So the question that the Buddha’s Teaching, the entire Buddha’s Teaching, is really addressing is the question of what leads to suffering, and what leads to non-suffering. What leads to long-lasting welfare and happiness, as opposed to what leads to long-lasting harm and suffering. At least that’s how one Sutta puts it. So it’s not this really abstruse, complex philosophical question, it’s a basic question. But if you don’t know the answer for yourself to that question, then there’s kind of no point in asking anything else. Or, anything else you’re asking or doing should really be for the sake of gaining that understanding for yourself first. That’s also pretty much the definition of right view, having knowledge, internal clarity and knowledge for yourself, in regard to what leads to suffering and what leads to non-suffering. If you really admit ‘I don’t know, but there is the possibility of knowing for myself what leads to the end of suffering’ then that means that I’m responsible for not doing it. Like, if I don’t know, that’s only because I haven’t made the necessary effort to gain that knowledge for myself. So it’s kind of unpleasant to admit that, and to feel the weight of that responsibility.
If you do admit that than, if you recognise that you don’t know or that your knowledge is at least severely limited or incomplete in regard to what leads to long-lasting welfare and happiness versus what leads to long-term harm and suffering, and you recognise there is the possibility of knowing, of gaining that right view, what can you do to start gaining it, to start getting that right clarity and understanding? How should you think, and how should you act? I don’t want to just give a list, like there are specific things, and I’m going to come to them in a minute, things that you can do, like behaviours, actions. But what ultimately really leads to long-lasting welfare and happiness and to the end of suffering, is knowing that for yourself. So not having to depend on somebody to tell you what specific things to do.
And actually, that’s how you can start to understand your non-understanding, which is an important thing to do. Like you can think about, what does it mean that I don’t know for myself what leads to the end of suffering, or how to put an end to suffering? You can basically see the limit to your own knowledge wherever there is anxiety, or wherever there is the possibility for anxiety or fear, or this kind of deep doubt and uncertainty about the nature of things to be there. And that’s already sort of revealing the basic nature, or structure of things that is the reason for that anxiety. Or, the reason for that anxiety is lack of understanding in regard to that nature of things. And so I’m saying that because that’s a way of already, directly for yourself, without referring to what somebody else has told you, you can recognise ‘OK, I don’t know for myself what leads to the end of suffering, and I know that I don’t know because I get anxious, and because I’m afraid’. And now ‘OK, why am I anxious, or what makes me anxious and afraid?’ You can recognise that really, fundamentally, the reason for that, for any kind of anxiety or fear, is you can see that your possibility of managing your circumstances, or your life, in ways that make you happy or that maintain your well-being, maintain your happiness, or that avoid suffering, is itself basically contained within certain things that you have no possibility of controlling or managing. And that’s why there’s anxiety.
So like, you might be able today to go to work, to maintain your living, maintain your family, get enough food and so on. But all of those things are only possible because your body is healthy, because things are set up in a certain way that is working, there’s peace in your country, hopefully, all of those things can change, and are changing for somebody, constantly. At any time, at any moment, somebody is losing things on a very fundamental level. That means they’re losing even the possibility of doing whatever they can to maintain their own happiness and avoid suffering. And ultimately for everybody, no matter how fortunate their circumstances happen to be in their lives, that applies, because no matter what you do, your life is going to end in kind of a dead end. Or literally a dead end, the ending of death. Which really undermines, if you think about it, anything you can do on a particular level, to maintain well-being or to avoid suffering.
I was trying to think of an analogy for this whole situation. The best one I could come up with was that it’s a bit like you’re being held, confined in a prison cell that’s with a guard, a prison guard in charge of it. And you can ask the guard to give you things in your prison cell, like give you food, give you things to do, give you whatever you might want to ask him for. And he, if he’s in a good mood, if he’s well-disposed towards you, he gives them to you. So the guard is your means of accessing everything that you have in this prison cell. But that’s up to the guard whether he gives them to you or not. And ultimately, he’s the one holding you in that prison cell. And he’s not holding you there with your happiness in mind, he’s there as a prison guard to keep you prisoner. He doesn’t have your best interests at heart.
So what this basically represents is like, the prison cell is your entire life, your situation. With the guard there representing basically your body and senses, that are your means of accessing anything in particular, or doing anything in particular in your life. Or any particular pleasures that you might get, you can only get them on account of your body and your senses. Which, as long as their working and they’re treating you well, it goes OK. But what you forget, or what it’s pleasant to not think about, is the fact that your very ability to access anything in particular that might make you happy, or to avoid anything that might make you suffer, has to go through that body. So it’s like, again, in that analogy, the guard at any moment, it’s up to him, at any moment he might just not show up. He might decide to not give you the things that you ask for, or he might decide to throw horrible things to you inside the prison cell instead of pleasant things. So even if he’s nice to you most of the time, if somebody is very lucky, it’s still ultimately not a good situation. And it’s not good to depend on that guard and depend on the things in the prison cell for your long-term welfare and happiness.
That’s really where the relevance of virtue and sense-restraint come in, in regard to even being able to see what’s for your long-term welfare and happiness. And we talk a lot about that, obviously, but it’s not just this random prerequisite, virtue and sense-restraint so that you can get the right view. It’s very directly relevant to this question of what’s for your long-lasting welfare and happiness. And that should be, if you’ve been thinking about things in the way that I’ve just outlined, it should already start to make sense why developing virtue for example would be more along the lines of what would be for your welfare and happiness, rather than depending on specific things in your life that you hold dear, or that bring you joy. And that’s because while circumstances changing can basically take away, or can destroy literally anything in particular that you can think of in your life that you hold dear, virtue is not something that can be just taken away in that sense. If it’s being developed properly, along the right lines. That aggregate of virtue is something that is basically more worthy to develop and to depend on than things like your body, or anything that depends on your body. So what I mean by developing the aggregate of virtue as well, it’s not just, it would start obviously by taking on the basic precepts, so like practising at least the five precepts, and ideally celibacy as the third.
