"I declare ONLY suffering and its cessation." — The Buddha, indeed

Essays
263

That use in the sutta’s is: that an arising, ceasing and changing in the meantime is not seen in the asankhata element, right? So it cannot be arahanthood. It cannot be one khandha, two, all khandha’s That is all seen arising, ceasing and changing. Agreed?

What do you not see arising, ceasing and changing in the meantime?

I believe it can be called unestablished, unsupported. It does not rely on conditions.

Maybe cessation is like the sun that is always there but conditions can make it appear the sun is absent or present. Or like noise and silence. One can see this as opposites but one can also reason that silence is always present but noise makes it look like it is absent. But when the noise ends, silence is immediately there. It is not really created.

I tend to see it also with the stilling of formations and dispassion.
Dispassion is not even absent when passion arises.

264

Arahanthood, so to speak, is the described in the suttas as the realization of the ending of rebirth and the ending of greed anger and ignorance.
Freedom from the kilesas may be unconditioned, even as the aggregates remain while an arahant is alive. Certainly final cessation is without conditions, as the aggregates and senses have ceased without rebirth. Meaning, dukkha has completely ceased.

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Well, here’s a story from Akutagawa Ryunosuke that can be applied to these various questions - teaching/declaring - suffering/cessation - and who’s doing what what and who’s who.

I remember when I first encountered this I got a bad impression of Buddha, because I was looking at it from the standard Western perspective of plight and judgment, and I thought I don’t know about this tinge of self here, in this sobbing Buddha, which is wiped away by Akutagawa’s construction of detachment and purity. This translation emphasizes this ambiguity in his tale. Other translations may be more upbeat.

akutagawa spider’s thread.pdf (345.2 KB)

Akutagawa is so masterful at his craft that Japan’s foremost literary prize is named after him. So there’s no need for high expectations in coming at him rough.

Someone thought to find a parallel to his interpretation of this tale in music. This is what he came up with:

Akutagawa was a modernist, Chopin a romantic, so … all very interesting IMO.

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Thanks- perhaps Chopin said more about Dukkha than most have been able.

Is Chopin ‘only’ entertainment and to be avoided? Can one describe the sadness of the human condition using ‘only’ music?

Perhaps ‘only’ Art does this best.

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It’s all yours Stephen :clap: All yours. And I mean that in the best possible way.

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268

Thank you.

As Eliot ends his great poem:
Shantih Shantih Shantih

or, in a more Pali mood,
Sabbītiyo vivajjantu
sabbā rogo vinassatu

269

Speaking of “the external world”

I’ll give an analogy,
Suppose there is only 2 people left in the world. One is color blind and another regular. One sees one color where the other sees another color when looking at the ‘thing’.

We can’t ask categorically ‘what color is the thing really?’. It depends on what instance of vision you are referencing, if you are talking about seeing which arises in dependence on this or that eye then it is like this or like that, the result of measurement is dependent on the instrument.

It is the same structure of reasoning when people talk about a world external to the senses. The world is however it appears/measured/observed and this depends on the instrument. Therefore the world is dependently arisen in a given frame of reference/observation and is not otherwise.

If one was to speak about a world without observation it’d be unlike anything else and there would be no time, space, particles or events.

This is confusing because this ‘world without observation’ is then that in dependence on which one attains the cessation of perception & feeling and it is aka the end of the world [of the six senses].

I think the buddhist conception of the unmade & parinibbana is closer to a coming into play of what people think of as ‘the external world’ rather than the atheist’s idea of death.

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Yes, SĀ 32 is a variant of the Soṇa Sutta (SN 22.49) that doesn’t have a Pali parallel. It says that one stops gathering up anything from the world → stops being attached to anything → attains nirvāṇa. Which then is defined as the declaration of liberation from future existence. I take it that the aggregates are what were being “gathered up” or “collected” from the world. I haven’t found another passage like this, though.

You may be right that upādāna should be read as a noun. SN 22.82/SĀ 58 certainly supports it when the question is asked whether the aggregates are identical to upādāna or not. It’s difficult to read it as an adjective in that passage.

