Ultimate Reality

Back in the Buddha’s day, a lot of teachers argued about the nature of ultimate reality. They had a list of questions that were the standard questionnaire you would ask a teacher: “Is the world eternal? Not eternal? Does it exist? Does it not exist? Is it finite? Infinite? How about people who gain awakening? Do they exist? Not exist? Both? Neither?” The Buddha would repeatedly be challenged with these questions and he’d repeatedly refuse to answer. There was one time he responded that all he taught was suffering and the end of suffering.

There was another time when one of his students, a layperson, Vajjiya Māhita, was asked about the Buddha’s positions on these topics. He said the Buddha didn’t address those topics at all, didn’t take a stance on them. So the person questioning him said, “Well then, your Buddha here is a nihilist, doesn’t teach anything.” Vajjiya said, “No, he teaches something very important: what’s skillful, what’s not skillful.” Vajjiya went back and asked the Buddha if that was true, and the Buddha said, “Yes, that was a good answer.”

Those two answers basically provide the foundation for what we’re trying to do here. The issue is suffering and how we can put an end to it. And it’s something we do put an end to through our skillful actions. Suffering doesn’t just happen on its own. It’s something we do. And it doesn’t cease on its own. It’s something we can learn to undo, stop doing, to come to the end of suffering. That’s what we’re here for.

So the existence of suffering was an issue the Buddha did have to address. And the way that your actions can or cannot lead to the end of suffering: That’s another issue he had to address. That’s why karma was the big metaphysical issue he taught and would answer questions about.

That’s what we’re focusing on here as we meditate. We’re focusing on our karma, our intentions. As he said, “Karma is the intention.” For the moment, we’re trying to make our intentions one: Stay with the breath. You learn best about your intentions if you try to hold on to one intention. Then you see what other intentions come in and try to knock it off balance, knock it off course.

If you just follow random intentions here, there, and everywhere, you have no clear idea of what happens as a result of what. But here you’re trying to find out, “If I hold to this intention, what happens?” “If I hold to a different intention, what happens?” “If I intend different perceptions, what happens?” “If I choose different topics, what happens?” Those are things you can learn from your meditation.

Someone once asked, “How do you learn about the nature of ultimate reality through meditation?” The answer is, you’re not looking for ultimate reality, you’re looking to understand how things work: not just how things are, but how they work, and how they can be made to work in the direction you want them to go. It’s a skill you can develop, and the Buddha has lots to say on that topic.

He starts with the lessons you learn from being generous; the lessons you learn from being virtuous, holding to the precepts; the lessons you learn from getting the mind concentrated; and the lessons of discernment, where you start asking the questions that the Buddha does say are important: “What is suffering? What is the duty with regard to suffering?”

The duty is to comprehend it, seeing how every instance of suffering boils down to the fact that you’re clinging to something.

“What’s the cause of that clinging?” That’s to be abandoned. The cause is three kinds of craving. Craving for sensuality: your fascination with sensual thoughts. Craving for becoming: taking on an identity in a world of experience, centered on a particular thing that you want to get or want to gain. And craving for non-becoming: You’ve got a becoming — a world or a sense of self — that you want to destroy. These three kinds of craving are the cause of suffering, and you have to learn how to recognize them, learn how to abandon them, develop dispassion for them.

That’s one of the big ironies in life: that we’re passionate about the things that make us suffer. It’s in our passion that we create the suffering.

The third noble truth, the cessation of suffering, is to be realized. You realize it through developing dispassion for the cause of suffering. In other words, you engage in the duty with regard to the cause of suffering, and that brings suffering to an end.

And you do that through developing the noble eightfold path, which boils down to virtue, concentration, and discernment. These are things you do, and you learn about what you’re doing by being very systematic in what you do.

This is why we practice concentration, why we have techniques for concentration, and specific questions to ask about what you’re doing while you’re centering the mind, what the results are. That’s something you can learn as you sit here with your eyes closed. That’s knowledge you can use. It can guide your actions.

