This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video “Buddhist Perspectives on Conflict and Non Conflict” with Andrea Fella (1 of 2). It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Andrea Fella at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Hi everyone. Nice to see you all. As Rob said, this class is on the Buddhist perspectives on conflict and non-conflict. This is a topic that to me has felt very alive in the last few years. It seems like there’s a lot of conflict in our world, and that is the emphasis that I’m looking at in this class: how conflict between people can be understood from a Buddhist perspective. How we can see it in our own hearts and minds, understand how it comes up in relationships, and also to begin to look at how we can explore maybe coming to terms with conflict, and also ways to navigate conflict, perhaps even to resolve conflict, although sometimes that doesn’t feel like it’s possible. So navigating conflict perhaps might be the goal. How do we navigate our lives with all of this conflict?
So, let’s start with a sitting to just settle in together. And I’ll offer a little bit of reflection. One thing I’ll say before we start the sitting: conflict is a form of dukkha.1 It’s a form of stress, of suffering. And often we think of it as external to us, but we also can see internal conflict. We can see how our minds are fighting with themselves, and we can see how our minds fight with what’s happening in the world. The exploration of our inner life can also be understood as meeting conflict internally. What does it mean to know conflict and non-conflict internally?
In the sitting practice, we can explore how we are relating to stresses, how we are relating to reactivity that comes up as we’re sitting. The practice of mindfulness, the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, is really about understanding dukkha. That’s what he said about the first noble truth, the truth of dukkha, and conflict as a form of dukkha. Dukkha should be understood, and by understanding, I understand he means not thinking about but meeting, understanding it experientially. And that is what the Satipatthana Sutta2 encourages.
For instance, in the third foundation of mindfulness, the instructions say one should understand a mind of aversion as a mind of aversion, and a mind without aversion as a mind without aversion. One should understand a mind with greed as a mind with greed, and a mind without greed as a mind without greed. It’s really pointing to understanding and knowing what our states of mind are, not judging them, not even trying to fix them consciously, not doing something about them. The Satipatthana Sutta mindfulness instructions are about understanding through meeting the experience.
What happens there? The follow-on from meeting our reactivity, our internal reactivity, from knowing aversion as aversion and knowing non-aversion, the non-arising of aversion, when the mind does not have aversion as not having aversion, the mind begins to understand through that meeting that non-aversion is more spacious, more easeful. We understand that the aversion or greed or any reactivity has a constricted quality to it. It’s suffering, and the human system does not want to suffer. The experience of meeting that reactivity is that it begins to let go. The process of this understanding of reactivity, understanding of dukkha, begins to create the conditions for dukkha to release. That’s an important part of the Buddhist teachings on conflict: that it needs to be understood, and through that understanding, there can begin to be ways for it to release, not just internally but also in the wider world. That’s a forward-looking way to think about what we’re going to be exploring in these two weeks.
As we settle into mindfulness now, just settling in however you usually practice, exploring the possibility of meeting what’s here and just opening to it. We’ll begin with a settling however you typically settle. That may be with an open awareness, just receiving whatever is arriving, whatever is arising, or it may be settling with a primary object like the breath.
The mindfulness of whether we are practicing mindfulness in a focused way or in an open way is about opening to what is being received. If we’re receiving the breath, for instance, explore the possibility of receiving it, letting it be as it is, allowing it to be as it is. We can be mindful of the breath as it is. We can be mindful of experience as it is.
As we open to experience as it is, it can be useful from time to time to be curious about our relationship to the experience. Whether we’re attuning to the breath or exploring open awareness or metta practice, whatever practice that you’re doing, from time to time, have a curiosity: how is the mind in relationship to what is happening? Is there a tension or a tightness around the meditation itself? Is there a liking or a not liking of what is arising? We can just kind of open and be curious. What is that relationship? You don’t have to think about it or try to find it. We can almost just drop in a little question: “How am I in relationship to what’s happening?” And then just keep noticing what’s happening, what’s arising. Keep exploring experience as it is.
