Austria 2025 | Tathātā

Today I want to talk about what is known as the Trilakshana or Tilakana. That's the three characteristics of existence and the three gates of liberation. These are connected, and the three characteristics are what's known as anicca, or generally translated as impermanence; dukkha, generally translated as suffering; and anatta, generally translated as not self. And the three gates of liberation are what is known as signless, animita, apanahita, which is undirected or desireless, and shunya, which is voidness or emptiness.

When we have the perception or understanding or insight into the nature of conditioned reality, that is to say, we have a good framework or an understanding of the framework of dependent origination. We understand: with the arising of this, there is the arising of that. With the passing away of this, there is the passing away of that. This, in essence, is the understanding of dependent origination.

I was talking a few days ago about Sariputta and Moggallana, who were the chief disciples of the Buddha. Before they were, they were both very good friends who lived in this village, and they heard about a circus coming into town, and they spent so many days going to this circus over and over again, every single day, and experiencing disenchantment, that samvega, that spiritual urgency, arose in them. They said, this can't be all there is to life. There must be something more, because this happiness is so fleeting. The joy of going to the circus has become stale.

So there must be something that is unfleeting, that is permanent. There must be something here beyond just this everyday life. So they went forth, they say. They became ascetics. They went out and became wanderers, shramanas. And they met with a man named Sanjaya, Sanjaya Belaputta. And Sanjaya had a doctrine known as skepticism, which now in modern context is called skepticism, understanding that there is no landing on any true certain knowledge. And they were very good adept students of Sanjaya, and they learned quite a lot from him about the fact of disengaging from what we think we know and being open to any and all information but never concluding on the certainty of that information.

This was criticized by the Buddhists as eel wrigglers, because they never made up their mind about anything. In any case, at a certain point, they met with a person who was a disciple of the Buddha coming across from the other side of the road, and they saw him, and they said, wow, this person seems, their faculties seem clear. They look enlightened. They mythologize the whole thing. He's very bright. There must be a halo behind him and all of these things. So he must be enlightened. What's going on there? They asked, who is your master and what does he teach? And he said, my master is the Buddha. My teacher is the Buddha. And he teaches this.

In short, he teaches that there is causation and conditionality. Rising of that. With the passing away of this, there's a passing away of that. And maybe because they were primed by this skepticism, this ability to have a logical sort of understanding of things without holding on to it, that they were able to understand it. And it is said that Sariputta understood it and experienced stream entry.

And actually it was Sariputta who first understood it. And then he went to Moggallana and he said, I think I found our teacher. I think I found the one that is going to help us in getting to that space of the unfleeting. And he says, who is he? What does he teach? And he said the same thing. And according to the story, it took Moggallana just a little bit more to understand the process. So with just the first line, Sariputta was able to understand the doctrine of dependent origination. But Moggallana had to understand the whole thing. With the passing away of this, there's also the passing away of that. And he understood dependent origination. And it said that he became a stream enterer.

From there, they went to the Buddha, became chief disciples of the Buddha, and then from there, their story continues. But the whole point of this is to say that the understanding of dependent origination, even at a rudimentary level, allows us to see that everything in this experience that we're having is interconnected and interdependent. When you see this, you realize that nothing is of your own accord.

Nothing is truly of your own will. Nothing is truly independent of its own causes and conditions. It is always dependent on something or another. We require mother and father to come into this life. Our parents required their parents to come into their lives. And so on and so forth. Because of various causes and conditions, it is inescapable; we cannot go beyond that. It is the truth of all life and all experience. Our life actually depends on so many different causes and conditions: the food that we eat, the water that we drink, the clothes that we wear, the heat of the fire, the cooling of the air conditioning, everything. Everything we experience has an interdependency. And seeing this, we can disengage from the idea that there is something that is permanent, that there is something that is independent, and that there is something that is long-lasting happiness, something that is eternal happiness within conditioned reality. The logical way of looking at it is that the perception of conditionality will lead to the perception of impermanence, and remember I like to use the word instability, because anicca means unstable.

