Search results for: "The Four Noble Truths"

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  2. 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 … 
  3. 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 … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. 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 … 
  6. 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.
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. Feeding on Ardency
     … When you look at the duties for the four noble truths, acceptance doesn’t fit into any of them. When you comprehend suffering, it’s not simply watching suffering. You try to understand it to the point of dispassion for it. That requires a lot of understanding. Think about the Buddha’s five-step program for inducing dispassion. It requires a lot of effort … 
  15. Hold on to Right View
     … In terms of the right view that would get you out of the system entirely—that’s the four noble truths and the duties appropriate to those truths. Hold to that as well. The two levels are connected in that they both have to do with actions and results. It’s simply that the four noble truths get more into the mind. The actions … 
  16. Stay Principled
     … We talk about discernment as being the ability to see things in terms of the four noble truths, using the Buddha’s teachings on inconstancy, stress, and not-self. Those are the general outlines, but each of us has his or her own specific problems, the things that cause us to suffer. Some people are over-confident. Some people lack confidence. Some people find … 
  17. Analysis of Qualities
     … You begin to see it so clearly that you can understand how the mind creates unnecessary suffering for itself—because that’s the original question we’re trying answer as we follow the four noble truths: Why is there suffering? Because of craving. Where is the craving? The craving is in the mind. So the questions of appropriate attention come back to the questions … 
  18. Forest Bathing
     … And the guide for dealing with those dangers is the four noble truths. We often hear that we’re here to see things as they are largely in terms of the three characteristics. But the Buddha never taught that. The three characteristics, he said, are subordinate to the four noble truths. We’re here to understand our craving. We’re here to understand our … 
  19. Admirable Friendship
     … And particularly, seeing things in terms of the four noble truths. That’s pretty radical. We hear the term four noble truths so often that we don’t stop to think about what a radical teaching they are. They’re a guideline for how to look at your experience. Most of us look at experience in terms of what’s us and what’s … 
  20. Discernment Is in the Doing
    There was a book a while back that discussed the Buddha’s teachings in the context of the four noble truths. The author didn’t know where to put the brahmaviharas in the context of those truths, so he just tacked them on at the end as a separate section. Actually, the brahmaviharas are an important part of the noble eightfold path. They’re … 
  21. Learning by Doing
    When we think in terms of the four noble truths, what we’re doing right now is developing the fourth truth—developing the path. And as the Buddha said, the heart of the path is right concentration. So, focus on staying with your breath. Take a couple of good, long, in-and-out breaths. Notice where you feel the breathing in your body, because … 
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