Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey)
Ltd.
Personal Self Habit, Phenomenal Self Habit -Part 2
John D. Hughes
Recorded
Teachings
Buddhist Discussion Centre
(Upwey) Ltd.
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Upwey, Victoria
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Disclaimer
Teacher: John D. Hughes
Date of recording: 25/6/88
Transcribed by Julian Bamford
Checked by Leanne Eames
CD Reference
25_06_88T2S2
File Name: 25_06_88T2S2i_JDHtranscribe.rtf
5 Day Meditation Course
Recording Title: "Personal Self Habit, Phenomenal Self Habit"
So we continue on with the Tsong Khapa text.
So the question is, how do we view this personal self habit, and the problem was that we haven't got a word like ‘dead body’ as the antithesis of what this personal self habit is. So we can look at it this way; where Tsong Khapa says. “The Buddha states that things are established by force of mental construction” The Buddha states that things are established by force of mental construction. And then he gives a reference to a text in the question in the Pali and this is a quote. This is one way of translating [it].
“The very delights of blossoming flowers, the pleasure of the glitter of a golden palace, these things have no intrinsic function, but are there on the strength of our constructs. The whole cosmos is constructed by force of thought.”
So it’s the results of good and bad kamma or wholesome and unwholesome kamma if you like, intentional action kamma means, that makes our lives different. Now, what you produce through your intentional self habit doesn't have to be forever what you produce. In other words Buddhism is not fatalism. It's not like a religion where you are powerless to do anything. When you say, “It’s my kamma”, you’re already wrong. What you should be saying is it’s my vipaka using Pali. The action done in the timeless past comes into the present, which as we said is unreal. And then it forms the future. If you don't alter or attend to the nature of your intentional self habit, your troubles will never come to an end.
If you keep doing the same as you’ve always done, you’ll get the same results. So let’s, because we haven't got a word, we'll invent a method to demonstrate. Let’s suppose there are two people. One is perfectly sane and one, if you will pardon the pun, is perfectly insane. They both look at a waterfall, I used the waterfall as an example before, and they both make the statement 'this waterfall is beautiful'.
The perfectly sane person contacts the waterfall which is the outside self habit of samsara, makes the statement 'this waterfall is beautiful'. The perfectly, if you will pardon the pun, insane person looks at the same waterfall and says 'this waterfall is beautiful'. Now at that level, at the superficial level, it seems like the two people are, are both the same, but we set up the postulate, one is sane and the other is insane.
So what the sane person is saying with profound wisdom is this: this mind, driven by kamma, has brought this external object into my vision. I know this external object has the nature of a waterfall, and I know that the water has no intention, is empty of the idea of kamma. For example, water doesn't set out to drown people, or to use the example earlier, if you fell over the waterfall and your body was smashed on the rocks below, the water had no intention of killing you. Nor did the phenomena of the habit of the way things work.
So you can't say 'I was killed by the waterfall', because there was no intention of the waterfall to do you in. But of course if you see the waterfall you say 'it is beautiful'. The sane person knows, if the contact between that, the sane person’s rupa, body or form, intensified, if the contact, if the attraction became more powerful, and each time a person saw the waterfall, it would only be a matter of time, because of the intentional action, where the person would actually be in the waterfall and then the body of the person would be killed. But the sane person can say, knowing all that, without attraction, without desire, without grabbing, I see, and having seen I know I've seen. The movement of the samsara, I know to be the self habit of the samsara, the water moves, the waterfall runs down the hill. I know that is the nature, and I know that the nature of the nature is unintentional, it has no intention. Therefore, although I see the waterfall as a potential for great danger, able to break bodies, as long as I lighten my gaze, and neither increase nor decrease my attraction for the waterfall, I can look at it again and again with safety. I will never be drawn into the waterfall to be destroyed, my rupa form, to be destroyed.
