The Dhamma Wheel

The passage we chanted just now is called “Setting the Dhamma Wheel in Motion.” It’s the Buddha’s first talk. People sometimes ask, “Where’s the wheel?” The wheel is in the part where the Buddha talks about the four noble truths, the duty appropriate to each, and then the fact that he had completed the duty. That was what constituted his awakening.

In those days, when you talked about what we would call a table — where you set two variables against each other, and it looks like a bunch of squares on a page — they would think of it as a wheel. You go around all the different alternatives: in this case, the truth, its duty, the fact that the duty had been completed, and then the next truth, and so on around the circle.

And it’s interesting to think about why that would constitute the Buddha’s awakening.

Of course, he doesn’t tell us the whole story about his awakening. There’s one point where he compares the things he learned in his awakening to the leaves in an entire forest. What he taught was just the handful of leaves that he held in his hand. That handful, he said, served a purpose, which is to enable people to put an end to their suffering. You do that by seeing what the suffering is.

In this case, it’s clinging to what the Buddha calls the five aggregates. Of course, he didn’t use the word “aggregate.” The Pali term, khandha, means “heap” or “pile.” Five categories of activities:

• Your sense of the form of the body as you feel it from within.

• Feelings of pleasure, pain, neither pleasure nor pain.

• Perceptions, where you put labels on things, identifying what they are, what they mean.

• Thought constructs or fabrications, where you put thoughts together.

• And then consciousness, which is aware of all these things.

He says we cling to these things, and that’s the suffering.

The word for “clinging,” upādāna, can also mean, “to feed, to take sustenance.” We go around feeding all the time, trying to find happiness in these things. Yet there’s always a sense of frustration because the happiness that they provide doesn’t last. But why do we keep doing that? Because we think it’s the only way to find happiness. We see that we can take these activities and turn them into states of becoming, where you identify something you want, and then you see what world that object is in. Then you go into that world. You take on an identity in that world.

This applies both on a micro and a macro level. The micro level is thoughts you have in mind. You desire something, and you can imagine where it is. Then the question is, do you really want it? Do you want to take on the identity that’s needed for that? You go through this many times in the course of the day. One of the Buddha’s great insights was that this is also how we take birth, as we go from one life to the next. The same process: There’s a desire. You came into this world because there was something in the human world you wanted, something in the human world had an allure. And you said, “Let’s go for it.” Then you took on this identity so that you can find what you want.

This is how we look for our pleasure, both on the macro and the micro level. Yet the Buddha’s saying that if we go for the craving that causes these things, it’s going to cause suffering. He’s saying some counterintuitive things. Feeding is suffering. The desire to take on an identity so that you can feed is a cause of suffering. Yet for most of us, this is where we find our pleasure.

Then there’s the cessation of suffering. He says this process can stop.

And you do that by following the path, which comes down to virtue, concentration, and discernment, like we’re doing right now.

In terms of the duties, you want to comprehend the suffering so that you can abandon the cause. You try to realize the cessation of suffering by developing the path. The factors of the path start with right view about these four noble truths. Then all the other factors of the path are aimed at getting the mind into right concentration.

You try to let go of thoughts of sensuality, ill will, and harmfulness. Bring the attitudes of the mind in line with the precepts. In other words, you’re going to be honest with yourself, truthful with yourself. And then, to get the mind into concentration, you have to let go of unskillful mental qualities and develop skillful ones. You have to have an establishment, a place where you can settle the mind. That’s what the establishings of mindfulness are for. You connect with the body in and of itself, or feelings in and of themselves, mind states, mental qualities in and of themselves.

The Buddha advises that you start with the body, and particularly with the breath. So focus on your breath. As for any other thoughts, put them aside. And to do this, you develop three qualities. One is mindfulness, the ability to keep something in mind. In this case, you’re going to keep in mind the fact that this is where you want to stay. And if you’ve meditated before, you try to remember what lessons you’ve learned, so that when a problem comes up, you can remember how to deal with it. If something skillful or unskillful comes up in the mind, you want to remember how to recognize it. This is all the duty of mindfulness.

The second quality is alertness, as you watch what you’re actually doing and the results you’re getting. For example, are you with the breath? Or are you someplace else?

If you realize that you’ve suddenly lost the breath, lost your focus, well, come right back. That’s the third quality, ardency. You’re trying to do this well. This is what develops your concentration. You can be mindful of anything, alert to anything, but the ardency in trying to do this well is what brings things in the direction of concentration. As you settle down with this foundation you’ve established, the mind does gain a sense of well-being.

Like right now, you can focus on the breath. There’s lots you can do with the breath. You can make it short, make it long, deep, shallow, heavy, light, fast or slow. What would feel good right now? When we talk about the breath, it’s not so much the air that makes contact at the nose as it comes in, goes out. It’s more the flow of energy in the body. As you breathe in, where do you feel that flow? Wherever it’s clearest to see, wherever you have sensations that tell you, “Now the breath is coming in; now the breath is going out,” focus there.

Then ask yourself, what kind of breathing would feel really good right now? What kind of breathing would fill the whole body with a sense of ease? As the mind develops a sense of ease in the body, well-being in the mind, you can settle down. It’s when the mind is settled down that it can see things clearly as to what’s going on inside. As right view tells you, the cause of suffering is not outside, it’s inside. And the qualities that need to be developed to put an end to suffering are not outside either. They’re inside. So you focus inside.

The concentration allows you to see more and more clearly where your clingings are, where your cravings are. So work on developing this foundation of stillness, of steadiness. If your mind wanders off, just keep bringing it back. If it’s used to wandering around, it’ll take a while to settle down. But as you get more and more confident in this sense of how you feel the body from within as you’re sitting right here, you can make it comfortable: relaxing if you’re feeling tense, energizing if you’re feeling tired, soothing if you’re feeling frazzled. You get to choose.

