[Buddha-l] the benefits of Jayarava's discussion

[Jayarava]

Thanks Joanna

I'm delighted that you found something useful in my blog, and that you read my essay on the Buddha's last words! You've made my week, although no doubt the worldly winds will blow from the other direction soon enough.

I should say that my ideas owe a great deal to other people. It was Richard Gombrich, in his 2006 Numata Letcures at SOAS, that first alerted me to dhammas being _mental_ phenomena. How did _that_ get by me for 12 years? Those lectures will soon appear in book form which I eagerly await. I find Richard's articles really quite scintillating at times. He's also very generous in responding to emails. Lovely man.

A lot of credit goes to my friend Gambhiradaka as well. We were looking at a 300ft high rock which after several weeks on retreat had not changed even a tiny bit as far as I could see. So why, I asked, do we bang on about everything changing all the time? His response was to ask me to close my eyes. I did, and at that point I saw everything in a new light! Closing my eyes, as he knew it would, radically changed my _experience_ of the rock in a moment - from sight-citta to memory-citta. So perhaps, I thought, it is experience that changes more than things (whatever things are)? Perhaps it is experience that changes from moment to moment, and is dependently arisen? 

Nagabodhi listened carefully when I started raving about this stuff, and confirmed for me that I was on the right track.

Bhikkhu Bodhi also translates appamāda as vigilance and I got the idea from him. I still prefer not-blind-drunk-on-the-objects-of-the-senses, but vigilance has the advantage of brevity.

The problem with 'things' is that we can only use our experience - via the six sense bases - to know them. Try to confirm your feeling of being embodied for instance, and you have to rely on sight, touch, smell perhaps. There seems no way to short cut this for knowing about things. The fact that there is broad agreement on the experience of things is suggestive of existence, but cannot be confirmed. On the other hand it's not that things don't exist, just that we only have fickle experience to go on. And all of the basic teachings of Buddhism make more sense to me in this frame of reference than in any other I've so far come across.

Thanks for taking time out to read my blog, and for sharing your enthusiasm!
Jayarava