The Four Floods The term ‘floods’ speaks for itself: the overwhelmed, swept-along feeling that comes as we get plunged into stress and suffering. In the Buddhist texts, the word is sometimes used in the broad sense of the mind being overwhelmed by sorrow, lamentation and despair in full-blown dukkha, or to the existential dukkha of our being carried along in the flood of ageing, sickness and death. On occasion the floods refer to five key hindrances that clog the mind: sense craving, ill-will, dullness and torpor, restless worry and doubt. Meditators in particular know how any of these five can hinder the mind from realizing the clarity and peace that they are aiming for. In their most specific use however, the floods (ogha) refer to four currents, also called ‘outflows’ (āsavā), that run underneath the bubbling stream of mental activity. There they remain unseen but yet direct the flow of that stream. Sounds eerie? Well if you sit still in silence for a while, with no particular preoccupation, you’ll notice the mind starts wandering ... to this and that ... towards things you plan or have to do, to memories of what you’ve done, good or bad, or had done to you ... to ideas of things that you’d like to have. At times you may find yourself reliving a fragment of your history, or anticipating a scene that you’re going to have to deal with. And along with that come judgements, opinions of what you should have done, or about the other person. All of this has a certain reality, though based on a few scanty observations. Yet this is the stream of mental activity that absorbs our attention and informs our actions — and it arises unbidden, and seems unstoppable. We have little, if any, control over it, and the stream is so usual that it’s difficult to imagine how we would sense ourselves without it. In fact, the only conclusion that this inner stream presents, as it takes us into past and future, desires and problems, is the implication that this uncontrollable wandering on (samsāra) is what we are.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 05:41:24 +0000
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