Samvega & Pasada

There’s a sutta that describes the last year of the Buddha’s life. It doesn’t go a lot into the doctrine, but it does talk about the emotional attitude you should have toward the practice.

You can think about the people who composed the sutta. They’d been with the Buddha, and now he was gone. The question was how to relate to that fact: that there had been this amazing person who, as they said, had turned upright what had been turned over, carried a light into the darkness, made things clear, urged, roused, and encouraged people to follow the practice. He himself gave an inspiring personal example. But now he was gone.

They counseled two emotional reactions.

One was saṁvega, which literally means terror—terror at the prospect of having to deal with samsara, that if you don’t do anything, if you just continue in your old ways, it’s an endless round that’s going to entail a lot of suffering.

Then there’s pasāda, confidence—confidence that there is a way out.

You reflect on the Buddha and you’re supposed to give rise to both of these emotions at once. If you have just saṁvega, you get depressed. After a while, you get tired of being depressed and say, “Forget about that. I’ll just do what I want.”

If you have just pasāda without saṃvega biting at your heels, it’s easy to get lazy, especially as the practice gets good. Your mind begins to settle down. Concentration feels pleasant. The breath is pleasant. Your state of mind is pleasant. The world doesn’t look so bad after all.

If you could maintain that state of mind, it would be very easy to live in the world and not suffer—too much. At least that’s what you think. So you need the saṁvega, a sense of urgency, a sense of dismay over the prospect of repeated rebirth, to make sure you don’t get lazy and complacent.

Ajaan Lee, in his meditation instructions, would often counsel an attitude of saṁvega to begin with. He would say, as you contemplate your body, here’s this body that you’ve been using to find happiness in this life, but how reliable is it? It’s going to turn on you someday. Already it’s giving you pains here, pains there, illnesses here, illnesses there, as little warning signals.

We spend so much time looking after the needs of the body. If we didn’t have all these needs of the body, we wouldn’t even have to have that kitchen over there. We wouldn’t need to have the bathrooms. We wouldn’t need to have huts or the whole system we have for providing food for the body. You ask yourself, how many people are really happy to be providing food for you? Think of all the people who have to work in the fields or work in the factories.

Every time you’re born, you bring a big gaping hole into the world. It has to be filled and yet it never gets full. Just think about it. No matter how good your relationship is with other people in the world, no matter how giving you are, there’s so much that you need to feed on.

The Buddha said that this is basically what defines us as beings: our need to be sustained by food. He wasn’t talking only about physical food; he was also talking about mental food. Without the food that gives a sense of well-being in the mind, we can’t survive. Yet so much of our feeding on other people, other beings, is not voluntary on their part.

Thinking in those ways gets you more inclined to want to practice.

This is the way out: “However difficult it may be, this is where I’m going to focus my efforts.” You come into the present moment, and what have you got? You’ve got the pains of the body sitting here. Those can be adjusted, though. You can work with the way you breathe, work with the way you conceive of the breath. Think of the breath energy going through the different parts of the body—down the back, out the legs, coming in the base of the spine, going down through the hips, coming in the back of the neck, going down the shoulders, and the arms.

There’s a lot you can work with right here, so the path out is not always difficult. And it’s not a selfish path. There’s so much said about how Theravada is very self-seeking, but the path requires that you be generous, that you be virtuous. You give what you can, you avoid harming others, and you try to cleanse your mind. What’s selfish about that?

You’re willing to replace our common habit of feeding with one of giving. Instead of taking in, you distribute out. Generosity, of course, is giving material gifts. Virtue is said to be the gift of safety. You may not be able to protect everybody from other sources, but you are protecting them from any potential harm coming from you. As you meditate, you give up your defilements. You become a better person to be around.

This relates to that second emotion, pasāda. Ajaan Suwat would encourage an attitude of pasāda each time as you begin to meditate, that what you’re doing here is important work. Trying to get the mind in concentration is good for you and for the people around you.

As the Buddha said, if you don’t have the sense of pleasure that comes from getting the mind into concentration, then no matter how much you may see the drawbacks of sensuality—of being attached to the body—you’re going to go back to sensuality. The mind needs pleasure for its food, so learn how to feed inside, on the pleasure of the form of the body as you sense it from within, so that you’re not taking food from other people’s fields.

Unfortunately, we can’t see the goal. We read all these exclamations throughout the Pali Canon about what a wonderful goal it is. Think of that image the Buddha gives—if we could make a deal that for a hundred years, every day in the morning, they would stab you with a hundred spears; then midday, another hundred spears; evening, another hundred spears; altogether, three hundred spears a day for a hundred years, but at the very end, you’d be guaranteed your first taste of awakening: He said that would be a good deal. You’d be well advised to take it. And the happiness that would come from the realization at the end would be so great that it would obliterate any thoughts of how much pain was involved in the path going there. It’s that amazing.

Or as Ajaan MahaBoowa said, if you could take nibbana out and show it to everybody, that would be the number one thing that people would desire throughout the world. Unfortunately, we can’t see it. Even the Buddha couldn’t take it out to show us, but he does give us an indication of how good it is.

He says you practice concentration, and you find that as you go from basic levels of concentration to ones that are higher and higher, you begin to shed things that weigh the mind down. Then, as you go further and further, you finally get to total shedding. You learn how to appreciate the stillness, the well-being that comes from the stillness of the mind when it’s not picking up burdens all the time.

That’s the irony. We think that by feeding on the world, we make ourselves stronger, and we do, but at the same time, we’re piling burdens on ourselves. It’s like eating a lot of food and getting so fat that your heart stops. The trade-off, we begin to realize, is that it’s really not worth it.

So as you sit here and meditate, think about these two attitudes: saṁvega on the one hand, pasāda on the other. There’s a huge load of suffering that we can leave behind by following this path.

Think of that other image the Buddha gave. He got some dirt under his fingernail one time. He asked the monks, “Which is greater, the dirt under my fingernail or the dirt in the whole earth?” The monks said, “Well, of course, the dirt in the whole earth is greater, much greater.”

The Buddha said, “In the same way, for those who attain the first level of awakening, the suffering that remains for them is like the dirt under my fingernail. For those who haven’t, it’s like the dirt in the whole earth.” The difference is that radical.

So ask yourself, which of these two emotions is weak in you as you practice? Learn how to contemplate in ways to strengthen it. It may seem artificial, but remember, all of our thinking is artificial. All our emotions are artificial. They’re all put together. What seems natural is simply what’s habitual—ways you’ve been thinking again and again and again. But there are better ways to think, better ways to talk to yourself, and you can make them habitual as well.

That’s what creates the right frame of mind to practice, the right frame of mind to adopt as you read about the Buddha and his life. Try to think about what it was like for people back in those days who actually had met him: the impact it had on them, and then he was gone.

But in leaving, he didn’t just disappear without a trace. He left a huge body of teachings. He left his example. He left the organization of the Sangha as a community of people who could continue the practice. So in his search for happiness, he wasn’t the only one who benefited. He benefited lots of people. He’s still benefiting us today.

The fact that he searched for happiness in a wise way is probably one of the most important events in world history. So think about how you relate to that, and use that thought to put some fire into your practice so that your search for happiness will be a gift, not only to yourself, but also for everyone around you.