THE THREEFOLD TRAINING
In this chapter we shall examine the method to be used for eliminating clinging. The method is based on three practical steps, namely Morality, Concentration, and Insight, known collectively as the Threefold Training.
The first step is morality (Sila). Morality is simply suitable behavior, behavior that conforms with the generally accepted standards and causes no distress to other people or to oneself. It is coded in the form of five moral precepts, or eight, or ten, or 227, or in other ways. It is conducted by way of body and speech aimed at peace, convenience and freedom from undesirable effects at the most basic level. It has to do with the members of a social group and the various pieces of property essential to living.
The second aspect of the threefold training is concentration (Samadhi). This consists in constraining the mind to remain in the condition most conducive to success in whatever he wishes to achieve. Just what is concentration
No doubt most of you have always understood concentration as implying a completely tranquil mind, as steady and unmoving as a log of wood. But merely these two characteristics of being tranquil and steady are not the real meaning of Concentration. The basis for this statement is an utterance of the Buddha. He described the concentrated mind as fit for work (kammaniya), in a suitable condition for doing its job. Fit for work is the very best way to describe the properly concentrated mind.
The third aspect is the training in insight (Panna), the practice and drill that gives rise to the full measure of right knowledge and understanding of the true nature of all things. Normally we are incapable of knowing anything at all in its true nature. Mostly we either stick to our own ideas or go along with popular opinion, so that what we see is not the truth at all. It is for this reason that Buddhist practice includes this training in insight, the last aspect of the threefold training, designed to give rise to full understanding of and insight into the true nature of things.
In the religious context, understanding and insight are not by any means the same. Understanding depends to some extent on the use of reasoning, on rational intellection. Insight goes further than that. An object known by insight has been absorbed; it has been penetrated to and confronted face to face; the mind has become thoroughly absorbed in it through examination and investigation so sustained that there has arisen a non-rational but genuine and heartfelt disenchantment with that thing and a complete lack of emotional involvement in it. Consequently the Buddhist training in insight does not refer to intellectual understanding of the kind used in present day academic and scholarly circles, where each inpidual can have his own particular kind of truth. Buddhist insight must be intuitive insight clear and immediate, the result of having penetrated to the object by one means or another, until it has made a definite and indelible impression on the mind. For this reason the objects of scrutiny in insight training must be things that one comes into contact with in the course of everyday living; or at least they must be things of sufficient importance to render the mind genuinely fed up and disenchanted with them as transient, unsatisfactory and not selves. However much we think rationally, evaluating the characteristics of transience, unsatisfactoriness and non-selfhood, nothing results but intellectual understanding. There is no way it can give rise to disillusionment and disenchantment with worldly things. It must be understood that the condition of disenchantment replaces that of desiring the formerly infatuatingly attractive object, and that this in itself constitutes the insight. It is a fact of na…
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