Four Placements of Close Mindfulness & Four Noble Truths

We have to have either this determination to be free or bodhichitta as our motivation. When we have to work through various stages to reach that level of mind where that motivation is sincere, that’s called “labored development”; it’s labored, with effort, we go through step by step. To develop the determination to be free:

• We go through the twelve links of dependent arising, which are very, very important to understand.
• We conclude that “This is really boring and horrible, and I want to stop it forever.”
• We understand that it’s possible to get out of it. It’s not just wishful thinking. 

We work ourselves up like that and come to that determination to be free; that’s labored development. Either we heard the teachings of the twelve links – Buddha’s teachings were available – and we’re a shravaka, or we didn’t hear the teachings, because there were no teachings available, but from instincts and so on from long ago past lives we sort of figure it out.

Now, we work more and more on this labored stage of going through this line of reasoning and so on, and eventually, we reach the point where it is unlabored. “Unlabored” means that we’re able to develop just by remembering, “Ah, determination to be free,” there we have it. We don’t have to go through the line of reasoning to be able to build up to it. Hopefully, what we try to do with the whole lam-rim, is just to have it, to have these states of mind. This might seem very far away from where we are now, but this is what we’re aiming for. It’s important to know what we are aiming for because then we can aim for it. If we don’t have a clear idea of what we’re aiming for and how we’re going to get there, we’re just sort of groping in the dark. Then, it’s just about sitting and quieting our mind and feeling nice. I mean, come on, that’s not going to get us terribly far. Maybe it will reduce our stress but only temporarily. 

When we have the unlabored determination to be free, either as a shravaka or pratyekabuddha, then only we get to this first pathway mind. The same thing with bodhichitta; first, we have to work to build up to that state of bodhichitta; remember, it’s very important to understand what bodhichitta is. It’s not compassion and it’s not love. It’s based on compassion and love, but it’s far, far more than that. It’s focused on our own individual enlightenments, which have not yet happened. 

• First, with love and compassion and that exceptional resolve – “I want to benefit everybody.”
• Then understanding what enlightenment is, how it’s possible for us to attain it. 
• Aiming for it on the basis of our potentials, our Buddha-nature factors that will actually enable us to reach that. 
• Then, we develop the emotion – love and compassion – in an emotional way. That’s with the seven-part cause and effect, that “Everybody’s been my mother and they’ve been so kind” – it’s very emotional. However, it has to be supplemented by equalizing and exchanging self with others, as that’s the rational way of developing love and compassion: everybody’s equal, everybody wants to be happy, nobody wants to be unhappy, everybody has the same rights. It’s very rational, not emotional (“Everybody’s been my mother; they’re so kind”). We need two of them, emotional and rational. One is going to be a little bit lopsided. Then, there’s the eleven-part meditation that combines the two.

We work with this labored bodhichitta, and we have to go through it again and again to get up to that state of bodhichitta. When it is unlabored – in other words, we can just get it all the time, it’s there – all we have to do is remind ourselves. Then, we have unlabored bodhichitta, and we get to this first of the five pathway minds. This is Mahayana. This is very important for what we are going to be doing with these five pathway minds, and that is actually our topic of this seminar. This was just a little introduction. 

I’d like to discuss and present what do we do once we have this unlabored determination to be free and unlabored bodhichitta. That is sort of like a preliminary, a prerequisite. I hope you can appreciate that when we actually have these states of mind – these realizations that are sincere, unlabored – how sincere we are then in working to attain liberation or enlightenment. We really, really want it; there’s no fooling around. It’s no longer, “Well, I don’t have time; I’m too busy with other things; I don’t feel like meditating.” We’re beyond that level. Now, we’re really serious about it, and we’re prepared.

Now, these five pathway minds, this is the ordinary jargon, the way that they’re translated, but I don’t find that communicates very much. We have a “building up pathway mind”; it’s not a path, it’s a mind, a level of mind that’s going to take us to the next level. We’re building up to something, not accumulating like packing a suitcase, but we’re building up through stages. What are we building up to? We’re building up to a combined state of shamatha and vipashyana. 

• Shamatha is a stilled and settled state of mind, stilled of all mental wandering and dullness, settled on an object.
• Vipashyana is an exceptionally perceptive state of mind. 

