Cutting the Fetters

A woman who was new to Ajaan Fuang’s way of teaching was having a Dhamma discussion with him one time, and she mentioned one of the defilements she encountered in her meditation. He told her, “Just put it aside and focus on your breath.”

She responded, “Shouldn’t I try to cut it at the root?”

He said, “If you try to cut it at the root, the fruits of the tree are going to fall down on the ground and create new trees.”

Of course, what he meant was, you try to cut away one defilement, and in the pride you have over doing that, other defilements will grow in your mind.

Of course, that raises the question: If you can’t cut the defilements, how do they get cut? This is especially important with regard to the fetters that bind us to saṁsāra. The image of a fetter, of course, is something that has to be cut if you want to be free. But you don’t cut it directly. You follow the path, the path leads to an experience of the deathless, and that experience of the deathless is what cuts through the fetters.

This is a point that’s widely misunderstood. You hear again and again that you have to cut the fetters first and then you have the experience of stream-entry. Often that’s presented in a way that makes the fetters sound like something you can think about, ponder, and you can see, yeah, you don’t want to go there. This is especially true with the lower fetters, the three fetters that are cut at stream-entry—identity views, doubt, and grasping at habits and practices—and then the two that are cut at non-return: sensual desire and irritation.

People say that you can think about what the Buddha had to say about the first fetter, identity view, the idea that you identify yourself with any of the five khandhas — form, feeling, perceptions, fabrications, consciousness — in any of four ways: either identifying directly with the khandha or aggregate itself, or seeing that you’re the owner of the aggregate, or that you’re in the aggregate, or that the aggregate is in you. Four times five gives twenty: twenty identity views. You think about how, yes, the aggregates are the things that make up what you are, but they’re obviously impermanent, so they can’t constitute a permanent self. That’s what they say. Actually, the aggregates are what you use to create your sense of self. But in any event, they claim that you see that these things are impermanent, and you agree with the Buddha: There is no permanent self there. And that’s supposed to cut the fetter.

The same with doubt: You ponder the Dhamma for a while, put it into practice and say, “The Buddha is reasonable. He says things that are inspiring. I’ve tried some of the practices and they seemed to work, so I have no doubts about him.”

As for grasping at habits and practices, often that’s translated as grasping at rites and rituals. A lot of people say, “Well, we don’t have any rites and rituals anymore. We may have to practice chanting, practice of meditation, but we understand that that’s not going to take us to awakening on its own.”

So there you are. Those three fetters are cut.

Well, they’re not cut at all. You’ve been hacking away at them. You may have weakened them, but they can still grow back.

Sometimes the act of cutting is presented as a gradual process where, over time, you become more and more convinced of the truth of the Buddha’s teachings, and that cuts through a lot of your false social conditioning. In fact, we’re told that the first three fetters are all the result of artificial social conditioning.

The creation of a sense of “I am this,” we’re told, is something inforced by society. We might not have come up with it on our own. As for our doubts about the Buddha’s teachings, well, if we hadn’t heard about the Buddha’s teachings, we wouldn’t have any doubts about them. And again, lots of societies don’t have many rituals and rites. That means that the first stage of awakening is simply a matter of undoing your social conditioning, something you can think your way through, and gradually come to the conclusion that, yes, you do agree with the Buddha.

But those fetters are not at all shallow like that. After all, the three lowest fetters are the things that not only bring you back to rebirth, but can also allow you to go to really low levels. So they must be very powerful if they can drag you down against your will… And even though you may not have articulated views about the aggregates, or even think in terms of the aggregates, you do have a strong sense of you are something, identifying with something. Even animals have that sense. They identify very strongly with their bodies and strongly with their food. You try to take their food away, they’ll attack you. You attack them, they’ll attack you back.

As for doubts and habits and practices, you don’t need to know about the Buddha’s awakening to have doubts about what’s right and wrong, what can be accomplished by your actions, whether death is followed by rebirth or whether it’s followed by annihilation. You already have lots of doubts about things that you should have some confidence in. You have confidence in a lot of things that you should have doubts about, along with confidence in certain ways of doing things.

If you don’t think that animals have rites and rituals, you really don’t know animal behavior. They say that deer have certain paths that they follow through the forest. When the snow comes, they continue to follow the same paths, wear those paths down, eat all the bark on the trees right next to the paths. And if the winter is long with lots of snow, they stay in those paths. If there’s no more bark left on the trees, they starve, even though there may be bark on the trees that are just a little bit off the path.

There’s that story of Konrad Lorenz’s goose. The first time it had entered his house, it freaked out. It saw a window at the end of the hall, ran down to the window but saw it couldn’t get out. Lorenz, though, had to climb some stairs to his apartment to feed the goose, so he called the goose. The goose turned around and followed him up the stairs. Then every day after that, when the goose came into the house, it would first run to the window, then go to the stairs. Over time, the path to the window got shorter and shorter, until finally the goose would go to that corner of the stairs, shake his foot at the window, and then head up the stairs.

Then one night, Konrad Lorenz came home late. The goose was hungry. Lorenz opened the door to the house and the goose ran in and immediately ran up the stairs. Then it stopped halfway up, started shivering all over, and walked back down the stairs, very methodically walked to the window, came back, and went up the stairs. So, animals have their rites and rituals.

So those first three fetters are nothing shallow, nothing social. They go deep, particularly the sense of, “I am this.” “This is my territory.” Possessiveness is a quality of many, many animals, even microscopic ones. So that kind of fetter is not going to be cut simply by thinking it through. It goes deep.

