Mastering the Core Teachings of Buddha - An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book

The Three Trainings provide a great framework for thinking about spiritual work, a framework that can help us maintain a clear and empowering way of thinking about what we are doing. In this chapter, I will discuss many important aspects of the spiritual path and use the Three Trainings, actually the scope of each of the Three Trainings, to provide an easy and powerful way of dealing with these complex topics.

Just to review, the scope of the first training, which I call morality, is the ordinary world, the conventional world, the world that we are all familiar with before we even consider more specialized topics such as meditation. The goal is to act, speak and think in ways that are conducive to the welfare of yourself and others. The scope of the second training, concentration or depths of meditation, is to focus on very specific and limited objects of meditation and thus attain to specific altered states of consciousness. The scope of the third training, that of insight or wisdom, is to shift to perceiving reality at the level of individual sensations, perceive the Three Characteristics of them, and thus attain to profound insights into the nature of reality and thus realize stages of enlightenment.

First, I will consider happiness in the context of scopes of the Three Trainings. As training in morality is such a vast subject, the ways we can find happiness is also a vast subject, and becomes interesting primarily in comparison to the other two training’s scopes, those of concentration and wisdom. The common denominator of the concentration

attainments is that we learn to get ourselves into states of consciousness that are some mixture of blissful and peaceful, as well as increasingly spacious and removed from our ordinary experience. These can be a source of happiness that is far more intense and reliable than the happiness found in the ordinary world. Being able to access as much happiness and peace as we wish when we wish reduces our anger at the world from not providing us with these, making us less needy and greedy. There is also the happiness that comes from seeing the true nature of the sensations that make up our world and thus attaining to stages of realization or enlightenment.

There are three areas of renunciation that correspond to the scopes of the Three Trainings. We can renounce aspects of the ordinary world

The Three Trainings Revisited

by simply abandoning these things. We can quit our job, leave our relationship, stop smoking crack, and shave our heads. We can try to be less angry or fearful. We can work on our communication skills, trying to avoid lying and slander. Some of these may be easier than others, and some of these may be helpful and some not, but the important point here is that these sorts of forms of renunciation are, for better or for worse, renunciation of aspects of the ordinary world within the context of the first training’s scope. Or, we can renounce renouncing these things and do them. Renunciation is a very arbitrary concept when applied to the first training.

There is also the renunciation that comes from being willing and able to attain the temporary concentration attainments. We are willing to spend some time removed from the ordinary experience of the world and enter into states where the ordinary world becomes more and more removed from us. It is usually not that hard to convince people that there may be occasions when having the ability to renounce the ordinary world in this way for some period of time could be advantageous. We can all imagine taking a little bliss break and finding it helpful in some appropriate context.

There is also the type of renunciation associated with insight practices, in which one is willing to break from the gross conceptual way of working that is helpful for the scope of the ordinary world, break from the more restricted and refined conceptual way of working that is necessary to attain stable altered states of consciousness, and move to perceiving sensations individually and directly, seeing the true nature of them. This is a much more subtle and sophisticated form of

renunciation than the other two, and it is not always easy to convince people that having this option open to them is a good idea.

While “enlightenment” generally sounds very appealing, it suddenly sounds strange in the context of seeing all sensations as being utterly transient, a source of pain if we make artificial dualities out of them, and not self. People often mix up the three kinds of renunciation, the most common error being that they imagine that they must “give up” aspects of the first two trainings (a happy life and fun concentration states) in order to renounce them in the insight way, in which they see the true nature of the sensations that make up these things. They imagine that 53

The Three Trainings Revisited