👈🏼 previous note, 07.03. Full Awakening, or Liberation from Suffering 🎯
The Buddha taught dhamma that resolves conflict in the world, the distinction between wholesome and unwholesome thought, and how to manage unruly thoughts.
MN 18 Madhupiṇḍika Sutta, ‘The Ball of Honey’
✅ Re-reading this sutta again now and feeling swamped by how psychologically technical this sutta gets, especially regarding the subject of sanya, and along with many others about variations of |dependent origination, I fall back on this sutta explicitly referencing that the dhamma leads to freedom from conflict even if I don’t fully understand the mechanisms yet.
It’s one of the few suttas I know of that approaches how practice of the dhamma directly contributes to social-justice, by ridding the individual of the inclination to engage in conflict, but I know there are others.
MN 19 Dvedhāvitakka Sutta, ‘Two Sorts of Thinking’
Inclining the mind
‘Whatever a mendicant frequently thinks about and considers becomes their heart’s inclination’ (Sujato)
✅
in which two kinds of thinking are discussed
wholesome thinking, and unwholesome thinking
I made thinking imbued with sensuality, thinking imbued with ill will, & thinking imbued with harmfulness one sort, and thinking imbued with renunciation, thinking imbued with non-ill will, & thinking imbued with harmlessness another sort.
MN 20 Vitakkasaṇṭhāna Sutta, ‘Working with Distraction’
✅, except I’m doubtful about ‘crushing mind with mind’
In this sutta, Buddha teaches five methods for dealing with distracting thoughts:
- replace the unwholesome with the wholesome; if that doesn’t work,
- examine the danger of unwholesome thoughts; if that doesn’t work,
- try to forget or ignore the thoughts ~ don’t give them attention; if that doesn’t work,
- still the thought formations; if that doesn’t work,
- crush mind with mind
Sujato points out that this single sutta alone dispels the myth that there is a single meditation method like a once-size-fits-all hard hat on the building site of reality. Of course, if you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail ~ but everything is not a nail, and you don’t only have a hammer. So you can think of these suttas as like Homebrew, which I recently learnt is a package of digital tools that can be downloaded to complement the existing tools on your computer. Except reality is not on your computer ~ at least I don’t think it is, but who knows 🤷
Steps 1, 2 and 4 are straightforward enough, but I’m right there with you if your brain’s letterbox raised a little red flag around 3 and 5: a whole and significant [[01. The Nature of Doubt#Sources of Doubt|source of doubt]] for me has been the questions around whether such instructions might result in repression if they are mis-understood or applied. So it’s worth unpacking that a bit because I agree with Jung saying that the only way to enlightenment is illuminating the unconscious, not feeding it by stuffing yet more dark thoughts in there.