Respect for the Truth
There are four kinds of truth in the body of every human being: stress, its cause, its disbanding, and the path to its disbanding. These truths are like gold: No matter whether you try to make gold into a bracelet, a ring, an earring, or whatever, it stays gold in line with its nature. Go ahead and try to change it, but it’ll stay as it is. The same holds true with the nature of the body. No matter how wonderful you try to make it, it’ll have to return to its normal nature. It’ll have to have stress and pain, their cause, their disbanding and the path to their disbanding.
People who don’t admit the normal nature of the body are said to be deluded; those who realize its normal nature are said to know. Wise people realize the principles of nature, which is why they don’t get caught up in a lot of fuss and confusion. In other words, the body is like an object that originally weighs four kilograms. Even though we may find things to plaster onto it to make it heavier, the plaster will eventually have to fall off and leave us with the original four kilograms. You simply can’t escape its original nature.
The stress and pain that occur in line with the principles of nature aren’t actually all that troublesome. For example, pain and disease: If we try to fight nature and not let there be disease, or if we want it to disappear right away, sometimes we make the disease even worse. But if we treat the disease without worrying about whether or not it’ll go away, it will follow its natural course and go away at its own pace without too much trouble or suffering on our part. This is because the mind isn’t struggling to fight nature, and so the body is strong enough to contend with the disease. Sometimes, if we have this attitude, we can survive diseases that otherwise would kill us. But if the mind gets all upset and thrashes around, wanting the disease to go away, then sometimes a small disease can get so bad it’ll kill us—like a person with a scorpion sting he thinks is a cobra bite, who gets so frightened and upset that the whole thing gets out of hand. Sometimes we may come down with a disease that ought to finish us off, but the power of the mind is so great that it fights off the pain and the disease goes away.
This is one of the principles of nature—but we shouldn’t be complacent about it. If we get complacent, then when the disease comes back it’ll be worse than before, because the truth, when you get right down to it, is that no matter what you do, these things can’t escape their true nature. When the body’s normal nature is to have pain and stress, then try as you may to make the pain go away, it’ll have to return to its true nature. Whether or not you can cure it, the truth is still the truth. In other words, even when you cure the disease, it comes back.
Suppose, for instance, that we feel ill, take some medicine, and feel better. We think the disease has gone away. People of discernment, though, realize that it hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s simply been suppressed for a while and then it’ll have to come back out again. We may think that we’ve made the disease go away, but the disease is smarter than we are. When it comes back again, it wears a new costume, like actors in a theater troupe: If the public gets tired of one play, they put on another. Otherwise, no one will spend money to watch them perform. In other words, the disease is smart enough to come from a new direction. If it put on the old play, it wouldn’t get any reward. At first it came in your stomach, so this time it comes in your leg. You treat it until it goes away, but then it comes back in a new play—in your eye. You treat it in your eye until it goes away, and then it comes back in your ear. So you treat your ear. Wherever it comes, you keep treating it and your money keeps getting spent. As for the disease, it’s glad you’re fooled. There’s only one of it, but it comes in all sorts of disguises. Aging, illness, and death are very smart. They can keep us tied on a short leash so that we can never get away from them. People who don’t train their minds to enter the Dhamma are sure to miss this point, but those who train themselves to know the truth of the Dhamma will understand this principle of nature for what it is.
If we don’t realize the truth, we lose in two ways. On the one side we lose in terms of the world: We waste our money because we don’t realize what’s necessary and what isn’t, so we get worked up and upset all out of proportion to reality. On the other side, we lose in terms of the Dhamma because our virtue, concentration, and meditation all suffer. Illness makes us lose in these ways because we lack discernment. This is why the Buddha taught us to use our eyes. We live in the world, so we have to look out for our well-being in the world; we live in the Dhamma, so we have to look out for our well-being in the Dhamma. The results will then develop of their own accord. If we use discernment to evaluate things until we know what’s necessary and what’s not, the time won’t be long before we prosper in terms both of the world and of the Dhamma. We won’t have to waste money and time, and there won’t be any obstacles to our practice.
In other words, when you see that something is true, don’t try to get in its way. Let it follow its own course. Even though the mind doesn’t age, grow ill or die, still the body has to age, grow ill and die. This is a part of its nature you can’t fight. When it gets ill, you take care of it enough to keep it going. You won’t be put to difficulties in terms of the world, and your Dhamma practice won’t suffer.
