Search results for: "The Four Noble Truths"
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- Firm in Your Intent… You’re trying to look to see what the mind is doing that’s causing suffering, which is why you have to stick with the duties of the four noble truths. Wherever you recognize the clinging you’re engaging in, you try to comprehend it. Exactly how is the act of clinging the same thing as suffering? As for the craving that gives rise …
- Fire… When he talks about the four noble truths and the duties that are appropriate for the four noble truths, this is a way of approaching any problem. No matter what your culture, no matter where you’re from, you look for where there’s stress and you look for what you’re doing to cause the stress. Then you try to abandon the cause …
- True for What Purpose?… When the Buddha taught the four noble truths, it was as if he was teaching the grammar for the practice. They’re not just four interesting facts that you file away in your vast library of facts. They’re meant to structure everything you think about: how you organize your library. He’s pointing out that the problem of suffering is the big problem …
- The Gift of Discernment… So the four noble truths, which are the categories of appropriate attention, are the Buddha’s protection. Those are your guide to make sure that wherever you go, whatever you do, you’re not bewildered. You have a sense of what you should do, because the mind, after all, is an active faculty. It doesn’t just sit here passively receiving things. Raw material …
- A Seeker’s Habits… And even insight into the four noble truths: That ultimately is a tool, a way of looking at things that helps you break free from attachments. So this is very much a “doing” practice, but it’s a very subtle doing. It starts from your outside actions and moves on in to the actions of the mind, and finally settles in on the real …
- How We Cling… These principles apply all the way through the development of right view, all the way up through the four noble truths, and even beyond the four noble truths. Take, for instance, the first noble truth: the truth of suffering. The Buddha starts with some ordinary examples: aging, illness, death, not getting what you want, being with what you don’t like, being separated from …
- You Can Do Better… Remember, the four noble truths don’t just sit there. They have duties. The duty with regard to suffering itself, if you really want to put an end to it, is to comprehend it, to see how the desire and passion of clinging, focused on the aggregates, is what actually constitutes suffering. You want to comprehend that, because most of the times when we …
- Truths of the Will… Looking at things the right way basically means looking at them in terms of the four noble truths, looking at the world in terms of suffering and the cause of suffering, the possibility for an end of suffering, and the fact that there is a path of practice leading there. You look at your mind and see which events in the mind fall into …
- Kind & Happy… People sometimes complain that the Buddha’s teachings on suffering—the four noble truths, the very first teachings he presented—are pessimistic because they focus on the issue of suffering. “Where is the happiness?” they say. Well, if you poke around in the four noble truths, you find happiness there in the fourth truth, which is the path to the end of suffering. That …
- Determination… Discernment was always taught in the context of the four noble truths. The four noble truths have duties. They’re about cause and effect. And their basic message is that if you want, you can put an end to suffering. If you want to suffer, you can continue to suffer. Which do you want? How are you going to look at your thoughts? How …
- Noble Priorities… Then we get to the four noble truths, which are the transcendent level of right view, and here everything is internal: Suffering is clinging to the aggregates. The body may grow ill, old, die, but that’s not the essence of the suffering. As Ajaan Lee says, those things are the shadows of suffering. The real suffering is clinging to the aggregates: form, feeling …
- Three Parts of Right View… When something comes up in the course of the meditation, you can ask yourself, “Which duty is appropriate here?” Which type of truth are you confronting—something to be developed, something to be abandoned, or something to be comprehended? This issue of comprehending stress is really important, because there’s the stress in the three characteristics, and there’s stress in the four noble …
- The Values of Stillness… When the Buddha taught the four noble truths the very first time, when he taught the noble eightfold path the first time, he started out with the motivation, “Why do you want to do this? Because it leads to true happiness, it leads to unbinding.” If you can see the value of that, then everything else follows.
- De-thinking… As you work with the breath in this way, the questions start building up to the Four Noble Truths: “Okay, where exactly is the stress?” “What’s causing it?” You see more and more subtle levels of stress simply by raising that question. If you don’t raise questions you’ll just sit here – in, out, in, out, in, out – and it becomes very …
- Caring Without Clinging… And that was the knowledge—seeing things in terms of the four noble truths—that allowed him to find something that was beyond equanimity and beyond the four noble truths. His knowledge of the total ending of suffering was the guarantee. But if he hadn’t been able to bring his mind to that equanimity to begin with, he wouldn’t have been able …
- Keep Your Options Open… This is what the four noble truths are all about: They expand our sense of what’s possible. As for the third noble truth, that the total end of suffering is possible: Some of the other teachers in the Buddha’s time would say, “Suffering will end, but there’s nothing you can do about it, you can’t speed up the process”—a …
- Action & Result… Teachings on skillful and unskillful actions come down to what are the long-term results of these actions? The four noble truths are about cause and effect, action and result. You do the craving, and there’s going to be clinging, which is going to be suffering. You do the path, you reach the realization of nibbāna. Nibbāna lies beyond action, though. The act …
- Fabrication… That’s what the Buddha said in his teachings on the four noble truths: The task with regard to pain is to comprehend it. Once the mind is solid enough and stable enough so as not to feel threatened by the pain, it can analyze the pain on whatever level it may be, searing pain or more subtle stress. As you comprehend the pain …
- Give It Your All… It’s a series of topics that the Buddha used to bring his listeners to the four noble truths. What’s strange is that we don’t have a complete record of any example of that discourse. It’s described simply by saying that the Buddha taught about this, he taught about that, and finally when the person was ready, he taught the four …
- Noble Right Concentration… But if you put that observation into the context of the four noble truths and their duties, then you can refine it and actually make it useful. The first truth is the truth of stress or suffering, and the duty there is to comprehend it. To comprehend it means to understand it to the point of getting past any passion, aversion, or delusion around …
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