Search results for: "The Four Noble Truths"
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- Part V : Finding a Teacher… The Buddha says to regard everything in terms of the four noble truths. This means that wherever there’s suffering, you look for the cause. You don’t attack the suffering, you attack the cause and you abandon the cause. You simply try to comprehend the suffering. That can apply to any mental event. You try to bring right view—all the factors of …
- The Pursuit of Excellence… What do we do in the meantime? We follow the four noble truths in refining our powers of judgment, because the four noble truths themselves are excellent standards for judgment. Wherever there’s suffering, you’ve got to look for its cause, because it’s something you want to abandon. You want to bring about the end of suffering. It’s not something to …
- Questions of Skill… So, what are the skills we need? The skills having to do with the duties of the four noble truths. The truths are not just truths “about” something. They’re truths that you have to approach in a skillful way. You try to comprehend suffering to see what it really is. You trace it to its cause. You abandon the cause. You try to …
- At Ease with the Breath… What’s a skillful way of breathing, what’s a skillful way of thinking, what’s a skillful way of focusing on the breath? What ways of breathing, thinking, and focusing are not skillful? From the issues of skillfulness, you move on to the four noble truths: What causes suffering? What is a path to the end of suffering? You can explain this in …
- Common Ground… After all, what do the four noble truths teach us? They teach us that the reason we’re suffering is not because of the things outside. It’s because of the habits we have in the mind: the habits that made us get born to begin with, our craving and our clinging. And so to solve the problem, we all have to turn inside …
- A Refuge Inside… But then there’s also the suffering of the four noble truths, what he calls the five clinging-aggregates. The first kind of suffering is just the way things are, in and of themselves. The question is: Why does that create suffering for us? Because of our clinging. So you’ve got to watch the mind to see why it clings, because the suffering …
- Sucked into the Tube… In this way, you’re beginning to develop the basic attitude behind the four noble truths. The four noble truths see things as processes of cause and effect: One thing leads to the next. Some things lead to stress; other things lead to the end of stress. If you see the distracting thought as something leading to stress, okay, as long as you stay …
- The Context for No Context… We’re all coming from ignorance, which in technical terms means that we’re coming from a position where we don’t really see the four noble truths. We don’t see our life in terms of the four noble truths. We have our own terms, our own narratives of who we are, our beliefs about the world, all kinds of knowledge and theories …
- The Buddha’s Shoulds… Only this time it’s right view in terms of the four noble truths: looking for the stress in your activities and seeing where it’s coming from in your mind. In other words, you look at mental events and mental states simply in terms of cause and effect, what’s skillful and what’s unskillful. Those are the basic categories underlying the four …
- A Soiled, Oily Rag… We have to use those perceptions within the larger context for the practice, which is the four noble truths. Turn around and look at what it is that wants to crave those things, wants to desire those things. Because the reason we look at them as inconstant, stressful and not-self, is to remind us that you can’t find any true happiness in …
- Goodwill & Gratitude… Look at the four noble truths, which Ven. Sariputta said contain all the other teachings. But what contains the four noble truths? The fact that someone on awakening would focus on the problem of suffering, teaching other people how they could stop suffering. Where does that come from if not from goodwill? The fact that someone would go around northern India for 45 years …
- At the End of the Day… That’s the suffering in the four noble truths. The physical pain itself is not the suffering in the four noble truths. The suffering in the four noble truths is the clinging. And how do we cling? We cling through perceptions. Work on your perceptions around the pain. Be curious about the pain. Then you can transfer the same set of questions into events …
- Proving the Teachings… Here it is, a force that could be used for a lot of happiness, yet when it’s out of your control, how can you guarantee that it’s going to work for your happiness or anything good at all? In fact, that fact explains why the Buddha taught the four noble truths. That chant we had just now: That was his first sermon …
- The Right Touch… By that, he meant the four noble truths. We don’t think of the four noble truths as brightness. The typical picture is that they’re pessimistic—they’re all about suffering, suffering, suffering—but that typical picture is really wrong. The truths pinpoint exactly where the suffering is. It’s in an activity we do. That means it’s something we can learn …
- The Wisdom of Ardency… You have the duties of the four noble truths. You try to comprehend stress, abandon the cause, realize the cessation of stress, and develop the path to the cessation of stress. The various duties of right effort, which are closely related to ardency, follow from that—such as the abandoning of the second noble truth. That comes under trying to prevent unskillful qualities from …
- Off the Continuum… Some people complain, when the Buddha starts off with the four noble truths, that there’s a lot about suffering and very little about pleasure or happiness. Well, it’s actually there in the fourth noble truth, the last factor: pleasure and rapture born of seclusion, pleasure and rapture born of concentration, and the pleasure of the mind coming into equanimity. In other words …
- The Wrong Uses of Right… And from our understanding of the importance of action and choosing skillful actions over unskillful ones, we’re led to a higher level of right view – the right view about the four noble truths – learning how to look at our own actions, look at our own minds to see where we are causing stress. Where is the stress to begin with? And then, we …
- Truth with Boundaries… The other was the four noble truths. That’s it. Those are the only teachings that he said are categorically true and beneficial. There were lots of other things he taught. Either they fit into the two principles and so are part of the categorical teachings, like the seven factors for awakening—those are basically part of the noble eightfold path, which comes under …
- The Unity of the Path… In fact, when the Buddha prepares people to understand the four noble truths and the elements of right view, he starts out with generosity and builds up through virtue, the rewards of these activities, and then their limitations. Simply being generous and virtuous is not enough. There’s more that needs to be done. Learning how to renounce your ordinary, everyday types of happiness …
- The Dhamma Eye… And explained the four noble truths as the first factor of the path. It was just after the explanation of those four truths and the duties appropriate to each that Koṇḍañña, who was the eldest of the five, gained the Dhamma Eye, experienced the deathless, and saw that everything else arose and passed away, but the deathless didn’t. That was his first taste …
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