Скачать или смотреть BEING VS BECOMING by Bhante Punnaji (Portland, 2004)

TRANSCRIPT:

In ancient times, the philosophers were talking about this change. What they saw was they thought there were some permanence in the change. They used 2 words to talk about this. One was "being" and the other was "becoming". The change was called becoming, and the permanence was called being. What this means if you have a golden ring or something, you can melt that gold and convert it into something else. That means the ring has disappeared and something else has taken its placed. It is has changed. But there is something that has not changed, which is gold. Gold has not changed. That change was called becoming, that means the ring became something else. The change was a becoming. But the gold was still being there in the same way. So the permanent aspect was seen as being.

When these Western scholars came to study Buddhism, they saw the Buddha speaking about impermanence, they thought he was talking about becoming. There was a word the Buddha used – bhava. The word, bhava is being, not becoming. But these translators thought because Buddha is speaking about impermanence, he cannot be talking about being, he must be talking about becoming. But that was a mistake. The Buddha was talking about being here. It is because we are thinking that being for the Buddha was not a reality. Being was a concept.

The Buddha saw this as a concept, that we form the concept of being. We are changing from the time we are born, we are in the process of change. We keep on changing. The person who is born is not the same person who dies in old age. The body has changed, the mind has changed, everything has changed to something else. But we don’t think like that. We think it is the same person who died.

That concept of being which is a continuity of existence, that is what is creating the problem, because I am being, I am born, then I grow old and then I die. The "I" is always there, the being. So as long as we think like that, then we are thinking about the change and the impermanence of our being, and that is how we become unhappy about that. We don’t want that, because we are being, we want to continue to be. We want to continue to be young. We don’t want to continue as old people, that’s the problem. So being is a static concept in a dynamic reality. We are trying to cling to a static concept, which is an illusion. The static concept is really emotional. It is an emotion that wants us to believe in the existence or being.

Whereas when we think and reason out, we see the impermanence of these things. There is no real being, but our emotions tell us there is a being. I want to be. So we cannot face death. When we cannot face death, we have to somehow believe that even when the body dies, I will still remain. Maybe go to heaven or go to hell and remain somehow. So we want that permanence which is all emotional.