                      THE TASTE OF FREEDOM

                               by
                          Bhikkhu Bodhi

           
                     Bodhi Leaves No. B. 71
                                     
                  BUDDHIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY
                  KANDY              SRI LANKA


                        
          Copyright 1976 Buddhist Publication Society

                             * * *

                     DharmaNet Edition 1994
                                     
    This electronic edition is offered for free distribution
        via DharmaNet by arrangement with the publisher.
                                     
           Transcribed for DharmaNet by W.D. Savage

                    DharmaNet International
             P.O. Box 4951, Berkeley CA 94704-4951
                                     

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                      THE TASTE OF FREEDOM


 The clarion call of our present age is, without doubt, the call for
 freedom. Perhaps at no time in the past history of mankind so much as
 at present has the cry for freedom sounded so widely and so urgently,
 perhaps never before has it penetrated so deeply into the fabric of
 human existence.

   In response to man's quest for freedom, far-reaching changes have
 been wrought in almost every sphere of his activity -- political,
 social, cultural and religious. The vast empires which once sprawled
 over the earth, engulfing like huge mythical sea-monsters the
 continents in their grasp, have crumbled away and disintegrated, as the
 peoples over whom they reigned have risen up to repossess their native
 lands -- in the name of independence, liberty and self-rule.

   Old political forms such as monarchy and oligarchy have given way to
 democracy -- government by the people -- because every man demands the
 right to contribute his voice to the direction of his collective life.
 Long-standing social institutions which kept man enthralled since
 before the dawn of history -- slavery, serfdom, the caste-system --
 have now disappeared, or are rapidly disappearing, while accounts of
 liberation movements of one sort or another daily deck the headlines of
 our newspapers and crowd the pages of our popular journals.
 
   The arts, too, bear testimony to this quest for greater freedom: free
 verse in poetry, abstract expression in painting, and atonal
 composition in music, are just a few of the innovations which have
 toppled restrictive traditional structures to give the artist open
 space in his drive for self-expression. Even religion has not been able
 to claim immunity from this expanding frontier of liberation. No longer
 can systems of belief and codes of conduct justify themselves, as in
 the past, on the grounds that they are commanded by God, sanctified by
 scripture, or prescribed by the priesthood. They must now be prepared
 to stand out in the open, shorn of their veils of sanctity, exposed to
 the critical thrust of the contemporary thinker who assumes himself the
 right to free inquiry and takes his own reason and experience for his
 court of final appeal. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and
 freedom of action have become the watchwords of our public life,
 freedom of thought and freedom of conscience the watchwords of our
 private life. In any form in which it obtains, freedom is guarded as
 our most precious possession, more valuable than life itself. "Give me
 liberty or give me death," an American patriot exclaimed two hundred
 years ago. The succeeding centuries have echoed his demand.

    As though in response to mankind's call for wider frontiers of
 freedom, the Buddha offers to the world His Teaching, the Dhamma, as a
 pathway to liberation as applicable today as it was when first
 proclaimed twenty-five centuries ago.

   "Just as in the great ocean there is but one taste -- the taste of
 salt -- so in this Doctrine and Discipline (//dhammavinaya//) there is
 but one taste -- the taste of freedom": with these words the Buddha
 vouches for the emancipating quality of His doctrine.

   Whether one samples water taken from the surface of the ocean, or
 from its middling region, or from its depths, the taste of the water is
 in every case the same -- the taste of salt. And again, whether one
 drinks but a thimble-full of ocean water, or a glass-full, or a
 bucket-full, the same salty taste is present throughout. Analogously
 with the Buddha's Teaching, a single flavor -- the flavor of freedom
 (//vimuttirasa//) -- pervades the entire Doctrine and Discipline, from
 its beginning to its end, from its gentle surface to its unfathomable
 depths. Whether one samples the Dhamma at its more elementary level --
 in the practice of generosity and moral discipline, in acts of devotion
 and piety, in conduct governed by reverence, courtesy, and
 loving-kindness; or at its intermediate level -- in the taintless
 supramundane knowledge and deliverance realized by the liberated saint,
 in every case the taste is the same -- the taste of freedom.
 
