Nutriment
Tahn Pamutto, October 26, 2024
PART I – THE FOUR NUTRIMENTS
To start off with a little story: everybody knows Anāthapiṇḍika? He was a very famous householder in the time of the Buddha; he was a benefactor of the Buddha and the Sangha. His name means “one who gives to those who have little” or “those who have not.” He was literally known for generosity. He spent his entire life giving and delighting in giving. Because of that he was friendly with the Buddha, and he had a special faith in Venerable Sāriputta. When Anāthapiṇḍika was on his deathbed, it was requested that the Venerable Sāriputta come and give a talk, and the Venerable Ānanda accompanied Venerable Sāriputta. They went to the bedside of Anāthapiṇḍika, and Venerable Sāriputta gave a stirring, rousing Dhamma talk on profound teachings.
He said, “Don’t grasp at the eye, and don’t let your consciousness arise dependent on it. Don’t grasp at the ear. Don’t grasp at the nose,” and on and on. “This is how you should train yourself. Don’t let your consciousness arise dependent on any of these things. Let them go.” And as Venerable Sāriputta is giving this Dhamma talk, Anāthapiṇḍika starts to cry. Ānanda, who is a very soft, very empathetic guy, says, “Oh, householder, you’re crying. Is this too much? Is this too intense for you?” But Anāthapiṇḍika says, “I’m not crying because I’m overwhelmed. I’m crying because for so many years, so many decades, I have drawn close to the Sangha and have given to the Sangha and heard Dhamma talks, and yet I have never heard a Dhamma talk like this.” Ānanda responded, “Oh! Well, Dhamma talks like this, these intense kind of training dhamma talks, they aren’t usually for lay people. They are usually given to the monks.” Anāthapiṇḍika responded to this, saying, “They should be for everybody. There are people who have little dust in their eyes and yet are wasting away for lack of hearing Dhamma talks like this. Please, out of compassion, give such talks to householders.”
I tell that story to say that because Anāthapiṇḍika was such a nice guy and because he asked so nicely, and because one of you asked so nicely, we can talk about āhāra (nutriment) today. It is a subject which is not generally given as a teaching for laypeople. To understand it completely requires that you be a Non-Returner or on the path of Non-Returning or an Arahant or on the path of Arahantship. It requires that you think of consciousness in an objective, impersonal way.
If you’re looking at consciousness like a scientist, you’re asking, “Why is it that ‘beings’ arise? Why is it that ‘consciousness’ arises? Why is it that ‘saṃsāra’ arises? Dependent on ‘what’ do these things arise and with the absence of ‘what’ do they not arise?” This kind of investigation is not terribly relevant to a lot of the things that are really important in cultivating Buddhist practice, like precepts and dāna (giving) and mettā (loving kindness) and sīla (ethics). Those things are really relevant and have immediate results in your daily life. But if you sit around thinking about nutriment, you might get it intellectually and it might encourage you to look further… and that’s probably the best we can hope for, because to have an experiential understanding of it, you have to get the mind to a place beyond this nutriment, which may take some time and deep samādhi. It may yet be off in the future for you.
It’s not the Buddha’s fault this comes up. It is the Dhamma’s fault. The Dhamma is “ehipassiko”; it is intriguing. It snares us. We hear there are these four nutriments and we want to know more. So today we’ll investigate these four nutriments: what they are and what they mean. This was all my disclaimer. If the concept doesn’t make sense, set it aside. It may seem intense, especially the sutta we cover later in this talk, a sutta for monastics who are serious about attaining the fruits of enlightenment in this very life.
Nutriment, Not Just Food
Nutriment (ahara) is framed in the Pali language and in philosophy at the time of the Buddha differently than we might think today. We hear “food,” we hear “nutriment,” and we think, “I get an apple, I eat an apple, I swallow it, I digest it, I assimilate the nutriments, and then I excrete it.” This is the normal, worldly way of thinking about food and thinking about the relationship to food. There are beings and there is food, and the beings go and get the food. Even when little amoebas see food, they come along and just swallow it. There’s the idea that somewhere in that process of ingesting, the food becomes the being. You eat the apple and at some at some point, the apple is you. We could study it with a microscope, but we can’t actually tell when that point is. Or if there is a point, and this is one of the philosophical traps that if you really start contemplating, you would get confused and get nowhere. When does the food become the person? The question is flawed. It’s based on an assumption. It is using a framework of food as separate from the beings.
That’s not how the Buddha is using this word. “Āhāra” doesn’t mean food. In the time of the Buddha, they had a really tangible way of thinking about the fire element. They believed that fire was attached to its fuel source. You need to have the fuel to have the fire. Fire doesn’t arise on its own. Because of this the fire arises but it can’t leave its fuel source. It’s dependent on that fuel source. And it’s consuming the fuel source, obviously. But when the fuel source is depleted, the fire goes out. It was dependent on that fuel source. It was attached to it out of necessity. This is how they thought of the fire element and how they thought about digestion. They imagined the body as like a flame, dependent on its fuel sources and consuming them. And that when these fuel sources are expended, when they’re out, the flame goes out. Similarly when the body runs out of fuel, the body dies. The body is dependent on its fuel sources.
Another way to think of nutriment might be like a petri dish, an empty little glass dish. Some bacteria float in on the air and they land on it. They survive only as long as their lifespan dictates. They cannot grow, they cannot multiply, they can’t do anything because it’s just glass. But smear some sugary nutriment substance on the petri dish… then when those bacteria land, they will consume it. In consuming it they grow and they multiply and they spread. Suddenly, you’ve got this big foaming bacterial colony ready to make someone sick.
That’s how we’re talking about nutriment. It is independent of beings that need it, but it can be a fuel source. When beings arise, they are arising dependent on that fuel source, attached to it, drawn to it. That is nutriment.
Ants and Cats
Here’s another way to look at it, closer to home: Jim has a table in his kitchen. Nice, sturdy, real wood table from a bygone era. Now, sometimes, a scouting ant walks across that table. It happens once an hour, once every couple hours, once a day. An ant will walk across the table and it’ll kind of do some loops, not finding anything, and it will wander off. Ants don’t stay just anywhere. They don’t just grow. They don’t multiply. It’ll just wander through and away, and that’s it.
Sometimes, though, there is food. Jim sits at the table and has some food and leaves some crumbs. Now because there are crumbs when the ant wanders by, it finds food. It becomes attached to and dependent on this food and this table. It thinks. “This is a place where I can live. This is a place where I can grow. This is a place where I can multiply.” They eat their fill, go back to the colony, bring back a friend or two, and suddenly there’s more ants. These go back to the colony and a signal goes out. There’s more ants and more ants. Suddenly you have all sorts of ants roaming around the table. And even if Jim were to clean up the table, the ants would keep coming back for a while because of the previous presence of that food source.
Now a spider happens along. Every hour, every couple hours, every couple days, a spider walks across the table. It doesn’t matter how often we sweep and vacuum. These little critters are everywhere. They wander through, but they usually don’t find anything. Except now, because the ants have been drawn to the crumbs, the spider lingers. It waits and it watches because now there is food for it – not the crumbs but the ants. Every now and then an ant wanders too close to the spider; the spider grabs it and sucks it dry then it tosses it off the table. And it waits for another one to wander by, then grabs it, drains it like a little juice box and throws it away. It just it hangs out dependent on this fuel source, dependent on this food.
Satine the cat, Jim’s cat, comes by. She doesn’t want for food – Jim is well trained, and he provides food at multiple opportunities during the day. Satine doesn’t even eat all of it. Sometimes she even leaves little bits in her bowl to come back and nibble on from time to time. She’s not here because she is hungry. But, drawn to the movement on the table, she gets up and perches there. She watches, she sees the ants. They’re moving. She sees the spider, and it’s moving. Fascinated with the movement, she hangs out on the table. And every now and then, her desire just wells up and she lands her paw on one of the ants or on the spider, and does what cats do… you know, torture and maim and mutilate the little creature for fun. For a mental form of satiation. All of this because of the presence of nutriment: ahara.
All these things are happening independently, on their own, even without the food being present. Without the food they do not stay, they do not grow, they do not multiply. With the presence of food, these things stay. They grow, and they multiply.