I’m not so certain that the aggregates are the same as the upādāna aggregates, though. It would seem to me that the former are categories of phenomenology, while the latter are categories of contamination that result in the afflictions. Which are dysfunctions that arise from craving the aggregates. I suppose at the end of the line, the aggregates are still painful to an arhat as the body and mind lose their integrity and fall apart, but they aren’t generating new defilements anymore. And that seems to be the significance of upādāna vs. aggregates without upādāna. It seems to be a technical definition of the process of “outflow” or āsava. The defilements are the impurities that flow out as a result of that process.

In the Sarvāstivāda’s Saṃgītiparyāya, there’s a passage that defines the five aggregates and the five upādāna aggregates, and provides a lengthy commentary on both. The aggregates are defined as whatever form, etc that exists, whether past, future, or present, internal or external, etc.

The upādāna aggregates are defined in this way: “If the aggregate is contaminated as a result of any clinging and, when desire arises for this aggregate in the past, future, or present, it gives rise to greed, hatred, delusion, or the subsidiary afflictions that follow each thought; then this is the upādāna aggregate.” It seems pretty clear that it represented the contaminated state of an ordinary person suffers, but not an arhat.

The Vimuttimagga goes a step further with this way of thinking by presenting a set of five Dharmic aggregates as the opposite of the upādāna aggregates: which are aggregates of precepts, samādhi, wisdom, liberation, and knowledge and vision of liberation. It doesn’t elaborate further, but I have to think these were aggregates that were the antidotes to the upādāna aggregates. What would remain after the antidotes were applied? I’d guess just the aggregates, sans upādāna.

So, I personally suspect as I think about it more, that the concept of upādāna kandha was an attempt to describe what exactly āsava is as a psychological process. Which might explain why we find these suttas that analyze the concept or juxtapose the five aggregates with the five upādāna aggregates. It may have been a new idea at the time that needed elaboration.

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271

As i understand it, both the continuation and ending of rebirth relies on conditions. The ending of rebirth relies on the absence of lobha, dosa and moha, the ending of tanha and avijja, the uprooting of asava and anusaya, and the arising of true knowledge. Those are the conditions.
True knowledge as condition is important because that is taught as the counterpart of ignorance (MN44, MN4). This ending of rebirth relies on conditions, right?

Freedom of kilesa’s also relies on a condition, the presence of true knowledge, the EBT teach.

Ofcourse, if final cessation refers to a mere cessation at death, one cannot talk about it as conditioned nor unconditioned. Because there is nothing to describe and talk about when all has ceased.

[later addition:
presence-condition, atthi-paccaya
absence-condition, natthi-paccaya

This is Abhidamma stuff. There is also something like an absence condition. I think one can use the example of rebirth…the absence of tanha etc. conditions the end of rebirth. And there must be true knowledge, a knowledge as

presence condition. So probably this situation of the ending of rebirth and defilements by the arahant cannot be refered to as the end of conditions, or unconditioned or free of conditions.]

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Well, if I understand you’re point, this is similar to what I was expressing.
The world we experience is that through the six sense fields.
Whatever reality outside the six senses may be can’t be directly known, as in SN35.23

However, the are examples in the suttas where the Buddha indicates a reality beyond the senses. In DN he speaks about how if several kings rule with kindness and generosity the lands will be at peace and will prosper.
Or, when after his Awakening he mentally sought after his old teachers in order to guide them.
What sense does this make if those kings, lands and teachers were not aspects of an external reality?

But maybe we’re in agreement. I’m not sure about your points.

273

Agree.
But it also depends on what one means by “unconditioned”, since the absence of all dukkha is unconditional in the sense it can never arise again, based on any conditions.

But again, we might speak of “unconditional” here as the fact that the freedom of the arahant from rebirth is unconditional since, in the absence of greed, anger, and ignorance, there are no conditions which can prevent the ending of rebirth at death.
So we can say this freedom akuppa cetovimutti is unconditional, MN29:

" It’s impossible for that mendicant to fall away from that irreversible freedom.

And so, mendicants, this spiritual life is not lived for the sake of possessions, honor, and popularity, or for accomplishment in ethics, or for accomplishment in immersion, or for knowledge and vision. Rather, the goal, heartwood, and final end of the spiritual life is the unshakable freedom of heart."

