There are different kinds of bells, different sizes and definitely different sounds. If you’re thinking of using a bell in practice, let’s check in. Remember that when you use a bell, you may be holding it for long periods of time, and you may well be in a room with 20 other people using a bell, so consider the weight, tone and volume.
Please treat all ritual objects—including those from non-Buddhist traditions—with respect and great care. Always ask before handling another person’s texts, ritual implements, instruments or rosary.
The Fourth Noble Truth said clearly and plainly that there is a way out of suffering, a path to genuine and lasting liberation. The Buddha outlined it in several sutras in detail.
This path is divided into three sections, each reflecting a key aspect of Buddhist practice (the italicized words are Pali):
Moral conduct (sila)
Mental discipline and (samadhi)
Wisdom. (panna)
The Eightfold Path is an artifact of the Buddha’s practicality and specificity. He taught often and broadly on each aspect of the path during the four decades after his enlightenment. As in many of the ‘structural components’ of Buddhist training, the Eightfold Path is explained throughout the sutras from many perspectives, each appropriate for the listeners present at the time. The components of the Eightfold Path are
Right understanding (Samma ditthi)
Right thought (Samma sankappa)
Right speech (Samma vaca)
Right action (Samma kammanta)
Right livelihood (Samma ajiva)
Right effort (Samma vayama)
Right mindfulness (Samma sati)
Right concentration (Samma samadhi)
To be clear—each of the areas above are not steps in progression, they are areas of emphasis. Like all dharma, whatever one accomplishes in one area enriches the rest of one’s practice and development, as well. Rather than thinking of them as separate efforts, one might better think of them as a web of activity.
Ethical Conduct
The guidelines for ethical conduct in Buddhism spring from the fundamental of equanimity and compassion for all beings. Ethical conduct is not a way to better align oneself with society in this case, it is a path to wisdom and compassion. Conventional success aside, these are guidelines for dissolving the misunderstanding and habits that keep us from a naturally arising goodness and wisdom.
What is compassion? Love, goodness, kindness, forbearance with others—all arising from a lived sense of equality of all beings, from the wish that the need for other’s well-being is exactly on par with our own—and is in fact, not seperate. Wisdom is the accurate understanding of how things are. All things...the nature of the entire content of our human experience, and of the nature of mind itself.
The well-progressed practitioner is balanced in wisdom and compassion. The analogy is made to two wings of a bird. Without wisdom, compassion can evolve into maudlin sentimentality. Without compassion, the clear seeing of wisdom can be cold and aloof.
Ethical conduct is divided into three parts:
Right speech
Right action and
Right livelihood.
Right Speech
Right speech does not mean speech that accords with the time and culture, necessarily. It means intentional, mindful speech that does no harm. The Buddha gave specific categories of effort of right speech, including
to not lie
to refrain from slander and gossip and speech that creates discord
to not speak abusively, impolitely or with force
to avoid idle chatter, wasting both time and precious opportunity, and strengthening the habit of gossip and useless conversation.
Implied in those four is that one speaks the truth as one understands it. One’s speech should be intentional, harmonizing and useful to others. What one says should be appropriate to the listener, the context and the occasion. And if one cannot speak in this way, one should maintain silence. My own teacher’s advice was, “Say what is necessary, useful and true.”
Right Action
Again, right action is the action which leads towards liberation, not away from it. Moral conduct, and peaceful engagement are the gist of it. Specifically, practitioners are advised to refrain from killing, stealing, dishonestly in interactions, harmful sexual relationships, and influencing others in such a way that they are confused about right action in their own life. So if one doesn’t steal, but causes others to do so, it’s not right action.
Right Livelihood
Right livelihood is the idea that one should refrain from working in such a way that it harms others, directly or indirectly. As a worker, one should avoid inflicting suffering on beings—including, for example, animals, and should avoid killing or creating tools of destruction, and avoid situations that draw one into participating destruction or harm.
Vandana Shiva, a well-known female Indian intellectual and activist, illuminated the depth of this thinking with advice for our times:
Conservation of diversity is, above all, the commitment to let alternatives flourish in society and nature, in economic systems and in knowledge systems. Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times. It is a survival imperative, and the precondition for the freedom of all, the big and the small.”
