Linked Discourses 35.136
- At Devadaha
Liking Sights (1st)
“Mendicants, gods and humans like sights, they love them and enjoy them.
But when sights perish, fade away, and cease, gods and humans live in suffering.
Gods and humans like sounds …
smells …
tastes …
touches …
ideas, they love them and enjoy them.
But when ideas perish, fade away, and cease, gods and humans live in suffering.
The Realized One has truly understood the origin, disappearance, gratification, drawback, and escape of sights, so he doesn’t like, love, or enjoy them.
When sights perish, fade away, and cease, the Realized One lives happily.
The Realized One has truly understood the origin, disappearance, gratification, drawback, and escape of sounds …
smells …
tastes …
touches …
ideas, so he doesn’t like, love, or enjoy them.
When ideas perish, fade away, and cease, the Realized One lives happily.”
That is what the Buddha said.
Then the Holy One, the Teacher, went on to say:
“Sights, sounds, tastes, smells,
touches and ideas, the lot of them—
they’re likable, desirable, and pleasurable
as long as you can say that they exist.
For all the world with its gods,
this is what they deem happiness.
And where they cease
is deemed as suffering for them.
The noble ones have seen that happiness
is the cessation of substantial reality.
This insight by those who see
contradicts the whole world.
What others say is happiness
the noble ones say is suffering.
What others say is suffering
the noble ones know as happiness.
See, this teaching is hard to understand,
it confuses the ignorant.
There is darkness for the shrouded;
blackness for those who don’t see.
But the good are open;
like light for those who see.
Though close, they do not understand,
the seekers inexpert in the teaching.
They’re mired in desire for continued existence,
flowing along the stream of lives,
mired in Māra’s dominion:
this teaching isn’t easy for them to understand.
Who, apart from the noble ones,
is qualified to understand this state?
Having rightly understood this state,
the undefiled are fully extinguished.”