And SN41.7:

"That unshakable release of the heart is empty of greed, hate, and delusion.
Sā kho pana akuppā cetovimutti suññā rāgena, suññā dosena, suññā mohena."

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274

Does this statement also incriminate itself?

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One could say that all truths depend on one’s point of view, the truth should be known personally.

The challenge is knowing if what one knows is in agreement with reality, ‘right view’, the Dhamma.

Is this ‘only’ suffering?

276

In the end even the Dhamma is given up.

277

It’s like if two people work a job
Person1 makes 10k a month
Person2 makes 30k a month

What does a person make when doing that work?

One can say the average is 20k but nobody makes that, it’s either 10 or 30.

If we ask what one actually can make then it’s either 10 or 30.

What one actually can make is always a special case. Whereas the average salary is a matter pertaining to a general case.

When talking about a world it is the same structure of reasoning.

One can talk about the general case of there being a world but this is like talking about that 20k average salary and no more mysterious. When there is this special relativity one can average it out as to think about the general case profile unlike any special profile.

It’s as if averaging out the features of human faces as to generate an image of what an average human looks like. Nobody special actually looks like this general case and we don’t go looking for this person because there could be no such thing.

Likewise if we talk about the general case of a world then we should understand that we are but averaging out some some special things. Therefore talk about such a general case only describes special relativity rather than something apart from it.

278

Absence of lobha, dosa, moha is a condition for ending rebirth.
Presence of true knowledge is a condition for ending lobha, dosa and moha.

I do not feel it is wise to talk about the unconditioned while we talk about khandha’s. Those are never unconditioned. Rupa up to vinnana arise dependend on conditions. Even when one would see Nibbana as special state of khandha’s, that is still true. It remains all conditioned. Or do you believe that the stream of vinnana of the arahant does arise without conditions?

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279

Who said they were?

Who said they weren’t?

While an arahant is alive the aggregates and senses are present, including the consciousness aggregate.
The freedom is not in or as the aggregates but in knowing that greed, anger, and ignorance have been eradicated and that there will be no rebirth/continuation of dukkha.

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Lol, one productive thread it turned out to be. :smiley: Yet little that’s really about the main ideas I brought up at the start! :frowning: :wink:

Hello Venerable, :slight_smile:

My purpose was to explain to Yeshe why in the 1st NT it’s not just aggregates that are currently clung to, so I oversimplified things a little for that sake. It could very well also be interpreted the way you suggest. But that is of course just a technical matter, since either way all khandhas are included. For any khandha, whether currently grasped at or not, in the end is a khandha that was taken up (or acquired) at birth.

At some point I also thought that upādāna- may just clarify which khandhas we’re talking about, and that upādānakkhandha is the basic term, not khandha. I’m happy to see someone else came up with this too.

However, there do seem to be, as you say, contexts where the word upādānakkhanda has a more restricted meaning of only the aggregates that are currently grasped at. That is primarily SN22.48, where they are said to be “with defilements”. Let me know if you have another interpretation of this text. I’m not sure I was completely satisfied with Venerable Bodhi’s, although it’s better than those who conclude from it that there are “bare” aggregates that aren’t suffering. Ven Sujato at one point interpreted it in a way where upādānakkhandas is all khandhas throughout the sutta, but I can’t remember where. He said something like: it’s different ways of contemplating the aggregates. It felt a bit forced to me, but a possible avenue.

As it stands, I think the term upādānakkhandas just has different meanings in different contexts. There’s nothing unique about this. Even upādāna itself has two meanings (‘fuel’ and ‘taking up/acquiring’) and it’s often purposefully ambiguous which one applies. However, it does seem to me that SN22.48 is pretty much an exception. Usually upādānakkhandas just means khandhas in general. (Bold suggestion: Could it be a late sutta that tried to make sense of the two terms khandhas and upādānakkhandas, which were at the start just synonymous?)

Good point. Also, try to find any statement where the Buddha directly says something like this, even in other words. Such statements may exist but they’ll be rare.

