Neither Here nor There

For the past two days, we’ve been discussing mindfulness of death in light of the Buddha’s analogy of the fire going from one house to another as it clings to the wind. The new house stands for a new destination, the fire stands for the being defined by attachments, and the wind stands for craving. Two nights ago we discussed ways of conducting your life to be make it more likely that the house next door is a good place to go. Last night we discussed ways of gaining some control over the wind so that it blows the fire in a good direction.

Tonight we’ll be discussing the Buddha’s advice for the best way to die, which is to put out the fire. This means learning how to let go of attachments by which you’ve been defining yourself as a being, so that you don’t have to be reborn at all.

This sounds scary. So, to allay the fears of his listeners, the Buddha—even though he said that total freedom can’t properly be described—did offer many positive perceptions to help convince you that total non-attachment really is the ultimate happiness.

Conversely, he also provided many other perceptions to show the dangers of being reborn. As Ajaan Maha Boowa once said, people who feel comfortable with the idea of rebirth don’t understand rebirth. If you really take the Buddha seriously, then you realize that death will keep on happening as long as there’s craving. That craving is unreliable, and the whole process is ultimately pointless. That’s a scary prospect. The best course is to find a way to put an end to birth once and for all. To stop rebirth, you have to stop the craving that leads to further becoming.

We’ve already discussed the Buddha’s approach for how to stop further becoming: Examine the processes in the mind that lead to new becomings to see clearly that they can’t provide lasting or reliable happiness. This realization is what leads to dispassion for those processes. When there’s dispassion, the processes lose their fuel, which was passion and desire. Old becomings will be allowed to fall away; new becomings won’t have a chance to arise.

Remember what we mean by becoming: a sense of identity or a sense of self in a world of experience. Your sense of the world boils down to the six senses and the five aggregates. Your sense of your self—you as a being—is built out of the same raw material. This is the being that, if it’s not deconstructed, will ride the winds of craving at the moment of death and set fire to the next house. The act of creating and identifying with this being was what the Buddha was referring to when he advised that a dying person should ideally abandon self-identity. That person was to look at the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, thought-fabrication, and sensory consciousness in such a way that he or she would have no sense of “I am this” hovering around any of them.

The Buddha describes four different ways that you can identify a sense of self around any of the aggregates. One is thinking that you’re identical with the aggregate, the second is that you possess the aggregate, the third is that you exist inside the aggregate, and the fourth is that the aggregate exists inside you. Five aggregates times four ways of identifying yourself around each aggregate—5 x 4—gives twenty types of self-identity views.

Now, taking apart all of these ways of identifying yourself sounds disconcertingly like self-annihilation. But the Buddha assures us that there’s still a consciousness independent of the aggregates and the six senses that can be found only when attachment to the aggregates and senses falls away. It’s outside of space, outside of time. He calls it consciousness without surface—viññāṇaṁ anidassanaṁ—and describes it as endless and radiant all around.

The image he gives for it is of a beam of light coming from the sun. There’s a house with a window in the east wall and a solid wall on the west. He asks the monks, “When the sun rises and the beam goes through the east window, where does it land?” “It lands on the western wall.” “What if there’s no western wall? Where does it land?” “It lands on the ground.” “What if there’s no ground?” “It lands on the water.” There was a belief at that time that there was water under the earth. “And what if there’s no water?” “It doesn’t land.” In other words, this light beam doesn’t reflect off of anything else, and so can’t be detected. In the same way consciousness, without surface, independent of the six senses, is bright in and of itself, but it doesn’t reflect off of anything else, so no one else can detect it. It’s not located anywhere, so it has no end.

However, it’s not a self of any kind. As the Buddha pointed out, when the six senses drop away, there can’t be the thought of “I am.”

Now, because your awareness of this consciousness doesn’t depend on the six senses, it won’t end even with the death of the body, the fading of the senses, or the ending of attachment.

Now, to an unawakened mind, this consciousness may sound alien and uninviting, which is why we need a lot of reassurance and encouragement in this direction so that you feel confident that it really is the ultimate happiness, and that the Buddha’s instructions for how to find it are worth following all the way. Otherwise, you’ll try to find something to hold on to as the aggregates and the senses slip away from your grasp. And, of course, what you’ll latch on to will be the craving that clings to more aggregates as you ride the wind and set fire to another house. This is why, in all of his instructions—to those who are alive and well, as well as to those who are sick and on the verge of dying—the Buddha recommends ways to prepare the mind to look favorably on the idea of abandoning the aggregates and the senses wherever they might be.