That’s an important principle of getting the mind into concentration: getting the mind to a place where it likes being here. The image the Buddha gives is of a cook working for a king. The king may not say what he likes, but if the cook is observant, he can see. The king reaches for this kind of food, doesn’t reach for that kind of food. If he goes back for seconds here, you know, “I’ll fix more of that.” The food he doesn’t like, you don’t have to fix so much of that. And you know how kings are. They can be very, very picky.

Well, your mind is very picky, too. It’s not willing to settle in unless there’s a good reason to settle in, one of which would be that it feels good.

The second reason is that you’re confident that this is where you really want to be.

This is where right view comes in again. Some people complain about the Buddha’s principle of right view, taking your suffering to be the big issue in life. They ask, “What about the suffering of others?” As the Buddha points out, the cause of suffering is inside. If you know how to take care of that cause properly, you’re not going to be harming anybody, and you’re actually going to be having a good influence on them. If you don’t know how to identify what the suffering is, and you look for the remedy in the wrong place, you can set a bad example and cause a lot of trouble. As we see all around us.

The news is full of people who have crazy ideas about how to find the end of suffering, or at least to alleviate their suffering. They end up causing a lot of destruction, a lot of death, because they’re looking for their happiness in the wrong places. So it’s something that each of us has to be responsible for.

And again, the news tends to focus our attention on things that we’re not responsible for, trying to make us feel guilty because we can’t do anything about them. But then if you actually try to do something about them, you find a lot of people who would push back, because you get in the way of what they think is going to create their happiness.

But again, as the Buddha is pointing out, the real cause for suffering is inside. That’s where you can really make a difference. You can change your mind. You can change how you’re looking for happiness. And you can learn how to do it in a responsible way, where nobody gets harmed. You don’t harm yourself and you don’t harm other people.

And it’s not just a lack of harm. You can have a positive influence on other people, too. At the very least, you show them by example: This is how responsible happiness is found. At the same time, as you’re working on reducing your own greed, aversion, and delusion, these qualities don’t go out and pester the neighbors. So you’re looking for happiness in a responsible way.

When the Buddha taught this to the five brethren, he said this was the beginning of his Dhamma. This Dhamma wheel, he said, is now set in motion and it can’t be stopped. The image there reverts to the image of a regular wheel, like the wheel of a king’s chariot. They had a myth in those days about the universal emperor who could drive his chariot from one side of India to the other, and the wheels of his chariot could not get stopped by anyone. In the same way, the Buddha’s teachings cannot get stopped by anybody. The truth is the truth.

Now, there are a lot of people who don’t like the Dhamma. They try to change it. But as the Buddha said, if you’re going to get the best benefit out of it, you give it the benefit of the doubt. You try it on as it is.

This is a major principle in the forest tradition. It goes back to a teaching from the last night of the Buddha’s life. Heavenly beings were singing songs, scattering flowers and incense. The Buddha said that this was not the proper way to show respect for the Buddha. The proper way is to practice the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma—in other words, as it’s taught, for the sake of dispassion.

Now, dispassion is a word that a lot of us have trouble with. It sounds like you give up, you get depressed, you don’t care anymore. Dispassion, though, is more like growing up. When you were a child, you liked to play tic-tac-toe and you found it challenging. As long as it was challenging, it was interesting. Then you finally figured out there are only so many ways you can play tic-tac-toe and you’ve tried them all. The game loses its interest. It’s not a challenge anymore. You want to find something more challenging, something more interesting. That’s dispassion.

The Buddha gets you passionate about doing the path. You want to really enjoy doing the concentration. Then you compare the sense of well-being that comes from concentration with sensual pleasures, and you see that it seeps deeper into the mind than other forms of pleasure. You ask yourself, why would you go for them when you’ve got something better? This is the process again and again. The same applies to the insight that allows you to let go of concentration, to find something even better. Again, you do concentration as you need to, but you get less passionate about it because you’ve got something better.

When the Buddha has you give up things, it’s not to deprive you of anything. It’s because he offers you something better. That’s what we’re going for. It’s not just the end of suffering. Where suffering ends is something amazing. There is a deathless element that can be contacted at the mind. Totally without limits—with none of the limitations of space, none of the limitations of time—and it’s available to everyone who practices. You get passionate for the path and you find that the path leads you to something even better.

So practicing for the sake of dispassion is not practicing for the sake of depression. Sometimes you see people who say, “Well, everything is inconstant, stressful, not-self. I just might as well give up.” That’s low-level depression. Or, “I just might as well accept things as they are.” Depression.

When you feel that you can’t change anything — and this is what often happens when people interpret the Buddha’s teachings on the cause of suffering as being craving, saying, “If I’m not allowed to crave anything, I’m not allowed to crave for things to be different from what they are, I’ll just give up”: That’s not what the Buddha teaches. He teaches you to want to make a difference in your mind, where it really matters and where you can make a difference. Then when you’ve found something so good that you lose your taste for other things, that’s the dispassion he’s talking about. Not from giving up, but from having succeeded in finding something really good. That’s where all this is headed.

This is why the wheel of the Dhamma can’t be stopped by anybody. It’s the truth. Now, when people refuse to practice it, then for them, the Dhamma wheel has stopped. But the truth is always the truth for those who want it. As long as the teachings are available, they’re there for you to practice.

So try on what the Buddha had to say. And give it a fair trial to see if what he said is true—not just out of curiosity, but out of the desire to make it work. After all, what it offers is so amazing that it’s really worth desiring.