That perception of instability leads to the perception of dukkha. We say suffering, but it is that nothing is inherently satisfying in this world, nothing is truly satisfying in this world. And the perception of that will lead to the perception of anatta. The perception of anatta means that we realize, our mind sees, that there is no self in this whole process. There is no individual, independent self that is controlling this whole process.

What we call self is basically a coagulation of various different elements, various different interdependencies that come together to create some kind of an ego, to create some kind of personality, that says, oh, this is me, and it identifies with name, it identifies with form, it identifies with the feeling or experiences, it identifies with... It identifies with awareness.

If I were to ask you, who are you? You'll say, oh, I am so-and-so. My name is so-and-so. No, no, that's the name that your parents gave you. Who are you? Oh, well, I do this work. No, no, no, that's the work that you have chosen to do. That's the profession that you've chosen to enter. Who are you?

Well, I'm this body. No, no, no. That's something that has grown over a period of time. Who are you? Can you find the self? Can you find you? If you say, no, well, it's this entire body. Okay, fine. So if I were to cut off your pinky, is part of yourself gone? Or is that just a body?

You say, well, it's more complicated. It's a little bit more subtle than that. It's my mind. The things that I've come up with, my concepts, the ideas of my views of the world, this is what makes up me. But were you born with those views when you came out of your mom's womb? Were you like, I'm a Democrat, I'm a Republican?

Did you say, I'm a Buddhist? Did you say, I'm a vegan? That came up later, right? It grew with your personality. Then you'll say, aha, see, my personality is myself. What does that even mean? What does personality mean to you? Everybody has their own definition of what personality is. You can say, oh, it's... It's my behavior patterns. It's the way I behave. It's the way I show up in the world. It's the way that I interact with the world.

Not true. You're not the same with everyone. You don't behave the same way with your spouse as you would with your parents, the same way with your friends as you would with your enemies. Your personality is dependent upon who you meet, who you interact with. Your behavior is dependent upon that. So who are you? Where is the self?

So this perception of not-self, the perception of the emptiness of self, is then leading to the perception of equanimity. Because you can spend a day, you can spend a week, you can spend a month, you can spend a year, you can spend your whole life looking for self. You can say, well, the great masters say that there is a soul, that this soul is my essence, that that's who I am.

And sometimes you use the words my soul or my body. So which one is it? Do you own the soul or do you own the body? And then you ask, where is the soul? Some of the ancient traditions will say, oh, the soul is in the heart. It's in the middle of the chest, of the spiritual heart, and all of these other things.

How do you know that? Oh, because I feel it. But isn't that just a feeling? Isn't that just an experience? So are you saying experience is the self? Yeah, experience is the self. Okay. But you didn't experience this before. So were you not the self before until you found out about the experience? Because we're talking about a self that is ongoing, that is continuous.

Then some masters will tell you, the universe is the self, and we are all from the universe. Consciousness is the self, and we all stem from the universal consciousness. And actually there is only one self, and we are just parts of that one self. How do you know that? It's nice to hear. It's a comforting thought. You know?

It's the big daddy in the sky. We can just let go and be there. But it's another idea. It's another concept. And you say, we've experienced it. I've seen it. I've experienced it. I've seen a wonderful image of it. or I've had this amazing experience in my heart. But that's an experience dependent on contact with some kind of internal state.

Do you still feel that? No. I had it there. I have the glimpse. Can you go to it again? No. Or sometimes I can go to it again. So then who is the self that is going to it? experiencing the self which self is it right so all of these kinds of understanding when you dissect it in this way you start to let go all notions of self versus not self because even if you go through the process of not self there's still an idea okay this is not self this is not so this is not me this is not mine is not myself

And it's a wonderful practice to do because it allows the mind to become equanimous, naturally. The mind just melts into the moment and it sees the process as an impersonal flow of experience, an impersonal flow of perception, an impersonal flow of choices and consciousness and so on. In this way, this equanimity leads to the perception of disenchantment. Disenchantment here is now we don't even care whether there's a self or no self.

We have transcended that whole dichotomy. We don't care if we're experiencing duality or non-duality or triality or something else. These are all just different names for different games that we like to play with ourselves. And the thing is, we take those views so seriously. We take that non-duality so seriously. We take that experience of the Godhead so seriously.

