Delight in the Dhamma

We’ve talked about how the mind is constantly making value judgments as to which desires are worth following and which ones are not. One of the Buddha’s purposes in teaching is to help make us change our standards for what counts as what’s worth following and what’s not.

So tonight we’ll look at one of the strategies he employs, which is delight. In Pāli this is nandi. It’s the process by which the mind likes to talk to itself about its pleasures to emphasize how good a particular pleasure was so that you’ll be more and more inclined to want to go for it again.

Of course, we don’t do this just in our minds. Advertising does a lot of this for us. Think of all the magazines devoted to wine, cars, food, guns. In America there’s a comic strip called “Calvin and Hobbes,” about a child with a fantasy friend, and it once included a whole series devoted to the magazine, Chewing. It’s all about chewing gum with articles on how to get the most out of your chewing gum experience, how to build up the muscles of your jaws, that kind of thing. It’s a satire on the magazines devoted to wine, cars, food, and guns.

The Pāli Canon contains a similar satire on the mindset that goes into developing delight in sensuality. If you think that French literature is obsessed with sensuality, you haven’t read Indian literature. Indian aesthetic theory contains long discussions about how to maximize the sensuality of the literary experience while reading or watching a play: what vocabulary and other techniques to use to maximize the sensual experience of the audience.

There’s a passage in the Pāli Canon that makes use of all the typical sensual techniques but then subverts them. It starts with a nun going into the forest. A rogue meets up with her. He’s the son of a goldsmith, which means he’s probably wealthy. He tries to seduce her, and he uses extremely sensual language: some of the most gorgeous language and images in the Pāli Canon.

Now, it turns out that the nun is a non-returner, so she’s not interested. She asks him, “What is it about this body of mine that you’re so attracted to?” He says, “Your eyes.” And he goes on and on and on about her eyes. So she tries to dissuade him. She says, “The eye is just a little ball rolled up with lots of tears and mucus. What could you possibly see in this eye that you like?” He says, “It doesn’t matter. I still want it. You have the eyes of a fawn.” So she says, “If you want it, then here, take it.” She takes out one of her eyes and offers it to him. And of course, that changes his attitude.

This is a case of using sensual language to subvert the whole idea of sensual language. The mood of the piece is very, very sensual, very dream-like, and then she changes it with a jolt of reality.

At the end of the story, the nun goes back to see the Buddha and gets her eye back.

But the point here is that the delight that we take in things can be very dangerous—like the song we talked about last night. You might be saying, “Come on, it’s an image,” but it’s still lying. And a relationship based on lying won’t be very stable. That’s why a large part of the teaching is to get you so that you’re not easily manipulated by language like that. That’s one of the Buddha’s strategies for dealing with delight.

Another one of his strategies is using delight in a positive way as you develop delight in the idea of following the path to encourage you when you encounter difficulties. Even though he says that delight is one of the causes of suffering, still you have to use it to rouse yourself on the path. After all, the path is a path of action—a path of doing and not simply being. This is why the Buddha had to rouse, urge, and encourage his listeners to stick with the path. By engaging in skillful delight, you’re doing the same thing for yourself.

There’s a sutta where the Buddha recommends six objects of delight that can provide you with pleasure and happiness as you practice the path in the here and now. In fact, these six objects of delight can motivate you to go all the way to bringing unskillful desires to an end. Even though all forms of delight can cause stress and ultimately will have to be abandoned at the end of the path, still, you first need to delight in the path and its goal so that you get started in the right direction and follow all the way through. At the same time, these forms of delight are antidotes to unskillful attitudes that could block you on the path.

The six objects of skillful delight are:

We’ll explain these terms later. When you find delight in these things, you counteract the mind’s tendency to delight in things that would hold you back from greater pleasures. You learn how to develop a taste for the allure of the path and its goal. Right concentration becomes attractive, as does the idea of experiencing the freedom of nibbāna.

• First in the list is delight in the Dhamma. You can take delight in the fact that there’s a Dhamma that gives big answers to the big questions of life, such as aging, illness, death, separation, grief, and despair. It teaches you that your actions are not totally determined by the past or by outside forces. You have the power of choice in your life, and your choices can make a big difference.

The Dhamma also teaches you that no one is imposing a purpose for your life on you. You’re free to devote yourself to whatever purpose you want, including the noblest possible purpose, which is a happiness that’s totally harmless and reliable.

It also tells us that you have the ability to reach that goal. It teaches you that suffering can be ended through human effort. It explains how we suffer, why we suffer, and how we don’t have to suffer. It gives clear, reliable guidance on how to use our drive to shape the present moment through our desires and point it in a safer, rewarding direction. It shows us how to act, speak, and think in skillful ways so as to gain total release. In other words, it gives clear advice on what is skillful, and it reassures us that the effort put into developing skillful actions is well spent.

