Compunction & Awe

We see all around us the extent to which fear can make people do evil, unskillful things. But there are actually two kinds of fear that the Buddha recommended as being skillful, as playing a big role in the path. In both cases, though, the Buddha doesn’t just leave you with the fear. He gives you reasons for confidence so that the fear inspires you to avoid unskillful actions. You’re confident that you can escape those dangers through your skillful actions.

The first is ottappa, which we translate as “compunction.” It’s not explained in very great detail in the Canon. In English, the word “compunction” has two meanings, depending on whether you’re taking the British meaning or the American. The British meaning has to do with past actions: You think about bad things you did in the past, and there’s a pang. In the American meaning, it can also deal with the thoughts you might have at the prospect of doing something evil, the prospect of doing something callous and careless, and you want not to do that.

I think the Buddha had the American meaning in mind, because he talks about compunction as a guardian of the world. It protects you from doing things you know you shouldn’t do—because you do care. It’s the opposite of apathy, callousness, the attitude that doesn’t really care about what the consequences of your actions are going to be, either for yourself or for other people. With compunction—ottappa—you do care. You’re wise enough to care because you see the power of action.

Here the source of confidence is that the Buddha can teach you skills by which you can avoid doing unskillful things. The whole path is a path of skillfulness. You get training in how to be skillful. It’s not just telling you, “Don’t do these things.” He teaches you the mental strengths you need—conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, discernment—so that you’re strong enough to resist the temptation to do something unskillful, and you can feel more and more secure in yourself. The result of having confidence of this sort is that you behave in a moral way, a harmless way. As the Buddha said, this is a guardian of the world. As long as you’re going to be in the world, it protects you.

But then there’s another kind of fear that takes you beyond the world. That’s saṁvega. This word is sometimes translated as “dismay,” “urgency,” or in a general way as “emotion,” which is probably one of the worst translations. Saṁvega has more to do with a sense of terror or awe.

There’s a passage in the Canon where the Buddha talks about a lion coming out in the afternoon and roaring its lion’s roar, and the animals of the forest all feel saṁvega. They don’t just feel emotion. They feel terror, they feel awe, because the lion is so much more powerful than they are.

I think “awe” is the best English translation for the term because it conveys the old sense of the meaning of “awe”: You’re face-to-face with the vastness of nature and see how huge and powerful it is. That can be terrifying. You go to a huge waterfall like Niagara and there’s an enormous amount of water, roaring, roaring, roaring over the cliff. You see storms rising up that can cover the sky over the entire Great Plains. You sense the power of nature and you feel so puny in comparison.

Think of that passage in Majjhima 28 where Ven. Sariputra is talking about the four great properties. With wind, think of huge windstorms that blow away villages, towns, cities, countries, countrysides. And then the wind will just stop. Things will be so still that, as he says, even the grass ends and the thatched roof don’t stir.

Water can flood and wash away villages, towns, cities, countries, and countrysides. And then the water in the oceans can dry up so that what’s left is only the depth of one palm tree. You can imagine how the Buddha saw that in his Buddha eye, surveying the world.

The same with fire: Fire can burn cities and towns, and then come to the edge of the water, to the edge of a road, and just stop. It’s so big, unpredictable, scary.

We’ve had moments like that here at the monastery. In 1993, there was a rainstorm where in three days we had 14 inches of rain. It washed away parts of the hill. It seemed there would be no end to the rain, but then it ended.

In 2003, a huge Santa Ana came at a time when there was not supposed to be a Santa Ana. The wind gusts got up to 100 miles per hour, blew down 300 trees—and then the next morning everything was perfectly still.

In 2007, a fire came in, again with very strong winds. We had to evacuate. Then the wind suddenly changed direction and blew the fire away from us. The monastery survived. But I remember seeing the fire coming on the horizon before dawn the morning we had to evacuate. The first thought that went through my mind was, “Mother Nature wants to kill us.”

So it is scary, the size of the elements here, how unpredictable they are and how puny we are in comparison. The Buddha advocates this as an emotion to develop.

There’s that famous story with the 30 monks who come to see the Buddha. They’re all forest monks, and the Buddha thinks to himself, “What can I say that would induce them all to gain awakening right in this very seat?” He talks to them about how the amount of blood they’ve lost over their past lives by having their heads cut off. Just the amount of blood they shed when their heads were cut off when they were sheep was more than the water in the great oceans. The amount of blood they shed when they had their heads cut off as oxen, as goats, was more than the water in the great oceans. When they had their heads cut off because they were arrested as adulterers or highwaymen was more than all the water in the oceans. All the monks developed a huge sense of saṁvega and became arahants right there.

