Search results for: "The Four Noble Truths"

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  2. Discernment on the Path
     … One of the most frequent ones is that as you see the four noble truths, it’s like a person watching fish move around and being still in a clear pool of water. In other words, you see precisely what’s happening. But it goes beyond just seeing. Another image for discernment is the plastered wall of a fortress. They would put plaster on … 
  3. Admirable Friendship
     … Then we take that principle deeper into the four noble truths. Try to comprehend suffering. Abandon its cause. Realize cessation by developing the path. To look at our experience in these terms—in terms of skillful and unskillful actions as they relate to the four noble truths: That’s what appropriate attention is. And the main point of appropriate attention is: If you’re … 
  4. Patience
     … When the Buddha talks about suffering in the four noble truths, it’s the suffering we place on ourselves unnecessarily. Like that old question Ajaan Suwat would ask about the mountain. “Is the mountain heavy? Well, yes, it’s heavy in and of itself, but as long as you don’t pick it up, it’s not going to be heavy for you.” That … 
  5. The Not-Self Discourse
     … How many more eons do you want to keep on doing it? Now, the five brethren had the advantage that they had actually experienced the deathless already and they were looking at this teaching in terms of the four noble truths. In fact, that questionnaire makes sense only in terms of the four noble truths. If you believe that all there is in this … 
  6. Scribe Knowledge, Warrior Knowledge
     … Ajaan Mun expresses this by saying that you start with the four noble truths. Actually prior to that you start with mundane right view, which is a belief in kamma, action, and that moves into the four noble truths. After all, craving, the cause of suffering, is an unskillful form of action. The path is a skillful form of action. The path is a … 
  7. 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 … 
  8. 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 … 
  9. 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 … 
  10. 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 … 
  11. 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 … 
  12. 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 … 
  13. 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 … 
  14. 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 … 
  15. 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 … 
  16. 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 … 
  17. 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 … 
  18. 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 … 
  19. 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 … 
  20. 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 … 
  21. 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 … 
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