Sometimes with that question dropped in, there can be a shift or a recognition. “Oh, there’s holding on here, or pushing into, or focusing, or forcing, or there’s confusion or frustration.” And if we notice a relationship, we can just allow that also. That is an aspect of what is arising, recognizing it as an experience. It’s helpful to know that it’s there. If it wasn’t recognized before, it was kind of behind the scenes informing how we were practicing. So just knowing it’s there. You may recognize, “Well, there’s frustration and there’s this thing happening. That’s what’s happening right now.”
Sometimes as we notice a relationship, it shifts quite naturally. You may notice that we’re holding on to the breath, for example, really tightly. And simply noticing that, there can be more ease around being with the breath.
But fundamentally, keeping your practice simple, receiving experience as it is. Exploring the possibility of allowing, even allowing those relationships when they’re recognized.
I’d like to end the sitting with a quote from a Zen teacher, Daishan Morgan. This reflection is around allowing, accepting.
“To accept means to receive what is offered. Circumstances of life give rise to conditions and our acceptance of these conditions is just the acceptance of things as they are. What is not meant by the idea of acceptance is any agreement or disagreement with the way things are. Acceptance is about basing ourselves in reality, not about making judgments of liking or disliking or of agreeing and disagreeing. To accept the situation is to be grounded in the actual state of things without getting lost in ideals or fantasies of how we would like it to be. We then have a good basis from which to see what action may be called for. Acceptance does not imply inertia. On the contrary, to be grounded in reality gives rise to a true response.”
I like this quote. It really, to me, points to the importance of understanding as a ground for navigating conflict. This is the way the whole of our practice is framed and unfolds: we open to what is, and from that place, wisdom begins to arise and support us to navigate our lives. We make more skillful choices around how we engage in the world. We make more skillful choices around what happens in our internal lives. Likewise, in the world, understanding the situation. What I really love that this points to is that acceptance is about understanding what is already here, not turning away from it, not trying to put a different veil on it and saying, “Well, if only this had happened, this is what would be here.” We are fully, clearly acknowledging this is what is here. This is the state of the situation. This is the state of the world.
Without inner conflict around that state of the world, that acceptance that this is the state of the world, this is what has come to be, as this quote points out, this gives us, it creates the conditions for a skillful response to arise instead of our habitual reactivity coming from anger and hatred and confusion. To me, this is a beautiful expression of an overarching perspective on conflict from the Buddhist perspective.
Conflict, as I said earlier, is a form of dukkha; it’s a form of suffering. When there is conflict, either internally or externally, we’re feeling it. We’re feeling the constriction, we’re feeling the struggle. Other words for conflict in English: contention, resistance, fighting against, hanging on to, stress. Those are all words that evoke suffering, evoke dukkha. When there’s conflict, we often feel like something has to give, something has to change. And perhaps there is. We often think the other person needs to change to the way I am. And that’s why we end up with the hard kind of fighting.
The exploration of conflict is to begin to understand, and I think the first thing we’ll be exploring this week really is how conflict arises, how it arises in our own minds and how it arises in the world. Largely, the understanding in the Buddhist exploration is that conflict arises in each person’s mind individually, and that is where we end up clashing.
There’s a sutta3 I asked Rob to send out, the sutra references. This first one, the exposition on non-conflict from the Majjhima Nikāya.4
“A state with conflict is a state beset by suffering, vexation, despair and fever and it is the wrong way. A state without conflict is a state without suffering, vexation, despair and fever and it is the right way. Therefore, you shall train yourself thus. We shall know the state with conflict, and we shall know the state without conflict. And knowing these, we shall enter upon the way without conflict.”