The Buddha is not talking about food and ants when he describes nutriment for the mind and nutriment for consciousness. He is describing mental processes. We can’t think of ahara as just food because the mind cannot eat. The mind cannot swallow. It cannot digest. It cannot assimilate. The mind has no form. These are things that only bodies can do. Only bodies can swallow other bodies and digest them and assimilate them. The mind is different but in a way it is the same. The mind is like fire – it is dependent on a fuel source to survive.
Mental States
How does the mind deal with nutriment?
The mind becomes “drawn to” through craving. It becomes “attached to” through dependency (upādāna). And then it “becomes” (bhāva) …it begins to linger at, identify with, and stay in a position. The mind becomes established based on nutriment.
The mind doesn’t have to do these things… for instance there are mental states not based on nutriment. We usually put these states in the category of either wholesome mental states or neutral mental states, which are like the ant wandering through or the spider just wandering through or Satine the cat just wandering through. These mental states arise, they wander through, and then they go on their way. They don’t get established because there’s nothing to get established on and they weren’t necessarily looking for something anyway. These states do arise and cease like normal – but you don’t get more of them. They arise based on certain conditions like time and place.
Some mental states are different. Fueled by ignorance, fueled by desire, they are drawn towards nutriment. They look for it and gather around it. They become dependent on it, and then they multiply.
Greed is like this. There’s something attractive and we’re drawn to it. We gather around it. We elaborate on it. And we keep coming back to it over and over again. It’s not that we can stay with it forever, but once we find out there’s this nice, tasty, pleasant object, we keep circling back to it over and over again, sometimes for the rest of our life. Even when that thing stops being pleasant, we might keep circling back to check on it because it was pleasant, once. We think, “Maybe this will be the time when it’s really good and I’ll finally be satisfied.” It doesn’t happen though, and we keep circling back. That’s the nature of the mind. It doesn’t have to circle back. But since these mental states are based around the idea of a ‘being’, they look to get established. They look to grow. They look to multiply. And when there is nutriment, they do.
In mental training we can act as an observer: we step aside from consciousness, step aside from craving, step aside from beings and ignorance. We can ask the question, “Dependent on what does consciousness arise?” Then this idea of nutriment starts to make sense. Wherever we see a lot of craving and attachment and identification arising, there will be a fuel source. This is why the Buddha compared unwholesome states to fire. They are dependent on a fuel source. If you only had an unwholesome mental state every now and then, once an hour, once every couple hours, once every couple days, then this path of liberation would not make sense. It just wouldn’t be worth all the effort to get rid of a couple of wandering mental states. But because they tend to gather and multiply it really pays to look at what they gather around. What is their fuel source? What is their nutriment? What feeds them? What makes them grow? What makes them reproduce? Because by attending to that you are attending to the root cause of a problem. You can deal with all the multiple problems that arise off of that at the same time.
This is the sort of thing you do for fun when you’re practicing in a very intense way like monastics or hermits tend to do. When you’re spending a lot of time in this, you stop thinking, “What is me? What do I want?” You start thinking, “What is consciousness? Why does it keep happening?” It’s fun because even though you are using this consciousness to investigate consciousness as if it is something external, still you can succeed. You can learn. You can grow in wisdom.
Sutta: If There Is Desire
Let’s look at a sutta to help frame why this is a problem. Saṃyutta Nikāya 12.64 , the book of Causation, “If There Is Desire”:
At Sāvatthī. (This is the Buddha speaking.) “Monks, there are these four nutriments. They maintain sentient beings that have been born and help those that are about to be born.
“What four? Solid food, whether solid or subtle (or whether coarse or subtle)is the first. Contact (this is contact with the sense bases) is the second. Mental intention is the third. Consciousness is the fourth. These are the four nutriments that maintain sentient beings that have been born and help those that are about to be born. If there is desire, relishing, and craving for solid food, consciousness becomes established there and grows. Where consciousness is established and grows, name and form are conceived. When name and form are conceived there is the growth of saṅkhāras (mental fabrications, choices). Where saṅkhāras grow, there is rebirth into a new state of existence in the future. When there is rebirth into a new state of existence in the future, there is rebirth, old age and death in the future. Where there is rebirth, old age and death in the future, I say this is full of sorrow, anguish and distress.
“Now if there is desire, relishing, and craving for contact; if there’s desire, relishing, and craving for mental intention; if there’s desire, relishing, and craving for consciousness as fuel: then consciousness will become established there and grow. Where consciousness is established and grows, name and form are conceived, where name and form are conceived, there are saṅkhāras. And when saṅkhāras grow, there is rebirth into a new state of existence. Where there is rebirth, old age, death in the future, I say this is full of sorrow, anguish, and distress.
“Suppose an artist or a painter had some dye, red lac, turmeric, indigo, or rose madder. And on a polished plank or a wall or a canvas, they create the form of a woman or a man, whole in its major and minor limbs. In the same way, if there is desire, relishing, and craving for solid food, consciousness will become established there and grow. Where consciousness is established and grows (etc.), there is rebirth, old age, and death. I say this is full of sorrow, anguish, and distress.
“Suppose there was a bungalow or a hall with a peaked roof with windows on the north, south or eastern side. When the sun rises and a ray of light enters through a window, where would it land?”
(The monks), “Well, it would land on the western wall, sir.”
“But if there was no western wall, where would it land?”
“It would land on the ground, sir.”
“But if there was no ground, where would it land?”
“If there was no land on top then the light would land in water.”
“But if there was no water where would the light land?”
“Well it wouldn’t land anywhere sir.”
“In the same way if there is no desire, relishing, and craving for solid food then consciousness does not become established there and doesn’t grow. There’s no desire, relishing, and craving for contact, for mental intention, or for consciousness. Then consciousness doesn’t become established there and grow. Then when consciousness is not established and doesn’t grow, name and form are not conceived. When name and form are not conceived, there is no growth in saṅkhāras. When saṅkhāras don’t grow, there is no rebirth into a new state of existence. When there’s no rebirth into a new state of existence, there is no rebirth, old age, and death in future. When there is no rebirth, old age, and death in the future, I say there’s no sorrow, anguish, and distress.” This is what Buddha said.
Into The Closet
How do we apply this? What are these four nutriments, how might this be relevant, how do we do something about this? It can only work if you were to see this as outside yourself, if you were to say, “There are these consciousnesses that cause me to suffer: consciousnesses of greed, of lust, of attachment; consciousnesses of anger, of indignation, of rage; consciousnesses of confusion, delusion, ego, conceit. I would really be okay if they withered away and died. If I could lock them in a closet and just wait until they stopped pounding on the door and fell silent, then I would do that with absolute viciousness. These are not things I want around.” This is the way that monks think.
Monks don’t think, “Oh, but they’re MY consciousnesses! And I want to accept them, nurture them, and protect them. Maybe some day they will grow up and be good.” The Thai forest masters, fierce teachers, would say, “You’re trying to kill yourself. Trying to kill the Self. You’re seeing your ego as a problem. It’s where your suffering comes from. It is hurting you. And it always will.”
If you do find yourself such a kind of mind state, and you realize, “This thing that keeps making me suffer? I really don’t want it anymore…” … then take away its food. Figure out what it’s eating and take it away. You may find that just like Satine the cat, it’s there because you keep putting out a bowl of food every morning. If you stop doing that, its loyalty would wane very quickly. I know that Jim the person and Satine the cat have a good thing going. He’s probably not gonna stop feeding her. But if he did, she would certainly be confused and she’d probably give him a couple of hours to consider his mistake. But she’s a cat. I don’t think she would wait very much longer. I know because we have cats at the monastery, and once the monk who feeds them was away. On that day I became the one who fed them. The very first morning that he was away, I put food in the bowl but they were out looking for the other monk. Even though I put the food out they had associated the other monk with feeding and that’s what they had become dependent on. They went on a rampage around the monastery looking for him and looking for the food and trying to figure out what to do. It was a long unpleasant hour or two for them. Then suddenly they let go of the old order and I became their best friend.
You may find this. You may find that you take away the nutriment of a particular source of your suffering and it begins to thrash and complain. It begins to look for new food sources. But lock it in the closet and let it waste away; separate it from its food source and it will eventually leave. It will be gone and you will remain and you will finally have peace.
