The Dhamma Wheel
November 06, 2023

The sutta we chanted just now is called “Setting the Wheel of Dhamma in Motion.” Sometimes the question comes up, “Where’s the wheel?” It’s in that section where the Buddha goes through all four noble truths, describing the duty appropriate to each and the fact that he has completed those duties.

There are basically two sets of variables. On the one hand, there are the truths, and on the other hand there are three levels of knowledge for each truth: knowing the truth, knowing the duty for that truth, and knowing that the duty had been completed. In ancient Indian texts, when you would list all the various permutations of different variables like that, it was called a “wheel.” In English, we would call it a “table” because it can be presented on a page like a table, but in those days they envisioned it as a wheel going around the horizon. Imagine each separate variable as you go around to complete the circle.

The fact that that’s the focal point of the sutta makes clear that the Buddha didn’t just teach the four noble truths. He taught the duty appropriate to each, and the fact that when you complete all the duties, that’s awakening.

For example, with regard to suffering or stress, the first noble truth, the duty is to comprehend it. Comprehending, we learn from another sutta in the Canon, means comprehending to the point of having no more passion, aversion, and delusion around it. Ordinarily we wouldn’t think that we’d have any passion for suffering. But remember, the Buddha’s definition of suffering is clinging to the five aggregates. We’re pretty passionate about that clinging. We cling to these things—form, feeling, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness—because we think they’re going to provide happiness for us.

Now, they do provide some pleasures. If they didn’t provide any pleasures at all, we wouldn’t have any passion for them. But the point the Buddha’s trying to make is that compared to the third noble truth—the ending of suffering—these things are painful: painful in the sense that if you find any happiness there, it’s not going to last. And even while it lasts, it’s not going to be dependable. So you’re trying to comprehend that fact that the things you’re holding on to aren’t worth holding on to.

In fact, they aren’t even things. They’re activities.

“Form,” as the Buddha said, “deforms.” Feelings feel, perceptions perceive, thought-constructs put things together, consciousness cognizes.

These are activities we engage in. We keep repeating them over and over again. It’s with these activities that we feed. You have the form of the body; you have the form of the food. The body needs the food. It feels pain when it doesn’t get the food. It feels pleasure when it does. When looking for food, if it sees something, the question is, “Is this food or is this not food?” That’s an issue of perception.

Think of a child crawling across the floor. Anything the child runs into, it picks it up and puts into his mouth, to test whether it’s food or not. That’s our first level of perception, actually. Then there are thought constructs. Suppose you do get something you can eat, then the question is, “Can you eat it raw or do you have to do something with it?“ You’ve got a potato but you can’t eat it raw, because it’s going to be poisonous. But if you cook it, then it’s okay. Then finally there’s consciousness, which is aware of all these things. These are activities we engage in, and one of the basic activities that defines us as beings is the fact that we feed using these activities, and we feed off of these activities.

So we have to comprehend these activities to the point of no passion, aversion, or delusion. That’s asking a lot. And it’s really quite radical. Suffering, the Buddha says, is not something that we simply experience passively on the receiving end of the equation. We’re actually doing it. The activity of the clinging is the suffering.

That’s something that’s hard to comprehend, which is why we have to work so hard at the practice.

Then there’s the cause of suffering, the three types of craving, and the duty there is to abandon them. This applies to any craving around sensuality, craving around becoming—which is the activity of taking on identity in a world of experience—or craving of non-becoming, when you’ve got a particular identity and a particular world of experience, and you decide you don’t like it. You want to get rid of it.

These forms of craving are the things that cause us to cling. The Buddha later said that one of the prime insights of his awakening was to realize that craving for non-becoming was part of the problem. Of course, that presented a strategic challenge: What do you do? You want to end craving for becoming, but if you crave non-becoming, that leads to more becoming.

As he pointed out later, the solution was to focus on the activities that lead more to becoming before you take on an identity, before a world of experience even forms in your mind. As you look at the various activities that can lead up to that, you realize that they’re not worth it.

This is a value of judgment. You see that they’re ephemeral, untrustworthy, so how could you create anything of real value out of them? You might say, “Well, it’s the best I’ve got,” which is why the Buddha teaches the third noble truth, that it is possible to put an end to that craving and to attain the ultimate happiness. That’s our reason for practicing. That third noble truth is to be realized. In other words, you have to learn how to experience it. And you do that by developing the factors of the path.

Like right now, we’re developing the factors of right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. What that means is we’re not just sitting here being open to the present moment. We focus on the present moment because there’s work to be done here, mental qualities to develop. When the Buddha defines alertness, one of the qualities of right mindfulness, it’s focused on your actions. What are you doing right now? Be very clear about that. And realize that you’ve got these duties. Like right now we’re trying to develop mindfulness and concentration because we realize it’s going to be good for us now and on into the future.

Remember the Buddha’s definition of the first question that leads to discernment or wisdom: “What will I do that will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” “Long-term”: He’s talking about time, he’s not talking about just being in the present moment.

