This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video The Way to the Far Shore Pārāyanavagga: Sutta Nipāta Book Five with Leigh Brasington (1 of 2). It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The Way to the Far Shore Pārāyanavagga: Sutta Nipāta Book Five (1 of 2) - Leigh Brasington

The following talk was given by Leigh Brasington at The Sati Center in Redwood City, CA on February 25, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

The Way to the Far Shore Pārāyanavagga: Sutta Nipāta Book Five (1 of 2)

Introduction

Yes, it's very nice to be back with the Sati Center again. I so appreciate the Sati Center. I've attended many classes here, and it's given me a platform to do some teaching as well. So I really appreciate the Sati Center; it's just great.

So the Pārāyanavagga, the way to the far shore. I'm going to share the screen so you can see what I'm talking about. The first thing is the sutta numbers. There are two ways the Pārāyanavagga gets numbered. Some are zero-relative. The Pārāyanavagga starts out with a backstory about how this came to be. On a scale of one to a hundred, the odds of the backstory being anything other than somebody's fiction, I put at exactly one. It's cute. It has nothing to do with the Pārāyanavagga's teachings. But some people number the suttas starting with that backstory as number one, which I think is wrong. That should be number zero. Others number things starting with the first actual sutta as number one. You have to be really careful if somebody says, "Oh, take a look at Sutta Nipāta 5.15." Are they talking about the 14th sutta, the 15th sutta, or the 16th sutta?

I'm going to use the zero-relative counting. The first sutta will be number one. That's what Bhikkhu Bodhi uses, and his translation is quite good if you have that one. Access to Insight uses that; it has some translations from John D. Ireland, and I believe all the suttas are there from Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu. The second method, where the first sutta is numbered two, is used by K. R. Norman and SuttaCentral. K. R. Norman's is the most accurate translation, but also the most difficult to work with because it's so accurate. It's kind of hard to read, but there's a great book on it called The Rhinoceros Horn by K. R. Norman. It's a translation of the whole Sutta Nipāta, not just the way to the far shore, and it's quite good. There is no digital version yet.

So I will be referring to things using the zero-relative counting. The first sutta is number one, but we'll look at stuff on SuttaCentral, which uses the other numbering system. Hopefully, it won't be too terribly confusing.

The suttas have a bunch of epithets or descriptions for the Buddha. This you can look at later; I assume everybody has the link that Rob sent out. The translations of Book Five that you can find are just for your future reference. The summary page also tells you how to find the Pali in a sutta, which is the easiest way to do it. I'm not going to go over the whole thing, but I'll give you a demo when we get to it. The resource I'm mostly going to be working with today is the summaries of the suttas. I think we're ready to get started.

The First Sutta: To Ajita

The first one is to Ajita. My summary of this is: a summary is not possible. Just read the sutta. So that's what we're going to do. You can see I have the English and the Pali side-by-side. The way I got that—and this is a good thing to know about SuttaCentral—is that you need Bhante Sujato's translation. It doesn't work for most other translations. You click "views," set it to English, and then view the Pali side-by-side or line-by-line. I find it easiest to work line-by-line.

"By what is the world shrouded," said Venerable Ajita, "Why does it not shine? Tell me, what is its tar pit? What is its greatest fear?"

The question is not exactly clear, but the Buddha's answer is helpful for figuring out what is going on.

"The world is shrouded in ignorance."

We can't clearly see what's going on because of our ignorance. The Pali word is avijjā¹. Vijjā is to know something, and avijjā is not knowing. So avijjā hinders the world.

"Ignorance and negligence make it not shine."

And then it says, "Prayer is its tar pit." And I thought, what is he talking about? K. R. Norman translated it instead as: "I call longing its sticky lime." So rather than prayer, it's longing. How do you get caught? With your longing, your desire.

"Suffering is its greatest fear."