There are some interesting things in this. This basically is pointing to conflict as a state of mind. It is arising in our minds. It’s conditioned. All states in the mind are conditioned. It’s an impermanent state. It is a phenomenon arising in the mind. The Buddhist understanding of mental phenomenon is that they arise in dependence on conditions and they pass away in dependence on conditions. They are impermanent. They are not self. They are simply phenomenon. They arise in dependence on conditions, and we will go into some of the conditions that lead to the arising of conflict.
Understanding conflict as a state, just understanding that it is conditioned, that’s useful. The Buddha also points out in the sutta that it’s useful to understand the state without conflict. I think of this as very similar to what I mentioned about the third foundation of mindfulness in the Satipatthana Sutta. One understands the mind with aversion and the mind without aversion. One understands the mind with greed and the mind without greed. Understanding that, one understands and feels that the mind without greed, the mind without aversion, the mind without delusion is a state of non-suffering. We feel the difference between when the mind is caught by aversion, caught by greed, caught by delusion, and when the mind is not. The difference is palpable. Feeling that difference, the understanding through the teachings of the practice of mindfulness, understanding that difference, the mind begins to move in the direction of non-suffering. It begins to let go of the tension, of the tightness, of the constriction around greed, aversion, and delusion.
This is a similar pointing: that we one should train yourselves to know the state with conflict and know the state without conflict. This can be conflict internally or conflict externally. So know in your own experience when there is that state of mind that is fighting, that is hanging on to, fighting against, resisting. Know what that’s like, and also know what it’s like when the mind does not have that state. As we begin to recognize the difference between those two, it’s quite natural that the mind wants to move in the direction of the state without conflict.
Our minds are so confused. When the mind is in the state with conflict, holding for instance to aversion or anger, when that state is present in the mind, there’s also often a belief present in the mind that “I’m right,” and that if I’m not following what I think is right here, there’s no other way to end this conflict. For instance, with something like anger, when we experience anger, the mind caught by that anger or aversion is telling us, “The only way that I can get rid of this, the only way for this anger to end is to get rid of this thing that I don’t like, to eliminate it in some way or to get myself out of here.” With aversion, the movement can either be a kind of lashing out or a pulling back. The mind with aversion thinks those are the only two possible responses, that it somehow needs to get rid of the thing. It doesn’t quite understand that there are other ways of taking action. The mind of aversion, the mind of conflict, believes that in the conflict, in the aversion, there’s the answer to how to get rid of the conflict or how to get rid of the aversion. That’s a fundamental confusion because that mind of aversion, when acted on, just generates more aversion. It may temporarily let us be free from the thing, and then we get a moment of relief, but that pattern just tends to create the reliance on aversion, the reliance on fighting, the reliance on that kind of conflict.
The quote from Daishin Morgan again points out there may be different ways to take action. We think that the emotions that underlie conflict—greed, aversion—when they’re active, they think they’re the only way to solve the conflict. But when we start to look at the conflict, look at those experiences, we begin to see actually there are other ways. We can act out of wisdom and discernment, and we can act out of compassion, and those do not have to have aversion, anger, or greed in them.
That, to me, is what the Daishin Morgan quote is pointing to. “To accept the situation is to be grounded in the actual state of things. We then have a good basis from which to see what action may be called for. Acceptance does not imply inertia. To be grounded in reality gives rise to a true response.” And to me, that is what this quote from the Buddha points to. “You should train yourselves thus. We shall know the state with conflict and the state without conflict.” As we know those states, as we understand the difference between those states, the true response is moving in the direction of non-conflict. But it is not non-action. I think that’s a crucial understanding. Non-conflict does not mean non-action. That’s a hard thing for us to wrap our minds around sometimes.
The teachings point us to understanding conflict. A lot of the mindfulness teachings are pointing to understanding internally what our experience is. But the Satipatthana Sutta also points to understanding experience internally and externally, and then both internally and externally. The application of understanding suffering can be not only about our internal suffering but also the suffering in the world. How do we understand suffering externally? A lot of the approach will be to apply these similar teachings around understanding suffering and how it comes to be, not only to our inner experience but also to our outer experience.
