PRESENTED TO THE MEMBERS OF THE BUDDHA CENTER ON SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2015, AND AGAIN ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 25, 2025 (REVISED) 

The Discourse on the Simile of the Water-Snake

Majjhima Nikaya 22

Date of Composition: 4th cent. BCE

The Buddha is living in Jeta’s Grove in Anathapindika’s Park. Savatthi or Shravasti was the capital of Kosala and one of the six largest cities of India at the time of the Buddha. Anathapindika is a wealthy householder and the chief lay disciple of the Buddha.

The discourse begins by considering the problem of heresy. As the order expanded in size and extent this must have been a growing problem, especially after the Buddha’s passing on, but even before the Buddha’s final emancipation there was concern about how best to preserve the teaching, and there is evidence of such thinking in the canon.

In this case, a monk, Arittha, is associated with the wrong or “pernicious” view that the obstructions or hindrances are not actually obstructions or hindrances. Arittha is “formerly of the vulture killers.” His former work probably consisted of such things as disposing of carcasses, funeral worker, cremation groundskeeper, hunter, trapper, tanner, leather worker, waste cleaner, or caretaker of scavenger birds This would place him outside the caste system as an “untouchable.”  The Five Hindrances are sensory desire, anger, sloth-torpor, restlessness-worry, and doubt. This view is like arguments made today that consumption, competition, and disbelief are good things—greed is good, the virtue of selfishness, the end justifies the means, etc. Here again the Law of Moral Causality is central—like creates like. The opposite view, that one can create one situation by appealing to its opposite, is the essence of nihilism.

Note that Arittha is not rejecting the Buddha’s teaching—he is a monastic after all—but rather he is inferring this conclusion from his (mis)understanding of the teaching. This is of course the definition of heresy.

Several monks hear about this and go to Arittha, challenging his doctrine by means of a variety of similes that indicate the negative character of the obstructions. Arittha, however, is not convinced. The monastics go to the Buddha to report Arittha’s heresy to him. The Buddha calls a monk to summon Arittha. Arittha comes as requested and tells the Buddha that his heresy that the obstructions are not hindrances is his understanding of the Buddha’s teaching. The implication, also identified by Bodhi, is that Arittha is advocating sensual pleasure, much along the lines advocated by some New Age gurus today, such as Aleister Crowley, Osho, Adi Da, Chögyam Trungpa, etc. Even Eckhart Tolle opposes celibacy!

Bodhi tells us that the Vinaya says that the order suspended Arittha and created the offence of refusing to give up a wrong view after repeated admonitions by others based on Arittha’s obstinacy.

The Buddha asks the monastics if Arittha has “kindled even a spark of wisdom in this Dhamma and Discipline?”  The monastics declare that he has not, and that his view is heretical, whereupon Arittha becomes dejected and sullen. Finally, the Buddha declares the principle, which seems to have been a particular point of dissension in the order—“Bhikkhus, that one can engage in sensual pleasure without sensual desire, without perception of sensual desire, without thoughts of sensual desire—that is impossible.”  Once a man came to me, who identified himself as a Buddhist, who asked me to teach him how to meditate so that he could have sex with women without any attachment or feelings for them that could cause him to suffer. I imagine that this kind of perversion of right view is what Arittha engaged in. In other words, emancipation and sensuality are mutually incompatible because without craving (the definition of emancipation) there can be no sensual desire and thus no sensual pleasure.

The discourse includes an interesting classification of the teaching into discourses, stanzas, expositions, verses, exclamations, sayings, birth stories, marvels, and answers to questions, clearly alluding to an intermediate stage of development of the oral tradition in which the teaching was identified with various classes of compositions but prior to the dissimilar organization of the canon that we have today.

The Buddha implies that Arittha is an intellectual whose thinking has led him astray. The Buddha contrasts this sophistical way of thinking, which he associates with criticizing others and winning in debates—a thinking popular in many universities today, especially in North America—with examining the meaning of the teachings with wisdom. Without wisdom, they fail to gain a “reflective acceptance” of the teachings. In other words, Arittha own cleverness seduced him.