And we're looking for stability. Again, we're looking for security, so that process of seeing that and disengaging, disenchanted from all of that experience, leads to this passion detachment, that this passion of, okay, this might be true, this might not be true, let me see and experience for myself what is true without getting affected in one way or the other. All kinds of concepts come into mind. All kinds of experiences come into mind. We explore all kinds of traditions, great, no problem, but we no longer are entrapped by the idea that this is the one absolute truth, because as soon as you do that you are in conflict with everyone else. As soon as you identify yourself as a non-dualist, identify yourself as a Buddhist, identify yourself as a nothingist, you know, I don't identify with anything.

Well, you identify with not identifying with anything. And those who don't do that are excluded. They're still an us versus them. Not so explicitly, but there's a separation. This passion, or the perception of this passion, leads to the perception of cessation. What is it that ceases? What ceases is all effort, all experience, all perception, all conceptualizing, all mental proliferation.

And when we come back from that, we experience peace. That in itself is not peace. That in itself is not the light. That in itself is not the Godhead. That in itself is not Nibbana or enlightenment or awakening or joy or relief or the truth of, you know, every experience, the reality, all of that. No, it is when we come back from that, we point to it and we define it from our mind as, I experienced the ultimate reality.

I had immense joy and relief. I experienced Nibbana. I experienced the great father in the sky. I experienced whatever it is that we experience. It is our conceptual mind that comes back online and then tries to define that is what I experienced. Why? Because we are still craving for stability. We're still craving for certainty in an uncertain world. We're craving for stability in an unstable world. We're trying to bring some meaning and order into this world.

If we treat it like a game, and we treat it like the fact that it is a game, and all we're doing is satisfying that mind that seeks an answer by engaging it with jhanas, engaging it with strategies to relate, relax and let go, engaging it with strategies of you do this and this will happen to you, and all of these other things.

Just to have some sense of, okay, I'm doing something towards something. I'm moving and making progress towards something. Why? Why make progress? Why move forward? Where does that idea of progress come from? Because teachers like myself have said that. Because traditions speak of it. Because you hear of it on YouTube, with some great teachers or masters or people who talk about it.

Because you read it in the suttas, or other spiritual texts. What you're looking for, what you're progressing towards, what you're moving forward towards, is still a concept. Look at the nature of the mind in this way, that it looks and listens and hears the pointer, and then creates a concept around that pointer. And there is an idea that this is what awakening means. This is what awakening feels like. This is what it means to be awakened. This is how one behaves when they're awakened. This is how the mind experiences pain and pleasure and love and hate and joy and fulfillment.

There is some permanence in that. And the seeking of that permanence is what the Buddhists called conceit, mana, the comparing mind. Mana stems from that desire for security. Conceit, what that means, is that the perception of impermanence, the realization and insight into the nature that everything is unstable, leads to a mind that drops all objects and drops the notion of subject-object duality, because in that there is no object worth holding on to. If everything is impermanent and everything is unstable, then we don't make it such a big deal to hold on to metta. Don't make it such a big deal to hold on to the breath. Don't make it such a big deal to hold on to forgiveness.

Don't make such a big deal to hold on to anything as an object of meditation. Because ultimately, all objects of meditation will lead to their change. Even the experience of the awakened mind is always there and already there. The experience of it, the dropping into it, the relaxing into it, is also impermanent. This realization of impermanence leads to signlessness, the animitta, the first gate of liberation. The realization of dukkha, of suffering, of things being a bummer, that there is an inherent sense of lack in something. There's a sense of inherent lack of fulfillment.

Nothing fully, truly satisfies. This leads to us seeing that every choice we make, every intention we have, every desire we have to control how the meditation goes, ultimately will lead to our suffering, because no matter how many strategies we come up with, no matter how many ways we come up with saying, no, I'll just do this, I just need to balance this enlightenment factor, and I need to just do that, maybe I just tweak this a little bit, you know, then I will move forward. Then I will do this. I just need that.

That intention. Where does that intention go? Okay, that intention goes to certain experiences, and now we have that experience, and that experience goes away. And we're not fully satisfied with it. No, no, there must be something more I have to do. If I just did this, you know. That intentionality. Seeing that it always leads to something more, to something more, to something more, which is what? The lack of, the inherent lack of fulfillment.

