..续本文上一页as forms, feelings, perceptions and thoughts arise into consciousness, they can destroy you. Magga and the kilesa thus proceed side by side. The place where you put effort into the practice is the heart. You have to keep sparring with the kilesa every step of the way. It”s as if there are two separate people arguing inside your mind, but it”s just magga and the kilesa struggling with each other. Magga functions to control the mind and fosters your ability to contemplate the Dhamma. As long as you are able to contemplate, the kilesa will be losing the battle. But if at any time your practice weakens and the kilesa regain their strength, magga will disappear and the kilesa will take it”s place. Necessarily, the two sides continue their struggle like this, until eventually there is a winner and the whole affair is settled. If you center your efforts on developing magga, it will continue to destroy the defilement”s. Ultimately, dukkha, samudaya, nirodha and magga will come to exist in your heart - that”s when you will have really practiced with and penetrated the Four Noble Truths.
Whatever suffering arises, in whatever form, it must have a cause - that is samudaya, the second Noble Truth. What is the cause
The cause is that your practice of sila, samadhi and panna is weak. When magga is weak, the kilesa can take hold of the mind. When they take over the mind, they become samudaya and inescapably give rise to different kinds of suffering. If suffering arises it means that the aspect which is able to extinguish suffering has disappeared. The factors which give rise to magga are sila, samadhi and panna. When they have reached their full strength, the practice of magga will advance inexorably, and will destroy samudaya - that which is able to cause suffering in the mind. It is then - when suffering is in abeyance, unable to arise because the practice of magga is in the process of cutting through the kilesa - that suffering actually dies out in the mind. Why are you able to extinguish suffering
Because the practice of sila, samadhi and panna has reached it”s highest level, which means that magga has reached the point where its progress has become unstoppable. I say that if you can practice like this, it will no longer matter where you have got to in studying the theoretical knowledge of the mind and mental factors, because in the end everything unifies in this one place. If the mind has transcended conceptual knowledge, it will be very confident and certain in the practice, having gone beyond all doubt. Even if it starts to wander off, you won”t have to chase it very far to bring it back onto the path.
What are leaves of the mango tree like
It”s enough just to pick up one leaf and look at it to know. Even if you look at ten thousand leaves, you won”t see much more than you do looking at one. Essentially they are all the same. By looking at one leaf, you can know all mango leaves. If you look at the trunk of the mango tree, you only have to look at the trunk of one tree to know them all. All the other mango tree trunks are the same. Even if there were a hundred thousand of them, I would just have to look at one to really see them all. The Buddha taught to practice Dhamma in this way.
Sila, samadhi and panna are what the Buddha called magga - but magga is still not the heart of the Buddha”s teaching. It”s not an end in itself and wasn”t really what the Buddha wanted, just by itself. But it is the way, which leads inwards. It would be like traveling from Bangkok to this monastery, Wat Nong Pah Pong. What you want is to reach the monastery, you don”t actually want the road or the tarmac itself. But you”d need to use the road for the journey to the monastery. The road and the monastery are not the same thing – the road is simply the w…
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