Okay, good evening everyone.
Welcome to our evening broadcast, evening Dhamma talk.
Tonight's topic is a challenging one.
It's not going to be long.
There's not too much to say, but...
I mean, sometimes we sugarcoat the truth.
I think I'm guilty of that, making Buddhism sound more pleasant or more accommodating than it actually is.
And the truth is, the Buddha really saw our situation as human beings as quite wretched.
There's no escaping that.
So when we talk about Buddhism as being pessimistic, we can deny it all we want.
But to some extent, it's not pessimistic.
I've talked about that.
That word has too much associated with it.
But it definitely doesn't look favorable upon it.
It makes a claim that you can argue.
You could say it's pessimistic because you might disagree with it.
But the argument is that our existence as human beings is quite wretched.
And it has very much to do with the fact that we're dependent.
We are as slaves, as sick people,
in ways that we don't realize.
We think that we're happy sometimes.
And we don't really understand what happiness is.
We think we do.
But what we think of as happiness turns out to be a cause for great suffering.
It turns out to be an inherent problem
with our way of looking at the world based on the fact that we are very much dependent and therefore at the mercy of the vicissitudes of life.
So this particular sutta, it's in the Sangyuta Nikaya, Nidana Sangyuta, which is a wonderful Sangyuta.
Sangyuta just means collection.
So it's this collection of discourses based around paticcasamuppada.
So if you want to learn about dependent origination, this is the chapter to read, the collection of suttas to read.
Sunyuta Nikaya is really wonderful.
It's just very, very big, so it's not an easy book to really go through.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't.
But this is number 63.
What's it called?
Puta Mangsupama Sutta.
Upama is a simile.
Mangsa means flesh and puta means son or child.
So the simile of the flesh of the child.
The sutta is actually about food.
I remember a few days ago, I think, or some days ago, I mentioned this as the first of the ten dharaka-panna, kumara-panna, the ten questions of the young child.
And the first one is, all beings subsist on food.
And I said there are four types of food.
Well, this sutta lays them out.
The four types of food are kabalinkahara, it's material food.
Pasahara, which is, or nutriment is a better word, the nutriment of contact.
The third is Manosanjetanahara, the nutriment of mental intention or volition.
And the fourth is Vijnanahara, which is the food of consciousness, the nourishment of consciousness and nutriment.
And so what it means by nutriment is again this dependency.
It's the cause.
I mean, the whole of this collection and really all of the Buddha's teaching is about seeing cause and effect, about learning how all of who we are and what we experience is dependent on causality.
We got the way we are for a reason.
And we learn about those reasons, and we realize how we're still becoming more and more based on the food that we take in, the nourishment, the nutriment.
If we take in bad, and if we take on bad, and if we cultivate the bad, then bad is the result.
If we cultivate the good, good is the result.
It's quite simple.
And so these four the Buddha laid out as sort of an outline of the kinds of things that have an effect on us.
The different kind of things that change us, that feed who we are.
And I said in the beginning, he sees it as quite wretched, this situation of dealing with these types of food.
They don't sound bad at all, I suppose, when we hear about them, because we're quite enamored with them.
But the Buddha, in this sutta, he lays out a description of these four.
So he said, how should you think of physical nutriment?
When we think of the food we eat, how should we think of it?
And he gives the simile of the flesh of the child.
The simile is this, or the example is this, the analogy, I guess, is this.
It's an allegory, I don't know, this story.
He says, imagine there was this couple, a husband and wife, a wife and husband, a woman and a man with their son, traveling through the desert.
They had to escape a plague or something.
And they hadn't brought much food with them, and they didn't realize how long it was.
And they get halfway through the desert, and they run out of food.
And so they're dying.
They're both dying, and their child is dying, and they can no longer nurse him because mother's breast milk dries up or whatever.
And he's certainly not advocating this, but what the husband and wife think to themselves is that they're all going to die.
And he's not advocating this.
This is not the teaching.
But he says, imagine that these two people, who are ordinary people, who have wrong ideas about things, decide that they're going to kill their child and eat his flesh, his or her flesh.
which is a horrific image, really.
But he purposefully makes it as horrific as possible, and he's not saying this is not horrific.
But what he says is, he says, do you think that this man and this woman who love their child dearly would eat that food for entertainment?
Do you think they'd sit around remarking on how delicious it is?
He asks the monks, would they eat it for enjoyment?
I mean, it's just the most awful example.
But he says, would they only eat it for crossing this desert?
And they say, yes, in this wretched state, that's what they would eat it for.
And he says, this is how you should see food.
This is how you should see food.
And what it does is it points out how wretched we are that we don't see this, our dependency on food.
We think it's great that we can eat, not seeing how ensnared we are, how caught up we are.
So it's a wake-up call for us to see using this food for pleasure is like chickens clocking about in the pen, having no clue that they're going to be slaughtered.
And it's the same because we go through our lives enjoying things like food or all the physical pleasures,
sights, sounds, smells, not just tastes, feelings.
And we suffer terribly for this because we become ensnared.