What are these four nutriments? I cannot claim to truly, deeply understand these four nutriments; for this is not a simple subject. I can only claim to have studied and thought about them for a while and will offer what I have learned.
Physical Food As Nutriment
So what is the nutriment of physical food? The Buddha says: food is coarse or subtle. The mind can’t eat. It can’t consume. It can’t digest. It can’t assimilate. It can’t excrete. The mind has no form. The mind has no body. But the body can do these things and you, each one of you, has a body. Each one of us is dependent on having a body, dependent on having a form and dependent on being attached to that form, and we’ve only had one body for our entire life. There is the need of that body for physical food. Because that body needs physical food, it actually begins to form a desire for particular foods, nourishing foods. Foods that help it to grow and to thrive and to multiply.
The squirrel spends all day finding an acorn. It will eat and it’ll go to sleep and it’ll spend the next day looking for an acorn. But if the squirrel happens to find a pile of acorns it gathers them all into its home. Having a food source and not having to go looking for more food, it can focus on multiplying. It immediately sets about trying to breed. This is the body: when we’re set – when we have food – we start looking for other kinds of pursuits. We stop worrying about food. But when we don’t have food, usually our entire mental status is about trying to get food. Without that, this body will die. So the mind is not getting the food. It’s not seeking the food. It’s not eating the food. But rather the mind is dependent on the body and the body has a need to fulfill.
We could say the mind believes it is the body. If you’re thinking, “Well, yes and no. I don’t always think I’m the body,” just go without eating. You will find that after you’ve had breakfast and you’re sitting here listening to a Dhamma talk, you don’t care about food. You’re not totally associated with the body right now. You’re focused on trying to learn something. But just give it a little while, and suddenly, when the body starts to get hungry or thirsty or hot or cold or sleepy or restless, it’s hard to ignore.
This first nutriment is recognizing that some of our mental states are dependent on the food condition of the body. It’s not always out of hunger. Sometimes you get weak and despondent and start thinking about food and start dreaming about particular foods because you’re hungry. Sometimes you’ve eaten food and you get listless and sleepy and you don’t have any aspiration to do anything. You just lay back and digest like a snake that’s swallowed an entire egg in one mouthful. These mental states are spawned because of the body eating food. It doesn’t matter whether it was “gross” food (meaning substantial food) or whether it was a simple vitamin water or juice that’s just got a bit of sugar, a subtle food. Give a box of juice to a child; all sorts of mental states will arise that weren’t there a minute before. That child will be bouncing off the walls. Just try to contain that child. You can’t. It’s not because the child’s mind ate the juice, but with juice as a condition, those mental states arose.
How would we use this in our practice? Well, most people eat. Most people eat regularly. It is possible that you could fast for a time. This may not be sustainable in the long term (although the monks do this every day for 16 to 20 hours). You would find that some mental states go quiet because they need the proximity of the body eating food. And the same with you. If you have fasted, you probably found that after a day or two, what before was a very loud mental state, “It’s dinner time! Gotta eat dinner,” became a very quiet mental state. “It’s almost dinnertime. But no, not for me. Okay. Well, I just won’t think about it.” It became not a mental state at all. Maybe on day 3 or 4 or 5 of the fast, you were shocked at how peaceful you were. You were hungry, but you weren’t thinking about food all the time. Mostly you were just weak. You were thinking, “Wow. I never noticed but the intestines make a lot of restless noise in the body. It’s nice when they go quiet. Not sustainable, but it’s it’s nice when it happens.”
The Buddha’s encouragement, the practice he calls always appropriate, is moderation in eating. Eat at simple predictable times of the day. Eat for the nourishing of the body, specifically with the purpose of nourishing the body. Because once you have accomplished that, you tend to stop. “I’ve eaten today. I’m good.” How many of you say that? Somebody offers you something and you say, “No. I ate today. I’m good.” “Like, when did you eat?” “I had breakfast. It’s fine. It was almost a full stomach of food. I’m good. I’m good till tomorrow, at least.” Nobody says this. It’s just not something people say.
Does sleepiness arise in the proximity of having eaten food? Does restlessness arise based on the proximity of having had a cup of coffee? Does this arise? Does that arise? Do you get grumpy when you eat something heavy? Do you get all happy when you eat something really delicious? “Oh, I tried something new. I bought this thing. It’s so great.” The mental state had food as its condition. If you didn’t have that food, if you didn’t have that experience, the mental state wouldn’t be there. Without food many mental states wouldn’t be able to grow and persist and strengthen.
Contact As Nutriment
The second nutriment is called contact, and this is sense contact.
Say I’ve got a nice, juicy, crisp red apple. You’re walking by (maybe I could put it on Jim’s table, even though it’s so busy on there) and you see that big, juicy red apple, and you say, “That looks really good. What kind of apple is that? Is that organic?” You’re kind of intrigued by its qualities. It has qualities which produce a pleasant feeling. The sense contact causes certain mind states to arise, and you might think, “Oh, what kind of apple is that? I feel like an apple right now. I’m not quite hungry. But wow. Some apple juice. That would really hit the spot. Or apple cider. It’s that time of year, isn’t it? Nice cup of apple cider…” Suddenly, based on that sense contact, all sorts of mental states start to arise.
Now suppose you’re allergic to apples and you’re walking by and you see that big juicy red apple and what you see is hives and itching and pain. You would immediately throw yourself against the wall. “Who let that apple in here? Don’t you know I’m deathly allergic to apples? What if I had touched that?”
All sorts of mental states arise with contact as their condition. Contact doesn’t last very long, but what we will find is there is a way that the mind desires and goes back to these attractive things. It looks for these attractive things. Contact is the source of feeling. And feeling is our compass for how we make decisions in the world if we’re not paying attention. We’re trying to get pleasant feeling, get away from unpleasant feeling. We’re so-so about neutral feeling. If we don’t pay attention, this is how we live our lives. We’re always seeking out this kind of food, that kind of nutriment. And when we find it, we keep circling back to it over and over again to get the particular feelings that we want.
Crazy enough, sometimes people keep going back to the same place to get unpleasant feelings. They like to be angry. They like to be indignant. They like to be pissed off. They actually go looking for anger. They turn on the news, and they just can’t wait to hear about somebody who did something in some place that will make them angry. It gives them a sense of being alive, as nutriment for those mental states. Have you ever considered the effects of social media? Even unpleasant feeling can feed the mind.
The Mind Bringing Things Together As Nutriment
Now we can go on a bit long about the third kind of nutriment, but we’ll just try to explain it.
“Manosañcetanā”. The name is a really clunky, rare Pāli construction. It shows up in the Abhidhamma (the sort of esoteric mental constituent part of the Dhamma). What does it mean? It was translated as “mental intention” in the suttas. It has three parts. Mano means mind. Cetanā is a mental state, or a state that causes things to happen. It’s usually linked to volition or activity. And san, in the middle, means “to bring together”. So manosañcetanā is the process of the mind bringing things together. It is the mind starting processes and doing things for a particular purpose.
How is this a nutriment? Say I bring up a juicy, crisp red apple. The thing is, the “red” and the “juicy” and the “crisp” …are they the same thing? Does juicy mean anything to the eye? No. Does crisp mean anything to the eye? No. Can you see crisp? No. Maybe if somebody were to break the apple apart and you saw how it broke apart all at once, you might then think, “That’s a very crisp, crackly kind of apple.” But to the eye it would look almost indistinguishable from a squishy apple, to be honest. “Crisp” matters to the body and to the ear. It’s about hardness and softness and pliability. Juicy matters to the tongue. It’s about the water element. You can’t really see juicy. You see an apple, you taste juicy. You can’t see the juice in the apple. If you looked closely you could guess if the apple is dehydrated by its lack of shininess. But how is it that when I say “a big red juicy apple,” the eye sees red and the tongue tastes juicy and the ear hears crisp? Why is it that those all arise together? Manosañcetanā. We see the red apple and we think, “Oh, it’s juicy and crisp. It’s a honey crisp apple. It’s organic. It’s from the farm just down the street. It’s probably perfect. It’ll be so satisfying at lunch. I can’t wait for lunch so I can crack into that apple and slice it and slather it with peanut butter. This will be so good.”
