MN 16 -Five Wildernesses -Weaknesses to be overcome -Cetokhila Sutta

All right, so we're going to continue with the series on Majjhima Nikaya. This is Majjhima Nikaya 16, Cetokhila Sutta. So cetokhila here is the heart. It's the mind. It's chitta, actually. So when we say something like, for example, cetovimutti, cetovimutti is referring to the freedom of the mind, freedom of the heart. And sometimes this is also translated as hard-heartedness.

In other words, hardness of the heart, where the mind is brittle and not malleable enough to obtain insight and so on. And it's an interesting sutta because it talks about some interesting practicalities, which we'll go into. Thus have I heard. On one occasion the Blessed One was living at Savatthi in Jeta's Grove, Anathapindika's Park. There he addressed the bhikkhus thus: "Bhikkhus." "Venerable sir," they replied. The Blessed One said this: "Bhikkhus, any bhikkhu who has not abandoned five wildernesses in the heart and not severed five shackles in the heart should come to grow, increase and fulfillment in this Dhamma and discipline, that is impossible."

It's interesting here. The first three we're going to talk about are really the triple gem, right? The teacher here is referring to the Buddha. So, one is doubtful, uncertain, undecided, unconfident about the teacher. What does that mean? What do we mean by that? In the retreats, and if you're at home and you do this, you take the five precepts, let's say at home, but you also take the three refuges.

And what are you doing by taking the three refuges, specifically in the Buddha? It's on account of faith, but eventually experiential confidence, that you know that there is someone, or there was someone, named Gautama Buddha. And so Buddhahood has basically opened up the path to awakening, or reopened up the path to awakening. And so if we don't see that, if we have any kind of doubt about that, if you're not able to recognize the importance of that, it's difficult to really take anything that the Buddha might say to heart. it in any other practical approaches. When you are meeting with, and I can tell you from the perspective of being a teacher and a guide, when somebody has any kind of lack of confidence in what a guide is saying or what a teacher is saying, even to the extent of having contempt, you're not going to get through to them.

You're not going to be able to have them really willingly open up and listen to the instructions that you're providing. So there needs to be a certain level of confidence. There needs to be a certain level of inclination to listen and to understand. And it says here, he does not incline to ardor, devotion, perseverance, and striving. So let's just break down these words.

When we say devotion, are we saying devotion to the Buddha as some kind of deity? Are we saying devotion to the Buddha as some kind of magical or mystical figurehead? No. When we're talking about devotion, we're talking about devotion to our own efforts, devotion to our own practice. There is hardly any of that in the mainstream Theravada practice, and in that process, the twin practice is part of that, where devotion is less about some kind of bhakti, where you're singing bhajans and things like that, as you might see in other places. Devotion has a sense of loving kindness, a sense of happiness that arises because you devote yourself to the practice. Perseverance and striving. Striving can be misconstrued as "I need to try very, very hard. I need to push. I need to be perfect. I need to make sure that I don't fail."

And the more you do that, the more you will fail. The more you will see for yourself that it is a counterproductive effort to try so hard. So when we say strive, we're really talking about making the right effort, making the balanced effort. What is the right effort? The six R's. The other day, we were talking about this at lunch. And the idea is that the twin practice of samatha and vipassana doesn't mean that we're just doing brahmavihara practice. Why are we doing brahmavihara practice? What is the benefit and reason for brahmavihara practice?

Well, number one, it feels good. It is congruent with the experiences of piti and sukha, which are factors of the first and second jhana, into the jhanas. So brahmaviharas as an object feel very in flow with the meditation practice. But does that mean we can't do breathing practice? Does that mean we can't do anapanasati? Does that mean we can't do meditation on the elements? Does that mean we can't do any other kind of practice? No. Ours, the right effort, is at the heart of what we are doing here.

If you're doing, let's say, anapanasati, which is a surprise to me, it is a shock to me to see how many people take for granted, including teachers and monastics, this idea that anapanasati is to focus on the tip just below the nose or to focus on the movement of the belly. And I would say to them, please show me in the sutta where exactly the Buddha says to focus on the tip below the nose or to focus on the movement of the belly. And you will not be able to see that, because that is not what anapanasati is. In fact, in the Anapanasati Sutta it says: breathing in, he tranquilizes formations; breathing out, he tranquilizes formations.

