Four Noble Truths: Nirodha (4 of 5) The End of the World

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Dharmette: Four Noble Truths: Nirodha (4 of 5) The End of the World. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on May 22, 2020. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Four Noble Truths: Nirodha (4 of 5) The End of the World

Today is the fourth talk on the Third Noble Truth, and the talk is primarily going to be about inconstancy. This is the alternative translation for the word anicca^[1], often translated into English as impermanence. Impermanence can imply just that things end sooner or later, but inconstancy implies more: that things are not constant, yet they still might have some kind of existence. They arise and they pass away. They come and they go. They don't quite exist in a permanent way, but they also don't not exist. They have this dynamic process aspect to them; they appear and they disappear.

In the ancient discourses, a person came to the Buddha and asked, "Is it possible by traveling to know, or to see, or to reach the end of the world where one is not born, does not age, does not die, does not pass away, and is not reborn?" Most likely, this person was pointing to a transcendent state where some core aspect of the self is unchanging and immortal. A place beyond the edges of the world that you can travel to and be safe from birth and death.

In answering the question, the Buddha, in his typical way, redefines the terms. He redefines what "the end of the world" means. The Buddha treats this end of the world as a metaphor. He says that without reaching the end of the world, there is no end of suffering. He redefines the goal. Whereas the person seeks a transcendent place where there is no birth and death, the Buddha simply points to something much more immediate and identifiable in our experience here. It is not dependent on ideas of rebirth or reaching some transcendent place. The end of suffering is found right here in this lived experience.

He then says you won't reach the end of suffering without reaching the end of the world, and defines what he means by the world: "The world is this two-arms-long body and its perceptions and its mind." Bhikkhu Bodhi^[2], who translated this passage, explains in his footnote that "the world" here means the world of personal experience.

It doesn't take a lot of consideration to realize that the world can be defined not by the earth and the real objects out there, but rather by how our minds construct the world. Our mind makes much of the world that we live in. If you are meditating or listening to this indoors, just about anything your eyes fall on looking around your room is constructed. Unless it is a plant or an animal, all the objects have been made by human hands or human design.

If you brought one of these objects to a human being who lived 50,000 years ago, they probably would have no idea what it was. If you took a door from your house and put it next to a tree, they wouldn't know it was a door, a chair, or a computer. They would be scratching their heads wondering what it is. For us, it is obvious what it is. But in that obviousness, we don't realize how much it is a product of human thought and ideas. We overlay these constructs on top of objects so that we can find our way in this world. There is nothing wrong with these associated concepts, but they are part of the human world that we have constructed.

We move about in a world that is, for the most part, a manifestation of what human beings have thought about, invented, and put in place in the past. This world of our direct experience is a constructed world of mental formations and ideas. Much of our suffering has to do with how we participate in and relate to this inner world of mental constructions. We don't think we are responsible for seeing a chair as a chair, but we are participating in this huge enterprise of agreeing that a chair is a chair. This is wise and appropriate, but our mind is constantly constructing.

When the Buddha says we cannot end suffering without coming to the end of the world, he means that to get to the root of our clinging and craving—the source of our suffering—we have to somehow step away from the stickiness and the incessantness of this world of concepts. We are swimming in it so much that we don't see it, like fish that supposedly don't see the water they swim in.

The idea of the end of the world can sound frightening, but tomorrow I will talk about the happiness of it; it is not just depressing. The Buddha shared a poem at the end of his teaching on this topic. He said: "He who has reached the end of the world has fulfilled the spiritual life. The peaceful one, having known the end of the world, has no wishes for this world or another world." This points to the state of not clinging to anything.

Part of what we cling to unconsciously is the stickiness of our concepts, our thoughts of experience, and our resistance to these experiences. It is kind of like coming up to the edge of a river, watching the river flow by, dipping a bucket in the water, and carrying the bucket around saying, "Here's the river." The river is no longer in the bucket; it is just water. What makes the river is the flow. There is no river without the flowing and moving.

