The Path to Enlightenment (in brief)

Buddhism (the Dhamma) reached ancient Greece

Continued: Siddhartha had previously turned his back on fundamental "meditation" (lit., jhana/dhyana, the pleasant meditative absorptions that unite the mind in a highly coherent state called samadhi), thinking instead that the path must be one of penance, suffering, striving, austerities (tapas [blaming the body as if it were in control of the mind]), self-torture, self-abnegation, and manly (virile) effort (viriya) when it is really the Middle Way that avoids both extremes of hedonism and self-torture. (There is such a thing as "sane asceticism" undertaken with a competent monastic).

He one day realized that he had been avoiding the bliss and pleasure (piti) of absorption as if it were like sensual pleasure. Realizing that it is utterly unconnected to the ordinary pleasures of the senses, he allowed himself to pursue these eight super states (the four material and four immaterial absorptions). This provided the temporary purity of mind/heart necessary for breaking through and realizing the ultimate truth of mentality and materiality, of mind and body.

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  The Heart Sutra is about the anatta of khandha

  The five phenomena (form; feeling, perceptions, mental formations, consciousness) are referred to as the Five Aggregates clung to as self throughout the Buddhist sutras and commentaries of the Pali canon and are the focus of the world-famous Heart Sutra, the favorite Mahayana Buddhist text nearly no chanter of the Sanskrit seems aware of.

What we take to be real is an illusion, whereas what is in fact verifiably real is at a more basic level of reality. What we have been calling "mind" all along breaks down to feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. Cittas or "mind moments" are the ultimate constituents of these impersonal processes. And what we have been calling "body" is not "me" or "mine" but ultimate matter (the Four Elements or qualities and characteristics of particles called kalapas).

• It is completely mistaken to assume that the Buddha's use of the term "Four Elements" has anything to do with the ancient Greek or classical Indian understanding. There are not four "things" in matter. Instead, there are four categories of characteristics/processes or potentialities of matter: fluidity, density, support, temperature... for a total of 12 traits or states of material phenomena.
• This is a practical, tangible, realizable reality (Four Elements Meditation by Pa Auk Sayadaw) not a theory of particle physics. This is about name-and-form (nama-rupa) not Western science. It is personally verifiable here and now. It is not going to win anyone a Nobel Prize in theoretical physic or microbiology. It is a PRACTICE of clear-seeing (vipassana), not a theory or paradigm to be argued about so that one becomes entangled in a thicket of views.

When one sees this directly, the mind/heart let's go, and one is freed. Free from what? Free from delusion, free from ignorance about these things, free from identity and personalization, free from suffering (pain, disappointment, unfulfillment, distress). So every five-minute version of the life of the Buddha should include these eleven elements:

1. Raised in privilege and comfort
2. Feels lack (unhappy, unfulfilled)
3. Renounces position, power, privilege
4. Sets off on spiritual quest for ultimate truth
5. Learns meditation (jhana practice) and yoga (restraints, practices, pacification of mind and body)
6. Avoids the tempting extremes of penance and sensual pleasures
7. Gains stillness (samadhi) through the absorptions
8. Emerges from jhana and takes up fourfold mindfulness (of body, feeling, mind, and mind-objects)
9. Practices Dependent Origination
10. Awakens to the ultimate truth that all things are impermanent, unsatisfactory, and impersonal
11. Letting go (real renunciation takes places) and light dawns, knowledge-and-vision arise.

• How to develop Four Elements Meditation
• Text by Dhr. Seven; Amber Larson (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly