In the previous lecture we talked about the first two noble truths, the Buddha's diagnosis of the human predicament. Now we're going to talk about the third and fourth noble truths which contain the Buddhist prescription, the cure for what ails us and also they point to meditation which we'll then talk about in some depth. Now I guess you could call the first two noble truths the bad news and good news, respectively. The bad news is that human life is full of [FOREIGN] of suffering, of unsatisfactoriness. And the good news in the second noble truth is that we have at least isolated the cause. The cause is craving. Clinging to things that are not going to last forever. Well in that sense I guess you could say that they third and fourth noble truths are respectively, more good news and then some bad news. The third noble truth tells us what the cure is. It is the abandonment of craving and of clinging. The fourth noble truth spells out the path you have to follow if you're going to attain full liberation. And it turns out that it is an Eightfold Path. There are eight things that you have to master if you want to be liberated. So it starts with right view, which is to say getting a proper understanding of the Buddhist's teaching. And there there are a lot of other right things I'm not going to get into all of them. But at the end we didn't right mindfulness and right concentration; which point us to meditation. Now some people might be surprised that there's so much stuff on the path, that isn't about meditation. I think there's an idea in the West, that what Buddhist mainly do is sit around and meditate. Well actually, in Asia, most Buddhists don't meditate at all. Most lay Buddhists do not meditate. A lot of Buddhist monks meditate. But if they're meditating really seriously and certainly if they're meditating with a hope of reaching nirvana, you can bet that they're going to be paying attention to all eight parts of the path. Another thing that may surprise people about the Eightfold Path is these three parts of the path here. These three factors which are about ethical behavior and cultivating virtue. I think there's an idea in the West that Buddhism doesn't have this kind of hangup about moral conduct that the Abrahamic religions have you know, there's not all these oppressive lists of do's and dont's, no Ten Commandments. Well actually these three parts of the path have quite a bit of overlap with the Ten Commandments and in some ways they're more demanding. This factor right here, right speech. Says that you not only have to avoid saying things that are not true, you actually have to avoid saying mean things about people. Avoid ideal gossip. And I don't know about you, but if I were to try to completely eliminate gossip from my life, that would take some pretty serious reform. Maybe if you offered me nirvana in exchange for it, I could do it, but I'm not honestly sure. Then when we get to the meditative part of the path, there's more heavy lifting to be done, more hard work. And one reason the work is hard is because, remember, to get to liberation, we're supposed to abandon craving, abandon clinging, we're supposed to lose our aversion to unpleasant things. And that's obviously not going to be easy. Meditation isn't the only thing that goes into cultivating that kind of discipline, but it's a big part of it and it's going to take a lot of work. There's another reason that meditation is going to involve work if you want to get all the way to Nirvana. And that is that remember, this isn't just liberation, it's enlightenment. It's seeing the essence of reality clearly as the Buddha taught it. And part of doing that is back up here in the first factor of the path, right view. That's when you try to gain an intellectual understanding of Buddhist doctrine. But it's in the meditative part of the path where you try to gain an experiential understanding of Buddhist doctrine. So, for example, with the idea of impermanence you would meditate and, and thereby gain just an intuitive apprehension of the impermanence of things. The impermanence of your feelings, of your thoughts, and of everything that comes into your mind and this apprehension would in turn reinforce the intellectual understanding of Buddhist doctrine and strengthen your commitment to it. Now you might ask, if it takes so much work. To attain liberation, how many people have actually done it? Well, this question came up in a conversation I recently had on a website I run called bloggingheads.tv, where we have video dialogues. I was talking to a very highly esteemed Buddhist scholar and monk named Biku Bodi just to give you some idea of what a serious scholar he is. This is a sizable chunk of the Buddhist Canon. And the connected discourses of the Budha. It's more than 2000 pages of translation and commentary. And this is the achievement of Biku Bodi the person I was talking to. And so I was talking to him, and I thought, well he's obviously a serious Buddhist. He says he meditates a lot. He's sitting there in a monastery. Maybe he's attained enlightenment. Maybe I'll ask him. Maybe this is kind of a personal question, but have you attained liberation? >> [LAUGH] No, not by a long shot. >> Not by a long shot. >> Yeah. [LAUGH] So are there people alive today that you think have attained liberation? >> I would say there is quite possible maybe some monks in maybe Thailand. [LAUGH] Maybe Burma. Maybe a few in the forest or Sri Lanka. >> Well he may not have attained Nirvana but he does seem happy. And for that matter I've seen a lot of happy buddhists. Now you may wonder, you know, what is the deal here? I mean we've got a whole religion that is supposedly devoted to helping people reach nirvana and virtually nobody ever reaches it? What kind of religion is that? You know, with Christianity it seems a lot more straightforward. The idea is to get to heaven and all you have to do is accept Jesus as your savior. Well actually, for lay Buddhists in Asia, the kind of incentive structure if you will, is a lot more like that in Christianity than you might imagine. They may not aspire to escape the cycle of rebirth in this life, which is what nirvana would accomplish. They can hope to get a more favorable rebirth in the next round. And that can include going to a kind of