Ennobling Questions

This evening, we used the Four Noble Truths as the core of four ennobling questions to be explored in dialogue. They are: • How does life rub you the wrong way? • How do you relate to difficulty? • Where do you find contentment? • What helps?

Transcript

This is our,

Obviously our last night of retreat and so tomorrow we're going to go back out there to the so-called real world.

From my view of things,

This world seems a lot realer than the one out there,

But it is a different world with emails and tweets and chatter and complex relationships and rising sea levels and new cycles and all the rest of it.

So what I would like for us to do tonight is spend some time just exploring taking in here out there.

Integrating what we've learned,

What we've discovered in the self,

What we've seen with the stuff and things and people out there.

I have no pat answer on how to do this,

But I have found that there are some questions that are really helpful for me and sometimes for other people to help work through this.

So in a little while I'm going to invite you to sit with a partner and this is not going to be a discussion,

But you'll have a partner and you'll have a period of time to just talk about these questions to a heartful listener and you'll also have,

You know,

Switch roles and have a chance to listen to a heartful speaker.

I find that actually talking about these questions with someone else is one way of helping to integrate it a little bit.

So the four questions are how does life rub you the wrong way?

Number two is how do you relate to difficulty?

I have these all printed out on little cards.

No that's okay.

I'll just tell you now and we'll pass them out when you're ready.

Or would you just like to look at them?

I don't care.

Somebody tell me what I'm doing.

How does life rub you the wrong way?

How do you relate to difficulty?

Where do you find contentment?

And what helps?

And these four questions come right out of the core of Buddhism.

Right out of the dead center out of it.

Most scholars and teachers agree that the real cornerstone of Buddhism is the Four Ennobling Truths,

Also known as the Four Noble Truths.

The so-called truths were not intended to be what we usually think of as spiritual or religious truths.

They're not statements about metaphysical reality or ultimate truth or something like that.

They are actually quite mundane observations about just how life really is.

And so the noble or the ennobling part is the Buddha gave a practice that goes with each of these.

Basically he was saying if you engage these observations,

If you engage these truths skillfully and wisely,

It will help ennoble you.

And nobility gets mixed reviews in the 21st century,

But back in his day ennobling really meant becoming wiser,

Becoming clearer,

Becoming freer.

So I thought musing on these questions that come right out of that would be helpful for a transition out of here.

But before we go into the questions themselves I thought it might be fun to tell you a little bit of the story behind these.

We all need a good story on the last night.

So,

As you know,

Perhaps,

But what happened is that Siddhartha Gautama went out on this spiritual quest.

He was in his late twenties and there was a long story about how all that came together.

But basically he went out and he trained for six and a half years.

First was some of the best known and best teachers they were around,

Alara Kalama and Ramaputta,

And learned what they had to offer and it wasn't enough.

And he ended up off meditating by himself along with five meditation buddies.

None of them were playing teacher,

They were just meditating together to support each other.

And he got clear and clear about what he needed to do and almost killed himself in the process by the way.

These were very harsh,

Severe,

Ascetic practices.

And he got clear on what needed to be done and he went out and found this nice place to meditate in this fig grove next to this river and sat down and over the course of a quite colorful evening of meditation woke up.

He became a fully enlightened Buddha.

And what he realized in that was so simple really yet so nuanced that he really wasn't sure anybody could understand what he had seen.

And so he hung out around the fig tree there,

The Pila tree,

For a month just kind of soaking in all that he had learned and seeing the ramifications of it.

And gradually it occurred to him,

Gradually began to see that there were a lot of people who he probably could not be any help for but there were a few people who were like close enough and seen enough that what he knew might help,

You know,

Push them over,

Might help them wake up fully.

So he decided to teach and the first people he thought to teach were his old teachers,

Alaricalaam and Ramaputta.

But unfortunately by that point they were dead so that wasn't going to work very well.

