Todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte takes us into the fascinating world of mind and mental events. and#8220;Dhammavichaya and#8211; Introspection of Mind and Mental Events,and#8221; is a crucial stage in the spiral path of spiritual development. The full talk, titled and#8220;What is Mind?and#8221; is from a series of talks from the Order Convention in 2001 offering different perspectives on the Abhidharma and exploring from a personal perspective what the study of the 51 Mental Events can tell us about our minds and how they work.
Dharmabytes from free buddhist audio
Dharmavichaya – Introspection of Mind and Mental Events
[music] Dharma Vites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. [music] So first of all, we need to talk about mind in mental events. What is mind and what is mental events? So let's go back to the beginning as it were and quote the first two verses of the Dhammapada. So this is Bante's translation of those two verses. The experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind and produced by mind. If one speaks or acts with an impure mind, suffering follows. Even as the cartwheel follows the hoof of the ox. Experiences are preceded by mind, led by mind and produced by mind. If one speaks or acts with a pure mind, happiness follows like a shadow that never departs. So the Buddha here is not involving himself in philosophical speculation, but he's giving us the benefit of his insight, of his wisdom, for practical purposes so that we can change our minds by pointing out to us that everything depends on our minds and the states of our minds. So Bante translates Dhammas as experiences. In some translations, it's just as mental states are preceded by mind. So that's Dhammas, mental states. So it follows that we need to know our mind and mental events. Of course, in any practice of mindfulness, we're attempting to know our minds and hopefully we've all been doing this for many, many years. The verse expresses knowing our mind in a very general sort of way, knowing at least the difference between an impure mind and a pure mind and its consequences. So we can, first of all, introspect in a very general way into what's going on in our minds. We can ask ourselves, are my mental states pleasant or unpleasant or neutral? Are my mental states happy or unhappy? Are my mental states skillful or unskillful, wholesome or unwholesome, pure or impure? Are my mental states ignorant or clear and wise? Are they in accordance with the Dhamma the way things are or not? That's a very general introspection in the nature of what's happening in our own mind. But we can take this introspection further by developing the faculty of Dhamma Bachaya. This is a very important faculty, which hopefully we will all develop on this retreat. So Dhamma Bachaya is the second of the seven Bodhyangas, the seven limbs of enlightenment, a teaching which I think Vante outlines in mind, reactive and creative as a path in itself. So just remind you what the other limbs are. We're not going to go into them in detail. So we start with mindfulness with Shmurti, and on the basis of that we develop Dhamma Bachaya, investigation of mental states. That gives rise to energy, that gives rise to pretty, that calms down. That gives rise to samadhi or deep concentration, and that gives rise to upexure in the highest sense. So mindfulness, investigation of mental states, energy, rapture, calm, concentration and equanimity. So the chaya means to discern or to discriminate, to pick out, to identify, to investigate, to distinguish, to sort out. So it's a bit like sorting out the wheat from the chaff, or sorting out the rice, going through your rice and picking out the black bits, the hard bits. That kind of process is what we're engaging in with our mental states. And Dhamma is mental state, event, object of mind, mental concomitant. So this is the faculty that we need to employ and develop if we are to know our mental events. We need to examine, identify, discriminate and sort out our mental states. And it's this faculty that we will be developing by focusing on our mental events during this retreat and then reflecting on our mental events more deeply. So important to realize that when we're investigating our mental events, when we're using Dhamma the chaya, we're not just thinking about what goes on in our minds in a sort of slightly alienated kind of sense. We're trying to experience our mental states, we're trying to experience what happens in a direct, intimate way. So first of all, we have to experience, then acknowledge, and then identify. So in a way, the naming process is secondary. First of all, we just have to get the feeling tone, as it were, of our mental states, our mental events. So eventually, this process of investigating our mental events, developing Dhamma the chaya, takes us deeper and deeper into the nature of the mind and involves reflection on the three electioners. Then we begin to see if we begin to look more and more deeply into our mental states, mental events, that our minds are impermanent and insubstantial. We realize if we don't realize that, that that leads to suffering or dukkha. So we begin to watch the flow of our mental events, the flow of our thoughts, and we begin to see that our mental events arise in dependence on conditions. So again, we begin to understand more deeply, Pratitya-tit-summit-pada. And as we go more and more deeply into those elections, particularly in some sensuality, we begin to experience our mind, particularly as we transform unskillful mental states, free of the glaciers, free of illusions and distortions, free of wrong views, free of the veil of conflicting emotions, and free of the veil of wrong views. So that eventually we experience a happy, blissful, pure, liberated and free mind. So this is the mind we're trying to experience at the end of the sixth element practice or at the beginning of a visualization practice. We let everything dissolve into the clear, blue sky of the mind. So through employing Damavachaya, we are trying to go deeper and deeper into the mind until both veils are rent and we experience blue sky mind. But we're not there yet, so we need to backtrack a little. So the Buddhist tradition has developed many aids for increasing our faculty of Damavachaya by analyzing mental events, so that we have a finer and more subtle experience of what goes on in our minds. So you find lists of poisons and lists of positive mental events in the suitors. However, the Abhidhamma tradition developed this investigation, this analysis, to a much higher degree. There are several Abhidhamma traditions, but they all analyze mental events, they all investigate what's going on in the mind, and give us a list to help us identify what is happening. As I said earlier, that investigation analysis did tend to drift into scholasticism, but nevertheless those lists remain as a practical source of knowledge for us, if we use them with the right motivation, and the right motivation is that we want to change our minds. So we know that there are different lists in the different Abhidhamma traditions. There's a Teravada list, a Savastivardan list, and a Yoga Chara list, just to name three. And we're going to focus on the list of the 51 mental events from Asangas Abhidhamma Samachaya, from the Yoga Chara tradition. So to some extent, the different lists overlap, and to some extent, they differ, and it's not something to worry about. No list is exhaustive, there are no fixed boundaries between mental and vest, mental events. The list is only a tool for practical purposes, so it's provisional, provisional labels. So using such a system is meant to be helpful to us, to help us recognize the subtle nuances of our mind and its mental events, to recognize, acknowledge, and change them into their opposites if they're unwholesome. It can be unhelpful if we get too academically involved in it all, and take it all too intellectually and literally. Mental states are infinite really, and we could cut the cake as it were of the mind in any number of ways. So the lists are just tools for a signpost. So we're working within the dualistic mind. We're using provisional labels of mental events in ignorance, as it were. We're making a distinction between different things that go on in our mind so that we can clarify the unskillful and the skillful and change this. This is a process at the Ningma Tantric tradition called "Using Dirt" to get rid of dirt. So we're working with our dualistic mind to get to mind as such pure mind. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [music fades out] [music fades out] [music fades out] [BLANK_AUDIO]