Beauty (Sobhanakaranā Dhammā)

Transcribed by Viet Hung

Below is a short dhamma talk taught by Yuttadhammo Bhikkhu from Sri Lanka, on Jul 30, 2024. You can find the original video posted on Youtube below and it is followed with the transcript.

So, the dhammā for today is called the sobhanakaranā dhammā. The dhammās that make one beautiful. That’s what they’re called in the Thai texts. The Buddha didn’t ever use, use this word to describe them. But they get it from a story that the Buddha told. Two different stories, actually. Stories about kings who, in spite of their great power, majesty, still acted in ways that made them beautiful. They possessed these qualities, and even though they could crush any opposition and force people to act according to their will and always get their way, they were able to act in a much more beautiful way. And the Buddha said, how much more beautiful would it be or something like to that extent, something to that end, how much greater would it be if you were to, as monks, have these qualities? He said this to monks when they were quarreling, when they didn’t have very beautiful or pleasant qualities. He mentioned these two dhammās. The two dhammās that the Buddha said lead one to become beautiful are khanti and soracca. Khanti is patience. And soracca, soracca is composure. These are the two dhammās the Buddha said make one beautiful… the Thai Dhamma, the Thai books explain as being the dhammā that make one beautiful, which is supported to some extent by the Buddhist teaching.

So, the Buddha didn’t spend a lot of time talking about beauty. The word he, the verb he used that they take this from was sobhita, which means be beautiful or be radiant or be splendiferous, I don’t know. How great it would be if you were, if you were to have these, if you were to have these qualities. But it gives us a chance to talk about beauty. Beauty is something interesting, something contentious, something that obviously, as Buddhists, we are somewhat wary of. And the Buddha was somewhat wary of something that the Buddha pointed out could be dangerous and could be a delusion, right? He talked about the delusion of thinking that the body is beautiful. And so we can separate beauty from attraction, if we want to get a good, positive definition of beauty. It’s not the same as something being attractive to call it beautiful. You don’t aren’t necessarily attracted to everything that you find beautiful. Of course, physical beauty is subjective and not very valuable. And yet, for practical purposes, being beautiful can be of great value, not necessarily being attractive. But when we talk about the beauty of things like harmony, the beauty of wisdom, or the beauty of the two qualities that the Buddha pointed out: patience… how beautiful it is to see patience in a human being… or how beautiful it is to see composure, someone who is composed without any bad behavior.

There’s a practical value in that for Buddhism. Because these two, especially these two qualities, are something remarkable in how they are possessed by those who have deep practice in the Buddha’s teaching. A person who has cultivated the Buddha’s teaching to any appreciable degree, has a level of patience that is hard to find in the world, has a level of composure that is hard to find in the world. Not reactionary, not listless or prone to bouts of fits of anger or greed or delusion. And the value is that it creates confidence. Of course, one of the greatest attractions, one of the greatest pulls towards any spiritual teaching is the quality of its practitioners. We sometimes warn people about being too caught up by a charismatic or persuasive teacher, but it’s hard to ignore the pull of someone who has positive qualities. When we find a teacher or a community that possesses these qualities, when we involve ourselves with the community and find that the practitioners of a certain practice have these qualities, it’s a great pull. So meaning it’s something that attracts people from the outside if they see us with these qualities: composed, patient. These are two of the many qualities that attract people to the Buddhist teaching, attract people to our practice, attract people to a given meditation center.

So, beauty is some, is a word that you could use to talk about goodness, to talk about quality and attainment that a person who has some level of attainment in the Buddha’s teaching, has gained a measure of beauty. And that beauty is valuable, not as valuable as the qualities themselves, but the beauty itself has value in creating confidence. And it has value for the individual. Because we use the word beauty in opposition of what is ugly. And what is ugly? It’s a way of describing things that are a cause for discomfort. It relates to those things that cause stress and suffering. So we could say wisdom, again, wisdom is beautiful. Goodness is beautiful. These are beautiful things. So true beauty can be seen as a very good thing. More important, we can talk about the two dhammā themselves. These are two very valuable dhammā that are not just valuable because of the bringing of beauty, though that’s what they’re sort of singled out as providing. They are in an integral part of the Buddha’s teaching. Patience… Patience is directly or intrinsically core in the Buddha’s teaching. It’s not some auxiliary teaching. It’s a very core part of the practice of the Buddha’s teaching. It’s another way of describing the practice of mindfulness.

