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Buddhist Hour Radio Broadcast on Hillside 88.0 FM
Script 358 for Sunday 5 December 2004CE
2547 Buddhist Era


This script is titled:
This dead body of mine

On 29 November 2004 we celebrated the death anniversary of our Teacher, John David Hughes.

May John David Hughes be well and happy in his current life.

May we meet John David Hughes again and again and again.

What do we really mean by this? According to Buddhist Logic - the being John David Hughes no longer exists. Nothing about this being exists in this world any more - only things that he created and touched this life.


He touched the lives of many persons and left recordings on each of their Vedana (feelings and emotions); Sanna (perceptions) and Sankharas (stories, concepts Mental formations).

In The Spectrum of Buddhism, writings of Venerable Mahathera Piyadassi it is noted:

It is difficult to give a satisfactory English equivalent to the term sankhara, let us, therefore, understand it in the context - as rebirth producing volitional activities, or volitional formations or simply as kamma. Wholesome sankharas are capable of brining about a good rebirth, unwholesome sankharas can cause a bad rebirth or birth in an evil state of existence. It must be mentioned that all sankharas, all good and evil actions have ignorance (Avija) as condition.

In other contexts, sankhara does signify anything conditioned and compounded... i.e. All things that come into being as the effect of causes and conditions and which themselves act as causes and conditions in turn again to give rises to other effects.”

Dependant on contact arises feeling. Feeling is six fold; feeling born on visual contact, feeling born of sound contact; feeling born of smell contact, feeling born of taste contact felling born of body contact and feeling born of mental contact.

Feeling maybe pleasurable (sukha), painful (dukkha), or neutral, i.e neither pleasurable nor painful (upekkha).

With the arising of contact, simultaneously there arises feeling, (vedana) and it can never be stopped by any power or force. Such is the nature of contact or feeling.

The experience of desirable and undesirable kamma-results of good and evil actions performed here or in a previous birth, is one of the prior conditions due to which feeling can arises.

Seeing a form, hearing a sound, smelling an odour, tasting a flavour, touching some tangible thing, cognising a mental object (an idea), man experiences feeling: but it cannot be said that all beings experience the same feeling with the same object.

Dependant on feeling arises raving. Craving has its source, its genesis, its rise in feeling.

We understand that at death nothing goes from a person’s present life to the next. It is the resultant kamma that generates the next life.

We believe that John David Hughes exists in another form in his current rebirth and our wish is that he is well and happy. We wish that he has all that he requires. Our method of doing this is to make merit - by offerings to Sangha members of flowers, food, water, chanting verses of Buddha Dhamma, and then transfer the merit we have made by our good actions to him in his current birth.

On Monday 29th we invited members of the Sangha to our centre. We offered Dana - food offerings to two Venerable Monks - Venerable Liv Peo and Venerable Bon Som. After the food offering the Venerable Bon Som gave a Dhamma talk.

The Venerable Bon Som directed each person present to use a glass of water and an empty bowl.

Under the Venerable's guidance, each person transferred their merit to John David Hughes, while pouring the water from the glass into the empty bowl.

The Venerable then instructed each person to pour the water on to the earth, requesting the goddess of the earth to make sure John David Hughes receives this merit.

Most persons offered the water under the Bodhi tree that grows at our Centre.

In the evening Venerable Wimalananda guided meditation and gave a Dhamma talk. The Venerable said:

There are beings in different realms - animal, heavenly, hell, ghost, human. In the human realm we cannot transfer merit to another human being, but we can transfer merit to beings in the other realms.

Some beings cannot receive the merit because they are not tuned in to receiving the merit - just like a radio - if you have it on the wrong frequency you cannot receive the program you want. Some beings can receive the merit because they are tuned in to receiving the merit. So we say that we transfer our merit to John David Hughes and any other beings that can receive it.

The Venerable then guided all present in transferring the merits they had made and chanted Buddha Dhamma verses.

As a tribute to our Founder John David Hughes we would like to read you a transcribed teaching that he gave in 1988 at one of the Five Day Bhavana Courses ( Meditation courses).

