In the Context of the Deathless

For a long time, especially in the West, the Buddha has had a reputation for being a pessimist, and the passage we chanted just now would seem to confirm that reputation. The world is swept away. It does not endure. It offers no shelter. There’s no one in charge. You have nothing of your own. You have to pass on, leaving everything behind. Everybody’s a slave to craving. It sounds pretty negative, but you have to remember the context. When the Buddha first taught his first disciples, he told them, “I’ve attained the deathless, and I can teach you in a way such that you, too, can attain the deathless”: a deathless happiness, a happiness that has no restrictions at all. He didn’t say, “I’m going to teach you how miserable the world is, and how there’s no hope for happiness.” In effect, he introduced his teachings by saying, “This is all about happiness.” A happiness that doesn’t die. A happiness with no limitations.

So when he’s talking about the negative side of the world, it’s because he basically wants to make sure that you don’t get stuck there, that you don’t content yourself with the things of the world. There are better things in the mind. And there’s a path to those better things. The path may require you to put forth more effort than you might want, it may be more difficult than you’d like, but the difficulties are then more than repaid. Even the path itself isn’t all bad. It’s not all hard effort. You’re sitting here meditating. What does the Buddha say? You try to get the mind in a state of concentration with a sense of ease and rapture or refreshment. In fact, the ease, pleasure, and refreshment are one of the main points of getting the mind into concentration.

So the path may have its difficulties, but it has its rewards. And it doesn’t save its rewards for the end. It’s a good path to be on. You look at the things the Buddha asks you to do in terms of virtue, concentration, discernment: They’re all honorable qualities. They’re all things you can be proud to do. Good qualities of the mind. Qualities of the mind that you respect within yourself. The Buddha’s asking you to develop them even further.

So there’s a joy in being on the path. And if you learn how to take delight, as the Buddha says, in abandoning your unskilled qualities and developing skillful ones—in other words, if you find the challenge exhilarating, find the challenge really worthwhile—then you’re going to get to the end of the path. He says you have to delight in these things, in the same way as when you delight in mastering a challenging game—although here the game has some serious consequences. If you don’t play it well, you just keep coming back to being born again and dying again and again and again and again. And the Buddha’s description of the world gives you some pause.

What is it like to remember a past lifetime? The Buddha said that you remember your name and what you looked like, you remember your happiness, you remember your pains, you remember what you ate, and then you died. That’s it. It’s not much. The ways of the world, he said, involve gain but then they also involve loss. Status, loss of status. Praise, criticism. Pleasure, pain. These are normal things in the world. And you have to reflect on them, because otherwise you get content when the world goes smoothly, and really upset when the world doesn’t go smoothly. You’re trying to feed on the world, and all of a sudden the world gives you garbage. So the Buddha says to reflect on this. Don’t let yourself be satisfied with what the world has to offer, because your mind, as you develop it, has much more to offer for you.

So always keep in mind the fact that even though we have to deal with limitations, the goal that we’re aiming at is without limit. And when the Buddha talks about things being inconstant, stressful, not-self, he’s not saying that you have to content yourself with finding your happiness in the midst of things that are inconstant, stressful, and not-self. He’s basically asking you to reflect on these things as you meet with them and ask yourself: In the context of your search for a deathless happiness, are these really worth going for?

There are few cases when the answer is actually Yes, in the sense that the path we’re working on is something we’re putting together out of these aggregates that the Buddha says are inconstant, stressful, and not-self.

Aggregates like the form of your body as you feel it from within, as you’re sitting here right now, working with the breath.

Feelings: You hope to create feelings of pleasure.

There are perceptions, the labels you apply to things that identify them, give them meaning. Here you’re identifying the breath as the topic you want to stick with.

There’s fabrication, the way you talk to yourself about the breath.

There’s consciousness, your awareness of these activities.

Even though these concentration aggregates ultimately will show that they, too, are inconstant, stressful, and not-self, you’re trying to fight against those characteristics for the time being.

Try to make your concentration as constant as you can. Make your mindfulness, your alertness, your ardency as constant as you can so that you can give rise to a sense of ease and well-being. Get the mind under your control so that you can create a path—a path that leads beyond the path. As for other things that are inconstant, stressful, not-self, don’t let yourself be satisfied with them. To whatever extent they’re useful on the path, you use them, but don’t rest content there.

People often get the context all backwards. They think that when the Buddha talks about things being inconstant and impermanent, he’s providing the context, saying that we simply have to put up with these facts and say that “If I’m going to look for happiness, I have to accept the fact that it’s going to be inconstant and impermanent.” That’s pretty miserable. But there are people who keep saying over and over again that the reason we’re miserable is that we don’t accept our limitations.

I was reading, just the other week, a monk saying that our problem is that we would like to have a permanent self. As long as we want something permanent in life, we’re going to suffer. But when we finally realize that there’s nothing permanent at all, we say, “Okay, no problem. I’ll accept that.” But that attitude is really sad, given the fact that the Buddha does promise: You follow the path and it leads to a happiness that has no limitations. It doesn’t even have the limitations of space and time. That’s where we’re headed.

So remember, it’s not the case that the teachings on impermanence or inconsistency form the context, and that you have to find happiness within that context. It’s the other way around. The Buddha has you take your desire for happiness seriously as your top priority, holding in mind the possibility promised in the third noble truth: There is a total end of suffering. And it’s not just a blank. It’s a state that the Buddha says is permanent. Refuge. The names he gives for it indicate that it’s a state of consciousness totally without limitations. It’s happiness. It’s bliss. It’s a sense of freedom. It’s true—in other words, it’s not going to disappoint. And it’s the ultimate. As Ajaan Suwat would say, “Once you attain that, there’s no question about who you are who’s experiencing it, or where it’s being experienced.” The happiness is that all-encompassing.

This is one of the reasons why we respect the Buddha. He has us respect our desire for true happiness. He makes us realize that there will be things we have to give up for it, but the things we give up are really not worth all that much. We’ve given them worth. But when you really look at them, there’s not much there.

So that’s the context: the search for happiness; the desire for true happiness. The teachings on inconstancy are then placed within that context to remind you that anything that’s inconstant is not the goal. It may be part of the path there, in which case you develop it. But then there comes a point when the path, too, will have to be put aside. As the Buddha said, the path is constructed. It’s fabricated.

This is another misunderstanding that sometimes comes up, that the path is somehow just a natural process that, if you get out of the way, will happen on its own. We’ve been told that the Buddha would use nothing but images of natural processes to describe the path. But that’s not the case. There’s one sutta where he compares the path to a chariot, going through a list of all the different parts of the chariot and equating them to aspects of the path. The chariots back in those days were pretty complex. They were considered works of the art of craftsmanship. And this path we’re doing is a work of art. It requires that we do things that we haven’t done before and let go of things that we haven’t let go of before. But it also promises that we’ll find a happiness that we haven’t found before, realize what we haven’t realized before, attain what we haven’t attained before.

So keep the context in mind. When we hear the passages that talk about the negative side of the world, remember they’re there because the Buddha has a really positive purpose. He’s like a doctor. If you go to the doctor and the doctor says, “Where does it hurt?” you don’t accuse the doctor of being pessimistic. He asks where it hurts because he’s got a cure. So remember that when the Buddha introduced his teachings, he didn’t say, “I’m going to teach you how miserable the world is.” He started out by saying, “I’m going to teach you the deathless and if you follow these teachings, you can find the deathless, too.”