This is manosañcetanā. It is the mind taking things that are independent on their own and sticking them together. This is the cause for a lot of different mental states. This is their nutriment. We do this a lot. This is a huge part of our mind. Because otherwise, we would be having nothing but simple moment-to-moment experiences that wouldn’t be connected much. There would be moments of connection, but then we’d immediately let them go. We’d see the apple and think, “It’s a bright red apple.” We cut up the apple and say, “Listen to that. What is that sound? It’s crisp.” And then we’d eat the apple and say, “It’s very juicy. It’s ripe. It’s perfect.” Each experience by itself could be perfect and clean and satisfying if we took them one by one.
But we don’t settle for that, do we? The mind comes alive sticking all the experiences together in new ways. It thrives on it. The more we do it, the more each individual experience seems diminished. It seems like “not enough” and we would have a mental hunger for more if we tried to focus on just one thing.
Habit Energy
Another example, one I tend to use when I think of manosañcetanā, is habit energy. When we find ourselves in a particular place, does it lead to certain mind states arising? What is a couch except as a landing pad for all sorts of consciousnesses? You lay down on that couch, and how long is it until you’re scrolling on the phone? How long is it until you’re thinking about having a snack? How long is it until your eyes are starting to get heavier? You’re starting to think, “Well, maybe I’ll do the gardening later. It looks like it’s getting cloudy out there anyway. Maybe I’ll get to it another time.” All of these mental states gathering are associated with that one original activity. It’s not necessarily a sense contact. There’s no particular sense contact of you sinking into the couch. It’s more about the location. It’s more about “habit energy”.
You work at a business and they have a break time. At break time you and the other workers go out back and you sit down at a picnic table. Some people smoke and some people have a drink and some people have a snack. Some people scroll over the phone. All of these things are associated with break time at that picnic table. If it’s break time they find themselves craving to go out to the picnic table. Why? Because it’s break time. That’s what they do. “I’m not gonna stay here at my workstation when I could be out there having slightly more fun.” So they get up and they go to the picnic table. Why? Manosañcetanā. There are mind states of relaxing, of stopping thoughts about work, of starting thoughts about other things, of eating snacks, of smoking, of having a drink. We’ve associated those particular activities with that particular place in time and space. The mind states are dependent on them.
You can eat a snack anywhere. You can have a drink anywhere. You can check your phone anywhere. But over time those activities got linked together with that place and they seem diminished or out of place anywhere else.
If we were to say, “No! When I go out to the picnic table I always get in an argument. I always scroll on my phone and that brings up stuff that I worry about. I forget what I’ve been working on. I make a mess of things. So I’m not gonna go out to the picnic table. I’m not going to do that to take my break.” Well, all of those mental states which were dependent on that activity suddenly have nowhere to land. Having nowhere to land, they can’t grow. They can’t multiply. They might find new homes if you’re not careful. But if you don’t let them they will cease. All of those activities that we thought were inherent to having a job and taking a break… we became dependent on them because of association.
Consciousness As Nutriment
The final nutriment is consciousness. This is a hard one to see. But we’ve been talking about it the whole time. Eating a piece of food and knowing you are doing it, that is consciousness. Experiencing sense contact, in all its different qualities, that is consciousness. The “habit energy” of where we land and when and how… we are conscious of this happening.
Even if we’ve dealt with the other nutriments, consciousness itself is arising dependent on us being alive. Because you’re alive, consciousness is going to keep arising. All the pain and suffering you have ever and will ever experience will have consciousness as its basic supporting condition. But consciousness itself isn’t the problem here. It should cease on its own when the body dies – and with it all future suffering. The problem we look at with nutriment is how consciousness becomes dependent on something. It latches onto something. It grows and multiplies dependent on something. And it keeps coming back to that thing over and over.
What are the consciousnesses that cause this growth and multiplication? Are there any consciousnesses that cause the mind to linger? It’s harder to see. You have a pain in your knee. It is a particular moment of body consciousness when you think about how your knee feels. When you think about how your knee feels, it hurts. So the condition for that pain is thinking about your knee. If we frame it like that, the question arises, why do you keep thinking about your knee? If the suffering and the pain of being aware of the knee is dependent on you being aware of the knee, then the end of the suffering of being aware of the pain in the knee is to stop becoming aware of the pain in the knee.
It couldn’t possibly be that simple, could it? Do we have a choice? Do we have a choice when there’s a pain in the knee to not focus on the pain in the knee? I will say we do. But are we willing, even as an experiment, to stop obsessing about the pain in the knee? OUR knee? Give it a try during meditation. Ask yourself, “What would happen if I were to stop paying attention to the pain in my knee?” Well, the knee might cease. It might blink out of existence. Are you okay with that? Or do you still want the knee to exist? Do you still want feedback from the knee even if it’s unpleasant? This is the question. Could you be okay if your knee consciousness was something that arose only every now and then, based on causes and conditions and not because you were seeking it? You might only occasionally have the thought, ‘Oh, my knee… yeah, it still hurts,” but then you’d immediately forget about it. Would that be okay to just every now and then be aware of your knee but otherwise it doesn’t exist?
This is the nutriment of consciousness. The dependency on things existing. When you’re not okay to just leave it be, not okay to just let it arise and cease on its own… this is a dependency on consciousness itself. Dependence on a belief that consciousness has to happen. That very belief makes more consciousnesses happen. It binds the consciousnesses to a particular event or fuel source. Being bound, the consciousnesses are like fire. They grow and they consume. And they hurt.
PART II – A LOOK AT EACH OF THE NUTRIMENTS
The Body Is Just Another Living Organism
Nutriment. It’s hard to figure out how to integrate it into our practice. It’s intriguing. It’s curious. It seems to make sense. In the Book of Ones, the Buddha says, “What is One? One is the reality that all beings subsist on nutriment.”
Living things are dependent on nutriment (a fuel source). That dependency links them to a nutriment. Nutriment is a fundamental fact of our reality. It is considered to be a basic fundamental truth. But the Buddha says this fundamental fact is actually a problem. You might think, “Well, I can’t live without it, right? I think I’m a being. Therefore, I am dependent on nutriment. What could I do?”
A lot of your being exists because of previous conditions. You’ve been born, so your body is here and your body is living. Your body is also independent to some degree of the choices that you make. Your body knows what to do because it is a living organism. Thank goodness you don’t have to constantly think, “Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.” When you swallow something, you don’t have to think, “Down, down. No, no… keep going down, keep going. Keep going.” You don’t have to will your food to go through your digestive tract. It breathes and digests because it is living. But it is not a “being”; it is not a satta.
In the Pāli language, the word for “being” is satta. This is a technical way of describing a living being, instead of saying “person” or “creature”. Not everything that is alive is a satta. The body is not a “being”. It is alive, but it is not deterministic. The body is not a person or a creature. It does not generate kamma. The mind generates kamma.
A body doesn’t generate kamma. This is something that a mind does. It is the mind, the consciousness derived from ignorance and volition, that generates kamma. That is what we call a satta.
And that is the difference between you and me and say, a plant. A plant doesn’t suffer, because it doesn’t make decisions. If there is a light source, that light is a source of nutriment for the plant. Plants grow towards the light. If they lose a limb, they grow another, or several others, in its place. They just keep doing what they do. They’re not making choices or suffering over their choices. Making choices and suffering are things a satta (a being) does. That’s where we start to connect the ideas of “being a being” “nutriment” and “suffering”. Many things need fuel to keep going. But only a satta (a being) suffers.
What is the condition for suffering? Existing. What is the condition for not suffering? Well… if you didn’t exist, you wouldn’t suffer, right? So now what do we do? It doesn’t sound feasible to work on not existing. Certainly we have to exist?
Meditators (especially later along the path, in deep stages of samādhi), will start to progressively comprehend and observe as parts of the mind assumed to be always there…actually cease. They cease to exist.
First, it’s the hindrances. They cease. It’s not that they go left or they go right or they go up or down. They’re not hiding under your bed waiting to pounce on you tomorrow morning. They are gone. They were dependent on a source. You developed mindfulness and removed that source and they ceased. They are nowhere to be found. Then, a basic fundamental part of our thinking, “applied and sustained thought” ceases. Through samādhi, our mind is willing to stay with an object and it doesn’t wander – because the part of the mind that could wander has ceased.