The suffering we feel because of these things comes from the cause of stress: delusion, ignorance of the truth. When the mind is deluded, it doesn’t know the cause of stress or the path to the disbanding of stress. When it knows, it doesn’t get caught up in the natural pain and stress of the body. Mental suffering comes from the accumulation of defilement, not from aging, illness and death. Once the stillness of the path arises within us, then aging, illness, and death won’t unsettle the mind. Sorrow, despair, distress, and lamentation won’t exist. The mind will be separate. We can compare this to the water in the sea when it’s full of waves: If we take a dipperful of sea water and set it down on the beach, there won’t be any waves in the dipper at all. The waves come from wavering. If we don’t stir it up, there won’t be any waves. For this reason, we have to fix the mind so that it’s steady in its meditation, without letting anything else seep in. It will then gain clarity: the discernment that sees the truth.
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The mental state of the cause of stress leads us to pain; the mental state of the path leads us to happiness. If you don’t want stress or pain, don’t stay with the flow of their cause. Mental suffering is something unnatural to the mind. It comes from letting defilement seep in. Diseases arise in the body, but we let their effects spread into the mind. We have to learn which phenomena die and which don’t. If our defilements are thick and tenacious, there’ll be a lot of aging, illness and death. If our defilements are thin, there won’t be much aging, illness and death.
For this reason, we should build inner quality—awareness of the truth—within ourselves. However far the body is going to develop, that’s how far it’s going to have to deteriorate, so don’t be complacent. The important point is that you develop the mind. If the mind gets developed to a point of true maturity, it won t regress. In other words, if your concentration is strong and your discernment developed, the defilements enwrapping your mind will fall away in the same way as when the flowers of a fruit tree reach full bloom, the petals fall away, leaving the fruit. When the fruit develops till it’s fully ripe, the skin and flesh fall away, leaving just the seeds that contain all the makings for a new tree. When the mind is fully developed, then aging, illness, and death fall away. Mental stress and suffering fall away, leaving the mind in Right Concentration.
When Right Concentration is ripe, you’ll know the location of what dies and what doesn’t. If you want to die, then stay with what dies. If you don’t want birth, don’t stay with what takes birth. If you don’t want aging, don’t stay with what ages. If you don’t want illness, don’t stay with what grows ill. If you don’t leave these things, you have to live with them. If you leave them, your mind won’t age—it won’t be able to age; it won’t grow ill—it won’t be able to grow ill; it won’t die; it won’t be able to die. If you can reach this point, you’re said to have respect for the truth—for the teachings of the Buddha.
Respect for the truth isn’t a matter of bowing down or paying homage. It means having a sense of time and place: If something is possible, you do it. If it’s not, you don’t—and you don’t try to straighten it out, either. The defilements of unawareness, craving, and attachment are things that connect us with suffering, so don’t let them entangle the mind.
Unawareness is the mental state that is deluded about the past, present, and future. True awareness knows what’s past and lets it go; knows what’s future and lets it go; knows what’s present and doesn’t fall for it. It can remove all attachments. Unawareness knows, but it falls for these things, which is why it forms the fuel for suffering. True awareness knows what things are past, present, and future, but it doesn’t run out after them. It knows but it stays put—quiet and calm. It doesn’t waver up or down. It doesn’t seep out, and nothing seeps in. The past, the present, and the future it knows in terms of the principles of its nature, without having to reason or think. People who have to reason and think are the ones who don’t know. With knowledge, there’s no thinking or reasoning, and yet the mind knows thoroughly. This is true awareness. Aging, illness, and death all become an affair of release. In other words, nothing is fashioned in the mind, and when nothing is fashioned, there’s no aging, illness, or death.
As for attachment, it catches us and ties us to a stake, like a person being led to his execution with no chance to wiggle free. We’re tied with a wire stretching out to the past and future. Craving inches along the wire toward us, rolling his eyes and making horrible faces, so that we worry about the past and future. Behind us he splits into three: craving for sensuality, craving for possibilities, and craving for impossibilities. In front of us, he splits into three—the same three sorts of craving—and in the present he splits into the same three. With nine of them and only one of us, how can we expect to be a match for them? In the end, we’re no match at all.
If we practice concentration and develop discernment, though, we’ll be able to cut the wire of Death. When the mental state that forms the path arises, our thoughts of past and future will all disband. This is the disbanding of stress. Attachment and craving won’t exist—so where will stress and suffering have a chance to arise? People who have defilements—even if they earn $3,000 a day—can’t keep themselves from falling into hell. But people with no defilements, even if they don’t have anything at all, are happy nonetheless—because the mind has enough to eat, enough to drink, enough of everything. It’s not poor. When we can think correctly in this way, it’s called respect for the Dhamma—and it can make us happy.