But also then, on top of that, it means having an attitude of just trying to avoid any fault in your actions. So avoiding any intentions, actions, that are rooted in greed, aversion, delusion, distraction, impatience, jealousy. We all kind of know the things that shouldn’t be done, so what you know shouldn’t be done, you don’t do it when it’s rooted in an unwholesome intention. Prioritising this generally in your life, prioritising the development of that virtue every day and working on that, and having that as something that is really your priority as opposed to any other particular goal that you might be trying to achieve, that’s already, even if you’re not specifically thinking about it, and even if you’re not specifically aiming to practise the Buddha’s Teaching, that’s already going to train your mind to be more content, to have more strength, to have more resilience.
And you can see why that is, because it’s like whatever might happen on a particular level, even if you lose your health or you lose particular things, that can’t remove your virtue. It can’t make you start to be dishonest, or start to act out of ill-will and so on. And that’s kind of an important thing to recognise even in itself, because if you follow that reflection through to it’s conclusion, that’s already showing you something important, which is really the line between where your responsibility begins and where it ends. So like, even if your own family is attacked, that doesn’t make you, that doesn’t justify you then attacking somebody else. That’s a completely different thing. And just as you can’t guarantee, no matter what you do, you can’t guarantee that your body will stay healthy, even ill-health can’t make you unvirtuous if you’ve been training your mind and training your behaviour in that aggregate of virtue. So basically, that’s why you can see virtue is more worthy to depend on than your body.
And that’s also why it’s like, as the Suttas put it, it’s a source of blameless joy when that aggregate of virtue is developed correctly. They give that simile of a king who has defeated his enemies and he sees no danger from any direction, because he sees, somebody who has developed this aggregate of virtue would see and know, that nothing that can happen can take away that aggregate of virtue. It’s there, it’s been developed, nothing can make them act out of ill-will, act out of greed. And that’s also actually, by the way, why that is pretty much developing the composure of the mind. So it’s a composure in the sense of literally something that contains anything that might happen, or change on a particular level day-to-day. So whatever might happen, the mind will become immovable in regard to it. And that’s literally because it has been developed along these lines of recognising its own responsibility in regard to other things that other people might do, or that might change on a particular level.
So yeah, it’s containing you in the face of all the disturbance that happens in your body, in your life, and everything else. That’s also why that develops the capacity for your mind to be able to start contemplating and recognising the nature of things, that deep-rooted anxiety that I mentioned earlier and what that is rooted in. That basically means when you then start to contemplate the nature of impermanence and change in general, things that would make you deeply anxious and afraid, it means that you’re able to do so without just kind of falling apart, and needing to shut your eyes to it, and resort to some sensual pleasure or something to forget about it. You have something to fall back on, to resort to, to contain you.
I mean if you think about that simile that I mentioned earlier about the guard and the prison cell, sensuality basically means taking the particular things that you can get through the guard as a source of happiness, basically. So you can see immediately how that is completely the opposite to anything that would allow you to recognise the nature of that situation for what it is, because it’s literally just rooted in ignoring the situation. Like, ‘quickly, guard, give me something, something that I can play with, that I can look at, that I can enjoy, that I can take pleasure in’. It’s basically just fuelling your sense of being in control of the prison. Like, you think you’re the king of the prison just because you can keep asking the guard for something and he gives it to you. So it’s kind of helping you to ignore that fundamental lack of ownership, and lack of control. So as long as you keep doing that, it’s completely impossible to actually recognise the situation for what it is. And it’s also making you, obviously, more and more dependent on the guard. It’s putting you more and more under his command, and under his control. The more you depend on the things that he can give you, the more he has the capacity to hurt you, and the more easily he can hurt you. That’s why he can start torturing you, harming you, and killing you, as the body does in the end.
So that’s why nobody who develops the right view can possibly maintain that valuing of sensuality, and it’s also why sensual pleasure really, from the point of view of what actually leads to long-term welfare and happiness as opposed to harm and suffering, sensuality is a source of blameworthy happiness, if you want to put it in that way. Or really, it’s not something pleasant, it’s not something that is worthy to rely on, or worthy to engage in. And restraint on the other hand is actually much more pleasant from that point of view. That composed and contained mind has the capacity to see things clearly, as they are. I think there’s a Sutta that says that as well. Then it’s possible to contemplate those same thoughts that would make you very anxious or afraid, or that are pertaining to where that deep-rooted anxiety is, and start to contemplate them accurately. Which basically means contemplating the nature of your situation accurately, without turning away from it, without finding another way to ignore it, without resorting to some method of management to just calm your mind down. But just to basically hold it there until you can start to see that reason for that anxiety is not in the way that things are, but is in your own gratuitous resistance or attitude, wrong attitude, in regard to the way that things are.
And that really just comes down to having an attitude of sense of ownership and sense of control over things that you realise were never yours to own, were never in your control, and could never even be possible to own or control. And that’s when the mind would let go of that anxiety and let go of that resistance, because it would see how futile and useless it is. It makes no difference to the situation anyway. And that’s why it’s really the cause of suffering. But again, that’s something that you can only see if you have been developing your mind along the right lines. If not, it’s like literally your whole mindset is set against it, is set in maintaining the ignorance of it, in maintaining the impossibility of seeing it.