This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Elephant’s Footprint- Wholesome Qualities included in the Four Noble Truths - Ying Chen. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Ying Chen at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org to find the authoritative record of this talk.
Good morning, and a good day for those who are joining through the invisible electrons and the web. I’m very happy to be here. It feels like I haven’t been here for a while, so it evokes a sense of coming home. It’s so good to be with you all this morning.
I brought a teaching today that’s inspired by a sutta1 called “The Simile of the Elephant’s Footprint.” Some of you may know this, and those of you who are interested in reading suttas might have come across it. This particular simile is deeply connected with the teachings of the Four Noble Truths, and I’ll say more about this particular teaching.
The Four Noble Truths are taught across many different Buddhist traditions and are quite well-known. The perspectives that I will be drawing from for this teaching will come from something inspired by this particular simile and by some of my ongoing reflections.
I’ll just briefly mention the Four Noble Truths, and then we’ll dive in a little more. There are four truths, maybe “enobling truths.” I personally feel a little shy saying the word “truth” because it evokes many different associations that may or may not be helpful. But I like the translation of the Pali2 word sacca, which also means “real”—something that we can feel tangibly in our own lives, our own experience.
So it does get better as this teaching unfolds. This is a rather significant teaching, in that the insights into these Four Noble Truths are what liberated Gautama to become the Buddha. It was insights into these four things that are real in our lives that brought liberation for the Buddha.
The tradition sometimes holds that this was the first teaching the Buddha offered. Some of you may know this as the teaching on setting in motion the Dharma wheel. The teachings began to turn from the very first teaching that the Buddha offered, and they began to roll on and on, all the way to today. So it’s the first turning of the Dharma wheel.
And yet, the teaching can often be overlooked. Practitioners can sometimes feel, “I got it, you know, I know this.” In our modern culture, we’re not always so friendly to pain and distress, so we can be conditioned to quickly skip over the teaching, turning away from it. Our relationship to this teaching can remain on a surface level.
Ajahn Sucitto4 said this Four Noble Truths teaching is an advanced teaching. It calls forth our attention, our curiosity, our interest.
In the first turning of the Dharma wheel, before the Buddha taught, he contemplated and thought, “Who should I teach first?” It occurred to him that he couldn’t just go on the street and tell anyone. He reflected and thought of the five ascetic companions he had practiced with for a long time, who had practiced with him in various ways in spiritual training before he went on his own, which led to his awakening.
So he thought, “This is a group of people who may have little dust in their eyes. Maybe I should begin with them.” He went and found the five ascetic companions and offered the teaching of the Four Noble Truths and the twelve insights to them.
We’re very fortunate. In the course of unfolding this particular teaching, one of the five got it. This was the venerable Kondañña5. The sutta says he opened the Dharma eye. He saw it, he felt it, and the Buddha felt it. “He got it. Wow.” The Buddha got really fired up and said, “Wow, okay, someone will understand this.” So he went on and started teaching the remaining four, and from there, it launched his 40-plus-year teaching career.
I feel very fortunate. This was the beginning of the forming of the Sangha, the beginning of the long teaching endeavor that the Buddha launched. We are the beneficiaries of this first turning. Sometimes I imagine, what if none of them got it? What would happen? I don’t let myself think about that too much.
What also struck me is that in the Parinibbana Sutta6, which is a long sutta that documented the last days of the Buddha’s life, the Buddha again highlighted the teachings of the Four Noble Truths. I want to read a little from this. He said:
“Practitioners, due to not understanding and not penetrating the Four Noble Truths, both you and I have wandered and transmigrated for such a very long time.”
I feel so tender just listening to this. He knew, and he didn’t say just “you.” He said, “you and I,” because we didn’t understand this Four Noble Truths and really penetrate it, we have wandered and transmigrated for such a long time. It really touches me to hear this.
Notice also the words that are used: “not understanding and not penetrating it.” This is not a surface-level “we just got it” because we read it somewhere. It’s about penetrating it. Penetrating has a flavor of a fullness of human, lived knowing, not just in our intellect.
I’ve been reading a book by Philip Moffitt7 called Dancing with Life, about the Four Noble Truths and the twelve insights teaching. In this book, he says the Four Noble Truths are not just a summary guideline, a creed, or a statement of a philosophy, but an actual practice of insight and a realization in and of itself. It’s a teaching on how to live wisely.
That’s quite something. How to live wisely through this thing that is so real in our lives?
I am personally affected by my Dharma teachers and maybe their teachers, in how they have spent decades reflecting on, articulating, and practicing with this teaching. I know for Gil Fronsdal8, for probably decades at IMC, the first teaching of the new year is the Four Noble Truths teaching. Some of you may be aware of this. Every new year, the first talk that Gil gives is around the Four Noble Truths, and it’s never the same.
