..续本文上一页poison, or deadly weapons, or vicious armed bandits, completely filling the three spheres of phenomenal existence-nothing but fearsomeness. This awareness of the fearsomeness (Bhayatupatthana-nana) of all phenomenal existence is reckoned as the third step.
d) When awareness of the completely fearsome nature of all phenomenal existence has been fully developed, there will arise in its turn awareness that all things are inherently dangerous. To become involved in things is not safe. They are like a forest full of dangerous beasts, and anyone seeking persion in the forest finds nothing pleasing there. This awareness of the danger (Adinavan- upassana - nana) inherent in all phenomenal existence is the fourth step.
e) When all things are seen to be in every way full of danger this gives rise to disenchantment. Things are seen as resembling a burntout house of which nothing remains but ashes and a skeleton, utterly unattractive. This disenchantment (Nibbidanupassanaa - nana) with having to be associated with conditioned things is the fifth step in the developing of knowledge.
f) When genuine disenchantment has become established, there arises a desire to become really free from those things. This is quite unlike our ordinary desire for freedom, which, lacking the power of concentration or insight to boost it up, is not real desire for freedom. The disenchantment arising out of vipassana insight involves the entire mind; and the desire for freedom is as great as the disenchantment, so is very real and genuine. This desire to escape from the unsatisfactoriness of phenomenal existence is as great as the desire for freedom a frog struggling to escape from a snake”s jaws, or the desire for freedom of a deer or bird struggling to break loose from a snare. This real desire to escape (Muncitukamyata - nana) from unsatisfactoriness is the sixth step.
g) Now with the full development of the desire to escape, there arises a feeling of an intense struggling to find a way out, an ever- present feeling that, phenomenal existence being as it is, one has to escape from it. Introspecting, one perceives the clinging and one perceives the defilements that are the cause of the mind”s bondage, the fetters binding it securely to that condition. Consequently one seeks for ways of weakening the defilements. Then seeing the defilements weakened, one sets about destroying them completely.
This weakening of the defilements is illustrated by means of a simile. A man goes to his fish trap and pulls out a snake thinking it to be a fish. When told it is a snake, he doesn”t believe it, at least not until he meets a wise, benevolent and sympathetic teacher, who guides and instructs him so that he comes to realize that it is in fact a snake. He then becomes afraid and searches about for a means of killing it. He grabs the snake by the neck and, lifting it above his head, swings it in a circle until it is worn out and falls down dead. This simile illustrates the arising of the knowledge that the defilements are the cause of people”s bondage to a condition much to be feared and dreaded.
If one has no technique for reducing the force of the defilements day by day, eradicating them is bound to be impossible. The power of the defilements far exceeds that of the still meager knowledge to be used in destroying them; hence knowledge must be developed and increased, and the suffering produced by the defilements will simultaneously diminish. Always maintaining and developing the knowledge that all things are transient, worthless and devoid of selfhood, that they are not worth getting or being, serves to cut off the food supply to the defilements, weakening them day by day. It behooves us to build ourselves up, develop, become more skillful and ingenious. By this means, we c…
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