Ch. 24 - Dissolution and Cessation – How to see Nibbāna
Everything that Arises Passes Away Without Remainder
Bhanga Nana, Knowledge of Dissolution
The Unconditioned State of Nibbana
Questions and Answers
[This discourse was given on a five month retreat and is a detailed discussion on the actual mechanics of how to see Nibbāna.]
Everything that Arises Passes Away Without Remainder
So we are looking at the stages in which our insight develops. Having completed the investigation that is necessary, so that it would be reasonable to say that we are investigating with wise attention and right view, rather than unwise attention and wrong view - the nature of mind and the nature of body, we have started to investigate its inherent characteristics.
So we have looked at the body as four elements, feeling as feeling, perception as perception, consciousness as consciousness, we’ve been over that many times. And I’ve hinted to you that we now need to start to see impermanence, suffering and no-self – the three marks of conditioned phenomena. So you have no doubt a reasonable experience now of the fact that everything that arises is impermanent.
You might start to be getting a sense that everything that arises, passes away, at the point at which it arises. Rather than passing away over time, it passes away immediately upon its arising, i.e. it is unstable, unreliable and it is suffering. You may have started to get a sense that it is not inherently there. That it is only there because the conditions for it being there are present, and as soon as those conditions change, it will change.
So we’ve seen impermanence; how things change over time. Now we need to see the ultimate truth of impermanence. We want to start to get a sense that, moment to moment, that which arises, passes away. But not only that, but when it passes, it passes away without remainder. It doesn’t reappear. You’ve probably got the sense that that vibration, or that energy, or that moment to moment arising of the five aggregates, arise, pass, and then arise again. So you might come to the conclusion that everything is merely in motion, and what arises keeps re-arising and passing away and that everything is vibrating in and out of existence
We need to sharpen our insight further to see that this is not the case and that that which arises, passes away without remainder. It comes to cessation (nirodha) and doesn’t re-arise. So you need really sharp concentration and mindfulness to see that the one state that comes to cessation never arises again. What you see arising next is a totally new state, whether mental or material process. So you see that all the time everything is dissolving and coming to cessation utterly. You may or may not be at the stage where this is clear to you. But you need to advert towards this, because this is the real knowledge of arising and passing away.
Bhanga Nana, Knowledge of Dissolution
Now, in the beginning you will only get a sense of this, this feeling that everything is dissolving. Knowledge of Dissolution (bhaṅga ñāṇa) means knowing that everything is dissolving. It is arising and passing away, passing away, passing away, passing away instantaneously. You are going to have to have very sharp insight to see that that which is passing away does not re-arise. But this works in an extraordinary way. You advert your mind that way.
So what we’re doing now, we’ve been paying attention to, we’ve watched this arising of feeling and its passing away, the arising of four elements and their passing away, the arising of perception and its passing away. We want to ignore the arising, and look only at passing away of whatever appears within the mind, and the mind that knows it.
Yes, well, that is quite challenging, but if you now start to lock into perception of impermanence with enough concentration and mindfulness, and ignoring the feeling of its arising within you, and pay attention only to its passing away within you, gradually your mind comes to the knowledge that, that which arises is passing away, is passing away, is passing away. We want to see that it is dissolving and passing, in the moment of its passing away.
So we could say that there was some imperfection of insight in our perception, that it was arising and passing, if we perceived the same thing to be arising and passing, arising again and passing away.
The insight we need to come to, and again I can only lay it out for you, is that that which arises, passes away without remainder. You will need to gradually mature into this experience and this will take time, maybe even some weeks, or some months going forward with your practice, or it may happen tonight or tomorrow. You need to see that having passed away in one moment, something else arises and passes away without remainder in the very next moment. Another five aggregates arise and pass away without remainder in each mind-moment.
The Unconditioned State of Nibbana
So whilst watching the passing away of formations, try to advert your mind to their passing away without remainder. If you try to do it too soon you will be lost in concepts, but when you have a clear experience of their passing away, advert your mind to where they are passing away to. Feeling arises and passes away and is gone. Materiality arises and passes away and is gone. Perception is arising and passing and is gone. We eventually want to try to advert our mind to the passing away of formations and to their non-arising, their cessation.
