37. To Summarize

We noted at the beginning of this book that when Ven. Sāriputta introduced the Buddha’s teachings as the subduing of desire and passion, he was making five implicit assertions:

1) The mind is not simply on the receiving end of experiences. It can influence events both inside and out. In fact, it’s the primary source of your experiences. If this were not the case, very little would be accomplished by subduing mental acts of desire and passion. There would have been no reason for the Buddha to focus his teachings on this or any other mental action. But because the mind is the primary agent shaping experience, and because desire is the root of all its actions, this is the right place to start.

2) The mind has the power of choice and can change directions quickly. Its experience of the present moment is not totally determined by forces coming from outside or from its own past. If it didn’t have the power to change its ways and choose to subdue desire and passion here and now, again, there would have been no reason for the Buddha to teach.

3) The Buddha’s teaching is essentially a how-to teaching: one that gives instructions, not only on what to believe, but also, and more importantly, on what to do so as to enjoy the rewards of subduing desire and passion.

4) That how-to teaching is based on a value judgment: Your actions should be judged by their results, and the best actions are those that release you from the fetter of desire and passion, and from suffering as a whole.

5) There is a paradoxical element in the teachings in that the Buddha had to rouse in his listeners the desire and passion to want to subdue desire and passion. In this way, he had to be operating strategically, or else he’d be trapped in an inconsistency.

We also noted that, in making these implicit assertions, Sāriputta was raising a number of questions, so as to guide his listeners in their further inquiry into the practice of the Buddha’s teachings. The purpose of this book has been to provide some extended answers to those questions. By way of summary, though, here are some short answers.

1) The first question, based on the assumption that the mind plays a creative role in shaping its experience: In what way does it create suffering and how do its workings allow it to stop doing that?

Suffering isn’t something the mind simply receives. It’s something it does. The suffering itself is the act of feeding, through desire and passion, on the aggregates. It wants a happiness out of the aggregates that the aggregates can provide only in small measure, not enough to give any real satisfaction.

But the fault doesn’t lie with the aggregates. The fault lies with the desire and passion. Those are the things that need to be abandoned.

That’s because the mind doesn’t experience the aggregates ready-made. Through its desires and passions, it plays a role in shaping the aggregates. The three types of fabrication in the present moment—bodily, verbal, and mental—take the potentials for the aggregates resulting from past actions and turn them into actual fabricated aggregates. They do this for the sake of a purpose rooted in desire. In effect, the mind is fixing its own food, but because the desires and passions that provided the raw ingredients and those that drive the fabrications that fix food from those ingredients are inconstant and stressful, the resulting food is inconstant and stressful as well.

This means that the present moment isn’t composed of static facts. It’s composed of purposeful actions, driven by an aim for results. It’s done for the sake of having aggregates to experience, and those aggregates are done for the sake of happiness. All of these actions are based on desire coming from a value judgment: that the happiness resulting from the act of fabricating aggregates is worth the effort that goes into it.

Because each moment is created for the sake of results, the mind’s relationship to every moment contains two assumptions: One, the mind is able to choose its actions, to at least some extent, to get the results it wants; and, two, it’s luminous enough that it can observe its actions so as to judge whether those actions got the desired results, or if something should be changed.

Suffering comes when our powers of observation—and the resulting value judgments—are distorted by ignorance. It’s because of this ignorance that even though experience is shaped by intentions, it doesn’t necessarily turn out the way those intentions intended it to be.

Ignorance means both a lack of knowledge and a lack of skill. In terms of knowledge, we may be blinded by our desires and passions so that we can’t see the connections between our actions and their results. We want the actions we like to yield results we like, and we refuse to admit when those actions actually cause harm. We either deny the harm or deny that it was connected to our actions in any way at all. As a result, we often end up denying responsibility for the harm we’ve caused. This type of ignorance comes from a failure—sometimes willful, sometimes not—in our powers of observation.

In terms of skill, our ignorance comes from limitations in our skill set: We know only a small range of actions, and can’t imagine other ways of acting or the results they could yield. So we’ve limited ourselves to choices that all turn out unsatisfactorily. This type of ignorance comes from a failure in imagination in exploring our powers of choice.

From the Buddha’s point of view, the most serious form of ignorance comes from a failure both in observation and in skill: We’re ignorant of the fact that there is a path of action that can lead to a deathless happiness, one that provides complete satisfaction. So we keep trying to satisfy ourselves with the lesser pleasures provided by the aggregates, putting up with whatever failures—moral or cognitive—they entail. We’re blind to the fact that there’s something infinitely better.

What needs to be done is to have conviction, as a working hypothesis, in the possibility of a path to a deathless happiness. Based on that hypothesis, we can learn to exercise our powers of choice, observation, and judgment so as to get on that path and follow it to the end.

2) How can the mind learn to change its ways and head in the right direction?

