Protections, Poisions, Buddha, Self
The mind never stops. It is constantly on, even while we’re asleep, moving from one thought to the next, emotions rising and falling for seemingly no reason, memories long forgotten popping up then slipping away. That’s why some folks call it the monkey mind.
That’s also why the Buddha taught the four protections. The four protections are things that one can focus on, places for the mind to come to rest, as we train it during meditation. As the monkey mind gets away from us, we can try and tame it by bringing it back to rest on the Buddha, or lovingkindness, or the body, or death. While this seems like a somewhat contradictory (at times uncomfortable) list, all four of these things have at least one thing in common: they are realities.
In some sense, Buddhism is all about two things: the Buddha and the self. Of course, what Buddhism is really all about is getting us to let go of the self as part of the path toward awakening, i.e., becoming a Buddha. And this path toward awakening is all about realizing how our limited self is more often than not driven by the three poisons of greed, hatred, and ignorance. And once we can get beyond those, we come closer and closer to seeing the Buddha, closer to our own awakening.
The four protections protect us from the three poisons. They work as antidotes to our limited self’s greed (attachment to the body), hatred (the opposite of compassion), and ignorance (of the reality of awakening).
We chose the four protections as a theme for the second issue of Prapañca as a way to draw closer to these antidotes to greed, hatred, and delusion. But more than that, to the extent that all of these Buddhist lists are really only talking about the Buddha and the self, what you’ll find in this issue are reflections on the image of the Buddha on the one hand and the image of the self on the other.
As always, our contributors wrestle with the question of how to locate Buddhism in the modern world, in their lives, in their own quests for understanding their own selves. Our limited, ego driven selves are counterbalanced by the overwhelming compassion of lovingkindness; our faces are reflected in art and images; we tame oxen with our own hands. And we travel the world only to discover what we were looking for was inside us all along.
Scott Mitchell
Scott is the Editor-in-chief of Prapañca: a buddhist journal. He is also a practicing Shin Buddhist and Buddhist scholar living in Oakland, California. He teaches courses on Buddhist history, Buddhist modernism, and Buddhism in the West at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley.
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