Ready for the Truth

The Canon tells us that the Buddha’s most important teaching was the four noble truths, and that it covers everything else he taught. So this is the most important thing for us to learn to understand.

But it’s also interesting to note that when the Buddha taught the four noble truths, especially to lay people, he prepared them first, with what’s called the graduated discourse, or the step-by-step discourse. We don’t have a record of the precise words he used when he gave that discourse; all we know are the topics he covered.

He’d start out with generosity and the rewards of generosity, and then virtue, holding by the precepts, and their rewards. Then he’d talk about heaven, the pleasures that come from being generous and being virtuous, even on into future lifetimes.

But then he would talk about the drawbacks, even of heavenly pleasures. They don’t last forever and they tend to make you complacent. Imagine: Every day, nothing but pleasure, pleasure, pleasure, all day long. You start getting lazy. You expect that this is going to keep on lasting, and you forget to continue with the good activities that got you there. And so you fall.

The mind has become intoxicated with pleasures, so that when you fall, it really hurts. Ajaan Fuang used to have some students who were very difficult people to get along with, and it was very hard to please them. He made the comment a couple of times that they had been devas in a previous lifetime. They were used to having things go their way, and now they were offended that things were not as easy as they used to be.

So the Buddha would focus on the drawbacks of the pleasures that could come from just generosity and virtue. The purpose, of course, was to get you to look for something better. That would be the next step: learning to see renunciation as safety, as peace.

As I’ve noted many times before, renunciation doesn’t mean just giving things up. It means looking for your pleasure in an area that has nothing to do with sensuality—like we’re doing right now: focusing on the breath, trying to make the breath comfortable, putting the mind at ease with the breath, and seeing that this really is a good place to be.

Then, the Buddha said, you would be ready for the four noble truths.

So you can see what he’s doing: On the one hand, in many places the prerequisite for getting the mind to settle down is a sense of gladness. You’re glad about the good things you’ve done in terms of being generous, in terms of being virtuous. That gladness makes it easy to settle down in the present moment, because you don’t settle down with a lot of open wounds. You settle down with a sense of well-being, a sense of self-worth, and that’s an important part of the meditation: the confidence that you can do this, confidence that you are worthy of this practice.

Then when the insights come into the ways in which you’re being unskillful in your thoughts or your words or your deeds, you’re willing to listen, you’re willing to take note of that fact and not deny it. If you go into denial about your mistakes, you’re never going to learn from them. But when the mind is in a good mood, reflecting on its virtue, reflecting on its generosity, it’s easy to settle down.

You might say that’s the carrot. Then there’s the stick.

The stick is the realization that if you allow your mind to go wandering around, just thinking about sensual pleasures, it’s going to pull you down. It’s going to make you complacent. You’ve got to learn to have a sense of dispassion, along with what the Buddha calls samvega, a sense of dismay. In this case, you would think about all the many, many lifetimes spent pursuing sensual pleasures—and what does it get you? Just up and down, up and down, up and down. You begin to see that it’s pointless.

When you can see that *that *kind of pleasure is pointless, then you’re more inclined to want to give even more energy into getting the mind concentrated, to find a well-being that doesn’t have those drawbacks.

So the Buddha is working at you from two sides: the side of putting the mind in a good mood, in and of itself, and the side of giving a sense of dismay about the world outside. He’s corralling you into the present moment: finding pleasure simply with the way you sit here, breathing in, breathing out, holding the perceptions in mind that allow the breath to come in and go out of the whole body, so that, as a sense of well-being arises with the breath, you can spread it around.

You have a good foundation, a sense of confidence, a disinterest in the world outside. That’s when you’re ready to see the four noble truths.

All too often, when we think about suffering, we think that we’re suffering because of this situation outside or that person outside. The Buddha wants you to see that it’s not those outside things making you suffer. You’re using those outside things to make yourself suffer, through your clinging, through your craving. He wants to point your attention here.

You’re going to have to be in the right mood to stay right here; you have to have the right focus to stay right here. That’s what the step-by-step discourse is for: to bring the mind to concentration. As you stay right here and you’re succeeding in getting the mind to stay right here, then you’re in the right place. You’re ready to consider that, yes, perhaps it is your clinging that’s causing your suffering, and your craving is what makes you cling—and that it’s not necessary, because there’s an alternative: the practice of virtue, concentration, and discernment—or what the Buddha called heightened virtue, heightened mind, heightened discernment. Discernment, concentration, virtue: all for the purpose of freedom.

That’s the alternative, and it does set you free. The ways of the world tie you down. The more you acquire, the more responsibilities you take on, and the less time you have to devote totally to the mind’s own needs.

But here we are: We’ve got a good hour where we can focus on what the mind is doing, how we can get it to settle down, and you can give yourself a step-by-step discourse. If you’re feeling discouraged in your practice, remind yourself of the generosity you’ve practiced in the past, the virtue you’ve been maintaining. That can lift your spirits. If you’re concerned about issues in the world, remind yourself: Those don’t take you anywhere outside of the world. They don’t help you. The time you spend worrying about the world is time you’ve wasted, time you could have spent doing constructive things for you own mind. In that way, you can help the world from within.

If you think about it, there are very few people out there in the world who would see that it would make any difference in their lives whether you lived or not, whether you were happy or not. So you can’t depend on people outside to take care of your happiness. You have to take care of your happiness from within. But you learn to do it in a skillful way, in a way that’s not taking anything away from anyone else. In that sense, you’re being very responsible. It’s not as if you’re abandoning the world. You’re becoming a responsible member of the world.

Even if you decide that you want to leave the world and find a happiness that’s above the world, you can’t do that by abusing the world. You have to leave behind some generosity. You have to leave behind the example of your virtue.

In other words, you give good things to the world, from within your heart, and both sides benefit.