This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Thoughts for the year - Four noble truth - Gil Fronsdal. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Good morning, everyone. This is my first talk of the new year, so Happy New Year to all of you, and best wishes for the year. It’s the custom for me for the first talk of the year to be on the Four Noble Truths. These are a phenomenally important and valuable template for insight, for understanding, for wisdom, for finding our way to a degree of freedom.
Over these maybe more than 20 years now that I’ve been doing this first talk of the year on the Four Noble Truths, how I’ve presented it has changed over the years. Someone could go back and listen to all of them and track the evolution of my thinking and my understanding of it over time. That speaks to how useful these are for new understandings, for new perspectives, for new ways of touching our heart in some important way. Rather than taking the Four Noble Truths as if there’s an orthodox, true understanding of it, this is a very useful thing to engage in and explore and apply in new ways.
I once sent an email to Bhikkhu Bodhi1, the famous translator of these ancient texts, a wonderful scholar, asking about one particular way the Buddha taught the Four Noble Truths. He replied not that it was the true way of understanding them; he explained, “Oh, that was a particular application that was being applied for a particular purpose.”
The simplest way of stating the Four Noble Truths is just an outline that needs to be filled in. They don’t use the word “there is”; they use the word “this.” This is the Noble Truth of suffering. This is the Noble Truth of the arising of suffering. This is the Noble Truth of the cessation of suffering. And this is the Noble Truth of the path leading to the cessation of suffering.
So immediately, we realize that this is about suffering, which for some people is a really big word. It’s not only to qualify as suffering in the sense of the big disasters of life. Sometimes it’s been translated as “stress.” Then we can understand that it can apply to the smallest little things in life that are stressful. In fact, it applies to any degree of stress or distress that we might experience that it is possible and reasonable to become free of, to bring to an end. This is the good news of Buddhism: that suffering can come to an end. Dukkha2 can come to an end.
Inherent in this teaching, central to all of Buddhism, is the idea of change. Things change, one way or the other. Sometimes other people, and myself maybe at times, would have worded this differently, would have said, “Central to Buddhism is the idea that everything passes or everything’s impermanent.” That’s valuable as well, but that also limits this understanding. If you hear it as “change,” that applies to everything. Everything changes, except for Platonic ideas, maybe, at least for Plato.
The idea is to find our peace by understanding something deep about change. You hear that in the wording of the Four Noble Truths: the second truth is the arising, and the third Noble Truth is the ceasing—the coming and going. The Buddha uses the word “coming and going” sometimes instead of change. Sometimes he uses “appearing and disappearing,” and sometimes “inconstancy” is used, and sometimes the word “change”—things becoming different.
There’s this wonderful account of a conversation that a householder, a man named Nakulapita3, had with the Buddha. He came to the Buddha, paid his respects, and then he said this: “I am old, venerable sir, aged, burdened with years, advanced in life, come to the last stage, afflicted in body, often ill.” Wow, that’s quite a statement.
Remember, this was 2,500 years ago. There was no ER, no pain medications, no blood pressure medication, no heart medication, no antibiotics, no surgery for the back, for the hips, for all this stuff. There’s so much that happens in the modern world that keeps us going, kind of tunes us up a little bit for a while. The march of change that the human body is will change. Sometime when you’re young, if you’re lucky, you get stronger and more capable and more skilled. And if you’re lucky enough to grow to be old, for most people, change is not a welcome thing. People in this country spend a lot of money fending off the effects of aging. I think at the time of the Buddha, they didn’t have Botox. What they had that was maybe better than Botox was meditation.
This is quite a remarkable statement this man is making. This is how it is for me. You can imagine in the ancient world that yes, being aged and old, you couldn’t escape it. There was no sense that you could go down to the local store and get some aspirin and some face cream and just kind of shore things up for a while. So he’s just saying, it’s kind of a very clear statement that things have changed for this man. He’s clearly stating it. “I am old, aged, burdened with years, advanced in life, come to the last stage, afflicted in body, often ill.” He’s not complaining; he’s just saying this is where I am.