The suffering. This leads to a meditative state known as the undirected meditation. You drop all effort. You drop all desire to control how the meditation works, how it should go. And then the realization, or the seeing, of every time I try to control something, it's not actually mine. Even outside of life, if we were to say that form is self, then we would say, may I lose so much weight in the next moment? And we would all be our ideal weight. We'd all be our ideal age. We'd all have our ideal health, but we can't.

Because we're not in control of it. It's not ours. It doesn't belong to us. It belongs actually to the four elements. It is made up of the four elements. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. One day this whole thing that you see here in the way of the body is going to be ending up burnt or in the ground.

When we talk about experience, any kind of feeling, it's beautiful in that moment, or it's very painful, or it's neutral, but we desire to do something with it. That desire in itself to do something with it shows that it's not actually us, because it's not fully satisfying. Likewise with perceptions, likewise with our choices, likewise with awareness. And when we have this realization that there is no control here, that there is no actual independent permanent self that is outside of the scope of any causes and conditions of dependent origination, then we drop that.

We drop trying to own the experience. We drop trying to own the meditation. We drop trying to make or identify with the meditation. And this is the third gate, the gate of emptiness. Of course, to clarify, when it comes to emptiness, the Buddha talks about emptiness in a couple of different contexts. He says, emptiness in terms of that which is empty of its former thing. In other words, the first jhana is empty of hindrances, because no hindrances are present in the mind. The second jhana is empty of the first jhana, because there are no thinking and examining thoughts in the mind. The third jhana is empty of the second jhana, because there's no more joy of the second jhana. So the third jhana is empty of whatever was there previously. That's one context. The other context is this, what we're talking about: the emptiness of self, seeing everything as empty or void of anything that can be called self or belonging to a self.

And the third context is what he calls the supreme emptiness. That is the unsurpassed, anuttara. That is nothing higher than that, the supreme emptiness. And that is what he calls Nibbana. Bit because it will give you a little bit more clarity into what is the significance of these three gates? What is it that is helping us get to?

Or when we do see it in this way, what are we actually experiencing? First and foremost, the Buddha talks about the signless. He says, when we say signless or objectless, without an object, we say it in the context of a couple of different ways. One is that the liberation of the mind is said to be signless. The liberation of the mind is said to have no object, because Nibbana itself is not an object. The liberation of the mind is undirected. There's no intention in that.

And in liberation of mind, there's no controller in that process. So what he says is that the contact that arises out of cessation, the contact that arises out of a deep experience of whatever we want to call it, Nibbana, experiencing Godhead, seeing the light, whatever it is. Remember, all of that is still happening within the purview of the mind, whatever you want to call that. The Buddha was called the one who went to that or the one who returned from that, which means thusness, suchness, whatever that is.

That the contact with that is said to be signless, is said to be undirected, is said to be empty. Which means we cannot define it. And yet, with our conditioned minds, we can have a reflexive awareness that there was something there that was experienced. Is saying that the great deep consciousness, that the great Brahman, that the great whatever it is, that is nibbana? Again, nibbana itself is a pointer. It's not a name for that. Nibbana means the cessation of the fuel for craving. Nibbana has some 31 odd names for it. It's called the refuge. It's called the beyond. It's called the other shore. It's called auspicious. It's called without craving. It's called the voidness. It's called so many different things, but they're all pointers to that.

And so the challenge there is, then, what is that? Can I define that? Once I define that, then I can get to that. And that is not that. But that whole process of, once I define that and I can get to that, is still a strategy of mine, because that, to us, represents the ultimate stability. That, to us, gives us the ultimate security, the ultimate comfort. Once I just get to that, everything will be great.

No more suffering. No more pain. No more arguments. Everybody will love me. No. The closest I can say to that is that sense of looking at the opposite of the three characteristics. In other words, that is permanent in the sense it's always there. Everything. It is beyond the conditions. It's beyond the seeing, beyond the hearing, beyond the thinking, beyond the sensing, beyond the conceptualizing.

