Disenchantment
April 29, 2007
One of the traditional principles of the teaching is that when the mind gains concentration, it’s able to see things as they are. Actually the Pali term means “seeing things as they’ve come to be.” There’s an interesting passage where the Buddha makes a distinction between bhava and bhuta. Bhava means a state of being, becoming, the process of becoming, which is a combination of past karma plus our present karma. But then bhuta means things as they’ve come to be: the raw material that comes in from the past before we’ve added our hype, added our salt-and-pepper and mustard and ketchup to make it what we want.