If we talk about it, it’s just talk. If you’ve seen it experientially, then it’s something totally different, it’s something amazing. It’s a profound, world shattering insight. “Wait! That little voice in my mind, it can cease without remainder? The action of applying my mind to something or drifting off, that can cease? My mind can stay with an object attached completely through unceasing interest and joy with that object? How could this be?” Yes. Through samādhi, you start to see that things can cease. They can end. They’re not necessary. The final meditative attainment (the eighth jhāna, in one way of numbering the jhānas) will be the cessation of perception and feeling.
Perception and feeling are really essential. It’s considered that if you are conscious of something, you are perceiving and feeling. You are trying to figure out what it is you’re conscious of, and you’re deciding if you like it or not. It’s instantaneous. You can’t not do it. It’s not something you can consciously stop doing. You can’t decide “I’m not gonna, no. I’m not gonna do perception. It leads to suffering. I’m just going to be only consciousness.” The part of the mind that would make such a decision requires perception and feeling.
The Trillion Year Sleep or Not-Non-Existence
There is a class of beings in the Buddhist cosmology called Those Who Are Not Percipient. It’s a very, very specialized class of beings who, through a particular meditative attainment, were able to achieve a state where perception and feeling do not arise. Because these are so closely linked to consciousness this causes them to be reborn in a state where they are without consciousness. Heavenly beings regard them with awe. They are also called The Great Unconscious Ones. Because they are literally asleep. For trillions of years. They sleep, not perceiving the things that are happening around them or the objects that are floating through their minds. They are unable to feel about anything one way or another.
Why would any being aspire to that? For some, it might be an accidental consequence of how they cultivated their minds. But others actually aim for it. In the absence of the Buddha-dhamma, in the absence to a true path to liberation, it seems like the next best thing. It seems to solve the problem of suffering. But this is only for a time. It’s kind of a great cosmic joke in a way. That’s not enlightenment. It’s not anything. They aren’t conscious and they aren’t suffering. Until they wake up after a trillion years. Then they go right back to suffering. Why wouldn’t they? They haven’t done anything to remove the causes. They just took a vacation from it for a couple of trillion years, and it comes back with a vengeance as soon as they stop. So that’s not very useful for us.
However, there is a meditative attainment called Neither Perception Nor Feeling. This is not an unconscious state but one where perception and feeling are arising with consciousness intermittently. If one regards this with wisdom they may see directly the very moment where consciousness, robbed of its nutriment, ceases to arise.
This is where one would shift over to the state of non-returning. A being who understood thus would never come back to lowly existence with a body. They have seen experientially that consciousness is just a thing. Again, for us here it’s just talk. It’s just theory. But if you were to ever experience that you would have experiential knowledge, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that consciousness is not everything. You would know that there are other ways for things, dhammas, to exist without you having to have consciousness perceiving them. You would know that dhammas arise and cease and consciousness arises and ceases and they are truly separate. You would know that there can be a whole universe, a whole multiverse of existences without you having to be conscious of them and perceiving them and deciding if you like them or not.
This is where the Buddha talks about the nibbāna element. The nibbāna element doesn’t arise, doesn’t cease. And everything that arises and ceases is within the nibbāna element. The nibbāna element is not added to or subtracted from. This means that when consciousness arises, it is just another dhamma arising in the nibbāna element. This means that our existence is just another thing that’s happening.
How do you reach a state where you’re willing to look at existing as “just another thing”? It’s just another thing in a universe full of things. It’s not even that big a deal. You could become totally okay that someday it’ll just cease. And you won’t need to worry about it starting back up again. What you’re pursuing in that case is full enlightenment. You’re pursuing being okay with existence ending. It’s not that you need to make existence end, and it’s not that your existence will end because you attained that. All that you have attained is the cessation of all clinging to existence and all suffering because of that.
It turns out that the mind, separated out and made “just another thing” is just like your body. It knows what to do. It’ll do its stuff. It’ll live out its time. And when it ends, it ends. Nobody needs to suffer over that. Seeing this you wouldn’t need to put in the causes and conditions for more existence. You don’t need to worry about it. Why worry about it? Just relax.
This is in the later stages of the path. It’s not that you yearn for non-existence. It is that you see the drawbacks of existence and you are not attached to it.
It’s not necessarily “non-existence” (it’s very hard for a mind which is focused on existence to conceive of non-existence), but rather focusing on the not-suffering part. “What if I just related to consciousness, to saṅkhāras, to perceptions and feelings as ‘just other things’ and saw them arising and ceasing and it didn’t bother me at all?” Well, then to talk about nutriments would make sense. You could say, “Wow. We just have to remove some basic causes and conditions and the suffering would cease. All of the mental habits that are causing that suffering would cease. They would end without remainder. They would end in a way that they don’t have anything to come back to.”
That’s how very deep practitioners are thinking in the later stages of the path. They’re seeing themselves, their ego and restlessness, and they’re saying, “That’s why I suffer. This ‘I’. Why don’t we do something about ‘I’? Without ‘me’, there won’t be any suffering.” And they’re really willing to investigate and they’re willing to make changes.
So if you’re wondering “How do I even apply this?” …the fact of the matter is: the reason this isn’t really taught to lay people is because in order to understand it and apply it at all, you have to be willing to make drastic lifestyle changes to see what happens. This path leads to their ceasing. The life of a person in the world is usually wrapped up with trying to survive and keep things going.
What To Do About Nutriments
To practice this you need to be able to stop eating dinner. You need to be able to stop watching movies. You need to be able to sit in meditation all through the night and get up the next morning and go do your work just like normal. You need to be able to look at the things that you think are intrinsically “you” and say, “Well, that’s exactly what I should avoid. That thing I think is ‘me’ is a deeply ingrained habit attached to a nutriment.”
I once was talking with a monk who is now the abbot of a forest monastery. He was offered the position, I guess you could call it, of founding a monastery in the Northeast United States. For years he neither accepted nor refused. His parents were were part of a group that got together and invited his community to start a branch monastery. This monk was from that area. His parents were on the board. So it was just obvious. Everyone was saying, “Come start a monastery. Your monastery, in your tradition.” But he didn’t want that. He put it off for years and he stayed a student of the Dhamma and traveled the world and did retreats and all that. Then finally one day he felt ready and he accepted. He came and the group bought a property and because people had been waiting for so long it was like “Instant Monastery”. They were ready to go. I got to talk with him in those early years and I asked him what had changed from avoiding starting the monastery to agreeing to it fully. He answered that for a long time he didn’t feel prepared, but also he worried about being so close to where he had grown up and of falling into old patterns. The places he used to visit, the foods he used to eat, the subcultures he used to be part of.
Then one day he realized he had grown, and he felt like he wanted to investigate what it would be like to be so close to the things that had been important to him while growing up without going after them. He remembered that when he was in his early training, he’d look at things that he used to do and say, “Well, that led to suffering. I’ll never do that again.” Which is easy to say when you’re a thousand miles from the thing you used to be attached to. He wanted to prove to himself he could do the same thing with the object of attachment right there in reach.
This is true for many monastics. A layperson might think, “I don’t know about all this renunciation stuff. There’s robes and bowls and rituals … it seems they’re adding a lot of stuff too. All that extra stuff sounds like extra suffering. The monastic life must be harder.”
That’s what one might think. But I know that growing up I was suffering a lot. The places, the foods, the activities, none of it seemed worth the effort. The whole culture wasn’t working. So I thought, “Based on my experience, all these things I’ve grown up with are suffering. I don’t know about the rest, but I’m sure of this.”
When you have this thought, there’s only one thing to do. You have to get seclusion from it all. You have to step away from it to see it as it really is. And then someday, you come back and maybe you’re ready to be around it without suffering. At that point you can test yourself to see if you can be near these things and not fall into the same pits. It’s a kind of a brave thing considering suffering is on the line, but if you’ve been practicing a long time you are also ready for a new challenge. You aren’t coming back because you want to do all of the things that you used to like. You’re coming back so that you can finally see them as they really are and overcome them. It’s a last act of planting your flag and saying, “No. I am done with you. No more existence like this for me.”