There are two kinds of patience. One is called adhivāsana khanti, patients as forbearance. Adhi means like on top of. Vāsana comes from the verb vas, the root vas, which means dwell or stay. So it means to stay with it or to stay on it. And this refers to the ability to persist in the face of unpleasant situations. So this relates specifically to things which are unpleasant and unbearable, a very powerful and important aspect of the cultivation of mindfulness. New meditators are quickly confronted with their lack of patience, their lack of ability to tolerate certain experiences, the most obvious ones pain, suffering. It comes as a shock that they’re expected to face these experiences when a very deeply ingrained knowledge or understanding that they thought was universal is that pain is something to be avoided. Pain is something to be not tolerated. And yet very much of our experience in the world teaches us the necessity, the importance of tolerating pain and mindfulness is very much at the front of that, at the height of that, the most… the highest sort of experience based learning is the practice of mindfulness. So at the moment of experiencing pain or could even be unpleasant sounds, loud noises, repetitive noises, experiences that you would rather shy away from… The practice of facing those things that you don’t want to face, this is an intrinsic part of the practice of mindfulness, right? One thing we’re constantly reminding, especially new meditators, of is the importance and the value of facing things as a means of changing your perspective. The problem isn’t the experience itself, it’s your inability to tolerate it. So most new meditators are confronted with this lack of patience, this inability to tolerate things. And an intrinsic part of the transformation is to stop needing to avoid and to fix your problems, to change your experiences and the ability to face them mindfully and peacefully. And so the cultivation of mindfulness is another… Another way of saying it is the development of patience, the ability to face without stress or suffering, things that other people find hard to face. In the end, it no longer looks like patience. It simply is experience. And since the things no longer bother you, as you’ve transformed your perspective of them, there’s no longer a need to be patient. But this process of transformation feels very much like patience.

The Buddha said, “Khanti paramaṃ tapo titikkhā”. He said patience, this “titikkhā” means staying with things, is the highest form of austerity. So in the time of the Buddha, people would torture themselves. We know that… You hear these stories about ascetics in the time of the Buddha, who would stand on one leg or lie in the sun or lie on fire or lie on thorns or those sorts of things. The idea was that if you… If you inflict great suffering on yourself, you would lose your desire for sensual pleasures. It doesn’t actually work that way, but this was the idea that you would be able to burn out the defilements in your body by torturing yourself. So in essence, the Buddha said, the only really good sort of torture is patience, because it actually does what these ascetics were seeking to do. When you’re mindful, when you face things, it does actually dry up your your defilements because you’re no longer triggering this habit of “I must fix this. I must get what I want”, of constantly chasing after better experiences than you have. So this is adhivāsana khanti.

The second one is anulomika khanti and this is the higher one. Anuloma means conformity, literally means with the grain. So when you start to go with the grain, like when you’re cutting wood, you have to cut with the grain or it won’t split. Wood has a grain in it. That was that’s where the anuloma. Loma is the grain. Anulomika khanti means patience that conforms with the truth. And this is where I said that it eventually doesn’t even look like patience anymore. This patience comes from wisdom, and it doesn’t simply relate to unpleasant experiences. This sort of patience relates to all experiences. As the practice of mindfulness develops, you not only gain a sense of patience, but you gain an understanding that nothing is worth reacting to. This stress and suffering that comes from liking and disliking and judging and clinging and identifying is worthless, is meaningless. And you gain a patience towards good things, a patience towards all things. So anything that’s attractive is no longer attractive, no longer attracts you, no longer excites you. You gain a profound sense of freedom that nothing has any pull over you or any sway, or there’s no longer a dependency on anything. “It must be like this, or I won’t be happy. It must not be like that, or I won’t be happy”. You have this patience which conforms with reality. Like for me to say, I want the world to be anything but what it is right now is for me to be in dissonance with reality, right? I want it to be some other way. That means you’re no longer conforming with experience. True patience is to say, not “it should be like this, or it should be like this”, but it is like this, right? Our practice of mindfulness is teaching us the way of living to be with reality, just as it is, without any judgment or reaction. And this leads to what we call anuloma. Anuloma means the conformity. So what we’re building up to through our practice of ordinary patience and of course, more importantly, mindfulness is ultimately this state of of patience as not reacting to anything.

