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

it, “In the end, you must give up even the desire for enlightenment, but not too soon!” Sutta #131 in The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha is called “One Fortunate Attachment,” and in it the Buddha clearly states that making effort to realize the truth of your experience is an extremely good idea. He also goes on and on about the Three Characteristics; funny that.

Another reason that students often fail to make progress is that they confuse content and insight. I suspect that they are confused because they have spent their whole lives thinking about content, learning about content, and dealing with content in a context where content matters, i.e. when one is not doing insight practice. You can’t take a spelling test in first grade and say that all that is important is that words come and go, don’t satisfy and aren’t you. This just won’t fly and wouldn’t be appropriate. Just so, when practicing morality, the first and most fundamental training in spirituality, content is everything, or at least as far as training in morality can take you. You can’t be a mass murderer and rationalize this by thinking, “Well, they were all impermanent, unsatisfactory and empty, so why not kill ’em?” This just won’t fly either, and so content and spirituality get quite connected. This is good to a point: see the chapter called Right Thought and The Aegean

Stables.

Fixation on content even works well when practicing the second training, training in concentration. When meditation students are learning to concentrate, they are told to concentrate on specific things, like the breath, a Green Tara (a tantric “deity”), or some other such thing. This is content. There is no such thing as the breath or a Green Tara from the point of view of insight practices, as these are just fresh streams of impermanent and absolutely transitory sensations that are crudely labeled “breath” or “Green Tara.” But for the purpose of developing the second training, concentration, this is ignored and these impermanent sensations are crudely labeled “breath” or “Green Tara.”

Thus, even for pure concentration practice, what you are concentrating on, i.e. content, matters. Thus, the idea that content is everything is reinforced.

However, when it comes to insight practice, content will get you nowhere fast. In insight practice, everything the student has learned 106

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about being lost in the names of things and thoughts about them, i.e.

content, will be completely useless and an impediment. Here the inquiry must turn to impermanence, suffering and no-self. These characteristics must be understood clearly and directly in whatever sensations arise, be they beautiful, ugly, helpful, not helpful, skillful, not skillful, holy, profane, dull, or otherwise. Anything other than this is just not insight practice, never was and never will be.

It doesn’t matter what the quality of your mind is, or what the sensations of your body are, if you directly understand the momentary sensations that make these up to be impermanent, unsatisfactory and not self, then you are on the right path, the path of liberating insight.

However, as mentioned before, off the cushion the quality of your mind, your reactions, your words and deeds all matter. These are not in conflict. Insight practice is about ultimate reality, the ultimate nature of reality, and thus the specifics don’t matter. Morality and concentration are about relative reality, and thus the specifics are everything. Learning to be a master of both the ultimate and the relative is what this is all about.

Another reason that people don’t make progress is that they may be being taught by people who have no or little insight, and so are taught by those who are themselves fascinated by content and unskilled in going beyond this into insight practices. The scary truth is that there are far more people teaching insight meditation that don’t know what insight is than those that do, though this tends to be less true in big, established retreat centers. Thus, even if the students learn what they are taught, if those who do not know are teaching them, then what they learn is unlikely to be correct or helpful. While the teacher may have learned to parrot the language of ultimate reality, this is absolutely no substitute for direct knowledge of it. In the tradition I come from, they consider the second stage of enlightenment (Second Path, see Part III) to generally be the minimum level of understanding for a teacher. This is a very reasonable standard.

Another possible reason that people get lost and don’t follow the clear and basic instructions of insight practices is that they just can’t believe that doing something as completely simple as looking into the impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and emptiness of the mundane 107

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sensations that make up their ordinary world could produce awakening.