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The Path of the Buddha
January 20, 2009, was likened to a collective sitting meditation session for America, as the whole nation listened attentively to President Obama’s inaugural address, the content of which clearly embodied the four aspects of the Four Noble Truths: suffering, its causes, hope, and the path that leads beyond suffering. The image of the entire people standing behind the president evokes the five aggregates within each person. In reality:
- Form
- Feeling
- Perception
- Mental formations
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Consciousness
If these aggregates do not cooperate, if each acts on its own like a drum beating out of sync with a trumpet, there will be a lack of strength. The solution is to bring mindfulness – concentration – insight into the breath, transforming the breath into a symphony: body and mind participating together, creating a solid state of concentration, similar to the unity, trust, and cooperation the American people offered President Obama.
The Buddha’s teaching offers four methods of investigative contemplation to look deeply into the truth:
- Contemplation of designation – seeing that names are only conventional designations
- Contemplation of phenomena – returning to the material phenomena, the five aggregates apart from names
- Contemplation of self-nature – discovering that the ontological ground is non-self-nature, form is emptiness
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Contemplation of differentiation – seeing dependent co-arising, that there is no independent entity (left exists because of right, right exists because of left)
The four contemplations take us from the phenomenal world to the ontological ground, and then from the ontological ground back to the phenomenal world. Applied to ethics, good – evil, right – wrong are also only conventional designations; their relative value is built from our capacity to transform suffering into understanding – love, and peace.