And then so he thought he would go to his five meditation buddies.

So he set out to find them.

And as he left the Pila grove and was walking down the trail the first person who passed there was this young ascetic by the name of Upaka.

And so Upaka is walking up the road and here comes this guy and he can imagine this serene countenance,

Kind of glowing sense about him and Upaka could see something,

You know,

Happened to this guy.

And so Upaka goes up and says,

You know,

What happened to who are you?

And he asked,

And who is your teacher?

You know,

So wherever he got it he wouldn't know who his teacher was so he could go get it too.

And so the Buddha responded to Upaka and this was his first attempt to teach anyone what the Dharma was really all about.

And what he said,

A version of it is recorded in the Majjhima Gaya and it goes something like this.

So Upaka says,

You know,

Who are you?

Who is your teacher?

And the freshly awakened Buddha says,

I am one who has transcended all,

A knower of all,

Unsullied among all things,

Renouncing all by cravings,

Ceasing freed.

I have no teacher and one like me exists nowhere in the world with all its gods because I have no person for my counterpart.

So just imagine you're in Rama,

That you are in Upaka's position.

You're walking through a park somewhere,

There is this guy that seems really clear and open and you say,

You know,

I just want to talk to you and,

You know,

And see what you're about.

And the Buddha was actually talking in verse at this point so you're,

So you ask this guy what it's all about and he starts rapping with you in cadence.

I am the accomplished one in the world.

I am the teacher supreme.

I alone am a fully enlightened one whose fires are quenched and extinguished.

What would you think?

You know,

This guy on drugs,

You know,

What's going on here?

So in Majjhima Gaya Upaka's response is recorded.

When this was said,

The ascetic Upaka said,

May it be so friend.

Shaking his head he took a by-path and departed.

So I always,

I can picture the Buddha here,

His first teaching,

You know,

And as he walks Upaka scooting off down the path,

You know,

Buddha's looking at this guy's back receding and think,

Hmm,

This didn't go very well.

The mistake that the Buddha made was he wasn't,

He was paying attention to what he knew,

What he had found,

But he wasn't paying attention to who he was talking to.

So he was just like talking right past him.

So when you go out of here and,

You know,

If you feel some enthusiasm,

Something for,

You know,

What you found,

Just remember that your people,

Your family,

The people out there,

You know,

You've been away for eight days.

Well,

They had eight days too,

And they may have been a little bit different than yours.

And as this very dear friend of mine who does a lot of training for big corporate types and stuff,

Loves to say about speech,

She says,

You have two eyes and one mouth,

I mean two ears and one mouth,

Use both of them and in those proportions.

So wise speech is really two parts listening and one part speaking.

So the Buddha was a very,

Very smart guy.

I mean,

He was brilliant.

I mean,

Just I think apart from his accomplishment and you can just see it in the flexibility of his teachings.

And so he got it.

And so when he found these five ascetics in this little village outside of Varanasi,

Sarnath,

They were staying in this wildlife refuge there,

He approached them a little differently.

And he was paying attention to who they were.

And he spoke directly to them in their language.

And you'll find it throughout the suttas when the Buddha is saying when you're talking with other people,

He says,

Talk in their vernacular.

Don't talk in your own language,

Talk to them in their own terms.

So this particular talk is known as the dhammaka-kapa-vatthana-suta.

That will be on the quiz tomorrow.

Dhammaka-kapa-vatthana-suta.

What it means is setting the wheel of dharma in motion.

And in my book that's coming out,

I have all this in a chapter,

It was fun to write about.

And it's really where Buddhism came into the world for the first time.

I was going to read you parts of the sutta as it's recorded on the Majjhima Gaya,

But I began to realize,

You know,

The language gets so thick that I think it might be better for me to just tell you the contents of it.

I think I can do it smoother that way.

And if you're really interested in unpacking this,

Let me know.

I could talk about it with you.