You can see the word dukkha² right down here in the text. What we're afraid of is that we're going to experience dukkha. I once made the comment that all aversion is related to fear. Somebody said, "I hate broccoli, but I'm not afraid of it." I replied, "Actually, you are. You're afraid if you put it in your mouth, you will experience unpleasant vedanā³." Fear is what drives us, and it's fear of dukkha.

Back to Ajita: "The streams flow everywhere. What is there to block them? Tell me the restraint of streams. By what are they locked out?"

The streams are all the stuff that happens that disturbs your peace. If there's a stream coming by that you don't want to be caught in, the first thing is mindfulness.

"I tell you the restraint of streams, they are locked out by wisdom."

I'll give you an image. Imagine a river coming along, and there's a place where it divides. One part is pretty narrow, and another part is quite wide. The wide part is our normal way of processing the world. In modern neuroscience, they talk about the default mode network. When you get distracted, that's the default mode network running. This other narrow part where the river divides is called mindfulness. The Buddha is saying, put some more energy not into your distractions (your default mode network), but into mindfulness. Then, use wisdom to build a dam across the default mode network. I think full awakening is basically shifting the river so that it all goes down the mindfulness channel. We want a new default, and the new default is mindfulness. The way to dam up the wider default mode network that runs all the time is with wisdom.

Ajita then asks: "That wisdom and mindfulness, that which is name and form... please tell me of this, where does this all cease?"

"Name and form" is nāma-rūpa. It's a literal translation. Sometimes, particularly in talking about dependent origination, you see it translated as "mind and body." It's used in many different circumstances, and I don't think there's one great translation that captures it all. I like "concept and manifestation." If I say to you "cell phone," you know what that is. That's the name; it's a concept. The physical device is the manifestation, the rūpa. Mostly what we're dealing with is our concepts and the manifestations of those concepts.

Ajita wants to know where that comes to an end. The Buddha answers: "This question you have asked, I shall answer you. Where name and form cease with nothing left over, it's with the cessation of consciousness. That's where they cease."

That sounds really weird. Is enlightenment just going unconscious? That doesn't make much sense. So what's going on here?

The "cessation of consciousness" shows up in a number of suttas, generally the early ones. For example, Dīgha Nikāya 11 and Saṃyutta Nikāya 22.53. Viññāṇa is the word we usually translate as consciousness, and it literally means "divided knowing."

To understand this, let's take a look at Dīgha Nikāya 11. These are some verses at the end of a very nice fairy tale. There's a monk who wants to know where the four elements cease without remainder. He goes up through all the heavens trying to find the answer, and nobody knows. Finally, Brahma says, "Hey, you look like a Buddhist monk, go ask the Buddha." So he asks the Buddha. The Buddha tells him, "You've asked your question wrong. You should ask: 'Where do earth, water, fire, and air find no footing? Where do long and short, small and great, fair and foul, where do name and form all come to an end?'"

The answer is: "Where consciousness is signless, limitless, and all-illuminating."

Consciousness that's signless. How did you know something is a cell phone? Because it's a rectangle, it's thin, it has a screen, it has cameras on the back. These are the signs of a cell phone. When you look at a painting, can you see the bird in the flowers? There is no bird or flowers. It's only colored shapes. Your mind makes the bird and the flowers. This is saññā, one of the five aggregates. Usually, saññā is translated as perception, but I think a much better translation is conceptualization. You conceptualize those colored shapes as a bird and flowers by picking up on their signs.

What the Buddha is saying is that nāma-rūpa comes to an end with consciousness that's not grasping onto signs—that's not conceptualizing what's going on. That consciousness is limitless. Normally, we interact with the world in terms of our concepts. But if you don't conceptualize and can still remain conscious, you experience the world raw, without any conceptualization on top of it. It's signless. It's limitless because you're not conceptualizing any limits. And this is all-illuminating.

The only world we know is the world of our senses. The only thing you've ever seen in your life is neurological activity in your visual cortex. You've never actually seen a tree. What you experience when you touch a tree is just pressure receptors in your fingers being activated. We interpret all this sensory input with our concepts. We have to do that to find food to eat, clothes to wear, and a house to keep the rain off us. Conceptualization is very useful, but it somewhat hides what's actually going on.

