..续本文上一页h you down, become empty too. Because they”re empty, they don”t disturb the emptiness of your awareness. So you can live together. You can live with these things but not be weighed down by them. The emptiness of your mental dwelling isn”t disturbed by the emptiness of the things that used to disturb it. That”s when the two different meanings or the two different contexts for emptiness come together in a way that creates freedom for the mind. This positive intent applies to of all the passages where the Buddha focuses on the negative side of things. There”s a passage in the Sutta Nipata where the Buddha describes how, as a young man, he looked at the world and it seemed like fish fighting in a dwindling puddle of water. There”s not enough water, so all the fish are struggling with each other. He said that”s the way the world is: People are constantly struggling as if there weren”t enough in the world to feed everybody, to clothe everybody, to give everybody shelter. It”s a constant competition, and everywhere he looked he found that everything was laid claim to. There wasn”t a spot in the world where you could simply be free. There wasn”t a spot in the world where you wouldn”t be squeezed out by somebody else. It gave him a sense of samvega, a sense of dismay. But then he realized that the problem was not in the world, it lay in the heart, that there was an “arrow in the heart,” as he called it. If you could pull that arrow out, then there would be no more problem.
His description of the world may sound pessimistic, but it”s there for a positive purpose. If we didn”t see the world as confining, then that would indicate that our hearts are small. But our hearts are large. Our problem is that we”re trying to use the world to fill up the heart and that”s impossible. The world isn”t large enough for the heart. The only thing that can fill the heart is the sense of emptiness—the peace, the lack of disturbance—that comes from concentration, from focusing the mind on a particular object, and even more so from letting go of attachments. Our problem is that we”re trying to fill up our lives with the wrong things. We”re trying to fill them up with things, rather than filling them up with the space and peace that can come as we work with the concentration, as we develop discernment.
There”s another negative-seeming passage where the Buddha talks about the body in terms of its 32 parts. You take the body apart, look at each piece, and realize that there”s nothing there in the body that you”d want to get attached to. You”ve got lungs, you”ve got a liver, you”ve got intestines, and you”ve got the contents of your intestines—all the way down the list. Many people object that this is a negative way of looking at the body, but the purpose is to free the mind, to give it a sense of lightness, to help you realize that you don”t have to take such obsessive care of the body. You don”t have to be so attached to it; you don”t have to regard it as a really valuable possession. It”s a useful tool and we need it in the practice, but when we make it an end in itself we burden the mind, we weigh it down. The purpose of this analysis is to free the mind, to give it a sense of lightness, to fill the mind up with the space of concentration. So these ways of looking at the world that seem so negative are actually there for a very positive purpose: to remind ourselves of the happiness that comes when we don”t confine ourselves to narrow desires, narrow obsessions; when we can free the mind from the straitjackets it”s imposed on itself; when we can pull out that arrow, the arrow of the craving based on the ignorant notion that somehow we”re going to get satisfaction out of our body, satisfaction out of our possessions, satisfaction out of our relationships, satisfaction out of building a nice coherent philosophy. We look at these things in this way to see through them, to realize that our attachments, our clingings, are nothing but forms of confinement for the mind.
When we have the concentration as a counterbalance, it”s easy to follow through with this sort of analysis and not get depressed because it opens the mind back up to stronger, more lasting, more solid, more spacious states of peace. So whatever stage you are in the practice, remember that respect for concentration is what forms the basis for everything else: appreciation for the stillness in the mind, those little spaces that may not seem all that impressive in the beginning but can lead to true happiness if you take them seriously, if you treat them with respect.
This is another common theme throughout the Buddha”s teachings: that little things in the mind that seem pretty unimpressive to begin with, if you pay them attention, if you look after them—if you, in Ajaan Fuang”s word, prakawng them—can more then repay the effort needed to develop them. The potential for happiness lies in little, unexpected things that may seem unremarkable but really show their true colors when you pay them respect. As in those fairy tales where there”s a little ugly troll that everybody despises: When a little child takes the time to show a little respect to the troll, the troll reveals his treasure of gold and gives it to the child. It”s the same with these qualities of the mind: When you show them respect, they give you their gold.
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