The Four Noble Truths in Context: Morning Dharma Talk

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video The Four Noble Truths in Context: Morning Dharma Talk - Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Ajaan Thanissaro at The Sati Center in Redwood City, CA on September 10, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

The Four Noble Truths in Context: Morning Dharma Talk

Introduction

You may be wondering why we're revisiting the Four Noble Truths. For a lot of us, this is the first teaching we learned about Buddhism. In my case, that was the case. I was an exchange student to the Philippines one year. And on the plane coming back from the Philippines, there were the kids who had also been exchange students in Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, and Singapore. Two guys from Thailand had ordained as novices. And so they explained the Four Noble Truths to me. And I said, "This sounds interesting. A religion about suffering. It seemed to be right on the topic." And so that was the beginning of my interest in Buddhism. And here I am now.

Just briefly, the Four Noble Truths are the teaching on suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the path to its cessation.

The reason we're revisiting them, even though we may have heard about them many times, is there's a lot of misunderstanding about them. Some of this comes from scholarly works. People with degrees can actually screw up the teachings more than people without degrees sometimes. Also, from various practice traditions, there are some misunderstandings about the truths.

Also, I thought it would be interesting to look at the truths in the context of two of the Buddha's other teachings. One was his teaching on how we ordinarily respond to the experience of pain and suffering. And then his teachings on how you could take that original response and turn it into a path to lead you to the truth that would take you beyond suffering entirely. So I'd like to first talk about some of the misunderstandings about the truths, and then we get into the truths in the context of this issue of how we respond to suffering—the universal response to suffering. And then what the Buddha proposes is a good way to get out of that suffering.

Misunderstandings About the Four Noble Truths

About some of the questions about the Four Noble Truths, I'll start this morning with some of the scholarly interesting interpretations that come out. Basically, nobody can seem to agree on anything except the fact that there are four of them. [Laughter]

The question, "Are they truths?" That's brought into question. Are they noble? That's also brought into question. And there is one scholar who even doubts the four.

First, there's a question about the phrase itself, "Four Noble Truths." There was a British scholar named K.R. Norman^[1], who wrote an article one time saying that the way this is expressed in Pali^[2] is very strange in terms of the grammar. It's a compound that has a masculine and a neuter, and they're left in their masculine in some of the cases, which is odd. And he says, because this is linguistically odd, it must come later. Now the assumption there, of course, is that languages start out regular, and then as they degenerate, they get irregular. Now I don't know any language where that's true. English starts out irregular, and then someone decides we have to standardize the language. Historically, if you look at any language that isn't standardized, it's either for one of two reasons. One is that someone has built a large empire, and they need a standardized language to run the empire. And the other is that there's a body of literature that someone wants to get to an extensive audience, so they create a standardized language to fit that need.

In the case of India, Sanskrit was standardized a couple of centuries after the Buddha because they needed a language to govern the entire subcontinent. As for inventing a language or standardizing language, we have the case of Dante^[3], who was faced with the fact that if he wrote his work in Tuscan, only people from Tuscany could understand it. So he invented Italian as a language. And I think that that's what happened in the case of the Pali Canon^[4]. Because prior to this, we don't have a standardized language in Northern India. We have dialects ranging from where Calcutta is now, all the way over to the West Coast, and there were many different dialects at that time. When they wrote down the canon, it seems to me that they decided to have standardized versions of each of those languages going across the board.

Now, in some cases, there would have been some phrases that were so distinctive of how the Buddha expressed himself that they didn't standardize those. The Four Noble Truths would be one of them, because it would be something he talked about all the time. Then secondly, there are other passages where they felt that they actually left it in other dialects. So the question of the fact that it was later linguistically, it's like saying that Shakespeare could not have written those works in such sloppy English, because a great writer had to write in a pure language. "The Buddha had to speak only a pure language." It doesn't make any sense. However, there are people who are based on that. And that argument, I said, well, maybe the whole idea of the Four Noble Truths as a teaching was a later addition to the canon. Now, if that's the case, we'd have to erase a lot of the canon. So that doesn't make any sense.

A second question about the word "truth." Again, K.R. Norman saying that the word "truth" can mean only statements about facts. It doesn't include facts themselves. And then you have this weird situation where when the Buddha talks about abandoning the truth of suffering or abandoning the cause of suffering, he's saying, "How do you abandon a phrase? How do you develop a phrase?" And this, of course, is assuming that everybody agreed with the English, that truths can only refer to statements about reality. You look in the Pali Canon, there are many cases where the Buddha talks about nibbana^[5] as a truth. Now, nibbana is not a word he's talking about. He's talking about the truth of the experience of nibbana. So when you understand that truth has two meanings in Pali—either the actual fact or a statement about the fact—that clears up a lot of confusion on the topic.

Because the second confusion has to do with the fact that there are seemingly conflicting statements in the canon about truth. Sometimes the teachings are said to be true and they're described as truths, but then they talk about the awakened person being beyond holding to any assertions as true or false. And sometimes this is given an interpretation that we have a postmodern Buddha who has realized that truths were only attempts to impose power on other people. Or that the Buddha didn't have a nuanced view of truth. But for example, you have this statement: "Of what would the Brahmans say, true or false, disputing with whom, in whom equal or inequal, or not? Those who dispute, taking hold of a view, saying this and only this is true... Those you can talk to, there's here, there's nothing, no confrontation at the birth of disputes." But if you realize again that when the Buddha is talking about truth, it could be either a statement or a fact. He's trying to get you to the fact of the end of suffering, starting with suffering itself as a fact and trying to get you to the fact of the end of suffering. The truths that get you there are words about those things. So when you're abandoning the truth of suffering, you're actually abandoning the reality of it, of suffering. That clears up a lot of confusion.

Secondly, the question about whether the truths are noble. A scholar once said, "What's noble about suffering? What's noble about craving? What's noble about clinging?" And the quick answer is that these truths have you take a noble attitude towards clinging and craving. So when the Buddha says, "Your suffering is your clinging," he's forcing you to look at things that you really like. You're suffering because of things you like and things you hold onto most dearly. Now in order to step back from that attachment, it requires a noble attitude in the mind, a willingness to question your likes and dislikes. The same about craving.

Also, the Buddha talks about what he calls the noble search. He says there are two kinds of search in life. There's the ignoble search when you yourself are subject to aging, illness, and death, and you're looking for your happiness in things that are subject to aging, illness, and death. And then there's the noble search, where you're looking for your happiness in things that don't age, don't grow ill, don't die. In this particular case, then the Four Noble Truths would be truths that are part of that noble search. And as you take on that search, it is ennobling to you, which is one of the meanings of noble truths. It ennobles the person who adopts the truths.

There are other meanings that we have in English that also apply. The truths are preeminent. In other words, they are the most important truths in Buddhism. As Sariputta^[6] once said, all the other skillful teachings can fit into the Four Noble Truths in the same way that all the footprints of all the animals that walk on the earth can fit into the footprint of the elephant. As I said, also, they're noble in taking responsibility for your truth. You're not saying, "Okay, I'm suffering. It's because of somebody else." You're saying, "I'm suffering because of my own actions. I have to improve my own actions to get beyond the suffering." There's also, in Pali, the word "noble" also means that it's universal. It's true for everybody across the board. The Buddha doesn't shy away from the idea that there are truths that are truths for everyone.

As for specific truths, there are lots of misunderstandings about each one of the four truths, which I'll treat later. But for right now, I'd like to point out one misunderstanding about the First Noble Truth that comes from scholarly literature. There is a modern Buddhist teacher who says, "The Buddha's teaching on the duty with regard to the First Noble Truth, which is to comprehend it," he retranslates that and he says, "You should embrace experience." Now, how do you get from comprehending suffering to embracing experience? Well, there is a story behind that.