Simply trying to stop desire and passion won’t work, and you can’t just wish your desires and passions away. You need to take on a course of training, pitting the overarching desire for awakening against all the various desires that would get in the way. This overarching desire takes four forms: the determinations on discernment, truth, relinquishment, and calm. You’re determined to discern which actions actually lead to long-term happiness, you’re truthful in admitting your own mistakes, and you relinquish whatever desires and passions get in the way of the calm that can come only with total freedom.

These determinations, in turn, are motivated by the thoughts and perceptions—the verbal and mental fabrications—motivated by the view that the subduing of those contrary desires and passions will lead to freedom from all things that limit and constrain the mind. This is why the Buddha frequently associated passion with being fettered, and dispassion with being unfettered: He wanted his listeners to make the same association and to act on it.

This battle between skillful and unskillful desires will be won through discernment, as it learns to detect the fact of fabrication and can arrive at a true judgment of the value of fabrication. But, on its own, discernment of general principles won’t be enough to win the battle. Desire and passion are not monolithic, nor do they function in the abstract. Your discernment will have to become pragmatic and strategic in order to deal with specific desires and passions that have many different strategies of their own. To do this, it’ll have to be helped by a complete training of your thoughts, words, and deeds.

3) What kind of training does the Buddha propose? Also, given that his teaching will have to involve a training, how does that influence not only what he taught, but also how he taught it, why he taught, who he would teach, and what kind of people he wanted to train them to be?

The Buddha proposes a course of training that develops

—your powers of truth and choice as you commit to a path of practice aimed at the subduing of desire and passion, and

—your powers of honest observation, based on the luminosity of the mind, as you reflect on the results of that commitment, to see where it could be improved to be more in line with that overarching aim.

This training starts with instructions from others, which is the first reason that the Buddha asked for honesty and conviction in those he was going to train. If you don’t have conviction in those who are training you, and are not honest in reporting what’s going on in your mind, the student-teacher relationship won’t work.

Over time, the training evolves into self-training, as you educate yourself: another reason why the Buddha asked for conviction and honesty, plus good powers of self-observation. To learn from your own actions, you have to be honest with yourself about what you’re doing and about the results that come from what you’re doing and have done.

To embark on this self-training, you need to develop a healthy sense of self that manifests in three functions: a sense of yourself as an agent capable of committing to the training, a sense of yourself as the enjoyer who will benefit from the training, and a sense of yourself as the inner commentator who can reflect on how well the training is going and can offer suggestions on how to keep it on course.

Eventually, the training will require that you put aside all sense of self, but only after you have mastered these three functions and they have done all the work that needs to be done to develop the path.

The training itself covers three skills: training in heightened virtue, the heightened mind, and heightened discernment. These qualities become heightened as they strengthen one another through continual commitment and repeated reflection.

As you commit to the training in virtue, you overcome the gross unskillful desires that would cause you to harm yourself or others. As you reflect on what you learn as you do battle with the desires that run counter to your precepts—sometimes winning, sometimes losing—you become more sensitive to the intentions behind your actions. This sensitivity will help your concentration and discernment in forcing you to be scrupulously honest and truthful with yourself.

In particular, virtue makes you sensitive to the mental qualities you bring to each action, and to the fact that events in the mind prior to outward actions—such as perception and intention—actually play a crucial role in shaping your experience. You see the fact of fabrication more clearly. And you realize that it’s only through honesty that your powers of observation can actually yield good results.

When you commit to the training in the heightened mind, the process of developing concentration helps your discernment in that it brings the mind to a state of calm where it can see subtle events within it more clearly, with a minimum of background mental noise. As you reflect on how you get the mind into concentration and keep it there, you become sensitized to the workings of the mind, both as you see how it falls under the influence of the hindrances and as you learn to overcome those hindrances and successfully fashion states of concentration out of the three types of fabrication.

Discernment becomes heightened as you commit to the triple training (or, in its expanded form, to the five faculties) by bringing the four determinations to that commitment, and then again as you bring those determinations to the five-step program of reflection that takes direct aim at subduing desire and passion. You begin by applying this program to the desires and passions that go against the training. Ultimately, you apply it to the desires and passions underlying the training itself. In this way, the training takes you beyond itself to the freedom of a dispassion that’s truly thorough and all-around.

That’s what the Buddha taught. As for how he taught: Because he had to inspire in his listeners the desire to take on the training, he didn’t limit his teachings to providing information. In addition to instructing his listeners, he also urged, roused, and encouraged them. Examples we’ve seen of his urging them include his recommendations to the monks to practice mindfulness immersed in the body as a basis for sense restraint, and to Rāhula to refrain from telling falsehoods even in jest. Examples of rousing his listeners include the similes that compare the good meditator to elephants who can steel themselves in battle and to a warrior who comes out of a battle victorious. Examples of encouraging them include the passages where he talks of the all-too-human difficulties he himself faced and overcame in conquering his fears and finding the right way, the message being that if he could do it, so can you.

