Transcending the Sutta Dharma – Tales From Nibbana Episode 1 with Delson Armstrong

Hello and welcome to our show, Tales from Nibbana. That's right, and our special guest is here. So yesterday there was a nice day outside, but unfortunately the microphone did not work properly, and it's mostly chirping. What are they called, those guys you are doing with the crickets? Yeah, chirping crickets, and so there was a very high chirping cricket to Dharma ratio. Yeah, and as you can see we're inside because it's storming outside right now. Yeah, so we're here in India, in a state called Uttarakhand. Uttarakhand, yeah. This is a state. That's a state. In a county called Nainital. Yeah, Nainital district. Nainital district. In a village called Satoli. But don't come here.

No, we don't want you here. We don't want you here. This is our refuge. That's right. We came here to work in a great state of focus. Right. Our books. That's right. And on our new hit show, Tales from Nibbana. Yes, there you go. Yeah. So I'm working on Heart Illuminated. Yeah. Right now I'm mostly focusing on the companion practice book. I've decided to separate the intellectual understanding from the actual practice path. And Delson is... Oh, what am I doing? Oh, right. Yeah. I was so engrossed in what you had to say. So I'm working on Craving. I still got a lot of Craving to work on. So just finishing that book in the series of Dependent Origination.

And I'm working on outlining a couple of other books that will be there in store. So that will be another book, which is probably the end of the series of Dependent Origination, and another book, which is basically sort of my version of an autobiography of a yogi. So, yeah, that's really what we've been working on. Just books and enjoying as much as we can the walks through the forest and, you know, chilling. It's a very, very laid-back life. A lot of chilling. Do you want to give us a sneak preview of your autobiography? Maybe a nice tidbit? Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen.

Cool. So what shall we talk about today? Well, one question that came to mind today was, seeing as how, classically speaking, in the Theravada maps, but also everyone I know who's attained to arahantship has said that there's still karma to work through. What do you think is the thing that needs to happen? Or do you think there's a particular subset of karma, maybe in some location in the body, some type of karma that needs to be dissolved? the final slip can happen? Yeah, this is a good question. So first of all, I think we can talk about the classical view and then we can talk about the realistic view. Because there's two ways of looking at this.

The classical view says that the karma that has to be worked out, let's say, is the classic 10-fetter model, which means the first five lower fetters have to be gone, which is wrong view or attaining right view. No doubts about the Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha. Not clinging to any rites and rituals and no self-view. So letting go of any idea of a permanent self on an intellectual level. And then sensual desire and aversion. These are the other two of the lower five. The upper five that have to be let go are basically conceit, craving for existence in a form realm or craving for existence in a formless realm and ignorance. So what did I get to?

Conceit? Restlessness. Restlessness. That's right. Thank you. It's my favorite one. Restlessness. Yeah. So these five have to be let go in order for arahantship to be there. I think if you think about it realistically in today's world, it can be seen that an arahant is someone who has let go of any kind of attachments to one view or the other. Even if it's a classical view, even if it's Theravadan, Mahayana, Vajrayana, whatever you want to put it as. You mean a dharmic view. A dharmic view, of all traditions, all views, and so on, and lives a life that's essentially spontaneous within, let's say, for lack of a better word, the bounds of ethical or ethics and morality, which means they wouldn't hurt people intentionally, they wouldn't do things that would cause harm to oneself and harm for others. Intend to.

That's right. It's all about the intention. So that's what I'm saying. They wouldn't intend to harm and they wouldn't intend to cause harm to others or to oneself. Even to bugs like this one? Yeah, it's just a bug. Mosquitoes, especially. What if it's trying to eat me? Probably the largest bug, as we've been told, is about the size of my palm. And those are not going to do anything to you. So anything less than that. It's fine. The other day I got bit by two, I guess it was an ant of some kind. It was the most painful experience that I've had in a long time. Yeah. And it just sparked all the way through here and then through my arm.

And then there was another one, and it felt like I had some sciatica pain. But then it subsided after a while. But I was quite surprised by that. Those little buggers, they're jumping towards you. Would you harm them? No, I would not harm them intentionally. Right now, if I stepped on them by mistake, that's a different thing. So you let them come at you and bite you? No, I would flick them off. Don't make me try to foist a more exaggerated story about, no, I want to. I want you want to. Okay, okay. So it's not a bug. Yeah. Let's not go with a human, but it's like a lion comes at you.

