justpractice wrote: ↑Sun Sep 25, 2022 9:03 pm I really like this Sutta.
Very intense indeed!
To add some dismay to the intensity, a person can very easily comprehend this on a theoretical level while simultaneously carrying - and even increasing - the weight of the burden. In fact, I see undoing this contradiction as the crux of the practice: aligning one's behavior with this theoretical knowledge until that knowledge can take root and actually protect one's behavior from further accumulation. As you already mentioned, this is why virtue must come first.
On one level, every person - even the most wild and unrestrained person - is acting under the weight of the burden. It's just that the unrestrained person, immersed in sensual gratification, has unknowingly nurtured the disastrous view that any burden is secondary - an anomaly even - to the endless availability of pleasure. This would be the fulfillment of the perversion, which the restrained person is giving himself a chance to undo through his restraint. Within that space of restraint, the burden should make itself (quite uncomfortably) known, at which point the strength developed on account of that initial restraint will be put to the test and hopefully strong enough to allow further endurance and development in regards to the weight he is carrying. This is how the contradiction can eventually be "cast off" and the craving uprooted. The person can then be understood.
Nice description!
That really is a troubling aspect to development. Not being able to tell the difference between being comfortable and accepting of an idea (while simultaneously working against it), and actually making the effort to uproot it. I was trying to think of a good simile the other day (though I’m sure there is a better one in the suttas, MN 75 comes close). Imagine a person is an expert on Mt Everest. They have a variety of different maps. Some that show temperature and weather; some that detail exposure; topographical maps that show different routes. They are an expert on the appropriate equipment to be used depending on the condition: tents, clothing, climbing gear, oxygen packs. Just every angle of climbing Everest, they know what is best. Yet…they themselves have never set foot on the slopes. Never even set foot in China or Nepal. In short, they have no experience actually applying their expertise.
That is one of the more dangerous scenarios when it comes to the Dhamma: that you can get very fulfilled just through learning about it, and not necessarily be applying it. But that lack of motion is a result the dwelling of personhood and self-view. And it seems to be an intensification within personhood that is mistaken for effort to surmount it, but that really is just doubling down on that onlooker’s position. You really have to put the person in check, put the mind in check, because yes, as you say, the behavior is protecting that person and keeping any Dhamma effort confined to a position that cannot affect the prominence of the person. That’s why the burden literally lands within the person.