Listen Well

Today is the full moon in July. In Pali this is the month of Asalha. The full moon in Asalha was the day in which the Buddha gave his first sermon and gained his first noble disciple, Ven. Añña Kondañña. So it’s the day in which the Triple Gem became complete. The Dhamma has always existed. The Buddha, of course, at that point had already gained awakening.

If we think about this in terms of that year, it was two months ago. After he gained the awakening, he spent seven weeks enjoying the bliss of release. Then at the beginning of the eighth week, he asked himself, should he teach or not? At first, he was inclined not to teach because the Dhamma was so subtle. This got all the way up to the Brahmas. Sahampati Brahma came down and begged with the Buddha, “Please teach. There are those with little dust in their eyes; they will benefit from the teaching.”

The Buddha surveyed the world on his own then and saw that, yes, it was true. There would be those who would benefit. So even though it was going to create a lot of trouble for him—he was going to have to expend a lot of effort to establish the Sāsana Dhamma, the Dhamma expressed in teachings—he decided to do that.

So he surveyed the world again to see who should be the first people to teach. First he thought of his two earlier teachers, the ones who had taught him the way to formless attainments, but they had passed away, gone into the formless realms where he couldn’t contact them. Then he thought of the five brethren, the monks who had looked after him when he was observing his austerities. He saw that they were in Sarnath. So he walked there.

At first they were disinclined to listen to him because he had given up on his austerities, and they thought austerities were the way. But he taught them, no, there was a middle way that doesn’t involve self-torture, and it doesn’t involve indulgence in sensuality. But to say that it’s between the two is not quite right. It’s off the continuum. In other words, you don’t pursue pleasures for their own sake; you don’t pursue pain for its own sake. You use them as means.

The path he taught involved the pleasure of concentration, which is a different kind of pleasure from sensuality, and it involved comprehending pain rather than just enduring it. That was what was special about his teaching. He came up with the four noble truths, and the duties for each of the truths:

• Suffering is to be comprehended.

• Its cause is to be abandoned.

• When the cause is abandoned, you realize the cessation of suffering.

• And you do that by developing the path.

So Añña Kondañña was listening along. And instead of just listening to this as interesting information, he looked into his own mind to see where he was creating suffering and how he could stop. That’s how he gained the Dhamma Eye. It’s expressed in the phrase, “Whatever is subject to origination is also subject to cessation.”

It doesn’t mean, simply, that whatever arises passes away. What it means is that with everything that arises from within the mind, if it’s based on craving, you can get rid of the craving, and it’ll cease. So he followed that path and gained the results. He saw the deathless. That was what confirmed that, yes, what the Buddha was teaching was really true.

Sometimes you hear people say, “Well, it’s just a matter of agreeing with the Buddha that, yes, things arise and pass away. Anybody can see that.” But what he saw was that when you pull out all the craving, pull out all the ignorance, then something special appears.

So we’re celebrating that today. We’ll be celebrating it again tonight. The lessons we can draw from this are many. The important one is that if you’re looking for the cause of suffering, don’t look outside, look inside. There may be things outside that are unpleasant—people say a lot of unpleasant things, do a lot of unpleasant things—but the fact that we suffer from them comes from our own lack of understanding. We don’t understand our own minds.

So. Look into your mind. See where you’re causing unnecessary suffering and learn how to drop whatever the cause is. Pursue that and you’ll be on the right path.

The world needs more noble disciples, but a lot of people are practicing the path to wipe out noble disciples—in other words, teaching wrong Dhamma. There’s wrong Dhamma all around us. And as the Buddha said, when there’s wrong Dhamma out there, then the true Dhamma is hard to find. But we can look for it within ourselves. If we practice with honesty, we practice with integrity, we can find the true Dhamma. It doesn’t die. It’s always there. It’s a question of just making ourselves worthy of it, looking in the right place. Then we have a chance of gaining the Dhamma as well.