Philip Moffitt, who wrote Dancing with Life, would tell us that he spent years writing this book because he had to practice with it. He had to reflect on it, contemplate it a lot, and it’s an ongoing process to this day. For me, I dedicated my life this year to the Four Noble Truths, so you’re receiving a little bit of the vibe through my own reflection, contemplation, and practice with it. I have to confess that I haven’t gone very far in this whole process. I feel like I’m repeatedly going over the basics, and I’m not in a big rush. I really enjoy the process of it. So today, I hope this also evokes some curiosity in you.
I want to go back to the simile of the elephant’s footprint. This sutta, this teaching, was offered by the Buddha’s great disciple, one of the chief disciples, Sariputta9. He offered a very detailed elaboration of the Four Noble Truths, and he started with a very powerful simile. This is what it says:
“The footprints of all creatures that walk can fit inside an elephant’s footprint. So an elephant’s footprint is said to be the biggest of them all. In the same way, all skillful or wholesome qualities are included in the Four Noble Truths.”
Often, with these similes, I like to just stop and imagine a little bit. What does it feel like? What does it evoke in me? I paused and thought a little bit about all the animals I can think of that walk and how big their footprints are. And I realized this feels right. The elephant’s footprint is probably the biggest and can hold it all.
In this way, the Four Noble Truths teaching has a flavor of being all-encompassing. Sometimes you may hear teachers say that all of the Buddha’s teachings can fit in the Four Noble Truths teaching, that the Buddha taught dukkha and the end of dukkha. That’s the shorthand. But this particular statement is a little different. Here, Sariputta said something very specific: “All wholesome qualities are included in the Four Noble Truths.” The Pali term is kusala10, sometimes also translated as “skillful qualities.” So all skillful, wholesome qualities are included here.
That’s very specific, and for me, it’s intriguing. It caught my attention when I read this. It’s somewhat ironic because often our association with the Four Noble Truths teaching is a little bit grim, a little bit like we have to grind our teeth or something. But here it says all wholesome qualities are included in this. I just loved it. That caught my attention to keep going. What is he pointing to? That’s a fantastic and wonderful way to begin this teaching.
So how do we understand this? Sariputta is quite an amazing teacher, and he unpacked this in great detail for the rest of the sutta.
I’ll also say a little bit about Sariputta; maybe that will help us understand how he was unpacking this teaching. He’s a quite unique teacher and practitioner. He has a very unique mind, quite detail-oriented. I’ll just read this that Ajahn Sucitto, who commented on the sutta, spoke about Sariputta’s quality and his contribution in teaching the Dharma at the time of the Buddha, and maybe all the way down to today. He said:
“This sutta is a master class on the methods employed by the Buddha’s greatest student, Sariputta. He begins with the Four Noble Truths, then proceeds to unpack them systematically, leading to a lengthy analysis of the four elements. But the unpacking takes surprising directions as Sariputta draws on unexpected layers of the Dharma to illustrate a familiar teaching in new ways. All the while, he conveys warmth and compassion, illustrating in his manner of teaching the connection that is also the topic of the teaching. Sariputta’s emphasis on the Four Noble Truths is shown elsewhere as well, where he is said to focus on teaching new students as far as stream-entry. The current sutta illustrates how he did this, carefully explaining fundamental concepts and showing their real-world impacts while offering pragmatic and reassuring advice along the way. He introduces all the major wisdom teachings, demonstrating exactly how they fit into the Four Noble Truths.”
That’s quite some skill, isn’t it? I really appreciate Sariputta quite a lot. He seems to have a capacity to, in a way, flip the ladder down all the way to the ground so we can go step-by-step to understand the teachings. Sometimes his teachings are not necessarily exactly the same as the Buddha’s, but the Buddha often praised him because he has this capacity to allow people to know. Maybe sometimes the teachings are offered as dropping breadcrumbs, but you can’t quite feel the whole thing. Sariputta has this capacity to really let you see the whole picture and also know the details.
So how did he unfold this? He started with the overarching teaching: the noble truth of suffering, the origin of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the practice that leads to the cessation of suffering. But then he didn’t just stop there. He went deeper. He drilled down by teasing apart these higher-level concepts and ideas into a more granular and immediately felt kind of experience.
For example, he first explained and teased apart what is meant by dukkha. What is it? He unpacked that with a list: there’s illness, aging, death, and there is association with the things that we don’t like, and not getting what we really like. He was doing all this unpacking so we can begin to relate to this for ourselves.