The insane person fantasises. The display becomes the stimulus. The insane person says 'Wouldn't it be fun to put my body in that water and to shoot over the waterfall, just imagine the sensation. The sensuality of the movement, if I put my body in the waterfall, just imagine the sensation of flying over the rocks like Rambo or something. 'Wouldn't that be a fun thing, wouldn't that provide the ultimate in body stimulation'. 'Wouldn't it be great!' Then that person makes intentional action, and then sooner or later, if they keep repeating that, the mad person, sooner or later they’ll come to a waterfall. One day they will sit at a waterfall feeling miserable. They feel very miserable, they feel very unhappy. And they might say 'I'm so miserable I wish I could kill this body'. Because of the past kamma, the past intentional action, they would throw themselves into the waterfall and that would be the way they suicided, they kill their body. If however, the sane person at some future time came to the waterfall, and say had a touch of the 'blues' if you like. The sane person would look at the waterfall and think 'that is beautiful, I would be silly, I would be mad if I destroyed my body so that I couldn’t see such beautiful things again'.
Now, if the insane person could be taught the Dhamma, and say 'have long life, have long life, have long life, have long life, don't destroy that human body so hard to find’. Because if you can become sane you will be able to examine the base of the samsaric self existence and you will be able to examine the base of your habitual self grabbing. So the goal is don't destroy yourself. Be sane. Increase your sanity.
So the Buddha, in the question of the Pali cited by Tsong Khapa says: “The various delights of blossoming flowers (anything you delight in), the pleasure of the glitter of a golden palace, these things have no intrinsic function.” They have no function whatever. They’re not there to say, they don’t say, gold doesn't say 'I am here so you can delight in my colour. Flowers don't blossom to say 'I want you to admire me'. There’s no intention on the phenomenal self packet to please you or displease you on that side. But personal self habit, being duped by the flowers, colour or form or shape, takes delight in something that is natural. The natural, the flower has got no other choice but to be a beautiful flower. The gold has no other choice but to be a beautiful gold. The golden palace has no other choice but to be a golden palace.
So it’s not, the Buddhist meditation is not to change the nature of the phenomenal self habit. You leave that alone; you don't try to change the outside world. But what you do, you meditate without taking no notice of the phenomena, you meditate on the personal self habit. And it is the personal self habit striking the phenomenal self habit that constructed, which is a mental process, which constructed whatever the phenomenon was. So as the Buddha says, the whole present is constructed by force of thought.
I heard second hand, but I believe it to be true, one student asked one of the Tibetan Lamas 'what would happen to the world if everybody simultaneously became enlightened at once? And the Lama said that the world would vanish. And that’s quite true. But since every being is not going to become simultaneously enlightened at once the world exists.
The next one that Tsong Khapa quotes is Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna states in his Philosophical Sixty, “The perfect Buddhas do declare misknowledge is the condition for the world; so why should it be wrong to say, ‘This world is a mental construct?’ Nagarjuna says, “Why should it be wrong to say, ‘This world is a mental construct?’ and Tsong Khapa says, quoting Chandrakirti’s comments, 'that this means that the worlds are not objectively established, but are merely constructed by conceptual thought'.
And again Aryadeva states in his Four Hundred, 'Since there is nothing existent in desires, feelings, memory, they're all empty, and so on, without mental constructs, what intelligent person adheres to ‘true objects’ and ‘constructs’.
Chandrakirti comments in explanation that desires, memories, all the mental phenomena, are like a snake imagined, you know like, often they say 'you see a rope, you think it’s a snake'. There's a guy who came into the pub shaking; he said ‘Give us a beer’. They said ‘You look upset, what happened?’ He said ‘I was walking along the road, and I stood on a stick, and I thought it was a big snake. He said ‘well, why did that upset you?' He said 'That didn't upset me, but I picked up a stick to kill this imagined snake and I made an error, the stick I picked up was a snake’. And that’s why he was shaking.
So like a snake imagined in a rope, insofar as they are mentally constructed, while not existing objectively we imagine something in error, because our personal self habit strikes our phenomenal self habit and they together constitute misknowledge.
So if you get someone who is fearful, like paranoid, it doesn't matter where you put them, every, their paranoia mind, their personal self habit mind of that type, strikes the phenomenal self habit, the outside world, and produces fearsome things. So for example, if they were walking along, say the back of a house, and there was a piece of pipe, say on the roof, the paranoid person would look at the pipe and think it is a gun barrel. Someone is aiming a gun at me.
