The great ocean is strange and wonderfuland#8230; and#8220;Just as the mighty ocean has but one taste, the taste of salt, even so the Dharma-vinaya (Buddhism) has but one taste, the taste of Freedomand#8221;- The Udana. In todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;What is Freedom?and#8221; Sangharakshita explores how the Dharma vinaya is both strange and wonderful.
From the cracker of a talk, and#8216;The Taste of Freedomand#8216; given in 1979.
[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. What then is this taste of freedom? What is freedom? That is perhaps the question that we ask ourselves, even more often than we ask ourselves. What is good is it? The word for freedom in the original parley text of the Bodhana is vimutti. And it's equivalent to the Sanskrit vimukti. It can be translated as release or emancipation, or also as freedom. The word for taste is rasa, which means use, taste. Special quality, flavor, relish, pleasure, essential property, extract and essence will come onto that shortly. Now, in recent times, we've heard a great deal about freedom, usually of course in connection with civil and political liberties. And we have therefore come to think of freedom in a certain kind of way. We've come to attach a certain meaning to the word. But in speaking tonight of the taste of freedom, I'm not really concerned with the meaning of the English word as such. I'm concerned with the English word only as a provisional equivalent of the parley word. I'm concerned with freedom in the sense of vimutti. So what is vimutti? Before going into this question, I want to say just a few more words about the Adana passage in which the Buddha describes the dharma vinaya in terms of the great ocean. Remember that the Buddha says that there are eight strange and wonderful things about the great ocean and that similarly there are eight strange and wonderful things about the dharma vinaya. And one of these things is of course the fact that the great ocean has one taste, the taste of salt and that the dharma vinaya has one taste, the taste of freedom. For the moment I want to concentrate on these two epithets, strange and wonderful. You might have missed them, might have overlooked them, but they want to give them their full thought. The great ocean is strange, the great ocean is wonderful, the dharma vinaya is strange, the dharma vinaya is wonderful. What does this mean? How is the great ocean strange? We must remember where it was, that Buddhism as we call it arose. We must remember where it was, that the Buddha taught, he taught in the valley of the ganges. In other words he taught many hundreds of miles from the great ocean. So far as we know the Buddha himself had never seen it, the great ocean. Under vast majority of his disciples had never seen it either. They knew it only by hearsane. They heard the rumor of this great ocean, this great body of water far greater than any river, even the ganges itself. They knew it only by hearsane. So to them the great ocean was a foreign and unfamiliar element. And it was the same, it is the same with the dharma vinaya. The dharma vinaya is strange to us, we could go further, we could elaborate on that. The spiritual life is strange to us, the unconditioned is strange to us. The transcendental is strange to us, it is something of which we have only heard. It represents a foreign element, it is not our native element, the Buddha himself is strange to us. The Buddha is the strange earth, he comes as it were from another world, another dimension. He stands at our door perhaps, but we do not recognize him, even the spiritual community is strange to us. Strange that is, if we are not ourselves, true individual, if we are not spiritually committed. So the great ocean is strange, the dharma vinaya is strange. How is the great ocean wonderful? It is wonderful in its vast extent, it is wonderful in its perpetual movement. It never rests, it never stands still, it never stays, not even for an instant, not even the tiniest particle of it. It is ever in movement. It is wonderful in its uninterrupted music, the sound of the sea. It is wonderful in its ever-changing lights and colors, the blue and the green and the most, the purple, the gold. It is wonderful in its unfathomable depth, and it is particularly wonderful when we see it for the first time. When we come into contact with it, for the first time, when perhaps we swim in it, for the first time when we plunge in, maybe on a hot stage, maybe on a cold stage, but we plunge in. We move our arms and we move our legs and for the first time in our life we are swimming in the great ocean, or at least paddling. So it is the same with the dharma vinaya. The dharma vinaya is not simply vast in its extent, it is infinite. The dharma vinaya, the principle and the practice of the Buddha is a sureless ocean. We can see no end to it, and it is not something fixed or rigid, static, unmoving, unchanging, it is full of life, it is full of movement, it is continually adapting itself to the needs of living beings. And it is continually speaking to us. This ocean of the dharma vinaya, it is singing to it, it is playing its own inimitable music to it, in its own indescribably appealing and fascinating way. Not dull, not uninteresting, but alive with all sorts of brilliance and tender life. All sorts of vivid and delicate colors, alive we may say with the radiantly colorful forms of goodness and bodhisattvas, dark hearts and dark in ease. And it is so deep, this ocean of the dharma vinaya that we can never hope to present its depth. So the dharma vinaya is wonderful in all of these ways, which we don't usually think of it in this kind of manner, but this is what it is really like. The dharma vinaya is wonderful, the buddha is wonderful. As the mortri cheater himself says, in his 500 verses of worship, what steadfastness, what conduct, what form, what virtue. In a buddha's qualities, there is nothing that is not wonderful. The spiritual humility is wonderful. Spiritual life is wonderful. It is wonderful that we can stick and meditate together. It is wonderful that we can live in residential spiritual humility. It is wonderful that we can work in team-based, right livelihood projects. It is wonderful that you are all listening to me here tonight. It is wonderful that I am speaking to you. So the dharma vinaya is in the wonderful, strange and wonderful, but we don't usually experience it like that. After a while, we start experiencing the dharma vinaya, buddha's spiritual life as something old and familiar. It is a stage we have gone through when we were young, a naive. It says that familiarity breeds content. It is probably more true to say that familiarity breeds indifference. In the case of the dharma vinaya, familiarity breeds indifference. Only when we've been familiar, simply with words, with concepts and external forms, with the words, concepts and external forms in which the dharma vinaya finds expression, but with which it is not to be identically. But if we have been familiar with the spirit, as we may say, of the dharma vinaya, if we've had even a little taste of it, we will see the dharma vinaya as more and more and more wonderful. It's important, therefore, to keep alive this feeling, this sense that the dharma vinaya is a wonderful thing. According to Plato, philosophy begins with a sense of wonder. Certainly, there's no spiritual life without an ever continuing sense of wonder, a sense of wonder with regard to the dharma vinaya. But we can go further than that. Your dharma goes further than that. The Buddha himself goes further than that. After describing the eight strange and wonderful things about the dharma vinaya, the Buddha says, these things are the eight strange and wonderful things about this dharma vinaya, seeing which again and again, because partakers take delight in this dharma vinaya. I want to concentrate on these 2.2. I want to give them also their full force. First, the bhikkhus, the bhautakas, the followers, the disciples, see the strange and wonderful qualities of the dharma vinaya, again and again. Never become tired of them. Just like some people see a film again and again. Never become tired of it. In the same way, the partakers, they see the dharma vinaya. Look at the dharma vinaya. Here the dharma vinaya, again and again, never become tired. The more they see, the more they hear of the dharma vinaya, the more wonderful it appears. Second, the bhikkhus, the partakers, the Buddha says, take delight in the dharma vinaya. The dharma vinaya is not only wonderful but enjoyable. It's enjoyable because it's wonderful. It's wonderful because it's enjoyable. Spiritual life is enjoyable. Meditation is enjoyable. Living in a residential, spiritual community is enjoyable. Working in a team-based, right livelihood project is enjoyable. Having our thoughts pointed out is enjoyable. Being thrown in at the deep end is enjoyable. Not being allowed to rationalize is enjoyable. It's important to remember this, that in every way, the dharma vinaya is enjoyable. Buddhism, to use that term, is enjoyable. It's something in which, since again and again, we take delight. I hardly need point out how greatly this difference from the usual conception of religion and religious life. We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. [music] [music] [music] [music] [music]