And at this point you want to observe clearly that everything is coming to cessation, you are watching things arise and pass away, pass away, pass away and you should follow them as they pass away. Whilst watching formations passing away, watch them come to cessation. Gradually you start to be able to perceive the cessation of formations until there comes a moment when you let your mind go to the cessation state and that’s when your attention will come to rest in the non-arising and passing of formations. Now, formations may still be arising within you, but your mind now comes to rest upon their non-arising. So now you see for yourself; that which appears to be innately there, is innately not there. You are seeing the basic ground from which they arise, rather than their appearance.
So let’s leave it at that for now. You will not be able to stay in that space from which things are non-arising, if you are still attached to that which is arising. So along with your adverting the mind towards the non-arising of formations, there must be a willingness to relinquish your attachment to them. And that will be the determining factor as to whether or not you will be able to take the unconditioned state (Nibbāna/cessation), or whether you will continue to just fix your mind on arising and passing, or passing away, passing away.
It is a very, very subtle and delicate process, and what it actually equates to, is what I mentioned yesterday, about coming out of the jungle of saṁsāra. In the jungle you are all confused until someone shows you the way to the riverbank. And then you start to see this riverbank. And you also start to see that on the other side of the river, you start to realise there is something which is not the arising and passing of the jungle, of saṁsāra. And eventually there comes a point where our insight becomes strong enough that we can perceive what Nibbāna might be and where it might lie. As we perceive this, we understand that it is over there on the other side of the river, it is beyond that which I am entangled with, but I can’t yet go there.
So you understand this unconditioned state now, and your understanding of phenomena has become sharp enough that you see things arise and pass away without remainder and come to cessation (nirodha) and never reappear. But where are these conditioned states coming from? It must be somewhere they are arising from and are passing away to. What is that place of their non-arising? So your mind starts to now grasp what was just an inconceivable idea when we were in the jungle. But you are looking at it, from this side of the river, the jungle side, trying to decide whether you are going to cross the river. Whether you cross the river is determined by how much momentum you approach the riverbank with, and how completely you launch yourself...
And finally you jump. “Oh...not enough,” and end up landing in the river, which is bhavaṅga, and you have to come back to the riverbank. So, in this instance, we launched ourselves at the unconditioned state, or the non-arising or cessation of conditioned states (Nibbāna), but without enough impulse and we fall into bhavaṅga for a moment, and the next thing we know, the mind is taking conditioned objects again and it doesn’t take the unconditioned object. And why? Because at that point of launching, there was not enough willingness to relinquish.
That moment of Path Knowledge, which is the moment the mind first takes the Nibbāna object, in all the rounds of conditioned lives, is the moment of crossing over and landing on the other side of the riverbank. This has never been known to you. Only the jungle of saṁsāra has been known so far. But in that moment that you come to know the unconditioned state, the impression of knowing the unconditioned state registers in bhavaṅga, and Nibbāna is now known.
It may well be that because of residual attachment to objects in saṁsāra, the next object the mind takes after knowing the Nibbāna object will be a conditioned object. It will probably fall into bhavaṅga and next take a conditioned object. You may not have enough, shall we say, harmonious mind, or stability, or concentration and mindfulness, to land on the far shore and stay there and continue to take the Nibbāna object, but it doesn’t matter. That path moment is the moment that the mind takes Nibbāna. It performs a function of cutting off residual attachment to conditioned formations, depending on how strong was the impulsion with which you knew it.
We will talk tonight about the way in which it cuts off this residual attachment and residual kamma. All I want you to understand at this stage, is that the way to see the unconditioned, is to watch the passing away and non-arising of the conditioned. So from arising and passing, arising and passing, to arising and gone, arising and gone, passing away, passing away, passing away, passing away and coming to cessation, passing away and coming to cessation, passing away and gone, passing away and gone. Eventually your mind may be able to stay behind, beyond, for one mind moment, and see Nibbāna, and that performs the function of cutting off kamma and purifying your mind. So we’ll try.
The stage that you will most likely be needing to be stable in, is the stage of dissolving. So first you need to establish your sense of arising and passing within you, the sure knowledge that what is arising is passing away instantly. That momentary dissolving feeling. When it’s clear to you, that everything is arising and passing, just advert your mind and ignore the arising of things, advert your mind to the passing. And stay there and see what happens. You have to build it up gradually. Okay?
