Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book - Revised and Expanded Edition

by Daniel M. Ingram

Just to review, the scope of the first training, which I call morality, is the ordinary world, the conventional world, the world that we are all familiar with before we even consider more specialized topics such as meditation. The goal is to act, speak and think in ways that are conducive to the welfare of yourself and others. The scope of the second training, concentration or depths of meditation, is to focus on very specific and limited objects of meditation and thus attain to specific altered states of consciousness. The scope of the third training, that of insight or wisdom, is to shift to perceiving reality at the level of individual sensations, perceive the Three Characteristics of them, and thus attain to profound insights into the nature of reality and thus realize stages of enlightenment. First, I will consider happiness in the context of scopes of the Three Trainings. As training in morality is such a vast subject, the ways we can find happiness is also a vast subject, and becomes interesting primarily in comparison with the scope of the other two trainings, those of concentration and wisdom. The common denominator of the concentration attainments is that we learn to get ourselves into states of consciousness that are some mixture of blissful and peaceful, as well as increasingly spacious and removed from our ordinary experience. These can be a source of happiness that is far more intense and reliable than the happiness found in the ordinary world. Being able to ...