what Is a living being?

[Two articles by Ajahn Amaro discussing the Buddhist meaning of Rebirth and related truths]
In the Theravāda Buddhist world, the Sutta on Loving- Kindness is one of the best known, best loved, and most often recited of the Buddha’s discourses.

Wishing: In gladness and in safety,

May all beings be at ease.

Whatever living beings there may be;

Whether they are weak or strong, omitting none,

The great or the mighty, medium, short or small,

The seen and the unseen,

Those living near and far away,

Those born and to-be-born,

May all beings be at ease!

By not holding to fixed views,

The pure-hearted one, having clarity of vision,

Being freed from all sense desires,

Is not born again into this world.

Notice the seamless flow of ideas, a deeply inspiring sentiment, until the last four lines of the sutta, which present a very different message: the notion of not being born again. We don’t really think in terms of birth and death in the Western Buddhist world, We may have a vague idea that after death something might happen, but we’re not quite sure what and most of us don’t seem to care very much. Our main concern is getting on with our practice, which is all well and good, but even this important focus is not the culmination. So, it can be useful to take a step back and consider our cultural conditioning and how that has an impact on our understanding of what it means “not to be reborn.”

The Process of Rebirth

When we talk about being born again, what we’re talking about is that moment when the clinging strikes and the heart gets caught and is carried away. The verse at the end of the Mettā Sutta encourages us to let go of clinging and thus not be born again. Not being born again is like the consummation of pure love or rigpa. We don’t get identified with any aspect of the internal, external, psychological, or material worlds of our bodies, thoughts, feelings, emotions, Buddha-fields, or whatever. As soon as there is that formulation, that crystallization, there’s birth. What are the four kinds of clinging? They are
clinging to sense pleasure; clinging to views and opinions;
clinging to conventions, to gurus, to meditation techniques, to an ethic, to specific religious forms;
and clinging to the idea of self.

The last four lines of the Loving- Kindness (mettā) Sutta are about the ending of clinging:

By not holding to fixed views (ditthupādāna),
the pure-hearted one, by not clinging to virtues, to ethics, to rules, to forms),
having clarity of vision (this has to do with clinging to self, attavādupādāna),
being freed from all sense[…] desires (kāmupādāna),
is not born again into this world (as the clinging stops, so does being born again).

[Note: In the following article Ajahn Amaro explores two kinds of truth, when he stayed at Ajahn Chah’s monastery, as a young monk]

Conventional Truth & Ultimate Truth

The longer I stayed there, the more I began to pay attention to Ajahn Chah’s repeated emphasis on the relationship between convention and liberation, conventional reality and ultimate reality. The things of this world are merely conventions of our own creation. Once we establish them, we proceed to get lost in or blinded by them. This gives rise to confusion, difficulty, and struggle. One of the great challenges of spiritual practice is to create the conventions, pick them up, and use them without confusion. We can recite the Buddha’s name, bow, chant, follow techniques and routines, pick up all these attributes of being a Buddhist, and then, without any hypocrisy, also recognise that everything is totally empty. There is no Buddhist! This is something Ajahn Chah focused on a great deal over the years: if you think you really are a Buddhist, you are totally lost. He would sometimes be sitting up on the Dharma seat, giving a talk to the whole assembly of monastics and laypeople, and say, “There are no monks or nuns here, there are no lay people, no women or men—these are all merely empty conventions that we create.

The capacity we have to commit ourselves sincerely to something and simultaneously to see through it is something we find difficult to exercise in the West. Either we grab onto something and identify with it or we think it is meaningless and reject it, since it’s not real anyway. So, the Middle Way is not necessarily a comfortable one for us. The Middle Way is the simultaneous holding of the conventional truth and the ultimate truth, and seeing that the one does not contradict or belie the other.

What Is a Living Being?

A certain amount of spiritual maturity hinges on understanding the nature of conventional reality. So much of our conditioning is predicated on the assumption that there is such a thing as a “real” living being. We see ourselves in terms of the limitations of the body and the personality, and we define what we are within those bounds. We assume then that other beings are also limited little pockets of beingness that float around in the cosmos. But a lot of what the practice is doing is deconstructing that model. Rather than taking the body and personality as the defining features of what we are, we take the Dharma as the basic reference point of what we are. (Or, if you like using the Vajrayāna language, you take the Dharmakāya as the basic reference point.) Then we see the body and personality as being merely minuscule subsets of that, and as a result, we relate to our own nature in a very different way. The body and personality are recognised as little windows that the Dharma-nature is filtered through.

