The Dhammapada

by Eknath Easwaran

Standing apart from all selfish urges and all states of mind harmful to spiritual progress, I entered the first meditative state, where the mind, though not quite free from divided and diffuse thought, experiences lasting joy.

By putting an end to divided and diffuse thought, with my mind stilled in one-pointed absorption, I entered the second meditative state quite free from any wave of thought, and experienced the lasting joy of the unitive state. As that joy became more intense and pure, I entered the third meditative state, becoming conscious in the very depths of the unconscious. Even my body was flooded with that joy of which the noble ones say, “They live in abiding joy who have stilled the mind and are fully awake.” Then, going beyond the duality of pleasure and pain and the whole field of memory-making forces in the mind, I dwelt at last in the fourth meditative state, utterly beyond the reach of thought, in that realm of complete purity which can be reached only through detachment and contemplation.

This last quiet phrase is deadly. Our everyday life, the Buddha is suggesting, is lived within an eggshell. We have no more idea of what life is really like than a chicken has before it hatches. Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain, are storms in a tiny, private, shell-bound realm which we take to be the whole of existence. Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new world. For a moment the Buddha draws aside the curtain of space and time and tells us what it is like to see into another dimension. When I read these words I remember listening to the far-off voice of Neil Armstrong that evening in 1969, telling us what it felt like to stand on the moon and look up at the earth floating in a sea of stars. The Buddha’s voice reaches us from no distance at all, yet from a place much more remote. He is at the center of consciousness, beyond the thinking apparatus itself. As in some science fiction story, he has slipped through a kind of black hole into a parallel universe and returned to tell the rest of us what lies outside the boundaries of the mind.

At this level we begin to see how the mind works. Cut off from its accustomed sensory input, it runs around looking for something to stimulate it. The Buddha specifies two aspects of this: “divided thought,” the ordinary two-track mind, trying to keep attention on two things at once, and “diffuse thought,” the mind’s tendency to wander. The natural direction of this movement is outward, toward the sensations of experience. To turn inward, this movement has to be reversed. Throughout the first dhyana the centrifugal force of the thinking process is gradually absorbed as attention is recalled.

This is only the first leg of a very long journey, but even in itself it is a rare achievement. The concentration it requires will bring success in any field, along with a deep sense of well-being, security, and a quiet joy in living. No great flashes of insight come at this level, but you do begin to see connections between personal problems and their deeper causes, and with this comes the will to make changes in your life.

The ego has retreated to more basic demands: the claims of “I” and “mine.” Here, to make progress, we become eager for opportunities to go against self-will, especially in personal relationships. There is no other way to gain detachment from the self-centered conditioning that burdens every human being. The Buddha calls this “swimming against the current”: the concerted, deliberate effort to dissolve self-interest in the desire to serve a larger whole, when eons of conditioning have programmed us to serve ourselves first.

What he means is that as human beings, our responses should not be automatic; we should be able to choose. When the mind is excited, we jump into a situation and do whatever comes automatically, which often only makes things worse. If the mind is calm, we see clearly and don’t get emotionally entangled in events around us, leaving us free to respond with compassion.

At this depth in consciousness, the sense world and even the notion of personal identity is very far away. Asleep to one’s body, asleep even to the thoughts, feelings, and desires that we think of as ourselves, we are nevertheless intensely awake in an inner world – deep in the unconscious, near the very threshold of personality.

Consciousness itself is like a still lake, clear, calm, and full of joy.

When the thought-process has been slowed to a crawl in meditation, there comes a time when – without warning – the movie of the mind stops and you get a glimpse right through the mind into deeper consciousness. This is called bodhi, and it comes like a blinding glimpse of pure light accompanied by a flood of joy.

This point marks the threshold between the second and third dhyanas. Crossing this threshold is one of the most difficult challenges in the spiritual journey. You feel blocked by an impenetrable wall. Bodhi is a glimpse of the other side, as you get when you drop a quarter into the telescope near the Golden Gate Bridge and the shutter snaps open for a two-minute look at sea lions frolicking on the rocks. But these first experiences of bodhi are over in an instant, leaving you so eagerly frustrated that you are willing to do anything to get through. You feel your way along that wall from one end to the other looking for a break, and finally you realize that there isn’t any. And you just start chipping away. It requires the patience of someone trying to wear down the Himalayas with a piece of silk – and you feel you are making about as much progress.

This is a rarefied world. Like the outside world, personal identity is far away. You feel as if the wall between yourself and the rest of creation were paper-thin. If you are to go further, this wall has to fall. For on the opposite side lies the collective unconscious: not necessarily what Jung meant when he coined the term, but what the Buddha calls “storehouse consciousness,” the strata of the mind shared by every individual creature. Here are stored the seeds of our evolutionary heritage, the race-old instincts, drives, urges, and experiences of a primordial past. To dive into these dark waters and stay conscious, you have to take off your individual personality and leave it on the shore.

Doing “good works” is not enough; the mental state is crucial. There must be no taint of “I” or “mine” in what you do, no self-interest, only your best effort to see yourself in all.

