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← In the Buddha’s Words Summary, Notes and Highlights

In the Buddha’s Words Chapter VI. Deepening One’s Perspective on the World

Author: Bhikku Bodhi Publisher: Wisdom Publications. Somerville, MA. Publish Date: 2005-6-28 Review Date: 2022-3-11 Status:📚

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  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3211 A blissful heavenly rebirth, however, is not the final purpose for which the Buddha taught the Dhamma. At best it is only a temporary waystation. The ultimate goal is the cessation of suffering, and the bliss of the heavens, no matter how blissful, is not the same as the cessation of suffering.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3214 all states of existence within the round of rebirths, even the heavens, are transient, unreliable, bound up with pain. Thus the ultimate aim of the Dhamma is nothing short of liberation, which means total release from the round of birth and death.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3216 What lies beyond the round of rebirths is an unconditioned state called Nibbāna.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3808 when he has completed the entire lifespan of those devas, he goes to hell, to the animal realm, and to the domain of spirits. But the Blessed One’s disciple remains there all his life, and when he has completed the entire lifespan of those devas, he attains final Nibbāna in that very same state of existence. This is the difference, the disparity, the distinction between the instructed noble disciple and the uninstructed worldling, that is, with regard to destination and rebirth. (AN 4:125; II 128–29)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3216 Nibbāna transcends the conditioned world, yet it can be attained within conditioned existence, in this very life, and experienced as the extinction of suffering.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3218 The realization of Nibbāna comes with the blossoming of wisdom and brings perfect peace, untarnished happiness, and the stilling of the mind’s compulsive drives.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3219 Nibbāna is the destruction of thirst, the thirst of craving.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3221 To guide his spiritually mature disciples toward Nibbāna, the Buddha had to steer them beyond the blissful rewards that could be won in a future life by performing wholesome deeds. He did so through the “supramundane” facets of his teaching, those aspects designed to lead disciples beyond the “triple world” of sense-sphere existence, form-sphere existence, and formless existence.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3253 To follow the Buddha in the direction he wants to lead us, we have to learn to see beneath the surface glitter of pleasure, position, and power that usually enthralls us, and at the same time, to learn to see through the deceptive distortions of perception, thought, and views that habitually cloak our vision.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3255 Ordinarily, we represent things to ourselves through the refractory prism of subjective biases. These biases are shaped by our craving and attachments, which they in turn reinforce. We see things that we want to see; we blot out things that threaten or disturb us, that shake our complacency, that throw into question our comforting assumptions about ourselves and our lives. To undo this process involves a commitment to truth that is often unsettling, but in the long run proves exhilarating and liberating.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3259 To help us transform our understanding and deepen our perspective on the world, he offers us three standpoints from which we can appraise the values by which we order our lives. These three standpoints also represent three “moments” or steps in an unfolding process of insight that starts from our common-sense attitudes and moves strategically toward higher knowledge, enlightenment, and release.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3262 The three moments are: gratification (ass̄da), danger (ādīnava), and escape (nissarạa).

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3267 one begins by recognizing the indubitable fact that such worldly phenomena as sense objects, forms, and feelings give us some degree of gratification. This gratification consists in the pleasure and joy (sukha-somanassa) we experience when we succeed in fulfilling our desires. Once we acknowledge this fact, we can then probe deeper by asking whether such pleasure and joy are entirely satisfactory.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3366 ‘Whatever pleasure and joy there is in the world, this is the gratification in the world (AN 3:101 §§1–2; I 258–59)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3270 If we address this question with utter honesty, in a dispassionate frame of mind, we will realize that such pleasure and joy are far from satisfactory. To the contrary, they are saddled with drawbacks and defects ranging from the trifling to the catastrophic, defects that we perpetually hide from ourselves so that we can continue unhindered in our quest for gratification. This is their danger, the second moment or step of observation.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3273 The most pervasive danger lurking behind the innocent façade of our worldly pleasures is their inherent nature of being impermanent (anicca), bound up with suffering and discontent (dukkha), and subject to inevitable change and decay (vipariṇāmadhamma).