The objects themselves – the food, the sense contacts, the habit energies – they aren’t nutriment by themselves. They only become that when a mind is drawn to them and becomes established on them. If the mind no longer craves it and no longer becomes established on it, even when it’s near, then it is no longer nutriment. That very mind exists only as long as it’s condition allows, and then it goes out.
When you recognize something is causing your suffering or that your suffering is dependent on some thing: are you willing to actually remove that thing? And many of us will say, “Yeah, but next lifetime, I guarantee I’ll do it next lifetime.” And that’s fine. That’s not even not-Buddhist. For millenia lots of Buddhists have taken precepts and made merit for the sake of better conditions in the future. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not the most energetic way of approaching practice, but it can work.
There is another way though. One that hurries the process along. So now let’s talk about the Jerky Sutta.
The Baby-Jerky Sutta
This is Saṃyutta Nikāya 12.63. The Puttamaṃsa Sutta, which literally means “Flesh Of The Son” …affectionately called the “Baby Jerky Sutta” by young people these days.
At Sāvatthī, (the Buddha says) “Monks, there are these four nutriments. They maintain sentient beings that have been born and help those that are about to be born. What four? Solid food, whether coarse or subtle. Contact is second. Mental intention is third. Consciousness is the fourth.
“These are the four nutriments. And how should you regard the nutriment of solid food? Suppose a couple who were husband and wife set out to cross the desert taking limited supplies. They had an only child with them, dear and beloved. As the couple were crossing the desert their limited quantity of supplies would run out and they’d still have the rest of the desert to cross. Then it would occur to that couple: Why don’t we kill our only child, so dear and beloved, and prepare dried and spiced meat? Then we can make it across the desert by eating our child’s flesh. Let not all three of us perish. Then that couple would kill their only child, so dear and beloved, and prepare dried and spiced meat. They’d make it across the desert by eating their child’s flesh. And as they ate their child’s flesh, they’d beat their breasts and cry, where are you, our only child? Where are you?
“What do you think, monks? Would they eat that food for fun, indulgence, adornment, or decoration?” “No, venerable sir.” “Wouldn’t they eat that food just so they can make it across the desert?” “Yes, venerable sir.”
“I say this is how you should regard solid food. When solid food is completely understood, desire for the five kinds of sensual stimulation is completely understood. When desire for the five kinds of sensual stimulation is completely understood, the noble disciple is bound by no fetter that might return them again to this world.”
So… man, those were the days. When you go on a road trip and take your children with you, not because you enjoyed their company, but just in case your car broke down you could have a snack while you were waiting for the tow truck. But, as shocking an idea as it is, it’s meant to convey something in particular. It hints at how monastics are given the freedom to consider things based on their renunciant lifestyle. Most people don’t have the luxury of considering food as a hindrance. Most people are really into food, to be quite honest. But if you’re a monastic, you get to see the downsides of food too. It’s not just the gathering of the food, or the preparing of the food, or the eating of the food, or the cleaning up of the dishes. It’s all of those things. Every single meal entails all of these steps. It’s a tremendous burden for a small pleasure.
Furthermore, the food is destroyed by this process. You have a shiny, juicy red apple. You can’t just rub it on your head and somehow get the nutrition. You have to chew it, crunch it, cover it in saliva, swallow it, digest it in order to get any nutriment from it. That completely destroys it. It turns it from a bright red, juicy, shiny apple into feces. It’s a time-honored process. Anything that you consume in this way will be destroyed and lost forever. Do you relate that way to your food? No, mostly, we’re so excited about it. It looks so good. The moment it passes into the mouth though we want to stop thinking about it. It stops being food and it starts starts being a pleasant lump in our stomach. Sukha vedana, pleasant feeling. Right? It’s already changed from food-out-there to me-in-here.
This sutta is offering a way of relating to food as a sort of desperate necessity. You have to eat. You’re crossing a desert. The nature of human beings is that you have to eat almost constantly. Every day you’ll have to eat something in order to survive. You’re on a dangerous, perilous journey. If there wasn’t a spiritual practice for liberation, then whether you lived or died would not be a big deal in the grand scheme of things. You’d just die and be reborn and keep traveling around the wheel of saṃsāra. If you starved for some noble reason you might even go to a better place.
But because there is a path, one more day of surviving might give you one more opportunity to grow. One more day is an opportunity to practice the eightfold path. Then this necessity of eating makes more sense. You’re eating just to get through the next day and have that much more opportunity to understand the Buddha’s teaching and to get to the end of suffering.
It’s not that monks look at every every piece of bacon that might come into their alms bowl and say, “This is just like the flesh of my own son, so dear to me.” No. They’re realists. They say, “This is bacon. It was an animal’s flesh. It belonged to a living being. I eat this not for fun, not for pleasure, not for adornment, not for beautification of the body. This is just to get through the day.” Then when they’ve had enough food they just set the rest aside.
The Buddha says in regards to physical food that to fully understand this means there is no fetter by which one could be reborn in this world. He is saying to fully understand the nature of physical food is to attain Non-Returning. You could still be reborn in a purely mental state, in the Non-Returner realms, based on whatever kamma you still have left. This means you would have no set form. You would be a formless being that could take on a form at will and disregard it equally at will. That is because to understand physical food is to understand that you are not eating anything. Only the body, the form, eats. Everything else is just a mental process of dependency.
The body eats. The mind cannot. Any mental state that arises that says, “I am hungry. I need to eat. I am eating. I have been nourished. I’m gonna get through another day…” All of those mind states are missing the point. It’s the body doing those things, not the mind.
The body is just the body. At the point of understanding this fully the mind sees the body as it does all other forms… basically the same. The only reason one who attains Non-returner here continues to live out their lifespan on earth, still taking care of themselves, is because consciousness is still arising at the place of the body. It started life tethered to it and life continues with that as condition. Consciousness doesn’t stop arising at this body just because they’ve abandoned that layer of suffering. Their consciousness is arising dependent on this body because of the condition of birth. When they die, then that condition will cease. Not a problem that needs to be dealt with. It fixes itself.
Onward to our second nutriment.
The Flayed Cow
The sutta continues, “And how should you regard sense contact as fuel? Suppose there was a flayed cow (a cow that’s had its skin removed). If that cow were to stand by a wall, creatures like ants and flies on the wall would bite her. If she were to stand under a tree, creatures on the tree would bite her. If she were to stand in the water, creatures in the water would bite her. If she stands out in the open, creatures in the open air would bite her. Wherever that flayed cow would stand the creatures there would bite her.
“I say this is how you should regard sense contact as fuel. When contact as a nutriment is completely understood, the three kinds of vedāna (feelings) are completely understood. When the three feelings are completely understood, the noble disciple has nothing further to do, I say.”
This is where, for the next three nutriments, the Buddha is basically saying to actually comprehend this is to attain full enlightenment. There is nothing more to be understood or done. That is because these last three nutriments deal with the basic factors conditioning the mind itself. Our most subtle fetters will be associated with these.
What is sense contact? Well, there is the eye, and there are visible objects. And when the visible object meets the eye, there is the arising of eye consciousness. This meeting of the two we call contact. Contact is dependent on two things: the sense base and an appropriate object. These two coming together produce contact. Now if contact does not occur then the consciousness of that sense base does not occur. If the consciousness does not occur, then feeling about that contact doesn’t occur. Feeling requires consciousness, consciousness requires contact, contact requires the sense base meeting an object.
Where is the nutriment? Well, we can see this work in our daily life. Has anyone ever been trying to meditate when somebody, a family member or neighbor, has a television on somewhere nearby? What does that feel like? Right? It’s awful, isn’t it? You’re trying to keep the mind steady and focused and to be in the present moment and something nearby is talking and crashing and trying to sell something and playing stressful music. It seems to just smack into your sense bases and grab you. It wrenches you away from the peace you are trying to cultivate and it feels like you have no control to resist whatsoever.
We’ve been conditioned by years of media to regard televisions as attractive objects. This is in general – some people hate televisions, but if so they hate them for this exact reason. The television networks work very hard to make every thing that appears, every second, to be attention-grabbing. It’s not really our fault that the pull is so hard to resist. This is the result of over a hundred years of intense research into grabbing people’s attention and playing on their cravings. If we have even the tiniest craving in our mind for sights or sounds then the television can get its hooks in us.
