It can't lead to implementation, but it has the potential and the power to facilitate such communication. The knowledge and wisdom to find the right programs and projects As long as provision of true knowledge is not fully clear, it is to be expensed in as tall a way as it can be, regarding the form of the truth. And to claim to have realized the perfect enlightenment of this supreme being, its gods, its miracles, and their wonders, in this work of God's work of mercy, is not necessary. It's precisely that. But when my vision of true knowledge was fully clear in its three aspects, in its twelve ways, according to the four other truths, then I came to realize the perfect and ultimate purpose of being a human with its gods, its gods, and gods.

[01:25]

In this world, this world boasts its gods, its gods, and gods. Its princes and women, the division of true knowledge amongst the needless, So, It's a nice short little teaching, isn't it? It's very, very succinct. And it has an interesting style, which if you've read many of these kinds of discourses, religious discourses, you recognize the repetitiveness, which has been shortened

[02:32]

This is where repetitions have been eliminated, but this is typical of a document that comes in which teaching was repeated, memorized, and repeated by various people and by monks, basically, and communicated to other people in that way. So, instead of being written down, dealt with in a linear fashion like that, the way one would have spread this word would have been groups of people without the discourse, perhaps saying it, reciting it, or chanting it together. New people are there visiting. They eventually memorize it.

[03:35]

They take it somewhere else. And so we have this repetitive quality There are maybe a couple of things to be said about the structure of it. First of all, we see that this interesting phrase, thus have I heard, and many of you know already that Buddhist discourses often begin, almost always begin with this expression, which is Ananda's expression, because Ananda was the source of he had memorized all of the Buddha's discourses and it was from Ananda that sort of standard versions of these discourses were established and read upon and so on.

[04:39]

So, thus have I heard is Ananda. This is what I heard. Here it is. And So, again, he addresses himself to these five gikus that he's talking to, and he says, he starts out by telling us, in a sense, something rather autobiographical. He says there are two extremes to be avoided, and they correspond to two important sections of his life. The first thing to be rejected is a life of indulgence. This is the life you had at home as a kid, as a prince, protected by his family from the vagaries of ordinary life as much as they could, given every kind of luxury.

[05:47]

And so he knew that life well. his time and place. He had a, what's that one called, a very good life. But he realized that the issues that were important to him were not answerable by pursuing a life like that. Indeed, it was at the end of that phase of his life when those questions became quite clear and powerful and compelling to him, and he left that life with indulgence. So he knows that's not the path. And he says, therefore, he recommends, don't take this path. That's my experience. He also says that self-mortification, sort of the other extreme, is not going to work either of those. And he's just come out of spring training, you know, and he knows that that path, even though he's apparently mastered the current practices of the time, which are ascetic practices, he knows they don't

[07:07]

give satisfaction. So a summary view of his experiences is to avoid these two extremes. The path you should follow is not to be found at either of those extremes. And so he describes a middle path. He says this path gives vision and knowledge. It leads to calm, it's insight, to enlightenment, to nirvana, nirvana. These are terms that would have been readily understandable to the monks he was practicing with, and actually to almost anyone at that time. All of these, calm, insight, enlightenment, nirvana, these were all terms that were on a current at the time.

[08:08]

He didn't make these ideas up. He'd say, this is what you get from the Little Path. This is what all these folks were seeking. He says, this is the way to get where all of you want to get. And what is this Little Path? He begins by telling us what later is cataloged as the Fourth Noble Truth, that is, he tells us about the Noble Eightfold Path, namely, Right View, Right Thought, Right Speech, Action, Livelihood, Effort, Mindfulness, and Concentration. He begins with this term, Right View, and you remember last week when we were talking about the Three Poisons. We saw how the three poisons morph into what are called the dull relations of the five.

[09:10]

And those in turn morph into kind of intellectual expressions of those five poisons. And the first one is basically false view or false understanding. on some version or another of basic delusion. So it's not a big surprise that Buddha's path, headed in a wholesome direction, begins with right view. So to set forth, not in this discourse, but later on, he's going to tell us what a right view would look like. And it's the, in a sense, the first step. At least that's what he begins with. It doesn't mean that it's exclusively the first step.