There's also an article on my website called Turning Towards,

Which I do a full kind of exegesis,

A full unpacking of the whole sutta and all that stuff,

So if you're curious about that.

But if you don't have the same kind of nerd genes I do,

Don't bother.

So the first thing he does in this talk is he introduces this idea of the middle way.

So these aesthetics were deeply into basically pushing the world away.

And so he starts talking about it and he says,

You know,

It's best not to really indulge the world,

That it can pull you off balance and everything else.

So you can see him listening and say,

Yeah,

Yeah,

Yeah,

We got that one,

We got that.

So he's got him hooked in.

And then he says,

And you also don't want to push the world away,

Which was probably a little confusing to them.

And that actually brought in this first talk about the middle way of neither renouncing the world nor indulging it.

And then after that he goes into talking about the Four Noble Truths that really become the foundation.

And they are usually,

Since they're called Four Noble Truths,

It sounds like,

As I said earlier,

They are talking,

That he's talking about kind of telling people how it is.

But they're actually practices.

And each of these observations has a practice that's associated with it.

So the first truth is,

What's the first truth?

Suffering.

There is suffering.

There is suffering in the world.

And the practice that's associated with that is to understand.

It's that suffering is to be understood.

And this is not an intellectual understanding.

If you feel understood by a friend or if you really understand a friend,

What that means is not only that you can analyze them,

But that you have an intuitive feel for them.

You know how they tick,

What inspires them,

What frightens them,

What motivates them,

You know,

What they're really all about.

And so the Buddha is saying that the first practice,

If you really want to get free,

Is you really have to intimately understand how suffering works.

And so the first thing you have to do for that,

At the very least,

Is actually turn towards truth,

Turn towards the suffering,

The difficulty,

Whatever life has brought along,

And open up and see it.

So I translate that into my own modern vernacular as the first practice is turning towards.

Just turning towards whatever life brings towards you.

Unenobling truth.

Oh,

Come on.

Pardon?

Yes,

And the causes are?

Craving.

Yes.

Tanha.

Tension.

Yeah.

So if you really get to understand suffering and how it's worked,

What you begin to see is that it has its roots,

It has its origins in this deep instinctual tightening called tanha,

Which is usually translated as craving.

And the practice that he gives for tanha is a very dramatic word,

And I've looked through lots and lots of different scholars' translations of all this,

And they all use the same one for this one,

And the word is abandon.

So that the craving,

The tanha,

The tension is to be abandon.

And I don't think that abandon has the implications of leaving the baby on the doorsteps of the church.

It's really just to walk away from it.

So how do you abandon tension?

Yeah,

You relax.

You relax.

The core of the six R's is the relax.

So turning towards,

Relax,

And it's not relax to get away from them.

So my own modern vernacular is first is turning towards,

The second is relaxing into,

Right,

So you're not trying to pull away from it.

And as you relax the tension,

What happens is it recedes sooner or later,

Maybe not immediately.

And so that leads,

Brings us to the third ennobling truth,

Which is?

Yes,

Yeah.

So is this observation that as you,

I mean this is not rocket science,

It's like if you sit here,

You can try to sort of tighten up a little bit,

And then relax.

It feels better.

You know,

That's what he's saying,

Is that,

You know,

Relaxing feels better on a really deep level.

And so the practice that's associated with this is I think really interesting.

The practice is usually translated into text as realize.

And what I think,

If you go through the translations,

What it's really talking about is just really make it real.

You know,

So when there are those moments of peace,

When there are those,

You know,

The well-being,

You know,

The ease or the sense of joy or that,

To really take it in.

And so I use this as a simple thing of savor.

And as we've talked about here before,

Part of it is the brain is so much more sensitive to negatives and positives.

And so with all the Buddha's emphasis on understanding suffering and abandoning the tension,

After all that it's really important just to savor it and take it in.

And then the fourth ennobling truth,

Basically it's not a truth at all.

