..续本文上一页 a tree. Before you know it — "Thud!" — you”ve hit the ground. Actually you”ve passed many branches and twigs on the way but you couldn”t count them, you couldn”t remember them as you passed them. You just fall, and then "Thud!"

　　The Paticcasamuppada is the same as this. If we pide it up as it is in the scriptures, we say ignorance gives rise to volitional activities, volitional activities give rise to consciousness, consciousness gives rise to mind and matter, mind and matter give rise to the six sense bases, the sense bases give rise to sense contact, contact gives rise to feeling, feeling gives rise to wanting, wanting gives rise to clinging, clinging gives rise to becoming, becoming gives rise to birth, birth gives rise to old age, sickness, death, and all forms of sorrow. But in truth, when you come into contact with something you don”t like, there”s immediate suffering! That feeling of suffering is actually the result of the whole chain of the Paticcasamuppada. This is why the Buddha exhorted his disciples to investigate and know fully their own minds.

　　When people are born into the world they are without names - once born, we name them. This is convention. We give people names for the sake of convenience, to call each other by. The scriptures are the same. We separate everything up with labels to make studying the reality convenient. In the same way, all things are simply sankharas. Their original nature is merely that of things born of conditions. The Buddha said that they are impermanent, unsatisfactory and not-self. They are unstable. We don”t understand this firmly, our understanding is not straight, and so we have wrong view. This wrong view is that the sankharas are ourselves, we are the sankharas, or that happiness and unhappiness are ourselves, we are happiness and unhappiness. Seeing like this is not full, clear knowledge of the true nature of things. The truth is that we can”t force all these things to follow our desires, they follow the way of nature.

　　A simple comparison is this: suppose you go and sit in the middle of a freeway with the cars and trucks charging down at you. You can”t get angry at the cars, shouting, "Don”t drive over here! Don”t drive over here!" It”s a freeway, you can”t tell them that! So what can you do

　　 You get off the road! The road is the place where cars run, if you don”t want the cars to be there, you suffer.

　　It”s the same with sankharas. We say they disturb us, like when we sit in meditation and hear a sound. We think, "Oh, that sound”s bothering me." If we understand that the sound bothers us then we suffer accordingly. If we investigate a little deeper, we will see that it”s we who go out and disturb the sound! The sound is simply sound. If we understand like this then there”s nothing more to it, we leave it be. We see that the sound is one thing, we are another. One who understands that the sound comes to disturb him is one who doesn”t see himself. He really doesn”t! Once you see yourself, then you”re at ease. The sound is just sound, why should you go and grab it

　　 You see that actually it was you who went out and disturbed the sound. This is real knowledge of the truth. You see both sides, so you have peace. If you see only one side, there is suffering. Once you see both sides, then you follow the Middle Way. This is the right practice of the mind. This is what we call "straightening out our understanding."

　　In the same way, the nature of all sankharas is impermanence and death, but we want to grab them, we carry them about and covet them. We want them to be true. We want to find truth within the things that aren”t true! Whenever someone sees like this and clings to the sankharas as being himself, he suffers. The Buddha wanted us to consider this.

　　The practice of Dhamma is not de…

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