Timeless Practice

We just chanted the Buddha’s first sermon, called Setting the Wheel of Dhamma in Motion.

People sometimes ask, where’s the wheel? It’s in the section where the Buddha goes through each of the four noble truths, stating the truth, stating the duty with regard to the truth, and stating the realization that he had completed the duty. That’s four truths, three levels of knowledge for each truth, twelve permutations. He goes through all the permutations one by one. In the West we would call that a table, but in India of his time, they would call that a wheel, because you go around all the possible combinations.

So that’s the Dhamma wheel. It emphasizes the fact that the four truths are not just four interesting facts. Each truth involves a duty. As stated in other places in the Canon, this is the main framework for all the Buddha’s other teachings. Ven. Sariputta gives an image, saying that just as the footprint of an elephant can contain all the footprints of animals that walk on land, in the same way the four noble truths contain all other skillful dhammas. So if you want to understand the Buddha’s teachings, you have to understand this framework. Then other teachings come in. The question is, where do they fit in?

In the first noble truth, the Buddha noted that there are lots of different kinds of suffering. The word he uses in Pali, dukkha, can mean anything from gross physical suffering, gross mental suffering, really intense anguish, all the way down to subtle levels of stress. Even in blissful states of mind that are fabricated, there’s going to be some stress, there’s some dukkha there. So the word dukkha covers all of that range. The basic meaning in everyday language in those days was pain. We usually translate it as suffering to emphasize the fact that compared to nibbana, everything you experience in the six senses is suffering.

But the Buddha talks about two types of suffering: the suffering of the three characteristics and the suffering of the four noble truths. The suffering of the three characteristics is simply the fact that things are fabricated, and there’s stress when you try to find happiness in things that are fabricated. The real suffering is the stress that comes from craving, the stress mentioned in the first noble truth, and that’s not necessary. As long as there’s going to be samsara, there are going to be fabricated things. Even arahants, after their awakening, still experience change, experience fabricated things, but they’ve learned how not to suffer in the sense of the suffering of the four noble truths. They don’t weigh their minds down because of the suffering of the four noble truths. They’ve learned to put an end to it.

The Buddha equates that kind of suffering or stress with clinging, clinging to the five aggregates. There’s something counterintuitive about that. We tend to like the things we cling to, and here’s the Buddha telling us we’re suffering because of those things. The word for clinging in Pali, upadana, can also mean to feed. This gets even more counterintuitive. For most of us, a lot of our pleasure in life comes from feeding, not only on physical food, but also on the emotional food we get from other people, the mental food that we get from other people. And here the Buddha is telling us that’s the essence of suffering.

Which is one of the reasons why when he taught people, he didn’t start out with the four noble truths. He started out with what’s called a step-by-step discourse.

He’d start with the topic of generosity, pointing out the goodness that comes from being generous, the happiness that comes from being generous. He’s talking specifically about the generosity that comes voluntarily.

A king once came to see the Buddha and asked him where a gift should be given. The Buddha replied, “Give where you feel inspired, where you feel it would be well used.” So he encourages voluntary giving, because there’s a goodness of the heart that comes to nourish you and also gets nourished by the voluntary act of giving.

When he talks about this, he’s talking about things that people have encountered in their lives. He doesn’t start out with abstractions. There are other passages in the Canon that describe the teachings of other teachers in the time of the Buddha. They always start out with pretty abstract ideas: about the nature of the cosmos, or saying that human action is totally useless, powerless. The Buddha says, No, human action makes a difference. Being generous makes a difference.

The same with the second topic in the step-by-step discourse: Virtue makes a difference. It’s good for your heart, good for your mind, when you abstain from harm. And you really do make a difference, inside and out. It’s a choice that you make. The goodness of generosity comes from your attitude before giving, while giving, after giving. The attitude is the important thing. With virtue, it’s your intention. You intend not to harm.

The third topic in the step-by-step discourse was heaven. This is where the rewards of generosity—beyond the reward of just being generous in and of itself, being virtuous in and of itself—give long-term benefits. This is where the Buddha first broaches the topic of how karma has an effect on rebirth and how there are many levels on which you might be reborn. Although it’s interesting: There are lots of passages in the Canon where the Buddha talks about generosity, lots of passages where he talks about virtue, but very little about heaven. Just that it’s very, very pleasant.

But then he goes on to point out the drawbacks of sensuality. And here he goes into detail again. You go to heaven, you get lazy, you get complacent. Not every deva gets complacent, but most of them do. As the Buddha said, the number of devas who, when leaving heaven, go to a good destination is very small. Many of them fall—and they fall hard. It’s almost as if samsara were a sick joke. You work hard to move your way up, but then you get up on top and you get lazy, you get complacent, you stop doing the goodness that got you there. Then you fall.

When you think about this, that’s when the Buddha said you’d be ready to realize the joys of renunciation, that renunciation would be a good thing. Renunciation here means, not depriving yourself, but rather looking for happiness in something beside sensuality.

When he got his listeners to this point, then he would teach them the four noble truths, because the four noble truths are basically a problem-solving approach to this problem: Why is it that the good things we do can lead to rewards that actually harm us? How do we get out of that trap? It’s a question of the how and the why. That’s why the four noble truths carry duties. The duty with regard to suffering, the clinging to the aggregates, is to comprehend it. That means understanding to the point where you have no passion, aversion, and delusion about it. The duty with regard to craving, the cause of suffering, is to abandon it. You abandon the cause. The cessation of suffering, the third truth, is basically the act of abandoning the cause and realizinig that suffering stops. And the way you do that is to follow the noble eightfold path. That’s something you develop. You realize the cessation of suffering by developing the path. That’s what we’re doing right now. That’s where we focus our attention: on the path.

