Affirming the Truths of the Heart
The Buddhist Teachings on Samvega and Pasada
By Thanissaro Bhikkhu
A life-affirming Buddhism that teaches us to find happiness by opening to the
richness of our everyday lives.
That's what we want -- or so we're told by the people who try to sell us a main-stream-lined
Buddhism. But is it what we need? And is it Buddhism?
Think back for a moment on the story of the young Prince Siddhartha and his
first encounters with aging, illness, death, and a wandering contemplative.
It's one of the most accessible chapters in the Buddhist tradition, largely
because of the direct, true-to-the-heart quality of the young prince's emotions.
He saw aging, illness, and death as an absolute terror, and pinned all his hopes
on the contemplative forest life as his only escape. As Asvaghosa, the great
Buddhist poet, depicts the story, the young prince had no lack of friends and
family members who tried to talk him out of those perceptions, and Asvaghosa
was wise enough to show their life-affirming advice in a very appealing light.
Still, the prince realized that if he were to give in to their advice, he would
be betraying his heart. Only by remaining true to his honest emotions was he
able to embark on the path that led away from the ordinary values of his society
and toward an unsurpassed Awakening into the Deathless.
This is hardly a life-affirming story in the ordinary sense of the term, but
it does affirm something more important than life: the truth of the heart when
it aspires to a happiness absolutely pure. The power of this aspiration depends
on two emotions, called in Pali samvega and pasada. Very few of us have heard
of them, but they're the emotions most basic to the Buddhist tradition. Not
only did they inspire the young prince in his quest for Awakening, but even
after he became the Buddha he advised his followers to cultivate them on a daily
basis. In fact, the way he handled these emotions is so distinctive that it
may be one of the most important contributions his teachings have to offer to
American culture today.
Samvega was what the young Prince Siddhartha felt on his first exposure to aging,
illness, and death. It's a hard word to translate because it covers such a complex
range -- at least three clusters of feelings at once: the oppressive sense of
shock, dismay, and alienation that come with realizing the futility and meaninglessness
of life as it's normally lived; a chastening sense of our own complacency and
foolishness in having let ourselves live so blindly; and an anxious sense of
urgency in trying to find a way out of the meaningless cycle. This is a cluster
of feelings that we've all experienced at one time or another in the process
of growing up, but I don't know of a single English term that adequately covers
all three. It would be useful to have such a term, and maybe that's reason enough
for simply adopting the word samvega into our language.
But more than providing a useful term, Buddhism also offers an effective strategy
for dealing with the feelings behind it -- feelings that our own culture finds
threatening and handles very poorly. Ours, of course, is not the only culture
threatened by feelings of samvega. In the Siddhartha story, the father's reaction
to the young prince's discovery stands for the way most cultures try to deal
with these feelings: He tried to convince the prince that his standards for
happiness were impossibly high, at the same time trying to distract him with
relationships and every sensual pleasure imaginable. To put it simply, the strategy
was to get the prince to lower his aims and to find satisfaction in a happiness
that was less than absolute and not especially pure.
If the young prince were living in America today, the father would have other
tools for dealing with the prince's dissatisfaction, but the basic strategy
would be essentially the same. We can easily imagine him taking the prince to
a religious counselor who would teach him to believe that God's creation is
basically good and not to focus on any aspects of life that would cast doubt
on that belief. Or he might take him to a psychotherapist who would treat feelings
of samvega as an inability to accept reality. If talking therapies didn't get
results, the therapist would probably prescribe mood-altering drugs to dull
the feeling out of the young man's system so that he could become a productive,
well-adjusted member of society.
If the father were really up on current trends, he might find a Dharma teacher
who would counsel the prince to find happiness in life's little miraculous pleasures
-- a cup of tea, a walk in the woods, social activism, easing another person's
pain. Never mind that these forms of happiness would still be cut short by aging,
illness, and death, he would be told. The present moment is all we have, so
we should try to appreciate the bittersweet opportunity of relishing but not
holding on to brief joys as they pass.
It's unlikely that the lion-hearted prince we know from the story would take
to any of this well-meant advice. He'd see it as propaganda for a life of quiet
desperation, asking him to be a traitor to his heart. But if he found no solace
from these sources, where in our society would he go? Unlike the India of his
time, we don't have any well-established, socially accepted alternatives to
being economically productive members of society. Even our contemplative religious
orders are prized for their ability to provide bread, honey, and wine for the
marketplace. So the prince would probably find no alternative but to join the
drifters and dropouts, the radicals and revolutionaries, the subsistence hunters
and survivalists consigned to the social fringe.