With the cessation of divided knowing—with the cessation of chopping the world up into bits and pieces, what I call "thingifying" the world—that's where nāma-rūpa comes to an end. You do that with a consciousness that is signless, that doesn't get lost in the concepts created by the signs of things.

Ajita continues: "There are those who have appraised the teaching and many kinds of trainees here. Tell me about their behavior, good sir."

The Buddha replies: "Not greedy for sensual pleasures, their mind unclouded, skilled in all things, a bhikkhu would wander mindful."

This is basically the Four Noble Truths. Not being greedy for sensual pleasures (not craving) and being mindful. "Skilled in all things" refers to dhamma, skilled in all phenomena. It means understanding the phenomenal world and not being fooled by your conceptualizing. The title of the last chapter of my book on dependent origination is Don't be Fooled by Your Conceptualizing. The idea isn't that you never conceptualize. The Buddha conceptualized; he ate with his hand, but he never ate his fingers. He knew food is different from his fingers. But he wasn't fooled by his conceptualizing. That's what we're after: to experience the world from time to time without concepts, just experiencing it raw.

Q&A: Experiencing the World Raw and Divided Knowing

Hyley: Thank you for your interpretation. Could you say a bit more about what you mean by experiencing the world raw?

Leigh: All the words I could possibly say about it will not capture what it's like. You have to experience it. If you've never eaten a mango and somebody describes a mango to you, you have no idea what it tastes like. You actually have to bite into the mango. By experiencing the world raw, I mean experiencing the world without conceptualizing your experience.

The advice to Bāhiya in Udāna 1.10 is: "In seeing there is only seeing, in hearing only hearing, in sensing only sensing, in cognizing only cognizing. When you can do that Bāhiya, there's no you in that, there's no you in this, there's no you in between. Just this is the end of dukkha."

If you want to get to that place where you're experiencing the world raw, the practice to do is the Bāhiya practice. This is an open awareness practice. At first, you see seeing, but then you want to step even further back, and there is just seeing. There's not even seeing seeing. One way to do that is when you're going for a walk, somewhere you don't have to worry about navigating rocks in the path. Walk along and see if your mind can step back from the visual field, so there is just the visual field and just the auditory field. When it's going well, I find I can sense my feet going up and down, but I'm not conceptualizing it. There's just a sense of things moving.

Carol: Just to be clear, the line "with the cessation of consciousness" means with the cessation of conceptualizing, the cessation of divided knowing? So there is consciousness, but it doesn't contain divided knowing?

Leigh: Correct. It's not unconscious. Now, this is my interpretation. The orthodox interpretation found in the commentaries is that the cessation of consciousness is a "path moment"—an experience without an experiencer that takes you to the various levels of awakening. But I think the Buddha is reverting back to the literal meaning of viññāṇa, divided knowing. In order to see seeing, you still have to be conscious, obviously. In dependent origination, consciousness gets used more like mental processing. It's as if the Buddha in the very earliest texts was reverting viññāṇa back to the literal "divided knowing," but later elaborations took it to mean mental processing.

Victoria: My background is in Christian mysticism, where the apophatic tradition says we cannot use language to define the sacred because we're just going to divide it. In English, consciousness just means being alive, whereas awareness is observing the world around me. Does divided knowing tie into the idea of defining and parsing out?

Leigh: Yes. The neat little box is: there are no boxes and there's nothing to put in them. You get to the point where there is no conceptualizing of anything. There's just the raw sensory input, and that teaches you that what we're normally experiencing are our concepts, and our concepts aren't necessarily correct. The idea is to step back far enough to see the limitations of concepts by experiencing the world prior to conceptualizing. Nibbāna as a concept is only described in the suttas as "not this, not that." The only positive thing you can say is that it's the end of greed, hatred, and delusion.

Kate: I'm a newbie. Could you say more about divided concepts or divided knowing?

