Karma for the End of Karma

We noted this morning that the way to develop discernment and wisdom is to ask wise people: “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term harm & suffering? What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?”

This shows that discernment begins with questions of karma: What kinds of actions lead to the best results? It also shows that discernment is not concerned exclusively with the present moment. It’s concerned with how actions in the present moment yield results now and into the future.

These two principles apply not only to the beginning levels of discernment and right view. They apply all the way to the highest levels of discernment that lead to the cessation of suffering.

This is clearest to see in the fourth noble truth: the noble eightfold path, the path of practice leading to the end of suffering. The Buddha calls it the karma that leads to the end of karma. But the same principle applies to all four noble truths. After all, right view is one of the factors of the path, and it includes all four of the noble truths. This is an important point to keep in mind. If you want to understand the Buddha’s wisdom teachings, such as the three perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self, you have to understand them in the context of karma. They’re things you do, tools you use for a higher purpose. We practice, not to arrive at right view. We use right view to take the mind to a dimension that’s beyond views.

So just as the path is karma that leads to the end of karma, right views are views that lead to the end of holding to views.

Take, for instance, the first noble truth, the truth of suffering and stress. You may know that the Buddha defines suffering as the five clinging-aggregates: clinging to form, feelings, perceptions, thought-fabrications, and consciousness.

Form is the body as you feel it from within.

Feelings are feeling tones of pleasure, pain, and neither pleasure nor pain.

Perceptions are the mental labels by which we define things and give them meaning: this microphone, my robe.

Thought-fabrications are the thoughts that we build out of perceptions: This microphone is useful. Please don’t take my robe.

Consciousness is what’s aware of these things.

As I said, you may already know about the aggregates, but you may not know that the Buddha defines them as activities: feelings feel, perceptions perceive, and so forth. Even the form of the body deforms. You have to keep doing things to maintain it.

So the aggregates are a type of karma. And just as the Buddha describes the present moment as a combination of past and present karma, he describes the aggregates as a combination of past and present actions. Past actions provide the raw material, the potentials from which you then fabricate actual aggregates in the present moment. And as the Buddha notes, you fabricate them for the sake of something—usually, your ideas of happiness.

But the Buddha notes that you do this out of ignorance, so that you actually end up fabricating suffering. Suffering is not something of which you’re just on the receiving end. It’s something you’re actually doing.

Now, part of your ignorance is that you rarely think in terms of aggregates. It’s like being told that when you drink water, you’re drinking hydrogen and oxygen. But you do know the aggregates in their mode as clinging-aggregates. You are very familiar with what you make out of them through clinging.

The Buddha lists four types of clinging:

The first is clinging to sensuality: This is your habit of looking for pleasure by fantasizing and planning sensual pleasures: sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations. We spend more time in our fantasies than we do in actually enjoying sensual pleasures, and we can have very strong opinions—and even define ourselves very strongly—around the kinds of sensual pleasure we fantasize about and those that we don’t fantasize about.

The second form of clinging is clinging to views, particularly about what the world is, what the universe is, our place in the world, and especially what pleasures and happiness are possible in this world.

The third form of clinging is clinging to habits and practices: our views about how we should act, how other people should act, what actions we think are appropriate for finding happiness. Even criminals are very attached to their ideas of how they should act to find happiness.

The fourth form of clinging is clinging to doctrines of the self: your ideas about who you are, your place in the cosmos, and what you’re capable of doing to find happiness.

These are all things that we cling to very strongly, because they constitute what the Buddha calls becoming: the process by which we identify what we want, the world in which the things we want are located, what actions should and shouldn’t be done to find what we want, and our ability to find the happiness we want. We feel that when we have these issues pinned down, we’ll know how to act. Which is why we cling to them, and feel threatened when they change, or when other people deny them. Only when things are nailed down do we feel that we live in a world where we can confidently look for happiness. We crave the security of a world we can understand and manipulate for our own purposes, which is why we keep clinging to our views of reality and our place in it.

Yet the Buddha points out that all these notions that we cling to for security are made of aggregates—feelings, perceptions, thought-fabrications, etc.—that are very unstable and require constant upkeep and management. That’s why clinging is suffering.

So the problem he faced as a teacher was how to get people to let go of the things that are making them suffer and yet they cling to dearly. The problem is compounded by the fact that the word for clinging—upādānā—can also mean to feed.

We’re feeding off our ideas of our self and the world, so it’s going to be hard to stop feeding in this way.