But again, he didn’t stop right there, because that is still at the conceptual level of understanding. He unpacked it all the way to the immediacy of the felt sense of experience, which the teachings sometimes point to as the elements. The elemental nature of our experience—this embodied experience has the earth element (our bones, our teeth that are solid, firm, steady) and the water element (the fluidity of it). It’s dropping down to the immediate felt-sense experience.
You can see that the ladders got flipped down. Now he’s talking about this dukkha not at our thinking level, but at our experiential level. The experience is like this: sometimes it’s pleasant, sometimes it’s unpleasant. For me sitting here, I have a fair amount of tightness and tension around my hip, and there’s some pain that’s been there for a while. That’s immediate. Oh, this is how it feels.
For me, this is rather game-changing. We are beginning to deepen in this process of penetration. Sariputta invited us to drop into our experience here and now, and this is where the wholesome qualities begin to emerge.
In this process, it almost feels like Sariputta was taking the students on a meditative journey. Now you’re feeling and sensing in your immediate experience, and several effects begin to emerge. This is my own reflection; I may be departing a little bit from the sutta.
Aliveness: The first wholesome quality that many of us might begin to feel as we drop into the immediacy of our experience is that we are in a raw, direct relationship with our lives. The vibrations in the body, the flow of the breath, the tinkling sensations, the vibrations of the sounds—what you’re feeling is a kind of aliveness. Wow. Sometimes I have this feeling, like I’m in this really alive feeling with my own life. Just now as we were sitting, there was the sound of the fan, the air conditioning, the sound of people moving, the sound of the breath, and the inner sound. This soundscape just feels like the vibratory feeling of life, and that’s enlivening. I don’t even know all the words that we might use to describe it, but there is a certain kind of wholesome quality when we’re in the immediacy of our experience. What it can contrast with is our ongoing movements of wanting and not wanting, of pushing away, which is actually deadening. We can begin to know this for ourselves. The first wholesome quality Sariputta is pointing out, in my own experience, is that when we’re dropping into this experience—instead of trying to push away, deny, or avoid all the pain we have and trying to get on to the things that we really want—there is an aliveness that comes forth, maybe in the midst of the difficulties, in the midst of the pain. There can be aliveness, and it’s meaningful. It may not be a meaning that you even know the words to say, but you can feel that this is a meaningful way of relating to our lives.
Clarity: The second quality is that as we begin to stay with this experience just as it is, in this raw, more direct form, what Sariputta was pointing out was that more and more clarity begins to emerge. We can begin to see how the experience of pleasant and unpleasant is different from our reactivity to the pleasant or the unpleasant. They’re not the same thing. Sometimes when we’re not seeing this clearly, they just get lumped together, and it’s automatic: “It’s not good.” But what we can see is, oh, pleasant is just pleasant, and our judgment of whether this is good or bad is another thing; it’s a separate thing. They don’t have to automatically connect. And our identification with it is yet another thing. Maybe someone criticized you. Actually, I was criticized last week or two, and it was unpleasant. I won’t say it’s pleasant; it’s unpleasant. But our often knee-jerk reaction of “I need to defend myself” would just come up, right? But in that moment, fortunately, I wasn’t present for it. I just let myself feel the unpleasantness, and that reactivity wasn’t coming up. What that allowed for me was to notice, “Oh, there is more to this criticism than what it sounds like.” It was very intuitive in my system. I didn’t even know what it was. I just felt like, “Oh, there’s more to this.” So I paused. I didn’t respond. I didn’t react. I just kind of let it go. There was a space for it. A while later, maybe hours later, I discovered the person was going through some real challenging diagnosis. This capacity to be able to drop into this felt-sense, experiential way gives us the opportunity to tease this apart. So here is something—ouch, you know, it’s dukkha—and here is the reactivity. And in this reactivity of judging and trying to fix this, we actually have a choice if we’re not flowing with our reactivity. We can say, “Oh, I can let this go. I don’t need to flow with my judgment that I am a failure.” That’s just extra. So that’s another wholesome quality that can flow from this.
Freedom and Peace: And yet another wholesome quality can emerge in this process. That is, as we begin to notice more and more that there is this choice in us that can let go of the grasping, the clinging, the judging, the fixing, there is actually more freedom. There is more peace and harmony that’s available in us. This is being pointed to as the third noble truth: the possibility that if there is no continual fueling of this wanting mind, there can be moments of harmony and peace with what I’m experiencing, whether it’s in our own hearts or in the surroundings that we’re interacting with. So that also becomes available to us.
