In the Buddha's Words - Bhikkhu Bodhi [97]
What lies beyond the round of rebirths is an unconditioned state called Nibbāna. Nibbāna transcends the conditioned world, yet it can be attained within conditioned existence, in this very life, and experienced as the extinction of suffering. The Buddha realized Nibbāna through his enlightenment, and for the next forty-five years of his life he endeavored to help others realize it for themselves. The realization of Nibbāna comes with the blossoming of wisdom and brings perfect peace, untarnished happiness, and the stilling of the mind’s compulsive drives. Nibbāna is the destruction of thirst, the thirst of craving. It is also the island of safety amid the raging currents of old age, sickness, and death.
To guide his spiritually mature disciples toward Nibbāna, the Buddha had to steer them beyond the blissful rewards that could be won in a future life by performing wholesome deeds. He did so through the “world-transcending” facets of his teaching, those aspects designed to lead disciples beyond the “triple world” of sense-sphere existence, form-sphere existence, and formless existence. Again and again throughout the discourses, the Buddha offered an uncompromising, razor-sharp exposure of the dangers inherent in all conditioned states of being. He sounded a clear warning signal that all states of existence are perilous and fraught with pain. He insisted, unambiguously, that the one hope of lasting security lies in complete purification and liberation of the mind. He presented a path that cuts through ignorance and craving in their entirety and dispels attachment even to the most refined states of meditative absorption.
In his “graduated discourse on the Dhamma,” given to introduce receptive newcomers to his teaching, the Buddha regularly began by discussing such practices as giving and moral discipline. He would extol the beauty of such virtues as generosity, harmlessness, honesty, and self-restraint, explaining how such meritorious deeds lead to the joys of a heavenly rebirth. At this point, he would reveal “the danger, degradation, and defilement in sensual pleasures and the blessings of renunciation.” Having thus gradually “ripened” the minds of his audience, he would next expound the doctrine distinctive of his own teaching, the Four Noble Truths: suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the path. When the Buddha himself taught the Four Noble Truths, his purpose was not to give his listeners an introductory course in “basic Buddhism,” but to awaken in them the “vision of the Dhamma,” the first direct realization of the transcendent truth that sets the disciple on the irreversible path to liberation.
Though we sometimes read in the suttas that disciples attained their first experience of awakening merely by listening to the Buddha preach, this does not mean that the Dhamma is easy to understand. Such disciples could penetrate the truth with such apparent ease because their faculties were mature, perhaps too because they had accumulated sufficient supporting conditions from previous lives. But by its very nature, the world-transcending Dhamma goes against the grain of the mundane mind. The Buddha describes the Dhamma as “subtle, deep, and difficult to see,” and one of the things that makes it so difficult to see is its thesis that the highest happiness cannot be won by yielding to the longings of the heart but only by subduing them. This thesis runs utterly counter to the thought, attitudes, and actions of people fully immersed in the world. As long as we are infatuated with the seductive lures of sensual enjoyment, as long as we take delight in being this or becoming that, we will regard the sublime Dhamma as a mystery and a puzzle. The Buddha therefore realized that the first major challenge he would face in establishing his world-transcending