A Man is an Island? 3-Day Island Solo Survival

Field Days; Doggone, Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Pat Mac (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

I am now an island unto myself, but the sutra says take the Dharma as my island and lamp.

(Field Days, Ep. 29) 3-day solo survival expedition (no food, no water, no shelter) on an island in Indonesia with only a pocket knife and batteries for the camera.

SUTRA: "An Island Unto Oneself"

Maurice O'Connell Walshe (trans.), Attadipa Sutra edited by Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly

Be an island/lamp unto yourselves.

"Meditators, be islands unto yourselves [Note 1], be your own guide, having no other. Let the Dharma be an island/lamp and a guide to you, having no other.

"Those who are islands unto themselves...are wise investigate to the very heart of things [2]:

"'What is the source of [dukkha, disappointment] sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair? How do they arise?' [What is their origin?]

"Here, meditators, the uninstructed worldling [continued as in SN 22.7] Change occurs in this person's body, and it becomes different. On account of this change and difference, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair arise.

• [The same is stated about 'feelings,' 'perceptions,' 'mental formations,'  and 'consciousness'].

"But seeing [3] the body's impermanence, its changeability, its waning [4], its ceasing, one says, 'Formerly, as now, all bodies were impermanent, unsatisfactory, and subject to change.'

"Thus, seeing this as it really is, with purified insight, one abandons all sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair. One is not worried at their abandonment but, unworried, lives at ease. And thus living at ease, one is said to be 'assuredly delivered'" [5].

• [The same is stated about 'feelings,' 'perceptions,' 'mental formations,' and 'consciousness'].

NOTES

1. Atta-dipa: Dipa means both "island" (Sanskrit dvipa) and "lamp" (Sanskrit dipa), but the meaning "island" is well established here. The "self" referred to is of course the unmetaphysical pronoun "oneself": cf. SN 3.8, n. 1. 2. It is necessary to withdraw, to be "an island unto oneself," at least for a time (as any meditator knows), not for "selfish" reasons but precisely in order to make this profound introspective investigation.

In another sense, Buddhists would of course agree with John Donne that "No man is an island."

3. As Woodward remarks in KS [Book of the Kindred Sayings, translation of the Samyutta Nikaya, Vol. III, PTS 1924], one would expect to find here the words which he inserts in the text: "The well-taught Ariyan [noble] disciple," as in many passages. If one in fact sees these things and reflects as said in the text, one will cease to be a "worldling."

4. Viraga: Elsewhere translated as "dispassion" (SN 12.16, n. 2), also has this meaning.

5. Tadanganibbuto means rather more than Woodward's "one who is rid of all that."