Able to Sink, Able to Surface

4.1 Able to Sink, Able to Surface

Perception ceased, feeling ceased, even the breath stopped — how does such a person differ from a dead one? In the canon, someone asked this to a monk's face. The questioner was a layman.

The Question in the Mango Grove

The Saṃyukta-āgama records: the Buddha was staying in the mango grove at Ambāṭaka, with the elder monks. The householder Citta came, paid his respects to the elders, then sat down before the venerable Kāmabhū and began to ask. This householder was no ordinary figure — the suttas on either side record the elders testing him with deep questions, and his answers earning the praise: into this profound Dharma, the noble eye of wisdom has entered. His questions went inward layer by layer.

First: what are called "activities" — what are they? Answer: three — the activity of body, of speech, of mind. Which are they? In-breath and out-breath are the bodily activity, for they depend on the body; thought-and-examination are the verbal activity, for one thinks and examines and then breaks into speech; perception and intention are the mental activity, for they depend on the mind. Then the householder asked: when a man dies and his body lies cast away in the charnel ground, mindless as wood or stone — what things have left him? The monk answered in verse: vitality, warmth, and consciousness — given up together when the body is given up. And then the householder asked the question:

When vitality and warmth are relinquished, the faculties all broken, body and life parted — that is called death. In the attainment of cessation, the activities of body, speech, and mind have ceased, but life is not relinquished, warmth has not departed, the faculties are unbroken, body and life belong together.

Set the two sentences side by side and hold them steady. Death: vitality and warmth given up, the faculties broken, body and life parted. Cessation: the three activities all ceased — the breath stopped (the bodily activity ceased), the engine of speech stilled (the verbal activity ceased), perception and intention at rest (the mental activity ceased) — and yet life not relinquished, warmth not departed, the faculties unbroken, body and life still of one household. The mind's subtlest movements all stopped; the foundations of life not one of them missing. This is stilling at its limit — and it is not annihilation.

The householder asked after the order of entry. Answer: entering the attainment of cessation, the verbal activity ceases first, then the bodily, then the mental; emerging, the order reverses — the mental activity arises first, then the bodily, then the verbal. And one sentence above all: one entering this attainment does not think, "I am entering cessation; I shall enter cessation" — the prior work of gradual stilling carries him in of itself; nor, emerging, does he think "I am emerging" — the mind rises as it was beforehand inclined. Not even the thought "I will enter" present, and yet the entering and emerging unerring — this effortless precision already shows the chapter's point. And where the attainment tends, the monk said plainly: it tends toward seclusion, flows toward seclusion; tends toward nirvāṇa, flows toward nirvāṇa, pours toward nirvāṇa.

The Endorsement at Jeta's Grove

The same demarcation was taught in another place, from the mouth of a nun. The Madhyama-āgama records: the Buddha was at Sāvatthī, in Jeta's Grove; the laywoman Visākhā went to the nun Dharmadinnā, bowed at her feet, and question followed question — the embodied self, the view of self, the eightfold path, the factors of meditation — and at every answer the laywoman exclaimed: excellent, excellent, noble one! The questions reached the border of death: what things depart, that the body lies in the charnel ground senseless as wood? Answer: three — vitality, warmth, consciousness. And straightaway, the question again: between death and the attainment of cessation, what is the difference?

In death, the life-span is extinguished, the warmth has gone, the faculties are decayed. When a monk enters the attainment of cessation, the life-span is not extinguished, the warmth has not gone, the faculties are not decayed.

The laywoman pressed: then between the attainment of cessation and the attainment of non-perception, what is the difference?

When a monk enters the attainment of cessation, perception and knowing have ceased. When one enters the attainment of non-perception, perception and knowing have not ceased.

Two strokes, and the place of cessation is fixed: against death — vitality, warmth, faculties unbroken: stilling, not annihilation; against the non-perception attainment — perception and knowing both ceased: stilling deeper still. Sunk below every attainment that keeps a mind, yet never sunk into death. The catechism climbed to the top: what is nirvāṇa's counterpart? The nun answered: you would ask an endless chain of questions, but your questions cannot reach past me — nirvāṇa has no counterpart. The laywoman bowed and left. The nun then went to the Blessed One, laid the whole exchange before him, and asked: speaking so, answering so, have I misrepresented the World-Honored One? He answered: had Visākhā come to me with these sentences and these words, I would have answered her with this very meaning, these very sentences, these very words. An endorsement to the letter.

