[Music] Dharma Bites 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 there are one or two places, at least in the palli canon, where fear is mentioned. Well, there are two places that I know about, that's what I really mean. Sure, there are many others that I don't know about. So one is the Abaya Suta, which I've got here. So Appaya, Baya, must be fear. Appaya means fearless. So I suppose Baya is fear or fearful. So there's a Brahman, and he goes to the Buddha, and he makes a statement. He says, "I'm of the view and opinion, that there is no one who, subject to death, is not afraid of it, or in terror of it." So you get this statement, and the Buddha says, "Well, there are some who do for your death, and there are some who don't." And he says, "Yes, it's true. When serious, say a serious illness overtakes someone, yes, at that moment, confrontation, there are some people who fear death, as you say, but I am of the view and opinion, that there are some who don't." And then he goes on to describe four things that cause us to fear death, which, you know, in the present circumstances of this retreat, death includes spiritual death. So the first two that he describes are craving for sense pleasures, and craving for our body. Because at a moment of, you know, say serious illness, your fear is, if you crave sense pleasures, your fear is, "I'm going to leave, these are about to be taken away from me." So I get what it says, "Sense pleasures, these are beloved to me. They will be taken away from me. I will be taken from them." And then, you know, you're tormented by that, and then afraid and in terror. And the same thing then for my body, my beloved body will be taken from me. I'll be taken from it. And then there's a torment and grief and a fear that arises from that. So those are the first two, so I thought those are interesting. From our point of view in this retreat, one would be doing the Brahma Vahara's, especially the Upeka Bhavana that we did the other day. Because traditionally, Upeka is said to free us from dependency on pleasure. It also frees us from fear of suffering. But it was particularly remembering that it's said to free us from dependency on pleasure, which is a straight antidote to the craving for sense pleasures that, and to send us down our body, that the Buddha is saying are two of the sources of fear, of dying, fear of death. So it struck me as then being a very good example of how the practices of the arena of positive emotion in this system of meditation very particularly help with some of the difficulties in contemplating spiritual death. So it's good to make these connections for ourselves. And I also particularly felt for one about body, about craving for the body of thirst. It says, "A person who's not abandoned desire of fondness, thirst, fever and craving for the body." And to be honest, I wouldn't always have said that I have any of that, or at least not in that very intense way. But a few months back, I had this really acute attack of sciatica, which involves quite a painful period, a few weeks, and then it passes. In the most of that, in that few weeks, there was the pain, which I didn't enjoy, of course, but really what I really couldn't do very well with was the unpredictability of the pain, because it would just suddenly shut down my leg, and I didn't know what I'd done to do it, so I didn't know how to avoid it. And I hadn't done anything in particular to start the whole thing off, so I was really in touch with my own physical vulnerability and uncertainty. And there was a fearfulness in that. I just didn't know what to do to stop it. And, yeah, it impressed me how much I depend on my normal, fairly healthy body. So it was quite a lesson. It was quite a lesson. It was one morning, I woke up, I was in bed, and I was lying bed, and I was going, "Okay, okay, cool, brother." There was probably no way that you'd be able to go from being horizontal to being vertical without there being some moments of pain. It's happened every time, every day for the last few weeks, it's probably going to happen again this morning, probably nothing you can do about it. But maybe I could avoid becoming despondent, because that is what had been happening. I had just been becoming despondent, so it was a bit of a line there, a bit of a bit of a talking to. I mean, I wasn't, I wasn't being unreasonable, so I could avoid. The thing is, I could avoid being despondent. It's not that it lasts forever. It's just that I don't ask for it last, maybe 10 seconds, this shooting pain, but it's just unexpectedness of it. So that was quite a lesson for me, and I definitely touched into fearfulness in myself. That isn't a very, normally it's not a very common experience for me. I mean, I have other things that hold me back, but not fearfulness, in some ways at least, you know, isn't one of them. But there it was, and obviously because I'm dependent on having this healthy body that I normally have. So by a city then, first two things that are sources for fear in the face of illness and death, and in this context, spiritual death are craving for sense pleasure, craving for her body. Now the third and fourth, the third one is realizing that you've acted unschoolfully, unsimpathetically, unethically, that that's going to reap painful consequences in the future after death, hence you fear dying. Now that's a somewhat different kind of fear, isn't it? In a way, actually, it's quite correct to fear that, to fear the consequences of unschoolful actions. I mean, it's quite rational knowing that you've acted not well without matter towards someone inappropriately. It's quite appropriate to have that rational, to feel fear about that, fear of the consequences. So come back to that one later. And then the fourth one is that the Buddha says is, there is the case of the person in doubt and perplexity, who has not arrived at certainty with regard to the true Dharma. So that's interesting as well, that if you have doubt, perplexity, uncertainty about the Dharma, that's going to be in a moment of acute illness, then that will be itself a source for fear arising. And also that's also a bit different, because he says that, well, having come down with the serious diseases as the context, the thought occurs to him, how doubtful and perplexed I am, I have not arrived at any certainty with regard to the Dharma, and then his gaze and his tormented. So again, that's not a rational occasion for fear in a certainty. So I cut to me that the first two were a bit different from saying to me. The other thing that occurred to me was that there was a certain similarity, which I haven't quite got worked out and detailed myself, but my whole inquiry, my whole hunches, is there is a certain similarity or relationship almost between these four fears that the Buddha is talking about in the Baya Sutter, and the four reminders, which actually come from much later in Mahayana tradition, come to us from the Tibetan tradition. So you have full reminders to remind yourself of the need to practice, which you contemplate the pressures human existence and not to waste it. You contemplate impermanence, contemplate the suffering of existence, and then contemplate karma. So certainly the last one, contemplating karma, is exactly the same as the one that's in the Sutter. I just have this hunch, that's the way that these are in relationship with one another, which next year the spiritual death retreat is going to be on the theme of the four reminders, so maybe then I'll have worked out. But it sort of strikes me that, yeah, the four reminders take the particularity and the personal fears that are described in the Baya Sutter and put them in a bigger context, bigger context of the whole of humanity and the big view. And my hunch is that that's what happens, and if that's true then we'd gain from having our particular fears put into a much bigger context because we'd have a perspective on our own fear. So that might be something to think about. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [music] [music] [ Silence ]
