Okay, good evening everyone.
Welcome to our weekly Dhamma session.
These days we're going through the Majjhima Nikaya.
It's a group of discourses of the Buddha that we call, we say, middle length.
They're not too long and not too short.
There are long ones that are also not too long, but they're longer.
And there are also short ones, which are not too short.
But these are the middle-length ones, which, to put them in a special place is sort of just the right size for consumption.
Yeah, useful for our purposes.
which our purposes are to provide inspiration and insight into meditation practice.
So we're trying to pick topics that will be useful and beneficial for meditators to help us free ourselves.
Really our meditation is about
changing the way we look at the world and opening up our hearts to the way things actually are.
Helping us to see that a lot of the way we look at the world is flawed.
And there's so many reasons for that.
Reasons of culture, religion, also parents and role models.
Some of it's just due to chance.
The way culture evolves is sometimes just due to chance, the way beliefs evolve.
You think of that story of Henny Penny who said, the sky is falling.
How something happens and it creates beliefs.
that spread.
The point being that much of our belief system and our way of looking at the world is makeshift.
We do the best we can.
Some of us do better than others.
Some do quite poorly and end up with views that cause them great suffering and stress.
Some do better.
Some are lucky enough, and I would say lucky is really the right word, but happen upon a way that is actually beneficial and leads to happiness.
Our intention, and the Buddha's intention really in teaching, was to clear all that up and provide some direction that if examined, followed, and
and observed as far as results, one would be able to see that, hmm, this is the way things actually are.
Much different than just the way I believe things to be.
Some of the suttas I've been skipping here, he goes over this again and again.
Belief turns out to be two, turns out one of two ways, right or wrong, basically, is what he says.
Your
Your religious books can say things and you say, well, it says in this book.
It can turn out one of two ways.
It can be tradition.
It can be all sorts of, because your teacher, well, these famous charismatic teachers say this.
It can turn out one of two ways.
So today we're looking at the Pancha Daya Sutta, which is an interesting name.
It means five and three.
It doesn't really say what the five and the three are, but I think I have an idea.
Again, I'm not going to go mainly through the Sutta, or completely through the Sutta.
I encourage you to read it, as with all of them.
But again, we're more interested in what sort of lesson it has for us.
And what this Sutta is really talking about
The five is referring to five types of view, mainly about the self.
And the three is talking about the three time periods.
One gets caught up in views about the future, about the past, or one gets caught up about the present.
That's what the sutta did.
It has a really interesting take on all three of these that I think is useful for meditators.
So hopefully there's some benefit here.
So the five, we don't really have to enumerate them.
I mean, four of them have to do with self and really have to do with the future.
We're talking about the three time periods.
The three is the three time periods.
And really what this...
sums up, I think, quite well.
It sums up a lot, if not all, of spirituality gone wrong.
And that's, I mean, it's harsh to say gone wrong, but I have to unpack this because
According, Buddhism sees, the Buddha saw the whole of the universe.
I'm not just talking about the physical universe, but all the realms of being.
He called this samsara.
We know this term, it's familiar.
And in that context, in the context of calling this all samsara, anything that keeps you in samsara is wrong.
And it's a very specific sort of wrong because someone can do right things in samsara, right?
Someone can be a good person and go to heaven.
And you would say, well, that's the right thing.
You did the right thing.
So we might not call it wrong.
I don't want to be too harsh, but limited.
We would call it spirituality that doesn't lead to a concrete goal or freedom, let's say.
It leads to samsara, to wandering around in circles.
Being born again is the idea.
And so the only thing in Buddhism that can be different is what he calls the cessation of formations, right?
What does he call?
The cessation of formations
But let's start at the start.
So people believe in self.
And belief in self, I'll pull that out of the sutta because that's a very important thing to pull out and talk about.
Clearly you don't have to have the Buddha point out how important the self is, soul, I.
how important that is, in Western thought anyway.
I don't know if you could argue that in other cultures, various cultures, there are various levels of this, but I think it's fair to say that most cultures, most people in the world have a strong sense of self, and that's very important to them.
In the Buddha's time, it was very important, and it was disturbing for people that the Buddha would denounce their views.
And so a lot of Buddhists have been quick to say that the Buddha thought there was no Self.
Other Buddhists have been quick to say that the Buddha never said that, and the Buddha didn't teach there was no Self, and the Buddha didn't deny the existence of the Self.
And so we get all these different conflicting ideas and arguments.
People believe in self.
They have this idea that particularly the Buddha refers to future.
