As a lay follower of the Buddha, I sometimes think about enlightenment.
“What does it feel like to live as an enlightened person?” I ask myself before I close my eyes and sit down to meditate. It’s not a question that comes up often in my daily practice. But when it does, my thoughts and feelings always lead me to the same word: “freedom.” Freedom from greed. Freedom from hate. Freedom from delusion.
For many of us (myself included), it’s an unattainable goal. It’s something we read about — and maybe even talk about — but never really understand. And yet the Pali Canon is full of hints that tell us what enlightenment actually means. This particular passage from the Buddhist scripture, for example, contains the Buddha’s cryptic message to Bahiya. The story goes that the wandering ascetic sought advice from the founder of Buddhism and attained enlightenment upon hearing these words:
When in the seen will be only what is seen, in the heard only what is heard, in the sensed only what is sensed, in the known only what is known, you will not be by that; when you are not by that, you will not be therein; when you are not therein, you will be neither here, nor there, nor in between. This is the end of dukkha.
In his book “Satipatthana: A Direct Path to Realization,” scholar-monk Bhikkhu Analayo writes that the Buddha’s message describes mindful sense restraint — a practice that guards our senses and prevents negative thoughts by directing mindfulness to the first stages of perceptual process:
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This instruction directs bare awareness to whatever is seen, heard, sensed, or cognized. Maintaining bare awareness in this way prevents the mind evaluating and proliferating the raw data of sense perception. This corresponds to an interception of the first stages in the sequence of the perceptual process, through mindful attention. Here, bare awareness simply registers whatever arises at a sense door without giving rise to biased forms of cognition and to unwholesome thoughts and associations.
Then he draws our attention to specific words and expressions and explains what they mean:
According to the Bahiya instruction, by maintaining [mindfulness] at all sense doors one will not be “by that”, which suggests not being carried away by the conditioned sequence of the perceptual process, thereby not modifying the experience through subjective biases and distorted cognitions. Not being carried away, one is not “therein” by way of subjective participation and identification.
Analayo concludes by writing that this type of mastery is usually ascribed to arahants, a term that refers to monks who attained enlightenment:
Such absence of unnecessary proliferation is characteristic of the cognitions of arahants, who are no longer influenced by subjective biases and who cognize phenomena without self-reference. Free from craving and proliferations, they are not identified with either “here” (senses), or “there” (objects), or “in between” (consciousness), resulting in freedom from any type of becoming.
Of course, mindful sense restraint can be developed — albeit to a lesser degree — by anyone who practices Buddhist meditation. In daily life, it can improve our interactions with other people and the way we interpret and respond to what we see, hear, and feel in our immediate environment. Complement with the article on what is mindful sense restraint in Buddhism and then revisit our guides that explain how to practice satipatthana — a type of meditation that, among other things, can help you develop mindful sense restraint.
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About the book’s author: Ven. Bhikkhu Analayo was born in 1962 in Germany, was ordained in 1995 in Sri Lanka, and completed his PhD on satipatthana at the University of Peradeniya in 2000. At present, he is mainly engaged in the practice of meditation, and among other things contributes to the Encyclopaedia of Buddhism. He has authored several books on Buddhist practice, including “Satipatthana” and “Compassion and Emptiness in Early Buddhist Meditation”.
I’m a freelance writer and mindfulness advocate behind this blog. I started my meditation practice in 2014, and in 2017 I launched this website to share what I learn with others. Here are the three things you can do here:
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