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The sentences I want to check with you are:

  1. Reducing suffering (or eliminating it) is the main goal.
  2. The main reason we keep suffering is desire and aversion.
  3. We can experience craving to any of the five aggregates (e.g. thoughts) and also to the situation in general (e.g. become a teacher or become enlightened).
  4. We have tools to reduce desire and aversion (or promote this reduction in others). E.g. not-self, impermanence and dukkha. Jhana.
  5. This tools (3 characteristics, jhana, etc.) are truthful (they are not white lies).
  6. This tools lead to a "desinterest" (equanimity) that gives freedom. For example, by seeing pain as impermanent (as lasting briefly or nothing) then there is "desinterest" in it (equanimity to it), and as such there is a freedom to either experience it or not without suffering it.
  7. Ultimately it's best to be equanimous even to becoming enlightened (a case of bhava-tanha?), the tools ("the raft" that is abandoned after crossing the river), no-thoughts (aversion to thoughts?), etc.

That's it, feel free to make little corrections or flat out tell me there are big mistakes there. Thanks.

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  1. People argue whether "suffering" is the best translation. Perhaps it depends on context. I guess dukkha has range of meaning from (extreme) anguish to (chronic) unsatisfactoriness to (eventual) insufficiency.

    And whose goal?

    And is it possible that the goal varies -- at the beginning people are caught up in suffering and want to escape it. Perhaps later they're not suffering so much, and there's a slightly different goal i.e. "liberation" or "unbinding".

  2. The "root" poison is ignorance.

  3. They're called "clinging-aggregates". To the extent that the doctrine distinguishes "craving" from "clinging", I think it's "clinging" to aggregates.

  4. I think that tool is the noble eightfold path -- "right view" etc.

    Seeing the three characteristics is an example of right view, Jhana is an example of adhicitta-sikkhā

  5. Here I think I'd refer to the Dhammanusati and say, "The doctrine is effective etc.".

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