Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book

by Daniel M. Ingram

Mahasi Sayadaw,

Thus, the Buddha taught that what we think, say, and do has consequences for our subsequent moment-to-moment experience.

If we can learn to substitute wise remorse, which simply says, “Well, that didn't work, and that is unfortunate. I will try my best to figure out why and hopefully do something better next time,” we will be much better able to train successfully in living a good and useful life.

There are few things more helpful on the spiritual path and for life in general than a positive attitude.

This is your life, so make it a great one.

The basic spirit is that these trainings are fun, a magnificent adventure in learning and growing, a remarkable opportunity to have many fascinating and transformative experiences, a wonderful experiment in what is possible in this life: these attitudes make a huge difference in all the trainings we will discuss here.

Further, if and when you start doing more intensive training, you will very quickly realize that whatever good mental and psychological habits you have will be a great support, and whatever unskillful mental habits you bring will definitely slow you down or even stop you.

Concentration is the ability to steady the mind on whatever you wish and attain unusual and profound altered states of consciousness.

Training in concentration has had thousands of pages dedicated to it, and there are probably thousands of concentration exercises. Some very commonly used objects of meditation are the breath (my personal favorite), our posture, a mantra or koan, a colored disk, an image, a candle flame, various visualized objects from simple to complex, feelings such as compassion, and even the experience of concentration itself. The object you choose should be one on which you would be happy to steady your mind.

The essential point about meditation is this: to get anywhere in meditation you need to be able to steady the mind and be present in the present.

The first formal goal when training in continuous concentration is to attain what is called “access concentration”, meaning the ability to remain focused on your chosen object with relative ease to the exclusion of distractions. This is the basic attainment that allows you to access the higher stages of concentration and to begin the path of insight, which is the third training, so make it a priority to attain access concentration in your meditative practice.

Regardless, for the sake of discussion, when you can keep your attention on your object of meditation second after second, minute after minute, without letting it go to other objects, but before any interesting, blissful, unusually steady alteration of perception happens, that is what I call access concentration.

The essential formal concentration practice instructions are: pick an object (the list on page 13 is a great place to begin), find a place to practice where you are as free from distractions as possible, pick a sustainable posture in which the spine is relatively straight (it doesn't really matter so much, but for this training it helps if it is somewhat comfortable), focus your attention on the object as completely and consistently as possible for the duration of that practice period, allowing as few lapses in concentration as possible, and learn to stabilize all of your attention on that object.

Tune in to anything smooth, flowing, and nice about what you are concentrating on and experiencing.

Until you gain access concentration, you ain't got squat.

For instance, pleasant and unusual experiences can become addictive and extremely seductive, causing us to give them more attention and focus than they deserve or than would be beneficial to deeper practice. They can also lead to people becoming way “out-there” and ungrounded, very much the way hallucinogens can. They can cause the “real world” to seem harsh by comparison, causing us to be tempted to reject the world, withdraw, or dissociate into the world of concentration states. They can also bring up lots of our psychological “stuff”. This last limitation could be a benefit if we were in a mood to deal maturely with our stuff.

Insight practice can seem more daunting, complex, or bizarre than other forms of practice. However, it is oddly simple. There are six sense doors. Sensations arise and vanish. Notice this for every sensation.

The gold standard for training in morality is how consciously harmless, kind, skillful, and compassionate our intentions, words, and actions are and how well we lead a useful and moral life.

The gold standard for training in concentration is how quickly we can enter into specific, skillful, altered states of consciousness on our own meditative power, how long we can stay in them, and how refined, complete, and stable we can make those states.

The gold standard for training in wisdom with insight practices is that we can quickly and consistently perceive the true nature of the countless quick sensations that make up our whole reality, regardless of what those sensations are, allowing us to cut to a level of understa...

To really get what the Buddha was talking about, we need to go beyond these conventional notions of wisdom and attain to ultimate insights by engaging specifically in insight practices.

However, I have concluded that we should not count on ultimate teachings to illuminate or resolve our relative issues or vice versa.

Therefore, it is extremely important not only to practice all three trainings, but also not to conflate the relative and ultimate wisdom teachings.

In summary, by seeing deeply into the truth of our own experience, profound and beneficial transformations of consciousness are possible. You guessed it—we're talking about awakening, nirvana, nibbana, the unconditioned, and all of that. The arising of this understanding is the primary focus of this book. There are many fascinating insights that typically occur even before awakening. Again, there are no magic formulae for producing ultimate insights, except for the three characteristics…

impermanence, dissatisfactoriness, and no-self

I cannot possibly overstate the usefulness of trying again and again to really discern these three qualities of all experience. They are the stuff from which ultimate insight at all stages comes, pure and simple. Every single time I say, “Understand the true nature of things,” what I mean is, “Directly perceive the three characteristics.” To perceive them thoroughly and directly is to be awakened.

The big message here is: drop the stories. Find a physical object like the breath, the body, pain, or pleasure, some feeling of resistance you may be experiencing, etc., and train yourself to perceive the three characteristics precisely and consistently. Drop to the level of bare sensations. This is vipassana, insight meditation, the way of the Buddhas. All the “opening to it”, “just being with it”, “letting it go”, and so on are quite important, as we will see later, but insight meditators must—I repeat, must—look into the following:

For example, you could close your eyes, put down this book or device, and then pick it up again where you left it without opening your eyes. From a pragmatic point of view, this book was where you left it even when you were not directly experiencing it. However, when doing insight practices, it just happens to be much more useful to assume that things are only there when you experience them and not when you don't. Thus, the gold standard for reality when doing insight practices is the sensations that make up your reality in that instant. Sensations that are not there at that time are not presumed to exist, and thus only sensations arising in that instant do exist, with “exist” clearly being a problematic term, given how transient sensations are.

