A door knocker in Basque country, 2023. Photo by author.

The dharma of the Buddha loves to be a helper to its students. And it does so by being precise. Very precise. Extremely precise. Now, can we be honest and admit that when a person gets precise and exact, it always sounds kinda rude, or even bitchy?

“What does the clock say, 12:00?” “It says 12:03.”

“I think our turn-off is coming up soon.” “It’s coming up in 53 yards.”

“That’s a nice shade of blue.”  “It’s midnight azure.”

You gotta bend that tone pretty hard to make ‘bitchy’ sound like ‘benign precision.’

This is all true because knowing things is obnoxious and rude.  Which means the Dharma is the most obnoxious thing in the entire universe.

There’s a lovely term called Kilesa, or Klesha, depending on who you need to impress. My man Ajahn Buddhadasa Bhikkhu spells it kilesa, therefore so will I. A kilesa is a particular state of mind that leads one to unwholesome or unwise actions. That’s a pretty easy thing to picture. We get them all the time. Candy bars use them to sell product: have you heard of ‘Hangry’? Boom, kilesa. Have you seen a movie full of sadness and then feel sad? Kilesa. Have you ever stuck your hand in a paint can full of paint and then pulled it slowly out, like in one of those industrial movies about how they make crayons? That’s not a kilesa, that’s just fun to do.

So kilesas—an unwholesome mental state—easy to understand, right? Well, guess what? Buddha and his bald-headed pals have amassed a list of 108 separate kilesas that spring from 5 basic kilesa categories. Which is cosmically annoying in a personal way! Because with Buddhism you can’t even have a problem all to yourself! Ever bad feeling you have ever had, even the really shitty ones, the ones you spent all that time working on—someone else has already had ’em and made a commemorative calendar with ’em! So when I go to the Dharma and tell it, ‘I have a bad feeling,’ it basically says, “Yes, and this is exactly the feeling you’re having, this is where it came from, this is how to get rid of it, these are the four difficulties you will have trying to get rid of it, and this is the hat it likes to wear on Saturdays. Now go and do it.”

Damn it, Buddha! I was enjoying the impossibility of my despair.

Getting the answer to your problems is not the answer to your problems. Applying that answer, using that answer is the answer to your problems. I have enjoyed discovering how much I have unconsciously valued my problems. It has brought a level of clownish ridiculousness to them, and that has made them even more vulnerable to the truth. My Wiccan comrades talk about knowing the true name of a thing is a key to having power of it. I see that reflected in the kilesas.

Soon, I would be facing down every Kilesa I have ever had, and I would nothing but time to think about them while walking through Spain, the land of redneck quiche.

The step of a thousand miles begins with the first complaint.