Arising & Passing Away
August 25, 2008
The Pali word for clinging, upadana, has been taken into the Thai language and given an interesting meaning. The Thai word is upataan. And the meaning that they give is best illustrated by an example. You’re sitting alone in a hut in the forest and you hear sounds outside—maybe the sound of a person walking around your hut, a little sound here, a little sound there—and the mind stitches it together to the point where you’re convinced that there’s a ghost outside. That’s upataan. You create a whole narrative, you create a whole other being out there, simply out of little bits and pieces of sounds. You can stitch it into something that’s really scary, overwhelming.