Search results for: "The Four Noble Truths"

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  2. Help Others, Help Your Mind
     … They include the principle that skillful actions should be developed, and unskillful actions should be abandoned, and then the four noble truths, which are basically the application of that first principle to the problem of suffering. The discernment comes in seeing what’s skillful and what’s not, in your own mind. When you follow certain patterns of thinking, where do they lead? The … 
  3. To Discern Suffering
     … When the Buddha’s talking in terms of the four noble truths, he’s talking about the added-on pain, the added-on suffering: in other words, the suffering caused by the mind. The pain of the body is something that’s going to be there. Even the pleasures of the body contain their element of pain. There’s a passage in the Canon … 
  4. The Wheel of Dhamma
     … The wheel of Dhamma in the title refers to the passage that goes through each of the four noble truths and the three levels of knowledge for each of the truths. The first of the noble truths is dukkha, which means pain, suffering, and stress. The second truth is the cause of suffering and stress. The third is the cessation of suffering and stress … 
  5. Significance
     … And then from that, you can draw out the four noble truths and their duties: comprehending suffering, abandoning its cause—the cause there, of course, would be an unskillful action; developing the path, which is a skillful action; and realizing the cessation of suffering. Everything you need to know lies under those duties. That’s the main framework you want to keep in mind … 
  6. Lust
     … But if you haven’t reached that point, the four noble truths still have their duties. You still have to do these things. You still have to learn how to delight in letting go and delight in developing. So there’s work to be done, but it’s good work. Without this work, you stay stuck in your old ways, suffering in the same … 
  7. The Buddha’s Universal Solvent
     … When you get down to the four noble truths—and that’s the third knowledge of the Buddha’s awakening—“beings” and “worlds” disappear. These truths are expressed just in terms of suffering and the acts of the mind that lead to suffering—in other words, the things that you experience directly inside that nobody else can experience. Each of us has to experience … 
  8. A Handful of Leaves
     … What did he teach? He taught the four noble truths: dukkha, which can be translated as stress or suffering; its cause; its cessation; and the path to its cessation. The reason why he focused only on this handful of leaves, he said, was because if he talked about the leaves in the forest—all the other things he had learned—it wouldn’t help … 
  9. The Buddha’s Buffet
     … If you see that you don’t want to keep on going like that, he points you to understanding the four noble truths. Understand how you’re suffering, what suffering is. It’s a pretty radical definition: clinging to the five aggregates. He starts out by giving some examples. Aging, illness, death, separation from what you love, having to be with what you don … 
  10. A Questioning Attitude
     … That’s what gaining insight in the four noble truths is all about—catching yourself creating stress and suffering where you didn’t even realize it was happening. Mindfulness gets you to the point where you can see these things more clearly. Concentration gets the mind still so that very subtle things become apparent. But they’re simply the foundation. Discernment, a questioning attitude … 
  11. Intelligence of the Heart
     … Given the understanding that the Buddha provides through the four noble truths, the wise thing is to act on those truths and to develop good qualities. The act of making a resolution is not just a passing whim in the mind. You want to make it stick. You want to make it consistent. Each time the potential comes up to do something unskillful, you … 
  12. Mindfulness as Refuge
     … And what do you keep in mind? The Buddha sets out the duties that we have in the four noble truths: to comprehend suffering, to abandon its cause, to realize the cessation of suffering, and to develop the path. So: four duties to keep in mind, four categories to keep in mind as you’re looking at your experience. This relates to another teaching … 
  13. The Breath All the Way
     … And so the question is, What’s causing that? What is the mind doing that’s creating that rise and fall in the level of stress? This is where you begin to get into the four noble truths. As the Buddha said, each truth has a duty. The duty with regard to stress is to comprehend it, which means watching it carefully so you … 
  14. Truth Without Air Quotes
     … But when we come to the Buddhist teachings, he talks about the four noble truth as being undeceptive and not other than what they are. He’s basically saying that they’re objective truths. He didn’t have much use for the idea of truth with air quotes. You might ask, “How does he know they’re objective?” Look at his analysis in dependent … 
  15. Maybe the Buddha Knew Something
     … After all, everything the Buddha’s saying in the four noble truths is very counterintuitive. We’re suffering not because of things happening outside, and we’re not simply on the receiving end of suffering. We’re actually doing it. We’re doing things that we hope will lead to happiness but they’re leading to suffering, stress, disturbance. Often, we don’t even … 
  16. The Skills of Truth & Calm
    The Buddha’s most basic teaching is the four noble truths. It’s a teaching about action: cause and effect in your actions. To understand it, you have to get very sensitive to what you’re actually doing. This is why we watch the mind right now. It’s hard to observe a past action or a future action, so you have to observe … 
  17. Right View
     … right view, going through the four noble truths. Simply listening to this talk on right view, one of the Five Brethren had his first taste of the deathless—or, as they say in the text, he experienced “the arising of the Dhamma Eye.” So right view is important. As one analysis of the path says, three qualities circle around every factor of the path … 
  18. Desires Rightly Directed
     … Keep the four noble truths in mind as to what’s worthwhile and what’s not. These are all value judgments. They’ll take you to where you don’t need value judgments anymore in order to enjoy what you’ve found, because there’s no more action. As the Buddha said, the realization of nibbāna is a dhamma, it is an action, but … 
  19. Right View & Right Resolve
     … So when you think about the Buddha’s teachings in the four noble truths, which are the principles of right view, the heedful response is right resolve. In other words, you don’t simply watch suffering or watch its cause. You realize that you have to make up your mind to fight the cause. That’s why we take on the path to begin … 
  20. Breathing Skillfully
     … The weight that comes when you lift it is stress in the four noble truths—in other words, the stress that comes from craving and is involved in clinging. That’s something that doesn’t have to be there. The mountain is going to be heavy on its own whether you think of picking it up or not. But you have the choice: Are … 
  21. An Auspicious Day
     … Some people stop there and say, “Here’s the Buddha telling us just to be in the present moment.” But the passage goes on and says, “Whatever duty you have to do, do it now, ardently.” In other words, you focus on the present moment because that’s where you do your duties with regard to the four noble truths. If you’re going … 
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