The Buddha was talking with Uttara, a young pupil of a
teacher called Parasariya.
“Uttara, does Parasariya teach you how to control your
senses?” asked the Buddha.
“Yes, Parasariya does indeed teach us how to control our
senses.”
“And how does he do this?”
“We are taught not to see material forms with the eye nor
hear sounds with the ear. This is how we are trained to control our senses.”
“But, in that case, Uttara, the blind and the deaf must be
in total control of their senses, for the one does not see and the other does
not hear,” the Buddha replied.
Uttara was silent.
After several moments, the Buddha continued, “Well, Uttara,
Parasariya teaches you one way and here we teach a different way. Let me tell
you what we teach. When a yogi sees a form with the eye, usually a feeling of
liking or disliking comes into being. The yogi understands that liking or
disliking has arisen but that either one is not inevitable but is conditioned
and dependent upon myriad causes and conditions. So, the yogi cultivates a
state in which there is equanimity and finds that in so doing, the liking or
disliking begins to fade and the yogi can then see things as they are. This is
how the yogi can control their senses. That is what we teach.”
---Majjhima Nikaya
I am often asked what are the
differences between the yoga taught by the Buddha and that taught by Patanjali
or the Classical Yoga tradition. While there are quite a few, this passage
points to a fairly central difference in actual practice. But first, it’s
helpful to remember that the earliest definitions of the word yoga emphasized the practice of yoking. And this “yoking” was itself
described as the practice of meditation. A common analogy of yoking the senses,
breath and mind was to parallel it to the yoking of horses to a chariot, where
the horses were the senses, the charioteer the egoic self and the owner of the
chariot, sitting within, the ‘True Self.’ The implication was that the horses
or senses, given free reign would cause havoc and needed to be restrained.
In Classical Yoga, pratyahara, the fifth limb of the
eightfold path described in the Yoga-Sutra
of Patanjali, was often defined as “withdrawal” and described as sensory
inhibition. The most popular image for this process of sensory inhibition is
offered in the Goraksha-Paddhati (2.24):
“As the tortoise retracts its limbs into the middle of the body, so the yogin
should withdraw the senses into himself.” Of course there are other
understandings of the process of pratyahara
as in “the pleasant state of consciousness that beholds the Self in all
things” as stated in the Tejo-Bindu-Upanishad
(1.34) but in the contemporary yoga world it is the former view of the
tortoise withdrawing inwardly that is most encountered. As Georg Feuerstein
said to a group of us in 2002, “For Patanjali, yoga was a process of
in-up-and-out.”
In this passage from the Majjhima Nikaya, Uttara is describing
his teacher’s teaching on sense control as a process of shutting down the
process of perception: “We are taught not to see material forms with the eye
nor hear sounds with the ear.” It might be easy to miss the Buddha’s wry sense
of humor as he responds, “But, in that case, Uttara, the blind and the deaf
must be in total control of their senses.” I can picture poor Uttara standing
there, now mute in the face of this subtle smack-down!
The dramatic tension exists in
those moments where Uttara remains silent, until the Buddha rescues him with
his teaching. And note, he doesn’t completely negate Parasariya’s teaching as “wrong,”
but rather just says “Parasariya teaches you one way and here we teach a
different way. Let me tell you what we teach.”
And what the Buddha teaches is
what my teachers more accurately describe as “guarding the senses” in that the
senses themselves are not “controlled” or “yoked” but the conditioned
reactivity to the sense perceptions.
In other passages, the Buddha exhorts his students: “In the seeing let there
just be the seeing; in the hearing let there just be the hearing.” What the
Buddha is getting at is that just about immediately upon a sense organ making
contact with a sense object (eyes making contact with form/color etc. or ears
making contact with sound) and the arising of sense consciousness, a
conditioned reaction of a feeling-tone of pleasant or unpleasant arises.
Without mindfulness, that conditioned reaction will condition and determine how
we then react through action that is either clingingly desirous or aversive.
The feeling-tone will present a kind of ‘veil’ that prevents us from actually
seeing or hearing with more objectivity and clarity. We react to our
feeling-tone and not the actual sense object (form or sound, in the case of eye
and ear).
With mindfulness, we can stop,
take a backward step from the conditioned reactivity and then choose a more
skillful and beneficial way of responding. While Parasariya’s way may lead to a
deep samadhi-like state of peace, it ultimately is very limiting as there can
be no engagement with the world of “sound and vision.” With the practice of satipatthana (mindfulness), the yogi
does not have to disassociate from the world, but rather changes the way they
relate to the world. From conditioned reactivity to creative response, the
practice of mindfulness can cultivate greater freedom here and now in the realm
of inter-relationship, or perhaps even more the reality of “interbeing.”