I’ll explain these shortly. I just want to present the five paths first. Either we have attained shamatha already before we attain the building up pathway mind, or now on this stage, we will attain shamatha, and we will also attain vipashyana. When we have the two together, then we go on to the next level. We attain a joined pair; a joined pair means we don’t attain the two at the same time. First, it’s shamatha and then on top of it, vipashyana.

The second pathway mind I call the “applying pathway mind.” That’s usually called “preparation,” but the word actually means “applying.” What we’re doing is applying this conceptual combined shamatha and vipashyana over and over and over again until we get it nonconceptual. Then, we’re at the next level.

When it is nonconceptual shamatha and vipashyana, we attain a “seeing pathway mind,” we see non-conceptually. We will get to what is the object of all of this that we’re focusing on; I’m just talking now about the state of mind. Then we start to attain true stoppings.

The next level of mind is called the “accustoming pathway of mind,” which is usually called the path of meditation. We are accustoming ourselves to nonconceptual cognition with shamatha and vipashyana so that we attain a true stopping of all the levels of true causes of suffering. When we’ve gotten rid of all the obscurations that are preventing liberation, we’ve attained a true stopping of the so-called emotional obscurations, then we have attained liberation either as a shravaka or pratyekabuddha. It’s called an arhat.

If we attain in addition true stopping of the deeper level of obscurations, the so-called cognitive obscurations, then we’ve attained enlightenment, we’re a Buddha. That level of mind of either an arhat or a Buddha is called a “pathway mind of no further training.” We don’t need any further training; we’ve achieved the goal. 

While we are progressing through these five pathway minds – regardless of which track we’re doing it on (shravaka, pratyekabuddha or bodhisattva) – what are we focusing on? We spoke about developing shamatha and vipashyana; the object that we’re focusing on are the four noble truths. Conventionally what they are, each of them has four characteristic features, the so-called 16 aspects of the four noble truths, and each of the four noble truths is devoid of four characteristics that it doesn’t have.

We are focusing on what these four noble truths are, with these 16 aspects; we’re also focusing on how these four noble truths are devoid of an impossible “me,” the voidness of a false “me” that is experiencing each of these four noble truths. Who is suffering? Who is building up the causes of suffering? Who will achieve a true stopping of suffering? Who will develop the understanding that will bring this about? “Me.” However, it’s not the false “me” that doesn’t exist. We are focusing on the voidness of a person experiencing the four noble truths. That’s as much as we do if we’re aiming to be an arhat. If we’re aiming to be a Buddha, we also have to understand the voidness of the four noble truths themselves: that suffering doesn’t have impossible existence, and the cause doesn’t have impossible existence, etc. That is what we are meditating on when we have the unlabored determination to be free and unlabored bodhichitta, and we’re doing that with shamatha and vipashyana. 

I hope that we start to appreciate that in order to be able to do this, we need to have built up many, many pieces that we can then put together. Although the topic of the seminar is really very advanced and I will explain it in a fairly sophisticated way, so you are forewarned. I don’t expect, and you shouldn’t expect that you’re going to be able to actually follow everything. Nonetheless, what I would like to be able to convey to you is the importance of really studying and learning the Dharma. What His Holiness the Dalai Lama says over and over and over again: we have to learn it, which means that we know it. Only if we know the pieces of the puzzle – Dharma is like getting many pieces of a jigsaw puzzle – it’s only when we know all the pieces that we can start to put them together. The real training is to figure out how the different pieces go together.

The initial training, of course, is to gather the pieces, build up the pieces. What are the pieces? The twelve links of dependent arising, the four noble truths, the seven-part cause and effect meditation for bodhichitta, shamatha and vipashyana. All these things we need to have at our fingertips even if we haven’t attained them. To attain these is very difficult, but at least know what they are, so that then we can start to see how to put them together. The more that we not only study and meditate and think about all of this, but the more that we actually go out there and help people – do something productive – the more positive force it builds up, so that we’ll be able to understand more. 

