Two Ways to Look at the World

Perhaps a good place to start contemplating the nature of Nibbāna is in the more mundane realm of things since, just as the Buddha opened his expression of the Four Noble Truths with the common and tangible experience of dukkha, unsatisfactoriness, it will be most helpful to begin this investigation within the realm of the familiar and then to work towards the more subtle and abstruse from there.

There are, of course, many ways to look at the world of things. Most people tend to frame the experiential domain in terms such as: nice/nasty, mine/ yours, exists/doesn’t exist, etc., but for the purposes of this exploration we’ll confine our ways of looking at things to two principal ones: a) the study of how things are related to each other, and b) the consideration of things in terms of a subject/object relationship.

The Buddha, as well as the meditation masters who have followed his path, spoke extensively on both approaches. The principal reason being that, by developing an understanding of the nature of conditionality, as it manifests in both these modes, it becomes possible to see that there is a means and an opening to escape from conditionality.

The Eightfold Path described by the Buddha is exactly this means. However, on this point, people often find a paradox: if the goal, Nibbāna, is by definition uncaused, how can a path of practice – which is causal by nature – bring it about? In the Milindapañha, the monk Nāgasena replies to this question with an analogy. He says: The path of practice doesn’t cause Nibbāna; it simply takes you there. Just as the road to a mountain does not cause the mountain to come into being; it simply leads you to where it already is.

This reflection by Ajahn Amaro is from the book, The Island, (pdf) p. 55.