Page 138 - The Buddha‘s Noble Eightfold Path

mental factors are involved, but that doesn't really help us to get

the feel of them or to know what they are really like. It may be
that a poetical description or, as it were, evocation of these

higher states of consciousness will be of greater help to us, and
fortunately for human weakness the Buddha himself does give a
beautiful simile for each of the four dhyanas. Throughout

Buddhist literature we do, in fact, find quite a number of
beautiful and even striking similes, many of which no doubt go

back to the Buddha himself, and I personally feel that this aspect
of the Buddha's teaching method is insufficiently stressed. You
must not think that the Buddha was always dry and analytical.

Very often he presented his teaching in purely poetical and
imaginative terms, and sometimes these convey the spirit of that

teaching more successfully than the rather analytical descriptions
on which some of his later followers tended to concentrate.

The simile for the first dhyana is that of soap powder mixed with
water. A bath-attendant, the Buddha says, takes a plateful of

soap powder and mixes it with water. He kneads the two
together until he has a ball of soap powder every particle of
which is a saturated with water. At the same time, there is not a

drop of water in excess of what is required to saturate the ball. In
this way, in the first dhyana the whole psychophysical being is, as

it were, saturated with the higher consciousness. Nothing
'overflows', and there is no particle of you that is unpermeated.
Those of you who have had any experience of this state, or any

foretaste of it, will know what is meant. It is as though your
ordinary being is suffused and penetrated by some higher

element. 'You' are still there, but you are completely permeated
by something

138