[10:14]

One must practice this first step and until you master it, you can't move on to the next. That's not the point. It's just, this is a key starting place. in one's practice of the path is correct. We can talk more about that in the literature of the Noble Truths. And then he talks about briefly, very briefly, the four noble or ennobling truths. He says what they are. He says what they are in a very plain language. The first Noble Truth. And it's this. Birth is suffering. Aging is suffering. Sickness is suffering. As you know from your reading of the chapters this week, this selection of the word suffering is a matter of judgment.

[11:25]

There are other terms that which may be more helpful, but suffering is the one that's often used. Sometimes ill-being or pain or difficulty or trouble or anyway, various terms are used instead of suffering. Suffering. And basically, Wahula advises us to use the term dukkha rather than one of his English substitutions. Nevertheless, his text uses the word suffering. So aging is suffering. Sickness is suffering. Death, sorrow, and lamentation. Pain, grief, and despair are suffering. Association with the unpleasant is suffering. dissociation from the pleasant is suffering, not to get what one wants is suffering, and then this sort of interesting phrase, in brief, the five aggregates of attachment are suffering.

[12:33]

So here he indulges in a little bit of technical language, which again we'll talk about a little bit later on in a lot of detail. Then he talks about the origin of suffering. It is this thirst, craving, which produces re-existence and re-becoming, bound up with passionate greed. It finds fresh delight, now here, now there. You get the feeling it's ubiquitous. It's wherever you look you're going to find this stuff. bound up with passionate greed, namely thirst for sense pleasures, thirst for existence and becoming, and thirst for non-existence. So maybe just for a moment to look at these, we know what thirst for sense pleasures means.

[13:36]

He's already told us that's one of the extremes that's to be rejected right at the outset. But then he talks about thirst for existence and becoming. It's a little strange kind of language for us. But we might say this means, this is thirst for a change of circumstances. Things to be somehow other than what they are and perhaps better. That might be a way of saying, that's thirst for becoming, or re-becoming. I'd really like things to be better than they are. I'd really like to sit in a chair, and I wish the speaker were better, and I had a cup of coffee, and you know what I mean? Some of you may be feeling that right now. And then there's thirst for non-existence. He calls it here, self-annihilation.

[14:37]

but which is the extreme form. I mean, in modern terms it might be suicide. It might also be various ways of seeking oblivion, drinking a great deal of alcohol, taking drugs, trying to numb out. These would be other examples of not for literal physical non-existence, but for kind of blotting out the moment in any way. So, what we have here is thirst for sense pleasure is greed. That's one of the three poisons. The desire for things to be different is, in a sense, based on hatred of the way things are right now. So this is hatred. And the last one, seeking for a violation, is an expression of delusion. So he's echoing the three poisons here in this teaching.

[15:44]

The noble truth of the cessation of suffering is this. It is the complete cessation of that very thirst, giving it up, renouncing it, emancipating oneself from it, detaching oneself from this thirst. So that's the sort of short version, basically just saying in the most concise terminology what each of his noble truths are. Then he restates the truths in a somewhat different way. In a way, he's now going back over in a very And so he kind of formulated in a way what his awakening experience was. And the way he does this is this threefold expression of each one of the truths. Three times four is twelve.

[16:52]

He summarizes things like that a little later. He says the noble truth of the path leading to the... I'm sorry. This is the noble truth of suffering, dukkha. Such was the vision, the knowledge, the wisdom, the science, the light that arose in me. In other words, I saw the truth of dukkha. I saw the first noble truth. I got it. Then he says, this truth should be understood. So this is like a second level of understanding. He doesn't spell this out, but we can imagine this is like a thorough examination, a kind of meditative examination, not a conceptual examination of the meaning of Dukkha.

[18:03]

But rather, what does it mean in your bones when you're sitting there on your cushion? To understand it in that very direct, intuitive way. And then thirdly, he says about his awakening experience, then it was fully understood. So a statement of an assertion that this is the truth, a penetration of that, truth through actual experience, and then an arrival at the point where one can say, it has now been fully understood. It is accomplished. I completely get the First Noble Truth. And in a sense, he says the same things about the others. And it's interesting that the first is an assertion. The second is sort of an action line. He's encouraging us to meditate on the person in the tree.