So a question can arise: how is conflict conditioned, constructed? At this point, turning more towards relational conflict. How is relational conflict conditioned or constructed?
The second sutta excerpt that is in the handout points to a question. Sakka is said to be one of the gods in one of the realms, and he came to the Buddha and asked him a question that has been repeated over and over again throughout the millennia. “What binds us gods, humans, all beings? What binds us so that they wish to be free of enmity, hostility, violence, and hate, and still have enmity, violence, hostility, and hate?”
I’m going to just point to the chain of things the Buddha highlights here. The Buddha responds, “The fetters of jealousy and stinginess are what bind people to enmity, hate, violence, and hostility.” This is a relational emotion. Jealousy is a relational emotion. We want something somebody else has. Stinginess, we want to keep what we have. This is where the Buddha points to some of the foundation of relational hatred, relational wars. Wars come out of stinginess and jealousy. Envy could also be added in there. Envy, the wish not only to have the thing that somebody else has, but to deprive them of having it. That’s the basic relational thing the Buddha points to as to where conflict arises from: jealousy and stinginess. These are relational mind states, but again, they are mind states. They are conditioned.
So the next question is, where do those come from? Where did jealousy and stinginess come from? And the Buddha responds, “From the liked and the disliked.” We like some things, we don’t like other things. This is a pretty simple thing that we all understand. From that comes jealousy when somebody else has something we like or want and we don’t have it.
Sakka has some wisdom because he keeps asking, “So where does that come from?” So jealousy and stinginess arise from the liked and disliked. “What is the source of the liked and the disliked?” “Desire is the source of the liked and disliked.” “What is the source of desire?” The word for desire in the Pāli5 here is chanda,6 which is often just translated as desire, and it can be a kind of a neutral desire. It sometimes is prefixed with dhammachanda,7 which is a wholesome desire, and it sometimes prefixed with desires for things like kāmachanda,8 the desire for sense pleasure. In this context, it is mostly connected to or associated with the kind of desire that’s not helpful, the taṇhā,9 the craving, the wanting to hold on to the things that we like.
“What is the source of desire?” And it says, “Thought is the source of desire.” That’s an interesting pointing here. Again, everything that the Buddha is pointing to are conditions arising in the mind. Many of you may be familiar with the teaching on dependent origination. It describes how suffering arises, so it’s relevant in terms of exploring conflict as well. In that teaching, it points to things that are pleasant and unpleasant as being the condition that leads to craving. Feeling itself, the feeling of whether things are pleasant or unpleasant, is understood not to be a decisive condition for the arising of craving, because feeling pleasant or unpleasant can arise and craving does not have to arise. So when does it arise? At what point does that feeling lead to craving? When we’re thinking about it from the perspective of “I need to have that, I want to have that.”
“What is the source of desire? Thought. What is the source of thought? Judgments driven by proliferation of perceptions are the source of thought.” This proliferation is a translation of the word papañca.10 There’s another translation of this line from another person who translated the suttas. His translation of this is, “The tendency to proliferation is the source of thoughts.”
This is where the sutta then shifts to, “Okay, so how do we let go of the tendency of proliferation?” The teaching is basically that we should understand what things lead to conflict, what things lead to suffering, and what things lead to non-suffering, what leads to non-conflict. It comes back to that: understand conflict, understand non-conflict. This is the training.
I want to look at a little bit more teaching on papañca because this is a key. The teaching here has traced conflict in the world back to this tendency to papañca. What is papañca? The tendency of papañca is often translated as proliferation, often talked about in teachings around this topic as a lot of thinking, a mind that’s run amok, just continually thinking, a mind lost in thought.
The teaching on papañca, I believe from reading a number of descriptions of how it is used and described, several other teachers have pointed to it as a much deeper process than simply a lot of thinking. The key teaching on papañca is in the suttas here in the handout, which describes how it arises.