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Respect for the Dhamma means taking seriously all the things that come in and out the house of your mind. (1) The door of the body: You have to be careful to make sure that none of your actions stray into ways that are harmful. (2) The door of speech—the door of the mouth—is very large. The tongue may be only a tiny piece of flesh, but it’s very important, because what we say today can keep echoing for an aeon after we die. When the body dies, the time isn’t long before there’s nothing left of it, and so it’s not as important as our speech, for the stone engravings we make with our tongue last a long, long time. For this reason, we should show a great deal of respect for our mouths by saying only things that are worthwhile. (3) The door of the intellect: We have to be careful with our thoughts. If something is harmful to us when we think about it, then we shouldn’t think about it. We should think only about things that are beneficial and good.
These three doors are always receiving guests into the mind, so we have to pay attention to see who is coming with good intentions and who is coming with bad. Don’t let down your guard. Whoever comes with good intentions will bring you happiness and prosperity. As for troublemakers and thieves, they’ll rob you and kill you and cause you all sorts of trouble.
As for your eyes, ears, and nose, these are like three windows that you have to be careful about as well. You have to know when to open and when to close them. If you aren’t discerning, you may invite thieves into your house to rob and kill you, plundering all the wealth your parents and teachers gave you. This is called being an ingrate—not knowing enough to care for the legacies that others have passed down to you. The legacies of your parents are your life, health, and strength. The legacies of your teachers are all the things they taught to make you a good person. If you leave your thoughts, words, and deeds wide open so that evil can flow into you, evil will keep pouring in, wearing down the health and strength of your body and mind. This is called having no appreciation for the kindness of your parents and teachers.
Sometimes we don’t leave just the doors open—we leave the windows open as well. Lizards, snakes, scorpions, birds, and bats will come in through the windows and take up residence in our house. After a while they’ll lay claim to it as theirs—and we give in to them. So they leave their droppings all over and make a mess of the place. If we don’t exercise self-restraint, our body and mind are going to be ruined, and this will destroy the wealth our parents and teachers went to such great trouble to give us.
So if anyone tries to come into your house, you have to grill them thoroughly to see what they’re up to and what they’re coming for—for good or for bad. Look them straight in the eye. In other words, you have to be mindful and reflecting in all your actions. Anything that isn’t good you have to drive out of your activities. Even if it would help you financially or make you popular and well-known, don’t have anything to do with it. The same holds true with your speech. If something you’re about to say will serve a good purpose, then open your mouth and say it. Say what should be said, and don’t say what shouldn’t. If something serves no real purpose, then no matter how fantastic it may be, don’t say it. You have to know how to respond to all the activities that present themselves for you to do. Let in the good ones and drive out the bad.
As for the mind, you have to show restraint with that, too. If a thought will lead to good and happy results, you should let yourself think it. But as for thoughts that will cause harm, don’t pull them in. If you go gobbling down everything you like, you’re going to die. I.e., (1) your inner quality will deteriorate. (2) The wealth your parents and teachers gave you will disappear.
As for your senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, feeling—you should show an interest in everything that will benefit you. Drive out what’s bad and bring in what’s good. When you can do this, it’s called showing respect for your parents, your teachers, and yourself as well. Your house will be clean, and you can lounge around in comfort without having to worry about sitting on bird- or bat-droppings.
But if you don’t exercise self-restraint, your actions will be defiled, your words will be defiled, so how can your mind live in comfort? Like a filthy house: No guests will want to go into it, and even the owner isn’t comfortable there. If you keep your home clean and well-swept, though, it’ll be nice to live in, and good people will be happy to come and visit. When good people come and visit, they won’t cause you any harm. In other words, the things that come in through the senses are like guests and they won’t cause any harm to the mind. The mind will be good and obedient and will stay put where you tell it to. But even if your couches and chairs are made of marble: If they’re dusty and dirty, no guests will want to sit there, and you yourself won’t want to, either.
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So if you keep your virtue bright and clear with regard to your senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, feeling, and ideation, your mind will find it easy to attain concentration. Then even when defilements come to visit you from time to time, they won’t be able to do you any harm—because you have more than enough wealth to share with them. If thieves come, you can throw them a hunk of diamond ore and they’ll disappear. If aging, illness, and death come begging, you can throw them another hunk, and they’ll stop pestering you.
If your old kamma debts come at you when you’re poor, they won’t get enough to satisfy them, so they’ll end up taking your life. But if they come at you when you’re rich, you simply share your merit—all the inner wealth you’ve accumulated—and they’ll leave you alone. If your goodness isn’t yet full, then evil will have an opening to flow in; but if your hands, feet, eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind are filled with goodness, evil can’t get into you, so you can come out unscathed.
Ultimately, you’ll get so rich in inner quality that you can go beyond both good and evil. That’s when you can be truly happy and free from danger. So I ask that you all remember this and treat your thoughts, words, and deeds in a way that shows respect for the Dhamma as I’ve explained it. You’ll then meet with the happiness you hope for.