It's called the Eightfold Path.

And my take on it,

And I've run it past a couple of futures,

And they say,

Oh yeah,

Absolutely,

Is that it's not so much a path as it is a kind of a checklist.

It's saying if you do these first three practices,

If you turn towards,

Relax into and savor,

And it still is,

You know,

After a while it's still not working,

Here are eight things that you can look at that might help you bring it into balance.

And so the eight are wise you,

Wise intentions,

Skillful speech,

Harmonious speech,

Skillful speech,

Skillful action,

Wise livelihood,

How you take care of yourself in the world is something that's done with consciousness,

Wise effort,

The six R's,

Wise effort,

Wise awareness,

Wise mindfulness,

I like to use the word awareness better,

And wise samadhi,

Wise peacefulness.

So those are just eight areas you can look at to see where you are in those.

Okay.

So after he had laid these out.

So what happens in the actual text is these are repeated three times,

And that happens a lot in oral tradition,

So they're repeated because people are listening,

They're not taking notes.

And so the way each one is said is so like there is suffering,

And then he says,

So that's the first repetition,

The second one says suffering is to be understood,

And the third one says and suffering has been understood by me.

And what the subtext there is that if you like what you see in me,

That I have understood this and that's part of what woke me up and you can do it too.

So that's what the three repetitions are.

So I'll just read the ending of that,

This little sutta.

He says,

As long as my knowing and seeing of how things are was not thoroughly purified by these four noble truths,

I did not claim unsurpassed full awakening.

I knew that I was not fully awakened.

But as soon as my knowing and seeing of how things are was quite purified,

Then I claimed surpassed full awakening.

Knowing and seeing arose in me thus,

My heart's deliverance is unshakable,

This is my last birth,

The meaning is fully enlightened,

Now there is no renewal of being.

That is what the Blessed One said,

Gratified the group of five monks delighted in his words.

And while the discourse was being given,

There arose in the venerable Kondanya,

Who is one of these five ascetics,

There arose in the venerable Kondanya the dust free stainless vision of the Dhamma,

Quote,

Whatever is subject to origination is subject to cessation.

The Blessed One exclaimed,

Kondanya knows,

Kondanya knows.

And that is how the venerable one acquired the name Ananya Kondanya,

One who knows.

The wheel of truth has thus been set rolling by the Blessed One.

And we can be very grateful to Kondanya.

And what happened is another one of the aesthetics got it fairly quickly.

The other ones had to practice for a few days and they woke up.

And I think if they hadn't,

The Buddha would have probably gone back to the fig grove and lived out his life quietly and disappeared from history.

But the fact that this work kind of kept it around and got it going.

So the way you describe the eight fold path of the checklist,

It actually changes how we use the practice because the main practice being the first three and the last one is more kind of tuning and adjustments.

So which is great because it wasn't told like this earlier.

Stephen Batchelor has a slightly different take on it which I think is useful that you understand suffering,

You release the crazy cave and you release the tanha and then there is this blissful wonderful stuff that comes up and then it subsides.

And you think,

How can I keep this going?

You know,

It keeps going away from me.

And so what he's saying is that there's this base practice and there are these other things that you can do that help the practice deepen and be more sustaining.

What I do see and if you look through all the Buddha's practices,

These first three turning towards,

Relaxing into and savoring are the common elements that go throughout them.

So.

.

.

Are you going to go into the eight fold path items separately?

If not,

I have a question on a specific one.

No,

I wasn't going to.

So the wise thought or what Gante puts as harmonious energy,

What is that all about?

So Samadhi,

Wise you,

How you see what's going on has a strong effect on your attitude and motivation and that has how you come to the practice,

What it is you're trying to accomplish.

That's what Samasankapa is,

Which is translated as wise attitude,

Wise thought is the traditional one.

Bantu uses wise imaging,

But it really,

For me the clearest one is wise attitude.