Ironically, these ways involve using some of the aggregates as tools for this purpose. In particular, you use perceptions and feelings, which are mental fabrications, as the raft that will lead you to the other side of the river. These will help you to focus on the drawbacks of all fabrications. Then, when you’ve arrived at the other shore, you can let the raft go.

Now, to follow these instructions requires strength, starting with the strength of conviction, even more so than with the instructions advising a skillful rebirth. As I mentioned, conviction makes heavy use of mental fabrications. For instance with feelings, as you learn not to be overcome by pain and to disjoin your mind from pain, you realize that you don’t really want to come back to be deluded and overcome by pain again. You also use perceptions to develop three other strengths in particular: compunction, shame, and discernment.

For example, with compunction: The Buddha has you hold in mind the perceptions of saṁsāra that show that it leads to no places you would want to come back to. One perception is that it’s like fish in a dwindling stream, fighting one another over the little water that’s left—but they’re all going to end up dying anyhow.

I saw this vividly once in British Columbia. There was a stream that flowed through a forest, then through a beach, and emptied into a bay. Salmon from the bay were swimming up the stream to spawn. As they swam the part of the stream the led through the beach, there were birds waiting on either side of the stream to peck out their eyes. The salmon that made it into the forest came to a shallow spot where there were dead salmon all over the creek bed, so they had to jump over the dead bodies to get to the water. Then there were two bears waiting by the side of the stream to scoop them up. And I thought to myself, “Saṁsāra.”

Another perception the Buddha recommends is that if you look around through all the world, you’ll see that any place you might look for happiness already has someone else laying claim to it. If you’re going to find happiness there, you’ll have to fight somebody else off.

So those are some perceptions that give rise to compunction.

As for perceptions that give rise to a healthy sense of shame, think of the story of King Koravya. He’s been talking to the monk about aging, illness, and death, yet when the monk then asks him, “If you had the opportunity to fight for another kingdom, would you go for it?” the king is so blind that he says, “Yes.” Think about that: Wouldn’t you be ashamed to be as blind as he is? And yet are you behaving like he does?

There’s another story that shows how to use a sense of shame to get people more serious about the practice. The Buddha had a half-brother whose name was Nanda. For some reason, Nanda got ordained even though he had left a very beautiful woman behind. After he ordained, all he could think about as he was meditating was how she glanced at him as he was leaving and said, “Come back.” So he wanted to disrobe. Other monks found out about this, so they reported the matter to the Buddha.

The Buddha asked to see Nanda. When Nanda came to him and admitted that, Yes, he wanted to disrobe, the Buddha took him by the arm and transported him up to heaven. There Nanda saw the king deva being waited on by 500 dove-footed nymphs.

As an aside, I always wondered what “dove-footed” meant. It turns out that doves that have red feet, right? In India, the women paint their hands red with henna. For some reason, the men find it really attractive. So the nymphs had feet that looked like they had been painted with henna.

At any rate, the Buddha said to Nanda, “Look at these nymphs. How does that women you left behind compare to them?” And Nanda said, “Compared to these nymphs, she looks like a cauterized monkey with its nose and ears cut off.” So the Buddha told him, “If you stay on as a monk, I promise you 500 nymphs in your next lifetime.”

So Nanda returns to Earth and starts meditating very seriously. The other monks find out why he’s meditating seriously, so they start taunting him, calling him a hireling and a wage-earner: He’s hoping for a wage of nymphs. Nanda gets really embarrassed. You can imagine someone from the noble warrior class suddenly being called a hireling or a wage-earner. So he starts meditating really seriously and he becomes an arahant. He then goes to see the Buddha and says, “About those 500 nymphs: You don’t have to provide them for me anymore.”

That’s a skillful use of shame in getting someone to practice.

As for using perceptions to develop the strength of discernment, you see that craving starts the process of becoming by focusing on a location, and that location can be either physical or mental, so you try to put the mind in a position where it sees that no location is worth going for. Now, this goes against a long-time habit of desire, because our tendency has long been to locate something to desire and then to settle right in there.

Remember that craving actually creates locations in worlds of becoming around which your sense of self can form. It can be focused on any number of places, even on craving itself—in other words, we can crave to crave. The Buddha’s definition of these locations is: whatever in the world is alluring and endearing. Therefore, you need to put the mind in a position where no location at all seems alluring or endearing, and every potential desire is stymied. You see that all alternative locations entail stress, and you learn to view dispassion toward all locations as a good thing. As the Buddha says, nibbāna is neither here nor there nor between the two, and yet it’s the ultimate happiness and the ultimate object of interest.