Study, think and meditate, but actually, we don’t just sit in our room and study, think and meditate. Go out there and help people. Do something productive. It is absolutely 100% true: we have to build up positive force, otherwise we’re not going to be able to understand things. We help others, we go out and we think more of others; it opens up our mind, opens up our heart. The more that our mind is open, the more that we can understand. We don’t have these mental blocks of “me,” “me,” “me”; “I want to do it for myself.” “You’re always thinking of yourself, always selfish,” and so on – our mind gets very closed; it’s very limited; it’s very tight. We won’t be able to understand. It’s a mental block, an emotional block. It’s not just a matter of relaxing. That’s not enough. Actually, we have to get out there and sincerely help people, even if in the beginning, we have to force ourselves to do it because we don’t really feel like it. So what? We do it anyway because in the process of doing it, even if initially we have to force ourselves, our heart starts to open up. That really is the key to being able to understand. Without that positive force, without that open mind that we get from that, we’re always going to be stuck.

We have an awful lot to cover in terms of how we actually meditate here. As I said, what we are doing now is meditating on the four noble truths with this building up pathway mind. We are doing this with the strong motivation of unlabored determination to be free or unlabored determination plus bodhichitta. Now, with that building up pathway mind, what do we practice? We practice what’s called the four placements of close mindfulness. I will present just the Mahayana path. The Mahayana way of meditating on the four placements of close mindfulness is quite different from the Theravada way of meditating on them. 

The four close placements of mindfulness are on the body, the feelings, the mind and the mental factors. 

• The body represents true suffering.
• The feelings represent true origin or cause of suffering.
• The mind represents true stopping of suffering.
• The mental factors represent the true pathway, the true path leading to the true stopping of suffering. 

It’s quite specific what we’re doing. We have to understand how to focus. What are we doing? First, we have to be able to focus on what these are. What are the body, feelings and so on? What are the four noble truths? How do we focus on these? For that, we need to know how we meditate. Tsongkhapa states it very clearly. We need to be able to know what we are focusing on, and how the mind “takes” that object, which means how it pays attention to it. That’s a mental factor. Another thing that we need to have just like that would be the 51 mental factors and to know all the different components of the five aggregates; these we also need to be able to work with. We have an object that we’re focusing on, and we have a way of paying attention to it, how we understand it, basically.

Focusing on the Body with Shamatha and Vipashyana

Now, we want shamatha and vipashyana. Often people use the words “shamatha” and “vipashyana” meditation and practice and so on for the stages of building up to the actual state of shamatha and the actual state of vipashyana. What is that state of shamatha? It is a state in which the mind is totally stilled and quieted down, and it has got rid of all flightiness of mind, with which our attention flies off to some object of desire; it’s under the influence of desire and attachment that is specified within the category of distraction. We can be distracted while meditating, thinking of some other meditation, or distracted because of anger, but we’re not talking about that. We’re being distracted because of desire; that’s specified because that desire, when we understand the twelve links of dependent arising, is what’s going to activate the throwing karma for the next rebirth. It’s much more dangerous than anger or any of these other disturbing emotions. 

The mind is stilled or quieted of flightiness and of mental dullness, which is when the hold on the object gets too weak. In addition to just perfect concentration, which is called samadhi, we have an exhilarating state of mind and body, in which there is an exhilarating, joyous feeling of body and mind. We feel totally fit like a fully trained athlete so that the attention, the concentration, can stay fixed on an object – a positive object – for as long as we want. That’s shamatha. It is attained conceptually. It’s a conceptual mental consciousness, which means that we are focusing on some sort of mental representation of something. The direction of our energy is inward; it’s withdrawn, but not too withdrawn. If it’s too withdrawn, that’s dullness. It’s like we’re focusing on our body through some sort of mental image of the body. It doesn’t have to be visual, mentally visual, just some sort of mental thing of the body. 

That body is what we understand to be true suffering. That’s how we pay attention to it. Each of the four noble truths has four aspects that it has and four that it doesn’t have. We distinguish (with the mental factor of distinguishing) these characteristic features of being:

• Non-static
• Miserable, in other words, subject to the three types of suffering
• Devoid of a coarse impossible self
• Devoid of a subtle impossible self

As for the first feature, not only does it change from moment to moment, but slowly it is going to the point where the body is going to end. It’s falling apart; it’s going to expire like a bottle of milk. It’s definitely going to expire, but it doesn’t have the date printed on it. It’s not static; that’s the thing that it is not. 