The Dhamma explains these issues not only clearly but also in an honorable way. As the Buddha said, “The path is admirable in the beginning, admirable in the middle, and admirable in the end.” To begin with, the words of the Dhamma are inspiring. The practice is a noble practice, one in which we engage in developing the noble qualities of our hearts and minds, such as virtue, compassion, and discernment. And the end is total freedom from restrictions of any kind. It’s a freedom that’s totally harmless. It’s a good Dhamma all the way through. Ajaan Maha Bua once said that if people who attained nibbāna could actually take it out and show it to you, you wouldn’t want anything else. Every market in the world would go bankrupt.

Delight in the Dhamma helps to counteract the tendency that prefers to delight in the idea that there are no genuinely objective standards for truth, that birth and death are all a big mystery, that right and wrong are simply a matter of different people’s opinions, so there’s nothing standing in the way of doing whatever you want. Of course, if you adopt that attitude, you give free rein to your greed, anger, and delusion. If good and evil are simply social constructs, you’re free to invent your own social constructs. No one can say definitively that you’re wrong, because their criticism is just a social construct, too.

But if you leave the processes of birth and death as a mystery, you don’t really know what to do to escape suffering. You have no reliable guidance for how to calculate if or for how long the effects of your actions will possibly last. In the Buddha’s terms, you’re left unprotected and bewildered. You leave unanswered the question to what’s our common reaction to pain, “Is there anyone who knows how to bring this pain to an end?” So delight in the Dhamma helps to hold and check these dangerous attitudes—attitudes that lead not just to more saṁsāra, but to some of its worst destinations.

• The next two types of delight are delight in developing and delight in abandoning. These refer to the delight you take in engaging in the struggle to develop skillful qualities and to abandon unskillful qualities in the mind. These are the most fundamental principles of the practice, so fundamental that they were one of the first lessons the Buddha gave to his own son, Rāhula, when Rāhula was still a child. As he told Rāhula, when you can see that your actions are harmless, both in the immediate present and in the long run, you should take delight in that fact and keep on training.

When you’re acting this way, you’re being heedful, choosing your actions not according to whether they bring immediate pleasure, but according to whether they bring long-term wealth and happiness. As the Buddha said, your ability to choose the long-term over the short-term good—and to be happy as you make that choice—is a measure of your practical wisdom and discernment.

Delight in developing and abandoning also means that you try to find joy in mastering the practical challenges posed by path, no matter how large or how small. Several people have complained that we’ve been focusing on the minutia of the body and the breath instead of focusing on awakened awareness, but you’re not going to reach awakened awareness unless you master the causal principles leading to suffering, and you won’t be able to master causal principles unless you’re willing to work with them as they play out in your immediate experience of the body and mind right here and now. If you learn to delight in developing and abandoning, you’ll have the energy to master each little step along the way.

To delight in developing and abandoning helps to counteract the mind’s tendency to delight in heedlessness. Heedlessness is the callous and apathetic part of the mind that says, “I don’t care what happens down the line, I just want what I want right now. Thinking about the future gets in the way of my enjoyment of the present.” If you have no sense of heedfulness, you’ll leave yourself unguarded, unprotected, and an easy prey for your greed, aversion, and delusion.

To delight in developing and abandoning also counteracts the lazy tendency in the mind that says, “If I can manage to accept my unskillful mind states, then I won’t suffer from them. If I don’t disturb them, they won’t disturb me.” You have to remember that the path is a struggle. And the Buddha never taught to accept your craving and clinging. You can do something about them to be free from them: In fact, you have to. You have to comprehend the clinging and abandon the craving. To delight in developing and abandoning helps you to feel up to the challenge and to find the reserves and strengths within you to recognize obstacles and to enjoy the effort in trying to overcome them.

In the biography that Ajaan Maha Bua wrote on Ajaan Mun, he says that in Ajaan Mun’s very last Dhamma talk, he talked about how the path is a battle. Your knowledge of the Dhamma is your weapon. Your forces of concentration are like the food for the soldiers. The question is, “Who’s the soldier?” He says, “The soldier is the determination never to come back and be the laughingstock of your defilements ever again.” So these two objects of delight, abandoning and developing, help you to find joy in committing to coming out victorious.

The remaining three objects of delight help to guide you in your reflection as you commit. As I said, as you’re making a value judgment about your desires, when you keep in mind the fact that there is the real possibility of gaining total freedom from suffering, that alters the cost-benefit analysis.

• The first of these three is the delight in seclusion. This helps to counteract your delight in craving for sensuality and for human entanglement. When the Buddha talks about seclusion, he’s referring partly to the physical seclusion that comes when you get away from other people. It is an important part of the path.

He gives a nice image of a bull elephant. When the elephant lives with a herd of elephants, the other elephants eat all of his nice leaves and branches. When he goes down to bathe, they bump into him. When he tries to drink clean water, they’ve already made it muddy. So he leaves the herd. He gets to eat his leaves and branches. When he goes to bathe, nobody bumps into him. When he wants to drink clean water, he has clean water to drink. And when he feels an itch, he takes a branch and scratches himself.