Someone sent me an article today from a British newspaper. It was about the Buddhist approach to child-raising. The author was treating child-raising as a topic of meditation, the purpose being to find a sense of freedom in the present moment as you raise your child. The choices the article offered on how you deal with your child were that you were either there for the child with presence and care, or there with aggressiveness and denial. You either try to exert control or you surrender and trust the flow.

Either choice is a pretty bad recipe for child-raising. And, of course, it’s false dichotomies all the way down the line. There are a lot of other choices, especially if the flow of your child right now is toward abusive behavior. You’ve got to have some standards that you’ve got to train the child in, so that the child can live in peace and happiness in society, and also learn how to control his or her emotions, his or her behavior—again, for the sake of long-term happiness.

But the whole idea that you want to have your experience of parenting to be one of freedom in the present moment? The Buddha never said you’re going to find freedom in the present moment. The present moment is where you do your work.

The goal is something that actually lies totally outside of the present moment. But it’s by focusing our attention here in the present that we get to do the work that needs to be done: developing right view, right resolve, all the way down through the right concentration.

So you focus on what you’re doing, and then you ask yourself, “Is it skillful?” If it’s not skillful, you do your best to make it more skillful.

There are the three qualities the Buddha has you bring to right mindfulness. First is mindfulness itself, which is the ability to keep something in mind. Like right now: you keep in mind the fact that, one, you want to stay here with the breath; and then, two, you want to remember how to recognize unskillful thoughts that would come up and destroy your concentration, and distinguish them from the skillful thoughts that are actually part of right concentration, as you begin to get the mind settled down, as you adjust the object to fit the mind, adjust the mind to fit the object.

Then there’s alertness, watching what you’re doing.

And then there’s ardency, the quality of mind, the quality of the heart, that wants to really do this right. This is the quality that makes the other two right. In other words, with mindfulness, you could keep anything in mind. And as for alertness, you could watch yourself do anything and that would count as alertness. With ardency, though, you want to be mindful of things that are really skillful to be mindful of. This mindfulness is not just a non-judging awareness. As the Buddha said, the role of mindfulness in the path is to remember right view about what’s right and wrong in terms of views and results. You also want to be alert to the right things, so that you can stop yourself if you’re doing something unskillful.

So you direct your efforts, your ardency, so that you can do all of this well. Focus on the right points; focus on the right issues. It’s work to be done. And that’s the message of this wheel the Buddha taught.

There are basically four different duties and he teaches four noble truths because as we start out on the path, there are four different things we have to do: some things we have to comprehend, some things we have to abandon, some things we have to realize, and others we have to develop. As we practice, we get a better and better sense of which duty is appropriate at which time.

Especially at the beginning, the development is going to be the primary duty. As you work on getting the mind into concentration, and work on all the qualities that need to be developed in terms of right views, right action, right speech, to make sure your concentration is not only solid, but also focused in the right way—and it’s reliable. This is one of the reasons why the Buddha lists right speech, right action, right livelihood before he lists the factors for concentration, because the development of virtue makes you honest.

You really have to look at what you’re doing, you really have to keep the precepts in mind, and you have to do your best to stick by the precepts. This focuses you on your intentions because you break a precept only if you intentionally break it. That keeps you focused on the mind and it makes you honest. Then that honesty carries over into the concentration, and from the concentration it carries over into the discernment.

So it’s a complete path we have here. The Buddha is asking us to train both our hearts and our minds, although in Pali they don’t distinguish between the two. The Pali word citta covers both. So training the citta is a total training for the heart and mind.

Which means that we come to the present moment because there’s work to be done, and the Dhamma wheel lays out what the work is.

So as you’re sitting here and the mind wanders off, you don’t just follow it and see where it’s going to wander. You realize, “This is taking me away from my initial intention, which was to stay with the breath.” So you drop those thoughts, drop them incomplete. There’s a tendency sometimes to say, “Well, let me finish this thought and then I’ll get back to the breath.” But then that thought has ramifications that lead to other thoughts, and more thoughts, and then you find yourself hopping from train of thought to another train of thought and end up in the Northwest Territories. So if you realize that you’ve left the breath, you drop the thought unfinished, get back to the breath. That’s the quality of ardency.

While you’re with the breath, the quality of ardency is to try to be as attentive as possible to what kind of breathing is really good for the body and mind right now. What does the body need? What would feel really satisfying? A large part of concentration is to pull you into the present moment and keep you here by providing a sense of well-being, a sense that you feel really satisfied being here—not because you’ve told yourself that you have to be satisfied, but because you’ve created the conditions, so that your breath feels energizing when you need to be energized, relaxing when you need to be relaxed. You do the work of the Dhamma wheel, and you find that the spokes begin to become stronger and stronger.

That’s why that Dhamma wheel on the wall over there has twelve spokes. Four truths, three levels of knowledge: knowing the truth itself, knowing the appropriate duty, and knowing that the duty has been completed.

That’s where we’re headed.