Entering Upon the Path: The Foundations of Buddhist Living

Structure of Stage 1: Entering Upon the Path

• The Four Noble Truths: The Revolutionary Vision of the Buddhadharma

  • A Spiritual Anatomy of Human Unhappiness (Samsara and Karma)

    • The truth of unhappiness itself: The untrained mind

    • The truth of the cause of unhappiness: Spiritual confusion and reification

      
      

  • ​The Buddha's Golden Path To Ultimate Liberation (Self-Cultivation and Nirvana)

    • The truth of the extinguishment of unhappiness: The profound truth of emptiness

    • The truth of the path leading to the extinguishment of unhappiness: The three higher trainings of the Buddha

      
      

• Taking Refuge in the Triple Gem: Committing to the Living Tradition

  • Our Safe-Haven From the Sufferings of Worldly, Unenlightened Living

    • The Buddha: The exemplar

    • The Dharma: The spiritual teachings

    • The Sangha: The spiritual community

      
      

Introducing Stage One of Bodhi-Mind Buddhism: “Entering Upon the Path”

The first stage of “Bodhi-Mind Buddhism,” entitled “Entering Upon the Path,” focuses on establishing the underlying philosophical framework necessary to properly identify, understand, and contextualize the foundations of a Buddhist way of life. The philosophical positions that we hold, whether explicitly or implicitly, help to shape the psychological processes that orient and structure the way we view and understand the world around us and our place within it. The core philosophical principles that animate the teachings of the Buddha are therefore an absolutely essential starting point for our journey. Our ideas of ontology, epistemology, phenomenology, psychology, ethics, the nature of the mind, etc., underlie our fundamental worldview and thereby help to determine how we engage with existence itself. These philosophical ideas are everything, whether we know it or not. This is critically important to understand at the onset of our philosophical journey because – to paraphrase Carl Jung – if we fail to dig deeply within ourselves and actively render the subconscious conscious, then these subtle internal forces will dictate the trajectory of our lives and we will curse them as fate. Instead of mindlessly going along with this uncritical, unexamined way of living, we should strive to overcome our needless and imaginary conflict with “fate” by developing a vision of reality that properly acknowledges and harnesses the profound agency and potential of the human mind. And this is precisely where the Buddha and his teachings come into play.

The core Buddhist teachings covered in the stage of “Entering Upon the Path” will act as our philosophical foundations and will be built upon through dedicated practice in the stages to come. It is deeply important that this introductory stage is not treated as a mere formality that can be skimmed over and sped through in order to move on to the “real practices.” On the contrary, this introductory stage should be taken incredibly seriously and should be revisited and contemplated as often as possible. A strong foundation of theory and principle is absolutely necessary to developing an effective and durable practice over the long-term. When our nascent Buddhist practice inevitably begins to stumble and falter in the weeks and months ahead as the vicissitudes of life gradually take their toll, it is this strong philosophical foundation that will help us to weather the storm and remain upon the path. So let's look more closely at what these crucial foundations consist of. The two guiding aspects of “Entering Upon the Path” are: (1) The Four Noble Truths and (2) Taking Refuge in the “Triple Gem.”

The Practical Takeaways of the Four Noble Truths

When the course of one's life leads them to the teachings of the Buddha, it would be wise to begin where the Buddha himself began. The Buddha’s very first sermon as the Fully Enlightened One is entitled, “Setting Into Motion the Wheel of Dharma,” (see Samyutta Nikaya, 56.11), and it focuses on a set of teachings called the “four noble truths.” These are the profound truths of human existence that the Buddha attained spiritual insight into at the moment of his enlightenment. These truths are what originally set the Buddha upon his path to becoming a spiritual leader, and they are the central doctrinal pillars of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. As such, the four noble truths constitute the philosophical and spiritual framework within which the entirety of the Buddha’s dispensation can be organized and understood.

The Four Noble Truths are:

• The truth of unhappiness itself.

• The truth of the cause of unhappiness.

• The truth of the extinguishment of unhappiness.

• The truth of the path leading to the extinguishment of unhappiness.

  
  

As we can see, the four noble truths establish the fundamental purpose of the Buddhadharma, which is to provide a practical, systematic approach to understanding and ultimately overcoming human ill-being. This emphasis on uplifting human life – on transcending the worldly vexations and anxieties that most people simply resign themselves to suffer through as a seemingly unavoidable aspect of human existence – is what makes the teachings of the Buddha so revolutionary. Along those lines, the first two noble truths (the truth of unhappiness and its cause) can be viewed as the Buddha’s philosophical diagnosis of the human condition – his spiritual anatomy of humanity's fundamental afflictions. The second two noble truths (the extinguishment of unhappiness and the path that leads to the extinguishment of unhappiness) can be viewed as the Buddha’s philosophical remedy for our spiritual ailment – his golden path leading to ultimate purification and liberation. By integrating these four noble truths into a cohesive worldview and contemplating them deeply, we can begin our journey toward the Buddhist path.