[19:16]

When he's elucidating the second noble truth in this way, he again asserts that this is the noble truth of the origin of suffering, such was the vision and so on and so on. This is what he states for us. And then he says, this origin of suffering as a noble truth should be abandoned. So again, there's something to do here. What you're to do is to abandon the source of suffering. And then finally, this source has been abandoned. So he's telling us in a kind of formulaic but nevertheless autobiographical way of the steps of his heart. He does it again with the third noble truth. This is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering. This was the vision.

[20:16]

And then he says, this cessation of suffering should be realized. It should be made manifest in one's body mind. The cessation. And then he says, it has been realized. Finish that work. It's done. That's what you have to do too. This is the noble truth of the path leading to the cessation of suffering. This was the vision I had. I saw this path. I followed this path. That path has been followed. I've come to the end of that path. So then he says, as long as this vision and so on, these three aspects, these twelve ways had not been accomplished, I didn't get it.

[21:23]

Having accomplished them, the work is done. Then I claim to have realized the perfect enlightenment that is supreme in the world. The vision of true knowledge arose in me. My heart's deliverance is unassailable. This is the last good." This is his way of expressing in terms that would have been understandable and meaningful to the monks that he was practicing with, who were trying to get off the wheel of life. This is the last time around. And then it says, as one often does, So I asked you to read chapters 2, 3, and 4, I think.

[22:25]

Is that right? Page 5. Yeah, right, 5 as well. So how did that go, by the way? I'm sort of asking that question at several levels. One is, did you read it? It's not in the test for you. It's in a way a way of examining what we're doing in this class. Is it a good idea to give this much reading, 36 pages of reading to do in one week? Did you find you could do it? If you did, raise your hand. Don't be shy. Could have, yeah. It did? It worked out. Okay, so most people were able... did it. And did you do it from the book? The book? Is it better to have handouts? Is it better to have it handed out? It's okay to have a little book of it. What? We didn't have a book of it.

[23:28]

We didn't have a book of it. No, no, that's right. We didn't. So what I'm trying to discern is If you didn't read it, this is directed to people who didn't read it, did you not read it because you didn't have a handout and would you have read it if you had a handout? Raise your hand. Okay, one, two. So, there's some virtue in having them out, though most of you found your way to the book and read it, so that's a copy. That's about it. Great. Okay, just a minute. So let's sort of skim along these four noble truths and see what's going on and see if we can get under the surface in a few places anyway. So one question is, what is dukkha?

[24:31]

It's a funny word, but familiar to us. It seems to get translated in a lot of different ways into English, and everybody says, well, none of them is satisfactory, so I'll use suffer. I think you should use dukkha, but then, in the end, they use suffer, or some English equivalent. So what is dukkha? Rahula, on the bottom of page 19, he tells us about three aspects of Dukkha. Now this is not in the Four Noble Truths, so it's important to understand that this is his interpretation, based on perhaps his own personal interpretation, but even more likely from other traditional sources which are interpreted in the Four Noble Truths. Anyway, he tells us that there are three kinds of dukkha.

[25:33]

One is called dukkha-dukkha. Dukkha-dukkha means kind of ordinary suffering, pain, being in the presence of odious circumstances for people, not being with loved ones. Some of the things that are being spelled out in in the Buddha's text or in the text we have of the Buddha's speech. So that's Dukkha-Dukkha. And then he talks about Dukkha as produced by change. This logical grows out of one of the marks that we studied last week about all phenomenal things change. They're impermanent. They don't stick around. You got something nice, and before you know it, it's gone. So of course we can easily understand the pain of influence.

[26:36]

Things change. And even if they change in a positive direction, if we weren't expecting it, we might somehow be surprised and insulted. So there's a kind of pain in that. But often things don't go the way we expected to them, and sometimes they might end up worse. So the change of, or rather the suffering of impermanence is fairly familiar, is it not? We don't have to scratch around with that, do we? Huh? Getting old and sick, right, that'd be another version of it. We are impermanent, so birth, old age, sickness, loose teeth. And then finally, he offers this third notion about dukkha, which is dukkha as conditioned states.