Over and over again, the Buddha emphasized that to release and relax the fists of clinging, we need to settle back into a very deep, peaceful, contented place. This mostly happens in meditation. It would be silly to try to live your daily life entirely without the concepts of the world. But in meditation, we can trust in such a deep way that we can put down the burden of all these thoughts, ideas, concepts, and reactivities. We can settle in a very peaceful place where concepts are no longer operating.

Direct experience of life is still happening. What we see is that things arise and pass; they come and go. What gives a sense of continuity is often our ideas of things, but in direct experience, things are flashing in and out of existence frequently and incessantly. The Buddha taught this as the primary liberating insight. Over and over again in the suttas^[3], the Buddha points to the insight into inconstancy that comes from a very deep, peaceful, settled, focused mind. He used many synonyms: arising and passing, appearing and vanishing, arising and cessation.

Cessation is nirodha^[4], the Third Noble Truth. One of the meanings of this Third Noble Truth is not just the cessation of the craving that leads to suffering, but seeing the cessation of whatever is happening—seeing that it comes and goes, that it arrives and passes and is not constant. Certainly, we can see that craving itself comes and goes. The Buddha lists many things that come and go. He talked about the factors of dependent arising, which include craving and clinging, but also feelings, sensations, birth, death, consciousness, and mental formations. He talked about the five aggregates coming and going, sense perceptions coming and going, and views coming and going.

A very common way he talks about it is in a formulaic way laid out in four statements. We can use 'X' as a blank to fill in: "This is X. This is the arising of X. This is the cessation of X. And this is the practice leading to the cessation of X." Understood in this way, it points to a core insight of just seeing things come and go, noticing that they have ceased. It is a phenomenal thing to see that even for a moment something is not there, and to appreciate that.

Often the mind latches onto ideas, and we flash in and out of preoccupation with our thoughts, but it feels to us like it is continuous. What we are asked to do in mindfulness practice is to notice the discontinuity. You might be thinking about what you are going to have for a meal. You are hungry, and it seems you are thinking only about food. But then there is a sound outside, and for a moment you wonder, "What was that sound?" Then you are back to thinking about food. Then you notice your bladder is full, and you wonder where the bathroom is. All these things flash in briefly, and then you are back to thinking about food. It feels like you are thinking about food all the time, but in fact, the thought comes and goes. You might feel like your emotions are continuous, but your attention and awareness are probably flitting in and out, arising and passing on different topics.

This is one of the key insights the Buddha taught. It can be very helpful in daily life, but the deepest experience of this happens in concentrated meditation. When the mind is concentrated and peaceful, you can be in the flow of arising and passing. It can be so thoroughgoing that any idea of "me," "myself," and "mine" disappears into the flow of phenomena. The value of being in this inconstant experience is not that we are supposed to live there constantly; rather, it is powerful medicine that helps us to relax the clinging. We let go, realizing that nothing whatsoever is worth clinging to because things are flowing and moving.

It is like putting a fist into the river because you want to take the river home. You grab a fistful of water, but the hand can't hold it, and it just fades away. After a while, you realize that is not the way to hold onto water. We cannot hold onto the flow of experience. So we begin to relax and settle back. In the deepest situations, the mind lets go of itself. With that perfect, deep release, a person is never the same again. When they come back into the world of experience, they have an embodied, deep understanding that nothing whatsoever is worth clinging to. They might still cling some, but they know that is not the way forward.

I hope this makes sense, and we will finish this discussion about nirodha tomorrow.

Announcements

I want to remind you that tomorrow, after we finish at 7:45, we will switch over to a Zoom meeting for a community gathering. For those of you who have been watching on YouTube for all these weeks, this is a chance to check in, say hello, and break into small groups to meet other people in this community. Afterward, we will come back together for questions and discussion for about an hour.

We will post the Zoom link and password tomorrow in the "What's New" section of the IMC website, and also in the YouTube chat box. The password will be the Pali word for loving-kindness—a five-letter word that begins with M^[5]. If you have never used Zoom before, you might want to quickly download a free account on your device. Thank you very much.