Then he says, “I rarely get a chance to see the Buddha and hear his teachings. May the Buddha please teach me, instruct me, since this would lead to my welfare and happiness for a long time.” So he’s asking for teachings. “Here is my situation, things have changed in this kind of way. Now please offer some teachings.”
The Buddha replied, “So it is, so it is. This body of yours is afflicted, weighed down, encumbered. If anyone carrying around this body were to claim to be healthy even for a moment, what is that other than foolishness?” That’s a kind of strange and powerful statement.
“Therefore, you should train yourself thus. You should practice this way. You should develop yourself and cultivate yourself in this way, with this orientation: ‘Even though I am afflicted in body, my mind will be unafflicted.’ This is how you should train yourself.”
Then the householder Nakulapita, having delighted and rejoiced in the Buddha’s statement, rose from his seat and, having paid homage to the Buddha, went to visit the Buddha’s disciple, venerable Sariputta4. He said to venerable Sariputta, “This is what the Buddha told me.” He repeated the conversation and said to Sariputta, “It was the ambrosia of such a Dhamma talk that the blessed one anointed me with.” It’s very religious language, but you know, that Dhamma talk was ambrosia; it was very welcome. He felt like he was given medicine, some wonderful thing. He was anointed, he was blessed by it, by the Buddha saying, “Yes, the body can be afflicted, but you train yourself so the mind is not afflicted.”
When I was in Burma with my teacher, U Pandita5, he was kind of a stern, fierce, general kind of teacher. Different teachers have very different personalities. In the same monastery, there was a teacher who was just completely filled with love. You’d get in his presence, and you could do no wrong. With U Pandita, you could do everything wrong. [Laughter] But there were two times when I was studying with him, giving a talk, his eyes sparkled, and he kind of leaned forward and said something like this. He said, “As you age, the body just gets more and more worn out, decays.” And then he’d lean forward with a sparkle and say, “But if you practice, your mind gets brighter.” He was getting to be an old man himself, but you could see his delight in what can happen. He had been training himself pretty much his whole life, this teacher of mine, and that was his conclusion: that the mind becomes brighter.
So then Sariputta said to the man, “Didn’t it occur to you to question the Buddha further on how one is afflicted in body and afflicted in mind, and how one is afflicted in body and not afflicted in mind? You got this great little teaching, but you didn’t ask him how to practice with it.” So the man says to Sariputta, “Well, maybe you’ll do it.” And he does.
A lot of it has to do with change. How do we live with change? And how is it we don’t live with change? That is one of the key insights, and that has a lot to do with the Four Noble Truths. We suffer when we lock on to something, and we’re no longer living in the stream, the river of change. We get preoccupied, caught in something. “This is how it is.”
The way that Sariputta presents it to this man is when we take something in this universe, in our experience, and think, “This is who I am.” If you take your appearance, and your appearance defines who you are—”this is who I am”—then when your appearance changes, you’ll be distressed. You’ll suffer. If you have an idea, “This is who I have to be,” and then you look in the mirror and you’re not what you once were.
I’ve been surprised sometimes by seeing people with a big gap of some years between seeing them, and I realized I was still carrying with me the image of them from some years ago. Sometimes it’s with kids that are growing up. And sometimes it’s seeing people who get older. I’m sure people have done that with me because I’m getting older. One of the curious things about my own self-image that I’ve seen over these decades is I do this to myself. I’m usually a few years behind with my self-image. I kind of remember myself as how I was some years ago and still assume that’s the way I am. I think it’s innocent enough; I don’t think I’ve suffered too much from that. But this orientation to have an idea, an image, and then lock onto it—”this is how it should be, this is how it is”—we can do that with appearance.
