All Dhammas

These suc­cinct phrases describ­ing the three char­ac­ter­ist­ics of real­ity are a well-known sum­mary of the Buddha’s teach­ing. They are pro­found, rad­ical, even dev­ast­at­ing in their philo­soph­ical implic­a­tions. But, true to the prag­matic ori­ent­a­tion of the Dhamma, their chief pur­pose is not to fuel coffee-table debates on the mean­ing of life, but to ori­ent our inner explor­a­tions, provid­ing con­cise yet com­pre­hens­ive guidelines for insight meditation.

As such, the mean­ing of these phrases would seem to be of no little interest for those pur­su­ing the Buddha’s way of calm and insight. Yet their pre­cise inter­pret­a­tion remains elu­sive, par­tic­u­larly the enig­matic shift from ‘saṅkhāras’ to ‘dham­mas’ in the third phrase. Both of these terms are highly ambigu­ous, assum­ing a vari­ety of mean­ings in dif­fer­ent con­texts. Here I will leave them untrans­lated so as to not col­our the interpretation.

One pop­u­lar con­tem­por­ary inter­pret­a­tion sees saṅkhāras here as ‘con­di­tioned phe­nom­ena’, or more pre­cisely, the phe­nom­ena of exper­i­ence as act­ive par­ti­cipants in an ongo­ing pro­cess of cause and effect. Dham­mas is seen as being broader, includ­ing con­di­tioned phe­nom­ena plus Nib­bana, the uncon­di­tioned. Doubt has been thrown on this view, how­ever, because Nib­bana is never dir­ectly referred to as ‘not-self’ in the sut­tas. The pur­pose of this con­tem­pla­tion is to become repulsed from suf­fer­ing, so one con­tem­plates phe­nom­ena as ‘not-self’, ‘a dis­ease’, ‘a barb’, ‘an afflic­tion’, etc. Obvi­ously, Nib­bana does not come within the scope of such contemplation.

It has been poin­ted out, how­ever, that Nib­bana is referred to as ‘not-self’ in the Vinaya Parivāra. This late com­pen­dium of mon­astic dis­cip­line is an odd place indeed to find such a state­ment, but at least this shows that such ideas were con­sidered ortho­dox by the emer­ging Theravada school.

One reason for the pop­ular­ity of the view that ‘all dham­mas’ includes Nib­bana has been to counter the opin­ion of some prom­in­ent schol­ars that Nib­bana is a kind of higher ‘Self’. The per­sist­ence of such ideas is quite aston­ish­ing in light of the Buddha’s con­sist­ent and unspar­ing con­dem­na­tion of all doc­trines of self, and the total lack of any hint that Nib­bana is a ‘self’. How­ever, it does not neces­sar­ily fol­low that the state­ment ‘all dham­mas are not-self’ refers to Nib­bana. In fact, it’s a weak argu­ment. One should never rely on a dis­puted inter­pret­a­tion of an ambigu­ous term to but­tress one’s pos­i­tion in a debate.

The Theravada com­ment­ar­ies offer con­flict­ing opin­ions on this point – a sure sign that the teach­ers of old were not unan­im­ous. One explan­a­tion has it that saṅkhāras here means the ‘aggreg­ate of saṅkhāras’ (i.e. vari­ous men­tal factors headed by voli­tion), while dham­mas means all five aggreg­ates. I find this inter­pret­a­tion too arbit­ary to do justice to the con­text. Else­where the com­ment­ar­ies sug­gest that dhamma includes ‘con­cepts’ along with con­di­tioned phe­nom­ena. This is inter­est­ing, but it rests on philo­soph­ical premises more char­ac­ter­istic of later strata of Buddhist thought, namely the dis­tinc­tion between ulti­mate truth and con­ven­tional truth.

The main prob­lem with all the above the­or­ies is that they lack sutta sup­port. Ideally we should like an import­ant sutta deal­ing dir­ectly with the three char­ac­ter­ist­ics which refers to some­thing as a dhamma while stat­ing or imply­ing that that dhamma is neither imper­man­ent nor suf­fer­ing. To find such a pas­sage we need look no fur­ther than the well-known ‘Dis­course on the Law­ful­ness of Dhamma’. I trans­late only the rel­ev­ant portions.

