Is this aversion?

score:1

Accepted answer

More info. is needed before making a conclusion. Ex: what is the root cause to that person not feeling comfortable at that temple. Is the teaching at the temple in line with the Buddha's Discourses and Discipline? (see related topic here) Does the abbot break the Bhikkhus' Code of Discipline? Do the forms or methods of practice not quite suitable to the person and as a result s/he doesn't make much progress on the Path? etc. It's important to keep in mind that the real metrics to Dhamma practice is not the frequency of one's visit to a temple but instead, should be ones' own progress on precepts observance, insight into conditioned phenomena, and meditation practice.

Upvote:0

Maybe.

If you push anything away so as to not accept things as they are, then that is aversion. So if fear, anger or disliking arise and it causes you to react by pushing the temple away then that is not seeing reality as it is. It is a defilement as a result of mental proliferation(being unaware).

When we are mindful of the averse feeling then we will not react to it and we will be taking reality as it is in that instance.

Liking, lust and greed work the same way except we pull the object(in this case the object is the temple) towards us instead of pushing it away. Not being mindful of our desire to pull something we like towards us will result in not seeing things as they are as well.

Upvote:3

Is this aversion?

Yes, of course. "Doesn't feel comfortable" sounds like a kind of aversion. The keyword is "comfortable".

An attitude not rooted in aversion would sound like "I stopped going because I saw it having more harmful effect and little beneficial effect" - see the difference?

As my last teacher explained, any time we feel strong aversion to going somewhere / doing something - we should take a really good look inside to see if the feeling comes from a deep-lying preconception.

Preconception (in this context corresponding to sankhara) is an abstract formula we have adopted based on some previous experience, some sort of wrong overgeneralization we cling to. A complex of preconceptions constitutes person's ego, or image-of-self-and-the-world. Buddha compared ego with banyan tree that grows by shooting down the prop roots (=preconceptions) which become the second-order trunks and so on.

More post

Search Posts

Related post