The Dharmic Map

I mentioned in my last post Ajahn Punnadhammo's image of crossing a stream as an analogy for the Buddhist path. The idea is that to reach the other sure, at some point, you have to step out into the water unsupported, a proverbial leap of faith. However, without any evidence that you are headed in an appropriate direction, what motivation is there to do so? Here's where another analogy Ajahn gave becomes relevant. Imagine you have a map of an unfamiliar area, but you don't know whether or not it is accurate. You start to use is provisionally, knowing that it could be wrong. As you continue to use it, you notice that where it says there's a town, when you get there, there's a town with the same name on the map, and so forth. Then, even though you haven't been everywhere on the map, the more towns it correctly identifies, the more and more confidence you have that the map is right. This has matched my own experience. Hitting signposts in my practice that the texts say will be there. Still, it's hard for me to break through my attachment to this life, even though I have full confidence in the dharma.

The three characteristics of phenomena

I just got back from the first in a series of teachings by Ajahn Punnadhammo, a monk in the Thai Forest tradition of Theravadan Buddhism. He's come to Knoxville twice before, and I've always gotten a lot out of his teachings. It's interesting because Theravadan Buddhism has many significant conceptual differences from Tibetan Buddhism, and yet there are also surprisingly deep similarities and parallels. I personally think it's a great complement to the Tibetan tradition. I wanted to record here one particular teaching that I had not heard before, and which I feel penetrates pretty deeply.

The teaching is that all compounded phenomena are marked by three characteristics: impermanence, suffering and not-self. 

Impermanence: This one is easy to see conceptually. All objects are in a constant state of change. Modern science of course confirms that things are changing very rapidly at an atomic level moment by moment, and we can see with our own eyes that things that come together always fall apart. Even though we know this, yet there is a very strong mental habit to see things as unchanging.

Suffering: Ajahn didn't elaborate on this too much tonight except to note that when we are still, we often experience pain and discomfort in our body. The nature of the body is suffering. (I should mention that this particular teaching, that all compounded phenomena are marked by suffering, is a big bone of contention. It's a teaching that many people do not want to accept.)

Not-self: All phenomena are empty of self. This is one of the characteristic teachings of the Buddha, and is another one that people find confusing and often misinterpret. I'll confine myself to explaining what Ajahn said tonight, even though there's a ton more to say. Namely, we have a strong mental habit of perceiving complex assemblies of processes and parts as a unitary whole. However that is just a conceptual fabrication. It's not really what's there.

I had come across in Tibetan teachings the fact that all compounded phenomena are marked by the above three characteristics. The new feature I hadn't been exposed to was the teaching on how these three characteristics are masked or disguised, which I'll now summarize:

Impermanence is masked by a sense of continuity. The perception that events continuously transform one into the other. However, it is asserted in the abhidharma that reality is actually digital and not analog. If you look closely enough, events are arising moment by moment and then disappearing. One moment arises, then disappears, and when the next moment arises it is similar to the previous one due to karmic cause and effect, so that when seen at high speed, it looks continuous. In the Tibetan tradition this is talked about as one way of perceiving reality, and Lamas have mentioned being able to experience this directly through meditation. I asked Ajahn tonight as well whether it is possible to directly experience this kind of flickering in and out aspect of reality, and he confirmed that it is.

Not-self is masked by a sense of compactness. A collecting of diverse phenomena and parts into one singular whole.

Suffering is masked by movement. Ajahn brought up the specific example of a person experiencing pain while meditating. After a while, the pain becomes too much and the person moves to a new position, whereupon the pain builds up again and the cycle repeats. The pain in each case is masked by movement. It takes the mind a while to recognize the novel configuration as being suffering. This resonates with me quite a bit, and not just because I've noticed this very cycle with physical pain. In a big way, I've noticed this cycle with mental discontent. When the mind is still, it is uncomfortable. It is experiencing suffering. So the mind moves in various ways. In meditation it will start to daydream or grasp onto various conceptual fabrications. During the day the mind will reach for the iPhone to check email or Facebook. I think this is a pretty close analogue to fidgeting to relieve physical suffering. Reflexively checking Facebook and the like is a way of distracting the mind from the inherent suffering in compounded phenomena.

Of course, if that were the entire dharma, that would be pretty depressing. The idea of Buddhism, at least as expressed in this tradition, is that true happiness and cessation of suffering can only come about by realizing the "unconditioned" or nibbana (this is the Pali term. Nirvana is the Sanskrit term). In my own personal journey, I'm at the point where I'm utterly convinced of the three marks of conditioned phenomena as I outlined above, but I don't yet have a deep resonance with the idea of liberation.  Having seen and experienced certain things, I have a lot of trust in the dharma, and I am certainly open to the idea of complete liberation as expressed in the idea of nibbana, but there's also a big part of me that seizes on the nihilistic viewpoint. Everything is falling apart, so why does anything matter? What's the point of anything? I obviously can't neatly resolve these two great rivers in my mindstream (the dharma and nihilism) with a short post before I go to bed, but I believe the dharma is there to carry me forward.

Edit: Ajahn gave an analogy which I remembered after the talk. Imagine a stream that takes three steps to cross. There is a branch on each shore that you can cling to to help you cross, but for the middle step, you can't reach either branch. The path to liberation is like that. The near shore is samsaric existence, our habitual tendencies. The far shore is the experience of nibbana. In order to get there, there is a point in the middle where you have to let go of the branch on the near shore before you can grab the branch on the far shore. I suppose that's where I am right now. Once a being has some experience of nibbana (who is then called a stream-winner in the terminology used by Ajahn), then even though that experience hasn't stabilized -- perhaps it was just a glimpse -- they still have seen its concrete reality and will continue to make progress after that. They have grabbed the branch on the far shore.