These three—right speech, right action, and right livelihood—create harmony in the mind and heart of the individual, the community and the world. The effort to live inside this framework of ethics is the necessary foundation of spiritual progress.
Mental Discipline
In the second of the three sections is Mental Discipline, which itself is divided into three parts:
Right Effort
Right Mindfulness and
Right Concentration.
Right Effort
Right effort is the effort to prevent unwholesome states of mind from arising, and to diminish or remove altogether the unwholesome mind states already present. And further, to develop and nurture wholesome mind states.
Right Mindfulness
Right mindfulness is to be mindful of
the activities of the body (kaya)
sensations or feelings (vedana) and
the activities of the mind (citta) and
one’s ideas, thoughts, concepts, and things (dhamma).
Through meditation and mindfulness practice, one develops the ability to be aware of feelings, sensations, whether pleasant, unpleasant or neutral and how they appear, abide and disappear, and so on.
One also develops awareness of states of mind–deluded, concentrated, and so forth—and one witnesses how those states arise, abide and disappear. And the same goes for thoughts, concepts and things.
These lists are enumerated and explained in detail in the Buddha’s teaching, the Satipatthana Sutra.
Right Concentration
Right concentration refers to meditative concentration and the stages of progression (dhyana) are four:
In the first stage of dhyana, passionate desires and unwholesome thoughts are discarded, and feelings of joy and happiness are nurtured.
Then, in the second stage, the naturally wandering ‘thinking’ is traded for “one-pointedness” of mind, and joy is further cultivated.
In the third stage, the feeling of active joy disappears, replaced by happiness, to which is added mindful equanimity.
Finally, in the fourth stage of dhyana, only pure equanimity and awareness remain, through the meditative discipline of right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration,
Widsom
Wisdom has two aspects, right thought and right understanding.
Right Thought
Right thought is the thought which cultivates selflessness and renunciation. Right thought is an expression of love for all beings, devoid of violence and maliciousness to any sentient creature. To the degree that wisdom is present, thought is naturally ‘right thought.’
Right Understanding
Right understanding is the understanding of things as they actually are, which in a way, pedagogically speaking, brings us back around to the truths expressed in the Four Noble Truths. Right Understanding is the experience of Ultimate Reality.
Buddhism divides reality, or the truth of reality into two: Relative and Ultimate.
Relative truth is accumulated ordinary knowledge and understanding. “The truth as we know it”—the culturally conditioned, shape-shifting way that we understand things. This truth is by nature contextual and incomplete—and yet we hold it in high esteem, perhaps at the expense of the absorption of actual wisdom.
Ultimate Truth is the name given to that understanding that comes from direct experience, in its true nature, before label or narrative. This truth is understood not through learning, but through letting go of learning and resting in the bare experience of truth arising, as we do in meditation.
The Fourth Noble Truth is that there is a path to liberation. Of this truth the Buddha said, “This path leading to the cessation of suffering, as a noble truth, should be followed.”
The Buddha not only found a way out of suffering, he illuminated the path for others. He left a map, a sequence of practice-methods called The Noble Eightfold Path.
The Eightfold Path is not a mountain to be climbed, but a view in which to rest. To experience this view cannot be contrived. It comes naturally when layers of confusion fall away . We call the means of the path ‘the dharma.’
As centuries have gone by after the Buddha’s passing, Buddhism has taken root in many places, many cultures, many times. Each time and place have added their own richness of wisdom and perspective to the dharma. Each has a unique method and unique forms—meditation, music, art, medicine, work forms, liturgy and rituals. All sparkle in their uniqueness and beauty. Like different plants growing from the same seed, they all bear fruit. The Buddha’s teaching is a living, evolving thing. It is the wish of his compassionate heart alive and well, even today.
Your longing—that spark of curiosity and warmth and aliveness in your heart—is your foot on the path. Welcome.
You do not need to be good. You do not need to be something you are not. You are enough. You only need to uncover what is already there, what has always been there, to be free. But as the Buddha noted in the Fourth Noble Truth, you have to follow the path. You have to get moving.
