Introduction

Good evening, everyone. Welcome to our retreat. It’s always a pleasure to be here meditating with you, and I hope the retreat is helpful for you all.

I recommend that you meditate while we talk.

The topic of our retreat this year is aging, illness, and death. These themes are central to the Buddha’s Dhamma, his teaching, which is primarily aimed at answering the question of how not to suffer from aging, illness, and death. This issue, of course, is of central concern for all of us. The Buddha answers this question by offering practical advice on two levels. The first level is how to experience aging, illness, and death without suffering from them. The second level is how to find a dimension where aging, illness, and death are never again experienced. As we’ll see, these two answers are closely related.

Some people, especially in the West, will be surprised to hear that these issues are central to the Dhamma. After all, questions of aging, illness, and death deal with what is, for most of us, something that will happen in the future, whereas modern versions of Buddhism focus almost exclusive attention on the present moment. In fact, modern Buddhism often focuses on the present moment as a way of avoiding the issues of aging, illness, and death. “Don’t think about things in the future,” we’re told. “Try to find happiness by appreciating the present moment as an end in itself.”

The Buddha’s approach, though, is to focus on the present moment as a means to a further end, because the present moment is where skills can be developed that will help you to handle the pains and suffering of aging, illness, and death when they inevitably come. This approach is based on the principle of heedfulness: There are things you can do to prepare, so you have to do the work needed to master these skills now because you don’t know when aging, illness, and death will come. Death, for instance, could occur without warning at any time.

An important lesson of this retreat will be that these skills are not just a matter of accepting the fact of aging, illness, and death. We need to proactively develop specific skills so that, to repeat, you’ll know how to experience aging, illness, and death without suffering from them, and ideally, so that you can know how to find the dimension where aging, illness, and death will never be experienced again.

When we look at the story of the young prince who went forth and became the Buddha, we realize that aging, illness, and death were his primary motivation for going forth. He had an audacious desire, not just to resign himself to facts of aging, illness, and death, but to be free from aging, illness, and death altogether. He didn’t sit under the Bodhi tree just to rest in the present moment. On the night of his awakening, questions of aging, illness, and death, and particularly death, were foremost in his mind. They were questions for which he was trying to find the answers.

We can see this in the three knowledges he gained that led to his awakening. The first knowledge was knowledge of his previous lifetimes. The lesson that he learned from that knowledge was that death is followed by birth. In the second knowledge, he realized that rebirth is directed by your kamma, which are your intentional actions, which in turn are shaped by your views and the people whose teachings you respect.

He also learned that the connection between kamma and rebirth is not simple. The results of the actions you’ve done during this lifetime can be counteracted by previous actions, by subsequent actions, or—most importantly—by the views and states of mind you have at death. The causal principle that the Buddha learned from seeing this was that present-moment kamma is necessary to shape how your past-moment kamma is experienced in the present moment. He also saw that the round of rebirth didn’t serve any overarching purpose or lead to any permanent destination. The only prospect for an undying happiness would be to get out of the round entirely.

So he applied these lessons to his state of mind, looking at his intentions and views in the present moment to see if there were views that could lead to the way out. The four noble truths were those views. This was the third knowledge he gained on that night: By completing the duties appropriate to each of the four noble truths, he gained knowledge of unbinding, which is the deathless.

Now, in finding an escape from death, he confirmed what he had learned about how death happens, and in particular about how cause and effect operate in human action in general, and in the actions that lead to suffering or away from it in particular.

The principles of causality underlying the four noble truths are two. We’ll be discussing them in detail in the course of the retreat, so here I’ll just set them out briefly. The first principle is called this/that conditionality. The second is dependent co-arising. These principles underlie the Buddha’s explanations for how aging, illness, and death happen, how they can be approached so as not to suffer from them, and how they can be brought to an end.

The basic statement of this/that conditionality is this:

Essentially, what you have here are two causal principles interacting. One is what we call synchronic causality, statements one and three, which describe causes and effects arising and passing away at the same time: When the cause arises, the effect immediately arises. When the cause disappears, the effect immediately disappears. For example, when you stick your finger in the fire, you don’t need to wait until the next lifetime before it hurts. It hurts immediately.

The second principle is diachronic causality, statements two and four, describing causality over time. The cause happens at one time, and the result can happen later, sometimes much later. But the fact that the first cause eventually ends means that the result will eventually end as well. For example, when you plant a redwood seed, you won’t immediately get a full-grown redwood tree. That will have to take time. But just as the action of planting the seed ends, the redwood tree will eventually have to die.

Now, the Buddha is basically saying that what we experience in the present moment is the combination of these two principles acting together. This means that some of our experiences of pleasure and pain in the present moment come from causes arising in the present moment itself, and others come from things we did in the past. In fact, our present-moment intentions take the raw material coming from past actions and shape it into our actual experience of the present moment.

This understanding of causality underlies the focus of Buddhist practice related to aging, illness, and death. You can do things ahead of time to prepare for death that will provide good opportunities when aging, illness, and death come. But you can also develop skills that you will need to use when faced with aging, illness, and death in the present moment. This is why we practice generosity and virtue to provide good opportunities when aging, illness, and death come. This is also why we develop good qualities of mind through meditation—such as mindfulness, alertness, ardency, and discernment—to handle whatever conditions may arise at the time of aging, illness, and death.

When we follow these two types of practice together, then at death we’re likely to have better things coming in from the past, and also we’ll have the skills to deal with whatever occurs in the mind at that moment. This is one of the reasons why the theme of this retreat is that you can do something about aging, illness, and death. You don’t simply have to accept what’s happening. You can actually act proactively to shape your experience for the better.

That’s the first basic principle: this/that conditionality.

