In the Buddha's Words - Bhikkhu Bodhi [98]
The requirements of this task drew upon all the Buddha’s skills as a teacher. It demanded that he make ample use of his ability to precisely adjust his teaching to the mental proclivities of the people who came to him for instruction. It demanded that he speak up frankly and candidly, even when candor bred resentment. It demanded that he enter the fray of debate, even though he much preferred the peace of seclusion. It demanded that he use similes, metaphors, and parables whenever concrete illustrations could give his arguments stronger appeal. It demanded that he uphold his principles strongly whether his adversaries were hostile ascetics or miscreant monks within the ranks of his own order (see the opening sections of MN 22 and MN 38, not included in this anthology). That the Buddha succeeded so well in fulfilling this difficult task is counted among his truly wonderful and marvelous accomplishments. This is a point to which Text VI,1 bears eloquent testimony.
The Buddha’s task at this stage in the unfolding of his doctrine is to impart to us a radically new education in the art of seeing. To follow the Buddha in the direction he wants to lead us, we have to learn to see beneath the surface glitter of pleasure, position, and power that usually enthralls us, and at the same time, to learn to see through the deceptive distortions of perception, thought, and views that habitually cloak our vision. Ordinarily, we represent things to ourselves through the refractory prism of subjective biases. These biases are shaped by our craving and attachments, which they in turn reinforce. We see things that we want to see; we blot out things that threaten or disturb us, that shake our complacency, that throw into question our comforting assumptions about ourselves and our lives. To undo this process involves a commitment to truth that is often unsettling, but in the long run proves exhilarating and liberating.
The education that the Buddha imparts to us brings about a deepening of our perspective on the world. To help us transform our understanding and deepen our perspective on the world, he offers us three standpoints from which we can appraise the values by which we order our lives. These three standpoints also represent three “moments” or steps in an unfolding process of insight that starts from our common-sense attitudes and moves strategically toward higher knowledge, enlightenment, and release. The three moments are: gratification (ass̄da), danger (ādīnava), and escape (nissarạa). In Texts VI,2(1)–(3), this scheme is applied to the world as a whole. Elsewhere in the Nikāyas, the scheme is applied more specifically to the four material elements (SN 14:31–33), the five aggregates (SN 22:26–28), and the six internal and external sense bases (SN 35:13–18). The Buddha underscores the importance of this scheme with the bold pronouncement that until he was able to fully evaluate the world (or, in the texts referred to just above, the elements, aggregates, and sense bases) in this way, he did not claim that he had attained the unsurpassed perfect enlightenment.
In advancing systematically through this scheme, one begins by recognizing the indubitable fact that such worldly phenomena as sense objects, forms, and feelings give us some degree of gratification. This gratification consists in the pleasure and joy (sukha-somanassa) we experience when we succeed in fulfilling our desires. Once we acknowledge this fact, we can then probe deeper by asking whether such pleasure and joy are entirely satisfactory. If we address this question with utter honesty, in a dispassionate frame of mind, we will realize that such pleasure and joy are far from satisfactory. To the contrary, they