Beyond Why We Must Escape: How Do We Escape?
Over the past several episodes, I have discussed why we must escape our wishes and desires, and why we must break through the shells of the countless views surrounding us. If the eye is dark, the whole body is steeped in darkness, and a person lost in delusion writhes in pain. That is why I have said: escape. But if we say only why one must escape and do not explain how, a person cannot awaken. We must also say how to remove the beam from one’s own eye and how to break through the shell of hardened views.
The Buddha did not hide that method behind difficulty. Buddhism feels difficult only because it is hard to encounter the Dharma properly taught. Once we do, why we must get out and how we can get out become perfectly clear. What I want to discuss today is the first of those methods.
Dependent Origination: Suffering Also Has a Cause
The starting point is the law of conditions, or dependent origination. We say that even your meeting with me is due to conditions. It means that causes existed, those causes became related, and the result called this meeting occurred. The Buddha’s awakening was no different. Where and in what environment he was born, from whom and what he learned, what sort of character he had, and what he experienced were causes that became related and produced awakening as a result. One does not awaken in isolation simply because one is exceptional. We are all connected within causes and conditions. Our learning the Buddha’s Dharma follows conditions, and our awakening again and escaping suffering also follow conditions.
To say that dependent origination is the core of the Buddha’s teaching means, conversely, that we can escape in accordance with dependent origination. If there is a result, there is a cause. Suffering has a cause, and joy has a cause. If the cause of suffering lies in my mind, I must look into the mind and resolve that cause. If the cause lies outside or in society, society and the surrounding conditions must be changed. Some conditions may be beyond anything I can do. Those too must be seen just as they are.
The Buddha’s Dharma is by no means a teaching that tells us to look only inside ourselves. Because the world moves according to dependent origination, we must see where the cause lies. If the problem is physical, its physical cause must be treated. If you catch COVID, you cannot cure it merely by concentrating the mind and unifying your attention. That is why modern medicine is needed. The mind and body, of course, affect one another. A peaceful mind can help the body, while stress can affect the body and cause illness. We must see both sides together, although here I will examine suffering that arises from within.
Observation and Stopping, and Seeing Things as They Are
Buddhist practice has two axes. One is observation, gwan (觀), seeing things as they are; the other is stopping, ji (止). If inner confusion and delusion put a beam in the eye and keep us from seeing properly, we must stop our thoughts and suspend judgment. Stopping is an excellent way to escape suffering and is itself a kind of escape. Today, however, my focus is observation: seeing the outward result and following it inward to the cause that produced it.
The Inner Flame Appears in Actions and Words
In the background photograph used in the video, many people are photographing the same subject. Some hold their cameras vertically, some horizontally, and each uses a different camera and composition. Even before the same scene, what people see and how they photograph it differ. The way the inner flame appears outwardly is the same. It differs from person to person, but the flame continually appears in actions and words.
A person cannot hide what is inside for long. Inner standards and desires—“I like that beautiful woman,” “I want to boast,” “I want to possess that”—become the principles of action and emerge outwardly. One may deceive others for a day or two, but one cannot deceive oneself, and over time a person’s actions and words reveal the inside exactly as it is. Just as many people each take a photograph, the words we utter and the actions we repeat are photographs showing our inner world. As my father, in the preceding story, revealed his resentment, sense of betrayal, and other inner feelings through drinking, people eventually show outwardly what is within them.
Jealousy That Suddenly Arose at a Basketball Game
Let me tell a personal story about how I practiced observation. Around age twenty-three, I liked basketball because of the influence of a high-school friend. At a tournament, I wanted to play, but I did not make either the regular roster or the substitutes selected by skill. At first I clapped and cheered “Go, our department!” among the women and men. But as I watched the game, the thoughts “I want to play too” and “I wish they would notice me too” appeared, followed abruptly by envy, competitiveness, and jealousy. My mood sank, and I became depressed.
At the time, I had just begun to set foot in Buddhism. When my feelings suddenly changed, I did not let them pass but looked at that depression. After the game, on the bus home, I stared blankly out the window and then turned my gaze inward. Why had that feeling arisen? Why did I want to join that game? Why did being left out upset me? Why did seeing other people cheer the players make me depressed?
As I kept asking, a thought struck my head hard: I wanted to look impressive. I wanted people to recognize me, and when that expectation was not met, I felt hurt. In the place where women cheered and men applauded, saying “Great job,” I wanted attention too. Only then did I see that a powerful need for recognition was lurking inside me. “I was captured by a thought like this.” The shock was enough to make my head ring.