"My devoted disciples, both formerly and now, all that I teach is unhappiness and the cessation of unhappiness.” 

(Majjhima Nikāya, 22.38)

In the spirit of “Bodhi-Mind Buddhism,” our focus will be on the functional, actionable takeaways of the four noble truths and how they can begin to form the foundations of an engaged Buddhist practice. To start, the Buddha ascribed four specific goals to the four noble truths: Unhappiness itself is to be contemplated and understood. The cause of unhappiness is to be renounced and overcome. The extinguishment of unhappiness is to be actualized. And the path leading to the extinguishment of unhappiness is to be actively practiced and embodied. These specific tasks provide a practical approach to the four noble truths, and they help to lay the foundations of the Buddha’s revolutionary way of life. So let us now look more closely at these four doctrinal pillars of Buddhism.

“Friends, just as the footprint of any living being that walks can be placed within an elephant’s footprint, and so the elephant’s footprint is declared the chief of them because of its great size; so too, all wholesome teachings can fit into the Four Noble Truths: in the noble truth of unhappiness itself, the noble truth of the origination of unhappiness, the noble truth of the cessation of unhappiness, and the noble truth of the path leading to the cessation of unhappiness.”

(Majjhima Nikāya, 28.2)

The truth of unhappiness itself is that the fundamentally dysfunctional and disordered structure of the unenlightened mind is of the nature to produce unhappiness indefinitely. In other words, the profound truth of unhappiness is that it is a product of the distorted workings of our own untrained minds and thus originates from within the very foundations of our being. Expanding upon that realization, the second noble truth tells us that the specific cause of our unenlightened sufferings is our own confusion regarding the true nature of our lived experience. Taken together, the first two noble truths allow us to draw a broad overview of the spiritual anatomy of human unhappiness and ill-being: In our state of deep existential confusion, we conjure up a wide variety of delusive ideas about our existence and our lived experience that simply have no meaningful grounding in reality. These misguided views – which adversely influence the ways that we engage with ourselves and the world – constantly give rise to agitating thoughts, afflictive emotions, and harmful behaviors that damage both ourselves and others. These destructive, unwholesome mental states further obscure and distort the mind by infusing it with negative habit-forming-energies and deleterious bouts of psychological conditioning (known as negative/unwholesome karma). These negative karmic forces then deepen our spiritual confusion even more by further disfiguring the ways that we view and engage with our existence, which sets the cycle in motion again and again; a cycle which continuously gives way to anxiety, discontentment, suffering, and all other forms of ill-being – sometimes subtly and sometimes explosively. Ultimately, what this means is that there's a cyclical dysfunction, a fatal flaw, in the habitual ways that we typically live out our lives and in how we try to acquire happiness and satisfaction along the way.

This vicious circle of confusion, unwholesome states of mind, destructive karmic conditioning, and unhappiness, is referred to as samsara. This cyclic, “samsaric” existence is the natural state of humanity that the Buddha believed we can transcend through spiritual self-cultivation. Fortunately for us, the third noble truth – the truth of the extinguishment of unhappiness – is that we can escape this self-perpetuating cycle of ill-being by unraveling our fundamental confusions about the true nature of our lived experience and replacing it with spiritual wisdom. Lastly, this transformation is made possible by adhering to the Buddha’s teachings and spiritual way of life, which constitute the fourth noble truth: the path leading to the extinguishment of unhappiness. This extremely general overview of the four noble truths is helpful as a starting point, but what are we really talking about here? What is it, exactly, that we are so confused about? And what does this "spiritual wisdom" consist of? In order to answer these questions we will have to take a somewhat lengthy but deeply necessary detour before coming back to the noble truths directly. 

 “[For many years] in samsara have I wandered in vain, seeking the cause of this cyclic existence. [Spiritual confusion] is indeed unhappiness!” 