There was a PhD thesis written by a scholar named Sue Hamilton^[7], in which she talks about how suffering is the five aggregates. Now because the five aggregates of form, feeling, perception, thought constructs, and consciousness cover all of experience, then maybe the word dukkha^[8] for suffering doesn't mean suffering, it just means experience in short. The problem is that she missed an important part of the definition. The Buddha never defined suffering as the five aggregates. He defined it as the five clinging-aggregates, in other words, clinging to those five activities. The clinging there is what actually causes the suffering. Whoever reviewed her thesis was missing an important point. There are some PhD theses out there that I think the world would be better off without them. And this is one of them. But at any rate, someone picked this up and says, "Since the First Noble Truth is about experience, what else do you do with experience? You embrace it." So that's where that particular misunderstanding came from. So those are some of the misunderstandings that are out there because of scholarly research. We'll get into other misunderstandings later on in the day.

The Universal Response to Suffering

But first though, I would like to talk about the Buddha's idea about the context in which these truths function. He says we all start out with a common reaction to suffering, which is twofold. One is we're bewildered by it. "Why is there this suffering?" You think of a little baby, suffering from pain. Nobody can explain anything to the baby. The baby has to figure this out on his or her own. And then secondly, our response is there's somebody out there who knows a way to put an end to this suffering. Now as children the first thing of course is we run to our parents. But then as we get older we still have the same reaction. When we're suffering we want somebody else to help us with this. So that implies that we're already looking out into society for a solution to this problem.

It's an interesting thing to think about. Suppose we didn't have any suffering at all? Would we be interested in other people? Let's just think about that for a bit. Most of our need for other people has to do with the fact that we are suffering and we're looking for a way to overcome that. See if anybody can help us with that issue. So the Buddha starts out by saying, okay, you start with this common reaction to suffering. And then in one of his suttas, Majjhima 95^[9], if you're into that kind of thing. He starts out by saying, you start out by looking for somebody who is trustworthy. You want someone who is knowledgeable, trustworthy, compassionate. In other words, they really know about suffering, its cause, and how you can put an end to it. And secondly, you can trust them to tell the truth about what they know. And third is that they would have compassion for you. That's the kind of person you're looking for.

And he gives tests for looking for that kind of person, which is first you stay around that person for a while. And see, would this person tell anybody else to do things that were not in that other person's real interest? In other words, try to get that person to do something that would be harmful to that person. If so, go away. Stay away from that person, stay away from that teacher. Secondly, would that teacher claim to know things that he or she did not know? If you catch someone claiming things that they cannot know, again, go away. Leave them alone. The third one is that you listen to their teaching. Is it the kind of teaching that is deep and profound and really gets to an understanding of what's going on inside you? Now, if a person meets these three characteristics, then the next step is to listen to that person's dharma. Listen to what that person has to say.

When you listen to it, then you ask questions about it. Make sure you understand. This is one of the distinctive things the Buddha said about his own teaching, was he encouraged people to ask questions. He didn't talk about the interconnectedness of all beings, or what a wonderful thing it was, because that's just way too vague. And if you ask him, "Well, what's wonderful about the fact that people are eating other beings?" That kind of question is usually discouraged in those contexts. He said, "If you have questions about it, the teacher should be prepared to answer." Once you're clear on the teachings, you've thought them through, and then the next step is to give rise to a desire to actually practice them. Because the teachings all require action.

You look at the Four Noble Truths, they're a part of another teaching which is actually more basic, which is the fact that there are such things as skillful actions and unskillful actions. Skillful actions, the Buddha said, should be developed. Unskillful actions should be abandoned. This is one of the few teachings that he says is categorical. In other words, true across the board for everybody, all times. Based on that, we apply that particular set of categories to the problem of suffering. Okay, what am I doing that's causing suffering? What could I do to put an end to suffering? Suffering itself is something that should be comprehended. The cause should be abandoned. Its cessation should be realized. You do that by developing the path, which is the fourth truth.

So the truths themselves give imperatives, basically. Now the Buddha's imperatives are not imposed on you. Basically, if you want to put an end to suffering—big "if", but it's usually pretty universal—then this is what you've got to do. So they're not imposed on you, but it's a statement of fact. So you realize, once you've listened to the Dharma, you realize, "This is something I have to act on." So you give rise to a desire to act on it. Then from that desire you give a willingness to listen to the teachings and apply them to your own actions to see where your actions measure and don't measure up. And then there's an act of judgment.

One of the biggest ironies about how Buddhism is explained in the West is that the Buddha wants you to have a non-judging attitude towards things. You're trying to develop a non-judging state of mind. But from the first word the Buddha spoke to the last, it's all judgments. First sentence: "This is what should not be done by people who are looking for a noble path." His last word was an imperative to attain completion. He saw it as a teacher's duty to protect the student by giving the student a good basis for figuring out what should and should not be done. These are things you have to weigh. So judgment is an important part of the path.

Once you judge your own actions and see where they're lacking, then you exert yourself to follow the path. And it's through exerting yourself to follow the path that you arrive at awakening to the truth. So that's the framework in terms of the Buddhist take on where you're starting with suffering and how you're going to end up by awakening to the truth. You start with your own personal reality of the experience of suffering. Then you go out into society looking for some help. Then you take the lessons you get from reliable teachers and then you bring them in to bring your own actions in line with what the Buddha had to say about how you could do this.

The Graduated Discourse

I'll give you the other thing about what I want to talk about before we break for our first round of questions, is that when the Buddha started out his introduction to Buddhism, his teaching, he didn't usually start with the Four Noble Truths. Now there are a few cases where he did. In fact, his first Dharma talk was point blank starting with the Four Noble Truths, with people he knew, people who were already practicing. For other people, especially for lay people, he gave what was called the Anupubbikathā^[10], or the step-by-step discourse.

And this is part two: establish that the person teaching you is reliable. He starts out with things that you know something about already and then from there he will take you to try to get your state of mind ready to accept the Four Noble Truths. Because there are some things in the Four Noble Truths that are counterintuitive.

He gave this teaching to many, many people. Everything from a king and his retinue to wealthy householders, men and women, wealthy housewives, down to a poor leper, and even to the assassin who was hired to kill him. Now I think that's one of the most fascinating passages in the Pali Canon. King Ajatasattu^[11] has allowed Devadatta^[12], who wants to take over the sangha, to take some of his archers. Archer number one is to go in and shoot the Buddha. And then secondly he's told to follow a different path to get away. Now there are two other archers that have been stationed at that path. They say, "Kill the archer when he comes here and then follow this path." And then that path there are four other archers that are stationed there. Kill the two archers. Gets to eight. Sixteen. And so all the evidence is erased, right?

And so here comes the poor archer. And he approaches the Buddha and he starts freezing up. He says that he at least has some goodness to him. He realized that this is something he really shouldn't be doing. And so the Buddha says, "So just put down your bow and arrow. Come in, see me." So he does. And the Buddha teaches him this graduated discourse. And at the end of the discourse, he teaches the Four Noble Truths, and the archer becomes a stream-enterer^[13]. How many years have you all been meditating and haven't got stream-entry yet? And you come here with the best intentions? It's one of the most amazing passages.

And then the Buddha says, "Don't follow that route, okay? There's another way out." So the next two archers say, "When is this archer going to come? What happened?" So they come to see the Buddha. The Buddha teaches them, they become stream-enterers. [Laughter] The four, the eight, the sixteen, a big crowd of stream-enterers by the end of this, and the Buddha survived.

Unfortunately, we don't have the text of what the Buddha taught in any of those graduated discourses. All we have is a list of topics. And I can understand why, because he probably tailored it to different needs. Like when he was teaching the poor leper, he was teaching one way. When he taught the king, he was teaching another way. When he taught the assassins, it was another way. He'd focus on different things. But the list of topics is really interesting. Remember, he's not teaching them Buddhism. He's teaching them how to meet with their need to put an end to suffering. That's an important point. And you have to think about why he taught this, what desire he's responding to. These people want to put an end to suffering.