The Third Noble Truth is that suffering can end. Of this truth the Buddha said, “This cessation of suffering, as a noble truth, should be realized directly.”
It would be totally understandable to read about the Buddha’s discovery of pervasive suffering and its causes related to craving and self-cherishing and think, “I give up.”
But the Third Noble truth says, “Progress—even complete healing—is possible.” Nirvana, the complete and total end of suffering can be accomplished. He did it. He knew, based on his own experience. And he wasn’t the first, the only nor the last to do so. Enlightened women, men and those who are gender non-conforming have all lived, live and will live. And not just Buddhists. Of course.
The Second Noble truth is that suffering has a cause. It doesn’t just randomly arise. We’re quite familiar with the notion that if we understand the cause of something, we can usually find a remedy, a cure, a fix—or at least a leverage point for progress. About this truth, the Buddha said, if you want to be free, “This origin of suffering…should be abandoned.”
The second noble truth identifies the causes of our suffering as craving or desire. And what is it that we most desire? That things be different than they are. Even things that we love just as they are in the moment, we wish to be permanent, which they can’t. Justcan’t. Impossible. It’s an anti-truth. And when we want things to be a way that they can’t, we suffer. You can’t ask a dog to be a cat and be happy with the result, because it’s anti-truth.
Craving produces a kind of restlessness. Human beings must ‘go’ and ‘do’ ceaselessly, all in the name of hoping to create a perfect existence. All in the name of desire. We want more and better in an escalating arc of wishful thinking and we simply can’t rest from this never-ending quest.
If we look a little more deeply into the mechanism of desire and craving, we find the most fundamental obsession of human life. For simplicity’s sake, let’s call it self-cherishing: the prevailing narrative is “I am more important, more essential, more valuable and more special than everyone else.” If this sounds absurd, consider how much of your life energy to date has been spent seeking your own well-being and how much has been spent on ensuring the well-being of the other 7.6 billion people in the world. (Not to mention the animals, and any beings of which we might be unaware.)
Relinquishing desire might sound like a plausible cure, but upon further examination, it might also sound nearly impossible. Where do I start? Can’t I desire anything any more? Can’t I cling stubbornly to even one thing? Of course you can. You can decide how much you want to suffer—and then cling to that much. Your life, your call.
But don’t confuse joy and love for clinging. They are not, necessarily. Think of how you have enjoyed a sunset and then happily watched it fade. No craving there. Love like that. Drink your coffee like that. Enjoy the beauty of youth like that. No problem. No suffering.
From the first two Noble Truths, we know that suffering is pervasive for human beings. And we know that what separates obsessive craving from simple joy is a kind of sticky clinging, instead of contentedness with things as they are. And we know that self-cherishing, the compulsion of I, Me and Mine as the most important thing in the universe is the root of the craving.
That root is the cause of oppression, racism, hatred and so much more. It is so poisonous that the one who perpetrates those things is the first victim of their own self-centeredness.
Now what? The Third Noble Truth was the answer to the Buddha’s own question, “Can the craving cease?” Read on.
Shariputra, one of the main disciples of the Buddha.
The first teaching of the Buddha is called “The Four Noble Truths”. These were his insights about human existence. Inside these four sentences are all the dharma. Or as my teacher, Lama Michael used to day, “Inside any of the dharma is all of the dharma.”
The First Noble Truth is the truth suffering; the fact of suffering. Grim, isn’t it? But even understanding this teaching is to take a step away from suffering, towards liberation or freedom. Abou this truth, the Buddha said, “This suffering, as a noble truth, should be fully understood.”
The Pali word ‘dukkha‘ is usually translated as suffering, stress, pain, unhappiness or dissatisfaction.
What is dukkha? The Buddha taught (in the winding speech pattern of the time)
Now this, monks, is the Noble Truth of dukkha: Birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, death is dukkha; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, & despair are dukkha; association with the unbeloved is dukkha; separation from the loved is dukkha; not getting what is wanted is dukkha. In short, the five clinging-aggregates are dukkha.