    ‘All saṅkhāras are imper­man­ent.’ Whether Tath­agatas arise or not, that ele­ment is stable, that sta­bil­ity of dhamma, that law­ful­ness of dhamma…

    ‘All saṅkhāras are suf­fer­ing.’ Whether Tath­agatas arise or not, that ele­ment is stable, that sta­bil­ity of dhamma, that law­ful­ness of dhamma…

    ‘All dham­mas are not-self.’ Whether Tath­agatas arise or not, that ele­ment is stable, that sta­bil­ity of dhamma, that law­ful­ness of dhamma…
    “

The idea is that the prin­ciples of the Dhamma are always true. Things are imper­man­ent. In the past they were imper­man­ent. In the future, too, they will be imper­man­ent. While the sutta stops short of such a bold state­ment as ‘imper­man­ence is per­man­ent’, still the terms ‘sta­bil­ity’ and ‘law­ful­ness’ are vir­tu­ally the oppos­ite of ‘impermanence’.

If the prin­ciples of the dhamma can­not be regarded as imper­man­ent, neither, it would seem, should they be regarded as suf­fer­ing. They are not men­tioned in the usual descrip­tions of suf­fer­ing, nor do they fall into the threefold ana­lysis of suf­fer­ing as the suf­fer­ing of pain­ful feel­ing, the suf­fer­ing of saṅkhāras, and the suf­fer­ing of change.

So the prin­ciples of imper­man­ence, suf­fer­ing, and self­less­ness are the ‘dhamma’ which is not imper­man­ent or suf­fer­ing; yet it seems plain enough that such prin­ciples are not-self. This is con­firmed in a related dis­course, which uses sim­ilar phrases such as the ‘sta­bil­ity of dhamma’ in the con­text of depend­ent ori­gin­a­tion. While the factors of depend­ent ori­gin­a­tion, the ‘depend­ently ori­gin­ated phe­nom­ena’ headed by ignor­ance, are imper­man­ent, the causal rela­tion­ship between the phe­nom­ena remains fixed. Whenever there is ignor­ance, that will always give rise to con­cep­tual activ­it­ies, and so on. And it is pre­cisely this con­sist­ent man­ner in which exper­i­ence oper­ates which cre­ates the illu­sion of ‘self’, of a per­man­ent essence or core under­ly­ing the tran­si­ent fluc­tu­ations of exper­i­ence. To see through this illu­sion, the Buddha taught us to make the con­di­tional rela­tion itself a focus of our invest­ig­a­tion, to see exper­i­ence neither as a ran­dom mean­ing­less chaos, nor as diverse sur­face mani­fest­a­tions of a hid­den inner unity, but as a flow of tran­si­ent phe­nom­ena gov­erned by nat­ural laws.

The three char­ac­ter­ist­ics them­selves are really little more than another per­spect­ive for examin­ing con­di­tion­al­ity. The sut­tas often treat ‘imper­man­ent’ as a vir­tual syn­onym for ‘depend­ently ori­gin­ated’. So in the end we can sum­mar­ize like this. Saṅkhāras means ‘con­di­tioned phe­nom­ena’, while ‘dham­mas’ encom­passes the con­di­tioned phe­nom­ena as well as the prin­ciples of conditionality.

This is use­ful. It reminds us that insight is not just ‘bare aware­ness’ of tran­si­ent phe­nom­ena, but must lead to an act of under­stand­ing, an intu­it­ive real­iz­a­tion of their fun­da­mental nature. See­ing that ‘this thought is imper­man­ent’, ‘this feel­ing is suf­fer­ing’, ‘this idea is not-self’, we can let go of that thought, that feel­ing, that idea. But only when we see that ‘all thoughts are imper­man­ent’, ‘all feel­ings are suf­fer­ing’, ‘all ideas are not-self’ can we let go of all thoughts, all feel­ings, all ideas.

The key to thus uni­ver­sal­iz­ing the par­tic­u­lars of one’s own exper­i­ence is con­di­tion­al­ity. Again and again and again one sees thoughts arising when cer­tain con­di­tions are present; and again and again and again one sees that when those con­di­tions are absent, thoughts do not arise.

One bright day it clicks: one under­stands. This inner event is really quite mys­ter­i­ous. No-one can say how or when it will occur; and yet we can point out how to bring it about. When it hap­pens, one has no thought of identi­fy­ing or cling­ing to the passing parade of phe­nom­ena, the Mardi-gras of the mind, for one under­stands: all dham­mas are not-self.

Source

santifm.org