The Eightfold Path The Way To End Suffering

Chapter 1. Right Understanding

This meditation practice, as many of you have done with this day of sitting and walking, was actually quite a lot. Some people will start with a 20-minute sitting and do that for a number of months, or go to a class and have some instruction and sit for a little bit. There are people who also will come to a ten-day retreat. We’ve even had a few kind of unusual people sign up for a three-month retreat who had never meditated before, and say, “Well, I guess I’ll just do it.” But as you can discover, even in just one day of sitting, though some things are interesting and you learn some from it, it’s also not so easy. There aren’t a lot of distractions and iversions here. It’s pretty simple. All that’s really left for you in this place is your own body and mind, and there’s not a lot to take one away from that.

What is the essence of meditation practice? Here is a story. After the Buddha was enlightened he was walking down the road in a very happy state. He was supposed to have been quite a handsome prince before going off to be a monk. So here’s this handsome prince now recently enlightened, wearing golden robes and obviously quite happy, and very special from all accounts.

And he met some people and they said, “You seem very special. What are you, are some kind of an angel or a deva?” He seemed inhuman in some way. “No.”

“Well, are you some kind of a god then?” “No.”

“Well, then are you some kind of a wizard or magician?” “No,” he replied.

“Well, are you a man?” “No,” he said.

“Then what are you?” And he answered, “I am awake.”

And in those three words —“I am awake”— he gave the whole teaching which Buddhism contains. To be a Buddha is to be one who has awakened, awakened to the nature of life and death and the world in which we live, awakened to the body and mind. So the purpose of practicing meditation, the Buddhist and other traditions, is not to become a meditator, or a spiritual person, or a Buddhist, or to join something. Rather, it is to understand this capacity we have as humans to awaken.

What is that which we can awaken to, what is the Dharma which we can awaken to? Dharma is the Sanskrit word and Dhamma is the Pali word which refers to that which is universal, to the laws of the universe, teachings which describe it. The Dharma as a law is that the way things work are always here to be discovered; they’re quite immediate. Full text