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Nothing is Enough // Or everything is not enough. // I have a hunger... //// The hunger is me. // If I feed it, it wants more. // Mostly, it wants something else. //// A wise person, said STOP. //

Thursday, November 10, 2022

The time the Bhikkhus did not delight in what the Buddha said

 In The Island (pg 97), there is a passage of the time the Bhikkhus did not delight and rejoice in the teachings of the Buddha. I have referenced it several times in helping me understand how against the stream the Buddha's teachings were. At the end, with full insight, all self identification, philosophizing, and metaphysical framework-ing has to melt away.



“He directly knows water as water ... the All as All. .. Nibbāna as Nibbāna, he does not conceive [himself as] Nibbāna, he does not conceive [himself] in Nibbāna, he does not conceive [himself] apart [or coming] from Nibbāna, he does not conceive Nibbāna to be ‘mine,’ he does not delight in Nibbāna. Why is that? Because he has understood that delight is the root of suffering, and that with being [as condition] there is birth and that for whatever has come to be there is ageing and death. Therefore, bhikkhus, through the complete destruction, fading away, cessation, giving up and relinquishing of cravings, the Tathāgata has awakened to supreme, full enlightenment, I say.” ~ M 1.3-194, (abridged)

At the end of the discourse the reader is treated to a rare finishing touch: “That is what the Blessed One said but those bhikkhus did not delight in the Blessed One’s words.”


It is said that the group of monks whom the Buddha was addressing were formerly brahmin priests and that perhaps this dismantlement of the conception of ‘being’ was too threatening for them to take. In addition, in other situations, even though the deconstruction of the sense of being that the anattā teaching provided might have been approved of, this was not always the end of the matter. For, no matter how hard the Buddha tried to convey that the teaching on anattā was not a  philosophical or metaphysical position, but rather skilfull means to free the heart, the teaching was regularly taken in the wrong way – and, not surprisingly, it has been repeatedly misconstrued in the intervening centuries 

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