Possesiveness

In the traditional Buddhist calendar, tonight is Visakha Atthamī. Eight days after the Buddha passed away, he was cremated—actually seven days, but they commemorate it on the eighth day because that fits in with the phases of the Moon.

The story goes that after the news came to the Mallans that the Buddha had passed away in their township, they made up their minds to cremate the body the next day. But then they set up a stage with music and dancing, and the music and dancing lasted all day long. So they said, “Well, tomorrow we’ll do the cremation.” Then the next day they had music and dancing all day long. This kept up until the seventh day, when they finally went ahead and had the cremation.

They waited until Ven. MahaKassapa came. They tried to set fire to the pyre, but it wouldn’t light. It turned out the devas were keeping it from being lit because MahaKassapa was on his way. He came, was able to show homage to the Buddha, and then the pyre miraculously lit on its own.

There are a number of events surrounding the cremation that are really interesting. One was that on his way there, MahaKassapa heard an old monk saying, “Thank goodness we’re finally rid of the Buddha. He was always telling us what we can do, what we can’t do. Now we can do as we like.” That was what made MahaKassapa realize that they would have to hold a council to decide on the Buddha’s teachings, to compile a standardized version. Otherwise, people would remember what they wanted to remember and forget what they didn’t want to remember. With a standardized version, though, you’d have a standard against which you could measure what was Dhamma and what was not Dhamma.

As the Buddha had said, if there’s something you know that fits in line with what you’ve already heard of the Dhamma, then it doesn’t matter who says their authority is, then it should be accepted. If it doesn’t fit in, then no matter what they say their authority is—a famous ajaan, a famous community—you shouldn’t accept it. So you need a standard against which to measure these things. That was one of the stories around the cremation.

The other is, when you look into the sutta that tells of the Buddha’s last year—the events from a year before his passing away up through the cremation—you see that the story starts with an averted war and ends with an averted war.

The war in the first case was in the offing because King Ajatasattu wanted to attack the Vajjians. Even though he had faith in the Buddha, he was pretty ignorant. He wanted to get some advice from the Buddha on whether or not he should attack. The Buddha didn’t answer the question directly. But he turned to Ananda and talked about the qualities that the Vajjians had that made them a tightly bound community with a lot of respect for one another.

The minister who had brought the question went back to the king and told him what the Buddha had said. So the king realized he was not going to be able to conquer this community by force of arms. So there was no war.

The Buddha then took that as an opportunity to call the monks together and tell them what was needed to keep the community together, to make sure there wasn’t going to be an easy prey to the forces of greed, aversion, and delusion.

So the story starts with a sense of the fragility of the Dhamma. Once the Buddha passes away, it could be very easy for the Dhamma to disappear. There are stories of previous Buddhas who had taught and not set forth a standardized version of their teaching. They basically would read people’s minds and say, “Do this. Don’t do that. Think this. Don’t think that.” That’s called the miracle of instruction. It brought a lot of people to awakening, but those particular traditions didn’t last long because there was no analysis of what goes on in the mind that other people could pick up and use in training their own minds. Once that talent of that Buddha to read minds was gone, that was it.

So again, the story points to the need for the council—to have a standard against which you can measure things, and also a standard that describes to you what’s going on in the mind.

But how can you make use of that knowledge? We read about the three kinds of fabrication that, under the influence of ignorance, can lead to suffering: bodily fabrication, the way you breathe; verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself; and mental fabrication, perceptions and feelings.

Now, the wise response to that analysis is not just to hold to the view that that’s how the mind works. You also have to develop right resolve to train the mind so that it can make use of that knowledge: resolve on renunciation, i.e., renouncing your fascination with thinking thoughts of sensuality; resolve on non-ill-will or non-affliction—in other words, maintaining thoughts of goodwill for yourself and for others; and resolve on harmlessness.

Harmfulness would be the attitude that you don’t really care whether people suffer or not. You mistreat them not out of ill-will, but simply out of callousness, thinking that they don’t matter or that your own suffering from your own unskillful karma wouldn’t matter.

You have to tame these attitudes: Develop thoughts of compassion instead, so that you can get the mind into concentration. Use that knowledge of fabrication: You focus on your breath; you talk to yourself about the breath to adjust it in ways that make it a good place to be; you focus on perceptions of the breath and perceptions of the mind that allow you to settle down with feelings of pleasure and ease.

That’s what right resolve does: It takes the knowledge of right view and uses it as a guide to get into right concentration. That’s the wise response to right view.

This is the right way to take the Buddha’s teachings: not to argue about them, but actually to ask yourself, “How can I use these teachings to make a difference in my mind? The Buddha says that I’m creating suffering through my own actions, so I’ve got to change my actions. How do I do that?” That’s the proper attitude to bring.

