Goenkaji, every time assistant teachers enter and leave the meditation hall, Dhamma servers bow down. The students are watching this, and when they offer Dhamma service they do the same thing. It has become almost a ritual. Could you please advise on this? In pure Dhamma no ritual at all should be allowed. Dhamma and ritual cannot co-exist. I find nothing wrong in somebody’s paying respect to an assistant teacher, provided this person is paying respect to Dhamma. An assistant teacher or whoever sits on the Dhamma seat—assistant or senior assistant or deputy or teacher, anybody—is representing the Buddha, the teachings of the Buddha, the Dhamma and the entire lineage of the teachers of Vipassana. He or she lives a life of Dhamma and is serving people in Dhamma. One develops a feeling of devotion, of gratitude towards this person. Bowing down is a meritorious deed. Actually one is bowing down to Dhamma, paying respect to Dhamma.But when this becomes merely a formal rite or ritual, it goes totally against Dhamma. If someone bows out of respect and others feel, If I do not bow then people will consider me a very discourteous person, so I must also bow, again, there is no Dhamma. To act with Dhamma is always to have a pure volition in the mind. Otherwise it is just a mechanical exercise: You bow down and give good exercise to your back! If these back exercises are to be done, better do them in your own room.If somebody does not bow because at that particular moment he or she has not developed the volition of devotion towards Dhamma, I feel happy, Very good. Bowing must be with this volition of paying respect to Dhamma, not to the individual.Even the Buddha did not like people paying respect to him. He said, You may be with me all the time, catching one corner of my robe, yet you are far away from me. But if you are practising Dhamma with purity of mind, though you may be thousands of miles away, you are near me.Yo dhammaṃ passati so maṃ passati, yo maṃ passati so dhammaṃ passati. One who is observing Dhamma—that means observing Dhamma inside—is observing me, is seeing me. If one is not observing Dhamma, then bowing down is merely a mad exercise. The Venerable Webu Sayadaw, in the booklet entitled The Essential Practice, says ānāpānasati is the shortcut to nibbāna. How is this so if he is observing sensations only in one small spot? And yet you advocate the need to observe the full realm of vedanā. Could you explain this, please? A very good question. There is a lot of misunderstanding by people who do not understand how this tradition was maintained in the neighbouring country [Burma]. The Venerable Webu Sayadaw was a product of a particular tradition of this technique maintained in that country, and that tradition says that a student must start with Anapana. There are many objects with which you can start to develop your samādhi. When you develop samādhi with Anapana, this is the shortcut to nibbāna— as he very rightly said.His teaching—because I met him a number of times and I was in close proximity with him—his way of teaching was as follows: Keep observing this area, keep observing the respiration. A time will come when the sensation will become very clear. And a time will come when automatically this sensation will start spreading to the whole body. The sensation has to spread in the whole body. Unless it spreads to the whole body, you can’t reach the nibbānic stage, because you can’t experience bhaṅga. Bhaṅga is not just experiencing sensation in a small part of the body: The entire nāma and rūpa must get totally dissolved. This is bhaṅga. The Venerable Webu Sayadaw didn’t instruct anybody by saying, You will reach nibbāna without bhaṅga. Such a view is a wrong understanding of his teaching - SNG @ vridhamma.org/uploadedfiles/BenefitofMany.pdf
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 11:54:21 +0000
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