Chris Willcox
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Class 4 Part 2 is now available: https://ocean.chronicleproject.com/lessons/https-vimeo-com-693792130/
Hi Claudia, thanks for bearing with us, we had a bit of technical trouble with the recording for this class. We should have a recording of the full class up today or tomorrow.
My understanding is that the Hinayana is less about manufacturing specific states and more, as you say, ruthlessly stripping back to immediate experience. There is a sense of “cultivating virtue,” which we will get into later in the class, but it’s less that we’re drumming up virtue because we think we ought to be well behaved, and more that virtuous behavior naturally results from stripping back our neurotic reactions and habits. Passionlessness, for example, arises not through its own intentional cultivation, but instead flows naturally from the meditative realization that we can take a break from the constant pursuit of comfort and entertainment, that we can simply sit with ourselves without needing something extra. So rather than working against seeing our experience clearly, these inner states co-occur with that process, and in this sense they co-occur with the taste of suffering.
Hi Mary Jo,
Thanks for these questions. To ask what ground, if any, exists, is to ask a pretty fundamental question. Maybe the fundamental question, and not just to be Buddhists and meditators. It’s a question that seems to cut to the core of what it means to be human. So over the millenia many answers have been given: the ground is understood to be physical particles, mental events, God, Brahman, a computer simulation, the struggle of good versus evil, Buddha nature, basic goodness, a dream, emptiness, and so on. What I have found to be helpful and what has been recommended by the tradition is to not rely on any of these particular philosophical answers and instead to simply look at one’s own experience and to see if any ground can be established “from the inside.” What has been stressed here is the importance of holding the question open and resisting the inclination to resolve it with some predetermined conceptual solution. While this approach of establishing a ground may not yield a particularly concrete answer, it does seem to bring us much closer to our actual experience, which on a more relative level seems to help anchor our practice and make us more available to others.
As for the falling metaphor, I kind of agree with you. I think it’s more meant to be provocative than something taken especially literally. The point seems to be that things are generally not nearly as solid as we usually assume they are, and that our concepts tend to unravel once we subject to much scrutiny. Yet, nevertheless, here we are.