So this is how your insight will mature, not through thinking about what I have just told you, but by watching this process unfold within.
Q: Can you use your breath?
A: What, watch the breath passing away? No. You need to see the four elements within the breath passing away, and the mind that knows the breath passing away. Because the breath only arises and passes over a period of time, and then you just stay...”Ahh, I’m not breathing now”, then you only just stay with awareness. You won’t see the non-arising of conditioned states.
Questions and Answers
Q: Where does Dharmakaya fit into all this? What is the difference between experiencing Dharmakaya (the basic ground of awareness) and Nibbāna?
A: Oh dear! Too clever for your own boots! Let’s look at it like this then – seeing Nibbāna functions in a way that seeing Dharmakaya (the basic ground of awareness) doesn’t function. Awareness itself is empty, there are no formations inherently in it, in the same way that a mirror doesn’t contain any of the objects it reflects. But when we are experiencing that awareness, that awareness is not seeing the cessation of formations that the lower mind clings to. So when the lower mind appears again from this state it appears still with its remaining capacity to cling; it only doesn’t cling for as long as we rest in awareness and pay no attention to formations. This leaving everything as it is, is, of course, a deep equanimity but it is only a momentary cessation of suffering.
When you see Nibbāna through watching formations come to cessation, your lower mind is now seeing that that which it clung to can’t be clung to, and your lower mind relinquishes its clinging to that which it previously clung to. Since that clinging was the cause of suffering, relinquishing that clinging is seen to be the cessation of suffering. Can you see why you have to go through that way? That’s why seeing Nibbāna is one thing and knowing the Buddha-Nature, as it’s called, is another thing. Even seeing awareness as empty is not the same as seeing Nibbāna. Why? Nibbāna is the non-arising of conditioned states of Mind and Matter. Dharmakaya is the basic ground from which these states arise. Now at one level you might think that these two things are the same. But in the process by which we come to know Dharmakaya, through the abiding in awareness itself, we haven’t actually seen formations come to cessation. It is the function of watching formations come to cessation, and then coming to rest upon their non-arising that we call Path Knowledge, and this is the knowing of Nibbāna.
It is possible that with deep enough meditative stability, that we can come to rest upon Dharmakaya as the basic ground from which formations appear, but in doing so we haven’t seen the passing away and coming to cessation of those formations. At a view level this feels like, “Aren’t they the same thing?” So you will have to inform yourselves from within your own practice. You will have to see for yourself how these two experiences function differently within you. But let me repeat. Seeing Nibbāna is seeing formations come to cessation and stopping upon that cessation. Literally nāma and rūpa come to cessation and you know they have come to cessation.
Awareness itself is the basic state of mind and is itself mirror-like. It can take conditioned states as its object, or the unconditioned state of Nibbāna as its object. This is why we say that Nibbāna and saṁsāra both appear within the basic space of awareness itself. Dharmakaya is the Basic Ground from which all formations arise. Seeing it and abiding in it, is not the same as seeing formations themselves come to cessation even though coming to rest upon Dharmakaya itself is a very deep level of meditative stability.
I am sure clarifying these things satisfies the mind but really we need to reach the definitive experience. It might be better if I didn’t explain any of these things to you but just asked you to practise until your experience verifies these things, and only then explain to help you clarify.
Anyway, are you all satisfied with your meditation? Are you satisfied with your progress? That’s important. Because how far we will need to go to cessation, and how much Path Knowledge we will need to feel totally satisfied is different for everyone. It depends upon our previous virtue and what kamma we may still have to forbear.
Q: You said that in order to see formations arise and pass you need to have very strong mindfulness, so is it good to go back at this point if you’re not seeing this?
A: This is the value of having done so much four elements practice in the past, because you’re getting that sharp mindfulness. It’s because of having done four elements that formations break down and you can hold that experience with enough stability. You need to have done enough concentrating on changing states and staying stable with them. This is another reason that four elements is such a good preparatory practice. If you find that you can’t jump the river, if you can’t get far enough, if your vipassanā insight does not mature far enough, then you go back and you train more concentration and more mindfulness.
