The Related Suttas Collection 35.136

14. At Devadaha

Liking Sights (1st)

“Bhikkhus, gods and humans like sights, they love them and enjoy them. But when sights perish, fade away, and cease, gods and humans live in suffering.

Gods and humans like sounds … smells … tastes … touches … thoughts, they love them and enjoy them. But when thoughts perish, fade away, and cease, gods and humans live in suffering.

The Realized One has truly understood the origin, ending, gratification, drawback, and escape of sights, so he doesn’t like, love, or enjoy them. When sights perish, fade away, and cease, the Realized One lives happily.

The Realized One has truly understood the origin, ending, gratification, drawback, and escape of sounds … smells … tastes … touches … thoughts, so he doesn’t like, love, or enjoy them. When thoughts perish, fade away, and cease, the Realized One lives happily.”

That is what the Buddha said. Then the Holy One, the Teacher, went on to say:

“Sights, sounds, tastes, smells, touches and thoughts, the lot of them—they’re likable, desirable, and pleasurable as long as you can say that they exist.

For all the world with its gods, this is what they deem happiness. And where they cease is deemed as suffering for them.

The noble ones have seen that happiness is the cessation of identity. This insight by those who see contradicts the whole world.

What others say is happiness the noble ones say is suffering. What others say is suffering the noble ones know as happiness.

See, this teaching is hard to understand, it confuses the ignorant. There is darkness for the shrouded; blackness for those who don’t see.

But the good are open; like light for those who see. Though close, they do not understand, those fools inexpert in the teaching.

They’re mired in desire to be reborn, flowing along the stream of lives, mired in Māra’s sway: this teaching isn’t easy for them to understand.

Who, apart from the noble ones, is qualified to understand this state? Having rightly understood this state, the undefiled become fully extinguished.”