Search results for: "The Four Noble Truths"
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- Asalha Puja – Completeness… The Buddha went on to say that it wasn’t until he realized he had completed these tasks, and his knowledge was complete in all three rounds of knowledge about the four noble truths—in other words, there are twelve factors to this knowledge: It wasn’t until then that he claimed to be fully awakened. So that’s genuine completeness. That’s why …
- Not-self for the Sake of Happiness… When your reflective self agrees, that’s when you’re ready for the four noble truths and their teaching that goes against the grain: that clinging to a sense of self is suffering. In the case of the Five Brethren, when he first taught them right view, he made no mention of self. He got them to an experience of the Dhamma Eye, where …
- Freedom, Conditioned & Not… One is the four noble truths, and the other is the principle that skillful actions should be developed and unskillful ones should be abandoned. In fact, you can derive the four noble truths from that second categorical teaching. Craving should be abandoned; the path should be developed, so as to comprehend suffering and then attain its cessation. In that case, the craving is the …
- Appropriate Attention Always… Simply that as the practice progresses, that principle gets developed even further into the four noble truths, which is the second expression of appropriate attention. What you develop is the noble eightfold path; what you abandon is craving. You realize that when you abandon craving, you can put an end to suffering. You develop the eightfold path so that you can abandon craving and …
- Categorical Truths… In terms of the four noble truths, the first one is the truth of suffering or stress—dukkha is the Pāli term. As the Buddha says, the truth here is basically that your suffering is in the way you cling. You cling to the body, you cling to your feelings, your perceptions, your thought constructs; you cling to consciousness of the senses. Wherever you …
- Owning Your Actions… And of course, this all relates to the four noble truths, which is the Buddha’s teaching on how the suffering that weighs the mind down comes from within. So meditation is always a matter of looking back at what you’re doing and the results of what you’re doing. This is why, when the Buddha wanted to express his awakening in as …
- Appropriate Attention… So, as you go through your meditation and you run across something that wears the mind down, weighs the mind down, ask yourself, “What are you craving? What are you clinging to? And how?” If you can see that you’re craving something that’s placing a weight on the mind, how about letting it go? Each of the four noble truths has a …
- Equanimity Isn’t Apathy… Look at the Buddha’s teaching on the four noble truths. You treat the cause of stress differently from the path to the end of stress. You try to abandon the cause and to develop the path. It’s not that you say, “I don’t care which happens, whether it’s stress or not stress.” You do care. You care so much that …
- Factors for Stream Entry… It basically comes down to thinking in terms of the four noble truths, trying to figure out, “Where is the stress here? What is the stress?” The Buddha identifies is as clinging to the five aggregates. What are the aggregates? What is clinging? You want to explore that. You want to comprehend what’s going on as you’re doing it, because all too …
- Clinging to Karmic Diarrhea… That’s one of the duties we have with regard to the four noble truths—and, as the Buddha said, to comprehend means to develop a sense of dispassion. You might think, “Why would we be passionate for suffering?” The problem is that there’s a side to suffering we like. In other words, the things that we do that cause suffering hold some …
- The Buddha’s Good News… After all, the four noble truths focus on suffering. You look at his worldview, and there are a lot of hells. The possibility of falling to the realm of the animals, hungry ghosts, is a possibility. But then you look at the people who listened to the Buddha’s teachings when he was alive. They found those teachings to be good news. The good …
- Determination… This is the basic teaching of the four noble truths. There are certain kinds of craving that lead to suffering. There are certain desires, in the factor of right effort in the path, that lead to the end of suffering. So the Buddha’s basically giving us guidance in how to sort through our desires. That guidance comes first in the path as right …
- To Understand the Path… Sariputta once said that the four noble truths cover all the Dhamma, encompass all the Dhamma in the same way that the footprint of an elephant can encompass the footprints of all the other animals on land. So when you’re practicing, it’s good to think in terms of the four noble truths, not only what they are but also the duties appropriate …
- Thinking About Rebirth… when he focused on the present moment, saw things in terms of the four noble truths, completed the duties for those truths, and gained full awakening. But the Buddha didn’t get to the present moment without having gone through his knowledges about rebirth and the role of karma in rebirth. The way he went from knowledge of his own rebirths to the role …
- Discernment… So, what kind of knowledge about arising and passing away would lead to the deathless? And to the right ending of stress? The Buddha goes on to define discernment in terms of the four noble truths. Here’s where he lays it out: what’s skillful and what’s not. Craving is an unskillful cause because it leads to clinging, which is suffering; the …
- No Happiness Other than Peace… Instead of looking at your experience in terms of yourself and other people or the world, i.e., objects in the world, you look at things simply in terms of the four noble truths—as stress, its cause, its cessation, and the path leading to its cessation—terms that don’t refer to people at all. But each of these terms carries a skill …
- Something New… In fact, that’s what the four noble truths are all about. Why are we suffering? We’re suffering because of things we’re doing, but we don’t have to keep on doing the things we’re doing. We can change. We can bring something new into the world. In fact, with every moment, we have that possibility. You can bring something new …
- Solo Practice… And that’s what connects to the four noble truths. You see what the mind does that creates suffering, you see what it does that puts an end to that suffering. That’s the basic pattern. Those are the basic questions. They start from the simple process of learning to be observant of your breath. And then the focus moves inward so that you …
- Mistakes… Even before he would teach people the four noble truths, he taught something called the Graduated Discourse. It starts out with generosity, the joy that comes with generosity and then the long-term benefits. Virtue was the next topic, and again, the joy of being virtuous, of looking at your behavior and seeing that there’s nothing in your behavior that you could criticize …
- The Safety of Dualities… In fact, I was reading just the other day a passage where the author said that when the Buddha was teaching the four noble truths, he was coming from a position of non-duality, which doesn’t make any sense at all. If any number is dual, it’s four: a dual duality. And the truths are four precisely because the Buddha’s trying …
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