Dependent on sense experience, sense consciousness arises. Based on sense experience, sense consciousness arises. With the contact of sense experience, there is feeling. With what one feels, that one perceives. When we have a sense experience—seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, touching, and things happening in the mind—there is a basic sense of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. When there’s that contact, the mind feels a contact with the sense base, and there’s a perception of it. We recognize what it is: a body sensation, a sight, a sound. We may recognize it at a more complex level like it’s a bird or a car or a motorcycle. We recognize the sound. That is a kind of a shift from the feeling side of things to the more cognitive side: perception. It’s very easy for that cognitive side of perception to shift into thinking.
And that’s what the sutta says: “What one perceives, that one thinks about.” When we perceive something, we start thinking about it. This is quite natural. We can see this happening in our meditation practice and in our daily lives. We’re taking a walk down the road and a motorcycle goes by, and it’s loud and noisy. We hear the sound, we notice it’s a motorcycle, and we start thinking about motorcycles, how much noise they make, and how frustrated we are with the amount of noise they make. We’ve launched into thinking, and a little bit into papañca.
“What one thinks about, that one mentally proliferates.” That’s papañca. The next part of the sutta is the key, because we don’t simply think about things; we kind of hold on to that perspective, and then we start experiencing things from that perspective. “With what one has mentally proliferated as the source, perceptions and notions born of mental proliferation beset one with respect to past, future, and present sense experience.” That proliferation kind of creates a lens, we could say, a perspective that we then start seeing experience through. We could call papañca “perspective making.” That’s one way that our minds get really into trouble, because we create a perspective, we start meeting experience from that perspective, and we start believing that perspective.
That’s the problematic nature of papañca. It’s a very fundamental process in our minds that, essentially, one way to frame it is that we take our own experience to be the truth of what is actually happening. We take our beliefs to be fact. We take our experience to be reality. This is a key understanding in Buddhist psychology. Everything that we experience, we can only experience mediated through our own minds. We are not experiencing what is actually out there. What we are experiencing is something that our minds have created. Every sight, every sound, every smell, every taste, every touch, every thought, every emotion is something created by our minds. We understand our mental stuff is often created by our minds, but sights and sounds and smells? This is the understanding that we are experiencing mediated through our sense experience, the consciousness, the perception, the feeling. That is what we are experiencing.
So we are not actually experiencing what’s out there. But the process of papañca basically has us believing that what we are experiencing is what’s actually out there. So our perspective is true. Our views are true. This is a foundational process in our mind. And I think you can maybe begin to see how that view of “I am right, my view is true,” when replicated 8 billion times, everybody doing the same thing, of course there’s conflict. Everybody has the same tendency to take their experience to be true, to believe their views to be how it should be. When we multiply that by 8 billion, of course there’s conflict. This is why the Buddha points back to papañca as being the source of conflict. It’s basically coming back to views and attachment to views.
I’m going to skip the views sutta for now. It basically is pointing to the familiarity that people have with believing “my view is the right view, every other view is wrong.” It also includes the teaching that these views are created. Realizing that how we believe, what our views are, are conditioned. There’s a place in the sutta where the follower Anāthapiṇḍika11 is saying to these other folks who are all proclaiming their views, “These views are conditioned. They’re arising either from their own inappropriate attention or from dependence on the word of another.” So again, pointing to the conditioned nature of views.
When Anāthapiṇḍika expresses his own view, he expresses it in a different way. He doesn’t say, “My view alone is true.” Anāthapiṇḍika’s view is a view about the nature of conditioned reality, not about something out there being the way it is. He says, “Whatever is brought into being is fabricated, dependently arisen, and inconstant. Whatever is inconstant is suffering. Whatever is suffering is not me, not mine, not who I am. This is the sort of view I have.” He’s pointing to a useful view, perhaps. The followers try to use his argument back on him to say, “Well, you’re just clinging to that view, too.” And Anāthapiṇḍika says, “Yes, this is a dependently arisen view, and when I see that, I’m not clinging to it, I’m not holding to it, there’s no suffering around that.” This is pointing to a different way to hold views and also to understand the kinds of views that are useful, because this kind of view is self-correcting. Anāthapiṇḍika says at the end, “Having seen a view with right discernment as it actually is, I discern the escape from it right now. I see it’s possible to not cling to it.”
