Search results for: "The Three Characteristics"

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  2. Questioning Your Conviction
     … In his explanations of the three characteristics, he says, “Before you’re really going to understand inconstancy, stress, and not-self, you have to take what’s inconstant and make it constant. You take what’s stressful and make it easeful. Take what’s not-self and get it under your control. In other words, you take this mind, which is so quick to … 
  3. Learning from the Precepts
     … understanding things in terms of the three characteristics and other aspects of discernment. Now, you find this not at all in the Canon. Every time the Canon talks about alertness or sampajañña, it means knowing what you’re doing while you’re doing it. The commentary says, though, “Well, everybody knows what they’re doing while they’re doing it. Even jackals know that … 
  4. 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 … 
  5. Discernment Fosters Concentration
     … In Ajaan Lee’s books, before he started teaching his breath meditation method, he talked a lot about contemplating the body, contemplating the elements, contemplating the three characteristics, as ways of getting the mind to settle down and be quiet. In other words, you think about all the things that the mind is entangled with, and you give yourself reasons for getting unentangled. You … 
  6. The Limits of Control
     … You’re taking those five aggregates and basically pushing against what they call the three characteristics. Push against aniccam:See how constant you can make your mind. Push against dukkham: See what sense of pleasure you can create out of your sense of the body, out of your present awareness. Push against anatta: How much can you control the mind to stay with the … 
  7. Analyzing Anger
     … Now, you’re using the three characteristics or the three perceptions there. You may not be thinking about them explicitly. But the idea that the anger is coming and it’s going: That’s the inconstancy. And you see the drawbacks: That’s the stress. And when you say, “I don’t want that anymore”: That’s the not-self. It’s a value … 
  8. Living Honorably
     … He talks about three perceptions, or what are often called the three characteristics. Yet the Buddha teaches them as perceptions. They’re perceptions for testing things: to gauge if something you’re focusing on is really worth taking as a goal, if it’s really an answer to the question of discernment. The first test is that if it’s not constant, it’s … 
  9. Training Your Desires
     … And that’s why the Buddha defined ignorance as ignorance of the four noble truths—not ignorance of the three characteristics, ignorance of the four noble truths—because they revolve around desire. There’s the unskillful desire that causes suffering. Then there’s the skillful desire in the noble eightfold path, under the factor of right effort, that leads to the end of suffering … 
  10. At Play
     … Ajaan Lee would talk about how getting the mind into concentration fights against the three characteristics. He also would talk about how gaining insight means looking into, “What in the mind is constant in addition to what’s inconstant? What’s easeful in addition to what’s stressful? What is under your control? What is not under your control?” Then you have to take … 
  11. Fix Your Views
     … You have to understand the teachings of the three characteristics, or the three perceptions, in the context of the duties of the four noble truths. They’re appropriate and useful for abandoning your craving and for comprehending your clinging. But when you’re trying to develop a path, you use those perceptions only on things that would pull you off the path. You don … 
  12. Skills Needed at Death
     … This is why I make that distinction between the suffering of the three characteristics and the suffering of the four noble truths. The fact that things are fabricated means they’re going to be stressful. That’s the nature of fabrications. The stress of inconstancy is something that’s not going to change. What you can change is the stress that comes from craving … 
  13. What’s Worth Doing?
     … done its duty. So all the way through, you’re making value judgments as to what’s worth doing and what’s not. The four noble truths are value judgments. The three characteristics are used in the context of the four noble truths, to help you see clearly when you’re doing something that’s not really in your best interest, and then you … 
  14. At the Door of the Cage
     … So you need to remember that the teachings on, say, the three characteristics — inconstancy, stress, and not-self — are part of a course of training, and that the different teachings make sense only in particular stages of the training. Only when you’re in the right stage for a particular teaching will it do its intended work. Ordinarily, we’d like to leapfrog over … 
  15. An Exercise in Sensitivity
    One of the teachings of the Forest Tradition is that when insight or discernment comes, it doesn’t necessarily have to express itself in terms of the three characteristics or the three perceptions of inconsistency, stress, and not-self. Anything that allows you to see that you’re holding on to something that’s making you suffer, and you don’t have to hold … 
  16. Conserving Your Strength
     … So the practice of the Dhamma is not just learning to focus your mind or learning to be mindful or seeing things in terms of the three characteristics or whatever. An important part of the practice is getting a sense of priorities: which things are really important in life, which things are less important, which types of happiness are worth the pursuit, which ones … 
  17. Changing the Pleasure Equation
     … This is another one of the strange things you hear sometimes around what they call the three characteristics: If people only realized that the idea of a self doesn’t make any sense or it’s a flawed concept, we’re told, then they would just let it go. Well, people don’t hang onto things unless those things serve a purpose of some … 
  18. Between You and Your Eyes
     … I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people say about meditation, “Well, get the mind to be still and then start looking for the three characteristics.” That’s skipping over a huge area of practice, which is based on the four noble truths. Look for where there is stress. Try to comprehend it. Comprehending means knowing it so thoroughly that when … 
  19. To Comprehend Suffering
     … The first kind of stress is the stress of the three characteristics. The second kind is the stress in the four noble truths, dukkha, which can also be translated as suffering or dis-ease. That, the Buddha said, we have to comprehend. And he gave us tools for comprehending it: the five aggregates. If there’s any stress weighing the mind down, you can … 
  20. The Value of Effort
     … There’s the stress of the three characteristics, which just goes with the fact that things arise and pass away. Then there’s the stress and suffering that comes from ignorance and craving. That’s something you can do something about. That’s what the Buddha wants you to comprehend—so that, once you comprehend it, you can see where the cause is and … 
  21. The Wisdom of Ardency
     … You comprehend a situation, and in particular you comprehend it in terms of the three characteristics. The commentary does mention that there are some people who say that sampajañña means knowing what you’re doing while you’re doing it, but it gets pretty snide about that interpretation. It says that even jackals know that they’re howling when they’re howling; babies know … 
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