(Dhammapada, 153)

Fundamentally, the problem, according to the Buddha, is that we instinctively view our own selves, and the objects of the “external world,” through the distorting lens of “reification” (or “essentialism”), wherein we (mis-)perceive things as being "inherently self-existent." This means that we think and behave with the false underlying assumption that things are more existentially independent, concrete, and fixed than they actually are; that things have their own self-sufficient and absolute mode of existence. Oftentimes, this innate tendency toward reification is bound up with the idea that things possess an autonomous “core essence,” which is something like a stable and unchanging essential nature that acts as an intrinsically fixed identity that makes things the way they are. For example, when we see a tree we view it as being a singular, self-contained “entity” that exists independently of all other things, completely in and of itself. We view this tree as if it were in possession of an intrinsic and essential nature (an “essence”) that establishes the “treeness” of the tree through itself from within. In other words, we think that the tree is what it is simply by virtue of being itself; that trees are tree-like because they inherently possess the self-determining essence of “treeness.” This all sounds like an obvious truism to the typical person – trees are trees because it is what they are; their “treeness” is the result of their intrinsic “tree-nature.” Indeed, we instinctively view the tree, and all things in general, in this way without even thinking about it. All things are viewed as being individual, discrete objects that exist from their own side, in their own way, because that’s just how they are constituted by their own unique and individual core essence. This is the natural condition we find ourselves in, and it feels extremely intuitive and proper. However, importantly, the Buddha came to realize that it is precisely this unreflective view of reification/essentialism that drives our existential misunderstandings of both the world and ourselves.

At this point we could ask, “But what's the big deal? Why is this seemingly natural and harmless view of things said to be so detrimental?” According to Buddhist teaching, the issue with the reificationist worldview is that it is fundamentally incorrect, and thus misleads us into thinking, feeling, and acting in ways that are counterproductive at best, and outright destructive at worst. Digging a bit deeper into the “why” and “how” of this idea, by looking at the mind a bit more closely, will help to bring us to the heart of the Buddha's spiritual philosophy.

The human mind is dominated by a vast, dynamic, and intense sensorium that floods our conscious awareness with a churning sea of stimulating sensations – sights, sounds, smells, physical sensations, etc. This internal inundation of sensorial phenomena spontaneously gives rise to an equally complex and frantic cascade of thoughts and emotions, whose quality and character are determined by the ways that we interpret and engage with the incoming torrent of sensory experiences. These three fluctuating, swirling aspects of the internal world of our lived experience  – the sensorial, the emotional, and the intellectual/conceptual – are what reificationists fundamentally misapprehend, misunderstand, and mishandle amidst the rushing flux of life. But there's a perfectly understandable reason as to why the view of reification is the natural, instinctive response to the ongoing flow of consciousness.

Practically speaking, "reification" is the mental model that most people use to try and make sense of this overwhelming torrent of seemingly concrete, stable, and self-sufficient mental phenomena because it is pragmatic and functional. However, fundamentally, these (mis-)perceptions and (mis-)conceptions are the result of our own lack of disciplined attention to the way things actually are. In our day to day lives we are so overwhelmingly preoccupied with the worldly distractions surging toward us, and so utterly inattentive to the motions and movements of the mind itself, that we fail to recognize the true nature of our own lived experiences even whilst living directly within them. Instead of skillfully attending to the phenomenological contents of the mind by carefully and calmly focusing on their true character and nature, we immediately and unthinkingly accept their misleading appearances at face value within the whirlwind of uncontrolled, unruly mental chaos. This is simply how the human mind has evolved to behave: relying upon blindingly rapid mental processing, imperfect cognitive heuristics, and other processing shortcuts that are related to facilitating material appropriation, functional utilization of resources, and raw survival. While this might be useful for savagely surviving and reproducing in the harsh wildernesses of our deep evolutionary history, it is not quite as helpful for living a spiritually fulfilling life free from unhappiness and existential suffering.

Now that we’ve covered what the root confusion of reification/essentialism is, now we might ask ourselves: “So what do we do about this false view of reification, then? What's the alternative?” In order to address this spiritual confusion, the Buddha taught the principle of sunyata, or “emptiness.” In doing so, he wanted to unravel the unreflective assumptions at the heart of reification: namely, that things exist independently and self-sufficiently, or that they are filled with a permanent, unchanging, self-existent essence. The Buddha wanted us to realize that all things are actually profoundly impermanent, ever-changing, and existentially dependent upon a dynamic network of causes and conditions that extend far beyond themselves. He wanted us to see that a tree is not an independent, self-determining entity because it is fundamentally contingent upon the coming together of a wide variety of outside forces, materials, and processes. The tree exists only so long as a strict set of prerequisites are maintained by the world around it, and the same is true for all things everywhere. Within this interconnected web of existential dependencies, there is nowhere in which an unchanging, permanent, and completely self-sustaining essence or existential core could be said to exist. Indeed, phenomena characterized by conditionality and interdependency are inherently unstable and subject to change across all facets of their being – there is no untouchable, self-contained essence residing within anything; there is no stable, fixed core hiding within things. No phenomena exists absolutely independently – all states of being are relative and relational, existing in a profoundly interconnected and provisional manner. There is no “self-existent tree-essence” to be found anywhere within a tree – you could spend all day tearing apart a tree and never find an autonomous “tree-essence" dwelling inside of it. Instead, trees – and all other phenomena – are ephemeral and dynamic aggregations of temporarily interacting processes and conditions. Therefore, everything is profoundly devoid of an inherent, self-contained core-essence; everything is fundamentally coreless and insubstantial; everything is thoroughly empty of intrinsic self-existence. This is the reality of “emptiness” that the Buddha realized most people are deeply confused about. This is the alternative to the false view of reification.