After all, the mind is an active process. You don’t just sit here receiving sensory input. We’re out looking for things, constantly fabricating. That’s the very beginning of causality in our experience: putting things together, trying to figure out what’s the best way to gain happiness. When you focus here, on useful knowledge, that’s really satisfying.

Think about the different visions of ultimate reality that people start out with: They often are very limiting. Some of the ones proposed in the time of the Buddha said you had no free will at all, everything was predetermined, either by a God or by your past karma. Others said there was no pattern at all. Everything was random. There was nothing to learn, nothing to master. Just grab whatever pleasures come your way whenever you find them.

Even visions of ultimate reality that have been developed within the Buddhist context, when people say we should start answering the questions that the Buddha didn’t answer: Those can get pretty limiting, too. Take the idea that we’re all interconnected, we’re in a sea of inter-being: That would mean that you can’t find the end of suffering for yourself. You’d have to wait until everybody else comes along as well. That’s never going to happen.

Or the idea that everything is inconstant, so you just have to hold to the bittersweet pleasures of knowing that what you’re holding on to right now is going to leave you sometime. That’s all very limiting.

The Buddha said, “Let’s take the limits off. Assume that true happiness can be found and human action can do it. What would that be like?” He found that it was possible. He tried various ways that didn’t lead to where he wanted to go, but he didn’t let those failures get him down. Ultimately, he found the way. He did find the way to an ultimate reality, but to one that can’t be described.

Nibbāna is the ultimate. It’s ultimately true, ultimately real. It doesn’t change. But it’s outside of the range of language, so there’s no description of ultimate reality that we’re working on here—aside from the possibility that, yes, nibbāna exists and true happiness is possible.

The Buddha did say a few things about nibbāna. He gave different names to it to indicate its good features. The names boiled down to five large categories. One is that it is a kind of consciousness. You don’t blank out. Two, it’s pleasant, the ultimate pleasure. Three, it’s true, it doesn’t change. Four, it’s freedom. In fact, that’s what “nibbāna” means: unbinding, total freedom.

We live in this sense of ourselves, inhabiting this body, inhabiting this mind. We’re trapped in our inner world here. Nibbāna releases us from this inner world into something much greater.

And finally, nibbāna is the ultimate. There’s nothing better. It’s one of the few things that doesn’t exist for the sake of something else. Everything else we encounter in life is for the sake of something else. Everything is means to an end, but it turns out that those ends are also means. Yet when you get to nibbāna, it’s not a means for anything else. It’s the endpoint. And when you get there, you don’t want to go anywhere else. You’re not even limited to being in a place. That’s where we’re headed: something undescribed but something that the Buddha promises is the best thing possible. The best thing imaginable. Better than imaginable.

So take his principles: We’re here to understand suffering and how to put an end to it. And we’re here to learn what’s skillful and what’s unskillful in that direction. So we take on the assumptions about karma, assumptions about the possibility that there is a third noble truth and a fourth noble truth, something we can do to get to the cessation of suffering. That’s all we’re asked to take as our assumptions. We build on that, focus on these questions, and aside from that, just leave questions of ultimate reality off to the side.

Our questions should be, “What am I doing right now? Where is it wrong? What can I change so that I can get what’s really desirable?” Those are issues worth learning about. And those are the things we can learn about as we practice.

You sit here with your eyes closed. How do you know what ultimate reality is? You may say, “Well, this is my ultimate reality, this consciousness in the present moment.” But what if there’s something better than that? Maybe there is something better than that.

What you can know is, “I do this, and these are the results I get.” And you can decide whether the results are good enough, taking as the Buddha’s standard that ultimate happiness is possible. Anything short of that is not yet good enough.

So try to answer his questions and use his standards for what counts as a good answer. You’ll find that the questions really are worth asking and really worth answering. They’re things you can answer. And when you arrive at the answer, you’ll be glad you did.