Note Cards from 1937 - 38
There is always a certain thing that we need without ourselves knowing what it is:
There is always a certain thing that we need without ourselves knowing what it is, for as long as we have not yet realized Arahantship. The Great Being went out in search of dukkha's quenching even though he didn’t know what it is! We ourselves can observe exactly here that all the things we have received are incapable of making our hearts stop & rest in peace. All the kinds of mental defilements still dominate our hearts all the time. The most difficult problem that we face is that we always need something most specially but we do not know and cannot answer ourselves what it is.
But this most difficult problem will disappear immediately when we discover Buddha-Dhamma, which reveals to us that we have continually fallen into spinning around.
(early 2480)
The Completeness of Buddhist Prajña
The completeness of Buddhist Prajña (Wisdom): One aspect concerns the cause that makes us humans desire to do various things. Dr. Sigmund Freud of Vienna, the leading psychologist of this 20th century, says that it is due to two causes, namely, the agitation of sex and the wish for stature and fame. Prof. John Davey, a philosopher, says that it is "the wish to be somebody important" alone.
We can see the incompleteness of these words when we discover that Buddhist wisdom speaks of three causes, that is, kamatanha (craving for sensuality), bhavatanha (craving for being & having), & vibhavatanha. The first two correspond with those of Freud. The final one, however, is the more complete. Vibhavatanha means "desire to not be," for example, not wanting to die, struggling to escape death, and so on.
If examined carefully, this will be realized to be one aspect of Buddhist Prajña's completeness. Some people further distinguish many other aspects which they understand to be genuinely different, but they are not really different (such as in "The People" of Prajajati Weekly, 3rd year, issue 145). None of them are different from those of Freud.
Vibhavatanha is something that modern thinkers don’t really understand.
(27 February 2480)
All sense objects are deceptive things
All sense objects are deceptions. The superficial illusion is within the sphere of physics, for example, the laws of time & space that modern science has discovered. The profound illusion is within the sphere of meta-physics, namely, the fact they have no freedom within themselves and are solely under the power of causes and conditions, yet trick us into falling in love and falling in hate with them.
(5 November 2480/1937)
Struggling with Nature
Struggle with Nature for the survival of humanity. Struggle with oneself for the sake of Dhamma. Struggle with karma for the realization of nibbana.
["Struggling with karma" means to liberate oneself from the power of both good karma and evil karma until all goodness and sin is finished.]
(17 December 2480/1937)
We have two levels of knowledge:
We have two levels of knowledge, that is, external knowledge and internal knowledge [Deductive & Inductive]. In the first, a teacher teaches us; in the later, we know something ourselves through directly experiencing it.
Someone teaches us, "fire is hot, don’t touch it." We then have one level of knowledge, but it doesn’t have much weight. Later, we touch fire by ourselves and thus experience more deeply that "fire is hot, it shouldn’t be touched" — really.
At this time, for the most part we just hear that "the world is dukkha." It's solely an external sort of knowledge, so there is no disenchantment. If at a later time we are actually burned by the world and truly experience it, that will be another level of knowledge, which is internal. It will disenchant us and we will understand life sufficiently to know what to do.
(8 February 2541/1938)
More Notecards from the 1930's
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