..續本文上一頁won”t deceive you.” That”s what he would say.
Actually, our heart is deceit incarnate, because that which deceives is within the heart and fools the heart into making assumptions and interpretations. Stupidity has an easy time believing lies. Clever people have an easy time deceiving stupid people. Deceit has an easy time fooling stupidity. The cleverness of the defilements gets along well with our own stupidity. This is why the Dhamma teaches us to ferret things out to investigate down to their truth and then to believe in line with that truth. This is our means of gaining victory step by step. Ferret out the pains that are always with you so as to see them. Don”t run away from them. Whether they”re big or small, investigate right there. Investigate right there. If you”re going to concentrate, concentrate right there. When you are investigating its causes, no matter how great the pain, keep probing in.
The thing we call pain: What does it depend on as its foundation
It depends on the body as its foundation. It depends on our attention as its means of flaring up — in other words, the attention that labels it in various ways: This is what makes pain flare up. We have to cure this kind of attention by investigating to know both the pain — what it”s like — and the place where pain arises, in whatever part of the body. Try to know clearly whether or not that spot is really pain.
For example, if there”s pain in the bone, in any part of the skin or flesh, the skin and the flesh are skin and flesh. The pain is a pain. Even though they dwell together, they are separate things, not one and the same. The mind — the knower that is aware of these things — is a mind, but it”s a deluded mind, so it assumes that this is pain, that”s pain, and conflates these things into being its ”self,” saying, ”I hurt here. I hurt there. I don”t want myself to be pained. I want the pain to vanish.” This desire is a defilement that encourages pain and suffering to arise. The heart is pained. The feeling of pain in the body is pain. The pain in the heart flares up with that pain, because it wants it to follow the heart”s desires. These things keep feeding each other. This is our own stupidity, loading us down with suffering.
To be intelligent, we have to investigate, to watch the feeling of pain in the heart. What does it come from
What does it depend on
It depends on the body. Which part of the body
From what spot in the body does the pain arise
Look at the body and the feeling: Are they one and the same thing
What kind of shape and features do they have
The feeling doesn”t have any shape or features or a posture of any kind. It simply appears as a feeling of pain, that”s all.
As for the body, it has a shape, a color, and complexion — and it stays as it was before the pain arose. When the pain arises, it stays just as it was. Actually, the pain is something separate from this. It simply depends on a malfunction of the body to arise. The mind is what takes notice of it. If the mind has any discernment, it should notice it in line with its truth. The mind then won”t be affected by it. But if the mind is deluded, it latches onto the pain — in other words, it pulls that pain in to be its ”self” — and then wants that pain, which it says is its self, to disappear.
This is why we can”t analyze it. Once the pain is our self, how can we separate it out
If it”s simply a pain, a separate reality, then the body is a separate reality. They aren”t one and the same. Each one exists separately. Each is a separate reality in line with its nature. Only when our awareness is like this can we analyze things.
But as long as we see the pain as our self, then we can analyze it all day long and not get anywhere, because once we hold that, ”This is myself,” how can we an…
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