Two Ways of Going Under

Gather the two dialogues into one figure. Two people are deep underwater: one is drowning — sinking passively, breath gone, going under for good; the other is a diver — gone down of his own accord, breath-thread unbroken, able to surface whenever he wills. Both are "submerged"; but one is death, the other is freedom. Cessation stands to death as the diver's descent stands to drowning: the same deepest immersion, but in one the faculties are already broken, in the other vitality and warmth still belong to the body — able to sink, able to surface.

Here "freedom inside stillness" stands up. It is not "activity continuing within the stillness" — that would unmake the cessation; it is sovereignty over the entering and emerging, the arising and ceasing, of this deepest stillness. Sleep and faint are stillings too, but passive ones, not one's own to command; the stilling of cessation is undertaken and commanded — and that command is the deepest aspect of the meditative mastery.

The canon even records this sovereignty exercised one last time in a single elder. After Śāriputra's passing, on the day Mahāmaudgalyāyana took leave of the world, he spread his own seat in the open air and climbed the ladder rung by rung from the first meditation into the attainment of cessation, then back down rung by rung to the first; up again, in again, out again — twice through with perfect ease — and at the last, rising from the fourth meditation, he passed away. Even on the day of his death, the entering and the emerging were his own. (Which sutta this scene belongs to, the final chapter will return to see.)

Supreme Bliss, the Noble Alone, and the Seal

Three more matters nail the chapter down.

First, this stilling is actually called a bliss. At the Bamboo Grove of Rājagṛha, King Bimbisāra and the venerable Udāyī fell into dispute over how many kinds of feeling there are, could not resolve it, and went together to the Buddha. The Blessed One said: I have at times taught one feeling, at times two, three — up to a hundred and eight, up to measureless feelings — and then he raised a ladder: the bliss of the first meditation, the higher bliss of the second, each rung surpassing the last, until: passing beyond the sphere of neither-perception-nor-non-perception, the cessation of perception and feeling, witnessed in one's own person — this is the bliss surpassing all of those. Feeling itself ceased — whence bliss? The Buddha answered in advance: there are four blisses — the bliss of dispassion, of seclusion, of stilling, of awakening. The bliss of cessation is not a bliss of feeling; it is the bliss of stilling: the ceasing of all feeling, itself the joy.

Second, only the noble attain it. The Abhidharmakośa:

This attainment of cessation is gained by the noble alone; the worldling cannot arouse it — dreading annihilation, because only the power of the noble path can arouse it, and because one enters it through the conviction of nirvāṇa here and now.

The worldling cannot enter — not for lack of strength, but for lack of daring: facing the extinction of perception and feeling, he dreads it as death. Only one who has seen non-self, who understands this state as nirvāṇa witnessable in this very life, enters without fear. And the treatise records a question: the Blessed One at his awakening had not necessarily first aroused the attainment of cessation — how was he straightway liberated both ways? The answer: "because he had mastery over arousing the attainment of cessation, he is as one who had aroused it, and so liberated both ways." The criterion, astonishingly, is not "whether one has been in," but mastery over the arising and ceasing — the sovereign capability to enter and to emerge: that is the signed line of the both-ways liberation.

Third, this deepest concentration still belongs to the face of concentration, not the face of taints. The Aśvajit discourse of the Madhyama-āgama divides with cold precision: one who bodily touches the eight liberations and by wisdom sees the taints exhausted — liberated both ways; one who does not bodily touch them yet by wisdom sees the taints exhausted — liberated by wisdom; one who bodily touches them without by wisdom seeing the taints exhausted — that one is named only a body-witness, and is not yet an arhat. Though he enter all eight liberations in his own person and sit through cessation itself, if the taints have not been seen through and ended by wisdom, he is not one of the exhausted. The deepest concentration cannot do wisdom's severing for it — the summit of the concentration face is, in the end, no increase of the taints face.

Drawn together: the attainment of cessation is the deepest impression the meditative mastery leaves — sovereignty over arising and ceasing kept even inside the stilling of perception and feeling. But deep as the impression goes, what it stamps is still those two words: only the taint-exhausted can press this seal without fear.

Onward

Only — watching this person, a deeper question surfaces of itself. One who dares to walk into the very likeness of death, and walk calmly out again — what can death itself still be to him? Of his four attested sentences, the last is "no further becoming." No becoming received — then after death, does he exist, or not? The next part watches how the Blessed One dealt with the question everyone asks.