Questioning the concept that concentrating on pleasant breath sensations can lead to liberation or achieve any semblance of Nobility. Suttas references: suttas.hillsidehermitage.org/?q=mn50#mn50:13.1-mn50:13.10 suttacentral.net/mn108 ____________________________________ If you wish to support the Hillside Hermitage Sangha and this channel you are very welcome to do so via: www.hillsidehermitage.org/support-us
(14:12) Since this sort of statement is often misunderstood, a further clarification may be useful. There's often the artificial division in contemporary teachings (not supported by the Suttas: Dhammapada 372) between samatha practice and vipassanā practice, and people would often have no problem acknowledging that "yes, of course breath-watching in itself won't lead to Nibbāna". But the point is that it doesn't lead to samatha _either_ , which, according to the Suttas, _does_ intrinsically slant the mind towards Nibbāna (SN 53.1). The same applies for actual ānāpānasati, which, even in its utmost basic form, centers around much more subtle and indirect aspects of experience than sensations, as do all forms of sati for that matter. Proficiency at breath/sensation observation won't help one on the path more than proficiency at eating with chopsticks or at solving a rubik's cube would.
Greetings, venerable sir! After deeply contemplating the nature of *pleasures*, I have realised all pleasures to be painful & tiresome. Pleasures destroy body & mind, just like years of hard labour in a coal mine. Pleasure is not the opposite of Dukkha, but it is just a different form of dukkha. Pleasure does whatever dukkha does, but without making any noise. Pleasure is like a fire without heat & smoke, a fire that is still a *fire*.
See our playlist on Mindfulness of breathing for further exploration on this topic: th-cam.com/play/PLUPMn2PfEqIwuLnCiCoXvgcD89ZQj9TKi.html&feature=shared
Exactly as Bhante says there is no problem with breath meditation just we should not believe that it can achieve the right view. As a beginner a breath meditation will lead one to master ones focus by stop focusing on the bad thought and instead putting ones entire focus on the breath which then will lead to purifying all the course bad thoughts and pains and the body will by default feel happy and pecaeful like a cloud. The breath meditation in the contemporary way should not be conflated with understanding the right view which is to unabsorb ourselfs only to the extent of our engagement with the bad thought while recogniznig that the bad thought has arisen on its own as a phenomenon.
How about using meditation technique (for example focused on a breath for some time at the morning) with intention to make your mind calmer and becoming more aware throughout the day, so it would help you keeping your sense restraint?
The reason you are not calm and unaware is because of your decision to not keep your senses guarded, and no amount of breath watching will help with that because lack of breath watching is not the cause. If you finally take responsibility for your choice of non-restraint and relinquish that non-restraint, you would be calm and fully aware. You can either temporarily deal with your issue of non-calm mind by watching your breath or you can go to the root cause which is your choice of non-restraint, and thus cure your issues once a for all. Set your intention to use restraint as a technique and you will calm down and become fully aware of the roots of your problems. It is only after this point that the anapanasati that the Buddha encouraged can be practiced. We will upload a talk later which discusses that. But for now here is a sutta which you can take a look at: Sn54.6: To Arittha "Monks, do you cultivate this mindfulness using in-and-out breathing as a reference?" Ven. Arittha replied to the Blessed One, "I cultivate this mindfulness using in-and-out breathing as a reference, lord." "But how do you cultivate this mindfulness using in-and-out breathing as a reference, Arittha? "Having let go of desire for past and future sensual pleasures, and having thoroughly subdued perceptions of resistance with regard to internal and external events, I knowingly breathe in and knowingly breathe out."
I wonder what you make in the following "paradox" : in some suttas, the Buddha says that the reason why practitioners revert back to sensuality despite knowing the drawbacks/dangers is because they haven't found a higher pleasure outside of sensuality (I. E. Jhana). Yet the pleasure of Jhana is the result of abandoning sensuality. If you rephrase, you get: the reason why some practitioners revert back to sensuality is because they haven't given up sensuality. That is redundant, is it not? Or is it that they haven't given up enough and long enough? But then why doesn't the Buddha just say so?
@@HillsideHermitagewould you agree that immersion in the Dhamma (head in the stream as Han Shan writes) is characterized by a completely non-sensual, non-intellectual, bliss and often rapturous experience of freedom and and a deep sense of continuous understanding?
