All Things Are Unworthy of Attachment
Today’s our day to discuss the practice.
It’s very beneficial that we have practiced the Dhamma by contemplating ourselves step by step and have—to some extent—come to know the truth. This is because each person has to find the truth within: the truths of stress, its cause, and the path leading to its disbanding. If we don’t know these things, we fall into the same sufferings as the rest of the world. We may have come to live in a Dhamma center, yet if we don’t know these truths we don’t benefit from staying here. The only way we differ from living at home is that we’re observing the precepts. If we don’t want to be deluded in our practice, these truths are things we have to know. Otherwise, we get deluded into looking for our fun in the stresses and sufferings offered by the world.
Our practice is to contemplate until we understand stress and its cause, in other words, the defilements that have power and authority in the heart and mind. It’s only because we have this practice that we can disband these defilements, that we can disband stress every day and at all times. This is something really marvelous. Those who don’t practice don’t have a clue, even though they live enveloped by defilements and stress. They simply get led around by the nose into more and more suffering, and yet none of them realize what’s going on. If we don’t make contact with the Dhamma, if we don’t practice, we go through birth and death simply to create kamma with one another and to keep whirling around in suffering and stress.
We have to contemplate until we really see stress: That’s when we’ll become uncomplacent and try to disband it or to gain release from it. The practice is thus a matter of struggling to gain victory over stress and suffering with better and better results each time. Whatever mistakes we make in whatever way, we have to try not to make them again. And we have to contemplate the harm and suffering caused by the more subtle defilements, cravings, and attachments within us. This is why we have to probe into the deeper, more profound parts of the heart—for if we stay only on the superficial levels of emptiness in the mind, we won’t gain any profound knowledge at all.
So we train the mind to be mindful and firmly centered, and to fix its focus on looking within, knowing within. Don’t let it get distracted outside. When it focuses within, it will come to know the truth: the truth of stress and of the causes of stress—defilement, craving, and attachment—as they arise. It will see what they’re like and how to probe inward to disband them
When all is said and done, the practice comes down to one issue, because it focuses exclusively on one thing: stress together with its cause. This is the central issue in human life—even animals are in the same predicament—but our ignorance deludes us into latching onto all kinds of things. This is because of our misunderstandings or wrong views. If we gain Right View, we see things correctly. Whenever we see stress, we see its truth. When we see the cause of stress, we see its truth. We both know and see because we’ve focused on it. If you don’t focus on stress, you won’t know it; but as soon as you focus on it, you will. It’s because the mind hasn’t focused here that it wanders out oblivious, chasing after its preoccupations.
When we try to focus it down, it struggles and resists because it’s used to wandering. But if we keep focusing it again and again, more and more frequently until we get a sense of how to bring it under control, then the task ultimately becomes easier because the mind no longer struggles to chase after its preoccupations as it did before. No matter how much it resists when we start training it, eventually we’re sure to bring it under our control, getting it to settle down and be still. If it doesn’t settle down, you have to contemplate it. You have to show it that you mean business. This is because defilement and craving are very strong. You can’t be weak when dealing with them. You have to be brave, to have a fight-to-the-death attitude, and to keep sustaining your efforts. If you’re concerned only with finding comfort and pleasure, the day will never come when you‘ll gain release. You’ll have to continue staying under their power.
Their power envelops everything in our character, making it very difficult for us to find out the truth about ourselves. What we do know is just a smattering, and so we play truant, abandoning the task, and end up seeing that the practice of the Dhamma isn’t really important. Thus we don’t bother to be strict with ourselves, and instead involve ourselves in all kinds of things, for that’s the path the defilements keep pointing out to us. We grope along weakly, making it harder and harder to see stress clearly because we keep giving in to the defilements and taking their bait. When they complain about the slightest discomfort, we quickly pander to them and take the bait again. It’s because we’re so addicted to the bait that we don’t appreciate either the power of craving—as it wanders out after sights, sounds, smells, tastes, etc.—or the harm it causes in making us scattered and restless, unable to stay still and contemplate ourselves. It’s always finding things for us to do, to think about, making ourselves suffer, and yet we remain blind to the fact.
