Friends,
You have now learned all the Buddha’s core teachings, including all Four Noble Truths, virtue (Topic #9), and “advanced subjects” such as emptiness, karma, and dependent origination (Topic #10). Congratulations.
When I started learning Buddhism, I too learned all those subjects, but I could never understand how the Noble Eightfold Path lead to nirvana. I mean, I understood that it was a good thing to live ethically, practice meditation, and so on. But I could not for the life of me see how doing all those things would result in liberation from all suffering. Worse still, I could not get anybody to give me a straight answer. That was a source of frustration for me for a long time. Now that I’m a big boy, all grown up and writing about Buddhism, I cannot not give you an answer. So, my pain, your gain. Congratulations.
In Topic #11, we will dig into yet another one of the Buddha’s great genius moves. It is true that full enlightenment can take a long time to achieve, perhaps more than one lifetime, but the Buddha wisely added rungs to the ladder to full enlightenment, and more importantly, he designed it such that reaching the first rung alone guarantees that you will eventually reach the final goal. And even more importantly, that first rung is achievable within a single lifetime. As I always say, the Buddha is by far the greatest genius in the history of the world. That first rung is known as “stream-entry”. And then in Topic #12, we will present a case study of how a real life modern person (one of Soryu’s students) arrived at stream-entry, so we can all, thorough her experience, get an idea of what that journey looks like.
We hope that Topics #11 and #12 together will show you how the Buddha’s core teachings can take you all the way to liberation from all suffering.
Enter the stream of Topic #11 starting today. As usual, we will put up 3 posts per week. Why 3? Because we performed careful scientific experiments (ie, we tried out random stuff), and 3 was found to be the optimum number.
Meng, on the Buddhism.net team