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3366 that the world is impermanent, bound up with suffering, and subject to change, this is the danger in the world (AN 3:101 §§1–2; I 258–59

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3275 The third moment, the moment of escape,

  • Highlight - Location 3276 “Escape” here is not escapism, a word that implies an anxious attempt to avoid facing one’s problems by pretending they don’t exist and losing oneself in distractions. True escape is quite the opposite:

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3279 Once we see that the objects of our attachment are flawed, beset with hidden dangers, we then realize that the way of escape lies in dropping our attachment to them.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3366 the removal and abandoning of desire and lust for the world, this is the escape from the world.’ (AN 3:101 §§1–2; I 258–59)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3286 three major objects of attachment: sensual pleasures, bodily form, and feelings.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3287 It begins with a close-up view of the tribulations that a “clansman”—a young householder pursuing the ancient Indian counterpart of a professional career—might undergo in his quest for sensual gratification.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3411 the danger in the case of sensual pleasures? (MN 13: Mahādukkhakkhandha Sutta; I 84–90)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3412 Here, monks, on account of the craft by which a clansman makes a living—whether checking, accounting, calculating, farming, trading, husbandry, archery, the royal service, or whatever craft it may be—he has to face cold and heat; he is injured by contact with gadflies, mosquitoes, wind, sun, and creeping things; he risks death by hunger and thirst. Now this is a danger in the case of sensual pleasures, a mass of suffering visible in this present life, (MN 13: Mahādukkhakkhandha Sutta; I 84–90)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3416 “If no property comes to the clansman while he works and strives and makes an effort thus, he sorrows, grieves, and laments, he weeps beating his breast and becomes distraught, crying: ‘My work is in vain, my effort is fruitless!’ Now this too is a danger in the case of sensual pleasures, a mass of suffering visible in this present life, (MN 13: Mahādukkhakkhandha Sutta; I 84–90)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3419 “If property comes to the clansman while he works and strives and makes an effort thus, he experiences pain and grief in protecting it: (MN 13: Mahādukkhakkhandha Sutta; I 84–90)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3421 as he guards and protects his property, kings or thieves make off with it, or fire burns it, or water sweeps it away, or unloved heirs make off with it. And he sorrows, grieves, and laments, he weeps beating his breast and becomes distraught, crying: ‘I no longer have my property!’ Now this too is a danger in the case of sensual pleasures, a mass of 8suffering visible in this present life (MN 13: Mahādukkhakkhandha Sutta; I 84–90)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3288 the scope of the examination widens from the personal to the collective, encompassing the broader social and political consequences of this quest. It reaches its climax in striking images of the warfare and human devastation that follow from the frenzied mass drive for sensual gratification.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3425 “Again, with sensual pleasures as the cause … kings quarrel with kings, khattiyas with khattiyas, brahmins with brahmins, householders with householders; mother quarrels with son, son with mother, father with son, son with father; brother quarrels with brother, brother with sister, sister with brother, friend with friend. And here in their quarrels, brawls, and disputes they attack each other with fists, clods, sticks, or knives, whereby they incur death or deadly suffering. Now this too is a danger in the case of sensual pleasures, a mass of suffering visible in this present life, (MN 13: Mahādukkhakkhandha Sutta; I 84–90)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3438 “Again, with sensual pleasures as the cause … men break into houses, plunder wealth, commit burglary, ambush highways, seduce others’ wives, and when they are caught, kings have many kinds of torture inflicted on them … whereby they incur death or deadly suffering. Now this too is a danger in the case of sensual pleasures, a mass of suffering visible in this present life, (MN 13: Mahādukkhakkhandha Sutta; I 84–90)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3441 “Again, with sensual pleasures as the cause … people indulge in misconduct of body, speech, and mind. Having done so, on the breakup of the body, after death, they are reborn in a state of misery, in a bad destination, in the lower world, in hell. Now this is a danger in the case of sensual pleasures, a mass of suffering in the life to come, (MN 13: Mahādukkhakkhandha Sutta; I 84–90)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3318 Craving for sensual pleasures is one trap that keeps beings bound to the round of rebirths. Another major trap is attachment to views.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3320 The most dangerous of wrong views are those that deny or undermine the foundations of ethics.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3321 a number of perils posed by this type of wrong view; prominent among them is rebirth in the lower realms. Views also lead to one-sided, biased interpretations of reality that we cling to as accurate and complete.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3323 People who cling tenaciously to their own views of a particular situation often come into conflict with those who view the same situation in a different light. Views thus give rise to conflicts and disputes.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3325 parable of the blind men and the elephant,