Now that we’ve come to practice the Dhamma, we begin to have a sense of what’s going on. For this reason, whoever practices without being complacent will find that defilement and stress will have to grow lighter and lighter, step by step. The areas where we used to be defeated, we now come out victorious. Where we used to be burned by the defilements, we now have the mindfulness and discernment to burn them instead. Only when we stop groping around and really come to our senses will we realize the benefits of the Dhamma, the importance of the practice. Then there is no way that we can abandon the practice, for something inside us keeps forcing us to stay with it. We’ve seen that if we don’t practice to disband defilement and stress, the stress of the defilements will keep piling up. This is why we have to stay with the practice to our last breath.
You have to be firm in not letting yourself be weak and easily led astray. Those who are mindful and discerning will naturally act it this way; those who aren’t will keep on following their defilements, ending up back where they were when they hadn’t yet started practicing to gain release from stress. They may keep on practicing, but it’s hard to tell what they’re practicing for—mostly for more stress. This shows that they’re still groping around—and when they grope around in this way, they start criticizing the practice as useless and bad.
When a person submits readily to defilement and craving, there’s no way she can practice, for if you’re going to practice, there are a lot of things you have to struggle with and endure. It’s like paddling a boat against the stream—you have to use strength if you want to make any headway. It’s not easy to go against the stream of the defilements, because they are always ready to pull you down to a lower level. If you aren’t mindful and discerning, if you don’t use the Lord Buddha’s Dhamma to examine yourself, your strength will fail you, for if you have only a little mindfulness and discernment in the face of a lot of defilements, they’ll make you vacillate. And if you’re living with sweet-talking sycophants, you’ll go even further off the path, involved with all sorts of things and oblivious to the practice.
To practice the Dhamma, then, is to go against the flow, to go upstream against suffering and stress, because suffering and stress are the main problems. If you don’t really contemplate stress, your practice will go nowhere. Stress is where you start, and then you try to trace out its root cause. You have to use your discernment to track down exactly where stress originates, for stress is a result. Once you see the result, you have to track down the cause. Those who are mindful and discerning are never complacent. Whenever stress arises they’re sure to search out its causes so that they can eliminate them. This sort of investigation can proceed on many levels, from the coarse to the refined, and requires that you seek advice so that you don’t stumble. Otherwise, you may think you can figure it all out in your head—which won’t work at all!
The basic Dhamma principles that the Lord Buddha proclaimed for us to use in our contemplation are many, but there’s no need to learn them all. Just focusing on some of the more important ones, such as the five aggregates or name and form, will be very useful. But you need to keep making a thorough, all-round examination, not just an occasional probe, so that a feeling of dispassion and disengagement arises and loosens the grip of desire. Use mindfulness to keep constant and close supervision over the senses, and that mindfulness will come to be more present than your tendency to drift off elsewhere. Regardless of what you’re doing, saying, or thinking, be on the lookout for whatever will make you slip, for if you’re tenacious in sustaining mindfulness, that’s how all your stresses and sufferings can be disbanded.
So keep at this. If you fall down 100 times, get back up 100 times and resume your stance. The reason mindfulness and discernment are slow to develop is because you’re not really sensitive to yourself. The greater your sensitivity, the stronger your mindfulness and discernment will become. As the Lord Buddha said, “Bhāvitā bahulīkatā”—which means, “Develop and maximize”—in other words, make the most of your mindfulness.
The way your practice has developed through contemplating and supervising the mind throughout your daily life has already shown its rewards to some extent, so keep stepping up your efforts. Don’t let yourself grow weak or lax. You’ve finally got this opportunity: Can you afford to be complacent? Your life is steadily ebbing away, so you have to compensate by building up more and more mindfulness and discernment until you become mature in the Dhamma. Otherwise, your defilements will remain many and your discernment crude. The older you grow, the more you have to watch out—for we know what happens to old people everywhere.
So seize the moment to develop the faculties of conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment in a balanced way. Keep contemplating and probing, and you’ll protect yourself from wandering out after the world. No matter who tempts you to go with them, you can be sure within yourself that you won’t go following them because you no longer have to go believing anyone else or hoping for the baits of the world—because the baits of the world are poison. The Dhamma has to be the refuge and light of your life. Once you have this degree of conviction in yourself, you can’t help but stride forward without slipping back; but if you waver and wander, unsure of whether or not to keep practicing the Dhamma, watch out: You’re sure to get pulled over the cliff and into the pit of fire.
If you aren’t free within yourself, you get pulled at from all sides because the world is full of things that keep pulling at you. But those who have the intelligence not to be gullible will see the stress and harm of those things distinctly for themselves. For this reason they’re not headed for anything low; they won’t have to keep suffering in the world. They feel dispassion. They lose their taste for all the various baits and lures the world has to offer.
