‘You should practise the path.’
In this context, ‘path’ does not mean an external path that leads from one place to another, but an inner path, a spiritual path that leads us to the pure happiness of liberation and enlightenment. A detailed explanation of the stages of the path to liberation and enlightenment can be found in Transform Your Life, The New Meditation Handbook and Joyful Path of Good Fortune.
The practice of the stages of the path to liberation can be condensed within the three trainings of higher moral discipline, higher concentration, and higher wisdom. These trainings are called ‘higher’ because they are motivated by renunciation, a sincere wish to attain permanent liberation from the sufferings of this life and future lives. They are therefore the actual path to liberation that we need to practise.
The nature of moral discipline is abandoning inappropriate actions, maintaining pure behaviour, and performing every action correctly with a virtuous motivation. Moral discipline is most important for everybody in order to prevent future problems for oneself and for others. It makes us pure because it makes our actions pure. We need to be clean and pure ourself; just having a clean body is not enough, since our body is not our self. Moral discipline is like a great earth that supports and nurtures the crops of spiritual realizations. Without practising moral discipline, it is very difficult to make progress in spiritual trainings. Training in higher moral discipline is learning to be deeply familiar with the practice of moral discipline, motivated by renunciation.
The second higher training is training in higher concentration. The nature of concentration is preventing distractions and concentrating on virtuous objects. It is very important to train in concentration, as with distractions we cannot accomplish anything. Training in higher concentration is learning to be deeply familiar with the ability to stop distractions and concentrate on virtuous objects, motivated by renunciation. With regard to any Dharma practice, if our concentration is clear and strong, it is very easy to make progress. Normally our main problem is distractions. The practice of moral discipline prevents gross distractions, and concentration prevents subtle distractions; together they give rise to quick results in our Dharma practice.
The third higher training is training in higher wisdom. The nature of wisdom is a virtuous intelligent mind whose functions are to dispel confusion and to understand profound objects thoroughly. Many people are very intelligent in destroying their enemies, caring for their families, finding what they want, and so forth, but this is not wisdom. Even animals have such intelligence. Worldly intelligence is deceptive, whereas wisdom will never deceive us. It is our inner Spiritual Guide who leads us to correct paths, and is the divine eye through which we can see past and future lives and the special connection between our actions and our experiences, known as ‘karma’. The subject of karma is very extensive and subtle, and we can understand it only through wisdom. Training in higher wisdom is meditating on wisdom realizing emptiness, motivated by renunciation. This wisdom is extremely profound. Its object, emptiness, is not nothingness but is the real nature of all phenomena. A detailed explanation of emptiness can be found in Transform Your Life.
The three higher trainings are the actual method to attain the permanent cessation of the sufferings of this life and of countless future lives. This can be understood by the following analogy. When we cut a tree using a saw, the saw alone cannot cut the tree without the use of our hands, which in turn depends upon our body. Training in higher moral discipline is like our body, training in higher concentration is like our hands, and training in higher wisdom is like the saw. By using these three together, we can cut the poisonous tree of our self-grasping ignorance, and automatically all other delusions – its branches – and all our sufferings and problems – its fruits – will cease completely. Then we shall have attained the permanent cessation of suffering in this life and future lives – the supreme permanent inner peace known as ‘nirvana’, or liberation. We shall have solved all our human problems and accomplished the real meaning of our life.
The four noble truths can be understood and practised on many different levels. Directly or indirectly, all Dharma practices are included within the practice of the four noble truths. Through the above instructions we can understand in general how to practise them. We should also understand how to practise them with regard to particular sufferings, origins, cessations, and paths; for example, the suffering of anger, its origin (which is anger itself), its cessation (the true cessation of the suffering of anger), and the path that is the practice of patience. This will be explained in Part Two.