..续本文上一页f the Jeta Grove which the Buddha once picked up, asking the monks whether these leaves are their self or their self”s property. And the monks replied: "They are surely not our self or anything belonging to our self." Then the Master said: "Therefore, monks, give up what is not yours! Give up all clinging to body, feelings, perceptions,[1] volitions, and consciousness" (Majjhima Nikaya 22). It is certainly not difficult to give up what is so obviously foreign to us, and worthless, too, like those dry leaves or any other insignificant trifles we encounter in our lives. It is harder to give up a cherished material object or a beloved human being. It is hardest, however, to detach ourselves from the body and its pleasures, from our likes and dislikes, from the intellectual enjoyment of our thoughts, from deep-rooted tendencies and habits; in short, from all that we instinctively and without question identify with as "ourselves." All these constituents of our supposed "self" are visibly changing, sometimes rapidly and radically; sometimes the changes of our likes and dislikes, habits and ideas, turn them into their very opposite. Yet we still continue to identify ourselves whole-heartedly with those new states of mind as if they were the old ego. So tenacious is the ego-illusion and therefore so hard to break.

　　Yet it is to that hardest task that the Master summons us: "Give up what is not yours! And what is not yours

　　 The body is not yours: give it up! Giving it up will be for your weal and happiness. Feelings, perceptions, volitions and consciousness are not yours: give them up! Giving them up will be for your weal and happiness."

　　We must recall here that it is attachment to these five aggregates that has to be given up and that this is a gradual process. We must not expect our habitual likes and dislikes, our intellectual enjoyments and our desires to vanish all at once; nor can or should they be broken by force. This seemingly compact and identifiable personality has been gradually built up by the intake of physical and mental nourishment. Again and again, thousands of times during a single day, we have approached and absorbed the physical and mental objects of our desire. One after the other we have made them "our own" and believed them to be our own. This continuous process of accumulating attachments and self-identifications must now be reversed by a gradual process of detachment achieved by dissolving or stopping the false identifications. The Buddha”s teaching chiefly consists of aids assisting us in that task of gradual detachment — aids to right living and to right thinking. The simile of the snake”s worn- out skin is one of these aids, and if seen as such it has much to teach. These are some of the ways in which contemplation can be helpful:

　　1. We look at our skin encasing the body: it is now firm and taut, healthily alive, our warm blood pulsating beneath it. Imagine it now lying before you, empty and limp, like a snake”s discarded slough. In such a manner you may visualize the feature skin among the thirty-two parts of the body, a meditation[2] recommended by the Buddha. When thus brought vividly to life, it will help you to alienate and detach yourself from the body.

　　2. Just as the serpent does not hesitate to fulfill the biological "law of its kind" in shedding its old skin, so right renunciation will not waver or shrink from those acts of giving up which right understanding of reality demands. Just as the serpent does not mourn over the loss of its worn-out slough, so right renunciation has no regrets when it discards what has been seen as void of value and substance and replaces it by something new and more beautiful: the happiness of letting go, the exhilaration of the freedom won, the serenity of insight and the…

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