The Story of the Baby Turtle: What Is Instinct

The teacher uses baby sea turtles to represent people and beings, because a turtle hatches with no thoughts of its own and no parents to raise it, unlike a chick. Upon hatching, it struggles alone out of the sand, then walks straight to the sea without anyone teaching it. How does it know that direction leads to the ocean? Isn't it afraid of drowning? What will it eat once it's in the water? People of every nationality give the same answer: "instinct." The word combines "sanchāti" (the origin of birth) and "ñāṇa" (inner knowing), together meaning innate inner knowledge — a program already set for every turtle worldwide, requiring no teacher, just as every newborn animal instinctively finds its mother's teat.

Why Instinct Seems Unfair

The next question: why does this same instinct let some turtles die young, some in middle life, and some live long — with no apparent fairness? No one could answer. The Buddha taught that this nature truly exists, but it is composed of three natures: kusalā dhammā, akusalā dhammā, abyākatā dhammā — the very words chanted at every funeral. This is the essential core of Buddhism — not merely "do good, avoid evil, purify the mind," since every religion defines good and evil differently. Before his enlightenment, the Buddha studied under teachers who brought him to the fourth and eighth jhāna, yet still knew this wasn't the answer. He needed to perfect the pāramī for 20 incalculable eons and a hundred thousand great eons to discover why doing good still fails to free beings from saṃsāra.

Story: A Man Torn Between Revenge and Peace

The teacher tells of a man at work who received a call to rush home because of trouble. Arriving, he found his wife and child in tears — a feuding relative had come to cause chaos at the house. One inner voice said "kill him." Another said "you can't — how will your wife and children survive?" A third suggested gathering friends to retaliate. The wise voice warned that doing so would only invite further revenge. Everyone has heard these same voices since childhood — voices that guide us into both right and wrong actions without our even realizing it.

The Goals of the Three Natures

Wholesomeness aims at rightness, goodness, knowledge, understanding, happiness, and success — all worldly disciplines taught in schools and universities, finance, accounting, medicine, pharmacy, all belong to the wholesome side. The unwholesome aims at total destruction, even dragging one down to the lower realms after death. The neutral is like a gray sheet of paper — "I won't take the good, and I won't take the bad either" — like someone who neither visits temples nor drinks alcohol. Such people are common; the world has three types: those who love doing good, those who love doing evil, and those in between, who make up as much as 90%. Looking at our own 24-hour day, we do good only a few hours, do wrong occasionally, and spend most of the time neither — the neutral covers roughly 90% of our lives too. To tell which nature currently rules us, check whether the mind has a clear anchor — such as "right step," "left step," or awareness of the breath.

Body, Feeling, Mind, and Dhamma Superimposed to Control Us

The Buddha taught the four foundations of mindfulness (satipaṭṭhāna) — discerning body, feeling, mind, and Dhamma — elevated further into the great foundations of mindfulness (mahāsatipaṭṭhāna): discerning "body in body," "feeling in feeling," "mind in mind," "Dhamma in Dhamma" that overlay and control the human body, feeling, mind, and Dhamma — much like a spirit possessing a person. The three natures compete in fractions of a second, whichever is subtler and faster wins the role of ruling master, then superimposes its own body, feeling, mind, and Dhamma. If wholesome, it brings a subtler body — the subtle human body or celestial body — to elevate the mind. To reach jhāna, it must elevate all the way to the brahma body. Conversely, the unwholesome brings a wandering-spirit body, or an animal or hell-being body, to press us down through greed, hatred, delusion, and lust.

The Law of Kamma Can Be Predicted; the Law of the Three Characteristics Cannot

Buddhism teaches two crucial laws: the law of kamma and the law of the three characteristics. The law of kamma bears fruit each present moment from a blueprint already completed, drawing in factors according to conditions already set — good, bad, or neutral — and we must prepare to receive it. Its net result is simply joy, sorrow, or equanimity. The law of the three characteristics is kusalā dhammā, akusalā dhammā, abyākatā dhammā (not merely impermanence-suffering-nonself, which is a subcategory of the unwholesome) — it takes that net result of joy or sorrow as material to prompt us into new causes. The unwholesome uses delight to provoke greed — like a Ponzi scheme — or uses displeasure to make us blame others instead of ourselves. The law of kamma yields only a fixed result based on the subtle treasure we've accumulated; wanting more than that is impossible. But the unwholesome pushes us to overreach anyway. Wholesomeness, by contrast, guides us toward legitimate causes — like enrolling in a course to genuinely improve.