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3773 Now at that time a number of ascetics and brahmins, (Ud 6:4; 67–69)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3774 held various views, beliefs, and opinions, and propagated various views. And they were quarrelsome, disputatious, wrangling, wounding each other with verbal darts, saying, “The Dhamma is like this, the Dhamma is not like that! (Ud 6:4; 67–69)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3780 “Formerly, monks, there was a king in Sāvatthī who addressed a man and asked him to round up all the persons in the city who were blind from birth. When the man had done so, the king asked the man to show the blind men an elephant. To some of the blind men he presented the head of the elephant, to some the ear, to others a tusk, the trunk, the body, a foot, the hindquarters, the tail, or the tuft at the end of the tail. And to each one he said, ‘This is an elephant.’ (Ud 6:4; 67–69)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3783 “When he reported to the king what he had done, the king went to the blind men and asked them, ‘Tell me, blind men, what is an elephant like?’ (Ud 6:4; 67–69)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3785 “Those who had been shown the head of the elephant replied, ‘An elephant, your majesty, is just like a water jar.’ Those who had been shown the ear replied, ‘An elephant is just like a winnowing basket.’ Those who had been shown the tusk replied, ‘An elephant is just like a plowshare.’ Those who had been shown the trunk replied, ‘An elephant is just like a plow pole.’ Those who had been shown the body replied, ‘An elephant is just like a storeroom.’ And each of the others likewise described the elephant in terms of the part they had been shown. (Ud 6:4; 67–69)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3789 “Then, saying, ‘An elephant is like this, an elephant is not like that! An elephant is not like this, an elephant is like that!’ they fought each other with their fists. And the king was delighted. Even so, monks, are the wanderers of other sects blind and sightless, and thus they become quarrelsome, disputatious, and wrangling, wounding each other with verbal darts.” (Ud 6:4; 67–69)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3290 “Form” is the physical body.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3291 consider a beautiful young girl. He then traces the progressive stages of her physical decay, through old age, sickness, death, and the eventual disintegration of the corpse until it is reduced to powdered bone.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3453 the gratification in the case of form? (MN 13: Mahādukkhakkhandha Sutta; I 84–90)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3453 Suppose there were a girl of the khattiya class or the brahmin class (MN 13: Mahādukkhakkhandha Sutta; I 84–90)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3455 “Now the pleasure and joy that arise in dependence on that beauty and loveliness are the gratification in the case of form. (MN 13: Mahādukkhakkhandha Sutta; I 84–90)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3457 the danger in the case of form?