Suppose, knowing this, you decide to avoid televisions altogether. Suppose you were to say, “If I were to get close to a television, my mind would be crawling as though it had ants all over it. I would have no control over that icky feeling of restlessness. I won’t even go near one. Ever. I won’t even sit on a couch in the same room.” This would be good. This would be an important first step. But it’s not one we can sustain indefinitely. Televisions are everywhere – in stores and airports and in almost every home. Sooner or later we would have to be around one. How could we get through that experience without having more craving arise?
There is an inquiry a meditator might make, one that wouldn’t occur to the average person. Recognizing that, “If there is contact there is going to be feeling, and if there is feeling, that feeling might lead to craving,” we might ask: “Are sense bases necessary? If having the sense base, the eye or ear or nose, leads to contact and feeling and craving and a loss of peace – what if we remove the sense base from the equation? If I’m feeling a craving for visible sights and I shut my eyes so I can’t see any, won’t that fix the problem?”
Unfortunately just removing the physical sense base isn’t a solution. Plucking out our eye removes our vision and all future sense contacts but does not remove the craving we might feel to see things. Don’t we still yearn for sights when our eyes our closed? This is because the previous eye contacts, the ones in memory, can still generate feelings and craving. When we are trying to meditate near a television and we can only hear it – don’t we still see pictures in our mind? Don’t we find ourselves subconsciously following the plot of the program? Any sort of contact could trigger this and memory or imagination would fill in the blanks.
We need a different way. We have to understand more about where the craving is coming from.
If we were hungry, we would probably not want to go and sit down next to a McDonald’s where they’re venting the smell of burgers and french fries into the air. They’re actually allowed by law to vent their grills in that way so that they can draw people in. That would not be a good place to sit. If sitting there increased craving it would be our own fault for sitting there.
But are the smells attractive by themselves, or does the mind make them so? When we’ve had a huge meal and our belly is absolutely stuffed, does food smell good? If you can’t remember I’ll remind you – it does not. Smelling more food at that time makes us feel sick. We can’t eat another bite. We don’t even want to think about food. Yet after some time when we digest and become hungry again suddenly that food smells attractive once more. The sense contact of the food was always producing feeling one way or another. When there is hunger that feeling might be pleasant. When the feeling is pleasant craving may arise.
Back to the television, we might ask the question, “What is the hunger that makes the sights and sounds of the television pleasant?” This is where we start to see the cycle of sense contact as a nutriment. The hunger for a sense contact makes it attractive and the attractive feeling from it increases our hunger. If we deal with the hunger at least the sense contacts might feel neutral. Then, if the sense base were closed the mind wouldn’t still yearn for it.
At the entry to samādhi (the first jhāna), the sense bases have gone quiet. Their contact no longer has an effect on the mind. This is a step that Buddhist meditators naturally work towards as they develop their mindfulness. It might not come right away but the Buddha describes the dhamma like a shore leading into the ocean – it ever slopes and inclines towards the depths. The longer we practice the more we head in this direction.
In samādhi the sense bases go quiet not because we’ve forced them shut but because they’ve become irrelevant. They became irrelevant because we’ve dealt with the craving in the mind. The mind is internally composed and focused on a mental object independent of the five senses, so gradually we just stop paying attention to the senses. This is where we can get an experience of not having either the sense bases or the hunger for them. Wow, is that peaceful! It is just so much better. It turns out you can have “experience” that is not coming through the five senses. And when you do it that way, there’s a lot of suffering that does not occur. All the suffering that is dependent on the five senses doesn’t arise here.
Coming out of this experience, a meditator could reflect. They could see the mind without the five senses and then see the five senses as they arise again. They would see for themselves the five senses are not an essential part of us. They are just things. They are just more things arising and ceasing in the mental landscape.
To understand this is to lose all interest and infatuation with the sense bases themselves, to have no possession over them, to see them as just phenomena. The eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, the body… it’s just a sphere of activity. It’s not “me”. It’s just like a TV screen that you don’t want to draw too close to. You would attain a layer of permanent seclusion from these things. “When I really need to, I’ll look at the TV screen and figure out what’s going on. But if I don’t need to, I’ll just just hang back. It’s just a lot of dukkha.” That would be fully understanding this nutriment.
When the craving is gone the mind no longer yearns for the sense bases when they have ceased. The mind no longer works to grow and multiply around them when they are active. Understanding this cycle is understanding the nature of feeling, and if you can fully understand feeling in this way nothing more needs to be done.
THE PIT OF GLOWING COALS
The sutta continues, “And how should we regard mental intention (manosañcetanā), as a nutriment? Suppose there is a pit of glowing coals deeper than a man’s height, filled with glowing coals that neither flamed nor smoked. Then a person would come along who wants to live and doesn’t want to die, who wants to be happy and recoils from pain. (That’s basically everybody.) Two strong men would grab that person by the arms and drag them towards that pit of glowing coals. Then that person’s intention and wish would be to get far away. Why is that? Because that person would think, ‘If I fall into that pit of glowing coals, this will result in my death or deadly pain’. And I say that this is how you should regard mental intention as nutriment. When mental intention as nutriment is completely understood, the three cravings are completely understood. When the three cravings are completely understood, the noble disciple has nothing further to do in this life.”
Manosañcetanā is a part of the mind that evaluates experiences in order to find ways to repeat the experience or have more experiences.
Say we see a red apple, and we suspect that there’s a crisp, juicy, sweet experience to be had. The sight of the apple draws us into thinking about cutting it and juicing it and chewing it and savoring it. All of those activities were derived from drawing close to the one object of the apple. Or we see a couch and suddenly we feel weary. We think, “Oh, it’s been such a long day. What if I were to sit?” If we were wise and mindful we would say, “The moment I sit down on that couch, all sorts of mental activities will come flooding in. I’ll procrastinate on all the duties I still have left to do today. I’ll want to have a snack. I’ll want to watch something on my phone.” All of these things might happen based on a couch. We’re just asking for it when we draw close. That’s what a couch is for.
This is how you could start to look at central points of habit energy. In general, a busy place where you go to eat, like a restaurant, is not a place where you could hang out quietly or meditate or read suttas. It is the place for eating. When you go there you’re bombarded with all kinds of different sense contacts. There’s dishes and smells and people coming and going. You go there when you want food but it doesn’t make sense to be there otherwise.
To approach the boundary of a deeply ingrained habit is like standing at the edge of a volcano. Even if you don’t fall in you will walk around the rim carefully as though you’re on a precarious cliff. One wrong move and down you would go. Habits are like this. They don’t harm us when we are far away but if we draw too close it’s all gravity and suffering.
If you’ve ever dealt with an addiction you might understand this much better. If you’re a recovered alcoholic then you probably had to learn through hard experience that you needed to make a drastic lifestyle change, and that you cannot be a recovered alcoholic who hangs out at bars. It just doesn’t work that way. You have to avoid the bars and the clubs and the places where alcohol is sold and everybody is drinking. Those places connect to and embolden all of the mental activities that you are trying to overcome. If you are a smoker and you’re trying to quit smoking, you probably don’t go hang out in the smoking area with other smokers. It would make no sense to hang out there just for fun when you’re trying not to be tempted. It would encourage and give nutriment to all of your thoughts associated with smoking, the very thing you’re trying to overcome. If you’re dieting and trying to lose weight, you would be very careful about how you relate to your refrigerator. You might wrap a chain around the handle to slow any approach you would have to it and give you time to think when a craving hits. You would begin to look at it as a pit of glowing coals, a source of danger.
This is exactly what the Buddha is suggesting. Once you get too close to a source of danger, it just starts working on its own. That’s the nature of volition and habits. It’s not that the urge to drink alcohol, the urge to smoke, the urge to eat are coming out of nowhere. You chose those cravings through choosing a place or activity that’s close and is connected to those activities.