I tend to interpret MN75 in this way:

Māgaṇḍiya, suppose I were to teach you the Dhamma, saying: ‘This is that health, this is that extinguishment.’ You might know health and see extinguishment. And as soon as your vision arises you might give up desire for the five grasping [or ‘acquired/taken up’] aggregates. And you might even think: ‘For such a long time I’ve been cheated, tricked, and deceived by this mind. For what I have been grasping [or ‘acquiring/taking up’] is only form, feeling, perception, choices, and consciousness. My grasping is a condition for continued existence. Continued existence is a condition for rebirth. [etc.]’

Note, ‘have been grasping’ is a past tense, upādiyiṁ. Technically it is, “I took up only form …” So it’s basically saying the aggregates Magandiya now has, were taken up in the past, with “for such a long time” being a reference to saṃsāra. (By the way, another eva (‘only’), to get back to the topic, haha! It’s the same idea again, basically. Magandiya will realize that whatever arises at birth is only aggregates, no self.)

Probably the most clear translation of this would be “the five aggregates that are taken up are suffering.”

I would suggest “khandhas, which are taken up, …”, instead of the restrictive ‘that’, which’ll sound like there are also aggregates that are not taken up, creating the exact same problem you’re trying to avoid. I used that before instead of “taken up khandhas”, but it became very verbose in certain sentences. (Perhaps I’ll use it in the 1st NT, though.) ‘Taking up’ itself already isn’t the most aesthetically pleasing and clumsy at times, although I do think it’s most accurate so I opted to stick with it. I think “taken up khandhas” can also be interpreted as taken up in the past, as well as now. Or not? That was the intention, anyway.

‘Acquired aggregates’ is good, but then the sense of taking the aggregates as ‘mine’, which is quite reasonably another sense of upādānakkhandas, gets lost even more. E.g. SN22.85:

You are attracted to form, take it up [i.e. take it as ‘mine’], and assume it to be your self. You are attracted sensation, perception, will, and consciousness, take it up, and assume it to be your self. Then those five taken up aspects of existence, which you are attracted to and take up, will lead to your long-lasting suffering and harm.

This does not mean ‘taking up’ in the exact same sense as the Magandiya Sutta, for example, where it means acquiring them at birth.

PS. Sorry, Ven, I know you replied to me in a few other places. Haven’t had the time to get back yet. I think I’ve got them bookmarked for the future, though!

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281

Hello Venerable!

So the earth itself and all the form on it is taken up at birth by every individual sentient being?

I’m sorry Venerable, I was not going to reply further here but this really is concerning to my mistaken mind. It appears to my mistaken mind that you’re suggesting this sutta is “late” based only on the problems you encounter incorporating it into your understanding? If I didn’t know better, I’d say this would qualify as prima facie evidence that this whole endeavor of classifying sutta as “late” inside the Pali canon - when it has a Chinese parallel that does not differ significantly in interpretation no less! - based on non-objective criteria really is misguided and should be abandoned with all due haste.

In the Mahayana, one of the sacred vows taken by all aspiring bodhisattvas is to not disparage the Pali canon or in any way suggest it is anything other than the authentic teaching of dhamma. It is considered a major transgression to imply otherwise to anyone and thus potentially cause a loss of faith or confidence in the triple jewel. Indeed, in the ultimate jewel: the dhamma itself. The dhamma is the medicine without which sentient beings are doomed.

:pray:

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282

I know all that @Jasudho . I have seen your reasoning. You have explained why you believe the uncondioned does not refer to the unconditioned but to the conditioned. You believe it refers to a temporary state that has arisen and will also completely cease at death. So you find reason to call the conditioned the unconditioned. Oke. I do not follow this reasoning. For me this is artificial.
The unconditioned is not described as something that is seen arising and ceasing. So we do not have to think it refers to a temporary state, even when this is a temporary conditioned state without lobha, dosa and moha.

By the way…how do you think that one can know for sure that lobha, dosa and moha have been totally eradicated in this very life? Can one not come in a situation that it shows that it is not fully eradicated and was still present as anusaya? How do you think the arahants know for sure defilements are really eradicated to a point they just do not arise anymore. What do you think is the principle behind this?