Hello and welcome to the Secular Buddhism Podcast, a podcast that presents Buddhist teachings,

concepts and ideas from a secular perspective.

You don't need to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist, you can use what you

learn to simply be a better whatever you already are.

I am your host Noah Rasheda and let's jump into today's topic.

This is episode number 178.

The topic I have in mind for today is a teaching called the Four Investigations and this

is a teaching that comes from the Yoga Chara School of Buddhism.

Yoga Chara was one of the original Mahayana forms of Buddhism.

It was influential in shaping what we know today as Tibetan Buddhism as it spread from

India to Tibet.

According to the Yoga Chara teachings, the key to understanding reality is to understand

the mind and there are four investigations that we can use to explore and these are intended

to help us to obtain a correct view or a correct understanding of reality.

I want to talk about these four investigations.

Now if you think about this for a moment when we talk about the notion of correct view,

you may recognize correct view is the first of the eightfold path.

Sometimes it's translated as skillful view, right view and that's not right as opposed

to wrong.

It's more along the lines of correct view as opposed to the incorrect view or the incorrect

understanding.

I think this will make sense as we talk about the four investigations.

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