The Heretic Sage

This is a series of articles on Ven. Katukurunde Ñāṇananda Thera Published by Bhikkhu Yogananda

“The wandering of the mind is not like that of phys­i­cal things. It’s a cir­cuitous jour­ney of a mind and its object. With the tak­ing up of one object by a mind, a sort of whirling begins; when one end is lost from grasp, the other end is taken up: itthabā­vaññathāb­hāvaṃ saṃsāraṃ n’ātivattati – this-ness and otherwise-ness, that’s all there is in saṃsāra. Our minds keep wan­der­ing away but keep com­ing back to this upādinna. Who likes to let go of it, to die? It always comes back to that which is held dearly. At the last moment, when Māra comes to snatch it away, one does not want to give it up, so there is a con­test: the strug­gle for life. The Bud­dha asked us to just give it up.

“Think of any kind of exis­tence, and you will see that it depends on grasp­ing. There is no ‘thing’ that exists on its own. Here again, I’m reminded of something Dr. W.S. Karunaratne said: ‘Existence has got to be rel­a­tive; there is no absolute existence.’ But the world thinks of uni­tary things exist­ing on their own. They ask, ‘why, even when I don’t look at this thing, doesn’t it con­tinue exist­ing’? But really there is only a diṭṭha, a seen. There is only a suta, a heard. But the moment we think of a seen ‘thing’, a heard ‘thing’, we are trapped. We cre­ate things with maññanā, ideation.

“The prob­lem with ‘things’ is solved in the Bāhiya Sutta: – Khuddaka Nikaya, Udāna, there are only diṭṭha, sutta, muta, viññāta, noth­ing else. That is the theme in the Kālakārāma Sutta too. As long as one does maññanā about these, one would be deluded.”

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