“... ‘All worldly phenomena are impermanent; all things are without a true essence.’ That is the way I instruct my disciples… ” 

(Majjhima Nikāya, 35.9)

As discussed above, the Buddha taught that the “essentialist,” “reificationist” worldview lies at the roots of our samsaric sufferings. Having outlined the Buddha’s alternative to reification, we can now use the understanding of emptiness to expand upon why the false view of reification is productive of spiritual discontentment. When we fail to recognize the true emptiness of things we mistake an empty, impermanent, processual world for a non-empty, essentialized, and existentially fixed world. When this confusion is in place we falsely believe that the phenomena comprising our lived experiences possess more concreteness, power, and potentiality than they actually do. In other words, we view things as being more existentially stable and independent than they actually are, and therefore as being more intrinsically capable of supplying us with lasting happiness and satisfaction than they actually are. This has crucial implications for our instinctive pursuit of material attainment and worldly pleasures.

“It is through an inversion of perception that your mind is engulfed by fire.”

(Samyutta Nikaya, 8.4)

If we trick ourselves into viewing the objects of the world around us as being stable, self-sufficiently existent bringers of inner-peace and happiness, then of course we will fixate upon them and feverishly pursue them. After all, it is a fundamental truth that all sentient beings long for peace and contentment, for freedom from suffering and for happiness. And so, misled by the confusion of reification and driven by our deep spiritual longing for fulfillment and satisfaction, we grasp at and emotionally cling to these worldly objects and pursuits, thinking that they are a secure, existentially substantial, and seemingly concrete foundation to build our well-being and happiness upon. But this, we could say, is simply too good to be true.

“Just as a dewdrop on the tip of a blade of grass quickly vanishes with the rising of the sun and does not endure … Just as a river flowing down from the mountains, going far, its current swift, carrying everything with it, so that there is not a moment, an instant, a second where it stands still, but instead it goes and rushes and flows… in the same way, devoted disciples, the life of human beings is like [these things].” 

(Anguttara Nikaya, 7.74)

A delicious meal, an exciting movie, an expensive vacation, a new job, a bigger house, fun friends, entertaining distractions, pleasurable indulgences, loving family members; these phenomena are all fundamentally incapable of providing lasting contentment and happiness because they are all impermanent and in constant moment-to-moment flux. They are transient, subject to change, and inherently unstable. They are fundamentally empty of all the false ideas of self-sufficiency and existential stability that we ascribe to them. To build our hopes and dreams upon them, then, is to sow the seeds of our own future unhappiness. To use them as a foundation upon which to stake our well-being and happiness is to willingly invite spiritual suffering and discontentment into our lives. It is like building a house upon a foundation of sand that shifts and swirls as time moves inexorably forward. All worldly phenomena will eventually change, and they will all eventually come to an end in one way or another. And when they do – even in the slightest bit – stress, suffering, anxiety, mourning, regret, agitation, discontentment, dissatisfaction, and more, will come crashing down upon us. Even in those rare and precious moments when we believe that we have everything we could ever ask for and our contentment is at its absolute peak, the latent anxieties surrounding the inevitability of loss and change, and the uneasy feeling that we must squeeze and hold onto this moment as long as we can, still pockmarks our lives with stress and subtle disquietude. Thus, even the "good times" are tinged with their own insidious forms of ill-being and unhappiness, in a way that connects directly to their true impermanent and “empty” nature.

“Impermanent are all worldly phenomena; Their nature is to arise and vanish. Having arisen, they quickly cease… Everything impermanent decays; The sages prosper having pierced this truth.” 