Also, it’s miserable; it’s suffering. Why? Birth, sickness, old age, death – these types of things – are horrible. It’s not true happiness (it’s so wonderful, body beautiful, etc.). We’re focusing on the body, so our energy is drawn into some mental object of the body. It doesn’t have to be what we look like but how we’re thinking of our body. We’re aware of the four aspects that it has and the four that is doesn’t have (being clean, in the nature of happiness, static and having an impossible self). We are now paying attention to it as “this is really suffering; it’s a drag, terrible.” We develop shamatha on that, which means that we stay focused on the body with that understanding. When we get actual shamatha, with this exhilarating state of joyous body and mind, it is not a disturbing state. It’s not “Oh, I’m so fantastically happy.” It’s a very calm state.

We add on top of that vipashyana, which maybe we trained in before to work up to it, but now we can add it onto that. Within this state of being totally fixed – this is the stabilizing meditation – we’re fixed on it, it’s stable. Within that, now we add the discerning meditation, the so-called analytical meditation, but actually it doesn’t mean analytical. That’s a misleading way of translating it. It’s not that we analyze; it’s what we do when we think about it to try to understand. It has to be unlabored; we don’t have to go through the line of reasoning anymore. We are able to use discriminating awareness to be able to detect the individual details of this object that we’re focusing on. We can detect it in fine detail – the four characteristics that it has, the four that it doesn’t have – which we’ve understood and really digested before, and which we just focused on without this fine detection when we were doing shamatha.

The energy is quite different here from just shamatha. With shamatha, the direction of the energy is slightly withdrawn, slightly going in. We’re, in a sense, lost in the object. Now, within that, the energy is going out with vipashyana; it is now detecting within this state all the fine details. Of course, we’re not verbalizing any of this in our head. We’ve gotten past that level long ago, in which we have blah blah blah going on in our mind. When we attain an additional sense of exhilaration, of fitness, that our mind can discriminate and discern anything, that’s vipashyana.

That’s combined shamatha and vipashyana; that’s what we’re aiming to achieve. We’re focusing first on the body as true suffering. 

Focusing on the Feelings

We focus on the feelings of some levels of happiness or unhappiness – that is the true cause of suffering. How is that the true cause of suffering? We have to have understood the twelve links of dependent arising. Feeling some level of happiness or unhappiness is link number seven. Link number eight is thirsting, which is usually translated as “craving,” but the Sanskrit word means to be thirsty. We’re thirsty when we have happiness; we thirst not to be parted from it. It’s like we’re really thirsty, we have just one little sip of water, and we don’t want to be parted from it. It’s not that we want more; we don’t want to be parted from it. It’s very important that the thirst is for some negative thing, “I don’t want to be parted, I don’t want to be parted from the happiness.” When we have unhappiness, we thirst to be parted from it. 

Then, when we’re in these higher states of total absorption – the so-called dhyanas, which are deeper than shamatha (the next steps beyond shamatha) – we’re going in that direction of being more and more withdrawn. However, it’s not going in the direction of more subtle for the clear-light mind, the highest class of tantra. The clear-light mind is more subtle than the disturbing emotions. These dhyanas, the deep absorptions, still have some of them. It’s different. When we experience this sort of neutral state in these higher states of absorption, then we thirst for the non-degeneration of them. 

Thus, when we focus on happiness, unhappiness or neutral feelings, the cause of suffering is our response to them. That’s thirsting, and that’s link number eight. Link number nine is the so-called “obtainer attitude,” obtainer emotion or attitude. It’s usually called “grasping,” but that’s very imprecise. It’s obtaining; it will obtain for us the next rebirth, and there’s a whole list of these obtainer emotions and attitudes. The most important ones for our discussion are desire for that object that we experience with happiness, desire to be parted from the object that is causing us unhappiness, or the deluded attitude toward a transitory network – towards our aggregates basically, with which we’re always throwing out the net of “me” and “mine” onto everything that we experience: “me,” “my happiness,” “me,” “I don’t want to be parted from it.”

When we focus on our feelings in this placement of close mindfulness, and it has the four aspects that it has and the four that it doesn’t have, we’re understanding how thirsting and the obtainer attitude toward them is the true cause of suffering because what they do is activate throwing karma for the next rebirth; it’s uncontrollably recurring rebirth via the twelve links of dependent arising. The four aspects that it has are feelings being:

• The cause of suffering – since thirsting for them activates throwing karma.
• The origin of suffering – from which the suffering of samsaric rebirth arises over and again.
• The strong producer of suffering.
• The conditions for suffering – the simultaneously acting conditions needed for rebirth to occur.

