Week 11 - MN 18: Madhupiṇḍika Sutta - "The Honey-Ball Sutta." (An Exploration with Q&A)

Описание: (Sutta Exploration Series with Bhikkhu Candana).
Week 11

Madhupiṇḍika Sutta "The Honey-Ball Discourse" - MN 18
From the Majjhima Nikāya (Middle Length Discourses). Recorded on July 31st, 2021.

This week, Bhante explored the “Honey-Ball Discourse" (MN 18), where he unpacked for us the meaning and significance of papañcas, usually translated as “mental proliferations,” and as Ven. Mahākaccāna explains them in terms of an impersonal process of conditionality.
The papañcas come to be in the presence of the six sense faculties, where contact takes place through sense awareness when the eye meets forms, for example, leading to the rise of feeling and perception, all of which are then conditions for thinking and conceptual proliferation to take place. Having thus arisen, these concepts then “harass” us, as Bhante put it, given that we have the underlying tendency to personalize these experiences out of ignorance, and thereby suffer in the hands of the papañcas. This is the lot of the average person, the putujjana, or the “uneducated ordinary person,” as the term is usually translated. Yet, in this sutta, Venerable Mahākaccāna breaks down this process of personalization in a superb manner, while clearly pointing to the underlying tendency of grabbing the experiences of the six sense faculties with the Wrong View of personalization, thereby causing much undue suffering to oneself.

Bhante used powerful imagery and metaphors to highlight the energy and extent of such grabbing and how much pain it creates in the mind, while explaining that the antidote to this suffering would be the “absence” of such grabbing, enabled by sati or mindfulness above all else. Here, Bhante helps us trace the process backwards while commenting on the sutta, where the absence of each link of causality is shown to remove the necessary conditions that would allow papañcas to arise. Bhante further clarified that this does not mean one rejects the sense faculties or dispenses with concepts altogether. Instead, we come to see concepts as tools, as a means to an end, as a boat, whereby we cross to the other shore, yet do not carry the boat on our shoulders upon arrival, as Lord Buddha states. Therefore, we are encouraged to see and understand the conditional arising of conceptual proliferation to be able to use these concepts in a wholesome way, without letting them “harass” us, or become slaves to them.

The link to the Sutta can be found here: http://www.mindreleased.com/pali-suttas

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