Here we will discuss Buddha Dharma Talks With Buddhist Council which will help you to get motivated from everything and you take the desired action in your life.
What are the processes that lead us to progress down the path towards awakening in one early suta called the great forty which is a somewhat obscure suta but I think a fascinating one nonetheless the buddha tries to delve into some of the mechanisms here that keep us moving in the right direction.
It's a Sutra that has many different aspects another aspect of the suta involves the distinction between mundane and transcendent aspects of the path and that is a separate issue that I'll get to a little bit later on in this talk but for now.
What I want to do is to focus on this engine that's what you might call three-stroke engine here that keeps us moving in the right direction now this suit of the great 40 is interesting as being one of the few places where right concentration which is the eighth step on the Eightfold Path the last step right concentration is defined as a kind of a focused mind a one-pointed mind that is supported by all of the other path factors the other seven path factors it's unusual because usually in early Buddhism right concentration is defined in terms of the four jhanas jhanas are states of a meditative absorption which we have certain kinds of feelings that arise naturally within us along with Buddha Dharma Talks With Buddhist Council.
Pleasant feelings of various kinds so this is unusual in this case however what the Buddha says here is that in all of these cases he says right view comes first right view that is the first of the eight steps on the Eightfold Path it comes first not in not simply in being the first step but in literally being the at the head of everything.
We can think of this in conceptual terms that it's knowing right from wrong that keeps us going in the right direction that keeps us from falling off the path to one side or the other now at our stage in the path where were the relative beginners or even pretty far along we should understand this as conceptual.
In early Buddhism that is it's knowing the concepts of a right versus wrong of knowing that there is a difference between right and wrong that is to say part of the right view that keeps that as the for you know.
The first stage on this journey that this thing that comes first part of this is overcoming our ordinary cynicism about right and wrong are ordinary relativism about right and wrong these senses that we have that oh maybe there isn't really any difference between doing right and doing wrong that's the kind of opinion that can really get us sidetracked or off-track completely by Buddha Dharma Talks With Buddhist Council,
So it's overcoming those ordinary tendencies that's part of this beginning stage this conceptual beginning stage along the path and then what right view helps us with is investigating the other elements of the path, in particular, the Buddha says here investigating right intention or whether we have the right or wrong intentions our right actions our right speech our Right Livelihood investigating all of these and seeing right versus wrong seeing that there is a better way to do things a way that is more skillful more healthy for us and for other people and that there are other ways that are less skillful and healthy for us and for everybody else it's seeing these differences you all of these different aspects of the Eightfold Path that keeps us moving in the right direction.
But in all of these cases just seeing and understanding this difference between right and wrong isn't alone enough it's not enough simply to know or see this difference we have to engage effort to abandon the wrong and in all of these and to foster the right in all of these.
So we have to make effort to let's say abandon wrong speech or a wrong action we're on livelihood wrong intention and to foster our ordinary tendencies towards kindness and compassion let's say with intention or with our speech with our actions with the whatever livelihood we pick it's its effort together with the right view that keeps us going that actually keeps us going.
I mean the view itself doesn't in a sense go anywhere the view is just a view until it engages with the effort it's idle but even that's not enough we also need the element of mindfulness I think we all know that you can make effort even with a right view even knowing what you should be doing and you can make a certain kind of effort but if the effort is not done mindfully it can misfire.
I think we all know of examples where we know what the right thing to do is where we're making a certain kind of effort but we're not really engaging with the world mindfully we're not really fully engaged and in that kind of circumstance a right effort can go wrong we can step on the row step off on the wrong foot and also in that kind of circumstance we may not be making an appropriate effort at all.
So what we need is a mindful approach to life and also in all of its circumstances what the Buddha says in this suit to on the great 40 is that these three path factors are essential in a certain way of looking at it the most important they're the ones that the Buddha says revolve around all of the other path factors you can think of it or I think of it as kind of again a three-stroke engine that sort of continues moving forward they revolve around they move around the other path factors right view right effort right mindfulness right view keeping us going in the right direction right effort keeping us actually moving and right mindfulness keeping the mind engaged.
So that we are acting in an appropriate way given the circumstance it's these three path factors engaged that helps us to put into practice right intention and right action and Right Livelihood and right speech and so on this is this three-stroke engine that I say helps us progress in the right direction as we practice now there's another element of this suta which i mentioned which has to do with the distinction between mundane and transcendent when it comes to path factors in particular in this in the suta and the pali example.
We find various these path factors given both mundane and transcendent interpretations that is to say there's mundane right view transcendent right view mundane intention and action speech livelihood there are a number of these that are given both and the distinction is given between mundane and transcendent is that the mundane path factors are he says defiled the defiled path factors they ripen in attachment they're done simply for doing.
