Search results for: "The Four Noble Truths"

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  2. Thoughts About Thinking
     … It’s in line with the four noble truths. We want to see which thoughts are part of the cause of suffering and which thoughts are part of the path away from suffering. It’s as if you have a factory here that’s producing very erratically—sometimes good products, sometimes bad—and you’re trying to figure out: Why is that? Sometimes it … 
  3. Willing to Learn
     … Still, he gives us the tools—his instructions on the four noble truths. Try to comprehend the suffering, he says. When you see the craving and the ignorance that underlie the suffering, try to let go. Develop the qualities of mind—whatever’s needed in terms of concentration or insight—so that you can really look at suffering long and hard. Look at stress … 
  4. Consciousness, Awakened & Not
     … Where are you causing suffering through what you’re doing? Each of the four noble truths involves an action. Clinging in the first noble truth is something to be comprehended. The craving in the second noble truth is to be abandoned. The third noble truth is dispassion—dispassion comes about as a result of looking directly at your actions. When an unskillful form of … 
  5. Right View Comes First
     … Now, in giving this talk, when the Buddha got people to this stage, when their minds were focused, gathered into one, he would teach them the four noble truths. This is right view on the transcendent level. He would have them look more deeply into their minds and tell them that whatever suffering they had was something they were doing—they were clinging, to … 
  6. To Stay the Course
     … It’s an excellent lesson, on a beginning level, in the four noble truths. After all, when the Buddha analyzes suffering, he doesn’t talk about just any old suffering. He focuses on the suffering that the mind creates for itself when it’s clinging. And where does that come from? It comes from the mind’s own actions. It comes from its cravings … 
  7. The Pursuit of True Happiness
     … So when he taught the four noble truths, he said, “With regard to the first truth, this is the task you want to accomplish: to comprehend suffering, to understand what’s creating such a burden on the mind.” He had discovered that there are two kinds of suffering: the stress in the changefulness in things in life, but also the unnecessary stress and suffering … 
  8. The Right Piece in the Right Puzzle
     … The other one is basically a subtler working out of that principle into the four noble truths: the truth of suffering, which is clinging; the truth of the origination of suffering, which is craving; the truth of the cessation of suffering, which is dispassion for that craving. And then there’s the truth of the path of practice that leads to the cessation of … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. Understanding Through Developing
     … These will be in line with the duties of the four noble truths: You want to comprehend suffering, you want to abandon the cause, you want to realize the cessation of suffering, and you do that by developing the path. Those are things you want to think about, so that you have at least a good sketch in your head about what you’re … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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