The Ahan Sutra: The Buddha's First Diagnosis of Mankind
This diagnosis is just one word
But the meaning of the word bitter
It's not what you think.
It doesn't mean you're suffering.
It's not that life is miserable
It means
The way you pursue happiness
It's wrong from the bottom up
The harder you try
Can't catch up
It's not because of your bad luck.
It's about how happiness works.
It's not what you think
2,500 years ago
One person saw through this.
Then use four sentences
Tear apart the underlying structure of human suffering
These four sentences
So far, no one has been able to falsify the core structure
Hello
Hello.
I am Wang Lijie
In the last installment, we flew through the entire series of five-story museums.
Today, we officially started entering the first exhibition hall.
I told you before.
If Buddhism is a big tree
The Ahan Sutra is the seed.
The Ahan Sutra was taught by the Buddha while he was alive
The disciples organized it from memory after his death
The life story of the Buddha
History of the Sangha
I talked about it in detail in the historical context series
No repeat today
Do only one thing today
Unravel the core teachings of the Buddha himself
See what it's saying.
And these words
With every thought you've had since you woke up this morning
What does it matter?
The Buddha's first public lecture after enlightenment
At Sarnagar
Facing five companions who had once suffered with him
It's about the Four Noble Truths.
You can understand the Four Noble Truths as a diagnostic report
It's exactly the same process as when you go to the hospital to see a doctor.
Step one.
What are the symptoms?
second step
What's the cause?
Step three
Can this disease be cured?
Step Four
Specific treatment plan
bitter
set
extinguish
Road
They correspond to symptoms.
etiology
Prognosis and Prescription
What the Buddha did 2,500 years ago
It's essentially a diagnosis for all of humanity.
Let's look at the first truth first
The Truth of Suffering
This is one of the most misunderstood aspects of Buddhism.
A lot of people explode when they hear that everything is bitter
I had a great time eating hot pot yesterday.
You tell me it's also bitter
I took a lot of beautiful photos on a trip with my friends
You tell me it's also bitter
Are you sick?
The word used by the Buddha
Pali is dukkha.
Transliterated as duka
It's not about pain.
The original meaning of the word
It's a wheel with a shaft hole that's not aligned.
You push it along.
It keeps shaking.
Been grinding
It hasn't been smooth
It doesn't describe miserable
It's not right.
Translated into today's words
The most accurate way to put it is
dissatisfaction
The Buddha divided this sense of dissatisfaction into three layers
The first layer is called suffering
Naked pain
toothache
Broken love
get laid off
Relatives passed away
This layer needs no explanation
Everybody knows that.
The second layer is called bad suffering
And this is where it gets really cool.
You are happy eating hot pot
Okay?
But have you noticed
From the moment you take your first bite to the moment you take your last bite
Happiness is on the wane.
The first bite is the peak
Every bite in the back is going downhill
If happiness itself is real
durable
It should be happier the more it eats
But it's not.
It comes with a countdown timer.
You go on a trip
Excited on the first day
And the third day it was OK.
Day 5 begins to feel homesick
It's not that the travel has gotten worse.
It's your pleasure threshold that's automatically raised
Neuroscience calls this hedonic adaptation.
The dopamine system is inherently a difference-chasing system.
It doesn't reward satisfaction.
Better than expected, the difference
Once a stimulus becomes normal
Dopamine goes off.
You think you're chasing happiness
You're actually chasing an anchor that's always moving forward.
The third level is called suffering
This is the deepest layer
And the hardest to accept
Even if you are not suffering
I'm not in retreat.
You just sit there and nothing happens.
But your consciousness is changing every moment.
Every cell in your body is aging
Everything you rely on is flowing
The impermanence itself
It's a deep unease.
You don't usually feel it.
But it keeps running in the background
Like those background processes on your phone you don't know about
You can't see them.
But they're draining your battery
When you suddenly wake up in the middle of the night
I feel an inexplicable emptiness
No specific reason
But something was wrong.
That suffering is surfacing
Add these three layers together
The Buddha had only one thing to say
No, life is miserable.
It's the system that you use to pursue gratification.
Its factory settings.
It's not for lasting satisfaction
OK
Symptoms are clear
Let's look at the etiology.
The second truth is called set truth
Gathering is gathering
What is gathering?
Is thirst
Pali is called tanha.
Sanskrit corresponds to trsna.
