FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;Beginning to Noticeand#8221; Padmavajra takes us far into the strong experience of Going Forth into homelessness where we begin to notice sickness, old age and death. With the end of intoxication, the beginning of deep awareness arises.
From the talk and#8220;The Buddha, Hakuin, Birth and Deathand#8221; delivered at Padmaloka Retreat Centre for men as part of the series and#8220;Tangling Eyebrows with Zen Masters.and#8221; (2004)
[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you, and happy listening. So life at home was stagnant, pleasurable, colourful, with the different panises, with all the family members, with the dancing girls and the dancing musicians and the servants. But it's hard, it was utterly stuck, dusty, stagnant, profoundly boring, meaningless. Not only did Siddhartha feel cramped and confined, he had problems, big problems. Not psychological problems, you could call them existential problems. He began to notice things as if for the first time he started to notice sickness and illness. The strong, youthful, handsome body gets sick, starts to just break down for a while. He started to notice old age, the strong, youthful body starts to get aches and pains. You start to notice as people get older that they bend over, that there are some grey hairs. And that just seems to, seems irreversible, that old age, that aging. The youthful body ages, decays and in the end dies. So he started to notice death. The body is carried away, the lifeless body is carried away to the burning ground. It's just laid on a pile of wood and cow dung and is consumed in the flames. Turn to dust and ashes, that's it. So this was all very deeply troubling, very deeply troubling for Siddhartha. You notice too that people's attitude to illness and old age and death was very strange. You notice that they felt aversion to it. They recoiled when they encountered it, that was kind of the instinctive response. They pulled away, they felt disgust. They felt almost a kind of humiliation in the face of it. And he realised, thinking about this, that this happened because they didn't recognise, they didn't understand that illness, old age and death would happen to them. Inevitably it would happen to them, so that recoiling was a way of trying to avoid that truth. So they had no empathy, no real deep empathy for others because they couldn't recognise this happens to everyone. At some point he had a kind of insight, he recognised that illness, old age, death would all happen to him. There was just no avoiding of these things. They were inherent to reality, inherent to his reality, and it had an incredibly sobering effect. He said that all the vanity, all the intoxication, the word is mother intoxication, left him, the intoxication with health, the intoxication with youth, even the intoxication with life just left him. So he had a profound sobering up. He started to feel deeply contemplative, deeply meditative. He started to not be able to relate to what was going on around him. Sometimes this happens, I remember with my father's death a couple of years ago, that I didn't sort of grieve exactly. I just felt thrown into a sort of state of contemplation, sort of turned inside and I found it very difficult to relate to what was going on around me. I couldn't think straight. But sometime as well, that Siddhartha had other experiences as well at this time, great openings, as you might call them, profound meditation experiences. He saw a field being plowed. He saw the weather beaten plowman bent over it. He just really weathered this man plowing the fields year in and year out, the toiling oxen, the cut earth, the cut worms. He saw life, toil, death. And it became the kind of vision of the whole of life. And what arose in him was a profound empathy, a profound feeling of, is this what life, is this all there is, is this what life is? He felt love, he felt compassion. But then he started to enter into profound meditative experiences of seeing life more deeply opened up these more profound levels of consciousness, these openings. And it became more and more concerned with the issue of life and death, life and death, the problem of birth and death, the problem of life and death. You are born, you live, you die. But what for? Just to live, to die, just to suffer, what, why? We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this screen. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donny. And thank you. [music] [music] [music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