In short, most of what you assume as making up your universe doesn't exist most of the time, from a purely sensate point of view. This is exactly, precisely, and specifically the point. Knowing this directly leads to freedom.

I am in no mood to debate questions of ontology, but, for the specific task of progressing in insight practice, this empirical extreme simply works.

However, when practicing insight meditation, it is far better to perceive one sensation arise and pass away. What do I mean by this? I mean that sensations arise out of nothing, do their thing, and vanish utterly. Gone. Entirely gone. Then the next sensation arises, does its thing, and disappears completely. “That's the stuff of modern physics,” we might say. “What does that have to do with practice?”

Just examine your actual experience, especially something nice and physical like the motion and sensations of the breath in the abdomen, the sensations of the tips of the fingers, the lips, the bridge of the nose, beneath the nose and above the lip, or the subtle tingling on the scalp and so on. Instant by instant, try to know when the actual physical sensations are there and when they are not. It turns out they are not there a good bit of the time, and even when they are, they are changing constantly.

These two kinds of sensations alternate, one arising and passing and then the other arising and passing, in a quick but perceptible fashion. Being clear about exactly when the physical sensations are present will begin to clarify their slippery counterparts—flickering mental impressions—that help co-create the illusion of continuity, stability, or solidity.

Each one of these sensations (the physical sensation and the mental impression) arises and vanishes completely before another begins, so it is possible to sort out which is which with relatively stable attention dedicated to consistent precision and to not being lost in stories.

Engage with the preceding paragraphs.

The whole goal is to experience momentariness directly, that is, things flickering, and what those things are doesn't matter one bit!

Finding the exact end of the out-breath is a commonly used exercise of great profundity once mastered.

Because it is challenging and engaging, we will be less prone to getting lost in thoughts rather than doing insight practices.

In one of these exercises, I sit quietly in a quiet place, close my eyes, put my right hand on my right knee, my left hand on my left knee, and concentrate just on my two index fingers. Basic dharma theory tells me that it is not possible to perceive both fingers simultaneously; so, with this knowledge, I try to see in each instant which one of the two fingers’ physical sensations are being perceived at any given moment. Once the mind has sped up a bit and become more stable, I try to perceive the arising and passing of each of these sensations. I may do this for half an hour or an hour, just staying with the sensations in my two fingers and perceiving when each sensation is and is not there.

At a rate of one to ten times per second, try to experience exactly how you know that you wish to do something other than simply face your current experience as it is. Moment to moment, try to discern every little uncomfortable shift, urge, impulse, and tension that prods your mind into fantasizing about the past or future or stopping the meditation entirely.

It doesn't mean that reality is not there, but that reality is not there in the way it may appear to us to be.

That the “watcher” (whatever seems to be observing things, aka the “perceiving subject”) is a thing separable and independent from what is perceived is mistaken.

There is a crucial point here that I would like to draw your attention to: people often use the truth of no-self to rationalize all sorts of strange and maladaptive behaviors because they misunderstand it as justifying a nihilistic perspective: “It's all illusion anyway,” or, “I don't even ultimately or truly exist so why bother?” It absolutely is not all merely illusion, and since we do exist conventionally, and conventional causality functions, “bothering” is a really good idea. The illusions are in how we misconceive and misperceive phenomena versus how they actually exist.

We don't have to sort this out all at once. We can begin with simple steps and the rest will fall into place if we are diligent and skillful.

The big, practical trick to understanding no-self when doing insight practices is to tune in to the fact that sensations arise on their own in a natural, causal fashion, even the intentions to do things. This is a formal practice instruction.

and when we fully get it we will be free.

In fact, just letting whatever happens happen is so easy that people can quickly get bored or distracted, thinking there must be something more than this, but this is a key part of realizing what is going on.

Start and perhaps remain with obvious sensations, such as physical sensations. They just show up and check out, don't they? Tune in to this. Allow this quality of things arising and passing on their own to show itself. Notice that whatever is observed is not “me” or “mine”. Notice this a...

Allow vibrations to show themselves, and tune in to the sense that you don't have to struggle for them to arise. Reality just continues to change on its own. That's really it. Investigate this again and again until you get it. Notice that this applies to every sensation that you experience, including all the core things we think are really “me”, such as effort, the sensations that make up the process of attending itself, analysis, investigation, questioning, and the like. These are more profound instructions than they may initially appear.

While we can direct the mind to penetrate phenomena with great precision and energy, we can also sit quietly and allow reality to just show itself as it is. Both perspectives are important and valuable, and being able to draw on each along the way can be very helpful. Said another way, we can realize that reality is already showing itself, settle quietly into this moment, and be clear and precise about it. Note well: many people will totally miss these last paragraphs and get all into pushing with everything they have and will just keep plowing on that way like mad bulldozers or rabid oxen, but really this is about noticing that everything shows itself on its own naturally without any forcing on the part of anyone, so any effort finally must lead to that quiet, easy, natural understanding.