Literally translated as thirsty
Not generally wanted
It's the one with the throat on fire
Thirst that never stops
The Buddha divided thirst into three types
The first is called lust
The thirst for sensual pleasure
delicious
Nice looking.
Nice
The one driven by the dopamine system
The second is called love
The thirst for existence itself
You want to be someone
Want to maintain a certain state
I want this thing to last forever.
Many people's anxiety today is not due to lack of money
I wasn't good enough.
I wasn't successful enough.
My people are set in the collapse
That's what love is driving.
The third kind is called without love
The thirst for non-existence
You are extremely tired of a situation
I wish the world would disappear
I wish I could disappear
Ostensibly, it's the opposite of desire.
But essentially it is also a kind of thirst
Longing to escape
You see
Whether it's chasing or fleeing
Behind it all is the same force
thirst for love
It is bitter fuel
Without it
Bitter has no raw materials
Here's an extremely important concept to introduce
dependent origin
Dependent origin is the cornerstone of Buddha's thought
If the Four Noble Truths are diagnostic reports
Origin is the pathological mechanism
Buddha discovered
Everything in the world
Including your pain
It didn't happen out of thin air.
It wasn't arranged by some creator
But because A exists
Therefore, B appears
A destruction
So B eliminates
Everything is a chain of conditions
The Buddha embodied this chain into twelve links
Twelve causes
Start with ignorance
Ignorance is not seeing the truth
You don't know. You don't know.
And then ignorance leads to impulsive behavior.
Behavioral impulses form conscious tendencies
Conscious tendencies build mind-body structure
Mind and body structures produce sensory functions
Sensory functions come into contact with the outside world
Touch makes sense.
Feeling generates thirst
Thirst begets attachment
Attachment Pushes Existential Continuation
And that leads to death and old age.
Twelve links
It's all connected.
Form a closed loop
It's not linear causality.
It's a self-reinforcing circulatory system.
In today's terms
What is this most like?
And addictive neural circuitry
Think about the mechanism of swiping short videos
Boring
That is, a manifestation of ignorance
Triggers you to pick up your phone
Fingers start to slide
Seeing interesting content generates pleasure
Pleasure triggers the urge to look at another one
Impulse becomes habit
Habits become your daily three hours of screen time
After three hours, you feel empty and guilty.
A miniature version of birth, old age, sickness and death
And then the emptiness itself
Triggers a new round of boredom
loop restart
The twelve causes described by the Buddha 2,500 years ago
It's the underlying framework of the dopamine cycle that you experience on your phone today.
The only difference is that
His description covers more than just one afternoon
It's the entirety of life.
And forever after.
But Buddha was not a doctor who only diagnoses but does not give solutions
He said the third truth
The truth of extinction
The core message of annihilation is very simple
Suffering can be completely ended
Not temporary relief
It's not about suffering in a different way.
Is the end
Because suffering is dependent
It depends on conditions to exist
Just remove the conditions
Suffering has no place
The chain is broken
The whole cycle stops
This is the fundamental difference between Buddhism and pessimism
If the Buddha had only mentioned the first two truths
Life is not satisfied
The reason is thirst
That was desperate.
But the third truth tells you
Although this system is factory set.
But the factory settings can be rewritten.
You are not a prisoner of this system
You are the one who can modify the parameters.
How to change
Fourth Truth
Dao Ti
The Noble Eightfold Path is the Noble Eightfold Path
The specific path of practice given by the Buddha
Eight operational dimensions
Right view
positive thinking
right language
decent job
Right Fate
positive diligence
Mindfulness
positive definite
Many people see the word positive
I thought it was moralizing
You have to do the right thing.
Say the right thing
Think the right thing.
No.
Right here.
Pali is called samma.
A more accurate translation would be
truthfully
aligned
complete
So, going back to the wheel.
The wheel with the wrong shaft hole is called dukkha.
If the shaft holes are aligned (aligned), it is samma.
What the Eightfold Path does is calibrate
Put your knowledge
intent
speech
behavior
livelihood
direction of effort
Attention and concentration
All recalibrated to align with the truth
I will divide the Noble Eightfold Path into three groups
So let's start with this.
The first group is wisdom.
Right view and right thinking
It is no accident that right view comes first
You must first see
See the essence of suffering
See the mechanism of thirst
See the chain of origin
If you can't see
All the following practices are groping in the dark
Positive thinking is about internalizing what you see as your intention
No longer driven by greed, hatred, delusion
You make decisions out of awareness.
