Được dạy bởi Sư Yuttadhammo Bhikkhu
Dịch Việt: Việt Hùng
Lời người dịch: Trong các bài Hỏi & Đáp như vậy, tôi sẽ chủ yếu dịch thoát ý, chứ không chặt chữ. Một mặt đây là việc tôi làm để có thể nghiền ngẫm phần trả lời của Sư Yuttadhammo. Một mặt, tôi chia sẻ lại đây, và hy vọng nó hữu ích cho các thiền sinh Vipassana tham khảo.
Bài pháp ngắn này nằm trong chương trình Monk Radio và được đăng tải trên Youtube vào ngày 19/03/2015. Phần English transcript ở cuối bài. Link Youtube của bài nói ở đây: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKFSgacZHdc
Mặc dù đã cố gắng tốt nhất trong khả năng của mình, tôi chắc chắn không thể ghi xuống được một cách chính xác 100% tất cả các từ ngữ, đặc biệt là các từ Pali mà Sư đề cập trong bài pháp. Tôi sẽ tiếp tục cập nhật bản ghi, bất cứ khi nào tôi thấy được những điểm còn thiếu sót.
Con xin thành kính đảnh lễ tạ ơn Sư Yuttadhammo về bài pháp thoại ngắn quí báu này. Con nguyện cho Sư được mọi thuận lợi và sức khoẻ trong hành trình tâm linh của Sư.
Các bạn có thể tìm hiểu thêm thông tin của Sư Yuttadhammo Bhikkhu và các lời dạy của Sư tại trang web: https://www.sirimangalo.org/.
English Transcript (quickly jotting down)
Quetion: When I meditate, I always want to investigate my thought, why I’m feeling that, what is the reason of my fear? What is the cause of this? Is it a good thing to do?
You have to understand what the purpose of meditation is. That’s finding out the cause of things is not the true purpose of meditation. It’s interesting. But we have to see the flaw in what you’re saying. The reality is like a river, everything, it goes in order, right? But on the other hand, it’s quite complex. So to say X is the cause of Y is a simplistic understanding of how things work. If you sit there and what you’re talking about is saying, ‘OK, I’m I’m angry this morning’. And the cause is that I was unmindful, you know, and I allowed experience to lead to anger. That’s that’s one part of the story. The question is, why were you unmindful in the first place? And what happened in between the time when you were unmindful and the time when you got angry? There’s many things going on. Pinpointing one specific thing as saying this is a cause, intellectually, it has some value then because you say, oh, well, then I should be more mindful.
And that sort of thing does happen in meditation. But that’s not meditation. It doesn’t solve the problem. In fact, meditation does begin by identifying momentary causes. So from one moment to the next, seeing what cause precedes what result. But it’s still a very limited, very preliminary basic understanding. That understanding is also not enough. It’s not the true reason for practicing. It’s not the highest insight. Highest insight is to see that things arise based on a cause, to see things are dependently reason. That’s it, not what was the cause, but to see the things arising and ceasing it comes and then it goes. So that’s to see impermanence. It’s also to see dukkha, which means an inability to satisfy because it’s impermanent and non self to see that there’s no essence to it. It’s about the Dhamma itself, about the experience itself. That’s what we’re most interested in. Because the cause of suffering is simply attachment to things, so cause and effect doesn’t directly, indirectly can be useful, but directly does not tie into that. The craving is simply caused by seeing that things are stable, satisfying and controllable.
Once you see that things are not that, then you let go of them. And when you let go of them, you become free. When you’re free, you say I’m free. Nothing more needs to be done. So is it useful? Yes, arguably that has some intellectual benefit because it’s going to say, well, then I shouldn’t do that or I shouldn’t judge myself. It allows you to be a sort of a meta analysis that allows you to adjust your practice. This is what we call [Pali word] and allows you to succeed. So there’s a benefit to it. I don’t think that it’s a replacement to meditation. It’s not, it’s a non meditative process. At that moment, you’re actually not meditating. Because you’re not observing things simply as they are. You’re reflecting on the mirror intellectualizing about them. You’re reflecting, processing your memories of things which in fact can be flawed. But that’s not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is it’s memories. This happened like this happened like this, which is all in the past. And it cannot be a replacement for true insight, so not wrong, not bad, but not in segment.