That story about the assassin reminds me of a short story I read one time. I've forgotten the name of the author, but it's about a young kid who has joined a gang in the city and in order to firm up his status within the gang, they've sent him back to steal from his mother. And he comes into the house and as he's sneaking in the kitchen that night, he looks at the sink and he remembers all the times when he helped his mother in the past. And there's this real pain of regret. Now in his case, he actually goes through with the theft. But I can imagine the archer thinking, "My gosh, here I've been hired to kill this great being." And in his case, he probably thinks of the good he'd done in the past. And that's what saved him, basically.

So the Buddha is responding to people's desire to put an end to suffering. And also he starts out with their sense of what is right and wrong in life. Because the topics are these: He starts with generosity. What's good about generosity? Then he goes on to virtue, where you abstain from harming others. And the third is the rewards of these two activities, both in this life and then on into the future lives, where he was talking about heaven. The fourth is, he talks about the drawbacks of sensual pleasures, which are the rewards. And then finally, to see renunciation as a good thing. And once you see renunciation as a good thing, then you're ready for the Four Noble Truths.

So look at the dynamic here. He starts out, again, not with talking about the world out there, or some being who's far away. He's talking about things you know about, we've all experienced, when you give something on a voluntary basis. It's not because it was a birthday, and not because you had to, because it was Christmas or what would the corresponding Jewish holiday be? Hanukkah. Did they give gifts on Hanukkah in the old days? Or was that a modern invention? I argue it was used to copy the Christians for the kids, because you're supposed to give very little gifts. The major celebration holiday is in March. Passover. You're commanded to get drunk actually on that holiday. [Laughter] Is that true? [Laughter] I was told you have to drink a little wine. I didn't think you were supposed to get drunk. You're supposed to get as drunk as the evil person who tried to kill all the Jews. So you're supposed to get as drunk so you can't tell the difference between the good people and the bad people. That's the problem. [Laughter]

You know, every culture has its weird customs. That's like the time when I was in Thailand and it was one of the first times when the cold season really was cold. And the cold wind was blowing down from the north and it started making me homesick. And I went to see Ajaan Fuang^[14] and I happened to mention to him, I said, "You know, the cold wind makes me homesick." And he said, "Yeah, every culture has its weird customs, doesn't it?" [Laughter]

And when the Buddha is talking about generosity, he's talking about voluntary giving. When you feel just out of the goodness of your heart, you want to give something to somebody else, and how good that is. The same with virtue, when you're thinking about the times when you had principles that you wanted to hold to, and you were going to have to sacrifice something in order to hold to your principles, and you went ahead and you made the sacrifice. So he's talking not about things that are far away, talking about how good these forms of goodness are. And this way he's developing an attitude of trust for the teacher. The teacher's talking about things you know about, things that also build on the fact that you do have potential. You've experienced goodness already.

And then to go further than that, this is when he begins to get out of your immediate range of experience. He starts talking about the rewards that come from being generous, the rewards that come from being virtuous, including the fact that you get to go to the sensual heavens. Now one of the weird things about the Pali Canon is that there's lots and lots of descriptions of hell and they're quite graphic. There are no graphic descriptions of heaven. Why? I don't know. But when I was trying to put together a sort of reconstruction of this graduated discourse, there's only one or two little passages on heaven. No great descriptions.

But then the Buddha says that there is what he calls the drawbacks and even the degradation of sensuality. And imagine, you go to heaven and you get used to having everything appear as you want it. But then you have to leave that. Now can you imagine what bad habits you develop in heaven? You get lazy. You feel entitled. And you've probably met people who are like this. Fresh recruits from heaven come falling down to earth. So it's like samsara^[15] is a sick joke. You make all these sacrifices in being generous and being virtuous. And then you get the rewards and the rewards spoil you. You're going to be sent back down.

And so that's when you realize, okay, maybe it would be a good thing to get out of this cycle. And the Buddha says, okay, the way out of the cycle is renunciation. Now renunciation does not mean you are depriving yourself of pleasure. It means you have to look someplace else for your pleasure. And the primary place he talks about looking for pleasure is in the practice of concentration. Because that's a pleasure, he says, that doesn't have any drawbacks. Now here again, this differs from a lot of what you've probably heard in mindfulness circles, which is you can get into jhāna^[16] and you never get out. The Buddha says, it is the way out of your attachment to sensuality. Because if we're not attached to our concentration, we're going to go back and be attached to our sensuality. Now, nobody has ever killed or stolen or had illicit sex or lied or taken intoxicants because of their attachment to concentration. Now, that does happen because of our attachment to sensuality. So the real danger is there in the sensuality.

Once your mind begins to see that the pleasures of the concentrated mind are really worth it, then he says, "You are prepared to hear the Four Noble Truths." Now what the Buddha's doing here, he's preparing both your head and your heart. Now in Pali, they have one word for that which is citta^[17], covers both sides.

In terms of your head, he's introduced the principles of karma and rebirth, talking about how your actions do give results. You are responsible for your actions. And you can choose, and you have the power to choose what you want to do. This will give rewards, not only in this lifetime, but also in future lifetimes. He's also talking about how karma is not deterministic. We have the power of choice in the present moment to counteract past bad karma and weaken its results. And then it takes us into larger context of how these teachings fit into the search for the end of pain, starting with virtue and generosity.

These are answers to a question that the Buddha said lies at the beginning of discernment, which is, "What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness? What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term harm and pain?" Now, the wisdom or discernment in those questions starts with, one, you realize that pain and happiness are dependent on your actions. Secondly, there is such a thing as long-term happiness, and two, it's better than short term. Sounds obvious, right? Again, K.R. Norman translated the Dhammapada. It gets to the one verse that says, "When you see that there is a greater happiness that comes as a result of abandoning a lesser happiness, the wise person will choose the greater happiness, will abandon the lesser happiness for the sake of the greater." K.R. Norman writes a footnote to this: "This cannot possibly be the meaning of this verse because it is just too obvious, too basic. We don't need the Buddha to tell us this." But then you look at the world. How many people are willing to sacrifice lesser happiness for the sake of the greater? We all want to win at chess and keep all our pieces. So that's the wisdom in this question.

The Buddha is also affirming that the desire to end pain is a good thing. Sometimes in some teachings we're taught that you shouldn't be concerned about ending your own suffering. You should be more concerned about the suffering of others. But then who are they supposed to be looking out for? They have to look out for you, right? But the question is how many people can actually solve your problem of suffering? Because it does come from within, as the Buddha said. It's from your own lack of skill and how you relate to your experiences around you. You cling to things and that causes your suffering. It's through your own lack of skill that the problem is caused. You have to develop your skills in order to put an end to it.

Also, when the Buddha is talking about karma here, he doesn't start with the issue of punishment, but he talks about the possibility of finding happiness through your own efforts. This is something that I think we should think about a little bit. Because for most of us, when we hear the first teaching on karma, we think, "Oh my gosh, that thing I did back when I was young, it's going to come and get me. I don't like this teaching." But the Buddha, when he talks about karma, he starts out with generosity. He starts out with gratitude. It's because your actions are your own choice that generosity is a good thing, and not just something that's forced on you. It's because other people have chosen to do good things for you. They had a choice not to. That's why you should have gratitude for the help they've given you. So for him, karma is what makes generosity and gratitude valid activities, valid attitudes.

And then finally, he's affirming the fact that your noble intentions are meaningful. Your intention to help others, your intention to be skillful in your own actions. These things do have meaning. Again, if the world were totally deterministic, or all things were predetermined by some outside force, our actions would not be meaningful. But the Buddha is saying, "You have the power of choice, and your actions can be meaningful."