The idea that the soul continues on.
The soul continues on and is aware and unimpaired after death.
And then some other people, some people see that as limited.
And we're dwelling a little bit into the way they thought in India because it might not seem that familiar, but I can show how it actually is quite familiar.
If you think about the Hindu concept, the popular Hindu concept of samsara,
It's that the soul is born again and again and again and it's part of this endless illusion of the world.
And so someone would maybe be quick to say, that's not leading anywhere.
And that to do that again and again and again is
It's missing something.
And so there was a lot of talk about moksha in India and this idea of something beyond that.
And so they would have these concepts of the soul becoming one with everything, one with God.
You've probably heard of these concepts.
And I sort of thought this was kind of an Indian concept.
And, you know, when you think of Christianity, take Christianity because it's the other big one that talks about heaven.
Talks about the afterlife.
Judaism, not so much.
I guess Islam as well, but I don't know too much about it.
So my thought, my concept of Christianity was that, you know, it's like fluffy clouds and people with rings around their heads and wings and stuff.
The pearly gates and all that.
But I was just reading today, actually, Simone Weil is this Christian mystic.
And someone said to her, well, if we don't see you in this life, I'll see you in the next.
And she said, there will be no knowing each other in the next, something like that.
So there's a deeper sense, a deeper spirituality beyond this wandering on that sort of has the idea that there's some state of, some higher state to just being born again and again or even going to heaven.
It's becoming one with everything and so on.
There are other people who try to jump even further and say, oh no, no, that's still limited.
What is that state?
So what?
So you're up in some oneness state.
And they talk about something even, I don't want to go into this in too detail, but they talk about deeper states that are neither percipient nor non-percipient.
And the fourth type are of course the annihilationists, the people who believe that when you die there's nothing.
That should be more familiar.
There's a lot of people in the West who, in our culture, who believe there's nothing after death.
When we die, that's it.
A lot of people have trouble with Buddhism, even though they want to, they agree with so much of it, but then really have trouble with the idea that there might be something after death.
It's just so fantastical and unsubstantiated, they would say.
Right?
We don't see any afterlife here.
What we see is people being born and then they die, and when they die, that's it.
The fifth type of person asserts Nibbana here and now.
That's what it says.
It means the fifth type of person is special.
That's what we're going to talk about at the very end.
But this type of person gets caught in the present.
So the first four are really about the future.
It's kind of a mixed up numbering system here, so I'm not really...
I'm sorry if it sounds a bit confusing, because it kind of is.
But first about the future, and particularly about the self.
So whether it be about our concepts of what happens after we die, or our concept of the self,
What the Buddha says about all of these is that they're gross, they're coarse.
Which is important.
The Buddha doesn't say it's true.
And I've said this several times.
The Buddha never says there is no self.
People hear this about the Buddha, that the Buddha taught non-self and so on, and they wonder, could there really be no self?
What would that even mean?
They get very confused.
And the confusion is coarse.
The confusion is on this level, the same level of believing in a self.
Whether you believe in a self or doubt a self, the doubt about a self, you're in the realm of coarseness, of a mind state that is not useful, not helpful.
It's very important that we understand how the Buddha replied, that a person who wanted to give the right answer would not say, no, no, Buddhism teaches that there is no self, that's wrong, really there is no self.
A person would say, your beliefs in self are just causing you stress and suffering, getting in your way, they're coarse.
And that's how the Buddha replied, that's how the Buddha taught, he said,
Having found something better, having seen there is this, having known there is this, seeing the escape from that, the tathagata has gone beyond that.
So there is this is referring to the freedom to this state of reality really.
If you want to paraphrase that you could say, having seen reality,
He shakes his head at all these views that people have.
Because if in your mind you say to yourself, there is a self, what's going on in that moment?
In that moment the mind has some activity, there is some mental activity.
In fact, even to say the mind has would be just a convention.
All that we know, all that really is happening is an experience of thought.
The conception, there is a self.
Same thing if you say there isn't a self.
Same thing if you say, I'm not sure, is there a self?
Or you worry about it.
What will happen to me if there's no self?
All of that is experience.
And having seen this, the Buddha has no use for such views.
Buddhists should have no use for such arguments or debates.
Because they're seeing experience.
They're too busy with reality to get caught up in
All that stuff.
And so it's a bit of a cop out because it doesn't answer the question.
The question that people often have is,
What proof do you have?
What evidence do you have that there's anything after you die?
The first three we can easily discard by saying these people are just caught up in their views.