The Need for Recognition Behind Exaggeration and Lies
I did not stop there but asked when it had begun. Then the patterns of my ordinary behavior appeared one after another. I remembered telling friends that I had done thirty push-ups when I had actually done only twenty-five, or inflating three hours of sleep into a claim that I had slept only two. By magnifying a modest achievement and saying, “I did this much” or “I am very good at that,” I wanted people to say, “You are an impressive person.” I exaggerated because I wanted to look good, and that exaggeration was, in fact, lying.
Not only in high school and university but since middle school, I had developed the habit of embellishing my past actions to nearly everyone I met. Even when I vaguely knew after speaking that I had exaggerated, the next similar situation made another exaggeration leap from my mouth. Looking more deeply, I saw that even some of my efforts to do something well had arisen from the desire to impress others. The need for recognition was not an occasional slip of the tongue; it was a principle that had long moved my speech and conduct.
The Child Who Wanted a Certificate and Applause
As I followed that cause, scenes from my life unfolded like a panorama. Even the reason I had studied hard in middle school became connected. At my elementary-school graduation—then called national school—other children received perfect-attendance certificates and various awards, while I sat there without one. I must have told my mother that I wanted a certificate too. When I entered middle school, she told me that I could receive one simply by studying well. I began to study because I wanted to stand before others, receive a certificate, and be applauded.
I began my first year of middle school ranked around thirtieth in the class and studied until I was around second by the end of the year. I received merit certificates according to my scores, and I felt proud each time I went forward to receive one. Because it felt good to study well and be recognized, I studied harder. Thus the wish to look good before others became the pattern and principle of my behavior for a long time. Until I recognized it at twenty-three, that inner flame kept moving my words and actions.
Seeing that I had lived bound by how I appeared to other people was shocking enough to bring tears. Yet change came immediately after that recognition. The habit of exaggerating whenever I spoke, of elevating myself, and of doing things to gain recognition began to disappear. Once I saw directly how large the need for recognition had been and how it had operated as the principle of my conduct, I could escape that attachment.
True Renunciation Means Leaving the Familiar Cave
We usually think of renunciation as leaving one’s home. Here, however, “home” also means the habits in which I have lived comfortably, the thoughts I have taken for granted, and the cave of views that has covered and hardened me.
Bound to a cave and covered by countless things, a hardened person is lost in delusion.
True renunciation is to stop treating the familiar as self-evident, look within, and escape it. Even if someone shaves their head, wears monastic robes, and eats one meal a day, that person has not renounced if they cannot return inward and see what binds them. Monastic status does not guarantee renunciation. Renunciation is to see my desires and ego, the habits of my past, and the cave in which I have lived, and then to come out of it.
The route inward is not vague. The behavioral patterns that appear outwardly through cause and effect, the direction of our thoughts, what we want to do and believe we must do, our words, and our states of mind are guides. Depression, joy, sorrow, resentment, anger, rage, envy, and jealousy all appear outwardly. If we dismiss them as familiar, we simply live hardened like an obstinate old know-it-all. Learning Buddhism is when observation finally begins. We look at actions and feelings like photographs taken by a camera and ask: “Why did I say that?” “Why did I act that way?” “Why do I want to do this?” “Why do I think I must do this?”
If the cause of suffering is not an external condition but an inner one, suffering and changes in emotion are the occasion to begin questioning. If we do not know the cause, we cannot understand the result; if we do not understand it, we cannot resolve it. Buddhism requires this kind of scientific thinking. Do not stop at “I am simply miserable.” Take one step back, look at the result, and then follow its cause inward. The moment we directly recognize even one flame of ego writhing inside, we escape it. This is the Buddha’s method of working one’s way out into escape—liberation.
Escaping One Thing Changes a Life
A true Buddhist is someone whose life changes by recognizing even one inner pattern. The moment one sees, “I have lived bound to that,” the pattern and principle of one’s conduct change. That moment itself is renunciation and escape. A person who sees which cave they inhabit and what binds them, and escapes even one of those things, enters the stream. Someone who experiences their own life actually changing has entered the stream of the waters of awakening: a stream-enterer. Once a person recognizes even one thing within, life begins to change little by little. That is a Buddhist life, and such a person is a renunciant.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.