by Tang Huyen

"The Buddhist path is unloading, whereas all concerns about the past and future are loading."

You make an elementary mistake, of confusing the world of facts and the world of meanings and values (which includes states that are beyond meanings and values, but which yet are not facts in the sense that trees are facts). In talking to people, the Buddha has to refer to the world of facts, or presumed facts, but the goal that he teaches, the ending of suffering, has scarcely anything to do with facts, other than coming to peace with them, whatever they are or are not. Whether there is a next world or not, one attains to peace with oneself, which then makes the issue of the next world moot. It even makes the issue of the present world moot.

The Buddha explicitly inveighs against thinking about past and future.

"When a practitioner cuts without remainder all views about the prior limit (i.e., related to the beginning of the world and to his past lives), cuts without remainder all views about the posterior limit (i.e., related to the end of the world and to his future lives), he becomes awakened." SA, 60, 15c.

The Pali equivalents are in MN, II, 233 (102), DN, I, 12–29 (1), DN, III, 137 (29) and the Sanskrit fragments are in Turfanfunde, IV, 156–157.

"But, Kaccana, let the past be, let the future be (titthatu pubbanto titthatu aparanto). Let there come an intelligent man, guileless, honest, straight, and I instruct him, if he follows my instruction, he will before long know by himself, see by himself." MN, II, 44 (80), MA, 209, 787b–c.

The above Pali "titthatu pubbanto titthatu aparanto" can also be understood as: put down the past, put down the future, drop the past, drop the future, leave them alone, don't touch them. The Buddhist path is unloading, whereas all concerns about the past and future are loading (and that is where you fail wretchedly). So to put down all those extraneous concerns and to concentrate on meditation is how views, frameworks or whatever else can be set aside temporarily, until they can be set aside definitively, with no remainder, at arhat-ship.

Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, II, 14: "Even if you were to live three thousand years or thirty thousand, nevertheless remember that no one loses another life than this which he is living, nor lives any other life than this which he is losing. So the shortest comes to the same thing as the longest. For the present is equal for all, and so what is passing away is equal; and this shows that what is being lost is merely a moment. No one could lose what is past or what is future. For how could any one deprive him of what he does not have? Always remember, then, these two things: one, that everything everlastingly is of the same kind and cyclically recurrent, and it makes no difference whether one should see the same things for a hundred years or for two hundred or for an infinite time. Two, that the longest lived and the quickest to die have an equal loss. For it is the present alone of which one will be deprived, since this is the only thing that he has, and no one loses what he does not have."

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on 27 September 2008, in the "Real men don't eat quiche" thread. Author: Tang Huyen. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

The phrase "titthatu pubbanto titthatu aparanto" (MN 80 / the Vekhanassa Sutta) is one of the most compressed Buddhist formulations of present-focus: let the past stand, let the future stand — drop them, and attend to what is here. TH reads this as a structural description of the whole path: unloading. All views about past lives and future worlds are exactly what must be cut without remainder at arhat-ship. The Marcus Aurelius citation (Meditations II.14) provides the Stoic parallel — no one loses what they do not have. Companion piece to "The Fathom-Long Body" (same day).

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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