We know in this society of ours, a tremendous amount of suffering occurs because of how people appear, their skin color. That difference, that distinction is deadly sometimes for people. There’s a lot of discrimination about age. People have told me repeatedly that because they’re old, or because they’re old and short, they get overlooked. People don’t even see them anymore. They tell me, “I stand in line at a store, and someone comes along who’s tall and young and just kind of talks over them, and the store clerk ignores the person who was there first.” Somehow they feel that they become invisible because of their appearance.
Then there are expectations of how we’re supposed to look and how we want to present ourselves, and this changes. So there’s change in our appearance, but that does not need to afflict the mind. How is the mind becoming afflicted around the changing of our appearance? Some of it has to do with how we lock in. We lock into what it should be. We have strong desires, expectations. We have strong fears that we have to maintain it this way. We live in the world of ideas and concepts, and we’re kind of orienting ourselves around these ideas of how it should be, how we should be, and what we expect it to be. The odd thing about concepts and ideas is they can be Platonic in the sense that they don’t change, and there’s an expectation that things shouldn’t change. So there can be resistance, there can be distress, there can be fear. All these kinds of things start arising in the mind because our appearances are changing, and it’s not what we want. Or it is what we want, and then we may feel happy for a while, but it’s a happiness that’s dependent on that appearance. Then it passes away, something happens, and it’s not there anymore.
So how do we train ourselves not to be afflicted in the mind when there’s change in the body? Part of it is understanding what is happening in the mind and being able to live with direct presence for the changing nature of experience. That’s one of the primary purposes of mindfulness meditation: to place ourselves experientially, somatically, in the field of change. That’s all that’s happening all the time. Things are changing all the time. There’s a song that has those lyrics, I don’t know if some of you are old enough to remember: “Things are changing all the time, nothing known will be mine, everything changed.” I made that up. [Laughter]
But nothing known, nothing that you know will remain mine. Everything changes. So this identification—”this is me, this is mine, this is who I am, I have to be this kind of person, this way”—we latch on, we hold on. But what are these ideas, these concepts that we latch on to? How do we step out of the river of change?
Recently, I had a migraine and got nauseous. This one was relatively mild, so I kind of continued my day. But the way that I practiced with it was to place myself in my body, in the river of change of my body, the flow of change, the movements and everything. So when there was pain, I would bring myself to the pain. When I bring myself carefully to the pain, it becomes more movement, more change. It makes it much easier; sometimes the pain goes away, or it’s no longer pain.
But why I’m telling you this is that it became a wonderful vantage point to see how I got afflicted in the mind. How I got caught up in the idea, “Oh, this is permanent.” Not that I knew it was going to be forever that way, but “this is not going to change for the rest of the day, I’m stuck, this is terrible, this is bad.” I could watch how that would happen. I could be sitting and practicing with the river of change in this body, and then if I got a little bit distracted, my mind would go into my head, into my thoughts. As I went into the thoughts, I would form this idea: “It shouldn’t be this way. This is terrible. You know, I must have done something wrong. What did I do?”
There were these thoughts where I started locking in. I had a certain amount of fear come up: “Oh, this is going to get worse.” And it wasn’t just fear that was coming, but I would lock onto the fear. “Oh no.” This locking on, this grabbing onto, that’s where things got reified, things got solidified. I was no longer in the river of change. I was in this idea, or created idea, of permanence.
Then I could see, “Oh, look at that, Gil, you’re locking on with the mind around something—some idea, some feeling, some attitude, some resistance.” That’s what the mind is doing. It’s adding something to the situation. Wow. And then I’d relax, go back into the river of change, and then it would be okay for a while. Until I wasn’t doing that, I kind of surfaced into my mind again and then had a whole other vantage point to see what the mind was doing that gave birth to my suffering around it. Then I would come back in and open up. I kept opening up to the body. That was my practice: open up to the change here, be open to how things are flowing and moving. And things were always flowing and moving.
