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

  • Zohar Lavie

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Zohar Lavie – Week of 31 March, 2025

    We’re delighted that Zohar Lavie will be leading our Daily Meditation sessions this week. We hope they bring depth and joy to your practice.

    This week’s theme is: A Compassionate Response

    As sensitive beings, we are impacted by the conditions of our lives. Having a body, heart and mind means meeting painful and challenging circumstances, whether in our immediate environment or in the world. During this week we will explore possibilities of responding with and through compassion to whatever is arising in our lives. Attuning as we do so to further wellbeing for all beings.

    Our Dharma Library thrives through collective generosity. Your donation helps sustain this offering for our entire community.

    Read More

  • Eugene Cash

    Self and Not-Self: Who (What) are You?

    This talk explores classic Buddhist teachings about anatta: self and not-self as well highlighting how other traditions and modalities recognized self and what it means to be free from self. We investigate self and not-self through spiritual, poetic cultural and personal perspectives.

    Read More

  • Jill Satterfield

    The Skilful Process of Transformation

    In this session, we’ll use the skilful means of mindfulness, mindful breathing and leading the nervous system into a parasympathetic state, to guide our mind towards organic spacious awareness. Within this relaxed spaciousness we’ll imagine the ways in which we wish to incline, head towards and become one with.

    Read More

  • Vimalasara Mason-John

    Emptied Inside Out

    Vimalasara takes a look at some of the teachings that point to the insanity in life. Join her in taking a look at form, feelings, perception, mental formation and consciousness, and discovering every day that we can be reminded of the meaninglessness of these mental constructions.

    Read More

  • The Compass of Wise Intention

    In times marked socially by uncertainty, injustice, polarization, and sometimes overwhelm, in the midst of the typical personal joys and sorrows of our day to day experiences, it can be difficult to know how to act-or even how to keep the heart steady. The Buddha’s teaching on Wise Intention (sammā saṅkappa) offers a compass, a…

    Read More

  • Zohar Lavie

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Zohar Lavie – Week of January 22, 2024

    This week’s topic is “Wholehearted Presence”. Meeting experience as it unfolds with presence and interest, we uncover the wellbeing and freedom available to us on the Dharma path. Through this week’s exploration we will open to what supports a wholehearted approach to practice, and understand what is nourished and cultivated when we relate to experience in this way. 

    Read More