We become, well, at the very least, we're
hopelessly ignorant of the reality of our situation and so unable to deal with stress and suffering, unable to deal with old age, sickness, death, loss, trauma.
Instead we live our lives praying and hoping that these sorts of things don't happen to us.
I'm going to live forever, right?
Or at the very least I won't be
I won't meet with loss or trauma or trouble, difficulty.
But we are like this woman and man crossing the desert.
We are in a wretched situation where we need these things, where we are not independent of them.
And moreover, we are intoxicated by them.
We're caught up in food, how wonderful it is, how much happiness it brings us.
When in fact we can see that it's just bringing, we can see as we meditate, that it's just bringing us stress.
Like so many other physical things, it's
If we don't, it's something that we just need.
We can't be without.
And he says that, I mean, it's an optimistic teaching, though many people might not agree.
The optimism is when you realize this, you free yourself.
If you really see food in this way, not something to enjoy, something that's fraught with problems and caught up in the suffering of samsara, and you have no attachment to it,
Buddha said, if you understand this about food, then you understand all of the senses.
And he says, then there is no fetter.
And this is the key, is that happiness is freedom from the fetters, freedom from any fetter, freedom from any bondage.
So that whether you get food or don't get food, you're at peace.
Someone was asking me, why wouldn't an enlightened being just starve themselves?
And in fact, it apparently is something that's in the text.
There are enlightened beings who just wouldn't eat.
Not purposefully, perhaps, but would just not be concerned about going to get food.
And it's not like, certainly not the way of all enlightened beings, but there's nothing wrong with this.
I mean, the point is when you're enlightened, you're free.
You don't require food to be happy, to satiate you, to satisfy you, to console you.
I'm not sure how this teaching tonight is going to be taken.
It doesn't get any better from here.
I don't care.
Number two.
This is the real stuff.
No, this is the Buddha.
Number two is contact.
So what is the food of contact?
The Buddha says, suppose there was a flayed cow.
This is a word that might not be familiar to everyone.
F-L-A-Y-E-D. Flayed means whipped, right?
But flayed actually means the skin is broken.
So it's a cow that someone whipped, or maybe flayed is to use a different instrument, I'm not quite sure, but to the point where it starts to bleed.
And he says, if this cow were to stand exposed to a wall, well, the creatures dwelling in the wall would nibble at her.
If it stood exposed to a tree, then the creatures in the tree would nibble at her.
If she stands exposed to water, the creatures dwelling in the water would nibble at her.
If she stands exposed to open air, the flies in the air would nibble at her.
Whatever that flayed cloud stands exposed to, the creatures dwelling there would nibble at her.
See, he's setting up the most wretched example of contact.
This wretchedness of being susceptible to contact.
He doesn't see contact, he didn't see contact as positive in any way.
We normally think of contact as a great thing.
When you come in contact with pleasant sounds and sights, tastes, smells, feelings, particularly feelings.
Contact is all about feelings.
When you come in contact with something, it makes you happy.
We think of this as pleasure and that as pleasure, or this pleasure, that pleasure as happiness.
So the Buddha really did see all of this as tortuous, as a cause for all of our suffering.
And the real deep reason, you can try to explain it philosophically like, oh, because it changes and so on.
But the deep reason is simply because it arises and ceases.
It's incessant.
This is what you'll see in your practice as you get to these later stages.
You'll see things arising and ceasing and become equanimous towards them.
See that that's all it is.
It's a bunch of arising and ceasing.
It never stops.
You're incessantly hounded by experience and thereby contact.
This is what causes one to let go.
And the point being that it only hurts us because we have expectations and attachment to it.
Once we see it as this, as worthless, then we can experience it just fine.
The incessant nature of it, the hounding of experience is no longer hounding us because we no longer are susceptible to it.
no longer enamored by it or caught up by it.
All contact should be seen clearly.
This is not a or the way to find happiness.
That's number two.
Number three,
is mental volition, mental volition.
This is karma, our intentions.
When we want to kill someone, or want to hurt someone, or when we want to be happy, when we want food, when we want sex, when we want romance, music, anything.
When we want to be free from suffering,
mental volition, when we're inclined towards something.
And the Buddha, again, saw this as wretched.
Even our volitions, our desires, our ambitions, wretched he saw them.
He said, imagine, here's another allegory, I think, is imagine there was a charcoal pit, a big pit with blazing hot embers.
glowing coals.
Have you ever seen one of these pits where they put coals and it's just a pit of very hot?
And then a man came along and then someone who didn't want to die, desiring happiness and averse to suffering.
Then two strong men would grab him by one arm and drag him towards the charcoal pit.
What do you think that man's volition would be?
That man's volition would be to get far away.
His longing would be to get far away.
He would wish, his wish would be to get far away from the charcoal pit.
And he said, this is how you should, for what reason?
Because if I fall into this charcoal pit, he says, this is how you should see mental volition.
It's the most wretched.
You think of this and this is wretched.
This man wants something so bad, right?
And in fact, the funny thing is, it's hard to believe if you've never really studied or, of course, practiced
the Buddha's teaching.