It starts with right view and goes to right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. These are things we try to develop. In the course of developing them, we learn how to comprehend suffering and we learn how to abandon craving, so the focus is on the doing of the path. That covers all the duties.

It’s one of the reasons why the very first thing the Buddha approached in his first talk was the path. You may have noticed he doesn’t start with the four noble truths, he starts with the path. Then, in the context of the path, he discusses the four noble truths, focusing on right view, the first factor of the path. This, too, is something to be developed. So we’re developing.

We focus on trying to abandon unskillful qualities in the mind and to develop skillful ones in their place. To do this well we have to be very mindful. That’s why we establish mindfulness, focusing on the breath, focusing on the body, focusing on the 32 parts of the body, the breath. There are lots of topics we can focus on. But you want to stay with the body in and of itself or feelings in and of themselves, mind states, mental qualities in and of themselves.

Right now we’re choosing the breath as part of the body in and of itself. We’re putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. Any thoughts that relate to the world right now, just put them aside. If they come up again, you put them aside again. They come up again, you put them aside again.

This is what the developing is all about. You’re changing your habits. You’re developing a new state of mind. If you think of the mind as a committee, you’re developing a new member, a skillful member, to take over the committee. But the important thing is that you develop a sense of well-being with this focus.

You do that by being, as the Buddha said, ardent, alert, and mindful. Mindful means keeping things in mind. Alert means being very clear about what you’re doing and the results of what you’re doing. Ardency is putting your whole heart into doing this well. It’s basically right effort in the context of right mindfulness.

So you’re not just watching things arising and passing away as they come and things go. That’s not the kind of mindfulness the Buddha is talking about. As he says, when mindfulness is a governing principle in your mind, you’re mindful that if there are skillful qualities that you haven’t given rise to yet, you do what you can to make them come into being. When they’re there, you make sure they don’t go away. So instead of watching things come and go, you’re trying to make sure that good things come and try to make sure they don’t go. That’s the developing.

When you do that, then the mind has a place to settle down with a sense of ease. Learning to settle down like this requires two qualities of mind, as the Buddha pointed out: tranquility and insight. Tranquility involves finding a sense of feeling at home here with the breath. You’re able to settle in, your mind can gather together and get unified and stilled. There will be pleasure that comes with this, and this is a good pleasure to have, because this is one of the reasons why the path is so effective at dealing with craving: It gives you a skillful alternative pleasure to sensuality.

As for the insight, you have to understand the mind, what it’s doing, why it’s going after things that would destroy your concentration. This is where that five-step program comes in. If something is eating away at your concentration, you look at when it comes, why is it coming, what causes it to come. Then you see that it does pass away on its own. After all, it is inconstant, stressful, and not self. Those are the first two steps.

But then you pick it up again. The question is, why do you pick it up? This is where you have to look into the allure. What do you find appealing about this thought, this mind state that’s pulling you away? This requires a lot of honesty because there are a lot of unskillful things going on in the mind that we’re not all proud of. Sometimes we don’t even admit to ourselves why we like them, or even that we like them. This is another reason why we practice concentration, to give the mind a sense of stability, a sense of learning how to trust itself, so as to be willing to look into some of its unskillful habits, admit them for what they are, and learn how to see through them.

Once you see the allure, then the Buddha says to look at the drawbacks of that particular state of mind. When you see that the drawbacks really outweigh the allure, then it really hits home. Dispassion.

This is not just an intellectual exercise. We’re training what in Pali is called citta, which means both heart and mind. The heart part is what says, “Why have I been doing this?” You see how much suffering you’ve been causing yourself. Needlessly. That gives rise to a sense of dispassion, and that’s the escape.

This kind of insight helps get the mind in concentration. And then the concentration, of course, gives you more solid states of mind where you can see things more subtly, so that your insight into other, subtler unskillful states gets more precise. This combination of tranquility and insight based on concentration, and concentration based on tranquility and insight is what’s going to undercut the cravings that cause suffering.

So we work on getting the mind to settle down, and in the course of getting the mind to settle down—developing mindfulness, developing concentration—we begin to abandon some of our cravings. We begin to comprehend some of our suffering, comprehend our clinging. This is how the duties of the four noble truths help one another along.

This is the framework for understanding what we’re doing right now. We’re working on developing something. We’re not just saying, “Well, I’ll be good with whatever comes up.” The Buddha never taught that. Everything falls under those duties of the four noble truths. There’s work to be done. It’s good work.

Sometimes it seems really daunting because, after all, there’s something about the four noble truths that really goes against the grain. We’re being asked to step back from our clingings and our cravings, the things we really like, to see that they’re causing suffering and to realize there’s something better that comes when we can drop these things that we like.

It’s as if we’ve been eating the wrong kind of food for a long time. The doctor tells us, okay, you’ve got to stop eating all that cholesterol, stop eating all that fat, all that sugar, whatever. But this doesn’t means you have to starve. After all, there is the food of concentration and the food of well-being that comes when you see things clearly.

The analogy ultimately breaks down, though: The Buddha is going to get you to a point where the mind doesn’t even need to feed at all, it’s so strong. You can let go of all of its sources of food. But in the meantime, work on developing good food for the mind.

Ajaan Fuang was never the sort of person who liked to talk about controversial points in the Dhamma, but there was one point that he brought up, which is that some people say that the path is all about letting go, letting go, letting go. He said that’s not the case. We’ve got to do some developing. After all, that’s the duty with the fourth noble truth, and it’s through doing that duty that all the other duties get done. So work on developing your concentration, work on developing your tranquility and insight. They all go together.

And that’s the basic message of the four noble truths: There’s work to be done. There’s a problem. The problem is suffering, but it can be solved. And this is how it’s done.