Okay, good evening everyone.
Welcome to our evening Dhamma session.
Live here from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
So tonight, we go on and talk about the third discourse of the Buddha.
It's not actually the third discourse, but it really is the third discourse that we have recorded chronologically, as far as I can think of.
So to recap,
The Buddha gave his first discourse which was called the turning of the wheel of the Dhamma.
So at that point he had set in motion this knowledge, right?
He had given this to the world.
There was no turning back.
Not that there was any desire to turn back but at that point the cat was out of the bag and so to speak and
it was inevitable that Buddhism would spread because the teaching is powerful.
The power was in the realization of the five monks, which ensured that it would be spread.
Five days later, he gave the second discourse and they all became arhat, which means they became enlightened.
They were no longer subject to rebirth and freed themselves from all defilement.
And they spent the three months of the rains in Isipatana.
Isipatana was this, some kind of grove, some kind of park.
where religious people hung out, ascetics maybe.
And during the rains, there was a man called Yasa, who was very rich.
His parents were very rich.
And so he lived in the lap of luxury and had everything he could ever want.
One night, and he lived in Varanasi, which is near, Isipatana was just outside of Varanasi, which is a big city in India still to this day, ancient city, the city of Gaya, really.
I don't know, the city of, sorry, the city of Varanasi, but the river Ganges, it's where the Ganga River is.
Kasi, I'm thinking of, it's also called Kasi, or it used to be.
And
And so one night Yasa wakes up in the middle of the night and he looks around his palace and he sees his consorts, the women who are meant to please him as a very, very rich man.
His concubines maybe, I don't know, just dancing girls maybe.
And he sees them all asleep and they look like corpses.
And he gets this strong sense of death.
This is what it's like to die.
It's curious.
I can empathize.
I had this sort of feeling myself when I was young.
Everyone would go to sleep and I think they were all dead.
It makes one wonder whether this is an echo of our experiences of death, which of course are very strong and would be one of the stronger memories that might carry over with us in some form.
Anyway, he became quite distraught, left his palace or his mansion and wandered into Isipatana.
He wandered out of the city, went for a walk, ended up in Isipatana muttering to himself, this place is, this world is crazy.
This world is all messed up.
And the Buddha heard him and said to him, Yasa, come here.
Here it is not messed up.
Here it is not confused.
It is not entangled.
And Yasa heard this voice and so he went to the Buddha and he sat down and the Buddha taught him the Dhamma and he became a Sotapanna.
And his parents came looking for him, found him, found the Buddha.
The Buddha taught them.
They became Sotapanna.
And while he was teaching them, Yasa became an Arahant when he heard the Dhamma the second time.
And
Then Yasa's friends, 54 of his friends became monks.
They heard that Yasa had gone forth, had left the home life because as an arahanti he became a monk right away.
And they heard this and so 54 of them, he had a large society in the city, became monks just on his reputation.
And they all became arahants as well.
So at that time, there was the Buddha plus five, plus 55.
No, the Buddha plus five.
Yes, plus 55.
So there were 61 at that time, 61 arahants in the world.
And then the Buddha, at the end of the reigns, he said to the monks, ,, go forth, monks.
for the benefit of all, for the benefit of the many.
But don't go by the same road, he said.
Go your separate ways.
Meaning, in order for this to spread, you're all enlightened, there's no need for you to depend on anyone.
So be a refuge to others.
And he sent them all in 60 different directions.
Pretty powerful.
That was the start of the dispensation of the Buddha, the Buddhist missionarism.
Now people say Buddhism is a missionary religion, which isn't really.
It's a bit misleading because these monks didn't go out and knock on people's door and say, hey, have you heard the good word?
They would just go and live in various places.
For example, Asaji left.
And when Sariputta saw him, just saw him, he knew right away that this was someone worth listening to, and he came and listened to his teaching.
That happens today in Buddhism.
Monks don't have to go out of their way to teach.
There are so many people interested in learning.
If you put the teaching out there, many people, not everyone, most people don't, but there are always people who want to hear.
Always people who will come and ask to learn.
And the Buddha himself went to Uruvela.
And in Uruvela he met these... Well, first, why he was going to Uruvela is he wanted to go to Rajagaha to meet Bimbisara.
and Bimbisara was the king of Rajagaha and so he knew that this would be a great place to start spreading his teaching or a great place to live and Bimbisara would be a great ally which of course he eventually was
Because Varanasi was perhaps too much entrenched in Brahmanism and it would be very difficult and there would be too much conflict.