That’s the purpose of this recollection: to gain a sense that we live in this world that’s a dangerous world with huge powers—powers beyond our comprehension, powers beyond our ability to control—and the Buddha is offering us a place to get out. That’s the confidence that he inspires in us: that the place where we get out of this is actually larger than that. It’s beyond being a place. It’s beyond space, beyond time.

Think of that passage we chant with the Khandha Paritta, talking about the limits to all the creepy-crawly things that could cause you harm when you’re in the forest. But then you contemplate, “Appamāṇo Buddho, Appamāṇo Dhammo, Appamāṇo Saṅgho”: Limitless is the Buddha. Limitless is the Dhamma. Limitless is the Sangha. There is a limit to the creepy-crawly things. That’s our out. This is our inspiration.

Sometimes saṁvega is confused with dispassion. Dispassion is the sense that you’ve been feeding off of your fabrications, willing to put in the effort to construct them, because you have a passion for the pleasures they provide. But now you see that they’re just simply not worth it. You lose any enthusiasm for continuing with this process, and you stop. Saṁvega is one of the ways of inducing dispassion, but it’s not quite the same thing.

Saṁvega is what induced the Buddha to go out into the forest to begin with. He saw that everything in the world was laid claim to, with nowhere he could look for happiness that wouldn’t require that he fight off somebody else. It was overwhelming. Then he realized that the big problem was inside. So he went off into the wilderness, removed the arrow in his heart, and found something infinitely bigger: consciousness without surface. Unlimited. Not bound by any of the six senses.

It’s because we have this confidence in something beyond the awesome things of nature that this sense of saṁvega has not always been seen as an unpleasant thing. It’s the same with the history of the word “awe” in the Western civilization. At first it meant terrifying, which is what “awful” meant to begin with. Big. Terrifying. Horrible. But then there was a sense that there must be a benevolent purpose behind all the awesome powers of nature. Then awe became a source of joy because the benevolent purpose must be bigger than these things. That’s how awe” became, in the Romantic period, a positive emotion. This is why we have national parks. When they started setting aside land for national parks, they were always places that inspired awe in a positive sense: waterfalls, canyons, mountains. A lot of the writings around the parks were very religious. It wasn’t until the 1930s that they started spreading the concept of national parks to include places like swamps, which don’t inspire awe, but have a beauty of a different kind.

It’s the same in the Buddhist tradition. If there were no nibbana, the awe we feel about the fire element, the water element, the wind element, would be really unpleasant. But realizing that there is an escape, something even bigger, more amazing, makes the awe-inspiring things of the world not so scary after all.

You look in the Apadanas, the section of the Canon that was added at the very end before the Suttas Pitaka was closed. They talk about awe as a pleasant experience. Saṁvega is a pleasant thing to feel. You travel through the universe, having made merit, and you travel only to good places. Then finally you decide you’ve had enough, and you develop a sense of saṁvega that’s blissful and rapturous, because you have the confidence that there’s something beyond the awful powers of nature, and your defilements just drop away.

Just think about that when you look at the world. There are a lot of powers that are much bigger than we are. It’s scary what these powers can do. But nibbāna is bigger. The Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha are bigger. They have no limit. As we imbue our minds with their qualities, we take our minds to a state that’s limitless as well.

So these are some ways in which even fear can be a useful thing to develop on the path, to motivate us to practice, to get a sense that we really do need to get out of here as fast as we can. That doesn’t mean we have to rush, rush, rush through the practice. Think of it as a prison break: You have to be very careful in each step along the way that you don’t get caught. So you combine a sense of urgency with a sense of meticulousness. That’s one of the definitions of mindfulness: You’re very meticulous in what you do.

But it’s useful to reflect on the awe-inspiring aspect of these things every now and then, to remind ourselves of why we’re doing this. We’re surrounded by powers that are bigger than we are. We have power within ourselves to begin with, the power of our actions, which could be used in unskillful ways and cause us to suffer. So have a strong sense of compunction about what you do. Take care about the consequences of your actions. But also have a sense that you’re going for something bigger than the world, bigger than even the physical universe as a whole. So however large the work may seem, the rewards are going to be even more awesome.