What is Dhamma, right? What does the word Dhamma actually mean? The word Dhamma, or Dharma from Sanskrit, comes from the root word dhr, D-H-R, dhr. And that means to hold or to uphold, to have a foundation on. So when people talk about what is my dharma, they talk about it from that perspective. Your dharma is that which allows you to exist in the material that you're existing in.

For example, the dharma of fire is to burn. The dharma of air is to flow. The dharma of earth is to be stable. So that doesn't mean the purpose. A lot of people may say purpose. What is my purpose in life? It's subtler than that. It's much more nuanced than that. But dharma means to uphold what keeps me upheld. And so the dharma, the dharma of the Buddha, is what keeps me upheld, what keeps me rooted towards liberation.

That's the dharma. That's the dharma. That's the teaching that upholds us towards liberation. And if we are unconfident about that, if we are undecided about that, then we have no dharma. And this was seen in ancient India as being an eel wriggler, someone who was on the fence about things, somebody who was undecided about things. And even in today's world, that's frustrating, both for the person who's indecisive and the person who needs a decision to be made.

So understand that when you see what the Dhamma is, the understanding of Dhamma is the understanding of the Four Noble Truths. The willingness to subscribe to the understanding of what suffering is, to abandoning what the cause and condition for suffering is, and to cultivate and perfect the development of the Eightfold Path. That's dharma. That's Dhamma. And when you have that and you can intrinsically practice that all the time, then you are rooted.

You are rooted in the wholesome. You are rooted in wisdom. You are rooted in the practice. Again, a bhikkhu is doubtful, uncertain, undecided, and unconfident about the Sangha. As his mind does not incline to ardor, devotion, perseverance, and striving, that is the third wilderness in the heart that he has not abandoned. Sangha. What do we mean by Sangha? The Buddha, in his last days, probably in the months leading up to his parinibbana, was speaking with his disciples. And he said he came into the world to establish the Dhamma, right? They established the teachings of the Buddha and so on. And to establish the Sangha, the monastic Sangha and the lay Sangha, the Aryan Sangha, the noble Sangha.

And so that was part of his duty, his dharma, if you will, his purpose, as existing as a Buddha: to uphold, or to establish, I should say, the Sangha. So what do we mean by the Sangha when we're doubtful of the Sangha? It means that we are doubting the possibility of the noble Sangha, the possibility of what is available to us, entering the stream.

When you get more mundane than that, it's really the doubt in the community. This is why it's so important to understand that creating a schism in any community, specifically this community of monastics or lay people, creating doubts is a very big no-no and is a very big, you know, quote-unquote sin. It's one of the immediately effective us, so to speak, in the sense that when you do that, you're creating darkness in people's hearts.

And so why do we need confidence in the Sangha? Why do we need faith in the Sangha? Because we know that we're not here alone. This is a very primal need for humans, to be part of a community. And the Buddha understood this. And while he emphasized seclusion and solitude, where you are in your own mind and you are in your own practice in meditation, he also understood the importance of being part of a community.

And when you're part of a community, you feel safe, you feel secure. You feel like you can talk about your problems. You feel like you can talk about your progress. You feel like you can talk about many different things. This is what we do every Sunday. This is what we do every Tuesday, right? We get together, we talk Dhamma, we discuss the Dhamma, we get our doubts cleared, we talk about our practice, we talk about what's happening, and we get support and we provide support. And this is very healthy for our development.

Again, a bhikkhu is doubtful, uncertain, undecided, and unconfident about the training, as his mind does not incline to ardor, and so on. That is the fourth wilderness in the heart that he has not abandoned. What do we mean by the training? Sila, Samadhi, and Panna. That is the training. The training of keeping the precepts, of taking the precepts and keeping the precepts. The training of developing the mind through a meditational practice every single day.

