2022-04-07 Satipaṭṭhāna (55) Sense Doors: Body

IInsight Meditation CenterApr 7, 2022 at 2:51 pm12min

GGil Fronsdal

00:02

There is a delightful teaching in Buddhism that it is possible to become omniscient. But this is not what you might think. It is possible to know something about everything– that omniscience is that it is not worth clinging to anything. Now we know something about everything – it is a certain kind of omniscience.

GGil Fronsdal

00:43

To continue with the theme of omniscience in human experience, all human experience – no matter how sophisticated and complex it is – has a common denominator: we know it through one of the six sense doors. The ancient analogy in the time of the Buddha was that if you had a walled city with only one gate into the city, a guard could stand at the gate and watch everyone coming and going, and could decide who could come in and who could go out. If there were six gates, then there would might be six guards who were doing the same thing.

GGil Fronsdal

01:44

So we have six doors – six gates – through which enter all experiences that we process, take in, and use to understand our life. These six doors or gates are: seeing – the gate of the eyes– the ears, the nose, the tongue, the tactile body, and the mind door – that door from which we observe or know what is happening in the mind. We take in the sense data – the experiences – from these doors, and then we process it. We do something with it. Sometimes we build whole universes with it.

GGil Fronsdal

02:31

There is a Chinese Zen story of a painter who painted very realistic paintings. He was painting a tiger up close, involved in the details. At some point, he stepped back some feet to look at it. It was so realistic that he became frightened and ran away.

GGil Fronsdal

02:57

Our mind is constructing stories, ideas, memories, predictions of the future, meaning, elaborations, ideas, creativity, poems, and songs – our mind creates all kinds of things. We can live in that inner world and get lost in it.

GGil Fronsdal

03:21

But in Buddhist practice, what we are trying to do is to live at the doors – to be mindful of things as they appear and occur in the present moment at each of the sense doors. The reason for that is if we do that, then we know something about everything. We know the common denominator. Everything that is going to happen is going to be built on those things coming in from the sense doors.

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