Yeah. And you have a rifle. Yeah. You're trying to escape. You're cornered. It thinks you slept with its wife or whatever. You're like this, and it's coming at you. Yeah. What do you do? Instinctively, I would probably shoot the rifle. Okay, thank you. All right. Intend to cause no harm, yeah, to living beings intentionally. Another teacher I greatly appreciate, when I asked him something similar, even with a human attacking him and so on, said that, of course, he would defend himself while doing whatever he can within the realm of his skills. Of course, limited, is not some martial arts master or anything, to just incapacitate the person, trying to minimize harm. And also from the perspective of, um, there's something a little that can sound a little condescending about this, but I fully believed the guy, and also in some sense adopted this attitude myself to prevent the guy from taking on the karma of killing someone. Yeah, yeah, that's right. In some sense a refinement of this idea of, do no harm, intend no

harm that leads to the least amount of harm, regardless of whether it's me or the other person. I think many spiritual teachers would try to pretend to be a little righteous in saying that they do not prefer themselves over another person, but at least that guy who I highly value would say, of course, if it comes to me or him, it's me. It's not even something that I think about. It's just the instinct, my animal body. That's why it would react. I had a similar question from a student a few years ago, and she had written me an email very similar to this was: what would you do if somebody, you were in an alleyway and they tried to mug you?

How would you defend yourself? Would you defend yourself? And yeah, of course you would defend yourself. You would try to evade the attacks initially. And yeah, that is true. You would try to minimize the level of harm the other person can cause. Usually in the heat of the moment, it's all about making sure that I'm not hurt. Fight and flight kicks into gear anyway, and you're just trying to get out of the situation safely. Okay, so back to the original question. What do you think needs to be cleared out of the system in particular, if anything, in terms of existing karma, in terms of existing conditioning, in terms of the existing tainted sankharas.

Because clearly even as you let go of all ten fetters, there can still be karma. And most people, I think, attain to arahantship and then have to continue clearing out the karma. In some sense, you could even say, and this is more the later vehicles, you attain to that level because that's a vantage point or a configuration of the system or a basis of operation that allows you to suppress the type of karma that otherwise the entire system is pushing down, right? Because it has all sorts of views about how you're supposed to be, what you're supposed to feel, what you're not supposed to. But clearly, if you're carrying a lot of karma without releasing a significant portion of it, again, I'm asking which significant portion, it would be very hard to let go towards being able to abide in Nibbana to a sufficient degree to then not allow any view, any self-referential process to land.

So what do you think needs to happen? So a couple of things. One is, when we talk about letting go of karma, I think we should let go of the idea that in order to attain arahantship or buddhahood, you need to be having a clean slate. Because historically speaking, or at least sutta-based experience, the Buddha shows that he had to still deal with external factors which could have been considered karmic in nature. So the idea that we need to clear a certain kind of karma in order to attain arahantship or to attain buddhahood might be one part of the puzzle, insofar as letting go of, let's say, the reactivity, the friction with the karma that arises.

And so it's not spiritual bypassing, it's not being passive, but really it's just seeing for what karma actually is. What karma actually is, is a series of experiences that come and go as a result of various kinds of contact. And that can only be developed, let's say, I say only be developed, but essentially that can be developed through a process of seeing with wisdom, so understanding that the karma that's coming is just sensations, just experiences, just feeling, and as soon as there's a clutching to it, as soon as there's a grasping to it, and that's what propagates that. So there's nothing to literally let go of except letting go of the idea of letting go.

Likewise, I would say in a way it doesn't really correspond with the ten fetter model. Every time I've had this flip to what felt like a complete ground level of reality, so to speak, without being caught up with the junk, it wasn't so much that I stopped having the type of vibration or the flavor of sensation that I would call restlessness. It's just that I could no longer believe that calling it restlessness is something reasonable to do. And even saying reasonable to do is conceptualizing. It's just naturally, I would just see the vibration for what it is. And it would be, for example, it would not be restlessness. It would be, a stupid example would be, I'm hungry, right?