I urge all of you to make sure that you keep up some kind of a practice. And it doesn't mean just the formal sitting. It also means: can you maintain that meditative awareness in everything that you do? Can you meet experience and feeling with a mind that is free of cravings and identification? And when I mean a mind that is free of craving and identification, I mean a mind that is fully aware and accepting of things as they actually are.

That is part of the training. That is how one cultivates wisdom. The knowledge and vision of things as they actually are. That is seeing things as they are. And you are only able to see that when you have your mind, your awareness, your attention rooted in the present moment. When you are rooted in the present, when things unfold, it's very easy for you to be able to see and navigate through the points in which the mind has identification.

The mind says, this is me, this is mine, this is myself, and be able to let go of that. That is part of the training. Again, a bhikkhu is angry and displeased with his companions in the holy life, resentful and callous towards them. And thus his mind does not incline to ardor, devotion, perseverance, and striving. As his mind does not incline to ardor, devotion, perseverance, and striving, that is the fifth wilderness in the heart that he has not abandoned.

These are the five wildernesses in the heart that he has not abandoned. So when you are having any kind of resentment towards your fellow practitioners, sangha members, people that you know, you have resentment towards a friend, towards a partner, towards a loved one, and you hold on to that resentment and you act passive-aggressive and you don't really communicate what is going on, you're causing yourself agitation and possibly agitation in the other.

So many things can be solved through just communicating. you did there? Can we talk about it? Instead of holding on and making judgments in our mind about this person and misinterpreting situations and actions, just doing that is so uplifting. The ability to communicate and say, this is how I feel. This is why the monastics gather together, right? Every full moon, every new moon is to chant the where they went wrong is to communicate, you know, and to get together and talk about these things. That was the whole purpose, is not to hold on to things.

So that ability to trust in your own skills of communication, of being like, hey, this is how I'm feeling. This is what I wanted to get off my chest. Can we talk about this? Is it an appropriate time? And if you can do that, you can let go of any kind of displeasure, any kind of resentment. Otherwise, maybe something I said, let's say, on retreat didn't really gel with you, didn't really jive with you, and you hold on to it. And you may have resentment towards me. I have a lot of people who resent me, and that's okay.

But if they came and communicated with me and told me this is how I feel, I think having a dialogue would be really beneficial because that would clear a lot of things. So think about that. Think about how you keep holding on to certain things and how you can let go of them. Maybe you need to do a forgiveness practice for some time before you can go and approach that person. That's fine too.

So we're talking about craving for sensual pleasures, the obsession around sensual pleasures. It's really the five cords of sensual stimulation: the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue, the body. The mind can experience its own pleasure devoid of or independent of what's happening outside with the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue, and the body. Say in Anguttara Nikaya 6.63 that are the craving. It's the intention behind it. It's the identification with the experience.

Letting go and understanding, oh, this is a pleasant sensation. This is a pleasant experience. This is nice. Wow, wonderful, great. But when there is this sense of, I can't live without it, if somebody gets in the way of me experiencing that, they are seen as an obstacle. That's what you need to look at. That's what you need to let go of.

Again, a bhikkhu is not free from lust, desire, affection, thirst, fever, and craving for the body. As his mind does not incline to ardor, that is the second shackle in the heart that he has not severed. The body, you know, we can take the body very, very seriously sometimes. But the body is a very beautiful system. It's a very beautiful system of processes. And it has its own primal intelligence.

It knows when it's actually hungry. It knows when it's actually thirsty. It knows when it's actually feeling pain. It knows when it's actually feeling pleasure. And if we can really tune into and embody the practice in that way, you see, embody the practice, beholden to identifying with the body. You see, embodying one's mind or touching one's body with jhanas, that can mean actually experiencing it in the body, the sense of piti in the body, the sense of joy in the body.

But here the Buddha is really pointing out craving for the body by identifying with it as self. The body has its own way of dealing with things, but we are not the body. Whatever we call the self is not the body. The body is just a shell, right? It's made up of all these wonderful processes. But the moment we identify with the body, which in itself continues to change, which continues to decay over a period of time, we are misperceiving reality.