And we can use different strategies to get to that. We can relax. We can look through the emptiness of things. We can go through the hamster wheel of the jhanas, into all of these things, or we can just relax and we just go, ah, okay. And the suchness of every moment is the mind going to that, and there's a reflection of that.

And then there's a definition of that as beauty, as joy, as being, as whatever we want to define it as in that moment. And then the opposite of that, that it is not suffering. It is total fulfillment. Nibbana means quenching. It quenches the fires of craving, of ignorance, of delusion. It is total fulfillment. And we say total fulfillment, not because that is going to lead you to it, but it is when we drop all trying, all intentionality, then there's already fulfillment. And when you live from that space of total fulfillment, then everything is the cherry on top.

The pleasures don't define you. The pains don't define you. The relationships don't define you. The fame, the name, the glory, the validation, the love, whatever it is, doesn't define you. But there is a sense of ease. Things flow. There's a flowing, and that is, we can say, a nature of that. And through that flowing, intuition is there. Intuition is the voice of that. It is not our own thing. It is not something the mind comes up with. And in some sense, I look at the opposite of not-self.

And we don't say that is self, that that is me, that that is mine. That it is the true nature of everything. And we can maybe understand it as it's the substrate of everything. We can do all kinds of conceptualizing there. But ultimately what we're saying is that it is, because it is outside of conditionality, because it is not dependent on anything, that it is outside of the purview of dependent origination. That in order to get to that, we need to do something. Because it is outside of that, that idea, it is said to be permanent. It is said to be lasting fulfillment. It is said to be self, true nature of all existence.

So these three gates of liberation, signlessness, undirectedness, and emptiness, these are strategies. These are other strategies. These are doorways leading to a room, the same room. Three possibly distinct flavors for the conceptual mind to understand that. Maybe the mind is inclined towards letting go of all objects and therefore experiencing objectless awareness. Maybe the mind is tired of trying and tired of intentionalizing.

And so it lets go of all effort. Or maybe the mind is tired of trying to find the self, and it lets go of all of that. No matter what you do or how you get to it, it will all lead to that. It's like three different doors. One, two, three. Three different doors leading to the same room.

And that room, or whatever is in that room, is that. So there are strategies to get there, but there are also the qualities of whatever it is that we're talking about. So you can, in your mind, whenever in your meditation you continue to have this idea, if I just get there, if I just do that, if I just repeat that process, if I go through the process of finding out how was my sitting position when that meditation was really good, right? If you go through that whole process and realize how cumbersome it is, and realize that it is just another strategy, and you let go of it, this process is the process of dropping into signlessness.

It doesn't matter what the object is, if there's an object or not an object. It doesn't matter if there is an intention or no intention. They drop all trying. It doesn't matter if it's happening to me or I'm doing it to myself or what's going on. They drop all notions. And then you submerge into that. But what happens, and will happen, is some sense of identity comes up and says, oh wait, I experienced that. Now how do I repeat that? What do I do?

There's always the analytical mind that comes and says, no, no, no, this can't be it. It can't be that simple. And so it'll again create strategies. And so the training there is to continue to drop strategies. Continue to see through the emptiness of the strategies. The emptiness of metta. The emptiness of forgiveness. The emptiness of breathing. The emptiness of mindfulness. The emptiness of the Dhamma. The emptiness of all experience.

And then there comes a point where your mind is very flexible, malleable, fluid and flowing. And the realization of, okay, sometimes I want to be in metta. If metta is there, it's great. But I'm also aware of the emptiness of metta. So I'm allowing this child that's called the analytical mind to play with metta for a little while, while the realization is that this is empty.

Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. So I can reside in this world. I can still do the things in this world. I can still have goals. I can still have ideas. I can still have relationships. I can do all of that. And I may even get caught up in all of it. Okay? That's fine. But there is that wisdom of having to touch that. Where it's like, ah, I'm reminding myself. I'm reminded by, oh, this is all just part of the process. But there is that, that's there. And I can sink back into it. When things get really crazy, when things get way out of hand, this is why that is called the refuge, the shelter, the island, the other shore. I can relax and sink back into that experience. And from there, intuition takes over and functions through the mind and body complex. you