(Samyutta Nikaya, 9.6 & 7.2)

The truth is that samsara is fundamentally imperfect and afflictive no matter what we try to do to secure a foothold in the world around us. When we step back and think about these things objectively, this is a seemingly obvious idea. Of course nothing lasts forever, and of course we become frustrated and upset when our desires are thwarted or when the objects of our pleasure are ripped from us. But despite this intellectual understanding that we all agree to, the vast majority of people still live their lives as if it is not true, and so the true nature of our lived experience is forgotten during the ebbs and flows of daily living. As a result, we slip into the unreflective assumption of reification and live in unhealthy psychological reliance upon these phenomena. In other words, we still live as untrained worldlings enmeshed in samsaric cycles of ill-being. We still become unsettled and agitated at the fluctuations of the social and material world around us because we grasp at them and emotionally cling to them as if they were concrete sources of genuine and lasting happiness. We still live and act as if the world really is inherently self-existent and existentially fixed, and our expectations and desires follow suit, lining up to be knocked down over and over. This is how the view of reification defiles our relationship to the external world.

However, the roots of our fundamental spiritual affliction go even deeper than our misunderstanding and mishandling of the world around us. More importantly, the Buddha taught that the profound confusion of reification strikes us most deeply and severely when it contaminates our own sense of self. This is extremely problematic as our sense of self pervades and informs essentially all of the mind’s moment-to-moment flow of lived experience. When we start to view our own sense of self through the obscurant lens of reification we begin to treat it as if it were an inherently self-existent entity that possesses far more concreteness, power, and potentiality than it actually does, and in doing so we unknowingly orient the deepest, most fundamental aspects of our inner-lives toward cyclical unhappiness and discontentment. This reified/essentialized view of the self is what we would nowadays call the “ego,” and this illusory manifestation of our spiritual confusion warps and distorts how we engage with ourselves, other people, and the world in general. As a result, the false view of intrinsic, "reified" egohood is taught by the Buddha as being the primary driver of samsara.

“... An untaught ordinary person, who … is unskilled and undisciplined in the true teaching … regards [the phenomena of the mind] as a true inner-self…”

(Majjhima Nikaya, 109.10)

A quick discussion of the term “ego” will be helpful here. “Ego" refers to the (false) idea that there is a stable and immutable entity (i.e. a “true inner-self” or a “fixed, objective self”) that abides at the core of our being and which acts as the self-existent basis of our supposedly fixed and objective identity. This “ego” is viewed as being the self-contained and independent essence that makes us who we are by existentially differentiating us from other people and from all other things in the deepest, most fundamental sense. This is simply the misguided reification of the sense of self, and in our confusion about the true, empty nature of all things most people simply take this false view of reified egohood as a given, as an obvious and permanent truth about themselves. As such, most people implicitly view their “true selves” as being this executive, superordinate ego-entity that exists at an exalted position within the mind, from which it allegedly performs the existential work of incarnating their essential nature. Egoists/reificationists view themselves as being ultimately identifiable with this inner-thinker of thoughts, this inner-feeler of feelings, this metaphysical inner-recipient of all incoming experiences, this mysterious inner-owner of their minds and bodies. This feeling of differentiated ownership, of being a concrete entity that is the distinct and separate commander and controller of the mind and body, is the ego that most people cling to and center their mental lives around. This is how the view of reification defiles our own relationship with ourselves.

In contrast, the Buddha taught that the reality of emptiness applies just as much to human beings as it does to everything else in reality, and thus he argued that humans are egoless – that we lack independent self-existence and/or a self-sufficient core essence. Indeed, the Buddha taught that it is directly observable that the mental phenomena of our lived experiences are in fact ephemeral manifestations that arise out of temporary combinations of conditions and processes that ultimately extend beyond themselves. As a result of the conditionally dependent nature of our lived experience, all states of mind are continuously blooming, decaying, and vanishing in response to the interconnected circumstances that exist around and within us. Everything about our minds and the conscious experiences they facilitate is impermanent and existentially reliant upon other things. Thus, whether we identify our “true (reified) selves” as our thoughts, our feelings, our internal narrations, our ideations, our perceptions, our capacity for awareness itself, or any other psychological process of consciousness – anything that we think could serve as the concrete, self-existent basis for a fixed and objectively binding ego-identity – is ultimately not what we think it is. Nothing within the unrelenting stream of our lived experience exists as a self-sufficient, stable, and permanent core essence or concrete existential foundation. Instead, there is simply the dynamic and highly interconnected flow of experience itself, which is intensely integrated and contiguous but ultimately empty of inherent self-existence. This is the “emptiness of the self” that is central to the Buddhist outlook on life, and it is the true nature of ourselves that most people are confused about.

“...'Noble disciples, what do you think? Are [the phenomena of the mind] permanent or impermanent?' — ‘Impermanent, venerable sir.’ — ‘Does that which is impermanent lead to unhappiness or happiness?’ — Unhappiness, venerable sir.’ — ‘Is that which is impermanent, a source of unhappiness, and [conditionally dependent], fit to be regarded thus: ‘This is mine, this I am, this is my true inner-self’?’ — ‘No, venerable sir.’”