   If one practices the Dhamma to a limited extent, leading a house-hold
 life in accordance with righteous principles, then one experiences in
 return a limited measure of freedom; if one practices the Dhamma to a
 fuller extent, going forth into the homeless state of monkhood,
 dwelling in seclusion adorned with the virtues of a recluse,
 contemplating the rise and fall of all conditioned things, then one
 experiences a fuller measure of freedom; and if one practices the
 Dhamma to its consummation, realising in this present life the goal of
 final deliverance, then one experiences a freedom that is measureless.

   At every level the flavor of the Teaching is of a single nature, the
 flavor of freedom. It is only the degree to which this flavor is
 enjoyed that differs, and the difference in degree is precisely
 proportional to the extent of one's practice. Practise a little Dhamma
 and one reaps a little freedom, practice abundant Dhamma and one reaps
 abundant freedom. The Dhamma brings its own reward of freedom, always
 with the exactness of scientific law.

   Since the Dhamma proposes to provide a freedom as complete and
 perfect as any the modern world might envisage, a fundamental
 congruence appears to obtain between man's aspiration for expanding
 horizons of liberty and the possibilities he might realize through the
 practice of the Buddha's Teaching. Nevertheless, despite this
 concordance of ends, when our contemporaries first encounter the Dhamma
 they often find themselves confronted at the outset by one particular
 feature which, clashing with their familiar modes of thought, strikes
 them intellectually as a contradiction and emotionally as a stumbling
 block. This is the fact that while the Dhamma purports to be a pathway
 to liberation, a Teaching pervaded throughout by `the taste of
 freedom,' it yet requires from its followers the practice of a regimen
 that seems the very antithesis of freedom -- a regimen built upon
 discipline, restraint, and self-control. "On the one hand we seek
 freedom," our contemporaries object, "and on the other we are told that
 to reach this freedom our deeds, words, and thoughts must be curbed and
 controlled." What are we to make of this astonishing thesis the
 Buddha's Teaching appears to advance: that to achieve freedom, freedom
 must be curtailed? Can freedom as an end really be achieved by means
 that involve the very denial of freedom?

   The solution to this seeming paradox lies in the distinction between
 two kinds of freedom -- between freedom as license and freedom as
 spiritual autonomy. Contemporary man, for the most part, identifies
 freedom with license. For him, freedom means the license to pursue
 undisturbed his impulses, passions and whims. To be free, he believes,
 he must be at liberty to do whatever he wants, to say whatever he wants
 and to think whatever he wants. Every restriction laid upon this
 license he sees as an encroachment upon his freedom; hence a practical
 regimen calling for restraint of deed, word, and thought, for
 discipline and self-control, strikes him as a form of bondage. But the
 freedom spoken of in the Buddha's Teaching is not the same as license.
 The freedom to which the Buddha points is spiritual freedom -- an
 inward autonomy of the mind which follows upon the destruction of the
 defilements, manifests itself in an emancipation from the mould of
 impulsive and compulsive patterns of behavior, and culminates in final
 deliverance from samsara, the round of repeated birth and death.
 
   In contrast to license, spiritual freedom cannot be acquired by
 external means. It can only be attained inwardly, through a course of
 training requiring the renunciation of passion and impulse in the
 interest of a higher end. The spiritual autonomy that emerges from this
 struggle is the ultimate triumph over all confinement and
 self-limitation; but the victory can never be achieved without
 conforming to the requirements of the contest -- requirements that
 include restraint, control, discipline and, as the final price, the
 surrender of self-assertive desire.

   In order to bring this notion of freedom into clearer focus, let us
 approach it via its opposite condition, the state of bondage, and begin
 by considering a case of extreme physical confinement. Suppose there is
 a man locked away in a prison, in a cell with dense stone walls and
 sturdy steel bars. He is tied to a chair -- his wrists bound together
 by rope behind his back, his feet locked in shackles, his eyes covered
 by a blindfold and his mouth by a gag. Suppose that one day the rope is
 unfastened, the shackles loosened, the blindfold and gag removed. Now
 the man is at liberty to move about the cell, to stretch his limbs, to
 speak, and to see. But though at first he might imagine that he is
 free, it would not take him long to realize that true freedom is still
 as distant as the clear blue sky beyond the stoned and steel bars of
 his cell.