To clear our accounts, we have to absorb whatever comes to us with kindness, calmness, courage, and compassion. Karma is not really erased; its negative entries are balanced with positive ones in a flood of selfless service.

You may wait and wait at this threshold, consumed in a patient impatience, doing everything possible during the day to allow you to break through in your next meditation. This can go on for days, months, even years; it is not really in your hands. But then, suddenly, the mind-process stops and stays stopped. You slip through, and the waters of the collective unconscious close over your head.

This experience cannot last. Like a diver, you have to come up for air. But unity has left an indelible imprint. Never again will you believe yourself a separate creature, a finite physical entity that was born to die. You know firsthand that you are inseparable from the whole of creation, and you are charged by the power of this experience to serve all life.

When you return to the surface of consciousness, you pick up the appearance of personality and slip it on again. But it is the personality of a new man, a new woman, purified of separateness and reborn in the love of all life.

As a word, nirvana is negative. It means “to blow out,” as one would extinguish a fire, and the Buddha often describes it as putting out, cooling, or quenching the fires of self-will and selfish passion. But the force of the word is entirely positive. Like the English word flawless, it expresses perfection as the absence of any fault. Perfection, the Buddha implies, is our real nature. All we have to do is remove the self-centeredness that covers it.

the Buddha describes matter, energy, and mental events as the structure of a fabric we can call consciousness. His universe is a process in continuous change – a seething sea of primordial energy, of which the mind and the physical world are only different aspects.

Like light, we can say, thought consists of quanta, discrete bursts of energy.

The bundle of thoughts, memories, desires, fears, urges, anxieties, and aspirations that we think of as ourselves is largely an illusion: a lot of separate mental events temporarily associated with a physical body, but nothing that anyone could call a whole.

That is how the Buddha describes personality: a blend of five skandhas or “heaps” of ingredients like these piles of spices in their banana-leaf wrapper. These ingredients are rupa, form, vedana, sensation or feeling, samjna, perception, samskara, the forces or impulses of the mind, and vijnana, consciousness. Without reference to an individual self or soul, the Buddha says that birth is the coming together of these aggregates; death is their breaking apart.

Samskaras are thought, speech, or behavior motivated by the desire to get some experience for oneself.

The opening verse of the Dhammapada takes us the next step: “Our life is shaped by our mind, for we become what we think.”

To the Buddha, everything is a dharma, a mental event. We don’t really experience the world, he observes; we experience constructs in the mind made up of information from the senses. This information is already a kind of code. We don’t actually see things, for example; we interpret as separate objects a mass of electrochemical impulses received by the brain. And of course this information covers only a narrow range of sensibility, limited to what the senses can register. But from this scanty data the mind makes a whole world.

What the Buddha is telling us is precisely parallel to what the quantum physicists say: when we examine the universe closely, it dissolves into discontinuity and a flux of fields of energy. But in the Buddha’s universe the mind-matter duality is gone; these are fields in consciousness.

This doesn’t make physical reality any less physical; it only reminds us that what we see in the world is shaped by the structure of consciousness.

“We see as we are,”

It follows that when we change ourselves, we have already begun to change the world.

Heisenberg taught physicists that in subatomic realms, the observer affects the observation.

Karma is stored in the mind. What we call personality is made up of karma, for it is the accumulation of everything we have done and said and thought.

The end of the body cannot clear these accounts, for although the skandhas of personality come apart, I-consciousness is not destroyed. Thus we come logically to the last theme of the Buddha’s universe: the cycle of death and rebirth.

We choose the context in which we are born – not consciously, of course, but by the sum of our previous actions and desires.

From this root ignorance arises trishna, the insistent craving for personal satisfaction.

From trishna comes duhkha, the frustration and suffering that are the human condition.

The ego cannot be satisfied, and the more we try, the more we suffer.

What is this real nature? Here the Buddha remains silent. He comes to us to point the way, to show a path, but he steadfastly refuses to limit with words what we will find.

Nirvana is aroga, freedom from all illness; shiva, happiness; kshema, security; abhaya, the absence of fear; shanta, peace of mind; anashrava, freedom from compulsions; ajara, untouched by age; amata, unaffected by death. It is, in sum, parama sukha, the highest joy.

Those who attain the island of nirvana can live thereafter in the sea of change without being swept away.

“Our life is shaped by our mind, for we become what we think.” That is the essence of the Buddha’s universe and the whole theme of the Dhammapada. If we can get hold of the thinking process, we can actually redo our personality, remake ourselves. Destructive ways of thinking can be rechanneled, constructive channels can be deepened, all through right effort and meditation. “As irrigators lead water to their fields, as archers make their arrows straight, as carpenters carve wood, the wise shape their lives.”

“The universe is hostile,” Wernher von Braun once said, “only when you do not know its laws. To those who know and obey, the universe is friendly.” When understood, the Buddha’s universe too is anything but alien and inhibiting. It is a world full of hope, where everything we need to do can be done and everything that matters is within human reach. It is a world where kindness, unselfishness, nonviolence, and compassion for all creatures achieve what self-interest and arrogance cannot. It is, simply, a world where any human being can be happy in goodness and the fullness of giving. We have the path to this world in the Dhammapada.