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Guided Meditation: An Ancient Path; Dharmette: (1 of 5) First Noble Truth - Kodo Conlin

The following talk was given by Kodo Conlin at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on January 01, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: An Ancient Path

Well, good morning. Welcome. It seems that overnight the year changed. Happy New Year! I feel very happy to be joining you for the first session of these 7:00 a.m. sittings in 2024. May our practice this year be fruitful. I'm joining you now from the Insight Retreat Center, so I'm on the West Coast and the dawn is just starting to break. I'm starting to see the grays and blues over the treetops. Wishing you all a peaceful morning.

So, we will start this year as I understand is the custom at IMC, by returning to one of the central frameworks in the Buddha's teaching. Returning to the root, we might say. And the teaching we will look at for this week is the Four Noble Truths. Let's spend some time setting up the meditation, then we'll enter into silence together.

For this meditation, to welcome ourselves into it, you can first imagine that you're walking in a forest. Say this forest has grown dense, thick with leaves, thick with trees, and brush, and shrubs, and grasses. The density increases to the point that you're not sure how to proceed. You don't know where to take the next step. So the best thing is to be still. Still, with senses open; still and attentive. And somehow, in that stillness, a way forward emerges. You could say we're rediscovering the path, a path that's been there all along. Now that we've seen the path, we can walk confidently on.

I'm imagining some of us, perhaps in 2023, became full of concerns and preoccupations. Maybe the trees and shrubs of our lives became dense. Maybe to the extent that we could benefit from a pause, stillness, and observation, so that we can sense our way forward and rediscover what path it is we're walking.

To hold two reflections in our mind during this sitting: One is, now that we've turned over a new year, what is asking to be released, relaxed, or even let go? And then later in the sitting, from that space of stillness—not from the head, but from the senses and the heart—sensing our way into what's next for us.

Let's start there. Let's find our way into the sitting posture. Settling our weight on our support. Spine growing long. Aligning that, maybe the shoulders roll back. Welcoming some deep breaths.

Already, what is asking to be released? Perhaps there's some extra muscle tension at the scalp, the forehead, the backs of the hands. Here with simplicity, present for this moment of experience. What is asking to be released?

Here the body breathing. What is asking to be released? And then as it fades, as it is released, what's the quality of the absence left behind?

Release and absence. What is the quality of this absence? A space where something new may emerge in its own time. No hurry.

And in the last minutes of this sitting, what is asking to be released, relaxed, let go? Opening the hand that grips. And then sensing the quality of the absence. The quality of the absence, and what has become possible.

Thank you.

Dharmette: (1 of 5) First Noble Truth

So, welcome again. It seems to be the first day of 2024. Wishing you a joyful and dharmic New Year. As I mentioned, it's the custom at IMC—I've seen Gil¹ give the first Sunday talk of the year on the Four Noble Truths. So inspired by that, we'll take up that same topic this week. In the context of the teaching lineages of Buddhist mindfulness, the Four Noble Truths, of course, hold a central place.

The tradition holds that the Four Noble Truths were the content of the Buddha's first teaching after his awakening. One helpful thing for us is that the Four Noble Truths can be a sort of summary of so much of the teaching, or they can serve as a framework that connects so many parts of the teaching. So there's that really big scope. I also find that the Four Noble Truths have this impressive degree of application. They can be applied as an understanding that's so helpful in a wide variety of the circumstances of our lives. So maybe with the Four Noble Truths in the background, one of Gil's slogans is that if you want to be free, study where you get stuck. That means we will have to study where we get stuck, and that's exactly what the Four Noble Truths are asking of us.

To start understanding the Four Noble Truths, one helpful thing to know is that one of the ways the Buddha was referred to is as the Great Physician. The Four Noble Truths are set up seemingly to follow in that medical model of his time. So, four parts: you've got the ailment, you have the second which is the basis or the condition or the cause, the third is the prognosis, and the fourth is the treatment. A medical model.

Let's correlate these with the Four Noble Truths. The first, the ailment: dukkha², suffering, stress. We're going to get to know this much more today. The Second Noble Truth correlates with the basis, the cause, the condition. This is the arising of dukkha, and in dharmic terms, we say it's the craving that leads to further becoming. We'll unpack that somewhat tomorrow. The Third Noble Truth correlates with the prognosis, and that is this wonderful fact that the cessation of suffering is possible. The cessation of that same craving that leads to further becoming—it can end. That's amazing. And then the Fourth Noble Truth correlates to the course of treatment, the path of practice that leads to the cessation of suffering. So you can pretty easily see the correlation with the ancient medical model here.

Something that's very interesting, and makes the Four Noble Truths not just an abstract set of ideas but locates them in our lives, is this fact that each of the Four Noble Truths has an associated task, or a duty, or a practice. As we go throughout the week, we'll talk each day about one of the truths and its associated task. Today we're looking at the First Noble Truth, and its associated task is to understand or to comprehend suffering.

Let's zoom in a bit on this First Noble Truth. The task of the First Noble Truth being to understand dukkha, suffering, and stress, it bears mentioning here that it's the nature of the path that our understanding will be partial all the way along until full awakening. It is said that if we fully understand dukkha in its depths, to its bottom, that precipitates awakening. So I mention this now, that our understanding will be partial, as actually a bit of encouragement. Let's not be too hard on ourselves for having a partial understanding. We're all doing our best with the understanding we have.