[27:48]

or put it another way, all phenomena are conditioned. That is, without self. That's another one of the marks we studied just last week, freshening your mind, I'm sure. So things are conditioned, they come together as a result of causes and conditions, and that's all they are. If you try to find the thing itself, apart from its causes and conditions, you have a hard time finding it. In fact, you can't find it. So, gee, things are kind of empty. They aren't as sort of solid and reliable and substantial and so on, as we might hope they were. Anyway, maybe we get some sense of of a kind of discomfort or dis-ease which arises with the perception of things as being caused and not really having such a solid, substantial existence as we imagine they have from a kind of taboo point of view.

[29:09]

I mean, if you accept taboos, you can say absolutely nothing through Marx. I disagree with the three marks. You don't get an illusion of the fact that things are solid and substantial and uncaused and so on. This is a wrong view. The example is wrong. in any sense, a number of things, about mental suffering, physical suffering, and so on and so on. I don't know. We could probably talk for hours about this. But one of the questions I'm going to put to you at the end of the class tonight relates to this very point about suffering and dukkha and conditionality. I think this is something for us to really think about. So you can try to get a sense of what that really means.

[30:10]

And then he goes in, Rahula goes into the discussion of the five aggregates. And did we talk about this at all last night? No. So this is kind of technical Buddhist language. It's a way of, if you read this, you have some sense of it. It's worth reading a number of times, because it may not be immediately accessible to you on a first reading. But it makes sense. And you can understand its utility, even if you don't agree with the details of the five aggregates. Basically, it's a way of analyzing a personality, a human being, to see that a human being is actually a conditioned thing also. The fact that a human being is not a solid, permanent, self-existing, enduring thing. In fact, it's kind of a conjury of events. It's a flux, and it's changing all the time.

[31:26]

And in fact, apart from these these aggregates, it's actually pretty hard to find a human being. And that's sort of bad news if you're really invested in the idea of being somebody. But it's actually comforting in a certain way if you're trying to get unstuck from who you are. So it has a utility in It helps one work through the issue of belief in this solid, enduring personality, so-called personality view. Remember we talked about that last time? That's one of the sharp cliches. That's a big problem. Belief in a personality is an enduring, solid, substantial thing. You've got a big problem.

[32:30]

So, he says, among other things then, that these five aggregates, these kind of elements, elements isn't quite right, but categories of existence and so on, are themselves Dukkha. A rather interesting statement, and another one that I want to ask you to bring up. You have to go back over and read about the aggregates and read about the first level to penetrate that. But also to really think about it carefully, because it is working. It is making sense for me. I've got the question. The second one, chapter 3, page 29, is the origin of suffering.

[33:48]

He finds the origin of suffering. The title he uses here is Samudaya. Samudaya is probably Pali. I don't know what it is in Sanskrit. But it means arising. important part of them. So dukkha samudaya means that which arises with dukkha. In this case he says the arising of dukkha. The second noble truth is that of the arising or origin of dukkha and he says that that And that origin is thirst or craving. Thirst is, as I understand it, actually the more precise meaning of tanha, but craving or desire is often used in that connection as well.

[35:00]

Piled up with passion and greed and so on. through this language before, finding fresh delight now here, now there, and so on. This is the, this is tantamount, well this is again a question, this is tantamount to dukkha. This is the arising of dukkha. This thirst, this craving. A sense of which, I mean, we might say cause and effect, but it's also equivalence. Remember that from math or chemistry? There were equal signs, two horizontal lines. But three was identical with, or fully equivalent with. So there's that sense of that here. Thirst is dukkha.

[36:02]

Almost like the first and second may be identical. In any case, there's a very, very close linkage. He says at the bottom of the page, of course, thirst is not the only thing. And it's not necessarily the most original cause, but there are many, many causes that work together. But thirst is kind of a leading candidate for a cause of dukkha. So we could use that term. It kind of symbolizes many, many other desires or feelings which might also serve as causes. It talks about karma.

[37:20]

Well, karma is a whole discussion of its own. he does bring up the subject of karma here, and it's fair to say that karma as volitional action is certainly an expression or an outcome of thirst or greed. And it may be enough for our purposes in this the time we have to discuss it, but just acknowledge that relationship and not undertake a deep discussion of it. We'll try to undertake a deep discussion of karma, exactly what it means. But it's volitional action. So it's activity, in the usual sense, human activity, arising out of creating desire or thirst.

