Search results for: "The Four Noble Truths"

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  2. Understanding Aggregates
     … This is where the teaching on the four noble truths and the three characteristics really goes against the grain. Precisely the places where you find joy, precisely the places where you feel that you’ve got to hold on: *Those *are the places, the Buddha says, you’ve got to watch out for. You’ve got to learn how to peel away the appeal … 
  3. A Light in the Darkness
     … the questions that surround the four noble truths. Where is there stress? Where is there craving? When is mindfulness present? When is it absent? Can you see these things? When mindfulness is present, how can you keep it going? When it’s absent, how can you give rise to it? These are the questions he has us ask about the present moment. Aside from … 
  4. Safety All Around
     … basically, seeing things in term of the four noble truths. What’s noble about the truths? They force you to question your clinging and your craving. Otherwise, you’re going to suffer from these things. The Buddha puts a little question mark into your likes and dislikes: The things that you hold on to, the things that you’re feeding on: Do you realize … 
  5. Discerning Actions
     … the teaching on skillful and unskillful actions, the teaching on the four noble truths. The reason there are four noble truths is because there are four duties with regard to stress. You want to comprehend the stress, to abandon its cause, to realize its cessation, and to develop the path to the cessation. Four different things you’ve got to do: That’s why … 
  6. Life in the Buddha’s Hospital
     … He starts off with the four noble truths, which are very much like an analysis of how to care for a disease. In his case, he’s offering a cure for the basic disease of the mind: the suffering that comes from craving and ignorance. That’s what we’ve got to cure. So he analyzes the symptoms of the disease, diagnoses it, explains … 
  7. The Primacy of the Mind (2)
     … After all, with the four noble truths, when the Buddha searches out the causes of suffering, they don’t come from outside—they come from within. It’s because of craving and ignorance that the mind creates suffering for itself. When you look at dependent co-arising, you find the same thing: Almost half of the factors are prior to sensory contact, our knowledge … 
  8. Inner Authorities
     … Why are you duty-bound to accept their indoctrination? If you’re going to adopt views that you’ll take as working hypotheses, try the four noble truths and the duties they entail. Instead of being duty-bound to keep in touch with the news, you’re duty-bound to comprehend your suffering, to see that suffering is in the clinging; to abandon the … 
  9. When You Don’t Like Your Selves
     … Do I want the consequences of this particular kind of action?” Then he has you talk to yourself in terms of the four noble truths. The way you self is a kind of clinging. When is it useful and skillful, and when is it not? Because you do need a sense of self to follow the path—a sense of yourself as competent, that … 
  10. Strategic Thinking
    If you look carefully at the four noble truths, you begin to realize that the Buddha was a very strategic thinker. He takes elements out of the first two noble truths—suffering and the cause of suffering—and puts them to use in the path to the end of suffering. Remember that suffering, as he said, when you boil it down to its essence … 
  11. Training Your Inner Teacher
     … When the Buddha sets out the four noble truths, he says that the thoughts that give rise to suffering come from craving for sensuality, craving for becoming, craving for non-becoming. Then there are the thoughts that lead away from suffering, starting with thoughts of right view, right resolve—your intention to follow the duties of the path—then right speech, right action, right … 
  12. Afraid of Inner Pleasure
     … This is *the *basic message of the four noble truths, that the suffering we experience in the world, the suffering that really weighs down the mind, comes from inside. People can be cruel outside; people can do horrible things outside. And they do. But it’s how you respond, how you process that: That’s what makes you suffer. This is why we hear … 
  13. Universal Truths
     … What this means is that the four noble truths are not some abstract teaching whose truth is peculiar to India 2,600 years ago. They’re things happening right here, right now, and they’re happening very directly in your awareness. To chip away at that ignorance, you start by focusing on something more obviously happening right here, right now: the breath. In the … 
  14. Mindfulness & Perception
     … That’s why right view is expressed in terms of the four noble truths, the causes and the effects related to suffering and its end. You’re not just watching things arise and pass away. If you get to a stage where that’s all you’re doing, okay, that’s because for that particular moment in the meditation, that’s the most useful … 
  15. Values of the Noble Ones
     … After all, the four noble truths talk about suffering. We know there’s suffering, but then the Buddha says it’s not because of people or things outside. It’s because of our own cravings. Now, that’s unexpected. Then the Buddha says that you can actually have dispassion for your cravings and find happiness. That, too, is unexpected. Then the path he gives … 
  16. Fangs in the Static
     … Years back, I was teaching the four noble truths to a group up in Orange County. When we got to the third noble truth, about nibbana, they said it didn’t sound all that attractive. Then we got to the fourth noble truth—where we have jhana, the practice of right concentration, which includes pleasure and rapture: That, they said, sounded attractive. As I … 
  17. How to Read the Dhamma
     … At the very end of his life, he mentioned that his main teachings were the four noble truths and the four establishings of mindfulness. You read his life story, though, and there’s very little detailed information about how he explained those teachings. Instead, there are a lot of other details to give you a sense of inspiration. So when you read the Dhamma … 
  18. Stop Shooting Yourself
     … This is where you get into the suffering that’s not just part of the three characteristics; it’s part of the four noble truths. This is the suffering that really digs deep inside. And that’s the suffering, as the Buddha said, that comes from craving and clinging. We crave for things to be a certain way. Then we cling to our notions … 
  19. The Path Is and Isn’t the Goal
     … Originally each of the four noble truths has its own duty. You try to comprehend stress. Let go of its cause. Realize the cessation of stress. And then develop the path. So you do a lot of work at developing the path, turning those five aggregates into a path. But that will involve a very subtle clinging. Then when the path has been fully … 
  20. Tranquility & Insight Through Jhāna
     … Now, if this were all we had in possibilities for happiness, we’d say, “Well, who cares about the drawbacks? I want to go for this.” But the Buddha reminds us, “There is a greater pleasure to be found by developing dispassion for these things.” This is why we always have to think about the Buddha’s teachings in the context of the four … 
  21. Cooking Skills
     … you have your wits about you, you can make a difference in the mind. That’s where the Buddha’s medicine focuses. The Buddha’s often compared to a doctor. The four noble truths are compared to the doctor’s approach to treating a disease: There’s the diagnosis, suffering. Then there’s the analysis of the cause. Then there’s the prognosis that … 
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