The practice of the Dhamma is what allows us to shake off whatever attractive things used to delude us into holding on. Realize that it won’t be long before we die—we won’t be here much longer!—so even if anyone offers us incredible wealth, why should we want it? Who could really own it? Who could really control it?
If you can read yourself in this matter, you come to a feeling of dispassion. Disenchantment. You lose your taste for all the lures of the world. You no longer hold them in esteem. If you make use of them, it’s for the sake of the benefits they give in terms of the Dhamma, but your disenchantment stays continuous. Even the name and form you’ve been regarding as “me” and “mine” have been wearing down and falling apart continually. As for the defilements, they’re still lying in wait to burn you. So how can you afford to be oblivious? First there’s the suffering and stress of the five aggregates, and on top of that there’s the suffering and stress caused by defilement, craving, and attachment, stabbing you, slapping you, beating you.
The more you practice and contemplate, the more you become sensitive to this on deeper and deeper levels. Your interest in blatant things outside—good and bad people, good and bad things—gets swept away. You don’t have to concern yourself with them, for you’re concerned solely with penetrating yourself within, destroying your pride and conceit. Outside affairs aren’t important. What’s important is how clearly you can see the truth inside until the brightness appears.
The brightness that comes from seeing the truth isn’t at all like the light we see outside. Once you really know it, you see that it’s indescribable, for it’s something entirely personal. It cleans everything out of the heart and mind in line with the strength of our mindfulness and discernment. It’s what sweeps and cleans and clears and lets go and disbands things inside. But if we don’t have mindfulness and discernment as our means of knowing, contemplating, and letting go, then everything inside is dark on all sides. And not only dark, but also full of fire whose poisonous fuel keeps burning away. What could be more terrifying than the fuel burning inside us? Even though it’s invisible, it flares up every time there’s sensory contact.
The bombs they drop on people to wipe them out aren’t really all that dangerous, for you can die only once per lifetime. But the three bombs of passion, aversion, and delusion keep exploding the heart and mind countless times. Normally we don’t realize how serious the damage is, but when we come to practice the Dhamma we can take stock of the situation, seeing what it’s like when sensory contact comes, at what moments the burning heat of defilement and craving arises, and why they’re all so very quick.
If you contemplate how to disband suffering and defilement, you need the proper tools and have to make the effort without being complacent. The fact that we’ve come to practice out here without any involvements or worldly responsibilities helps speed up the practice. It’s extremely beneficial in helping us to examine our inner diseases in detail and to disband suffering and stress continually in line with our mindfulness and discernment. Our burdens grow lighter and we come to realize how much our practice of the Dhamma is progressing in the direction of the cessation of suffering.
Those who don’t have the time to come and rest here or to really stop, get carried away with all kinds of distractions. They may say, “I can practice anywhere,” but it’s just words. The fact of the matter is that their practice is to follow the defilements until their heads are spinning, and yet they can still boast that they can practice anywhere! Their mouths aren’t in line with their minds, and their minds—burned and beaten by defilement, craving, and attachment—don’t realize their situation. They’re like worms that live in filth and are happy to stay and die right there in the filth.
People with any mindfulness and discernment feel disgust at the filth of the defilements in the mind. The more they practice, the more sensitive they become, the more their revulsion grows. Before, when our mindfulness and discernment were still crude, we didn’t feel this at all. We were happy to play around in the filth within ourselves. But now that we’ve come to practice, to contemplate from the blatant to the more subtle levels, we sense more and more how disgusting the filth really is. There’s nothing to it that’s worth falling for at all, because it’s all inconstancy, stress, and not-self.
So what’s there to want out of life? Those who are ignorant say that we’re born to gain wealth and be millionaires, but that kind of life is like falling into hell! If you understand the practice of the Dhamma in the Buddha’s footsteps, you realize that nothing is worth having, nothing is worth getting involved with, everything has to be let go.
Those who still latch on to the body, feeling, perceptions, thought-fabrications, and consciousness as self need to contemplate until they see that the body is stressful, feelings are stressful, perceptions are stressful, thought-fabrications are stressful, consciousness is stressful—in short, name is stressful and so is form, or in even plainer terms, the body is stressful and so is the mind. You have to focus on stress. Once you see it thoroughly, from the blatant to the subtle levels, you’ll be able to rise above pleasure and pain because you’ve let them go. But if you have yet to fully understand stress, you’ll still yearn for pleasure—and the more you yearn, the more you suffer.
