Q&APauenhof Center Retreat29 Apr 2016
Group interview C2 — Experiential Understanding and Practicing Continuously
Sayadaw U Tejaniya · 1 hr 10 min
Original audio: Burmese · English interpretation
0:00−1:10:20
Uses compressed audio.
AI-written summary
In this group interview, the teacher clarifies experiential wisdom versus intellectual thinking, explaining how craving and delusion fuel aversion and depression. Meditators are encouraged to sustain continuous awareness throughout daily life rather than focusing too intensely on changing objects.
Topics
Talks in this retreat
Pauenhof Center Retreat · 17 talks
- 81 hr 30 minGroup interview C1 — Mind Activities and Right Attitude Toward Emotions26 Apr 2016
- 940 minMorning instruction day 5 — Recognizing Mind and Continuity of Awareness27 Apr 2016
- 102 hr 10 minGroup interview A2 — Meditation as a Learning Process and Working with Defilements27 Apr 2016
- 1134 minMorning instruction day 6 — Eight Conditions for Dhamma and Awareness in Speech28 Apr 2016
- 121 hr 18 minGroup interview B2 — Gross and Subtle Objects, and Attitude Towards Sensations28 Apr 2016
- 1332 minMorning instruction day 7 — Noticing Intentions and Observing Present Experiences29 Apr 2016
- Viewing141 hr 10 minGroup interview C2 — Experiential Understanding and Practicing Continuously29 Apr 2016
- 1549 minMorning instruction day 8 — Cultivating Awareness and the Process of Mind30 Apr 2016
- 161 hr 31 minGroup interview B3 — Mind as Nature, Wise Attitude, and Skillful Action30 Apr 2016
- 1740 minMorning instruction day 9 — Practicing at Home and Working with Anger1 May 2016
Transcript
English
English
. Please, can you talk a little bit more about understanding? This morning you said again— The goal is understanding. It's good understanding, but in our culture, in my culture, understanding has something with an analytical
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mind and so So he talks about understanding, he's talking about wisdom.
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Okay, and in the Buddhist texts they talk about three kinds of wisdom, and he's talking about the third kind of wisdom, which is bhavanamaya paññā, which is sometimes translated as experiential knowledge. Which is what we do when we meditate, the journey, the path is to meditate, to be aware.
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And when you're constantly aware,
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you get to a point sometimes where you understand something, not by thinking about it, but because you've been aware of it, you've been watching it, and suddenly you realize something about it that you had never noticed before. And that's
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its insight, he means. Yes, yes. So he gives an example. He says it's like if you were to observe somebody, observe someone, spy on them, day in and day out.
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If you observe someone, you spy on someone all the time, you begin to understand their nature, you begin to understand their personality, their characteristics, their quirks, their secret fantasies. You know? So you begin to understand that person
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much more than if you were a casual, if you had casual encounters with the person. When you watch them much more closely. Có ai Tôi chưa hề thấy cái đó, So like you might, you know, when you watch someone that closely, you might have had some idea about the person, and then you begin to realize what that person really is.
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And whether that matched your idea or whether it is something else altogether.
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. Yeah. He says it's like psychology. You know, in psychology they've come, they've created all their theories of psychology by observing people, right? The psychologists, they observe people, they question them, they
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theorize, they test, and then they come to these conclusions about how they think the mind works.
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So then they observe nature, and then they then use the nature of the mind, you know, to try and help people unravel the things, the difficulties that they have with their own minds. Right?
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And it's the same for any subject, right? Physics, or astronomy, or, you know, it's all about observing nature and its cycles, its natural
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processes, and then using the knowledge of that, of these processes, to then create things that are useful for us.
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So now what we're doing is observing closely the way this mind and body work, so that we can understand the nature of how this mind and body work.
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He gives a simple example. Anger. Every time we're angry, we recognize there is anger. This is what anger is like.
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And then we recognize, over and over again, if we, you know, give ourselves a question, for example, is it, is anger suffering? Or is it peaceful? And we get an answer every time. Maybe this time we feel like this, this time. And we keep observing. And you do it repeatedly, over and over and over again, until what anger brings to us, what anger means to us, what it represents to us, becomes very, very clear.
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Because you are watching it every time it comes. And then your mind will decide for you whether it wants to live with anger or not. It's like fire. When you, even a child, he says, when they touch fire, it's when they decide they don't want to touch fire again.
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Understanding then. That's understanding. Right?
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understanding . So that's the sort of understanding he's talking about. When something hits home, very clearly.
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But sometimes the observer is the mind who observes has its ideas when he observes. So he can't observe clearly in the beginning, no? Yeah, yeah. So that's why again and again, so much. .
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Yeah. So our old idea, he says it's delusion at work. It has its ideas. And he says, so we're trying to, trying to, put aside the delusion and just, just observe. Although the delusion might be there, it doesn't matter. We recognize it and we just observe. And we do it again and again.
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delusion part of
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Yeah. He says
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his delusion has its group of unskillful friends, and wisdom has its group of skillful friends. And he says, but delusion and wisdom are like opposite sides of, you know, one is, one represents light and one represents dark. They're so completely different that if you were in one, you couldn't imagine the other.
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So, yeah. . It's hard to. Six. six, six. . He says it's like if you sat and watched a six, the other side sees a nine, and if you don't go over there, you won't really know what.
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Opposite . You can say it's opposite, but you won't really know what it looks like until you're on the other side.
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That's why he finds it so interesting, because every time there's an insight, he, it's, it's a, he sees every time, it's totally opposite to what he thought before.
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Sayadaw U Tejaniya began his Buddhist training as a young teenager in Burma under the late Shwe Oo Min Sayadaw (1913–2002). After a career in business and life as a householder, he has become a permanent monk since 1996.…