, fabrications cease.

There are two images the Buddha gives. One is the image of fixing food. You fix food because you have a passion for feeding, but when you realize that there’s something better than eating, there’s a part of the mind that doesn’t require eating, then you can stop. It’s like housewives who get sick and tired of having to fix the evening meal every day, every day, every day. When we finally can arrive at a state where we don’t have to fix food because there is no hunger, we go for it.

The other image is of building a house. The Buddha said after his awakening that he had been searching for many, many lifetimes for the house builder, and now he had found the house builder by taking apart the house he was in right now—in other words, analyzing what goes into the state of becoming and seeing how unreliable all the raw materials are. When you do that, you get to a point where there’s no more desire to build any more houses.

There’s a connected image of children who like to build sand castles. As long as they feel desire and passion for their sand castles, they’ll protect them, they’ll build more, and build more. But when they get tired of building, they just kick them, smash them, and scatter them.

You realize there’s got to be something better. So kicking, smashing, and scattering—i.e., taking things apart into aggregates: That’s how you develop dispassion. It’s through the path that you sensitize yourself into realizing that dispassion really is a good thing. Of the different qualities of nibbāna, the one that the Buddha pairs with dispassion is freedom. Passion, he says, is a fetter that keeps us tied down to the aggregates. When we let it go, we’re free. The Buddha said that he dwelt with unrestricted awareness. Our problem is that we don’t realize that our awareness is restricted. But there is an awareness where we realize the restrictions that we ordinarily place on our awareness. You remove them, and then you have total freedom from any kind of restriction at all.

That’s where this practice is headed.