MEDITATIONS: THE DHAMMAPADA, CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Miscellaneous

Conflict and suffering are inevitable, but that does not mean that there is no validity or utility in delineating between good and bad or necessary and unnecessary suffering. That is to point out that if suffering is the most fundamental element of human experience, then it is the case that all things are composed of it. Therefore, it is never a question of to suffer or not to suffer, but instead what kind of suffering one will accept.

That begs the question: which suffering-inducing conflicts are good and which are bad?

Buddha’s answer is that external conflicts are those which entangle us is the need for more external conflict—a need which produces more needs, forever expanding and entangling, eternally unsatiated in a kind of karmic feedback loop:

Those who seek their own happiness
By causing suffering for others
Are entangled with hostility.
From hostility they are not set free.

The toxins multiply
For the insolent and negligent
who reject what they should do
And do instead what they should not. (Buddha 71)

Instead of constant conquest or the seeking of remedying reality with sensory experiences—or the nullifying of them if they are painful—the Buddha advises his followers to seek psychological satiation. Unnecessary, futile, and unproductive suffering can be eliminated by dialectically synthesizing opposing reality and desire into one. Viz. if one brings his will in accord with the universe, he makes himself content by obliterating his opposition to it. This is what the Buddha means when he says in metaphor:

Having killed
Mother, father,
Two warrior kings
A kingdom and its subjects
The brahmin, undisturbed, moves on.

Having killed
Mother, father,
Two learned kings
And a tiger
The brahmin, undisturbed, moves on. (72)

As noted by the translator: “mother” refers to craving / nature / material-related natural impulses; “father” refers to conceit / contrivance / ideology, theory, and socially constructed institutions; “two warrior kings” are eternalism and annihilationism; “the kingdom” is the twelve sense spheres; “the subjects” are the pleasures derived from the sense spheres; “the tiger” refers to the five hindrances sensual desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and anxiety, and doubt. (128-29)

The enlightened one kills these opposites, he sees them as one. To see a pair of opposites as one is like combining a positive and negative integer. positive and negative one come together to make zero—nothing—oblivion.

So what the Buddha is saying is that on can obliterate suffering in ones own path when it arrives by recognizing the conflict is an illusion. There is no difference between that which is natural and artificial. There is no difference between finitude and eternity. The discrimination of the senses are not the things themselves—thus the divisions which we see, hear, taste, touch, smell, etc. among various objects don’t really exist in the way in which we imagine. The pleasures, therefore, aren’t any more real, and therefore neither is the suffering.

This is the nihilistic perspective that is the eye of the universe.

Now, it is vital to consider what this perspective is for. After all, we are not the universe. Perhaps we are a part of it, yet still that makes us a part apart—fundamentally human. Our senses and experiences are not totally nullifiable without nullifying life itself.

Therefore, it is paramount to understand the hierarchy of values present in oneself and in his belief structures. In Buddhism, they are laid out thusly:

Always wide awake
Are the disciples of Gotama
Who constantly, day and night,
Are mindful of the Buddha. . . .

Are mindful of the Dharma. . . .

Are mindful of the Sangha. . . .

Are mindful of the body. . . . (72-3)

“The Buddha” is the ideal; “the Dharma” are the teachings and consequent duties; “the Sangha” is the monastic community, though that may be extended to the community as a whole; and “the body” is oneself and literally one’s flesh.

The application of Buddhistic dialectical synthesis is to be in service of these valued things. The nihilistic acid is not meant to be over-indulged in to one’s own detriment, nor his community’s, nor against his duty and his ideal. The function of the solvent is just that: it is a method over cultivating a stoic attitude in oneself in order to foster a necessary self-transformation. One brings himself more in accord with those things which are beyond his control. This brings him peace, and in a state of peace, he does not need to endlessly quarrel with others in order to feed the bottomless belly of the man who knows only how to struggle futilely against more and more entanglements.

Thus,

. . . the disciples of Gotama
Whose minds constantly, day and night,
Delight in spiritual practice. (73)

Buddha Siddhartha Gautama. The Dhammapada; Teachings of the Buddha, translated by Gil Fronsdal, Shambala Publications Inc, 2008.