This points to different kinds of views. The views the other people were expressing were views around the nature of “this is the way it is.” They were saying, “The cosmos is eternal,” or “The cosmos is not eternal.” Again, that kind of reifying or saying that what I have experienced or what somebody else has told me, that is the way it is. Anāthapiṇḍika says his kind of view, this view that things are conditioned and holding on to something conditioned is suffering, that kind of view helps one to not hold on to views.
There is another sutta, the next one in the handout, that points to the attachment to views as being a source of conflict. “For one free of passion towards perception, there are no ties. For one realized through wisdom, there are no illusions. Those attached to perception and views roam the world offending people.”
This is pointing to views being intimately connected to this process of papañca, the process of reifying, of taking what is out there to be actual experience, and the views that are created from that. The clinging to views is a major source of conflict. As I said a few moments ago, if we multiply by 8 billion people saying, “My view is the right way, the only way, everybody else’s view is wrong,” we will end up with wars. We’ll end up with the state of the world that we have.
So, let’s take a five-minute break until five after the hour.
All right. Well, before I open it to questions, I want to read another quote. This is from a scholar. He actually wrote a very relevant article, some of which I have used to create this course. Professor Palihawadana. The article is called “Theravāda12 Perspectives on the Causation and the Resolution of Conflict” or something like that, and it’s available as a PDF file online. I will put that in the chat a little later.
Here’s what he said around this papañca: “This process of distorted perception of papañca, of placing every bare perception into a framework of emotions and beliefs that have come from our past, our history, our conditioning, robs the freshness out of our experiences. But we are not aware of this constant interference of the past. Because of this unawareness, which is our ignorance and our delusion, we see humanity fragmented into me and others, us and them, and in various other stereotypes, skin color, ethnicity, language, ideology included.”
This is pointing to another way that papañca works. It creates this sense of me and you, self and other, us and them, which is a huge realm in which conflict arises. One thing I’d say too is that in conflict related to selfing and othering, sometimes the person experiencing the most suffering around the conflict is not the one who’s clinging the most, who has the strongest identification. People in a dominant culture, who are in a group sharing a perspective, if you’re in the minority there, it can be that the people in the dominant group are actually clinging more strongly to their perspective than the person who’s suffering the most from being “othered.” People in the dominant culture can cling strongly to views of culture and are often unaware of that clinging because it is the dominant view, and not agreeing with those views can be dangerous, as we’re kind of seeing play out here.
All right. So, some questions and, um, yeah, Barton.
Barton: Hi, Andrea. So, just a maybe a quick one. You a little while ago, maybe 20 minutes ago or so… I should say, by the way, speaking of conflict, I’m somewhat conflicted today. I accidentally signed up for two courses and I got the dates mixed up. I don’t think it’s fair to the teachers to tell you which one I went to, but anyways, I’m glad I came to this. What I wanted to know, you were talking earlier about how everything originates in the mind, and this is a principled teaching I believe. It’s highly relevant for me lately because I’ve been contemplating and meditating on and studying emptiness, which is a concept that I sort of grasp but don’t really grok or get completely yet. I don’t quite feel it in my bones, sort of thing. I’m still thinking it through because it’s fundamentally opposed to everything that we experience in our lives and are taught. So when you were talking about, for example, when you perceive a thing, it’s not as it is—I can’t remember your exact words—but is that what you were referring to, is emptiness basically in the perceived thing?
