“If you have the right view that this is the nature of the body, that it is going to get sick, get old and die, and the body is not you...”

“If you have the right view that this is the nature of the body, that it is going to get sick, get old and die, and the body is not you...”

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Question:  To what level of eradication (of the 3 fetters) before stream entry is attained?

Than Ajahn: Basically you first have to have jhāna or samādhi because if you don’t have samādhi, you don’t have the strength to eradicate your defilements.

Without jhāna, the defilements will be too strong for you, so first of all you need to have jhāna. Once you have jhāna, you can contemplate so that you have the right view, the right understanding of the nature of the body.

The body is such that it is impermanent, it is subjected to sickness, old age and death and the body is not yourself. The body is just a composition of the 32 parts and it is built from the four elements. When the body stops functioning, it dies and disintegrates because the four elements that built up the body will disintegrate and go their separate ways. The fire element will go away; the water element will go one way; the air element will go another way and the earth element will go the other way.

If you contemplate and investigate the nature of the body, you will see that the body is just made up of the four elements and it is not you. You are the one who thinks, the one who knows this body, but you are not the body. You want to separate yourself from the body. Once you know that the body is not you, then you can let go of the body and accept the truth about the body: that the body has to get sick, get old and die. When you accept this truth, your mind will not be hurt by the sickness, by the aging and by the death of the body. If you can do this, it means that you have let go of your attachment due to wrong view. With wrong view, you will think that the body is me, the body is myself, the body will not get sick, will not get old, will not die. When you have this wrong view, you cling to the body and have the desire for the body not to get sick, get old and die, and when the body gets sick, gets old and dies, you become sad because you have the desire for it not to get sick, get old and die.

If you have the right view that this is the nature of the body, that it is going to get sick, get old and die and the body is not you, and you don’t have to worry about it, you just let it be. You let the body get sick, get old and die, then you will not be hurt by the body’s sickness or death. You will also come to see that your suffering or stress arises from your own desire, your desire for the body to last, not to get sick, not to get old and die, but this is contrary to the truth. If you want to get rid of your stress that arises from your desire for the body not to get sick, get old and die, then you have to see clearly and truly that the body will have to get old, get sick and die and there is nothing you can do about it. The proper thing that you can do is to accept this truth. Once you accept this truth, then you eliminate the stress in your mind because you stop your desire for the body not to get sick, get old and die.

Once you have seen the Four Noble Truths, then you have no doubt in the Buddha because the Four Noble Truths was taught by the Buddha, so if the teaching was taught by him, then he must be the teacher, so there must be a Buddha. It is not something that people created out of nothing. It is the truth that there was a Buddha and this Buddha taught the Dhamma which is the Four Noble Truths. The person who realised the Four Noble Truths was the noble disciple; he was the one who can get rid of his wrong view, get rid of his attachment to the body, get rid of the desire for the body not to get sick, get old and die and he became enlightened on the first level—on the level of the body and of the feeling. He can let go of the five khandhas and he became a Sotapañña. Once he knows that all the stress, all the problems arise from his own desire and nothing else, then he will not have to use rites and rituals to cure his problems.

Sometimes, when people have problems, they think they have to go and do something to allay it with some forces or spirits to make their problems disappear, but the problem arises from their desire.

Suffering arises from our desire to have things going according to our way. Once things don’t go according to our way, we become troubled and we try to fix the problems in some forms of rituals like killing a sheep to make things better. Once you have seen the Noble Truths, then you know that the problem is in your own desire, the desire to be, the desire not to be or the desire for sensual gratification. When you could not fulfill these desires, you can become sad or unhappy so you want to cure this sadness by trying to fix it which will still make you sad. You don’t know that these problems are not the root of the problems. The root of the problems is your desires that want them to be according to what you want them to be and when things don’t go according to what you want them to be, you become sad.

If you want to be happy then you just have to leave everything alone and don’t have any desire for them, don’t depend on them to make you happy, don’t depend on anything to make you happy and when you don’t get it, you will not be sad because you do not rely on it. This is basically what will happen once you contemplate the nature of the body until you see that the stress in your mind is arisen from your desire towards the body and towards other things, and they cannot be according to your desire because the truth is that everything will rise and cease, all things come and go, and once they come, our desire wants them to be with us all the time. We don’t want them to be separated from us. Once we see that this is not possible then we stop our desire for them to last forever. We accept the impermanence of them: that one day they are going to have to dissolve, like the body. One day they are going to die. Once you accept it then there will be no stress in your mind, you will feel nothing towards the death of the body. This is basically the practice on the contemplation of the body, on the five khandhas, to let go of them, then you will be free from stress and suffering.

Dhamma in English, Oct 27, 2016.

By Ajahn Suchart Abhijāto
www.phrasuchart.com

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