These are serious examples, obvious examples, where somebody feels really motivated to make a change. In those cases they realize they have to change their lifestyle in order to be successful. But throughout our lives there are things that cause us low-level suffering. When we’re close to the source of a minor suffering, we tend to tell ourselves, “It’s really not that bad.” Or, “Maybe this time it won’t be that bad.” Even though every other time it has been bad, we would say it’s a low-level suffering. “I can tolerate it. I’ll just dip my toe in and then I’ll get back out. It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.” Would you dip your toe into a red hot pit of glowing coals? Would even one toe’s worth be tolerable?
All of our worst and most self-destructive habits started as low-level sufferings. That very act of waving it off and tolerating the consequences were how they eventually got so strong. So it’s always a bad idea to cultivate a bad habit. We should see them all in the same way, as a pit of coals. When we do, we start to have the thought when we draw close to a habit, “I know that this will be suffering. What if I don’t even toy with it? What if I don’t even get close to it?“
ONE HUNDRED SPEARS
Finally, we have the nutriment of consciousness. The sutta continues, “How should you regard consciousness as a nutriment? Suppose guards were to arrest a bandit, a criminal, and present them to the king saying, ‘Your majesty: this is a bandit, a criminal. Punish him as you like.’ The king would say, ‘Go, my men, and strike this man in the morning with 100 spears.’ The king’s men would do as they were told.
“Then at midday, the king would say, ‘Well, how is it? How’s that man?’ They’d say, ‘Well, he’s still alive, your majesty.’ So the king would say, ‘Well, go and strike the man in the middle of the day with 100 spears.’ The men would do as they were told. And then in the late afternoon, the king would say, ‘So how is he?’ ‘He’s still alive, your majesty.’ And the king would say, ‘Go, my men, and strike this man in the late afternoon with 100 spears.’ And the king’s men would do as they were told.
“What do you think, mendicants? Would that man experience pain and distress from being struck with 300 spears each day?”
“Yes, venerable sir. That man would experience pain and distress from being struck with one spear, let alone 300 spears.”
“I say that is how you should regard consciousness as a nutriment. When consciousness as a nutriment is completely understood, name and form is completely understood. When name and form are completely understood, a noble disciple has nothing further to do, I say.”
This is how we finish the sutta, with this image of the spears. The Buddha is saying that consciousness – something seemingly essential, seemingly neutral – is actually the cause of our suffering. If we weren’t conscious, we wouldn’t suffer. Setting everything else aside, that’s true isn’t it? When you put it that way it seems really weird and somehow obvious. Yet, at the same time, what in practical terms can we do about it?
What do we tell ourselves about consciousness? Do we tell ourselves, “I can’t not be conscious. I just gotta leave that nutriment alone. I’ll just practice all the other stuff in the eightfold path and get to that one later.”
What’s being suggested by talking about this nutriment is not starting off shunning all consciousness completely. It’s a tall order to be expected to use your consciousness to work towards not having consciousness at all. Instead, we start here by looking at what kind of conscious experience is totally suffering, totally painful, totally unpleasant. When we find one we can ask, “Do I know this is suffering and nevertheless set myself up for it?”
Again, we’re looking at something like a pain in the knee. We keep thinking, “Oh, my knee hurts. Oh, my knee hurts.” We dwell on it and ruminate about it. Maybe we forget for awhile but the second we notice it we go right back to obsessing about it. Because we want it gone but at the same time we can’t stop thinking about it.
Then somebody says, “Hey, do you wanna go for a walk?” Because it’s so fresh in your mind you would think, “Nooo! I mustn’t! I can’t! My knee hurts.” That’ll be your first thought before everything else. All of this – all of the pain, all the prevarication, all of the avoiding of activities, all of the cringing away from things that might make it worse – all of these are dependent on the awareness of that pain in the knee.
Just like the sense bases, can we think about the pain in the knee when we’re not thinking about the knee? No. When we’re not thinking about the knee, we’re not thinking about the pain in the knee. At that point in time the consciousness, the knee consciousness, is not arising. Dependent on that, the pain is not arising. Depending on that, all of those mental states will not arise. We might think the knee is constant and the pain is constant. But in reality when we forget about it for a time, it doesn’t exist. It’s the using the knee or thinking about the knee or being asked to do something that uses a knee that brings the awareness back and with it thoughts of pain.
To understand this requires us to acknowledge that everything we tell ourselves is “us,” everything that we see as an important and unavoidable component of us, might only be us when we think it is. Otherwise it’s either just stuff or doesn’t even exist. When we contemplate long and hard on this it leads to the realization that there IS no “us”. Whatever we are in any given moment is just whatever components are present in that moment. When we’re not thinking about our knee, it doesn’t exist in the mind. It’s still there in the body but the mind is not the body; the mind is only sometimes aware of the body. The body is a living organism, bound by physical laws, and it continues to move on. It’s what the Buddha calls old kamma. But what’s going on in the mind is active. We don’t have to generate our mental idea of the body every moment. And if we don’t have attention on the body, at whatever moment this attention is not present, the “us” wouldn’t include a body and all the things dependent on it.
It really matters what you’re paying attention to and why you’re paying attention to it. Because in the realm of consciousness, with attention comes consequences.
Here’s a modern example that seems pretty obvious: the internet.
Bored, Disinterested, and Stabbed
It works with all the nutriments because there’s so many ways that something like this causes suffering. We usually think of the internet as one of the greatest inventions of all time, don’t we? Instant access to all information everywhere – isn’t that great?
It would be great if it was inherently good to have more information. If all information made you smarter, calmer, and happier then the more information the better. There is this modern conceit that we can see or hear about something and then decide how we feel about it after. In reality the feeling happens at the point of contact. The moment we see or hear something, we start feeling. And then we are on a ride.
Every time you enter the internet it’s like turning on the television. You might go looking for a particular piece of information, but what you actually receive is a carefully curated experience designed to make you feel intense emotion, whether pleasant or painful or neutral. It doesn’t seem to matter much which kind as long as the feelings are strong. Because strong feelings can motivate strong craving.
Throughout the experience of surfing through the internet you might find you are getting bored, overwhelmed, or disinterested. But usually a voice in the mind says, “One more click. One more.” Your mind tells you that it’s necessary that you do this and that a good experience is one click away. That all the information is making you better. Why would you actually believe this? Why would you tell yourself that this experience is necessary? If you were to relate to that experience like getting stabbed with a spear, then you would definitely enter that experience with extreme caution.
If somebody said, “Oh, did you hear about what so-and-so said…?” a wise person might say, “No, I didn’t. And usually that kind of information makes me angry. Why would I want to hear about that? I don’t want to look into that… why would I seek out information that would make me feel awful?”
Very necessarily, if you practiced caution like this you would probably lose membership in some social groups. You would no longer be able to hold the right kinds of conversations. But if those social groups were based on and founded on suffering maybe that would be a good thing. This is a voluntary choice, a voluntary exploration we can undertake. As meditators, we already have a sense that entertainment will rattle our minds. This is taking that principle a step further. It’s understanding that anything the mind makes contact with affects it. And if the mind keeps returning to something we should start to ask why. Why was the mind in the place where that painful contact occurred? Why did it go there?
Even if somebody forced you to stop using the internet, if you personally didn’t come to the understanding that the activity was suffering then the desire for it would still remain. There are people all over the world who don’t have access to the internet and it doesn’t make them free of craving. Hand them a smartphone and watch. It is not the access but the desire that leads you towards these nutriments, that draws you close to them. Desire is the reason you incline towards them and you get stuck. Or in this case, struck. You get too close to the thing and you get stabbed.
So just give it up. Give up that experience now and then. Maybe that consciousness will still arise. Maybe every once in a while you feel the craving to hear some news, or you do hear something about what somebody said on social media. But you didn’t seek it out. You didn’t look for it. You just receive it. It arises. You feel it. And then it goes its own way. There’s no nutriment. There’s no dwelling on it. There’s no building an identity around it. It’s not enough for the craving mind to survive on. There’s no fuel. There’s no binding agent to keep it in your mind. It just slides right back out.
That’s what saṃsāra is. It’s not about the moment to moment experiences but about the patterns, the endless repeating cycles. We’re not in this cycle of endless rebirth by accident. We choose this every moment. Saṃsara is something we’re attached to. Dependent on. Until we realize it and stop giving it fuel.
Okay. So that’s some basis to contemplate this thing we call nutriment. Look for it in your meditations; ask yourself the questions.