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3457 Later on one might see that same woman here at eighty, ninety, or a hundred years, aged, as crooked as a roof bracket, doubled up, supported by a walking stick, tottering, frail, her youth gone, her teeth broken, gray-haired, scanty-haired, bald, wrinkled, with limbs all blotchy.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3459 What do you think, monks? Has her former beauty and loveliness vanished and the danger become evident?”—“Yes, venerable sir.”—“Monks, this is a danger in the case of form.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3292 To show the danger in “feeling,” the Buddha selects the feelings of a meditating monk in the jhānas, the meditative absorptions, the most refined mundane experiences of pleasure and peace. He points out that even these lofty feelings are impermanent, unsatisfactory, and subject to change.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3478 the gratification in the case of feelings? (MN 13: Mahādukkhakkhandha Sutta; I 84–90)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3479 Here, monks, quite secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, a monk enters upon and dwells in the first jhāna, (MN 13: Mahādukkhakkhandha Sutta; I 84–90)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3485 On that occasion he feels only feeling that is free from affliction. (MN 13: Mahādukkhakkhandha Sutta; I 84–90)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3486 The highest gratification in the case of feelings is freedom from affliction, I say. (MN 13: Mahādukkhakkhandha Sutta; I 84–90)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3486 “And what, monks, is the danger in the case of feelings? Feelings are impermanent, suffering, and subject to change. (MN 13: Mahādukkhakkhandha Sutta; I 84–90)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3488 “And what, monks, is the escape in the case of feelings? It is the removal of desire and lust, the abandonment of desire and lust for feelings. (MN 13: Mahādukkhakkhandha Sutta; I 84–90)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3300 sensual pleasures seem to be pleasurable only through a distortion of perception, but when seen rightly are like the fire in a burning charcoal pit—“painful to touch, hot, and scorching.”

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3585 “Suppose, Māgandiya, there was a leper with sores and blisters on his limbs, being devoured by worms, scratching the scabs off the openings of his wounds with his nails, cauterizing his body over a burning charcoal pit. Then his friends and companions, his kinsmen and relatives, would bring a physician to treat him. The physician would make medicine for him, and by means of that medicine the man would be cured of his leprosy and would become well and happy, independent, master of himself, able to go where he likes. Then he might see another leper (from MN 75: Māgandiya Sutta; I 504–8)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3590 What do you think, Māgandiya? Would that man envy that leper for his burning charcoal pit or his use of medicine?” “No, Master Gotama. Why is that? Because when there is sickness, there is need for medicine, and when there is no sickness there is no need for medicine.” (from MN 75: Māgandiya Sutta; I 504–8)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3594 “Suppose, Māgandiya, there was a leper with sores and blisters on his limbs, being devoured by worms, scratching the scabs off the openings of his wounds with his nails, cauterizing his body over a burning charcoal pit. Then his friends and companions, his kinsmen and relatives, brought a physician to treat him. The physician would make medicine for him, and by means of that medicine the man would be cured of his leprosy and would become well and happy, independent, master of himself, able to go where he likes. Then two strong men would seize him by both arms and drag him toward a burning charcoal pit. (from MN 75: Māgandiya Sutta; I 504–8)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3601 that fire is now painful to touch, hot, and scorching, and previously too that fire was painful to touch, hot, and scorching. For when that man was a leper with sores and blisters on his limbs, (from MN 75: Māgandiya Sutta; I 504–8)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3603 his faculties were impaired; thus, though the fire was actually painful to touch, he acquired a mistaken perception of it as pleasant.” (from MN 75: Māgandiya Sutta; I 504–8)