[38:24]

The third noble truth is named Nirodha, and it is tantamount to the cessation of dukkha, which we're told is tantamount to the cessation of thirst. So, in the second noble truth we're told that the cause of Dukkha is. It's the arising of thirst. And in the Third Noble Truth, we're told that the cessation of Dukkha is the cessation of dharma. It's two very closely related phenomena. And he goes into quite a discussion here. Perhaps by way of explanation of the third noble truth, perhaps not. It's another question I'm willing to put to you.

[39:30]

He talks a lot about nirvana and the absolute. Whether this explicates the third noble truth or not, I don't know. But there is an interesting discussion of nirvana and some of the traditional languages used. around the world. Finally, the fourth noble truth is the path. This is the Eightfold Path. and on page 45 he lists the eight steps or stages or aspects of the path and they're

[40:35]

pretty well spelled out here. I don't think it's necessary for me to read this text to you. If you haven't already done that, you can read it for yourself. He does something very interesting in talking about this eightfold path. He relates it back to an earlier threefold discipline or teaching which he, let's see where he goes with this. Well, on page 46, he talks about the eight factors as promoting and perfecting three essentials of Buddhist training and discipline, namely ethical conduct or shila, mental discipline, samadhi or meditation, and Third Leaf Wisdom, Pratyahara, in Pali.

[41:44]

And he relates these eight factors of the path, or eight stages of the path. He shows them under these three headings. Now last week, I handed out to you a third of using The 8-fold pastry comes out of a period of American Zen life. more or less the last quarter of the 20th century, when many Zenzens were making their living making and selling pastry and coffee and similar goods to ordinary San Franciscans.

[42:55]

A number of us were. Eric was in that line of work. Pastry shovelers. Raise your hands. Back in the good old days. So this chart, God called the Eightfold Pastry or the Threefold Pastry. Anyway, in a sort of charming and interesting way, it shows progress through along this Eightfold Path in terms of these three disciplines. So you see the top circle there represents the Samadhi tendency, or the cultivation of energy or willpower, equanimity, and concentration.

[43:56]

So this is meditative practice. To the lower right is the Shila tendency, of correct conduct, ethical behavior, and so on in the lower left is the wisdom tendency, the cultivation of wisdom through study of everyday life. And so following the Eightfold Path is featured as a kind of a spiral. So the outset of the path for most people is to begin to get a handle on correct view, at least to have some superficial appreciation of what's true and what's not from the point of view of the Buddha's teaching. So this is, I don't know, you might say wisdom light. It's the beginnings of the appreciation of wisdom, and it's a way of orienting yourself with respect to the path.

[45:06]

It's not necessarily, it is not, deep penetration of the path or wisdom, but it's starting out. And then one begins to practice right intention right there at the boundary between wisdom and ethics, and proceeds to correct speech, which indicates an overlap between wisdom and behavior. So, correct speech, kind speech, non-harming speech, skillful speech, and so on, arise out of a combination of wisdom and ethical behavior. Conduct, the same thing. Correct livelihood, again, occurs in the overlap between wisdom and ethical behavior.

[46:12]

Correct effort pertains both to ethical behavior and to meditation. Mindfulness, as we ordinarily understand that, is a function that here is portrayed as falling in the samadhi, in the practice of samadhi and wisdom, though anyone who's made any effort to behave ethically, of course, you appreciate that mindfulness is a major tool in following one's conduct and watching out for pitfalls and sticking to the wholesome path. It's kind of interesting, the seven is tucked up there, apparently out of the sheila area, although it just wouldn't have been as nice and curved, I guess.

[47:17]

Those aesthetics have to be taken into consideration. And then eight, meditation. What do you know? Zen bias here, you might say. It's right there in the middle of the practice of ethics, meditation, and wisdom. But then there's this subtle dotted line. You see that it doesn't just spiral into meditation and stop. It then spirals out and reconnects with six again. So you've got six, seven, eight, six, seven, eight, six, seven, eight. further and further refining of these three disciplines. So this is the 8-fold pastry and I'm so happy to have it now. and then have questions and move on.