It's like a general knows that he has to retreat and build up his forces because there were only 60 of them.
And so he wanted to start, he wanted to come in with a bang.
But he knew that if he went to Rajgaha, there would be a similar situation.
And so instead of going directly to Rajgaha, he went to Uruwela where the three most famous ascetics were living.
It was just outside of Rajgaha.
And I guess with the idea, or we guess with the idea that if he converted these three, then everyone, not just Bimbisara, but the whole of the kingdom of Rajagaha would...
would know how powerful or how great the Buddhist teaching was.
And so he converted these three ascetics through various ways and all of their disciples, which ended up being
500 followers of the oldest brother.
There were the three brothers, so the 500 followers of him, his second brother, 300 followers, and the youngest brother, 200 followers.
Altogether, a thousand monks.
And then he took them up to the Gaya Sisa, up on the hill, outside of Gaya.
And he taught them the fire sermon, the Aditya Sutta or Aditya Pariyaya Sutta.
And so that's the third discourse of the Buddha.
And to recap, the first one was about the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Noble Path.
That was about the content of it.
The second discourse is a little bit more technical and detailed.
So it's on the five aggregates.
The third discourse is on the six senses.
And so it's good to talk about these two ways of looking at reality.
The five aggregates and the six senses are really a good way together to sum up reality according to Buddhism or according to Theravada Buddhism.
So the six senses are the base.
Every experience we have is going to be based on one of these six senses.
Some experiences will be visual, some will be audible, some will be nasal, olfactory, some will be smell, some will be taste, some will be feelings on the body, and some will be thoughts.
It's just saying that there are many different kinds of experience or these are the doors by which experience arises.
But each one of those experiences is made up of the five aggregates in various forms.
So at each of the six senses, every moment of experience or every series, cognitive series that describes an experience is made up of the five aggregates.
So when you see something, there is the light and there is the eye and that's rupa, that's the first aggregate.
There's the feeling of neutral about the object or if you like it, there might be a happiness about it.
If it's beautiful, if it's ugly, there might be an unhappiness.
Although technically it's all neutral because when light touches the eye, it's not pleasurable until you cognize it.
So there's some technicality there.
But basically speaking, if it's beautiful, there is going to be a pleasure involved with that.
And that's talked about in this sutta.
We'll get into it.
Then there's recognition, you see something and you recognize it, that's sannyā.
You think about it, you like it, you dislike it, that's sankhāra.
And just the fact that you experience it, the awareness of it, the ability to see at all is vijñāna, is consciousness.
So what these things do, I mean, it's not even all that useful, I don't think, to get really technical and try to say, oh, this is this, this is, which aggregate is it, or so on.
But what this does, by mapping this out and giving us a framework, it's what it's not.
It's not the way we ordinarily look at reality.
I mean, there's no people, places, things involved here.
This provides a framework, a cage, so to speak,
within which we can we are able to fix our what's the word epistemology I think or how we cultivate knowledge our awareness so that we don't look at things in terms of people places and things
We look at our experiences.
What is reality?
It's this.
You hear my voice, that's sound.
That's an experience of sound.
It arises and ceases.
You see my face, that's an experience of seeing.
You smell whatever you smell.
You feel something on the body.
You taste when you eat your food.
Every thought you have.
Each one of these is a different kind of experience, but they're all experiences.
So without really getting into it, he sets the stage right off the bat for them to look at reality in this way.
And why it's useful is because it takes us out of our heads.
There's a real difference, people, places and things, whether they exist or not, philosophically.
When you're concentrated, the effect
of uh on the mind of thinking of things conceptually is is in the abstract it's it's it's all up in your head right so you think about people you know you're not experiencing them what you're experiencing is seeing and then there's the interpretation so it's always a step removed from reality
As a result, you never really get a sense of what's really going on now.
What's going on behind the scenes?
What am I doing to myself?
You never are clearly aware of the states that you're cultivating.
When you focus on experiences rather than people, places and things, you do get a clearer understanding of what you're doing.
Am I benefiting myself in the way I'm acting or speaking or thinking?
Or am I harming myself?
Am I doing harm?
Is this pure?
Is this impure?
What are my motivations?
What's going on at this moment?
When you focus on this framework that the Buddha taught, the six senses and the five aggregates,
you really do get an understanding of what's going on how your mind is working what you're doing right, what you're doing wrong what you're doing to hurt yourself what you're doing to benefit yourself so that's the start of this that's the background to this sutta but it's the fire sermon and so it is somewhat specific it's the fire sermon because these guys were fire worshippers so the Buddha turns this on its head and says look you want to talk about fire
Everything is on fire.
