True & Beneficial

The Buddha said twice that all he taught was suffering and the end of suffering. The truths he taught were truths about suffering and the end of suffering. In other words, he didn’t teach truth in the abstract. As he said, we suffer, and the most heartfelt questions that come to us, come out of bewilderment around the suffering. The big question is: Who knows a way to put an end to the suffering?

We’re not interested in truth in the abstract, or truth in and of itself, aside from the truths that can be used to understand suffering and how we can put an end to it. This is why the Buddha said that when he chose his words, he would choose words that were true and beneficial—beneficial meaning useful for putting an end to suffering. If something was true but not beneficial, he wouldn’t say it.

So, as we’re meditating, we should think: We’re not here to find truths except as they’re useful for putting an end to suffering. When we learn a truth about the way the mind works, the next question is: How do we use this truth to put an end to suffering? How do we use this to find true happiness?

There are a lot of people who have insights into not-self or emptiness, conditionality, and some of those insights are actually useful if you put them to use. On their own, they don’t amount to much and they don’t have that much impact because, after all, what drives us is the desire for truths that will put an end to suffering.

You can learn interesting facts about your mind, but if they’re not relevant to that issue, they don’t have much impact. Now, you may grab on to some ideas that give you some satisfaction on a temporary level, such as, “Everything is all an illusion.” That’s one you hear a lot. It means you don’t have to take things all that seriously. But does that really put an end to suffering?

And what kind of mind-state is satisfied with the idea that the world is all make-believe? If you’ve been taking certain things too seriously and it’s been hurting, that might give some temporary relief, but it’s not a good belief to hold on to in the long term. The only thing that’s really satisfying is nibbāna—a happiness that’s totally unconditioned—and it is total. As the Buddha said, if you think there’s anything negative or lacking in nibbāna, that’s wrong view.

So when an insight comes, ask yourself: “To what extent does this really liberate me from my sufferings? And which part of my mind is satisfied with this truth?” Then the next question is: Can this truth be used? Like truths about no-self: The Buddha said to say that there is no self is actually an evil viewpoint. To say there is a self also sides with an evil viewpoint. If you believe there is no self, then the question is: Well, who’s going to be doing the path? Who’s going to benefit? That completely defeats the whole project.

So the question of whether there is or isn’t a self is a question the Buddha has you put aside. If you say there is a self, well, what kind of self is it? Once you have an idea that something is self, you’re going to hold on to whatever that is. A large part of the path is learning how to let go.

So that view is not going to help you. The Buddha does recommend a provisional sense of self: that you are capable of doing the path, you will benefit from it, and you have the power to examine your own actions and evaluate them so that you can get better and better at the path. A sense that you’re responsible for what you’re doing: That’s an important part of the path, too.

So that kind of self-perception is useful temporarily, but eventually it’s going to have to go. You do have to work on it. You do have to make it skillful. Some people don’t like themselves. They’re happy to hear that there is no self, that what they don’t like doesn’t exist—but that aborts the path. There are things in yourself that you do have to develop.

As for seeing the constructed nature of reality, it is true that your experience of the present moment is partly a construction of what you’re doing right now, partly a construction based on what comes from the past. If there were no input from the present—in other words, if there were no intentions in the present—you wouldn’t have an experience of the present moment. In fact, that’s what we’re after: What happens when there is no input in the present moment? Total nibbāna, totally divorced from all six senses. It’s not known through any of the six senses at all. But the question is: To what extent are you constructing things? And the next question is: How can you use the fact of construction to construct the path? The path does have to be made.

Think of the raft analogy. You’re on this side of the river where it’s unsafe. Safety is on the other side of the river, but there’s no nibbāna yacht to come over and pick you up. There’s no bridge to go over. So you have to make a raft.

What do you make the raft of? You make the raft out of the twigs and branches on this side of the river, which the Buddha identifies as form, feelings, perceptions, thought-constructs, consciousness of the senses—in other words, the things that you ordinarily cling to that cause suffering, but now you’re going to cling to them strategically as you make this raft and hold on to it as you swim across the river. So, given that your projections and fabrications in the present moment are an important part of your experience, how do you fabricate well? The Buddha’s instructions are all about that: that it is possible to make a fabricated path, a constructed path that goes to something that is unfabricated and unconstructed.

The raft doesn’t cause the other side of the river to be, but it gets you there, together with your own efforts. So there’s not just letting go, there’s also using your insights to construct something useful for the sake of the path: something that’s true and beneficial. When you get to the other side, then you can let all fabrications go. And when you let all fabrications go, your experience of the six senses will go as well, for a spell. You still have kamma to come back. But your relationship to things will be very different.

The important thing here is that you remember that we’re here for the sake of putting an end to suffering: not just to find truths, but to find truths that are useful for the end of suffering, or to take truths that we know and make them so that they are useful. That’s when they have a real impact on the mind. Otherwise, you can read a lot of Buddhist philosophy and say, “Yeah, I’ve seen that happen in my mind. I’ve seen that happen in my mind.”

But we’re not here just to affirm what you’ve seen. We’re here to say: Given that you’ve seen this, now how do you use it? How do you make this truth beneficial? How do you use this truth to serve what you’re really looking for, which is truths about happiness? Truths about how to find true happiness, how to understand suffering, put an end to suffering: Those are the truths that have an impact, because they’re not just truths about things, they have to be true in the doing and in receiving results.

So for the insights you gain, the question always is: How is this useful? Is this something that can be made beneficial or not?

I’m always amazed at the people who say, “When you discover there’s no permanent self, that’s the end of the problem.” The end of what problem?

There are still lots of problems in the mind, no matter how strongly you believe in that. That’s why the Buddha has a series of questions that he puts aside. He says they’re not worth following up because the answers you get, even if they are true, are not beneficial. The question of “Who am I?”, “What am I?”, “Do I have a self?”, “Do I not have a self?”, “What’s the true nature of the world?”—these things the Buddha says to put aside.

Watch your own mind. Watch the workings of your mind. We’re here to see not “things as they are”—which would just be a truth—but things as they have come to be—in other words, to see a process of causation in the mind—because then you can use that knowledge of causation to manipulate causes to bring about the end of suffering. You can make it beneficial.

When the Buddha describes dependent co-arising, he doesn’t just describe how certain conditions give rise to suffering. He also describes how putting an end to those conditions can put an end to suffering. And you put an end to those conditions by seeing them in terms of the noble truths. What here is the suffering? i.e., the clinging. What’s causing the suffering? And how can you put an end to it?

We’re here to see things as they have come to be so that we can use that knowledge of causality to see how things can be—in other words, how they can they be turned into the path.

If things can’t be turned into the path, put them aside. Things that don’t make a good raft, you don’t want to burden the raft. Things that would put a hole in the raft, you don’t want to carry those, either. Carry just the twigs and leaves and branches that would get you across. Then you put those truths aside, too.

Ajaan Lee makes this point. We’re not here for the truth. We’re here for truths that we can use and then put aside when the job is really done. So the important thing is: Learn now to distinguish between the truths that are useful and those that are useless. As for the ones that are potentially useful, how do you get the best use out of them?

That’s when the insight really hits home and solves the genuine problem: the bewilderment we have over suffering. We finally find that, yes, we can put an end to it, and that the end of suffering is the ultimate happiness.

Truths that satisfy.