The Buddha compares this wrong way of grasping the teaching with grasping a snake by its tail, which turns about and bites one. Similarly, misapprehending the teaching creates much demerit. The simile of the snake is like consciousness itself—subtle, lively, hard to pin down, and easy to lead to a bad result. On the other hand, one properly grasps a snake with a cleft stick. This is the right way of grasping the teaching.

The Buddha’s simile suggests the process of meditation: “Suppose a man needing a snake, seeking a snake, wandering in search of a snake, saw a large snake and caught it rightly with a cleft stick and having done so, grasped it rightly by the neck. Then although the snake might wrap its coils round his hand or his arm or his limbs, still he would not come to death or deadly suffering because of that.”  The snake is a universal symbol of volatility and psychic energy, including libido or sexual energy and kundalini shakti that lies coiled and dormant as the ecstatic potential of consciousness, the buddha nature or tathagatagarbha. The cleft stick is meditation. “Grasping” consciousness in this way confers timelessness or “deathlessness.”

The purpose of the teaching, the Buddha says, is not to win debates but to cross over the flood of the world through dispassion. Once one overcomes the world, one can discard the teaching itself, rather than continuing to engage in vain intellectual inquiry. However, to discard the teaching, one must first construct it and use before one can discard it. The point then is that one transcends the construction of the teaching, which is a necessary means, by realization.

The Buddha contrasts his doctrine of absolute dispassion, including attachment to high and beneficial states, with Arittha’s attempt to admit sensuality through the back door of disputation. “Bhikkhus, when you know the Dhamma to be similar to a raft, you should abandon even good states, how much more bad states.”  The ultimate disposition is perfect indifference, beyond even morality.

The Buddha criticizes both the doctrine of self and the doctrine of non-self (annihilation) as equally false, with regard to matter, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness (the Five Aggregates), ranging from possessiveness and territoriality (the subject of another discourse on interconnectedness), to the soul theory, including the contemplation of non-existence, which creates the agitation of fear and craving. However, one who understands these theories for what they are, i.e., illusions or delusions, is not agitated by them. This is my reading of this difficult section, which Bodhi calls “Standpoint for Views.”

The Buddha explains that there are two kinds of agitation about nothing. Externally, one frets over the loss or non-possession of an illusory object. Internally, one frets over the prospect of personal annihilation. One who thinks that the teaching means that the self annihilates itself in emancipation specifically arouses (says the Buddha) the latter agitation, implying that this is wrong view.

The solution to both types of agitation is to hear “the Dhamma for the elimination of all standpoints, decisions, obsessions, adherences and underlying tendencies, for the stilling of all formations, for the relinquishing of all attachments, for the destruction of craving for dispassion, for cessation, for Nibbana.”  The Buddha specifically says that such a follower of the teaching does not “think” that they are to be annihilated. He realizes non-self-identity as a matter of knowledge, not belief.

Next, the Buddha asks the monks whether they are aware of anything existent that is permanent, everlasting, eternal, changeless, and enduring; anything in the world that does not arouse suffering in anyone who clings to it as a property of a self or  a support, recapitulating the Three Characteristics of Existence—transience, non-self-identity, and suffering.

The Buddha goes on to criticize the classic Upanishadic axiom of the unity of Brahman and Atman; this is a core precept of Hinduism. This axiom contradicts two fundamental Buddhist precepts: first, the essential suffering of the world (Brahman) and second, non-self-identity. The Buddha ridicules the notion of an “eternal self” (i.e., soul), yet he posits Deathlessness as the goal of emancipation. Rather, the Buddha instructs his followers to not identify the self with anything at all, whether physical (material) or psychological (mental). The cultivation of this state progresses from disenchantment through dispassion to liberation and non-rebirth.