And what do I mean by everything or what everything?
Well, and this is where he pulls in this paradigm and pulls them into the paradigm.
He says the eye is on fire.
We chant this sutta.
We used to chant it at Doi Sutta.
It was really great.
Doi Sutta is the only place that I've been that does all these suttas.
The eye is on fire.
Form is on fire.
Eye consciousness is on fire.
Contact with the eye is on fire, is burning.
Whatever arises based on the contact.
Contact here means contact between the consciousness and the body.
So when the eye and the light touch and the consciousness goes there, there's contact.
That's how experience arises.
whatever arises based on that whether it be pleasant, painful or neither pleasant nor painful so when you see something beautiful it becomes pleasant a pleasant feeling arises see something ugly you don't like unpleasant feeling arises most of the time a neutral feeling arises all of that is on fire all of that is burning
So this is what he says.
First, so he's doing two things.
First, he's saying, what is all?
What is everything?
Everything is not the universe, the solar system, and so on.
Everything is seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking.
It really is.
That's all there is.
And then the second thing he's doing is saying there's something wrong.
This is where fire is.
You guys are sitting here worshiping fire.
There's a fire that you're ignoring.
And there's two kinds of fire he goes into.
He has a list of them, but they can be separated into two parts.
So the first kind of fire is defilement.
With the fire of passion, with the fire of anger, with the fire of delusion, they are on fire.
They are burning.
So these are considered fire in Buddhism.
I think this is the first important teaching because this isn't always seen.
It isn't always seen this way in the world.
In fact, most often we think passion is something wonderful.
Anger is something, well, important, something that's a part of us.
And delusion, well, might be bad, but we don't see how these are fires, right?
What's wrong with these things?
What's the real problem?
Or maybe we just don't ever think about it.
And so when we get angry, we just think of it as something to do with me.
We don't have any clarity of mind, really, that allows us to see this is a problem.
So we just act on impulse, on habit, passion as well.
It's not like we intend, we say, I think today I'll be passionate.
Although we do reaffirm it, we say, I'm passionate about this, I'm passionate about this, that, as though we're a good thing.
But when it comes up, it comes by itself.
And so the passion comes just by habit.
That's really the first problem, is that it's not really under our control.
These are like wildfires, really.
You can't say of the wildfire, okay, as long as it only stays in the trees and doesn't go to the grass, or only stays in the grass and doesn't go to the trees, or it only stays in this tree and doesn't go to that tree.
That's not how fire works.
Fire goes where it will, wherever there's fuel.
wildfire.
Jumps from object to object.
Rāgagīna, dosagīna, mohagīna.
Passion, anger and delusion.
All three of them.
And the other fire, the other burning involved is really the real reason or the other reason, perhaps the more important reason why defilements are problematic.
It's because our experiences or reality isn't amenable to these.
When you want something, it's not amenable to that wanting.
The wanting can't be satisfied.
Why?
Because these things are on fire with birth, old age, death, change really.
We could even separate this into two parts.
This is the second part.
This is old age, sickness and death.
This is suffering.
No, let's keep them together.
And the rest are This is actually the Buddhist definition of suffering.
All these different things.
Old age, birth is suffering.
Old age is suffering.
Death is suffering.
Sorrow is suffering.
Lamentation is suffering.
Pain is suffering.
Displeasure is suffering.
Despair is suffering.
Not getting what you want, getting what you don't want.
This is all what's caught up in the six senses.
The eye, the ear, the nose, the tongue, the body, and the heart.
This is where you try to find happiness.
they're in for a problem, right?
So we talk about old age, sickness, and death.
How this creates such suffering is through the senses.
You see a person, you hear them, and you cultivate this attachment, the raga, dosa, moha.
You cultivate these attachments, and if you really are attached to the person in a positive way, then when they get old, sick, and die, it can be quite stressful, unpleasant.
It's a cause of great sadness and sorrow.
Even for ourselves, when we get old, sick and die, it's something that we wouldn't wish on ourselves.
We wish we could live forever, really.
Because of change, because of what the Buddha talked about in the second discourse, impermanent, suffering, non-self, because you can't control, because you're not in charge, because you can't fix, because you can't predict what you're going to see, what you're going to hear.
You want to see certain people and then they leave you or they pass away and you never get to see them again.
It's quite stressful.
You want to hear pleasant sounds and then someone is banging or making noise in the next room and you're displeased because of the impermanence and because you're not in charge of what you hear.
And so on.
So this is a meditation teaching.