[48:20]

I have to give you your homework before you go home. All right. I want to suggest for your consideration a kind of overall structure for this Four Noble Truths and the interpretation of the Four Noble Truths that we study here at the Wahoo. Page, right inside the cover, we have a picture of the Buddha as the great doctor. Kind of a, well, a pretty jolly physician. Looks like he spends more time in the locker room than on the golf course. Anyway, he's a pretty heavyset guy, this person. He looks a little matronly, yeah. Anyway, it's the great physician.

[49:22]

And my guess is it's not an accident that he put that picture in the front, because what we have in this expression of the Four Noble Truths is what some call a sort of medical model of how to practice. Right? Dukkha, the First Noble Truth, you might say, well, that's the problem. That's the trouble the Buddha encountered early in his life, and that's what caused him to go over the wall and try to figure out what's going on. But we might say that right in there with suffering is that this is dis-ease, or the symptoms that arise with illness, with disease. So the first noble truth is illness. The second noble truth is kind of, we might say, diagnosis.

[50:27]

The problem is you've got a tanha infection here. You've got a thirst infection. And these little thirst bugs are traveling around your body and making you sick. You've got to deal with these with this cause of suffering, thirst, craving, or desire. So, this is the diagnosis. You can see Dr. Buddha. Buddha says you've got the problem, you've got Dukkha, and the way to deal with this is to fight the infection, fight the root cause of the symptoms you're having, which is sudden diarrhea, a rise in thirst. And lucky for you, there's a cure. Namely, there's a way to get rid of this stuff.

[51:32]

We can actually kill these bugs. We can get them out of your bloodstream. That notion of treatment, the results of the treatment, the cure, is the third noble truth. There's a cure. Isn't that great? It's nice to know there's a cure. And the prescription, the regimen that's to be followed, is the fourth one, right? This is the illness. This is the cause. What we want to do is get rid of the cause. Here's the medicine we've got to take. This painful path. Do that. and you'll work your way back up the ladder and you'll get rid of the symptoms and you'll be delivered. You'll be healthy. You'll be whole again. So this is a particular way of seeing the world, which is a kind of an orthodox one.

[52:34]

It's around. It's pretty popular. You'll see it elsewhere. You'll recognize it when you do see it again. Again, it's one we might think about or question, but it's good to have this sort of methodology in our pockets. We have maybe seven minutes for questions now, questions and answers. We'll have more time next time for discussion. I'm going to try to arrange the next class so there's a bigger time for discussion. But let's hear what you have to say. Yes, please say your name. Brother, I think that's the story.

[53:52]

Yeah. I mean, what's he talking about? It's a really good question for him to go from, not so much, I don't want to teach this, at least my understanding is, I don't know how to teach. How am I going to teach this to people? Whatever it was that he thought it was may be too simple. That's sort of my speculation. It's just so simple, people are going to say, oh, come on, it can't be that. But whatever it was, we are told he was reluctant to teach. I don't think out of selfishness or something like that. He just, you know, he didn't know how to do it. Something like that. But then he's persuaded by Brahma to teach his compassion. in some way ignited further by Brahma speaking for gods and humans and all the other creatures that need this teaching.

[55:16]

Then he gives this teaching. And you're saying, well, gee, this does sound somewhat dogmatic. Although I was at pains earlier to say, to try to describe that some of the language is It's saying, this is what I saw. In other words, he gives it in a very terse form. He gives these four teachings in a few paragraphs. We read them all here together. It's pretty formulaic. It's simple. You can memorize it. We could probably memorize it together in a few months and sit around here and recite it. You never have to look at the text. It's really simple. So that tends to be aligned with dogma. We think, you know, little formulas, that's dogmatic. But there's also a way in which he's expressing himself, which is, this is what I saw. And this is what I'm saying to you.

[56:18]

And, you know, the language at the end is a little bit, again, it's formulaic. It says the monks are really happy to hear this. And in another version of this that we're going to read next week, we hear that Dondanya, one of the monks, actually completely wakes up hearing this talk. But if we read something into that kind of symbolism, we might say, well, Kodanya had done a lot of practice. He was right. But also, this was a teaching. He woke up. Before, he was kind of like, oh, God, it's the Buddha again. Look at him, Buddha, the Dharma, eating rice, the jerk. You know, he was one of the five, but he wakes up. The others didn't quite do it. They were very impressed with the teaching, and they signed up. They became his monks.