Arhant is variously explained as ‘one who is worthy’ or ‘foe destroyer.’ The term is not unique to Buddhism. It refers to an advanced spiritual aspirant, but not a buddha. Nonetheless, the evidence of the Pali Canon is that the Buddha teaches the path of the arhant to his followers, along with at least two other paths—the path to divine rebirth and the similar but more specialized path to Union with Brahma—as well as the renowned “84,000 techniques” of spiritual practice. In other words, the Buddha’s teachings are diverse and adapted to his audience. Buddhism is a meta-theory of spirituality that both includes and transcends religion as such. It is interesting that the Buddha chose to use this familiar pan-Indian term, which also describes the goal of the ascetic movement in general, including the Jains, rather than some more specialized term (e.g., tathagata, which he mostly uses for himself). The emphasis throughout the Pali Canon on the path of the arhant is unsurprising considering that it is the monastics who preserved the canon, i.e., precisely those who were committed to this path. Nonetheless, the evidence of the Pali Canon is that the Buddha teaches the path of the arhant to the monastics.

The Eighteen Schools differ in their view of the spiritual perfection of the arhants, though all schools agree that an arhant perfecting dispassion emancipates him, thus breaking the chain of interconnectedness by “reversing” the  ‘cause’ of craving. Some schools held to the accepted view that an arhant is an advanced spiritual aspirant but not necessarily a buddha. We might say that an arhant is an adept but not a master. Thus, while the Buddha is an arhant, this does not mean that an arhant is necessarily a buddha, and there is evidence in the Pali Canon to support this view. At least eight schools held this view. The Theravada hold the alternate view that the arhants are perfected beings in every sense, in terms of the development of their wisdom, and are therefore infallible. Thus, this view has erroneously become identified with the Eighteen Schools themselves. If arhants are not perfected beings, then there must be another path, a path that leads to Buddhahood, the path of the Buddha himself, and we find this path described in the Pali Canon as the path of the bodhisattva.

The Buddha gives several similes to express the things that they have completely abandoned or renounced, specifically, ignorance, rebirth, craving, and the five lower fetters (i.e., self-identity, doubt, attachment to rites and rituals, sensual desire or lust, and anger). He repeats self-identity-view. Thus, the Buddha says of an arhant that “when the god with Indra, with Brahma, and with Pajapati [lit. ‘lord of creation’] seek a bhikkhu who is thus liberated in mind, they do not find anything of which they could say: ‘The consciousness of one thus gone (tathagata) is supported by this.’ Why is that? One thus gone, I say, is untraceable here and now.”

Note the Buddha’s use of the word, tathagata, ‘thus gone.’ Usually, the canon reserves this word for the Buddha alone, but occasionally uses it with reference to the arhant, just as it uses “arhant” with reference to the Buddha. Both beings have emancipated themselves. However, to infer from this that the Buddha and the arhant are identical, as some so-called modern Buddhists might have it, is overreaching and untenable, not only canonically, but in terms of fundamental logic as well, for if the Buddha is simply another arhant, then Buddhism itself disappears and becomes a kind of Vedanta. According to this view, we should regard all arhants equally. This denial of the primogeniture of the Buddha is entirely non-canonical.

The consciousness of the arhant is “untraceable.” The commentaries interpret this word to mean that the arhant has no self-identity and that his “insight-path-fruition mind” is not discernible within the world, referring of course to the mind-stream. Something that cannot be “traced” is also non-temporal and acausal.