The texts call this strategy, “finding an opening in a confining place.” In other words, you get the mind cornered so that it has to see that it has to abandon passion for any location, here or there, in order to find genuine happiness. And it won’t settle for anything less.

The Buddha employs two approaches for developing discernment in this way. Both of them make use of perceptions. He uses these approaches to get people to examine their minds both when they’re healthy and strong and when they’re dying.

The moment of death is when the issue of location becomes especially urgent. Normally, you see that you can’t stay here, so you search for another location someplace else—“there”—to settle in to. What the Buddha does in a case like that is to get you to see that there’s nowhere here or there worth going to.

Of the two approaches, the first is to set your mind on the higher pleasures of the heavenly realms so that your desires are no longer focused here on the human realm. Then you reflect on the drawbacks of those higher pleasures, until you see that even those locations aren’t worthy of desire. We’ve already seen this approach in the cases of Mahānāma and Ven. Nanda.

This approach especially works for those with strong sensual desires. In other words, the Buddha says, in effect, that you don’t really want to come back here because the pleasures up in heaven are a lot better. Then, when you set your mind on heaven, he asks, “Do you really want to go there?” You reflect until you see that those pleasures will ultimately disappoint you. So neither here nor there looks good. Then the mind is in a position where it might be open to an option that’s not a location, that’s neither here nor there.

The Buddha’s second approach is to start out focusing on the drawbacks of each of the aggregates right here in the present moment until it really goes to your heart that these things really entail suffering if you go for them. Then you reflect: All the aggregates anywhere you might go are the same sorts of things. Anywhere in the cosmos, in any future place that you could go. So no location looks alluring or endearing. That’s when you see that dispassion and letting go of desire is a good thing.

I’ll give you two examples of this second approach. The first is the famous questionnaire the Buddha gave many times on not-self. The first time he gave it was in his second sermon. In his first sermon, he had taught the monks that clinging to the aggregates was suffering, and that the duty with regard to that suffering was to comprehend it. This means contemplating the aggregates and the act of clinging until you end passion, aversion, and delusion for both.

Then he built on this teaching in his second sermon, and did it in three stages. In the first stage, he posed the questionnaire. He asked the monks, “Is form constant or inconstant?” They said, “Inconstant.” Then he asked, “If something is inconstant, is it easeful or stressful?” This is where using the word inconstant for anicca is important. It’s possible to see impermanent things as pleasant, but inconstant things are obviously stressful. So the monks said, “It’s stressful.” Then the Buddha said, “If something is inconstant and stressful, is it worth calling it yourself?”

Notice that this is a value judgment. And the answer is “No.” Then he goes through all of the other aggregates in the same way. That’s the first stage.

In the second stage, he has the monks reflect on how that value judgment—that the aggregates are not worth clinging to as self—applies to all possible aggregates: past, present, future, near, far, gross, refined. In other words, on any possible level of rebirth in the cosmos.

In the third stage in this approach, he recommends that disenchantment with all of these aggregates would be a good thing: both with regard to current aggregates and with regard to the idea of taking them up again in any future rebirth. Disenchantment with these things leads to dispassion. Dispassion then leads to total freedom.

It was by following the Buddha through these three stages that all of his listeners became fully awakened.

That’s one example of how the Buddha would start with pointing out the drawbacks in the present moment, right here, and then the drawbacks of any possible there where you might focus your craving. Then you open your heart to the positive results of disenchantment and dispassion, so that you can incline the mind to see the freedom of the deathless, neither here nor there, as a positive thing.

The second example comes from a time when a monk, Ven. Girimānanda, was very sick. Ven. Ānanda comes to the Buddha with news that Girimānanda is sick, and asks the Buddha to go teach him. The Buddha says, “I’ll teach you ten perceptions, and you can go teach them to Girimānanda.”

1) The first perception is the perception of inconstancy: perceiving all of the five aggregates as inconstant.

2) The second perception is the perception of not-self, which means perceiving the six senses, along with their objects, as not-self.

3) The third perception is the perception of unattractiveness, which analyzes the body into its 32 parts and asks: Which part of the body, if you took it out on its own, would be attractive? The skin? If you peeled the skin off and just put it in a pile on the floor, would it be attractive? Not at all. That’s the perception of unattractiveness.

4) The fourth perception is the perception of drawbacks, which is a list of the many diseases to which the body is prey. In other words, each part of the body has its diseases. And yes, even your eyebrows: There are mites that live there.

5) The fifth perception is the perception of abandoning, seeing that you should not allow any unskillful mind states such as sensuality, ill will, or harmfulness to invade the mind or remain there—and that it’s possible to wipe them out of existence.

