A man is sitting under a tree on the bank of a river.
The place is Uruvela, the river is the Neranjara, and according to the opening of the Udana, he has just awakened. He doesn't get up. He sits at the root of the tree for seven days in a single session, taking in what has happened.
Much later, at Jeta's Grove near the city of Savatthi, the same teacher speaks to a gathering of monks about what that awakening opened onto. And he describes it in a way that has puzzled and moved people for well over two thousand years. He doesn't say what it is. He only says what it isn't.
What does Udana 8.3 say?
In Thanissaro Bhikkhu's translation, Udana 8.3 opens with the words "There is, monks, an unborn", and goes on to call it unbecome, unmade and unfabricated. If there were not, the Buddha says, there would be no escape from the born, become, made and fabricated. Because there is, escape can be discerned.
That's the whole teaching. Four words of negation, and a statement that freedom is possible.
The Udana itself is a small collection of inspired sayings in the Pali Canon, and this passage sits in its eighth chapter among a short group of teachings on Nibbana, usually translated as unbinding. It's brief enough to read in under a minute. People have spent whole lives sitting with it. If you read it in full, read it in a published translation and, if you can, alongside a teacher of the tradition.
Why is freedom described only by what it isn't?
Because anything you could add to the description would be one more thing that was made.
Notice what the passage refuses to do. It doesn't promise a new self, a better self or a higher self. It doesn't describe a state to strive for. Every word points away from the things that come and go: being born, becoming something, being made, being put together. What's left when all of that is set aside isn't described at all. It's simply said to be there.
I find that one of the most quietly radical ideas ever spoken. Most of us have spent our lives on the other side of it. We've tried to become: more confident, more successful, more healed, more spiritual. Each becoming is something made, so each one can be unmade by a bad week. And underneath all of it, the passage says, there's something that was never born and was never become.
I'm not a teacher of this tradition, and I won't pretend to explain what the Buddha meant by unbinding in its full depth. That belongs to the tradition and its teachers, and I'd encourage anyone drawn to it to read the passage in full in a published translation. What I can do is point at the pattern I see in it, because it's the pattern my own work has been built around.
Where does "unbecome" come from?
The word sounds modern. It isn't. Here it is in one of the oldest records of the Buddha's teaching, pointing at the same direction my own work has always pointed: not becoming someone new, but unbecoming everything that was never you. It's also the title of my book, and the shortest description I know of what happens in the rooms I run. I've written more about the word itself in what does it mean to unbecome?
To be clear, the RS Method isn't Buddhist practice, and nothing in it claims to be what the Buddha taught. The pattern is universal. I've written about it in Michelangelo and the statue in the stone and Ramana Maharshi's question, Who am I?. The method is mine. The pattern belongs to everyone.
If you'd like to sit with the question underneath this passage in your own life, the free Who Am I? masterclass is built for exactly that. You can start it here. Or read on.
What does this ask of us?
Not belief. A different direction.
Almost everything we're offered for our suffering points the same way: add something. A technique, a habit, a new way of thinking, a story about who we'll become. The passage points the other way. It suggests that what we're looking for was never made, so it can't be built. It can only be uncovered, by setting down what was. That isn't a call to stop living or stop growing. It's a call to stop mistaking what you've built for who you are.
That's what I see, over and over, in the people I work with. The confident one, the careful one, the strong one who never needs anything: those were all made, usually for good reasons, usually in childhood. They can be set down. And what's there when they are isn't a new person. It's the one who was there before any of them.
You are not broken. You are buried. The freedom is in the removal.
Isn't unbecoming just giving up?
No, and the difference matters.
Giving up abandons the self. You stop caring, stop reaching, stop showing up. It's a kind of collapse, and it usually comes from exhaustion. Unbecoming is the opposite movement. You keep living fully: you still work, love, raise your children, build what you're building. What you set down is the weight you were carrying while you did it. The need to prove. The guard that never rests. The costume you forgot was a costume.
People who've set some of that down rarely become less engaged with life. More often, they become more present in it, because they're no longer spending half their energy holding up a self that was made. That's the sense in which I say the freedom is in the removal. Nothing you love is removed. Only what was never you.
Can I try this for myself?
Here's a simple practice, done in the spirit of the passage rather than as a technique taken from it. Give it ten quiet minutes.
- Sit comfortably and let your breathing settle. Don't control it. Just let it find its own pace.
- Notice one thing you're being right now. "Tired." "Worried about tomorrow." "A mother." "The one who has to hold it together."
- Ask, silently: was this always here? Not "is it bad?" Just: was there a time before it?
- Let it be set aside for a moment. Not fought, not fixed. Just put down, the way you'd put down a bag you've carried too long.
- Then ask: what's still here? Don't answer with words. Notice what remains when that one thing isn't being held.
- Repeat with the next thing you notice yourself being.
You won't find the unborn in ten minutes, and I'd be wary of anyone who promised you would. But you may notice, for a moment, that you're not only the things you've become. Something is still here when they're set down.
What remains when everything made is set down?
The passage doesn't say, and I won't either. But I'll tell you what people describe when some of what was made comes off.
They describe something quieter than they expected. Not a new identity, but relief at not having to carry the old one. Talya Whitaker put it this way: "There are no words for how this has changed my life, changed every cell of my being."
If this passage has stirred something in you, I wrote a whole book about that direction of travel: Unbecome. It took the Amazon best seller badge at launch, and it's written for anyone who has tried to become their way out of their life and found that it doesn't hold. It isn't a book about the Buddha. It's a book about what's left when you stop adding.
So I'll leave you with the question the passage seems to me to ask. Underneath everything you've become, who were you before the world told you who to be?
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.
P.S. Tonight, before you sleep, you'll probably run through tomorrow's list of things to be. Before you do, give ten minutes to the practice above, or ninety to the Who Am I? masterclass, and notice who's there before the list begins.