» Library » Thai Forest » Ajaan Lee *Knowledge * by Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo translated from the Thai by Thanissaro Bhikkhu © 1997–2011 Translator's note: This is one of Ajaan Lee's few tape recorded talks, dating from October 4, 1960, just six months before he passed away. In the talk, he covers the eight classical forms of knowledge and skill (vijja) that come from the practice of concentration, discussing how they relate to the methods of science and other forms of worldly knowledge. Three of the knowledges toward the end of the list are barely touched on, and the end of the talk is fairly abrupt. This may have been due to the tape's running out, for he had quite a lot to say on these knowledges in his other talks and writings. Still, the heart of the talk — the role of thinking and not-thinking in developing concentration and liberating insight — is discussed in considerable detail, making this an extremely helpful guide to the "how" of concentration and insight practice. Vijja-carana-sampanno: Consummate in knowledge & conduct. I'm going to talk about knowledge — the highest level of knowledge, not ordinary knowledge. Ordinary knowledge is adulterated with a lot of defilements and mental fermentations, and so it's called hethima-vijja, lower knowledge. Lower knowledge is something everyone has, Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike: the various branches of worldly knowledge that people study from textbooks so as to run their societies and administer their nations. And then there are the special branches of knowledge, the scientific ways of thinking that people use to invent all sorts of amazing contraptions for the human race — things like clairvoyance (television), clairaudience (telephones), and powers of levitation (airplanes). They've gotten to the point where these contraptions can work in place of people. During the last war, for instance, I heard that they were able to drop bombs on other countries without sending people along with them. With a push of a button they could tell the missile where to go, what to do, and when it had finished the job to their satisfaction, have it come back home. This is what's called progress in worldly knowledge — or lokiya vijja. This kind of knowledge is common all over the world, and falls into the two sorts that I've mentioned: the sort that comes from studying books (sutamaya-pañña), and the sort that comes from thinking things through, or cintamaya-pañña. This second kind of knowledge arises within the mind itself. People with a lot of education in the theoretical sciences work with their thinking. They think to the point where an idea appears as a picture in the mind, like an uggaha-nimitta (spontaneous image). When the picture appears in the mind, they may sketch it down on paper, and then experiment with physical objects to see if it works. If it doesn't work, they make adjustments, creating a new idea from their old idea — adjusting it a bit here, expanding it a bit there — keeping at it until they find what works in line with their aims. If we think about this on a shallow level, it's really amazing. But if we think a little bit deeper, it's not so amazing at all. They take their starting point with something really simple: for example, how to make a small person large, or a large person small — something really, really simple. Then they take a mirror and bend it in, so that a tall person will turn into a small person. They bend it out, so that a small person will become tall. That's all to begin with. Then they keep thinking along these lines until they can take a faraway object and make it appear up close. The people who get these things started tend to be military strategists. They're the ones who usually get these ideas first. Another important branch of science is medicine. People in both these branches have to think deeper than people in general. For example, people in ships out at sea got it into their heads that they'd like to see the ships approaching them from a distance. "How can we see them? How can we get their image to appear in our ship?" They worked on this idea until they succeeded. First they started out really simple-minded, just like us. Simple-minded in what way? They thought like a mirror, that's all, nothing special. They put a mirror up high on a mast and then had a series of mirrors pick up the image in the first mirror and send it on down into the ship. They didn't have to look in the first mirror. They could look at a little tiny mirror down in the ship and see ships approaching from far away. That's all they used in the beginning. After a while they made a single mirror in waves. When an image hit the top wave, the next wave picked it up and sent it on down the waves of the mirror into the ship. They kept thinking about this until now, no more: They have radar, a tiny little box that doesn't use a series of mirrors, and doesn't use a mirror in waves, but can still pull the image of a faraway ship and make it appear in your ship. This is how knowledge develops to a high level in the sciences. As for medicine, doctors these days are researching into how they can keep people from dying. Lots of people are doing the research, but no one has found the solution. No matter how much research they do, people are still dying. They haven't succeeded in making people live longer than their ordinary span. This is another branch of knowledge that comes from thinking, and not from textbooks. And there's still another branch that's moving even further out, but how far they'll get is hard to say. These are the people who want to go and live on Mars. It must be really nice up there. But the chances of their succeeding are small. Why are they small? Because the people aren't really sincere. And why aren't they sincere? Because they're still unsure and uncertain. The idea isn't really clear in their heads. This uncertainty is what gets in the way of success. So this is the second level of worldly knowledge, the level that comes from thinking and ideas, or cintamaya-pañña. But in the final analysis, neither of these two levels of knowledge can take us beyond suffering and stress. They're the type of knowledge that creates bad kamma about 70 percent of the time. Only 30 percent of the time do they actually benefit the human race. Why only 30 percent? If another war gets started: total disaster. The kinds of knowledge that are really useful, that give convenience to human transportation and communication, are few and far between. For the most part, worldly knowledge is aimed at massive killing, at amassing power and influence. That's why it doesn't lead beyond suffering and stress, doesn't lead beyond birth, aging, illness, and death. Take, for instance, the countries at present that are clever in building all kinds of weapons. They sell their weapons to other countries, and sometimes those other countries use the weapons to kill people in the countries that built them. There are countries that can't build their own weapons, yet they declare war on the countries who gave them military aid. That's about as far as the results of worldly knowledge can take you. This is why the Buddha taught us a higher level of knowledge: Dhamma knowledge. Dhamma knowledge arises in two ways, through thinking and through not thinking. The first level of thinking is called appropriate attention (yoniso manasikara). When we hear the Dhamma, we have to use appropriate attention to consider things before we're asked to believe them. For instance, suppose we want to make merit. We simply hear the word "merit" and we want some, but usually without stopping to think about what sorts of things are appropriate to give as donations, and what sorts of people are appropriate to receive our meritorious offerings. You have to consider things carefully: consider yourself, then consider the object you want to give, and then consider the recipient of the object, to see if all these things go together. Even if they don't, you can still go ahead and give the object, of course, but it's best that you know what you're doing, that you're not acting out of delusion, not simply acting out of desire. If you want merit and simply act without giving appropriate attention to things, you're lacking the kind of discernment that comes from thinking, cintamaya-pañña. You have to reflect on things on many levels if you want your act of merit-making to lead to purity. This is called doing good based on discernment. This is what's meant by kusala dhamma, the quality of skillfulness. Kusala dhamma is a name for discernment, but we usually don't translate that way in Thai. We think of kusala as just another word for merit. Actually, kusala can be a noun, and it can also be an adjective. As a noun, it means the demeanor by which a person acts in good ways, in body, speech, and mind. As an adjective, it refers to this and that kind of act leading to this and that kind of purity. When we apply it to discernment, it means kusalopaya, a skillful strategy. When we do anything at all, we have to use our discernment to consider things from every angle before we act, so that our actions will give complete results. This is called having a skillful strategy for giving rise to goodness within ourselves in full purity. This is why the Buddha taught us to start out by using appropriate attention in considering things over and over, around and around many times. Only then — when things are really clear in the mind — should we act. It's the nature of things that the more you walk bac...
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