(Majjhima Nikaya, 22.26)

When we view our own selves through the distorting lens of reification, our minds become dominated by this fabricated ego-construct because we view it as being more concrete, powerful, and capable of bringing us happiness than it actually is. Therefore, upon reifying our sense of self, we are misled into trying to serve and obey this all-important “me” – this "independent, unchanging, essential core" of who we are. When this reified ego-construct begins to dominate the mind, we are confused into feverishly grasping at it and recklessly stumbling over ourselves to try and gratify its self-centered whims. The ego is a self-perpetuating mental construct that inherently desires its own gratification and continuation – its fundamental nature is to seek out self-affirmation, which we fervently indulge in a misguided hunt for happiness. When we confusedly engage with ourselves and the world through this egocentric mindset, our patterns of mental and behavioral activity are profoundly deformed, giving rise to a host of afflictive psychological states. Our life becomes a gauntlet of hedonic confusion wherein we fixate entirely on the next bout of shallow, egoistic indulgence, which karmically degrades the mind and contaminates the world around us.

“Those who are infatuated with passionate cravings fall back into the swirling current (of samsara) like a spider on its self-spun web.” 

(Dhammapada, 347)

In its turbulent quest for satisfaction and self-indulgence, the ego naturally bifurcates the whole of lived experience into two categories: that which is deemed “me,” “mine,” and “good for me,” and that which is deemed “not me,” “not mine,” and “not good for me.” We become infatuated by both of these illusory categories and reflexively anchor our sense of wellbeing to their perceived status. We seek to appease and satiate the ego-mind by appropriating, controlling, and lavishing gratuitous attention onto seemingly pleasurable mental phenomena (i.e. physical sensory delights, positive feelings, and self-aggrandizing thoughts/ideas) – which ultimately ripens into greedy cravings and feverish clinging. Likewise, we seek to uphold, affirm, and protect the imagined sanctity of the ego by fiercely avoiding, diminishing, or otherwise eliminating seemingly unpleasurable mental phenomena (i.e. unpleasant physical sensations, negative feelings, and thoughts/ideas that threaten or provoke the ego) – which ultimately festers into anger, hostility, and ill-will. This is the emotionally fraught approach to life for the egoists, who are profoundly confused about the true nature of things, and who are therefore trapped within the afflictive state of samsara. 

“There is no fire like greed; there is no grip like hostility; there is no net like confusion; there is no river like craving.” 

(Dhammapada, 251)

Once established, the self-cherishing ego-mind continually gives rise to extraordinarily powerful psychological forces which confuse and mislead us from within, further blinding us to the true nature of things and frantically urging us to seek out permanent satisfaction and stable happiness within conditionally dependent, impermanent, and fundamentally empty phenomena. These egoistic mental states cyclically intensify as we become increasingly obsessed with and habituated to the pursuit of self-absorbed gratification – this is the psychological force of unwholesome karmic conditioning (i.e. negative karma). It is with the arrival of these increasingly possessive and disturbing mental states that our entire outlook on life becomes fixated on selfishly exploiting the phenomena of existence that we think will bring lasting satisfaction to our egos. As a result, we begin to treasure the futile delights and self-serving desires of the ego above all else in our pursuit of infantile satiation, regardless of the effects that these confused compulsions have on the world around us. We mistakenly assume that serving and appeasing the ever-agitated, unsatisfiable ego will bring us the peace that we desperately want.

“Sensory pleasures and mental phenomena: This is the terrible bait of the world with which the unenlightened are infatuated.” 

(Samyutta Nikaya, 4.17)

However, by feverishly pursuing and clinging to these misunderstood objects of desire, we inadvertently stake our well-being upon them, which sets the stage for inevitable encounters with unhappiness. In reality, these pleasurable phenomena – these ruinous illusions of permanence, satisfaction, and stability – are constantly engaged in a process of flux and will eventually evaporate like mirages amidst the passage of time, leaving us with only disappointment, frustration, and spiritual distress when they do. This causes us to endlessly chase after something within ourselves and the world that doesn’t truly exist and that we can never attain, and so we never allow ourselves to rest. This endless, restless, egocentric pursuit is the cycle of samsara. Instead of happiness, this egoistic way of life only causes us to generate ill-being and unhappiness. It contorts our way of life into something fundamentally self-centered and disconnected from others. Our fixation on gratifying and serving the false ego-construct by exploiting the world doesn't bring us the comfort and contentment we think it will, because neither the ego nor the world is as inherently absolute and concrete as we think it is. We are confused about our own true nature and so we suffer for it.