The second basic principle is dependent co-arising. Several years ago, Bernard asked if I would do a retreat on dependent co-arising, and I told him we would need an entire month. However, there are a couple of basic facts about dependent co-arising that are useful for us to know for the topic of this retreat, and we can cover them briefly.

The first fact is that the causes of suffering and of aging, illness, and death come from within the mind. In fact, almost half the factors in dependent co-arising come prior to sensory contact. In other words, even before you see or hear or touch something, factors in your mind have already primed you to suffer from that contact or not.

The second fact that’s important to know is that the immediate cause of suffering is craving. From craving comes clinging, which is the actual suffering. From clinging you go to becoming, which means taking on an identity in a world of experience. Now, the process of becoming is what makes it possible to take birth. This happens both inside the mind and in the outside world.

For example, right now, suppose that, as you’re sitting here, the thought comes into your mind that you’d like some ice cream. Then you think of the world related to your desire for ice cream: the things that either would help you with that desire or would get in the way. The things that would help you are the fact that you have a car parked out in the parking lot and you have money in your pocket. Things that get in the way include the two monks talking to you right now, and it would be impolite to leave the room while they’re talking. That’s the world of a becoming that could happen in your mind right now.

As for your identity in that world, if you decide that, Yes, you want some ice cream, you play the role of the person who is capable of getting the ice cream and the role of the person who will enjoy the ice cream. On top of that, there’s also the “you” who is commenting on whether “you” in these two roles is acting rightly or not: This is “you” as the commentator.

Now on the larger level, if you’re dying and you want to continue existing, a mental image will come to your mind showing you another world in which you could be reborn. If you go into that world, you die from this lifetime and you would be reborn as a being in another lifetime. Images of this sort could be telling you the truth, or they could be false, but even when they’re true, that doesn’t guarantee that the world they lead you to would be as good as it seems in the image. For instance, suppose that it’s showing you a beautiful world, but it doesn’t tell you that when you enter into this world, there will be more aging, illness, and death again. Yet even if it does tell you that, it’s often the case that when you die from this body, you’re desperate, thinking, “I’ll take what I can get.” That’s a tendency over which you want to get some control.

This is an important reason for why, when we meditate, we observe the mind in the present moment and try to gain some control over it, because you’re seeing the processes of becoming happening again and again right here and now in your mind. In particular, you want to gain some control over the cravings that would otherwise lead you to take on bad states of becoming.

Now, the craving that causes suffering is not just a desire for things to be different from what they are. Actually there are three specific types of craving that lead to clinging and suffering: craving for sensuality, craving for becoming, and craving for non-becoming. We’ll discuss these later in the retreat. As we’ll also see, to escape from becoming requires that we understand the steps leading up to craving and becoming, and then to develop dispassion for those steps.

There was one time when Ven. Sāriputta was teaching a group of monks who were going to a foreign country. He said to them: “The people there are intelligent. Suppose they ask you, ‘What does your teacher teach?’ What will you tell them?” The monks said that they would like to hear Sāriputta’s answer, and what he said was this: “Our teacher teaches the ending of desire and passion.” That’s an interesting way of boiling the Buddha’s teachings down to their basic message.

A lot of people don’t like to hear this message. Dispassion, the ending of passion, strikes us as a dead, dull mind state. The best way to understand dispassion, however, is to see that when you feel dispassion for something, you’ve basically outgrown it. It’s like outgrowing tic-tac-toe or chess. When you’re a certain age, tic-tac-toe is fascinating, but then there comes a time where you’ve figured out all the possible moves, so it no longer holds any interest for you. As for chess, you may never figure out all the possible games, but you see that the rules are so artificial that whatever skill you develop in the game won’t be worth the time invested. In either case, you develop dispassion for the game. You’ve outgrown it.

This is why we meditate: We’re basically outgrowing our infatuation with the steps that lead to craving, and developing dispassion for them. When we develop dispassion for them, craving goes away without our having to attack it directly.

In dependent co-arising, there are a lot of steps before craving, prior even to sensory contact, such as ignorance, fabrication, and name and form. These are the mental events that can prime you to suffer even before sights, sounds, etc., have made contact at the senses. We won’t be going through all of these different factors on this retreat. We’ll focus on two.

The first is ignorance of the four noble truths and the skills related to them. The second factor we’ll be concentrating on will be fabrications, or saṅkhāra, the mental processes that are the sources of our bodily, verbal, and mental actions.

The solution to the problem of suffering is to bring knowledge, based on the four noble truths, to the processes of fabrication. When you do that, you develop dispassion for them, and then the causal links that will lead up to craving and suffering will fall away. Now, it turns out that when the Buddha taught breath meditation, he taught it in such a way as to focus appropriate attention on just those factors of fabrication, seeing them in the light of the four noble truths. So an important part of the retreat will be to get some practice in breath meditation in line with the way the Buddha taught it.

The organization of the retreat is this: In the evening, we’ll have talks on aging, illness, and death in the light of the insights the Buddha gained on the night of his awakening. The morning talks will be related to issues of breath meditation. In the afternoon, we’ll have time to answer questions related to both issues. We’ll place a bowl up here in which you can put your questions.

One question that often comes up when we’re doing breath meditation like this is, “Are we using our imagination too much by imagining these breath energies?” Actually, the breath energies are already there, but it’s only when you allow yourself to imagine them that you can perceive them. It’s like imagining that the world is round. When you first heard that as a child, you didn’t have any evidence. You had to imagine that it was round. But as you get older, you gain experience to prove that it’s true. For instance, when flying from Los Angeles to Paris, the fastest route is over northern Canada. If the world were flat, you wouldn’t save time by flying that route.