It was fascinating also to be open to change and see that the thoughts were changing. So I would have the thought that was something like, “This will be forever.” But then I would watch it. The word “will be” was very fleeting. And “forever”—that word came to an end very quickly. It was just there for a moment. It made a world of difference to just see it as this word going through, rather than, “This is going to be forever.” Oh, forever, forever, forever—which is succumbing to it and getting caught in it and locked into it and believing it. Just for that moment, it was “forever” because that was what the word said, but it wasn’t forever. The word wasn’t forever. The thoughts were not forever. The thoughts come and go as well.
Recently, I was presenting on something with a friend, and my friend said, “Well, I’m going to offer you my thoughts, how I’m thinking about this topic, and then we’ll hear about what Gil thinks about this topic.” As soon as he said that, I thought, “Oh yeah, I am thinking about it.” And I could watch the thinking, almost as if I could watch it in the air in front of me like a river just passing by, that had no weight, no substance. It was just a changing flow of thoughts, as opposed to sometimes when I’m thinking about something and I’m in it. I’m locked into it, I’m concerned with it, I’m curious about it, I’m exploring it. Something about the mind has locked in, something about the mind has zeroed in.
That zeroing in, locking in, can provide a sense of permanence, a sense of constancy, a sense that nothing is changing. But when my friend said, “what Gil’s going to be thinking about,” it was just a stream. It was kind of like if you took watercolors and a brush and you were going to paint a beautiful painting, but the surface you were going to paint it on was a flowing river. Imagine dipping your brush with watercolors to make a stroke in a flowing river. Maybe you’d leave a trail of color, but it would just kind of be washing by, and you couldn’t really make the picture. It was like that’s how I saw my thoughts go by—the changing nature of thoughts. Wow.
So in that, there was no room for those thoughts to afflict the mind. The thoughts can afflict our mind not because of the thoughts, but because of how we’re involved in thoughts, how we lock into them, tense up, react, resist, have an emotional response to it. Most emotional responses are fine if we stay in the river of change with emotions. Things are changing all the time. But if we react to the emotion… I had self-pity many years ago. I have this wonderful story for me of self-pity, and when I locked into the self-pity, it became clear that I suffered, and my distress and suffering grew. But if I saw it as self-pity and kind of let go of it, the suffering disappeared, and the physical pain that was associated with it disappeared as well.
Anger, fear—there’s a way in which we get locked in, we get caught in it, and we don’t really see it or respect it or relate to it as part of the changing nature of life. I’ve seen it works so much better to be with my emotional life if I experience it as this constant change. Then there’s much more room to allow it to be what it is. Anger arises, it’s okay, but it comes and it goes. In and of itself, most emotions don’t last more than a few seconds, a minute or two or something. What keeps them going is our feeding it, our reacting to it, our participation in it. But if we can really settle into the changing flow of emotions, it’s a kaleidoscope of change and movement.
So the Four Noble Truths are an honest recognition that “I’m suffering, I have stress here,” as Nakulapita told the Buddha in a clear, uncomplaining way: “I’m old and ill and afflicted. Now, give me a Dhamma talk.” And the Buddha said, “Yes, it’s true, you are.” And we say that for ourselves: “Yes, it’s true, I’m suffering.”
Can you see the difference between afflictions of the body and non-affliction of the mind? Train yourself to look at the mind, look what the mind is doing. The second and third Noble Truths have a lot to do with seeing the change, stepping back into the river of change rather than being outside of it or caught in it or holding a bucket of the river and saying, “I have the river,” and it’s a burden to carry this heavy bucket. Put the water back into the river and watch the arising and passing, watch the coming and going. Be in the change.
Then comes one of the most marvelous things about the teachings of the Four Noble Truths: the fourth Noble Truth. If you can know the river of change and see the freedom from that, the freedom from locking in, feel the ease of the mind or the spaciousness of the mind—even a mind that has a migraine can feel this freedom, the psychological freedom in that flow. What is it like to be flowing in the current? If everything is change, you’re change. You are the change.