Secondly, the second group are the commandments
right language
decent job
Right Fate
Attention
Buddha is not making a moral judgment
He is doing system optimization
You're lying.
Do something that hurts others
Make a living in an improper manner
Each of these actions is planting new seeds deep in your consciousness
In terms of the framework we established in the previous Consciousness Only series
Every time the seed is smoked
The seeds will flow again in the future
So commandments are not constraints.
It's your operation to stop creating new sources of pain for yourself
The third group is meditation
positive diligence
Mindfulness
positive definite
Positive improvement is the direction of energy
Put your energy to good use
Mindfulness is the constant presence of awareness.
You know what you are doing right now
What do you think?
What do you feel?
Positive concentration is the depth of attention.
When attention is firmly anchored to an object
Consciousness has lost the raw material for creating delusions
Thoughts weaken on their own
This fits perfectly with the neuroscience principles we talked about earlier in the meditation issue
Inhibitory Effects of the Prefrontal Lobe on Default Pattern Networks in Meditation
It's the neural counterpart of mindfulness and mindfulness at the brain level.
Did you notice
The structure of the Eightfold Path is strikingly similar to the logic of cognitive behavioral therapy today.
Cognitive behavioral therapy is also a three-step process
The first step is to identify your automated thinking patterns
The second step is to adjust your behavior
The third step is to train your attention and emotion regulation skills
The path map that the Buddha figured out under the Bodhi tree 2,500 years ago
The most evidence-based methodology in psychotherapy today
Almost perfectly aligned in structure.
But Buddha went much further than cognitive behavioral therapy
The goal of cognitive behavioral therapy is to make you function normally
relieve anxiety
Managing depression
Restore daily life
The Buddha's goal is to make you see through
Functioning properly is itself a more refined state of dissatisfaction
He's not asking you to go from unhappy to happy.
I want you to see through happiness and unhappiness
It's all products made by thirst
And wake up from this whole system
This is where the Four Noble Truths come in at their finest
It's not like a lot of chicken soup for the soul tells you
Just change your mindset
That's a Band-Aid on a bitter surface.
It cuts directly to the root with a scalpel
You are not in pain because the world has treated you poorly
It's about the way you see the world
There was a fundamental miscalculation.
You think satisfaction can be accumulated by acquisition
But the law of dependent origin tells you
Everything you get
Are conditional temporary aggregations
It falls apart when conditions change
In the words of today's investment community
How happy do you think you are?
In fact, what you are doing is an asset with its own attenuation coefficient
Buddha didn't tell you not to invest
But to let you see the true properties of this asset
After seeing clearly
Your entire investment strategy will naturally change
So you understand now
Why do I say the Four Noble Truths for 2,500 years?
Can no one falsify the core structure?
Because it's not an opinion.
It's not a religious position.
It's a structural diagnosis.
You may not like this diagnosis
Like you can dislike the numbers on your medical report
But you can't say it's wrong.
Neuroscience Confirms the Existence of Hedonic Adaptation
Psychology confirms the craving-driven addiction model
Evolutionary biology explains
Why did natural selection set dissatisfaction as the default state of living things?
Because satisfied individuals don't reproduce.
Where Buddha Went with Vipassana
Modern science experiments from the outside
Went to the same place
But the Buddha went one step further.
This is the real chilling step
This is also the Buddha's insight
Parted ways with modern evolutionary psychology
Natural selection cannot design a function that removes you from it.
But the Buddha said
Consciousness itself has the capacity for self-observation and self-transcendence.
You're not a programmed machine.
You are a system that can read its own source code
The ability itself
The entrance to awakening
In the next issue, I'm going to show you some of the most powerful and original dialogues from the Ahan Sutra.
Fire Parable Sutra
Arrow Sutra
Snake Parable
The Buddha exhibited a very rare quality in those conversations
He's not preaching.
He is facing a living person
In the most accurate language
At the moment when that person needs it most
Shattered his most central illusion
That penetrating power
It's top-notch on any conversation show today
The Four Noble Truths for today
How do you feel?
Especially the concept of bad suffering
Is there anything particularly profound in your life?
The experience of happiness fading
How do you cope?
And the idea of origin.
You think you can use it to analyze your daily emotional responses
Is it good to use?
Welcome to let me know in the comment area.
I am Wang Lijie
See you next time.