= Highlight(pink) - Location 3604 “So too, Māgandiya, in the past sensual pleasures were painful to touch, hot, and scorching; in the future sensual pleasures will be painful to touch, hot, and scorching; and now at present sensual pleasures are painful to touch, hot, and scorching. (from MN 75: Māgandiya Sutta; I 504–8)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3606 But these people who are not free from lust for sensual pleasures, who are devoured by craving for sensual pleasures, who burn with the fever of sensual pleasures, have faculties that are impaired; thus, though sensual pleasures are actually painful to touch, they acquire a mistaken perception of them as pleasant.9 (from MN 75: Māgandiya Sutta; I 504–8)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3609 “Suppose, Māgandiya, there was a leper with sores and blisters on his limbs, (from MN 75: Māgandiya Sutta; I 504–8)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3610 the more he scratches the scabs and cauterizes his body, the fouler, more evil-smelling, and more infected the openings of his wounds would become, yet he would find a certain measure of satisfaction and enjoyment in scratching the openings of his wounds. (from MN 75: Māgandiya Sutta; I 504–8)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3612 So too, Māgandiya, people who are not free from lust for sensual pleasures, who are devoured by craving for sensual pleasures, who burn with the fever of sensual pleasures, still indulge in sensual pleasures; the more they indulge in sensual pleasures, the more their craving for sensual pleasures increases and the more they are burned by the fever of sensual pleasures, yet they find a certain measure of satisfaction and enjoyment in dependence on the five cords of sensual pleasure.” (from MN 75: Māgandiya Sutta; I 504–8)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3303 Buddhist literature frequently advises us to contemplate the certainty of death and the uncertainty of the time of its arrival. This recommendation is not made to induce an attitude of chronic morbidity but to help us break our infatuation with life and develop detachment.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3618 “‘Short is the life of human beings, O brahmins, limited and brief; it is full of suffering, full of tribulation. This one should wisely understand. One should do good and live a pure life; for none who is born can escape death. (AN 7:70; IV 136–39)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3649 Meditate, monks, do not be negligent, or else you will regret it later. This is our instruction to you.” (AN 7:70; IV 136–39)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3326 eternalism (sassatav̄da) and annihilationism (ucchedav̄da), also called, respectively, the view of existence (bhavadiṭṭhi) and the view of nonexistence (vibhavadiṭṭhi).

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3328 Eternalism affirms an eternal component in the individual, an indestructible self, and an eternal ground of the world, such as an all-powerful creator God.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3794 Devas and human beings delight in existence, (It 49; 43–44)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3795 When the Dhamma is taught to them for the cessation of existence, their minds do not enter into it, acquire confidence in it, (It 49; 43–44)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3329 Annihilationism denies that there is any survival beyond death, holding that the individual comes to a complete end with the demise of the physical body.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3797 Now some are troubled, ashamed, and disgusted by this very same existence and they rejoice in nonexistence, saying, ‘In as much as this self, good sirs, is annihilated and destroyed with the breakup of the body and does not exist after death, this is peaceful, this is excellent, this is just so!’ (It 49; 43–44)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3331 As we will see below, the Buddha’s teaching of dependent origination avoids both these futile ends

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3800 a monk sees what has come to be as having come to be. Having seen it thus, he practices the course for disenchantment, for dispassion, for the cessation of what has come to be. (It 49; 43–44)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3333 a particular problem posed by eternalist views. Such views can inspire meditators to attain states of deep meditative bliss, which they interpret as union with a divine reality or realization of an eternal self. From the perspective of the Buddha’s teaching, however, such attainments merely create the karmic potential for rebirth into a realm in which that meditative experience becomes the fundamental condition of consciousness. In other words, the attainment of these states in the human realm generates rebirth into the corresponding planes in the realm of subtle form or the formless realm.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3338 The text cited here shows that certain meditators attain the four “divine abodes” and take rebirth in the corresponding planes of the brahma world, where they might abide even for as long as five hundred great eons. Eventually, however, they must inevitably pass away and may then fall into the unfortunate realms of rebirth.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3341 say the same respectively about realms of rebirth corresponding to the jhānas and the formless attainments.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3808 when he has completed the entire lifespan of those devas, he goes to hell, to the animal realm, and to the domain of spirits. But the Blessed One’s disciple remains there all his life, and when he has completed the entire lifespan of those devas, he attains final Nibbāna in that very same state of existence. This is the difference, the disparity, the distinction between the instructed noble disciple and the uninstructed worldling, that is, with regard to destination and rebirth. (AN 4:125; II 128–29)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3838 this saṃsāra is without discoverable beginning. A first point is not discerned (SN 15:3; II 179–80)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3839 beings roaming and wandering on hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving. (SN 15:3; II 179–80)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 3852 It is enough to experience revulsion toward all formations, (SN 15:3; II 179–80)

Notes

Total: 7

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