Seeking pleasures of the breath is not better than seeking coarse sense pleasures because the former is more moral than the latter. Morality or immorality is not the issue. Pleasure of the breath is in the same domain as coarse sense pleasures because either way you are welcoming , seeking out and delighting in pleasure on account of a body and its senses which are subject to ruin and therefore are unownable. So the fallacy is that by delighting and enjoying on account of a body which does not belong to you in the first place, you are overstepping the boundaries and venturing into territory in which you have no say , so to say. You are basically ignoring the impermanent nature of the body. That is the reason why seeking and delighting in sensual pleasures is only possible on account of a misconception of reality. For how could one delight and enjoy or seek out joy and delight on account of a body if the perception of uncertainty and therefore the unownability of that body is rightly developed and maintained? That is the fallacy of all sensual pleasures. That on account of which one delights and enjoys ,is not seen as uncertain and therefore it is taken as for me and mine. So in a sense the immorality pertains to the fact that you have delighted on account of something that does not belong to you. And when the owner comes he has every right to take what is his. That will then be felt as disturbing and unpleasant. And that will be solely your own responsibility.
Not Bhante, but I think he meant it as regarding to sense of touch only. In case of other senses you would have visual sensations, auditory sensations etc. and sensuality would be volitional lust towards that which manifests within the world (the 6 sense bases)
I follow all the theravada monks. I've been mixing zazen and vipassana but mostly doing vipassana. I like vipassana because its focused but zazen because its directionless. It goes where it goes.
Anapanasati, Absorbtion Jahnas - thats found in the suttas. Many references, many places. Abidharma and visudimagga just craved that more out. Concentration is not right view and has nothing to do with right view. Itgs right samadhi. It developes a mind state that is very suptle and sharp, so we can easiliy doing the right effort and develop the right wisdom. Joy is nothing bad. Its very supported by the suttas. Attachment to joy is the problem. So you dont do jahnas for pleasure, you do it for seeing the things as they are directly. Which is not pleasurable.
I may be wrong, but I think he means that dwelling on the breath pleasure mentioned in the Anapanasati Sutta is a diversion into sensuality. Dwelling on it turns meditation into a sensual practice.
This monk works out! Very odd for a bikkhu in the Theravadav tradition. I just met a layman who told me he is a rogue monk, with a few other monks who left the mona stery to live on their own. He obviously knows the dhamma by intellect but not sure the bhavana is there
He doesn’t work out. They do a lot of physical work around the monastery themselves and if you watch some of the videos showing their life there, you’ll quickly understand how, in some seasons, they happen to get jacked. Now, HH is “rogue” in the sense that they discard commentarial tradition as it basically reinterprets the Dhamma in the Yogic / proto-Vedic fashion and Theravada as a whole does accept commentarial work and a lot of its practices are based around Abhidhamma and Vissudhimagga with the latter basically being its “meditation manual”, which, some think is somehow missing from the original suttas. Now, Buddhaghosa was himself a representative of one of the many sects that split and kept on splitting on many textual matters so his take is that of one school of thought among many and it just so happened that Theravada is the only tradition that survived (and a tradition that happened to like Buddhaghossa’s ideas). Meanwhile, he departed from the original suttas; made flat out mistakes (not knowing some deities mentioned by the Buddha, for example, yet providing “authoritative” explanations). Most importantly, he reinterpreted the Dhamma in the very way the Buddha criticized: basically, bringing the jhana of the unbroken colt back. Sort of a bit of a further development of what Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta practiced. And it’s understandable, absorption-based practices were all the rage during the Buddha’s times and remain all the rage until these days. The Vedic tradition likewise was completely reinterpreted in the same fashion and you can see how clumsily they were trying to attach this style of meditation to the original ideas in the first three Vedic Upanishadas. Accidentally, you can also find an explanation of what the Buddha was trying to practice in some of these early Vedic texts (and some descriptions are literally word for word what the Buddha said he was trying to do initially). Yet, if you temporarily set aside the commentaries and read the original suttas… they clearly look almost unrelated. So, people have often tried to get to the bottom of it all by setting commentarial tradition aside (and thus, almost all of Theravada’s meditation practices). HH are not the first, nor the last. And not the most famous ones (Nanavira Thera comes to mind in the West). And Ven. Nyanamoli, in my opinion, is the opposite of what you said: if you listen to more talks you’ll most likely see how deeply experiential what he says is. Or you can start by talks from their sister monastery Samanadipa Hermitage, there’s fewer to begin with :)
@@Limemill seems like you're new here, because some kettlebells actually did appear in the videos before. Someone's using them for sure. And I don't think there's anything wrong with it
Questioning the concept that concentrating on pleasant breath sensations can lead to liberation or achieve any semblance of Nobility.
Suttas references:
suttas.hillsidehermitage.org/?q=mn50#mn50:13.1-mn50:13.10
suttacentral.net/mn108
____________________________________
If you wish to support the Hillside Hermitage Sangha and this channel you are very welcome to do so via:
www.hillsidehermitage.org/support-us
May all be free from Mara's domain & reaching to the right view 🙏☘️
Thanks bhante for clarifying this point. Sadhu
straight to the point! sadhu Bhante
This is so refreshing and true. For years I listened to other monks, but you are my ultimate one:)
Good morning Dhamma Family
Good evening here in Malaysia.
