This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video GM: Effect of Mental Activity; The Six Sense Spheres - Our World(3of5):Tongue & Nose, Taste & Aromas. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by an unknown speaker at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Okay, it’s the top of the hour, many different hours depending on where you are in the world. Wherever it is, I hope you’re having a good day and welcome to our weekday morning sit and dharmette. Today is the third day of this week’s investigation of what the Buddha called “the world”: the six internal sense spaces and their objects, the avenues through which we come to perceive and conceive the world. That’s language from Ānanda1, a monk, one of the Buddha’s disciples, his cousin and attendant.
So we perceive, that is, we take in through our senses, and we conceive, we develop ideas and concepts about what is perceived. Our experience of our world comes into being through this interaction. I talked about the sense of sight on Monday, and then yesterday about hearing. Today, I’m going to talk about two senses that are very closely related: taste and smell. We know now because of science that the sense of taste is really dependent upon the sense of smell; that it’s difficult to detect flavor if our sense of smell is not operating. I don’t know if that was common knowledge in the Buddha’s time. Those two senses are always spoken of separately, as far as I know, in the suttas, but I’ll talk about them both today, and often together in concert. And of course, if I didn’t conflate two senses sometime during this week, five days wouldn’t be long enough to talk about all six of them. So there’s a practical reason for it, but it makes absolute sense.
Yesterday, I mentioned a story that Ajahn Chah2 used to tell about practicing outside a village where there was a festival going on, and he was getting irritated by the loud music that was playing. He finally came to realize that it wasn’t the sound that was bothering him, it was him bothering the sound. Yesterday, my husband commented that he’s always been a little bothered by that language because sound itself can’t be bothered, which of course is true. But my sense is that what Ajahn Chah was pointing to was that all the bothering was being generated by his own reactivity to the sound. He was blaming the sound for his discomfort, and maybe blaming is a kind of bothering.
There’s a really important lesson in that story that I want to be more specific about today. I mentioned yesterday that people often have a tendency to blame the object of their sense perception for their discomfort, for their stress, for the desire or craving that arises in them. When we see something we don’t like, the tendency is for us to focus on what we see as the source of our discomfort. We conflate our reaction to the sense contact with the actual sensing of it. We forget the difference between nāma and rūpa3 that Gil talked about last week: appearances and mental activity. When we hear a sound that we don’t like, we tend to blame the sound for bothering us, just like Ajahn Chah did. But the sense contact did not cause the discomfort; our reaction did. Our action was actually the discomfort. The problem is the way in which we’re conceiving in reaction to the perception. That’s what’s called in the suttas a “fetter” that arises in the mind, in the citta4.
There’s a teaching about this in the suttas that I want to quote from. Another monk comes to sit by Sāriputta5, who was the Buddha’s foremost disciple in wisdom. After an exchange of friendly greetings and courtesies, this other monk sat to one side and said to venerable Sāriputta, “Now tell me, friend Sāriputta, is the eye the fetter of forms, or are forms the fetter of the eye? Is the ear the fetter of sounds, or are sounds the fetter of the ear? Is the nose the fetter of aromas, or are aromas the fetter of the nose?” And he went on with the other senses, concluding with the mind: “Is the mind the fetter of mental activities, or are mental activities the fetter of the mind?”
Sāriputta responded, “No, my friend. The eye is not the fetter of forms, nor are forms the fetter of the eye. Whatever desire and passion arises in dependence on the two of them, that is the fetter there. The ear is not the fetter of sounds, nor are the sounds the fetter of the ear. Whatever desire and passion arises in dependence on the two of them, that is the fetter there.” And he goes on with each of the other senses, concluding with the mind again: “The mind is not the fetter of mental activities, nor are mental activities the fetter of the mind. Whatever desire and passion arises in dependence on the two of them, that is the fetter there.”
Of course, “desire and passion” is a kind of shorthand for all the kinds of mental complications that arise out of greed, hatred, and delusion that can arise in that space. So the fetter lies in how we are relating to what is happening. Just as we did with sight and hearing in the past two days, we want to make the distinction between the tastes and smells that we sense and then the mental activity that comes along with them, to see where that activity might be creating some kind of knot, some obstacle to really feeling free, to being at ease.
With that intro, we’ll sit now. Let’s meditate.