The Neutral Leads to Isolation

The unwholesome wants us isolated from others — dissatisfied, we leave one place for another, again and again, until no one remains, and eventually we begin bullying ourselves into despair. The neutral, meanwhile, scatters our attention — dissatisfied, we switch places, switch jobs, endlessly, with no anchor for the mind, achieving nothing, consuming old merit until it runs out. By contrast, abiding in wholesomeness is like having a personal secretary reporting everything, noticing inconsistencies, explaining the mechanism behind events so we understand — life proceeds smoothly, growing wiser every day. Wholesomeness teaches patience, step by step, unlike the unwholesome, which pushes for instant wealth regardless of principle.

Two Things to Watch: Stains and Ignorance

What we must guard against: (1) stains — the result of accepting the unwholesome's guidance, becoming bound within its dimension, then molded and forced into action. The result is a sphere of demerit containing demeritorious energy, a sphere of ruin (darker still, destined to destroy treasure), and the completed blueprint of the demerit side, stored within the sphere of Dhamma, awaiting placement on life's timeline. Conversely, doing good produces a completed blueprint on the wholesome side too, containing meritorious energy, subtle treasure, and its own blueprint. (2) Ignorance — not merely lacking worldly knowledge, but lacking inner knowledge, which is actually the root of all outer knowledge. Even as we grow more educated, the unwholesome can still fabricate (saṅkhāra) wrong views (micchā-diṭṭhi). We must therefore know more, and be wiser, than the unwholesome — only then can we argue back, as if arguing with ourselves.

The Hidden Mechanism Behind Sudden Boredom

Even alone, the unwholesome and the neutral keep inviting us through feelings we can't see — a sudden wave of boredom, gloom, stress, discouragement, restlessness — followed by a voice suggesting a drink or an outing. All of this is the mechanism of the three natures constantly at work on us. Without recognizing it, we get swept into creating new causes, cycling endlessly through saṃsāra.

Clearing Stains Through Mindfulness and Clear Comprehension

Stains are cleared through samatha — discerning any meditation object, such as reciting "Samma-araham," to draw in pure energy that purifies stains. Mindfulness (sati) is awareness of the general point; clear comprehension (sampajañña) goes deeper into detail — such as full-body awareness spreading to every pore, or detailed awareness of the breath's every nuance. The teacher urges gradually extending sitting time from one hour to two, three, four, cultivating the desire (chanda) to extend duration further, relying on the four bases of success (iddhipāda: chanda, viriya, citta, vīmaṃsā) — without setting this intention, a voice will always suggest stopping early. Extended sitting brings access to deeper, subtler levels and connection with wiser, more powerful beings.

From Spacious Emptiness to Brightness

As merit flows in to purify stains, the hindrances clear first, leaving a sense of open, light spaciousness — but not yet brightness, since subtle stains remain. Merit continues purifying until those subtle stains clear too, and brightness naturally emerges from the accumulating mass of purity — though still not fully clear. Continuous merit is needed until it becomes clear and controllable, expandable and contractible. We then set our focus at the seventh base at the center of the body, the seat of the sphere of Dhamma (which resides at the sixth base before rising to the seventh). Once stains are fully cleared, the elements of earth, water, wind, and fire unite as one and rise, drawing us into the sphere of Dhamma within.

The Path Through Every Body to the Gotrabhū Dharmakāya

From the sphere of Dhamma of the subtle human body — containing the spheres of precepts, concentration, wisdom, liberation, and knowledge-and-vision of liberation (six spheres) — we're freed into the celestial body, subtle celestial body, brahma body, subtle brahma body, arūpa-brahma body, subtle arūpa-brahma body, each with its own six spheres, until reaching the Gotrabhū dharmakāya — possessed of the great-man marks, more beautiful than anything ever seen in this world. From there, through six more spheres, we reach the Sotāpanna path and fruit, Sakadāgāmī path and fruit, Anāgāmī path and fruit, up to the Arahant path and fruit. This does not mean we have attained noble status — it means we have seen the structure that genuinely exists within every body. This is why the Tipiṭaka records that any son or daughter of good family entering the Tathāgata's dispensation should train in the precept training, the concentration training, and the wisdom training — because this structure already exists within every body. Studying precepts, concentration, and wisdom leads to the sphere of liberation, freeing us from the stains of the unwholesome — laziness, fear, addiction to gambling, alcohol, and so on — and the sphere of knowledge-and-vision of liberation then leads us to a nobler life. Once we access this structure, the process runs automatically — just as sitting for only five minutes at first gradually became ten, thirty minutes, then a full hour, comfortably, simply because it actually worked.