[J]ust as if a fisherman were to cast a baited hook into a deep lake and a fish with its eye out for food would swallow it — so that the fish that had thus swallowed the fisherman's hook would fall into misfortune & disaster, and the fisherman could do with it as he will — in the same way, there are these six hooks in the world for the misfortune of beings, for the slaughter of those that breathe.The six hooks turn out to be associated with the senses as they are conceptualised by the tradition. These include the five that we are familiar with - sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell - as well as the intellect, which is conceived in Buddhist psychology as a six 'sense'.The text explains how each of the senses perceives the bait on a particular hook.The quotation below is what it says about sight - the comments on the other senses are similar. (In the earlier phase of Buddhism a lot of emphasis was placed on monasticism and this is why the sutta addresses and talks about the 'bikkhavo' or monks.)
There are forms, monks, cognizable via the eye — agreeable, pleasing, charming, endearing, fostering desire, enticing. If a monk relishes them, welcomes them, & remains fastened to them, he is said to be a monk who has swallowed Mara's hook, who has fallen into misfortune & disaster. The Evil One can do with him as he will.Mara is a demon who appears in a number of the suttas and famously tried to tempt the Buddha away from his contemplative practice. He is not exactly evil - more a symbol of the distraction that the sensory world offers to the anyone following the contemplative path. Rather than characterising the objects of the senses as the bait on Mara's hooks, other suttas depict them as the demon's beautiful daughters.
At the centre of Buddhist throught is the idea that dukkha, the suffering of life, is conquered by letting go of 'attachment' - desire, appetite, yearning, envy. We erroneously believe that the objects of our desire will bring us happiness (or, if we have them already, that our present happiness is conditional upon them). So, in a sense, they are like the bait on the demon's hooks. They seem to offer fufilment but, in reality, lure you into danger. The solution is ... well, the solution is complex but it includes contemplation, particularly meditation that trains us to be more fully present as life unfolds and not always away in hypothetical worlds where everything would be better - or would have been better - 'if only...'.
The baited hook is the key metaphor at the end of Saturday Night Sunday Morning to indicate surrender to 'everyday life'. 'He drank tea from the flask and ate a cheese sandwich, then sat back to watch the red and white float- up to its waist in water under the alder trees - and keep an eye always close to it for the sudden indication of a fortunate catch. For himself, his own catch had been made, and he would have to wrestle with it for the rest of his life. Whenever you caught a fish, the fish caught you, in a way of speaking, and it was the same with anything else you caught, like the measles or a woman. Everyone in the world was caught, somehow, one way or another, and those that weren't were always on the way to it. (pp216)
ReplyDeleteWhat a great quotation! I like the way the metaphor appears in very different texts. Some concrete experiences - and the baited hook is clearly one of them - lend themselves to metaphorical use and there's something very compelling about the way they surface again and again in different times and different places.
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