SN 56.11 (this is a link to a sutra, a translation of a direct teaching of the Buddha)
Buddhism categorizes Three Kinds of Suffering:
The is suffering of suffering: the outright pain of, say, stubbing your toe. I love it that the Pali word for this is dukkha-dukkha. Suffering-suffering.
The suffering of change: that experience when you think things are just right and you want them to stay how they are right now (which is impossible since they are impermanent) and they change—which they inevitably will.
And the suffering of cyclic existence—which I like to think of as the pervasive suffering of conditioning. This is a dense topic, but think of it for now as this: All our life is spent trying to finally fix samsara. We are constantly hoping for something that can’t actually happen, which is for the world as we know it to be fixed once and for all. “If I just (fill in the blank) then I will be happy once and for all.” Thinking like this, we run off to exert our effort to change things in life for the better. But the effort will never end and we forget that part. Money can’t fix it all. Intellect can’t fix it all. A good heart can’t fix it all. This is samsara—when it’s broken, it’s working! That’s it’s nature.
Since these three sufferings are the natural experience of being human, we are happier when we acknowledge this truth and live our lives accordingly. When you get a new cup, remember that one day it will break.
This is deeper than it might seem. To expound on suffering is not to say there is not joy, or even bliss in life. There most certainly is…new found love, cherry blossoms in spring, puppies and beauty are all joyful experiences. It’s more to say that to the extent that we recognize the character of life’s experiences as suffering, and to know that that suffering is transitory and illusory, our craving, confusion and disturbing emotions will subside naturally. There is relief in living inside truth.
In addition to those three categories of suffering, there are The Eight Sufferings of Being Human
The suffering of being born
The suffering of old age
The suffering of sickness and
The suffering of death.
The suffering of worry about future harsh circumstances
The suffering of being separated from the beings and the things that you love
The suffering of not accomplishing what you most wish to accomplish
The suffering of meeting situations you wish you could avoid.
The first four are conditions that every single human being will suffer, to one degree of another. No exceptions will be made. In addition to those four, each human life will be marked by four more sufferings, to a greater or lesser degree, which are enumerated in 5-8 in the list.
If this feels depressing, remember that the next three Noble Truths tell what causes suffering and let’s us know that we can be free from suffering and even give us a map to freedom from suffering. These Four Noble Truths are a treatise a physician might make: The disease identified, the cause explained, the fact that it is curable and the cure.
Good news, right? Keep reading. The next post is about the Second Noble Truth.
The pandemic may possibly come to an end soon. Quick! Before you lose this precious opportunity, ask yourself what you can do during a pandemic that you can’t do after it’s over.
Remember how when the pandemic started, you found so many things you’d taken for granted, like being able to kiss loved ones goodbye, or sharing a meal with friends and colleagues, or even receiving a simple hug? When the death rate rose, those things were no longer possible, and suddenly their preciousness was visible.
The same thing will be true when the pandemic ends. What will you miss about this time of change, inconvenience and chaos? What’s happening right now that’s precious but also so familiar that you don’t even notice it?
Make a little list. Let us know what you’ll be missing and what you might do about that.
Shovel in hand, I plant, thinking of beauty and sustenance. The land sustains us. I offer acknowledgement of the original people of this land. What we now call Portland, Oregon and Multnomah County were the traditional lands of the Multnomah, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Tumwater, Tualatin Kalapuya, Wasco, Molalla, Cowlitz and Watlala bands of the Chinook, and many other Tribes.
May we always practice in awareness of all beings, supporting their sovereign right to freedom.
Let’s flip the script. When you think a negative thought, instead of growing it, or criticizing yourself for thinking it. Just fill your mind with three positive thoughts. For example. If you think, “Oh my neighbor is so noisy, she has no consideration of my space.”
As soon as you’re aware of the negative thought, think, “Oh my neighbor loves her dog so much. “My neighbor keeps her entry way so tidy.” “My neighbor never complains when I leave my garbage cans out an extra day.”
This is simple. And it’s not for your neighbor. We are the first ones we hurt with our negativity–even when it’s true. With body, speech and even mind, we create a negative world.But we can flip the script and create a positive one, starting with our own mind. It’s free. It’s fast. It works.
I’m going to do this each day next week. Let’s see how it goes. You in?