'So the main part of the teachings are from Venerable Tsong Ka-pa; but we are going to look at the different forms of ignorance and how to overcome them.'

''The target is on the essence where you can basically know what you want to know, past, present and future.'

'The trouble is that if you, for example, very quickly attained Arahant fruit at that point you'd go on until you die.'

'Since you haven't accumulated vast oceans of merit on the way you couldn't do much to help other people; you couldn't teach much or give many blessings.'

'But if you examine very carefully the Buddha's teachings, one of the Buddha's monks had killed one thousand people and chopped of their fingers - so he had a necklace of fingers. He was called 'Angulimala' meaning necklace of fingers. When he became an arahant he asked the Buddha if he could go back to where he lived. The Buddha said 'What would you do if they hated you and called you names?' He said his mind wouldn't move.'

'So he went back. At first they were scared of him, then they started to call him names because they hated him, then throw stones at him and eventually beat him to death. So the problem was for the villagers - because the negative karma of killing an arahant is to be born in Avici hell.'

'The second story where the monk broke both his kneecaps to stop the robbers killing him, prevented the other people from making negative karma. He was karmically kinder.'

'The people who accumulate large stores of merit over a long long time can for example, become Sariputta - someone who is able to manage the Sangha after the Buddha's death. It is wiser to eradicate (the effects of) your negative karma as much as possible before you became arahant fruit.'

'Because of his power the Buddha was able to guide very bad people to arahant – however, there was not enough time for them to develop Bodhicitta or compassion, and were thus not really beneficial to others. Even the Buddha was attacked by one of his monks.'

'Your clouded mind thinks that a perfectly enlightened being can only be a benefit - not so. It depends on the disposition of the being because it is a double-edged sword. You should prevent yourself from being in situations that cause negative karma to others.'

'Teachings dispelling one’s negativity will not bring another negativity to an end. All afflictions truly depend on delusions.'

'If you conquer all delusions in all areas, like the Buddha, you can help many beings. Brighten you mind and unearth your own defilements and quickly eradicate them.'

Look on your mind and do a rating chart, to what extent have you got rid of the fourteen {unwholesome cetasikas} and out of the twenty five wholesome cetasikas how many can you say you have developed. You have to generate a method where you can identify afflictional mis-knowledge so you would not interact {blinded by the mis-knowledge} with other human beings.'

[The] 'sutra states: Compassion is the king of wholesome minds, develop the king of perfections - because wherever the king goes the others {wholesome minds} will follow.

'Teachings dispelling delusions conquer all afflictions. All unwholesome minds depend on delusion - Ignorance - is not knowing what is what. Opposite to ignorance is omniscience.'

'Driven by compassion for all human beings and your own need to become enlightened [work towards removing your delusion]. Afflictions depend on delusions. Sunyata, third arupa jhana, Nothingness: Suchness: Emptiness: third arupa jhana knowledge, meditation on Suchness is necessary, it is the medicine. Delusion is afflictional, it is mis-knowledge, unknowledge: Ignorance.'

Suppose you had in your mind hate, if you remove the hate it doesn't necessarily mean there will be love and kindness or compassion. You could be on a neutral kriya mind, and this is where the language of English breaks down, because you assume that the absence of hate is love. But there is a possibility, you can have this situation - a mind with hate, a mind with the absence of hate, a mind with love, a mind with the absence of love, now you've got to analyse, get an array on your mind and examine.

A mind with hate, a mind with the absence of hate, a mind with love, a mind with the absence of love. And what you want to know, just as a slight beginning to attack that two by two matrix - is a mind with the absence of hate the same as a mind with the absence of love? So you've got to meditate into it. And you've got to develop precision of classification so therefore you'd better generate minds that are very good at making matrices to be able to look at columns and rows and to fill up the columns and rows.

Now when you do that, we do this with pen and paper, or you can do it in the mind, when you do that you will come to some insight wisdom.

Now lets take a simple matrix. Take a chessboard or a draughts board, I think that's eight by eight, sixty-four spaces.