But it's not actually the charcoal pit that's going to make him suffer.
If he was okay about being dragged somehow, amazingly okay with being dragged towards the charcoal pit and okay with having his skin burnt up and okay with the pain and okay with the seizures and whatever else would happen, okay with dying, then he wouldn't suffer.
But it's a great example of how, it's an extreme example of how volition causes such great suffering.
I mean, if you wake up, if they were to knock him out and throw him in the charcoal pit and then he wakes up in it, he would suffer less, right?
Could you imagine being dragged towards the charcoal pit?
How much suffering even before he gets there?
The anguish, the horror.
And he's not even there yet.
It's like, why are you suffering so much?
You're not even feeling it yet.
Because of volition.
And he said, this is how we should see volition.
Because it's all just trying to escape suffering and find happiness.
We run around like chickens with our heads cut off, looking for satisfaction.
And we hurt ourselves and we hurt other people and we
I mean, look at all the problems in society and the world.
How many of them are caused by this greed and ambition and our conflicting desires?
So much stress and suffering.
Think of all the stress and suffering in this world.
All of you come here and we talk about the stress and suffering that you have.
It gives you perspective to think that the world is full of people like us, suffering, tortured, wretched.
Yeah, well, and if you don't like this, you're welcome.
There's lots of other YouTube stuff out there.
And for those of you staying with me, well, I think you kind of get what I'm saying.
This is deep stuff.
It's hard to swallow, I think.
If you've never really practiced, it just sounds pessimistic.
It's really not.
It's realistic and it's optimistic because it talks about how to find real happiness.
Buddha wasn't afraid of calling it like it is.
How this would be received by the world, how it will be received tonight by YouTube, I don't know.
It doesn't really matter.
Truth is the truth.
The fourth one is consciousness.
And he says, how should you understand consciousness?
Yeah, it's not any better.
So we have consciousness.
We're always conscious, right?
Maybe except when we're sleeping or in between experiences maybe.
But consciousness, how should we see consciousness?
He says, well, suppose there were a bandit, a criminal, and they brought him before the king.
and said, this man here is a bandit, a criminal.
They say, King, tell us what his punishment should be.
And the king says, well, go and in the morning, strike him with a hundred spears.
All morning, a hundred spears.
I don't know what it means.
Maybe poke him with the tip of it, bleed a little bit.
A hundred times.
And so in the morning they go and they strike him with a spear a hundred, they poke him with a spear a hundred times.
And the king asks at noon, men, how's that man?
And they say, still alive, sire.
Remarkably.
And then he says, then go at noon now and strike him with a hundred spears.
And so they strike him with a hundred spears at noon, pierce him with a hundred spears.
In the evening he asks again, how is that man still alive, sire?
And he says, then go in the evening and strike him with another hundred spears.
And so in the evening they strike him with another hundred spears.
And the Buddha says, what do you think?
That man being struck with 300 spears, would he experience pain and displeasure on that account?
And they're like, venerable sir, even if he were struck with one spear, he would experience pain and displeasure on that account, not to speak of 300 spears.
And the Buddha said, in this way, the nutriment of consciousness should be understood, should be seen.
Wretched.
Again, all consciousness.
All consciousness.
You see the incessant arising and ceasing of it.
You see that consciousness is just like a dart.
It's an invasion.
How hard is that to see?
Right?
Consciousness is an invasion.
It's very hard to see.
The only way you could really appreciate that is if you'd seen Nibbana.
You'd seen something better.
Experienced something better.
Something better than consciousness.
When you say unconsciousness, well, I suppose, I mean, it's one way of describing it.
But it's not like sleep.
It's like freedom.
I don't know.
It's a very deep teaching.
I'm afraid it will be misunderstood or unappreciated by the general audience.
But I think it's also important that we do at least come to terms and we don't lie to ourselves about what we're dealing with.
If you don't like it,
then you have to...
I mean, the best thing about all this is if you don't like it, you can disprove it.
The problem is it's true.
So, I mean, it'd be nice if samsara was a wonderful place and if we could work this out so we all live together in harmony for the rest of eternity, but you know, those religions that teach people about this eternal heaven where you sing hallelujah forever, it's a nice thought.
It's a wonderful dream, but it's not reality.
But the great thing is we can be free.
We can find peace.
I mean, whether you like this or not, ask yourself if you're happy.
I mean, the reason people come to me is because they're generally not happy.
Some are fairly happy.
It's not all the case.
But people come because they see they want to improve themselves.
I mean, the best people.
Some people come thinking they're just going to have fun, and that's a problem because they don't see the challenges and the problems and the danger of clinging.
But the best people, the ones who really get from this, are the ones who need help and see that they need help.
Because they're able to find help.
They're able to help themselves.
So, there you go.
A little food for thought.
There's the Dhamma for tonight.
Thank you all for tuning in.
Thank you all for coming.
Do we have questions?
I can't even log in.
Okay, I'm going to save the questions for another day.
Thank you all for coming out.
Have a good night.