Focusing on the Mind

Very briefly, we focus on the mind just in terms of the nature of the mind, the conventional nature, the rising of holograms and cognition without some separate “me” that’s the controller or observer, and we focus on the voidness of the mind. We focus on the mind as representing true stopping of suffering. We’re referring here to the purity of the mind – the natural purity and the attained purity when getting rid of the obscurations.

The four aspects of the mind, representing the true stopping of suffering and its causes are that the purity of the mind is a state of:

• Stopping – opponents have stopped true suffering and their true causes so that nothing remains.
• Pacification – because true suffering and its causes are gone forever.
• A superior state – immaculate and blissful since it is parted forever from what caused suffering. 
• Definite emergence – from the suffering of samsaric rebirth, because it will never recur. 

Focusing on the Mental Factors

Then, the mental factors here refer specifically to discriminating awareness, which is usually translated as “wisdom,” but that’s too vague. Distinguishing, the aggregate of distinguishing, is usually called “recognition”; we distinguish a characteristic feature of something. For example, it’s this and not anything else. Discriminating awareness adds certainty to that. Here what we have discriminating awareness of is how we exist. We don’t exist in some impossible way. We do exist in a possible way. We focus on that discriminating awareness, and the way that we pay attention to it is with the understanding in terms of the true pathway mind leading to the stopping of suffering. We focus on discriminating awareness within ourselves, basically our intelligence, as the true path. Again, each of the four noble truths has four characteristics that they have and four that they don’t have. It’s important to learn them.

Discriminating awareness of emptiness is:

• A pathway mind – for leaving the state of being an ordinary being and becoming an arya and beyond.
• An appropriate means – for discriminating the appropriate true origins of suffering to be gotten rid of and the appropriate opponent forces to rid the mind of them.
• A means for actualization – of nonconceptual cognitions to actualize the attainments of becoming an arya, an arhat and a Buddha.
• A means for definite removal – forever, of all obscurations preventing the attainment of those goals.

[See: The Sixteen Aspects of the Four Noble Truths]

Summary of the Four Close Placements of Mindfulness

Now, we start to understand the four close placements of mindfulness: 

• The body – that’s the aggregate of forms, in terms of understanding it as true suffering. 
• Feelings – that’s the aggregate of feelings, understanding them in terms of true cause of suffering. 
• Mind – that’s the aggregate of consciousness, and we understand that in terms of true stopping of suffering. 
• Discriminating awareness, which is adding certainty to distinguishing; basically, distinguishing is the aggregate of distinguishing, the so-called “aggregate of recognition,” and discriminating awareness is the aggregate of other affecting variables. We understand that in terms of the true pathway mind.

Now, within that, “me” as the one who is experiencing this, what are we experiencing? What are we focusing on? We’re focusing on the five aggregates as represented by these four objects that we’re placing close mindfulness on. It’s the relationship of the “me” with the five aggregates while understanding the four noble truths in terms of those aggregates. This whole discussion that we have studied is concerned with the relationship between the self and the aggregates: are they one, are they separate, and so on? This is the context within which it is meditated upon. This is where it comes.

We understand the five aggregates in terms of the four noble truths, and we understand the “me,” the person, as the one who is understanding and meditating on these, either suffering (the first two noble truths, suffering and its true cause) or experiencing the true path and the true stopping. That’s what we have to work on to get rid of impossible ways in which that “me” – who’s doing this meditation and has this understanding – exists. Because when we focus with either shamatha or combined shamatha and vipashyana on these four placements of close mindfulness, the five aggregates, either we focus just conventionally on what they are (the 16 aspects) or we focus on them being void of an impossible “me,” the impossible person; or, in addition, the Mahayana way, that they’re also void of themselves existing in some impossible way.

That’s our introduction, just to give you the context of what we are talking about. You can see that it is essential, if we are going to meditate on the four noble truths, to know what is the real thing – the actual meditation on the four noble truths. Then, we need to understand who is it that’s meditating on this, and how do we exist. Who’s experiencing this? Then, how does what we’re experiencing exist as well?

However, in this seminar, we’ll just focus in terms of “me,” how the person who’s doing this, experiencing this, exists.