To talk about how we might develop in terms of understanding dukkha, I want to borrow an analogy, and that is the Appalachian Trail. I'm going to use this to point to three different modes of developing an understanding. Say you wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail. The first layer would be, of course, it would be great to read about it. Number one, you might find out that the Appalachian Trail is X miles or kilometers long, or that it has these certain features.

The second mode of developing an understanding would be reflection. Reflection on what you learn. You could reflect on the features of the trail. You might reflect on your own capacities as a hiker, and see that this trail is appropriate for you for right now, at your level of skill. This does something really important, which is it gives us the confidence that, "Yes, I can do this." It's this reflection that really gets to know what you've learned and then gives you some confidence.

And then the third mode of developing understanding is to walk the path for yourself. This is the sort of cultivated wisdom that only comes by, let's say, getting your boots dirty.

Similarly, in developing an understanding of the Dharma, and for today, developing an understanding of the First Noble Truth, you can start in this first mode by reading, or in this case, listening to the teachings. You begin to understand, "Oh, this is what the Buddha meant when he talked about suffering and stress. This is what all of these centuries of teachers have been talking about. This is it."

Then the second mode would look like a certain reflection on what you learn in terms of your own experience. One of the things that this mode of reflection opens up is this realization that, "Oh, the Dharma is right here. The Dharma is right here in my life, not somewhere else. This is where I can learn, reflect, and practice." It's this actual suffering; it's not some suffering in the abstract.

And then that opens the way for the third mode of developing understanding: that is to practice directly, to walk the path for ourselves. One teacher put this concisely and beautifully: it's our problems, actually, that are our meditation hall.

So let's go just a little bit further into each of these three. This first mode of understanding, in terms of the First Noble Truth, is to hear and learn the teaching. This is a moment when I'll pull straight from the texts, one of the definitions of dukkha, suffering, and stress. This is from—for those who like the sutta references—Middle Length Discourses 141³. The Buddha says: "Now what is the noble truth of stress? Birth is stressful, aging is stressful, death is stressful; sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, and despair are stressful; not getting what is wanted is stressful. In short, the five clinging aggregates⁴ are stressful."

For today, I'm really interested in highlighting one of these, and that is: not getting what one wants is stressful. This is a sort of First Noble Truth that is so visible and applicable now. Who of us cannot relate to not getting what we want from time to time? And here again we see this characteristic of the Buddha's teaching, that it's this dukkha that's evident and applicable and visible and understandable just right here in our lives.

In my understanding, to broaden this teaching a bit, by dukkha—suffering and stress—the Buddha means the entire array of suffering and stress. From very obvious physical pain or emotional distress, all the way to existential fear, to death itself, and to very subtle, perhaps pervasive dis-ease. It's this whole spectrum of experiences.

This might sound like a pessimistic start to a very important teaching, but let's remember that it's right here in our problems that the Dharma unfolds. The Buddha didn't just teach suffering, but taught a path and an assurance that its ending is possible.

So, this second mode of understanding, reflection. I want to highlight especially "not getting what one wants" and tell you just a brief story. As I get into the story, maybe take a moment just to reflect for yourself if there's been a recent time that you didn't, in fact, get what you wanted, and then how that went. How was that for you? My story went something like this:

It was about two weeks ago. I traveled to my home state to visit family for the holiday. I had all kinds of expectations, these visions of days in the kitchen with my family, and visits with my siblings and their spouses. It wasn't long after I got there that expectation met reality, and they didn't match. Presumably on the plane, despite my care, I got sick. A few days after the arrival, I found I was quite sick and had to spend most of the holiday without my family.

Not what I expected. Expectation met reality, and they did not match. It meant that I couldn't be in the same home as my vulnerable parents. All of this vision and expectation, these things that I'd been looking forward to, they became impossible. I wasn't getting what I wanted.

Now right here, right here, if we really want to pile dukkha upon dukkha, this is our opportunity to compound our misfortune. We could sort of double down on our expectations and make our desires into demands. Maybe this is a place where we can see underlying tendencies of aversion. Not getting what we want and just trying to assert that aversion will annihilate this reality that I'm experiencing. Or maybe the underlying tendency is to ignore. These are all possibilities.

But right here, right here where we're not getting what we want, this is so precious, because it can reveal to us what's happening underneath the surface. And because of the power of our mindfulness practice, we know that bringing a balanced, open, wise attention to all of the circumstances of life helps to grow the beautiful. Interestingly, what's expected and what arises—when they don't match, actually, there doesn't have to be suffering there. That's an amazing power of mindfulness that can grow our confidence.

And this is exactly how we go from the second mode of understanding to the third mode of understanding: by studying our suffering right here in the specifics of our life. Right here. And we can learn from the dukkha itself, the suffering and stress itself. We can learn when the dukkha actually doesn't arise when we expected it to arise. Or we can learn from that process of being with dukkha, understanding it, seeing it, observing it, reflecting on it, and then watching it fade and let go. It won't be here with us forever.

So to conclude briefly, the task of the First Noble Truth is to understand dukkha, and we can practice it in these three modes: hearing and learning, reflecting, and cultivating and developing. This is the beginning of an ennobling path of the Four Noble Truths, and we'll talk more as we carry on tomorrow with the Second Noble Truth. Take care. Wishing you a happy New Year.