heaven where they will not stay forever. But stay for a very long time before another rebirth. And the way they do this is to pursue virtuous behavior. And that increases their chances of a favorable rebirth. So the religion does make sense on its own terms. I want to emphasize that there are people that would disagree with Biku Bodi about this liberation thing. There are people who will tell you that they are enlightened, and who am I to judge. And there are meditation teachers who will insist that yes, liberation is within reach. Still, I think it's safe to say that for most of us, nirvana is not going to happen today, next week, next month, next year, next decade. Still there is some good news. You know, if you can't attain full liberation, there is such thing as partial liberation. If you can't eliminate all your suffering, you can eliminate some of it. If you can't reach complete equanimity you can get more tranquility and balance than you have now. And your life, according to reports from people who have done this, your life can change considerably and even be transformed. So, I guess the way I think of meditative practice is, is being on a kind of spectrum. So, one end you have strictly therapeutic practice. Maybe you, you come home from work stressed out and you do ten minutes of meditation and you feel better and, and that's it. You don't think of any Buddhist doctrines that may be associated with meditation. And then at the other end of the spectrum, there's Nirvana. Way, way down there. But then I would say that at some point as you move toward the Nirvana end of the spectrum, you enter a zone that we could call spiritual practice. Not just therapeutic but spiritual practice. Now, what does that mean? Well, first of all, this is just my definition. You know, there's no official definition of spiritual. But what I would say is that if practice qualifies for the term spiritual, then the motivation is not just about self-help. There is a desire to, to become a better person, to help others, and to see the world more clearly. And there's the beginning of an understanding that there's a connection between these two goals of becoming a better person, seeing the world more clearly. So, there's a desire to kind of strip yourself of some of the delusions and misperceptions that seem to be natural for human beings. And in the process become a better person. So you're trying to align yourself with the truth about the world, the truth about other people, about yourself and with moral truth. Of course, it's good news that you reduce your suffering in the process. And it's fine that this is one thing that sustains the practice, but that's. Just not all that it's about. Now, I don't want to over emphasize this distinction between the therapeutic and the spiritual. Because for one thing, even if you just reduce your stress, then you're probably going to see the world a little more clearly, and you're probably going to become a better person. If only in the sense of making the people around you less unhappy than you might make them when you're stressed out. And also, if you're doing this kind of therapeutic practice, it may happen that you start expanding the practice. You, you don't want to just get a, get rid of your stress. You realize that, that this can help with anxiety. With sorrow and so on, you may start meditating more. And I think it tends to happen when people do that. That they do become better people and more considerate of others. In fact, one interesting thing about Buddhism is this kind of organic connection between self-help and helping others. It's not automatic. And maybe that's why the Buddha included explicit ethical strictures. But there is something natural about the progression from helping yourself to becoming a more considerate person. Still, when I think about practice, it qualifies for the term spiritual, I do think about the aspiration being about more than self help. So kind of the driving dissatisfaction isn't just about the fact that we're born into these machines that sometimes make us suffer. It's that we're born into these machines that make it hard to see things clearly, that fill us with misperceptions that lead us to make other people suffer. Now a lot of you have probably seen the movie The Matrix. And in that movie the character played by Keanu Reeves realizes that he and everyone else on the planet is actually living in a dream world. They, they've actually, what they thought was reality is really just an hu, an hallucination And it's been inflicted on them by their robot overlords. And Keanu Reeves then joins a rebellion that aims to attain complete liberation. Now I don't think either modern psychology or mainstream Buddhism tells us that we're quite that deluded about reality. But it is interesting that a lot of western Buddhists identify with that movie. They call it a dharma movie. They, they saw in, in it a kind of allegory. And they and they see themselves as being in the process of overcoming delusion in a very significant sense and, and, and kind of fighting for liberation. And, and I do think that, Buddhist practice in the spiritual sense, involves having a little Keanu Reeves, in you know? Just, just saying you know, I just want to see the truth or at least come as close to that, as possible. I want to see things more clearly. Now, I hope I haven't sounded too dismissive in the course of this segment about full fledged enlightenment. I mean, I think it's, it's a very interesting question what enlightenment in a Buddhist sense would feel like. And in fact, later in the course, we're going to be talking to some people who if not enlightened are a lot closer to that than I am and, and we're going to hear what they have to say about this. And I'm interested in particular in the question of, Is enlightenment as described by Buddhists, is that something like what a psychologist might say your consciousness would be like if we stripped it of all the mispreceptions and delusions that seem to be kind of built into us by natural selection. So that's going to come later in the course, but right now in the next segment of this lecture, we're going to turn to the subject of meditation. We're going to talk about different kinds of meditation, and about what they have to offer. [BLANK_AUDIO]