He'd discover many fine minds and sensitive spirits in these groups, but no
accumulated body of proven and profound alternative wisdom to draw on. Someone
might give him a book by Thoreau or Muir, but their writings would offer him
no satisfactory analysis of aging, illness, and death, and no recommendations
for how to go beyond them. And because there's hardly any safety net for people
on the fringe, he'd find himself putting an inordinate amount of his energy
into issues of basic survival, with little time or energy left over to find
his own solution to the problem of samvega. He would end up disappearing, his
Buddhahood aborted -- perhaps in the Utah canyon country, perhaps in a Yukon
forest -- without trace.
Fortunately for us, however, the prince was born in a society that did provide
support and respect for its dropouts. This was what gave him the opportunity
to find a solution to the problem of samvega that did justice to the truths
of his heart.
The first step in that solution is symbolized in the Siddhartha story by the
prince's reaction to the fourth person he saw on his travels outside of the
palace: the wandering forest contemplative. The emotion he felt at this point
is termed pasada, another complex set of feelings usually translated as "clarity
and serene confidence." It's what keeps samvega from turning into despair.
In the prince's case, he gained a clear sense of his predicament and of the
way out of it, leading to something beyond aging, illness, and death, at the
same time feeling confident that the way would work.
As the early Buddhist teachings freely admit, the predicament is that the cycle
of birth, aging, and death is meaningless. They don't try to deny this fact
and so don't ask us to be dishonest with ourselves or to close our eyes to reality.
As one teacher has put it, the Buddhist recognition of the reality of suffering
-- so important that suffering is honored as the first noble truth -- is a gift,
in that it confirms our most sensitive and direct experience of things, an experience
that many other traditions try to deny.
From there, the early teachings ask us to become even more sensitive, to the
point where we see that the true cause of suffering is not out there -- in society
or some outside being -- but in here, in the craving present in each individual
mind. They then confirm that there is an end to suffering, a release from the
cycle. And they show the way to that release, through developing noble qualities
already latent in the mind to the point where they cast craving aside and open
onto Deathlessness. Thus the predicament has a practical solution, a solution
within the powers of every human being.
It's also a solution open to critical scrutiny and testing -- an indication
of how confident the Buddha was in the solution he found to the problem of samvega.
This is one of the aspects of authentic Buddhism that most inspires confidence
in people who are accustomed to being told that they should try to put the insights
that inspired their sense of samvega out of their minds.
In fact, early Buddhism is not only confident that it can handle feelings of
samvega but it's one of the few religions that actively cultivates them to a
radical extent. Its solution to the problems of life demand so much dedicated
effort that only strong samvega will keep the practicing Buddhist from slipping
back into his or her old ways. Hence the recommendation that all Buddhists,
both men and women, lay or ordained, should reflect daily on the facts of aging,
illness, separation, and death -- to develop feelings of samvega -- and on the
power of one's own actions, to take samvega one step further, to pasada.
For people whose sense of samvega is so strong that they want to abandon any
social ties that prevent them from following the path to the end of suffering,
Buddhism offers both a long-proven body of wisdom for them to draw from, as
well as a safety net: the monastic Sangha, an institution that enables them
to leave lay society without having to waste time worrying about basic survival.
For those who can't leave their social ties, Buddhist teaching offers a way
to live in the world without being overcome by the world, following a life of
generosity, virtue, and meditation to strengthen the noble qualities of the
mind that will lead to the end of suffering.
The symbiotic relationship designed for these two branches of the Buddhist parisa,
or community, guarantees that each will benefit from contact with the other.
The support of the laity guarantees that the monastics will not need to be overly
concerned about food, clothing, and shelter; the gratitude that the monastics
inevitably feel for the freely-offered generosity of the laity helps to keep
them from turning into misfits and misanthropes. At the same time, contact with
the monastics helps the laity foster the proper perspective on life that nurtures
the energy of samvega and pasada they need to keep from becoming dulled and
numbed by the materialistic propaganda of the mainstream economy.
So the Buddhist attitude toward life cultivates samvega -- a clear acceptance
of the meaninglessness of the cycle of birth, aging, and death -- and develops
it into pasada: a confident path to the Deathless. That path includes not only
time-proven guidance, but also a social institution that nurtures it and keeps
it alive. These are all things that our society desperately needs. It's a shame
that, in our current efforts at mainstreaming Buddhism, they are aspects of
the Buddhist tradition usually ignored. We keep forgetting that one source of
Buddhism's strength is its ability to keep one foot out of the mainstream, and
that the traditional metaphor for the practice is that it crosses over the stream
to the further shore. My hope is that we will begin calling these things to
mind and taking them to heart, so that in our drive to find a Buddhism that
sells, we don't end up selling ourselves short.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu