Dhammapada Studies

By Sylvia Swain

Continued from part 1

Mindfulness

Having established that the awakening of the mind is both the way and the goal, we must expect to hear much about mindfulness as we proceed through this book. It is important to understand that awareness needs to be applied beyond the simple paying of attention to material things. Many people and organizations in the West keep up very high standards of concentration, efficiency and technique, but in the religious life close attention to motivation is the criterion for the attainment of the purified mind.

If we are to understand the wisdom of the Dhammapada in the modern context, we need to look beyond and below the surface of the materialism and dependence on technology which has re-shaped our thinking, and to question our acceptance of extraverted materialism, both in public and in private life, which has almost unconsciously become the basis of our value judgements and our thinking processes. For example, our “unthought-out thought” passively gives consent to the asset-stripping of the planet, whereas “conscious”, mindful thought would point out that we are only custodians and not the owners at all.

This is only one example, and we can all add our own, but when greed is triggered, people are easily convinced. The important thing is not to follow the examples which clearly cause the problems but to turn our attention to the thoughts the Buddha had, when he too was confronted by all the suffering of his day, which stemmed from what he termed heedlessness. He observed that the causes of human suffering had three powerful sources. He called them the Three Fires, translated as desire or craving, hatred or aversion and delusion or ignorance.

This ignorance means not only that we are ignorant regarding others, their reality as distinct from our judgements of them, but that we are self-ignorant, living an inner delusion, whilst we are not sufficiently self-aware to be capable of distinguishing truth from falsehood, wholeness from partiality, either inwardly or by implication, in the outer world.

The dangers of ignorance are pointed out at the beginning of the book in verses 11 and 12:

Those who mistake the shadow for the substance, and the substance for the shadow, never arrive at Reality, but follow false aims.

Those who know the substance as the substance, and the shadow as the shadow arrive at Reality, and follow right aims.

The charge of ignorance comes as a shock to the modern mind, so clearly confident now in the ability of science to solve its problems of desire and aversion. For science, although excellent in its technology, is not moral but answers to demand, so that not only the traditional authority of religion to provide fundamental and spiritual explanations and remedies is being fast eroded, but moral values too are giving way to market forces.

So we need urgently to challenge the tacit assumption that to appease desire is the same as bringing an end to suffering or giving meaning to life. It so obviously is not doing so, since mental and emotional suffering are at an all-time high.

The mind that is continually self-seeking is not stable but, in reality, is out of communication with life and thus is out of communion as well. So, clearly, we need to return to our theme, which is, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought”. If we have hubris it is because we have inflated thoughts.

Inflation is a common problem in a society of high technology; the ego can inflate when it identifies with a powerful car or any technology that extends its normal fields of activity. Even higher education cannot pacify a mind which is distressed or unsteady.

There is an important difference between a well-stocked mind and a well-trained one. We may well stock our mind with all kinds of prejudice as well as knowledge, but only the “well-trained-mind”, which becomes modest and wise in the training process, can distinguish the true from the false. As verse 14 says:

As rain does not break into a well-thatched house, so craving does not break into a well-trained mind.

We all know the religious rules verbally and we know of the existence of good and evil, but in what vein do we know these things? Verse 136 says:

A fool does not know when he does evil, evil deeds consume him as by fire.

And verse 141 is a very interesting sidelight of the wrong thinking which the Buddha had to correct in his day, and which can easily be applied to today:

Not nakedness, nor matted hair, nor fasting, nor sleeping on the ground, neither rubbing the body with dust, nor sitting like an ascetic can purify a man who has not solved his doubts.

The Buddha taught only from experience — not hearsay. He had lived as an ascetic himself in the early days of his search for the truth, and later on when he taught about Nirvana. That too was from experience and so we can surely trust his words. Verse 145 is just another illustration of mindfulness in action:

Irrigators guide water, fletchers straighten arrows, carpenters bend wood, wise men shape themselves. As a fletcher straightens his arrow, so the wise man straightens his unsteady mind which is so hard to control.

He knew how the crooked becomes straight and how the unsteady mind can find peace. This brings us to the important question of how we are to change the tenor of our thoughts, to straighten the unsteady mind.

The history of countless centuries of human thought in the form of religion, philosophy or dogma has shown that even the high sounding ideologies have their hidden agendas and thus beget a very negative contraflow, leading to outer conflicts such as the ever-repeated succession of wars, which has dogged the whole history of man. On the individual scale too, even the most loyal adherents to an ethic find themselves caught up in doubts and intrusive thoughts of an unwanted nature. In Buddhism, it is not belief in anything, however laudable, which saves us, but experience in mindfulness. Who but the Buddha would have said, “Do not believe what I say because I say it [although he knew his words were true] but try these things out for yourselves”? Verse 243 makes this clear:

Ignorance is the worst stain of all, let the bhikkhu remove ignorance and be clean.

To the Buddha, belief, not being self-discovered, was still a form of ignorance, so we can only really benefit from his teaching by doing the work for ourselves. This is why Buddhism makes a clear distinction between the dishonest repression of thought, a denial of negative contents of the mind, and the active examination of them with a view to their transformation. Many religions advise control by will power alone, whereas Buddhism, which is psychologically based, aims not so much at the obedience of commandments as at the achievement of the remedying of ignorance, which is seen as a sickness of the mind to be cured. Tao Te Ching 71 says:

Knowing ignorance is strength.
Ignoring knowledge is sickness.
If one is sick of sickness, then one is not sick.
The sage is not sick because he is sick of sickness.
Therefore he is not sick.

Only mindfulness will give us sufficient knowledge of our sick mind to make us sick of it and thus to lead to the adoption of the hard, but necessary, mental exercises of the religious life. Without this honesty we can easily escape into self-satisfied justification. There are no quick ways to purify the mind, all sudden changes are only reversals of old ethics. Verse 226 puts it into a nutshell:

Those who train themselves by day and night and are ever watchful will destroy their evil thoughts and approach Nirvana.

So this embodies the new ethic, new not in the sense that it is not ancient, as Buddhism is, but new to the humanity who has lived on the old ethics of divide and rule for so long a time. In the next part we will consider the ways of healing that division.

Continued in part 3

Comments