Convention and Liberation.
reflections on gaining understanding and working our way to freedom….
A topic which I have found myself musing on recently is ‘convention and liberation’, which is fascinating but also quite difficult to fully understand.
“THE THINGS OF THIS WORLD are merely conventions of our own making. Having established them we get lost in them, and refuse to let go, giving rise to clinging to personal views and opinions. Now, if we know conventional reality then we’ll know liberation.” — Ajahn Chah
(i) Convention.
Conventions are things which we create for convenience ie. we give each other and material things ‘names’ so that we can can talk about them. These are labels — we are all labelled. We then cling to these names and notions as though our lives depend upon them, which they don’t, and we get hung up and distraught when others don’t revere them in the same way we do.
(ii) Liberation.
We practice to attain liberation from suffering in our daily life, this is the foundation of our practice. Liberation from the cycle of birth and death, freeing ourselves into ‘enlightenment’ and Nirvana is the ultimate goal.
There is clearly much joy to be found in freeing ourselves, there can be no doubt about that. I often say that monks are…