(14:12) Since this sort of statement is often misunderstood, a further clarification may be useful.
There's often the artificial division in contemporary teachings (not supported by the Suttas: Dhammapada 372) between
samatha practice and vipassanā practice, and people would often have no problem acknowledging that "yes, of course breath-watching in itself won't lead to Nibbāna". But the point is that it doesn't lead to samatha _either_ , which, according to the Suttas, _does_ intrinsically slant the mind towards Nibbāna (SN 53.1). The same applies for actual ānāpānasati, which, even in its utmost basic form, centers around much more subtle and indirect aspects of experience than sensations, as do all forms of sati for that matter.
Proficiency at breath/sensation observation won't help one on the path more than proficiency at eating with chopsticks or at solving a rubik's cube would.
🙏
Greetings, venerable sir! After deeply contemplating the nature of *pleasures*, I have realised all pleasures to be painful & tiresome. Pleasures destroy body & mind, just like years of hard labour in a coal mine. Pleasure is not the opposite of Dukkha, but it is just a different form of dukkha. Pleasure does whatever dukkha does, but without making any noise. Pleasure is like a fire without heat & smoke, a fire that is still a *fire*.
See our playlist on Mindfulness of breathing for further exploration on this topic:
th-cam.com/play/PLUPMn2PfEqIwuLnCiCoXvgcD89ZQj9TKi.html&feature=shared
Exactly as Bhante says there is no problem with breath meditation just we should not believe that it can achieve the right view. As a beginner a breath meditation will lead one to master ones focus by stop focusing on the bad thought and instead putting ones entire focus on the breath which then will lead to purifying all the course bad thoughts and pains and the body will by default feel happy and pecaeful like a cloud. The breath meditation in the contemporary way should not be conflated with understanding the right view which is to unabsorb ourselfs only to the extent of our engagement with the bad thought while recogniznig that the bad thought has arisen on its own as a phenomenon.
How about using meditation technique (for example focused on a breath for some time at the morning) with intention to make your mind calmer and becoming more aware throughout the day, so it would help you keeping your sense restraint?
The reason you are not calm and unaware is because of your decision to not keep your senses guarded, and no amount of breath watching will help with that because lack of breath watching is not the cause.
If you finally take responsibility for your choice of non-restraint and relinquish that non-restraint, you would be calm and fully aware.
You can either temporarily deal with your issue of non-calm mind by watching your breath or you can go to the root cause which is your choice of non-restraint, and thus cure your issues once a for all.
Set your intention to use restraint as a technique and you will calm down and become fully aware of the roots of your problems. It is only after this point that the anapanasati that the Buddha encouraged can be practiced.
We will upload a talk later which discusses that. But for now here is a sutta which you can take a look at:
Sn54.6: To Arittha
"Monks, do you cultivate this mindfulness using in-and-out breathing as a reference?"
Ven. Arittha replied to the Blessed One, "I cultivate this mindfulness using in-and-out breathing as a reference, lord."
"But how do you cultivate this mindfulness using in-and-out breathing as a reference, Arittha?
"Having let go of desire for past and future sensual pleasures, and having thoroughly subdued perceptions of resistance with regard to internal and external events, I knowingly breathe in and knowingly breathe out."
Another discussion that you might find useful:
th-cam.com/video/GrgV9KI5LeI/w-d-xo.htmlfeature=shared
I wonder what you make in the following "paradox" : in some suttas, the Buddha says that the reason why practitioners revert back to sensuality despite knowing the drawbacks/dangers is because they haven't found a higher pleasure outside of sensuality (I. E. Jhana). Yet the pleasure of Jhana is the result of abandoning sensuality. If you rephrase, you get: the reason why some practitioners revert back to sensuality is because they haven't given up sensuality. That is redundant, is it not? Or is it that they haven't given up enough and long enough? But then why doesn't the Buddha just say so?
Yes, despite "knowing" the dangers of sensuality, they haven't lived withdrawn from it LONG ENOUGH in order to fully UNDERSTAND it.
@@HillsideHermitage👏🙏🙏🙏 thank you!
@@HillsideHermitagewould you agree that immersion in the Dhamma (head in the stream as Han Shan writes) is characterized by a completely non-sensual, non-intellectual, bliss and often rapturous experience of freedom and and a deep sense of continuous understanding?
Practicing these pleasures and working to release attachment to them? Is this a path forward? When combined with inquiry into motives.
Maybe unrelated or not: interested in the causes and conditions surrounding ill will and lack thereof
Contemplation on Anger:
th-cam.com/video/Bw7DVHH_kNY/w-d-xo.htmlfeature=shared
Seeking pleasures of the breath is not better than seeking coarse sense pleasures because the former is more moral than the latter.
Morality or immorality is not the issue.
