..续本文上一页 built in to not only the first Noble Truth but also the second and the fourth. This is part of the Buddha”s genius. Once he”d attained, or experienced, what is uncompounded or unconditioned, he looked back at conditioned reality and saw that in comparison to what he had attained, all of it was stressful, all of it was burdensome. But he also saw that you can”t take the uncompounded and use it as a path to the uncompounded. Things won”t work that way. You have to learn how to take the compounded and use it as a path. So he pided compounded reality, things made up of causes and conditions, into three things: stress, its cause, and the path to its end. And he gave us a task for each of them. Our task is to comprehend the stress and suffering, to abandon the cause, and to develop the path. Ultimately, though, you get to the point where stress has been comprehended, its cause has been abandoned, and the only thing left is to relinquish the path itself.

　　This is why the Buddha has us focus on the issue of stress, and particularly the stress and suffering that come with clinging. When you actually see them, you stop being so complacent about your clingings, about your attachments. You begin to realize that even the most subtle form of pleasure on the everyday level has some clinging mixed into it, and that that particular clinging opens the bridge for all kinds of suffering to come into the mind. Once you build that kind of bridge to things, anybody can come over the bridge. Pleasure can come over the bridge; pain can come over the bridge. Once you latch on to the body and say, “This is me, this is mine,” you lay claim to it. Then whatever happens to the body suddenly becomes a burden to the mind. We latch onto it because we find there are certain pleasures in the body. Once that bridge is open, though, all the pains can come along as well.

　　So try to get the mind in to a state of good, solid concentration. That way it can look back on those attachments with some detachment, some objectivity, and see all the things you cling to that you really like, that you really identify with. When you look objectively, you see that there really is some problem in holding on in that way. And when the mind is in good enough shape, it”s willing to let go. So when the Buddha has us focus on the stress and the suffering that come from clinging, it”s not that he”s trying to bad mouth the world or to deny pleasure. It”s just that there”s something better than this. And the way to find that something better is to focus on the way the mind reacts to pain. If you really want to understand the mind, that”s the place to understand it. There are all the issues in the mind that come thronging around the pain, whereas ordinary, everyday pleasures just tend to cover things up, so that they”re not as clear.

　　This is why the Buddha has us have respect for the sufferings we undergo, because we can learn from them. There”s an interesting passage in the Canon where the Buddha talks about the reason for respect and it”s basically to learn. When there”s respect, you open up your mind. There”s the possibility of learning something new. If there”s no respect, the mind is closed. It dismisses things really easily. And as a result, it loses a really good opportunity to learn. This is why the attitude of respect is built into the Buddha”s teachings. A lot of people think that Buddhism is an interesting philosophy, perhaps a very good philosophy, that somehow got religion tacked on to it, with all the bowing and all the other paraphernalia that go along with religion. And they”d like to separate the two: “Can”t we just have the philosophy without the religion

　　” But if you look at the nature of the Buddha”s philosophy, his teachings on the Four Noble Truths, the whole attitude o…

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