Their paranoia mind, their misknowledge mind, very bad, very bad, would strike the reality of the piece of metal pipe and instead of saying ‘That is a piece of metal pipe’, would see a gun barrel. So then the paranoid person runs up to someone and says, ‘There is a man on the roof with a gun aimed at me’. The sane man then takes this mad man back, takes him to the roof where he saw the bit of pipe, picks up the bit of pipe and shows him. ‘This is a bit of pipe, it is not a gun barrel’. Now depending on the intentional action of the past, the paranoid person will say 'You are duping me. I really did see a man with a gun. And you are in this conspiracy too.'
One of the funny things if you like, if you've got a sense of humour, it’s funny from my viewpoint but it’s not funny from the paranoid person’s viewpoint, is that paranoid people I've met tell me of hundreds and hundreds of people who conspire together and they're really out to kill them. And when I say to the paranoid person, 'How do you think all these hundreds of people who are out to get you, who pays them, how do they live? And then they say 'They pay them', and I say ‘Well, you know, professional gunman might, you know, charge $5000 dollars a week. And professional phone tappers might charge $2000 dollars a week' and I add them all together and, you know, you can say ‘So the net result of all these people persecuting you is people are spending a million dollars a week to come and get you. Why are you so valuable that people would waste that sort of money?’
Of course if anyone’s got any sense of humour, their sense of humour might break their paranoia. You know the old quote? “Just because you're paranoid, don't think they're not out to get you.” Now the phenomenal self habit of the samsara has no intention. It is empty of any intention. And similarly, when you sit in Sunyata, Sphere of Nothingness, you might realise that the kammic return of your personal self habit is also empty. Sunyata, empty of any intention. But the personal self habit striking the phenomenal self habit is like, what, a steel and a flint stone will produce a spark. You are fascinated with the spark.
Stop looking at the phenomena and look at the personal self habit. It is empty of phenomena. Empty. It is empty of phenomena. However that, not knowing it to be empty, if something empty of phenomena, empty of intention, your own, your own personal self habit kammically returning to your vipaka, empty of intention, comes and strikes the samsara, the phenomenal self habit which has its own forms, if empty strikes empty, the phenomena, the sparks themselves are like an accident, they themselves are empty, because two empty things striking together must produce an empty phenomena.
So this world is a mental construct. Chandrakirti comments that this means the worlds are not objectively established but merely constructed by conceptual thought. The two, the conceptual thought, the one you can control, is your personal self habit thought.
Again Aryadeva states in his Four Hundred, ‘Since there is nothing in existent in desires and so on’, whatever mental objects reappear, there's nothing existent without mental constructs. What intelligent person adheres to so-called ‘true objects’? There is no true objects in your mental ...there’s nothing true, because they're empty, empty of self, empty of function, empty of desire and so on. And the clashing of your personal self habit, which is your vipaka, the clashing of that, the unskillful hitting of that on the phenomenal self habit, on the samsara, the outside world, naturally produces something. It must produce something, because when two things come together, as the Buddha points out, once you get contact, phasa, contact, things arise.
So they're like a snake. The phenomena that you place so much importance in, is like a snake imagined in a rope. And similarly, the very personal self habits are equally empty. They have no use anywhere, they’re useless. The outside samsara is useless, because it goes its way. Your personal self habits are useless, and yet the two striking together, there must be something in there. You're so fascinated with the phenomena. Bring your attention back to the stream of personal self habit which is your vipaka, the kammic return, and examine that.
So, like a snake imagined in a rope, insofar as they are mentally constructed, while not existing objectively, they have no inherent existence, no inherent existence. As existence itself goes only with mental construction, since a rupa form has no existence, it is just rupa. Existence, the becoming, the becoming, the becoming this becoming that, the striking again and again, the ever changing phenomena, that great kaleidoscope of events which you call my life, my life, my happiness, my events, my this, my that. That has no objective status in things, because it’s not rupa. Just like a snake imagined in a striped rope. It does not mean that the rope …
The next session of these Teachings is entitled 'Personal Self Habit, Phenomenal Self Habit
- Part 3'.