Bodhisattvacharyavatara: Chapter VII, Joyous Effort – verse 6; reflectionary & verses 3-6 embroidery

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arm in arm, requres chewing

Bodhisattvacharyavatara by Acharya Śāntideva

Chapter VII– verse 6

Transglomeration: And the lord of death has already caught sight of you and closed off all possible exit.   How can you continue taking pleasure eating and copulating, and how can you, contented, turn round and go back to sleep?

~~~ “BCA” ~~~

V. 5 evidence of death all around, but I sit chewing the cud
↑ Stitch ↓
V. 6 while death watches me, has my whole life covered

Reflection: immanence of death – how enjoy worldly pleasures (simile: being ‘eyeballed’ (Berzin) by the Lord of Death); if death were actually standing by me, watching everything I do, waiting for his chance, I would not able to find anywhere or place to get away from his sight, how could I enjoy a piece of cake, watching a film, sleeping; death exposes the lie of the kleśas that there is pleasure or constancy to be gained in this life: they lead only to birth, and then death

Reflection: this is meant to be shocking (shocking to what?), shocking to my own complacency, shocking to me thinking it’s probably alright, I can just feel good about this, I can just eat that, I can take some time out for the other … recent dreams about school – still! – about not quite being in control, bridge through my waking to thoughts of incredulity that they didn’t listen to me, didn’t take what I had to give seriously, spills through into my waking life where I am easily barbed by a change of plan (‘I thought I knew what I was doing’), where I am easily emptied of self-confidence because, far less than not seeing an immediate effect (just about tolerable if I keep my eye raised to the horizon), the slightest questioning or lack of expected response throws me into deep and angry self-doubt, that I haven’t gotten anywhere, that what I thought was the way is just another instance of me … not quite being in control of this class, and the biggest embarrassment of all is my own, for myself, ‘I thought I had it’ before I really did; death will prod me out of wallowing in this (because there definitely is no gain from wallowing around prolonging the feeling that I don’t know anything, that I can’t do anything, that I can’t have an effect etc.), and later in the chapter will be the development of a self-confidence (in the Vow I have taken) to actually do something about it (rather than think I might have the answer already)

Reflection: when playing with my cat, dangling something for her to ambush, at some point she’ll crouchlow, I’ll slow the dangling to a slight drag along the floor, she’ll have already tested the environs for open doors, under tables, chairs, beside cupboards during the preliminary playing, her eyes quickly double-check them from her central position, she has anticipated everything, she could make whichever move from where she is jusslikethat, belly on the ground, she can’t be seen but her eyes are now completely fixed, chin on the ground, ears back, she lets the quarry do a few moves without any reaction at all, she can take her time, she knows the outcome; death knows my outcome, fixes me with his piggy little eyes, watches me scrape myself into ever-receding corners until there is nowhere left that I might hope to escape from this nagging ennui anymore, but I can’t see him, he’s crouched low where I least expected he’d be, he’s so where I least expected him to be that I’d put off thinking he was anywhere around anyway … except for this faint haunting, this beguiling echo when I thought I was most out in the open; but it’s me he’s fixed on, it really is me; there’s nothing I can do about it, the least I can do is drop this infantile hubris that Mark Redford has got this and damned-well grow up and face it in the time I have left

Embroidery [3-6]: saṃsāra is a way of being which runs contrary to how things exist; it runs contrary because it is a way of being which is predicated on there being a ‘self’ ready-made with some reflex notion of a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; this pre-predicated reflex thrives the better the less it is analysed but the more it is fed; the perpetuation of this way of being comes about through habit, through being used to operating like this, through exercising that right before all else; there is no better way to exercise this right than through laziness: the laziness of not questioning the basis of this self and the laziness of indulging in the feeding of this self in the many ways it requires; [3] when there is no dis-satisfaction with saṃsāra – a wilful ignorance wherein the self, and the life that the self leads, is not questioned, but just indulged, even consumed – then the attachment and the hate run riot holding high a triumphant banner of self-justification … the be-coming of the self is reinforced with every breath it takes, so much so that perpetuates its own momentum, all one has to do is sit back, and the momentum does the rest leading you deeper and deeper (lower and lower) into this predicated existence; it thrives on laziness once it really gets going; verses 4-6 start to give the lie to this laziness, this satisfaction of being, by introducing the immediate and shocking flaw in this way of being, [4] which is death: as soon as a ‘self’ is propounded it is born, as soon as a ‘self’ is born it immediately embroils death (as soon as there is the crescendo of a ‘1’ then there is the immediate context of the ‘0’ from which it extrapolated); the stronger the ‘self’ the harder the death, the longer the ‘self’ perpetuates despite death, the more it has to inevitably lose; any being despite its own context is an extrapolation which has lost its own bearing, it is a needless being, it is a pointless being, it is a selfish being; as soon as it, the ‘self’, ‘be’s despite its own whole and complete existence, it instigates for itself a whole universe of ‘not-me’ with which it struggles with its weapons, the kleśas of attachment and hatred and so many others … death is the redress of this obscene and embarrassing tantrum of being; [5] but do we listen to it, do we heck: we see it as the spoiler of our fun and we pretend it doesn’t happen the better to chew our own cud, we are that self-propounded and self-perpetuated that we cannot stop; so verse [6] wracks up the reality, labours it, beats us over the head with it, ‘look, here it is’ – slap! – ‘it’s been eyeing you since your latest birth – all 60 of them, Mark, all 60 trillion of them, Mark’s mind – all the time with a beady eye; and there you are eating jam on toast again thinking “I’m safe now, it won’t happen now”’; the first step out of laziness is facing death

Determination: the first step out of the laziness of a needlessly extrapolated and indulgent life is to face death

Bodhisattvacharyavatara: Chapter VII, Joyous Effort – verse 5; reflectionary

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arm in arm, requres chewing

Bodhisattvacharyavatara by Acharya Śāntideva

Chapter VII– verse 5

Transglomeration: And do I still not see all these ones about, my mothers, felled and finished with, one by one, without let?   And all the while I am one who allows himself a complacent slumber like the buffalo unperturbed before the butcher!