Of course, it's generally something a little deeper than that. Normally I have a hard time attuning to it because of the way that my system is set up, because of the schisms in my mind and body, because of whatever trauma or wounds I'm still carrying. Then from that perspective, I could no longer believe that calling anything a fetter or calling anything craving is in any way some ultimate reality. Of course, that's not to say that the process of restlessness or the thing that we could call craving wasn't still there and influencing the system in some way. But from that perspective, it just became much easier to relate to it skillfully and, of course, abandon the craving as soon as it arises, right?

Because in some sense, even calling something craving or restlessness, for that matter, is a subtle way of putting it in a box and putting that box in the bad pile, right? And it's a subtle way of pushing it away. So in some sense, that's what went away in those configurations of mind versus the thing in itself. Does that resonate with your experience? Yeah, I think this kind of points back to our conversation the other day, which was about when we talk about earth in relation to earth and all of these things. I really like Krishnamurti's statement, which is the word is not the thing. The word is not the experience. Yeah, the map is not the territory.

Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And it does resonate with the way I see things. Yeah. In some sense, this is the essence of the Vajrayana path over the earlier turnings of the wheel of Dharma. have the 12 links of dependent origination. Part of it is clinging, and particularly clinging to views. Oh, that's nice. And so India brownouts, I don't know, like a third of our time? Yeah. Yeah, interesting. Thank God for batteries. Now we're in India, so thanks, Shiva. Vishnu. Vishnu. Sometimes the quintessential Vajrayana move that, of course, you don't have to do anymore when you're not, because that in itself is the same type of realization. The quintessential fake it till you make it Vajrayana move is also not clinging to the view of the 12 links.

Right. Such that you completely jump out of the system, so to speak, or you transcend and include the system in such a way that, even as, of course, you're still dealing with the process, you can't call craving, you're not clinging to the idea of craving in a way that then subtly inclines the mind to continue spinning. Oh, so there's clinging, and it means I have to do this, it means that I have that as a self that's in samsara, and then you condition the next moment of perception, and again you have tainted contact, really leading to feeling and person, blah blah blah blah, the whole thing. So the essential Vajrayana move that's possible, or I guess I would say, is enhanced throughout every step of the Mahamudra path that I'm familiar with, and I've been teaching lately. It's a way to empty out and then, in that sense, transcend the idea that craving exists a priori, that it's something self-existent, inherent in the world, which is of course ridiculous rationally. But as you take your first steps in Buddhist school, that's the first truth that you learn.

Craving leads to suffering. And you suffer. There's tension, there's ease. You're like, oh, craving. In some sense, the first steps of the path is refining a gross level understanding that serves you up until a certain point. Because at the beginning, it's very useful to be like, oh, okay, this is craving and I'm gonna stop doing that, right? Which is of course another way of controlling, another way of selfing, creating the self, iterative agent, so to speak, trying to control and manage the world. And then later on I'm gonna say something that's gonna piss off many people, probably, sort of like going from a high school model of atoms and the way electrons orbit them, and so on, to a grad level where you have statistical clouds and the whole model. Right? So it's like having something to grab hold on to at the beginning that's skillful, and then moving beyond it once you've ingrained the fundamental understandings of that vehicle of Buddhism.

Yeah, this makes a lot of sense to me, because even if you go back to the third model in the Pali canon, there are references to this, uh, in, um, and with our Nikaya, uh, there are references to where the Buddha talks about, you know, he says, luminous is the mind, but due to adventitious defilements the mind becomes obscure, and that's the way he says it. And adventitious means not inherent to the quality of the mind. So craving is not, I don't think it's going to be picked up, so it's fine. We'll see. We'll see how it goes. And the other thing is, he even talks about craving as being an impersonal process.

It has nothing inherent to do with what I'm doing. You know, just it creates, you know, in the Theravada model, it talks about craving being the cause of suffering, or the condition for suffering. Yeah, that's one way of looking at it, but then eventually there's a sutta called Six Sets of Six, where he says even craving is not me, not mine, not myself, and that really just means craving is another concept that's put onto whatever is happening in this process. So even the suttas make a point of this.

Talking about the innate, free, luminous, self-knowing quality of the mind, the obscurations and the empty nature of the obscuration, the lack of self-nature, of craving and even conceit. So how is it that so many Theravada schools are so keen on making craving the bad thing? Suttas like this are few and far in between, right? I mean, this is just one or two of those. And then there's also anidasana vinnana, which is a whole other topic, which the Abhidhamma have different ways of looking at. I mean, everybody has different ways of looking at that particular one. But I think when it comes to craving, it's like how you said, right? It's like graduated schools in that sense. So in the relative world, where you start off, you have to understand what to let go of for your own mind.