The images the Buddha used in this way point to another aspect of how he taught: Just as he was teaching his listeners to replace their unskillful desires with new, more skillful ones, he also gave them examples of how to engage in the three types of fabrication in skillful ways as part of the path. As dependent co-arising shows, these fabrications, if done in ignorance, lead to suffering. But as the Buddha’s teaching methods show, if they’re done with knowledge, they can lead to suffering’s end. They’re the fabrications that can induce dispassion for the causes of suffering that won’t go away when you simply watch their comings and goings with equanimity.

His many similes, for instance, are examples of skillful perceptions, or mental fabrications. He gives you many examples of how to use skillful verbal fabrications as you talk to yourself, as when he taught Rāhula to train himself: “I will not tell a deliberate lie even in jest” or when he taught the monks in general how to talk to themselves to generate right effort and to develop qualities like restraint of the senses, contentment, and concentration. He even teaches you how to breathe in a way that’s conducive to awakening.

As for why he taught: As we come to appreciate the Buddha’s course of training, we can see that he wasn’t interested in teaching others simply for the sake of gaining their assent, for winning debates, or for exerting power over his listeners. He wanted to train people in how to stop causing themselves to suffer. As he saw it, people were bewildered by their sufferings and were seeking someone who might show them how to put an end to those sufferings (AN 6:63). He offered them an effective answer to their search. He asked for nothing in return but that they practice the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma, putting his teachings into practice to gain the freedom that comes from disenchantment with fabrications and from total dispassion (DN 16; SN 12:67). In short, he was motivated by pure compassion.

As for who the Buddha would teach, we’ve already noted the qualities he looked for in a potential student: someone who was honest and observant, willing to act on conviction in what he taught. He would train this person to use these qualities in the direction of becoming virtuous, exercising restraint of the senses, becoming wakeful, and knowing moderation in eating. He also noted that, to be worthy of the Dhamma, you have to be content with few material possessions, modest, reclusive, persistent, mindful, concentrated, and discerning. You also have to learn to delight in non-objectification: freeing the mind from thoughts that lead to conflict. That’s the kind of person he would train you to be.

When you become fully awakened, you no longer have any need for conviction, because conviction in the Buddha’s awakening has now been replaced by knowledge. As for the other qualities developed on the path, you’re no longer “made” of them—in other words, you no longer need to create a sense of self around them to perfect them—but they’re still available for you to use in the work of teaching others and in maintaining a comfortable abiding for the mind until it’s totally released at death.

4) What sort of arguments does the Buddha propose on the topic of life after death? And how objective are the standards he uses for judging actions and their results?

The Buddha knew he couldn’t prove the fact of rebirth to others, and that they would have to come to know it for themselves through the practice. However, he saw that belief in rebirth was a useful working hypothesis along the way, so he would encourage you to adopt that hypothesis because it would give you good reason to be skillful and heedful in all your actions. Even if it turned out that the teachings on kamma and rebirth were not true, at the very least you would have lived your life in a way that created no hostility and would be praised by the wise.

These reasons, the Buddha knew, would be convincing to people who were willing to step back from their desires and passions so as to judge their results objectively, and who had enough of a healthy sense of honor and shame to care about how wise people would view their actions. However, if you couldn’t muster these qualities and accept the Buddha’s reasons, you wouldn’t be ready for the training anyhow, so he wouldn’t be interested in teaching you. Yet if you’re weak in these qualities but willing to develop them, then you can make yourself worthy to be his student.

As for the objectivity of his standards, that came from the fact that, in stepping outside of space and time, he had come to a knowledge that wasn’t influenced by the conditions that shape knowledge within space and time: the factors of dependent co-arising that come prior to sensory contact, such as perception, intention, and attention. Stepping outside of these conditions and from all influences from the past, he was stepping outside of the ordinary conditions that prevent knowledge from being genuinely objective.

5) Was the Buddha, in encouraging desire along the path, being inconsistent, or was he thinking strategically? And if he was being strategic, what’s the strategy?

In answering the preceding questions, we’ve shown clearly that the Buddha was being strategic in using desire and passion to overcome desire and passion—and in encouraging his listeners to use desire and passion strategically as well. Examples include the role of skillful forms of clinging in fashioning the path, the role of the four types of determination in motivating and guiding the path, along with the skillful desires of right effort, right resolve, and the bases of power. This strategic use of desire and passion is simply one aspect of the strategic nature of the Buddha’s teachings as a whole: His teachings were aimed at a purpose outside of themselves: total freedom. He taught by means of fabrications, and the purpose of those fabrications was to get you to engage in fabrications that, when they’ve done their work, would encourage you to let them go so that you can arrive at the unfabricated.

But there is one aspect of how the Buddha used desire strategically that deserves special notice.

In teaching the subduing of desire and passion, he wasn’t teaching his listeners to subdue their desire for unalloyed happiness, or to lower their sights and to content themselves with the pleasures of fabrication as they already knew them. Instead, he taught them to raise their sights. He showed them how to abandon the desires and passions that lead to suffering and to replace them with desires and passions that lead to something beyond what they could fabricate: the deathless, a happiness so totally satisfying and unrestricted that there’s no more need for any further desire or passion for anything else ever again.