Subrahma's Problem
By Bhikkhu Bodhi
Today, in both East and West, a general breakdown of law and order has planted
in us an implacable sense of uneasiness that creeps up on us on the streets,
in our workplace, and even in our homes. The rising number of drug addicts,
the increase in petty crime, the decline of respect for others -- all these
have jointly infected our most ordinary human encounters with an intensified
atmosphere of suspicion. Many people only feel at ease behind double-locked
doors, with windows secured by metal bars and gates guarded by high-alert sensors.
Yet, it is often only when we have armored ourselves with the most impregnable
defense systems that we discover a still more intrusive source of insecurity.
This sense of fear and dread, which can eat away at our most precious moments
of enjoyment, does not stem from outside threats but swells up inexplicably
from within. Though it may wrap itself around our everyday affairs and send
us into flurries of concern, its true cause is not so much external dangers
as an un-localized anxiety floating dizzily along the edges of the mind.
A little known Sutta tucked away in the Devaputta-samyutta gives us an insight
into the nature of this hidden anguish far more poignant and realistic than
our most astute existentialist philosophers. In his short Sutta, only eight
lines of print in the Pali, a young god named Subrahma appears before the Awakened
One and explains the problem weighing on his heart:
"Always anxious is this mind,
the mind is always agitated,
about problems present and future;
please tell me the release from fear."
It is perhaps ironic that it takes a deva to express so succinctly, with such
elegant simplicity, the dilemma at the crux of the human condition. Subrahma's
confession also makes it clear that neither the deva world nor any other set
of outer conditions offers a final refuge from anguish. Luxurious mansions,
lucrative jobs, unchallenged authority, high-alert security systems: none of
these can guarantee inner stillness and peace. For the source of all problems
is the mind itself, which follows us wherever we may go.
To understand Subrahma's distress we need only sit down quietly, draw our attention
inward, and watch our thoughts as they tumble by. If we do not fix on any one
thought but simply observe each thought as it passes by, we will almost surely
find waves of anxiety, care, and worry running through and beneath this ceaseless
procession. Our tears and concerns need not assume vast proportions, booming
forth bold metaphysical decrees. But beneath the melody of constantly changing
thoughts, punctuating them like the thumping of the bass in a jazz quintet,
is the persistent throb of worry and care, the second rhythm of the heart.
Subrahma underscores the predicament he faced -- the predicament faced by all
"unenlightened worldlings" -- by repeating the words "always"
(niccam) in the first two lines. This repetition is significant. It does not
mean that every thought we think is plagued by worry and dread, nor does it
rule out the joy of successful achievement, the pleasure of requited love, or
courage in the face of life's daunting challenges. But it does underscore the
stubborn persistence of anxious dread, which trails behind us like a scruffy
mongrel -- growling when we cast a backward glance, ready to snap at our heels
when we're off guard.
Fear and anxiety haunt the corridors of the mind because the mind is a function
of time, a rolling glimmer of awareness that flows inexorably from a past that
can never be undone into a future that teases us with a perpetual, undecipherable
"not yet." It is just because the mind attempts to clamp down on the
passage of time, wrapping its tentacles around a thousand projects and concerns,
that the passage of time appears so formidable. For time means change, and change
brings dissolution, the breaking of the bonds that we have forged with so much
toil. Time also means the uncertainty of the future, plummeting us into unexpected
challenges and inevitable old age and death.
When Subrahma came to the Buddha with his urgent plea for help, he was not seeking
a prescription of Prozacs that would tide him through his next round of business
deals and his dalliance with celestial nymphs. He wanted nothing less than total
release from fear, and thus the Buddha did not have to pull any punches with
his answer. In four piquant lines he told Subrahma the only effective way to
heal his inner wound, to heal it with no danger of relapse:
"Not apart from awakening and austerity,
Not apart from sense restraint,
Not apart from relinquishing all,
Do I see any safety for living beings."
The ultimate escape from anxiety, the Buddha makes clear, is summed up in four
simple measures. The most decisive are "awakening" (bodhi) and "relinquishment"
(nissagga), wisdom and release. These, however, do not arise in a vacuum but
only as a consequence of training in virtue and meditation, expressed here as
restraint of the sense faculties and "austerity" (tapas), the energy
of contemplative endeavor. The entire program is directed to digging up the
hidden root of anguish, which the existentialists, with all their philosophical
acumen, could not discern. That root is clinging. Asleep in the deep night of
ignorance, we cling to our possessions, our loved ones, our position and status;
and most tenaciously of all, we cling to these "five aggregates" of
form, feeling, perception, volitional activity, and consciousness, taking them
to be permanent, pleasurable, and a truly existent self.
To cling to anything is to aim at preserving it, at sealing it off from the
ravenous appetite of time. Yet to make such an attempt is to run smack up against
the fixed decree written into the texture of being: that whatever comes to be
must pass away. It is not only the object of clinging that must yield to the
law of impermanence. The subject too, the one who clings, and the very act of
clinging, are also bound to dissolve, perish, and pass away. To sit back trying
to shape a world that will conform to our heart's desires is to fight against
the inflexible law of change. But try as we may there is no escape: the sonorous
truth swells up from the depths of being, and we can either heed its message
or continue to stuff our ears.
The cutting irony in the solution the Buddha holds out to Subrahma lies in the
fact that the prescription requires a voluntary assent to the act we instinctively
try to avoid. The final escape from anxiety and care is not a warm assurance
that the universe will give us a cheerful hug. It is, rather, a call for us
to take the step that we habitually resist. What we fear above all else, what
causes the tremors of anxiety to ripple through our heart, is the giving up
of what we cherish. Yet the Buddha tells us that the only way to reach true
safety is by giving up all: "Not apart from relinquishing all do I see
any safety for living beings." In the end we have no choice: we must give
up all, for when death comes to claim us everything we identify with will be
taken away. But to go beyond anxiety we must let go now -- not, of course, by
a premature act of renunciation, which in many cases might even be harmful or
self-destructive -- but by wearing away the clinging, attachment, and acquisitiveness
that lie within as the buried root of fear.
This relinquishment of clinging cannot come about through the forcible rejection
of what we love and cherish. It arises from wisdom, from insight, from awakening,
from breaking through the deep dark sleep of ignorance. The sovereign remedy
is to see that right now, at this very moment, there is nothing we can truly
claim as ours, for in reality "All this is empty of self and of what belongs
to self." Form, feeling, perception, volition, and consciousness: all are
to he given up by seeing them as they really are, as "not mine, not I,
not my self." To see the truth that all conditioned things are impermanent,
disintegrating, and bound to perish, is to turn away from clinging, to relinquish
all. And to relinquish all is to find ourselves, not barren and empty-handed,
but rich with the wealth of the noble ones. For one without clinging, there
is no fear, no tremor or agitation, no dark winds of anxiety. The one without
clinging is akutobhaya, one who faces no danger from any quarter. Though dwelling
in the midst of aging, sickness, and death, he has reached what lies beyond
aging, sickness, and death. Though the leaves fall and world systems shimmer,
he sees security everywhere.