Pleasure of the breath is in the same domain as coarse sense pleasures because either way you are welcoming , seeking out and delighting in pleasure on account of a body and its senses which are subject to ruin and therefore are unownable. So the fallacy is that by delighting and enjoying on account of a body which does not belong to you in the first place, you are overstepping the boundaries and venturing into territory in which you have no say , so to say. You are basically ignoring the impermanent nature of the body. That is the reason why seeking and delighting in sensual pleasures is only possible on account of a misconception of reality.
For how could one delight and enjoy or seek out joy and delight on account of a body if the perception of uncertainty and therefore the unownability of that body is rightly developed and maintained?
That is the fallacy of all sensual pleasures. That on account of which one delights and enjoys ,is not seen as uncertain and therefore it is taken as for me and mine.
So in a sense the immorality pertains to the fact that you have delighted on account of something that does not belong to you. And when the owner comes he has every right to take what is his. That will then be felt as disturbing and unpleasant. And that will be solely your own responsibility.
Slamming Goenka method
I noticed Venerable N. is from Serbia. If I may how is his English so perfect?
Umm... He learned how to speak it??
Did you mean tactile as regarding to a sense of touch or sensuality in general 🤔🙏
touch, otherwise "sensuality" would have been used.
Not Bhante, but I think he meant it as regarding to sense of touch only. In case of other senses you would have visual sensations, auditory sensations etc. and sensuality would be volitional lust towards that which manifests within the world (the 6 sense bases)
What about the mind sense base?
That would be mahasi method.
I follow all the theravada monks.
I've been mixing zazen and vipassana but mostly doing vipassana.
I like vipassana because its focused but zazen because its directionless.
It goes where it goes.
Anapanasati, Absorbtion Jahnas - thats found in the suttas. Many references, many places. Abidharma and visudimagga just craved that more out. Concentration is not right view and has nothing to do with right view. Itgs right samadhi. It developes a mind state that is very suptle and sharp, so we can easiliy doing the right effort and develop the right wisdom. Joy is nothing bad. Its very supported by the suttas. Attachment to joy is the problem. So you dont do jahnas for pleasure, you do it for seeing the things as they are directly. Which is not pleasurable.
I may be wrong, but I think he means that dwelling on the breath pleasure mentioned in the Anapanasati Sutta is a diversion into sensuality. Dwelling on it turns meditation into a sensual practice.
This monk works out! Very odd for a bikkhu in the Theravadav tradition. I just met a layman who told me he is a rogue monk, with a few other monks who left the mona stery to live on their own. He obviously knows the dhamma by intellect but not sure the bhavana is there
He doesn’t work out. They do a lot of physical work around the monastery themselves and if you watch some of the videos showing their life there, you’ll quickly understand how, in some seasons, they happen to get jacked. Now, HH is “rogue” in the sense that they discard commentarial tradition as it basically reinterprets the Dhamma in the Yogic / proto-Vedic fashion and Theravada as a whole does accept commentarial work and a lot of its practices are based around Abhidhamma and Vissudhimagga with the latter basically being its “meditation manual”, which, some think is somehow missing from the original suttas. Now, Buddhaghosa was himself a representative of one of the many sects that split and kept on splitting on many textual matters so his take is that of one school of thought among many and it just so happened that Theravada is the only tradition that survived (and a tradition that happened to like Buddhaghossa’s ideas). Meanwhile, he departed from the original suttas; made flat out mistakes (not knowing some deities mentioned by the Buddha, for example, yet providing “authoritative” explanations). Most importantly, he reinterpreted the Dhamma in the very way the Buddha criticized: basically, bringing the jhana of the unbroken colt back. Sort of a bit of a further development of what Alara Kalama and Uddaka Ramaputta practiced. And it’s understandable, absorption-based practices were all the rage during the Buddha’s times and remain all the rage until these days. The Vedic tradition likewise was completely reinterpreted in the same fashion and you can see how clumsily they were trying to attach this style of meditation to the original ideas in the first three Vedic Upanishadas. Accidentally, you can also find an explanation of what the Buddha was trying to practice in some of these early Vedic texts (and some descriptions are literally word for word what the Buddha said he was trying to do initially). Yet, if you temporarily set aside the commentaries and read the original suttas… they clearly look almost unrelated. So, people have often tried to get to the bottom of it all by setting commentarial tradition aside (and thus, almost all of Theravada’s meditation practices). HH are not the first, nor the last. And not the most famous ones (Nanavira Thera comes to mind in the West). And Ven. Nyanamoli, in my opinion, is the opposite of what you said: if you listen to more talks you’ll most likely see how deeply experiential what he says is. Or you can start by talks from their sister monastery Samanadipa Hermitage, there’s fewer to begin with :)
@@Limemill seems like you're new here, because some kettlebells actually did appear in the videos before. Someone's using them for sure. And I don't think there's anything wrong with it