Find your good meditation posture, a way of sitting or lying down or standing, whatever posture you happen to be in, whatever posture works for you that allows you to feel awake and aware, alert to what’s going on in your experience, and also relaxed.
Again, I’ll invite you to do a brief body scan, just letting your attention move through the body, touching any places where there’s tension and maybe using the breath as a kind of massager to let those areas ease up, let them soften as much as they’re ready to.
Let the chest and belly be open and soft so that the breath can move in and out really freely. Let the belly be soft so that it can just expand on the in-breath and gently fall on the out-breath.
If you like, spend a little bit of time with sound. That can be a nice way of settling, just attending to the sounds in the room where you are, the sound of my voice in a very receptive, useful way. Just receiving the sound, not reaching out for it, as we explored yesterday. Just inviting a sense of receptivity into the awareness, into the mind and the body.
And moving the attention to the breath, attending to the rhythm of the breath, maybe in and out like gentle waves just climbing up a beach and slowly receding, over and over again, a little bit different each time, never the same.
Inviting the rhythm of the breath to calm the body and the mind. In and out, rising and falling.
As you sit, just attending to your breathing or maybe being open to other experiences, sometimes thoughts will arise, maybe in response or reaction to what’s happening in your meditation, maybe triggered by a memory of something in the past or some anticipation of something to come in the future. Just notice the ways that thinking complicates the inner landscape, the way it’s different from just receiving the sensations of breathing, other sensations that you’re experiencing. Just notice that. Notice the effect in your body. Is there tension associated with thinking when it arises? Constriction in the mind?
And then as you sit, know that it’s possible to recognize the difference between what is happening in the body as we sit here and the mental activity that accompanies it, comments on it, reacts to it, analyzes it. Whatever the activity is, it can be done in a very simple way, just noticing. And then see if you can just let it go. Let it all go. Soften into a simple, receptive presence, sensing the breath, sensing other sensations, maybe sensing the mental activity in the same receptive way, not getting involved in it, not taking part in it. Just be simple.
Any kind of calm or ease that you feel as a result of sitting this half hour, any sense of rightness, appreciation, may you turn that outward and offer it to those around you, those farther out, to the world, to all beings. With a wish that all beings may be safe, that all beings may be happy, that they have the strength to meet what comes in their lives, and that all beings everywhere may be free.
Welcome again. I hope the bell wasn’t too loud. There was a reaction to that sound in my mind, the sense, “Oh, I did something wrong, made it too loud.”
In that teaching that Sāriputta offered the other monk that I was talking about before the sit, he continued with a simile to explain what he meant by a fetter arising in dependence on the two—the sense space and its object. He said, “Suppose that a black ox and a white ox were joined with a single collar or yoke. If someone were to say, ‘The black ox is the fetter of the white ox,’ or ‘The white ox is the fetter of the black,’ speaking this way, would they be speaking rightly?” And the other monk said, “No, my friend. The black ox is not the fetter of the white ox, nor is the white ox the fetter of the black. The single collar or yoke by which they are joined, that is the fetter there.” What lies between them, the single collar or yoke.
Then Sāriputta goes on to say that if the sense organs were actually the fetters of their objects or vice versa, there wouldn’t be the possibility of liberation. Because if that were the case, there would always be a fetter present. They would be fettered to each other. As long as we are alive and our senses are operating, there would be no escape. It would be like being tied to a perch like the falconer’s hawk, not allowed to fly free. But because the fetter arises in dependence on both, because it is a knot sort of between them that complicates their relationship, we have the potential to untie that knot, that fetter, and to be free to fly.
At the end of this sutta, Sāriputta describes how the sense bases and their objects are all still operating in the Buddha, but he isn’t fettered by any of them. No reactivity arises in him in relation to the sense spheres. He sees and hears and tastes and smells and has thoughts, but his relationships to those sense activities is not complicated by unhealthy desire or aversion or a need to take possession of the activity, to create a self around it.
I think this is so important to remember. The end of the world, in the Buddhist sense, doesn’t come because we no longer have the use of our senses—that would mean we’d be dead. It comes when the senses are allowed to operate as they naturally do, and no fetters arise. Instead, what is present is clear seeing, equanimity, generosity, care, mettā6—qualities that arise from deep within that become our natural way of relating to what’s happening once we’ve thoroughly let go. It’s a gradual process, of course.