But we say the same thing about the fourth person, a person who says after death there's nothing.
This person is also caught up in their views, which is sort of a callback because we're just, we don't have time, it's almost like we don't have time to entertain it.
It's like, pfft.
Let go of that.
There's too much going on and you've got to worry about the future.
You've got to be concerned about where this is leading you.
The Buddha says, such a person who gets caught up in this idea that there's nothing after death is still caught up and they're going to go to a bad place when they die.
He doesn't give proof or evidence.
which I think in the West we often want this evidence that there is some life after death.
I've talked about this before.
My take on it is the burden of proof lies on the people who say experience stops at the moment of death.
We know that experience exists.
We have first-hand evidence.
I can look and see, yes, there's experience, that's true, and yes, it continues on moment after moment after moment.
But a person who says something is going to happen to you that's going to stop this, I would say, well, prove it.
Provide me with evidence.
And they show me the dead person and I say, that has nothing to do with experience.
I don't know anything about that being's experience.
All I know is that this experience continues unimpeded.
If you start to look at reality in this way, it makes so much, it resonates with you.
This way of looking at the world resonates because there's laws to it.
If you do bad things, bad things happen to you.
If you're mean and nasty, it corrupts your mind.
If you're attached and greedy, you become addicted.
We can see how this works.
The idea that a death that just stops, it creates a whole host of problems.
That's probably where a lot of religion came from.
The ideas of heaven and God and so on.
Thinking of something higher when in fact this is all there is.
All there is, is these experiences.
Death doesn't stop that.
If you think it does, you gotta prove it.
But this suit isn't really about that question.
It's about, again, states of mind and the state of a person's mind when they believe and hold on to any of these things instead of being mindful and doing the work that needs to be done to purify their mind, really.
Which is, according to Buddhism, the most important thing, that we make our minds free from defilement.
All these views and opinions don't really matter.
So a second type of person has lots of views about the past.
Moving right along, we'll talk about that.
Speculation about the past.
He labels it as speculation about the past, but we could broaden it a little bit and talk about speculation about the world, because he says the self and world are eternal.
Not entirely about the past.
You could say that.
I'm not going to argue with the Buddha.
But just to keep it simple, we're talking about views about
What do we call metaphysics or cosmology?
I guess it's called metaphysics.
It's about the nature of the world.
There's too many.
There's a whole bunch.
There's 16 of them.
I'm not going to go into them.
But it's about the self and the world.
It's about the nature of the world and a lot about past life, I would guess.
If you're the idea of who you were before.
He doesn't talk about that, though.
And that's not because I think in the West we're not so
I know a lot of our listeners have this sort of question, who was I in my past life?
And the Buddha talks about that in other places.
He's not talking about it here.
There's speculation about the world, really.
What is the nature of the world?
They speculate that we could turn maybe to the way religion looks at the world.
Religion has all sorts of views like the world was created in seven days, six days, six days.
Some people believe, what's this belief that the world is on the back of a turtle?
There's this funny belief that it's kind of derisive.
Atheists will talk about if the earth is on the back of a turtle, then what's the turtle on the back of?
And the person who was arguing said, oh, it's turtles all the way down.
Something like that.
which they deride because it's not very well thought out.
It doesn't answer the question.
It's called infinite regress.
But lots of views.
Views about the way things are.
Views about the self.
Views about the world.
If you think of all the religious views, how Hindus believe that this is just an illusion.
These things aren't actually here.
This is God giving us something to play with or God playing with us or something like that.
We're not actually born and die.
We're actually seeing and none of these things are actually here.
It's all just illusion.
People believe what leads to heaven.
These terrorists who believe that if you kill people or kill yourself, you'll go to heaven.
And Christians believe that if you put your faith in Jesus Christ, you'll go to heaven.
Lots of different beliefs.
And what the Buddha says about these beliefs is that
Well, it's important to distinguish.
It's important because we fall into the habit of subsisting on belief, thinking that it's enough that I believe such and such.
We gain comfort from our beliefs.
I've met so many people in my time teaching, so many people who have such strange beliefs.
And you can hear it in their voice that they feel like it's enough.
They shouldn't have to justify themselves or prove or provide evidence.
It's satisfactory as a human being.
You've kind of done your job as a spiritual being to believe something.
We talk about believing in something.
And I hope it's clear that that's not really sufficient.
You can believe in the very wrong thing.
Having belief in something is by no means support for it being useful, beneficial, let alone true.
And so the Buddha says, make a claim of knowing what's true.
