4. The Internal and the External — The True and the False

　　Developing the Samana in the Heart

　　Whenever Ven. Acharn Mun touched on this particular topic in his Dhamma talks or conversation, he would always say... I think it”s in the Muttodaya collection.1 But there it”s only couched in general terms, whereas I recorded it in more detail than the compiler of Muttodaya. The Ven. Acharn himself didn”t always go into detailed analysis but what he said was enough for us to understand the implications. When he brought up the whole tree trunk the finer points and branches would come along too.

　　What he said was this:

　　"The Dhamma of the Lord Buddha is pure by nature, but when it comes to stay in an ordinary worldling2 it becomes counterfeit and is corrupted. Only when it”s placed in a Noble One3 is it the real, genuine Dhamma."

　　That was the general way in which he described it.

　　There are many levels of Noble Ones: Stream-enterers are the first level, followed by once-returners, nonreturners4 and then arahants as the fourth. When we analyze it in this way, we can then go on to say that in the hearts of stream-enterers, the dhamma of stream-entry is pure and true, but the dhammas of once-returning, nonreturning and arahantship are still corrupted. The stream-enterer may commit all these dhammas to memory and fully know the way to reach them, yet even so they remain falsified in his heart, in spite of his awareness.

　　The once-returner is still counterfeit on the levels of nonreturning and arahantship while the nonreturner remains false to the dhamma of arahantship. Only when arahantship is attained does every level of the Dhamma become fully complete in the heart, with no corruptions at all.

　　Some may argue that, ”since the Dhamma of the Lord Buddha is real and pure, it must remain so wherever it might be. It can be compared with pure gold which though fallen in the mire is still pure gold. It can”t turn into mud or muck.”

　　If we fail to analyze this further, it does indeed seem that ”gold can”t change into mud”. But who will deny that there isn”t any mud around

　　 The dirt is smeared over and contaminates the gold as they lie there together. Is there no difference between gold that has fallen in mud and that which hasn”t

　　 Of course there is. How can anyone assert that the pure, uncontaminated gold and slime covered gold are both equally pure

　　 Surely, there must be a difference.

　　A second illustration could consider food, prepared and ready to eat. If the morsel was to drop from our fingers and land in some dirt, then what had been eminently eatable becomes unacceptable — and even offensively so. Alternatively, if the actual food container is soiled, then regardless of how succulent the food appears, once it”s placed in the dirty vessel it too becomes contaminated. How can it remain pure when it”s mixed with dirt

　　The Dhamma of the Lord Buddha is much the same. In this case the vessel equates to the heart, which alone is suitable for receiving Dhamma. However much the heart has been soiled will rub off on the Dhamma when it comes into contact and associates with it. It is this impurity that the Lord described as ”counterfeit and corrupted”.

　　Furthermore, although the palm-leaf scriptures are Dhamma, when we look them up and study them, we can only commit them to memory and retain them in mind. Yet that mind is already full with defilements so the Dhamma that comes into the heart is really more a ”rote-learned Dhamma” than the genuine thing. If it is the authentic Dhamma, why don”t the defilements all disappear from our hearts since each of us has studied and engraved it in our memory

　　 We”ve gone into every intellectual aspect of Dhamma — including the subject of Nibbana — and yet we can”t go beyond the fact that our hearts remain brimful …

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