So you can see the attitude that you bring to the practice can have a dramatic effect on the outcome.

So if you're coming at it with,

You know,

A difficult attitude,

Then it's not going to work as well.

So is it specifically for the practice or also for the day to day life?

It's all of it.

It's all of it.

It's all of it.

Yeah.

Would you use attitude and intention interchangeably for the service of the difference?

She's wondering about attitude and intention.

I use attitude because I think it's a little clearer for me and intention implies a little bit,

You know,

Can be,

You know,

I want to get somewhere,

It has that as opposed to attitude is just how you view it.

And I think that's what's there.

So what I have done with this is we could say,

You know,

How much,

How well do you understand suffering?

Do you abandon it?

Do you realize cessation?

I don't think that's terribly useful.

So what I wanted to do was to frame some questions that actually approach these because what's most important is not so much of whether you see suffering but actually look at how suffering appears in your life.

You know,

We're trying to personalize this.

And I had some fun coming up with life rubs you the wrong way because the word dukkha,

Which is the word that the use for suffering,

The origin of the term dukkha,

What it literally means is it refers to the axle,

I mean to the hole in the center of a wheel into which the axle goes.

And if the hole is a little off center or has some sand or gravel on it,

Then it kind of presses and grinds as it turns and that was,

So that off center hole is called a dukkha.

So there's this sense of what he was really talking about with suffering is ways that life kind of presses and grinds and kind of wears on us.

And so I just translated that into how does life rub you the wrong way.

And the second one is,

He talks about abandoning the tension and rather than just making that a declaration,

I think what's most helpful is to just look at what your some habitual ways are of dealing with tension and difficulty in your life to see what some of your habit patterns are.

You know enough about this practice that you know what the correct answer so to speak is.

You know what really is helpful is to kind of bring it into wholeness,

Just look how you relate to difficulty and just be really clear and honest and open with yourself.

And the third truth about savoring,

So the question there is like where do you find contentment?

You know where are the places that you find that peace or pleasure or something in your life?

Because actually once you can recognize where that is then the savoring becomes a little easier.

And then rather than going through the whole checklist,

You know the fourth one I'm just saying what helps?

You know what really helps or what supports you in?

Personally in your own life.

Yeah these are all personal questions,

These are all about you.

This is about taking this into your life here and your life out there,

How you relate to this.

Okay are those clear?

Clear is not a location.

Yeah right.

Yeah.

So I missed that,

Maybe I was supposed to.

So what I'm going to ask you to do is to find a partner and what you will be doing is I'll be keeping track of the time and you'll have like two or three minutes,

Probably more like four or five.

I'll sort of feel it out.

And your first task when you have a partner is to decide who's going to speak first and who's going to listen,

That's the hard part.

And then when it's your turn to talk what you will do is you will have these questions in front of you and you can use these any way you want.

You can go through them systematically looking at each one or there may be one that really grabs you at the moment and you can still look at that and talk about that for a while.

I don't want to give you a prescribed way of being with these but you can just use them as cues to keep on bringing you back to these core teachings of the Buddha.

Okay so can we get into pairs and see if we have an even or odd number of people.

Okay so we're going to have one group of three.

Okay so what's going to happen since we have one group of three is we're going to have three rounds.

Okay so what's going to happen is the person who speaks first will be talking while the other person listens and then I will ring a gong and let you know and you will switch roles and then you will go back and we'll do that three times except for these guys.

So you'll be going around and each of you rather than speaking and listening three times you will as you're speaking you will be listened to by two people at the same time.

You guys will end up with two rounds.

Okay?

No.

And by the way let me just say one other thing.

I'm sorry I know you're so excited to get there.

I really want to encourage you when you're listening to just listen.

We all know good listening you're supposed to be nodding and agreeing and setting off all these cues.

For those of you who don't know this story when I was in college earning a degree in psychology there was a friend of mine who was studying operant conditioning.