6) The sixth perception is the perception of dispassion. This is the perception that dispassion would be a refined and exquisite pleasure.

7) The seventh perception, the perception of cessation, is to perceive the cessation of aggregates, leading to unbinding, as something exquisite.

8) The eighth perception is the perception of distaste for any world. You abandon any attachments to or obsessions with any world at all. In other words, you think about going to heaven and you reflect, “No, I wouldn’t want to go there, because its pleasures aren’t secure.” You think about going to the Brahmā worlds, and you’ve probably heard stories about Brahmās who were totally deluded into thinking that they’d finished their work in training the mind, so: “I don’t want to go there, either.” That’s the eighth perception.

9) The ninth perception is the perception of the undesirability of all fabrications. Here, the Buddha says, you develop a sense of horror and disgust toward all fabrications, in other words, all the processes that would lead to becoming of any kind.

10) The tenth perception is really interesting. It’s the practice of mindfulness of in-and-out breathing, training yourself in all 16 steps. It counts as a perception because it involves perceptions that keep you focused on the breath in the present moment, and also perceptions of the processes of fabrication that surround the breath.

Now, look at these different perceptions. The first four perceptions—the perceptions of not-self, inconstancy, drawbacks, and unattractiveness—like the second sermon, focus on the drawbacks of fabrications in the present moment, both in the body and in the mind. The fifth perception, the perception of abandoning, reminds you that you can get rid of unskillful mind states that would cause you to be attached to the aggregates. The perceptions of dispassion and cessation, the sixth and seventh, help you develop a positive attitude toward dispassion for any fabrications, seeing dispassion as a good thing. The eighth and the ninth perceptions—the perception of distaste for any world and the undesirability of fabrications—are like the conclusions in the Buddha’s second sermon—in other words, the conclusions that he would have you draw from reflecting how the aggregates in the future, no matter how refined, would be just like the aggregates whose drawbacks you’ve been contemplating right now.

Now, the perception of distaste for any world helps you to cut through any narratives going through your mind about what’s happening to you as a person as you’re dying: nostalgia for stories about where you’ve been, stories of resentment about people who have mistreated you during this lifetime, or stories you might concoct about where you might like to go in your next lifetime. The perception of the undesirability of all fabrications looks directly at the process of fabrication in the mind: You realize that the source of all the trouble entailed in becoming, your sense of you in a world, comes from these fabrications. As a result, this perception induces a sense of disgust for fabrications of every sort.

This is where this line of inquiry becomes self-reflective, because all of the perceptions in this list, up to and including this one, are fabrications, too. As for mindfulness of breathing: As you’ll remember, this gets you sensitive to the processes of fabrication, to the point where you can abandon them in all their forms. Then, after the path has done its work, you let go of the path, too.

These are some examples of how the Buddha would have you use verbal fabrications and mental fabrications, perceptions and feelings, to induce the mind to let go of present, past, and future aggregates. Seeing the drawbacks of present aggregates and reflecting on the drawbacks of future aggregates, you feel dispassion for both sides, wanting neither to stay where you are nor to go anyplace else to any future states of being.

So the question is: What to do?

This dilemma is similar to the Buddha’s paradoxical comment to a deva in Samyutta 1:1. The deva comes to the Buddha and asks, “How did you cross over the river?” And the Buddha says, “I crossed over the river neither staying in place nor moving forward.” The deva is taken aback.

The Buddha’s not being smart-alecky here. He’s actually talking about how this is what’s involved in awakening: neither staying nor going. Remember, space and time are defined by the two alternatives of either staying in place or moving someplace else. In space and time, these are the only alternatives at any given moment. When you find another alternative, that gets you out of space and time, even out of present moments, and the mind is freed.

Now, this may sound daunting and not a little disorienting, but when you get used to dropping your personal narratives in concentration practice and focusing just on the events that would normally lead to states of becoming simply as events, you’re getting some practice with stepping out of worlds by developing dispassion for the raw material that goes into the construction of worlds in the mind.

Remember what those processes are: the three types of fabrication. As you get used to seeing these fabrications simply as processes—inconstant, stressful, and not worthy of claiming as your self—you begin to become more and more inclined to see that the Buddha was right: that the unfabricated would be the highest possible happiness.

This is how the practice of developing mindfulness and concentration helps support discernment as a strength. So even though total freedom may sound daunting, remember: The Buddha never let himself get daunted by aging, illness, and death, or by whatever was needed to go beyond these things. He was willing to make sacrifices for whatever would be better. And he teaches us so that we can become undaunted in the same way, too.