This holds too for the pleasure that comes when the mind is tranquil. If you let yourself get stuck on it, you’re like a person addicted to a drug: Once there’s the desire, you take the drug and think yourself happy. But as for how much suffering the repeated desire causes, you don’t have the intelligence to see it. All you see is that if you take the drug whenever you want, you’re okay.
When people can’t shake off their addictions, this is why. They get stuck on the sense of pleasure that comes when they take the drug. They’re ingesting sensuality and they keep on wanting more, for only when they ingest more will their hunger subside. But soon it comes back again, so they’ll want still more. They keep on ingesting sensuality, stirring up the mind, but don’t see that there’s any harm or suffering involved. Instead, they say they’re happy. When the longing gets really intense, it feels really good to satisfy it. That’s what they say. People who have heavy defilements and crude discernment don’t see that desire and longing are suffering, and so they don’t know how to do away with them. As soon as they take what they want, the desire goes away. Then it comes back again, so they take some more. It comes back again and they take still more—over and over like this, so blind that they don’t know anything at all.
People of intelligence, though, contemplate: “Why is there desire and why do I have to satisfy it? And when it comes back, why do I have to keep satisfying it over and over again?” Once they realize that the desire in and of itself is what they have to attack, that by disbanding this one thing they won’t feel any disturbance and will never have to suffer from desire again, that’s when they really can gain release from suffering and stress. But for the most part we don’t see things from this angle because we still take our pleasure in consuming things. This is why it’s hard for us to practice to abandon desire. All we know is how to feed on the bait, so we don’t dare try giving it up—as when people who are addicted to meat-eating are afraid to become vegetarians. Why? Because they’re still attached to flavor, still slaves to desire.
If you can’t let go of even these blatant things, how can you ever hope to abandon the damp and fermenting desires within you that are so much harder to detect? You still take the most blatant baits. When desire whispers and pleads with you, there you go—pandering to it as quickly as possible. You don’t notice how much this tires you out, don’t realize that this is the source of the most vicious sufferings that deceive all living beings into falling under its power. Even though the Buddha’s teachings reveal the easiest way to use our discernment to contemplate cause and effect in this area, we don’t make the effort to contemplate and instead keep swallowing the bait. We get our pleasure and that’s all we want, going with the flow of defilement and craving.
Our practice here is to go against the flow of every sort of desire and wandering of the mind. It means self-restraint and training in many, many areas: as, for instance, when sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations arise and deceive us into liking something and then, a moment later, tiring of it and wanting something else. We get so thoroughly deceived that we end up running frantically all over the place.
The virulent diseases in the mind are more than many. If you don’t know how to deal with them, you’ll remain under Māra’s power. Those who have truly seen stress and suffering will be willing to put their lives on the line in their effort to work free, in the same way the Buddha was willing to put his life on the line in order to gain freedom from suffering and release from the world. He wasn’t out after personal comfort at all. Each Buddha-to-be has had to undergo suffering in the world for his own sake and that of others. Each has had to relinquish all of his vast wealth instead of using it for his comfort. So the practice is one of struggle and endurance. Whoever struggles and endures will gain victory—and no other victory can match it. Gaining control over the defilements is the ultimate victory. Whatever you contemplate, you can let go: That’s the ultimate victory.
So please keep at the effort. You can’t let yourself relax after each little victory. The more you keep being victorious, the stronger, more daring, and more resilient your mindfulness and discernment will become in every area, examining everything regardless of whether it comes in by way of the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, or mind.
The more you examine yourself, the sharper your mindfulness and discernment will become, understanding how to disband things and let them go. As soon as there’s attachment, you’ll see the suffering and stress—just as when you touch fire, feel the heat, and immediately let go. This is why the practice of the Dhamma is of supreme worth. It’s not just a game you play around with—for the defilements have a great deal of power that’s hard to overcome. But if you make the effort to overcome them, they’ll weaken as mindfulness and discernment grow stronger. This is when you can say that you’re making progress in the Dhamma: when you can disband your own suffering and stress.