In fact, the Buddha said that at some point in practice, we enter the stream. When it was asked, “What is the stream?” he said, “It’s the Eightfold Path6 in you.” The stream is a way of living, to be in the flow of change completely without locking on, without getting attached to anything or resisting anything. It makes us really wise. The Eightfold Path is a manifestation of that wisdom.
If you’re in the stream of change in this kind of way, you’re wise because you can see when you get caught, when you’re trying to block the river, “Stop, don’t move, don’t go,” when you try to freeze it up, when you resist it, when you’re holding on to things. That’s a tremendously wise thing to see. Just like when I had the migraine, I could see that difference, and that made a world of difference for me. I was able to manage fine with it because I could see what the mind was doing and not give into it, and come back to the river of change.
To see what it’s like to have the mind unattached—that’s the first step of the Eightfold Path, Right View, to see that operating. If you’re in the flow of that river, you see that if you have ill will, you’re caught. You see if you have greed, if you have hostility, you’re caught. And if you let go of that, you have this wonderful delight of non-ill will, non-hostility, which in Buddhism is often defined as kindness and compassion.
If you are the river of change, you see how lying and stealing, intentionally wanting to harm anyone, takes you out of the river, takes you out of the change. You can see how that causes distress, stress, suffering. So this wisdom of seeing that unethical behavior is actually a loss of something very profound, some freedom. That’s the middle steps of the Eightfold Path.
And to see that when you’re in the flow of the river, the flow of change in us has freed up all kinds of beautiful and healthy and wholesome qualities inside of us to flow: integrity, the drive for honesty, for generosity, for wisdom, for patience, for equanimity. There are all these beautiful qualities that can flow when there isn’t any resistance or locking in or attachment. And then to be mindful of this, and to be settled in oneself in the river of change—these are the last three steps of the Eightfold Path.
So the Eightfold Path, in this description, is not exactly what you do; it’s what you become if you learn to relax and become the river of change. It’s not just seeing change, which is the first step. Once you see it, then your task is to open and relax and become it. In that becoming, you become a wise person, and you understand what it’s like not to be afflicted in mind. You might be afflicted in body as you get older. Some of you probably will become older. And as you do, maybe you know something now about not becoming afflicted in your mind. That’s the premise of the Four Noble Truths: that it’s possible to come to a place where the mind is not afflicted, believe it or not.
So those are my thoughts for this year around the Four Noble Truths, and I hope that they were meaningful for you in some way, evocative in some way. Partly because today we have tea and we still have seven minutes of the Dhamma talk time, if you’re willing to stay for a few minutes and talk to someone near you, say hello. It would be nice to greet someone and welcome them to IMC. Even if this is your first time at IMC, you’re here, and you can welcome the person. Hopefully, you’ll get welcomed, but you could also welcome them and say hello and introduce yourself. If you want to say something about this talk, anything that was evocative or interesting or perplexing or useful for you, maybe share a little bit what that was like.
So if you’d take a few minutes, and then I’ll ring a bell when it’s time to stop for the tea. Everyone’s welcome to stay, or you can continue your conversations. The one thing I ask is that when you look around to talk to someone, maybe talk to two or three people, a little group of three, just so no one’s kind of alone because everyone around you turned the other way. We want everyone to be included. So look around, make sure everyone around you is included somehow. So please, thank you.
Bhikkhu Bodhi: An American Buddhist monk and scholar, known for his numerous translations of the Pali Canon. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and painfulness of mundane life. ↩
Nakulapita: An elderly householder who appears in the Pali Canon, known for his devotion and his conversation with the Buddha about old age. ↩
Sariputta: One of the two chief male disciples of the Buddha, renowned for his wisdom. ↩
U Pandita: A highly respected Burmese Theravada Buddhist monk and meditation master who taught insight meditation (Vipassanā) worldwide. ↩
Eightfold Path: The path to liberation in Buddhism, consisting of eight interconnected factors or practices: Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration. ↩