Some of it is pāramī. If you’ve done a lot of vipassanā in a previous life, once your concentration comes then when you see formations they’ll break down, but they’ll only break down as far as you’ve already gone. So if it doesn’t appear to you then you do need to build it up, as stable meditative energy is what makes this possible. Unstable meditative energy does not make this possible.
Q: How does one go from the point of seeing the arising and passing, which can be like a hailstorm, through to distinguishing just the passing, when it’s all happening and there are so many things?
A: That’s where your mind has to be stable and concentrated enough so that if you advert it to arising you’d only see arising, and when you advert to passing away then you don’t see the arising, then you’ll only perceive passing away of anything or everything. So if you see a mass of rūpa, any one that you take you’ll see it flashing, your mindfulness has to concentrate more, you have to be more focussed, you see it arising and passing – you catch it – and then you have to advert to its passing away.
It’s like when you’re doing four elements, you don’t notice hardness in the body till you advert to it, while you’re adverting to the hardness you don’t know whether your body’s hot or cold. But as soon as you advert to the fire element however, you start to notice it by adverting your mind. You have to advert to the passing away only because that’s when you start to get the feeling of dissolving, everything is just falling away from you, it’s like sand dropping through your fingers. It’s at this point that insufficient concentration will bring us to a point beyond which we can’t go and if our vipassanā practice does not come to distinction at this point and these things do not become clear to us, we will need to go back and develop stronger concentration.
The danger that many yogis fall into at this stage is that because their discernment is not clear within their actual experience, their meditation becomes merely a contemplation of the insight that they are working towards. Concentration is our very ability to advert our mind to one thing and ignore all else. This is very important when we come to discernment of arising, standing, passing away and cessation as separate aspects. This ability to advert the mind to one object and ignore the rest is what will enable us to incline towards passing away for example and in that moment no longer notice arising. It will be the same when we start to recognize cessation, ignoring arising and passing away.
Q: So you’re not looking necessarily to pick out one particle out of the whole mass? You can work with all of them together, but the feeling of them all?
A: First, you have to pick one anywhere you are, in the eye, in the eye-base, in the nose, in the nose-base, in the body-base – you’ve got to see it coming and going. Really you should be able to see the four elements in it, and if you are reviewing materiality you should be able to see ‘this is kamma, consciousness, temperature or nutriment produced’. But whatever, you have to see it arising and passing, and then you have to see it passing, because you have to see clearly enough ‘it’s gone’, because otherwise all you have is impermanence.
Your perception at this stage would be that it’s impermanent, constantly changing, and that’s not enough - it has to be ‘this is arising, and passing’. Udayabbaya it’s called. You have to get to that stage, it has to be sharp enough to perceive that clearly, that it locks into the passing away. After that it will be able to, if you advert your mind, but if you can’t see it as arising and passing then if you try to see it passing, your mind won’t see passing away. It’ll only be left in a mass of impermanence, and you can sit in that mass of impermanence all day long but you won’t see cessation.
Q: At that point do you go back to the mindfulness practice or is there no point?
A: You should try adverting your mind with more intention. Look at your initial and sustained application. They may well be slackening off. The point is, you’re probably just sitting there not knowing what to do. That’s the danger. But now you should know what to do. This is why I am spending so much time clarifying the practice to you, so that you are not just sitting there not knowing what to do.
Q: It’s all so fast, I know mentally what to do from what you’ve said, look at the arising and passing but it’s so fast, such a blur…
A: There will come a point where it’s almost still. But remember it will be a reflection of the energy of your mind. If the meditative mind is not deep enough you will need to work more on that. This is why we do samatha. Otherwise it’s like playing a game of tennis without being the slightest bit fit. You maybe have to spend some time fitness training first. And even after you are fit you will still need to practice to hit the ball skilfully.
Q: So how does one work towards that?
A: It will happen firstly with practice, but if, even with practice you cannot do it, then you will need more mental training, more samatha, more concentration. The energy in your mind, the insight energy, will make your mind very bright. Thereafter it’s actually about right effort – if you put enough initial and sustained application into it, your mind will stabilise that. If you don’t, you will just sit with it, your mind will just sit in that mass of impermanence and that won’t do enough – you think you’re letting go by sitting in the impermanence or this constantly changing thing, and it will have an effect but it won’t cut deep enough. This is what I mean by meditative stability.
