BSWA Retreat March 2008
Ranjith Daluwatta
Recordings at the 9 day Retreat at Jana Grove BSWA Perth, Australia conducted by Ven Ajahn Brahmavamso. The Three Knowledges (Extracted from a Talk by Ven Brahm..) The First Knowledge. When the Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree, according to tradition he gained three knowledge’s. The first knowledge was the memory of past lives. When you get close to the mind, there are certain powers that come with that experience. The powers are no more than an ability, a dexterity with the use of the mind. It’s like the difference between a dog that has been running wild and a dog that has been well trained. You can tell the trained dog to go and pick up the newspaper. It wags its tail and goes and picks up the newspaper for you. Some people have got their dogs so well trained that they can actually pick up the telephone. Maybe they could answer the telephone as well, then that would really save you a lot of time! When you get to these deep states of meditation often, the mind becomes well trained. One of the things which the Buddha did (and which you can do when you get into deep meditation) is tell the mind to go back to the past. What’s your earliest memory? Go back further and further and further. Monks who do this get early memories of their childhood. They even get memories of the moment they were born. Sometimes people say that when you’re born, you have no consciousness because the neuron’s aren’t developed yet, or something like that. But when you re-experience your birth, you know that that is just not true. When the memory of your own birth appears, it is just like you are there and you experience all feelings of that birth. Then you can ask yourself for an even earlier memory, and then you get back into your past lives. That’s what the Buddha did under the Bodhi tree. Through meditation you know rebirth, you know your own past lives. This is just what happens with the mind and you know how it happens. That was the first knowledge that the Buddha had. The Second Knowledge. The second knowledge was to know how you are reborn. Why you are reborn. Where you are reborn. This is the Law of Kamma . Someone was showing me a book today which, unfortunately, we had for free distribution but which I hadn’t seen before. It had some really weird ideas in it about the Law of Kamma . I think what it said was that if you read one of the Suttas while you are lying on the ground, you will be reborn with a bad back, or something like that. Just stupid ideas! Kamma is much more complex than that and it depends mostly upon the quality of your intention. The movement of the mind itself is what determines the Kamma , not just the act, but why and where it came from. You can see this in meditation, but also you can see just how that mind gets fully liberated. The Third Knowledge. The third knowledge was the ending of suffering. With understanding of The Four Noble Truths, you realise the Way and what enlightenment really means. It means freedom! The mind is liberated, especially liberated from the body, liberated not just from the suffering of the body but liberated from the happiness of the body as well. That means that there is no more inclination for sexuality, no fear of pain, no grief over the destruction of the body, no ill will and no fear of criticism. Why do people get worried about bad words that are said? Only because of ego. They take something to be themselves. Just imagine for a moment being free from all of those things. What would that be like, no fear, no craving, no need to move from this moment – In other words nothing missing, and nothing left to do, nowhere to go because you’re completely happy right here no matter what happens! This is what we mean by enlightenment. This meditation is the source of the Buddha’s enlightenment and the source of every person’s enlightenment. There is no enlightenment without that meditation. This is why Buddhism is far more than a psychotherapy. It’s far more than a philosophy. It’s far more than a religion. It goes deep into the nature of being, and it is accessible to all people. You know how to meditate. Teachers are giving all the instructions free without any charge. Do you want to do it? Usually the answer is, “Maybe tomorrow but not today.” Never the less because the seeds have been placed in the mind, because the meditation has begun already, there is an interest. Already there is a sense of this enlightenment, a fascination for peace, and you will not be able to resist that path. You may be able to put it off for a while, maybe for lifetimes, but it’s a strange thing that, as someone said to me many years ago, “When you hear these teachings you can’t discard them.” You just can’t forget them. They aren’t telling you what to believe. They aren’t giving you a theory which is merely rational. But they are pointing you to something which you can understand and experience for yourself, and you get intuitions of this the deeper you go. To read the full article CLICK HERE