That's the issue around the head, and around the heart. He starts with common everyday activities that are familiar to you, not abstract principles. He is affirming the value of looking for happiness in ways that are socially mature. I mean, this is when we learn how to be more adult, as we learn how to be generous and learn how to be virtuous. And also, this helps you develop a trust in the person teaching you this. You know that he or she is a good person by affirming activities that you know are good. And it affirms the happiness of generosity, virtue, and heaven. The Buddha's no prude. In other words, he says heaven is a good place to be. He's saying being a miser is a stupid thing to be. You should have some ability to enjoy the pleasures that come from your wealth. So when he starts talking about the dangers of sensuality, you're more likely to trust him. And when he talks about it, there's another way to find happiness in a non-sensual way. So once your mind and heart have been sort of developed through following the Buddha through this introduction to the teachings. He says, "It's like your mind and heart have been washed and now they're like a cloth that you're trying to dye, they're ready to receive the dye."

So we'll stop there for a few minutes, see if there are any questions. Start with live people first.

Q&A: Part 1

Question: At the end of meditations, you always say try to keep the breath with you throughout the day. And I've been trying to work on that for a while, and I'm really bad at it. So after I get out, I'm able to check in throughout the day and randomly I'll check in and for 20 seconds be with the breath, but it's very discrete rather than continuous.

Ajaan Thanissaro: Well, discrete moments is better than nothing. But also, when you're trying to be with the breath as you go through the day and you're doing other activities, it's still a bit too much to ask you to be aware of when the breath is coming in, when it's going out. Just think about what's the quality of the energy in my body. And try to be sensitive to that. Like when you're listening to somebody or making a particular task, "Okay, today while I'm listening to other people, I will be with my breath. Next day while I'm talking to other people, I will be with my breath." And then add more and more and more activities throughout the day and you find that you actually can make it more continuous.

Question: A question on what is the origin of clinging and craving? What is the cause for these things to come into the mind and heart and touch it?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Okay, the origin of clinging and craving is traced back to ignorance of the Four Noble Truths. In other words, you don't realize that your own actions are leading to suffering and so you see clinging and craving as a good thing. I remember when I was in town in Brazil, there was an issue about dispassion. First question, what's wrong with passion? And the answer, of course, is, well, you do stupid things and you do these things because you don't see the connection between your actions and the suffering they're causing. Once you see that connection, then you will see the drawbacks of going for those kinds of activities.

Question: You talked about generosity, but often women, especially in my culture, are often told to give all the time. So how do I know when to stop?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Well, the Buddha says to give where you feel inspired, but not to harm yourself through giving. And there are two ways you can harm yourself through giving. One is you steal something to give, and the other is you give too much. So you have to realize, he would have you divide your wealth into four or five categories. One is looking after yourself. Second is looking after your family. And then the third is for gifts and offerings. And the fourth is to prepare for the future. Sort of divide your wealth up into those categories. It's up to you to decide which percentages you want to use. But always remember that you have to save some for your own sake. There's nothing wrong with that.

Question: So my question is around clinging for parents and householders. We have to look after aging parents and growing children. And sometimes their suffering is too much, especially seeing your parents grow old and die. And if they have not learned dharma, then helping them see life. So there is a lot of suffering for us helping our children. Is that also clinging?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Okay, you're going to have to help them. And there's a difference between having affection for people and clinging to the affection. And the word for clinging in Pali, upadana, can also mean to feed. To what extent are you feeding off of that relationship? In other words, to what extent do you make your happiness dependent on that relationship? And the more you cling to somebody, actually the more of a weight you're putting on them, hoping that they will provide for your need for happiness. If you learn more to look for your happiness inside, then you can still have affection for other people and help them. But the fact that your happiness has a basis inside means that you don't suffer so much from the fact that they are leaving you, or the fact that they're getting old. Or the fact that you've got a child and now you don't know when the child is going to get into danger. But if you have a sense of well-being that's solidly inside, then you can live with these other people, have affection for them, look after them. But it's not going to cause you so much suffering. So ask yourself to what extent am I feeding off of this relationship? And how much better the relationship would be for both sides if I don't feed off of it?

Question: Is it possible that someone experiences something that lays outside of the realm of the results of his karma?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Some of the details. I mean, when the Buddha talks about karma, he's talking about your experience of pleasure or pain. And the specific details, like the fact that some people in here are wearing clothing of strange colors that I don't like. I think it's beyond my karma. The question of whether I'm going to suffer from that or not, that's my karma.

Question: So is what you've covered so far what the Buddha meant by comprehending these truths or the duties to be completed regarding these truths?

Ajaan Thanissaro: No, there's a lot more. Particularly when we get into the discussion of the First Noble Truth, what the Buddha is talking about constitutes suffering. That's when you start getting into comprehending. This is just giving you a background.

Question: Another misconception I've read about Four Noble Truths, for instance in Wikipedia, is that Four Noble Truths have been overly emphasized as the core of the teaching in modernity, whereas historically this may not have been the case. Could you speak to why this is incorrect?

Ajaan Thanissaro: It's incorrect because Wikipedia doesn't filter things enough. I mean, in the canon itself, it talks about how the Four Noble Truths are the Buddha's most distinctive teaching, and there is the teaching that covers everything else. And as I said earlier, the Buddha said only two of his teachings were categorical, in other words, true for everybody across the board. One is the teaching that skillful action should be developed and unskillful action should be avoided. The second one is the Four Noble Truths. Now you get into the commentaries, and we have time for this a little bit in the afternoon, they put more emphasis on the three characteristics as being the Buddha's most important teaching. But in the canon it's very clear that you apply the three characteristics, or actually the three perceptions, in the context of trying to comprehend suffering and abandoning its cause. So Four Noble Truths provide the context for everything else.

Question: This is going to be a technical question perhaps on the first point that you made about one of the misconceptions about the Four Noble Truths. You said the claim at least is that the Pali is strange because it's a compound of a masculine and a neuter word. I'm kind of wondering which part of it you're talking about? The cattāri ariyasaccāni, they're both neuter.

Ajaan Thanissaro: No, talking about the dukkha nirodho, masculine, ariya saccaṃ, neuter. And then the idaṃ in the front of it, that's also neuter. And K.R. Norman makes a big deal out of this. And the same with samudayo. Samudayo and saccaṃ.

Question: But that itself is exactly what you were pointing out, that the saccaṃ there is the statement of the truth and not the...

Ajaan Thanissaro: Yeah, well, he's saying just the fact that that particular phrase is grammatically weird means it must be later, it must be degenerate. But that's not necessary, right? It's more the case that in the rest of the canon, you don't have that particular kind of construct. There's something called a syntactical compound. And the irony of all this is that K.R. Norman himself is the one who wrote an article about this topic, in which you would have dukkha-nirodho ariyasaccaṃ. It's perfectly okay. So, I don't understand. I mean, one of the things about studying the Pali Canon is that the Pali grammar of the Vinaya and the Pali grammar of the suttas are different. And my feeling is that this is at a time when you didn't have standardized vocabulary, you didn't have the Académie Française^[18] to tell you this word is okay and this word is not okay. People spoke what they spoke and they had their own sense of the grammar and their own sense of the language. And the suttas have a non-standardization of Pali grammar, and the Vinaya was probably a Pali sense of Pali grammar. And there would be phrases that were so associated with the way the Buddha expressed things, you felt weird about trying to standardize them into your own expression, so you would allow him to speak in his own way. I mean, the whole argument is very, very odd.

Question: Does karma from the previous life affect how well your meditation will progress in this life?

Ajaan Thanissaro: [Laughter] Your meditation is a combination of present and past karma. And some people have some really heavy past karma. And they have to struggle a lot more than other people who have very light past karma. So that will have an impact. But the important thing is your present karma. It's what you're doing now.

