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The Buddhist Teachings on Samvega &
Pasada
A life-affirming Buddhism that teaches us to find
happiness by opening to the richness of our everyday lives.
That's what we want -- or so we're told by the people
who try to sell us a main streamlined Buddhism. But is it what we need?
And is it Buddhism?
Think back for a moment on the story of the young
Prince Siddhartha and
his first encounters with aging, illness, death,
and a wandering contemplative. It's one of the most accessible chapters
in the Buddhist tradition, largely because of the direct,
true-to-the-heart quality of the young prince's emotions. He saw aging,
illness, and death as an absolute terror, and pinned all his hopes on
the contemplative forest life as his only escape. As Asvaghosa, the
great Buddhist poet, depicts the story, the young prince had no lack of
friends and family members who tried to talk him out of those
perceptions, and Asvaghosa was wise enough to show their life-affirming
advice in a very appealing light. Still, the prince realized that if he
were to give in to their advice, he would be betraying his heart. Only
by remaining true to his honest emotions was he able to embark on the
path that led away from the ordinary values of his society and toward an
unsurpassed Awakening into the Deathless.
This is hardly a life-affirming story in the ordinary
sense of the term, but it does affirm something more important than
life: the truth of the heart when it aspires to a happiness absolutely
pure. The power of this aspiration depends on two emotions, called in
Pali samvega and pasada. Very few of us have heard of them, but they're
the emotions most basic to the Buddhist tradition. Not only did they
inspire the young prince in his quest for Awakening, but even after he
became the Buddha he advised his followers to cultivate them on a daily
basis. In fact, the way he handled these emotions is so distinctive that
it may be one of the most important contributions his teachings have to
offer to American culture today.
Samvega was what the young Prince Siddhartha felt on
his first exposure to aging, illness, and death. It's a hard word to
translate because it covers such a complex range -- at least three
clusters of feelings at once: the oppressive sense of shock, dismay, and
alienation that come with realizing the futility and meaninglessness of
life as it's normally lived; a chastening sense of our own complacency
and foolishness in having let ourselves live so blindly; and an anxious
sense of urgency in trying to find a way out of the meaningless cycle.
This is a cluster of feelings we've all experienced at one time or
another in the process of growing up, but I don't know of a single
English term that adequately covers all three. It would be useful to
have such a term, and maybe that's reason enough for simply adopting the
word samvega into our language.
But more than providing a useful term, Buddhism also
offers an effective strategy for dealing with the feelings behind it --
feelings that our own culture finds threatening and handles very poorly.
Ours, of course, is not the only culture threatened by feelings of
samvega. In the Siddhartha story, the father's reaction to the young
prince's discovery stands for the way most cultures try to deal with
these feelings: He tried to convince the prince that his standards for
happiness were impossibly high, at the same time trying to distract him
with relationships and every sensual pleasure imaginable. To put it
simply, the strategy was to get the prince to lower his aims and to find
satisfaction in a happiness that was less than absolute and not
especially pure.
If the young prince were living in America today, the
father would have
other tools for dealing with the prince's
dissatisfaction, but the basic strategy would be essentially the same.
We can easily imagine him taking the prince to a religious counselor who
would teach him to believe that God's creation is basically good and not
to focus on any aspects of life that would cast doubt on that belief. Or
he might take him to a psychotherapist who would treat feelings of
samvega as an inability to accept reality. If talking therapies didn't
get results, the therapist would probably prescribe mood-altering drugs
to dull the feeling out of the young man's system so that he could
become a productive, well-adjusted member of society.
If the father were really up on current trends, he
might find a Dharma teacher who would counsel the prince to find
happiness in life's little miraculous pleasures -- a cup of tea, a walk
in the woods, social activism, easing another person's pain. Never mind
that these forms of happiness would still be cut short by aging,
illness, and death, he would be told. The present moment is all we have,
so we should try to appreciate the bittersweet opportunity of relishing
but not holding on to brief joys as they pass.
It's unlikely that the lion-hearted prince we know
from the story would take to any of this well-meant advice. He'd see it
as propaganda for a life of quiet desperation, asking him to be a
traitor to his heart. But if he found no solace from these sources,
where in our society would he go? Unlike the India of his time, we don't
have any well-established, socially accepted alternatives to being
economically productive members of society. Even our contemplative
religious orders are prized for their ability to provide bread, honey,
and wine for the marketplace. So the prince would probably find no
alternative but to join the drifters and dropouts, the radicals and
revolutionaries, the subsistence hunters and survivalists consigned to
the social fringe.
