Search results for: "The Four Noble Truths"

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  2. Stick to Your Duties
     … Everything keeps coming back to those duties of the four noble truths. For some people, that seems just too ordinary: the fact that you’re suffering, and you can put an end to suffering. They want to go into the “bigger” issues. But the Buddha was wise to say that this is the issue that makes a difference. If you get involved in abstractions … 
  3. Pay Careful Attention
     … For instance, with the four noble truths, the Buddha said to comprehend the first truth, to abandon the second, to realize the third, and to develop the fourth. Now, he’s not saying to abandon words about the cause of suffering. He’s not saying to develop words about the path to the end of suffering. He’s telling you to abandon the reality … 
  4. Antidotes for Clinging
     … This is stress in terms of the four noble truths. Wherever there’s craving, there can be clinging, and the clinging to the aggregates is the stress that really weighs on the mind. When we practice, our main focus is on the stress in the four noble truths, the stress that weighs on the mind. If you don’t cling to the things that … 
  5. Wandering On, Shooting Arrows
    When the Buddha explains the causes for suffering, he traces them back to ignorance—ignorance of the four noble truths. When that ignorance is ended with knowledge (vijjā), he says, all the causes of suffering come to an end. The question is: How do you get from ignorance to knowledge? There’s a passage where he explains how. He describes the steps of dependent … 
  6. Understanding Goodwill & Equanimity
     … All too often, the sublime abidings are treated as something separate from the four noble truths. There was a book years back, What the Buddha Taught, that treated the four sublime abidings as an addendum tacked on to the end, because they didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the discussion, which was on the four noble truths. But that’s … 
  7. Mange in the Mind
     … If you want to see the four noble truths, you can see them right here, in the way the mind relates to the body. If you want to see the three characteristics, you can find them right here as well. Ajaan Maha Boowa’s analogy is the body as a city, with streets and buildings. The four-way intersections are the four noble truths … 
  8. What Is Skillful?
     … It’s all too easy reading the texts to see that delusion is a matter of not seeing the four noble truths and it gets even bigger with delusion about dependent co-arising, which makes it all very abstract. But you have to realize, when the Buddha is talking about the four noble truths and dependent co-arising, what is he talking about? He … 
  9. True to the Teachings
     … He overcame their doubts about him and gave them his first sermon, Setting the wheel of Dhamma in Motion, in which he taught about the noble eightfold path and the four noble truths. One of the results of the sermon was that one of the five brethren attained the Dhamma Eye, his first glimpse of the deathless. In that glimpse of the deathless, he … 
  10. Noble & True
     … I was reading recently of some scholars complaining that the four noble truths are not really noble. After all, what’s noble about craving? What’s noble about suffering? They were claiming that the four noble truths aren’t even really true for anybody aside from those who have already become awakened, which is a very peculiar statement, After all, the Buddha teaches the … 
  11. Positive Capability
     … Why is the mind suffering? What is it doing to make itself suffer? How can it stop? This takes the four noble truths as questions. The Buddha points our attention in the right direction. We’re looking for the cause of suffering. We’re not going to be looking outside. We have to look inside. We have to look at our cravings, see why … 
  12. Feeding While You Work
     … In the four noble truths, there’s a cause and there’s an effect. There’s either craving and the suffering that comes from craving, or else there’s the factors of the path and the freedom from suffering that comes from developing the factors of the path. You want the mind to be in a position where it can see those connections. As … 
  13. Victory
     … When the Buddha talks about duties, it’s always in the context of the four noble truths, starting out with the principle of skillful action: that skillful action should be developed and unskillful action should be abandoned. “Action” here means not only outside actions but also actions of your mind. From there come the duties of the four noble truths: to comprehend suffering, to … 
  14. No Who or Where
     … Then think of the duties of the four noble truths. The four noble truths are not expressed in terms of, “Who’s suffering?” or where the suffering is. It’s just, “This is suffering, and this is its cause”: events. There’s also a path away from suffering. And each of these truths has a duty. The duty with regard to suffering or stress … 
  15. Pride in Your Craft
     … As you do this, you’re getting practice in the four noble truths, regardless of whether it’s the first jhana or the second jhana, or the 1½ jhana, or however jhanas there may be. If you develop this attitude, it doesn’t really matter what level of concentration you’ve attained, you can learn from it. And that’s a sign of a … 
  16. The Gift of the Practice
     … It’s a kind of how-to knowledge and is defined as knowledge of the four noble truths. On the surface this may sound like just knowing about the four noble truths, but when the Buddha explained the kind of knowledge that’s appropriate of four noble truths, it’s not just that. You realize that, on the one hand, you have to learn … 
  17. Four Noble Truths to One
     … But we can’t get there without the four noble truths first, because we have a problem—the problem of suffering—along with the bewilderment that goes along with suffering together with a search for a way out. To solve that problem, you have to divide reality into four categories: There’s the cause of the problem, and then the problem itself. Then there … 
  18. Duties
     … It’s one of the duties associated with the four noble truths. You develop the path so that you can comprehend suffering, and find out where the cause is from. And you’ll find that the cause is coming from your desires. All these duties are duties because of our desires. So you abandon the desire, and then the mind is free from having … 
  19. Balancing Effort & Patience
     … seeing things in terms of the four noble truths, which are not particularly beliefs, but are categories for sorting out your experiences. Which experiences are suffering? Which experiences are the cause of suffering? Usually we have these things all mixed up. Which things you do are the path? Which things you do are the cause of suffering? They’re not just passive experiences, because … 
  20. Free from Buddha Nature
     … ignorance of the four noble truths and the tasks appropriate for the four noble truths. When you’re ignorant of those tasks, you start doing unskillful things. With ignorance as a condition, there are fabrications. In fact, what you think you are is something you fabricate. Sometimes you’re doing the fabrication right here and now. Sometimes it’s the result of past fabrications … 
  21. Commit & Reflect
     … And he realized, by looking at the present moment in terms of the four noble truths, he could go beyond being reborn. The implication here is that you want to focus not only on the present moment but also on developing skillful qualities in the present moment, because that’s what the four noble truths are all about. You see that you’re suffering … 
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