Search results for: "The Four Noble Truths"

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  2. Honest & Observant
     … The other categorical teaching, of course, are the four noble truths. In these two cases, you keep running up against fences that the Buddha puts up, and your willingness requires that you see that “Yes, my old behavior doesn’t fit in. I’ve got to change.” But it’s not just that. You also have to be willing to look at your intentions … 
  3. Strong Through Commitment
     … not looking at things in terms of the four noble truths. In other words, you may know about the truths, but if you actually don’t use them to frame your experience, you’re still ignorant. Then, based on that ignorance, he says, the next step is that you engage in fabrication—saṅkhārā is the Pali word. You put things together. In particular, you … 
  4. Choosing Freedom
     … If you want to put an end to suffering, you keep the four noble truths in mind and then ask yourself, “Okay, given the four noble truths, what do I have to do right now? Is this stress? I’ve got to comprehend it then.” How about this movement of the mind? Is that the cause of stress? In that case, you abandon it … 
  5. Sensitive to Fabrication
     … You can see if any one of them is conducive to suffering or to craving, and you can change it—because the difference between whether this is going to be an experience of suffering or not, as the Buddha said, is whether you apply the four noble truths to what you’re doing. And your applying the four noble truths is not just remembering … 
  6. A Connoisseur of Happiness
     … He talked for an hour about the four noble truths, with his major focus on the truth of suffering, suffering, suffering. Just a few minutes after he had finished, the senior monk from Bangkok finally arrived. So they asked him to get up on the sermon seat and give a talk, too. He hadn’t heard what the previous talk was. He got up … 
  7. The Karma of Pain
     … Years back I was listening aghast as a Zen teacher was telling me how he really liked the four noble truths because they asked unanswerable questions, like: What is the cause of pain? Well, there is an answer! It’s your ignorance; it’s your craving. And where are they? They’re happening right here, right now. Can you find them? They’re here … 
  8. Alighting on the Dhamma
     … This means that you bring the questions of the four noble truths to bear on noticing, “Where is the stress in my mind as I am listening to the talk? What’s the cause of stress? How does the talk help illuminate my understanding of where the stress is and what’s causing the stress? Or what qualities does it recommend that I develop … 
  9. Insight into Pain
     … There’s the pain in the three characteristics and there’s the pain or suffering in the four noble truths. The pain in the three characteristics is something universal. Wherever there’s a process of fabrication where conditions come together to create other conditions, there’s going to be stress. There’s stress inherent in the fact that things arise and pass away, and … 
  10. Practicing for Dispassion
     … Sariputta didn’t start with the four noble truths. He didn’t start with three characteristics. He started with the goal of the practice —which is dispassion. In Thai, they have a way of putting two words together to make paired concepts, and the word they tend to pair with Dhamma is attha: the goal, the meaning, the purpose. So we have the Dhamma … 
  11. Fear & Anger
     … In other words, you see things in terms of the four noble truths. Each truth has a task, which has to be mastered as a skill and brought to completion: comprehend the stress, abandon the cause, develop the path, so that you can realize the cessation. That’s a very different approach from simply being non-reactive, or learning to accept whatever comes. If … 
  12. Remembering Ajaan Lee
     … Of course, this fits in with the four noble truths. We’re looking for the cause of suffering. We want to see what arises together with the suffering, what passes away together with the suffering, so that we can know where it comes from. And this focused analysis is also a burning away of the defilement. As soon as you see the defilement for … 
  13. Questioning & Acceptance
     … The second sort are questions framed in terms of the four noble truths. Those are the most categorical of his categorical teachings, the only ones that he actually describes as categorical in the Canon. So the questions derived from those issues are the ones that you should be applying yourself to. And this is what appropriate attention is all about. You pay attention to … 
  14. The Buddha’s Questions
     … In this case, it turned out to be ignorance of what he later taught as the four noble truths: suffering, its origination, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. What was he to do with those truths? He realized that there were duties that you had to fulfill with regard to them. Again: “What’s the most skillful use of this knowledge?” That … 
  15. Experimental Intelligence
     … The larger context is formed by the four noble truths: the fact that there is suffering, that there’s a cause for suffering, that suffering can cease, and that there’s a path of practice leading to its cessation. These truths in turn relate to a more basic issue: that the whole purpose of the Buddha’s teachings is for the sake of finding … 
  16. Allowing the Breath to Spread
     … That’s stress in the four noble truths, which is based on craving. Because of the craving, you have your perceptions of your feelings that are based on craving, you have thought-constructs about your feelings that are based on a craving, even the ways you breathe are based on craving. Those are going to make the pain even worse. So remind yourself that … 
  17. Shoulds & Ideals
     … And where do the shoulds come from? From the Buddha’s teachings of the four noble truths, as in that chant we had just now: understanding suffering, what’s causing suffering, the end of suffering, and the way to the end of suffering. This is where his shoulds come from, because each of these four truths has a duty. Suffering is to be comprehended … 
  18. The Tools of the Path
     … He’d seen the truth of the four noble truths. In other words, he’d actually had a taste of the cessation of suffering, but even then he said, “I don’t really know the entirety of the Buddha’s views, or the entirety of the views of the awakened monks.” So think of right view as the Buddha’s directions to us specifically … 
  19. A Good Foundation
    One of the messages of the four noble truths is that you’ve been making some pretty big mistakes. Everything you do, say, think, is for the purpose of happiness, pleasure, and well-being, yet so much of it actually leads to suffering. When you learn how to admit that fact, then you’re ready to grow in the Dhamma. But it means that … 
  20. An Apprenticeship in Integrity
     … When the Buddha was talking about the four noble truths, he wasn’t just telling us information about the four noble truths. He was asserting a value, that this is the most important way of looking at things to help attain the most important goal you can set for yourself: putting an end to suffering. So to understand him, you have to understand not … 
  21. An Auspicious Night
     … What are your duties? The duties of the four noble truths: Suffering is to be comprehended; craving—its cause—is to be abandoned; its cessation is to be realized; and the path of that cessation is to be developed. So, there’s work to do, especially in the abandoning and the developing. As the Buddha says twice in the poem, you have to be … 
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