~~~ “BCA” ~~~

V. 4 cornered prey, trapped in birth after birth
↑ Stitch ↓
V. 5 evidence of death all around, but I sit chewing the cud

Glimpse: living (life) in ignorance of death (simile: the buffalo asleep with the butcher – Sharma, ‘…and the butcher’s sword breathing over its neck, one goes on chewing the cud of illusory joys…’); everyone else is dying

Reflection: making the implication of verse 4 even more explicit, there’s nothing clever going on here, no subtlety of argument: death is immanent, it’s there, it’s right behind you!   It really is!   Verses 4-6 are driving the point home, verse 4 a hook – makes us look completely the other way; verse 5 a body punch, right in the ribs, makes us look stupid, wo wind; verse 6 the downing KO, this is what happens when you live stupidly; and what is ‘stupid’: in verse 5 it is the wilful ignorance we exercise, the ostrich-reaction to what is the single most definite thing in life – death; and this is beyond the ‘o, people die’ realisation, the flippant ‘no one can live forever and can I have that last piece of pizza’, and neither is it the perverse reaction to death that makes a ghoulish fetish and fashion out of it, this should be the realisation that should bite, sink its teeth in and draw blood – the fact that we are still sitting around, chewing the cud, means that that realisation has not bitten; `makes us look really stupid

Determination: if I am really serious about making anything out of my life anything more meaningful than swallowed cud, there needs to be an edge that pricks me out of complacency; now!