So try to go all the way while you still have the breath to breathe. The Buddha said, “Make an effort to attain the as-yet-unattained, reach the as-yet-unreached, realize the as-yet-unrealized.” He didn’t want us to be weak and vacillating, always making excuses for ourselves, because now that we’ve ordained we’ve already made an important sacrifice. In the Buddha’s time, no matter where the monks and nuns came from—from royal, wealthy, or ordinary backgrounds—once they had left their homes they cut their family ties and entered the Lord Buddha’s lineage without ever returning. To return to the home life, he said, was to become a person of no worth. His only concern was to keep pulling people out, pulling them out of suffering and stress. If we want to escape, we have to follow his example, cutting away worry and concern for our family and relatives by entering his lineage. To live and practice under his discipline is truly the supreme refuge, the supreme way.
Those who follow the principles of the Dhamma-Vinaya—even though they may have managed only an occasional taste of its peace without yet reaching the paths and their fruitions—pledge their lives to the Buddha, Dhamma, and Saṅgha. They realize that nothing else they can reach will lead to freedom from suffering, but if they reach this one refuge, they’ll gain total release. Those whose mindfulness and discernment are deep, far-seeing, and meticulous will cross over to the further shore. They’ve lived long enough on this shore and have had all the suffering they can bear. They’ve circled around in birth and death countless times. So now they realize that they have to go to the further shore and so they make a relentless effort to let go of their sense of self.
There’s nothing distant about the further shore, but to get there you first have to give up your sense of self in the five aggregates by investigating to see them all as stress, to see that none of them are “me” or “mine.” Focus on this one theme: not clinging. The Lord Buddha once spoke of the past as below, the future as above, and the present as in the middle. He also said that unskillful qualities are below, skillful qualities above, and neutral ones in the middle. To each of them, he said, “Don’t cling to it.” Even nibbāna, the further shore, shouldn’t be clung to. See how far we’re going to be released through not-clinging! Any of you who can’t comprehend that even nibbāna isn’t to be clung to should consider the standard teaching that tells us not to cling, that we have to let go: “All things are unworthy of attachment.” This is the ultimate summary of all that the Buddha taught.
All phenomena, whether compounded or uncompounded, fall under the phrase, “Sabbe dhammā anattā—All phenomena are not-self.” They’re all unworthy of attachment. This summarizes everything, including our investigation to see the truth of the world and of the Dhamma, to see things clearly with our mindfulness and discernment, penetrating through the compounded to the uncompounded, or through the worldly to the transcendent, all of which has to be done by looking within, not without.
And if we want to see the real essence of the Dhamma, we have to look deeply, profoundly. Then it’s simply a matter of letting go all along the way. We see all the way in and let go of everything. The theme of not clinging covers everything from beginning to end. If our practice is to go correctly, it’s because we look with mindfulness and discernment to penetrate everything, not getting stuck on any form, feeling, perception, thought-fabrication, or consciousness at all.
The Buddha taught about how ignorance—not knowing form, delusion with form—leads to craving, the mental act that arises at the mind and agitates it, leading to the kamma by which we try to get what we crave. When you understand this, you can practice correctly, for you know that you have to disband the craving. The reason we contemplate the body and mind over and over again is so that we won’t feel desire for anything outside, won’t get engrossed in anything outside. The more you contemplate, the more things outside seem pitiful and not worth getting engrossed in at all. The reason you were engrossed and excited was because you didn’t know. And so you raved about people and things and made a lot of fuss, talking about worldly matters: “This is good, that’s bad, she’s good, he’s bad.” The mind got all scattered in worldly affairs—and so how could you examine the diseases within your own mind?
The Buddha answered Mogharāja’s question—“In what way does one view the world so as not to be seen by the king of death?”—by telling him to view the world as empty, as devoid of self. We have to strip away conventions, such as “person” and “being,” and all designations such as elements, aggregates, and sense media. Once we know how to strip away conventions and designations, there’s nothing we need to hold onto. What’s left is the Deathless. The transcendent. Nibbāna. There are many names for it, but they’re all one and the same thing. When you strip away all worldly things, what’s left is the transcendent. When you strip away all compounded things, what’s left is the uncompounded, the true Dhamma.
So consider for yourself whether or not this is worth attaining. If we stay in the world, we have to go through repeated births and deaths in the three levels of existence: sensuality, form, and formlessness. But on that further shore there’s no birth, no death. It’s beyond the reach of the King of Mortality. But because we don’t know the further shore, we want to keep on being reborn on this shore with its innumerable repeated sufferings.
