An open library of thought
Understand suffering in order to be free of it.
Suffering, its arising through craving, its cessation and the path to that cessation are presented as truths to be put into practice: understanding, abandoning, realizing and cultivating rather than simply believing.
Later commentators compare the four truths to a physician who names an illness, finds its cause, affirms that a cure is possible and prescribes treatment.
Awakening is sought neither in sensual indulgence nor in self-mortification; elsewhere the same idea steers between the claim that a self lasts forever and the claim that it is simply annihilated.
A lute sounds true only when its strings are neither too tight nor too slack, the image offered to a monk who strained too hard in his practice.
Body, feeling, perception, mental formations and consciousness are each impermanent and not under one’s full control, so none can be taken as a lasting self; the teaching targets grasping, not ordinary personal responsibility.
The nun Vajirā explains that “chariot” names an assembly of parts, just as “being” names a combination of changing factors.
Experiences arise from conditions and cease when those conditions cease: “when this exists, that comes to be.” A classic series of twelve links connects ignorance, craving, clinging and further birth.
Paying repeated attention to a slight annoyance can turn a passing feeling into craving, then into a grudge; changing that attention changes what follows.