“With the change and alteration of [the phenomena of the world], there arises in him sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure, and despair.” 

(Samyutta Nikaya, 22.1)

Whether it is through the reification of the phenomena around us or of our own sense of self, we are all desperately trying to find a permanent, unwavering foothold for ourselves to stand firmly upon. But this is simply not possible; this delusional mission is destined to fail over and over again. And this is why the cycle of samsara continues to spin into motion so long as we remain confused about the true nature of things, but especially of ourselves. By misunderstanding emptiness, we misattribute undue power, potentiality, and concreteness to our sense of self and the phenomena of the world. By granting these things undue existential status we turn them into captivating targets for emotional grasping and clinging, and so we feverishly seek them out as sources of enduring happiness and comfort – but they always fail us eventually, since they are actually empty and impermanent. We confuse ourselves into thinking that our lives only have real meaning or a real capacity for happiness if both we and the world really possess inherent self-existence and objectively binding, existential fixity. But none of this is true, it is merely the outgrowth of our own confusion and spiritual obscuration. There is a powerful, instinctual drive to reify the sense of self and the ideas and abstractions that relate to it. Perhaps it is because we feel that if our own feelings of selfhood aren’t inherently concretized in an objective, independent, and self-sufficient way, then perhaps nothing that we value is real and worthwhile in any way at all, and if nothing that we experience in the world at large is intrinsically self-existent either, then perhaps our lives truly have no meaning of any sort and all is hopeless and lost. This is the spiritual disease that afflicts all unenlightened beings, this is the darkness and confusion that the Buddha believed his teachings could save us from.

Up to this point we have covered both reification and emptiness, both with respect to the world around us and to ourselves, and how these ideas connect to human unhappiness. Now, let’s circle back and connect all of this to the four noble truths directly to form an expanded, fleshed out summary of them. As a reminder, the four noble truths are: (1) the truth of unhappiness itself, (2) the truth of the cause of unhappiness, (3) the truth of the extinguishment of unhappiness, and (4) the truth of the path that leads to the extinguishment of unhappiness.

The truth of unhappiness is that the unenlightened mind, being spiritually distorted at its innermost foundations, continually gives rise to its own sufferings and disquietude regardless of the circumstances of our lives – meaning that unhappiness is enmeshed within the very structure of the untrained, unenlightened mind. The true cause of our unhappiness is the fundamental confusion of “reification” (i.e. viewing the phenomena of our lived experience, and especially our egoic sense of self, as being objective, stably fixed, and concretely grounded upon an autonomous inner-essence), which obscures the true nature of both ourselves and the world. This state of spiritual confusion contaminates our lives with dynamic cycles of disturbing thoughts, afflictive emotions, and harmful behaviors. This cyclic state of spiritual confusion and unhappiness is known as samsara. The truth regarding the extinguishment of unhappiness is the realization that it is possible to save ourselves from our existential confusions by displacing them with the Buddha’s liberating wisdom of emptiness, which transforms how we understand and engage with our lived experience by breaking the cycle of samsara and entering us into nirvana – the state of total freedom from spiritual confusion and unhappiness. The true path that leads to the complete extinguishment of unhappiness is constituted by the Buddha’s higher trainings, which can be broken down into three primary domains of self-cultivation/personal development: virtuous living, mental discipline, and liberating wisdom. Taken together, these four noble truths provide the framework for understanding and actively engaging in this Buddhist way of life.

“By [spiritual confusion] is the world bound; By the removal of [spiritual confusion] it is freed. [Spiritual confusion] is what one must forsake to cut off all bondage” 

(Samyutta Nikaya, 1.220)

In this article, we focused primarily on the first three noble truths, because the fourth noble truth regarding the path to enlightenment requires its own separate in-depth exploration. In the second stage of “Bodhi-Mind Buddhism,” entitled “Progressing Along the Path,” we will dive more deeply into the practical teachings that are meant to actually lead us out of samsara, which ranges from generating bodhi-mind, to Buddhist meditation, and more. For now, it will suffice to simply understand that the fourth noble truth emerges from and revolves around the first three noble truths, and that it empowers us to cultivate and purify ourselves ethically, mentally, and spiritually, so that we may gradually unravel the confusions and destructive karmic forces that drive our cyclic unhappiness and unwholesome ways of living. In short, it is the true Buddhist way of life that perfectly embodies the full scope and depth of the profound truth of sunyata (“emptiness”).

