Search results for: "Suffering"

  1. The First Noble Truth
    The First Noble Truth November 5, 2015 The passage we chanted now starts with a very strange phrase: “those who don’t discern suffering.” You would think that everybody would discern suffering. But in this passage the Buddha’s talking about understanding suffering on a deeper level. When he explains the truth of suffering—he uses the word dukkha, which can cover everything from … 
  2. The Brightness of Life
     … They’re not all suffering. So his understanding of life, his understanding of the world, had a lot more nuance—and was a lot more useful. He didn’t say life is suffering. When he made his shortest explanation of suffering, he says it’s clinging to the five aggregates. The five aggregates themselves are not suffering. They may have pain in the fact … 
  3. The Dhamma Wheel
     … The four noble truths, of course, are the truth of suffering or stress—the Pali word is dukkha—the origination of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the path to its cessation. In the case of the first truth, suffering is basically boiled down to clinging to the five aggregates. The Buddha never said that life is suffering. That’s one of those fake … 
  4. The Noble Truth of Suffering
    As the Buddha once said, all he taught was suffering and the end of suffering. Everything else that he taught is an elaboration on those two topics. What’s sad is that a lot of people have trouble accepting what the Buddha had to say about suffering itself. Some people have him saying that life is suffering, as a way of rejecting his teachings … 
  5. The Questions of Suffering
    The Buddha said that when we meet with suffering in life, we tend to have two reactions. One is bewilderment—not understanding why there’s suffering or even what it is, just knowing that we don’t like it. We have no idea where it came from or what we can do about it. That leads to the second reaction, which is a search … 
  6. To Suffer Is an Active Verb
    To Suffer Is an Active Verb August 22, 2018 When we say that we suffer, we usually think that we’re on the passive receiving end of the suffering. It’s something imposed on us, something to which we have to submit. In some of our more mature moments, we realize that there are times when we’re adding to our own suffering, but … 
  7. Four Noble Truths to One
     … We suffer because of craving. Our craving. The cause is inside. We don’t suffer from what’s coming into the mind. We suffer from what’s coming out of the mind. That’s what you have to abandon. But first you have to comprehend the suffering. As the Buddha says, aging, illness, and death are suffering. Not getting what you want; having to … 
  8. The Particulars of Your Suffering
    The Particulars of Your Suffering September 22, 2011 I once knew a journalist in Bangkok who asked me why Buddhism focuses so much on suffering. He said, “I don’t have any suffering in my life. Why all the talk about suffering?” So I asked him if he had any stress in his life and he said, “Oh yeah, lots and lots of stress … 
  9. The Challenge of Right View
     … The first level of knowledge is knowing the noble truth—in other words knowing suffering, knowing the cause of suffering, knowing the cessation of suffering, knowing what the path to the cessation of suffering would be. Second level is knowing the duty appropriate to each. In terms of suffering or stress, you have to comprehend it. In terms of the cause, you have to … 
  10. Beyond Natural Suffering
    There’s a fanciful definition of dukkha, or suffering, stress, in the commentary. I say it’s fanciful because it’s based on a technique that the commentary often uses to try to explain a Pali term by taking it apart into its supposed roots. In this case, dukkha is derived from words that mean a hub that doesn’t fit on an axle … 
  11. Right View as Tool
     … We’re here to cure the problem in our own minds, which is the problem of suffering. And can anyone else see your suffering? No. They can see your face when it’s contorted in response to suffering, or they can hear it in your voice, but they can’t actually sense the suffering, sense the pain, sense the stress that you feel. You … 
  12. Appropriate Attention
     … So even though we can be pained by those other things, the real suffering is in the clinging. Now, the Buddha talks about suffering not simply because he wants us to stay with the suffering or accept it. After all, he says he teaches suffering and the end of suffering. There is a way out. He’s like a doctor. When you go to … 
  13. The Thinking Heart
     … As the Buddha said, our first response to suffering is bewilderment, trying to figure it out: “Why is this happening?” Then the second response is a thought, too: “Is there anybody out there who knows a way to put an end to this suffering?” So the suffering already has us thinking. In fact, you might say that if we didn’t suffer, we wouldn … 
  14. Respect for Suffering
     … suffering and the end of suffering. So when we study the Buddha’s Dhamma, that’s what we’re studying: how we’re suffering and how to put an end to it. He said there are four truths you have to know about suffering. In fact, that was his first teaching: know what suffering is, what its cause is, know that you can put … 
  15. Appropriate Attention, Appropriate Intention
    The Buddha once said that all he taught was suffering and the end of suffering—or, to translate it another way, stress and the end of stress. That statement right there says several things: One, it focuses you on the issue that you should be paying attention to; and two, it tells you how you should pay attention to it. The first point is … 
  16. Noble Priorities
     … That’s yours, exclusively yours, and this is where suffering is. When the Buddha established his teachings, he started with the truth of suffering. This is the suffering he was talking about, the suffering in the mind, the suffering that you feel inside and nobody else can feel for you. Nobody else can take it away. There’s that passage where Ven. Ratthapala is … 
  17. Nostalgia for Suffering
     … We’re nostalgic for our suffering. And yet one of the qualities of the third noble truth is analayo, which means letting go of your nostalgia for suffering. You don’t want to ruminate over your old sufferings again. They hold no interest any more. You’ve got to realize you’ve had enough. Only then will suffering cease. So you have to take … 
  18. Friends with the Dhamma Wheel
     … It requires that you admit causality, admit your role in causing the suffering and in being deluded about your own suffering. We have that phrase in another one of our chants, “those who don’t discern suffering.” People sometimes wonder how you can say that anyone doesn’t discern suffering; everybody knows they suffer. Well, they may know they suffer, but they don’t … 
  19. The Bright Tunnel
    “Those who don’t discern suffering.” It sounds strange. We all know that there’s suffering in life. The problem is that we don’t really look at it. We try to run away, we try to cover it up—anything not to have to deal with it. As a result, it keeps hounding us. No matter where we go, there it is, right … 
  20. A Handful of Leaves
     … And that’s to give strength to your discernment, to see exactly what you’re doing that’s causing the suffering and what you can do to stop. That chant we had just now—“those who don’t discern suffering”—may sound strange: Doesn’t everyone discern their suffering? But the Buddha said our main duty with regard to suffering and stress is to … 
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