I mean, this is a...
introduction to meditation.
It's where we start, because once you understand this, once you see what's going on in your mind, you see things in your experience, you see them changing.
And we come to the second part, when it says,
seeing thus and your seeing is vipassana so his passang is passati means to see but we're not talking about the eye anymore now we're talking about vipassana seeing clearly with the mind with wisdom someone who a disciple of the holy of the of the noble ones
becomes disenchanted with the I. So you see this, and you see how much stress is caused by your attachments.
You see this during meditation.
You watch yourself cling to something and not be satisfied.
Cling to it and the stress and the fire, the burning that comes from wanting or you dislike something and the burning that comes from disliking it.
Or you have conceit or arrogance or delusions or even just distraction, thinking too much, worry for example.
And you see how much stress is involved.
You start to get tired of it.
Meditation is the feeling that the meditator gets after some time.
I'm tired of all this.
I've had enough of all this.
And that's when they start.
That's when they make this shift that we talked about in the last discourse as well.
Where they stop clinging so much.
Where they're able to let go.
And they see how much suffering they're causing themselves.
And they really understand it.
And they really appreciate it.
They begin to let go of all the I. They let go of forms.
They let go of contact.
They let go of the feelings.
Again, this is the same as the last discourse.
When they are disenchanted,
They become dispassionate.
With the freedom from passion, they are free.
With freedom, there is knowledge.
There is knowledge of the freedom.
Knowledge of that freedom.
Destroyed is birth.
Lived is the holy life.
Done is what needs to be done.
He knows.
There is nothing more to be done here.
There is nothing.
There is no further than here.
There's no going further than this.
You can't get any better than this, basically.
At this moment, there's peace, freedom, and nothing further to be done.
There's nothing more to hope for, to wish for, to want for, to strive for.
One has freed oneself from all of the stress and all of the suffering that could ever possibly arise
simply because one is no longer concerned, is no longer moved, is no longer reacting or reactive to one's experience.
So when the Buddha taught this, all those monks became arahants, according to the commentary, according to the sutta.
So that's the third discourse.
Really, these three together are called the three cardinal discourses.
If you'd like, it's on the internet.
You can read them, and there's a good commentary, I think a fairly good commentary on these suttas.
Look up the three cardinal discourses of the Buddha.
It's a nice compilation.
Together they talk about the Four Noble Truths, they explain them and what it means, what the Four Noble Truths mean in the basic sense.
And then they talk about the Five Aggregates and how you should approach and how we understand non-self, because this is something that people often have trouble with.
And then the Six Senses.
And the six senses are, I think, something that we maybe don't give enough attention to.
And the Buddha certainly did give a lot of attention to them.
So we should always remember these two go together.
The five aggregates are dependent on the six senses.
And the six senses are really much better to be the base.
We look at the five aggregates because we think, oh yes, I'm made up of five things.
But that's not what it means.
It means an experience is made up of five things.
I am not a part of this equation.
There's only seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, and thinking, and each one of those has the five aggregates in it.
So together, these really make up a basic... If you just know these three, it's a really good base for then going on to practice mindfulness, the Four Satipatthana, and insight meditation.
So there you go.
There's the Dhamma for tonight.
Thank you all for tuning in.
Oh, I guess we'll take some questions off the site as well.
But I think I'm only going to take questions off of the meditation site, otherwise it's too chaotic.
So if you want to ask questions wherever you are, you've got to go to our meditation site and you've got to ask them there.
The site is meditation.srimangalo.org.
And yes, you have to sign in, so we're not making it easy.
If we make it too easy, we get a lot of random questions.
People who are not willing to put out the effort.
If you're not willing to put out the effort, of course, this is all way too easy anyway.
In the olden days, you had to actually come here and meditate in order to ask questions.
In the olden days, you had to go to Asia, maybe learn a foreign language.
You guys can go.
You don't have to.
You better not stay for this.
We have four meditators here today.
And I can't load the site.
I think we have to take issue with this service provider.
It's not like Amazon.
When we were on Amazon, it was very fast.
Now I can't even load the ask panel.
So that's no good.
Somebody please take this up with Doug.
Tell him that we can't, we have to maybe switch providers because this provider is just, it can't be anything but that because we never had the problem on Amazon.
I mean, I don't know.
It could be anything, but.
Seems pretty clear that this provider is not nearly as good as Amazon.
Or it's not nearly as expensive either.
So there's that.
Well, the Ask panel is not working.
So I'm going to take that as a sign that we will have no questions today.
I'd like to thank you all for tuning in.