We will take it as a chess board rather than a draughts board because on a draughts board you can pile the draughts up one on top of the other which means you make a three dimensional matrix. So lets keep it in your mind as a chessboard where only one piece can be on one square at one time. Because remember in chess if you take the piece you take the other piece off and your piece occupies its position.

So if you look at the chess board there are empty squares because remember you start off with sixteen pieces on one side and sixteen on the other. There will always empty spaces and then you put the chess pieces into the empty spaces. But when you move a piece it leaves behind emptiness where its position was. So the removal of something creates emptiness. So the idea of Nothingness or Emptiness or Sunyata is not as foreign to your mind as perhaps you think it is.

Now although the particular square might be empty at one point, it is on the emptiness that you can put the piece. So the emptiness of a Sunyata can support something. In this case the emptiness can support one chess piece. But the rules are it can't support two. Because if two - if you take a piece the other piece must go automatically.

Chess has been said to be one of the most complex games you can play, although games like yin and a few other games are perhaps more interesting in some ways - but we will stay with a simple array.

Remember don't confuse the rupa form of the chess and the rupa form of the arrays because what we are talking about is a mind in arupa jhana, sunyata, third arupa jhana, with no materiality in it. There's a different situation compared to the materiality. The analogue can't be pushed too far with the chess board but it will do as a start.

If you take all the pieces off the chessboard you still haven't got to nothing as you can always put them back on again.

Now if you remove, if you washed your mind somehow and you removed hate on the array remember it could get stained with hate again. In fact the Pali texts talk about stains - it is one way of translating the word for a defilement.

Now what is staining the mind? What is contaminating the mind. Well it can't be physical objects contaminating the mind. It must be mind objects in mind. There must be in the mind array, the contamination must be mental objects such as vedana, feeling. Now if you stain the mind and you only shift something, did you shift it or did it just shift itself?

We start to argue now about the nature of atta and the anatta. So, to remove something and then examine its absence you've forgotten that the measuring probe is now in that space. It's like the old problem that you have difficulty in measuring things in physics because you have to put an instrument into the system and putting the measuring instrument displaces the equilibrium of the system or the non equilibrium of the system, or whatever.

So for example, if you had, as a simple case, a glass of water and you put a ruler into the water to measure the depth of the water, you have pushed some of the water out of the way and therefore what you read on the ruler is in error. You've got to allow for the volume of the ruler, the volume of the measuring stick.

So sometimes when you are doing investigation of mental states the very mind that is doing the investigating comes as a contaminant on the thing you are investigating. And then you think you are alright but then, you've got to think again.

So it's this re-inforcing or reification of a self, and as there is always two of these selves coming together with the analysis; to get to omniscience requires a lot of care. There are things and there are persons. Things could be just rupa, tables, chairs, trees, rocks, things like that. And then there is what you call selves or persons, five groups appearing and disappearing. So there's the personal self habit which is your karmic habituated returning phenomena, and then there's the phenomenal self habit; the very fact the objects in the samsara are objects in samsara. So they are there whether you live or die you might argue.

And then the two strike together it's like a spark appears due to the contact, and what happens is you get fascinated by the spark, by the feeling or whatever comes out of the clash of the two; you get fascinated by the spark and you forget to look what two things came together. So when you try this meditation strongly you get an enormous amount of information. You might remember a million past lives. Just as a sparking phenomena.

You strike two rocks together, say a piece of steel and a flint, you strike them together you get a spark. You are fascinated by the spark, you strike them again and again to watch the spark. What you should have been examining is the one rock and the piece of iron, or the flint and the iron, or whatever you like. But out of habit karma there is an intense phenomenal display.

For example if you are looking up at the sky, you say "I want to look at the sky". Suppose it's daylight, a blue sky, "I want to look at the sky", "I want to look at the sky", and then someone sends up like a star shell or some big fireworks display. Pow!. And you see all this phenomena. You forget that you were trying to look at the sky, which is like saying you can't see the wood for the trees.

And since in this sort of meditation two things are coming together there is always a production of something, it could be anything. It could be the most profound worldly knowledge you will ever see. It could be anything, it could be a whole stream of past lives, glimpses of phenomena, and anything will come out of that. And to resist forgetting what you are doing, and to look at the by-product of the meditation, that is the mis-knowledge. Not to.