He'd discover many fine minds and sensitive spirits
in these groups, but no accumulated body of proven and profound
alternative wisdom to draw on. Someone might give him a book by Thoreau
or Muir, but their writings would offer him no satisfactory analysis of
aging, illness, and death, and no recommendations for how to go beyond
them. And because there's hardly any safety net for people on the
fringe, he'd find himself putting an inordinate amount of his energy
into issues of basic survival, with little time or energy left over to
find his own solution to the problem of samvega. He would end up
disappearing, his Buddhahood aborted -- perhaps in the Utah canyon
country, perhaps in a Yukon forest -- without trace.
Fortunately for us, however, the prince was born in a
society that did provide support and respect for its dropouts. This was
what gave him the opportunity to find a solution to the problem of
samvega that did justice to the truths of his heart.
The first step in that solution is symbolized in the
Siddhartha story by the prince's reaction to the fourth person he saw on
his travels outside of the palace: the wandering forest contemplative.
The emotion he felt at this point is termed pasada, another complex set
of feelings usually translated as "clarity and serene
confidence." It's what keeps samvega from turning into despair. In
the prince's case, he gained a clear sense of his predicament and of the
way out of it, leading to something beyond aging, illness, and death, at
the same time feeling confident that the way would work.
As the early Buddhist teachings freely admit, the
predicament is that the cycle of birth, aging, and death is meaningless.
They don't try to deny this fact and so don't ask us to be dishonest
with ourselves or to close our eyes to reality. As one teacher has put
it, the Buddhist recognition of the reality of suffering -- so important
that suffering is honored as the first noble truth -- is a gift, in that
it confirms our most sensitive and direct experience of things, an
experience that many other traditions try to deny.
From there, the early teachings ask us to become even
more sensitive, to the point where we see that the true cause of
suffering is not out there -- in society or some outside being -- but in
here, in the craving present in each individual mind. They then confirm
that there is an end to suffering, a release from the cycle. And they
show the way to that release, through developing noble qualities already
latent in the mind to the point where they cast craving aside and open
onto Deathlessness. Thus the predicament has a practical solution, a
solution within the powers of every human being.
It's also a solution open to critical scrutiny and
testing -- an indication of how confident the Buddha was in the solution
he found to the problem of samvega. This is one of the aspects of
authentic Buddhism that most attracts people who are tired of being told
that they should try to deny the insights that inspired their sense of
samvega in the first place.
In fact, early Buddhism is not only confident that it
can handle feelings of samvega but it's also one of the few religions
that actively cultivates them to a radical extent. Its solution to the
problems of life demand so much dedicated effort that only strong
samvega will keep the practicing Buddhist from slipping back into his or
her old ways. Hence the recommendation that all Buddhists, both men and
women, lay or ordained, should reflect daily on the facts of aging,
illness, separation, and death -- to develop feelings of samvega -- and
on the power of one's own actions, to take samvega one step further, to
pasada.
For people whose sense of samvega is so strong that
they want to abandon any social ties that prevent them from following
the path to the end of suffering, Buddhism offers both a long-proven
body of wisdom for them to draw from, as well as a safety net: the
monastic sangha, an institution that enables them to leave lay society
without having to waste time worrying about basic survival. For those
who can't leave their social ties, Buddhist teaching offers a way to
live in the world without being overcome by the world, following a life
of generosity, virtue, and meditation to strengthen the noble qualities
of the mind that will lead to the end of suffering.
The symbiotic relationship designed for these two
branches of the Buddhist parisa, or community, guarantees that each will
benefit from contact with the other. The support of the laity guarantees
that the monastics will not need to be overly concerned about food,
clothing, and shelter; the gratitude that the monastics inevitably feel
for the freely-offered generosity of the laity helps to keep them from
turning into misfits and misanthropes. At the same time, contact with
the monastics helps the laity foster the proper perspective on life that
nurtures the energy of samvega and pasada they need to keep from
becoming dulled and numbed by the materialistic propaganda of the
mainstream economy.
So the Buddhist attitude toward life cultivates
samvega -- a clear
acceptance of the meaninglessness of the cycle of
birth, aging, and death -- and develops it into pasada: a confident path
to the Deathless. That path includes not only time-proven guidance, but
also a social institution that nurtures it and keeps it alive. These are
all things that our society desperately needs. It's a shame that, in our
current efforts at mainstreaming Buddhism, they are aspects of the
Buddhist tradition usually ignored. We keep forgetting that one source
of Buddhism's strength is its ability to keep one foot out of the
mainstream, and that the traditional metaphor for the practice is that
it crosses over the stream to the further shore. My hope is that we will
begin calling these things to mind and taking them to heart, so that in
our drive to find a Buddhism that sells, we don't end up selling
ourselves short.
| Source: Copyright © 1997 Thanissaro
Bhikkhu. The author
gives permission to re-format and redistribute his work for use on
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