Through the matrix of the body, personality, and our mental faculties, that nature of reality can be realised; it is not some little thing that is tacked on at the edge. Within all Buddhist traditions, understanding what a living being is means revisioning that whole structure, the habitual image of what we are. It’s quite a common expression in the Mahāyāna Buddhist world (for instance in the Vajra Sutra) for the teachings to say such things as, “‘Living beings are numberless, I vow to save them all.’ And how do you save all living beings? You realize that there are no living beings. That is how you save living beings.” But does saying that there aren’t any beings mean that they don’t exist? We can’t quite say that either. A true understanding of this expression means we are seeing beyond the normal limitations of the senses.

Where Are We?

You can practice understanding the experience of limitation. Try taking out the physical element of what you are and just look at yourself in terms of mind. You will find that the whole quality of boundary breaks up, as does the idea of “where I am” and “and “where other people are.” You will see that the body, its location, and three-dimensional space only apply to rūpa-khandha— only to the world of material form. In fact, “inside” and “outside,” “here” and “there,” “space” and “spatial relations” only apply to form; they do not apply to mind. Mind does not exist in space. Three-dimensional space exists only in relationship to the world of physical form.

That’s why meditating with our eyes open is a good test. It seems that there are separate bodies out there. There’s one here, there’s one there. With our eyes closed, it’s easier to get a feeling of unity. The material form is giving us the clue of separateness, but that separateness is entirely dependent on the material world. In terms of mind, place does not apply. The mind is not anywhere. We are here, but we are not here. Those limitations of separate identities are conventions that have a relative but not an absolute value.

We create the illusion of separateness and individuality through our belief in the sense world. When we start to let go of the sense world, particularly the way we relate to physical form, then we start being able to expand the vision of what we are as beings. It’s not even a matter of seeing how we overlap with other beings; it’s a matter of realising that we are of a piece with other beings.

The Middle Way

Meditation is a special kind of dance in which we commit ourselves wholeheartedly to the practice of deconstructing the materialistic view of reality. The challenge is simultaneously to hold on and to let go; it is to see clearly what we are doing and at the same time see through it. To do this, it’s important to cultivate a feeling for the Middle Way. This is the balance point. The Middle Way is not just halfway between two extremes—it’s not a 50-50 kind of thing. It’s more like saying [holds the bell striker vertically and moves the lower end to the left] existence is over here and nonexistence is over here [moves the lower end to the right]. The Middle Way is the hinge-point at the top where the two pivot, rather than the lower end of the striker just being halfway along its arc. It’s actually the source from which the two emanate. This is just one way of describing it.

Some people may be familiar with Tibetan practice, others more familiar with Theravāda and vipassanā practice. The questions often arise: “How do we mesh the two? Can we? Should we?” If we are looking to align the different methodologies, we can get really tangled up and confused, because this one says do this and the other one says do that. I therefore encourage everyone to recognise that every technique, every form of expression is just a convention that we’re picking up and using for a single goal: to transcend suffering and to be liberated. That’s what any technique points us toward.

The way to know if what we are doing is worthwhile is to ask, “Does this lead to the end of suffering or does it not?” If it does, continue. If it does not, we need to switch our attention to what will. We can simply ask ourselves, “Am I experiencing dukkha? Is there a feeling of alienation or difficulty?” If there is, it means that we are clinging or hanging on to something. We need to see that the heart is attached somewhere and then make the gesture to loosen up, to let go. Sometimes we don’t notice where the suffering gets generated. We get so used to doing things in a particular way that we take it as a standard. But in meditation, we challenge the status quo. We investigate where there is a feeling of “dis-ease” and look to see what’s causing it. By stepping back and scanning the inner domain, it’s possible to find out where the attachment is and what’s causing it. Ajahn Chah would say, “If you have an itch on your leg, you don’t scratch your ear.” In other words, go to where the dukkha is, no matter how subtle it may be; notice it and let go. That’s how we allow the dukkha to disperse. This is how we will know whether the practices we are doing are effective or not.

My suggestions and recommendations on how to understand ultimate and conventional reality are not anything you need to believe in. Buddhist teachings are always put out as themes for us to contemplate. You need to find out for yourself if what I’m saying makes sense or rings true. Don’t worry if you’re getting contradicting instructions. Do your best not to spend too much energy or attention getting everything to match. Otherwise, you’ll just stay confused. The fact is, things in life don’t match. You can’t align all the loose ends. But you can go to the place where they come from.