Taking Refuge in the Triple Gem

As stated at the outset of this post, the two guiding aspects of “Entering Upon the Path” are: (1) The Four Noble Truths and (2) Taking Refuge in the “Triple Gem.” With the four noble truths now addressed, there is one more thing to be done in order to formally enter upon the Buddha’s path of enlightenment. “Taking refuge in the triple gem” is an explicit, formal decision to take the Buddha, the Dharma (i.e. the teachings of the Buddha and his venerated disciples), and the Sangha (i.e. the spiritual community of Buddhist practitioners) to be one’s precious safe haven from a vitiating life of samsara.

In a sense, what this really means is that we decide to take up a formal commitment to study, contemplate, and practice the living tradition of the Buddhadharma throughout our daily lives. This is the step that newcomers to Buddhism can take once they arrive at a reasoned conviction regarding the evident sensibility and empirical veracity of the four noble truths. This process of initial discernment is different for every individual, and will take time and involve a lot of self-reflection and contemplation. But, regardless of how long it might take, if the revolutionary vision of life presented by the Buddha’s four-truth framework begins to speak to you and inspire you to cultivate change in your life, then taking refuge in the triple gem is how you can begin to formally reorient your life towards the Dharmic, Buddhist way of life. This is important because an explicit commitment to spiritual development and self-cultivation helps to bolster and fortify your practice and your state of mind as you move forward. Also, traditionally speaking, “taking refuge” is what marks somebody as being a Buddhist, and so it has major historical and sociocultural significance as well. Therefore, the practice of taking refuge weaves a golden thread of continuity and interconnectedness across all Buddhist practitioners throughout history. So let's briefly look at what these three jewels are meant to signify.

“He who takes refuge in the Buddha, in his Dharma and his Sangha, penetrates with transcendental wisdom the Four Noble Truths … Having arrived at such a refuge, one is emancipated from all unhappiness.”

 (Dhammapada, 190-192)

Taking refuge in the Buddha (the first jewel of the “triple-gem”) is meant to help ground one's spiritual life in a mind oriented towards the Buddha's inspirational example of embodied enlightenment. It is meant to solidify the notion that the historical Buddha – the flesh and blood man named Siddhartha Gautama – is our precious teacher and the ultimate proof of the fruits of spiritual practice. By recognizing the potential of the human Gautama to become the fully enlightened Buddha, we are recognizing the potential of all people, ourselves included, to properly cultivate the path and transcend the sufferings of unenlightened existence. And so to take refuge in the Buddha is to fortify oneself against the vicissitudes of life, and all the hurdles and hardships that one will face along the path and in general living. The Buddha is the spiritual teacher, the accomplished exemplar, and the reminder that enlightenment is within our power to bring about. By trusting that the luminous “Buddha-nature” of the Fully Enlightened One is not any different from our own “Buddha-nature,” we can set aside all doubt and hesitancy and allow ourselves to walk the path toward the extinguishment of spiritual unhappiness.

Taking refuge in the Dharma (the second jewel of the “triple-gem”) is meant to center our spiritual studies, contemplations, and practices upon the teachings of the Buddha and his enlightened disciples. Whether this is by engaging with the ancient canonical literature, the subsequent writings of the tradition’s historical masters, or lectures and speeches from the learned teachers of our own time, Buddhism encourages us to engage in a rich and fruitful life of continuous study and learning. But more than that, is that we must directly apply these newfound perspectives, ideas, and practices to our lives as well. However one engages in their philosophical development, taking refuge in the Dharma means that one accepts the Buddhist teachings as a guide to enlightenment and continually engages with them as a means of spiritual growth.

Taking refuge in the Sangha (the third jewel of the “triple-gem”) is meant to enter us into fellowship with the living community of Buddhist practitioners all around the world. It is the living and breathing spiritual support system, wherein devoted and sincere practitioners can support one another in mutual reciprocity. When we commit to the Sangha (i.e. the Buddhist community), we know that we are not alone and that there is a place for us to open our hearts and minds to others who understand where we are coming from. The Sangha is absolutely critical as spiritual growth flourishes most brilliantly when it is cultivated alongside others. As such, taking refuge in the Sangha means that one acknowledges the role that the Buddhist community ought to play in their spiritual life.

With that being said, to formally take refuge in the triple gem – the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha – all you need to do is say and truly believe the following vow:

“In the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha,

I take refuge until I attain supreme enlightenment.

Through the merit of practicing the path,

May I attain buddhahood for the benefit of all beings.”

And with that, we are ready to set out upon the path itself, with a mind focused upon the inspirational model of the Buddha, the guidance and wisdom of the Dharma, and the living support and friendship of the Sangha. Now we must begin to progress along the path of the Great Mahayana tradition and begin to cultivate ourselves in order to serve and uplift the world around us.

Please read the next article in this series to dive more deeply into Stage 2 of Bodhi-Mind Buddhism: “Progressing Along the Path.”