Question: Does one always use the whole body to breathe from, say, the heart all day long?

Ajaan Thanissaro: You can.

Question: I'm suffering with the thought that I'm worth nothing and cannot listen to someone appreciating me, but I'm not able to drop this thought and have been suffering with this thought my whole life.

Ajaan Thanissaro: Okay, you have to ask yourself where you got that thought and what part of your mind feels that you have to believe it. It's good to think of the mind as being like a committee and you've got this really bad voice in the committee, but you have other voices in the committee as well. Which you can get the other voices to come in and say, "Hey, wait a minute, this is ridiculous."

Question: Sometimes as one practices, one becomes dispassionate about the same things that there was a lot of passion for. And that internal shift causes suffering. In that situation, is it skillful to just observe this as a change and stick with whatever is going on outside? Or is it skillful to say, "Oh, no," because then there's a sense of preference, and then one should change the external conditions to respond to the inner shift?

Ajaan Thanissaro: It depends on what the shift is about. You have some responsibilities that whether you feel passion for them or don't feel passion for them, you've got to meet the responsibility. Other areas that you're not all that responsible and it's more a question of, "Do I like doing this or do I not like doing this?" So you look at your social duties and you say, "Okay, I'll stick with my social duties. I'm not going to abandon them." But in other areas where it's, you used to like certain movies and you don't like those movies anymore. And you say, "OK, that's fine with me. I don't need those movies again." Because when they talk about dispassion, it's not so much seeing all of life as oatmeal. It's more like saying, "I've outgrown that activity. It no longer holds any interest."

Because what gives us interest in things is the fact that we can move into a situation and we can make a difference. And we enjoy that. We all enjoy exercising our power there. But there's sometimes when you see, okay, this is a situation, I can see all the different ways that I could exercise and make a difference, but it just doesn't appeal to me anymore. It's like tic-tac-toe. When you're a little kid, it's really interesting how you're gonna win that game. But then you get to a point where you realize, okay, I know how to start the game, so at the very least, I never lose. No longer any interest. Because it doesn't give any range for your own creativity.

There's a study that was done years back, a psychologist observing infants, and he said the thing that makes infants happiest is when they realize they can do an action and they get the same results. And they'll do it again. I mean, things that drive you crazy about infants, you know, they're "Nah, nah, nah, nah." But that's what they enjoy, because they realize, "Okay, I can do something and I know what the result is going to be." They have a sense of agency. And we enjoy our sense of agency probably more than anything else. So we feel dispassion for areas where we say, "Okay, I could exercise my agency here, but it just doesn't hold any interest anymore." And in this case you want to find some passion for the path, and figure out, "Okay, if my mind doesn't settle down, what can I do to make it settle down?" And then do it again and do it again.

Question: On that note, what would you say is the most important thing that a person could do to realize that they're clinging or what they're clinging to in the present moment?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Okay, ask yourself, "If I were to drop this, would I be okay? If I were to drop that, would I be okay?" And listen to the committee of the mind. And some things you're about to drop, they're, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's too much." But that's a good segue into our next topic, which is the First Noble Truth. I'm going to talk a little bit about the Buddha's first discourse first.

The Setting in Motion of the Wheel of Dharma

When the Buddha gained awakening, he asked himself, "Who do I teach?" First the question was, "Should I teach or not?" And the commentaries get all tied up in knots about that. Here the Buddha has gone through all these many, many eons developing the virtues to become Buddha. And then he might even think of not teaching at all. And they said, "What kind of compassionate Buddha is this?" And so they come up with the story that he was just playing coy, that he wanted somebody to invite him. I think it's more expressed with the fact that when the Buddha came to awaken, he owed nothing to anybody. And so it's totally an act of generosity on his part that he taught at all.

Once we establish that, then the Brahma comes down and invites him to teach. And the Buddha says, "Okay, there I can see that it would be worthwhile." Because you can imagine how tough it is being a Buddha. We get this picture sometimes, you know, the Buddha kind of floats around on a lotus and doesn't have any problems. But all you have to do is read the Vinaya and realize, okay, here he's set up the Sangha. He's got all these monks and nuns. And all they can do is think about ways of misbehaving.

There's a story about the monk who had sex to please his mother, basically. She wanted an heir for the family. And then there's one monk who said, "Okay," the Buddha says, "Okay, no sex, okay?" And there's another monk who says, "Okay, when the Buddha said that, he meant only human beings." So I don't want to go into the details. They're pretty disgusting. But then the Buddha has to add it: "Okay. Including animals. Okay." And then the Vinaya, I mean, it's five volumes and that's even shortened versions. He has to spend all these years just dealing with this kind of stuff. And on top of that, there were people who accused him of all kinds of horrible things. So I think he foresaw that. But it really was an act of generosity on his part. He said, "Okay, I'll put up with the hardships of being a Buddha. Establish the teaching."

First question, who do you teach? First he thought of the two teachers who had taught him strong states of concentration before, but they had gone to the formless realms where they weren't in communication with anybody. You go to the form of infinite space and you're having a good time with infinite space, you're not communicating with anybody. So then he thought about the five brethren. Now the five brethren were five monks who had attended to him during his austerities. And then when he had given up his austerities, they left him in disgust. They saw he's given up on his path. He's no longer practicing seriously. He said, "Okay, they would be ready. They would understand." And so he goes to see them. And first he has to establish the fact that he's a reliable, knowledgeable person. He says, "Look, I found the Deathless and I can teach you the way."

And they said, "How could you have found that? Because you've been eating." He said, "Eating or not eating doesn't matter. I found the way." And so they basically say, "No, we don't believe you," three times. And finally he said, "Look, have I ever made a claim like this before?" And they realized, "He is a very truthful person. Okay, let's listen." So he teaches them, starts with the Four Noble Truths.

You may know that the talk is called the Setting of the Dharma Wheel in Motion. The question always is, where's the wheel? A wheel back in those days was like in a philosophical discourse or legal discourse where you have two sets of variables. And you put the two sets against each other and then you go through each permutation. In English we call that a table, right? In India they called it a wheel. You just go round, and round, and round. And so the wheel is when the Buddha talks about the Four Noble Truths and the three levels of knowledge with regard to each truth. First one is knowing the truth. Second one is knowing the duty with regard to that truth. And the third one is knowing that he had completed the duty. And as he said, when he completed all that, that's when he knew he was awakened.

So with the First Noble Truth, the truth of suffering, the duty is, as I said, to comprehend it. Second Noble Truth, the duty is to abandon it. That's the cause of suffering. The cessation of suffering, the duty is to realize it. And with the path, the duty is to develop it. So when he sets out the teaching, he starts with the path. And the Four Noble Truths are the first factor in the path, i.e. Right View. It makes the point that they're not the goal, instead they're instrumental. This is a big issue in Buddhist discussions. Some people say we practice in order to arrive at Right View. But the Buddha himself here is saying, "No, you use Right View in order to arrive at awakening." And awakening is going to be beyond the expression of right view. We're actually using right view, which is words, toward the reality of the end of suffering.

The First Noble Truth and the Aggregates

Right view here is the First Noble Truth. It's the truth of dukkha, which can be translated as pain, stress, or suffering. Now, sometimes you hear it translated as unsatisfactoriness. And I think that's a very unsatisfactory translation. It's as if you're, "Ah, it's not good enough for me." [Laughter] And then the solution, of course, would be, "Well, learn how to be satisfied with less and lower your expectations." And that's not what the Buddha's saying. I mean, there really is pain, there really is stress, there really is suffering.

