Fall 2018 Retreat Session 5 Four Noble Truths and Not-Self

This is a recording of the fifth session from our Becoming Buddha Foundations Of Mindfulness and Meditation Fall Retreat at Won Dharma Center on September 22, 2018.

My talks and our Sangha discussions are on the Dhammacakkappavattana and Anatta-Lakkhana Suttas. The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta is the Buddha's very first teaching where he established developing profound understanding of Four Noble Truths as the context and purpose of his Dhamma.

Everything the Buddha would teach during his forty-five year teaching career was taught in the context of The Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta and informed by the Paticcasamuppada Sutta, the primary sutta on Dependent Origination.

The Anatta-Lakkhana Sutta is the second teaching of an awakened human being where the Buddha teaches how to recognize and abandon “selfing” or “I-making” as the ultimate goal of the Dhamma - to empty oneself of self-referential wrong views rooted in ignorance of Four Noble Truths. These first two suttas referred to here and the following Fire Discourse are considered the “Cardinal” discourses or the three most primary and important sutras and the singular focus of insight - Vipassana - gaining insight into Three Marks of Existence. It can be seen that Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta speaks to Impermanence and ending all wrong views and the Anatta-Lakkhana Sutta explains how self-referential views arise in ignorance of Four Noble truths which forms the basis for developing attachments to impermanent objects, events, views, and ideas. The following discourse, the Fire Discourse speaks to the third mark of existence of Dukkha arising from the passion for continued self-establishment.

Videos of our Spring 2018 retreat sessions are available here:
https://becoming-buddha.com/becoming-buddha-2018-retreats/

Information on our future retreats is available at Becoming-Buddha.com.

All of these talks are based on the suttas included in my book Becoming Buddha, Becoming Awakened.

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Thank You. Peace.