One of the big misunderstandings of Buddhism is the accusation that Buddhism is a sort of nihilism, advocating self-extinction. The worldly focus of the Pali Canon reinforces this wrong view. However, here the Buddha declares this view to be a mistake: “So saying, bhikkhus, so proclaiming, I have been baselessly, vainly, falsely, and wrongly misrepresented by some recluses and brahmins thus: ‘The recluse Gotama is one who leads astray; he teaches the annihilation, the destruction, the extermination of an existing being.’”  Rather, the Buddha says, “what I teach is suffering and the cessation of suffering.”  Bodhi comments: “Nibbana, the cessation of suffering, is not the annihilation of a being but the termination of that same unsatisfactory process.”  In other words, emancipation is the annihilation of an illusion. The annihilation of illusion is not nihilism, but rather the realization of the relative nature of existence. By realizing the relative nature of the relative, one realizes the absolute nature of the absolute. This is the enlightened perspective.

However, the Buddha says of himself as Tathagata that he is indifferent as to whether others abuse, revile, scold, and harass him or honour, respect, revere, or venerate him, since there is no ego to experience either annoyance, bitterness, or dejection or delight, joy, or elation “of the heart.” The reference to the heart may be a double entendre since, besides being the centre of emotion, it is also the traditional centre of the self. Therefore, says the Buddha, the monastics should feel neither annoyance nor delight because of others, reiterating a statement made in the first discourse in the Digha Nikaya, the Net of Confusion (Brahmajala Sutta).

Therefore, says the Buddha, since there is no self or object to possess, abandon this process, which is doubly illusory; it was never yours in the first place. The construction parallels the second precept against taking what is not given. Thus, one should abandon attachment to material form, feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness—the Five Aggregates of self or psyche. Let it be.

This teaching that the Buddha proclaims is, he says, clear, open, evident, and “free of patchwork” (?). The commentary explains this idiom as meaning that the teaching is not fragmentary, outmoded, or deceptive in any way. The Buddha says that the arhants who have destroyed the taints have completely liberated themselves. Note that the Buddha specifically identifies the salvific principle with “final knowledge,” once again confirming that the Pali Canon clearly teaches that wisdom is the essential salvific principle.

Moreover, those monastics who abandon the five lower fetters are reborn in the Pure Abodes, the highest planes of the Form world, corresponding to the attainment of the fourth meditative attainment, whence they will attain final emancipation without ever being reborn in a lower world.

Those monastics that abandon the three lower fetters (self-view, doubt, attachment to rites and rituals) and attenuated lust, hatred, and delusion are reborn as a person once more only, whence they will attain arhantship. Thus, it is possible to attain liberation either from the Pure Abodes or from the human world. Those monastics that abandon the three lower fetters are stream entrants, who are on the path that leads to liberation.

Similarly, the Buddha identifies two subordinate classes of aspirant, dharma followers and faith followers, who are also on the path to enlightenment. Bodhi notes that the liberation of dharma followers is called “attained to view.” The liberation of faith followers is called “liberated by faith.” However, it is important to note that according to the Kitagiri Sutta (MN 70) only those liberated both ways or liberated by wisdom have completely liberated themselves, with nothing left to do. All the other types, including one liberated by faith, still have work to do. The other types of those who still have work to do are the body witness, one attained to view, a dharma follower, and a faith follower. The body witness, not discussed in discourse 22, seems to refer to an aspirant who has experienced awareness of the body and the immaterial (i.e., fifth through eighth) meditative attainments.

Finally, those monastics who have a certain degree of faith and love for the Buddha are reborn in a divine world. This is the lowest level of Buddhist attainment. Rebirth in a divine world may result in an extended period of great happiness and other benefits, including beauty, power, and wisdom, but eventually it seems that all divine  beings (excluding those born in the Pure Abodes) are eventually reborn in a lower state. Nevertheless, the Buddha includes the conventional religious aspiration to “heaven” in his teachings, but as an inferior path not leading to final emancipation. Since the Buddha clearly includes inferior paths and secondary techniques in his teachings, presumably as a concession, the question arises concerning the spiritual status of the path of the arhant, which is not a specifically Buddhist attainment but is mentioned by the Jains, renunciates, and others as a non-ultimate attainment intermediate between the path of heaven and Buddhahood.

Buddha Centre, Saturday, January 25, 2025