Shall we say getting good karma for ourselves that you might say they're self-directed they're selfish in a sense they're based on getting benefits for ourselves and in some sense whereas the transcendent path factors he says are undefiled they ripen in Awakening as opposed to attachment now the idea here basically is that the mundane path factors our path factors directed at the good that is to say their path factors that include the right view?
So they're directed in the right direction but they're defiled because they are directed towards benefits for ourselves, in other words, we're doing good in order to gain something out of it let's say that's an example but precisely how to make this a distinction here between mundane and transcendent is a little bit difficult.
There are some oddities with the presentation for example when the suta makes the distinction between mundane and transcendent right view for example but neither of these definitions that it discusses involves the Four Noble Truths which is very strange because in most early Buddhist texts or many early Buddhist texts right view is defined in terms of the Four Noble Truths of view of the first second third and fourth noble truth understanding or seeing that that life is unsatisfactory.
Unsatisfactory nature of life is due to our attachments and that there is an end to attachments and that attacked that end is through the Eightfold Path that is sort of the understanding of right view that we get most of the time we don't find that in this particular suit though and similarly with many of the other path factors the mundane path factor such as let's say a mundane right speech or mundane right action Monday and right intention these are given the definition of the mundane one is using the same words that we find the path factor itself defined in other texts.
Why is that strange well it's strange because here they say that that Monday path factor culminates in attachment it ripens in attachment whereas in other texts that the same definition ripens in Awakening that is to say the path factor itself is the one that leads us to wake and accept in this text it doesn't in this text you need something more so this is very strange and the question is what to make of that and here is where a deep historical study and textual comparisons of parallel recensions and other languages can be immensely helpful that one of the people studying?
This most deeply is the scholar of early Buddhism an ally, oh and he has looked and others have looked at the recensions of this particular text as we find it in the Chinese example and in the Tibetan example and in those examples we don't have any mention of this distinction between mundane and transcendent in these path factors.
In other words, there are a number of different mentions of mundane and transcendent in this task and that in the Pali text that we just don't find in other examples that have been translated into other languages so the conclusion that Analia takes and others as well is that this distinction between mundane and transcendence that we find in the great 40 was probably a later edition, in other words, it wasn't originally there it wouldn't perhaps have been there in the buddha's lifetime.
It would have been added in particular Analia believes it would have been added perhaps during the time of the rising of the Abhidhamma or RB dharma now the Abhidhamma is a later tradition within Buddhism each school had its abbe Dharma and that was a way of sort of collating and interpreting the early texts by trying to find the commonalities in all of them and put them into an organized and systematic kind of theory and one of the things that happen when you try to do that is you try to overcome problems or at least potential problems that you find in the original texts.
One of these problems or concerns was making out precisely the distinction between somebody approaching the path from let's say a beginner's perspective versus somebody who sees the path from a more awakened perspective what is this awakening mind what is this transcendent mind like how does it differ from the more mundane mind that we ordinarily have that is I think many of us have struggled with perhaps the differences between let's say being on the Buddhist path and doing it for selfish reasons to make ourselves better.
People let's say versus being on the Buddhist path in a kind of a selfless way and we understand that the selfless way is perhaps more refined and farther along but we aren't there yet or at least we're not there often.
So within the later period of development of these theories, there was an attempt or more of an attempt or an interest a concern about distinguishing these two distinguishing between people who were on the path but shall we say not entirely on the path because they were doing things that weren't quite right versus people who were really completely on the path and as you make that out more and more and try to refine this more and more it becomes that sort of your own that the transcendent path becomes smaller and smaller and smaller until that transcendent path really is only momentary.
If you like at the end of the path to awakening when awakening actually occurs and then at that moment or at that time that small-time period then you all of a sudden are on this transcendent path and it's almost like as I've heard I believe bhikkhu bodhi described that the Senden path is really not a path at all it's only a moment so these become very shall we say difficult and complicated things to contemplate but that perhaps is one of the reasons why we find this element in this suit - on the great 40.
I mean if you're interested in looking at it I'll put a link to it down below I always put links to them sutras that I discuss in videos down below the video so that you can go and look at them if you want to and one of the issues here is how it is that we can indeed pursue the path through.
let's say a comparing mind by saying which is ordinarily considered conceit as a bad thing and in Buddhism a comparing yourself to others puffing yourself up or putting yourself down these are not considered particularly healthy but if they're done on the service of the path it can be at least in certain contexts a kind of a skillful means to get us along and indeed there is there are early suta's that discuss these very things that the that there are certain kinds of what we might call normally unskillful mental states or you might say mundane or defiled if you want to use that term mental states that are nevertheless useful to us along the path.
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