And then once you have laid out the groundwork and done what preparation you need to do with regards to both samatha and vipassanā, it can happen one time, it’ll lock-in and in that lock-in it can really get it. So put your mind towards it – can you see it arising and passing? Can you perceive it?
Q: Okay, so even when it’s all going off at a hundred miles an hour?
A: As your concentration, mindfulness and equanimity become stronger, it’s almost like it can just grab in a moment, it can stop everything. Maybe you’ll just get it for a few seconds, where everything stops while it’s going on, and the mind is suddenly extremely clear.
The experience will develop as follows: compactness breaks down and we see it’s all impermanent, then we see it all is momentarily arising and passing, then we see bhaṅga, we see dissolving, and then from there we pay attention only to passing away and then passing away and gone until we can see formations actually coming to cessation in the moment. Go to cessation. Otherwise what’ll happen if you just watch arising and passing for too long, all that’ll happen is that you’ll end up staying in that impermanence, and you can stay there all day but you won’t get any further.
So then what you should do is go back, stabilise your concentration, and then come back to it again when your focus and sustained concentration are deeper. You do not necessarily have to develop all the way to jhāna if your discernment is sharp and focus concentration is strong.
These are the key points in vipassanā. But it can also tire the mind, and for this we need samatha practice and sustained serenity concentration as our refuge. If you stay too long in arising and passing you won’t maintain enough energy, so you have to come to it with enough energy to go all the way through and the energy will take you further. That’s why actually, when we have those five minute sessions towards the end of a session, where I am steering you, I’m just giving some prompts, but also you all tune in to me and we are all on the same wavelength hitting the same target together.
Sometimes in those brief spells you can find that you have the energy in you in that moment and you can follow it through, those are the moments where you just go. Maybe one time your mind will follow all the way through to cessation… It’ll take you quite a long time before you can go and stay in cessation for a long period of time. The point is to have enough energy to take you to it. It’s like you’ve got to let everything stop. It’s a moment of total surrender if you like.
When you go to cessation, what you were before completely immersed in has gone, and the moment you come back out of cessation, there it is again. So, to stay in cessation, when formations are gone you’ve got to stay there so they don’t re-arise. You’ve almost got to feel the point where it starts appearing again. It’s like emerging from jhāna; you can feel something impinge on the sense-door and start to shake your absorption but it doesn’t pull your attention and you don’t come back out to the sense door, you stay in your absorption. With training it becomes exactly like that. First you enter briefly into cessation the same way you enter only briefly into absorption but gradually with practice and experience we learn to stay in that cessation – you don’t come back to formations. It’s like learning to stay there. This becomes our fruition attainment and it will depend on how deep is our Path moment and Fruition moment.
Gosh, wouldn’t it be nice if there was like a chip, just put it on a memory stick so you could upload it! It’s like trying to upload the data onto your memory stick so that you can play it back later. But I guess these discourses are like uploading the road map so that you know where you are heading. I hope at least they are helpful. Sometimes even you can receive the transmission from the teacher’s mind in these moments. If you can stay concentrated and mindful enough when I am explaining these things it is almost like a virtual meditation where you can review in advance what you have to do. This is very important. It can really open doors to progress and speed up the practice.
Q: I’m guessing there’s a point where you have to spend some time just resting with it to get stability enough at that point, so that it is no longer shocking or unsettling in any way?
A: Yes, catch your breath, and let your energy catch up. You have to be equanimous to it, otherwise it just becomes unstable. This is when your practice of abiding in awareness as the witness to what you have revealed becomes very important. It gives you sustained exposure to these phenomena without tiring your mind. The point is, that process of deep investigation and penetration is very powerful and can take you very deeply in just a few minutes or moments when everything is set up well. But it is also quite exhausting. So don’t try and do this all the time. Do it a couple of times a day. You do all the preparatory work, you keep sharpening your insight, you keep being with formations, and you balance it with just resting in awareness – in equanimity itself. But this bit where you try to see cessation, when you’ve tried a few times and it hasn’t worked, come back and rest up. Don’t keep trying because each time you’ll have less energy to throw yourself across the river. The first time you really come to it and you know what you’re doing, you’ve got your ducks in a row and that’s the time to really have a jump.
Q: Are you talking about while it’s still a hailstorm? Are you saying don’t even go to the hailstorm bit?
