Seeing with the Eye of Dhamma by Buddhadasa Bhikkhu

Author:Buddhadasa Bhikkhu [Bhikkhu, Buddhadasa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2022-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

Spinning in Circles of Dukkha

How might we go further in investigating life comprehensively? I would like to consider all aspects of life as vaṭṭasaṃsāra, which means “spinning in circles, repeating the same old rounds of saṃsāra over and over.” Let’s explore the cyclical, revolving, repeating aspect of life comprehensively.2

Life has meanings both in the language of the world and of Dhamma. In worldly language, life is about animate creatures—plants, trees, and so on that aren’t dead yet. In Dhamma language, life has the rather deeper meaning of being fresh, cool, and peaceful. This goes beyond the materialist view of protoplasm being alive, which has nothing to do with happiness and suffering. For us, to be alive is to live without having to suffer. Living with dukkha, in Dhamma language, is a kind of death. When we’re distressed by birth, aging, sickness, death, or any other issue, that is a kind of living death. Hence, to be truly alive is the freshness, vibrancy, and clarity of living without dukkha. The life of Dhamma language has this more profound meaning.

If we analyze further, we’ll see that one kind of life—conventional life without the benefit of Dhamma—is endlessly concocted by the power of causes and conditions, making it prone to change and transformation because of those causes and conditions. Another kind, living with Dhamma, isn’t concocted by causes and conditions, doesn’t change because of them, and thus isn’t afflicted by dukkha. This is difficult for ordinary people to understand; they take the change of concocting for granted. They can’t conceive of nonconcocting as life.

I’d like you to see both kinds of life. There is life fabricated by causes and conditions, and there is life unconcocted by causes and conditions—in other words, the kind of mind that can’t be fabricated by causes and conditions—because life is permeated with profound understanding. The latter sort of life has realized visaṅkhāra (nonconcocting). After his awakening, the Buddha laughed away craving because, having penetrated visaṅkhāra, nothing could stir it up again. We ought to consider a life lived above any concocting as the most satisfying.

Life that is still ignorant, that lacks understanding of the Dhamma, is full of the problems that cause dukkha. Not knowing how to select the right flowers from the Buddha’s beautiful garden, people suffer lives of constant fabricating and spinning in circles. In general, people don’t know about the possibility of the nonfabricated life, and so they experience lives afflicted by problems. To understand this, we need to look at vaṭṭasaṃsāra. We contemplate it in order to see what we have been missing or ignoring. Saṃsāra is spinning around in birth and death, while vaṭṭas are the habitual patterns or cycles in which saṃsāra spins. Vaṭṭasaṃsāra is the whole worldly universe through which we spin and cycle. Understanding the spinning around and concocting illuminates this life of suffering as well as Dhammic life.

We’ll start with the basics of vaṭṭasaṃsāra, the cycle of birth and death. There is birth, then there is death. From birth, life spins toward death.

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