As the Buddha explains the image, that branch is the practice of jhāna. So think about that when you’re practicing jhāna: You’re scratching right where it itches.

So physical seclusion is part of what the Buddha is talking about when he talks about delighting in seclusion.

But his main emphasis is on secluding the mind from sensuality by getting it into concentration. When you learn to appreciate the pleasure and rapture that can come when the mind is really concentrated in the present moment and your awareness is filling the body, that offers some skillful alternatives to the tendency to delight in sensual fantasies. You can see that there are better pleasures than those promised by cravings for sensuality flowing like effluents and fermentations freely through the mind. At the same time, you can anticipate how good it would be to attain an even higher level of seclusion that comes when the mind is free from the influence of all defilements.

• Next is delight in the unafflicted. The unafflicted is one of the Buddha’s names for nibbāna. It highlights the fact that nibbāna is totally devoid of the slightest limitations, constraints, discomfort, or coercion. But even prior to the experience of nibbāna, as you develop concentration to higher and higher levels, you become sensitive to how these higher levels are free from the afflictions of an unconcentrated mind and even from the refined afflictions of the lower levels of concentration. As you develop an appreciation of the higher levels of concentration, you come to look favorably at the prospect of a total absence of affliction in nibbāna.

This helps to counteract the tendency of ignorance to say that suffering is inevitable, that the pleasures of saṁsāra are worth whatever pains and difficulties they entail—or that those pains and difficulties should simply be accepted because you have no other choice.

• Finally, there’s delight in non-objectification. Non-objectification is another name for nibbāna. It’s focused on the fact that it’s free from disturbances that come from objectifying yourself and others. “Objectification” is a translation of the word papañca, which you may have heard. As the Buddha defines the term, it’s the type of thinking that starts with the perception, “I am the thinker.” From there, you identify yourself as a being who needs to feed and so needs a certain part of the world to feed on, whether for physical food or for the food of emotions and ideas. This type of thinking proliferates and leads to further becoming. But as the Buddha notes, objectification also leads inevitably to conflict. When you stake your claim to any part of the world, you have to fight with other people who want to lay claim to that same part of the world to provide themselves with the food they want.

So when you delight in non-objectification, you delight in thinking in terms that avoid that conflict and that promote harmlessness. This inclines you to adopt the viewpoint of the four noble truths with the focus on identifying what is suffering, what is the cause of suffering, what is the cessation of suffering, and what is the path to the cessation of suffering—all inside your heart. These thoughts, as we have noted, have nothing to do with the terms of becoming and they lead to a greater happiness, totally free of conflict.

As you delight in that, you call into question the side of the mind that actually enjoys conflict and competition, the part that likes to assume an identity, taking a stance, laying claim to things, and then fighting off anyone who would dispute that claim. To delight in non-objectification is to see the downside of the desire to exert power over others in the world. So when you can adopt delight in non-objectification, it helps you to counteract craving for becoming.

Those are the six objects of delight. We can map them against the four determinations.

Now, it may seem paradoxical that the Buddha wants you to use delight in this way. This paradox can be resolved by considering the difference between fabricated happiness and unfabricated happiness. Fabricated happiness, which is happiness dependent on conditions, gets amplified when you talk about it in positive terms to yourself or to others.

For example, when you’ve had a good meal, you actually derive more pleasure from it when you can exclaim about how good it was, and you can elaborate on why you liked it and why it deserves three stars. That increased pleasure inclines you to want to have similar meals again.

In the same way when you undertake the path—which, after all, is fabricated—you can develop more enthusiasm for it by telling yourself how good the goal will be and how much you want to do whatever is required to get there. When the path begins to yield results in terms of the pleasures of generosity, virtue, and meditation, then the more you consciously take joy in those pleasures, the more likely you’ll be to pursue the path even further.

It’s for this reason that the Buddha recommends that you delight in practices that help to counteract the pull of your defilements. As I said earlier, this is in line with what the Canon has to say about the Buddha’s teaching style in general. In a typical Dhamma talk, he would not only instruct his audience, but also urge, rouse, and encourage them. By doing so, he’s showing them how to urge, rouse, and encourage themselves.

The nature of this dynamic changes, though, when the path finally brings you to the unfabricated happiness of nibbāna. Because that happiness is not dependent on conditions, it’s not affected by praise or blame—yours or anyone else’s. Praise adds nothing to it; criticism takes nothing away. This is why those who have reached this attainment are said to have left delight behind—not because their senses have been dulled, but because they have no need to increase the happiness they’ve already found.

So the Buddha teaches strategically, advocating delight as it’s needed to arrive ultimately at an attainment where the happiness is so great that you don’t need delight to encourage yourself with anything further. You’ve already arrived. There’s nothing more you need to do to improve that happiness. Totally free from dependencies, your work is done.

But as long as you haven’t reached that point yet, don’t be embarrassed to delight in the path of the Dhamma or in your ability to master the skills it requires.