A: No, you come to what you call this hailstorm, which is arising and passing (udayabayya) which then develops into dissolution (bhaṅga) with an intention of going through to cessation. It’s like you’ve got to have all your insight right there with you, clearly knowing what you must do. It seems like a lot of people get to where you are and don’t get any further than that because they don’t actually know what to do, so they just stay there waiting for something to happen next. That’s the point – it won’t just happen next if you just get to where you are and stay there.
You need to be skilful at that point, and all the reflection previously that I’ve taught you in the last vipassanā session is for this purpose. There has to be a willingness to relinquish, there’s a feeling that you’re ready to, there’s a desire to go beyond, there’s a reflection on beyond; everything is magnetising you. If you just remain reviewing that point where everything is impermanent then you’ll just stay in that. If you are not careful this can become your default setting for all your life without ever getting further.
Q: So if you’re not going to go beyond, what do you do at that point?
A: Either there will be unwillingness to relinquish, or there will not be enough equanimity, or meditative stability is not strong enough. So we develop all three of these things. But always review your equanimity. Many people assume they are equanimous when actually they are not yet. Practise your upekkhā. If you can be really upekkhā there then that’s what we call vipassanā jhāna. It’s not jhāna, it’s upacāra samādhi (access concentration), but it will contain the five jhāna factors.
So you can look for the jhāna factors first of all, to see if the energy in that experience is really strong. When your energy can arrive at that experience of impermanence really strongly then you’ll be able to start going beyond it. It’s a bit like when you try and stay in stillness. You can stay in stillness and you’re not really even meditating, you’re just chilling out. There’s no energy there. In the same way you can get to impermanence without much energy, then you practice your jhāna factors and coming into strong clear equanimity, and from that clear equanimity there’ll be enough energy to go to udayabbaya – arising and passing, passing away – and then nirodha, cessation…ah..!
There comes a point at saṅkhār’upekkhāñāṇa where your mind’s eye can see Nibbāna right before you. It now knows that just beyond, is Nibbāna. That’s like really being on the river bank, you can’t see any ground in front of you any more. You can only see the river and you know that beyond the river is Nibbāna. At that point the only thing that is holding you back is unwillingness to relinquish, or the fact that maybe you didn’t make the determination or the aspiration to go to Nibbāna. That’s why that saṅkhār’upekkhāñāṇa, the last vispassana stage, is an important one.
Before you get to that steady and even smooth experience of impermanence, when it’s just a mass of arising and passing, and it isn’t saṅkhār’upekkhāñāṇa yet, you need to become more equanimous in that state and more stable. The saṅkhār’upekkhāñāṇa stage is the bit that you see after the dissolving and fading away, and then it’s like, “Phew, now I’m really not clinging to any of this any more”, but you haven’t yet gone to Nibbāna.
Q: I’m a bit confused, because what you’re saying sounds a little contradictory. You’re saying you need to get equanimity in that hailstorm situation, but at the same time you’re saying not to spend too long there, but to get equanimity you’ve got to spend quite a bit of time there.
A: What I’m saying is, that if you’re staying there all day with a little bit of energy then it won’t mature. As you come to that point, you want to stabilise there. So maybe half an hour into your meditation maybe everything’s broken down, there’s no compactness, there’s just a mass of impermanence. You stay there, you stop huffing and puffing, you relax into it, you don’t retreat into any other samatha experience or you don’t look to go off into emptiness. You stay there in this experience, and see if you’ve got enough concentration to see arising and passing, and then look for and advert to passing away.
That is enough, because the mind just locks into it and then it feels as if something clicks. It’s like a subtle friction, the manifest universe, the friction of it being manifest, the energy of holding it together, when you look to dissolving, it’s as if you feel it’s not held any more, and then the energy in your body will all go soft. All the kammic energy in your body, which is the clung-to, manifest energy, which is what is producing this tension, there comes a point when you will watch it also passing away, so all the body becomes relaxed.
All the tension and friction is relaxing, that’s why I say it’s a very, very, deeply, deeply still state while the universe is dissolving. It can happen in the blink of an eye, but you’ll always have to go through these stages: Udayabbaya – arising and passing, dissolving, passing away – and then deep dispassion and equanimity and then letting go, relinquishing....and stop, ah.......cessation.
