Samvegic Ironies
September 26, 2024

When Ajaan Lee gives his beginning instructions in meditation in the book Frames of Reference, Satipaṭṭhān, he starts by having you develop the right attitude—one of samvega. He has you think of the body and all the struggles that we have to keep the body going. Yet what do we have in a body? Take out the parts, take out the elements—it’s not much, and yet it runs our lives.

That’s one way to develop samvega.

But sometimes, to develop samvega, you have to take in the bigger picture. Think about the Buddha on the night of his awakening: He gained his first knowledge about rebirth, seeing that he had gone up and down, up and down, up and down, many, many times. The question was, why? In the second knowledge, he saw why: It was because of karma. He looked at the bigger picture, and he saw that beings were dying and being reborn in line with their karma.

It was all very complex but it went nowhere: People would develop, get better and better, get to a comfortable place, then get lazy and complacent, and then fall. Up and down, up and down. His instinctive reaction was, “You’ve got to get out.” Then the question was, “How do you get out?”

You look at the world. You see people being oppressed and you want to help them. But all too often, when people who have been oppressed get in a position of power, they start becoming oppressors. People who have been abused start abusing. You see it again and again and again.

The only people who are really trustworthy are those who are on their way out—the noble ones. The only people whose virtue is firm are, at the very least, stream-enterers, those who have had their first glimpse of the deathless. And they’re going to be around for only seven more lifetimes at most.

Otherwise, everybody is unreliable. They can be very good, but all too often their goodness depends on unstable conditions. They listen to the wise ones, they listen to the noble ones, they try to act in line with right view, but then they fall from that—for one reason or another—and start acting on wrong view.

It’s scary, because that’s the way we’ve been all along: doing good, getting results, and not appreciating the connection between the good we’ve done and the results we get—or the bad we’ve done and the bad results we get. It’s as if we never learn.

So it’s good to think about the Buddha’s vision of the universe to see what you can learn from it. One lesson is that even though people are not true necessarily to the principles of morality, and you haven’t been true to the principles of morality, still, that doesn’t mean that the principles are not objective.

I was reading an article recently by an author saying that scientists have discovered that monkeys have moral behavior in their tribes, but it’s all very self-centered, all in self-interest. Then the author reasoned that if the evolutionary roots of morality are tainted, human morality has to be tainted, too—and that a morality based on self-interest has to be hypocritical and unreliable.

The principles of karma and rebirth, though, show that morality has objective standards: no killing, no stealing, no lying, no illicit sex, no taking of intoxicants, no harsh speech, no idle chatter, no divisive speech, no lying. These are principles that govern how people die and are reborn throughout time, regardless of culture, so it’s in your enlightened self-interest to follow them. If you don’t afflict other people, you won’t have to suffer affliction yourself.

Whether you believe these principles or not, that’s how things happen. So there is an objective basis. The irony is that this vision of the world—which gives morality an objective basis—also shows why people tend to be unreliable in how they follow through with their good intentions. They don’t see the connection between their actions and their result because there are times when the results take a long, long time to show themselves. So people easily fall back on the quick fix, whatever gets pleasure right now. You can’t rely on people like that.

Of course, the scary thing is that as long as you’re not on your way out, you can’t be relied on, either: If you haven’t had a view of the deathless, your sense of right and wrong depends very much on conditions being a certain way. When those conditions are not met, your idea of right and wrong can change very easily.

When life is going relatively well, it’s a lot easier to be moral, a lot easier to do good for yourself and for other people. But when things get very iffy—and they can do that very easily, when you suddenly find yourself starving or deprived of shelter—what are you going to do? Can you trust yourself? That’s the scary part of saṁsāra.

Think about what the Buddha said about saṁsāra: how many times you’ve been up and down, up and down, up and down. You lose count. The other irony, of course, is that the vision that shows that morality is objective also shows why people are unreliable; and it also shows that the only people who are reliable are the ones who are on their way out.

So, think about this: Wherever your thoughts could go that would pull you away from your object of concentration, you have realize they’re taking you to a place that’s unreliable. The only way to make yourself reliable is through the practice.

That’s what your breath offers. It may not seem like much—just in and out, in and out—but the way you develop your mind as you stay with that in and out, explore it, experiment with it, use it as a mirror for seeing what’s going on in the mind, can take you to freedom. And it can make you reliable. When you can depend on yourself, that’s when you have a true refuge.

As the Buddha said, “Attahi attano natho: The self is its own refuge.” And who else could be your refuge? So look at yourself. How good a refuge are you? You have to take responsibility for this, so that you can be one of those people who’s reliable and leaves a good example for the world even as you leave.

After all, leaving doesn’t mean you don’t care about the world. You do care and you leave behind this good example. And to get out, you can’t just run away. You have to be generous, you have to be virtuous, you have to have compassion, goodwill, empathetic joy: all good social virtues.

But you also have to remember—again and again—that they’re not reliable until you’ve trained the mind and learned how to understand its process of how intentions happen—how good intentions happen, how bad intentions happen, what’s the allure of good intentions, what’s the allure of bad intentions, what are their drawbacks—so that you develop dispassion.

Another irony: Dispassion is what makes you reliable. It’s what makes you free. The prospect of dispassion doesn’t seem all that attractive. As the Buddha pointed out, you have to be passionate about the path in order to do it, but it requires that you become dispassionate for other things that so you really can be reliable. Ultimately, though, you reach a point where total freedom comes from having dispassion for the path itself.

So, there are many ironies in the path. You have to care about goodness, and really caring about it—really wanting to be reliable—has to take you to a point where you get dispassionate. You have to learn to see dispassion as a good thing. You’re growing up. In becoming reliable, you become free.

Those are the lessons that the Buddha learned from his second knowledge and that led through to his third: the knowledge where he realized that what kept all that round and round and round of rebirth going was circling around in his own heart. He would have to take care of that if he was going to solve the problem outside, and actually be a reliable help to the world.

Through his quest for true happiness, look at what he left behind. Out of his compassion, he taught other people how to find the same happiness as well. His quest for happiness has meant more for the human race than anything else that has ever happened.

So, learn to think in those terms. These are not the terms that most of us grew up with, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn how to adopt them and adapt ourselves so they provide the framework for our sense of what’s worth doing in life—and why sitting here training your mind right now is the best thing you can be doing.