Once you comprehend suffering and stress, though, there’s nowhere else you want to turn: You head straight for the further shore, the shore with no birth or death, the shore where defilement and craving disband once and for all. Your practice thus goes straight to the cessation of suffering and defilement, to clear penetration of the common characteristics of inconstancy, stress, and not-selfness in the aggregates. People with mindfulness and discernment focus their contemplation in the direction of absolute disbanding, for if their disbanding isn’t absolute, they’ll have to be reborn again in suffering and stress. So keep disbanding attachments, keep letting go, contemplating inconstancy, stress, and not-selfness and relinquishing them. This is the right path for sure.
Isn’t this something worth knowing and training for? It’s not all that mysterious or far away, you know. It’s something that anyone—man or woman—can realize, something we can all train in. We can develop virtue, can make the mind quiet, and can use our mindfulness and discernment to contemplate. So isn’t this really worth practicing?
Stupid people like to say no. They say they can’t do it: They can’t observe the precepts, can’t make the mind quiet. The best thing in life—the practice for release from suffering and stress—and yet they reject it. Instead, they rush around in a turmoil, competing with one another, bragging to one another, and then end up rotting in their coffins. Exactly what is appealing about all that?
We’ve gone astray for far too long already, our lives almost gone after how many decades. Now we’ve come here to turn ourselves around. No matter how old you are, the air you breathe isn’t just for your convenience and comfort, but for you to learn about suffering and stress. That way you’ll be able to disband it. Don’t imagine that your family and relatives are essential to you. You are alone. You came alone and you’ll go alone. This holds true for each of us. Only when there’s no self to go: That’s when you penetrate to the Dhamma. If there is still a self to be born, then you’re stuck in the cycle of suffering and stress. So isn’t it worthwhile to strive for release? After all, it’s something each of us has to find for him or herself.
Those who trust in the Lord Buddha will all have to follow this way. To trust the defilements is to throw yourself down in the mire—and there who will you be able to brag to, aside from your own sufferings? The knowledge that leads to dispassion and disenchantment is what counts as true knowledge. But if your knowledge leads you to hold on, then you’re a disciple of Māra. You still find things very delicious. You may say that you’re disenchanted, but the mind isn’t disenchanted at all. It still wants to take this, to get that, to stay right here.
Whoever can keep reading the truth within her own mind, deeper and deeper, will be able to go all the way through, wiping out stupidity and delusion each step along the way. Where you used to be deluded, you’ve now begun to come to your senses. Where you used to brag, you now realize how very stupid you were—and that you’ll have to keep on correcting your stupidity.
Reading yourself, contemplating yourself, you see new angles, you gain more precise self-knowledge each step along the way. It’s not a question of being expert about things outside. You see how what’s inside is really inconstant, really stressful, really not-self. The way you used to fall for things and latch onto them was because of your blindness, because you didn’t understand. So who can you blame? Your own stupidity, that’s who—because it wanted to brag about how much it knew.
Now you know that you’ve still got a lot of stupidity left and that you’ll have to get rid of it before you die. Every day that you still have breath left to breathe, you’ll use it to wipe out your stupidity rather than to get this or be that or to dance around. The ones who dance around are possessed by spirits: the demons of defilement making them crazy and deluded, wanting to get this and be that and dance all over the place. But if you focus your attention in on yourself, then your pride, your conceit, your desires to stand out will shrink out of sight, never daring to show their faces for the rest of your life, for you realize that the more you brag, the more you suffer.
So the essence of the practice is to turn around and focus inside. The more you can wash away these things, the more empty and free the mind will be: This is its own reward. If you connive with your conceits, you’ll destroy whatever virtue you have, but if you can drive these demons away, virtuous ones will come and stay with you. If the demons are still there, the virtuous ones won’t be able to stay. They can’t get along at all. If you let yourself get entangled in turmoil, it’s an affair of the demons. If you’re empty and free, it’s an affair of cleanliness and peace—an affair of the virtuous ones.
So go and check to see how many of these demons you’ve been able to sweep away. Are they thinning out? When they make an appearance, point them right in the face and call them what they are: demons and devils, come to eat your heart and drink your blood. You’ve let them eat you before, but now you’ve finally come to your senses and can drive them away. That will put an end to your troubles, or at least help your sufferings grow lighter. Your sense of self will start to shrivel away. Before, it was big, fat, and powerful, but now its power is gone. Your pride and conceit have grown thin and weak. It’s as when a person has been bitten by a rabid dog: They give him a serum made from rabid dogs to drive out the disease. The same holds here: If we can recognize these things, they disband. The mind is then empty and at peace, for this one thing—the theme of not clinging—can disband suffering and stress with every moment.