As the Buddha said, the conviction that overcomes doubt in the Buddha has to be confirmed. What’s going to confirm it? Being convinced of things simply by thinking them through is what the Buddha calls arriving at an agreement through pondering views. And that, he says, can sometimes be true and sometimes false. So it doesn’t qualify as confirmation. There has to be something more radical, something that goes deeper.

As for the idea that you have to abandon the fetters first and then have stream-entry, there are many cases in the Canon where the Buddha is teaching people, they attain stream-entry while they’re listening, but he never mentions the fetters. They know nothing about the fetters.

In the case of the five brethren, there’s no mention of the fetters at all in the first sermon. Or the case of the assassin who was sent to kill the Buddha, but then stopped and put down his weapon when he was in the Buddha’s presence. The Buddha called him and said, “I’ll teach you the Dhamma.” He listens to the Dhamma. I doubt that he has any idea about fetters at all. But he attains stream-entry. And his fetters are cut.

So it’s not that you ponder the fetters first and then let go of them. There’s a path that you have to follow.

This is a problem that’s common throughout the West. We read about awakening that cuts the fetters, so we say, “Let’s go straight to cutting the fetters.” We read about *jhāna, *descriptions of *jhāna, *so we say, “Well, let’s just do what’s said in the descriptions of jhāna.” You don’t do the descriptions of jhāna. You do what’s told in the description of right mindfulness. Those are the instructions for getting into concentration. Then when you attain concentration, you’re ready to contemplate things.

This is exactly how the Buddha says you arrive at a place where the lower fetters have been cut. You start with your practice of concentration. You get really good at it. He compares it to being an archer, able to shoot long distances, fire in rapid succession, pierce great masses. In other words, you get really good at concentration.

Once you’re good enough, then you can start contemplating it. You begin to see that it’s made up of aggregates: the same aggregates that go into your sense of self; the same aggregates that, when you cling to them, are suffering. But here you have them in a very pleasant state.

You’ve got the breath, which is form. You’ve got the feeling of pleasure that goes with the breath: That’s feeling. You’ve got the perception that holds you with the breath — how you visualize the breath coming in and going out, where it goes in the body, how it goes in the body, which sensations in the body can be labeled as breath sensations: All that is perception. Then there’s the intention to stay here, and the directed thought and evaluation as you try to adjust the breath, adjust the mind, so that they fit together snugly. That’s all the aggregate of fabrication. Then there’s consciousness, which is aware of all these things.

As you contemplate these things, you see that concentration is the best thing that the aggregates can do. You get really attached to the concentration, but then you begin to see that it has its limitations. This is when the Buddha says that you start perceiving it in terms of being inconstant, stressful, not-self, and variations on those three perceptions: being empty, a dart, a disease, fleeting. As you begin to contemplate the drawbacks, the mind inclines for something that’s not fabricated. And it’s a natural inclination at this point, because you’ve seen how good fabrication can be and yet you can see its limitations. You stay in this state of concentration, there’s going to be stress. You go to stay in another, there’s going to be stress. What’s the alternative to going and staying?

At that point, the mind inclines to the deathless, which is unfabricated. Then, based on that experience, either you gain full awakening or—if you have some passion for that experience—just the five lower fetters are cut. But still, the important point is that the fetters are cut* after* the experience of the deathless. Because only the deathless can confirm for you, “Yes, the Buddha knew what he was talking about. There is this deathless dimension. It is the end of suffering.” So your doubts about the Buddha are totally cut through confirmed conviction, confirmed confidence.

You see that this consciousness that you have of the deathless, which the Buddha calls “consciousness without surface,” has nothing to do with the aggregates, nothing to do with the six sense spheres. Those all go away at that point. So there’s no reason to identify yourself around those aggregates. You’ve found something that has nothing to do with them at all, something that’s better than anything you can create out of the aggregates.

As for habits and practices, you realize that you followed good habits to get here, but it was an act of discernment that allowed you to break through. And your attitude toward the practices you’ve been doing changes at that point.

As the Buddha says, you’re virtuous, but you’re not made of virtue. In other words, you stick with the precepts, you stick with the good habits the Buddha taught, but you don’t create any identity around them. You don’t take pride in the fact that you’re virtuous and other people are not. You see the precepts more as medicine. You have to take the medicine. But you realize also that the reason you hadn’t seen this deathless dimension before was because of breaking the precepts in the past. So you never intentionally break the precepts again.

The experience is that radical, that astounding, and only an experience totally astounding can really cut through the fetters.

So this is how it’s done. You follow the steps of the path as the Buddha laid them out. As he said, he had no inside or outside teaching. It’s not that he taught the noble eightfold path to outsiders and then taught the skill of cutting the fetters to the insiders. And it’s striking how few times he actually mentions the fetters in the texts, whereas the path and the factors of the path are mentioned again and again. Those are the things you focus on. You do what needs to be done to get there. Then the result is not something you have to plan or have to anticipate. It’s going to happen because you followed the path.

It’s in this way that the fetters get cut. The root of the tree gets cut and none of the fruit falls down to the ground. You’re safe—because that also means none of the fruit is going to fall down and hit you on the head.

There are people who think they’ve attained some of the noble attainments and they’re very far away. And from the point of view of the forest tradition, that’s one of the most difficult defilements to solve, and also one of the most dangerous.

So see things in terms of cause and effect. Focus on the causes, and the results will come—and they’ll bring you more than you could anticipate.