And also, sometimes you hear that the First Noble Truth is life is suffering, which is not the case. The Buddha never said that. If all life is suffering, the solution, of course, would be to die. [Laughter] But that's not a solution. Another expression you sometimes hear is that there is suffering. And I heard somebody made a really good comment about this. It was, "Duh." [Laughter] It took the Buddha all that time to realize... [Laughter]

The teaching, he says, basically, starts out with some familiar examples. He says, "Birth, aging, and death is suffering. Not getting what you want, having to be with what you don't like, being separated from what you do like, sorrow, distress, despair. These things are all suffering." So he starts with familiar examples. Plato would hate this, right? Because Plato, the idea for him, for a decent definition, is you don't give examples, you define the essence of something. The Buddha starts out with examples. And then he comes down to the common denominator among all the forms of suffering, which is the five clinging-aggregates.

Now, it's not that the aggregates cling. It's just that you cling to the aggregates. And there are five aggregates, and there are four ways of clinging. It sounds very abstract, but he actually is talking to something that's very intimate. The five aggregates are form, your sense of your body; feeling, feeling tones of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain; perception, which is the labels you put on things by which you identify them or give them meaning. Biology, for me that's a perception. Elizabeth, Steve, these are perceptions and the names we give to things. And then there are thought constructs or thought fabrications, where you put your perceptions together and make full sentences out of them. And then finally consciousness, which is your awareness of these things.

Now, as I said, these are actually intimate things because they are related to our process of feeding. There is one point where the Buddha says, "This is what all beings have in common, is they have to feed." Even the devas have to feed. Hell beings have to feed. Although hell beings don't get really good food. They get molten copper down their throats. But I'll just give you an example of feeding. Okay. First you got form. You've got the body that needs the food in order to survive. And then you've got the material things out there that could or could not be the food that you're going to be feeding on. You've got the feeling of hunger, the pain. And you're looking for a feeling of satisfaction that comes when you've eaten enough.

There's the perception. This is the really important one. It's perceiving what things are edible and which things are not. And this is how we begin to navigate our way through the world. You know, a little baby comes across, crawling across the floor, comes across something. What is the first thing the baby does? Puts it in his mouth to see whether it's edible or not. And this is how we begin to perceive things in the world. This is edible, that's not edible. And also there's the perception of what kind of hunger we have. You know, are we hungry for something salty, something sweet? There's that great line in "The Member of the Wedding"^[19] where the heroine of the story, a 13-year-old girl, takes a line out of Dostoyevsky^[20], "I feel like I've been stripped and I'm standing in the wind, sand blowing on me. What I need is a good ice cream cone." [Laughter] That's perception.

Then the thought constructs. Okay, you get the food, what do you do with it? Now you get a raw potato, you can't eat the raw potato, you have to fix it. And first you have to learn how to find the food to begin with. This is all your thinking process. How am I going to get the food? Once I get the food, how do I prepare it? And then you eat it. And then finally, consciousness, your awareness of all these things.

So these are activities that are all very familiar to us. They're very, very basic to our relationship to the world. Now, the Buddha says there are four ways of clinging to these activities. One is in terms of sensuality. Now for sensuality, what he means is not so much sensual pleasures, it's our fascination with thinking about and planning for sensual pleasures. Like right now you could be thinking about what am I going to have for lunch? And you start thinking about, "Well there's this pizza place down the road and then there's Starbucks," and then you can start elaborating. "Okay, with the pizza place, what kind of toppings do the pizzas have?" And you can think about that for quite a while. You get there and how long does it take to eat the pizza? I asked that question one time in France and they said a good hour and a half. [Laughter]

Actually it was the time we went to a restaurant in France. And true noon in France in the summer is 1:30. We arrived at the restaurant at noon and we asked the chef, "Can we finish the meal by 1:30?" He said, "Only if you order the plat du jour." [Laughter] I said, "We're living in a different world." [Laughter] Okay, here in America you eat the pizza and it's five minutes, 10 minutes, you're done, right? But you can think for a long time about how good the pizza is going to be and then afterwards how good the pizza was. That's sensuality. That's the first thing we cling to.

The second thing we cling to is our views about the world. You know, the world is like this, the world is like that. It can have to do with our views about the physics of the universe, our views about the politics of the society, but our views about the world in which we're engaged in, those are all a way that we cling. And we really hold fast to our views. Secondly, habits and practices, what you should do in order to engage the world. Sometimes it's translated as precepts and practices. Sometimes it's translated as rites and rituals. In which case, people who have no rites or rituals, they'd already be free of that kind of clinging. But they still cling to certain ways of doing things. That this has to be done this way, has to be done that way. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong.

And then there's you, about yourself. Are you negotiating with all these other forms of clinging? "Given that the world is this way, things should be done that way, but I want this." The "I" comes in there and says, "How do I negotiate this? And which of my desires do I have to sacrifice? Which of my desires can I make mesh with the world? Or should I redefine my idea of the world so I can get more of what I want?" There's a lot of negotiation going on in there. And this is the role of the "me" in there, the self in there.

The self in here basically has three roles. There's the agent, there's the consumer, and there's the observer. These are all related to our desire for happiness. On the one hand, there's the agent. Once you decide that you want something, then the agent can decide, "Can I do this or not? And what would have to be done?" Then there's the consumer. "Okay, when I attain this pleasure, I get to enjoy it." And then there's the observer saying, "Okay, you guys, what you're planning to do here is good or not good. It's working or it's not working." I mean, this observer is in it and these are all parts of our strategies for happiness. Which is why when people say there is no self, you may say, "Well, yeah, it makes sense, but no, I'm not going to let go." Because you feel you're going to be deprived of your strategies for happiness.

So we cling to things in these four ways. That may seem like an odd list. But you think about Freud's analysis of how the mind works. Sensuality would be your id, the desires. Your views about the world would be your sense of the reality principle. Your attachment to habits and practices, that would be your superego telling you what you should and should not do. And then self would be the ego that's trying to negotiate among these things. So this way of analyzing how the mind functions has parallels in Western thought as well.

Now, to comprehend suffering doesn't mean you simply witness the fact of stress and suffering and say, "Oh, there is suffering." You see, it's because I'm clinging to these things in these ways. That's where the suffering is. And you want to observe that in action. That's how you comprehend the First Noble Truth. Questions? Yes.

Q&A: Part 2

Question: The last point that you made, may I just try to maybe phrase it the way I understand that when you're saying that suffering or the First Noble Truth is not that there is suffering or that life is suffering, it's that this clinging is suffering. So it's not that suffering is because of clinging, it is that it is the clinging itself. I mean normally we don't think of it that way. We think that, "I like this thing, I want to cling to this." What part of the mind comes to the point where it tells you, "Okay, it's the clinging, it's the feeding, it's the clinging to this that is painful." Is there some sense or some energy of pain that one feels in the process of clinging at some subtle level that one can tell that?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Okay, this relates to what I was planning to say next. I'll go ahead and do this right now. When the Buddha has you to comprehend these things, he doesn't have you just stop clinging. He first gives you good things to cling to, because otherwise you're not going to be able to function on the path. And so in terms of sensuality, that was the one thing he says you don't cling to at all as part of the path. Now, he doesn't say you deny yourself sensual pleasures, but you don't spend your time fantasizing about the pizza, okay? Or whatever else.

In terms of views, okay, your view about the world is, the world does function according to action. And your own actions are things that give rise to suffering. Your unskillful actions actually are suffering, and cravings actually cause you to do that. So views about karma and views about the fact of rebirth, he says, "You adopt those as skillful views." And then any other views that would come in that would be antithetical to that, you have to learn how to drop them. Now if you begin to realize, "Okay, by holding on to this kind of stuff, I am suffering." So the Buddha gives you something better to hold on to. You begin to see, "Okay, holding on to this, I am suffering." So it's selectively letting go.

In terms of habits and practices, the Eightfold Noble Path is habits and practices that you want to follow. Sīla, vata^[21]. Sīla would be the precept part. Vata would be the mindfulness and concentration part. And then sense of self. You as the person who's on the path, who is responsible for doing the path and will benefit from doing the path. And as observing what you're doing as you're on the path. All those three functions do function as part of being on the path.