Like, I even talk about it with regards to meditation and jhanas, where I tell people, like, the jhanas are not the big, not the big deal. They're just, they're just all these things that you use for your mind to kind of distract itself until you can get to the actual work, so to speak. The same way craving is something for the mind to do, to let go of, until it realizes that that's all just part of the conceptual process. So what should we talk about next? How about Vinnana Anidasana? Vinnana Anidasana, yeah. How about you speak first about all the wrong ways that people are thinking about this? So Anidasana Vinnana. Anidasana has been translated as without surface or non-manifestative, uh, I call it non-reflective, and so on. And a lot of people equate that anidasana vinnana sometimes as cessation of perception, feeling and consciousness, sometimes they equate it with the signless, and other times they'll equate it with nibbana, and they're all pointing one way or the other to those things, but they are not the same as those things.

So I see you're gracefully skipping my request to talk about the wrong interpretation, because I really don't know what the wrong interpretations could be. I'm just messing around. So what would be the difference between vinnana anidasana and cessation of perception and feeling, a.k.a. being in nibbana? So anidasana vinnana is the consciousness, vinnana, right? The consciousness. Anidasana is non-reflective, which arises when you know that you were in nibbana. Very good. I mean, following nibbana? Following nibbana. Following nibbana. I see. So in some sense, you're saying that is a quality of awareness. It's not the quality of nibbana being the unconditioned. It's the quality of the awareness that is aware of nibbana. So in some sense, that is the equivalent of the word rigpa.

Exactly. I see. So it's like rigpa sort of describes the same thing, like awareness, cognizant or recognizing of the unconditioned, of the absolute base, they say in Tibetan, in a positive way. This is the thing. It's recognizing it. And the Theravadins are saying it in a negative way. It's like an awareness that nothing sticks to, awareness that nothing catches on to, and to perpetuate the self-iterative, right? So I guess the question is whether we would say that awareness is only in the first moment of coming out of complete cessation, or if it's like rigpa. This is a very semantic and scholarly discussion. I'm still curious about the way that Theravada speaks about this.

Is it unlike rigpa in that rigpa is also the type of awareness that, even if it continues self-ignorating and even if it's still touched by the taints, just by mere virtue of continuous recognition of ground floor, of the absolute base, we call it non-ignorance or intelligent awareness, right? Awake awareness, versus anidasana vinnana, that as soon as it starts spinning again or has any taint, we're like, no, it's not that anymore. So I would probably contextualize it with the way the Buddha has used it in that particular sutta. It's the Kevaddha Sutta, the Digha Nikaya 11, I believe. And it's in verse form. And he says, you know, like there's this monk who goes and asks, you know, where do earth, water, fire, air cease?

That's the wrong question. The question should be, "In what do earth, water, air, fire find no foot in me?" And he says it's anidassana, that's in the vinnana consciousness without surface consciousness. So there I would see that it's a self-propelling thing, like Rigpa, because if you're staying in that... Or another way to look at it is, sorry, also Tsongkhapa talks about this. He says it's like there's the perception of nibbana, which is the anidassana vinnana, and there's the nibbana itself, and it's just flowing continuously. But then why would the elements not find hold in anidassana vinnana? Because the Tibetans would say, even if awareness has the quality of Rigpa in recognizing, and even for the purpose of continuing down the path, it has to allow the type of defilements, so to speak, that otherwise obscure the ground to come up as they are, for the purpose of liberation.

I see. So that they can see, in some sense, the folly of grabbing, so that they can reform or transmute to be more in alignment with the understanding, the visceral, direct understanding of the ground. And so maybe this is the case of the Theravadans being a little more idyllic in the sutras again? Maybe another way of looking at it is they're calling it, or they're referring to it as, a non-conceptual awareness. So it's more that the label, or the reified form of the elements, doesn't find hold. I see. That makes sense. So you would say that it is one-to-one equivalent to Rigpa? If we could say that that's basically what Rigpa is as well, which is it's the awareness of the ground, which is, in this sense, the nibbana element.