And we are causing ignorance to grow. Again, a bhikkhu is not free from the lust, desire, affection, thirst, fever, and craving for form. And as his mind is not inclined to ardor, perseverance, and so on, that is the third shackle in the heart that he has not severed. So the body, of course, is part of rupa, part of form. But it's for any kind of form. It's for this table that my laptop is on. It's for this laptop. It's for the microphone. It's for the phone that I have. It's for whatever it is that's there.

The things that we accumulate, the things that we think we possess. And when we identify with those forms and when those forms are gone, we may experience displeasure. We may experience grief. We may experience anger. We may experience sadness. Any kind of form. So what do we mean by form? Rupa? Form that is internal or external. Form that is near or far. Form that is gross or subtle. Form that is existing in the past, the present, or the future. All types of form.

Understand that everything has its own utility. The monastics, they subsist on food that they use their bowls for feeding from. They subsist on the survive the warmth and the winters and everything with their clothing, with their robes. Likewise, we do the same. We utilize whatever it is that we utilize. The form that is there in the way of something like a canister or a utensil, or our clothing, or whatever it is. Don't get attached to it. That's the idea. Use it when it's needed and keep it aside when it's not. That's it.

Again, a bhikkhu eats as much as he likes until his belly is full and indulges in the pleasures of sleeping, lolling, and drowsing. As his mind is not inclined to ardor and so on, that is the fourth shackle in the heart that he has not severed. This is the shackle that I have not severed. I love food.

I love to eat. In this last week or so, I got off my diet. I was trying to be very keto, but my body was just craving comfort food. I needed the mashed potatoes. I needed all of these wonderful things. I needed that chicken biryani and I suffered for it. I took long naps. I was drowsy. That's also the exhaustion of the body.

But the idea here is eat when you're hungry. That's it. The body will know when it's hungry and you eat when you're hungry. The Buddha, as he got older, towards his 50s and 60s and so on, recommended eating one time a day. He was an ardent follower and proponent of intermittent fasting, so to speak. So eating once a day, because once you have that, the body will survive on that. The body will survive on its own fat, on its own whatever is available to it. So the pleasure of eating is one thing, and subsisting on food for letting the body survive and thrive is another.

So keep that in mind, especially when you're on retreat and when you're practicing. You will notice that when you eat heavily, when you eat heavy foods, it has an effect on your energy. When you meditate after a heavy meal, you're not going to be... you'll be sleeping. So the idea is to be mindful of these things. Again, a bhikkhu lives the holy life aspiring to some order of gods: thus by this virtue or observance or asceticism or holy life I shall become a great god or some lesser god, and thus his mind does not... So, this is an interesting one. Somebody who is practicing the Dhamma, somebody who is meditating, gets attached to rites and rituals.

This is part of the attachment to rites and rituals: something like, may I be existent in a different kind of heaven? May I be existent in some kind of status as a deity or a god or a Brahma or whatever? But that's not the purpose of the holy life. The purpose of the holy life is to get out of samsara.

There are wonderful, we just talked about Ajahn Punadamo giving his talk on the cosmology. And he gave a great talk on the different deities. And he talked about how subtler and subtler and subtler the sense bases are and the sensual pleasures are. And then the brahma lokas correspond to the jhanas, where there is no sensual pleasure. There is just a pleasure of the mind experiencing wonderful qualities of piti and sukha and then the formless and so on. Shackled by samsara, we don't realize this until maybe it's too late if we don't practice, but once we see through the reality that we're experiencing here through the sense bases, and once we break through cessation, we realize, ah, that is the ultimate relief that is beyond the scope of this. That is not nonexistence.

That is the substrate, in some parts, in some ways of saying that word, substrate of Nibbana, in the sense that you have unraveled and uncovered all of the illusions of so-called reality and realize that all of that is ultimately impermanent and leading to suffering. And that the only true refuge, the only true shelter, the only true comforting shore is to rest in Nibbana. You have that preview when you experience cessation, when you enter the stream.

And so you become uninterested in wanting to go on the merry-go-round again. Sometimes you don't even need that. Enough suffering has shown you that: do I really want to repeat that same thing? Because the thing is, it's not just human existence. People may have this misconception that a higher realm might be better. They got their own set of problems.