The Buddha’s solution to this problem was to teach us to change our feeding habits by looking for pleasure and sustenance in skillful forms of clinging along the path. Think of the image of the raft: We’re on one shore of a river where there’s danger. There’s safety on the far shore. We have to build a raft out of the things we find on this shore: the five clinging-aggregates. We then cross over the river and, when we reach the safety of the far shore, we can let go of the raft. But while we’re still crossing the river, we need to hold on. Otherwise, our old forms of clinging will sweep us away to whirlpools and monsters downstream.

We cling to the raft in four skillful ways:

We cling to a view of the world in which karma has power, and our skillful intentions can lead us to the end of suffering.

We cling to the habits and practices of generosity, virtue, and meditation.

We cling to a view of ourselves as being confident that we will benefit from following the path, confident that we can do it, and responsible in seeing that we stick to the path in spite of difficulties.

Instead of clinging to sensuality, we cling to the finer pleasures of mastering right concentration. This accomplishes two things: (1) It weans us off our unskillful feeding habits, helping us see that the happiness of a centered mind is much greater than the happiness provide by the world, And (2) it helps us get familiar with the aggregates from which our clingings are constructed.

Let’s focus on the second point, on how the act of doing concentration gets you familiar with the activities of the five aggregates.

To begin with, to get the mind in a good state of concentration, grounded in the present moment, you start with form: the breath and other properties of the body as you sense them from within.

Then there’s the feeling of pleasure that you try to create through the way you breathe.

There are the perceptions of how the in-and-out breath connects with the other energies in the body in a way that allow that feeling of pleasure to be maintained and spread through the body.

Thought-fabrications start with the intention to stay with the breath, along with the directed thoughts and evaluations by which you analyze how well the breath and the mind are staying together, and what needs to be done to keep them together.

Consciousness is what’s aware of all this.

As you master concentration, you are not only dealing directly with the aggregates, you’re also seeing that the Buddha was right: They’re activities that you keep on doing. Concentration is a kind of karma: It’s not a place of shelter where you can simply rest. It’s something you have to keep on fabricating, as we noted on the first morning of the retreat. It’s a shelter where the roof and walls have to be constantly repaired.

As you get more sensitive, you begin to yearn for a pleasure that doesn’t have to be maintained. You look at the world around you, and now that you’re familiar with the aggregates, you see that your sense of the world and your place in the world is composed of aggregates. They’re not as solid or reliable as you used to think. There’s nowhere in space or time where you want to go.

The Buddha provides perceptions to help you see the world in this way. This is where he brings in the three perceptions of inconstancy, stress, and not-self. You see that anything you fabricate, because it’s composed of actions, has to be inconstant. To look for security in inconstant things is stressful: It’s like trying to sit comfortably on a chair whose legs are uneven. And compared to the prospect of the third noble truth, anything that’s inconstant and stressful is not worth claiming as you or yours.

The Buddha supplements these perceptions with images: Three of the images deal with the image of the river in flood. Form is like a glob of foam floating down the river; feelings are like bubbles that form and disappear on the surface of the river when it rains. Neither foam nor bubbles are things that offer any safety. As for the other aggregates, perceptions are like mirages; fabrications are like a banana tree in that there’s no core or essence to them; and consciousness is like a magic show, making things appear and disappear in a flash.

When you see the truth of these perceptions, and agree with the value judgment they imply—that there’s no security in anything composed of aggregates—that’s when the mind lets go. It sees no more value in fabricating the present moment—either for its own sake or for the sake of the future—so it drops all present-moment intentions. And that’s when the opening to the deathless occurs: a happiness outside of space and time that isn’t fabricated and doesn’t need to be maintained. That’s the end of suffering.

It was this experience, by the way, that taught the Buddha about the power of karma. His skillful karma was what got him to the threshold of this experience, but more than that. When present intentions dropped away, space and time and the present moment dropped away as well. That’s how he knew that present karma was required for there to be an experience of the present moment.

The fact that he survived this experience and came back to his experience of the six senses showed him the power of past karma: That’s what brought him back and enabled him to keep on teaching until all his karma—past and present—came to an end.

The texts say that the Buddha and all other fully awakened people still have intentions until the moment of their death, but their intentions no longer create karmic consequences. The image in the texts is that they burn their karmic seeds as soon as they create them, but how they do that, and what it means, we’d have to be fully awakened ourselves to understand. Just leave it as one of the many amazing things about fully awakened beings that the Buddha said only fully awakened beings can understand. As for the rest of us, we can still take heart in the fact that it is possible to reach a state where karma no longer has power over us. The freedom of that state may be hard to comprehend, but it does offer us hope: that there can come a day when our minds will be totally freed.