So when we’re attending to what’s coming in through our senses, dealing with some habitual reactivity that’s creating stress in our lives—whether it’s a craving that’s really pervasive or something more on the aversive side that’s pervasive, like anger or irritation or disapproval, judgment that seems to arise maybe in particular situations—whatever it is, it’s really useful to remind ourselves that that reactivity is something we actually have some power over. It isn’t hardwired. It isn’t built into the activity of the senses in some permanent way. It’s really what our practice is about: recognizing what is obstructing us and seeing, “Can it be let go? What good is it doing us?” The fetters that arise might be really deeply ingrained, conditioned from a really early time in our lives, but they’re still something that we can work with, something to come to know with deep sensitivity, great sensitivity. And eventually, we can let go of them. The beginning of becoming free of anything is recognizing that it’s there, knowing that whatever it is is conditioned, and conditioning is changing all the time. And we have a role in that process.
Today, I’m going to focus on smell and taste. And boy, these two senses are really a big part, I think, of what drives many people’s sense desires, you know, food and drink, of course. And that’s what mostly fills this realm, I imagine. Food and drink, what comes into our mouths, and what we smell. Actually, odors have other sources, but all the flavor of food, scientists tell us, is made up of both taste and aroma. A lot of people during the COVID pandemic, and also as a result of other illnesses, have lost their sense of smell, and many are still affected by that. I’ve heard many people say that when their sense of smell came back, they were so grateful, because when it wasn’t operating, they just lost all interest in food and in eating and in cooking for their friends and families. All that the tongue can taste without the sense of smell is the very basic tastes of sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. All the nuance is lost, all the things that delight us, that maybe give rise to fetters.
There are aromas, smells, odors that give rise to a big variety of reactions in people, conditioned on past experience, mostly. Cultural conditioning plays a really big part in this area. Tastes and odors that are considered really foul in some cultures are highly regarded in others. Both personal and cultural conditioning affect how we relate to all the things that we smell and taste. Just as a really simple example, you might notice how one person can find the aroma of beef on a barbecue just really delightful, enticing, while someone else is just disgusted by it. So we know the reaction is not inherent in the smell itself; it arises dependent on our relationship and how we relate to the smell or taste. And that is conditioned. We relate to all our experience based on prior conditioning, on memories and attitudes of mind that often we aren’t even conscious of.
Noticing how our reactions to different odors and tastes change over time points to the same truth. The pleasure or disgust we experience is generated in our minds, and as conditioning changes, the reactions in the mind change.
Some foods we call “comfort foods.” Different people, of course, have different comfort foods, and it can be illuminating, I think, to notice what arises in the mind when we smell or taste those particular foods. What is it that actually feels comforting in them? They’re not inherently comforting or just nutrition for the body, or maybe just not nutrition but something that we like to take in. What are the mental associations with the food that make it feel comforting? Memories. My husband mentioned mashed potatoes in this regard just a couple of weeks ago. He was feeling a little bit blue, a little bit stressed, and a buffet was serving mashed potatoes with mushroom gravy. He ended up with a stomach ache some hours later because he had seriously overdone the spuds because of the emotional resonance the flavor had for him. What is the comfort he’s looking for? It was a hook, a fetter.
There are a lot of people who use food for comfort. Occasionally, probably me, most people I would imagine use it occasionally for comfort. And there are some who do it habitually, who really are kind of addicted to using it in that way, and they often suffer for it in many, many ways. Slowing down, noticing the effect of each bite in the mouth, in the mind, looking to the mind and heart to see, “Is there some kind of craving here that has nothing to do with nourishing my body?” The craving is in the mind, and the taste doesn’t cause it.
There used to be an exercise that was part of every intro to meditation class series, and I think it was also used in MBSR. Students would be instructed to mindfully eat a raisin or a dried cranberry, just one. To smell it first—although raisins don’t smell very much, I don’t think—to feel the texture of it in the mouth, to chew it very slowly, kind of letting the tongue really get involved in the taste, and then finally to swallow it, sensing it going down the throat. People would often comment that after chewing for a little while, the taste became neutral or even unpleasant. It’s an interesting kind of exercise. I think usually we don’t eat slowly enough to allow ourselves to continually track the sensations that are going on in the taste buds and the aroma receptors, which we have in our mouths. We don’t think of odors as arising in our mouth, but apparently they do.