Bodhisattvacharyavatara: Chapter VII, Joyous Effort – verse 4; reflectionary

Tags

arm in arm, requres chewing

Bodhisattvacharyavatara by Acharya Śāntideva

Chapter VII– verse 4

Transglomeration: Baited then caught in the traps of the hunters, the kleśas, these disruptive emotions; here I am, snared and trapped in birth after birth, endlessly becoming.   And still do I not see that I am lying here in the open jaws of the lord of death?

~~~ “BCA” ~~~

V. 3 languishing in rebirth and becoming through inertia, sleep and learnt-dependence
↑ Stitch ↓
V. 4 like cornered prey, trapped in birth after birth

Simile: kleśas (trappers, hunters), those minds that consent to a sense of a self, distinct from other >>> birth (trap/net and being trapped), the exercise of those kleśas in the building up and identifying that sense of self as a person, self-identity >>> death (mouth of the trapper, death; once trapped, death is inevitable), that once exposed and out on a limb as a self, the downfall of the self is inevitable; kleśas > birth > death happens inexorably

Reflection: there is such a mass out there, in here, of constantly connecting, branching, tiding, consuming, conflicting, incompatible, over-laying, undermining, influencing, exploiting, accruing causes and conditions, like an overwhelming mass of muscle with ever-renewing fibres of connective tissue pulling in all directions, like a self-propelling idea with ever-firing synapses in all directions; and I need to haemorrhage from it all so that I am not consumed by it (but how do I adhere in the first place, and at all – because I seek to define myself in and amidst this amorphous mass of cause and conditioning; if I need to haemorrhage from it I need to dismantle this very needy self that came into existence when I was born and fears that it will go out of existence when it dies (as all cause and conditioning inevitably does) before it was able to prove itself); but I do not need to ignore it for concern of all others caught in the same unnecessary drag and whirl, I do not just inure myself from the mire (even if I do have to lose that self to inure it) and think the job is done; look at all my brothers and sisters bumping into their own walls, I’ve got a job, here, to do

Reflection: … in the human realm, certainly, there is a proliferation, a saturation even, of cause and conditionality within which we exercise our lifetimes and even, to some extent, which we understand: we build our civilisations and technology and science upon it, we personally define our ‘selves’ according to how we navigate through cause and conditionality; but our understanding is, necessarily, only human, it is only a political or social or institutional or technological or economic understanding of how the mass (the chaos) of cause and conditioning can be made to work to a specific goal: from the time the ape triumphantly picked up the bone to the graceful according waltz of the spaceship rendezvous we have channelled cause and conditionality to make the various froth of civilisations through which we live, and this channelling has been achieved by selectivity, by de-finition, by dividing and exclusivising, by hierarchizing … by the exercising of will on cause and conditionality to hone an outcome; we, as humans, have the ability – and have exercised it – to play cause and conditionality, to make certain things happen despite the amorphous mass of cause and condition that is all about – but we are also trapped and caught in those very same outcomes that we ourselves channelled, we are stuck being one side or the other (king or peasant, rich or poor, have or have not) of whichever dichotomy we are proximate to because we are defined by it, and we are such a clever species that we can be proximate to many more than one dichotomy; because the channelling serves a self, the manipulation of cause and conditionality narrows the plethora of possible outcomes to serve a particular need of a self, and because there are all these other ‘selves’ about, the prevailing ‘channel’ becomes the one through which the majority of others can define themselves compromised, whether willingly or coerced; it is the exercise of will over cause and conditionality which defines the human experience; (those practised in the exercise of magic practise the same exertion of will over cause and conditionality which bypasses established political, economic routes of cause and conditionality through tapping into more subtle fibres and synapses of cause and conditionality – but it is nevertheless the exercise of will over (caused and conditioned) existence); OK, so the ethical question arises: is this exercise of will to serve the needs of the selfs (i.e. ‘I’ and, by mutual distinction, ‘other’), good, or not … depends on the extent to which the channelling of causes and conditions is for the sake of a self over and against other selves (on either a macro or micro level) (i.e. selfish, not good), or whether it is for the sake of others over and against oneself (i.e. better, but unsustainable), or whether it is exercised with no sense of self (one’s own or others’) at all (good, as in, wise; wise, as in, plays within cause and conditionality without self-reference, which can only be fully appreciated when cause and conditionality are realised to be empty of any self at all in order to be causal and conditional … emptiness); so, as with chapter 6 which largely played out the exercise of other-concern in the cause and conditional context of difficulty and frustration, chapter 7 likewise exercises will/effort in the cause and conditional context of inertia and self-defeat; but, again as already noted, there is a ‘wise accommodating with’ in the exercise of patience, there is a ‘wise making so’ with effort – the dynamics are contrasting although the wisdom is the same

Reflection: this is very redolent of the suffering of conditioned aggregates – that having the body and receptors of a human being, I am inexorably to experience the fulfilments and frustrations of a human life according to both the constructive and destructive tendencies I packed with me when I came.   The fact that I just don’t feel right today is a peculiarly human condition which might even drag me back for a whole day or week; it is a feeling and drag that could not even remotely occur to my cat who is made up of an altogether different physiology and psychology and sense of self – she has the aggregates of a cat, she suffers from a desperation around feeding that I, a rationalising human, need not suffer from; how these kleśas perceive and develop within me and my cat are wholly dependent on the psycho-physical aggregates which we respectively spent many lifetimes accumulating before; and here we both are, wandering about our lives and bumping into our respective walls, both of us also wilfully (well, actually, that’s only for me, as I have the human mind-aggregate) oblivious to the fact that it will all just end some time, the body/mind aggregates will fail and we shall die

Determination: I need to sharpen up my act, I need to sharpen up the realisation of what is going on here, I need to do more than simply run around after the next feed, however I might cleverly conceive of it being a human being; (‘… and may it increase infinitely’).