Leigh: When I hold up my cell phone, you divide this from my eyeglasses, from the curtain on the wall, and from the thangka over there. In order to see something, you have to divide the "something" from everything else. When you become conscious of something, you divide that sensory input out from all the other possible sensory inputs. That's what's being talked about. It took me about 30 years of practice to come to this understanding. The takeaway is that our conceptualizing of the world is not particularly accurate. It may be good enough to keep us eating, but it has the inaccuracy of conceptualizing things as worth craving and clinging to, which sets us up for dukkha.

Sean: What is the relationship between non-conceptualization and craving? How does non-conceptualization help deconstruct craving?

Leigh: By getting a deeper understanding of our conceptualizing of the world, we can see that when we're craving something, we're actually craving the concept. We don't really know the thing; we only know the concept of the thing. And that concept might not be totally accurate. My conceptualization doesn't include the fact that the object is impermanent (anicca)⁴, unsatisfactory (dukkha), and not-self (anattā)⁵. We tend to crave things and miss all of the less-than-desirable aspects of the thing we're craving. All concepts are wrong, but some are useful. Once we understand the limitations of our conceptualizing, hopefully we can use it to get more accurate pictures in the future.

Maya: In dependent origination, by the time it comes to responses, it's already name and form and all the way down to craving. How do I change my habits of presuming and assuming in daily life?

Leigh: We're all entangled in this stuff, and the way out is to practice not being entangled. The Bāhiya practice of experiencing the world prior to conceptualizing it helps you notice, "Oh yeah, I'm laying something on top of what's really there." Once you get the hang of it while going for a walk, you can do it while sitting. Open your eyes and try to rest in the non-conceptual visual field, the non-conceptual auditory field, the non-conceptual tactile field. The more time you spend hanging out in the non-conceptual experience of the world, the more you understand the limitations of concepts.

Suttas 5.2 and 5.3: Succeeding on the Spiritual Path and Sacrifices

The next sutta, 5.2, asks: "Who has succeeded on the spiritual path?" The answer is: "Those leading the spiritual life among sensual pleasures, instead of craving, ever mindful." There are going to be sensual pleasures out there. Don't get hooked. Don't lose your way, don't get lost in the craving, and keep your mindfulness up. That's really what's necessary.

Sutta 5.3 asks: "Why do people perform sacrifices in the hope of escaping old age and death? Does it work?" No. What does work? Wisdom, calm, freedom from greed, hatred, and delusion. Most spiritual practices across all religions are in some way trying to escape dukkha. Performing sacrifices is not going to get you there. What works is practice. Appraise the world high and low—understand how the world works. When you have the understood experience, there is nothing in the world that disturbs you. Peaceful, unclouded by greed, untroubled by aversion, with no need for hope, they have crossed over birth and old age.

The Source of Dukkha: Upadhi

"What is the source of dukkha? Creating an attachment. How did the wise cross the flood of dukkha? Expel delight and dogmatism, uproot consciousness, forego becoming."

The Buddha is asked: "Please tell me, where do all the sufferings come from?" The Buddha replies: "Attachment is a source of suffering."

The Pali word here is upadhi⁶. Upadhi is a very interesting word. Its root meaning is foundation, basis, ground, support. Secondarily, it means worldly possessions or acquisitions. It covers a whole gamut of assets which culture provides for measuring self-identity: gender, nationality, ethnicity, rank, occupation, power, wealth, status. All the accoutrements of your lifestyle are upadhi. If you get attached to them, that's where the dukkha comes in.

"When an ignorant person builds up upadhi, that idiot returns to dukkha again and again." So how do we cross over the flood? Remember the simile of the raft. You're on the near shore, and you want to get to the far shore. The near shore is dangerous because there's a lot of craving and clinging going on. You make a raft to propel yourself to the far shore. What's the raft?

"I shall extol to you a teaching that is apparent in the present, not relying on tradition. Having understood it, one who lives mindfully may cross over clinging in the world."

The next verse says: "Once you've expelled relishing and dogmatism." Relishing is delighting. Dogmatism means you don't have an open mind. Whatever views you have need to be held very lightly.

"Having uprooted consciousness... they don't continue in becoming." You're not constructing yourself in new ways. A bhikkhu who wanders meditating like this, calling nothing their own, gives up the dukkha of birth, old age, sorrow, and lamentation right here.

Q&A: Upadhi, Craving, and Delight

Victoria: The translation of upadhi as 'acquisitions' implies that you are trying to acquire, which already falls into the trap of craving. Whereas 'assets,' especially with an expansive definition like nationality and gender, feels more accurate because those are just givens.

Leigh: Basically, there's craving and clinging. If you haven't got it, there's the craving part. If you've got it and you're attached to it, that's the clinging part. The Buddha says both of these are problems, and upadhi actually captures both. It's the stuff you're going after and the stuff you've got. If you're lost in any of that, that's the setup for dukkha. English just doesn't capture the full meaning of Pali words perfectly.

Sean: Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu translates upādāna⁷ as 'feeding' in some of his texts. It reminds me of evolutionary theory's focus on adaptation in the service of survival. Could you comment on the translation of upādāna as feeding, and the parallel with evolutionary theory?

Leigh: Upādāna usually gets translated as clinging. But at the time of the Buddha, they thought of fire clinging to its fuel. So we would say a fire is blazing, and they would say a fire was clinging. We are blazing with the fires of greed, hatred, and delusion. What are we clinging to? The five aggregates (khandhas). As for evolution, an amoeba or a tree isn't doing craving and clinging. But as organisms become more sophisticated, craving and clinging show up because it's very useful for ensuring the survival of the species. When it gets to our level of sophistication, we have the craving, the clinging, and the assets that we think are ours.

Mara: I'm noticing my delight in the appurtenances of my lifestyle. Is there a way besides daily meditation to nudge my detachment along? And is delight intrinsically a bad thing? How do you achieve detached delight?

Leigh: I'm the greedy personality type, so I've been working on this for decades. I think it is possible to enjoy the pleasant vedanā of an experience without having attachment, craving, or clinging. It takes mindfulness. The default is: "It's pleasant, I want more." Mindfulness says: "This is pleasant, I'm just going to enjoy it." When you recognize that what you're really attracted to is your concept of the thing, and not the thing itself, it helps you see its limitations. Just being totally in the moment heightens the pleasure. I often refer to cameras as "anicca stoppers" because you're trying to stop impermanence instead of just being fully present with a delightful sensation.

Victoria: In terms of evolution, lower life forms have an advantage because they are in the moment. As humans, we have the capacity to choose to override craving. How does choice play into this?

Leigh: This leads into the two perspectives: the relative/conventional perspective, and the ultimate perspective. From the relative perspective, you chose to come and hang out with me today. From the ultimate perspective, there aren't any choices; things in the past have just unfolded in such a way that you wound up here. You have to choose the proper perspective for what's going on. If you want to find freedom, you have to look from the ultimate perspective and see that concepts are empty. But when you cross the street, you drop into the relative perspective and choose not to step in front of the bus. Choice is a relative perspective activity that we need to engage in because we can't operate entirely from the ultimate perspective all the time.

Suttas 5.5 and 5.6: Seclusion and No-thingness

Moving on to the sutta to Vacchagotta. Vacchagotta says: "Teach me, be keen, alert, mindful, release me from my doubts."

The Buddha replies: "I'm not able to release anyone in the world who has doubts. But when you understand the best of teachings, you shall cross the flood."

Buddhism is a do-it-yourself project. The Buddha can show the way, but you've got to do the practice yourself.

Vacchagotta asks: "Teach me out of compassion the principle of seclusion so that I may understand."

The Buddha says: "Once you have understood everything you are aware of in the world, above, below, and all around, in between is a snare. Don't crave for this or that." Everything you are aware of is your concepts. The Buddha is returning to the point: don't be fooled by your conceptualizing.

