..续本文上一页 these developments obviously do not stand the test.

　　Considering all this, we shall understand and appreciate the grave warning and the firm repudiation expressed in our discourse by the Master wishing for the welfare and progress of those who had confidence in his guidance.

　　The first section of the discourse deals with the rejection of the views held by the monk Ari.t.tha. His views are not merely a misconception of the Teaching but a direct challenge of some of the Buddha”s statements. Ari.t.tha expressly denies that what the Buddha taught as obstructive is an obstruction by necessity. He does not specify the obstructions he means, but from the monks” reply, referring to sense-desires (kaama), it is evident that they were well aware of Ari.t.tha”s intention: the condoning of sex indulgence for a monk.

　　It need hardly be stressed that the Buddha”s firm rejection of such condonation was meant for monks only. Of his lay followers he did not expect sexual abstinence. To them he advised restraint and mindfulness, and avoidance of giving excessive nourishment to sex desire. Here, if anywhere, a middle path between unrestrained indulgence and enforced repression was apt. But the Buddha made it clear that full deliverance required full detachment from desire. The gradual progress towards it, however, was left to the degree of insight and self-control possessed and developed by the inpidual lay follower.

　　For the monk, however, it was expected that the ardor of his quest for the final goal, the serenity of mind and emotional satisfaction derived from meditation, and his relative freedom from external sense titillation — that all these and other factors should enable him to keep the sex urge well in check and his mind tranquil enough for allowing further progress (or at least effort) on the road to radical detachment. He who could not attain to that degree of self-mastery, was free to leave the Order, and no stigma was attached; and he was also free to return whenever he wanted. But inside the Sangha no compromise could be admitted unless the Buddha was to invite disintegration from within and disrepute from without.

　　(§§10-12). The instance of Ari.t.tha”s wrong view is now used by the Buddha as an opportunity to warn against any other wrong approach to the Teaching, and the misuse of it. He gives here the simile of the wrong grasp of a snake to illustrate the harm and the danger of misconceiving the Dhamma.

　　The harm done is to the inpidual”s character and his progress on the Path; and the danger is the likelihood of his falling into lower forms of existence, or at the least a rebirth unfavorable to the understanding and practicing of the Dhamma. That such results may follow, can be easily understood in the case of Ari.t.tha”s views which are an outright reversal and corruption of the Teaching. It may, however, at first sight be surprising to the reader that, in the section now under consideration, the misuse of the Teaching for the verbal wrangles of disputation is likewise regarded as a dangerously wrong grasp of the Dhamma.

　　Here the danger and harm have more subtle, but no less real, roots. The danger in contentiousness is chiefly twofold. It provides one of the many evasions by which the mind shirks from devoting itself earnestly to the actual practice of the Dhamma. Secondly, under the respectable guise of the advocacy of the Dhamma, the attachment to "I" and "Mine" finds an easy outlet. In disputations the ego gets the chance to indulge in self-assertion, superiority feeling, self-righteousness and opinionatedness. Furthermore, the ego may attach itself to the Dhamma in an attitude of possessiveness which sometimes may even resemble the behavior of a dog jealously and angrily defending a morsel of food without having himself the…

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