Just this morning I was looking at a book on "what's wrong with mindfulness", written from a Zen perspective. And that was their main complaint. There's too much "I" doing things. And if you don't do it, who's going to do it? The path doesn't happen on its own. You get to exercise your sense of agency by doing the path in these ways. Now what you're gonna run up to is parts of your committee of the mind that don't like this. And if you can see, "Well, if I hold onto this way of doing things as opposed to that way of doing things, I'm suffering less. So it's in my best interest to let go of those old ways." So that's how you begin to see, oh yeah, that is the clinging. The clinging is the suffering.

Question: The clinging to these other things is causing you to suffer, is your suffering. You see that the act of clinging to these things is in and of itself, there's suffering there. If I learn how to let go of those things, I'm not going to suffer. But isn't there a sense of control that you can get when you know, okay, for example, if you cling to right view, you get a sense of control that, "Okay, if I'm generous, then I can get happiness hopefully in the future." So you get a sense of that "control", that, "Okay, I can be generous right now so that I will be happy in the future." So isn't that kind of relieving to a certain extent instead of burdensome?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Well the part of you that's holding on to that object says, "I don't want to give that away." You see, as long as I'm holding on to that object I'm going to suffer. So you're making choices, okay, which way of acting is going to involve less suffering. Now eventually you get to the point where the only thing you're holding on to is the path. And then you realize, okay, this holding on to the path, there's still some suffering there. That's when I have to let go of that too.

Question: That's exactly the part that's a little confusing because it's almost like there is a part, at least from this perspective, it appears, maybe because it's too advanced to see that the path itself is suffering. But it appears very much like it's a little bit of a relief because you kind of get some freedom from all the other things that you could be doing and getting into more pain. So you would want to cling to this and there is a certain level up to which you would want to see this as the antithesis of clinging. So that this clinging is not suffering, whereas this other clinging is suffering. Isn't there that distinction?

Ajaan Thanissaro: In the beginning there is, yeah. This is less suffering than that. But then once you let go of that, you begin to realize, okay, it's still not good enough. I'm still not totally free of stress. Here it's gonna be subtle, but there is some suffering, there is some stress there. And that moment is when you're not talking about my suffering, just the fact of activity, the fact of suffering. Let's try to stop this activity. And all of that has to be done for stream entry. Even realizing that the path itself is suffering. And the fact that you can actually let go of it. And not just go back to your old ways.

Question: I've often heard that clinging and craving are used somewhat interchangeably. And it seems to me that we ultimately need to realize that there is clinging that is occurring in our lives, but preceding that, once you have that realization, it's also important to understand that it stems from a particular type of craving. And so we're encouraged to also understand why is it that we are craving or desiring these things? And then a part of the path tells us to replace or squelch that craving with something that is more desirable or that leads to genuine, true happiness. Am I on target there by understanding that?

Ajaan Thanissaro: In Pali, the word for clinging, as I said earlier, is related to feeding. The word for craving is thirst. We feed because we're hungry. And this is one of the reasons why Nibbana is said to be freedom from hunger. You can ask, "Why do I hunger for these things? Where's the lack that I feel can be fulfilled by holding onto this, holding onto that?" And so in the beginning, I was just saying, you give yourself the path to follow and you cling to that and you crave that. And then there's a passage in the canon which says, "Okay, you hold this craving to get to the end of the path, and when you finally arrive, that's when you can let it go."

Question: In the Buddha's progressive discourse, how would you present the aspect of the rewards of heaven to people who don't believe in rebirth/samsara or even an afterlife?

Ajaan Thanissaro: I've never given the graduated discourse. I imagine when the Buddha was giving it he had a more impressive personality. It wasn't the case that everybody in India believed in it. But I think he was interested in talking to people who were open minded enough to say it could be a possibility.

Question: I gather from your teachings and translations that the aggregate of consciousness takes the six senses as objects and that consciousness without surface has no objects, but what is the element or property of consciousness?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Okay, the Buddha tends to use the word consciousness in many different ways in the canon. In terms of the six senses, consciousness would be just simply the fact that you are registering the input from the senses. But there are other passages where the Buddha talks about consciousness that is actually holding onto things and grasping things. And it's a more active principle. And there's even one place where it talks about consciousness being released. So consciousness without surface, the image the Buddha gives is of a light beam. The sun rises in the east, goes through a window on the east side of a house. And where does it land? Well, it lands on the west wall. If there's no wall, where does it land? It lands on the ground. If there's no ground, where does it land? It lands on the water. If there's no water, it doesn't land. In other words, this would be consciousness without an object. Not even itself as an object.

Question: Are the terms element and property of consciousness synonymous? If so, is the element property of consciousness the same thing as the infinitude of consciousness that takes consciousness itself as its object or is the infinitude of consciousness really just the aggregate of consciousness and the element property of consciousness another way of saying consciousness without surface?

Ajaan Thanissaro: No, the infinitude of consciousness has consciousness as its object as a perception, whereas consciousness without surface has no object at all. The Buddha never lays out, "Okay, this is how the property of consciousness is related to the aggregate of consciousness and these other things." I think what he does though is he's talking to people who have different backgrounds and different senses of the language. So he would adapt his teachings to fit that particular audience. But he never lays out the relationship between the aggregates and the properties. That's all I can say.

Question: Could not belief in the Four Noble Truths be seen as a fixed view?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Well the Buddha never says that fixed views are bad but that particular view would be very good.

Question: Since "life is suffering" is a mistranslation, can you suggest a better translation?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Clinging to the five aggregates is suffering. It's the best translation I know of.

Question: So in the pizza example, was that an example of clinging to the fourth aggregate of thoughts?

Ajaan Thanissaro: It would be clinging to perceptions and thought fabrications, yeah.

Question: And do you have examples of clinging for the other aggregates?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Well, clinging to a sense of form: You're sitting here meditating, and it just feels really good. You say, "Okay, I'm clinging to the sense of my body right now." Clinging to feelings is, okay, there are certain feelings that are really pleasurable, and you cling to those. Clinging to consciousness is a fear of going unconscious, or fear of not having an object for your consciousness to land on. Because sensory consciousness has to come with an object. So the fear of not having anything to know would also be clinging to consciousness.

Question: I think you spoke about political beliefs as potentially a form of clinging. And I wonder if you could also speak about ways in which political beliefs could not be a form of clinging, could be a form of generosity. If one believes, for example, that there could be enormous destruction if a particular political thing were to happen, what then become the skillful means that one should employ?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Okay, you would have to say, "This is how things appear to me." Always keeping in mind that this is how things appear to me. And that there's a lot of unexpected stuff that comes. You know, X happens, and it looks like it's gonna be a good thing. So you work for X, but also it turns out when X happens, Y happens, and you don't want that. If non-X happens, that would be a bad thing. But maybe something good happens when non-X happens. So you have to be open to that possibility. And then you decide, "Okay, but still, I'd like to see X." And this is where you decide, "This is going to be my form of generosity. I'm going to work for X." And that means putting it in a category of generosity. The Buddha says, you don't harm yourself, you don't harm others. Harming yourself would be breaking the precepts. And also giving so much that it's depleting you. You have to realize when you're burning out. But from that point on, the Buddha says, "Give where you feel inspired."

Question: Somebody asked about tanha versus clinging and so I'm a little confused. I thought the first noble truth was about tanha.

Ajaan Thanissaro: The craving is the cause, which we'll get to, I guess, after lunch. But the clinging is the actual suffering, the holding on. And again, your mind doesn't have a hand that grasps things, it's just there's an activity that you do over and over and over again. The baby who's crying, "wah wah wah". There are certain activities the mind keeps repeatedly doing because it doesn't feel comfortable not doing them.