   But suppose, next, that we release the man from prison, set him up as
 a middle-class householder, and restore to him his full body of rights
 as a citizen of the state. Now he can enjoy the social and political
 freedom he lacked as a prisoner; he can vote, work, and travel as he
 likes, can even hold public office. But there still remains -- in the
 form of his responsibilities, his burden of duties, his limitations of
 power, pleasure, and prestige -- a painful discrepancy between the
 freedom of mastery for which he might personally yearn, and the
 actuality of the situation which circumstances has doled out to him as
 his drearisome lot. So let us, as a further step, lift our man up from
 this middle-class routine, and install him, to his pleasant surprise
 upon the throne of a world monarch, a universal emperor exercising
 sovereignty over all the earth. Let us place him in a magnificent
 palace, surrounded by a hundred wives more beautiful than
 lotus-flowers, possessed of limitless resources of gold, land, and
 gems, endowed with the most sublime pleasures of the five senses. All
 power is his, all enjoyment, fame, glory, and wealth. He needs only
 express his will for it to be taken as command, need only utter a wish
 for it to be translated into deed. No obstruction to his freedom of
 license remains. But still the question stands: is he truly free? Let
 us consider the issue at a deeper level.

   Three kinds of feelings have been pointed out by the Buddha: pleasant
 feeling, painful feeling, and neutral feeling, i.e. feeling which is
 neither pleasant nor painful. These three classes exhaust the totality
 of feeling, and one feeling of one class must be present on any given
 occasion of experience. Again, three mental factors have been singled
 out by the Buddha as the subjective counterparts of the three classes
 of feeling and described by him as //anusaya//, latent tendencies which
 have been lying dormant in the subconscious mental continua of sentient
 beings since beginningless time, always ready to crop up into a state
 of manifestation when an appropriate stimulus is encountered, and to
 subside again into the state of dormancy when the impact of the
 stimulus has worn off.

   These three mental factors are lust (//raga//), repugnance
 (//patigha//), and ignorance (//avijja//), psychological equivalents of
 the unwholesome roots of greed (//lobha//), hatred (//dosa//), and
 delusion (//moha//). When a worldling, with a mind untrained in the
 higher course of mental discipline taught by the Buddha, experiences a
 pleasant feeling, then the latent tendency to lust springs up in
 response -- a desire to possess and enjoy the object serving as
 stimulus for the pleasant feeling. When a worldling experiences a
 painful feeling, then the latent tendency to repugnance comes into
 play, an aversion towards the cause of the pain. And when a worldling
 experiences a neutral feeling, then the latent tendency to ignorance --
 present but recessive on occasions of lust and aversion -- rises to
 prominence, shrouding the worldling's consciousness in a cloak of dull
 apathy.

   On whatever occasion the three latent tendencies to lust, repugnance,
 and ignorance are provoked by their corresponding feelings from their
 dormant condition into a state of activity, if a man does not make an
 effort to dispel them, does not strive to restrain, remove, and abandon
 them and bring them to nought, then they will persist in consciousness.
 If, as they persist in consciousness, he repeatedly yields to them,
 endorses them, and continues to cling to them, they will gather
 momentum, come to growth, and like a ball of flame flung upon a
 haystack, flare up from their initial phase as feeble impulses into
 powerful obsessions which usurp from a man his capacity for
 self-control. Then, even if a man be, like our hypothetical subject, an
 emperor over the earth, he is inwardly no longer his own master but a
 servant at the bidding of his own defilements of mind.

