Use code SUMMERPRACTICE for a 25% discount on all On Demand Courses through August 31.

The Gratification, The Danger and The Escape

With Dave Smith recorded on September 23, 2018.

Found our teachings useful? Help us continue our work and support your teachers with a donation. Here’s how.

The triad of gratification, danger, and escape is one of the Buddha’s most concise and simple teachings for investigating everyday lived experience. This formula can be applied to every single aspect of our experience. Many Buddhist scholars point out that this teaching contains the earliest roots of what we have come to know as the four noble truths, the basic framework for all Buddhist traditions.

During this session Dave outlines the teaching and its implications from the early Buddhist tradition. He also offers some basic tools and tips for how this teaching can be applied to all areas of our lives, on and off the cushion. Cultivating a liberation-based lifestyle in the tragic, yet beautiful complexity of the modern world.

Listen to the audio version below, or click here to download the mp3.

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of March 21, 2022

    This week’s topic is: Harmonising Our Life. The Buddha’s wisdom highlights how we often live entangled in stress and distress. The earliest mentions of this disharmonious state called it being in an argument with life. Dharma teachings invite us away from habitual rigidity and reactivity into a responsive and harmonising release. This week we will uncover deeper and more creative ways of attuning to life that support inner and outer freedom and well-being.

    Read More

  • Ayya Santussika

    Choices – The Ones that Matter and the Ones that Don’t

    How many choices will you make today? Which ones are likely to lead to happiness and which to suffering? Often we have many more options than we think we do. The Buddha’s teachings offer clear guidance on how to make choices that help us develop our habits, our character, and our karma in a way…

    Read More

  • photo of Martin Aylward smiling

    For the love of mindfulness!

    Mindfulness practice has burst out of its Buddhist origins and is hugely impacting the culture at large, particularly in the fields of education, healthcare and business. Some delight in the liberating possibilities of this, and some are concerned about what they see as the ‘dumbing down’ of the practice, or the exclusion of important areas…

    Read More

  • Daily Meditation Recordings, with Caverly Morgan – Week of March 30

    We’re very grateful to have Caverly Morgan hosting our Daily Meditation Series for North America. To find out more about Caverly, and to view her past recordings and contributions to Sangha Live, click here. Monday, March 30 Recognizing ourselves as that which can offer blessings out into the world Wednesday, April 1 Being with what…

    Read More

  • James Baraz

    Groundlessness: Letting Go Into the Unknown

    Pema Chödrön writes, “It’s not impermanence per se, or knowing we’re going to die, that is the cause of our suffering. Rather, it’s our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation.” The truth of impermanence means that ultimately there is nothing we can rely on for lasting happiness. We will investigate the underlying feeling…

    Read More

  • Brian Dean Williams

    Seeing Clearly in an Age of Confusion

    The Buddha spoke of the three poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion. We see all three of these showing up in the realm of global events currently, and in particular, the phenomenon of ‘fake news’, intentional misinformation, and delusional thinking. How might the practice of Vipassana or ‘seeing clearly’ help us in this context? How…

    Read More