Question: What does non-clinging feel like moment to moment in daily life?

Ajaan Thanissaro: In daily life, there is going to be some clinging and the question is what to cling to. Learning how to let go of certain things, but holding on, you're like holding on to your view that, "Okay, if I let go of X, I will be better off," even though parts of the mind want to hang on to X. So in this case you would hold to the view, which would be, letting go there would be better. So it's just like choosing what you're going to hang on to, but try to hang on to the best things you can.

Question: How can we distinguish the First and Second Noble Truths?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Okay, they're awfully close. But when you get to the Second Noble Truth, then we can ask that question again.

Question: How important is an understanding of reincarnation? Comprehending it feels challenging. Is there a consistent "I" that translocates between forms? Are these even skillful contemplations?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Okay, the Buddha never answered the question of what it is that gets reborn. For him it was just a question of what's the process? How does it happen? Because you're not responsible for the what, but you are responsible for the how, because that's something you do. And so if you can learn how to say, "Okay, I'm just going to learn how to get rid of this craving for becoming, or craving for sensuality, or craving for non-becoming." Work on those. And once you've got the process under control, then you don't have to worry about the what.

Question: I feel a deep hole in my chest thinking of the repercussions of unskillful actions. I've been unskillful in the past, and even though I'm changing that, there is a fear that I may fall again, or that I will do something unskillful again, and feel those repercussions. I feel the fear can be skillful, but I may take it to an unhealthy extreme. Thoughts?

Ajaan Thanissaro: The Buddha says recognizing a mistake as a mistake is an important first step to not doing it again. And what's called "compunction", ottappa^[22], or fear of doing evil, is a fear to be cultivated. But it has to be combined with goodwill for yourself, goodwill for others. And when you see yourself, you're making yourself suffer unnecessarily over this, recognizing what's unnecessary. That's part of the thing. "Only if I beat myself up enough will I not do this anymore." That's not helpful. Because there comes a point where we say, "I can't beat myself up anymore, this is crazy," and then you go back to your old ways. Instead have goodwill for yourself, compassion for yourself, empathetic joy for the times when you are skillful, and equanimity about what's happened in the past. And then spread those same attitudes to other people as well.

Question: How to give more respect to the outcome which comes from feeding the mind with breath and doing skillful activities? After getting used to the state of mind for some time, I tend to take it for granted and do something unskillful, leading to an undesirable outcome. The cycle of being more mindful and skillful action starts till I do something unskillful.

Ajaan Thanissaro: You really got to talk to yourself about, "But this is a great thing, this breath is really, really good." And then just keep reminding yourself what it was like before you were in touch with the breath. The Buddha talks about how delight can be a cause for suffering, but he also recommends that you have delight in practicing. And delight is just this, the way you hype actions and activities and experiences to yourself. I think about the pizza, "Boy, that pizza place down the road is really, really good. Yeah, that's really good." And then afterwards, "That was really worth it. Yes, that was worth it." That's delight. And so you're about, "What a great breath. And that was another great breath." Just learn how to keep reminding yourself, "If I don't learn how to appreciate these things, if I start taking it for granted, I'm going to start slipping again. So I got to do whatever I can to appreciate this." That kind of hype is okay.

Question: I had a question about the clinging aggregates. I'm just wondering, what's the distinction between form and feeling? And the second part of this question is, are we in some cases clinging to the five different aggregates simultaneously?

Ajaan Thanissaro: Okay, the difference between form and feeling is form is made up of this sense of either solidity, coolness, warmth, or energy. The feeling is basically pleasure or pain. And those are two very different things. In fact, that's going to be an important part of your meditation. Because there's often a sense, "Okay, the feeling and the sense of the body are the same thing," especially when there's a pain someplace there. You feel like the pain is the same thing as your experience of the knee. Then you have to keep reminding yourself, "Well, no, they're different things."

And one way of doing that is to ask yourself, "Okay, when there is a pain, where is the sharpest point of the pain?" And you begin to realize it keeps moving around, moving around, moving around. And you begin to see this momentarily coming and going, coming and going. And then you ask yourself, "When it comes, is it coming at me or is it going away from me?" I find this a really useful perception to have. It's actually going away.

There was a time when I was in Singapore one time, and I was being treated for back pain. And the Chinese doctor started rubbing oil on my back. And at first it felt really good. And then he's rubbing harder and harder and harder and it's getting kind of raw. Then he pulls out these bamboo whisks and starts beating me on the back. And my first thought was, "Oh my gosh, what bad karma do I have?" [Laughter] And it didn't seem like he's gonna let up at any time. So I said, "Well, I gotta work on this." And so I began to see, oh yeah, when he hits it, that pain is actually going away. Not coming at me, but it's going away. It's like sitting in the back of one of those old station wagons with a seat facing back, and you're going down the road, and as soon as something comes into your range of vision, it's going away. And I found that it seemed like the pain and my sense of the body actually separated out. So that's what you want to work on, to see that they really are separate. But this is one common misperception we have, is when there's pain in the knee, the knee is pain, but they actually are separate things. An analogy you can think of is, if you have a radio here and you tune into a station in San Francisco, and if you want to tune into a station in San Jose, you don't have to move to another spot. You just change the frequency. They're in the same spot, but they're different.

Question: Could you speak on the elements as they pertain to this First Noble Truth? You've spoken about the elements in some of your books and I always have trouble grasping.

Ajaan Thanissaro: Okay, there are elementary types of sensation or elementary experiences of having this body. Like there's a sense of solidity or weight that would be earth. In a lot of scholarly work, when they talk about the element of water, they talk about cohesion. Now, I don't know how you experience cohesion. By doing that, you experience coolness. That would be the water. Heat would be the element of fire. And then the energy would be the breath or the wind. And you can actually, when the breath settles down, it gets really, really still, then you can think about, "Okay, where is the warmest spot in the body?" Focus on that. And then say, "Okay, now can I spread the warmth throughout the body?" And as long as you hold onto that perception of warmth, you begin to realize that you can make more of the body feel warm. You can do the same thing with coolness and solidity.

If we had a little bit more time, I could tell you a story. I'll go ahead and tell that anyhow. My teacher had a student whose powers of concentration were really strong. And after she got the breath still in her body, he said, "Okay, think about fire, the element of fire." Well, her body went very hot. He said, "Okay." And then she left the meditation. But her problem was that many times she'd get these perceptions and part of her mind would hold on. So as she was going through the day, she stepped up really, really hot. Now, you don't want to feel hot in Bangkok. Especially, she was an English professor at a very exclusive private school. And you don't want to sweat in front of the students. So she didn't like this. So she came back the next evening and said, "I don't like fire."

And then Ajaan Fuang said, "If you don't like fire, try water." Okay, her fire cooled down, her body felt cool. But then she noticed that she started thinking about the water in her body, and it was blood and lymph and all these other disgusting things. And she got this sense of the smell of her body, and didn't like that. But again, she was stuck that way for the whole day. She came back, "I don't know what kind of meditation you're teaching here." This is a woman who had visions that she had been Ajaan Fuang's daughter in a previous lifetime, so she felt confident that she could criticize him.

And so he said, "If you don't like water, try earth." But earth was worse. One, it was very heavy. And two, she had this vision of herself as this walking cesspool just full of excrement going through the day. And so she came back and complained again. And he said, "Okay, if you don't like earth, there's space." And as he said space, she started grasping around because she'd lost her sense of the body. I mean, her powers of perception and concentration were that strong. Now, I don't recommend doing it that intensely, but what he would have you do then was say, you take the different elements and you sort of put them back together again so everything comes down to normal, not too heavy, not too light, not too cold, not too hot. And you begin to see that your perception of what's going on here and your sense of the form of the body does have a huge influence over what you're actually going to experience.

So it's time to break for lunch.