Right Understanding

Right understanding means to see things as they really are. Understanding the true about things rather than simply seeing them as they appear to be.

When we attempt to aquire right understanding on a given situation, we see that we begin with an objective observation of a situation and of ourselves.
We join objective observation with enquiry, examining and considering the given situation.

Seeing things as they are can mean seeing things as impermanent, as dependently originated, as non self, as impersonal, as seeing the fourth noble truths.

Right understanding leads to an analytical way of seeing things as they really are, for example in the case of the cause of suffering.

Buddhism states that the cause of suffering is caused by desire, ill-will and ignorance.
Among those the main cause is ignorance, because it is due to ignorance that desire and ill-will arise.

Essentially, in the buddhist view, ignorance is the idea of a permanent, independent self. It is this conception of an "I" opposed and separate from the people and things around us. Once we have the notion of an "I", we have an inclination to favour those things that sustain this "I" and to be averse to those things that we think threaten this "I". It is this conception of the self that is the fundamental cause of suffering, the root of the various negative emotions - desire, anger, ill-will, envy, greed and jealousy. It is ignorant of the fact that the so-called "I", the self, is just a convenient name for a collection of ever-changing, dependent, contingent factors. Is there a forest apart from the trees? The self is just a convenient name for a collection of processes. The self is a cause of suffering and fear. In this context the self is likened to mistaking a rope for a snake in the semi-darkness. If we come upon a rope in the darkness, we may assume the rope is in fact a snake and this assumption is a cause of fear. Similarly, in ignorance we take the impersonal, impermanent processes of feelings, perceptions, and so forth to be a self, and as a result we respond to situations with hope and fear. We desire certain things, we are averse to others. We are fond of certain people, we dislike others. So ignorance in this sense is the mistaken notion of a permanent ego, of a real self.