THE SAMSARIC MUD FIGHT: SAMSARA AS A PROCESS AND BAD HABIT

THE SAMSARIC MUD FIGHT: SAMSARA AS A PROCESS AND BAD HABIT

The question came up yesterday about the difference between Mahayana and Theravada. And one of the important differences is how they view samsara. For the Mahayana, samsara is a place. And because it's a place, if someone does a lot of good, develops a lot of good qualities, and then leaves that place, they're leaving everybody else in a lurch--which is why they say that the truly generous and compassionate person wants to hang around, doesn't want to leave samsara. In fact, they define samsara as being identical with nirvana if, they say, you look at it the right way. That way the bodhisattva gets to be in samsara and nirvana at the same time.

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But the early teachings don't treat samsara as a place. They treat it as a process.  Samsara literally means "the wandering on." It's an activity. A process. And you don't just wander. You *create* the worlds in which you're going to wander into. They involve feeding, and that's addictive. 

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So samsara is basically a bad habit, where you have an idea: You'd like to have this kind of pleasure, but it's going to cost a certain amount of suffering both for yourself and for other people. This is why stopping the process, stopping the addictive habit, is actually good for yourself and for the others. And this is why samsara and nirvana can't be the same thing, because you can't stop the addiction--that's nirvana--while still indulging in it. 

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Stopping your own addiction is good for others for two reasons. On the one hand, you're giving a good example. On the other hand, you're taking one more person out of this addictive process, one more person out of the feeding chain. So the idea that you would want to wait until everybody else got over the addiction before you're willing to give up your addiction doesn't make any sense. 

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We could look at samsara like a big mud fight. I splash mud on you. You splash mud on me. And then I splash mud on you back because you splashed mud on me. It goes back and forth like this and it never ends. So the idea of trying to straighten everybody out--or trying to settle the score--again makes no sense...

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...The idea of settling scores makes sense if you have a clear beginning point and a clear endpoint. But when the beginning point, as the Buddha said, cannot be found, how are you going to figure out what the score is? Where would you begin the tally?

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This is a useful point to think about when things come up in your meditation. You start thinking about events in your past: people who abused you, people who did horrible things to you, or people who are still doing horrible things to you. You have to ask yourself, "Well maybe I've done something to that person."  That doesn't exonerate the other person. It simply means that the two of you have been entangled in this mud fight, back and forth, and you don't know when it began.

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So the best thing is to say, 'Okay, I'm just going to not continue the back and forth.' Wish the other person well. If reconciliation is possible, try for reconciliation. If it's not, you go for forgiveness, because you realize that not every score is going to get settled. And again, in a mud fight, the question of who splashed more mud on the other person after a while becomes really irrelevant. It's not the kind of score you want to keep, a score you want to settle. It's a fight you want to get out of..."

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Excerpt from "The Samsaric Mud Fight"

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You can read the complete article here:

https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/Meditations8/Section0031.html