Andrea: I would say yes. The nature of our experience is constructed. What we experience of something, like what we see, is actually like little pixelated things. When I see a picture on the wall, it’s actually constructed in the mind. We can actually see the reflection of it on the retina, you know, you can see how it’s being created in the sense base and then in the mind, we then interpret it as a picture. So what we’re experiencing is not the actual thing. It is something that is created, and that creation is just a creation. It’s not a thing. And so it’s empty in that way. In the Buddhist understanding, the Theravāda perspective, the perspective of the suttas is that emptiness is empty of self and what belongs to self. The understanding of emptiness from the Theravāda perspective is that whenever we take something to be “I,” “me,” or “mine,” we are reifying, and that’s that process of papañca again. We’re kind of saying this is a thing, and it’s not what we take it to be. It is processes unfolding. There’s no thing here. It is empty of any inherent existence.
Barton: That’s where it gets confusing, because to say that a thing is empty is not the same as saying that it doesn’t exist. I’ve tried to explain this to a couple people. I’m still working on really deeply understanding it and accepting it. There’s a difference between the intellectual grasping of a concept and then really taking it to heart and embracing it. When I try to explain to others, I’m still failing a bit, but the biggest thing that comes up is everybody says, “So you’re saying it doesn’t exist?” Like, “No, that’s not what I’m saying.”
Andrea: Sometimes what I say is, “It doesn’t exist in the way we think it exists.”
Barton: Well, I think what you just said is really good. You were saying we are basically reifying that thing, recreating it, as a representation through our sensors. We’re taking it in, then we reify it in our mind to reconstruct it so that we can process and hold the thing that is not actually in our mind as a construct or as a virtualization. For example, I can look at an image of an airplane and I don’t have to be next to the airplane. So there’s actually a double representation. There’s the photo, and now I’m reifying the photo and I’m thinking, “Oh, how cool is that airplane?” And I haven’t actually been next to the airplane. So, anyway, thank you. This is helpful. I hope you’re going to touch on compassion later. You were talking about how there is so much conflict because people see things so differently, the 8 billion people. And yet I personally feel that there is no immediate fix for that other than compassion.
Andrea: Mostly I’ll talk about compassion next time. This time is more looking at how conflict arises.
Dukkha: A Pāli word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is a central concept in Buddhism, referring to the fundamental unsatisfactoriness and pain of mundane life. ↩
Satipatthana Sutta: A key discourse from the Pāli Canon that is the primary source for the practice of mindfulness meditation. ↩
Sutta: A discourse or sermon of the Buddha or one of his disciples, collected in the Pāli Canon. ↩
Majjhima Nikāya: The “Middle-length Discourses,” the second of the five nikāyas, or collections, in the Sutta Piṭaka of the Pāli Canon. ↩
Pāli: An ancient Indo-Aryan liturgical language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is the classical language of the Theravāda Buddhist canon. ↩
Chanda: A Pāli term for “desire,” “intention,” or “will.” It can be wholesome, unwholesome, or neutral depending on the context. ↩
Dhammachanda: A wholesome desire or intention, specifically the desire to practice the Dharma and attain enlightenment. ↩
Kāmachanda: Sensual desire, the desire for pleasure through the five senses. It is considered one of the five hindrances in Buddhist practice. ↩
Taṇhā: A Pāli word for “thirst,” “desire,” or “craving.” It is a key concept in the Four Noble Truths, identified as the cause of dukkha. ↩
Papañca: A Pāli term often translated as “mental proliferation,” “conceptual proliferation,” or “objectification.” It refers to the mind’s tendency to elaborate on and complicate sensory experience with concepts, views, and narratives, which leads to suffering. ↩
Anāthapiṇḍika: A wealthy merchant and chief lay disciple of the Buddha. He is known for his generosity, particularly for purchasing the Jetavana monastery for the Buddha and his monks. ↩
Theravāda: The “School of the Elders,” the oldest surviving branch of Buddhism. It is the dominant form of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand. ↩