The other dhammā, soracca which I translated as composure. Composure because the… That’s not any word I got from a dictionary. But if you look at the root of the word. Soracca, racca comes from the root rac, I think, which the verb relates to restraint, being restrained, holding yourself back. And so comes from su, so it comes from suratto. Suratta is a word that you do see more often soracca. Soracca is not a word that you hear very often. But it’s just one form of this root with the prefix attached to it. But the idea behind it is the non… and this is directly how the Buddha described it, the non performance of bodily or verbal transgressions or… Actually that’s the commentary. I don’t think the Buddha did explain it. Anyway, it’s in the text… The texts say that what we mean by composure is the non transgression. So, you know, there’s the three kinds of defilements, the defilements that are transgression, the defilements that are just in the mind and the defilements that haven’t arisen yet. So the three levels. So basically it’s ethics. It’s the sila part of the training. But soracca as something that makes one beautiful… The idea is that a person who is not breaking precepts, but is in general of good behavior. So suratta means, well, restrained. Well restrained can be simply sitting still as opposed to fidgeting. When someone says something you don’t like, do not grimace do, not, you know, be upset, be flustered. I’ve seen people talking and I’ve seen people listening to someone scold them and become very red in the face and upset, you know. This is not being composed, right? The idea behind composure and the relationship to beauty or splendor or what makes people appreciate you.

So the the commentary also says that it is equivalent to Arahant-ship. And you could say the same thing about patience that someone who was truly patient, the only one who is truly patient, is an enlightened being. And that truly beautiful being is, well, an enlightened being. So, another valuable aspect of thinking of these dhammās is how they encourage us, or how they help us to appreciate what it would be like to be enlightened, that an enlightened being would be fully composed and perfectly patient. And so while we can’t practice immediately to be fully enlightened, we can… My teacher said something like pretend, not pretend but emulate is the word, emulate them. And it’s valuable to think about what it’s like to be enlightened. For example, you know, we artificially cultivate composure. I’m not composed naturally. Naturally, I want to fidget. Naturally, I want to get upset when people say things. But I will understand and appreciate the value or know the the greatness of composure and how a great being is composed, in order to understand what I’m lacking and in order to know how to direct my mind. So when I want to get upset, when I want to do things and say things to hurt others and to retaliate and so on, I know that that’s not the way. That’s only a bad habit in me. That’s not the way forward. That’s not a valuable way to act, and so on. And beauty works the same way. We know that we’re not fully beautiful, that sometimes we’re ugly. We say things that make us ugly. We do things that make us ugly. We act and we deport ourselves in ways that are not, not as beautiful as they might be when we compare them to enlightened beings. But that’s valuable in that it reminds us of the ugly qualities of mind that we still have, and of the importance of working these out. So a valuable teaching, I think. Something to remember and something to help us in our spreading of the dhammā as we share these dhammā with others. And when we talk about beauty, we can say, well, patience and composure, that’s what makes a person truly beautiful. These kind of teachings are valuable to, especially people who haven’t heard about the Buddha’s teaching, to get an idea of what the Buddha taught. So that’s the Dhamma for today.

Viet Hung | A Happiness pursuer | Author of The Happiness Journal, Tản mạn về Hạnh phúc and NGẪM CAFÉ
Sách tôi dịch: Trái tim thiền Phật giáo, Thiền cho người mới bắt đầu, Nổi loạn và tự do, Bài chú giải Kinh Mangala Sutta, Sức mạnh của sự hoài nghi và thiền chánh niệm (Vipassana), Những nguyên lý để sống hạnh phúc, Chúng ta đang sống vì điều gì?, Sự cho đi và Tình thương yêu, “Lấy tâm mình làm bạn của chính mình”, Cảm xúc, Thiền với sự hình dung, Căng thẳng, Bản chất cao thượng
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