You know, it might seem it's much better. You think about, forget about just higher realms. You think about people in so-called higher strata of society. glamorous life, that their life is where they have assistants and, you know, they have a lot of money in the bank and all of these things, but they're not really happy. They're not really, you know, they may be happy on a physical level because all of their needs and wants and everything is there, but there's a certain kind of vacuous emptiness that's there in their heart and in their mind. fact that they want more and more and more and more.

The mind that is free of craving and that is content in what's going on here and now is much wealthier than the mind of someone like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or whatever great billionaire that everybody seems to worship. So these are the five shackles in the heart that he has not severed. A bhikkhu who has not abandoned these five wildernesses in the heart and severed these five shackles in the heart should come to growth, increase, and fulfillment in this Dhamma and discipline.

One is not doubtful, uncertain, undecided, or unconfident about the Buddha, the Dhamma, or the Sangha. These are the three wildernesses in the heart that have been abandoned. One is not doubtful, uncertain, undecided, or unconfident about the training. One persists in the training. And so, this is the fourth wilderness that has been abandoned by him. One is not angry or resentful or displeased with his companions in the holy life or resentful or callous towards them. And so he has let go and does not have the fifth wilderness in the heart. These are the five wildernesses in the heart that he has abandoned.

What, bhikkhus, are the five shackles in the heart that he has severed? Craving for sensual pleasures. And so the first shackle in the heart has been severed by him. He is free from the craving for the body. And so this second shackle in the heart has been severed by him. He is free from craving for form. And so the third shackle in the heart has been severed by him.

Therefore, he develops the basis for spiritual power. about the accomplishments, what is one of the four basis, and we'll get into what that is. So the power consisting in collectedness due to zeal and determined striving? So this is collectedness. He develops the basis of zeal. That's the enthusiasm, I should say. He develops the basis of spiritual power consisting in collectedness due to energy and determined striving. He develops the basis for spiritual power consisting in collectedness due to purity of mind and determined striving. He develops the basis for spiritual power consisting in collectedness due to the investigation and determined striving.

And enthusiasm is the fifth. So what are we talking about here? We're talking about the iddhipadas. Now, a lot of people think when we say iddhipadas, it means it's just for the purpose of psychic development. What we may fail to recognize is that full awakening, or awakening in general, is probably the highest psychic power, I should say, and so when we are having the zeal, that is the determination, when we are having the energy, the right balanced effort, when we're having the purity of mind, right purity of intention, so we have purified the mind of letting go of the hindrances.

And we have investigation. We have what is known as vimamsa, the ability to investigate and see what is wholesome and unwholesome, discerning between what is wholesome and unwholesome. And enthusiasm here is the drive to continue the practice. Some people don't have that. They just are there because I want peace of mind and I have that and that's enough. But if you want to get towards full liberation, you need to continue with discipline, with enthusiasm.

Again, one who possesses the 15 factors, including enthusiasm, is capable of breaking out, capable of enlightenment, capable of attaining the supreme security from bondage. Suppose there were a hen with 8, 10, or 12 eggs, which she had covered, incubated, and nurtured properly. Even though she did not wish, oh, that my chicks might pierce their shells with the points of their claws and beaks and hatch out safely, yet the chicks are capable of piercing their shells with the points of their claws and beaks and hatching out safely. So too, one who thus possesses the 15 factors, including enthusiasm, is capable of breaking out, capable of enlightenment, capable of attaining the supreme security from bondage. So what are the 15 factors here?

It's letting go of the five wildernesses and the five shackles, having the four basis of spiritual power and enthusiasm. That is how one is capable of breaking out, capable of enlightenment, capable of attaining the supreme security from bondage, i.e. Nibbana. Satisfied and delighted in the Blessed One's words. May suffering ones be suffering free and the fear struck fearless be. May the grieving shed all grief and may all beings find relief. May all beings share this merit that we have thus acquired for the acquisition of all kinds of happiness. May beings inhabiting space and earth, devas and nagas of mighty power, share this merit of ours. May they long protect the Buddha's dispensation. Sadhu, sadhu, sadhu. Thank you, everyone. I'll see you next week.