Feeding Off of Others

There’s a passage in the Canon where the Buddha comes across a woman crying in a cemetery. She’s lost her son who was still young when he died. The Buddha asked her, “Before he was your son, do you know where he came from?” He came from you don’t know where. Now that he’s gone, where has he gone? You don’t know where.”

Just that much shook her. She realized how arbitrary our loves can be—our connections, our families. We come from who knows where, go who knows where. We have a brief time together—and this is where we try to find our nourishment.

It’s an aspect of a relationship we don’t like to think about, but we do internalize the people we love. In other words, we feed on them. They become a part of us. Then it’s all ripped away. The Buddha talks about the fact that you can’t easily meet someone who hasn’t been your mother or your father or your brother or your sister or your daughter or your son in the long, long time you’ve been wandering on.

He’s not saying this to get you sentimental about everybody else. He says that when you think about this, it’s enough to give you a strong sense of saṁvega—terror—and to want to find release.

Even before we’re separated by death, there are a lot of times when relationships just die. Someone you’ve been feeding off of suddenly doesn’t know how to play by the rules of the game. Most of our feeding is mutual. You tell your friends, you tell your loved ones, essentially, “I’ll let you feed off me if you let me feed off you.”

As long as everybody feeds politely, we’re okay with the arrangement. But then when somebody doesn’t play along with the rules of the game, that’s when you realize how much, one, you’ve been depending on feeding off of them, and two, how miserable it is to be fed off of. So, we want to escape.

That’s why the Buddha said, “Suffering is in the feeding.” His word for clinging, the definition of suffering, upadana, also means to take sustenance, i.e., to feed. And when we’re feeding off of somebody else, are we really feeding off of them, or are we feeding off of our ideas of them? When you desire somebody, the Buddha says, in effect, “When you talk to yourself about desiring someone else, is the desire focused on their body, on your feelings about the person, on your perceptions about the person, on your thought constructs, or is your desire focused on simply the desire to crave?” Our relationships are very strange. We feed off of other people, and yet there’s a separation.

There’s a famous German philosopher who once said that the world is made up of monads. By that he meant little beings that really know nobody else but themselves. Each has its own inner world, and nobody else can know anybody else’s inner world. That’s who we are, and these are the people we’re trying to find sustenance from.

Think about it. Your breath that you’re focusing on right now: Can anybody else feel the breath the way you feel it? The person sitting next to you may hear you breathing, but that’s about it. Of course, if it’s really loud, you should tone it down a bit. But your sense of the breath is yours. Your sense of the body as you feel it from within is yours. Your sense of how you feel your own mind is yours. There’s a wall between you and other people, even people very close to you. You can’t really sense them from the inside, just as they can’t sense you from inside.

So, when we’re feeding off of other people, often we’re feeding off of our imaginatings about them, our thoughts about them, our feelings, our perceptions. No wonder it’s a very unstable situation.

This is why the Buddha said you need to find better things to feed on. He offers you the path.

There’s a social aspect of the path as you practice generosity and observe the precepts, in which you’ll be feeding off of your interactions with other people. You’re doing it, though, in a very skillful way, a harmless way.

But when you get to the meditation, it’s purely an internal affair. There will be some outside influences emanating from your meditation. As you become a more stable person, other people around you will appreciate that. But by and large, it’s you dealing with yourself inside.

If you’re not able to do this, remember the Buddha’s other image, where he talks about how all the water in the oceans is less than the amount of tears that you’ve shed over past separations. Even the best relationships have to end, and then we go our separate ways, not knowing who’s going where. And that’s where you want to find your sustenance, in that ocean of tears.

The Buddha offers you another ocean, though, a much better one. He says that when you gain awakening, you end your hunger, not because you’ve suppressed it, not because you’ve denied it, but because you’ve found something so totally satisfactory that you have no need for anything else, no need further to feed. A person like that, he says, is totally undefined and cannot be measured, in the same way that the water in the ocean can’t be measured. And that’s total freedom.

That may sound lonely to us, especially if we’re used to finding our most satisfying food in relationships. But then relationships are so arbitrary and so ephemeral. You walk down the street, you walk past someone who may have been your mother in a previous lifetime—someone who loved you and cared for you—and yet now there’s no interaction at all. That gives a strong sense of how ephemeral and unpredictable the whole thing is. How insubstantial it is.

So when the Buddha talks about nibbāna being totally satisfying, we have to take him at his word and give him the benefit of the doubt. Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about this. He says that if people who’ve experienced nibbāna could take it out and show it to everyone else, nobody would want anything else. Every other market in the world would go empty and bankrupt. But unfortunately, those who’ve attained nibbāna can’t show it to anyone else. Still, they all say with the same voice that this is the ultimate happiness. And it’s totally satisfactory. Nothing is lacking.

So, try to take the Buddha at his word. When you realize that there is the possibility of this happiness, then the fact that our relationships with one another come and go so easily doesn’t weigh so heavily on the heart or the mind.

This is what we’re training here, both heart and mind. In Pali, the word citta covers both. So, try to get your head around the idea that dispassion really is a good thing, get your heart around the idea that dispassion is a good thing, and you’ll be heading in the right direction.