   Under the dominance of lust he is drawn to the pleasant, under the
 dominance of hate he is repelled by the painful, under the dominance of
 delusion he is confused by the neutral. He is bent up by happiness,
 bent down by sorrow, elated by gain, honor, and praise, dejected by
 loss, dishonor, and blame. Even though he perceives that a particular
 course of action can lead only to his harm, he is powerless to avoid
 it; even though he knows that an alternative course of action is
 clearly to his advantage, he is unable to pursue it. Swept on by the
 current of unabandoned defilements, he is driven from existence to
 existence through the ocean of samsara, with its waves of birth and
 death, its whirlpools of misery and despair. Outwardly, he may be a
 ruler over all the world, but in the court of consciousness he is still
 a prisoner. In terms of license he may be completely free, but in terms
 of spiritual autonomy he remains a victim of bondage in its most
 desperate form: bondage to the workings of a defiled mind.

   Spiritual freedom, as the opposite of this condition of bondage, must
 therefore mean freedom from lust, hatred, and delusion. When lust,
 hatred, and delusion are abandoned in a man, cut off at the root so
 that they no longer remain even in latent form, then a man finds for
 himself a seat of autonomy from which he can never be dethroned, a
 position of mastery from which he can never be shaken. Even though he
 be a mendicant gathering his alms from house to house, he is still a
 king; even though he be locked behind bars of steel, he is inwardly
 free. He is now sovereign over his own mind, and as such over the whole
 universe; for nothing in the universe can take from him that
 deliverance of heart which is his inalienable possession. He dwells in
 the world among the things of the world, yet stands in perfect poise
 above the world's ebb and flow. If pleasant objects come within range
 of his perception he does not yearn for them, if painful objects come
 into range he does not recoil from them. He looks upon both with
 equanimity and notes their rise and fall. Towards the pairs of
 opposites which keep the world in rotation he is without concern, the
 cycle of attraction and repulsion he has broken at its base. A lump of
 gold and a lump of clay are to his eyes the same; praise and scorn are
 to his ears empty sounds. He abides in the freedom he has won through
 long and disciplined effort. He is free from suffering, for with the
 defilements uprooted no more can sorrow or grief fall upon his heart;
 there remains only that perfect bliss unsullied by any trace of craving.

   He is free from fear, from the chill of anxiety which even kings know
 in their palaces, protected by bodyguards inside and out. And he is
 free from disease, from the sickness of the passions vexing and
 feverish that tie the mind in knots, from the sickness of samsara with
 its rounds of defilement, action, and result. He passes his days in
 peace, pervading the world with a mind of boundless compassion,
 enjoying the bliss of emancipation, or teaching fellow way-farers the
 path he himself has followed to the goal, in the calm certain knowledge
 that for him the beginningless trail of repeated births and deaths has
 been brought to a close, that he has reached the pinnacle of holiness
 and effected the cessation of all future becoming.

  In its fullness, the freedom to which the Buddha points as the goal of
 His Teaching can only be enjoyed by him who has made the realisation of
 the goal a matter of his own living experience. But just as salt lends
 its taste to whatever food it is used to season, so does the taste of
 freedom pervade the entire range of the Doctrine and Discipline
 proclaimed by the Buddha, its beginning, its middle, and its end.
 Whatever our degree of progress may be in the practice of the Dhamma,
 to that extent may the taste of freedom be enjoyed. It must always be
 borne in mind, however, that true freedom -- the inward autonomy of the
 mind -- does not descend as a gift of grace. It can only be won by the
 practice of the path to freedom, the Noble Eightfold Path.


                        * * * * * * * *


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                          CORRECTIONS
  
  In preparing this electronic edition for DharmaNet, some minor changes
  and corrections were made to the original text. These include changing
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                       DISTRIBUTION AGREEMENT
                       ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 TITLE OF WORK: The Taste of Freedom (Bodhi Leaves No. B.71)
 FILENAME: BODHI071.ZIP
 AUTHOR: Bhikkhu Bodhi
 AUTHOR'S ADDRESS:   N/A
 PUBLISHER'S ADDRESS: Buddhist Publication Society
                    P.O. Box 61
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 COPYRIGHT HOLDER: Buddhist Publication Society (1976)
 DATE OF PUBLICATION: 1976
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