The next sutta is Upasiva. Upasiva asks: "I am alone and independent. I'm not able to cross the great flood. Tell me a support, O all-seer, depending on which I may cross the flood."

The Buddha replies: "Mindfully contemplating no-thingness... depending on the perception there is no thing, cross the flood."

This is a controversial bit. The commentaries and some modern scholars interpret this to mean the seventh jhāna⁸, the base of nothingness. As a practitioner of the seventh jhāna, I say no, that's not what it's talking about. I see what was talked about earlier: don't thingify the world. It should be "no-thingness." It turns out that there are no independent things in the entire universe. Everything arises dependent on other things. You may think you have independent existence, but you are completely dependent on air pressure, oxygen, farmers growing your food, and electricity. When we thingify our experience, we're missing the bigger picture.

Upasiva then asks: "One free from all sensual desires, depending on no-thingness... intent on the ultimate liberation of perception. If they were to remain there without traveling on for many years... and were to grow cold right there [die], would the consciousness of such a one pass away?"

The Buddha replies: "As a flame tossed by a gust of wind comes to an end and cannot be reckoned, so too a sage freed from the set of mental phenomena comes to an end and cannot be reckoned."

Asking what happens to the consciousness of one who is liberated doesn't make any sense, just like asking which way a fire goes when it goes out. In Majjhima Nikāya 38, a foolish bhikkhu named Sāti thinks consciousness transmigrates. The Buddha rebukes him: "Consciousness is dependently originated. For without supporting conditions, there is no origination of consciousness."

If you truly understand dependent origination at the deepest level, you realize that you are nothing but the intersection of a bunch of streams of dependently arising processes interacting. Joseph Goldstein said you should think of yourself as a verb rather than a noun. Actually, there aren't any nouns; it's just that some verbs move kind of slow. A tree is "treeing." Once you start seeing past the things of the world, you start seeing the flow of verbs, and then you realize there's really only one giant unfolding.

Q&A: Rebirth, Non-Duality, and Verbs

Bindu: I have a curiosity about rebirth. I feel there is a flow, that there isn't a static entity that lives on. The suttas seem replete with rebirth, and to say it's an interpolation from Brahmanism is quite a leap.

Leigh: I don't know what happens after we die. I have no memory of ever dying, so I don't know. I do know that my actions have consequences. If there is rebirth, and your next station is dependent on how well you led your previous life, then leading an ethical life takes care of it. If there's nothing else, I had better lead an ethical, full life now. By living ethically, I've covered both bases.

Anita: These teachings seem to point to non-duality. Why did non-duality become such a big thing in Tibetan Dzogchen, and why is that word not used in these early teachings?

Leigh: "Non-dual" as a word didn't exist at the time of the Buddha. He was limited by the ideas in his culture, so he talked about the end of divided knowing. Later, the Mahayana tradition invented the shorthand concept of non-duality to talk about it. The early commentaries were pretty much stuck at the literal interpretation of the suttas, which is why they interpret "nothingness" as a meditative state (the seventh jhāna) rather than not looking at the world through concepts.

Dave: Could you point me to modern scholars who might have different views from yours on this "no-thingness" interpretation?

Leigh: Alexander Wynne in The Origin of Buddhist Meditation thinks it refers to the realm of nothingness. You can also look up what the commentaries say in Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation of the Sutta Nipāta. I prefer to work directly with the suttas rather than having my mind colored by the commentaries, which were written in a different culture many years later.

Sarah: Who else teaches this way, emphasizing the experiential and less conceptual approach?

Leigh: I have a good friend in the Bay Area named Diana Clark who talks about this. You might also find Stephen Batchelor or John Peacock talking about it. But it's pretty rare to hear people teaching about the jhānas, no-thingness, and non-conceptuality outside of the Mahayana tradition.

Carol: I read a book called Buddha Essence by Daryl Bailey. He talks a lot about getting a perspective in which you perceive the unfolding without differentiating things. What is your view on his teachings?

Leigh: He's really good. His take on the ultimate view is quite good. The one thing I would say is that he tends to dismiss the relative perspective and promote the ultimate, whereas I'm saying you have to have both of them.

