Search results for: "The Four Noble Truths"

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  2. A Victory that Matters
     … He defines ignorance not so much as ignorance of his teachings as a whole, but more ignorance of the four noble truths and the tasks appropriate to them: comprehending suffering, abandoning its cause, realizing its cessation, and developing the path to its cessation. Just knowing those things doesn’t end the problem. You have to actually look at things in terms of the noble … 
  3. Cut the Currents
     … The final effluent is ignorance—not seeing things in terms of the four noble truths. In other words, you see things in terms of “me” and “mine,” “what I want,” “what I don’t want,” whereas the four noble truths don’t talk about who you are or where you are. It’s just: There is suffering here in the clinging, and it’s … 
  4. The Origination of Suffering
     … When the Buddha set up the four noble truths, he set up the path that we’re following to attack the problem not at the problem itself, but at the cause. It’s like having a boat with a leak, and water’s coming into the boat through the leak. If you just spend your time bailing out the water, bailing out the water … 
  5. Nothing Wrong with Right & Wrong
     … And he taught the four noble truths as truths that lead reliably to a noble goal, i.e., a goal that was unconditioned, a goal that was not subject to death. That’s what he meant by “noble.” The truths are both noble and true in that they reliable set out the right duties for getting to a dimension that doesn’t die. Those … 
  6. Complaining Rights
     … What’s the connection between the four noble truths and the three characteristics? Which noble truth do they fall under? Well, the three characteristics—they’re actually three perceptions—are tools for performing the duties of the four noble truths. They don’t come under any one particular truth. You apply them to the stress so that you can see the arising and falling … 
  7. Strength of Conviction
     … When you follow that process into its subtler levels, you discover that that issue of skillfulness and unskillfulness is what underlies the four noble truths. The four noble truths are ways of looking at experience. You’re not so much concerned about who you are; you’re simply concerned with which actions are skillful and which actions are not. What’s causing suffering? What … 
  8. Jhana: Responsible Happiness
     … That’s what the four noble truths are all about. They’re like a doctor’s prescription. What’s the illness? Where does it come from? Cure the illness by getting rid of the cause. Everything the Buddha taught was meant to be healing, a means to happiness that’s blameless. So if you start feeling guilty about practicing concentration, remind yourself this is … 
  9. The Challenge of Right View
     … He talks about the four noble truths and how each noble truth has three levels of knowledge associated with it. He goes through all the permutations: Three times four is twelve. That’s why the Dhamma wheel on the wall over there has twelve spokes. The first level of knowledge is knowing the noble truth—in other words knowing suffering, knowing the cause of … 
  10. Infinity
     … What kind of intentions, what kind of actions right now, what kind of views right now, would lead to the way out? As the answer to that question came, he saw that the way out was to see things in terms of the four noble truths, to understand what suffering is, and what he was doing right now to cause suffering right now. He … 
  11. Concentration & Insight
     … The best questions have to do with the four noble truths—where is there any stress or suffering right here?—although there are other useful ones as well. Say you sense that there’s greed, anger, or delusion lurking around in the mind. The Buddha says if you really want to understand them to the point of getting past them, you have to understand … 
  12. Skills to Make a Difference
     … So even these basic principles of action teach you a lot—and get you ready for the other set of categorical teachings, which are the four noble truths. These truths, too, don’t just sit there. They have duties associated with them. The first truth is the fact that stress is in clinging to the aggregates. The duty is to comprehend that: in other … 
  13. Asalha Puja
     … 12 spokes that represent the four noble truths multiplied by the three levels of knowledge appropriate to each truth. There’s the truth of stress or suffering—dukkha—the truth of the cause, the truth of the cessation, and the truth of the path of practice leading to cessation. Those are the four truths. In explaining stress, the Buddha gave a list of examples … 
  14. To Strengthen the Path
     … We talk about seeing things in terms of the four noble truths, and it sounds kind of exotic and formal. But it’s actually something very close to what we do a lot of the time with other things that we find are problems. We try to figure out what the problem is and then what’s the cause. And is it possible to … 
  15. An Island in the Flood
     … That’s how, in the third knowledge, he realized that seeing things in terms of the four noble truths and then doing the duties with regard to those truths would lead him out, would lead to the unconditioned. At that point, he didn’t have to do anything more. In other words, the unconditioned isn’t used for the sake of something else. It … 
  16. Frame Your Questions Well
     … And the second was the four noble truths and their duties: the duty to comprehend suffering, the duty to abandon its cause, the duty to realize its cessation, and the duty to develop the path to its cessation. These were the terms that framed, as he said, the ideal questions, because in both cases, we’re talking about actions and results. These are truths … 
  17. Strong-hearted
     … What is discernment based on? The Buddha’s framework for discernment, of course, is the four noble truths. Sometimes you hear it expressed as the three characteristics—seeing things as being inconstant, stressful, not-self—but those the Buddha calls perceptions. And those perceptions have meaning within the context of the framework provided by the four noble truths, which is that you’re trying … 
  18. What to Tolerate, What Not
     … That’s the stress in the four noble truths, and that’s where you can really focus your attention and make a difference. It comes from the activity of the mind. It comes from your ignorance and all the other factors that lead up to craving. That’s something you can do something about. This is one of the basic principles of wisdom: figuring … 
  19. You Are Not a Textbook
     … Be very sensitive to what you’re doing and the results you’re getting from your actions, because as he taught in the four noble truths, some of the things you’re doing now are leading to suffering. There are other things you could be doing that would lead away from suffering. Then he gives you pointers as to what to look for, but … 
  20. Constructing & Deconstructing
     … When you start making distinctions like that, that’s when you can apply the teachings of the four noble truths. Because the different events in the mind do have their different duties, and the four noble truths are there to remind you what the duties are. With the aggregates, your duty is to comprehend them. That means understanding how you cling to them until … 
  21. How to Talk to Yourself
     … The principles of right view are the four noble truths, and the four noble truths have duties: Suffering is something you want to comprehend, its cause is something you want to abandon, its cessation is something you want to realize, and the path is something you want to develop. So when something unskillful comes up in the mind, notice that it’s something to … 
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