And that we all tend to.
not just as Buddhists.
As Buddhists we tend to make these claims because of our experiences, because of how empirical our practice is.
And that's important to remind ourselves, you know, I've seen what's real.
This is real.
Real is experience.
And so he says that anyone
could know for themselves, basically put it this way, that anyone could investigate reality and find evidence for all these crazy views is impossible.
I mean the Buddha knows that, knew that.
All of us through our practice, if you practice
It's not, we don't call it practicing Buddhism.
If you practice looking at reality, you'll see the same thing the Buddha did.
I mean, you'll only see one thing, whatever it is.
And it won't be all these crazy views, which come out of very different, many different things.
the most common is they come out of extrapolation, where you experience one thing and you extrapolate it to be something much, much more.
Like you feel bliss or peace, and every religious tradition out there will interpret it in a different way.
The same experience of peace.
So Buddhism would say, well, it's an experience of peace.
And in fact, it does.
So let's move right along to the third section.
When we get stuck in the present, some people are able to avoid these, what the Buddha calls future and past clingings.
Clingings to what happens to us in the future and clingings to about how the world has gotten the way it is and I guess how the way the world is.
And they only focus on the present and they become enlightened in the present according to them.
So some people find, what does he call, he has layers here, abides in the rapture of seclusion.
They give up views about the past, they give up sensual pleasure, and they enter into the rapture of seclusion.
It means their mind is secluded, peaceful.
And they think, this is the peaceful, this is the sublime, this is nibbana.
They enter into the rapture of seclusion, this rapture, this blissful state.
And then that state ends.
And they scramble to get back, and when it doesn't come back, they experience grief.
With the cessation of the rapture of seclusion, grief arises.
With the cessation of grief, the rapture of seclusion arises.
And the Tathagata, this is a word for Buddha, understands that is conditioned and gross.
This is a refrain that goes throughout the sutta.
That is conditioned and gross, but there is
but there is instead the cessation of formations.
Having known there is this, seeing the escape from that, the tathagata has gone beyond that.
So in this case, I mean, it's not bad to feel rapture of seclusion, but it's coarse and conditioned.
It's limited.
It's not an ultimate good.
It's problematic because it's impermanent, because you can't control it.
So another person goes beyond that and they experience unworldly pleasure.
Some people experience just complete calm and quiet, neither painful nor pleasant feeling.
So they'll come and they'll explain it as this perfect tranquility, stillness of mind, emptiness.
The Buddha says, neither painful nor pleasant feeling.
quite utilitarian description, which really cuts to the point.
You can have all sorts of flowery, you can say this is oneness with God or oneness with the universe.
Dude, it's just a feeling.
And the Buddha says, this is course.
This is gross.
This is conditioned.
What does conditioned mean?
Conditioned means it comes about because of causes.
You did something and you got there.
But the nature of conditioned things is they rely upon the support.
And when you stop supporting them, they disappear.
And to someone even...
So these people who attain these states, and if they get deep into these states, they can think to themselves, I am at peace, I have attained nibbana, I am without clinging.
Now it's possible for someone to attain Nibbana and have that sort of thought, hey, I've attained Nibbana and I'm without clinging.
But there are many, many people and many examples of people who have the idea that they're free, that they've attained enlightenment, when in fact they haven't.
And of course the way to tell is, do they have clinging?
Is there some attachment?
Which really you can only find through being mindful.
You can only see through strict and objective observation.
If you take our practice, the practice that we do, none of this really is a problem.
You're able to see how glaringly problematic all of this is and how at odds it is with the very simple truth of reality.
You can see yourself holding on to views, holding on to your outlook and your beliefs.
And so the Buddha said, I teach the supreme state of sublime peace, which is liberation through not clinging.
Really what we're trying to do is to work on our clinging.
Look at the things that we cling to, the things that we like and enjoy and want and strive for, and try to see them objectively.
doesn't mean we're trying to see them without clinging, we're trying to look at them and answer the question of whether they're worth clinging to, or not even asking that question, but look at them clearly to see the unfortunate truth that none of them are worth clinging to, and that unfortunately we've been clinging to things that are not worth clinging to, that in fact nothing is worth clinging to, not even the view that I have attained Nibbana, not even the idea of attaining Nibbana,
And that is the Panchataya Sutta.
Some interesting insights.
Definitely worth a read, but for now I hope it's been somehow insightful and helpful to direct our attention in our meditation practice.
That's the Dhamma for tonight.
Thank you all for tuning in.