You know how you use rewards to train rats to go through mazes and stuff.

And so he undertook this experiment with his roommate which was every time his roommate moved his hand towards his ear he would smile.

Not a big smile just a very subtle one and within about three or four days his roommate had developed this habit of pulling on his ear.

So when you do all that smiling and nodding etc.

What you're actually doing is you're actually guiding your partner and encouraging them to talk more about this or less than that.

There may not be your intention.

What you're really trying to do is reassure them that you're really listening.

They will feel it.

They will know whether you're listening or not.

So what I want you to do is just be a presence for them.

And when you're speaking it can get a little disoriented because usually no response is a negative in our culture.

But you'll know it's not a negative it's just instructions I gave you.

And then what I used to do is I'd start telling jokes,

Anything to get a rise from them.

But eventually what happens is you realize you're not going to get anything from them so there's nothing left to do but pay attention to what's going on inside and speak from that place.

And that can be enormously supportive.

So these questions that we're discussing with our partner is how we're going to apply the dharma into our lives?

How you have.

How you have.

We all have great intentions but I think what's really most valuable is to know what has been because it's awareness of that that creates the greatest possibility for change.

Okay.

So we're not saying everything that we want to say initially we're going to be speaking three times?

Right.

Right.

So we'll go back and forth several times.

And what happens is that at some point it may feel like you run out of things to say.

And if so just kind of drop into silence and just be with it.

And usually what happens is after a few moments you know something else will come up and meanwhile you're just waiting and so it allows it to go a little bit deeper.

So if you run out of things to say don't treat it as a failure.

There's this process called meditation.

Some of you may have heard of it.

You can just sit there and be with it for a moment and see what comes forth.

Okay.

What is the three times thing?

So what happens is you will,

To who's speaking first?

Have you figured that out?

Yeah.

Okay.

So you will speak and then you'll listen and then you'll speak and listen and speak and listen.

Okay.

So you get three chances to speak and three chances to listen.

Okay.

And how much for each question?

Half an hour each round.

No.

You know how much I love this.

Well,

We picked out a really wonderful partner for you.

I know.

I have you met Alana.

So it'll be two or three minutes.

But you're actually not going to know how much time it is.

You won't really know.

I will keep track of it.

You will be safe.

I will make sure you leave here on time tomorrow.

Okay.

Any other questions about logistics?

We got it.

If you get confused and you're not sure,

Just raise your hand.

It actually works quite simply.

So if you're confused,

Raise your hand.

I will make sure you do it right.

Samavaka.

Right speech.

So the first speaker begins.

Speak one at a time.

So you're speaking first.

Until the gong.

Okay.

If I do one question at a time or all these questions.

However you like.

You can use them any way you like.

But remember we have three minutes.

Yeah.

All right.

This is a chance to practice this thing that you'll be doing out there.

It's called speaking.

I know it's foreign,

But it's a good thing to practice.

So come into silence.

The listeners say thank you.

And then just come into silence for just a moment as you switch roles.

And then as you are ready,

The next person begins to speak.

So come into silence.

Those who are listening say thank you.

It's a gift to have somebody share.

And then close your eyes for just a moment and shift roles.

And then open your eyes and the new speaker begins working with these questions in whatever way feels most productive for you.

So the listeners say thank you.

And then just close your eyes for a moment and shift roles.

And then as you're ready,

The new speaker opens her eyes and begins to work with the questions.

The new speaker says thank you.

Come into silence.

The listeners say thank you and then come into silence.

And silently shift roles inside.

You'll be the listener to just be a presence there for your partner.

And then when you're ready,

Open your eyes and the new speaker begins.

Come into silence and the listener says thank you.

And the dyads,

Each of you has spoken and listened three times.

We have one more round.

And the last round,

It will be chaos.

You can listen and talk.

All rules are off.

You can ask questions.

You can nod.

Use it in a way that feels most productive for you.

Begin.