Sincere Practice: We will also notice in this process that we lose our mindfulness. It’s not automatic that we are able to simply stay with our experience in this direct, immediate way. We get lost in our stories, our beliefs. And we begin to notice, “Oh, this heart and mind is to be cultivated.” And so yet another wholesome quality that can emerge, which is being pointed to as the fourth noble truth, is that we give ourselves over to the practice. We offer ourselves to practice sincerely.
So in this way, what is being pointed to in these Four Noble Truths is that each of the four begins to manifest as wholesome qualities.
Sometimes, I know some people would ask, “If things ever get easier through the practice?” I like that question, and I’ve reflected about it a lot. On one level, the conditions of our lives are often not under our control. It’s hard to say how things might be getting easier or harder, whether it’s because of the broader environment we’re in or because of individual situations. In my broader household, there was a car accident. Not easy, very difficult for many people involved.
But through this practice, what we’re learning is to cultivate a capacity that allows us to relate to our lives and our life events with more and more wholesome ways. This allows us to have a sense of ease, a sense of harmony in the midst of difficulties. So in that way, whether you call it easier or better, I don’t know. But there is a possibility. And this kind of wholesome orientation is more and more independent of the life situations or the conditions that we’re in. This is what this teaching is pointing to: how we relate to our lives is the empowerment that each of us has.
So as all of us connect to this teaching in some way, maybe in a very moderate way—we just heard this, we just have a little sense of it—my invitation is to let the teaching come alive. So it’s real. We can have a real felt sense of it and let that guide us in how we relate to our lives.
So, thank you. Thank you everyone for your attention.
We only have a few minutes. Maybe just a short comment or a question. I’m happy to stay over and respond in any way that I can.
Question: Thanks for the talk. I think one of the things I’m learning, and maybe you can speak to it, is that I’m not actually interested in freedom as much as wanting what I want. And then the path is like getting me to be more peaceful or more this or more that. Is that something that you’ve encountered yourself, this “I don’t actually want to be free, I want to be happy” kind of thing?
Ying Chen: Yeah. So that’s good. I don’t know what all the words might be, you know. And so, it might be worthwhile to turn that question around to see, if this is my aspiration, how am I relating to this aspiration? How does it manifest for me right now, if that’s what’s aspiring for me?
Comment: I just really appreciated the piece about pleasant and unpleasant and how we think about that.
Ying Chen: Yeah. We have a lot of associations about pleasant and unpleasant and what they can mean to us. So this is a real worthy process in our practice: to begin to tease that apart, kind of like what Sariputta is pointing to. It’s like, “Oh, there is pleasant, there’s unpleasant. How do we associate with this?” It’s like immediately, “I don’t like this. I would rather it go away,” or “I’m fearful.” So we can begin to tease apart all of this. So, it’s great. Thank you.
Maybe we’ll end with a dedication of merit together. I really feel grateful for us to have this opportunity to practice together and to learn the Dharma teachings together. I still feel that resonance of this first turning of the Dharma wheel; we’re in this long stream.
May whatever benefits that arose out of our own practice and our own learning ripple out in all directions. May all the beings everywhere be benefited in some way. Maybe it’s a kind of ease of the heart, clarity of the mind, or healthy, vital bodies.
May they all be happy. May they all be peaceful.
And may we all, everyone everywhere, experience liberating wisdom and compassion in our own hearts and minds and everywhere, for all beings.
Thank you. Thank you, everyone.
Sutta: A discourse or sermon of the Buddha or one of his senior disciples. ↩
Pali: An ancient Indo-Aryan liturgical language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is the scriptural language of the Theravada Buddhist canon. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and painfulness of mundane life. ↩
Ajahn Sucitto: A British-born Theravada Buddhist monk and the former abbot of Cittaviveka (Chithurst Buddhist Monastery) in the UK. ↩
Kondañña: One of the first five disciples of the Buddha. He was the first to comprehend the Buddha’s teaching and become an arahant (a fully enlightened being). ↩
Parinibbana Sutta: A scripture from the Pali Canon that describes the final days and death of the Buddha. ↩
Philip Moffitt: A Buddhist meditation teacher and writer who leads retreats at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and other venues. ↩
Gil Fronsdal: A Norwegian-born American Buddhist teacher, writer, and scholar. He is a co-teacher at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. ↩
Sariputta: One of the two chief male disciples of the Buddha, along with Mahamoggallana. He was renowned for his wisdom and is depicted in the Buddhist scriptures as an important and influential disciple. ↩
Kusala: A Pali word that translates to “skillful,” “wholesome,” “meritorious,” or “conducive to welfare.” It refers to actions and states of mind that are beneficial and lead to positive outcomes. ↩