So it’s good that we have that standardized version that’s kept the Dhamma alive all these many, many years. xx

As for the war at the end that was averted: After the Mallans had cremated the Buddha’s body, they decided to keep all the relics for themselves. But there were other people who had been students of the Buddha as well, and they came and they made their claims—different kings, even some nagas, came and made their claim. It looked like there was going to be a war because the Mallans were refusing to give up what they had.

And just as Ajatasatthu showed that he really didn’t understand what the Buddha had said, those who were willing to go to war over the relics showed they really didn’t understand what the Buddha had taught, either. There was the stain of possessiveness: “This is my place. This is my this. This is my that.”

As soon as you set up a “my” there, there have to be fights over that. The Buddha calls this papañca, when you come up with the attitude, “I am the thinker.” When you’re a thinker, that means you’re a being, and beings have to feed. Where are you going to feed? Well, you feed in the world. But there are other beings who are also doing the same kind of thing in the same place—they need to feed as well, and they’re feeding in this world. So you’re going to come into conflict. When you lay claim to something—“This is me. This is my territory. Nobody else can come in here”—you’re showing that you don’t understand what the Buddha taught.

There are a lot of things we have to let go. When I was in Poland, that question came up, “What do we let go, when we realize that we can’t let go of everything all at once?” And the answer is: You remember that the teaching is not just about letting go, it’s also about developing. You develop skillful qualities in the mind. The list of skillful qualities is there in the noble eightfold path.

And even before the noble eightfold path, there’s the teaching of the graduated discourse, where the Buddha teaches developing qualities of generosity, virtue, reflecting on the rewards of virtue and generosity, realizing that the sensual rewards that come from those activities are going to end and they entail a lot of drawbacks and what the Buddha says is even degradation. So you realize that renunciation is a good thing. These are all thoughts that will lead eventually to right resolve.

But part of right resolve comes from understanding there are also things you should develop. And in the course of developing them, you’re going to find that you have states of mind that get in the way—those are the things you have to let go of. So, if possessiveness gets in the way of your being generous, gets in the way of your being virtuous, you’ve got to let it go.

These things that we claim as “me” and “mine”—how many of them do you really need? What’s the allure of possessiveness? There’s a sense that you’re safe because you have your territory. But there are a lot of other very unskillful attitudes that go along with that—the unwillingness to share: Why? Are people not worth sharing things with?

And what happens if you don’t let go? There are many, many stories in the Buddhist tradition of people who couldn’t let go of something, and then they come back and become spirits hovering around those places, trying to hold on. That’s a miserable state to be in.

That’s why the Buddha said that when you define who you are and what belongs to you, you’re placing limitations on yourself. We tend to think that our definitions of “who we are” are useful strategies for getting what we want. But then when you get those things, what are you going to do with them? Are you going to use them or are you just going to hold on?

Even in Western fairy tales, they talk about how when you try to hold on to some good fortune, it’s going to turn into ashes. Only when you give something away does it become yours. That, of course, is the message the Buddha taught, too: The things we give away are ours. The things we try to hold on to are going to get torn from our grasp. The more we try to hold on to them, the more miserable we’re going to be.

So look at the things that you’re being possessive of and ask yourself, “What are these things preventing me from attaining, in terms of the good qualities of the mind?” Those good qualities are your genuine treasures. Those are yours: Conviction. Sense of shame and compunction. Virtue. Generosity. Learning. Discernment. These are genuine treasures and they’re genuinely yours. Nobody can take them away from you.

So if you want to be wealthy, focus there because those treasures don’t lead to war, they don’t lead to conflict. Anywhere else where you try to be possessive, there’s going to be conflict.

Fortunately, there was a brahman who came and reasoned with the people who were about to go to war over the relics: “Didn’t the Buddha teach you not to hold on to things like this? Didn’t he teach you peace and harmony?” The people came to their senses. Then he divided the relics so that everybody got a share and went home happy. But the happiest people in that story were the monks—they didn’t get any relics at all. They got the Dhamma instead.

So it’s good that we have these events from the Buddha’s life that we place on our calendar year, so we can think about the implications and draw lessons from them that can keep the Dhamma alive here and now—because the Dhamma is still fragile.

People keep trying to change it. People who claim to be Dhamma teachers are the ones who seem to hate the Dhamma the most. They’re always changing it.

But you can make up your mind that whatever they do, that’s their business. You’re going to do your best to tame yourself, bring yourself in line with the Dhamma. That’s how you keep the Dhamma alive. And that’s when it becomes genuinely yours.