So the personal self-habit and the phenomenal self-habit, both of them, together, constitute mis-knowledge. So as the manner of reinforcing, reification, reasserting, "I am this" or something, it is the habitual sense that things have intrinsically objective, intrinsically identifiable or intrinsically real status, and so on.

To get to the ability not to be duped by the phenomenon, that constitutes the biggest problem. So what you've got to do is seeing what brought about the need for such Teachings. Then you remember what brought about it was a Vow of compassion in your life, that you'd be kind to other people.

Then you've got to make a deal with yourself, you develop enough Bodhicitta, you say look, I know its very fascinating that whenever I move my mind and it hits some part of Samsara; there will be a phenomena, there will be a display, but I've got to resist that display, I've got to really resist it, no matter how glorious it is, no matter what a fireworks show I get. I've got to resist it.

So one way of resisting that display is to take something fairly simple. You take naturally the simplest thing you've got is your own body. And you meditate like this; this body of mine, you say of your own body, is now alive and living. And then you meditate on a dead body and you say "that dead body is not alive and living". Well every one will agree with you at that point it seems. It seems perfectly logical, it seems perfectly rational.

But then, you analyse a bit further. You say well "that dead body has no four groups, feeling, sanna, sankhara, vinnanam. It is four great elements only. So if I am going to make the investigation of four great elements in my own body and I ignore that it is associated with the other four groups, and I'm not struck by the phenomena of whenever I investigate the four great elements in my body and get contact with some phenomena arising, feeling or something else, which I attribute to the body through contact.

Then, you start to meditate like this. This is powerful meditation. The body that is dead, the dead body will not harm anyone, it will not kill, it will not lie, it will not steal, and so on. Whereas this body, these four great elements, under the influence of the defilements of the mind is still mobilised and will do all those things.

Then you compare again the dead body. Now in Burma there are very powerful meditators, they have actually got the power to put their mind into dead bodies, you know like zombies if you like, this is true, and get them to move and walk. They are experts in black magic phenomena. Even some of the Buddhist monks can do that.

Then you intensify the meditation. And you say by analysis, there are four elements in that dead body; there are four great elements in this body. You come to the conclusion that this body and the dead body cannot, as body, as rupa I'm talking about - not as nama rupa, not as mind body. This body as body, rupa using Pali, this body and that dead body are no different because the dead body is four great elements; this is four great elements. The dead body is subject to dissolution, falling apart, but so is this one. You know, like kayanupassana.

Therefore you meditate again; to stop grasping at the phenomena produced by the meditator, and then you say there is no difference between the dead body and this body. Therefore it is quite fit to call this, a dead body. It comes back to the word dead, you see.

Now what happened is it got emotional, it got emotional about the word dead body. But a dead body is four great elements. That’s all it is. And this body is four great elements.

So it is presumptuous to call that dead body, dead; and this four great elements which is basically identical, alive. Therefore this, and you cut off all the phenomena that will appear, the psychic phenomena that will appear. This body is a dead body.

There are two sorts of dead bodies; one lies dead in the cemetery. But there is another sort of dead body, this one that is capable of moving under mainly the negative influence of the unwholesome actions.

Then you meditate strongly and cut off all the phenomenon, because you are interested in rupa, body or form, and then when that knowledge is understood, you understand that this is a dead body moving, whereas the other one is in the cemetery unmoving.

This concludes part one of the reading of this talk. Please tune in to the Buddhist Hour again next Sunday at 11am to here part two.

Thank you very much.

May you be well and happy.

May all beings be well and happy

This Script was written and edited by Helen Costas, Julian Bamford, Anita Hughes, Frank Carter, Lainie Smallwood and Evelin Halls.

References:

Mahathera Piyadassi, Venerable. The Spectrum of Buddhism. The Corporate Body of the Buddha Educational Foundation.1991. Taiwan. Pages: 143, 151 to 152, 179.

Dhammananda, K. Sri, “Flower of Mankind”, Buddhist Missionary Society, Kuala Lumpur (no date).


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