I would say that anidassana vinnana is a result, quote-unquote result, of having made contact with nibbana. It's a one-to-one, yeah. But could you say Rigpa is non-conceptual awareness? I would say Rigpa is an awareness that has a basis that is before the sensory bits or the mind atoms differentiate or combine into reified forms. Okay. Into concepts. Yeah. It's like the awareness less divided from the ultimate, or from the vast potentiality, infinite potentiality. Yeah. And so in that sense, yeah, that does correspond.

Yeah. Okay, great. We've solved the divide. We have made peace. Oh, finally. And no longer shall the schools of Buddhism war over random reified definitions. Let it be known today, on the 3rd of June. You can see how isolated we are. I still think my emptiness is a little more empty than yours. That's for another discussion. That's for another discussion. Even if not now, I would like to continue talking about this from the perspective of the way that the Theravada and Jhana paths culminate in cessation. Yeah. Cessation of feeling. And I like saying combination. I don't like perception. It's like we say perception, but we mean Sutta perception, not Western perception. So I prefer cessation of cognition.

Getting to that is a means of coming into direct, unsurpassable, doubtless, complete contact with nibbana. Sometimes I like saying they need to be clubbed over the head with them, versus the later vehicles, which point to you the parts of awareness that are already in contact with it. So I'm bookmarking that. Then another thing that would be useful is to talk about

the parallel between signless collectedness and the type of practice, pointing-out practice, that is an approximation of Rigpa, that is in some sense a view that's installed in the mind of a practitioner so that they can get to the true signless or the true Rigpa. This whole path of approximation, I find very scriptful. Yeah. So I also want to get phala samapatti in this and tease out the exact meaning of it. Yeah. But then, let's just for today, what's in with, because we started with this from pabhassara citta? It's more of a description of the content of awareness, so the shift in quality of the mind. I think it's, with contacts, where would you put this? I think it's actually, in some sense, referring to buddha nature. That's what I'm looking at it as. So the quality of the mind, yeah, the quality of the mind is

luminous, and luminous is a very interesting term, because I don't think it's referring to there being a light in the mind. Yeah. But rather it has this radiant quality. It has this sort of clear light quality to it, where you can just be here with buddha nature. What's the difference between luminous mind and ordinary mind? Ordinary mind, let's say in conventional terms, gets caught up in whatever is going on, and then starts to grab and reify and everything, whereas luminous mind, which is the natural quality of mind, is in conventional terms present, present, and ever fluid to whatever's happening. So where does the notion of luminosity come from? What's the essence of that? I think it's referring more to the clarity of mind. Good, good. So the continuous capacity to see through any mental construct very clearly, not being able to get caught in it. Yeah. Like seeing the porousness of perception. And in my experience, the more the mind is deconstructed and the more reified forms coming up, mental contact coming up,

is naturally seen through, is empty. It also corresponds with a sense of not just spaciousness in this sense, but like a porousness, like everything has more space right inside. Yeah, inside, and between, right, where otherwise the reified form blocks some of this. What, in my mind, I relate to is luminous nature, or like the clear nature. Yeah. So does that correspond with what you're saying? Because it sounds like the way that you're treating luminous mind is not so much that something has changed in terms of my subjective perception, like the quality of even just immediate sensory perception. I'm looking at it as the Buddha talking about the natural state of the mind, which is that it is ever present to whatever happens, spontaneously present to everything without any kind of effort.

So again, why would you choose the word luminous? Yeah. Pabhassara. Pabhassara means bright, it means radiant, it means luminous, and all of these things. So, a mind that is not dimmed by mental contact. Yeah. Reified forms grabbing, squeezing, holding hostage the sensory afferents, yeah, for their purposes, because the last part of it is obscurations. Right. There you go. The luminous mind, you know, the last part of it is obscurations, where the mind is obscured by the adventitious defilements, by the fact that it starts to grab onto them. Yeah, which is another interesting topic for this question, for another time. My thesis, which diverges very much from anything that I've seen in Buddhism or otherwise, for why this happens in perception, that I just hinted at, is like the way that reified forms, to exist, have to sort of grab the basic machinery of the chain of sensory perception processing and integration. But that's a topic for another time. Join us again. How do we call the show? Nibbana Tales, from Nibbana, right? Something like that. That's right. Good, cool. Let's go eat.