Victoria: In the context of being an artist, like Ansel Adams taking a photograph, isn't that contributing to the beauty in the world? And shouldn't we be engaged in helping others?

Leigh: As an artist, you're doing something different than a tourist snapping photographs and missing the scene. Ansel Adams couldn't have taken those pictures without truly seeing the scene. As for helping others, yes, that's part of what goes on. The first precept isn't just "don't kill." It says one "dwells conscientious, full of kindness and sympathetic for the welfare of all living beings." You want to recognize the interconnected nature of all of us and have an impact that makes the world a better place.

Joshua: Could you talk a little bit more about this notion of seclusion that keeps coming up?

Leigh: The Buddha was big on peace and quiet. He is frequently recommending that you go off by yourself and meditate. It means going on retreat, or at least getting yourself secluded enough during the day to do your daily practice. I spent 20 out of 36 months on retreat at the Forest Refuge in seclusion, and it was really powerful. Do the seclusion bit as much as makes sense for the life you're leading.

The Sage and Liberation

In the sutta to Nanda, the question is asked: "Is someone called a sage because of their knowledge or because of their way of life?"

The Buddha replies: "Experts do not speak of a sage in terms of view, learning, or knowledge. Those who are sages live far from the crowd, I say, untroubled with no need of hope."

A sage (muni) is wise because of how they live their life. They live far from the crowd, untroubled, and they don't grasp into the future with hope. They have given up all that is seen, heard, thought, and even precepts and vows—meaning they don't keep them out of attachment, but because they see it's the useful way to behave.

The final sutta we'll cover today describes liberation. Hamaka says: "The removal of desire and lust for what is seen, heard, thought, or cognized here, or anything liked or disliked, is extinguishment (Nibbāna)."

This is a depiction of the Four Noble Truths. With the end of desire and lust is the end of dukkha.

"In whom sensual pleasures do not dwell, and for whom there is no craving and who've crossed over doubt, their liberation is none other than this. They are free from hope, they are not in need of hope. They possess wisdom, they're not still forming wisdom. That is how to understand the sage."

Final Q&A

Victoria: I don't see hope the way you described it. In the context of the spiritual path, isn't hope an orientation or an awareness of an ultimate destination? Is it essential?

Leigh: If you can do it without the concept of hope, orient yourself that way. The concept of hope that you're talking about is probably okay, but it's tinged with craving. It's better to just go do the practice rather than hoping and wishing, which won't do any good.

Clara Lynn: In Pali, the word we're translating as hope (āsā) comes from the root meaning to desire or to seek. Anything built on this verbal root has a "wanting" feel to it. It's different from charting a course. Pali is a language where verbs are the basic building blocks.

Leigh: Thank you, that's really helpful. Pali is far more verb-oriented than English. When you're reading the suttas and you can re-translate the translation into a more verb-oriented sense, you're probably closer to what the Buddha actually meant.

Alex: You said to find what works in your life for practice. How do you figure out what works for you?

Leigh: Experiment. I gave up smoking marijuana, which meant I needed an hour less sleep, and I used that same hour for meditating. See if sleeping an hour less gives you an hour more for practice, and if you're not falling asleep when you're meditating, then it looks like it's working. Given the constraints of the life you're leading, what can you do to advance on the spiritual path? Play with it and figure out what will work for you.

Lauren: I haven't heard before that the Buddha left home looking for peace from quarreling. Do you have any advice about how to start my own exploration of the suttas?

Leigh: The best place to start is a book by Bhikkhu Bodhi entitled In the Buddha's Words. It's an anthology of suttas grouped by topic, with nice introductions. Once you've worked with that, you might want to take a look at a book by Gil Fronsdal entitled The Buddha Before Buddhism. The sutta where the Buddha left home looking for peace is actually covered in that book.

Thank you to all of you for showing up. Thank you for your generosity. May any merit from this sharing of the Dharma be for the benefit and liberation of all beings everywhere.