[57:20]

But Kodanya is the one who saw, the one who understood. So there is substance here, too, even though it has this formulaic aspect. But this is a very important question. What is the Buddha doing here? What is the nature of his teaching? Is it a medical model? Is it that kind of account? what's going on with human suffering and how to get over suffering, and if so, what kind of teaching is it at the schools? Go find out for yourself. I found out for myself, this is what I found out. What you find out for yourself.

[58:35]

Well, and of course, people come along and, you know, they recite this and write it down eventually. We don't know what the followers did. You know, they might have been more inclined to make it a formula. You do this, Buddha said it over 400 years ago, and so on. It's got a lot of mileage by then. Buddhism's got a lot of credibility by now, so maybe it gets a little more dogmatic in the writing of death. We don't know. Okay, so here's the homework for next week. I'm going to mention a number of questions, and if one of them lights you up, or lights up for you, write it down and think about it this week. What does the Buddha say when he says that the five aggregates are dukkha?

[59:42]

That's the question. What does the Buddha mean by, in brief, the five aggregates of attachment are dukkha? Another even kind of more basic question, hooked to the first order of truth is, having heard all this and had all this discussion about dukkha, what is dukkha? Second. What is it to say that thirst

[60:48]

symbolizing, standing for volition, your mental volition, your karma. How does that constitute your rising of dukkha? How do you get from thirst to dukkha? What I'm suggesting in these questions is that you ask for yourself. I've read this, I've read the Ula, maybe I'll re-read it and so on, but do I really understand what's going on here? Is this really making sense to me? You know, me? That's the kind of test, common sense, in a way to take up the Buddha's challenge. Check it out for yourself. Is this really making sense to me, or am I just kind of going along with it because, you know, it's happening at the Zen Center, and, you know, there are all these books in the room, and some people seem to know what they're doing, and, right?

[61:59]

So they must be right. Yeah, I understand it. Sounds okay. Does it really? That's the point. This is kind of a companion question to the one I just asked. Does he really mean to say that getting rid of thirst or desire is the same as getting rid of Dukkha? We asked earlier, what is Dukkha? So we want to work on that question first, but you can come at this any way you want. So you could say, does getting rid of thirst really get rid of suffering? You could ask for it. work at it that way. Decide to do good means suffering and so just getting rid of thirst. You're not going to get rid of suffering. Just think about that in terms of your own experience.

[63:02]

Write, think, sing, record, You name it. It's up to you. Now I'm going to give you another piece of homework which relates to... This is a chart for practicing wakefulness. in the middle of your life, not necessarily when you're on your cushion, although it could occur. This is a kind of a diary exercise. And the point is for you to keep a very brief diary of pleasant and unpleasant events that occur to you over the next week.

[64:04]

The piece of paper you're getting says pleasant at the top. What I want to suggest is that you spend a few days on pleasant and a few days on unpleasant. And just to ask yourself the kinds of questions that are at the top of the page, I don't imagine you're going to wander around through your day carrying this chart, but you may have to make an appointment with yourself at night systematically to sit down for five minutes and think through the day. Now, okay, what was something? And then write it down. Describe what it was in a pleasant way. And what did I experience in the body? What were the sensations? What were the thoughts, feelings, emotional responses? What am I feeling now as I write this down? Just basically answering questions along that pathway. So do that for a few days with pleasant events. And then turn to unpleasant things. Is this fairly clear?

[65:07]

Pleasant and unpleasant. You don't have to wait for a catastrophe. Hopefully nobody in this class will have a real catastrophe. So it can be things that are sort of subtly unpleasant. Often we're blown away by the big ones. We don't know what we felt or saw. Unpleasant. Oh, what is it? What is it? It actually feels like a sense of sensation. Do I feel it in my gut? My chest? My face? Do I feel it anywhere? Am I aware of my body in connection with an unpleasant experience? Similarly for thoughts and feelings. So we'll talk about this exercise next time in relation to the material world we're studying. And yes, here's a final little reading to do. This is one page in Kansa about the Four Noble Truths, and you have Grazier's version of the Four Noble Truths.

[66:18]

Please read that, also very shortly. Okay, thank you very much. Good night. Thank you.

[66:26]

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