I think usually when there’s some kind of craving operating in the taste-smell arena, we tend to eat in a way that prolongs the flavor that we desire, either trying to get that next hit of a pleasant flavor in quickly, or maybe letting something like chocolate melt slowly in the mouth, savoring each moment, and then maybe often wanting another bite as soon as that one is swallowed. I think I might be giving myself away a little bit here with my references to chocolate.
And of course, we see in alcohol addiction how strongly debilitating the craving that arises between the senses of taste and aroma and the liquid tasted can be. That craving, of course, we know it destroys lives. And addiction is a very complicated process, and I don’t mean to imply that all we need to do is to notice the craving and know it as something that arises out of prior conditioning and somehow we’ll just let go of it. But that is the beginning, of course. And the same with dependence on food. We talk about stress eating or anxiety eating. We need to recognize the triggers there, recognize the conditioning that pushes us toward looking for comfort in the foods we love or the drinks we think we need. Investigating our relationship to the experience of eating and drinking, of tasting and sensing odors. What is the hook?
We assign meaning to smells, often especially smells associated with the body. The human body produces odors, and most of them give rise to aversion in most people. There’s even shame associated with many of the odors that the body produces, but they’re just odors in themselves, perfectly natural. We assign meaning to them that they don’t have, usually some kind of negative judgment or shame if it’s our body producing the odor. Dependent on the sense of smell and the odor, some kind of reactive mental process arises that obstructs our ease and freedom, that gives rise to dukkha7, to pain.
I think we know that smells are especially powerful in evoking memories. I think of a plant that blooms here in the foothills and the mountains where I live, ceanothus, California lilac it’s often called. And every time I smell it in the winter after the rains have come and it’s started to bloom, it brings out memories of hikes from when I was a teenager, and days in the garden long ago when I’d catch the scent. Of course, a French author, Marcel Proust8, ended up writing 3,000 pages of fiction based on his memory of a little cookie, a Madeleine. So sometimes memories evoked by odors might be really beautiful. Memories evoked by taste as well might give rise to appreciation, joy. And sometimes there are hooks.
As we develop the deep sensitivity to what’s arising in us, we can give more attention to what it is that gives rise to the beautiful mental states as we gradually untie the unhelpful fetters.
So remember that in every moment, there are only two things happening: there’s what is happening, and our relationship to what is happening. And the fetter, the knot that characterizes our relationship to what’s happening in a way that obstructs us—sometimes it’s really subtle and sometimes it’s very obvious, but it’s something to tune into. It’s something to recognize and just to know, “This is what’s happening, and this is reactivity.”
Thank you for your attention. I’ll see you tomorrow, and we’ll talk about bodily sensations. I hope you have a day filled with appreciation and gratitude for what is good that comes through the sense spaces.
Ānanda: One of the Buddha’s principal disciples and his devoted attendant and cousin. He was renowned for his outstanding memory and was instrumental in reciting and preserving the Buddha’s teachings after his passing. ↩
Ajahn Chah: (1918-1992) A highly respected Thai Buddhist monk and a master of the Thai Forest Tradition of Theravada Buddhism. He was known for his simple, direct, and profound teaching style, which attracted a large following of both Thai and international students. ↩
Nāma and Rūpa: Pali terms that translate to “name and form.” In Buddhism, this pair refers to the mental (nāma) and physical (rūpa) components of a being. Rūpa is the material form, while nāma includes feelings, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. ↩
Citta: A Pali word that is often translated as “mind,” “heart,” or “consciousness.” It refers to the quality of awareness or the state of one’s mind. ↩
Sāriputta: One of the two chief male disciples of the Buddha (along with Mahāmoggallāna). He was renowned for his wisdom and was considered the foremost of the Buddha’s disciples in this quality. ↩
Mettā: A Pali word meaning loving-kindness, friendliness, goodwill, and active interest in others. It is the first of the four sublime states (Brahmavihāras) and a central concept in Buddhist practice. ↩
Dukkha: A fundamental concept in Buddhism, often translated from Pali as “suffering,” “stress,” “dissatisfaction,” or “unease.” It refers to the inherent unsatisfactoriness and pain in all of conditioned existence. ↩
Marcel Proust: (1871-1922) A French novelist, best known for his monumental work In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu). A famous scene in the book involves the narrator eating a madeleine cake dipped in tea, which triggers a flood of involuntary memories from his childhood. ↩