..续本文上一页d -- that you choose to create it -- there”s no compelling reason to keep creating a "me" or "mine" around any experience that”s inconstant and stressful. You want something better. You don”t want to make that experience the goal of your practice.

　　So what do you do with experiences that are inconstant and stressful

　　 You could treat them as worthless and throw them away, but that would be wasteful. After all, you went to the trouble to fabricate them in the first place; and, as it turns out, the only way you can reach the goal is by utilizing experiences of just this sort. So you can learn how to use them as means to the goal; and the role they can play in serving that purpose is determined by the type of activity that went into producing them: the type that produces a pleasure conducive to the goal, or the type that doesn”t. Those that do, the Buddha labeled the "path." These activities include acts of generosity, acts of virtue, and the practice of mental absorption, or concentration. Even though they fall under the Three Characteristics, these activities produce a sense of pleasure relatively stable and secure, more deeply gratifying and nourishing than the act of producing and consuming ordinary sensual pleasures. So if you”re aiming at happiness within the cycles of change, you should look to generosity, virtue, and mental absorption to produce that happiness. But if you”d rather aim for a happiness going beyond change, these same activities can still help you by fostering the clarity of mind needed for Awakening. Either way, they”re worth mastering as skills. They”re your basic set of tools, so you want to keep them in good shape and ready to hand.

　　As for other pleasures and pains -- such as those involved in sensual pursuits and in simply having a body and mind -- these can serve as the objects you fashion with your tools, as raw materials for the discernment leading to Awakening. By carefully examining them in light of their Three Characteristics -- to see exactly how they”re inconstant, stressful, and not-self -- you become less inclined to keep on producing and consuming them. You see that your addictive compulsion to fabricate them comes entirely from the hunger and ignorance embodied in states of passion, aversion, and delusion. When these realizations give rise to dispassion both for fabricated experiences and for the processes of fabrication, you enter the path of the fourth kind of kamma, leading to the Deathless.

　　This path contains two important turns. The first comes when all passion and aversion for sensual pleasures and pains has been abandoned, and your only remaining attachment is to the pleasure of concentration. At this point, you turn and examine the pleasure of concentration in terms of the same Three Characteristics you used to contemplate sensual experiences. The difficulty here is that you”ve come to rely so strongly on the solidity of your concentration that you”d rather not look for its drawbacks. At the same time, the inconstancy of a concentrated mind is much more subtle than that of sensual experiences. But once you overcome your unwillingness to look for that inconstancy, the day is sure to come when you detect it. And then the mind can be inclined to the Deathless.

　　That”s where the second turn occurs. As the texts point out, when the mind encounters the Deathless it can treat it as a mind-object -- a dhamma -- and then produce a feeling of passion and delight for it. The fabricated sense of the self that”s producing and consuming this passion and delight thus gets in the way of full Awakening. So at this point the logic of the Three Characteristics has to take a new turn. Their original logic -- "Whatever is inconstant is stressful; whatever is stressful is not-self" -- leaves open the pos…

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